Laura Z. Hobson

by Gentleman's Agreement

  But through dinner, she seemed preoccupied, unlike her usual self. Once she fell into a long silence and then sighed. Resistance edged up ungenerously in him. He’d assumed she’d been joking about “listen to my troubles,” and now he was fearful that she’d meant it. He felt anesthetized as yet to any confidences she might make. How self-centered one’s own pain could make one!

  “I’ll make you some decent coffee at home,” she said, and in contrition he agreed that that was a fine idea. In her apartment, he stared about him. Thinly in his mind, the whistles and tooting and “Happy New Years” of his last visit echoed; suddenly the letter in his pocket seemed the final plaque nailed on a long-closed coffin.

  Was Kathy out with some man tonight, hearing him tell her she was beautiful, seeing his gaze travel over her face and throat and body? Jealousy reached into him. He sat, numb and patient, waiting for the spasm to ease. By now he knew it well. This also was different from the time after Betty’s death, this onslaught a dozen times each night of an enemy he’d never had to face during that other siege.

  From the kitchen Anne called, “It’s perking now; be ready in a minute.” He reached for the letter and reread it once again.

  There really isn’t any use, Phil. I’ve thought and thought, but I keep remembering how pointless it was for me and Bill to try to patch up the differences between us. There’s no use my going on always feeling in the wrong—it’s so humiliating, it wouldn’t wear well. Things would keep coming up on this, and we’d just kill everything off with quarrels. Maybe we fell in love too quickly, before we really had enough time to know each other. I’m sorry.

  Kathy

  He put it back in his pocket. At last Anne came in with the coffee. She looked at him, shook her head, said, “You brood too much,” and immediately talked of office things. He had misjudged Anne, he decided; unspoken apology formed in his mind. For all her brittle manner, she was clear and unequivocal about things; with her there’d never be the doubtful wonder, the watching for nuance that could communicate a lifetime slant to a child.

  “You’re quite a girl—I’ve never told you.”

  “Me? Sure, everybody loves Anne.”

  She sat beside him on the sofa and poured the coffee as if she had just learned how to do it. With a start, Phil saw that her hand was shaking.

  “You said you weren’t very happy, Anne,” he said impulsively. “Want to talk about it?”

  “No, thanks—that much I’ve learned. Nothing bores any man as much as an unhappy female.”

  “We’re good friends by now.”

  She put sugar into her coffee, shaking her head for “no” as she stirred it. He watched her hand. There was something mesmeric in the way she stirred the coffee and stirred and stirred and stirred and stirred. Suddenly the spoon was still.

  “I know about it being called off, Phil. Could I say something about you and Kathy?”

  “Sure.” It sounded wary.

  “John had a sort of office party last night for some of us old-timers, and she was there. We put on our usual act about liking each other.”

  “Act?”

  “You must have guessed it was mostly an act.”

  “I wondered about it.”

  “I just never go for that upper-classes stuff she lives for—”

  “Anne, let’s don’t.” He put his hand over hers to lessen the rebuke. It wasn’t possible to sit here, discussing, dissecting. Abruptly she drew her hand out from under his.

  “Oh, all right, be the little gentleman.” She took up her coffee cup, but did not drink from it. “It’s just, I think you’re pretty straight and—” His unbudging stare halted the rest of it. She smiled. “Lord, I do seem to be digging myself in deeper and deeper.”

  Dave had said “one of the nicest and one of the bitchiest.” Had she been getting off malice about Kathy all along? Was it only malice? Again the sense of betrayal whipped at him. But there was something here, some clue, maybe the clue he’d searched for. “Upper-classes stuff” was her way of putting what Kathy called “living attractively” or “knowing amusing people.” How important were these things to Kathy? Her voice spoke a phrase in his mind. “When I didn’t have the things my friends did, then I was full of snobbish misery.” There was some excitement here the excitement of theory, of possible discovery. Privately, he’d have to carry this forward. Not now. Not with anybody, even Anne.

  “I sure hope,” he said aloud, “we can find some place for Dave before the month’s up. You’d like Carol as much as you do Dave.”

  She turned toward him quickly. “Any connection?”

  “Why, no.”

  “Or innuendo?”

  “Anne, what the hell?” He put his hands out, palms up, in the instinctive need to show he held no trickery, no weapon, no motive. “I guess I was just trying to change the subject and being clumsy over it.” He turned toward her so that he was sitting along the edge of the sofa, almost facing her.

  “O.K.” She tossed her head, like an impudent child. But in the next moment, she leaned forward and hid her face in her hands. Looking down upon her, a kinship flared—here was the bitter universal, for whatever hidden cause. He put his hand out. He stroked her hair, awkward as a two-year-old patting a kitten. She turned her body toward him; her head rested against his knees. His startled flesh felt her warm breath through his clothing; his thigh knew the round rise and fall of her breast. His hand stopped moving along her hair.

  “Everything’s so damn rotten, Phil.” Her voice came up to him, muffled and thick. “We’re both unhappy. Why can’t we try to find some way—”

  He did nothing. He said nothing. She was as motionless and mute as he. Seconds slipped past as if they were a tableau on a stage, rigidly waiting for an appointed time to elapse. Then she sat up. When she spoke, her voice was at once embarrassed and defiant.

  “Let’s go to a movie,” she said.

  For the third time, Kathy struck the chord incorrectly. Her nerves clanged with the dissonance. She dropped her hands from the keyboard and sat staring at the notes. She’d better put off this week’s lesson, too.

  She stood up and moved quickly away from the piano. In the ten days since it had happened, she seemed to be moving away from everything. She’d had to force herself to answer Phil’s letter. And an hour ago, when Bill had phoned, asking to see her, she’d pleaded a headache, in the attempt to run from the dull half-hour it would mean. Maybe “unfriendly divorces” were the wisest after all, without this farce of amiability.

  “I’m about to resign, Kathy,” he’d said, “and start a firm of my own. It would really help to check it with you.”

  Poor Bill—the old habit of “sharing his work.” She’d refused going out to a bar and had asked him up instead. Maybe for once he wouldn’t tell every detail as he “spotted in the background.”

  “You don’t look up to par,” Bill began when he arrived.

  “February letdown is all it is.” She gave him whisky and water. He’d never liked soda or much ice. He sat where Phil used to sit, at one end of the sofa. He was ill at ease; she knew it instantly. Had he come for something other than talk of the new firm?

  “I ran into Tom Manning at luncheon the other day,” he said. “He told me Jane said you’d broken your engagement.”

  “Yes. Are Ellen and Tom still hipped on skiing?”

  “I suppose so.” He sipped his drink. She watched him. Bill’s meaningless good looks never changed. “I saw you and Mr. Green together one night,” Bill said. His tone insisted that this was purely by the way.

  “When? Why didn’t you come over?”

  “It was coming out of a movie, before Christmas, I think. I tried to catch your eye, but you both got into a taxi. I didn’t know who he was, of course, but when you described Mr. Green the day you told me the news, it fitted.”

  The “Mr. Green” jarred. She said, “Yes, it must have been Phil.” Why hadn’t Bill mentioned seeing them during his New Year visit? She decided not to
ask. “What’s this about a firm of your own, though?”

  “In a minute, Kathy.” He sipped his drink again. “I’m sorry, if breaking it upset you,” he said awkwardly, and she was touched.

  “That’s sweet, Bill,” she said. “I’m not upset any more, but let’s skip it anyway.”

  “Tom said he’s a Jew. Is that right?”

  She looked at him briefly. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Well, then, maybe in the long run.”

  His intonation, Kathy thought, made it a complete statement. Subject, verb, object, modifiers—the complacent voice, the judicious shake of the head, had managed to include all of them. It was a sentence. You could parse it. Truculence burred in her. She wouldn’t get drawn into discussion with him. During their marriage, they’d had so many useless squabbles about Bill’s ready prejudices.

  “I’ve got to start for Aunt Jessie’s soon,” she said firmly. “Have you already resigned, Bill?”

  “No, these financial matters can’t be rushed.” Looking reflective, he fondled the lobe of his right ear. It was one of his old mannerisms, denoting preoccupation with business. “What I mean,” he said at last, “is that in the long run it would have been all sorts of a nuisance to be the wife of a Jew.”

  “Bill, please.” The truculence was audible now. “You really—” But nothing would deflect Bill, ever.

  “I mean like the cottage, for instance. Of course you could have sold it. I’d have taken it off your hands in a jiffy myself.”

  “Sold it?” She put her glass down. “Why would we sell it?”

  He looked astonished. “He looked a good sort, Kathy.”

  “He is a good sort.”

  “Well, then. He’d never barge into a neighborhood that doesn’t take Jews—he’d never have been comfortable there.”

  Something stung through her.

  “I know you disapprove,” Bill went on, “and I do, too, if they’re the acceptable kind, but, well, it’s just facing facts.” He shrugged. “And you couldn’t go to New Canaan or anywhere near Jane and the crowd. New Canaan’s even stricter about Jews than Darien.”

  “Stop it. Don’t go on. I hate this. You know how I feel about all that.”

  “Why, Kathy.” His voice was soothing. “As I always told you, you can’t change the whole world, no sense getting so—”

  The sting again. She stood up abruptly. Bill scrambled up, too. Good manners, perfect breeding always. She hated him; with one more of his slipping-along phrases, she would scream at him.

  “I told you I had a headache. It’s worse. I’ve got to lie down.” She saw the uncomprehending look. “You saw Phil. You know he’s not filthy or diseased or vulgar. Could he spoil the neighborhood and the real-estate values? Could he? Then how can you just stand there spilling out those horrible things without even being angry?”

  “What horrible things?” There was only perplexity in it.

  She said, “Oh, no,” and was silent. Then she said, limply, “Bill, please go now. My head’s splitting. Some other time we’ll talk over your new firm.”

  She left him standing there and went to her bedroom. She closed the door. She listened. When the front door slammed, she went to the bed and lay down.

  There was something sickening here, something more hateful than anything there had been between them in their old squabbles. Something not about Bill; something about her, and not to be borne.

  “Never be comfortable there” … “New Canaan’s even stricter than Darien” … “can’t change the whole world …”

  The phrases pelted her. “Oh, no.” The staccato of disbelief was for herself now. It wasn’t the same. She had said those phrases as hateful facts; Bill had offered them casually, without emotion.

  She lay still. The swift sting changed to a suffusion of heat, spreading, reaching.

  Everything important between her and Bill had come to differences. But on this? On this there was no difference. In tone, in mood, maybe, but nothing more. One by one, the arguments she had desperately given Phil that day about Dave had come easily now from Bill’s lips.

  From the lips and heart and shabby mind of Bill Pawling.

  Off and on during dinner Kathy’s attention went back to the one point that was rebuttal. “Tone and mood are important; they’re the distance between acceptance and rejection.”

  She forced herself to make talk with the Minifys, but her thoughts carried on their own busy work of comfort and persuasion. By dessert, her nerves were steadier. But she felt that she’d come through some brief, savage fever.

  In the living room, Uncle John took his coffee from the tray and said, “Want to read something in rough draft?”

  “You don’t mean me, dear?” Jessie asked.

  “No, Jess. I thought Kathy might, though.”

  “Is it?” She stopped, and he didn’t answer. He looked at Kathy uneasily. She had a depleted air that worried him. She’d fallen into the almost nightly habit of coming over for dinner; it was being a stiff time for her, no question of that. He looked at her now, as she accepted coffee from Jessie, and remembered her as a college girl, then as a bride, then as a newly divorced woman. Never before had her pretty face been so concave from jawbone to eye socket; never before had he seen the puffed arcs of shiny, almost oiled, skin under her eyes. She cried in that apartment of hers, and that’s what did it. The act she put on all the time was fine, but it didn’t fool him. It was so rational, the explanation she’d finally given Jessie—Phil was so intense, so given to moods, so impatient of other points of view that she’d have to become a wishy-washy carbon copy of him or else prepare for constant bickering or outright scenes about all sorts of problems. It was wiser to admit incompatibility beforehand than when it was too late. That was all.

  All this explanation had rather surprised him; he’d figured Phil differently. But, of course, just in a working relationship one never saw the whole man. She meant it—enough to be going through plenty of torment for it. What trouble it was to be young! At sixty you grieved for the world; in youth you grieved for one unique creature. And so opaque and stubborn was the grief, you could blot out the world with it as you could blot out the sun with a disk of black glass.

  “It’s the last one of the series,” he said finally. “He turned it in this afternoon.”

  “I’m not much good with rough-draft stuff.”

  “Hm. He does fairly smooth copy right off once he gets going.” He crossed the room to his brief case. She watched him open it, nervously waiting, as if he were pulling aside a curtain from which Phil himself might emerge. She still felt too shattered to dare any new emotion. Uncle John took out a stack of manuscript, fastened at the top with the largest paper clip she had ever seen. She watched him as he riffled through the pages, reading a sentence here and there. Phil’s hands had held those pages a few hours ago; his voice had spoken to Uncle John as he’d turned it over to him. His life was going on along the same paths, sure and undeviating.

  “I’ll react better to it when it’s in print, Uncle John.”

  “O.K., if you’d rather.” He turned another page. He looked pleased, partly with Phil, partly with his own judgment in choosing him. “Hell of a balanced job,” he said, without looking up. “Got a thousand facts into the five pieces, from all angles, all over the country, but he’s worked them into his own story so you go from objective to subjective without stumbling.” He threw the manuscript down on the coffee table. “Make a sensation.”

  “Such a shame, about his mother,” Jessie said. “You say she’s all right again, though?” John nodded, but they both ignored her. For a space there was the drinking of more coffee.

  “One part in this one’s about you, I’d guess,” John said casually.

  “Me?” Kathy’s eyes accused him of lying. “Why, he wouldn’t!”

  “Oh, thoroughly disguised—everything personal in it is disguised. Doesn’t make it Smith’s Weekly, of course—just a big business office.”

  “But y
ou can recognize?”

  “He’s got a beautiful woman in it, all the way through; married, in her forties, wife of a friend in Rumson, New Jersey, two boys. But I made a long guess.”

  “Uncle John, he just couldn’t!”

  “The hell he couldn’t. I’m in the second article—the big liberal who had an antisemitic personnel manager in his own office and never took the trouble to find out about it! He had quite a field day with me. Sure, when I read it, it kind of burned me for five minutes. But he had to, Kathy. He’s writing what happened to him while he was Jewish—you and I and everything else are what happened to him. Want him to leave it all out and dream up stuff?”

  “No, but if you recognize that woman—”

  “He took about ten people and braided them into her— that’s what all writers worth a bean do when they need types of people, recognizable types.” He reached over and patted her hand. It was unexpected, an unspoken reassurance. “You’re very special to people who love you, Kath. But you’re also a type, like anybody else.”

  “I suppose I am. You never think of yourself as a type.”

  They fell silent. Kathy looked at the six-inch paper clip. In the shaded light of the room it shone like silver. She leaned forward and idly picked up the manuscript.

  As she turned the pages phrases caught at her, but she could hardly filter their meaning through the haze of feeling. Touching the paper was like feeling his body near her again.

  “… driving away from the inn, I knew all about every man or woman who’d been told the job was filled when he knew it wasn’t, every youngster who’d ever been turned down by a college because they ‘have too many New Yorkers already’ when he knew the true word was ‘Jews’ or ‘foreign-sounding’ …” She turned a page. “… this primitive rage pitching through you when you see your own child shaken and dazed that he was selected for attack …” She lost the next sentences. “… a new phase in my own reactions. From that moment I saw it as an unending attack by a hundred million adults on kids of seven and eight and ten and twelve; on adolescent boys and girls, on youngsters trying to get into summer camps and medical schools …” The haze began to thin down.