The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Oh,” Tad said, disappointed.

  Martha realized she had reached the point of dishonesty: Nathan had known of Marcus before. One always reached the point of dishonesty and either stopped or plunged ahead as though the point had not been reached and passed. But that was the night, she thought, by which her marriage to him was foresworn. She went to the window and opened it wide for a moment.

  Tad, watching her, thought he had got on to something else. “Was Nathan ever married before?”

  “No.” But she hesitated before answering.

  “You don’t even know for sure, do you? Tell me the truth, mother. You don’t even know.”

  “I suppose you’re old enough now, Tad, to know what I was too young to realize then: he and the Baroness were—intimate friends.”

  “Lovers, you mean?” Tad burst out incredulously.

  She had told him fearing he would hear it from someone else, visiting in New York. “Once long ago they were,” she said quietly.

  Tad’s mind was aflame: “Did he leave her for you?” he persisted. “Is that what’s making you feel guilty now, mother? Is that why you don’t go there?”

  “No. I just don’t like leaving home,” she said. But she felt utterly ineffectual. She was sick of defending Nathan and the part of herself that had become part of him. She could feel despair like a giant hand closing down upon her. With a great effort she turned away from it. “Should I have told you so much, Tad?” She took his hands in hers to still them. “I’ve often thought you understood too much, knowing too little. It’s been the other way around with me: I’ve known too much for the little of it I was able to understand. I’ve tried to be honest with you today, but I haven’t altogether managed it. I don’t know what total honesty is. Perhaps there is no such thing. We are conditioned by so many things—our childhood, our faith or lack of it, those whom we love and hurt seeking to hurt ourselves hurting them: you do that sometimes. There is a twist and tangle to all of us. I haven’t learned much in my almost forty years, but this I think is true: without love, without sacrificial love, the potential for evil in us is very great. I don’t think I could live if you were in danger and I couldn’t save you—you, Annie, Nathan, I’m almost sure a stranger—if I saw death approaching, I should have to try. And I think that’s about the best of me. I’m by no means sure it’s enough in a human being.”

  She let go of his hands and began rubbing her own together as though to bring warmth into them.

  “But Marcus and your grandfather Jonathan were quite something else. Their souls were not pinched up like mine. Even when they were wrong, they were good men with vision and humility, and what I can only call a sort of cosmic charity. Dr. Mueller has it. Mother St. John whom I’ve told you about, the dean at St. Cecilia’s. She had faith. My religion, I’ve come to think now never got beyond credulity. And it might have been enough. I expect it is for most people.” She stopped abruptly and smiled at him. “Now, do you think we’ll know each other when you come home again?”

  “Mother, if Nathan were unfaithful to you now, would you divorce him?”

  Martha stared at him, her smile slowly diminishing. “What did you say, Tad?”

  He tried to stand his ground, but he knew from the pallor of his mother’s face that he should not have said it after all. But he could only repeat: “If you thought Nathan …”

  Martha cut him off. “I have never thought of the possibility. And if my speaking frankly this afternoon has put that idea in your mind, I regret it with all my heart.”

  Tad looked at her and away. Her eyes were green and angry and the vein showed on her forehead.

  “You do not play with emotions, Tad. You don’t improvise things like that to gratify your own fancy.”

  “I said IF,” the boy retreated.

  “I know you said IF. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  He went to the dresser and gathered his wallet, his nail clippers and his watch. “That isn’t any worse than some other things I’ve thought about him. And it didn’t happen just today. I was able to say it to you today, that’s all.”

  Martha went to the door. There she paused, waiting. For the same old apology, he supposed.

  “Tad, I don’t like your leaving with this blackness in your heart.”

  “You don’t like my staying either,” he said, looking at her only through the mirror. “Peace at any price. I can’t apologize, mother. I would if I could. But I just can’t any more.”

  “I understand,” Martha said. “Bring your things when you’re ready.” And going out, she closed the door behind her.

  5

  TAD RETURNED TO SCHOOL with somewhat less than a scholar’s enthusiasm. Nor was he in any of Professor Covington’s classes that semester. Their first meeting of any length occurred when Covington suggested an hour’s walk one afternoon in mid-October. They set out across the farm along the stubbled corn field where the stalks were cocked, row upon row like Indian teepees. Tad asked if the teacher knew the McCutcheon cartoon called “Injun Summer.” It did not seem to mean much to Covington who was not a Midwesterner. They exchanged accounts of the summer, neither of them striking fire to the other’s imagination, and both of them had thought from time to time during those months of this exchange as being one of its rewards.

  Covington asked whose classes Tad was in.

  Tad said: “I want to learn more French and some Italian. Maybe I’ll go abroad next year.”

  “Add a little Dutch and I’ll give you a job,” Covington said.

  “Do you mean it, Mr. Covington?”

  “Well, I hadn’t meant it literally, but I can think about it.”

  Gusts of wind blew up as they walked, the raw east wind from the ocean which at the farmland’s edge bowed the trees and stripped them early of their leaves. The taste of the sea was in it that day, and overhead the clouds rode faster and faster across the sky as though racing to be off the horizon before the sun’s setting.

  “Did you like Grandpa Jon’s book? Did it help you?”

  “More in its sources, I’m afraid, than in its summary.”

  “Isn’t it any good?”

  “I shouldn’t say that. I just didn’t find it as good as I had hoped. I got the feeling it was the work of a man who set out to prove something—not to find something. Will you want to go into the city when we get organized this year? I suppose not since most of my gang will be freshmen.”

  “I expect to be going in on my own quite a lot this year, sir. But thanks.”

  Covington picked up an oak tree twig, two empty acorn cups at the end of it. He broke one off. “We used to make pipes of these as kids and stuff them with corn silk.”

  “Mr. Covington, do you remember who the woman was sitting next to Nathan at dinner that night at Madame Schwarzbach’s?”

  “It seems to me she was a designer,” Covington said. It gave him no cheer to see where Tad’s mind was again. Indeed the more he thought of it, the more uneasy he became. “I recall her husband sat across the table from them.”

  Tad smiled.

  “Why?”

  “I met her on the street the other day. That’s all.”

  Covington suspected that to be a lie, but nothing was to be gained by challenging it. He threw the bit of oak away.

  They climbed a gate rather than open its complicated latch, and walked through a glade of bent pines. The wind made the sound among them of constant sighing. The only other sound was that of crows, loud, desolate and unrelieved. Covington wished that they had gone into the village for coffee instead. Only when they came out of the grove and stood on the high ridge from where they could see the ocean—a mile beyond the flatland that lay in a steep drop below them—did either of them speak again, Covington proposing that they return by way of the road.

  “It’s a bleak day,” Tad said. “I like it.”

  “Wuthering—that’s the word for it. There are times it would suit me better,” Covington said.

  “Mr. Covington,
if I call on Madame Schwarzbach now and then, you won’t consider it disloyal of me, will you?”

  “I’d be curious to know to whom you are being loyal,” the teacher said.

  “To myself.”

  “A better man I never knew,” Covington said with attempted levity. Then: “I don’t suppose you want to tell me any more about it than that.”

  “There isn’t anything to tell much … yet. She and Nathan once were lovers. Would you have thought so?”

  “It crossed my mind,” Covington said. “But I’m sure it’s not so now.”

  “So am I,” Tad said.

  Covington’s relief was brief.

  Tad added: “I think she must loathe him as much as I do … but I want to be sure.”

  Covington sucked in a deep breath of the cold, raw air. “All right, Tad, even if it’s so and you find out—what purpose will it serve?”

  “I’ve got to know,” the boy said.

  On their way back to the campus, going by the highway, they had to wait at the railway tracks for the passing of the train to New York City. Tad remarked: “I wish I were on that.”

  Covington said: “You might as well be for all the good it’s going to do you to be in school in your frame of mind.” Before they parted he said: “Come and see me whenever you have a chance, Tad. I promise that I won’t interfere.”

  “Thank you, sir.” They shook hands.

  Tad wrote what he considered an ingratiating letter to the Baroness that night asking if he might come to tea when next he was in New York. In a week’s time he had not received a reply. He wrote again, suggesting this time that he wished to talk with her on an important matter. Having not heard from her by the following Saturday, he went into New York and while there telephoned her. A maid answered and then John came to the phone to say that Madame Schwarzbach was not feeling well and therefore was not accepting calls or callers.

  Tad passed his eighteenth birthday that Hallowe’en, and came very close to failing his first quarter’s examination. He did so poorly for one who had stood second in a class of 480 at the end of his freshman year that when Nathan Reiss came East and Tad asked permission to stay overnight in New York with him, he was refused. He was allowed to go in town for dinner, but expected to sign on campus before midnight.

  The dean of studies called Covington in to discuss the problem of the boy.

  It was a day of heavy fog and Tad hurried to get off campus lest all permissions be canceled because of the weather. When Nathan had called, he said that George Bergner had come East with him to be present at a testimonial luncheon. “I had hoped Sylvia might also come. After all, she too is responsible. It is for The Plan I am being honored.”

  “And mother?” Tad had asked.

  “She is not well. And considering the weather, I am pleased she did not come.”

  So was Tad this time.

  In his haste to catch the first train, he chanced the shortcut which took him close to Covington’s quarters. His luck did not hold: he ran almost into the teacher’s arms.

  Covington had but an hour before come from the dean of studies’ office.

  “What are you going in town for, Tad?”

  The boy’s eyes were glittering. “To pay my homage to the great man. This is the day he’s crowned king of the Jews.”

  “Let’s have the translation for that,” Covington said irritably.

  “The Conference of Jewish Women gave him a testimonial luncheon. I’ve got to hurry, sir.”

  Covington caught his arm. “I have a good notion to campus you for the day. Your marks are disgraceful, the weather is filthy, and I don’t like anything about this trip.”

  “If you do,” the boy said in quiet insubordination, “I shall go A.W.O.L.”

  6

  GEORGE BERGNER AND TAD were not likely to have been friends under any circumstance. George detested brilliance, having felt himself its victim in so many ways, and there was, he sensed, about the youngster the unmistakable mark of it. But George was no longer the friend of any man: he was one man’s servant. When Tad arrived at the Imperial Hotel in the late afternoon it was George who was waiting for him in Reiss’ room.

  “I’m sorry to be late,” Tad said, “but I couldn’t get a cab in this weather.”

  “So is Nathan late,” Bergner said. “He hasn’t time to pack for himself, but he has time to be late.”

  The room was muggy with a sort of body warmth as though a man had been sweating in it for a long time. George himself looked untidy, his suit wrinkled and there was the glisten of sweat on his bald head. But Nathan’s luggage, open on the rack, was neatly packed. The room was hung with heavy draperies, furnished ornately, and decorated with pictures of pasturelands and seascapes weightily framed in gilt. A bottle of brandy, a third empty stood open on the writing desk. The Gideon Bible there was also open, and when Tad paused, noticing it, Bergner said:

  “Couldn’t find another damn thing to read. Have a drink?”

  “No thanks,” Tad said. He took off his raincoat. George’s coat lay over a chair beside the door, his hat atop it. “How was the testimonial?”

  “Stupendous. Absolutely stupendous. The ladies gave him an ovation—and that.” He gestured toward the dresser, spilling the drink, a few drops, over himself.

  “They’re a corny outfit.” Tad went to the dresser where a case lined with white satin stood open. It held, each piece fitted into its own slot, a set of surgical instruments. “How come this? I thought they came with the hospital. Or are they giving him one of those, too?”

  George guffawed. “A symbol, my boy. Rehabilitation. Or it might just be that somebody on the board of Jewish ladies has a friend a manufacturer of surgical instruments.”

  Tad did not like the remark, and Bergner was a little drunk and for it the more offensive. But neither did Tad care very much for the Conference of Jewish Women when they gave Nathan Reiss a testimonial luncheon.

  “The Jewish people are very sentimental. Don’t you think so?” George sat down carefully on the edge of the bed, this time shepherding the glass in his hand.

  But Tad, catching the aroma of brandy, plunged back in memory to the scene on the dock when Dr. Winthrop died. He remembered Louise Bergner taking the brandy Sylvia had brought and spilling it over her husband who lay gasping like a guppy, otherwise unattended while Nathan tried to resuscitate the dead. Tad’s own heart began to pound.

  “He saved your life once, didn’t he, Mr. Bergner?”

  “Yes,” George said, “one of the chosen.”

  Nothing he could have said would have been more likely to fire Tad’s imagination. He moistened his lips. “But he couldn’t save my father’s life—or Dr. Winthrop’s. They weren’t among the chosen.”

  Bergner opened his mouth and then closed it again without saying what had come into his mind.

  “Mr. Bergner, did you know the boat was going to tip that day—I mean just before it happened, didn’t you know it was going to happen?”

  Bergner did not understand the preciseness of the distinction in time Tad was trying to make. “My boy, if I’d known that, I wouldn’t have been aboard it, not even for Nathan Reiss.”

  Tad had reached the place of taking the meanings he wanted from the man’s words. He felt himself exhilarated, in command, and almost cruelly superior at the moment to George Bergner. Nor had he ever felt so alert: memory and the present vividly merged. He could relive his very feeling on the dock, his chagrin at being excluded, his loss of the opportunity to show off his nautical skill to Dr. Winthrop. Nathan had seen to it he was not aboard, presumably to make room for Mr. Bergner. “You didn’t want to go at all, did you?” he said, attempting to make his voice casual, even as the hunter might disarm his prey.

  And George, looking at his glass, was diverted. “I didn’t,” he said. “That’s the truth. And now I wish to Christ I hadn’t gone.”

  “Why?”

  Bergner took a long swallow of the brandy. The color rose in blotches to hi
s face with the impact of the drink. “It’s the story of my life,” he said between choking coughs. “I don’t think you want to hear it any more than I want to hear it. Where the hell is Nathan?” He looked at his watch.

  “I knew you were going over,” Tad said. “I knew it the minute Nathan let the boom swing free.”

  Bergner grunted his disparagement. “You were a child.”

  “I knew how to sail that boat,” Tad said, “and I was watching. I had the field glasses and I could see everything.”

  Bergner wiped the tears brought on by the coughing from the corners of his eyes. His eyelids were so puffy Tad could scarcely see his eyes. “Just what could you see?”

  “That Nathan was smiling and that you were scared.”

  Bergner laughed. “A blind man could have seen that.”

  Tad blurted out the words purposely, lest the opportunity to say them be lost, the words that would commit him beyond retreat: “Nathan deliberately tipped that boat, Mr. Bergner.”

  Very slowly the look of sour amusement faded from George’s face. He sat a few seconds as though in a stupor. Then he got up and trundled across the room to the writing desk where he poured himself another drink. With it in hand, he turned to the boy who stood clutching the back of a chair on which he sometimes leaned, and sometimes pushed about, the activity an unconscious compliment to the manipulations of his mind.

  Bergner said: “I’m going to give you a small piece of advice, my boy, just two words of it: shut up. If you don’t, you may wind up like me, drinking this stuff.”

  “Or like my father—another accident?”

  “What are you saying this to me for? I didn’t like your father. But he didn’t like me either. And I did him no more harm than he did me. I’d have been his friend if he’d let me. When decent people turn you down, you run after dogs.” George began to whine, a self-pitying stream of irrelevant invective against his own father, against Marcus Hogan, his wife, himself. Only when he touched on Nathan Reiss could Tad attend him with patience. But he was powerless to stem the half-drunken, maudlin ramblings. “You know what I am?” George said finally. “Another cripple. A broken reed. So don’t lean on me. I don’t hear anything, I don’t know anything, I don’t do anything. I belch and I break wind. That way I know I’m alive.”