First Papers (67 page)

“I won’t either, sir,” he heard himself say, as Dr. Holmes at last turned toward him. “Thank you for the way you put it.” He flushed, as awkward as a schoolboy, and added, “My name’s Paige, I think you know my father, Evander Paige.”

Later he drove his old car over to the Hudson River and then on up along the river. It was impossible to go home, settle down for the day, read. Vaguely, he longed for someone close, to whom he could talk. Not Letty, not anybody at all like Letty. He wasn’t meeting new people; he went nowhere as yet, and was out of the mood for social life. When he was asked, anywhere and by anybody, whether he had a family, he always answered briefly, “I was married, but we’re amicably separated.”

“Amicably separated” was a lie. No matter how polite, how restrained, how calm their behavior, a man and a woman who had left each other were not amicable. They were filled with pain that they had failed; they were filled with questions as to whether it might have been avoided, if only one or the other had been less insistent, more flexible.

I’ll be damned if I’d be anything, once I stopped being insistent, Garry thought. Without transition he began to compose an official letter in his mind. “Sirs, this is to tell you, I will not kill. No President, no public outcry, can persuade me or force me to this business of killing—”

He came to with a start. He’d have to figure out his own way of saying it. He wondered how much time there was left.

Three mornings later, in the anteroom to Molloy’s office, Garry was waiting for the eleven o’clock appointment he had asked for. He was early, and though he had already read every word of the war message at home, he picked up the folded
Tribune
from Miss Alston’s desk, saying, “May I?” Her nod was routine, but he was unaware that she watched him with interest as he read.

It would have surprised and rather pleased him. Victoria Alston had been Molloy’s secretary for several years, proof enough of her intelligence and ability, but never yet had Garry managed a few words with her without finding the conversational burden too lopsided to enjoy. Usually they said their good mornings or good evenings and let that stand for an exchange of the amenities.

THE PRESIDENT CALLS FOR WAR WITHOUT HATE

Garry stared at the banner headline on the
Tribune.
He read it once again, and there it was, unchanged. It was not a morning for levity, but the phrasing made him compress his lips in what looked like a smile. Kill but do not hate; eviscerate but do not hate; murder but do not hate.

“Now, come
on,”
he said half aloud.

“What was that, Mr. Paige?”

He pointed to the headline. “Did you read this?” he asked.

“Mostly I did. It’s historic, isn’t it?”

“‘War without hate,’” he said, in the tone of a bewildered man. “Loving little bullets, I suppose, sweet little bombs.”

“Oh, Mr. Paige, you always say such things!”

“What things, Vicky?”

He glanced down at her; she was blushing. It was so unexpected a sight; he might have been loading her with endearing compliments. She fidgeted, staring at his hands holding the paper, and then beyond his fingers to the type itself. “It’s just, well, it’s a historic speech, and you’re taking digs at it.”

“At this soapy headline,” he said.

“Soapy?”

“Mealy-mouthed,” he said. “I didn’t say a word about the speech itself.”

“But you’re not
for
it.”

An authority suddenly charged her words, and Garry was interested. Was there a real person at this desk, not the automaton she had always seemed? “I don’t think we can make the world safe for democracy through killing people,” he said. “But I do think it’s as fine a speech as anybody could make who does believe we can.”

“That’s what I thought you meant.”

At that moment, Molloy came out with his caller. “Sorry,” he said, “we took a bit longer,” and then went on to the elevator with his guest. “You can go in now,” Miss Alston said, and as he started toward the open door, she called in a fierce postscript, “You oughtn’t talk that way, with people’s relatives wounded or dying.”

He wheeled around; her face was scarlet again. It wasn’t a blush, he realized now, it was fury.

“I didn’t know you had relatives in it,” he said, as Molloy came back. “I really am sorry.”

But inside, Molloy shut the door and said, “She hasn’t one soul in it, Garry. She’s just made it her own private war, and if it ended tomorrow, she’d cry her heart out, like being jilted at the church.”

His venom surprised Garry. About everything but the Irish question, Molloy was generally in good humor. He was turning forty, and the first conscription would not reach him, so his edginess could not be the kind that was showing its ragged presence among the younger men at Synthex.

Molloy suddenly said, “Forget it. I’m fed up about something else, taking it out on Vicky. Now about those new tests you want to run, here are the figures of what they’ll cost.”

Garry ran through them, everything suddenly forgotten but the research he had been projecting for most of a year. A Swiss chemist had patented a process for making artificial viscose in transparent sheets instead of in filaments, and Garry believed he could go further and make such sheets so waterproof that they could be used for everything from a baby’s milk bottle to a surgeon’s hypodermic syringe.

“The figures,” he said at last to Molloy, trying to subdue the entreaty in his voice, “aren’t too far from my estimates, are they?”

“Mighty close. So get going, Garry my lad, and if it’s a smashing flop, it’ll be right on your own head.”

Garry laughed. He was happy. Good Lord, he thought as he left the office, happy.

B
EFORE THE WEEK WAS
spent, flags flew from every house in Barnett, from every house that had a flag to fly, throughout the state, throughout the nation.

Alexandra Ivarin wept for the young men who still had to die, and then she wept for Eli. She gazed at their own flag, remembering the joy with which they had hung it out at dawn just three weeks ago, and their somber pain when they hung it out at dawn this morning, the first day America was at war. Once again they had seen the sun come up, waiting through the night for the momentous news. It was half-past three when Congress finished voting and Abe Kesselbaum, sleepless too and at the paper, caught the news off the ticker and called them.

And this morning came the official proclamation of war on Germany, and the frenzy of rejoicing and recruiting and enlisting was engulfing the land. For the young and reckless, a blaze of glory and heroism lighted the skies. But for those with sons in their early manhood, there was the choke and gulp of fear.

“The day we’re in it,” Eli had said, “I’ll enlist.” Her only son, sometimes weak, sometimes hurtful, but her adored son. By now he might be in line at the recruiting booth nearest him; he might even be signed up, already the Army’s.

She saw him as he would be in khaki uniform, the rakish overseas cap on his light hair, his blue eyes eager, his color high.

He married too young, she thought, he was trapped by life, and now it takes the risk of death to offer him the adventures he should have had.

Then she saw the khaki ripped apart by shrapnel, his blood pouring, his eyes glazing—she put her head down into the cradle of her arms and sobbed. The one pain not to be borne—how had those mothers borne it, the ones to whom it had already come?

Stop, stop, stop it, Alexandra thought. Do something, get up, go somewhere, and don’t wallow in this danger you now have to live with. You’re not the only one, you’re not the only one.

Only then did she remember that she did not know for certain that Eli had already enlisted, nor that they had accepted him. If he were wheezing with his asthma, they would reject him, surely the Army would have to turn him away. The trouble was that between his attacks, he could breathe freely, easily; he might be just boyish enough, adventurous enough, not to say a word of his real medical history.

Alexandra moved to the telephone. It would be better not to ask Eli, but Joan might answer and she might know. Poor Joan, how different she had been since Eli’s infatuation two years ago. Like all hurt women, Joan forgot that when she and Eli were the ones caught up in an infatuation too strong for them, she had seen nothing wicked in his desires, had found them as natural and good as life itself. But when it was Eli and somebody else, of course it was agony and jealousy and outrage.

At least Joan had been clever enough to think twice before leaving him forever. Webby and Sandra were her “reasons,” but she still loved Eli, so she did what women so often do, and took him back.

Alexandra’s hand had come to rest on the telephone, but it still had not lifted the receiver. She never would try to hold Eli back from enlisting—never could she be so great a hypocrite, when she believed that there was no hope for humanity until this horrible war was won.

She rushed from the telephone and sought refuge in the garden. Her hobby of so many springs and summers was now, it appeared, an act for the good of mankind: the government called upon every citizen to grow as much produce as possible, to send more food to war, for our Allies, and soon for our own sons.

Remarkable, how her own enthusiasms all seemed to be coming home to roost now, bringing satisfactions the whole world could see. She had always loved her lettuces and tomatoes and radishes and corn, so now she had a head start on poor Alida who never had grown a thing except flowers for the table. And she had loved her little lectures on the beach years ago, so now her first piece had just come out in
Abend,
and she was actually an author, with four more pieces already accepted by them, “in the bank.” And the first letters she had ever received from total strangers were already waiting for her replies! Five letters were received on Thursday, and then eight on Friday. Even on such a day as yesterday, somebody there had called her to tell her the number.

She suddenly hacked viciously at some weeds, chopping them down with her hoe. She ought to go in this instant to answer those letters; war news had let her put it off this long, but it was folly of the worst sort to fall behind. If she was going to be lax about answering such mail as the week’s article brought, then soon she would be falling behind with the article itself. She had not been married to a Stefan Ivarin for nearly thirty years without learning what torture awaited any writer who had to race a deadline.

Inside the house the telephone rang, and it sent a nervous thrill along her skin as she rushed to answer it.

“I suppose you’ll like this,” Eli said heavily.

“Which?”

“They’d rather we didn’t enlist until the term is out,” he said. “Can you beat it?”

Her heart leaped. “Until the term is out?” she repeated stupidly. Respite, she thought, April, May, June.

“Registration Day will probably be before that,” he said, “and naturally when that’s decided on, they can’t suggest any delay.”

“But as for volunteering right away,” she said, “the Board of Ed is asking teachers to finish out the school term?”

“That’s about it,” he said. “We heard yesterday afternoon.”

She said not a word of her relief, and later she searched both the
Times
and the
World
for the school announcement. It was not there; it must have been crowded out of these early editions. But they would print it tomorrow.

There were two other students in the classroom when Fee arrived on Monday, and Dr. Wohl said, “Well, Fira, you are Number Three. For the grand total, we’ll wait for the bell.”

He didn’t roll his r’s any more, nor was he effervescent and amusing. Fee couldn’t remember when he had changed into this somber man but it got worse as the war went on. There had been about thirty in the class at the beginning of it, and a year later there were only twelve. Four more had dropped out last fall at the start of senior year, and not a single freshman had registered then for German I. There had been pieces in the papers all along, angry letters to the editor, demanding that schools drop German forever, and Fee often squirmed at the idea of Dr. Wohl reading those wild-eyed attacks.

But all that was nothing to what he had read for the past two days and Fee watched him, without daring to meet his eyes, in a misery of worry about the way he must be feeling now. Sixty German spies, the papers said, were arrested the very day we declared war, sixty in New York alone, seized and jailed. All over the country, every police force was rounding up spies, too; in war, speed and no-escape was the first principle. The police didn’t have to wait around for warrants or anything; they swooped down and hauled you off the way they used to do in Russia.

Fee hadn’t had time to think of Dr. Wohl over the weekend. It was a crazy time for the whole family. Her mother shivered through half of it expecting Eli not only to enlist but die in battle any minute, and her father, grimly satisfied about our getting into the war at last to help win it, was absolutely livid about the fanatic spy hunt, and he was over with Mr. Paige half the weekend, yelling his head off even worse after he got back. All kinds of old laws of sedition and treason, from as far back as 1798 and the War of 1812, were being rushed back to life, he said, and every human being who cared a fig for decency and justice would have to enlist for this other war here at home, parallel to the visible one in Europe.

Out in the school corridor the bell rang, and Dr. Wohl closed the door. Nobody else had arrived; that meant the other five wouldn’t stick it out until June. With a spark of his old style, Dr. Wohl counted them aloud,
“Eins, zwei, drei,”
and then bowed low. “A crowded classroom, under the circumstances,” he said. “I thank you.”

Fee felt awful. He rapped briskly on his desk with his knuckles and said “Page eighty-two, please, Class,” and the word “Class” made her hate the five who had quit. One of them was Trudy Loheim, and she knew Trudy wasn’t home sick because she had seen her in the hall. A couple of weeks ago, Anne Miller told Fee that the Loheims were going to change their name to Lowe because Loheim was so German, and then they hadn’t, because they thought Lowe sounded Jewish. It had made Fee sore, but now all she thought was that Trudy was mean and cheap to walk out on Dr. Wohl. He was an American citizen and everybody knew it, and had been since before Trudy was born.