The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Isn’t he generally?”

  “Not always. He wants to know—too much. Which I don’t mean is bad. That part is only difficult.”

  Elizabeth said, “Didn’t you want to know at his age? You must have felt that something was wrong.”

  “We can’t get away from that, can we, mother? The sin in the family: I don’t see why you’re so proud of it.”

  “I don’t know that I am,” Elizabeth said coldly.

  “You carry it in front of you like a processional cross.”

  “Blasphemy is scarcely necessary. Or is it? Did you have to leave the church before you could tell your mother what you thought of her?”

  They paused in the grove of trees at the bottom of the meadow for they were alone there. Martha said, “You’ve asked me to compare Tad to myself at his age and I’m trying to. I worshiped you and that’s what you wanted. You didn’t want me to love you, not really. You would have had to let me in then. I don’t want Tad to worship me, I want him to love me. I want to be there when he needs me, not when I need him.”

  “I don’t think that is something you are going to be able to determine, however you may think so now. And what of your husband? Can you categorize that love also?”

  “I have loved one man only,” Martha said quietly.

  “Then why did you marry again? Why?” Elizabeth persisted.

  “Because I needed him and he wanted me.”

  Her mother caught hold of her wrist. “Are you sure you needed him? Or was it the other way around? Didn’t you want him, and didn’t he need you?”

  “I am sure,” Martha said, the vein standing out on her forehead.

  “It is time for questions and I will ask them,” Elizabeth said. “I do not want happening to you what happened to your father, the pleasure of his life was in his persecution of himself. Do you sleep with Nathan?”

  “Yes!”

  “And die at every act.”

  Martha did not answer.

  “You are in danger, child, not only of losing the power to love, but of losing your immortal soul.”

  “Mother, I do not give a damn about my immortal soul. If there is such a thing and I’d had my way, I’d have given it to the devil myself long ago. Nathan saved me from suicide. I used to look out at the garden, at the grape arbor where the tool shed used to be, and I wished the tool shed back. Then Nathan came one day and persuaded me I was alive. I felt him when he touched me. I knew that if life were forced upon me I could live. We were married that very day by a justice of the peace. And if there is anything for which I ever hope Tad to be grateful to him, it is that. And that is as close as I shall come to salvation.”

  Elizabeth let go her hand, suddenly realizing that she held it. “It is a greater burden you place on your son than ever I should have placed on you, for all my selfishness,” she said, and walked alone up to the house.

  Only Jonathan and Tad in the end discovered satisfaction in reunion, in their exploration of each other. He and Martha could not even reminisce. They could talk of friends, the Muellers, but not of one another. After all, Jonathan thought, remembering their photograph in the Star, at their finest moment together he had had to go and throw up against the Stadium wall. But he and Tad were a different matter. He could see the boy absorbing certain interests from him, and one day, during their trip to Scotland, he realized there was an important area in the boy’s values which he would never need influence. Tad had found a postcard, a mountain scene, the legend written entirely in Gaelic.

  “I want to send it to Nathan,” Tad explained.

  “I can walk as far as the post office with you.”

  “I don’t want to send it from here. From France or some place like that.”

  “Why?”

  Tad weighed the wisdom of confiding in his grandfather. “I want him to think it’s written in Hebrew.”

  “The character resemblance between the languages,” Jonathan said, “is very superficial.”

  The boy looked up at him and smiled, saying nothing, but quite as though to say, Jonathan was sure, that so was Nathan very superficial. The cunning disturbed him, but he felt the instinct to be true, and that to Jonathan had always been enough in any man.

  11

  ON THE FLIGHT BACK to New York from Paris Sylvia observed what good company Tad had become. His summer with Jonathan had made him both grave and courtly, the habit of solicitousness he had acquired for the aging man staying with him. The two of them had crossed from Scotland down into the Lake country, Jonathan’s—and Tad’s—favorite part of all England. More than fifty years before, Jonathan had gone from Keswick to Windermere in a horse drawn coach on his own first trip to England. All this Tad retold with a touching sense of the old gentleman’s nostalgia, and gently miming his way now of carefully counting out his money from a change purse and murmuring: “Well spent, well spent.” Having managed that much of England together, the two of them had gone on to London, each in the other’s care. Tad had idled many hours among the Elgin marbles and other antiquities of the British Museum while Jonathan worked in the library. Tad was now thinking that he would like to be an archeologist.

  Thank God for Tad, Sylvia thought. For her own part, she had found it difficult to stay out her appointed time, and she ended up visiting the D.P. camps, the memory of which even now disturbed her, the desolate becoming dissolute, the homeless despairingly at home in their homelessness. One could not even take the children out of this for care. To where do you return a stateless child? She was fleeing home herself with a sense of urgency to extend the work of her own project. After Alex’ death she had leaned heavily on the Children’s Plan. She had felt it the one thing she cared to salvage out of her life till then. Not a whit cared she any longer for politics or publications. She had arranged the sale of the Star to the first bidder, and when George Bergner was out of a job thereupon, she had been persuaded by Reiss to make him public relations council for the Children’s Rehabilitation Plan. She had not thought in the beginning of the Plan’s ever needing public relations. She had yielded. The important thing, she had told herself was to know that she was yielding.

  “Mother,” Tad said, thinking Martha asleep.

  Martha opened her eyes. The signal was flickering and the loudspeaker system in the plane had been turned on. The stewardess was waiting, smiling, for the announcement that they were approaching International Airport.

  Tad’s eyes were dancing.

  Sylvia drew a deep breath and another: her moment of fear. One wanted to live. Oh, yes, and the more the older one got. Thus, she thought, was made a conservative. She said to Martha: “Are you afraid?”

  “A little,” Martha said, but her eyes were on Tad. “I wonder if Nathan will meet us here. He said he would if it were possible.”

  “It’s so damned far down,” Sylvia said, “from up here.”

  Martha smiled broadly at her. “Courage.”

  “That’s what we need—courage and a paper bag.”

  Tad looked round at her. “You’re kidding, Syl.”

  “I hope so.”

  Nathan waved to them from beyond the glass partition as soon as they came into Customs. While they waited their turns for baggage inspection he pantomimed pleasure, affection, what-did-you-bring-me to whomever of them looked his way.

  “What a ham,” Sylvia said, but it occurred to her that you always felt good, seeing Nathan. He looked so vigorous, self-confident. It was a good thing to see in a doctor, in any human being in this shaky world. Proclaim yourself a savior and you’ve got a congregation.

  He kissed them all, Tad on both cheeks. You could see all the American dream in him, Sylvia thought. He might have come from Brooklyn or up from New York’s East Side. Instead he had come from the playgrounds of Europe which had also bred the festering camps she had just seen there. She could not blame him that he was not there. As soon could she blame herself. She asked immediately about the farm, how many new children, who, where, and particulars about one
and another’s of their progress.

  “I will tell you everything,” Nathan said. He took their baggage checks. “We shall send the luggage in a taxi. I have a surprise for you.” The luggage arranged, he led the way through the terminal. “Someone you have not seen in many years, Martha,” he said as they reached the curb where a limousine was waiting, a chauffeur coming to attention as they approached. “Nor I until this summer.”

  That much preparation Sylvia had before the car door was opened and the Baroness Schwarzbach leaned forward in the seat, her hand extended.

  “Martha, dear child, do you remember me?”

  “I remember you very well,” Martha said, and took her hand.

  The Baroness looked round Martha to Sylvia. “Mrs. Winthrop, one meets many places in a lifetime.”

  Sylvia also took the hand offered her and murmured: “How nice to see you again, Baroness Schwarzbach.”

  Nathan brought Tad close to the Baroness. “And this is Thaddeus, whom we call Tad. Your Aunt Johanna, Tad.”

  An aunt to end all aunts, Sylvia thought. Nathan had arranged for them to spend the night as the Baroness’ houseguests before flying on to Traders City. Sylvia declined, saying she always stayed at the Sulgate in New York.

  The Baroness was gracious. “We shall take you there on our way. I believe it is near to my house. John will know.” She indicated the chauffeur. “But you will come to dinner and for the evening, please, Mrs. Winthrop. I have not forgotten your hospitality in Naples, and I have arranged a small gathering.”

  Sylvia acquiesced, and settled in the luxurious car on one side of Martha while the Baroness, on the other, took Martha’s hand and gently patted it now and then, talking of their last meeting. She was as plump as when she had last seen her, Sylvia thought, but a little younger looking. Nathan and Tad sat on what, in Sylvia’s childhood, she had called the monkey seats. Everyone became quite gay.

  “It is the city of the modern world, New York,” the Baroness said as the car moved smoothly, grooving its way into the sludge of traffic toward Manhattan.

  Sylvia eased herself a little to the side, the better to see the profile of the man at the wheel, John. If he knew the city so well as the Baroness implied, he would be new to her employ, an American acquisition. John was young and dark, a strapping fellow with a ruddy glow to his cheeks. Sylvia leaned back in the seat and was mirthful within herself remembering a story Tony had told her: it concerned an old gentleman in Paris, a roué in his declining years and the bane of his numerous and proper family whom he nonetheless ruled with patriarchal tyranny. Then one day his doctor told him that he must give up the activity for which he was notorious. Whereupon, he hired a girl to come to his rooms every day at the usual hour. She was paid her fee just to sit with him the hour and to hold her tongue thereafter. The family remained in awe of his virility and submissive to his law to the day he died.

  Tad, having seen within the year the film Gone With the Wind, was inclined to call the Baroness Aunt Pittypat, he confided to Martha, not that she was flustery in her manner, but she resembled her physically, like an animate doll, and was much concerned for everyone’s comfort. Martha did not think the Baroness would be especially charmed by the comparison.

  “I’m not going to say it to her,” Tad said, and then speaking conspiratorially: “She must have tons of money.”

  The expression was Annie’s. Martha laughed. “I dare say.”

  Tad was given the blue room at the top floor of the East Side house. He thought the house resembled a French hotel. There was a tiny elevator in which there was room for no more than two people at once. He could look out his window to the building across the way where he could see the boxed shrubbery of a penthouse garden, and beyond it a façade of New York buildings like a patchwork of glass. The bathroom between his room and his mother and Nathan’s was walled in mirrors, something which at once fascinated and discomfited him.

  “I remember the Baroness’ house in Paris,” Martha said. “I was much older than you, but I’d never been in a place like it, not that people lived in. But Nathan was very much at home there and that made it easier. She and her husband, you see, had sort of adopted him. They were his patrons in the way people do in Europe with artists or writers or doctors.”

  “Who was Pépé” Tad asked, having heard the Baroness inquire if Martha remembered him.

  “A toy French poodle the Baroness carried around rather like a baby.”

  “Ugh.”

  “I remember feeling that way, too,” Martha said. “It was all very strange—but it’s vivid to me still in the way dreams sometimes are. My father had just died and I was terribly lonesome for Marcus. Then on New Year’s Day I got a cablegram from him asking me to come home at once and marry him.”

  Tad was looking over the books which had been placed on his bedside table: Tom Brown’s School Days, The Mystery of Sanders’ Cave, Space Cadet.

  “I’ll bet Nathan was mad,” he said.

  Martha laughed. “Perhaps. But he didn’t show it.”

  “He smiled,” Tad said, and drew his own lips wide across his teeth in mimicry.

  “I don’t much like that, Tad,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.” He looked restlessly about the exquisite room. He toured the lithographs hanging on the walls, French caricatures of the courts of law. “When are we going home?”

  “Tomorrow,” Martha said.

  “What kind of books are there in your room?”

  “Come and see,” Martha said.

  Nathan was dressing for dinner. Martha’s gown hung at a closet door, freshly pressed and brought upstairs by a pretty young servant who batted her eyes at Dr. Reiss.

  Nathan said: “We have not had a chance to talk, Martha.” He watched them in the mirror before which he was adjusting his black tie. “I have become very interested in Zionism while you were away this summer. I never was before, you know. There are some very interesting people …”

  Tad said: “Did you get the postcard I sent you, Nathan—the one in Hebrew?”

  “I was just thinking about it,” Reiss said. “That was very thoughtful of you, Tad, to send it to me.”

  Tad examined the half-dozen books on the table between the beds and selected one to his liking, The Plague by Camus. “May I take this one, mother?”

  Martha glanced at it. “Do you think you will understand it?”

  Tad shrugged. “I liked L’Etranger.”

  When Tad had returned to his room Nathan said: “A boy his age should not be allowed to read everything, do you think?”

  “I think he should be allowed to read what he wants to read.”

  “Then you will have to explain it to him.”

  “I generally try,” Martha said. She could not remember Nathan’s having read a book since they were married.

  After a moment Nathan said: “Do you mind very much coming to this house, Martha?”

  She looked at him in the mirror, her own brows arched in wry humor. “Not if you don’t, Nathan.”

  He finished bowing his tie before asking: “What do you mean, Martha?”

  “I have always remembered the Baroness with affection. She was very kind to me, and she gave me something I might not otherwise have got—a respect for my father and how he died. When last you and I spoke of her, you were concerned that she thought you had betrayed her.”

  “It was all a misunderstanding, a confusion,” Nathan said. “But I have explained and she has accepted. When she wrote to me that she was coming to New York I did not tell you, and I was very glad you were not here. I can tell you that now. You do not like to see me humiliate myself. And when one has to explain, it is humiliating, is it not?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. But that’s the difference between us.”

  “Are you not glad to see me?” he said reproachfully.

  “I am glad to see you, Nathan. And I shall be very glad to get home.”

  “This was a mistake—is that what you are saying? I’m sorry Mar
tha. I thought you would be pleased—for just one day. And it is very important to me in many ways.”

  “I understand,” she said and began to dress.

  He watched her with critical satisfaction and when she had finished her make-up and tucked the last strand of her hair into the braided bun, he brought from his pocket a pearl and diamond chip pendant. Watching her in the mirror he fastened the clasp at the back of her neck. “Always I have tried to give you jewels,” he said, “and always you have tried to give me a book.”

  “Wouldn’t it be dreadful the other way around?” Martha said with gentle humor.

  She wore the jewelry with reluctant grace.

  Martha, meeting the distinguished company the Baroness had gathered for the evening, began to understand the ways in which it was important to Nathan. The Baroness was building—indeed seemed to have built—an American salon probably the match of that which Martha remembered with such awe in Paris. Philanthropy would be in common among most of the guests—some in the arts, some in medicine, and in the course of the evening she was able to trace the associations by which she assumed Nathan to have become interested in Zionism. She had not seen him so voluble and attentive to so numerous an audience since the days of his arrival in Lakewood. The difference here, however, was that he could move with the ease of belonging: the Baroness’ prestige was behind him: there was a certain hauteur in his manner that Lakewood would have much admired could he have managed it for them. Perhaps now he would be able to carry it over. That particular vision of the future gave her no great cheer. She felt herself removed to an even more distant observation point of the life in which she presumably participated.

  It was late in the evening when dancing had started in the first floor gallery that the Baroness took Martha by the arm and drew her apart. “Now, my dear, you and I may talk. In all my houses I have always insisted on little coves of privacy.” The Baroness looked amused, glancing up at Martha, and Martha wondered if she had been aware at the time of the cove of privacy into which Nathan Reiss had led her on the night of the New Year’s ball in Paris. “This will do,” the Baroness said.