The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Oh, I don’t doubt that,” he said.

  “I don’t know why the investigators are asking about Sylvia. I suppose they have to in times like these—they have to go over all the names of people who were once associated with such organizations. I should suppose it’s proper and necessary—and this is much to my point: I should suppose that Sylvia, especially for the sake of the Plan, would welcome such an investigation.”

  Reiss’ whole expression changed. Martha repeated: “Especially for the Plan.”

  “I see,” Reiss said. “I see what you mean.”

  “The Fields Foundation is not on the Attorney General’s list, I shouldn’t think.”

  Reiss looked at her and laughed a little. “Hurd Abington—can you imagine?”

  “No. But I can’t imagine Sylvia belonging there either,” Martha said.

  Reiss leaned back in his chair, his lower lip protruding, a habit of his that always put her in mind of a repentant child, and said: “If you are right…” He glanced up at her, his eyes soft with regret… “I hope I have not done her harm.”

  Martha slid off the desk and went to the window where she could turn her back to him. How revelatory that last remark! She could conjecture from it the whole interview with the interrogators, his anxiety to be cooperative, to ingratiate himself with them, and inevitably she remembered again: “I am not a Jew.” Her anger was quick and fierce with him, not for what he was. She knew that, had known it, but for his willingness to expose himself to her in utter indecency, forcing her to look at him at his cowardly worst.

  She tried unsuccessfully to control the trembling of her shoulders.

  “What is it, Martha?”

  She shook her head and he repeated his question. She turned and faced him. “You have no shame.”

  “You are right,” he said, satisfied to have wrung from her the accusation. He left the chair and himself half-sat on the desk, his arms folded, and smiled ruefully as he watched her face for the effect upon it of his words. “I have never claimed to be more than worthless. But I have an honorable wife whom I adore. My conscience and my queen. Do not waste your anger on me, Martha. I have given you what I had to give. We both—you and I—give everything … and nothing. It is enough for an unimportant man like me. I am sorry if it is not enough for you.”

  Martha drew a deep, long breath. She had won and lost which was the pattern of their lives. “It is enough,” she murmured.

  Reiss picked up the phone and dialed Mount Clement Hospital to set up his schedule for the morning. Martha touched his hand, almost as though for luck, passing him to leave the room.

  But in a larger scene and with the variation of more people present, Martha went through virtually the same experience a few days later. On a Sunday evening they were returning from Fox Lake and stopped at the farm as was their custom. Sylvia persuaded them to stay to supper. Nathan went on to Lakewood for an hour and then returned. Supper was served on the screened porch.

  Winthrop was surprised to discover that he enjoyed his weekends on the farm. The children’s dormitory was a half-mile from the house so that he saw them only when he wanted to. He found that crops and a garden for home consumption gave him pleasure in nature that he had never known at the Tamarack estate, a place he now referred to rather ashamedly. He liked to tease Tad, pretending to be more ignorant of the farm than he actually was, just to hear the boy explain with elaborate patience to him the facts of farm life.

  “Sylvia’s finally got me aboard a horse again,” he remarked at supper. “At my age that’s a dangerous pastime.”

  Tad wanted to know which horse he was riding. Being told, he said: “It’s not very dangerous.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that,” Winthrop said. “It relieves my mind if not my backside.”

  “Do you sail, Uncle Alexander?”

  Winthrop said: “I float,” and Tad grinned.

  “I hope you and Sylvia will come out to the lake soon,” Martha said. “I remember you were fond of boats.” She was remembering an occasion in her childhood when she, her mother and father had gone sailing with him on Judge Phipps’s yacht.

  “That would be very nice,” Winthrop said, but he was puzzled at what made her think he was fond of boats. Actually he had a strong tendency toward seasickness.

  “I remember you put on the pilot’s cap and papa took your picture.”

  “Ah, now I remember,” Winthrop said.

  Reiss said: “We shall invite the Bergners and make a weekend party of it. What do you say, Sylvia?”

  Sylvia did not answer right away. She had been under numerous if more subtle pressures from both her husband and Reiss to restore the Bergners to her social calendar. She glanced at Martha and seeing no reaction to mention of them wondered if living with Nathan Reiss wore down one’s sensitivities. But of course the last hour in Marcus’s life was not as vivid to Martha as to her: only the loss had been vivid. And as Alexander said, you could accuse George of many things, but you couldn’t actually blame him for Marcus’s death. Willy nilly hers and George Bergner’s paths crossed and recrossed whether or not she accepted him.

  She merely said: “I don’t like week-end parties.”

  “Then an afternoon, a picnic perhaps,” Reiss persisted.

  Tad was looking at her. Sylvia said: “That would be lovely.”

  “Good,” Reiss said. A moment later he took her plate and asked if he might bring her coffee.

  “I can get it,” she said, starting up.

  He persuaded her. “There is something I have been wanting to tell you.”

  Across the porch, her attention presumably given to Winthrop’s account to Tad of the goatherds who lived in caves outside Athens, Martha overheard her husband telling Sylvia of the visit to his office of the F.B.I, investigators. Distinctly she heard him say: “Martha thought you ought to be told and I had to agree with her.”

  “I must say I’m not surprised, all things considered,” Sylvia said.

  Nathan said: “Please?” He could make his curiosity seem very offhand.

  “Alex is about to set a new editorial policy with the Star. I should think it would stir up a certain amount of … uneasiness.”

  “Ah, I see. Then it has nothing to do with the Children’s Plan.”

  “I should hope that it won’t, Nathan.”

  Reiss glanced at his wife. Martha, aware of his eyes did not meet them however. Reiss took Sylvia’s hand for a moment. “I was very noncommital when they asked their questions.”

  Sylvia laughed. “Thank you, Nathan. But I assure you, my life is an open book. The name Fields was always good for a headline. It was all in the newspapers. But perhaps they don’t have time these days for that kind of research.”

  Martha went outdoors managing to do it without attracting attention and walked the pebbled path to the garden. The evening star shone brightly in the twilight. By way of not thinking, she tried to remember a poem of which both she and Marcus had been very fond. At last she was able to conjure the lines from Yeats by which she had made the association:

  “… how love fled and paced upon the mountain overhead and hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

  7

  GEORGE BERGNER HAD BEEN uneasy from the day Winthrop returned to Traders City. He had the feeling of being at the wheel of a machine the steering apparatus of which was about to go out of control: when he acted he got a response, but something did not feel right, something was unsure to his touch. He had prepared the staff for Winthrop’s return; he had also let it be known that he expected the boss to be around for a while and then to take off on some new project. But this Winthrop showed no signs of doing. Bergner remained General Manager of the Star, but Winthrop consulted primarily with the editor and neither of them saw fit to fill George in on what was going on. He would have liked by his manner, his aplomb, to seem confident, at least a man in the know, but his own secretary gave him the jitters with her solicitude. It was not long until he was getting sympathy fro
m all sides.

  But he stayed at his desk, sifting rumors that came from the front office, reading signs in the requisitions that came to him for approval. For example, he got a day’s cheer out of the fact that the foreign editor was authorized to send his own man to Korea: that was not likely to happen if the Star was going on the block. He had heard that rumor, too. The country was suddenly in another fighting war in Korea, ill-prepared, most of our troops home, decoyed out of Korea by the Russian withdrawal from their sector. The State Department was under even more severe fire, the charges of disloyalty and security failures exploding like buckshot.

  On the day the Korean correspondent was sent out, George was suddenly informed of what had been going on at the top. Winthrop called him in and showed him the copy for a lead editorial. It bore the head: JUST WHO IS JOE McCARTHY?

  George kept his eyes on the piece, but he did not read it. He knew then that he had been expecting something of this sort. When he looked up, he said: “You’re the boss, Alex. When do you plan to run it?”

  “Soon. It’s a couple of years late now.”

  George lit a cigaret. “You shouldn’t have left a boy to do a man’s work.”

  “I didn’t. I left a man who got old too soon, that’s all.”

  “You’ve got a newspaper. I’m not sure you’d have had one otherwise.”

  “Both Sylvia and I would have been willing to take that chance. We’re going to take it now.”

  “Will you grant me this much, Alex: I’ve brought the Star to where it’s got enough circulation to make your message count?”

  “I’ll grant you that—and more, George. Fifteen years ago, left to my own devices I’d have done what you did. I’ve not forgotten you helped get me out of the basement of City Hall.”

  George picked up the copy again and this time read a few lines. “You know, Alex, you ought not to run this until you’ve got a first-rate cartoonist to take up the theme.”

  Winthrop was quick to agree, and subsequently lavish in paying credit to George when he included him in talks with the editorial staff. Names were suggested. Winthrop said: “Since this is your baby, George, why don’t you find us someone?”

  “Give me a day or two. There ought to be someone left over from the thirties.”

  George wondered afterwards, Winthrop shaking hands with him as he left the office, if he had not by that intuitive stroke saved his own job with the Star. If he had lost it, he could not have felt Winthrop’s treatment of him much shabbier. He presumed Sylvia had got to him.

  In the old days he had had the advantage of riding home on the train with Winthrop, a contact which daily reassured him of the mutuality of their enterprise. There was little solace in his own company on these daily journeys, small pleasure in choosing between the contemplation of his own belly or looking out the window at the uniformed construction known as “middle-income housing” strung all the way up the North Shore. He was cursed with both the love and fear of individualism: he knew it and blamed his father. But no more than he blamed himself. He had somehow got mixed up with liberalism in the thirties: he had thought he was hitching his wagon to a star; instead he seemed to have got caught in a chain gang. Mental depression settled on him very easily. He had a job dependent upon another man’s whims, a daughter who had not been able to get out of his house soon enough, a son who wouldn’t shave his face and a wife who hadn’t the guts to encourage a lover.

  The latter thought occurred to him when he arrived home—he still walked the near mile from the station—and saw Nathan Reiss’ car in the driveway. There had been a time when he thought something was going to happen between them—Louise and Reiss—when the refugee had first arrived on the scene. He had been constantly about the house, flattering and fluttering her, the giddy woman. But Reiss was a man who could always get what he wanted without committing himself, while George, by his own calculation, never got what he wanted and always committed himself. He was the beggar who spat behind the back of his benefactor, loathing himself even while he did it.

  He unlocked the front door. Before he had put down his dispatch case Louise called out, “George? We’re in the conservatory. Guess who’s here, honey.”

  He looked in the hall-stand mirror and tried to flatten his circle of hair. When it curled up with perspiration it looked like a crepe-paper skirt on a kewpie doll. Once he had been vain about what he considered his good looks.

  “Is there a doctor in the house?” he said in answer to Louise as he went in. “How are you, Nathan?”

  The two men shook hands.

  “I have taken the liberty of mixing martinis—five to one, Louise says. It is barbarous. But you will have one?”

  Bergner nodded and kissed Louise lightly on her moist forehead. She smelt of honeysuckle. Always something delicate, fresh at the first whiff, then suddenly too sweet. He took the glass from Nathan’s hand.

  Reiss said, “Well, to what shall we drink? To the summer? To one another?”

  “Let us drink,” George said, “to be drunk.”

  “Oh, dear,” Louise said, “I haven’t been intoxicated since the night Eleanor left to go to Paris.”

  “So the Big Man is taking over, eh?” Reiss said.

  George glanced at him and said nothing. With Sylvia to inform him, Reiss knew more than he did about what was going on at the Star.

  “Everything will be all right. It will have to be. We shall find him a new toy, George.”

  “The Children’s Rehabilitation Plan,” George said sardonically.

  Reiss shrugged. “If that will make him happy, I will give it up to him gladly.”

  “He already is happy, Nathan. Ecstatically happy.”

  “So.”

  George sat down heavily in a white leather chair. Louise had finally done something modern with the conservatory. The leather, however, reminded him of white satin. He kept thinking of a casket-maker’s showroom. “We’re off on a great crusade. The Star is going liberal again.”

  “But it has always been a liberal newspaper,” Louise said.

  George looked at her over the rim of his glass. “Perhaps you could convince Alex of that, my dear.”

  “Maybe I could if I ever had a chance,” she said, reacting to his sarcasm.

  Reiss said: “As a matter of fact you are all going to be invited to Fox Lake. I have spoken to Sylvia.”

  “And she’s going?” George said. He laughed. “She must be damned sure she’s running the show these days.”

  “What do you think will happen?” Reiss said, “I mean with the newspaper and all?”

  “I think he’ll run the circulation to hell and sell the newspaper.”

  Reiss pursed his lips. “It is a great shame,” he said then, “that one man can do that to another man’s work. It is political, this crusade?”

  “I’ve never known one that wasn’t—at bottom,” George said.

  “So. Is there nothing we can do to persuade him?”

  “What would you suggest?”

  Reiss shrugged. “I am not political as you know. But if as you say, Sylvia is behind him in this matter, perhaps we should ask how it will affect the Children’s Rehabilitation Plan. I have been told she is not exactly invulnerable … politically, I mean.”

  When Reiss groped for his words, George grinned. “Kosher,” he said. “She’s not quite kosher. Isn’t that what you mean?”

  “I am not speaking from my own knowledge,” Reiss said without humor. “I am merely repeating something I have heard.”

  “It was never much of a secret,” George said. “I don’t think anybody took it seriously—except Sylvia.”

  “I am glad to hear you say that,” Reiss said. “I was afraid it might be serious when the government investigators came to see me. I have the European idea of investigators, you see.”

  “When did they come to see you, Nathan?”

  “A couple of weeks ago perhaps.”

  “Did you tell Sylvia?”

  “The other day I
did mention it. She was not surprised. But one says that anyway, doesn’t one?”

  George emptied his glass. “Well, now we’ll all be investigated. Have you got anything to hide, Nathan?”

  “What man does not have something to hide? All the same, a refugee does not like to be investigated.”

  “Don’t worry, Nathan. As long as you weren’t a Communist, nobody’s going to bother with you.”

  George got up and took the mixer from beside Reiss and started to make another batch of martinis. He was trying to figure out precisely what Reiss’ concern was. That it was his own hide he was out to protect, George would not doubt for a moment. “There’s something we’ve both got to face up to in this, Nathan: people with as much money as the Winthrops don’t scare as easily as the rest of us poor slobs. The fact that Sylvia is under investigation—and knows it—doesn’t seem to have made any difference at all as far as the newspaper’s concerned. I got my briefing on that today: Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. As for the Children’s Plan, do you know what can happen? If she thought her name was going to jeopardize it, she would pull out.”

  Reiss lifted his head and smiled. George knew him well enough to understand the meaning of the smile: when Reiss was hurt he smiled. It was his immediate camouflage. He always hid himself behind that magnificent barricade of teeth. George began to enjoy himself. He elaborated: “She would not want to, of course, but that’s the kind of woman she is: sublimated mother love. She would probably turn the whole thing over to the Fields Foundation.”

  George counted five jiggers of gin into the pitcher.

  “Do you think that would seriously affect my position with the Children’s Plan?” Reiss asked.

  George said: “How do you think you stand with say, Hurd Abington?”

  “He was always very pleasant to me,” Reiss said with a shrug.

  It seemed incredible to George that Reiss would not have been sensitive to the man’s rabid anti-Semitism. Reiss was still a conundrum to him: he had what was needed of course to drive to the top and stay there, a refusal to know, much less to care, what some people thought of him.