Evening of the Good Samaritan (19 page)

“W
E SHALL NOT PLAY
any truth or consequences, you and I, on this trip, Martha.” They were in their first full day at sea, and the gulls still pursued the ship, reminding Martha of Marcus, and the poem he often misquoted—so beautifully—about the white birds flying. The sun was warm and yet it was comfortable to have the deck blankets over their knees. In all directions there was only the undulating sea, whitecapped, opaque, endless, fathomless. “We are two women on a voyage of discovery,” her mother went on. “We might have met at the dining room table. We shall do absolutely nothing on this trip, either of us, that we don’t want to do. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Martha said.

Her mother laid back her head. Already the sun was burnishing her cheeks so that her dark eyes seemed to glow the more. “We shall probably do a number of things neither one of us wants to, only because Thomas Cook thinks we ought to. But it’s best. Everyone knows Mr. Cook is very respectable.”

“Is there really a Mr. Cook?”

“If there isn’t, let us not tell your father.”

Martha laughed.

“I don’t expect to have any flirtations, do you?” her mother said.

Martha thought for a moment. “I should not like to commit myself on anything so theoretical.”

This time her mother laughed and laid her hand for a moment on Martha’s where it rested on the arm of the deck chair between them. “When I was a little girl, we used to be taken to the continent at least once a year, nurse and all. Only the older people seemed to enjoy it. I loathed it. None of the parks in Paris that I remember had any grass in them. The green grass is terribly important to the Irish. I don’t suppose you remember your Uncle Philip?”

“Not very well.” She could remember his taking her, during his visit to Traders City when she was very small, to see a rodeo but what she remembered most about it was that he wore his carpet slippers, having walked a blister on his heel. “Mother, do you feel that you’re going home, because we’re going to visit Ireland?”

“I suppose I do. It will all be changed, of course, and so am I. But in a way, I’m going home. What did I just say about truth and consequences?”

But in the cathedral city of Chartres, less than a week later, where the Fitzgeralds stayed an extra day, omitting Versailles, Martha came to realize how much more there was to this journey for her mother than she had begun to understand. They were having dinner at the hotel and with it a bottle of wine. Her mother was eating very little, a piece of bread with the wine. She would smile at Martha if their eyes met, more to ward off intrusion, the girl thought, than to welcome anything she might say.

Suddenly she asked, “Do you miss Marcus very much?”

“Yes, in a way.”

“But you enjoy writing to him?”

“Oh, yes. I look at everything in a special way so that I can tell him about it.”

“It makes things more beautiful, doesn’t it?”

Martha nodded. She wondered if her mother were not wishing she was in love, herself. How terrible not to be in love when love was yours to give. She had danced on shipboard and been very gay; she had led the Grand March with the captain at the farewell ball. But now that they were alone her gaiety was not spontaneous. Both of them started to speak at once, and stopped.

Her mother said, “Would you mind if I were to leave you for an hour or two? Take your time and finish dinner. I want to go about a bit alone. We agreed to that, didn’t we?”

“Of course,” Martha said. “I like to be alone sometimes myself.”

And with that her mother left the table. Martha ordered cheese, even though she did not like it very much, and then dessert. Marcus liked cheese, and she thought about ways to describe it to him. She began to enjoy herself enormously, a sort of exhilaration at being for the moment quite on her own. She even speculated briefly that perhaps her mother was meeting a gentleman whose acquaintance she might have made on the boat. Martha numbered the possibilities: they did not come to much. But she was not shocked at herself.

She was sitting near the window. The sun had set but the street lamps had not been lighted yet. She wondered if a man would come around with a torch. She saw her mother leave the hotel, wearing hat and gloves, and walk without a backward glance down one of the narrow, cobbled streets that angled, as did most of the streets of the town, toward the cathedral. She walked out of Martha’s sight.

Martha finished her dinner, signed the check for it, and left the dining room. People were just beginning to come in, tourists who made the most of daylight and observed the French habit—while they were out of Paris, anyway—of lingering over dinner until bedtime. She went outdoors and walked down to the river where a little boy was fishing. They both waved at a passing barge. A woman was doing her laundry aboard it. A party of ducks swam up and started scolding the fisherman. He scolded them back. Martha understood one about as well as the other. She returned to the hotel and went up to her room, climbing the winding staircase rather than go up in a birdcage, as she presently wrote to Marcus. “The elevators all look like birdcages and I’m always afraid of being hung up in one like a parrot …”

Her mother returned before she had finished the letter, and did not interrupt. After making her toilet, she sat down herself to letters and accounts while Martha made ready for bed. When she was propped up there with the guide book to Avignon, their next stop, and a French
roman policier
which she could read with the help of a dictionary, her mother came to the side of the bed and looked down at her as though she had news to tell which she could no longer contain. At Martha’s invitation she seated herself on the edge of the bed.

“Martha, I thought I should tell you—you will know it in the morning anyway—I’ve been to confession tonight.”

Martha could not precisely remember when she had last been aware of her mother’s going to confession. It was a long time ago. She said, rather startled and startlingly, “In French?”

Her mother burst out laughing. Then very quickly, the laughter turned into tears. Martha drew her into her arms—she was not reluctant—and held her until the weeping was past.

“I’m very happy,” she said then. “Thank you, my dear.” Getting up, she put her hand beneath Martha’s chin, lifted it, and bending down, kissed her low upon the cheek so that the edges of their lips just touched.

It was not the best of summers in which to travel Europe, nor yet the worst. Some tourists were given to sudden, frantic activity, as though it might soon be too late to see or do some things, and this despite—or perhaps because—of the urgent reassurance of the natives. But rebellion had broken out in Spain and was within the week called civil war. In Avignon, the Fitzgeralds overheard an American priest, who was conducting a tour just re-routed out of Spain, tell all within his hearing that there was such a thing as a just war. The Republican government of Spain had—to say the best word for it—tolerated the burning of convents, the sacking of churches. (Republican in the Old World sense of Red Republican, he explained, not the Kansas-Alf Landon variety. Everyone laughed.) Martha, for some reason, kept mixing up the Italian Marshal Balbo with the Spanish General Franco.

They had not seen many towns in France, of course, when they reached Avignon, but both Martha and her mother took a special liking to the people. They marked what they supposed a Spanish influence—color, bullfight advertisements, the sharper, less nasal sound of language, and the prominent bone structure in the people’s faces. As was becoming their habit, the two of them broke away from their camera-toting comrades, forsaking to them the austere castle of the “captive” popes, and walked the narrow, winding side-streets. The children stared at them frankly and generally without smiling, pulling back into darkened entries as they drew close.

A vendor of oranges called Elizabeth Fitzgerald “señora” and spoke to her in Spanish until she replied in French that she was not Spanish. To which he cried, “Oh, American!” which comment on her mother’s French made Martha giggle. They bought an orange apiece.

“I wonder if he thought we were refugees,” her mother said afterwards. They had heard there were refugees crossing the border, but had not seen any, at least to recognize.

Martha supposed a refugee did not necessarily wear rags.

“I have a feeling they are not very sympathetic here with the rebels,” her mother said.

“But look at all the churches, mother.”

“I was looking at the poverty. And they don’t beg—isn’t that interesting?”

In Italy they came upon beggars who begged as a way of life, a trade, beggars suddenly arrogant if one refused them, boastful of an empire, the Ethiopian jewel now secure in the king’s crown. And in Rome, Martha first heard the marching. She awoke one morning in her hotel room, high above the Via Veneto, to the sound of cheers and rhythmic clomping—the hard, fierce footfalls of tens of hundreds of military boots. Her mother was already at the window, gazing down.

“They’re so ridiculous—looking at them from here. One should always look down on soldiers. It puts them in proper perspective.” And she went back to bed, trying first to ring for breakfast, but no one was answering bells anywhere.

Martha could see the white-jacketed staff on the steps below, the boys saluting over the heads of one another. All up and down the street, as far as she could see, the same scene was re-enacted, the cafe tables and chairs thrust back from the sidewalks, and the laughing crowds tumbling outdoors, half-dressed, half-awake, waving, saluting, many of them in the Fascist manner.

And when the soldiers were gone, the tables and chairs came out again, and the multi-colored umbrellas were opened to the sky. Martha loved Rome. Even the beggars were handsome. The romantic Christ seemed to be everywhere. But it was in Rome that she was for the first time really homesick.

They reached Vienna toward the end of July, going up from Venice through Trieste on the overnight train. Several members of the tour predicted Martha would love Vienna best of all. She and her mother somehow belonged there: it was the happiest city in Europe. Elizabeth was amused: of all the characteristics credited to her over the years, gaiety was not among them. Martha, riding from the station behind a fat-necked, talkative driver, and looking out on wide boulevards, the baroque-fronted buildings, rows upon rows of trees, remarked, almost wistfully, “I do love to waltz.”

It sounded like a small girl’s counseling of herself that despite its strangeness there was bound to be something at the party she would like. And it did seem from the outset that all Vienna had determined this also. It was not merely the charming manners the good hostelers managed for visitors. There ran that week through much of Austria a festive spirit, rejoicing sometimes near hysteria. Chancellor Schuschnigg had just signed an agreement with Hitler whereby the German threat to Austrian autonomy was removed; Austria would be Austria still.

They stayed at one of the fine hotels within walking distance of the old city and nearer still to the fashionable shops. Their accommodations were the nicest thus far: a bedroom each and a parlor-writing room where among the awesome furniture, gilded and brocaded chairs, a carved desk and an ivory inlaid card table, was a piano, a piano which was in tune. Standing, her left hand still gloved, Elizabeth played a few bars of a Schubert etude with her right. Martha had been looking out on the park she could see beyond the corner of the Museum, and turned from the window in time to see her mother close the lid upon the keys. Martha went up and opened it, saying, quite authoritatively, “No.”

Her mother said, “No?” and, trailing her fingernail up the keys, she described a question in sound. Then with the knuckles of her left hand she struck three black keys at once at the bottom of the bass. Smiling, she took off her other glove.

At that moment they both discovered the flowers, a vaseful of red and white roses. “That’s being rather explicit about us, isn’t it? Red roses and white roses. I hadn’t thought the Austrians so neat.”

“Sometimes you say the strangest things, mother.”

“Not dull, I trust.”

“No. Amusing, really.”

“I’ve often thought the world lost a great bawd in me.”

“It isn’t too late, is it, mother?” Martha said, in mock naïveté.

Her mother, glancing up sharply, caught the mischief in Martha’s eyes and was amused. She paused, opening the envelope which accompanied the flowers. “I hope you will have the chance to go among Parisian society this winter, Martha. I shall do what I can before I leave. But in the end, it depends on yourself, on the friends you make. For heaven’s sake, don’t make any attachments out of pity. It’s a waste of everybody’s time, especially among the young.” She opened the note, scanned it and exclaimed, “How nice!” She read aloud: “‘I shall be honored if you will be my guests for dinner. May I call for you at seven? Respectfully yours, Nathan Reiss.’ That’s through Marcus’s father’s friend, isn’t it?”

Martha was enormously pleased. Then she said, “How do you answer it?”

Elizabeth picked up a telephone which vaguely reminded one of the scales of justice by the delicacy of its balance. She inquired of the concierge the proper procedure. But a servant was waiting downstairs for her answer when convenient, he told her.

“Really?” Martha said. “But then I suppose there’s a great deal of unemployment, and it’s better than doing nothing.”

Her mother, composing an answer in her mind, did not answer for a moment. She sat down at the desk. “I understand the Austrian Jews and the Hapsburgs have a—rapprochement.” She wrote the note of acceptance and sent for the messenger. “Martha, you must tell me all you can about Marcus’s friend—Doctor Mueller, is it?”

Nothing could have less adequately prepared anyone for Nathan Reiss than a description of Erich Mueller. Reiss was not a tall man, five foot ten probably, slender, and strikingly handsome. What neither of them had expected was that he was young, under forty it might be supposed. His eyes were very black, his mouth almost feminine, sensuous, in the full redness of the lips. He drew himself even more erect when they stepped from the lift, and then came to them, his hands extended, and took one of theirs in each of his. “Doctor Mueller did not tell me so much,” he said. “But then Mueller is a scientist, not an artist.” He lifted Elizabeth’s gloved hand first to his lips, then Martha’s bare hand, for she had turned back her glove at the wrist.