Laura Z. Hobson

by Gentleman's Agreement

  “For God’s sake, Belle.”

  “All right, be high and mighty. Just the same, if people are going to think Dick’s wife is Jewish!”

  He scarcely listened to the swift words, foaming with self-justification. “All children are so decent to start with.” His mother’s words sounded louder in his mind than Belle’s. “So none of you fell for it at school or anywhere.” But one wasn’t fixed forever in childhood patterns, in spite of what the Catholics believed about the first seven years. Those early patterns could be shifted; new values could be superimposed.

  “Stop wetting your pants,” he said roughly. “I’m not going to drag you into it. Nobody thought you were a miner or an Okie, did they?”

  When it was over, he sat glaring at the telephone as if it were Belle herself. There was a knock at the door, and he called out, “Yes?” glad to be distracted from his exasperation. Miss Wales came in, a dozen letters in her hand. “Some answers,” she said, and put them on his desk. The envelopes were already slit, and he smiled at her. From the first day she had treated him as if she’d been his secretary for years. She offered him co-operation, friendliness, and no deference. He liked the way she looked, though he supposed it was a little “bold.” Her blond hair was an elaboration of curls, her skin pale against the ripe mouth. High cheekbones made her seem Scandinavian, Slavic, something foreign and interesting. She had the curious New York speech that he was not yet used to, plus some extra oddities that intrigued his ear. When she said “bottle” or “settle,” she left the double t’s out completely, a little the way a Scot did. He had tried, with amusement once when he was alone, to mimic her pronunciation. “Bah-ull.” “Seh-ull.” No, he couldn’t quite do it.

  He began on the letters. Just what he’d expected. Nothing new. These were the cliches of the thing, really. Yet as he read on, anger simmered low in him.

  “Yes to the Greens and no to the Greenbergs?” Miss Wales asked good-humoredly.

  “At least promises to let the Greens know if any reservation gets canceled.” He passed the letters over as he read them. This was from the first batch of inquiries to resort hotels in Miami, Palm Beach, Bermuda. They’d gone off in pairs, on blank stationery, and on the same day. Each was signed, “Philip Green,” but one of each pair included the phrase, “for myself and my cousin, Capt. Joseph Greenberg,” while the other made no mention of this cousin. The ones without bore Phil’s own address; the ones with had Minify’s address on Park Avenue. He and John had planned this move together, to avoid confusion about the replies. Even the “care of Minify” was unnecessary—“Apt. 18 A” with the street and house number would do it. Jessie Minify, who looked on the whole thing, John had wryly reported, as an exciting kind of secret-service game to which she was eager to lend a hand, had taken on the task of readdressing these letters to the office or seeing them safely into John’s brief case.

  “Dear old Jess,” John had remarked. “She adores your idea. Of course she won’t give you away. She’s dying to give a big party and ask all the antisemites she can think of and introduce you—she didn’t say any of this, you know, Phil, but I rather think I’m right—as ‘this nice Jewish man, Phil Green, did you hear, Jewish.’”

  Phil had laughed.

  “Anyway, I know she thinks of antisemitism as something sort of naughty, like gambling for too high stakes or not holding your liquor.”

  Phil finished reading the replies and waited for Miss Wales. She knew the only purpose of these letters was research for the series. She flipped over another letter, smiling and unperturbed. With the best will in the world, Phil told himself, they don’t give a damn because it’s nothing that’ll ever touch them.

  “I’ll start a file for replies, now,” she said cheerfully. “There’ll be lots more tomorrow.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll be good material for your pieces.” She gave him a look that was part encouragement, part boredom. “If your name was Irving Green or Saul or something, it wouldn’t have worked this way.” He looked at her quickly.

  “We’ll have a cross check all right.”

  “I changed mine,” she said casually. “Did you?”

  “Wales? No, mine was always Green. What was yours?” His voice had shown no surprise.

  “Walovsky, Estelle Walovsky. I couldn’t take it. About applications, I mean.” She shrugged, matter-of-factly. “So once I wrote the same firm two letters, same as you’re doing. I wrote the Elaine Wales one after they’d said there were no openings to my first letter. I got the job all right.”

  “Damn.”

  “You know what firm that was?” She waited. She seemed to be enjoying herself. He shook his head. “Smith’s Weekly,” she said demurely.

  “You’re kidding!”

  “The great liberal magazine,” she went on with a kind of impishness, “that fights injustice on all sides. It slays me. I love it.”

  “Brother! Does Minify—”

  “I guess he can’t bother thinking about the small fry. That’s Jordan’s stuff. If anybody snitched, you know there’d be some excuse for throwing them out.” She jerked her thumb toward the window, and Phil stared at it till she dropped her hand. “So, anyway, I thought maybe you’d changed yours sometime,” she went on. “I mean, when I heard you were.”

  “You heard it? You mean before I told you?”

  “Sure. Everybody knew it the next day.”

  Then his job of “working it in” had been done for him? But how? Who had bothered? And how was it done? Never in all his life did he remember saying to one human about another, “He’s Jewish, you know.” That must have been spoken about him at once. By Anne Dettrey? By Frank Tingler? By Bert McAnny? Possibly Minify himself, to help launch the thing? No. He could not imagine John Minify saying the words, either. “He’s Catholic.” “He’s a Jew.” To talk of another man in the vocabulary of religious distinctions would go against Minify’s grain as it would against his own.

  He waved to the letters she was gathering together.

  “Does that kind of stuff get you sore?”

  “Not any more. Yes, sure it does. So what?” She shrugged, and with the same imperturbable look in her eyes she left the room. He looked after her. The Nordic type; the Aryan type. He lit a cigarette. He must search out that article Life had run a couple of years ago by Hooton of Harvard about the balderdash of race and types. Or read Hooton’s book. Suddenly he grinned. He’d have a little fun telling Minify about things.

  The telephone rang again. Maybe this time.

  “Hello—oh, Kathy. You back?”

  “It was such a lovely witty present, Phil. First I laughed and then I sort of hugged it.”

  “I’m glad. You’ll be getting a grimy note from Tom sometime—he went nuts over the gun. When can I see you?”

  “Any time.”

  “Right now, tonight, tomorrow, I missed you these four days. I wish we were married.”

  “Phil.”

  So, he had said it at last. Here, at an office desk, his elbow on a stack of notes and papers, into a perforated black disk he had said the words he’d forced back into his throat all that evening before she’d gone away.

  “It’s a hell of a way to say it,” he said, “isn’t it?” There was no answer. “Kathy? You still there?”

  “I missed you, too,” she said slowly. “Just awfully.”

  He saw the picture when he came in. The old one that had been over the fireplace lay flat on the piano, and his present hung in its place. Pleasure darted through him, but he said nothing. She knew he had seen it, and remained silent with him. He took her into his arms.

  Standing tight to each other, saying nothing, they knew no importance other than the one streaming close about them in this double admission of longing. The tentative was gone. The surprise was gone. Acknowledgment, compulsion, sureness—these they shared.

  Later, leaning over her, he looked at her and found tranquility and an odd return of shyness.

  “Darling. My be
autiful Kathy.”

  She smiled and turned away from his asking, knowing that he wanted her to say it, not knowing how to say it.

  “You don’t look grim and dark now, Phil.”

  “You don’t either.”

  “Isn’t it—” She looked at him and then away. The question hung in the air.

  “When it’s all mixed with being in love, yes.” He waited. “So damn beautiful you can’t bear it, I mean me.”

  “Me, too.”

  All night they forgot to sleep, except in snatches of drowsy silence which were half sleep. They talked with the candor that could come only in intimacy and confessed love. Already each felt a new loyalty to the other sketching in its first outlines beyond the old loyalty clinging to anything past. She could make him see more now, about her marriage, and he more about his stubborn suffering for Betty. Each had sought, each had hoped and watched for a new beginning, and now together they had found the way to it.

  “Should we meet our families first?” Kathy said once. “Or after we’re married and surprise them?”

  “Which way do you want ?”

  “Any.”

  Nothing was settled, no question fully answered, through all the hours until the windows showed graying streaks around the drawn shades. There was no time or need now for decisions. There was all the time.

  Only when he was dressed and sitting on the edge of her bed for a last cigarette did they come to specifics. “Darling, I’ll tell Mom in the morning. Come and meet her tomorrow? I’ll stop by after the office.”

  “All right. And Tom?”

  “Let’s have him get to know you first. Then after he likes you we’ll tell him. He’ll be so happy.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure. I guess it’s better for him to like you first, don’t you?”

  “Then maybe tomorrow’d be better after he’s asleep?”

  He nodded. “We’ll take him to a movie together for a start. That’ll make him all easy with you.” He took her into his arms. His clothed body, his sleeved arm around her still bare shoulders, shot a lewdness through him, unwanted, dismaying. He spoke somberly. “You’re not sorry, darling, about Tom?”

  “Oh, Phil. You know I’m glad.” She hesitated. “It’ll be almost as if my marriage hadn’t all been wasted—as if all those years I’d had a boy growing up for me.”

  He suddenly stood up. “I’m a Christ-bitten fool,” he said, and heard how thick his voice was. Then he left her.

  Behind, alone, hearing him walk through the living room, hearing him click off the lights they’d forgotten, guessing that he looked once more at the framed print of the Toledo over the fireplace, Kathy lay in a confusion of fatigue and happiness that banished sleep for another while. He couldn’t know, she would tell him sometime after they were married, but now she couldn’t utter the words to tell him how right he was with her and for her.

  She hadn’t expected it. She hadn’t guessed that with his moodiness, his complexity, he would have so simple and driving a power to move her. If she had speculated, she’d have guessed he’d be a nervous, unsure lover.

  It mattered so much—no marriage had half a chance if the two were constantly frustrate or anxious about sex. Phil, she thought. Darling.

  I’ll make him happy, I can help him, I’m good for being married. All the rest of it about Betty will disappear without his even knowing when it finally slides off into nothingness. I can make Tom feel right; I’m good with children; why wouldn’t I be with this one when I want to so much? And we’ll have our own.

  She reached for a final cigarette, changed her mind, and turned out the light. In the dark she thanked something for having made it happen and did not try to name what it was she thanked.

  Lack of sleep didn’t matter, Phil thought, when you felt this good. His mother’s pleasure over the news that they’d marry in a week or two had only made him indulgent, not uneasy and embarrassed. Whistling, he finished dressing and went back to his desk for the morning’s batch of hotel letters. Mrs. Green was still sitting there. Tom was already out.

  “The story about Miss Wales made Kathy laugh, too,” he said. He didn’t want the talk to get back to personal levels. “She was delighted I hadn’t told Minify yet—wants to be around when I dish it out.”

  Kathy had been angry about Dr. Craigie, had sniffed over Bill Johnson of the Times. He had forgotten to tell her about Belle’s telephone call. One of those shame-caused repressions? Sometime around midnight they’d remembered they’d had no dinner and they’d gone into the small kitchen for scrambled eggs and toast and milk. While they were there, they'd been able again to talk of impersonal things, and she’d wanted to know “everything that’s happened so far.” Sitting there, while she cooked for him, talking of his work, was like a rehearsal of married life. But he could report only episodes; the nebulous world of his own developing feeling he had to inhabit alone. So far, even for himself it remained uncharted.

  “That thing about Miss Wales is the only thing that’s been amusing,” Mrs. Green said. He came to with a start. The letters were still in his hand.

  “Funny thing,” he said, “the way I felt so man-to-man with Miss Wales when she pitched me that one. Asking her right out how she felt, as if we both were really on the inside. I keep forgetting it’s just an act.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully. “I suppose that’s what’s called ‘Identification.’”

  “I didn’t think it would come so fast.”

  “What does Kathy think about it?”

  “I told you.”

  “I mean about your doing it at all?”

  “Oh. She fretted about it some, pitfalls, stuff like that. She’s all for it.”

  “When’s Dave due?” she asked without transition.

  “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next month. You know the army.”

  He went off, ready for Dave, ready for more letters, ready for work and effort and anything. Never try to dismay a man, he thought in the taxi, about anything in the world the morning after he’s made love to his girl. Kathy’s face came back, hesitant, a touch surprised. A primitive sense of achievement and self-satisfaction filled him. She’d thought he’d be a goddam intellectual about everything! In the half-dark of the cab he sat back, trying to ready himself for the moment just ahead, the cab pulling up, the flag shoved upright, the making of change and the offer of the tip. The office was there, the series was there, the watching himself and asking himself were all just ahead of him.

  “Identification.” In a way he was kidding himself. Always he knew that for him it would come to an end when he gave the word. That must make it different. He alone had an escape clause in his contract.

  A dart of relief nipped at him.

  Jee-sus, he thought then. I’m goddam smug myself.

  Of it, yet also apart. The actor on the boards and the watching audience in the dark beyond. The lumberjack with his ax and the tree awaiting the blow. The invasion barge and the empty beach. The giver and taker at once.

  It was fallacy. It could achieve nothing true. He’d embarked on a sort of Dostoevskian insoluble, dark, brooding, ending only in uncertainty. He should never have started it. At best it was an approximation; at worst a fraud.

  The taxi stopped. The driver’s arm reached out to the white flag on the meter. Phil opened the door. On the street, sunlight blazed; cold air bit at him. Upstairs he went directly to Minify’s office. Minify was alone.

  “It’s no good, John,” he began. “The damn idea’s a phony from the word go.”

  John looked up, startled.

  “It’s glib and trumped up and fake,” Phil went on. “I’ve got an ‘out’ all the time, and no real Jew has. My unconscious knows about that ‘out’ even if I forget it.”

  “Hold on, there—”

  “I’m starting over. There’ll be some other angle that isn’t slick like this one.”

  Now John cut him short. “For God’s sake, stop psychoanalyzing it.” His words were brisk with irrita
tion. “It’s a good angle—nobody said it was perfect. But it’s a new springboard into the thing, and that’s good.” Phil started to answer, but Minify waved him silent. “You had an ‘out’ all the time you were a miner, didn’t you?”

  “Sure. So has a miner.”

  “Not the usual, run-of-the-mill miner, to mix a phrase.” He sat back; the annoyed look left him. “There was nothing slick and fake in that series, Phil. You’re just having the usual attack of ‘it’s lousy—I’m lousy.’”

  Phil thought, Maybe that’s all it comes to, and wished he’d thought it over longer before coming in. Then he saw Minify smile.

  “And if the first couple articles do turn out n.g.,” John said calmly, “we’ve got a good ‘out’ ourselves.” He kicked the wastebasket beside the desk.

  Phil looked down at the basket and laughed. “Escape clause,” he said. “O.K. I’d overlooked that.”

  Reassured, he went back to his office and got to work. It was after six before he was ready to leave. Kathy had sounded happy when he phoned, and tired, and had suggested waiting until eight so she could nap. He might do a spot of sleeping himself. All afternoon he’d worked with his usual intensity; he was writing now as well as carrying on the research. The writing was going well; it pleased him. But he was tired, too.

  He went through the reception room, dim and emptied of its authors and salesmen and portfolios. Bert McAnny, the assistant art editor, and Anne Dettrey were out in the hall, waiting for the elevator.

  “I’m bushed,” Anne greeted him. “Getting the book to bed gets worse every issue.”

  “I thought we weren’t to call it ‘the book’ around here,” Bert said. He pushed the down button again.

  “True, true,” Anne said. “Anyway, what about a getting-to-bed drink? Sound cozy?” They all laughed. “How’s about it?”

  They decided on the Oak Room and walked to the Plaza. Phil felt at ease with them, as though he’d been on the staff a long time. Shoptalk was what you missed when you worked at home, the lazily given “inside dope” that seemed curiously important: “Say, Luce paid fifty thousand for Churchill’s articles”—“When do they start?”—“February. I hear he’s fighting with Field for the autobiography”—“Jim told me the bidding was around a million already.” As they turned into Fifty-ninth Street, Bert began to talk with relish about a new illustrator he’d discovered. “He’s a kind of modern Leyendecker,” he said. “Same outfit in the army, and the minute I saw some doodles he did, I knew he had it.”