Laura Z. Hobson Read online

  Perhaps that’s why his mind was being so inelastic about the new work; perhaps that’s why he’d been so edgy over Belle.

  Suddenly he remembered her despair. “That cheap Pat Curran keeps trying to Jew us down.”

  His mind drew back sharply. All he’d thought then was two-room flats. The verb had glided right by him. His mother, he now realized, had been frowning about that as he was leaving. But he? He hadn’t even registered.

  Maybe he was the wrong man for this series. Heart in the right place, but tone-deaf. Rot, he argued back at once. It’s just the old inertia at the start of a long pull.

  At a newsstand he bought the evening papers. On the front page, dwarfed by the headlines about General Motors and the War Guilt Trial, was a story about some Brooklyn hoodlums attacking three Jewish boys. He ought to begin a file of his own clippings if he were going ahead with the series. Maggotlike, the “if” squirmed through his conscience.

  Damn it, why couldn’t Minify give it to an old-timer and not load it on me for the first?

  A few blocks later, he passed a newsreel theater, went by it, and then turned back to it. He read the signs about what was showing. Feeling a traitor, he fished a quarter out of his pocket and went through the turnstile. It moved oilily, without a click, and vaguely he felt cheated about everything.

  He paid off his taxi and said to the doorman, “Minify, please.”

  “Eighteenth, sir. To your right.”

  He went into the small lobby, noted the gleam of the white border on the black linoleum floor, and turned right to a small elevator. Inside, he looked into the square of beveled, unframed mirror and straightened his tie. It was friendly of Minify to ask him, but this sort of setup was somehow jarring. Formality always dispirited him, not because he worried about being gauche, but because what he and Betty used to call “fingerbowl houses” implied alien values and importances. Something had been building between him and Minify since their first meeting two months before. He did not want it destroyed. A husky maid in black and white answered his ring, and he heard Minify calling out, “Never mind, Berta, I’ll answer it—oh, you’re already there.” He stuck out his hand and said, “Hello, Green. I might have thought of this before.”

  Relief swept up in Phil. It was the same easy Minify. As he followed him into the living room, he felt a whole atmosphere of wealth, beautiful colors and fabrics. A thin middle-aged woman came toward them.

  “Jessie, this is Schuyler Green I’ve been talking about. My wife.”

  “I’ve read everything he ever wrote, don’t be silly, John. Good evening, Mr. Green. Kathy, this is Mr. Green. My niece, Miss Lacey.”

  Simultaneously he shook hands with Jessie Minify and smiled at the girl sitting on the sofa just behind her. Mrs. Minify had small curls like gray bubbles all over her head; her voice seemed to bubble too, and he felt that the apartment was cut to her pattern and fitted nothing in Minify at all. He turned and took the hand held up to him by Miss Lacey and knew she was very pretty and that this was going to be a fine evening.

  “I haven’t read everything,” Miss Lacey said, “but what I did read was—” She tipped thumb and forefinger together to form a circle and flicked the circle toward him, braking the gesture in mid-air so suddenly that her hand shook on her wrist. It was the effusive gesture for “done to a turn, monsieur,” and it struck him now as absurd and artificial. He smiled and said, “Thanks,” but the first flush of approval chilled in him. Her voice had a hint of Jessie Minify’s too-well-bred tone. He felt vaguely resentful to it, as he did to the gesture.

  Through the next quick sequence of Minify’s “Scotch or rye?” and of Mrs. Minify’s “Sit over there, Mr. Green, it’s the biggest,” and of his own “Thanks, I like big chairs,” and “Scotch, please, a light one,” he kept on being aware of an uneasy disappointment. From a bar closet at the side of the room, Minify called out, “What do people call a guy whose first name is Schuyler?”

  “Phil,” he answered, and everybody laughed.

  “Thank God, I don’t have to say Green all the time,” Minify answered. “So hearty, last names.”

  “It’s my mother’s name, my middle one. I started signing my stuff ‘Schuyler Green’ on the college paper at Stanford. Sounded ritzier to me, I guess, than Philip—like Somerset Maugham instead of William, or Sinclair Lewis instead of Harry. My literary heroes then.”

  “Somerset, Sinclair, Schuyler,” Miss Lacey said. “All S’s. Maybe that means something.”

  He wondered if she were laughing at him and felt stiffly young and too explanatory. In that moment also he realized that the maid Berta had held out her arms in a gesture which meant he was to give her his coat and hat and that he had not handed them over but had put them down on a chair himself. Miss Lacey was saying something about noms de plume, but he missed it, feeling embarrassed about Berta and exasperated that he should. Though he hadn’t remembered it all day he now recalled his unaccountable awkwardness that morning about shaking hands with Minify. A resigned dismay darted through him, as at the second pang of a toothache. He was in for a tight, watchful evening, after all.

  “… from California?” Only the end of Miss Lacey’s question came clearly to him, but like an aftermemory on his eardrums the first part still registered. The voice was again overbright, but the words were simple and interested. He turned toward her just as Minify came back with his drink, saying, “Here, Phil, light one.” She looked natural and friendly, and he suddenly felt he had been too quick to disapprove of her. How furious he would be if somebody made judgments on him because of a gesture or tone in the first clumsiness of meeting! For the second time in a few minutes, apprehension fell back. He admonished himself to stop vacillating between tension and ease and enjoy himself. “Not my first trip,” he said to Miss Lacey. “But the first time I’ve ever come here without a steamship ticket for tomorrow or something.” She nodded, and he went on more easily with the prefaces of getting acquainted as she or Jessie Minify prodded him. All the while he kept taking an inventory of her, in quick installments, so that it should not be apparent. She was small, with lovely legs, and about twenty-eight or -nine. (“No, I wasn’t born there. But when I was seven, we moved out from Minnesota, so we all feel like Californians.”) There was a sureness about her manner and clothes which you found in New York or Hollywood or London girls, a self-confidence it was, somehow provocative. (“There was this small private hospital in Santa Barbara, my father was a doctor. I was going to study medicine, too.”) She undoubtedly wished she weighed ten pounds less, but no man would. His heart hammered once against his ribs and went back to its ordinary business. (“You did read those? I was mad, so I suppose it showed up in the writing. That’s when Mr. Minify wrote me to come East about a job.”) There was something a little wrong with her looks, but you’d call her beautiful, anyway. She had blue eyes, her hair was dark and smooth, her whole look was somehow very clean and precise and neatly tended. He turned to Mrs. Minify’s question about him and the war, but John Minify was answering it for him, and he glanced again at Katherine Lacey. She was looking up at Minify, and he saw the stretch of her throat from chin down to the dark close dress. Suddenly he knew what was wrong. By itself, in a close-up, say, her face was beautiful, but it was scaled to go with a taller girl and was top-heavy for her. A click of satisfaction accompanied this recognition. She now seemed vulnerable and human, not so perfect that he felt lumpish and nervous.

  “So after eleven months of training and a month of transport, he had one vicious week of action with the Marines at Guadalcanal and then out. Isn’t that it, Phil?”

  He nodded. “Except for the hospital.”

  “Do you still hate to talk about it?” Mrs. Minify sounded cautious but caught in irrepressible curiosity.

  “I never hated to. I wanted to tell about my operation the way everybody else always does. Only that wore off, especially after V-J Day. Now it seems a million years back.”

  The talk veered off to general dis
cussion about the new organizations for veterans. He relaxed further. The first phase of the evening was over. A benevolence went through him; he sipped his drink comfortably. Jessie Minify began some anecdote about a woman he didn’t know, and he scarcely listened. She was not the wife he would have imagined for John Minify, but she was amiable and perhaps just the right complement for his high-voltage mind. Some men preferred it that way.

  Miss Lacey brought the talk back to him.

  “Do you mind telling people what you’re writing, Mr. Green?”

  “Not at all.” He hesitated and glanced at Minify. “Only right now I’m not writing anything—just starting a new thing.”

  “I asked him to try a series on antisemitism,” Minify said. “A knockdown and drag-out at every part of it. Here, not Europe.”

  Phil was watching her. She did an unexpected thing. She grinned.

  “Do I get a credit line on it?”

  “You, Kathy?” Minify was as astonished as he himself.

  “Don’t you remember back in, oh, in the spring it was, about that Jewish girl resigning and I asked you—”

  “Why, sure.” Minify looked pleased with her. “I knew somebody’d been at me but I forgot who. I’m always stealing ideas without knowing it.”

  “Stealing? I gave it to you. I rammed it down your throat.” She turned to Phil. “I carried on about how the big magazines and papers and radio chains were helping spread it by staying off it except for bits here and there. And why didn’t somebody go after it the way they do taxes or strikes? Yell and scream and take sides and fight?”

  Phil was watching her as if she were revealing something immensely important. The affectation in her voice was gone, or lost to his ear already. All he said was, “What I’m afraid of is just stringing those same bits—”

  “I fixed it with Bill Johnson at the Times,” Minify said, reaching for Phil’s glass, “about borrowing their clips for a week or so. It’s against their rules. Another drink, Phil?”

  “Thanks, this’ll do it, John.”

  The first name slipped out on the rush of affection he felt for the honesty and simplicity of the man. He had long respected and admired Minify; it was surprising to like him so much. Minify was sixty, yet each time they had talked together, the quarter century between their ages ripped away and left them contemporaries. Minify looked his sixty. His roundish head was fringed with red hair, wiry and free of gray; it was a remarkable baldness since the scalp was not the glossy pink that usually tops florid complexions, but a dull walnut like tan suede, result of sporadic attempts to keep fit with a sun lamp. Below this oddly hued top, the parallel ellipses of dark eyebrows and the darker crescents of his eye sockets made his gray eyes noticeably light. Unless he stood or sat in determined erectness, his stomach bulged over his belt. But vitality rode every sentence he spoke and played large on every plan he outlined for the years ahead.

  That, Phil had decided after their first long talk in October, was what made Minify seem so young. Whenever he talked of the future, he gave forth a confidence about having enough time. There was none of that anxious “I won’t be here then” which Phil nearly always found in men of sixty. Nor was there any tacit concession, as they had discussed politics, that there was any basic difference in the older point of view and the younger. In their first interview, Minify had excited in Phil a sharp desire to work with him more intimately than he had been doing as a free-lance special writer for Smith’s. Coming at a time when his life in California seemed especially flaccid, that one personal meeting with the famous editor had turned the trick.

  So far he’d had no qualms or regrets, he thought now, looking from Minify to his wife to Kathy. The bell rang just then, and four other people arrived, exuberant or a little drunk. “Why, Katherine Pawling, where’ve you been keeping yourself?” one of the girls cried out as she came in. The room filled with voices and noise and movement, and at once the character of the evening changed. He talked around him vaguely for a bit and then moved to the sofa to sit by Kathy.

  “What about you?” he started. “You have a pretty complete dossier on me. It’s your turn now.”

  “What should I start on? I heard Aunt Jessie explaining I’d been divorced and was running a nursery school and was called Miss Lacey there.” She glanced up at him and then quickly away. The knowledgeable, experienced look that faintly irritated him deserted her for a moment. He was puzzled again; she was always offering some new facet that made it hard to stick to any estimate of what she was or whether he liked her as a person or only responded to her as a pretty girl. The things she said seemed real and good; the manner and clothes and air seemed too, in quotes, upper class. But he was drawn to her, whatever she was.

  “Just anything,” he said. “And maybe you could finish at a bar or someplace when I take you home.”

  “Are you?”

  “May I?”

  She waited a second and then nodded. Sitting side by side with her now, looking down at her, he saw the faintly raised, branching arcs just above the V neck of her dark dress. Again his heart hammered once against his ribs.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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 d
id, 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?”