Gentleman's Agreement (22 page)

Abruptly, he turned toward the front door. The man waiting there gave a pleasant half salute and called out, “How do?” in the rising, puzzled tone of somebody excepting nobody, but not perturbed by the unexpected. His face was pale, his hair thick and gray; he was as tall as Phil, middle-yeared, not homely, not handsome. He wore grayish tweeds, with a plaid wool shirt, an island of color and impudence in his general indefiniteness.

“How do,” Phil said. “The desk right ahead?”

“Just inside. Driving through?”

“No, I came by air.” He went past him, into a large lounge. The registration desk was at his left, and he turned to it, but his snapshot picture of the place had already given him the blazing fireplace, the deep chairs, the beams overhead. Behind the counter the tall man was gently pushing forward a leather-cornered pad with a registration card slotted into it, saying affably, “I hope it won’t be for
too
many days, but with one bag and no skis—”

“I have reservations,” Phil said, and took the pen angled toward him from its plastic base. “For a double room and bath, today through Thursday.”

He wrote, “Philip—”

“Reservations? In what name?” There was a stiffening all over him, mouth, voice, the arms on the counter.

Phil wrote, “S. Green” and his address. Then he said, “Green. My wife will get here tomorrow.”

“The Mr. Green who—”

“Yes,” Phil said. “You’re Mr. Calkins, the owner?” He didn’t wait for the nod. He pulled out his wallet, opened it without haste, took out the telegram, laid it on the desk, and set the wallet on top of it. Absurdly, a shakiness began in his knees, but the slow-seeping juice that caused it merely deepened his steady voice.

“But there’s some error, Mr. Green. There isn’t one free room in the entire inn.” His eyes sent the page boy an almost imperceptible look, but Phil saw it. It signaled “no” or “hold it” or something which the boy understood well enough to make him shift from his rigid attention to an “at ease.” And with the signal, a curious thing had happened to Mr. Calkins’ face. It had drawn all mobility into itself, absorbing it, blotterlike; it presented now only the even, dead stain of on-guardedness.

“You were about to give me a room—apart from the reservation. What’s changed your mind?”

“Why, not a thing. It’s unfortunate, but there isn’t—”

He reached toward the telegram. Quietly Phil shoved the wallet aside so that the message and the signature, “J. Calkins,” became visible. But he let his hand rest on the lower part of it. Mr. Calkins said, “Perhaps the Brewster Hotel near the station?” and reached toward the telephone.

“I’m not staying at the Brewster,” Phil said. He looked directly into Calkins’ eyes. Calkins raised his shoulders, drew his hand back from the telephone, and said nothing at all. “I am Jewish, and you don’t take Jews—that’s it, isn’t it?”

“Why, I wouldn’t put it like that. It’s just—”

“This place is what they call ‘restricted’—is
that
it?”

“I never said that.”

It was like fighting fog, slapping at mist. A man and woman came up, saying “Air-mail for these,” left two letters, and began to go off.

“If you don’t accept Jews, say so,” Phil said. The pair stopped. Calkins picked up the letters.

“I am very busy just now, Mr. Green. If you’d like me to phone up a cab or the Brewster—” He reached into a drawer, took out a strip of air-mail stamps, and folded two back on the perforated hinge. The couple moved on. From behind him, the woman’s voice came clearly back to Phil. “Always pushing in, that’s the Jew of it.” Calkins turned aside to a rustic box with a slit top and dropped the letters into it. There was something so placid, so undisturbed about the gesture that all the backed-up violence Phil had been grinding down exploded. His hand suddenly had plaid wool and buttons in it; he had leaned across the counter and seized Calkins under the throat, twisting him forward so that they faced each other once more.

“You coward,” he said and dropped his hand. He turned to the page, signaled for his bag, and said, “My cab’s waiting; I’ve got tickets on the four-o’clock plane.”

The page grinned widely. “So it
is
just books in it. Clothes aren’t ever this heavy, sir.”

Calkins made a sound. Comprehension was in it, and nervousness. A cold shaft of triumph shot through the heat and poison boiling in Phil. Mr. Calkins had caught on to the fact that something was going on besides the hiring of a room. Mr. Calkins was frightened.

G
LUEY AND INESCAPABLE
, the extraordinary melancholy clung to him. For more than a week he was never fully free of it. The fast-thickening pile of manuscript in his desk at home, usually the rising barometer of his spirits, offered no permanent release. His mother was definitely improving, the spastic pull at her lips easing; Tom was himself again; Kathy had greeted his account of Flume Inn with disgust for Calkins and praise for him; their new plans were already in order. They were going to Nassau for the first week of February. “I came right out with it at the travel agent’s, Phil—there’ll be no nonsense in
this
place.”

But still there persisted in him the odd sense of omen, heavy-heavy-hanging over. Almost constantly he was strung on an unhappy tension, a man racing for a train and uncertain of the watch that said he still had a minute to go. Impatiently, Phil tried to locate the source of this new infection of moodiness—the inn, his mother’s stroke, the hostility of Miss Wales, the continued fruitlessness of Dave’s search for a place to live, the postponement of the wedding—but not any one of them, nor the sum of them all, convinced him that he had isolated the cause of the sticky sadness in him.

He had accepted the fact that in a few weeks he’d undergone a swift and deep transfusion into his own blood of a million corpuscles of experience and emotion. He pointed that out one night to Dave, during one of their “sessions” at one in the morning, and Dave had given him a knowing and compassionate smile.

“You’re not insulated yet, Phil. It’s new every time, so the impact must be quite a business.”

“You mean you get indifferent to it in time?”

“No—unless you’re a pachyderm. But you aren’t as quick and raw.
You’re
concentrating a lifetime thing into a few weeks; you’re
making
the thing happen every day, writing letters, asking questions, going to meet it. The facts are no different, but it does telescope it.”

“Christ, it must be worse on the organism, though, to have it drag out year after year.”

“It’s not too good.” Dave shrugged. “Know something, Phil? Remember I said the other night I’ve never felt that ‘proud to be a Jew’ stuff? Any more than you’re proud or not proud to be a Christian?” Phil nodded. “Well, there’s one thing about Jews that does make me feel sort of set up.” He seemed to be thinking it out, and Phil said nothing. “You go talk to a psychiatrist, Phil; tell him about some guy that got his first feel of insult and contempt as a little boy, went on right through life being taunted or held apart, knew that people like him were being beaten and butchered and killed. The psychiatrist would expect a screaming psychopath as a result, wouldn’t he?”

“I never thought of it that way,” Phil said. “And the wonder is, you’re going to say, not that some Jews are aggressive or thirsty for money or power, but that most of them are so ordinary and patient and able to lead regular lives.”

Dave smiled. “Kind of remarkable, isn’t it? Even happy lives, with love and work and kids and plans. Takes guts, especially the last ten years or so.”

They fell silent. Phil wondered if he’d have the guts himself. A dozen times since he’d started this, he’d been called “sensitive,” as if it were a failing. But who wouldn’t be sensitive or oversensitive, with this sort of daily raw-rubbing technique? Only the gross, the truly vulgar, could remain untouched and unchanged, in an idiot slumber of indifference. Since when was it a flaw of character to be sensitive, anyway?

“Minify said something the other day, Dave. One of those office arguments about how you fight off Communism or Fascism in this country.”

“The old malarky?” Dave winked. “Let me guess. True democracy!”

“Not from John. Jobs and economic security, sure—even the Fascists and Communists promise that. No, he said it had got down to a matter of equal self-respect, pride, ego, whatever. Take Communism. It’s got one good thing, anyway—equality among white and black, all minorities—only the price there is so big, too. If we did it, without the price of free speech, free opposition, free everything—then we’d really be fighting the Communists where it counts.”

“Smart cookie.”

“So he feels beating antisemitism and antinegroism is a political must now, not just sweet decency.”

“What the hell chance have we of getting decent with thirteen million Negroes if we can’t lick the much easier business of antisemitism?”

“What indeed?” Phil said. “That’s why
Smith’s
is going after it so hard. My stuff will be just the first—he’s planning an endless amount to come.”

For a long time they sat on, talking, and when he went to bed Phil felt more cheerful.
Smith’s
wasn’t alone; plans were afoot in many places, more than forty cities were trying their own Springfield Plans, legislatures everywhere were considering and passing anti-bias and civic-rights laws, town meetings were discussing subjects that didn’t seem hot a decade ago. As the bigots got more active they inadvertently mobilized the anti-bigots. There were millions of honestly democratic people in the country; they were the great majority, and when they really knew what was in the balance, they’d throw the full weight of their convictions into the scale.

The next morning at the office, he began the fourth article of the series and knew they were holding up, perhaps even building up beyond the level of the first one. Minify had just read the first three in rough draft and asked him in and suggested arranging for book publication later. Might be; might be. He’d never had a book published, and the suggestion excited him. He considered phoning Kathy at the school just to tell her about John’s notion, but decided against it. He was calling for her and taking her home with him at four-thirty; she’d been insistent on getting the dinner there every night, with him and Tom to help and Dave doing the dirty work afterward.

But when he saw her he said nothing about the book.

“Dave’s going tomorrow,” he greeted her. “He just phoned me.”

“Going? Where?”

“California.”

“No! And give up that Quirich—”

“He can’t abandon his wife and kids forever. Or find a house or apartment. The housing shortage isn’t going to end overnight. You
know
he’d never let Anne give him her place for months at a time.”

A knobbed something was inside his ribs. For longer than he wanted to admit he’d waited for Kathy to say one thing. All along, stubbornly, he’d kept on believing in the flat Dave would find, the small house, the shack, the cottage. And all the time, along one fine thread of his mind, he’d listened for the thing she would finally say.

The taxi stopped, and he paid the driver. Upstairs Dave greeted them cheerily, “Hi, you two. I’m off on a date. Should I wind up here with Anne? Your mother’s fine, Phil.”

His bag was already packed, lying open to receive tomorrow morning’s last-minute things. After he’d gone, they spent half an hour with Mrs. Green and then went into the living room. Phil told himself he was just tired. The depression was upon him once again, mucilaginous and cold.

And then Kathy said, “I suppose you’re thinking of the cottage, Phil.”

“I had thought of it.”

“So have I. I thought of it when Anne offered to move.”

She fell silent. She had brought it up herself; she’d only been waiting to see if there was not some other solution for Dave. She’d confided that she meant to work on the cottage during the spring months, changing curtains and slip covers, altering its “personality” so there’d be no associative thing with past summers when she and Bill were there. But now Dave was going back to California, driven to reject a job with twice the future of the one he’d go back to. Now a matter of redecorating would no longer hold back the words that could alone keep Dave here. She was looking at him.

“It just would be so uncomfortable for Dave,
knowing
he’d moved into one of those damn neighborhoods that won’t take Jews.”

“Kathy.”

“I loathe it, but that’s the way it is up there. New Canaan’s worse—nobody can sell or rent to a Jew there. But even Darien is—well, it’s a sort of gentleman’s agreement when you buy, especially in the section where Jane’s place and mine are.”

“Gentleman—oh, my God, you don’t
really
—you
can’t
actually—”

He was standing. He did not remember getting up. I mustn’t fight with her; she’s my girl, my wife, almost; I mustn’t yell. I’ve been bunched up in a tangle these last days; I’ve got to hang on.

“You won’t buck it, Kathy? Just going to give in, play, along, let their idiotic rules stand?”

“I don’t play along—but what could one person do?”

“Tell them to go to hell. What could
they
do?”

“Ostracize him. Even some of the markets. Not deliver food. Not wait on them promptly. And I couldn’t give him guest cards to the clubs and—” She saw his eyes, and added, “But,
Phil,
you’ll be all done with the series before we get there.”

He made a gesture so sharp that she stopped as if she’d been struck. His face was new. Rigid in self-control, half sick. She was frightened.

“Do you expect
us
to live in the cottage,” he said, “once I know all this?”

“Oh, Phil, don’t! We can’t make the whole world over.”

“Or go happily to the clubs?”

“You know I’m on Dave’s side.”

“I’m not on Dave’s side or any side except against
their
side. My God, Kathy, do you or don’t you believe in this? And if you do, then how—”

The door opened. It was Tom. Phil wanted to order him at once to his room; interruption now was intolerable. Tom said “Hi” in a lifeless voice and looked at neither of them. Had he heard their angry voices on his way upstairs?