Gentleman's Agreement (23 page)

Tom had closed the door. He was standing still, just inside it. He made no move to get out of his overcoat or throw off his cap. Phil glanced at him.

“Anything wrong?”

Tom didn’t answer. Kathy took a step toward him.

“Tom,” Phil said. “What’s up? You look funny.”

Tom shook his head. He opened his lips; they worked at something, but no sound came. He stood there, taut with effort, staring, only his jaws moving. Suddenly Phil knew he was trying not to cry.

“Fight, hey?” His voice was hearty, parental. “An argument with one of the guys?”

“Dad.” The word was tight. He was ignoring Kathy, looking only at Phil.

I’ve never seen him like this, Phil thought, state of shock—and he went to him, everything else forgotten.

“Tell me what happened, Tom.”

Bewilderment showed in Tom's eyes, and then, suddenly, he put the back of one hand up to his mouth and was sobbing.

“They called me,” he said at last, “ ‘dirty Jew’ and ‘stinky kike’ and—” The next was too broken to make out. “—and they ran off and I—” His bitter crying claimed the rest of it.

Explosion in the mind—they have hurt my child. Roar of hatred different from any fury when it’s only yourself they hurt. Murder for what they’ve done to my kid—

He put a hand on Tom’s head. Kathy was down on her knees, her arms around him.

“But it’s just a mistake; it’s not
true,
Tom,” she cried out to him. “You’re not any more Jewish than I am.”

Savagery toward her now, blinding, for these words rushing … offering the Benison, the Great Assurance that he was all right, as all right as she, with white Protestant all-rightness, unquestioned, unassailable.

Phil couldn’t speak. Kathy looked up. There was no sound in the room except Tom’s clutching sobs.

Slowly, she stood up, and Tom turned toward his father. “Let’s get your coat off, Tom,” Phil said quietly. “We’ll talk about it in a minute.”

Without a word to her, he led Tom from the room. In the bathroom, he took off Tom’s cap and washed the streaked face as if this were years ago and Tom still a baby. Calm him first with ordinary things.

“Suppose you start over,” he said then. “Was it at school? Was Jimmy in it?”

Tom shook his head to both questions. He was no longer crying, but the indrawn breathing was effort enough. Phil dried his face, using his own bath towel in some impulse for closeness out of the ordinary. Then he sat on the edge of the bathtub and asked, “Anybody sock anybody?”

“No. They just yelled it. It was at our corner—I sort of walked over to Lexington before I came up. You said I could.”

“Sure.”

“And then this bunch.”

Phil saw the small face go red and contorted again and the dazed look of shock come back. He wanted to take him into his arms, hold him, but boys of eight have the right to give some signal before they are babied. Tom gave none.

“One was a kid from school, about eleven. I don’t know the other two and they were playing hop and I asked—”

Phil waited. “You said could you play, too?”

“And the school one said no dirty little Jew could ever get in their games and they all yelled those other things.
Why,
Dad? Why
did
they?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “And I started for the school one and he said my father had a long curly beard and they all ran away.”

“Here’s a glass of water, Tom. Drink some.” He got the glass, filled it, offered it. Only while he was drinking did Phil notice he was still in his overcoat. “Give me your coat; it’s hot in here.” Tom started automatically at the buttons, and Phil said, “You didn’t want to tell them you weren’t really Jewish?”

Tom gave him a glance that was not only startled but critical. His hands backed each other, fingers laced, reminding Phil of the G2 pledge.

“Good boy. I like that.” Phil nodded judiciously. “Lots of kids just like you are Jewish, and if you said it, it’d be sort of admitting there
was
something bad in being Jewish and something swell in not.”

Tom nodded, too. Then his eyes hardened; his lower jaw pushed out. For the first time anger replaced hurt. “They wouldn’t fight. They just ran.”

“Damn cowards,” Phil said. “There are grownups like that too, Tom. They do it with wisecracks instead of yelling.” They looked at each other. Tom was getting calm again. A moment later, Phil said, “O.K. now?” Tom picked up his cap and overcoat from the wicker hamper. “Then will you go read or something? Gram’s sleeping, and I have to talk to Kathy awhile.”

He put his hand on Tom’s shoulder and squeezed down on it. “Let’s keep it to ourselves till Gram’s well.” Tom hunched against the pressure and smiled uncertainly at him. Then he left.

For a moment Phil stayed on, his thoughts rocketing back to Kathy. “When something hits into your kid.” Just names? Just exclusion? Or equally the sly corruption, the comforting poison of superiority? “Any place can be a hotbed, Phil; each house decides it.” His house would decide it for Tom—by a phrase, a nuance, an attitude. Each day it would go on being decided, through the rest of his childhood, through adolescence. A passion tore through Phil, to protect this one boy from that slow sure poison.

He went in to Kathy and could think of nothing to say at all. She sat in the chair she’d been in that night he’d first kissed her, when he’d felt the vast hope, like a drug to heal the long misery. Now she looked withdrawn, unwilling; she offered him only silence.

Idiotically, he thought of Miss Wales these last days, the punctilious politeness, the unspeaking docility with which she sat there, taking down every letter he dictated, never looking up inquiringly as he paused, never mentioning the talk they’d had, and never forgiving it. Punishing him was so much easier than questioning herself.

Kathy’s silence was as unforgiving. “It was an aberration, Phil—” She would not say it now, candid, eager. He could not, simply could not, say words now to minimize and condone. The inflection in her cry to Tom betrayed her more than any action. The doctor comforting the patient, “You’re as healthy as I am”; the psychiatrist saying heartily, “You’re no more insane than me.” He wanted to explain what he felt, but knew they would quarrel again. “Those are the toughest fights, Phil, the ones about ideas. Families split apart—” Suddenly he saw himself facing Kathy over and over with some such fight between them, next month, next summer, next year. Again and again there would be the distance, the coldness. In this one moment were all the unborn moments.

This was recognition at last. This was the underlying heaviness, the tenacious melancholy, stemming from the unwilling knowledge that they stood miles apart once the top words were said, the easy words, the usual words. A dozen times he had overlooked, explained, blamed his own solemnity. A dozen times some new evidence had come. Each time, his yearning for her, his love and passion, had conspired to help him skirt the truth that lay, bulky and impassable, in the road before them.

“I’m pretty tired of feeling in the wrong,” Kathy said slowly. “Everything I do or say is wrong, about anything Jewish.”

He said nothing. He had never heard this ring in her voice.

“All I did just now was to face the facts about Dave in Darien. And then tell Tom just what you told him when he asked that day if he was one.”

“Not ‘just what.’ ”

“You really do think I’m an antisemite! And Jane and Harry and everybody who simply recognizes things.”

“No, Kathy. I’ve just come to see more clearly that—”

“You
do
think it. You’ve thought it secretly a long time.”

“It’s just that I’ve come to see that lots of nice people who aren’t
are
their unknowing helpers and connivers. People who’d never beat up a Jew or yell kike at a child. They think antisemitism is something way off there, in a dark crackpot place with low-class morons. That’s the biggest thing I’ve discovered about the whole business.”

He put his hand up to span his eyes. His stretched fingers and thumb rotated the flesh at the corners of his closed eyes as if his temples throbbed there… . That
is
what I’ve come to see. She isn’t consciously antisemitic, nor is Jane or all the pleasant, intelligent people at the party or the inns and clubs. They despise it; it’s an “awful thing.” But all of them, and the Craigies and Wales and Jordans and McAnnys, who also deplore it and protest their own innocence—they help it along and then wonder why it grows. Millions like them back up the lunatic vanguard in its war for this country—forming the rear echelons, the home front in the factories, manufacturing the silence and acquiescence… .

“You mean we’re
not
going to Darien for the summer or to the club, even though you’re through by then?”

He dropped his hand. “Let’s save that for another time.”

She stood up abruptly. And suddenly she was saying, “Oh, damn everything about this horrible thing. They always make trouble for everybody, even their friends. They force everybody to take sides with them—”

“Quit it.” He was on his feet, facing her. “Quit that.” He heard the rasping voice and was powerless to control it. “ ‘They’ didn’t suggest the series—‘they’ didn’t give me my idea—‘they’ haven’t one single goddam thing to do with what’s happened between you and me.”

“I won’t have you shout at me. I know what you’re thinking about marrying me—I saw it in your face when I said that to Tom.”

“My God, you charge me with thinking you’re an anti-semite—I answer that and you switch to Darien and the club! You blame everything on the Jews, and I lose my temper, and you switch to my face and our marriage!”

“Or swear at me or treat me to sarcasm and implication, either. I’m
not
going to marry into hothead shouting and nerves, and you might as well know it now. Let’s just call it off for good.”

She walked to the table where her purse and hat and gloves lay. She took up her coat and put it on.

“Kathy.” The word was only half spoken. “I’m sorry I shouted. I hate it when I do it.”

“It isn’t the shouting. It’s just everything. You’ve changed so since the first night at Uncle John’s. I just know there’s no use.”

She went to the door. Phil watched her. Then she was gone.

T
HE CITY WAS ASLEEP
. New York, the nervous, keyed-up city, was almost at rest two hours past midnight. Watching the sleeping stone under the quiet sky, the mind might know that there were still people laughing in night clubs, trucks and taxis still speeding through streets and avenues, swift subways underground still thundering into lighted stations.

But to the eye itself, the city was dark, sleeping, motionless. Here an oblong of shaded yellow cut its way out of the surrounding block of stone, and there a strip of continuing light showed a whole floor of a skyscraper café, a shelf of life and animation bracketed high above the city.

But apart from the single window, from the single strip, there stretched from river to river, from street to sky, a city’s surrender to oblivion or dreaming.

Watching the night from her own lighted window, Kathy wondered about the other yellow oblongs. Who were the people behind their bland faces? Why were they awake now? Could there be delight and love behind those unwinking surfaces, or only this sleepless despair? In her childhood she had known this plunging of misery, but never before as an adult. Yet it was right to break with Phil now; it would be worse to have it come afterwards and bring a second divorce, a second failure. Nobody could live with a man who’d turned crusader. At the beginning he’d been the way she was about the dreadful thing, the way any civilized person was. It was a problem, a danger to be fought, but he’d been sane and objective about it. Twice he’d shown a perfectly human resentment at being saddled with so difficult a subject for his first stab as a staff editor. He’d admitted frankly once that all those interviews with various committees wore him down as committee talks always did. He’d been simply the journalist doing an important job and perfectly normal about everything—the way she was or Jane or anybody.

Then he got “the angle” and began to change.

That night when he told her his plan, she’d drawn back, and at last she knew why: she’d known it instinctively for an impossible thing. You were what you were, for the one life you had. You couldn’t help it if you were born Christian instead of Jewish, white instead of black. It didn’t mean you were
glad
you were—

“But I am glad. God, it would be awful.”

The words spoke out in her mind. She drew into herself as if she could shrink away from them. Then combativeness reared—this was abject readiness to feel in the wrong, and she’d had enough of it.

“It’s just that in this world, with the way things are, I
am
glad.” That was it; it was purely a practical recognition, not a judgment of superior status. Here was another case in point. If Phil had been there and she had said that very same thing aloud, he’d have worn the quick look. Try as she might, she’d have been unable to make him see how innocently she meant it, how devoid of prejudice it was. It’s just a fact, like being glad you were good-looking instead of ugly, or comfortably fixed instead of poor, healthy instead of crippled, young instead of old. But Phil, this Phil, the Phil he’d become, would twist it into something horrible, a conniving, a helping, an aiding and abetting the thing she loathed as much as he. They’d quarrel—their life would be the sudden chill between them, the words, the quarrel to be made up, and then finally to be left unmade up.

That time after he’d gone to see Professor Lieberman and she’d said something perfectly casual about “the Jewish race.” Phil had explained once or twice that the phrase was based on old misconceptions which were completely disproved by modern anthropologists. But she’d said it— it was just habit. She wasn’t fighting the scientists when they said there was no such thing. She knew perfectly well that the three great divisions of mankind were the Caucasian Race, the Mongoloid, the Negroid. She remembered his finger pointing out a phrase in a pamphlet written by leading anthropologists. “There is no Jewish ‘Race.’ ”