Gentleman's Agreement (5 page)

“Antisemitism,” he repeated. “What
is
that, Dad?”

“Well, let’s see.” He saw Tom’s eyes on him, expectant. The boy knew he would get an answer as he always got an answer. There was never any “when you’re older, I’ll explain” between them. Phil said, “It’s when people don’t like other people just because they’re Jews.”

“Oh.” Tom considered for a second. “Why? Are they bad?”

“Some are, sure. Some aren’t. It’s like everybody else.”

“What
are
Jews anyhow?”

Phil looked at him thoughtfully. This same unexpected thing had happened on a hundred levels in the last year. A word, a name, a place that Tom had heard over and over without showing the faintest interest would all at once catch at him and become the subject of exhaustive inquiry. Here we go, Phil thought, wondering how to start. If the kid had been given the usual religious training, this would be simpler now.

“Remember last week, you asked about that big church?”

“Sure.”

“And I told you there were lots of different kinds of churches?”

“You and Gram think, it’s prob’ly nature instead, but I can think it’s God if I want and go to one.”

“That’s right. Well, the people that go to that particular church are called Catholics. Then there are people who go to other churches, and they’re called Protestants, and there are others that go to still different ones, and they’re called Jews. Only they call their kind of church synagogues or temples.”

“Oh.” He thought it over. “Then why don’t some people like those?”

“It’s kind of tough to explain.” He shrugged. “Some people hate Catholics, some hate Jews—”

“And nobody hates
us
’cause we’re Americans?”

Mrs. Green began to clear the breakfast table. She was going to let him struggle alone.

“No, that’s something different again. You can be an American and a Catholic, or an American and a Protestant, or an American and a Jew. Or you could be French or German or Spanish or any nationality at the same time you’re Catholic or a Protestant or a Jew.”

Tom looked perplexed. Phil had an impulse of flight but he repressed it.

“Look, Tom. One thing is your
country,
like America, or France or Germany or Russia—all the countries. The flag is different and the uniform is different, the language is different.”

“The airplanes are marked different.” This was interesting talk, his tone said.

“Differently. That’s right. But the other thing is religion if you have any, or your grandfather’s religion, like Jewish or Catholic or Protestant religion.
That
hasn’t anything to do with the country or the language or the airplanes. Get it?”

“Yep.”

“Don’t ever get mixed up on that. Some people are mixed up.”

“Why?”

“Oh, they talk about the Jewish race, but never about the Catholic race or the Protestant race. Or about the Jewish people, but never about the Protestant people or—”

“Why don’t they?”

Phil searched his mother’s face. It was now impassive and definitely not helpful. He glanced at his watch, and a wave of relief rewarded him.

“Hey, it’s eight-forty.”

Tommy knocked his chair over as he flung himself to his feet. His elbow skittered the newspaper off the table. Tragically he said, “Oh, gosh, I’ll be late for school.”

“We’ll talk some more sometime.”

Tom raced out, heels hammering on the uncarpeted floor past kitchen and bathroom. Phil stretched back in his chair and looked up at Mrs. Green.

“Whew.”

She laughed in wicked enjoyment. Then she said seriously, “It’s all right, Phil. You’re always good with him.”

“He won’t remember a word of it.”

“If he just gets one little sequence fixed, you’ve done enough.”

“What sequence?”

“Just using the three together every time, as a group. Catholic Protestant Jew, like apples pears peaches. That’s a good start.”

“I guess it is. I hadn’t planned it.” He shook his head; his lips pushed out as if he were saying “Whew” again. “That kid’ll wreck me yet.” He poured more coffee and looked at her as if something had occurred to him for the first time.

“Did
you
and Dad have to go through this sort of stuff with me and the girls?”

“Of course we did. All parents have to if they have definite designs on their children.”

“Meaning about their kids’ prejudices?”

She nodded. “Out there in California the problem was a little special—remember a boy called Petey?”

“Alamacho? Sure, Dave and I and he were The Gang.”

“Well, Dave. Your father and his were such good friends, you boys just would be, too.”

“But Petey?”

“You know the Mexican thing there.”

“Oh, California.” He made a face. “And the Filipino thing and the Chinese and the Nisei and the Negro thing —what a hotbed of a place for kids to grow up in!”

“Every place can be a hotbed. It’s only each house that decides it. Belle and Mary and you never heard any prejudice from Dad or me, even the disguised kind, so you didn’t fall for it in school or anywhere.”

“Mm, I guess.”

“All kids are so decent to start with.” She smiled at him and went back to the dishes. He thought uneasily of Belle and wondered whether his mother also had. He picked the newspaper up from the floor. A headline about the Marine Corps caught his eye.

He read it, and went to his desk. He spread out last night’s penciled notes and read them. He yawned. Ashy and cold, the stuff lay there before him. The promise of future success it had contained only a few hours ago seemed burned out for good.

The house buzzer sounded. He didn’t move. Mail never mattered to him, except when he’d been at camp or overseas. He picked up a pencil. On the sheet headed “Antisemitism in Business,” he idly sketched the insigne of the Marine Corps and beneath it scrupulously began to letter “Semper Fidelis.” As he drew, he thought of Kathy.

Only after he’d joined the Marine Corps in the spring of 1941 had he begun to go out with girls and remain free of an irrational sense of infidelity to Betty. With some of those girls, the evenings had passed in a vague, tentative unconcern about how they would end; with others, he’d been ridden from the first moment with a kind of sullen plan to get through with whatever preliminaries were needed to get them to bed. There was no beauty in it, but there was reassurance. He was young; he was, after all, not the inert man he thought he had become.

“Package for you,” his mother called. She came in with two large Manila envelopes, each one crammed and straining against the red twine twisted around the cardboard button on its flap. Inside were hundreds of clippings from newspapers and magazines.

He began at once to read them, making no exceptions and taking them in the order they came. He made careful notes of names, incidents, dates, committees, entering them below major headings that followed his rough breakdown of subjects. On a separate sheet of paper, on which he printed the word ANGLE, he jotted down fragments of ideas as they came to him. Off and on through the next hours he thought back to his breakfast talk with Tom, thumbing through it, as it were, to see if he could spot some clue that might lead to the solution of his problem. Maybe he could slant the whole series from the point of view of parents anxious to keep bigotry from their own children.

Before he finished formulating the idea, he discarded it. Even thinking it embarrassed him. It was real enough when it happened, but it would sound phony, a tear-jerky patriotic kind of phony if he tried to pin a whole series to it. For the first time the conviction that this was an impossible assignment took hold of him. Fine in an editor’s head—or a girl’s—but journalistically a dud. He should have rejected it; for the first job, anyway.

He was probably pressing too hard, too soon. Minify had told him there was no rush. He’d better spend a week or two reading and thinking and interviewing some of these committee people before even reporting back. As soon as he decided that, he realized he was tired from the eyeballs down. It was long past lunchtime. He made stacks of the clippings he’d been through and on the others he put an oval glass paperweight that had been a gift from Betty. Mrs. Green heard him moving about and came in for the first time since breakfast.

“Lunch is ready, Phil.”

“Don’t want any.”

“It’s nearly three.”

“I’m not hungry.”

She left him. He went to his room and lay down on his bed. He thought of taking flowers to Kathy for their date tonight and veered promptly away from the notion. He was not the man for courtly gestures. Anyway, don’t rush things, he thought. This may be important.

T
HE DAYLONG RAIN HAD
depleted itself into a thin drizzle, and Phil gratefully saw that the approaching cab was empty. He gave Kathy’s address and said, “I’m in luck tonight.”

“Sure are, gettin’ a cab this far downtown,” the driver said amiably. “It’s the doormen all along Park, flaggin’ us down for them rich Jews.” With that, he snapped the butt of his cigarette through the window of the cab and began whistling a tune.

“The taxi shortage hasn’t anything to do with Jews,” Phil said shortly.

“It’s just them fancy doormen,” the driver agreed willingly, “doin’ it
for
them.”

You moron, Phil thought. For the rest of the short trip he searched for some effective thing to say; he found none, and decided that he’d be damned before he’d tip him. But at Kathy’s door he paid the driver and found himself helpless to resist the waiting palm. Frustration still clutched at him as he went into the self-service elevator.

Upstairs he rang the bell and heard quick footsteps. She opened the door herself and said, “Hello. You’re on the dot.”

“Should I be fashionably late?” At once he thought, How cute of me.

She laughed, took his coat and hat, and hung them in a hall closet. She seemed glad to see him. She went ahead into a living room which pleased him before he could look at its details. There were books around and a piano and none of the too-perfect look of the interior decorator.

“Do you want a cocktail?” she asked. “Or Scotch? I have a little, and plenty of Scotch-type blend.”

She wrinkled her nose over the last part. He stopped looking about the room and turned to her. She was different from last night, wearing some kind of dress with flowers printed along the bottom and fitting close up under her chin.

“You really look so—never mind.” Compliments always sounded false, He went over to the piano. It was a large grand, too big for this room, undoubtedly a hangover from her married life. There were two books of Mozart sonatas open on the rack. One looked clean and new, the other worn. He riffled the pages of the old one and saw pencil marks for loud and soft, for the pedal, for an overlooked sharp or flat.

“Do you play?” he asked.

“Some. The easy ones. Do you?”

“Not any more, but I’m a sucker for music.”

“I started taking lessons again this winter.” She stood near the piano. He turned the pages further, then closed the volume and looked at her without saying anything, studying her. She stood poised and quiet, letting him, and then moved away. “You still haven’t said what drink.”

“Whatever you have. Got any ideas about restaurants? I’m lost in this town.”

“We’ll think that up when we start out.” She poured Scotch into an old-fashioned glass and put two lumps of ice into it from an ice bucket. The ice tongs were right on the tray, but she ignored them and used her fingers. He didn’t know why, but that pleased him.

He took the glass and waited until she had a drink ready for herself. He raised his in a toast, said, “Here’s to—” and stopped. “I’m no good at toasts,” he said. “I can never think of anything.”

“Here’s to never thinking of anything,” she said quickly. He thought it the most charming, the wittiest—and before he could finish the sentence he thought, Boy, it wasn’t
that
good. She was taking a sip of her drink, and he noticed her pursed lips. She started telling a funny thing that had happened at the nursery school that afternoon. She told a story well. The too-social tone was gone. Had he imagined it entirely? One way or the other, it didn’t matter any more. She had begun laughing at her own story, and he laughed with her.

“You like kids, don’t you?”

“I seem to,” she said. “I’ve got thirty. All stages from training pants to six years. They’re more exhausting than the factory ever was.”

“What factory?”

“Didn’t I—for Pete’s sake, did I leave that out?”

“I’m not so much of an interviewer at that, am I? What factory?”

It was her first job after her divorce, the first full-time job she’d ever had. For the first year of the war, she had operated a drill press at Wright Aeronautical in Paterson. After a deep bronchial infection her doctor talked darkly of pneumonia, even tuberculosis, and ordered her to leave.

“I guess I wasn’t hard to persuade,” she said. “After the first excitement, I hated it.”

“I bet.”

“Anyway, after a vacation, I got into the school. In those days nobody asked you if you had the proper training. I do like kids.”

She asked about Tom, and he guarded himself against sounding boastful. He was a nice kid, fun to talk to and take places. He’d made a good adjustment already to his new school.

“It could be tough on a boy that age,” he ended. “Switching from a small country school to a big city one and especially in the middle of a term. He’s O.K., I guess.”

Suddenly she smiled at him and saw his eyes go uncertain, as if he were unsure of why she had and were asking her not to wound him. She wanted to tell him that she knew more about his inner states than he had told her, that she knew he not only wasn’t happy now but hadn’t been for a long time, so that possibly he’d forgotten how simple and good it was to feel happy. But she said none of those things. New Yorkers made greatly personal remarks to each other on first or second meetings, but perhaps people from smaller places would get tied up with constraint and embarrassment. He’d be miffed if he knew she thought of him as different from New Yorkers. He’d been abroad three times, he’d traveled a good deal in America, yet there was some of the air of a small-towner about him, indefinable but there.