Laura Z. Hobson

by Gentleman's Agreement

  “I got stood up.” She laughed. “I’m just wrapping presents. Why?”

  “I can’t leave her alone here. I’d be afraid to. But I’ve got it at last, and I thought, I mean, I’d give a lot to tell you about it.”

  “The angle? What is it?”

  “You wouldn’t—have you any feeling about getting in a cab and coming over for a bit?” It was awkward, saying it. He didn’t care. “It’s just I’d hate to go into it on a phone and I’m pretty set up.”

  “I’ll be there in half an hour. What’s your address again?

  He went to the kitchen for ice cubes. He went to his room, changed his shirt, looked in the mirror, and remembered he hadn’t shaved till afternoon, anyway. Then he went into the bathroom and got out the electric razor he almost never used. Once over quickly would do it. He tried to phrase a beginning for her so she’d see what a gold mine of a thing this was. Nothing phrased.

  His mind raced. There’d be snags, complications, problems. So all right. Every second made him surer that there’d be validity to what he’d find in himself as time went on. There was no rush. Minify had told him that two or three times. If it did take six weeks or nine months—

  Nine months. He didn’t usually think in platitudes, yet he kept coming back to this one. He knew he couldn’t delay the series for that length of time, rush or no rush. He was using it as a device to get at something arcane and buried. He put the razor down and lit a cigarette. He smoked half an inch of it before he noticed that the razor was still buzzing. He clicked it off and nodded to his image in the mirror.

  Yes, that was it. That’s what he’d been trying to articulate to himself. There was a rationale behind his idea, hesitant, unprovable, but there. Just as the embryo in the womb reproduced in nine months the whole evolutionary process of the race, maybe he could reproduce in himself in a short time the whole history of persecution—

  “I wish she’d get here.” He finished shaving and went in to his mother’s room once more.

  “Want anything?”

  “No. I’m all right. Don’t bring them in to meet me, will you? Some other time.”

  He shook his head. “I didn't call Minify. Just this Katherine Lacey.”

  “Is she nice?”

  “Fine.” Never had he made a confidant of her and he couldn’t begin now. “There was some old gag about Michael Arlen,” he suddenly said. “Wait a minute. How’d it go?” She saw him screw up his eyes and remembered him at ten or twelve, laboring over homework. “Oh, I’ve got it—train of thought is a wonderful gadget.”

  “What was it?”

  “Somebody says to him, ‘Mr. Arlen, do tell me, is it true that you’re an Armenian? You sound so British.’” He was mimicking the accent of a British dowager. She laughed.” And Arlen answered, ‘Would anyone say he was Armenian if he wasn’t Armenian?’” She laughed again and he with her. “We would, wouldn’t we?”

  “If there was a point to it, and there is.”

  The bell rang.

  Behind the closing door, she lay back, her book abandoned. If he could always be the way he is now, she thought. Direct, mobilized, all because he is fired with this idea. He doesn’t even stop to think of the difficult parts—there will be many, there would have to be. He could change in five minutes from man of thought to man of action. She had seen him do it when he decided to join the Marine Corps. He signed for OCS and at once he was the officer. The things ahead he ignored, the hardships, the dangers. The inevitable problems of the interrupted career, the separation from Tommy, he had shoved off for future considering. He was that way now—on an island of rock after muddy floundering.

  Tom. He hadn’t even thought yet whether he’d have to tell Tom about it or not, and that if he did, a child would surely find it impossible to follow or understand. It could start a confusion that might go pretty deep. She sighed. Phil would find the way to handle it, if it came, as he had always found the way for the boy’s problems.

  “It’s nice to have a mommy, isn’t it, Daddy?” Three years ago that was, possibly four, with the high voice of a little boy asking, and the solemn eyes looking up at Phil. “Tip and Sky have a mommy.”

  “Sure it is. It’s swell.”

  “I haven’t got a mommy. Why haven’t I got a mommy?”

  “She died when you were so little you couldn’t even walk or talk. Imagine not even knowing how to walk or talk.”

  “Me?”

  “Yep. But anyway, you’ve got me and Gram, and that’s a lot.” He had lifted Tom to his lap. “And someday I might marry again and you might have a second mother. Would you like that?” The tone so ordinary, as if he were asking whether he’d like a new train, another picture book. From time to time the small conversation would happen again, taking a new form as Tom got older. Always Phil met it in that same key. Always he used it to enlist Tom’s support, long before the event, signing up an ally in plenty of time. If it were to happen, it would hold no shock of surprise for Tom.

  Voices came up from the stair well. Phil must have gone down to open the door himself. No words came to her, just the two voices. A woman’s voice and Phil’s. That was good to hear again. It would be good to see Phil married again before she died.

  “Oh, Phil, it’s so attractive. All those books.”

  “It’s not done yet. Those packages are pictures.” He was startled at how different having her in his house was from his being in hers. She was looking around, taking her coat off, avoiding a direct look at him.

  “I wish I had a fireplace that works. Mine’s only a fake one.”

  “I lit it just before you got here.”

  She sat in the chair close to the fire, and he busied himself with drinks. The moment he had opened the big door downstairs and had seen her waiting there, trying the knob to see if it would turn, physical awareness of her had swooped back into him. The impatience to tell her his idea for the series, to blurt it out and see her interest and approval, seemed not half as big a thing as just finding her beyond the glass-paned door, letting her pass in front of him to go upstairs.

  “What is it, Phil? Tell me fast. The drinks’ll keep.”

  “I will in a minute.” He put the glass down, looked toward the rear of the house. “I’ll just check about—” He motioned with his head and walked out of the room.

  “I think I’ve got the accommodator for you,” she called after him.

  She could hear his footsteps on bare flooring. Then his voice, “All fixed?” and his mother’s answer, “Of course. I’ll call if I need anything.” He came back and this time he closed the living-room door behind him. Without moving her lips, she felt as if she were smiling. He had gone out just to be able to close the door without making a point of it. She waited for him to say something.

  She had thought about him a great deal. She’d even told Jane about him, casually, but she’d done it. She’d never told Jane about anybody else since Bill, at least not after just two evenings. Jane had said at once, “Married?” and she’d answered, “Oh, cut it.” But she’d added, “He’s a widower with a child and a mother.” They’d both made a face at the last word. Then she’d changed the subject.

  Now she sat here in this delightful room, alone with him, yet knowing that his mother and his son were in the house too, so that there was none of the raffish air of visiting a man’s apartment. She took the drink Phil gave her.

  “You’re not telling it to me,” she said.

  “Funny. I thought I’d spit it out the minute you got here.”

  “You sounded awfully excited.”

  “I am. There’ll be stumbling blocks and holes, and I just don’t give a damn. I’ll come to them when I get to them.”

  “That’s the only way to do anything worth doing, I guess.”

  Suddenly from the side of her chair where he’d been standing, he was bending down over her. She was wearing the same dress she’d worn at the Minifys’ that first night. Her throat stretched long as she put her head back to look up.
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  He kissed her hair and then her mouth. He was in the wrong position; it was a half kiss. He twisted her shoulder and kissed her lips as if he had just fought his way to her. She pushed back from him and stood up.

  For one second he looked at her. Then he took her into his arms. He heard her breath catch; he felt the first resistance go slack. He kissed her, and this time she kissed him.

  “Kathy, this is something. It’s—for me, it’s—”

  “I know.”

  He kissed her again. Everything in the world was gone except this. He couldn’t talk, explain, ask, question. Work, ideas, the future, nothing counted.

  “Phil, wait now.”

  He let his arms drop. He looked at her. Then he felt easy again. She was happy. Her eyes shone. Her breasts rose and fell as she breathed hard. She wasn’t going to warn him, preach at him, reveal some secret that meant there was nothing possible.

  “I have to just wait,” she said. “You go away and let me sit here a minute.”

  He crossed to the chair where he’d set his own drink down. Again, an elation was in him, but not of triumph as the other had been, only of hope. He was shaken by it, tender with it. He wanted to thank her, for he knew not what. He wanted to talk to her, to kiss her again, to tell her of Betty and not of Betty’s death alone. He just sat, and coursing through him, like a drug to heal, ran the hoping.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MINIFY LOOKED UP, ready to be pleased. On his desk two Christmas packages, stiff with glassy red bows, caught the morning sunlight. A dozen letters, their engraved tops concealed by the addressed envelopes slipped over their edges, lay before him. He shoved them back. On the side of the desk the advance issue of Smith’s, stamped MAKE READY, caught his eye. He shoved that aside, too.

  “Must be good,” he said. “You sounded top of the world on the phone.”

  “Yeah.” Phil’s voice was quiet. Minify was no man to “sell” an idea to; you just told him about it. “Remember I said I’d fall on my face before I’d put Professor Lieberman or anybody else through a quiz about this?” He saw Minify nod. “I guess this goes back to that reluctance. And that sense that I’d have to go at it from inside.”

  Minify’s whole attention was on him.

  “Anyway, I got—hell, let me just give you the title for the series.” He waited while Minify clicked up a switch to the interoffice communicator and said, “No calls, Mary.” When the switch went down again, Phil said, without emphasis, “I was Jewish for three months.”

  Minify was reaching for a cigarette. His hand stopped on the way to the package.

  “Christ, Phil.” He hitched himself forward in his chair.

  “Or six weeks or however long, till I get the feel of it.” He saw Minify’s lips repeating the title, testing it; saw his eyes go to the cover of the make-ready, visualizing it there.

  “It’s a hell of a stunt, Phil.”

  “Usually these ‘I’ titles give me a pain. But there’s such a wallop to this one.” Minify nodded. “It won’t be just the same,” Phil added, “but some of it will.”

  Again Minify nodded. He looked at Phil thoughtfully. “I knew you’d get the series going somehow, in spite of the sticky start. I didn’t think—but who’d ever think of this? Can you get away with it?”

  “If you and Mrs. Minify and Kathy won’t give me away. I haven’t told Kathy yet, but I bet—”

  Minify took over. For unbroken stretches he explored the possibilities, a fever of planning in him. Then he fell silent, to listen to Phil. For half an hour they mapped out a campaign to follow, always allowing for the improvising Phil would have to do as he went along. Clubs, resorts, apartment leases, social life. Interviews for jobs, applications to medical schools. Perhaps some trips to “trouble spots” that came into the news. Getting to know people of all types in New York. “That’ll be the toughest part for me,” Phil remarked. “I’m not gregarious by nature. But O.K.” And when at last both of them were skimmed clean of their top ideas, Phil stretched. He felt good.

  “There won’t be one bloody thing that’ll be news about clubs and jobs and hotels,” he said. “I might chuck all that stuff except for the subjective reactions.”

  “Any way you want. When do you start?”

  “What’s the matter with now? I told you I wanted to work in the office for a while—I’ll get it going right here.”

  Minify reached toward the buzzer but drew back without touching it. “Remember you said nobody’d read the goddam things?”

  “They’ll read this.”

  “Damn right they will.”

  They grinned at each other, and Phil said, “Well, I’ll report progress once in a while.”

  Minify said, “Any time,” and tapped the buzzer. Mary Cresson, his middle-aged secretary who had followed him from job to job, came in, her book and pencil ready.

  “Mary, Mr. Green’s going to work inside a couple of weeks. Maybe more. Get Jordan to fix him up, will you?”

  “Mr. Kingland’s office is empty.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll go along with you,” Phil said.

  But outside the door, he heard, “Hey, Phil,” and went back again. John had pulled back the sheaf of letters and had his pen ready for signing them.

  “Dig up a working title, will you?” he said. “For the file we keep on Futures.”

  “Right.”

  “We won’t tell the real one to anybody at all; it’d give your show away around here.”

  “What about just scheduling it as ‘Antisemitism in the U.S.’?”

  John jotted it down. “And what about help? Secretary for all the letters and phone calls on it?”

  “I hadn’t thought. I’ve never had help.”

  “Might as well have a girl assigned, part-time probably. Somebody good. She’d have to know too, wouldn't she?”

  “Why?” They each thought about it. “Can’t see why even she should know a damn thing about it. Suppose I were really Jewish and you’d given me this assignment? What difference would it make to her or anybody?”

  “Sure. You’re right.” Again he tapped the buzzer. “Mary, check secretarial, would you, and assign a smart girl to Mr. Green for as much time as he’ll need?”

  “Yes, Mr. Minify.”

  “No hurry about it,” Phil said. “I always make a lot of notes first.”

  But when he went to the office that was to be his, he made no effort to get started on his notes. It was a pleasant, two-windowed room, facing south. The austere shaft of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center was right in front of him, a little to the left. Against the gray of the winter sky, it stood like some monolith, unravageable. He stayed at the window, looking at it, and then sat down at his desk.

  From beyond the partition came guffaws of sudden laughter. “Somebody’s told a dirty story,” he decided, and smiled, too. Next door was the art department, Miss Cresson had told him. That meant loud discussions, many visitors, arguments. He knew. But when he was working well, noise never bothered him.

  He tried the typewriter. He called an office boy and sent for stationery, pencils, ink, clips, a jar of rubber cement, and a pair of long shears.

  “I’m one of those guys that paste in added paragraphs or rewrites,” he explained to the surprised face. “Scotch tape’ll do if there’s no cement.”

  But after the supplies had come, he still made no motion to begin work. Lazily he gave himself over to remembering last night. For two hours more he and Kathy had talked of themselves, in the halting half-openness that was all the openness possible during beginnings. No matter how direct and free you wished to make every sentence, and they had each wished it, there were all the blocks that kept standing up, barricades to full revelation. Once, at the fireplace with his back half turned to her, he’d managed to get out one of the things that pressed hardest to be said.

  “I’m one of those solemn guys, I guess. You know—always fine to get in the hay, but a wife’s what I’m really hoping for sometime.
”

  And from behind him, uncertain, troubled, she’d answered, “Anybody does. A wife, or a husband. If it turns out that way.”

  He’d never heard that note in her voice. She’d always seemed so unruffled and sure, the way she had when she’d hit the wrong keys at the piano. But last night, after she’d said that, he’d wondered whether there weren’t sad dark places that she stumbled through in her mind as there were in his.

  “Any woman would rather be married,” she’d gone on, “but if it’s been a mistake once, you’re afraid.”

  He’d taken her into his arms then, just holding her. She said nothing, nor did he. Yet each of them—he had felt it— each, in a secret and separate cave of emotion, was considering the words, married, wife, husband. He had kissed her again, and suddenly, this time, something was promised between them. He had become sure, violently sure, that the moment would come when they’d be in bed together. Not yet. Not for a while. But sometime.

  Remembering now, he shoved his chair back from the desk and went back to the window. It had just begun to snow. There was no wind, and these first flakes floated on the tranquil air. Delight stirred in him, memory of the glee he’d always felt with the first snow as a child in Minnesota. The long, impatient wait was at last rewarded—the sled ready on the back porch could at last be used. There was always a kind of victory to it. One had always waited so long.

  “I’ve waited so long.”

  He was seeing her again tonight. He never had got around to telling her what he was going to do. Two or three times she’d tried to bring him back to the series, but he couldn’t make the transition to the impersonal world of ideas. That first talking to each other on the level of feeling and not of biography was too engrossing. That first realizing that she wanted him to kiss her, as he wanted her, was too heady. He’d been afraid to shift their mood. “This isn’t the time to talk about work,” he’d said. “I’ll save it for tomorrow.”

  The office door opened. Mary Cresson put her head in.

  “Mr. Minify wondered if you’d like to have luncheon with him and Frank Tingler and Bert McAnny?”