"I don’t think I particularly care for that bit after all", said Erica after a moment’s silence.
"I wasn’t listening to the words", said Marc, "It’s your voice. Did I ever tell you what a lovely voice you have?"
"No, I don’t think so. You may tell me now if you like".
"Some other time". He kissed her shoulder and the hollow at the base of her throat and then lifting his head to listen again he said, "Everything is sort of suspended. It’s so quiet, Eric… even our whippoorwill seems to have gone off the air for the time being".
He pulled the pillows up behind his head and turned so that he could see her better. "Are you sleepy?"
"No, are you?"
He shook his head.
"When do we sleep?" asked Erica without much interest.
"Later", he said vaguely, paused, and then added, "Probably much later".
Erica moved over so that she was lying with her head on his shoulder and observed in a detached tone, "You know, you’re going to be in a shocking condition when you arrive at camp Monday".
"They must be used to it by this time".
After another brief silence she asked suddenly, "What were you like when you were a little boy?"
"Why?"
"You’ve told me a lot, but there are still too many gaps. It’s like a jig-saw puzzle with half the pieces missing; I want a whole picture, not one full of holes".
"Where shall I start?"
"Well…" She thought, and then asked, "Have you always lived in the same house?" He nodded. "What’s it like?"
"It’s just a house, with a big veranda in front and a lot of trees around it, and a garden at the back that slopes slightly down toward the garage, so in winter when the snow is melting, the water in front of the garage is about a foot deep. David and I used to get hold of some planks every year and paddle around on them till we fell off. It was wonderful", he said reminiscently. "The water was good and muddy".
Erica wanted to know about the inside of the house and after struggling, Marc finally produced the information that the sitting-room contained some ferns or something in brass pots, and a canary named Mike that never sang.
"How long have you had Mike?"
"Oh, years. He must be pretty old by now".
After trying to visualize a sitting-room furnished with brass pots and one aging canary, Erica gave up. "What about your room?"
He was much more satisfactory on the subject of his own room. He even told her that there was a large spot on one corner of the carpet where years ago, the afternoon plane on the Moscow-Zagreb line running above his desk had come down too low, picked up a bottle of ink and deposited it somewhere in Transylvania.
"Of course that was around 1922 when the airplane industry was still pretty young and almost anything was like to happen".
Erica laughed and then asked, "How did the planes work?"
"On wires. They had hooks on the nose and tail so you could attach them to the wire on one side of the room and they’d shoot down the slope to the landing-field on the other. I kept building more planes and rigging more wires and our maid kept complaining to Mother that whenever she tried to get in there to clean, the wires either caught in her hair or tripped her up. Mother was sympathetic but that was about as far as she was willing to go. For the first time in my life I seemed to be learning geography, accidentally, of course, but she’d realized by then that accidentally was the only way I was ever likely to learn any. Then David came home from his first year at medical school and I lost interest in airplanes and began dissecting frogs all over the house and filling my room with bottles containing various forms of animal life, more or less preserved in alcohol".
"What happened to the less preserved ones?"
"Mother used to go into my room and remove them when I was out", he said, sighing. "I remember being particularly annoyed about a small mud-puppy which vanished when I was out fishing. Mud-puppies are pretty rare and it had taken me weeks of digging around in swamps and streams before I finally found one. I felt that its scarcity value should have outweighed its smell. Mother didn’t".
He said thoughtfully, "You know, I’ve always wondered what Mother did with those things. Do you suppose a young mud-puppy, slightly over-ripe, would burn easily?"
"I shouldn’t think so".
"I must ask her some time".
"What’s her name?"
"Maria", he said, giving it the German pronunciation. "How are the gaps?"
"Filling up nicely, thank you".
"Mine aren’t", Marc pointed out.
Erica was more interested in her own gaps than in his, and she asked, "When did you first decide you wanted to be a lawyer?"
"I don’t know. I must have been pretty small anyhow. I used to sit on the back fence and look at the Algoma Hills and dream of being a judge. I don’t know what gave me the idea of going on the Bench either, it must have been something I’d read".
There it is again, she thought, as the stone wall which had appeared for the first time that day back in June when Marc had said, "They don’t take Jews", suddenly turned up again in front of her. She knew by now that there was no way of getting through it, over it or around it, but she had not yet learned to take it for granted. Whenever she was confronted with it she always stopped and stared for a moment, while the conversation went on without her.
Marc, however, having been brought up with it, barely gave it a glance. He said, "By the time I got cured of that idea it was too late to change my mind", and then asked immediately, reverting to his own gaps again, "What did you want to do when you grew up?"
"I wanted to be a conductor".
"On a tram?"
"Certainly not", said Erica indignantly. "I wanted to conduct an orchestra".
"And what happened?"
"Nothing, that was the trouble. I took theory and harmony and tried awfully hard, but no matter how hard I tried, I always ended up at the top of the class in English and at the bottom in music, so finally I got discouraged".
"Did you collect anything?"
"Yes. Later on I collected rocks".
"What kind of rocks?"
"Any kind of rocks. After giving up music, I’d decided I wanted to be a geologist".
"And what happened that time?"
Erica sighed, leaned over to reach the ash-tray on the small table beside him, then back on the pillows again she remarked sadly, "Nothing happened then either. I took various courses at McGill and tried awfully hard, but I still ended up at the head of my year in English and the bottom in geology, so then I…"
"You decided to be a journalist".
"No, I decided to get married".
He looked at her, rather startled, and then said, his face clearing, "Oh, yes, I remember. You told me you were engaged to someone who was killed in a motor accident. That must have been pretty tough… how old were you?"
"Twenty-one. We were supposed to be married in June after I’d graduated. Well, I did graduate, but he was killed two weeks before the wedding".
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"Yes", said Erica.
At the end she remarked, "It seems now as though it had all happened to someone else, because I’m not the same person now that I was then. My whole life would have been different if I’d married him. I like it better the way it is, not just because it is this way, but because I’ve had to develop more and work harder and adapt myself to life, rather than arrange things so that it would more or less adapt itself to me. You see, he had quite a lot of money, and I don’t know what would have happened to us, but we would probably have been much too comfortable for our own good".
"How old was he?"
"Twenty-six".
"What was his name?"