You might just as well try to see a man through a brick wall as try to see him through a mass of preconceived ideas.
In the intervals when she was really listening, Erica sometimes tried to visualize Marc as he must appear to her father. He always came out as a nightmare figure, a crazy conglomerate of a shyster lawyer, quick, insinuating and tricky; a fat clothing merchant with a cigar in his mouth, employing sweated labor with one hand and contriving to outsmart both his competitors and the Government with the other; a loud-voiced, flashy young man pushing his way up to the head of the queue; a skull-capped figure muttering incantations in a synagogue; a furtive, greasy individual setting fire to his own house or his own shop in order to collect the insurance… all this not only combined in one individual, but an individual who was determined not to be assimilated but to remain an outsider, and who was perpetually turning up where he was not wanted, overrunning hotels, beaches, clubs and practically every place he was permitted to enter.
It might have been funny, only it wasn’t. Coming from her father-not Charles, her Charles, the individual on the left with whom she was never in contact any more except when they were listening to music-as the creature of his imagination and set beside Marc Reiser who, in this house, lived only in her mind and in her heart, it was not funny at all. Neither was the spectacle of her father, apparently powerless in the grip of a steadily mounting obsession-he had told his wife and his wife had told Erica that there was not one moment of the day when Erica was really out of his mind-nor the spectacle of her mother, appalled at what might happen to Erica and what was already happening to her husband, nor Erica herself. Beneath her silence and her expressionless face, she was beginning to break up, and she knew it.
Only Miriam remained detached and objective, partly because she was Miriam, not Charles or Margaret Drake, and Erica was her sister, not her daughter, and partly because she knew Marc.
Chapter VI
Miriam had met Marc in the last week of August. The four of them, Erica, Marc, Max Eliot and herself were to have had dinner together, but that morning Max Eliot had left unexpectedly for England, and Miriam brought John Gardiner instead. John was the complete opposite of Max in almost every respect, blond, towering, physically hard and innately kind, and he and Marc took an immediate liking to each other. They were both in uniform, John with a red First Division patch on his sleeve. As soon as Marc had finished ordering, they began to talk about various men they both knew among the officers of the First Battalion of the Gatineau Rifles, who had been stationed near John’s unit on the south coast of England, for almost a year.
They were well away, and Erica said to Miriam, "Where’s Max?"
"He’s gone",
"Where?"
"England. He left on a bomber this morning".
"When is he coming back?"
Miriam was looking at the wall beyond John’s fair head, her dark eyes wide and her face unnaturally stiff. She said at last, as though she had had to wait in order to be sure that she would say it casually, "I haven’t the remotest idea. I got the air last night".
A little later when she had finished her cocktail and Marc had ordered another one for her, she observed to Erica as the two men went on talking, "I guess I always knew it was going to happen. I had such a strong feeling about it that I even tried to plan the whole thing in advance, so that if or when it did happen, I wouldn’t make any fuss".
"And did you, darling?"
"No", she said under her breath. "No fuss". She glanced at Erica and went on in the same even tone, "I can’t let go because if I do, I’ll probably just go to pieces. I hate crying, it always makes everything so much worse. What shall we do after dinner?"
"We might go somewhere and dance".
"You should have seen me getting the air at two o’clock this morning. I was really terrific, Eric. Not that it makes any difference. An exit is just an exit, whether you mess it up or not".
"You should have stayed home, darling", said Erica, watching her.
"Not on your life. I’m going to get good and drunk".
"How do you like Marc?" asked Erica after a pause.
Miriam looked at him and said, "He isn’t exactly what I expected".
"What did you expect?"
"He looks marvelous in uniform", remarked Miriam irrelevantly, and then answered, "Somebody you could probably do pretty much what you liked with… up to a point, that is".
"Oh, dear no", said Erica, shaking her head.
"No", said Miriam, "evidently not". Since she was the first member of Erica’s family that Marc had really met, she realized now that what she had chiefly expected was that Marc would try to make some kind of an impression. Not an obvious effort, of course, but still, an effort. She had supposed that he would put himself out at least to some extent. Instead of that, and although she had never seen him before, she was certain that he was simply being himself, and nothing more. Of the four of them, he seemed to Miriam to be the one in control, as though it were John and herself who were up for inspection, so to speak, and not the other way round, and finding that it helped her to keep her mind off Max, she went on watching Marc as he sat across the table with his head turned toward John, twisting the stem of a cocktail glass through his fingers and not talking much himself, wondering how he did it. It occurred to her that there was something in his oddly set eyes and his sensitive face which was rather disconcerting-a latent quality, both hard and resistant, like a metal which will be hot on the surface and cold in the center and which, try as you will, you cannot heat all the way through.
She thought with sudden astonishment, Marc Reiser is just as tough as Charles and probably still harder to handle. She said again to Erica, sitting on the banquette beside her because it was more comfortable than the two straight-backed chairs occupied by Marc and John across the table, "No, he definitely isn’t what I expected", and suddenly found herself back at Max again. This small restaurant with old-fashioned wallpaper, white-clothed tables and dark woodwork, in a converted house on a side street had been Max Eliot’s favorite place to dine when he was in Montreal. She had often been here with him, and had even sat at this very table one Saturday night when all the tables for two were already taken.
She said, gripping the edge of the banquette with both hands, "May I have another drink?"
She had already drunk two cocktails and John asked, "Why don’t you wait for a while, Mimi?"
"Mind your own business", said Miriam in French, and then added in English, "I’ve got a headache".
John looked relieved, and then almost immediately concerned again. "Wouldn’t you like some aspirin?" he asked.
"I would like another cocktail", said Miriam patiently. She smiled faintly as she saw a flicker of amusement in Marc’s face. He turned to give the order to a passing waiter and then started talking to John again. They were discussing the problem of Germany, and she tried to focus her mind on what they were saying for a while but it was no use, and she lapsed back into herself again.
It was not only Max and the fact that she was not going to see him again, never again; there was something else which she could not afford to think about until she was back on solid ground and had really got hold of herself again. It was the old game of keeping your balance by looking straight ahead and not allowing yourself to look down. When they were children, they had sometimes gone for walks along the railway up in the Laurentians, and she had always been able to balance on the rail long after Tony and Eric had got bored and were down in the ditch or racing along the path. Erica had never been any good at it, though she was almost five years older than Miriam; she had always looked down and then fallen off. Through all these unpredictable years leading up to the present, with Tony flying a bomber over Europe, Erica close to a final break with their mother and father because she was in love with a Jew, and herself… well, anyhow, she could still hear Tony yelling at the fair-haired, tottering little figure on the rail, "Don’t look down, Eric! Look straight ahead…".