KATHY SAID, “WON'T WE have to let Jane in on it?”
He looked quickly at her. “I hadn’t thought.”
“I hadn’t, either, till now.” She smiled at him. “She’s dying to meet you. I sort of blurted the news on the phone, and she squealed ‘Kath-eeee’ as if she’d given up all hope.” He nodded as a preoccupied parent does when a child prattles. She waited. Then she said, “Phil, my own sister?”
He sat forward in his chair and studied the flames in the fireplace. A minute ago there’d been still the good pleasure of watching her with his mother. Almost a proprietary thing it was, as if he’d not only found Kathy but created her out of his own talents and materials. He’d been impatient for his mother to leave them, but now that she had there’d been this question and the sunny feeling had fogged over.
“Your sisters know,” she went on.
“My mother wrote them. But they know I’m not Jewish. Jane and Harry don’t. After all, if you want to keep a secret, the only way—”
“But, Phil. Wouldn’t it be sort of exaggerated, with my sister, your sister-in-law almost?”
It was so logical. But logic—he stood up, poked the fire, threw on a heavy log. It clattered sparks and chips off the burning wood, and with the side of his shoe he shoved each glowing bit back from the slate hearth.
“Jane was engaged to a boy named Sidney Pearlman,” she said at last, “and he died of pneumonia and she nearly went crazy for a long time.”
“What’s the point?” The harsh tone, the stern pounce of the disciplinarian—he regretted them even before her quick, “Phil, really!”
“I’m sorry.”
“There is a point, darling,” she went on reasonably, “a kind of pragmatic point. I do think it would be pretty inflexible of you—”
Her glance was inviting him to be as reasonable as she. Somewhere there was the neat and simple syllogism that would present no flaw to her, but he was too perplexed to find it. He was on the defensive—how had he got there? She got up and came to him. She put her arm through his. “Don’t you see, Phil?”
“I suppose so.” It sounded grudging, and he added, “Inside the family.”
“That’s all I meant.” She squeezed his arm. “They’d never breathe it.”
“No point running things into the ground, I guess.”
Exaggerated. Inflexible. Waiting for sleep, hours later, Phil suddenly remembered Pop and the interest.
“But it is unearned increment, Mattie.” He could imagine his father as a young man saying it earnestly to his astonished wife. Thirty-two years ago, that had been, and their first savings account. Written in red ink in the small green bankbook was an 0.72, the interest on their fortune. Phil had heard the tale a dozen times. “Of course I can’t accept it.”
“Are you going to give it back to the bank?”
“Certainly not. But if you believe a thing’s evil, you can’t give in just because the amount is small.” He’d gone off into a lecture which would now be called “Old-Fashioned Socialism.”
“Then what are you going to do with it?”
“I’ll think of something.”
All through his life, his father had refused to make personal use of a penny of interest. Each year he would do a meticulous calculation and send off a check to something he believed in. It was never a charity in the accepted sense. Before 1917, he’d sent it to an organization for the defense of political prisoners in Russia; when the Ku Klux Klan was raging in the early twenties, he’d sent it to a group fighting it; when the Civil Liberties Union came into being he’d mailed his little checks there. He never forgot, never relented. It was exaggerated, it was laughable. But it was curiously admirable, too.
Phil rarely thought of his father any more, but when he did he always came on some hard little nubbin like this. It was one of the inevitables in a man like Stephen Slater Green. “If you compromise,” he used to say, “you’re corrupt.” Character, principle, ethic, whatever one called it, was the deciding factor in every life, in every society. Even in the various religions of the world, there was a common extract, the ethic behind the shell of creed. One could reject the shell with no impairment to the essence. But without the essence one was lost.
Phil stretched his arms high above his head and yawned deeply. His wrist struck the bed lamp, and the cigarette still in his fingers shook ashes down over him. Impatiently he brushed them from his face and pajamas. Two o’clock in the morning was a hell of a time to remember Pop and his large-scale talk about ethics. The mind was never a respecter of appropriateness.
In the instant of giving in about Jane and Harry he could see Kathy’s mouth and want her; he could write a phrase for the series and wonder what movie they should choose for Tom; he could leave Kathy’s side and dredge out of his memory the red handwriting in the interest column.
Unexpectedly, as he was leaving tonight, she’d held her arms out to him. “Comparisons are awful, darling, but I never was so happy before.”
They each had comparisons in them; always the later love came equipped with the earlier and with the gray knowledge of what had happened to it and could happen again. Perhaps the knowledge of that mortality added depth as well as fear to the new; else why this passionate resolve in him to let no disaster strike this time?
“Never so happy before.” He hadn’t consciously measured or compared. Was this the same for him as the round deep joy he’d known with Betty when he’d been a boy of twenty-five? There was in him now the gritty residue of burned-out grief; with Betty long ago he had been an innocent lover in the true sense of the word, guileless toward the future.
He ground out his cigarette in the ash tray and turned out the light. They could take Tommy to see Danny Kaye in Wonder Man.
At the office next morning, Miss Wales was upset.
“I don’t know what I was thinking of. I switched about ten of the applications to colleges and medical schools.”
“Oh, well.”
“But the answers won’t be delivered. The post office will mark them ‘Unknown.’” She had just discovered from her carbons that she’d typed in the Minify address on a batch of Greens and his own on the corresponding Greenbergs. Her professional confidence was shaken; two or three times she pointed out that she never made mistakes, and this was awful. “If you lived in an apartment house, you could tell the doorman, but not where there are letter boxes downstairs.”
“I’ll just write in his name on our card down there.”
“Oh.” Relief smoothed her face. “I never thought of that.”
Past the open door Bert McAnny went by with his boss, Bill Jayson, and Sam Goodman, Tingler'’ assistant on fiction. As they called “Morning,” Jayson stopped, looked in, and then came in. McAnny went on with Goodman.
“Photographs, would you guess?” Jayson started. “For your series?”
“I hadn’t thought.” Miss Wales left. Bill Jayson sat down. He was short and thin, with an odd toed-out gait. In the one brief talk they’d already had, Phil had noticed the pedantic way he enunciated every syllable, but there was an earnestness in him that was attractive. “I thought nonfiction always called for photographic treatment.”
“John says you have some special angle that might shift that.” Jayson looked troubled. “He says to skip it for now. Then it’ll turn out oils, and I’ll be in hell rushing them.”
“I’ll give you plenty of time.”
“It’s the devil, illustrating a series like that. Why all the mystery? John wouldn’t give me a line.”
“Well, it’s better this way for a bit.” He took one of the two cigarettes Jayson held out in his fingers. Friendly little guy.
“McAnny just told me about yesterday,” Jayson went on carefully. “He’s always doing something. Knows his job, though.”
“Sure.” He looked at Jayson. “How come he told you?”
Jayson made a sound that could only be described as a titter. “He’s scared of Dettrey, I think.” Phil laughed. Jayson went on, “Look, could I make a highly personal remark?”
“Go ahead.”
Jayson looked unhappy. He scowled. He opened his small mouth and closed it. “Don’t keep a—don’t wear a chip on your shoulder, Green.”
“Do I?”
“I used to, about being five foot two,” he went on solemnly. “Looking for tactless remarks all day long. Then I just said to myself that everybody’s got a low riling point on something.”
“That’s true enough. Have I? I didn’t think—”
“Well, just telling everybody you’re a Jew right off. What the hell business is it of anybody?”
“I oughtn’t mention it?”
Jayson’s scowl returned. He pursed his lips like a pettish child. Then he shook his head.
“I guess that wouldn’t go either. Then they’d say you were hiding it. Hell of a note, isn’t it?”
They grinned at each other.
Going up the stairs that evening, Phil was in a cheerful mood. The long New Year’s week end was coming up. Except for deadline stuff, the office would be closed for four days. Suddenly he remembered his promise to Miss Wales. He went down again to the vestibule and stopped in front of the shining brass plate of bells and letter boxes. He stooped and printed CAPT. J. GREENBERG above the typed name on his box. Behind him the door opened.
“Evening, Mr. Green.” It was the superintendent for the three adjoining houses of which this was one.
“Nice night,” Phil said, and put his key again in the hall door. Behind him Mr. Olsen made a sound. Phil turned and saw Olsen leaning down to the printed name.
“You could fill out one of them cards at the post office, better,” he said. He didn’t look at Phil. “Or watch for the mailman and tell him.”
“What’s the matter with this way?”
“Rule.” He reached into his vest pocket and brought out a pencil. Phil saw him turn it upside down. The eraser moved toward the card.
“Just a minute.” Phil ripped out the order as he’d done in uniform.
Olsen stopped short. He met Phil’s eyes then, his own plaintive. “It’s nothin’ I can help, Mr. Green. It’s the rules. Not in these three houses. The broker should of explained, that is, excuse me, if you are.”
“Excuse me, hell. This place is mine for two years, and you don’t touch that sign.”
“I'll have to repor—”
Phil slammed the door in his face. Queasy rage rode him. Upstairs he went directly to his own room. This sullen moron of a janitor. The rules. He’d seen the owner of these three buildings just once, back in September. Alma Martin was one of those rich widows you saw in movies and never met. At the time he’d merely noted the flash of rings, the beaded eyelashes, the lacy bosom and vulgar voice. Now a hateful snobbery sprang high in him. That cheap tart felt superior to him! The nasty little whore who couldn’t get into a cultivated household actually would keep him out of her three citadels! He and Dave and anybody Jewish were to be kept off the premises.
He ought to laugh, but laughter wasn’t in him. Every day the thump of insult, the assault on your dignity. The rules of the Alma Martins and Joe Olsens. The flicks of the McAnnys andGraigies, nice intelligent people who scorned the lunatic fringe and wouldn’t have Alma Martin in their houses either.
Don’t wear a chip on your shoulder. Don’t be oversensitive. And don’t be clannish. He’d heard that one, too. The trouble with Jews is they’re so clannish. If one of them moves into an apartment house, why, pretty soon the whole house is nothing but Jews. Or a hotel or a neighborhood. They just don’t want to mix. And the ones that do mix easily and melt right in with everybody, why, they’re so quick to take offense at the slightest thing.
Don’t be so thin-skinned, Izzy. Don’t withdraw from the clever little flick, don’t stay off in groups where the tap, tap, tap can’t get at you and madden you with drop-of-water persistence. This is America, and there are no torture chambers in Detroit or Boston or St. Paul. Why fret?
Nine months? Two weeks was enough. He’d been doing this for less than two weeks and he’d changed. A mutation had been produced in the bunched nerves, in the eardrums that caught nuance, in the very corneas that gave him sight. Already when he glanced at the over-all gray of a page of the Times, if the word “Jew” was printed anywhere on it, that word leaped into his vision. Already when somebody started a story about Izzy Epstein or Mrs. Garfinkel, he felt his teeth on edge. Now the sly little phrases got no obliging deafness or excuses from him. How small a step remained before he might seethe with determination to “show them,” to attain some power, of wealth, of fame, that would be impregnable!
Two weeks. Maybe the slow embryo in the patient womb needed nine months to reproduce the sweep from tadpole to man, but no such time was needed to re-create the reaction to prejudice. He’d been a fool that night, a fancy maker of metaphor and simile. Whole history of persecution indeed. He’d forgotten that the inheritance of acquired characteristics was a myth. The baby born in the ghetto was as free of the history of persecution as it was free of its father’s skill at making neckties or mathematical formulae. But these teachers were soon met, and they taught their devious lessons rapidly and well.
He took the opening pages of his manuscript out of his pocket and threw it at the top of his dresser. It slithered across the mahogany and fell to the floor.
“That you, dear?”
He shook his head sharply as if to snap it free of concussion after big guns had gone off.
“Yeah. No office till Wednesday.”
He retrieved the folded pages. He rolled them up and absently beat the brittle tube against the side of his leg. That’s where he’d pounded his thigh in that first sweep of elation.
Over the radio, the shouts, toots, whistles notched up in intensity.
“Half a minute to go,” somebody in the room called out.
Anne moved through the crowd to the wall switch. Unnoticed before, the two lighted candles on the mantel sprang alive as the other lights went out. At the piano somebody played the opening bars of Auld Lang Syne.
“Corny,” Kathy whispered, but her eyes glistened. “Happy New Year, darling.”
“Happy New Year.” They kissed. Around them wives kissed husbands, friends kissed friends. Corny. And curiously, stubbornly moving. The new year, the new hope, the peace, the stumbling effort of man. …
“It’s a grand party, Phil,” Kathy said. “Anne’s awfully attractive, isn’t she?” They both looked toward Anne in her bright green.
“She looks grand tonight.”
“She certainly does,” Kathy said. “She likes you a lot.”
He looked down at her, and she made a face. She said, smiling, “I’ll scratch her eyes out if she makes a play for you.”
“You darling.” It delighted him that she should show possessiveness. Tonight was the first time, apart from their dinner last evening with the Minifys, that their relationship had become public. “My fiancé," Kathy had said twice when she introduced him to people she knew. The afternoon with Tom and the movies had slid by on silk. In three days they were going for the wedding license. He leaned down so he could whisper to her.
“Let’s not stay around too long. You look pretty damn grand yourself.” She was in a long black dress held up by shoestrings.
“In this? It’s four years old.”
“And still sexy as hell.”
They both laughed. Then. Kathy said quietly, “I wish Bill would get married this year, too.”
“Bill?” It sounded stupid. “Oh, yes, Bill.”
“Pawling,” she said. “My ex-husband. He dropped in today to say Happy New Year, and I told him about us. He was awfully effusive with good wishes. It made me sad for him.”
He didn’t say anything. When somebody came up to Kathy just then, he was glad to have the subject changed.
It was a good party, as Kathy had said, not merely good for lovers. This was what people could find in New York if they were fortunate, the good mixture of talent and interests and ideas. There were Joe Lieberman, the physicist; Jerry Torrence, the novelist, with his beautiful wife; Jascha Rimitov, the violinist, and his gifted wife, who was his accompanist. Lawyers, businessmen, a Congressman up from Washington, one of the younger men in the State Department, a publisher, and a minor actress. The faces in the room were various with many kinds of origin; the speech mingled the accents of Middle West, East, and West, of Europe and America. This, the fluid easy coming together of a dozen worlds, was the bonus life set aside for the luckier ones in the metropolises of the earth. The small city, the town and village, could not offer it. To Phil, grown in small cities and towns, it was as stimulating as the champagne—“Domestic, dears,” Anne had said—that he’d been drinking all evening.
Here was a world where a man’s name, the shape of his nose, the religion he believed in or the religion he did not believe in—where none of it counted. Here was rugged individualism in its best sense, each man or woman a whole person, the sum of his worth and character left whole, no part subtracted by prejudice.
He’d been pleased to see Lieberman there and went straight to him with, “Minify wanted to get us together. I’m Phil Green.”
“He told me he did.”
They shook hands. Only yesterday John had told Phil he’d talked to Lieberman about him. “I’m not as easy as you are, Phil, about sliding it into a sentence, but I got it across to him.”
Lieberman was plump as well as short, middle-aged, with the face of a Jew in a Nazi cartoon, the beaked nose, the blue jowls, and the curling black hair. Phil saw all of it, and the fine candid eyes.
“I’m writing a series for him on antisemitism.”
“Pro or con?”
Phil roared, and Lieberman’s eyes twinkled. He seemed pleased with himself, affectionate toward his quick retort, rewarded by Phil’s outburst as by a just reward.
“And John thought we might hash over some ideas. I expect you’re pretty busy these days.”
Lieberman shook his head in denial. “What sort of ideas?”
“Palestine, for instance, Zionism—”
“Which? Palestine as refuge or Zionism as a movement for a Jewish state?”
“The confusion between the two, more than anything.”
“Good. If we agree there’s confusion, we can talk. I can’t really talk to a positive Zionist any more than to a confirmed Communist—there is no language.”
They talked on for a bit and agreed to meet soon.
In the taxi uptown, Phil and Kathy discussed the party. She was voluble and gay, with excitement, with champagne. “I thought I’d die at some of the jokes she told,” she said, and laughed in reminiscence.
Anne had revealed a gift for mimicry he’d only glimpsed when she’d imitated Bert, and for over an hour she’d regaled one corner of the room with story after story, most of them old ones refurbished with current build-ups and made newly engaging by her uncanny ear for dialect.
“If McAnny told the same ones,” he said, “I’d have been puckered as a quince. Why the hell is it so different?”
Kathy shook her head, and they went on in silence. It could be different. With Anne, and in that crowd, you could laugh at a joke about two priests or two Jews or two Negroes and hear no overtone of cruelty. Kathy and he had shouted over the chestnut about Mandy and the colored judge and again at the one about “Lord Chahmly-Chahmly” getting the wrong telephone connection.
“So he gets this little old fellow in the Bronx, you know, long beard, black skullcap, and says, ‘I say, is Freddy Breck-ston theah?”
“ ‘Who-o-o-? Who you vant?’
“ ‘Breckston, old chap, Lord Harrowbridge Turnbridge Pethbright, y’know.’
“ ‘Oi! Hev you got the wrung numbair!’ ”
In the dim cab, Kathy heard him chuckle and said, “Phil?” He took her into his arms.
“I’m just so damn happy,” he said, as if it explained anything.
He stood looking down at her as she sat at one end of the sofa. Disbelief, acknowledgment warred through him. His mind strained for understanding, the ache of trying told him it was beyond his reach.
“God, Kathy, we’re quarreling.”
“I said we shouldn’t talk it out now. It’s nearly four, we had stuff to drink, we’re just worn out.” Her face was pale. Her dejected limpness was an accusation.
“All right. Let’s quit it.” He stood up and began pacing the room.
“I know I promised, Phil. I crossed my heart. No exceptions. And you were being reasonable to stretch it to Jane. But it just seems so silly to get her into a thing up there when it’s not true.”
Women always talk in italics, he thought, when they know they’re wrong. She must see this is impossible. Aloud he said, “The whole goddam business just depends on my not making loopholes whenever it’s convenient, that’s all.”
“She didn’t mean for you to deny it. Just not to bring it up.”
He didn’t say anything. They’d been over this five times already since she’d unlocked the front door and said, “Oh, I forgot. Jane wants to throw a big party for us Saturday night.” She’d switched on only one lamp in the living room, made a comedy gesture of chucking off her short cape and letting it lie on the rug, and curled up against banked cushions with an unshielded yawn like a child. He’d sat near her, unsuspicious of danger, tired also, and unwilling to admit he ought to be on his way at once.
“What’d she say when you told her?”
“Oh, she thought it was the cleverest way to do research and that you must have a touch of the screwball in you to think it up.”
“But she promised?”
“I wouldn’t tell her till she did. And Harry, too. Anyway, today when she phoned, she asked if you’d just skip the whole thing for the party and I said—”
“No.”
“What?”
“You said, ‘No, he won’t skip the whole thing for the party.’ ”
“Why, Phil, I didn’t. I said I’d ask you.”
He’d stood abruptly then.
“Ask me?”
“I’d never say yes without asking you.”
“You mean I should?”
She looked away. “You know those suburban crowds. Especially Darien and up there. It would just start a whole mess for Jane and Harry for nothing.”
“And if it were a mess for something?”
“But, Phil, you’re not. So—oh, you can be solemn about things. It’ll just ruin the party for Jane if she has problems at it.”
“Why not just tell Jane to skip the party?”
“Oh, Phil, that would look so queer—her only sister.”
She made an impatient gesture. “If you were I’d manage, but—”
“Thanks.”
Again the look stood in her eyes. (“But, Phil, you’re not really, are you?”) The look he’d found excuses for—the mind plays funny tricks, you’re not Minify, I should have led you along. This time the look wasn’t caused by unpreparedness or misunderstanding. This time it was just there.
Over and over, they’d gone at it, round and round. She couldn’t see it, and he couldn’t make her see it. He couldn’t see it, and she couldn't make him see it.
“Nobody’s asking you to make loopholes where it counts,” she went on now. “At the office, or meeting people right there like at Anne’s tonight. But out there’s just an occasional visit, and if we use my house for next summer, and anyway, Jane and Harry—”
“I thought you said they were so grand.”
“They are. But they can’t help it if some of their friends—and they’d be saying ‘our future brother-in-law’ or maybe ‘our brother-in-law’ by then, and it would make such a—”
“A thing. A mess. An inconvenience.”
“Well, it would!”
“Just for Jane and Harry? Or for you, too?”
“Damn it, I’d be so tensed up I wouldn’t have any fun either. Heavens, if everything’s going to be tensed up and solemn all the time—”
Her voice was hard. Her eyes avoided his. “If.” Suddenly he was unbearably tired. “I think I’d better go now,” he said.
Outside, a misty cold hung over the still-wet streets. Numbly he walked down Park Avenue. The Christmas lights were dead on the long single line of trees down the center islands of earth. Taxis whooshed by on the puddled road, but he did not try to see whether they were vacant. He walked all the way.
In the dim vestibule of his house the brass plate gleamed softly. He shoved his key into the door.
On his pillow two yellow telegrams were placed where he could not miss them even if he undressed in the dark. He reached to the headboard lamp. They were both addressed to him. He tore one open.
CONGRATULATIONS ON THE GRAND NEWS ABOUT YOU AND KATHY AND MY BEST TO HER. LET’S HEAR THE EXACT DATE. LOVE FROM ALL. BELLE.
He ripped apart the second envelope. It was unsigned. It had been sent that evening from Brentwood, California.
YIPPEE.
He sat down on the bed and put his head down on his hands. The telegram from his sister Mary crackled slowly in his tightening fist.