First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  “She is a chatterbox,” he wrote, “whose most fundamental belief is that a newspaper cannot entertain me as much as her conversation does. She also assumes that, like the feudal lords in Poland, I am waiting to order her into my bed. Her willingness begins to get on my nerves.”

  “Your father will starve,” Alexandra had cried to the children, hiding the letter. “A man who can’t do a thing for himself, except make tea! I’m going home to see—I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  She had returned, chagrined and relieved. “He boils two eggs till they’re like rocks,” she reported, “and stands by the stove to eat them. He makes tea, and cuts a slice of bread. Later, he goes to New York and has a real meal at the café. He seems to like it. The house is like a pigsty. You can smell eggshells at the front door.”

  Only after that episode, was Alexandra able to banish all guilt, and relish every hour of life at the shore. This summer, as she spoke of feeling selfish, she knew that nobody took her seriously. But she was happy.

  Early each morning, she would wake with the first outdoor sounds of voices, steps, pails, pumps—wake rested and glad to be done with the non-living of sleep. In her cotton nightgown, she would go to the rear of the tent, reach down for the two bottles of milk set under the extending flap of canvas by the milkman, and transfer them to the icebox.

  The iceman had been there even before the milkman, entering the back of the tent on rubber-soled feet, lifting the lid of the icebox and leaving his great lump of ice inside so quietly that the lightest sleeper would never stir.

  The morning paper and the mail did not come until noon, but she quickly re-shaped her habit to accommodate this fact. She would then put on the long kimono she had made from the black bunting that had caused such grief, and start for the public bathhouse, carrying her toothbrush and can of toothpowder, a towel, a small covered butter dish in which reposed a piece of soap.

  Returning to the tent, she would put on her coffee, and wake the girls. They needed less than ten seconds to dress; she had made them black alpaca bathing suits, with matching bloomers, and these they wore all day long. The color of their skin delighted her, Francesca’s a gold-bronze, and Fira’s a fierce dark brown.

  Alexandra was a good swimmer, and she had long ago taught Eli and the girls how to swim. Now she loved to watch Fran and Fee in the water, though when the breakers were rough after a storm, and she saw their young slender bodies sliding out of sight as they dived under curling tons of water, fear would send a shaft of steel through her heart to tell her that such frailty could never return safely. The cure for this fear was to dive under the same breakers herself, and when she felt her own plump small flesh tightly secure under the ferocity passing above it, she became tranquil about the girls once more.

  One morning, however, after perhaps two weeks of this second tent-summer had gone, Alexandra became aware of a faint dissatisfaction, the opposite of tranquility, somewhere within her, and she realized that she had been harboring it for several days. She could not describe it; it was like a faint sensation of hunger, perhaps ignored to start with, but now grown so energetic one had to pay attention to it.

  Did this faint malaise have anything to do with Stefan? With Eli and Joan and the baby? The girls? Could it be that repetition, even of something she loved as much as this glorious blazing-white beach—could repetition cut down the joy? So soon? It was impossible. In relief she began to hum.

  Instantly she knew what was wrong. She missed her dancing.

  She knew it with complete certainty. And in the certainty was dismay; she did not like to become slavishly attached to anything.

  It was obvious that tent life precluded her dancing. Not only was there no Victrola; to dance in front of Franny and Fira was not to be considered; to wait until they had gone swimming and then to lower the tent flaps for privacy, would mean raising the temperature under the morning-hot canvas to suffocating heights, like dancing in a Turkish bath. Impossible.

  A hundred Victrolas, a symphony orchestra. Still impossible.

  Last summer, her dancing had still been so new that she had bid farewell to it for two months, and struggled punctiliously with the boredom of calisthenics.

  And this summer, too, she had summoned up the sturdy realism she liked to think she always showed, and once again said farewell to her dancing until the fall.

  How astonishing then, that on this particular morning, without warning, the lack of it should suddenly seem unbearable. It was as if her muscles had at last rebelled at the injustice she was perpetrating on them, at the denial to them of their rightful and habitual pleasure. She was delighted with them; they were entities with a life of their own, capable of making demands, organizing in defiance. They had, in effect, called meetings, taken a vote, gone on strike.

  The moment this notion entered her mind, Alexandra Ivarin capitulated.

  She gazed down at her body, encased in her own alpaca bathing suit, as if she were greeting each one of her valiant muscles. She kicked off her slippers and moved into the open space in the center of the tent. For a moment she stood still, regarding the open flaps of canvas. The warm air drifting in bore the distant smell of the sea, fresh and heart-lifting. She turned her back on the triangular expanse of yellow light and began again to hum.

  The melody of the Strauss waltz was like wine, and a joyous giddiness entered her spirit. Hop, hop, hop on the right foot, change; hop, hop, hop on the left. Slide and jump to the right, slide and jump to the left. The three hops once more, then a deep bend to the right, a deep bend to the left.

  It was glorious. Humming became harder as her breathing grew labored, and after a moment, her lips opened of themselves and she gave up humming in favor of singing. Her voice was a high soprano, thin and untrained, but it struck her own ear now as almost beautiful.

  On the wooden floor, with nothing but a little space underneath and then sand, her bare feet made more of a thump than they did at home; she raised her voice to compensate for the thumping and slapping and sliding, and the very act of raising it seemed like a new assertion of freedom.

  When she reached the end of the melody, she paused, as she did at home when the record had to be turned over. Only then did she become aware of voices behind her, and she looked over her shoulder to the back of the tent. Outside, on the wood sidewalk, watching, were four or five children and several women.

  Fleetingly Alexandra thought, Oh, my goodness, it’s good the girls aren’t here. As the people outside saw her turn toward them, one of the women laughed derisively and left, and another took her child’s hand to lead him away.

  “No,” the child shouted. “I want to see some more.”

  “Come, Morris,” his mother said, speaking in Yiddish. “Or you know what’ll happen.”

  “I want to see the crazy lady do it again.”

  “You want—” his mother shouted, and slapped him across the face; the child yelled but didn’t budge. Once again the raised hand smacked him. His screams rose to the heavens.

  By now Alexandra was outside, still panting, but smiling vaguely. To the mother of the screaming child she said politely, “Have you ever tried it?” and at the confused look on the other’s face, she repeated her question, this time in Yiddish.

  “Tried it?” The woman eyed her cautiously.

  “Dancing for exercise,” Alexandra said cheerily. “It makes you feel young.”

  “Young,” the woman said. “Maybe a little crazy.” She started off, but Alexandra put a hand on her arm.

  “Don’t go,” Alexandra said. “Could you come in for a moment?”

  At the astonishment on the other’s face, Alexandra said, “You know I’m not crazy, so do come in for a minute. But without little Morris—I really would like to talk something over with you alone.”

  One of the other women now leaned forward and whispered to the one Alexandra had invited in; the expression on the woman’s face underwent a remarkable change. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” she demanded of the
whisperer, and turning back to Alexandra she said, “Is it true? Your husband is Ivarin?”

  “Yes,” Alexandra said. Pride in Stefan suffused her. Away from New York, living out on Long Island, it was easy to forget that to people like these, working people from the East Side, Stefan was famous, a public figure, a hero.

  “My husband is in cloaks, he’s a cutter,” the woman said, giving a shove of dismissal to her child, who was still screaming. “He tells me every word Ivarin says from the platform at union meetings. He reads every word he writes in the Jewish News. If I had dreamed who you are! But we only arrived here yesterday—”

  Alexandra touched her finger to her lips, as if she were hushing a child. “‘Who’ isn’t important,” she said, leading the way back into the tent, pulling a chair forward for her visitor, and stooping to fight a burner on the kerosene stove. “If you would permit me, though, I’d like to talk to you about your little boy.”

  “My Morris?”

  “That’s why I wanted you to come in without him. Please tell me your name; I don’t know what to call you.”

  “Godleberg,” she said. “I’m so excited I forgot. Anna Godleberg, my husband’s name is Dave, the boy is Morris, another boy is Louis, he’s four years older, and a baby, Rebecca, we call her Reba.”

  “How do you do, Mrs. Godleberg,” Alexandra said, as if she were acknowledging an introduction made by a third person.

  “About Morris, you said?” Mrs. Godleberg rushed on. “He drives me wild, he’s a terror, he never minds me, he—”

  “No child,” Alexandra put in mildly, “is born a terror. Of course, it’s none of my business, but—”

  “Please, it is your business,” the other said. “The wife of Ivarin? Anything you like is your business.”

  Alexandra dropped her tentative tone. “Then if I may, I think you are turning him into a terror.”

  Her visitor stared at her in amazement. “I’m turning him?” she demanded. “I’d give ten years of my life if I could make him be a good boy.”

  “Smacking a child across the face,” Alexandra said, “yelling at him, shoving him—all of that is old-fashioned now.”

  There was silence, hostile, unwilling silence on Mrs. Godleberg’s part, patient silence on Alexandra’s. As she waited, she remembered one of her first pupils, years ago when she also had begun to give private lessons in the evening, to add to Stefan’s earnings. At the beginning, whenever she penciled in a correction in the pupil’s exercise book, writing in her blue crayon over the misspelled or misused word—whether it was an important error or the merest nothing, the pupil would respond with that same unwilling, hostile silence, as if a teacher were unspeakably rude to teach.

  “Old-fashioned?” Mrs. Godleberg asked at last.

  “Modern methods of discipline are nothing like the old way we were brought up. It’s something we can all learn. Have you ever heard of Madame Montessori?”

  “Never.”

  “A woman doctor in Italy, Marie Montessori, the first woman doctor Italy ever had. She became interested in the right way to educate a child, train a child, help him develop—”

  For the next half-hour, as she watched her visitor’s face grow absorbed in the Montessori Method, as she answered the first uncertain questions, felt the other’s springing eagerness to learn, Alexandra Ivarin was elated and happy.

  “I only wish, Mrs. Ivarin, I had met you long ago, when I was carrying my first child. How can I know such things? Who is to tell me?”

  “Well, I’ve started,” Alexandra said.

  “It is too late now. That Morris—nothing I could do, nothing I could learn—”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Alexandra said. “You can at least try. And then, remember, there’s your baby, little Reba.”

  “You remember her name!”

  “Even if it is late with Morris,” Alexandra went on, “you have a fresh start right now, with her.”

  “Oh, how can I thank you, Mrs. Ivarin? I have a friend here, Sadie Cohen, her two children are worse than my Morris. If she could only hear what you told me—”

  “Ask her to come over with you, next time.”

  “You wouldn’t mind? You mean it?”

  “I mean it.”

  And so it was that a few nights later, Anna Godleberg and her friend Sadie Cohen, and Mrs. Cohen’s friend Esther Malowitch, and Mrs. Malowitch’s friend, Sophie Jabrowsky, all came to the Ivarin tent after supper, and sat on chairs and cots while Alexandra talked to them about the Montessori Method.

  Fee and Franny left just before they arrived, to visit new friends at the far end of the tent city. They both told their mother they were glad she was meeting friends of her own, and they had been fascinated by the story of the screaming Morris and his mother (though Alexandra had not deemed it necessary, for the moment, to tell them of the dancing which had brought Morris into her life).

  “If you like it, Mama, why shouldn’t you have a little lecture club?” Fran said, and Alexandra was relieved that there was none of her usual “Oh, Mama.”

  “Not a lecture club,” Alexandra said. “Only Papa can lecture or write. But teaching is something we both can do, he and I equally.”

  “You’re a teacher by nature,” Fee informed her. “Papa said so to the Paiges once; I heard him.”

  A teacher by nature, Alexandra thought. It’s true. It makes me happy when I teach an immigrant how to read English and write it and spell it. But this kind of teaching, about their children who have to grow up here in America? Could any other teaching be as good to do as that?

  Off and on, for the rest of the summer, Alexandra gave one or two evenings a week to groups of women like this first group of Anna Godleberg’s friends, groups that shifted and changed and grew. At times there were six women to listen to her, at times twenty, using every available chair and cot, sitting on the wood flooring, looking up at her.

  Each time she varied her subject matter as the occasion suggested, improvising as she went along, astonished at how she could hold their interest with many of her own favorite topics—the value of whole grains, the danger in denatured foods, the justice of woman suffrage, labor’s right to organize and bargain for a ten-hour day and a six-day week, with extra pay for anything over those minimums.

  But invariably it was her discussions of their daily problems with their children that awoke the strongest response, the greatest willingness to hear more.

  “You must write all this down, in a book, Mrs. Ivarin,” Anna Godleberg said on the eve of her departure for the heat of a Rivington Street tenement. “Every Jewish woman in America would read it.”

  “A book? My husband is the author in our family.”

  “But men know nothing about children,” Sophie Jabrowsky said. “Even your famous husband—is he fine with your children?”

  Alexandra passed the question by. But that night, unable to sleep for the excitement racing through her mind, she wondered how one went about writing a textbook for immigrant women. The chief section would be about children; another might give them a basic grounding in diet and health, with perhaps some American recipes, too, and surely a section to teach these poor harried women how to organize their hours, so they would not be forever trapped in the sloppy slavery of housework.

  A book! How gigantic a task it would be. A mountain of pages piled up in the eye of her mind; she felt exhausted and dejected at the idea of it. And yet she could not stop thinking about it.

  At last her eyes closed and she dozed, waked, slept, but never deeply or surely. At the first sifting of light across her eyelids, she went and sat down at the front of the tent, on the edge of the flooring. To her bare feet the sand was cold, but the pinkish silver tint of it pleased her. The sky was streaked with pearly yellows, and a few stars were still visible, reluctant to yield to the new day. Far off the cries of unseen gulls sounded, and Alexandra’s heart seemed to swoop and circle with them, in a reaching thrusting longing for she knew not what.

  It was larger
than wanting to write a book to help ignorant women with the thousand problems life showered upon them; that was part of it, but it was larger and more formless.

  She thought of Stefan, standing at the side of the gas range, eating stone-hard eggs, perfectly contented, doing very well without her, without the Polish servant girl. His life is so full, she thought, that he feels no emptiness, no matter what changes around him.

  So far my life has been as full as his. But Eli is already gone, Francesca has a birthday next month, and even the little one was eleven in June. Life is emptying; it always empties earlier for women than for men.

  Jealousy struck her, jealousy of Stefan, of all men. Until they are tottering and senile, she thought, they can go on with their kind of usefulness. Stefan will go on lecturing and editing the paper until he is seventy, but in another few years I will be finished.

  Fear assailed her, an apprehension she had never known, dark and thick. She stood up, went inside and stood looking down at her two girls, sweet in their young sleep.

  For another little while, she thought. A few years more.

  SEVEN

  LETTY HEARD HIM COMING up the stairs and she went out into the hall to meet him, holding the door almost closed so he could not see past her, into the room. He looked up and said, “You look as excited as a kid.”

  She said, “I told you I’d finish in time,” and lifted his jacket from his arm where he had been carrying it. His shirt was damp through, and he wore the summertime look of all men coming home from work in New York City, but he was cheerful and impatient for her to open the door and let him see.

  She waited for an instant and then flung it wide.

  He stopped on the threshold. Behind him she said, “They make a difference, don’t they?”