Evening of the Good Samaritan (25 page)

“In management. I’m not a newspaper man,” George said.

“What makes you think you’re a manager?”

“I think
you
are, Alex, and wherever I put my desk, I have no doubts about who’s going to be sitting at it most of the time.”

Winthrop grinned, and it passed through his mind that if George was as good with the hatchet on others as he was on himself, he could become a very nearly indispensable man. He called Washington and got through directly to the Secretary, using his private number.

The only other man daring to do that, Bergner thought, was the President of the United States.

That evening, its being Thursday, Winthrop attended the Traders City Symphony concert. He sat with Sylvia and thought, as he always did on musical occasions, of Elizabeth Fitzgerald. It was odd that a man as unmusical as himself should be attracted to women to whom music meant so much. He glanced at Sylvia, alert, her severe chin poised, and having something in common he felt with the conductor’s baton. He admired her intensity, the way she had of going heart and soul into everything in which she was at all involved. At the moment it was Mendelssohn. No pose, no guile, really. Straight. And she had probably exhausted any man who had ever had the guts to take up with her. He could not number many such possibilities over their long acquaintanceship. She had been a school girl when he acquired Tamarack. He had bought it for its size and isolation, with vague ideas of Elizabeth as its mistress, and under the mistaken notion that there was privacy in Lakewood. From the first, Alicia Fields had taken him over: in the beginning perversely as though to mock him—she had advised him on his art collection, and what nobody to this day was aware that he knew, the old witch had loaded him with expensive duds: she had, simultaneous to building his collection, improved her own on the advice of dealers, for which he was sure he had paid. He never went into his own gallery—or his library. They had been his tribute to the gods he worshiped, expecting by it to gain their heaven. But in the end Alicia had come round: she had been the real thing, the old aristocrat, and she had had her own test of a man’s mettle.

He stirred in his seat and Sylvia put her hand on his as she might on a restless child’s. He caught it and was tempted to lift it to his lips, but the lights never went that low in Orchestra Hall. He squeezed it and they glanced at one another with very little turning of their heads. He saw the color suffuse her long neck, and disappear beneath the iron grey curls. And to this he responded within himself … and was grateful that it happened to him. A man of conscience truly.

T
HE HOUSE ON OAK
Street, deeded by Elizabeth to Martha and her husband, became soon after they moved into it, a convenient meeting place for many people. Rather too many, Martha sometimes thought, but the envy of her childhood and youth had been the houses of her friends which seemed to have no locks upon the doors. The Muellers came; Sylvia Fields and Martha had become close friends, the closest Martha had ever had, in fact; Tony Fields was in the habit of bringing his girl to dinner every month or so, and almost invariably a new one who, he would assure Martha in a stolen moment’s confidence, was truly the only one for him. And Jonathan kept a pair of pajamas and a change of linens in his temporary quarters, Martha’s own old room, which was destined, when the time came, to be the nursery. But in four years Martha had suffered two miscarriages, one of them after six months.

The Hogan house served among its numerous offices in those days as headquarters for the University branch of “Bundles for Britain.” Annie said the place looked more like the laundry of International House or Treadwell Street (the famous Sunday morning market in the Jewish section). But, however she described it, she always added to Martha, “Mind now, I’m not complaining.”

Annie would not for the world have complained at this point in her life: she had seen this house grow cold with hate, crooked with deception, still with death and warm again with love … All this she had seen, she told her friends, unbeknownst to herself. But whatever she had known or felt, her wild red hair had turned a rusty gray. She had gone back to Ireland with Elizabeth Fitzgerald in the cold of February—and had returned forever to America the same spring.

“Mind, I’m not complaining,” she said to Martha, starting up the stairs when the front doorbell rang. But her mind was on a lovely gray sweater in that day’s lot which she would have liked to have for one of her nieces in Ireland, who, God knew, needed it almost as much as the British, poor things. It was a charity that warmed her heart, parceling out bundles for Britain, but her occasional honest thievery on behalf of the impoverished Irish salved her conscience for having denounced the land of her birth when Martha invited her to come back and keep house for her and the doctor. It was a case, by Annie’s logic, of a wrong and a right making a right and a wrong.

She opened the front door to Sylvia Fields. A cold rain was pelting down.

“I should have gone round by the basement,” Sylvia said, “but I didn’t think of it till I’d rung the bell.” She took off her coat and hat and shook her head like a colt.

“It’s all right, Miss,” Annie said, and watched her then unwrap an enormous package. It was a raccoon coat. “Lord, I haven’t seen one of them in years.”

“Do you think it’s too ostentatious—I mean to give to the British?”

“Indeed not. It’ll be better at night than a sleeping bag.”

Sylvia wondered if Annie had been reading
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Not very likely.

“Look what I’ve brought,” she called out to Martha on the stairs. She put the coat on herself and wore it going down.

“You look pregnant,” Martha said, and felt very strange when Sylvia blushed.

Sylvia took off the coat and put it alongside several others hung from the water pipe near the ceiling. “I don’t suppose Marcus is coming home early? Annie says she’ll call down when tea’s ready, by the way.”

“If your luck is good,” Martha said. “I’ve decided it’s all a matter of luck when I get him home, having absolutely nothing to do with clocks.”

Sylvia looked at her scrutinously. “You’re looking stunning.”

Martha smiled in her sudden way. “I feel stunning—when I don’t feel nauseated.”

“I thought so!” Sylvia cried, meaning she had suspected Martha to be pregnant again. “You’ve got that look in your eye.”

“This time for keeps, please God.” Martha clasped her hands together in determination. “It’s still raining, isn’t it?”

Sylvia broke away from the sudden digression of her own thoughts. “Torrents.” She looked around. “My God, people wear extraordinary things, don’t they?” She picked up an inner garment gingerly.

“That is a corset cover, according to Annie.”

“I’d hate to tell you what I thought it was,” Sylvia said. “Martha …”

Martha waited out the hesitation.

“Never mind, I’ll tell you at tea. Annie invited me. She said to tell you she’d call down when it’s ready. I just said that, didn’t I?”

“It’s something tremendous, isn’t it? You can’t even look at me in the face,” Martha prodded.

“For heaven’s sake, don’t start guessing.” She laid her hand on Martha’s and gave it a quick, nervous squeeze. “I’m going to be married.”

It was indeed startling news to Martha. “I think that’s just marvelous, Syl. Look at me.” She gave her friend a shake. “You certainly managed to keep things to yourself.”

“For years and years,” Sylvia said. “I’m going to marry Alexander … some time this spring.”

Martha’s hands fell away; she needed them to steady herself against the wash tub at her back. She failed to control the little shudder of revulsion that ran through her at the whole chain of association.

Neither of them spoke for a long moment, but Sylvia had seen what happened. “I didn’t think you were going to feel that way about it.”

Martha said, “I didn’t have time … to think about it at all. I’m surprised. That’s all.”

“Thanks,” Sylvia said.

Martha could not amend her reaction. Nor could she wax enthusiastic when her heart was simply not in it. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Sylvia flared. “That I’m marrying him? I’ve loved him long enough and well enough to wait all the days your mother had him at her discretion. Think of it, Martha. From your high perch, look down a minute and think what it would be like if you hadn’t got Marcus when you wanted him, if he’d gone off to someone else. And always there was the chance it would break up. After all, who knows better than you that it should have broken up? Would you have been cured in my position?”

“No,” Martha said quietly. “Nothing would ever have cured me of Marcus. Nothing will.”

“Then wish me Godspeed, at least.”

Sylvia’s eyes were filling. Martha pulled her into her arms and hugged her. “Forgive me, Sylvia. Please. Do forgive me.”

Sylvia responded to her affection awkwardly, and then drew back. “You’ve got to forgive Alexander, Martha. I don’t suppose I can make you like him, but that’s where you’ve got to start. You must. It wasn’t all his fault, you know.”

“It’s never the man’s,” Martha said, repeating a line of Annie’s she had heard so often it came out without her summoning it. “That’s what Annie will say. She’s going to be very happy about this. She
is.”
Martha thought further about it. “She has a marvelous sense of the fitness of things. It will put Doctor Winthrop right back up on the pedestal where she had him for years.”

“I’m very fond of Annie, but I’m not marrying Alexander to put her scales in balance.”

Martha said, looking at her and seeing her in a new way, really, “I want you to be very happy, Syl. I want it for both of you.”

Sylvia moved away and back again, restless, excited. “When I was your age, I could have fallen in love too if I’d got the chance at somebody decent. I managed to live for a while in New York’s Greenwich Village. I used to stand for hours outside where Edna St. Vincent Millay lived—hoping she’d ask me what time it was—or drop something on my head. An old lover, maybe, she was throwing out. I even gave away all my furniture because I heard that everyone sat around on cushions in her place. I let an artist paint murals on my walls. Deep purple. My mother was absolutely horrified. She said, and I remember it quite clearly, ‘Sylvia, I am going to make you a final offer. Come home with me, and I shall buy you any painter of your choice. Stay, and you must earn your own bread.’ I’ve often wondered what she would have done if I’d asked for a live painter.” Martha laughed. Sylvia smiled, but sighed at the same time.

Presently Martha asked, “Where will you live—you and Alexander?” She supposed it was the first time she had ever spoken of him by his given name.

Nor was it lost on Sylvia. “I think Tony must have our house in Lakewood. Mother’s will didn’t specify. She could be deliberately vague on some things. As for that Italian grotesque of Alexander’s. …”

Martha laughed aloud.

“You must not repeat that, friend Martha. Something will happen to it one of these days. Alex can’t really afford it, unless he becomes a tax-free institution … The inheritance tax on mother’s estate was over seven million dollars, by the way.”

“Pauvre, pauvre,”
Martha said.

Sylvia laughed at herself. “We have a farm just north of Lakewood with a house about this size. I have an idea that’s where …” She interrupted herself. She was much too apt to plan for everybody. “But you and Marcus have got to come this spring to Alex’s soiree. You’ve got to, and I shall see that some of our people are there: the Muellers, sans children, and Jonathan. I don’t know which of Tony’s females should be invited. All of them, I suppose. My God, Mother will turn over in her grave. She considered an excess of females at any party positively gauche.”

“I expect we’d better get started packing these things,” Martha said. “The truck will be here at five.”

They worked a few moments in silence. Then at the sound of footsteps overhead, Martha stopped. “Marcus is home,” she said.

She said it as though her very heart was on tiptoe, Sylvia thought. But for once, as Marcus came down the stairs, she was able to watch them, to see the meeting of their eyes, and not to be ashamed for her own embarrassment.

“Beautiful people, move over,” Sylvia said. “I’m coming to the party.”

I
N ORDER FOR MARCUS
to attend the Winthrop affair at all he needed to so arrange his schedule that he could combine the party with his weekly visit to Dr. Bergner. The old gentleman had not been going into the city for over a year, but he insisted on Marcus’s consultation, and when necessary they used the facilities of Lakewood Hospital, for example, to look at X rays. Dr. Bergner had been a trustee and an honorary member of the Lakewood staff for many years. It was a small hospital, well endowed and well staffed, at least technologically: the doctors of the community were mainly general practitioners, most of whom still took a turn in surgery, some good, some adequate and some very nearly dangerous.

“We’ve got to break that,” the old man said, sitting in the car with Marcus outside the hospital. “Old-fashioned vanity, that’s all it is. I have an idea how we shall do it, too. There’s no reason, with our facilities, we can’t be a teaching hospital. Accredited. You see, Marc, you see?” He gave Marcus a poke with his glasses. “Then all these—these tailors in white coats will have to go round again, pass a board of surgeons before they do any more cutting up here. Eh? Why not? We shall be going to war. We’ll need more doctors. Why not a school here? Patients galore. There is an army of them to the south and a navy of them to the north.” (He spoke of the two nearby government installations.) “How would you like to teach here, Marc?”

Marcus laughed aloud at the abruptness of the question. “I don’t think so, Doctor Albert. For one thing, I shouldn’t think the first outsiders on the staff would be very popular.”

“What does that matter? You’re not a salesman or a politician.”

“I’m not a teacher either,” Marcus said, which was an evasion of the point.

“You’re too busy,” Bergner said with some sarcasm.