Laura Z. Hobson

by Gentleman's Agreement

  They were all at the front door with him. “Dave, find Dr. Craigie in the book. Stephen Craigie. Park in the Seventies. Get him down there right off, will you? And Abrahams, Dr. J. Ephraim Abrahams, call him too, would you?”

  Kathy said, “I’m coming with you.” The elevator clanged open its metal door, and she stepped in before him, her coat and hat in her hands.

  It was Sunday morning.

  Phil leaned his head flat against the small panel of glass so that he could see more. On the rolled clouds below, the shadow of the plane was a moving finger of gray. He followed it as if it were his only orientation in this indescribable arc of space and brilliance. Since they’d flown him back from Guadalcanal in the hospital ship, this was the first time he’d been up. In the seconds just before they’d swept off the runway some whisper of the excitement and fear he’d known at eighteen in the first moment of feeling himself airborne had come back; then the superstructure of years of uneventful flying had erected itself once more. But now again, gazing down and out and around him, the loneliness and conquest of flight tingled along his nerves.

  Yet he could not shake off the sense of omen.

  It was Kathy who’d suggested the postponement of their wedding, quietly, without weighing it or hesitating. Across nearly three turbulent days and nights her words came back to him. “It isn’t only that missing it would break her heart,” she’d said. “But we’d feel just heavyhearted while we were gone, and wrong about—being happy.”

  Of course she was right. It wasn’t merely the five-day absence, particularly with Dave living there. A business trip would not have needed to be canceled.

  “Just a week, Phil, two at the longest, Abrahams said. Postponing a wedding isn’t so awful.”

  “No, I suppose it isn’t.” They both felt that it was. “It’s Tom more than anything,” he’d suddenly said. “Funny, you don’t fuss around much with your kid until something hits into him hard. But then nothing else seems to count for a while.”

  She’d nodded and said she understood. Now he wondered whether it had hurt her. It had leaped out. Any parent would know how he meant it, any parent whose child had clutched his arm in the stiffness of fear.

  Both Craigie and Abrahams had returned the next morning and corroborated their first opinions. A minute lesion in the motor-control system on the left side. She would undoubtedly regain normal speech, almost free of the characteristic thickening and word confusion. It was not related to the heart attack. Not directly related. It is true that at her age, the degenerative—

  The memory of the phrases again irritated him. The point, the only point, was that it was the first break in the vessel that held reason and co-ordination. If you could choose, you’d choose death in one abrupt instant instead of this inchmeal dying; a cell here, a nerve there, a valve, a steady emptying of the veins as with Betty.

  He turned his mind back to Kathy. Yesterday and the day before, she’d been at the house whenever she could, easy with Tom, fine with his mother. But four o’clock on Saturday hadn’t been exactly good for either of them. It was right, it was necessary, and if she hadn’t suggested the postponement it would have been for him to do and he would have done it.

  Again the persistent feeling of something ominous weighted his spirits. He looked out once more. He had been flying for more than three hours; in another twenty minutes it would be over. He would be in the hired car the air line had promised, speeding along dry-packed roads, rehearsing at last what he should do and say.

  The decision to turn in only one plane ticket had made itself for him on Friday. He’d just arranged the change of date with Judge Mayhew and normally he’d have followed through with a call to the air-line office and a wire to Flume Inn. Maybe seeing Craigie with Abrahams the second time, so affable, so agreeable—maybe that had signaled his mind back. Suddenly the phone call was blasting him apart again as if it had just happened.

  He’d be goddamned if he’d play their game for them. Wiring now, even for cause, would hand them the easy way out they counted on. He’d pulled their wire out of his pocket—he’d told the squirt he wasn’t canceling. He’d taken the airplane tickets out and fingered them as if he were blind and they in Braille. And the idea had apparently jumped into him from the finger tips upward.

  He’d looked over to Dave, still doing KP. The house was quiet. Mom was asleep again, and Tom at school.

  “I’m going up there for a couple hours on Sunday, Dave. I’ll be back the same evening.”

  “You’re wasting your time.”

  They’d argued, but in the end Dave had said, “Sure you have to face them once. I did it once at Monterey.”

  Apart from the research need to test it all the way himself as he was doing with everything else, there was this inability to acquiesce by default. He’d make them look him in the eye and then do it; force them out of the generalized evasion into a boxed refusal to him, one specific individual. Flume Inn must be all the inns and hotels and clubs and landlords anywhere across all the innocent horizons below him where antisemitism was part of the “rules.”

  “They’re more than nasty little snobs, Kathy.” In his mind he addressed her as if he were leaning forward in urgency. “They’re the enemy. Call them snobs, and you can dismiss them. See them as persistent little traitors to everything this country stands for and stands on, and you have to fight them. Not for ‘the poor, poor Jews,’ but for the whole damn thing the country is—”

  Weariness overcame him; he slumped back and closed his eyes. His own phrase, “the first break in the vessel,” came back to him and, as he so often had in the last three days, he found himself at once thinking of death. Not of that final moment toward which his mother had just taken her second tentative step, not of Betty’s death, but simply of death and dying, of irreparable loss and desolation. A desperate longing for Kathy seized him. He wanted her near him; he must never lose her. As if from nightmare, he jerked his eyes open and sat upright in his chair.

  The plane swept through a layer of cloud. He hadn’t realized they’d been losing altitude. At once the golden brilliance of the light dimmed to gray. The oblong signal at the pilot’s door went on, and Phil fastened his seat belt and put away his cigarette. In another few minutes they were on the ground at Montpelier, Vermont, and the mountains lay serene and white under a lowering winter sky.

  As the Ford sedan moved along the miles, he sat almost in silence. He had chucked his suitcase in the back and got in with the tall blond boy in corduroy slacks, woolen cap, and heavy navy jacket. The boy’s face had the sallow look of farm folk during the winter absence of outdoor work. Did he hate Jews and Negroes and Catholics and foreigners? Or only summer folk and rich people and city slickers? Or nobody who hadn’t angered or injured him?

  “I’m taking the four-o’clock back,” Phil said. “Will you kill half an hour over a beer and come back for me?”

  “You up from Boston?”

  “New York.”

  “Just for half an hour?”

  “Business trip.”

  “Sure, I’ll just wait outside.”

  “No, that won’t be right. I want you to drive off as if I— well, just drop me and then come back. Better skip the beer, at that; just drive around and be back in ten minutes, will you?”

  “Whatever you say.”

  They were nearing the inn. Laconically, the boy played guide, but Phil scarcely listened. The Flume, the Great Stone Face, the Notch. But he saw the grand rise of the mountains—here all about him were beauty and serenity and the peculiar American story of New England, the new version of the old England, the town meetings, the small groups of protesting men, the freedom of conscience, the freedom of worship. And here now amid all this stately calmness, the corruption.

  The car swerved as it turned into a long crescent that was the approach to the inn. In couples or groups, ski-suited men and women made vigorous splashes of color on the whited landscape. Phil looked at them with special curiosity. Some looked char
ming and well mannered and intelligent; two couples were already drunk, uproarious and vulgar. They can make it, and I can’t, he thought. Dry and amused bitterness invaded him.

  The tires squeaked against the snow. As the car stopped, a smiling page boy in green opened the door for him, spotted the suitcase, and lugged it out, asking, “Skis, sir?” Phil shook his head and nodded to the driver. The car drove off. Behind, a door opened heavily, and Phil turned. His peripheral vision told him a man was waiting in the open door, but he stood still and looked about him with interest. Sprawling, faced with half logs, smoke rising bluely at half a dozen massive stone chimneys, the inn sent off its instant message of being expensive, comfortable, and what was meant by the word “smart,” which blanketed a thousand variables. At one side, along its shallow depth, was a porch studded with more of the bright raw colors of mittens and scarves and caps, restless with movement as skis were scraped and rubbed and waxed. Everywhere was the smell of new snow, the stretching whiteness, the crunch of boots through the glazed top surface to the hardness below. It would have been a calm and happy place for him to bring Kathy in their first living together.

  Abruptly, he turned toward the front door. The man waiting there gave a pleasant half salute and called out, “How do?” in the rising, puzzled tone of somebody excepting nobody, but not perturbed by the unexpected. His face was pale, his hair thick and gray; he was as tall as Phil, middle-yeared, not homely, not handsome. He wore grayish tweeds, with a plaid wool shirt, an island of color and impudence in his general indefiniteness.

  “How do,” Phil said. “The desk right ahead?”

  “Just inside. Driving through?”

  “No, I came by air.” He went past him, into a large lounge. The registration desk was at his left, and he turned to it, but his snapshot picture of the place had already given him the blazing fireplace, the deep chairs, the beams overhead. Behind the counter the tall man was gently pushing forward a leather-cornered pad with a registration card slotted into it, saying affably, “I hope it won’t be for too many days, but with one bag and no skis—”

  “I have reservations,” Phil said, and took the pen angled toward him from its plastic base. “For a double room and bath, today through Thursday.”

  He wrote, “Philip—”

  “Reservations? In what name?” There was a stiffening all over him, mouth, voice, the arms on the counter.

  Phil wrote, “S. Green” and his address. Then he said, “Green. My wife will get here tomorrow.”

  “The Mr. Green who—”

  “Yes,” Phil said. “You’re Mr. Calkins, the owner?” He didn’t wait for the nod. He pulled out his wallet, opened it without haste, took out the telegram, laid it on the desk, and set the wallet on top of it. Absurdly, a shakiness began in his knees, but the slow-seeping juice that caused it merely deepened his steady voice.

  “But there’s some error, Mr. Green. There isn’t one free room in the entire inn.” His eyes sent the page boy an almost imperceptible look, but Phil saw it. It signaled “no” or “hold it” or something which the boy understood well enough to make him shift from his rigid attention to an “at ease.” And with the signal, a curious thing had happened to Mr. Calkins’ face. It had drawn all mobility into itself, absorbing it, blotterlike; it presented now only the even, dead stain of on-guardedness.

  “You were about to give me a room—apart from the reservation. What’s changed your mind?”

  “Why, not a thing. It’s unfortunate, but there isn’t—”

  He reached toward the telegram. Quietly Phil shoved the wallet aside so that the message and the signature, “J. Calkins,” became visible. But he let his hand rest on the lower part of it. Mr. Calkins said, “Perhaps the Brewster Hotel near the station?” and reached toward the telephone.

  “I’m not staying at the Brewster,” Phil said. He looked directly into Calkins’ eyes. Calkins raised his shoulders, drew his hand back from the telephone, and said nothing at all. “I am Jewish, and you don’t take Jews—that’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Why, I wouldn’t put it like that. It’s just—”

  “This place is what they call ‘restricted’—is that it?”

  “I never said that.”

  It was like fighting fog, slapping at mist. A man and woman came up, saying “Air-mail for these,” left two letters, and began to go off.

  “If you don’t accept Jews, say so,” Phil said. The pair stopped. Calkins picked up the letters.

  “I am very busy just now, Mr. Green. If you’d like me to phone up a cab or the Brewster—” He reached into a drawer, took out a strip of air-mail stamps, and folded two back on the perforated hinge. The couple moved on. From behind him, the woman’s voice came clearly back to Phil. “Always pushing in, that’s the Jew of it.” Calkins turned aside to a rustic box with a slit top and dropped the letters into it. There was something so placid, so undisturbed about the gesture that all the backed-up violence Phil had been grinding down exploded. His hand suddenly had plaid wool and buttons in it; he had leaned across the counter and seized Calkins under the throat, twisting him forward so that they faced each other once more.

  “You coward,” he said and dropped his hand. He turned to the page, signaled for his bag, and said, “My cab’s waiting; I’ve got tickets on the four-o’clock plane.”

  The page grinned widely. “So it is just books in it. Clothes aren’t ever this heavy, sir.”

  Calkins made a sound. Comprehension was in it, and nervousness. A cold shaft of triumph shot through the heat and poison boiling in Phil. Mr. Calkins had caught on to the fact that something was going on besides the hiring of a room. Mr. Calkins was frightened.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  GLUEY AND INESCAPABLE, the extraordinary melancholy clung to him. For more than a week he was never fully free of it. The fast-thickening pile of manuscript in his desk at home, usually the rising barometer of his spirits, offered no permanent release. His mother was definitely improving, the spastic pull at her lips easing; Tom was himself again; Kathy had greeted his account of Flume Inn with disgust for Calkins and praise for him; their new plans were already in order. They were going to Nassau for the first week of February. “I came right out with it at the travel agent’s, Phil—there’ll be no nonsense in this place.”

  But still there persisted in him the odd sense of omen, heavy-heavy-hanging over. Almost constantly he was strung on an unhappy tension, a man racing for a train and uncertain of the watch that said he still had a minute to go. Impatiently, Phil tried to locate the source of this new infection of moodiness—the inn, his mother’s stroke, the hostility of Miss Wales, the continued fruitlessness of Dave’s search for a place to live, the postponement of the wedding—but not any one of them, nor the sum of them all, convinced him that he had isolated the cause of the sticky sadness in him.

  He had accepted the fact that in a few weeks he’d undergone a swift and deep transfusion into his own blood of a million corpuscles of experience and emotion. He pointed that out one night to Dave, during one of their “sessions” at one in the morning, and Dave had given him a knowing and compassionate smile.

  “You’re not insulated yet, Phil. It’s new every time, so the impact must be quite a business.”

  “You mean you get indifferent to it in time?”

  “No—unless you’re a pachyderm. But you aren’t as quick and raw. You’re concentrating a lifetime thing into a few weeks; you’re making the thing happen every day, writing letters, asking questions, going to meet it. The facts are no different, but it does telescope it.”

  “Christ, it must be worse on the organism, though, to have it drag out year after year.”

  “It’s not too good.” Dave shrugged. “Know something, Phil? Remember I said the other night I’ve never felt that ‘proud to be a Jew’ stuff? Any more than you’re proud or not proud to be a Christian?” Phil nodded. “Well, there’s one thing about Jews that does make me feel sort of set up.” He seemed to be thinking it o
ut, and Phil said nothing. “You go talk to a psychiatrist, Phil; tell him about some guy that got his first feel of insult and contempt as a little boy, went on right through life being taunted or held apart, knew that people like him were being beaten and butchered and killed. The psychiatrist would expect a screaming psychopath as a result, wouldn’t he?”

  “I never thought of it that way,” Phil said. “And the wonder is, you’re going to say, not that some Jews are aggressive or thirsty for money or power, but that most of them are so ordinary and patient and able to lead regular lives.”

  Dave smiled. “Kind of remarkable, isn’t it? Even happy lives, with love and work and kids and plans. Takes guts, especially the last ten years or so.”

  They fell silent. Phil wondered if he’d have the guts himself. A dozen times since he’d started this, he’d been called “sensitive,” as if it were a failing. But who wouldn’t be sensitive or oversensitive, with this sort of daily raw-rubbing technique? Only the gross, the truly vulgar, could remain untouched and unchanged, in an idiot slumber of indifference. Since when was it a flaw of character to be sensitive, anyway?

  “Minify said something the other day, Dave. One of those office arguments about how you fight off Communism or Fascism in this country.”

  “The old malarky?” Dave winked. “Let me guess. True democracy!”

  “Not from John. Jobs and economic security, sure—even the Fascists and Communists promise that. No, he said it had got down to a matter of equal self-respect, pride, ego, whatever. Take Communism. It’s got one good thing, anyway—equality among white and black, all minorities—only the price there is so big, too. If we did it, without the price of free speech, free opposition, free everything—then we’d really be fighting the Communists where it counts.”

  “Smart cookie.”

  “So he feels beating antisemitism and antinegroism is a political must now, not just sweet decency.”

  “What the hell chance have we of getting decent with thirteen million Negroes if we can’t lick the much easier business of antisemitism?”