Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  2

  TAD WAS OBSERVED EARLY by his teachers at Rodgers University to have the makings of a scholar. He contrived to keep his bookish predilection from his fellow students and largely succeeded. They knew him to have a sharp tongue, a good allowance, and an indifference to authority just short of insubordination—assets all in a community of college freshmen. He roomed alone, ate in the less fashionable places, but occasionally stood a feast that won him favor with both gourmet and glutton, a distinction not always possible among lower classmen.

  The campus of Rodgers was vast and uncrowded, the school heavily endowed especially in land. The agricultural college and experimental farm adjoined the main grounds adding miles of comparatively secluded walks. Tad was reminded, exploring the well-hedged pastures and fields, of England. He could have gone quite a long time without striking up particular friendships within his college: he supposed until winter. He did not repulse overtures of other boys, but he was slow to make them himself and tended to be suspicious of anyone who sought his company. He was slower still to accept the friendliness of one or another of his teachers. There he could see the cliques forming. He came very soon to understand that a teacher was measured among other teachers by the quality of the boys he attracted. Too much camaraderie among faculty and students was not approved; too little was disapproved.

  Tad, from his first day in modern European history, was the follower of one man at Rodgers although it was some time before the man himself became aware of it.

  Lawrence Covington was starting his first year as a full professor and was for the first time in his life earning a salary beyond his needs. He was not in as much awe of his new position when among the students as when in the faculty lounge. Certain men spoke to him there by name for the first time and not once during registration week did he hear himself referred to as “Young Covington.” But in the classroom the change was barely perceptible. Nor did he change much his opening lecture to the predominantly freshman class.

  And this was the lecture that won him Tad’s devotion.

  He started off, after a slow silent appraisal of the new faces, his gray eyes humorous as he took off his glasses: “Gentlemen, history is about people. First of all, it is about people. Remember that. We are not going to be able to understand what happened at, shall we say, the Congress of Vienna, unless we get to know M. Talleyrand, his aches and pains, his vanities, even a little about his love life: just a little. After all, we shan’t be making a movie. We can afford perspective. So then, we shall study men, statesmen and generals, possibly their mistresses, occasionally their wives. And if I seem to suggest to you that women had more influence on history before they had the vote than since having it, believe me, it is not because I am a bachelor—which I am. It is rather because I believe suppression to be the beginning of all history. When women were politically suppressed, they moved men. In some cases, mountains might have been easier. But when man moves, history begins …”

  Covington was the only person about whom Tad wrote home in any detail. There were a lot of “bloaters” in the class, he wrote, and explained that bloaters were fellows who blew hard when they didn’t know the answer. In that way some of the teachers were persuaded to blame themselves for not having been clear. Not “Cov”. “You know, I’ve never heard it explained that way before,” he would say. “I wish you’d write it up for me—say three or four hundred words.”

  Covington’s students gathered occasionally in his rooms and all the talk did not run to history. He was good for advice on the girls at the “female academy” in the next town, on wines, vintage cars, omelets and poetic meter. On special occasions he would loan records. But he was one of those rare and fortunate people who did not have to call a halt to things, even with freshmen. “He never laughs out loud,” Tad wrote again, “but you can see in his eyes that he got the joke, maybe a little ahead of everybody else. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t laugh aloud.”

  But for all that Tad was writing home about him, it was not until a football Saturday in early November that Covington first saw him as other than a reserved youngster with a good head on him. He was sitting in front of Hogan and his family at the Homecoming game. Hogan was one of 480 freshmen, and conspicuous in the grandstand only in that he looked even younger than a college freshman, and Covington had begun to feel that there was nothing younger. What came to recommend him to the teacher’s attention was his apparent indifference to the game of football.

  After the welcoming roar when the team came on the field everyone stood in silence for the band’s playing of the Rodgers alma mater. Then Covington heard the man he presumed to be Hogan’s father say: “No college spirit, Tad? Martha, I do not understand your son.”

  The boy said: “Team, team, team! How’s that?”

  His mother gave him a weary reproach.

  “Such beautiful men,” the older man said. “Graceful. Take the glasses, Martha. Look at number seventy-two. Look how he runs! A ballet dancer.”

  “He’d rather be dead,” Tad said.

  Covington cast him an amused glance over his shoulder. The boy looked at him blandly, unconspiratorially. His was a lone game.

  “I do not yet understand American prejudices.”

  Covington had been trying to place the older man’s accent. A bit guttural, but rather precise in pronunciation.

  “Young men are jealous of their masculinity, I suppose,” the woman said.

  “Why, if they are men?”

  Throughout the first half of the game Covington amused himself by speculating on the man’s origins and business. Prosperous, athletic, possibly an importer. Covington hoped of French wines! He made himself available for an introduction at half time.

  “Mother, may I present Professor Covington? My mother, sir: Mrs. Reiss.”

  Mrs. Reiss’ beauty struck Covington as being so deeply feminine as to suggest an inwardness, a sort of self-cloistering one often associated with the women in early Renaissance painting. Demure was perhaps the word, and truly he could not remember having applied it before. Yet she spoke with utter ease.

  “My husband, Dr. Reiss, Mr. Covington.”

  Covington shook hands and wondered why he had not surmised the man to be a doctor. He knew instantly: doctors were not supposed to look so prosperous!

  “Football is a great athletic, Mr. Covington. American to the shoestrings. I like it.”

  “Is this your first game, doctor?”

  “Except for television.”

  “Hot dogs, anyone?” Tad said.

  “He doesn’t like it,” the doctor said, “and him an American born boy. He should want to carry the water bucket.”

  “I’m subversive,” Tad said. “Have a hot dog, Nathan.”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “It’s American.”

  “I wish you would not be so flippant, Tad,” his mother said quietly.

  Covington did not like the boy’s attitude toward his stepfather. It was more than a little insolent to a man who, Covington would have said on first observance, did his best to please everyone. That would get to be pretty cloying in time, of course. But a man close to twenty years older than his wife had to do a lot of pleasing.

  A moment came when Martha was able to speak to the teacher out of Tad’s hearing. “My son often mentions you in his letters, Mr. Covington. He admires you very much.”

  “I’d never have known it,” Covington said gravely.

  “I suspected that—which is why I’ve told you.”

  Her simple directness further intrigued the teacher. Nor did she follow up by pressing for information about the boy as would virtually every mother he knew having paid him a mother’s highest compliment. Instead, she asked: “Are you a Rodgers alumnus yourself, Mr. Covington?”

  “Harvard, I’m afraid.”

  “It will do,” she said, her eyes humorous. “I was thinking you might have known Tad’s father.”

  “So Tad is second generation Rodgers?”

  �
�Third,” Martha said. “His grandfather Jonathan went here, too. And then to Harvard.”

  “The economist?” Covington asked.

  “Yes. Did you know him?” Her face became vivid with the sudden smile.

  “I attended a number of his lectures at London University after the war. A very fine gentleman, God rest him.”

  Again with Martha Reiss the unexpected happened: she did not, turning almost at once to involve Tad and her husband in the conversation, mention the association she and Covington had just discovered.

  It fell to Covington himself to tell the boy of it some time afterwards when they had become friends. Their friendship did develop out of that afternoon, or the quicker for it. And one of the things Covington first tried to understand was Tad’s resentment of Nathan Reiss. He was surprised himself to discover that Reiss had been in this country for so long, an Austrian refugee. Something in his manner suggested a more recent arrival. Tad, when Covington mentioned it, said it was part of his phoniness: something he put on for strangers to impress them with his differentness.

  “Don’t you see, sir,” the boy said, “he really loathes Americans. That’s his snobbism, pretending to love football. It really sticks him that I won’t fit in, that I won’t cheer like a rooster and strut with the team.”

  “You’re mixing metaphors—among other things,” Covington said. “Don’t you think you’re a little young to judge a man?”

  “No. It’s time somebody did.”

  Another surprising thing he learned about the Hogan-Reiss relationship was that Tad was only five years old at the time of his father’s death. He could have known him scarcely at all, yet he spoke of him quite often. Suddenly he realized that the boy’s notion of his father was actually a composite of father and grandfather, and Covington wondered if just possibly his mother did not entertain a similar admixture of memory.

  Speaking of his father one day, Tad said: “It’s funny, you know, what you once said about judging a man? Nobody ever hesitates to pronounce it on a good man, do they? When he dies they think only of the good in his life and sing him hallelujahs. That way his death doesn’t have any meaning because there was so much meaning in his life.”

  “Don’t you think your father’s life had meaning, Tad?”

  “I’m not so almighty sure it had a lot, if you want to know, sir.” He looked at him suddenly. “Do you think a man can do evil, doing good?”

  “I think the good a man does can be turned to evil purpose.”

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  “Why ask it then?” Covington said testily.

  “I mean a teacher would have to say that, wouldn’t he?”

  “I try to rarely say things that have to be said, Tad. More often than not they’re the very things that should not have been said at the moment.”

  Presently the boy asked: “Do you know anything about Judaism?”

  “A little.”

  “Are you Jewish?” The question was sudden and with the brightness of hoped-for discovery.

  “No … but I once wanted to marry a girl who was.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “It’s a long story—with a short ending. She wouldn’t have me.”

  “Because of your religion?”

  Covington laughed. “Because of hers. And I wouldn’t call it religion actually. It was after the war and there was Israel in which she was much more interested.” Covington found himself then telling the boy quite a lot about that time in his life, his involvement in a cause and a culture which had sounded a response at the very core of his New England heart.

  “I wish I had a cause like that,” Tad said, “something I believed in with all my heart.”

  “It can’t be manufactured,” Covington said. “It’s got to grow from seed. I found that out.”

  “Yes!” Tad said, and then confirmed what Covington already suspected, his turning back to the same old obsession: “Nathan’s a Zionist.”

  “So?”

  Tad said: “Mr. Covington, do you know Hebrew?”

  “A smattering of it.”

  “Will you teach it to me?”

  “If you’re interested in the language, why don’t you take it as one of your electives next year?”

  “I’d have to do it under the Divinity School.”

  “Contiguous but not necessarily contagious,” Covington said.

  “Maybe I will.”

  “To make more sport of your stepfather? It’s not good, Tad.”

  “No. I don’t think it’s for that.” He fell silent for a few moments. They were sitting in Covington’s study at the time, the logs in the fireplace sending up an orange-red glow that illumined their faces while the winter daylight faded leaving the rest of their bodies, the furniture, the books, the whole room in shadow. Tad bent down, untied and retied his shoelaces. Finally he said, trying to make it sound off-hand, “Nathan isn’t the only Jew in the world.”

  Covington understood then, and was moved in a way he had not been before by this deep, if sometimes devious boy. Tad, from trying to find the worst in one man, he realized, had set himself to trying to find the best in others of his kind. There was a sort of anguished splendor in the youngster that made the teacher feel humble, glad to be a teacher. He wanted to pay him some casual compliment that would commend without embarrassing him, which Covington decided would satisfy himself more than the boy. He held his peace and let the fire make the only spangled noise in the room.

  But more credit was due Covington for the social as well as the intellectual balance in Tad’s development that year than the teacher would have presumed to accept. It was his custom, going into New York on free days to research a book set in Holland, to take three or four of the boys with him. Whenever possible he included Tad among them. They would catch an early train, separate at the Pennsylvania Station, Covington to work at the library, the boys to go to the U.N., a museum or library, or just to be on their own for a few hours in the city. They would meet again for a late lunch generally downtown, for Covington’s fondness for lower Manhattan was contagious among his students. Tad loved to walk the old streets, Pearl, for example, still the shipwrights’ market place; Fulton Street—fish and cheese; Elizabeth Street on an Italian festival; Chinatown; old cemeteries, St. Paul’s and Trinity, St. Mark’s in-the-Bouwerie. On Saturdays the Broadway and Wall Street skyscrapers, all but deserted, seemed like spiraling ghosts of a city built upon a city and abandoned while a more primitive life went on at the level of their foundations.

  Sometimes Covington and his charges stayed in town for theater or a concert and caught the last train back to Rodgers.

  Twice during that winter Tad met Nathan in town for dinner, and once he stayed overnight, having a room adjoining Nathan’s at the Imperial Hotel. On these occasions they got on well: they always seemed to get along better alone. Tad suspected this to be part of his mother’s reason for not coming East. She often promised but never arrived. It was not until late spring that Tad received the invitation that Nathan promised he was likely to have from Madame Schwarzbach, as the Baroness preferred to be called in America.

  Tad read her note aloud to Covington: “I have invited your mother and Nathan to spend the week-end. I hope it will be convenient for you also to be my guest. If you wish, you may bring a friend…”

  “It’s a fabulous place, Mr. Covington,” Tad told him of the mirrored bathroom. “You stand there, you know, looking at yourself like a Bernini fountain.”

  Covington grinned.

  “She says I may bring a friend. How about it? Mother’s going to be there.”

  “Thanks very much, chum, but I’m not the sort of friend your hostess has in mind.” It was never dominant in Covington’s thought, but he was aware of a small self-cautioning voice where Tad’s mother was concerned. It was not a matter of self-flattery to see a possible flight the boy’s imagination could take, feeling as he did about his stepfather.

  Tad himself had, at least since mid-year
, been looking forward to an invitation to Madame Schwarzbach’s: a week-end in New York. He laid out a daytime schedule for his mother and himself—the Frick Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, theater: a week would have scarcely sufficed it. Then a letter came from Martha.

  “I have badly hurt my ankle,” she wrote a few days before she was due, “and Nathan thinks it better that I do not travel just now …”

  Tad showed the letter to Covington. “Do you believe it?”

  “I believe it,” the teacher said matter-of-factly. “I don’t see that there’s any choice but to believe it.”

  “What kind of logic is that?” Tad turned on him, furious with disappointment. “That’s my mother’s logic. I do have a choice and I don’t believe it. There’s some other reason. There has to be.”

  Covington could see the boy’s progress toward social stability abruptly bogging down. He would have liked at that moment to have been able to say a few words to his mother. He persuaded Tad with some difficulty to go anyway, his hostess having telegraphed that he was still expected.

  Tad went into town after his last class on Friday. He woke Covington out of a sound sleep at seven o’clock Saturday morning with a phone call. “I was afraid you might get off on the first train,” he apologized.

  “Afraid is not the word,” Covington said.

  “Mr. Covington, I was talking to Madame Schwarzbach about you last night. She’s having one of her affairs tonight—you know, I told you—all kinds of people.”

  “Like whom?”

  “I don’t know, painters, theater people. Will you come? She said she would have called you herself, but she couldn’t very well do it at seven o’clock in the morning, could she?”

  “I don’t like to think so,” Covington said.

  “Will you come? There’s a Vermeer painting in the library and a Kalf in the dining room. And she knows a lot of people in Holland.”

  “What time?” Covington said.

  “Seven. Wear your dinner jacket. And Mr. Covington, you’re invited to stay over. Please do. It’ll be late and we can talk. You’ll find her very interesting.”