Earth and High Heaven (18 page)

Uncomfortable or not, however, at least he had been able to escape at the end of the evening. From the elder Reisers there would be no escape, and no end, from the day on which he would find himself standing beside his wife and a couple of middle-aged immigrant Jews from some small town in Ontario, attempting to introduce his son-in-law's parents to Montreal society.

It is no good thinking of life in terms of vague and idealistic principles; life is not made up of common sense, logic, or even elementary justice. It is made up of the way people think, feel, and behave, with or without due cause, and when they have felt and thought that way for two thousand years, one war and a fresh outburst of lofty generalities about a better world are not going to make much difference. Even supposing by some miracle or other the Reisers should turn out to be moderately well-bred, from a social point of view they would still be unmanageable.

Charles Drake was almost beside himself.

At breakfast, at dinner, and in the evenings when Erica was at home, he would suddenly start in on the Jews again and go on talking, talking, talking; he said anything that came into his head without fully realizing what he was saying, except that he was careful never to refer to Marc directly. It was as though everything he had ever heard against the Jews, back to his earliest childhood, was coming out all in a period of a few weeks, five, ten, or fifteen minutes at a time, during which he would keep his eyes fixed on Erica, searching her face to see if at last he had succeeded in making an impression.

He did not succeed; he failed altogether. Erica had lost the faculty of thinking in reverse, she was no longer even capable of applying the generalization to the individual. She knew Marc, she was in possession of the evidence, of the actual facts concerning Marc Reiser, and between those facts and her father's statements about Jews, there was simply no connection. He was still talking about someone else.

She would sit and listen to him in silence, or at any rate she appeared to be listening. His voice only reached her at intervals, becoming audible and then fading away again, according to the rise and fall in the level of her consciousness.

What he was saying was of no importance in itself, it had all been said before so many times, repeated parrot-like but with an air of acute perception and originality by one person after another, in one country after another, all the way down through history. After all, even Hitler was unable to think up anything really new on the subject of the Jews; he merely said what everybody else had been saying, only of course he said it louder and oftener, and put it a bit more strongly.

The importance lay, first, in the fact that it was Charles who was saying it, and second, in the fact that if he believed what he said, if he believed that even half of what he was saying applied to Marc, then, whether or not her father ultimately came round, it would make no real difference. He might put up with Marc, he might endure him for her sake, but he would never like him. He would never even get near enough to Marc to find out whether he was likable or not.

You might just as well try to see a man through a brick wall as try to see him through a mass of preconceived ideas.

In the intervals when she was really listening, Erica sometimes tried to visualize Marc as he must appear to her father. He always came out as a nightmare figure, a crazy conglomerate of a shyster lawyer, quick, insinuating, and tricky; a fat clothing merchant with a cigar in his mouth, employing sweated labor with one hand and contriving to outsmart both his competitors and the government with the other; a loud-voiced, flashy young man pushing his way up to the head of the queue; a skullcapped figure muttering incantations in a synagogue; a furtive, greasy individual setting fire to his own house or his own shop in order to collect the insurance ... all this not only combined in one individual, but an individual who was determined not to be assimilated but to remain an outsider, and who was perpetually turning up where he was not wanted, overrunning hotels, beaches, clubs, and practically every place he was permitted to enter.

It might have been funny, only it wasn't. Coming from her father — not Charles, her Charles, the individual on the left with whom she was never in contact any more except when they were listening to music — as the creature of his imagination and set beside Marc Reiser who, in this house, lived only in her mind and in her heart, it was not funny at all. Neither was the spectacle of her father, apparently powerless in the grip of a steadily mounting obsession — he had told his wife and his wife had told Erica that there was not one moment of the day when Erica was really out of his mind — nor the spectacle of her mother, appalled at what might happen to Erica and what was already happening to her husband, nor Erica herself. Beneath her silence and her expressionless face, she was beginning to break up, and she knew it.

Only Miriam remained detached and objective, partly because she was Miriam, not Charles or Margaret Drake, and Erica was her sister, not her daughter, and partly because she knew Marc.

VI

Miriam had met Marc in the last week of August. The four of them, Erica, Marc, Max Eliot, and herself were to have had dinner together, but that morning Max Eliot had left unexpectedly for England, and Miriam brought John Gardiner instead. John was the complete opposite of Max in almost every respect — blond, towering, physically hard and innately kind — and he and Marc took an immediate liking to each other. They were both in uniform, John with a red First Division patch on his sleeve. As soon as Marc had finished ordering, they began to talk about various men they both knew among the officers of the First Battalion of the Gatineau Rifles, who had been stationed near John's unit on the south coast of England for almost a year.

They were well away, and Erica said to Miriam, “Where's Max?”

“He's gone.”

“Where?”

“England. He left on a bomber this morning.”

“When is he coming back?”

Miriam was looking at the wall behind John's fair head, her dark eyes wide and her face unnaturally stiff. She said at last, as though she had had to wait in order to be sure that she would say it casually, “I haven't the remotest idea. I got the air last night.”

A little later when she had finished her cocktail and Marc had ordered another one for her, she observed to Erica as the two men went on talking, “I guess I always knew it was going to happen. I had such a strong feeling about it that I even tried to plan the whole thing in advance, so that if or when it did happen, I wouldn't make any fuss.”

“And did you, darling?”

“No,” she said under her breath. “No fuss.” She glanced at Erica and went on in the same even tone, “I can't let go because if I do, I'll probably just go to pieces. I hate crying, it always makes everything so much worse. What shall we do after dinner?”

“We might go somewhere and dance.”

“You should have seen me getting the air at two o'clock this morning. I was really terrific, Eric. Not that it makes any difference. An exit is just an exit, whether you mess it up or not.”

“You should have stayed home, darling,” said Erica, watching her.

“Not on your life. I'm going to get good and drunk.”

“How do you like Marc?” asked Erica after a pause.

Miriam looked at him and said, “He isn't exactly what I expected.”

“What
did
you expect?”

“He looks marvellous in uniform,” remarked Miriam irrelevantly, and then answered, “Somebody you could probably do pretty much what you liked with ... up to a point, that is.”

“Oh, dear no,” said Erica, shaking her head.

“No,” said Miriam, “evidently not.” Since she was the first member of Erica's family that Marc had really met, she realized now that what she had chiefly expected was that Marc would try to make some kind of an impression. Not an obvious effort, of course, but still, an effort. She had supposed that he would put himself out at least to some extent. Instead of that, and although she had never seen him before, she was certain that he was simply being himself, and nothing more. Of the four of them, he seemed to Miriam to be the one in control, as though it were John and herself who were up for inspection, so to speak, and not the other way round, and finding that it helped her to keep her mind off Max, she went on watching Marc as he sat across the table with his head turned toward John, twisting the stem of a cocktail glass through his fingers and not talking much himself, wondering how he did it. It occurred to her that there was something in his oddly set eyes and his sensitive face which was rather disconcerting — a latent quality, both hard and resistant, like a metal which will be hot on the surface and cold in the center and which, try as you will, you cannot heat all the way through.

She thought with sudden astonishment, Marc Reiser is just as tough as Charles and probably still harder to handle. She said again to Erica, sitting on the banquette beside her because it was more comfortable than the two straight-backed chairs occupied by Marc and John across the table, “No, he definitely isn't what I expected,” and suddenly found herself back at Max again. This small restaurant with old-fashioned wallpaper, white-clothed tables, and dark woodwork, in a converted house on a side street, had been Max Eliot's favourite place to dine when he was in Montreal. She had often been here with him, and had even sat at this very table one Saturday night when all the tables for two were already taken.

She said, gripping the edge of the banquette with both hands, “May I have another drink?”

She had already drunk two cocktails and John asked, “Why don't you wait for a while, Mimi?”

“Mind your own business,” said Miriam in French, and then added in English, “I've got a headache.”

John looked relieved, and then almost immediately concerned again. “Wouldn't you like some aspirin?” he asked.

“I would like another cocktail,” said Miriam patiently. She smiled faintly as she saw a flicker of amusement in Marc's face. He turned to give the order to a passing waiter and then started talking to John again. They were discussing the problem of Germany, and she tried to focus her mind on what they were saying for a while but it was no use, and she lapsed back into herself again.

It was not only Max and the fact that she was not going to see him again, never again; there was something else which she could not afford to think about until she was back on solid ground and had really got hold of herself again. It was the old game of keeping your balance by looking straight ahead and not allowing yourself to look down. When they were children, they had sometimes gone for walks along the railway up in the Laurentians, and she had always been able to balance on the rail long after Tony and Eric had got bored and were down in the ditch or racing along the path. Erica had never been any good at it, though she was almost five years older than Miriam; she had always looked down and then fallen off. Through all these unpredictable years leading up to the present, with Tony flying a bomber over Europe, Erica close to a final break with their mother and father because she was in love with a Jew, and herself ... well, anyhow, she could still hear Tony yelling at the fair-haired, tottering little figure on the rail, “Don't look down, Eric! Look straight ahead ...”

Don't look down, Miriam, look straight ahead. Straight ahead at what? That was the trouble, instead of a curve of a railway track, a white farmhouse and the plowed fields running halfway up the mountain to the edge of the pine forest, there was nothing to look at, absolutely nothing.

She realized now that although consciously she had known that she could not hold Max indefinitely, unconsciously she had gone on hoping that not only would he not leave her, but that by some miracle he would want her enough to go through all the bother of a divorce so that he could marry her.

She said suddenly to Erica, “Damn it, I thought I'd be a better sport than this!” Eric did not answer, she was listening to Marc and John. She would not have known what Miriam was talking about anyhow, for no one, not even Erica, knew how much Max had done for her. When someone does as much as that for you, the least you can do is not feel sorry for yourself all over the place because he didn't do more!

“Putting the whole blame on the German nation isn't going to get us anywhere,” said Marc. “It's like treating a case of smallpox by cutting off a man's leg because there happen to be more spots on his leg than anywhere else.”

“You're Jewish, aren't you?”

What was John asking that for? She had told him the whole story of Marc, Erica, and her parents when she and John had been pub crawling one night the week before. Somewhere between the Mount Royal bar and the Colony Club, she had observed that John was about to start telling her how much he loved her all over again. Miriam always knew when he was about to start, because whatever he was feeling found its way to his face before he could get hold of the right words, and in order to stop him, she had hurriedly taken refuge in Erica and Marc and the behaviour of her parents. She could not remember what she had said, exactly, but she had certainly told John that Marc was a Jew. After all, that was the whole point.

“Yes, of course,” said Marc.

“Most of the Jews I know would like to see the entire German nation at the bottom of the Atlantic.”

“Oh?” Marc looked briefly at Erica's plate, remarked, “There's no excuse for your leaving half your steak, darling, it hasn't any bones in it,” and then back at John again, he said mildly, “I'm not giving you a racial opinion of the Germans, if there is such a thing. I'm just giving you my own opinion, though as a matter of fact, every Jew ought to know by this time that Nazism isn't a German monopoly. Given complete power over every possible source of public information, I'm inclined to think that you could make any nation believe anything in six months.”

“I don't agree with you,” said John.

“Have you ever met anyone who's actually lived under the Nazis?”

“Well, a lot of refugees.”

“I don't mean refugees, particularly Jews. I mean ordinary Germans. I met a lot of them coming back from Europe on the boat in 1937. They were just out on business and expected to be back in Germany in a few months. Anyhow, arguing with them was like arguing with someone in a nightmare, or arguing geography with a man who's been brought up to believe that the earth is square. They'd been so consistently misinformed on every subject for so long that there was no common ground for discussion at all. It was hopeless. Every time you produced a fact, they produced a contrary fact, and neither of you could advance an inch.”

“It's a lot easier to convince the Germans that the earth is square than it is most people,” said John.

Miriam saw Marc glance at him with a skeptical expression but he said nothing. Then she heard Erica remark, “It probably depends on whether the particular nation wants to be convinced or not.”

“And what makes them want to be convinced?”

“I suppose a combination of certain historical, economic, and environmental factors.”

Miriam began to lose track again. Her mind was like a badly functioning radio transmitter; for a while the voices would come over quite clearly, then they would begin to fade, and finally there would be another interval of silence.

Some time later John's voice reached her, asking if anyone minded if he smoked a pipe. He never smoked until he had finished a meal and Miriam glanced at him in surprise, then down at her own plate. Somebody, she remembered, had said something about steak, but all she herself had been aware of eating was a shrimp cocktail. On her plate, however, was half a French pastry.

“Just as a matter of interest, Eric,” she said, “what entrée did I have?”

“Chicken.”

“Well, well. I must be going nuts.” Here, she added peremptorily to herself, pull yourself together. Hoping that they were still on the same subject, she said almost briskly, “There seem to be two theories about this war. One that it's all the fault of the Germans and the other that it's part of a — of a ...”

She looked helplessly at Marc who said “... a historical process?”

“Yes, thanks.”

He said to John, “We've got to a point where we recognize that the basis of government is the individual, but the individual is not yet the basis of the economic system, and until we produce primarily for consumption and not primarily for profits, democracy as a purely political system with almost no economic application is not going to work. We'll just have another war if we blame it all on the Germans and try to revert to the status quo ante. That's what you mean, isn't it?” he asked, turning to Miriam.

“Er ... yes,” said Miriam.

“What are you two?” asked John, glancing from Marc to Erica across the table. “Socialists?”

“Must we be labelled?” asked Erica, making a face. She grinned at Marc and said, “I'm allergic to labels.”

A cloud of smoke from John's pipe floated over to an elderly woman at the next table who turned slowly and deliberately in her chair, directed a long look in John's direction, and slowly resumed her former position.

John put down his pipe and said resignedly, “Give me a cigarette, somebody.”

He took one from Marc's case and Miriam asked him rather curiously, “What do
you
think we're fighting for?”

He said slowly after a pause, “I can tell you what the men in the Army don't think they're fighting for, if that's any help. They're not fighting for the kind of life they've been leading for the past ten or twelve years.” He paused again, frowning, and went on at last, “The trouble is that so far, even after three years of war, their only definite ideas seem to be negative ones — they know they've got to beat Hitler, of course, but they seem to be fairly cynical about the Post-war world. It's not their fault; the people who do all the talking haven't really said anything yet.”

“Do you think the people who are in a position to do all the talking really know?” asked Erica.

“Maybe a few of them do, but all we seem to have got so far is a kind of mass consciousness of the way things are changing, or ought to change, if we're really going to get anywhere after the war. At least the English masses seem to be getting the hang of things, and I guess we are too, though naturally not to the same extent yet, because we haven't taken anything like the beating they have. I don't know about the Americans, though I'd be willing to bet that when capitalism is a dead duck in the rest of the world, the Americans will be the last nation to admit it.”

“Why?” asked Erica.

“Because their attitude towards government seems to be fundamentally different from ours. The further you get from unrestricted capitalism the more government you have to have. So far as the war is concerned, for example, the Americans apparently get production in spite of their government, half the time, and not because of it. It's their individual industrial geniuses who work the miracles, not Washington. They still believe in rugged individualism and don't believe in ‘government interference,' so rugged individualism works and government doesn't. Most of the Americans I know talk about their government as though it was on one side of the fence and they were on the other. Good old-fashioned capitalism is the only economic system that suits that point of view.”