It was his father who was looking at him this time, still worried.
Sunday, the day he had finally told them about Erica, he had spent picking up the last pieces of the puzzle, a series of individual portraits, each with a segment of background, until the first seventeen years of his life were complete. There was old George Brophy, still fishing off the end of the long dock by the warehouse, who had taught him how to cast; Mac Tyrrel who had stored Marc’s boat for him each winter; old Isadore Rabinovitch who had made him his first pair of long pants and stayed in his shop till midnight two days later mending a tear eight inches long which Marc had got fishing back up the river. The mend was so well done that his parents had never found out about it. They had issued strict orders that he was not to wear his new trousers fishing.
Two blocks away from Rabinovitch and Son was O’Reilly’s, where they sold tobacco, candy, newspapers, magazines and soft drinks in front, with a pool room and beer parlor behind. O’Reilly still had a vast assortment of highly colored candies sold by the cent. Marc remembered particularly some big round ones which you could get in either bright pink, orange, purple or green, five for a cent, and which had been his favorites for years. He did not know what they were made of; having been offered a couple on Sunday afternoon for old time’s sake, he still did not know what they were made of.
The beer parlor behind had had no part in his past; he had never liked beer and had been singularly free of the adolescent urge to do something because the crowd is doing it. He had been just as immune to influence where girls were concerned, until his third year in college when he had fallen in love with a girl named Helen. It had lasted until they both graduated and she went back to her home in Ottawa and he went on to law school. His family had known about her; for a while they had been afraid that he might marry her, and when he was home for his holidays, they had talked all round the subject, letting him know what they thought of his marrying a Gentile without actually saying it. That was fourteen years ago, however, and he had forgotten all about it, until Sunday night when they were in the living-room, his father sitting in one of the big chairs and his mother and himself at opposite ends of the sofa, and he had told them about Erica.
"You’re not thinking of marrying her, are you?" his father had asked.
"I don’t know".
There was a pause and then his father said, "That’s the second time, isn’t it?"
"What do you mean?"
"That other girl-the one you knew in college-she wasn’t Jewish either". He knocked his pipe against the heavy brass ash-tray standing beside his chair and asked, "What’s her family like?"
"They’re-well, they’re the Drakes, that’s all. They’re pretty well-known".
"What do they think of you?"
He had known that he was going to be asked that question, he had known it ever since he had realized that he was going to have to talk to his mother and father about Erica. He said, "I’ve never met them".
"You…" his father began incredulously, and stopped.
His mother glanced at him quickly and said nothing at all.
He waited for a moment and then burst out, "I wish you could meet her! You’d both like her, I know you would. She’s so straight. She even knows how to think straight. She knows exactly what matters…".
"Does she?" asked his father.
His mother said quietly, "Then she must know that her family matters, Marc".
"Yes", said Marc hopelessly. "I guess she does".
In his cage in the corner, Mike, the canary that never sang, shifted restlessly on his perch and then chirruped faintly.
"Hello, Mike", said Marc.
"He wants his cover on so that he can go to bed", said his mother.
"Where is it?"
"Over there on top of the piano".
He got up and put the cover around the cage and then went to the mantelpiece for a cigarette. With his back to the empty fireplace, he said, looking down at the worn spot in the middle of the carpet, "Nobody else has ever meant as much to me as she does. I can’t explain it".
"You aren’t going to do her any good by marrying her", said his father.
"But she feels just the same about me…".
"Maybe she does now".
His father’s rather heavy face was out of range of the light from the lamp on the table behind the sofa, but even in the dimness and from the fireplace some distance away, Marc could see his expression. His father was not going to change his mind. Nothing would make him change his mind. He said, "It won’t work".
"Why can’t we make it work?"
"Because you’re too different, and because other people won’t let you".
He turned to his mother and said, "You’d let us, wouldn’t you?"
Her face changed and she said unhappily, "I don’t know, Marc".
Then his father’s voice cut across the room saying grimly, "We wouldn’t behave like the Drakes, if that’s what you mean!"
He glanced at his wife and sank heavily back into his chair again, muttering, "All right, Maria, all right", and then said in a different tone, "You’re a Jew, Marc. You ought to know we can’t afford to lose anyone we don’t have to lose. There aren’t so many of us now as there were before Hitler and his friends got going on us".
"I’m not going to stop being a Jew".
"You wouldn’t be able to help it. You’d be neither one thing nor the other, and that goes for your wife and children too, particularly your children. You’d just be…" he spread out his hands and said, "…nothing. It’s like mixing oil and water. You can’t do it, it doesn’t work".
He paused again, looking up at Marc, and then with his voice still pitched low but speaking with profound conviction, as though this were a summing up of his sixty-five years of living experience, he went on, "You think you could compromise and somehow you’d manage, but sooner or later you’d find out that you can go just so far and no farther. You’d get sick of compromising, and so would she, and some day you’d wake up and realize that it wasn’t a question of compromising on little things any more, but of compromising yourself. And you couldn’t do it, neither of you could do it. Nobody can do it. You’ve got to be yourself, otherwise you’re better off dead". He said with a sudden undercurrent of violence, "For God’s sake, Marc, you’re a Jew. You ought to know that!"
The violence died away again and he said, "It isn’t just a question of conventions; it’s five thousand years which have made you and her hopelessly different. You don’t know how different you are yet".
"I’ve had a pretty good chance to find out, since I left home sixteen years ago!"
"Find out", he repeated. "You haven’t even begun to find out. Getting yourself kicked out of a hotel is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you! You’ve had a pretty easy time of it, don’t fool yourself. It would probably be better for you if you hadn’t. You don’t yet know how Jewish you are, otherwise you wouldn’t be talking about marrying a Gentile; you’d realize that no matter how much you have in common, it doesn’t make up for that one fundamental difference between you. Nothing can make up for that. What counts in the long run isn’t whether or not you and your wife like the same books or like to do the same things-it’s whether or not, down underneath, you’re the same kind of person. Whether you have the same attitude toward things, the same outlook on life-the same background, and heredity and the same traditions".
He paused again and then finished it. He said, "And if there’s one thing that’s dead certain, it is that no Jew and no Gentile that ever lived have the same outlook on life".
That was all his father had had to say.
Our Father, Our King, remember thy mercy and suppress thine anger, and remove pestilence, sword and famine, destruction, captivity, iniquity and plague, all evil occurrences, and every disease, every stumbling block and contention, every kind of punishment, every evil decree and all causeless enmity, from us and from all the children of thy covenant….