First Papers (56 page)

“Of course, Mrs. Ivarin, of course.”

Poor thing, Alexandra thought, he couldn’t very well say anything else, but I can’t help that right now.

It worked as smoothly with Stefan’s other pupil. She set about shifting Anna Godleberg’s lesson to New York, and those of other pupils, fitting them in before or after these of Stefan’s. Switching them around like marbles, she thought, it’s a crime. Then she started to rearrange her Monday and Thursday morning trips to Sonya, and felt her first trepidation, for her little lectures to Sonya had taken on a special importance, forcing her to read up on all sorts of authorities besides Madame Montessori. She bought a child’s copybook and began to keep notes. It was as if she, too, were taking lessons, a postgraduate course of her own, and to jeopardize her agreement with Sonya would be a loss of more than money.

But Sonya proved as flexible as the others; perhaps a time of sickness and trouble brought out the kindness in people. One evening Sonya asked if her husband might listen, and Vladinsky sat, mute and absorbed. Alexandra regarded him as a special feather in her cap.

Why? she scolded herself. If I get a bigger satisfaction because a man responds to my little talks, am I not betraying the principle of suffrage and equal rights?

She was. But it was delicious.

“It’s your turn,” Fran said.

“It is not,” Fee answered. “Mama said you’d do it, to make up for yesterday when I did it so you could go out with Nick Fanelli.”

“But she didn’t say today or any other day that happens to suit
you.
So leave me alone. I have an exam.”

“So have I,” Fee said, though she had none. In half an hour, Papa’s supper had to be ready, and this was a perfect example of how Fran managed to sneak out of things. “If I do it, it would be two nights in a row, Monday and Tuesday.”

“If I do it,” Fran said scathingly, “it would be two nights in a row, Tuesday and Wednesday. Or is that too much for you to figure out?”

Fee stood still, helpless. She was beaten because she was afraid of her father and what would happen if he didn’t get his food; Fran won out because she wasn’t afraid. Fee ran down to the kitchen, wishing she could slap Fran’s face, or push her over. It was always Fran who won out; Fran always knew how to twist things around so she could get out of doing things she didn’t want to do. Like hanging their things up in the closet. Fran never hung up anything, never. And Fee hated skirts and dresses draped over the chairs and the bedpost, or underwear and petticoats and nightgowns in round little pools on the floor.

“Fran, you’re supposed to hang your own things up,” she would say. “It looks horrible.”

“I don’t think it looks horrible at all.”

“But it
does.
I always hang my clothes up.”

“I like mine this way.”

“But it’s my room too. It isn’t fair to make me live in a pig pen.”

“If you feel so awful about it, then hang things up yourself. Just stop yapping about it.”

Tears of rage came to Fee’s eyes. She reached for the kitchen towel, but the touch of it was like a burn. She was getting to be as bad as Mama, crying over everything, a million times a day.

Only Mama didn’t. Not any more.

Come to think of it, Mama was different, now that she was going to New York four nights a week. Mama was being just wonderful, Mrs. Paige said once, and Joan and Eli said it too. “You have to hand it to her,” Eli said on the phone. “But secretly she’s enjoying herself too, don’t forget.”

How could Mama enjoy
anything
with all the things that had happened? Fee went to the door and let Shag in. Even he knew something had changed everybody’s life in the Ivarin family. He wasn’t allowed in the house at all any more unless he was on a leash, in case he raced upstairs and flung himself against Papa’s bed and wrenched his back all over again. Poor Shag drooped around, acting as if he had done something wrong. Actually, Papa liked it when somebody took Shag upstairs on the leash to visit him; he didn’t want to see anybody else in the family except Shag, and when you took his meals in on a tray, he just looked at the dishes, as if he didn’t know for sure what they were there for.

Fee flipped open the petcocks on the stove and lit the gas. Then she read the list of directions her mother had written out and left on the grooved enamel dish rack that hooked over the edge of the sink.

“Heat ch. in g,” it read, in her mother’s most hurried writing. “St. b. about 15; carrots same; sweets in ov. to warm them. Slice Orange, ap & ban.”

Fee proceeded to follow orders, heating the chicken in the gravy, after the string beans, carrots and baked sweets had had ten of their fifteen minutes. She also peeled and sliced two oranges and two bananas and two apples; it looked like lots more than three portions of dessert, so she spooned some off into a fourth plate and put it in the icebox. Mama might come home hungry.

The bell rang, and she flew to the door, not forgetting to shut Shag into the kitchen first. It was John Miller, and her heart skipped. He came in nearly every day, on his way home after basketball or baseball practice. With Papa out of the way upstairs for sure, and Mama in New York, it was lots more fun to have John in the house than it used to be. Fee didn’t know why it was nicer; they never did
anything.

“I’m busy,” she said at the door. “I’m fixing supper.”

“I’ll go on home, if you’re so all-fired busy.”

“Don’t be so mean.”

“Who’s the mean one? You didn’t even say hello.”

“Hello,” she said and giggled.

They always said the cutest things to each other, Fee thought happily. She always
felt
clever when he was around, the way she didn’t feel with ordinary people. John piled his coat on the top of the coat rack, and the way he stacked it up there was cute too. She led the way into the kitchen, and Shag jumped all over him; the big lunk treated John now as if he were a member of the family and Fee wanted to hug him for doing it.

“I’ll just take my father’s stuff up,” she said. “Here’s something, if you’re hungry, I made it myself.” She fetched back the plate of sliced fruit she had put aside for her mother, and John said, “Gee.”

“That was great,” John said, when she came back. “You’re some cook.”

“Poo-ey,” Fee said, and it made him laugh. It was a wonderful visit, and after John went home, she was suddenly scared that she was as selfish as Eli, who still hadn’t come out to visit Papa. She couldn’t stop being happy, no matter what had happened to Papa, and what an awful time it was for Mama too. One day her mother had heard her singing, and sort of sighed and said, “Youth is a time for enjoying life, Firuschka, go ahead and enjoy it, no matter.”

It made guilt rush through her, but Fee kept on forgetting to feel awful, even when her mother talked about Papa’s not being a famous editor any more, or when she said he looked ten years older. Fee looked at him hard when she took his next tray in, but he always looked so old, she couldn’t see any difference. She thought her mother would feel encouraged when she said so.

“Children never look at their parents,” Mama said. “You never know whether I look well or not, you never know whether Papa does.”

“I do so.”

“If you came downstairs and found another woman right in the kitchen giving you breakfast, you wouldn’t notice it for ten minutes. Children never
see
their parents, I tell you.”

It was one of those typical Mama remarks, but you didn’t know how to prove it was wrong. And maybe there was nothing wrong in singing if you felt wonderful. It was glorious to be in love, and to adore high school, and church every Sunday, and even to be able to look in the mirror and see that you weren’t
absolutely
as flat as a board any more, even if you still weren’t anything to brag about.

Another wave of joy boiled up in Fee, a bubbling up of hope and expectation. At once, a new rush of guilt shook her, and almost as an act of revenge, she pushed Shag out the door for the night. Then, because the wind suddenly felt so fresh and inviting, she ran out too, and raced him all the way up to Charming Street and back. Shag won, but it was grand.

It happened about a week later. It happened during the night. Fee did not know it until she awoke in the morning and started to take off her thin nightgown. Then she saw the faint sign, like a delicate brush stroke on the white batiste. She knew at once and her heart jumped with relief and joy.

Her mother had always said there was nothing to fear, that Nature had planned everything wisely, without anything horrid or nasty. Only superstition and ignorance misled girls into imagining ugly and unlovely things, she said, but actually it was sweet and normal, with nothing to dread.

It was true. It had happened while she slept, so quietly, so easily, and she had at last, at last, at last, begun.

She didn’t get dressed and she said nothing to Fran, who was stirring in the first moment of waking up. Instead, she ran down to the kitchen where her mother was already finishing her own breakfast.

“Mama,” she said, “look.” She fanned out her nightgown on each side of her body, like a little girl about to curtsy. She watched the expression change in her mother’s eyes.

“My darling,” Alexandra said, and came around the table toward her and kissed her.

All day Alexandra felt wanned and happy because of Fee, and then that same evening dear loyal Anna Godleberg sprang her great surprise.

For the very first time, she was not at home when Alexandra arrived. Her son Morris could only explain “She’s out,” a fact which was all too obvious, and Alexandra said, “I’ll wait.” But so unprecedented was it to be kept waiting by this of all pupils, that the minutes stretched out inordinately. Then the door opened, and a breathless Mrs. Godleberg rushed in, her hands already on the hatpins in her big pathetic hat, with its imitation plumes and shabby velvet.

“Well, Mrs. Ivarin,” she announced with a hitherto unheard cadence of triumph, “you will have twelve in your audience the first time.”

“Oh my goodness.”

“Monday night,
next
Monday.”

A month had passed since Alexandra had asked her favor, and not once had Anna Godleberg mentioned it. Now “an evening in the tent” was arranged. Eight of the twelve women were from the beach, including three Alexandra barely remembered. The others were unknowns, recruited either by Anna Godleberg or her eager co-organizer, Sophie Jabrowsky, galvanized into action at the chance of “going to hear Mrs. Ivarin again.”

The lecture was to last an hour and each woman was to pay fifteen cents, but from the first Monday, Alexandra found herself talking and answering their questions for nearly two hours. And each time, the old surge of joy rose in her again, especially when they burst into self-conscious applause at the end of a lecture, when she heard again, “Oh, if you would only write it down in a book.”

Long ago she had sat at the edge of the tent at dawn with the sand cold beneath her bare feet, thinking that life emptied so much earlier for women than it did for men. Now, in the midst of hardship and sadness, her own life was becoming full again, with a lovely fullness as if she were young enough to be pregnant, looking ahead with hope and eagerness.

You’re a good girl.
The words often sounded again when she pocketed her dollar or two dollars after an evening of lessons or the little lectures and started for the Delancey Street station of the subway. These midnight streets of the East Side—how often Stiva had walked them on his way home. This was the same subway station he had entered and left a thousand times since they had moved out to the little country town, as it was then, of Barnett. Undoubtedly he had sat in the very seat she now had, in this same lighted car swaying on the curves, rushing through the city earth and then emerging into the air of Long Island. Now it was she who made the trip in the middle of the night, who walked up the hill, carrying the first edition of all the papers, including that one.

She thought of it as “that” or “it” now, never as the
Jewish News.
She had come to hate it, for what it had done to him more than for what it had become. But he wanted to read it every day, sick as he was; his interest in what they were doing to it was as fierce and strong as a ruffian boy on a street corner.

And he was more eager for the Russian papers now, as if, in his decrease in strength, he looked homeward and backward to his first years. He always had kept up an unflagging watchfulness about what the socialists in Russia were doing, their victories, their defeats; he never wavered in his faith that the czars would go, and only grew agitated at the fear that the extremists might win out in the supreme moment of victory, reducing it and robbing it. “Betraying it,” was what he said.

Alexandra shifted the papers to her other arm; they grew heavy as she walked uphill. Suddenly, from afar, came Shag’s double bark of excitement, and she smiled at the familiar sound. “Here, boy, here,” she called, though she knew he was already racing toward her. He really did know how to make you feel welcomed home.

“Down, you silly fool,” she cried at his first impact, but he paid no attention until she patted his head and talked to him and started toward the house again.

He probably wonders why it’s me and not Stiva, she thought, who comes home late at night now.

But you’ll see, she thought, as if she were addressing Shag. He’ll be doing it again the day he is well enough. He will be active again and happy again, you’ll see.

Like me, she added. It was amazing, unimaginable beforehand. Four nights a week, and it was marvelous.

You’re a good girl.
He had said it before he fell sick, during his determined new start at earning a living, without the fifty dollars from the paper every payday.

And now she was the only breadwinner the family had. Eight dollars a week was no great sum, but in her thankful heart, she knew the glory of accomplishment.

Forty-two days, Stefan Ivarin thought, and I still have not. He glanced at the bag of tobacco with its thin cord drawn tight, like a miser’s purse-string, and touched the half-empty packet of papers beside it. His trophies; he had refused to let Alexandra remove them. In his fingers was a tactile memory of how fine and crisp a sheet of the rice paper felt, curved into a three-inch trough waiting for the pebbly fall of the tobacco. And in his nostrils was the strong appealing aroma.