Gentleman's Agreement by Laura Z. Hobson Page B

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