First Papers (21 page)

Months ago, that had been, a few weeks after the terrible night of Eli telling about his name. One afternoon the Paiges had stopped by during a walk, as they sometimes did, without telephoning first, and Stefan had been right there when they came in.

He greeted them almost formally and turned away with some flimsy excuse about a rush of work. He was still in his bad mood—that was it; she had forgotten—it was this very visit of Evan and Alida that had finally brought him out of it. Their visit, not to be too modest about it, plus her own sudden inspiration as she saw he meant to leave them to her.

She had given him no time. At once, almost as a greeting, she said, “You know, my dears, Stefan has started something like one of Evan’s cases.”

“Like a parole case?” Alida asked him, “or a free speech case?”

Stefan stopped; he had no choice. “It’s not precisely—”

“Unprecisely then,” Evan prompted. “It sounds interesting.”

Alexandra avoided Stefan’s eyes. “It’s like freedom of the press,” she said, “for a book he simply detests, that’s one reason it’s such a vital case, so similar to—”

“Alexandra,” Stefan said.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “I’ll go start some tea; you’ll tell it yourself—after all it’s
your
editorial, and
your
printing fund.”

With alacrity, she left them together, and from the kitchen she could hear him talking about “Assassinate a Book?”—at first reluctantly, then warming up as he gave them the background for it and answered their questions about the public’s response to it, and the plan to print the book privately.

Dawdling over the glasses and spoons and biscuits and quince jam, Alexandra smiled. It lifted her heart just to hear Stiva speaking warmly to somebody, talking again in sentences, in lively inflections, not in the dead wood he had been using for speech ever since his mood had begun.

When she judged his improvement irreversible, she went back to the dining room with the loaded tray. As she saw the concentration in their faces and the satisfaction in Stiva’s she felt almost a physical jar as the second half of her inspiration nudged her. Without a word of explanation, she departed again, this time to her sewing room.

In a moment she was back, holding out a copy of the
Jewish News,
folded back on itself to an inside page. “Stiva, translate it for them,” she said. To Evan and Alida she added, “This is the very editorial. I sometimes save a special article for years.”

“Do
translate it, Stefan,” Alida said.

“Is impromptu translation fair to your work?” Evan asked.

“Fair enough,” Stefan said. He took the paper from his wife’s hand and read a few lines over to himself. Then he began swiftly, as if he were reading a piece printed in English, “This paper has fought anarchism for twenty years. It still does. Yet it is a shock that in this free country—”

He paused only once or twice to search for a word, to re-phrase a sentence. Evan sat motionless and Alida spoke once. It was after the part about readers who still remembered the tyrannies they had escaped by coming to America. “They say again and again, ‘It’s a free country,’ and their hearts hammer with gratitude and love. But that great banner ‘A free country—’”

“It’s wonderful, Stefan,” Alida murmured. “Truly wonderful.”

When the translation ended, Evan sat on without speaking. He looked at the folded newspaper, then at Stefan, then at the newspaper once more as if its physical size and conformation interested him.

“Stiva,” he said at last, “would you write it out for me, when you can find time?”

Alexandra thought, He’s never called him Stiva before.

“Write out the translation?” Ivarin said. “Yes, of course, yes, if you want it. I confess I’m pleased that you do.”

“I’d like to show it to the League people. And to some of my law partners.”

Evan had twenty copies made at his office, and had circulated them among everybody he knew; he even sent a few out to California, to the new group of Free Speech people who were organizing their own League there.

With a start, Alexandra returned to the present, to the mop in her hand. She had forgotten the cleaning, remembering that other visit of the Paiges and forgetting the one they were paying today.

She began to slash around her with the oiled mop, sliding it over the parquet squares of the floor as if she were in a race. Last-minute cleaning was so undignified—she disliked it on principle. Rushing against time, so as not to be caught at it by the expected guest or pupil. Or was there a hidden snobbery behind it—hating to be caught red-handed with this proof that she didn’t have a nice Polish servant girl to do it for her?

Outrageous idea! She slashed the mop around twice as fast.

Fee raced for the front door at the ring of the bell. “Do you know yet, Mr. Paige?” she cried, while Evan and Alida were still on the porch, stamping the snow from their rubbers. “Are you going in a train all the way to California?”

“Fira,” Alexandra said. “Can’t you wait until they’re in the house before firing your questions?”

“Yes, I am, Fee,” Evan answered. “It was settled at last.”

“When? Tomorrow?”

Her mother was welcoming the Paiges now, but Fee kept talking to Evan as if nobody else existed.

“I have to wait a while,” he said. “A case of mine finally reached court, and I can’t drop it flat and go.”

“You can’t?” Fee asked unbelievingly. Her father came down and it became clear soon that whatever Mr. Paige did want to talk about wasn’t his trip at all. Fee knew with the familiar falling weight inside her, that it would be the kind of talk where children didn’t count.

“Come on,” she whispered to Fran.

Fran shook her head. She thought of her birthday party at the beach, and the churning rolling excitement in listening to Garry talk about the railroad strikes in England and Ireland. Perhaps listening to Garry’s father would start up the same wonderful feeling.

“Stefan, I said on the phone I had something I wanted to tell you about.”

“Alexandra was sure it was your trip.”

“It would have been about that too,” Evan said.

Hastily, Alida said, “If I hadn’t told Alexandra about it first.”

Both men smiled at this flutter of apology and Stefan said to Alexandra, “So you’re not the only chatterbox! Forgive me, Alida.”

They separated for a moment into two men united in common cause against two women, then at once joined again as two couples, four neighbors.

“Come on, Franny,” Fee whispered again.

“Don’t pester me. You go, if you want.”

Alexandra said, “Franny, we might ask the Paiges if they’d want you to go out for a while, don’t you think so?”

“Not at all,” Evan said before Fran had time to resent being chided, “but I don’t imagine the girls will be interested.” He had grown serious and addressed himself directly to Stefan, and Fran settled back in triumph over her mother.

“What I want to discuss, Stefan,” Evan Paige said, “is something important to me, and to the League. We have too many lawyers and we need editors, writers, lecturers. We need to find the right man, and nominate him and elect him as a member of our Board.”

“And you want Stefan,” Alexandra said, her pleasure uncomplicated and unconcealed.

“Not just I,” he answered. “When I told Theodore Schroeder and Brand Whitlock and Abbott about knowing Stefan—they wanted him as much as I do.”

Stefan, too, was pleased—Paige would not imply that Whitlock and Abbott and the rest knew of him unless it were so, but a frown pulled together the lines above his nose.

“I’m not the man for it,” he said.

“Oh, Stefan, my dear,” Alida said, her color rising a little, “you are just the man for it, just the man they want.” As she ended, she saw the intent faces turned to her, and she looked flustered.

“Now, girls,” Alexandra said, “I think we’d like to discuss this by ourselves.”

“Please,”
Fran said, “just a little while longer. Mr. Paige said—”

“No, dear,” Alexandra said calmly. “Now, we want to be down here ourselves.”

“But, Mama,” Fee protested. She still wished Fran weren’t pigheaded about staying, but being put out was another matter.

“Now, now,” Alexandra said, standing up and signaling to Stefan to leave this familiar business to her. “We’ve had this before. I don’t hang around when Trudy is here to make fudge, do I, Fee? Not every single minute until you scrape the pot? Or you, Franny, when you come home after school with Jack Purney—”

“Oh, all right,” Fran interrupted, to head off any Mama-ish comments about Jack. “Come on, Fee.”

She walked off in ladylike poise, Fee at her side, but when it was safe, she made a face of deadly disapproval in the direction of her parents and their friends. Fee giggled. Fran glided toward the door and then ran up the stairs two at a time. Fee raced after her, stopping only to unlock the back door, whistle for Shag, and let him dash up at her side as if he too were glad to escape the dopey world of parents.

Downstairs, Stefan repeated more firmly, “No, I’m really not the man for it. By nature, I’m sorry to say, I don’t work well any more in a committee. When I was young, at the University of Odessa, with Drubhinov and the others—there, to work together was priceless; we all found it so.”

“It
is
harder to be flexible as we grow older,” Paige conceded. “But I am sure you would be flexible enough, Stefan; this is a rather remarkable group.”

“That’s the trouble,” he said. “‘A remarkable group.’ I’m too used to being on a lecture platform, perhaps, the kingpin for a lot of poor devils, too hortatory perhaps, too much the eternal teacher, you follow me?”

At his last three words, Ivarin suddenly laughed, holding up a cautionary finger. “See there? I didn’t mean it, it slipped out, it’s the betrayer, the trademark of the lecturer and the teacher. ‘You follow me’ indeed.”

Paige laughed also, his eyes fighting with a private pleasure in the way Ivarin’s mind operated. “It is the phrase of a teacher,” he said comfortably. “But they know about you and what you do. And they want you very much. By now they are counting on it.”

“I thank you,” Stefan said. “I thank them.” He shoved his tea from him, stood up, and began pacing back and forth on a small track, remaining part of the group, yet finding the comfort of motion he so often needed. By now, both Paiges had become accustomed to this habit, and neither one remarked it as they had done in the first stages of their friendship, when it had invariably made them wonder if he had grown so restless that they ought to take their leave at once. Now they merely watched him idly, as if he were polishing his glasses or rolling a cigarette.

Alexandra said, to nobody in particular, “It is only a phrase, after all. They want him as he is.”

“Yes, yes, I don’t doubt it,” Stefan answered vigorously. To Evan, he said, “You will be able to explain to them, I’m sure. They will understand, because—if I am wrong, please correct me—because
you
understand.”

Evan nodded. He looked up at Ivarin affectionately, not challenging or pursuing the discussion. Then he said simply, “We need your help, Stefan.”

Ivarin stopped pacing. “I’m not refusing to help.” He sat down at the table, addressing himself to Evan with heightened seriousness. “There is another point, if I may raise it.”

“Please do.”

“Aside from my own fitness or unfitness, I must tell you—I disagree that your League needs writers and editors to mix in with its lawyers.”

“But we’re topheavy with lawyers, and we could be more effective in our work if—”

“Permit me, less effective by far!”

“Why less?” Paige asked, nettled. “You seem so positive.”

“Your Free Speech League can be effective only
if
it stays topheavy with lawyers. Your work is with courts and judges, with witnesses and juries—the devil with adding members who cannot work inside courts and who are not qualified to deal with judges and juries.”

“I see what Stefan means, I think,” Alida said dubiously. Alexandra agreed, but a wary expectancy stood in her heart.

“I see too, and I disagree with every word of it,” Evan said flatly. “You’re dismissing writers pretty lightly, and editors and lecturers. You also overlook the weight of what people think after they read and hear them.”

“Of course not.” Ivarin stressed each word. “Of course I am not.”

“But you do dismiss them from our Board,” Evan said, also with extra vigor. “Rather high-handed, I would say.”

“They would add nothing but talk and more talk.” Stefan leaned forward across the table. “They’d be nice willing believers in free speech who would hamstring your specialists in endless ropes of words and clever suggestions. Throw them out in advance, I tell you.”

Suddenly Evan Paige laughed. It was the laugh of a man amused and pleased, free of irony, free of resentment.

Alexandra glanced quickly at him and then at Alida. Both of the Paiges were worked up, in much the same way as they got worked up over pacifism, about which she and Stefan could never agree with them. It was a level-temperature “worked up” that was as foreign to Stefan or to herself as cool water to boiling oil. A moment ago, when Evan had been irritated, and showed it, he still was anchored to some solid reserve underneath. With the Paiges, the fear of a scene never occurred to you. It was remarkable.

Was this one more result of being born in America instead of in excitable Russia? For a moment there stirred in her the old forgotten sense of apology about being “a foreigner among real Americans.”

“You fooled me, Stefan, by your sudden attack,” Evan said. “But I just remembered the basic point: you did say you would help.”

“I was never refusing that, you understand,” Ivarin said. His words were quietly spoken again, as if in a victory he did not want to press. “If there is a free-speech case someday, that you are angry about, you might perhaps like me to write about it.” He glanced at Evan with a new gleam in his eyes, and added, “Even though I’m not also on your Board, talking. You follow me?”

Again Evan Paige laughed, but this time he stretched in his chair, his left hand kneading the back of his neck as if it had felt cramped for a long time.