First Papers (42 page)

Fee whirled toward the mirror and a high grunted “Oh” came out of her reddened lips, astonishment first and then delight. There in the mirror was somebody who looked like her but also didn’t look like her at all. It was Fira Ivarin, but a different, grown-up,
lady
Fira Ivarin. “Oh, Franny,” she said.

Fran was watching her, smiling as if Fee were a new toy, a doll after all the grown-up years when she was too old for dolls. “You’re pretty already,” she said, in a burst of generosity she had never had before for her little sister.

Fee was peering at herself so closely now, her breath clouded the mirror. It’s me, she thought, it’s the way I’ll be all the time when I grow up. She put both her hands up, cupping them, to feel of the raised-up curve of the pompadour. Her hair was suddenly wonderful, not her usual horrible hair, like brown rain falling, but a curving dark crown upon her head, weighing nothing, rounded and rising, like a diadem without diamonds.

“And once you
begin,
and everything,” Fran said behind her, “you’ll be prettier fast.”

“But suppose I never
do
begin!” Fee’s voice went rough with terror.

Fran turned brusquely away. “Don’t start ‘suppose I never.’ I’ll scream if I hear that one more time.”

“But Trudy’s mother knows somebody who’s
twenty-eight
and hasn’t begun.”

Fran ignored Fee’s fear that some hellish design had singled her out for the same extraordinary fate; by now she had to finish dressing. She opened her precious cologne from Paris, but in the mirror she caught sight of Fee’s face. Distress lay on it, together with the delicate pinks and reds, and Fran for the first time felt remote and yet enmeshed with that distress. She herself was so lucky, almost seventeen and almost a high-school graduate. It was unfair, being a kid of Fee’s age.

“Listen,” she said, “why don’t you run down and show Mama?”

Fee’s misery vanished. “I’ll surprise her,” she squealed, rushing for the door. “She’ll take one look at me and just die.”

One drifts along, Stefan Ivarin thought. To pretend that all is well is work for a fool, but to assume that it may be a long time before all is
not
well is an adjunct of wisdom. Here it is, May, and no monumental explosions. One cannot keep girded up forever.

The second meeting of the enlarged policy staff had gone very well, as had the first. Bunzig and Kinchevsky were to be the other permanent members, and Miriam Landau was getting over her initial diffidence, though she still expressed an opinion only after preliminary whispering with her lawyer.

Thus far, Joseph Steinberger had added a considerable definition and dimension to their discussions. Across the years, Isaac had talked often of his abilities, and now Ivarin was seeing them for himself. With all his clients, Isaac had told him, it was Steinberger’s nature to investigate the structure of their businesses or companies; it gave him the wider base he needed to serve their interests, and if in certain cases he thus was able to offer a client some opinions or advice that led to increased profits, he was usually well rewarded, by gratitude, and then perhaps by increased fees or even a few shares in the company’s stock. He was a rich man, and his wealth was a direct harvest from his deep-sowed devotion to those he served.

After two meetings, Ivarin could well believe it. He was quick and perceptive; he brought with him an amount of background information the others did not expect. Once, Steinberger asked about the apportionment of space for Russian news, German news, Polish news, and had at his own fingertips rather exact figures about how many of their readers came originally from Russia, from Germany, from Poland.

Ivarin was impressed. Both meetings were devoted to “the money side,” and he found nothing to interest him deeply. Nor to antagonize him deeply. The paper always had taken advertising; Fehler was hiring two extra men to try to get more. They were called “salesmen” and the usage amused Ivarin. He had always thought a salesman sold shoes, a hat, a quarter-pound of tobacco and the papers for it, but these salesmen were to sell empty space in an unborn copy of the
Jewish News.
A rather metaphysical sale, he thought, yet devoutly to be wished.

At home, Alexandra had adjusted to things as they were, and the girls had returned to their normal belief that nothing connected with parents could be interesting for long. Fee had decided he was not yet due to appear on the nearest corner with a tin cup and a case of pencils, and Fran had retrogressed to her assumption that fathers were created in heaven to provide private tennis courts, nets, iron rollers and the rest of the paraphernalia now cluttering up the back porch while Fran and all her friends, mostly boys, labored to finish the court once and for all.

One splendid small labor of his own had unexpectedly offered itself through Evander Paige’s outfit at the Free Speech League.

“We’d like to publish the vigilante series in a pamphlet,” Evan announced on the telephone one afternoon, calling him from his law office in New York. “The English translation.”

“What a fine piece of news. When did you decide on that?”

“I’m just back from the League luncheon. They voted unanimously Aye. Do you remember the San Diego lawyer whose car I borrowed to follow the vigilantes in?”

“Smithers,” Ivarin said promptly. “He took your exhibits overnight for safekeeping from the police.”

Paige said, “That’s right.” Ivarin’s memory for details of a story always surprised him. “It was Jonathan who suggested the pamphlet. He’s come East for a few weeks, and I took him to the meeting. In California, they used your series with membership appeals and got better results, so he thought we might try it in all our chapters, with a national drive for new membership.”

“I’ll give the pieces one final editing,” Stefan said. “When’s your date with the printer?”

“You needn’t,” Evan said. “I reread them all, and they hold up just as they are.”

“I won’t do much. Just look for rough spots.”

“The editor’s privilege,” Evan conceded. “If you damage these, though, we’ll make trouble for you.”

“Thanks, Evan, and that gang of yours.” Then, as an antidote to the warmth in his voice, he ceremoniously added, “Tell them I am deeply honored.”

One drifts along, he thought, and the days go and the weeks, and the only panacea is work at something your heart rushes to.

“B
UT THE MINUTE IT’S
ready to play on,” Fran said in despair, “I’ll have to go away for the summer! Can’t I
please?
Just for two weeks?”

Alexandra said nothing. Day after day since the start of June, this argument had run along until the sight of the tan expanse beyond the windows made her angry. To stay behind when they started for the beach was what Fran was nagging her to death about, to stay behind by herself, so she could preside like a queen over the tennis court.

“If it was my fault,” Fran went on. “But you know how much rain there’s been.”

“You can
not
stay all alone, no matter whose fault.”

Fran looked away, hating her mother for being so pig-headed. She glanced at her father, who was insensible to what was going on around him, in that way he had, and then at Fee, who was almost as miserable as she was. Fee understood. They had worked all spring a year ago and all spring this year, and now at last the court was nearly ready, would positively be ready by Graduation—and bang, the next day she had to turn her back on it until September.

“It’s like being a prisoner,” she cried out. “Dragged off to the beach no matter what.”

“By apron strings,” Stefan agreed suddenly. “Fran is nearly seventeen. Is she to be tied hand and foot regardless of her own desires?”

“Apron strings,” Alexandra retorted. “Could any mother believe more in free will for her children?”

“Free Will and White Slavery!”

Alexandra was infuriated. She wheeled toward the girls and said, “Must you both sit there enjoying this spectacle? Go upstairs or go outside.”

Neither moved.

Fee sat as if tacked to the chair and Fran stared at her father, mute, afraid to break the spell and see him return to indifference. To have him as her ally and defender was an unimaginable glory. Maybe
he
could see the tremendous necessity of being right here for the court’s first two weeks of life, so Tom and Jack Purney and the whole neighborhood would get it fixed in their minds forever that it was her court, not just any old tennis court but her private court, inextricably a part of Fran Ivarin, no matter how many of them played on it with no matter what equal rights. Maybe he could make Mama see it, too.

“Aping the rich,” Alexandra flung at him, forced to accept the girls’ immobility. “You said it a hundred times—they’d want tiaras next, you said. And now you’re the big defender and I’m suddenly the Czar’s jailer who wants to tie Fran up in apron strings and lock her away on the beach.”

A faint smile moved across his mouth and Alexandra was infuriated anew. If he said a word about her being volatile, she would leave the room, leave the house, and they could all three get along forever without her. Her eyes stung with a hundred points of hotness and she started for the back door and the sight of her garden just beyond.

“There’s nothing so frightful,” Stefan said more amicably behind her, “when a girl chooses to stay at home with her father for a couple of weeks, is there?”

“That’s right,” Fran said urgently to her mother. “I can cook breakfast and supper for Papa and take care of the house. I won’t be here all alone.”

“You’ll be alone half the night while Papa is at the paper,” Alexandra retorted. “With Tom or Jack and ten other boys right here in the house with you!”

“Oh, Mama,” Fran said. Her tone said that mothers could be revolting.

Fee suddenly spoke for the first time. “All spring long, Franny hurried with all her might, Mama, but the weeds and rocks and raining-all-the-time!”

Alexandra sat down heavily. “All three united against me,” she said. The kitchen towel lifted to her eyes was the signal for Ivarin’s abrupt departure, but Fran exulted in her heart. The struggle was all but won. She signaled Fee to follow her and they both left their weeping mother with alacrity.

The miracle that spelled total victory came the next morning. “How would you like to be a visitor every evening at the Paiges’?” Alexandra asked, ignoring Fee and addressing herself to Fran. “Every night till the middle of July?”

“What kind of visitor?”

“An overnight visitor—just to sleep there. You could be back here every morning to play tennis, stay here all day, then go to the Paiges’ again for the night.”

“Mama!” Fran cried, winds of delight blowing through her. “Did you ask her, or what?”

“Of course I didn’t ask!” Alexandra said. “But we talk over things, you know how we do, and Alida agreed, a girl staying alone every night till three in the morning—”

“You didn’t say those terrible things about ten boys, did you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Alexandra sighed enjoyably. She had regained the upper hand in this matter of a daughter’s behavior, although Fran would not see it that way. Nor would Fee, nor perhaps even Stiva. “We were discussing modern ideas about letting young people do anything and everything, without any adult nearby, and Alida knew exactly how I felt. So she invited you.”

Fran kissed her mother and then raced over to Channing Street to thank Mrs. Paige for her marvelous kindness and goodness. In her excitement she almost blurted out the question churning in her heart. “Will Garry come out while I’m here?”

Even thinking it and holding it choked off was exciting. Victory? It was unheard of. Not only had Mama been beaten about carting her away from her court, but she had unwittingly arranged a sort of
assignation
for her daughter and Garrett Paige!

“Sweet girl graduates—two of them the same day,” Alexandra cried, kissing first Francesca and then Fira as they came down for a quick breakfast before dressing. Fee’s graduation exercises at P.S. 6 were scheduled for nine o’clock and Fran’s from Barnett High at noon, a schedule that avoided the unthinkable for Alexandra.

A twin graduation day. What a happy quirk of fate, her two lovely daughters approaching two of life’s milestones on the same glorious June morning. Even Stefan’s refusal to go with her to their separate commencement ceremonies could not becloud the entrancing hours just ahead. Play no favorites indeed. Nobody could expect a man who worked all night, he had said, to be up for commencement exercises at the unholy hour of nine
A.M.,
and since he could not attend Fee’s, he would play no favorites and stay away at noon from Fran’s as well.

But she had accepted it without discussion. Up and down, up and down, his internal barometer about the climate at the paper had recently begun to change from one day to another, and it was wiser to let him alone on as many other things as possible. He was still reasonably free from agitation about Fehler’s doings, but in the last two or three weeks he had lost that seeming trust that “it could have been worse.” He was not moody or agitated; if anything, he seemed to have lost interest in what was going on. Not that anything big
was
going on; the only news he had to tell her recently was that Borg was happy at last, ordered by Fehler to get his survey going again, and at all possible speed.

“Fehler changed the plan of it somewhat,” he said. “Borg has to go beyond innovations and collect samples of big popular appeal.”

Big popular appeal. Stefan mistrusted words like that, and she did too. Hearst! The name went hissing through her mind.

But this morning she was not going to let anything spoil one moment. Fran’s court lay out there in the sun, like a silken tan carpet. They had finished it only yesterday afternoon, when Fran had mixed the plaster of Paris for the white lines, and then watched inch by inch while Tom Ladendock ran the little marking machine over the nailed-down lengths of string stretched along the base line, service lines and alleys. The white fluid came out of a square spout, to even it off at its edges, but the lines wavered a bit anyway, looking homemade. Just the same they had dried hard overnight and this afternoon was to be the official start of the tennis season at the Ivarins’.