Gentleman's Agreement (7 page)

“Got any Jewish friends in New York?” Minify asked.

“Who, me? I haven’t
any
friends in New York.”

“I’ll introduce you to Joe Lieberman. He’s a physicist and a good guy to talk anything over with. He was in on Oak Ridge.”

Phil put his hand up, in a “stop” gesture.

“Hold it for now, would you? It’s no use till I know what I want to ask him. I can’t just say, ‘How do you do, Professor Lieberman, let’s talk about how you react to antisemitism.’ I’d fall on my face first.”

John Minify laughed with him. “Joe’d get it,” he said. “He’s the man you could say it to, once I gave him a line on you.”

They agreed to keep the meeting in reserve. Phil rose to go, anxious to explore this new path that had just opened to him. At the door, he turned. Minify looked quizzical, obscurely pleased with life or himself.

“Thanks for letting me barge in,” Phil said.

“Any time.” He smiled. “You made a hit with Jessie,” he said. “And, I gather, with Kathy.”

“Thanks.” It sounded too abrupt. “They made a hit with me, too.”

“She’s quite a girl, Kathy. She has a lot on the ball.”

Phil wanted to say the urbane, the perfect thing, but he couldn’t think for the life of him what that would be. He said, “She’s damn attractive,” added, “Well, be seeing you,” and left.

Even on the way home, the big new question was on him like a seizure. Over and above what any other normal man thinks about it, what must a Jew feel about this thing? That’s what he must find out, thinking himself into the very brain of another human being to find his answer. It was a fascinating quest for any speculative guy. It was a human question, it was dramatic. Out of it should come the way to lead readers along.

For the rest of the afternoon and again after his early supper with Tom and his mother, he remained absorbed. Pacing the living room, sitting at his desk, getting up again to wander around and stare vacantly at his books—hour after hour he persisted. Without purposely or consciously limiting his interest, he kept coming back to Dave, trying to think into Dave’s mind. It was more valid to think of someone like Dave, the kind of man he himself would be if he were a Jew. He could not “think into” a deeply religious old Jew in a prayer shawl, or into the poor, ignorant Jewish peddler behind a pushcart on the East Side, or into the wealthy tycoon in business. The deeply pious, the truly ignorant, the greatly powerful of any creed or religion were beyond his quick understanding.

Dave was not. Dave was like him in every essential, had the same boyhood patterns, the same freedom from either extreme of poverty or wealth, the same freedom from any creed-bound faith. They had both grown up in a generation when religion did not work itself very deep into life. Whatever Dave felt now—indifference? outrage? fear? or contempt?—would be the feeling of Dave as a man, and not Dave as a Jew. Dave as citizen, as American, and not Dave as a religious being. That, Phil was sure of. And that was good.

He began to glance through his hundreds of notes, pausing over this episode or that to ask himself what would go on in a man like Dave when he read of it in his morning newspaper. Betty’s paperweight sat on top of the thin sheaf of clips which he had not yet read. Idly he picked up the heavy chunk of glass and began tossing it from one hand to the other. His eyes were on the top clipping where the oval outline of the paperweight still showed, like the imprint of a doctor’s thumb into the puffed flesh of edema. It was the first page of an issue of
Time
magazine, nearly two years old. He began to read it. Congressman John Rankin had stood up in the House to attack the soldier-vote bill; he had referred to Walter Winchell as “the little kike I was telling you about.”

His fingers tightened around the cold smooth glass. Time’s next words were, “This was a new low in demagoguery, even for John Rankin, but in the entire House no one rose to protest.” Shame for the Congress twisted in him. He read on through a column and a half to
Time
’s sentence: “The House rose and gave him prolonged applause.”

The House. The Senate. The great Congress of the United States.

He stood up abruptly. “Jesus, what’s happening to this country? A country never knows what’s
happening
to it.” How many of
Time
’s million readers had felt like rushing down there, punching Rankin in the jaw, yelling at the whole House? And if a reader were Jewish—could he be any
more
outraged? What had Dave felt when he’d come on this? The same, exactly the same as he himself did. He’d bet a million on that. He knew that.

The thick glass in his hand was moist. He set it down and wiped his hand against his trousers.

He
thought
he knew. There was that good familiar click of certitude he always felt when his instincts were true. But there was no way to check on himself, no way to prove he was correct.

He would have to write Dave after all, have to get to know this Joe Lieberman, have to do personal research on this as he did on every other problem he had ever worked on.

“How do you do, Professor Lieberman, let’s talk about how you react to antisemitism in the good old U. S. A.” Damn it, he’d die first. “Dear Dave, Give me the lowdown on your gizzard when you read about Rankin calling people kikes or a Jewish kid getting his face slashed by Jew haters in New York City.”

Out. It was out. All of it was out. There was no way he could dig and prod and tear open the secret heart of a human being. This was blind alley, too.

He turned on the radio. In an instant he snapped it off. He picked up the evening papers. The news was stale. He thought of writing letters and abandoned the idea. It was only eleven; if he went to bed, he’d never sleep.

Again he’d felt himself pressing the hard edge of discovery; again he’d slipped right through it. Like the oily turnstile. Flickering across his mind was a wonder about whether he was losing his grip for a while. It happened to, writers. Maybe it was his turn.

Grimly he told himself not to start yammering. His gaze traveled slowly over the room as if he were looking for affirmation that other writers had fought and struggled for an idea. Books—the room was full of books. Books told about people's feelings, private reactions. There hadn’t been many novels where the main characters were Jewish, but there’d been some.

For half an hour he searched the shelves. He was a hoarder of books—he never could bring himself to throw any book away, so one or two of the ones he remembered owning ought to be somewhere in this conglomeration. Whatever novels he had were old. He’d heard of a couple of new ones in the last year that dealt with “the Jewish problem,” but he wasn’t much of a novel reader, so he’d missed them. He’d have to ask about them, buy them for whatever he might learn from them.

He finally found one of the books he’d expected to find, and he renewed his search. Then he had two more. He’d known they ought to be there, and they might help him now with his job of “thinking into.” As he remembered these books, their central characters had been Jewish. He began to reread, rapidly skimming, suddenly remembering the people, plot, incidents.

For more than an hour he read. And as he read a sickish anger grew in him.

He stood up finally. He placed the three books side by side on a shelf. He stared at them. One, two, three in a row. Exhibits A, B, and C.

In each of these novels the central figure, the Jew, was a heel—dishonest, scheming, or repulsive. A Goebbels, a Rankin might have written these books. But in each case a talented Jew had been the author. It was before the war that each had done it. But he had done it.

Somewhere in the 1930’s each had labored long and done it.

What dark unconscious hatreds must have been operating in those very authors that made each of them, with a world of subjects to pick over, finally choose
these
subjects and stay unswerving to their purpose through the long months and loneliness of writing! How neurotic they themselves must have been made by the world of hatred! Did it never occur to one of them to write about a fine guy who was Jewish? Did each one feel some savage necessity to pick a Jew who was a swine in the wholesale business, a Jew who was a swine in the movies, a Jew who was a swine in bed?

He would have to look elsewhere for any valid clue to what a normal Jew would feel about anything—a Jew who was a scientist, say, or a historian, or a businessman, or a housewife. Or a Jew who’d risked maiming or death in the war against the master-race theory.

He sat down and wrote quickly on his typewriter.

Dear Dave:

When the hell you getting back? And will it be a surprise to know we’ve moved to New York for good, or did I say I was going to, last time I wrote? I’ve taken a staff job with Minify. I want to talk to you about a series I’m supposed to do, on antisemitism; do you hyphenate the damn word or not, I never can remember. Anyway, what chance your stopping here for a bit before heading for the Coast?

Best, and where’s the letter you owe me,

Phil

He put three red stamps on the envelope, wrote, “AIR” beneath them, checked on Dave’s APO number, and went down to the street to mail the letter.

Even this much decisiveness feels good, he thought. He could almost taste his own disgust and bile.

He dreamed of Betty. For the first time in months, she was there in his angry sleep, young as she had been, asleep beside him and smiling at something. Somewhere was the sound of an infant’s thin wailing, and she wasn’t startled, just smiling, calling out, “Yes, darling, I’m coming.” There was such readiness in her voice, hurrying to her baby, unruffled, not resentful at being waked.

He turned on his back and knew he had dreamed. “You’re afraid to let on to anybody about it, aren’t you? Don’t be, Phil, you don’t have to be, with me or anybody.” That was Kathy, his sleep-filled mind told him, and he stirred into a half waking. There had been the overwash of two voices, the second flowing over the first like a new wave rolling in on the outgo of the preceding. Different yet one because each was of the indivisible sea.

Now he sat up, really awake. He turned on the light above his head and reached for a cigarette.

An extraordinary sense of peace ran through him as he remembered the dream and the half dream it had borne with it. He swallowed, and it made a hard, audible sound in the silent room. He heard it and contemplated the tip of his cigarette. He thought, I guess I’m in love with her.

He lay, still warmed with sleep, freed from the incessant striving of the evening, relaxed as a man basking under a summer sun on an unpeopled beach. He heard again her voice on the telephone that afternoon, open, eager. All the complex wariness he’d felt that first time was gone. The doubts were gone. That was good. These seven years had made him too critical of people. Minute analysis of himself was bad enough; minute analysis of others was a preposterous nonsense, an unspoken effrontery. She was on no witness stand under cross-examination, with him the prosecutor; she had nothing to prove, with him the dissenter.

Did she want to marry some other Bill Pawling, but more “liberal” in his ideas? Or could she marry some man who could never give her the beautiful apartment, the expensive vacations? She could, but after a while would she feel cheated?

Oh, quit being a self-appointed bastard of a judge and jury and God. He turned out the light. Illogically, he remembered Belle’s visit a week before. Sleep was invading his mind again, like a slow infiltration into resisting terrain. He felt the cold December night in the room, the realm of warmth under the blankets.

A sound came to him, thin, miserable. For one instant he thought he was dreaming again about Betty and the baby. Then he jerked free of his blankets. That had been a real sound.

Swiftly he went through the dark apartment. His mother had called aloud in the night and then there had been a long silence and now she was calling again.

“Mom, what?” The switch clicked under his finger. “You’re sick.”

She moved her head. Her face rigid with pain, her hand bluish across her breast, the fingers digging into her left arm —fear assaulted him, and the memory of himself as a small boy wondering what he could do to bear it if his mother ever died.

“Heart?” he said. “Does it seem your heart?”

She moved her head again. He stooped over her, his arm cradling her, not knowing whether to raise her or lower her from the propped-up pillows.

“Better,” she whispered. “Wait.”

He left her as she was. He took the glass of water on the table, held it to her lips, knew enormous relief that she could sip from it. He pressed her shoulder as if to reassure her that this was nothing, hearts were nothing, age and death and pain were nothing.

“Mom, are you all right? Is it easier?”

“It’s passing.” She looked at him. Regret was in her eyes, apology in her voice.

“I’ll get a doctor.” Doctor? What doctor? In all this city he didn’t know the name of one doctor. “I’ll phone Minify or Kathy and ask.” He started for the door, stopped, turned. “Can I leave you? Are you really better?”

“Wait another minute.” Her right hand fell away from her breast, and her breathing sounded more ordinary. The attack must be over. She had never been really sick in her life and now she was sick, struggling with this first onslaught of deep sickness. He sat on the edge of her bed. He would get a maid for the work; they would move where there was no flight of stairs to strain her.

“Now,” she said. She moved, sat forward, and then carefully lay down again. “Angina,” she said. “I’d never realized the pain was so sharp.” As if it were a startling idea, he remembered his father had been a doctor; she and the girls and he himself knew far more than the usual layman about symptoms and disease.

“I’m going to phone Minify,” he said. “He’ll know a heart man.”

“What time is it?”

“It doesn’t matter.” He went to the window, closed it, and then went to the fireplace. “Let’s have a fire.” He struck a match. The wood, dried and ready, crackled.

“It’s nice,” she said. “You didn’t hear the first time I called.”