Gentleman's Agreement (2 page)

“Now, Phil.”

“O.K.” Suddenly he grinned. “She
is
a little hard to take at times, and you know it.”

“So are you, dear, but it’s worth it.”

“Sure, sure. I’d hate to think I’d stodgied up as much as she has in the last few years, though.” Mrs. Green made no comment. When the coffee was ready, Phil took his cup, said, “Think I’ll start jotting down some notes,” and went back to the living room. “I’ll quit when she gets here,” he added.

But when the downstairs bell rang half an hour later, he left his desk and went to his room. It was too small to serve as a study, taking only a tall chest, one big reading chair, and a narrow bed. He puttered about, dissatisfied, with what he did not know. He drew out a bureau drawer, closed it, and drew out another, as if he were searching for something. At his desk, he had ordered himself to think about the assignment, but like a fractious child, his mind had refused to comply. This was another sign, he thought dismally, that his flash appraisal in Minify’s office had been correct. There was in him no itch to get at it, the way there was when instinct told him he had a “natural” by the tail. As he had said, it was going to be the hell of an assignment and the bitch of a job to bring the stuff alive.

There was a knock at the door. “Hi, Belle,” he called, and she opened the door.

“Mamma says you’re working.” She made it a gentle accusation. “Come out a minute and tell me about the new job.”

When he told her, she said, “I should think he’d have assigned it to a Jewish writer.”

“Why? I’m not blind, am I?”

Belle went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Anyway, I just wonder. You can’t scold people into changing.”

“Who said anything about scolding?” Phil asked, and Mrs. Green said, “Now, Belle, you don’t mean that. It’s not like you.”

Belle began to elaborate her point, but Phil scarcely listened. There was a flat certainty about her statements which irritated him. He had noticed it on her other trip and decided she had changed a good deal during the war years. The difficulties of travel had kept her away from the Coast; for five years they had not seen her. Apparently she regarded New York as a neighboring town of Grosse Pointe.

He sat, dispirited and silent, looking at her and wondering how he could get off by himself again. Belle was handsome, slender, expensively dressed. He looked at her attentively, as if she were someone he would have to describe accurately on paper. There were two horizontal lines grooved in her neck, like necklaces tight to the skin; he had never noticed detail of that sort before. She talked with loud animation as one does in a large room with many voices to combat; her hands moved restlessly in gesture. Now she was describing the large new house she and Dick wanted to buy.

“Did you close the sale on the old place?” Mrs. Green asked.

“Not yet. That cheap Pat Curran keeps trying to Jew us down.” She shook her head despairingly, and Phil thought her distress vulgar and ridiculous when millions of people couldn’t find a two-room flat. He saw his mother frown at her. He glanced at his watch, offered excuses about a pressing appointment, and left them.

Outside, the city was already dim with the early twilight and sharp with the clean smell of cold, but he still relished New York’s positive weather and walked into it as if into sanctuary. He wished it were his sister Mary in California instead of Belle who lived near enough for frequent visits. Belle was seven years older than he, and Mary only four; maybe that accounted for the greater closeness there’d always been between him and Mary. No, it was more than that. Mary lived in a sprawly house near the university and was lazy and easy about things; Belle had a terrific place, smart to the last ash tray. He’d been only sixteen when Belle had married Dick King. Nineteen years ago, Dick had been a college-boy draftsman, and for a long time the Kings had led an ordinary modest life like the rest of the family. Then Dick had designed the new wheel-transmission gadget that did the trick better than the one his company had been using; almost at once he’d become one of the high-priced big shots in the automotive world. That was ten years ago, and as if she’d been tensed and ready to spring, should the chance ever be offered her, Belle instantly changed into one of the “smart set” out there. “Perhaps a long transition period would have made her less of a jackass about being rich,” Phil had once remarked to Mary. Now he thought, Oh, well, and forgot her.

He’d been walking along Lexington Avenue. At Forty-second, he stopped and folded his head back on his neck as far as it would go, looking up at the Chrysler Tower. He wondered whether an atomic bomb could really vaporize it out of existence. He knew he looked like any tourist, but it did not disturb him. After two weeks he still was a tourist in his greed to examine all the great city he had only glimpsed in the brief stopovers of the past. But feeling again a tourist brought back the sense of strangeness in this new place; loneliness drifted through his mood. He began to walk again. Christmas decorations livened every shopwindow; though it was only the first day of December, the stores already bustled with shoppers for this first postwar Christmas. In December, seven years ago, Betty had died. Decembers would always be hard months for him.

Perhaps that’s why his mind was being so inelastic about the new work; perhaps that’s why he’d been so edgy over Belle.

Suddenly he remembered her despair. “That cheap Pat Curran keeps trying to Jew us down.”

His mind drew back sharply. All he’d thought then was two-room flats. The verb had glided right by him. His mother, he now realized, had been frowning about that as he was leaving. But he? He hadn’t even registered.

Maybe he was the wrong man for this series. Heart in the right place, but tone-deaf. Rot, he argued back at once. It’s just the old inertia at the start of a long pull.

At a newsstand he bought the evening papers. On the front page, dwarfed by the headlines about General Motors and the War Guilt Trial, was a story about some Brooklyn hoodlums attacking three Jewish boys. He ought to begin a file of his own clippings if he were going ahead with the series. Maggotlike, the “if” squirmed through his conscience.

Damn it, why couldn’t Minify give it to an old-timer and not load it on me for the
first?

A few blocks later, he passed a newsreel theater, went by it, and then turned back to it. He read the signs about what was showing. Feeling a traitor, he fished a quarter out of his pocket and went through the turnstile. It moved oilily, without a click, and vaguely he felt cheated about everything.

He paid off his taxi and said to the doorman, “Minify, please.”

“Eighteenth, sir. To your right.”

He went into the small lobby, noted the gleam of the white border on the black linoleum floor, and turned right to a small elevator. Inside, he looked into the square of beveled, unframed mirror and straightened his tie. It was friendly of Minify to ask him, but this sort of setup was somehow jarring. Formality always dispirited him, not because he worried about being gauche, but because what he and Betty used to call “fingerbowl houses” implied alien values and importances. Something had been building between him and Minify since their first meeting two months before. He did not want it destroyed. A husky maid in black and white answered his ring, and he heard Minify calling out, “Never mind, Berta, I’ll answer it—oh, you’re already there.” He stuck out his hand and said, “Hello, Green. I might have thought of this before.”

Relief swept up in Phil. It was the same easy Minify. As he followed him into the living room, he felt a whole atmosphere of wealth, beautiful colors and fabrics. A thin middle-aged woman came toward them.

“Jessie, this is Schuyler Green I’ve been talking about. My wife.”

“I’ve read everything he ever wrote, don’t be silly, John. Good evening, Mr. Green. Kathy, this is Mr. Green. My niece, Miss Lacey.”

Simultaneously he shook hands with Jessie Minify and smiled at the girl sitting on the sofa just behind her. Mrs. Minify had small curls like gray bubbles all over her head; her voice seemed to bubble too, and he felt that the apartment was cut to her pattern and fitted nothing in Minify at all. He turned and took the hand held up to him by Miss Lacey and knew she was very pretty and that this was going to be a fine evening.

“I haven’t read
everything,
” Miss Lacey said, “but what I did read was—” She tipped thumb and forefinger together to form a circle and flicked the circle toward him, braking the gesture in mid-air so suddenly that her hand shook on her wrist. It was the effusive gesture for “done to a turn, monsieur,” and it struck him now as absurd and artificial. He smiled and said, “Thanks,” but the first flush of approval chilled in him. Her voice had a hint of Jessie Minify’s too-well-bred tone. He felt vaguely resentful to it, as he did to the gesture.

Through the next quick sequence of Minify’s “Scotch or rye?” and of Mrs. Minify’s “Sit over there, Mr. Green, it’s the biggest,” and of his own “Thanks, I like big chairs,” and “Scotch, please, a light one,” he kept on being aware of an uneasy disappointment. From a bar closet at the side of the room, Minify called out, “What do people call a guy whose first name is Schuyler?”

“Phil,” he answered, and everybody laughed.

“Thank God, I don’t have to say Green all the time,” Minify answered. “So hearty, last names.”

“It’s my mother’s name, my middle one. I started signing my stuff ‘Schuyler Green’ on the college paper at Stanford. Sounded ritzier to me, I guess, than Philip—like Somerset Maugham instead of William, or Sinclair Lewis instead of Harry. My literary heroes then.”

“Somerset, Sinclair, Schuyler,” Miss Lacey said. “All
S
’s. Maybe that means something.”

He wondered if she were laughing at him and felt stiffly young and too explanatory. In that moment also he realized that the maid Berta had held out her arms in a gesture which meant he was to give her his coat and hat and that he had not handed them over but had put them down on a chair himself. Miss Lacey was saying something about
noms de plume
, but he missed it, feeling embarrassed about Berta and exasperated that he should. Though he hadn’t remembered it all day he now recalled his unaccountable awkwardness that morning about shaking hands with Minify. A resigned dismay darted through him, as at the second pang of a toothache. He was in for a tight, watchful evening, after all.

“… from California?” Only the end of Miss Lacey’s question came clearly to him, but like an aftermemory on his eardrums the first part still registered. The voice was again overbright, but the words were simple and interested. He turned toward her just as Minify came back with his drink, saying, “Here, Phil, light one.” She looked natural and friendly, and he suddenly felt he had been too quick to disapprove of her. How furious he would be if somebody made judgments on
him
because of a gesture or tone in the first clumsiness of meeting! For the second time in a few minutes, apprehension fell back. He admonished himself to stop vacillating between tension and ease and enjoy himself. “Not my first
trip,”
he said to Miss Lacey. “But the first time I’ve ever come here without a steamship ticket for tomorrow or something.” She nodded, and he went on more easily with the prefaces of getting acquainted as she or Jessie Minify prodded him. All the while he kept taking an inventory of her, in quick installments, so that it should not be apparent. She was small, with lovely legs, and about twenty-eight or -nine. (“No, I wasn’t born there. But when I was seven, we moved out from Minnesota, so we all feel like Californians.”) There was a sureness about her manner and clothes which you found in New York or Hollywood or London girls, a self-confidence it was, somehow provocative. (“There was this small private hospital in Santa Barbara, my father was a doctor. I was going to study medicine, too.”) She undoubtedly wished she weighed ten pounds less, but no man would. His heart hammered once against his ribs and went back to its ordinary business. (“You
did
read those? I was mad, so I suppose it showed up in the writing. That’s when Mr. Minify wrote me to come East about a job.”) There was something a little wrong with her looks, but you’d call her beautiful, anyway. She had blue eyes, her hair was dark and smooth, her whole look was somehow very clean and precise and neatly tended. He turned to Mrs. Minify’s question about him and the war, but John Minify was answering it for him, and he glanced again at Katherine Lacey. She was looking up at Minify, and he saw the stretch of her throat from chin down to the dark close dress. Suddenly he knew what was wrong. By itself, in a close-up, say, her face was beautiful, but it was scaled to go with a taller girl and was top-heavy for her. A click of satisfaction accompanied this recognition. She now seemed vulnerable and human, not so perfect that he felt lumpish and nervous.

“So after eleven months of training and a month of transport, he had one vicious week of action with the Marines at Guadalcanal and then out. Isn’t that it, Phil?”

He nodded. “Except for the hospital.”

“Do you still hate to talk about it?” Mrs. Minify sounded cautious but caught in irrepressible curiosity.

“I never hated to. I
wanted
to tell about my operation the way everybody else always does. Only that wore off, especially after V-J Day. Now it seems a million years back.”

The talk veered off to general discussion about the new organizations for veterans. He relaxed further. The first phase of the evening was over. A benevolence went through him; he sipped his drink comfortably. Jessie Minify began some anecdote about a woman he didn’t know, and he scarcely listened. She was not the wife he would have imagined for John Minify, but she was amiable and perhaps just the right complement for his high-voltage mind. Some men preferred it that way.

Miss Lacey brought the talk back to him.

“Do you mind telling people what you’re writing, Mr. Green?”

“Not at all.” He hesitated and glanced at Minify. “Only right now I’m not writing anything—just starting a new thing.”