Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  No one said anything for a moment.

  Then Sylvia said: “You make it sound like dropping the other shoe.”

  “Well, perhaps it is. This suspense now—will there be war? Will there not be war? It is holding back the whole country.”

  “Not that you’d notice it coming home from abroad,” Winthrop said. “Do you have a television set?”

  He looked at Martha. She smiled and nodded regretfully.

  “Personally,” Sylvia said, and Winthrop knew the clarion ring to her voice, “I think we should wait until we have a new bomb, this thing Truman’s talking about. It’s supposed to be much more efficient.”

  Reiss said: “You are pulling my leg.”

  “Frankly, Nathan, when you talk like that, I’d like to wring your neck.”

  Nathan smiled, looking at Winthrop. “Your wife is so charming in pique. I am afraid I often provoke her purposely.” He laid his hand on Sylvia’s for an instant. “Forgive me.”

  Sylvia drew her hand away, not abruptly, ostensibly to use her fork, but she said, “I should think that having lost a friend with such pronouncements, you’d think twice before setting them off again.”

  “Mueller is a fanatic. He is going to get himself into trouble with the government. Scientists do not belong in politics.”

  “Who do you think does, Nathan?” Winthrop asked.

  “Men who make it their business,” Reiss said amiably. “It is enough for doctors to be doctors, soldiers soldiers, physicists, physicists.”

  “It’s an interesting theory,” Winthrop said, “but it doesn’t exactly jibe with the history of this country.”

  Reiss smiled. “I am afraid I do not know very much about the history of this country, alas—only enough to have got my citizenship papers.”

  Winthrop said, “But you should know something of German history.”

  Reiss looked at him quizzically. Then he said, “I see what you mean: Hitler was a politician?”

  “Something like that.”

  Martha asked, “How long is it since you’ve seen Jonathan, Alexander?”

  “It’s a long time,” Winthrop said. “I intended to stop over in London, but Sylvia took care of that: four children to manage—in Greek.”

  “Poor Alex,” Sylvia said.

  “I understand he’s got a book under way, a mercantile history … of something medieval.”

  Martha smiled in spite of herself. “The Merchant Adventurers.”

  “You can see, Nathan,” Winthrop said dryly, “I’m also an historian.” To Martha he said: “The last time I saw Jonathan was at a party we gave, an enormous affair before Sylvia came home from Naples …”

  “I’ve told them about it,” Sylvia said almost rudely. And she had never mentioned it.

  “Yes,” Winthrop said. “Well, that’s what happens when you and your wife travel separately. Whoever gets there first tells all the stories.”

  “If I’ve heard it before,” Martha said, and she could not remember having heard it, “I should love to hear it again.” Jonathan’s letters were sparse and formal since her marriage to Reiss.

  “I was in Naples once when I was very young,” Reiss said. “It was a most wonderful time of my life. I drove a car in a race—I have never told you, Martha. It was the most daring thing I ever did. Me, a nobody, and all those very important people. It was a society affair.”

  Sylvia listened, fascinated in spite of the constricted feeling at the pit of her stomach.

  Reiss said: “Forgive me, Alex. I have interrupted your story.”

  “The point seems to have escaped me,” Winthrop said.

  Martha prompted: “Jonathan.”

  “Ah, yes. Do you know an Italian writer, Marcello Ruggeo?”

  “Bitter Wine,” Martha said. “I’ve just read it—a strange book. Quite beautiful, I thought.”

  “He’s a friend of Jonathan’s, you know. He was a partisan, or at least in sympathy with them during the war. It was quite a party we had—I remember Sylvia’s saying that all we needed was the king and we could have held court. Well, Sylvia—being Sylvia—invited Ruggeo and Jonathan who was down from London for a few days. And I, much to my own chagrin afterwards, invited Alberto Gemini, the American banker…”

  Sylvia sat, her nerves taut as the fork she held in her hand.

  “I’ll never forget,” Winthrop went on, “he arrived with the Baroness …” He had forgotten the name. “You had lunch with her, Sylvia …”

  “The Baroness Schwarzbach,” Sylvia said without looking at anyone.

  Winthrop saw that Reiss had turned a yellowish green beneath his suntan; and the vein was standing out on Martha’s forehead. He harkened back then to the story of the patroness he had altogether forgotten in Reiss’ background.

  Reiss moistened his lips. “She is alive?”

  “She was very much alive in 1945,” Winthrop said.

  Reiss began to get hold of the situation. “But of course you wouldn’t know: she was my patroness. I have thought her dead after the Nazis. I saw them taking her away, you know, and I could do nothing.”

  Sylvia felt him to be waiting, trying to compel her eyes. When she did not look at him he spoke directly to her: “Sylvia, she is all right?”

  “It was my understanding that she had spent the war in a villa in Ischia.”

  “But you saw her. You must have talked. She would know Martha. Why has she not communicated with me?”

  Sylvia said carefully: “Perhaps she thought happened to you what you thought happened to her, Nathan.”

  Reiss smiled tentatively. “It is fantastic. She does not know I am here?”

  “She knows.”

  “Then,” he said, all the bravura drained out of him, “she will have thought I betrayed her. Is it so? Is that why you have not spoken to me, Sylvia?”

  “She has other interests now,” Sylvia said quietly.

  “I see.” Reiss sat a moment in silence. Then he laughed. “But of course I see. I am a conceited fool.” He looked from Winthrop to Sylvia and back to Winthrop. “So. She is in society again. Good.” And finally he spoke to his wife: “Dear Martha, do not look so forlorn. It is a great burden lifted from my mind. Shame on you, Sylvia, for not telling me. Did you think I would mind? All that part of my life is ended now. Now it is more happily ended than I ever dared to hope.”

  An agony of embarrassed silence hung over the Winthrops, primarily for Martha to whom privacy was sacred.

  Martha said: “What about Jonathan, Alexander?”

  “Oh, it’s a part of history now,” Winthrop said, rising above his own oppression. “It was awkward at the time, and in a way it came to a head that night. Jonathan was on the side of his friend, Ruggeo. I was caught between the Right and the Left. Not for the first time, by the way …”

  Sylvia managed to smile, but all the lines in her face showed the effort it cost her. “I think Jonathan was wise to stay in England. He would not like what’s happening here today, McCarthy and all.”

  “He and my Uncle Philip play chess when my uncle is in London,” Martha said. “He used to play chess with Erich, but God knows my Uncle Philip is no Erich. He is an Anglo-Irishman who likes to hunt, to listen to a good sermon, to pinch the bottoms of pretty girls, and to sit in Parliament saying ‘hear, hear!’ at mention of the Empire. Uncle Philip is … Establishment. He has managed to restore the McMahon name to very near where his father undid it—when he joined the Gaelic partisans.”

  Winthrop, for all that he admired Martha in this remarkable—for her—speech, was saddened by it, too. “And your mother?” he said.

  Martha smiled. “She’s very fond of Jonathan.”

  They moved into the living room for coffee where Tad came and politely said good night to each of them.

  Afterwards Sylvia told her husband the Baroness’ story. Winthrop admitted he had also heard the part of it concerning the execution of her Nazi lover.

  “When did you hear it?”

  “A
day or two after the party. Count Bordoni told me. Do you remember him?”

  “I remember his wife,” Sylvia said.

  Winthrop was about to go into his dressing room. Sylvia crushed out a cigaret she had just lighted. “I’ve smoked too much tonight.”

  Winthrop said: “Why do you think Reiss married her?”

  “Martha?”

  He nodded. “Possession or position? Or both?”

  “I think he loves her in his fashion,” Sylvia said.

  “She’s living off the top of her head. You know that. All surface.”

  “It’s better,” Sylvia said.

  “Better than what?”

  Sylvia laughed dryly. “I was going to say better than nothing.”

  “Do you think he married her to make sure he’d get the directorship of the Children’s Plan?”

  “Alex, I’ll tell you the God’s truth: I don’t see that it matters. I just don’t see that it matters now.”

  “Perhaps not. But I was thinking—a man who would do that would do almost anything, wouldn’t he?”

  6

  IT WAS A NOTABLE winter, 1950-51, for Nathan Reiss. In January he performed his first major surgery in almost five years. To celebrate he, Tad and Martha went to the Boat Show at the Armory and bought a twenty-foot sloop to be delivered that spring at Fox Lake where they arranged to rent a cottage for the summer. Fox Lake was an hour and a half drive from Traders City and less than a half-hour from Lakewood. Since the war it had become the most fashionable of the resort lakes. In the old days it had been rather more notorious, a hideaway for bootleggers and the cabaret society they entertained there in gaudy splendor. In some of the elegant “cottages” surviving since the twenties, secret panels could still be found where once were concealed caches of contraband whisky.

  It was hard to tell whether Nathan or Tad was the more excited about the boat. Outdoors they got along well together, both of them fiercely competitive athletes. Indoors, where they were exposed to each other intellectually, explosions were fairly frequent. “Martha, I cannot understand your son,” was Reiss’ frequent complaint. Tad had reached the age of answering everything with a shrug. He went to the Baker School which was far more permissive with him than was Martha. He was advanced for his age and knew it, and he was in rather too frequent a habit of bringing home problems to Nathan in science and arithmetic which in the end he could solve better than could his stepfather. The prospect of the boat, however, brought amity indoors as well as out. They drew sketches, studied riggings and heaven knows what, filling Nathan’s study with magazines and books on the subject.

  Tad was given open sesame to the study even when Nathan was not home, and there one day Martha found him liberally educating himself on matters other than nautical.

  “Would you like to be a doctor, Tad?”

  “No.”

  “A sailor,” Martha said.

  “I get it,” Tad said, and took the book on obstetrics back to the shelf where he had found it.

  Martha laughed. “No, I didn’t mean that, but I should think with that kind of book you ought to ask Nathan to explain it to you.”

  “I was just looking at the pictures.”

  “I expect when you get to biology it will be time enough to go into the details,” Martha said.

  Tad looked into her face in the penetrative way that always made her fear for what he was about to ask. “I want to ask you something … some day.” At the very last instant he lost courage himself.

  “All right,” Martha said. “Some day you ask it and I shall try to answer it—some day. Shall we see what Annie has left us for tea?”

  But when they were having their tea at the kitchen table, Tad asked: “Was I circumcised when I was a baby?”

  “Yes,” Martha said. She supposed it a matter already explored in the wash room at school. “Your father believed it to be healthier, cleaner. In fact, I think that’s its significance in the Jewish religion, too. I’m not sure. We must ask Nathan.”

  “He doesn’t know,” Tad said. “I asked him.”

  “Then we must look it up,” Martha said. It was not Nathan’s ignorances that surprised her so much as his lack of curiosity. It would have seemed to her that when Tad asked him, Nathan would have proposed to find out at least.

  “He says I ask questions like that on purpose.”

  “Well, I should think so,” Martha said. “On purpose to find out.”

  “He means to find out he doesn’t know.”

  “That’s rather silly, isn’t it? As a matter of fact, I remember now—Circumcision is also called the Feast of the Purification. So that is its religious symbolism.”

  “What’s symbolism?”

  Compared to some of his questions, symbolism was easily explained.

  But Martha herself re-examined another problem in symbolism that winter. She read again Bitter Wine by Marcello Ruggeo. It was the story of a poet who left his wife and children for a woman—a marvelous, dreadful woman of beauty, culture and passion, of many affairs—whom he deluded himself into thinking that by his own fidelity he could save from the devil. He wrote her poetry of praise, of exhortation. He kept vigil with and upon her. She was intelligent, wise, gay—and wanton. She ravished him. And when he was spent, body and soul, she left him for another, a banker who wanted only to boast having added her to his possessions. Yet in the end the poet did not blame her. She had been at best only what he pretended her to be.

  Nathan arrived home one spring afternoon in a state of high agitation. When Martha followed him into the study, he bade her close the door although Annie was the only one home besides themselves, and she in her room off the kitchen, far down the hall.

  “I had visitors this afternoon at the office,” Reiss said. He opened and closed one after another of the drawers of his desk, looking for something which after a moment he seemed to forget. “Two investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation came to see me.”

  He spoke with such ominous portent that Martha very nearly laughed with relief when he added: “They were inquiring about Sylvia.” He looked at her as though incredulous that she too was not shocked.

  Martha said: “What did they want to know?”

  “Did she ever try to recruit me into the Communist Party—questions like that. I did not know things like that about her, Martha.”

  Martha’s tendency to mirth passed quickly. “Do you know them now, Nathan?”

  “I have sometimes thought,” he said, ignoring her question, “but who would believe a woman in her position …” He went on for some time, breaking off his sentences in the inarticulateness of his distress. It was as though he had been deliberately compromised, deceived.

  Finally Martha said: “Nathan, how does it affect you? I don’t understand.”

  “They will be wanting to know if she is using the Children’s Plan for subversion, won’t they?”

  “Subversion among whom, for heaven’s sake? The children?”

  “Do not be so sure of yourself, Martha. I know what investigators are like. They probe and hunt and look for pieces. And let me tell you, many pieces can be put into places they were not cut out for. I know.” He burst out laughing. The sound was not pleasant. Martha waited. “I have just made a very bad joke on myself. It does not matter.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Martha said. “What other questions did they ask?”

  “If she talks politics with me … oh, and yes: did she post a bond for me when I came into this country. That was their final question.” He resumed the search of his desk, this time bringing out his citizenship papers which he glanced through and then put away again.

  “Is that what’s upset you?”

  Again he did not answer directly. “She did not! Erich Mueller … and, thank God, the president of the Bankers Trust Company of Traders City.”

  “Yes, by all means let’s thank God for the Bankers Trust Company of Traders City,” Martha said mockingly.

  “My dear wife,�
� Reiss spoke with exaggerated calmness: “I did not escape the Nazis to be made a dupe of by the Communists.”

  It was, Martha thought, like arguing religion with a fanatic. Or politics with a Communist. Her inclination was strong to drop the matter there, as she always did with him. But she foresaw in it even further isolation within herself, and at a time she felt able to cope with sensibility as well as her senses. “Dear man, listen to me for a moment. If you believe in what you are doing, isn’t that the important thing? Is there politics in straightening a child’s back? Was there politics in your mind when you brought your good right hand back to where you can use it?”

  “That is precisely what I mean, Martha. I do not want to lose everything again for something I do not care that about.” He snapped his fingers. “I am going to withdraw from the Children’s Plan. If I do so now it will mean something. Later may be too late.”

  Martha gazed down at him. She was sitting on the corner of his desk. “It will mean something to whom, Nathan?”

  “You are deliberately misunderstanding me.”

  “I’m not, Nathan. I’m trying to understand you. Does the Children’s Plan mean nothing to you any longer?”

  “That is not what I am saying. Very well. They asked me a list of associations—did I know Sylvia Fields Winthrop had belonged to them. They are on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. Where will I be, its director, an immigrant, when they add the Children’s Plan to the list?”

  “Nathan, you are putting together pieces that don’t fit. I’ve known Sylvia since 1936. In those days I was as politically innocent as you are, as I think you are—and if ignorance is innocence. I’m not sure about that. I don’t know if she was actually a Communist or not. It’s just possible they wouldn’t have her, you know. I think it was Marcus who said that to me once. But after the Hitler-Stalin pact, like a lot of people, she was disillusioned. And really today, Nathan, I think I’m further to the left than Sylvia is.”