Gentleman's Agreement (27 page)

“When? Why didn’t you come over?”

“It was coming out of a movie, before Christmas, I think. I tried to catch your eye, but you both got into a taxi. I didn’t know who he was, of course, but when you described Mr. Green the day you told me the news, it fitted.”

The “Mr. Green” jarred. She said, “Yes, it must have been Phil.” Why hadn’t Bill mentioned seeing them during his New Year visit? She decided not to ask. “What’s this about a firm of your own, though?”

“In a minute, Kathy.” He sipped his drink again. “I’m sorry, if breaking it upset you,” he said awkwardly, and she was touched.

“That’s sweet, Bill,” she said. “I’m not upset any more, but let’s skip it anyway.”

“Tom said he’s a Jew. Is that right?”

 She looked at him briefly. “Yes, that’s right.”

“Well, then, maybe in the long run.”

His intonation, Kathy thought, made it a complete statement. Subject, verb, object, modifiers—the complacent voice, the judicious shake of the head, had managed to include all of them. It was a sentence. You could parse it. Truculence burred in her. She wouldn’t get drawn into discussion with him. During their marriage, they’d had so many useless squabbles about Bill’s ready prejudices.

“I’ve got to start for Aunt Jessie’s soon,” she said firmly. “Have you already resigned, Bill?”

“No, these financial matters can’t be rushed.” Looking reflective, he fondled the lobe of his right ear. It was one of his old mannerisms, denoting preoccupation with business. “What I mean,” he said at last, “is that in the long run it would have been all sorts of a nuisance to be the wife of a Jew.”

“Bill,
please.”
The truculence was audible now. “You really—” But nothing would deflect Bill, ever.

“I mean like the cottage, for instance. Of course you could have sold it. I’d have taken it off your hands in a jiffy myself.”

“Sold it?” She put her glass down. “Why would we sell it?”

He looked astonished. “He looked a good sort, Kathy.”

“He
is
a good sort.”

“Well, then. He’d never barge into a neighborhood that doesn’t take Jews—he’d never have been comfortable there.”

Something stung through her.

“I know you disapprove,” Bill went on, “and I do, too, if they’re the acceptable kind, but, well, it’s just facing facts.” He shrugged. “And you couldn’t go to New Canaan or anywhere near Jane and the crowd. New Canaan’s even stricter about Jews than Darien.”

“Stop it. Don’t go on. I hate this. You
know
how I feel about all that.”

“Why, Kathy.” His voice was soothing. “As I always told you,
you
can’t change the whole world, no sense getting so—”

The sting again. She stood up abruptly. Bill scrambled up, too. Good manners, perfect breeding always. She hated him; with one more of his slipping-along phrases, she would scream at him.

“I told you I had a headache. It’s worse. I’ve got to lie down.” She saw the uncomprehending look. “You
saw
Phil. You know he’s not filthy or diseased or vulgar. Could he spoil the neighborhood and the real-estate values? Could he? Then
how
can you just stand there spilling out those horrible things without even being angry?”

“What horrible things?” There was only perplexity in it.

She said, “Oh,
no,”
and was silent. Then she said, limply, “Bill, please go now. My head’s splitting. Some other time we’ll talk over your new firm.”

She left him standing there and went to her bedroom. She closed the door. She listened. When the front door slammed, she went to the bed and lay down.

There was something sickening here, something more hateful than anything there had been between them in their old squabbles. Something not about Bill; something about her, and not to be borne.

“Never be comfortable there” … “New Canaan’s even stricter than Darien” … “can’t change the whole world …”

The phrases pelted her. “Oh,
no.”
The staccato of disbelief was for herself now. It wasn’t the same.
She
had said those phrases as hateful facts; Bill had offered them casually, without emotion.

She lay still. The swift sting changed to a suffusion of heat, spreading, reaching.

Everything important between her and Bill had come to differences. But on this? On this there was no difference. In tone, in mood, maybe, but nothing more. One by one, the arguments she had desperately given Phil that day about Dave had come easily now from Bill’s lips.

From the lips and heart and shabby mind of Bill Pawling.

Off and on during dinner Kathy’s attention went back to the one point that was rebuttal. “Tone and mood
are
important; they’re the distance between acceptance and rejection.”

She forced herself to make talk with the Minifys, but her thoughts carried on their own busy work of comfort and persuasion. By dessert, her nerves were steadier. But she felt that she’d come through some brief, savage fever.

In the living room, Uncle John took his coffee from the tray and said, “Want to read something in rough draft?”

“You don’t mean me, dear?” Jessie asked.

“No, Jess. I thought Kathy might, though.”

“Is it?” She stopped, and he didn’t answer. He looked at Kathy uneasily. She had a depleted air that worried him. She’d fallen into the almost nightly habit of coming over for dinner; it was being a stiff time for her, no question of that. He looked at her now, as she accepted coffee from Jessie, and remembered her as a college girl, then as a bride, then as a newly divorced woman. Never before had her pretty face been so concave from jawbone to eye socket; never before had he seen the puffed arcs of shiny, almost oiled, skin under her eyes. She cried in that apartment of hers, and that’s what did it. The act she put on all the time was fine, but it didn’t fool him. It was so rational, the explanation she’d finally given Jessie—Phil was so intense, so given to moods, so impatient of other points of view that she’d have to become a wishy-washy carbon copy of him or else prepare for constant bickering or outright scenes about all sorts of problems. It was wiser to admit incompatibility beforehand than when it was too late. That was all.

All this explanation had rather surprised him; he’d figured Phil differently. But, of course, just in a working relationship one never saw the whole man. She meant it—enough to be going through plenty of torment for it. What trouble it was to be young! At sixty you grieved for the world; in youth you grieved for one unique creature. And so opaque and stubborn was the grief, you could blot out the world with it as you could blot out the sun with a disk of black glass.

“It’s the last one of the series,” he said finally. “He turned it in this afternoon.”

“I’m not much good with rough-draft stuff.”

“Hm. He does fairly smooth copy right off once he gets going.” He crossed the room to his brief case. She watched him open it, nervously waiting, as if he were pulling aside a curtain from which Phil himself might emerge. She still felt too shattered to dare any new emotion. Uncle John took out a stack of manuscript, fastened at the top with the largest paper clip she had ever seen. She watched him as he riffled through the pages, reading a sentence here and there. Phil’s hands had held those pages a few hours ago; his voice had spoken to Uncle John as he’d turned it over to him. His life was going on along the same paths, sure and undeviating.

“I’ll react better to it when it’s in print, Uncle John.”

“O.K., if you’d rather.” He turned another page. He looked pleased, partly with Phil, partly with his own judgment in choosing him. “Hell of a balanced job,” he said, without looking up. “Got a thousand facts into the five pieces, from all angles, all over the country, but he’s worked them into his own story so you go from objective to subjective without stumbling.” He threw the manuscript down on the coffee table. “Make a sensation.”

“Such a shame, about his mother,” Jessie said. “You say she’s all right again, though?” John nodded, but they both ignored her. For a space there was the drinking of more coffee.

“One part in this one’s about you, I’d guess,” John said casually.

“Me?”
Kathy’s eyes accused him of lying. “Why, he wouldn’t!”

“Oh, thoroughly disguised—everything personal in it is disguised. Doesn’t make it
Smith’s Weekly,
of course—just a big business office.”

“But you can recognize?”

“He’s got a beautiful woman in it, all the way through; married, in her forties, wife of a friend in Rumson, New Jersey, two boys. But I made a long guess.”

“Uncle John, he just couldn’t!”

“The hell he couldn’t. I’m in the second article—the big liberal who had an antisemitic personnel manager in his own office and never took the trouble to find out about it! He had quite a field day with me. Sure, when I read it, it kind of burned me for five minutes. But he
had
to, Kathy. He’s writing what happened to him while he was Jewish—you and I and everything else
are
what happened to him. Want him to leave it all out and dream up stuff?”

“No, but if
you
recognize that woman—”

“He took about ten people and braided them into her— that’s what all writers worth a bean do when they need types of people, recognizable types.” He reached over and patted her hand. It was unexpected, an unspoken reassurance. “You’re very special to people who love you, Kath. But you’re also a type, like anybody else.”

“I suppose I am. You never think of yourself as a type.”

They fell silent. Kathy looked at the six-inch paper clip. In the shaded light of the room it shone like silver. She leaned forward and idly picked up the manuscript.

As she turned the pages phrases caught at her, but she could hardly filter their meaning through the haze of feeling. Touching the paper was like feeling his body near her again.

“… driving away from the inn, I knew all about every man or woman who’d been told the job was filled when he knew it wasn’t, every youngster who’d ever been turned down by a college because they ‘have too many New Yorkers already’ when he knew the true word was ‘Jews’ or ‘foreign-sounding’ …” She turned a page. “… this primitive rage pitching through you when you see your own child shaken and dazed that he was selected for attack …” She lost the next sentences. “… a new phase in my own reactions. From that moment I saw it as an unending attack by a hundred million adults on kids of seven and eight and ten and twelve; on adolescent boys and girls, on youngsters trying to get into summer camps and medical schools …” The haze began to thin down.

“I don’t see anything in it about me,” she said to John.

John didn’t answer.

She leafed over several pages, searching, almost fearfully, like a vain woman looking for her own face in a group photograph, hoping it would not be too unkind. “… and I felt suddenly that I knew why this lovely woman in Rumson can never truly fight the thing she says she hates. One part of her does indeed hate it, but that part is at war with another part, a buried part, a part that started in her childhood’s misery because ‘the other girls’ had prettier houses and nicer clothes. Like millions of us, she’d pursued the American dream of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ or catching up with them. And the buried part is still living out her childhood ambition to be one of the ‘smart set’ in her community, the ‘in group’ that belongs. She won’t jeopardize that adored status by becoming an outlandish arguer at a dinner table where somebody takes a crack at Jews; she won’t risk being gauche by ripping through the ‘set of rules’ in the pretty world she lives in. During the shooting war, she worked herself half sick in factories, sold bonds, accepted all the discomfort of ration books and shortages like a good soldier. But during this covert war for this country’s future, this secret war in which antisemitism is one of the most familiar weapons, she is unable to do more than offer little clucking sounds of disapproval. Her own success story paralyzes her.”

Kathy threw the manuscript down. She avoided John’s eyes. She said, “How about some gin rummy, Aunt Jess?” and at once Jessie went to a built-in cupboard below the bookshelves and brought out cards.

“But not too late, Kathy,” Jessie said. “You really worry me, losing weight that way. You must get lots of sleep.”

“It’s so easy to see the flaws in everybody else,” Kathy said to the room at large, as she pulled chairs up to the card table.

“Sometimes the flaws are really there, Kathy.” Minify looked back to the stacked pages. “In the first one he points out that he’d never gone much beyond the sounds of disapproval himself.”

“He doesn’t say anything about the real bigots—”

“Oh, there’s plenty about that in the series. But he showed me an advance copy of the next
Fortune
survey—damn interesting. Proves something he hunched onto all along.” Minify’s eyes were serious. “The biggest incidence of antisemitism comes from the top-income bracket now.”

“Really? Not the other way round?”

“The very people who set the styles for the country in clothes and cars and salads—and mores.” He was enjoying her astonishment. “The middle-aged stuffy ones in the bracket more than the young ones. Survey also shows only nine per cent of the country admits any prejudice.”

“That’s not so much,” Aunt Jessie said.

“It’s plenty.” He turned again to Kathy. “What Phil’s trying to do is make the rest of the style setters, the ones who really
are
against prejudice, come out and fight. Not just the rich ones, everybody.”

She glanced down at the manuscript as if she were appealing to it to judge her and find her a fighter.

“There are a hell of a lot more of
our
kind of style setters,” John went on with a sudden intensity. “Even a handful of us in every community could set a new national style in a few months. Damn it, it’s worth trying.”

“Ready, Kathy?” Aunt Jessie said. “Shall we play the double spade?”

Two mornings later, Phil brandished a bulky roll of manuscript at Miss Wales.

“One and two,” he said. “Edited and ready to go. I’ll get through number three before you can handle this much."