First Papers (60 page)

The world had changed. Month after month since that summer day when Fira Ivarin had run toward her father on the wooden sidewalk of the tent city, the world around her had kept filling with new words, new places, new phrases.

The rape of Belgium, the Huns, the Allies, the Battle of the Marne—at first the war in Europe was a barrage of sounds, strange sounds spoken by her parents, by the Paiges, by teachers and newsboys, and passers-by on the street.

Then the sounds gave way to feelings, feelings of her own, although she could not remember why they started, or when. Perhaps it was the day she gave ten cents of her allowance for Belgium Relief, and knew for the first time in her whole life that she was part of something bigger than herself, something right and good. It must be what her mother had always meant about the way to be happy. This was different, of course, not like socialism and strikes and labor unions; this was joining with
everybody,
instead of just a few “idealists” everybody laughed at. And this was joining in on something of real use, helping to win the war this year or next, not something that might be of use a hundred years from now.

Belgium Relief. Soon that seemed far away too, familiar as if it had always been there. The awful news kept sweeping on, the awful battles and the awful numbers of the dead and wounded piled up higher each spring, each summer, each fall and winter. She could never keep the figures straight because they were always erased from the blackboard of memory by new totals of the dead and wounded. But the names stayed, like great bells ringing in a dark and terrible hymn … Flanders and the Somme, Jutland and the Dardanelles, the Western Front, the Eastern Front, Ypres and Verdun.

Even the
Lusitania
seemed years back already, but when she stopped to reckon it out, it was less than two years ago. She wasn’t even fifteen that spring, and she kept getting it mixed up with the
Titanic,
and was ashamed because once she made a mistake and said “When the German sub sank the
Titanic.”
Now she was sixteen and a half, and registering for the last half of her last year at Barnett High.

Stopping to reckon out dates about the war was a sort of a lie, anyway. What she really felt was that it had been there always. When people said “before the war,” it was like their saying “before you were born,” and she couldn’t imagine it for herself any more than she could imagine the Diet of Worms or the Crusades. As the second year passed and now half of the third, she couldn’t even remember newspapers without the big maps of this battle line or that, without dispatches from “Somewhere in France,” or believe that people had ever dismissed bad news from Europe as “just another war scare.”

And there was one good thing about the war.

It was lovely not having to be brave about her own parents. To have them feel the way Anne and John’s felt, or Juanita’s, was so new and so comfortable, it was wonderful.
This
war, they said, was inescapable; they despised war, but this one had to be, and had to be won, to rid the world of Prussian militarism and mailed fists, and balance-of-power deals, always on the necks of the poor.

This time it was the Paiges who were different from everybody, and somehow half of Barnett knew it and said snide things about them. The milkman tried it one morning and Fee was glad her mother slapped him down for being “a tattletale,” and glad she gave him a little lecture on the Paiges’ right to stick to their principles, yes, stick to their lifelong pacifism even now, and then said he ought to remember that America was a free country.

But it was exciting to have it somebody else that needed to be defended for what they believed. Whenever the Paiges came over to the house, the argument would start, and Fee always went pins-and-needles while she listened. Wonderful Mr. Paige could disagree so hard with her father—and yet they could remain friends. And Garry Paige had the same knack. The few times he and Letty came over, too, he would argue even harder than his father did. Even though he was about as young as Eli, he never budged an inch under all of Papa’s pounding words or loud voice, and he never got sarcastic or sore either, which was such a dead giveaway about Eli. The war was morally wrong, Garry said, killing was wrong. And the war would not end any of the terrible things Mr. Ivarin thought it would end. It would just lead to another war, bigger and more horrible than this one, with bigger bombs and faster airplanes and faster, more terrible deaths.

Listening to him, Fran would look miserable, or bored, the way Letty looked, but Fee didn’t feel that way at all. She noticed something about Garry when he talked up to her father that she had never noticed when she was little; he was handsome. His eyes looked bluer and his mouth went stubborn, and it made him twice as attractive as the old Garry she had seen around since she was a child.

“It’s terrible,” Fran said one night, after he had lambasted the “preparedness craze” sweeping the country. “Pacifists are even more terrible than socialists. It’s just my luck.”

“What’s just your luck?” Fee asked.

“Nothing.”

Fee looked at her with disgust; she was often disgusted with her. Fran might be grown-up, now that she was twenty and a teacher for nearly two years, but she was a sap about saying “just my luck,” when nothing about Garry could possibly matter to her any more—she who could have crushes faster than you could count!

Fee was still in love with John Miller, even though he was off at Iowa State. Or anyway, she liked him better than anybody else. She wasn’t the fickle kind, that was all, and never would be. Even if she forgot to write for a while when she was snowed under with work at school, or practice during the basketball season she didn’t go and fall in love with any new boy who gave her that special look or said she was a marvelous dancer.

And to have to listen to Fran say “just my luck” about Garry, with that moony tone in her voice—whew.

She knocked on the door marked
Principal
and Mr. Fitch called, “Come in, Fira.” She had written a note to ask if she might see him, and she had rehearsed what she was going to say, but now she suddenly was stage-struck. If he said she couldn’t, she would never get over it. “What’s on your mind?” he asked as she sat down.

“Miss Mercer said I’d be allowed to,” she began, “that anybody would be allowed to take over a Regents exam, if you didn’t get a good grade the first time.”

“That’s true,” Mr. Fitch said. “You are allowed to.”

“How many?” She leaned toward him. “Could you take
a lot
over?”

“How many are you thinking of?”

She lowered her head, as if she were about to say something embarrassing. “All of them, except drawing.”

“Drawing—that was back in your freshman year.” Mr. Fitch looked at her sharply.

“I got sixty-two in it,” she said, “and I’d get even worse now, so there’d be no use. But could I take all the other ones over?” A slip of paper showed at the top of one of the books she was holding tightly, and she drew it out and offered it to him. “I made a list of them.”

He began to read it aloud, at first with rapidity and then with longer and longer pauses as the list lengthened. “‘English I, English II, English III. Intermediate Algebra. American History. French I, French II. German I, German II, German III. Geometry. Elementary Physics.’”

He gave a small whistle, and went through the list once more, this time with his pencil nicking off each subject as he counted them. “Why, Fira, that’s twelve. And how many senior Regents?”

“Only three. English IV and German IV and French III. And they’re not too hard.” She added urgently, “I have real reasons for asking.”

“Fifteen. Three hours each, and they’d overlap—you might have to take four in one day.”

“Oh, please, Mr. Fitch, it’s the only way I could bring up my grades and try for a State scholarship.” With an effort, she added, “I used to have a crazy idea that if a girl got A’s, she’d never be—popular.”

“Are your grades very low? You’ve always been a good student, Fira.”

“They’re all right. Sort of average. But not good enough for winning a scholarship. That’s why I got this idea—please say yes.”

“You’d have to study up on all of the old ones,” he said dubiously. “It would be like cramming an entire four years into five months. That’s—a little excessive.”

“But honestly I
like
having a crazy amount to do, if it’s something I’m crazy about. And if I could win a State scholarship, then I’d have a chance of going to college instead of just Jamaica Training.”

He read the list once more, this time in silence. Then he reached above him to a bookshelf hung on brackets and brought down a loose-leaf notebook. “I must say it’s one question I’ve never been asked before,” he said as he opened it, “and I’ve been principal of B.H.S. for sixteen years.”

The notebook contained various official documents, Fee saw, and as she watched him leaf through it, a little hammer began to beat inside her, near her heart it felt, except that it also went tack, tack, tack inside her throat.

“—and it is expressly stated,” Mr. Fitch read in a mutter as he came to the page he wanted, “—not to be construed—” He looked up at her encouragingly. “Let me just check this once more,” he said.

By this time, the little hammer had grown heavier, and Fee’s lungs felt crowded. Please have it say I can, she thought, please let me take them all. It’s the only possible way to even try to persuade him. She saw her father’s face, red with refusal, and she hated it.

“It seems clear enough,” Mr. Fitch said at last. “Until such student has received his or her diploma—at any time prior—may take one or more Regents examinations again for the purpose of improving his or her grade for the final record—”

“I can,” Fee cried. “I can, it says so.” She jumped up from her chair. “Oh, thank you, it’s marvelous news.”

“Have you talked this out with your parents, Fira?”

“My mother knows,” she said, sitting down again.

“And your father?”

She shook her head. “If I do win a scholarship,” she said, “of course I’d have to tell him. But there’s no use upsetting him—I mean, if I don’t win one, then I’d have to go to Training next fall anyway.”

Mr. Fitch looked disapproving for the first time. “If I’m not interfering, Fira, I’d suggest you get his permission now, before you start this—this big project.”

“You don’t understand how he can be,” she said pleadingly. “Even my mother said I could wait until after Regents Week to tell him.”

“I wish she hadn’t.” He closed the loose-leaf notebook and Fee thanked him again and left. She was filled with joy and gratitude. He had been wonderful, and let her see he was impressed with her—and yet she had told him a lie. Mama had said she could wait, only at the end of an awful quarrel, giving in because there was nothing else she could do to make Fee tell him right away. Fran thought she ought to tell him right away, too, and get it over with. The only one who agreed with her was Eli, the only one who advised her to say nothing, not one word, not until she actually had the official letter from Albany toward the end of August. “Why go through all hell with him, if you do
not
get it?” Eli said. He gave her a huge smile, as if something wonderful had just happened to him. “I used to say there’d be plenty of fireworks when you girls grew up and could give the old crank a real argument. ‘Especially Fee,’ I used to say, ‘that kid’s spunky and she’s got a mind of her own.’ I was right. Go to it, Sis.”

For Garrett Paige, the phrase, “before the war,” had a tenacious and evocative power, as if it were a phrase of music that would forever call up a memory, a time, a state of mind and heart that had once been his and was his no more.

Before the war he was an innocent. Before the war were all the years when he thought man could barter reason for unreason, with millions in every nation eager for the exchange.

But from the first weeks of the war, he was an innocent no longer. He knew. He would always date his first encounter with crime and sin from that August of 1914, with the first wounded screaming out their pain on foreign battlefields, the first dead going rigid and cold.

For that was when he discovered that men loved war.

He had always believed they hated it and that nations hated it. But within weeks—perhaps within days, even hours—he discovered that there was an excitement, a heightened life and importance among people who were at war, people who watched them at war, people who wanted to be at war with them.

The British newspapers revealed it, the French, the American. An exhilaration took hold of those who read the dispatches; it fired their talk. The phlegmatic disappeared, burned away by a hotness of opinion—we should be in it, we should steer clear of it, we can’t stay out of it—

Life constantly notched up in tempo, in pressure and intensity. Around him, people were less bored, and therefore happier; they were making more money, and therefore happier; they snatched at papers, bought up Extras, swapped reports and communiqués like generals at military headquarters.

Like them, Garry snatched at papers, bought the Extras, talked of every advance, each defeat, the mounting statistics of the dead. But unlike them, he was solid with resistance; he could never grant that there was an ultimate good to come from this paroxysm of killing.

So many others had changed overnight. Within twenty-four hours of the first guns, H. G. Wells was declaiming that there never had been “so righteous a war,” and that he was setting his pacifism aside. “Now is the sword drawn for peace,” he wrote, going off into an ecstasy to explain how his “declared horror of war” had found the span of a single day long enough to overturn a lifetime’s vow against it.

How did he manage with such rapidity? Garry wondered. Five weeks after that Wellsian flip-flop, his own life somersaulted, albeit differently. A mimeographed notice was sent around to all heads of departments at the plant, signed by Mark Aldrich himself. As of that day, the nth of September, 1914, the Number Two plant, built to manufacture industrial explosives, would instead make only explosives and propellants for the Allies. Two ten-hour shifts were being set up; soon this schedule would be changed to three eight-hour shifts. Number Two would remain on a round-the-clock basis for the duration of the war.