Gentleman's Agreement (30 page)

“The exception.” They had sat in judgment and found him passable. “The one ‘pet Jew’ we can all use as proof? ‘See, we’re not anti-Semitic.’ ”

“Why, Kathy. I hate that idiocy as much as you do.”

“I know you do. I’m not even thinking you don’t.”

“But then there are the bigoted fools in the club.”

“I remember.”

“After all, a club’s only a social,
personal
thing.”

Ellen looked at her; Kathy seemed on the verge of— what? Tears? Collapse? She really looked sick. “Quit talking about all this, darling,” Ellen said at last. “Just makes you think about stuff that still rubs deep. Everybody goes through that awhile.”

“I wasn’t thinking of anything like that,” Kathy said. “I wasn't even thinking of the club any more. Or you. Or Phil. Funny, I got thinking about the Springfield Plan.”

“The Sp—”

Kathy began to laugh a little, then a little more. Ellen threw a quick appraising glance at her.

Kathy said, “The one thing I do know about is children. I got thinking how screwed up your little boys and everybody else’s little boys and girls are going to get if they’re taught five days a week that everybody’s just the same and then on Saturday and Sunday they have to leave some of their pals outside the gates while they go into the country club with Papa and Mamma.” She was really laughing now.
“All
the country clubs, all over.”

“You’re poking fun at me, Kathy!” Ellen saw Tom and a bellboy with their luggage and at once stood up in dignified coolness. During the good-bys, Kathy sounded more cheerful.

Again that night she could not sleep. But somewhere in the dark spinning where she was again talking to Phil and being kissed by Phil and bemoaning the excesses in Phil— somewhere there was one curious, heady new thing, unlike anything she’d ever known.

What kept coming back from her session with Ellen was that one thing. Not anything Ellen had said or she had said; not any points she’d made. Just this one exhilarating funny thing. She hadn’t taken Ellen’s liberalism for granted as she always had before. She had looked at it, into it; she had weighed it and tested it and sized it up. It was like the stretching of muscles. And it was fine.

Bill Jayson said to Phil, “It’s the by-goddest idea for a series this book’s ever run.”

Phil grinned. An hour before, Miss Wales had taken the top carbon of number one in to the art department. Jayson had it with him; as he talked, he thumped it for emphasis, and the careful pedantic turn of his usual speech was absent. “No kidding, Phil, I couldn’t put it down. I meant to give it just a look and hand it over to McAnny for suggestions on pix, but I never moved from my chair.”

“Has he seen it yet?”

Jayson laughed. “No. He’s on a rush layout against deadline. I’m going to hide this till he’s made it—he’s in for a collapse.” His eyes gleamed. “Boy, I bet he tries a sneak bunt to third with this one.”

Phil laughed with him. “What’ll you decide for artwork, Bill?”

“It’s not going to be easy. Take time. But I see now why you and John wouldn’t give.”

“Photographic treatment your hunch?”

“Sure.” He frowned. “God knows what of.”

“No shots of my kid, now, or my family,” Phil said sternly. “John says I’m hooked for the lead-off. But mind, nobody else.”

“And mind, you stop bossing me around,” Jayson answered equally sternly. Then he grinned. “That’s the trouble with you Christians—aggressive. Pure compensation, of course.”

From the first, Phil had liked Bill Jayson; now he admired him. The whole damn point in one wisecrack, he thought, but before he could transfer thought to speech, the door opened and Anne came in. She saw the manuscript in Jayson’s hand.

“So whatever the mystery was,” she said cheerily, “the unveiling has begun. When’s my turn, Phil?”

“You?” Jayson said. “You interested in anything but your own department?”

“You rat,” she said pleasantly. “My secretary’s in a frenzy over the wonderful plot of Mr. Green’s series.”

“Plot?” Phil liked the attention he was getting.

Anne said, “She keeps saying ‘plot’ and won’t tell. What plot there can be in a series on antisemitism escapes me, but I have been needled long enough. So give over.”

Jayson looked to Phil, and Phil said, “Sure.” He gave the manuscript to Anne, and she looked at it. She read the title, glanced up, smiled at Phil, and then began to read. Both men remained quiet for a moment and then in low voices continued their discussion about possible illustration. Anne read on. As he talked, Phil found himself aware of her reading, knew when she turned a page, knew when she stopped to light a cigarette. He realized suddenly that he wanted very much that she should like it. John’s final O.K. of the finished series had warmed him— “It’s got it, Phil.” His mother, reading the first two, had gone into her queer little stream of
sotto voce
commentary—“Imagine!” … “How dreadful, Phil!” … “Not really, it’s barbarous.” Several times there’d even been the quick dabs at her eyes over some paragraph or other, filling him with curiosity since she was obviously in some part—he could tell by the page she was at —which he’d set down unemotionally or coldly. Then he’d gone over to stand behind her, reading over her shoulder, to discover what it was that had moved her. But he’d never been able to tell; his mother’s reactions to words and thoughts he'd written were so personal, so unpredictable, that the only message he could get from them while she read was that this time was not one of his failures.

Now he was held by Anne’s continuing silence. Soon Jayson saw he was preoccupied and stopped talking. Only when their voices stopped did Anne look up. She’d read half a dozen pages.

“Murder,” she said to Phil. “I wish I’d thought of it first.” She shook her head. “It’s hot, all right.”

“Thanks.” She was trying to phrase something else; he waited.

“It explains some things I never quite understood about you, Phil. Like Flume Inn coming as a shock instead of a sure-the-usual-dirty-trick. I put it down to things being different out West.”

“I didn’t give things away much, did I?” he asked anxiously.

“Fooled me. I did want to say a couple of times, ‘For heaven’s sake, how’ve you lived this long, spending this much juice on it all the time?’ ” Phil looked embarrassed. “But then I remembered getting into a steam myself over some series I’d been living with, so I let it go at that.”

“Remember the juvenile-delinquency stuff you did?” Jayson twitted her. He turned to Phil dismally. “Couldn’t eat lunch with her for a month without a load of statistics on child prostitutes.”

“I quit harping on it once the job ended, didn’t I?” She turned reflectively to Phil. “This must have been dizzy, though, kind of mirror-within-mirror stuff. Watching yourself as Jewish but at the same time watching yourself as Christian-watching-Jew.”

“At the start. Then it just boiled down to a guy taking his first real look around.”

“Just the same,” she said, “if everybody acted it out just one day a year, it’d be curtains to the thing overnight, I’ll bet.”

“Not so sure,” Jayson said. “That business of everybody needing to feel superior to somebody else.”

“Right.” Anne shrugged. “
I
feel superior. To anti-semites.” She got up. “Well, I got to get back.” She went to the door and then suddenly turned back to them, laughing. “No wonder Minify wouldn’t listen to the screams of the Brown crowd.”

Brown and Wheeling, Phil knew, was the large advertising agency that handled
Smith’s
account. He knew also that Anne as a major editor went to periodic meetings with them and held most advertising men in low esteem as a result.

“Screams about what?” he asked.

“A couple of weeks back, John told them this would be the big spot for the first May ad—practically the whole page, with just a ten-on-two panel for rest-of-issue copy. They always need four years to be bright in, so they beseeched the boss for the first article. Nope. A synopsis. Nope. The title of the series. Nope.”

“Same treatment the art department got,” Jayson said. He stretched. “Get the hell out of here, Dettrey, will you? The author and I have to bat around some ideas for pix.”

For the rest of the week, Bert McAnny avoided Phil. As they passed each other in the corridors or waiting room, even when they met in the sanctuary of the washroom, he made no reference to the series at all, never dropped in for the usual discussion of possible shots. The impression he gave was that the series did not exist.

Phil had expected virtuous reiteration that it had never made any difference, but this gauche silence he would never have foretold. He found it at first obvious, then ridiculous, finally contemptible. The hell with McAnny.

The flabbiness which always followed a sustained period of work was bogging him down more than usual. It was as if his last reliable props had buckled. He no longer kept regular hours at the office; he stayed up later and later each night, reading detective stories, books about the war, novels.

Interims were always nerve-racking. Soon there’d be some new assignment—no matter what it was, he felt he’d never be able to work up any enthusiasm or energy for it. But that, too, was old stuff. That, too, happened in interims.

He saw Professor Lieberman again. This was one of the good things which would survive the writing of a series. Lieberman greeted Phil’s recital of “my own research project” with dry, rapid questions, as if they were colleagues in a laboratory. “Yet every antisemite you met,” he remarked comfortably at the end, “would swear in court that ‘Jewishness’ is something demonstrable. Your Mr. Calkins at Flume Inn, for example, is positive he faced a Jew that day —he’s got
eyes,
hasn’t he?” They both laughed. Later, as Phil was leaving, Lieberman said, in his imperturbable voice, “I’ll never hold the truth against you, Phil. I’m a stout believer in the rights of majorities.”

All through these days there was one new facet to his life. For the first time a manuscript he’d written was in the office of a great publishing house, up for consideration as a book. Minify had asked permission to send it over to somebody he knew, and Phil had nervously assented. When Miss Mittelson at last phoned to say Mr. Minify’s publishing friend was in the office, could he come in, he found his pulse quickening. He’d never confessed until this moment how much he wanted to see his name on the spine of a book. During the introductions he was too tense to catch the publisher’s full name; through the meeting Minify called him “Jock.” Jock’s smiling face told him the decision while they shook hands. Behind his desk, Minify’s smile corroborated it.

“It’s had four readings already, Mr. Green,” the publisher said. “No dissenting report at all. We’d like to put it on our fall list.”

“Fine.” He hoped he sounded merely pleased and businesslike. “Need some padding, won’t it? It’s only about thirty-five thousand words.”

“Yes, we’d wondered if you mightn’t have more material which you’d left out of the articles.”

Phil didn’t want to sound too ready with suggestions. For a time he listened while the two men agreed that such a book ought to have a fair sale at worst, possibly even “hit the list.”

“More and more people seem interested in these problem books,” Jock said. “Look at
Strange Fruit
or
Under Cover.”

“I looked at them,” John said, “before I decided to get this series written.” They all laughed.

“Matter of fact,” Phil now offered, “I’d even been wondering about writing a sixth for our own series.” Minify looked up. “Sort of post-mortem stuff—what I call ‘the unwinding.’ Kind of fascinates me, the way it runs to pattern.”

“Interesting idea, that,” the publisher said. “Certainly for the book.” Minify was looking at Phil reflectively. Jock stood up. “Could you give us a rough draft of the new material, or a synopsis? Oh, yes, and have you an agent, Mr. Green?”

“Yes to the first, no to the second. Agents aren’t much good for articles. I’ll get one for a book, though.”

Jock smiled. “Better to have the publisher picked first, on a book like this. Sure as hell, they’d have sent it to the wrong house and pinned a neat handicap to the book to start with.”

“How do you mean, ‘wrong house’?” Phil asked.

“From the point of view of the book’s reception; wrong, that way.”

Phil glanced at John. He was looking at Phil.

“It’s just better publishing to have a house like ours do a book of this type,” Jock went on.

“Why?” John asked. He wasn’t looking at Phil now. He was staring at the desk.

“If one of the Jewish houses put their imprint on it, people might think it was just special pleading, and of course, it’s not.”

“Jewish houses?” Phil asked. “You mean Jewish publishing houses?”

“You must mean,” Minify said lazily, “whatever firm publishes
The Jewish Daily Forward.”
To Phil he said, “It’s a daily newspaper, printed in Yiddish.”

The publisher looked at him, ready to laugh if he were smiling.

“You see,” Phil put in, smoothly, as if he and John were rehearsing dialogue from a script and he were ready now to take over for the curtain line, “Mr. Minify and I never heard of ‘Christian publishing houses’ and ‘Jewish publishing houses’ except in the Third Reich.” He smiled. “Even firms run by men who are Jewish—we just call them ‘publishing houses.’ In a way, that’s what the whole series is about.”

There was a pause. Jock was bewildered. He turned back to Minify. “It’s just a phrase in the book trade, John.”

“ ‘Jewish bankers’ is just a phrase, too,” Minify answered. “And ‘Jewish newspaper owners’ and ‘Jewish Communists’—just phrases.”

Phil spoke to Jock. “My verbal acceptance before,” he said. “Would that be binding? Or could I change my mind?”

“You’re perfectly, free, Mr. Green. I release you, of course. But there’s some misunderstanding here. I was simply thinking of the best imprint for your book.”

“Yes,” Phil said. “I know.”

“At least you’ll think it over? Good Lord, man, an unfortunate locution at most, that’s all it was. John’s known me for years—”

“Sure, Jock,” Minify said, “but now I
hear
it if a man doesn’t just say plain ‘bankers’ or ‘Communists’ or ‘publishing houses.’ ”