First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  The heavenly place, they both knew, was the Stileses’ cottage on Mt. Desert, but the weekend was the one just beginning. Letty promptly called Lucinda, and explained.

  “I knew you’d be in Rockland or Augusta or some place near,” Cindy said, “but I couldn’t remember when. Can’t you start a day later for Canada, and stop over with us for Monday?” Their weekend guests would be gone, but Hank’s brother was staying on, and so was her sister Connie. “You let me talk to Garry,” Cindy ended.

  It took little persuasion. They loved the iced waters of Maine and the islands and bays and coves washed by them, and their one-day stay with the Stileses stretched to three. The cottage was really a cottage, and not one of the vast estates along the shores of Bar Harbor that often went by the same name in the stylish snobbery of understatement. It had been built twenty-five years before by their parents, when Peter was fifteen and Hank a toddler. Now they owned it jointly, and they took turns at it summer by summer. This summer was Hank and Cindy’s turn, though with Peter still a bachelor, and a Wall Streeter as well, all summers now tended to be their turn.

  Cindy and Connie welcomed Garry and Letty as if they were the first attractive people to appear for years. It was a trait of all the Aldriches, Garry realized, absent only during business hours at the Aldrich Chemical Plant, where the relationship of employee and owner was always clear, except on those rare occasions when Mr. Aldrich appeared in the laboratory. There, where Garry had again been promoted and was now second-in-command of research in synthetics, they met more casually, as men of unrelated but essential abilities who were both doing rather well.

  Garry and Letty had celebrated his promotion by buying a new $500 Ford runabout for their trip, and she had chipped in from her own profits, so they both had a sense of high occasion over it. This vacation was also the first time she could leave the shop in charge of somebody else, a Mrs. Everrett (“two r’s and two t’s”) a saleswoman with “social and antique references both.” That was a milestone too.

  Now, looking out at the choppy Maine sea, Letty thought, I’m so lucky. Everything she had longed for was hers, really, Garry, and her own success, and through it getting to know people like these, born to a life that was amusing and endlessly charming. It had been lucky, having Mrs. Aldrich take her under her wing, but luck was only the start of anything you wanted. Then it was a decision you could make, about caring enough for people to remain close for a good long time. She did care enough.

  “Want a swim before lunch?” Hank asked. They were down at the edge of the water, all of them except Hank and Cindy’s baby, and they were in bathing suits, sitting around, talking and joking. Whatever anybody said seemed funny, and they laughed easily and often, like children.

  “Let’s go out in the boat first,” Peter Stiles said, “that wind’s going to turn into a blow.” The boat had belonged to their parents too; it was a thirty-foot sloop, old and slim and beautiful; its mainsail was patched in three triangles that seemed blind-white against the weatherbeaten grey-white of the rest of the canvas. Peter sailed it as if he were showing off its skills to restore its own awareness of eternal youth, and Letty thought, He doesn’t have to memorize what somebody else tells him about it being a good little ship.

  “Why the funny smile, Letty?”

  “Was I smiling?” She looked up and flushed. It was Peter, and she realized she had been gazing at him as if he were an actor on a stage, staring straight up at him as if she had paid for a seat, and with it the right to watch his every gesture. “I didn’t know I was.”

  “It’s not a crime. Smile some more.”

  Letty did, but looked past him out at the sea. Her face and throat were reddening, and it bothered her to know it. As she watched the edges of the waves blow white, she thought he said something more to her, faintly mocking or teasing, but she did not look up again. Garry’s back was to her. She was glad, and immediately flustered that she should be glad.

  The three-day visit sped by; the long lazy hours of vacation one read about were lies, for these were short busy ones, flying by like balloons in bright colors. And then, on the last evening of their visit, at the table in the airy dining room facing away from the sea, the balloons burst. It started casually, with Peter saying something about a Congressman Underwood and what his tariff act could do to Wall Street.

  “President Wilson running around making personal pleas for it,” he said with the first annoyance he had shown about anything, “wanting tariffs knocked down all over the place.”

  “I gather you’re not a Wilson man,” Garry said.

  “Good Lord!” Peter said. “I voted for Taft.”

  “Don’t sound so righteous,” Hank said sharply.

  “Hank, please,” Cindy said, elongating the “please” so it was a moan. “No speeches for Teddy Roosevelt. That’s over and done with.”

  “No speeches,” Hank agreed, still looking at his brother. “But if Garry did vote for Wilson, I fail to see why he should be given the ‘Good Lord, no’ treatment.”

  Peter said, “I didn’t give him anything of the sort, and Garry knows it.”

  An instant of pause followed and then Garry said, “I didn’t vote for Wilson. I voted for Debs.”

  “You what?” Hank said.

  “Didn’t vote for Wilson,” Garry answered. “I voted for Eugene V. Debs.”

  As Garry repeated it, Letty blushed and glanced quickly from one to the other. Cindy was asking for the salt, Hank was suggesting second helpings, and Peter was refilling his wine glass from the old English carafe at his right hand. She looked down at her plate, praying they would all get talking about something else, searching for a way to start them, all words stoppered up inside. How could Garry, up here? How could he possibly, with this crowd?

  “I wish Proff Yates were here,” Constance said brightly. “Ron did vote for Wilson, and another instructor he knows in the history department at Yale did vote for Debs. So there!”

  Garry laughed. “Thanks, Connie. I knew Gene Debs polled more than my one vote.”

  They all laughed at the way he stressed my one vote and the subject shifted. And when the time came next day for their final good-byes, Letty decided it hadn’t made a whit of difference. Or was it simply their flawless good manners?

  “The latchstring’s out for next summer,” Hank said.

  “Lovely,” Letty said.

  “Next summer, the latchstring is mine,” Peter said to his brother. Then to Garry and Letty, he said, “And you two couldn’t be more welcome, so is it a date?”

  “It sure is, Peter,” Garry said, “and thanks.”

  But when they were alone in their car again, Garry suddenly said, “You wouldn’t have me stay discreetly mum, would you, Letty?”

  “About what?” she asked.

  “About the way I vote, or what I think, or anything.”

  “Why, Gare, of course I wouldn’t.”

  The unseen social yardstick, Garry thought. I’ll be damned if we’re going to measure our lives by it.

  It was the end of their first week in the cabin they had rented in the Laurentians, and he had been off hunting most of the day, with a paid guide and one of the other vacationers. He had enjoyed male companionship, liked the rough muscular fatigue, and come back at sunset ready for food and sleep.

  “Let’s not stay any longer,” Letty greeted him. “It’s so pokey.”

  He had been expecting it; they had got as far as mentioning it. The truth was that Canada was not being much of a success; they blamed themselves for coming back to the same place as last year, instead of trying a new one. The sense of discovery added spice to a vacation, they agreed; they would remember that for future summers. Here, it soon grew plain, they were finding it quiet and uneventful and stodgy, as if they were placid and middle-aged already. At first they joked about it being a letdown from Mt. Desert, with the large cottage and the sloop and private beach, with the constant companionship of Hank and Peter, Cindy and Connie. But they soon foun
d it better not to pursue the joke.

  “It is a letdown,” Garry said now. “Let’s not run away from the fact, if that’s what’s eating us.”

  “I just feel sort of stuffy here, that’s all.” This wasn’t the time to get serious, she thought, he still was annoyed about that last dinner at the cottage, about her looking embarrassed. Not that he had said so, but the way he had clammed up on it told her enough.

  “Then let’s leave,” he said briskly. “Any ideas?”

  “Oh, Gare,” she said. “You sound angry.”

  “I’m hungry and worn out—I’ve been on my legs since dawn. That’s all.”

  “You’ve been angry since that night at the Stileses’.”

  “I didn’t enjoy the way you acted, no.”

  “I just couldn’t see—” she began. He was busy unlacing his high hunting boots and looking down at them; she could never make him understand when he wouldn’t look at her. “They’re the best friends we’ve found,” she started again, “and I couldn’t see the point—”

  “Of my shocking them with Debs.” He yanked off his boots and faced her. “My best friends are never going to be people I’ve got to be careful with on what I think.”

  “Mine aren’t either.”

  “We’re agreed then. Fine.”

  It wasn’t fine, he thought, and again saw the glaze of her awkwardness at the table. It had caught him short, and it kept coming back to disturb him. He had enjoyed the dances and parties of this past year as much as she had, but a sudden doubt had been growing since Mt. Desert. With the Aldrich girls and their world of Society, did you have to be a little cagey about keeping in good standing? If you did, then the hell with it.

  They went to the main lodge for supper and he picked up yesterday’s papers, just in from New York, glancing at the headlines as they went into the dining room. At the table he found himself talking about the endless stream of visits and consultations between the Chiefs of the General Staffs of the British and French and Russian armies; she looked at him in astonishment.

  “I don’t know how long it’s been since you even mentioned the war scare,” she said.

  “I said I wasn’t going to harp on the news any more, so I quit. It’s worked pretty well, hasn’t it?”

  “But I thought you were changing about it.”

  “Well, I wasn’t.”

  The waitress came and they fell silent. Then Letty said, “About the shop, Garry. Wasn’t that real either?”

  “Of course it was. But it’s your doing it that I’m proud of, not who your customers are.” She sounded so desolate that he suddenly softened. “Let’s eat and then look at some maps. We’ll pick us a new place and be out of here at daybreak.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE HEAT TOOK ON its weight of wetness, took it unto itself as fiber absorbs moisture, grew heavy and sullen with it, and the city sweltered.

  In the city’s parks, sleepers appeared each night, stray figures walking about tentatively, then lying down on the grass, to remain until dawn. Or whole families would come, like picnickers, a mother and father with two or three children, the parents sometimes carrying a basket with a baby’s bottles and something to eat themselves, should the fiery wakefulness of the tenement pursue them to the night secrecy of the park.

  Along the city’s piers and wharves, too, the sleepers lay each night, sometimes propped against fences and poles, sometimes lying prone along the safe edges of warehouse or dock or factory, away from the clomping hooves of truck horses and the tires of a new delivery auto.

  The heat wave had lasted for days and the city’s stone never cooled completely, even during the interludes of darkness. On the Lower East Side, as Stefan Ivarin walked slowly day after day to his office from the Delancey Street station, not one window was closed above the level of the fixed glass panes in the stores, not one bedroom window but was raised as far as the sash would go. Each fire escape and stoop was crowded, and later at night, when factory and machine were stilled, the tenement roofs sprang to life with voices and shouts and sometimes the songs and laughter of the young, managing gayety and flirtation and hope in the paltry ugliness about them.

  It was during the twelfth day of such heat, late on a stupefying afternoon, that the July meeting took place in the office that was still often called “Landau’s office.” Fehler’s large square table, the one change he had made on taking possession, seated them all easily, though Borg was present along with his exhibits. The five newspaper-size portfolios were ranged against one wall, but at the start nobody seemed aware of them. For the preceding days, they had been circulated among the seven members of the policy group, to allow time for examination; Ivarin had made his own estimate clear to Borg in private, surprised at how insulated Borg seemed against any criticism.

  “Just so you are warned in advance, Saul.”

  “You have been fairer than fair, Mr. Ivarin.”

  Now Fehler was explaining that today’s discussion of popular successes in other newspapers was not necessarily a prelude to change for the Jewish News.

  “Let us say,” he ended, “that these exhibits of current practices in the English-language press have one main goal: further edification for some of us in the modern and changing newspaper world of today.”

  Stefan Ivarin said, “Further edification is always welcome.”

  Fehler asked Borg for a resume of the methods he had followed, and with surprising authority and lack of nervousness, Saul rapidly outlined his work. He started with his attempts to trace the shift in funnies from their original once-a-week version to today’s six-a-week pattern, and went on to his study of humor columns, from the earliest right up to the new one in the Sun by a young man who signed himself Don Marquis. He talked of the special material for women readers and went on to his “Pinkerton” tactics, sleuthing for jumps in newsstand sales after some new expose or feature appeared. It wasn’t too hard, getting actual figures; the papers involved were only too ready to brag about success.

  Of Borg’s seven listeners, only Miriam Landau and Jacob Steinberger were untroubled by the comfortable air of the meeting thus far. Bunzig and Kinchevsky spoke occasionally in undertones; Fehler wondered about Ivarin’s apparent disengagement; Abe Kesselbaum concentrated on a pad before him, drawing circles and interlocking triangles, not looking up from the tip of his pencil, waiting for the editor to speak out, and Stefan kept checking his emotions and behavior, like a hypochondriac taking his pulse. Still all right. Still regular.

  “Borg has done a big job,” Ivarin said easily when Borg ended, “the very job Mr. Fehler assigned him to do. If we may start with the humor columns, I agree in toto, but whenever I thought I had found a humorist for us, he turned in mere babble.”

  Fehler thought, Is he going to tell us he thought of it first? He said, “Do you know anybody we might approach now?”

  Still easily, Ivarin said, “‘Anybody’ won’t do. It should be a man with a flair. I’ll of course keep on the lookout.”

  “You never told me,” Fehler said too heartily, “that you have been considering something for pure entertainment.”

  Ivarin turned his calm, pale face toward him. “An oversight,” he said. “Or perhaps my old habit of thinking we both do best when we don’t cross over the line between editorial and business. As for the funnies, you will have to do the searching without me. With funnies I would not trust myself for flair.”

  Fehler said to Mrs. Landau and Steinberger, “There are syndicates that sell them. Some funnies can be bought on a contract, and translated. We could look into it.”

  They both looked surprised. “Mutt and Jeff talking Yiddish,” Ivarin said solemnly, not knowing whether this applied to well-known funnies or not. “I dare say it’s feasible. But Jiggs? The Hall-room Boys? Happy Hooligan? Krazy Kat?”

  Abe Kesselbaum burst into raucous laughter, and the others turned toward him. So far Abe had said almost nothing. Now his shouted laughter was an assault on the quiet room. Stefan Ivarin thou
ght, It’s pure relief, like the grave diggers in Shakespeare, but Joseph Fehler, staring past Abe, kept his astonished eyes on Ivarin. Jiggs? he thought. Krazy Kat and Happy Hooligan? A man who never reads the funnies?

  The meeting went forward. A few more exchanges maintained a fairly amiable air, and then Ivarin said, “Matters like these will give us no trouble, but—”

  He had not raised his voice, but the others paused as if he had asked for complete attention. Mrs. Landau leaned forward, and at her side her lawyer instinctively knew they had come to a key point, as if the preliminaries in a trial had been dispensed with and the case was about to begin.

  Joseph Fehler heard Ivarin’s “but” and thought, Here it starts, now it comes. Ivarin will show himself to Miriam as he did to Isaac all those years, the idealistic editor with purity of motive. More success, more profit? Only the base and vulgar could want that.

  “But there is more involved,” Ivarin said, “than funnies and a Don Marquis. I do not edit funnies; their galleys never need reach my desk. The Don Marquis? I’d edit that, but it would be a gifted writer, presumably, and one does little editing with gifted writers.”

  He went to the side of the room and brought two of Borg’s portfolios back to the table with him. Stacked together, their weight was considerable, and he grimaced as his back felt the pull of them. The others watched him; no one spoke.

  The constraint, Ivarin thought, is because Miriam and Steinberger are here. Company manners, instead of our rough meetings with Landau. We think, Miriam is new at this, why upset her? And we are impressed, perhaps intimidated, by Steinberger. The one rich man among us. His voice never rises and so we are muted; he does not commit himself and so we are unwilling to fight anything out.

  “But beyond funnies and humor columns,” he said, “there, the trouble starts.” He opened one of the portfolios, standing, pointing down at it as he turned pages. “This stuff for the lovelorn, the heartsick? Never. Not if Dorothy Dix and Winifred Black and Beatrice Fairfax melted into one and gave their outpourings to us free. Never in any paper I am the editor of.”