Gentleman's Agreement (3 page)

“I asked him to try a series on antisemitism,” Minify said. “A knockdown and drag-out at every part of it. Here, not Europe.”

Phil was watching her. She did an unexpected thing. She grinned.

“Do I get a credit line on it?”

“You, Kathy?” Minify was as astonished as he himself.

“Don’t you remember back in, oh, in the spring it was, about that Jewish girl resigning and I asked you—”

“Why, sure.” Minify looked pleased with her. “I knew
somebody’d
been at me but I forgot who. I’m always stealing ideas without knowing it.”

“Stealing? I gave it to you. I rammed it down your throat.” She turned to Phil. “I carried on about how the big magazines and papers and radio chains were helping spread it by staying off it except for bits here and there. And why didn’t somebody go after it the way they do taxes or strikes? Yell and scream and take sides and fight?”

Phil was watching her as if she were revealing something immensely important. The affectation in her voice was gone, or lost to his ear already. All he said was, “What I’m afraid of is just stringing those same bits—”

“I fixed it with Bill Johnson at the
Times,
” Minify said, reaching for Phil’s glass, “about borrowing their clips for a week or so. It’s against their rules. Another drink, Phil?”

“Thanks, this’ll do it, John.”

The first name slipped out on the rush of affection he felt for the honesty and simplicity of the man. He had long respected and admired Minify; it was surprising to like him so much. Minify was sixty, yet each time they had talked together, the quarter century between their ages ripped away and left them contemporaries. Minify looked his sixty. His roundish head was fringed with red hair, wiry and free of gray; it was a remarkable baldness since the scalp was not the glossy pink that usually tops florid complexions, but a dull walnut like tan suede, result of sporadic attempts to keep fit with a sun lamp. Below this oddly hued top, the parallel ellipses of dark eyebrows and the darker crescents of his eye sockets made his gray eyes noticeably light. Unless he stood or sat in determined erectness, his stomach bulged over his belt. But vitality rode every sentence he spoke and played large on every plan he outlined for the years ahead.

That, Phil had decided after their first long talk in October, was what made Minify seem so young. Whenever he talked of the future, he gave forth a confidence about having enough time. There was none of that anxious “I won’t be here then” which Phil nearly always found in men of sixty. Nor was there any tacit concession, as they had discussed politics, that there was any basic difference in the older point of view and the younger. In their first interview, Minify had excited in Phil a sharp desire to work with him more intimately than he had been doing as a free-lance special writer for
Smith’s.
Coming at a time when his life in California seemed especially flaccid, that one personal meeting with the famous editor had turned the trick.

So far he’d had no qualms or regrets, he thought now, looking from Minify to his wife to Kathy. The bell rang just then, and four other people arrived, exuberant or a little drunk. “Why, Katherine Pawling, where’ve you been keeping yourself?” one of the girls cried out as she came in. The room filled with voices and noise and movement, and at once the character of the evening changed. He talked around him vaguely for a bit and then moved to the sofa to sit by Kathy.

“What about you?” he started. “You have a pretty complete dossier on me. It’s your turn now.”

“What should I start on? I heard Aunt Jessie explaining I’d been divorced and was running a nursery school and was called Miss Lacey there.” She glanced up at him and then quickly away. The knowledgeable, experienced look that faintly irritated him deserted her for a moment. He was puzzled again; she was always offering some new facet that made it hard to stick to any estimate of what she was or whether he liked her as a person or only responded to her as a pretty girl. The things she said seemed real and good; the manner and clothes and air seemed too, in quotes, upper class. But he was drawn to her, whatever she was.

“Just anything,” he said. “And maybe you could finish at a bar or someplace when I take you home.”

“Are you?”

“May I?”

She waited a second and then nodded. Sitting side by side with her now, looking down at her, he saw the faintly raised, branching arcs just above the V neck of her dark dress. Again his heart hammered once against his ribs.

K
ATHY THOUGHT, HE’S NOT
very happy. It’s more than just being new here and not knowing people. Across the fake-marble table in the restaurant, she leaned forward to the match he struck for her cigarette.

As she drew the flame into the tip, she looked up over it. His face was attentive as it had been all the time she’d been talking, but the puzzled or even critical look that had tightened it at times wasn’t there now. She straightened up and inhaled deeply as if this were the first cigarette of the day. A small paroxysm of coughing seized her.

“I smoke too much,” she said.

She saw him glance at the ash tray filled with butts, his and hers. It was an indicator of elapsed time as well as corroboration of her comment, but he didn’t offer health advice as some men would, nor did he give any sign that he knew it was late or that he cared.

Ever since they’d left Aunt Jessie’s, he’d led her on to talk about herself. Apart from one interlude when he’d told her in quick colorless sentences about his wife’s death, he’d seemed truly and wholly interested in holding the talk on her. Whenever she’d come to some stopping place and say, “Well, that’s enough about me,” he’d be ready with some question that sent her on again. He gave her an unfamiliar feeling of being a listener who took an active role in his listening; he wasn’t merely neutral but seemed to take sides for or against each segment of her character as he saw it through her recital. When she talked about her childhood, for instance, and the old longing to have a “nice” house like other kids, he nodded with sympathy. But when she was telling him about her marriage to Bill and the way they’d lived, he looked withdrawn. He liked the fact that at Vassar she’d “fallen in with the radical group—we worshiped Roosevelt.” He looked bleak when she said she’d been “pretty good at the endless entertaining a banker’s life depends on.”

It was as if he were voting for or against her on each phase of her story. It could have been annoying, but though her mind marked it, her emotions didn’t engage. She saw it only as a trait he was unconsciously revealing, about on a par with the fact that though he needed a haircut, his fingernails were well trimmed and extremely clean.

“Your parents,” he prompted. “How’d they take it about Aunt Jessie’s house and Vassar and the pretty clothes?”

“They were pleased, mostly,” she said. “I guess it ground into my father a little—just highlighting his own failure. But he said he wanted me and my sister Jane to have the things that would make us happy.”

“And did they?”

She nodded and thought for a while and then nodded again. “You know, the old idea that privation is good for the character? I don’t think it worked that way for me at all. Looking back, now, I don’t.”

He waited. She could feel him receptive to the mood she’d fallen into.

“I think when I
didn’t
have the things my friends did, that
then
I was all full of snobbish misery. But when Aunt Jessie handed Vassar over and let me ask people to their apartment week ends—why, I think I quit being nasty and snobbish right off.” She smiled at him. “I just felt easy and right.”

“The old business of security.”

“Maybe. Do you think I’m funny, praising myself this way?”

He shook his head, but remained silent. He looked down at his hand, stretched the five fingers wide, then closed them into a fist, then stretched them wide, as if he were making some important test of their muscular reaction. She watched his fingers. About what could he feel insecure? Not about his talent or his growing reputation. Uncle John said he would be one of the major writers of the country in a few years. But something was empty in his life—she could feel him hungry for staying on here, talking.

Perhaps that was what made her pry into the crevices of her memory for answers to his questions. With other men major landmarks and dates were enough—never the shadowy substance of childhood and adolescence. But this Schuyler Green or Phil Green would not be bought off with her usual quick brush strokes of biography. “Then I got married to Bill Pawling and for a while it was grand and then it didn’t work out, so we got divorced in a friendly sort of way, and still see each other every so often at parties and things.” That gliding recital would not have satisfied the man across from her. He was still absorbed in whatever he was thinking. His silence made her uncomfortable.

“Would
you hit that waiter over the head,” she said, “and get me some water?”

“Sure. I forgot.” He tapped his spoon against his empty glass and then pointed down into it. He watched her drink. She had been almost arch as she’d asked for the water.

“You’re looking all dubious again,” she said.

“Am I?”

“Every once in a while, you sort of stare at the words coming out of my mouth, as if you didn’t quite understand English and needed help to get the strange sounds.”

She was perceptive, Phil thought. His face must show the bewilderment that struck him when she went back every so often, as she just had, to that voice and manner. She’d fallen into it, also, when she’d been talking about her marriage to Pawling and the beautiful apartment and the dinner parties—“I got so I could give a dinner for twelve with my eyes shut.” She’d said she had finally found that sort of thing artificial, dull, but the inevitable way the brittle social cloak fell upon her again made him wonder if she really had. “I can’t quite make you out,” he said.

“Me? I’m pretty easy to understand.”

“Parts of you don’t seem to go with other parts—Lord knows,
I’m
not all of a piece; nobody ever is.” His voice took on anxiety. “Please don’t think I’m sitting here approving and disapproving. I’m just damn interested.”

“I don’t,” she said. “Or maybe I do. Anyway, that’s enough about me. I feel as if you’d interviewed me.” He laughed, and she thought again how nice-looking he was. Not handsome but, what was better, immediately appealing. “I wish I could draw you out the way you do me.”

“There’s not so much more about me,” he said. “You’ve got the main stuff.” He lit another cigarette for her. “Are you engaged to anybody now?” he asked abruptly. She shook her head. “Or in love or anything?”

“Not specially.” He was waiting as if he wanted her to amplify that. She said, “Are you?”

“Not anything.” He made it unequivocal.

They smiled at each other. She looked at her watch. He saw it and signaled the waiter.

“I have to get up awfully early,” she said as if she needed to apologize for thinking of home at one in the morning.

She couldn’t get to sleep, anyway. She thought of the whole evening and the pleasantness of beginnings. How wonderful it would be to find somebody who wouldn’t matter less each time! So often getting to know a new man was a disheartening business of revising downward from the first impression. She was so ready for something on a more rewarding level than just “dates” and the ever-present will-we or won’t-we.

If that question could only lie dormant—but it never did. Even though she was “free” and “a modern girl”—those two handy arguments—love affairs were just not her style. She didn’t ponder the why of that. That’s the way she was.

She’d never been particularly introspective, not since those college sessions of rooting around in the lumpy soil of everybody’s “character.” As an adult, she’d fall into self-inquiry only over some specific problem which needed solution. She’d spent many an hour trying to see why her marriage had become so empty, but that was introspection, for the sake of decision. When she’d reached the decision, she’d been able to go to Bill with clarity and say they ought to part.

She’d never been cruel enough to say, “I don’t love you.”

She’d never been rude enough to say, “I can’t listen to one more story about debentures and bonds and foreign exchange.” She simply knew there was no way to live with Bill and not listen. Unlike many other bankers, Bill was articulate. He enjoyed talking. He enjoyed detail. He enjoyed “sharing his work with her.”

She merely said, instead, that they'd developed into people who were incompatible on too many fronts. She merely said, “We seem to disagree automatically about everything.” He knew it was true.

“All the unessentials between us, Bill, are right, but all the essentials are wrong.”

“You mean about politics.”

“Not politics—just, oh, we’re just drifting farther apart every year about everything. Even a baby.”

“I’ll be taken in the next draft,” he said angrily. “I’m not going to put that on you all alone. That’s a heel’s trick.”

She could see again his outraged stiffness, the dignity with which he spoke cliché after cliché. If he only knew it, she could have found stimulation in disagreement if there hadn’t been the clothy phrases, the awful predictability.

“Darling, wouldn’t you just
once
say ‘Roosevelt’ or ‘the President’?”

“What? Damn it, Kathy, that man makes monkeys out of you liberals.”

There’d been the way his face would light whenever she talked against Communism or the Soviet scorn for “the imperialistic war.”

“At least we’re on the same side about the Commies,” he’d said once, with a kind of comradely gaiety.

“We’re not!”

“But you always—”

“I’m against it as a principle—the slavery to the party line—the killing of freedom—but I’m
not
against it as The Red Menace the way you are.”

“It comes down to the same thing.”

“It doesn’t. It just doesn’t. Oh, never mind.” It was one of the times when she despised him. He’d never see the difference between her opposition and his Red-baiting.