The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “I went today and proposed myself for military service,” Reiss said. “You see, Sylvia, Alexander—I was going to try to steal the thunder from your farewell party. We are two men, Marcus and I, strong, good surgeons. It is too much—in one family, you might say—and Marcus has the wife and child.”

  “Yes,” Marcus said, reaching for a cigaret, “they are mine, aren’t they?”

  “Beg pardon?” Reiss said, his dark eyes full of sudden submissiveness in case he had said something wrong.

  Jonathan said, “When do you leave, Doctor Reiss?”

  Nathan shot out his lower lip. “Alas! When they have nobody else they will take me. I have a disability—I have a heart leakage.”

  Jonathan laughed aloud. “Oh, Christ,” he said rudely, and got up and left the room.

  “It is very remarkable—what that man finds amusing about me,” Reiss said.

  Martha, understanding very well how Jonathan felt, said nonetheless: “It must have been a great shock to you to learn of it, Nathan.”

  He did not lie, but no one pressed him for the explicit truth of when he had discovered the ailment. He said: “I did not tell it tonight because I wanted sympathy,” and shrugged his shoulders as though at a loss to understand the rudeness. He lapsed into a sort of self-pitying silence.

  Someone in a gayer crowd or where the women were not Sylvia and herself, Martha thought—if Louise were there—he would now have his wounded feelings succored. He was truly so shallow. She could imagine his response to such coddling, his mock recovery meant only to ingratiate him with his cajoler.

  “Jonathan is tired, Marcus,” Sylvia said. “The world is too much with him.”

  “That’s it,” Marcus said.

  “No, I think it’s the other way around,” Martha said. “He isn’t with it at all. And always before he was.”

  “Patriotism embarrasses him,” Marcus said. “I dare say it is a primitive emotion.”

  “Or the last refuge of scoundrels,” Sylvia said.

  Reiss looked at her. “That is a most extraordinary remark.”

  “It’s not original,” Sylvia said, an amused gleam in her eye.

  Everyone knew Nathan Reiss had the makings of a great patriot.

  When the Winthrops, the last to leave, were going toward midnight, Winthrop lingered to speak to Martha after Sylvia had gone outdoors. “I’ll remember tonight,” he said. “You have a way like your mother’s, kindness that isn’t charity.”

  She allowed him to kiss her cheek.

  A moment later with the sound of the door latch loudly clicking, she turned at the foot of the stairs where she had been about to go up and check on the baby, and Marcus paused on his way to put out the downstairs lights. Instead, they moved with utter urgency into one another’s arms.

  PART THREE

  1943

  1

  MARCUS WAS A LONG distance from Traders City when he learned of his son’s first words. He was sitting in the lounge of the Officers Club in Bizerte, North Africa, and laughed aloud, reading them: “I want a dog like that one.” He looked up self-consciously and would have shared the phenomenon of a two-year-old’s articulacy had there been anyone at hand likely to give him more than polite attention. The French-Tunisian bartender would have been likely to give him a lecture on Western sentimentalism as opposed to Arab realism. The four officers playing bridge were as unprepossessing prospects. The Englishman among them would say, “Fine show, old chap,” or some such Britishism. No one was as British as a British Army man. The three Americans, senior officers, looked like regular Army, and were likely to be far more at home in an officers’ club in Bizerte than in, say, the Elks’ Club in Beloit. Marcus returned to the letter.

  “I should have preferred to tell you he asked, ‘Where’s papa?’” Martha wrote. “And where I am to find a dog like that one, heaven knows. I don’t think its own parents, having it to do over again, could manage …”

  Marcus read the letter twice, finished his brandy, and went to a writing desk to answer it. If he did not write at once, he would find it difficult, perhaps to the point of impossibility.

  In his first weeks overseas writing had been easier, but his letters, Martha wrote, were heavily censored. He knew the reason. He had written about the men and what they thought the war was all about: he could not have taken his own cause from a consensus of theirs, and he had come to the conclusion that no American made a good soldier until he had seen another American die. This was not the stuff on which morale on the home front was sustained. Nor was the telling of an incident which had made his own gorge rise: the G.I.s’ admiration for the soldierly arrogance of the defeated German Afrika Korps men.

  Marcus and his unit had taken their final training as a team in North Africa. They had first gone into action, a self-sufficient mobile hospital unit, with the invasion of Sicily, and had moved onto the Italian mainland with a Fifth Army battalion as soon as the beachhead had been secured. Mud and blood: the position was always fluid. Again and again during the hours of invasion, the sides of the hospital tent had billowed out with the percussion of their own big guns. The littered wounded at such a time came to him almost as on a conveyor belt: there was never a question of whether or not to operate; he saw only the men for whom there was no alternative. The injured who could be evacuated, were. There were times he had operated in twelve-hour shifts, his only relief a change of positions with the anesthetist who was also a surgeon. He had never marveled at his own endurance, only afterwards at the statistics of lives saved.

  But neither was this the stuff of which one wrote, putting up the scalpel for the pen.

  There had been a day of lull in the Sicilian operation when he had walked out among the ruins—those of time and those of war—and he had come upon a sculptured marble arm, exquisitely delicate, a woman’s, among the rubble, and bending down he had put his hand to it, and found himself moved to tears for the first time by any desolation of the war. Later that day, in the company of some G. I.’s who had found a veritable cache of temple statuary, he had thought marvelously funny the remark of one of them: “Gee, look at all the Venuses. D’you suppose we did that to ’em?”

  But writing home, he could not find the right words for that story either. And too many of his anecdotes concerned latrines. The censor, he suspected, was the only constipated man in the whole damned army.

  Nor could he write of love: he felt inhibited by his own sensuality. He who loathed to dance, danced every night of his leave, every dance he could obtain, with any of the colon girls, and as intimately as she allowed. It had nothing to do with Martha, he told himself, only with war and blood and genitals.

  He sat and wrote a letter flat as sand and dry as desert. Crazy things kept popping into his head, like: Get him a fat hound dog in case meat rationing gets any tighter—which he did not write. “A hound dog might be best,” he wrote. “They are supposed to be the gentlest.” He said that he was glad his father had got leave from the University for whatever wartime assignment he was on. He did not even mention Dr. Winthrop whom he supposed to be in Italy since he was on the staff of the Allied Control Commission. He finished the letter: “I’m rested now and feeling fit, ready for reassignment, so that if you don’t hear for a while, you will know I am back in the land of beginning again. That’s what it is for most of these boys when we get through with them. We’re saving more lives this time …” More lives than what? Writing “I love you” with a relief that shamed him, he scrawled his name, dispatched the letter, and went quickly to the bar for another brandy.

  2

  THE PILOT BANKED THE plane as they approached Naples, and the chief of the mission tapped Jonathan on the arm. “There she is!” he shouted.

  Jonathan looked down with some reluctance at the great, gray jagged mountain, Vesuvius, streaked with scars that shone like lightnings through the mist. “I’m glad you didn’t say ‘there she blows.’”

  The plane, in a sudden air pocket, dropped and lurched and th
en soared upward. The chief laughed aloud, as gay as a youngster on a loop-the-loop. The other civilians smiled rather weakly. Jonathan concentrated on the back of the head of the man in front of him and thought of a line from an Odets play: “Who do you know up there, eagles?” Distinctly, he did not like flying. But assuming they got down safely, the interesting question then would be: whom did he know down there?

  Jonathan had over his long years of association with Midwestern University taken many leaves of absence to teach or study abroad. He was as well known at London University, for example, as any foreign lecturer. As one of the best informed anti-Fascists and one with connections abroad, he was highly valued during this period by the United States State Department. The small ironies of it, Jonathan did not choose to contemplate. His present job was as part of an Economic Survey Mission sent out to study and recommend in the problems of Italian rehabilitation. Not that there was much of Italy to rehabilitate in December of 1943. The Allied drive on Rome had bogged down, and in the north the Germans were moving in, not out.

  There were several people with whom Jonathan hoped to make contact. But the first acknowledgment of his presence was from a source he had not expected: a message from Alexander Winthrop awaited him at the mission’s headquarters: “If I can be of any assistance, please do not hesitate to call on me. I hope you will find it convenient to have dinner with me during your time in Naples.” Winthrop headed a unit with the Allied Control Commission whose work was the restoration of public health facilities. He would probably be a good man to know—if you were an Italian.

  The first day in Naples was an agony for Jonathan. Touring the district he saw for himself the war’s devastation. He thought he could understand—as certain members of the mission seemed unable to—the people’s indifference to their liberation. They were living on a bare subsistence level and the reality was that all the recommendations of missions and commissions were going to bring very little relief until the war was won everywhere. The problem was transport. It was not sufficient even to military necessity. The food was waiting to be delivered to them, but on the other side of the sea. It was something not easily explained to civilians of whom you were inquiring their needs for rehabilitation.

  But at the day’s end Jonathan was waited on by an old friend, Marcello Ruggeo, the poet and novelist who had returned from his American exile to his native Naples when the city was liberated. With Ruggeo, he sat down that night at a meeting of the Italian Committee of Liberation. He was not long in discovering why they welcomed him: they were looking for an American sympathetic to the anti-Monarchist cause. The Occupation authorities, American and particularly British, had no intention of encouraging an Italian revolution. “Mussolini, no. Badoglio and the King, okay.” Thusly an Italian put it in basic American.

  Jonathan, of course, did not comment. He merely listened, Ruggeo translating much that went on for him. If he did not understand the language, Jonathan understood the men—well enough at least to speculate on their personal ambitions, their commitments to a political philosophy and their patriotism. Under discussion was the institutional question of the King, the circumstances under which the various anti-Fascist parties would enter a cabinet under Badoglio or under a regency so that an Italian government could be said to represent a majority of the people. A half dozen parties were represented in the room—the paneled dining room of an old villa, half of which had been shorn away by shell fire so that the room, once within the interior of the building, could be entered directly from outdoors; in the marble fireplace a part of the building’s own timber was burning noisily—Christian and Social Democrats were there, a publisher and a professor of history; Ruggeo represented the Actionists, himself a curious exception to his family who almost to a name were Monarchists; and a Communist who expressed the mildest views of the meeting. Jonathan wondered if he could not pursue the line in its course: Russia was an ally; the Allies were not going to tolerate a revolution behind their lines; therefore any government was suitable for the present.

  Afterwards, walking through the cold, dark streets with Ruggeo to his rooms over a leather shop, Jonathan asked Ruggeo if he did not think this were so.

  Ruggeo, his gray hair close-cropped so that it added to his look of explosiveness, said: “Of course, it is so. They will join the King’s government, if we all do.”

  “And pull out when it suits them to bring it down.”

  “Which of us will not?” Ruggeo said. He lit the one light in his room. It hung over a desk and threw a pale glow on the bed, the bookcases that seemed to hold only newspapers, and on the photograph of a pretty dark woman and two blond children. Ruggeo himself was fair. “I have some inferior wine but it is not as inferior as my coffee.

  “My friend,” he said, “I do not represent a majority of the people. If any one party does, it is the Communists. I am not afraid of them, not now. They are the strength behind the partisans in the north, underground in Rome it is they. With their help we may have an Actionist premier: then we shall have the land reform without which returns Fascism—or comes communism.”

  “Exactly,” Jonathan said. “Is it realistic to expect them to participate in their own containment?”

  Ruggeo pulled the cork from the bottle. “What are those lines from Shakespeare? I remember you quoting them to me once—about meeting the bear in the mouth.”

  “‘Thou’dst shun a bear, but if thy flight lay toward the raging sea, thou’dst meet the bear i’ the mouth.’”

  “I’ve had one flight across the raging sea, Jonathan. It is enough in a lifetime. Now I must meet the bear in the mouth—and maybe tame him.”

  “That’ll be the day,” Jonathan said.

  They talked long into the night for Ruggeo was leaving in the morning to go to Brindisi, the seat of the provisional government, and Jonathan promised to stop in New York if he could manage it to see Ruggeo’s family.

  “Tell them how beautiful is Naples. Even now. They will have forgotten as I almost had myself. Tell them I shall have a fine home for them after the war, with a garden and a view. Always I have promised my wife a view, and always it has been of someone else’s back window.”

  By the time Jonathan saw Winthrop, he had acquired great respect for the reconstruction work the Allied Control Commission was doing and with little equipment and only salvaged materials. “Wheelbarrows and pulleys,” Winthrop said. “Donkeys and small boys.” But Jonathan was much less enthusiastic about the Commission’s attitude toward the Italians. The top men were at best paternalistic. Most of them were career army men, impatient with civilian ways, especially the ways of Italian civilians. They were looking always for those Italians they “could do business with.” And efficiency was still the prevailing myth about Fascism. Jonathan was not so partisan in his thinking however as not to appreciate the British view that Italy, under whatever government, had been an enemy with whom they had been at war for three years. They could scarcely be blamed for caring less about its rehabilitation than winning the war and rehabilitating Britain.

  But Italy, in a few weeks’ time, was on the way to becoming Jonathan’s “cause.” He had never been able to live without one, and having found one now, he proposed to enter upon it with all the caution learned of numerous defeats.

  He saw in Winthrop the typical laissez-faire Occupation officer. It was Winthrop’s view that what was good for the Allies was good for the Italians: a transition government of technicians under the King until the war was over. He was little moved by Jonathan’s remark that he had found small affection for the King among the people. “I haven’t heard anybody say they loved Mussolini either,” Winthrop said, “but he was pretty much their boss for twenty years.”

  “Exactly,” Jonathan said, but having got exactly nowhere. As close as he came to moving Winthrop was in his mischievous but true suggestion that Winthrop, speaking as he did, was coming close to the official British opinion. There was enough of the Midwesterner in the man to rile at the association. But
there Jonathan let it stand. His assignment was to report to Washington, and it was the only place at the moment, he could properly press his opinion.

  And the evening he spent with Winthrop in Naples chanced to be Christmas Eve. They talked more of home than either of them was likely to on another occasion. Winthrop occupied a gloomy, ornate apartment, a bedroom and a sitting room in a pensione taken over by the officers of his commission. He displayed a foot-high imitation Christmas tree, dye-green and tinseled, a part of the wartime gadgetry manufactured in the U.S.A. to be sent to the American soldier overseas. Set atop the mantelplace, it cast a shadow stronger than itself across an ancient print of the Pompeii ruins. The room was hung with faded velvet drapes from the high ceiling to the marble floor. The furniture, a mixture of gilt and mahogany, was in an advanced state of decay. Things either decayed or collapsed in Italy, Winthrop said. Either they lasted for centuries or they broke down within a week of manufacture.

  “Not the land for installment buying,” Jonathan said.

  Winthrop opened a bottle of Scotch whisky and while they drank Jonathan took off his shoes and warmed his feet at the gas heater set up on the rim of the fireplace. He could not remember his feet having been warm since he left the States. Just seeing him thus relaxed and grinning gave Winthrop a pleasure associable with home. He arranged the service of their dinner with “the signora” and then after their drinks, the two men walked out in the raw twilight.

  The pink-tinted clouds and the ancient yellowing buildings that huddled one in the shelter of another were all reflected in the damp glare of the streets. Looking ahead they might be seeing canals, Jonathan thought. It was a solemn festival, Christmas in Italy, not a time for gifts except to the Christ Child. Every home, however stricken, seemed to have managed a crèche and candles. People hurried along the narrow circuitous streets, pausing now and then to take a hasty poke at a rubble heap. If you watched very closely, Jonathan discovered, you could catch the quick gesture of concealment on the part of the successful scavenger. The cats of the city were no more cunning. What Jonathan did enjoy was a visit to the fish market in S. Brigida, a babble of bargaining, abuse and blessings. An Italian in wrath was almost as musical, he thought, as one in love. Winthrop gave freely of coins to the children. They knew well the poignancy of their outstretched hands on that particular night of the year. But the sight of them seared the soul as did no other pathos of the war: great sunken eyes sometimes festered, rickety limbs, rags and shaggy heads; the maimed among them too numerous almost for distinction made infirmity itself a crutch. Jonathan thought of Ruggeo and his message to his family: “Tell them how beautiful Naples is.”