“I wasn’t thinking of mentioning it,” said Erica absently, suddenly struck by the change in her sister’s face. Something had happened to her sister since Erica had last seen her; she had lost the rather guarded and slightly inscrutable expression she had had as long as Erica could remember. She was leaning forward, looking out the open windows of the cab on first one side and then the other; her dark hair was blown back and along with her eagerness to see everything that there was to be seen along the way from the station to the home which she had left six years before, there was another quality, an inner light reflected softly in her face which made her more beautiful than ever.
They were winding their way up through Westmount, past the big houses set in their own gardens which sloped steeply down to the retaining wall running along the inner edge of the pavement. A little more of Montreal became visible with each hairpin turn in the road until at last they reached the street where the Drakes lived and the whole city lay spread out in the sunlight.
Erica had forgotten her key and had to ring the doorbell. “Hello, Mary,” she said, when their plump, grey-haired cook appeared. “This is my sister, Miss Miriam.”
As the taxi driver carried Miriam’s luggage into the hall, Erica saw Mary glance at Miriam from time to time, as though, like so many people, she would not believe at first that Miriam was quite real. Or that she could be my sister, though Erica, feeling discouraged. Nobody had ever looked at her like that.
When the three of them had carried the bags up from the hall and into Miriam’s pale-green and beige bedroom, Mary paused in the doorway, still plainly beglamoured, and asked, “Is there anything you’d like, Miss Miriam?”
“Yes,” said Miriam, throwing her hat on the bed. “I want some oranges, lots and lots of oranges.”
She went over to the windows which faced the mountain and said whistling, “My gosh, look at that garden,” her eyes traveling slowly up from the retaining wall across the street, past flowering shrubs, a fountain, some dwarf cedars, and innumerable flower beds to the summer house at the top. “If it was England, it would be full of carrots.”
“Come on,” said Erica, “let’s unpack and get it over with.”
Sometime later, as she was on her way to the cupboard with an armful of shoes, Erica asked, “Mimi, why did you come back? You wouldn’t leave during the Blitz ...”
“I know, but we weren’t being blitzed any more.” She paused and said with her back to Erica, “I came because someone else did.”
“Did he come with you?”
“No. He’s been over here for about a month.”
“Whereabouts?”
“I don’t know exactly — Washington and Ottawa, I guess. He’s on the Purchasing Commission.”
“English?”
Miriam straightened up, having put the last of her underwear into the chest of drawers, and glancing at her three suitcases lying open and now almost empty in a row on the window seat, she said, “No, one of those Americans who has lived all over the place and might be almost anything. Sit down, Eric, I’ll finish up. There isn’t much left.”
“Are you going to marry him?” asked Erica after a brief silence.
“Not at the moment anyhow. He’s already got a wife somewhere in California. They’ve been separated for five years.”
“Do you think ...”
“I don’t think,” said Miriam with her back to Erica again. “I just hope.”
“How old is he?”
“Forty-two.”
“Here are your oranges, Miss Miriam,” said Mary from the door.
“Put them over there by the bed, will you, please?”
On her way out again Mary said, “I’ll take your bags up to the storeroom if you’re ready with them, Miss Miriam.”
“Thanks, Mary.”
Erica helped her move the bags as far as the hall, closed the door again and went over to the chaise longue in the corner. She lit a cigarette and smoked in silence while Miriam changed into a flowered housecoat, and sitting cross-legged in the center of her bed, began peeling an orange. Finally Erica asked, “Why are you so much in love with him, Mimi?” thinking that anyone who had known Miriam before had only to look at her now to realize how much that was.
It was a silly question to ask anyone, particularly Miriam, who had always disliked personal questions even when she knew the answer, and Erica was startled to hear her say rather slowly a moment later, “You don’t know how much he’s done for me, Eric. He’s given me something that I’ve never had before. I didn’t think I ever would have it. Some women manage to be philosophical about it — they even manage to go on being married and make up for what they’re missing by raising a family and having ‘outside interests.’ I don’t know how they do it. I couldn’t.”
She ate two slices of orange and said, “The worst of it was that I didn’t look the part, and I got so sick of having men make passes at me that by the time I met Max, I’d reacted so violently against the whole business that what I really needed was a psychiatrist.”
“Or Max,” said Erica.
“Yes,” said Miriam, half smiling to herself. “Or Max. Are you shocked?”
“What about?” asked Erica, bewildered. “What kind of person do you think I am?”
“You?” Miriam scrutinized her in silence and said finally, “You’re the best of the three of us, you’re the one everybody depends on. Tony and I just do what we want, but you spend your life doing what other people want. You’re the sucker. They say there’s one in every family,” she added.
“Thanks,” said Erica.
There was a bird singing in the tree outside the bedroom windows and they could hear the fountain splashing in the garden across the street. Downstairs the telephone began to ring and Miriam turned her head toward the door to listen, then as Mary’s footsteps retreated into the kitchen again she said, relaxing, “I guess it must have been for Mother or Dad.”
“Do you think he’ll call you today?”
“I don’t know. I sent him a wire to the Mount Royal because he expected to be in Ottawa this week and said he’d be here for the weekend but he may not have been able to make it.”
“Why don’t you phone and find out?”
“If he’s here he’ll call me.”
“What’s his last name?”
“Eliot.”
“Throw me an orange, will you?” asked Erica. She caught it and began peeling. “What did you mean when you said I was a sucker?”
“I don’t know. You’ve never even thought of getting out and living somewhere else, have you?”
“Why should I?”
“Because you’re the sort of person who ought to be married, not staying home and keeping your parents company year after year.”
Miriam lit a cigarette, looked about for an ashtray and failing to see any but the one Erica was using on the other side of the room, she rolled over and reached out for the wastebasket. The wastebasket was some distance away and anyone else, thought Erica, watching her fascinated, would have fallen off the bed. But not Miriam. She stretched out, half her body apparently supported by nothing, picked up the basket and deposited it beside her, then rolled over and back all in one movement until she was lying down with her head against the pillows again.
“I suppose you realize that there’s never going to be anyone Charles will let you marry.”
“Why not?”
“You’re too important to him. Sometimes I think he could get along without Mother better than he could without you, at least in some ways. It isn’t just that he adores you. It’s more complicated than that.”
Miriam paused, frowning at the wall above Erica’s head. Finally she went on, “I remember when he and Mother were in London last time he was always saying how interested you would have been in some speech or other and cutting things out of the papers to send to you. More or less radical ideas that should have shocked him, didn’t seem to shock him at all ...”
“Charles is a lot more radi
cal than most people think,” interrupted Erica. “He just doesn’t want to be labeled, that’s all. I don’t know exactly where he stands, but it’s certainly somewhere to the left of center ...”
“Because of you,” said Miriam.
“It’s not because of me,” Erica said impatiently. “He’s too much aware of things and has too much heart to belong to the Right.”
“Maybe, but he’s pretty deeply rooted in the past too.” Miriam paused again, watching the smoke from her cigarette drifting toward the window, and finally she remarked, “I don’t think you or I can begin to realize how completely cockeyed everything must seem to people who are so aware of events and at the same time so conditioned by pre-Depression ideas on almost every subject as Charles. If he could fool himself like his friends he’d be all right, but he can’t. He knows he’ll never be rich again ...”
“That isn’t what matters,” said Erica. Fundamentally, Charles isn’t really awfully interested in money.”
“I know. What does matter, though, is the fact that everything looks so horribly unsettled. He doesn’t know where he’s at now, and still less where he’s going to be ten years from now. All he knows is that whatever is coming, it won’t be his kind of world, and he’s scared, or he would be if it weren’t for you. He has a lot of respect for you — you know the way he’s always saying that ‘Erica’s got her head screwed on straight.’ And besides, you know how to talk to him without putting his back up ...”
“It’s perfectly simple ...” began Erica.
“It may be simple for you but it isn’t for the rest of us! Anyhow, the point is that Charles will listen to you. You’re about the only person who isn’t hopelessly committed to the past that he will listen to. So far as he’s concerned, you’re about his only bridge between the past and the future because you can translate ideas into terms he can understand and because, when you say something, it makes sense. He’s going to hang on to you as long as he possibly can, and I’m willing to bet you anything you like that no matter whom you pick, Charles will try to stop you from marrying him.”
“There’s no way he can stop me,” said Erica. “This is 1942, not 1867 ...”
Looking at her rather oddly, Erica thought, Miriam interrupted, “And as a situation, it’s been so overdone and it’s so out of date that it just couldn’t happen to you, could it?”
“What do you expect Charles to do? Lock me up in my room and feed me on bread and water until I come to my senses?”
“He doesn’t have to do that, Eric — so long as you’re living here, he can work on you without your ever even realizing it.”
“Look,” said Erica patiently. “You got married when Charles thought you were far too young and Tony married someone he didn’t approve of at all — even if Charles doesn’t want to let me go, if you two could get away with it, why can’t I?”
“He didn’t care half as much about us.” She said rather deliberately, “And we didn’t care half as much about him either.”
“And you forget one thing,” said Erica. “I have far more influence on Charles than you ever had.”
“You’ll probably need it.”
A door slammed somewhere downstairs and Miriam started, then said lightly, “If you’re determined to stick around until someone decides to come and rescue you from your overly devoted father, at least pick a man who’s got all the necessary qualifications and a couple of extra ones for good measure, so that Charles won’t have any valid grounds for objecting. He’ll object anyhow, but you might just as well make it as tough for him as you can ...”
“I wish you’d shut up,” said Erica with sudden violence.
Miriam glanced at her quickly and after a pause she said, “I’m sorry, Eric.”
“It’s all right. Do you want this orange? It’s all peeled.”
“Don’t you want it?”
“No.” She got up and gave it to Miriam, then went over to the window and sat down on the seat with her hands in the pockets of her jacket. She said, looking down at the toe of her shoe, “I have picked someone, only he hasn’t got the necessary qualifications — he came to a cocktail party here with René, and Charles refused to meet him.”
“My God, what was he?” asked Miriam in amazement.
“A Jewish lawyer.”
“Oh.” She said as though she were reading aloud to herself. “Mr. and Mrs. Charles Sickert Drake announce the engagement of their daughter, Erica Elizabeth, to a Jewish lawyer ...” She broke off and said, “Well, never mind, Eric, you can count on me anyhow. What’s he like?”
“He’s about six feet, with brown hair and eyes about the same color as mine, but they slant ...”
“Upwards or downwards?” inquired Miriam with interest.
“Upwards, you ass!”
“That’s good. Otherwise I should think he’d have rather a droopy look — you know, like a bloodhound. Is he good-looking?”
“Not particularly, he’s just attractive. Nice shoulders and no hips. His skin is dark enough so that he won’t look as though he’s come out from under a stone the first time he goes swimming — you know, that sort of golden skin that’s very smooth ...”
“How many times have you met this guy?”
“Just twice.”
“I must say you notice a lot,” said Miriam admiringly. “And what sort of person is René?”
“Thirty-four, dark, aquiline, slightly satirical, very intelligent, and very Catholic.”
“Very Quebec Catholic?”
“I don’t know. We usually try to stay off the subject. I somehow can’t see René with twelve children, but you never can tell. We might even invite ourselves there for dinner tomorrow night. Mary’s going to be out.”
“For heaven’s sake let’s get ourselves invited somewhere, then.”
“You’d better leave out the part about Tony ‘having the time of his life’ when you’re talking to Madeleine and René. Madeleine still has too many illusions about Tony and René hasn’t enough. I suppose there’s someone else in the picture?” she asked.
“Well, there was for a while anyhow. I don’t know whether it’s still going on or not, and if it is, how much it means to Tony or how far it goes. She was certainly nuts about him, at any rate. I ran into them together a couple of times.”
“So here’s Madeleine,” said Erica, “having a baby in August and saying, ‘Of course Tony always hated writing letters, and anyhow he’s so busy, and besides there are so many sinkings that we’re not getting half the English mails ...’” She said furiously, “I could break his bloody neck!”
Miriam said calmly, “You can’t imagine the sort of life he leads now, Eric. These are extraordinary circumstances ...” she began and stopped, confused by the sheer inanity of her own remark. “Anyhow, Madeleine doesn’t need to know anything about it,” she added at last.
They were silent for a while and then Erica said idly, “John Gardiner’s been phoning practically every day for the last month to see if you’d got here yet ...”
“Good Old Faithful,” said Miriam. “Is he still strong and silent and full of ideals?”
“I guess so,” said Erica, uncomfortably. The description, while recognizable, did not strike her as quite just, although there was no doubt that so far as his attitude toward Miriam was concerned, John was certainly too full of ideals for his own good. Erica had had to spend a good many evenings off and on during the past eight years listening to John on the subject of Miriam, and half the time he had sounded as though he were talking about someone else. Or so she had thought, but now Erica was beginning to wonder. It was possible that he had not been so far off the track after all. Unlike the rest of them, he had never regarded Miriam as impervious; unlike Charles and Margaret Drake he had never believed that Miriam had divorced Peter Kingsley “for no really good reason”; John had said over and over again that Miriam was altogether too vulnerable, that her emotions were likely to run away with her, that her ex-husband had given her a “raw deal” �
� Erica did not know exactly how John had worked that out for himself — and that what Miriam needed was someone to look after her. All of which, Erica reflected, might turn out to be true after all.
“How is he?” asked Miriam, turning her head toward the door again as the telephone rang.
“He’s still mad about being sent back from England just because he’s bilingual. Apparently they’re short of bilingual officers.”
Miriam finished her second orange and then asked suddenly, “Why don’t you tell him what I’m really like, Eric? He still thinks I’m some kind of superfatted angel. After all this time, he deserves a break.”
“Maybe he knows,” said Erica.
There was a knock on the door and Mary said, “The telephone’s for you, Miss Miriam — a Mr. Eliot. I called you but I guess you didn’t hear me ...”
Miriam was off the bed and out the door before Mary had finished her sentence.
Form the window Erica said resignedly, “I’ll be alone for dinner after all, Mary.”
“Yes, Miss Drake,” she said, and then added vaguely, “but it’s only a quarter past six and maybe something will turn up.”
“At a quarter past six?” asked Erica. “Well, maybe.” She got up from the window seat, wandered about for a while after Mary had gone, then decided she would kill the next half hour by taking a bath.
When the telephone rang again she did not hear it; she was cold-creaming her face in her bathroom with both taps running.
“Miss Drake ...”
“Yes, Mary?”
“You’re wanted on the phone.” As Erica opened the door Mary said happily, “It’s a gentleman, Miss Drake. I told you something would turn up.”
Erica went off down the hall to her mother’s room to answer. By the time she got there, she had succeeded in convincing herself that it could not possibly be Marc, and that it was probably someone from the Post. Thus fortified against the inevitable letdown, she picked up the phone, sat down on the edge of her mother’s bed and said, “Hello?”
“Hello, this is Marc Reiser — you know, the guy you only managed to get rid of three hours ago.”
Earth and High Heaven Page 11
