First Papers (57 page)

Forty-two days and nights. Not once had he come close to rolling one and lighting it and smoking it, but not once had he experienced the moment of release when it no longer mattered. The moment would come, he knew it as one knows the theorems and propositions of mathematics, but he had not the faintest idea when it would arrive and let him move on to some more important issue.

How interlaced were the importances of a man’s being, when once their normal shapes and balances were distorted by disaster or disease or despair.

The longing for tobacco was more acute than the longing for a paper to edit, yet it was not as involved with his true necessities. The compulsive gambler like Dostoevsky, the compulsive drinker, the compulsive smoker, they all had in common the singular disgrace of being captive to their own folly, whatever elegant excuses they might adduce for their consciences. If he had any virtue in this whole shabby agony of forty-two days, it was only his refusal to make any excuse whatever for it. He was like a dope addict, of a milder persuasion than the poor devils who took heroin or opium, but an addict.

It was a shock, among many shocks, to face the fact.

But he was surviving it, and he had survived the others. Little by little, more slowly than one could imagine, he had begun to recover himself from the series of events which at times took on the aspect of assaults upon his total being. At seven one evening, during the third week of his collapse, he had begun to “earn” again. He had obeyed Michelovsky and waited for the contraption to be made for his back, but the day it arrived, he had taken back the first of his two Barnett pupils from Alexandra, and given the lesson himself. The next night he had taken back the other, and at his urging, each of them had suggested several other stores where the proprietor would display his special printed card. Three more pupils and a dozen inquiries had already resulted; but one had to allow time for these things to build up.

Stefan put on the “contraption.” It was a steel-and-leather belt or holster, a handspan in width, that circled him at his hipbones. It laced with thong-like cords, and was padded with a spongy wool inside, over a crosshatching of steel ribs. Made to his measure by a surgical outfitter, it had cost an outrageous thirteen dollars.

But with it he could begin to manage again. It did protect him, in part, from the tearing, ripping feeling he had had for the first days of moving about. It would save him from a new wrench or twist, and it permitted him to walk for as much as a quarter of each hour, or to sit at his desk for that amount of time, and write. And then at last it let him go slowly down the stairs, to teach and earn and be his own man again.

His own man again. There was a farcical quality to so large a phrase for so minor a beginning, but he was not willing to edit it. “His own man” would not sound farcical forever. Step by step he was on his way once more.

But there were decisions to make that could not wait for the unknown length of that journey. The time was coming when they could not be put off any longer.

Alexandra saw the light in the kitchen windows, and she guessed. When Shag hurled himself at her, more excited than usual, she said, “He’s downstairs, boy, isn’t he? So late at night.”

She hurried the rest of the way. “Is that you?” she called out as she unlocked the front door, and from the kitchen his voice came, “I wasn’t sleepy.”

“I’m not sleepy either.”

With deliberation, he came toward her through the dining room. He was straight again, with the artificial straightness the steel-and-leather belt gave him. Though he had been coming down once each evening to give a lesson, he had always been upstairs again and in bed long before she arrived from the city.

She touched the switch in the parlor and saw his pale face, his thin neck, his careful slowness. Old, she thought. It’s the first time he looks old—we are getting old at last. The one sickness they have no drugs for, the one attack they can never fend off. She didn’t want him to grow old, never, never, she didn’t want to herself, she could not bear it for either of them. They loved life, they loved the struggle and challenge of their kind of life, throbbing with hope for a better world, furious with fire and resolve, not like the thin empty fives of people who accepted poverty and injustice as if God himself were a capitalist.

“You look surprised to see me down here,” Stefan said.

“Oh, Stiva, the worst is over, I feel it.”

“Today I even did two sessions of the translating. A second one this evening, and none the worse for it. And the blood pressure stays down.”

“For once they were right.”

“Maybe they know something about certain sickness,” he said grudgingly. “Give me.” He reached for the papers and preceded her into the kitchen. On the range, steam curled out of the spout of the aluminum kettle, and she raised it to see how full it was.

“You’re not to lift anything that heavy,” she scolded, and he chuckled in pleasure at his own prowess.

“Yes, yes, but now we can have tea without waiting.”

He sat down carefully and she fetched what they would need. He glanced at the headlines but did not give himself over to reading, as if he were waiting to finish something else first.

“What did you mean, ‘the blood pressure stays down’?” she asked. “How do you know?”

“Joan’s father came by after supper,” he said. “I rang him up to ask if I could go to New York. I told him it was getting more imperative, about money. So he came and checked up and said ‘next week.’ I can give two lessons on the same evening, but he orders a half-hour rest between them, and again before starting for home.”

“It’s wonderful. What you’ve been through, and now it’s beginning to be done with.”

“By June,” Stefan went on, “he thinks I could even lecture. It would be welcome, I can tell you. Getting up on a platform again …”

“I know.” His longing set off an answering sharpness of desire in her, that he should be himself again, at least Stefan Ivarin the lecturer, if not Stefan Ivarin the editor.

“But even though I’ll be earning some money again,” he added, “I have reached a decision at last. It can’t be put off any longer.” He waited, but she would not ask him what it was. “It’s the house,” he said slowly.

“The house?”

“There is no way for us to keep it any longer.” He turned his face so she would not see his expression. “We will have to sell it.” She said nothing; she had been thinking of it too. “Offer it for sale,” he added.

“Must we? Are you sure?”

“I calculated it a hundred different ways. Even with your help, there is no way out.”

She wanted to protest, to cry out, argue. But they had warned her: he could not stand dissension, scenes, storms of emotion. “I’ve been trying to prepare myself,” she said. “I knew it was coming. But I hoped we could put it off—”

“You can’t sell a house in one day,” he answered. “We can’t put it off any longer, the first step, listing it with the real estate people.”

The first step. The blueprints were the first step; she could see them again, the strong blue of their sturdy paper, their lines and labels and dimensions in white. The quarrels and crises over them were long ago forgotten, the stairs, the icebox, the bedrooms like cubicles. What folly to have been miserable over such details. What mattered was the house they had built, the house they loved, the house they now had to sell to strangers.

Alexandra’s eyes filled with tears, but this time she made no move to hide them, and was not surprised at his hand upon her shoulder.

T
HE WHITE SIGN, HOUSE FOR SALE
, stood at the crest of the rise of earth that sloped sharply back from the sidewalk. It was made of wood on a painted metal spoke, and under its unwavering arms the lawn was tender and green in the early June warmth. At the curb, the three maples, still supple and slender, bent toward it under a brisk west wind, as if to acknowledge its sudden presence.

It’s like a cross over a grave, Alexandra thought. It will be death itself to the girls, the end of everything they have always taken as immutable.

She had come down early, unable to sleep. Another few weeks had gone by since Stefan and she had agreed that it was inescapable, and at last they had gone together yesterday to buy it. They had felt the need to go together, though they had found almost nothing to say to each other, either on the way to Beck’s Hardware or on the way home. Stefan insisted on carrying it, and as he trudged silently on with it, unwrapped because it did not lend itself to neat packaging, she wondered if he and all other human beings also found an infinite sadness linked to the shape of any cross.

“I’ll tell the girls in the morning,” she said.

And now the moment had come. “Fran, Fira,” she said, and they looked up. If only she need not give them one more thing to accept as best they could. How many there had been already; how good and brave they both had been most of the time. Even about staying home all summer long, the first summer of their lives without the mountains or the beach. “It’s nearly half a year,” she began, “since Papa got sick. Longer since he left the paper.”

“What’s wrong, Mama?” Fran asked. Fee sat up straighter.

“He’s getting well, he’s earning again, signing up a few lectures, writing a few articles, but even so.”

“Are we poor now?” asked Fee.

“Not as the poor are poor. But we do have to take a certain step; we finally decided we must. We argued it from every angle; there’s no way out.”

“What step?” Fee asked.

“To sell the house.”

“Sell
it?” Fran cried.

“Where would we live?” Fee asked.

“In a smaller place,” Alexandra answered. “For what we get from the house, we could pay rent for a long time, low rent.”

Her heart chilled at the look on their faces. Fee had been a tiny thing of three or four the first time they had begun to talk and plan about building their own house; even Fran had been too little to remember the rented houses they had had before this, the only home they could regard as permanent.

“How do you sell a house?” Fee almost whispered it.

“You advertise it, and you tell real estate people. And usually you put out a little sign saying it’s for sale.” She wet her lips and unclasped her hands. “Papa and I went down to Main Street together yesterday, while you were still at school, and we bought one.”

“Where is it?” Franny and Fee said together.

“Outside on the lawn,” Alexandra said. “Late last night we went out and put it up.”

Franny and Fee left the table as if at a signal. Alexandra followed only as far as the parlor, and then waited at the window. Unwilling, unbelieving, the girls stood face to face with its stiff unyielding whiteness. HOUSE FOR SALE.

Alexandra turned away from the window. Then she heard Fee begin to cry and Fran try to comfort her.

Alida Paige saw the sign and told Evan that evening. “Is there nothing we can do?” she said.

“They’d refuse, if we offered.”

“Why should they? They know us so well.”

“When it comes to money, and being out of a job, a man—” he broke off, thinking about it. “Stefan’s an easier man to ask help of, than to offer it to.”

“But it’s a poor friend who makes no offer at all. I’ll talk to Alexandra, and feel her out a bit.”

“I’d go pretty lightly,” he said.

Suddenly Alida knew that Alexandra, like Stefan, would refuse a loan. As she herself would refuse. Going into debt was the unthinkable, in the tenets of behavior which had guided her own parents and grandparents. Undoubtedly it was just as unthinkable to the Ivarins. “The Puritan background,” her family would have named it, “the New England tradition.” Yet here were Stefan and Alexandra, as far from the Puritanism of New England as the North Pole from the South, but a loan would seem unthinkable to an identical degree. Alida pointed out this paradox to Evan. “How alike the four of us really are.”

“Maybe they’re Russian Puritans,” he said.

“You’re laughing at me.”

More seriously he said, “There’s something of the ascetic in any idealist, don’t you think?”

“I suppose that’s it,” and almost without pause she added, “Garry hasn’t been sounding right, have you noticed?”

“Not particularly, no.”

“He really has not. When he telephones, he never has those little teasing things to say, the way he used to, and the last time they were here, he seemed quite edgy.”

“I did notice that,” Evan said. “I thought Letty did too.”

“Oh, dear,” Alida said, and they fell silent. Then she called 1718-W, but when she went over, she had no better idea than to offer to lend the Ivarins some money.

“I came over,” she said, waving vaguely toward the front lawn, “to see if there’s anything we can do to help.”

“You’re upset about the sign,” Alexandra said.

“Evan and I were talking about it.”

“You’re lovely to worry about us, simply lovely. It makes me feel better, just hearing it.”

“He said a man doesn’t like to borrow from a friend, but I do think illness makes it different.” She looked earnestly at Alexandra. “If men can’t understand that, it’s a lack in
them,
don’t you think?”

A comfortable look passed between them, but Alexandra said, “Still, it’s true. Stefan wouldn’t like it.”

“I’ll be darned if I wouldn’t,” Alida said defiantly. “As a practical stopgap for a while—” she stopped short and said, “That does give me an idea.”

Alexandra waited. Through the open windows came the sweet smell of summer meadows and trees; for all the speed with which downtown Barnett was being built up, the hill was still blessed with great patches of openness. The last week of school was beginning for the girls; in other summers they would already be more than half packed for their move to the beach.

“Suppose you rented the house,” Alida said, “instead of selling it. Then it would still belong to you, and the rent from it would be just enough to pay for a small stopgap place that you could rent for yourselves.” Alexandra was staring at her, her face brightening. “Only until Stefan is all settled again, and when he is, then you would still have your own house to move back to again.”