First Papers (2 page)

He went about the kitchen cautiously, careful of noise as he selected a pan for water and found the wire strainer that fitted inside the rim of the glass tumblers they used for tea. No matter how Americanized he had become about everything else, tea in a cup would always outrage some sensibility deep inside.

Possessed of the strainer, he turned to the four canisters on the hanging shelf above the sink. He opened the first one; it contained flour. He opened another; it held brown sugar. Then came coffee, then, brown rice.

“Where the devil does she keep the tea?” he asked the quiet kitchen. In his mind, he tried to re-create the path Alexandra traversed as she went about making their tea, and then, nodding to himself, he went out to the pantry.

The crowded shelves dismayed him; he never had been one of those men who were at home with household affairs. Uncertainly he gazed at the salt, cocoa, Mason jars of their own tomatoes, jelly glasses topped with paraffin discs, Eli’s huge bottle of malted milk. The familiar square box of tea was not in sight.

Was tea kept on ice? He stared suspiciously at the varnished oak box, still gleaming after two years. The icebox—another
cause célèbre,
like the stairway. From the kitchen he could hear the boiling of the water, and the sense of being driven seized him.

He lifted the lid on top of the icebox; a diminished block of ice was there and nothing else. Forgetting his avoidance of noise, he let the lid drop and flung open the door in the lower half of the icebox. A wild conglomeration faced him but no tea. He seized a lemon, slammed the door and went back to the kitchen. An importance had infused the entire search. To give up the idea of tea now, to go upstairs quietly, to close doors softly, to open his window easily, to get into bed and fall into an unremarkable sleep—none of this was any longer tenable.

Suddenly he spied the square yellow box standing just beyond the breadbox. Relief burst through him, and he tore off the tightly fitted square cover, lowering his face to the good strong smell of the blackish-green spears. Forgiveness pervaded him, toward them, toward Alexandra.

He made his tea and watched the tumbler change color, from white to pale yellow to deep amber. Then he curved his forefinger and thumb toward each other, set the glass within their embrace, with the middle finger as its nether support, and began to pace up and down the room. His left hand could not have borne that scalding heat, but some forty years had wrought the mutation that made it possible for his right. One of his earliest memories, as a small child in Russia, was of his father walking about that dark inhuman kitchen of theirs, with a glass of boiling tea nested in the circle of his fingers.

A continuity, Stefan Ivarin thought, a small immortality. When I was arrested, it was a death for both of them, and in ’79, when I escaped and left for America, another death—their one son gone forever. Yet there is, somehow, a continuity.

He nodded at his glass, as if in salute. He had not yet tasted his tea; now that it was securely there, compulsion had fled. He enjoyed walking up and down the kitchen; upstairs, in his study, hardly three steps were possible between desk and wall, and when he opened the connecting door to his bedroom, the distance lengthened only another few paces.

Inadequate, it was true. He felt blocked off, barred from freedom, constantly turning back on himself. Perhaps on this one point, he should have given in to Alexandra, and hang the extra cost and the lost work.

The cubicle argument. There had been the stairway argument and the icebox argument and finally the size of the bedrooms. Perhaps if the others had not come first, he would have felt less protective toward his blueprints, less congealed with the ice of resistance at the very mention of the word “change.” By that time, he had proved to them all that the stairway could not start up from the front hall at the front door. “If it does,” he had said, “the bathroom door upstairs would be like a gate across the top step. Would you prefer that?”

“Can’t you put the bathroom somewhere else, Stiva?” Alexandra had demanded. “Did President Taft say it must be just there?”

“President Taft wouldn’t mind spending another hundred dollars to lengthen the water pipes!”

In the end, they had abandoned their cry for conformity. He doubted whether it ever crossed their minds, from the moment the house had been completed, that whereas in most houses you saw stairs as you came in at the front door, in this one you found them at the back door, near the kitchen and side porch, and went upstairs to the front bedrooms instead of the ones at the rear.

But, to this day, the size of the bedrooms remained a continuing boil, indurated and tight under their emotional skins. It was probable that he had been overeager to have a wide stairway and open hallway on the upper floor, probable that, buried deep in him, there was some hatred of narrow corridors. Who knew of the thousand concealed longings, wishes, fears, born subterraneously in the seas of fifty years of a man’s life?

At any rate, on all his earlier floor plans, the proportions of hallway to bedrooms had been acceptable to the whole family. Only when fluidity had left, only when the builder was pressing him to turn over his worksheets for formalization in blueprint, only then had Alexandra begun to demand an overhaul of every dimension and arrangement on the second floor.

As usual, the girls had sided with her. They could not, and she would not, follow him when he explained the additional costs, of juggling beams and uprights about, of shifting pipes and electric outlets. They would listen, and the next day, they would attack him again.

“Each bedroom,” Alexandra would tearfully say, “could be ten inches wider, and you would still have your good big hall.”

Irascibility was his weakness; the tear ducts hers. The sight of her weeping would snap his control. “A passageway,” he would shout. “Like a coldwater flat on Essex Street. Is that the great desideratum of life?”

“But you’re making five cubicles for the bedrooms, and a grandstand out of the hall.”

“Cubicles! Eleven by thirteen—is that a cubicle?”

“Your bedroom is nine by thirteen.”

“But I have my other room too!”

“Another cubicle.”

“Is it me you worry about? If it is, let it alone, Alexandra, I beg of you, let it alone.”

A bad time, Stefan Ivarin thought now, a time to forget. The bedrooms are a little crowded; I sometimes feel it so myself. But how many human beings on the face of this globe would not consider themselves in palaces, if they had each a bedroom like any one of ours?

Comfort filled him, and pride in his house. He raised his right hand and took his first sip of tea. It had gone tepid, but he did not mind.

Alexandra Ivarin began each day with her own method of physical exercise. A year before, just after her forty-ninth birthday, the doctor had pronounced her flabby as to muscle tone, and had ordered her to take up regular exercising.

Dutifully she had begun calisthenics, following the printed directions he had put into her unwilling hands, and every morning for a week, she spent twelve minutes bending, reaching, stretching and twisting to the accompaniment of a martinet’s voice saying, “One, two, three, four, five. And one, two, three four five. And one, two three four five”—a voice she soon detested though it was her own.

After a week, she had quit in rebellion. Then, by some golden accident, the idea had come to her, and she had devised what she called “my dancing.”

It had been a revelation of new pleasure, and since logic told her that the same muscles of arms, legs and torso would be in use when she danced, she had never doubted that the curative results were comparable, if not superior, to those the doctor wanted. For more than a year, in winter and in summer, she had kept up her morning ritual; by now she actively looked forward to it each day.

She opened the windows in the living room and wound up the Victrola. It was Sunday morning and still early; there was no chance of the girls coming down, and Eli and Joan slept until ten. Stefan, of course, never appeared before noon, and last night he must have come home later than usual. She peeled off her cotton nightgown, which hampered the freedom of her body, and stood naked, selecting from the small pile of records the Strauss waltz with which she liked to begin.

The music started, and pausing only to get the rhythm set in her mind, she began to hop on her right foot, then on her left. Hop, hop, hop on the right, change; hop, hop, hop on the left. Slide and jump to the right, slide and jump to the left. The hops once more, then a deep bend to the right, to the left.

The delicious melody, a little sugary perhaps but so caressing, so young, was like the clear air blowing in over the fields; her spirits lifted as her breath shortened, and she began to experience that surge of joy which always came to her through these secret minutes of her dancing.

Hop, hop, hop, slide and jump, bend to the right, bend to the left. Vaguely she knew that to others—if anybody could ever see her so—she might seem ludicrous in her dancing. They would see pendulous belly and breasts, grey hair flying; they would see an aging, overweight woman capering and leaping about. It did not matter. In herself, within her muscles and bones and hard-beating heart, was the sense of grace and youth, exhilarating and priceless.

Hop, hop, hop, slide and jump. Never, for the rest of her life, would she forgive Alexis Michelovsky, fine physician, dedicated socialist though he was, for permitting her to get this pendulous stomach, these elongated breasts. Idealism, idealism. All of them in their youth were so fired with scorn for people who thought of looks and money and possessions instead of abiding principles, and Alexis was intimately one of them.

But a thousand times since, she had wished she had gone to a nice American doctor who would have permitted her a maternity girdle for her pregnancies. If Alexis had done so, this disformity might never have begun. When she had asked, a little uncertainly, whether there were some way of preserving her figure—she had been slender then—: Dr. Michelovsky had looked at her sadly and said, “You too, Alexandra?” as if he were saying
“Et tu, Brute?”

Then she had been too young, too lacking in courage to tell him it was no worship of materialism to want her stomach held up. Through her first pregnancy, her beloved lost child, Stefan, dead at six months from diphtheria, and then through Elijah’s and Francesca’s time, she had helplessly suffered the knowledge of irremediable distention, but never again had she ventured to ask Alexis to prescribe any escape. Only when she was having Fira had she turned on him and demanded an uplifting corset; by then it had been too late.

Hop, hop, hop, slide and jump, bend to the right, bend to the left. Her blood was racing now, and her breathing a strain. The waltz ended and she was glad for a moment’s rest while she turned the record, and rewound the machine.

Once, during the summer, Fee, or perhaps it was Fran, had come downstairs in bare feet while she was still dancing. Luckily, that morning she had on a corset-cover and petticoat, so that she was not undressed. Children were horrified at the sight of nakedness in old bodies, particularly of their own parents. She herself, as a child, had hated the smell in her parents’ room, always thinking of it as an “old smell,” as if it were a personal failing of her mother and father. Forty years ago in Russia, even a well-furnished house like theirs, tended by plenty of servants, must have stagnated with odors from primitive plumbing and closed windows in a way that was unknown in modern houses in America.

Alexandra Ivarin glanced affectionately around the room. As she looked, a darkness stole into her mood; those white naked walls, unpainted plaster still, as on the day they had moved in! When they were building, Stefan had told her that new plaster had to be given time to settle, before wallpaper could be put on, and she, in turn, had explained to the girls so that they would not expect decorated rooms to start with.

Two years had passed, the plaster throughout the house must have settled as much as it would settle unto eternity, but whenever she spoke about paper and paint, Stefan grew vexed or angry.

About the house, there never had been any arguing with him, only fighting or giving in. But by now, these raw dead walls were a torment to the girls; it was natural for them to want a pretty place to bring their friends to. Especially Francesca, fifteen next August, and beginning to bring boys home once in a while.

It had been Fran, she suddenly remembered, who had come downstairs barefoot that morning and caught her at her dancing. The child had stopped short and watched, appalled.

“It’s my own invention, instead of those awful gymnastics,” Alexandra had explained, “it’s my dancing.”

“Oh, Mama.”

Fran had turned away, a tone of helplessness in her voice, as if she had suffered defeat.

“Everything is ‘oh, Mama,’” Alexandra had said sharply. “What’s wrong with getting my morning exercises any way I like?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Mama.”

Fran had left the room, sagging in the shoulders. For the rest of the record, she, Alexandra, had stubbornly gone on, but there was no longer any joy in continuing, and for the next few mornings she had been self-conscious even with no one to watch her. Her daughter was ashamed of her, of the way she looked, of the large bulge under her thin slip, of the grotesque figure she made, leaping like Pavlova.

A child, she had thought, Fran is still a child. This lump in my throat is as if I were a child too. She is an American child, what is more; she does not like to be reminded that Stefan and I were once foreigners, coming through Ellis Island like all the others, with that same hunger to get our first papers and start belonging to America.

“Fran,” she had called, “I’ll be there soon, to get breakfast.”

“All right, Mama. I’m setting the table.”

She was forgiven, Alexandra had thought. For the moment, forgiven. Remembering it now, however, dampened her spirits, as the sight of the white plaster had done. Stefan could be immovable, cantankerous; to balk at his decision was to bring on a violence that destroyed the whole house.