Free First Papers by Laura Z. Hobson

door, turned back, and said, “Eli will be only too glad to take the bunting down for you, perhaps even tonight, under cover of darkness, in the perfect idiom of his surroundings.”
    His angry footsteps sounded through the dining room, through the parlor. The front door slammed. Alexandra’s sobs rose in volume, and the girls came running in, Fee burying her face against her mother’s waist.
    “The big crank,” Fran stormed. “The minute I’m a teacher, I’m going to move out of here and never even talk to him again.”
    “Move now,” Alexandra said, still crying. “Move tonight. Don’t you dare to call him such names while you stay here, that’s all.”
    “You call him things, you say he ruined your life, but if anybody else says a word, you stick up for him.”
    Alexandra stood over Fran, her plump body quivering with anger. “I at least understand him,” she said. “He has had a terrible life, from the moment he was born it was hard, and he has become a great man and you are too silly to know it.”
    “If that’s what great men are like!”
    “You think a great man is always an angel, day and night? You’re a child, you know nothing about life. But go ask anybody in the labor movement—”
    “Oh, God, the labor movement.”
    “Franny,” Fee pleaded.
    “Ask Eugene V. Debs,” Alexandra went on, “Debs himself would tell you your father is—”
    “Is it true,” Fee interrupted, “that Papa ruined your life?”
    “Of course not,” Alexandra said. She put her hand on the child’s shoulder. “Don’t look so frightened, Firuschka,” she said. “Nothing’s really wrong. This is the way we are, that’s all.”
    “Does Papa hate us?”
    “No, darling, no. He loves us, he would die for us. But when he’s in a bad mood, he can’t help it.”
    Fee stared at her for a moment and then said, “Could I go to the library?”
    “Go, both of you. Get some nice interesting books.”
    As they left, Alexandra thought, I’ll tell them about the bunting in the morning. She imagined the relief that would leap to their faces, and her spirits lifted. When the kitchen was at last tidy, she filled the kettle—she and Stefan had made tea-drinkers of the Paiges in the two years of their friendship—and went to change from her housedress. Again she thought of the bunting. She could hear the ripping sounds it would make as it was torn down, could see the porch columns emerge white again after their single night of mourning. She sat down suddenly on her bed.
    No idea, she thought wretchedly, none, from Christianity to the French Revolution to the first labor union, not one of them would ever have taken root if every parent gave up the moment a child disapproved. Had the children of the abolitionists all applauded when their parents spoke out first against slavery? Had the sons of Socrates and Galileo and Abraham Lincoln approved everything their Papa said or did? And even from a child’s point of view—would those young girls of sixteen and seventeen who jumped from skyscraper windows last Saturday, their hair streaming upwards in flames—would they have disapproved of a house draped in black to mourn them?
    No, she thought. No. It is impossible. To say nothing to the world? To do not even one small thing? No, it is not possible.
    The doorbell rang, and she hurried to answer it.

FOUR
    They stood there, surveying the bunting, not only Alida and Evan, but their son Garrett and his wife Letty, who still lived with them. Alexandra touched her finger to the switch and flooded the porch with light; all four looked about them once again, but it was Alida who spoke first.
    “Oh, Alexandra,” she said in her high little voice. “It’s a fine idea. I think we’ll do it too.”
    Gratitude and warmth surged through Alexandra, and as she welcomed them into the house, explaining Stefan’s absence as well as she could, saying the girls would be right back, offering them tea, she thought for the hundredth time how