Earth and High Heaven

by Gwethalyn Graham

  Surveying his own thoroughly undistinguished record from the age of six to the age of twenty-one, he was inclined to agree that a high proportion of Jewish brilliance is due to compensatory motivation. Once, at the collegiate, he had headed his class, but only because his father had bribed him with the offer of a small sailboat. Having got his sailboat, he had promptly subsided to somewhere around eighth or tenth place again.

  At seventeen he had been ready for university and had started out for the city two hundred miles away full of hope and illusions. Two weeks later he was back in Manchester again, with some of the hope and most of the illusions gone for good. For all but strictly academic purposes, the university was divided into Gentiles and Jews; there was only a handful of Jews registered for his course, and he had spent his first two weeks away from home either alone in the great crowd, eating alone in restaurants, or sitting alone in his room in the rooming house, to which, it turned out on the thirteenth day, he had only been admitted because the landlady had failed to realize that he was Jewish.

  Home again on the fourteenth day, he had told his mother and father everything that had happened, and after waiting for his mother to say something instead of just looking at the wall, he had turned to his father and asked, “Do I have to go back?”

  “No,” said his father. “But you have to go somewhere. Why don’t you try a smalltown university? Then when you’re ready for law school, you’ll be older and you’ll have had a chance to get used to it gradually.”

  So he had lived for another four years in a small town. At the university he had averaged around tenth in his course, played football, and spent a good many weekends and holidays fishing and canoeing up in the Gatineau country. He had made a lot of friends, some Gentile as well as Jewish, though it was a lot tougher going than it had been at public school and collegiate. Still, as his father had said, he was having a chance to get used to it gradually, and had almost forgotten the two weeks in that other university and everything he had been up against there, when, at the very end of his fourth year, he had gone into the Senior Common Room and found that someone had written in block capitals on the notice board: “WE GAVE YOU BACK JERUSALEM; LEAVE US THE SENIOR COMMON ROOM.” There were two or three men from his class over by the windows; he knew that they were watching him. He turned round and walked out. It was the day before graduation.

  He discovered, too late, that there was an unofficial Jewish quota for students entering the law school, and with his thoroughly undistinguished record, he almost failed to make it. He had wanted to be a lawyer for as long as he could remember, and he had come so close to not being admitted that it gave him a bad fright. The fright did it; for the first time in his life, he really began to work. He headed his course all three years and working got to be a habit. If the other students occasionally wondered why Reiser was always at the top, they probably decided that being a Jew, he was just naturally clever.

  And thou has given us in love, O Lord our God, this Day of Atonement, for pardon, forgiveness and atonement, that we may obtain pardon thereon for all our iniquities; a holy convocation, a memorial of the departure from Egypt.

  He was suddenly aware of the rabbi’s chant, of the slowly changing atmosphere of the hall and the growing tension, as the service drew nearer the long confession in which they would confess and make supplication not only for themselves but for the whole House of Israel and for all Jews, living and dead. He glanced at the faces around him and was struck by their simplicity and the exaltation which had washed away all the marks of ordinary, everyday living and left them transfigured. And the wave which was mounting steadily higher toward the climax of the service caught him up for the second time.

  Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

  The past is not and the present is not; the House of Israel stands apart form time and from place, one people, one brotherhood, one God.

  The whole earth is full of his glory.

  He had been dreading the interminable list of sins which covered every conceivable and sometimes inconceivable individual and collective act and which were repeated phrase by phrase by the rabbi and repeated back phrase by phrase by the congregation. Now he was unaware of the minutes passing by.

  We have trespassed, we have dealt treacherously, we have robbed, we have spoken slander, we have acted perversely and we have wrought wickedness.

  The minutes stretched out in a gradually lengthening path behind these forty people gathered together in the public hall of Manchester, Ontario.

  As it is written by the hand of thy prophet, “Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage?” He retaineth not his anger forever because he delighteth in mercy. He will turn again and have compassion upon us....

  The wave carried him off to one side and left him there, going on without him, and he found himself alone again, wishing violently that he had not come, that like David, he had been honest enough to stay home. He had come partly to please his mother and father and partly because it was the last complete day of his last leave. Now it seemed to him that he was like a man going to the bank in which he had left a small deposit twenty years before, expecting to find himself rich. Since he had put almost nothing into his religion at any time during his life, there was no real reason why he should have expected, suddenly in an emergency, to get something out of it.

  He remembered having said once to Erica that marriage to a Jew would mean living in a kind of no man’s land, an undefined area out in the middle distance somewhere between the majority from which she had come and the minority on the other side who would never admit her. He could tell her more about that now, for he was apparently drifting toward no man’s land himself, unable to become one even with his own people and at this crucial moment.

  It was his father who was looking at him this time, still worried.

  Sunday, the day he had finally told them about Erica, he had spent picking up the last pieces of the puzzle, a series of individual portraits, each with a segment of background, until the first seventeen years of his life were complete. There was old George Brophy, still fishing off the end of the long dock by the warehouse, who had taught him how to cast; Mac Tyrrel who had stored Marc’s boat for him each winter; old Isadore Rabinovitch who had made him his first pair of long pants and stayed in his shop till midnight two days later mending a tear eight inches long which Marc had got fishing back up the river. The mend was so well done that his parents had never found out about it. They had issued strict orders that he was not to wear his new trousers fishing.

  Two blocks away from Rabinovitch and Son was O’Reilly’s, where they sold tobacco, candy, newspapers, magazines, and soft drinks in front, with a pool room and beer parlour behind. O’Reilly still had a vast assortment of highly coloured candies sold by the cent. Marc remembered particularly some big round ones which you could get in either bright pink, orange, purple, or green, five for a cent, and which had been his favourites for years. He did not know what they were made of; having been offered a couple on Sunday afternoon for old time’s sake, he still did not know what they were made of.

  The beer parlour behind had had no part in his past; he had never liked beer and had been singularly free of the adolescent urge to do something because the crowd is doing it. He had been just as immune to influence where girls were concerned, until his third year in college when he had fallen in love with a girl named Helen. It had lasted until they both graduated and she went back to her home in Ottawa and he went back to law school. His family had known about her; for a while they had been afraid that he might marry her, and when he was home for his holidays, they had talked all round the subject, letting him know what they thought of his marrying a Gentile without actually saying it. That was fourteen years ago, however, and he had forgotten all about it, until Sunday night when they were in the living room, his father sitting in one of the big chairs and his mother and himself at opposite ends of the sofa, and he had told th
em about Erica.

  “You’re not thinking of marrying her, are you?” his father had asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a pause and then his father said, “That’s the second time, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That other girl — the one you knew in college — she was-n’t Jewish either.” He knocked his pipe against the heavy brass ashtray standing beside his chair and asked, “What’s her family like?”

  “They’re — well, they’re the Drakes, that’s all. They’re pretty well known.”

  “What do they think of you?”

  He had known that he was going to be asked that question, he had known it ever since he had realized that he was going to have to talk to his mother and father about Erica. He said, “I’ve never met them.”

  “You ...” his father began incredulously, and stopped.

  His mother glanced at him quickly and said nothing at all.

  He waited for a moment and then burst out, “I wish you could meet her! You’d both like her, I know you would. She’s so straight. She even knows how to think straight. She knows exactly what matters ...”

  “Does she?” asked his father.

  His mother said quietly, “Then she must know that her family matters, Marc.”

  “Yes,” said Marc hopelessly. “I guess she does.”

  In his cage in the corner, Mike, the canary that never sang, shifted restlessly on his perch and then chirruped faintly.

  “Hello, Mike,” said Marc.

  “He wants his cover on so that he can go to bed,” said his mother.

  “Where is it?”

  “Over there on top of the piano.”

  He got up and put the cover around the cage and then went to the mantelpiece for a cigarette. With his back to the empty fireplace, he said, looking down at the worn spot in the middle of the carpet, “Nobody else has ever meant as much to me as she does. I can’t explain it.”

  “You aren’t going to do her any good by marrying her,” said his father.

  “But she feels just the same about me ...”

  “Maybe she does now.”

  His father’s rather heavy face was out of range of the light from the lamp on the table behind the sofa, but even in the dimness and from the fireplace some distance away, Marc could see his expression. His father was not going to change his mind. Nothing would make him change his mind. He said, “It won’t work.”

  “Why can’t we make it work?”

  “Because you’re too different, and because other people won’t let you.”

  He turned to his mother and said, “You’d let us, wouldn’t you?”

  Her face changed and she said unhappily, “I don’t know, Marc.”

  Then his father’s voice cut across the room saying grimly, “We wouldn’t behave like the Drakes, if that’s what you mean!”

  He glanced at his wife and sank heavily back into his chair again, muttering, “All right, Maria, all right,” and then said in a different tone, “You’re a Jew, Marc. You ought to know we can’t afford to lose anyone we don’t have to lose. There aren’t so many of us now as there were before Hitler and his friends got going on us.”

  “I’m not going to stop being a Jew.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to help it. You’d be neither one thing nor the other, and that goes for your wife and children too, particularly your children. You’d just be ...” he spread out his hands and said, “... nothing. It’s like mixing oil and water. You can’t do it, it doesn’t work.”

  He paused again, looking up at Marc, and then with his voice still pitched low but speaking with profound conviction, as though this were a summing up of his sixty-five years of living experience, he went on, “You think you could compromise and somehow you’d manage, but sooner or later you’d find out that you can go just so far and no farther. You’d get sick of compromising, and so would she, and some day you’d wake up and realize that it wasn’t a question of compromising on little things any more, but of compromising yourself. And you couldn’t do it, neither of you could do it. Nobody can do it. You’ve got to be yourself, otherwise you’re better off dead.” He said with a sudden undercurrent of violence, “For God’s sake, Marc, you’re a Jew. You ought to know that!”

  The violence died away again and he said, “It isn’t just a question of conventions; it’s five thousand years which have made you and her hopelessly different. You don’t know how different you are yet.”

  “I’ve had a pretty good chance to find out, since I left home sixteen years ago!”

  “Find out,” he repeated. “You haven’t even begun to find out. Getting yourself kicked out of a hotel is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you! You’ve had a pretty easy time of it, don’t fool yourself. It would probably be better for you if you hadn’t. You don’t yet know how Jewish you are, otherwise you wouldn’t be talking about marrying a Gentile; you’d realize that no matter how much you have in common, it doesn’t make up for that one fundamental difference between you. Nothing can make up for that. What counts in the long run isn’t whether or not you and your wife like the same books or like to do the same things — it’s whether or not, down underneath, you’re the same kind of person. Whether you have the same attitude toward things, the same outlook on life — the same background, and heredity, and the same traditions.”

  He paused again and then finished it. He said, “And if there’s one thing that’s dead certain, it is that no Jew and no Gentile that ever lived have the same outlook on life.”

  That was all his father had had to say.

  Our Father, Our King, remember thy mercy and suppress thine anger, and remove pestilence, sword and famine, destruction, captivity, iniquity and plague, all evil occurrences, and every disease, every stumbling block and contention, every kind of punishment, every evil decree and all causeless enmity, from us and from all the children of thy covenant....

  In this year Five Thousand, Seven Hundred and Three, in this year of causeless enmity, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Forty-Two, remember thy mercy.

  One voice merged with another; it seemed to him that for weeks he had had nothing to say for himself, even to Marc Reiser. He had only listened:

  To Erica saying, “Most people just travel along their particular groove till they get to the end of it and die.” And his father, “You aren’t going to do her any good by marrying her.” And Erica again, “They just climb out for a while, take a good look around, get scared, and climb down again.”

  That was what he had done. First of all, before he had gone away to college, he had been unaware of a groove, he didn’t know he was in one. Or maybe the groove was wider in those days, so wide that it didn’t matter. Anyhow, for the next four years he had been aware of it, but had succeeded pretty well in ignoring it, up to the day before graduation when it had abruptly narrowed down to a point where it was no use even trying to ignore it. He had just put up with it and had more or less come to accept it as a permanent condition of life when he had heard that voice for the fist time. From just behind him she was saying, “Hello, I’m Erica, one of the invisible Drakes.”

  Invisible was right, as it had turned out.

  So then he had climbed out and stayed there on top for three months, taking a good look around.

  You can’t do it, it doesn’t work. You’re a Jew, and you ought to know that. But the people who play safe don’t change anything, they just sit tight and wait for someone else to change it. And that’s not what you and I are for, just to play safe and wait.

  To wait — the whole history of our race is the history of a people whose faith has never run out, whose faith has never wavered, and who are never done with waiting.

  He who maketh peace in his high places, may he make peace for us and for all Israel, and say ye, Amen....

  Peace for us and for all Israel — it was nothing but words, words patiently repeated year after year, century after century, for a thousand, two thousand yea
rs and all the way back to Jeremiah crying, Peace, peace, when there is no peace.

  He remembered that on Sunday night, or rather early Monday morning, his mother had come into his room. He was lying in bed, still awake, watching the shadows of the elm leaves on his ceiling. There was a street lamp below the tree by his window, and ever since he could remember those shadows had been there overhead for him to look at when he was awake at night — the faint outlines of bare branches in winter, slowly thickening and spreading out as spring drew into summer, until the whole ceiling was covered with an intricate pattern which was seldom still and usually in continuous flickering motion.

  He saw the door opening and the widening strip of light on the carpet which finally stopped at the large bluish spot in the corner where the afternoon plane on the Moscow-Zagreb line had crashed somewhere in Transylvania.

  “Marc, are you awake?”

  “Yes, Mother. Come in and sit down.”

  “I’ll sit here,” she said, motioning toward the chair by the dresser. She was wearing a wrapper of some kind of printed material, and her hair was hanging over her shoulders in two thick braids. She did not turn on the light, but closed the door and sat down in the chair, with the dresser behind her. The moon was full, shining in an oblique line across his carpet. He could see her quite clearly.

  “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Yes, I thought you would,” he said, for downstairs she had let his father do almost all the talking. She had obviously agreed with him, but he had sensed a faint inner reservation which was still unaccounted for.