First Papers (68 page)

It isn’t fair, she thought, it isn’t. In a flash, like a dream, she suddenly saw Dr. Wohl as a little boy getting up in class to answer a question, with everybody giggling behind his back and making fun of him. Though the little boy was only about ten, he had a reddish goatee and a rounded stomach, but his voice went piping high as he tried to answer the teacher, and the giggling and laughing got louder. In another flash the little boy was gone.

“Another paragraph, if you please.” This was the real Dr. Wohl, and Fee forced her attention back to the translation. But after class she hung around a minute; she wanted to say something nice to him. She couldn’t think what, though, so she made up a question about the subjunctive mode, and they talked about that.

By the start of the next week, one of the others dropped out, and Dr. Wohl elaborately counted,
“Eins UND zwei.
Further casualties, and we may have to disband.”

A different sort of distress flooded Fee, and she was furious at him for making jokes. If they disbanded as a class, maybe they wouldn’t even give Regents exams in German—and her scholarship could go down the drain. Out of the fifteen she was taking,
four
were in German, and all the cramming she had been doing on the three easy Germans had done marvels for her work in Senior German, too. She was counting on a 90 to 95 in it, and even better in the others.

To lose these four! It wouldn’t be fair, not the way she had been slaving. The other day, Mr. Fitch told Miss Mercer she had character, and Miss Mercer passed it along with a big smile. But now everything in her character focused on this one danger; she could not get it out of her head and she connected it with Dr. Wohl and couldn’t bear him for being so offhand about it.

Nor could she wait patiently day after day for nearly three whole months, waiting to find out. It would drive her crazy; she might have a nervous breakdown or something long before then. Maybe it would upset Dr. Wohl to pin him down now. But she didn’t care; she couldn’t think about everybody in the world’s feelings. She stopped at his desk again and said, “Would there be Regents anyway, do you know?”

He looked at her without asking what she meant. He always knew what she meant. Then he said, “Mr. Fitch says, this year without question.”

“Oh, you checked up already.”

“I knew Miss Fira would be thinking of her scholarship soon enough,” he said.

He said it almost in his old twinkly way, but Fee blushed. “I was worried,” she said lamely. “I mean, if
I
was the only one left—”

“A natural worry.”

“Oh, Dr. Wohl, I was worried about other people too.”

“That is nice,” he said, as if he believed her. He let her get as far as the door and then called her back. “What would you say if I told you that I am also cramming night and day on something?”

“On what,
Herr Doktor?”

“This coming Monday, I take over two of Mr. Burney’s classes, in algebra.” Her surprise delighted him. “Mr. Burney enlisted, and I wish him well.”

“Enlisted?” Fee showed her astonishment.

“Why not? He’s a young man, not an old tub like some of us.”

“But the Board of Education ordered all teachers to finish out the term,” she said.

“What’s this?”

She only stared at him. Then she shook her head and said, “Just another rumor, I guess,” but like an explosion in her mind was the realization that Eli had made it all up, about the Board of Ed not letting teachers enlist until June. That night she was glad her mother was off in New York. Mama could always guess if something had happened, and pry it out of you. She would make a big speech about how wrong parents were to dig and pry into their children’s developing minds—she probably would make it a subject for her lecture groups, and then write it as an article later on. But in one way or another, she would pry it out of you just the same.

Fran was at home, but Fee never told her things like this any more. Fran probably hadn’t even noticed Eli taking digs at Garry about rushing out to enlist. For a few seconds, she considered telephoning Eli and having it out with him about his lie, after his holier-than-thou dig at Garry about enlisting on the spot. But she made no move to the phone. Suddenly it came to her that the only person in the world that she really wanted to tell it to was Garry Paige.

She could see him balancing the glass of tea on his folded handkerchief, and then the way he changed when Eli started in on him. She could hear his voice too, not joking any more.
Just having me on … I’ll be needing plenty of practice.

Without warning, the painful knot rose in her throat, and the great force tore at her, half sorrow and half something else. This time it had no name.

She almost prayed that people wouldn’t take digs at Garry about rushing out to enlist, but she was out of the habit of praying. She stopped saying prayers when she stopped going to Grace Episcopal, and that was a long time back. She couldn’t remember when exactly, except that it was about two years after she’d started to go. John Miller was already off at Iowa State, so he never went with them any more, but she still hadn’t ever skipped a single Sunday, except if she had a cold and wasn’t allowed out of the house.

And then one time the minister bowed his head and begged God to keep the nation out of the bloody war that was raging across the sea, and it sort of sounded like a whine, moaning around to God, beseeching Him to keep our fine strong-limbed young men out of the carnage but not wasting a breath on the fine strong-limbed young men in Europe. It wasn’t only a whine; it was so selfish, and somehow after that she didn’t feel happy and good in church any more and began to stay away.

I don’t have to pray about Garry, Fee thought now. I can just hope people won’t take nasty digs at him, whatever he’s going to do, that’s all. Please don’t let them, please.

From the platform that night, Stefan Ivarin was far too nearsighted to be sure whether the blurred uniforms in the rear of the hall were policemen or not. He halted so briefly at the idea, that his audience took it for one of his pauses.

“So for all my shudders,” he went on, flinging his words out into the audience, “I was long ago positive that we must enter this inescapable war. At first, when it was just starting in Europe, many of us, most real socialists, condemned it out of hand. It is our tradition—it was always our tradition—to be against wars, all wars between ententes and alliances, wars which always ended by making new power blocs, new fortunes, and new exploitation of the working class.

“The only exception, the
only,
mind you, were wars of revolt against kings and emperors and czars—the French Revolution, our own Revolutionary War in America to throw off England, the Civil War to end slavery—these were the only wars a socialist could ever call—if not a good war, then a necessary war, an inescapable war.”

He paused, and the crowd waited for the “But” that was to come. They knew what it would be; their papers and many of the papers in English, that they could read a little or which their children read to them, all had said it—since the news came from Russia a month ago: BUT now, defeat for the Allies would also be a deathblow for the young revolution, the return of the Romanoffs for another hundred years.

“But,” Ivarin went on, “there is another inescapable war—and that also has to be won. This war too will have many battlefronts—The Espionage Act they call it, and it’s before Congress now. Every word you or I say can be a target on
these
battlefronts, every opinion, each meeting, every newspaper or magazine. Already they are rounding up the work of the labor press, the socialist press, calling everything ‘anarchist’—that damnable convenient label.

“While we’re getting rid of Prussians in Germany and the secret police in Russia, are we to grow their brothers over here?”

From the side of the platform, a young man began to tiptoe out to the center of the stage. Ivarin stopped short at this unheard-of intrusion, but the young man whispered, “Important,” as he came on. Behind him murmurs sprang up in the crowd and there was a sweep of new interest.

“The manager of the hall,” the young man whispered, “made me come. There are four policemen in the audience, with a translator, to take down everything. Please don’t be excited.”

“I thought I saw them,” Stefan said. “I wasn’t sure.”

“And outside, on the sidewalk, there are perhaps eight, ten, with high-powered rifles. But our permit is in order. Nothing overlooked.”

“Are we sending somebody to the police?”

“They’re on the way.”

“So they want me to keep the audience calm. I’ll try.”

Throughout this colloquy, Ivarin’s hand had been raised to the audience, in a signal to them to be patient, to wait just a moment. Now he nodded farewell pleasantly to the young man on the platform and then addressed his listeners in an easy voice, as if he had an amusing anecdote to share with them. “As if by a special favor to me,” he said, “arranged by some helpful friend in the Mayor’s or the Police Commissioner’s office, we have been given a beautiful illustration of what I mean.

“Every good teacher—and I was a teacher long before I became a lecturer—wants the perfect illustration for his pupils, to make a point, to drum it into their heads. Now this is a point you need not be alarmed about—we have the legal papers to meet here, as we have met a hundred times before.

“But the fact is that the police seem interested in listening to every word I say. I did not know I was so fascinating as all that. There are also a few policemen outside in the street—but we have all learned from strikes and picket lines that never, never must we give these gentlemen what looks like any reason for getting rough, so not one of us will begin to shout or shove. Not here, nor later out there. Agreed? Your word?”

There was a roar of “Sure … Yes … You bet,” but Ivarin’s hand was up for silence through it all.

“These policemen were sent here tonight, just in case. In case what? Just in case. They know that socialists hired the hall; they know I am a socialist. And we are workingmen, after all. I do not think any policemen have been sent to any meeting that J. P. Morgan may be holding tonight, or John D. Rockefeller.

“But we are poor men, and we belong to unions. We will soon be making something like a million khaki uniforms for the new army, and a million or so overcoats, and another million hats, and a million khaki shirts. Up in Lawrence Mass, the workers will be weaving the cloth for these millions of pieces, and somewhere else, other workers will be making two million pairs of shoes, and digging a million tons of coal for the million ships to carry the fifty million shells and rifles and grenades, to win this war that must be won.

“Perhaps that is why the police are so fascinated with us. We are important. We are valuable. We must be protected and cherished.

“BUT—some of us are also cranks about a phrase we know by heart. We heard it in Europe before we bought our tickets in the steerage. We said it here a thousand times before we got our first papers. ‘It’s a free country’ and we want to keep it free. Not only in peacetime. Even now, in war, with the necessary taboos on military information—even so, we want to go on saying ‘It’s a free country’ and we will fight every inch to keep it free. Won’t we?”

This time when the roar came, Ivarin held up no hand to stop it.

In some unlooked-for way, the actuality of being at war made Garry think more often of Letty.
All you think of is war, war, war.
Her furious phrases took to sounding again in his mind.
All you think of is what
you
want, what
you
believe, what
you’ll
do.”

She was wrong. She was unjust and she was wrong. She had been wrong then, and she would be wrong now. At that time he had thought of their life, their needs and plans, the baby they both wanted, the children. And now, too, he thought of a thousand things apart from the war and his beliefs about it; he was absorbed in his sheet-synthetic experiments at the lab, mesmerized by their problems and quirks, on a deeper level than he had ever reached on any research of any sort. He still enjoyed people and easily made friends; at Synthex, there was nobody like Otto Ohrmann, but a chemist named Plevette was intelligent and likable, and they were soon sharing many free evenings. Plevette was devoted to the theater, and once a week or so they went to Broadway for dinner at a steak house and then a show. Plevette liked to dance, too, and several times lured Garry along for an evening, talking about a pretty girl he wanted him to meet. These evenings always held a special invitation in them, but the expectations were usually greater than the outcome. Plevette once told him he was growing monkish and virtuous, but Garry knew better, knew it with the wretched authority of his private misery.

It’s a damn stupid way to live, he thought often. “A lonely way to live” was a phrase that offended him, and one night only was it formed by his treacherous mind before he could halt it. That was the night war was declared.

One evening a month later, he had a sudden impulse to take a walk past Letty’s shop. He had no reason to find himself in that neighborhood and never had laid eyes on it since they had parted. The idea came to him at the theater and he told Plevette he had a late engagement. While Plevette gave him a knowing grin of farewell, he set off at a stroll for Madison and Seventieth.

It was nearly half past eleven as he approached the shop. From a distance he could see a mild square glow from one of the show windows; Letty still kept her display lighted until midnight, and the outside switch that would be turned off by the night watchman at twelve was still part of her life. The small unimportant fact took on a sudden poignancy.

He slowed down. He had chosen the opposite side of the avenue; if she were staying late at the shop, or were showing it to some friend, he did not want to come upon her, discomfiting them both. They had exchanged a brief letter or two on impersonal things like bills and charges, but they had not seen each other or talked by telephone. Neither had set forth these conditions; they seemed inevitable to each of them. It was more than three months since he had gone to the Brevoort. A quarter of a year.