Earth and High Heaven (27 page)

“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.”

“Yes,” said Erica. “Well, go on. We might just as well get it over with.”

“It's not your father and your friends, it's not even just us and what we can take — if we were married, it would be our children — your children — who'd have to take it. First, you'd suffer through me and then you'd start getting it through them, only what came to you through them would hit you far harder because I'm grown up and more or less used to it, and anyhow you didn't bring me into the world, you're not responsible for me. But to have to watch your children go through school tagged as ‘Jews,' as outsiders — that's not so easy.”

He broke off, and then remarked, looking out over the mountains again, “I'll never forget the way my mother looked the first time I came running home from school bawling my eyes out with a bunch of kids after me, pelting me with snowballs and yelling, ‘Marc's a dirty kike.' It wasn't the snowballs that scared me,” he added hastily. “It was the word ‘kike.' I'd never heard it before and I didn't know what it meant — I don't suppose the kids who were yelling it did either,” he added. “It just sounded awful. It sounded even worse to my mother and she's Jewish herself.”

“But that was twenty-five years ago,” protested Erica.

“Yes,” said Marc. “That was twenty-five years ago and Hitler was just a corporal in the German Army. It will probably take us another twenty-five years to get back to where we were in 1915.” He said incredulously, “You think after ten years of Nazism that things are easier for us now than they were then?”

“I don't know,” said Erica miserably.

“Well, I do,” said Marc. “The outlook, my darling, is not very bright, and just why you should be dragged into it when you don't have to be, I can't quite see.”

“Can't you? I should think it would be fairly obvious.” Before he could say anything she asked, “Isn't it easier for children who are half-Jewish?”

“No. Most Gentiles regard half-Jews as Jews — look at the refugees! — particularly if the father's Jewish, regardless of whether they've been brought up as Christians or not, and if they have, then the Jews won't accept them, so they end up by not really belonging anywhere.”

“Would you want our children to be brought up as Jews?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why?” asked Erica in amazement.

“Why?” he repeated, looking surprised. “Well, apart from the fact that I'm Jewish, simply because it's easier for them in the long run. It's much easier to grow up knowing you're Jewish from the time you're old enough to know anything, than to have it suddenly thrown in your face when you're twenty or twenty-five. That was what happened to God knows how many people in Austria and Germany who'd gone through life under the impression that they were Catholics or Protestants who'd been ‘assimilated.' Assimilated,” he said derisively, “I wonder who invented that word.”

“I don't see what Germany and Austria have to do with it. Naturally, the Nazis ...”

“Do you mean to say you've never heard a good Canadian Gentile say about some refugee or other, ‘Yes, I know he's supposed to be a Catholic but he's really Jewish ...”

She could not deny it; she had heard plenty of good Canadian Gentiles say that, sometimes even about refugees who were racially, or whatever you could call it, even less than half Jewish.

Erica opened her mouth to say something else, and then thought better of it. She knew now that unless there were a miracle, she would never marry Marc, but sometimes miracles happened and there was still one day left.

“Aren't you going to argue about it?” asked Marc, looking still more surprised.

“No,” said Erica. The idea that if they were married, their children would be brought up as Jews had come as a shock, the worst shock Marc had given her so far, she realized. At the moment it did not seem to her to make much sense, and it was certainly going to take some getting used to, but to argue about it now struck her as just about as futile as stopping a film in the middle and proceeding to quarrel over what took place in the part neither of them had yet seen.

She said suddenly a moment later, “These children of ours would be brought up as both anyhow.”

“Why?”

“Because, darling,” she said patiently, “whether we like it or not, we're both.”

“Oh,” said Marc. He grinned, remarking, “I guess that stops me.”

“Temporarily,” said Erica, carefully putting out her cigarette.

He glanced at her but she said nothing more. At the end of another silence he asked, “What did you mean when you said that you and your father were never going to get back to where you were before?”

“The whole basis of our relationship has gone. When I think of the way Charles and I used to be, it seems to me we were like those characters in cartoon comedies who run off a cliff and keep on running until they happen to look down and discover that the cliff isn't there any more, and then start to fall.”

With her eyes on a sumac flaming against the dark green of two young pines on the other side of the clearing, she said, “Well, we had a good run for our money, Charles and I. It took us longer than most people to find out that there wasn't anything underneath us.”

He was staring straight ahead of him with the rather bleak look which she had seen in his face at odd times ever since she had known him, only lately it had become much more frequent. It made him look older, not younger like his smile.

“My God, Eric, what a mess I've made of your life! I've taken you away from your family — I've even taken you away from your job.”

“Oh, damn my job,” said Erica. “I was sick to death of it anyway.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Join the Army, just like you.”

“Oh,” said Marc again. She knew that he still disliked the idea of women in uniform, and that he must dislike the idea of Erica in uniform still more, but all he said was, “Are you sure you want to?”