"I don’t think so", said Erica, after due reflection.
"You may now tell us about the bar, Bubbles", said Sylvia.
"Oh, shut up", said Weathersby. "Women", he said resentfully to Weathersby. "Women. I’ve had enough women around here to last me the rest of my life".
"Speaking of women", remarked Sylvia, returning to work. "How’s your mother’s jelly?"
"She still sets it with wax!" said Weathersby hotly.
Erica and Sylvia started to laugh. They went on laughing for a while and finally Erica said, "Well, it’s almost over, Sylvia, but we’ve had an awful lot of fun".
"Yes", said Sylvia. Glancing first at Erica, who was rolling a fresh sheet of copy paper into her typewriter, with the light from the window behind her falling on her long fair hair and around her tired, sensitive face, and then at Weathersby in his corner, growling as he embarked on still another account of a wedding, she said again, "Yes, we’ve had a lot of fun".
Back at work herself, she asked absently after a pause, "What was the bride wearing this time, Bubbles?"
"Mousseline de soie", said Weathersby. "If I’m ever dope enough to get married, my wife is going to be ’radiant in her grandmother’s bathing-suit,’ God damn it. Anything for a little variety".
Chapter XI
From the Friday evening when Erica had told her parents that she was going to spend the first half of Marc’s embarkation leave with him in the Laurentians until a week from the following Monday, less than two hours before her train was due to leave, Charles Drake did not mention the subject again. During those ten days he scarcely spoke to her at all; even the indirect references to Marc which had acted to some extent as escape valves, had abruptly come to an end, and he said nothing in Erica’s hearing which could possibly be related to Marc by even the most roundabout route.
Shortly before three o’clock on Monday afternoon, Erica went up to her bedroom to pack, and a few minutes later she returned from her bathroom with a handful of toilet articles to find her father standing against the closed door leading to the hall.
Erica had not heard him come in and on first sight of him she started, dropping one of her cosmetic jars on the soft carpet, although she had known all along, and in spite of his silence, that some kind of ultimatum was inevitable. He was simply not going to allow her to walk out, on her way to spend three days with Marc, without making any effort to stop her.
She picked up the jar and asked calmly, "What are you doing home at this hour, Charles?"
"I wasn’t getting any work done. I couldn’t keep my mind on it". He watched her for a moment in silence, while Erica went on with her packing, and then said jerkily, "I came-to ask you-not to go".
"Why?"
"You know why".
He moved out of the shadow by the door into the light, a big, dark-haired man with hands clenched at his sides, and said, "That other week-end you were away was bad enough but I didn’t know definitely…"
"There’s nothing more to know now than there was then".
He went on as though he had not heard her, "I didn’t know for certain that he was going to be there, or whether you-whether you were definitely…"
His voice trailed off; he left the sentence unfinished and fumbled in his pocket with one hand, taking out his cigar case and a bunch of keys, then putting them back again. He looked almost ill; the flesh around his fine dark eyes was puffed and discolored and in the strong light from the windows his skin had a yellowish tinge. He said, trying to keep his voice level, "You can’t expect your mother and me to sit here for three days, from now till Thursday night, while you-while you…"
He swallowed, and then said with sudden violence, "We can’t stand it. I tell you, Erica, we can’t stand it! We’re too old; if you go through with this thing, you’ll leave a mark on us that will last the rest of our lives".
"You sound as though I was going to commit murder".
She took two pairs of shoes from the cupboard, then sat down on her bed with the shoes in her lap, remarking aimlessly, "It’s a bit late, isn’t it? Marc left Petawawa two hours ago and it’s less than two hours till my train goes. Why didn’t you get all this over with last night or even this morning? You went off downtown after breakfast without saying a word".
"I wasn’t going to say anything. Your mother didn’t…" He stopped again.
"What made you change your mind?"
With his eyes fixed on her face, he tried to say something, but nothing came. At last he answered only, "I told you, I can’t go through with it".
"I don’t know what you want, Charles, except that you seem to want everything".
"All I want you to do is to stay home and behave like any decent girl who values her own self-respect!"
"You don’t know what this is all about". She put one pair of shoes into the suitcase lying on the bed beside her, and looking down at the other pair in her lap, she said hopelessly, "Apparently you play the game on the principle of ’Heads I win, tails you lose’. You haven’t the remotest idea what this is all about because you’ve never given me a chance to tell you. Ever since the beginning, whenever I tried to tell you, you told me. You knew. You knew without being told, just as you knew exactly what Marc was like without ever having met him".
He said, staring at her, "I’ll admit it hadn’t even occurred to me that you might try to justify yourself by putting the blame on me…".
"I’m not trying to justify myself! I don’t give a damn about justifying myself".
She began wrapping the second pair of shoes in tissue paper with her hands shaking. She had no idea where this was going to end, but she knew that if she lost her temper, it could only end in disaster. She had kept her feelings dammed up for too long.
"Do you know what I’ve been doing for the past two months, Charles?" she asked without looking at him. "I’ve been trying to out-balance thirty-three years. It’s been quite a job with only two months to do it in, and now when all I’ve got left is three days, you…"
He said, cutting her short, "You’ve got the rest of your life!"
"…I’ve got to prove…" She stopped, glanced at him and said, "No, I haven’t got the rest of my life. It isn’t even a question of whether he comes back or not, but whether I’ll ever see him again if he does".
Evidently he did have at least a vague idea of what it was all about, for he said, "Isn’t it possible that instead of all these subtle reasons you keep looking for, it may simply be that he’s not really in love with you?"
"Otherwise it would be a case of all for love and the world well lost, is that it? I thought that was one of the notions you get over when you grow up". She turned suddenly and said, facing him, "And supposing he isn’t in love with me, or not enough in love with me-then why?"
"Why what?"
"Why isn’t he?"
He fumbled for his cigar case again, still standing in the middle of the room a few feet from the foot of her bed, and answered finally through a cloud of smoke, "You wouldn’t be the first girl to find out that respect is what matters most in the long run".
"Doesn’t that depend somewhat on the individual?"
"No, it’s just human nature".
"There’s a generalization to take care of everything, isn’t there?" asked Erica, starting toward the chest of drawers behind him.
He said angrily, "Generalizations only exist because they represent the accumulated experience of the human race right down through history!"
"And so whenever we find someone who doesn’t fit, we go to work on him and by the time we’re finished, we’ve damn well-made him fit! Like Procrustes and his bed-all you have to do is stretch him or chop him down to the right size".