Laura Z. Hobson Read online

  “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 co
nsidering 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.