Earth and High Heaven (13 page)

Her father never asked Erica again who was taking her out or where she was going; sometime during the day following the scene at the breakfast table, he had apparently decided to show no further interest in Marc Reiser, nor for the time being at any rate, even in Erica herself. When she came home at ten-thirty that night, having cut short her evening with Marc in order to try once more to talk to her father and work out some compromise which would make it possible for them to go on living as they had before, she found that his attitude toward her had changed completely. Instead of the anger, which she had expected, she was faced with a wall of indifference. He did not refuse to discuss the subject; he simply went on reading his paper and did not bother to listen.

To his wife and Miriam he was the same as ever, but from then on into the first week of August, whenever Erica tried speaking to him directly, no matter what she said, his expression would begin to set at the first sound of her voice, and by the time he had swung round to look at her, he had walled himself up again. Erica did not know what to do; he was treating her rather like a guest who had overstayed her welcome, and it was so unlike him and such a startling reversal of their former relationship, that in the beginning she somehow managed to ignore it and to go on as though nothing had happened. At the end of a week, however, the most bewildering and miserable week she had had for years, her father remained as remote and as unapproachable as ever, and she gradually lost hope and stopped trying. She began to avoid him as much as she could, and hardly ever said anything to him without including either her mother or Miriam. On the evenings when both of them were out, Erica either stayed out herself or went to bed almost immediately after dinner, in order not to be left alone with him.

The whole atmosphere of the house had changed with the change in the relationship between Charles and Erica, but Margaret Drake could do nothing. It had only taken her a few hours to regret her loss of self-control at the breakfast table; and early in the afternoon, just after the final edition had gone to press — nothing short of disaster could have induced her to disturb Erica before then; she had too much respect for her daughter and her daughter's working hours — she had phoned from Red Cross Headquarters where she had been working full-time, eight hours a day, ever since September 1939, to apologize. She told Erica that her opinions remained unaltered, but that on thinking it over, she could not see that either her own or Charles' behaviour had been in any way justified. If, on her side, Erica would make a genuine effort to see things from their point of view and to realize that their one desire was to protect her as far as possible, she herself would do her best to persuade Charles to adopt a more rational and less emotional viewpoint.

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 that 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?”