“What indeed?” Phil said. “That’s why Smith’s is going after it so hard. My stuff will be just the first—he’s planning an endless amount to come.”
For a long time they sat on, talking, and when he went to bed Phil felt more cheerful. Smith’s wasn’t alone; plans were afoot in many places, more than forty cities were trying their own Springfield Plans, legislatures everywhere were considering and passing anti-bias and civic-rights laws, town meetings were discussing subjects that didn’t seem hot a decade ago. As the bigots got more active they inadvertently mobilized the anti-bigots. There were millions of honestly democratic people in the country; they were the great majority, and when they really knew what was in the balance, they’d throw the full weight of their convictions into the scale.
The next morning at the office, he began the fourth article of the series and knew they were holding up, perhaps even building up beyond the level of the first one. Minify had just read the first three in rough draft and asked him in and suggested arranging for book publication later. Might be; might be. He’d never had a book published, and the suggestion excited him. He considered phoning Kathy at the school just to tell her about John’s notion, but decided against it. He was calling for her and taking her home with him at four-thirty; she’d been insistent on getting the dinner there every night, with him and Tom to help and Dave doing the dirty work afterward.
But when he saw her he said nothing about the book.
“Dave’s going tomorrow,” he greeted her. “He just phoned me.”
“Going? Where?”
“California.”
“No! And give up that Quirich—”
“He can’t abandon his wife and kids forever. Or find a house or apartment. The housing shortage isn’t going to end overnight. You know he’d never let Anne give him her place for months at a time.”
A knobbed something was inside his ribs. For longer than he wanted to admit he’d waited for Kathy to say one thing. All along, stubbornly, he’d kept on believing in the flat Dave would find, the small house, the shack, the cottage. And all the time, along one fine thread of his mind, he’d listened for the thing she would finally say.
The taxi stopped, and he paid the driver. Upstairs Dave greeted them cheerily, “Hi, you two. I’m off on a date. Should I wind up here with Anne? Your mother’s fine, Phil.”
His bag was already packed, lying open to receive tomorrow morning’s last-minute things. After he’d gone, they spent half an hour with Mrs. Green and then went into the living room. Phil told himself he was just tired. The depression was upon him once again, mucilaginous and cold.
And then Kathy said, “I suppose you’re thinking of the cottage, Phil.”
“I had thought of it.”
“So have I. I thought of it when Anne offered to move.”
She fell silent. She had brought it up herself; she’d only been waiting to see if there was not some other solution for Dave. She’d confided that she meant to work on the cottage during the spring months, changing curtains and slip covers, altering its “personality” so there’d be no associative thing with past summers when she and Bill were there. But now Dave was going back to California, driven to reject a job with twice the future of the one he’d go back to. Now a matter of redecorating would no longer hold back the words that could alone keep Dave here. She was looking at him.
“It just would be so uncomfortable for Dave, knowing he’d moved into one of those damn neighborhoods that won’t take Jews.”
“Kathy.”
“I loathe it, but that’s the way it is up there. New Canaan’s worse—nobody can sell or rent to a Jew there. But even Darien is—well, it’s a sort of gentleman’s agreement when you buy, especially in the section where Jane’s place and mine are.”
“Gentleman—oh, my God, you don’t really—you can’t actually—”
He was standing. He did not remember getting up. I mustn’t fight with her; she’s my girl, my wife, almost; I mustn’t yell. I’ve been bunched up in a tangle these last days; I’ve got to hang on.
“You won’t buck it, Kathy? Just going to give in, play, along, let their idiotic rules stand?”
“I don’t play along—but what could one person do?”
“Tell them to go to hell. What could they do?”
“Ostracize him. Even some of the markets. Not deliver food. Not wait on them promptly. And I couldn’t give him guest cards to the clubs and—” She saw his eyes, and added, “But, Phil, you’ll be all done with the series before we get there.”
He made a gesture so sharp that she stopped as if she’d been struck. His face was new. Rigid in self-control, half sick. She was frightened.
“Do you expect us to live in the cottage,” he said, “once I know all this?”
“Oh, Phil, don’t! We can’t make the whole world over.”
“Or go happily to the clubs?”
“You know I’m on Dave’s side.”
“I’m not on Dave’s side or any side except against their side. My God, Kathy, do you or don’t you believe in this? And if you do, then how—”
The door opened. It was Tom. Phil wanted to order him at once to his room; interruption now was intolerable. Tom said “Hi” in a lifeless voice and looked at neither of them. Had he heard their angry voices on his way upstairs?
Tom had closed the door. He was standing still, just inside it. He made no move to get out of his overcoat or throw off his cap. Phil glanced at him.
“Anything wrong?”
Tom didn’t answer. Kathy took a step toward him.
“Tom,” Phil said. “What’s up? You look funny.”
Tom shook his head. He opened his lips; they worked at something, but no sound came. He stood there, taut with effort, staring, only his jaws moving. Suddenly Phil knew he was trying not to cry.
“Fight, hey?” His voice was hearty, parental. “An argument with one of the guys?”
“Dad.” The word was tight. He was ignoring Kathy, looking only at Phil.
I’ve never seen him like this, Phil thought, state of shock—and he went to him, everything else forgotten.
“Tell me what happened, Tom.”
Bewilderment showed in Tom's eyes, and then, suddenly, he put the back of one hand up to his mouth and was sobbing.
“They called me,” he said at last, “ ‘dirty Jew’ and ‘stinky kike’ and—” The next was too broken to make out. “—and they ran off and I—” His bitter crying claimed the rest of it.
Explosion in the mind—they have hurt my child. Roar of hatred different from any fury when it’s only yourself they hurt. Murder for what they’ve done to my kid—
He put a hand on Tom’s head. Kathy was down on her knees, her arms around him.
“But it’s just a mistake; it’s not true, Tom,” she cried out to him. “You’re not any more Jewish than I am.”
Savagery toward her now, blinding, for these words rushing … offering the Benison, the Great Assurance that he was all right, as all right as she, with white Protestant all-rightness, unquestioned, unassailable.
Phil couldn’t speak. Kathy looked up. There was no sound in the room except Tom’s clutching sobs.
Slowly, she stood up, and Tom turned toward his father. “Let’s get your coat off, Tom,” Phil said quietly. “We’ll talk about it in a minute.”
Without a word to her, he led Tom from the room. In the bathroom, he took off Tom’s cap and washed the streaked face as if this were years ago and Tom still a baby. Calm him first with ordinary things.
“Suppose you start over,” he said then. “Was it at school? Was Jimmy in it?”
Tom shook his head to both questions. He was no longer crying, but the indrawn breathing was effort enough. Phil dried his face, using his own bath towel in some impulse for closeness out of the ordinary. Then he sat on the edge of the bathtub and asked, “Anybody sock anybody?”
“No. They just yelled it. It was at our corner—I sort of walked over to Lexington befo
re I came up. You said I could.”
“Sure.”
“And then this bunch.”
Phil saw the small face go red and contorted again and the dazed look of shock come back. He wanted to take him into his arms, hold him, but boys of eight have the right to give some signal before they are babied. Tom gave none.
“One was a kid from school, about eleven. I don’t know the other two and they were playing hop and I asked—”
Phil waited. “You said could you play, too?”
“And the school one said no dirty little Jew could ever get in their games and they all yelled those other things. Why, Dad? Why did they?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “And I started for the school one and he said my father had a long curly beard and they all ran away.”
“Here’s a glass of water, Tom. Drink some.” He got the glass, filled it, offered it. Only while he was drinking did Phil notice he was still in his overcoat. “Give me your coat; it’s hot in here.” Tom started automatically at the buttons, and Phil said, “You didn’t want to tell them you weren’t really Jewish?”
Tom gave him a glance that was not only startled but critical. His hands backed each other, fingers laced, reminding Phil of the G2 pledge.
“Good boy. I like that.” Phil nodded judiciously. “Lots of kids just like you are Jewish, and if you said it, it’d be sort of admitting there was something bad in being Jewish and something swell in not.”
Tom nodded, too. Then his eyes hardened; his lower jaw pushed out. For the first time anger replaced hurt. “They wouldn’t fight. They just ran.”
“Damn cowards,” Phil said. “There are grownups like that too, Tom. They do it with wisecracks instead of yelling.” They looked at each other. Tom was getting calm again. A moment later, Phil said, “O.K. now?” Tom picked up his cap and overcoat from the wicker hamper. “Then will you go read or something? Gram’s sleeping, and I have to talk to Kathy awhile.”
He put his hand on Tom’s shoulder and squeezed down on it. “Let’s keep it to ourselves till Gram’s well.” Tom hunched against the pressure and smiled uncertainly at him. Then he left.
For a moment Phil stayed on, his thoughts rocketing back to Kathy. “When something hits into your kid.” Just names? Just exclusion? Or equally the sly corruption, the comforting poison of superiority? “Any place can be a hotbed, Phil; each house decides it.” His house would decide it for Tom—by a phrase, a nuance, an attitude. Each day it would go on being decided, through the rest of his childhood, through adolescence. A passion tore through Phil, to protect this one boy from that slow sure poison.
He went in to Kathy and could think of nothing to say at all. She sat in the chair she’d been in that night he’d first kissed her, when he’d felt the vast hope, like a drug to heal the long misery. Now she looked withdrawn, unwilling; she offered him only silence.
Idiotically, he thought of Miss Wales these last days, the punctilious politeness, the unspeaking docility with which she sat there, taking down every letter he dictated, never looking up inquiringly as he paused, never mentioning the talk they’d had, and never forgiving it. Punishing him was so much easier than questioning herself.
Kathy’s silence was as unforgiving. “It was an aberration, Phil—” She would not say it now, candid, eager. He could not, simply could not, say words now to minimize and condone. The inflection in her cry to Tom betrayed her more than any action. The doctor comforting the patient, “You’re as healthy as I am”; the psychiatrist saying heartily, “You’re no more insane than me.” He wanted to explain what he felt, but knew they would quarrel again. “Those are the toughest fights, Phil, the ones about ideas. Families split apart—” Suddenly he saw himself facing Kathy over and over with some such fight between them, next month, next summer, next year. Again and again there would be the distance, the coldness. In this one moment were all the unborn moments.
This was recognition at last. This was the underlying heaviness, the tenacious melancholy, stemming from the unwilling knowledge that they stood miles apart once the top words were said, the easy words, the usual words. A dozen times he had overlooked, explained, blamed his own solemnity. A dozen times some new evidence had come. Each time, his yearning for her, his love and passion, had conspired to help him skirt the truth that lay, bulky and impassable, in the road before them.
“I’m pretty tired of feeling in the wrong,” Kathy said slowly. “Everything I do or say is wrong, about anything Jewish.”
He said nothing. He had never heard this ring in her voice.
“All I did just now was to face the facts about Dave in Darien. And then tell Tom just what you told him when he asked that day if he was one.”
“Not ‘just what.’ ”
“You really do think I’m an antisemite! And Jane and Harry and everybody who simply recognizes things.”
“No, Kathy. I’ve just come to see more clearly that—”
“You do think it. You’ve thought it secretly a long time.”
“It’s just that I’ve come to see that lots of nice people who aren’t are their unknowing helpers and connivers. People who’d never beat up a Jew or yell kike at a child. They think antisemitism is something way off there, in a dark crackpot place with low-class morons. That’s the biggest thing I’ve discovered about the whole business.”
He put his hand up to span his eyes. His stretched fingers and thumb rotated the flesh at the corners of his closed eyes as if his temples throbbed there… . That is what I’ve come to see. She isn’t consciously antisemitic, nor is Jane or all the pleasant, intelligent people at the party or the inns and clubs. They despise it; it’s an “awful thing.” But all of them, and the Craigies and Wales and Jordans and McAnnys, who also deplore it and protest their own innocence—they help it along and then wonder why it grows. Millions like them back up the lunatic vanguard in its war for this country—forming the rear echelons, the home front in the factories, manufacturing the silence and acquiescence… .
“You mean we’re not going to Darien for the summer or to the club, even though you’re through by then?”
He dropped his hand. “Let’s save that for another time.”
She stood up abruptly. And suddenly she was saying, “Oh, damn everything about this horrible thing. They always make trouble for everybody, even their friends. They force everybody to take sides with them—”
“Quit it.” He was on his feet, facing her. “Quit that.” He heard the rasping voice and was powerless to control it. “ ‘They’ didn’t suggest the series—‘they’ didn’t give me my idea—‘they’ haven’t one single goddam thing to do with what’s happened between you and me.”
“I won’t have you shout at me. I know what you’re thinking about marrying me—I saw it in your face when I said that to Tom.”
“My God, you charge me with thinking you’re an anti-semite—I answer that and you switch to Darien and the club! You blame everything on the Jews, and I lose my temper, and you switch to my face and our marriage!”
“Or swear at me or treat me to sarcasm and implication, either. I’m not going to marry into hothead shouting and nerves, and you might as well know it now. Let’s just call it off for good.”
She walked to the table where her purse and hat and gloves lay. She took up her coat and put it on.
“Kathy.” The word was only half spoken. “I’m sorry I shouted. I hate it when I do it.”
“It isn’t the shouting. It’s just everything. You’ve changed so since the first night at Uncle John’s. I just know there’s no use.”
She went to the door. Phil watched her. Then she was gone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE CITY WAS ASLEEP. New York, the nervous, keyed-up city, was almost at rest two hours past midnight. Watching the sleeping stone under the quiet sky, the mind might know that there were still people laughing in night clubs, trucks and taxis still speeding through streets and avenues, swift subways underground still thundering into lighted stations.
/> But to the eye itself, the city was dark, sleeping, motionless. Here an oblong of shaded yellow cut its way out of the surrounding block of stone, and there a strip of continuing light showed a whole floor of a skyscraper café, a shelf of life and animation bracketed high above the city.
But apart from the single window, from the single strip, there stretched from river to river, from street to sky, a city’s surrender to oblivion or dreaming.
Watching the night from her own lighted window, Kathy wondered about the other yellow oblongs. Who were the people behind their bland faces? Why were they awake now? Could there be delight and love behind those unwinking surfaces, or only this sleepless despair? In her childhood she had known this plunging of misery, but never before as an adult. Yet it was right to break with Phil now; it would be worse to have it come afterwards and bring a second divorce, a second failure. Nobody could live with a man who’d turned crusader. At the beginning he’d been the way she was about the dreadful thing, the way any civilized person was. It was a problem, a danger to be fought, but he’d been sane and objective about it. Twice he’d shown a perfectly human resentment at being saddled with so difficult a subject for his first stab as a staff editor. He’d admitted frankly once that all those interviews with various committees wore him down as committee talks always did. He’d been simply the journalist doing an important job and perfectly normal about everything—the way she was or Jane or anybody.
Then he got “the angle” and began to change.
That night when he told her his plan, she’d drawn back, and at last she knew why: she’d known it instinctively for an impossible thing. You were what you were, for the one life you had. You couldn’t help it if you were born Christian instead of Jewish, white instead of black. It didn’t mean you were glad you were—
“But I am glad. God, it would be awful.”
The words spoke out in her mind. She drew into herself as if she could shrink away from them. Then combativeness reared—this was abject readiness to feel in the wrong, and she’d had enough of it.
Laura Z. Hobson Page 18
