Laura Z. Hobson

by Gentleman's Agreement

  “So whatever the mystery was,” she said cheerily, “the unveiling has begun. When’s my turn, Phil?”

  “You?” Jayson said. “You interested in anything but your own department?”

  “You rat,” she said pleasantly. “My secretary’s in a frenzy over the wonderful plot of Mr. Green’s series.”

  “Plot?” Phil liked the attention he was getting.

  Anne said, “She keeps saying ‘plot’ and won’t tell. What plot there can be in a series on antisemitism escapes me, but I have been needled long enough. So give over.”

  Jayson looked to Phil, and Phil said, “Sure.” He gave the manuscript to Anne, and she looked at it. She read the title, glanced up, smiled at Phil, and then began to read. Both men remained quiet for a moment and then in low voices continued their discussion about possible illustration. Anne read on. As he talked, Phil found himself aware of her reading, knew when she turned a page, knew when she stopped to light a cigarette. He realized suddenly that he wanted very much that she should like it. John’s final O.K. of the finished series had warmed him— “It’s got it, Phil.” His mother, reading the first two, had gone into her queer little stream of sotto voce commentary—“Imagine!” … “How dreadful, Phil!” … “Not really, it’s barbarous.” Several times there’d even been the quick dabs at her eyes over some paragraph or other, filling him with curiosity since she was obviously in some part—he could tell by the page she was at —which he’d set down unemotionally or coldly. Then he’d gone over to stand behind her, reading over her shoulder, to discover what it was that had moved her. But he’d never been able to tell; his mother’s reactions to words and thoughts he'd written were so personal, so unpredictable, that the only message he could get from them while she read was that this time was not one of his failures.

  Now he was held by Anne’s continuing silence. Soon Jayson saw he was preoccupied and stopped talking. Only when their voices stopped did Anne look up. She’d read half a dozen pages.

  “Murder,” she said to Phil. “I wish I’d thought of it first.” She shook her head. “It’s hot, all right.”

  “Thanks.” She was trying to phrase something else; he waited.

  “It explains some things I never quite understood about you, Phil. Like Flume Inn coming as a shock instead of a sure-the-usual-dirty-trick. I put it down to things being different out West.”

  “I didn’t give things away much, did I?” he asked anxiously.

  “Fooled me. I did want to say a couple of times, ‘For heaven’s sake, how’ve you lived this long, spending this much juice on it all the time?’ ” Phil looked embarrassed. “But then I remembered getting into a steam myself over some series I’d been living with, so I let it go at that.”

  “Remember the juvenile-delinquency stuff you did?” Jayson twitted her. He turned to Phil dismally. “Couldn’t eat lunch with her for a month without a load of statistics on child prostitutes.”

  “I quit harping on it once the job ended, didn’t I?” She turned reflectively to Phil. “This must have been dizzy, though, kind of mirror-within-mirror stuff. Watching yourself as Jewish but at the same time watching yourself as Christian-watching-Jew.”

  “At the start. Then it just boiled down to a guy taking his first real look around.”

  “Just the same,” she said, “if everybody acted it out just one day a year, it’d be curtains to the thing overnight, I’ll bet.”

  “Not so sure,” Jayson said. “That business of everybody needing to feel superior to somebody else.”

  “Right.” Anne shrugged. “I feel superior. To anti-semites.” She got up. “Well, I got to get back.” She went to the door and then suddenly turned back to them, laughing. “No wonder Minify wouldn’t listen to the screams of the Brown crowd.”

  Brown and Wheeling, Phil knew, was the large advertising agency that handled Smith’s account. He knew also that Anne as a major editor went to periodic meetings with them and held most advertising men in low esteem as a result.

  “Screams about what?” he asked.

  “A couple of weeks back, John told them this would be the big spot for the first May ad—practically the whole page, with just a ten-on-two panel for rest-of-issue copy. They always need four years to be bright in, so they beseeched the boss for the first article. Nope. A synopsis. Nope. The title of the series. Nope.”

  “Same treatment the art department got,” Jayson said. He stretched. “Get the hell out of here, Dettrey, will you? The author and I have to bat around some ideas for pix.”

  For the rest of the week, Bert McAnny avoided Phil. As they passed each other in the corridors or waiting room, even when they met in the sanctuary of the washroom, he made no reference to the series at all, never dropped in for the usual discussion of possible shots. The impression he gave was that the series did not exist.

  Phil had expected virtuous reiteration that it had never made any difference, but this gauche silence he would never have foretold. He found it at first obvious, then ridiculous, finally contemptible. The hell with McAnny.

  The flabbiness which always followed a sustained period of work was bogging him down more than usual. It was as if his last reliable props had buckled. He no longer kept regular hours at the office; he stayed up later and later each night, reading detective stories, books about the war, novels.

  Interims were always nerve-racking. Soon there’d be some new assignment—no matter what it was, he felt he’d never be able to work up any enthusiasm or energy for it. But that, too, was old stuff. That, too, happened in interims.

  He saw Professor Lieberman again. This was one of the good things which would survive the writing of a series. Lieberman greeted Phil’s recital of “my own research project” with dry, rapid questions, as if they were colleagues in a laboratory. “Yet every antisemite you met,” he remarked comfortably at the end, “would swear in court that ‘Jewishness’ is something demonstrable. Your Mr. Calkins at Flume Inn, for example, is positive he faced a Jew that day —he’s got eyes, hasn’t he?” They both laughed. Later, as Phil was leaving, Lieberman said, in his imperturbable voice, “I’ll never hold the truth against you, Phil. I’m a stout believer in the rights of majorities.”

  All through these days there was one new facet to his life. For the first time a manuscript he’d written was in the office of a great publishing house, up for consideration as a book. Minify had asked permission to send it over to somebody he knew, and Phil had nervously assented. When Miss Mittelson at last phoned to say Mr. Minify’s publishing friend was in the office, could he come in, he found his pulse quickening. He’d never confessed until this moment how much he wanted to see his name on the spine of a book. During the introductions he was too tense to catch the publisher’s full name; through the meeting Minify called him “Jock.” Jock’s smiling face told him the decision while they shook hands. Behind his desk, Minify’s smile corroborated it.

  “It’s had four readings already, Mr. Green,” the publisher said. “No dissenting report at all. We’d like to put it on our fall list.”

  “Fine.” He hoped he sounded merely pleased and businesslike. “Need some padding, won’t it? It’s only about thirty-five thousand words.”

  “Yes, we’d wondered if you mightn’t have more material which you’d left out of the articles.”

  Phil didn’t want to sound too ready with suggestions. For a time he listened while the two men agreed that such a book ought to have a fair sale at worst, possibly even “hit the list.”

  “More and more people seem interested in these problem books,” Jock said. “Look at Strange Fruit or Under Cover.”

  “I looked at them,” John said, “before I decided to get this series written.” They all laughed.

  “Matter of fact,” Phil now offered, “I’d even been wondering about writing a sixth for our own series.” Minify looked up. “Sort of post-mortem stuff—what I call ‘the unwinding.’ Kind of fascinates me, the way it runs to pattern.”

  �
��Interesting idea, that,” the publisher said. “Certainly for the book.” Minify was looking at Phil reflectively. Jock stood up. “Could you give us a rough draft of the new material, or a synopsis? Oh, yes, and have you an agent, Mr. Green?”

  “Yes to the first, no to the second. Agents aren’t much good for articles. I’ll get one for a book, though.”

  Jock smiled. “Better to have the publisher picked first, on a book like this. Sure as hell, they’d have sent it to the wrong house and pinned a neat handicap to the book to start with.”

  “How do you mean, ‘wrong house’?” Phil asked.

  “From the point of view of the book’s reception; wrong, that way.”

  Phil glanced at John. He was looking at Phil.

  “It’s just better publishing to have a house like ours do a book of this type,” Jock went on.

  “Why?” John asked. He wasn’t looking at Phil now. He was staring at the desk.

  “If one of the Jewish houses put their imprint on it, people might think it was just special pleading, and of course, it’s not.”

  “Jewish houses?” Phil asked. “You mean Jewish publishing houses?”

  “You must mean,” Minify said lazily, “whatever firm publishes The Jewish Daily Forward.” To Phil he said, “It’s a daily newspaper, printed in Yiddish.”

  The publisher looked at him, ready to laugh if he were smiling.

  “You see,” Phil put in, smoothly, as if he and John were rehearsing dialogue from a script and he were ready now to take over for the curtain line, “Mr. Minify and I never heard of ‘Christian publishing houses’ and ‘Jewish publishing houses’ except in the Third Reich.” He smiled. “Even firms run by men who are Jewish—we just call them ‘publishing houses.’ In a way, that’s what the whole series is about.”

  There was a pause. Jock was bewildered. He turned back to Minify. “It’s just a phrase in the book trade, John.”

  “ ‘Jewish bankers’ is just a phrase, too,” Minify answered. “And ‘Jewish newspaper owners’ and ‘Jewish Communists’—just phrases.”

  Phil spoke to Jock. “My verbal acceptance before,” he said. “Would that be binding? Or could I change my mind?”

  “You’re perfectly, free, Mr. Green. I release you, of course. But there’s some misunderstanding here. I was simply thinking of the best imprint for your book.”

  “Yes,” Phil said. “I know.”

  “At least you’ll think it over? Good Lord, man, an unfortunate locution at most, that’s all it was. John’s known me for years—”

  “Sure, Jock,” Minify said, “but now I hear it if a man doesn’t just say plain ‘bankers’ or ‘Communists’ or ‘publishing houses.’ ”

  No sooner did Phil get back to the office than his telephone rang.

  “John, Phil. I’m sending it over to another house. O.K.?”

  “You bet.”

  “There are a dozen good ones. Somebody else’ll grab it. Care who?”

  Phil made a rough sound. “Just so the house is non-sectarian in locution as well as personnel.”

  That night, going up the stairs to the apartment, he heard his mother’s voice, raised and shrill. Never once had she talked to Tom that way. He braced himself against whatever unpleasantness waited. He opened the door and said, “Oh, hello.” Belle just looked at him.

  “… the whole way,” his mother was saying to her. “I never thought any child of mine could possibly change into the typical jingo reactionary.”

  Phil said, “Mom, you look too excited. You’re not supposed to get this excited.”

  “I’m no good,” Belle explained dryly. “I’ve let Dick and our crowd infect me with race hatred and religious hatred. Then to justify and bolster my new position, I’ve fallen deeper and deeper from grace.” She was controlling it, but the fury was deep.

  “It’s true,” Mrs. Green said. “Sarcasm doesn’t change it.”

  “I’ve been turning against labor, boasting about my glorious American ancestry, hating foreigners and radicals, the works.”

  “Mom, sit down and cut this,” he ordered, and pulled up a chair behind Mrs. Green. To Belle he said, “I told you to can it. She’s got to avoid excitement and exertion.”

  “And it’s revolting that you couldn’t keep Phil’s secret,” Mrs. Green went on, her voice sharp and unlovely, “and had to scamper around like a frightened rabbit telling everybody.”

  Belle looked at Phil coldly. “You might have asked me before you started something that was bound to involve me, instead of just telling me after you’d begun.”

  “Oh, hell,” Phil said without vigor. “So they finally got around to asking you, hey?” He smiled cheerfully.

  “Even Tom had the—the guts,” Mrs. Green said as if no other word could fit her need, “to stick it and not go sniveling.”

  “It was Mrs. Naismith herself, I told you,” Belle said in exasperation. She turned to Phil angrily. “Wife of the president of the firm. Right at her own party with twelve people there.” She closed her eyes in recollection. “ ‘So fascinating, Belle dear,’ she said to me in that tin voice of hers.” She looked at Phil with fury. “ ‘What’s fascinating?’ I asked her. Then there was this little silence while everybody listened. ‘Why, your interesting foreign background,’ she said. ‘But I can’t see why you didn’t tell us all these years—Jewish people are always so clever and interesting.’ ”

  Phil laughed.

  “So Belle tried,” Mrs. Green said, “to turn it all into a great joke on her peculiar brother. She fell all over herself, I gather, betraying your secret.”

  “I told you on the phone I’d have to if—”

  “Where’s Tom?” Phil asked his mother.

  “I sent him to do his homework,” his mother said. “I certainly don’t want him to hear Belle make this exhibition of herself.”

  “I’m going to see the kid.” He said to Belle offensively, “Your life’s saved—I’ve turned in the series. Your disgrace is over.”

  Long after Belle and his mother had come to whatever terms they could come to, he stayed out of the living room. With Tom chattering beside him, he looked through the evening paper. His mind kept drifting away from the news. Tonight he might write letters. Always during a long series he fell behind on all personal mail. He opened the top drawer of his bureau where letters to be answered mingled with handkerchiefs and socks. He picked up the one his sister Mary had sent him weeks ago from California. He glanced through it. “… and somehow it’s such a sweet thing for you to do, Phil, sort of trying it on to see if it fits or hurts or what for yourself. Even if it doesn’t make a good series, it’ll be something inside you for the rest of your life, and I kind of wonder if that in itself isn’t worth the messy parts. As for Mamma’s news about you and Kathy, it made me just kind of weepy to think of you being happy again. …”

  He put the letter back into the drawer.

  “Wish the Coast wasn’t so far off, Tom,” he said.

  “So you could go there?”

  “No. But Aunt Mary might get to come here if it weren’t.”

  “Yeah. Say, Dad, couldn’t you take me to a movie tonight?”

  “School night? You kidding?”

  “Oh.”

  “Scram out of here, will you? I’d like a nap till dinner.”

  “O.K.” He picked up the jeep and three tanks he’d been playing with. “You lonesome for Aunt Mary?”

  “At times. Aren’t you, and for Tip and Sky and the boys you used to play with out there?”

  Tom nodded. But there was no bemoaning the past in eight-year-olds. “You lonesome for Kathy too, Dad?”

  “Sure.”

  “You had a fight, Gram said.”

  Phil looked at him. “That’s right. Run along, what do you say.” There was no question in the tone, and Tom disappeared. Phil lay down. The twisting and gnarling and squeezing that could go on in a man who’d been through death and war and wounding, merely at a phrase in a letter, a child’s of
fhand catechism!

  He’d been too righteous, too demanding; he’d had too little patience and too thin a capacity to allow for Kathy’s confusion and womanish softness under sudden pressure. Kathy wasn’t another Belle. If he’d have given her more time to see it, she’d have stiffened up, too. “You don’t have to be a sainted character.”

  At once then, words, phrases, the revealing hesitation, the quick cry to Tom, the velvet resistance to this mess and that inconvenience—from the raw, deep places where they’d lodged they paced forth now, one by one, in gray procession.

  But damn it, whatever I did, it wouldn’t have been any use. People have to see it themselves or not. You can’t do it for them. And if they give in to it the way Belle did and it digs in deeper and deeper? Families could split apart—

  “Telegram, Dad.” Tom’s shout startled Phil. He hadn’t heard the doorbell. He took it and tore it open in the involuntary haste telegrams always aroused in him. It was from Dave:

  ROTTEN NEWS ABOUT YOU TWO. BIG THANKS TO YOU AND ANNE. ARRIVING TWENTY SECOND AND WILL BUY YOU BOTH NINE GRATEFUL MARTINIS .

  He read it twice. Good old Dave, going to promote a little marriage idea of his own. Anne’s face came to him— its handsome, sharp planes, the reddish frame of hair, the lively eyes, the intelligence and bitterness and restlessness behind them. And instantly he wanted only Kathy; savagely and insanely he wanted only Kathy.

  In spite of the continuing sleeplessness, the stay at Placid had done some good, she thought, appraising herself in the mirror. The old black evening dress still looked all right. She was going up to Darien for the night and Sunday. Jane was entertaining an elderly big shot and needed her.

  Placid was already a queer, hazy memory, though she’d only been back three days. When she tried to recall the processes by which she’d got to Phil’s voice ruefully talking to her, she failed completely. But she could remember clearly how pathetic Ellen and all her works had suddenly seemed against that one picture of the Mannings taking their three boys into the club after a week of Springfield-Planning them. El and Tom Manning might be at the dinner party tonight. Would Ellen still be a touch haughty?