Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Marcus nodded, smiling.

  She spread her hands. “Then why do you not go home?”

  He laughed. “Soon. Very soon.”

  “For me they say there is a plaque, a memorial—you know? On a street where there was shooting where I used to live. Now it is spring and people will put flowers there. I will go and look at it, and I will weep because I am not dead and everybody thinks so. What will I say if somebody asks me who I am?”

  “You will have to tell them. We may all have to tell who we are when we get home. Or try.”

  “But you they will not ask. You will only have to tell them if you want to,” she said with French exactness.

  “You are quite right,” Marcus said. “It is not the same.”

  “I have no money,” the woman said, “and they say Paris is expensive. I do not even know if my husband is alive or dead. And I tell you, I do not know which is better, he is alive or dead. I feel in my heart he was a collaborator. Is it better I know or I don’t know?” She looked up at him with sudden cunning. “Your wife is faithful, do you think, doctor?”

  Marcus smiled. “What makes you ask that?”

  She shrugged. “It is the same thing. Do you have any American dollars you could give me, doctor? On the black market in Paris I could get a great many francs for them.”

  Marcus did have ten dollars. He had got it from an American medical officer on his personal I.O.U. He would have liked to keep it for an emergency until he could draw his own back pay. But he gave it now to the Frenchwoman. Before his eyes and the eyes of a platoon of army engineers, she lifted her skirt and tucked the money beneath a garment next to her skin and fastened it there with a safety pin. Some of the soldiers whistled. Her face became vivid with a smile.

  “How did you get a safety pin?” Marcus asked, amused.

  She gave a throaty laugh and for just an instant he could see her as she must have been before the war: pretty, earnest, but sometimes full of mischief. “But I asked for it, too, that is all.”

  She left him and walked back through the town, swinging her satchel at her thigh. He had thought her over forty when first they spoke. Now he realized she was still in her early twenties. And whether or not there was a word of truth in her story, he would never know.

  Marcus flew home aboard a hospital plane, the patients in his charge bound, almost to a man, to a lifetime of invalidism. They would not die of their wounds; that was about the only thing any of them was sure of. And at that, it was more than the men still fighting in the Pacific could be sure of.

  “How does it feel to be going home, doc?” one of the boys asked. His maimed hands were hung up in improvised traction for the flight.

  “Great,” Marcus said.

  “Me, too,” the youngster said, and Marcus was ashamed because there was no irony in the boy’s words.

  He called Martha as soon as possible on landing, and from the moment of hearing her voice, his need for her brooked neither barrier nor delay. Let the dead bury the dead; time and again the words ran through his mind on the last of his homeward flight. Truly, he felt he had done little, but he did not see how he could have done more. Looking at his watch as the plane circled the Traders City airport, the thought occurred to him that no matter where one was coming from or by what mode of transportation, he always seemed to arrive at Traders City in the morning. That the sky was blotched with dirty-looking clouds by the time he got on the ground only served to make him feel more sure that he had indeed come home.

  Martha, watching from the garden where from dawn she had been walking up and down, saw the cab drawn up in front of the house. She thought she had felt its turn into Oak Street. She ran to the edge of the terrace and then called out his name, her voice seeming to shut off in her throat. But he heard it and came directly to the terrace. She waited at the far end. Marcus, too, stopped. Tad came out through French doors and looked from one of them to the other. They all ran at once then, but when the child put his arms around Marcus’s legs and hugged him, Marcus broke down completely and did not try to hide his tears.

  6

  “ONCE I CAN GET down inside things… Do you know what I mean?” Marcus sometimes tried to explain the peculiar peripheral sensation, not entirely unlike his wartime nightmare of watching himself at work.

  “It’s going to have to wear off,” Martha said, “like a scab on a sore and it’s not going to help to keep picking at it.”

  “That’s very good,” Marcus said, but it wasn’t really. One felt a sore, picking at it. He did not seem to be able to feel anything, only an aloof distaste for the city and the work once so dearly familiar.

  The truth was, and perhaps deep within his own subconscious Marcus knew it—indeed it might account for his inability to submerge as it were—very little he saw outside his own home pleased him. The whole of Traders City seemed flat, dirty and insular. Only the lake front and The Avenue were in any way beautiful. That a city untouched by war since the Indian raids should be so squalid and ramshackle irritated him. It went no deeper: just irritation.

  Nor did his first visit to Mount Clement Hospital enable him to break across the moat of disassociation. The hospital path was littered with cigaret butts, the shrubbery clogged with debris, candy wrappers, cigaret packages the brand names of which he had never heard before: Lucky Strike green had gone to war. The brass fixtures on the doors were tarnished, the windows smudgy, the painted walls a coffee yellow. At the admissions window—the visitors’ reception desk had been removed, he noticed—he waited his turn to speak to the girl on duty. Observing the name T. M. Hogan on the staff roster he gave an instant’s wonder as to whether there were another Dr. T. M. Hogan in the city. The attendant, a new girl since his time, had got herself a bad case of sunburn. Otherwise there was nothing sunny about her. Few places of business—and what hospitals weren’t that? Cash and carry, you might say—tolerated such rudeness to the customers. Or maybe they did now that there was a war on. Inevitably he thought of England where good manners were a part of national survival.

  He was startled by the abruptness with which the girl gave him her attention: a twist of the head and a “Yes?”

  “I wonder—is Redmond or MacQueen on duty?” One was the head nurse, the other in charge of surgery.

  “Who is your doctor, please?”

  She very nearly intimidated him, assuming, he supposed, that he was about to launch a complaint. He might even look to her like a lawyer, not like a doctor obviously.

  “Doctor Hogan,” Marcus said with a self-conscious grin entirely lost on her.

  “I suggest you talk to Doctor Reiss who’s taking his patients. If you will please step around the corner to the switchboard, the operator will give you his office address.”

  “What about Hogan?” Marcus could not resist asking.

  The girl sighed, having already turned away from him. “He’s in service. There’s still a war on, you know.”

  “Doctor Hogan is out of service, for your information, miss.” Marcus left, immediately feeling foolish. Out of service. He probably was at that.

  But because something had got to him a little deeper than mere irritation, he went along that same day to see Reiss in the office. He knew Reiss had taken new offices for them in the same building, and he had vaguely thought it a good idea. Bergner’s old office which Marcus had inherited was out-of-date and small. But riding up in the elevator to the twenty-sixth floor he suffered a new discomfiture, something very nearly claustrophobic. The whine of the mechanism made him nauseous: the sound was like that of a plane going into a dive. The nausea passed as soon as he got out of the elevator. But he could feel the cold sweat and the traces of strain must have shown in his face.

  Reiss took him by the arm and forced him into a chair.

  “I got a bit nauseous in the elevator,” Marcus said.

  Reiss brought a flask of brandy from the desk drawer and poured him a shot of it. Marcus drank it down.

  “I know the feeling,” Reiss s
aid. “It’s the rush—all at once.”

  Marcus nodded.

  “You must not hurry to come back. It is better to do it gradually. Perhaps only consultation at first. I do not mind if our arrangement stands as it is for a time longer.”

  “You’ve been very generous.” Marcus roused himself and looked about the new offices: a lot of glass and air, thank God.

  “No more than you were to me.” Reiss smiled, his white teeth glowing. He was as tanned as an Italian fisherman. “I have looked forward to this day, Marcus. I have been greedy to show you how far I could go from a small beginning. When a man starts over at my age—well, you will find out. It is like that, isn’t it, starting over?”

  Marcus felt himself on the verge of floating off into space. He took hold of the arms of the chair. “Yes, it’s like that.”

  Reiss, assuming that he was about to get up, proposed to show him the offices. Marcus followed him submissively. Reiss had taken the top floor suite that spring at a cost Marcus was sure considerably exceeded their old rental. Instinctively he felt there was a higher tone to the patients now, too. And Miss Sorenson, the secretary Marcus had inherited from Dr. Bergner, was retired. True, she had reached a fine age for it. Miss Kohler, her successor, looked efficient, sensuous, and not particularly anxious to meet him.

  “You are not afraid of heights?” Reiss inquired. He was opening the casement doors off the waiting room onto a small, cement-railed outdoor balcony.

  “Not even of depths,” Marcus said.

  Reiss looked at him reproachfully. “There are no debts. I would not do that without your consent. The X-ray equipment, that will be something else, perhaps …”

  “Depths, I said, not debts, Nathan. Heights and depths.”

  “Ah. I misunderstood. Come and see the view.”

  Marcus stepped outside. From the balcony one could look down over the graceful spread of green park, the sweep of the drives and the hairpin curves approaching the bridge. Beyond was the lake, the horizon unbroken. One remembered that horizon, having forgotten many things about Traders City.

  Reiss took him by the arm. “From here you can signal me in an emergency,” he said, his tone jocular, “with a red handkerchief. That is it: with a red handkerchief. I have a boat down there.” He pointed to the basin. There were not many pleasure craft in the water except sailboats.

  “A sailboat?”

  “What other kind? Mechanical devices—they are not boats. I hate to think what it will be like after gasoline rationing ends. They will foul the water. Like beetles.”

  Reiss leaned over the balcony rail and looked down at Lake Front Avenue. “It is like a child’s game, the buses and the cars and the people.”

  Marcus had no wish to look down. “How are the Muellers, Nathan?”

  The two men moved back into the office, the breeze that was almost constant off the lake following them indoors.

  “I have not seen them for months. Julie is a doll, but getting so fat. Too many children. And Erich, you will be surprised: an old man, a grouch, doubled up like a toad.”

  “I am beginning to feel like a grouch myself,” Marcus said. The word ‘doll’ hung in his mind, an irritant.

  Reiss used it again a little later speaking of Martha.

  Marcus said, “I wish you wouldn’t use that word ‘doll’. I don’t like it.” He thought then how unlikely he would have been to comment to anyone else on his selection of words. “I’ve still got nerves. I suppose that’s what it is. Forgive my bad manners.” He lit a cigaret.

  Reiss looked at him sympathetically, his heavily lidded eyes limpid. Marcus was even more uncomfortable. He would have preferred Reiss to show him less patience.

  “It takes time to come home, let me tell you.” Reiss spoke as though he, too, had come home. He stepped to the door of the inner office where the secretary was working. “Will you please set up the Morgan X rays, Miss Kohler?” He returned to Marcus. “I want to know what you see in these pictures. There is a peculiar progress of malignancy.” He looked at his watch. “Then I must go.”

  Marcus knew the consultation was a gesture but he went along with it. Afterwards he said, “What did you do with the old office equipment?”

  “I sold it. There is a great demand for equipment because of the war.” He laid his hand upon the arm of the X-ray machine and fondled it sensuously. “Beautiful is it not? You are a priority, you know.”

  “Me?” Marcus said.

  Reiss nodded. He put the folder of X rays into his case and instructed Miss Kohler on his schedule.

  “Hooray for me,” Marcus murmured, and through his mind began to run the words: hooray for me, to hell with you, hooray for me, to hell with you. It took a severe effort of will to shut them off.

  Reiss said, “Why don’t you come with me to the hospital? Put on the mask and gown. You don’t have to do anything.”

  “That’s a fine idea—but not today, Nathan.” He did, however, sit for a few moments in the office that was now his. Reiss had given him the better of the two.

  The desk drawers were empty except for the Manual of Operative Surgery. Marcus took it out and opened it. His name was on the flyleaf in his own handwriting, “Rodgers University, School of Medicine.”

  Reiss came to the door. “I must go now, Marcus.”

  Marcus picked up the book, rising. “I think I’ll take this along with me.”

  “If you wish, of course,” Reiss said, “but I sometimes refer to it.”

  Marcus put the book back in the drawer. Reiss, he knew, was using it as a therapeutic symbol. He would have something more recent of his own.

  They went down in the elevator together. Marcus’s distress did not recur. Reiss and he shook hands when they reached the street.

  “It is up to you to say when you are coming back, Marcus. I am in no hurry to change our arrangement though I should like a short holiday if you agree. You will know I have done well in your absence. I have made important contacts. You understand they are yours also. I shall recommend you if you do not know them. But you must see people yourself. They forget. Let me tell you, how they forget. They must be made to know they are not without obligation to you. It was you who went to war, not they, not I.” Almost as an afterthought he added: “Perhaps you will come sailing with me Sunday morning, you and Tad? The boy can swim. Have you seen? He loves the water.”

  Marcus had not seen.

  “Like a puppy dog,” Reiss said. He was about to go on his way. He turned back and asked, “Why did you ask about the old equipment, Marcus?”

  Marcus shrugged. He did not quite know himself.

  Reiss shook hands again and settled an expensive Panama on his head. “Au revoir, mon confrère.”

  Marcus stood a long moment on Lake Front Avenue looking after him. Then he wondered what had ever happened to the dog Tad had asked for with his first words. He could not remember mention of it again in Martha’s letters. The whole thing was a fable, he decided, intended to charm a displaced parent. Standing on the Avenue, the long blocks of elegant shops stretching as far as his eyesight carried, haberdasheries, perfumeries, the showrooms of the future in automobiles, housewares, all to be had—just come in and get it as soon as there wasn’t a war on. He thought how much akin his present feeling of futility was to what he had known during the Depression. He had not been able to get inside anything then either. He looked at his hands, the fingers yellowed with nicotine, and he remembered the night Dr. Bergner had steadied his own palsied hands in front of that very confident young man, Thaddeus Marcus Hogan, M.D.

  But instead of taking command of himself, Marcus found it more and more of an effort to leave the house unless he took Tad with him. From day to day he put off such things as visiting the Brandon Clinic. The Clinic, he told himself, would not have changed. It was built on a firm foundation of charity and dedicated to the proposition that the poor we shall always have with us. That it might not have changed became, in his present condition, even more of a deterren
t to him. He and Tad roamed every block of the University campus. He pointed out the windows of the room in the social science building where Jonathan had taught for many years, and standing in the shadows of Anders Hall, he remembered the night of his encounter with the students and the policeman. Now he too was one of the veterans, entitled to the patriot’s sinecure. Reiss had said it: Let them not forget. And remembering still further back—to his own boyhood—he could hear Jonathan’s invocational reading to him of Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-war poems … “Have you forgotten yet? … Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.” Now that was curious: “Look down.” Dreams were founded on funny things. He looked up the poem and reread it several times. The line he liked far better now: “Look up and swear by the green of the Spring that you’ll never forget!”

  There was not a museum in the city he and Tad did not visit, not a lagoon on which they did not cast bread and watch for fish. The roses faded and the gladioli bloomed. The snowberries turned brown on the bushes but refused to fall. People were impatient, resentful, many of them that the war had not ended with Hitler. As Marcus overheard a woman in the streetcar say: “Sure, the war would be over long before the duration if it wasn’t for the politicians in Washington.”

  Martha wondered if she were jealous of his and Tad’s comradeship. She had tried during Marcus’s absence not to allow the child to become too dependent on her. Plainly she had succeeded. But her own days were full and without its having any specific peaks, she was enjoying what might be called her ascendance in the family. She knew Marcus admired her garden although, like her father, he made no gesture to help in it. She and Annie put up strawberry, raspberry and gooseberry jam, red currant jelly, string beans and tomatoes. And she had learned to cook—to make vegetables taste almost as good as meat. They opened a bottle of wine every night, she and Marcus, and talked around many issues without ever getting to the heart of them. She did not ask direct questions. As a child she had been taught not to by her mother: people would tell what they wanted to tell. Only in fragments did she learn anything of his visit to her mother—as on the night he got down a poetry anthology and read her G. K. Chesterton’s poem Wine and Water. “I knew I had that wrong,” he said.