The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Don’t be facetious with me. Answer my question: do you mind a search of your family

  Marcus said dryly, “I can bring you a Bible that should save you two hundred years.”

  “I’ll see it, happily. I don’t suppose they had the foresight to enter the unbaptized also?”

  “Beg pardon?” Marcus said.

  “The premature births, stillborns and the like. Very important to my work, and information almost never available.”

  “I don’t really know,” Marcus said.

  “I’ll have you look into my book one of these days, Hogan, when it’s done. A major contribution, I think. Mine, anyway. When the living are dead, some of them would only have been dead the sooner but for me, eh? And for you. Taking out little bits of them that’s gone rotten. But give us a man that doesn’t rot …”

  “That’ll be the day,” Marcus said quietly.

  “Pure-bred stock … why not?”

  Marcus got up and put his coffee cup on the tray. “I’ve got to go, doctor.”

  This might have seemed abrupt to another man, but Bergner was by then so deep in his own thoughts, he was anxious to get upstairs to his study. “I know, I know. Alike, all of you, the new humanists: you go round forever on the treadmill of political equality, eh? Profound believers in the perfectability of man, the part of him you can’t lay hold of—you can’t even prove is there—the soul, the over-soul. But I, who propose to find out what makes a good body, my own son calls a Fascist. What do you think of that, eh? What do you think of that, Hogan?”

  “I think you must have goaded him into saying it, doctor,” Marcus said in George’s defense, although he cared little for him.

  The old man gave his single spate of laughter. “Of course, of course. But a man is what he’s goaded into as well as the picture he poses for, isn’t he?”

  And it was true, true, Marcus thought. In the end, one had to account not for his best, but for the worst he could be provoked into doing. He waited until the old gentleman had gone upstairs in the elevator. Hearing its door open and then close on the next floor, and the tread of the old man’s footsteps, he let himself out at the front of the house. The housekeeper would come presently and lock up. It was hard to feel sorry for George; he was moderately successful, although his success must always hang on that of another man—one saw that, knowing him better. It hung now on whether or not Winthrop won as mayor. But George was a chronic malcontent. So many things in his life, even his marriage, seemed to have been contrived to aggravate his dissatisfaction with his own lot. He was in a number of ways like the worst of his father: the same streak of cruelty was in them both, the need to hurt the better to mend. But there is something terrible in a son who imitates the worst things in his father because he cannot match the best.

  Marcus drove from Dr. Bergner’s to the Fields’s where Martha was waiting for him: they practiced an amusing sort of duplicity on the nuns in this arrangement in that he was seeing much less of her during the evening than they had approved. They assumed, Marcus picking Martha up at six-thirty, he was taking her to dinner—dinner, to be sure, served in candlelight and elegance, for she was not expected to sign in until ten-thirty. Instead, Martha dined with the Fields’s where Marcus joined them at nine-thirty or so. At that hour she would not have been allowed to leave the campus: thus the duplicity in order to meet at all.

  He found the young people, Sylvia, Martha and Tony, having iced coffee on the patio overlooking the lake. A three-quarters moon had risen not long since, throwing its long white shadow across the dark and shimmering water.

  “There never was such a night,” Marcus said.

  Perfumed oil was burning in an urn, driving off the insects.

  “Never,” Sylvia said.

  Marcus drew a chair up near Martha’s and stretched out his legs. Presently, in the darkness, their hands met and hung clasped between them, as indeed their lives needed to hang now: nothing said, nothing promised, the future undefined, the present a precious all and yet itself all promise. Melancholy intruded upon their happiest moments: Martha talked of Europe, not often, but inevitably, her parents having determined that she take her third year of college with the nuns abroad. Already the pangs of anticipated separation made more poignant their every meeting—as would have something else had not these circumstances so quickly smitten them. There is no falling in love without retreat upon discovery, pursuit and wilder flight, done all in a fearful, joyful expectancy of love’s rapturous captivity.

  “Poor Alex,” Sylvia said, “having to spend all his time in the city.”

  “And what about you, poor you, Syl?” her brother said. “He’s going to be mayor when he gets through. What are you going to be?”

  Marcus answered for her, the word coming easily to him: “Tired.”

  Sylvia was working hard at Winthrop’s headquarters. “Isn’t it odd,” she said, “that Tony should be so annoyed with me? And this is the only politics I’ve ever pursued with mother’s approval. The day Judge Phipps came out for him, Alexander became a new man in her eyes.”

  “And an old one in mine,” Tony said. “Old Fogy Winthrop.”

  “Cut it out, Tony,” Sylvia said.

  “What he gets away with by not combing his hair.” Tony ran his fingers through his own in imitation.

  Marcus thought he was showing off, but Martha sympathized with Tony although she failed entirely to see that Sylvia Fields was in love with Winthrop. But then she was accustomed to her father’s excessive loyalty to the man.

  Martha said, “You don’t like Doctor Winthrop, do you, Tony?”

  “Not much,” the boy said.

  “Do you know why?”

  “Yes!” Tony tossed his head. His handsome features, the long nose, the high, curved forehead, shone as the lantern light caught his profile. But his one word hung with no amplification.

  Martha said, “I don’t either, and I wish I did know why.”

  Marcus groped in his pocket for a cigaret.

  Sylvia said, too quickly and rather too loudly, “I called on your father today, Marcus. I thought he might give us something—a few words of support. There are a lot of votes coming of age this fall.”

  “There are a lot of votes never come of age and never will,” Tony said, “and I shouldn’t be surprised if old Alexander gets at least half of them.”

  Marcus said, “Tony, I’ve had my Bergnerisms for tonight. You’re not old enough to spout that kind of stuff yet. I agree with Sylvia. Cut it out.” He shook a cigaret out of the package. “Have a crushed Camel.”

  “Thanks,” Tony said. He grinned sheepishly when Marcus held the lighter for him.

  Marcus winked at him, saying to Sylvia, “What did my father say?”

  “He was gracious as usual, but he said that he was very much afraid he might sink the boat, jumping aboard it.”

  Marcus nodded. His father thought Winthrop would make a pretty good mayor; at least, he would be susceptible of good advice, and if he made it, he would be beholden to forces which would automatically cancel each other out. Marcus groped again for Martha’s hand. “Hadn’t we better go?”

  “I think we should,” Martha said, and held her watch to the lantern light.

  Ten minutes’ drive, a long kiss in the car, and a short good-by on the convent steps. Mother Josepha, that night’s portress, would be waiting to hear exactly what she had had for dinner. Martha would exaggerate the menu and probably the nun would know it, for she would say, “Oh-ho?” and her brows would arch clear up to her coif. She would turn out the vestibule light then and say good night, and she might even volunteer that she would pray for Martha’s intention, although Martha had never asked it. She would go in the nun’s door of the chapel and Martha would get her veil and enter by the students’ door, and at least one of them—probably two—would say a prayer for Marcus’s conversion. Martha would leave the chapel first, and putting her veil away, she would hear the lights being switched off. Pausing to genuflect at t
he open door on her way to the students’ wing, she would see the red glow of the vigil lamp in the darkness and perhaps the glint of the long gold chain by which it hung from the ceiling, and she would murmur quickly, “Good night, Sweet Jesus, my Savior. Good night, Sweet Mary, my Mother. I give Thee my heart, my soul and my life. Keep me from sin this night and forever.”

  Seeing it all in a sweep before her, she came back in mind to the moment, and squeezing Marcus’s hand, said, “Now?”

  Marcus found his father playing chess with his friend Mueller, their heads fairly floating in the smoke of pipe tobacco. Marcus looked down at the board and watched for a minute or two. Mueller winked at him, confident, and Marcus laughed. It had suddenly occurred to him to wonder how Dr. Bergner would feel about a homely, dynamic little man like Mueller who had begot four daughters in a row.

  “How are the girls, Dr. Mueller?”

  “They are blooming,” the physicist said, starting off the sentence with the buzz of his accent. “They send you their love and ask if you are still waiting.”

  “For all of them?” Marcus said.

  “For the choice,” Mueller said. “But no dowry. The dowry I am saving for the one who goes last.”

  “Sensible,” Marcus said.

  “Check,” his father said.

  Mueller threw up his hands and then clapped them together. “Oh, my friend,” he said and made a solicitous sort of clucking, “checkmate.”

  Jonathan Hogan turned around stiffly in his chair. “Now, what was so damn funny when you first came in?” He spoke, of course, as though Marcus had thrown him off his game. It was so common a routine it did not even require an answer.

  Marcus said, “Coffee, anyone?”

  “All you have to do is warm it up,” his father said.

  “How many times has it been warmed up already?”

  “Once or twice, that’s all.”

  “I’ll make a fresh pot,” Marcus said.

  His father was putting away the chess pieces. “The joy of physics,” he said, “of German physics. Did you see that in the paper the other day?”

  Mueller grunted.

  “What was the difference now—between it and Jewish physics?”

  “The German physicists are happy—the Jewish physicists are sad, that’s all,” Mueller said facetiously.

  “I wish that were all,” Jonathan Hogan said.

  Mueller reached for his pipe. “That makes as much sense as what was said, let me tell you. The German researches for the joy of observing the reactions. The Jew makes physics a purely mathematical thought construction—propagated in characteristic Jewish manner.”

  “What does that mean?” said Marcus.

  “I think it means the German works for pleasure—the Jew wants to be paid. What does it mean? Everything. Nothing. It means what they want it to mean.”

  Marcus, going into the kitchen, thought of Martha’s father and his periodic tirades about materialistic scientists.

  When he returned with the coffee, his father asked, “Did you have a decent supper, Marc?”

  He thought for a moment. Bergner was not a gourmet. “Probably. I can’t remember.”

  “You are in love, Marc!” Dr. Mueller cried. “And me with the four girls.”

  Marcus laughed, knowing that he was indeed in love. It gave him deep, deep pleasure to sit as he did now, cup in hand, his legs stretched out, and to think of Martha—to conjure her wide, frank eyes, serious, innocent, curious, changing as their color seemed to, and the sudden smile which fairly went through him every time.

  “When I was your age, I was in love. Oh, my God, I was in love!”

  Jonathan Hogan said, “Erich, when were you not in love? Tell me that.”

  But Mueller had grown quite serious. “Have I been in love since? My friend, I tell you the truth, I do not know. I am so hurt, so … dead when my first wife died. And the little French girl, Julie, she was so pretty, and she liked me, and now the children they all look like her … and sometimes I wonder who I am.” He sat, quietly fondling his empty pipe. “There is a man I would like to see in this country—I would like him to come out soon, before it is too late. He is a doctor of medicine—a surgeon, Marcus … Nathan Reiss. He stayed with my wife night and day and him a young man! He operated twice. Are we not the strange creatures, my friends? If my wife had lived, sometimes we should have spoken of Dr. Reiss. Perhaps. But she died and I remember him more clearly—almost—than I do her.”

  Marcus went upstairs very soon. It was not a comment on human nature that Erich had made at all. As many people blame the death upon the doctor who cannot save a life as honor him for trying to save it. It was simply a comment on Erich Mueller.

  14

  BECAUSE MARTHA VERY MUCH wanted him to attend the annual St. Cecilia Bazaar, Marcus managed it. In the midst of some fairly gawky youths, not a few of whom still bore the scars of adolescence on their faces, he felt a remote sense of tolerance he supposed was paternalism. In his own pre-medical days at Rodgers, he had been a very serious fellow. Gin and politics had been his only vices, and he had now put both of them behind him. The girls one knew in college he had always considered quite apart from the girls one talked about academically. And that afternoon, roaming the lawns and pausing at the raffle booths of St. Cecilia’s, observing the students in their wide, calf-length skirts, he remembered the invasion of the Rodgers campus by the girls from what he and his chums called—in mockery of their fathers who had been even more formal in their fraternization—the female academy nearby. In his day, hemline and waistline had very nearly met. Remembering, feeling the warm June sun upon his back, aware of the high and aged elms and of the solid brick of which the nuns had built their college, hearing laughter near, and somewhere off during a sudden hush the tinkling of a bell, he thought of the way one generation cycled into the next, perpetuating each what became its heritage. Here nothing changed but to better match that which had endured before it.

  Marcus stood among the outdoor exhibit of paintings. He was trying to guess which of the canvases was Martha’s, when a girl said to him, “That’s Martha Fitzgerald’s,” and indicated a landscape with some extraordinarily ominous clouds hanging over a meadow.

  “Oh, very nice,” he murmured.

  “Those clouds were supposed to be light and fluffy—like dumplings,” the girl said. She was herself plump and wonderfully open-faced, the sort of girl he would have expected to see in a meadow, a peasant’s blouse over her large bosom and her brow damp with honest sweat. He would probably discover she was third generation St. Cecilia bred. “It was really a very nice day,” she concluded in critical comment on Martha’s painting.

  “Well,” Marcus said, “dumplings have a way of turning out like that sometimes, don’t they?”

  The girl giggled and fled, but now and then as he moved on, he was acutely conscious of her eyes upon him. He suspected that for a time he was going to show up in her dreams. And if she were to show up in his, it would surely serve him right for such conceit.

  “Marcus …”

  He turned when Martha spoke, and saw the nun with her, a small, bright-eyed woman whose rimless glasses sat on the bridge of her nose so that she had to cock her head back to look up at him. She had a nice smile, her lips closed, and his first opinion was that here was a woman in control of herself and at peace with her world. He knew Martha greatly admired her.

  “Mother, may I present Doctor Hogan? Marcus, this is Mother St. John.”

  She gave him a small hand, her own grasp brief, firm. “I’m so glad you could come, doctor.”

  “Thank you.” He knew from the way Martha had introduced them, from the tone in her voice, that this meeting was the reason Martha had most wanted him to come. Mother St. John was the dean of St. Cecilia’s. His experience with the religious hitherto had been entirely among the nursing orders who tended, on the whole, to have been recruited from working class families.

  “Shall we find a place to sit for a few mome
nts?” the nun said. “Have you had refreshment, doctor? Martha will bring you tea, perhaps?”

  “We are to have tea with my mother in town afterwards,” Martha said.

  “Oh, yes. I’d forgotten.” She led the way among the trellised roses to where the garden furniture had been set out. “Please smoke if you wish, doctor. You don’t smoke, do you, Martha?”

  “No, mother.”

  “So many of the girls do. I am going to recommend a smoking room one of these days—not because I wish to encourage the habit among them, but if having to walk a mile in the dead of winter to find a place of concealment does not discourage it, one might doubt that a smoking room would matter one way or the other—except to the dignity of the college.”

  She would be very strong on dignity, Marcus supposed, and modern in her outlook. Martha had said so, but he had nonetheless felt that a medieval aura hung about all members of a religious community, and vaguely he approved it—as most assuredly Mother St. John would not, he soon discovered. She remarked in the train of a conversation Marcus immediately forgot, alert as he became to her meaning, “I should not think anything done solely for its own sake to be entirely good—whether it be art or prayer, philosophy or the study of ancient Persia. So many people, I am told, study and translate among the ancients today because they cannot abide the superficialities of our times. I think this rather terrible: one must use the past as a guide, not a crutch. Don’t you think so, doctor?”

  Marcus rubbed the back of his neck, thinking. “I think—Mother St. John—that anyone who needs a crutch is going to find one. I realize that is not a direct answer to your question.”

  “When I was a child,” the nun went on, her hands in her lap, loosely one within the other, and with the sun catching the glitter of the small gold crucifix on her ring, “I had a teacher—a sister of another order—” Marcus caught the twinkle this brought to her eye; it disappeared quickly, “—who always used a pointer in class. It must have been several feet long and at least an inch thick at one end. I remember she would say, ‘Now, look at the blackboard, and I shall go through it again.’”