First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  It didn’t come out like a joke; it nearly started a quarrel in front of his parents. That would have been too awful. Garry hated scenes; the slightest emphasis of a word, even when they were alone at home, made him draw in on himself, and if they were at his family’s or with friends, he went stone-still inside. You could feel it.

  Of course, when he was the one who emphasized words, or ideas, he saw nothing wrong in it. It was a good talk then, a discussion, the breath of life.

  She hadn’t dreamed of this kind of difference between them when they had fallen in love at the summer hotel in Maine. Garry had told her straight out about his politics and not killing people in wars and all the rest; she was fair enough to admit that. But when a man was in love the way he was that summer, he could say that pacifism mattered terribly, but not sound as if anything mattered a button except his longings for his girl, and later, his bride.

  “And please don’t make fun of the Ivarins any more,” he said now, a little less sharply. “I like them, and they don’t seem silly or foolish or anything else except interesting and nice.”

  He disappeared into the bathroom. When he returned she was in bed, and he said, “You can keep the light on, if you want to read for a while,” and kissed her cheek and said good night. He turned on his side, away from her, and in a moment or two his breathing took on the rhythm of his immediate sleep.

  Exasperation stung her; he always fell asleep easily. She wanted to shake his shoulder, make him stay awake a little longer. What was the matter, anyway? Something had begun to go wrong between them—when? How long ago? For what reason? It couldn’t be jealousy, but it did make her want to clutch at his actual physical body, as if he were a drowning swimmer, and she desperately trying not to let him sink out of sight.

  Imagine, Letty thought, being jealous of pacifism, and politics, and a bunch of crazy Russian Jew socialists. I wish I could tell Gare just once that I do feel they ought to behave better because they weren’t born in this country.

  But that would start something too serious. Except at the beginning, when being in love and making love and wanting each other was everything there was to life, she knew it was simply sensible to guard every word, every look even, about anybody that was foreign or Jewish, or, of course, pacifist or socialist.

  She loved Garry and she wanted him to be happy, so she could never say the ordinary things people said. Not in front of him or his parents. They took their ideas so seriously, all the Paiges, just as they did their religion.

  Unitarians could be as ardent as Catholics when it came to believing. Garry’s mother quoted the Bible often, and they never missed going to church, but they never criticized people who never went, even downright atheists, and much less agnostic people like the Ivarins, who only said they didn’t know about God.

  “It’s a humble enough point of view, this not-knowing,” Mr. Paige once said. “Perhaps we who are so certain are the arrogant ones. Believers and atheists are both so positive they’re right.”

  Letty felt the sting of exasperation once more. Garry was always so positive he was right, and about lots more things than his religion. He admitted he was overpositive and said he would have to get over it, but he never had. Once he told her about coming an awful cropper because of it and he seemed rather tickled about it; it was when he was seventeen and had just made the Debating Society in Barnett High. In practice debates he was supposed to take any side assigned to him and put that side across heart and soul.

  “But the first time I had to take the affirmative of something I thought all wrong,” Garry told her, “I stood there, with my mouth open, just gaping like a fish sucking at air. Not a word would come out, not one. Finally somebody motioned me to get off the stage, and I slunk off, red as a beet.”

  “Did they put you off the Debating Team?”

  “No, they just treated me like a freak. After that they only assigned me to the side I did believe in.”

  “You weren’t a freak,” she assured him, “you just had to stick to your guns. It’s wonderful, being that way.”

  But that was just after they had fallen in love. Now, at times, it didn’t seem so wonderful. There was so little difference, really, between sticking to your guns and just digging in and being mulish.

  FIVE

  THE MOMENT SHE WALKED into the classroom on Monday morning, Fee felt a strangeness there, a waiting. Trudy wouldn’t look up from her desk, but stayed behind the raised lid, searching for something, and Betty Murphy said, “Hello,” and looked away.

  Miss King was wearing a new grey shirtwaist with tiny tucks all over it, and as Fee passed her desk and said “Good morning, Miss King,” she couldn’t help staring. Miss King always looked so beautiful and her clothes were beautiful, too. Miss King answered, as she always did, “Good morning to you,” but she didn’t look at Fee either.

  The class bell rang and Miss King stood up. “Good morning, class,” she said, and they all sat up straight, hands clasped at the edges of their desks, eyes forward. “Good morning, Miss King.” But instead of starting right in on fractions, Miss King remained silent. She was looking straight at Fee, and as Fee realized it, her heart skipped a beat.

  “Fira,” Miss King said, “don’t you want to be excused today?”

  “Excused?” Out of habit, she stood up, as if she were reciting. “Why, no, ma’am.”

  “Well, I saw your house all draped in black. If there’s been a death in your family—”

  “Oh, no, ma’am. Nobody in my family died.”

  In the row just ahead of Fee, Tommy Gording leaned over to Jack Dryer, whispering. Jack turned around in his seat and stared up at Fee, and Tommy Gording began to laugh. At the side of the room somebody else began whispering and laughing too.

  Up forward, behind her desk, Miss King said, “Class!” in her discipline voice and the whispers and giggling stopped abruptly. But the watching did not, nor the waiting. As if a thousand eyes had suddenly been socketed into place all over her head, Fee could see an expectant look on each face in the room, behind her, at either side of her.

  “But all that black crepe?” Miss King said. “Did your dog Shag die?”

  This time the entire class laughed right out and Fee went rigid. She stood there with her head lowered, and as she shook it from side to side in answer, the rough cloth of her blue middy rubbed first one side of her chin and then the other. She could hear Miss King’s ruler, tapping for silence, but she could not look up.

  “Then what is the mourning for, Fira?”

  “Why, it’s—”

  Her voice caught and stuck. Suddenly she wanted to hit somebody, hit Miss King, hit every boy and girl in the whole room. She wanted to run right home and hit her mother and father.

  “It’s what, Fira?”

  “It’s a—well, Miss King—” Her voice surprised her; it sounded like a kindergarten voice, way up high. “It’s a protest.”

  “A what?”

  “A pro-test,” she said in little separate squeaks, “for the Tri-ang-le Fire Vic-tims.”

  This time the room seemed to rock and shake with laughter, and this time Miss King didn’t rap with the ruler. She simply stood still, her eyebrows arched, looking around as if waiting for somebody to explain. Then she said, “Well!” and reached for the lesson book.

  Fee sat down, but Miss King still looked puzzled, and when she spoke again, her voice seemed louder and there was an unbelieving sound in it.

  “Why then, Fira, your family must be anarchists or socialists or something, isn’t that right?”

  Fee said nothing.

  “Aren’t they, Fira?”

  “We’re socialists, ma’am.”

  Once more everybody roared and Miss King suddenly said, “Page fifty-seven, class,” and there was the sound of books being opened and it was over.

  But for Fira Ivarin it was not over. Minute after minute it was not over. Minute after minute she told herself it would never be over, as long as she lived, never never over. Neve
r would she forget that sound of the laughing and whispering; never would she love school again, and be happy at getting A or B-plus. If Trudy or Betty ever asked her to go home, she’d say no; she would just run off alone forever and never even talk to them.

  Suddenly a sour nasty taste was in her mouth and her skin went cold and wet all over. She knew what it was, and without raising her hand for permission, she darted to the door. Behind her she heard Miss King say, “Fira—?” but she cupped her left hand over her mouth and ran out. She got into the hall, but before she could even start down the corridor, it started.

  She kneeled down on the stone floor. The transom is open, she thought, they can all hear me. On her knees, bending over the sourness there, she began to cry. Her eyes felt as if they were bleeding.

  Sounds of music reached out to Fee as she started up the three steps to the porch. She had run nearly all the way home, but she stopped at the front door and couldn’t go in. Mama was in there, doing her dancing, and Fee didn’t want to see her while she hated her so for what had just happened.

  The bright happy music went on, and Fee stood still. She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see the terrible bunting, but its blackness was like fingers touching her skin. She heard Shag come bounding around from the back yard and up the steps, and she kneeled down to him and laid her face against his big furry head. “Oh, Shag,” she said. Without knowing it, she began to cry again.

  Suddenly her mother’s voice cried out, “What’s the matter, Fee? Are you sick? Why are you home?”

  Fee looked up. Her mother was leaning out of the window that opened on the porch and before she could answer, her mother said, “My poor child, what happened?”

  The words made Fira’s hate dissolve and she ran inside straight into her arms. “Oh, Mama,” she said, “Miss King—”

  “My poor child,” Alexandra said. “You look green, you are sick, let me see you.” She put her fingers under Fee’s chin and raised her head so she could look at her, but in a moment, Fee hid her head against her mother’s body, as if the light hurt her eyes.

  Her mother was in a cotton slip, and her feet were bare, and they looked so strange and old, so different from her own feet, or Fran’s. There were crisscross veins, like blue strings, standing up on them and Fira suddenly had a wild longing to have a young mother who wouldn’t die and leave her when she was so unhappy.

  “Tell me, Firuschka, tell Mama what happened to you.”

  She tried to answer, but her words came only in squeezed-out little gasps. “Miss King,” she began again. “She saw our house—”

  “Yes, darling, yes,” her mother said, holding her closely, waiting, not needing to hear more, knowing already. On the Victrola, the forgotten Strauss waltz played on with gayety and sweetness, but Alexandra’s heart beat thickly with the oldest pain. To watch your child suffer, she thought, because of you—

  Upstairs, Stefan’s steps sounded and she knew he had been waked, but Fee was able at last to begin her story, and nothing else mattered.

  In the middle of it, Stefan appeared but only Alexandra saw him. He stood motionless just inside the double frame of the dining-room door, listening with her, listening to Fee’s mimicry of her own piping syllables in the classroom.

  “And then,” Fee went on, not seeing him, “Miss King said well, we must be anarchists, mustn’t we, or socialists, and I told her we were socialists, and they all laughed all over again and then I knew I had to vomit so I ran out, and then she came out and said to go home—”

  “Firuschka,” her father said.

  Fee looked up, and there he was, as if he’d appeared from the air, silently, in his old bathrobe and long winter underwear, just staring down at her.

  “This is bad,” he said. “For a little girl to be so unhappy is very bad.”

  He took her hand and led her toward the dining room; with his other hand he pulled out a chair and sat down. Then he put his arm around her waist and drew her toward him; she could feel the edge of his chair against her legs. She tried to choke back her crying because it always made him nervous to hear crying, but he said, “Cry, cry, Firuschka. I heard what happened. It’s very bad, I agree.”

  Then, without wanting to, or knowing she was going to, Fee started her story over again, from the beginning, as if her father had not just told her he had listened the first time. As she repeated it, her father kept nodding, and once he took off his glasses, and wiped them, and blew his nose. Fee saw that his face was very red and that he kept biting the corner of his lip over and over again.

  “You see, Fira,” he said at the end, “it’s not always easy to be a little girl, when your parents are people like Mama and me. It sometimes is hard. Maybe even too hard.”

  She pressed herself against him. “Oh, no, Papa, it isn’t.”

  “But,” he went on, “to be the little girl of people who believe there could be a better world? In some ways that might be nicer than to be the little girl of people who never think of anything except having fun.”

  “It is nicer.”

  “When you grow up I think you will feel the way Mama and I feel, but in the meantime, I’m sorry about what happened. Very sorry, Firuschka.”

  For a moment nobody said anything. Alexandra was looking at Stefan with a private love and gratitude. Then she made her voice practical and said, “Fee, you can read in bed for an hour or two. Would you like that?”

  “Later on,” her father said, “I could perhaps give you a chess lesson.”

  Uncertainly, Fee looked from one to the other. A new feeling rippled through her, warm and exciting. Nothing that had ever happened before in her whole life had been like this.

  “Read first,” her father said, “then later maybe the chess. Have you a good book up there?”

  Her mother went up with her, and propped Fran’s pillow behind her own, and brought a glass of water and her library book, and opened the window.

  Even when her mother went downstairs again, they both kept right on talking about it. Two or three times Fee heard her father say, “Miss King,” and as the minutes passed, the new feeling grew. They made her feel important. They were a wonderful wonderful father and mother.

  After a while, she heard her father at the telephone asking for a number. Then he said, “Miss Mainley, please.” Miss Mainley was the principal of the school, and Fee jumped out of bed and ran halfway down the stairs, calling out, “Please, Papa, don’t.”

  He was already talking. He sounded strange, very polite and formal. “Entirely convenient,” he was saying. “And, Miss Mainley, would you be kind enough to invite Miss King to be present as well? Thank you again.”

  Fee heard him hang up and then say to her mother, “Of course I will be careful. I will keep so cool it will be like ice.”

  “Maybe I had better go, Stiva?”

  “No. At schools, they do not see so many fathers.”

  “But if you should get irritated—”

  “Under the ice, may I be permitted to be irritated if my daughter is tormented?”

  Fee went back to her bed, her new feeling of importance higher than before. Her father wasn’t going to his office, he wasn’t going to a meeting, or to a lecture; having a tormented daughter came ahead of anything else.

  And soon Miss Mainley and Miss King would know it. Even his having a Russian accent wouldn’t spoil that. He could be so wonderful when he wanted to be. And it was wonderful that he was going, not Mama. Mama was too fat.

  It was early afternoon when Stefan Ivarin, dressed in his best suit, which he wore only on the lecture platform, went through the front door of Barnett’s grade school, peering through his thick glasses, as he always did in a strange place. He found a door whose gold-stamped glass pane proclaimed, “Principal’s Office,” and as he knocked, he sternly reminded himself that he was, if ever in his life, to maintain a glacial tone and manner. As the door opened, a voice said cordially, “You are Fira’s father? I’m Geraldine Mainley.”

  “How d
o you do, Miss Mainley,” Stefan said, taking the hand she offered and bowing a little over it. “Thank you for arranging this visit so quickly.”

  Geraldine Mainley was about forty, he guessed, with a candid, intelligent face. But her appearance was remarkable; from an extremely slender body there sprang a bosom so ample, so protruding, that he swiftly looked away rather than risk any facial betrayal of the astonishment he felt. Standing near the window was Miss King, whom Miss Mainley introduced. To her he merely nodded, saying, “Miss King.” She was young and he could see why Fira always called her beautiful, with her retroussé nose and blue eyes, but he thought, No distinction, quite the opposite.

  “Is Fira feeling better, Mr. Ivarin?” Miss Mainley asked as she indicated a chair for him.

  “Yes,” he answered slowly. “Yes, a good deal. Physically.”

  Geraldine Mainley looked at him thoughtfully. She had known that the Ivarins were in no way the typical immigrant family, and the telephone call had prepared her for cultivated speech, yet now she found herself unable to absorb this man’s actual presence. He’s like a—a diplomat, she thought, and she glanced at Miss King. Miss King was looking at the floor.

  “You must mean,” Miss Mainley said, “that she is still upset emotionally.”

  “Precisely,” he said. “And I confess, so am I.” He paused, waiting for comment, but there was none. “Not only that she should have been ridiculed in public about the bunting—”

  “I merely asked about it out of interest and concern,” Miss King put in.

  “Children of ten, nearly eleven,” Stefan said courteously, “do not vomit over questions that arise from interest and concern.”

  “I don’t know what Fira told you, Mr. Ivarin.” She pronounced it Ivverin.