“Oh, yes, Strickland. Old John Strickland’s son. I wonder what’s become of him? Must be ten years since I last saw him ...” He paused, dismissed old John Strickland and back at René again, he said with a sudden change of tone, “I don’t want to see you end up as an old maid, Eric, but after what’s happened to Miriam’s marriage, and God only knows what will happen to Tony’s by the time this war’s over, I don’t want to see you making any mistakes. It’s no use my pretending that they mean as much to me as you do. They don’t. And if you married someone and then he let you down some way or other, I think I’d probably murder him. So far my children haven’t shown much talent for picking the right person.”
“Mimi was too young. And give Tony and Madeleine a chance; after all, they were only married two months before Tony went overseas.”
“Even when he left, Madeleine didn’t really know what Tony was all about. How could she, after spending most of her life in a convent? I don’t know what’s happening to those boys like Tony in the Air Force, and neither do you or Madeleine or anyone else. They’re going to be something new in the way of a Post-war problem. Not that you’d have that to contend with in René, at any rate,” he added rather acidly.
“Don’t let’s get started on René again.”
“How in hell can I help it with my only son in the Air Force, making the world safe for René to sit at home playing politics?” he demanded angrily. “Not that René ever says anything about it,” he went on sarcastically. “He doesn’t even bother to make excuses for himself. He just blandly ignores the whole war except when he’s talking all around the subject and then he’s so bloody smart when it comes to avoiding issues that you can’t even push him into it — apart from the fact that he thinks Tony should have stayed home and played nursemaid to Madeleine, of course, instead of going overseas. It doesn’t seem to have dawned on René yet that Tony isn’t a French Canadian.”
“That’s not fair, Charles,” she said calmly.
He started to say something else and then let it go. “No, I know it’s not fair,” he remarked at last, and got up. “Come on, Eric, I guess it’s time we gave your mother some moral support.”
As they reached the door leading into the upstairs hall Erica said, “By the way, he’s downstairs.”
“Who is?” he asked without interest.
“René.”
She knew her father and found herself wishing violently that Marc had come with someone else, or at least that they had not got started on René again at this particular time. Her father had always disliked René. She said as casually as she could, “He brought a friend of his, a young lawyer named Reiser ...”
“Sounds like a Jew.”
She said quickly, “But he’s the most charming person, Charles, I know you’ll like him.”
“I don’t usually care much for Jewish lawyers,” he said coolly. “What firm is he in?”
“Something and Aaronson.”
“Then he definitely is a Jew. I didn’t know René was so broad-minded. What on earth did he bring him for?”
With steadily rising anxiety she said, “I told you, Charles — because he’s thoroughly nice and René wanted him to meet us.”
“What are you making all this fuss about?” he asked, eying her curiously.
“I’m not making a fuss!”
He went on, “Anyhow, I’ll bet you anything that it wasn’t René’s idea.”
She stopped with her hand on the Post at the top of the stairs and asked, “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that since we’ve known René for more than a year and he’s never shown much interest in introducing us to his friends before, when he finally turns up with some shyster lawyer, it’s more likely to be the shyster lawyer’s idea than René’s.”
The half-sick feeling that she had had when Marc had said so matter-of-factly, “They don’t take Jews,” came back, only this time it was worse, because instead of some anonymous, ill-educated concierge, it was her father who was saying in effect, “We don’t take Jews,” and because she was already beginning to be frightened. Marc was still downstairs; he would expect to be introduced to her father, and if there was anything wrong with Charles’ manner, anything at all, Marc would be certain to notice it.
Her father was on the second step down. She raced out and caught his arm and said, slowly and clearly, “Charles, I’ve met Marc Reiser and talked to him. I like him. I want you to like him.”
He came round slowly and faced her, looking into her eyes which were on a level with his own; his expression altered slightly as he looked at her, and then he said deliberately, “I’m afraid I’m not very interested in whether you like him or not.”
They went down the stairs. Erica had made up her mind that she would not introduce Marc to her father; instead, she would get hold of René and tell him to take Marc away at once on any pretext he liked. But it was not to be changed; the pattern had already been designed and laid out, and none of them could change it.
At the foot of the stairs René was standing with Marc, waiting for her, and as Erica and her father reached the last step, he said, “Good afternoon, sir. I’d like to introduce a friend of mine, Marc ...”
Her father said “Oh, hello, René,” cutting him short, then glanced at Marc without pausing and went on.
II
I t was after midnight when Erica got home, having left the house soon after René and Marc. She had spent three hours on the Red Cross story which would ordinarily have taken her less than an hour to write, because she could not keep her mind on what she was doing. From the office she went to the Guild meeting where she heard very little that was said and afterwards was unable to remember who had been there. The Guild was slow in getting organized and every extra person made a difference. She had promised to go, in any case. The meeting broke up late, long after she had finally accepted the fact that nothing could be done about Marc, even supposing her father could be persuaded to do it. It had been quite obvious from the way Marc had said goodbye to her, immediately after Charles had failed to stop at the foot of the stairs, that he did not expect to see her again.
There remained the problem of her father and herself.
He was sitting in his pyjamas and dressing gown with an untouched whisky and soda on the table beside him and from the door of the study Erica said, “Charles, I want to talk to you.”
Although he had left the study door open so that, as usual, he would hear her come in, and had in fact been waiting for her ever since dinner, not knowing what to do with himself, he said, barely raising his eyes, “It’s rather late, isn’t it?”
“I won’t take long.”
He knew that what she wanted to talk about was his behaviour towards René’s Jewish friend, and he not only had no intention of being put in a position where he would have to justify an action which, so far as Charles Drake was concerned, did not require justification, he was still irritated by Erica’s rudeness when he had last seen her just before she had left for her office.
As soon as he was certain that René and whatever-his-namewas had taken their departure, he had returned from the drawing-room to find Erica had gone upstairs. His wife said that she had some work to finish downtown and that after that, she was going to some kind of union meeting. He had hung about in the hall trying to avoid getting into conversation with anyone, keeping his eyes on the landing so that he shouldn’t miss her. It was not that he wanted to say anything in particular, he just wanted to have a look at his daughter to see if everything was all right, and to let her know that so far as he himself was concerned, there were no hard feelings.
When Erica had finally come running downstairs he could see that she had been crying; he knew that she wouldn’t want to stop in the hall among a lot of people, so he had cut across to the front door, getting there just ahead of her, and had opened it for her.
“Have you had any dinner, Eric?”
“No.”
“Are you going to get some some
where?”
She said nothing but simply stood with her hands at her sides and her eyes on some point near the floor at his feet, waiting for him to let her pass.
“You’d better let me pay for your dinner and then I’ll be sure you won’t forget to go without it.”
He took a bill from his pocket and held it out to her but she did not take it, and he asked, “What time do you think you’ll be back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is something the matter?”
Her eyes moved up to his face, then down again, and said, “Let me go please, Charles. I’m late enough already.”
It was the first time that he could remember Erica ever having gone off without saying what was on her mind and for a while he had been thoroughly upset. He was sensitive to the moods of everyone with whom he lived or worked, particularly where his wife and Erica were concerned, and he had watched his daughter disappear down the long flight of steps which led from their street to the one below, still holding the two-dollar bill in his hand and wondering if he had been right to act on his hunch about the fellow, after all.
Since then, however, he had had four hours in which to think it over, four hours during which he had, in fact, found it impossible to think about anything else. He had intended to spend the evening rearranging and listing fifty or sixty miscellaneous records which were at present scattered through half a dozen big albums so that he could never find anything without searching for it. He had got out all the records and grouped them, according to the composer, on the big, flat-topped desk which he had had brought up from his office for just this sort of thing, and had then lost interest. The listing would have to wait. Having returned the records to their albums in even worse disorder than they had been in to start with, he had then tried to read for a while, and had finally ended up by simply sitting, waiting to hear the front door open and the sound of Erica’s footsteps in the hall below.
In the meantime, he had come to certain conclusions. The fact that Erica could be so worried by his behaviour toward a complete stranger that she would first go up to her room and cry, and then refuse even to tell him where she was going to have her dinner or so much as thank him for having offered to pay for it, was clear proof that his hunch had been right. Besides that, even if it had been entirely groundless, what he did in his own house was his own business, and it was not up to Erica either to regard his unwillingness to meet René’s singularly ill-chosen friend as an injury to herself, or to take it out on him by refusing to be even civil.
He said, “Whatever you want to talk about can wait till the morning. You’d better go to bed.”
Instead of going to bed, she left the door and went over to the windows, asking with her back to him, “Why did you do it, Charles?”
She heard him knocking his pipe against the brass ashtray standing beside his chair and finally his voice saying, “If you’ll think back to what I said when you first told me that René had turned up with some Jewish lawyer ...”
“His name is Marc Reiser.” The apple tree in the garden next door had turned to mist and silver; it looked like a ghost in the moonlight. “Anyhow, that isn’t enough to explain it.”
“I don’t think I’m called upon to give explanations.”
Erica swung around, so that she was facing him. She was still inwardly raging; like her father, she had had four hours in which to think over his behaviour at the foot of the stairs, but she had come to somewhat different conclusions. Still managing to keep her voice fairly level, however, she said, “It’s no use talking like that to me, Charles. It isn’t going to work. I’ve been going around in circles all evening trying to find some way of straightening this thing out. So far as Marc’s concerned, there doesn’t seem to be any — nothing you or I can say will make the slightest difference, it’s done and we can’t change it. Every time he remembers what happened to him in our house, it will happen to him all over again ...”
“I daresay it’s happened to him before,” said his father dryly.
“Probably,” said Erica. “After all, we Canadians don’t really disagree fundamentally with the Nazis about the Jews — we just think they go a bit too far.”
There was a quick flash of anger in his dark eyes and a momentary tightening of the muscles around his mouth, but he said nothing, and the next minute his face was as impassive as ever. He went on looking at her steadily, almost speculatively, with no indication of what he was thinking showing in his face. It was so unlike him that Erica felt vaguely uneasy, but she added in the same tone, “Anyhow, the fact that other people have kicked him around doesn’t mean that Marc has worked up an immunity which more or less lets you out — or that I feel any better because all you did was gang up with the others.”
She said, “Apart from your manners, which are usually a good deal better than that, what on earth has become of your sense of justice ...” and suddenly pulled herself up short. She was on the wrong track. None of them had ever got anywhere with Charles by a discussion of abstract principles — though after thirty-two years of marriage, Margaret Drake was still trying! — the only way to reach him was through his emotions. Her father had never cared what his family thought on any subject, since in most arguments, he did not think himself; he only cared how they felt. Any stand he took with them was likely to be largely emotional, and to counter emotion with logic was useless; the only effective way to deal with him was to take advantage of his intuitive understanding of people and to substitute either your own or someone else’s feelings for his own. Once her father started to be sympathetic, he usually defeated himself.
She said, “I don’t know when I’ve met anyone I’ve liked as much as I liked Marc, or anyone as intelligent and civilized and as easy to talk to. He’s the complete opposite of everything you seem to think. He hasn’t much self-confidence and he didn’t know anybody but René; I think he had an awful time until I came along and rescued him. If you’d even bothered to look at him, you’d have known what kind of person he is because it’s all in his face ...”
Unimpressed and still nowhere near losing his temper, her father broke in at last, “You don’t seem to realize that fortunately or unfortunately, the kind of person he is has almost nothing to do with it ...”
“What matters is the label, is that it?”
“I didn’t invent the label, Eric. And I’ve already told you that I don’t intend to sit here and be lectured by one of my children ...”
“I’m not trying to lecture you,” said Erica desperately. “I’m trying to get you to tell me why you did it. Along with what you did to Marc, you gave me the worst shock I’ve ever had — you, of all people! I thought I could count on you to back me up — you always have until now — and instead of that, you let me down. You couldn’t have let me down any harder if you’d tried. And having put me in the most humiliating position — believe it or not, Charles, I’d just finished telling him that you’d like to meet him because both of you are so keen on music; I’d even invited him to come and listen to your records! — you tell me that I’m not even entitled to an explanation.”
The reading lamp standing beside his chair was almost in line with Erica and himself, shining into his eyes whenever he looked up at her. She was still standing with her back to the windows, and the pupils of her eyes were so enlarged that her eyes appeared black instead of green. Her pupils had always done that when Erica was either very angry or had gone too long without food.
He swung the lamp out of the way and said at last, “You know as well as I do that among the people we know — your mother’s friends, my friends, even your own friends for that matter, or most of them at any rate — a Jewish lawyer sticks out like a sore thumb. He just doesn’t fit; from a social point of view, he’s unmanageable — makes everybody else feel awkward, and if he’s as decent as you seem to think your friend Reiser is, after an intimate acquaintance of half an hour, probably he feels pretty awkward himself.”
“He did.”
“Wha
t’s all the argument about, then?”
“Go on, Charles,” she said.
He shrugged. “Very well, then, since you asked for it. When you’ve known as many Jews as I have, particularly young Jewish lawyers who are on the make professionally, you’ll realize that when they choose to mix with Gentiles after business hours, it isn’t usually because they prefer to spend their free time with Gentiles instead of Jews. It’s because they’re out to do themselves a bit of good socially. Contacts count, Eric — the more contacts, the better. You never know when they’re likely to come in handy ... particularly a contact with, say, people like us ...”
“Speak for yourself, Charles.”
He gave another shrug of his heavy shoulders and said, “All right — people like me. The point is that once they ...”
“‘They’?” repeated Erica innocently.
He said impatiently, “Jewish lawyers ...”
“But we’re not talking about ‘Jewish lawyers,’” said Erica. “We’re talking about Marc Reiser.”
“I don’t give a damn about Marc Reiser!” said her father angrily.
“That was more than obvious,” said Erica. “However, you started to say something about the point. What is the point, exactly?”
“The point is that once they get a foot in your door, if you treat them the way you would anyone else, either they deliberately take advantage of it, or simply misunderstand it, and before you know it, they’re all the way in and there’s no way of getting rid of them.”
“So it was in the nature of a prophylactic measure.”
“I don’t like your tone, Erica.”
“Well, I don’t like your point of view, so that makes us even,” said Erica, unmoved.
He said almost indifferently, “You’ll find my point of view is pretty general, whether you like it or not. I’ve had a great deal more experience of the world than you. I’ve no objection to Jews, some of the ones I know downtown are very decent fellows, but that doesn’t mean I want them in my house any more than they want me in theirs — it works both ways, don’t forget that — and I prefer to choose my own friends, and not have René do it for me.”
Earth and High Heaven Page 6