First Papers (64 page)

He had stayed at the Brevoort for only a week, and had found his new place on the first day he had searched for it. Apart from wanting to be near his work, he had no specifications for the way he wanted to live; to his surprise, it was a relief to find himself in harsh and unlovely surroundings, plain and dull to the point of idiocy. He did enjoy fine furniture and the soft gleam of old wood and silver, but suddenly now, in their absence, he realized that there was a suction in them too, pulling at your independence of judgment about what you liked, what was good, what was attractive. Unless it were “important,” you were obligated to disapprove of it.

He was exaggerating, of course; Letty would be the first to say, “Why, Gare, you never heard
me
preach any slavish following of period or that sort of thing.”

“Why, Gare.” He heard her voice saying the two syllables, and knew the sense of loss in a quick plunge inward and downward at the core of his body. The first days at the Brevoort he had been berserk with fury at her, and at Peter Stiles whom she had never mentioned, he realized at last, for a solid year or more, though she chatted often about everybody else they knew. By the end of a week he had cooled down, again surprised at the speed with which he could accept the end of their marriage. For longer than he liked to admit, he had known the end was approaching; again and again, after some miserable set-to, he had expected her to issue the ultimatum. How often had his mind gone waiting-empty then, like a beaker drained of its contents, waiting for refilling.

Even so, her words had come with stunning suddenness, and that suddenness could infuriate him still. There was a female cleverness to it, a particular kind of attack no man would ever think up or act upon. She must have known all winter that things were in their last moments between them; he had not made love to her for months, nor had she sought him, telling each other in the most blatant way that love had vanished. And yet that final night, she had made it seem, not a mutual parting, but as if she had dismissed him.

He looked about his ugly flat, as if assessing the distance there was between them. The sickly tan of the walls was matched by the unhealthy pink of the shower curtain in the bathroom, where he was shaving. Behind him, visible in the mirror, was the bedroom and a swathe of the parlor, with its “store-bought” furniture and pictures, its starched lace curtains, fancy lamps and endless knickknacks.

He thought of Letty seeing it, or their friends. “Or Cynthia Aldrich,” he said to his image in the mirror and this time he smiled.

The telephone behind him rang, and his mother’s cheerful voice asked him to dinner on Saturday. “Same time?” he asked, and thanked her, meaning it. It was already a habit, driving out to Barnett once a week, to have “one home meal” with his parents, and it was solidly pleasant, not a dutiful chore.

It wasn’t that they agreed with him; it was that their terms were the same; wrong meant wrong, not unpatriotic. And when they went, as in the old days, to visit the Ivarins, who did not agree at all, who never yielded a point, there was a kind of good muscular strength in their arguing, unrelated to the vapid exchanges with most of his opponents.

The Ivarin girls were pleasant too. He did not think Francesca quite the beauty his mother called her; she was pretty but she was vain, and it flawed her. Fira was a surprise. She wasn’t a child any more, and it was easy to see why his mother always pronounced her “striking.” There was something intense in her and something original. He had never noticed until his mother spoke one night of “Fee’s big secret,” and even then he had been mainly amused at the idea of anybody taking fifteen finals over in a lump. But the amusement left its residue, and the residue made him notice Fee as an individual instead of as “the Ivarin kid,” which she had always been. She did strike you, that was true.

Fee was ashamed about being so weak about her secret. She had told it to her mother, of course, and to Fran, because she had to, what with staying up studying night after night until at least two o’clock, and she also had to tell it in a letter to John at Iowa State, to explain why she hadn’t written for so long. Then she decided he would probably say something about her plan in a letter back home to his family, so Anne would know, and it would be awful if Anne was hurt at finding it out in so roundabout a way, so she confided it to Anne too. And to be fair to Juanita Endoza, she simply had to tell her also. Then Ginny Smith, the captain of the girls’ basketball team, bawled her out one day for not playing her top game at Center, and she was so upset at Ginny’s tone, she found herself explaining just
why
she seemed lackadaisical on the court. Even Trudy Loheim, when Trudy smugly said that by fall she would be earning twenty dollars a week.

“Next fall,” Fee said airily, “I might be in college.”

“You’re kidding.”

“If I win my scholarship, I’m not.”

“What scholarship?” Trudy asked suspiciously.

There was nothing to do but explain. But by now, so many people knew the secret of her extra study schedule that Fee began to worry about her father finding out. Mr. Fitch’s advice about getting his permission kept coming back to her, and she was almost glad when her mother at last took a stand.

“You’re putting a burden on me, Fee,” Alexandra said sternly one evening. “I have never kept secrets from Papa, and I have never lied to him, and you are forcing me to do both.”

“Oh, Mama.”

“You sound just like Franny. I’m not a big boobie, and you needn’t sound as if I am. Besides, you’ll discover that this is the surest way of all to get him angry, when he discovers what’s been going on behind his back for months and months. He thinks you’re outgrowing this idea of college.”

Her father was just back from one of his lecture trips, taking “a swing,” as he called it, from Scranton and Wilkes-Barre to Milwaukee and St. Louis and Toledo and Buffalo, although she could never remember what order they came in. He loved his swings. He never came right out and admitted that they were fun, that he liked going to diners on trains and living at hotels and having all his fares and bills paid for him by the union or whoever was sending him. But everybody knew he loved the change and the travel, the crowds he drew everywhere, the applause.

Fee always thought of him as a lecturer now, and if anybody asked what her father did, she answered, “Lecture,” and it sounded silly. She could remember him as an editor of the paper, but it was almost like remembering “before the war.” It was that way, too, when she tried to imagine him rolling a cigarette and smoking it, though that bag of tobacco was still on top of his desk, and the half-empty packet of rice papers. Even the last box of matches he had used was there; when you were dusting his room, you had to be careful with these three-year-old relics.

The night before he had gone on this swing, she heard him complaining to her mother about the nightly waste of electric lights, and after her mother’s explanation, he had said, “Am I supposed to take that literally—that she’s studying each night until two in the morning?”

“It’s true.”

“Is this routine performance now at that high school of hers?” he said.

While he was gone her mother kept on at her: she had better tell him soon. “Oh, all right,” Fee said, at last, none too pleasantly, “I’ll tell him.”

But when the moment came, she said, “Papa,” and then stopped. He said, “Yes?” and she looked at her mother in a wild petition. “Go on, Fee,” her mother said, “tell.”

“What is this, a game of riddles?” he said good-naturedly. “Tell me what?”

“Why I’m up so late every night,” she said. “I—well, you see if I could take over a lot of my old Regents exams—anyway, I am taking them over, all of them.”

“Taking them over?” he said. “What for?”

“Trying to win a State scholarship.”

“Good for you. How much is it worth?”

“A hundred dollars a year.”

“Two hundred dollars.” He looked at her in admiring re-appraisal, as if he had never realized that she could do anything that could be valued at so high a price.

“Not two hundred,” she said. “Four.”

“How four?”

“It’s a four-year scholarship, for college,” Fee said. “If you go to Training, you don’t get any of it.”

“But you are going to Training.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” he demanded. Gone instantly was his good-natured tone, gone his admiring appraisal, and in these five words there sounded instead the outrage and sarcasm that she had so often heard him direct at Eli or her mother, but never yet at her. Something went thick in her throat, and she couldn’t answer him.

“What does that ‘no’ mean?” he insisted.

“I don’t want to go to Jamaica Training,” she said. “I want to go to college. If I win a schol—”

“You want what?”

“To go to college,” Fee cried. “Because I—
please
listen to me about
why.”

“What can there be, for me to listen to? Are we so rich, that you can take two more years before you are self-supporting, two whole years more?”

“I can’t bear Training School. I’d rather die—”

“You’d rather die!” he roared at her. “How many times have I asked you to do what
I
want in this world?” he went on. “And on this one point that I
do
ask, that your mother and I have always taken for granted—on this you flout us?”

“Stiva, if Fee does win a scholarship—”

“Keep out of this,” he ordered Alexandra. “You are always ready to give in, supinely, spinelessly, whatever they want, no matter how shameless and selfish.”

“It’s not selfish,” Fee said, her voice suddenly shrill. “There’s nothing bad about wanting to go to college.” She looked at him and thought, I hate him, he’s horrible and unfair. She burst into tears, and at the sight of them, Alexandra’s own eyes filled.

“For God’s sake,” Stefan shouted at Alexandra, “none of your tears.”

“How can I help it?” Alexandra demanded, moving closer to Fee. “The poor child.”

“If you can’t help it, then leave me alone.”

Alexandra clattered a chair out of the way and left the room. She banged the door so violently that her hand tingled around the knob. He was a czar, a Cossack, a tyrant. One by one, the children had come up against his will and gone through this hell of beating against its iron. First Eli, then Fran when she wanted to move out and live in New York, and now Fee. Fran had given in after a scene like this, but Fee would kill herself before—

The thought turned Alexandra motionless. In the kitchen Fee was crying convulsively.

“—Nineteen twenty-one before you are self-supporting,” Stefan thundered, “not 1919, as we always calculated. That’s too soon for milady who must do just what the rich girls do—”

“Don’t you call me names,” Fee shouted. “Don’t make fun of me, I’m not going to Training, no matter what you say, I’m not, I’m not.”

“Milady doesn’t intend to obey her parents,” he said, as if he were addressing somebody in the distance. “Did you hear that? She is no daughter of mine any longer, who spits on her father’s wishes—”

The door flew open and Alexandra confronted him.

“Are you suddenly a patriarch in the Bible?” she demanded, tears wet on her cheeks, hair wild. “What’s wrong with you?”

Stefan ignored her. His face was scarlet, the skin damp and burnished so that it shone. He moved toward Fee, facing her, standing inches away from her. “You are to give up this rich man’s notion, do you follow me?” he demanded. “You need only two years to become a teacher and—”

“I won’t become a teacher. I’ll never be a teacher.”

Hysteria flung the words at him, and Fee ran out of the room.

For a full week Alexandra spoke to Stefan only in monosyllables. He seemed not to notice, not to mind. But she knew that he did mind. She didn’t know how she knew it, but she was convinced. Soon she began to find an exhilaration in this unprecedented experience.
She
was in a bad mood.

Day after day it continued. She left her food untouched on her plate, she muttered good morning and then fell silent. She could see him glance at her above his newspaper and then glance down, his foot pumping up and down on the linoleum in agitation. She would put his food before him and leave.

She would not forgive him. She would not, could not, dredge up the usual excuses for him and exonerate him. Never before had poor Fee faced her father in a battle, faced him head on. From babyhood onward, the worst times Fee could remember were when Stefan was fighting Eli or Fran, and of course, herself, Alexandra. Those times were bad enough, when his shouting, his unbridled rage and temper had terrified and scarified Fee as a bystander.

Now she was not a bystander, she was his enemy, facing him while his wrath and fury threw themselves at her like physical blows.

My poor child, Alexandra thought, my Firuschka. If this Dr. Freud is right, this war with her father can damage her for life; it will set off echoes she will always vaguely hear whenever she’s in conflict with any man she loves—with a fiancé, with—with a lover perhaps, with her husband, and later on, her son. Dr. Freud might not be right in his more exaggerated views about what could go on in an infant’s life, but surely he was correct and intuitive about the unseen damage done to children by the very parents who loved them.

Alexandra wished, fleetingly, that Dr. Freud had written more about the damage inflicted on parents
by
children. She thought of the night Eli had told her about changing his name to Eaves. Of his refusal to visit when his father was so sick. And of the family scandal when his infidelity was discovered that summer after the war began.

For a moment, Dr. Freud and Fee alike were forgotten, and Alexandra’s heart squeezed in shame for Eli. During his second summer at the New Hampshire school, he had once again dawdled and delayed about finding a place for Joan and the children. But this time Joan suspected more than a lack of houses and when she finally joined him, she began sleuthing about. Sure enough, he had fallen in love the year before with a silly young thing, and was again carrying on with his pastoral paramour. Poor Joan—who could blame her for blurting out her pain to her mother? And then to Eli’s mother?