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

for your mother when Eli married outside your religion.”
    Fee sat up, astonished. “But it wasn’t,” she said positively. “They liked it; it’s a principle.”
    “What is that, anyway?”
    “Well, it’s—” Fee waved her hand vaguely. “Oh, I can’t exactly say it right out, but you know, something terribly important.”
    Trudy nodded. “When I grow up,” she said, “I’m going to marry a millionaire and have a governess and a maid and a butler.”
    The hammering ceased and Fee looked at Trudy in sudden hope. If the black was all on, maybe it wouldn’t be so horrible as knowing they were still putting it on.
    “I’m going to make lots of money,” Fee said after a moment, “and have a tennis court of my own, and a motorcycle. Are you?”
    “I’m going to get an auto.”
    “So am I. A dark red one, like the Paiges’. Mr. Paige took us for a ride last night, me and Franny and Joan and Eli. My mother wouldn’t go.”
    “Franny likes Jack Purney.”
    “I hate her. She’s so stuck-up about how she looks.”
    Trudy crossed the room to the bureau and looked at herself in the mirror. She picked up a comb and ran it through her hair, shaking her head from this side to that, watching her curls move. “My mother’s going to get me a white silk middy,” she said. “When I’m twelve.”
    “Oh, Trudy!” Fee sprang up, her heart squeezing into a hard knob. Trudy had such a lot of clothes, all bought at Wanamaker, and never looking homemade. Trudy called clothes “Dutchy” if they were made by your mother, and said she’d rather die than look Dutchy.
    “And maybe a white serge skirt,” Trudy added, relishing Fira’s anguish. “My father doesn’t even know. He’s so stingy.”
    “Mine is too.” She took the comb from Trudy, but when she shook her head from side to side, her hair fell like brown rain, straight down. “He wants me to be a teacher when I’m big,” she said. “But I’m not going to.”
    “I’m going to be a secretary, and make a lot of money.”
    “I guess I will too.”
    “Let’s make the fudge, Fee.”
    “All right.”
    They ran downstairs, and while Trudy went into the kitchen, Fee stayed behind and went into the pantry for the milk and butter. That was another thing that was different from everybody else’s house, having a kitchen without an icebox right in it. Her father and mother were forever talking about being American and what a wonderful thing it was to live in this wonderful free country where the police never came after you if you believed in things some people didn’t like. But they kept right on doing things and saying things nobody else in Barnett ever did. Except the Paiges.
    “Here comes Fran, up the hill,” Trudy called to her. “Who do you think’s with her?”
    “Who?”
    A vast unwillingness swept through her as she went back to the kitchen. If Fran was bringing that awful Jack Purney home, it would spoil the last chance to get back to the happy feeling she had had walking up the hill before she saw the black house. Jack’s forehead was all little tight pimples, like cut velvet, and once when Franny and he were dancing in the parlor and thought nobody could see, he slid his hand all over Fran’s chest, and she giggled and said “Don’t,” but you could tell she liked it.
    Fee glanced out of the window. Fran was laughing and looking up at Jack Purney and Fee said, “She flirts, that’s what’s so icky about her.” But the old wonder came, about whether she would be pretty too, and she was almost relieved when Fran’s face suddenly went shocked and angry, as she saw the porch.
    “Oh, Trudy,” Fee whispered, “it’s going to be just awful around here tonight. When my brother Eli gets home too, it’s going to be just terrible.”

THREE
    A S A SMALL CHILD, Stefan Ossipovitch Ivarin had heard many times that he was descended from a famous man, the great Lev Isaacovitch Ivarin who, in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, had been