Gentleman's Agreement (16 page)

Dave was a break. Man’s talk it would be, of the army, the occupation, terminal leave, the old job or a new one. Good old Dave, thank God for Dave, Dave who didn’t know a damn thing about Kathy.

“If things are going to be all tense and solemn all the time.”

“Then what?” He should have said it at once. He should have made her finish the sentence, verbalize the threat implicit in the tone she used. “We’d better not get married after all.” That’s how she’d have ended it. He might as well have heard it, then, not let it hang in the air, a warning to behave, to be lighthearted about things. He had shrunk from hearing it, had gone wise with a soft wisdom and said he’d better leave now. He should have faced her. Told her. “Things
will
be tense and solemn plenty of the time,” he should have said. “I’m a guy that gets tense, see? I snarl up and I goddam well can’t help myself. I care about a thing and forget about other things. Damn it to hell, that’s the way I am. If you don’t want my kind of man, O.K., no harm done. Better now than later.”

All those things he’d crumpled into a dignified silence while he made a dignified exit. Afraid to slug it out lest he lose her. You love a woman and you lose her—Christ, how do you stand it a second time? You don’t—you crawl into a shell and stifle. All the sentences addressed to her later were so fine and right, but they were spoken only in the safe room of his mind. And so this waking with fear, shame, depression—the clinical trio, the three sisters pursuing—

He leaned down over the basin and slogged his face with the stinging cold of winter water as if he were beating himself.

As he sat talking with Dave, a preference for male companionship beat through him, surly, superior. Women talked of parties, of family, of children and summer cottages and love. This with Dave was what a man needed, this bone and muscle for the mind instead of pale plump softness. This men’s talk was all in the hard clean outlines of battle, impossible bridges to be built under fire, the split of the atom, the greed of looting armies. Dave had begun in Italy and gone on through the whole business of D Day and the rest. He’d been wounded and mended and thrown back in. Women clawed softly at your manhood. War and work and the things you believed in gave it back to you.
This
gave it back to you, lounging in opposite chairs, taking the good short cuts men could take who’d been through the same things, fiddling through long drinks, arguing, differing or agreeing, but always tight on the tracks of reality.

Separation and time had made him forget how much he liked Dave. He’d told Minify they weren’t especially close any more, yet when Dave had dumped his bag down and they’d stood there foolishly thumping each other on the shoulder, Phil had been seized with the old excess of feeling he’d had as a kid for “my best friend.” Dave seemed taken by the same kind of upheaval, mixed in his case with the emotions of coming home at last. For him this was a homecoming by proxy, with Tom awestruck at his ribbons, Mrs. Green saying, “Well, Dave, why, Dave,” and the house all astir to give him food, make him comfortable.

Phil found himself studying Dave’s face as they talked. He looked older, he seemed quieter. Was it just that three years had passed? Was it still the stamp of war and distance and loneliness, which would rub off soon under the caress of ordinary life? Or was Dave the holder of new knowledge which really aged and toughened the whole stuff of which his body and mind and understanding were compounded? He saw the thinning hair, the uneven groove between the eyebrows which showed clear now even when Dave wasn’t frowning; he saw, too, the ruddy outdoor skin and knew a fleeting envy for the top fitness that army living clamped hard to a man.

“What’s this series?” Dave asked.

“We’ll get to it later.” Inexplicably he wanted to put off talking of what he was doing. A shyness pervaded him, as if he might seem to Dave like a kid caught playing at a man’s game. They went back to their discussion of Dave’s plans. He was going to move his family East as Phil had done and was going to stay on now for part of his terminal leave to look over the ground. He’d already had letters from his old boss assuring him that a good job could be arranged with one of several Eastern firms, but the housing shortage might defeat him, if it was as serious as the papers reported. Phil listened and replied. Yet now, submerged but insistent, the series was fingering his mind again. He looked at the expressive face opposite him with new attention while a silent question nuzzled him back to his endless research.

Does Dave
look
Jewish?

Yes, he supposed he did, now that he asked it. He simply could not remember that he had ever thought the thing before in all the years they’d known each other. Where was it, this Jewishness? Dave topped six feet as he did, a little heavier, with no fat but of a bigger bone. His nose was short, stubby even, no hint of hook or curve. Hair and eyes were brown, lighter than his own and, where the unshaved stubble caught the last glint of sunlight from the window behind him, tinged with red blond. Yet if you thought, you’d know this man was Jewish. It was there somewhere. In the indented arcs of the nostrils? In the turn of his lips? In the quiet eyes? It was such a damn strong good face.

“What’s eating you, Phil?”

“Me?”

“You’ve been giving me the once-over for five minutes.”

“I got bogged in the series when you asked about it, and I started thinking what makes people look or not look Jewish.”

“Come on, let’s get down to it. Who’s this Minify, anyway?”

Phil started at the beginning, his first jaundiced sureness that “it would be a lousy flop unless I caught hold of some hot idea.” Without surprise, he noted that Dave showed as little steam as he himself had, nodding judiciously, trying to visualize it as if he were also a writer, but not aroused. Obscurely it pleased him that Dave should react also on this low-voltage level. He’d been right—they
were
just the same about things like this. He shoved back the tenuous shyness that persisted in him as he got nearer the point.

Once Dave interrupted. “You expecting a call, Phil?”

“A call?”

“You keep looking at the phone every few minutes.”

“Hell.” A moment later he added, “I had a scrap with my girl. I guess I want her to be the one to phone.”

“Suppose I take that shower now?”

Phil shook his head and went on. He’d got to the part about the three books and found himself worked up all over again.

“Why shouldn’t they write about swinish Jews?” Dave put in. “Don’t Christians write about swinish Christians?”

It brought him up short. He said, “Sure, but—” and then remained silent. Finally he shook his head, rejecting it.

“It’s a question of timing, Dave. Fire-in-a-crowded-theater.” He walked to the bookcase and took one of the books down holding it flat on his palm as if he were guessing the weight. “These authors aren’t dopes. They know they can add to the panic by this kind of thing.”

“Balls. If they wrote only about big beautiful Jewish heroes—you’d get the business of glorifying. Chosen People Department.” Idly, Dave tapped his thumbnail against the edges of his lower teeth. In the quiet room the clicking sounded like some new Morse code. “A two-thousand-year start on the master-race business,” he said coldly, “by one small bunch of crackpot Jews—and look how many generations haven’t paid it out.”

“That’s a point. I never thought of it.” An excited twinge went through Phil.

“I read it somewhere,” Dave said. “Doesn’t explain the whole thing—too many pat explanations all over the place. The big hole in this one is the world won’t be persecuting Germans two thousand years from now because they fell for the same crap.”

He went to the Scotch and poured himself another drink. He waved the bottle at Phil and then took it over to the glass he held up.

“But that’s not the point right now, Phil. Did you ever get your special angle?”

The odd reluctance arose again. It wasn’t the skeptical mistrust that had sent him in to Minify that morning. It was only that Dave seemed cold about the articles. That had been all right at the start, but now it disturbed him. Politely interested he was, nothing more.

“Don’t you
want
a good stiff series in a big national magazine, Dave?”

“Me? Sure.”

“You sound bored.”

“Hell, I’m anything but. In my outfit—no, I’ll save that for later. It’s just—” Dave smiled, as if in anticipation of his next sentence. “Well,
I’m
on the side lines on anti-semitism.” He raised his glass in salute. “It’s
your
fight, brother.”

Phil thought it over. “O.K., I get it.”

“The Jewish part is, anyway. The rest of it’s everybody’s fight. I bet we’re in for a hell of a scrap, what’s more.”

“I bet. The Jews are always just the first.”

“The hell with the Jews, as Jews.” Dave hitched forward. He wasn’t cold and polite any longer. “It’s the whole thing, not the poor, poor Jews.” He waved toward the windows, as if he were waving to the whole stretch of country beyond.

Involuntarily, Phil looked outside. The last daylight was still there, wan, impotent against the encroaching dark.

Dave’s voice went on, somber now. “The price for anti-semitism is so damn big, Phil. And there’s always a price for it.”

A current of affection shot through Phil. Dave’s face had gone hard; there was neither unease nor concession in it. He was staring into his drink as though there were a speck in it.

“You mean price reckoned in constitutions and preambles, things like that?”

“You know damn well what I mean. Don’t force me to make with the big words.” Dave shrugged, amiable again. “Anyway, let’s hear the rest of it, for Pete’s sake. You still hunting for the angle?”

“No, I finally got it.” Quickly Phil told him what he’d been up to. “I’ve been doing it,” he ended, “for about two weeks.”

Dave didn’t say anything. Phil waited. Dave carefully set his glass down and reached into his pocket for a cigarette. Then he remembered they were on the table near him. He got one out and lit it. He inhaled deeply and blew smoke out hard. Then he looked directly at Phil.

“Why, you crazy bastard,” Dave said slowly. “You goddam crazy bastard.”

Phil suddenly remembered the three of them in the pup tent in the woods near the house. The daylight all but gone, fierce rain battering the canvas. Through the open triangle the streaming pepper trees were as black green as sycamore and eucalyptus. They’d be thoroughly scolded when they got home, they knew, but the chilling excitement of the game held them there. Nine, maybe ten, they’d been. Their wooden rifles were at the ready, their eyes strained into the howling gloom.

“There,” Petey had whispered hoarsely, “behind the trees. Lions and the jagers and the big cats. See?”

“Ready, men?” That was Dave.

“Ready, sir.” Petey and he together.

Dave’s voice went majestic.

“Let them have it. The jungle holds no terrors for Cecil Rhodes and his gallant band.”

The delicious feeling of unity, friendship, safety together —whatever it was then, suddenly it stood warm and fresh again in him. He looked across to Dave’s chair.

“Crazy bastard yourself.”

Would she call him? Was she waiting for him to call her? Off and on all afternoon, the question mark had curled its separate existence in his mind. When Dave finally went for his shave and shower, Phil dialed her number. There was no answer.

Suddenly he knew that through all the hours, using Dave’s presence for a screen, he’d been in hiding from his own sense of disaster. If he’d been alone, he’d have watched each hour of silence as a new semaphore of warning. He’d have faced the truth: that she, too, must have been charged with unspoken thoughts, stifled challenges. Dismay must stand thick in her heart, too.

Perhaps he’d dialed the wrong number. Sometimes you got balled up on the simplest mechanical things. He lifted the receiver again. Extreme care went into the operation this time, as if he were Tom adventuring with the delightful fact that if you did thus and so you could really pick Jimmy Kelly’s house out of all the houses in New York. Not until the dial clicked hard against the metal stop each time did Phil release it and regard that step as successful. Then he waited. He counted the rings up to seven. There was no answer.

Just before he and Dave left for dinner, he said, “Oh, I’d better call Kathy.” Dave waited. Phil whistled a phrase of music while he dialed. “Harder to get tickets for a concert than for the theater,” he said, and hung up. “Thought she might join the celebration about your being home,” he added heartily. “Guess she’s out to a movie or something.”

They went to a restaurant in the East Fifties which Kathy liked. As they waited for the Martinis they both ordered, they sat without talk. The tables were all filled; waiters hurried by with platters of charred steaks or creamy mixtures; thick oblongs of butter were forked out to them by a smiling bus boy. When their drinks came Phil swallowed a third of his in the first go.

“Want to talk about it?” Dave asked.

“Just one of those things.” Phil put his drink down and lit a cigarette. “I’d probably be wiser staying on my own,” he said. “You lose the instinct for marriage after seven years alone.”

“Nuts.”

“You and Carol get off on tangents much?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“I don’t mean fights about the kids or money or things. I mean about ideas.”

Dave started to ask something but changed his mind. From anybody else it would have been a direct question about Kathy, Phil thought, and was grateful. He stared at the tip of his cigarette. In the amber light of the room it burned greenish white, without redness. Betty and I never— but that was a bad business to start on, even with himself. Betty was Betty and Kathy, Kathy. Nor had he ever set up yardsticks for Betty’s thinking; he hadn’t himself been moody, susceptible to shift and self-questioning then. Politics and principles hadn’t even cut deeply into his existence in those days. All at once he wanted to find Kathy, apologize to her for being ratchety. And go meekly to Jane’s party and “just not bring it up”? He ground out his cigarette.