Gentleman's Agreement (21 page)

“No. But I’m sure.”

“I can’t believe—” Kathy turned to Phil. “They w
ouldn’t—”
But she thought of her golf club and beach club at Darien and broke off.

Phil glanced at his watch. “Only nine.” He went into the bedroom to the telephone. She heard the three short dial swings.
2-1-1
for Long Distance. The music from the phonograph suddenly was an offense—she snapped the metal button viciously. Dave leaned back and lit a cigarette. Anne reached for one. Kathy thought, She’s the only one here who doesn’t know Phil isn’t Jewish.

From the bedroom, his voice came clear and efficient.

“—check on reservations for five days starting Sunday, for Mr. and Mrs. Philip Green of New York.” There was a pause for the flattened voice in the receiver. “One more thing,” Phil said. “Is your inn restricted?” Kathy went into the bedroom and sat beside him on the bed. Now the metallic sounds became words she could hear. “Is this Mr. Green himself?” There was caution in it.

“Yes.”

“Well, could I ask you why you—I mean, Mr. Green—”

The voice waited, the sentence hung along the wire unfinished.

“Is it or isn’t it?” Phil said.

“Well, I wouldn’t say it was ‘restricted.’ ” The voice sounded plaintive.

“Then it is
not
restricted?”

“Ah—may I inquire, Mr. Green, are you—that is, do you yourself follow the Hebrew religion, or do you just wish to make sure that—”

Phil had a desire to shout, “You goddam little coward,” but he forced his voice into calmness.

“I’ve asked a simple question; I’d like a simple answer.”

“You see, we do have a very high-class clientele and naturally—”

At his side, Kathy stirred. She put her hand on his arm. “Don’t, darling,” she whispered. “Cancel it.”

“You mean you
do
restrict your guests to gentiles?”

“Why, I wouldn’t say that, Mr. Green. But—just a moment, please.” There was the muffled thud of a receiver being laid on a table. Phil put his own hand over Kathy’s on his left arm. They sat in silence. From the other room, Dave’s voice and Anne’s came to them in indistinguishable sounds. “Hello, Mr. Green?”

“Yes?”

“There seems to be an error somewhere, Mr. Green. We have no rooms open for Sunday or the following days.”

“I beg your pardon.” Phil stripped all inflection from his words. “I have a wire accepting the entire reservation.”

“These new clerks—I mean to say, well, suppose I wire you after I can straighten out this mistake with Mr. Calkins?”

“Just a minute.” The dubious voice, the hedging, the counting on proud withdrawal. Some legalism prodded Phil’s mind. “I’m not canceling from this end,” he said. “Goodnight.”

Immobile and silent, he sat staring at his own hand holding the receiver hard against its prongs. Obviously they would not go there, ravaging the first hours of their honeymoon. But there was something he must do besides accepting this. He could not think what it might be. Not yet.

People could live without smart clubs and resorts. Indeed they could. In a world where only yesterday human bones powdered to ash in blazing furnaces, the barred register of a chic hotel could scarcely be called disaster.

But this maddening arrogance, this automatic decision that you were not quite the equal—

“We’ll open the cottage, darling,” Kathy said in soft agitation. “It’s so lovely. We won’t even tell Jane we’re there.”

“We’ll go somewhere.” He turned toward her. “Go in to them for a minute, Kathy?” He looked an apology. “I’ve got to think.”

She stood up. “The nasty little snobs aren’t worth fretting over—
don’t
be so upset, Phil.”

He nodded; he wanted to respond. Her distress for him was real; it came warm and strong. But the right answer eluded him. From the doorway, Anne spoke, and they both turned around as she came in.

“If Disraeli and Irving Berlin and Danny Kaye and Einstein got up a happy skiing party, Phil,” she said harshly, “that place would send for the Northwest Nazi Police and keep them out. And all such places, too.”

There was no distress in her voice. Anne didn’t give one good damn about his lacerated feelings or outraged pride. She had used that one word, “Nazi”—it was the
meaning
of the thing that angered her. While Kathy only— Cut it, Phil ordered himself. Dave had come after Anne, and all four stood there in a cluster, as if in meeting.

“The thing is you can’t fight them back,” Dave said coldly. “You can never pin them down. I heard you try to.”

“Anti-bias laws,” Anne said. “Possible lawsuits. They never say it or write it.”

“It’s horrible,” Kathy said. “It’s—”

Behind them the telephone rang. Phil started to it and then knew it could not be Flume Inn calling back. Kathy answered.

“Is my father there, Kathy?” Tommy’s voice, tense, shrill, sounded through the room.

“Yes, Tom, right here.”

Phil took the receiver while she was still speaking.

“What’s up, kid? This is me.”

“Oh, Dad, I—oh, it kept mixing up on the dial.”

“Is Gram sick, Tom?”

“She—oh, Dad, her mouth is twisted sort of queer, and she said to look in the little red book and then I couldn’t get the dial to—”

Calm. The voice calm. The kid’s badly frightened.

“Tom, listen. I’ll be there right away. O.K.?”

“Yes, Dad. And she talks sort of thick.”

“I’m on my way this minute. Give her that bottle of medicine—”

“She took some.”

“Good. Five minutes and I’ll be there.” He hung up. “Stroke,” he said. “Facial paralysis, sounds like.”

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 charming 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.