THE STUNNING COLD made Kathy flinch as she came through the door of the hotel. Perhaps Aunt Jess was right about “overdoing it.” Maybe she was too worn out for this strenuous life. Night after night of the yellow pills knocked you down from any sense of well-being. But without them you just turned round and round in that dark, silent pit of memory. Then exhaustion stripped you of the strength to fight back to your ordinary calmness. She’d got to a point where the noisy scramble of the school jabbed impossibly at her nerves. A week at Lake Placid with Aunt Jess was no bonanza of fun and jollity, but she’d been meekly grateful for the suggestion. For the third time, she’d announced to her assistant at the nursery that she was taking a few days off. To have gone the week already arranged for Nassau with Phil would have been simpler. But the constant comparisons those actual days would have tossed at her— that she could not have borne.
She was dressed for skiing, but the piercing air decided her on a short walk instead. Besides, the hotel station wagon in the driveway, filling up with another load for the big run, was too full of talking, laughing couples. Everywhere she went now she was aware of the couples—always a man and a woman, a man and a woman. When you were as glaringly alone, as she, the full import of that “male and female created He them” began to shame you. You were the abnormal one; against nature, against the pattern and stream of the normal. She started up the main road, almost furtive in the hope she’d pass nobody she’d met in the four days they’d been there.
Before she got to the big fork, the station wagon passed her, and above the metallic clicking of its chains she heard tapping on the glass panes. Automatically she smiled and waved; it was surely Ellen or Tom Manning. It was good they’d come only for the week end and would be off again late tonight. She really liked them both, and, with their insatiable appetite for skiing, she’d not even been surprised when they arrived. But their awkwardness about “being sorry to hear the news,” their most innocent references to home or Darien, even Ellen’s inevitable table talk about the Springfield Plan—all of it kept scratching at her resolution “not to think about it any more.” At the party, Ellen had liked Phil and he her; they were kindred spirits; they both got hipped on things.
She was no longer huddling down from the stinging cold. She walked along briskly despite the heavy boots she’d not used for three winters. It began to snow, and she remembered how right and just the snow had seemed the first night they had dinner in her place. A week before Christmas, and now it was almost the middle of February, and the year that was to take her back to happiness and marriage was instead being the worst period she had ever lived. She brushed her mittened hand across her face. This snow was wet and clinging, as though it, too, held a soggy inertia.
Aunt Jess’s first suggestion had been Bermuda or Florida, but there wasn’t a room to be had anywhere at either place. If Phil had been involved, he’d have leaped at it as another example, she’d thought in a rush of scorn. While she’d been reading the pages he’d written, right then while she was still shaken by Bill’s visit, she’d been terribly moved by the earnestness and odd sadness he’d got into his phrases. She’d writhed for the beautiful woman in Rumson, and, as it had with Bill, fear struck her that maybe she, Kathy, really was like that. “Braided ten people into one”—she was at most only a strand in that composite portrait. When she’d really calmed down she’d seen that, as she’d at last seen the difference between her attitude and Bill’s.
Later, she’d checked back through her whole relationship with Phil, step by step. She’d got perspective back into things, for good this time. The molehill could always be cleverly made to look like a mountain for a while, but it still remained a silly little molehill not worth fuming over.
That Phil had left out of the article, honest though he was. Because that is what he’d never seen, what she’d never been able to make him see. It was so much simpler for him to judge her guilty.
Innocent or guilty, the pain stuck there inside her, the lump was ready in her throat; the fear of losing him had become the unreasoning remorse that it was over. That was stronger than anything else. Except the one black clean knowledge that a second failure, advertised to the world by a second divorce, would shatter everything she was or could be.
There were women, she knew, who were able to take emotional failure in their stride and go on being successful and happy people. Anne Dettrey was like that. She had talents, a job she adored, endless chances to meet new people. Envy for Anne’s busy, rounded life struck at her. She’d never been really easy with Anne; she always wondered how critical those clever eyes were being. But she admired her. Phil probably would turn to her; she was the only other woman he knew well in all New York. Perhaps already—
She turned back to the hotel. She couldn’t bear the lashing cold one more instant. Even this winter spread all about her, the icy snow under her feet, the glittering white of the mountains, the creaking branches of the burdened trees— even this was a mark of the terrible distance from the plan to the reality. Nassau would have been hot, brilliant with the red of hibiscus, the purplish pink of bougainvillea, the intense blues and greens of the sea.
Voices rang out behind her, and she half turned around. Two girls, their skis slung over their shoulders, their ski poles wearily trailing shining points along the snow, had appeared out of the woods. There was a beginners’ slope there, she remembered. She turned back. Soon they were close enough so she could hear a strident voice.
“So Cholly said I shouldna done it, and I said, ‘Well, I said, Mr. Smotty, you can go ta hell in a bucket.’ ”
The other girl made soothing sounds. They were abreast of her now. “Got a match, miss?” the strident voice asked, and Kathy stopped. While she was pulling off her oiled-silk ski mitten and reaching into the pocket of her jacket, she saw the glittering costume jewelry at their ears below their ski caps, the frozen beads of mascara of their eyes, the gleam of eye shadow, the thick lipstick, congealed and cracked in the dry five above zero.
Why do they do it? she thought miserably. Why do they make themselves so noticeable? It’s awful. It’s just awful.
She handed over the packet of matches with a warm smile, and the girls smiled back. They had trouble with the wind, and she cupped her hands over the shielding ones of the soothing girl to make a taller chimney for the match. They talked about the weather and the easy runs which were all they could try as yet. And all the time that “why” was crying out in her, protective yet helpless.
As she walked on alone again, her regret and distress deepened. The cruel comments of people who saw them on the slopes or on the roads angered her, though she had heard none. All Jews aren’t vulgar and overdressed, she thought passionately, and wished Phil could know how hotly she despised with him the injustice that taxed a whole group for the offense of two ill-bred girls.
For once he’d not find anything to get the quick look about.
Back at the hotel, Aunt Jessie was taking a nap. Kathy shed her cap and jacket and took off her ski boots. She rolled thick plaid wool socks over her feet and slid into her sloppy old moccasins. Then she went down to the Snack Bar for coffee. Singularly, her distress on the road had given way to a security about herself. For once he just couldn’t. And if she’d been more able to find the just word, the exact phrase for each and every thought she’d had when they’d been together, he’d never have been able to.
She thought of Bill Pawling. He wouldn't have felt this distress. A warmth grew in her.
The hot coffee, the blazing logs in the ten-foot stone fireplace before her, made her cheeks and forehead tingle after the attack of the icy outdoors. Drowsiness shredded orderly thinking into wisps. She relaxed against the sloped back of the lounge chair and wondered why she couldn’t feel this way when she was in bed. No matter how exhausted she was, the moment she lay down, there it was, a seizure, a swoop.
Suddenly she sat upright. The drowsy, lazy drifting was done. In her mind Phil’s voice was talking to her, not sarcastic, not irritated, but rueful and discouraged.
“But, darling, if they’d been two Irish-Catholic girls, all you’d have thought would have been how vulgar all that make-up is in sport clothes.”
She gulped.
“You wouldn’t even have thought, Kathy, ‘All Irish-Catholics aren’t vulgar and overdressed.’ You wouldn’t have defended all the Irish any more than all the Hindus. Because you would have thought of them only as two girls.”
Kathy put her hand up to her forehead. The fire was scorching. She felt dizzied and ill. Oh, God, I do get mixed up. Maybe he is right about something in me being—
Desperation spiked her feelings. She wanted crazily to tear the brain out of her skull so she could examine it, find what was there and what was not there. In a moment the violent mood passed. She sat enervated and more unsure of herself than she had ever in all her life felt before.
Even at the dinner table that evening, she could not shake off her lassitude. There was resignation in it, defeat, the old concession that she must be in the wrong somehow about everything. She listened to Ellen and Tom Manning and Aunt Jessie prattle about the invigorating mountain air and contributed monosyllables of appreciation. Something Aunt Jess said about Vassar got Ellen started on education and that led to the good old Springfield Plan. Idly Kathy gazed about the room, at the tanned and wind-burned faces at the other tables for two or four. She was all for the Springfield Plan; she’d read about it and heard about it and knew that it was right for children to meet democracy in action from their youngest school days. She hoped Ellen’s movement would succeed in Darien. But she could not listen attentively to Ellen or anybody else just now.
She remembered the two girls on the road. Vaguely she looked about. They hadn’t said anything about how far they’d come, at what hotel they were. Perhaps they looked less garish in ordinary clothing. She began to look over the faces around her. Face by face, now, no longer the blur.
Once again, she suddenly sat forward. In all that crowded room there was not one face that was obviously “Jewish.” She’d been in this hotel several times in the last ten years, and it had never even occurred to her to check over the faces. Now she was searching them, faster and faster, in a scrabbling anxiety to find the proof that this pleasant place wasn’t another Flume Inn.
“What’s on your mind, Kath?” Tom Manning asked.
“Me? Oh.” She was flustered. “Just looking around. I missed what you were saying, El. Sorry.”
“Anybody you want to see specially, dear?”
“No, Aunt Jess.” She looked about once more. The others were silent now, watching her. She must seem agitated and queer. “Is this hotel,” she said to Ellen, “for Christians only, d’you think?”
Ellen looked about now, and Tom did, too. Jessie said, “Of course not, Kathy,” in a comfortable voice, and Ellen said, “Why, I never thought.”
“This near New York and not one person that looks Jewish?” Kathy asked. “That couldn’t just be accident, with half the Jews in America right in New York City.” Her voice had changed. It had gone quiet. “I never thought about it, either,” she said to Ellen. Something pounded in her chest where only her heart should have been beating.
There was a silence. The Mannings were both thinking of Phil, she’d have sworn it. Broken engagement or not, a promise was a promise, and Jane would never have betrayed him until she got the word the series was done.
“It’s beastly, if it’s true,” Ellen said, and began to talk about protecting children from prejudice. Sunday-school teaching had to be revised. “Nobody ever says, ‘the Americans killed Lincoln,’ ” she said emphatically. Kathy nodded.
It isn’t just that they’re Jewish, she thought. Those two girls wouldn’t fit in here on other levels—of manners and smartness and all. But Dave and Carol and Phil and—oh, damn, even if you do hate it, what’s there you can do? She couldn’t march up to the hotel manager, ask questions, make speeches. She just wasn’t the type—she’d die of pure embarrassment. You just sat, that’s all you could do. Sat and felt this crawly shame.
After dinner, they played bridge, and when Aunt Jessie went upstairs, Kathy went to the bar with the Mannings for a “stirrup cup before train time.” Tom yawned and said he couldn’t wait to crawl into the berth; skiing this much always made him groggy for sleep at night. Ellen talked about her problems for the summer. Her eldest boy wanted to go to camp in Maine, and the two youngest were jealous of this first distinction. Kathy let her talk. Tom left them soon to see to their luggage.
“Kath, you look sort of thin,” Ellen said affectionately. Broken engagements aren’t any fun, I know. I broke one once.”
“Oh, well.”
“He’s brilliant and charming,” Ellen went on, “and I know you’d have been too big to care about sticky places like this.” Kathy didn’t answer. “It’s one’s own world that matters—and we’d already smoothed it out at the club. With so many of us having met him personally.”
“Smoothed it out?” Her voice edged, but she couldn’t help it.
“There was the midwinter meeting of the board about a week after Jane’s party, so it came up.” Ellen saw Kathy’s eyes go remote—it probably still killed her to talk about him. A lively sympathy warmed Ellen; she’d always liked Jane and Kathy and had been glad to see the last of that reactionary Bill Pawling. And she’d taken to Phil Green at sight and then felt oddly forlorn when Jane had made the curt announcement that Kathy had changed her mind. She knew Katherine Lacey far too well, or she’d have wondered whether it wasn’t partly because he was Jewish. But that would be too absurd for anyone as liberal as Kath.
“Phil’s membership came up?” Kathy prompted.
“Not formally—just talking about when he did apply this summer. It was perfectly simple, with him the way he is, and you a member.”
“The exception.” They had sat in judgment and found him passable. “The one ‘pet Jew’ we can all use as proof? ‘See, we’re not anti-Semitic.’ ”
“Why, Kathy. I hate that idiocy as much as you do.”
“I know you do. I’m not even thinking you don’t.”
“But then there are the bigoted fools in the club.”
“I remember.”
“After all, a club’s only a social, personal thing.”
Ellen looked at her; Kathy seemed on the verge of— what? Tears? Collapse? She really looked sick. “Quit talking about all this, darling,” Ellen said at last. “Just makes you think about stuff that still rubs deep. Everybody goes through that awhile.”
“I wasn’t thinking of anything like that,” Kathy said. “I wasn't even thinking of the club any more. Or you. Or Phil. Funny, I got thinking about the Springfield Plan.”
“The Sp—”
Kathy began to laugh a little, then a little more. Ellen threw a quick appraising glance at her.
Kathy said, “The one thing I do know about is children. I got thinking how screwed up your little boys and everybody else’s little boys and girls are going to get if they’re taught five days a week that everybody’s just the same and then on Saturday and Sunday they have to leave some of their pals outside the gates while they go into the country club with Papa and Mamma.” She was really laughing now. “All the country clubs, all over.”
“You’re poking fun at me, Kathy!” Ellen saw Tom and a bellboy with their luggage and at once stood up in dignified coolness. During the good-bys, Kathy sounded more cheerful.
Again that night she could not sleep. But somewhere in the dark spinning where she was again talking to Phil and being kissed by Phil and bemoaning the excesses in Phil— somewhere there was one curious, heady new thing, unlike anything she’d ever known.
What kept coming back from her session with Ellen was that one thing. Not anything Ellen had said or she had said; not any points she’d made. Just this one exhilarating funny thing. She hadn’t taken Ellen’s liberalism for granted as she always had before. She had looked at it, into it; she had weighed it and tested it and sized it up. It was like the stretching of muscles. And it was fine.
Bill Jayson said to Phil, “It’s the by-goddest idea for a series this book’s ever run.”
Phil grinned. An hour before, Miss Wales had taken the top carbon of number one in to the art department. Jayson had it with him; as he talked, he thumped it for emphasis, and the careful pedantic turn of his usual speech was absent. “No kidding, Phil, I couldn’t put it down. I meant to give it just a look and hand it over to McAnny for suggestions on pix, but I never moved from my chair.”
“Has he seen it yet?”
Jayson laughed. “No. He’s on a rush layout against deadline. I’m going to hide this till he’s made it—he’s in for a collapse.” His eyes gleamed. “Boy, I bet he tries a sneak bunt to third with this one.”
Phil laughed with him. “What’ll you decide for artwork, Bill?”
“It’s not going to be easy. Take time. But I see now why you and John wouldn’t give.”
“Photographic treatment your hunch?”
“Sure.” He frowned. “God knows what of.”
“No shots of my kid, now, or my family,” Phil said sternly. “John says I’m hooked for the lead-off. But mind, nobody else.”
“And mind, you stop bossing me around,” Jayson answered equally sternly. Then he grinned. “That’s the trouble with you Christians—aggressive. Pure compensation, of course.”
From the first, Phil had liked Bill Jayson; now he admired him. The whole damn point in one wisecrack, he thought, but before he could transfer thought to speech, the door opened and Anne came in. She saw the manuscript in Jayson’s hand.
“So whatever the mystery was,” she said cheerily, “the unveiling has begun. When’s my turn, Phil?”
“You?” Jayson said. “You interested in anything but your own department?”
“You rat,” she said pleasantly. “My secretary’s in a frenzy over the wonderful plot of Mr. Green’s series.”
“Plot?” Phil liked the attention he was getting.
Anne said, “She keeps saying ‘plot’ and won’t tell. What plot there can be in a series on antisemitism escapes me, but I have been needled long enough. So give over.”
Jayson looked to Phil, and Phil said, “Sure.” He gave the manuscript to Anne, and she looked at it. She read the title, glanced up, smiled at Phil, and then began to read. Both men remained quiet for a moment and then in low voices continued their discussion about possible illustration. Anne read on. As he talked, Phil found himself aware of her reading, knew when she turned a page, knew when she stopped to light a cigarette. He realized suddenly that he wanted very much that she should like it. John’s final O.K. of the finished series had warmed him— “It’s got it, Phil.” His mother, reading the first two, had gone into her queer little stream of sotto voce commentary—“Imagine!” … “How dreadful, Phil!” … “Not really, it’s barbarous.” Several times there’d even been the quick dabs at her eyes over some paragraph or other, filling him with curiosity since she was obviously in some part—he could tell by the page she was at —which he’d set down unemotionally or coldly. Then he’d gone over to stand behind her, reading over her shoulder, to discover what it was that had moved her. But he’d never been able to tell; his mother’s reactions to words and thoughts he'd written were so personal, so unpredictable, that the only message he could get from them while she read was that this time was not one of his failures.
Now he was held by Anne’s continuing silence. Soon Jayson saw he was preoccupied and stopped talking. Only when their voices stopped did Anne look up. She’d read half a dozen pages.
“Murder,” she said to Phil. “I wish I’d thought of it first.” She shook her head. “It’s hot, all right.”
“Thanks.” She was trying to phrase something else; he waited.
“It explains some things I never quite understood about you, Phil. Like Flume Inn coming as a shock instead of a sure-the-usual-dirty-trick. I put it down to things being different out West.”
“I didn’t give things away much, did I?” he asked anxiously.
“Fooled me. I did want to say a couple of times, ‘For heaven’s sake, how’ve you lived this long, spending this much juice on it all the time?’ ” Phil looked embarrassed. “But then I remembered getting into a steam myself over some series I’d been living with, so I let it go at that.”
“Remember the juvenile-delinquency stuff you did?” Jayson twitted her. He turned to Phil dismally. “Couldn’t eat lunch with her for a month without a load of statistics on child prostitutes.”
“I quit harping on it once the job ended, didn’t I?” She turned reflectively to Phil. “This must have been dizzy, though, kind of mirror-within-mirror stuff. Watching yourself as Jewish but at the same time watching yourself as Christian-watching-Jew.”
“At the start. Then it just boiled down to a guy taking his first real look around.”
“Just the same,” she said, “if everybody acted it out just one day a year, it’d be curtains to the thing overnight, I’ll bet.”
“Not so sure,” Jayson said. “That business of everybody needing to feel superior to somebody else.”
“Right.” Anne shrugged. “I feel superior. To anti-semites.” She got up. “Well, I got to get back.” She went to the door and then suddenly turned back to them, laughing. “No wonder Minify wouldn’t listen to the screams of the Brown crowd.”
Brown and Wheeling, Phil knew, was the large advertising agency that handled Smith’s account. He knew also that Anne as a major editor went to periodic meetings with them and held most advertising men in low esteem as a result.
“Screams about what?” he asked.
“A couple of weeks back, John told them this would be the big spot for the first May ad—practically the whole page, with just a ten-on-two panel for rest-of-issue copy. They always need four years to be bright in, so they beseeched the boss for the first article. Nope. A synopsis. Nope. The title of the series. Nope.”
“Same treatment the art department got,” Jayson said. He stretched. “Get the hell out of here, Dettrey, will you? The author and I have to bat around some ideas for pix.”
For the rest of the week, Bert McAnny avoided Phil. As they passed each other in the corridors or waiting room, even when they met in the sanctuary of the washroom, he made no reference to the series at all, never dropped in for the usual discussion of possible shots. The impression he gave was that the series did not exist.
Phil had expected virtuous reiteration that it had never made any difference, but this gauche silence he would never have foretold. He found it at first obvious, then ridiculous, finally contemptible. The hell with McAnny.
The flabbiness which always followed a sustained period of work was bogging him down more than usual. It was as if his last reliable props had buckled. He no longer kept regular hours at the office; he stayed up later and later each night, reading detective stories, books about the war, novels.
Interims were always nerve-racking. Soon there’d be some new assignment—no matter what it was, he felt he’d never be able to work up any enthusiasm or energy for it. But that, too, was old stuff. That, too, happened in interims.
He saw Professor Lieberman again. This was one of the good things which would survive the writing of a series. Lieberman greeted Phil’s recital of “my own research project” with dry, rapid questions, as if they were colleagues in a laboratory. “Yet every antisemite you met,” he remarked comfortably at the end, “would swear in court that ‘Jewishness’ is something demonstrable. Your Mr. Calkins at Flume Inn, for example, is positive he faced a Jew that day —he’s got eyes, hasn’t he?” They both laughed. Later, as Phil was leaving, Lieberman said, in his imperturbable voice, “I’ll never hold the truth against you, Phil. I’m a stout believer in the rights of majorities.”
All through these days there was one new facet to his life. For the first time a manuscript he’d written was in the office of a great publishing house, up for consideration as a book. Minify had asked permission to send it over to somebody he knew, and Phil had nervously assented. When Miss Mittelson at last phoned to say Mr. Minify’s publishing friend was in the office, could he come in, he found his pulse quickening. He’d never confessed until this moment how much he wanted to see his name on the spine of a book. During the introductions he was too tense to catch the publisher’s full name; through the meeting Minify called him “Jock.” Jock’s smiling face told him the decision while they shook hands. Behind his desk, Minify’s smile corroborated it.
“It’s had four readings already, Mr. Green,” the publisher said. “No dissenting report at all. We’d like to put it on our fall list.”
“Fine.” He hoped he sounded merely pleased and businesslike. “Need some padding, won’t it? It’s only about thirty-five thousand words.”
“Yes, we’d wondered if you mightn’t have more material which you’d left out of the articles.”
Phil didn’t want to sound too ready with suggestions. For a time he listened while the two men agreed that such a book ought to have a fair sale at worst, possibly even “hit the list.”
“More and more people seem interested in these problem books,” Jock said. “Look at Strange Fruit or Under Cover.”
“I looked at them,” John said, “before I decided to get this series written.” They all laughed.
“Matter of fact,” Phil now offered, “I’d even been wondering about writing a sixth for our own series.” Minify looked up. “Sort of post-mortem stuff—what I call ‘the unwinding.’ Kind of fascinates me, the way it runs to pattern.”
“Interesting idea, that,” the publisher said. “Certainly for the book.” Minify was looking at Phil reflectively. Jock stood up. “Could you give us a rough draft of the new material, or a synopsis? Oh, yes, and have you an agent, Mr. Green?”
“Yes to the first, no to the second. Agents aren’t much good for articles. I’ll get one for a book, though.”
Jock smiled. “Better to have the publisher picked first, on a book like this. Sure as hell, they’d have sent it to the wrong house and pinned a neat handicap to the book to start with.”
“How do you mean, ‘wrong house’?” Phil asked.
“From the point of view of the book’s reception; wrong, that way.”
Phil glanced at John. He was looking at Phil.
“It’s just better publishing to have a house like ours do a book of this type,” Jock went on.
“Why?” John asked. He wasn’t looking at Phil now. He was staring at the desk.
“If one of the Jewish houses put their imprint on it, people might think it was just special pleading, and of course, it’s not.”
“Jewish houses?” Phil asked. “You mean Jewish publishing houses?”
“You must mean,” Minify said lazily, “whatever firm publishes The Jewish Daily Forward.” To Phil he said, “It’s a daily newspaper, printed in Yiddish.”
The publisher looked at him, ready to laugh if he were smiling.
“You see,” Phil put in, smoothly, as if he and John were rehearsing dialogue from a script and he were ready now to take over for the curtain line, “Mr. Minify and I never heard of ‘Christian publishing houses’ and ‘Jewish publishing houses’ except in the Third Reich.” He smiled. “Even firms run by men who are Jewish—we just call them ‘publishing houses.’ In a way, that’s what the whole series is about.”
There was a pause. Jock was bewildered. He turned back to Minify. “It’s just a phrase in the book trade, John.”
“ ‘Jewish bankers’ is just a phrase, too,” Minify answered. “And ‘Jewish newspaper owners’ and ‘Jewish Communists’—just phrases.”
Phil spoke to Jock. “My verbal acceptance before,” he said. “Would that be binding? Or could I change my mind?”
“You’re perfectly, free, Mr. Green. I release you, of course. But there’s some misunderstanding here. I was simply thinking of the best imprint for your book.”
“Yes,” Phil said. “I know.”
“At least you’ll think it over? Good Lord, man, an unfortunate locution at most, that’s all it was. John’s known me for years—”
“Sure, Jock,” Minify said, “but now I hear it if a man doesn’t just say plain ‘bankers’ or ‘Communists’ or ‘publishing houses.’ ”
No sooner did Phil get back to the office than his telephone rang.
“John, Phil. I’m sending it over to another house. O.K.?”
“You bet.”
“There are a dozen good ones. Somebody else’ll grab it. Care who?”
Phil made a rough sound. “Just so the house is non-sectarian in locution as well as personnel.”
That night, going up the stairs to the apartment, he heard his mother’s voice, raised and shrill. Never once had she talked to Tom that way. He braced himself against whatever unpleasantness waited. He opened the door and said, “Oh, hello.” Belle just looked at him.
“… the whole way,” his mother was saying to her. “I never thought any child of mine could possibly change into the typical jingo reactionary.”
Phil said, “Mom, you look too excited. You’re not supposed to get this excited.”
“I’m no good,” Belle explained dryly. “I’ve let Dick and our crowd infect me with race hatred and religious hatred. Then to justify and bolster my new position, I’ve fallen deeper and deeper from grace.” She was controlling it, but the fury was deep.
“It’s true,” Mrs. Green said. “Sarcasm doesn’t change it.”
“I’ve been turning against labor, boasting about my glorious American ancestry, hating foreigners and radicals, the works.”
“Mom, sit down and cut this,” he ordered, and pulled up a chair behind Mrs. Green. To Belle he said, “I told you to can it. She’s got to avoid excitement and exertion.”
“And it’s revolting that you couldn’t keep Phil’s secret,” Mrs. Green went on, her voice sharp and unlovely, “and had to scamper around like a frightened rabbit telling everybody.”
Belle looked at Phil coldly. “You might have asked me before you started something that was bound to involve me, instead of just telling me after you’d begun.”
“Oh, hell,” Phil said without vigor. “So they finally got around to asking you, hey?” He smiled cheerfully.
“Even Tom had the—the guts,” Mrs. Green said as if no other word could fit her need, “to stick it and not go sniveling.”
“It was Mrs. Naismith herself, I told you,” Belle said in exasperation. She turned to Phil angrily. “Wife of the president of the firm. Right at her own party with twelve people there.” She closed her eyes in recollection. “ ‘So fascinating, Belle dear,’ she said to me in that tin voice of hers.” She looked at Phil with fury. “ ‘What’s fascinating?’ I asked her. Then there was this little silence while everybody listened. ‘Why, your interesting foreign background,’ she said. ‘But I can’t see why you didn’t tell us all these years—Jewish people are always so clever and interesting.’ ”
Phil laughed.
“So Belle tried,” Mrs. Green said, “to turn it all into a great joke on her peculiar brother. She fell all over herself, I gather, betraying your secret.”
“I told you on the phone I’d have to if—”
“Where’s Tom?” Phil asked his mother.
“I sent him to do his homework,” his mother said. “I certainly don’t want him to hear Belle make this exhibition of herself.”
“I’m going to see the kid.” He said to Belle offensively, “Your life’s saved—I’ve turned in the series. Your disgrace is over.”
Long after Belle and his mother had come to whatever terms they could come to, he stayed out of the living room. With Tom chattering beside him, he looked through the evening paper. His mind kept drifting away from the news. Tonight he might write letters. Always during a long series he fell behind on all personal mail. He opened the top drawer of his bureau where letters to be answered mingled with handkerchiefs and socks. He picked up the one his sister Mary had sent him weeks ago from California. He glanced through it. “… and somehow it’s such a sweet thing for you to do, Phil, sort of trying it on to see if it fits or hurts or what for yourself. Even if it doesn’t make a good series, it’ll be something inside you for the rest of your life, and I kind of wonder if that in itself isn’t worth the messy parts. As for Mamma’s news about you and Kathy, it made me just kind of weepy to think of you being happy again. …”
He put the letter back into the drawer.
“Wish the Coast wasn’t so far off, Tom,” he said.
“So you could go there?”
“No. But Aunt Mary might get to come here if it weren’t.”
“Yeah. Say, Dad, couldn’t you take me to a movie tonight?”
“School night? You kidding?”
“Oh.”
“Scram out of here, will you? I’d like a nap till dinner.”
“O.K.” He picked up the jeep and three tanks he’d been playing with. “You lonesome for Aunt Mary?”
“At times. Aren’t you, and for Tip and Sky and the boys you used to play with out there?”
Tom nodded. But there was no bemoaning the past in eight-year-olds. “You lonesome for Kathy too, Dad?”
“Sure.”
“You had a fight, Gram said.”
Phil looked at him. “That’s right. Run along, what do you say.” There was no question in the tone, and Tom disappeared. Phil lay down. The twisting and gnarling and squeezing that could go on in a man who’d been through death and war and wounding, merely at a phrase in a letter, a child’s offhand catechism!
He’d been too righteous, too demanding; he’d had too little patience and too thin a capacity to allow for Kathy’s confusion and womanish softness under sudden pressure. Kathy wasn’t another Belle. If he’d have given her more time to see it, she’d have stiffened up, too. “You don’t have to be a sainted character.”
At once then, words, phrases, the revealing hesitation, the quick cry to Tom, the velvet resistance to this mess and that inconvenience—from the raw, deep places where they’d lodged they paced forth now, one by one, in gray procession.
But damn it, whatever I did, it wouldn’t have been any use. People have to see it themselves or not. You can’t do it for them. And if they give in to it the way Belle did and it digs in deeper and deeper? Families could split apart—
“Telegram, Dad.” Tom’s shout startled Phil. He hadn’t heard the doorbell. He took it and tore it open in the involuntary haste telegrams always aroused in him. It was from Dave:
ROTTEN NEWS ABOUT YOU TWO. BIG THANKS TO YOU AND ANNE. ARRIVING TWENTY SECOND AND WILL BUY YOU BOTH NINE GRATEFUL MARTINIS .
He read it twice. Good old Dave, going to promote a little marriage idea of his own. Anne’s face came to him— its handsome, sharp planes, the reddish frame of hair, the lively eyes, the intelligence and bitterness and restlessness behind them. And instantly he wanted only Kathy; savagely and insanely he wanted only Kathy.
In spite of the continuing sleeplessness, the stay at Placid had done some good, she thought, appraising herself in the mirror. The old black evening dress still looked all right. She was going up to Darien for the night and Sunday. Jane was entertaining an elderly big shot and needed her.
Placid was already a queer, hazy memory, though she’d only been back three days. When she tried to recall the processes by which she’d got to Phil’s voice ruefully talking to her, she failed completely. But she could remember clearly how pathetic Ellen and all her works had suddenly seemed against that one picture of the Mannings taking their three boys into the club after a week of Springfield-Planning them. El and Tom Manning might be at the dinner party tonight. Would Ellen still be a touch haughty?
She locked her suitcase and started out. In the living room, she looked automatically about her. She’d given Claudia the week end off. No forgotten cigarettes smoking in an ash tray, no windows up. On the piano her music stood open, and she went to it and closed it. The sonata she’d played for Phil. She glanced over to the fire-place. Dark, forbidding, wind-swept, the landscape looked gloomily down at her. She turned quickly and left.
The elderly big shot dismayed her at sight. She’d hoped he’d at least be charming and attractive. Vaguely she’d read or heard of Lockhart Jones during the war or even before from Bill. He was tall, gray, about sixty-five, with an old man’s phlegm already in his voice. His chin and nose were sharp, the lengthened ear lobes were pointed with age, and his stainless teeth in even perfection told of dentures. The Mannings were already there, and the Tay Carsons. Jane and Harry said the Trippens were coming up from Washington for a week. Lockhart Jones was important to Harry; that much she caught in the first few minutes of cocktails and talk. Probably a client with big business for a corporation-law firm.
The, talk centered in his account of a recent “swing around Europe and the Middle East.” He seemed to have connections everywhere, to know all sorts of government officials, industrialists, army brass. Suddenly she remembered that Bill had had some dealings with him on foreign exchange and didn’t like him. “Finger in any old kind of pie,” Bill had grumbled. Dimly she seemed to know that he was a man who never limited himself to one line but was mentioned in half a dozen deals a year. Bill had said aviation and steel, she thought, but now Jones was talking about new railroads in Europe and a copper mine in South America. “Money, money, money; profit, profit, profit,” Kathy commented to herself, and turned to Jane.
Mr. Jones was giving everybody a tip about investing in some company he and two associates had just acquired. Harry and the other men were attentive, and for a moment nobody else was talking.
“Over-the-counter, but it’ll be on the Curb next month,” Mr. Jones said, the expectancy of quick profit clear in his voice. “Sound setup now. None of the chosen people.”
Kathy saw Ellen’s quick distaste, saw Jane’s eyebrows rise. A dart of revulsion nipped her. Ellen said nothing. Jane heard the doorbell and got to her feet, and Kathy just sat. The talk went on.
What was there to do, she thought, and remembered her helplessness at the hotel in Placid. There was just nothing, without making a fool of yourself. In a fight with Bill, in a town-hall meeting, you could object, argue, denounce. But with a stranger in a private group, you just averted your eyes, in a way of speaking, as from an unfortunate smear of grease on the cheerful face of your dinner neighbor.
All through the cocktails and the new arrivals and small chatter at the table, despondency held her. It was queer to feel so inadequate, sort of obediently toeing the mark. She looked about her. It was a beautiful dining room, brilliant with crystal and silver, the flash of jewelry, the black and white of dinner jackets. “Between them, Bill and Vassar didn’t succeed in making you conservative.” Uncle John’s words came back once again. “But they had more luck making you conventional.” The s's of Vassar and succeed and conservative boiled up, sibilant and offensive.
She seemed to have lost all her old bearings about herself. Her old calmness about what she was and what she felt had apparently deserted her for good. The episode with Bill kept coming back even after she’d reassured herself completely about it; phrases from Phil’s article kept coming back; her brief triumph of feeling right about the two girls kept plaguing her. Each one was like a shadow falling across her mind. She kept dispelling them one day and they kept returning the next, their dim forms inching over her once more. She looked unhappily around her.
Jane was listening to Lockhart Jones on her right. Ellen was talking politics to Nick Trippen. All around the table there were the unperturbed faces, the low voices, the mysterious calmness of people at ease with themselves and the world. She alone, keeping half track of what Tay Carson was saying, was worried and uncertain. Mr. Jones was beginning some funny story. His voice had risen. Around the table sentences politely halted in midstream.
“So you hand a thousand dollars to each of them and ship them off to Africa,” he was saying, “and with thirteen million coons that’s thirteen billions, and the kikes go running after it, so we’ll be rid of all of them at one swoop.” He laughed uproariously. One of the men laughed, but there was silence from everybody else. Kathy saw Jane, Ellen, Harry in a montage of their annoyance or disgust. It was one of those appalled silences, no doubt about that. Nobody there liked Mr. Jones.
“Fell flat,” Mr. Jones boomed. “Guess it’s not new at that,” and affably went on to something else. The halted sentences all about her were picked up. The maids came in with the square silver dishes of vegetables.
Kathy waited for the waves of heat to stop running through her. She turned to the left and picked up the oversize serving spoon and fork. She put food on her plate and knew she could not eat it. Illness was in her, and shame for all of them. They despised him and they kept quiet. They were well bred and polite, so they kept quiet. Just as she did. Not making fusses was also part of the gentleman’s agreement. To rise and leave the room was not in her knees and muscles; to call him to account was not in her vocal cords and larynx.
At Placid, with Ellen, she’d thought she was changing. It wasn’t true—it couldn’t ever be true. The ‘beautiful woman in Rumson’ wouldn’t risk a scene. Phil, Phil, you must be right.