Gentleman's Agreement (19 page)

She’d been perfectly uncomplicated about it. So different, he’d thought, when your own life isn’t involved, and chided his mind the next instant.

“Meet-the-family party?” Dave had grinned. “Not me. But thanks, anyway.”

A polite cough brought him back to the present. Miss Wales said, “Go right ahead, Mr. Green,” and looked at the notes already folded neatly before him.

“Sorry, I got thinking about something. What about Jordan?”

“Well, he’s telling everybody about Mr. Minify’s ad and he thinks it’s a wonderful thing. He’s
saying.”

“Quick as that?” He snapped his fingers. Knuckling little hypocrite.

“I’d thought I’d ask you if it’s true the ad says right out that—”

“Right straight out. It’ll be in the papers tomorrow.”

“You mean practically
inviting
any type to apply?”

“Any type? What are you driving at?”

“Oh, Mr. Green,
you
don’t want things different around here either, do you? Even though you’re an editor and it’s different with editors?”

Finally it got through the sheath of his own good spirits that under her usual manner was something new.

“Different for editors how?”

She hesitated. She looked away. “Well, I just mean. If they just get one wrong one in, it’ll come out of
us.”
Her voice edged into stridency. “Don’t you hate being the fall guy for the kikey ones?”

Kin to no reaction he’d ever had before, a tiny geyser seemed to shoot upward and spray out within his viscera. An image flashed into his mind of a minuscule Old Faithful. When he spoke, he did so with extreme care.

“We’ve got to be frank with each other,” he said. “You have the right to know right off that words like kike and kikey and yid and coon and nigger just make me kind of sick, no matter who says them.”

“Why, I just said it for a type. You know the kind of person.” She was clearly astonished at being picked up on it.

“We’re talking about a word, first.”

“But that’s nothing. Why, sometimes I even say it to myself—about me, I mean. Like, if I’m about to do something and I know I shouldn’t, sort of in my head I’ll say, ‘Oh, don’t be such a kike.’”

The minute geyser rose in stature, crowding his solar plexus. She was not improvising; this was truth she was telling him.

As if the matter were disposed of, she went on, “Just
one
of the objectionable ones in here and—”

He said, “Just a minute.” She stopped. It had to be thought through a bit before he could go on. He leaned over his desk, picked up a pencil as though he were about to write. She waited, and this time he felt no compunction about letting her wait.

What made her do it? He had to know something of the answer, guess at it, find it, before he could go on speaking. Did she have so deep a hatred and fear of the word that she needed to fob it off as a light jest to exorcise it? Was it an unconscious need to beat the insulter at his own game by applying the epithet to oneself first? “This is nothing; this isn’t a word that can hurt me.” The man who cries out to the wife he has betrayed, “I know I’m a weakling, a bounder, a cad, anything you want,” in the need to make himself immune from the words she would otherwise hurl—wasn’t she doing the same thing? Or did her impulse spring from an unconscious longing, hidden and desperate, to be gentile and have the “right” to call Jews kikes?

He put down the pencil and turned back to her.

“What do you mean by ‘objectionable’?” He was proud that no irritation sounded in his words.

“You know, loud, and too much rouge and all.”

“They don’t hire
any
girls that are loud and vulgar. What makes you think they’ll suddenly start?”

“Well, it isn’t
only
that.” She suddenly turned on him with spirit. “You’re just sort of heckling me, Mr. Green. You
know
the kind that just starts trouble in a place; like this and the kind that doesn’t, like you or me, so what’s the sense of pinning me down?”

“You mean because we don’t look especially Jewish.”

“Well—” She smiled confidently.

That was it, then. They were O.K. Jews; they were “white” Jews; with them about, the issue could lie mousy and quiet.

“Look, Miss Wales,” he said slowly, “I hate antisemitism and I guess I’d better tell you I hate it just as much when it comes from you as from anybody else.”

“Me? Anti—why, Mr. Green!” She stood up, did nothing whatever for a space of seconds, and then walked with complete dignity from the room.

Bert McAnny was in an expansive mood. He’d been in Detroit for only two days, and already his assignment was well wound up. The press photographer Jayson frequently used on free-lance assignments in the Middle West had proved responsive to his direction and ideas, and there’d be enough good shots for ten articles instead of one. The second batch of enlargements should be done by evening, and he could start East at once. Everybody had been friendly and helpful, whatever side they took on the strike. That was because
Smith’s
was so big. This man across the luncheon table had made himself an old friend in two days.

Jefferson Brown was public-relations counsel for one of the smaller automotive companies, and not involved with the strike, but he’d given Bert McAnny much time and help with collateral pictures for background and fill-ins. Bert liked him.

“Want to see some shots, Jeff?” he asked. “All I’ve got are Leica-size glossies, though.” He reached into his pocket.

“I’m no good, with them while they’re just postage stamps.” But Jeff Brown took the envelope and went through the pictures.

“You sure slant the whole damn thing for the strikers,” he grumbled when he returned them. “Orders?”

“I told you I was pro-labor.” McAnny shrugged. “You go after stuff you feel sympathetic to.”

“You going to print those nigger ones?”

“If they fit the story that’s turned in. Why not?”

“Stir up—God, you people that don’t have to live with it the way we do!” McAnny sat there looking superior. Jeff Brown thought, Righteous little bastard. Pro-labor, sure. Pro-underdog. Pro-the FEPC. They were all Jew lovers, coon lovers, Roosevelt lovers. Communists.

“It’s plenty stirred up without any help from
Smith’s,”
McAnny said.

“You guys in New York ought to wake up. Why, out here, between the Jews and the coons, we’re—” He stopped at the look McAnny gave him. “Skip it.”

“You’ll be telling me next that Bilbo and Rankin are great fellows,” Bert said. A combative look came into Jeff Brown’s face, and Bert abandoned sarcasm for persuasion. “There’s no sense us fighting, Jeff. We’ve had a swell time for two days, and it’s a free country.”

“Until they take over the rest of it.” Brown raised a fork for emphasis. “You know something? Guy over at Ford told me. There’s a boycott on the radio against Christians.”

“Go on, you’re kidding.”

“Fact. All the networks and their Jew owners have ganged up—last two weeks all they’ve carried is
White Christmas
just so they wouldn’t have to play
Silent Night
and
Adeste Fidelis
and things like that.”

Bert guffawed, and Jeff protested, “It’s no joke—it’s true.”

“Come on, Jeff, you’re falling for a lot of antisemitic stuff. It gives me the creeps, hearing cockeyed talk like that. That’s nothing but witch-hunt stuff.”

“They’ve taken you into camp, too, hey?”

“I just don’t go for antisemitism and all that business,” McAnny said. He took a sedate sip of coffee. “At the office about four of the editors are Jews, but you couldn’t ask for better guys. There’s this fellow, calls himself Schuyler Green—you must have read some of his stuff. Well, except he’s too touchy, you’d—”

“Schuyler Green?”

“Know him?”

“No. I just—name rings a bell somewhere.”

“Probably seen some of his things. Take him now.” Bert’s manner was judicious; he would not indulge in panegyric. “Oh, sure, he’s pushy the way they all are, gets himself asked to lunch with the boss, won’t give Jayson a line on a series he’s doing just to make us dance around waiting. But he’s really O.K.” He saw that Jeff Brown wasn’t listening.

“I knew it,” Jeff said suddenly. “That name. Vice-President over at Naismith Motors is married to his sister. My wife plays bridge with her, and she brags about her famous brother, Schuyler Green. King, Belle King, probably Bella to start with—well, will you just imagine that!”

“Imagine what?”

“The hot shot’s wife, Dick King’s wife, being a yid.” He roared. “Is that something!”

“You mean you didn’t know it?”

“Christ, a thing like that? She’s never let on, or King either. Belong to the Grosse Pointe smart set, clubs, all that.”

“Passing, hey?” McAnny said. He wrinkled his nose as at a sudden stink. “I’d have the guts to admit it wouldn’t you?”

Brown shook his head, the amiable expert. “Yellow underneath, all of them. They’ll do it every time if they can get away with it.” He paused. “Bella doesn’t look Jewish. Does he?”

“Well—” He thought back to Phil’s face. “There’s that Jewish something when he smiles, around the mouth.”

Suddenly Jeff Brown slapped the table and began to laugh. “Wait’ll Helen hears this. Oh, brother.”

It had been a successful party any way you looked at it. As Phil drove off with Kathy from the music and talk and laughter behind them, he felt that an invisible imp perched on the dashboard and pointed a derisive finger at him.

“Was fun, wasn’t it, darling?” Kathy said. She had wanted to go up in her car and had insisted on his taking the wheel.

“Except for meeting everybody. But that’s me all over. A goddam violet.”

“Nobody’d ever guess it. They all think you’re wonderful.”

They drove on in easy silence. It was midnight; they were going to join Anne and Dave for a nightcap at Anne’s place. Beside him Kathy hummed the tune they had danced to in the cleared dining room. “You old smoothie,” she’d said after their first steps together. “Why didn’t you tell me you dance like this?” His dancing was dated, and he knew it perfectly, but her praise made him feel young and smug. He’d promptly tried a fancy rhythm break and muffed it. They had laughed over it, and the whole evening had gone just that way.

Pleasant people, good talk, faintly lascivious remarks about the wedding license and waiting for their marriage next week spurts of discussion about price control and draft extension and taxes, disagreement, agreement, no tension about anything. He had “brought it up” when they asked what he was writing; and nothing had happened. No look, no lull in the talk, no quick glance. The talk and jokes and laughter drifted on, and the pride in Kathy’s eyes exhilarated him as much as the sense of being liked and even lionized a little as “a real live author.”

He took his eyes briefly away from the road and looked at Kathy.

“Who’s that Mrs. Manning?” he asked. “The one said she was hipped on education?”

“Ellen? She’s got three boys and she’s been up to her ears starting a sort of Springfield Plan in the schools here. Her husband Tom is hipped on skiing—drags her off to Placid every other week end.”

“She told me, at least about the schools. I got on fine with her. I guess I understand people that get hipped on things.”

“Darling.” She looked up at him. In the bluish light from the instrument panel he looked tired. But he was happy. His moods never needed to be guessed at; he was transparent because he was without a touch of the devious. In the first minutes after they’d arrived for dinner alone with Jane and Harry, she’d known that everything was going to go smoothly and she was proud of him, pleased with herself for belonging to so pleasant a world as Jane’s delightful house indicated. They’d talked about his series. Harry called it “a smart stunt” in his booming way, but she’d warned Phil on the way up that Harry Caulton Was the hearty extrovert about everything. “He was against Dewey, though,” she’d said, and Phil had chuckled at the recommendation. “For a big corporation lawyer that
is
sort of bright, Phil.” Jane had praised
Smith’s
for “going after this awful thing,” and by the first ring of the doorbell they were all four in a party mood. And now it was over and without mishap. Confidence and anticipation surged in her. By next Saturday they’d be man and wife, and whatever other problems arose would be vanquished, too.

“He can have my apartment,” she said suddenly. “Dave.”

“Yours?”

“Oh, no, I guess they just couldn’t squeeze in, with two children.”

“It’s sweet of you, to worry so about him, darling.” She’d gone to every broker in town with Dave for the past three days, bought the papers at midnight, and marked the addresses that were not in “impossible neighborhoods.” He was as grateful as Dave himself. “Maybe the kids could sleep in cots in the living room for a while, anyway. We’ll ask him.”

His mother’s room was to be theirs. Just yesterday, she and Kathy had discussed it with a serene practicality that left him fidgeting. About some things women were tougher than men. He doubted whether Kathy would be as ill at ease as he himself if their first nights were to be spent right in the apartment with Tom and his mother. Not that they would be. They were going off for five days to the White Mountains.

“Why’d we ever say we’d meet them after the theater?” Kathy asked. “It’ll be way past one when we hit town.”

“Should we phone them no soap?” Under the casual words, the secret hammering. They’d been out with Dave or with Dave and Anne every night for a week. “Let’s, darling.” He could scarcely hear the words. Automatically, his foot inched the accelerator nearer the floorboard. They drove on in silence. It had been a strange week; they had never been alone enough even to “talk out” the quarrel they’d had.

“I felt pretty damn much of a fool at Jane’s,” he said. “For all the fuss I’d kicked up beforehand.”

She made a little sound. She was touched by his apology. It felt good to offer it, so simple, so casual, the daisy impulsively picked from a meadow and handed over in a moment of love.

“Can’t think why she even bothered to ask,” he went on lazily, “if I’d lay off for tonight.”