Gentleman's Agreement (6 page)

“You’re sort of afraid,” she said, “to let on to anybody that you’re nuts about Tom, aren’t you?” She leaned toward him earnestly. “Don’t be, Phil, you don’t have to be, with me or anybody.”

“It’s—well, I just—” He broke it. He was touched, about what he did not know. Ever since Betty he had not found any girl who knew more about him than he chose to put into words. Communication with another human being, communication on the levels where words were needless, was something he had missed so deeply that recognition of it stirred sharply in him. “I guess I cover on lots of things,” he said stiffly.

“And when you do, you look—well, all sort of dark and brooding.” She suddenly added, “Like
Toledo.
You know, that landscape of El Greco?”

He laughed.

“You mean all dark greens and blacks? Mackerel sky? Storm coming?”

She nodded. “Practically a portrait of you.” She waited till he stopped laughing and then asked about the new assignment. He countered by telling her of the taxi driver. She said, “It’s sickening, isn’t it?” and they fell silent. A moment later, he suggested that she play for him. She went at once to the piano and began a simple Mozart sonata. Several times she struck wrong notes and corrected them without nervousness or embarrassment. She played pleasingly, with no attempts to dazzle by speed or crashing chords. He sat listening to her in a slow suffusion of
Gemutlichkeit.
Toward the end of the short sonata, he went over to stand by the piano, watching her hands. Looking down at her, he saw that her hair was not black as he had thought, but dark brown.

She finished playing, stood up at once, and went back to her unfinished drink. He closed the book of music and set it atop the other volume, squaring the edges precisely with the one beneath. He heard her laugh.

“Sort of old-maidish,” he said sheepishly.

“Or bachelorism.”

“I like the way you play.”

“I’m glad.”

Confidence, sureness, the freedom from his own ever-questioning-of-himself—she had that, and he envied her as he envied anybody else who was not forever involved with the weighing, the analyzing, the searching out he went through. She would not know the torment there could be in the fluctuating mood, the shifting decision, the wide swing between clarity and confusion, between cheerfulness and depression. Even though there were things about her that didn’t seem to square with other things, she seemed direct, free of complication or self-question.

“Another drink?” she asked. “Or should we start? I’m starved.”

When they were finishing dinner, she came back to the articles. This time he did not counter or dodge.

“The thing’s got me licked so far, but that’s nothing new at the start. I’ve had a flock of ideas about how to angle it, but they’re all lousy.” Briefly he told her two of them. She liked them, but he brushed that aside. “They just don’t stand up. When you get the right one, a kind of click happens inside you. It hasn’t happened yet. Let’s skip it.”

It was about ten when they left the restaurant. He hoped, expected even, that she would suggest going back to her place, but instead she said there was a movie she’d been watching the neighborhood playhouses for. A displeasure stabbed him, as if she’d said something to offend him, but he agreed that a movie was a fine notion. In the deep loge seats, he felt placated; watching the screen, he was conscious of her nearness, of whether her arm was on the seat rest or not, of her breathing. Each time she fished in her purse, he offered her a cigarette—leaning close to her to light it became a delicate and pleasing thing. The afternoon’s unspoken admonition not to hurry this sounded again in his mind. He kept his eyes on the picture, but every time she moved her head, recrossed her legs, shifted about in any way, he knew it.

Was this to be like all the rest? His lips closed hard against each other as though to keep out the bitter taste of the question. He glanced toward her. Her whole attention was on the screen. In the dim light she seemed guileless and very young, and he believed at last in what she had told him about her divorce leaving no residue of bitterness or hatred. She had undoubtedly known pain—what human being could finish nearly three decades and be a stranger to it? But she seemed whole and unchipped in her personality, with none of the braced expectation of further pain.

Across the veil of silence between them, Kathy was thinking, And maybe
I’ve
forgotten how simple and good it is to feel happy. She hadn’t been
un
happy, not even through the first adjustment after divorcing Bill. She hadn’t really suffered about anything since those long-ago days back home, in her teens. But it suddenly seemed a long time since she’d known the outrageous delight in life that she’d felt over going to college or getting married. For her, living alone was a stopgap. Three years was a great deal of stopgap indeed.

There were good things about marriage that she’d begun to miss. Small things, apart from the big question of rightness and love. The comfortableness of always having somebody to go to a party with, the normal knowledge that you were a man’s wife like everybody else—marriage was a sweet way to live. Or could be.

She glanced over at him. He was concentrating on the movie. He’d be shocked probably if he could see past the thin casing of her skin into her mind.

Mrs. Schuyler Green.

She was amused. That was the adolescent trick; every time she’d met a new boy, she’d instantly thought of what her name would be if she married him. She’d write out his name and then hers beneath it and cross off all the matching letters in each. There was some childish abracadabra for the remaining letters. What was it? “Rich man, poor—” No, that was even younger nonsense, before the dreamy days of thinking about boys. Her mind blanked out—she could think of nothing. Rich man, poor man—her childhood had been spent with that differentiation. The fact that as a small-town lawyer, her father was too poor to do the things he wanted to do for his wife and his two children had embittered him long before she and Janey were old enough to show they wanted things they couldn’t have. Probably his own bitterness had helped teach
them
that differentiation.

“Love, friendship, marriage, hate.” Suddenly the boy-girl rigmarole tumbled back into her possession—fortunetelling . for adolescence. She tried to do the trick in her mind.

Should I take Schuyler Green and Katherine Pawling? Or Philip Green and Katherine Lacey?

In the dark, she grinned. She started to open her bag, but across the arm of the chair, he offered her his pack of cigarettes. She took one, and he flipped his lighter. The sleeve of his coat touched her bare arm, and in the small flare of light she suddenly looked at him and whispered, “This is nice, isn’t it?”

As they came out to the street, he said, “And now?”

“Would you mind if we
didn’t
go anywhere else? During the week I just never get enough sleep any more.”

“Of course I wouldn’t mind.”

He heard how formal his words sounded. Did they show his disappointment? He felt a fool. In the taxi he sat well away from her. At her house, he loudly told the driver to keep the flag down, took her to the door, and was the first to say good night. Secret and abject, a wish twisted in him that she’d change her mind and ask him up for a nightcap. She said it had all been lovely, and was gone.

A hundred notions discarded, sentences x-ed out, opening paragraphs, phrases for titles.

Attempts at a dry underwriting, at a just logic and reason, attempts at ringing words.

And always the distaste, the dejection, the renewed battering at his mind to yield, to create, to reward him.

Phil reached to the top of the paper in his typewriter and wrenched it out of the machine. The platen whined like line singing out of a steel reel.

“Damn it, I’ll go nuts.”

For nearly a week he had fought the increasing sense of failure. Or was it boredom? He had heard nothing from Minify and had neither telephoned nor gone to see him. He had read with minute care all but six or eight of the borrowed clippings; he had made twenty appointments for the following week with head people in each of twenty organizations. He delayed the interviews because experience had taught him that each one would yield him a richer result if he went to it with his own plans already formulated, so he could pin the ready talker down to pertinent material. He had given himself a week’s leeway; now he knew it wasn’t enough. He still had no plan. The “angle” refused to show itself.

Again and again some clipping would-rouse him, and his quickened feelings would carry assurance that he was on the edge of discovery. But an hour later he would know that all he had was one more episode of a store window smashed in Boston, a child kicked and beaten in Washington Heights, a synagogue or cemetery ravaged in Chicago or Minneapolis or Detroit.

“This Christ-bitten stuff won’t budge.” He considered telling Minify that he’d prefer, after all, to leave this for his second assignment, that he’d surely strain less after he’d rung up one good record in the new job. Something stopped him from doing it. He had a stubborn streak. “It’s a mile wide right now,” he told himself, and bent glumly toward the typewriter.

Maybe he could make each article a kind of Profile of some Jewish guy who’d been heroic in the war, decorated, all that. Nonsense. Heroes were heroes because they were heroes, not because they were or weren’t Jewish. Even offering such a selection—what the hell was different between being brave if you were a Jew and being brave if you weren’t a Jew?

My trouble is, he thought, the only difference that rates with me is people’s sex. The notion amused him. I
do
care whether somebody’s a woman or a man.

He had not telephoned Kathy all week. Until he felt better about the first stage of this job, he was in no mood for personal things.

Or was it the other way round?

He shoved back from his desk and stood up. She’d been on his mind too damn much, that’s what it was. Any man, meeting her after months of nothing—hell, no wonder he couldn’t get on with his work.

He went to the telephone and called her at the school. She said, “Oh, Phil, hello,” as if she were glad.

“You wouldn’t be free tonight by any chance?” He admired his offhand tone.

“No, I’m not. I’m sorry.”

“Then how about tomorrow?”

“I’d like that. How’s the work coming? I’ve wondered about it a lot.”

“It’s not. I’m still rooting around for some special lead-in, and I just can’t hit it.” He sounded cheerful.
“You’re
responsible for the hell I’m in. You sold Minify.”

“You’ll get it, Phil. I
know
it.” She made a comforting sound. “About seven then?”

This time he wasn’t irritated that somebody else was sure. It delighted him. The whole call delighted him. She had thought about the series; she had thought about him. He looked triumphantly at the telephone. Tomorrow night he’d ask
himself
up for a nightcap. Last time, for all he knew, she’d waited for him to suggest it.

Maybe Minify, too, was waiting for a signal from him. At any rate, there was no reason to avoid him this way. Often a suggestion from somebody else, even when you rejected it, picked you up from the sticky muck you’d been working in. He went to the telephone once again.

An hour later they were deep in discussion. One by one, Phil checked over the ideas he’d had, the reasons for throwing each one aside. There was no surprised look on Minify’s face, no careful choice of words to conceal disappointment. Minify knew. Before he turned editor, he’d written too many thousands of newsprint columns himself, too many dozens of special articles for magazines, not to know. His eyes intent, he listened carefully as Phil told him of the material he had already gathered.

“The more you give me, the surer I am I want the articles,” he said. “It’s getting nasty for fair.”

Phil looked briefly at Minify. “One of my sisters was here last week from Detroit. She always gets me on edge, but I used to think she was O.K. underneath. I told her what I was up to, and she went into a routine about ‘you can’t write or legislate these things out of existence.’”

“Yeah. I get lots of that.”

“A few years ago she wouldn’t have said that—anyway, not in that pleasant, smug tone. I guess in a place that’s running over with the Negro thing and the Jewish thing— I suppose I ought to go out there.” He considered Detroit. “But you know something?” Minify waited. “I’ve a hunch there’s a bigger thing to do than just to go after the crackpot story. That’s been done plenty. It’s the wider spread of it I’d like to get at—the people who’d never go near a Christian Front meeting or send a dime to Gerald L. K. Smith.”

“I’m with you on that. But it’s harder.”

They sat across from each other, smoking, silent. Just in this companionship of searching, Phil found it easier to think. His thorny mood was smoothing out. He let his thoughts drift.

“I wish Dave wasn’t in Europe,” he finally said, almost to himself.

“Who’s he?”

“Dave Goldman. We were kids together, in California.” He waved largely. “Undying friendship at eight.” He looked reflective. “I wonder what he feels like when he runs into it or reads about it. He’s in the Engineers. Seems stuck over there. Captain.”

“Still friends?”

“Not especially close any more. We went through everything together up to college. Then I picked Stanford, and he went to UCLA. We still write every so often. But letters are no good on this kind of business. I wish—”

He broke off and closed his eyes, leaning a little forward as if he were trying to hear a sound very far away. Then he said slowly, “Maybe there’s something in that.”

“Going to suggest my sending you abroad?”

Undisturbed by the joshing tone, Phil shook his head. He reached for a cigarette, forgot to make the gesture of offering one.

“I’m going to start on a new tack,” he said slowly. “So far I’ve been going after facts, evidence. I’ve sort of ignored feelings.” He shifted his glance to Minify. “How does it make somebody like Dave feel? The way we feel only stepped up?” He spoke more quickly. “It’s at least a chance to break the log jam.”