The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “‘Old Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale,

  He ate his eggs with a ladle in an egg cup big as a pail.’”

  And he told her about Herbie and the overseer’s son.

  But it was in the depth of night as she listened to his heavy, uninterrupted breathing that anxiety came upon her. She had never really known financial worry. Her father’s estate yielded a modest income, and Marcus had done very well after Dr. Bergner’s death, and he had come home with an accumulation of army pay. But property taxes now made the house and garden a luxury. She supposed the way she felt about Nathan’s check each month to be false pride … and Marcus’s business.

  But suddenly one night she shook Marcus awake out of a deep slumber and begged him to tell her the truth: had he taken drugs to make him sleep so soundly?

  “No, of course not. But I wonder if maybe we shouldn’t get you something.”

  “I’m all right as long as I know,” she said. She had an almost religious aversion to the sedative drugs—and to psychiatry, a subject turning up rather frequently in their random conversations. She was, she knew, in many ways her father’s daughter.

  One August afternoon, Marcus and Tad were crossing the park at the back of Anders Hall about to go into the University Museum of Science when Marcus stopped to look more closely at a man coming down the museum steps. He suspected it was Mueller, but he was a long moment being sure. He saw what Reiss had meant about the resemblance to a toad. Mueller’s shoulders were hunched, his head pulled in, which made him look even more squat than was his natural posture, and he wore a frightful scowl. Marcus was very near to turning aside, but this time pity stayed him. In the August days of 1945, Erich Mueller’s name was among those suddenly in the news, the atomic scientists. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been bombed; Japan was about to surrender. But Mueller looked like a man defeated; the glory of the day had passed him by.

  A shudder ran through Marcus. He was remembering his father and Mueller, his father always the older man of them. He leaned down and put his hand on Tad’s shoulder, causing the boy to wait—and himself with him. And he said when the boy looked up at him, “I’ll tell you a story later if you remind me, a Chinese story.”

  Mueller came on and would have passed without even looking up at them. Marcus said, “Excuse me, sir—about that dowry—my son and I are ready to discuss it with you.”

  Mueller cocked his head round and up, his whole expression slowly changing, his mouth open an instant before he cried out as though the world should hear him, “Ma-arc!”

  The two men embraced embarrassedly, comically (because of their contrast in sizes) but with great joy, and for the moment at least on the public thoroughfare Mueller became his old bouncing, exuberant self.

  They made their way to a nearby park bench, Mueller looking now and then at Tad, and exclaiming over and over, “So! Tad, is it?” Then, “Yes. A fine match for my youngest. We can make the arrangement.” He pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose noisily.

  Marcus was ashamed that he had not known till then even the sex of Mueller’s youngest child. “All girls?”

  Mueller plopped down with a sigh. “Yes, I am a defeated man!”

  Tad was looking at him solemnly. Finally he said, “Are you a Chinaman?”

  Mueller shook his head, his heavy jowl quivering. “No,” he said good-humoredly, and winked at Marcus. “It is enough I am a Jew.”

  “Chinese,” Marcus said gently to the boy, “not Chinaman.”

  “Annie says ‘Chinaman.’”

  Marcus hesitated only a second. “Annie also says ‘terrass’—‘will I serve the tea on the terrass?’ But you and I know the word is terrace, don’t we?”

  “Sometimes she says terrace,” Tad said.

  “Sometimes. So if you remind her, sometimes she will say ‘Chinese.’”

  Mueller clapped Marcus on the shoulder. “There you have it, Marc. Ha! I can remember your father saying that,” and he shook his finger in imitation of Jonathan Hogan. “‘There you have it, Erich. There you have it.’ And you know something, Marc? He was right about more things than you or I ever were. Never mind. Where is Jonathan? He was in Italy, England now, is it? How I have missed him.”

  “I too,” Marcus said.

  “You have been a long way, the two of you.”

  “A long way. Where do we go from here, Erich?”

  Mueller flung out his hand. “Much further. We go to the moon, Marc. And shoot it up also. But right now…” he touched Tad’s nose with the tip of his finger, “we are going to my house, to see Julie and all my girls.” He got up and took Tad’s hand. “First we are going to buy a bagful of hotdogs. Always you can buy hotdogs. Sometimes I wonder what they put inside them. Better we don’t know, eh? You do like hotdogs, Tad?”

  The child nodded.

  “So! Then we will call your mama and she will come also. The most beautiful Martha, yes?”

  “The most,” Marcus said and grinned.

  Mueller gave him a hug. “Ah, Marc, it is good, good. Let me see now. Where did I leave the car? I have a C-ration book, you know? I am a very important person.” He steered them toward the parking lot at the back of the museum. “A very important person.”

  Mueller went through a veritable ceremony to get the car started, prompting Marcus to ask: “What kind of a car is it?”

  “A Frankenstein.” And twisting his head so that he could look at Marcus, he said: “That’s a joke, son. Ah, Marc, Marc. I listen to the radio all the time: the comedians. What do you do?”

  Marcus gave a short laugh. “I sleep.”

  But that afternoon, sitting on the Mueller front porch, Marcus spoke openly in a way he had not been able to until then. He told something of what Ireland had meant to him, the stillnesses, the day to day importance of drawing sustenance from the soil, out of the sea, of coaxing heat from a peat fire, of talk that was like poetry, and poetry as simple as talk.

  “But we cannot be primitives again, you and I,” Mueller said, “and you know, it is sinful for us to want to be. We are responsible for our own times.”

  “I know, I know. I’ll tell you something, Erich, I didn’t come home to operate on women for imaginary diseases.”

  Why he had said that he did not know and instantly admitted it. There were only the four adults present, the children romping through the house: but it was a strange thing to have said. Martha looked at him quizzically, trying to know what he had really meant to say if it were not that.

  “Ah-ha,” Mueller said. “I know. I am no psychiatrist, but I think I know. Europe is sick. Maybe so is America, but she does not know it. She is a mixture of crankiness and fat. You saw the concentration camps, eh, Marc?”

  “One of them. And not the worst.”

  “Tell me—can they happen here?”

  Marcus sat a moment. “I suppose you’re right, they couldn’t happen here.”

  Mueller leaped to his feet. “Shame on you! You do not understand anything to shrug your shoulders and say that. You say they cannot happen here. What makes you say it? Because you are lazy, it can’t happen?”

  Mueller was, Marcus realized, himself taken aback by it, in a very real fury. Julie merely sat, hugging her plump body as she rocked faintly back and forth in the swing. It was a family sort of gesture, protective of what she could protect while her husband was profligate with his energies.

  “You are a sentimental fool, Marc,” Mueller started again. “An ignorant giant is no better than a vicious dwarf. Look what we have done with our miracle! You cannot know what nuclear power is.”

  “Morally, I will take Hiroshima over Dachau any day, Erich.”

  Mueller flew into a new rage. “What has that got to do with it? We are responsible for Hiroshima. Dachau does not justify us. The death march of Bataan, all the cruel, barbaric atrocities do not justify us. What justice is there for the monstrous crime? Only the ironic. Punishment equal to crime degrades the society which administers
it. When all men kill, who will stanch the wounds, eh? What happens when there is only justice—no charity?”

  “That’s all, Erich. When there are no more good Samaritans, that’s the end of us. I have no quarrel with you there.”

  Mueller stood glowering down on him, his small, dark eyes aglow within their puffy lids. His voice changed. “No? Then I will quarrel with myself. There will be no more war. I, Erich Mueller, says so. The politician-scientist. Where your father left off, I am starting. The people must know.” He held his hands apart, each cupped as though a balance to the other. “Dachau and Hiroshima. Either one could happen here, but they will not. They must not. Not here or anywhere in the world again. War does not right wrong. The people must know it.”

  “The people,” Marcus repeated.

  Mueller thumped his chest. “I am the people.”

  Time and again through the afternoon, both Marcus and Martha glimpsed the violence the war had done Mueller who was as close to a pure man, Marcus thought, as any he had ever known. Very few Americans, including Martha and himself, thought of the atomic bomb as anything more than a very large bomb, and the number of lives its use saved, American and, it was easily assumed, Japanese, by the earlier termination of hostilities seemed moral justification enough. And Marcus knew, too, perhaps better than did Mueller, how imprecise virtually all bombing was. But something of the magnitude of this man-wrought miracle, this capture of the sun’s own power, came through to them from Mueller. He was alternately humble and furious. “It is like a bear whom you have trained to do prodigious things … and fools, irresponsibles, have come on a stormy night and taken off his shackles. Now I must be vigilant they do not put the shackles on me.”

  Marcus said, “Erich, isn’t it possible that it would have been better never to have shackled the bear in the first place?”

  “No, Marc! No. No. No.” And Mueller caught him by the lapels and shook him like a small boy.

  At bedtime that night Tad reminded his father of the Chinese story he had promised to tell him.

  “Well, it’s not a very long story,” Marcus said. “Once there was a man standing at the foot of a mountain, and away off, he saw something move. He thought at first it was—a bear—yes, a bear. But then it came closer, and he saw that it was a man. And pretty soon, when the man came closer still, he saw that it was his brother.”

  Nathan Reiss often called at the house in those days, or telephoned. He was the more solicitous, Martha supposed, for his own conscience’ sake, Marcus having suffered where he had not. But there was also, she suspected, the matter of the financial arrangement although it was never mentioned. She had thought for a time that Marcus might be able to take hold after his reunion with Mueller. But he fell more and more into unshared contemplation. Day after day passed and nothing changed except for the worse. The deeper the attachment grew between Marcus and his son, the less either of them seemed to need her.

  Always Nathan would say, “Tell me what I can do?”

  What she needed was someone to tell her what she could do. But she was the last person to ask it of anyone. She found herself thinking often of her mother and grew in understanding of a marriage that was not altogether marriage. But she loved Marcus as she was sure her mother had never loved her father. Yet her love was not enough, obviously. Marcus told her often, painfully often, that he loved her. She understood, but she was helpless, and to be made helpless by the helpless was too terrible.

  So that there came the morning when Martha rose and bathed, and hearing Tad at breakfast in the kitchen with Annie, returned to the bedroom and sat down on Marcus’s side of the bed. He was awake, smiling tentatively.

  “Where’s Tad?” he asked.

  “Marcus, is it Nathan?”

  He was hesitant in answering. “Do you mean am I jealous of him?”

  “I wish you were,” she said. “I don’t mean that at all, and I should think you know it. Why don’t you break the arrangement with him, Marcus? It might be better for both of you.”

  He sat up and leaned on his elbow. “Has Nathan suggested that?”

  “Is that what you’re waiting for—for him to suggest it?” Martha said, on the verge of anger because she seemed about to be put in the position of defending Reiss.

  “I asked you, Martha—did he suggest it?”

  “Not ever,” Martha said. “I’m not thinking of him at all.”

  “I have a responsibility. I shall be able to take it on soon. The trouble is, with this kind of responsibility, a man ought to care a great deal more about people than I’ve been able to since I’ve been home.”

  “A responsibility to Nathan?”

  Marcus leaned back on his pillow, not relaxed, but away from her direct scrutiny. “No. For him in a way.” He laughed shortly. “To assume that kind of responsibility takes the martyr’s arrogance, doesn’t it? Or do you think martyrs are humble?”

  She ignored the gibe, feeling it was that and unlike Marcus so that she supposed he was diverting her from some other meaning on which he did not wish to elaborate.

  “I remember our talking about something like this a long time ago. Do you remember my telling you about Sister Mathilde?”

  He did not remember.

  “Are you thinking about the people who were killed—in the concentration camps?”

  “In a way. But I’m thinking more about those who weren’t, those who have no idea of what happened over there. A doctor can’t do much for the dead. It ought to be enough for me to be a surgeon. But I don’t seem to be able to make that arrangement with myself. What about Sister Mathilde?”

  “I’m not sure now it’s relevant. I was only thinking that we cannot persecute ourselves for not having been called upon to die in such a manner.”

  “We can’t blame Nathan for being alive and healthy, is that it? I quite agree with you.” Then he added, “Especially since Nathan doesn’t blame Nathan.”

  “I think he does—in his fashion.”

  Marcus laughed. “You, too.”

  “Marcus, I don’t give the slightest damn for Nathan. It’s you I love and want, and sometimes feel I’ve lost entirely since you came home. I live in this family, too, you know. I’m not just its guardian angel, or its matriarch.”

  Marcus reached out and pulled her down, resisting, atop him.

  “You said I would have to come and get you. But I can’t, Marcus, if you won’t let me. Don’t you understand? I’ve got to feel your hand upon me, not just your words, your tolerance, your patronage. I’m hungry for the love of you, and aching with loneliness. I cannot say it all. I cannot touch you and feel that dreadful faraway-ness you have now.”

  His mouth was at her ear. “Don’t say any more. Please, dear.”

  “I am trying to turn myself inside out for you. You have always said I am so introverted. Then if you don’t want my love, I must understand it.”

  He managed to catch her head in his hands. Holding her face above him, he kissed her mouth, long and tenderly, so that she submitted and put her head on the pillow after it and wept quietly, while he stroked her hair.

  “I’m home,” he whispered, and over again, and within himself determining that it be so, began to feel it so: there was a kind of exaltation in his release, and, in that euphoric state, his senses were suddenly assaulted by the silken softness and the fragrance of Martha’s streaming hair, in which he then burrowed his face.

  7

  SYLVIA, AT HOME AND particularly abroad, much preferred to give an intimate party to the grand affairs such as those for which Winthrop was famous in Lakewood. But in the autumn of 1945 when the pressures for early industrial and business transition were very great in Italy, Winthrop felt that such a party might be expeditious. No American of his rank was in as good a position as he to do it. He could afford it financially, his wife was with him, their house was adequate to such an affair, and they were sufficiently acquainted with Neapolitan society by then to carry it off with a degree of grace. There was nothing Nea
politans admired more than concealed purpose—and what else was grace?

  Sylvia agreed to give the party, but she had never felt less sure of herself in such an undertaking. It was a feeling she did not enjoy. She knew that she was not liked in the upper circles, and for her own sake, cared little. The society of Naples found her too direct for a woman, brassy, and of course an American. She had too intimate a rapport with the lower clergy, for it was with their help she had gotten under way her project of rehabilitating the war-maimed children. Having no need for prelates was in itself an offense to prelacy. But it was the ceremony, not the sacrifice, in which too many of them would have wished to join: so Sylvia felt, and she was ever impatient with ceremony. It was only after an incident during one of her early ventures with Winthrop into local society that she had realized herself to have been the object of a covert jest. The Marchesa of somewhere she had since forgotten, remarked across her to their hostess, and in English: “It is a South wind blows tonight. It is scented with Fra Giacomo.” Fra Giacomo was a mendicant who begged of the wealthy on behalf of the children. Sylvia thought it as well she had not got the point. But the truth was she often did smell of her associates, and nothing stank quite so dramatically as an aged cassock.

  She was hard put to overcome her misgivings about the party. If she had herself been invited to such an affair as she and Winthrop were arranging, she would have found an excuse to escape it: the population of Naples and much of Italy was living in dire poverty, the harvest was the worst in years, rumors of a harsh peace came out of the foreign ministers’ conference in London, and the country, particularly the North, was on the verge of political turmoil. She was not at all sure, although she could not elicit such an admission from her husband, that Winthrop was not persuaded to give the grand affair by precisely that consideration: their party was bound to be taken as a not too oblique gesture on behalf of the old ruling class.