Gentleman's Agreement (31 page)

No sooner did Phil get back to the office than his telephone rang.

“John, Phil. I’m sending it over to another house. O.K.?”

“You bet.”

“There are a dozen good ones. Somebody else’ll grab it. Care who?”

Phil made a rough sound. “Just so the house is non-sectarian in locution as well as personnel.”

That night, going up the stairs to the apartment, he heard his mother’s voice, raised and shrill. Never once had she talked to Tom that way. He braced himself against whatever unpleasantness waited. He opened the door and said, “Oh, hello.” Belle just looked at him.

“… the whole way,” his mother was saying to her. “I never thought any child of mine could possibly change into the typical jingo reactionary.”

Phil said, “Mom, you look too excited. You’re not supposed to get this excited.”

“I’m no good,” Belle explained dryly. “I’ve let Dick and our crowd infect me with race hatred and religious hatred. Then to justify and bolster my new position, I’ve fallen deeper and deeper from grace.” She was controlling it, but the fury was deep.

“It’s true,” Mrs. Green said. “Sarcasm doesn’t change it.”

“I’ve been turning against labor, boasting about my glorious American ancestry, hating foreigners and radicals, the works.”

“Mom, sit down and cut this,” he ordered, and pulled up a chair behind Mrs. Green. To Belle he said, “I told you to can it. She’s got to avoid excitement and exertion.”

“And it’s revolting that you couldn’t keep Phil’s secret,” Mrs. Green went on, her voice sharp and unlovely, “and had to scamper around like a frightened rabbit telling everybody.”

Belle looked at Phil coldly. “You might have asked me before you started something that was bound to involve me, instead of just telling me after you’d begun.”

“Oh, hell,” Phil said without vigor. “So they finally got around to asking you, hey?” He smiled cheerfully.

“Even Tom had the—the guts,” Mrs. Green said as if no other word could fit her need, “to stick it and not go sniveling.”

“It was Mrs. Naismith herself, I told you,” Belle said in exasperation. She turned to Phil angrily. “Wife of the president of the firm. Right at her own party with twelve people there.” She closed her eyes in recollection. “ ‘So fascinating, Belle dear,’ she said to me in that tin voice of hers.” She looked at Phil with fury. “ ‘What’s fascinating?’ I asked her. Then there was this little silence while everybody listened. ‘Why, your interesting foreign background,’ she said. ‘But I can’t see why you didn’t tell us all these years—Jewish people are always so clever and interesting.’ ”

Phil laughed.

“So Belle tried,” Mrs. Green said, “to turn it all into a great joke on her peculiar brother. She fell all over herself, I gather, betraying your secret.”

“I
told
you on the phone I’d have to if—”

“Where’s Tom?” Phil asked his mother.

“I sent him to do his homework,” his mother said. “I certainly don’t want him to hear Belle make this exhibition of herself.”

“I’m going to see the kid.” He said to Belle offensively, “Your life’s saved—I’ve turned in the series. Your disgrace is over.”

Long after Belle and his mother had come to whatever terms they could come to, he stayed out of the living room. With Tom chattering beside him, he looked through the evening paper. His mind kept drifting away from the news. Tonight he might write letters. Always during a long series he fell behind on all personal mail. He opened the top drawer of his bureau where letters to be answered mingled with handkerchiefs and socks. He picked up the one his sister Mary had sent him weeks ago from California. He glanced through it. “… and somehow it’s such a
sweet
thing for you to do, Phil, sort of trying it on to see if it fits or hurts or what for yourself. Even if it doesn’t make a good series, it’ll be something inside you for the rest of your life, and I kind of wonder if that in itself isn’t worth the messy parts. As for Mamma’s news about you and Kathy, it made me just kind of weepy to think of you being happy again. …”

He put the letter back into the drawer.

“Wish the Coast wasn’t so far off, Tom,” he said.

“So you could go there?”

“No. But Aunt Mary might get to come here if it weren’t.”

“Yeah. Say, Dad, couldn’t you take me to a movie tonight?”

“School night? You kidding?”

“Oh.”

“Scram out of here, will you? I’d like a nap till dinner.”

“O.K.” He picked up the jeep and three tanks he’d been playing with. “You lonesome for Aunt Mary?”

“At times. Aren’t you, and for Tip and Sky and the boys you used to play with out there?”

Tom nodded. But there was no bemoaning the past in eight-year-olds. “You lonesome for Kathy too, Dad?”

“Sure.”

“You had a fight, Gram said.”

Phil looked at him. “That’s right. Run along, what do you say.” There was no question in the tone, and Tom disappeared. Phil lay down. The twisting and gnarling and squeezing that could go on in a man who’d been through death and war and wounding, merely at a phrase in a letter, a child’s offhand catechism!

He’d been too righteous, too demanding; he’d had too little patience and too thin a capacity to allow for Kathy’s confusion and womanish softness under sudden pressure. Kathy wasn’t another Belle. If he’d have given her more time to see it, she’d have stiffened up, too. “You don’t have to be a sainted character.”

At once then, words, phrases, the revealing hesitation, the quick cry to Tom, the velvet resistance to this mess and that inconvenience—from the raw, deep places where they’d lodged they paced forth now, one by one, in gray procession.

But damn it, whatever I did, it wouldn’t have been any use. People have to see it themselves or not. You can’t do it for them. And if they give in to it the way Belle did and it digs in deeper and deeper? Families could split apart—

“Telegram, Dad.” Tom’s shout startled Phil. He hadn’t heard the doorbell. He took it and tore it open in the involuntary haste telegrams always aroused in him. It was from Dave:

ROTTEN NEWS ABOUT YOU TWO. BIG THANKS TO YOU AND ANNE. ARRIVING TWENTY SECOND AND WILL BUY YOU BOTH NINE GRATEFUL MARTINIS .

He read it twice. Good old Dave, going to promote a little marriage idea of his own. Anne’s face came to him— its handsome, sharp planes, the reddish frame of hair, the lively eyes, the intelligence and bitterness and restlessness behind them. And instantly he wanted only Kathy; savagely and insanely he wanted only Kathy.

In spite of the continuing sleeplessness, the stay at Placid had done some good, she thought, appraising herself in the mirror. The old black evening dress still looked all right. She was going up to Darien for the night and Sunday. Jane was entertaining an elderly big shot and needed her.

Placid was already a queer, hazy memory, though she’d only been back three days. When she tried to recall the processes by which she’d got to Phil’s voice ruefully talking to her, she failed completely. But she could remember clearly how pathetic Ellen and all her works had suddenly seemed against that one picture of the Mannings taking their three boys into the club after a week of Springfield-Planning them. El and Tom Manning might be at the dinner party tonight. Would Ellen still be a touch haughty?

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.

“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.