The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Martha watched what she could only feel was Jonathan’s physical decline. She knew his solitariness a torture, for when he stayed overnight she could hear him moving about his room at any hour she chanced to listen. She could not help him, but neither would she let him go. Nor did she intend to make it easy for Erich to do it either. She called Julie oftener by far than Julie called her, and at considerable pain to everyone concerned forced her to make excuses, or to accept an invitation only to call back and say that Erich would not be able to get away from work that night. She did not tell Marcus how dogged she was about this: his father’s politics had become something he and Jonathan did not speak about either.

  It was in late August that she chanced one afternoon to get Erich himself on the phone, and promptly asked him to come to dinner.

  “Tonight? But we cannot, Martha,” Erich said. “We have Nathan with us, and not often do we see him now.”

  “Why don’t you bring him, Erich? May I speak to him?” And so, violating her every inclination, she persisted and prevailed.

  She had not known, of course, the depth of Jonathan’s antipathy to Reiss. His intention in praising Reiss’ American progress had always been ironic. He could not allow himself to be more overt: the privileges of pacifism at such a time were few. But it was a curious Jew, he felt, for whom Fascism held so little horror. There was a time when he might himself have been amused by such a man. But in 1941 Reiss was an anachronism and a dangerous one: he blinded the already purblind to the plight of millions of Jews. Society might accept him as their exception, but if ever there was an axiomatic nonsense it was that an exception proved a rule. Yet, who was Jonathan to speak of an anachronism?

  The evening did not go well. People spoke at once or not at all. And bent by the strain to carelessness, Jonathan decided to challenge his old friend. “Erich, remember the meetings I used to drag you to to hear me speak? Come with me tomorrow night. It may be my valedictory.”

  “Ah, I am sorry, old friend. But I have a meeting at the laboratory. Don’t I, Julie?”

  If he had not turned to his wife for confirmation, Jonathan would not have been so outraged.

  Nathan Reiss asked, “What kind of a speech, professor? Is everyone welcome?”

  “It is a public rally of the Anti-Fascist Conference,” Hogan said.

  Reiss arched his neat, dark brows. “That is the Communist organization, is it not?”

  “It is an organization of anti-Fascists, some of whom no doubt are Communists,” Jonathan said coldly.

  Reiss puckered his lips, the kiss of regret, the kiss of death. Jonathan was ashamed of himself, but he could not tolerate this polished interloper.

  Martha, pouring coffee, working and sitting sideways in that lopsided way of women in the late months of pregnancy, said, “I should like to go, Jonathan—if you will have time for me. It’s Marcus’s night at the Clinic.” Marcus went frequently to the Brandon Clinic: the pledge of an endowment from the Fields Foundation was going to make possible a special wing for diseases of the chest.

  Marcus said, “I’m not at all sure you should go among crowds of that size just now, Martha.”

  Reiss said, “What a shame, I have to study. Imagine—at my age and in a foreign language. It is humiliating. I shall fail the examinations.”

  Marcus said dryly, “I doubt it.”

  Reiss smiled at Martha. “But if I could go with you, I could make it up to you for the Heldenplatz embarrassment. I always remember, you see.”

  “I have forgotten it, Nathan, believe me.”

  “Such fools. With all this fighting, everyone will need doctors, no?”

  “I have no doubt you could join the American Army and be there soon enough, doctor,” Jonathan said in a mixture of bitterness and malice.

  “No, I have had quite enough of war already.”

  “Have you?”

  Reiss turned to him, smiling still. “Sometimes, professor, the hardest thing a man does is to run away. Is it not so?”

  Jonathan, with his tic, grimaced in his attempt to smile. The point had been well scored.

  In the cab on the way to the Stadium the night of the rally, Jonathan went over his notes. Several times throughout the day he had been tempted to destroy them. Several times in the last weeks he had been on the verge of withdrawing from the conference rally. Yet he knew that to be the coward’s way. Nor was his work done. His message, he felt, was more important now than at any moment heretofore. Had he been a religious man, he would have prayed during that brief journey. Instead, having pocketed his notes, he sat back in the corner of the cab from where he could glance sidewise at Martha. Seeing her sit serene behind her burden, he took comfort from her and from all that pregnancy is symbol of in times of man’s destruction of himself.

  Martha had never been in the Stadium, which served most of the time as a sports arena, and she was reminded, looking up at it while Jonathan paid the driver, of the Castel d’Angelo in Rome. No angel, however, sat atop it. But around it like a moat hung the vaporous heat. Men in shirt sleeves and women in sleeveless dresses passed through the entrances, moving among numerous police. She and Jonathan moved inside and up the ramp, Jonathan protecting her like an old gallant from an occasional surge of the crowd.

  The Stadium was cavernous despite the trooping people. Huge buntings seemed no more than ribbons draped at either end, and a haze hung between the remote ceiling lights and the gathering audience. At the moment the loudspeakers were tested Martha was thrust back in memory to where she wanted least to go: the Heldenplatz. These were Americans, she told herself, for all that some of them might be Communists. She and Jonathan took seats at the end of a row near the speaker’s platform at the heart of the oval structure.

  Many people, passing to and fro, stopped to speak to Jonathan or pat him on the back. “Remember, Professor Hogan, if ever we needed you, we need you now.”

  Martha wondered if you could tell the Communists by their use of the word “comrade,” and naïvely asked Jonathan.

  He laughed and said, “There are other ways. For one, when everyone else is gone from here tonight, they’ll still be here.”

  Martha did not understand, but it was the least of her ignorances. While the Stadium filled, an organist started playing and very soon people started to sing. Then everyone was singing: work songs, folk songs, spirituals, the tunes to most of which she knew although the words were sometimes unfamiliar. There was a prevalence of martial music; one song that Martha liked especially was the Red Army Cavalry Song.

  During a lull, Jonathan said, “‘Will you love me in December as you did in May?’ How does that go?” The question was rhetorical. He added, “Franklin doesn’t want war. Neither does Eleanor.” He smiled then at Martha. “The majority of these people were pacifists last spring. How do you think they feel tonight?”

  Martha said, “Things have changed.” She meant that the war had spread. Russia was now with the Allies.

  “And the more they are the same,” Jonathan said.

  The gray light of day faded at the small, high windows deepset in concrete, and when the darkness fell outside, spotlights came up on the speakers’ platform, encircling the rostrum and a half-dozen chairs. Then a roving spot picked up one after another behind the platform the flags of many nations. Everyone stood up and cheered. Martha put her hand on her father-in-law’s arm. He patted it gently. “We are nothing if not dramatic. I shall have to go up in a minute. I’ll come back here for you afterwards.”

  The speaker at the rostrum leaned into the microphone and announced “Our National Anthem.” The playing and singing of it brought the crowd to order. He called the speakers to the platform one by one. There were names among them Martha recognized: a clergyman, a labor leader, a well-known sociologist. Jonathan Hogan, she thought, received the warmest welcome of all.

  The keynote speaker sounded the rallying cry of the evening: American preparation for war. He called it a just war, a war that was inevitable, a war of libe
ration, and he was frequently interrupted by applause. He called for increased arms production, for no-strike pledges from the unions; for legislation to prohibit profiteering, for American pressure on the Allies to open a second front.

  Martha could not keep her attention focused. So much in what the speakers said was repetitious. She observed that there often recurred the reference to “the brave Russian people,” “the heroic Russian people,” and she longed for someone to get up and pay tribute to the British. From her mother she knew their plight: Elizabeth had turned McMahon Manor in Northern Ireland into a home for the orphaned refugees from the London blitz. She was surprised at how little enthusiasm greeted mention of the Atlantic Charter and decided it must be too mild a document for this crowd. How emotional they were, these stiff-necked, high-headed people, working men and women, most of them, with a sprinkling of intellectuals. She could not escape the feeling of their foreignness. She did not know very many working people, she realized. Sylvia would have been much more at home here than she was; Sylvia, she supposed, was a much more complete human being. She came to think—bored with the speeches and given to the speculative sort of reflection one may sometimes enjoy in a church not of one’s own creed—that if intelligence discovered the error in false creeds, their best combatant, nonetheless, was a mass ignorance. It was not his meaning at all, but Martha thought of the words of a learned monsignor who could make theology romantic: two kinds of people find God, he said, the very wise and the very simple.

  Jonathan sat, his head bowed, his hands in his lap, until his name was called. He stood then in the glaring light, acknowledging with the barest of nods in one direction and then the other, the applause; in it Martha joined heartily.

  “I have ever believed myself among friends here,” he began, his voice quite different on the microphone, deeper and resonant. “And I know that in this I exalt myself … We have together long cried peace. But there is no peace … and I have come to the agonizing conclusion that there can be no peace while men like Hitler stalk the earth.”

  The crowd gave a virtual whoop of cheer. Jonathan held up his hand to restrain them and shook his head the while. He went on: “But I will not, for I cannot, sound the trumpet of war. In my deep heart’s core, I feel that we in the United States, and men anywhere fortunate enough to be free, can best serve mankind preparing, not for war—as has been so eloquently petitioned here among us pacifists—but for the peace …”

  A confused murmur ran through the audience, a mixture of laughter and protest.

  “Hear me, as I have heard you—each the other over many years now … We shall not conquer our enemies by imitating them. If war is thrust upon us, we shall need defend ourselves and our friends. But let us not now or later confuse our purpose with our allies’ ambitions. Let us not defend colonialism …”

  The cheers returned mingled with cries of “No! No!”

  “Let us not justify exploitation …”

  “No, no, NO, NO!” The response was chanted as though to a familiar pattern set long ago between Jonathan and his audience.

  “Let us not wink at expansionism …”

  “No, no, NO, NO!”

  “… whether it is that of the so-called empires … or that of the Soviet Union.”

  There was a stunned silence of at least a few seconds’ duration. Then a flutter of applause broke upon it.

  “In all conscience I must tell you,” Jonathan went on slowly, determinedly, “I am no more influenced to enthusiasm for the war by Germany’s march into Russia than I was dissuaded of the true meaning of anti-Fascism by Stalin’s march into Finland. I am only less sanguine of peace.

  “Dictators breed dictators, war breeds war …”

  From that instant on Jonathan’s words could not be heard for the sudden booing and hissing of the crowd, the stomping of their feet, the chanting then of a rhythmic, even “No, No, No, No … Go home, Jonathan … Go home, Jonathan …”

  Jonathan stood, yielding the microphone to the chairman who was powerless to impose silence. He spread his hands in despair. It seemed to Martha that Jonathan stood there forever. Yet everything happened with incredible speed. She seemed herself numb, immovable, weighted like stone. With austere mockery, Jonathan bowed from the waist and left the platform.

  A sector of the crowd had struck up a tune to set their words to. They sang, “Go home, Jonathan—Go home, Jonathan. It’s time to leave you now.” The whole auditorium seemed to rock with it.

  Jonathan went directly up the ramp nearest the platform. Only when he disappeared from her sight was Martha able to gather motion into her body and hasten after him. The discord of the organ pumping out martial music against the persistent singing voices heightened the wild madness of sound and motion. Everything seemed zigzag, the ascending ramps and rails, the buttresses beneath the tiers, and the only light for guidance the red and white eye-like bulbs, guide lights of the exits.

  Martha was a moment before she saw him, his head against one of the steel girders. While she watched, on her way to him, he began to pound his head against the girder, harder and harder, as though he would knock himself senseless. She took hold of him and, failing to pull him away from the post, pried one hand loose of it. He swung at her with the hand, in no way an injurious blow, but only then did he seem to come to his senses. He let go of the girder and stood before her, limp, his face all awry. Martha got him outside as quickly as she could to where a little air was stirring.

  “I’ve got to vomit,” he said. “I should not have had supper.”

  It was the worst possible moment for a newspaper man to appear, but a Star reporter identified himself. “Hey, professor! Are you disillusioned with the Commies now?”

  “Couldn’t you see? They were disillusioned with me.”

  “Aw, come on, professor. Let’s make a story out of it. It’s the Star you’re talking to. We’ll give you a break. How about it, lady? Are you his daughter? What did it feel like—having that crowd turn on the old man?”

  “I have nothing to say,” Martha said.

  Jonathan was trying to move away, to reach the shadow of the building; the reporter started after him.

  “Leave him alone! He’s sick,” Martha said.

  “I’ll say he is.” The reporter stood by and watched Jonathan throw up. While Hogan wiped his face with his handkerchief, the reporter insisted, “What made you sick, professor? Come on. They’re a bunch of muckers, aren’t they, to turn on an old guy like you—the best friend they got in America? Christ, haven’t you got any guts?”

  Martha was trying to get the attention of a policeman.

  “I’m not going to say anything tonight for publication,” Jonathan said.

  Martha had attracted attention, but that of other members of the press, including a photographer.

  “And who the hell will publish it, do you think, when you get around to it? Professor, you aren’t going to be news after tonight. Better have a last fling at the headlines.”

  Hogan said nothing.

  A policeman was finally coming.

  “‘Professor Hogan walks out on Reds.’ That’s the truth, isn’t it? Make the most of it. Or do you want me to file this way: ‘The Reds kick Hogan out’?”

  “Officer, will you please help us get a taxi? My father is ill.”

  “Come on, Jerry, get us a picture and let’s get out of here,” the reporter said.

  “Shame on you!” Martha cried, and at the moment the flash bulbs went off. Her arm was crooked in Jonathan’s.

  The policeman guided them through a small crowd of street gawkers, the ever available but nameless and silent witnesses to any incident on the city streets.

  “The worst of it is—I knew,” Jonathan said within the cab. “I knew it was going to happen.”

  Martha said nothing, for the first time hating Traders City because she did not know where else to focus her revulsion. She insisted that Jonathan stay the night on Oak Street.

  He was past arguing. He was
past a great many things which until now had kept in working condition his sparse and infirm body. Marcus was shocked at the change in him. There were bruised lacerations on his father’s forehead. These he could and did patch up instantly. The other condition made him furious. And he would have liked to make his father furious.

  “You know you had it coming to you, don’t you, dad?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  This was not what Marcus wanted at all. Nor was he prepared for Martha’s turning on him.

  “You weren’t there, Marcus. You’ve got no right to judge. He was magnificent!”

  “I’ve had a pretty fair sampling of his opinions in my lifetime,” Marcus said, “and there comes a time when the best of fashions go out of date.”

  “Meaning?” Jonathan said.

  “That it’s too late for your doctrine of passive resistance. Could you go to that window, look out, and see one man clubbing hell out of another, and do nothing about it?”

  “No. I would have to go out—get help if need be—and take the club from him. And then I should have to see forever that he did not get another club. But, Marc—what would it avail me to club him to death, even with his own club? What man dares trust himself with the power of destruction? Not I. Killing kills.”

  “I’m sorry, dad. But I do not believe there is any way to deal with force except with force. There is a time we have to kill.”

  Jonathan said, “If you feel that way, Marc, you must.” The silence in the room became as heavy as the atmosphere. All three of them knew something more had to be said, a final word. There is always that last bit of self-justification which puts the matter neatly out of reach, perhaps not forever, but at least for a time, a sort of deliberate alienation, meant not so much to score against the other person, as to clear a ground for oneself in which to rest and sort out the truths from the over-truths, principle from posture. “I don’t disown you,” Jonathan added, spreading his hands, “but I’m not sure I know you.”