Earth and High Heaven

by Gwethalyn Graham

  “Is that what happens?” he had asked David as they were walking away from the house.

  His brother was shorter than Marc, with black hair and dark eyes; he glanced up sideways at Marc and said briefly, “I guess all married couples have their off nights.”

  He had forgotten what they had talked about after that, until they were sitting at a corner table in the beer parlor and his brother had asked suddenly, “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered after a pause. “I guess it was just the Rosenberg atmosphere.”

  “Why? Are you thinking of doing what Max did?” After waiting for a while, David said resignedly, “You might just as well tell me all about it, laddie. You will sooner or later anyhow. What’s her name?”

  “Erica Drake.”

  His brother finished his beer and then asked, “What’s she like?”

  He tried to tell David what Erica was like but that came out all wrong too. The more he said, the less it sounded like Erica. Finally his brother cut him short with, “All right, all right ... so you think you’re in love with her.”

  “I don’t just think so.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time if you did.”

  “I know,” said Marc impatiently, “but this time it’s different.”

  “Not really.”

  “I can’t remember ever having wanted to marry anyone before.”

  His brother was sitting hunched over his glass with his pipe between his teeth. He removed the pipe, glanced at Marc and with his eyes back on the table again he said, “You haven’t shown much talent for sticking so far, and if you’re really serious about marrying her, you’ll need a lot. I wouldn’t make it too tough for myself if I were you.”

  “I’m not worried about myself. I’m really in love with her; I’ve never felt this way about anyone before in my life. We just belong together, that’s all. Oh, hell,” he said, exasperated, grinding out his cigarette. “You can’t explain these things.”

  There was a brief silence and then Marc asked, “Are you just against it on principle?”

  “No,” said David. “I haven’t got any of those particular principles. How long have you known her?”

  “About a month. It hasn’t anything to do with that. I knew Eric better after I’d been talking to her for half an hour than I know René de Sevigny after ten years.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.” David glanced at his watch, signaled the waiter for their bill and got up. Looking down at Marc, he said, “The trouble with you is, laddie, you’ve never really grown up. You haven’t found yourself yet. I’m sorry if I sound like a copybook but I can’t think of any other way of putting it. And until you have, and really know what you want, you’d better stay clear of complicated situations. After all, it isn’t just a question of messing up your own life.”

  You haven’t found yourself yet.

  He still did not know exactly what his brother had meant by that. And he certainly did not want to mess up Erica’s life, or even run the risk of hurting her. It was because he was afraid for her and for himself, but particularly for Erica, that he had sat on the opposite side of the car and kept on driving, or had gone from one public place to another, for what had once begun in the car or on the mountain or in a park — the only places in which they were ever alone — would inevitably end in a hotel in the Laurentians for a weekend. The idea of leaving Erica to pick up the pieces in Montreal when he himself went overseas, after one or several weekends in the Laurentians, did not appeal to Marc particularly.

  And along with everything else, he had himself to cope with.

  The cocktails had arrived. He drank his all at once, then said to Erica who was staring at the cherry in the bottom of her glass, “Spear it with a match.”

  “I wonder what’s become of the toothpick?”

  “It’s probably a war measure.”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “You,” he said. “Us.”

  His life had been run largely by his intelligence so far; his emotions had never threatened to run away with him until now — the only thing which could be said ever to have run away with him was his lack of emotion. He had never got either himself or anyone else into trouble through feeling too much, only through his having felt too little.

  And now, Erica. She was wearing some kind of green and white summer dress, sitting beside him with her fair hair almost down to her shoulders, spearing the cherry at the bottom of her glass with a match.

  “Don’t look like that!” said Marc.

  Erica raised her head and asked, startled, “Like what?”

  But he did not know what he wanted her to look like, except that it would have been a help if she had looked less like herself. He moved a few inches away from her and ordered another cocktail.

  There was a radio playing out in the hall. Erica ate the cherry and listened above the murmur of voices and the soft clatter of dishes, and asked finally, “What is it?”

  “Schubert No. 5. I think he stole most of the last movement from Mozart.”

  Charles would have liked that, even if he had considered that Marc was slandering Schubert. The utterly lunatic part of it was that there was nothing about Marc that either Charles or her mother would not have liked.

  “What did you say?” she asked a moment later.

  “I said, you should have had a martini too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because all I’ve got in my room is half a bottle of gin.”

  “Are we going to your room?” Erica asked, looking at a woman out in the middle of the long, light room who was wearing a very large black hat and eating lobster.

  “Don’t you think it’s about time you learned something about my background?”

  She felt that he was smiling at her, but the next moment the amusement died out of his oblique, greenish eyes. He took her hand suddenly for the first time, and held it with a pressure which went on steadily increasing until the waiter appeared on the other side of the table with his wagon of hors d’oeuvres, and he released it.

  “Everything except onions, beets, herring, and that pink stuff,” said Erica, after the waiter had waited patiently for one of them to pay some attention to him. “What’s your room like?” she asked Marc.

  “Depressing.”

  Some time later, as she was struggling with her chicken, Erica remarked, “When I eat hors d’oeuvres I never have any appetite left for the rest of the meal.”

  “You never have any appetite anyhow.”

  He was watching her with an anxious expression and an angry look in the tight muscles around his mouth. “What was it today?” he demanded without warning. “More trouble?”

  Erica glanced at him quickly and then answered matter-offactly, “No, of course not. I’m just not hungry.”

  He picked up the basket of bread and when she shook her head, he put a slice on her plate anyhow. “You’ve got to eat, Eric.” He gave her some butter and then asked, “Do you really think I’m worth it?”

  “Yes,” said Erica under her breath. Her eyes met his, and she said involuntarily, “Darling, don’t look at me like that!”

  “I can’t help it. I’ve behaved very well so far but I don’t think it’s going to last much longer. In the meantime, you’d better go on eating. No woman looks romantic with her mouth full.”

  “Do I have to eat all of it?”

  “There isn’t much, Eric, it’s mostly bones.”

  He was talking about something else and she thought that once again she had succeeded in heading him off, when he asked suddenly, as they were waiting for their dessert, “Do they go on at you about me all the time, or is it just intermittent?”

  Evidently some of it had got through to him anyhow, in spite of the way she had worked to keep him from finding out, having realized from the beginning that the most dangerous aspect of the whole situation was not her father’s attitude toward Marc but Marc’s reaction to that attitude once he became
fully aware of it. He would take it as final, because it was confirmed by so much in his own experience if for no other reason, when in fact it was not. Erica’s conviction that sooner or later Charles Drake would come round was not based on hope so much as on a fairly complete knowledge of Charles Drake. If, at some future date, he should be faced with the choice of accepting Marc Reiser or losing his daughter, then Miriam to the contrary, Charles would accept Marc Reiser, but whether she could succeed in convincing Marc of that fact was a different matter. Marc did not know her father. And in any case, to ask Marc simply to wait and put up with the attitude until her father was forced into a position where he had to change it, and with nothing to look forward to, so far as Marc could see, but a grudging “acceptance” under due pressure, was to ask altogether too much of anyone with as much pride as Marc Reiser. He could not be expected to realize that the word “acceptance” had a different meaning for her father than it had for most people. You had actually to have seen Charles Drake do one of his voltes-faces before you could believe it was possible. He did not put his prejudices behind him and go on from there; he went back to the beginning and started all over again.

  If only Marc had known her father — if only her father had known Marc. But neither of them did, and all she could do was to go on playing for time, trying to keep Marc from finding out what her family really thought of him, until, after a while, they thought a little better.

  She said, “They don’t ‘go on’ about you, darling; you’re hardly ever mentioned.”

  After dinner they drove through the grey streets lined with trees, every shade and depth of green in the evening light, out of the city, through a village and across the canal, then on the straight new highway for a while and finally off to the left down a series of narrow country roads until they came to the river, and the primitive cable ferry which sailed back and forth on the current between Ile de Montreal and Ile Bizard. They found the old ferryman sitting as usual on a kitchen chair at one end of his barge, puffing on his pipe. There was no sound but the movement of the water in the long grasses by the bank, and some bells ringing in the monastery across the river. The old man stood up, beckoning them to drive onto the barge, then he cast off, and barge, car, and kitchen chair started for Ile Bizard. Of all the islands near the island of Montreal, Bizard was the one Erica loved best.

  “How can anyone make a living out of ferrying people across here?” asked Erica. “Nobody ever goes to Ile Bizard but us, I mean not on this thing. Everybody else uses the bridge. Which river is this anyhow?”

  “The Back River.”

  Erica sighed. “I’m always hoping it will turn out to be the Ottawa or the St. Lawrence but it never does.”

  The top of the car was down and looking up at the sky she remarked, “By the way, Vic and Barbara Wells are having a cocktail party on Friday. Do you want to go?”

  “Was I invited?”

  “Yes, Barbie asked if I’d bring you. She’s going to phone you herself tomorrow.”

  “I don’t have to be brought.”

  It sounded more like an observation than an objection.

  So far so good, thought Erica, and said, “May I have a cigarette, please?”

  He lit one for her and then one for himself and said at last, “I’ve known Vic ever since my first year at law school; he was a year ahead of me and he went into his father’s firm as soon as he graduated. I’ve had lunch with him a couple of times since but that’s about all — strictly business. So why the sudden interest?”

  Farther up, the river was dotted with heavily wooded islands and there were a few villages hidden among the trees along the shore, although all you could see of them was an occasional roof or a church spire. Erica had been born and brought up in Montreal but she had never managed to get the geography of the region completely straightened out; it remained a green and watery tangle of islands, rivers, lakes, and villages all named after saints, the more obscure and improbable, the better. Just who, for example, was St. Polycarp de Crabtree Mills?

  The sudden interest was due to the fact that she had had lunch with Barbara Wells the day before and since she knew Barbara very well, she had asked, “You wouldn’t like to invite a friend of mine too, would you? His name is Marc Reiser, he’s a Jewish lawyer and Charles won’t have him in the house.”

  “Good Lord,” said Barbara. After a moment she remarked, “If he’s a lawyer, Vic probably knows him.”

  “That’s more than can be said for Charles,” said Erica. “He’s one of those people who can judge the quality of the contents by the label on the can.”

  “Your father’s not the only one. Vic can be pretty stuffy when he wants to be, particularly about the Jewish legal fraternity — he was well away on some frightful story about a firm of Jewish lawyers last night before he remembered that the Oppenheims are Jews and they were sitting on the opposite side of the table. Of course they’re Austrians and you’d never guess ...”

  “Yes, dear,” Erica interrupted patiently. “Well, Marc’s parents are Austrian too, if that’s any help.” She could not imagine anyone who knew Marc not liking him and she said, “Anyhow, ask Vic what he thinks.”

  Later in the afternoon Barbara had phoned to say that Vic had said by all means, bring him along, and that was that, except for the fact that there was something in the tone in which Marc had asked about the sudden interest which made Erica suspect that he had no intention of going.

  She did not care particularly whether he went or not, but she knew that this business of always being alone together was bad for them both and sooner or later, something would definitely have to be done about it. As things were, they were simply playing the parts Charles Drake had assigned them — the parts of a couple of outcasts. With the exception of one or two friends of Marc’s who, like himself, were waiting to go overseas, most of his other friends having gone long since, and an occasional friend of Erica’s, they had kept to themselves. The longer they went on keeping to themselves, without even trying to behave like ordinary people with a place in the society which surrounded them, the easier it was for Charles. If, on the other hand, enough people outside the family got to the point where they took Marc and herself for granted, the situation would begin to be thoroughly awkward for her parents. The Drakes could not go on indefinitely refusing to meet someone whom a steadily increasing number of other people they knew had met and accepted, without appearing rather silly. Vic and Barbara Wells combined an unassailable social position — which meant that their approval would automatically carry some weight with her father and mother, since the social aspect of the problem seemed to be one of their chief worries — with intelligence and, in spite of Vic’s temporary lapse in the presence of the Oppenheims, a general lack of stuffiness, so their cocktail party looked to Erica like a good place to start.

  The ringing of the monastery bells had died away. They heard the long whistle of a distant railway train, then a faint shout from somewhere on the shore behind them, and then there was silence again except for the splashing of the swift current, driving at an angle against the barge, and the noise the pulleys made as they creaked along the cable up in the air.

  “I think I’d rather not go,” said Marc.

  “Why?” Before he could answer Erica said, “You know what cocktail parties are like, Marc — a lot of people bring their friends without even asking.”

  “Did you ask, Eric?”

  “No.”

  His right arm was lying on the back of the seat behind her, and all he had to do was let it down to her shoulders in order to bring her around so that she was facing him. “Say it again.”

  “All right then,” said Erica defiantly, “I did ask her. Good heavens, I’ve asked dozens of people if I could bring someone to their parties. Look at the one we gave in June — we started out with thirty people and ended up with over fifty.”

  “I know, I was one of them,” said Marc noncommittally.

  He took his arm away from her shoulders and turne
d so that he was sitting under the wheel again, looking past the bent figure of the old ferryman who was standing on the bow staring upriver, to the tumbledown landing stage on the green shore in front of him.

  “You said that once ...”

  “Go on.”

  “You said it was important not to start imagining things.”

  “I’m not imagining anything, darling. You don’t realize what the legal profession is like. It isn’t the same as being a Jewish doctor, or professor, or even a Jewish businessman. You’ve got Vic on the spot, and the only thing for me to do is not to turn up. He knows he’s never made any effort to see me outside of business hours since we were at law school — I tried once or twice after we graduated but he was always busy or something — and I know it, and he knows I know it. So now when you come along and finally get me invited to his house after twelve years — what does it all add up to?”

  “It adds up to everybody going on forever playing this idiotic game according to the rules and never getting anywhere!” She said miserably, “You’re just helping to make it work.”

  “Well, if I didn’t, I’d only be accusing of pushing in where I’m not wanted.”

  The barge slid into place against the beach and with her eyes on the old French Canadian who was adjusting the two planks which served as runways, she asked after a pause, “Are you going to feel like this about everyone?”

  “No, of course not. You just happened to pick the wrong people.” They drove past the monastery, then into a village by a steepled church, around one side of the green square where a few old men were playing bowls, and out the other side among the fields and scattered farmhouses painted white and with the softly curving bell-cast roofs of Quebec, and the great barns of faded yellow and blue and red. There was a shrine by the side of the road and a few people grouped around it, old men and women and children and the village curé, and later on they came to a herd of cows and had to follow along behind with the car in low gear until the cows turned in at a gate.