First Papers (4 page)

“Please.” He jerked his shoulder to shake her hand off. His wife and sisters looked at him uneasily. But Alexandra thought, He’s sick, poor boy, no wonder he’s cranky.

T
HE ACRID SMOKE OF
Cubeb cigarettes penetrated the thinning screen of sleep, and Stefan Ivarin awoke. It was three days since the fire, and ever since the quarrel with Fehler at the office about the boxed editorial on the first page, he had been sleeping badly; it was remarkable he had not had one of his nightmares.

All his adult life, he had been subject to intermittent nightmares, sometimes once every few months, sometimes once a week. Their coming was unpredictable, with no apparent relation to his waking state of mind, and as apt to occur during periods of tranquility as during crisis.

Once, when he had been laid up with lumbago, he had mentioned them to Alexis Michelovsky, and again, conversationally, to Dr. Martin, in the process of the two families’ early acquaintanceship over Joan and Eli. Both physicians had promptly blamed too much strong tea, too many cigarettes; neither had even paused to wonder why, with the same vast quantities of tea and cigarettes, other nights remained dreamless. Whatever else their predilections, the equations of logic and reason, it would seem, held no appeal to either of them.

Bernard Shaw was right, and not only in being a socialist. Most doctors knew next to nothing, and if they did not prattle about white phagocytes, they usually erupted as learnedly about other nonsense. Alexandra with her newly declared war on “refined” foods probably made more sense than half the accredited physicians.

Not one doctor had found any cause for Elijah’s asthma, not one any cure. Though his worst attacks came only once a year or so, these “small attacks” baffled them quite as thoroughly. Rest and medicated cigarettes were their prescriptions, and during the big attack, injections of adrenalin. And a young man of twenty, in the meantime, remained the vessel of a mystery that could destroy his health and his youth.

Frowning, Stefan began to dress. His eyeballs ached with strain, and he felt the first heaviness of a headache. The impregnated air distressed him; he was always sensitive to certain odors, usually the greasy smells from frying, but Eli’s rank cigarettes had added a new type.

Fatigue had not vanished with sleep; he was jumpy and on edge. It had been a crushing week, with his usual duties augmented by endless meetings and discussions about strategy over the fire. Relief funds were being organized by religious groups, labor organizations, the Red Cross; churches and synagogues were planning special services for the dead, permits and licenses for parades and meetings were being sought throughout the city.

A funeral procession of three hundred thousand garment workers was being arranged by the Women’s Trade Union League; the Cloakmakers were staging a giant mass meeting at Grand Central Palace and there would be another at the Metropolitan Opera House next Sunday.

He had been invited to speak on all three occasions. Gompers and others in the labor movement would be appearing; he was already preparing notes—as if he would ever need them. Every union in the city was calling for tighter enforcement of safety regulations, sufficient exits, fire drills, condemnation of some thirty thousand other deathtraps in which men and women, boys and girls, spent their twelve hours every day. Like every disaster, the fire was the catalyst that had brought a seething new agitation to the ranks of labor. How hideous the price of these catalysts, how tremendous the purchase.

From Eli’s room came sounds of coughing; it had been a stubborn attack, passing now, after four days, but leaving the boy depleted and wan. Since it had begun, Alexandra, frightened and weeping, had turned on him each time he left for the office, accusing him of “not caring enough.” A wonderful woman, Alexandra, but maddening in her inconsistency.

When Eli was small, she had chided him often about devoting more time to his son, and whenever Eli was ill, “nagging” was the inevitable word that came to the tongue. Later, with the girls, the situation was worse; by then he was on the staff of a morning paper and scarcely ever at home when they were awake.

Like most mothers, Alexandra saw reality, and rejected it. Her mind was host to a vast illogic and nothing would dislodge it for long. She respected, honored, egged on her husband in his chosen work, and at the same time resented the fact that that work prevented him from being “a good father.”

“A good father.” What was it, this being “a good father”? To love one’s sons and daughters was not enough; to carry in one’s bone and blood a pride in them, a longing for their growth and development—this was not enough. One had to be a ready companion to games and jokes and outings, to earn from the world this accolade. The devil with it.

He finished dressing and went next door. Eli was propped against four pillows and Joan was reading.

“How do you feel?” Stefan asked.

“Better, thanks.”

“He’s going to get up after lunch,” Joan said.

“Good.” Eli was breathing through his nostrils again, distended still, but once more capable of supplying him enough air. That was good. To see him at the worst of a serious attack was a horror: a youngster sucking at space, fingers plucking at his pajamas as if they were made of constricting iron.

“Is your father coming again today, Joan?”

“I think so. To see if Eli can go back to school tomorrow.”

“Too soon,” Stefan said, with authority. “Don’t go for the rest of the week.”

“You can talk,” Eli said. “It would be my third absence this term.”

Stefan said, “Well,” and shrugged. Then he turned to Joan, noticing with some surprise how big she was, as if he had forgotten her pregnancy. “And how do you feel, Joanischka?”

“Fine,” she said, and laughed. “I never
will
get used to ‘Joanischka.’” Like a child, she added, “Don’t be sore at me for teasing you, Father Ivarin.”

“Sore?” he said gruffly. “Nonsense. It’s all in the tone.” He hesitated, and then as he left, he spoke past her to his son. “She’s all right, Eli, she’s a good girl.”

Downstairs, the kitchen was empty, but through the windows, he saw his wife working in the garden. At last the weather had turned mild, the earth was thawing, and a haze of young green already touched the fields and trees.

Now for days on end, Alexandra would be out there digging and weeding and planting her lettuces and tomatoes and radishes and beans, even the two rows of corn in the narrow strip left over at the side of the yard. If she suspected that sometimes he was sorry he had calculated costs so closely when they had bought their plot, she would begin at once to press him about the empty lot next them. Better to say nothing.

On what they earned, it was miracle enough that they had finally built their own house on their own ground. Forty by a hundred was the usual plot in this neighborhood; less would have been forbidden by the zoning laws, more would have been aping the rich.

Yet when he watched Alexandra measuring out the inches for her vegetables, he did sometimes speculate on approaching the owner of the neighboring property about renting his vacant ground. It would give her so much pleasure to have a larger garden, and unlike her yearnings when he was planning the house itself, these had some validity.

We’ll see, he thought, and stepped to the window and called her. She looked up, raised her forefinger to say she would be in in a minute and went on tamping down the earth around the seeds she had planted. At the side of the garden, Shag was lying stretched out on his belly, his huge front paws parallel before him, a speculative look about him as he eyed Alexandra’s activity. Watching him, Stefan thought, There will be problems larger than life when he starts tearing up her plants.

Seating himself at the table, he picked up the paper, and by the time Alexandra came in, he was deeply absorbed. She greeted him and he replied but went on reading. As she set out his breakfast, she kept up a steady questioning about the developing plans for a funeral procession, for the mass meeting; he answered between paragraphs, with a growing annoyance at her persistence.

“We ought to do something ourselves,” Alexandra said.

“I gave the relief fund five dollars yesterday.”

“I mean, do something here in Barnett,” she said. “Out here it’s already forgotten, a few days after it happened.”

Stefan nodded and went on reading. The final figure was 146 dead. The
World’s
coverage was again the largest and the best of any of the papers; even today, the fire was page one, column one, and most of page three was given over to pictures and affidavits. Like the rest, however, the
World
was blaming the disaster on “incompetent government” and overlapping authority between local and state departments. Even the liberal press could not grasp the truth underneath the superficiality.

“Something to make the neighbors remember and think a little,” Alexandra went on.

Stefan looked up and said sharply, “Must I leave the room, to read my paper?”

She drew back as if he had thrown something at her, and turned quickly, to hide the ready tears that sprang to her eyes. But he had seen, and, in Russian, he said, “The devil!”

“Chortu, chortu,”
she repeated after him. “Everything is
chortu,
if I dare open my mouth when you want silence.”

He made no answer. Under the table his right foot moved backward under the chair, his leg bent and the knee jutting forward like a runner’s at the tape. On the ball of his foot, as if driven by an unseen mechanism, the leg began a rapid up and down pumping. Unlike a tic or tremor, this pumping was something he could instantly control when he knew he was doing it, but it had become so habitual that he usually did not know. It was not always a mark of irritability; at times of delighted concentration over some baffling problem of chess, for instance, it would also begin, continuing until his calf and thigh began to ache.

Now, however, in the sudden silence, he heard his shoe squeak and his rubber heel go tap, tap, tap on the floor. Suddenly eager to soothe his wife’s feelings, he brought his right foot forward, in alignment with his left, and set his heel flat on the linoleum.

“You’re right,” he said, making his tone agreeable again. “Some kind of public protest in Barnett would not be a bad idea.”

Instantly smiling, Alexandra wiped her eyes with a kitchen towel. “We’ll decide on something. If only there was time to arrange a big meeting in that hall in Jamaica. Alida and Evan would help, and you could speak—”

“Alexandra, I beg you. Not now.” Under the table his right foot moved back under the chair once more; his knee rose and fell; this time he did not know it. He bent over his paper, shutting her face out of his line of vision. Without a word, she left him and went back to her garden. Stefan was relieved.

And he was relieved again some twelve hours later, when he returned to the house, to find it already dark. It had been another exhausting day and he needed silence and separateness. He would work out Capablanca’s game with Lasker, and go to bed early.

His fatigue was out of proportion to the day; he wondered at it. The trip from New York had taken longer than usual; a lightning storm had damaged power lines, and after the change at Cypress Hills from the elevated, the trolley crawled to Jamaica and Barnett. By the time he had walked the mile up from Main Street to the house, he was conscious of a dragging pain in his back and shoulders.

Only rarely did he regret the decision to move out to Long Island so that the girls, at least, could grow up from babyhood in a thoroughly American environment, but tonight was one of the times. For a man on a morning newspaper—daily except Saturdays—with the first deadline at eleven each night, it was a hard trip, harder than it had been nine years ago when they had taken the step.

When he was a block away from home, Shag heard him and came loping across the empty fields to greet him. Having a dog was charming; there was a great clumsy loving energy about Shag that appealed to him even when he was depressed.

“How are you, boy?”

Shag leaped at him, his weight striking full on his shoulders.

“Down,” Stefan shouted. “Lie down.” He bent to pat the great animal. “You blockhead you,” he said. “Come home and behave yourself.”

The lightning storm had wiped the sky clear of cloud, and the rain had freshened the odors of new grass and earth. In the pale light, the house looked beautiful. Stefan Ivarin drew a deep breath and some inner tightness loosened. Walking more easily, he climbed the three concrete steps that rose in the bank of ground, and then the three wooden steps of the porch.

But for once the chess game failed to stimulate him and he left it before the final moves. With vague apprehension he wondered again why he should feel so weary. It was never hard work, long hours, the expenditure of energy which produced this depletion; it was, rather, depression.

Was the situation at the office really growing worse, or did he imagine it? Nonsense, Ivarin thought. I am no skittish youth to be imagining. A clash will come between us. He is heading for a show of power which will kill off one or the other of us.

Well, let it come. If the
Jewish News
is to go in for Joseph Fehler’s yellow journalism, I would not remain in any case. Fehler bridles at the phrase, but his schemes are all for sensationalism in the paper. In this too he is an extremist, not in his politics alone. It was a bad day when Fehler was appointed Business Manager, bad for the paper, bad for my peace of mind.

An anarchist for a business manager and efficiency expert—that is a touch of the sardonic for you. Socialism is too moderate for Mr. Fehler, the Socialist Party is too moderate, I am too moderate, Debs is too moderate. Only the Socialist Labor Party—how mischievous political titles could be, concealing disparate principles under similarities, to confuse the innocent or naïve—only Fehler’s S.L.P. is any good! Like all extremists everywhere, in Russia, in America, even in the offices of newspapers, Fehler will hurl his little bombs the moment he feels powerful enough to do so. Woe to anybody in his way. Woe to anybody when the extremists win anything anywhere.