The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Very much. It’s so—lived-in looking.”

  Marcus nodded. “It gets lived in now and then.” He grinned and glanced at his father, more than a little self-conscious. “When my brother and I were youngsters, the whole neighborhood lived in it.”

  “It reminds me of mother’s studio.”

  In the wake of the little silence Marcus let hang, his father said, “Well, I guess we’ve passed muster, Marc. When do you sail, Martha? You don’t mind my calling you that, do you? I don’t know exactly what you’ll call me. Some people call me the Red Jonathan. It makes me feel like a pope, which I doubt is what they have in mind. Do you go to Italy?”

  Marcus was amused. He sat back. His father was trying to put forward the worst and the best of himself at once. He must feel this ordeal rather keenly. It was quite some time since Marcus had brought a girl into the house, and on those few occasions his father had felt it incumbent on him to make himself scarce rather than personable. Martha sat in the middle of the couch, very erect and yet relaxed in manner at least, her hands limp in her lap. There was a serenity about her that gave him much pleasure in observing, almost the quality of a painting, an inner stillness.

  “We sail on the third,” Martha said. “Paris first, then Rome.”

  “French boat? You’ll be fortunate if they don’t strike before you’ve landed. I can’t just figure out what’s happening over there now. The Communists are throwing their weight around. It’s the first time they’ve got anywhere near the government. Presumably they’re supporting the coalition, and yet they seem to be doing their best to hobble it.”

  Leon Blum had just come to power in France, heading the government known as the Popular Front.

  “Papa says it may be dangerous for me to go to school there next year. They closed all the convent schools in France once, the government, you know.”

  “The French have a way of doing things once they would never do again, and which no one else would do even once. They are culpable, violent, wretched. But their revolutions are always their own.”

  “Do you admire them, Mr. Hogan?”

  “No, I don’t admire them. Not at this stage anyway. But I love them … and I don’t think the convents will be locked up again. It is thirty years later. And, you see, a good number of French Catholics, particularly the intellectuals, are quite a ways to the left these days.”

  Martha said, very seriously, “You wouldn’t consider my father left, would you?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Hogan said gravely. “Left of Herbert Hoover, perhaps.” And they both smiled.

  Martha soon decided that she liked Mr. Hogan. She tried not to be distracted by his tic. He spoke to her as to an adult, and he did not explain something unless she asked him to. Marcus was not at all interested in politics, not even in world affairs.

  The Muellers were not at all what Martha had expected. He was a jolly man who talked with a buzz, as Marcus had said, but his wife was so young—at least twenty years younger than him. And their language was remarkable. Mrs. Mueller generally spoke English, but as soon as the conversation got any way complicated, she lapsed into French, begging an explanation from her husband. His French, with its Austrian accent, Martha decided, was another language altogether.

  Every once in a while that afternoon, Martha and Jonathan Hogan found themselves looking at one another, and when their eyes met, they would smile, both feeling rather shy, but curious—and engaged. Martha thought of the word, not meaning it to have any relationship to a promise of marriage. They were engaged—with one another.

  Mrs. Mueller kept talking about Paris, the places Martha must go, the people she must see. “So many friends, they will take you under their wing. Jonathan, that is right? Under their wing?” She cocked her right elbow in the air and fanned her left hand beneath it. She was all gesture when she talked, all vitality.

  Hogan smiled and nodded. “Very good.”

  She tossed her head. “I am speaking American, Erich!”

  “Whatever you are speaking, darling, it is music.”

  “Ho! You hear, everybody?” The Frenchwoman laughed and again addressed herself to Martha. “At our house everybody talks. Four little girls. And me. Erich says I am number five little girl.”

  Dr. Mueller nodded gravely and, without speaking, made the shape of little moving mouths with his fingertips bunched together. Everyone laughed.

  His wife said, again to Martha, “You are an artist, no? Marcus says you paint very good, very nicely. I have some friends I will write to—Montparnasse, Erich? You remember Henri and the others?” She turned to Marcus. “They are a little bohemian. Only a little.”

  “I also want to give you an introduction,” Mueller said. “I want to give you the name of a doctor, Miss Martha.”

  “That’s much better,” Marcus said.

  Mueller shook his head. “No, I am serious. It is very important to know a doctor when you are a stranger in a country. The nuns are very dear ladies. I admire them. But they are more sentimental than any other women. If the doctor has the nice beard and kind eyes—that is all they have to know about him. Doctor Reiss is sometimes in Vienna and sometimes in Paris. I think you said your mother is with you this summer?” Martha nodded. “Good. You will visit socially first. That is always the right way.”

  So many things within the compass of that afternoon were strange to Martha, marvelously strange, because this was Marcus’s house, these his family friends, this his way of life. She looked earnestly on the portraits, on the old French prints in the dining room, the books, “medical and unmedical,” Jonathan Hogan said, “poetic and unpoetic, knowledgeable and nonsensical—a library got together by random scratching at the cribs of learning.” Making the speech, he had in hand a highball glass, and when Martha smiled her appreciation, he bowed gallantly, and without spilling his drink.

  And Martha shook hands with Mrs. Turley when Marcus introduced them. She had heard him speak often of her with great affection, but it was the first time in her life she had ever touched a Negro.

  Then there came a moment at dinner, with laughter and talk around them, when she and Marcus looked at one another across the table, and saying nothing said all there was to say: their love, their good-by, and then looked down to their plates and went on eating. Nothing after that had any reality for Martha: it was all like a ceremony, like getting a medal, or like the May procession in which one walked with many but thought apart. She felt no thrill, no pang thereafter; it was all ritual, the good-byes here and at the railway station. And her memory would go back always to that moment; whenever she wanted Marcus most before her, all her life, it was that moment she tried to conjure.

  16

  “WE SHALL NOT PLAY any truth or consequences, you and I, on this trip, Martha.” They were in their first full day at sea, and the gulls still pursued the ship, reminding Martha of Marcus, and the poem he often misquoted—so beautifully—about the white birds flying. The sun was warm and yet it was comfortable to have the deck blankets over their knees. In all directions there was only the undulating sea, whitecapped, opaque, endless, fathomless. “We are two women on a voyage of discovery,” her mother went on. “We might have met at the dining room table. We shall do absolutely nothing on this trip, either of us, that we don’t want to do. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Martha said.

  Her mother laid back her head. Already the sun was burnishing her cheeks so that her dark eyes seemed to glow the more. “We shall probably do a number of things neither one of us wants to, only because Thomas Cook thinks we ought to. But it’s best. Everyone knows Mr. Cook is very respectable.”

  “Is there really a Mr. Cook?”

  “If there isn’t, let us not tell your father.”

  Martha laughed.

  “I don’t expect to have any flirtations, do you?” her mother said.

  Martha thought for a moment. “I should not like to commit myself on anything so theoretical.”

  This time her mother lau
ghed and laid her hand for a moment on Martha’s where it rested on the arm of the deck chair between them. “When I was a little girl, we used to be taken to the continent at least once a year, nurse and all. Only the older people seemed to enjoy it. I loathed it. None of the parks in Paris that I remember had any grass in them. The green grass is terribly important to the Irish. I don’t suppose you remember your Uncle Philip?”

  “Not very well.” She could remember his taking her, during his visit to Traders City when she was very small, to see a rodeo but what she remembered most about it was that he wore his carpet slippers, having walked a blister on his heel. “Mother, do you feel that you’re going home, because we’re going to visit Ireland?”

  “I suppose I do. It will all be changed, of course, and so am I. But in a way, I’m going home. What did I just say about truth and consequences?”

  But in the cathedral city of Chartres, less than a week later, where the Fitzgeralds stayed an extra day, omitting Versailles, Martha came to realize how much more there was to this journey for her mother than she had begun to understand. They were having dinner at the hotel and with it a bottle of wine. Her mother was eating very little, a piece of bread with the wine. She would smile at Martha if their eyes met, more to ward off intrusion, the girl thought, than to welcome anything she might say.

  Suddenly she asked, “Do you miss Marcus very much?”

  “Yes, in a way.”

  “But you enjoy writing to him?”

  “Oh, yes. I look at everything in a special way so that I can tell him about it.”

  “It makes things more beautiful, doesn’t it?”

  Martha nodded. She wondered if her mother were not wishing she was in love, herself. How terrible not to be in love when love was yours to give. She had danced on shipboard and been very gay; she had led the Grand March with the captain at the farewell ball. But now that they were alone her gaiety was not spontaneous. Both of them started to speak at once, and stopped.

  Her mother said, “Would you mind if I were to leave you for an hour or two? Take your time and finish dinner. I want to go about a bit alone. We agreed to that, didn’t we?”

  “Of course,” Martha said. “I like to be alone sometimes myself.”

  And with that her mother left the table. Martha ordered cheese, even though she did not like it very much, and then dessert. Marcus liked cheese, and she thought about ways to describe it to him. She began to enjoy herself enormously, a sort of exhilaration at being for the moment quite on her own. She even speculated briefly that perhaps her mother was meeting a gentleman whose acquaintance she might have made on the boat. Martha numbered the possibilities: they did not come to much. But she was not shocked at herself.

  She was sitting near the window. The sun had set but the street lamps had not been lighted yet. She wondered if a man would come around with a torch. She saw her mother leave the hotel, wearing hat and gloves, and walk without a backward glance down one of the narrow, cobbled streets that angled, as did most of the streets of the town, toward the cathedral. She walked out of Martha’s sight.

  Martha finished her dinner, signed the check for it, and left the dining room. People were just beginning to come in, tourists who made the most of daylight and observed the French habit—while they were out of Paris, anyway—of lingering over dinner until bedtime. She went outdoors and walked down to the river where a little boy was fishing. They both waved at a passing barge. A woman was doing her laundry aboard it. A party of ducks swam up and started scolding the fisherman. He scolded them back. Martha understood one about as well as the other. She returned to the hotel and went up to her room, climbing the winding staircase rather than go up in a birdcage, as she presently wrote to Marcus. “The elevators all look like birdcages and I’m always afraid of being hung up in one like a parrot …”

  Her mother returned before she had finished the letter, and did not interrupt. After making her toilet, she sat down herself to letters and accounts while Martha made ready for bed. When she was propped up there with the guide book to Avignon, their next stop, and a French roman policier which she could read with the help of a dictionary, her mother came to the side of the bed and looked down at her as though she had news to tell which she could no longer contain. At Martha’s invitation she seated herself on the edge of the bed.

  “Martha, I thought I should tell you—you will know it in the morning anyway—I’ve been to confession tonight.”

  Martha could not precisely remember when she had last been aware of her mother’s going to confession. It was a long time ago. She said, rather startled and startlingly, “In French?”

  Her mother burst out laughing. Then very quickly, the laughter turned into tears. Martha drew her into her arms—she was not reluctant—and held her until the weeping was past.

  “I’m very happy,” she said then. “Thank you, my dear.” Getting up, she put her hand beneath Martha’s chin, lifted it, and bending down, kissed her low upon the cheek so that the edges of their lips just touched.

  It was not the best of summers in which to travel Europe, nor yet the worst. Some tourists were given to sudden, frantic activity, as though it might soon be too late to see or do some things, and this despite—or perhaps because—of the urgent reassurance of the natives. But rebellion had broken out in Spain and was within the week called civil war. In Avignon, the Fitzgeralds overheard an American priest, who was conducting a tour just re-routed out of Spain, tell all within his hearing that there was such a thing as a just war. The Republican government of Spain had—to say the best word for it—tolerated the burning of convents, the sacking of churches. (Republican in the Old World sense of Red Republican, he explained, not the Kansas-Alf Landon variety. Everyone laughed.) Martha, for some reason, kept mixing up the Italian Marshal Balbo with the Spanish General Franco.

  They had not seen many towns in France, of course, when they reached Avignon, but both Martha and her mother took a special liking to the people. They marked what they supposed a Spanish influence—color, bullfight advertisements, the sharper, less nasal sound of language, and the prominent bone structure in the people’s faces. As was becoming their habit, the two of them broke away from their camera-toting comrades, forsaking to them the austere castle of the “captive” popes, and walked the narrow, winding side-streets. The children stared at them frankly and generally without smiling, pulling back into darkened entries as they drew close.

  A vendor of oranges called Elizabeth Fitzgerald “señora” and spoke to her in Spanish until she replied in French that she was not Spanish. To which he cried, “Oh, American!” which comment on her mother’s French made Martha giggle. They bought an orange apiece.

  “I wonder if he thought we were refugees,” her mother said afterwards. They had heard there were refugees crossing the border, but had not seen any, at least to recognize.

  Martha supposed a refugee did not necessarily wear rags.

  “I have a feeling they are not very sympathetic here with the rebels,” her mother said.

  “But look at all the churches, mother.”

  “I was looking at the poverty. And they don’t beg—isn’t that interesting?”

  In Italy they came upon beggars who begged as a way of life, a trade, beggars suddenly arrogant if one refused them, boastful of an empire, the Ethiopian jewel now secure in the king’s crown. And in Rome, Martha first heard the marching. She awoke one morning in her hotel room, high above the Via Veneto, to the sound of cheers and rhythmic clomping—the hard, fierce footfalls of tens of hundreds of military boots. Her mother was already at the window, gazing down.

  “They’re so ridiculous—looking at them from here. One should always look down on soldiers. It puts them in proper perspective.” And she went back to bed, trying first to ring for breakfast, but no one was answering bells anywhere.

  Martha could see the white-jacketed staff on the steps below, the boys saluting over the heads of one another. All up and down the street, as far as she cou
ld see, the same scene was re-enacted, the cafe tables and chairs thrust back from the sidewalks, and the laughing crowds tumbling outdoors, half-dressed, half-awake, waving, saluting, many of them in the Fascist manner.

  And when the soldiers were gone, the tables and chairs came out again, and the multi-colored umbrellas were opened to the sky. Martha loved Rome. Even the beggars were handsome. The romantic Christ seemed to be everywhere. But it was in Rome that she was for the first time really homesick.

  They reached Vienna toward the end of July, going up from Venice through Trieste on the overnight train. Several members of the tour predicted Martha would love Vienna best of all. She and her mother somehow belonged there: it was the happiest city in Europe. Elizabeth was amused: of all the characteristics credited to her over the years, gaiety was not among them. Martha, riding from the station behind a fat-necked, talkative driver, and looking out on wide boulevards, the baroque-fronted buildings, rows upon rows of trees, remarked, almost wistfully, “I do love to waltz.”

  It sounded like a small girl’s counseling of herself that despite its strangeness there was bound to be something at the party she would like. And it did seem from the outset that all Vienna had determined this also. It was not merely the charming manners the good hostelers managed for visitors. There ran that week through much of Austria a festive spirit, rejoicing sometimes near hysteria. Chancellor Schuschnigg had just signed an agreement with Hitler whereby the German threat to Austrian autonomy was removed; Austria would be Austria still.

  They stayed at one of the fine hotels within walking distance of the old city and nearer still to the fashionable shops. Their accommodations were the nicest thus far: a bedroom each and a parlor-writing room where among the awesome furniture, gilded and brocaded chairs, a carved desk and an ivory inlaid card table, was a piano, a piano which was in tune. Standing, her left hand still gloved, Elizabeth played a few bars of a Schubert etude with her right. Martha had been looking out on the park she could see beyond the corner of the Museum, and turned from the window in time to see her mother close the lid upon the keys. Martha went up and opened it, saying, quite authoritatively, “No.”