Read Online First Papers by Laura Z. Hobson - Free Book Online Page B

“You look pale. Come, I’ll take you upstairs, and you rest a little.”
    “Eli will take me up, Mother Ivarin.” Slowly Joan rose from her chair, smiling as if in regret at leaving a gay party, and they all watched as she and Eli left the room.
    The kitchen was silent. Ivarin stared at the oilcloth around his plate, a bright red-and-white-checked pattern, mitered at the corners and tacked on the underside, to keep it taut. His nerves were as stretched as that, nailed down, a crucifix of nerves; he was a fool to argue on these matters with any of them. “America” is not the magic word to them, he thought, that it is to me, liberty is not, freedom not. This, precisely, is where I come closest to Alexandra’s weeping, a gulping in my throat, as hard to control as her tears.
    “Poor Joan is not used to our ways,” Alexandra said to no one in particular.
    “She must hate it here,” Fran muttered.
    “She does not hate it here,” Alexandra said sharply. “She loves it, being a member of our family. She and Eli could live with her family, couldn’t they? The Martins keep inviting them.”
    “I bet she never heard such fights before,” Fran said.
    “An argument,” Alexandra said sternly, “is not a fight.”
    “Argument!” Fran let scorn sound in her words. To Fee she said, “Come on, let’s get started,” and began jamming dishes together, scraping each free of food as she did so. Fee carried glasses and silver to the sink and their mother took out dishpan and soap.
    Stefan remained motionless. Joan’s device had not deceived him; to her he must have sounded like the czar of the supper table. Not czar; Oliver Wendell Holmes had called it “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.” Delightful, full of wisdom and good humor.
    Good humor. Ay, there’s the rub, he thought. Tonight, good humor had been noticeable by its absence, and Joan had known it as had everybody else. He had an impulse to follow her upstairs and beg her to believe that soft-spoken discussion was impossible for him, and that a raised voice meant intensity as often as it meant anger. He sat on, doing nothing except to wonder why and when this vice had begun. Had his own parents habitually raised their voices? He could not remember.
    “You’ve helped enough,” Alexandra said to the girls. “I’ll finish.”
    Fran threw down her towel and left the room. Fee went on working, and Alexandra said, “Go, go. I’ll finish.” In her voice was the tone that warned Ivarin she wanted to speak to him in private, and he sighed.
    “Stefan,” she said tentatively when Fira left.
    “Yes?”
    “If they all feel so terrible about it—”
    “You are going to take the bunting down?”
    “They all are so miserable.”
    “Do as you like.”
    “I’m not ‘doing.’ But perhaps it’s wrong to persist. Can’t we talk it through a little, sensibly?”
    “Have you no memory, Alexandra? When I was reluctant about your idea, you accused me of indifference. Now you want to back down, and you demand that I approve. I beg you, decide it yourself.”
    “You won’t even talk about it?”
    He made a gesture of exhaustion. As she turned abruptly away, he heard the familiar, maddening first sound of her sniffling and then weeping. It is fantastic, he thought, literally a matter of fantasy and dreaming. Even when I give in supinely on something she wishes, we end in anguished tears.
    We have always differed in our approach to action; she will never concede that to drill the milkman every day may accomplish nothing but the satisfaction of her need to drill, and that black drapery may be nothing but a desire to wear her socialism on her sleeve. He pushed his chair back. “I’m going to New York.”
    “At this hour? But why? It’s after seven.”
    “Must I give an accounting of every desire I have to go to New York?”
    “But Alida and Evan are coming. I told them you’d be home. You know that.”
    “Then tell them I’m not home.” He opened the