She read his letter once more, but deliberately put off the editorial itself, the longer to savor its promise of pleasure. She went around to the front of the tent and settled comfortably into one of the brightly striped canvas camp chairs that were a new luxury for their summer life this year.
It was a gleaming day, cooler than it had been, with the air promising September and then October. Her spirits sparkled like the points of mica that seemed to be strewn all over the white sand, and her heart rose and leaped like the blue box kite some boys were flying at the edge of the surf.
For a moment she watched the kite, smiling at it, and then she could wait no longer before turning to Stefan’s piece.
ASSASSINATE A PREFACE?
Alexander Berkman, author of Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, denouncer of all American publishers as crass suppressors of freedom for writers whose ideas run counter to theirs, has just indulged in a little crass suppression of his own.
He has suppressed the work of a great writer, work done at Berkman’s invitation, at his urgent and repeated request, a preface for his book.
The great man is Jack London, whose work is known and welcomed on the printing presses of the world.
Nearly a year ago, this editorial page contained a piece that raised a large question. It was called, “Assassinate a Book?”
“To assassinate a book,” that piece said, if it is pardonable to quote from it, “we need only refuse it print … In a free country, all writing and speaking and thinking must remain free, even that which we detest, despise or fear.”
It was for that principle, and standing on that platform, that this newspaper then campaigned for contributions from its readers to get Berkman’s book privately printed.
The campaign succeeded, as did other efforts of people elsewhere, many of whom had other motives. The book escaped the death of suppression; it appears today; it is today reviewed by a member of the staff of this paper who, it appears, does detest and despise it, though “fear” is as yet not evident to the human eye.
Not evident either is Jack London’s preface.
For the author of this rescued book, living by the nasty code of extremists everywhere, is quite willing to assassinate the writings of others. The preface in his book is not the long and thoughtful piece written by Jack London. It is by one Hutchins Hapgood, whose wisdom surely rests on something other than his willingness to substitute his talents for Jack London’s.
Bombed, destroyed, assassinated: one preface.
Killed because in it, the illustrious Jack London used his inalienable American right of free speech for his own beliefs as well as Berkman’s. He upheld Berkman’s right to speak, to write and to publish, but he did not uphold Berkman’s anarchism. And he explained why not, inevitably expounding his own moderate principles as a socialist while doing so.
Which obviously, by official ukase, put him beyond the pale.
Free Speech yes.
Free Speech always.
Free Speech, however, says Alexander Berkman by this singular piece of hypocrisy and hilarity, “only for me.”
To assassinate a preface, we have only to refuse it print.
Alexandra said aloud, “It’s simply wonderful,” and looked around for the girls. She could translate bits of it for them, tell them enough about it to make them see how splendid it was, how forthright and uncompromising, yet how ironic. Lethal but funny.
Berkman would be the laughingstock of every real believer in freedom. It would be a delicious jest that would be talked of far beyond the readership of the Jewish News. Sooner or later all of Stefan’s best things became the talk of the socialist and labor movement, wherever Yiddish or Russian was read and spoken, and since Evan’s list of papers for the vigilante series, the name of Stefan Ivarin was known far beyond those linguistic limits. This editorial on killing Jack London’s words would be a sensation anywhere it appeared and surely Evan’s Free Speech League would want it in every paper on their special list.
It was lovely to feel so much a part of a future success, and Alexandra read his pages again, more slowly this time, pausing over each phrase Stiva had scratched out, comparing it with the one he had written in its place, testing each in her mind to see if his choice was always right. Invariably it was.
Again she looked up and down the beach. The girls were nowhere in sight. It was annoying to be so full of pride in their father’s latest work and be unable to tell them about it. He had made a big point about not reading it to a soul, but surely that prohibition didn’t extend to his own children.
She put the folded pages into the envelope, counting them first to be certain they were all there, as he always counted his chess pieces before putting them away in their box. Then she started toward the curling edge of the sea. She would enjoy a walk anyway, and when she spotted the girls she would say not a word about the editorial if they were with friends. She curved the bulky letter into the circle of her hand and it felt like a chunky white club. Just like the what-you-call-it, she thought, in those relay races in ancient Greece. Cheerfully she swung the cylinder of the letter against her thigh as she walked. Baton, she remembered. Like a conductor’s at a concert. Like music to move one’s soul.
Except for these last days of worry about Joan, it was being a lovely summer once more, with Fran at sixteen an absolute belle, imperiously snubbing nearly all the boys who were ready to worship and dance attendance on her day and night. And little Fee, suddenly twelve, was losing some of her tomboy wildness and maturing in subtle ways, though the poor child still went purple with jealousy whenever one of her contemporaries confided to her about the start of menstruation. Despite her sympathy for Fee’s despair, Alexandra had to laugh at the boastful girls, every one pretending it was so awful, such pain, and every one ruthlessly lording it over Fee or any other girl who had not yet arrived at the moment of womanhood.
Apart from the children and her own extraordinary peacefulness at the sea, happy with her swimming, her dancing, with the feeling of wet hair on her neck and salt drying on her body, happy each day as a child is happy, for no good reason—
Aside from all this, there was again this summer, as if it had been lying dormant under the winter waiting for her, the same unparalleled discovery that the beach women came to her for guidance, about how to become American women instead of remaining immigrant women from the steerage of a hundred ships coming from a hundred cities and villages in Europe.
Again their turning to her was an experience like wine, like the moment of love, like the discovery of music. Anna Godleberg was still her star pupil, her devoted propagandist, indeed her circus barker advertising to one and all the thrills and delights awaiting them inside Mrs. Ivarin’s tent.
It was easy to smile at Anna Godleberg but just as easy to cry over her. Longfellow’s poem, whose opening line was all anybody seemed to know, always came to her mind, somewhat embarrassingly, whenever she had a pupil like Anna Godleberg, so eager to learn, to change, to grow.
And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays;
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;
Every clod feels a stir of might,
An instinct within it that reaches and towers,
And, groping blindly above it for light,
Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers; …
Anna Godleberg with her Morris and Louis and baby Reba would never stop groping now, and to be the one who had helped that groping, fostered it, made it less blind—there was a sweetness in that which must be kin to the sweetness of prayer.
This year twelve women came on “Mrs. Ivarin’s evenings,” and only two were repeaters from the summer before. Since rentals were usually short-term affairs “until the money was gone,” the group constantly shifted and changed and remained fluid, yet there was an as
tonishing consistency about the women in each new group.
“You must write a book, Mrs. Ivarin,” one of them would always say.
“You should give lectures in a big hall, Mrs. Ivarin—every mother would come to hear you.”
“You simply have to write it down—I could make my sister read it. She has one child, oh God, a brat you want to kill.”
“Please—a book.”
So last summer had not been a fluke after all, Alexandra Ivarin thought. There did seem to be some unchanging response to her from these poor souls of Delancey Street and Rivington, of Gouverneur Street and Orchard, of Avenue A and East Broadway. Street by street, tenement by tenement, they were asearch for the ultimate difference between life in America and life in the ancient ghettos from which they had fled. And many also searched to keep up with their children, “American born,” at home from birth in the great and beloved land.
Alexandra looked off at the shining sea and loved it. Foaming, leaping, curling, it was nevertheless a bridge for the hopeful. It would always be a bridge and she would always love it.
She had walked the entire length of the beach and the girls were still nowhere in sight; they must be inside somebody’s tent, and Shag, who often gave her a clue to their whereabouts, must be inside with them. Sharing things was best while the impulse was warm, but now she would have to wait until evening to tell them about Stiva’s letter and his not waiting to copy out his editorial before mailing it to her. Disappointed, she walked home.
“Mrs. Ivarin, I decided you flew away in an aeroplane!”
It was Anna Godleberg, waiting for her return. Alexandra was delighted, as if Mrs. Godleberg had magically changed into the most desired friend on earth. As she invited her in “for a few minutes,” she heard an extra cordiality in her own tone, and a gong of warning sounded in her mind. But Anna Godleberg said she had come for the special rice-pudding recipe with natural brown rice and brown sugar, and the gong had a faraway tone, with no urgency.
Alexandra laid her husband’s letter on the table and as she wrote out the recipe her hand was only inches away from it. “And this cup of raisins,” she said at the end, “they mustn’t be white raisins. Those are bleached with sulphur and lose all their minerals. Be sure you get dark ones like these.”
She reached for a box on the open shelf which was the tent’s pantry, tasted a few raisins and said, “Simply delicious,” as she offered the box to her pupil. “Everything seems delicious right now,” she added in the same breath, “I’m so excited about something I just read.”
“In today’s paper? Can I borrow it if you’re through reading it?”
“No, it’s not in today’s paper.”
“Something by your husband?”
“An editorial.”
Mrs. Godleberg was electrified. “In yesterday’s paper then. I didn’t see that either. Could I please borrow that one? I’ll send my Morris back with it right after supper.”
“It hasn’t been in the paper at all yet.” Alexandra heard the gong more clearly, but Mrs. Godleberg looked confused, and she added, “It will be in the paper of course, perhaps in two weeks. I wasn’t supposed to speak of it. It slipped out.”
Her visitor’s face was transformed. Like a child with its first glimpse of an unheard-of toy, Mrs. Godleberg was radiant with discovery. “You said you just read it—you mean just now, in that letter?”
Her hand moved forward toward the letter so prominently in view, but Alexandra said, “I’m afraid I can’t. I promised.”
Mrs. Godleberg halted her hand and stood still, nodding in obedience, not speaking, as if she had been caught in some indecency.
“Sometimes, he sends me an editorial ahead of time,” Alexandra said, uneasy as she saw Mrs. Godleberg’s radiance give way to a somber look, as she watched her move back a step, away from the table.
Alexandra understood. It was the look of respect, a return to deference that was part of the uneducated European’s automatic posture to those in high places.
Oh, my goodness, Alexandra Ivarin thought in dismay. I made her feel she’s a nobody.
Suddenly she was miserable. Why had they started on Stiva’s editorial? Had she brought it up herself? She hadn’t, she was sure; she was on her honor to confide in nobody about it.
Yet somehow they were talking about it. Had Anna Godleberg asked her what Mr. Ivarin was writing? She often did ask questions about “the great Mr. Ivarin”; perhaps it was all Mrs. Godleberg’s doing.
“I didn’t mean to butt in,” Mrs. Godleberg said, wretchedly nodding at the letter as if she were indicating a third person with whom she had found Mrs. Ivarin involved. “I wouldn’t have asked—if I had even dreamed—Excuse me, Mrs. Ivarin, please.”
“No, no,” Alexandra said contritely. “You must excuse me. I feel ridiculous, embarrassing you over something which, after all, is public property.”
Hope shone forth again in Anna Godleberg’s face, and eagerness, but she said nothing. She was waiting for the rest of the reprieve Mrs. Ivarin was going to give her. Alexandra added, “I mean will be public property when it is printed.”
The niceties of this retreat were lost on Mrs. Godleberg, who still looked expectant. Alexandra suddenly thought, There’s no way out now. I can’t hurt her again and send her off empty—how I ever got so tangled up, I’ll never know.
Aloud she said, “Let me read you a bit here and a bit there, but you must promise first—”
“Not one word. Wild horses couldn’t drag it out.” She leaned toward Alexandra, whispering. “I’d be so, I’d feel, I’m so excited already, even to see you open the envelope, see you take it out, and know it hasn’t even been in the paper yet. Oh, thank you.”
Alexandra read the headline, and the first paragraph. She would skip everything after that, go straight to the end and read another line or two from the last page. That would give Mrs. Godleberg enough to restore her, and still permit her own conscience to stay calm.
But at the end of the first paragraph, she somehow could not skip. It would mutilate Stiva’s beautiful piling up of effect, his way of moving inexorably from point to point, his perfect interplay of cold fact, icy sarcasm, hot wrath.
She read the second page to Mrs. Godleberg, and the third. With each one her heart felt an anchor of guilt unwind and sink through fathoms to hold it firm to a dark regret, yet she was helpless until the last syllable Stiva had entrusted to her.
“God in heaven, he is the most brilliant writer in the whole world,” Anna Godleberg said then. “What a privilege!”
Her rapture almost repaid Alexandra. But as Anna Godleberg took her departure, Alexandra detained her for one final word of caution.
“Remember, I read it only as a real secret,” she said. “I think my husband wanted me not to speak of it to anybody.”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Ivarin. I’m like the grave.”
SEVENTEEN
WEBSTER MARTIN EAVES, AGED a year and a quarter, proceeded on plump legs toward his Aunt Fee.
His right hand clutched four orange-yellow asters which he had just pulled from a round flower bed in his front yard, and he held his hand stiffly toward her during his journey, as if he were pushing the flowers through the air against stubborn resistance.
“Annie Fee-fee ha!” he said.
Fee laughed. “Ha” meant “have” and she kneeled on the dry grass, her arms out, ready for his final lurch. “Come on, Webby, all the way to Auntie Fee.”
His last steps were a stagger and she caught him, took his flowers, and rolled him on the ground like a smaller Shag. “Say ‘Auntie Fee,’” she said, stressing the T.
“Annie Fee-fee,” he said amiably.
“Not Fifi,” Fee said. “That’s like a French novel.”
“Webby wants.” He got up and lunged for his orange-yellow asters and Fee moved them just beyond his reach. “Webby wants,” he said again, and stamped his foot so that a flurry of white powder flew up from his square-toed shoe. “Indian giver
,” she said, returning the flowers as she watched the white flurry. It reminded her of the soft puff from a dandelion, after it stopped being a yellow disc and became a ball on a greeny-grey stem, and she said, “Stamp your foot again,” and laughed.
Everything made her feel good today. She had come all the way to Brooklyn by herself, to stay with Webby while Eli was at the hospital with Joan and the new baby, Alexandra, that they had been so scared about, and when Eli got home it would be too late for her to start back to Barnett, so she was going to stay overnight, even though it was a school night when she was supposed to go to bed early.
She never did go to bed early when she stayed overnight at anybody else’s house, and certainly not to sleep early. Even when she was allowed to spend the night at Trudy’s, it was such fun she never felt sleepy at the right time, and for Trudy’s she didn’t have to take a trolley and then a train.
But sleeping in any house that wasn’t yours was exciting. There was an adventure-feeling from the moment you packed your toothbrush and nightgown to the final moment of getting home the next morning.
Nobody could explain why it was so special, but they admitted it was. People loved change, Mama said, new surroundings, getting away from the humdrum. But Mama warned her not to get “Wanderlust” too soon, and not to be in too much of a hurry for life. If she was too much in a hurry, trouble was sure to strike.
“What kind of trouble?” she asked, but her mother went vague and pretty stupid and so did Eli and Joan. As for Fran, she was now so crazy about herself and being sixteen and a senior at High, and she had such a crush on a new boy, Tom Ladendock, that she wouldn’t say a thing you could make any sense out of.
Actually it was perfectly clear what her mother meant; she had uttered a thousand solemn warnings all their lives about the White Slave Traffic, and they both knew perfectly well that if that happened to you, trouble certainly had struck.
But of late, other people said she shouldn’t be impatient to grow up and be independent, and they weren’t all thinking of the White Slave Traffic. Trudy said her mother thought Fee was restless, and predicted she would want to leave home for good when she was sixteen or eighteen, and then that would give Trudy ideas, and Trudy would leave home too.
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