The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “He didn’t try very hard,” Martha said.

  Reiss said, “How do they say it in Brooklyn—now she tells me that?”

  Again laughter.

  “Did you like Brooklyn, Doctor Reiss?” Louise Bergner inquired.

  “It was difficult for me to tell, Mrs. Bergner. You see, there is the language barrier.”

  Others were amused, but Louise said, “You speak English beautifully, doctor …” Then she added, “Oh, I see what you mean.”

  It was, Martha thought, much to his credit that as the evening progressed, Nathan gave much of his attention to Louise Bergner. And she had need of it as did no one else of the women who might have gladly accepted. Her husband’s contempt of her was ill disguised, a relationship Martha found agonizing to observe. Louise fairly shone in the reflected glory of Lakewood’s popular refugee.

  Jonathan was persuaded by the man who had introduced himself as Charlie Forsberg to accompany him to the Trophy Room. He was affable with the drink and as he put his arm through Jonathan’s, the latter thought of the Charlie Chaplin movie, “City Lights,” and the millionaire who, drunk, adored him, and sober, threw him out.

  “There are some of us old-fashioned enough,” Forsberg explained having ordered a double Scotch, “to want our whisky straight and our champagne with the ladies.”

  Jonathan took bourbon.

  Forsberg, he would have said, was a banker. He lacked the rough cut of most men on the Exchange or in industry. Having made his guess, he would not have then been surprised to learn that his companion was a meat packer. A generation had done wonders of refinement to the heirs of those dynasties.

  Forsberg touched his glass with his. “Jonathan Hogan: the name’s familiar.”

  “I teach at Midwestern University.”

  “Ohhh,” Forsberg said, the prolonged sound of understanding. “That one.”

  “That one,” Jonathan said, and sipped his whisky.

  Forsberg was a long moment in contemplation of his own glass. Then he looked up, squinting, probably in reaction to Jonathan’s tic. “I’m an old radical myself, believe it or not. You wouldn’t believe that, would you? Look at my fingernails.” He held up a hand, the carefully manicured nails of which had been buffed to a polish. “I’ve been twenty years growing these nails, twenty years getting the coal dust out from under them. I got my start in life stoking furnaces in the steel mills. How do you like that?”

  Jonathan smiled, as much amused in a grim way at himself. Now he knew who Forsberg was: President of the steel company whose local plant Jonathan had proposed to do his bit to help strike before he was “immunized” by the Red charges at the University. The strike had been one of the bloodiest in Traders City history.

  “Do you know Clarence Darrow?” the steel man asked.

  “I’ve met him.”

  “There’s a maverick. Like yourself. If it wasn’t for my wife, we’d be the best of friends to this day. Not, mind you, that she thinks there’s anything wrong with him. It’s the people, you see, he takes up the cudgels for.” Forsberg ran his finger along the rail of the bar. He called to the bartender for a towel, wiped his finger on it and showed the man the dust. To Jonathan he said, “I’m a fanatic about dust.”

  With his next drink Forsberg’s reminiscences became more confidential. “I started out a Populist. Remember them? Oh, by God, they were right! Those were the days. But let me tell you, the man who opened my eyes—what’s his name—Norsten Theblan?”

  Jonathan grinned. “Thorstein Veblen.”

  “That’s the one. Theory of the Leisure Class … A man’s instinct for workmanship. I never forgot it. That’s what God put us here for, isn’t it? Workmanship. And now look at me, a goddamned medicine man. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “I think so,” Jonathan said. He had had occasion to lecture on Veblen himself, but it had been a long time since he had heard a lecture on him, however inchoate.

  His companion nodded. “In 1912 I voted for Eugene Debs. He had more guts than the whole New Deal put together. Do you play golf?”

  “No.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m afraid the only thing I play is chess.”

  Forsberg prodded him with his finger. “Don’t be afraid. I always tell my friends, when you’re doing what you want to do, don’t be afraid. You believe that, don’t you?”

  “I have reason to believe it,” Jonathan said.

  “That’s the boy. This is America. Not any of those other places they were talking about down there. They’re all alike, you know. One way or another, they’re all alike. But I’m not an isolationist. I haven’t gone that far. We can’t let them go down.” He made a slightly drunken gesture with his hand. “We got to keep them afloat. Take Churchill. There’s a man for you. I don’t mind having him on our side. An American mother, you can tell that. Or is it his wife? You admire him, don’t you?”

  “I do,” Jonathan said.

  “‘Blood, sweat and tears.’ Oh, by God, there is a man.”

  “‘Take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again,’” Jonathan quoted.

  “That’s right,” Forsberg said thoughtfully, and added, “We’ve got to keep him afloat.”

  Dinner was announced, but Forsberg made a gesture of disregard. “Confidentially,” he said, “I think we ought to send the Marines over right now. But mind, if you quote me, when we get downstairs, I’ll deny it.”

  “I think there are a number of people here who would agree with you,” Jonathan said.

  “Don’t you?” His show of shock was exaggerated by the effects of the whisky.

  “I’m afraid not,” Jonathan said.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Forsberg said impatiently. “Why?”

  “It’s a long story. And we might just be missed at dinner if we don’t go.”

  Forsberg gave him an elbow. “So you’re a Communist, after all.” His manner became more confidentially affable than ever.

  “By that logic,” Jonathan said, “you could say the same for most of the guests downstairs. They don’t want us to get into the war either.”

  “We know what they are. But what are you? I was kidding about you being a Communist. I know one of them when I see one.”

  “I am a pacifist.”

  “That’s what the Communists say they are. And you know why?”

  “I know,” Jonathan said.

  “They’re no more pacifist than I am.”

  The bartender was waiting to get a word in. Jonathan deferred to him. “I have to go down and help serve now, Mr. Forsberg,” the man said.

  Forsberg looked at him a moment. “We won’t steal the whisky.” Then to Jonathan, “Just tell me why you’re a pacifist, and we’ll go.”

  Jonathan drew a long breath. “I don’t think killing stops killing. I think wars are seeded in economics, and I see nothing in the alignment of this war that does not promise another to come after it. I do not think Britain and France would have stood up to Hitler if they had not finally seen the economic status quo threatened. And if we get into it, I am convinced it will be for the same reason.”

  Forsberg nodded. “You know something, Hogan? I think you’re dead right. I just wish I could get it across to some of my pig-headed friends who can’t see it in terms of their own survival. It’s our way of life that’s at stake, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Jonathan said.

  “Then how in hell can you be a pacifist?”

  Jonathan laughed heartily and not a little because he was relieved at not having been understood.

  4

  SYLVIA FIELDS AND ALEXANDER Winthrop were married late in April. The ceremony was private, performed in the Fields home, with only the Bergners and Tony present, and Nathan Reiss, who was at the time staying with Tony.

  For all its nativism, Lakewood had for many years imported royalty and the friends of royalty with much the same zeal it imported European art, furniture and glass for its mansions, themselves
imitative of Old World splendor. By 1941, however, what might have been called the foreign contingent in Lakewood had dispersed, some to their beleaguered homelands or at least to a more useful exile. Some were in the process of becoming American citizens, having taken up residence more becoming their own incomes. Their absence but confirmed the changing of the old order. Many of the Lakewood families realized, as did Sylvia Fields Winthrop, that Lakewood itself would soon vanish as they had known it, yielding to the scythe of taxes, giving ground literally to the newly moneyed for whom an acre or two would be estate enough so long as their neighbors had no more than an acre or two. Estates were soon to mean conformity in, not contrasts of, architecture and landscape. It was, therefore, a society in flux that welcomed Nathan Reiss. His being a refugee, and some might say, symbolically rather than recognizably, a Jew, he obliged the conscience of those who might have otherwise been squeamish. He conducted himself with an elegance of manner, a proper snobbishness, and the self-assurance of a man skilled in a useful profession as well as social grace. He allowed it to be known that he was a surgeon although presently confined from practice by state law, and at the appropriate moments, when, say, a hostess would confide a particular pain to him, he was likely to recall attending So-and-So in Vienna or Paris or on the Riviera for just such a complaint. It would probably entail minor surgery some day, he was likely to say. Once he was asked what he considered major surgery, to which he replied, “With a first-rate surgeon there is no such thing as major surgery.” It sounded reassuring. But some doctors felt there was no such thing as minor surgery.

  Meanwhile, he sailed with Tony, and helped him close the greater part of the Fields’ house after Sylvia moved out of it. And he was in those days a frequent visitor of Louise Bergner.

  His attentions to her amused George, and rather flattered him, aware as he was of Reiss’ general acceptability in Lakewood. George actually stood up to his father when Reiss’ frequent presence in the house became an issue with the old man.

  Dr. Bergner had liked Reiss at first. There was no doubt in the old man’s mind that Reiss knew his profession; he might be a social fraud, but medically he seemed more sound than most Europeans Bergner had encountered over the years. He considered it a myth that Viennese made the best doctors, that Vienna hospitals were superior to others on the Continent. And, of course, Reiss undertook to confirm this suspicion for him with numerous documentation. But with the old gentleman Reiss committed one of his few blunders. He supposed, when Dr. Bergner was probing him on his origins, that the old man was getting at him again—as he had on previous occasions—for his orientation toward the moneyed class, and Reiss decided to disarm him by admitting that he was an orphan who had made his own way out of the ghetto into the most fashionable salons of Europe.

  From that day on the old doctor had no more time for him. He had been proposing in his own mind to add another study to his work on heredity: as well have a eunuch as an orphan! With the cantankerousness of age, he found thereafter that when most he wanted Louise’s attentions she was occupied with Reiss. In the midst of his complaints one day, George turned on him and accused him of anti-Semitism.

  “Nonsense, nonsense. A Jew would have served me fine; I have several in the book. Need them for the whole picture.”

  “That goddamned book,” George said.

  “When you read it, you’ll have the right to curse it, George Allan. There’s always been anti-Semitism, and I dare say there always will be—or a reasonable facsimile of it, but you didn’t learn yours from your father. Send Louise up to me. She understands me better than you do.”

  As on all similar occasions, George left the room in a rage at his own impotence.

  And, as though further to confound him, Dr. Bergner shortly proposed that Nathan Reiss be added to the teaching staff of Lakewood Hospital where he might at the same time take his own internship and prepare for the state examinations.

  5

  THE TRADERS CITY STAR gathered some fine talent, mixing idealism with money. The editor-in-chief had been long associated with a chain of newspapers headquartered in Washington, D. C; the head of the foreign desk came home from London to take on the job, having been European correspondent to a national magazine for over a decade. A book supplement to the Sunday paper was created under the editorship of a young firebrand; its criticism was sharp and manly. “Books Alive” was its signet, and if all the books reviewed were not that lively, the reviewing of them was. A man of national reputation took on the music desk. Theatre went to an acid Irishman who had abandoned Dublin at about the time Sean O’Casey had, and for much the same reason. The announced purpose of the paper was service to all members of the community, and there was not to be found in its pages anywhere the class and race distinctions in its reporting long a practice of its chief competitor.

  There was, to say the least, a rather heady atmosphere in the editorial office in the early days, but from where George Bergner sat, the harsher facts of publishing and circulation had to be dealt with. The Star, for the time being, used the plant and printing facilities of one of the afternoon dailies, but a week before publication of its first edition, Winthrop had not been able to obtain a franchise to a major wire service: persuasion had to go forth at a very high level and among a diversity of publishing members who subscribed to the services. The vote to allow the Star a franchise to the one service it had to have was terrifyingly close. The same situation prevailed with the so-called “feature” syndicates, as though it weren’t going to be hard enough to introduce any new comic or cartoon, much less the rejects of the papers already operating in the city.

  A contest for subscriptions was set up for delivery boys, the first prize a year’s scholarship to college.

  Winthrop himself worked as hard as did George, and not only on the top level of persuasion: he personally contacted more than four hundred news dealers and made it plain that Christmas wasn’t half so far away as it seemed. Nor did he hesitate to use his old contacts among the ward politicians of guaranteed persuasiveness in their own neighborhoods. There are at least two definitions to liberalism.

  George recruited the drivers for the trucks that had to dispute the streets of Traders City with Judge Phipps’s deliverers, a rugged crew that rode herd on city traffic on their ordinary rounds. He signed on ex-cops and ex-rumrunners alike.

  Sylvia spent her honeymoon in the Star offices, and in truth, neither she nor Winthrop could have found a tour more to their liking. She had never been a woman for passive observance, and nothing in her experience till then had so obliged both her talents and her energies. They shared a camaraderie, the Winthrops, Bergner, and the editorial staff, that all of them would remember; the long days’ work, negotiation and manipulation, and then good drinks and supper together afterwards at Cellini’s Restaurant or sometimes at Winthrop’s flat. Vanities and jealousies had no part in the organization of the Star. These waited upon more leisured times. Winthrop himself believed in what he was doing, not in what he hoped to do. What dreamers there were among the staff got to him through Sylvia, the trouble-shooters through George. The three of them had maturity enough—and each in diverse ways, experience enough—to forestall in them any dilettantist meddling. As close as Sylvia came to it was an idea which in time proved both solid and profitable.

  A week after the Star was successfully on the streets, she persuaded George one day to drive down with her to the Stockyards Tavern. It was a rambling, dust-bound building, tawdry in its best days, still vaguely Spanish like a gypsy who had lost her way in the wasteland of the city. One got the feeling within the building of being in an underground cave with the wide, low-ceilinged passageways. The walls were hung with faded prints of prize steers, of trotting champions and hunters, and with photographs of bearded meat packers. The windows were dirty enough to seem but lighter patches of wall on which someone had been playing ticktacktoe. It was not a place frequented by ladies, even those of more colorful complexion than Sylvia. She felt a certain trib
ute when two of the drovers standing at the bar removed their hats as she came in. The bartender saluted her.

  “There’s a certain delicacy in choosing a table,” Sylvia explained. “It must be out of range of their conversation, yet within walking distance for Tom, the bartender.”

  “This is not exactly the place to bring a man on your honeymoon,” George said, “especially when he’s not your husband.”

  Sylvia took off her gloves. “Alex just wouldn’t fit.” She looked around, her attitude somewhat proprietary. “I used to be a social worker down here—among other things.”

  George grinned. “Workers of the world, unite?”

  “You’ve got nothing to lose but your entrails. There’s a great little neighborhood back of the Yards.” She looked up at the bartender. “How are you, Tom?”

  “Fine, miss, thank you.” He gave a jerk of his head. “Your friend called up he’ll be a mite late. He’s misplaced his papers, can’t find his hat.” Tom, a round-faced man with a warm smile but cold blue eyes, had the strong tune of Gaelic in his voice.

  “Is he sober?” Sylvia asked.

  Tom shrugged. “We’ll know if he comes. What’ll you folks have to drink?”

  “Harper’s for me with a little soda,” Sylvia said. “Tom, this is Mr. George Bergner. Tom Jefferson.”

  George looked up sharply. The two men nodded. Tom said, “It’s Jeffries is my name, sir, but you can’t change a woman’s notion once she’s got it in her head. And I could be mistook for worse.”

  “Harper’s is fine,” George said. He could not share Sylvia’s fellowship here, but he could and did relish the idea of being in her confidence. She was one mare that money had made go, he thought, and he was a lot surer of himself in her company than he was with Winthrop. It might be said in passing he had been very happy to dance at their wedding. When Tom went back to the bar, George asked, “Who’s the fellow who’s out looking for his hat?”

  “Did you ever hear of Billy Kirk?”