Evening of the Good Samaritan (31 page)

He was past arguing. He was past a great many things which until now had kept in working condition his sparse and infirm body. Marcus was shocked at the change in him. There were bruised lacerations on his father’s forehead. These he could and did patch up instantly. The other condition made him furious. And he would have liked to make his father furious.

“You know you had it coming to you, don’t you, dad?”

“Yes, I know.”

This was not what Marcus wanted at all. Nor was he prepared for Martha’s turning on him.

“You weren’t there, Marcus. You’ve got no right to judge. He was magnificent!”

“I’ve had a pretty fair sampling of his opinions in my lifetime,” Marcus said, “and there comes a time when the best of fashions go out of date.”

“Meaning?” Jonathan said.

“That it’s too late for your doctrine of passive resistance. Could you go to that window, look out, and see one man clubbing hell out of another, and do nothing about it?”

“No. I would have to go out—get help if need be—and take the club from him. And then I should have to see forever that he did not get another club. But, Marc—what would it avail me to club him to death, even with his own club? What man dares trust himself with the power of destruction? Not I. Killing kills.”

“I’m sorry, dad. But I do not believe there is any way to deal with force except with force. There is a time we have to kill.”

Jonathan said, “If you feel that way, Marc, you must.” The silence in the room became as heavy as the atmosphere. All three of them knew something more had to be said, a final word. There is always that last bit of self-justification which puts the matter neatly out of reach, perhaps not forever, but at least for a time, a sort of deliberate alienation, meant not so much to score against the other person, as to clear a ground for oneself in which to rest and sort out the truths from the over-truths, principle from posture. “I don’t disown you,” Jonathan added, spreading his hands, “but I’m not sure I know you.”

They sat, all of them disconsolate. The hall clock struck midnight. Marcus proposed they light a citronella candle and go out on the terrace. Martha said it ought to rain soon. At that moment the telephone rang.

Martha said, “I’ll take it, Marcus.” Wherever she could she tried to intercept late calls for him.

But that night Marcus said, “No, you’ve had enough for one night.”

He took the call in the library. It was George Bergner. Marcus had not seen him since the night of his father’s death, their only communication an exchange of letters on matters relating to the estate. The work on genetics might never have been done for all the worth of the fragments Marcus had been able to gather from Dr. Bergner’s secretary.

“I’ve just been talking to the city editor at the
Star,
Marcus,” Bergner said. “That was an ugly business tonight at the Stadium.”

“Would you like to speak to my father, George?”

“No, no. I wouldn’t disturb him. You can tell he was upset. The reason I’ve called you—one of our boys got a picture, one of those heart-breaking, human interest shots that come along maybe once in a photographer’s life? You know what I mean, Marcus?”

Marcus did not answer, but he suspected what was coming.

“A pregnant girl supporting a broken old man. The cruelty of life, as my father used to say—but it would be a little thick, wouldn’t it, me quoting him to you? The thing is, Marcus … well, I thought I ought to tell you before it appears in the morning. You get the
Star,
don’t you?” A sound like muffled, nervous laughter ran through the last sentence.

“Sometimes.”

Bergner said: “Well, I just thought I’d tell you before it’s locked up … you knowing the publisher and all.”

Marcus realized he had been given an invitation to call Winthrop. George did not care whom he asked to destroy the picture, so long as he asked it. Marcus was caught: there is no position so vulnerable as the high ground of righteousness.

“Thank you very much, George,” Marcus said and hung up.

It was some moments before he returned to the living room. By then Martha and his father had moved out to the terrace. The damp, slightly putrid smell of late summer hung in the unstirring air.

“You don’t have to go out, do you, Marcus?”

“It was George Bergner. The
Star
photographer seems to have got a picture of you two.”

“Oh,” was all Martha said.

“I’m sorry, Marc,” Jonathan said after a moment. “It isn’t every son has a bad boy for a father.”

“For God’s sake, get off that line. If I were going to be embarrassed by you it would have happened a long time ago. Was it your pride that got hurt tonight or your principles?”

“That’s a very good question,” Jonathan said. “Mostly my pride.”

To Martha, Marcus said gently: “Why don’t you go up to bed? I shall be along soon.”

Martha asked: “Are you going to call Doctor Winthrop?”

“I was thinking of it.”

“To ask him not to allow the picture?”

Marcus did not say anything.

“Please don’t, Marcus. Jonathan has had his picture in the paper before, and I am not ashamed to be seen with him. As you said, his principles weren’t compromised tonight. I wish it all hadn’t happened, but it did. A picture in the newspaper isn’t going to change anything much, is it?”

Marcus shook a cigaret out of a damp package, gave it to his father and took one for himself. He lit them both. “Not much.” He brushed Martha’s cheek with the back of his hand.

Much later and when they had talked of many other things, Jonathan remarked: “Something I have observed—I wonder if either of you has: when two people in love live a number of years together, they tend not only to reconcile their differences. They are quite likely to change positions with one another. Have you noticed it?”

He turned round to Martha, but she had fallen asleep in the chair.

N
OTHING WAS MORE ILLUSTRATIVE
of Lakewood’s estimate of a man’s position than the attitude of the commuters on the eight o’clock train to Traders City. No one had ever made a point of snubbing Alexander Winthrop, and no one now made a point of including him, yet a change had occurred and he could feel it. It was in the inflection of a one-word greeting, in the way Hurd Abington for example would say “Winthrop,” without, so far as Winthrop had been able to observe, having lifted his eyes from the
Journal of Commerce.
A few of the men who carried more than one newspaper took the
Star,
although Winthrop was sure they opened it almost as gingerly as they would a Hearst sheet. With Hearst they agreed in principle but preferred to disassociate from his exploitation. Winthrop suspected they mistook the
Star’s
principles for exploitation and perversely honored its publisher for a successful stratagem. Then too, his marriage to Sylvia Fields, presumably on his own terms, further bound him within the community. It was considered sage and apt of him to have waited until the old lady died. Winthrop understood how much the rich can admire abstemiousness.

He supposed it was an affectation, but he could not bring himself to read his own newspaper on the train. Thus it was not until George Bergner came back from the smoking car and, as was their custom, sat with him the last fifteen minutes of the journey, that he learned of Martha’s and Jonathan Hogan’s picture on the front page.

The first sight of it turned his stomach: Hogan gaunt and withered, Martha as undisguisedly pregnant as a she-goat in the same condition, and as belligerent-looking, the police holding back what appeared to be a baiting mob. (It was not: merely the curious bystanders trying to get a better view; Hogan’s baiters were within the Stadium. But all the symbolism was there.)

“Our man, Jerry Adams, will get the Pulitzer Prize for that picture,” George said, “I’ll lay you odds on it.”

Winthrop found himself unable to speak. He read the caption:
EXIT OF A HERO.

“We had to use it. You can see that, Alex,” George said. “It’s a shame—I mean their being who they are—to you and me. But in the end, it’s going to do old Hogan more good than harm.”

“I don’t see how,” Winthrop said. “And I don’t see why I wasn’t consulted on its use. You manage to consult me on damn near everything else.”

“I think we’d better wait till we get to the office,” George said.

“Yes—since you waited this long.”

Winthrop meanwhile read the story: its ending everyone could have expected except Hogan, by the signs. It made Winthrop grateful that he was not himself a man given to causes, to religion. It caused him for the first time in many months to think of Walter Fitzgerald. Walter’s daughter and Red Jonathan. The dead had little protest. But he doubted Walter would have had more influence, alive. Martha would cleave her own way. Her loyalties might not be sensible, but they were steadfast. He was in a position to know. She had made one gesture toward him for Sylvia’s sake, but after that the drift had been away.

The
Star
switchboard reported having to put on an extra girl to handle the calls coming in about the Stadium story—and the picture, roughly a hundred to one congratulatory.

“I’ll bet the
Workers’ Guardian
flays our hides,” George said, and rubbed his hands together. “That’s why we had to do it, Alex.”

Winthrop drew a line the width of his finger tip through the dust on his desk. “Have you been answering the phone, too, Miss Kelly?” he said to his secretary.

“Yes, sir.” She ignored the sarcasm and handed him a fistful of messages.

Winthrop said, “Now, George, tell me why we had to do it.”

“In the first place, Alex, because we’re a newspaper. You made fun of me once for thinking myself a newspaper man. I’m going to make you eat those words. But it’s all a matter of survival for the
Star.
You know as well as I do, whenever the big boys want to grind us out they’ll run up the red flag over us. This sort of thing is the best answer we’ve got: ‘You can’t do business with Stalin: ask Jonathan Hogan.’ You’ll find that on the editorial page.”

“I suppose I wrote it,” Winthrop said dryly.

“And that was what I meant when I said it would do Hogan more good than harm. They won’t be able to tag him a Communist either after this.”

Winthrop flicked through his messages.

“Can’t you guess the reason I didn’t consult you?” George said. “You can’t very well be expected to be on top of everything, can you?”

Winthrop looked at him. It was so neat, he could not help but wonder how much personal satisfaction George had got out of this newspaper coup. That he was satisfied with himself was obvious. Was it because he had brought it off leaving Winthrop himself clean, or did the satisfaction go back to his hostility toward Marcus Hogan? The old gentleman, Dr. Bergner, had left nothing in money to Marcus. Most of the estate outside the house in Lakewood—which George was now hard put to keep up himself—had been put in trust for George’s two children. In a way it had been more of a slap at George than to have been disinherited. Winthrop had heard Dr. Albert talk at one time and another about his theory of the one good seed in every family line. Too obviously he had skipped George looking for it in his own.

Winthrop said, “Ignorance comes a little too natural to me, George, for me to enjoy pleading it. I’ll take the responsibility. After all, I’m responsible for you, ain’t I?”

“You could fire me,” George said.

“And lose a good newspaper man?” Winthrop had meant it in sarcasm, but a sudden pink suffused George’s bald pate and Winthrop conceded that he had no grounds for sarcasm. George was doing a fine job for him. If he were to personally abandon the paper tomorrow, it would go on under George’s management quite as though Winthrop himself were there. He said, “Give my congratulations to the photographer. Tell him that picture’s the real thing.”

But throughout the day, thinking now and then of the paper’s sound launching, and the steady pull it must now be on someone’s part to increase its circulation and keep up its advertising, he was aware of the stir of restlessness again within himself. In the afternoon he had occasion to write his cabinet friend in Washington. Toward the end of the letter he wrote: “Who knows? A year or two and I may be looking for another enterprise.”

That morning Martha received a call from Sylvia, and later in the day, a visit. By then she had got used to the fact that her picture had been in the morning news. The embarrassed sting of it was gone; indeed the picture was no longer in the house, Jonathan having taken the paper to clip for his scrapbook, so he said. He had no scrapbook and supposed now he knew the wisdom of not having kept one. He and Martha both understood: Without ceremony he dropped it in the first public trash container.

When Sylvia came the two women met with an awkwardness merely compounded by the incident; they had not seen each other since Sylvia’s marriage. Martha knew it would have been proper that she invite the Winthrops to dinner soon thereafter, but she had let it go too long and Marcus understood. They had sent a telegram of congratulations on the day of the wedding and there it had had to stand. She was too honest to do more and she had suffered as those who oblige the forms without qualm cannot suffer. She did not make friends easily and despite some twenty years’ difference in their ages, she and Sylvia had become very close. They shared many tastes if few confidences. As Sylvia had once said of Martha to her brother, Tony: “You’re always afraid she’ll see the truth in something too soon.” It had been a futile wish, but from the night she met Martha, she would have liked to see Tony marry her.

When they were sitting opposite one another that afternoon, a hard rain threshing against the terrace doors, Sylvia said, “I haven’t changed very much—have you?”

“Not as much as I’d have liked to,” Martha said.

They both laughed to deprecate the moment’s portent.

“What’s happening these days with our B’s for B?” Sylvia referred to Bundles for Britain.

“They’re piling up again. Marcus calls the basement ‘Moth Haven.’ I dare say when school starts I shall have some help.”