First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  But she only did it that one time. It made her go icky afterwards, and she hated Trudy for making it happen. She never mentioned, drunk Mr. Loheim any more, but if anybody made fun of Trudy’s thick ankles, she felt glad.

  She took a vow not to risk having John Miller hear gossip about her being smarter than any girl in the freshman class, and the surest way was to stop being it. She didn’t do her homework half the time; she didn’t study her German vocab the way she used to, and she couldn’t write some of the new words out on the blackboard when Dr. Wohl called on her. A couple of times he struck his forehead with his palm and said, “Fraulein Fira, was ist los?”

  She still got B and B-plus in everything, but no A’s, and John stopped calling her too smart for a girl, and it was lovely. Once he called her “Skinny,” though, and she almost came right out and begged him not to tease her about being too thin and flat.

  “That’s what you think,” she said instead, and some sort of miracle must have been wrapped up in the words.

  “What does that mean?” John asked, blushing down to his collar.

  He looked straight at her chest and automatically she caved herself in, as if she had started to have a shape and wanted to hide it from him. He took both her shoulders, trying to force her to un-cave, but she wriggled free and hunched herself up again, thanking her lucky stars for her heavy winter coat and laughing at him. The beet-juicy color of his face and neck, and the way he kept glancing sideways at her as they walked up the hill, and the way his books kept touching her books as if books could have a crush on each other—it was the most thrilling heavenly moment of her life.

  When she got home and had to go in, she hid just inside the window of her mother’s sewing room, so she could watch him walk up to Charming before he had to turn. She wanted to tell Anne about it, and Fran, but telling it to anybody would be like tearing a wonderful book in two and giving half of it away.

  “Then resign,” Alexandra cried. “If life is one long misery because of it, what good is it to stay there?”

  “‘Resign and leave it all to him?’” he said, mimicking her voice of a week ago. “‘Let Fehler lord it over those poor devils who can’t fight back’—you seem to have changed remarkably since you begged me to stick it out.”

  “But nobody dreamed how it would be. Now I’d rather starve—”

  “For God’s sake stop bawling.” He banged his fist on the table, once, twice, a third time. Alexandra ran out of the room, and still he banged the table. He knew Fira and Francesca were near enough to hear, but he could not stop. He had been in this hellish depression since the night Fehler had carved out half his territory and handed it over to Borg, since the night he had forced himself not to resign.

  Now she was nagging at him as if she alone had principles. Day after day he felt hammered at, enraged that he should have no shelter from the incessant attack upon his nerves. At the office his blood was whipped to a froth; at home his nerves were twanged and plucked until he felt himself at the edge of breakdown.

  “I’d rather starve.” It was a recurrent refrain, like a line in a ragtime song. Whenever he forced himself to smash through his black prison and talk to her, she said it—but wept buckets of her damnable tears if he talked not at all. “You’d rather starve,” he answered once, “but what about the children?”

  “Let them starve too,” she cried.

  “Do you know how long our savings would last?”

  “I’d rather scrub floors in City Hall than have you stay at a paper you despise.”

  He could not tolerate her moralizing. He left the house earlier each day; that act lengthened the hours he spent at the office. No knout had ever had this backlash.

  By the end of Borg’s first week, at least six front-page stories offended Ivarin. The worst was one he would have given no more than a stick or two on an inside page; it appeared as a four-column screamer with two large pictures.

  CIRCUS FATMAN ASSAULTS GIRL OF 12

  The man weighed over three hundred pounds; the very notion of this creature in the act of sex—

  I will vomit, Ivarin thought. Up until now it’s been only the look of the paper that they have raped. Now it’s the essence.

  No, the essence is still the editorial page.

  “Borg,” he said abruptly, flinging open the door to Borg’s new office, and flinging the wet proof on his desk, “this lechery doesn’t go in.”

  “But Mr. Ivarin—”

  “You are responsible to me. It is part of my responsibility not to permit this trash.” His finger flicked across the headline with such vigor, the flimsy paper tore.

  Borg again started to speak. Instead he picked up a black crayon, held it poised in the air and then printed at the side of the proof.

  CIRCUS FATMAN

  CHARGED

  WITH ASSAULT

  “Would this be better?” Borg asked. His tone was not as conciliatory as his action.

  “At least the nastiness is delayed,” Ivarin said, and left as abruptly as he had entered.

  By the end of the week, the circulation jump was two thousand a day.

  The second week of Borg’s new glory brought new clashes, and the third week imitated it. At the end of his first month as City Editor, Ivarin sent a note to him, with a copy to Fehler.

  “Borg—you may think yourself responsible to me as per the bulletin board, but from now on I am not responsible for you. Henceforth, you are to check all news stories with Mr. Fehler.”

  He’s been doing it all along, Ivarin thought in a sweep of clarity. Had Fehler come right out and told him to? “Never mind Ivarin’s objections, this is what we want. He’ll get over it sooner or later.”

  They’ve left me my one page, but they pour their filth on every other. They keep their paws off what I say, but I am standing on a platform of dung to speak from. In the end, what kind of audience will gather around a platform of dung?

  By mid-December the daily jump was at four thousand, and by the close of the year, it was close to five thousand. In the nineties, Ivarin thought as the whistles and horns of New Year’s Eve died down below his office window, when Hearst hired Brisbane away from the World, the Journal shot from forty thousand a day to quarter of a million in a few months—is Fehler dreaming of grandiose achievements like that?

  He reached into his inside pocket and drew out the little oblong wafer that was his savings book at the Barnett Bank and Trust. He had taken to carrying it around with him; he was never sure when the mood would strike him to recalculate their general financial situation. Once it had been in the subway coming home, and he fumed because he hadn’t the book at hand. Not that he didn’t know precisely the fourteen hundred and sixty dollars recorded there, but it had long been ritualistic to open up the little bankbook whenever he had to plan for future expenses or change the family budget. Not too bad a sum, over and above the amount they had saved for buying their piece of ground and building their own house. The first entry in the bankbook was 1902, when they had moved away from New York to make Barnett their home for life.

  For life? If he could no longer earn his living as an editor? He could get lectures, he could give private lessons again, he could write articles for other papers and magazines, in Yiddish, in Russian, in English. Through Evan Paige and the Free Speech League his work was now known to twenty socialist papers in the nation, and if he told Evan that it had become a question of writing articles for those out-of-town dailies and weeklies to augment what he could earn in New York, then Evan would turn himself inside out to arrange it.

  Exactly $1460. Allowing for coal and gas and light, for the three interest payments after this one in January, they could still draw out fifteen to twenty dollars a week for food for over a year. They need not starve, not for a year, not through all of 1914, even if disaster struck him down so he could not earn a penny for those twelve months. In fact, one of these days, merely as a precautionary measure, he might line up a private lesson or two in English to foreigners, just
as an experiment in regaining his touch.

  It had been twenty-five years since he had given lessons. But he had earned extra money as a teacher when he was a young man, and he could earn extra money as a teacher again, now that he was getting old.

  The moment came sullenly, as everything at the paper did now. Some days later, Fehler asked him into his office; they were alone there, and Fehler said, “I do not expect you to be too happy with this.”

  Ivarin thought, I knew it would come. It’s almost a relief.

  “But the facts,” Fehler went on, “force us to experiment with the one page we thought should be left as is.”

  “The editorial page,” Ivarin stated, as if in warning. Fehler did not acknowledge the three words; he aligned several pencils at the edge of his desk blotter, and placed his telephone carefully back on a round felt pad tailored to fit its base.

  “The editorial page,” Ivarin repeated, “may be experimented with only in type face, arrangement, appearance. Not in any other way. You follow me?”

  Fehler looked up. “There is such a trend to short lively editorials, in short lively jabs of phrases. Like Arthur Brisbane.”

  “I am unlike Mr. Brisbane.”

  “No sane man,” Fehler said, “would ask you to change your style. We only wanted to ask—” He lowered his gaze to his table. “—That is, Mrs. Landau and her lawyer and I, we would like to ask you, as a matter of providing the space, to write only two editorials a week for the time being. At the same salary, it goes without saying.”

  “It goes without saying that I refuse.”

  He spoke without heat. For a moment the two men gazed at each other and then Ivarin started for the door. Behind him Fehler said urgently, “Don’t decide yet. This needs discussion. It is too serious.”

  “It is a farce. I am through.”

  He walked out slowly. In his own office was the smudged proof of an editorial he had just written denouncing the rising call for compulsory military service in the United States. Automatically, he began to read it through, uncapping his pen at the same time. After one sentence he stopped, dropped the galley on his desk, rolled up his eye-shade and eased it into his pocket. He opened the drawers of his desk rapidly, but took nothing from them. Then he walked over to the coat rack in the corner and lifted down his things, stomping into his overshoes but carrying his coat and hat. He clicked off the light switch at the doorjamb and his office went dark. He felt the darkness as if something had hit him. It was not yet seven o’clock.

  He did not wait for the elevator to achieve its deliberate climb from the press rooms in the basement, but started slowly down the stairs. On the main floor, he paused briefly at the bulletin board, staring at it absently while he put on his hat and buttoned up his coat. There was nothing new there.

  Then he walked swiftly out of the building.

  TWENTY—FIVE

  “I HAVE SOMETHING TO tell you,” Alexandra said the next morning when Fran and Fee were done with breakfast. “It isn’t very happy.”

  Fran said, “What isn’t?” but Fee asked quickly, “Is it about Papa?”

  “It’s about all of us,” Alexandra said. “We must all stick together now, no matter how hard it may be.”

  “Whatever happened to him, I don’t wonder,” Fran said resentfully. “He’s been in a bad mood for a hundred years.”

  “You’re heartless,” Alexandra cried out. “You never did try to understand him or think that he suffers too when he’s in a mood. And now that this terrible thing happened—”

  She bowed her head and closed her eyes. Fee looked at her grey curly hair parted in the middle, pulled down tight into the two braids Mama always went to bed with; this time the part was jagged and uneven, as if her hand shook when she drew the comb down the middle of her scalp.

  “Did you have a fight with Papa?” she whispered.

  “Oh no, darling, no.” Alexandra raised her head and said, “In fact last night was the first night in I don’t know how long when we agreed about everything, because at last he did something we both think is right.”

  “Did he have a fight with Fehler?” Fran asked.

  “This time there was no fight,” Alexandra said proudly. “Fehler suggested one final indignity and Papa said no and resigned.”

  “Is he out of work?” Fee asked.

  “When did it happen?” Fran added.

  “Yesterday. There was one more change Fehler suggested, but by now Papa knows that each time he gives in, something new develops a few weeks later. Last night was the end. He left for good.”

  “Can he be an editor of anything else?” Fran asked.

  Alexandra did not seem to hear it. “If you both knew,” she said, “what torment Papa has been through, for months now, trying to decide. But at last he knew he could not face himself another day, so he did it.”

  “Are we going to be poor?” Fee asked.

  “Oh, my poor child, of course not. Papa will get lectures, and he’ll teach again, and write for all kinds of magazines and papers. You’ll see. And of course, I’ll get a few more lessons too.”

  “Gee,” Fran said. “No wonder he’s been in a mood.”

  “At last,” Alexandra said sternly. “At last you are able to think that maybe he has a reason, and isn’t simply a bad father. He always has a reason. I’ve told you a thousand times, it’s like a killing disease that swoops into him—can a man’s children hate him, because he has a terrible sickness?”

  “Do editors ever go on a bread line?” Fee asked in a small voice.

  “Never, darling,” Alexandra said, getting up from her chair and going over to Fee. “A brilliant man like Papa, a famous man, why he’ll have more lectures than he can fit into a schedule. The A. F. of L. keeps begging him to give some lectures, ever since the Lawrence strike, they’ve said a hundred times he’s the most effective lecturer they ever found. And they will pay him ten dollars for an hour’s talk, even for a shorter one. And the Socialist Party will too.”

  “If he gave only one a night,” Fran said hopefully.

  “Lectures aren’t like that, one a night on a regular calendar, like clockwork. But when a strike is looming, or when they want to organize a new union, like all the times Papa went to Scranton and Wilkes-Barre or out to Milwaukee, why then, he’ll have more lectures than you can imagine.”

  “That’s good,” Fee said, expelling a large breath. “Gosh, having your father out of work.”

  At first Stefan went to New York every night. To stay at home would quickly demoralize him, he said; it was better to follow his ingrained routine of walking down the hill, taking the trolley and then the train, reaching the city and spending the first half of the night there.

  By the end of the first week, he had lined up two pupils, at the now generally accepted higher rate of fifty cents an hour, and two paid lectures, one to be given before the month was out, the second in February. He had discussed an article in English with the Call on the growing viciousness of the fuel and iron workers’ long strike in Colorado; there had already been shootings and deaths and he would write his reasons for saying it was headed for historic proportions and historic bloodletting. The Call could not pay more than a few dollars, but they were “eager to see a piece by Stefan Ivarin.”

  It was hopeful, he told Alexandra. He even had “headquarters” in New York for giving his lessons or for any appointment that might come up. Abe Kesselbaum had instantly offered the parlor of his tenement flat on Essex Street for as many evenings as Ivarin would honor him by using it.

  “The news about you flew from one man to the next,” Abe said the first time they met after Ivarin had left. “Like when Landau died. Everybody is uneasy, scared of his job again, asking what’s next. They think Borg is too stuck on himself, and Fehler, you know what they think of Fehler.”

  “Who’s writing the editorials? Bunzig’s style is easy to spot, so I know he’s done some of them, and I think Kinchevsky has filled in on several. Has there been any decision y
et about a new editor?”

  “Not that anybody knows of.” Fehler was interviewing men almost daily, without apparent success thus far. Abe sounded despondent; he was getting along well enough with his new boss; he had schooled himself in masking his real feelings, but with Ivarin off the paper, he knew that his own chance for regaining a higher status had gone forever.

  “Life changes,” Ivarin comforted him, more out of desire to comfort than out of conviction. “Even on newspapers, it sometimes changes for the better. You are still young, Abe.”

  Still young, Ivarin thought, lucky the man who wears the description. He himself was no longer able to. And yet? A burst of young energy had erupted in him; there was an excitement he had not expected in telephoning people in the newspaper world or the labor movement, and saying, more or less abruptly according to impulse, “This is Ivarin, I’ve just quit the Jewish News, and I would like to talk to you.”

  Not yet old, he thought. That’s the phrase for me. “Still young” would be whistling in the dark, but not yet old is quite the thing. Apart from the flare-up of his lumbago, which had remained high and fairly constant since his enforced three-mile walk against stiff winds a month ago—only a month?—he actually felt in better shape than he had since the sweltering day last summer when the first “little test period” began.

  In better shape emotionally, too. To be active was always a cure for him, to start a new project, begin a new series, even line up appointments and lectures and lessons. The despair that was born in that July meeting half a year back, had vanished like a puff of oily smoke. Occasionally an ache for the office seized his heart, irrational and inconsolable, like the longing for the dead, but time would ease that, he knew. He wrote his article on the Colorado strike with ease and authority, and sent it off, thinking, They’ll surely take it. The thought unexpectedly jarred him. To hang on another editor’s decision about a piece he had written? To write “on speculation”?

  I’m boggling over phrases, he thought, feeling disgraced at being a free-lance writer, as if all writers were not exactly that.