Gentleman's Agreement (12 page)

“Merry Christmas from Katherine Lacey—just because I’ve heard a lot about you.” He’d read it with a crazy leap of pleasure.

She didn’t do it just to please me, he thought again as he worked on the gun. She wants him to like her, too. She needn’t have sent any Christmas gift at all to a child she doesn’t know, but she did. She went into those shoving crowds in the stores and searched and rejected and kept on and finally found this. She took it home and fussed with the big bow herself and dropped it off here herself.

“Why won’t the dingus revolve, Dad?”

“Trying to see.”

The creaky, balky misunderstanding which had stood between them before dinner that night had been nothing another man would have noticed. All through dinner he had belabored himself to forget it. When she’d come back to the plan later on, she’d been enthusiastic over it, happy with it.

Twice she had praised it, and twice he had felt only that this was afterthought. He had had the wit to say nothing further of the small doubt which stubbornly nibbled at him. He had excoriated his need for approval as “an infantilism” and ended by feeling clumsy about everything he did. And when he’d
had
to leave he had gone reluctantly, as one does when things still need fixing up.

But the next day at the office, he’d regained all his confidence. About himself, about Kathy, about the series. The girl who’d been assigned to him, Miss Wales, was intelligent, quick, interested. She was going to be a fine help on those parts of the research that could be done by mail and telephone. All day he’d felt integrated and composed. And at four he’d telephoned.

“There, Dad, the little hammer’s caught. See? Right
there!
”

“Getting it now, Tom. Wait a minute.” He recoiled the spool of caps and inserted it again into the nest cast in the metal. He closed the sliding part and dramatically cocked the pistol. It fired.

“Oh, gee, thanks.” Tom grabbed it and was gone. Exit, shooting, thought Phil. As if she had been sitting right beside him, politely waiting for him to finish the repair job, he turned back to Kathy. From his first “hello” on the phone, she’d begun to talk with an earnestness that caressed his fretted spirits. “It was a kind of aberration last night, Phil. I thought about it a lot, after, and didn’t like myself much.”

He’d blamed himself for having let it matter so much to him. All the while they talked, he admired this ability to say she’d been wrong. They’d seen each other once more before she’d left for the Christmas week end with her sister Jane. The sweetness of reconciliation had been theirs, though there’d been no real quarrel, and he’d had to fight back the words that kept bursting against his orders to them to stay unsaid a while longer.

In his chair, Phil shifted uneasily. He stood up, crossed the room to the tree, disconnected the cord from the wall socket. The tree dimmed as if expression had fled a face. Ornamented, arrayed, it had made the infinitesimal shift from life to death.

He had thought as much, of Betty as on other Christmases, had been as subject to all the willful tricks association could play. Specialized tricks at times like Christmas, seasonal tricks, with the help of brightly colored glass balls and flame-shaped bulbs, come forth from forgotten boxes, to set memory going with freshened sharpness.

December had been a month of her dying, and all the Decembers had been echoes of it, each more muted than the last, yet each clamoring in its own way as distance had added the ingredient of lost hope. But this time there was an insulation along his nerves, a buffer to soften the old blows.

And even as he thought, the muscles in his throat knotted, the slow thud of grief took up its interrupted rhythm. Like a devout, stepped briefly into a chapel, he stood again for a moment in the old sorrow.

Dr. Craigie was enthusiastic. “No immediacy.” He kept returning to the phrase, and it had its effect on Mrs. Green and Phil. There was enormous calm in his manner, a pleasure at the massed notes and graphs spread on the desk before him. It had been a long visit, an exhaustive inquiry. Waiting now for his mother to come from the dressing room, Phil felt relief mixed with a hurry to leave.

“A good internist, though,” Dr. Craigie was saying.

“We’ll make an appointment if you wish. Or have you some good man you like?”

“I’ve been asking at the office,” Phil said. “One of the editors there recommended Dr. Abrahams so highly, I made an appointment for Monday.”

“Abrahams?”

“J. E., I think she said. Ephraim. Mt. Sinai or Beth Israel or both.”

“Yes, yes, of course. You won’t need this then.” With finality he placed a prescription blank on the desk before him. Phil picked it up. Two names and addresses were written there. Mason Van Dick. James Ayres Kent. “If you, that is, if you
should
decide to have your mother see either—”

The tone was extremely polite. Too polite, raising an issue.

“Why? Isn’t this Abrahams any good?”

“No, nothing like that. Good man. Completely reliable. Not given to overcharging and running visits out, the way some do.”

“I see.” Phil looked at him. “You mean ‘the way some doctors’ do?” (Do you tell even a doctor that you’re Jewish? Was it necessary to produce that fact everywhere? Was it not an affront to a man to offer him the unsolicited fact, when its very uttering carried the implication that it held an importance to
him,
the listener?) “Or did you mean,” he went on, “ ‘the way some Jewish doctors’ do?”

Craigie laughed. “I suppose you’re right,” he said heartily. “I suppose some of
us
do it, too.”

Then Phil had not given it the wrong reading. Us, Them; We, They. “If Dr. Abrahams doesn’t impress me,” he said, “I’ll try Van Dick or Kent. I’ve no special loyalty to Jewish doctors simply because I’m Jewish myself.”

Stephen Craigie swallowed. He laughed again. He folded the electrocardiogram and placed it in the Manila envelope on the desk before him.

“No, of course not,” he said. “Good man is a good man. I don’t believe in prejudice. And do remember me to John Minify. Haven’t seen him in years, since the night his father had a coronary. Fine man, that.”

Mrs. Green appeared, and they left.

That’s all it was, Phil thought later, stretching back from the littered desk in the office. A flick here, a flick there. Craigie hadn’t known he “was Jewish.” If he had, he’d have been “more careful.” But already in this first week, after he, Phil, had made it a known premise wherever he reasonably could, the same flick had come often enough.

Sometimes it came only from an unconscious train of thought, as with Bill Johnson, of the
Times,
the other day. Returning the borrowed clips himself, he’d worked it in easily, without strain; it had been forgotten before they’d started down the street together for the drink Johnson had suggested at Bleeck’s. They’d fallen into talk of the atomic secret, the Pearl Harbor investigation, politics in general.

“You were for Roosevelt?” Johnson began, and then added, “Sure, you would be.”

“Why
would
I be?”

Johnson hadn’t answered. Phil had let it pass. Flick.

Half a dozen other times, the same thing had happened. That’s all these first days had given him. No big things. No yellow armband, no marked park bench, no Gestapo. Just here a flick and there another. Each unimportant. Each to be rejected as unimportant.

But day by day the little thump of insult. Day by day the tapping on the nerves, the delicate assault on the proud stuff of a man’s identity. That’s how they did it. A week had shown him how they did it.

At Phil’s elbow the telephone rang. His mind wiped clear of every thought. All day yesterday he’d hoped she’d call.

“Phil, this is Belle.”

“Oh, you here again?”

“No, home.” Her voice was brisk. “Mamma’s letter just came. About your wonderful scheme.” There was a clacking and whining in the receiver, and he lost her next words.

“—and I have no control over what
you
do, but I want you to know
I’m
not having any part of it.”

“Keep your shirt on. Nobody’s asking you to do a thing.”

“You know what Dick’s company is like. And no matter how I disapprove of them, I just have to be realistic about it. I can’t have people thinking—”

“For God’s sake, Belle.”

“All right,
be
high and mighty. Just the same, if people are going to think Dick’s wife is Jewish!”

He scarcely listened to the swift words, foaming with self-justification. “All children are so decent to start with.” His mother’s words sounded louder in his mind than Belle’s. “So none of you fell for it at school or anywhere.” But one wasn’t fixed forever in childhood patterns, in spite of what the Catholics believed about the first seven years. Those early patterns
could
be shifted; new values could be superimposed.

“Stop wetting your pants,” he said roughly. “I’m not going to drag you into it. Nobody thought you were a miner or an Okie, did they?”

When it was over, he sat glaring at the telephone as if it were Belle herself. There was a knock at the door, and he called out, “Yes?” glad to be distracted from his exasperation. Miss Wales came in, a dozen letters in her hand. “Some answers,” she said, and put them on his desk. The envelopes were already slit, and he smiled at her. From the first day she had treated him as if she’d been his secretary for years. She offered him co-operation, friendliness, and no deference. He liked the way she looked, though he supposed it was a little “bold.” Her blond hair was an elaboration of curls, her skin pale against the ripe mouth. High cheekbones made her seem Scandinavian, Slavic, something foreign and interesting. She had the curious New York speech that he was not yet used to, plus some extra oddities that intrigued his ear. When she said “bottle” or “settle,” she left the double
t
’s out completely, a little the way a Scot did. He had tried, with amusement once when he was alone, to mimic her pronunciation. “Bah-ull.” “Seh-ull.” No, he couldn’t quite do it.

He began on the letters. Just what he’d expected. Nothing new. These were the cliches of the thing, really. Yet as he read on, anger simmered low in him.

“Yes to the Greens and no to the Greenbergs?” Miss Wales asked good-humoredly.

“At least promises to let the Greens know if any reservation gets canceled.” He passed the letters over as he read them. This was from the first batch of inquiries to resort hotels in Miami, Palm Beach, Bermuda. They’d gone off in pairs, on blank stationery, and on the same day. Each was signed, “Philip Green,” but one of each pair included the phrase, “for myself and my cousin, Capt. Joseph Greenberg,” while the other made no mention of this cousin. The ones without bore Phil’s own address; the ones with had Minify’s address on Park Avenue. He and John had planned this move together, to avoid confusion about the replies. Even the “care of Minify” was unnecessary—“Apt. 18 A” with the street and house number would do it. Jessie Minify, who looked on the whole thing, John had wryly reported, as an exciting kind of secret-service game to which she was eager to lend a hand, had taken on the task of readdressing these letters to the office or seeing them safely into John’s brief case.

“Dear old Jess,” John had remarked. “She
adores
your idea. Of course she won’t give you away. She’s dying to give a big party and ask all the antisemites she can think of and introduce you—she didn’t say any of this, you know, Phil, but I rather think I’m right—as ‘this nice Jewish man, Phil Green, did you hear,
Jewish.’”

Phil had laughed.

“Anyway, I know she thinks of antisemitism as something sort of naughty, like gambling for too high stakes or not holding your liquor.”

Phil finished reading the replies and waited for Miss Wales. She knew the only purpose of these letters was research for the series. She flipped over another letter, smiling and unperturbed. With the best will in the world, Phil told himself, they don’t give a damn because it’s nothing that’ll ever touch them.

“I’ll start a file for replies, now,” she said cheerfully. “There’ll be lots more tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“It’ll be good material for your pieces.” She gave him a look that was part encouragement, part boredom. “If your name was Irving Green or Saul or something, it wouldn’t have worked this way.” He looked at her quickly.

“We’ll have a cross check all right.”

“I changed mine,” she said casually. “Did you?”

“Wales? No, mine was always Green. What was yours?” His voice had shown no surprise.

“Walovsky, Estelle Walovsky. I couldn’t take it. About applications, I mean.” She shrugged, matter-of-factly. “So once I wrote the same firm two letters, same as you’re doing. I wrote the Elaine Wales one after they’d said there were no openings to my first letter. I got the job all right.”

“Damn.”

“You know what firm that was?” She waited. She seemed to be enjoying herself. He shook his head. “
Smith’s Weekly,”
she said demurely.

“You’re kidding!”

“The great liberal magazine,” she went on with a kind of impishness, “that fights injustice on all sides. It slays me. I love it.”

“Brother! Does Minify—”

“I guess he can’t bother thinking about the small fry. That’s Jordan’s stuff. If anybody snitched, you know there’d be some excuse for throwing them out.” She jerked her thumb toward the window, and Phil stared at it till she dropped her hand. “So, anyway, I thought maybe you’d changed yours sometime,” she went on. “I mean, when I heard you were.”

“You
heard
it? You mean before I told you?”

“Sure. Everybody knew it the next day.”

Then his job of “working it in” had been done for him? But how? Who had bothered? And how was it done? Never in all his life did he remember saying to one human about another, “He’s Jewish, you know.” That must have been spoken about him at once. By Anne Dettrey? By Frank Tingler? By Bert McAnny? Possibly Minify himself, to help launch the thing? No. He could not imagine John Minify saying the words, either. “He’s Catholic.” “He’s a Jew.” To talk of another man in the vocabulary of religious distinctions would go against Minify’s grain as it would against his own.