Earth and High Heaven

by Gwethalyn Graham

  “Oh, shut up,” said Miriam. She found a handkerchief in her bag, a very fine linen handkerchief with the initial “M” worked into an intricate embroidered design in one corner and she glanced at it, remarking, “Max gave me that,” and dried her eyes. Looking first at Erica’s plate and then at her own, she said, “Since neither of us seems to be much good at eating today, we might have a drink.”

  “Yes, we might.”

  “What do you want?” asked Miriam, beckoning to the waitress.

  “Rye and water.”

  “Two rye and water, please,” Miriam said.

  There was a family of Italians, mother, father, and three children, all eating spaghetti at the next table. Erica said, looking at them, “You’ve got to put it behind you and forget about it.” A moment later she was surprised to hear herself adding suddenly, “And you’ve got to marry John.”

  Miriam shook her head smiling, her face stiff, and said, “It’s going to be a bit too much this time, Eric, even for John.”

  At that moment the waitress appeared with two glasses on a tray, explaining that they were out of rye and that she had brought Scotch, which cost ten cents more. “That’s all right,” said Erica. When the waitress had gone she asked, still rather surprised, “Do you want to marry him, Mimi?”

  “I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “I’m so muddled, I don’t know anything any more. What difference does it make? It’s too late anyhow.”

  “Well,” said Erica. She straightened up and said, “Well, here’s to you, darling. Keep your chin up.”

  René had taken his sister to the hospital at noon and shortly before midnight, Madeleine’s son was born, the first Catholic Drake since the time of Charles the Second.

  “We might just as well never have bothered to leave England,” observed Madeleine’s father-in-law somewhat gloomily when the excitement had worn off, Madeleine was reported to be already peacefully asleep, and the four Protestant Drakes were on their way upstairs to bed. “The Holy Roman Church always catches up with you again, sooner or later, even if it takes them three hundred years. When can we see Madeleine and the baby?” he asked his wife.

  “They might let you look at the baby through the nursery door — it’s made of glass,” she added hastily, “but you won’t be able to see Madeleine for a few days.”

  “Why not?” demanded Charles.

  “Don’t be silly, Charles. Even if she is unusually well, they won’t let her have visitors for the first week.”

  “A week!” said Charles, exploding. “I’m not a visitor, damn it!” He thought, and then asked suddenly, “They wouldn’t make her father wait a week, would they? Or her mother?”

  “You’re not her father and mother,” Miriam pointed out.

  “No? Well, I’m all the father she’s got, and if the rest of you are willing to let a bunch of bureaucratic nurses keep you hanging around the outside of Madeleine’s room for a week trying to see her through a glass door ...”

  “It’s the nursery that has a glass door, Charles,” interrupted his wife patiently.

  “... while they unwind a lot of unnecessary and ridiculous red tape,” continued Charles obliviously, “I’m not. And that goes for the baby too.”

  “Charles, do be sensible for once! It’s not red tape, it’s a question of taking the most ordinary precautions ...”

  “Precautions against what?”

  “Against infection, of course.”

  “I’m not infectious.” He thought some more and finally admitted grudgingly, “Well, maybe you’re right about the baby. If I have to look at my grandson through a glass door, then I’ll look at him through a glass door, but I’m not going to have Madeleine lying there for a week seeing nobody but that ass René and a lot of sour-faced nurses, and that’s final. Final,” he repeated, giving it a bit more emphasis. “She’s probably lonely, lonely as the devil, with Tony ...” He left the sentence unfinished, shaking his head, and then announced, “I’ll go and see her on my way home from the office tomorrow.”

  “Don’t you think someone should warn Royal Victoria Hospital that Charles is impending?” Miriam asked her mother as Charles disappeared into his study.

  “What difference would it make?” asked Margaret Drake wearily. “He’ll get in anyhow, he always does.”

  His wife was right. Charles arrived at the hospital next day with a long box of flowers, a bottle of his best brandy “for emergencies,” two baskets of fruit, his portable radio, and a rather startling bright pink marabou bedjacket which he had noticed in a shop at noonhour, when he was on his way back to the office after lunching at his club. For the baby he had brought a large pale blue teddy bear. In the corridor he passed a room which was evidently a nursery, came to a dead stop and discovered that a newcomer labelled “Drake” had been placed most conveniently a few feet away on the other side of the glass door. He shifted some of his packages and stood for a while, admiring what he could see of the first Catholic Drake since the time of Charles the Second, which wasn’t much, and then advanced down the corridor to the door of Madeleine’s room where he knocked gently with one foot, informed the nurse that he was Mr. Drake and would be staying ten minutes, and walked straight in.

  That afternoon Erica had withdrawn all her savings from the bank and two of her three Victory bonds, having interviewed the doctor whose name had been given her by Sylvia, who had got it from Mike, who had got it from someone else. As she had said to Miriam, people who work on newspapers know practically everything, and what they don’t know they can usually find out. To her astonishment, it was the name of a doctor who was fairly well known and the larger part of whose practice was perfectly legitimate, so that up to the last moment, Erica was sure that someone had blundered and that she had got into the wrong office. The doctor seemed to understand her well enough, however, in spite of her stammering and evasions, told her the price and made an appointment for “her friend” for ten o’clock the following morning, which meant that for most of the day, and except for Mary who would be busy downstairs, Miriam and she would have the house to themselves.

  It was not as bad as it might have been if she had not been able to pay such a price, but it was still bad enough. It was worse than anything Erica had imagined; she was appalled at the responsibility she had taken on herself, although she knew that it was the only way out, and for three days her mind rocked back and forth between her fear for Miriam on the one hand and her fear for her mother and father on the other, if by some ill chance or through her father’s unpredictable intuitive processes, they should fail to believe Miriam’s story that she was simply feeling under the weather, when they returned home at dinnertime on Wednesday to find her in bed.

  Except for a brief interval on Wednesday night after Charles and Margaret Drake had gone to bed, having noticed nothing out of the ordinary, when all in one moment of overwhelming relief, Erica realized that it was over and done with and between the two of them, they had got away with it, from beginning to end, she had almost no sense of reality. It had started as a nightmare, it continued as a nightmare, and it finished as a nightmare from which she gradually awoke over a period of days. By the weekend, if it had not been for the effect on Miriam, Erica would almost have been prepared to deny, even to herself, that it had ever happened.

  On Monday night she had dinner with René in the flat which he had been sharing with his sister again since Anthony had been overseas. Until late in the evening she found it difficult to keep her mind on what he was saying; she was too tired, too lonely for Marc and too uneasy about Miriam, who was looking as though the bottom had dropped out of her world and as though she were feeling her way along, trying to find something solid to put her feet on.

  It was about eleven when René elected to tell her almost casually that he was in love with her and still hoped to marry her, as he simply could not believe that she would ever marry Marc. His reasons for not believing it seemed to be much like those of Charles Drake and almost everyone else, so sh
e found herself once more in the position of having to listen to the same arguments all over again. It never seemed to occur to anyone that you might be deathly tired of simply listening.

  She interrupted him at last and tried to give him some idea of what was actually going on. Toward the end she said, “I can’t do anything. I can’t convince Marc unless I can convince my family first, and nothing’s going to convince them. Marc won’t be the cause of a final break between us. He just won’t, that’s all, partly because he wouldn’t do that to anyone’s father and mother, and partly because he thinks that if marrying him means that I have to give up my parents along with — well, whatever it is you have to give up when you marry a Jewish lawyer, and for whatever it’s worth, I don’t know — then it’s too much altogether.”

  She leaned over to put her cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table beside her, and then lying back on the sofa again with her head resting on the arm, she said, “Marc knows perfectly well what’s going on at home. I guess, like Mother and Charles and the effect they have on me, it isn’t what I say when I’m with him, it’s the way I look. I’m not much of an actress, and I’m so scared and miserable most of the time nowadays that I guess I can’t help showing it, and of course when I do, Marc thinks he’s responsible for it, that if it weren’t for him, my life would still be just like a duckpond, and he gets just that much more discouraged.”

  She stopped again, wondering why she was saying all this to René, whose point of view was essentially the same as her parents’ only more so, because he wanted to marry her himself. She smiled at him apologetically, and said finally, “So you see, René, my family hold all the cards. Provided they just go on doing nothing, they can’t lose, and I guess they know it. And if you put your money on the Drakes, probably in the long run, you won’t lose either.”

  When she got home shortly after one, Erica found a letter from Marc saying that he would probably have his forty-eight hour leave the following weekend and asking her to meet him in Ottawa on Saturday morning, and a note from her father on the hall table, telling her to call Operator 14 at Farnham, regardless of how late it was.

  Anyone using the phone in the downstairs hall could be heard all over the house. Her father always slept with his bedroom door open, and she went into the kitchen and dialed long distance, wondering what it was all about. She knew no one in Farnham.

  Operator 14 said, “Is that Miss Drake? It’s a personal call.”

  “Miss Drake speaking.” “Just a moment, please. I’ll connect you.”

  She sat on the edge of the white-topped kitchen table listening to a faint voice repeating, “Hello, New York — New York, please — hello, New York ...” and then suddenly a man’s voice said in her ear, “47 Garrison, Captain Henderson speaking.”

  “On your call to Miss Drake in Montreal, Miss Drake is ready. Go ahead please.”

  “Hello,” said Erica.

  “Hello, Miss Drake, this is Jim Henderson speaking. Sorry to bother you so late but I’ve been trying to get in touch with you ever since around ten. I don’t know whether you remember me or not but I met you at the Ritz a couple of weeks ago ...”

  She could not remember meeting anyone named Henderson at the Ritz, but she said, “Yes, though I’m afraid I ...”

  “I’m a friend of Major Gardiner’s. As a matter of fact, it’s about him that I’m phoning you ...”

  “About John?”

  “Yes, you see he ...”

  Erica interrupted. “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong Miss Drake ...”

  “Oh. I was hoping you might have some idea where he is,” said Captain Henderson, his voice dropping with disappointment.

  Erica said, completely at sea, “Well, I know he has a flat here — I can give you the number if you like. And you can usually get him through Headquarters during the day ...”

  “Yes, Miss Drake,” he said patiently, “I know that. But what I don’t know is where he is now. He’s supposed to be here. He came down on Monday, went up to Headquarters on Saturday afternoon, and hasn’t been heard of since.”

  “Do you mean John is missing?” said Erica incredulously.

  “If it were anyone else, I’d say ‘missing’ isn’t the word for it!”

  She said, “Just a minute, please. I’ll get my sister.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you, you’ve got the wrong Miss Drake. John is a friend of my sister Miriam. If you’ll hold on a minute, I’ll go and wake her and find out if she knows anything ...”

  “I’d like to talk to her myself, if you don’t mind.”

  “No, certainly.”

  Erica ran up the back stairs, down the hall and into Miriam’s room where she shook her by one shoulder saying quietly, “Wake up, Mimi — wake up, darling!”

  “I’m awake.” She turned over, opened her dark eyes and asked, “What’s the matter?”

  “John’s missing. He’s been missing for two days, apparently. Someone’s just called from Farnham — someone named Captain Henderson. He got me by mistake. I guess he must have called the first time, after you went to bed and Charles did-n’t think of asking whether he meant you or not.”

  She stared at Erica, fully awake now, then suddenly got up. “Which phone is it?” “The kitchen. I didn’t want to make a noise.”

  “Come down with me, Eric.”

  She did not stop to put on shoes or a dressing gown but rushed ahead of Erica down the back stairs.

  Into the phone Erica heard her say, “This is Miriam Drake speaking ... Yes, Captain Henderson, I remember. What’s this about John? No, not since Saturday night, but wasn’t he supposed to have leave over the weekend? Oh, I see. What!” She put out one hand, feeling for the edge of the table so that she could lean on it, and said dully, “I’m afraid not. I don’t know where he’s likely to be, except the usual places. You know all those. Yes,” she said, her voice so heavy that Erica looked at her in alarm, “yes, I think he had. All right. As soon as you hear anything, would you let me know, please?”

  She hung up and sat down on the table in her nightgown. Finally she said, “He didn’t go back on Saturday night, Eric.”

  “Why not?”

  “I guess because of me,” she answered after a pause.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. Because of me.”

  Erica sat down on the edge of the cupboard facing her and asked, “Just how much did you tell him?”

  “Everything.”

  She added after another pause, “I told him everything for the last six years.”

  “Miriam, you fool,” said Erica softly, “you damn fool.”

  She said desperately, “Don’t you see, Eric, I had to! I had to give it to him straight. There wasn’t any other way of doing it. Where do you suppose he is?”

  “Down at some joint on St. Antoine Street, though if he is, I don’t know why the M.P.s haven’t picked him up by this time.”

  “John?” asked Miriam, horrified.

  “Yes, John,” repeated Erica impatiently.

  “But people don’t do that sort of thing, Eric!”

  “People like John do. He probably started drinking and then eventually passed out, and when he came to, the only thing he could think of was you, so he got drunk all over again. Where do you suppose he is?”

  “I don’t know,” said Miriam frantically.

  “You’d better go back to bed or you’ll catch cold.”

  “Come and talk to me, Eric. Please.”

  They went back upstairs and Erica undressed, and with a satin negligee which Marc had given her thrown over her shoulders, she went into Miriam’s room and sat down beside her on the bed. “What did Captain Henderson say?”

  “Just that he hadn’t turned up when he was supposed to, on Saturday night. He asked me if I knew whether John had had some kind of shock. What will they do to him, Eric?”

  “I don’t know.” She remembered that Miriam had been looking
worse since Saturday, instead of better, and she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me, Mimi?”

  “I couldn’t. I didn’t realize how much he meant to me until I saw him walk out for good. I knew he was going to, of course. I knew it all along.”

  “What did you tell him exactly?”

  “I didn’t make it any worse than it was — rather difficult anyhow,” she added, smiling faintly in spite of the tears in her eyes. “I told him about Peter; I told him that the reason he himself had never had a chance was because he reminded me of Peter ...”

  “That was a nice touch,” commented Erica. “Did you tell him why he reminded you of Peter?” Miriam nodded and Erica said, “A still nicer touch. You couldn’t have done much better than that if you’d tried.”

  She said quietly, “I did try. I thought I might just as well let him know the whole truth while I was at it.”

  “Well, go on,” asked Erica, after waiting for a while.

  “Then he got up and walked out.”

  “Out of where?”

  “Here — downstairs, in the drawing-room.” She sat up with a jerk a moment later, saying wildly, “We’ve got to go and look for him, Eric! We can’t just sit here ...”

  “Where do you suggest we start looking?” inquired Erica without moving. “He must be somewhere — he might even be in his flat and not answering the door or the phone because he was still ...”

  “They’ll have looked in his flat long ago.” Again Miriam asked despairingly, “What will they do to him?” “I don’t know,” said Erica hopelessly.

  IX

  On Friday night when Erica had already started to pack, in order to catch the early train to Ottawa next day, Marc telephoned her long distance to tell her that his forty-eight hour leave had been cancelled, and that a week from the following Monday, on September 14th, he was to start his embarkation leave.

  Erica had taken the call in her mother’s room. She was alone on the second floor; the rest of the family were downstairs having coffee in the drawing-room, and in the intervals when neither Marc nor she was talking, she could hear the clock ticking in her father’s study. She was sitting on the edge of her mother’s bed, looking up unseeingly at the watercolour of some calla lilies on the opposite wall. Everything was the same as it had been the first time he had called her, the night Miriam had come home; she was even wearing the same grey flannel suit. But now it was September, instead of early in July; the summer was over, and Marc was to start his embarkation leave a week from the following Monday.