“WE ARE BORN in innocence.” The phrase was in him, a cluster of words in his mind, a challenge in his blood. A hundred times in the next days it spoke to him. Where it had come from, what it was trying to tell him, he did not know. It was just there, one measure of a stately music.
“We are born in innocence.”
Like a phrase written in sleep, laden with an import the dreaming mind strains to hold past the moment of waking, it touched the threshold of his understanding again and again, only to retreat before he could welcome the message he felt it brought. It had the commanding significance of the final spinning sentence he had pursued just before surrender to the anesthetic in the base hospital. And, as then, he felt enormous with its revelation, comforted that he had found for himself some magic litany that explained essence and truth and being.
But though he could this time remember the words, as words, he could not grasp or pin down the implication that hung mistily over them. At Kathy’s that night, they had spoken themselves within him, while he looked at her across the table, while he half listened to something she was saying about Central Park under the first good snow. And since then they had sounded their grave cadence through all his changing moods.
Alone now, on Christmas afternoon, he felt them as much in the room with him as the lights on the tree and the blurred voices from the kitchen.
We are born in innocence. In blood and water and pain we are born, but in an unstained purity of heart. Wizened, crushed, our fogged eyes blinded by new light, our outraged skins shocked by a thirty-degree drop in the envelope about us—still we are born a good vessel, innocent of corruption.
Corruption comes later. The first fear is a corruption, the first reaching for something that defies us. The first nuance of difference, the first need to feel better than the different one, more loved, stronger, richer, more blessed— these are corruptions. One by one they pour their drops into the vessel, and the layer forms, seedbed of the future life.
His mother came in, moving slowly as if to test out the returned ease of her body. In her eyes there still was the look of contentment with which she’d watched Tom’s bright delight of the Christmas morning.
She said, “You’re not staying in because of me, Phil?”
“I haven’t a date. I know you’re all right. Craigie’ll be surprised tomorrow.”
She nodded, belligerently, as if she’d indeed show Dr. Craigie and his spying electrocardiograph their proper places. The bell rang, and she moved to the buzzer. Phil went out into the hall.
“Telegram,” he said a moment later. “Funny. The girls—” He signed, tore it open. “Dave.” He read the brief message. “Got my letter, and he’s to start any minute and would like a stopover. Boy, that’ll be good, to see Dave.”
She was as pleased as he. They discussed the advisability of giving him Tom’s room and decided against it. “Dave can have mine, and I’ll sleep on the sofa,” Phil said. “That way, if we stay up all night chewing the fat, the kid won’t be in the way.”
The spell was broken. When she left the room, he went back to the five words. But now they were just words, with no promise of secret meaning.
“Probably had something to do with Christmas coming and the new snow in the park and the new thing I was starting, like getting born again.” But why the melancholy that went with them?
“Dad, say, Dad. Please.” Tom’s shout came as imperious as though the house were on fire. Phil didn’t move.
“What’s up?”
“It won’t work. I’ve got the caps in it, and it just won’t. Oh, the damn thing’s haywire.”
“Let’s have a look at it.” He smiled. Tom’s damns and hells were a fine business, traceable to his own liberal use of them. Maybe he was overcasual about the way he ignored them in the kid. He looked up. Tom was standing rigid, just inside the door. From his dejected right hand, the cap pistol dangled. That morning when he’d seen it, he’d gone into a delirium over it. “Iron, Dad,” he’d shouted. “Not wooden. Feel it; it’s cold.”
Now he stood waiting for Phil to say something.
“What am I?” he demanded. For the moment the crisis of the gun was forgotten.
Phil looked at him. Across the bridge of his nose, he wore a green scarf, folded into a triangle. Low on his skinny hips hung a studded belt and holster. His corduroy “longies” which the eights and nines wore these days were tucked into his still-new galoshes. Besides the pistol, he had a pearl-handled revolver in the holster and its twin in the belt of his pants. Phil stared at him judiciously. “You’re a—let’s see. A sheriff.”
“Oh, Dad.” (Disgust.)
“A horse rustler.”
“No.”
“A cowboy in Arizona.”
“Dad, you’re nuts.”
“Well, then.” Enough of this game. There never had been the slightest doubt what he was, but the rules of childhood made an immediate guess unthinkable. “Then you’re an outlaw, a bandit outlaw.”
“Yes, that’s it, yessir that’s just it.” Above the green fold of silk, his eyes gleamed. Slyly he went behind the wing chair, in a movement which brought only the word “skulking” to Phil’s mind, and aimed the cap pistol at his father. Then, suddenly, he remembered, and tragedy stood gaunt upon him. “It won’t work. The caps stick.”
Phil took the pistol and pried apart the two halves of the butt. Kathy had sent it. It had arrived last night, and nothing about the package showed that it was from her. This morning, when Tom had ripped off the bright wrappings, the card had fallen to the floor, ignored by the instantly inflamed child. Mrs. Green had picked it up, glanced at it, and handed it to Phil.
“What a nice thing,” she’d said.
“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.
He waved to the letters she was gathering together.
“Does that kind of stuff get you sore?”
“Not any more. Yes, sure it does. So what?” She shrugged, and with the same imperturbable look in her eyes she left the room. He looked after her. The Nordic type; the Aryan type. He lit a cigarette. He must search out that article Life had run a couple of years ago by Hooton of Harvard about the balderdash of race and types. Or read Hooton’s book. Suddenly he grinned. He’d have a little fun telling Minify about things.
The telephone rang again. Maybe this time.
“Hello—oh, Kathy. You back?”
“It was such a lovely witty present, Phil. First I laughed and then I sort of hugged it.”
“I’m glad. You’ll be getting a grimy note from Tom sometime—he went nuts over the gun. When can I see you?”
“Any time.”
“Right now, tonight, tomorrow, I missed you these four days. I wish we were married.”
“Phil.”
So, he had said it at last. Here, at an office desk, his elbow on a stack of notes and papers, into a perforated black disk he had said the words he’d forced back into his throat all that evening before she’d gone away.
“It’s a hell of a way to say it,” he said, “isn’t it?” There was no answer. “Kathy? You still there?”
“I missed you, too,” she said slowly. “Just awfully.”
He saw the picture when he came in. The old one that had been over the fireplace lay flat on the piano, and his present hung in its place. Pleasure darted through him, but he said nothing. She knew he had seen it, and remained silent with him. He took her into his arms.
Standing tight to each other, saying nothing, they knew no importance other than the one streaming close about them in this double admission of longing. The tentative was gone. The surprise was gone. Acknowledgment, compulsion, sureness—these they shared.
Later, leaning over her, he looked at her and found tranquility and an odd return of shyness.
“Darling. My beautiful Kathy.”
She smiled and turned away from his asking, knowing that he wanted her to say it, not knowing how to say it.
“You don’t look grim and dark now, Phil.”
“You don’t either.”
“Isn’t it—” She looked at him and then away. The question hung in the air.
“When it’s all mixed with being in love, yes.” He waited. “So damn beautiful you can’t bear it, I mean me.”
“Me, too.”
All night they forgot to sleep, except in snatches of drowsy silence which were half sleep. They talked with the candor that could come only in intimacy and confessed love. Already each felt a new loyalty to the other sketching in its first outlines beyond the old loyalty clinging to anything past. She could make him see more now, about her marriage, and he more about his stubborn suffering for Betty. Each had sought, each had hoped and watched for a new beginning, and now together they had found the way to it.
“Should we meet our families first?” Kathy said once. “Or after we’re married and surprise them?”
“Which way do you want ?”
“Any.”
Nothing was settled, no question fully answered, through all the hours until the windows showed graying streaks around the drawn shades. There was no time or need now for decisions. There was all the time.
Only when he was dressed and sitting on the edge of her bed for a last cigarette did they come to specifics. “Darling, I’ll tell Mom in the morning. Come and meet her tomorrow? I’ll stop by after the office.”
“All right. And Tom?”
“Let’s have him get to know you first. Then after he likes you we’ll tell him. He’ll be so happy.”
“Sure?”
“Sure. I guess it’s better for him to like you first, don’t you?”
“Then maybe tomorrow’d be better after he’s asleep?”
He nodded. “We’ll take him to a movie together for a start. That’ll make him all easy with you.” He took her into his arms. His clothed body, his sleeved arm around her still bare shoulders, shot a lewdness through him, unwanted, dismaying. He spoke somberly. “You’re not sorry, darling, about Tom?”
“Oh, Phil. You know I’m glad.” She hesitated. “It’ll be almost as if my marriage hadn’t all been wasted—as if all those years I’d had a boy growing up for me.”
He suddenly stood up. “I’m a Christ-bitten fool,” he said, and heard how thick his voice was. Then he left her.
Behind, alone, hearing him walk through the living room, hearing him click off the lights they’d forgotten, guessing that he looked once more at the framed print of the Toledo over the fireplace, Kathy lay in a confusion of fatigue and happiness that banished sleep for another while. He couldn’t know, she would tell him sometime after they were married, but now she couldn’t utter the words to tell him how right he was with her and for her.
She hadn’t expected it. She hadn’t guessed that with his moodiness, his complexity, he would have so simple and driving a power to move her. If she had speculated, she’d have guessed he’d be a nervous, unsure lover.
It mattered so much—no marriage had half a chance if the two were constantly frustrate or anxious about sex. Phil, she thought. Darling.
I’ll make him happy, I can help him, I’m good for being married. All the rest of it about Betty will disappear without his even knowing when it finally slides off into nothingness. I can make Tom feel right; I’m good with children; why wouldn’t I be with this one when I want to so much? And we’ll have our own.
She reached for a final cigarette, changed her mind, and turned out the light. In the dark she thanked something for having made it happen and did not try to name what it was she thanked.
Lack of sleep didn’t matter, Phil thought, when you felt this good. His mother’s pleasure over the news that they’d marry in a week or two had only made him indulgent, not uneasy and embarrassed. Whistling, he finished dressing and went back to his desk for the morning’s batch of hotel letters. Mrs. Green was still sitting there. Tom was already out.
“The story about Miss Wales made Kathy laugh, too,” he said. He didn’t want the talk to get back to personal levels. “She was delighted I hadn’t told Minify yet—wants to be around when I dish it out.”
Kathy had been angry about Dr. Craigie, had sniffed over Bill Johnson of the Times. He had forgotten to tell her about Belle’s telephone call. One of those shame-caused repressions? Sometime around midnight they’d remembered they’d had no dinner and they’d gone into the small kitchen for scrambled eggs and toast and milk. While they were there, they'd been able again to talk of impersonal things, and she’d wanted to know “everything that’s happened so far.” Sitting there, while she cooked for him, talking of his work, was like a rehearsal of married life. But he could report only episodes; the nebulous world of his own developing feeling he had to inhabit alone. So far, even for himself it remained uncharted.
“That thing about Miss Wales is the only thing that’s been amusing,” Mrs. Green said. He came to with a start. The letters were still in his hand.
“Funny thing,” he said, “the way I felt so man-to-man with Miss Wales when she pitched me that one. Asking her right out how she felt, as if we both were really on the inside. I keep forgetting it’s just an act.”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “I suppose that’s what’s called ‘Identification.’”
“I didn’t think it would come so fast.”
“What does Kathy think about it?”
“I told you.”
“I mean about your doing it at all?”
“Oh. She fretted about it some, pitfalls, stuff like that. She’s all for it.”
“When’s Dave due?” she asked without transition.
“Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next month. You know the army.”
He went off, ready for Dave, ready for more letters, ready for work and effort and anything. Never try to dismay a man, he thought in the taxi, about anything in the world the morning after he’s made love to his girl. Kathy’s face came back, hesitant, a touch surprised. A primitive sense of achievement and self-satisfaction filled him. She’d thought he’d be a goddam intellectual about everything! In the half-dark of the cab he sat back, trying to ready himself for the moment just ahead, the cab pulling up, the flag shoved upright, the making of change and the offer of the tip. The office was there, the series was there, the watching himself and asking himself were all just ahead of him.
“Identification.” In a way he was kidding himself. Always he knew that for him it would come to an end when he gave the word. That must make it different. He alone had an escape clause in his contract.
A dart of relief nipped at him.
Jee-sus, he thought then. I’m goddam smug myself.
Of it, yet also apart. The actor on the boards and the watching audience in the dark beyond. The lumberjack with his ax and the tree awaiting the blow. The invasion barge and the empty beach. The giver and taker at once.
It was fallacy. It could achieve nothing true. He’d embarked on a sort of Dostoevskian insoluble, dark, brooding, ending only in uncertainty. He should never have started it. At best it was an approximation; at worst a fraud.
The taxi stopped. The driver’s arm reached out to the white flag on the meter. Phil opened the door. On the street, sunlight blazed; cold air bit at him. Upstairs he went directly to Minify’s office. Minify was alone.
“It’s no good, John,” he began. “The damn idea’s a phony from the word go.”
John looked up, startled.
“It’s glib and trumped up and fake,” Phil went on. “I’ve got an ‘out’ all the time, and no real Jew has. My unconscious knows about that ‘out’ even if I forget it.”
“Hold on, there—”
“I’m starting over. There’ll be some other angle that isn’t slick like this one.”
Now John cut him short. “For God’s sake, stop psychoanalyzing it.” His words were brisk with irritation. “It’s a good angle—nobody said it was perfect. But it’s a new springboard into the thing, and that’s good.” Phil started to answer, but Minify waved him silent. “You had an ‘out’ all the time you were a miner, didn’t you?”
“Sure. So has a miner.”
“Not the usual, run-of-the-mill miner, to mix a phrase.” He sat back; the annoyed look left him. “There was nothing slick and fake in that series, Phil. You’re just having the usual attack of ‘it’s lousy—I’m lousy.’”
Phil thought, Maybe that’s all it comes to, and wished he’d thought it over longer before coming in. Then he saw Minify smile.
“And if the first couple articles do turn out n.g.,” John said calmly, “we’ve got a good ‘out’ ourselves.” He kicked the wastebasket beside the desk.
Phil looked down at the basket and laughed. “Escape clause,” he said. “O.K. I’d overlooked that.”
Reassured, he went back to his office and got to work. It was after six before he was ready to leave. Kathy had sounded happy when he phoned, and tired, and had suggested waiting until eight so she could nap. He might do a spot of sleeping himself. All afternoon he’d worked with his usual intensity; he was writing now as well as carrying on the research. The writing was going well; it pleased him. But he was tired, too.
He went through the reception room, dim and emptied of its authors and salesmen and portfolios. Bert McAnny, the assistant art editor, and Anne Dettrey were out in the hall, waiting for the elevator.
“I’m bushed,” Anne greeted him. “Getting the book to bed gets worse every issue.”
“I thought we weren’t to call it ‘the book’ around here,” Bert said. He pushed the down button again.
“True, true,” Anne said. “Anyway, what about a getting-to-bed drink? Sound cozy?” They all laughed. “How’s about it?”
They decided on the Oak Room and walked to the Plaza. Phil felt at ease with them, as though he’d been on the staff a long time. Shoptalk was what you missed when you worked at home, the lazily given “inside dope” that seemed curiously important: “Say, Luce paid fifty thousand for Churchill’s articles”—“When do they start?”—“February. I hear he’s fighting with Field for the autobiography”—“Jim told me the bidding was around a million already.” As they turned into Fifty-ninth Street, Bert began to talk with relish about a new illustrator he’d discovered. “He’s a kind of modern Leyendecker,” he said. “Same outfit in the army, and the minute I saw some doodles he did, I knew he had it.”
“Leyendecker?” Anne said. “You were in three-cornered pants when Leyendecker—”
“I know them all the way back,” Bert said. “This kid’s got it. Little Jew boy from the Bronx, but he sure has got it. Signed him for the Dohen serial.”
There was a pause.
It’s just an expression, Phil told himself. He feels affectionate and proud of this kid. Aloud he said, “What’s his name? Anybody ever hear of him?”
“Jacob Her—” Bert stopped then. He’s remembering about me, Phil thought, and embarrassment for Bert washed over him. “Jake Hermann,” Bert hurried on. “Fine stuff, all right. He’ll hit every cover on the stands in two years.”
Enthusiasm in the voice, pride, alliance. Don’t be bothered by idioms and expressions, Phil counseled himself. Bert feels like a jackass over the thing. But he thought of Belle’s Jew-us-down.
Over their drinks they talked about plays and movies and the difference in the holiday mood this year. Bert had missed all the war Christmases, he said, so he couldn’t catch the difference. It was Anne who asked about the series.
“I’m still just getting stuff together,” Phil said deprecatingly. “God knows there’s plenty around.”
“Too much,” she answered crisply. Nobody said anything. McAnny shifted in his chair.
“You a correspondent during the war?” he asked Phil.
Instantly Phil was hostile. He rescinded the excuses he had made before. He said, “What makes you think I wasn’t right in it?”
“I just—hey, don’t be oversensitive now.”
“I was with the Marines on Guad. First Division, Eleventh Regiment Artillery.” Don’t be oversensitive. Jews are oversensitive. “Jew boy” is just an expression—let it pass. But how directly Bert had leaped from Anne’s “too much antisemitism” to “were you a correspondent?” That fool mind was clearly taping even war correspondents as inferiors, so the train of thought meant, being a Jew, did you choose a cushy berth in the war; were you a slacker?
Idioms, expressions, forgettings, associated ideas. Flick. Tap.
“You don’t wear your ribbons, do you, Phil?” Anne put in quietly. “I know you got it pretty badly. Minify told me.”
“No.” He looked down at his own lapel. “I don’t.”
He saw her smiling at him, friendly, teamed against Bert. He smiled back. He knew Bert had seen the exchange.
“For God’s sake, Phil,” he exploded. “I’m no antisemite. Why, some of my best—”
“I know, dear,” Anne put in, “and some of your other best friends are Methodists, but you never bother saying it. Skip it. Phil, flag the old boy for another Manhattan, there’s a dear.”
Bert couldn’t stay another round because of an appointment. When they were alone, Anne said, “Little Squirt.”
“I suppose Minify doesn’t come into contact with him much,” Phil said reflectively. “That day at lunch—”
“He was in Tingler’s office, so he came along. John doesn’t know anybody the way he does the writers and editors. Place is too big.” She grinned comfortably and pitched her voice to imitate Bert. “ ‘For God’s sake, Phil, I’m no antisemite.’ He believes that. He disapproves of Bilbo and Gerald L. K. Smith and the poll tax and religious prejudice. Really says so. He’s just a little snot, let’s face it.”
He laughed. She was refreshing. And she liked him. He looked at her, more personally attentive than he’d yet been. She was certainly an attractive and colorful girl. Her hat was a silly thing like a man's black Homburg swathed in dark brown veil, but it was becoming.
“Tell you what,” she said. “I’m having a flock of people up New Year’s Eve. What about pressing out your black tie and coming up?”
“I’d like that,” he said. “Can I bring my girl?”
“Of course,” she said. Her expression changed for a second, and then she smiled again.