Laura Z. Hobson

by Gentleman's Agreement

  “Leyendecker?” Anne said. “You were in three-cornered pants when Leyendecker—”

  “I know them all the way back,” Bert said. “This kid’s got it. Little Jew boy from the Bronx, but he sure has got it. Signed him for the Dohen serial.”

  There was a pause.

  It’s just an expression, Phil told himself. He feels affectionate and proud of this kid. Aloud he said, “What’s his name? Anybody ever hear of him?”

  “Jacob Her—” Bert stopped then. He’s remembering about me, Phil thought, and embarrassment for Bert washed over him. “Jake Hermann,” Bert hurried on. “Fine stuff, all right. He’ll hit every cover on the stands in two years.”

  Enthusiasm in the voice, pride, alliance. Don’t be bothered by idioms and expressions, Phil counseled himself. Bert feels like a jackass over the thing. But he thought of Belle’s Jew-us-down.

  Over their drinks they talked about plays and movies and the difference in the holiday mood this year. Bert had missed all the war Christmases, he said, so he couldn’t catch the difference. It was Anne who asked about the series.

  “I’m still just getting stuff together,” Phil said deprecatingly. “God knows there’s plenty around.”

  “Too much,” she answered crisply. Nobody said anything. McAnny shifted in his chair.

  “You a correspondent during the war?” he asked Phil.

  Instantly Phil was hostile. He rescinded the excuses he had made before. He said, “What makes you think I wasn’t right in it?”

  “I just—hey, don’t be oversensitive now.”

  “I was with the Marines on Guad. First Division, Eleventh Regiment Artillery.” Don’t be oversensitive. Jews are oversensitive. “Jew boy” is just an expression—let it pass. But how directly Bert had leaped from Anne’s “too much antisemitism” to “were you a correspondent?” That fool mind was clearly taping even war correspondents as inferiors, so the train of thought meant, being a Jew, did you choose a cushy berth in the war; were you a slacker?

  Idioms, expressions, forgettings, associated ideas. Flick. Tap.

  “You don’t wear your ribbons, do you, Phil?” Anne put in quietly. “I know you got it pretty badly. Minify told me.”

  “No.” He looked down at his own lapel. “I don’t.”

  He saw her smiling at him, friendly, teamed against Bert. He smiled back. He knew Bert had seen the exchange.

  “For God’s sake, Phil,” he exploded. “I’m no antisemite. Why, some of my best—”

  “I know, dear,” Anne put in, “and some of your other best friends are Methodists, but you never bother saying it. Skip it. Phil, flag the old boy for another Manhattan, there’s a dear.”

  Bert couldn’t stay another round because of an appointment. When they were alone, Anne said, “Little Squirt.”

  “I suppose Minify doesn’t come into contact with him much,” Phil said reflectively. “That day at lunch—”

  “He was in Tingler’s office, so he came along. John doesn’t know anybody the way he does the writers and editors. Place is too big.” She grinned comfortably and pitched her voice to imitate Bert. “ ‘For God’s sake, Phil, I’m no antisemite.’ He believes that. He disapproves of Bilbo and Gerald L. K. Smith and the poll tax and religious prejudice. Really says so. He’s just a little snot, let’s face it.”

  He laughed. She was refreshing. And she liked him. He looked at her, more personally attentive than he’d yet been. She was certainly an attractive and colorful girl. Her hat was a silly thing like a man's black Homburg swathed in dark brown veil, but it was becoming.

  “Tell you what,” she said. “I’m having a flock of people up New Year’s Eve. What about pressing out your black tie and coming up?”

  “I’d like that,” he said. “Can I bring my girl?”

  “Of course,” she said. Her expression changed for a second, and then she smiled again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  KATHY SAID, “WON'T WE have to let Jane in on it?”

  He looked quickly at her. “I hadn’t thought.”

  “I hadn’t, either, till now.” She smiled at him. “She’s dying to meet you. I sort of blurted the news on the phone, and she squealed ‘Kath-eeee’ as if she’d given up all hope.” He nodded as a preoccupied parent does when a child prattles. She waited. Then she said, “Phil, my own sister?”

  He sat forward in his chair and studied the flames in the fireplace. A minute ago there’d been still the good pleasure of watching her with his mother. Almost a proprietary thing it was, as if he’d not only found Kathy but created her out of his own talents and materials. He’d been impatient for his mother to leave them, but now that she had there’d been this question and the sunny feeling had fogged over.

  “Your sisters know,” she went on.

  “My mother wrote them. But they know I’m not Jewish. Jane and Harry don’t. After all, if you want to keep a secret, the only way—”

  “But, Phil. Wouldn’t it be sort of exaggerated, with my sister, your sister-in-law almost?”

  It was so logical. But logic—he stood up, poked the fire, threw on a heavy log. It clattered sparks and chips off the burning wood, and with the side of his shoe he shoved each glowing bit back from the slate hearth.

  “Jane was engaged to a boy named Sidney Pearlman,” she said at last, “and he died of pneumonia and she nearly went crazy for a long time.”

  “What’s the point?” The harsh tone, the stern pounce of the disciplinarian—he regretted them even before her quick, “Phil, really!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “There is a point, darling,” she went on reasonably, “a kind of pragmatic point. I do think it would be pretty inflexible of you—”

  Her glance was inviting him to be as reasonable as she. Somewhere there was the neat and simple syllogism that would present no flaw to her, but he was too perplexed to find it. He was on the defensive—how had he got there? She got up and came to him. She put her arm through his. “Don’t you see, Phil?”

  “I suppose so.” It sounded grudging, and he added, “Inside the family.”

  “That’s all I meant.” She squeezed his arm. “They’d never breathe it.”

  “No point running things into the ground, I guess.”

  Exaggerated. Inflexible. Waiting for sleep, hours later, Phil suddenly remembered Pop and the interest.

  “But it is unearned increment, Mattie.” He could imagine his father as a young man saying it earnestly to his astonished wife. Thirty-two years ago, that had been, and their first savings account. Written in red ink in the small green bankbook was an 0.72, the interest on their fortune. Phil had heard the tale a dozen times. “Of course I can’t accept it.”

  “Are you going to give it back to the bank?”

  “Certainly not. But if you believe a thing’s evil, you can’t give in just because the amount is small.” He’d gone off into a lecture which would now be called “Old-Fashioned Socialism.”

  “Then what are you going to do with it?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  All through his life, his father had refused to make personal use of a penny of interest. Each year he would do a meticulous calculation and send off a check to something he believed in. It was never a charity in the accepted sense. Before 1917, he’d sent it to an organization for the defense of political prisoners in Russia; when the Ku Klux Klan was raging in the early twenties, he’d sent it to a group fighting it; when the Civil Liberties Union came into being he’d mailed his little checks there. He never forgot, never relented. It was exaggerated, it was laughable. But it was curiously admirable, too.

  Phil rarely thought of his father any more, but when he did he always came on some hard little nubbin like this. It was one of the inevitables in a man like Stephen Slater Green. “If you compromise,” he used to say, “you’re corrupt.” Character, principle, ethic, whatever one called it, was the deciding factor in every life, in every society. Even in the various religions of the world, t
here was a common extract, the ethic behind the shell of creed. One could reject the shell with no impairment to the essence. But without the essence one was lost.

  Phil stretched his arms high above his head and yawned deeply. His wrist struck the bed lamp, and the cigarette still in his fingers shook ashes down over him. Impatiently he brushed them from his face and pajamas. Two o’clock in the morning was a hell of a time to remember Pop and his large-scale talk about ethics. The mind was never a respecter of appropriateness.

  In the instant of giving in about Jane and Harry he could see Kathy’s mouth and want her; he could write a phrase for the series and wonder what movie they should choose for Tom; he could leave Kathy’s side and dredge out of his memory the red handwriting in the interest column.

  Unexpectedly, as he was leaving tonight, she’d held her arms out to him. “Comparisons are awful, darling, but I never was so happy before.”

  They each had comparisons in them; always the later love came equipped with the earlier and with the gray knowledge of what had happened to it and could happen again. Perhaps the knowledge of that mortality added depth as well as fear to the new; else why this passionate resolve in him to let no disaster strike this time?

  “Never so happy before.” He hadn’t consciously measured or compared. Was this the same for him as the round deep joy he’d known with Betty when he’d been a boy of twenty-five? There was in him now the gritty residue of burned-out grief; with Betty long ago he had been an innocent lover in the true sense of the word, guileless toward the future.

  He ground out his cigarette in the ash tray and turned out the light. They could take Tommy to see Danny Kaye in Wonder Man.

  At the office next morning, Miss Wales was upset.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking of. I switched about ten of the applications to colleges and medical schools.”

  “Oh, well.”

  “But the answers won’t be delivered. The post office will mark them ‘Unknown.’” She had just discovered from her carbons that she’d typed in the Minify address on a batch of Greens and his own on the corresponding Greenbergs. Her professional confidence was shaken; two or three times she pointed out that she never made mistakes, and this was awful. “If you lived in an apartment house, you could tell the doorman, but not where there are letter boxes downstairs.”

  “I’ll just write in his name on our card down there.”

  “Oh.” Relief smoothed her face. “I never thought of that.”

  Past the open door Bert McAnny went by with his boss, Bill Jayson, and Sam Goodman, Tingler'’ assistant on fiction. As they called “Morning,” Jayson stopped, looked in, and then came in. McAnny went on with Goodman.

  “Photographs, would you guess?” Jayson started. “For your series?”

  “I hadn’t thought.” Miss Wales left. Bill Jayson sat down. He was short and thin, with an odd toed-out gait. In the one brief talk they’d already had, Phil had noticed the pedantic way he enunciated every syllable, but there was an earnestness in him that was attractive. “I thought nonfiction always called for photographic treatment.”

  “John says you have some special angle that might shift that.” Jayson looked troubled. “He says to skip it for now. Then it’ll turn out oils, and I’ll be in hell rushing them.”

  “I’ll give you plenty of time.”

  “It’s the devil, illustrating a series like that. Why all the mystery? John wouldn’t give me a line.”

  “Well, it’s better this way for a bit.” He took one of the two cigarettes Jayson held out in his fingers. Friendly little guy.

  “McAnny just told me about yesterday,” Jayson went on carefully. “He’s always doing something. Knows his job, though.”

  “Sure.” He looked at Jayson. “How come he told you?”

  Jayson made a sound that could only be described as a titter. “He’s scared of Dettrey, I think.” Phil laughed. Jayson went on, “Look, could I make a highly personal remark?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Jayson looked unhappy. He scowled. He opened his small mouth and closed it. “Don’t keep a—don’t wear a chip on your shoulder, Green.”

  “Do I?”

  “I used to, about being five foot two,” he went on solemnly. “Looking for tactless remarks all day long. Then I just said to myself that everybody’s got a low riling point on something.”

  “That’s true enough. Have I? I didn’t think—”

  “Well, just telling everybody you’re a Jew right off. What the hell business is it of anybody?”

  “I oughtn’t mention it?”

  Jayson’s scowl returned. He pursed his lips like a pettish child. Then he shook his head.

  “I guess that wouldn’t go either. Then they’d say you were hiding it. Hell of a note, isn’t it?”

  They grinned at each other.

  Going up the stairs that evening, Phil was in a cheerful mood. The long New Year’s week end was coming up. Except for deadline stuff, the office would be closed for four days. Suddenly he remembered his promise to Miss Wales. He went down again to the vestibule and stopped in front of the shining brass plate of bells and letter boxes. He stooped and printed CAPT. J. GREENBERG above the typed name on his box. Behind him the door opened.

  “Evening, Mr. Green.” It was the superintendent for the three adjoining houses of which this was one.

  “Nice night,” Phil said, and put his key again in the hall door. Behind him Mr. Olsen made a sound. Phil turned and saw Olsen leaning down to the printed name.

  “You could fill out one of them cards at the post office, better,” he said. He didn’t look at Phil. “Or watch for the mailman and tell him.”

  “What’s the matter with this way?”

  “Rule.” He reached into his vest pocket and brought out a pencil. Phil saw him turn it upside down. The eraser moved toward the card.

  “Just a minute.” Phil ripped out the order as he’d done in uniform.

  Olsen stopped short. He met Phil’s eyes then, his own plaintive. “It’s nothin’ I can help, Mr. Green. It’s the rules. Not in these three houses. The broker should of explained, that is, excuse me, if you are.”

  “Excuse me, hell. This place is mine for two years, and you don’t touch that sign.”

  “I'll have to repor—”

  Phil slammed the door in his face. Queasy rage rode him. Upstairs he went directly to his own room. This sullen moron of a janitor. The rules. He’d seen the owner of these three buildings just once, back in September. Alma Martin was one of those rich widows you saw in movies and never met. At the time he’d merely noted the flash of rings, the beaded eyelashes, the lacy bosom and vulgar voice. Now a hateful snobbery sprang high in him. That cheap tart felt superior to him! The nasty little whore who couldn’t get into a cultivated household actually would keep him out of her three citadels! He and Dave and anybody Jewish were to be kept off the premises.

  He ought to laugh, but laughter wasn’t in him. Every day the thump of insult, the assault on your dignity. The rules of the Alma Martins and Joe Olsens. The flicks of the McAnnys andGraigies, nice intelligent people who scorned the lunatic fringe and wouldn’t have Alma Martin in their houses either.

  Don’t wear a chip on your shoulder. Don’t be oversensitive. And don’t be clannish. He’d heard that one, too. The trouble with Jews is they’re so clannish. If one of them moves into an apartment house, why, pretty soon the whole house is nothing but Jews. Or a hotel or a neighborhood. They just don’t want to mix. And the ones that do mix easily and melt right in with everybody, why, they’re so quick to take offense at the slightest thing.

  Don’t be so thin-skinned, Izzy. Don’t withdraw from the clever little flick, don’t stay off in groups where the tap, tap, tap can’t get at you and madden you with drop-of-water persistence. This is America, and there are no torture chambers in Detroit or Boston or St. Paul. Why fret?

  Nine months? Two weeks was enough. He’d been doing this for less than two weeks and he�
��d changed. A mutation had been produced in the bunched nerves, in the eardrums that caught nuance, in the very corneas that gave him sight. Already when he glanced at the over-all gray of a page of the Times, if the word “Jew” was printed anywhere on it, that word leaped into his vision. Already when somebody started a story about Izzy Epstein or Mrs. Garfinkel, he felt his teeth on edge. Now the sly little phrases got no obliging deafness or excuses from him. How small a step remained before he might seethe with determination to “show them,” to attain some power, of wealth, of fame, that would be impregnable!

  Two weeks. Maybe the slow embryo in the patient womb needed nine months to reproduce the sweep from tadpole to man, but no such time was needed to re-create the reaction to prejudice. He’d been a fool that night, a fancy maker of metaphor and simile. Whole history of persecution indeed. He’d forgotten that the inheritance of acquired characteristics was a myth. The baby born in the ghetto was as free of the history of persecution as it was free of its father’s skill at making neckties or mathematical formulae. But these teachers were soon met, and they taught their devious lessons rapidly and well.

  He took the opening pages of his manuscript out of his pocket and threw it at the top of his dresser. It slithered across the mahogany and fell to the floor.

  “That you, dear?”

  He shook his head sharply as if to snap it free of concussion after big guns had gone off.

  “Yeah. No office till Wednesday.”

  He retrieved the folded pages. He rolled them up and absently beat the brittle tube against the side of his leg. That’s where he’d pounded his thigh in that first sweep of elation.