Laura Z. Hobson Read online

  It was about ten when they left the restaurant. He hoped, expected even, that she would suggest going back to her place, but instead she said there was a movie she’d been watching the neighborhood playhouses for. A displeasure stabbed him, as if she’d said something to offend him, but he agreed that a movie was a fine notion. In the deep loge seats, he felt placated; watching the screen, he was conscious of her nearness, of whether her arm was on the seat rest or not, of her breathing. Each time she fished in her purse, he offered her a cigarette—leaning close to her to light it became a delicate and pleasing thing. The afternoon’s unspoken admonition not to hurry this sounded again in his mind. He kept his eyes on the picture, but every time she moved her head, recrossed her legs, shifted about in any way, he knew it.

  Was this to be like all the rest? His lips closed hard against each other as though to keep out the bitter taste of the question. He glanced toward her. Her whole attention was on the screen. In the dim light she seemed guileless and very young, and he believed at last in what she had told him about her divorce leaving no residue of bitterness or hatred. She had undoubtedly known pain—what human being could finish nearly three decades and be a stranger to it? But she seemed whole and unchipped in her personality, with none of the braced expectation of further pain.

  Across the veil of silence between them, Kathy was thinking, And maybe I’ve forgotten how simple and good it is to feel happy. She hadn’t been unhappy, not even through the first adjustment after divorcing Bill. She hadn’t really suffered about anything since those long-ago days back home, in her teens. But it suddenly seemed a long time since she’d known the outrageous delight in life that she’d felt over going to college or getting married. For her, living alone was a stopgap. Three years was a great deal of stopgap indeed.

  There were good things about marriage that she’d begun to miss. Small things, apart from the big question of rightness and love. The comfortableness of always having somebody to go to a party with, the normal knowledge that you were a man’s wife like everybody else—marriage was a sweet way to live. Or could be.

  She glanced over at him. He was concentrating on the movie. He’d be shocked probably if he could see past the thin casing of her skin into her mind.

  Mrs. Schuyler Green.

  She was amused. That was the adolescent trick; every time she’d met a new boy, she’d instantly thought of what her name would be if she married him. She’d write out his name and then hers beneath it and cross off all the matching letters in each. There was some childish abracadabra for the remaining letters. What was it? “Rich man, poor—” No, that was even younger nonsense, before the dreamy days of thinking about boys. Her mind blanked out—she could think of nothing. Rich man, poor man—her childhood had been spent with that differentiation. The fact that as a small-town lawyer, her father was too poor to do the things he wanted to do for his wife and his two children had embittered him long before she and Janey were old enough to show they wanted things they couldn’t have. Probably his own bitterness had helped teach them that differentiation.

  “Love, friendship, marriage, hate.” Suddenly the boy-girl rigmarole tumbled back into her possession—fortunetelling . for adolescence. She tried to do the trick in her mind.

  Should I take Schuyler Green and Katherine Pawling? Or Philip Green and Katherine Lacey?

  In the dark, she grinned. She started to open her bag, but across the arm of the chair, he offered her his pack of cigarettes. She took one, and he flipped his lighter. The sleeve of his coat touched her bare arm, and in the small flare of light she suddenly looked at him and whispered, “This is nice, isn’t it?”

  As they came out to the street, he said, “And now?”

  “Would you mind if we didn’t go anywhere else? During the week I just never get enough sleep any more.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t mind.”

  He heard how formal his words sounded. Did they show his disappointment? He felt a fool. In the taxi he sat well away from her. At her house, he loudly told the driver to keep the flag down, took her to the door, and was the first to say good night. Secret and abject, a wish twisted in him that she’d change her mind and ask him up for a nightcap. She said it had all been lovely, and was gone.

  A hundred notions discarded, sentences x-ed out, opening paragraphs, phrases for titles.

  Attempts at a dry underwriting, at a just logic and reason, attempts at ringing words.

  And always the distaste, the dejection, the renewed battering at his mind to yield, to create, to reward him.

  Phil reached to the top of the paper in his typewriter and wrenched it out of the machine. The platen whined like line singing out of a steel reel.

  “Damn it, I’ll go nuts.”

  For nearly a week he had fought the increasing sense of failure. Or was it boredom? He had heard nothing from Minify and had neither telephoned nor gone to see him. He had read with minute care all but six or eight of the borrowed clippings; he had made twenty appointments for the following week with head people in each of twenty organizations. He delayed the interviews because experience had taught him that each one would yield him a richer result if he went to it with his own plans already formulated, so he could pin the ready talker down to pertinent material. He had given himself a week’s leeway; now he knew it wasn’t enough. He still had no plan. The “angle” refused to show itself.

  Again and again some clipping would-rouse him, and his quickened feelings would carry assurance that he was on the edge of discovery. But an hour later he would know that all he had was one more episode of a store window smashed in Boston, a child kicked and beaten in Washington Heights, a synagogue or cemetery ravaged in Chicago or Minneapolis or Detroit.

  “This Christ-bitten stuff won’t budge.” He considered telling Minify that he’d prefer, after all, to leave this for his second assignment, that he’d surely strain less after he’d rung up one good record in the new job. Something stopped him from doing it. He had a stubborn streak. “It’s a mile wide right now,” he told himself, and bent glumly toward the typewriter.

  Maybe he could make each article a kind of Profile of some Jewish guy who’d been heroic in the war, decorated, all that. Nonsense. Heroes were heroes because they were heroes, not because they were or weren’t Jewish. Even offering such a selection—what the hell was different between being brave if you were a Jew and being brave if you weren’t a Jew?

  My trouble is, he thought, the only difference that rates with me is people’s sex. The notion amused him. I do care whether somebody’s a woman or a man.

  He had not telephoned Kathy all week. Until he felt better about the first stage of this job, he was in no mood for personal things.

  Or was it the other way round?

  He shoved back from his desk and stood up. She’d been on his mind too damn much, that’s what it was. Any man, meeting her after months of nothing—hell, no wonder he couldn’t get on with his work.

  He went to the telephone and called her at the school. She said, “Oh, Phil, hello,” as if she were glad.

  “You wouldn’t be free tonight by any chance?” He admired his offhand tone.

  “No, I’m not. I’m sorry.”

  “Then how about tomorrow?”

  “I’d like that. How’s the work coming? I’ve wondered about it a lot.”

  “It’s not. I’m still rooting around for some special lead-in, and I just can’t hit it.” He sounded cheerful. “You’re responsible for the hell I’m in. You sold Minify.”

  “You’ll get it, Phil. I know it.” She made a comforting sound. “About seven then?”

  This time he wasn’t irritated that somebody else was sure. It delighted him. The whole call delighted him. She had thought about the series; she had thought about him. He looked triumphantly at the telephone. Tomorrow night he’d ask himself up for a nightcap. Last time, for all he knew, she’d waited for him to suggest it.

  Maybe Minify, too, was waiting for a signal from him. At any ra
te, there was no reason to avoid him this way. Often a suggestion from somebody else, even when you rejected it, picked you up from the sticky muck you’d been working in. He went to the telephone once again.

  An hour later they were deep in discussion. One by one, Phil checked over the ideas he’d had, the reasons for throwing each one aside. There was no surprised look on Minify’s face, no careful choice of words to conceal disappointment. Minify knew. Before he turned editor, he’d written too many thousands of newsprint columns himself, too many dozens of special articles for magazines, not to know. His eyes intent, he listened carefully as Phil told him of the material he had already gathered.

  “The more you give me, the surer I am I want the articles,” he said. “It’s getting nasty for fair.”

  Phil looked briefly at Minify. “One of my sisters was here last week from Detroit. She always gets me on edge, but I used to think she was O.K. underneath. I told her what I was up to, and she went into a routine about ‘you can’t write or legislate these things out of existence.’”

  “Yeah. I get lots of that.”

  “A few years ago she wouldn’t have said that—anyway, not in that pleasant, smug tone. I guess in a place that’s running over with the Negro thing and the Jewish thing— I suppose I ought to go out there.” He considered Detroit. “But you know something?” Minify waited. “I’ve a hunch there’s a bigger thing to do than just to go after the crackpot story. That’s been done plenty. It’s the wider spread of it I’d like to get at—the people who’d never go near a Christian Front meeting or send a dime to Gerald L. K. Smith.”

  “I’m with you on that. But it’s harder.”

  They sat across from each other, smoking, silent. Just in this companionship of searching, Phil found it easier to think. His thorny mood was smoothing out. He let his thoughts drift.

  “I wish Dave wasn’t in Europe,” he finally said, almost to himself.

  “Who’s he?”

  “Dave Goldman. We were kids together, in California.” He waved largely. “Undying friendship at eight.” He looked reflective. “I wonder what he feels like when he runs into it or reads about it. He’s in the Engineers. Seems stuck over there. Captain.”

  “Still friends?”

  “Not especially close any more. We went through everything together up to college. Then I picked Stanford, and he went to UCLA. We still write every so often. But letters are no good on this kind of business. I wish—”

  He broke off and closed his eyes, leaning a little forward as if he were trying to hear a sound very far away. Then he said slowly, “Maybe there’s something in that.”

  “Going to suggest my sending you abroad?”

  Undisturbed by the joshing tone, Phil shook his head. He reached for a cigarette, forgot to make the gesture of offering one.

  “I’m going to start on a new tack,” he said slowly. “So far I’ve been going after facts, evidence. I’ve sort of ignored feelings.” He shifted his glance to Minify. “How does it make somebody like Dave feel? The way we feel only stepped up?” He spoke more quickly. “It’s at least a chance to break the log jam.”

  “Got any Jewish friends in New York?” Minify asked.

  “Who, me? I haven’t any friends in New York.”

  “I’ll introduce you to Joe Lieberman. He’s a physicist and a good guy to talk anything over with. He was in on Oak Ridge.”

  Phil put his hand up, in a “stop” gesture.

  “Hold it for now, would you? It’s no use till I know what I want to ask him. I can’t just say, ‘How do you do, Professor Lieberman, let’s talk about how you react to antisemitism.’ I’d fall on my face first.”

  John Minify laughed with him. “Joe’d get it,” he said. “He’s the man you could say it to, once I gave him a line on you.”

  They agreed to keep the meeting in reserve. Phil rose to go, anxious to explore this new path that had just opened to him. At the door, he turned. Minify looked quizzical, obscurely pleased with life or himself.

  “Thanks for letting me barge in,” Phil said.

  “Any time.” He smiled. “You made a hit with Jessie,” he said. “And, I gather, with Kathy.”

  “Thanks.” It sounded too abrupt. “They made a hit with me, too.”

  “She’s quite a girl, Kathy. She has a lot on the ball.”

  Phil wanted to say the urbane, the perfect thing, but he couldn’t think for the life of him what that would be. He said, “She’s damn attractive,” added, “Well, be seeing you,” and left.

  Even on the way home, the big new question was on him like a seizure. Over and above what any other normal man thinks about it, what must a Jew feel about this thing? That’s what he must find out, thinking himself into the very brain of another human being to find his answer. It was a fascinating quest for any speculative guy. It was a human question, it was dramatic. Out of it should come the way to lead readers along.

  For the rest of the afternoon and again after his early supper with Tom and his mother, he remained absorbed. Pacing the living room, sitting at his desk, getting up again to wander around and stare vacantly at his books—hour after hour he persisted. Without purposely or consciously limiting his interest, he kept coming back to Dave, trying to think into Dave’s mind. It was more valid to think of someone like Dave, the kind of man he himself would be if he were a Jew. He could not “think into” a deeply religious old Jew in a prayer shawl, or into the poor, ignorant Jewish peddler behind a pushcart on the East Side, or into the wealthy tycoon in business. The deeply pious, the truly ignorant, the greatly powerful of any creed or religion were beyond his quick understanding.

  Dave was not. Dave was like him in every essential, had the same boyhood patterns, the same freedom from either extreme of poverty or wealth, the same freedom from any creed-bound faith. They had both grown up in a generation when religion did not work itself very deep into life. Whatever Dave felt now—indifference? outrage? fear? or contempt?—would be the feeling of Dave as a man, and not Dave as a Jew. Dave as citizen, as American, and not Dave as a religious being. That, Phil was sure of. And that was good.

  He began to glance through his hundreds of notes, pausing over this episode or that to ask himself what would go on in a man like Dave when he read of it in his morning newspaper. Betty’s paperweight sat on top of the thin sheaf of clips which he had not yet read. Idly he picked up the heavy chunk of glass and began tossing it from one hand to the other. His eyes were on the top clipping where the oval outline of the paperweight still showed, like the imprint of a doctor’s thumb into the puffed flesh of edema. It was the first page of an issue of Time magazine, nearly two years old. He began to read it. Congressman John Rankin had stood up in the House to attack the soldier-vote bill; he had referred to Walter Winchell as “the little kike I was telling you about.”

  His fingers tightened around the cold smooth glass. Time’s next words were, “This was a new low in demagoguery, even for John Rankin, but in the entire House no one rose to protest.” Shame for the Congress twisted in him. He read on through a column and a half to Time’s sentence: “The House rose and gave him prolonged applause.”

  The House. The Senate. The great Congress of the United States.

  He stood up abruptly. “Jesus, what’s happening to this country? A country never knows what’s happening to it.” How many of Time’s million readers had felt like rushing down there, punching Rankin in the jaw, yelling at the whole House? And if a reader were Jewish—could he be any more outraged? What had Dave felt when he’d come on this? The same, exactly the same as he himself did. He’d bet a million on that. He knew that.

  The thick glass in his hand was moist. He set it down and wiped his hand against his trousers.

  He thought he knew. There was that good familiar click of certitude he always felt when his instincts were true. But there was no way to check on himself, no way to prove he was correct.

  He would have to write Dave after all, have to get to know this Joe
Lieberman, have to do personal research on this as he did on every other problem he had ever worked on.

  “How do you do, Professor Lieberman, let’s talk about how you react to antisemitism in the good old U. S. A.” Damn it, he’d die first. “Dear Dave, Give me the lowdown on your gizzard when you read about Rankin calling people kikes or a Jewish kid getting his face slashed by Jew haters in New York City.”

  Out. It was out. All of it was out. There was no way he could dig and prod and tear open the secret heart of a human being. This was blind alley, too.

  He turned on the radio. In an instant he snapped it off. He picked up the evening papers. The news was stale. He thought of writing letters and abandoned the idea. It was only eleven; if he went to bed, he’d never sleep.

  Again he’d felt himself pressing the hard edge of discovery; again he’d slipped right through it. Like the oily turnstile. Flickering across his mind was a wonder about whether he was losing his grip for a while. It happened to, writers. Maybe it was his turn.

  Grimly he told himself not to start yammering. His gaze traveled slowly over the room as if he were looking for affirmation that other writers had fought and struggled for an idea. Books—the room was full of books. Books told about people's feelings, private reactions. There hadn’t been many novels where the main characters were Jewish, but there’d been some.

  For half an hour he searched the shelves. He was a hoarder of books—he never could bring himself to throw any book away, so one or two of the ones he remembered owning ought to be somewhere in this conglomeration. Whatever novels he had were old. He’d heard of a couple of new ones in the last year that dealt with “the Jewish problem,” but he wasn’t much of a novel reader, so he’d missed them. He’d have to ask about them, buy them for whatever he might learn from them.

  He finally found one of the books he’d expected to find, and he renewed his search. Then he had two more. He’d known they ought to be there, and they might help him now with his job of “thinking into.” As he remembered these books, their central characters had been Jewish. He began to reread, rapidly skimming, suddenly remembering the people, plot, incidents.