“Why?”
“Because in a small town you have a chance to do something. You can be ...” He broke off, searching for the right word, and went on, “You can be effective. I suppose that’s the only criterion of ‘success’ which isn’t somehow associated with the idea of making a lot of money.”
“Aren’t you interested in making a lot of money?” asked Erica, regarding him curiously.
“Not particularly. I wouldn’t know what to do with it.” He paused, looking off down the room, and remarked, “I’d like to make enough out of law to be able to have a farm someday, though.”
“Why?” asked Erica again.
“Because I like horses. I’ve always done a lot of riding, and I like living in the country — not out in the middle of nowhere, of course, but near enough to a town so that I could go in to the office every day. You ask an awful lot of questions.”
He didn’t appear to mind her questions and she said, “It’s the only way to get anything out of you. Besides, if you know what a person wants most, you usually have a pretty good idea what he’s like.”
“What do you want most?”
“Just what every other woman wants,” said Erica. “I’m afraid I’m not very original. What else do you dream about besides horses?”
“That sounds rather Freudian,” said Marc, grinning, and then answered, “Nothing much. I’d like to be able to buy all the books I want and ...” He paused for thought and added, “Oh, yes. I want a custom-built radio-phonograph with two loudspeakers and a room full of good records.”
“Do you like music too?” asked Erica.
“What do you mean, ‘too’?”
“Never mind,” said Erica. “I was just wondering where you’d been all these years. What kind of music do you like?”
“Almost everything.” He said quickly, “I don’t know anything about it; almost every time I go to a concert or turn on the radio I hear something that I haven’t heard before. I’m still at the beginning stage.”
She told him about her father’s custom-built radio-phonograph and his record library and said, “You must come with René some evening and we’ll play whatever you like. Charles has everything from Corelli to Shostakovich.”
Afterwards she was to remember the way his face lit up, and the way he said, “I’d like to awfully, if your father wouldn’t mind.”
And the utter confidence with which she had answered, “Charles wouldn’t mind at all, once he’d recovered from the shock of meeting someone who was really interested. He doesn’t get much encouragement from most of the people we know. Music is all right in its place, of course, but its place is the concert hall, once or twice a month, and Charles has no sense of proportion. He even interrupts bridge games and rushes home from the golf course in order to hear the first North American broadcast of some symphony written by some crazy modern composer, which nobody in their senses would call ‘music’ in any case. I think a lot of our friends feel that it isn’t quite normal, or in very good taste, for a man otherwise as sound in his opinions as C. S. Drake to know so damn much about music and take it so seriously.”
She said with amusement, “My father is incapable of being even moderately polite about a bad performance, regardless of how successful it was from a social standpoint.”
“What sort of music does he like?”
“Almost everything, except that, in general, he’s antiromantic. He has a passion for Bach and the very early composers and for some of the moderns, particularly Mahler.”
“Do you always call him ‘Charles’?” asked Marc.
“Yes. We have a very odd relationship, I guess. We even lunch together downtown once or twice a week, as if we didn’t see enough of each other the rest of the time!”
“How does your mother feel about music?”
“Mother?” said Erica. “Oh, she has far more sense of proportion.”
People were beginning to go. Erica got up and crossed the room to say goodbye to someone, and then came back and sat down on the window seat beside Marc again, hoping that no one else would notice her. Their guests were almost all friends of her mother’s, with the exception of a few who had been friends of Erica’s but who belonged to the period which had come to an end after she went to work on the Post and in whom Erica had gradually lost interest. Unlike her mother, who refused to believe it, she knew that the loss of interest was mutual; it was as disconcerting for them to discover that in any discussion involving politics or economics, Erica was likely to be on the side of Labor, as it was for her to realize that they were not. She had tried to explain it to her mother but it was no use. Margaret Drake had invited some of Erica’s former friends today because she still felt that Erica was being “left out of things” and remained convinced that the mutual lack of interest was partly the product of Erica’s imagination, partly due to a temporary upset in her daughter’s sense of values, and partly due to the fact that Erica simply would not make any real effort to see them.
Having done her duty and made the rounds before she had discovered Marc, Erica had no intention of moving again if she could help it, at least until the general exodus got under way. No one else in the still-crowded room showed any sign of being about to leave, and she turned to Marc, who was still leaning with one shoulder against the wall looking down at her, having watched her all the way across the room and back again with an expression which told her nothing except that he was as absorbed and as oblivious to everyone else as she was herself, and asked, “What did you mean a while ago when you said you didn’t want to go on living in Montreal indefinitely, because you couldn’t be ‘effective’?”
“I meant that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a place where no matter how bad social conditions are, I can’t change anything.”
He paused and then said, “I don’t know whether I can explain it or not,” wondering if she realized that he had never even tried to explain it to anyone else. “It’s this feeling of being completely helpless, of having to watch people suffer, through a combination of bigotry and stupidity and sheer backwardness, without ever being able to do anything about it.”
His eyes left her face and looking out over the city again, he remarked, “I don’t know which is worse, the feeling of not knowing what’s going on behind all the barred windows and high walls of these so-called ‘welfare’ institutions run by the Church, or the feeling that it wouldn’t make any difference if you did. You’re up against a colossal organization that interferes everywhere, in the life of its own people, but which must never be interfered with — even by its own people. In its treatment of the poor and the sick, of orphans, illegitimate children, juvenile delinquents, adolescent and women prisoners, unmarried mothers, and in fact almost everyone who gets into trouble — it is responsible to no one and nothing but itself. What it chooses to tell you about the way it deals with those people, you are permitted to know; what it does not choose to tell you, is none of your business. And of course, if you’re not a Catholic, it’s none of your business anyhow.”
His oblique, greenish eyes came back to her face and he said, “I suppose it all boils down to the one question of just how you want to live, or what you think you’re living for. You can make a lot of money in Montreal, you can be a big success, but you can’t change anything outside your own little racial category.
You have to adjust your conscience so that it doesn’t function, except in relation to people who bear the same label as you do, and then spend most of your life passing by on the other side of the road, minding your own business.”
She could not think of any way of telling him that she knew what he was talking about, because he was talking from the same point of view as her own. Instead, she looked up at him and smiled, and then realized that there was no need to tell him. He already knew.
Marc offered her another cigarette, then found he was out of matches and as Erica started up to get them, he said quickly, “No, I’ll do it. If you go, someone else will stop you and s
tart telling you the story of his life. Where are they?”
“Over there on that little table at the end of the sofa.”
Her eyes followed him as he made his way through the groups of people toward the fireplace, and she said to herself that he would stop to look at the Arlésienne. He did.
When he returned with the matches she asked him where he lived.
“In a rooming house on Sherbrooke Street.”
“Is it a nice one?”
“No, it’s awful. You don’t know where I could get a furnished apartment, more or less central, on a month-to-month lease, do you?”
“Well, there’s that new building on Côte des Neiges. I don’t know whether it’s open yet or not — I think it’s called ‘The Terrace.’”
“I know, I’ve been there.”
“Didn’t they have any vacancies?”
“Yes, they did have then, but the janitor told me they don’t take Jews.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that Erica almost missed it, and then it was as though it had caught her full in the face. There was an interval during which she was simply taken aback, and then she looked up at him, her expression slowly changing, and found that he had begun to draw away from her, to recede further and further into the back of her mind until finally she no longer saw him at all. He said something else which she did not even hear; she was listening to other voices repeating phrases and statements which she had heard all her life without paying much attention, because they had been said so often before and were so tiresomely unoriginal, but which had abruptly become significant, like a collection of firearms which have been hanging on the wall for years unnoticed, and then are suddenly discovered to be fully loaded.
The voices were talking against a background of signs which she had seen in newspaper advertisements, on hotels, beaches, golf courses, apartment houses, clubs, and the little restaurants for skiers in the Laurentians, an endless stream of signs which, apparently, might just as well have been written in another language, referring to human beings in another country, for until now she had never bothered to read them.
She had met a good many Jews before Marc, but in some way which already seemed to her inexplicable, she had neglected to relate the general situation with any one individual. Evidently some small and yet vital part of the machinery of her thought had failed to work until this moment, or worse still, she might have defeated its efforts to function by taking refuge in the comfortable delusion that even if these prejudices and restrictions were actually in effective operation, they could only be applied against — well, against what is usually designated as “the more undesirable type of Jew.” In other words, against people who more or less deserved it.
Now she saw for the first time that it was the label, not the man, that mattered. And even if it had been the man, there was still the good old get-out, “Yes, so-and-so’s all right, the very best type of Jew, and we’ve nothing against him personally, but first thing you know, he’ll be wanting to bring in his friends.” And so “the best type of Jew” was thereby disposed of.
That human beings, regardless of their own merit, should take upon themselves the right to judge a whole group of men, women, and children, arbitrarily assembled according to a largely meaningless set of definitions, was evil enough; that there should not even be a judgment, was intolerable.
It made no difference what Marc was like; he could still be told by janitors that they didn’t take Jews, before the door was slammed in his face.
“Hello,” said Marc. He smiled at her, then the smile faded. He stared at her, straightening up so that he was no longer leaning against the window frame, without taking his eyes from her face, and then he said with an undercurrent of desperation in his voice, “You did realize I was Jewish, didn’t you?”
“Yes, of course,” said Erica, appalled. “Of course I did!”
“I’m sorry, I thought ...”
“Yes,” said Erica. “Well, you thought wrong. If you’ll sit down, I’ll try and explain it to you.”
He sat down beside her on the window seat and after a pause she went on, “You see, the trouble with me is that I’m just like everybody else — I don’t realize what something really means until it suddenly walks up and hits me between the eyes. I can be quite convinced intellectually that a situation is wrong, but it’s still an academic question which doesn’t really affect me personally, until, for some reason or other, it starts coming at me through my emotions as well. It isn’t enough to think, you have to feel ...”
“I see,” said Marc, as Erica stopped abruptly, somewhat embarrassed. He took her hand without thinking and held it for a moment, then remembered where he was and quickly let it go again, remarking, also embarrassed, “That makes us even.”
Erica laughed and said, “You’re very tactful, anyhow.”
“I wasn’t being tactful.”
“How long have we known each other?” asked Erica, after a pause.
“What difference does it make?” He glanced at his watch and remarked, “Three quarters of an hour. You’re very honest, aren’t you?”
“It seems to me my honesty is rather belated. Anyhow,” she said, smiling at him, “if I never meet you again, Mr. Reiser, you’ll still have done me a lot of good.”
“You can’t call me Mr. Reiser when I’ve just been holding your hand. And what makes you think you’re not going to see me again? You’ve already invited me to come and listen to your father’s records,” he pointed out, and then asked, “What do you do on the Post?”
“I’m the Woman’s Editor — you know, social stuff, fashions, women’s interests, meetings, charities, and now all the rules, regulations, and handouts from the Wartime Prices and Trade Board that have to do with clothes, house furnishings, food, conservation of materials — that sort of thing.”
“How many pages?”
“Three or four, usually. Depends on which edition it is. I have an awfully good assistant, a girl named Sylvia Arnold from Ottawa, and an office boy named Weathersby Canning, known as ‘Bubbles.’”
“Is he any relation to the stockbroking Cannings?”
“Yes, he’s one of their sons — younger brother of the one who got the d.f.c. in April. Bubbles is waiting to get into the Air Force too; he’s got another year to go before he’s old enough.”
“Do you like your job?”
Erica paused, and said finally, “Yes, I like working on a newspaper because I like people, particularly newspaper people, but I’m not a career woman, if that’s what you mean.”
She broke off as René appeared, sauntering toward them with a glass in either hand. He asked, “Is there room for me to sit down?” and then remarked, glancing from one to the other, “I see you’ve met each other. Do I have to give him my drink?” he asked Erica as he lowered himself to the window seat beside her.
“It’s about time you did something for him besides leave him alone. I thought you were drinking martinis, René ...”
“I was,” said René.
“Then stick to them,” advised Erica, removing the glasses and handing one to Marc. “How do you like Mrs. Oppenheim?”
“I would like her considerably more if she didn’t insist on speaking French. She has the most atrocious accent — ça vient du ventre,” he explained, gesturing. “She told me I was the first French Canadian she’d met who didn’t speak a kind of patois, and with that graceful compliment she passed on to politics. She’s a Monarchist.”
“My God,” said Marc, “another one.”
“Well, why not?” said René.
Marc regarded him, evidently amused, and finally inquired: “Just what has Otto of Hapsburg got that the King of England hasn’t got?”
“I think he has you there, René,” murmured Erica, smiling into her glass, and answered, “The right religion.”
“I have nothing against the King of England,” protested René.
“No?” said Marc. “But you don’t see any reason why our Liberal Government at
Ottawa shouldn’t go on issuing official pamphlets and placards with ‘For King and Country’ in the English version and simply ‘Pour la Patrie’ in the French.”
“I haven’t your English Canadian passion for England,” said René.
“I don’t give a damn about England,” said Marc impatiently. “It hasn’t anything to do with England, as such. It’s the British Commonwealth of Nations. We’re living in a period where the tendency is toward greater international units, and for us as a country to resign from the Commonwealth is to move in the opposite direction, backwards toward a pure nationalism that’s already out of date. I don’t see why our Liberal politicians should make such an effort to avoid reminding the people of Quebec that they are a part of an organization which, whatever its faults, is still the only concrete example of the kind of international federation which we want to see existing all over the world. What’s the use of talking about ‘federating Europe’ in one breath and unfederating Canada in the next? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“One of them is a geographical and economic unit and the other isn’t,” said René mildly. He turned to Erica and said, “And the Hapsburg question hasn’t anything to do with religion either. Mrs. Oppenheim appears to be Jewish.”
“That just makes it worse,” said Marc. He took a drink and added, “Much worse.”
“I didn’t say that it had anything to do with religion so far as Mrs. Oppenheim is concerned,” said Erica.
René smiled back at her, remarking, “I don’t know why I put up with you. Speaking of ventres, where’s your father?”
“You’re about the tenth person that’s asked me that. If we ever give another party, which,” said Erica, “I must say is unlikely, I’m going to hang a sign in the front hall saying ‘Mr. Drake welcomes you all and hopes you will have a good time, but wishes to be left strictly alone.’ He’s upstairs in the study,” she told René.
Earth and High Heaven Page 4