First Papers (48 page)

With the letter in the pocket of her alpaca bathing suit, Alexandra set out for the Herzog tent. At the store or in the public bathhouse, Mrs. Herzog was rather shy and withdrawn when they met, but shyness was so usual among the women in the tent city. And showing them you were interested in their children was unfailingly the magic sesame that dissolved it.

“May I come in?” she asked David’s mother, pausing at the wide-open flaps of canvas. “It’s about your David. He’s the brightest boy!”

Mrs. Herzog was sweeping and her broom halted in mid-stroke. “The highest marks in the whole class,” she said. Pride warmed her face fleetingly, but she made no gesture to invite her visitor inside.

“He’s as impatient for high school this fall as my child,” Alexandra said, stepping in as a matter of course. “And he’ll get good marks there, too.”

Mrs. Herzog muttered a fragment of prayer, but said not a word in direct reply. She remained standing, almost in Alexandra’s path, as if waiting for the real purpose of this visit to reveal itself. The tent was arranged like their own, with the addition of a crib for the baby sister, but Mrs. Herzog ignored the wooden chairs and made no move to offer one of them.

Suddenly, Alexandra was abashed. David’s mother had not asked her to come in, though she was actually in, had offered her no tea, not even ice water. She realized she was smiling at a young woman who had not smiled even once. “If this is a bad time to drop in,” she said, “I’ll come back later.”

“Bad time, good time, it’s the same. If you have a complaint about David, I’m ready.”

“It’s not a complaint, anything
but,”
Alexandra said warmly, and then faltered for words. It had seemed so natural, so simple, but now standing this way, face to face, unsmiling, it suddenly was hard to lead into the subject of singsong nasalities. “You know, a group of women from the tents come to my place twice a week, sometimes three times—”

“I heard,” the other said. She shrugged slightly. “I’m too busy.”

“Oh my goodness,” Alexandra said. “I didn’t come here like—like a salesman, to get another pupil.” She was embarrassed and a little resentful at being so misunderstood. “I mentioned the women to explain that I’m not exactly an amateur about bringing up children in an American way.”

“David isn’t brought up right? Did he break something? I’ll pay for it. Did he do something dirty with your little girl?”

“Heavens, nothing like that. I simply had an idea I want to talk over, about children losing their foreign accents.”

“Who said David has a foreign accent? I know him like a book and never heard it.”

Alexandra was nonplussed. She wished she could turn on her heel and walk out. This young mother was either stupid or rude, and as unresponsive as a mule. “People
can’t
hear it themselves,” she said in one further attempt. “There’s a brand-new play, on that very point. About a professor who teaches a little English girl to speak English without an accent. An Englishman wrote it, a brilliant man, a socialist, and it’s a wonderful play, so human and so funny. The little girl didn’t know she had an accent, of course, nor did her father or mother. They couldn’t
hear
it, because they heard it all the time.”

She had been carried away in her pleasure at finding so apt a way to make her point, so impressive a colleague in the world of phonetics. It apparently had got through to David’s mother, for she seemed at last to be thinking and receptive, mulling this over.

“You listen to me,” Mrs. Herzog said suddenly. “Just two words,
you
listen.”

“Why, you’re in a fury,” Alexandra said. “I’ll go. Forgive me.”

“Mrs. Buttinsky!” She spat it out, and then repeated it in a shrewish scream. “Mrs. Buttinsky, that’s who you are. Get out of my tent, and leave my David alone.”

Alexandra shook with anger at the onslaught. “Good day,” she said with dignity. “I wanted to—I hoped to—to interest you in an idea. But good day.”

She did turn on her heel and behind her she heard a storm of language, ending in another “Mrs. Buttinsky.” The words lashed at her and her own anger whipped back at them, but, she thought, It’s impossible. Never, not once in all the hours of her life, as a teacher, as an adviser, an informal lecturer out here on the beach—never had she met anything but eagerness, never had she heard anything but words of thanks and desire for more. Now without warning, on this lovely hot clear summer morning, a woman she had approached with an open heart had turned fishwife and called her names and ordered her out. It was unbelievable. It was dreadful.

Back in her own tent, Alexandra sat down heavily at the kitchen table. A sadness suffused her, an emptiness she usually escaped, except when Stiva was in a mood that hurt her and would not let her.

Her worry about his not writing swooped down upon her like a dark grey gull, wings outspread, blotting out the sweet normal sun. For a few days she had almost banished it, but now this raw abusive encounter brought it back, raw and abusive too. Was he merely too busy? Or was something seriously wrong? By now it must be more than two weeks since he had sent a line. And both times she had telephoned him he had given her a curt “Nothing’s wrong,” and shut her off as only he could shut her off.

She went over to the unread copies of the
Jewish News,
now stacked in a neat little pyramid by Fee. There must be ten or twelve of them, still rolled up; somehow she never could find time to start at the oldest one and read them until she did catch up. It might be a way of getting back at Stiva for not finding time to write to her.

She opened the top copy, to keep Fee’s pyramid from collapsing, though starting with the latest issue was the exact opposite of reading them in sequence.

The moment she slit open the skin-tight wrapper and spread the paper wide, she forgot Mrs. Buttinsky and everything that had happened to her that day.

No wonder he hadn’t written. No wonder he had to say nothing was wrong when she phoned. His only alternative was to say everything was wrong.

The paper was wrong. It was different. It glared up at her like an excited stranger. It was another paper.

It was splashed and splotched with headlines and pictures and captions and boxes. A big thick streamer of type, seven columns wide, topped the entire page, as if war had just started or a terrible strike, or the Triangle fire. But it was only a follow-up story about Becker in the death house at Sing Sing, where he had already been for months for killing a gambler named Rosenthal, by now the stalest story in New York City, even though the yellow press kept pumping air into its lungs with the artificial respiration of their tricks.

Under the screamer of a headline, there was something explosive and strange about the entire page. There were four photographs, three of them big, with heavy captions underneath. The columns of type were chopped up into short chunky paragraphs, wedged apart by black subheads, everything combining into the “crisis look” of it, the fire-alarm urgency.

Alexandra did not read the page; she stared at it as if reading were not part of the expected thing to do with a newspaper. Was it possible, she wondered, that her own low spirits because of Mrs. Buttinsky were dragging down her judgment in general? In her surprise at finding any change at all in the paper, was she exaggerating, being “volatile” in her response? She looked away for a moment, out at the sand glistening before the tent, and then looked at the paper once more.

It was not so terribly different after all, was it? More emphatic, certainly, as if it were thumping a fist on the table to make a point. In a way, there was something about it that looked easier to read, more coaxing to the eye, like a novel with lots of conversation as opposed to a book on economics.

I’m trying to like it, she thought. I’m trying to pretend there’s nothing to be angry about. As if I was already face to face with Stiva and had to hide my feelings about it for his sake.

She stood up uncertainly and went back for the pyramided cylinders atop the bookcase, carefully bringing them all to the table with her and setting them down as if it were vital not to disturb the symmetry of their arrangement. Using a paring knife to slit and rip off the tight wrappers, she opened them as they came off the top, going backward in date and sequence, so that Thursday’s paper gave way to Wednesday’s, and Wednesday’s to Tuesday’s, this week to last week. One by one, their front pages flared out their strangeness at her, and still she did not read. But as she looked down at it, she began to realize that this strangeness diminished in degree as she went backwards in time.

The change had been planned to be gradual. She had missed its earliest stages; perhaps if she had been reading the paper regularly every day, she would not have found this morning’s paper so startling. If you got used to it, you might not even see it.

“They couldn’t
hear
it,” she had told Mrs. Herzog about the little English girl’s parents, “because they heard it all the time.”

Alexandra at last stood up. She had been sitting over the papers for a long time and her legs were cramped and tired. When she had finally begun to read, she could find nothing to pause over; the news stories sounded much the same as always. The editorial page reassured her; it was Stiva in each leading piece.

So far they were changing only the quiet strong face the paper had always worn, not its heart. Would that come in time?

She walked out to the front of the tent. The sun had disappeared under mackerel clouds and the air was cool. Suddenly, she wished the summer was over. Normally she was content to stay at the beach until the last moment, enjoying the sudden briskness of August nights, the need for sweaters and an extra blanket for each cot, hearing the ocean pound more meaningfully, promising gales ahead, storms, winter. It was lovely, this quiet falling away of summer, and she valued it as she valued its beginning and ripening in June and July.

But suddenly she was homesick. If Stiva were enraged about the paper, home would be miserable, but all at once she was tired of the lazy life at the beach, and her heart filled with longing for home, for the late nights when she sat up waiting against all reason for the moment when she heard the front door open and Stiva come in.

B
EFORE
S
EPTEMBER WAS OUT,
Fira Ivarin decided she was the happiest girl in the world. Nothing in her entire life had ever been as wonderful as being a freshman at Barnett High.

From the first morning, she loved it. She loved having an armchair with a side rest instead of a babyish desk with a lid, loved leaving a classroom when a bell rang at the end of a period, and going to a different one for the next course, instead of staying at the same place in the same room all day long.

She was thrilled to have one teacher for algebra and a different one for English, another one for American history and a different one for German. The one for German was the most thrilling of all. He was a man, the first man teacher she had ever seen, except for Eli who didn’t count, and the first man teacher she had ever had as her very own. His name was Ludwig Wohl, and you said it with a V and a very big O, and you called him Doctor, not Mister, Wohl.

He was rather tubby, but good-looking, with a reddish mustache and a beard that was as pointy as an ice pick. He called every girl in the class
Fräulein
and every boy
Herr,
rolling the r’s until it must have tickled the tip of his tongue. When he called on her to recite and said “Fraulein Ivarin” as he did the first day or two, rolling both the r’s as if he loved doing it, she felt grown-up and all set to giggle at the same time. Later, he switched to first names, and she became “Fraulein Fira,” and though there were no extra r’s, he seemed to get more roll with “Fira,” and that was even better.

From the start, she knew she was going to get an A with Dr. Wohl, because classes with him were such fun that it was impossible not to do your homework and be able to reel off the new vocabulary you had to learn by heart overnight, or write out German words on the blackboard, or even read something aloud, which was hardest because of the crazy sound of words ending in
ich
or
och
or
ach.

She said, “Gee, I don’t know,” when anybody asked why she chose German instead of French for her modern language, but the reason probably was that Trudy never had any doubt about what to take, and Fee took it too.

But being best friends wasn’t the same, now that they were at Barnett High, though neither one of them admitted it. They kept on saying they were best friends; if anybody mentioned Trudy to Fee, it was automatic to say, “She’s my best friend,” and Trudy did the same thing. But it began to sound funny and young. Nobody else said it.

That was before Fee met Juanita Endoza and Anne Miller, so liking them had nothing to do with it. You could have a best friend in high school without calling her your best friend; it was another change from grammar school. Every day was a change, even going past the chemistry lab and smelling the awful sulphuric acid and knowing you’d be taking chem next year, even that was exciting.

Anne Miller was different from Trudy or anybody else she had ever known before; she was from Iowa, and she was fourteen. And Anne talked about boys, and could answer anything you asked about
anything,
and even if you didn’t ask, she seemed to know what you didn’t understand about, and she would tell you. Anne always dropped her voice, or even whispered, when she talked about boys, and her whisper made what she said twice as interesting. She had an older brother and maybe that was why she knew so much about boys, but compared to Anne, Trudy Loheim never said one thing worth listening to any more.

But talking about boys wasn’t the only thing that made Anne Miller so fascinating. The other thing was being religious. She went to the Grace Episcopal Church down on Main Street and she really truly believed so hard in God and angels and life after death that she talked a lot about that, too, almost from the first day they had started to know each other. She couldn’t believe Fee had never been baptized or christened or anything and when Fee said she was agnostic and Jewish, Anne wouldn’t believe her. You could always
tell,
she insisted, and she knew Fee wasn’t. After a while she did believe it and then she asked if Fee would be allowed to go to church with her some Sunday, to see what it was like, and Fee said she’d love it.