Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “That’s very kind of you, Alex. I didn’t realize you had such confidence in my forebearance.”

  Winthrop laughed.

  “Nineteen sixty-two, oh, my God!” Sylvia said.

  “We’ve got a lot of living to do between now and then.” Winthrop looked at his wife with an amused affection, which made Marcus think it was going along fine, their marriage, obliging both with what each needed. Pride had never been a stumbling block for either of them.

  “We sure as hell better,” Sylvia said in the broad way she sometimes had, reminding Winthrop of her mother. “We won’t be doing much of it after that.”

  It was while they were having brandy, and having checked his watch that Winthrop remarked with a casualness Marcus suspected to be deliberate, “Have you given any thought to having someone with you since Doctor Albert died?”

  “Not much.” But that very evening it had crossed his mind when he was thinking of the war.

  “Reiss is doing fine at Lakewood … and he started with something of a handicap.”

  “His religion?” Marcus said after a moment. Winthrop nodded. “It doesn’t seem ever to have been much of a handicap.”

  “And why should it?” Sylvia said with a quickness that made Marcus suppose she might be behind Winthrop’s awareness of the man.

  “I was not suggesting that it should. But it does seem to have been confining to a number of his people in our times, doesn’t it?”

  “He’s a good doctor,” Winthrop said. “Doctor Albert’s whim paid off nicely. You ought to watch him, Marcus. You may need someone. You can’t tell these days.” The chain of association was crudely obvious.

  Marcus lit a cigaret. “Do you think he’s the real thing, Alex?” He was using Winthrop’s own phrase.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is he sincere? Does he give a damn about medicine or only money?”

  “He’s ambitious as they come, but his knife is clean.”

  Marcus smoked in silence.

  Sylvia said, “Whether he’s genuine or not, he always does the right thing, Marcus. It almost comes natural to him.”

  Almost, Marcus noticed. He grinned. “A dozen roses came for Martha this afternoon. I didn’t send them. Did you?”

  “No. It sounds like Nathan,” she said.

  “Or George,” Winthrop said. “That’s where I found out you were a father. He’s got a lot of savoir faire these days, our George.”

  Marcus held his tongue, but Sylvia caught the flash in his eyes. She said, “I’m sure it was Reiss. Wasn’t there a card?”

  “I didn’t look,” Marcus said. “At the time of childbirth a man feels he has to suffer in any way he can.” He knew he was being flippant, but he did not—on this occasion at any rate—want to say the things coming into his mind. He had not told anyone of George’s destruction of his father’s manuscript. Too many people, judging the old man on personality, his lectures—into which he had been known to introduce gratuitously his theories on the scientific breeding of men—might well have applauded George. Midwestern University had at one time quietly suggested that Dr. Bergner stick to the manual.

  When the time came he walked the Winthrops to the theater, and while there bought tickets for Martha and himself for a month hence: Watch on the Rhine. He bought the best seats in the house, since he proposed them as a present to Martha. He assumed she would like them better than a dozen roses. He went from the theater to a phone booth in the nearest drugstore. He called his answering service first and then Erich Mueller. It was Mueller himself who answered the phone.

  “Erich? This is Marcus Hogan. I’ve got a pocketful of cigars and an eight-pound son. May I come and see you for an hour?”

  “What a question!”

  Mueller kissed him on both cheeks, needing to stand on tiptoe to reach him. “So! Now you are a father! If you do not first succeed, try, try again. See?” He called up the stairs, “Julie, come! Here is the new papa.”

  Julie kissed him and made a noisy fuss over him as only the French can. Marcus saw that she was pregnant.

  Mueller said: “A boy, just like that!” and snapped his fingers.

  Marcus said: “If you do not first succeed …”

  “Oui!” Julie cried and patted her distended belly while all of them laughed.

  They had the good dark coffee that would keep his nerves marching up and down all night, Marcus thought, coffee in tall, narrow cups with the whipped cream in the upper half, and Mueller asked about Jonathan. He was the more solicitous of him for being out of patience with him and his cause.

  Afterwards, while Julie was putting away the coffee things, Marcus asked Mueller how much he really knew about Nathan Reiss.

  “How much do I need to know about a man? He is a good doctor. They will tell you that up where he is doing this dreadful thing they require in this state, a new internship—a year out of a man’s life. Just because he is educated elsewhere, he is stupid? I do not think so.”

  “He would not have had to do that in some states, as I understand it,” Marcus said. “New York, for example.”

  “Because he is a Jew, you think he should have stopped in New York?”

  “That’s not worthy of you, Erich.” Marcus was the more irritated because it was the second time that night something of the sort had happened to him.

  “I don’t think it’s worthy of you to have said it, Marc. If I misunderstand you, forgive me.”

  “You do misunderstand me. There is a man in New York—a refugee whose history I know. He has done heart surgery and I have been thinking of going out there to observe him.”

  “Ach, then you must forgive me, Marc, what I said. It is how Nathan himself says: Many people ask him why he did not stay there. He is very sensitive.”

  “Not any more than the rest of us,” Marcus said.

  “Why do you not like him?”

  “I’m not sure that I don’t. I’ve not seen very much of him.” Marcus gave a short laugh. “But I begin to get the feeling that somewhere back in the years, he was tied into my life, my destiny—to give it a fancy word: Winthrop to Bergner to me to Reiss to Winthrop to me.”

  “But of course! That’s how it is, Marc, we are all waiting someone to complement. We are nothing alone.”

  “I should like to have some say in it, that’s all.”

  “Now it is quid pro quo. Is that what you mean?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But that is marvelous, Marc! I knew Doctor Winthrop would like him. They are both so—vital. We are all linked to one another, Marc, believe me.”

  “Like sausages,” Marcus said irreverently.

  Mueller made a noise of mock disapproval.

  “Erich, why was he so long in getting out of Europe? Wasn’t it risky?”

  “But of course. I will tell you, Marc, but I ask you to keep it in confidence. You will understand why he wants it that way. He was out already and went back. The Baroness … Look, Marc, we are men. She was for many years his mistress. She did everything for him. In the beginning he was an orphan boy of eighteen she wanted to sleep with, I suppose. I don’t know. I’ve been told there are women like that. He was a beautiful boy, I am sure. But she is a very foolish woman. She thinks money can buy everything …” Mueller paused in the story as his wife came into the room. He said to her, “You go upstairs now, Julie, tout de suite,” and he gave her a brief slap on the backside as he might a child.

  When she was gone he continued: “She thought money could even buy off the Nazis. And it did for a time. Then one day she could look down from her window and see the Jews scrubbing the streets of Vienna on their knees. Then she knew it was very late. She telephoned Nathan in Switzerland and he said one word to her: the name of her villa in the Austrian Alps. She got to it all right and she knew—the international lake, you see. And he came for her at night in a boat and waited. And when finally she did not come he went up to look for her and he saw the Nazis taking her away. They were armed, he was not. He
is very much ashamed, but he did not try to rescue her. He saved himself only.”

  Marcus studied the end of the cigar he was smoking. “What happened to her?”

  Mueller shrugged. “Who can tell? There is no word. I should think a concentration camp. It is not a story you can blame a man if he does not tell about himself, is it?”

  Marcus got up from the round dining room table and brushed an ash from the lace cloth. He should have blown it off not to have left a smudge. “No, I don’t blame him … for anything. Not even for being so damned footloose and fancy free.”

  “It is a pose, Marc. All a pose. That man has known trouble and fear. And let me tell you, when you have known real fear you are never again fancy free, as you call it. Yes, I tell you it is a pose. You can believe me: Nathan Reiss will make you a fine partner.”

  At the door they shook hands. “You must give all the Hogans our love, Marc. A son … just like that.” He stood grinning and shaking his head while Marcus went down the steps.

  Ah, but it was a glorious month for all the Hogans, that November. Jonathan began to act like a grandfather. His other son, Trent, in the Far East, had two children, but Jonathan had never seen them. When Martha came home with the child, he would often sit with her and tell her stories of Trent’s and Marcus’s boyhood, and it was foreseeable that Tad would grow up asking to hear the stories again and again. Martha could remember the stories she loved of Ireland, her mother’s and Annie’s, both. He would not be at a loss for entertainment, this child.

  The date for his baptism was set for the first Sunday afternoon in December. Jonathan said, “If he’s to have a name it might as well be fastened on him proper.” And he went to church with them. “I don’t mind the atmosphere of churches. I think it would be very nice if atheists like myself had churches of our own in which to sit and think.”

  Martha always demurred when he called himself an atheist.

  “But I am, all the same. We’ll leave that in-between business to Marcus. He’s very good at it.”

  When they came out of the church that Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941, the word was abroad upon the street of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

  10

  IT WAS ONE OF the things he was simply going to have to get used to in the man, Marcus decided of Reiss’ self-assurance. It bordered on arrogance, but he had observed something of the same haughtiness in other Austrians who were also charming, the mixture of nails and velvet. Reiss, at the point where Marcus suggested sharing his downtown office with him, responded as though it were he who was doing Marcus a favor. And perhaps he was, Marcus thought. What amused him of himself was that he had given a great deal of thought on how to approach the matter without seeming to condescend to Reiss. Perhaps in the days Mueller had known him in Paris, when he was young and still in awe of medicine he had been sensitive, but the role of a rich woman’s lover had seared the tender heart; the truly remarkable thing was that he was a good surgeon. To his everlasting credit, one would have to say that for him. The temptation to dilettantism must have been very great. But the scalpel in hand, Reiss was coldly, brilliantly professional.

  All in all, Marcus enjoyed the association. If Reiss was supremely confident in himself, the patients were also confident in him, particularly the women, and this was no small part of preparation and recovery.

  Because Marcus knew that he would be called up for military service when he was needed and that he did not intend to seek an exemption, he was, he supposed, just biding time. He watched the changes in the child, the first laugh, the first tooth, the first illness, the first step, and he watched Martha grow in motherhood. They were at once the happiest and the saddest of days, with parting imminent and the not quite repressible aura of the heroic about him.

  Everywhere was change. By the end of 1942 Lakewood, so far as owners of the great estates were concerned, had been virtually abandoned. Gasoline was rationed, taxes compounded. The army had leased a number of houses, breaking them up into multiple dwellings. The Winthrops closed their house and moved into town. Tony sold the Fields estate at auction and joined the Air Force. The Bergners stayed on: their house was not so large and was within walking distance of the railway station. George could not find it in his heart, he said, to separate Louise from the house she adored. And then, he found it convenient to stay in town alone some nights. Louise, blithe soul, became one of those people tradesmen were constantly asking, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

  As it turned out, however, the first—except for Tony—among them to make a move directly the result of the war was Alexander Winthrop. Because of his administrative experience and medical background, he was one of the people Washington called upon in anticipation of the occupation period. He was to be given a direct army commission and training preparatory to service overseas. As the time approached for him to leave, Martha knew the time had also come to make another attempt at reconciliation. She proposed to give a small party for the Winthrops before Alexander left.

  “The vegetable plate special?” Marcus said.

  “Grandpa Jon and I are very proud of that garden,” Martha said. “I do much better in vegetables than flowers.”

  Martha consulted Sylvia on whom to invite.

  “Just ourselves,” Sylvia said, and then as Martha seemed hesitant she quickly added, “and Nathan and Jonathan. How’s that?”

  “That will be fine,” Martha said, and she was on the verge of adding that just themselves would be all right, too. But she didn’t say it, feeling that Nathan’s amiable—or even his malicious—small talk might well be what the evening needed. It seemed at the time like a very small decision.

  Everyone dressed for dinner. Martha had got a fine plump bird, shopping for it herself as she preferred to do, having now the dubious assistance of Tad. (He walked early, but he steadfastly refused to talk. He was, his father said, a listener, thank God. Jonathan said he was a philosopher, that he would say something when he thought of something worth saying. Martha allowed that it would be the day on which he missed his first meal.) Cocktails and dinner went off well. Jonathan even laughed at an experience of Nathan’s. It concerned a man who married late and for company, not for progeny. His wife, nonetheless, conceived. But it was diagnosed as a tumor by her own physician. Reiss examined her and agreed to break the good news to her husband. “This will surprise you, my friend—your wife’s tumor is a pregnancy.” “God in heaven, doctor! That’s what her father died of!”

  Martha, meeting Winthrop as Sylvia’s husband, wondered how she had been so long so foolish. The intimate relationships of one being to another were to be felt only by the people involved: it was the basis of marriage, of courtship in all nature. She could not imagine herself lying down at the side of any man save Marcus. She tried, by way of further self-illumination to picture herself in so intimate a situation with Nathan—as he had once proposed. A shudder of revulsion ran through her. But removed to the distance he was across the room from her, he seemed particularly handsome. Her inability to accept Dr. Winthrop until now came, she realized, not out of any sense of righteousness—she had never in her life felt holier than anyone—but out of her inability to put herself in her mother’s position.

  Dr. Winthrop was less restive than she remembered him. She could see now that he had always been an ambitious man who must have been greatly frustrated during his relationship with her mother. It was a curious experience to begin to see things from his point of view. Then she was hurtled back, hearing him talk about George Bergner, to the day at dinner when he had ridiculed her father and coaxed him into participating in his own humiliation. A little of the old ache returned. Martha found herself speculating on what moments Tad would find to suffer for her or Marcus. They might even be moments of which they themselves were oblivious. The need to suffer was bred deeply in man, more deeply, one might pray, than the need to inflict suffering. She thought almost constantly of the war. There were times she could not look at Marcus lest her eyes show tears.
That he would soon go she knew. Every farewell seemed the beginning of their own.

  “The thing I’ve discovered about George,” Winthrop was saying, “is that he thrives on a little praise. He needs to be depended on. Why, that’s the reason he married a simple, trusting soul like Louise. He’d kill himself married to a woman like Sylvia here.”

  “I’d be the first to help him, dear,” Sylvia said.

  Marcus laughed.

  “I’m going to leave him in full charge of the paper while I’m gone. Wait and see if the responsibility doesn’t make a man of him.”

  “It’s about time something did,” Marcus said impatiently.

  “You’ll see. You don’t know what it’s like to have a father who’d rather do a stranger a good turn that he would you. I had one. He couldn’t get over having made a fortune and he was so damned sure I wasn’t worth leaving it to, he had me jumping through hoops for him till the day he died.”

  He could not see, Martha thought, that that was what he expected people to do for him: he was always manipulating them—true, to their own benefit as in Marcus’s case, and Nathan’s. Power—he loved power. Once he had it, he was benevolent. But she was never going to find Alexander Winthrop admirable, much less lovable.

  “I have been treated with many kindnesses all my life,” Marcus said. “By my father and by other men. There is not a man alive more blessed than I have been.” He cocked his head and grinned wryly at having come so close to sentimentality. “You’re right, Alex. It should make me very tolerant.”

  Why Nathan chose that moment to speak, who could say? Perhaps he was self-confronting with his own benefactors. Perhaps he was embarrassed by so frank a confession on Marcus’s part. Or he might have been, as Jonathan supposed, striking a loud note in his own behalf at the most judicious moment. To everyone it seemed tactless of him.