Gentleman's Agreement (11 page)

“It’s what?”

“Oh, Phil, I just think it’ll mix everybody up. People won’t know
what
you are.”

“After I’m through, they’ll—” He couldn’t say it. A remarkable thing had happened. Something had seized him that he couldn’t argue with. It had started to happen with her first question. Now he knew suddenly what it was. This heavy strange thing in him was what you felt when you’d been insulted. He felt insulted. If he were really a Jew, this is what he’d feel. He was having his first lesson. With Kathy, he’d stumbled into his first lesson at feeling bruised and unwilling to say the placating thing, the reassuring thing. She had reminded him that there was something important about knowing that you were
not
a Jew or were a Jew, no matter what your face or voice or manners or whole being. A slow soreness had been spreading through him. He’d be damned if he’d let her see it. But at last he knew what it was.

“They’ll know afterwards that you’d just been assuming a pose?” she finished for him. “Of course they will. And even so, it’ll keep cropping up.”

“All right. Let it.”

His words were calm. No, they were calmly spoken, but the answer was brusque. That much he could not help. Kathy? The Kathy who’d thought up the whole series? She wanted to fight the thing, sure. She wanted
Smith’s
to use its three-million circulation to yell and scream and take sides and fight. That’s the way she’d put it that night. But she didn’t like the idea of anybody misunderstanding anything about
him.

He saw a perplexity begin in her face. She was frowning. She was thinking, away somewhere from where they were, thinking to herself. Then the moment was over. She made a quick scissoring with both her hands, slashing the last few minutes out of time.

“I’m out of my head,” she said firmly. “‘Let it’ is right. Who cares? I was just being too practical about things.” She smiled directly at him. “It’s a
grand
idea. Only, last night you said there’d be pitfalls, and I guess I got looking for those right off.”

His spirits rose. This quick change bewildered him, but he felt relieved, at least enough to get by on for now. The mind plays funny tricks—look at his own “slow take” on Belle’s Jew-us-down. He told Kathy about it, and she said, “Those nasty propaganda phrases.” Again he was reassured. He had been a fool to toss his scheme at her without any windup. You could do things like that with an editor, but with her he’d have done better to explain first, lead her along to make her see the inevitability of it.

“There’ll
be
nasty things,” he said. “But after all, the whole point is to find out for myself.”

“How long will it take, do you think?” He shrugged, and her shoulders imitated his, as if to agree that nobody could ever predict how long anything important would take.

“You and the Minifys will have to promise not to give away my act,” he said. She nodded, and he said, “But really. No exceptions for anything. O.K.?”

“O.K.” She made a child’s cross-my-heart. “What about the people at
Smith’s
? Won’t they talk?”

“At—but they’re not in on it. Only John.”

“They
think you’re Jewish?” She sounded unbelieving.

“I don’t think you understand, Kathy. If this is going to work—maybe it won’t—but the only chance is to go whole hog at it.” Carefully he explained about having met none of the staff until today, knowing nobody in the East; he gave a brief account of the luncheon and the start he’d made. “It’s got to run right through everything,” he ended.

“Why, of course. I hadn’t really seen it before.”

She seemed penitent, and guilt rose obscurely in him. He demanded too much always. He judged too quickly. “I got riled at you before,” he said. “I thought for a minute that if I
were
Jewish—” At her quick laugh he broke off. He felt a fool.

“Now, Phil, you’re not calling me An Anti Semite?” She made three round words of it.

“Good Lord, no.”

There was a pause. They each leaned forward to pick up their neglected glasses. The silence expanded. It’s no good analyzing
every
reaction, he thought. Was his feeling a fool the right reaction? Or his being riled? Save it, quit it, he ordered himself. Dope it later, when you can think.

“My trouble is,” he said to her, “I’m always too damn apt to weigh and measure and wonder and ponder everything till I don’t know where I stand.”

“I’m not,” she said. Her voice was soft. “Not often. But last night I did that, too. I didn’t get to sleep till nearly three.”

“Kathy.”

He wanted to take her into his arms. We’ll work things out, he thought. If there’s anything real to work out, we’ll work it out. Somewhere behind him a swinging door swished.

“Dinner,” she said. “Let’s finish these at the table.”

The soreness of disappointment wouldn’t leave her. The moment the front door had closed on him, she’d wanted to call him back, find the one more thing to say that would change the feel of the evening.

It wasn’t even eleven. She went about the living room, emptying ash trays, tidying up the bar table. Claudia had missed his dinner napkin; it was still on the end table where he’d carried it with him when they’d gone over to the sofa for coffee. She took up the yellow square. “KLP,” the monogram said fatly. She tossed it on the coffee tray and carried both into the small kitchen. Claudia was always in such a rush to escape, it had become an unwritten agreement between them that she need not bother with the belated coffee things. Kathy washed the small cups and the slivers of spoons. “KLP” twined on their fiddle-shaped handles. All fancy and twisted, she thought.

She dried the things and put them away. The soreness persisted. The evening had balled up.
She’d
balled it up by that extraordinary reluctance she’d felt about his idea. Remembering that first instant after his announcement, she felt fidgety. What
had
happened to her? She didn’t like it.

“It’s a brilliant notion, Phil. It’ll make a stunning series. You’ll be famous.” Twice she’d said that, once during dinner and once later on. He’d smiled each time, and each time she’d thought that the snarl was straightening out. But the next moment he’d talked about something else, and the discomfort remained in her.

What
had
hit her? From where had it come?

She sighed. The subterranean paths that twined through human impulses and motives always eluded you if you tried to follow them. At least for her they did. There was no use to will herself to the task. She never had a road map. She always got lost.

It really was a good idea; she knew it in the same blind way she knew when a play had a good plot, or a novel a strong sense of character and movement. She should have said so at once, kept to herself the instant visions of the difficulties he’d get into, praised him wholly. That’s what a man needed from a woman. Belief, encouragement, never skepticism, no matter how truly skepticism might be justified. She’d failed him by reacting too quickly.

That’s all it was.

Bill wouldn’t have minded; he wouldn’t even have noticed anything that subtle. Phil was neurotic, she supposed, easily thrown off key, easily let down. But the Bills weren’t for her, and Phil was. She needed to learn him a little more to know where lay the craters and bogs of his intricate personality and be quicker about stepping around them. It was so easy to hurt a man like Phil. Yet the sensitive mind was his appeal, and the delight she felt when his eyes went easy and happy was her reward.

She wished he’d not had to leave just then. The accommodator she’d sent him, Emma, was the timetable kind who would march off at eleven, heart patient or no, so he had no choice. But perhaps another hour would have sloughed off their heaviness. He hadn’t even tried to kiss her the whole stilted evening. And the quiet look had been on him.

Disconsolate, she turned out the lights and went into her room. As she undressed, dissatisfaction wormed anew through her.

“I’m getting neurotic myself.” She’d blundered with him over his idea, so what? She’d said the wrong things, so what? He knew a moment later she was sorry—she’d said perfectly openly she’d been off her head. You blunder, you apologize—that ought to be all there was to it. Instead that good feeling that everything was right had burst like a bubble blown against slate.

“W
E ARE BORN
in innocence.” The phrase was in him, a cluster of words in his mind, a challenge in his blood. A hundred times in the next days it spoke to him. Where it had come from, what it was trying to tell him, he did not know. It was just there, one measure of a stately music.

“We are born in innocence.”

Like a phrase written in sleep, laden with an import the dreaming mind strains to hold past the moment of waking, it touched the threshold of his understanding again and again, only to retreat before he could welcome the message he felt it brought. It had the commanding significance of the final spinning sentence he had pursued just before surrender to the anesthetic in the base hospital. And, as then, he felt enormous with its revelation, comforted that he had found for himself some magic litany that explained essence and truth and being.

But though he could this time remember the words, as words, he could not grasp or pin down the implication that hung mistily over them. At Kathy’s that night, they had spoken themselves within him, while he looked at her across the table, while he half listened to something she was saying about Central Park under the first good snow. And since then they had sounded their grave cadence through all his changing moods.

Alone now, on Christmas afternoon, he felt them as much in the room with him as the lights on the tree and the blurred voices from the kitchen.

We are born in innocence. In blood and water and pain we are born, but in an unstained purity of heart. Wizened, crushed, our fogged eyes blinded by new light, our outraged skins shocked by a thirty-degree drop in the envelope about us—still we are born a good vessel, innocent of corruption.

Corruption comes later. The first fear is a corruption, the first reaching for something that defies us. The first nuance of difference, the first need to feel better than the different one, more loved, stronger, richer, more blessed— these are corruptions. One by one they pour their drops into the vessel, and the layer forms, seedbed of the future life.

His mother came in, moving slowly as if to test out the returned ease of her body. In her eyes there still was the look of contentment with which she’d watched Tom’s bright delight of the Christmas morning.

She said, “You’re not staying in because of me, Phil?”

“I haven’t a date. I know you’re all right. Craigie’ll be surprised tomorrow.”

She nodded, belligerently, as if she’d indeed show Dr. Craigie and his spying electrocardiograph their proper places. The bell rang, and she moved to the buzzer. Phil went out into the hall.

“Telegram,” he said a moment later. “Funny. The girls—” He signed, tore it open. “Dave.” He read the brief message. “Got my letter, and he’s to start any minute and would like a stopover. Boy, that’ll be good, to see Dave.”

She was as pleased as he. They discussed the advisability of giving him Tom’s room and decided against it. “Dave can have mine, and I’ll sleep on the sofa,” Phil said. “That way, if we stay up all night chewing the fat, the kid won’t be in the way.”

The spell was broken. When she left the room, he went back to the five words. But now they were just words, with no promise of secret meaning.

“Probably had something to do with Christmas coming and the new snow in the park and the new thing I was starting, like getting born again.” But why the melancholy that went with them?

“Dad, say, Dad.
Please.
” Tom’s shout came as imperious as though the house were on fire. Phil didn’t move.

“What’s up?”

“It won’t
work.
I’ve got the caps in it, and it just
won’t.
Oh, the damn thing’s haywire.”

“Let’s have a look at it.” He smiled. Tom’s damns and hells were a fine business, traceable to his own liberal use of them. Maybe he was overcasual about the way he ignored them in the kid. He looked up. Tom was standing rigid, just inside the door. From his dejected right hand, the cap pistol dangled. That morning when he’d seen it, he’d gone into a delirium over it. “Iron, Dad,” he’d shouted. “Not wooden.
Feel
it; it’s cold.”

Now he stood waiting for Phil to say something.

“What am I?” he demanded. For the moment the crisis of the gun was forgotten.

Phil looked at him. Across the bridge of his nose, he wore a green scarf, folded into a triangle. Low on his skinny hips hung a studded belt and holster. His corduroy “longies” which the eights and nines wore these days were tucked into his still-new galoshes. Besides the pistol, he had a pearl-handled revolver in the holster and its twin in the belt of his pants. Phil stared at him judiciously. “You’re a—let’s see. A sheriff.”

“Oh,
Dad.
” (Disgust.)

“A horse rustler.”

“No.”

“A cowboy in Arizona.”

“Dad, you’re nuts.”

“Well, then.” Enough of this game. There never had been the slightest doubt what he was, but the rules of childhood made an immediate guess unthinkable. “Then you’re an outlaw, a bandit outlaw.”

“Yes, that’s it, yessir that’s just it.” Above the green fold of silk, his eyes gleamed. Slyly he went behind the wing chair, in a movement which brought only the word “skulking” to Phil’s mind, and aimed the cap pistol at his father. Then, suddenly, he remembered, and tragedy stood gaunt upon him. “It won’t work. The caps stick.”

Phil took the pistol and pried apart the two halves of the butt. Kathy had sent it. It had arrived last night, and nothing about the package showed that it was from her. This morning, when Tom had ripped off the bright wrappings, the card had fallen to the floor, ignored by the instantly inflamed child. Mrs. Green had picked it up, glanced at it, and handed it to Phil.

“What a nice thing,” she’d said.