KATHY THOUGHT, HE’S NOT very happy. It’s more than just being new here and not knowing people. Across the fake-marble table in the restaurant, she leaned forward to the match he struck for her cigarette.
As she drew the flame into the tip, she looked up over it. His face was attentive as it had been all the time she’d been talking, but the puzzled or even critical look that had tightened it at times wasn’t there now. She straightened up and inhaled deeply as if this were the first cigarette of the day. A small paroxysm of coughing seized her.
“I smoke too much,” she said.
She saw him glance at the ash tray filled with butts, his and hers. It was an indicator of elapsed time as well as corroboration of her comment, but he didn’t offer health advice as some men would, nor did he give any sign that he knew it was late or that he cared.
Ever since they’d left Aunt Jessie’s, he’d led her on to talk about herself. Apart from one interlude when he’d told her in quick colorless sentences about his wife’s death, he’d seemed truly and wholly interested in holding the talk on her. Whenever she’d come to some stopping place and say, “Well, that’s enough about me,” he’d be ready with some question that sent her on again. He gave her an unfamiliar feeling of being a listener who took an active role in his listening; he wasn’t merely neutral but seemed to take sides for or against each segment of her character as he saw it through her recital. When she talked about her childhood, for instance, and the old longing to have a “nice” house like other kids, he nodded with sympathy. But when she was telling him about her marriage to Bill and the way they’d lived, he looked withdrawn. He liked the fact that at Vassar she’d “fallen in with the radical group—we worshiped Roosevelt.” He looked bleak when she said she’d been “pretty good at the endless entertaining a banker’s life depends on.”
It was as if he were voting for or against her on each phase of her story. It could have been annoying, but though her mind marked it, her emotions didn’t engage. She saw it only as a trait he was unconsciously revealing, about on a par with the fact that though he needed a haircut, his fingernails were well trimmed and extremely clean.
“Your parents,” he prompted. “How’d they take it about Aunt Jessie’s house and Vassar and the pretty clothes?”
“They were pleased, mostly,” she said. “I guess it ground into my father a little—just highlighting his own failure. But he said he wanted me and my sister Jane to have the things that would make us happy.”
“And did they?”
She nodded and thought for a while and then nodded again. “You know, the old idea that privation is good for the character? I don’t think it worked that way for me at all. Looking back, now, I don’t.”
He waited. She could feel him receptive to the mood she’d fallen into.
“I think when I didn’t have the things my friends did, that then I was all full of snobbish misery. But when Aunt Jessie handed Vassar over and let me ask people to their apartment week ends—why, I think I quit being nasty and snobbish right off.” She smiled at him. “I just felt easy and right.”
“The old business of security.”
“Maybe. Do you think I’m funny, praising myself this way?”
He shook his head, but remained silent. He looked down at his hand, stretched the five fingers wide, then closed them into a fist, then stretched them wide, as if he were making some important test of their muscular reaction. She watched his fingers. About what could he feel insecure? Not about his talent or his growing reputation. Uncle John said he would be one of the major writers of the country in a few years. But something was empty in his life—she could feel him hungry for staying on here, talking.
Perhaps that was what made her pry into the crevices of her memory for answers to his questions. With other men major landmarks and dates were enough—never the shadowy substance of childhood and adolescence. But this Schuyler Green or Phil Green would not be bought off with her usual quick brush strokes of biography. “Then I got married to Bill Pawling and for a while it was grand and then it didn’t work out, so we got divorced in a friendly sort of way, and still see each other every so often at parties and things.” That gliding recital would not have satisfied the man across from her. He was still absorbed in whatever he was thinking. His silence made her uncomfortable.
“Would you hit that waiter over the head,” she said, “and get me some water?”
“Sure. I forgot.” He tapped his spoon against his empty glass and then pointed down into it. He watched her drink. She had been almost arch as she’d asked for the water.
“You’re looking all dubious again,” she said.
“Am I?”
“Every once in a while, you sort of stare at the words coming out of my mouth, as if you didn’t quite understand English and needed help to get the strange sounds.”
She was perceptive, Phil thought. His face must show the bewilderment that struck him when she went back every so often, as she just had, to that voice and manner. She’d fallen into it, also, when she’d been talking about her marriage to Pawling and the beautiful apartment and the dinner parties—“I got so I could give a dinner for twelve with my eyes shut.” She’d said she had finally found that sort of thing artificial, dull, but the inevitable way the brittle social cloak fell upon her again made him wonder if she really had. “I can’t quite make you out,” he said.
“Me? I’m pretty easy to understand.”
“Parts of you don’t seem to go with other parts—Lord knows, I’m not all of a piece; nobody ever is.” His voice took on anxiety. “Please don’t think I’m sitting here approving and disapproving. I’m just damn interested.”
“I don’t,” she said. “Or maybe I do. Anyway, that’s enough about me. I feel as if you’d interviewed me.” He laughed, and she thought again how nice-looking he was. Not handsome but, what was better, immediately appealing. “I wish I could draw you out the way you do me.”
“There’s not so much more about me,” he said. “You’ve got the main stuff.” He lit another cigarette for her. “Are you engaged to anybody now?” he asked abruptly. She shook her head. “Or in love or anything?”
“Not specially.” He was waiting as if he wanted her to amplify that. She said, “Are you?”
“Not anything.” He made it unequivocal.
They smiled at each other. She looked at her watch. He saw it and signaled the waiter.
“I have to get up awfully early,” she said as if she needed to apologize for thinking of home at one in the morning.
She couldn’t get to sleep, anyway. She thought of the whole evening and the pleasantness of beginnings. How wonderful it would be to find somebody who wouldn’t matter less each time! So often getting to know a new man was a disheartening business of revising downward from the first impression. She was so ready for something on a more rewarding level than just “dates” and the ever-present will-we or won’t-we.
If that question could only lie dormant—but it never did. Even though she was “free” and “a modern girl”—those two handy arguments—love affairs were just not her style. She didn’t ponder the why of that. That’s the way she was.
She’d never been particularly introspective, not since those college sessions of rooting around in the lumpy soil of everybody’s “character.” As an adult, she’d fall into self-inquiry only over some specific problem which needed solution. She’d spent many an hour trying to see why her marriage had become so empty, but that was introspection, for the sake of decision. When she’d reached the decision, she’d been able to go to Bill with clarity and say they ought to part.
She’d never been cruel enough to say, “I don’t love you.”
She’d never been rude enough to say, “I can’t listen to one more story about debentures and bonds and foreign exchange.” She simply knew there was no way to live with Bill and not listen. Unlike many other bankers, Bill was articulate. He enjoyed talking. He enjoyed detail. He enjoyed “sharing his work with her.”
She merely said, instead, that they'd developed into people who were incompatible on too many fronts. She merely said, “We seem to disagree automatically about everything.” He knew it was true.
“All the unessentials between us, Bill, are right, but all the essentials are wrong.”
“You mean about politics.”
“Not politics—just, oh, we’re just drifting farther apart every year about everything. Even a baby.”
“I’ll be taken in the next draft,” he said angrily. “I’m not going to put that on you all alone. That’s a heel’s trick.”
She could see again his outraged stiffness, the dignity with which he spoke cliché after cliché. If he only knew it, she could have found stimulation in disagreement if there hadn’t been the clothy phrases, the awful predictability.
“Darling, wouldn’t you just once say ‘Roosevelt’ or ‘the President’?”
“What? Damn it, Kathy, that man makes monkeys out of you liberals.”
There’d been the way his face would light whenever she talked against Communism or the Soviet scorn for “the imperialistic war.”
“At least we’re on the same side about the Commies,” he’d said once, with a kind of comradely gaiety.
“We’re not!”
“But you always—”
“I’m against it as a principle—the slavery to the party line—the killing of freedom—but I’m not against it as The Red Menace the way you are.”
“It comes down to the same thing.”
“It doesn’t. It just doesn’t. Oh, never mind.” It was one of the times when she despised him. He’d never see the difference between her opposition and his Red-baiting.
Everything between them came to differences. Not everything. They both loved their apartment, their week-end cottage in Darien, tennis, dancing, the unessentials. But everything else came to differences. Isolationism for him; intervention for her. A loathing of Hitlerism for her; a loathing of “those Heinies” for him. A disgust with Pegler for her; a “well, he sure gets the goods on those racketeers” for him. McCormick, the Daily News, the poll tax, Lindbergh, even books, plays—always he was for and she against or she for and he against.
“Any writer can just put dirty words in a book . ..”
“It’s time this country showed those unions …”
“I see where Eleanor’s on the go again …”
“Big deal on foreign exchange. Let me spot in some background …”
The boredom, the boredom, the screaming boredom.
It was strange, sad, that a marriage could ratchet apart the way theirs had. There’d never been much overt quarreling. But for their last two or three years, they’d been inching further and further apart from each other, like hostile lovers under the shared and pleasant blanket.
Of all this she’d given Phil no account. She’d seen from his eyes that he’d felt no conviction behind what she did say. But that she couldn’t help.
Phil chucked his hat and overcoat at the day bed in the living room and then went over to the fireplace. He had no intention of going to bed. He was keyed up, but not with the old tight restlessness. Meeting Kathy, having her accept his suggestion for dinner tomorrow night as he left her at the door of her apartment house—the whole evening had shot a tingling expectancy into him. He glanced speculatively at the piled logs below him. He felt luxurious; he struck a match and lit the paper under them. Then he stood back and regarded the flames.
In a way, it was Katherine Lacey who had handed him his first assignment on the new job. Obscurely, that pleased him. People who “thought up ideas” for books or articles always felt themselves the ultimate proprietors of them; she would watch for his series as if she, not Minify, were his editor.
A drive of aggression uncoiled in him; he would find the way to do this series well if he had to pick at his brains with tweezers. There must be some compelling lead, some dramatic device to humanize it, so it would be read. He went to his desk. The logical start was to make notes of whatever general knowledge he had of anti-Jewish feeling in America. Under separate headings, he began to block out the segments he knew would need research:
Antisemitism in Business
antisemitism in Labor
antisem—social
antisem—housing, hotels, clubs
a.s.—violence, hoodlums, etc.
a.s.—schools, professions
a.s.—growth, counter-efforts like anti-bias bills.
Link up with growth of anti-alien feeling, anti-Negro, anti-Catholic, all minority. (Threat to U.S. most serious, not to Jew.)
He sat back and looked at the list. This was already quite a revelation. That he, before special inquiry, should carry in his mind enough information, fact, rumor, to be able to make so comprehensive a list was proof that antisemitism was seeping into all the arteries of daily life. Right there, jotted down in a few minutes, waiting only for documentation, was a picture of the scope and depth of the thing. If he failed, it would not be for thinness of material. Two or three weeks of research would swamp him.
And swamp the readers of Smith’s Weekly as well? He was back again at his own barricade. But this time, confidence was in him.
He let his mind wander easily. He might take some anti-semitic community and angle everything he wrote to show the damage, not to the Jews in it, but to the community itself —a sort of psychiatric approach about the effects of hatred on the hater. No, that was even worse than the idea he’d had in the afternoon—preachy, hortatory, even surer to bore the reader.
Cheerfully he abandoned the notion and let his mind explore further, as a general on the winning side examines the terrain of a future operation, weighing this point of attack against that, balancing the virtues against the faults, estimating the desire against the probable outcome.
It was two-thirty when he gathered his notes together and gave up. His list made a good start; he’d get the angle soon and show Miss Lacey a thing or two about journalism.
In bed, he lit one last cigarette and thought about her. She was interesting; with other girls he had met, he always sat stiffly through the inevitable anecdotes of family and childhood, but with her he’d really wanted to hear, to visualize everything. He tried now to remember each thing she’d said and to equate his opposed emotions about her.
But soon his thinking moved away from her and became only the unnamable longing which had been the steady accompaniment to his last seven years. It was an unprecise need, to which the specifics of sex and companionship were only tangential. Partly it was hunger for a tightly shared life once more with a woman he trusted and admired; it was also an uneasy sadness that Tom should be an only child without brothers and sisters; in it, too, was sharp distaste for the picture of himself as “a bachelor.” A reaching toward the future stirred him. Sometime he might again find the continuing pattern he’d known with Betty. There’s always a chance, he thought, and switched off the lamp clamped to the headboard of his bed.
With the dark, long-dulled memories of Betty stood instantly about him, like watchdogs snarling off this new hope, ready to set upon it, tear it, shred it, should it really move forward to claim him.
Phil lay motionless and was again back across the massive distance of seven years and the stretch of a continent. In California, in December of 1938, Betty had died; the whole month had been a time of her dying. The baby was already a year old; all the associative fears of childbirth pain and possible death had long been washed clear of his mind. And then the hemorrhaging had suddenly started, the endless transfusions, the pinker cheeks of one day yielding to the waxy ones of the next. The pendulum of hope and fear had swung deeper and deeper in his heart, grooving it forever in the nameless arc of loss.
“Quit it, quit it.” The words gritted in his mind, as they used to grit through his throat when he said them half aloud in those first weeks after her death. His own voice, sounding suddenly in his ears, would shock him, yet there had been a physical need, apparently, to break the unending silence of his bed, where they had lain together, talking, laughing, making love, making long plans. That wide bed had been a focal point of his torment, and, for a long time, each night he would become obsessed with his awareness of the empty half of it. Then he would angrily plan to order a new bed the very next morning, a narrow bed, a single bed. His mother had come to live with him and the baby, and unknowingly she had blocked this simple escape. He could never manage to announce, “I’m ordering a new bed; it’ll be delivered in a couple of days; it’s for my room.”
His mother, his sisters, his friends, praised him for “bearing up so well.” The truth had been that he was charged with a grief so raucous that he’d had to silence it complete or yell all of it to the world. He had worked harder than he had ever done, had started a new article the day he turned in a completed one, had traveled, read, told himself a thousand times that “time heals everything.” Endlessly time had mocked him. But at last the first savage grief and longing had given way to a pain more patient. In a sense this new pain had been more frightening because of its quieter, more durable characteristic.
The evenings had continued, each of them, to be an assault on his decent courage. That moment when the house had quieted down, Tommy long since asleep and his mother finally through with the clatter of dishes and soft slapping of the refrigerator door—that moment still had remained the signal of the empty time ahead before he could say good night and go off to his room. That necessary empty time to be got through—it seemed a thing, tangible, a chunk of time sitting there in the room, an obstacle and an offense. As he forced himself to make talk with his mother, about the baby, about books or politics, the knowledge that it was his mother, and not Betty, who was there to share his house and his evenings would rasp through his nerves until he hated her unruffled gentleness.
Unconsciously perhaps, he had begun frittering away his daytime working hours, so that he should be forced to write at night. It was a good plan. The manuscript in his typewriter became a reliable contrivance, a mechanism down which, each evening, he could cram that offensive chunk of time as into a meat grinder. The thin ribbons of typed words were the end products of that grinding down. As the chunk grew steadily smaller, he would feel less afraid of it, and when his mother would say good night and leave him, he could feel a gratitude that she had been unresentful at being ignored.
“It’s harder for people like us, Phil,” she had once said, without preamble. “Because there’s no loophole.”
“I know.” He did, exactly and without discussion. The softening of the blow that was for people who believed in some reunion after death was not for him. He never felt that he was an irreligious man, for he had too much sureness that somewhere, still beyond the reach of pondering and searching minds, must lie the great synthesis of life and all its forces. But like his agnostic father and mother, he had always held all organized religions to be wistful evasions from the loneliness and insecurity of that pondering. When the first hours of Betty’s death encircled him, he had known she was gone from him finally and forever, with no reprieve.
“Well, quit it, come on, quit it now.” This time he sat up, switched on the light. He was not in California seven years ago; he was here in this small New York room, in this new narrow bed (bought so many years after the need for it had left him). He gazed about him; he reached out and touched the wall with his elbow. But the old space was in his mind again, the vastness and emptiness and loneliness.
He lit another cigarette and steered his thoughts back to the list he’d made. But the assignment was dead now; he could not force it alive. He put the cigarette out, turned out the light again, and was at once asleep.
Rain was blowing against the tall gray window in the dim room as he woke. For a moment he felt he had only dozed; then he saw that it was morning. Eagerness washed along his nerves, as last night when he had left Kathy. For a moment he could not characterize this unfamiliar mood. He regarded the inner quality of this waking as if it were something in a showcase before him. Good Lord, he thought, imagine waking up feeling good.
Ignoring slippers and bathrobe, he went to the bathroom for his shower. The full-bodied rush of city water was still new and pleasing; its battering left him brisk. He was glad to be alive.
While he shaved, Tommy came in, perched on the edge of the bathtub, and began his usual chattering. From time to time Phil glanced down at him. This tall thin boy was such a good-looking kid. He had Betty’s cleft chin and small even teeth, but his height, his dark eyes and straight nose were Phil’s.
“How old will I have to be, Dad, before I can start shaving?” But before Phil could answer, Tommy was considering how old he’d be before he could fly a plane, then how old before he’d be in the Air Corps. In mixed amusement and surprise Phil listened to the tumble of technical talk about firing power, flying range, rockets, radar. Were all boys like this today, he wondered. In 1917, when he himself was eight, had he had so lethal a vocabulary, been so conscious of the other war? He decided not. There were no radios then, no Lifes and Looks—no newsreels, no avalanche of comic books about martial daredevils. For him during that war there had been only his parents’ talk about it, and the newspaper which came each morning. He’d had none of this war’s incessant instruction in the very sounds and colors and sights of killing and dying.
“Couldn’t we, Dad?” Tommy’s voice was insistent. Phil had missed something and tried to remember what it had been.
“Couldn’t we what?”
“Buy a secondhand jeep when they’re really demobilized? Jimmy Kelly says his dad’s going to.”
Phil thought, And the words they use! When I was a kid that age, did I know half the big words he does? Aloud he said, “It’s an idea, anyway, Tommy.”
“Tom.”
“Tom. Sorry.”
At breakfast he caught himself just as he was going to remind Tommy not to read the comic strips at the table. It was hopeless. Better to retire with dignity than go on at the boy. His mother’s face told him she had watched this change of heart.
“Nice time last night?” she asked, and waited for his nod. “That’s good. You really need new people as much as new places. I mean everybody does, not just you.”
“It was a good bunch to start on. We talked some about the articles; I moseyed around making some notes when I got in.”
He told her about the list he had jotted down. They often talked about his work, and generally he valued their discussions as a good sounding board. He respected her opinions about something he’d written. She never said anything was a failure, but when she remained calm and judicious after finishing a manuscript, he knew that it would leave others cold, too. For when his stuff was really moving, her whole manner told him so before she spoke. He would steal quick looks at her while she was reading, and know. Sometimes she would chuckle and shake her head, sometimes her eyes would fill, sometimes she would wince and say, in a half voice, “It’s impossible,” or “Imagine!” Then her face would express so much pride in him as a son and so much response to him as a writer that there was no room for doubt about whether he had written well. Now he was not watching her reactions. They were simply talking at the level of preliminaries.
“What’s antisemitism?” Tom asked, without looking up from the comics.
“It’s—” Phil was taken aback by the size and casualness of the question. Tom finished the last strip and shoved the paper aside.
“Antisemitism,” he repeated. “What is that, Dad?”
“Well, let’s see.” He saw Tom’s eyes on him, expectant. The boy knew he would get an answer as he always got an answer. There was never any “when you’re older, I’ll explain” between them. Phil said, “It’s when people don’t like other people just because they’re Jews.”
“Oh.” Tom considered for a second. “Why? Are they bad?”
“Some are, sure. Some aren’t. It’s like everybody else.”
“What are Jews anyhow?”
Phil looked at him thoughtfully. This same unexpected thing had happened on a hundred levels in the last year. A word, a name, a place that Tom had heard over and over without showing the faintest interest would all at once catch at him and become the subject of exhaustive inquiry. Here we go, Phil thought, wondering how to start. If the kid had been given the usual religious training, this would be simpler now.
“Remember last week, you asked about that big church?”
“Sure.”
“And I told you there were lots of different kinds of churches?”
“You and Gram think, it’s prob’ly nature instead, but I can think it’s God if I want and go to one.”
“That’s right. Well, the people that go to that particular church are called Catholics. Then there are people who go to other churches, and they’re called Protestants, and there are others that go to still different ones, and they’re called Jews. Only they call their kind of church synagogues or temples.”
“Oh.” He thought it over. “Then why don’t some people like those?”
“It’s kind of tough to explain.” He shrugged. “Some people hate Catholics, some hate Jews—”
“And nobody hates us ’cause we’re Americans?”
Mrs. Green began to clear the breakfast table. She was going to let him struggle alone.
“No, that’s something different again. You can be an American and a Catholic, or an American and a Protestant, or an American and a Jew. Or you could be French or German or Spanish or any nationality at the same time you’re Catholic or a Protestant or a Jew.”
Tom looked perplexed. Phil had an impulse of flight but he repressed it.
“Look, Tom. One thing is your country, like America, or France or Germany or Russia—all the countries. The flag is different and the uniform is different, the language is different.”
“The airplanes are marked different.” This was interesting talk, his tone said.
“Differently. That’s right. But the other thing is religion if you have any, or your grandfather’s religion, like Jewish or Catholic or Protestant religion. That hasn’t anything to do with the country or the language or the airplanes. Get it?”
“Yep.”
“Don’t ever get mixed up on that. Some people are mixed up.”
“Why?”
“Oh, they talk about the Jewish race, but never about the Catholic race or the Protestant race. Or about the Jewish people, but never about the Protestant people or—”
“Why don’t they?”
Phil searched his mother’s face. It was now impassive and definitely not helpful. He glanced at his watch, and a wave of relief rewarded him.
“Hey, it’s eight-forty.”
Tommy knocked his chair over as he flung himself to his feet. His elbow skittered the newspaper off the table. Tragically he said, “Oh, gosh, I’ll be late for school.”
“We’ll talk some more sometime.”
Tom raced out, heels hammering on the uncarpeted floor past kitchen and bathroom. Phil stretched back in his chair and looked up at Mrs. Green.
“Whew.”
She laughed in wicked enjoyment. Then she said seriously, “It’s all right, Phil. You’re always good with him.”
“He won’t remember a word of it.”
“If he just gets one little sequence fixed, you’ve done enough.”
“What sequence?”
“Just using the three together every time, as a group. Catholic Protestant Jew, like apples pears peaches. That’s a good start.”
“I guess it is. I hadn’t planned it.” He shook his head; his lips pushed out as if he were saying “Whew” again. “That kid’ll wreck me yet.” He poured more coffee and looked at her as if something had occurred to him for the first time.
“Did you and Dad have to go through this sort of stuff with me and the girls?”
“Of course we did. All parents have to if they have definite designs on their children.”
“Meaning about their kids’ prejudices?”
She nodded. “Out there in California the problem was a little special—remember a boy called Petey?”
“Alamacho? Sure, Dave and I and he were The Gang.”
“Well, Dave. Your father and his were such good friends, you boys just would be, too.”
“But Petey?”
“You know the Mexican thing there.”
“Oh, California.” He made a face. “And the Filipino thing and the Chinese and the Nisei and the Negro thing —what a hotbed of a place for kids to grow up in!”
“Every place can be a hotbed. It’s only each house that decides it. Belle and Mary and you never heard any prejudice from Dad or me, even the disguised kind, so you didn’t fall for it in school or anywhere.”
“Mm, I guess.”
“All kids are so decent to start with.” She smiled at him and went back to the dishes. He thought uneasily of Belle and wondered whether his mother also had. He picked the newspaper up from the floor. A headline about the Marine Corps caught his eye.
He read it, and went to his desk. He spread out last night’s penciled notes and read them. He yawned. Ashy and cold, the stuff lay there before him. The promise of future success it had contained only a few hours ago seemed burned out for good.
The house buzzer sounded. He didn’t move. Mail never mattered to him, except when he’d been at camp or overseas. He picked up a pencil. On the sheet headed “Antisemitism in Business,” he idly sketched the insigne of the Marine Corps and beneath it scrupulously began to letter “Semper Fidelis.” As he drew, he thought of Kathy.
Only after he’d joined the Marine Corps in the spring of 1941 had he begun to go out with girls and remain free of an irrational sense of infidelity to Betty. With some of those girls, the evenings had passed in a vague, tentative unconcern about how they would end; with others, he’d been ridden from the first moment with a kind of sullen plan to get through with whatever preliminaries were needed to get them to bed. There was no beauty in it, but there was reassurance. He was young; he was, after all, not the inert man he thought he had become.
“Package for you,” his mother called. She came in with two large Manila envelopes, each one crammed and straining against the red twine twisted around the cardboard button on its flap. Inside were hundreds of clippings from newspapers and magazines.
He began at once to read them, making no exceptions and taking them in the order they came. He made careful notes of names, incidents, dates, committees, entering them below major headings that followed his rough breakdown of subjects. On a separate sheet of paper, on which he printed the word ANGLE, he jotted down fragments of ideas as they came to him. Off and on through the next hours he thought back to his breakfast talk with Tom, thumbing through it, as it were, to see if he could spot some clue that might lead to the solution of his problem. Maybe he could slant the whole series from the point of view of parents anxious to keep bigotry from their own children.
Before he finished formulating the idea, he discarded it. Even thinking it embarrassed him. It was real enough when it happened, but it would sound phony, a tear-jerky patriotic kind of phony if he tried to pin a whole series to it. For the first time the conviction that this was an impossible assignment took hold of him. Fine in an editor’s head—or a girl’s—but journalistically a dud. He should have rejected it; for the first job, anyway.
He was probably pressing too hard, too soon. Minify had told him there was no rush. He’d better spend a week or two reading and thinking and interviewing some of these committee people before even reporting back. As soon as he decided that, he realized he was tired from the eyeballs down. It was long past lunchtime. He made stacks of the clippings he’d been through and on the others he put an oval glass paperweight that had been a gift from Betty. Mrs. Green heard him moving about and came in for the first time since breakfast.
“Lunch is ready, Phil.”
“Don’t want any.”
“It’s nearly three.”
“I’m not hungry.”
She left him. He went to his room and lay down on his bed. He thought of taking flowers to Kathy for their date tonight and veered promptly away from the notion. He was not the man for courtly gestures. Anyway, don’t rush things, he thought. This may be important.