First Papers (44 page)

Was he looking forward to a week or two of solitude? Did something in him cry out for a rest from parenthood? A father at twenty, again at twenty-one—perhaps he secretly grieved for the larky young manhood he had never had, free as the air, the gay young blade chasing after this pretty girl for a while and then another, with no thought as yet of wife or children.

My poor Eli, Alexandra thought, rushing headlong into marriage and babies and worries over doctors’ bills. Eli was still seated at the table, staring down at it. Perhaps it was the down-turning of his face that made him look not like a boy of twenty-two but far older, thin, harried, with faint lines straining to show in his face.

So soon? She glanced down at the baby in her arms, sleeping now, her head heavy against Alexandra’s shoulder, and the tides of memory swept in to engulf her, carrying with them the very feel and smell of another nine-month-old baby she had held against her breast, the first of her own to reach that age, the first to fill her with joy and love.

If only she could reach out to him now, as she had done when he was a child. But children grown were not easy to reach.

“Eli …” she began.

“I have to check up on my bike,” he said, starting for the door. “An oil drip was starting.”

She made no move. In a moment, from the street in front of the house, came the metallic clink of tools, and she sat down, listening. She was alone, with her namesake in her arms. Stefan’s footsteps sounded above her, evenly spaced; Joan and Webby were silent; probably he had sobbed himself to sleep, with his mother sitting near him, alone too. Outside on the tennis court, a tightly fought game was in progress, with players and spectators for the moment silent, intense in their concentration on the white ball going back and forth, back and forth. Beyond them, coming toward the house, Fee and Trudy came into view, with Shag trotting sedately beside them.

They at least look at peace, Alexandra thought, and her harried nerves quieted. Gently she began to rock the sleeping baby in her arms, back and forth, back and forth. She glanced once or twice at the splintered glass on the floor and knew she should sweep it up. But there was, despite everything, a placid goodness about staying just as she was, and so she stayed just as she was.

E
N
G
ARDE,
S
TEFAN
I
VARIN
had said, as if it were chess. He thought it a fortunate phrase, vague enough to cover anything, including his obligation not to worry Alexandra needlessly, as well as his own inalienable right to keep things to himself when he saw fit.

If it were a chess game, there had been an imperceptible change in the overall position. It could not be explained to a beginner, but Ivarin saw it. The middle game is on, he thought. The opening lasted long enough, and it was too smooth, too sedate, to be arresting. Now it is another matter.

The change began with nothing more tangible than a feeling of hurry. Fehler no longer said there was no rush; he sounded rushed when you spoke to him, and he hastened from one appointment to the next. Nor did he take time to seek Ivarin out for his opinion or to pass along some information. When he suddenly resuscitated Borg’s survey, and widened the scope of it, he dealt only in vague talk about current trends in the press.

Big popular appeal, Ivarin thought. He means big popular trash. He means yellow journalism. This could be the end game, not the middle game.

Ivarin asked Borg for further elucidation, but Saul also took recourse in generalities.

“Anything that made a real hit, or that’s making a real hit.” With a young glint of mischief in his eye, Borg added, “This time, I’m remembering my promise not to talk too much.”

“Good for you.”

“You’ll admit I’ve stuck to it so far, Mr. Ivarin?”

“Keep it up.”

After which small exchange, Borg kept his mouth shut. He was adroit, Ivarin conceded, at pulling himself over to a new line of behavior when his superior officers indicated distaste with the old. A valuable trait for any young man. And confoundedly impudent, if too assiduously practiced.

A few days later Fehler asked Ivarin whether he could manage without Borg entirely for two weeks or fifteen days.

Ivarin said, “I could,” in an unwilling tone. “I did without him for years until Landau hired him. What’s up?”

Fehler would like the July meeting to steer entirely away from the money-minded topics of their first three meetings, and talk about the paper as a whole. The survey, if it were completed in time, might prove a point of departure.

“Even as a whipping boy, it would be useful,” Fehler said. “Parts of it we certainly will all attack.”

Ivarin looked at him skeptically. “Why include them?”

“To steer us toward things we can agree on.”

He expects me to lash out at it, Ivarin thought. He is counting on me to. As to releasing Borg for two weeks, he agreed with a show of good will he did not feel. In the old days, true enough, he had had no assistant at all. But the flow of news had doubled since the old days, trebled, quadrupled. The two weeks would be frantic.

The prospect rather appealed to him. He shoved his eyeshade back from his forehead and reflected, a little sheepishly, on his willingness to slave for untold hours over the paper. Some men drew strength and substance from music, from painting, from the competition of moneymaking, from prayer and faith. But he renewed himself from this fountain pen in his stained fingers and the endless pulsing rush of the news.

The pulse and beat and rhythm of life on this newspaper had so long ago become the timepiece of his universe, that he no longer wanted the more leisurely world outside, where more time could usually be had for the asking of it. Here, time was the driver, the commander; the first edition’s presses were the lords of the afternoon and evening hours; their sworn subjects were all the people in the building, from the foundry men and machinists and typesetters in the basement all the way up to the reporters, the rewrite men, himself.

He drew his silver watch from his vest pocket, opened it and propped it up on his desk, the triangle of space made by it and its hinged cover suddenly a wedge of time, five minutes of time.

So the next meeting was to concern itself with the “paper as a whole.” It should be illuminating. And more basic than the money topics that had thus far engaged them. Basic to the paper, basic to him.

Stefan Ivarin picked up his pen. It had gone dry and he gave it a sharp flick. Its tip went moist; the gold nib glistened through the blue-black fluid, winking up at him.

Alida Paige said to her husband, “She’s the most studious girl. Vacation just starting, and taking an armload of newspapers to her room every night, making notes on them!”

“Maybe she fell behind on current events and has to make it up,” Evan said. “Or maybe she’s going to be an editor like her father.”

“Not Franny,” Alida said. “She hasn’t the faintest idea of doing anything but fall in love and get married.”

“I like watching the boys walk her over here. Remember Garry at that age?”

“I wrote Alexandra about Tom,” Alida said. “Any mother of girls likes to hear about things like that. Standing out there in the street looking up at her lighted window.”

“Hoping the shade was up.”

It was the fifth night since Francesca Ivarin had been their “bedtime guest” and Alida had found the arrangement no trouble and unexpectedly interesting. She would have thought it rude to inquire into Fran’s strange pursuits with the newspapers she brought with her each twilight when she arrived at Channing Street, but she rather wished Fran would volunteer an explanation. All she had offered so far was a slight wave of her hand at her folded papers, and a vague, “It’s so thrilling.”

That had been on her first evening, and Alida had thought nothing of the papers at all. But soon it became obvious that they were an inseparable part of Fran’s evening existence, and she began to wish Fran would explain them. But after a polite half-hour of chatting, mostly about the glory of tennis when you didn’t have to go to the public courts in the park and wait and wait and wait, Fran would say good night and go upstairs to bed. Alida had put her in the guest room, originally Van’s room, next door to Garry’s, and despite Alexandra’s warnings of Fran’s untidy habits, Fran was keeping it as neat as a room in a convent, the bed tightly made each morning before she left, her nightgown hung up, everything dusted. Only the papers crammed into the wastebasket were a mess.

It was rather intriguing, and at last Alida sat down on Fran’s perfectly made bed one morning and fished the papers out to have a look.

How odd, she thought, Fran is making a study of war news from Europe. Fran had underlined certain headlines and subheads on the front pages, certain names and dates, and they all dealt with Germany or England or France. The Reichstag’s frightening new bill for big increases in the German Army, the newest defeat of Bulgaria by Rumania and Turkey, even the heated predictions that the House of Lords would vote down Irish Home Rule next week—all these Fran had marked with her pencil, circling key phrases and quotes as she went, as if she meant to copy them out or learn them by heart.

The misleading little creature, Alida thought. With that face and figure, a secret passion for this kind of thing! How perfectly extraordinary.

But never a solitary word about it. Was she shy about her own ideas, as so many children of forceful parents so often were?

It was a startling discovery. But it
was
odd that Fran left the papers behind, like Hansel and Gretel leaving their clues in the wood. Did she long to be found out? Might it perhaps be a kindness to draw her out?

“This awful hypocrisy,” Alida said gently the next morning, pointing to a headline in the
World.
“Holding an international peace conference right here in Washington, and now here’s General Pershing fighting the Moro in the Philippines. Again!”

“Really?” Fran sat down at the table looking distressed. She wanted to ask what the Moro was, or were, in the Philippines, but she did not, in case she ought to know. “It’s terrible,” she said. “Is it a big war?”

Mr. Paige arrived for breakfast and the talk shifted to his newest free-speech case. For a while Fran listened because it was a murder case, too. Two migrant farm workers who were witnesses to the murder were being held illegally in prison, and had been for 158 days in a row, without any lawyer and with bail set at something wild like $10,000, when neither one had a cent. This was in Rhode Island and Fran heard familiar phrases like “due process” and “illegal search and seizure,” and her attention wandered.

Being in the Paiges’ house, though, made even this kind of talk seem different. They ate in the kitchen, too, but there was a real tablecloth instead of tacked-down oilcloth, and fresh napkins for everybody each morning, without a napkin ring in sight. All the cups and saucers and dishes matched each other, and there was always a little silver bowl of nasturtiums or cosmos or whatever was in bloom in the garden. Never had she been in a house where they had a centerpiece of flowers always on the table, and it filled her with the shyness she hated most, the kind she always felt when anybody new saw her own house for the first time.

“—address up in Canada?” Evan Paige asked his wife, and Fran’s heart dropped.

“Letty’s mother would forward it, dear,” Mrs. Paige said. “She’ll know if they decided on the new Laurentian place or the one they went to last year.”

Fran nearly gasped out her sudden terror. Canada? Letty’s mother? Were they off for Garry’s summer vacation, and would they be gone during the entire fifteen nights she was sleeping at the Paiges’ house?

Yes they will, something told her heavily. They went to Canada last year over the Fourth of July. She had forgotten that. Probably Garry’s vacation always came over the Fourth of July. He was a million miles away and would be for the whole time she was there.

“Are you all right, Franny?” Alida asked.

“Me?”

“You haven’t touched your food, dear.”

“I’m fine, honestly. I just can’t eat, I don’t know why not, but if you won’t be mad at me?”

“Of course I won’t.” She looked closely at Fran, hoping she wasn’t catching cold. “Perhaps you’re playing too much tennis in this suffocating heat, Franny.”

“I’m all right, honestly I am.” She sipped from her glass of milk and then stood up. “I’ll only play doubles today, no singles.”

Alida watched her run down Channing Street a few minutes later. If something had upset Fran, it doubtless would never be understood by any adult alive. Girls almost seventeen, though she had never had daughters, were very much like boys almost seventeen: indecipherable most of the time.

It was two or three days before Alida again admitted her lack of skill at deciphering. Then as she glanced into Fran’s tidy room one morning, it struck her that the marked-up mess of newspapers was not there. She paused and stared at the empty wastebasket. It had been empty yesterday and the day before, she realized. Perhaps ever since she had told the child about General Pershing and the Moro in the Philippines.

Alexandra Ivarin felt like a traitor to her own flesh and blood. For the past ten days, only one member of her family had been with her on her beloved beach and she didn’t miss a soul.

Fira and she—plus, of course, Shag—were in sole possession of the tent, and it was remarkable how much she was enjoying it. How calm the place was, without the girls’ talk or bickering, how easy and quick to cook only for two, and most astonishing of all, how rarely she missed her darling Franny. Not to speak of Stiva and Eli and Joan. It was almost shameful.

She did think of Webby from time to time, because an idea kept nibbling away at her mind that could apply only to him—that is, if they had not all left already to join Eli in New Hampshire. Baby Sandra was too young to be able to live in a tent, with its limited facilities, but Webby? With him there would be no bottles to boil, no diapers to wash, no warm bath to give every day; he would eat like a little horse and paddle in the sea and play in the sand from morning to night.