First Papers (66 page)

“Evan?” he shouted once. “Yes, yes, of course—all night long—Please do, yes, I needn’t even ask her, I assure you. She’ll be as delighted.” He suddenly burst out laughing. “You’re right, quite right, like the call of the wild.” Then he said, solemn for one moment, “No, if it had been the Bolsheviki, it would be a different matter altogether.”

Fee watched her father as he talked. His face was younger-looking and his body as straight as a kid’s, as if his writer’s stoop was blown off his shoulders by the wind out there on the sleeping porch. When he hung up, he said,
“Their
flag is up, too,” and for an instant his voice went shaky again. “Garry has been trying to call us, but our line was tied up. I wonder if Eli—” He cut the sentence off and substituted, “Evan and Alida want to come over tonight. That’s what I meant about not needing to ask you first.”

“Lovely,” Alexandra said. “Simply the dearest friends—”

“And Garry’s coming too. He also feels this is one of the great days.” He paused for the time of a breath. “I wonder if Eli does.”

“Stiva,” Alexandra said. “You always say not to compare our children with any other children.”

“All right.”

“Not today.”

“I forgot,” he said. “I’m excited so I forgot.”

Again the telephone rang, and she started for it, but once more Stefan was there ahead of her. A firecracker of annoyance popped off within her, that he should have
all
the pleasure this morning, but his first words restored her joy.

“Good boy, Eli,” he said. “Beside ourselves is right.” He beamed at the telephone, listening. “As you say,
not
the Bolsheviki—better not spoil the day with nightmares.” He listened again and then said, “Good, fine. The Paiges will be here too, and Garry, the more the merrier … Here she is—”

Alexandra said, “See, I told you,” and took the telephone in triumph, but nobody paid any attention. Somehow the whole day seemed to belong to him.

Fran could scarcely wait for the evening. The insane thing was that every time she thought she had grown out of her dreams about Garry Paige, something would happen to show she had not.

The day she heard that Garry had moved out and taken his own apartment, she felt that her whole life was involved, that the news was
her
news. She was no longer young enough to moon about him; nothing was going to happen overnight. A separation wasn’t final; divorces took time; he might even be in love with somebody else already.

But she didn’t believe it. Not Garry. He was the kind to stick to his guns—how often had she heard that—and that meant he wasn’t fickle and fast either. She blushed. She had been called both, by angry boys, but that was all behind her.

Garry was twenty-eight and she was twenty. Perfect. It was only at school that boys were the same age as the girls they fell in love with. In real life the man was always six or eight years older, or even more. She’d wear her one black dress tonight; he had no idea of how sophisticated she had become. He would notice that she really had changed, in all the subtle ways that only the young ever recognized, one to the other, barred from parents as if they were not even there.

Fee had changed too, she suddenly thought. She tried to see her with Garry’s eyes, and was relieved. Of course he would see that Fee was pretty now, and he might even know why girls always called her “a clothes horse.” Everything Fee wore, from a gym suit to a sweater and skirt to a real dress, just looked wonderful. She acted as if she never gave a hoot about how she looked, but that was just an act. Fee knew what was right for her, and always got it or else wore her eternal middy. She was a whole inch taller than Franny now, and weighed the same, which irritated Fran, though she’d die rather than admit it. Fee had those long straight legs that didn’t get wider up at the thighs, and they gave her the long skinny look that all the magazines now showed, especially when they ran pictures of coeds and college girls. The war had changed styles a lot, and the new ones were just made for people like Fee.

As if I care, Fran thought. Recently Fee got on her nerves. Everybody admired her energy all the time, everybody praised her “spirit” about the scholarship—except Papa, of course. Fran was on Fee’s side a million per cent, but she did wish at times that Fee would ease up a bit and be easier to get on with. Fee could be a damn crank too, just like Papa. She was always busy, or dead tired, or not at home when it was her turn to do things.

“Basketball,” her mother said once when Fran said it was Fee’s turn to set the table. “How she can keep that up—and track and dramatics—that girl is killing herself.”

With that insane schedule of study, Fran thought, Fee could at least have got off all the teams and dropped the senior play, but no, it had to be everything. “I’d lose my numerals!” she cried in anguish when Mama broached the subject of doing less. “And I have the
lead
in the play.”

Fee always talked in that ferocious emphasis now. Nothing was so-so with her any more; everything was a crisis, climax, big headlines. Boy, if she ever falls in love, it’ll be the end of the world, till death do us part and all the rest, ten times over. Ick.

Fran turned away from the mirror, suddenly disconsolate. She thought of lying down for a while before putting on her black dress, but then she’d have to do her hair all over again, and next time it might not come out as perfectly as this. What was wrong with her, she wondered, what was bothering her when an hour from now she’d be seeing Garry for the first time since he’d got rid of Letty?

It can’t be, she thought, it simply is impossible. Fee would strike any man on earth as what she is, a schoolgirl, dying to stay just that for another whole four years of college. And in a way, she’s a kind of nut. Men don’t ever like girls that are the way Fee is.

A pleasant sureness returned. She just prayed they wouldn’t spend the whole evening talking about Russia, that was all. Or how soon we’d be in the war. Good heavens above, there was more to life than that.

“I’d like my tea in a glass,” Garry said, and everybody laughed.

“Good fellow,” Stefan said, “a most fitting desire.”

Alexandra had brought the tray, with the usual two glasses for Stefan and herself, and cups for everybody else, and Fran thought that this unexpected request was really darling of Garry. To see him try to nestle the glass of boiling hot tea on his curved fingers, imitating her father, was lovely, and her spirits soared. They had talked and talked about Russia, but with such a holiday kind of air, it really wasn’t bad at all. Her father even managed to be funny when he got on his favorite theme. He cocked his teaspoon at his forehead as if it were a pistol, and went click-click with his tongue. “If it were the Bolsheviki, I’d be shot at dawn. Provided I was there.” Now he was sipping his tea as if it were champagne.

“That’s better,” Alexandra said to Garry, “or you’ll scorch yourself.” She sounded as if he were her son as much as Eli, who was next to him. Garry’s handkerchief was folded under the glass, and he was using his other hand to keep the glass from sliding right off it.

“You’d make a damn poor Russian, my dear sir,” Stefan said to Garry, “unless you can dispense with that bandage over your knuckles.” Then a moment later, in a different voice, he said, “I have to admit, since the news came, for the first time in forty years I’ve been longing to see Russia again.”

“I too,” Alexandra said. “Never did I dream of such a thing before, not once. Even when my poor mother died—it was too late anyway.”

“To be there for the first free elections, see it with my own eyes?” Stefan said. “To speak up, with no secret police reporting you?”

He shook his head as if it were too much to envision. Garry stopped his clowning with the glass of tea. Eli said, “Maybe when the war is over, you could visit,” and Fee asked, “How long does it take to get to Russia from here, anyway?”

“You want souvenirs of that trip too, Fee?” Evan Paige instantly demanded.

Fee said, “Will you
ever
forget what a baby I was about that Pullman hammock?”

Fran went to the phonograph and searched for a record. She didn’t want to put on “Tipperary” or any of the war songs, because she didn’t think Garry liked them, but a good dance tune might keep them from turning serious about this new business of going to visit Russia. So far, nothing had gone too far wrong. Eli and Joan arrived about a minute after the Paiges got there, so the first moments were all mixed up; with nine people around, she’d have to be clever to get any private word with him at all.

She wound up the Victrola, but before the first note, she knew it was too late. Behind her Eli said to Garry, “When we
are
in it, are you going to be one of those—those—?”

“One of those what?” Garry said.

Eli said, “Oh, nothing,” but his voice was queer and hard. Everybody knew what he meant, and Fran held the needle at the edge of the spinning record without daring to put it down. The whole room had a hush over it; she forced herself to look around.

Eli was looking away from Garry, and straight at Papa. “I’m not going to wait around to be drafted,” he said. “When we get in, I’ll enlist the first day.”

“Eli,” Alexandra cried out. “Why do you say that? When did you decide? Joan, does he
mean
it?”

“I mean it,” Eli told her, “and it’s true. The day we’re at war, I should think the one thing any man could do would be to enlist.”

“Not quite the one thing,” Garry said. His voice was quiet, but each word was clear.

“What else?”

“You could go right on saying war is useless and evil,” Garry told him. “If you believe it is.”

“Even if your own country’s in it?”

But Stefan interrupted sharply. “Eli, what is this?” he demanded. “A military board of inquiry?”

“Of course not. Can’t I ask a question?”

“I think not, unless Garry wishes you to.”

“I was just—”

“Just having me on,” Garry said, still quiet. “I’ll be needing plenty of practice.”

“Not in this house, you won’t,” Stefan said flatly. Without ado he turned his back on Eli and said to Evan Paige, “Is your new bureau coming along by now?”

Evan nodded. “We’re up to our necks already.”

Fran closed the lid of the Victrola, murmured an excuse and went upstairs. She needn’t have bothered with excuses; nobody noticed her leaving. She could have killed Eli; he probably was still trying to make up for everybody’s low opinion of him when they found out about him and that nitwit girl at Lake Winnepesaukee. And this was another selfish little trick to get attention as usual, not even thinking that he might be wrecking the evening for somebody else.

But wrecked it was. Garry stayed cool as a cucumber, but he must have been furious. Eli had as good as called him a draft-dodger and it didn’t help to know that once the war did start, everybody else would be calling him the same thing.

Fran threw herself down on her bed, not even bothering to smooth out her black dress. Her eyes hurt and her stomach was squeezed and tight. I can’t bear it, she thought, I can’t stand it.

Suddenly she realized it was Garry she couldn’t bear, not Eli. It was Garry she could never forgive. Why,
why,
couldn’t he be like everybody else?

Occasionally on Sunday morning, Garry would drive to New York to go to the church he had attended most regularly during the years he lived on West Eleventh. He knew he would not meet Letty there; she was a Presbyterian, and had gone to Unitarian services with him out of a wifely willingness, nothing more, but now she would see little reason for going uptown to Park Avenue and Thirty-fourth.

“He’s a preacher who thinks my way,” he told his parents once when they remarked on his “commuting” to church. “Don’t most of us choose ministers who agree with
us?”

“He’s a good man, Holmes is,” Evan said. “One of the ones you can count on.”

As Garry entered the Church of the Messiah in the beneficent mildness of the first day of April, he was thinking, How characteristic, not only of Dad but of everybody, to weigh people in scales of their own making. “One of the ones you can count on,” meant that the Reverend John Haynes Holmes, so much younger than his father’s crowd—he was in his mid-thirties—was already a key figure in nearly every group his father had joined or helped organize since the first months of the war, anti-militarist all of them, against the preparedness craze, and of course against compulsory military service.

Garry sent dues and “belonged” to his father’s particular groups, mostly to endorse his father, but he wondered often whether any group could ever budge history. An idea might, a man’s work might, but a group, a committee?

The church doors softly closed behind him and the service began. Garry again felt the beneficence of the fresh April morning, and was glad he had come. Beneficence was not easy to come by these days, not in his private life, not in any other.

He gave himself to respite, seeking it, accepting it. But then the sermon began. Almost at once it was clear that this was to be no ordinary Sunday discourse, and Garry sat straighter, leaning a little forward. Around him men and women did the same; like beads on a string they all were suddenly looped on a current of excitement. Dr. Holmes was talking of the war, of the President working day and night in Washington, drafting his message to Congress, that message which would ask for a declaration of war. No man was in doubt any longer; no man still hoped it could be avoided. One day this week, America too would be at war.

The whole church waited; the minister’s position was known. The pause was endless.

“If there is a war,” said John Haynes Holmes, “I will not fight. No order of a President can persuade me or force me to the business of killing.” If the church found it an embarrassment for him to continue as its minister, his resignation was tendered then and there. But his position would not alter. “If there is a war, I will not fight.”

When it was over, Garry made his way toward the man he had heard with such astounded awe. He was not used to making himself known to any public speaker, but there was nothing for it; he had to get close, he had to speak.