First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  Now, for all their dissimilarity, they were taking on a certain unity because, though they were a shipment on consignment, they were in a sense hers, in her control, set out in groups and clusters in her place, behind the two handsome screens she had installed across the width of the store to conceal from customers the mundane necessities she had begun with and still used in all her spare time: her scrapers and brushes and rubbers, her varnish removers and waxes and stains and polishes, the cracked old washbasin on the back wall, next to a gas plate where she made tea for the sandwich she brought from home each morning.

  At her feet on the floor, Garry propped himself up on one elbow and looked about him. “Even I can tell it’s quite a collection,” he said.

  “I could sell every single thing right off the floor, they’re so marvelous.” She leaned forward to pick a wisp of straw from a fluted vase and to blow dust from the face of a gilded wall clock, with an American eagle spreading brass wings across its top. “What luck that Cynthia thought of it.”

  Mrs. Aldrich had arranged the shipment on consignment, the first Letty had ever had. It came from the estate of a millionaire banker named Will Harrett, of Fifth Avenue and Oyster Bay, whose widow was a lifelong friend of Cynthia Aldrich. “It wouldn’t take a cent of added capital,” she explained to Letty, “and your commission would be thirty-three per cent, and on some things fifty. You would be doing Olive Harrett a kindness, too, my dear; she simply has to give up that enormous place out there, and she does have the loveliest things.”

  Her timing was perfection itself, for Letty had been taking inventory, her first attempt at that “store-wide inventory” that she had so often read about, and Mrs. Aldrich’s talk of “the loveliest things” made her glance around her Christmas-depleted shop.

  “It does look awfully empty, doesn’t it?” she said. “I never will get used to that.”

  Last fall when success had still seemed a mirage, Letty had been constantly astonished that so small a store could swallow up all the pieces she had collected and restored throughout the summer and early fall. Each departure of a chair or table or chest left a gaping space that hurt her newborn proprietary pride, and now, even with new things due to arrive daily, she longed for those small odds and ends to “fill up the holes” and restore the fullness and variety she wanted.

  “I’d love to go out to Oyster Bay,” she said tentatively to Cynthia Aldrich. “Could I?”

  “Of course, Letty. To make your own selection?”

  “It’s just that—”

  “No explanation’s necessary, child. When shall we go?”

  “It’s just that I’ve noticed that if I am really crazy about something, it always seems to sell. But if I can’t quite make up my mind about it, customers can’t make up their minds either.”

  Cynthia Aldrich patted her shoulder, nodding approval, and later that week enjoyed the long day at Oyster Bay as much as Letty did. She relished the role she had adopted for herself, and enjoyed Letty’s gratitude immensely. Last October, on Opening Day, she had appeared at the shop with another of her close friends, who soon turned into Letty’s “second best customer,” and each day or two thereafter Mrs. Aldrich would show up with yet another. These friends in turn brought in their friends, or sent them in, and in some ways they were all alike. None of them fussed over cost. None showed surprise even at a price that Letty once would have called “scandalous.”

  Very soon Letty saw “social importance” turn visibly into commercial importance, and she never knew when she herself began unknowingly to put a private label upon each woman who came through the door. As with the price tags hidden away inside a drawer, or glued to the underside of a table-leaf, these private labels were unobtrusive and concealed, so artfully concealed that she remained half unaware of their existence on the retentive undersurface of her mind. She would have denied that she was impressed by one customer more than another, but she regarded this ticketing of the women she dealt with as “just business” and never questioned it.

  Nor did it seem strange when Mrs. Aldrich invited her and Garry to dinner. The Aldriches lived in a wide stone house facing Gramercy Park, and Letty had been there once by herself for tea, afterward giving Garry a lyrical description of the beauty within it, its paintings and rare books as well as its fine furniture and carpets, its dignity as well as its elegance.

  The dinner was planned for the young; the Aldriches’ married daughters, Constance and Lucinda, both in their twenties, asked their friends too, so that seven young couples were at the table. Later, a five-piece orchestra played for them to dance to; the evening was a delight.

  Neither Letty nor Garry had ever dined in such surroundings before, nor did they often go to parties where evening dress was taken for granted, where four wines were served at the table, where a butler and a footman in livery served champagne or liqueurs or whiskey afterward into the night. It all was new and exciting and carefree; Lucinda Aldrich was married to a man named Hank Stiles, who sold stocks on Wall Street and who kept coming back to Letty after dancing with any other girl, to ask for the next. Constance’s husband was an assistant professor of history at Yale, Ronald Yates, whom everybody called “Proff,” and both Proff and Connie were diverting and companionable from the start.

  It was three in the morning when the Aldrich door closed on Letty and Garry and two other couples, and it was clear that this evening would lead to other evenings. At the curb several hansom cabs were waiting patiently, drawn there by the fight streaming from the windows, their owners knowing that if a ball was in progress, customers would be sure and payment generous.

  “It was wonderful, wasn’t it?” Letty asked Garry happily, as the cabman spread a thick lap robe over their knees. She leaned against him, feeling herself newly valuable because she had been his introduction to the Aldrich house, even though it was he and the lab and his job that had brought the Aldriches into her life to start with. Garry agreed that it was a fine party; all evening he had worn that look which announced that he liked every moment of the evening, at dinner, over liqueurs, while he was dancing. Because he so openly showed what he felt, people responded and liked him in return.

  All their new friends did that, Letty had frequently reflected since that night, at all the places they had been asked to since, and she was always aware of it, soothed and reassured by it. Garry was changing into a more social being; he didn’t get started on the gloomy news from Europe while he was at a party, just as he no longer carried on about it at home the way he used to do. He was changing, and maturing, and that was wonderful too.

  “Hey, what are you thinking about?” Garry said, and for a moment she thought they were still in the hansom cab, still in their new evening clothes, he handsome above his white tie and she still too conscious of how deeply décolleté her cerise gown actually was. Then he stretched and groaned and got to his feet from the littered floor of the shop and she came back to the present, to her pinned-up skirts and straggling hair.

  “Oh,” she answered, “about Mrs. Aldrich and this shipment and the first time she had us for dinner, and Lucinda and Hank’s party and the Grintzers’ theater-supper.”

  “Let’s hurry and finish up now,” he said. “It’s nearly nine, and we’re both giving out.”

  Outside on the street they stopped for a last look at the outer face of the shop, and Letty said, “It’s prettiest at night.” Even to a casual passer-by the shop proclaimed itself different, an individual among shops, unwilling to be like a thousand other small shops in the city. Letty had never changed her decision to keep the big window uncluttered, and there was in it now only one oblong dinner table of flame mahogany, its rounded tapering legs ending in the claw-and-ball feet characteristic of Chippendale. The window itself was framed by a pair of draperies of the same red damask Letty had used at home, and these, gave an unexpected and personal warmth to the shining window. Instead of the usual store lighting, she had installed a crystal chandelier, hanging over the table on a long linked
metal chain, lighted, not by candles, but by tiny frosted bulbs shaped like candles and imported from Belgium. It remained alight every evening of the week until midnight, when a watchman for the neighborhood turned an outside switch on the back door. Separated from them by the smooth expanse of glass, it blazed with a hundred twinkling brilliances, casting reflections into the depth of the old mahogany below it, sending radiance out to the guide lines of red damask at its left and right.

  “I love it most of all at night,” Letty said.

  Garry pulled her hand through his arm and led her toward Fifth Avenue, past the grand shuttered solemnity of the Tiffany store on the corner. Had that begun as a small shop, he wondered, with the sparkle and dazzle of quick success? Or had it been a tedious halting growth, as most successes were? Even yet, it was hard to credit the reality of “Mrs. Garrett Paige, Antiques,” but any doubt was evanescent. Long before Christmas it was clear that Letty would have to employ people to help her, but thus far she had hired only a handyman, Josh Flick, who could not get a regular job because he limped rockily and “looked peculiar.” For a dollar a day, Josh kept the shop clean, the furniture dusted or waxed; he polished the great brass plate on the front door with its six-inch doorknob, washed the plate-glass window after every rain or snow, and packed and crated each item so skillfully that nothing was ever scratched or injured by the trucking wagon hired for deliveries.

  Letty agreed long ago that she needed a salesman or saleswoman to take over when she was away from the store on her endless searching through her ever-widening “sources,” which now included regular antique dealers as well as her old dealers in junk. But she had hired nobody, and apart from some temporary help for the holiday season, she had rarely even interviewed anyone who seemed “right.”

  “It has to be somebody who’s really lived with lovely things,” she explained to Garry once, when he urged her to widen her idea of “right.” “So she would feel in her bones why my things are lovely, and not just memorize what I said about them.” The process of interviewing was an ordeal that made her feel as if she were the suppliant, she the one being measured or on trial, and she was invariably glad when the moment came to say, “Thank you for coming in, and I’ll decide in a day or two.”

  The day or two was another of Cynthia’s contributions. “So you can check up on references. You’re not to risk being cooped up with anything that answers your Help Wanted ad.”

  “When are you going to advertise again, Letts?” Garry asked now, as they sank into chairs at the nearest Childs Restaurant. “Too many days like today would kill you off.”

  “I know. Do you remember Hank Stiles’ brother Peter?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “His private hobby is collecting antiques, mostly eighteenth-century.” She looked pensive. “He said Wall Street bored him.”

  Garry laughed. “He’s forty or so, isn’t he? Could a young chit like you be his boss?”

  “Why couldn’t I? I could have salespeople of fifty or even sixty. Most antique dealers do.”

  “Would any Stiles ever become a salesman in any shop?”

  “I suppose not.” Again she looked pensive, but in a moment her face brightened. “If I ever did find somebody like Peter,” she said, “he wouldn’t have to be a salesman. I could call him Assistant Manager.”

  “You clever girl,” he said. “I guess you could.”

  The decent time of mourning and legalities went by, and still there was no announcement about the reorganization of the paper.

  “Any news?” Alexandra asked every time Stefan Ivarin came back from New York.

  “None.”

  A dozen times in the past weeks she had promised not to ask the question any more; a dozen times he had promised that the moment there was news of Landau’s successor, he would let her know, even if it came in the middle of the night when she was bound to be asleep.

  The inclusiveness of this promise always set her mind at rest for a day or two, but then again she would greet him with that instinctive question. “Any news?”

  Landau’s death had made Alexandra weep, and these tears had touched Stefan to the point of pain. She was grieving, not only for an old companion of his last twenty years, but for the years themselves, gone now as Isaac was gone, irrecoverable as youth itself, as its limitless energies and hopes.

  She had gone to New York to the funeral, though neither of them believed in religious ceremonials for the dead, regarding them as leftovers from primitive rites, just as they felt about religious ceremonies at weddings. One was a sanctified orgy over sex and procreation, the other a sanctified orgy of self-laceration and agony in public.

  She herself had emerged so wrecked by the experience of Landau’s funeral, to which he had not gone, that she kept returning to it as a topic of discussion for days, and at last he had drawn back in some reflex of distaste. Was she weeping for Landau’s death, or in a self-pity of worry about her husband’s future at the paper?

  The moment the thought was born, it proved itself a giant, a Gargantua, not to be vanquished in a few casual bouts of reason. “The more you fret and worry about what will happen at the paper,” he finally burst out at Alexandra, “the harder it is for me not to.”

  By that time a month had gone by since Landau’s death. At the paper, the word “reorganization” had become virtually an oath. By the New Year, it could no longer be doubted that Miriam Landau and her four daughters and their four husbands and their several advisers, lawyers and relatives were in some inexplicable paralysis at reaching a solution of the problem death had presented to them. By then the acuteness of first anxiety throughout the staff had diluted down to a milder form, but there was an almost daily display of temperament or quarrelsomeness among the reporters or press crew or stenographers.

  Late one afternoon Jacob Steinberger, now Miriam Landau’s lawyer, came to the office to explain matters to the three remaining members of the policy group. Steinberger had been Isaac’s friend as well as his attorney for some twenty years, and he was chagrined at his inability to get Isaac’s family to agree. It was partly his doing, he told Ivarin and Fehler and Kesselbaum. He was not satisfied with the man finally selected by the four Landau daughters and their husbands, and he had persuaded Mrs. Landau to hold out for somebody else. With the mother’s veto of their candidate, all semblance of family solidarity had disappeared, and thus far had not been recaptured. In the circumstances, he could not predict when and where they could find the person they would all agree on. The makeshift techniques they had been following since November would have to continue.

  They did. The paper kept appearing day after day with no official owner at its head, with everything in abeyance, with a standing alibi for every grievance unanswered or denied. Once a week Mrs. Landau signed a check, countersigned by Steinberger, so that wages were paid on Friday mornings as they always had been. But promptness ended there. The old bookkeeper, Dov Moskowitz, held back all the weekly and monthly bills that used to go to Isaac Landau for approval and payment. With fine impartiality, old Dov kept them out of sight as long as possible, whether they were for a box of pencils or tons of newsprint, typewriter ribbons or inks for the presses, the Associated Press wire service, telephone and electricity or erasers and rubber bands.

  Only when the first bill was superseded by a Statement of Arrears, and then with incredible speed by an ominous “Final Warning” did he appear in Joseph Fehler’s office, slap the threatening notices and bills on his desk and demand, “So?”

  “I’ll see to it, at the policy meeting, Dov.”

  As always, Ivarin showed himself so bored by “these trivia” of invoices, bills, arrears, first, second and final warnings, that Fehler soon offered to take them straight to Mrs. Landau and her lawyer without bothering Ivarin at all.

  “A capital idea,” Stefan said, grateful that Fehler for once understood his basic emotions. Kesselbaum shook his head in disapproval, but Stefan said, “Don’t you agree, Abe? It’s a capital idea.”
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  Later that night, Abe came up from the press room to Ivarin’s office, frowning and uncertain. “Can I speak up about your decision?” he asked.

  “Speak up,” Ivarin said, but Abe hesitated. Stefan waited without impatience. Abe was a good boy, a good man, rather, with his birthday this month proclaiming him thirty-six and his dark hair so thin now that although he had no bald spot, the sheen of his scalp could be seen pinkly through the black sparseness, everywhere except around the base of his skull. His wife had had another baby recently, their fourth child, and their oldest boy was now fourteen, the age at which Abe had first begun to work in a press room. It was inevitable, Abe’s ferocity of determination that Freddy should stay in school and go on to the education he himself had never had. For Kesselbaum, Landau’s death had been a particular misfortune; he had been promised a long-awaited raise on December first, which had been automatically halted when Itzak died.

  “Your decision to not bother with the bills,” Abe said at last. “It makes me nervous. Fehler and Mrs. Landau going over them together each week—”

  Ivarin saw the effort it cost Abe to put his fear into words. “But would you have me tag along with Fehler each time, with his bills and invoices?”

  “Of course not,” the younger man said. “You are an editor. What have you to do with running to widows to get bills paid?”

  “Precisely nothing.”

  “But that is why I worry. He will get to know her so well.”

  “He knew Landau well for years.”

  “Much good it did him.” Abe suddenly grinned.

  Ivarin developed a philosophical detachment toward Borg’s elation over his survey. Borg had lost no time starting it, and during the darkest gloom and uncertainty for everybody else, he basked in the new sun of his private opportunity. He was collecting a mass of material in five large proof-books: one for funnies and cartoons, another for exposés and running series, another for scientific articles, another for women’s specials and one marked, “Human Interest.”