Laura Z. Hobson

by Gentleman's Agreement

  “Sure.”

  “And how you asked if a dead brother’s ghost could really get into his twin’s body and make him dance and sing and talk like him?”

  “Kathy said it was just pretending.” His eyes brightened in memory, and he began to laugh.

  “Well, I’m pretending I’m Jewish for the stuff I’m writing now.”

  “You mean it’s like a movie or a game?”

  “Sort of a grown-up game.”

  “You mean you’re not Jewish but just as if you had a twin brother’s ghost in you, like the movie, and that one is Jewish?”

  “Something like that.” He grinned at Tom and in a singular flare of pleasure leaned toward him and gave him a shadow-box punch to the shoulder. The kid had caught something up into a phrase for him. Tom punched back and giggled. He often took recourse in this silly giggle when something was happening which was pleasant but beyond him. Now he immediately masked his face with severity, plunged both hands deep into his pockets, and looked at his father in man-to-man deliberation.

  “D’you suppose I could let Jimmy in on the game, too?”

  “Too? You mean you want to get in on it yourself?”

  “Can I, Dad? What do you have to do?”

  Phil didn’t answer. His mind darted ahead, skimmed the possibilities that might be there for a boy of eight. He remembered the navy’s searchlights, picking over dark, ominous shores and beaches.

  “Look, Tom, this isn’t a game a little boy would know how to play right,” he said finally. “I’d like it if you’d just promise not even to tell anybody it’s a game. Would you promise that?”

  Tom turned serious, to match his father’s new look. He placed the backs of his hands hard against each other, lacing his fingers stiffly. “That’s our special G2 sign for the pledge of honor.”

  “O.K.”

  For the first time, Mrs. Green spoke. “What’ll you tell Jimmy?” Tom looked quickly from her to his father. A sly look came into his face. “White fibs aren’t wrong for G2,” he said, “even if they stick needles in you.” He shuddered deliciously. “I’ll tell him I haven’t any information.”

  It didn’t satisfy Phil, but he let it go. Tom rushed away from the table to get his books and the new stamps he’d collected for trading at school. Mrs. Green sat very still. She looked tired again these last two or three days. He asked when she was to have her second check-up at Dr. Craigie’s and at Dr. Abrahams’, but as she answered he was suddenly hearing Bill Jayson’s rueful “Hell of a note, isn’t it? Then they’d think you were hiding it.”

  Tom clattered back on his way out.

  “Wait a minute,” Phil said. “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.” Tom stopped. “To tell him you haven’t any information.”

  “Oh.” He looked crestfallen.

  “Maybe you’d better say you asked me and I said I was partly Jewish.”

  “O.K. But not say it’s the ghost part!” His face brightened again, and he banged out of the house.

  “That’s better, I think,” his mother said, but Phil didn’t answer. From his room came sounds which said Dave was getting up. In a way, he thought, it’s always going to be true, at that.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “SORT OF TRIPLE PLAY,” Anne was saying, “till he finds an apartment big enough.” She glanced at Kathy, then across to Phil, ignoring Dave as if they were three doctors in consultation and he the patient who could listen but not object.

  “It’s awfully bright,” Kathy said.

  “Certainly better than giving up this grand job he’s hooked,” Anne said, “and going back to California.”

  “Nuts. I wouldn’t consider it.” The patient refused to be relegated to the passive role any longer. “I’ll widen my field of operations, that’s all. Brooklyn, the Bronx, the suburbs.”

  Dave’s firmness put, if not a period to the discussion, at least a semicolon, and it came to a temporary halt while they all shifted positions in their chairs, sipped their brandy or coffee, and looked appraisingly at him and each other. Behind them, ignored by common consent, was the cluttered table they had just left. They were at Kathy’s; it was Claudia’s day off, and the girls had got dinner together. Anne had been efficient and gay, offering some joking comment every time she came in from the kitchen. Kathy had been quiet and so clearly happy that she sent forth to Phil an indescribable assurance that being a wife, a mother, a provider of food and comfort was her natural role. In two days they’d be married and alone together and their life truly launched.

  “You won’t find a thing anywhere,” Anne began again to Dave, “and anyway”—she gestured to the whole room—“this would be a promotion from my dump. By summer you’ll find a sublease at least.”

  “Your place is lovely, Anne,” Kathy protested, “even with all that glamorous mob hiding the color scheme.”

  Lazily Phil wondered whether there really was an undercurrent of antagonism between the two or whether he imagined it. It didn’t matter. In this exchange, Kathy’s voice again wore its silken envelope as it had once or twice at Jane’s party. That no longer mattered either. For now he knew it for a clue that she was straining a bit for that air of suavity which so many people in and around New York seemed to regard as desirable. It was silly and a little insecure, but no longer did it antagonize him; rather he felt it a touching recourse for her to have to take.

  Dave was again resisting Anne’s plan and he let them argue. He’d been as astonished as Dave when she’d come out with it. It was fantastic, some ten days after she’d met him, but no more so than that the housing shortage might force him to turn down the Quirich-Jones offer. In his own concern for Dave—the last two long-distance calls to Carol and the kids were tempered with discouragement—he had kept himself mute in this discussion for fear he’d weight it to Anne’s disadvantage. Even a temporary move would be a good deal of nuisance for her. Why had she offered it? Was she falling in love with Dave, married though he was? “It’s you she’s really interested in,” Dave had said casually one night. “I mean if you weren’t engaged.” No, her motive in this offer was surely free of anything personal. Lonely people were often the generous ones, as if they unconsciously sought ways to prove themselves needed and important. Anne was looking at Dave directly, on her face only a matter-of-factness, undecorated by sympathy or generosity.

  “So it’s a cinch,” she summed up. “Kathy moves in with Phil; I move here; you and your wife and kids move into my place. No cots in the living room.”

  “We’ll see.” Dave took her empty glass without asking her and said, “May I?” to Kathy.

  “Let me,” Kathy said. “How’s yours?” He raised a half-amber glass, and she turned to Phil, repeating the question. She looked not at his drink but at him. Her face still wore the smile she’d just given Dave, friendly, wanting to fetch things for welcomed guests, but this private glance was a question for Phil alone. “Did they?”

  His eyebrows moved up as if in a shrug, but a dart of unwillingness pricked at him again. “We’re practically arranging an affair for them,” Kathy had said last night, “deserting them in her apartment in the middle of the night.” Her words came back, casual and even gay. There was no reproof in them, no prying for a counter remark that might consolidate her assumptions into fact. She was willing for them to be in bed together; she would not turn to the moralist’s vocabulary for terms like “adultery” any more than he.

  Yet the very notion had nicked reluctance into life like a touched nerve. He had pulled back sharply last night from speculation and now again he did the same thing. He gave Kathy a bland smile, waved to the piano, and said, “You wouldn’t play that sonata for us, would you?”

  Instead, she opened the phonograph and clicked a switch. A record must have been lying on the turntable, for at once the room filled with the lilting cadence of music which Phil did not know. He listened, trying to identify it, and knew the record was from some middle movement; the first measures were a continuation, not an openin
g. He said, “Mozart?” and Kathy nodded, and came to sit near him. He looked at her and heard the music spill forth in a rippling, simple beauty. All at once he hungered to be free of all angers and resentments and confusions always, to know only this contentment trickling into the secret layers—so vulnerable—inside him.

  For perhaps a quarter hour there was no talk from anyone. When a record wound down to its eccentric grooves, Kathy would rise to turn it over or change it, and during the silence each of them seemed unwilling to break the serene emptiness and waiting in the room.

  Suddenly Anne leaned forward. She stamped her cigarette out with an energy that was decisive, even ill-tempered.

  “Let’s go somewhere and dance,” she said. “All you happy people give me the willies.”

  Kathy’s eyelids hooded her eyes. They don’t really like each other, Phil decided. “Wait’ll we hear this thing out?” he asked Anne. “Then we’ll discuss.” Anne leaned back in her chair again.

  But now the music was only a pleasant backdrop to his thinking. No longer was he listening to it directly, separate note after separate note, as one reads a compelling book, word after word, but in a vagueness, as to the sounds of summer wind and rain through the open window of a comradely room. Curiosity bubbled in him; he needed to know more about Dave and Anne, about Anne and Kathy. He told himself that he would always need to know about people, that’s what made him a writer instead of an engineer or a businessman; instantly he derided this as a pious attempt at promoting a gossip’s eagerness into something more respectable. He grinned. Kathy touched his hand and smiled also. The record was stopping again. “This is the last of it,” she said, and turned it over.

  “Whereabouts in the White Mountains?” Anne asked.

  “Franconia Notch,” he answered. Simultaneously, Kathy said, “Flume Inn.” He was looking at Anne, stirred to a quick, sad knowledge by the revealing question she’d asked, the offhand question that documented and implemented her jibe at “all you happy people.”

  Anne sat forward and said, “Flume Inn?” Her face blanked of expression, then took on a look he’d never seen there. Disapproval? Disbelief? “Oh, you wouldn’t,” she said vigorously.

  “Why not?” he and Kathy said together.

  “Why, Phil, because.” She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at Kathy, asking, estimating. “Phil doesn’t know anything about resort places here in the East, Kathy.” She said it gently, without chiding. Kathy looked back at her, then to Phil. Her single quick breath could be heard against the pianissimo measures from the phonograph.

  “Restricted, hey?” Dave underlined the word with mockery. Faintly his eyes gleamed as if this were a pallid joke, not really execrable, not really funny, just familiar and worth some notice.

  “God damn it,” Phil said. He stood up.

  “Oh, no!” Kathy cried. “I never—oh, Phil, I’m sorry, darling, when I sent the wire I never—” She looked at him with candor, with a shocked misery that she had— what? Forgotten that he “was Jewish”?

  “Of course you didn’t think of it,” he said. “Civilized people don’t go around forever thinking, This man is Jewish, that one isn’t.”

  She had done only what he’d have done himself—been unable to translate the bald facts in his researching mail into a close and live reality. Joseph Greenberg, the researcher’s fiction, had read, from dozens of hotels and resorts, the little phrase, “indefinitely booked up,” and had dismissed each with impassive dignity, with scorn for the evasiveness of it. “Just the clichés of the thing; people can live without these places.”

  But that was for a man who did not exist. Now a resort, one resort, was barring Phil Green—or would if they knew he was Jewish.

  “This isn’t your fault, darling,” he said to Kathy. Nor her failure any more than his own. Neither of them could transform the individual they knew him to be into a man an innkeeper in the White Mountains would refuse to admit.

  “Are you sure?” Kathy said to Anne. “Have you been there recently?”

  “No. But I’m sure.”

  “I can’t believe—” Kathy turned to Phil. “They wouldn’t—” But she thought of her golf club and beach club at Darien and broke off.

  Phil glanced at his watch. “Only nine.” He went into the bedroom to the telephone. She heard the three short dial swings. 2-1-1 for Long Distance. The music from the phonograph suddenly was an offense—she snapped the metal button viciously. Dave leaned back and lit a cigarette. Anne reached for one. Kathy thought, She’s the only one here who doesn’t know Phil isn’t Jewish.

  From the bedroom, his voice came clear and efficient.

  “—check on reservations for five days starting Sunday, for Mr. and Mrs. Philip Green of New York.” There was a pause for the flattened voice in the receiver. “One more thing,” Phil said. “Is your inn restricted?” Kathy went into the bedroom and sat beside him on the bed. Now the metallic sounds became words she could hear. “Is this Mr. Green himself?” There was caution in it.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, could I ask you why you—I mean, Mr. Green—”

  The voice waited, the sentence hung along the wire unfinished.

  “Is it or isn’t it?” Phil said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say it was ‘restricted.’ ” The voice sounded plaintive.

  “Then it is not restricted?”

  “Ah—may I inquire, Mr. Green, are you—that is, do you yourself follow the Hebrew religion, or do you just wish to make sure that—”

  Phil had a desire to shout, “You goddam little coward,” but he forced his voice into calmness.

  “I’ve asked a simple question; I’d like a simple answer.”

  “You see, we do have a very high-class clientele and naturally—”

  At his side, Kathy stirred. She put her hand on his arm. “Don’t, darling,” she whispered. “Cancel it.”

  “You mean you do restrict your guests to gentiles?”

  “Why, I wouldn’t say that, Mr. Green. But—just a moment, please.” There was the muffled thud of a receiver being laid on a table. Phil put his own hand over Kathy’s on his left arm. They sat in silence. From the other room, Dave’s voice and Anne’s came to them in indistinguishable sounds. “Hello, Mr. Green?”

  “Yes?”

  “There seems to be an error somewhere, Mr. Green. We have no rooms open for Sunday or the following days.”

  “I beg your pardon.” Phil stripped all inflection from his words. “I have a wire accepting the entire reservation.”

  “These new clerks—I mean to say, well, suppose I wire you after I can straighten out this mistake with Mr. Calkins?”

  “Just a minute.” The dubious voice, the hedging, the counting on proud withdrawal. Some legalism prodded Phil’s mind. “I’m not canceling from this end,” he said. “Goodnight.”

  Immobile and silent, he sat staring at his own hand holding the receiver hard against its prongs. Obviously they would not go there, ravaging the first hours of their honeymoon. But there was something he must do besides accepting this. He could not think what it might be. Not yet.

  People could live without smart clubs and resorts. Indeed they could. In a world where only yesterday human bones powdered to ash in blazing furnaces, the barred register of a chic hotel could scarcely be called disaster.

  But this maddening arrogance, this automatic decision that you were not quite the equal—

  “We’ll open the cottage, darling,” Kathy said in soft agitation. “It’s so lovely. We won’t even tell Jane we’re there.”

  “We’ll go somewhere.” He turned toward her. “Go in to them for a minute, Kathy?” He looked an apology. “I’ve got to think.”

  She stood up. “The nasty little snobs aren’t worth fretting over—don’t be so upset, Phil.”

  He nodded; he wanted to respond. Her distress for him was real; it came warm and strong. But the right answer eluded him. From the doorway, Anne spoke, and they both turned around as she
came in.

  “If Disraeli and Irving Berlin and Danny Kaye and Einstein got up a happy skiing party, Phil,” she said harshly, “that place would send for the Northwest Nazi Police and keep them out. And all such places, too.”

  There was no distress in her voice. Anne didn’t give one good damn about his lacerated feelings or outraged pride. She had used that one word, “Nazi”—it was the meaning of the thing that angered her. While Kathy only— Cut it, Phil ordered himself. Dave had come after Anne, and all four stood there in a cluster, as if in meeting.

  “The thing is you can’t fight them back,” Dave said coldly. “You can never pin them down. I heard you try to.”

  “Anti-bias laws,” Anne said. “Possible lawsuits. They never say it or write it.”

  “It’s horrible,” Kathy said. “It’s—”

  Behind them the telephone rang. Phil started to it and then knew it could not be Flume Inn calling back. Kathy answered.

  “Is my father there, Kathy?” Tommy’s voice, tense, shrill, sounded through the room.

  “Yes, Tom, right here.”

  Phil took the receiver while she was still speaking.

  “What’s up, kid? This is me.”

  “Oh, Dad, I—oh, it kept mixing up on the dial.”

  “Is Gram sick, Tom?”

  “She—oh, Dad, her mouth is twisted sort of queer, and she said to look in the little red book and then I couldn’t get the dial to—”

  Calm. The voice calm. The kid’s badly frightened.

  “Tom, listen. I’ll be there right away. O.K.?”

  “Yes, Dad. And she talks sort of thick.”

  “I’m on my way this minute. Give her that bottle of medicine—”

  “She took some.”

  “Good. Five minutes and I’ll be there.” He hung up. “Stroke,” he said. “Facial paralysis, sounds like.”