First Papers (69 page)

Even from where he stood, Garry could see the gilt legend, “Mrs. Garrett Paige, Antiques,” and again a small poignancy stabbed him. By now it was clear that the shop was deserted, and he crossed the street and stood, like any casual window shopper, gazing in past the gleam of its double plate-glass windows.

The display was beautiful. For a moment he tried to remember what he had learned from Letty, to be able to name the long slender settee or sofa facing out at him; the long flirtings, the reed-like legs, but he gave up. It could be Chippendale or Sheraton or Hepplewhite; in some complex, convoluted way he was glad he did not know. The release he had felt in his ugly three-room flat was mysteriously heightened by his nearness now to this glassed-in perfection.

Letty’s sense of release must be heightened too. Now, with the war, her long disapproval of him must have grown worse. Just about everybody else’s had.

Extraordinary and unwelcome, a shaft of apprehension drove through him. “Now, with the war”—it was a ghoul calling the changes in a simple dance, a calm and simple dance that had been familiar and dear. Now, with the war. Long ago Letty had said he would change, if ever war did come, and he suddenly twisted with longing to do just that, to change, to be like others and run their risks with them, not a special set of risks of his own, risks that were not even codified, that were vague and unknown. The apprehension deepened and became so sharp it was fear. It held him as he stood there looking in at her beautiful scene made of polished woods and shining crystal and cool yellow draperies flowing untroubled down the outer edges.

Garry turned harshly away. He slept badly that night and next morning telephoned Cindy Stiles, to ask if she and Hank would let him take them out to dinner and the theater soon.

“We’d love it,” she said promptly. “We miss you.”

“It’s nice to hear
that,”
he said, with a laugh that undid some of his emphasis. “What haven’t you seen? And what night?”

They agreed on Friday of the following week, and then Cindy impulsively added, “It’s been so long, Garry, why don’t you come on over and have supper tonight—we’re stuck with the babies. It’ll just be my cooking.”

“The best kind,” he said, a decided lift in his spirits.

Hank was equally glad to see him, though he said at once, “Bob Grintzer may drop in later. Are you and he all right?”

“I forgot Bob,” Cindy said. “Did you know Betty’s had another baby? She’s still in the hospital and he passes here on his way home.”

Garry hoped Bob would be sidetracked, but said he’d like to see him again. It was quite natural, neither forced nor obvious, to add, “Have you seen Letty? How is she?”

“Fine,” Hank said. “She seems just fine.”

“She had to hire a third woman,” Cindy said, “to shop for fabrics and wallpapers, and write letters and bills and things. That’s five people working for her!” She went on about the new complications Letty had to face, now that the supply problems that had plagued her for the last three years, about imports from England and France, were starting in all over again right at home. “She’s already buying up bolts of absolutely everything in America, you know, of
anything
good to make curtains or drapes with, or upholster things in.”

There was silence. Garry wished they would volunteer what he knew they were thinking about. Was she in love with Hank’s brother Peter, or with anybody else? Was she happy? Did she go out constantly? Was she ever sad, or troubled?

“Who do you think’s enlisted?” Hank said then. “My brother-in-law, Proff, that’s who. In the Navy, like his father and grandfather.”

“Connie gets me sick,” his wife said, not explaining it.

“They’ll have to come and get
me,”
Hank said. “If conscription passes, why fine, but—”

“You’ll be exempted if it does pass, Hank,” Cindy said sharply. “Married, and two children? Please!”

From that instant on, right through supper, which they had in the kitchen on the ground floor of the house, there was no break in their talk of the war, and when Bob Grintzer arrived, they were at it still.

But with Bob’s first words, the evening changed. Maybe it’s his name, Garry thought. Is he turning into another of these fool German-name apologists? “I can’t see,” Bob said truculently, “where anybody gets off, attacking conscription any longer. It sure is going to pass and be a key part of the war effort.”

“Until it becomes law,” Garry said flatly, “I can talk for it, against it, at it, under it, over it or any other way I choose.”

“You sure can,” Hank said. “They’re still at it hot and heavy in Congress. Why shouldn’t you?”

“When it comes to that,” Garry added, straight at Grintzer, “after it becomes law! What’s wrong with saying it should be repealed, that it’s unconstitutional? We’ve done that with plenty of other laws that passed.”

“Not in wartime.”

“Come on, Bob,” Hank said. “The idea of it gets my goat, too—I don’t even know why.”

“Sure you know why,” Garry said hotly. “Damn it, Hank, forced conscription goes against the grain in this country, that’s all there is to it. It always has. Start it up now as an emergency measure, good Lord, after a while it gets to be taken for granted. Before long, you’ve got it in peacetime too, and nobody even gets up and argues any more.”

“Sure, sure,” Grintzer said, “go worry about fifty years from now, and lose the war today. The only
real
question is what you intend to do about conscription now.”

“What I intend to do about it?” Garry now was truculent too.

“Yes, you,” Grintzer said stiffly.

“That’s my business, wouldn’t you say? I’m not asking you what you’ll do about it, or saying what I think you should or shouldn’t do.”

Bob Grintzer stood up. “That about finishes it,” he said, looking only at Hank. “I’ll run along.”

“Take it easy,” Hank said as he took him to the door. “That new baby must be winding up your nerves.” He looked dubious when he came back. “He’s sure hot under the collar,” he said to Garry. “He’ll get over it.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it.”

The Selective Service Act passed, and as May inched gently into June, Garry called his father’s office and said, “Is there any agreement by now?”

There was, Evan told him with obvious relief, and suggested that he come into town that afternoon or the next, “like a real client.” He added, “It’ll be nice to see you again anyway.”

“Me too, Dad.”

On his last two or three visits to Barnett, his mother had always greeted him with “More meetings,” to explain his father’s absence. It had been just as well. With his mother alone, he could talk in comfortable generalities; when his father was there, the specifics of law came up, and they could be uncomfortable. Since America had got into the war, he sometimes felt, his parents’ classic and pure pacifism had shaded off in the faintest degree. No flip-flop, no flag-bestrewn speeches about patriotism, but an almost imperceptible retreat from the unequivocal position that had for so long been theirs.

If ideas were shifting and changing over at the Ivarins’, he once thought, there’d be nightly boxing bouts, but we’re not so noisy. Maybe that’s too bad.

He didn’t mean it. Day by day, as the details were announced for carrying out the sweeping new law, he felt less noisy, more muted. Apart from the Civil War Draft, with its riots and evasions and bribes, this was something the country had never condoned, had always denounced as peculiarly European, unacceptable to America, yet now one would think that forced conscription had been ordained by all the founding fathers and blessed by God as well.

Ten million men, the papers agreed, would register on the fifth of June. On that single day, from dawn to dusk across the land, one by one, yet thousand after thousand and million after million, those who had already had their twenty-first birthday but not yet their thirty-first, would register. One by one, alone for all the millions, each would go to a designated “local board” in his neighborhood grocery or bakery, schoolhouse or barber shop, fill out a printed draft form and come into possession of a little green card that might prove to be his official license to go forth and kill.

The fifth of June, Garry thought, as he started driving toward the city. Next Tuesday. Five days from now. Where did resistance start, and when? With a technicality, not unlike a census or the filling out of forms for a driver’s license? Even in matters of conscience, of a man’s immortal soul, there could be so practical a question to ponder, such a splitting of hairs. Preposterous. But there it was.

More than the splitting of hairs. The evaluation of the member-parts of the problem; put that way, it gained some dignity. In this hell of re-evaluation and re-defining, his own father had worn himself down over the past months; his relief was obvious, that they had reached agreement on the immediate issue of registration, and he would certainly assign all credit to the new member he was so impressed with, a man who had moved East from St. Louis the week war was declared, and who had almost overnight become a key figure among them all.

“He sees it,” his father had said once, “not only as a theory of civil liberty, but as the war forces us to see it. Baldwin wants a separate bureau for objectors, because he knows we could never sandwich those cases in with the usual ones.”

“I’d like to meet your ‘sage,’ Dad,” he had said, only to have his father laugh and say, “Roger Baldwin is younger than
your
sage. Thirty-two or three.”

Never sandwich them in, Garry thought now, as he looked for a space in which to park his car. It was getting harder every day to find one; people now talked about traffic problems and crowding of roads, even good ones like Queens Boulevard. A separate bureau for objectors; did they expect much crowding there too?

In his new office, waiting for Garry to arrive, Evander Paige stopped any pretense of work and gazed out on the young green of Central Park. Turner, Paige, Levy and Payson had moved up to West Fifty-ninth Street only recently and the oily smell of paint and varnish was lively still in the warm air. A slight burn within his eyelids, for which Evan blamed the new paint, made him lean back in his leather chair with his eyes closed.

It had been an exhausting time, for him, for all of them, a time raw with dissension and readjustment, and new slow clarities. It was true not only for his own free-speech group, but for the larger groups, the anti-militarist, anti-armament groups all over the nation, wherever other men and women who had long been united to combat war were faced with the fact that war had come.

So much human effort, Evan thought now. So much idealism and hope about the power of citizen-opinion to alter or sway the decisions and acts of government. And now so much character needed to resist the paralysis of defeat. To go on instead, laboring toward new goals, beyond the immediacy of the war. Toward a just peace, without vengeance, as Wilson put it, perhaps even toward some federation of countries large and small, powerful and weak.

On his desk, the telephone rang, and he picked it up himself. It was Stefan Ivarin, and Paige said, “Did they issue it?”

“And every mail copy was confiscated at the post office.”

Frequently now, Stefan called him for “the law” on this point or the other, usually about some socialist publication in the foreign-language press. Sometimes he called just to tell him of some new episode of censorship or suppression. The opinionated fellow still would never sit on the board of any league or union, and sometimes his convictions about the war’s historic inevitability rode so roughly over any dissent, that it was hard not to resent him and go off in anger.

“But I called about something else,” Ivarin said. “Have you heard about the girl and two boys they arrested today?”

“No, who? Where?”

“Students at Columbia. She’s at Barnard. Secret Service agents pulled them in—I just heard it from my friend Abe at the paper.”

“Is it in the papers? I know about the Madison Square affair, but I haven’t seen a word about this.”

“You will tomorrow. It’s not a case for you fellows, I don’t think—they’ll have their own lawyers by the sound of it.”

The three were members of the Collegiate Anti-Militarism League, he said, with chapters at most colleges and universities, and they had printed two thousand copies of a pamphlet urging men not to register, to defy conscription. Proofs of the pamphlet had been sent to the Attorney General in Washington by some informer, and the agents had found more on press.

“A sidelight,” Stefan said, “is that only one boy is old enough to register; the other is nineteen, and then there’s the girl. She’s descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence. I like that touch.”

“Yes,” Evan said, and he talked of other arrests in the past twenty-four hours, three in Kansas, two in New Jersey, two in Maine and several on the West Coast. As they hung up, Evan looked toward the door, as if Garry had already knocked. Zealotry spread fast in wartime. Again he closed his eyes and leaned back.

The Madison Square Garden affair last night was a magnified version of Ivarin’s four policemen—with the Garden surrounded by no fewer than five hundred of them, all carrying rifles, training huge floodlights on every corner of the building, on each exit and entrance on Twenty-sixth or -seventh. Emergency police headquarters were set up in the S.P.C.A. nearby, with high-powered rifles, and temporary field telephones, as in the trenches. Inside the Garden, no fewer than seventy-five Federal government stenographers took down every word that was said, every question, every cheer.

It was a mass meeting of pacifists and socialists, where each speaker underlined the fact that he was not urging one man to break the conscription law. The meeting had only one goal: to call on the Supreme Court to pass on it, as to whether or not it violated the Constitution of the United States.

The fact that the meeting was held, said the Police Department to the press, was proof that pacifists and socialists were permitted free speech. The five hundred police, the rifles, the field telephones and floodlights were only to quell any unpatriotic demonstration that might arise. Five were arrested; no more.