First Papers (27 page)

All of a sudden it seemed so funny to be spanked by a
father,
that they got the giggles. The harder he spanked them, the louder they giggled, and if they looked at each other, it started them all over again.

He gave up at last, talking Russian to himself, and he took the doll away by force, carrying it with him to his own room, slamming his door. The idea of the doll in there with him set them off worse than before, and they laughed until their stomachs hurt.

The next day Papa said, “From now on, it is
my
doll. You can play with it any time you like, every day, if you like. But if you start fighting over it, I will take it away in one minute flat. Do you follow me?”

After that, Fran and she always called it “Papa’s doll,” and it became a family joke that Mama told everybody. What Fee liked best of all was one part she didn’t remember herself, but had heard so many times, she almost
did
remember it.

“It’s my father’s doll,” she had once explained to a visitor. “I think he plays with it at night when we’re asleep.”

Even now, rigid on the edge of her bed waiting to see what would happen when he got upstairs, that part made her smile. He came up heavily and stopped, and her heart stopped too. But then he went straight to his room. She waited another moment to be sure he wasn’t coming back, and then ran down to the kitchen.

Joan had stopped crying but Eli was saying the wildest things about “never coming to this damn house again,” and about Papa’s sarcasm and inhuman logic and being a big fake about children having the right to live their own lives.

Mama said “Stop it, Eli,” but she didn’t seem to be thinking about Eli.

“We scared you, poor child,” she said when she saw Fee, but she didn’t seem to be thinking about Fee either.

“We’d better start home,” Joan said.

“Don’t stay upset,” Alexandra said. “You know how he is.”

“She sure does,” Eli said. “And I know too. God!”

They left, and Alexandra came back from the door looking vaguely around as if she were searching for something. Fee was putting away the rest of the dishes, but instead of praising her for being a good girl, Alexandra hardly saw what she was doing.

Fee glanced at her once or twice, but Alexandra did not notice that either. Then she said, “Oh my goodness! I knew something was making me furious at him.”

“At Eli?”

“At Papa. I knew it all the time. But I couldn’t separate it from everything else. I listened, I agreed with every word he said to Eli, and yet, under agreeing with him, there was something burning in me about him.”

She pulled her lower lip in with her teeth and then let it go and then pulled it back in. Fee said, “Don’t do that, Mama,” and Alexandra said sharply, “Stop ordering me about!”

Fee didn’t take it as a scolding. Her mother probably didn’t know she had said it. She was still puzzling out whatever it was Papa had done to her.

“When Eli said ‘inhuman logic,’ something sounded familiar,” Alexandra continued. “But I couldn’t
think
then, not until a minute ago. ‘Inhuman logic’—why, those were the very words I used to Papa, that night Eli told me he’d changed his name.”

Fee wished her mother wouldn’t talk about that horrible time. It was so long ago and so frightening—

“That night,” Alexandra said, “I waited and waited for Papa to come home, with my heart breaking for the way he would feel at the news that his only boy—”

Her voice thickened, and Fee begged, “Don’t, Mama.”

“But Papa didn’t feel that way,” Alexandra went on. “With his inhuman logic, he made me look like an idiot. And
now,
half a year later, after I finally got over Eli’s action by myself, now he shows he was just as heartbroken as I was.” Her eyes filled and she added, “It was unspeakable of him that night to be so noble. Posing as a philosopher and sage, married to a simpleton and booby.”

Fee shook her head in total disapproval of her father, still not sure what had been so unspeakable in his long-ago behavior. Her mother looked at her with new misery.

“‘Euphonious,’ he called their new name. ‘Well, it’s euphonious enough’—oh, Firuschka, he can be so hurtful, he can really torment the soul.”

Her tears now spilled over and she wiped them harshly away with the checked kitchen towel. Her shoulders shook, and her round stomach shook, and Fee couldn’t think of anything except how awful it was to be fat and old and floppy instead of young.

She hated thinking it now, but she couldn’t help it. She looked away from her weeping mother, wishing she could go up to her room where she needn’t see her. Did Papa sometimes think she was disgusting too? Did they love each other any more, Papa and Mama? Was
that
what really was the hurtful thing, tormenting the soul?

Maybe Papa did have a crush on Mrs. Paige and Mama knew it, and knew that Mrs. Paige had one right back.

Fee suddenly remembered how it felt when Fran told her about it, how her heart exploded in a terrible new kind of pain, and later went all shiny with joy when she saw for herself that they didn’t look the way people with crushes always did look.

But now, standing off watching while her mother cried so—“he can really torment the soul”—now the explosion happened again and then the icy skin encasing her and she wondered if old people were different when they fell in love, different and hiding and secret so you couldn’t tell just by looking at them. If she and Fran had been able to keep Eli’s secret from that night on the beach, maybe Papa and Mrs. Paige had a secret
they
had to keep.

“Oh, Mama,” she cried out, rushing to her mother, “I love you so.”

Joan transferred Webby from their neighbor’s bed to his own, adoring his sleepy gibberish, and then made two cups of steaming malted milk for herself and Eli. In a winter like this the motorcycle ride home from Barnett was all anybody could bear.

“This will warm us up,” she said. “I hope it won’t give you a heartburn.”

“Only the powder does that,” he said. “And if I didn’t have to make a pig of myself when I open the jar—”

He sounded like a child confessing an orgy of cookies and jam, but it was more serious than that. He did make a pig of himself; whenever he felt like a snack, he went straight to the huge jar of the powdered malted milk, as big as the ones you saw in soda fountains, and ate spoonful after spoonful of it, just as it was. She had tried it a couple of times, but she didn’t like the grainy dry feel of the powder, nor the way it stuck to her teeth and caked on her palate. Eli did; he couldn’t remember how far back he had formed his taste for it, but it never left him. If he overdid it, he knew he’d pay the price with an upset stomach, a heartburn, often the first steps toward an attack of asthma. And he overdid it at least once a month.

But now Joan smiled in absolution at his confession. She was glad he was getting over his fury at his father. What an evening! What a family! Whenever she thought she had learned not to let them shake her to her smallest nerves, they could fly into some new crisis that jangled a hundred tinier nerves she never knew she had. Tonight she had felt like one huge scream from the moment it began until Eli kicked over the motor on the Harley for the trip home. In the rush of freezing wind, talk was impossible and she wished it could stay impossible forever.

Everything at supper had been so smooth until the very end. They’d all laughed over her new stories of Webby’s doings, and both the Ivarins were happy and dear that she was to have another baby in August.

“If it’s a girl,” she started to tell them, but Eli interrupted.

“Since Web was named for Joan’s father,” he said happily, “we’re going to call this one Stefan if it’s a boy, and Alexandra if it’s a girl.”

“Stefan?” Father Ivarin asked instantly. “Why not change it to Steve?”

In one swoop the nightmare was on them.

Joan stole a look at Eli now, but he was finishing his drink, stretching and yawning. “If it
is
a girl,” he said, “we won’t be up against it in August.”

All she answered was, “It’s five months off. Let’s not think about it.”

“The damn old crank, nothing will satisfy him. Remember when you said my being the only son is why he picks me up no matter what I do? You wait till the girls get bigger.”

“Boys often clash with their fathers more than girls do,” she said. “That’s all I meant.”

“But you just wait,” he said. “Let’s say if Fran decides next year, she isn’t going to Training School and be a teacher, if she sees how great it is to earn what I earn. Or, wait till Fee is sixteen. Fee’s a spunky kid with ideas of her own. She can get mad, too—and she won’t always knuckle down to him.”

“She’s awfully stubborn sometimes.”

“You stick around, Joanie,” he said. “There’ll be fireworks just like the ones I had to stand for.”

He coughed slightly. Illogically Joan said, “I wish I hadn’t cried so tonight. I was a disgrace.”

“I could kill him when he’s that way, the God-damn tyrant. The Great Ivarin, the Champion of the Suffering, the Noble Fighter for a Better World. Sure Mike—in public. But at home, why, he’s the biggest czar of them all. If you agree with him, good. If you don’t, by God, if you argue against him or act the way
you
think is right instead of the way he does, by God, down comes the knout on
your
back.”

“Oh, Eli, don’t get worked up again.”

“His
knout is words. And rages. And then the hell of living with his bad moods.”

Fee woke up with the decision made. It would be only fair to prepare Damsie and Josie. They had lived there for two whole weeks, but they hadn’t ever seen Papa in a mood, and they might be frightened. She didn’t know how to explain, but she
had
to. Perhaps, she said, as they dressed, her mother might seem nervous or sad, and might even stay that way for a day or two, but it would pass, and it wasn’t anything they need be upset about. Her father might be grumpy and slam doors and things, but that needn’t be scary either.

“Why?” Josie asked.

“Well, last night they had a big argument—”

“Did he hit her?” Damsie interrupted eagerly.

“Hit my
mother?”
Fee cried.

“My Pa hits my Ma like that, that, that, that, when they get in a fight.” Each “that” was Damsie’s clenched fist hitting herself vigorously on the jaw, on her ear, on her mouth, under her chin so her teeth clacked together.

“He hits me,” Josie said calmly.

“Ma hits us most,” Damsie said. She pulled down her black stocking halfway to her shoe. “Look.” She pointed to a scar circling the lower curve of her kneecap, which Fee had once asked about without getting any reply. “My Ma hit me so hard that time, I fell against the big black pail of coal, and the shovel slit me open and all the blood and everything—”

“You poor little thing,” Fee cried. An unusual stir went through her, a strange sense of safety and sureness about her own life compared to Damsie’s, no matter whether Papa was in a horrible mood or not.

When they came in that afternoon, he was not in a mood at all. At the front door, they could hear Mama laughing in the kitchen, and he was talking about something in the papers, and laughing too.

Fee stopped in the doorway, listening. Brief resentment rose in her, as her father’s voice went on so merrily, and her mother’s short little laughs, like commas, broke in at spaced-out moments. They really were the craziest parents anybody could imagine. You never could count on them, even when you explained them first.

A
FEW DAYS LATER,
Fee tapped on her father’s door. For the first time in her life, she was seeking him out in the privacy of his study to ask him a question about capital and labor.

She offered him a newspaper she had brought with her, pointing to an article about Lawrence on an inside page, and standing close to him while he glanced at it.

“Is it true they demand a twenty-five-per-cent raise, Papa?” she asked, her eyes somber, her tone worried. “And would it really wreck all New England?”

Stefan was taken aback. He looked at her above the paper, not knowing what made the small familiar face newly appealing. For a moment he was conscious of how his desk must appear to anyone but himself, with its usual storm of clippings, letters, papers, pages laden with the beautiful hieroglyphics of mathematics, and the hateful flock of household bills, that swooped in upon him like vultures in the first days of each new month.

“Are you too busy now?” she asked at last.

“No, no, I was thinking.” He was careful not to show that what he thought amused him: Her two children have turned her into a student of economics.

He put out his cigarette as he read the article, remembering it at once; it was in one of the papers he had brought home last night. Reading its black warning in the subway at two A.M., he had found a sour amusement in its devotion to the percentage mark.

RAISES UP TO 25% DEMANDED

THREE MILLS OFFER
5%

LEADERS DEMAND 15% AND UP

DICKERINGS PROCEED ON
71/2%

TO COST OWNERS $5,000,000 YEARLY “—THREAT TO ALLNEW ENGLAND INDUSTRY”

“Is it true,” Fee repeated, “about the twenty-five per cent?”

“It sounds like a bonanza,” he said, nodding judiciously to her. “A big fat jump, all right.”

He was being sarcastic, she knew, but she had been so sure he would denounce all of it as another big lie directed against the strikers that she was vaguely disappointed.

“This bonanza,” he went on, starting to make another cigarette though his last one still sent up a curling thread of smoke, “this would be twenty-five per cent, at the highest. BUT—” At his loud BUT, he picked up his chunky inkwell of black coal. It was empty; he never filled it, but it was as much a part of his workroom as his chess pieces and books; he used it as a paperweight or else as something blocky to throw from hand to hand while he was thinking out a problem.

“But twenty-five per cent of
what?”
he asked. “The paper didn’t tell you that, did it?”

“No.”

“Twenty-five per cent of nine cents an hour!” He glared at the offending headlines. “Nine cents an hour—do you hear?”