Gentleman's Agreement (26 page)

“An anticlerical one, too.”

“Precisely.” They both laughed, and then Phil grew thoughtful. “There must be millions of people nowadays,” he said, “who are either atheist, agnostic, or religious only in the vaguest terms. I’ve often wondered why the Jewish ones among them, maybe even after a couple of generations of being pretty free of religion, still go on calling themselves Jews.”

Now Lieberman became serious.

“I know why they do—except for an occasional Dohen.”

“Why?”

“Because this world still makes it an advantage not to be one.” His lower lip shoved forward. His eyes changed their cheerfulness for a remote coldness. “Yes, I will even have to abandon my crusade. Only if there were no anti-semites could I do it.” At once he was good-humored again. “I’m reluctant to abandon it so soon. It would have had an innocence—no, a sort of purity—that would appeal to any scientist.”

“Y
OU MUST THINK
Mamma’s your property,” Belle’s voice in the receiver began vigorously. “The time she had the heart attack you kept it to yourself for a week, and now this calm letter days after her stroke.”

“Hello, Belle,” Phil said. “I should have written right off, but—”

“Or at least phoned. Even if the doctors did say it would pass. She’s my mother, too.”

“Want to speak to her? She’s starting to sit up a bit now.” Belle never used to antagonize him so quickly in the old days in California.

“I want her to come out here for some real rest and care, where she won’t have those awful stairs to climb. I’ll come and get her when she can travel.”

Phil motioned to his mother and laid the receiver on the table. Belle’s voice continued to spring forth from it. “I should think, Phil, you’d at least find an apartment where—”

“Now, Belle, really.” Mrs. Green picked up the phone as she was talking. “In all of New York—”

Belle interrupted with worried questions about how Mrs. Green felt. The slight thickness of speech had apparently shocked her into thinking more of her mother than of her own sense of neglect. A moment later, she repeated her invitation, and, standing near, Phil could hear each syllable even now that her voice had softened.

“Thanks, dear,” Mrs. Green said, “but I’ll be fine soon, and I can’t leave Tom and Phil alone. We still have no maid, and Phil couldn’t ever go out in the evening.”

“Then take Tom out of school for a bit,” Belle said energetically, “and take him with you.
He
doesn’t go around telling people he’s Jewish too, does he?”

Mrs. Green looked up sharply. Phil put his hands in his pockets.

“Does he?” The sounds in the receiver grew louder again. “Because if he did it here, I’d have to give Phil’s ridiculous scheme away.”

“Belle!” Phil watched his mother closely. Like many patient people, she could go to an extreme of rage once in a great while. “That’s a shocking, dreadful thing to say.”

“Dick’s firm—”

“You’re not thinking only of Dick’s firm,” Mrs. Green said. “That last time you were here, you said things while you were angry that told me you’ve lost all your old principles on your own account, not on Dick’s.”

“Oh, Mamma, please!”

“Now I see you’ve lost your spunk, too. It makes me ashamed.”

Phil saw his mother’s hand tremble. Brusquely he took the receiver away and with his head motioned her to her chair.

“Listen here, Belle,” he said with authority. “I don’t want Mom to have a relapse. So can it.” Belle started to say something. He cut in. “And on your next visit here, can it, too. Better quit this now; good night.”

He hung up and turned to Mrs. Green. “Feels queer to have one right in our own family, doesn’t it? She’ll be in New York in less than a week, trying to justify everything.”

“Stop that, Phil,” his mother said sharply. “I won’t
have
you saying ugly things about your own sister.” She was

silent for several minutes and then started for her room. At the door she stopped.

“Did you know we quarreled that day she was here?” she asked in a flat voice. “About her money-mad Jew, Patrick Curran? I guessed it.”

“More about her defeatist attitude in general. Then about the motor strike and labor unions and the Negro migration to Detroit.” She breathed deeply.

“Maybe she’ll change back.”

“It’s too late. It’s gone too far with her.” She left him.

It’s gone too far with her. With Belle it had gone past curing. But Kathy? Kathy was not like that about strikes and unions and migrations. Kathy was no defeatist about prejudice. She might be diffident, even weak, but there was also somewhere in her the thing that had made her argue Minify into taking some definite step to combat it.

A renewed hope surged. He went to his desk. For more than an hour he remained there.

Dear Kathy,

It seems impossible that we were unable to reach through this and find some place where we could be right with each other on it again. We never did go back to talk out the quarrel on New Year's about the party. I keep thinking that if we started back there, we might find out what kept going so wrong. Can I see you?

Phil

He who could write so easily, who could speed a thousand words down along his plunging fingers on the green-rubber keyboard of his machine, had stumbled like a first-grader over this single paragraph. A dozen times he had begun it and written into it a naked desperation; a dozen times he had begun it and written into it the frosted mathematics of logic. Finally he’d written out quickly the sentences that kept cropping up in all the versions. Those must be, to whatever censor there was in him, the most acceptable ones. He sealed it without rereading it and went out to mail it. An hour later he despised himself for having sent it.

Kathy’s answer was in his pocket when he called for Anne. It had come by return mail and was all the passport he needed to any new relationship, yet the guilt of disloyalty, even betrayal, nagged at him.

Anne had stopped by in the office with another cautious report of a possible apartment for Dave. Phil had been unable to sound other than limp and tired. “You’re none too cheerful these days, Phil,” she’d said kindly. “I worry about you.”

“Me? Why, I’m fine.”

“Well, I’m not. If you’re free tonight, come on down for a drink and listen to
my
troubles.”

So she’d guessed. She wouldn’t have suggested an evening date if she hadn’t guessed—or heard it herself. Everybody in that office seemed to hear everything, tell everything. He’d suggested dinner. With the exception of Professor Lieberman, he’d seen no one, done nothing but work. Suddenly he was grateful to her for forcing him out of the house, away from Tom and his mother, out into the world. Her clever, emphatic speech would—“Hell, I don’t need any alibis for going out with her.”

But through dinner, she seemed preoccupied, unlike her usual self. Once she fell into a long silence and then sighed. Resistance edged up ungenerously in him. He’d assumed she’d been joking about “listen to my troubles,” and now he was fearful that she’d meant it. He felt anesthetized as yet to any confidences she might make. How self-centered one’s own pain could make one!

“I’ll make you some decent coffee at home,” she said, and in contrition he agreed that that was a fine idea. In her apartment, he stared about him. Thinly in his mind, the whistles and tooting and “Happy New Years” of his last visit echoed; suddenly the letter in his pocket seemed the final plaque nailed on a long-closed coffin.

Was Kathy out with some man tonight, hearing him tell her she was beautiful, seeing his gaze travel over her face and throat and body? Jealousy reached into him. He sat, numb and patient, waiting for the spasm to ease. By now he knew it well. This also was different from the time after Betty’s death, this onslaught a dozen times each night of an enemy he’d never had to face during that other siege.

From the kitchen Anne called, “It’s perking now; be ready in a minute.” He reached for the letter and reread it once again.

There really isn’t any use, Phil. I’ve thought and thought, but I keep remembering how pointless it was for me and Bill to try to patch up the differences between us. There’s no use my going on always feeling in the wrong—it’s so humiliating, it wouldn’t wear well. Things would keep coming up on this, and we’d just kill everything off with quarrels. Maybe we fell in love too quickly, before we really had enough time to know each other. I’m sorry.

Kathy

He put it back in his pocket. At last Anne came in with the coffee. She looked at him, shook her head, said, “You brood too much,” and immediately talked of office things. He had misjudged Anne, he decided; unspoken apology formed in his mind. For all her brittle manner, she was clear and unequivocal about things; with her there’d never be the doubtful wonder, the watching for nuance that could communicate a lifetime slant to a child.

“You’re quite a girl—I’ve never told you.”

“Me? Sure, everybody loves Anne.”

She sat beside him on the sofa and poured the coffee as if she had just learned how to do it. With a start, Phil saw that her hand was shaking.

“You said you weren’t very happy, Anne,” he said impulsively. “Want to talk about it?”

“No, thanks—that much I’ve learned. Nothing bores any man as much as an unhappy female.”

“We’re good friends by now.”

She put sugar into her coffee, shaking her head for “no” as she stirred it. He watched her hand. There was something mesmeric in the way she stirred the coffee and stirred and stirred and stirred and stirred. Suddenly the spoon was still.

“I know about it being called off, Phil. Could I say something about you and Kathy?”

“Sure.” It sounded wary.

“John had a sort of office party last night for some of us old-timers, and she was there. We put on our usual act about liking each other.”

“Act?”

“You must have guessed it was mostly an act.”

“I wondered about it.”

“I just never go for that upper-classes stuff she lives for—”

“Anne, let’s don’t.” He put his hand over hers to lessen the rebuke. It wasn’t possible to sit here, discussing, dissecting. Abruptly she drew her hand out from under his.

“Oh, all right, be the little gentleman.” She took up her coffee cup, but did not drink from it. “It’s just, I think you’re pretty straight and—” His unbudging stare halted the rest of it. She smiled. “Lord, I do seem to be digging myself in deeper and deeper.”

Dave had said “one of the nicest and one of the bitchiest.” Had she been getting off malice about Kathy all along? Was it only malice? Again the sense of betrayal whipped at him. But there was something here, some clue, maybe the clue he’d searched for. “Upper-classes stuff” was her way of putting what Kathy called “living attractively” or “knowing amusing people.” How important
were
these things to Kathy? Her voice spoke a phrase in his mind. “When I didn’t have the things my friends did, then I was full of snobbish misery.” There was some excitement here the excitement of theory, of possible discovery. Privately, he’d have to carry this forward. Not now. Not with anybody, even Anne.

“I sure hope,” he said aloud, “we can find some place for Dave before the month’s up. You’d like Carol as much as you do Dave.”

She turned toward him quickly. “Any connection?”

“Why, no.”

“Or innuendo?”

“Anne, what the hell?” He put his hands out, palms up, in the instinctive need to show he held no trickery, no weapon, no motive. “I guess I was just trying to change the subject and being clumsy over it.” He turned toward her so that he was sitting along the edge of the sofa, almost facing her.

“O.K.” She tossed her head, like an impudent child. But in the next moment, she leaned forward and hid her face in her hands. Looking down upon her, a kinship flared—here was the bitter universal, for whatever hidden cause. He put his hand out. He stroked her hair, awkward as a two-year-old patting a kitten. She turned her body toward him; her head rested against his knees. His startled flesh felt her warm breath through his clothing; his thigh knew the round rise and fall of her breast. His hand stopped moving along her hair.

“Everything’s so damn rotten, Phil.” Her voice came up to him, muffled and thick. “We’re both unhappy. Why can’t we try to find some way—”

He did nothing. He said nothing. She was as motionless and mute as he. Seconds slipped past as if they were a tableau on a stage, rigidly waiting for an appointed time to elapse. Then she sat up. When she spoke, her voice was at once embarrassed and defiant.

“Let’s go to a movie,” she said.

For the third time, Kathy struck the chord incorrectly. Her nerves clanged with the dissonance. She dropped her hands from the keyboard and sat staring at the notes. She’d better put off this week’s lesson, too.

She stood up and moved quickly away from the piano. In the ten days since it had happened, she seemed to be moving away from everything. She’d had to force herself to answer Phil’s letter. And an hour ago, when Bill had phoned, asking to see her, she’d pleaded a headache, in the attempt to run from the dull half-hour it would mean. Maybe “unfriendly divorces” were the wisest after all, without this farce of amiability.

“I’m about to resign, Kathy,” he’d said, “and start a firm of my own. It would really help to check it with you.”

Poor Bill—the old habit of “sharing his work.” She’d refused going out to a bar and had asked him up instead. Maybe for once he wouldn’t tell every detail as he “spotted in the background.”

“You don’t look up to par,” Bill began when he arrived.

“February letdown is all it is.” She gave him whisky and water. He’d never liked soda or much ice. He sat where Phil used to sit, at one end of the sofa. He was ill at ease; she knew it instantly. Had he come for something other than talk of the new firm?

“I ran into Tom Manning at luncheon the other day,” he said. “He told me Jane said you’d broken your engagement.”

“Yes. Are Ellen and Tom still hipped on skiing?”

“I suppose so.” He sipped his drink. She watched him. Bill’s meaningless good looks never changed. “I saw you and Mr. Green together one night,” Bill said. His tone insisted that this was purely by the way.