First Papers (47 page)

Ivarin’s derision was too marked. Fehler clapped both portfolios shut and sat down. Miriam Landau put two fingers tightly across her lips as if to keep them from trembling, and Jacob Steinberger gazed at him uncomfortably.

Ivarin knew he had gone too far and it faintly pleased him. What’s wrong with popularizing a science story? Fehler should ask Hearst and Brisbane and Pulitzer his hypocrite question, and get the answer he wanted. Since the nineties, their little wars for circulation gave all of them the proper answers to their eternal what’s wrong with doing this, doing that, doing the other, to boost their precious totals of copies sold.

“Nothing is ‘wrong with popularizing,’” Ivarin said to Fehler. He was still on his feet, and his voice took on the iron ring of the lecturer. “Popularize anything on earth—science, art, politics, even an idea! But trash like this, by reporters who carry out the boss’s orders, who interview dope fiends, lunatics, White Slavers, get pictures of executions, lynchings, rapes, murders? That’s what your naked whore with the mad dog always leads to, and always in the holy name of circulation.”

“Bravo,” Abe Kesselbaum whispered.

It was like a blast of sound. The room tingled with it, and nobody spoke. But Jacob Steinberger had lost his uncomfortable look; he watched Ivarin minutely, attending to every syllable, seeing every play of expression on his reddened face.

“Mr. Ivarin,” Borg said urgently, “science stories like these were all I found in the papers I was clipping.”

“He knew we would tone them down, change them,” Fehler said.

“That’s a farce,” Ivarin said angrily. “You can’t compete against trash with modified trash. Either you print it or you spit on it.”

He sat down. Again he was faintly pleased. Miriam and Steinberger, he thought, know that this quarrel is not over these portfolios but over the meaning of the
Jewish News
today, yesterday, tomorrow. There is no puzzle about what’s fit to print and what not fit to print, to quote the one paper Borg ignored. True, the
Times
sells two hundred thousand copies while the
World
sells seven hundred thousand and Hearst’s damnable sheets are well over the million mark. But there’s next year and the year after and then another, and who’s to know which paper is on the way down and which on the way up?

Fehler had turned to the others, discussing what was in the other portfolios, but Ivarin scarcely listened. His high energy of a few minutes before seeped away and he was suddenly tired. He let them talk on.

“Mr. Ivarin, would you?”

It was Miriam Landau, and Stefan came to with a start. Sunk in his own feeling, thinking in his own terms, he had seen a moment he had never before seen, even in his darkest times. It was a moment that might never come to pass, but in the flashing of time from one thought to its following thought, he had seen himself walking out of the room, walking out of the building, walking out of the paper for good.

“Would I? I beg your pardon, I missed it,” he said to her almost formally.

“Would you give in a little, as a favor?” she asked. “A
little,
for the test period?”

“The test period?” Had anybody mentioned a test period?

“A most informal one,” Steinberger answered, his manner instructing Miriam Landau to let her attorney take over. “I have suggested to Mr. Fehler that he merely test out some physical changes, changes in format, type, a wider use of pictures. These are areas that would not disturb you, Mr. Ivarin. True?”

“They are outside my domain,” Ivarin answered. He turned to Kesselbaum. “Abe, you’re boss of format and layout, how do you feel about this proposition?” But Abe only shook his head and said, “We’ll have to see.” Was he thinking of his four children, of the raise he had been promised for last December that had not yet come through?

“That’s right, Abe,” Fehler said. “We’ll have to see. We may never change by one iota, but we’ll make a start and see.” He could not suppress the exultant note, and his smile was broader than the day the notice went up five months before. There was no need for a vote since an experiment was not binding.

Ivarin took his leave while the meeting was breaking up. A big name, he thought as he walked slowly to his office. Ivarin is a big name. Nothing must disturb him or his work.

That night Stefan Ivarin left the city the moment he could, without his customary stop at the café. During the evening it had rained, and the heat had become fetid. He thought ahead to the first breath of country air awaiting at home in Barnett, hot, too, but clean and quiet. How long it had been since the decision to move away from New York had struck him as a personal sacrifice of everything he valued. On a night like this, the thought of the house on the hill, his house, set back from the street behind its three young maples which had shed their supporting wires long since—it was surcease and haven. Even the train ride was worth enduring.

For the first time this summer he missed Alexandra. Shag, too; it would be nice to have the great oaf leap to life at the sound of his approach and come hurtling along the street toward him. Fran and Fira were not to be compared to Shag as companions; at this stage of their lives, they took everything, absorbed everything, and offered nothing. He remembered the Lawrence strike and Fee’s “if we win,” and thought, Most of the time, nothing. Maybe later, when they are grown, they will be companions to whom I can talk about things like this.

They are going to change the paper.

Not just the way it looks. The
paper.

First, big type, bursting headlines, huge pictures. Then later, the explosion into trash.

That is what he was bursting to say. That was why he missed Alexandra. They will make it over, he would tell her, you will see. Not tomorrow, not next week, but soon.

This is his arena; here’s where he will try to tear me apart.

We’ll make a start and see, Fehler had said; we may never change by one iota. A test period. For a little while. But corruption had no time limit. And it never went back. Imperceptibly, the experiment became the mold of the future, beyond fluidity or shifting, became the hardened mold into which the hot metal of tomorrow would be poured.

Ivarin rose in the lurching train and took off his jacket. He loosened his necktie and opened his cuff links so that his shirt sleeves hung free of his wrists. It was hotter than ever. The forward rush of the train under the river and into the humid earth caused a blowing of air, but it was like the blast of some chemical gas, noxious and sickening.

He did feel a little sick. After the meeting, he had had three private talks, all brief, all but the last unwelcome. First had come Borg, to explain again that he was merely carrying out orders, and Ivarin had cut him off without ado. “Your boss praised you. What more do you hope for?” Then Miriam Landau had fluttered in, to beg him to believe that it was not she, but her four daughters who were so insistent that the paper try a few ways to make more money. “I am not so young,” she had said, “and when I go, the paper will be theirs, so it’s only natural they should look ahead.”

He had agreed that it was natural and escorted her to the door. Only with Abe Kesselbaum had he let his feelings show. “There have been storms before,” he had ended, and Abe had replied, “But then we had Isaac, not her.” They had each gladly escaped to their work.

Now there was no escape. The emptying train was taking other night workers home to rest and sleep, but he would not sleep too soon.

Steinberger might restrain Fehler in the fight ahead. He was a man of the world, a man of taste. And he had been faithful to Isaac and Isaac’s paper for twenty years.

He had restrained Fehler already, in the meeting, in public, and he had done it with ease.
Merely some physical changes, areas that would not disturb you, Mr. Ivarin.
But he was counsel to Miriam Landau; he was in her service and on her side. Whatever his private tastes, that whispered “Bravo” had come from Abe, not from him.

For perhaps the eighth day in a row, Alexandra came back from the postman with nothing but the rolled-up copy of the
Jewish News
in its tight skin of wrapping paper. Disconsolately she went to the low shelves under the angle of hot canvas, and set it down unopened with several similar rolls. She usually saved the paper to read at night, but she had fallen behind and wanted to catch up in the proper sequence.

“Not even a postcard,” she said. “I tell you something’s the matter with Papa.”

“He’s all right, Mama,” Fee assured her. “He’s just busy.”

“He’ll write soon,” Francesca added.

Alexandra thought, Much they care, but she kept this dark decision to herself. They knew nothing of life, for all their maturity and wisdom in things at their own level. For the first time in their four summers at the beach, Fee had become friends with a boy, and though the experience had not brought forth any feminine wiles, it did give her a new poise when she was treated to Franny’s superiorities about crushes and romance.

The boy was a whole year younger, however, and this Fee took to be an insuperable chasm between them. His name was David Herzog and his father was a baker. David was starting high school right after Labor Day just as Fee was, despite being only twelve, and was going to go to college and study engineering.

“He knows all about electricity,” Fee said the day she brought him to the tent for the first time. “Engines and dynamos and everything.”

“Do you, David? That’s lovely,” Alexandra said. “Would you like some lemonade?”

“O-o-oh, he’d love it,” Fee cried and flung herself onto the nearest cot, scooping both her legs up in her arms so her knees touched her chin.

“Get up, Fee, your bathing suit’s still wet,” Alexandra said, glad she had a legitimate reason for correcting this tomboy performance.

Fee jumped up, in a fit of shrill laughter that set David off into paroxysms with her. In the galley-like section at the rear of the tent, Alexandra busied herself with hacking slivers of ice off the block in the zinc-lined oak box that never held enough to last through the night. Behind her, their laughter raced on like a river, widened and narrowed between banks of words, first from Fee, then from David, though more frequently from Fee.

The realization troubled Alexandra. Fira must be told, somehow, not to out-talk a boy, not quite so obviously at any rate. David seemed a willing victim, even egging Fee on with his frequent sounds of approval, which came out sounding like “yare, yare,” with the r’s left out. Idly, Alexandra wondered how she could go about suggesting to David’s mother that elocution lessons could be as important to a bright young boy as engineering lessons, and that parents owed children an education in the native speech of their native land, as surely as they owed them an education in general. David was a native-born American, but he spoke in the accent of the Jewish East Side, where he lived fifty weeks of the year, and where all his friends and classmates spoke in the same intonations and inflections. His teachers, from kindergarten onward, had doubtless decided it was hopeless to try to change the way these ghetto children talked English, and whatever attempt they did make probably was limited to “the elocution period” instead of extending through the entire school day, school week, school year.

Poor David. His voice had not yet deepened, and to an eavesdropper who did not see him, he might have been another girl in the tent with Fee. Now, the two of them sounded like a pair of birds twittering and cajoling each other, rilling and trilling away as merrily as on the first day of spring.

“Here’s your lemonade,” Alexandra said as she went back to them, “and here’s some jelly sandwiches. The cookies are all gone.”

“What’s that funny bread?” David asked, after one great gulp at his lemonade. “It isn’t pumpernickel, isn’t rye—” He picked up a sandwich but seemed unwilling to try it.

“It’s delicious whole wheat,” Alexandra began. “Refined white flour, David, even though your own Papa bakes with it—”

“I’ll tell him, Mama,” Fee said hurriedly. “Ow, my nose hurts, I drank the lemonade so fast, it froze.”

She set her glass down and clapped both hands over the bridge of her nose, going off into squeals of sound, mixed of simulated pain and silliness.

David imitated her, and then with his hands still cupped over his face, he alternately raised and lowered the fingers of his right hand while he began a whooping sound, rising and falling.

“You’re an Indian chief,” Fee cried, joining her war cries to his. On the floor, Shag began a howl of protest, abandoned it, and lay inert, one ear twitching, eyes aggrieved.

It’s enough to pierce an eardrum, Alexandra thought, backing out of the tent. David’s shrieks fell away into high hysterics, but Fee kept on whooping and pounding her feet on the wood flooring of the tent. Bedlam, Alexandra thought. They’re still babies, without an idea of what’s ahead.

Fee would discover soon enough that she ought not out-talk a boy, but how would David discover English diphthongs and vowels and consonants in their native shapes and sounds?

She wondered if Evan and Alida happened to know any expert speech teacher in New York who might be persuaded to start a small class next fall for David and a few of his classmates, charging no more than a nickel or dime a child, since higher fees would kill off the idea before it could be tried.

The idea appealed to her and in the next few days, as Fee and David became inseparable, she began to feel it incumbent on her to do something to help him. The perfect speech teacher, that was the first step. On impulse she wrote Alida, to enlist her help in finding one. Not all parents could move to a small town for the sake of their children’s speech and mannerisms, but not all who stayed put could be happy about it. David’s mother, still young, would surely be only too pleased if some such community teaching could be arranged. David’s little brother also talked the way David did, and in due time their baby sister, still in diapers, would start singsonging too.

Alida’s quick reply lifted her heart. It was so kind, so willing. She was inquiring among all their friends, and had already asked Garry and Letty to canvass all theirs as well. The moment there was news, she would send it, special delivery; it was a lovely idea and she wanted to be of use for it in any way she could.