Laura Z. Hobson

by Gentleman's Agreement

  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.”

  “I thought I dreamed it.”

  He went out into the hall. Quietly he opened the door to Tom’s bedroom. In the dim light from the doorway the slight mound under the blankets seemed motionless. He went to the bed and leaned down. Even and strong, the boy’s breathing came up to him. For a moment he remained, listening.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WILL SHE—DAD, will she die?” Phil turned, saw the stricken eyes watching him. He wanted to ease that look away, lie if necessary to replace it with confidence. But always he’d played it the other way, and he would now. Answers had to be answers.

  “She’ll die sometime, just the way you will or me or Aunt Belle or anybody. But maybe it won’t be for a long time.”

  “Oh, Dad.”

  He put his hand on Tom’s head, ruffling the dark hair.

  “The doctor said she might be fine for years if she’s careful. She’s pretty old, and all the packing and unpacking tired her too much.”

  Tom moved closer. Phil pushed the lever of th
e toaster down. The ticking sounded very loud.

  “Scram into some clothes, Tom.” He gave him a shove toward the door as if they were roughhousing. “Then you can set the table. We can run this place between us, I bet.”

  “All right.” He started to leave, then stopped. “Oh, gosh, Dad.”

  “It’s scary, Tom, I know. I was scared last night, too. But we’ll take care of her, and she might be just fine till you’re grown up and married and have kids.”

  The shoulders relaxed. Phil heard him tiptoe down the hall. “Nothing to worry about.” A dozen times Dr. Craigie’s words had come back. With them had come again the four-in-the-morning silence of the sleeping city around the lighted bedroom, the knowledge that between her first calling out and her second, there’d been the time to dream, to wake, to ponder the sense of peace and continuing life, all unknowing that across a dark hall a dying had begun.

  “People with hearts outlive everybody else, if they take care,” Dr. Craigie had said. The quotation marks around “hearts” had been cheery, a comfortable dismissing. “It may prove to be what we call false angina instead of the true angina. She’ll sleep well now, and you keep her in bed for a few days, and then we’ll get her to the office and really see. Angina is actually a symptom rather than a disease— some circulatory deficiency, perhaps, or a kind of anemia of the cardiac—well, no use getting too technical this time of the night, Mr. Green, is there?”

  No, don’t get technical. Be calm, pleasant, willing to be routed out of bed, reassure the patient that the sensation of dissolution was merely part of the clinical picture, like the choking off of air, the sword in the arm.

  “I never minimize in a sickroom,” his own father had once told him. “I don’t frighten, but I don’t minimize.”

  Perhaps Craigie didn’t either. John Minify had called him “one of the best in New York.” Perhaps the suave voice was only a mannerism, acquired, too.

  I must call Kathy, he thought, and break tonight.

  The day sped remarkably. There was a curious ease to this kind of work, something like that week on Guad, with the mind nailed to the automatic directions for the next step. Life could be a simple thing of small actions on a string. Cook this, get the tray ready, take it in to her, straighten up this room, that room, phone the market, wash dishes, keep Tom quiet, go in now and talk to Mom, she’s awake again, get Tom to bed, wash the dishes. No time for big thinking, no time for foreign policy, losing the peace, badgering your mind. Just do this, then do that. Easy.

  It was the first day since he’d got the assignment that he had stayed clear of sifting and seeking. It was a little like desertion, but for cause. At nine in the evening, with Tom gone to bed and no further chores to do, he still avoided the waiting morass. There was no use; he was too tired to think. He had telephoned Kathy to explain why he could not see her. She gave him quick sympathy and offered to find a maid. “At least a temporary one, Phil, what they call an ‘accommodator.’”

  “Thanks, Kathy, it’s—well, thanks. I could phone my sister Belle in Detroit to come for a few days, but she gets me down too much.”

  He hung up, and began to pace the room. A, B, and C were still side by side as he had left them last night. He looked at the three books listlessly. His fatigue deepened. He had not gone back to sleep after Dr. Craigie had left, nor had he slept all day. It was just as well he’d been forced to desert.

  I’ve got some sort of block on the whole damn thing, he thought. If I could dig and pry into some decent Jewish guy, I’d get it. Scalpels of the interviewer. The incision. The probing. You just can’t do things to human beings that you do to a Manila envelope full of clips.

  Today when Mom had said, “I’m nearly seventy after all, dear,” he’d wanted to ask, “Are you afraid? Is it awful to know you might die soon?” There were questions no one could speak. He would know the answers to those two only when he himself was seventy. It was that way about every question that mattered most, about every question whose answer lay in the heart.

  Yet he had got answers in the past.

  “Every article you’ve done for us, Phil,” Minify had said, “has a kind of human stuff in it. The right answers get in it somehow.”

  Sure. But he hadn’t asked for them and pried for them. When he’d wanted to find out about a scared guy in a jalopy with his whole family behind him hoping for a living in California, he hadn’t stood on Route 66 and signaled one of them to a stop so he could ask a lot of questions. He’d just bought himself some old clothes and a breaking-up car and taken Route 66 himself. He’d melted into the crowds moving from grove to grove, ranch to ranch, picking till he’d dropped. He lived in their camps, ate what they ate, told nobody what he was. He’d found the answers in his own guts, not somebody else’s. He’d been an Okie.

  And the mine series. What had he done to get research for it? Go and tap some poor grimy guy on the shoulder and begin to talk? No, he’d damn well gone to Scranton, got himself a job, gone down into the dark, slept in a bunk in a shack. He hadn’t dug into a man’s secret being. He’d been a miner.

  “Christ!”

  He banged his fist on his thigh. His breath seemed to suck back into his lungs. The startled flesh of his leg still felt the impact of the blow.

  “Oh, God, I’ve got it. It’s the way. It’s the only way. I’ll be Jewish. I’ll just say—nobody knows me—I can just say it. I can live it myself. Six weeks, eight weeks, nine months —however long it takes. Christ, I’ve got it.”

  An elation roared through him. He had it, the idea, the lead, the angle. A dozen times he could have settled for some other idea, but each time he’d thrown it away, tossed it, profligate, stubborn. He’d known that there was somewhere, around some unexpected corner, a better idea, stronger, more real, the only. He’d stalked it, beseeched it, spied for it, waited, rushed, fought. And when he’d found it, this burst of recognition shouted out from him.

  “I Was Jewish for Six Months.” That was the title. It leaped at him. There was no doubt, no editing, no need to wonder. That would get read. That there was no passing up. Six weeks it might be, ten, four months, nine, but apart from that one change, it was it.

  Nobody but another writer could know how goddam good I feel, he thought. This was the reward, the strange compelling excitement of getting an idea. Resistance to the series was a vapor, remembered but gone. Nothing could stop this. It would be simple enough. He didn’t look Jewish, sound Jewish, his name wasn’t Jewish—well, Phil Green might be anything; he’d skip the “Schuyler” and not have to bother with assumed names. He checked on himself in his mind’s eye—tall, lanky; sure, so was Dave, so were a hell of a lot of guys who were Jewish. He had no accent or mannerisms that were Jewish—neither did lots of Jews, and antisemitism was hitting at them just the same. His nose was straight—so was Dave’s, so were a lot of other guys’. He had dark eyes, dark hair, a kind of sensitive look—“the Toledo,” Kathy had said. Brother, it was a cinch.

  In California, no, he couldn’t get away with it anywhere on the Coast. Too many people knew him there; he’d keep running into them, spoiling things. But here—for once he was delighted with his shyness, with his inability to make friends. He’d meant to hang around the office and meet people, writers, editors, but he hadn’t gone in even once. He didn’t know a soul in this whole damn city, except Minify and Kathy—they’d see it, they’d be as excited as he, they’d keep his secret.

  He couldn’t wait for morning to tell her, to tell Minify. He’d phone them right now. No, this was no thing for phoning.

  “Phil.” From the bedroom, his mother’s voice sounded strong, ordinary. He went in. She looked better; her color was good.

  “You don’t have to stay in,” she said. “I feel all right.”

  “Don’t crowd things.” He looked at her inquiringly, “Feel like talking?”

  She sat forward from the bunched pillows. “Of course.”

  “I’ve got it. I’ve got the way to get that series. This
isn’t like any of the other ideas I told you.”

  “It must be right,” she said. “It always is when you’re this sure.”

  “I’m going to be Jewish, that’s all. Just tell people I am and see what happens. See what I feel like. For a while, for however long it takes to feel it.”

  “Oh, Phil. It’s brilliant.”

  “It won’t be the same, sure it won’t, but it ought to come damn close.” He was almost shouting but he couldn’t decrease his voice. “It’s worth a try—just put myself into every situation I can think of where being Jewish might mean something. It’s so simple. See?”

  “Of course. It’s wonderful, really.”

  “Then I’ll write stuff they’ll read.” He rubbed his thigh. He looked down at her as if she had done him a favor. She’d got it; he’d known she would.

  “If we do have a maid tomorrow,” he said, “I’ll go tell Minify. And that girl I told you suggested the series, I want to tell her about it.”

  “Can’t you invite them down here now? I’m not going to need anything.”

  He looked at his watch. It was only nine-twenty. Had all this thing happened to him in less than twenty minutes? After two weeks of sweating it out day and night? Where did ideas come from, anyway? This one had leaped at him when he’d been exhausted, AWOL from his search. Sometime he’d have to try to trace back every step he’d taken. Not now; he had no time now.

  “That’s an idea.” He started for the door. “Will you keep my secret if you meet any new people? It’d have to be without exceptions, you know, to work at all.”

  “If you’re Jewish, I am too, I guess.” She waved him out of the room.

  He went to the telephone, dialed Kathy’s number.

  “It’s me, Phil. I never thought you’d be in.”

  “How’s your mother? You sound as if she were better.”

  “She is, lots. Kathy, you haven’t a date?”