Evening of the Good Samaritan (22 page)

Elizabeth had never liked her husband’s study: the leather chairs were cold and odorous, the prints of the wild geese forlorn. A hunter’s horn and a rifle hung over the fireplace although Walter himself had a distinct aversion to the sport. She had once thought, looking in, it was so much a man’s room it did not need a man in it. It was entirely apt that what must now be acted out be done here.

Winthrop stood, his hands behind his back, his shoulders hunched, his head down. “I don’t know how to say this to you. I can begin by apologizing—particularly to Elizabeth. I got a call from Mike Shea this afternoon, Walter. He’s threatening to link Elizabeth’s and my name in scandal if I don’t withdraw from the race.”

Fitzgerald sat for a moment, his forefingers pointed together, the fingernails touching his teeth. “We had to assume he’d use such tactics when he got desperate.”

“I’m genuinely sorry, Elizabeth,” Winthrop said.

She roused herself and said flatly, “So am I.” She had rather expected, returning to the church, and in the way of the prodigal, to have been spared retribution.

“Are you surprised?” Fitzgerald said to his wife. “I’d always thought you were made of more worldly stuff than that.” Of Winthrop he asked, “Just what is he proposing to say?”

“I don’t know exactly. I hung up on him, but it’s along the lines that Elizabeth and I were having an affair behind your back.”

“Not to my face?” Fitzgerald said. The remark disclosed a self-flagellation that turned Elizabeth cold. “If you can get him to repeat whatever it is publicly,” Fitzgerald went on, “you can sue him for slander, can’t you?”

“Of course. But the harm will have been done to you and your family, Walter.”

Fitzgerald looked at his wife. “Isn’t it fortunate you persuaded me to allow Martha this year abroad, Elizabeth?”

She simply could not look at him. “It will reach her there, too, I’m afraid. But it is better.”

Fitzgerald laid his head on the back of the chair and studied the ceiling. “I suppose he must have something that seems like evidence on which to base such charges. Have you any idea what it could be?” He gave a dry laugh. “I’ve never thought you two got on together at all.”

Winthrop said, “I’ve always been very fond of Elizabeth, Walter. I’ve considered you a lucky man.”

Fitzgerald nodded and made a noise of agreement. “I suppose maybe that’s what he’s got hold of.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean, Walter.”

“I’ve sometimes wondered if your friendship for me hadn’t something in it of covetousness of my wife. And it has given me an odd kind of satisfaction.” He sat up in his chair and spoke out harshly. “She could take in any man, any man at all. I’ve seen her do it time and again. And I’ve profited by it, I’m well aware, in the patronage of men more successful than myself. I’ve profited by their lusting eyes, and watching, I’ve thought to myself, you poor benighted fools. What woman is what she pretends to be? Not my wife. My wife has the body of Venus—forgive me, Elizabeth—and the soul of Famine. And what none of you knew, Alex, what none of you knew …” His voice sank almost to a whisper “… I could not have lived with her otherwise.” He hunched forward and buried his face in his hands.

Elizabeth thought she was going to faint; her mouth was dry, her lips almost numb and the taste in her throat was sickening.

Winthrop felt as though something was crawling up his back. It was not easy to watch a man, even a fool, make a spectacle of himself. And the odd idea occurred to him that even if he and Elizabeth were to confess their affair to Walter right now, he would not believe them. And this, of course, was the situation that was going to make it possible for him to spit in the blue, blue eye of Mike Shea.

“I could withdraw from the race,” he said. “Reasons of health. I am sure there are a few doctors around town who would be willing to certify to it.”

Fitzgerald slowly drew his face out from the cover of his hands. “No.”

Winthrop said, “Elizabeth, say the word. It’s your good name at stake here.”

“I think I am going to be sick,” she said, and managed somehow to get out of the room before it happened.

Fitzgerald said, “Alex, we shall fight them to the last scrap of courage. Let them dump their garbage where they will.”

Mike Shea’s charges, handed to the evening papers, created a furor in the city: they were going to be good for many a headline. Yet they did Shea’s candidate very little good. In fact, it was not long before Mike could begin to calculate the harm it was doing him. Shameful as might be the charges against Winthrop, if true, the people felt it was even more shameful of the mayor to bring them up at this time. It was a desperate move, and nobody wanted to vote for a desperate candidate.

Mike Shea could count this, everybody said, a major blunder. Then Winthrop himself made one. Against George Bergner’s advice to do nothing about Shea’s libel—beyond making a public denial—until the campaign was over, Winthrop had no choice but to play it righteous all the way. Fitzgerald insisted on it and Winthrop filed suit. Shea filed counter-suit, and made the affidavits he had collected a matter of public records. Three employees of the International Building gave testimony, including a window washer whose very occupation, when published, suggested the most damning evidence of all. A state trooper testified to Winthrop’s occasional visits to a cabin in the dunes in the company of a woman.

But through it all, Walter Fitzgerald was steadfast. He might not even have read the papers. The only thing which humiliated him, he told each of his classes, was that the University was once more in the newspapers, and he had never, never thought it would be on his account. Purposefully now he spent a little while every day in the men’s faculty lounge: he was available for any question, any scrutiny. And it was there that Jonathan Hogan spoke to him.

“I don’t know whether it will help his cause—or sink it, but I’ve undertaken to make a few speeches for Winthrop.”

“It’s a little late, isn’t it, Hogan?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mind my asking what prompted you to change your mind?”

The little twitching at Hogan’s eye became more intense, his head nodding. “I’ve had my own days of persecution at the hands of the newspapers.”

“Then you propose, by association, to prove Alexander Winthrop also innocent?” Fitzgerald said in bitter sarcasm.

“I do not have an opinion in the matter. I do not judge.”

“I do,” Fitzgerald snapped.

Hogan nodded his head. “I know that well enough, professor.”

It would not make a great difference, but a few votes came along with Jonathan Hogan into Winthrop’s camp. And they were not likely to be necessary. His supporters seemed to be holding fast. It was the die-hard Democrats who were defecting from Mike Shea—to, of all things, the Republican candidate, saying in effect to Winthrop and to the mayor, a plague on both your houses.

But Elizabeth found her first pleasure in many days in the rallying of the Hogans to their side. It was largely a gesture of loyalty, for she knew that nothing really had changed and that Marcus must now see confirmed what he earlier suspected. Perhaps it was Jonathan Hogan’s reasoning that he was rallying to one more lost cause. She, too, and on the briefest of acquaintanceship, had been won to the man as had her daughter. He had the kindest face of any man she knew.

“Loyalty?” Fitzgerald said. “The man doesn’t know the meaning of the word—not to country, nor to school, nor to any man.”

“What does it mean then—his coming out for Alexander?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and then added vehemently, “but I am ashamed for Alexander that he accepted him.”

“Ashamed? You are ashamed for that, Walter, and for nothing else?”

“Do not defend him to me, Elizabeth. I have seen the president of a university compromise his integrity on that man’s behalf, and it is one of the greatest regrets in my life that I allowed myself to compromise also. I can see the pattern of corruption. I can feel its presence! In my own house, I can feel it closing in to destroy me. I shall do no more work for Alex now. If I could, I would undo what I’ve done for him.”

He sat, tired and gray and full of hatred, and for the first time in so very long, Elizabeth was moved to pity. He saw what he had to see, and knew far more than he was aware of knowing. How arrogant of her to have supposed she could read him as though he were a child’s primer.

She went to him and put a hand upon his shoulder. “Must you hate, Walter?”

It was some seconds before he said anything, then just the word “love,” as though he were contemplating it.

They had an early dinner that night so that Annie could wash up and be off for the weekend with her relatives. She was bitter company in the house, these days of scandal. Professor Fitzgerald went into his study and closed the door; it was his old habit which he had fallen out of during the election campaign. Elizabeth went upstairs early and read late into the night. Now and then she heard a sound in the house. She did not hear him come upstairs, but dozing off, she might have missed him. The bathroom divided their bedrooms. But on the first instant of waking in the morning, she sensed herself to be alone in the house.

His bed had not been slept in. His study was empty, but his topcoat was in the closet. She called down into the basement and then went down. It was neat, and he was not there. Dressing, she went outdoors. She found him where he had hung himself in the tool shed, by the light of a now flickering, fading flashlight which was propped up on the potting bench. It was, to her knowledge, the first time he had even been in the building. His body was cold and stiff, but she cut him down and held him in her arms for a little while before going to call for help.

T
HE MOTHER SUPERIOR TOLD
Martha of her father’s death. He was found to have taken his own life while temporarily insane, for he was not a man to have done it otherwise. A devout man really, Martha herself qualified. The nun nodded and said, “But of course! He is being given Christian burial.” A requiem high Mass was sung for him in the school chapel on the day of his funeral.

Martha could not say that she grieved. She mourned her father, putting on the black which the nuns advised. Perhaps if she had knelt before the body, if she had attended the wake, seen Annie’s tear-reddened eyes—for it was Annie who could grieve in the Irish way—there might have been a greater reality for her to his death. What she felt was melancholy, not sorrow. Then her mother wrote her briefly, but frankly, of the scandal. “They say Alexander and I have been lovers …” Martha was never to forget the shock of reading those words. The room seemed to tip sidewise so that she had to hold onto the chair in order not to lose her balance. But after it was straight again, the words were still there. They were there even after she no longer felt anything, reading them.

The two months which followed were to Martha time without definition, a clock without hands. She could not seem to relate to anything, to anybody. She studied and took her examinations. That she passed them mildly surprised her but did not especially please her. She wrote affectionate, comforting letters to her mother and to Marcus as though to console them because they did not feel that they could console her. She wrote the letters; they were in her handwriting, but she sensed no emotion, writing them. This was, she supposed, hypocrisy. But she could not find anything true within herself.

The nuns were understanding. They were French, after all, and however explosive a combination politics and cuckoldry, they all too often went together in French history. The good nuns were, however, at a loss to understand the girl’s aloofness at such a time. She was expected, indeed she was encouraged, to confide, to weep, to beat her fists; in other words, to take full advantage of the chance to dramatize herself and thus to spend her travail in a natural and profitable manner.

How could she explain that she felt no travail?

Another American student who seemed in some unremembered way associated with the trauma was Genevieve Revere who had that autumn made herself quite despicable to Martha. In art class and before the lay instructor she had told how she had teased poor Sister Mathilde. Martha discovered then that she had not been the only girl to whom Mathilde had confided her crush on Revere. The poor unbalanced nun had told it to anyone she thought would carry it back to Genevieve.

“And finally,” Revere had said, telling her tale in the art class, “finally she destroyed my painting.”

“She did not,” Martha had said. “I destroyed it.”

“You did! Why? It was a joke, Martha.”

“Then it was a filthy joke.”

“Do you mean filthy—dirty?”

“Yes. That, too.”

And that, Martha had discovered, perversely won her the unwanted devotion of Genevieve Revere. The girl renewed an old invitation to share an apartment in the Latin Quarter of Paris instead of going home. Revere had Parisian friends who gathered all the American papers for her and she became the most informed person on the Winthrop-Fitzgerald scandal on that side of the Atlantic. She got it all to Martha as though it were the duty of a friend, and as though it ought to win her friendship in return. So Martha came to know, whether or not she wanted to, that Dr. Winthrop was denounced by Judge Phipps in a front page editorial in the
Dispatch
on election eve, that he was defeated and a Republican victorious in Traders City, and she knew that before Christmas Dr. Winthrop withdrew his libel suit against Michael Shea.

When Genevieve said in feigned innocence, “Why would he do that?” Martha said coldly, “Because it costs a great deal of money.” But she knew very well that was not the reason. She could not be shocked again, however. Her mother’s plain telling of the charges in the first place had been to her admission of their truth. What did happen to Martha now, however, was a sudden desire for change, to leave the convent school for freedom, for—as she wrote to Marcus because there was no one else to whom she could write or say it—“a house without eyes, a place among strangers.”

Although she did not realize it, she had voiced her first personal protest, her first consciousness of being, perhaps, herself a victim of the tragedy.