“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?”
She nodded. He was silent a moment and then he said, “They’ll cut your hair, darling.”
“I know,” she said, amused, because she had been so certain that Marc’s first comment would be something about her hair.
“Is there any chance of your getting overseas?”
“I’m late for that. They take you in the order of enlistment ...”
“When are you going to enlist?”
He was due to leave for Halifax at seven-thirty on Wednesday night and she said, “Thursday morning.”
“Is Miriam joining up too?”
“No, Sylvia is. Miriam’s too busy trying to talk John into believing that she really cares about him.”
“I hope she succeeds,” said Marc. “Your father has always liked John, hasn’t he?”
A flock of crows flew by, down toward the ragged autumn fields below, and they listened to the cawing as it grew steadily fainter in the distance, looking out over the valley and the mountains which were slowly changing colour in the afternoon light.
She knew that Marc was still thinking about her mother and father, although all she had told him so far was that there had been a row, and he still had no idea how bad things actually were.
“Eric, if I thought ...”
“If you thought what?” she asked him after waiting for him to go on.
“If I thought there was going to be someone else — someone like John, someone who’d mean as much to you as I do ...” He stopped again, his face very strained, and then made himself finish the sentence. “... I guess I’d call quits for good and never see you again. Life isn’t a bed of roses anyhow, without adding a lot of extra complications that you can so easily avoid ...”
“... by not marrying you,” said Erica.
“Yes,” he said hopelessly. “Just by not marrying me.”
She was beginning to realize that nothing she could say would make any real difference now, but for the sake of that one chance, that miracle which might stil
l happen sometime between now and tomorrow night, she answered, “Maybe there will be someone else, I don’t know. All I do know is that it will be different, and I won’t feel like this again. When I’m with you, I feel — I feel safe. I feel safe all the way through. I know that whatever you do, you’ll never hurt me, and all the little things that are so deep down and so vulnerable — they’re safe too.”
She smiled at him, although her throat and eyes were too dry and it was hard to talk. “I know lots of people who are comfortably married, with nothing much to worry about, no really serious problems of their own, but they sit on opposite sides of the living room at night and they might just as well be sitting on opposite sides of the Atlantic, because they’re not two halves of a whole, they’re two separate wholes, two separate individuals who give you the feeling that they got married by accident and might just as well have married — someone else,” she said, looking at him. “They’re not fundamentally interested in each other — they’re interested in other things, in their children, their house, their friends, and what keeps them together comes from outside, rather than from any inner necessity.”
She broke off and then said with difficulty, “That’s something I’ve always been afraid of. What matters most to me is not being lonely, and what scares me most is not being poor, or ending up on the wrong side of the local prejudices or even the local conventions, but ending up ...”
“... on the wrong side of the living room.”
She said, her eyes searching his face, “I wish you’d believe me.”
“I do believe you, darling.”
“No,” said Erica, “not quite.”
After that there was another silence, and at last he said, “I keep thinking of all the people who’ve started feeling the way you do now, and then realized when it was too late, that one person couldn’t make up for so many disadvantages — no matter how hard that person tried, no matter how hard they both tried — particularly when it was only that one person who stood in the way.”
She said again, “It depends on what matters most to you,” wondering how often, just how many times she had said that before, first to her father and then to Marc. Ultimately every argument involving the ability of any individual to make a valid choice comes down to that one question of relative values. And your relative values depend on your experience of living, which in turn forms the basis for your outlook on life as a whole.
She herself belonged to the generation born during the last war, who were still too young to be greatly influenced either by the disillusionment of the immediate Post-war years or by the blind optimism of the late twenties. She had come to full consciousness when political security had begun to go and economic security had already gone. Change was to Erica the only permanent condition of life; she had no idea what tomorrow would be like, except that it would be different from yesterday and today. The more you could learn to do without, the safer you were; security consisted in traveling light and staking your happiness on a few fundamentals of a non-material nature which could not, or at least were unlikely to be taken away from you.
Looking back now, she realized that long before Marc, this point of view had shaped her existence; among other things, it had prevented her from marrying any one of several different men who had been in love with her in the past. She had recognized the fact that any individual looks quite different when he is viewed in terms of a specific and familiar social and economic structure from when he is viewed as an isolated human being, solely in terms of his own inherent qualities. You might be reasonably happy living with someone in Montreal and with that social and economic structure to absorb the inevitable stresses and strains, only to find that life on a desert island with that same person was quite unendurable.
For Erica, the desert island was always more or less imminent, or if not imminent, it was at least a possibility which loomed too large to be ignored. Marc was the only man she had ever known with whom she was willing to risk it, and so far as her own values were concerned, what she would be giving up in marrying him was a handful of social, and if the worst came to the worst, economic nonessentials which were not important to her and in whose continued existence she did not put much faith in any case. She had been born in 1914, so that the first twenty-eight years of her life had begun with one world war and ended with another; she had earned her living on a newspaper for the past six years, and she knew beyond doubt that what mattered most to Erica Drake was Marc Reiser.
Marc, however, did not know it, and even if he had, the problem would still have been only half solved. It was not enough for him to believe in her; he had also to believe in himself.
His eyes met hers and he said, “You should have known me ten years ago when I was still full of illusions.”
“And still trying,” said Erica, looking away from him. “Instead of just sitting around — or rather just lying around, you’re too supine to be described as ‘sitting’! — agreeing with everybody.” She jabbed the burned match which she was still holding in her hand as far as it would go into the earth which was covered with a thin carpet of pine needles, then bringing her eyes back to his face she said in a different tone, “Most people are born into a fixed social pattern and just travel along their particular groove until they get to the other end and die, but once in a while, somebody gets a chance to climb out of his groove and give the whole thing a push from behind. Well, they either take that chance or they don’t. I know a couple of people who have and so do you. Look at Max Rosenberg and Betty Innes ...”
“Yes,” said Marc. “Look at them — or rather look at their families. Their families kicked up such a row that Max and Betty ended up by moving to Toronto, flat broke and starting all over again.”
“Well, Toronto’s better.”
“Is it?”
“You know it is!” said Erica, exasperated.
“Go on about the groove, darling,” he said, looking amused. “Most people haven’t got the Rosenbergs’ guts. They just climb out for a while, take a good look around, get scared and decide it’s too tough and climb down again. They play safe. But the people who play safe don’t change anything — they just sit tight and wait for someone else to change it. Do you think that’s what you and I are for — just to play safe and wait?”
“I don’t know,” he said, looking down at the long cloud of smoke which the afternoon train from Montreal had left behind on its way through the valley a few minutes before. The smoke was drifting upwards against the background of evergreens, so slowly that he knew the wind must have dropped. He glanced upwards at the motionless trees overhead and said hopelessly again, “I don’t know, Eric. I wouldn’t want you to look the way Betty Rosenberg does now, anyhow.”
“Why?”
“She looks as though she’s washed too many dishes and scrubbed too many floors and stayed awake too many nights worrying because they can’t afford to send the kids to a private school, where the fact that they’re Jews maybe wouldn’t matter so much. She’s even beginning to look as though she’s not sure now whether it was worth it or not.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Erica involuntarily.
He shrugged and said, “Well, perhaps she just happened to look like that the evening I was there.”
They were silent for a while, and then he asked without warning, “Did your father object to your coming up here?”
“Yes,” said Erica after a pause. “I didn’t think he’d make an issue of it now, particularly when he only has to stand it a few more days.”
For a moment Marc seemed merely surprised, then he said, “But you are here. How did you manage it?”
“I just came.”
“You couldn’t ‘just come.’ You must have walked out.”
She turned her head quickly to look at him and then asked with sudden terror, “What do you think I should have done?”
“I can’t answer that, Eric.”
“Would you have come to Montreal?”
“I’m not sure,”
he said almost inaudibly.
She began to cry and he put his arm around her and drew her head down on his shoulder without saying anything. She knew that he was still looking straight ahead of him with that bleak look, and she went on crying with her face partly hidden against his shirt.
Finally he said, “This must be about the last straw so far as your family is concerned.” He took out his handkerchief and dried her eyes and put the handkerchief away again. Then he asked, “Exactly what did happen on Monday?”
“Charles came into my room when I was packing and said that I was not to go.”
“Didn’t you tell him beforehand that you were going?”
“Yes, I told them the night you phoned.”
“Then why didn’t he ...”
“I guess it was because of Mother. She tried to make Charles promise not to try to stop me from going, and when it was all over and she found out what was happening, she came running down the hall and she kept saying, ‘I told you, Charles, I told you,’ and she was so upset that she was nearly out of her head. So was Charles, only he was angry too. I’ve never seen him so angry. He just went into his study and shut the door. I told Mother I’d behaved awfully badly and that it was just as much my fault as it was his, only he’d put me in a position where either I had to stay home, or if I went, then he made it clear that I’d be doing something so wrong that there wouldn’t be enough left for us to go on with afterwards. He said I’d never be the same to them again.”
At least she could leave Marc a few shreds of self-respect; there was no unfairness to her father in leaving out the part in which he had offered to have Marc to the house. It did not put Charles Drake in any better light.
She went on, as Marc had said nothing, “I guess Mother knew what would happen. She’s just as uncompromising as Charles is, she was brought up in the same way and she feels the same way about things, and it was just as hard for her as it was for Charles, but she cares far more for justice, and she has a terrible sense of moral responsibility for this whole situation. She said that it was mostly her fault because she’s my mother, and that they’d both let me down so badly that they no longer had any right to interfere. I wouldn’t have gone then if she’d asked me not to, but she wouldn’t. She said she wouldn’t even ask me to come back, because it was up to Charles now.”
Earth and High Heaven Page 27
