She locked her suitcase and started out. In the living room, she looked automatically about her. She’d given Claudia the week end off. No forgotten cigarettes smoking in an ash tray, no windows up. On the piano her music stood open, and she went to it and closed it. The sonata she’d played for Phil. She glanced over to the fire-place. Dark, forbidding, wind-swept, the landscape looked gloomily down at her. She turned quickly and left.
The elderly big shot dismayed her at sight. She’d hoped he’d at least be charming and attractive. Vaguely she’d read or heard of Lockhart Jones during the war or even before from Bill. He was tall, gray, about sixty-five, with an old man’s phlegm already in his voice. His chin and nose were sharp, the lengthened ear lobes were pointed with age, and his stainless teeth in even perfection told of dentures. The Mannings were already there, and the Tay Carsons. Jane and Harry said the Trippens were coming up from Washington for a week. Lockhart Jones was important to Harry; that much she caught in the first few minutes of cocktails and talk. Probably a client with big business for a corporation-law firm.
The, talk centered in his account of a recent “swing around Europe and the Middle East.” He seemed to have connections everywhere, to know all sorts of government officials, industrialists, army brass. Suddenly she remembered that Bill had had some dealings with him on foreign exchange and didn’t like him. “Finger in any old kind of pie,” Bill had grumbled. Dimly she seemed to know that he was a man who never limited himself to one line but was mentioned in half a dozen deals a year. Bill had said aviation and steel, she thought, but now Jones was talking about new railroads in Europe and a copper mine in South America. “Money, money, money; profit, profit, profit,” Kathy commented to herself, and turned to Jane.
Mr. Jones was giving everybody a tip about investing in some company he and two associates had just acquired. Harry and the other men were attentive, and for a moment nobody else was talking.
“Over-the-counter, but it’ll be on the Curb next month,” Mr. Jones said, the expectancy of quick profit clear in his voice. “Sound setup now. None of the chosen people.”
Kathy saw Ellen’s quick distaste, saw Jane’s eyebrows rise. A dart of revulsion nipped her. Ellen said nothing. Jane heard the doorbell and got to her feet, and Kathy just sat. The talk went on.
What was there to do, she thought, and remembered her helplessness at the hotel in Placid. There was just nothing, without making a fool of yourself. In a fight with Bill, in a town-hall meeting, you could object, argue, denounce. But with a stranger in a private group, you just averted your eyes, in a way of speaking, as from an unfortunate smear of grease on the cheerful face of your dinner neighbor.
All through the cocktails and the new arrivals and small chatter at the table, despondency held her. It was queer to feel so inadequate, sort of obediently toeing the mark. She looked about her. It was a beautiful dining room, brilliant with crystal and silver, the flash of jewelry, the black and white of dinner jackets. “Between them, Bill and Vassar didn’t succeed in making you conservative.” Uncle John’s words came back once again. “But they had more luck making you conventional.” The s's of Vassar and succeed and conservative boiled up, sibilant and offensive.
She seemed to have lost all her old bearings about herself. Her old calmness about what she was and what she felt had apparently deserted her for good. The episode with Bill kept coming back even after she’d reassured herself completely about it; phrases from Phil’s article kept coming back; her brief triumph of feeling right about the two girls kept plaguing her. Each one was like a shadow falling across her mind. She kept dispelling them one day and they kept returning the next, their dim forms inching over her once more. She looked unhappily around her.
Jane was listening to Lockhart Jones on her right. Ellen was talking politics to Nick Trippen. All around the table there were the unperturbed faces, the low voices, the mysterious calmness of people at ease with themselves and the world. She alone, keeping half track of what Tay Carson was saying, was worried and uncertain. Mr. Jones was beginning some funny story. His voice had risen. Around the table sentences politely halted in midstream.
“So you hand a thousand dollars to each of them and ship them off to Africa,” he was saying, “and with thirteen million coons that’s thirteen billions, and the kikes go running after it, so we’ll be rid of all of them at one swoop.” He laughed uproariously. One of the men laughed, but there was silence from everybody else. Kathy saw Jane, Ellen, Harry in a montage of their annoyance or disgust. It was one of those appalled silences, no doubt about that. Nobody there liked Mr. Jones.
“Fell flat,” Mr. Jones boomed. “Guess it’s not new at that,” and affably went on to something else. The halted sentences all about her were picked up. The maids came in with the square silver dishes of vegetables.
Kathy waited for the waves of heat to stop running through her. She turned to the left and picked up the oversize serving spoon and fork. She put food on her plate and knew she could not eat it. Illness was in her, and shame for all of them. They despised him and they kept quiet. They were well bred and polite, so they kept quiet. Just as she did. Not making fusses was also part of the gentleman’s agreement. To rise and leave the room was not in her knees and muscles; to call him to account was not in her vocal cords and larynx.
At Placid, with Ellen, she’d thought she was changing. It wasn’t true—it couldn’t ever be true. The ‘beautiful woman in Rumson’ wouldn’t risk a scene. Phil, Phil, you must be right.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I PULLED OUT this morning,” Kathy listlessly explained to the Minifys on Sunday evening. “I told Jane a fib about not feeling well.”
“Couldn’t have been much of a fib,” Aunt Jessie fretted. “Oh, dear, I did think Lake Placid—”
“She’s fine,” Uncle John said. “Stop clucking over her.”
Kathy’s elbows retracted and hit her sides. Unfortunate word, he thought, remembering Phil’s “clucking disapproval” in the fifth article. During most of the evening Minify sat apart from them, reading and apparently undisturbed by their talk, as if their voices sent no waves to his eardrums. Only once he looked up. For the third time Jess had asked about Jane’s dinner party.
“It was ghastly,” Kathy said sharply. “That man is impossible.”
“Jess, stop pumping her,” John said. “Can’t you see the week end upset her?”
When she was leaving, Kathy turned to him casually. “Are all the articles typed up now?”
“Yes.”
“Could I read the rest of them sometime?”
“Now, if you want. Brought a set home to give his revises a look.”
“Goodness, no rush. I just thought.”
He gave her a smile that had no amusement in it, and her throat tightened. Without further ado, he went to the library and came back with a large envelope marked Smith’s Weekly Magazine in the top left corner. She took it, tossed it on the sofa, and ignored it. But when she said goodnight, she did not walk off and leave it.
By ten-thirty, she was in bed and beginning at age one. She went slowly, as if she were prodding each phrase with an investigating finger, digging each sentence clean of all content. She came on no episode he had not already told her, no reaction she had not heard directly from him.
Yet there was something different about reading them, some intangible and heightened growth in this written version. These black words on white paper, moving on without wavering, held impact she’d not felt in the same words as he spoke them aloud to her.
Not until one o’clock did she come again to the fifth article, which she had already seen. This one was implicit with the final stretch of their own story together; the crushed feeling in her as she read these pages must come from the close personal meanings in them grinding against the impersonal.
For a long time after she’d come to the last line, she lay against her pillows. In the flat pottery ash tray beside her, a cigarette burned to the end, a two-inch mound
of dirty gray ash. She looked from one to the other of the articles on the bedspread about her, five granite steppingstones to —what? Mechanical and precise, she collected the five in proper order, aligned them, and slid them into the big envelope. She turned the heavy package over; slowly she fastened the clasp.
No, there was nothing really new inside it. Only, the authority and candor of print had forced her to see each episode as he himself had seen it. For a while no rebuttal was possible. For a while she was defenseless and mute.
Minify looked out at the winter twilight and then at the electric clock on his desk. It was nearly five.
“Come on out to celebrate, Phil,” he said. “Let’s ask some of the gang. You’re nowhere near set up enough over this.”
“Sure I am.” The two men he’d just left had invited him to “have a drink on it” too, but he’d come back to the office instead. Kathy was the only one in the world he wanted to share this with; with her this moment would have had twice the meaning. Even with the people he’d come so close to here since the thing had started, any celebrating was a substitute thing.
Minify was already standing. “My party,” he said. “Tingler and Anne and Sam Goodman. Who else?”
“Jayson. That ought to do it.”
“Not McAnny, hm?” They both laughed, and John went to the corner closet for his overcoat. They started through the outer office.
“Mr. Green,” Mary Cresson said, and Phil stopped at her desk as John went on to Tingler’s office. “Did Mr. Minify remember to ask you?”
“What about?”
“That house in California—has your friend rented or sold it yet?”
“Lord, I don’t know. Why?”
“He has some business friend, Mr. Minify has, who’s being transferred there. He thought he’d wire ahead if it’s not gone already.”
“Here.” Phil scribbled Dave’s address on a scrap of her desk-paper.
“Thanks. And, Mr. Green,” she flushed—“could I congratulate you about your book?”
He winked and went off down the corridor. John and Anne were already going through the door of his own office.
Spread on his desk were three large tissue layouts of picture spreads. Leaning over them, pencil in hand, was Bert McAnny.
“Smith’s has another book coming,” Minify said. “Phil’s just signed for September publication.” McAnny stood up. His light skin flushed. Tingler and Sam Goodman walked in, and the small office seemed suddenly stuffed to the walls.
“Great,” Bert said, “simply great.” He thumped Phil on the shoulder and let his hand rest there. Phil moved an inch, and the hand dropped. Jayson came in, his small mouth prissy as ever, but his eyes delighted.
“Take your layouts along, Bert,” Tingler said. He and Sam knew about Phil’s “stunt” by now, but neither of them had guessed the antagonism between him and Bert McAnny.
“I’ll just leave them here till morning,” Bert said. He put Phil’s desk calendar on them and started for the door. “Meet you at the elevator in a jiffy.”
“No.”
It was Phil, and they all turned to him. He had tilted his head downward so that his chin was nearly touching his tie. Looking at him, Anne thought of a butting animal. Phil was staring at McAnny. “We’re not drinking together, Bert,” he said. “And Christ, you can’t say I’m being touchy and sensitive now.”
Nobody spoke. Then Bert pulled the three tissues toward him. He began to roll them up. John and Anne, Jayson and Phil, watched him. Tingler and Sam looked from one face to another, seeking, finding nothing. The only motion in the room was in Bert’s hands rolling the tissues; the only sound, the thin crackle of the transparent sheets. Now all six watched him. He was nearly done. Now the only thing visible on the layouts was the blackly penciled-in title: “I Was Jewish for Eight Weeks.”
The thin roll was in his hand. Bert looked about, his lips parted for speech, his face deeply red under the fair hair. Then he left them.
Through the drinks and the easy talking, one recurring notion sent bursts of feeling secretly through Phil. It had never been a Jewish problem, for the Jews alone could never solve it. It was a nonsectarian problem. And because of the simple thing of majority, it was mostly a Christian problem. He’d always known that. But now he was a different sort of Christian. Now he was one of the Christians able and ready to act. On whatever front the thing showed itself.
It was a big difference. The difference.
“For heaven’s sake, John,” Anne was objecting. “You don’t have to dish it to my department just because the DAR’s in Washington are women.” John was not disturbed. She looked about for support. As she came to Phil, her tone became mischievous. “Give it to Phil for his next assignment.”
“I was a woman for eight weeks?” Phil asked, and they all shouted.
Because it was a holiday, Phil was at home all day. At ten tonight Dave and his family were due, and he was going to LaGuardia to meet them. Smith’s advertising manager had wangled two rooms at the Roosevelt for them. Dave hadn’t asked him to arrange it, but till their furniture arrived, they could scarcely eat and sleep on the floor, Village informality or no.
In the afternoon he’d taken Tom to a double feature, and now they were doing the dishes together. Of all the chores in the house, this was the one Phil most detested. He glanced into the living room, and his rebellion died. Under the tall lamp, his mother was reading the newspaper. Perhaps it was only the direct harsh light, but she was wan and her mouth faintly pulled aside again. The slight distortion gave her a wistful look, as though she might cry. She was in no danger, but she was so old. “September, Phil?” she’d said quickly when he’d told her last week about the book being accepted.
“The summer’s no good, they said, and it still takes ages to manufacture.”
Anxiously she’d added, “There’ll be actual books long before September, though, won’t there?”
All he answered was, “Oh, sure, probably late June. They send them out way ahead to book dealers and reviewers.”
When Tom had heard the news, he’d been unimpressed. But now, with his agonizing efficiency, he wiped another dish and looked up at Phil.
“When the book comes, Dad, will the game stop?”
“I’ve stopped it already. About three weeks ago.” He’d never thought to tell Tom.
“Why did you? You get tired of it?”
“No, it just ended.”
“Are you ever going to play it again?”
“Not really.” Detailed explanation was beyond him. “Maybe in a different sort of way, though.”
“If you just skip a game for a while,” Tom said as if to comfort him, “and then play it again, it’s just as good as if it was brand-new.”
“I guess that’s right with ordinary games.”
“But not with this one?”
“No. If everybody knows it’s a game, you can’t go on with it because then they know you’re just imagining it and they stop playing.”
Tom looked sympathetic.
“Matter, of fact,” Phil added, “if you want to know, sometimes I sort of miss this special game. It was awfully interesting.”
“What’s this game called, Dad?”
Phil searched his mind. This was a matter of childhood protocol, too. Everything had to have a name, a label.
“ ‘Identification,’ I guess,” Phil said. Tom nodded.
“Gee, Dad, there’s an interesting game we’re starting in the gym. Foot soccer. You have two teams of—”
As he’d long since learned to do, Phil followed only the key words of the detailed exposition which followed, limiting himself to appropriate remarks at decent intervals.
In a tenuous way he did “miss” it. During the eight weeks, he had faced up to, headed into, a new, unexplored set of emotions. Any life he’d ever heard of, his own included, was burdened with emotions—love, loss, jobs, jealousy, money, death, pain. But if you were Jewish, always there was this extra one, the added p
ull at your endurance, the one more thing. There was that line in Thoreau about “quiet desperation”—that was indeed true of most men. But for some men and women, for some fathers and mothers and children, the world still contrived that one extra test, endless and unrelenting.
“Fair play,” he said half aloud. Tom took it as a comment on whatever point he’d just made about foot soccer. Perhaps, Phil thought, it was an unconscious reply at that.
“The British say ‘cricket’ instead,” Tom informed him, proud of his worldliness.
“Yeah. Say, look, let’s get through with this. I ought to get going for the airport.”
Watching the airliner circle the field for its landing, Phil wrenched his mind back to the present. He’d arrived much too early, and the waiting time—as all inactive time still did—had turned it back to Kathy, given one more tug to the tight knot still bulked in his chest. Minutely he concentrated on the plane’s bumping progress along the runway, saw it check to the brakes, watched the movable stairs shoved up to its wide door. The passengers began to drift out, singly and in pairs, with the vague, uncertain look of people returning from remoteness to reality. Dave appeared, stooping for the door frame. From the top step he saw Phil, straightened, and saluted sharply. Dave was in civilian clothes again and he was alone.
“Where’s the gang?” Phil asked.
“They’re on the train, didn’t I wire you?”
“No, you jack.” He himself might have known they’d have to, with all the trunks and things. “You’ve got two rooms at a hotel all for yourself.”
“Take one over and get a rest cure—you look rotten.”
“I’m all right,” Phil said shortly. On the drive to town they caught up with each other’s news. Except about himself and Kathy. About that, Dave asked nothing; Phil told nothing. When Dave had checked in, Phil suggested the bar, but instead they went up to the rooms.
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