Earth and High Heaven

by Gwethalyn Graham

  She looked at the old battered desk across the room, then at the map above it, which showed the world as it had been in 1922, and finally at the bookcase in the corner, and remarked, “It’s hard for me to realize that you’re grown up when I come in here, or that David is either. Mothers are so silly — Good heavens, David’s almost forty!”

  A moment later she added, “And you’re going overseas.” After another pause, looking down at her hands lying loosely on her lap, she said, “I’m proud of you, Marc — not because you’re going overseas, though that’s part of it, but mostly just because you’re a fine person. So is David. I’ve been lucky, both my sons have turned out to be fine people. I’m glad about your Captaincy too, darling.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything, Mum. It’s just a formality. Lieutenants of my age aren’t allowed to go overseas any more.”

  “I know, but still ...”

  He took a cigarette from the table beside his bed and she said, “You smoke to much.”

  “I know.”

  “So does David. That pipe of his reminds me of those awful things you used to keep in bottles!”

  “That reminds me,” said Marc with sudden interest, “what became of my mud puppy? I’ve always meant to ask you.”

  “I buried it.”

  “Oh, that explains it then,” he said, adding without thinking, “Eric was sure it wouldn’t burn.”

  She stared at him, her expression changing completely, and suddenly she said, her voice trembling, “Marc, I want you to be happy! I don’t care about anything else.”

  “I know you don’t, Mother.”

  “I wish I could see that girl of yours. You’re thirty-three, and you’ve never really been in love with anyone else. I’m sure she must be fine too, because you wouldn’t be in love with her if she wasn’t. And though everything your father said tonight was true, there’s no getting around it, still I kept thinking all the time he was talking that she should have been there to speak for herself.”

  “You’re the first person who’s thought that. I don’t know whether even I have, really ...”

  He stopped and she said, letting out her breath in a long sigh, “Of course she doesn’t know what it’s like.” In a different tone she added after a pause, “And you don’t really, either.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No.”

  She was still sitting in the same position but her hands were clasped tightly together now, and her whole body had stiffened. She said, “You don’t know what happens to people when they live together year after year. They get angry sometimes, and they say things that they couldn’t have imagined themselves saying before they were married, and that they wouldn’t dream of saying to anyone else. That’s what I’m afraid of, and I simply couldn’t bear to have it happen to you.”

  “What are you afraid of?” he asked, after waiting for her to go on.

  She had begun to rock in a slight back and forth movement. He never forgot the way she looked or the tone of her voice as she said despairingly, “I’m afraid that sometime when she was very angry, she would round on you and blame you for being a Jew.”

  Tell us, we pray thee, for whose cause this evil is upon us, and he said unto them, I am an Hebrew.

  The afternoon service for Yom Kippur was almost over. The scene in his bedroom faded from his mind and he glanced at the congregation ahead of him; then beside him, his mother touched his arm and turned her head slightly, gesturing toward the back of the hall. His brother David had come after all and was standing by the door, a short, almost stocky figure in baggy grey flannels and an old leather windbreaker. He had very thick black hair, a black mustache, a rather pronounced nose which must have been a throwback to some fairly remote ancestor, for none of the recent Reisers or Mendals, Maria Reiser’s family, were particularly Semitic in appearance; black eyes which gave you the feeling that he never missed anything, and a manner which was so offhand that it was frequently mistaken for rudeness. He was almost seven years older than Marc; his mind had been conditioned by twenty years of scientific training and his range of interests lay almost entirely outside himself. He had few personal problems; he lived a hard life as a bush doctor attached to a nickel mine some distance north, and he lived it to the best of his ability, indifferent to his own comfort and absorbed in his work. He was passionately fond of poetry and occasionally wrote good verse himself.

  As he caught Marc’s eye he waved casually with one hand but stayed where he was, leaning against the back wall by the door.

  They had come to the final Kaddish in the Afternoon Service.

  May the prayers and supplications of the whole house of Israel be accepted in the presence of their Father who is in heaven; and say ye, Amen.

  May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life for us and for all Israel, and say ye, Amen.

  May he who maketh peace in his high places, make peace for us and for all Israel, and say ye, Amen.

  The tired congregation stirred a little, but there was still another service before the Day of Atonement would end.

  Marc turned to his mother and asked, “Do you mind if I go? Dave seems to have something on his mind.”

  “No, go along, I’ll see you back at the house.”

  Outside in the street David said to Marc, “Let’s go for a walk before dinner. I want to talk to you.”

  “And you, Brutus,” said Marc wearily.

  “Sorry. If you’re hungry, I’ll buy you a sandwich and a cup of coffee first, though. That Greek joint is just up the street.”

  “All right,” said Marc indifferently. He was wondering just how his mother and father had managed to tell David about Erica, when his brother had only arrived late the night before, had gone to bed when he himself had gone, and had come downstairs for breakfast at approximately the same moment. It could only have been while he, Marc, had been taking a bath later on in the morning. His parents had certainly made the most of that bath, for it was obvious that David knew all about it.

  Whatever it was he had to say on the subject, however, he said nothing while they were in the Greek restaurant or when they were walking through the town toward the road which led back through the strip of rough farm country to the bush, and eventually into the Algoma Hills. When they had passed the last rundown cottage on the outskirts of town, he was still talking about Father LaFleur, the new priest in his district, who was a great improvement on the old one, younger, more adaptable, and far less fatalistic in his attitude toward the wretched living conditions in his parish. He was already talking about co-operatives, and on top of all of his other qualifications, he could even play a good game of chess.

  “We usually manage to get together for a game every week or so,” David remarked, his black eyes following a flock of crows which flew up from a haystack near the road, high into the blue autumn air and off toward the town behind them. “You have no idea what a difference a good priest can make to the local doctor. I had a devil of a time with the other one; he was as hard as nails, he’d put off calling me till the last moment, and sometimes I used to wonder if he didn’t actually prefer to have his parishioners enter the Kingdom of Heaven right away, rather than have their entry Postponed by a Jewish doctor butting in and interfering with the Will of God. He was very strong on the Will of God.”

  “Does the new priest object to your being Jewish?”

  “Well, he put out a few feelers when he first came, on the off chance of converting me, but I told him that my attitude toward religion in general, Judaism, Catholicism, or any other, was chiefly scientific, and after that he gave up. On the spiritual side, we have a strictly live and let live attitude toward each other. Got a cigarette?”

  They stopped in the middle of the road, and shielding a match with his hands, David lit Marc’s cigarette and his own, blew out the match and said, “I’ve got a couple of things to tell you.”

  “You and everybody else,” said Marc, starting to walk up the road again. Straight ahead of them were the Algo
ma Hills, strung out like sentinels guarding the deep mining country beyond; below the hills was the bush, heavily splashed with colour, and somewhere in there off to the left was a certain maple tree overhanging some falls, a long narrow shaft of water pouring down past the maple into an almost circular pond edged with evergreens, poplars, white birch trees, and sumac. The effect at this time of year was always extraordinary, a kind of annual miracle, for the maple turned to pure scarlet, the water of the pool to cobalt blue, and the trees were a tangled mass of colour ranging from deep bluish green through rust and orange to a clear, translucent yellow. He wished violently, so violently he felt almost sick, that Erica was with him, that it was early morning and they were starting back toward the hills with the whole day ahead of them, and instead of that, it was late afternoon, the hills had a darkening, purplish cast, and he was with David, about to listen to still another voice saying the same things all over again, and about to answer a lot of silly questions, with Erica five hundred miles away.

  Eric, what are we doing? How are we going to live, you without me and I without you?

  “Would you like to know what I think?” asked David suddenly beside him.

  He started and then answered shortly, “Not if it’s what everybody else thinks.”

  “It isn’t. At least it’s not what Mother and Dad seem to think. I told them that if you decided you wanted to marry Erica Drake, I was going to back you up.”

  “You’re going to back me up?” he said incredulously.

  “Well,” said David shrugging, “Erica anyhow. I don’t know about you yet, I want to hear your side of it first.” He paused and then remarked, “I gather the chief objection to her is the fact that she’s not Jewish.”

  “Obviously. There aren’t any other objections.”

  His brother glanced at him briefly and said, “I didn’t realize that you were so particular.”

  “It’s not me, for God’s sake,” said Marc irritably. “I don’t give a damn whether she’s Jewish or not. It’s what will happen to her — what has already happened to her, in less than three months. You don’t know how much she’s changed. She’s been getting it from every direction because of me — because just by being what I am, I lay her open to it. And I can’t help it, I can’t even do anything to make it easier for her. I just go on making it harder.”

  He said, “I keep seeing her the way she was when I met her ...” and broke off, as the picture of Erica in his mind divided into two impressions, one three months old and the other less than a week old, two portraits labeled “Before” and “After,” before and after Marc Reiser, only reversing the usual order because After was always supposed to be a great improvement over Before, instead of the other way round.

  Two portraits side by side, of Erica as she had been the day he had met her, with that look of having come to terms with life, and Erica as she had been up at the clearing near the top of the mountain the day he had left her, bewildered and beaten.

  He said to the short, stocky figure marching along beside him, “You haven’t any idea how much she’s changed — My God, how much she’s changed! She doesn’t even look really young any more. If I’d deliberately set out to see how much damage I could do, I couldn’t have made a better job of it. What kind of case have we got? I haven’t given her anything compared to what I’ve already taken away from her.”

  Not for years and perhaps never again would he walk this road as he had walked it so many times with a fishing rod and a basket slung over his shoulder, this road which led back through the fields and the bush to the hills, standing like sentinels against the sky, but he had forgotten where he was; he might just as well have been walking down a city street, he who had always loved Algoma and the bush and had always hated cities.

  He said to David, who was having a hard time keeping up with him, his legs were so much shorter than Marc’s, “The first weekend we went away, she had a copy of The Shropshire Lad with her, and when I picked it up it fell open at those lines that begin:

  ‘Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle ...

  Earth and high heaven are fixed of old and founded strong.’”

  “It’s no use going on like that, Marc.”

  “Do you remember the rest of it?”

  His brother did not answer.

  Still walking blindly up the road, toward the bush which began abruptly at the edge of the last stony field just ahead of them, Marc said,

  “‘Think rather — call to thought if you now grieve a little,

  The days when we had rest, O soul, for they were long.’”

  “All right,” said David, exasperated. “You don’t need to go on, I know every word of it. So that’s your idea of Erica now. All you have to do is be noble, make your exit, and Erica will promptly forget all the horror and scorn and fear and indignation and go back to sleep again. Is that it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “She must be a nice, simple soul.”

  He glanced at Marc again and asked, “By the way, just what did you think was going to happen while you were home this weekend?”

  The road had entered the bush and narrowed down to a rough track which looked as though it might end at every turn, but which actually continued for miles, winding its way through the trees and undergrowth and bracken and then through the hills and on into the heart of the mining country. Staring at a flaming sumac a few yards ahead, Marc said, “I suppose I thought there would be something that she couldn’t ...”

  “Something you belonged to and she didn’t?”

  “Yes.”

  “And was there?”

  Marc shook his head. “It was the opposite. Because she wasn’t with me, I felt as though I didn’t belong either. I kept wishing she was here, so I could take her around and show her things. I even felt that way about the service this afternoon — how interested she would have been, and how much it would have impressed her, because it is impressive, and how much more it would have meant to me if she’d been beside me.” He stopped, embarrassed, and remarked, “I guess it sounds pretty silly, doesn’t it? After all, nothing could be much more exclusively Jewish than the Day of Atonement.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with it. Does it sound silly to you?”

  “No, but it probably would to everybody else.”

  “Oh? And what have they got to do with it?”

  There was a bridge crossing a small, clear stream just ahead, and they left the road and sat down beside the bridge at a place where the light came filtering down through the trees from the west and shone on the clean sand underneath the water.

  As he felt through the pockets of his windbreaker for one of the several pipes he always carried about with him, David asked, “Has Erica ever said anything at all, to justify this theory of yours that you’d do less damage in the long run, by just walking out on her?”

  “No, but ...”

  “Isn’t that something she’s entitled to decide for herself? Or isn’t Erica entitled to decide anything for herself? I don’t wonder she’s changed so much in the last three months, but I wouldn’t blame it all on her father if I were you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re enough to drive anybody nuts.”

  “Do you mean to say that you think it’s all my fault?” asked Marc incredulously.

  He shrugged and said, “Well, not all your fault. Say about ninety-eight percent.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ve let her down too. That makes it unanimous, doesn’t it? Only you were the one who mattered most to her, so that if you hadn’t let her down, it would have made all the difference. I suppose,” David went on conversationally, “that you’ve been doing it nice and gradually, a bit of letting down here, and a bit of letting down there, so that she really had nothing to hang on to, while she was fighting her family ...”

  “Shut up,” said Marc, suddenly.

  “I thought you wanted to know why she’s changed so much, an
d whether what has been happening to her is quite as inevitable as you seem to think it is. You said that you couldn’t do anything to make things easier for her; all you could do was just go on making it harder. I don’t agree.”

  He paused, looking across the stream at a pine which had fallen down the bank and was lying with its upper branches in the water. “Must have been a bad electric storm lately,” he remarked. “The split’s quite fresh.” Then he said deliberately, “You and I weren’t brought up to play games at other people’s expense. You’re old enough to know better, and you’re starting too late to be able to get away with it. Don’t fool yourself, laddie, you won’t get away with it. You’re going to find out that for every person who’s stepped out of line and lived to regret it, there are two people who stayed in line because they got their values mixed and lost their nerve, and who have lived to regret it still more. You don’t hear about those people because they’re still in line where they don’t show. You only hear about the others.”

  “Do you believe that?” asked Marc, startled.

  “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t. From my own experience, that is, from what the people themselves have told me, I’d say the proportion was somewhat higher than two to one. In the old days, the difference in religion was probably a real barrier to mixed marriages, but you don’t take your religion that seriously and I don’t suppose Erica does either, so what you’d be up against would come chiefly from outside. That makes it a lot easier, and if you and Erica are really in love with each other, then all you have to do is figure out what matters most to you — whether you’d rather be out of line with Erica, or stay in line without her. You can’t have it both ways.”

  “I wish Eric could.”

  David said sharply, “She hasn’t been getting it either way so far, has she?”

  “I guess not.”

  He saw Marc’s expression and said, “Sorry, but sympathy is not what you need at the moment. What you need is a good swift kick in the pants.” It seemed to Marc that what he needed most at the moment was time to think, and he said, “I wish you’d shut up.”