Читать книгу Earth and High Heaven - Gwethalyn Graham - Страница 4

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It was after midnight when Erica got home, having left the house soon after René and Marc. She had spent three hours on the Red Cross story which would ordinarily have taken her less than an hour to rewrite, because she could not keep her mind on what she was doing. From the office she went to the Guild meeting where she heard very little that was said and afterwards was unable to remember who had been there. The Guild was slow in getting organized and every extra person made a difference. She had promised to go, in any case. The meeting broke up late, long after she had finally accepted the fact that nothing could be done about Marc, even supposing her father could be persuaded to do it. It had been quite obvious from the way Marc had said good-by to her, immediately after Charles had failed to stop at the foot of the stairs, that he did not expect to see her again.

There remained the problem of her father and herself.

He was sitting in his pajamas and dressing-gown with an untouched whisky and soda on the table beside him and from the door of the study Erica said, “Charles, I want to talk to you.”

Although he had left the study door open so that as usual, he would hear her come in, and had in fact been waiting for her ever since dinner, not knowing what to do with himself, he said, barely raising his eyes, “It’s rather late, isn’t it?”

“I won’t take long.”

He knew that what she wanted to talk about was his behavior toward René’s Jewish friend, and he not only had no intention of being put in a position where he would have to justify an action which, so far as Charles Drake was concerned, did not require justification, he was still irritated by Erica’s rudeness when he had last seen her just before she had left for her office.

As soon as he was certain that René and whatever-his-name-was, had taken their departure, he had returned from the drawing-room to find that Erica had gone upstairs. His wife said that she had some work to finish downtown and that after that, she was going to some kind of union meeting. He had hung about in the hall trying to avoid getting into conversation with anyone, keeping his eyes on the landing so that he shouldn’t miss her. It was not that he wanted to say anything in particular, he just wanted to have a look at his daughter to see if everything was all right, and to let her know that so far as he himself was concerned, there were no hard feelings.

When Erica had finally come running downstairs he could see that she had been crying; he knew that she wouldn’t want to stop in the hall among a lot of people, so he had cut across to the front door, getting there just ahead of her, and had opened it for her.

“Have you had any dinner, Eric?”

“No.”

“Are you going to get some somewhere?”

She said nothing but simply stood with her hands at her sides and her eyes on some point near the floor at his feet, waiting for him to let her pass.

“You’d better let me pay for your dinner and then I’ll be sure you won’t forget and go without it.”

He took a bill from his pocket and held it out to her but she did not take it, and he asked, “What time do you think you’ll be back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is something the matter?”

Her eyes moved up to his face, then down again, and she said, “Let me go please, Charles. I’m late enough already.”

It was the first time that he could remember Erica ever having gone off without saying what was on her mind and for a while he had been thoroughly upset. He was sensitive to the moods of everyone with whom he lived or worked, particularly where his wife and Erica were concerned, and he had watched his daughter disappear down the long flight of steps which led from their street to the one below, still holding the two-dollar bill in his hand and wondering if he had been right to act on his hunch about the fellow, after all.

Since then, however, he had had four hours in which to think it over, four hours during which he had, in fact, found it impossible to think about anything else. He had intended to spend the evening rearranging and listing fifty or sixty miscellaneous records which were at present scattered through half a dozen big albums so that he could never find anything without searching for it. He had got out all the records and grouped them, according to the composer, on the big, flat-topped desk which he had had brought up from his office for just this sort of thing, and had then lost interest. The listing would have to wait. Having returned the records to their albums in even worse disorder than they had been in to start with, he had then tried to read for a while, and had finally ended up by simply sitting, waiting to hear the front door open and the sound of Erica’s footsteps in the hall below.

In the meantime, he had come to certain conclusions. The fact that Erica could be so worried by his behavior toward a complete stranger that she would first go up to her room and cry, and then refuse even to tell him where she was going to have her dinner or so much as thank him for having offered to pay for it, was clear proof that his hunch had been right. Besides that, even if it had been entirely groundless, what he did in his own house was his own business, and it was not up to Erica either to regard his unwillingness to meet René’s singularly ill-chosen friend as an injury to herself, or to take it out on him by refusing to be even civil.

He said, “Whatever you want to talk about can wait till the morning. You’d better go to bed.”

Instead of going to bed, she left the door and went over to the windows, asking with her back to him, “Why did you do it, Charles?”

She heard him knocking his pipe against the brass ash-tray standing beside his chair and finally his voice saying, “If you’ll think back to what I said when you first told me that René had turned up with some Jewish lawyer ...”

“His name is Marc Reiser.” The apple tree in the garden next door had turned to mist and silver; it looked like a ghost in the moonlight. “Anyhow, that isn’t enough to explain it.”

“I don’t think I’m called upon to give explanations.”

Erica swung around, so that she was facing him. She was still inwardly raging; like her father, she had had four hours in which to think over his behavior at the foot of the stairs, but she had come to somewhat different conclusions. Still managing to keep her voice fairly level, however, she said, “It’s no use talking like that to me, Charles. It isn’t going to work. I’ve been going around in circles all evening trying to find some way of straightening this thing out. So far as Marc’s concerned, there doesn’t seem to be any—nothing you or I can say will make the slightest difference, it’s done and we can’t change it. Every time he remembers what happened to him in our house, it will happen to him all over again....”

“I daresay it’s happened to him before,” said her father dryly.

“Probably,” said Erica. “After all, we Canadians don’t really disagree fundamentally with the Nazis about the Jews—we just think they go a bit too far.”

There was a quick flash of anger in his dark eyes and a momentary tightening of the muscles around his mouth, but he said nothing, and the next minute his face was as impassive as ever. He went on looking at her steadily, almost speculatively, with no indication of what he was thinking showing in his face. It was so unlike him that Erica felt vaguely uneasy, but she added in the same tone, “Anyhow, the fact that other people have kicked him around doesn’t mean that Marc has worked up an immunity which more or less lets you out—or that I feel any better because all you did was gang up with the others.”

She said, “Apart from your manners, which are usually a good deal better than that, what on earth has become of your sense of justice ...” and suddenly pulled herself up short. She was on the wrong track. None of them had ever got anywhere with Charles by a discussion of abstract principles—though after thirty-two years of marriage, Margaret Drake was still trying!—the only way to reach him was through his emotions. Her father had never cared what his family thought on any subject, since in most arguments, he did not think himself; he only cared how they felt. Any stand he took with them was likely to be largely emotional, and to counter emotion with logic was useless; the only effective way to deal with him was to take advantage of his intuitive understanding of people and to substitute either your own or someone else’s feelings for his own. Once her father started to be sympathetic, he usually defeated himself.

She said, “I don’t know when I’ve met anyone I’ve liked as much as I liked Marc, or anyone as intelligent and civilized and as easy to talk to. He’s the complete opposite of everything you seem to think. He hasn’t much self-confidence and he didn’t know anybody but René; I think he had an awful time until I came along and rescued him. If you’d even bothered to look at him, you’d have known what kind of person he is because it’s all in his face....”

Unimpressed and still nowhere near losing his temper, her father broke in at last, “You don’t seem to realize that fortunately or unfortunately, the kind of person he is has almost nothing to do with it....”

“What matters is the label, is that it?”

“I didn’t invent the label, Eric. And I’ve already told you that I don’t intend to sit here and be lectured by one of my children....”

“I’m not trying to lecture you,” said Erica desperately. “I’m trying to get you to tell me why you did it. Along with what you did to Marc, you gave me the worst shock I’ve ever had—you, of all people! I thought I could count on you to back me up—you always have until now—and instead of that, you let me down. You couldn’t have let me down any harder if you’d tried. And having put me in the most humiliating position—believe it or not, Charles, I’d just finished telling him that you’d like to meet him because both of you are so keen on music; I’d even invited him to come and listen to your records!—you tell me that I’m not even entitled to an explanation.”

The reading lamp standing beside his chair was almost in line with Erica and himself, shining into his eyes whenever he looked up at her. She was still standing with her back to the windows, and the pupils of her eyes were so enlarged that her eyes appeared black instead of green. Her pupils had always done that when Erica was either very angry or had gone too long without food.

He swung the lamp out of the way and said at last, “You know as well as I do that among the people we know—your mother’s friends, my friends, even your own friends for that matter, or most of them at any rate—a Jewish lawyer sticks out like a sore thumb. He just doesn’t fit; from a social point of view, he’s unmanageable—makes everybody else feel awkward, and if he’s as decent as you seem to think your friend Reiser is, after an intimate acquaintance of half an hour, probably he feels pretty awkward himself.”

“He did.”

“What’s all the argument about, then?”

“Go on, Charles,” she said.

He shrugged. “Very well, then, since you asked for it. When you’ve known as many Jews as I have, particularly young Jewish lawyers who are on the make professionally, you’ll realize that when they choose to mix with Gentiles after business hours, it isn’t usually because they prefer to spend their free time with Gentiles instead of Jews. It’s because they’re out to do themselves a bit of good socially. Contacts count, Eric—the more contacts, the better. You never know when they’re likely to come in handy ... particularly a contact with, say, people like us....”

“Speak for yourself, Charles.”

He gave another shrug of his heavy shoulders and said, “All right—people like me. The point is that once they ...”

“ ‘They’?” repeated Erica innocently.

He said impatiently, “Jewish lawyers ...”

“But we’re not talking about ‘Jewish lawyers,’ ” said Erica. “We’re talking about Marc Reiser.”

“I don’t give a damn about Marc Reiser!” said her father angrily.

“That was more than obvious,” said Erica. “However, you started to say something about the point. What is the point, exactly?”

“The point is that once they get a foot in your door, if you treat them the way you would anyone else, either they deliberately take advantage of it, or simply misunderstand it, and before you know it, they’re all the way in and there’s no way of getting rid of them.”

“So it was in the nature of a prophylactic measure.”

“I don’t like your tone, Erica.”

“Well, I don’t like your point of view, so that makes us even,” said Erica, unmoved.

He said almost indifferently, “You’ll find my point of view is pretty general, whether you like it or not. I’ve had a great deal more experience of the world than you. I’ve no objection to Jews, some of the ones I know downtown are very decent fellows, but that doesn’t mean I want them in my house any more than they want me in theirs—it works both ways, don’t forget that—and I prefer to choose my own friends, and not have René do it for me.”

Erica had heard most of that before, particularly the part about not having any objection to Jews, but, etc., which seemed to be the one that was always used in this connection ... not by her father, but by people in general. She said mildly, “If René was doing any choosing, it wasn’t for you, it was for me.”

What her father had said sounded all right, and there was no doubt that he was sincere; the only trouble was that it had nothing to do with Marc, and as the “explanation” of Charles’ treatment of Marc, it was totally unsatisfactory. You can’t offer a series of vague generalizations referring to the supposed characteristics of approximately sixteen million people scattered over the earth’s surface—that was the pre-war figure, of course—as a valid explanation of your attitude toward a given individual. It doesn’t make sense. Nor even, narrowing it down somewhat, by referring to the supposed characteristics of “Jewish lawyers.” As she herself had just made a futile effort to point out, they were discussing one specific human being, not a category.

She watched her father relighting his pipe and said finally, “If you want to play the heavy father and start telling me whom I’m to know and whom I’m not to know, there’s nothing I can do to stop you, at least so far as the people I invite to your house are concerned—presumably whom I see outside your house is my own business.” She paused and remarked, “You’re starting a bit late, of course,” and went on, “however, if you don’t pay any more attention to my opinions than you did to Tony’s and Miriam’s, then you’re likely to end up in the same relationship with me as with them....”

“It’s up to you, Eric.”

She said incredulously, “When I ask you particularly to be nice to someone and your answer to that is to refuse even to show him the most ordinary courtesy, how on earth can you say that what happens to us after that is my responsibility?”

There was no response, her father did not appear to be listening. After a lifetime of making mountains out of molehills, this time, for some inexplicable reason, he was evidently determined to make a molehill out of a mountain, or determined to try, at any rate. Nothing she had said so far had had any effect; for all she had accomplished, she might just as well have done what he had suggested when she had first told him that she wanted to talk to him, and gone straight to bed.

She sat down in the chair by the radio, regarded her father curiously for a while longer and then asked, “What’s back of all this, Charles?”

“I’ve already explained it once.”

“You’ve only given me half the explanation. The other half is still missing.” Strong as they were, she knew that her father’s anti-Jewish prejudices and his even more pronounced anti-Jewish lawyer prejudices were still not strong enough to stand alone when they came into conflict with his innate kindness and sense of chivalry. He would blast away at nations, classes, groups or categories of human beings, but to individuals he was unfailingly considerate, regardless of their category, or always had been, until this afternoon. He had objected violently and at length to a convent-bred French Canadian daughter-in-law, but the moment Anthony had stopped shouting and let all the misery inside him come out, his father’s opposition had collapsed. It had collapsed too late to get Tony back, but once rid of the generalization and confronted with the individual, Charles had been so consistently good to Madeleine that, of all the Drakes and outside of Tony himself, Charles was the one Madeleine was fondest of. It was rather unfair, when you came to think of it, for whatever Margaret Drake’s opinions had been on the subject, her sense of justice and her determination to respect her children’s right to make their own decisions had kept her from expressing them, and now, after she had done her best from the beginning and her husband had done his worst as long as he could, it was her husband who was Madeleine’s favorite. As Margaret Drake had once observed ruefully to Erica, Madeleine’s devotion to her father-in-law was just another example of Charles Drake’s extraordinary talent for having his cake and eating it. People with charm can get away with a lot.

“Do you want a drink?”

“Yes, please.”

Her father poured some whisky into a glass and asked, “How much soda?”

“Two thirds of the way up.”

He got to his feet and gave her the glass, then began to walk up and down the room, from the flat-topped desk at one end to the row of bookcases at the other, with his hands in the pockets of his dark blue dressing-gown.

As he passed her for the third time, Erica, still searching for the missing half of the explanation, remarked idly, “Of course you knew how much I liked Marc,” because in some way or other, her father always knew these things, just as he always knew when someone was lying, and when a member of his immediate family was in serious trouble. His disconcertingly well-developed intuitive processes seemed to be unaffected by the distance between himself and the person concerned; three years before, he had been in New York on a business trip and his wife had been hurt in a motor accident in Montreal, and within half an hour of the accident, Charles Drake had been on the long distance phone, asking in alarm what had happened to her. One night during the Blitz he had had a “feeling” that something was wrong with Miriam in London and had suddenly taken it into his head to cable her: “ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” The cable had reached her in the hospital to which she had been taken a few hours before, with a piece of shrapnel embedded in her left shoulder and another one in her thigh.

In 1937, Erica remembered, Miriam had written her mother from Switzerland, mentioning among other things, that she had met a young Englishman named Peter Kingsley, who was a very good skier, had a job in a London publishing house and had spent the evening defending British policy in India. “Huh,” was Charles’ comment. He took an unusual interest in Peter Kingsley from then on, and when Miriam married him two and a half months later, her father was the only person who was not surprised. And four years later, Charles had got the wind up on the strength of nothing whatever but a casual announcement from his son that he, Anthony, had met a girl named Madeleine de Sevigny, at a party the night before, and that he was taking her out to dinner on Thursday.

“Catholic?” asked Charles.

“I suppose so,” said Anthony.

“French Canadian?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Huh,” her father had said for the second time, and then the fireworks had started.

If all he had needed in Miriam’s case was a letter containing four facts about one Peter Kingsley, and all he had needed in Anthony’s case was a casual statement followed by two facts about Madeleine, then, in telling him about Marc and in saying so desperately, “I like him, I want you to like him,” she had certainly provided her father with more than enough to go on.

As he passed her again on his way down the study toward the flat-topped desk, she began, “You know, Charles, you really owe it to the advancement of science to go down to Duke University and offer yourself as a subject for their experiments in Extra-Sensory Perception ...” and came to an abrupt stop.

She had stumbled on the missing half of the explanation. It was precisely because her father had known how much she had liked Marc that he had refused to speak to him. Charles Drake was simply not going to have his favorite daughter, who was also, in some respects, his favorite human being, getting mixed up with a Jewish lawyer.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Erica, viewing her father with amazement. “Of all the nerve....”

“What are you talking about?”

“You and your little performance this afternoon. Really, Charles ...” she said, exasperated, and then as the funny side of it struck her, she began to laugh.

Her father sat down in the corner chair again and finally he said, “Do you mind telling me what in hell you’re laughing at?”

“I’m laughing at you. You don’t seem to realize that other people just don’t behave the way you do. Incidentally,” she said, looking at him with interest, “did you say ‘Huh’ to yourself when I told you about Marc?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”

“Now what?” he asked a moment later as the amusement died out of her face.

“I just remembered Marc.” It wasn’t so funny after all. She sat with her head against the back of the chair and her hands on the arms, looking straight ahead of her, remarking idly after a pause, “It seems to me you’re being a little previous this time. Besides, your system doesn’t make any sense. It’s illogical....”

“Why?”

“Because if something weren’t going to happen, you wouldn’t have a premonition about it, so since it is inevitable, what’s the use of going to all this trouble to try and stop it? I’m just being academic, by the way,” she added, “because judging from the look on his face when he left, Marc Reiser has been stopped quite effectively.”

He said impatiently, “It’s not the event or whatever you call it that I can see coming—that’s pure fatalism. It’s just that if you know how people feel, or rather how strongly they feel it, then you can tell whether or not their feelings are likely to lead to a particular course of action....”

“That doesn’t apply in either Miriam’s or Tony’s case,” Erica interrupted. “You went off the deep end about Madeleine when Tony hardly knew her and didn’t ‘feel’ anything in particular about her....”

“I was right, wasn’t I?”

“I suppose so.”

“As for this afternoon,” her father went on, “it was perfectly obvious that Reiser had made a great impression on you. Probably you’d impressed him just as much—it usually works both ways. Anyhow, it seemed to me that it was better for everybody all round to make things quite clear at the very beginning, than to let an impossible situation develop and then have to clear it up later....”

“Yes,” said Erica. “What you mean is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure....”

“Of course,” he said, obviously relieved that she had finally come to see it that way.

“... and since you’ve always done exactly what you like, it hasn’t even occurred to you to wonder whether it’s up to you to prevent it or not.” She paused, surveying him, and finally added, “As I remarked a few minutes ago, Charles, you really have a lot of nerve.”