Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

He broke his hands apart, and moving with the pent vigor of someone doing one thing when he wants to do another, shifted a chair around and then back to where it was and finally sat down in it. “Was there a point to his closing the doors, do you think?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “The only time my conscience bothers me is when I think the least of him,” Winthrop said. “Who the devil else would close the doors on us like that?”

  “Sometimes I think he knows—has known for some time.”

  Winthrop gave a short, dry laugh.

  “I don’t suppose it really matters—except for Martha. I will not have her scandalized.”

  “What are you reading?” he asked, but not caring, wanting only to change the subject.

  She did not answer. “Did it go against Walter tonight?”

  “Haven’t you got it backwards, my dear? It wasn’t he that was on trial.”

  “It was … in his own mind.”

  Winthrop did not have much humor; therefore he was often more direct than even he would have preferred. “That’s a mighty small place for a man my size to get in and out of every time.”

  “He worships you, Alexander.”

  “What does it mean, you saying that to me, Elizabeth?”

  “Only that Walter hoped your vote would justify him among the trustees.”

  “I assure you, his name never came up.”

  “And Hogan—what happens to him?”

  “Unless something treasonable shows up in his record—and I’m sure it won’t—he stays. I voted with the rest of them. I don’t give a damn about Hogan. I think it’s a good thing we’ll know what he’s up to for a while. But to tell you the God’s truth, Elizabeth, I don’t think he’s any more dangerous than your husband.”

  She looked at him frankly and smiled. It crossed her mind that he had himself got a liberal education that night from whatever source. “Some new poems,” she said, indicating the book. “They’re very nice.”

  He glanced at the door for there was the sound of footsteps in the hall. “May I see you tomorrow?”

  She nodded. “After two.” They would meet in her music studio downtown as was their custom.

  The steps receded, Walter apparently having forgotten something.

  “Elizabeth … look at me.”

  She lifted her head and steadily they gazed at one another across the untraversable few feet between them. She could see the strength and tenderness of him, the dangerous weakness, for the lidded desire all but spilled from his eyes.

  “I have never wanted you more than at this moment,” he said, meting the words out slowly to watch them affect her.

  She cast her eyes down and spread her strong hands like wings upon the book.

  “Elizabeth …”

  She got up then and went around the couch away from him. Only then did she meet his eyes again. “I am going upstairs now, if you will excuse me, Alexander,” she said.

  And still he looked at her. “I love you,” he said, but no louder than a whisper.

  “I know,” she said, and briefly pursed her lips to him before turning and moving with unhurried grace from the room.

  Fitzgerald was coming with the tray from the kitchen when she reached the hall. “Good night, Walter. I’m going up now.”

  “Good night, my dear. I’m sorry it took me so long.” To Winthrop he said, going into the parlor, “it’s too bad Elizabeth went off so soon. You mustn’t mind, Alex.”

  “She said good night to me,” Winthrop said.

  Fitzgerald took this to mean that his wife had been brusque. “God knows, she’s not an easy woman. All temperament. But she soon gets over it. They say there’s Spanish blood in her family—a lot of it in the part of Ireland she comes from.”

  “She looks Spanish,” Winthrop murmured, as though the subject had just come up. Even Walter had told him this many times before. Elizabeth did look Spanish, with her dark hair parted in the middle and tightly drawn to a bun at the back of her head, the long neck, the oval face with olive coloring, the black eyes and heavy lashes.

  “You’re coming to dinner all the same on Sunday, aren’t you, Alex? It is your Sunday and she’ll be expecting you.”

  “For God’s sake, let’s have the brandy,” Winthrop said.

  2

  NOT LONG AFTER WINTHROP and Fitzgerald had left Anders Hall, Jonathan Hogan took his departure also, going out alone and past the porter’s desk at the main entry. How quickly the hounds of notoriety had given up his scent. A few hours earlier the reporters had followed him into the building, the porter unable to restrain them. Now good news was no news where he was concerned. He took a short cut cross-campus to the streetcar line. There was in the southern sky a trail of stars that vanished into the yellow smoke over the steel mills. Snake-quick tongues of flame flicked into the night. They would be after him again, of course, the yellow press: they would watch his every move.

  He boarded the first streetcar south. The car was overheated, the brass-barred windows mud-brown still from the last thaw, the straw seats lumpy. He caught the disinfectant smell associable with public lavatories so that he supposed the women talking together in a Slavic tongue were coming off their cleaning jobs downtown. Most of the male occupancy would go on the midnight shift at the mills. One could thank God, of course, that there was a midnight shift. One could be grateful for a number of things this night if he were Jonathan Hogan. But he could also be realistic, and there was nothing like a southside streetcar ride to sober a man giddy with too easy a triumph. He had been exonerated, true. But he had also been rendered impotent outside the classroom for a long time to come if not for the rest of his life.

  Men like Winthrop had sustained him. The president of United States Copper had put his arm about him. A killing kindness: was this the intention? They could not care very much, those men really, about his anti-Fascist, antiwar activities; only the Walter Fitzgeralds, the pious and the patriotic, cared about them. The trustees almost to a man were laissez faire capitalists, and it was doubtless known among them, though not likely to have been discussed that night with Hawkins, that he was economic advisor to a group of labor organizers about to go to work in the steel industry. The best service he could do them now would be to withdraw from their council. He had been defended and isolated. But what could they have done? Suppose they had fired him? They would have not merely brought him down then, they would have compromised Hawkins and the University. They had acted honorably. Who could gainsay that? It fell to him now to be as explicit in his loyalties.

  Adieu, gentlemen, he thought, leaving the streetcar.

  “Good night, professor,” the motorman called after him for they had long been friends on the same run.

  He turned and waved his hand.

  The newest thing about the house he shared with his unmarried son was the sign at the walk: T. M. HOGAN, M.D. The house itself was set a distance back from the street unlike the other buildings in the block. It afforded a garden in front. Otherwise from the parlor and from Marcus’s office there was a fine view of the neighborhood’s back porches. Frontside, the houses were ugly enough. The area was changing fast. Mrs. Turley, the Negro woman who kept house for them, often said, “Mr. Hogan, you ought to go and live among the white folks now and sell this place for money while you can. It all going to be colored people soon.”

  She was right: he hadn’t much inheritance to leave his sons. As he climbed the steps he could see Marcus sitting forward on the sofa, his shoulders hunched. It occurred to him that the boy was waiting, had probably been waiting for word for some time.

  “Dad?”

  He looked in at the living room door.

  “It’s a wonder you wouldn’t phone a man,” Marcus said.

  The older man put away his coat. He took off his collar and tie and hung them on the banister. “I’m sorry, Marc. I thought you’d be at the clinic. It all came out fine: they voted me everything but a raise.”

  “I heard it on the radio finally,�
�� Marcus said. “Complete exoneration.”

  “I feel let down all the same,” Jonathan said.

  Marcus laughed and shook out a cigaret from his packet, offering it to his father.

  “Thanks, no. I’ll have my pipe. I’ve smoked too much tonight.” He went to the mantle and filled his pipe from the jar there. “You know, the chairman of the Board of Trustees came up and put his arm around me. Think of that: United States Copper.”

  “I don’t suppose any of it rubbed off,” Marcus said.

  Hogan sat down wearily and struck a match on the bottom of his shoe. “I’d be a great fool to think this restored things to where they were. And yet …” He shrugged. “Even Fitzgerald shook me by the hand. The important thing is that we trust one another: that’s what he said.” He puffed the fire into his pipe.

  “Who’s Fitzgerald?”

  Hogan started to explain. Suddenly he was very tired, and he could feel something hard, numbing, running up through his head. “He’s in the philosophy department.”

  “Isn’t he the one who was after your hide?”

  “One of them. Ah, but he’s Irish, Marc. That’s the difference.”

  “Meaning what?”

  The numbness eased off as he rubbed his forehead. “Oh, just that. He’s sentimental. If his victim doesn’t die of the blow he struck him, Fitzgerald’ll be the first man out to congratulate him.”

  “The damned hypocrite,” Marcus said, for he had watched his father age these last few weeks.

  Hogan pulled at his pipe, thinking, and then laughed. “You know, I shook him up a bit tonight though. The minute he stuck out his hand to me, I said to him, ‘Professor, there’s something you can do for me, now.’ ‘Anything, anything at all, Jonathan,’ he said. In fact, I think he said, ‘Jonathan, my boy.’ And I said, ‘I want you to speak to your friend Winthrop about my son. Like Winthrop,’ I said, ‘he’s interested in public health. He’s got some fine ideas on chest surgery, but what he needs is a good residency.’”

  Marcus grinned. He sat, finally relaxed himself, his hands dangling between his high, bony knees, the cigaret smoke trailing sensuously up the back of one hand. “What did he say?”

  “He wants to look you over himself tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Marcus said, and sat for some seconds thinking about it. His father had spoken lightly, but it was in Marcus’s mind that he might very well be judging his own position by the extent to which Fitzgerald was willing to go now to make amends. “Let’s have a beer.” Marcus got up. In the kitchen he opened two bottles.

  “Will you go to see him, Marc?”

  “Why not? Any nurse can do what I’m doing in the clinic—and downstairs here. At the rate I’m going, it’s going to take a war to make a surgeon of me.”

  Jonathan frowned, the pulse starting up where it sometimes appeared at his temple; together with the tic, it distorted a face that ordinarily was handsome.

  “I’m sorry I said that. It wasn’t necessary. I didn’t like what I saw on the campus tonight. I was over there. There was a meanness in the police.”

  “There always is, Marc, among men who would rather obey than think. Self-discipline is one of our more recent luxuries.”

  “I’ll say,” Marcus said and both men laughed.

  Marcus touched his glass to his father’s. “Skoal,” he said.

  “Skoal.”

  3

  MARTHA FITZGERALD WAS ALWAYS of two minds about week-ends: most of the girls who lived within fifty miles of St. Cecilia’s College went home on Friday afternoons. It was a lonely moment for her after they had trooped down to the North Shore station, watching until the train pulled out. At home she could herself go to a play or a concert, or even to a dance if somebody’s brother didn’t have a date of his own making. And she could gorge herself on Annie’s cooking. But after the hollow moment of watching, she generally went off on a long walk with one of the lay faculty or with classmates, and had tea in the village—tea consisting of raisin toast sopping with butter and a chocolate milk shake. And staying, she could spend all of Saturday morning in the studio—without the boondogglers. Sometimes she thought she was the only one in art class who took it seriously—except for a girl called Genevieve Revere of whom Martha was in awe, and vaguely, a little afraid. Genevieve was always talking of Paris and how she expected to be there soon. Once she suggested that if Martha could spend her junior year abroad they could run away from school together and have an apartment in the Latin Quarter. Martha had been appalled at the idea.

  Sister Mathilde was already in the studio when Martha arrived, herself working, her black sleeves turned up to where the white undergarment showed at her wrists. She was young and she painted beautifully despite an almost palsied shaking of her hand. She had had a nervous breakdown, it was said, and most of the girls considered that quite as important an accomplishment as her painting.

  Martha put on her smock and went to work at her own easel after the merest exchange of greetings. They were accustomed to silences in the studio. Even out of it, she had little to say to Sister Mathilde. There was in the nun’s way of looking at a person a sort of probing as though to discover deep, important things that made Martha fear saying something trite in her presence. She soon forgot Mathilde altogether and gave a start when the nun, standing beside her, said, “Come here a moment with me, my dear.”

  Martha followed her to an easel near the window which the nun then turned around to where the water color propped up on it caught the full morning sunlight. Martha thought at first that its subject was something anatomical or biological—like intestines, except that they were green; snakes, she decided, curling around a barkless tree. By then she had glimpsed the name on the easel: Genevieve Revere. Her first reaction was one of shock, realizing that the nun was looking at and showing the girl’s work when she was not there. Martha did not say anything. She could not. The nun, who was several inches beneath her in height, turned to look up at her. Her eyes were moist, glistening, and she was even paler than usual. Martha could never tell whether she was pleased or angry because of the set of her mouth, the lips perpetually curved upwards ever so slightly at the corners.

  “Isn’t it extraordinary?” the nun said then. “Isn’t it wicked?”

  “I like most of her painting,” Martha said in feeble defense of someone she did not really care for as a person.

  “Oh, my dear, the girl is wonderfully talented. She can paint like an angel. She’s done this deliberately, you see. She wants to get even with me.”

  “For what, sister?” Martha said, but she did not care at all. She was shocked discovering that the nun was trembling, the dark veil over her white coif aquiver. She would have given anything for the nerve to move, to run. One expected anger in a nun, laughter, reproach … but never this … whatever thing it was, so personal.

  “For loving her soul, and trying to save it, while she makes riot of it. I do penance for her every day of my life. I know what sin is, Martha. My father and mother were divorced when I was thirteen years old. My brother hanged himself in the hallway of our house, and now I have to do penance for her, too, this wicked, beautiful child.”

  Genevieve Revere was not a child, Martha knew. She was nineteen years old, and another of the reasons Martha feared her was that she dared to say out that she hated Sister Mathilde; she made fun of her, called her a Puritan witch, a creep, a ghoul. She would stand at the blackboard before art class started, this tall, violent, vitriolic girl, and draw voluptuous nudes on which she would deftly stroke swatches and sweeps of clothes against the metronomic rattle of Mathilde’s beads as the nun came up the stairs. Only Mathilde’s breathing could be heard in the instant of her entry and then the plunking sound of the chalk as Genevieve dropped it ostentatiously onto the blackboard railing.

  Martha felt herself leaden, bound head and foot, chained as ever was Prometheus, and as gnawed at as was he. Sister Mathilde was looking up into her face as though herself in an ecst
asy of pain. “Can you tell that I’m weeping?” the nun asked. Martha shook her head. “I am. The tears are running hot and scalding down my throat. I love that child. I want her for God.”

  Martha could not look at her any longer, and yet the nun’s eyes clung to her own, drawing, sucking back her gaze. Then Mathilde turned to the painting, the green water color, the bare tree bound round with snakes, and lifted a trembling finger which she pointed at the tree. “You understand her allegory, don’t you? You can see the tree is meant to represent me.”

  “No,” Martha said.

  “Oh, yes. I can see it quite plainly.”

  Afterwards Martha could never remember the impulse, or the sound she made; she always thought it must have been a scream, but no one answered it. What she did remember was the impact in each of the five fingers on her right hand as they struck the drawing board, and she recalled the scrape of her fingernails, and the sound of the tearing and crumpling of paper. The nun, she knew, turned away to the window, and Martha, throwing down the destroyed water color to the floor, managed at last to move toward the door, faster then, and then faster, almost away.

  “Martha!”

  She paused on the threshold and looked back.

  “Thank you, my dear,” Mathilde said and bowed her head over her clasped hands, the knuckles of which she pressed against her mouth.

  Martha ran down the back stairs so that she might encounter no one, tore off her smock and escaped outdoors wearing a borrowed coat. She walked to the lake alone although it was forbidden, but even the cold wind sifting snow about her face could not drive out or make orderly the tumult and revulsion. She tried to pray a little, and then to understand. To understand without feeling. She was eighteen and suddenly she remembered an older friend now on the faculty telling her of having been kissed by a priest once when she was eighteen. She had not been able to take Holy Communion for months and months afterwards, compounding her own sins thereby, and unable to account the reason to anyone, or for that matter, to herself. “It just wore off—like most things do,” her friend had answered her query. And remembering it now, Martha was oddly comforted.