Laura Z. Hobson

by Gentleman's Agreement

  Other centuries had had their driving forces. Perhaps the twentieth would have its own singular characteristic as men looked far back to it one day. It might not be The American Century after all, or The Russian Century, or The Atomic Century. Perhaps it would be the century that broadened and implemented the idea of freedom, all the freedoms. Of all men.

  Phil walked back and forth, back and forth. His old patterns were re-establishing themselves quickly. A few brief weeks of shared love, fulfillment—and then they had come back. You live in loneliness; you ache and work and think, and sometimes the work or the thinking lifts you for a moment out of the embrace of agony.

  After the week at home, going back to the office was like an escape to safety. At last the inevitable question had come from his mother. “What’s wrong, dear? You’re not seeing Kathy.” He’d been unable to look up from his manuscript. “No, we’ve put things off awhile.” Sometime later he would have to tell her. And write to Dave to head off any wire of congratulations on the second of February. He had let Dave go off that next day with no mention of anything.

  He went into Minify’s office, with an offhand “Here’s the fourth—won’t be long now.” He studied Minify’s face. The other time, Weldon had been there and personal talk impossible. Had she told him? And Jessie and Jane and Harry? Formalizing it? He was relieved when Minify spoke only about the series. It was now scheduled to begin with the first issue in May. Jayson ought to get started on illustrations in a week at most. They talked busily about pictures. Then it came.

  “Sorry about you two,” Minify said at last. “Kathy told us.”

  “Thanks.” Ridiculous reply, awkwardness clapping down; at the soft syllables of her name, an electric shock had twanged through him.

  “She wouldn’t talk about it much. Only that you were always running into things you were at odds about.” Phil said nothing. “She seems pretty upset,” Minify volunteered, and Phil’s heart jumped. “She’s talking of going off for a vacation—she’d arranged at the school for your—” He broke off, and again silence lay between them.

  The door opened, and a girl came in with the usual sheaf of letters for signature. Minify said, “Miss Mittelson, Mr. Green,” and they nodded to each other. She was slender, dark, composed as she moved. Phil thought of the old names, Ruth and Esther, Bathsheba and Naomi; a delicate admiration as for the impersonal idea of antiquity and survival moved in him. “You’re Miss Cresson’s new assistant,” he said, and she smiled and said, “That’s right.”

  She spoke to Minify about the top letter and left the room.

  “Reach any final decision about Jordan?” Phil asked.

  “Told him yesterday I’d never fire a man for the way he voted, the party he belonged to, his religion, his private morals. But I’d come to look on the smallest spreading of race hatred and religious prejudice as a kind of treason. He began the why-I-never-care stuff, and I hauled him up short. The ad brought us calls from half a dozen employment agencies, astonished at ‘our change of policy.’” Minify glowered at Phil. “I got fairly insulting when I told that to Jordan—he’s been Smith’s to them for five years. Said treason was a fancy word but a lousy thing to have around even in small quantities. He resigned in a great huff. I admit I laid it on plenty.”

  “Why not?” Phil stood up, oddly grateful for this recital. He wanted to ask more about Kathy, but could not. As he reached the door, John said, “I’d have liked it to go on, Phil.” His voice had deepened. He was not talking about Jordan any longer.

  “Yes.”

  Even back in his own office, the word still vibrated the tight string of longing in him. Like the idiotic “thanks,” it had come from too much silence, as if he’d lost the trick of fluent speech. He’d been a monk in the cell of regret. He’d begin to see people again, as of now. He picked up the phone and asked Anne if she’d lunch with him. “Me? All alone?” She’d already made a date and urged him to come along, “even though we are chaperoned by two fiction editors.” He agreed, wondering how much she knew.

  Miss Wales came in. As she brought him up to date on the research mail that had arrived during his absence, she seemed less haughty, more communicative. She even smiled. She was beginning to forgive him.

  “Any calls while I was away?”

  “Just a couple. I gave them your home phone.”

  “Any messages?” She shook her head. “Any names to call back?”

  “No.” She smiled again.

  He wanted to let it go at that, but compulsion shoved him. “Anybody’s voice you recognized?”

  “Professor Lieberman, I think.”

  “I’m seeing him, tonight.”

  At lunch Anne kept a covert watch on him, asking unspoken questions. He tried to sound ordinary, but he knew he wasn’t fooling her much. Sam Goodman and Frank Tingler were discussing the new Dohen serial. Both were derisive of its countesses and young dukes and American society folk.

  “He’s half psychotic inside,” Goodman said. “God, twenty-five years of it.”

  “Of what?” Phil asked.

  “Hiding the fact he’s Jewish,” Tingler said calmly. “Just so he can be the snob he really is—the best clubs, the Social Register, the whole routine. Sam told me this morning.”

  “Phew,” said Anne. “When’d you hear it, Sam?”

  “Hell, I grew up with a nephew of his. I knew it ten years ago when I came here.”

  Tingler smiled. Close to, the opaque glasses no longer screened his eyes, and Phil could see the cheery look in them. It was the first time he’d ever seen Frank Tingler without the air of boredom. “Should think you’d have been too riled,” Tingler said, “to keep his secret for him, Sam. Boy, he sure can dish up a story the customers’ll read, though.”

  “Doesn’t rile me as much as another kind of psychotic,” Sam said. “I know a couple guys—they’re above changing their names, or denying anything. But they can go through years without one single solitary mention of the word Jew or Jewish, antisemitism, Palestine, Zionism. Just never, no matter what the group, what the conversation, what the news in the afternoon paper.” He looked almost awed. “Talk to them about prejudice, and they instantly launch into a passionate defense of the Negro. Brother, they’re the ones rile me the most.”

  “No,” Tingler said. “You got madder about that golf-club bunch. They rile you most.”

  “Yeah, that gang,” Sam said. Phil and Anne waited. “It’s this bunch of rich guys around town, Jewish-but-don’t-look-it-much, mostly of English or German-Jewish ancestry. They set up a snazzy golf club of their own.” He grinned mischievously. “And they blackball guys of Polish or Russian-Jewish stock. Meaning, anybody who looks good-and-Jewish. Like it?”

  Phil thought of Miss Wales.

  “After all,” Anne said firmly, “why should gentiles have a corner on the sport of feeling superior?” She looked at Sam. “Dohen change his name?”

  “Just slipped a notch in the alphabet, down from C,” Goodman laughed maliciously.

  “And they say cattiness is female,” Anne observed.

  Sam wasn’t disturbed. “This morning Frank got psychoanalyzing all the phony tripe Dohen always writes, so I finally explained what’s been rotting him for years.”

  “Have you ever doped out,” Phil lazily asked Sam, “why rough talk about a Jew sometimes gets you sore and times like now it doesn’t?”

  “Yeah.” Sam shrugged indifferently. “If I know the guy rates it on his record and not on his nose.”

  “Sam straightened me out on that long ago,” Tingler said. “I’d read a thing—by van Loon maybe—that struck me. Something about van Loon’s hating Hitler for putting an obligation on him to like all Jews, good or bad.”

  “I had to reassure Frank,” Sam explained, “that he and I both had a God-given right to dislike any louse alive, Jewish, Mohammedan, or whatever.”

  “Antilousism,” Anne said affably. She turned to Phil. “How come your sister Bella’s taken such a different line fro
m you, Phil?” Anne asked.

  “My sister who? Belle? Isabel?”

  “McAnny said ‘Bella’—met her in Detroit, or some people knew her. I forget which. He came back full of praise for you and scorn for her because she’s hidden—”

  “Oh, my God.” It was a shout, a laugh, a choking, and they all stared at him.

  “What’s the matter?” Anne was ready to laugh too, if he would share the joke. Tingler and Goodman looked on expectantly.

  “You mean McAnny came back—I’ve been out of the office a week, remember, haven’t heard a thing,” Phil said to Anne.

  “My gal got it from your Miss Wales, who got it in the washroom. He’s spreading around his little poison about you being O.K., but your cowardly sister—”

  Phil’s mirth rubbed off in one swipe. “Damn that squirt,” he said. “He’s a liar about Belle; I know what started it, but I—” He stopped. Then he shrugged. “I’ll tell you about Belle sometime.”

  Anne asked for more coffee, and Goodman talked of a short story he thought Tingler should buy. Phil suddenly remembered Miss Wales’s readiness to forgive him. No wonder she feels we’re quits. Laughter pushed up in him again. Poor Belle. He’d told her so positively she had nothing to wet her pants about.

  That night, he discussed Dohen with Professor Lieberman, but found himself more interested in exploring Sam Goodman’s reluctance to “betray” the secret Dohen had guarded so assiduously. As on his first visit, he saw now that Joe Lieberman remained imperturbable, almost indifferent, to specific individuals and their behavior in anything whatever. He dismissed both Dohen and Goodman with a casual, “It would be more convenient if people were always predictable,” and for an hour they talked “atomic politics.” The half-shabby library where the physicist worked in his old apartment near Columbia was conducive to easy friendliness. Nothing could untie the hard-knotted depression incessantly within him, but here Phil found his mind absorbed, as if it coexisted on quite another level of life. As a tangent to some other remark, Lieberman suddenly came back to “Dohen and his life of crime.”

  “I think I’ll start a new crusade,” he announced, his eyes shining with private merriment. “I can’t invite you to join it because you don’t look Jewish enough—they’d accuse you of pulling a Dohen. But for my crusade, I am perfection.”

  He put his fingers up to his plump, beaked face as if to refresh his tactile memory of it.

  “You see, Phil, I have no religion, so I am not Jewish by religion. Further, I am a scientist, so I must rely on science which tells me I am not Jewish by race since there’s no such thing as a distinct Jewish race. As for ethnic group or Jewish type, we know I fit perfectly the Syrian or Turkish or Egyptian type—there’s not even such a thing, anthropologically, as the Jewish type.”

  Phil waited for him to go on. The man could discuss nuclear physics, attack Zionism, comment on anything, and make it rational, unexpected, amusing. From his last visit, when Phil had defended “the Palestine solution” for the immediate present at least, Lieberman’s words came back to him. “Don’t let them pull the crisis over your eyes. You say you oppose all nationalism—then how can you fall for a religious nationalism? A rejoining of church and state after all these centuries? A kind of voluntary segregation? Always for the other fellow, of course, not for the signers of the full-page ads in the Times and Tribune!”

  “My crusade will have a certain charm,” Lieberman continued now. “I will go forth and state flatly, ‘I am not a Jew.’ ” He looked at Phil. “With this face that becomes not an evasion but a new principle. A scientific principle.”

  “An anticlerical one, too.”

  “Precisely.” They both laughed, and then Phil grew thoughtful. “There must be millions of people nowadays,” he said, “who are either atheist, agnostic, or religious only in the vaguest terms. I’ve often wondered why the Jewish ones among them, maybe even after a couple of generations of being pretty free of religion, still go on calling themselves Jews.”

  Now Lieberman became serious.

  “I know why they do—except for an occasional Dohen.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this world still makes it an advantage not to be one.” His lower lip shoved forward. His eyes changed their cheerfulness for a remote coldness. “Yes, I will even have to abandon my crusade. Only if there were no anti-semites could I do it.” At once he was good-humored again. “I’m reluctant to abandon it so soon. It would have had an innocence—no, a sort of purity—that would appeal to any scientist.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “YOU MUST THINK Mamma’s your property,” Belle’s voice in the receiver began vigorously. “The time she had the heart attack you kept it to yourself for a week, and now this calm letter days after her stroke.”

  “Hello, Belle,” Phil said. “I should have written right off, but—”

  “Or at least phoned. Even if the doctors did say it would pass. She’s my mother, too.”

  “Want to speak to her? She’s starting to sit up a bit now.” Belle never used to antagonize him so quickly in the old days in California.

  “I want her to come out here for some real rest and care, where she won’t have those awful stairs to climb. I’ll come and get her when she can travel.”

  Phil motioned to his mother and laid the receiver on the table. Belle’s voice continued to spring forth from it. “I should think, Phil, you’d at least find an apartment where—”

  “Now, Belle, really.” Mrs. Green picked up the phone as she was talking. “In all of New York—”

  Belle interrupted with worried questions about how Mrs. Green felt. The slight thickness of speech had apparently shocked her into thinking more of her mother than of her own sense of neglect. A moment later, she repeated her invitation, and, standing near, Phil could hear each syllable even now that her voice had softened.

  “Thanks, dear,” Mrs. Green said, “but I’ll be fine soon, and I can’t leave Tom and Phil alone. We still have no maid, and Phil couldn’t ever go out in the evening.”

  “Then take Tom out of school for a bit,” Belle said energetically, “and take him with you. He doesn’t go around telling people he’s Jewish too, does he?”

  Mrs. Green looked up sharply. Phil put his hands in his pockets.

  “Does he?” The sounds in the receiver grew louder again. “Because if he did it here, I’d have to give Phil’s ridiculous scheme away.”

  “Belle!” Phil watched his mother closely. Like many patient people, she could go to an extreme of rage once in a great while. “That’s a shocking, dreadful thing to say.”

  “Dick’s firm—”

  “You’re not thinking only of Dick’s firm,” Mrs. Green said. “That last time you were here, you said things while you were angry that told me you’ve lost all your old principles on your own account, not on Dick’s.”

  “Oh, Mamma, please!”

  “Now I see you’ve lost your spunk, too. It makes me ashamed.”

  Phil saw his mother’s hand tremble. Brusquely he took the receiver away and with his head motioned her to her chair.

  “Listen here, Belle,” he said with authority. “I don’t want Mom to have a relapse. So can it.” Belle started to say something. He cut in. “And on your next visit here, can it, too. Better quit this now; good night.”

  He hung up and turned to Mrs. Green. “Feels queer to have one right in our own family, doesn’t it? She’ll be in New York in less than a week, trying to justify everything.”

  “Stop that, Phil,” his mother said sharply. “I won’t have you saying ugly things about your own sister.” She was

  silent for several minutes and then started for her room. At the door she stopped.

  “Did you know we quarreled that day she was here?” she asked in a flat voice. “About her money-mad Jew, Patrick Curran? I guessed it.”

  “More about her defeatist attitude in general. Then about the motor strike and labor unions and the Negro migration to Detroit.”
She breathed deeply.

  “Maybe she’ll change back.”

  “It’s too late. It’s gone too far with her.” She left him.

  It’s gone too far with her. With Belle it had gone past curing. But Kathy? Kathy was not like that about strikes and unions and migrations. Kathy was no defeatist about prejudice. She might be diffident, even weak, but there was also somewhere in her the thing that had made her argue Minify into taking some definite step to combat it.

  A renewed hope surged. He went to his desk. For more than an hour he remained there.

  Dear Kathy,

  It seems impossible that we were unable to reach through this and find some place where we could be right with each other on it again. We never did go back to talk out the quarrel on New Year's about the party. I keep thinking that if we started back there, we might find out what kept going so wrong. Can I see you?

  Phil

  He who could write so easily, who could speed a thousand words down along his plunging fingers on the green-rubber keyboard of his machine, had stumbled like a first-grader over this single paragraph. A dozen times he had begun it and written into it a naked desperation; a dozen times he had begun it and written into it the frosted mathematics of logic. Finally he’d written out quickly the sentences that kept cropping up in all the versions. Those must be, to whatever censor there was in him, the most acceptable ones. He sealed it without rereading it and went out to mail it. An hour later he despised himself for having sent it.

  Kathy’s answer was in his pocket when he called for Anne. It had come by return mail and was all the passport he needed to any new relationship, yet the guilt of disloyalty, even betrayal, nagged at him.

  Anne had stopped by in the office with another cautious report of a possible apartment for Dave. Phil had been unable to sound other than limp and tired. “You’re none too cheerful these days, Phil,” she’d said kindly. “I worry about you.”

  “Me? Why, I’m fine.”

  “Well, I’m not. If you’re free tonight, come on down for a drink and listen to my troubles.”

  So she’d guessed. She wouldn’t have suggested an evening date if she hadn’t guessed—or heard it herself. Everybody in that office seemed to hear everything, tell everything. He’d suggested dinner. With the exception of Professor Lieberman, he’d seen no one, done nothing but work. Suddenly he was grateful to her for forcing him out of the house, away from Tom and his mother, out into the world. Her clever, emphatic speech would—“Hell, I don’t need any alibis for going out with her.”