Laura Z. Hobson Read online

  “My trouble is,” he said to her, “I’m always too damn apt to weigh and measure and wonder and ponder everything till I don’t know where I stand.”

  “I’m not,” she said. Her voice was soft. “Not often. But last night I did that, too. I didn’t get to sleep till nearly three.”

  “Kathy.”

  He wanted to take her into his arms. We’ll work things out, he thought. If there’s anything real to work out, we’ll work it out. Somewhere behind him a swinging door swished.

  “Dinner,” she said. “Let’s finish these at the table.”

  The soreness of disappointment wouldn’t leave her. The moment the front door had closed on him, she’d wanted to call him back, find the one more thing to say that would change the feel of the evening.

  It wasn’t even eleven. She went about the living room, emptying ash trays, tidying up the bar table. Claudia had missed his dinner napkin; it was still on the end table where he’d carried it with him when they’d gone over to the sofa for coffee. She took up the yellow square. “KLP,” the monogram said fatly. She tossed it on the coffee tray and carried both into the small kitchen. Claudia was always in such a rush to escape, it had become an unwritten agreement between them that she need not bother with the belated coffee things. Kathy washed the small cups and the slivers of spoons. “KLP” twined on their fiddle-shaped handles. All fancy and twisted, she thought.

  She dried the things and put them away. The soreness persisted. The evening had balled up. She’d balled it up by that extraordinary reluctance she’d felt about his idea. Remembering that first instant after his announcement, she felt fidgety. What had happened to her? She didn’t like it.

  “It’s a brilliant notion, Phil. It’ll make a stunning series. You’ll be famous.” Twice she’d said that, once during dinner and once later on. He’d smiled each time, and each time she’d thought that the snarl was straightening out. But the next moment he’d talked about something else, and the discomfort remained in her.

  What had hit her? From where had it come?

  She sighed. The subterranean paths that twined through human impulses and motives always eluded you if you tried to follow them. At least for her they did. There was no use to will herself to the task. She never had a road map. She always got lost.

  It really was a good idea; she knew it in the same blind way she knew when a play had a good plot, or a novel a strong sense of character and movement. She should have said so at once, kept to herself the instant visions of the difficulties he’d get into, praised him wholly. That’s what a man needed from a woman. Belief, encouragement, never skepticism, no matter how truly skepticism might be justified. She’d failed him by reacting too quickly.

  That’s all it was.

  Bill wouldn’t have minded; he wouldn’t even have noticed anything that subtle. Phil was neurotic, she supposed, easily thrown off key, easily let down. But the Bills weren’t for her, and Phil was. She needed to learn him a little more to know where lay the craters and bogs of his intricate personality and be quicker about stepping around them. It was so easy to hurt a man like Phil. Yet the sensitive mind was his appeal, and the delight she felt when his eyes went easy and happy was her reward.

  She wished he’d not had to leave just then. The accommodator she’d sent him, Emma, was the timetable kind who would march off at eleven, heart patient or no, so he had no choice. But perhaps another hour would have sloughed off their heaviness. He hadn’t even tried to kiss her the whole stilted evening. And the quiet look had been on him.

  Disconsolate, she turned out the lights and went into her room. As she undressed, dissatisfaction wormed anew through her.

  “I’m getting neurotic myself.” She’d blundered with him over his idea, so what? She’d said the wrong things, so what? He knew a moment later she was sorry—she’d said perfectly openly she’d been off her head. You blunder, you apologize—that ought to be all there was to it. Instead that good feeling that everything was right had burst like a bubble blown against slate.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “WE ARE BORN in innocence.” The phrase was in him, a cluster of words in his mind, a challenge in his blood. A hundred times in the next days it spoke to him. Where it had come from, what it was trying to tell him, he did not know. It was just there, one measure of a stately music.

  “We are born in innocence.”

  Like a phrase written in sleep, laden with an import the dreaming mind strains to hold past the moment of waking, it touched the threshold of his understanding again and again, only to retreat before he could welcome the message he felt it brought. It had the commanding significance of the final spinning sentence he had pursued just before surrender to the anesthetic in the base hospital. And, as then, he felt enormous with its revelation, comforted that he had found for himself some magic litany that explained essence and truth and being.

  But though he could this time remember the words, as words, he could not grasp or pin down the implication that hung mistily over them. At Kathy’s that night, they had spoken themselves within him, while he looked at her across the table, while he half listened to something she was saying about Central Park under the first good snow. And since then they had sounded their grave cadence through all his changing moods.

  Alone now, on Christmas afternoon, he felt them as much in the room with him as the lights on the tree and the blurred voices from the kitchen.

  We are born in innocence. In blood and water and pain we are born, but in an unstained purity of heart. Wizened, crushed, our fogged eyes blinded by new light, our outraged skins shocked by a thirty-degree drop in the envelope about us—still we are born a good vessel, innocent of corruption.

  Corruption comes later. The first fear is a corruption, the first reaching for something that defies us. The first nuance of difference, the first need to feel better than the different one, more loved, stronger, richer, more blessed— these are corruptions. One by one they pour their drops into the vessel, and the layer forms, seedbed of the future life.

  His mother came in, moving slowly as if to test out the returned ease of her body. In her eyes there still was the look of contentment with which she’d watched Tom’s bright delight of the Christmas morning.

  She said, “You’re not staying in because of me, Phil?”

  “I haven’t a date. I know you’re all right. Craigie’ll be surprised tomorrow.”

  She nodded, belligerently, as if she’d indeed show Dr. Craigie and his spying electrocardiograph their proper places. The bell rang, and she moved to the buzzer. Phil went out into the hall.

  “Telegram,” he said a moment later. “Funny. The girls—” He signed, tore it open. “Dave.” He read the brief message. “Got my letter, and he’s to start any minute and would like a stopover. Boy, that’ll be good, to see Dave.”

  She was as pleased as he. They discussed the advisability of giving him Tom’s room and decided against it. “Dave can have mine, and I’ll sleep on the sofa,” Phil said. “That way, if we stay up all night chewing the fat, the kid won’t be in the way.”

  The spell was broken. When she left the room, he went back to the five words. But now they were just words, with no promise of secret meaning.

  “Probably had something to do with Christmas coming and the new snow in the park and the new thing I was starting, like getting born again.” But why the melancholy that went with them?

  “Dad, say, Dad. Please.” Tom’s shout came as imperious as though the house were on fire. Phil didn’t move.

  “What’s up?”

  “It won’t work. I’ve got the caps in it, and it just won’t. Oh, the damn thing’s haywire.”

  “Let’s have a look at it.” He smiled. Tom’s damns and hells were a fine business, traceable to his own liberal use of them. Maybe he was overcasual about the way he ignored them in the kid. He looked up. Tom was standing rigid, just inside the door. From his dejected right hand, the cap pistol dangled. That morning when he’d seen it, he’d go
ne into a delirium over it. “Iron, Dad,” he’d shouted. “Not wooden. Feel it; it’s cold.”

  Now he stood waiting for Phil to say something.

  “What am I?” he demanded. For the moment the crisis of the gun was forgotten.

  Phil looked at him. Across the bridge of his nose, he wore a green scarf, folded into a triangle. Low on his skinny hips hung a studded belt and holster. His corduroy “longies” which the eights and nines wore these days were tucked into his still-new galoshes. Besides the pistol, he had a pearl-handled revolver in the holster and its twin in the belt of his pants. Phil stared at him judiciously. “You’re a—let’s see. A sheriff.”

  “Oh, Dad.” (Disgust.)

  “A horse rustler.”

  “No.”

  “A cowboy in Arizona.”

  “Dad, you’re nuts.”

  “Well, then.” Enough of this game. There never had been the slightest doubt what he was, but the rules of childhood made an immediate guess unthinkable. “Then you’re an outlaw, a bandit outlaw.”

  “Yes, that’s it, yessir that’s just it.” Above the green fold of silk, his eyes gleamed. Slyly he went behind the wing chair, in a movement which brought only the word “skulking” to Phil’s mind, and aimed the cap pistol at his father. Then, suddenly, he remembered, and tragedy stood gaunt upon him. “It won’t work. The caps stick.”

  Phil took the pistol and pried apart the two halves of the butt. Kathy had sent it. It had arrived last night, and nothing about the package showed that it was from her. This morning, when Tom had ripped off the bright wrappings, the card had fallen to the floor, ignored by the instantly inflamed child. Mrs. Green had picked it up, glanced at it, and handed it to Phil.

  “What a nice thing,” she’d said.

  “Merry Christmas from Katherine Lacey—just because I’ve heard a lot about you.” He’d read it with a crazy leap of pleasure.

  She didn’t do it just to please me, he thought again as he worked on the gun. She wants him to like her, too. She needn’t have sent any Christmas gift at all to a child she doesn’t know, but she did. She went into those shoving crowds in the stores and searched and rejected and kept on and finally found this. She took it home and fussed with the big bow herself and dropped it off here herself.

  “Why won’t the dingus revolve, Dad?”

  “Trying to see.”

  The creaky, balky misunderstanding which had stood between them before dinner that night had been nothing another man would have noticed. All through dinner he had belabored himself to forget it. When she’d come back to the plan later on, she’d been enthusiastic over it, happy with it.

  Twice she had praised it, and twice he had felt only that this was afterthought. He had had the wit to say nothing further of the small doubt which stubbornly nibbled at him. He had excoriated his need for approval as “an infantilism” and ended by feeling clumsy about everything he did. And when he’d had to leave he had gone reluctantly, as one does when things still need fixing up.

  But the next day at the office, he’d regained all his confidence. About himself, about Kathy, about the series. The girl who’d been assigned to him, Miss Wales, was intelligent, quick, interested. She was going to be a fine help on those parts of the research that could be done by mail and telephone. All day he’d felt integrated and composed. And at four he’d telephoned.

  “There, Dad, the little hammer’s caught. See? Right there!”

  “Getting it now, Tom. Wait a minute.” He recoiled the spool of caps and inserted it again into the nest cast in the metal. He closed the sliding part and dramatically cocked the pistol. It fired.

  “Oh, gee, thanks.” Tom grabbed it and was gone. Exit, shooting, thought Phil. As if she had been sitting right beside him, politely waiting for him to finish the repair job, he turned back to Kathy. From his first “hello” on the phone, she’d begun to talk with an earnestness that caressed his fretted spirits. “It was a kind of aberration last night, Phil. I thought about it a lot, after, and didn’t like myself much.”

  He’d blamed himself for having let it matter so much to him. All the while they talked, he admired this ability to say she’d been wrong. They’d seen each other once more before she’d left for the Christmas week end with her sister Jane. The sweetness of reconciliation had been theirs, though there’d been no real quarrel, and he’d had to fight back the words that kept bursting against his orders to them to stay unsaid a while longer.

  In his chair, Phil shifted uneasily. He stood up, crossed the room to the tree, disconnected the cord from the wall socket. The tree dimmed as if expression had fled a face. Ornamented, arrayed, it had made the infinitesimal shift from life to death.

  He had thought as much, of Betty as on other Christmases, had been as subject to all the willful tricks association could play. Specialized tricks at times like Christmas, seasonal tricks, with the help of brightly colored glass balls and flame-shaped bulbs, come forth from forgotten boxes, to set memory going with freshened sharpness.

  December had been a month of her dying, and all the Decembers had been echoes of it, each more muted than the last, yet each clamoring in its own way as distance had added the ingredient of lost hope. But this time there was an insulation along his nerves, a buffer to soften the old blows.

  And even as he thought, the muscles in his throat knotted, the slow thud of grief took up its interrupted rhythm. Like a devout, stepped briefly into a chapel, he stood again for a moment in the old sorrow.

  Dr. Craigie was enthusiastic. “No immediacy.” He kept returning to the phrase, and it had its effect on Mrs. Green and Phil. There was enormous calm in his manner, a pleasure at the massed notes and graphs spread on the desk before him. It had been a long visit, an exhaustive inquiry. Waiting now for his mother to come from the dressing room, Phil felt relief mixed with a hurry to leave.

  “A good internist, though,” Dr. Craigie was saying.

  “We’ll make an appointment if you wish. Or have you some good man you like?”

  “I’ve been asking at the office,” Phil said. “One of the editors there recommended Dr. Abrahams so highly, I made an appointment for Monday.”

  “Abrahams?”

  “J. E., I think she said. Ephraim. Mt. Sinai or Beth Israel or both.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. You won’t need this then.” With finality he placed a prescription blank on the desk before him. Phil picked it up. Two names and addresses were written there. Mason Van Dick. James Ayres Kent. “If you, that is, if you should decide to have your mother see either—”

  The tone was extremely polite. Too polite, raising an issue.

  “Why? Isn’t this Abrahams any good?”

  “No, nothing like that. Good man. Completely reliable. Not given to overcharging and running visits out, the way some do.”

  “I see.” Phil looked at him. “You mean ‘the way some doctors’ do?” (Do you tell even a doctor that you’re Jewish? Was it necessary to produce that fact everywhere? Was it not an affront to a man to offer him the unsolicited fact, when its very uttering carried the implication that it held an importance to him, the listener?) “Or did you mean,” he went on, “ ‘the way some Jewish doctors’ do?”

  Craigie laughed. “I suppose you’re right,” he said heartily. “I suppose some of us do it, too.”

  Then Phil had not given it the wrong reading. Us, Them; We, They. “If Dr. Abrahams doesn’t impress me,” he said, “I’ll try Van Dick or Kent. I’ve no special loyalty to Jewish doctors simply because I’m Jewish myself.”

  Stephen Craigie swallowed. He laughed again. He folded the electrocardiogram and placed it in the Manila envelope on the desk before him.

  “No, of course not,” he said. “Good man is a good man. I don’t believe in prejudice. And do remember me to John Minify. Haven’t seen him in years, since the night his father had a coronary. Fine man, that.”

  Mrs. Green appeared, and they left.

  That’s all it was, Phil thought later,
stretching back from the littered desk in the office. A flick here, a flick there. Craigie hadn’t known he “was Jewish.” If he had, he’d have been “more careful.” But already in this first week, after he, Phil, had made it a known premise wherever he reasonably could, the same flick had come often enough.

  Sometimes it came only from an unconscious train of thought, as with Bill Johnson, of the Times, the other day. Returning the borrowed clips himself, he’d worked it in easily, without strain; it had been forgotten before they’d started down the street together for the drink Johnson had suggested at Bleeck’s. They’d fallen into talk of the atomic secret, the Pearl Harbor investigation, politics in general.

  “You were for Roosevelt?” Johnson began, and then added, “Sure, you would be.”

  “Why would I be?”

  Johnson hadn’t answered. Phil had let it pass. Flick.

  Half a dozen other times, the same thing had happened. That’s all these first days had given him. No big things. No yellow armband, no marked park bench, no Gestapo. Just here a flick and there another. Each unimportant. Each to be rejected as unimportant.

  But day by day the little thump of insult. Day by day the tapping on the nerves, the delicate assault on the proud stuff of a man’s identity. That’s how they did it. A week had shown him how they did it.

  At Phil’s elbow the telephone rang. His mind wiped clear of every thought. All day yesterday he’d hoped she’d call.

  “Phil, this is Belle.”

  “Oh, you here again?”

  “No, home.” Her voice was brisk. “Mamma’s letter just came. About your wonderful scheme.” There was a clacking and whining in the receiver, and he lost her next words.

  “—and I have no control over what you do, but I want you to know I’m not having any part of it.”

  “Keep your shirt on. Nobody’s asking you to do a thing.”

  “You know what Dick’s company is like. And no matter how I disapprove of them, I just have to be realistic about it. I can’t have people thinking—”