The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  They sat, all of them disconsolate. The hall clock struck midnight. Marcus proposed they light a citronella candle and go out on the terrace. Martha said it ought to rain soon. At that moment the telephone rang.

  Martha said, “I’ll take it, Marcus.” Wherever she could she tried to intercept late calls for him.

  But that night Marcus said, “No, you’ve had enough for one night.”

  He took the call in the library. It was George Bergner. Marcus had not seen him since the night of his father’s death, their only communication an exchange of letters on matters relating to the estate. The work on genetics might never have been done for all the worth of the fragments Marcus had been able to gather from Dr. Bergner’s secretary.

  “I’ve just been talking to the city editor at the Star, Marcus,” Bergner said. “That was an ugly business tonight at the Stadium.”

  “Would you like to speak to my father, George?”

  “No, no. I wouldn’t disturb him. You can tell he was upset. The reason I’ve called you—one of our boys got a picture, one of those heart-breaking, human interest shots that come along maybe once in a photographer’s life? You know what I mean, Marcus?”

  Marcus did not answer, but he suspected what was coming.

  “A pregnant girl supporting a broken old man. The cruelty of life, as my father used to say—but it would be a little thick, wouldn’t it, me quoting him to you? The thing is, Marcus … well, I thought I ought to tell you before it appears in the morning. You get the Star, don’t you?” A sound like muffled, nervous laughter ran through the last sentence.

  “Sometimes.”

  Bergner said: “Well, I just thought I’d tell you before it’s locked up … you knowing the publisher and all.”

  Marcus realized he had been given an invitation to call Winthrop. George did not care whom he asked to destroy the picture, so long as he asked it. Marcus was caught: there is no position so vulnerable as the high ground of righteousness.

  “Thank you very much, George,” Marcus said and hung up.

  It was some moments before he returned to the living room. By then Martha and his father had moved out to the terrace. The damp, slightly putrid smell of late summer hung in the unstirring air.

  “You don’t have to go out, do you, Marcus?”

  “It was George Bergner. The Star photographer seems to have got a picture of you two.”

  “Oh,” was all Martha said.

  “I’m sorry, Marc,” Jonathan said after a moment. “It isn’t every son has a bad boy for a father.”

  “For God’s sake, get off that line. If I were going to be embarrassed by you it would have happened a long time ago. Was it your pride that got hurt tonight or your principles?”

  “That’s a very good question,” Jonathan said. “Mostly my pride.”

  To Martha, Marcus said gently: “Why don’t you go up to bed? I shall be along soon.”

  Martha asked: “Are you going to call Doctor Winthrop?”

  “I was thinking of it.”

  “To ask him not to allow the picture?”

  Marcus did not say anything.

  “Please don’t, Marcus. Jonathan has had his picture in the paper before, and I am not ashamed to be seen with him. As you said, his principles weren’t compromised tonight. I wish it all hadn’t happened, but it did. A picture in the newspaper isn’t going to change anything much, is it?”

  Marcus shook a cigaret out of a damp package, gave it to his father and took one for himself. He lit them both. “Not much.” He brushed Martha’s cheek with the back of his hand.

  Much later and when they had talked of many other things, Jonathan remarked: “Something I have observed—I wonder if either of you has: when two people in love live a number of years together, they tend not only to reconcile their differences. They are quite likely to change positions with one another. Have you noticed it?”

  He turned round to Martha, but she had fallen asleep in the chair.

  8

  NOTHING WAS MORE ILLUSTRATIVE of Lakewood’s estimate of a man’s position than the attitude of the commuters on the eight o’clock train to Traders City. No one had ever made a point of snubbing Alexander Winthrop, and no one now made a point of including him, yet a change had occurred and he could feel it. It was in the inflection of a one-word greeting, in the way Hurd Abington for example would say “Winthrop,” without, so far as Winthrop had been able to observe, having lifted his eyes from the Journal of Commerce. A few of the men who carried more than one newspaper took the Star, although Winthrop was sure they opened it almost as gingerly as they would a Hearst sheet. With Hearst they agreed in principle but preferred to disassociate from his exploitation. Winthrop suspected they mistook the Star’s principles for exploitation and perversely honored its publisher for a successful stratagem. Then too, his marriage to Sylvia Fields, presumably on his own terms, further bound him within the community. It was considered sage and apt of him to have waited until the old lady died. Winthrop understood how much the rich can admire abstemiousness.

  He supposed it was an affectation, but he could not bring himself to read his own newspaper on the train. Thus it was not until George Bergner came back from the smoking car and, as was their custom, sat with him the last fifteen minutes of the journey, that he learned of Martha’s and Jonathan Hogan’s picture on the front page.

  The first sight of it turned his stomach: Hogan gaunt and withered, Martha as undisguisedly pregnant as a she-goat in the same condition, and as belligerent-looking, the police holding back what appeared to be a baiting mob. (It was not: merely the curious bystanders trying to get a better view; Hogan’s baiters were within the Stadium. But all the symbolism was there.)

  “Our man, Jerry Adams, will get the Pulitzer Prize for that picture,” George said, “I’ll lay you odds on it.”

  Winthrop found himself unable to speak. He read the caption: EXIT OF A HERO.

  “We had to use it. You can see that, Alex,” George said. “It’s a shame—I mean their being who they are—to you and me. But in the end, it’s going to do old Hogan more good than harm.”

  “I don’t see how,” Winthrop said. “And I don’t see why I wasn’t consulted on its use. You manage to consult me on damn near everything else.”

  “I think we’d better wait till we get to the office,” George said.

  “Yes—since you waited this long.”

  Winthrop meanwhile read the story: its ending everyone could have expected except Hogan, by the signs. It made Winthrop grateful that he was not himself a man given to causes, to religion. It caused him for the first time in many months to think of Walter Fitzgerald. Walter’s daughter and Red Jonathan. The dead had little protest. But he doubted Walter would have had more influence, alive. Martha would cleave her own way. Her loyalties might not be sensible, but they were steadfast. He was in a position to know. She had made one gesture toward him for Sylvia’s sake, but after that the drift had been away.

  The Star switchboard reported having to put on an extra girl to handle the calls coming in about the Stadium story—and the picture, roughly a hundred to one congratulatory.

  “I’ll bet the Workers’ Guardian flays our hides,” George said, and rubbed his hands together. “That’s why we had to do it, Alex.”

  Winthrop drew a line the width of his finger tip through the dust on his desk. “Have you been answering the phone, too, Miss Kelly?” he said to his secretary.

  “Yes, sir.” She ignored the sarcasm and handed him a fistful of messages.

  Winthrop said, “Now, George, tell me why we had to do it.”

  “In the first place, Alex, because we’re a newspaper. You made fun of me once for thinking myself a newspaper man. I’m going to make you eat those words. But it’s all a matter of survival for the Star. You know as well as I do, whenever the big boys want to grind us out they’ll run up the red flag over us. This sort of thing is the best answer we’ve got: ‘You can’t do business with Stalin: ask Jonatha
n Hogan.’ You’ll find that on the editorial page.”

  “I suppose I wrote it,” Winthrop said dryly.

  “And that was what I meant when I said it would do Hogan more good than harm. They won’t be able to tag him a Communist either after this.”

  Winthrop flicked through his messages.

  “Can’t you guess the reason I didn’t consult you?” George said. “You can’t very well be expected to be on top of everything, can you?”

  Winthrop looked at him. It was so neat, he could not help but wonder how much personal satisfaction George had got out of this newspaper coup. That he was satisfied with himself was obvious. Was it because he had brought it off leaving Winthrop himself clean, or did the satisfaction go back to his hostility toward Marcus Hogan? The old gentleman, Dr. Bergner, had left nothing in money to Marcus. Most of the estate outside the house in Lakewood—which George was now hard put to keep up himself—had been put in trust for George’s two children. In a way it had been more of a slap at George than to have been disinherited. Winthrop had heard Dr. Albert talk at one time and another about his theory of the one good seed in every family line. Too obviously he had skipped George looking for it in his own.

  Winthrop said, “Ignorance comes a little too natural to me, George, for me to enjoy pleading it. I’ll take the responsibility. After all, I’m responsible for you, ain’t I?”

  “You could fire me,” George said.

  “And lose a good newspaper man?” Winthrop had meant it in sarcasm, but a sudden pink suffused George’s bald pate and Winthrop conceded that he had no grounds for sarcasm. George was doing a fine job for him. If he were to personally abandon the paper tomorrow, it would go on under George’s management quite as though Winthrop himself were there. He said, “Give my congratulations to the photographer. Tell him that picture’s the real thing.”

  But throughout the day, thinking now and then of the paper’s sound launching, and the steady pull it must now be on someone’s part to increase its circulation and keep up its advertising, he was aware of the stir of restlessness again within himself. In the afternoon he had occasion to write his cabinet friend in Washington. Toward the end of the letter he wrote: “Who knows? A year or two and I may be looking for another enterprise.”

  That morning Martha received a call from Sylvia, and later in the day, a visit. By then she had got used to the fact that her picture had been in the morning news. The embarrassed sting of it was gone; indeed the picture was no longer in the house, Jonathan having taken the paper to clip for his scrapbook, so he said. He had no scrapbook and supposed now he knew the wisdom of not having kept one. He and Martha both understood: Without ceremony he dropped it in the first public trash container.

  When Sylvia came the two women met with an awkwardness merely compounded by the incident; they had not seen each other since Sylvia’s marriage. Martha knew it would have been proper that she invite the Winthrops to dinner soon thereafter, but she had let it go too long and Marcus understood. They had sent a telegram of congratulations on the day of the wedding and there it had had to stand. She was too honest to do more and she had suffered as those who oblige the forms without qualm cannot suffer. She did not make friends easily and despite some twenty years’ difference in their ages, she and Sylvia had become very close. They shared many tastes if few confidences. As Sylvia had once said of Martha to her brother, Tony: “You’re always afraid she’ll see the truth in something too soon.” It had been a futile wish, but from the night she met Martha, she would have liked to see Tony marry her.

  When they were sitting opposite one another that afternoon, a hard rain threshing against the terrace doors, Sylvia said, “I haven’t changed very much—have you?”

  “Not as much as I’d have liked to,” Martha said.

  They both laughed to deprecate the moment’s portent.

  “What’s happening these days with our B’s for B?” Sylvia referred to Bundles for Britain.

  “They’re piling up again. Marcus calls the basement ‘Moth Haven.’ I dare say when school starts I shall have some help.”

  “We’re starting on the Russians now in Lakewood, God help them. It’s going to be very fashionable. There’s a rumor circulating that after this war is over, there’s going to be another Russian revolution, and the Whites will take over again. ‘Ha!’ you say, but don’t. I could raise ten million dollars for such a cause in one night.”

  “For the brave Russian people,” Martha mused.

  “That will be the day.”

  They glanced at each other and smiled. The time had come. “Alex won’t admit it, but he didn’t know about the picture, Martha. We are both deeply sorry.”

  Martha laughed, a small sound of self-derision. “It was colorful though, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m sure it hurt you very much.”

  “Not as much as other things last night, Sylvia, and Jonathan took the paper out with him this morning like a dead fish, and we could laugh.”

  “He must be very wretched, poor man.”

  “They might have left him his dignity, even if he was wrong,” Martha said. “That’s the worst of it, he’s beginning to feel he may be wrong—and if he is wrong, what is right is utterly abhorrent to him.”

  “‘Thou shalt not kill.’ That’s all he’s saying, isn’t it?”

  “I am not a pacifist,” Martha said. “Marcus says there are killings every day in hospitals by doctors who are criminally inept. There are accidents: men crushed in machines, or children burned horribly and to no purpose except that we must die, all of us. My father thought he was dying for something, at least. A soldier dies for something. I don’t know that living is always so important, is it?”

  “I don’t know either, but I want to live. Don’t you?”

  “Yes. Terribly.”

  Sylvia asked, “Are you afraid, Martha?”

  She lifted her chin. “I am, a little. I shouldn’t want Marcus to know it, though. It’s having got this far, I suppose, when twice before I didn’t. Sometimes I feel that if I manage to bear a child—a child that breathes and lives—I must pay forfeit for it.”

  “What morbid Irish nonsense!” Sylvia cried, and herself began to move about the room. There were times she could no more sit still than could her husband. “I know,” Martha said.

  “And feeling that way, you went to that rally last night?”

  “I had a feeling about that, too,” she said, and then smiled in her sudden reassuring way and tilted her head back. “I shall be hung for a witch in the end, if I’m not careful, shan’t I?”

  9

  THE BOY WHO WAS to be named Thaddeus Marcus Hogan, Jr., was born on October 31, 1941, in every way well equipped, it seemed, to cope with living. Assured that her son was a fine healthy baby, Martha asked Marcus who or what he looked like. Marcus said, “Let me put it this way: If anyone were to nickname him Tadpole at this moment, it would be sheer flattery.”

  When the baby was brought to her, Martha said, “I think he looks like you, Marcus.”

  To which he answered, “Thank you, dear.”

  From his office he called Jonathan who was attending a conference in the East.

  At home, he and Annie drank a toast. “It’s a sign, doctor, surely, to be born on Allhallows’ Eve. Maybe he’ll grow up to be a priest.” And she gave Marcus a nudge with her red knuckles. “Would you mind that?”

  “You know, Annie, it’s something that never occurred to me. I shouldn’t want to say until I’ve talked it over with him.”

  Annie breathed a great sigh. “Ah, sure, it’s given me a new leash on life.”

  Marcus grinned and realized by the ache in his jaw muscles that he must have given them a great deal of exercise throughout the day. Nonetheless, alone in the house except for Annie, he felt himself on the verge of depression as the October darkness fell. Looking down from the terrace, he could see beyond the hedge the little ghosts and grotesques of Hallowe’en pass by in search of mischief. Their jack-o-la
nterns bobbed like will-o’-the-wisps. The smell of burning leaves hung in the dry, sharp air. Was it a good time to be born? “Too young for this war”: he had heard the phrase more than once in Maternity. He had himself been born in 1908. A better time? He had been born too young for that war … but not for this one if the country was to be involved as it must surely be. There were not many doctors in a better position to serve, and he a surgeon. But to excise disease was one thing, to probe young flesh for lead another; to open cleanly and exactly was what he strove to make his genius. The wounds of war, he knew, were ghastly imprecise. He went indoors and made a note: he needed to remember that Martha asked him to have the handy man check the sacking around the rose bushes.

  How desolate the house without Martha in it; how desolate the house for Martha without him in it. But now there was Thaddeus Marcus Hogan, Jr.—Tad. He said the name aloud, getting used to the idea of there being an actual person to go with it. And there was Jonathan who could not bear his house alone either, but who kept it, Marcus knew although it had not been said, for Mrs. Turley’s sake. It would fall to him, he supposed, to do something about that tie. A modest pension could be arranged, and she would have to—and very well could—accommodate herself to the notion than Jonathan Hogan could survive without her care, assuming he could survive with it.

  Marcus was very grateful when Alexander Winthrop called up to congratulate him and then asked if he could, by any chance, join him and Sylvia at the Union League Club for dinner. They were in town for theater that night.

  The occasion being festive, Sylvia chose the menu and Winthrop the wine: fish and a filet mignon, champagne before they went to the table, and for dinner Vouvray and a Côte du Rhone, ’24.

  “This is a great compliment to you, Marcus,” Sylvia said when he closed his eyes with pleasure at the Rhone. “The steward has just three bottles more for Alex of this vintage.”