First Papers (41 page)

Fehler offered a typed sheet of paper, the notice to the staff, to be posted in the morning. This time it was over the joint signatures of Miriam B. Landau and Jacob Steinberger, announcing “the long-awaited decision” and stating that Joseph Fehler would be known, not as General Manager, but as Publisher, a term more widely in use in the changing practices of modern journalism. Below this was an added message.

NOBODY’S
J
OB

I
S IN
J
EOPARDY

AT THE
J
EWISH
N
EWS
.

N
O
C
HANGES

A
RE IN
V
IEW

ON THE
S
TAFF.

The notice was dated February 15, 1913, and Ivarin was sure that on the bulletin board next day it would be greeted with nearly universal relief. Though only the most unsophisticated would take its promise to heart, there would be a stir of reassurance throughout the paper. Better Joseph Fehler whom everybody knew by sight than a total stranger from the outside world.

Ivarin handed back the notice and drew his watch from his pocket, his automatic signal that unfinished work was on his desk, waiting for him. He said, “Well, we’ll all have a go at it,” not quite knowing what he meant by that.

“One small point, Stiva,” Fehler said, again rising, and strolling to the door with him. “Mrs. Landau doesn’t seem at all interested in political questions. Had you noticed?”

“I never thought of it, one way or another.”

“I did only recently. And Steinberger, too. He does not seem even inquisitive about where I stand.”

They had reached the door of his office and Ivarin stopped. A sensation he did not like invaded him and for a moment he could not put a name to it. Then he knew it for embarrassment. Fehler was going to ask, as a favor—

“It’s the paper’s politics that can matter to them,” Ivarin said hurriedly. “Not yours.”

He raised a finger in final salute and departed. But inside his mind he suddenly gave way to mirth. It was abrupt and lavish, not feigned, but a burst of delight.

It was the first relief, the first balance wheel of the evening. The new Publisher of the
Jewish News
was shivering in his pants that his benefactors might discover he was an anarchist. Or that Stefan Ivarin might go and tell them.

He did not call Alexandra. If it had been anybody else they had chosen, a relative, a businessman, somebody from any other newspaper, he would have abided by his promise and called her. But Fehler would be a shock to her as it had been to him, despite its having occurred to him more than once during the deadlock, and he could not deal it to her by telephone. He would have to endure the scene she would put him through.

He was angry at her in advance but he resolutely picked up his pen and went to work. March 4 was to be a historic day, apart from the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, and he meant to write a ringing editorial about it. For on that same day, for the first time in the history of America, labor would be officially elevated in the scheme of government; a Department of Labor was to be established, with its own seat in the Cabinet.

It was rich material, but he could not write two sentences easily. His pen stuck as if it were filled with mucilage; he struck out phrases as soon as he set them down. At last he tore up what he had written and leaned back in his chair.

He was tempted to tell Abe Kesselbaum the news, suggesting a visit to the café for a thorough talk about what it might mean. But he decided not to.

Borg came in at his usual intervals, but Ivarin had no thought of saying anything to him. Each time he glanced over the copy Borg brought in, asking “Do I need to read it?” and when Borg said “Nothing to bother about,” he scrawled his initial in the lower corner and gave it no further thought. Whatever Borg’s faults, his editing of routine stories constantly grew faster and more expert. In that respect he was still a godsend.

Once or twice one of the rewrite men or reporters came in, Bunzig, who had been on the paper as long as he had, and the labor specialist, Kinchevsky. Each time Ivarin was tempted, and then thought, Let them find out tomorrow, with the rest of the staff. What a parade there would be then to Fehler’s office, to offer congratulations and best wishes, express delight, wish him well, and incidentally to consolidate positions already held in his esteem or attempt to wipe out past mishaps and make a fresh start.

You’d think I was jealous of him, Ivarin thought. Back there I was like a cub reporter fretting whether my job was on thin ice; now I begrudge him the plaudits and bravos and excitement tomorrow. The new Publisher, the big man on the paper.

And the editor? When was the editor demoted?

Again he was invaded by mirth, but this time there was less conviction in it. It was far-fetched, that “jealous”; it was unlikely that what he felt in the pit of his stomach was the shabby squirm of jealousy. But if this persistent unwillingness was something nobler than that, he did not know it, so let it be dubbed jealousy and the devil with it.

Alexandra surprised him. She took the news without dramatics, without tears. She listened in nearly unbroken silence to his whole story and fastened onto Miriam Landau’s passionate question, “What could be different on this paper, for Ivarin?” She relished the lawyer’s amplification of the point and virtually memorized it.

“It’s a guarantee,” she said.

“They meant it for that.”

“And a warning to him.”

“We’ll see,” Ivarin said.

“See? Is Fehler rash enough to flout such clear orders? What is there to ‘see’?”

He shrugged, relieved that she was being so matter-of-fact about his news, yet puzzled too. She who could read untold menace into Fehler’s plan for something called a “survey” now accepted with serene confidence the absence of all menace in his appointment to the executive post the owner himself had held for twenty years.

Yet there was something soothing in her sunny decision that Joseph Fehler in any post whatever was Joseph Fehler still. The tight chain of his own thinking soon loosened and he told her of Fehler’s parting remark.

“The coward,” she cried, transformed on the instant. “The sniveling coward. Is he going to run around to the whole staff, one by one, hinting to them to say he always voted for Taft?”

He said, “Now, now,” as if he were soothing an excited child. Only Alexandra would have produced “Taft” that way, like a cat spitting. But her notion of Fehler in delicate conclave with all the staff, one by one, amused him and he said, “You cheered me up.”

“The sniveling coward,” she repeated, compressing her lips, a perfect mime of Scorn. “A guarantee is what it was, Stiva. He wouldn’t dare, but with cowards you need guarantees.”

This time he laughed, though the convolutions of thought that had led to this pronouncement were beyond him. “Was Fehler one of the possibilities you had already thought of?” he asked, and the question so clearly mystified her that he added, “While the deadlock held on, I did wonder if it would end up Fehler.”

“But he’s not good enough and they knew it all along.”

“They decided he was.”

“They grew desperate, so they took him for the time being,
knowing
he isn’t good enough. If he actually
were,
Landau would have named him in his will, or in some codicil, or told the lawyer.”

How clever she was, to put her finger on that point so promptly, so effortlessly. His own phrase, “convolutions of thought,” sounded in his mind, with its patronizing affection, and he disowned it.

“The will or the codicil or telling Steinberger,” he said. “I think you must be right. It never occurred to me.”

She beamed. Her pleasure in his praise glistened on her skin like the sheen of summer’s first burn. She longed to touch him, to kiss him as if they were still young. How happy people could be even in times of change and trouble if they were close in what life meant to them. The word “socialism” began to sound in her mind, but for once she rebuked it as inappropriate and halted it at the end of its first syllable in a soft protracted “Shhh.”

They sat on for a long time, talking.

The weeks of early spring were easy ones for Stefan Ivarin and for the rest of the staff of the
Jewish News.
No changes were announced in procedure, none in personnel. Once the initial furor engendered by the bulletin board had petered out, the most noticeable change was the sight of Joseph Fehler in the office that had been Jacob Landau’s.

“There is no rush,” Fehler replied to people asking his plans. “I am considering certain matters, but there is no rush.”

With Ivarin he took pains to be more specific. “What would you think of getting the first edition out an hour earlier? They are all doing it.” “I’m thinking of how the policy staff should be enlarged—what do you think?” Day by day, or nearly so, Fehler would seek out Ivarin in the early evening, the end of his own working day and the beginning of the editor’s, and tell him what he was considering and ask for opinion and discussion and advice. Sometimes he would ask Abe Kesselbaum, too, and they would all three talk for a while, thoughtful, agreeable.

“A new Fehler,” Ivarin said one night to Alexandra. “A diplomat, a pourer of oil. If it’s an act, he does it well. If he means it, so much the better.”

“Don’t trust him,” she said, her old air of being menaced again upon her like a soubrette’s agony in a low play. “It’s some sort of trap.”

“And I the fool to walk into it?” He turned away. Her serenity had been too good to last—the real trap was his thinking it might.

“There
is
no new Fehler, a man like that never changes for good.”

“Alexandra, I beg you.”

“Then don’t tell me another word about him! If I’m not permitted to say what I think, without ‘Alexandra, I beg you.’”

She walked out of the room, and straight into Fee and Franny. They must have heard, for they were standing stock still, their schoolbooks in their arms. They knew enough about what had happened to understand; she had told them about Fehler’s selection, adding that it was probably a better choice than some total stranger, who might turn out to be a capitalist at heart, against labor, against unions, against Papa’s whole life.

The girls
had
heard, and Fee whispered, “Did Fehler do anything to Papa?”

“No, darling, of course not.” She was too vexed to be amused at Fee’s use of the name, Fehler, but at other times it made her laugh. Neither of the girls ever said “Mr. Fehler”; naturally not, since they had never heard him called anything but the unadorned Fehler. But coming from Fee, it was as if she had spoken of King or Roberts or Mainley.

Stefan came out, saw them clustered at the foot of the stairs, and silently went off to the city. He usually went in earlier now, and so did many of the others; he would have to stop this soon or get fraternal protests from the photoengravers and typesetters who already did have unions and saw no reason why writers, reporters and editors could not get a union too.

When he reached the office he found Borg in a state of distress, and half-guessed what it was. To a degree he rather sympathized with him: Saul had confidently gone to Fehler with the question that had been in his throat since the notice went up on the bulletin board a month before.

“Now that the staff
is
settled down, can I resume work on it?”

“There’s no rush, Saul. I couldn’t examine it right away, a big survey like that, and all your exhibits would go out of date before I could. I’ll give you the signal later on.”

Borg looked at Ivarin as he finished telling him about it. “‘Later on,’” he said. “The vaguest date in journalism.”

“True,” Ivarin said. “And well put, too.”

The first meeting of the enlarged policy staff was put off by Fehler also, and April was half-spent before it actually took place. Two of the seven members were not yet selected, but Steinberger was there and Miriam Landau with him.

“Steinberger wants her to come always,” Fehler had explained beforehand. “She should know something of the working problems of her paper.”

“‘Her paper sounds funny,” Abe said.

“Hers it is,” Ivarin put in. “By the inexorable law of ownership and possession, the
Jewish News
is ‘her paper.’ What it would be without
us,
God only knows, but our paper it is not, except by courtesy of the language we use—” He broke off, and said, “I sound like my wife.”

“Could Papa ever get out of work?” Fee asked.

“Of course not,” Fran answered. “Stop worrying, will you?”

“I don’t.”

“Ever since Mama told us about Fehler, you’ve been as scared as a rabbit.”

“I haven’t even thought about it more than once or twice.”

“Once or twice a minute.” Fran hooted. She was getting dressed for a high-school dance, the last one of the senior class except the Graduation Dance in June, and Fee, with Shag at her heels, had come in to watch her put on her rouge and lipstick. Fran didn’t have to do it in secret, now that she was almost out of High; she was allowed to, if it wasn’t too red. And no round circles, like red quarters, on her cheeks. It had to blend in, like Nature.

Suddenly Fee said, “Put some on me, Franny.” She cocked her head and held her right cheek up at a sharp angle toward Fran’s hand; her tongue stiffened to ramrod usefulness and pushed the center of her cheek outward.

“It’s like a crab apple,” Fran said. “Stop that.” She rubbed rouge lightly over Fee’s cheeks. Fee was already moving toward the mirror but her sister yanked her back and said, “Wait till you’re finished and gorgeous.”

Fran applied lipstick, and then said, “Now let’s see how you look with a pompadour instead of that drippy old hair.”

Fee giggled. Fran was already working at a section of Fee’s dark straight hair, combing downward in quick, choppy strokes.

“You’re teasing it,” Fee cried. “I’ll hate it.”

“No, you won’t,” Fran said. “High will look good on you,” she pronounced, and brushed it smooth and high up on Fee’s head. “You’re going to be pretty, Fee.”