"What time is it?"
"Five past one. Weren’t you supposed to meet Miriam at one?"
Erica remembered Miriam then, and she said, "My gosh, I must be going nuts".
She found Miriam sitting at a small table by the wall which was decorated with a large colored photograph of the Bay of Naples. She was wearing a white dress, and in spite of the heat which swept into the half-shuttered restaurant from the blazing street outside, whenever the door was opened, and seeped through cracks when it was closed, her face was chalky and she looked cold.
She cut short Erica’s apologies for once more keeping her waiting, with, "Let’s order and get it over with". When the waitress had come and gone and Erica asked if there was something wrong, instead of answering she asked, "How was your week-end, Eric?"
"It was almost perfect".
Her eyes left Miriam’s face, followed a waiter as he made his way down the stuffy little room and disappeared through the swing door leading to the kitchen, and finally came to rest at a bad oil painting of Venice hanging on the back wall. There was nothing, no typewriter, no story of the Wrens, no weddings or meetings, not even two familiar voices discussing the best method of making jelly on the other side of the room-nothing to hold her to the present and keep her from slipping back into the past. She gave up trying and let herself go, back to the mountain lake, the little brightly painted houses like toys on the hillside opposite the hotel, the terrace with orange and yellow umbrellas, the light paneled bedroom with homespun curtains and a small lamp on the bedside table which cast a long oval shadow across the ceiling. Everywhere she looked she saw Marc again, lying on the float beside her, sitting in the stern of a red canoe watching the water dripping off the blade of his paddle, stretched out on a deck chair in a pair of dark red bathing trunks, grinning because some woman had just remarked very audibly to her companion that he ought to be in the Army. "What does she want me to do-wear my uniform in swimming?"
"Why ’almost’?" asked Miriam.
Her eyes left the painting of Venice on the back wall and returned to Miriam and she said, "Because I’m not going to win after all, Mimi. I’m going to lose".
"Why?"
"I don’t know why", said Erica, having failed to think of any way of explaining it so that it made sense. Sometime during the past three days she had realized that Marc was tired out, that was all, but added to everything else, sooner or later that tiredness would prove to be fatal. He had been up against it for seventeen years, ever since he had left home, and he had already had more than enough; he was simply not fit to take on another and far worse struggle involving another person, when he needed all his resources for himself. He was due to go overseas in a few weeks, and although he had somehow contrived to get through his officer’s training, one of a total of seven out of a class of five hundred to finish with a Q-1 rating, and by the same will power he would somehow contrive to get through the war just as creditably, at the same time it was not going to be easy. Of all the men Erica had ever known, he was by nature the least adapted to military life. There are limits to the number of demands you can make on anyone’s endurance, and to expect Marc to take on his family, his wife’s family and most of his own friends as well as hers, at this time of all times, was really to expect too much.
"Did he say anything in particular?" asked Miriam.
"No. It wasn’t anything he said or did, it was just something I…" she paused and then said hopelessly, "something I could feel".
"You’re not imagining it, are you?"
Erica shook her head.
"Then how much longer do you give it?"
"Until he goes home for the last half of his embarkation leave".
"It’s too bad it’s not the other way round", said Miriam. "I’d rather you had the last half".
"It wouldn’t make any difference", said Erica, looking down at the plate of food which had appeared in front of her. "I guess I’m just hopelessly outnumbered".
"You think his family is going to work on him, is that it?"
"I don’t think it, I know it. They’ll say everything he knows my family has been saying for the past three months, only they’ll have to pack it all into three days".
He had often talked to her about his home and his own people, but she could not remember his ever having said anything to suggest that they would not go to work on him, and in her confused, exhausted mind, there was only the growing fear that his family and his environment would be as inimical to her as hers were to him, and this new realization that he was too tired, too discouraged, and too ridden with other problems not to give in, particularly when he knew that he might never see his parents again. Like Erica, he was greatly attached to his father and mother, but unlike Erica, who had believed and who had never for a moment ceased to believe, that her parents were wrong, his whole experience of life would lay him open to the conviction that the Reisers were right. His parents even had the Drakes on their side. They might not know it at the beginning, but they would find out sooner or later, and Erica could imagine what they would make of it when they did find out.
She said, "I wonder who’s going to take the case for the defense… I can’t very well take my own case when I’m five hundred miles away. Anyhow, it would have to be someone who’s Jewish. Nobody but a Jew can help me now".
She picked up some coleslaw on her fork and then put it down again. She laughed and said, "That’s funny, isn’t it, Mimi?"
"Not particularly", said Miriam, looking at her. "Eat some lunch".
After a brief silence she said, "I suppose it hasn’t even occurred to you that there just might be someone who’s Jewish and who would back you up?"
"Don’t be silly".
A moment later she said suddenly, "Mimi, I’m going to tell you something. Everybody else is wrong and I’m right. To the day I die, I’ll know that we should have got married and that our not marrying each other was the worst mistake we ever made".
She laughed again and said, "Do me a favor, Mimi. When I’m dead, see that they put on my tombstone, ’Everybody was out of step but our Erica’. It’s all right, I’m not getting hysterical".
"I wish you’d eat something", said Miriam miserably.
"It’s a sort of drawing-room version of Abie’s Irish Rose, without the comedy relief, isn’t it? Very high-class, of course, and brought up to date with the background of World War II".
There was a fat man drinking soup a few tables away with a napkin tucked under his chin and Erica watched him for a while. Then she said to Miriam, "You know, all the way up the mountains in the car, I kept wondering if the hotel people knew Marc was a Jew when they made the reservations. I guess they usually go by the names, but ’Reiser’ doesn’t sound Jewish, necessarily, and I didn’t know if Marc had remembered to volunteer the information. I looked up the hotel advertisement in the paper but they didn’t say whether their clientele was selected or not and I didn’t like to ask him about it so I just sat and worried. To be thrown out of a hotel on arrival seemed a rather grim way of starting a week-end. It was all right, though, so I guess he had remembered. Incidentally, how do you suppose it’s done?"
"What?"
"I mean how do they manage to work it in gracefully? Do they say, I should like to reserve two rooms and a bath for three days beginning Friday, the 27th, provided you have no objection to Jews,’ or do they just write an ordinary letter and stick ’By the way, I’m Jewish’ in a postscript?"
"Eric, for heaven’s sake!"
"Sorry", said Erica. "But it all goes together, doesn’t it?"
She tried to eat some coleslaw and then some cold salmon, but it was too difficult to swallow and she pushed her plate away from her. After a while she said suddenly in complete despair, "I never knew anyone who seemed to be so alone-even with me, and I know I’m closer to him than anyone else has ever been. But there’s still something-something I can’t get through, except for a little while, and then he’s on the other side of it again, with-whatever it is-between us. He’s so alone, that I can’t bear to think of it. I used to lie awake at night after he’d gone to sleep and look at him, and just cry".