Gentleman's Agreement (25 page)

John was free of the corruption. Anne was free, his mother, Jayson, Mary, Dave, Tingler—there were plenty of people who truly were whole and sound. They were the roots and trunk of the—there it was again, the juxtaposition. He took down his Bartlett. From “corrupt” and “corruption” he found no clue. He turned to “tree.” As he searched, diagnosis of his own actions rocked his busy mind. He was manufacturing devices to keep him from acknowledging the longing in his blood, the memory in his flesh. For the first days he’d been enslaved by thought—barred from images of passion and physical love. Treacherously they had come back, to engulf him. Could anything matter more than
this
rightness between them?

Finger moving down six-point type, steering one’s eyes rigidly, perhaps one’s mind—it was the device for this moment. A dozen times already he’d forged other devices and used them even as he mocked them.

“Is known by his fruit, 1115.” That might be part of it. The Bible, as he had half expected. He’d always been deeply moved by certain parts of the Bible, by their grave intonations, their humanity and beauty. He found the quotation on page 1115 and knew it was not the one. But it was from Saint Matthew; he crossed to the bookshelves, took down the worn leather volume and began to read the Gospel According to Saint Matthew. Something about a tree. Something about corrupt. He read on, certain now that he would be rewarded.

“Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his fruit.” There it was, uncompromising, noble— Jesus addressing the Pharisees. It was the everlasting choice for wholeness and soundness in a man or in a nation.

They had known it, the patient, stubborn men who for years had argued and written and rephrased and fought over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They had known that injustice could corrupt the tree. They had known that its fruit could pale and sicken and fall at last to the dark ground of history where other dreams of equality and freedom had rotted.

That was the choice, and most men knew it as their hearts knew how to beat and their lungs to draw in air.

A comfort pervaded him. The slippery danger would be fought back and conquered. Freedom was men’s sturdiest hope; it would stand off the new onslaughts against it in this nation and others.

“This is the century for it.”

The words spoke themselves as, a long time ago—was it only on Christmas morning?—another phrase had sounded itself in his mind. As with that other one, this was charged with import. “Maybe this is the century for it.”

Other centuries had had their driving forces. Perhaps the twentieth would have its own singular characteristic as men looked far back to it one day. It might not be The American Century after all, or The Russian Century, or The Atomic Century. Perhaps it would be the century that broadened and implemented the idea of freedom, all the freedoms. Of all men.

Phil walked back and forth, back and forth. His old patterns were re-establishing themselves quickly. A few brief weeks of shared love, fulfillment—and then they had come back. You live in loneliness; you ache and work and think, and sometimes the work or the thinking lifts you for a moment out of the embrace of agony.

After the week at home, going back to the office was like an escape to safety. At last the inevitable question had come from his mother. “What’s wrong, dear? You’re not seeing Kathy.” He’d been unable to look up from his manuscript. “No, we’ve put things off awhile.” Sometime later he would have to tell her. And write to Dave to head off any wire of congratulations on the second of February. He had let Dave go off that next day with no mention of anything.

He went into Minify’s office, with an offhand “Here’s the fourth—won’t be long now.” He studied Minify’s face. The other time, Weldon had been there and personal talk impossible. Had she told him? And Jessie and Jane and Harry? Formalizing it? He was relieved when Minify spoke only about the series. It was now scheduled to begin with the first issue in May. Jayson ought to get started on illustrations in a week at most. They talked busily about pictures. Then it came.

“Sorry about you two,” Minify said at last. “Kathy told us.”

“Thanks.” Ridiculous reply, awkwardness clapping down; at the soft syllables of her name, an electric shock had twanged through him.

“She wouldn’t talk about it much. Only that you were always running into things you were at odds about.” Phil said nothing. “She seems pretty upset,” Minify volunteered, and Phil’s heart jumped. “She’s talking of going off for a vacation—she’d arranged at the school for your—” He broke off, and again silence lay between them.

The door opened, and a girl came in with the usual sheaf of letters for signature. Minify said, “Miss Mittelson, Mr. Green,” and they nodded to each other. She was slender, dark, composed as she moved. Phil thought of the old names, Ruth and Esther, Bathsheba and Naomi; a delicate admiration as for the impersonal idea of antiquity and survival moved in him. “You’re Miss Cresson’s new assistant,” he said, and she smiled and said, “That’s right.”

She spoke to Minify about the top letter and left the room.

“Reach any final decision about Jordan?” Phil asked.

“Told him yesterday I’d never fire a man for the way he voted, the party he belonged to, his religion, his private morals. But I’d come to look on the smallest spreading of race hatred and religious prejudice as a kind of treason. He began the why-I-never-care stuff, and I hauled him up short. The ad brought us calls from half a dozen employment agencies, astonished at ‘our change of policy.’” Minify glowered at Phil. “I got fairly insulting when I told that to Jordan—he’s been
Smith’s
to them for five years. Said treason was a fancy word but a lousy thing to have around even in small quantities. He resigned in a great huff. I admit I laid it on plenty.”

“Why not?” Phil stood up, oddly grateful for this recital. He wanted to ask more about Kathy, but could not. As he reached the door, John said, “I’d have liked it to go on, Phil.” His voice had deepened. He was not talking about Jordan any longer.

“Yes.”

Even back in his own office, the word still vibrated the tight string of longing in him. Like the idiotic “thanks,” it had come from too much silence, as if he’d lost the trick of fluent speech. He’d been a monk in the cell of regret. He’d begin to see people again, as of now. He picked up the phone and asked Anne if she’d lunch with him. “Me? All alone?” She’d already made a date and urged him to come along, “even though we are chaperoned by two fiction editors.” He agreed, wondering how much she knew.

Miss Wales came in. As she brought him up to date on the research mail that had arrived during his absence, she seemed less haughty, more communicative. She even smiled. She was beginning to forgive him.

“Any calls while I was away?”

“Just a couple. I gave them your home phone.”

“Any messages?” She shook her head. “Any names to call back?”

“No.” She smiled again.

He wanted to let it go at that, but compulsion shoved him. “Anybody’s voice you recognized?”

“Professor Lieberman, I think.”

“I’m seeing him, tonight.”

At lunch Anne kept a covert watch on him, asking unspoken questions. He tried to sound ordinary, but he knew he wasn’t fooling her much. Sam Goodman and Frank Tingler were discussing the new Dohen serial. Both were derisive of its countesses and young dukes and American society folk.

“He’s half psychotic inside,” Goodman said. “God, twenty-five years of it.”

“Of what?” Phil asked.

“Hiding the fact he’s Jewish,” Tingler said calmly. “Just so he can be the snob he really is—the best clubs, the
Social Register,
the whole routine. Sam told me this morning.”

“Phew,” said Anne. “When’d you hear it, Sam?”

“Hell, I grew up with a nephew of his. I knew it ten years ago when I came here.”

Tingler smiled. Close to, the opaque glasses no longer screened his eyes, and Phil could see the cheery look in them. It was the first time he’d ever seen Frank Tingler without the air of boredom. “Should think you’d have been too riled,” Tingler said, “to keep his secret for him, Sam. Boy, he sure can dish up a story the customers’ll read, though.”

“Doesn’t rile me as much as another kind of psychotic,” Sam said. “I know a couple guys—they’re above changing their names, or denying anything. But they can go through years without one single solitary mention of the word Jew or Jewish, antisemitism, Palestine, Zionism. Just never, no matter what the group, what the conversation, what the news in the afternoon paper.” He looked almost awed. “Talk to them about prejudice, and they instantly launch into a passionate defense of the Negro. Brother, they’re the ones rile me the most.”

“No,” Tingler said. “You got madder about that golf-club bunch.
They
rile you most.”

“Yeah, that gang,” Sam said. Phil and Anne waited. “It’s this bunch of rich guys around town, Jewish-but-don’t-look-it-much, mostly of English or German-Jewish ancestry. They set up a snazzy golf club of their own.” He grinned mischievously.
“And
they blackball guys of Polish or Russian-Jewish stock. Meaning, anybody who looks good-and-Jewish. Like it?”

Phil thought of Miss Wales.

“After all,” Anne said firmly, “why should gentiles have a corner on the sport of feeling superior?” She looked at Sam. “Dohen change his name?”

“Just slipped a notch in the alphabet, down from
C,”
Goodman laughed maliciously.

“And they say cattiness is female,” Anne observed.

Sam wasn’t disturbed. “This morning Frank got psychoanalyzing all the phony tripe Dohen always writes, so I finally explained what’s been rotting him for years.”

“Have you ever doped out,” Phil lazily asked Sam, “why rough talk about a Jew sometimes gets you sore and times like now it doesn’t?”

“Yeah.” Sam shrugged indifferently. “If I know the guy rates it on his record and not on his nose.”

“Sam straightened me out on that long ago,” Tingler said. “I’d read a thing—by van Loon maybe—that struck me. Something about van Loon’s hating Hitler for putting an obligation on him to like
all
Jews, good or bad.”

“I had to reassure Frank,” Sam explained, “that he and I both had a God-given right to dislike any louse alive, Jewish, Mohammedan, or whatever.”

“Antilousism,” Anne said affably. She turned to Phil. “How come your sister Bella’s taken such a different line from you, Phil?” Anne asked.

“My sister who? Belle? Isabel?”

“McAnny said ‘Bella’—met her in Detroit, or some people knew her. I forget which. He came back full of praise for you and scorn for her because she’s hidden—”

“Oh, my God.” It was a shout, a laugh, a choking, and they all stared at him.

“What’s the matter?” Anne was ready to laugh too, if he would share the joke. Tingler and Goodman looked on expectantly.

“You mean McAnny came back—I’ve been out of the office a week, remember, haven’t heard a thing,” Phil said to Anne.

“My gal got it from your Miss Wales, who got it in the washroom. He’s spreading around his little poison about you being O.K., but your cowardly sister—”

Phil’s mirth rubbed off in one swipe. “Damn that squirt,” he said. “He’s a liar about Belle; I know what started it, but I—” He stopped. Then he shrugged. “I’ll tell you about Belle sometime.”

Anne asked for more coffee, and Goodman talked of a short story he thought Tingler should buy. Phil suddenly remembered Miss Wales’s readiness to forgive him. No wonder she feels we’re quits. Laughter pushed up in him again. Poor Belle. He’d told her so positively she had nothing to wet her pants about.

That night, he discussed Dohen with Professor Lieberman, but found himself more interested in exploring Sam Goodman’s reluctance to “betray” the secret Dohen had guarded so assiduously. As on his first visit, he saw now that Joe Lieberman remained imperturbable, almost indifferent, to specific individuals and their behavior in anything whatever. He dismissed both Dohen and Goodman with a casual, “It would be more convenient if people were always predictable,” and for an hour they talked “atomic politics.” The half-shabby library where the physicist worked in his old apartment near Columbia was conducive to easy friendliness. Nothing could untie the hard-knotted depression incessantly within him, but here Phil found his mind absorbed, as if it coexisted on quite another level of life. As a tangent to some other remark, Lieberman suddenly came back to “Dohen and his life of crime.”

“I think I’ll start a new crusade,” he announced, his eyes shining with private merriment. “I can’t invite you to join it because you don’t look Jewish enough—they’d accuse you of pulling a Dohen. But for my crusade, I am perfection.”

He put his fingers up to his plump, beaked face as if to refresh his tactile memory of it.

“You see, Phil, I have no religion, so I am not Jewish by religion. Further, I am a scientist, so I must rely on science which tells me I am not Jewish by race since there’s no such thing as a distinct Jewish race. As for ethnic group or Jewish type, we know I fit perfectly the Syrian or Turkish or Egyptian type—there’s not even such a thing, anthropologically, as the Jewish type.”

Phil waited for him to go on. The man could discuss nuclear physics, attack Zionism, comment on anything, and make it rational, unexpected, amusing. From his last visit, when Phil had defended “the Palestine solution” for the immediate present at least, Lieberman’s words came back to him. “Don’t let them pull the crisis over your eyes. You say you oppose all nationalism—then how can you fall for a
religious
nationalism? A rejoining of church and state after all these centuries? A kind of voluntary segregation? Always for the other fellow, of course, not for the signers of the full-page ads in the
Times
and
Tribune
!”

“My crusade will have a certain charm,” Lieberman continued now. “I will go forth and state flatly, ‘I am not a Jew.’ ” He looked at Phil. “With this face that becomes not an evasion but a new principle. A scientific principle.”