Evening of the Good Samaritan (18 page)

Martha was too stunned to speak for a moment. She glanced at her mother, and then away quickly; her mother’s eyes were a well of longing, full of tears, reminding Martha again of Sister Mathilde. Never, never before had her mother allowed anything so personal between them. It was inexplicable to Martha, and although she tried to resist it, the resentment in her grew quickly.

“I don’t want to, mother, not if I have to go to school there in the fall.”

“I see.” Her mother withdrew her hand.

“If we were to go this summer, could I go back to St. Cecilia’s in the fall?”

“No, Martha, that part is quite set. Our going this summer is entirely up to you.”

Martha felt herself disarmed by the responsibility. It was her own impotence that angered her. “It’s because of Marcus, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“And you know I’m helpless. I’ve just told you we were not making a lifetime of plans. If we weren’t so sensible, so honest, you wouldn’t be able to take this advantage, mother.”

“You’re not making any sense at all, Martha.”

“I know I’m not. It doesn’t make sense to me to go to Europe this summer. None! None!”

“I didn’t expect it to,” her mother said quietly. “If you will remember what I said to you …”

Martha interrupted: “Is papa willing that we go? He didn’t even want me to go this fall.”

“Until you met Marcus. Do you think he has taken easily to the idea of your being in love with him—with Jonathan Hogan’s son—a Protestant, a man ten years your senior?”

“I know he hasn’t. And I know you’ve made that easier for me, mother. I grant that.”

“I’ve not made it easier or more difficult, Martha. Understand that.”

“But now you’ve made it impossible!” Her voice broke on the word.

“Martha, listen to me for just one moment, please.” She spoke then, very carefully: “If I were in the position with your father to make things easier—or for that matter, more difficult—to have any deep influence with him whatsoever—I should not need to ask that you and I go abroad together this summer. I said in the beginning it would have to be a favor you did for me. I hoped not to have to explain it to you.”

“You don’t, mother.” Martha was now having to do battle with her own tears. Her mother had won over hers, and she had won over her daughter, too. Martha was already beginning to feel the distance spread between her and Marcus. And this the happiest day: so she had proclaimed it.

When Martha wiped the tears from her eyes, her mother said quietly, persuasively, “You are very young—you have a lifetime—and it isn’t practical, let alone possible, for you to get married soon anyway. The religious issue between you and Marcus is going to take a great deal of time and tact.”

Martha nodded, hoping her mother would stop. These were the very things she and Marcus avoided saying. She had thought her mother understood.

“I don’t pretend it will be easy for you, Martha. You and I have never been—close, as they say. I’ve always felt it my duty to encourage a more intimate relationship between your father and you—since I was failing both of you in so many ways.”

“You don’t have to talk like this, mother. I was surprised, that’s all. I agree to go.”

“I don’t want you just to agree. You see, Martha, I owe your father a great deal … In twenty years, we have done some rather cruel things to each other. People do, you know.”

“I know,” Martha said.

“Your father is also ten years older than me. You’ll find the distance lengthens as you get older.”

Martha did not say anything.

They had reached the tool shed at the end of the garden and turned back. “I just wonder if there isn’t time for Walter and me to find a happier life together—before we’re left to it alone, happy or no. I expect that would please you, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” Martha said, but she did not have any feeling about it at all. In fact, she much preferred being with her mother when they did not talk. There was something more “giving” about her when she seemed to be holding back, or doling out her communication. Martha sensed now, her mother having mentioned the difference in hers and Martha’s father’s ages, that she was in some way referring to their sexual relationship. Martha had occasionally thought about it, but not very much; she did not really know what happened to people in that way when they got older.

“I want to try a couple of months’ separation from Walter—and then when I come back and we have the year alone together …” Her voice stopped. She was looking straight ahead at the house, and Martha, glancing sideways at her, saw the straight, hard line of her mouth. Then she threw back her head and opened her mouth, breathing deeply. “We shall visit your uncle in Ireland. We shall have a glorious summer, Martha. I promise you!”

I
T WAS AN AGONIZING
commingling of feelings Martha and Marcus went through about one another after that; the sense of parting hung over their every meeting. Sometimes an impatience to have it quickly accomplished came upon them and then a refusal to believe it was happening at all. “The moment is all,” Marcus said more than once, and afterwards mocked himself for its melodrama. It was indeed much better for them that she go abroad this year, and going, that she go quickly: a year should greatly clarify his own future at the rate he was getting on now with Bergner. They would come to agreement on this at every meeting, he and Martha, and then crash into each other’s arms for the moment that was all.

Marcus was not able to be home for the Sunday he had first invited Martha, nor the Sunday following, so that when finally he was able to arrange the dinner he had proposed it turned out to be a farewell party as well as one of introductions.

Mrs. Turley, the Hogans’ housekeeper, fussed and polished. “You got no business bringing that elegant girl down here, Dr. Marcus. You ought to get your father to sell this big old house.”

It was an old complaint. The house was not very old and not very big, but it was the house in which Marcus and his brother had grown up, and from which his mother had been buried when Marcus was twelve and Trent seventeen. It had seemed a very big house to him then, for Trent at the time had been a freshman at Rodgers. Because of the flu epidemic, he had not been allowed home even for the funeral.

“Our guest is not that elegant,” Marcus said.

Marcus brought Martha himself, timing it that they might have an hour or so before the Muellers arrived. His father was waiting on the front porch, and came down the steps to meet them.

Martha complimented him soon upon his garden. Marcus had never mentioned it and, to be sure, it bore comparison to her mother’s only in that whatever was growing took root in the ground.

“It runs rather heavily to carrots this year,” the elder Hogan said. “I have a feeling that if I’d put in the radishes, I’d have found them by now. Don’t you think so?”

“If you’d put in any more carrots,” Marcus said, “we’d be hard put to find the house.”

Martha laughed. “I like carrots,” she said.

“I wish I could say the same,” Jonathan Hogan said. “I like the idea of carrots. How is your father?”

“Well, thank you. He sends you his very best regards.”

“Shall we go in?” Marcus said. Fortunately it was a cool day, the wind off the lake sufficient to make it more comfortable indoors than out.

Martha stood a moment in the hallway, looking at the pictures hanging there, of old-fashioned people in various styles of clothes and poses. Then she looked into the living room. “You don’t mind my exploring, do you?”

“No. That’s what we’re here for,” Jonathan Hogan said, “to stand inspection.”

“You sound just like Marcus,” Martha said.

“More and more, the older he gets,” Marcus said. When they were in the living room, he asked, “Is it what you expected?”

“Very much. It’s so—lived-in looking.”

Marcus nodded. “It gets lived in now and then.” He grinned and glanced at his father, more than a little self-conscious. “When my brother and I were youngsters, the whole neighborhood lived in it.”

“It reminds me of mother’s studio.”

In the wake of the little silence Marcus let hang, his father said, “Well, I guess we’ve passed muster, Marc. When do you sail, Martha? You don’t mind my calling you that, do you? I don’t know exactly what you’ll call me. Some people call me the Red Jonathan. It makes me feel like a pope, which I doubt is what they have in mind. Do you go to Italy?”

Marcus was amused. He sat back. His father was trying to put forward the worst and the best of himself at once. He must feel this ordeal rather keenly. It was quite some time since Marcus had brought a girl into the house, and on those few occasions his father had felt it incumbent on him to make himself scarce rather than personable. Martha sat in the middle of the couch, very erect and yet relaxed in manner at least, her hands limp in her lap. There was a serenity about her that gave him much pleasure in observing, almost the quality of a painting, an inner stillness.

“We sail on the third,” Martha said. “Paris first, then Rome.”

“French boat? You’ll be fortunate if they don’t strike before you’ve landed. I can’t just figure out what’s happening over there now. The Communists are throwing their weight around. It’s the first time they’ve got anywhere near the government. Presumably they’re supporting the coalition, and yet they seem to be doing their best to hobble it.”

Leon Blum had just come to power in France, heading the government known as the Popular Front.

“Papa says it may be dangerous for me to go to school there next year. They closed all the convent schools in France once, the government, you know.”

“The French have a way of doing things once they would never do again, and which no one else would do even once. They are culpable, violent, wretched. But their revolutions are always their own.”

“Do you admire them, Mr. Hogan?”

“No, I don’t admire them. Not at this stage anyway. But I love them … and I don’t think the convents will be locked up again. It is thirty years later. And, you see, a good number of French Catholics, particularly the intellectuals, are quite a ways to the left these days.”

Martha said, very seriously, “You wouldn’t consider my father left, would you?”

“I’m afraid not,” Hogan said gravely. “Left of Herbert Hoover, perhaps.” And they both smiled.

Martha soon decided that she liked Mr. Hogan. She tried not to be distracted by his tic. He spoke to her as to an adult, and he did not explain something unless she asked him to. Marcus was not at all interested in politics, not even in world affairs.

The Muellers were not at all what Martha had expected. He was a jolly man who talked with a buzz, as Marcus had said, but his wife was so young—at least twenty years younger than him. And their language was remarkable. Mrs. Mueller generally spoke English, but as soon as the conversation got any way complicated, she lapsed into French, begging an explanation from her husband. His French, with its Austrian accent, Martha decided, was another language altogether.

Every once in a while that afternoon, Martha and Jonathan Hogan found themselves looking at one another, and when their eyes met, they would smile, both feeling rather shy, but curious—and engaged. Martha thought of the word, not meaning it to have any relationship to a promise of marriage. They were engaged—
with
one another.

Mrs. Mueller kept talking about Paris, the places Martha must go, the people she must see. “So many friends, they will take you under their wing. Jonathan, that is right? Under their wing?” She cocked her right elbow in the air and fanned her left hand beneath it. She was all gesture when she talked, all vitality.

Hogan smiled and nodded. “Very good.”

She tossed her head. “I am speaking American, Erich!”

“Whatever you are speaking, darling, it is music.”

“Ho! You hear, everybody?” The Frenchwoman laughed and again addressed herself to Martha. “At our house everybody talks. Four little girls. And me. Erich says I am number five little girl.”

Dr. Mueller nodded gravely and, without speaking, made the shape of little moving mouths with his fingertips bunched together. Everyone laughed.

His wife said, again to Martha, “You are an artist, no? Marcus says you paint very good, very nicely. I have some friends I will write to—Montparnasse, Erich? You remember Henri and the others?” She turned to Marcus. “They are a little bohemian. Only a little.”

“I also want to give you an introduction,” Mueller said. “I want to give you the name of a doctor, Miss Martha.”

“That’s much better,” Marcus said.

Mueller shook his head. “No, I am serious. It is very important to know a doctor when you are a stranger in a country. The nuns are very dear ladies. I admire them. But they are more sentimental than any other women. If the doctor has the nice beard and kind eyes—that is all they have to know about him. Doctor Reiss is sometimes in Vienna and sometimes in Paris. I think you said your mother is with you this summer?” Martha nodded. “Good. You will visit socially first. That is always the right way.”

So many things within the compass of that afternoon were strange to Martha, marvelously strange, because this was Marcus’s house, these his family friends, this his way of life. She looked earnestly on the portraits, on the old French prints in the dining room, the books, “medical and unmedical,” Jonathan Hogan said, “poetic and unpoetic, knowledgeable and nonsensical—a library got together by random scratching at the cribs of learning.” Making the speech, he had in hand a highball glass, and when Martha smiled her appreciation, he bowed gallantly, and without spilling his drink.

And Martha shook hands with Mrs. Turley when Marcus introduced them. She had heard him speak often of her with great affection, but it was the first time in her life she had ever touched a Negro.

Then there came a moment at dinner, with laughter and talk around them, when she and Marcus looked at one another across the table, and saying nothing said all there was to say: their love, their good-by, and then looked down to their plates and went on eating. Nothing after that had any reality for Martha: it was all like a ceremony, like getting a medal, or like the May procession in which one walked with many but thought apart. She felt no thrill, no pang thereafter; it was all ritual, the good-byes here and at the railway station. And her memory would go back always to that moment; whenever she wanted Marcus most before her, all her life, it was that moment she tried to conjure.