The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Reiss smiled ruefully. “My dear Sylvia, when I say it they do not believe me. It is incredible, but they do not believe me. They simply think I am being excessively loyal to my associate.”

  Sylvia knew enough of the nature of people to realize that the more she probed the opposition, the deeper would grow its roots. She did not want to confide the situation to Marcus: it would hurt him personally, and it might even hurt his effectiveness. Distrust can get at a sensitive man in subtle ways. She settled herself, the two Italian children and Maria in at the farm, giving herself up entirely to that chore. She intended to forestall any precipitate action, which she knew very well to be her tendency.

  In the end, weighing as much as she knew, Sylvia concluded that George Bergner had at very least contributed to the undermining of Marcus. She doubted that the majority of Lakewood knew his animosity to be underlying their own altruistic fervor on behalf of Lakewood Hospital. She had not thought George capable of going underground.

  Sylvia rode horseback with characteristic abandon in the days of dilemma that followed, but both she and the horses were older. Nor was her mind made any more supple for the cruel stiffness in her body. Yet she rode again and again, and rode out the soreness. She also succeeded in bringing a horse that had not been properly exercised into condition, and the morning she realized what had happened to her and her mount, she decided to take somewhat the same course in the matter of the Children’s Rehabilitation Plan. She made up her mind to go full tilt ahead as though there were no opposition and thus to force it into the open.

  She arranged a meeting for the following afternoon among George Bergner, Marcus and herself. It was Marcus’s suggestion that they meet in his office. It seemed to Sylvia as good a place as any: she wanted Marcus to have what advantage might come of being on home grounds as it were. The day was a Friday and Fridays, ordinarily, Reiss spent at Lakewood. In a way Sylvia would have liked to have had him present so that if matters did come to a showdown, he would have to make his own position clear. She had every intention of quoting him to George in his agreement with Marcus. As it turned out, the question of his being present was all but taken out of her hands. Reiss was in his office when she arrived, and George remarked with perhaps studied casualness: “I’ve asked Nathan to sit in on the meeting. I assume it’s all right with you?”

  Both she and Marcus agreed without so much as an exchange of glances.

  George added: “I’ve had the benefit of his advice on the Foundation affairs since Alex has been away.” Bergner was Winthrop’s proxy on the Foundation Board. “I’m only one vote out of twelve, but at that it’s probably a better informed vote than most of them.”

  Sylvia could think of nothing to say that would not smack of sarcasm, but she knew now that Bergner was going to force the issue of the Foundation: it was among its trustees that he had done his mischief, and thoroughly enough to give him self-confidence. So be it. She looked about the office and commented on its décor. Very modern. This was her first visit since the move to the top floor.

  “Nothing modern about the service,” George complained. “I had to wait ten minutes for an elevator.”

  Reiss brought a bottle of Scotch, a siphon bottle and some ice.

  Outside the wind blew forlornly at the windows. It was a sound Sylvia supposed one grew used to. They were sitting in the waiting room, their chairs drawn in a circle, but it occurred to her that such a mournful sound as the wind made here must be distressing to a patient waiting consultation with a surgeon. One could see only sky through the windows. She watched the thunderheads gathering over the lake. Nearer My God to Thee: that’s what they needed up here, an organ playing “Nearer My God to Thee.” She laughed at herself.

  Marcus said: “So?”

  “You’d be surprised,” she said.

  Miss Kohler came to the door. “I’ll stay late if you’d like me to take notes of the meeting,” she said.

  Reiss looked to Sylvia. “I don’t think it’s necessary, thank you.”

  “Then good night, all.”

  “Better put the phone on service so we won’t be disturbed,” Marcus said.

  “I’ve already done that, doctor,” Miss Kohler said a little reproachfully.

  When she was gone, Sylvia said: “She must be appallingly efficient.”

  “Like a second lieutenant,” Marcus said.

  Sylvia took a cigaret from her purse and tapped it. Marcus lighted it for her and then lit one of his own. Reiss passed the drinks.

  George lifted his glass: “Well, to what we’re here for,” he said by way of a toast and sipped the whisky. Then he said: “I wonder if we shouldn’t have asked the Director of the Foundation to come this afternoon? I’d meant to mention it, but I’ve been so busy it slipped my mind.”

  “It will be time enough,” Sylvia said, “when we have our plan ready to put before them.”

  “They like to be in on the beginning of things. Sometimes it makes it easier later on.”

  Sylvia looked at him as directly as it was possible. As soon as their eyes met, his slipped away. “I don’t expect to have trouble with the Foundation, George. I have put almost a million dollars into it myself in the last two years.”

  George looked pained. The discussion of money always offended him, like the mention of an infirmity. He said: “You should the more readily agree then in the Foundation’s first principle: resistance to undue influence on the part of its benefactors.”

  Sylvia was speechless.

  “Let’s talk for a moment about the children, may we?” Marcus said, seeking to divert what he supposed was merely a wrangle over titles of authority: he knew how much they meant to Bergner, and for his own part, he did not mind catering to the man in that regard if it facilitated getting the Plan under way. If Winthrop wanted George to administer its finances, he should be given a title and told to go to work. He thought Sylvia was being unduly stiff-necked.

  “Before settling on the director’s salary?” George said.

  Marcus smiled and put out his cigaret. “Good Lord, yes. The last person people think of paying is the doctor, especially those who can afford to. I’ve had a talk with Zacharis—the plastic man, you know? He’s easily the best in this part of the country, wouldn’t you say, Nathan?”

  “Very fine.”

  “He’s seen Angelina twice now—ran a series of pictures. It will take a year at least, but he’s confident her face can be brought completely into balance.”

  George, studying the ice cubes within his glass, said nothing. He might not even have heard him. Sylvia and Reiss both commented.

  Marcus went on, trying the while to fathom George’s indifference. “He’s an interesting man, Zacharis. He’s about to take off for a week in Japan. He wants to see some of the Hiroshima victims. There’s divergent opinion on whether surgery will help—whether it will work in cases of radium burns. But he wants to see for himself.”

  George lifted his eyes from the glass. “A friend of Mueller’s?”

  Marcus was a moment making the association. Sylvia made it at once: Mueller’s crusade against further development of the atomic bomb.

  “I never thought to ask him,” Marcus said, an intended irony.

  “It may prove to have been a relevant question,” George said.

  It was Sylvia who digressed this time. She would have liked to take issue but not just then. “Marcus, I’ve decided we must have a national board of advisers for The Plan, a few men like Zacharis, and Jerome Feinberg, perhaps.” She named the latter, president of the Medical Association, because it was the name coming into her mind at the moment, her subconscious counter-balance to Bergner’s reaction to Zacharis. She knew nothing herself about Zacharis; nor had she intention of presuming to evaluate men in medicine. But having said what she had, she exposed her position to both Marcus and Bergner.

  A little smile was playing at the corners of George’s mouth.

  Marcus said: “I see.” He lit another cigaret. His opinion of
Feinberg, Sylvia knew, was not high. “Sylvia, to whom are we being made acceptable, may I ask?”

  Sylvia got up and crushed out the cigaret which had burned down to her fingers. “No one, Marcus. As of right now: no one. My mind is made up. If the Fields Foundation will not support the Children’s Rehabilitation Plan as we—you, Marcus Hogan, and I,—conceive its functioning, we shall go it alone.”

  Marcus sat blinking his eyes rapidly, trying to fathom the opposition.

  George said: “Don’t you think Alex ought to be consulted?”

  Sylvia ignored him. “And if we have to do it, I shall go into the courts and seek to break the trust fund by which the Foundation was set up.”

  George smiled. “Sylvia, you are a barnburner. You are, you know.”

  Sylvia’s fury was beyond the curb of logic. “God damn you, George, don’t patronize me. Let’s dig the rat out of the barn and have a look at it.”

  “All right,” George said. “Let’s do that.” He carefully pushed aside a stack of magazines and put his glass down on the table. “Your mother set up the Fields Foundation in the interests of medical research…”

  Sylvia interrupted him: “The Fields Foundation is not really at issue here, and do not presume to tell me its function.”

  Marcus said: “Sylvia, what is at issue? Me?”

  Reiss said with deliberate calm: “Perhaps because I am not concerned I may presume to explain? May I try, Sylvia?” She said nothing and he went on: “You see, Marcus, a great number of people in Lakewood do want the Children’s Plan as Sylvia herself originally proposed it, an actual hospital, you know? I have put myself on record as favoring your plan so I am above or perhaps below the battle. I do not matter. That is all I am trying to say …”

  “Forgive me, Nathan,” Sylvia said, “but you, too, are talking about what has come to the top, not what’s at the bottom of it.”

  Reiss shrugged, and George spread his hands. He said: “I must say I’m at a loss myself to see what you’re getting at, Sylvia.”

  “Are you telling me, George, that you are unaware of what I can only call a smear campaign in Lakewood against Marcus?” It had to come, she thought. Marcus himself would have forced it if she had not.

  George said: “That’s a good old Communist phrase, smear campaign, isn’t it?”

  “If it’s a Communist phrase, which I doubt, it is also a Fascist technique.”

  The color rose to George’s face and Sylvia knew she had touched something vulnerable. It did a great deal to restore her own equability. She was able to contemplate point by point her conversation with Hurd Abington.

  “Marcus,” she said, “do you remember Doctor Albert’s papers that he was always working on—his doctorate or whatever you’d call it—on a superior line of human beings?”

  “I remember it,” Marcus said evenly. “I was in it. He did a search of my mother’s family.”

  “Did you collaborate with him?”

  “I don’t think he wanted a collaborator. He wanted an audience.” Marcus looked at George.

  “Did you persuade him not to publish it?” Sylvia said, following Abington’s train of remarks.

  “I was not given that prerogative,” Marcus said quietly.

  There followed a few seconds of silence and George gazed up at Sylvia where she stood looking from one to the other of them. He said: “I suppose you’re wondering what became of father’s papers? Tell her, Marcus.”

  Marcus hesitated but an instant. “I don’t see that it matters now.”

  But George said: “Marcus burned them the night of my father’s death, I presume at Father’s request.”

  Marcus turned very pale and his hand trembled so violently as he tried to set his glass on the table that the glass upset and tumbled to the floor. He caught hold of the arms of the chair and pushed himself up. “I’m not going to be able to work with this man, Sylvia. I’m sorry, but I’m not.” He had been clenching and unclenching his fists. He looked at his hands, the palms of them, and then rubbed them together. He was quite overwrought. “I don’t even seem to be able to stay in the same room with him,” he said, and made his way to the door, bumping first into a chair, and then a typewriter table which he pushed violently, blindly out of his way. He went the length of the office without stopping, and out.

  Reiss leaped up from where he had sat, all but mesmerized. All of them had become momentarily paralyzed. Reiss said, “Excuse me,” and ran after Marcus, calling out his name.

  “Well, George,” Sylvia said, “I feel the way Marcus does.”

  “For God’s sake, Sylvia, can’t you see that the man’s unstable? He should be in a rehabilitation hospital himself.”

  “That, too,” Sylvia said with bitter calm.

  “I don’t know what you’re accusing me of, but I think Alex ought to be apprised of the whole situation. I work for him, you know. I don’t want a damn thing out of your Children’s Plan …”

  George stopped. There was a noise or a shout from the hall beyond the office. Sylvia started running, and Bergner lumbered after her. She reached the office door to hear Reiss shout again and again for help. He and Marcus seemed to be scuffling at the elevator gate, Marcus half in, half out. Other people were running down the hall from other offices. Reiss thrust his hand through the wire cage, trying to reach the mechanism. But Sylvia saw Marcus teeter backwards as the doors began to close. The elevator within plunged down. Reiss screamed, his hand caught in the gate. The gate, its mechanism interrupted, snapped open, releasing his hand. But Marcus, with much the pendulum-like motion of a drunk man, lurched forward and hurtled silently down the shaft, twenty-one floors to his death.

  Reiss was doubled up, holding his hand between his arm and his breast, the blood from it streaming down all the way to the tops of white shoes. He lay down on the floor and writhed with the pain.

  Interlude

  1

  THE RAIN BEAT NOISILY upon the roof. It was the harsh rain of September after which the birds go south and nothing in the garden grows any more. Because it allowed no other sound to reach her ears it was to Martha the best of sounds. She would not hear the chiming of the tower clock, the cars that passed without stopping, or stopping when she would have sped them on; she would not hear the clatter Annie made in the kitchen by the sudden crescendos in which she would know her to be venting in her own loud way her Irish grief. In such deluged silence one could stand before the easel making a mirror of one’s mind on canvas. One could put a bold dark stroke in space—and see it there forever.

  She put down brush and palette and went to the window, wiping her hands in a rag. On a day like this Tad, with Sylvia in the country, would be having a story before the fire or playing Chinese checkers. Looking down at the garden she thought that some of the green tomatoes should be brought indoors to ripen. It was a good thing to think about: green tomatoes ripening, and grapes that needed to be picked before the first frost. The grapes grew well planted along an arbor where the tool shed once had stood. Something always grew even in the soil of graves: that much she could believe. The rain coursed down the roof, bubbling over the drainpipe at the joint beneath the eaves where the shoot was blocked by bits and pieces which might once have been a bird’s nest. “My heart is like a singing bird whose nest is in a watered shoot…” She closed out the poem from her mind knowing instantly where the lines would take her. But even as she turned back to the easel another line slipped into her consciousness to take her thence anyway: “I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get in the wine.”

  One must paint and paint and paint and think of oneself as one, thus making two of one, company for each other and in that way neither of them cries. When next she went to the window, she saw the black umbrella bobbing along the far side of the hedge. From the gait of its carrier she knew her to be Annie, and this being Saturday afternoon, she would be on her way to confession. Marcus had come to believe that all creeds were vain, and so now did she, unutterably vain. Which did
but speed Annie the more often to tattle into the ear of God.

  Secure in being alone in the house, Martha went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea. Tea and toast: a sane and salutary ritual. A note from Annie was propped against the toaster in the center of the kitchen table. “I’ll be stopping for tea with your father’s cousin,” the note said in part. Her father’s cousin was also Annie’s cousin, and once or twice less removed, but Annie always spoke of her as “your father’s cousin”—whether to give herself station or Martha “a rub” Martha did not know. There were certain defects Annie expected to find in all natures, and if they did not show up outright, Annie assumed they were there all the same.

  The kettle was about to boil when the front doorbell rang. It rang twice more before Martha moved from the kitchen. She went because there was in the ringing the suggestion of someone who would not—possibly who could not—go away. It was an impulse of mercy that sent her to a door she often left unanswered.

  Nathan Reiss stood on the lower step, the rain falling between them like a scrim. She drew back and held the door open to him: he stepped into the hallway on her wordless invitation.

  “I am alone,” he said. “Do you mind that I have come?”

  She did not know whether she minded or not. The sense of urgency she had supposed in the ringing of the bell did not altogether abate. “I am making tea,” she said. “Better bring your coat into the kitchen where it will dry.”

  He needed to take a silk scarf from his bandaged hand before he could remove his coat. The last time she had seen him he had been wearing a cotton glove so that she supposed he had recently had another operation.

  “Is it painful, Nathan?”

  “Only when I am impatient—which is most of the time. They have accomplished nothing. In three months you would expect some change, wouldn’t you?”

  “Three months is a long time,” she said. She gave him a fresh towel with which he wiped the rain from his face. She arranged the tea tray on the cart. “We’ll have it in the library. Can you manage the fire there? Annie may have already set it.”