Evening of the Good Samaritan (33 page)

Marcus got up from the round dining room table and brushed an ash from the lace cloth. He should have blown it off not to have left a smudge. “No, I don’t blame him … for anything. Not even for being so damned footloose and fancy free.”

“It is a pose, Marc. All a pose. That man has known trouble and fear. And let me tell you, when you have known real fear you are never again fancy free, as you call it. Yes, I tell you it is a pose. You can believe me: Nathan Reiss will make you a fine partner.”

At the door they shook hands. “You must give all the Hogans our love, Marc. A son … just like that.” He stood grinning and shaking his head while Marcus went down the steps.

Ah, but it was a glorious month for all the Hogans, that November. Jonathan began to act like a grandfather. His other son, Trent, in the Far East, had two children, but Jonathan had never seen them. When Martha came home with the child, he would often sit with her and tell her stories of Trent’s and Marcus’s boyhood, and it was foreseeable that Tad would grow up asking to hear the stories again and again. Martha could remember the stories she loved of Ireland, her mother’s and Annie’s, both. He would not be at a loss for entertainment, this child.

The date for his baptism was set for the first Sunday afternoon in December. Jonathan said, “If he’s to have a name it might as well be fastened on him proper.” And he went to church with them. “I don’t mind the atmosphere of churches. I think it would be very nice if atheists like myself had churches of our own in which to sit and think.”

Martha always demurred when he called himself an atheist.

“But I am, all the same. We’ll leave that in-between business to Marcus. He’s very good at it.”

When they came out of the church that Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941, the word was abroad upon the street of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

I
T WAS ONE OF
the things he was simply going to have to get used to in the man, Marcus decided of Reiss’ self-assurance. It bordered on arrogance, but he had observed something of the same haughtiness in other Austrians who were also charming, the mixture of nails and velvet. Reiss, at the point where Marcus suggested sharing his downtown office with him, responded as though it were he who was doing Marcus a favor. And perhaps he was, Marcus thought. What amused him of himself was that he had given a great deal of thought on how to approach the matter without seeming to condescend to Reiss. Perhaps in the days Mueller had known him in Paris, when he was young and still in awe of medicine he had been sensitive, but the role of a rich woman’s lover had seared the tender heart; the truly remarkable thing was that he was a good surgeon. To his everlasting credit, one would have to say that for him. The temptation to dilettantism must have been very great. But the scalpel in hand, Reiss was coldly, brilliantly professional.

All in all, Marcus enjoyed the association. If Reiss was supremely confident in himself, the patients were also confident in him, particularly the women, and this was no small part of preparation and recovery.

Because Marcus knew that he would be called up for military service when he was needed and that he did not intend to seek an exemption, he was, he supposed, just biding time. He watched the changes in the child, the first laugh, the first tooth, the first illness, the first step, and he watched Martha grow in motherhood. They were at once the happiest and the saddest of days, with parting imminent and the not quite repressible aura of the heroic about him.

Everywhere was change. By the end of 1942 Lakewood, so far as owners of the great estates were concerned, had been virtually abandoned. Gasoline was rationed, taxes compounded. The army had leased a number of houses, breaking them up into multiple dwellings. The Winthrops closed their house and moved into town. Tony sold the Fields estate at auction and joined the Air Force. The Bergners stayed on: their house was not so large and was within walking distance of the railway station. George could not find it in his heart, he said, to separate Louise from the house she adored. And then, he found it convenient to stay in town alone some nights. Louise, blithe soul, became one of those people tradesmen were constantly asking, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

As it turned out, however, the first—except for Tony—among them to make a move directly the result of the war was Alexander Winthrop. Because of his administrative experience and medical background, he was one of the people Washington called upon in anticipation of the occupation period. He was to be given a direct army commission and training preparatory to service overseas. As the time approached for him to leave, Martha knew the time had also come to make another attempt at reconciliation. She proposed to give a small party for the Winthrops before Alexander left.

“The vegetable plate special?” Marcus said.

“Grandpa Jon and I are very proud of that garden,” Martha said. “I do much better in vegetables than flowers.”

Martha consulted Sylvia on whom to invite.

“Just ourselves,” Sylvia said, and then as Martha seemed hesitant she quickly added, “and Nathan and Jonathan. How’s that?”

“That will be fine,” Martha said, and she was on the verge of adding that just themselves would be all right, too. But she didn’t say it, feeling that Nathan’s amiable—or even his malicious—small talk might well be what the evening needed. It seemed at the time like a very small decision.

Everyone dressed for dinner. Martha had got a fine plump bird, shopping for it herself as she preferred to do, having now the dubious assistance of Tad. (He walked early, but he steadfastly refused to talk. He was, his father said, a listener, thank God. Jonathan said he was a philosopher, that he would say something when he thought of something worth saying. Martha allowed that it would be the day on which he missed his first meal.) Cocktails and dinner went off well. Jonathan even laughed at an experience of Nathan’s. It concerned a man who married late and for company, not for progeny. His wife, nonetheless, conceived. But it was diagnosed as a tumor by her own physician. Reiss examined her and agreed to break the good news to her husband. “This will surprise you, my friend—your wife’s tumor is a pregnancy.” “God in heaven, doctor! That’s what her father died of!”

Martha, meeting Winthrop as Sylvia’s husband, wondered how she had been so long so foolish. The intimate relationships of one being to another were to be felt only by the people involved: it was the basis of marriage, of courtship in all nature. She could not imagine herself lying down at the side of any man save Marcus. She tried, by way of further self-illumination to picture herself in so intimate a situation with Nathan—as he had once proposed. A shudder of revulsion ran through her. But removed to the distance he was across the room from her, he seemed particularly handsome. Her inability to accept Dr. Winthrop until now came, she realized, not out of any sense of righteousness—she had never in her life felt holier than anyone—but out of her inability to put herself in her mother’s position.

Dr. Winthrop was less restive than she remembered him. She could see now that he had always been an ambitious man who must have been greatly frustrated during his relationship with her mother. It was a curious experience to begin to see things from his point of view. Then she was hurtled back, hearing him talk about George Bergner, to the day at dinner when he had ridiculed her father and coaxed him into participating in his own humiliation. A little of the old ache returned. Martha found herself speculating on what moments Tad would find to suffer for her or Marcus. They might even be moments of which they themselves were oblivious. The need to suffer was bred deeply in man, more deeply, one might pray, than the need to inflict suffering. She thought almost constantly of the war. There were times she could not look at Marcus lest her eyes show tears. That he would soon go she knew. Every farewell seemed the beginning of their own.

“The thing I’ve discovered about George,” Winthrop was saying, “is that he thrives on a little praise. He needs to be depended on. Why, that’s the reason he married a simple, trusting soul like Louise. He’d kill himself married to a woman like Sylvia here.”

“I’d be the first to help him, dear,” Sylvia said.

Marcus laughed.

“I’m going to leave him in full charge of the paper while I’m gone. Wait and see if the responsibility doesn’t make a man of him.”

“It’s about time something did,” Marcus said impatiently.

“You’ll see. You don’t know what it’s like to have a father who’d rather do a stranger a good turn that he would you. I had one. He couldn’t get over having made a fortune and he was so damned sure I wasn’t worth leaving it to, he had me jumping through hoops for him till the day he died.”

He could not see, Martha thought, that that was what he expected people to do for him: he was always manipulating them—true, to their own benefit as in Marcus’s case, and Nathan’s. Power—he loved power. Once he had it, he was benevolent. But she was never going to find Alexander Winthrop admirable, much less lovable.

“I have been treated with many kindnesses all my life,” Marcus said. “By my father and by other men. There is not a man alive more blessed than I have been.” He cocked his head and grinned wryly at having come so close to sentimentality. “You’re right, Alex. It should make me very tolerant.”

Why Nathan chose that moment to speak, who could say? Perhaps he was self-confronting with his own benefactors. Perhaps he was embarrassed by so frank a confession on Marcus’s part. Or he might have been, as Jonathan supposed, striking a loud note in his own behalf at the most judicious moment. To everyone it seemed tactless of him.

“I went today and proposed myself for military service,” Reiss said. “You see, Sylvia, Alexander—I was going to try to steal the thunder from your farewell party. We are two men, Marcus and I, strong, good surgeons. It is too much—in one family, you might say—and Marcus has the wife and child.”

“Yes,” Marcus said, reaching for a cigaret, “they are mine, aren’t they?”

“Beg pardon?” Reiss said, his dark eyes full of sudden submissiveness in case he had said something wrong.

Jonathan said, “When do you leave, Doctor Reiss?”

Nathan shot out his lower lip. “Alas! When they have nobody else they will take me. I have a disability—I have a heart leakage.”

Jonathan laughed aloud. “Oh, Christ,” he said rudely, and got up and left the room.

“It is very remarkable—what that man finds amusing about me,” Reiss said.

Martha, understanding very well how Jonathan felt, said nonetheless: “It must have been a great shock to you to learn of it, Nathan.”

He did not lie, but no one pressed him for the explicit truth of when he had discovered the ailment. He said: “I did not tell it tonight because I wanted sympathy,” and shrugged his shoulders as though at a loss to understand the rudeness. He lapsed into a sort of self-pitying silence.

Someone in a gayer crowd or where the women were not Sylvia and herself, Martha thought—if Louise were there—he would now have his wounded feelings succored. He was truly so shallow. She could imagine his response to such coddling, his mock recovery meant only to ingratiate him with his cajoler.

“Jonathan is tired, Marcus,” Sylvia said. “The world is too much with him.”

“That’s it,” Marcus said.

“No, I think it’s the other way around,” Martha said. “He isn’t with it at all. And always before he was.”

“Patriotism embarrasses him,” Marcus said. “I dare say it is a primitive emotion.”

“Or the last refuge of scoundrels,” Sylvia said.

Reiss looked at her. “That is a most extraordinary remark.”

“It’s not original,” Sylvia said, an amused gleam in her eye.

Everyone knew Nathan Reiss had the makings of a great patriot.

When the Winthrops, the last to leave, were going toward midnight, Winthrop lingered to speak to Martha after Sylvia had gone outdoors. “I’ll remember tonight,” he said. “You have a way like your mother’s, kindness that isn’t charity.”

She allowed him to kiss her cheek.

A moment later with the sound of the door latch loudly clicking, she turned at the foot of the stairs where she had been about to go up and check on the baby, and Marcus paused on his way to put out the downstairs lights. Instead, they moved with utter urgency into one another’s arms.

M
ARCUS WAS A LONG
distance from Traders City when he learned of his son’s first words. He was sitting in the lounge of the Officers Club in Bizerte, North Africa, and laughed aloud, reading them: “I want a dog like that one.” He looked up self-consciously and would have shared the phenomenon of a two-year-old’s articulacy had there been anyone at hand likely to give him more than polite attention. The French-Tunisian bartender would have been likely to give him a lecture on Western sentimentalism as opposed to Arab realism. The four officers playing bridge were as unprepossessing prospects. The Englishman among them would say, “Fine show, old chap,” or some such Britishism. No one was as British as a British Army man. The three Americans, senior officers, looked like regular Army, and were likely to be far more at home in an officers’ club in Bizerte than in, say, the Elks’ Club in Beloit. Marcus returned to the letter.

“I should have preferred to tell you he asked, ‘Where’s papa?’” Martha wrote. “And where I am to find a dog like that one, heaven knows. I don’t think its own parents, having it to do over again, could manage …”

Marcus read the letter twice, finished his brandy, and went to a writing desk to answer it. If he did not write at once, he would find it difficult, perhaps to the point of impossibility.

In his first weeks overseas writing had been easier, but his letters, Martha wrote, were heavily censored. He knew the reason. He had written about the men and what they thought the war was all about: he could not have taken his own cause from a consensus of theirs, and he had come to the conclusion that no American made a good soldier until he had seen another American die. This was not the stuff on which morale on the home front was sustained. Nor was the telling of an incident which had made his own gorge rise: the G.I.s’ admiration for the soldierly arrogance of the defeated German Afrika Korps men.