But her best was not good enough. Night after night, sometimes until very late, Erica could hear their voices in the study. It was like the year before, when Margaret Drake had stayed up till all hours attempting to persuade her husband to adopt a more rational viewpoint toward his son’s French Canadian and devoutly Catholic fiancée. She had not got anywhere then either. Now, she needed sleep more than ever; for three years everything which did not come under the heading of war work had been crammed into the hours before nine in the morning and after five, and the only way Margaret Drake had been able to keep it up was by going to bed each night at ten. Instead of that, she was once more talking until eleven, twelve, and occasionally even one, dragging herself out of bed again at seven in the morning, having slept only in the intervals when the argument stopped turning round and round in her head and let her alone for a while. If she had appealed to Erica at that time, Erica would have given in for her mother’s sake, not for the sake of her father who, apart from the fact that he was obviously lonely without Erica, seemed comfortable enough behind his wall of indifference. For reasons of her own, however, Margaret Drake preferred to wait, to go on struggling with her husband until she was finally convinced that it was hopeless, and then only appeal to Erica as a last resort and not because she felt that Erica was chiefly to blame. By then it was too late.
Charles did not budge an inch. He told his wife that his position was clear and his decision final; he would not have Reiser in the house, and so long as Erica continued to ignore her parents and show so little concern for their peace of mind that she could go on seeing a cheap Jewish lawyer two and three times a week outside the house, he, Charles, would have nothing to say to her.
As an explanation of his own attitude toward the whole affair, it was fairly good as far as it went, and since Margaret Drake had always had a tendency to oversimplify her husband’s character and motives, largely because her own character and motives were so eminently simple and straightforward that she could not conceive of his as being anything else, she accepted his explanation for what it was worth, and failed to realize that even for Charles Drake, it did not go far enough.
Putting it like that, it implied that Erica was the cause of his behaviour, which was only partly true, and that he himself really believed that she was oblivious to his own feelings and those of his wife, which was not true at all.
He knew exactly how unoblivious Erica was, and how much she cared about her parents’ peace of mind, and in actual fact, whether he was entirely aware of it or not, half his behaviour was put on in the instinctive effort to wear down Erica’s resistance. The effort might have been successful if it had not been for one fact which he had overlooked. Erica’s concern for her mother and father and their evident unhappiness was slowly becoming outbalanced by her resentment at their treatment of Marc.
That resentment was steadily growing, having taken root on Wednesday afternoon, the day everything had started, when she had had to telephone Marc from her office to ask him not to call for her that night. It had not occurred to her until the lull after the final edition went to press and she at last had had time to think, that if Marc were to call for her that night, there was no way of making certain that he and Charles would not run into each other again. At that hour, just before or during dinner, her father was likely to be almost anywhere on the ground floor. She could not instruct Mary to leave Mr. Reiser standing on the front steps with the door closed; the only thing to do was to keep him away from the house altogether.
Keeping Marc away from the house without telling him why, which would have made him feel worse than ever, turned out to be even more difficult than she had expected. For that first evening, she had invented an appointment downtown which would keep her so late that it would not be worthwhile to go home before dinner. The second time, it was gas rationing and the distance up to the top of Westmount. Marc had been well brought up, and he appeared to be definitely unreceptive to the idea that when you invite a girl to dine at a restaurant, you do not necessarily have to call for her. The third time, as his car happened to be laid up for repairs, he told Erica that he would take a tram to the boulevard, and walk up from there. After all, he pointed out, there were steps and other people used them. Unable to think up a fresh excuse on such short notice, Erica had fallen back on the one about having a late appointment downtown.
So then, at last, he got it. There was no fourth time, he never suggested calling for her again.
Compared to the problem as a whole, whether he called for her or not was relatively unimportant, but Marc happened to be one of those people to whom good manners are second nature, and he could not get used to letting Erica find her own way to wherever it was that they were to meet, while he simply sat and waited for her.
One Sunday afternoon when they were walking on Mount Royal, along one of the roads which always reminded Erica of Europe, there were so many people on bicycles, on foot, or riding by in carriages since no cars were allowed on the mountain, he said suddenly, “Remember Hans Castorp, Eric? ‘Life consists of getting used to not getting used to it.’” A moment later he added moodily, “Well, at least I can still take you home.”
Only as far as the front door, however. He would probably just have to get used to not getting used to that too.
Sometimes Erica found herself thinking that it was as though Charles and Margaret Drake were determined to put Marc down on the level on which they apparently thought he belonged, to force him to be as they imagined him to be, and not as he actually was. Each time that Erica set out to meet him at a restaurant, a bar, a hotel lobby, and once or twice even on a street corner, and each time that she left him at the front door and watched him turn back, down the walk to his car or along the street leading to the steps which were a shortcut to the street below, back to his own world again, she could feel her resentment growing and the gulf between herself and her mother and father steadily widening.
The gulf was worse than the resentment. To be really good at resentment, you have to have had considerable practice, and until the Wednesday afternoon when she had heard herself telling her first lie to Marc, over the telephone, Erica could not remember ever having resented anything in her life. The moment her parents showed signs of coming round, she knew that her resentment would be over and done with, but the gulf was a different matter. The most vital part of her life was lived with Marc, away from home, and in spite of herself, she was coming to regard the house in Westmount merely as a place to eat and sleep. In a desperate effort to bridge the gulf, at least to some extent, and to bring the two separate halves of her life closer together, she had tried to talk to her mother and father about Marc, literally forcing herself to refer to him or quote something that he had said just as though he were — well, just as though he were anybody else. But she found herself talking into a vacuum; the moment she mentioned him, or even looked as though she were about to mention him — Erica was no actress, and the effort it required in order to sound natural was probably fairly obvious — her mother and father stopped listening. And the gulf went on widening.
The night before Margaret Drake finally appealed to Erica, Max Eliot, Miriam’s American on the Purchasing Committee, had come to dinner and the gulf suddenly widened still further.
He had turned out to be quite presentable, of medium height, rather heavily built, very well-dressed and very good-looking, but everything about him seemed to Erica to stop just short of too much. Another few pounds and he would have been overweight, his clothes were such that John Gardiner summed him up a few weeks later as “something out of Esquire,” and his profile was so good that it made you wonder whether he was conscious of it or not. With Max Eliot, you could not be sure. All his various qualities and characteristics added up to a personality which just missed being both slick and a little caddish; he was neither slick nor caddish, as it happened, but it was too close a miss for either Charles, his wife, or Erica to feel entirely at ease with him.
Apart from the fact th
at he was obviously very intelligent, he had almost nothing to recommend him, since with everything else, there was even a Mrs. Eliot in California; he was in almost every respect Marc Reiser’s inferior, and his one advantage over Marc was purely negative. But negative or not, it made all the difference. He could call for Miriam when he was taking her out; he could have a drink with Charles in the drawing-room while he was waiting for her, because Miriam was always late, and he could come for dinner.
Erica spent the evening observing Mr. Eliot from the sidelines, saying almost nothing, and trying to figure out the system by which one negative advantage counted for more than any number of positive ones. Whatever it was, it had nothing to do with ordinary human values, or with even the most elementary justice, although you had to know Marc Reiser as Erica knew him by this time, really to appreciate how unjust it was.
The following day her mother came into Erica’s room as she was dressing to go out to dinner with Marc and after talking disjointedly for a while about people and things which interested neither of them at the moment, she said at last, “I can’t do anything with Charles; I’ve tried and tried, but it’s hopeless. I guess from now on, it’s up to you, Eric.”
“You don’t imagine he’ll listen to me, do you?”
“No.”
Erica was sitting at her dressing table taking the cold cream off her face; she had her back to her mother who was standing by the chest of drawers on the other side of the room but in direct line with the dressing table mirror which reflected her straight, slender figure like a full-length portrait. After waiting for her to say something else, Erica asked expressionlessly, although she knew the answer already, “What do you want me to do then?”
“I want you to stop seeing him.” She went on without pausing, “You’ve got to, Erica! We can’t go on like this, our whole life seems to be falling apart. Marc Reiser can’t possibly mean as much to you as you mean to us, and the damage you’re doing is out of all proportion to the very most you can hope to get out of an infatuation which can’t conceivably last or lead anywhere. It isn’t worth it, Eric!”
“It is to me,” said Erica. “I wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t. You know me well enough to know that.”
Her mother said despairingly, “I don’t know you at all any more! You’ve changed so much ... sometimes I think ...”
“Yes, what?”
She said, her mouth trembling, “Sometimes I wonder if Marc Reiser has any idea what he’s done to you — what he’s doing to all of us. I don’t suppose he’d care anyhow.”
A moment later she burst out, “You think you’re in love with him, but real love doesn’t make you turn into someone else overnight — it doesn’t make you hate everyone else because of it. You couldn’t be in love with him anyhow, you haven’t known him long enough and he isn’t the sort of person you could ...”
“How can you tell what sort of person he is?”
“I can tell easily enough and so can your father, just from the way he’s behaving. If he were genuinely in love with you, instead of just out for what he can get, apparently, he wouldn’t be rushing you off your feet and doing his best to make you fall in love with him, when he’s old enough and certainly experienced enough to be fully aware of the fact that there’s no real future in it for either of you, and you’re the one who’s going to have to pay for it. He must realize how we feel about it, of course, although obviously our opinions don’t matter in the least so far as Marc Reiser is concerned, but that’s beside the point. If he were really in love with you, he’d care far more about your happiness and far less about himself.”
There was no point in arguing; the system of ready-made definitions and generalities by which Margaret Drake arrived at her moral judgments was infallible. All you had to do was to compare the behaviour and reactions of a given individual with the standard set of measurements which had long ago been laid down for all time, and you could even tell whether he or she was “genuinely” in love or not. It was as simple as that. Erica had been brought up on the system, but she had never been able to make it work, although she realized that it had worked well enough for her mother and father and for a great many others of their generation, enabling them to go through life with fewer misgivings, less uncertainty, and probably a good deal less muddle in the long run than she herself had any reason to expect.
She said, “I don’t think you’re being fair to either of us,” and let it go at that.
“Do you imagine you’re being fair to us?”
She left the chest of drawers and sat down on the chair by Erica’s desk with her back to the windows. She was wearing her pale blue linen dress and the late afternoon light fell on her shoulders and her soft brown hair, and was kind to her tired face. She said, “You don’t understand, Eric. You seem to expect us just to sit back and do nothing and let you make a mess of your life without even trying to stop you. That’s not what we’re for. That’s not what any parents are for, just to sit back and say nothing ...”
“But most of what you say about Marc simply doesn’t make any sense. You always sound as though you’re talking about a couple of other people.”
Her mother said impatiently, “I’m talking about a general situation which you know exists as well as I do! There is no use your trying to pretend that it doesn’t exist ...”
“I’m not,” said Erica, switching on the light by her dressing table mirror in order to put on some makeup. “And I don’t, but what I do have to do is balance Marc, and what he’s worth to me, against the general situation and decide for myself whether I’m going to gain more than I lose. Nobody else can decide that for me. I haven’t lived your sort of life, you were born in 1890 and I was born in 1914, and obviously what matters most to me isn’t what matters most to you. Our whole scale of values is different. What would ‘ruin’ your life wouldn’t necessarily ruin mine, and anyhow, I don’t think it’s a question of ruining my life at the moment, so much as a question of who’s going to run it. Obviously, if I were to stop seeing Marc purely because you wanted me to and for a set of reasons which I don’t agree with, then it would be you and Charles who were running it, not I.”
“You know perfectly well your father and I haven’t the faintest desire to run your life. If we had, we’d have started long ago.” Her mother paused, looked at Erica, one hand absently turning a pencil by hitting first one end and then the other against the desk and sliding it through her fingers.
She was on the point of saying something else when Erica broke in suddenly, “Mother ...”
“Yes?”
“Do you remember what Miriam said about Charles not wanting a son-in-law at all if it was a question of my getting married?”
“A lot of what Miriam says is pure nonsense.”
“Is it?” She herself had not taken the idea very seriously until now, but she had been listening to her mother for the past few minutes with a growing feeling that something was wrong somewhere, for while her father was as prejudiced as her mother on the subject of Jews, at the same time, he was a great deal less conventional. He could not possibly be as concerned with the purely social aspect of the problem, since he was such a thorough going individualist, so that, strictly speaking, he actually had fewer reasons for objecting — unless there was another motive still unaccounted for.
Erica said at last, “I’m not so sure that Charles doesn’t want to run my life, and I’m beginning to wonder if he ever will want me to marry anyone.”
To Erica’s surprise, her mother answered calmly, “I doubt if Charles will ever think anyone is really good enough for you, if that’s what you mean, but Marc Reiser is hardly a fair example. After all, what matters most to your father is your happiness, and no one in his senses could possibly imagine that you and Marc have even a reasonable chance of being happy. There’s too much against you.” She glanced at Erica and then went on in a different tone, “There’ll be someone else, Eric — someone who’ll really belong and who’ll mean far more to you th
an Marc Reiser ever could and who wouldn’t put you into an impossible situation simply by marrying you.”
“Marc has never said anything about marrying me. He’s never even said anything about being in love with me.” Although she knew it was useless, because her mother’s theories on the subject of Marc Reiser were so wildly at variance with the facts that they were literally discussing two different people, one real and one imaginary, she added, “You keep forgetting that the person who’s going to take the most convincing is Marc, not me — or you and Charles.”
“Then just what does Mr. Reiser think he’s doing at the moment?” inquired her mother.
“Maybe, like Miriam, he doesn’t think, he just hopes.”
“Really, Erica,” said her mother, exasperated.
Erica picked up her lipstick and said as she unscrewed the cap, “As for there being ‘someone else,’ the only answer to that is that I’m in love with Marc.”
Her mother said nothing but went on silently turning the pencil through her fingers.
“I can’t understand why you and Charles feel the way you do and why it would be hell for either of you to be married to a Jew, in the world in which you’ve lived, but I’m not you and your world isn’t the same as mine, and what I simply cannot see is how you can expect me to feel the same way. One of the things that seems to appall Charles most is the fact that if I married Marc, my husband could not be admitted to his club. I don’t care about clubs!”
She got up, took the green and white print dress which was lying on her bed and as she pulled it over her head, Erica asked suddenly, “What did you mean when you said that you couldn’t do anything with Charles? You agree with him, don’t you?”
“Yes, so far as your marrying Marc Reiser is concerned. Yes, I know,” she said impatiently as Erica’s head appeared and she saw that her daughter was about to protest again, “but neither of us has ever seen you so worked up about anyone else, you’re obviously not yourself and there’s no telling what may happen or what you’re likely to do in this state,” she added, her face drawn with anxiety. “You’re in love with him, or you think you are, and you’ve said absolutely nothing to give us any grounds for thinking that you wouldn’t marry him, or that you even realize what you’d be letting yourself in for.”
Earth and High Heaven Page 13