Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “The thing I remember best,” Tad said instantly, “was the horse falling into the well.” He climbed onto the bed and sat, Indian-style, his legs crossed in front of him. “Are you sure you want to hear about it?”

  “Of course,” Martha said, but she was by no means sure.

  “Well, there’s this old abandoned well, see, where the barn used to be before it burned down. That was years and years ago. There isn’t any water in it any more and it’s supposed to be all covered up. But the kids were playing there. They make believe it’s a castle dungeon and they got some of the boards loose. Well, the horses get put down in that field to pasture every night, and you see, old Maudie’s blind. She could work just as good as King, because when they got the harness on, he could lead her. And she knew the farm better than even Mr. Walker. But Mr. Walker says she must have got mixed up, or maybe a horsefly stung her. Anyway, she must’ve run that way and she crashed right through the boards and fell way down in. She made a terrible noise then, crying like she was hurt. Mr. Walker ran down and saw what happened and then he got the tractor out and Aunt Sylvia drove her car across the field so the lights would shine, you know? Aunt Sylvia didn’t even know I was there. Then the hired man, Al, came. Al was drunk and he couldn’t do anything right and Mr. Walker fired him. Only later he let him come back to work. Mrs. Walker ran all the way up to the house to call Doc Bailey, and he wasn’t home. So they fixed a great big pulley. And Mr. Walker, you see, was talking down to Maudie all this time, soothing her: ‘It’s all right, Maudie. I’m going to get you out, Maudie …’ And Maudie would just go, ‘Whaa-aanh.’“ He imitated a plaintive whinny.

  Martha set her will, her very soul, to hear the story out. Tad, his eyes shining, leaned across suddenly and with his forefinger traced the vein on her forehead from the hairline to where it disappeared at the bridge of her nose. And even as he did it a look of knowing came into his eyes. He had been told that his father had died in an accident and that his Uncle Nathan had tried to save him, that Nathan had hurt the hand on which he now constantly wore a glove. The row of gray gloves hanging on the wash line every week was a constant fascination to him. But what he had known only vaguely, or without understanding, took on meaning at that moment. Martha saw it happening.

  He asked, “Mother, how did papa get killed?”

  “You know that.” Martha tried to keep her voice natural. “In an accident.”

  “Like Maudie?”

  “In a way, I suppose.”

  For just a few seconds the child thought about it. He asked, “But Uncle Nathan didn’t have to shoot him, did he?”

  “Of course not!” But Martha’s voice cracked. She managed, “Is that what happened to poor Maudie?”

  Tad nodded in the affirmative, but plainly his mind had turned to some private contemplation, and when Nathan came a few minutes later, Tad said, “Go away, Nathan.”

  “Uncle Nathan,” Reiss corrected. “I shall go away if you wish it. It is almost time for us to leave, Martha. Good night, Tad.” He turned and started out of the room, stiffly formal.

  Martha said, “That is wicked, Tad.”

  “Do not make an issue of it,” Nathan said, and going out, closed the door.

  Martha and the boy faced each other silently, Tad’s eyes brooding, his mouth a little puckered as though he were fighting back tears. It occurred to his mother then that he might just be trying to fetch them. She had spent too many years of her own childhood disliking a man for a reason she could not explain, not to sense the danger of this moment, not to know how mercilessly a child uses the emotions of an adult to his own ends. She thought about telling him that he had learned a very adult lesson that summer, how all living things must die. But what a start his imagination could take from that. And what answer could she give to such questions as: why? when?

  She laid her hand on his pajamaed knee. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Do you love Uncle Nathan?”

  Uncle Nathan. The question was not guileless, Martha thought.

  “Differently from the way I loved your father—from the way I love you.”

  He did not press the matter, and after a moment he said, “You better go, mother, or he’ll be mean to you.”

  Martha got up and gave the child a brief but stiff shake which surprised more than hurt him. “Nathan has never been mean to me or to you,” she said. “And I don’t want to hear you say anything like that again, Tad. It’s mischievous.”

  He sniffed and swallowed, not wanting to cry now, his pride severely injured by the shaking.

  “I’ll stop in when I come home and wake you for the bathroom,” she said gently. “Shall I send Annie in to read you a story?”

  He shook his head, then seemed to change his mind. “Does she know David Copperfield? That’s what Aunt Sylvia was reading to us.”

  “Was she?” Martha said. Tad looked up at her. “Now there was a stepfather,” she said—with purposeful exaggeration.

  Tad laughed, gratefully beyond the crisis. Martha laughed too. She kissed him and hurried out, pausing for a last salute from the door.

  It had been a scene neatly ended, much too neatly, she thought, and a situation controlled almost entirely by him.

  Annie met her in the hallway. Nathan was waiting at the door, holding her evening cape. Annie said, “Miss Martha, will I take Tad to the eight o’clock Mass with me in the morning? I’ll be in bed when you and the doctor gets home.”

  “I don’t think so, Annie, thank you.”

  The Irishwoman stood her ground, and she was getting solid enough to stand any ground. “I’ll be making dinner later in the morning, ma’am. It’ll be inconvenient.”

  “I know. We shan’t interfere with your work. Good night, Annie.”

  Nathan drove. He could use his hand in many ways. He could now articulate two of his fingers and his thumb. In the car he said, “I am glad to see you take a firm stand with her. Now if you will do the same with your son. …”

  “I am more firm with him than I am with Annie—and he is not as simple.”

  “He is a child—and he is not his father.”

  “I have never once pretended that he was, Nathan.” Martha’s voice rang out, so vehement was her protest.

  Nathan took his hand from the wheel for an instant and sought hers. He squeezed hard for want of response. She made no sound.

  “Forgive me, my dear,” he said. “I love you so much I am jealous of the dead.”

  Martha said nothing. He used words like instruments. But who didn’t? Who in God’s name didn’t?

  5

  WINTHROP REALIZED WITHIN A week of returning to Traders City that he was not ready for retirement at all as he had supposed resigning his post with the European Recovery Plan. The country and the city had changed, and the change was of the sort a man needed to have seen gradually if he were going to have patience with it: all the new houses were alike and built in rows, their only variation, color. And he had not found that much variation in the State Department where everyone suddenly seemed to be thinking neatly and all in a row. A senator named McCarthy had put the fear of dissidence in them.

  Winthrop undertook in his first days home to “update” himself, a word George Bergner used with the glibness of having coined it. He went over two years’ issues of the Star and the Dispatch and was more disturbed than he admitted to Sylvia to discover how similar in outlook the two papers had become. And the change was not in old Judge Phipps.

  George made a great show of being glad to see him. He took him around the office introducing him as “the boss” to the newcomers, of whom there was quite a number. George himself had got fat and confident. He was not exactly patronizing in his attitude, Winthrop thought, but he had prepared the staff for the boss’ return. It was “yes, sir,” to him all the way down the line, all in anticipation that he would come and go like an absentee owner … which in fact he had been. But something in this not too covert indulgence irritated Winthrop—as much with the
staff as with George, their willingness to go along, to keep in line. Uniformity again: teamwork. Not a maverick in the plant. George seemed to have found himself a formula for success. It made Winthrop think again of what Sylvia said had happened in Lakewood when George decided to discredit Marcus Hogan. Winthrop had thought Sylvia to have exaggerated that—as was her nature when anyone tried to obstruct her single-minded determination. He had thought, having the advantage abroad of perspective, albeit the disadvantage of lacking personal observation, that she had managed the whole affair badly. And, of course, Hogan’s death in the wake of a quarrel with George had, he had supposed, damned George in Sylvia’s eyes out of all proportion to the mischief he had actually done. But an ambitious man, weak-kneed, had to get where he wanted to go on his belly.

  Thinking of George, Winthrop saw exactly what was happening to the Star. It was traveling happily on its belly.

  He resolved not to act precipitously. He needed to know more of what was going on in the country as well as at the newspaper. Bergner seemed to be the unit of strength there, but the more Winthrop observed, the more he felt that George was not actually in power either. The key men on the paper were a closely knit team, men who knew that newspaper publishing was a consolidating business, not an expanding one, men who knew politics and commerce, advertising and their readers’ tender hearts, their patriotic souls and their uncritical minds. Winthrop wondered if George, perhaps without knowing it himself, was not simply the front for these men, their liaison with the publisher.

  He suggested some of these things to Sylvia.

  “It’s all so mad,” she said. “One no longer owns what he owns. It’s become a sort of uncooperative cooperative. One builds when and how the building unions say he can, and when it comes to business there doesn’t seem to be anyone to talk to. The president of Fields’ Machinery doesn’t do anything. I’m not even sure he knows anything. He consults.”

  It was Saturday morning and they were having a second cup of coffee in the small sitting room of the flat, the room he had once called his study. This was the room in which he, George, and Judge Phipps had launched his independent candidacy for mayor of Traders City. He could see the old man yet picking up the phone.

  “Judge Phipps must be over eighty now,” he said.

  He got up and stood at the window. He had often looked downtown from there to the green roof of the International Building where Elizabeth had had her studio. The sky that morning was cloudless, the sunlight putting a harsh glare on the new construction which had interposed between him and the green roof. While he was at the window there passed through the room, through the entire building, a slight tremor that caused a tinkle of glassware in the liquor cabinet.

  “Is that the new subway?”

  “That is grandfather turning over in his grave,” Sylvia said.

  Returning from the window, Winthrop bent down and kissed the top of her head, and moved on to blow the dust from the shield of a fifteenth century Tuscan sculpture. “We ought to get a soft brush for these things, something that won’t scratch the paint.”

  “Perhaps a basting brush like cook uses.”

  “Don’t they make feather dusters any more?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen one in years.”

  “Is Reiss doing a good job for you, Sylvia?”

  She stuck the needles into the wool and put her knitting away. “I think so. Not for me. Not for the children’s sake either, I shouldn’t think. But for Nathan Reiss—from which we all benefit.”

  “What we didn’t want.”

  “I’ve come round to accept it. He’s an individualist in some ways. I’m sentimental enough for everybody where the children are concerned.”

  “Funny—you and Elizabeth with the children. I’ve been wishing lately there was a young Winthrop. I never cared much—for myself or what I came from. But lately …” He shrugged, smiling.

  Sylvia nodded sympathetically. “You know, after Marcus died and Martha was so desperate, I sometimes was afraid that she might die too, and I used to think that if anything happened we might be able to adopt Tad.”

  Winthrop said, “It’s better this way, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sure it is. Nathan has to be given a great deal of credit, Alex. You might say he’s created a new hand for himself. Operation after operation. I dare say he’ll be able to go back to surgery soon.”

  “And we’ll have to find ourselves a new director?”

  “No. He won’t give that up now. It’s become his entree to the important people in medicine. And Nathan likes important people.”

  “By God, isn’t it remarkable the things we can’t do, considering that there wouldn’t be anything to do if we hadn’t started it?”

  “Were you thinking of taking over yourself, Alex?” She sounded like a woman who had exactly the project to start a man off on.

  “No, no, no,” he said to forestall her. “I’ve got a bit out of touch for that.” Alexander Winthrop, M.D.: his mind went back to the days of his column in Judge Phipps’ Dispatch. Reactionary old coot that the Judge was, he was an individualist.

  “No,” he went on, “I was thinking of George, actually.” He stood, his hands in his pockets, springing a little on his toes as though testing his resilience. “I’ve made up my mind, Sylvia. Either I do what I think ought to be done with the Star or I sell it. I don’t like what’s happening to this country. I don’t much like this man McCarthy. And it isn’t himself so much. When I first heard about him I couldn’t take it seriously, but I can see what’s happening, people taking for cover, getting on the safe side, so that pretty soon there’s only going to be one side. You see it more sharply coming home from abroad. But that’s how it is with the paper, too. But what to do about George. You couldn’t work with him. I wonder if I can.”

  Sylvia resolved not to interfere. This, she felt, Alex must learn for himself. The issue with George so far as she was concerned had been resolved when Winthrop had transferred his proxy as trustee of the Fields Foundation from George to her. George remained on the board of Lakewood Hospital, of course, having been voted his father’s seat after Dr. Albert’s death. But in that capacity he dealt with Reiss, not with her.

  “He and Nathan get along very well together,” she said.

  Winthrop merely grunted.

  “You know that whatever you do will be all right with me,” Sylvia said presently. “In a way, I’ve run for safety too. In the old days, I’d have been on some committee or other. Something happens. It isn’t only money that corrupts—or power. It’s a lot of things. I suppose if one had children, they would be the excuse, just as I’m using a parcel of them now. I always think of the Plan. But what has happened to me lately, Alex, I’ve begun to feel superior to quite a lot of people—to the great mass I used to call comrades in my left wing days. I always wanted what they had and I didn’t, and why I liked them: they didn’t want what I had. Or so I thought. But money seems to be all anybody wants now. Maybe it’s just me that’s getting older. But I don’t think so. I swear to God, when I was young I’d have loved to change places with a carpenter, a farmer, a shoemaker. I’d have loved to make shoes, and oh my God, but I would have loved to make a picture or a poem … I remember being invited into our chauffeur’s flat for tea when I was a little girl. I remember every room: scrubbed and neat, and the cat in the window and a great hanging fern all the way to the floor. I used to make believe I lived there, that I was in charge of all the cars in the garage below. He could play their motors like musical instruments, tuning them, you know? He had merry blue eyes and ruddy cheeks …” Sylvia broke off abruptly, for talking of the chauffeur, she remembered the Baroness and hers. She shrugged. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

  “Probably because we need a chauffeur.”

  “No we don’t, Alex.”

  “I don’t like to drive,” he said.

  “I do.”

  “I know, but you can’t do it for both of us, can you?�
� he said, a twinkle in his eye.

  Sylvia laughed. “Even if I think so, I’m not going to admit it now.”

  That night they taxied the few blocks north to Martha and Reiss’ apartment. There was no joy in Winthrop’s anticipation of the reunion. He could only be grateful that it was not the house on Oak Street to which they were going: that was now part of the Midwestern University campus. Reiss opened the door to them, dark from the summer sun and handsomer than ever, the white teeth flashing in his smile. Shaking hands with him, Winthrop felt the scar tissue with the tips of his fingers, and seeing the man flex his fingers afterwards, he supposed the business of shaking hands to be a part of his therapy. The manipulation of his fingers was something Reiss did frequently, not ostentatiously, but in a room with him you grew conscious of it.

  Martha came hurrying, half-running down the hall. Winthrop opened his arms and she ran into them and hugged him as never, never had she done before. Then he saw the youngster.

  “And this is Tad,” Martha said. “Your Uncle Alexander, Tad.”

  They shook hands and the boy said: “How do you do, sir?” and then: “May I take your hat?”

  He was too well mannered for an American: he would need to have a good right punch with those manners. But when an instant later Tad said: “Hi, Syl, put her thar,” and the two of them shook hands acrobatically, Winthrop supposed the balance satisfactory in a nine-year old.

  Several of Winthrop’s observances through the evening pleased him: Martha was mistress of the occasion, Reiss not its master. Always a reserved girl, Martha was now a woman of such poise as he remembered in her mother. Tad stayed a few moments with them in the living room and then went off to do his homework. Annie served dinner, red-faced as ever at a compliment, heavier on her feet. She deferred to Martha even to the point of asking her: “Will the doctor want the red wine now?” And Tad had called Reiss “Nathan.” But Reiss was a man who could ride with the punches. He inquired of Winthrop what he thought of the hospital and the farm, and whether he approved the shape the Rehabilitation Plan had taken. Did he think the new spy scare was going to make it more difficult for them to process the foreign children? “Always the Communists. I will tell you the truth: I think the world would be better off to drop a bomb on them and have it over with.”