Evening of the Good Samaritan (13 page)

“Wouldn’t it kill them here to drink to his election?” Bergner said, directing his remark to Marcus across Martha.

“Bad manners, do you think?” said Marcus, remembering Sylvia’s appraisal of the company.

“Where I come from,” Louise said, “only gentlemen go into politics.”

Bergner said, “Where you come from, dear, there
are
only gentlemen. Gentlemen and squalor. That’s almost a pun, isn’t it? My father would be proud of me.” He laughed unpleasantly.

Marcus, addressing himself to Bergner, asked, “Who is the dark woman at Dr. Winthrop’s right?”

“That’s my mother,” Martha said.

“Is it? She’s very beautiful.” He was grateful that the girl was too shy to more than glance at him for the moment, and he deliberately avoided meeting Bergner’s eyes which he knew to be waiting his. The fact was he had been startled at the discovery, and he was for some time thereafter preoccupied with it. He could not escape associating it with what he knew of Sylvia Fields, and her proximity with her brother, Dr. Bergner and her mother, to the head of the table. It was not entirely unwarranted to suppose the man with whom she was in love was Winthrop. But Mrs. Fitzgerald sat on his right, and in some remote corner of his memory, Marcus had registered a bit of University gossip.

Martha asked, “Mr. Bergner …”

“Please call me George,” he interrupted. “I’m not that old despite the recession.” He pointed to his hair line.

“George,” she amended. “My father is the man down fourth from my mother. He has white hair. Do you know who the woman is sitting on the far side of him?”

Bergner, having looked, said, “Why, that’s Gertrude Milgrim, the opera singer.”

“How wonderful!” Martha said. “But poor papa! He can’t even carry a tune.”

Bergner laughed aloud, an inordinate burst that angered Marcus and prompted Louise to lean across the table and ask, “What did she say?” Then to Martha, “What did you say, honey?”

Marcus answered. “She said her father was unmusical and isn’t it strange that he should get an opera singer as his dinner partner.”

“That’s what I like best about Alexander,” Louise said. “He mixes just all sorts of people.”

Martha, having observed that Marcus did not repeat precisely what she had said, sensed something to be remiss. It occurred to her then that her father might be under the pall—in George Bergner’s terms—for being several down the table from the top. His own father was sitting across but one from her mother. She said, meaning that a friend is not compromised by a mere seating arrangement, “Dr. Winthrop is my father’s best friend.”

“So I’ve heard.” Bergner touched his wine glass to Martha’s. “To friendship.”

Had he looked at Marcus then he would have seen the color of wrath and he might not soon have forgotten it.

Well over an hour later as they left the table, Martha asked Marcus, “Would you like to meet my mother?”

“I should—very much,” Marcus said, and deliberately abandoned Louise to her husband. And as they moved among the intermingling guests, he murmured, “A deserving couple.”

Martha said, “What did you say?”

“Something nasty, I’m afraid. But not nasty enough.”

And so he met Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a woman whom her daughter resembled only in height and a certain proud bearing. He supposed Mrs. Fitzgerald to be a person of great passion and deep reserve. That her daughter worshiped her was plain, and it was likely too that she craved more love of her mother than was allowed her … if he were right in the other matter.

Professor Fitzgerald came up to him and shook his hand. He said, “I’m glad to see you here.” But he did not even mention the young doctor’s name.

Marcus observed Sylvia Fields watching him, and as soon as the chance came, he introduced Martha to her and her brother. Sylvia, even bitter in love, he felt, would be a far kinder person than George Bergner. He tended, of course, to romanticize in his appraisal of all women.

Something with which Marcus had not reckoned was Tony Fields’ readiness to take over the only person as young as himself present. George Bergner, who had by then caught up, was the first to see it outside Marcus. Elaborately he set about repairing the damage he knew he had done to any possible friendship between himself and Marcus. It was, though Marcus did not know it then, the pattern in all his relationships: his was a long history of amendment, restitution. In fact, he got on toward his goal with people by overcompensating to them for an earlier and deliberate affront: not to accept him at such a moment would be tantamount to rejecting an apology. His way to Marcus’s heart was to be won, it seemed, by hacking down young Tony Fields. He began a loud recital of Tony’s athletic achievements; the implication plainly was that Tony was a playboy. To Fields himself he said:

“Isn’t this your time of year to be off somewhere skiing, Tony?”

“I’m working,” the boy said.

“Oh. A marvelous experience, isn’t it?”

“It’s a loathsome experience. Work is a Puritan notion, the only thing out of all the tenets of Christianity they hung onto and the one thing guaranteed to keep the human being on the level of the jackass.”

He was talking nonsense, but everyone within earshot was amused, Marcus observed.

Tony, his handsome face flushed with excitement and the pleasure of hearing his own voice, elaborated: “What the devil difference is there in me sitting at a desk behind a stack of Poor’s industrial ratings on the one side and a stack of Moody’s industrial ratings on the other, and the donkey chasing after the carrot in front of his nose? By heavens, the donkey at least cares what’s in the carrot!”

Bergner said, and then abandoned the defense, “Tony, you’d better care, old boy. You’d better care.”

“But I care very much,” Tony said. “I’m rather fond of carrots.”

Martha turned that sudden and wonderful smile of hers on the boy, and Marcus thought that with Bergner to defend him he would not need a prosecutor.

Martha was no more than a little amused by Tony Fields, and she gave him more attention than she truly wanted to, but it occurred to her the moment he introduced them that Marcus wished to disengage himself. She supposed he thought her very young.

Then, just as he was about to go off with Dr. Bergner, Marcus looked around. “Please don’t go far,” he said. “I shall be back.”

Marcus strode self-consciously alongside Dr. Bergner. It was hard to keep step with him, especially on the highly polished floors, for he had the habit of pulling up suddenly every few steps to draw several deep breaths before proceeding. High blood pressure, likely. The servant guiding them threw open the library door, and then touched a switch which lighted several milk glass sconces along the wall as well as the reading lamps. Marcus’s first thought was that the room had remained unchanged, possibly undisturbed, from the day a decorator had put his imprimatur on it. The servant lighted the fireplace and told them where the bell cord hung if they should wish anything.

Bergner was rubbing his hands together, looking round the room. “Well, well,” he said, “sixty feet of red vellum, twenty of blue. What’s that?” He trembled a finger at a row of white leather bindings, gold-tooled, near where Marcus stood.

Marcus said, “Dickens, of all things.” He took a volume from the shelf. “I got my Dickens in six point type and paper as rough as an elephant’s hide. These aren’t even cut.”

Dr. Bergner took his glasses from his pocket and put them on, tilting his head back then to look at Marcus through them. “Wouldn’t it offend you to see grubby little finger marks all over that exquisite paper?”

“Not much,” Marcus said and put back the book.

Dr. Bergner gave the guttural explosion which in him passed for a laugh and put away his glasses. He chose a chair in front of the fire and indicated the one in which he expected Marcus to sit. “Why don’t you have some brandy, Hogan? I’d like to see that—that tassel in operation. I shouldn’t be surprised if it plays ‘Swanee River.’”

“Will you have something yourself, doctor?”

“No, damn it. Doctor’s orders, ha!” He scowled. “Who’s this man Fitzgerald?”

Marcus told him.

“He’s an ass. I listened to him prate all through dinner. ‘Materialistic scientists.’” He mocked Fitzgerald’s accent. “He’s an Irish bigot. I supposed till now he was a politician—one of those indispensables to a man who wants to be mayor of our metropolis.” Again Dr. Bergner groped for his glasses. He did not keep them on for any length of time ever, merely needing them when he wanted to take a good look at a man, as he did now at Marcus. He said abruptly, “What qualifies you, Hogan—aside from the fact that your mother’s grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother missed the first boat to America—to become an associate of mine?”

Marcus grinned. He supposed a number of people were afraid of this old tyrant, and he had no doubt that Dr. Bergner was tyrannical. His daughter-in-law, Marcus was sure, lived in terror of him. Marcus did not say a word; he stretched his hands out in front of Bergner, palms downward, fingers separated, the hands absolutely steady.

Bergner looked at them, his lower lip shooting out a bit presently so that it pulled down the corners of his mouth. “Well, well,” he said at last, and drew a deep breath. “Well, well.”

Marcus dropped his hands.

After a few seconds, Bergner said, “All right. We’ll see what’s in those hands, we shall, but not until we’ve seen what else is in you. I shall pay you a small salary, doctor … and since I have a son a lawyer, he’ll draw up the contract.”

“A salary, doctor?” Marcus said, his confidence diminishing.

“A small one, to be sure.” He found his glasses with no trouble this time and looked at Marcus. “I’m hiring a servant, doctor. Oh yes, that’s what it amounts to, hiring a servant.”

Marcus felt something like a slow crumbling inside of him: his dream of residency in a good hospital. It was not a new experience, but the events of the night had not prepared him for it.

“An indentured one, at that,” he said.

“You do not like it, doctor?”

“Not much, sir.”

“Well, well.” The old man leaned back. “Perhaps you would like me to assist you, Doctor Hogan?”

“I can conceive of the day’s coming when that might happen,” Marcus said in quiet bitterness. He had had no right, of course, to the vision he had got of himself among the glitter of the night’s company; he had been conjuring success in spite of himself. He had been thinking of position or his pride would not be suffering as it now was.

Bergner said, and his jowl and mustaches shook with the vehemence of his words, “So can I, but I do not look forward to it, doctor. And I will not look backward in the company of an untried cub.”

His words touched Marcus to the marrow. He said, “Can I live on the salary, Doctor Bergner?”

“If you live alone you can manage. Oh yes.”

“I live with my father.”

“Ah, yes, yes. Jonathan Hogan. Does he measure himself, I wonder, by the amount of money he gets for what he does, eh?”

“I don’t think my father has ever measured himself, doctor. Or for that matter, any man.”

“Well, well.” Again Bergner’s lip shot out, pulling down the corners of his mouth. “Shall we meet next Wednesday then, say, in my office, and draw up the contract?”

There was no use pressing on the amount of the salary even, Marcus thought. He was destined, it seemed, to a life of apprenticeship. “Yes, sir.”

“Be there at twelve then. Now, doctor …”

Marcus looked at him, for he paused, waiting full attention.

“Put out your hands to me again the way you did a few moments ago.”

Marcus held out his hands, palms downward, and saw himself the tremor in them: his emotions and his nerves had responded badly to the interview.

Very slowly, Dr. Bergner brought his palsied, loose-skinned hands to the level of the younger man’s, and as Marcus watched, all but mesmerized, he saw them grow steadier, steadier by far than his, and then all but still. And looking up he saw the hard lines of discipline, the act of will, showing upon the old man’s face. The watery gray eyes under the dark, jagged brows proclaimed a fierce triumph. Marcus was already the master’s servant.

Winthrop traditionally opened the dance by taking into it the grande dame of Lake Shore society, Alicia Fields. She had been judge, jury and jailer to him in Lakewood, at first resenting his buying Tamarack, then condescending to advise him on his household, not always wisely, and sometimes with deliberate malice. He sometimes wondered if her tolerance of him did not begin and grow commensurately to the aging of her unmarried daughter. It was only a year ago that she had said to him, “Alexander, I think you may call me Alicia now.” He still reverted sometimes to “Mrs. Fields.” Now the old lady could scarcely dance a step, and in her old age she was becoming a bawd. It amused him only in that he remembered how diffident he had been in her staid presence some fifteen years before.

They walked onto the ballroom floor, arm in arm, and that sufficed to satisfy tradition. He guided her then to a chair at the wall and sat with her through the first dance.

“So at last you’re on the road to fame, Alexander. It’s the way you’ve always wanted to go, via politics, isn’t it?”

“Yes, though I didn’t always know it.”

“You knew it. I knew it. And now I’m glad. Shall I tell you why?”

“I think I know, Alicia.”

She darted her eyes at him without turning her head very much. “And you don’t want me to say it?”

He merely shrugged.

“It’s all over?”

He frowned, not because she had said the words, but because it seemed not irrevocably so, their not having been said by anyone till then. He nodded slightly in affirmation.

“Then what is she doing here tonight?”

“It’s better,” he said, meaning that it was better not to make conspicuous an absence.

The old lady leaned toward him and said, “I shall be watching you when you dance with her, Alexander.”

“Do!” he said sharply.

She gave a dry laugh. “I thought so.”

“You have a dirty mind, Alicia.”

“Its cultivation is one of the few pleasures left me. Go. I can see your impatience.”