First Papers (50 page)

“‘Sells the paper,’” she prompted. “How much more?”

“Fehler says a thousand copies more a day.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“It was his big news at the September meeting. Mrs. Landau almost jumped up and down on her chair, like Webby.”

“I can’t stand her.”

“Fehler also announced something else,” he said. “He hired a man to be the first Picture Editor and General Art Director, one of Hearst’s young geniuses, who’s Jewish so there’s no language problem. He’ll be Abe’s boss.”

She stared at him, shocked. “Poor Abe, it’s a public slap in the face.”

“After being top man so long, yes.”

“Can he do anything?” she said. “Will he quit?”

“He has four children.”

“It’s a crime,” she said. “What things can happen under capitalism.”

“This is a socialist paper,” he said drily.

“But Fehler is an anarchist, no matter how he cringes and lies about it now to save his skin.”

Here it was again, the unending wonder of her logical progressions. This time it didn’t amuse him. He wished he had kept quiet about that thousand a day.

“I asked Otto and Louise for dinner Saturday,” Garry said. “Is that all right?”

“Saturday?” Letty asked. “This coming Saturday?”

“Have we something for Saturday?” he asked. “It’s Otto’s birthday.”

“The Harretts are coming, and the Grintzers, and Peter. I asked them two weeks ago, don’t you remember?”

He looked disgusted with himself. “Of course I remember.” He glanced at their dining table; more than six was crowded, and they were already seven. “Well, I’ll tell Otto they can come afterwards.”

“Afterwards?” She hesitated. “You mean some other night, after Saturday?”

“No, I meant after dinner.”

“Oh,” Letty said.

Garry almost said, “I can un-invite them,” but an unwillingness kept him back. “What’s wrong with asking them to drop in after dinner for coffee and some drinks? I thought you liked Otto and Louise.”

“I do, only—” She was opening a large box delivered by an expensive dress shop that afternoon, and as she peeled away layers of white tissue paper from the top to reveal a glistening green satin, she said, “Isn’t that heavenly, that color! I loved it the minute I saw it.”

He admired the new dress and predicted she would look beautiful in it. Then he said, “About the Ohrmanns. We haven’t had them here since spring.”

“I know,” she said. “But I was just wondering how they’d get along with everybody.” She waited for an answer and then said, “Otto and Louise are so different, that’s all.”

“Does that mean,” he asked carefully, “not well-off and fashionable?”

“Why in the world would I care about anything like that?”

“I can’t imagine. Just the way you said it.”

“You
are
imagining,” she said.

Again he thought of the unseen social yardstick. Since the summer it kept poking at his thoughts at unexpected times. The table and its limits—was that now being measured by it, too? He was willing to make the usual concessions to the social graces, but beyond a point they didn’t count enough. “I could stall Otto off until after dinner, nine-thirty or ten,” he finally said.

“Wouldn’t it be better asking them for Sunday,
for
dinner? It’s awful inviting people, but saying ‘you eat by yourself first.’”

“What’s all this fiddling around?” he demanded. “You don’t want them here with the others. Why not come right out and say so?” “Otto is a—a radical,” she said, flinging it into the room between them. “Most nice people just can’t stand—” She turned away, saying something he couldn’t catch about “free speech and all the rest,” and left the room.

A radical. A single word to damn all dissenters, from the lunatics hurling bombs to the most moderate of socialists like his father. She would exempt the family from such a labeling; it would be too embarrassing: My father-in-law a radical! My husband a radical!

He stared down at the dress box and with a wrench of the string of memory remembered their trip to Canada. Were they going to keep on hitting rough spots whenever their path crossed the path of the Stileses and the Aldriches, the Harretts and the Grintzers?

From the other room, Letty called to him, and a moment later she appeared in the bedroom door. “I’m sorry, darling,” she said.

He nodded and she withdrew once more. Soon he grew calmer and went into their room. She was lying down, facing the tall windows. The last afternoon light was yellowing the October-dry garden, and a shaft of light struck warmly across his eyes.

“Come on, Letty,” he said. “I didn’t ask Otto on purpose, but since I did.” He made a complete statement of it, and she sat up, ready for compromise.

“I shouldn’t have called him that,” she conceded. “But take people like Jerry and Kay—apart from being friends, they’re awfully important in business. Jerry is Olive Harrett’s pride and joy, and he tells her absolutely everything, and I may get a second shipment on consignment from her any minute.”

“They’re not such boobs, though, that they’ll fall apart at Otto’s ideas. Or at mine. We’ll have a fine time, dance and be merry. You’ll see.”

On Saturday, they were done with coffee before the Ohrmanns came, and Otto accepted everybody’s congratulations and a special bottle of Rhine wine from Garry. Louise told a story about their youngest child, who had bought him a penny’s-worth of licorice shoestrings as a gift, and burst into tears when he ate one. Then both Ohrmanns withdrew into a shell of shyness that Garry had never seen, built, he thought, on Otto’s self-consciousness, among these strangers, about his still-heavy accent, and Louise’s uneasy lack of small talk. He waited for it to pass, but after another round of chatter by the others on books and plays, he saw that their shyness was worse. It was impossible to let them sit and flounder.

“What’s new from home?” he said, and was rewarded by Otto’s look.

“It’s been a three-day orgy there,” he said, and explained to the others, “I have a brother still in Germany. With I. G. Farben, you know them?”

“They’re in steel, aren’t they?” Jerry Harrett asked.

“That’s Krupp,” Peter Stiles answered for Otto. “They make machinery for heavy industry, heavy arms. The Farben people are mainly drugs and dyes and chemicals, isn’t that right?”

Otto said it was, and Letty looked impressed at Peter’s ready knowledge. “Otto’s brother is a top salesman at Farben,” Garry said, and then asked Otto, “What kind of three-day orgy?” though they had already talked it all out over their sandwich lunches at the lab. A fever of military self-love had seized the country, a public frenzy of boasting about German might and German power, all in the guise of a national celebration of the victory over Napoleon at Leipzig a hundred years ago, and the invasion of France that followed.

“‘We did it once, we can do it again,’” Otto said. “That’s what they’re all shouting. Bismarck foams up at them in every stein of beer.”

“Good old Bismarck,” Garry said, raising his glass as if in a toast. “Likewise, good old France.” It was heavy-handed and the knowledge irked him.

“There won’t be war between them,” Bob Grintzer said positively. “Another Balkan mess, maybe, and let them stew in it.”

“It might be a bigger stew next time,” Otto said. “As big as all Europe.”

“They’re busy fixing up for it,” said Garry.

Peter looked at Otto and then at Garry. “Socialists,” he said too casually, “are always against war, aren’t they? Automatically against it? Justifiable war or not?”

“Not all socialists,” Garry said quickly, “but I sure am.”

Peter shrugged and the others said nothing, but their heightened attention excited Garry. This was the way it should be in a man’s house.

“Is that glass empty, Jerry?” Letty asked brightly. “Gare, would you fix people’s drinks, darling?”

He refilled glasses, but he thought, This is what counts, what really counts. He was oddly elated, and he urged Otto on. There was already a “war prosperity” in many pockets of industry, Otto said; shortages of raw materials were now so acute that every factory from Krupp and Farben down was aswim with overdue and undeliverable orders. The hunt for raw materials went far beyond the borders of Germany, and everyone in the field knew that England was buying up the waste products of spinning mills in Egypt and Indian cotton waste called “linters” for making cellulose and the new explosives and expellants.

“And over here,” Garry added, “everyone in the field knows how many of our own Krupps and Farbens are getting ready right now.” Ironically he went on, “Business is business, and it doesn’t say ‘Thou Shalt Not Do Business.’”

“That gets my goat,” Jerry Harrett suddenly said, but his wife Kay said, “I’m sick of all this business talk. Let’s put on that new record and dance.”

“‘The International Rag,’” Letty said, jumping up. “It’s too cute for words.”

Peter Stiles jumped up also, with a quick glance at Letty, a look of understanding, even of sympathy. Garry saw it and it enraged him, a tacit assurance to his wife that he, Peter, knew what she had to put up with. The music started, people moved about, laughter and snatches of talk filled the room, and Garry found himself repeating, Just the same, this is what really counts. He had no time to decide what “This” was, which counted, but he knew he would recognize it when he could think the evening through.

He sat on with Otto and Louise, apart from the others now, as if they three had floated off on an unseen current, and before too long the Ohrmanns said good-bye and left. Then he asked Betty Grintzer to dance, and later Kay, and when he said “May I dance with my own wife?” she looked happy.

But the moment they “were alone in their bedroom, she glanced at the clock on the dresser and said, “Not even twelve.”

“They had a lovely time, Letty. And we did have two hours of dancing too, didn’t we?”

“It was awful. They mixed like oil and water and I hated every minute of it.

“You hated me,” he said, and remembered the way Peter Stiles had looked at her.

She flung herself into the process of undressing, not answering, not giving any sign she had heard his three words, not denying them. As the silence extended, he gave up and undressed also.

She went to the bathroom and the small familiar sounds of tooth-powder and toothbrush, of the heavy cold cream jar, the rapid brushing of hair, all came to him but brought him no warmth of intimacy or love. He got into bed and his eyes kept closing. He was not acting; his lids were weary and his heart worn. When she came in and said “Good night,” his own “Good night” was muffled and far away. A loneliness and sadness had come to him when he had first insisted on inviting Otto, and though he had had his way, it had been no happy victory. And yet, he had come to where he had to be. Tonight talking with Otto, talking of things that might make for life or death of God knew how many people in God knew how short a time, he had known a terrible rightness that was almost like being happy.

This is what counts, he had thought repeatedly. This, the truth of life, the fear and reality of it, the blind spinning folly of the powerful, and the meekness of the rest. To see it and to think about what a man has to do, that is what matters.

The rest is vanity. One fools with it and accepts it on a summer day or a snowy evening when the orchestra plays, and nobody is the worse for it. But ultimately one has to set it aside again, a lovely tune, a scarlet ribbon, a glass of wine.

S
TEFAN
I
VARIN WAS LATE.
The trolley from Barnett had trembled to a stop about three miles short of Cypress Hills, where one changed for the train.

After some minutes of waiting for repairs, passengers began to leave, despite the raw weather outside, but Stefan stifled his disgust and concentrated on the work he had brought with him.

Conjectural work, rather, since he was undecided whether to accept the offer of a small publisher, to translate into Yiddish a little-known Russian novel,
What Is To Be Done?,
from which he often quoted in lectures. He had never translated an entire book and the idea appealed to him as a new hobby. Nobody had translated Tchernyshevsky’s work for Jewish readers, and though his fee would be nominal and future royalties problematical, he was tempted by the idea of a prolonged piece of work. It would take over a year, since he would do it in spare time, and there would be a continuity about it that, in these days of surprise and change, might well be soothing. “All out,” the motorman cried, and Stefan called, “No hope?” The power failure had now affected the entire line, the motorman explained. Everybody could get his nickel back. Stefan frowned and asked how far he’d have to walk.

“Around sixty blocks, mister. Maybe you’ll hitch a ride.”

The blustery November twilight gave little promise of good samaritans in wagons or automobiles. It was only half past four but it was already nearly dark, and as Ivarin stepped down to the gutter, his mood darkened too. For no reason, he stood beside the trolley, watching the other passengers come out; then he abandoned the car’s oblong helplessness and set forth, squinting as the roughening wind nipped at his ears and eyes, turning up the velvet collar of his black overcoat and wishing he had listened to Alexandra about rubbers and gloves. After ten blocks, he paused briefly to rest and thought, Fifty more, best not to count them. The wind began to come at him in uneven sweeps and gusts, and he bent into it, aware of his back grudging the extra effort and strain.

Strain nearly always gave him a backache now, both kinds of strain, physical or mental. He could feel his muscles tighten up if his temper tightened, feel them grow shorter as they pulled together and closed in on themselves, not precisely in knots, but in their entirety, like wool socks shrunk with too-frequent washing, not yet worn through in holes at toe or heel, but tight in their fibers.

He stopped once, to telephone the office, and then trudged on. By now the wind had gained further force, and he wondered what the precise point was at which the weather bureau began to use the term “gale.” It was the first bitter weather of the fall. By the time he reached Cypress Hills and sat down in the train, he was shaken with cold and physical weariness and when at last he reached the warmth of his own office, he actually thought of stretching out on the floor for ten minutes to rest.