“But I have my other room too!”
“Another cubicle.”
“Is it me you worry about? If it is, let it alone, Alexandra, I beg of you, let it alone.”
A bad time, Stefan Ivarin thought now, a time to forget. The bedrooms are a little crowded; I sometimes feel it so myself. But how many human beings on the face of this globe would not consider themselves in palaces, if they had each a bedroom like any one of ours?
Comfort filled him, and pride in his house. He raised his right hand and took his first sip of tea. It had gone tepid, but he did not mind.
Alexandra Ivarin began each day with her own method of physical exercise. A year before, just after her forty-ninth birthday, the doctor had pronounced her flabby as to muscle tone, and had ordered her to take up regular exercising.
Dutifully she had begun calisthenics, following the printed directions he had put into her unwilling hands, and every morning for a week, she spent twelve minutes bending, reaching, stretching and twisting to the accompaniment of a martinet’s voice saying, “One, two, three, four, five. And one, two, three four five. And one, two three four five”—a voice she soon detested though it was her own.
After a week, she had quit in rebellion. Then, by some golden accident, the idea had come to her, and she had devised what she called “my dancing.”
It had been a revelation of new pleasure, and since logic told her that the same muscles of arms, legs and torso would be in use when she danced, she had never doubted that the curative results were comparable, if not superior, to those the doctor wanted. For more than a year, in winter and in summer, she had kept up her morning ritual; by now she actively looked forward to it each day.
She opened the windows in the living room and wound up the Victrola. It was Sunday morning and still early; there was no chance of the girls coming down, and Eli and Joan slept until ten. Stefan, of course, never appeared before noon, and last night he must have come home later than usual. She peeled off her cotton nightgown, which hampered the freedom of her body, and stood naked, selecting from the small pile of records the Strauss waltz with which she liked to begin.
The music started, and pausing only to get the rhythm set in her mind, she began to hop on her right foot, then on her left. Hop, hop, hop on the right, change; hop, hop, hop on the left. Slide and jump to the right, slide and jump to the left. The hops once more, then a deep bend to the right, to the left.
The delicious melody, a little sugary perhaps but so caressing, so young, was like the clear air blowing in over the fields; her spirits lifted as her breath shortened, and she began to experience that surge of joy which always came to her through these secret minutes of her dancing.
Hop, hop, hop, slide and jump, bend to the right, bend to the left. Vaguely she knew that to others—if anybody could ever see her so—she might seem ludicrous in her dancing. They would see pendulous belly and breasts, grey hair flying; they would see an aging, overweight woman capering and leaping about. It did not matter. In herself, within her muscles and bones and hard-beating heart, was the sense of grace and youth, exhilarating and priceless.
Hop, hop, hop, slide and jump. Never, for the rest of her life, would she forgive Alexis Michelovsky, fine physician, dedicated socialist though he was, for permitting her to get this pendulous stomach, these elongated breasts. Idealism, idealism. All of them in their youth were so fired with scorn for people who thought of looks and money and possessions instead of abiding principles, and Alexis was intimately one of them.
But a thousand times since, she had wished she had gone to a nice American doctor who would have permitted her a maternity girdle for her pregnancies. If Alexis had done so, this disformity might never have begun. When she had asked, a little uncertainly, whether there were some way of preserving her figure—she had been slender then—: Dr. Michelovsky had looked at her sadly and said, “You too, Alexandra?” as if he were saying “Et tu, Brute?”
Then she had been too young, too lacking in courage to tell him it was no worship of materialism to want her stomach held up. Through her first pregnancy, her beloved lost child, Stefan, dead at six months from diphtheria, and then through Elijah’s and Francesca’s time, she had helplessly suffered the knowledge of irremediable distention, but never again had she ventured to ask Alexis to prescribe any escape. Only when she was having Fira had she turned on him and demanded an uplifting corset; by then it had been too late.
Hop, hop, hop, slide and jump, bend to the right, bend to the left. Her blood was racing now, and her breathing a strain. The waltz ended and she was glad for a moment’s rest while she turned the record, and rewound the machine.
Once, during the summer, Fee, or perhaps it was Fran, had come downstairs in bare feet while she was still dancing. Luckily, that morning she had on a corset-cover and petticoat, so that she was not undressed. Children were horrified at the sight of nakedness in old bodies, particularly of their own parents. She herself, as a child, had hated the smell in her parents’ room, always thinking of it as an “old smell,” as if it were a personal failing of her mother and father. Forty years ago in Russia, even a well-furnished house like theirs, tended by plenty of servants, must have stagnated with odors from primitive plumbing and closed windows in a way that was unknown in modern houses in America.
Alexandra Ivarin glanced affectionately around the room. As she looked, a darkness stole into her mood; those white naked walls, unpainted plaster still, as on the day they had moved in! When they were building, Stefan had told her that new plaster had to be given time to settle, before wallpaper could be put on, and she, in turn, had explained to the girls so that they would not expect decorated rooms to start with.
Two years had passed, the plaster throughout the house must have settled as much as it would settle unto eternity, but whenever she spoke about paper and paint, Stefan grew vexed or angry.
About the house, there never had been any arguing with him, only fighting or giving in. But by now, these raw dead walls were a torment to the girls; it was natural for them to want a pretty place to bring their friends to. Especially Francesca, fifteen next August, and beginning to bring boys home once in a while.
It had been Fran, she suddenly remembered, who had come downstairs barefoot that morning and caught her at her dancing. The child had stopped short and watched, appalled.
“It’s my own invention, instead of those awful gymnastics,” Alexandra had explained, “it’s my dancing.”
“Oh, Mama.”
Fran had turned away, a tone of helplessness in her voice, as if she had suffered defeat.
“Everything is ‘oh, Mama,’” Alexandra had said sharply. “What’s wrong with getting my morning exercises any way I like?”
“Nothing’s wrong, Mama.”
Fran had left the room, sagging in the shoulders. For the rest of the record, she, Alexandra, had stubbornly gone on, but there was no longer any joy in continuing, and for the next few mornings she had been self-conscious even with no one to watch her. Her daughter was ashamed of her, of the way she looked, of the large bulge under her thin slip, of the grotesque figure she made, leaping like Pavlova.
A child, she had thought, Fran is still a child. This lump in my throat is as if I were a child too. She is an American child, what is more; she does not like to be reminded that Stefan and I were once foreigners, coming through Ellis Island like all the others, with that same hunger to get our first papers and start belonging to America.
“Fran,” she had called, “I’ll be there soon, to get breakfast.”
“All right, Mama. I’m setting the table.”
She was forgiven, Alexandra had thought. For the moment, forgiven. Remembering it now, however, dampened her spirits, as the sight of the white plaster had done. Stefan could be immovable, cantankerous; to balk at his decision was to bring on a violence that destroyed the whole house.
The second Strauss waltz was ending. She turned off the Victrola and went back to her room, a small one, next to the parlor.
It had started out as the spare room and had become “the sewing room.” It was bare except for the sewing machine, the cot, and a chair, but she was sleeping better, since she had turned over her bedroom upstairs to Eli and Joan, and had moved down here. They had protested that they could manage in Eli’s room, but she had insisted.
Not only was it too small for two people, but when Eli was having an attack, he needed to sleep alone on that mountain of pillows. If only he would get well, if only he were older, she would be overjoyed about what had happened. A boy like that, though, just past twenty, to have a wife, a baby coming, and his inexplicable asthma—
Perhaps if her first son, the baby Stefan, had lived, she might not have so fierce a joy and pride in Eli, but it was as if he, the living Elijah, were her first-born. The love that she had for the girls was profound, of course, deep-flowing through every vein. But in her love for Eli was another quality, almost—she had almost thought “worship.” That was overstating it, but let it go. One worshiped humanity, one worshiped the ideas which would serve humanity, but also there was, in some love, a breath of worship.
Perhaps what she felt for Eli was a “mathematical” doubling and multiplying for the lost son and the living son. Almost a quarter-century had gone since the baby’s death, and yet the same cold fingers of memory reached for her heart whenever she thought of it.
Time flew, life went, the years softened much. But she would never be done completely with that first horror when she watched helplessly as her baby died. She herself had been in her twenties then, a girl still, unused to personal suffering. Twenty-three years ago that had been, twenty-three swift terrible beautiful years.
The thump of the morning newspaper against the porch steps brought Alexandra Ivarin back to the present, and she put on her bathrobe, combed her hair, and went outside for it. Folded and interlocked so that it would not fly apart when it was hurled through space by the newsboy, it sent invitation through her fingers, but she resisted it and went back to the kitchen. She put the percolator and a pot of water on the gas range and then opened the back door, calling to the dog. He came bounding in, a great shaggy beast with energy enough to throw over ten men.
“Down, Shag, down,” she cried. Immediately he crouched at her feet, looking up with his brown eyes glistening. She laughed. “You big silly fool,” she said, and leaned down to pat his massive head. He was an English sheep dog, unkempt, savage-looking, but gentle and loving. One of her pupils had given him to the children a year ago when he was a tan-and-white puppy; nobody had dreamed then that Shag would grow into this great animal, eating so much, thumping his tail so hard on the floor that the whole house shook. He needed a new kennel; Eli had built this one, allowing what they all thought was plenty of room for Shag’s growth. They had been wrong, and Eli kept promising to make a larger one.
“Soon,” he would say, “next Saturday at the latest.”
But a week of teaching seemed to exhaust him, probably because he was so new at it. Manhood had come to him too fast; six months ago he had begun to earn a living, five months ago he had married, and in two months he would be a father. Too fast, too fast—from the high springboard of boyhood he had dived into maturity. Joan had been nineteen, too, when they met at Jamaica Training School; neither of them had any experience with love, and they had been overpowered.
Poor children, Alexandra thought, what they must have gone through before they got up the courage to tell us and the Martins.
In Joan, fear was more understandable; her parents, Webster and Madge Martin, were strict, conventional people, good and kind, intelligent, too, since her father was a doctor, but both enslaved by what was proper or not proper, right or not right.
But Eli knew that his own parents set little value on such sanctities as ceremonies; common-law marriage was as legal as any other, if both man and woman were serious in their purpose and not merely having a liaison. Or had the boy been afraid that any parents would abandon convictions and principles when put to the test by their own children? He had been as frightened and miserable as Joan; only after their marriage at City Hall had he regained the appearance of happiness.
From the gas range came the sound of bubbling. Alexandra measured out the Scotch pinhead oatmeal, and stirred it into the boiling water. The sight of the hard little grains pleased her. So much better than denatured foods, she thought. When would people stop killing themselves off with gluey white oats and white flour and white rice and white sugar? Some day she might become a lecturer, too, and tell women about these new discoveries in diet and health. Even Alida Paige, so liberal and modern, lived in the dark ages about such matters; what chance was there for ignorant immigrants on the East Side, filled with their orthodox dietary rules and laws?
She turned away from the range and picked up the squared lump of newspaper, carefully opening its tightly folded bulk so as not to tear it. Every morning, when the boy on his bicycle fired the paper at the porch, it made a woody thump she loved. In the city one never heard these small sounds of village and town, so comforting and neighborly; before she and Stefan had arrived at their great decision to move away from New York, she had always had to go out to buy the morning paper at the corner stand. But here, a mile’s walk from Main Street, they had fallen into this Americanism of the thumping paper as if they had all been born to it.
The paper was now open and Alexandra turned it right side up. The front page was splattered with pictures and huge headlines.
154 KILLED IN SKYSCRAPER FACTORY FIRE: SCORES BURN, OTHERS LEAP TO DEATH
In the silent kitchen, her gasp was audible. From the black type, words sprang out at her. “700 Workers, mostly girls, trapped” … “Bodies of dead heap the streets” … “Triangle Waist Factory” … “charred skeletons bending over sewing machines” … “locked doors” … “girls jumping from windows with hair aflame …”
“Oh, my goodness,” Alexandra Ivarin whispered. She pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down heavily, trying to read the story word for word. But her eyes refused methodical behavior; they leaped from phrase to phrase—the single fire escape, the one stairway, the locked exit, the wooden sewing machines massed so closely that flight between them was impossible.
She turned to the second page and saw that it, too, contained nothing but the fire, and the third page, the fourth, most of the fifth. Lists of the dead stretched on, column after column, and she began to read them. Every second or third name was followed by “age 16” or “age 17.” Often the final words to the brief paragraphs were, “Identification by pay envelope.”
Children, she thought, half of them were children.
The names were Polish and Russian and Italian—the addresses all on the Lower East Side. Children of the Ghetto, Zangwill had named them, children of poverty and ignorance and injustice.
The fire had begun just before five in the afternoon. In the first hour after the news broke, the World said, ten thousand mothers and fathers had flocked to Washington Square, by eight o’clock twenty thousand were there, breaking through police and fire lines under the towering ten-story building, searching for their sons and daughters, begging for the names of the rescued. Her own throat felt their anguished voices, her own breast their pounding hearts. Suppose Eli or Fran or Fee—
“Oh, my goodness,” Alexandra Ivarin said again.
“Oh, my goodness what?” It was Fran, coming into the kitchen.
Silently Alexandra handed over the paper. Stefan had known about the fire last night; that was what had kept him in New York so much later than usual. It was two when she had gone to bed, his normal time for getting home, but there had been no sign of him. Now she understood.
“Gee, isn’t that awful?” Fran said a moment later.
Alexandra nodded, and said nothing. If she spoke at all, she would find herself explaining why it was not only awful but criminal, that it was not merely an accident but part of a whole system. And Fran would say “Oh, Mama,” with that sagging look.
> Alexandra turned to the stove and began to serve the oatmeal. Behind her, she soon heard Fran riffle through the rest of the paper. She was looking for the Katzenjammer Kids, Mutt and Jeff, and the rest of the funnies.
As her older sister ran downstairs, Fira Ivarin pulled a white middy blouse over her head and wondered if she would be pretty too when she was fourteen. Three and a quarter years was a horrible time to have to wait to find out. Trudy Loheim, her best friend, was pretty already, prettier even than Fran. Anybody with Trudy’s blond hair and blue eyes and wonderful complexion had a big start on being pretty.
Fee slung the folded black silk sailor’s tie under the collar of her middy, hooked up her navy serge skirt and went up to the mirror above the bureau, staring at her brown eyes and brown hair. After a moment, she made a face and turned away.
“She’ll be a striking woman,” Alida Paige had once said to her mother, when they didn’t know she could hear them. “Francesca will be a pretty girl, but Fira will be handsome. People will notice her.”
Striking, Fee thought, handsome. When all anybody wanted was to be pretty and know how to dance and wear nice dresses from Best or Wanamaker, the way Trudy did. Trudy’s father worked in a brewery and was fat and drunk and sleepy, but Trudy looked like a picture in a magazine and had the start of a real shape, even though she hadn’t begun any more than she, Fira, had. Fran was always talking about everything being different once you began, but she just looked superior if you asked any questions about what it was like.
Her mother had explained everything, because her mother believed in educating children about such things, instead of letting them hear it from their friends, or on the street. But even though Mama went into everything scientifically, she never got to real things like Joan and Eli and their going to have a baby.
Fee glanced toward the next room, now Eli and Joan’s. Sometimes she could hear them in there, laughing and talking, and last Sunday morning when Joan felt sick, she had gone in with a cup of hot coffee. Eli was still asleep, next to Joan, and it had made Fee feel queer to see them right out that way, even though she knew perfectly well that married people slept together in one bed. Actually seeing her own brother that way was different from simply knowing, and she had almost spilled the coffee.
First Papers Page 2