Free Gentleman's Agreement by Laura Z. Hobson Page A

quick sympathy and offered to find a maid. “At least a temporary one, Phil, what they call an ‘accommodator.’”
    “Thanks, Kathy, it’s—well, thanks. I could phone my sister Belle in Detroit to come for a few days, but she gets me down too much.”
    He hung up, and began to pace the room. A, B, and C were still side by side as he had left them last night. He looked at the three books listlessly. His fatigue deepened. He had not gone back to sleep after Dr. Craigie had left, nor had he slept all day. It was just as well he’d been forced to desert.
    I’ve got some sort of block on the whole damn thing, he thought. If I could dig and pry into some decent Jewish guy, I’d get it. Scalpels of the interviewer. The incision. The probing. You just can’t do things to human beings that you do to a Manila envelope full of clips.
    Today when Mom had said, “I’m nearly seventy after all, dear,” he’d wanted to ask, “Are you afraid? Is it awful to know you might die soon?” There were questions no one could speak. He would know the answers to those two only when he himself was seventy. It was that way about every question that mattered most, about every question whose answer lay in the heart.
    Yet he had got answers in the past.
    “Every article you’ve done for us, Phil,” Minify had said, “has a kind of human stuff in it. The right answers get in it somehow.”
    Sure. But he hadn’t asked for them and pried for them. When he’d wanted to find out about a scared guy in a jalopy with his whole family behind him hoping for a living in California, he hadn’t stood on Route 66 and signaled one of them to a stop so he could ask a lot of questions. He’d just bought himself some old clothes and a breaking-up car and taken Route 66 himself. He’d melted into the crowds moving from grove to grove, ranch to ranch, picking till he’d dropped. He lived in their camps, ate what they ate, told nobody what he was. He’d found the answers in his own guts, not somebody else’s. He’d been an Okie.
    And the mine series. What had he done to get research for it? Go and tap some poor grimy guy on the shoulder and begin to talk? No, he’d damn well gone to Scranton, got himself a job, gone down into the dark, slept in a bunk in a shack. He hadn’t dug into a man’s secret being. He’d been a miner.
    “Christ!”
    He banged his fist on his thigh. His breath seemed to suck back into his lungs. The startled flesh of his leg still felt the impact of the blow.
    “Oh, God, I’ve got it. It’s the way. It’s the only way. I’ll be Jewish. I’ll just say—nobody knows me—I can just say it. I can live it myself. Six weeks, eight weeks, nine months —however long it takes. Christ, I’ve got it.”
    An elation roared through him. He had it, the idea, the lead, the angle. A dozen times he could have settled for some other idea, but each time he’d thrown it away, tossed it, profligate, stubborn. He’d known that there was somewhere, around some unexpected corner, a better idea, stronger, more real, the only. He’d stalked it, beseeched it, spied for it, waited, rushed, fought. And when he’d found it, this burst of recognition shouted out from him.
    “I Was Jewish for Six Months.” That was the title. It leaped at him. There was no doubt, no editing, no need to wonder. That would get read. That there was no passing up. Six weeks it might be, ten, four months, nine, but apart from that one change, it was it.
    Nobody but another writer could know how goddam good I feel, he thought. This was the reward, the strange compelling excitement of getting an idea. Resistance to the series was a vapor, remembered but gone. Nothing could stop this. It would be simple enough. He didn’t look Jewish, sound Jewish, his name wasn’t Jewish—well, Phil Green might be anything; he’d skip the “Schuyler” and not have to bother with assumed names. He checked on himself in his mind’s eye—tall, lanky; sure, so was Dave,