“YOU MUST THINK Mamma’s your property,” Belle’s voice in the receiver began vigorously. “The time she had the heart attack you kept it to yourself for a week, and now this calm letter days after her stroke.”
“Hello, Belle,” Phil said. “I should have written right off, but—”
“Or at least phoned. Even if the doctors did say it would pass. She’s my mother, too.”
“Want to speak to her? She’s starting to sit up a bit now.” Belle never used to antagonize him so quickly in the old days in California.
“I want her to come out here for some real rest and care, where she won’t have those awful stairs to climb. I’ll come and get her when she can travel.”
Phil motioned to his mother and laid the receiver on the table. Belle’s voice continued to spring forth from it. “I should think, Phil, you’d at least find an apartment where—”
“Now, Belle, really.” Mrs. Green picked up the phone as she was talking. “In all of New York—”
Belle interrupted with worried questions about how Mrs. Green felt. The slight thickness of speech had apparently shocked her into thinking more of her mother than of her own sense of neglect. A moment later, she repeated her invitation, and, standing near, Phil could hear each syllable even now that her voice had softened.
“Thanks, dear,” Mrs. Green said, “but I’ll be fine soon, and I can’t leave Tom and Phil alone. We still have no maid, and Phil couldn’t ever go out in the evening.”
“Then take Tom out of school for a bit,” Belle said energetically, “and take him with you. He doesn’t go around telling people he’s Jewish too, does he?”
Mrs. Green looked up sharply. Phil put his hands in his pockets.
“Does he?” The sounds in the receiver grew louder again. “Because if he did it here, I’d have to give Phil’s ridiculous scheme away.”
“Belle!” Phil watched his mother closely. Like many patient people, she could go to an extreme of rage once in a great while. “That’s a shocking, dreadful thing to say.”
“Dick’s firm—”
“You’re not thinking only of Dick’s firm,” Mrs. Green said. “That last time you were here, you said things while you were angry that told me you’ve lost all your old principles on your own account, not on Dick’s.”
“Oh, Mamma, please!”
“Now I see you’ve lost your spunk, too. It makes me ashamed.”
Phil saw his mother’s hand tremble. Brusquely he took the receiver away and with his head motioned her to her chair.
“Listen here, Belle,” he said with authority. “I don’t want Mom to have a relapse. So can it.” Belle started to say something. He cut in. “And on your next visit here, can it, too. Better quit this now; good night.”
He hung up and turned to Mrs. Green. “Feels queer to have one right in our own family, doesn’t it? She’ll be in New York in less than a week, trying to justify everything.”
“Stop that, Phil,” his mother said sharply. “I won’t have you saying ugly things about your own sister.” She was
silent for several minutes and then started for her room. At the door she stopped.
“Did you know we quarreled that day she was here?” she asked in a flat voice. “About her money-mad Jew, Patrick Curran? I guessed it.”
“More about her defeatist attitude in general. Then about the motor strike and labor unions and the Negro migration to Detroit.” She breathed deeply.
“Maybe she’ll change back.”
“It’s too late. It’s gone too far with her.” She left him.
It’s gone too far with her. With Belle it had gone past curing. But Kathy? Kathy was not like that about strikes and unions and migrations. Kathy was no defeatist about prejudice. She might be diffident, even weak, but there was also somewhere in her the thing that had made her argue Minify into taking some definite step to combat it.
A renewed hope surged. He went to his desk. For more than an hour he remained there.
Dear Kathy,
It seems impossible that we were unable to reach through this and find some place where we could be right with each other on it again. We never did go back to talk out the quarrel on New Year's about the party. I keep thinking that if we started back there, we might find out what kept going so wrong. Can I see you?
Phil
He who could write so easily, who could speed a thousand words down along his plunging fingers on the green-rubber keyboard of his machine, had stumbled like a first-grader over this single paragraph. A dozen times he had begun it and written into it a naked desperation; a dozen times he had begun it and written into it the frosted mathematics of logic. Finally he’d written out quickly the sentences that kept cropping up in all the versions. Those must be, to whatever censor there was in him, the most acceptable ones. He sealed it without rereading it and went out to mail it. An hour later he despised himself for having sent it.
Kathy’s answer was in his pocket when he called for Anne. It had come by return mail and was all the passport he needed to any new relationship, yet the guilt of disloyalty, even betrayal, nagged at him.
Anne had stopped by in the office with another cautious report of a possible apartment for Dave. Phil had been unable to sound other than limp and tired. “You’re none too cheerful these days, Phil,” she’d said kindly. “I worry about you.”
“Me? Why, I’m fine.”
“Well, I’m not. If you’re free tonight, come on down for a drink and listen to my troubles.”
So she’d guessed. She wouldn’t have suggested an evening date if she hadn’t guessed—or heard it herself. Everybody in that office seemed to hear everything, tell everything. He’d suggested dinner. With the exception of Professor Lieberman, he’d seen no one, done nothing but work. Suddenly he was grateful to her for forcing him out of the house, away from Tom and his mother, out into the world. Her clever, emphatic speech would—“Hell, I don’t need any alibis for going out with her.”
But through dinner, she seemed preoccupied, unlike her usual self. Once she fell into a long silence and then sighed. Resistance edged up ungenerously in him. He’d assumed she’d been joking about “listen to my troubles,” and now he was fearful that she’d meant it. He felt anesthetized as yet to any confidences she might make. How self-centered one’s own pain could make one!
“I’ll make you some decent coffee at home,” she said, and in contrition he agreed that that was a fine idea. In her apartment, he stared about him. Thinly in his mind, the whistles and tooting and “Happy New Years” of his last visit echoed; suddenly the letter in his pocket seemed the final plaque nailed on a long-closed coffin.
Was Kathy out with some man tonight, hearing him tell her she was beautiful, seeing his gaze travel over her face and throat and body? Jealousy reached into him. He sat, numb and patient, waiting for the spasm to ease. By now he knew it well. This also was different from the time after Betty’s death, this onslaught a dozen times each night of an enemy he’d never had to face during that other siege.
From the kitchen Anne called, “It’s perking now; be ready in a minute.” He reached for the letter and reread it once again.
There really isn’t any use, Phil. I’ve thought and thought, but I keep remembering how pointless it was for me and Bill to try to patch up the differences between us. There’s no use my going on always feeling in the wrong—it’s so humiliating, it wouldn’t wear well. Things would keep coming up on this, and we’d just kill everything off with quarrels. Maybe we fell in love too quickly, before we really had enough time to know each other. I’m sorry.
Kathy
He put it back in his pocket. At last Anne came in with the coffee. She looked at him, shook her head, said, “You brood too much,” and immediately talked of office things. He had misjudged Anne, he decided; unspoken apology formed in his mind. For all her brittle manner, she was clear and unequivocal about things; with her there’d never be the doubtful wonder, the watching for nuance that could communicate a lifetime slant to a child.
“You’re quite a girl—I’ve never told you.”
“Me? Sure, everybody loves Anne.”
She sat beside him on the sofa and poured the coffee as if she had just learned how to do it. With a start, Phil saw that her hand was shaking.
“You said you weren’t very happy, Anne,” he said impulsively. “Want to talk about it?”
“No, thanks—that much I’ve learned. Nothing bores any man as much as an unhappy female.”
“We’re good friends by now.”
She put sugar into her coffee, shaking her head for “no” as she stirred it. He watched her hand. There was something mesmeric in the way she stirred the coffee and stirred and stirred and stirred and stirred. Suddenly the spoon was still.
“I know about it being called off, Phil. Could I say something about you and Kathy?”
“Sure.” It sounded wary.
“John had a sort of office party last night for some of us old-timers, and she was there. We put on our usual act about liking each other.”
“Act?”
“You must have guessed it was mostly an act.”
“I wondered about it.”
“I just never go for that upper-classes stuff she lives for—”
“Anne, let’s don’t.” He put his hand over hers to lessen the rebuke. It wasn’t possible to sit here, discussing, dissecting. Abruptly she drew her hand out from under his.
“Oh, all right, be the little gentleman.” She took up her coffee cup, but did not drink from it. “It’s just, I think you’re pretty straight and—” His unbudging stare halted the rest of it. She smiled. “Lord, I do seem to be digging myself in deeper and deeper.”
Dave had said “one of the nicest and one of the bitchiest.” Had she been getting off malice about Kathy all along? Was it only malice? Again the sense of betrayal whipped at him. But there was something here, some clue, maybe the clue he’d searched for. “Upper-classes stuff” was her way of putting what Kathy called “living attractively” or “knowing amusing people.” How important were these things to Kathy? Her voice spoke a phrase in his mind. “When I didn’t have the things my friends did, then I was full of snobbish misery.” There was some excitement here the excitement of theory, of possible discovery. Privately, he’d have to carry this forward. Not now. Not with anybody, even Anne.
“I sure hope,” he said aloud, “we can find some place for Dave before the month’s up. You’d like Carol as much as you do Dave.”
She turned toward him quickly. “Any connection?”
“Why, no.”
“Or innuendo?”
“Anne, what the hell?” He put his hands out, palms up, in the instinctive need to show he held no trickery, no weapon, no motive. “I guess I was just trying to change the subject and being clumsy over it.” He turned toward her so that he was sitting along the edge of the sofa, almost facing her.
“O.K.” She tossed her head, like an impudent child. But in the next moment, she leaned forward and hid her face in her hands. Looking down upon her, a kinship flared—here was the bitter universal, for whatever hidden cause. He put his hand out. He stroked her hair, awkward as a two-year-old patting a kitten. She turned her body toward him; her head rested against his knees. His startled flesh felt her warm breath through his clothing; his thigh knew the round rise and fall of her breast. His hand stopped moving along her hair.
“Everything’s so damn rotten, Phil.” Her voice came up to him, muffled and thick. “We’re both unhappy. Why can’t we try to find some way—”
He did nothing. He said nothing. She was as motionless and mute as he. Seconds slipped past as if they were a tableau on a stage, rigidly waiting for an appointed time to elapse. Then she sat up. When she spoke, her voice was at once embarrassed and defiant.
“Let’s go to a movie,” she said.
For the third time, Kathy struck the chord incorrectly. Her nerves clanged with the dissonance. She dropped her hands from the keyboard and sat staring at the notes. She’d better put off this week’s lesson, too.
She stood up and moved quickly away from the piano. In the ten days since it had happened, she seemed to be moving away from everything. She’d had to force herself to answer Phil’s letter. And an hour ago, when Bill had phoned, asking to see her, she’d pleaded a headache, in the attempt to run from the dull half-hour it would mean. Maybe “unfriendly divorces” were the wisest after all, without this farce of amiability.
“I’m about to resign, Kathy,” he’d said, “and start a firm of my own. It would really help to check it with you.”
Poor Bill—the old habit of “sharing his work.” She’d refused going out to a bar and had asked him up instead. Maybe for once he wouldn’t tell every detail as he “spotted in the background.”
“You don’t look up to par,” Bill began when he arrived.
“February letdown is all it is.” She gave him whisky and water. He’d never liked soda or much ice. He sat where Phil used to sit, at one end of the sofa. He was ill at ease; she knew it instantly. Had he come for something other than talk of the new firm?
“I ran into Tom Manning at luncheon the other day,” he said. “He told me Jane said you’d broken your engagement.”
“Yes. Are Ellen and Tom still hipped on skiing?”
“I suppose so.” He sipped his drink. She watched him. Bill’s meaningless good looks never changed. “I saw you and Mr. Green together one night,” Bill said. His tone insisted that this was purely by the way.
“When? Why didn’t you come over?”
“It was coming out of a movie, before Christmas, I think. I tried to catch your eye, but you both got into a taxi. I didn’t know who he was, of course, but when you described Mr. Green the day you told me the news, it fitted.”
The “Mr. Green” jarred. She said, “Yes, it must have been Phil.” Why hadn’t Bill mentioned seeing them during his New Year visit? She decided not to ask. “What’s this about a firm of your own, though?”
“In a minute, Kathy.” He sipped his drink again. “I’m sorry, if breaking it upset you,” he said awkwardly, and she was touched.
“That’s sweet, Bill,” she said. “I’m not upset any more, but let’s skip it anyway.”
“Tom said he’s a Jew. Is that right?”
She looked at him briefly. “Yes, that’s right.”
“Well, then, maybe in the long run.”
His intonation, Kathy thought, made it a complete statement. Subject, verb, object, modifiers—the complacent voice, the judicious shake of the head, had managed to include all of them. It was a sentence. You could parse it. Truculence burred in her. She wouldn’t get drawn into discussion with him. During their marriage, they’d had so many useless squabbles about Bill’s ready prejudices.
“I’ve got to start for Aunt Jessie’s soon,” she said firmly. “Have you already resigned, Bill?”
“No, these financial matters can’t be rushed.” Looking reflective, he fondled the lobe of his right ear. It was one of his old mannerisms, denoting preoccupation with business. “What I mean,” he said at last, “is that in the long run it would have been all sorts of a nuisance to be the wife of a Jew.”
“Bill, please.” The truculence was audible now. “You really—” But nothing would deflect Bill, ever.
“I mean like the cottage, for instance. Of course you could have sold it. I’d have taken it off your hands in a jiffy myself.”
“Sold it?” She put her glass down. “Why would we sell it?”
He looked astonished. “He looked a good sort, Kathy.”
“He is a good sort.”
“Well, then. He’d never barge into a neighborhood that doesn’t take Jews—he’d never have been comfortable there.”
Something stung through her.
“I know you disapprove,” Bill went on, “and I do, too, if they’re the acceptable kind, but, well, it’s just facing facts.” He shrugged. “And you couldn’t go to New Canaan or anywhere near Jane and the crowd. New Canaan’s even stricter about Jews than Darien.”
“Stop it. Don’t go on. I hate this. You know how I feel about all that.”
“Why, Kathy.” His voice was soothing. “As I always told you, you can’t change the whole world, no sense getting so—”
The sting again. She stood up abruptly. Bill scrambled up, too. Good manners, perfect breeding always. She hated him; with one more of his slipping-along phrases, she would scream at him.
“I told you I had a headache. It’s worse. I’ve got to lie down.” She saw the uncomprehending look. “You saw Phil. You know he’s not filthy or diseased or vulgar. Could he spoil the neighborhood and the real-estate values? Could he? Then how can you just stand there spilling out those horrible things without even being angry?”
“What horrible things?” There was only perplexity in it.
She said, “Oh, no,” and was silent. Then she said, limply, “Bill, please go now. My head’s splitting. Some other time we’ll talk over your new firm.”
She left him standing there and went to her bedroom. She closed the door. She listened. When the front door slammed, she went to the bed and lay down.
There was something sickening here, something more hateful than anything there had been between them in their old squabbles. Something not about Bill; something about her, and not to be borne.
“Never be comfortable there” … “New Canaan’s even stricter than Darien” … “can’t change the whole world …”
The phrases pelted her. “Oh, no.” The staccato of disbelief was for herself now. It wasn’t the same. She had said those phrases as hateful facts; Bill had offered them casually, without emotion.
She lay still. The swift sting changed to a suffusion of heat, spreading, reaching.
Everything important between her and Bill had come to differences. But on this? On this there was no difference. In tone, in mood, maybe, but nothing more. One by one, the arguments she had desperately given Phil that day about Dave had come easily now from Bill’s lips.
From the lips and heart and shabby mind of Bill Pawling.
Off and on during dinner Kathy’s attention went back to the one point that was rebuttal. “Tone and mood are important; they’re the distance between acceptance and rejection.”
She forced herself to make talk with the Minifys, but her thoughts carried on their own busy work of comfort and persuasion. By dessert, her nerves were steadier. But she felt that she’d come through some brief, savage fever.
In the living room, Uncle John took his coffee from the tray and said, “Want to read something in rough draft?”
“You don’t mean me, dear?” Jessie asked.
“No, Jess. I thought Kathy might, though.”
“Is it?” She stopped, and he didn’t answer. He looked at Kathy uneasily. She had a depleted air that worried him. She’d fallen into the almost nightly habit of coming over for dinner; it was being a stiff time for her, no question of that. He looked at her now, as she accepted coffee from Jessie, and remembered her as a college girl, then as a bride, then as a newly divorced woman. Never before had her pretty face been so concave from jawbone to eye socket; never before had he seen the puffed arcs of shiny, almost oiled, skin under her eyes. She cried in that apartment of hers, and that’s what did it. The act she put on all the time was fine, but it didn’t fool him. It was so rational, the explanation she’d finally given Jessie—Phil was so intense, so given to moods, so impatient of other points of view that she’d have to become a wishy-washy carbon copy of him or else prepare for constant bickering or outright scenes about all sorts of problems. It was wiser to admit incompatibility beforehand than when it was too late. That was all.
All this explanation had rather surprised him; he’d figured Phil differently. But, of course, just in a working relationship one never saw the whole man. She meant it—enough to be going through plenty of torment for it. What trouble it was to be young! At sixty you grieved for the world; in youth you grieved for one unique creature. And so opaque and stubborn was the grief, you could blot out the world with it as you could blot out the sun with a disk of black glass.
“It’s the last one of the series,” he said finally. “He turned it in this afternoon.”
“I’m not much good with rough-draft stuff.”
“Hm. He does fairly smooth copy right off once he gets going.” He crossed the room to his brief case. She watched him open it, nervously waiting, as if he were pulling aside a curtain from which Phil himself might emerge. She still felt too shattered to dare any new emotion. Uncle John took out a stack of manuscript, fastened at the top with the largest paper clip she had ever seen. She watched him as he riffled through the pages, reading a sentence here and there. Phil’s hands had held those pages a few hours ago; his voice had spoken to Uncle John as he’d turned it over to him. His life was going on along the same paths, sure and undeviating.
“I’ll react better to it when it’s in print, Uncle John.”
“O.K., if you’d rather.” He turned another page. He looked pleased, partly with Phil, partly with his own judgment in choosing him. “Hell of a balanced job,” he said, without looking up. “Got a thousand facts into the five pieces, from all angles, all over the country, but he’s worked them into his own story so you go from objective to subjective without stumbling.” He threw the manuscript down on the coffee table. “Make a sensation.”
“Such a shame, about his mother,” Jessie said. “You say she’s all right again, though?” John nodded, but they both ignored her. For a space there was the drinking of more coffee.
“One part in this one’s about you, I’d guess,” John said casually.
“Me?” Kathy’s eyes accused him of lying. “Why, he wouldn’t!”
“Oh, thoroughly disguised—everything personal in it is disguised. Doesn’t make it Smith’s Weekly, of course—just a big business office.”
“But you can recognize?”
“He’s got a beautiful woman in it, all the way through; married, in her forties, wife of a friend in Rumson, New Jersey, two boys. But I made a long guess.”
“Uncle John, he just couldn’t!”
“The hell he couldn’t. I’m in the second article—the big liberal who had an antisemitic personnel manager in his own office and never took the trouble to find out about it! He had quite a field day with me. Sure, when I read it, it kind of burned me for five minutes. But he had to, Kathy. He’s writing what happened to him while he was Jewish—you and I and everything else are what happened to him. Want him to leave it all out and dream up stuff?”
“No, but if you recognize that woman—”
“He took about ten people and braided them into her— that’s what all writers worth a bean do when they need types of people, recognizable types.” He reached over and patted her hand. It was unexpected, an unspoken reassurance. “You’re very special to people who love you, Kath. But you’re also a type, like anybody else.”
“I suppose I am. You never think of yourself as a type.”
They fell silent. Kathy looked at the six-inch paper clip. In the shaded light of the room it shone like silver. She leaned forward and idly picked up the manuscript.
As she turned the pages phrases caught at her, but she could hardly filter their meaning through the haze of feeling. Touching the paper was like feeling his body near her again.
“… driving away from the inn, I knew all about every man or woman who’d been told the job was filled when he knew it wasn’t, every youngster who’d ever been turned down by a college because they ‘have too many New Yorkers already’ when he knew the true word was ‘Jews’ or ‘foreign-sounding’ …” She turned a page. “… this primitive rage pitching through you when you see your own child shaken and dazed that he was selected for attack …” She lost the next sentences. “… a new phase in my own reactions. From that moment I saw it as an unending attack by a hundred million adults on kids of seven and eight and ten and twelve; on adolescent boys and girls, on youngsters trying to get into summer camps and medical schools …” The haze began to thin down.
“I don’t see anything in it about me,” she said to John.
John didn’t answer.
She leafed over several pages, searching, almost fearfully, like a vain woman looking for her own face in a group photograph, hoping it would not be too unkind. “… and I felt suddenly that I knew why this lovely woman in Rumson can never truly fight the thing she says she hates. One part of her does indeed hate it, but that part is at war with another part, a buried part, a part that started in her childhood’s misery because ‘the other girls’ had prettier houses and nicer clothes. Like millions of us, she’d pursued the American dream of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ or catching up with them. And the buried part is still living out her childhood ambition to be one of the ‘smart set’ in her community, the ‘in group’ that belongs. She won’t jeopardize that adored status by becoming an outlandish arguer at a dinner table where somebody takes a crack at Jews; she won’t risk being gauche by ripping through the ‘set of rules’ in the pretty world she lives in. During the shooting war, she worked herself half sick in factories, sold bonds, accepted all the discomfort of ration books and shortages like a good soldier. But during this covert war for this country’s future, this secret war in which antisemitism is one of the most familiar weapons, she is unable to do more than offer little clucking sounds of disapproval. Her own success story paralyzes her.”
Kathy threw the manuscript down. She avoided John’s eyes. She said, “How about some gin rummy, Aunt Jess?” and at once Jessie went to a built-in cupboard below the bookshelves and brought out cards.
“But not too late, Kathy,” Jessie said. “You really worry me, losing weight that way. You must get lots of sleep.”
“It’s so easy to see the flaws in everybody else,” Kathy said to the room at large, as she pulled chairs up to the card table.
“Sometimes the flaws are really there, Kathy.” Minify looked back to the stacked pages. “In the first one he points out that he’d never gone much beyond the sounds of disapproval himself.”
“He doesn’t say anything about the real bigots—”
“Oh, there’s plenty about that in the series. But he showed me an advance copy of the next Fortune survey—damn interesting. Proves something he hunched onto all along.” Minify’s eyes were serious. “The biggest incidence of antisemitism comes from the top-income bracket now.”
“Really? Not the other way round?”
“The very people who set the styles for the country in clothes and cars and salads—and mores.” He was enjoying her astonishment. “The middle-aged stuffy ones in the bracket more than the young ones. Survey also shows only nine per cent of the country admits any prejudice.”
“That’s not so much,” Aunt Jessie said.
“It’s plenty.” He turned again to Kathy. “What Phil’s trying to do is make the rest of the style setters, the ones who really are against prejudice, come out and fight. Not just the rich ones, everybody.”
She glanced down at the manuscript as if she were appealing to it to judge her and find her a fighter.
“There are a hell of a lot more of our kind of style setters,” John went on with a sudden intensity. “Even a handful of us in every community could set a new national style in a few months. Damn it, it’s worth trying.”
“Ready, Kathy?” Aunt Jessie said. “Shall we play the double spade?”
Two mornings later, Phil brandished a bulky roll of manuscript at Miss Wales.
“One and two,” he said. “Edited and ready to go. I’ll get through number three before you can handle this much."
He chucked the roll over to her. She caught it and began to work the elastic band down the thick column. The rubber squeaked against the paper.
“How long do you guess for that much?” Phil asked.
She looked up and said, “This about ten thousand, do you figure?” Her open palms continued their downward stroke on the resisting elastic, and Phil remembered the time years ago when he’d watched a saleswoman roll new gloves on Betty’s stiffly upright fingers.
“More than that,” he said. “They each run pretty near seven thousand. Minify says not to cut till galley, anyway.”
“By tomorrow night,” she said with assurance. “I’m pretty fast when it isn’t longhand.” She was smiling at him, eager to begin her ministrations at last. Ever since he’d remained silent when she’d taunted him about Belle’s “running away from it,” her forgiveness had been complete and he’d avoided reopening hostilities. She glanced down at her hands. The tight band was at the lower rim of the roll now, compressing it so that above it the paper fanned out, an inverted cone. Horn of plenty, Phil thought. Full of all the good things, hate and indifference and hypocrisy. And maybe some hope, too. He was watching her.
She had the band off. She glanced up at him, saying professionally, “And, of course, if it isn’t all thick with pencil corrections and inserts and stuff.” As she talked her hands were busy on the curling wad, rerolling it backward, then flattening it out on her knees. She looked down. He saw her eyes go to the title.
“For eight weeks?” She looked up, and immediately down to the short first paragraph. He had never changed it. He had made the decision, long ago, to tell it straight, right from his first resistance to the “hell of an assignment.” He didn’t particularly relish remembering that early boredom and resistance, but that was the way it had been.
He was still keeping an eye on Miss Wales. She was nearing the bottom of the first page. Her head was bent, and he could see only her profile. Below its impassive repose, he saw that her slender neck was coloring. It touched him. She was upset. That he hadn’t expected.
She turned to page two. Abruptly then she put the manuscript aside.
“You’re a Christian, Mr. Green!” Surprise, reproof, embarrassment, all these were in the stare, the unbelieving tone. “And I never suspected it; I fell for—why, for Pete’s sake.”
“Everybody else did, too, what the hell.”
“I saw you more than anybody else, though, and I never once—” Her face was going rosy also. Her round-eyed pinkness disconcerted him. Odd, this much reaction.
“What’s so upsetting about that, Wales?”
“I feel so dumb!”
“You’re practically telling me, in a funny backhand way, that there is something different between Jews and Christians.”
“How am I?”
“By being so floored at not guessing.”
“Oh, Mr. Green. You’re always doing that, reading things in.” She looked up at him, silently asking him not to badger her now. “I’m so—I feel all turned round somehow.”
“Take it easy. I’m the same guy I was yesterday.”
“I—I guess you are.” She blinked rapidly. “But why’d you ever tell people—just purposely—I don’t get it.”
“You will when you get to page ten or so.” Echo of Kathy’s voice as she knelt to Tom. The Great Benison— Miss Wales felt it, too, in a kind of reverse twist. Threaded through her ordinary surprise was astonished disbelief that anybody could voluntarily abandon that glory! And if he charged her again with antisemitism, the unwitting concession that being Christian was better than being Jewish, she’d accuse him of reading things in. Or echo Kathy once more. “It’s just facing facts.”
“Anyway, let me have the first one when it’s ready,” he said, “so I can turn it over to the art department.”
She rose, the automatic response to the tone of finality. She was still flustered. “Hold on a minute, Wales.” She looked up, ready to be offended. “Look, I’m the same guy I’ve been all along,” he said gently. “Same face, nose, tweed suit, voice, everything. Only the word ‘Christian’ is different. Someday you’ll believe me about people being people instead of words and labels.”
She rolled the manuscript so tightly, Phil thought, she’s throttling the life out of it. She left, and he reached for a cigarette. The first time he’d catalogued himself that way, the magic word had been “Jewish.” He oughtn’t, he supposed, be surprised over this first small episode of “the unwinding”; there should never be surprises when you deal with the irrational. Turning the manuscript over was a milestone as far as the series went, but it meant nothing much about himself. Kathy was right. He had changed. Once you change about things like this, you never unchange. He was through and he wasn’t through. The eight weeks had uncovered things, many things, and not only about being Jewish. They had pried him loose from his own blindfolds.
He’d learned about being Jewish. But he’d also learned a good deal about being anybody.
The manuscript of the third and fourth articles bulked thick in the Manila envelope on the desk. He reached for it and took it out. Three days had gone into the editing of the first two, but the rest had come off the machine more readily; they shouldn’t need so much revision. He picked up a pencil. Then he knew that he was too depleted to start in again.
He leaned back in his chair. The desk calendar caught his eye. Friday, the eighth of February. At this moment they’d have been on a bright beach in Nassau, somnolent beside each other on the sand, secret with the night they’d shared. He stabbed his cigarette at the ash tray; it broke in the middle and shredded tobacco over his fingers. He had to take a walk, get out of here, go somewhere.
In the corridor he saw Bert McAnny and ignored him.
That day after lunch he’d gone straight for Bert on his gossip about Belle. It had proved futile, even cheap.
“But, Phil, this Jeff Brown said it; I didn’t. All I said was that if I were Jewish, I’d be the way you are.”
“Cut the bouquets, Bert. Strikes me, the very people who make life galling for Jews are the most upright about demanding guts and courage and dignity from them.”
Now, the sight of Bert merely made him wonder whether Belle would run into anything out there, or whether it would stay in the gossip stage all around her and she unaware of it. Well, she’d have to stand it. She and Dick and the whole of Naismith Motors.
He drifted down along the corridor. In the “pen,” twenty typewriters rushed along on their dry clacking, the racket interspersed with chiming bells and the shrewish whine of the slung-back carriage. Had Wales already shown the title and first paragraph to her cronies? Was there the same astonished look on all of them, or did any of them take it with the plain, ordinary interestedness they’d feel in any other journalistic stunt?
The door to Anne’s office was open. Her secretary was in there with her. He said, “Hi,” and started to go past.
“Phil. Come on in. I found an apartment for Dave.”
He went in and waited while the two women talked. He watched her conduct the brief business, easy, friendly, bright as ever. Nobody in this world, he decided, could look at her, listen to her, talk to her, and think something was sad and hurt and wrong in her life. She signaled to him once that it would only be another minute and gave him what was surely a lighthearted smile. Since the night at her house he had seen her only at the office or for drinks with other people. Neither of them had made even oblique reference to what had happened.
“It’s sort of a railroad flat,” she said, the moment they were alone. “But not awful at all—I went and looked at it this morning. Converted tenement on the south fringe of the Village. The father committed suicide last night, and my broker pal practically phoned me before the hearse got there.”
He shook his head. “You are a gruesome one. What broker pal?”
“I told you—you never listen to what I say. Clare Spradling. Used to broke uptown in the fancy East Side offices and then started her own business in Village properties. Anyway, listen.” She described the flat, and ended, “But it’s clean and sunny and warm and the only thing they’ll ever get. Should we take it? She’s holding it for me till noon.”
“What’s happening to the suicide’s family?”
“Oh, them.” She waved them out of the world. “Want to go see it?”
“If you say so, grab it. I’ll write a wire for Dave.”
While she was getting the number, she said, “Clare’s the one gave me that code stuff I told you—the brokers’ little dodges, ‘hundred per cent co-operative’ when they mean gentiles only, remember?”
“And ‘he’s an Otto Kahn’ if they mean Jewish-but-O.K. Sure, I worked it in in the fourth one, along with Sam’s golf-club boys. I’m through at last.”
She said, “Great,” and talked efficiently into the telephone. He wrote out a wire for Dave and Carol. They could still make it, and they’d be happy about it. The one letter he’d had from Dave did a bad job of concealing his sharpened desire for the bigger future Quirich-Jones offered. “That’s right, Clare, as is,” Anne was saying, “no repainting and rent from Feb fifteen even if they’re not here. I’m sending fifty deposit by boy; God bless you for smelling the gas or whatever.” She hung up.
Gratitude made him say, “Come on, I’ll buy you a sandwich at the Ritz.”
“Decided I won’t attack you again, hey?”
They walked through the crowds and colors of Fifth Avenue at noon. It was a day such as comes sometimes in early February, taunting in its unseasonable warmth, immediate with spring and gentle winds and beneficent skies forever. Slow and unarguable, the old desire for love, for a close-shared life, struck at him, not with Kathy, not with Anne, not with any one woman. It was concept only, urgency in the blood. He wondered if this tall, slim girl beside him, never pretty, but striking and vigorous and stimulating, knew that hunger also, and for how long she had sought to appease it.
“Phil, I suppose Dave told you about us? Men always put on such talk about guarding a woman’s name but usually manage to slip the idea across to their best buddy just the same.”
“Matter of fact, he never did.”
“Oh. You mean I’m talking too much, as usual?”
“What difference does it make, if I do know? It’d hurt Carol, that’s all. Wives never understand what it’s like to get back to an appealing girl of your own kind after three years.”
“I’ll never tell Carol. I’m loathsome about phony women, but—”
He made a gesture so sharp, she stopped at once. They walked on in silence. Once or twice she glanced at him and then away; he knew it without turning his head., Even his mother, when he’d finally told her it was off for good, had said nothing against Kathy. Nor would Dave when he received the letter about it. Then why should Anne?
Downstairs in the grill the room was already filling with people. From previous visits there, Phil knew that many of them were from New York’s publishing houses and advertising agencies, that they were radio executives and literary agents and playwrights and authors. In the good downtown restaurants they would be bankers and lawyers and brokers and insurance men. Around Times Square, they would be show folk and garment-industry executives and newspaper management people who did not like “eating in” with lino-typers and copy runners and rewrite men who used the restaurants right in their own buildings.
“I’m becoming a New Yorker fast,” he said aloud to Anne.
“Like it?”
“You do spend more time in restaurants here than in any city out West,” he said. “In New York, you can live through most of the dramatic moments of your life leaning over a table or side by side on one of those damn benches.”
She was reading the menu and made no answer. He looked about him. He would for a long time, he supposed, be quite unable to enter a peopled place without this fleeting wonder if Kathy might be there. Unconsciously he looked for her in every street group, on every bus, among the women stopping at the windows of the stores strung brightly along Fifth and Madison and Fifty-seventh. He never knew that he was doing it until the mixed disappointment and relief told him he’d been at it again, half longing, half afraid of the shock if he should one day come upon her face to face.
Anne put the menu aside. She picked up the roll on her plate and crumbled a piece off it. “The thing that’s wrong with me, Phil, is I’ve been in love for eleven years with a man I can’t ever marry.”
She spoke without the coloring of any emotion whatever, neither sorrow nor regret, not self-pity or appeal for sympathy. It was purely a handing over of fact for any use he might make of it.
“I’m thirty-three,” she said, “so it’s been the only thing you’d call love there’s ever been. You take quite a beating, so you begin doing all sorts of things to make it easier for you from time to time. Like Dave.”
He remained silent, but he nodded as if to tell her he knew all about what one did from time to time to make it easier.
“And you get tense and nasty and discontented and fairly acid about things. So that’s me. Dave wasn’t kidding when he said I was bitchy—I’d have taken him away from Carol if I could have, divorce and the works. If you’ve been through enough you get callous about other women’s sufferings—they can stand it, too. I know I’m twisted up about everything and I don’t give much of a damn by now.”
“Sure you can’t ever marry this man you’re in love with?”
“He’s married and one of those decent ones. He won’t hurt her. O.K. to wreck me and himself. Sometimes the decent men are the most laughable.”
“You were going to give him up for Dave. Couldn’t you just give him up for good, anyway, and get over it?”
“I’ve tried that, too. But no matter how much is wrong, so much else is right—if it’s got you, Phil, you can’t just argue it away.”
Who knew that better than he? “So much else is right.” For a moment he could not speak, silenced by the clamor of that recognition.
“I’m sorry, Anne. It must be hell.” The captain came up benignly for their order. When he’d gone, Phil turned earnestly to her. “You’re not twisted up about everything.”
She suddenly laughed. “Meaning I’m free of antisemitism!” She was ridiculing him, and he did not mind it. “Whoever said you had to be a sainted character to be free of it? Just the way your life turned you, that’s all.” She waved gaily to somebody across the room. She looked self-possessed and completely gratified that she was alive.