First Papers (51 page)

Just then Joseph Fehler came in, saying he had waited for him, and could he spare a minute now before settling down. “It’s something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to,” Fehler said. “It
should
please you.”

Ivarin’s private semaphor signaled DANGER. “If you have planned something to please me,” he said, “let’s hear about it. And thanks in advance.”

They had both spoken with raised voices. The gales hurling themselves at the windows rattled and shook them in their frames, and Ivarin’s “Thanks in advance” was almost a shout. Fehler now looked up at the ceiling as if he hoped for a sign about how to proceed. Then he went to the door and closed it.

“It’s not an original idea with me,” he said, “and I’m not claiming originality. It’s another step in modernization, copying from the
World
and the
Times
and the
Sun
and all of them.” Again he gazed at the ceiling.

Stefan Ivarin waited. The sense of danger intensified. He drew out his cigarette papers and tobacco pouch and sifted tobacco carefully into the transparent trough of rice paper. The paper held steady; the rain of fine brown shreds was even and steady too.

“I want to create,” Fehler went on, “a special City Desk, the kind they have for the daily flow of the news, the routine stories. It would be under its own City Editor.”

“Not under me, if you please.”

“Of course not. You’re too valuable.” He took a typed sheet from his pocket, unfolded it and offered it. As Ivarin took it, he remembered the night in February when he had gone in to congratulate Fehler, and Fehler had handed him the public announcement the staff would see the next day.

As with all New York’s English-language newspapers, there is to be created a City Desk on this paper, responsible for the daily flow of the news, under its own City Editor.

The famous editor of the paper, Stefan Ivarin, thus released from the routine editing of routine stories, will be sole editor of the editorial page, and continue as the paper’s illustrious Editor-in-Chief.

The new City Editor is Saul Borg.

Joseph Fehler

Publisher 11/10/13

Stefan Ivarin read it twice. Automatically, as always when any form of manuscript was handed to him, he had picked up his fountain pen, but he made no move to use it. Unpredictably he suddenly recalled an old man in a skullcap, sidling up to the table in the café where he was losing a chess game to the violinist from the Metropolitan Opera House. “You have many moves, Mr. Ivarin,” the old man had said, when Feiffel had said “Check” in a quiet voice. Ivarin had swiftly run over the positions of the pieces, considering the possible plays still open to him. Useless moves, he had decided, futile, staving off the inevitable. Pah, that’s for children, he had thought, and turned his king over on its side.

Now he handed the typed sheet back to Fehler and laid his fountain pen down on his desk. He hadn’t realized how tightly he had been holding it, but an emptiness proclaimed itself in his fingers as if he had let a welcome support slip from his grasp.

“Does Borg know?” he said.

“Only that I am considering it. I wanted to ask your opinion before reaching a decision.”

Ivarin looked at him. “And Mrs. Landau? Steinberger?”

“Also on a preliminary level. I saw them, it so happens, the other night for supper.”

Ivarin said briskly, “So you came in to tell me of a
fait accompli.”
Unceremoniously he stood up and began to pace the floor. He did not look at Fehler as he passed him and there was silence except for the thud of his feet on the linoleum floor. Within his skull, a pulse thudded more importantly; he knew that the fork of veins over the bridge of his nose was rising bluely and he could feel his face inflame.

Pah, that was for children, he had decided that night. Futile moves, childishly delaying the inevitable. A man resigns.

A prima donna leaves the cast, he thought in rebuttal now. A baby throws a tantrum. The matinee idol makes a splendid speech and a noble exit.

Perhaps a man stays.

He stopped in front of Fehler. “So be it,” he said. “We’ll have a go at it and see.” The phrase sounded familiar, but he could not place it.

“That’s fine,” Fehler said quickly. “Look at this shorter version. I can’t decide which one is better.”

As with all New York’s English-language newspapers, there is to be created a City Desk on this paper, responsible for the daily flow of the news, under its own City Editor. To this post I have appointed Saul Borg.

Stefan Ivarin

Editor-in-Chief

11/10/13

Ivarin read the signature aloud, on a rising inflection and with a hint of drollery. “A little face-saving?” he asked, but before Fehler could speak he said unequivocally, “Use either version, suit yourself. But my signature cannot be used in either case.”

Fehler said, “Since you’re his boss, I thought perhaps, coming from you it might—”

Ivarin said nothing, and in a moment Fehler left. At once Ivarin telephoned to Borg and asked him to come in when he could. In a matter of seconds Saul was there, his eyes alight. “Congratulations, Mr. City Editor,” Ivarin said, rising to shake hands.

“Thanks, Mr. Ivarin. I can hardly believe it.”

“I remember,” Ivarin said, “nearly two years ago, I told Landau you were a godsend. You had a lot to learn, I said, but you were a godsend. Oh, yes, it was during the Lawrence strike.” Unexpectedly he patted Borg on the shoulder, as if he were a clever and dear child. “You’ve learned a ‘lot’ by now, more than a lot. Let’s hope you remain a godsend.”

“Let’s hope.”

Almost undiscernible, a change came over Borg as he said the words, the faintest insolence. Ivarin thought, From now on he’s his own godsend—that will be quite enough for him. Unknowingly he moved toward the door, as if to usher Borg out, and in a moment the new City Editor departed. Ivarin returned to his desk, permitted himself a few minutes of nothingness, not really thinking, but sitting quiet in a kind of empty stupor.

It’s a bad business, he thought then, and returned to his work, driving through it all evening. At about midnight, the gales began to abate, and the infernal racketing of the windows died down. That helped. He had forgotten the three-mile walk which had begun this evening, but he knew he was more tired than usual. On his way out at last, he stopped a few paces from the front door. On the bulletin board, the typed announcement was already thumbtacked in place. His peripheral vision told him it was different from both versions he had seen, and he stopped.

After consultation and discussion with Stefan Ivarin, it is decided to create on this paper a City Desk, to handle the routine flow of the news. This is the universal practice among English-language newspapers, and becomes mandatory with the sharp increase in today’s volume of news. The City Editor is to be Saul Borg. He will be responsible to Mr. Ivarin, the paper’s illustrious Editor-in-Chief.

It was signed with Fehler’s name. That’s smoother, Ivarin thought. More unprincipled, since Borg will not be responsible to me in truth, but to you. Nevertheless a more polished bit of craftsmanship.

Editor-in-Chief indeed.

He flung open the front door to the street, thinking, Why, it turns out I’ve been promoted.

As he approached the house and saw the lighted windows, he thought, The lights are always on now. No matter what time I get home, she’s waiting up.

“Is that you?” she called as he unlocked the front door.

“I wasn’t sleepy,” she said.

It’s become a ritual, he thought, I hadn’t realized it. Always the same words, like a vaudeville turn that’s too rehearsed to vary. “Is that you?” “I wasn’t sleepy.”

“Anything to eat?” he asked.

“In a minute.”

“It’s good you’re still awake,” he said. “I feel wide-awake too.” He waited only until she had set out two glasses of tea and then he told her.

This time Alexandra took the news badly. She stormed and railed, her voice breaking and her eyes filled. But when he said his first impulse had been to resign, she cried out, “Run with your tail between your legs? Leave it all to Fehler, give him a free hand? Of course not!”

He did not answer. Only on the long way home did he remember that the first mortgage payment of 1914 would fall due in a few weeks; he was glad this doleful fact had not intruded itself during his first shock about Fehler’s news.

With each hour, the shock grew stronger. A shock was what it was, the second shock he had had to absorb this year, just as he had had to extend congratulations a second time with some show of grace he did not feel. Not that Borg mattered much one way or the other. He was to be Fehler’s tool, that was the surly part of it, but Borg himself did not count. Fehler did, and now Fehler was more than ever the victor. The arena at last had a name.

“Modernization, Fehler calls it,” he said. “Everything goes by the innocent name of ‘modernization.’ Whatever he does in the future—that too will be called ‘modernizing.’ Or Americanizing. I call it Fehlerizing. Maybe I should have walked out after all.”

Again she cried out in protest. “And let him lord it over those poor devils who can’t fight back, like Abe? Please, don’t consider it, please, never.”

“It’s quite a lot of dancing on the point of a needle,” he said, speaking more to himself than to her. “To stay or not to stay,” he said mockingly. “That is the question. To quit and call it honor, or quit and call it pique. To stay and call it maturity, or stay and call it expediency. How’s a man to know?”

As he was speaking, a blackness seized him, weighted and blind, and he went upstairs. In his room he slammed the door with a ferocity he had been able to stave off for months. Leaning against the door, he put both his fists hard to his throat, his knuckles ridging into his jawbone, his shoulders rising and hunching forward as if to fuse with his stiffened thumbs.

The damnable conflict. He would live with it, sleep with it, work with it, write with it, try to ignore it, try to face it, try to solve it. But there was only one way to solve it.

If he had no children, no wife, no installment on the mortgage, there would be only one way to solve it and one time to solve it. Now. A letter written now, mailed now, sent on its way this night.

Then what? He was fifty-two and editor of a great paper, of what still was a great paper underneath its whore’s paint and powder. The only other paper with a large following was the
Forward,
and to him it already was so far from the kind of paper he could be proud to work for that he could not walk through its front door in a hope of finding the next chapter of his life there. There the barter of almost anything he believed in had already been made for the painted beads of success.

There was no place he wanted except his own place, editor of the paper he had given twenty-two years to and had always counted on giving the rest of his life to, the core of himself for whatever years there still were to be.

Fee didn’t care whether her father was in a mood or not. She kept out of his way and tried to keep out of her mother’s way too, because no matter what was wrong with them, she couldn’t help it. Not now, not when she was so happy she could scarcely breathe.

She was in love. Anne Miller’s brother had come to church with them at Thanksgiving, and he took the hymnal out of the rack and handed it to her, and her heart rang out the way the bells did when they began to peal. He was fifteen and his name was John and he wouldn’t let anybody call him Jack.

“Does anybody call John D. Rockefeller ‘Jack D.’?” he demanded when she asked him why, and she had to laugh at the sort of fresh way he said it. But that wasn’t what made her fall in love with him; she was already in love before she had the nerve to ask personal things like that.

It wasn’t anything all by itself anyway; it happened when he handed her the hymnal that first time, and then it kept on, and then one day when they were walking home from Grace Episcopal, with his mother and Anne separated from them to cross the street, he suddenly said, “If you meet me at Gray’s, I’ll treat you to a frappe.”

“When?”

“Right after I get home and get out of this Sunday suit. Can you?”

“I don’t even have to go home first,” she said. “I could go right now.”

“If we went right now, guess who we’d be stuck with,” he said grimly, and she felt idiotic to have to be reminded of his mother and Anne.

Feeling idiotic was so wonderful. She always felt smarter than anybody she was with, and to feel the opposite was strange and new and glorious. John made her feel absolutely tiny, too; he was a long string-beany boy and next to him nobody could be scared about turning into an Amazon. Ever since she fell in love, she had stopped measuring how wide her shoulders were, and the only thing left to worry her was not seeming too smart for a girl. Lots of times, instead of doing her homework, she’d just read a book from the libe, to make sure she’d stop getting the best marks in her whole class.

John was a sophomore and wouldn’t be able to keep track of her grades, but things got around in the most mysterious way. Trudy was one way. Ever since they had stopped being best friends, Trudy began to say things about her, and somebody would always tell either Juanita or Anne, and then Juanita or Anne would feel it a sacred honor not to keep her in the dark. That was how she knew Trudy had gone around telling everybody in Barnett High about the black bunting all over the front porch and how Miss King asked if Shag had died and were they socialists. That time she was so furious at Trudy, she told Juanita and Anne about Trudy’s father getting slobbery drunk on beer every single night and falling half off his chair and how her mother and brother Carl had to heave him and lug him and pull at him to make him get up and be carted off to bed, with the two of them pulling his clothes off for him.

But she only did it that one time. It made her go icky afterwards, and she hated Trudy for making it happen. She never mentioned, drunk Mr. Loheim any more, but if anybody made fun of Trudy’s thick ankles, she felt glad.

She took a vow not to risk having John Miller hear gossip about her being smarter than any girl in the freshman class, and the surest way was to stop being it. She didn’t do her homework half the time; she didn’t study her German vocab the way she used to, and she couldn’t write some of the new words out on the blackboard when Dr. Wohl called on her. A couple of times he struck his forehead with his palm and said,
“Fraulein Fira, was ist los?”