Now, she thought, this is it, this skepticism, this “superrealism” which consists of reminding yourself that no matter how bad you think things are going to be, they usually turn out to be worse; this basic sense of insecurity, this profound discouragement which was all the more baffling because it was so matter of fact.
She said at last, “You can’t tell whether or not it would be worth it to Erica. Nobody can. Nobody can tell which things matter and which don’t, or how much they matter one way or the other — to anyone but himself. You can’t tell what price anyone else can afford to pay for what they want most, because their price is their whole system of values, and their system of values is the result of everything which has ever happened to them — the way they have come to think and feel and the sum total of all their experience. You’d have to know all that about Eric, and you don’t. You can’t.” She broke off for a moment, staring at him, and then said half to herself, “That’s what I simply can’t forgive Charles for. He presumes to know everything about Eric, far better, of course, than she knows herself.”
“Let’s leave your father out of it.”
“Sorry.”
“He isn’t the main problem anyhow.”
She raised her eyes to his face again and said, “I’m beginning to realize that, but to do Charles justice, he helps!”
“He certainly helps,” said Marc, smiling at her. “I suppose you know you’re beginning to get drunk?”
“Yes,” said Miriam. She glanced around the small blue and silver bar and then remarked, “Everything seems nice and distant. I’m even getting away from myself.”
He signaled the waiter and ordered another drink for her and then said, “After that we’d better go back.”
“Cigarette, please.”
Leaning forward to light it for her he observed, “You’re quite right, I don’t know enough about Erica, but she doesn’t know enough about what she would have to deal with either. It’s not just marrying into a set of social restrictions — like not being able to go to some beach to swim or to some hotel in the Laurentians to ski, unless she goes without me and carefully explains that although her name is Reiser, she herself isn’t Jewish. It isn’t even knowing that there are certain things I can’t do, like going on the bench or the board of directors of a bank or something. The big restrictions aren’t so important, there aren’t an awful lot of them, and they’re not what gets you down. What does get you down, particularly when it’s not you but someone you’re fond of, are the intangibles — the negatives, the endless little problems in human relationships which you never think of until you come up against them and which are so small that you hardly notice them until they start to pile up and eventually amount to a staggering total.”
“Don’t be so vague,” said Miriam. “I’m a little too drunk to follow you except when you’re specific.”
“All right, then. Erica was born on top. She’s been on top all her life. She’s part of a complicated social system where she has a place, where she can go anywhere and do anything on a basis of complete equality with anyone, and it’s simply up to her. If she marries me, she’ll lose all that overnight. Where there was certainty, there’ll be doubt — nothing definite, just doubt. She’ll lose some of her friends who simply won’t take to the idea of always having to invite a Jew along with Erica; she’ll keep others. Maybe she’ll keep most of the others, but she’ll never again be sure. She’ll never be sure of anyone the first time she meets him. She won’t even be sure of people she’s known all her life until she’s had a chance to re-examine every last one of them and find out where they stand. She’s never before had to pick her friends on the basis of whether they liked Jews or not, Miriam.”
“And what about you?” asked Miriam. “Would you be willing to go through life waiting for the verdict of one person after another?”
“I have to anyhow,” he said quietly.
That was a rather extraordinary remark when you came to think of it. “I really think it’s about time we tried that new system.” She put her elbows on the table, gazed at him dreamily and then asked, “What do they call it? You know the one I mean — the one that begins with a D. Oh, yes, democracy, that’s it. Have you heard about it?”
“Everything is relative,” said Marc.
“You mean, you don’t mind being kicked out of hotels and most of the better Montreal homes when you think of Nazi Germany ...”
“You bet I don’t!”
“I suppose that’s the reason nothing’s ever done about it here,” said Miriam reflectively. “Whenever a good Canadian begins to have doubts, he says, ‘Oh, well, look at the Nazis,’ and figures he’s so superior, he’s practically perfect.”
“But he is.”
“Oh, nuts,” said Miriam. “Has it occurred to you that you might have a lot less trouble if you moved away from Montreal?”
“Why?”
“To get rid of your wife’s family and most of your wife’s friends. Or are you wedded to Mr. what’s-his-name?”
“Aaronson?”
Miriam nodded.
“Not that I know of. But I don’t think that would help much.”
“It might,” said Miriam, sliding down in her chair until her dark head was resting against the back. She closed her eyes and said sleepily, “They say it’s much better out west, for example.”
“I doubt it.”
“You doubt everything, damn it! You’re a nice person, in fact you’re one of the nicest people I’ve ever met but you ...” She yawned unexpectedly, opening her dark eyes and said with renewed decision, “You’re too bloody fatalistic. What you need is a little simple faith in your fellow men, a dash of optimism, a couple of illusions and a lot more self-confidence. You’ve got everything else, and if someone like you can’t break it down, then no one can. At least you can try — God damn it,” said Miriam, exasperated, “it’s your duty to try!”
She found that he was regarding her with a certain amusement and she said, “I know. It’s easy for me to talk. All the same, if you just stay away instead of facing up to it and jolly well making people take a good look at you ... if you don’t have a shot at it, no one else will.” She was no longer quite clear what she was driving at, but it sounded as though she was suggesting that he should put himself permanently on exhibition. Life must be almost intolerable when, like Marc, you know that you will always have to turn up in person, to pass the inspection, in order to get a break. Never to be taken for granted but always to bear the burden of proof. The burden of proof, she repeated to herself, trying to imagine what it would be like to be Marc Reiser. She could not imagine it; her mind was too tired and too muddled, and anyhow, she herself was a Drake, and had been taken for granted ever since she could remember.
Marc was back on the subject of Erica. His voice seemed to be coming from some point a lot farther away than the other side of the rather small table in front of her, and by the time her mind had veered round again, he was saying, “Put it this way. I don’t know what price she can afford to pay and Erica doesn’t know what she’s buying.”
“Couldn’t you get together and pool your information?”
“My God,” said Marc in amazement. “What do you think we do all the time?”
At a table on the edge of the dance floor opposite the orchestra, Erica was building a house out of matches and once again listening to John on the subject of Miriam. He was feeling discouraged and was sitting with his heavy shoulders against the frail back of the chair, drawing a series of squares and rectangles on the white cloth with the pointed handle of a fork.
“What odds would you give on our ever getting married?”
“Five to one,” said Erica.
“The last time I asked you that you said five to one against.”
“I know, but you’ve improved a lot. If you could manage to be as bright about Miriam as you are about most things now, I’d even give you ten to one.”
“Why?”
“Because Miriam’s
on the rebound. Max walked out on her for good this morning and went to England on a bomber.”
“But she didn’t really care about him, Eric ...”
“Didn’t she? Why not?”
“Eliot wasn’t her type.”
He seemed so sure of that anyhow that Erica asked, “And what is Miriam’s type?”
“Well, whatever it is, it’s not something straight out of Esquire!” he said impatiently.
“Well, maybe not,” said Erica, “but even if he wasn’t her type, Miriam is now getting good and drunk out in the bar.”
“Miriam doesn’t get drunk.” He frowned at her, looking less certain, and finally asked, “Are you serious, Eric?”
“Mm,” said Erica, carefully placing another match.
“We’d better go and get her then.”
“Marc will look after her,” said Erica without moving. Her eyes had been following one line, from the pile of matches on the table before her to the door which led to the bar, from the door back to the matches, the matches back to the door again for what already seemed like several hours, but although every minute without Marc dragged interminably, what mattered most to her at the moment was not Marc and herself, but Marc and Miriam. She wanted them to have a chance to get to know each other.
It did not even occur to her that while Marc and her sister were getting to know each other, Marc might also be getting to know a good deal about her parents as well. He asked no direct questions; he was simply letting Miriam talk. In telling him her attitude toward the whole situation, she was giving him a fairly clear idea of the situation itself, without being aware of what she was doing. She never realized that in part of one evening, Marc had found out more from her than he had been able to find out from Erica in two months. By the time he left the bar and returned with Miriam, his former guesswork and suspicion had turned into actual knowledge. He was not yet ready to admit that he was beaten; it was simply that the future had become much darker and he was no longer able to see clearly beyond the next few weeks. The rest was obscurity. His point of view had not changed, it had merely shortened and covered only the period between the present and the day on which he would leave for overseas.
John was still looking unsettled, and Erica said, “Besides, Miriam never gets drunk enough for it to be noticeable.”
“That was rather unnecessary, wasn’t it?”
“What was?”
“I wasn’t worrying whether it would be ‘noticeable’ or not.”
“Oh, hell,” said Erica as her house of matches collapsed. “I meant that since there’s no danger of her making an ass of herself, it’ll probably do her good. And for heaven’s sake, Johnny, don’t be stuffy.”
“Sorry, Eric. You’ve had an awful lot to put up with, haven’t you? I don’t know why you didn’t tell me to damn well pack up my troubles and take them somewhere else long ago. Do you think Miriam’s really upset about that fellow?” he asked incredulously.
“More upset than I’ve ever seen her before, anyhow.”
“Why on earth did she come out with us then?”
“Haven’t you ever tried to Postpone thinking about something until you’ve had a chance to get used to the idea a little at a time?”
His handsome face stiffened, only instead of looking years older as Marc always did, unhappiness made him much younger, as young as he had been when Erica had first known him, eight years before.
At that time, all his thoughts had been orderly, catalogued and arranged under the proper headings. He had just graduated from McGill and started work in the family bond house. Until he had been sent back from England after two years overseas, because there was such a shortage of bilingual officers, Erica could not remember ever having heard John say anything which had not been said before. He had been quite unoriginal; his life had been unoriginal, conforming completely to the given pattern for his age, class, and country, so that looking first at John Gardiner and then at his father and his father’s friends, you could see quite clearly the direction he was taking and where he would undoubtedly end up.
Erica could remember the way he had thought, if you could call it thinking. At university he had done the required reading and no more. In a bond house, no reading is required, so at the age of twenty-one, and apart from the sports and finance sections of the morning and evening papers, a few magazines, and still fewer bestsellers, John had found himself relieved of the necessity for doing any reading at all. He played a very good game of bridge, golf, and tennis; he was an officer in the Reserve Army of peacetime, he had no interest whatever in any of the arts or in ideas, as such; he was unshakably decent, honest, hard-working, and unimaginative. He was a typical Canadian. From 1930 until far too late, he had assumed that the Depression would right itself; he had hung on to the illusion that the Depression would right itself long after Charles Drake had abandoned it, and had resigned his Reserve commission because his regiment showed no signs of being mobilized, for the time being at any rate, in order to enlist for Active Service in September, 1939, because, as he had said at dinner, his sort always does.
He was, however, one of the few men Erica knew whom the war had turned right-side up, instead of temporarily upside down. When you’ve been in the Army for three years, as John had pointed out himself, sooner or later you’re bound to start wondering why you’re there.
His face stiffer, younger, and more uncomprehending than ever, he said, “Did Miriam think she was going to marry him, Eric?”
“No,” said Erica.
“Then what’s it all about?”
Erica regarded him helplessly for a moment and then said, “Don’t you think you’d better ask Miriam instead of me?”
“Did she want to marry him?”
“She may have,” said Erica vaguely.
“Why?”
Having finally found an answer which she thought would do, she said, “Well, you know they say that when divorced people remarry, they usually go to the opposite extreme.”
“Really,” said John. “I’ve never heard that before.”
Neither had Erica, but it was as good an explanation of Max Eliot’s attraction for Miriam as any Erica could think of as well as a partial explanation of Miriam’s continuing inability to fall in love with John, she realized a moment later. In one respect, John and Peter Kingsley, Miriam’s ex-husband, were too much alike, or at least Miriam thought they were, and it was impossible to talk her out of it. The worst mistake John had made was when he had told Miriam in London, just when she had been on the point of falling in love with him at last, that he had never looked at anyone else since he had met her, adding, rather embarrassed, that of course that meant he had never looked at anyone else at all. If he had not been embarrassed, Miriam might not have known what he was talking about, or rather that what he was saying was to be taken literally; as it was, she did know, even before he went on still more embarrassed, to add something about having kept himself for her.
Even without the embarrassment, it would have sounded like Peter all over again, and that was enough for Miriam. Out of every ten idealists, nine are likely to be more or less neurotic and only one entirely genuine, and having been tricked once, Miriam was not going to run the risk of being tricked a second time. And genuine or not, she did not want the burden of John’s idealism and above all, she wanted no more embarrassment and no more speeches. Instead of being moved by what he said, because John happened to be a thoroughly genuine human being genuinely in love with her, Miriam froze up. From then on she had scarcely allowed him to touch her. In some very deep sense, she was afraid of him, and because he was so decent and hadn’t the faintest idea what was wrong, he let her get away with it, thereby following up his worst mistake with another which was almost as bad for both of them.
Erica had no idea what it would be like for him when he found out, as he must inevitably find out sometime, that during this past year and in fact up until last night, while he had been denying his own desire for Miriam’s sake and his,
and for the sake of their future, as he thought, she had been the mistress of a man for whom he had so little use that he had just described him as something out of Esquire. John hadn’t much vanity, but even if he had had none at all, he could not fail to realize that he was worth a great deal more according to anybody’s standards, except those of the one person who mattered most to him, than Max Eliot. And leaving out everything else, that would hurt. It would hurt like hell.
As though he had guessed a little of what she was thinking he said, “I didn’t know I’d been playing second fiddle again, Eric.”
He was looking down at the table, the orchestra was making a great deal of noise and his voice was pitched so low that Erica could hardly make out what he said. She missed the next few words altogether and then, “I ought to have got it through my head by this time that there always is someone else.”
“Always?”
“Yes, there was another one she was in love with after Kingsley and before she met Eliot — while I was still in England.”
The whole romantic room with the long windows at one end through which you could see a cluster of lighted buildings against the night sky, the orchestra in its fantastic white shell, and the people dancing or talking at their tables — all of it had dropped away from him. He had forgotten where he was and went on sitting half-turned away from her, a tall, fair-haired man in an officer’s uniform whose blue eyes were fixed on some point near the door leading to the bar.
“Eric.”
“Yes?”
“Remember that nursery rhyme, ‘The Farmer Takes a Wife’ and the wife takes somebody else who takes somebody else? Even when I was a kid I always hated that rhyme.”
The next moment Miriam and Marc were skirting the edge of the dance floor on their way back again, Marc with his hands in his trouser pockets and Miriam walking with her head up, her movements as light and full of grace as ever. Except for her burning dark eyes and a slight flush, there was no outward sign that she had eaten almost nothing for the past twenty-four hours and had drunk far too much in the last three and a half.
Earth and High Heaven Page 19
