First Papers (59 page)

Now, during a particularly wild burst of applause and stamping from the audience, he glanced at her, sitting in the first row. She was gazing up at him, responsive, enraptured for all the world to see, her eyes the shining eyes of the girl, Alexandra Bartschoi, who used to come to every lecture he ever gave when they were both young.

Letty looked at the postmark and tore open the letter. It was from Mt. Desert and it was signed, “Please do, Peter.” A lightness entered her heart.

Dear Letty and Garry,

This is to remind you about the latchstring being out. I can’t recall when you take your vacation but I hope this isn’t too late. Hank and Cindy are still off in England, as I think you know, and it’s been mostly their kid and the governess up here so far. But now I’m hoping to have a few amusing weekends, and this is to ask you for either the first or second in August. They’ll be back by then, and it will be like old times if you say yes.

Please do, Peter.

They had already taken their vacation, starting as usual over the Fourth of July, and they had got back only two days ago. Neither of them had suggested Canada this year; neither had remarked on the absence of an invitation from Hank and Cindy, Connie and Proff, or Peter himself, but Letty knew the lack of it in her heart and wondered if it had some special meaning.

She never spoke of it to Garry, and all he thought of was where to go for their holiday; she was glad to leave it all to him.

“White Sulphur Springs,” he finally said. “There’s a new hotel down there, very fashionable, very expensive.”

“It sounds lovely.

“We drive through Washington, and we could take a day for sightseeing.”

“I’ve always wanted to see Washington.”

“But what about our visit to the family?”

“I’d write Father and Mother and say we’re heading for the Sunny Southland instead. Maybe we could manage a weekend later.”

“If we took a Pullman up instead of driving, we could.”

Maybe during the first or second weekend in August, she thought now, and combine the two. That would mean Garry asking for a couple of days off at Aldrich, and so soon after his vacation, he wouldn’t want to.

She leaned back and let Peter’s letter drop on the table. She was still at breakfast; during the hot weather, with her best clients off at their summer places, she did not hurry to the shop the way she did at the height of the season. Mrs. Everrett could manage the ordinary customers, and it was lovely to dawdle around a little after Garry left for work each day.

“Is there any more coffee, Blanche?” she asked. “I’ll take it in my room, please.”

She took Peter’s letter with her. The tall windows were bright with summer, the tree leafy and full in the sun. The sea around Mt. Desert would be aquamarine on such a day, Peter and Hank’s lovely old boat would slip across the water, with the slap-slap of the sea on her hull, and of the wind on her canvas. She could feel herself, lazy and sunburned in a bathing suit, sitting on the deck again, gazing up at Peter until she realized she was staring as if he were an actor on a stage and she a member of the audience who had paid for the right to watch his every gesture.

Perhaps the only way would be for them to visit her parents in Rockland as they planned, and then have her take another day or two by herself to go on to Mt. Desert, while Garry went back to town for Monday morning. He was always sweet about that, no matter what else went wrong between them. Women were more than appendages of their husbands, he said; had he ever acted as if it was just talk?

Blanche appeared with fresh coffee, on a Sheffield tray laid with her best Georgian silver, by Emes and Barnard, 1792. A sense of luxury suffused Letty, and slowly she read the letter once more.

“Please do, Peter.”

It had a special sound in her mind, not insistent and yet rather commanding. Maybe I will, she thought.

Sixteen days of the summer vacation had gone by, when Stefan Ivarin suddenly thought, Nothing is worth this. Poverty averted is excellent in theory, but if insanity is the price, then let poverty come.

For sixteen days there had been no school for his daughters and all their energetic friends. He glanced out at the tennis court, which seemed to lie just under his window, as if it had developed the faculty of creeping closer during this first summer of having the whole family at home. There were six or eight of Fran’s friends there, going off in their particular style of laughter, insufferably full of sex awareness as well as noise.

Fee and her religious duenna, Anne Miller, were close at hand, too, on the back porch. At the moment they had forgotten their twin devotions to God and Boys, and were playing some thumping game that shook the house. It involved Shag, causing frenzied rushes and whanging against the copper screening, so that Stefan kept awaiting the whining tear of metallic mesh.

And in the parlor, mysteriously delayed long past her usual schedule, Alexandra was doing her morning dancing to the accompaniment of that eternal Strauss lollipop she called a waltz.

Suddenly he consulted a narrow strip of celluloid propped against his inkwell. The 1914 calendar was there in entirety, and showed him there were nearly two months to go before education would again claim the daytimes of the young. An intolerable stretch of time for a man at last making some headway as a functioning human being.

He stood still, listening. Fran, Fee, the Strauss waltz.

He had to get rid of them.

They had taken it very well, all three, the dictum that there could be no extravagances this year like going off to the seashore. But, to his surprise, he had not.

Was there any way, now that he felt a little less pessimistic about what lay ahead, to get them out of the house for the rest of the summer? Perhaps for three or four weeks, if not for the rest of the summer?

The vision of them gone was entrancing. The familiar lost sensation of being alone in the house suddenly returned, floating into him like a silken fog. Alone, silent, untended, asked no questions, offered no solace. He could feel himself going downstairs in the morning to start the coffee, going out for the two papers, folded into thirds and interlocked, waiting for him on the porch in their pristine lumpishness. Since the Sarajevo affair, he had stopped telling himself he ought to cut the morning newspaper bill in half by giving up either the
World
or the
Times;
it was impossible to give up either one now. Never had an extra penny been better spent, nor the extra nickel on Sundays.

In any case, the saving of pennies and nickels no longer seemed so imperative. Where did optimism he buried when it was gone, and why did it seem so natural when it returned?

In hard reality, there was not yet much to be optimistic about, and yet here he was, daring to think of using up fifty dollars of their savings to send them off to their tent for at least a month.

His one lecture, after all, was not the only one he had on the schedule. The A. F. of L. had signed him for no less than six during their annual convention in the early fall. More than that, he had their assurances, backed up by word from Gompers, that they would count on him for two appearances each month throughout the year, usually in New York, but occasionally a night’s trip away. That was the minimum, at ten dollars each, and since when did a year go by in American labor where a minimum of lectures could suffice?

The Democratic Party had approached him just last week for their campaign in the city elections in November. Thirty dollars each was their rate, but to talk to labor not as a socialist but as a Tammany boy was not to talk to labor at all.

The devil take their thirty; even at an honest man’s ten, he would build up a schedule of three or four lectures a week, and with the growth in his list of pupils that he was already seeing, he would be supporting his family again before he was through.

If he did not lose his mind first from the hullaballoo.

He took out his savings book; the steady earnings of Alexandra had put a big stretch into his earlier calculations; there was no doubt about it. He opened his checkbook and flipped the pages backwards, going through his check stubs until he came to a year ago May and the name of the landlord of the tent city. Were all the tents rented by now? He thought of the slow season and depressed business of the last months and then went down to the telephone, closing the vestibule door behind him.

When he emerged, he called all three of them together, in the parlor. They came warily, each face studying his for a clue to what might be coming.

“How soon could you all get packed for a vacation at your heavenly beach?” he said.

“The beach?” Alexandra cried.

“When?” Fee said, jumping to her feet.

“You said we couldn’t afford it,” Fran put in.

“I think Mama needs a little rest,” he said hypocritically. “Maybe a month out there, to the middle of August, would break up the summer in a good way.”

“I’d love it, I’d just love it,” Fee squealed, whirling around and then rushing toward him, as Shag did, but stopping an inch away. Her face was flushed and pink; she had been less of a child recently, he realized, in this instant of seeing her revert to a total childishness.

“What are you saying this for?” Alexandra said. “As a theory, or as a real thing?”

“Do I dare theorize, when it comes to beaches?” he demanded. “There is an empty tent. I just telephoned the tent landlord, to find out. Your old one in the front row is rented, but the end one in the second row is vacant, and so is the middle one in the last row.”

“I can’t believe this,” Alexandra said. “But my lessons, and my little lectures—”

“Oh, Mama,” Fran said.

“Please,” Fee begged. If she were going away before John left, if it weren’t she who had to stay behind—”Please say yes, please.”

“But my lessons,” Alexandra repeated wretchedly.

“Some of them you can give right there,” Stefan said. “The ones you thought were temporarily lost for a while. Your Sophie Jabrowsky, for example, who always goes to that beach for two weeks, and Mrs. Godleberg for four this year, and Sonya Mikhailovna, with her husband, the jeweler, doing so well.”

She looked at him, flabbergasted. “How did you know, how could you figure out all these schedules?”

“You forever talk about which pupils you will lose for which times, don’t you? I remember what you tell me.”

She gazed at him. Was there ever another man like this one, to be in command of every detail of her pupils and their plans, in case he needed to make an unexpected new calculation?

“Thus,” he went on, “you need not interrupt
all
your lessons, merely a different group. You follow me?”

“And in fact,” Alexandra said with a sudden lift to her voice, “I always seem to meet a few brand-new women out there who—” At this naked commercialism, sudden embarrassment appeared in her face, but it gave way to a seraphic look of acquiescence. A yearning awoke within her, for the white sand stretching as far as she could see, for the twinkling spray over the crest of the waves, the flaky crackle of hot canvas at the touch of a mid-morning wind. “Oh my goodness, what wonderful news,” she said, and for the first time in all that troubled and frightening year, an unqualified serenity possessed her.

“There is one condition,” said Stefan, suddenly stern.

“What condition?” she demanded, while both girls went motionless.

“You must not shilly-shally over ten thousand getting-readies. You are to start tomorrow afternoon.”

“But, Stiva—”

“But, Papa—”

“I just can’t, my clothes are all dirty.”

“Tomorrow,” he said.

A vast enlightenment entered Alexandra’s soul. She looked at him for an instant. He suddenly had had enough of them, he suddenly wanted to go back to his hard-boiled eggs like rocks, his unmade bed, his ability to get along without them. That was what was behind this whole change of mind, this entire remarkable performance. He was getting well at last, within himself where it counted most.

“We’ll go tomorrow,” she cried happily. “We’ll take our dirty clothes with us.”

One morning nearly three weeks later, Fee was lolling in one of the striped canvas chairs in front of their tent. It was barely past eight, but the sun was already ablaze.

Suddenly she looked up and could scarcely believe her eyes. Way off, at the end of the trolley line, where the wooden sidewalk started for the tent city, was her father, dressed in his dark wool suit and stiff white collar, and holding his felt hat against the wind that blew toward him from the sea. He was walking slowly toward her.

He’s sick again, she thought, something terrible must have happened. And at this hour of the morning! He must have been up all night.

She began to run toward him. With the first steps, she wished she had a towel or a sweater over her bathing suit; sometimes she was suddenly embarrassed at the way she was filling out day by day. She jackknifed her arms up in front of her, with loosely clenched fists under her chin, and then ran on. She called out to him, but he had his head down against the stiff breeze, and her voice carried past him.

She could see him now, really see his face, and it was dull and grey. He had an armload of newspapers, about ten different ones; his whole right side sagged with the weight of them. Maybe that was why he looked sick again, infirm, and so old. He never came out to the beach, simply never, even if Mama begged him to come for a day, not even once in all their summers in the tent had he ever been there. Yet here he was now, with everything still hushed and quiet around him, like a scarecrow in hot black wool. She was frightened, and called out again.

This time he heard her. “Firuschka,” he said eagerly, actually sounding glad to see her.

“Are you all right, Papa? Are you sick again?”

He shook his head. Then to her astonishment, he bent down and kissed her. “The war has started,” he said slowly. “All over Europe.” He spread out the papers a little and she saw that they were black with big headlines, but he held on to them, as if he couldn’t let go.

“It started at last,” he went on, half-closing his eyes, the way he did when light hurt them. “I came out to tell Mama, and be here for today with the family.”