The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Tad’s excitement fell almost as quickly as it had risen. He had taken his plunge—into blubber.

  He went to the writing table and picked up the Bible, reading at random where the book was open: “Wherefore the sin of the young men was very great before the Lord: for men abhorred the offering of the Lord.

  “But Samuel ministered before the Lord, being a child, girded with a linen ephod.

  “Moreover his mother made him a little coat, and brought it to him from year to year, when she came up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice.”

  Tad read the paragraphs again, taking from them a special understanding. He closed the book and hugged it to him.

  George, watching him, grew philosophic. “Bible, bed and bottle … as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.”

  Nathan Reiss let himself into the room, looked about it as though to see who was there, and then without speaking to either Tad or Bergner closed the door and took off his hat and coat. Tad had not heard the key in the door and he thought there was something different about Nathan as he came in, a preoccupation whereby he forgot to put on the smiling mask. But in his own far from normal state he was in no position to judge the normalcy of Nathan.

  “So, George. What are you drinking to this time?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it, Nathan.” He lifted his glass. “Your health and long life.”

  Reiss glared at him from under drawn brows. “I should have as many lives as you drink toasts to me.” Finally he acknowledged the boy’s presence. His smile was quick but brief, a shot of teeth. “Hello, Tad.” He went toward the bathroom. At the door he paused. “George, did you make the reservation?”

  “Jacques’ Restaurant at seven,” George said.

  “Will you go down please and arrange a cab to be waiting for us?” He closed the door behind him.

  “Your obedient servant,” George said in self-mocking humility. He drained his glass, and on sudden impulse, cried to Tad: “Catch.” He tossed the glass underhand to the boy who had to lunge in order to catch it. George picked up his own coat and hat. “He must be back here by eleven o’clock. We are taking the train since there are no flights.”

  Reiss opened the bathroom door, and made no secret of the fact that he had been listening. “No flights, did you say, George?”

  “That’s what they tell me downstairs. All planes grounded in the fog.”

  “For how long?”

  George said gravely: “I’ll try and find out for you, Nathan.”

  Tad grinned, but Reiss returned to the bathroom without knowing the mockery in George’s subservient response.

  “Have fun,” Bergner said to Tad, and went out.

  Tad, waiting, took up the Bible again and tried to find the page in Samuel, but before he found it, his mind shot restlessly elsewhere. He put down the book and moved to the dresser where he gazed down on the glittering display of steel, cold as the snow-white satin in which they were shrouded. He had never wanted to be a doctor, only a veterinarian as a small child, and that because he was fonder then of animals than people. He ventured to draw from its sheathing one of the knives, and put it back at once: the sight of it made him nauseous for he could imagine its incision into the flesh. He went to the window, unlocked, and tried to open it.

  Nathan came from the bathroom. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to open the window.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Fresh air,” Tad said. “The room stinks of brandy.”

  “It stinks of more than that,” Reiss said, and passing the dresser on his way across the room, he asked: “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

  Tad was a moment remembering the occasion. “Yes, of course.”

  Reiss looked at him. “You look feverish, dissipated. Like him.” He jerked his head, indicating the door by which George had gone out. He opened the window with very little difficulty. “It is a fine evening for fresh air,” he said sarcastically.

  Tad had observed in awe the ease with which Reiss had managed the window. Outside the fog hugged the building like a dirty sheet. Instinctively he drew away from the window.

  “Are you afraid of heights?” Reiss said. “I think your father was.”

  “I am not afraid,” Tad said, but he moistened his lips, and was aware that something very like fear was overtaking him.

  “Sometimes it is better to be afraid.”

  “Nathan, why won’t the Baroness see me?”

  Reiss smiled in his old fashion for the first time since he had come. “For whatever reason, it is not because she is afraid. Go and put some cold water on your face. You look sick.”

  “I’m not sick!”

  “Do as I say. Look at yourself in the mirror.”

  Tad obeyed him, but out of the need to move, to lift his feet, to counter the sudden, self-shaming weakness that had come on him. Nor did the vision of his own face in the mirror, the flushed cheeks, the pale lips, the staring eyes, restore him. He felt himself utterly inadequate. More than ever he had loathed Nathan Reiss he loathed himself at that moment. He washed his face and drew several deep breaths before rejoining his stepfather who was at the dresser gazing down at the instruments.

  Voices grew loud in the hallway as people approached and passed their doorway. Someone shouted: “Hold it!” presumably to the elevator operator and the voices faded.

  Reiss closed the display of instruments with a contemptuous flick of his wrist. “Are you ready?”

  Tad said: “Nathan, I told George this afternoon that I thought you deliberately tipped the Lorna Doone when and he and Dr. Winthrop … when Dr. Winthrop died.”

  Reiss looked at him, a curious gaze, but not one of surprise. Having said the words, Tad could say no more. He required all his strength to stand up straight and keep his head steady.

  Reiss said: “You have a long memory. What, may I ask, did George say?” Reiss waited, but the boy did not answer, and he went on. “I should not be surprised if he agreed with you. Ah, but I would be surprised. George has the fat tongue of a coward. Do you know what I thought, Tad, when I saw you trying so desperately to open that window? I was afraid you were contemplating suicide.”

  Tad calculated the few steps between himself and the hall door. Hit and run. But by the calculation he was able to say: “So you opened it for me … and didn’t even hurt your hand.”

  “Poor boy,” Reiss said, and then rather crossly: “Take your coat and let us go. This room is reeking of malignancy.”

  Tad, out of an old training, waited at the door for the man to precede him. He knew an instant of terror in the brief interlude of darkness when Nathan snapped off the room lights before they moved into the hall. But in the flood of light and space to which they passed that terror, too, became a part of a larger chagrin. Reiss went back and tried the door to be sure that it was locked. Returning and leading the way he said: “Many people would have believed your father a suicide if I had not been there.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Tad said.

  Reiss shrugged. “I am only telling what was said to everyone except your mother.” At the elevator he smiled, his reproachful, lower lip-hanging smile. “Perhaps you had better press the signal yourself.”

  Tad merely stared at the man as though with his eyes he hoped to penetrate to the inside of him. Reiss touched the signal button and waiting, adjusted his tie, which at another time Tad would have thought a ridiculous gesture of indifference. Now he was steeped in his own frustration. “It doesn’t matter what I think now, does it, Nathan? You’ve got everything the way you want it—and all the old answers. It’s too late for new ones, isn’t it?”

  “Shall I tell you the truth?” Reiss said. “If it mattered more to me just now, Tad, I should feel very sorry for you. Why not pretend a little longer that we enjoy each other? Let us try to make the best of this expensive dinner I am proposing—as the climax, let us say, of the father and son ceremony.”

&nbs
p; The elevator stopped and Reiss got in. The operator said testily to Tad: “Down, sir?”

  He got in mutely.

  Bergner was waiting for them at the Park Avenue entrance to the hotel, his hand on a cab door as though he were prepared to run alongside the vehicle if that were necessary to hold it. As soon as Tad and Reiss were inside, the driver thrust them back in their seats with the violence of his start from the curb. Reiss spoke sharply to him and a moment later they were engaged in an acrimonious exchange. “I’m not your private chauffeur, see?” the driver said. “If I get a ticket, I’m the guy what’s got to pay for it. It says ‘no standing’ and me they don’t let stand.”

  Tad was grateful for the diversion, numb as were his own senses. You could answer a curse, but cursing a smile turned back the curses on yourself. Once he had been able to infuriate his stepfather—like a small stinging gnat. In his rashness, he had lost even that measly strength.

  When they reached Greenwich Village the driver had to stop to get his bearings in the fog.

  “Schlaacht’s,” Nathan said, observing the sign as they started up again. He sat forward in his seat. The restaurant sign gleamed within a halo of mist. “That will suit us quite as well as the French tonight. We will stop here, driver.”

  The driver stepped on his brakes. A car, too close behind them, came to a screaming stop.

  In the restaurant the head waiter asked if Reiss had a reservation.

  “I do not need a reservation,” Reiss said. His and the waiter’s eyes met, and after the slightest further hesitation, the waiter seated them at an excellent table in an uncrowded part of the room.

  When he was gone, Reiss said: “That is how it is done, even in America. You will have a drink, Tad? I prescribe it.”

  “Only wine.”

  “Champagne, perhaps?”

  “If you like.”

  “And why not?” Reiss said, “since we are celebrating your maturity—and my discovery. So. The mouse nibbles and the lion claws.” He ordered the wine, and waiting, looked around the room of heavy dark beams and voluptuous panelings. “I am glad they do not bring in manufactured music.” When the wine came he supervised its chilling himself. He read the menu aloud, translating the English into German, and thereby enjoying himself. He called the headwaiter back to inquire particularly about the pâté.

  “I remember recommending a certain pâté to your mother once in Vienna—such a long time ago. Who would have supposed?”

  With the first sip of wine, he said: “So. You and the Baroness have become friends, do I understand?”

  Tad wondered if the Baroness had given him that impression. He said nothing, doubting it.

  “And of course you discussed your prognosis concerning your father and Dr. Winthrop?”

  Tad resolved to do so at the first opportunity, and he would make his own opportunity.

  Reiss was smiling, amused, tolerant, hypocritical. “Believe me, Tad, she is a melodramatic woman.”

  Throughout the elaborate service of the first course, Nathan talked in Nathan’s way—smoothly-spoken ambiguities, in which Tad discovered, trying to attend him, to understand him if not his meanderings, there was a sort of glancing relevancy. Tad’s own mind grew keener as he realized this. Nathan was playing with the truth as a child plays on ice he knows to be dangerous, skating ever closer to trouble and growing ecstatic with the crackling of the ice beneath him. Tad began to participate, and with the strain, further exhausted his nerves, trying to provoke the man to the disaster he fervently believed lay beyond the edge.

  Suddenly Reiss leaned across the table and said: “Suppose, Tad, I admitted to you that it was sometimes within my power to save—where I have deliberately not saved: if I were to admit that to you now, how would you profit yourself of such an admission? In other words, who would believe you?”

  “The Baroness,” Tad said cunningly.

  “Very good,” Reiss said, as though Tad had given a correct answer in recitation. “But not your mother.”

  “I’m not so damned sure of that, Nathan.”

  “I am so damned sure of it. And so, my dear boy, is the Baroness who knows a good deal more about human nature than you or I. I am going to tell you something about your mother, Tad: some day she will go into a nunnery. Mark my having told you. It is the prison to which people like her commit themselves when there is no other way to expiate their guilt—or the guilt of others.”

  “I would rather she was in one now than married to you,” Tad said.

  “Would you? Shall I tell you the truth? So would I. I am revolted by her patience, her forebearance. It is like an act of contrition every time she takes me to her bed.”

  The words went through Tad like so many stabs. He blurted out: “Why don’t you leave her then?”

  Reiss shrugged. “She would not permit it. She is Mrs. Nathan Reiss, part and bond of me. Rather she would die than give me up. Do you not believe it?”

  Tad fell back in his chair, faint and damp with a cold perspiration. He struggled with himself to hold consciousness, to focus on something to save him from that degradation: hatred—if only he could hate enough. Then, for the first time in fact—or fantasy—he thought: I must kill this man. It is the only way. He said the words to himself and with them, with their challenge, was revived, even presently exhilarated. He was able to sit up straight and ask out boldly for more wine. He even managed the bravura of eating a morsel of bread. He was able then to eat a shrimp.

  Reiss scraped the last of his pâté from the plate and spread it on a cracker. He ate it, sipped his champagne and signaled the waiter to refill his glass. “I have not been in a German restaurant in America,” he said. “So foolish of me.”

  Tad’s one thought was to get away as quickly as he could, to walk the streets, to think, to plan. If he could go out now and make his way to the haunts of the city’s hunted, among the degraded, the degenerates and the vicious, if he could go among them and yet remain himself apart, unsullied—where better learn the art of killing and the ease to practice it? To kill, but not to die: that was his wish; to live free and strong, in some distant place if necessary, and to be the kinder to all God’s creatures for having done so dreadful but inescapable a duty. There was no other freedom possible for him until he freed his mother and himself from this obsessive man. While his thoughts ran thusly, he toyed with the food set before him, and pretended to attend Nathan’s new tirade.

  Had he been less involved in his own dire dream, he might have realized that Nathan Reiss—in his revelation of his true feeling about Martha and now in his derision of the Conference of Jewish Women—had skated far beyond the edge of safety. But Tad was himself beyond that state of comprehension.

  Abruptly, as though testing his power to act, he laid his silver down neatly on the plate, and rose from the table.

  “Good night, Nathan,” he said, and with the exuberance born of freedom he walked buoyantly from the room.

  Everything now was a test. Nathan had their coat checks, but Tad demanded of the check-room girl the right to find his own coat and was given it.

  But once he was upon the street everything changed. He found the fog a wall into which he seemed constantly about to crash, and he would draw up suddenly, even throwing up his arm in self-protection. Other people came through it, but they came at him like spirits which disappeared as soon as he was sure that they were real. The foghorns groaned incessantly, complaints from the shores of hell. Loneliness enveloped him and he became afraid, even of himself. He groped his way toward light, the company of neon nobodies on drugstore stools, at bookstore stalls, who nonetheless were flesh and blood and voices. Where he was—what street—he did not know. He thought he had been walking in the angled straightness of the Greenwich Village streets for a long time. And when he found himself once more within a few feet of Schlaacht’s he was confounded. Fear abated. How ironic that he should have walked so boldly—in a circle. Self-contempt returned. Where could he turn to ease this agony of s
elf-derision? He thought again of the Baroness who he believed, as did Nathan, knew more of human nature than anyone he had ever known. Had the cab drawing up to the restaurant at that moment not been caught by emerging diners, he would have taken it directly to her house.

  Nathan Reiss came out of the restaurant. Tad moved instinctively into the shadows at the corner of the building. Reiss walked past him within touching distance and on into the fog, his step sure, his direction set. The few seconds Tad hesitated, uncertain whether to follow Nathan or to try to call the Baroness from the phone inside the restaurant door were sufficient for Reiss to disappear. A car drove close to the curb and went on in the direction Reiss had taken, but it was not a taxi. Tad went into the restaurant, looked up the number and dialed. He got a busy signal. The bartender was mixing drinks in manual expertise, the hat-check girl chewing gum, reading a magazine as fast as she could chew: all New York was a busy signal. He dialed again, and again got a busy signal.

  He went out then and walked in the direction Nathan had gone. He did not expect to catch up with him, he did not want to, and yet he began to run. He was not aware of passing a soul within the block. He almost stumbled over the feet of a man slumped against a building whom he thought at the instant to be groaning drunk. He was startled, slowed down, shying away from the figure, and then glanced back, for something lay on the ground that caught and reflected light. Tad hesitated and went back knowing, he afterwards thought, before he had seen what it was: a surgical knife smeared all but a small star-bright part of it with blood. He would not remember touching Nathan except that he became aware of the warmth and blood-wetness of him, and his sudden dead limpness and the silence when the moaning had ceased. Nothing else of those few moments was ever clear again to him until the hat-check girl’s scream when he returned to Schlaacht’s Restaurant.

  7