Gentleman's Agreement Read Online Free PDF Page A

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