Laura Z. Hobson

by Gentleman's Agreement

  “It’s just that in this world, with the way things are, I am glad.” That was it; it was purely a practical recognition, not a judgment of superior status. Here was another case in point. If Phil had been there and she had said that very same thing aloud, he’d have worn the quick look. Try as she might, she’d have been unable to make him see how innocently she meant it, how devoid of prejudice it was. It’s just a fact, like being glad you were good-looking instead of ugly, or comfortably fixed instead of poor, healthy instead of crippled, young instead of old. But Phil, this Phil, the Phil he’d become, would twist it into something horrible, a conniving, a helping, an aiding and abetting the thing she loathed as much as he. They’d quarrel—their life would be the sudden chill between them, the words, the quarrel to be made up, and then finally to be left unmade up.

  That time after he’d gone to see Professor Lieberman and she’d said something perfectly casual about “the Jewish race.” Phil had explained once or twice that the phrase was based on old misconceptions which were completely disproved by modern anthropologists. But she’d said it— it was just habit. She wasn’t fighting the scientists when they said there was no such thing. She knew perfectly well that the three great divisions of mankind were the Caucasian Race, the Mongoloid, the Negroid. She remembered his finger pointing out a phrase in a pamphlet written by leading anthropologists. “There is no Jewish ‘Race.’ ”

  “Kathy, sweet, every time you say it, you carry on the myth that Jews are a race apart instead of just a religious group, or just a ghetto group or a persecution-conscious group.”

  “I forgot, Phil. It’s just an expression.”

  “That’s what half this thing thrives on—just an expression, here, there, and everywhere. What you yourself called nasty propaganda phrases when I told you about Belle and McAnny.”

  He hadn’t been irritated then. True. She’d been the one to lose her temper—at the analogy. She was different from Belle or McAnny, and whatever Hooton and Boas and Benedict and Mead and all the great anthropologists said, people would just keep on saying “the Jewish race.”

  That time the quarrel had been her fault; other times it had been his. Blame placing wasn’t the point; the only point was the frazzling nerves, the ratcheting apart each time.

  Especially if he thought Tom was concerned.

  No. It was better to end it now. Get it over with; endure this jagged grief, but get it over with now. Time would pass, she might go away for a change of scene, she might meet some other man.

  At the window, she suddenly shivered and remembered she’d been standing there a long time. She went back to the untidy bed and lay down. The cold, wet place in the pillow struck her cheek, and without sitting up she raised her head so she could turn it over. All at once hatred seized her— hatred for Phil for making this happen. They had been so in love; they could have been so happy, had so much to share, so much to enjoy together. And he had snatched it away from both of them because he’d become a man possessed. It was she who’d broken their engagement, but he who’d made the break inevitable. She wanted to hit him, beat at him with her hands, spit names into his face.

  As quickly as it had come, the spasm quitted her, and in a listless note taking she observed that the hair bunched under her neck was getting damp once more.

  Hour followed hour, and Phil sat on alone, without reading, without working, without even thinking in the sense of orderly pursuit of any idea. After she’d gone there’d been the small, definite things to do, and he had done them, the automaton still performing accurately while the inner mechanism inched toward collapse. At supper, neither his mother nor Tom had suspected anything about Kathy’s departure. Tom needed extra time and attention tonight, and Phil had given him both; in private they had reopened their discussion about “the cowards” and then gone off into a thorough exchange of opinions about winter training for baseball players.

  But then came the evening alone and, with it, the stupor of silence in the room. Then it had hit, a paralysis that kept him sitting in one position in one chair, a torpid drunkenness remarkable only because he had had nothing to drink.

  This time there was no watching the telephone, no wondering if she might call, no impulsive decision to dial her number. This time there was only the shock of amputation. At midnight, he undressed and went to bed, not for the sleep he did not expect, but to avoid Dave and Anne when they came in as Dave had said they would. That much clarity he did have—he could not talk and laugh; better to fool them into a tiptoed retreat down the stairs in search of whatever bon voyage doings they would be in the mood for.

  Ten minutes later he heard Dave’s key and then his “What do you know?” The door closed. “He’s asleep.”

  “On your last night?” said Anne. “Nonsense. We’ll have to wake him up.”

  “Let the guy alone.”

  “It’s against my deepest principles.” She laughed, and the next minute she was sitting on the edge of the day bed, saying, “Phil, wake up, it’s us.” The smell of cold fur, of perfume, of leather and winter air assailed his nostrils, and for the first time he disliked her. His massive unwillingness kept him motionless.

  “Let the poor lug alone,” Dave whispered, but she said, “I told you I never let any man alone,” and laughed again. They’d been to the theater, but they also had been drinking. She touched his shoulder, and Phil stirred.

  “What the hell?”

  “Where’s Kathy?” she said. “I thought we were expected?” Dave clicked the switch, and Phil sat up.

  “You look nice in pajamas,” she said, and Dave hooted.

  “She went early,” Phil said. They’d ascribe the gruffness to the weighting of sleep. He was not trying to act out his deception; the tone came honestly enough.

  “Get a dressing gown on,” she said. “I’ll close my eyes.”

  “Come help with ice cubes,” Dave ordered, “and he can dress. He wouldn’t let any dame see his ratty bathrobe.”

  On his way to the bedroom, Phil remembered the dirty dishes in the kitchen; he had forgotten them and the opened cans on the sink tray. She’d know that Kathy had left before dinner and begin to speculate, just as Kathy had done about her. But at once their laughter came to him, a vigorous duet of good spirits, and as in the restaurant the night he’d introduced them, envy for all lightheartedness hooked into him.

  When he went back, Anne gave him half a glassful of what looked like straight whisky except that it bubbled. “Here’s a mean one, to catch you up, Phil.” She surveyed him. “Men oughtn’t wear ties and coats ever. Much more attractive in shirts and pants.”

  She was flirting with him while Dave watched, and laughing and talking intimately with Dave a moment later. What was all this?

  “Dave’s going to ask Quirich-Jones to hold the offer open for one more month,” she said. “And while he’s out home, I’m going to find some place for them to live if it kills me. You help?”

  “Sure.” He looked at Dave. “Think they’ll do it?”

  “They’ve heard of the housing shortage.”

  “Dave says his wife isn’t one of those that just die if they don’t live in the sma-a-artest places and know the sma-a-artest people, so—”

  Phil lost the rest of the sentence. She meant Kathy. She was using her gift of mimicry to catch that suave-stretching vowel. The venom of the imitation he could forgive, but the content of the words was an uglier attack. And unjust. Kathy liked pleasant apartments and houses and clothes and parties as any other person did, but Anne was imputing an excess of importance that wasn’t true.

  “Your own apartment is pretty smart, Anne.” He sounded lightly conversational, nothing more. “Don’t all girls like nice places and yet not die if they haven’t them?”

  “Jumpy, my man,” she said. “You’re jumpy. Now why?”

  “Being dragged out of bed,” Dave said, “would explain it.” To Phil, as if she weren’t there, he said, “That Anne Dettrey is one of the nicest and one of the bitchie
st people I’ve ever met. I’m warning you.”

  They all laughed. His laughter astonished him. The laugh, the bland face, the polite badinage—he’d worn them all seven years before, and six and five. Here they were again, preserved all along in some indestructible camphor, ready to be donned and worn in this new season of secrecy and loss.

  Anne looked about her. “Where’s the bathroom, Phil? Don’t you hate people who say ‘little girls’ room’ or ‘little boys’ room’ or must-wash-my-hands?”

  As she disappeared, Dave at once changed. He studied Phil. Concern made him look forbidding.

  ‘What’s wrong, Phil?”

  “Skip it.” To speak of Kathy was impossible. He added at once, “Tom got called dirty Jew and kike. He came home bewildered and stunned, and I had pure murder all through me.”

  Dave’s teeth made a grinding sound. “Now you know it all,” he said harshly to Phil. “There’s the place they really get at you—your kids. Now you even know about that. You can quit being Jewish tomorrow. There’s nothing else.”

  Bitterness, hate. Dave had never before revealed either. Often enough Phil had speculated at Dave’s ability to joke, flirt with Anne, go about all the business of jobs and house hunting and long-distance telephone calls. In every discussion they’d had, he’d admired his tough, muscular attitude toward whatever aspect of antisemitism they were talking over, free from fear or self-pity, unshackled even by self-consciousness. This was a new Dave.

  “My own kids got it without the names—just setting their hearts on a camp their bunch were going to and being kept out. It wrecked them for a while.” He looked briefly at Phil and then down at his own fists. “The only other thing that makes murder snap in you is—” He stood up. “There was a boy in our outfit, Abe Schlussman, good soldier, good engineer. One night we got bombed, and he caught it. I was ten yards off; this is straight. Somebody growled, ‘Give me a hand with the goddam sheeny—’ Before I got to him he was dead. Those were the last words he ever heard.”

  “Christ.”

  Anne came back, smiling, ready for fun. They ignored her. “I—” She looked at both of them, sat down silently, and picked up her drink.

  “Remember when I said it was your fight, Phil?” Dave saw Phil’s warning gesture and nodded as if to say, “I haven’t forgotten; I can phrase this so as not to give anything away.” He went on, “That was, of course, just for the sound effect. I’m in it up to my neck every way I can find.”

  “I always knew that.” Phil’s throat ached. There was silence. Then Dave said to Anne, “Well, my girl, you look beautiful with the new lipstick. How’s the drink?”

  Phil let them talk on. Anne’s gaiety was muted now, and for no reason his affection and respect for her came back— she went off on strange detours from her natural paths, like everybody else. An odd conviction took him: if Kathy could hear Dave’s story, everything confused in her would straighten out for all time. Maybe even this full break would yet prove mendable between them. Only death was the unbridgeable difference between two people who loved each other. Maybe instead of shouting in exasperation, he would yet find the wisdom to reason, explain, reach her inner sweetness.

  When Dave at last took Anne home, Phil again got into bed, slugged through with fatigue as during the first days of basic so long ago. One sentence formed, with which he would try to reach her, another, another. Then he was sleeping.

  Sometime during the night he turned over. Have to work at home a few days, with Dave gone, he thought, and then get hold of a maid again. His sleeping mind had stripped clean of illusion. It had faced the loneliness ahead and was arranging for it. Certainty tore through him. This was no temporary quarrel. He had lost her, and it was not for the flash of temper and shouting.

  He reached for a cigarette and turned on the light.

  Hour followed hour, day followed day, and finality hardened into an almost palpable knot against which his heart seemed to do its heavy beating. Yes, he could endure this. And as it had been seven years ago and six and five, so would it be now—through work he could help himself most.

  Day after day he wrote. Night after night, he wrote. There was nothing to turn to but the driving concentration of more and more work.

  After Betty, at least there had been a finis that was unarguable. Now it was not true, as it had then been, that there was not one thing to do, to say, to write, to undo. Now there was the scurrying of the mind, the frenzied excursions into the if’s and but’s and perhaps-after-all’s. And always the dead end to bring you up short.

  You could take most solemn oaths never again to quarrel, shout, even argue. But to keep them would necessitate a pliability on the issue involved—docile willingness to live in the house, go to the club, play at affability with the mores of the group which was her acceptable world. And soon you’d fall into the tacit concessions that would be necessary —if the Goldmans visited you for a month, you’d not be prude enough to ask for guest cards for them at the golf club or beach club.

  You’d become, the victim of your oath—or the betrayer of it.

  No, it wouldn’t go down. You have to stick by some guns or be lost. If you feel lost, you drag everything down with you in your guilt and self-disgust. No love could stand against that sullen drag. He worked. Within a week he was beginning the fifth and last article. It had become so simple a thing to write. It was only a matter of disguising a name, a face, the background, but for the rest it was recording instead of contriving. Each thing as it had happened was put down; he was only the biographer of a Phil Green who was Jewish. The power of the inventing novelist or the devising playwright was as nothing to this simple strength of the biographer; here was truth, not fantasy, here in these paragraphs unrolling were only fact and record. A delicate thread of scorn for the so-called creative writers stitched itself on the fabric of his comparison. In the next instant he spotted it and tore it loose as if he were a tailor and it a gross basting cotton in a smooth lapel.

  All nonfiction writers—he remembered the long-ago days of his newspaper work and the discussions with other reporters—always tried to feel superior to all fiction writers. And fiction writers reversed the process and felt superior because they could create people and events which had never happened except in that world which sat between their foreheads and their top vertebra. The childish need to feel oneself bigger than, smarter than, stronger than—

  Among writers there was no danger in it. But when masses of people did it, when whole nations did it, then it became the corruption that could attack the very tissue, the very tree. Tree? Why the tree? Why had he thought of corruption and tree? It was an odd juxtaposition.

  He got up and walked about the living room. He was still working at home. The accommodator had a steady job, and he had been unable, or too inefficient, to find another maid. Now that his mother was almost well again, he had finally written Belle and Mary of her attack, underlining the sharp improvement, and, to Belle, the fine way he was managing alone. He had even left her alone this afternoon for an hour, for the meeting Minify had arranged with Smith’s lawyer, Stuart Weldon. The Flume Inn story had fired John with desire to bring suit, establish a precedent which could be publicized widely. But for all the “presumptive evidence” which Weldon spoke of so learnedly, there was no action which could be brought. “We couldn’t prove our charge.”

  “They play it so safe, damn the slimy bastards,” Minify had said, and banged his fist on the desk.

  John was free of the corruption. Anne was free, his mother, Jayson, Mary, Dave, Tingler—there were plenty of people who truly were whole and sound. They were the roots and trunk of the—there it was again, the juxtaposition. He took down his Bartlett. From “corrupt” and “corruption” he found no clue. He turned to “tree.” As he searched, diagnosis of his own actions rocked his busy mind. He was manufacturing devices to keep him from acknowledging the longing in his blood, the memory in his flesh. For the first days he’d been enslaved by thought—barred from ima
ges of passion and physical love. Treacherously they had come back, to engulf him. Could anything matter more than this rightness between them?

  Finger moving down six-point type, steering one’s eyes rigidly, perhaps one’s mind—it was the device for this moment. A dozen times already he’d forged other devices and used them even as he mocked them.

  “Is known by his fruit, 1115.” That might be part of it. The Bible, as he had half expected. He’d always been deeply moved by certain parts of the Bible, by their grave intonations, their humanity and beauty. He found the quotation on page 1115 and knew it was not the one. But it was from Saint Matthew; he crossed to the bookshelves, took down the worn leather volume and began to read the Gospel According to Saint Matthew. Something about a tree. Something about corrupt. He read on, certain now that he would be rewarded.

  “Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his fruit.” There it was, uncompromising, noble— Jesus addressing the Pharisees. It was the everlasting choice for wholeness and soundness in a man or in a nation.

  They had known it, the patient, stubborn men who for years had argued and written and rephrased and fought over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They had known that injustice could corrupt the tree. They had known that its fruit could pale and sicken and fall at last to the dark ground of history where other dreams of equality and freedom had rotted.

  That was the choice, and most men knew it as their hearts knew how to beat and their lungs to draw in air.

  A comfort pervaded him. The slippery danger would be fought back and conquered. Freedom was men’s sturdiest hope; it would stand off the new onslaughts against it in this nation and others.

  “This is the century for it.”

  The words spoke themselves as, a long time ago—was it only on Christmas morning?—another phrase had sounded itself in his mind. As with that other one, this was charged with import. “Maybe this is the century for it.”