First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  In both he hammered at that one point of the protest vote. He had done so in every lecture he had given thus far in the campaign, and he knew he would redouble his efforts as his speaking schedule was doubling and redoubling itself. From now until Election Day, he was putting himself on a sweatshop routine of speaking engagements; rather, he was permitting Debs Headquarters to pile up an incessant list of appearances for him, in the drive to poll the largest Socialist vote ever known in New York City.

  Everywhere he spoke, he pounded home that theme, the beautiful power, in a free country, of a protesting minority. On a platform, on a soapbox at a street corner, speaking to vast audiences or to groups of fifty, he harangued and pleaded and yelled that a vote for Debs would be not a wasted vote but a real vote, a good vote, a strong vote.

  “I tell you,” he shouted, “that every senator and every congressman, from every one of the forty-eight states, will pay more attention to the demands of labor, if there is a big, a tremendous jump in the Socialist vote this year.”

  Sometimes he said “forty-six states” and instantly corrected himself, saying he kept forgetting that Arizona and New Mexico had been admitted to the Union this year, saying he was a bad student to forget, a numskull to forget. Each time there would come delighted denials from the crowd, signals to his lecturer’s sixth sense that he had won his audience. Then he would thunder at them to realize that in a great free country like America, a man’s protest vote was a big instrument, that it could sledgehammer a big dent in the steel walls of politics as usual, profits as usual, poverty as usual.

  Day after day, night after night, Stefan Ivarin kept on; during the final week before November fifth, he never went home to Barnett at all, sleeping wherever and whenever he could, campaigning around the clock. At the paper, he turned over all routine editing to Borg, blessing him again for his willingness to assume twice the normal burden, forgetting his brief clutch of doubt over his ambition.

  By Election Day, Ivarin felt his vocal cords ready to split over one more syllable, and he was unable to utter an ordinary word to a waiter, a streetcar conductor, to Alexandra on the telephone. But three more times during that final evening, as crowds gathered before the lighted glass doors of the Jewish News, he climbed up on an improvised platform made from a shored-up pushcart in the gutter, and there, by sheer need, by will, by magic, he again found the huge hortatory voice of the campaigner.

  Never had an election meant so much to him before. This would be the eighth time he would vote for a President of the United States. It was in 1884, when he was twenty-three, that he had first known the tremendous emotion of walking into a curtained booth and there, unbeknownst to any ruler alive, to any employer, policeman, magistrate, civil official, to any enemy or friend, there cast his secret, protected, inviolate vote. He never could forget that emotion; he knew now that it would clamor within his veins and cells every four years for the rest of his life.

  “It’s glorious, Stiva! What a day! Did you dare to dream—nearly a million?”

  He shook his head. Debs had indeed polled the greatest Socialist vote of all time, and the whole world of labor was joyous. Out of every sixteen men who had gone to the polls across the vast stretch of America, one man had voted the Socialist ticket, and Debs’ total was more than twice his vote of just four years before. Woodrow Wilson with his six million votes, Teddy with his four and Taft with less than that—suddenly it shone forth that workingmen held an edge of history in their hands. The country would grow and factories would grow and capitalism would grow, but labor would grow as well, and the voice of labor, the right to be heard as equals are heard.

  “It’s a turning point, all right,” Stefan said, his voice again torn and thick. “The whole year, if you think back.”

  He turned to his columns of printed figures. As each new edition of each paper arrived, he had checked the endless lines of numbers himself, his fountain pen skimming down their plunging slopes not because he doubted their accuracy but for the delight of adding such unheard-of sums, such muscular, such life-filled sums in the column for Debs and the Socialist Party.

  Alexandra’s eyes gleamed as she watched him. It was a turning point; he was right. A sweep for everything they both believed in and worked for, right through the year from January onward. The terrible strike in Lawrence—that had started in January and gone on for bitter bitter weeks, but it was won. The steel strike, the anthracite strike, the railroad strike—won. The hatmakers, the bricklayers, the cloakmakers, the cutters, the furriers, out in the West the lumber strikes and the copper strike—won. Everywhere, in a hundred kinds of labor, all over the great growing land it was the same: the strike vote taken, the picket line started, the soup kitchens and bread lines set up, the jeers and taunts and curses, the clubbings and arrests, at times the blood flowing—but at last, the strike won. Nine cents an hour gave way to eleven, ten bowed to twelve, twenty to twenty-one. Ninety-hour weeks had already gone down the slide of history, eighty-hour weeks following them, now even sixty-hour weeks were beginning to go—

  Won, won, a step here, an inch there, a right acknowledged, a dignity no longer denied—all over America change was afoot, hope renewing, the tiny patient tallies entered in the unseen books.

  And now this soaring shouting vote for Debs. Alexandra wanted to say something to Stefan and his columns of figures but she was afraid to go too far, afraid she would not find the right word, so she said nothing.

  Early in the afternoon, Stefan left for the office. He was still unrested except for a snatched couple of hours of sleep just before he voted yesterday morning and again at about dawn this morning. But he was drawn toward the office and she understood that. In the evening she was to meet him there, for a round of celebrations with old friends they had known in New York when they were young, when a socialist victory such as this was so far off in the unborn years that they had not dared to imagine it as something they might all live to see.

  The round of celebrating was called off an hour before it was supposed to begin. When Stefan arrived at the office, it was still alive with excitement and discovery as it had been through the night before while the results kept streaming in from the AP ticker. Because it was still afternoon, Isaac Landau was there, and he sought out Ivarin in his office. “Shall I confess something,” he asked.

  “Confess away.”

  “It will make you conceited.”

  Ivarin studied Landau’s expression. “At the last moment you decided it would not be wasting your vote.”

  “But it was God who helped me decide, not you, so why need I worry about making you conceited?”

  “Perhaps that you find me on God’s side, politically at least? From you, Itzak, that’s big praise.”

  Landau smiled, but he looked meditative, and Ivarin waited. Itzak was no intellectual, and below the level of practical affairs they had never found a deep kinship with each other, but he liked Landau and Landau liked him.

  “Politically on God’s side?” Landau repeated disapprovingly. “That’s too blasphemous for me.”

  “Forgive me,” Ivarin said quickly.

  “Forgive, of course I forgive. But sometimes I think it’s a big hoax, your being such an unbeliever.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “A hoax, at least, that you feel nothing.”

  “Feel nothing? When did you get that idea?”

  “Feel no pride in being a Jew,” Landau said. “I wonder if it isn’t a bluff when you deny that you’re proud to be a Jew, as every Jew must feel proud.”

  “Neither proud nor unproud,” Ivarin said unemphatically.

  “You must admit there is something, Stiva, a secret pride that you were born a Jew, that you share a glorious heritage,” he said with emotion. “I think of my heritage as a Jew and my heart burns with joy; I feel uplifted and grateful. For my children, too, and their children.”

  “I know you do, Itzak.”

  “An endless riches in their blood. Just think, Abraham, Isa
ac, Jacob. The Ancient Prophets, and Moses, David, Solomon. Think of Jesus. Then down the ages—Spinoza, Heine, Disraeli, and this Dr. Freud who some people say will revolutionize all medicine.”

  “An impressive list,” Stefan said.

  “You don’t have to admit it openly, you old argufier,” Isaac Landau insisted. “But in secret you must feel proud that your own children share this great heritage.”

  Stefan shook his head, half-wishing he could let Landau think himself unanswerable, but aware that nothing could make him hold back any longer.

  “I’m afraid, Itzak,” he said, “that if I did feel all this pride on behalf of my children, that then I would have to balance things by feeling a little quiver of shame as well.”

  “Shame?”

  “That I give them no heritage of Galileo or Descartes or Thomas Jefferson or Shakespeare or Abraham Lincoln.”

  Isaac Landau said, “I should have known there was no use.”

  “Why, I couldn’t look my children in the eye,” Stefan went on, now enjoying himself thoroughly. “If we are starting to measure off glorious heritages, then I tremble to have them accuse me about Michelangelo, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy—”

  “You’re a madman, Stiva,” Landau broke in, clutching his forehead in mock despair. “You are no Jew at all. Agnostics are all madmen.”

  “You bet your bottom dollar I’m a Jew. As long as there’s one pogrom in Russia, I remain a Jew, agnostic but a Jew. As for you, my dear Itzak—”

  “Don’t tell me again. I’m a synagogue chauvinist. I know it by heart. A Jewish jingo—”

  There was a tap at the door and Fehler joined them. They discussed the starting date for the survey and then the basic meaning of the election of Woodrow Wilson, the first Democrat to become President in twenty years. Suddenly Landau put both his hands to his stomach, his gasp almost a cry.

  “Boy, boy,” Stefan Ivarin shouted, “get a doctor.”

  A week later, in the hospital where he had undergone so many tests for his digestive ailment, Isaac Landau died of heart failure. Stefan’s shock was deep, and the tenacity of his sorrow surprising. For weeks he felt the loss of him, sometimes too sharply to credit, sometimes in a muted way. It was a melancholy deprivation, knowing they would never sit together in a meeting, never greet each other in the hall, never resume their insoluble problem about blood-pride in one’s religion. Through the whole life of the Jewish News they had worked together; they had shared those years and grown older sharing them. Now it was over for Landau, and he felt something over for him too.

  The inevitable reorganization of the paper would begin as soon as a decent time of mourning and legalities went by, and Stefan dreaded the discussions with Landau’s family and heirs, with their lawyers and advisers. His children were all daughters; none of their husbands had shown any desire for a job with the paper or any inclination toward the field of the foreign-language press. Eventually, since the largest fraction of the ownership was Landau’s, they would select some person to safeguard their interests and they would install him in Landau’s place. Perhaps it would be a figurehead. One could hope for a strong and able man, a man one would not need to persuade or proselytize.

  It was depressing to speculate about, and Stefan Ivarin preferred to avoid it. After the first days, he knew he could not. Uncertainty was everywhere. The Landau lawyer, Jacob Steinberger, had posted a large bulletin inside the front door, countersigned by Fehler and himself, stating that nobody’s job was at stake during the reorganization period, but after a day or two, the words of reassurance might have been written in invisible ink.

  Throughout the paper the sense of change hung like a thin sour gas in the air. Groups gathered in the corridors and around desks, broke up, formed anew. A quickening anxiety was noticeable in every office, on every floor, in the pressrooms below. It was understandable but demoralizing. During the peak rush each evening, work and the clock cured it, but as the first edition went to press, it seeped back through the crevices of each partition and each personality.

  One night for no particular reason, Ivarin found himself recalling the quarrel he had had long ago when he had overruled Fehler for interfering in some purely editorial matter. They had bickered like young girls until at the end he had reminded Fehler that for years the owner had approved of his business management and the growth of the paper’s sales and income, just as he had also approved of the paper’s writing and editing.

  “So has it been for five years,” he had told Fehler, “so let it be for another five years.”

  “Perhaps,” Fehler had answered.

  The “perhaps” had congealed in his mind before Fehler was out of the door, taking shape there, a lumpish possession to be cast out without ado.

  Yet here it was, Ivarin reflected now, his possession still. Perhaps.

  EIGHTEEN

  BY THE START OF the Christmas season, Letty’s success was proved, and before the end of the winter it was clear to Garry that it was self-generating and as irreversible as the suffrage movement itself.

  “You don’t look like a New Woman,” he said when she brought him her year-end figures. “But I’m proud of you.”

  “Gare the profit!”

  “From wrecks to riches,” he said and ducked. They were happy; the opening of the shop on East Thirty-seventh Street, “around the corner from Tiffany’s,” had opened a new period of their marriage, with their other problems forgotten or tabled. For Letty, the shop was far more than something to work at all day, and for him, it was a surprising source of new satisfaction that he spoke about often.

  Unexpectedly too, it swiftly became an influence on the basic shape of their social life, a life filled now with new activity in new circumstances neither had ever known before and that both found fascinating to explore.

  It was the world of fashion, the world of wealth, and it was Cynthia Aldrich who led them into it. Regarding herself not only as “Letty’s first customer,” but as her natural mentor and adviser, Mrs. Aldrich had started by offering herself as a partner, ready to “put in any percentage of capital you’ll let me have, child,” but Letty had gracefully rejected this offer even before hearing Garry’s explosive “no.”

  “The shop’s yours, and only yours,” he insisted.

  The shop remained Letty’s and only Letty’s. Apart from a token share bought for a hundred dollars by her parents and another bought by Garry’s, it was hers even in a legal sense, the lease signed in her own name, the books and credits and special checking account in her own name, without the usual countersignature or endorsement by her husband. Garry’s “no” had also been explosive each time she suggested that since she was using their money to launch herself, the new project really belonged to both of them, “for richer or poorer, profit or loss,” which made him laugh but did not change his no to yes.

  And as the weeks and months passed, Letty found new pride for herself by feeling the mantle of his around her, and new reasons for a sense of well-being and achievement. When she came each month to the day that told her again they were not yet to have a baby, she no longer wept in desolation and sense of failure, accepting the fact and not dwelling upon it. All she knew was that she was happy again as she had been in the first year of their marriage and that Garry seemed happy with her.

  One night early in February she thought, In a way he’s happier. It was a mild Sunday evening and they were both in the closed and locked store, finishing the largest task that had ever faced them, each weary but each stubbornly unwilling to quit before it was done. Garry had just heaved an empty crate atop half a dozen others at the rear exit of the shop and was mopping his grimy arms and face with a filthy rag that had been tucked into his belt. Out front in the gutter, where the street-cleaner would get them in the morning, were a dozen more, and he decided to add these newly emptied ones to their outdoor brothers.

  “Do you remember,” he asked as he banged the door behind him at last, “when I promised to drop you a curtsy the first time I came in
?”

  “And then never once did!”

  His hands were stained with varnish and oil, his shirt dark with dust and sweat, but at her reproving tone, he promptly sank in an elaborate maneuver that he took to be a curtsy and said, “Queen Anne, ma’am.”

  “And me looking like the washerwoman. Oh, Gare.” She gave his shoulder a push while he was jackknifed at her feet, and he collapsed willingly on the littered floor, stretching out on the packing straw and shredded newspapers from the barrels and boxes they had been opening for hours.

  “It feels good,” he said. “I’ll stay down here a while.”

  “You must be half dead,” she said, “and starved too. But I’m so glad.” She looked around at what they had accomplished. “It would have taken me forever without you.”

  She was as disheveled and grimy as he and as unconscious of her appearance, unworried about the hair coming loose from her high pompadour, about her skirts turned back and pinned up at her waist with a safety-pin like a slavey’s. The backbreaking part was done, and now she could manage quite easily and get the entire shipment on display in a couple of days, a week at most. The barrels and crates and cartons had been filled with an unrelated assortment of decorative objects that even Garry’s untutored eye recognized as beautiful or unusual or old or costly, or all of these at once. There were clocks and barometers and lamps, silver trays and bowls and candlesticks, crystal candelabra and wall sconces, andirons and firedogs and fireplace screens and fenders, several small tables and tiered stands and footstools, and then dozens upon dozens of those unknowns he always thought of as bric-a-brac, these ranging from fragile porcelains and china to indestructible bronze and marble.