Laura Z. Hobson Read online

  “Yes, sure.” He glanced at his watch. “Who’s Bert McAnny?” Tingler was fiction editor, he knew from the masthead.

  “Assistant to Bill Jayson, the art editor. He’d only been here a while before he got drafted, but they gave him his old job back, anyway. About one, then.”

  This would be the start. This would be the chance to get it across—how, he didn’t know. You didn’t blurt it out; it had to come up. If it didn’t come up, you made it come up. There’d be something that would lead into it. His heart began to pound as if he were going into an unaccustomed place where there was sure to be danger. But his mind felt ready and impatient.

  Anne Dettrey was at their table, too. She was woman’s editor, though there were no recipe and fashion departments in the magazine. Her province was nonfiction of special interest to women readers, and Phil knew, though he didn’t remember how he knew, that she was one of the top editors on the staff. As John had come by with the two men, he’d said, “I’ve asked Anne Dettrey to come along, Phil,” and there’d been a blur of how-do-you-do’s all round, as Minify did introductions.

  “Phil?” she’d said. “I thought it was Schuyler Green.”

  “That’s my writing name.”

  Through the shoptalk of the first part of the meal, he’d thought, That’s the way you do it. Lie when you have to, but for the most part, it’ll be as much what you leave out as what you put in. There was no lie in leaving out the explanation about “Schuyler.” Just let them assume he’d made up a pseudonym cold.

  She was a woman about his own age, this Anne Dettrey. She talked well, turning the kind of phrases you found in slick fiction and never heard in real speech, yet so effortlessly that she seemed natural always. She had a rather long, clearly boned face, and she was almost as tall as he was. Her reddish hair and brown eyes compelled the attention, though you’d never call her pretty. Because they’d all plunged, even as they were walking over to the restaurant, into some question about the issue going to press next week, he’d had time to orient himself to all of them.

  The short, pale man was Tingler. He was middle-aged and ugly, with thick-lensed glasses over protruding eyes that probably meant hyperthyroid. His voice was calm always, almost bored, even when the others were pitched up on some question or other. He was a competent one, clearly. McAnny was a youngster, not out of his twenties. Phil saw the discharge button in his lapel. He’d never worn his own, or the ribbon. But Bert McAnny, with his small features and light voice, would wear his for a long time. There was too much awe in him as he listened to Minify’s words. He was flushing now as he asked the editor about “the time you decided to change Smith’s into a liberal magazine.”

  “It wasn’t that way at all, Bert. I didn’t.” Minify smiled, but above his genial mouth the gray eyes were thoughtful. “Fact is, when they offered me this job as editor in chief, I said if they were out to run a liberal magazine, quote, quote, I wasn’t their man.”

  “You?”

  The sharp inflection from Phil and McAnny pleased Minify. Anne and Frank Tingler showed no surprise. They’d been on the staff since John had taken over. Phil had read about how he’d gone to Smith’s. Way back, he’d been one of the best reporters on the old World, in the days when a by-line was a badge and not just an automatic gadget. After the World had folded, he’d knocked about on other papers without finding himself right on any of them. He’d gone abroad, free-lanced foreign stuff for magazines, and returned, surprisingly enough, to become managing editor of one of the folksier women’s magazines. But he’d increased its circulation from the first year. When Smith’s, along with three other magazines, had changed ownership in 1940, Minify had become editor in chief. In a year, Smith’s circulation jumped thirty per cent; in another, thirty more. The three other magazines had been abandoned, their paper allotments going into this one weekly. By now its circulation was more than double what it had been when he’d taken the reins.

  “Sure, I did,” Minify went on. “You don’t get anywhere with that for a platform.”

  “How do you mean?” McAnny asked.

  “Ever hear of anybody calling a bunch of guys together and saying, ‘Let’s run a reactionary magazine’?” He laughed. “It’s never like that—they get together to run a successful magazine. If they’re mostly reactionary themselves, it turns out reactionary. Same thing the other way around.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” McAnny said.

  “I took this job with one idea—to make a go of it. It’s been a go because the readers like our stories and serials and pictures and articles. It’s true I don’t hire reactionary guys—I’d just fight with them all the time if I did. So with the staff we’ve got, we generally manage to be on the liberal side. But that’s all the trick there is to it—not a conscious line you take.”

  “What about your decision to run a series like the one I’m starting?” Phil said. He did it deliberately. He couldn’t let this whole luncheon go by without managing to take his first step.

  “What’re you doing, Mr. Green?” That was Anne Dettrey, but the others had turned to him also.

  “Good case in point,” Minify answered for him. “Phil’s going to do a series on antisemitism. I didn’t assign it because it’s the ‘liberal thing’ to do. I just think it’ll get read, start a stink, make talk.”

  Closer, Phil thought. When the opening did come, how would he say it? How had he put it last night? He couldn’t remember. In his mind he rehearsed phrases. “I’m a Jew.” Would that be the natural way? “I’m Jewish.” That was better. “I’m a Jew. I’m Jewish.”

  “Got any special slant on it yet?” Tingler asked, turning to him.

  “Yeah. But I’m never any good talking about a thing till it’s written.” Tension stood in his words, in spite of his desire to seem matter-of-fact.

  “You sound as if you had something pretty hot,” Anne said.

  “I feel pretty hot over it,” he said. He glanced at her. Here it was. “And I don’t think the heat has anything to do with my being Jewish.”

  “Of course it hasn’t,” she said. “When’ll they run?”

  “Oh, Phil’s just started,” Minify put in. “Probably not before summer.” He sounded comfortable. “I’m afraid it’ll be just as timely then.” They all made sounds or gestures of agreement, and the talk went off again to the troublesome next issue.

  Phil heard none of it. “It’s done; I’m in,” he told himself. The odd excitement in him when the moment came had been read as high interest in the series itself; that it had to do with anything more personal than that had been apparent to nobody. Of that he was sure. Of course, this was a special crowd; he’d had no hostility to contend with. Nobody had shown surprise; nobody had changed expression; they didn’t give a damn. But it was the first hurdle, anyway, a line of demarcation crossed. He’d said it and he was launched. Like a debutante, he thought, and smiled to himself.

  He wasn’t due for another half-hour, but Kathy was dressed and ready. She went to the piano, played a few measures, and then stood up. From the small kitchen where Claudia was getting dinner came the teasing smell of roasting beef. He didn’t know yet that they would have dinner there. He would be pleased.

  The room was too warm. She crossed to the window and threw it wide open. At once snow began to sift over the sill. It had been snowing all day, and the radio said there’d be twelve inches before morning. It felt right to have it snow a week before Christmas. Everything felt right these days.

  Last night she’d come home from Phil’s and gone straight to bed. She’d propped both pillows behind her as if she were going to read, but she’d never opened a book. She’d lain there, smoking and thinking until past two, just letting the minutes stream by. If ever there was a time, she’d thought lazily, almost cozily, when you’re glad you’re a woman, it’s this first moment of knowing that a man you’re drawn to is falling in love with you. That’s when you’re completely, un-complicatedly glad you are. None of the vague resent
ment that “it’s a man’s world” held its shape against the good solvent of that first knowing. Suddenly it was an unarguable blessed thing to be a woman, and you felt a kind of indebtedness to the man who made you feel so.

  All day she’d felt that, and now, waiting for him to get there, she still did. He’d talked of marriage, obliquely, squeezing the words out. She wanted to marry again. She’d never be fully happy without it.

  Perhaps “being conventional” had something to do with it. Once Uncle John had teased her because she’d said she'd never go to a theater alone at night— the vision of herself alone in the lobby for a smoke during intermission made her squirm.

  “Give up smoking,” he’d said, and then, “Vassar and Bill between them didn’t have any luck making you conservative, Kathy; they did better about making you conventional.”

  “Because I won’t behave just like a man?” She’d felt resentful. “A man can drop into a bar alone and have a drink and get talking to somebody and go have dinner with him—you think I’m conventional because I can’t?”

  “Don’t get so emphatic. I didn’t mean much.”

  But he’d been partly right. She just didn’t feel right on her own, and maybe that was being conventional about “the things a woman can’t do.” It was trivial, probably a throwback to the nagging envy in childhood about being a boy instead of “just a girl.” Trivial or no, it was there.

  She wound her watch. It was seven. She was waiting dinner for a man again and found it sweet to be doing it, and if that made her a conventional fool, why, let it. The bell rang.

  He was taking off galoshes in the outside hall, and she waited till he straightened up. When he came in, she put her hand out, and he took it in both of his and then released it quickly. “You’re on the dot again,” she said.

  “Should I be fashionably late?” He laughed as he shook snow off his coat. “The other time you said that and I said that and then I was afraid you’d think I was coy or always mugging or something.” His voice was easier than she’d ever heard it, his manner surer. She watched him fold his coat and put it on a chair, his hat on top of it. He sniffed at the homely smell of cooking and looked about him. She saw him catch sight of the table, laid and waiting in one corner of the living room. His whole mood seemed suddenly to sparkle.

  “You don’t mean here?” When she nodded, he made a sound of surprise and pleasure.

  “So we can talk.” She was delighted she’d thought of it. She motioned him to the sofa and went to the bar table. “This time I’m not going to let you get going on anything else. I’ve tried all day to guess what it could be.”

  “Have you really?”

  “I kept thinking, suppose I were him, and had to find an idea for this, what would I do?” She came back with two Martinis, walking gingerly because she’d poured them too full.

  He waited, unwilling to say anything. He wanted her to go on, to offer even more testimony that his problems mattered to her. He took the glass and leaned forward to sip it before he brought it closer. She sat on the sofa beside him, in her eyes an eagerness that was all the testimony anybody could want.

  “And what would you do?”

  She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “I’m just no good at ideas. The ones you told me seemed swell, but you threw them out and kept on hunting.”

  “You’ll see why now.” He hitched himself around. He wanted to see her face change as Minify’s had. For another moment he said nothing. “I’m going to tell everybody I’m Jewish, that’s all.”

  “Jewish? But you’re not, Phil, are you?” Instantly she added, “It wouldn’t make any difference, of course.”

  But something had appeared in her eyes.

  “You said, ‘I’m going to tell’—as if you hadn’t before but would now,” she went on, “so I just wondered. Not that it’d matter to me, one way or the other.”

  “You said that before.” He put his drink down.

  “Well, are you, Phil?”

  He almost said, “You know I’m not,” but it choked back. Some veil of a thing had shown in her eyes. He’d been watching her face every minute, greedy for the quick approval that would show there. This had been quick, but different. She wanted him not to be Jewish. She knew he was not, knew that if he were, he’d never have concealed it. But she wanted to hear him say so right out.

  “Oh, this is nonsense,” she said briskly. “I know perfectly well you’re not Jewish and I wouldn’t care if you were. It’s just interesting.”

  He reached for a cigarette. Of course she wouldn’t care, any more than he would. Or would she? If he said now, “I really am Jewish”? He’d be the same guy, the same face, the same voice, manner, tweed suit, same eyes, nose, body, but the word “Jewish” would have been said and he’d be different in her mind. In that very same vessel that contained him there’d be a something to “not-care” about.

  “Why, Phil,” she said slowly, “you’re annoyed.” She put her drink down also. “You haven’t said anything.”

  “I’m not annoyed. I’m just thinking.”

  “Don’t be so serious about it—you must know where I stand.”

  “I do, Kathy.”

  “It’s just that it caught me off balance. You know, not knowing much about you because you kept making me talk about my childhood. So for a second there—” She laughed and shook her head. “Not very bright on the uptake.”

  He smiled. He felt heavy, flattened out. With her last sentence, the creamy smooth tone had come back. The laugh was the laugh he’d heard that first night. His hand, listless on the arm of the sofa, dropped over the side. Without knowing that he did it, he felt his thumb and forefinger tip together, out of sight, making a circle.

  “But anyway, you don’t like my angle,” he said. “Do you?”

  “Oh, I do. It’s—” She broke off. Now she reached for a cigarette, and he leaned toward her to light it. Her hair shone. He heard her breathe. Physical knowledge of her moved through him. But there was a sadness to it he couldn’t name.

  “It’s what?”

  “Oh, Phil, I just think it’ll mix everybody up. People won’t know what you are.”

  “After I’m through, they’ll—” He couldn’t say it. A remarkable thing had happened. Something had seized him that he couldn’t argue with. It had started to happen with her first question. Now he knew suddenly what it was. This heavy strange thing in him was what you felt when you’d been insulted. He felt insulted. If he were really a Jew, this is what he’d feel. He was having his first lesson. With Kathy, he’d stumbled into his first lesson at feeling bruised and unwilling to say the placating thing, the reassuring thing. She had reminded him that there was something important about knowing that you were not a Jew or were a Jew, no matter what your face or voice or manners or whole being. A slow soreness had been spreading through him. He’d be damned if he’d let her see it. But at last he knew what it was.

  “They’ll know afterwards that you’d just been assuming a pose?” she finished for him. “Of course they will. And even so, it’ll keep cropping up.”

  “All right. Let it.”

  His words were calm. No, they were calmly spoken, but the answer was brusque. That much he could not help. Kathy? The Kathy who’d thought up the whole series? She wanted to fight the thing, sure. She wanted Smith’s to use its three-million circulation to yell and scream and take sides and fight. That’s the way she’d put it that night. But she didn’t like the idea of anybody misunderstanding anything about him.

  He saw a perplexity begin in her face. She was frowning. She was thinking, away somewhere from where they were, thinking to herself. Then the moment was over. She made a quick scissoring with both her hands, slashing the last few minutes out of time.

  “I’m out of my head,” she said firmly. “‘Let it’ is right. Who cares? I was just being too practical about things.” She smiled directly at him. “It’s a grand idea. Only, last night you said there’d be pitfalls, and I guess I got looking for
those right off.”

  His spirits rose. This quick change bewildered him, but he felt relieved, at least enough to get by on for now. The mind plays funny tricks—look at his own “slow take” on Belle’s Jew-us-down. He told Kathy about it, and she said, “Those nasty propaganda phrases.” Again he was reassured. He had been a fool to toss his scheme at her without any windup. You could do things like that with an editor, but with her he’d have done better to explain first, lead her along to make her see the inevitability of it.

  “There’ll be nasty things,” he said. “But after all, the whole point is to find out for myself.”

  “How long will it take, do you think?” He shrugged, and her shoulders imitated his, as if to agree that nobody could ever predict how long anything important would take.

  “You and the Minifys will have to promise not to give away my act,” he said. She nodded, and he said, “But really. No exceptions for anything. O.K.?”

  “O.K.” She made a child’s cross-my-heart. “What about the people at Smith’s? Won’t they talk?”

  “At—but they’re not in on it. Only John.”

  “They think you’re Jewish?” She sounded unbelieving.

  “I don’t think you understand, Kathy. If this is going to work—maybe it won’t—but the only chance is to go whole hog at it.” Carefully he explained about having met none of the staff until today, knowing nobody in the East; he gave a brief account of the luncheon and the start he’d made. “It’s got to run right through everything,” he ended.

  “Why, of course. I hadn’t really seen it before.”

  She seemed penitent, and guilt rose obscurely in him. He demanded too much always. He judged too quickly. “I got riled at you before,” he said. “I thought for a minute that if I were Jewish—” At her quick laugh he broke off. He felt a fool.

  “Now, Phil, you’re not calling me An Anti Semite?” She made three round words of it.

  “Good Lord, no.”

  There was a pause. They each leaned forward to pick up their neglected glasses. The silence expanded. It’s no good analyzing every reaction, he thought. Was his feeling a fool the right reaction? Or his being riled? Save it, quit it, he ordered himself. Dope it later, when you can think.