“Go on,” said Erica, watching him.
“Anyhow, we didn’t ask you not to go last time, and it isn’t as though you went in spite of everything we could do to stop you. But this time, we are asking you ...”
“Yes?” said Erica. “What right have you to ask me not to go?”
“What did you say?”
“Are you and Mother the only ones who have any rights?”
“I don’t think I have to answer that.”
“As you like,” said Erica, shrugging. “Go on. I’d still like to know what you’re getting at.”
“I told you. I don’t want you to go. If you do go, you’ll go deliberately this time, knowing exactly how we feel about it and the price we’re paying for your three days of happiness or whatever you call it, and as long as you live, you’ll never be able to forget what you did to us and to yourself, and neither will we. You’ll never be quite the same to us again.”
“You don’t mean that,” she asked incredulously.
“I do mean it.” He looked straight at her. His face had become quite colourless, and he said, “We’ll go to our graves knowing that when it came to a choice between your mother and father and a rotten ...”
“Don’t say anything about Marc,” said Erica warningly.
“I’ll say anything I like!” he burst out angrily.
“I don’t think you’d better. I’ve had about enough from you on the subject, Charles. I don’t intend to listen to any more.”
“If you’d listened to me in the first place, none of this would have happened! I told you Reiser was just out for what he could get. I told you that, didn’t I? Well, he’s got it evidently, and I was only wrong about one thing — I’ll admit I was wrong about that. I thought he really intended to marry you.”
Erica stared at him in silence and finally she said, her heart pounding, “Charles, get out. Go away ... please go away, because I — I ...”
“No,” said her father.
“All right,” she said faintly. “I guess I can’t make you.” It was twenty minutes to four and her train left at five, but she did not move. Still standing with her back against the chest of drawers she said, “What you want me to do is wire Marc to meet me at the drug store on the corner of Peel and St. Catherine. That’s your idea of a suitable way for Marc to spend his last leave, isn’t it? Meeting me on street corners, going from Charcot’s to the Ritz bar and from the Ritz bar to a bench in Dominion Square, looking for a place to sit down because his car’s in storage and we can’t sit in it any more. Well, why not, you’re probably asking yourself. He must be used to it by this time.” She took a step forward and looking up at him she said, “I’ll tell you why not, Charles. He’s had enough of that. For me to ask him to come here and do just what we’ve been doing ever since we met, would be like saying, ‘This is all you get — this is all you’re ever going to get if you stick with me,’ when the one thing I’ve been trying to get into his head from the very beginning is that this is not all he’s ever going to get. Heaven help me, I even promised him that you would not only change your mind but that you’d like him and be really nice to him. You don’t realize what a difference it would have made if you’d given us a break ...”
“Oh, yes I do,” he said before he could stop himself.
“Yes,” said Erica. “Yes, of course you realize. I forgot. And now you want us to stay in town for your sake.”
“Eric ...”
Turning away from him she said, “You’re just wasting your breath.” She went back to the chest of drawers and gathering up a few articles of clothing, she carried them over to the bed and put them in her suitcase. When she glanced at him again, she found that her father’s expression had changed, and she regarded him without interest, waiting for whatever was coming next. She had an odd idea that it was something which he had been holding in reserve until now, intended to be used only as a last resort. Finally he said with a visible effort, stumbling over the words, “Erica — if your mother and I — if we agreed to have him here, the way you said ...”
“Good God!”
For a moment she could only gape at him in amazement. Then she thought that she must have misunderstood him, for it could not be true, it was so utterly outrageous that it could not possibly be true. She said, “Wait a minute — I don’t think I quite get it. You’re not suggesting that you’re willing to make some kind of deal, are you?”
He said despairingly, “I guess I’m willing to make almost any kind of a deal to keep you from going.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Almost beside himself he said, “Good God, don’t you realize that after what he’s done to me, having him in the house is really more than I can stomach? The idea of you, my daughter, and that ...”
“I see,” said Erica, for now at last she did see all of it, including the motive which had been largely hidden by all the other motives and had remained unaccounted for. It was not what he was saying, or even the rasping tone of his voice, but the way he looked.
Her father managed to get hold of himself again, for the time being at any rate, and went on with a little less emotion, “You wanted us to treat him like anyone else. That’s what you said, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve said all along. Well, he isn’t ‘anybody else,’ now less than ever,” he said between his teeth. “But don’t worry, we’ll manage some way or other. You needn’t worry about that.”
“I’m not worrying about that.” She was lost now, and she knew it. She was going down for the last time, but before she went down, she was going to do the talking for once, she was going to make up for all the times she had sat and simply listened, in order not to have a row. She was finally going to tell her father what she thought of him.
She said, “Not for the sake of my soul or even out of common decency and kindness, but for the sake of my virtue which you regard as your private property, you’re going to start treating Marc ‘as though he were anyone else.’ You needn’t look like that, Charles. You gave yourself away when you said, ‘After what he’s done to me.’ It would have sounded nicer if you’d at least said ‘After what he’s done to you.’ Better still if you’d said, ‘After what I’ve done to you.’”
“So it’s all my fault.”
“Yes, it’s your fault. Nobody has any right to be as stupid as you, and no one can afford to be so muddled. Nothing matters to you compared to your prejudices, your opinions and your theories as to what’s ‘best’ for other people and you’d see us all dead before you’d give them up and admit you’re wrong. You don’t care what happens to me, you’ve proved that over and over again. If you had cared, you would have stopped all this long ago.”
He was angry but not as angry as Erica. She moved a little nearer to him, seeing his lips move but deaf to what he was trying to say and went on, raging, “My, how cozy it would be, Charles — how frightfully cozy, with just the four of us together on Marc’s last leave, you and Mother and Marc and me. I can’t think of a more agreeable way for Marc to spend his three days than sitting in the living room downstairs listening to you and Mother desperately making conversation in order to keep us from going out and misbehaving ourselves. What would you talk about, Charles? How would you keep him interested? Or hadn’t you thought of that? And are you so insane that you think all you have to do is crook your little finger at Marc and he’ll come running? What do you think he’s been doing for the past three months — skulking around your door waiting for you to condescend to let him in?”
“I know what Mr. Reiser has been doing,” he said at last between his teeth. “All I have to do is look at you and I know what Mr. Reiser has been doing for the past three months.”
“You ought to be grateful to him.”
“Grateful!” he said hoarsely. “Grateful for taking my daughter away from me and turning you into what you are now.”
“Oh, no. For what I am now you can be grateful to yourself. You’ve got something else to be grateful to Marc for — after all, it was
very thoughtful of him to turn out to be even more of a swine than you expected — to settle for a couple of weekends instead of marriage. He would have been so much harder to get rid of then, if we’d actually got married, and if I’d held out for a license and made sure of his ‘respect’ instead of selling myself cheap.”
“Erica, for God’s sake, stop it!”
“You got what you wanted,” she said, paying no attention. “He isn’t going to marry a Drake. You fixed it.” She went a little closer to him and asked, “Would you like to know how you fixed it, Charles?”
“Erica, I warn you I’m not going to stand for much more of this ...”
“Oh, now look,” said Erica, “be reasonable. For almost three months you’ve been saying exactly what you liked and writing it all off under the heading of Father Knows Best. I’m not going to take three months, I’ll probably be finished in less than three minutes. That’s fair enough, isn’t it?”
He said, catching his breath, “Erica, you don’t know what you’re saying!”
“Then there’s more excuse for me than there ever was for you, because you always knew, right from the start.” She paused and then said softly, “I’ll tell you how you fixed it, Charles. You did precisely what Marc expected you to do, right from the beginning. Remember, you said once that you’d got his number as soon as you heard he was downstairs with René? Well, you hadn’t. You never said one thing about him which was true. But he had your number — yours and everybody else’s.”
She stopped. It sounded like someone else, someone else using her voice, and after a moment she heard that person saying, “Listen to me, Charles. Listen to me very carefully so that after I’m gone, you’ll know at last just how it all happened. Every time I told Marc he was wrong, wrong about you and wrong about everyone else, you, my father, my ex-best friend — you made a liar out of me.”
He said, peering at her, his voice hardly more than a whisper, “You are going, Eric?”
“Yes, I’m going,” said Erica. “And I’m not coming back again.”
XII
There was a clearing near the top of the mountain from which you could look out over a semicircle of valley with scattered lakes and villages, and over fold upon fold of heavily wooded mountains growing more indefinitely blue toward the northern horizon. The clearing was almost level, fenced in on three sides by evergreens and a thick mass of undergrowth, and open in front where the mountain shelved steeply away from the edge in a small cliff. Below the cliff was a stretch of sloping forest giving way suddenly to the hilly pastures and fields on the uneven floor of the valley.
Marc and Erica had ridden up the steep trail under a blazing sun, and after tethering their horses to a fallen pine at the back of the clearing they had eaten their lunch in the shade, and then moved out into the sun again.
Erica was lying with her head on one arm and her face turned toward Marc, sitting with his back against a boulder overgrown with moss, so that he could see out. It was Wednesday afternoon, two of their last three days together already lay behind them, and neither of them had as yet said anything that really mattered. They had simply stood still, letting time rush by them, each of them apparently waiting for the other to speak first. Something had gone wrong and they knew it; they had felt it the moment Erica had arrived from Montreal an hour after Marc from Ottawa, and first on Monday and again on Tuesday, they had said goodnight at the door of Erica’s room. They were both haunted, Marc by a sense of failure and Erica by the recollection of the scene with her father on Monday afternoon, and whatever affected the one affected the other, so that together each of them carried a double burden.
Against the background of evergreens which were like a dark robe thrown over the hills, there was an occasional splash of yellow and crimson; the wind blowing lazily from the northwest was cool and dry, and the sky was too deep a blue for summer.
“It’s going to be a marvellous autumn, Eric. It’s going to be the best autumn for years. Write me about it, will you?”
“Yes, darling,” she said under her breath.
“Tell me how everything looks. You might even send me a maple leaf, the reddest you can find. It wouldn’t wither by the time it got there, would it?”
He leaned forward, reaching into the back pocket of his riding breeches for cigarettes, and as he lit first one and then the other, she asked, “What are you going to do after the war — go back to Maresch and Aaronson?”
“Probably for a while, I don’t know. I’d rather like to practice in a small town in Ontario. When I was taking my C.O.T.C. at Brockville I got to know the country around there pretty well, and I wouldn’t mind spending the rest of my life in one of those old towns along the river or out on Presqu’Ile. Have you ever been to Presqu’Ile?”
“No, what’s it like?”
“It’s lovely country — rolling and green, and old and rich. The farmhouses are great big old places with enormous barns. You know I’ve always wanted to own a farm ...”
“Yes, I remember,” said Erica. “It was one of the first things you ever said to me. If you go back to Ontario you’ll have to write your exams all over again before you can practice there, won’t you?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t matter. How would you like living in a small town?” he asked lightly.
“I don’t mind where I live,” said Erica, turning her head suddenly so that she was looking the other way, toward the two horses standing together under the pines.
There was another silence, just like so many others during the past few days, only this one was broken by Marc saying at last, “I think it’s about time we got started, don’t you? We can’t go on like this, or rather we can’t — we can’t leave, like this, tomorrow ...” He paused and said, “You start, Eric. You’re going to have to tell me sooner or later anyhow.”
“Tell you what?”
“Whatever it is that’s been making you look the way you have ever since you arrived — or like someone trying awfully hard not to look like that.”
As she did not answer but kept her head turned away from him, he said, “I finally got you into a real mess, didn’t I?” as though he already knew what had happened on Monday afternoon.
She had realized as soon as it was over, that the break with her father would react on Marc to almost the same degree as it had reacted on Charles and herself, unless she could somehow manage to keep Marc from finding out about it. She had tried, she had not for a moment stopped trying except when she was safely in her room at the hotel, and although it had been rather like attempting to hide an object twice as big as herself by standing in front of it, still she had thought that she was getting away with it.
And all she had actually succeeded in doing was to look like someone trying awfully hard not to look like that.
She said, “I had a row with Charles.”
“About me,” he said.
“Yes.”
He was watching a bird circling in and out of the sun toward the west and he said, “All your rows are about me, aren’t they? You never had any till I came along.”
“It was just by accident that we didn’t. I never happened to want to do anything that Charles and Mother disapproved of until now, that’s all. They knew I didn’t agree with them about a lot of things, of course, but they didn’t seem to mind, and it’s taken me all this time to discover that the only reason they didn’t mind was because they thought it was just so much talk and so naturally it didn’t matter. The moment they realized that it wasn’t just so much talk, then all hell broke loose. They were bound to realize it sooner or later.”
He said after a long pause, “I wish it hadn’t been me.”
Erica sat up, as though the ground on which she had been lying had, in fact, begun to slip out from under her, and moving back so that she was sitting cross-legged facing him, she said desperately, “Darling, it isn’t just you. Can’t you get that into your head? It was you who started it, but if it hadn’t been you, it would have been something else, and if
I never saw you again after today, it wouldn’t make any difference to Charles and me.” With her voice rigidly controlled she said almost matterof-factly, “We both know where we stand now, and we’ll never get back to where we both thought we stood before.”
“All your father wants is to get rid of me.”
“What my father wants is unconditional surrender to a set of prejudices and a bunch of filthy conventions which are hopelessly out of date!”
The bird flew down, out of the path of the sun and disappeared among the trees edging the trail, and as his eyes came back to her face he said quietly, “They’re not out of date, Eric. The moment you’d married me, you’d find that out. The prejudices are still there, working overtime as a result of war conditions,” he added a little ironically.
“Not with us ...”
“Us?” he repeated. “You mean people of our generation? Don’t be silly. I live and eat and sleep with people of our generation; I happen to be the only Jewish officer in our particular outfit at the moment, and although most of my brother officers are thoroughly decent and do their damnedest to make me feel as though I belong, they have to make an effort, and I know they have to make it, and I think it’s probably just as difficult for them to get used to the idea of always having a Jew in the room as it was for their fathers in the last war. Even when people don’t dislike you, even when they really like you, you still make them feel slightly self-conscious, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just because they’ve been brought up to regard Jews as ‘different.’ Do you want a biscuit?”
“Yes, please,” said Erica. “One of the chocolate ones.”
He handed her two chocolate biscuits and said, “Except for a very few people, so few they hardly count, that self-consciousness so far as I’m concerned would be about the best you could hope for. What you could actually expect, as opposed to just hoping, is usually something a lot worse.”
He said, “You’ve got to see it, Eric.”
Earth and High Heaven Page 26