Earth and High Heaven (17 page)

V

In the first week of August, Charles Drake suddenly changed tactics. His conduct from the Wednesday morning in mid-July when they had had that scene at the breakfast table, through to the end, sometime in September, represented three different and distinctive methods of attack, from the negative, in which he had withdrawn in apparent indifference and simply waited, through the positive but indirect, in which he attempted to break down Erica's resistance by abandoning all efforts to conceal what he felt while never actually referring to his feelings, and at the same time by letting loose a continuous stream of broad statements, anecdotes, and even rather pointless jokes on the subject of Jews in general, to the third and last stage, in which he swung around and made use of every weapon he could lay his hands on.

For reasons of her own, Margaret Drake went along with him. Although so far as her surface behaviour was concerned, she seemed to take her cue from her husband, her attitude was fundamentally different. She believed that all mésalliances are the result of infatuation, and therefore from start to finish, she consistently underestimated Erica's love for Marc. In fact, she did not regard it as love, in the proper sense of the word. She lacked her husband's ability to understand emotion as such, particularly an emotion which lay outside the field of her own experience. The sexual element did not exist for her except in a derogatory sense; in her conception of a valid and lasting relationship between a man and a woman, that element was removed. She did not discount it; she simply left it out altogether. The ingredients of a successful marriage, she had often said, were community of tastes, interests, and a similarity of viewpoint and background. All these were blended together by an emotion called “love” of course, but a love which was to her a composite of other kinds of love, rather than a separate entity with a basic character of its own. She was devoted to her husband; he was her best friend, her father and counselor, her child, her brother — in fact he was the sum total of all her other relationships and because that was so much, it had never occurred to her, consciously at any rate, that he could have been anything more.

Surveying Erica's relationship to Marc from the standpoint of community of tastes and interests and similarity of viewpoint and background — above all, similarity of background, since it is the background which gives rise to the viewpoint — and convinced as she was that you cannot be “genuinely” in love with a man whom you have only known for a period of weeks, rather than months, Margaret Drake could not bring herself to regard it as anything but an infatuation.

Charles Drake was under no such delusions, and in this respect, his conduct was considerably less justifiable than that of his wife. If he had regarded it as an infatuation, he would have let it run its course, and trusted Erica to come to her senses in time to prevent her from taking any final step on the strength of it, but as a matter of fact, he knew Erica too well to imagine that she was capable of being infatuated with anyone.

It was precisely because he realized how much Marc meant to her that he did everything in his power to get rid of him. In the end, unlike his wife, he could not plead ignorance; he could not say as Margaret Drake was to say in sheer despair, after Marc had finally gone home, “Erica, I didn't know — I didn't know!”

Charles Drake had known, as he generally did, from the very beginning. His only excuse was self-defence, for in trying to defend Erica, he was defending not her interests, but his conception of her interests.

The change in tactics came without warning so far as Erica was concerned, except for Miriam's statement that her parents had decided to stay in town because they were too worried to derive any benefit from their much-needed holiday.

The morning after Marc and Erica had crossed the river to Ile Bizard by the cable ferry, her father asked Erica suddenly if she was going to be in to dinner the following night.

“No, I don't think so,” said Erica.

“Who are you going out with? René?”

Once before he had asked her if she were going out with René when he already knew she was not.

“I haven't seen him for weeks.”

“So even René is getting the short end of it. Do you mind telling me who you are going out with?”

“Yes, Marc Reiser.”

“Weren't you out with him last night, Erica?” asked her mother.

“Rather overdoing it, isn't he?” asked Charles.

“He isn't going to be here much longer ...”

“Oh, I don't know,” interrupted her father. “We've been at war three years and he seems to have managed pretty well so far.”

“You don't know anything about it, Charles,” said Erica expressionlessly. She had reached the stage where nothing he said about Marc could make her angry, which, she thought, was simply so much the worse for them both. “It isn't his fault that he was Posted to a reinforcement unit and just told to mark time at Divisional Headquarters until ...” Erica stopped. Neither of them, as usual, appeared to be listening; her father's eyes were back on his newspaper and her mother was pouring a second cup of coffee for Miriam, who opened her mouth to say something, glanced at Erica, and then subsided, muttering resignedly, “O.K., darling, have it your own way.”

Erica said at last, looking down at her plate, “I thought you wanted to know why Marc and I are seeing so much of each other.”

“We already know that without being told.” Her father made an effort to read a little further, obviously thoroughly depressed, then with an exclamation he suddenly put down his paper, got up, and left the room.

From then on, any direct or indirect reference to Marc always produced the same result. It wasn't what they said, for they rarely said anything, but the way they looked. Whenever they knew that Erica was on her way to meet Marc somewhere or had just come back from meeting him, the moment she entered the room, that look would settle down over their faces. It was apparently necessary that she should not go out the front door under any illusion that they would be enjoying themselves while she was with Marc, and when she returned home, it was equally necessary that she should realize that it was they who were paying for any happiness she might have had from her dinner, or her drive or whatever it was. The look was not in any way put on; it was a matter of simple fact that they did not and could not enjoy themselves when they knew Erica was with Marc, and that her happiness, such as it was, was purchased at their expense, and they made no effort to conceal it, that was all.

Erica lived with that look from the beginning of August until the middle of September when Marc went home, back to his own people, and she finally broke down. She never got used to it, and up to the very end, it still required an effort of will before she could force herself to enter a room and face it.

The indirect attack on Marc started a few nights later at dinner. It did not amount to much; Charles Drake had lunched that day with a dollar-a-year man on the Wartime Prices and Trading Board who had told him that the most persistent violators of the price ceiling were the Jews, particularly the Jewish clothing firms who were so universally determined to beat the Government that there would have been no particular risk involved in arresting every Jewish clothier first and taking the chance of being able to secure enough evidence for the conviction of each of them individually, afterwards. “The Jews” had no sense of responsibility and regarding themselves as outside the community, for some reason or other, you simply could not make them realize that what affected the community as a whole would ultimately affect them to the same extent as everyone else.

Since she had heard it all before from various other people, and had grown up in a society in which almost everyone threw off derogatory remarks about “The Jews,” often from sheer force of habit, Erica would probably not have attached any particular significance to her father's remarks if he had not rather gone out of his way to avoid all unflattering references to Jews, as such, until now. He was too imaginative ever to be accidentally tactless and since he himself bracketed Marc with Jews in general, until now he had preferred to stay off the subject altogether.

Erica was out the following night. The night after that it was something about “The Jews” safeguarding themselves against the inflation for which their own conduct would be partly responsible, by buying up all the available real estate.

At breakfast a day or so later, it was the old story of fire insurance; in a slightly different form, however. The previous night he had been playing bridge at his club with the president of an insurance company who had remarked in the course of a discussion about the Jews that Jews and fires always went together, and that if you wanted to find the Jewish districts in any given city, all you had to do was look at the nearest insurance company map for the heaviest concentration of fires. In fact they were such a bad risk that a good many companies preferred not to sell them fire insurance, with the result that a group of Jews who were angered by the discrimination against them had got together and started an insurance company of their own, only to go broke in short order. The richest part of it was that these same Jews would now sell fire insurance only to Gentiles.

The maps were something new so far as Erica was concerned, but the Jewish company which refused to insure other Jews against fire was not. She had often wondered if it really existed.

There was a curious, very faint deliberateness in the way her father went about it, a barely perceptible change of expression and a barely audible change in his voice, so that she always knew when he was going to start, and tried to steel herself against what was coming. She had an odd feeling that to allow herself to be hurt by it would be to fall into the same fundamental error as her father — the error of identifying the characteristics of the individual with the usually misinterpreted characteristics of the group.

It was not until his observations on the subject of “The Jews” began to be interspersed with anti-Jewish anecdotes and rather unfunny jokes which Charles Drake had usually heard from “a man downtown” — well, he undoubtedly had; Erica knew from her own experience that there were a large number of people with that particular kind of sense of humor — that Erica realized what was happening to him.

The faint air of deliberateness had gone; having set out to convince his daughter, Charles Drake was in danger of convincing himself. He had already forgotten what he had been told about Marc downtown and over at Divisional Headquarters. After a very brief appearance, the individual had once more been obliterated by the generalization.

Some time very lately he must have begun to associate the interminable gossip about Jews which he heard “downtown” directly with Marc, to assume more and more that this endless stream of astronomical generalizations which tossed sixteen million human beings, scattered all over the pre-war world, into one heap and covered the lot of them, must inevitably apply at least to some extent to the man his daughter was in love with and probably intended to marry. From then on, every chance remark that other people made, either to him or simply in his hearing, must have struck home, until the idea that someone about whom such things could be said might also in the future be referred to as Erica's husband and C. S. Drake's son-in-law became finally too much for him.

It was an indication of how far Charles Drake had degenerated in the past two months that he could tell a pointless and sordid story of “Jewish” behaviour during the Blitz, for example, and insult both Erica and himself by suggesting, even indirectly, that it reflected on Marc. All his life he had been unusually free of malice and in spite of his explosive prejudices, he had had a certain largeness of mind and generosity of spirit which had prevented him from gibing at individuals for characteristics beyond their control. That he should have lost so much of what had been the best in him in such a short time was also an indication of the way he was suffering.

He no longer seemed to care what methods he had to use in order to get through to Erica, provided she could be made to face facts. There was no reason why she should be protected and encouraged to go on living in a world of illusions, among a handful of friends who apparently believed that one war could change the whole structure of human society. Married to a Jewish lawyer whose parents had been ordinary immigrants, life would be no easier for Erica in 1945 than in 1910.

He had no idea what she would do with Marc Reiser; he had no idea what any of them would do with him. He could not be made to fit in, one Jew among a lot of Drakes. Wherever they took him, to the houses of their relatives or their friends, he would stick out like a sore thumb.

That was not all. Later on there would be children, Erica's children who would be half Jewish by race and probably brought up in the Jewish religion — Jews and Catholics could always be counted on to look out for their own interests — so that his grandchildren would be wholly Jewish by faith.

And what on earth would they do with Marc Reiser's family, since presumably he had a family? When your son or daughter marries, you cannot pretend that the relatives of your daughterin-law or son-in-law simply do not exist.

Charles Drake could not imagine what Marc Reiser's family would be like. The fact that their son was presentable enough on the surface proved nothing, since there was often an extraordinary difference between the first and the second generation. He remembered what a shock he had had when the parents of a Jewish importer whom he had known for years and had always regarded as quite exceptional, the very best type of Jew ... what a shock he had had when the fellow's parents had turned out to be pure ghetto. The old man wore a black skull cap, both he and his wife kept dropping into Yiddish, and what English they knew sounded as though they had learned it on New York's East Side. Their accent had reminded Charles Drake of the old days of vaudeville and the inevitable cheap Jewish comic who had elected to make a living by holding up his own people to ridicule. There always seemed to be one on every program and either he or his straight man was usually called “Ikey.” To this day Erica's father did not know what had possessed their son when he had suddenly invited C. S. Drake to his home for “supper” on Saturday night; it was one of the most uncomfortable evenings Charles Drake had ever had.