"Warn us?" repeated her mother, staring at her.
"In less than three weeks you’re going to be rid of Marc Reiser for good. That’s enough, isn’t it?" she asked both of them. "Surely you don’t want to get rid of Erica too…".
"Miriam!" gasped her mother.
"I know the way you feel about things", said Miriam, looking down at the floor, "but you can’t stop Eric from going away with Marc week after next. If you try, she’ll go anyhow, but she won’t come back again". She raised her eyes, looking from one to the other, and said desperately, "Don’t you see, if you try to stop her, you’ll put her in a position where she has to choose between you and Marc. She can’t come back again, after you’ve told her not to go, and particularly after the kind of row you’ll have if you do. She’s just about at the end of her rope and she knows it. That’s the reason she keeps saying ’I don’t want any rows, I don’t want any rows’. You simply must not make an issue of it!"
"Do you realize what you’re suggesting?" asked her father when at last he had found his voice.
"It’s a question of what matters most to you, Charles". She could not bring herself even to glance at her mother, and with her eyes back at the floor in front of her, she said, "I’m sorry for you, but I’m not half as sorry for you as I am for Erica".
"That’s quite obvious", She heard him draw in his breath, and then he said, his voice shaking, "I suppose you’d go with her".
"You suppose wrong".
"Why?"
"Never mind me. There’s no reason I can think of why a daughter should have to explain to her mother and father why she is not going to walk out on them, anyhow. It’s a silly question", she said dispassionately, "and you know the answer as well as I do".
She said, her face strained, "Maybe I shouldn’t have let you go on, maybe I shouldn’t have kept out of it, I don’t know. I’ve never got on with you as well as she has, and I haven’t been awfully successful in running my own life. I don’t suppose you would have paid any attention to what I thought. I’ve made the damnedest mistakes about people", she added as though she were talking to herself, "so I couldn’t really expect you to be very interested in my opinion of Marc Reiser".
"Do you know him, Miriam?" asked her mother, looking straight ahead at the empty fireplace.
"Yes, of course I know him".
"So you were encouraging her behind our backs", said her father.
She said immediately, "If you choose to turn your back, Charles, you can hardly complain about what goes on behind it!"
"Miriam…" said her mother.
"Yes, darling?"
"I am interested in your opinion of Marc Reiser". All the life seemed to have gone from her face, and her husband might just as well not have been in the room. Still looking straight ahead of her, she said, "I want to know what he’s like, Miriam".
She knew that at last her mother was in a mood to listen and to believe what she was told, and Miriam said quietly, "He’s the opposite of everything you thought. If he weren’t, you wouldn’t have been able to get rid of him so easily, because he really cares about Eric. Maybe you have to know him to realize what a difference it would have made if you’d only been willing to give him a break, not for his sake, but for Erica’s…".
"I wish I had known him".
"Margaret…"
She glanced at her husband without really seeing him and then said to Miriam, "Go on, please".
"I can’t tell you what Marc’s like, except that he’s the same kind of person as Erica, he’s the other side of the same medal. They just seem to belong together, that’s all. I guess if you didn’t know he was Jewish, or if that didn’t matter so much, you’d say that there couldn’t be anyone better for Erica than Marc".
Her mother went on staring at her for just a moment after Miriam had finished, then turning away, she began to cry in her corner of the sofa with her face hidden in her arms.
No one had ever seen Margaret Drake cry like that before. Watching her, Miriam found herself thinking dully that whatever Charles Drake did or said from now on, her mother was through. Miriam made a sudden movement toward her, then drew back again. She said, "Well, it wasn’t really your fault anyhow, darling…".
"My fault!" she repeated, gasping.
"Margaret, for heaven’s sake…"
She did not even hear him. With her face still hidden she said, "Of course it’s my fault! All the excuse I’ve got is that I didn’t know him and I didn’t realize how much he means to her, and what kind of an excuse is that?"
She could not stop crying, she had to wait again before she could make herself intelligible, and then she said, "Mothers have no right not to know. It isn’t as though Erica hadn’t tried to tell me, she tried over and over again-she even asked me to lunch with her and Marc and all I… I…" she said incredulously, "all I, her own mother, could think of to say was that I was too busy!"
"Margaret, stop that!"
"I can’t stop". As she felt his hands she pushed him away, saying despairingly, "Leave me alone, Charles. I don’t blame you, I blame myself".
He was thoroughly frightened and he did not know what to do; he watched her helplessly for a while, his face working, and then he suddenly rounded on Miriam. He said, raging, "Well, you wanted your row, and now you’ve finished, I’d like to know exactly what you think you’ve accomplished…".
Miriam did not answer. At that moment she had remembered a remark that Erica had made to her weeks before when they were walking on the mountain where Erica and Charles had once walked every Sunday afternoon after the Philharmonic broadcast from New York. They had stopped to watch the model yachts sailing back and forth on Beaver Pond, and out of nothing, except perhaps that the place itself was so associated with her father in her mind, Erica had said suddenly, "Charles doesn’t want to go on this way, but he got started on the wrong track at the very beginning and he can’t stop, he just has to keep on going".
It was in order to stop him before it was too late that Miriam, who detested rows, had deliberately created this one, but as her father turned away from her, back to his wife again, she knew that so far as Charles Drake was concerned she had accomplished nothing. He had already gone so far that no one else could stop him either.
Chapter X
The Managing Editor of the Montreal Post was a slight, gray-haired man in his early forties, with small, unusually white hands, a soft voice and a fondness for light gray suits, gray ties and suède shoes. Nobody liked him, but he was recognized as exceptionally capable, and by and large, Erica reflected as she sat facing him across his desk, waiting for the verdict, and compared to the other Post employees of whom it was generally said that they learned more in less time and were fired faster than the employees of any other paper in the country, she herself had had a fairly easy time of it, chiefly because she was a Drake and Mr. Prescott was a snob.
This morning, however, Mr. Prescott was in one of his subtle moods. He had said nothing so far, he had merely regarded her rather curiously across the desk, listened to what she had to say, and then swung around so that he could look out the window and watch some pigeons on a near-by roof. She realized that she might have approached him more tactfully, instead of having come straight to the point, but during the past three years of war she had been gradually losing interest in the Woman’s Section of the Post, and during the past six years, she had become thoroughly tired of being tactful with Mr. Prescott, who demanded the utmost tact from his staff, and then invariably walked all over them anyway.