The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Sylvia said, “Marcus, will you come and help me explain why we don’t want to use Lakewood Hospital?”

  He would, himself addressing these people, have preferred to put it less directly. But Sylvia was as forthright in speech as she was strong in will, and she was probably right to give no ground in the first place.

  “For one thing,” Marcus said, observing George’s sharp attention (after all, he was a trustee of Lakewood and Nathan was on the staff), “Lakewood is a community hospital.” He went on to explain the difficulties he foresaw in mixing the children, particularly those with language and cultural difficulties in addition to their deformities, with local appendectomies and tonsillectomies. A therapy center was one thing, but for the actual treatment, the child should be taken to the doctor, rather than ask the doctor to come to the child. “We shall want the best specialist available to us in each case.”

  “And you will decide who the best man is, Doctor Hogan?” George addressed him formally for the benefit of the people there who did not know him.

  Nathan said instantly: “But who would be in a better position to know, George?”

  Marcus got the curious feeling of being knocked down by the one and picked up by the other. He wondered if Reiss were trying to allay any possible suspicion that he, Reiss, might be envious. He doubted that Reiss was in fact. He might temporarily covet the prestige attendant on such a project, but he was too much the virtuoso to bind himself with administrative and consultative routine. That, Marcus thought a little wryly, better became him—since the war. He was not himself ever going to be the master surgeon he had once supposed. “Actually, George, the men will recommend themselves—bone specialists, neurosurgeons, their specializations make them known throughout the profession, don’t you see?”

  Bergner said: “Yes, I see. But it occurs to me—and there’s the whole new wing of the Lakewood so that there wouldn’t be such a mixture of breeds as you suggest—that a setup such as there is in some of the veterans’ hospitals where a number of good doctors can come together at times—have an exchange of views—might be an advantage. Of course, I speak with the prejudice of having a hospital to sell.”

  Whatever his prejudice, George spoke with authority. Winthrop, far away and having been besieged by a zealous and idealistic wife, had devised an excellent system of check and balance to her scheme: he had insisted that George administer the finances of the Rehabilitation Plan, the money for which was to come from The Fields Foundation.

  Sylvia said, “Marcus, most of these good people here tonight are going to be involved if I can help it. You must speak frankly.”

  Marcus opened his hands. “I have spoken frankly.”

  “Tell them why you consented to take on the job—aside from the fact that I wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  Marcus was embarrassed. He hedged a moment, glancing at Martha whose eyes held fast upon him. “I suppose a hurt child is the best friend one’s conscience has …” He would have liked to have had those words back as soon as they were out. He rubbed the back of his neck and amended: “At least he’s the best messenger you can get to call on somebody else’s conscience …”

  Sylvia took advantage of a murmur of amusement and cut in: “Doctor Hogan agreed to direct the Plan because we all felt that it was absolutely essential that no one use the hospital or its work as a vehicle for personal advancement. My husband—” Sylvia lifted her chin, a gesture of pride and defiance to all of Lakewood—“said that Marcus Hogan was the only man he knew who would put this job above himself.”

  Marcus again rubbed the back of his neck and said quietly but audibly, “And God have mercy on his soul.”

  Those who heard him laughed and whatever tensions there seemed to have been in the room eased off. There had been no public announcement of his appointment or of the Plan itself, for that matter. It was still largely in Sylvia’s mind. But the two children she had brought from Italy were introduced that night, and they were already under treatment. Nathan, leaving the party early, offered to drive them and their Italian governess back to Traders City.

  Afterwards Martha commented on it. “You don’t think Nathan’s jealous, do you? He’s terribly ambitious, and he loves publicity—he loves to read about himself in the paper …” Even as she groped for a way to put her own estimate of him, Martha was testing. She had never been able to quite know Marcus’s feeling about Nathan.

  “He wouldn’t be right for the job and I think he knows it,” Marcus said, but committed himself no further. They were about to get into the car. He looked up into the sky. The air was scented with chestnut blossoms and he suddenly remembered the girl from the concentration camp who had talked him out of his ten dollars.

  Martha said: “Could we drive down to the lake for a few minutes?”

  “Why not?”

  On the way Marcus was several times at the point of speaking about Reiss, of trying to speak frankly. There had hung between him and Martha from the beginning a reluctance to talk about him—as they did about, say, Winthrop or Sylvia, George, even Martha’s father—and it was because he was Jewish, Marcus thought. If Reiss had been patently a good man like Erich Mueller this would not have happened either. But in a way, their reluctance to talk about him had very little to do with Reiss: it was as though such conversation might discover in one of them something obscene. No, not quite that, but something damaging to the ideal each had of the other, the ideal each wished to be in the other’s eyes; something a little comparable to an adolescent sex digression, long since suppressed, untold and untellable, but unforgotten. The time was coming—not for the tearing away of masks: neither of them was dishonest—but for the dropping of veils. And he knew it would be the more difficult for Martha: hers was the background of intolerance on which she still kept vigil—although he doubted she knew he was aware of it. But this in itself was almost as crippling as prejudice—to both of them.

  If Reiss were not Jewish, then, it would have been easy to talk about him. But talking of him, would they know him any the better for it? He doubted it. Reiss was a chameleon. He took on the coloration and the virtue of the society he kept—except for one oddness: his distressing habit of making people acknowledge his Jewishness.

  They drove down the steep road through the ravine and parked a few yards from the water’s edge. Marcus turned off the car motor and lights. Along the crescent shore line to the south, some twenty miles away, the lights of Traders City glittered like a ridge of stars. The water rippled quietly and the white sands shifted, making the sound of a soft and constant sighing.

  “I’ve been so lonely here,” Martha said. “And so much in love.”

  “I’ve never been here alone and always in love here,” Marcus said.

  And they remembered the hurried nights out of which they had stolen a little time there before Martha’s return to St. Cecilia’s.

  Presently Martha said: “We’re not going to have any more children, are we?”

  “It doesn’t look like it, does it?”

  She buried her face in his shoulder.

  But he continued on the same level: “I don’t see how we could improve on what we’ve done, do you?”

  “No,” she whispered, and straightened up and blew her nose.

  On the way home Martha said, “You’re happy about the Children’s Plan, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, Lord, yes. I can’t begin to tell you what that’s done for me—from the moment I saw that child’s face. Wait till you see what a good plastic surgeon will do for it.”

  “Sylvia knew how you’d feel.”

  “It was a very great moment,” Marcus said humbly, and then, thinking aloud, “Something happens, you see. Medicine—surgery—was no longer enough for me after the war. Or maybe too much. There was a time when I thought I would never be able to go into the operating room again …”

  “I know,” Martha said. “I knew that day at the Muellers.”

  “That was almost the turning point. But I’m not p
olitically capable like my father—or like Erich, God bless him. And God help him. I’m afraid he’ll go down my father’s road twenty years later. All their arts and sciences and professions won’t get the bomb back into the box. But I understand them, I think. A liberal cannot live without faith in man: that’s his creed. And the public forum is the only pulpit he’s got. But I’m afraid I feel now that all creeds are vain. There is only vigilance—and kindness. Creeds make men blind.”

  He drove in silence for several miles. It was after midnight and the roads were almost empty.

  “I would not say a surgeon doesn’t need a heart—but this surgeon anyway needs to know more of his fellow men than their critical insides. As I started to say a while back, something happens. A man makes money and that becomes a measure even to himself. Reputations are built on fees and charities. And a man’s reputation is the only guide his colleagues and their patients have to him. Fees and charities.” Again he glanced at Martha and smiled. “I’m very grateful to Sylvia. She’s given me a new leash on life.”

  Martha smiled. One thing about Annie: her malapropisms never changed but they were reliable helps in tying up the ends of emotion in the family.

  “Of course,” Marcus added, “ten years from now, if I live, it may be something else again. But for now, I know where I’m going.” He reached across and took Martha’s gloved hand and held it between them on the seat. “And I know who’s going with me.”

  10

  WITHIN A FEW DAYS of the gathering at the Bergners’ Sylvia found herself in a position that at one and the same time angered and bewildered her: the citizens of Lakewood had decided they wanted a Children’s Rehabilitation Hospital within the village limits, in fact, to be associated with Lakewood Hospital. They were to a man, at least to a moneyed man, opposed to Marcus Hogan’s proposal. In a way, Sylvia had herself to blame for the situation. Her own idea in the first place had been to found such a hospital, and she had confided this in her correspondence home, paving the way for what she had then supposed would be the village’s coolness to the project. She had misjudged the psychology of her own people, failing to weigh against their nativism their compulsive charity. Too late, she could say one had only to look at their “Orphans of the Road” where any stray dog could live like a monarch’s pug to realize the benefaction of which they were capable.

  Their zeal was spontaneous. It could be traced to no other source than Sylvia’s own original enthusiasm. The perceptible change to have taken place during her absence was their conscious pride in Lakewood Hospital, and she could assume that Nathan Reiss had something to do with that. He had become its first chief surgeon, and the hospital had achieved top classification from the Medical Association. Sylvia profoundly doubted, however, that he had gained the social stature in Lakewood to appreciably influence such a community.

  She decided to visit an old family friend, Hurd Abington, by way of exploring through a source she was sure was not going to be overly sanguine of the immigrant doctor’s contribution. Indeed, there were moments during her talk with Abington that she regretted having come to him: his continual reference to Reiss as “our pet Jew” made her flinch inwardly every time he said it. It was the more disconcerting because she had her own prejudicial association to fight where Reiss was concerned.

  “But my dear girl,” Abington explained of Reiss’ progress, “once he was in, there’s nothing surprising about it. Don’t you see, he makes our local mediocrities look good. I dare say some of them may be all right, but that he is a first-rate surgeon is indisputable. Every man has his price, Sylvia, especially a Jew. His price was the title, chief surgeon. And the vote of the staff was unanimous.” Her host chuckled. “Having voted it in their own interests, they are now convinced they did it out of tolerance. We have become a hotbed of tolerance. That, my dear girl, is democracy. For years the crown courts of Europe had their pet Jews as the power behind them. I shouldn’t be surprised if history turns up one or two behind Hitler, would you?”

  “Six million I believe,” Sylvia said, her temper very nearly out of control.

  “I think that figure is somewhat exaggerated,” Abington murmured.

  Sylvia held her tongue. To abandon it at that moment might have been to abandon Lakewood, the Children’s Plan, everything. The admission of this fact brought her to the edge of panic—which was itself an antidote to temper. She felt like someone trying to manage both sides of a see-saw. The whole plan was hers, but now with very nearly the same suddenness in which she had conceived it, she could lose its control. The financing of the plan was to come through the Fields Foundation into which, for taxation purposes, she and Winthrop had been putting their own surplus funds. Sylvia, from the time she had thought of the Children’s Plan, had diverted to the Foundation monies she had been advised by her broker to place elsewhere. Except for Winthrop and herself, the trustees of the Fund were now residing in Lakewood. A two-thirds majority of them could overrule her! Sylvia made a bolt from the chair to where the French doors opened on one of the most famous gardens in the country. With the gesture of physical release she was able to turn back to the complacent old gentleman who watched her with an expression both benign and cynical.

  “I thought I smelt delphinium,” she said inanely.

  “No. Not yet. Roses, I should think. I’m having the flower show here this year, did you know?”

  “No,” Sylvia said, and thought that another barrier was down when the Abington gardens were opened to the public. Abington, a childless widower, had made even more exquisite the famous formal gardens following his wife’s death. Her ashes were buried in an urn from which center the floral beds radiated even as rays go out from the sun.

  “Year after year, they’ve asked. I thought it was about time—since your Children’s Plan is to be its beneficiary—through the Foundation, of course.”

  Nor had she known that. He talked a few minutes about the gardens, the incompetence of the younger gardeners. Then he said, almost offhandedly: “This Hogan fellow, he’s something of a radical, isn’t he?”

  “That was his father,” Sylvia said, and only a few seconds later did she realize that here might be actual issue in Lakewood. “Doctor Hogan was Albert Bergner’s protégé his successor, really.”

  “I shouldn’t go so far as to say that,” Abington said easily. He brushed his fine white hair back from his forehead as though it were a cobweb. “If he has a successor, I should say it was our friend.”

  “Reiss?”

  Abington nodded. “A touch of conscience, I shouldn’t wonder. It was old Doctor Albert who put Reiss into Lakewood, you know. I should have thought it would have been the place for … your man if he thought so highly of him.”

  Sylvia came very close to saying that Marcus might not have wanted Lakewood, which she supposed could very well have been the truth. The community was not for him surely. But to have said it at that moment would have further compromised Marcus whom she now suspected to have been rather thoroughly done over already. She harked back to a phrase Abington had used: “A touch of conscience, did you say, Hurd?”

  Abington shrugged. “Doctor Albert, as I recall hearing it, had some peculiar notions about a superior race of men. I suppose you’re too young to remember the discourses he used to give us at the drop of a hat.”

  “I remember them. He used to give mother and me first refusal.”

  Abington laughed. “I’d forgotten how fond he was of Alicia.”

  “I don’t remember anything anti-Semitic in them,” Sylvia said. “They were just bloody boring.”

  “That’s how I felt myself. But some of our more sensitive people took exception to them. There was talk, Sylvia, talk. The University made him confine himself to the surgeon’s manual—which was remarkable in its way, considering their permissiveness in other cases.” This was of course a snide reference to the Jonathan Hogan affair. Abington looked at her almost mournfully. “He was always going to have them published, if you remember. But in the en
d, he didn’t do it, did he? I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that young Hogan had some influence there, would you?”

  “There’s one way to find out,” Sylvia said. “I shall ask him.”

  Abington changed his position in the chair. He might have been changing tack. “It’s not a matter of genuine relevance at this point, is it? George seems to feel it was just as well that they weren’t published. The old fellow was getting a bit dotty on it, as the English say. Still, it occurred to some of us that in the end, young Hogan might have out-smarted himself.” He looked at her. “I understand he has a distinguished war record?”

  “Does that surprise you, Hurd?”

  “Frankly, yes. But I keep forgetting, the Russians were on our side then.”

  “Jesus Christ in the morning, Hurd! Marcus Hogan is no more a Communist than you are.”

  He leaned across the small Chinese lacquer table between them and patted her hand. “If you say so, Sylvia. If you say so.”

  Sylvia was at a loss to know where to turn next in the matter. She did not suppose George Bergner would dare to oppose her openly. After all, she was co-publisher of the Star on which his fine new prestige was founded. And he did not need to oppose her: the whole of Lakewood was doing the job for him. She talked with Reiss: he had nothing but praise for Marcus although he admitted disappointment that the Rehabilitation Plan was to be taken away from Lakewood Hospital. He sounded sincere.

  “Nathan, the Plan has never been in the Lakewood Hospital.”

  “Yes, of course. And I agree with you, Sylvia, its director must have entire freedom in determining its requirements. I have come round myself, by the way, to Marcus’s view: I am disappointed, but I agree. It is more practical to take the children to the doctors than to bring the doctors to the children. Much more. After all, there is a limit to what a man can do in his own field even.”

  “Have you said this in Lakewood, Nathan—that you agree with Marcus and me?”