“Nor,” he said, “does Fira normally tell lies.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t. But I simply asked—”
“Permit me, Miss King,” Stefan interrupted. “Permit me to explain why I am here. By the way, I asked that you be present because I do not wish to make charges about you in your absence.”
Miss King glanced away. Geraldine Mainley said, “It is a grave enough matter, Mr. Ivarin, if a pupil feels ridiculed by a teacher.”
“Yet there is a graver matter.” Now he turned slightly in his chair, addressing himself only to the older woman. “And this larger matter,” he continued, “is that Fira was asked to state whether her parents were anarchists or socialists.”
Miss King looked up. “I simply made a remark.”
Stefan Ivarin raised a palm of caution, as if to head her off from further folly. “For anybody in authority,” he went on quietly, “to interrogate an American about his political belief is shocking. Am I not correct?”
“I would certainly think so,” Miss Mainley said. Miss King said nothing.
“It also is illegal,” he continued drily. “Not that she was interrogated about her own political faith. That I will readily grant. She was asked, it appears, about somebody else’s. She was asked, in effect, to turn informer. They do just this in Russia. Precisely this.”
“Why, Mr. Ivverin,” Miss King said. “That’s taking it too seriously.”
“My dear Miss King, not too seriously, I assure you. If the day should ever come when an American can be quizzed about his political or religious belief, quizzed against his will, mind you, and by someone in authority, America will not be the free country it is.”
“But I wasn’t ‘quizzing’ her. It was, well, thinking out loud, chatting—”
“When one is required to answer,” Stefan said, “that is not chatting.”
Miss Mainley said, “No, it could not be.”
“I am only too happy to volunteer the shocking information,” Stefan went on, with a new crispness in his enunciation, “that I am a socialist. That, however, is volunteering. You follow me?”
He waited until Miss King nodded.
“If anybody in authority,” he said, “required me to answer, I’d tell him to go to the devil. And as an American citizen, I would be within my rights.”
Geraldine Mainley said, “I’m sure Miss King agrees with you.”
“In that case,” he said, “she will understand why I now charge her with invading the inalienable rights of an American child.”
There was no reply from either of the two. Stefan leaned forward. For the first time, his color rose.
“As to Miss King’s rights,” he continued. “I assure you, Miss King, I defend your right to ridicule me, publicly, privately, in a lecture hall where I am speaking, or in letters to the newspapers—anywhere, any time, you choose.”
“Ridicule?” she said. “I really didn’t mean to hurt Fira’s feelings. As for my ‘right’—”
“Though I defend it,” he went on, suddenly sharp, “I also despise the practice of such a right on a child.”
Miss King gasped. “Why, Mr. Ivverin.”
“Ee-var-in,” he said, amiable again, “the accent is not recessive. By the way, Fira tells me that though she has been your pupil since last fall, you still stumble over her name, obviously too foreign a name to master. Ivarin.” He dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand and rose.
“Thank you, Miss Mainley,” he said. “I was ordered by my wife not to lose my temper. I hope I can report a passing mark on that?”
“You can, you certainly can.” She rose too, and put out her hand. Her face was miserable, her gaze direct and clear.
He clasped her hand warmly, bowing over it again, and said, “I am grateful you and I understand each other, Miss Mainley; I am glad that I came. Good-bye.” He turned briefly to Miss King. “Good day, Miss King,” he said.
“Good-bye, Mr. ur-unn—Mr. Ivarin.” “Quite easy, isn’t it?” He smiled and was gone.
SIX
THE NIGHT THE BABY WAS BORN, Fee was allowed to stay up “as long as you please,” and as eleven o’clock went by and then midnight, she realized that having a baby was a far bigger event than the last day of school or the Fourth of July.
It was eighteen days after the day set for its arrival and as those days passed, Eli and Joan and Mama and even Fran grew jumpy about the delay. Eli and Joan had been living with the Martins for about two months, but as the time came closer for Joan to go to the hospital, they came over to the house quite often.
“Mother doesn’t even think of how I feel about dragging it out this way,” Joan complained once. “She’s just so thrilled the baby is cooperating with her fibs to the neighbors.”
“A tactful baby,” Alexandra remarked.
“Why is the baby tactful?” Fee asked, and everybody burst out laughing. It became a family joke, and though her mother did what she called “explain openly,” Fee remained puzzled. It was an afternoon in the middle of June when the baby started to get born, and even her father was suddenly excited. He telephoned the paper that he wouldn’t be there that evening, and hour after hour, he sat in the kitchen with them, drinking tea and talking. “The second generation of Ivarins to be born in America,” he said, sounding happier than Fee had ever heard him sound. “But this time, it’s an Ivarin who’ll be able to say, ‘In America,’ when they ask, ‘And where was your father born?’”
His voice went thick and funny as he said it, and he began to talk about his first few days in America, about how he kept walking for ten and twelve hours each day, just looking at the houses and the meadows and the Brooklyn Bridge, which wasn’t finished.
“The Statue of Liberty wasn’t there yet,” he said. “Remember that was in 1879, when I was eighteen, but when the ship was entering the harbor, I felt precisely the way they feel now when they look up and see it standing there. Precisely.”
“Tell them about the buttons, Stiva.”
Fee and Fran knew about Papa’s first job in America, sewing buttons on shirts in a factory on the East Side, where he worked for twelve and sometimes fifteen hours a day, earning six or eight dollars a week. But they had heard it only from Mama, never straight from him, and it sounded like a new story now.
He told them of getting a room for three dollars a month on Delancey Street, and board for four dollars, and going to night school for English lessons, because in Russia he spoke “school English” only. Even while he was going to night school for English, he began to give English lessons to other foreigners, whom he called “other greenhorns.” During the off-seasons in the needle trades when there was nothing to sew buttons on, when he was laid off without warning for two months at a time, he might have gone hungry without his pupils and their twenty-five cents an hour.
Fee could not imagine her father as a boy of eighteen or nineteen, younger than Eli or Garrett Paige, and she sat listening as if he were reading aloud from a book he had just got from the library. But even in books where people were poor, like Little Women or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, there was nothing like a man sewing buttons and giving English lessons to foreigners while he was taking English lessons himself.
After another glass of tea and another telephone call to the hospital to ask about Joan, Papa went on and told them about starting to work on a newspaper, a Russian one first, and then a Jewish one, and about going to meetings with other people working in factories, and beginning to lecture to them about unions and sweatshops and child labor. His lectures were also in Russian at first, but later his audiences grew so large he changed to Jewish for that too, although “everybody in the Russian colony,” he said, “regarded Russian as their mother tongue and their intellectual cachet.”
Fee didn’t know what he meant, but she didn’t want to ask questions and stop what he was telling them. It was another way he could be wonderful, and it didn’t happen often either, any more than his caring about things at school. A long time had passed sin
ce that terrible day, two report cards’ worth, but she still hated Miss King and Tommy Gording and the others.
Now her father was talking of his own days at school. His voice was very loud even though he wasn’t angry, but now the loudness was happy, like the bells on a holiday or kids shouting when a team won.
“Your mother’s family were rich,” he said. “When she came to America, she had a big trunk loaded down with silver candlesticks and silver dishes and jewelry and furs, but when I was a little boy, my father was a hatmaker and we were always poor. We never had enough to eat, and we lived like cattle in the same room.”
“Your mother and father and all?” Fran asked.
“My three sisters and I, and my parents. None of us had ambitions for a private tennis court, I can tell you.”
“Oh, Papa,” Fran said. “Don’t.”
“No, no, I’m teasing you.”
Instantly Fran looked wary, and Fee waited to see what would happen. That spring, Fran had begun to talk about how easy it would be to make a tennis court themselves, on the vacant lot next door—“just get the grass off, and level it a little, about four feet would have to be dug off the back end and it would be level. Jack Purney promised to help and we could do it without spending one cent.”
“I’ll help dig, Franny,” Fee had said, half-begging as if she wanted a favor. “I’m awfully strong.”
Day after day since then, Fran kept talking about their own court, until at last Mama had openly spoken about it to Papa one evening when he was in a good mood.
“Couldn’t we rent the ground next door, Stiva, for a small price, from whoever it is that owns it?”
Stefan had opened his mouth, then closed it. Looking speculative he had then said, “It’s amazing, what turns life takes.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it had occurred to me already that the owner might be only too glad to rent the plot. But I had something else in mind for it.”
“What ‘something else’?”
“No matter. To tell you now would only provide you with a problem.”
“Who owns it?” Alexandra said.
“How should I know that? But banks can tell whose property any lot is, even without searching the title.”
“Will you ask them, then?” She sounded vexed, and more urgent.
“Let me pay this month’s interest on our mortgage first,” he said. “I will hate to explain at the bank that we now need a private tennis court in our family.”
“And why not?” Alexandra flared up. “If the child wants it so much she’s willing to dig and level and sod it herself?”
“I can help,” Fee said. “Franny said I could.”
“Aping the rich,” Stefan had said to Mama. “They’ll want tiaras next.”
Now, when he dragged in the tennis court, both Fee and Fran expected him to launch an attack on it, but the moment passed, and he went back to his childhood. The first big thing he could remember was a night when his mother grabbed him out of bed and rushed him through the snowy streets to a place where twenty of their neighbors were huddled with their own children, all wailing and praying and talking about the pogrom. His own sisters were there, hiding under a table, and at every noise outside, his mother spread her full skirts wide, to cover their heads.
It was the night before Easter; being Russia, though, the land was still locked in ice and the air fluffy with snowflakes. His father was not with them; none of the fathers were with any of the families. There was scarcely any mention of the fathers; once a woman cried out, “He’ll be slaughtered like a pig with one stroke of a sword.”
There was a suffocating fear in the place, and the crying women were placing benches against the doors, piling one on another until they were like a grandstand at a parade, but a grandstand shoved back on itself so that the rows of benches had become a wall.
“What is a pogram, Papa?” Fee asked. She wished he had never begun on this part. She wanted to go back to the English lessons and the buttons and the new bridge to Brooklyn.
“A pogrom,” he said. “Po-grum—it’s a killing of Jews by savages, that’s what it is.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re Jews,” he said. “In Russia, Jews were hated so much that drunken Cossacks could kill off a few just for fun, and nobody in the government really minded too much. Christians all, but not Christ-like.”
“Oh, Papa.” A shudder went through her. This time the word “Jew” and the word “Christian” were producing more than a simple feeling of excitement. “Do they still have pogroms?” she asked.
“Not so many.” He caught a warning glance from Alexandra and added, “And never in America, never in this country.”
“Never?” Fran asked. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Even in Russia, it’s not often, any more, or anywhere in Europe. It’s like the Spanish Inquisition or the Massacre of the Christians in the arenas in Rome. History.” He looked from one to the other. “Come, come, girls, I did not mean to frighten you, but it’s another reason you should be happy you were born in America.”
The telephone rang then and they all jumped. Alexandra got to it first and a moment later she was calling, “A boy, a boy,” and then Stefan went to the phone too, and talked for a minute, and then they both kissed each other and Alexandra kissed Franny and Fee. “You’re aunts,” she said to them, hugging them. “And I’m a grandmother. Webster’s grandmother. Imagine!”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she laughed and said, “Oh, my goodness, a grandson.” Nobody minded her tears this time, and she didn’t try to hide them.
After a moment, Papa said, “Well, one more glass of tea in honor of young Mr. Ivarin.”
A few days later school was over and full summer burst upon them with high clear skies and unfaltering heat. On the first of July their second exodus to the beach began. It had always been the “mountains” while they still lived in New York, the mountains meaning any of the small inexpensive towns within sight of the Catskills.
But the summer of 1910 had been a summer of discovery, with Alexandra the Columbus who had found a new world for them, a tent colony on the Atlantic, a few miles east of established resorts like Far Rockaway, Long Beach and Edgemere.
This year’s return was scarcely an exodus, for Eli of course would not be going, and Stefan pronounced himself unable to do what he had managed last year, go along for the first day, which was all the time he ever could, or ever did, spend with them “in the country” anyway.
Once the baby was born, Fran and Fee went back to their usual June hatred of school and their usual June longings for vacation. And Alexandra was hardly less eager than they to get back again to her new love, a summer in a tent. That it was a summer without fashion, and with a minimum of convenience or comfort, did not disturb her; that their mode of life for July and August would strike many people as primitive gave her a secret pleasure. “Thoreau,” she had remarked once, “would have called our tent a palace.”
“Disputing Thoreau,” Stefan had replied, “I cannot call it a palace. I’d rather stay right here.”
The tent was one of about two hundred, all identical, lined up in seven rows separated by wooden “sidewalks,” making a tent city of more than a thousand people on a half-mile expanse of white sand beach directly on the sea.
To Alexandra the tents were compact miracles, livable, quickly cleaned, offering the free charm of life in the jungle or aboard a ship at sea. This year, learning from last year’s longings, she was paying ten a month more to be in the front row of tents, with an unobstructed view of the ocean hers “by riparian rights.”
“It’s worth the whole summer’s hundred dollars,” she said again and again, “every time I look out the front door. The front flaps.”
Each tent, about twelve by fourteen overall, was built upon a wooden flooring, raised on stubby posts a few inches from the sand. A three-foot-high wall of planking extended the full depth of the tent on each side; thus the
slope of tan canvas began high enough up so that the floor space was usable over the entire area. One had to stoop only when making up the, cots, placed end to end along the walls, two on each side.
A curtained shelf with hooks and nails provided closet space for the few skirts and dresses and coats Alexandra and the girls took with them, and all other apparel was kept in a low old chest, which Alexandra in a burst of gayety had painted a blazing blue.
Fore and aft, the flaps of the tent could be tied back to form large triangles of sky and light; at night, a single electric bulb on the crossbeam gave brilliant raw illumination. The rear of the tent, separated from the main part by inside flaps, contained an icebox and kerosene stove, an oblong table to seat four, open shelves for dishes, a small sink, with a drain and stopper but without faucets or water, and a small washtub, equally deprived. Water, pure but brackish, came from great iron hand-pumps, painted dark green and standing like motionless one-winged birds at crossings of the wooden sidewalks. Clusters of children and adults were always gathered around them, carrying zinc pails into which they pumped up the morning, noon or evening supply.
Even these arrangements did not dismay Alexandra; the one aspect of tent life that she did concede was “primitive” was the lack of private bathrooms.
“But,” she said loyally, “they have two modern buildings, with twenty separate places in each. The one thing I don’t like is when I’m going there and meet somebody I know, also going there. Such a community of motive!”
This minor flaw was forgotten soon enough and so, for Alexandra Ivarin, the summer of 1911 began beneficently as it had the year before. Life on the beach was delicious, easy, lazy.
“There’s nothing to wash and iron, with all of us in bathing suits from morning to night. Nothing to sew. If only Papa liked it here—I feel so selfish!”
She never admitted, even to herself, that it was a relief to be away from Stefan, from the necessity to gauge his moods, from the frequent hurt that blighted her day, that brought her unwanted, shameful tears. The year before, she had ascribed her lift in spirits to the newness of their summer arrangements, which persisted despite her worry about how Stefan would get along. She had hired a Polish immigrant girl to take care of him at home during their absence, a plump young illiterate, who was only too glad to get food, a place to live, and $ 14 a month. But in a week, Stefan fired the girl.
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