Gentleman's Agreement Read Online Free PDF

feeling in America. Under separate headings, he began to block out the segments he knew would need research:
Antisemitism in Business
antisemitism in Labor
antisem—social
antisem—housing, hotels, clubs
a.s.—violence, hoodlums, etc.
a.s.—schools, professions
a.s.—growth, counter-efforts like anti-bias bills.
Link up with growth of anti-alien feeling, anti-Negro, anti-Catholic, all minority. (Threat to U.S. most serious, not to Jew.)
    He sat back and looked at the list. This was already quite a revelation. That he, before special inquiry, should carry in his mind enough information, fact, rumor, to be able to make so comprehensive a list was proof that antisemitism was seeping into all the arteries of daily life. Right there, jotted down in a few minutes, waiting only for documentation, was a picture of the scope and depth of the thing. If he failed, it would not be for thinness of material. Two or three weeks of research would swamp him.
    And swamp the readers of Smith’s Weekly as well? He was back again at his own barricade. But this time, confidence was in him.
    He let his mind wander easily. He might take some anti-semitic community and angle everything he wrote to show the damage, not to the Jews in it, but to the community itself —a sort of psychiatric approach about the effects of hatred on the hater. No, that was even worse than the idea he’d had in the afternoon—preachy, hortatory, even surer to bore the reader.
    Cheerfully he abandoned the notion and let his mind explore further, as a general on the winning side examines the terrain of a future operation, weighing this point of attack against that, balancing the virtues against the faults, estimating the desire against the probable outcome.
    It was two-thirty when he gathered his notes together and gave up. His list made a good start; he’d get the angle soon and show Miss Lacey a thing or two about journalism.
    In bed, he lit one last cigarette and thought about her. She was interesting; with other girls he had met, he always sat stiffly through the inevitable anecdotes of family and childhood, but with her he’d really wanted to hear, to visualize everything. He tried now to remember each thing she’d said and to equate his opposed emotions about her.
    But soon his thinking moved away from her and became only the unnamable longing which had been the steady accompaniment to his last seven years. It was an unprecise need, to which the specifics of sex and companionship were only tangential. Partly it was hunger for a tightly shared life once more with a woman he trusted and admired; it was also an uneasy sadness that Tom should be an only child without brothers and sisters; in it, too, was sharp distaste for the picture of himself as “a bachelor.” A reaching toward the future stirred him. Sometime he might again find the continuing pattern he’d known with Betty. There’s always a chance, he thought, and switched off the lamp clamped to the headboard of his bed.
    With the dark, long-dulled memories of Betty stood instantly about him, like watchdogs snarling off this new hope, ready to set upon it, tear it, shred it, should it really move forward to claim him.
    Phil lay motionless and was again back across the massive distance of seven years and the stretch of a continent. In California, in December of 1938, Betty had died; the whole month had been a time of her dying. The baby was already a year old; all the associative fears of childbirth pain and possible death had long been washed clear of his mind. And then the hemorrhaging had suddenly started, the endless transfusions, the pinker cheeks of one day yielding to the waxy ones of the next. The pendulum of hope and fear had swung deeper and deeper in his heart, grooving it forever in the nameless arc of loss.
    “Quit it, quit it.” The words gritted in his mind, as they used to grit through his throat when he said them half aloud in those first weeks after her death. His own voice,