Laura Z. Hobson

by Gentleman's Agreement

  She suddenly laughed. “Meaning I’m free of antisemitism!” She was ridiculing him, and he did not mind it. “Whoever said you had to be a sainted character to be free of it? Just the way your life turned you, that’s all.” She waved gaily to somebody across the room. She looked self-possessed and completely gratified that she was alive.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE STUNNING COLD made Kathy flinch as she came through the door of the hotel. Perhaps Aunt Jess was right about “overdoing it.” Maybe she was too worn out for this strenuous life. Night after night of the yellow pills knocked you down from any sense of well-being. But without them you just turned round and round in that dark, silent pit of memory. Then exhaustion stripped you of the strength to fight back to your ordinary calmness. She’d got to a point where the noisy scramble of the school jabbed impossibly at her nerves. A week at Lake Placid with Aunt Jess was no bonanza of fun and jollity, but she’d been meekly grateful for the suggestion. For the third time, she’d announced to her assistant at the nursery that she was taking a few days off. To have gone the week already arranged for Nassau with Phil would have been simpler. But the constant comparisons those actual days would have tossed at her— that she could not have borne.

  She was dressed for skiing, but the piercing air decided her on a short walk instead. Besides, the hotel station wagon in the driveway, filling up with another load for the big run, was too full of talking, laughing couples. Everywhere she went now she was aware of the couples—always a man and a woman, a man and a woman. When you were as glaringly alone, as she, the full import of that “male and female created He them” began to shame you. You were the abnormal one; against nature, against the pattern and stream of the normal. She started up the main road, almost furtive in the hope she’d pass nobody she’d met in the four days they’d been there.

  Before she got to the big fork, the station wagon passed her, and above the metallic clicking of its chains she heard tapping on the glass panes. Automatically she smiled and waved; it was surely Ellen or Tom Manning. It was good they’d come only for the week end and would be off again late tonight. She really liked them both, and, with their insatiable appetite for skiing, she’d not even been surprised when they arrived. But their awkwardness about “being sorry to hear the news,” their most innocent references to home or Darien, even Ellen’s inevitable table talk about the Springfield Plan—all of it kept scratching at her resolution “not to think about it any more.” At the party, Ellen had liked Phil and he her; they were kindred spirits; they both got hipped on things.

  She was no longer huddling down from the stinging cold. She walked along briskly despite the heavy boots she’d not used for three winters. It began to snow, and she remembered how right and just the snow had seemed the first night they had dinner in her place. A week before Christmas, and now it was almost the middle of February, and the year that was to take her back to happiness and marriage was instead being the worst period she had ever lived. She brushed her mittened hand across her face. This snow was wet and clinging, as though it, too, held a soggy inertia.

  Aunt Jess’s first suggestion had been Bermuda or Florida, but there wasn’t a room to be had anywhere at either place. If Phil had been involved, he’d have leaped at it as another example, she’d thought in a rush of scorn. While she’d been reading the pages he’d written, right then while she was still shaken by Bill’s visit, she’d been terribly moved by the earnestness and odd sadness he’d got into his phrases. She’d writhed for the beautiful woman in Rumson, and, as it had with Bill, fear struck her that maybe she, Kathy, really was like that. “Braided ten people into one”—she was at most only a strand in that composite portrait. When she’d really calmed down she’d seen that, as she’d at last seen the difference between her attitude and Bill’s.

  Later, she’d checked back through her whole relationship with Phil, step by step. She’d got perspective back into things, for good this time. The molehill could always be cleverly made to look like a mountain for a while, but it still remained a silly little molehill not worth fuming over.

  That Phil had left out of the article, honest though he was. Because that is what he’d never seen, what she’d never been able to make him see. It was so much simpler for him to judge her guilty.

  Innocent or guilty, the pain stuck there inside her, the lump was ready in her throat; the fear of losing him had become the unreasoning remorse that it was over. That was stronger than anything else. Except the one black clean knowledge that a second failure, advertised to the world by a second divorce, would shatter everything she was or could be.

  There were women, she knew, who were able to take emotional failure in their stride and go on being successful and happy people. Anne Dettrey was like that. She had talents, a job she adored, endless chances to meet new people. Envy for Anne’s busy, rounded life struck at her. She’d never been really easy with Anne; she always wondered how critical those clever eyes were being. But she admired her. Phil probably would turn to her; she was the only other woman he knew well in all New York. Perhaps already—

  She turned back to the hotel. She couldn’t bear the lashing cold one more instant. Even this winter spread all about her, the icy snow under her feet, the glittering white of the mountains, the creaking branches of the burdened trees— even this was a mark of the terrible distance from the plan to the reality. Nassau would have been hot, brilliant with the red of hibiscus, the purplish pink of bougainvillea, the intense blues and greens of the sea.

  Voices rang out behind her, and she half turned around. Two girls, their skis slung over their shoulders, their ski poles wearily trailing shining points along the snow, had appeared out of the woods. There was a beginners’ slope there, she remembered. She turned back. Soon they were close enough so she could hear a strident voice.

  “So Cholly said I shouldna done it, and I said, ‘Well, I said, Mr. Smotty, you can go ta hell in a bucket.’ ”

  The other girl made soothing sounds. They were abreast of her now. “Got a match, miss?” the strident voice asked, and Kathy stopped. While she was pulling off her oiled-silk ski mitten and reaching into the pocket of her jacket, she saw the glittering costume jewelry at their ears below their ski caps, the frozen beads of mascara of their eyes, the gleam of eye shadow, the thick lipstick, congealed and cracked in the dry five above zero.

  Why do they do it? she thought miserably. Why do they make themselves so noticeable? It’s awful. It’s just awful.

  She handed over the packet of matches with a warm smile, and the girls smiled back. They had trouble with the wind, and she cupped her hands over the shielding ones of the soothing girl to make a taller chimney for the match. They talked about the weather and the easy runs which were all they could try as yet. And all the time that “why” was crying out in her, protective yet helpless.

  As she walked on alone again, her regret and distress deepened. The cruel comments of people who saw them on the slopes or on the roads angered her, though she had heard none. All Jews aren’t vulgar and overdressed, she thought passionately, and wished Phil could know how hotly she despised with him the injustice that taxed a whole group for the offense of two ill-bred girls.

  For once he’d not find anything to get the quick look about.

  Back at the hotel, Aunt Jessie was taking a nap. Kathy shed her cap and jacket and took off her ski boots. She rolled thick plaid wool socks over her feet and slid into her sloppy old moccasins. Then she went down to the Snack Bar for coffee. Singularly, her distress on the road had given way to a security about herself. For once he just couldn’t. And if she’d been more able to find the just word, the exact phrase for each and every thought she’d had when they’d been together, he’d never have been able to.

  She thought of Bill Pawling. He wouldn't have felt this distress. A warmth grew in her.

  The hot coffee, the blazing logs in the ten-foot stone fireplace before her, made her cheeks and forehead tingle after the attack of the icy outdoors
. Drowsiness shredded orderly thinking into wisps. She relaxed against the sloped back of the lounge chair and wondered why she couldn’t feel this way when she was in bed. No matter how exhausted she was, the moment she lay down, there it was, a seizure, a swoop.

  Suddenly she sat upright. The drowsy, lazy drifting was done. In her mind Phil’s voice was talking to her, not sarcastic, not irritated, but rueful and discouraged.

  “But, darling, if they’d been two Irish-Catholic girls, all you’d have thought would have been how vulgar all that make-up is in sport clothes.”

  She gulped.

  “You wouldn’t even have thought, Kathy, ‘All Irish-Catholics aren’t vulgar and overdressed.’ You wouldn’t have defended all the Irish any more than all the Hindus. Because you would have thought of them only as two girls.”

  Kathy put her hand up to her forehead. The fire was scorching. She felt dizzied and ill. Oh, God, I do get mixed up. Maybe he is right about something in me being—

  Desperation spiked her feelings. She wanted crazily to tear the brain out of her skull so she could examine it, find what was there and what was not there. In a moment the violent mood passed. She sat enervated and more unsure of herself than she had ever in all her life felt before.

  Even at the dinner table that evening, she could not shake off her lassitude. There was resignation in it, defeat, the old concession that she must be in the wrong somehow about everything. She listened to Ellen and Tom Manning and Aunt Jessie prattle about the invigorating mountain air and contributed monosyllables of appreciation. Something Aunt Jess said about Vassar got Ellen started on education and that led to the good old Springfield Plan. Idly Kathy gazed about the room, at the tanned and wind-burned faces at the other tables for two or four. She was all for the Springfield Plan; she’d read about it and heard about it and knew that it was right for children to meet democracy in action from their youngest school days. She hoped Ellen’s movement would succeed in Darien. But she could not listen attentively to Ellen or anybody else just now.

  She remembered the two girls on the road. Vaguely she looked about. They hadn’t said anything about how far they’d come, at what hotel they were. Perhaps they looked less garish in ordinary clothing. She began to look over the faces around her. Face by face, now, no longer the blur.

  Once again, she suddenly sat forward. In all that crowded room there was not one face that was obviously “Jewish.” She’d been in this hotel several times in the last ten years, and it had never even occurred to her to check over the faces. Now she was searching them, faster and faster, in a scrabbling anxiety to find the proof that this pleasant place wasn’t another Flume Inn.

  “What’s on your mind, Kath?” Tom Manning asked.

  “Me? Oh.” She was flustered. “Just looking around. I missed what you were saying, El. Sorry.”

  “Anybody you want to see specially, dear?”

  “No, Aunt Jess.” She looked about once more. The others were silent now, watching her. She must seem agitated and queer. “Is this hotel,” she said to Ellen, “for Christians only, d’you think?”

  Ellen looked about now, and Tom did, too. Jessie said, “Of course not, Kathy,” in a comfortable voice, and Ellen said, “Why, I never thought.”

  “This near New York and not one person that looks Jewish?” Kathy asked. “That couldn’t just be accident, with half the Jews in America right in New York City.” Her voice had changed. It had gone quiet. “I never thought about it, either,” she said to Ellen. Something pounded in her chest where only her heart should have been beating.

  There was a silence. The Mannings were both thinking of Phil, she’d have sworn it. Broken engagement or not, a promise was a promise, and Jane would never have betrayed him until she got the word the series was done.

  “It’s beastly, if it’s true,” Ellen said, and began to talk about protecting children from prejudice. Sunday-school teaching had to be revised. “Nobody ever says, ‘the Americans killed Lincoln,’ ” she said emphatically. Kathy nodded.

  It isn’t just that they’re Jewish, she thought. Those two girls wouldn’t fit in here on other levels—of manners and smartness and all. But Dave and Carol and Phil and—oh, damn, even if you do hate it, what’s there you can do? She couldn’t march up to the hotel manager, ask questions, make speeches. She just wasn’t the type—she’d die of pure embarrassment. You just sat, that’s all you could do. Sat and felt this crawly shame.

  After dinner, they played bridge, and when Aunt Jessie went upstairs, Kathy went to the bar with the Mannings for a “stirrup cup before train time.” Tom yawned and said he couldn’t wait to crawl into the berth; skiing this much always made him groggy for sleep at night. Ellen talked about her problems for the summer. Her eldest boy wanted to go to camp in Maine, and the two youngest were jealous of this first distinction. Kathy let her talk. Tom left them soon to see to their luggage.

  “Kath, you look sort of thin,” Ellen said affectionately. Broken engagements aren’t any fun, I know. I broke one once.”

  “Oh, well.”

  “He’s brilliant and charming,” Ellen went on, “and I know you’d have been too big to care about sticky places like this.” Kathy didn’t answer. “It’s one’s own world that matters—and we’d already smoothed it out at the club. With so many of us having met him personally.”

  “Smoothed it out?” Her voice edged, but she couldn’t help it.

  “There was the midwinter meeting of the board about a week after Jane’s party, so it came up.” Ellen saw Kathy’s eyes go remote—it probably still killed her to talk about him. A lively sympathy warmed Ellen; she’d always liked Jane and Kathy and had been glad to see the last of that reactionary Bill Pawling. And she’d taken to Phil Green at sight and then felt oddly forlorn when Jane had made the curt announcement that Kathy had changed her mind. She knew Katherine Lacey far too well, or she’d have wondered whether it wasn’t partly because he was Jewish. But that would be too absurd for anyone as liberal as Kath.

  “Phil’s membership came up?” Kathy prompted.

  “Not formally—just talking about when he did apply this summer. It was perfectly simple, with him the way he is, and you a member.”

  “The exception.” They had sat in judgment and found him passable. “The one ‘pet Jew’ we can all use as proof? ‘See, we’re not anti-Semitic.’ ”

  “Why, Kathy. I hate that idiocy as much as you do.”

  “I know you do. I’m not even thinking you don’t.”

  “But then there are the bigoted fools in the club.”

  “I remember.”

  “After all, a club’s only a social, personal thing.”

  Ellen looked at her; Kathy seemed on the verge of— what? Tears? Collapse? She really looked sick. “Quit talking about all this, darling,” Ellen said at last. “Just makes you think about stuff that still rubs deep. Everybody goes through that awhile.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of anything like that,” Kathy said. “I wasn't even thinking of the club any more. Or you. Or Phil. Funny, I got thinking about the Springfield Plan.”

  “The Sp—”

  Kathy began to laugh a little, then a little more. Ellen threw a quick appraising glance at her.

  Kathy said, “The one thing I do know about is children. I got thinking how screwed up your little boys and everybody else’s little boys and girls are going to get if they’re taught five days a week that everybody’s just the same and then on Saturday and Sunday they have to leave some of their pals outside the gates while they go into the country club with Papa and Mamma.” She was really laughing now. “All the country clubs, all over.”

  “You’re poking fun at me, Kathy!” Ellen saw Tom and a bellboy with their luggage and at once stood up in dignified coolness. During the good-bys, Kathy sounded more cheerful.

  Again that night she could not sleep. But somewhere in the dark spinning where she was again talking to Phil and being kissed by Phil and bemoaning the excesses in Phil— some
where there was one curious, heady new thing, unlike anything she’d ever known.

  What kept coming back from her session with Ellen was that one thing. Not anything Ellen had said or she had said; not any points she’d made. Just this one exhilarating funny thing. She hadn’t taken Ellen’s liberalism for granted as she always had before. She had looked at it, into it; she had weighed it and tested it and sized it up. It was like the stretching of muscles. And it was fine.

  Bill Jayson said to Phil, “It’s the by-goddest idea for a series this book’s ever run.”

  Phil grinned. An hour before, Miss Wales had taken the top carbon of number one in to the art department. Jayson had it with him; as he talked, he thumped it for emphasis, and the careful pedantic turn of his usual speech was absent. “No kidding, Phil, I couldn’t put it down. I meant to give it just a look and hand it over to McAnny for suggestions on pix, but I never moved from my chair.”

  “Has he seen it yet?”

  Jayson laughed. “No. He’s on a rush layout against deadline. I’m going to hide this till he’s made it—he’s in for a collapse.” His eyes gleamed. “Boy, I bet he tries a sneak bunt to third with this one.”

  Phil laughed with him. “What’ll you decide for artwork, Bill?”

  “It’s not going to be easy. Take time. But I see now why you and John wouldn’t give.”

  “Photographic treatment your hunch?”

  “Sure.” He frowned. “God knows what of.”

  “No shots of my kid, now, or my family,” Phil said sternly. “John says I’m hooked for the lead-off. But mind, nobody else.”

  “And mind, you stop bossing me around,” Jayson answered equally sternly. Then he grinned. “That’s the trouble with you Christians—aggressive. Pure compensation, of course.”

  From the first, Phil had liked Bill Jayson; now he admired him. The whole damn point in one wisecrack, he thought, but before he could transfer thought to speech, the door opened and Anne came in. She saw the manuscript in Jayson’s hand.