Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  She lay the shawl over the arm of his chair. “Tad looks like Marcus, you know.”

  She was trying to prepare him, he thought, and it made him feel a bit like an invalid. “My heart is sound, Elizabeth. It’s only the structure that needs to be shored up now and then.”

  She smiled down at him. “God knows, I’ve tried to put some flesh on those bones.”

  “As cook says, you couldn’t do it with butter.” He could hear the carpenters at work then, the hammering starting again at the big house. “What are you doing now up there?”

  “I dare say that’s the bathroom on the third floor. There’s a great deal to be done, you know. We shall not have had so many rooms occupied since my refugees.”

  “From all directions,” Jonathan said. He had at some time or other—though he could not remember when—met Sylvia’s brother, Tony, who was coming from France with his French bride. And from America were coming Sylvia, Martha and Tad. “Which of the children around here are twelve, do you know, Elizabeth?”

  She shook her head, and picked up the basket again from where she had set it down to fold the shawl. “It won’t do, Jonathan. There’s no one around here a fit comparison. Tad is precocious, I’m sure. He finished the eighth grade this year.”

  “He probably wets the bed, you had better take care.”

  “For shame, Jonathan.”

  “I don’t approve the forced intellectual feeding of bright children. They’re social, physical beings—not merely heads on sticks.”

  “He goes to one of the best schools in the country, one, if I’m not mistaken, you had something to do with the founding of yourself.”

  But Jonathan’s mind had strayed ahead, or rather back: “I entered Rodgers University at the age of sixteen myself,” he said. “So did Trent.” He chuckled. “Marcus was the slow one among the Hogans. He was seventeen before he could make it.”

  Elizabeth threw open the door of the cottage. “Shall we let some sun in there for a while?” The sunlight seemed to fall on the whole of his thousand books: they looked to be that many. He had come over the year following her invitation, sending along a thousand books for a thousand days, as he had put it, and she had said at the time, “A thousand, you’ll see, won’t be near enough books.” Now she asked, “What time is Mary coming up today?”

  “Not till noon. She has to give dinner to the family.”

  “That’s unfair,” Elizabeth said. “They’ll drive her away, taking advantage.”

  Mary did Jonathan’s typing and secretarial work. She had gone to commercial school in Belfast, and was virtually the only girl on the coast who had found such work north of Larne.

  “I was thinking of that myself,” Jonathan said, slowly getting out of the chair. He stretched himself to the best height he was ever going to reach again. “I just sent young Tom Brennan up there on an errand for me. If he goes about it right, he’ll get a free lunch, and they can smooch on their own time instead of mine.”

  “Aren’t you the cunning one, Jonathan.”

  He did not like the way she sometimes had of treating him like a small child. That was the curse of age: people were not ashamed to look through you and tell you what they thought they saw. He made a rude joke to oblige her concept of him: “Well, I’d rather have her pregnant than not have her at all.”

  He went indoors and settled in the cushioned chair at the large table he used for a desk. He drew the lamp down from the ceiling and lit it, opened his notebook. He sucked on an empty pipe for he was not allowed tobacco until after lunch. There was a question that sorely troubled him almost every day. To give it a negative answer had the virtue at least of setting him to work. The question: Was he ever again to know the company of his peers?

  They came, the American visitors, in a rented car, luggage piled atop it and canvassed over like a gypsy caravan. The farmer’s youngest—and there was always one, barefooted, young enough to call the youngest—ran down from his lookout above the Coast Road, scattering dust and chickens, and singing out like a crier of old: “They be rounding the turn below the pump!” Elizabeth and Jonathan went out on the flagstone walk and waited, and Elizabeth remembered mutely, deeply, Marcus’s coming that way, too. Jonathan looked at her sharply and knew by the sudden lift of her chin what she was remembering for they had often talked of it. Neither of them spoke until the car was bumping along at the bottom of the meadow and Elizabeth said, “We must get some fill for the hollow in the road.”

  Sylvia was driving, and with the car a right-hand drive, she got out the side nearer to Jonathan and Elizabeth. Jonathan remarked that there was still the loose-limbed swing to her of a woman dismounting a horse.

  “Welcome home,” Elizabeth said, looking only at her daughter. There was a long, slow shyness in the movement of Martha and her toward one another and almost a clash when finally they came together in a hard embrace. Afterwards they stood and looked at each other and wept in the midst of laughter.

  Sylvia mediated the moment of diffidence between Tad and Jonathan.

  “Ha!” Jonathan said, the boy already the height of the old man’s shoulder, “it’s a good thing you didn’t wait any longer. I’d have had to look up to you.”

  “Wouldn’t you know him anywhere?” Sylvia said.

  Jonathan tugged at his own ear, a habit that went with his shyness. “Well, I’ll say this: I’d like to!”

  Tad smiled, a bright, sudden smile on so serious a mien, and Jonathan drew him close to kiss his forehead, and then hugged him.

  Martha and Jonathan did not embrace. He put his hands upon her arms and felt her tremble as she leaned close and brushed his cheek with her lips, and that in itself hurt him, that and the flight of her eyes from his. He sensed a reserve far too deep for an old man to plumb. He was past his days of courting. People had to come to him.

  Thaddeus Marcus Hogan, Jr., might not have been his grandfather’s peer, but he was better intellectual company, the old man thought, discovering him day by day, than he had known in quite some time. One of his first questions, looking around the cottage, was, “Do you read all these books?”

  “Perhaps not,” the old man said.

  “It’s just that you think you might,” the boy said, explaining more to himself than to Jonathan.

  “I don’t suppose you still take teddy-bears—or things like that—to bed with you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s something like that.” Jonathan thought he had moved their conversation back several years with that comparison.

  Tad pushed it ahead: “I should think it would be easier to understand a book than a teddy-bear.”

  “Mmmmm. I think you have something there,” his grandfather said.

  Tad had the dark brown hair and the very blue eyes of his father, and sometimes Jonathan skipped a generation in his own mind talking with him. When on one occasion Tad said he thought he would like to be a diplomat, Jonathan said, “I thought you were going to be a doctor?”

  “No. Nathan’s a doctor. I used to think I’d like to be a veterinarian, but I don’t any more. I was just being sentimental, I guess.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?”

  Tad shrugged and drew a treble staff in the dust on the table with his finger. “My father was also a doctor,” Tad said.

  “Yes, I seem to remember putting him through medical school,” the old man said dryly.

  Tad said, “I’ll be going to Rodgers in four years if they’ll take me.”

  “Why shouldn’t they take you?”

  “Maybe I’ll be too dumb.” He said the nonsense and grinned impishly.

  He seemed sometimes a little old man and then suddenly a boy. And he was likely at such a moment, without forewarning, to run outdoors, and perhaps clear across the meadow, scattering the sheep, and he might not come back for an hour or two, or for the whole afternoon sometimes. He had been brought up with a curious lack of discipline in some areas. Jonathan would have thought that Martha would be more likely t
o over-protect him than to let him go wild like that.

  In the late afternoon of such a day, Jonathan might be giving Mary dictation when suddenly she would giggle in a suppressed way—rather as though she had hiccoughs, and he would know the mischiefer was back and at the cottage window making faces in at them. The old gentleman was never fast enough himself to see him.

  Jonathan planned a trick. It was three days in the making and he needed Sylvia’s help. They rigged up a square of unbreakable mirror on a pulley so that it would fall like a window shade when Jonathan released the string fastened under his desk. On the day that it worked Mary very nearly had hysterics, for Tad let out a shriek at the sudden sight of his own grimacing face.

  “Would the gift the gods had gi’ us,” Jonathan said when Mary had got Tad in, “to see oursils as ithers see us.”

  That led him to getting down a volume of Robert Burns’ poems and dismissing Mary for the day. Adjusting his glasses, he read Tad “Tam O’Shanter.” He was again mixing generations, for he could quite literally believe that he was reading to Marcus and the quiet ache he felt within himself was because it seemed that Marcus’s mother had died but recently. “Now, that’s a tale for Hallowe’en,” he said, finishing.

  “I was born on Hallowe’en,” Tad said.

  “Were you? Yes, of course you were.”

  “The kids all call me ‘Spooky’.”

  “Mmmmm. It could be worse, I suppose. In my day it was Stinky, or something like that.”

  “Grandpa Jon, could you and I take the ferry to Scotland and go and see the Robert Burns country?”

  The old man put away his glasses. “You know about that, do you?”

  “Papa used to read “Tam O’Shanter” to me. Now mother does—every Hallowe’en.”

  “Yes, they would,” Jonathan murmured.

  “Could we?”

  “Eh?”

  “Could we go across the channel to Ayre? I have the travel brochure in my room, pictures and maps and everything.”

  “Why not?” Jonathan said. “Why not indeed?”

  After the Fields had come and gone and Sylvia returned to France with Tony and his wife—Sylvia still poking at Bohemia as though there were something in it she had lost in her own youth and hoped still to find—Martha tried at last to take some calculation of herself. Hearing of Jonathan’s mirror trick on Tad she had thought: that’s what I need. But one didn’t see oneself looking in a mirror: that was only the person other people also saw, or the person one hoped other people saw. Always at the end of such self-seeking she asked if the quest was worth the effort. Was she not to others—to Tad, the only one who really mattered—all right as she was? The trouble with living outside oneself, never going inside, as it were, was that whatever there had been inside got more and more grown round as with some spiritual wisteria, and would in time, without ever showing itself again, die altogether. And, more troublous still, it must be assumed that then the outside person would die also, for however much she tried to pretend otherwise, a human being was only one person: one soul, one heart, one body. What duality there was was in the mind only. The essence was one.

  Sometimes in the early mornings, especially on Sundays when Tad would oblige his grandmother by going to Mass with her, Martha would walk out among the hills alone following the paths of sheep and shepherds. She could see the wide blue of the channel waters and, on very clear days, the coast of Scotland like a cloudbank on the horizon. Inland she could see the summer greens, early grain the palest, the hay clover-spotted with purple, and the dark scrubby green of gorse on the hillsides. The cottages sat hither and yon, each of them beneath a twist of smoke, serene as only a North of Ireland Sabbath can be. And she would say to herself: this is what Marcus saw and loved. He might have stayed here by his own inclination, and staying, might have lived.

  Erich had said he was wrong in his nostalgia for the primitive. But Erich was not always right, as he now well knew himself. She did not often see Erich, he and Nathan having quarrelled, but they shared a rare understanding—akin to that she had once had with Jonathan—and a somewhat similar purpose in life: the control of something to the formation of which each had, in his own case, contributed.

  She had not thought Nathan a particularly good man, marrying him, but neither had she thought him evil. A fair question was what had she ever thought evil? The word to her had always been an abstraction, believing as she did, all mortal acts to be subject to mitigation: the catechismic definition of a mortal sin: a serious matter given sufficient reflection and full consent of the will. The closest she had ever come to a personal sense of evil had been emotional, her reaction as a girl to Genevieve Revere. She did not think Nathan evil now: if she thought that she would have been able to choose between her responsibilities: for him and to Tad. Nathan was in some ways a strong force for good—as Marcus had once called him, an instinctively good doctor—so long as it did not conflict with what he wanted. It had become her mission, her vigil, to guide and persuade his wants—even as she did Tad’s—and sometimes to oppose them. Nathan had wanted to quit the Rehabilitation Plan when the threat of scandal over Sylvia’s politics arose, and he had been quite capable, she had realized then, of doing it with all the publicity attendant on the Communist issue. Nor had he seen anything wrong in his contemplated action: he had yielded because she persuaded him. To this day Sylvia knew nothing of it, for the matter passed entirely with Alexander’s death and the subsequent merging of the Star with the Evening Post. But from then on, Martha had taken up her vigil on him. Sometimes he even thanked her when she intervened, and sometimes he would then proceed to find another way of doing the very thing she had forestalled.

  Now, away from him for the first time, she could get some perspective on herself, something she had neither wanted nor dared to do since Marcus’s death. She was startled to discover the extent of her spiritual withdrawal. Never once, she supposed, had she and Nathan touched souls. In the beginning it had been involuntary on her part, Marcus too strong within her to admit any other influence. Now, she held herself consciously apart from him—not physically, spiritually only. She had managed that separation. She doubted very much that Nathan had any notion of it at all. But now it had got beyond Nathan, her withdrawal. She looked out from within herself and then closed up if there were a chance of anyone’s looking in. Thus she could not admit even Jonathan. And she would have liked to let him know about her affinity with Erich. He would understand it—if she could make him understand how she had come to marry Nathan Reiss. For her it was impossible even to try.

  Elizabeth thought she understood her daughter better than Martha understood herself. She had, after all, lived many years in duplicity, but her deception had not been of herself: she had contrived to understand everything. Martha, she feared, was deliberately contriving not to understand some things. She walked out one Sunday morning and waited atop the first ridge to see which way Martha would come through the valley. By the time she appeared the church bells all were silent.

  “I’d have come further,” Elizabeth said when they met, “if only I’d known the way you’d gone.”

  Their eyes met. Martha smiled briefly and said nothing.

  “But I don’t suppose you wanted that.”

  “You were at church,” Martha said, choosing a literal interpretation of her mother’s words.

  “I wonder if you ever miss going to church. I must say I never did—until I didn’t have anything else … Except you.”

  “I didn’t come till much later,” Martha said, a trace of humor in her voice.

  Elizabeth did not deny it: it was so. What she had given to Alexander she had not taken as she then believed from an all but willing husband, but from her daughter. “Did it hurt you very much?”

  “Nothing hurts very much, mother, when you get used to it.”

  Elizabeth drew back for the words cut deeply. They walked in silence for a time, the bleating of sheep and the scuffle of their own footsteps the only intru
sion on the stillness. They came to a pond where two boys were wading, their short pants hitched up to the crotch and their Sunday white shirt sleeves rolled to the armpits. Three other boys watched from the shore, sedately dressed and making not a sound.

  “What are they doing?” Martha asked.

  “They’re looking for duck eggs.” The boys in the water were stepping gingerly as though they were already walking on them.

  “And the others?” Martha indicated the watchers.

  “They’re the Protestant lads. Theirs is a Presbyterian Sunday. Look now. Kevin has one.”

  The boy shot his long bare arm into the water, the motion reminding Martha of a swan’s dive. And indeed his shirttail popped out behind even as a swan’s tail.

  “Will they share with the others?”

  “They will not. Sunday is the only advantage they have over the Protestants. Otherwise, they’re outnumbered.”

  “There are times when I enjoy my present perspective on religion,” Martha said as they walked on.

  “Did you leave the church because Nathan asked it?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t answer me if you don’t want to. I see I’ve asked a question without meaning to.”

  “I left the church because I did not want someone who did not believe in it to join it for my sake.”

  “I suppose he would have had to be baptized in some Christian faith, wouldn’t he?”

  “He offered to be.”

  “How ironic!” Elizabeth said, thinking that Nathan Reiss might have embraced the excuse to become a Christian.

  “I had given up the Sacraments after Marcus’s death anyway. I wanted to hold him but I couldn’t, and I didn’t want anything else.” She said it flatly, matter-of-factly.

  She had been right about the demon love in her dark Irish understanding, Elizabeth thought. “You’ll come back to the church in time,” she said.

  “I don’t know. But I am glad now things are as they are. Tad will have the choice of his father’s way—or the religion he was baptized in—or God knows.” She touched her foot to a toadstool and toppled it, white on top and green as bile underneath. “He’s been a very good boy since we are here.”