Evening of the Good Samaritan (52 page)

Winthrop was quick to agree, and subsequently lavish in paying credit to George when he included him in talks with the editorial staff. Names were suggested. Winthrop said: “Since this is your baby, George, why don’t you find us someone?”

“Give me a day or two. There ought to be someone left over from the thirties.”

George wondered afterwards, Winthrop shaking hands with him as he left the office, if he had not by that intuitive stroke saved his own job with the
Star.
If he had lost it, he could not have felt Winthrop’s treatment of him much shabbier. He presumed Sylvia had got to him.

In the old days he had had the advantage of riding home on the train with Winthrop, a contact which daily reassured him of the mutuality of their enterprise. There was little solace in his own company on these daily journeys, small pleasure in choosing between the contemplation of his own belly or looking out the window at the uniformed construction known as “middle-income housing” strung all the way up the North Shore. He was cursed with both the love and fear of individualism: he knew it and blamed his father. But no more than he blamed himself. He had somehow got mixed up with liberalism in the thirties: he had thought he was hitching his wagon to a star; instead he seemed to have got caught in a chain gang. Mental depression settled on him very easily. He had a job dependent upon another man’s whims, a daughter who had not been able to get out of his house soon enough, a son who wouldn’t shave his face and a wife who hadn’t the guts to encourage a lover.

The latter thought occurred to him when he arrived home—he still walked the near mile from the station—and saw Nathan Reiss’ car in the driveway. There had been a time when he thought something was going to happen between them—Louise and Reiss—when the refugee had first arrived on the scene. He had been constantly about the house, flattering and fluttering her, the giddy woman. But Reiss was a man who could always get what he wanted without committing himself, while George, by his own calculation, never got what he wanted and always committed himself. He was the beggar who spat behind the back of his benefactor, loathing himself even while he did it.

He unlocked the front door. Before he had put down his dispatch case Louise called out, “George? We’re in the conservatory. Guess who’s here, honey.”

He looked in the hall-stand mirror and tried to flatten his circle of hair. When it curled up with perspiration it looked like a crepe-paper skirt on a kewpie doll. Once he had been vain about what he considered his good looks.

“Is there a doctor in the house?” he said in answer to Louise as he went in. “How are you, Nathan?”

The two men shook hands.

“I have taken the liberty of mixing martinis—five to one, Louise says. It is barbarous. But you will have one?”

Bergner nodded and kissed Louise lightly on her moist forehead. She smelt of honeysuckle. Always something delicate, fresh at the first whiff, then suddenly too sweet. He took the glass from Nathan’s hand.

Reiss said, “Well, to what shall we drink? To the summer? To one another?”

“Let us drink,” George said, “to be drunk.”

“Oh, dear,” Louise said, “I haven’t been intoxicated since the night Eleanor left to go to Paris.”

“So the Big Man is taking over, eh?” Reiss said.

George glanced at him and said nothing. With Sylvia to inform him, Reiss knew more than he did about what was going on at the
Star.

“Everything will be all right. It will have to be. We shall find him a new toy, George.”

“The Children’s Rehabilitation Plan,” George said sardonically.

Reiss shrugged. “If that will make him happy, I will give it up to him gladly.”

“He already is happy, Nathan. Ecstatically happy.”

“So.”

George sat down heavily in a white leather chair. Louise had finally done something modern with the conservatory. The leather, however, reminded him of white satin. He kept thinking of a casket-maker’s showroom. “We’re off on a great crusade. The
Star
is going liberal again.”

“But it has always been a liberal newspaper,” Louise said.

George looked at her over the rim of his glass. “Perhaps you could convince Alex of that, my dear.”

“Maybe I could if I ever had a chance,” she said, reacting to his sarcasm.

Reiss said: “As a matter of fact you are all going to be invited to Fox Lake. I have spoken to Sylvia.”

“And she’s going?” George said. He laughed. “She must be damned sure she’s running the show these days.”

“What do you think will happen?” Reiss said, “I mean with the newspaper and all?”

“I think he’ll run the circulation to hell and sell the newspaper.”

Reiss pursed his lips. “It is a great shame,” he said then, “that one man can do that to another man’s work. It is political, this crusade?”

“I’ve never known one that wasn’t—at bottom,” George said.

“So. Is there nothing we can do to persuade him?”

“What would you suggest?”

Reiss shrugged. “I am not political as you know. But if as you say, Sylvia is behind him in this matter, perhaps we should ask how it will affect the Children’s Rehabilitation Plan. I have been told she is not exactly invulnerable … politically, I mean.”

When Reiss groped for his words, George grinned. “Kosher,” he said. “She’s not quite kosher. Isn’t that what you mean?”

“I am not speaking from my own knowledge,” Reiss said without humor. “I am merely repeating something I have heard.”

“It was never much of a secret,” George said. “I don’t think anybody took it seriously—except Sylvia.”

“I am glad to hear you say that,” Reiss said. “I was afraid it might be serious when the government investigators came to see me. I have the European idea of investigators, you see.”

“When did they come to see you, Nathan?”

“A couple of weeks ago perhaps.”

“Did you tell Sylvia?”

“The other day I did mention it. She was not surprised. But one says that anyway, doesn’t one?”

George emptied his glass. “Well, now we’ll all be investigated. Have you got anything to hide, Nathan?”

“What man does not have something to hide? All the same, a refugee does not like to be investigated.”

“Don’t worry, Nathan. As long as you weren’t a Communist, nobody’s going to bother with you.”

George got up and took the mixer from beside Reiss and started to make another batch of martinis. He was trying to figure out precisely what Reiss’ concern was. That it was his own hide he was out to protect, George would not doubt for a moment. “There’s something we’ve both got to face up to in this, Nathan: people with as much money as the Winthrops don’t scare as easily as the rest of us poor slobs. The fact that Sylvia is under investigation—and knows it—doesn’t seem to have made any difference at all as far as the newspaper’s concerned. I got my briefing on that today: Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. As for the Children’s Plan, do you know what can happen? If she thought her name was going to jeopardize it, she would pull out.”

Reiss lifted his head and smiled. George knew him well enough to understand the meaning of the smile: when Reiss was hurt he smiled. It was his immediate camouflage. He always hid himself behind that magnificent barricade of teeth. George began to enjoy himself. He elaborated: “She would not want to, of course, but that’s the kind of woman she is: sublimated mother love. She would probably turn the whole thing over to the Fields Foundation.”

George counted five jiggers of gin into the pitcher.

“Do you think that would seriously affect my position with the Children’s Plan?” Reiss asked.

George said: “How do you think you stand with say, Hurd Abington?”

“He was always very pleasant to me,” Reiss said with a shrug.

It seemed incredible to George that Reiss would not have been sensitive to the man’s rabid anti-Semitism. Reiss was still a conundrum to him: he had what was needed of course to drive to the top and stay there, a refusal to know, much less to care, what some people thought of him.

“There’s something you and I have got to remember, Nathan. We’re both hired help. Whether we like it or not, that’s what we are, hired help.” He decided to make a double batch of martinis.

Louise brought her empty glass.

“So,” Reiss said, smiling, “we are all in the same boat as they say. Do you like sailing, George?”

It was a few seconds before George realized that he had meant the question literally. “I love it,” he said self-mockingly, “as long as it isn’t my boat.”

“Good. Martha will make the arrangements with Louise and Sylvia.”

Louise put her hand through her husband’s arm. She was always affectionate after the first drink. After the third, he knew how she really felt. “Shall we go?”

“Don’t you want to?”

“Very much. I’ve been feeling so out of things till now.”

“Then accept with pleasure, my dear. Accept with pleasure.” And transferring the bottle from one hand to the other, George folded Louise’s hand within his, his index finger still doubled from where he had left off counting the jiggers. It became an obscene gesture he had learned in college and had not to his recollection used since. He was much surprised to see his wife blush.

T
AD SAT ON THE
pier and dangled his feet in the water. Sometimes, with the motion of the lake, the long grass swayed and touched his outstretched toes, and sometimes he could catch a spike of it between his big toe and the one next to it. This was but a passing distraction and he began presently to weep again the tears of the righteous. Righteousness does not last very long with a small boy, however, and he had to stare hard at the receding sailboat with the three men aboard and imagine himself upon it—as it was his right to be—in order to prime the source of his tears. He had the most distinct recollection of his mother’s saying that he, Tad, and Nathan sailed the
Lorna Doone
beautifully, and his Uncle Alexander had expected him to be aboard. But at the last moment he had been bumped off, and he knew it was because Mr. Bergner was too fat.

He had behaved badly, he knew, and he did not expect his mother to speak to him until lunch time or until he could go to her and tell her he had apologized to Nathan. He was always having to apologize to Nathan. Not actually. His apologies bored both Nathan and him. All he had to do was tell his mother he had apologized. He discovered he could even get away with the subterfuge if Nathan were present. Afterwards, when they were alone, Nathan would say, “So. You apologized, did you? Where was I at the time?” “Right there,” Tad would say, or, “You must’ve been there.” “And what did I say?” Nathan would tease. “You said I was a good boy.” “And are you?” Tad would sometimes shrug or sometimes say in a speculative manner, “No, I guess I’m not.” And Nathan would laugh and shake his finger and say, “That is one more thing we must not tell your mother. She thinks you are a very good boy.” It was a funny game to play, mixing up good with bad, right with wrong. He did not really like Nathan, but that was part of the game, too, pretending that he did. Except on occasions like this morning when Nathan had bumped him off the boat, and he said, “I hate you.” Nathan had patted him on the head and said, “How can you say that, mein Tad, when I love you?” “That’s a lie!” Tad said, and everyone had been shocked. Thus had he learned what he thought a very important thing about adults: you could say anything was the truth to them, but you couldn’t say a lie was a lie.

He did not expect his mother to speak to him, but he had expected his Aunt Sylvia to come out and say, “Oh, there you are!” and suggest that he and she go horseback riding.

The people next door had not come out this weekend, and the caretaker’s boy and another youngster from the village were fishing from their pier. They wouldn’t catch anything but bullheads, but bullheads were most delicious, skinned and fried outdoors. If he went over and fished with them, or even just watched them, they would invite him to the fishfry, especially if he had fifteen cents for a bag of potato chips. He stood up and started to take the leather strap of the field glasses from around his neck. Nathan had put the glasses in his hands by way of consolation. “You can watch what I do wrong and tell me.” To the others he had said, “Tad is a very fine sailor.” Tad had felt like throwing the glasses into the lake, and he might have done it had not his Uncle Alexander been there.

He was starting up the steps when he heard the commotion on the water. He turned and saw almost at once that the sailboat was in trouble. The boom looked to be swinging loose. Men in the two fishing boats in its vicinity were trying to start their motors, and one got going, speeding toward the
Lorn
a Doone. The boys on the next pier were shouting and pointing. Tad lifted the field glasses and had just got them focused when he heard his mother’s voice and Aunt Sylvia’s, and then their running footsteps. On the boat he could see Nathan hanging onto one of the other men who seemed to be falling over the side, tilting the
Lorna Doone
terribly. Then he saw Mr. Bergner bracing himself near the stern, not doing anything but sitting, hanging onto either side.

Tad did not hear the questions, exactly, but he said, “It’s Uncle Alexander. He’s sick. They’re going to tip if they don’t watch out.” The mainsail described a semi-circle, the boom loose. “Why doesn’t Mr. Bergner help?”

His mother took the glasses from him at that moment, but with his naked eyes he saw the
Lorna Doone
go over, the men disappear for the moment.

“It’s all right,” Martha kept saying. “Nathan has him … and the other boats are coming.”

“Where’s George? Is he in the water?” That was Mrs. Bergner asking a foolish question, Tad thought, since there was no place else he could be after the boat tipped over.

“I see his head,” Martha said, then she began to pray: “Sacred Heart of Jesus …” Annie prayed, but he had not heard his mother pray since he was very small.

Tad became aware of Sylvia’s hands upon his shoulders; they were as hard as the claws of a hammer when he tried to free himself of their grasp. “I wish I was there,” Tad said. “I could have saved them.”