First Papers (12 page)

“I’ll help dig, Franny,” Fee had said, half-begging as if she wanted a favor. “I’m awfully strong.”

Day after day since then, Fran kept talking about their own court, until at last Mama had openly spoken about it to Papa one evening when he was in a good mood.

“Couldn’t we rent the ground next door, Stiva, for a small price, from whoever it is that owns it?”

Stefan had opened his mouth, then closed it. Looking speculative he had then said, “It’s amazing, what turns life takes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it had occurred to me already that the owner might be only too glad to rent the plot. But I had something else in mind for it.”

“What ‘something else’?”

“No matter. To tell you now would only provide you with a problem.”

“Who owns it?” Alexandra said.

“How should I know that? But banks can tell whose property any lot is, even without searching the title.”

“Will you ask them, then?” She sounded vexed, and more urgent.

“Let me pay this month’s interest on our mortgage first,” he said. “I will hate to explain at the bank that we now need a private tennis court in our family.”

“And why not?” Alexandra flared up. “If the child wants it so much she’s willing to dig and level and sod it herself?”

“I can help,” Fee said. “Franny said I could.”

“Aping the rich,” Stefan had said to Mama. “They’ll want tiaras next.”

Now, when he dragged in the tennis court, both Fee and Fran expected him to launch an attack on it, but the moment passed, and he went back to his childhood. The first big thing he could remember was a night when his mother grabbed him out of bed and rushed him through the snowy streets to a place where twenty of their neighbors were huddled with their own children, all wailing and praying and talking about the pogrom. His own sisters were there, hiding under a table, and at every noise outside, his mother spread her full skirts wide, to cover their heads.

It was the night before Easter; being Russia, though, the land was still locked in ice and the air fluffy with snowflakes. His father was not with them; none of the fathers were with any of the families. There was scarcely any mention of the fathers; once a woman cried out, “He’ll be slaughtered like a pig with one stroke of a sword.”

There was a suffocating fear in the place, and the crying women were placing benches against the doors, piling one on another until they were like a grandstand at a parade, but a grandstand shoved back on itself so that the rows of benches had become a wall.

“What
is
a pogram, Papa?” Fee asked. She wished he had never begun on this part. She wanted to go back to the English lessons and the buttons and the new bridge to Brooklyn.

“A pogrom,” he said. “Po-
grum
—it’s a killing of Jews by savages, that’s what it is.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re Jews,” he said. “In Russia, Jews were hated so much that drunken Cossacks could kill off a few just for fun, and nobody in the government really minded too much. Christians all, but not Christ-like.”

“Oh, Papa.” A shudder went through her. This time the word “Jew” and the word “Christian” were producing more than a simple feeling of excitement. “Do they still have pogroms?” she asked.

“Not so many.” He caught a warning glance from Alexandra and added, “And never in America, never in this country.”

“Never?” Fran asked. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. Even in Russia, it’s not often, any more, or anywhere in Europe. It’s like the Spanish Inquisition or the Massacre of the Christians in the arenas in Rome. History.” He looked from one to the other. “Come, come, girls, I did not mean to frighten you, but it’s another reason you should be happy you were born in America.”

The telephone rang then and they all jumped. Alexandra got to it first and a moment later she was calling, “A boy, a boy,” and then Stefan went to the phone too, and talked for a minute, and then they both kissed each other and Alexandra kissed Franny and Fee. “You’re aunts,” she said to them, hugging them. “And I’m a grandmother. Webster’s grandmother. Imagine!”

Her eyes filled with tears, and she laughed and said, “Oh, my goodness, a grandson.” Nobody minded her tears this time, and she didn’t try to hide them.

After a moment, Papa said, “Well, one more glass of tea in honor of young Mr. Ivarin.”

A few days later school was over and full summer burst upon them with high clear skies and unfaltering heat. On the first of July their second exodus to the beach began. It had always been the “mountains” while they still lived in New York, the mountains meaning any of the small inexpensive towns within sight of the Catskills.

But the summer of 1910 had been a summer of discovery, with Alexandra the Columbus who had found a new world for them, a tent colony on the Atlantic, a few miles east of established resorts like Far Rockaway, Long Beach and Edgemere.

This year’s return was scarcely an exodus, for Eli of course would not be going, and Stefan pronounced himself unable to do what he had managed last year, go along for the first day, which was all the time he ever could, or ever did, spend with them “in the country” anyway.

Once the baby was born, Fran and Fee went back to their usual June hatred of school and their usual June longings for vacation. And Alexandra was hardly less eager than they to get back again to her new love, a summer in a tent. That it was a summer without fashion, and with a minimum of convenience or comfort, did not disturb her; that their mode of life for July and August would strike many people as primitive gave her a secret pleasure. “Thoreau,” she had remarked once, “would have called our tent a palace.”

“Disputing Thoreau,” Stefan had replied, “I cannot call it a palace. I’d rather stay right here.”

The tent was one of about two hundred, all identical, lined up in seven rows separated by wooden “sidewalks,” making a tent city of more than a thousand people on a half-mile expanse of white sand beach directly on the sea.

To Alexandra the tents were compact miracles, livable, quickly cleaned, offering the free charm of life in the jungle or aboard a ship at sea. This year, learning from last year’s longings, she was paying ten a month more to be in the front row of tents, with an unobstructed view of the ocean hers “by riparian rights.”

“It’s worth the whole summer’s hundred dollars,” she said again and again, “every time I look out the front door. The front flaps.”

Each tent, about twelve by fourteen overall, was built upon a wooden flooring, raised on stubby posts a few inches from the sand. A three-foot-high wall of planking extended the full depth of the tent on each side; thus the slope of tan canvas began high enough up so that the floor space was usable over the entire area. One had to stoop only when making up the, cots, placed end to end along the walls, two on each side.

A curtained shelf with hooks and nails provided closet space for the few skirts and dresses and coats Alexandra and the girls took with them, and all other apparel was kept in a low old chest, which Alexandra in a burst of gayety had painted a blazing blue.

Fore and aft, the flaps of the tent could be tied back to form large triangles of sky and light; at night, a single electric bulb on the crossbeam gave brilliant raw illumination. The rear of the tent, separated from the main part by inside flaps, contained an icebox and kerosene stove, an oblong table to seat four, open shelves for dishes, a small sink, with a drain and stopper but without faucets or water, and a small washtub, equally deprived. Water, pure but brackish, came from great iron hand-pumps, painted dark green and standing like motionless one-winged birds at crossings of the wooden sidewalks. Clusters of children and adults were always gathered around them, carrying zinc pails into which they pumped up the morning, noon or evening supply.

Even these arrangements did not dismay Alexandra; the one aspect of tent life that she did concede was “primitive” was the lack of private bathrooms.

“But,” she said loyally, “they have two modern buildings, with twenty separate places in each. The one thing I don’t like is when I’m going there and meet somebody I know, also going there. Such a community of motive!”

This minor flaw was forgotten soon enough and so, for Alexandra Ivarin, the summer of 1911 began beneficently as it had the year before. Life on the beach was delicious, easy, lazy.

“There’s nothing to wash and iron, with all of us in bathing suits from morning to night. Nothing to sew. If only Papa liked it here—I feel so selfish!”

She never admitted, even to herself, that it was a relief to be away from Stefan, from the necessity to gauge his moods, from the frequent hurt that blighted her day, that brought her unwanted, shameful tears. The year before, she had ascribed her lift in spirits to the newness of their summer arrangements, which persisted despite her worry about how Stefan would get along. She had hired a Polish immigrant girl to take care of him at home during their absence, a plump young illiterate, who was only too glad to get food, a place to live, and $ 14 a month. But in a week, Stefan fired the girl.

“She is a chatterbox,” he wrote, “whose most fundamental belief is that a newspaper cannot entertain me as much as her conversation does. She also assumes that, like the feudal lords in Poland, I am waiting to order her into my bed. Her willingness begins to get on my nerves.”

“Your father will starve,” Alexandra had cried to the children, hiding the letter. “A man who can’t do a thing for himself, except make tea! I’m going home to see—I’ll be back tomorrow.”

She had returned, chagrined and relieved. “He boils two eggs till they’re like rocks,” she reported, “and stands by the stove to eat them. He makes tea, and cuts a slice of bread. Later, he goes to New York and has a real meal at the café. He seems to like it. The house is like a pigsty. You can smell eggshells at the front door.”

Only after that episode, was Alexandra able to banish all guilt, and relish every hour of life at the shore. This summer, as she spoke of feeling selfish, she knew that nobody took her seriously. But she was happy.

Early each morning, she would wake with the first outdoor sounds of voices, steps, pails, pumps—wake rested and glad to be done with the non-living of sleep. In her cotton nightgown, she would go to the rear of the tent, reach down for the two bottles of milk set under the extending flap of canvas by the milkman, and transfer them to the icebox.

The iceman had been there even before the milkman, entering the back of the tent on rubber-soled feet, lifting the lid of the icebox and leaving his great lump of ice inside so quietly that the lightest sleeper would never stir.

The morning paper and the mail did not come until noon, but she quickly re-shaped her habit to accommodate this fact. She would then put on the long kimono she had made from the black bunting that had caused such grief, and start for the public bathhouse, carrying her toothbrush and can of toothpowder, a towel, a small covered butter dish in which reposed a piece of soap.

Returning to the tent, she would put on her coffee, and wake the girls. They needed less than ten seconds to dress; she had made them black alpaca bathing suits, with matching bloomers, and these they wore all day long. The color of their skin delighted her, Francesca’s a gold-bronze, and Fira’s a fierce dark brown.

Alexandra was a good swimmer, and she had long ago taught Eli and the girls how to swim. Now she loved to watch Fran and Fee in the water, though when the breakers were rough after a storm, and she saw their young slender bodies sliding out of sight as they dived under curling tons of water, fear would send a shaft of steel through her heart to tell her that such frailty could never return safely. The cure for this fear was to dive under the same breakers herself, and when she felt her own plump small flesh tightly secure under the ferocity passing above it, she became tranquil about the girls once more.

One morning, however, after perhaps two weeks of this second tent-summer had gone, Alexandra became aware of a faint dissatisfaction, the opposite of tranquility, somewhere within her, and she realized that she had been harboring it for several days. She could not describe it; it was like a faint sensation of hunger, perhaps ignored to start with, but now grown so energetic one had to pay attention to it.

Did this faint malaise have anything to do with Stefan? With Eli and Joan and the baby? The girls? Could it be that repetition, even of something she loved as much as this glorious blazing-white beach—could repetition cut down the joy? So soon? It was impossible. In relief she began to hum.

Instantly she knew what was wrong. She missed her dancing.

She knew it with complete certainty. And in the certainty was dismay; she did not like to become slavishly attached to anything.

It was obvious that tent life precluded her dancing. Not only was there no Victrola; to dance in front of Franny and Fira was not to be considered; to wait until they had gone swimming and then to lower the tent flaps for privacy, would mean raising the temperature under the morning-hot canvas to suffocating heights, like dancing in a Turkish bath. Impossible.

A hundred Victrolas, a symphony orchestra. Still impossible.

Last summer, her dancing had still been so new that she had bid farewell to it for two months, and struggled punctiliously with the boredom of calisthenics.

And this summer, too, she had summoned up the sturdy realism she liked to think she always showed, and once again said farewell to her dancing until the fall.

How astonishing then, that on this particular morning, without warning, the lack of it should suddenly seem unbearable. It was as if her muscles had at last rebelled at the injustice she was perpetrating on them, at the denial to them of their rightful and habitual pleasure. She was delighted with them; they were entities with a life of their own, capable of making demands, organizing in defiance. They had, in effect, called meetings, taken a vote, gone on strike.

The moment this notion entered her mind, Alexandra Ivarin capitulated.

She gazed down at her body, encased in her own alpaca bathing suit, as if she were greeting each one of her valiant muscles. She kicked off her slippers and moved into the open space in the center of the tent. For a moment she stood still, regarding the open flaps of canvas. The warm air drifting in bore the distant smell of the sea, fresh and heart-lifting. She turned her back on the triangular expanse of yellow light and began again to hum.