Gentleman's Agreement Read Online Free PDF Page B

sounding suddenly in his ears, would shock him, yet there had been a physical need, apparently, to break the unending silence of his bed, where they had lain together, talking, laughing, making love, making long plans. That wide bed had been a focal point of his torment, and, for a long time, each night he would become obsessed with his awareness of the empty half of it. Then he would angrily plan to order a new bed the very next morning, a narrow bed, a single bed. His mother had come to live with him and the baby, and unknowingly she had blocked this simple escape. He could never manage to announce, “I’m ordering a new bed; it’ll be delivered in a couple of days; it’s for my room.”
    His mother, his sisters, his friends, praised him for “bearing up so well.” The truth had been that he was charged with a grief so raucous that he’d had to silence it complete or yell all of it to the world. He had worked harder than he had ever done, had started a new article the day he turned in a completed one, had traveled, read, told himself a thousand times that “time heals everything.” Endlessly time had mocked him. But at last the first savage grief and longing had given way to a pain more patient. In a sense this new pain had been more frightening because of its quieter, more durable characteristic.
    The evenings had continued, each of them, to be an assault on his decent courage. That moment when the house had quieted down, Tommy long since asleep and his mother finally through with the clatter of dishes and soft slapping of the refrigerator door—that moment still had remained the signal of the empty time ahead before he could say good night and go off to his room. That necessary empty time to be got through—it seemed a thing, tangible, a chunk of time sitting there in the room, an obstacle and an offense. As he forced himself to make talk with his mother, about the baby, about books or politics, the knowledge that it was his mother, and not Betty, who was there to share his house and his evenings would rasp through his nerves until he hated her unruffled gentleness.
    Unconsciously perhaps, he had begun frittering away his daytime working hours, so that he should be forced to write at night. It was a good plan. The manuscript in his typewriter became a reliable contrivance, a mechanism down which, each evening, he could cram that offensive chunk of time as into a meat grinder. The thin ribbons of typed words were the end products of that grinding down. As the chunk grew steadily smaller, he would feel less afraid of it, and when his mother would say good night and leave him, he could feel a gratitude that she had been unresentful at being ignored.
    “It’s harder for people like us, Phil,” she had once said, without preamble. “Because there’s no loophole.”
    “I know.” He did, exactly and without discussion. The softening of the blow that was for people who believed in some reunion after death was not for him. He never felt that he was an irreligious man, for he had too much sureness that somewhere, still beyond the reach of pondering and searching minds, must lie the great synthesis of life and all its forces. But like his agnostic father and mother, he had always held all organized religions to be wistful evasions from the loneliness and insecurity of that pondering. When the first hours of Betty’s death encircled him, he had known she was gone from him finally and forever, with no reprieve.
    “Well, quit it, come on, quit it now. ” This time he sat up, switched on the light. He was not in California seven years ago; he was here in this small New York room, in this new narrow bed (bought so many years after the need for it had left him). He gazed about him; he reached out and touched the wall with his elbow. But the old space was in his mind again, the vastness and emptiness and loneliness.
    He lit another cigarette and steered his thoughts back to the list he’d made. But the assignment was