Phyllis Read online

  Phyllis

  Howard Fast writing as E. V. Cunningham

  part one PHYLLIS GOLDMARK

  PHYLLIS BECAME the matrix of a number of things, but she was not cast for melodrama, and too much of it was melodrama. She would not agree; she holds that the sum and substance of our lives—not just Phyllis and myself but you as well—in a tinny, jazzed-up melodrama, not fit for any audience of civilized people. But the measure of civilization is thin and delicate, believe me.

  Let me say that she was not cast for romance either, which is the pervasive fiction of the lives of all young ladies. At that time when I was instructed—“This is an order, Clancy, and duty by God and your country”—to win her love and trust and affection, she was not as young as romance and young ladies. She was twenty-nine years old. They commiserated with me over the fact that she was no beauty—as they put it—for even the great captains of mankind, the directors of destinies, are meat for the Hollywood and Madison Avenue grinder; and when their romance is extracurricular, they see it only in terms of long legs, enormous mammary glands, and a face as standard as and less varied than our native automobiles.

  Phyllis was not that, but slender, unaggressive, with brown hair that she cut short, and a pleasant face. She looked younger and acted older than her age. She was an assistant professor of physics at Knickerbocker University. She was shy but not painfully so, and introspective and burdened with the difficulties of an only child. Her father was dead. She lived with her mother in a four-room apartment on Washington Heights, and out of her wages she paid the rent and provided for both. She had been educated at Julia Richman High School and Hunter College and had taken her doctorate at Columbia. When her father died, he left behind five thousand dollars of insurance money, the largest portion of all his wordly goods, and this had seen them through her postgraduate studies and kept body and soul together for herself and her mother. When she could get the work, Phyllis’s mother did odds and ends of dressmaking, shortened hems and adjusted sleeves. Phyllis had worked in department stores. She had all the guilts and profound survival-sadness of poverty—to which I, Thomas Clancy, was no stranger.

  She also had large, steady brown eyes that looked at you directly and inquiringly. Her sex life, so far as I knew, was Professor Alex Horton, forty-one years old, the same department at Knickerbocker as Phyllis. They had gone together, more or less, for two years. They were as intimate as two such people might be presumed to be. They sometimes went to the movies and sometimes to the theater. They had appeared together at four faculty affairs. As far as marriage went, it was never concretized. Horton was a Methodist; Phyllis was Jewish. A friend of Horton’s had remarked on the difficulties presented in this situation by Phyllis’s mother. Professor Edward Gorland, the chief of the physics department at Knickerbocker, also commented on this.

  Professor Gorland was a careful man for success. On every level and in every nook and cranny of what constitutes success in our world, there are careful men with proper techniques. They are versed in the language and delicacy of their movements. Granting that a department head in so great a university as Knickerbocker was of considerable importance, as such things go in the academic world, Professor Gorland made more of much, a great deal more. He was careful and pompous, in his late fifties, and filled with the idiocies of “top level.” The fact that his field and department was physics nurtured this. “Having changed the world, Mr. Clancy,” he once remarked to me, “we must never lose touch with that change, must we?” He had a long, dignified head, and like most actors I know, he had mastered the trick of raising one eyebrow. “A pilot who changes the course, a new course, you don’t drop him?”

  I had no opinion on pilots or courses or ships, and the substance of his manner was in the fact that he was prying. Inside, he was filled with envy and annoyance because he did not know exactly what I was doing in his department or why I was there. He would have given a pretty to know, and he kept hinting that the dean over him did know. I didn’t know who knew, nor did I care; but the fact of such men as Gorland is that within their practiced delicacy, they are indelicate as hell. About Phyllis, he referred three times in a single conversation to the fact that she was Jewish.

  The first time, he made it plain that there were no distinctions drawn in his department. “I mean,” he said, “it would hardly be cricket to have a whole department of Jews. Here in New York, that can happen. It would become reverse discrimination, so to speak. And you can’t really separate physics and security any more, can you? I mean you people in security are inclined to look twice where a Jew is concerned, aren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “As I told you, Professor Gorland, I am not in security of any kind and I don’t work for the federal government. I’m just a New York City cop.”

  The second time, he mentioned that Phyllis was a lady, and you wouldn’t think just to know her or talk to her that she was Jewish. “Why not?” I asked him, and he said, well, there it was—you just wouldn’t think so. I told him that I would, and that came of a gutter education and growing up on the city streets with all kinds of elements, and that anyway I was never sure of what a lady was except a female.

  The third time, he said that since I was an Irish Catholic, that would make it worse.

  “Worse for what?”

  “Well,” he said, “I mentioned Alex Horton.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Of course, when a man’s a bachelor as long as Horton, marriage is difficult.”

  “I suppose so,” I agreed. “What has that got to do with me being an Irish Catholic?”

  “I mean that Miss Goldmark’s mother is one of the old-fashioned religious kind. So I gather, at least. The fact that Horton was a Methodist made a difficult thing more difficult. Would it be presumptuous for me to suppose that as a Catholic, the difficulty will be accented?”

  “I can’t say what is presumptuous, Professor. I don’t intend to marry Phyllis Goldmark. And does it follow because my name is Clancy that I’m a Catholic?”

  “Believe me, I have no prejudice against Catholics. And I think I am justified, Mr. Clancy, in feeling that your manner toward me is antagonistic. I am only trying to co-operate in what is at best a most delicate and troublesome matter.”

  “I understand that and I appreciate it. If I appeared antagonistic, I am ready to apologize.”

  “Not at all, not at all!” he said. “No need for apologies at all. I feel better. I feel that we’re squared away, Mr. Clancy. I was simply concerned—”

  “I’m sure,” I agreed. “As a fact, I am not a Catholic, if it makes any difference. My grandfather came from Belfast. My father and mother were Presbyterians. I’m not sure that I’m anything very much, and I’d just as soon be taken for a Catholic as not. But there’s no use making it more difficult, and if Miss Goldmark inquires, you could tell her that—or get it around. I don’t care.”

  “You understand my position?”

  “I understand your position,” I said.

  “I mean, I am in the dark, entirely in the dark. If I only had some inkling of what all this adds up to. Mind you, I am not asking—I am not prying—”

  I shrugged.

  “—We’re all soldiers in a vast army now, aren’t we? I mean as a little more than a figure of speech.”

  “I’m not a soldier,” I said. “I’m just a cop, Professor Gorland.”

  I took two lecture classes a week, which was all I could possibly prepare for, even with the help I got; and that meant ten days of preparation, living with the subject and breathing it and reading until my eyes blurred and refused to see. I don’t suppose I did too badly.

  Phyllis came to the class the first time I took Horton’s students. The subject of my paper for that day was the meaning and origin of high-
energy cosmic radiation, and I faced eighty-three young men who knew more of physics and more about the mathematics of high-energy radiation than I would know if I had taken ten months instead of ten days to prepare. On my side, I had the empty dignity and overbearance of my age—thirty-seven—expert help, and a recent survey of things that Enrico Fermi, Bruno Rossi, Pierre Auger, Robert Millikan, and Carl D. Anderson had written upon the subject. Phyllis came in just before I began, stood at the rear of the room for a few minutes, a slight, almost wistful figure, and then found a seat in the last row as I explained that the most imposing difficulty, when dealing with the origins of cosmic radiation, lay in the fact that the various points or directions from which they bombard our planet seem to have no actual connection with what we have determined as plausible points of beginning or origin.

  She listened intently, chin resting on the back of one hand, as I developed the lecture I had somehow put together; and in spite of myself, I found that I watched her for reactions and assurance. I wanted the lecture to be a good one, and that was apart from the fact that I had to stand up here and deliver it. I wanted the students to respect me, and I even wanted to believe for a little while that I was a part of a university faculty, and that my own life had some direction, sense, and purpose. Maybe, as I continue with this, I will be able to make clear why I wanted all this.

  When I had finished and dealt passably well with the questions and not made an ass of myself and the students were on their way out, Phyllis came up to the podium and introduced herself and told me that Professor Gorland had suggested that she sit in on my first lecture. I had seen her before on several occasions, but this was our first actual meeting.

  “Not to spy or observe you, you must understand,” she said, “but our work is complementary. It would be good if you could find the time to sit in on one or two of my classes.”

  “I’d like that,” I nodded, “Miss——?”

  “Goldmark,” she said. “Phyllis Goldmark. You’re Thomas Clancy. I hear that you were in research. Do you enjoy coming back to teaching?”

  “I’m not coming back, Miss Goldmark. It’s my first time.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m sure my nervousness was apparent.”

  “As a matter of fact, it was not,” she said. “I thought you were quite poised and self-assured. I can’t believe that you have never done any teaching. I have been teaching for seven years, and I must say that I would give a great deal for your self-assurance.”

  “That’s a great compliment. You’re very kind, Miss Goldmark.”

  Until now, she had been formal and correct and uninhibited in the small talk of one faculty member to another. Now that broke; she became uneasy, and said that she thought she must be going. I made a point of being a stranger in a very large university, alone and bewildered and even a little frightened, and begged her to join me for a cup of coffee, and a sandwich. She admitted that she had not yet lunched, and I admitted that I did not even know where the faculty cafeteria was.

  It pleased her to be knowledgeable, even about the geography of an eating place, and it was less her timidity that made her shy than her difficulties with men. There are women in whom this difficulty intensifies with age, and I remember thinking to myself that soon, all too soon, she would become professionally a spinster, just as she was already professionally a teacher. She would dry up, turn inward upon herself, and suck the remnants of her own juices until they were gone and wasted. She did not lack beauty or femininity, but she lacked the ability to comfort herself with either quality or to make other people aware of them.

  As we went into the cafeteria, she nodded to several people but did not introduce me. We each took coffee, a sandwich, and a piece of pie, and we found an empty table. She was explaining that the food was adequate here but not very good. But at least it was on campus, and since the pseudo Gothic vault of the place was half buried in the basement, it was always cool during the hot months.

  “If you expect to stay that long?” she asked me.

  “Perhaps. My future is still uncertain. I was brought in to plug up a hole, I suppose, a sort of odd man. Professor Gorland mentioned a discussion of my future, as soon as he gets around to it.”

  “Now you don’t seem very much like a teacher,” she smiled. “I don’t know why.”

  “Perhaps because I am not really a teacher. Not yet.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” She would drop her eyes as she ate.

  “I read your essay on refraction,” I said.

  “Where did you ever find it?”

  “Here in the library. It’s very good.”

  “No—well, I mean there’s so little that’s original in it. But I am delighted when anyone mentions that he has read it. I sometimes wonder what it is like to be a popular magazine writer and have a million people read what you write—instead of twenty.”

  “It depends on what you write, I would say.”

  “I guess so.”

  At this point, a stout, red-faced man in his forties, carrying a heavily loaded tray, paused by our table and said, “Hello, Phyllis. Is that our new man? Won’t you introduce me?”

  “Professor Vanpelt,” she said. I stood up and shook hands with him. “This is Mr. Clancy—the new assistant.”

  “Glad to meet you, Clancy,” Vanpelt said, chopping with his head, a jovial man and full of smiles. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Please.”

  He had the chair out already. Unless he had not eaten for weeks, he was a glutton, his tray loaded with beef stew, potato pancakes, mashed potatoes as a side dish, apple sauce, a double portion of bread, four pats of butter, and an enormous piece of chocolate layer cake. He began to eat immediately and talked through a full mouth. “I hear you’re a research man, Clancy. Hell, if I had one of those twenty-five thousand a year jobs with a big outfit, I’m damned if I’d come here. Not for teaching. Take it from me what you can do with teaching. I come into class filled with the joy and glory of knowledge, and then I face that rippling field of snotnose youth, and it goes, it goes. Anyway, don’t let them bug you, the way they did Horton.”

  “Horton?”

  “Your predecessor, Professor Alex Horton—may he rest in peace.”

  “What a cruel thing to say!” Phyllis burst out. “He’s not dead.”

  “He’s not dead, he’s not alive—and he’s neither here nor there,” Vanpelt mumbled, his mouth full of beef stew. “What did they tell you, Clancy? That he resigned?”

  “I just took it for granted that he left for reasons of his own. It’s not my problem.”

  “No. Oh, no. No one can spend twenty-four hours at Knickerbocker and remain that innocent. Do you mean to tell me that no one let you into the mysteries and delights of the Horton affair?”

  I was watching Phyllis, whose face was pale, controlled, and angry. There is a chain of command and an order of precedence and protocol in a university as precise and numbing as in the Army. I had already realized that Vanpelt was major to Phyllis Goldmark. She said quietly and carefully,

  “I don’t thing it’s our business to go into that. If Mr. Clancy should be told whatever we don’t know—and we know nothing—let those who are supposed to do it.”

  “Bosh,” said Vanpelt. “He’s over twenty-one, isn’t he. The fact is, Clancy, that Professor Alexander Horton walked oat of here one day and vanished from me sight of honest men. Poof! Like that. Whereupon a veritable horde of G men, T men, S men, cops and so forth descended upon these drowsy academic halls and picked them as clean of information as a turkey’s bones of flesh on December first. All very quiet, very genteel, and not one blessed word of it in the press. Fourteen, fifteen days ago. Still no word in the press, no sign of Alex—nothing. Not even the G men.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Neither do we,” Phyllis said. “Neither does anyone here. I don’t see any sense talking about it.”

  I saw Phyllis again in the cafeteria the following day, and I wa
s able to join her for lunch. Whether I could have pushed our acquaintance so quickly under other circumstances, I don’t know, but she was lonely and afraid—not so afraid that she was ready to pour out her heart to me, but still possessed of fear she could not conceal. On the other hand, I had not established myself as anyone importantly receptive to the outpouring of a woman’s heart.

  “I wanted to ask you about Vanpelt,” I began at one point, but she shook her head.

  “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “He’s a full professor?”

  “Yes.”

  “A glutton? Always that way?”

  “Mr. Clancy,” she said, smiling for the first time since we had met today—her smile was warm and uncertain at once and transformed her whole face—“to a new teacher from an old hand at it, just let me say that personal observations have a way of getting around. There are neither secrets nor privacies in a place like this. You appear to be a very nice person and very open.”

  “Thank you.”

  Again the dropping of her glance, the retreat.

  “What were you getting at?” I asked her.

  “The way you called Professor Vanpelt a glutton just now. Do you always say whatever is on your mind?”

  “Not always. But Vanpelt is a pig with food. Some people are. I wouldn’t make such an observation if I thought you cared a fig about him, but it was plain enough that you don’t like him——”

  “I don’t want to talk about Professor Vanpelt, if you don’t mind,” she interrupted me, and then I steered away from that and we talked about our work and she asked me some questions about my research at Consolidated Dynamics, where a card in a file said that I had done research, and I made answers that I was prepared to make. I cut that off as quickly as possible, suggesting that since I was free for the rest of the day, I might sit in on a class of hers, if she bad one?

  “I don’t. It’s my free afternoon too.”

  “Would I be pushing too hard if I asked what you intend to do with it?”

  Again the smile. “Nothing very important, Mr. Clancy. They’re showing The Great Dictator at the Museum of Moden Art. I never saw it, and I thought that this would be a good time, and anyway I want to get away from the ivy walls for a while. Do you like Chaplin?”