Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “I wish Sylvia was here,” Winthrop remarked. “She’d be able to do something for these youngsters. Somebody’s got to. Soon.”

  He spoke loudly for the drone of approaching planes grew steadily louder. They came from the South, Allied planes, and high beyond sight. When they had passed, Winthrop said: “They’ll be softening up some place tonight with that load.”

  And maiming more children, Jonathan thought, but he said nothing. He could be grateful that Marcus’s child if not Marcus was a far distance from the Italian shores.

  Jonathan’s appraisal of the Italian situation was generally shared by his chief and the other members of the mission. Their broad recommendation was that agriculture and certain civilian industry be quickly rehabilitated so that the emphasis might be shifted from relief to self-help. They reported finding little respect for the King and Badoglio among the people, but by the time of their report, the forces at work in Italy to promote the coalition government had already moved in that direction. It was also becoming evident that without partisan help, the war in Italy was not going to be quickly won. The Anzio beachhead was established during the winter at heavy cost in Allied lives. Certain of the high officers were more amenable thereafter to an Italian government in which the Republican forces were represented.

  Jonathan was not able to see Ruggeo’s family, or for that matter his own family. He did however see Sylvia Winthrop who was in Washington in connection with the newspaper promotion of a War Bond drive. Over lunch, he told her of his evening with Winthrop. Sylvia was restless, impatient with the work a volunteer could do at home and Jonathan suspected that she resented war’s being primarily a man’s business. Then he told her about the children of Naples and what her husband had said.

  She looked at him closely, as though disbelieving. “Is that what he said—that he wished I were there?”

  Jonathan nodded.

  Sylvia turned her water glass round and round. “It’s funny the things that go through your mind. I’d sometimes come to think that that was what he didn’t want, that he was taking this in stride as sort of a sabbatical from me.”

  “War doesn’t make much of a sabbatical,” Jonathan said.

  “I’ve never seen you look better.”

  “I’ve got work to do that excites me.”

  “I’d have almost thought it was a woman.”

  Jonathan laughed. “My dear, I almost feel as though it were.”

  Sylvia reached across the table and gave his hand an impulsive squeeze. “We’re of a kind in some ways, aren’t we, Jonathan?”

  “Ah yes.”

  “My God,” she said, “that was humble of me!” She began tidying up the table. A bread crumbler, she now gathered the crumbs into a neat mound. “Tell me exactly what Alex said.”

  Jonathan set the scene, the dank streets, glistening with frost, the sound of the bombers overhead, and the children scurrying out from their holes to beg and in again, the lame, the diseased and the hungry. And while he talked he watched her eyes, brooding at first, and then lighting up. You did not tell Sylvia anything if you did not want it attended to. At once. During a dessert she scarcely touched, she took her notebook from her purse and began writing names, men she could get to in medicine, in government, in philanthropy. She was on her way, Jonathan thought. She moved like a prairie fire, testing, probing, catching on, and once she had caught on it would be virtually impossible to stop her. The children of Naples had a benefactress.

  While they waited for the check, Sylvia asked: “And you, Jonathan, what now?”

  “I understand there’s a plan afoot to send me to England—on the Italian business. That seems to be my desk now.”

  “Will you be in Italy again, do you think?”

  “I hope so … but I shouldn’t want to give odds that you won’t be there before me.”

  3

  AFTER ANZIO, MARCUS’S UNIT was again withdrawn from the advance combat zone. The unit was cited for extraordinary service and awarded the Fifth Army Plaque. Back once more in North Africa, Marcus was promoted to the rank of major, detached and reassigned to England. In the moment of vanity in which he indulged himself, examining his new insignia and decoration in a mirror, he suddenly looked at his face to see the whole of it for the first time in many months, not merely the part which needed shaving. He was looking at someone quite different than he remembered, himself, for the eyes stared back at him, but not entirely himself either. He had once been fairly good looking, but he would not say it of the pallid, stark face that smiled unnaturally at his prompting. And his hair was white at the temples.

  His leave began the moment he set foot on British soil.

  He had always believed, having no reason to doubt, that Ireland was green, but when the plane banked and he saw the earth dappled with the shapes of clouds like a great emerald quilt asway in the wind, he felt the green. Like a balm it was to his blood-wearied eyes, like the cooling of nightfall upon the blaze of day, and the curious thought struck him that this must be how the dead felt, utterly possessed of and by the enduring green of earth.

  He was put down outside of Belfast, a concession, for the big plane rose at once into the sky again, paradoxically seeming more encumbered by its emptiness than it would have been full-laden. It was well nicknamed the Flying Boxcar. Even as it disappeared in the west, a formation of its like soared high overhead, steady and fully weighted, bound for England. In Italy the men were doubting still that there was ever to come an invasion from the north, but the moment he had left the hospital plane in England, he knew one was at last imminent. For him Italy then had been but prologue, and realizing that, he had not wanted to take his leave at all. To come and go and come again to the field hospital was worse than never leaving it. There was a rhythm to war a man could lose himself in, the tempo set by the great guns booming and the screaming descent of planes, the squeal and growl of mud-bound trucks, the purr of the hospital generator. He had not wanted this leave, but given it, he had wired Elizabeth and come to Ireland with no more conscious deliberation than a doctor gives to a prescription when he knows the patient as well as he knows the disease.

  “Where to, Major?” A craggy-faced old man tugged at the greasy brim of his rumpled cap. There was a stoppage to his R’s similar to a Scotsman’s.

  Marcus named the village in the north. “I have to go by train to Larne, I understand.”

  “You will, sir, unless we can get you aboard a lorry. They’re convoying and conveying night and day.” He took Marcus’s bag. “I remember the Coast Road when you would not see two vehicles on it at once unless it be the circus coming down this time of year.”

  Marcus telephoned and then took the train by choice. He saw that there had been a recent raid on Belfast. The smoke still rose from out of the skeletonous rubble along the wharves, but compared to London, the city itself looked solid and whole, ugly, prosperous and middle class, ever so faintly reminiscent in its grayness of Traders City. He did not regret not lingering to see more of it until disquieted by the thought that when next he had the chance to look, there might not be a city left. The train was jammed with travelers who, as the saying went among them, “had people” in the country. They were moving with their blankets, their bolsters, their tinker-mended pots and pans, which showed how much of Belfast he had seen: these people were not prosperous. There were dogs and cats aboard, and doubtless other creatures invited and uninvited. It fell to Marcus and his companions to share their compartment with a goose. Its owner set it on the floor while she removed her hat and pinned it to the headrest between her face and that of the man next to her, an elegant plume just clearing the man’s nose. The goose meanwhile began to chip at his ankles. The woman took the bird into her lap, and every now and then throughout the journey, it would crank its neck around and nibble gently at the jewel in its mistress’ ear, a jewel no more coldly bright, Marcus thought, than the bird’s own eye.

  He was met and sorted out from the soldiery and the evacuees at the Larn
e station by two boys in knee pants whose ages he would have put at eleven or twelve. They stood as at attention before him. “Major Hogan, sir, we’re sent by the mistress for you.”

  Marcus nodded gravely. One had the plump, ruddy face o£ the country lad, and the other the red-spotted cheeks he had observed all too often during the Depression in the city tubercular. “How did you know me?”

  “You’re American,” the spokesman said. It was one of the greatest distinctions a man could claim in Ireland, Marcus soon discovered.

  The English boy—for Marcus sized him up as one of Elizabeth’s war refugees—took his bag, and Marcus allowed him to boast his strength by it.

  They drove out the coast road in a cart at the rump of a donkey. To the west rose the pale green hills of Antrim, spotted yellow with gorse and daffodils, and to the east was water bluer than ever he had seen the Mediterranean. One could look down and see the stones shining on the bottom as smoothly rounded as eggs. Scarcely aware that he spoke, much less that he delved back almost to his own childhood for the words, Marcus quoted: “‘And Noah he ate an ostrich egg from an egg cup big as a pail.’” The boys giggled and made him say it again. After that he found himself laughing with them. Unfortunately, the only other line he could remember from the poem was: “‘I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get in the wine.’”

  The Irish boy laid a frequent whip across the donkey’s haunches to which the beast merely tossed his head and wiggled his ears. When Marcus finally bade him put up the whip, the boy said, “If he didn’t like it, he’d go faster, sure,” a particularly Irish logic which put Marcus in mind of his patients at the Brandon Clinic and of Annie at home.

  In time they left the coast road, climbing a gentle upward slope, each turning in the road providing a longer vista: of sheep grazing fat-bellied with lambs and unshorn, occasional cottages of clay and timber, some whitewashed and some not, stone-hedged yards that grew ever noisier with the clamor of chickens and ducks and geese as the cart approached. They stopped at a crossroads pump and drank clear water from a tin cup while the donkey got his from a wooden bucket. As they resumed their journey and the animal relieved himself, his driver remarked, “Now isn’t that gratitude for you?”

  As they started downhill on the other side of the first long ridge above the sea, Marcus observed in the distance a house of great and solid build. It stood in a grove of trees beyond a long meadow in which he could see numerous workers. As they drew nearer he saw that the workers were children, and that their work did not so thoroughly occupy them that they could not stand and stare until the cart had passed. Marcus asked what they were doing.

  “Picking up stones. I’m ploughing the meadow myself in the morning, putting it to ’taties. You can watch me if you like.”

  “I’ll remember,” Marcus said.

  Suddenly, as they approached the manor house, the English boy said, “I lives in there.” He jerked his head toward the big house.

  “Do you?” Marcus said.

  “They all do, but not me,” the Irish boy said. “My da’s overseer of McMahon Manor.”

  Elizabeth hastened around the side of the house when the cart entered the grove. She and Marcus lifted their hands in a tentative salute as the distance between them dwindled, she the while rolling down the sleeves of her sweater, having left off some bare-armed chore.

  It had been seven years since last he had seen her, the occasion his marriage to her daughter. He had always held Elizabeth in a sort of reverential awe and a faint guilt clung to the moments he felt most warmly toward her. Nothing he had ever done was reason for it so that it could only be his awareness of her or of her scandal—her love affair outside marriage, the sudden public knowledge of which had wrought so furious a climax to many lives, including his own. He was disturbed at the fleck of guilt he saw upon himself: the Puritan streak ran more deeply in him than he knew.

  Yet, seeing her run to meet him, he felt a thrust of pure joy quicker by far than conscience or the stagnant lust of war which had oppressed his coming. He leaped down from the cart and caught the hands outstretched to him, and they stood for a second or two, face to face, measuring the differences in one another from when they last had met.

  She must be nearing fifty, but her hair was dark still as a raven, and the lines in her face which he remembered were crossed with new and the lighter ones of laughter. Nothing had marred her high-born beauty: the spacious forehead, dominant cheek bones, the strong, sensuous mouth, features unblunted, delicate still as a young woman’s. She had seemed, leaving America, to be going into exile, but he knew from the sight of her now she had instead come home.

  She drew him close and kissed both cheeks. A mixture of fragrances clung to her, a faint perfume and cinnamon so that he supposed she had come running from the kitchen.

  The two boys were gawking down at them from the cart. Elizabeth said, “Take the doctor’s luggage to my cottage, John. Then you and Herbert may go to cook. She has saved your tea for you.” To Marcus she said, “You will have the cottage to yourself which I daresay you won’t mind. I’m told the army is no place for privacy.”

  Marcus said, with something of his old wryness, “The army is no place. It’s a condition.”

  But Elizabeth suspected very soon that her guest was in his way as much a victim of the war as any of her numerous brood of English children. It was not that he said so little—he would sit a long while blinking his eyes rapidly, a trait that reminded her of his father’s tic, thus of his father, of Alexander and the wife he had married, and summoned up so many associations that the silences obliged her, too; and if their eyes chanced to meet he would smile self-consciously like an old man who had been unable to hold the thread of conversation—but that when he did speak his words seemed an abrupt and deliberate diversion lest she say something intimate, lest she mention his family.

  She would not say again she thought that tragedy befell only the unhappy marriage. If ever a marriage had been made in love it was her daughter’s and Marcus’s. She could remember him the night she was sure they had fallen in love. At Alexander’s ball. Martha had brought him to her and introduced him, her voice high and trembling on his name. Proper as the nuns who trained her she was, and Marcus diffident but wise, a young man in a dress suit which did not fit him, but which somehow made him look the better for the wearing of it. She had thought then that here was an incorruptible man, and she had been very proud of Martha whose adored father, for all his piety and exactitude in material things, was corrupt of spirit. Now Martha waited for word. To her Marcus’s silence must be inexplicable because she knew he was not dead. There were so many things in her life Martha had had to endure without understanding, pity the child of a loveless marriage. Ah, but she had a child of her own, conceived in love under God’s Own Eye! Elizabeth was at very tongue-tip of mentioning the pictures of Tad she had received but a few days before when Marcus, seeming to anticipate, said,

  “That English child looks tuberculous.”

  “A number of them do, but I’m supposed to have gotten them in time. I’m hoping you’ll go over them for me, Marcus. There’s a man comes down from Belfast when he can, but he’s harassed as a shrew’s husband, poor man, and not a very good doctor even at leisure.”

  Marcus smiled. “Down from Belfast. I’d have said ‘up’.”

  “That’s our contrariness. We’re all far-downers up here.”

  Marcus got up from the tea table and went to the window where he stood a moment. Elizabeth made neat the things on the tray and scraped the bit of butter he had left back into the jar. Returning, he glanced up at the dark portrait hung over the mantel. It was only in the late afternoon light it was distinguishable as the picture of a man.

  “Who is it?”

  “My great-grandfather, Lord Peter McMahon. He built McMahon Manor—dark and windy as himself from what I’ve read of him. I dare say it’s true from what I know of his descendants—and mine.” She had but one—two, counting the chi
ld, Tad. But Marcus did not rise to the bait.

  “Is there a Lord McMahon now?”

  “No. My father gave up the title. He was more a Gael than a nobleman.”

  “That was when you went to America, at that time, wasn’t it?”

  “You might say I was exported then.”

  “You belong here, Elizabeth,” he said, willing enough to talk of her if not of himself and his.

  “One belongs where one can love,” she said.

  “Yes!” He agreed with such fervor she was distressed at having probed the wound without yet knowing its nature.

  She joined him at the window. “Look at them out there,” she said, retreating further within her own experience. “Hungry little beggars, every one. The need for love is the child’s need. Some of us never outgrow it, but the time comes for most of us when it’s surpassed by the need to give love; whatever we do in response to that need is the best we can do, I am convinced.”

  Marcus nodded, blinking, studying the end of his cigaret until it began to burn him. He rubbed it out on a brass scuttle and threw it into the grate. “When do you want me to look them over?”

  She suppressed a sigh. “Morning would be best, I think, so they won’t have nightmares. You’ll have to convert some of them, you know.”