Evening of the Good Samaritan (57 page)

“Both very good in small doses,” Sylvia said.

“I’ll take pigs’ feet, thank you, and small beer.”

“You’re a peasant.”

“A knave in peasant’s clothes … Syl …”

She interrupted him: “How long have you been playing Hamlet, Tad?”

He stuck the tip of his tongue between his teeth and she could see by his eyes that he was excited, pleased to have been discovered. She wished instantly she had not asked him.

“You see it, don’t you?” he said.

“I can see some adolescent nonsense brewing,” she said.

“A toy in blood,” Tad said, having got his Hamlet down well. For a moment he fixed his eyes upon her, weighing whether or not to confide his elaborate projection. Sylvia would have given a great deal to divert him. His confidences flattered her but they also dismayed her. Intuitively she knew the turns his mind must now be taking. Tad drew his chair up close to hers, jockeying it—and her—into position.

“Don’t you think it’s weird that Nathan was right there when my father tumbled down the elevator shaft? I know he smashed his hand. But that made him a real hero, didn’t it?”

“It happened, Tad. That’s all … I think you’re playing a very dangerous game with yourself.”

“Why—if it’s with myself?” he said sharply, and in a way that made her feel she must let him go on aloud, involving her, involving someone at least to answer him in ways not necessarily to his liking.

“I was there at the time,” she said. “Your father was upset, disturbed when he left the office.”

“Then why didn’t you go after him?”

It was a question she had asked herself too many times. “I couldn’t know what was going to happen, Tad.”

“But Nathan could!”

“He could not and did not!”

“All right, Syl,” he said placatingly. “But what happened to him: it set him up with mother, didn’t it? Tell me, what can I do? That’s what he always says to her—and then he goes on and does whatever he wants and she doesn’t even know it.”

“She knows it,” Sylvia said quietly. “I know it when he does it to me.” In that Tad was quite right: Reiss always consulted and then proceeding as he had wanted to in the first place, he was likely to say: But Sylvia, I thought we decided …

“Then why don’t you stop him?”

“Because it’s always too late. By then he has made whatever it was work.”

The boy threw up his hands wildly. “You’re all crazy!”

And for a soon vanished second Sylvia saw it that way too. Nathan Reiss took everyone he could use exactly where he wanted to go himself. The Plan had grown to something far beyond what Sylvia had anticipated: but was that bad? She would not say so. There was a center in New York now, a Long Island estate converted into such a convalescent home as she had made of the farm. Another was contemplated in San Francisco and among its benefactors was Alberto Gemini. Ironic, but she could not say it was bad.

“Everybody’s crazy but thee and me,” she said, “and there are times I think even thee’s a bit teched.”

But Tad said: “Remember when Grandpa Jon and I went to Scotland? I found a postcard that was written in Gaelic. I mailed it to Nathan from Holland and when I got home I asked him if he’d got the Hebrew card I’d sent him. He said: that was very thoughtful of you, Tad.”

“So?”

“He’s a phony, Syl,” the boy said passionately, begging for confirmation. “Now he claims he’s a Zionist and he doesn’t know as much about it as I do. And he doesn’t care as much!”

Sylvia took the boy’s hands in hers. “Tad, you must understand there’s a good deal of pretense in all of us. I know, Nathan’s got more than most of us. But we like people to see us as we’d like to be, not as we are. I don’t doubt for a moment that Nathan’s causes aren’t always idealistic. It’s done to impress somebody—to enhance his own prestige. I don’t know. But this is not unusual practice in church or charity. It is fairly common practice.”

“But why do they take people like him? Don’t they know what he’s doing it for?”

“They may. But it’s not a point easily established. Sometimes the line between sincerity and—illusion is very thin. I can only say that a great deal of good is often done in this world out of dubious motive.”

Tad shook his head. “I don’t dig it. I don’t.”

“You will—in time, but when you do, I hope you won’t like it any more than you do now,” Sylvia said.

The Hamlet fantasy having waxed then waned as other interests urged themselves upon him. He and Sylvia went twice a week to the music festival and Ravens’ Park, a few miles south of Lakewood. He played a rather noisy piano himself and loved to break up classical themes into a jazz beat. He invited two friends out for a week who had finished at the Barker School with him the previous spring, and they gave Sylvia a recital one night on the veranda, the three of them on piano, drums and milk cans that Sylvia swore woke every chicken in the coop a quarter of a mile away.

The day it was time for him to go home, Sylvia took him to Lakewood where he waited to drive back to Traders City with Nathan. She put the accelerator to the floor, returning to the farm, and drove directly to the Rehabilitation house where the children came flocking as soon as they saw her.

Nathan on the way into town talked about how wonderful it was going to be for Tad in the University. “I wanted you to have a car, but your mother does not think you should, and she is probably right. She would worry. You will be able to rent one sometimes. You must take your driver’s license.”

“I’m not worried about it,” Tad said. The fact was, and he wasn’t sure Nathan did not know it, too, that cars were not permitted on the campus of Rodgers University.

“What athletics will you take?”

“None if I can get out of it,” Tad said.

“None?”

“I’ll ride if I can, and swim. Maybe some tennis. No football, Nathan.”

“It is a shame. Competitive athletics are very good. When you were a child, you were very competitive. You kept me on my toes, let me tell you. I do not know. Sometimes I think the Barker School is not as well balanced as it could be.”

Tad was tempted to suggest that military school for him would have been more to Nathan’s tastes, but the fact was that baiting Nathan gave him no pleasure. Sometimes Nathan did not even know it, and sometimes when he found out, he would complain to Martha of it. Tad wondered suddenly: if I called him “father” would it please him? He hadn’t been an easy kid to bring up, he thought now of himself. Sylvia was right when she had said to him that he’d never given Nathan a chance. There were two sides, etc. etc. He fell to thinking then of what it would be like to try for the rest of his time at home to be really decent to Nathan.

Nathan said, coming out of a reverie of his own: “I am thinking of getting a sports car—a Jaguar, perhaps. What do you think your mother will say?”

“Just get her a fish net for her hair at the same time,” Tad said.

Nathan smiled. “She will say it is undignified. Do you think it is?”

“No. I think it’s a fine idea,” Tad said, making a beginning on agreeability.

“May I quote you?” Nathan said half-jokingly.

“Sure. She’ll just say we’re both square.”

“I have never heard your mother use the word. What kind of an automobile would you prefer?”

“A Dusenberg,” Tad said.

Nathan glanced at him. “You’re pulling my leg.”

“No. I’m serious. I like old cars.”

“But did you know I drove one in a race once?”

Tad seemed to have heard the story before, but he could not remember the circumstances. “Did you win?”

“Yes. It was very exciting. … Tad, in New York when you are East, sometimes perhaps the Baroness Schwarzbach will invite you to visit her. Will you go?”

Tad thought about it. He did not care very much for the Baroness. She had a way, talking to a person, of trying to look down inside him. He was intrigued by her foreignness and the fact that she was rich in a way that no one else he knew was—except Sylvia. Sylvia didn’t show it. The Baroness did. Tad had actually visited but three times altogether, the last time in the spring when he had gone out with Nathan and his mother to be interviewed at Rodgers. That was the time she had really got to him, sitting on the side of his bed and saying: “Tell me, mein Tad, what does it feel like to become a man?”

Nathan, he assumed, visited her whenever he went East.

“I don’t expect I’ll have much time for visiting,” he said finally in answer to Nathan’s question.

“But if you do, I want to ask a favor of you: do not confide in her all the things you do not like about me. She has known me for a long time. But in a way it is with her like your mother is about you. You can be a very difficult boy sometimes, but in the end your mother will always defend you. Do you understand what I mean?”

“I understand,” Tad said.

T
AD WAS OBSERVED EARLY
by his teachers at Rodgers University to have the makings of a scholar. He contrived to keep his bookish predilection from his fellow students and largely succeeded. They knew him to have a sharp tongue, a good allowance, and an indifference to authority just short of insubordination—assets all in a community of college freshmen. He roomed alone, ate in the less fashionable places, but occasionally stood a feast that won him favor with both gourmet and glutton, a distinction not always possible among lower classmen.

The campus of Rodgers was vast and uncrowded, the school heavily endowed especially in land. The agricultural college and experimental farm adjoined the main grounds adding miles of comparatively secluded walks. Tad was reminded, exploring the well-hedged pastures and fields, of England. He could have gone quite a long time without striking up particular friendships within his college: he supposed until winter. He did not repulse overtures of other boys, but he was slow to make them himself and tended to be suspicious of anyone who sought his company. He was slower still to accept the friendliness of one or another of his teachers. There he could see the cliques forming. He came very soon to understand that a teacher was measured among other teachers by the quality of the boys he attracted. Too much camaraderie among faculty and students was not approved; too little was disapproved.

Tad, from his first day in modern European history, was the follower of one man at Rodgers although it was some time before the man himself became aware of it.

Lawrence Covington was starting his first year as a full professor and was for the first time in his life earning a salary beyond his needs. He was not in as much awe of his new position when among the students as when in the faculty lounge. Certain men spoke to him there by name for the first time and not once during registration week did he hear himself referred to as “Young Covington.” But in the classroom the change was barely perceptible. Nor did he change much his opening lecture to the predominantly freshman class.

And this was the lecture that won him Tad’s devotion.

He started off, after a slow silent appraisal of the new faces, his gray eyes humorous as he took off his glasses: “Gentlemen, history is about people. First of all, it is about people. Remember that. We are not going to be able to understand what happened at, shall we say, the Congress of Vienna, unless we get to know
M. T
alleyrand, his aches and pains, his vanities, even a little about his love life: just a little. After all, we shan’t be making a movie. We can afford perspective. So then, we shall study men, statesmen and generals, possibly their mistresses, occasionally their wives. And if I seem to suggest to you that women had more influence on history before they had the vote than since having it, believe me, it is not because I am a bachelor—which I am. It is rather because I believe suppression to be the beginning of all history. When women were politically suppressed, they moved men. In some cases, mountains might have been easier. But when man moves, history begins …”

Covington was the only person about whom Tad wrote home in any detail. There were a lot of “bloaters” in the class, he wrote, and explained that bloaters were fellows who blew hard when they didn’t know the answer. In that way some of the teachers were persuaded to blame themselves for not having been clear. Not “Cov”. “You know, I’ve never heard it explained that way before,” he would say. “I wish you’d write it up for me—say three or four hundred words.”

Covington’s students gathered occasionally in his rooms and all the talk did not run to history. He was good for advice on the girls at the “female academy” in the next town, on wines, vintage cars, omelets and poetic meter. On special occasions he would loan records. But he was one of those rare and fortunate people who did not have to call a halt to things, even with freshmen. “He never laughs out loud,” Tad wrote again, “but you can see in his eyes that he got the joke, maybe a little ahead of everybody else. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t laugh aloud.”

But for all that Tad was writing home about him, it was not until a football Saturday in early November that Covington first saw him as other than a reserved youngster with a good head on him. He was sitting in front of Hogan and his family at the Homecoming game. Hogan was one of 480 freshmen, and conspicuous in the grandstand only in that he looked even younger than a college freshman, and Covington had begun to feel that there was nothing younger. What came to recommend him to the teacher’s attention was his apparent indifference to the game of football.

After the welcoming roar when the team came on the field everyone stood in silence for the band’s playing of the Rodgers alma mater. Then Covington heard the man he presumed to be Hogan’s father say: “No college spirit, Tad? Martha, I do not understand your son.”

The boy said: “Team, team, team! How’s that?”

His mother gave him a weary reproach.

“Such beautiful men,” the older man said. “Graceful. Take the glasses, Martha. Look at number seventy-two. Look how he runs! A ballet dancer.”

“He’d rather be dead,” Tad said.

Covington cast him an amused glance over his shoulder. The boy looked at him blandly, unconspiratorially. His was a lone game.

“I do not yet understand American prejudices.”