Evening of the Good Samaritan (59 page)

“God Needs Men,” Covington said, referring to the title of a Delannoy film, and prepared to speak of its theme if the Baroness were not familiar with it.

But she said, “Quite so. I know that coast of France very well. But such a story might have been set in certain of the Italian islands also—the mystique of the people. I understand you are to be in Holland this summer, Mr. Covington?”

“This summer and probably the next. God knows how many.”

“You are a scholar?”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m looking for something—if that makes me a scholar.”

“You are too modest,” she said, her eyes flashing with mockery of his humbleness. “If you find what you are looking for they will call you a scholar. Otherwise you must admit it of yourself. You will come to tea one of the Saturday afternoons Tad says you spend in New York, and tell me about your project. Perhaps I have friends to whom I can give you letters.”

Covington recognized this as both a command performance and present dismissal. “You are very kind,” he murmured and showed himself ready to leave her if she wished it.

She nodded and then detained him. “Is Tad interested in your … undertaking?”

“I shouldn’t think especially,” Covington said, “except that by coincidence, I attended some lectures of his grandfather which first got me onto it.”

“I am entirely pleased,” the Baroness said, a remark Covington was a long time understanding.

There was no one present at the party of Tad’s own generation, a fact with which he was thoroughly satisfied. At dinner the Baroness had kept him next to her which he understood to be less a compliment to him than a courtesy to her other guests. She rarely spoke to him to be sure, attending more to the gentleman on her right. What fascinated him was that she had seemed to know what was going on up and down the table—even when the general conversation was suspended between courses and people fell to quiet talk among themselves. Once she had remarked half to him, half to herself: “Nathan will not carry that point very long, we shall see.”

Tad, convinced that Nathan was the least informed person at the table, had answered: “Nathan never does carry any point very long.” And having said it, he had blushed and added: “I beg your pardon, Madame Schwarzbach,” for she had looked at him with mock severity. But just after that she reached across and pressed his hand.

Later she asked him a number of questions about Covington, and not once all evening had he had to talk with her about Nathan Reiss. He had eavesdropped on a number of conversations—openly; no one seemed to care—and as he told Covington when they went upstairs together toward midnight, what shocked him was the frankness with which people talked about, for example, a man very high in the United States government.

“What if such things got into the newspapers?”

“They won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Well, there are two levels of conspiracy, I suppose—and by no great stretch we could use the word decency instead of conspiracy—the people who know won’t tell—and the people who don’t know wouldn’t believe it if it were told.”

They sat for a long time and talked in Tad’s room, Covington now curious about what Tad knew of Madame Schwarzbach’s story. He was careful in his questions, for he suspected almost at once, calculating ages and relationships as a man of forty can and a boy of seventeen cannot, that far more than a patronal interest had existed at one time if it did not now exist between the Baroness and Nathan Reiss. He could see no other justification for her interest in so shallow a man. He was not himself, Covington supposed, her type: something that both amused and vaguely irritated him. But if his supposition about the Baroness and Reiss were true, it explained Martha Reiss’ absence. He did not like to think of Tad’s arriving at such an understanding.

A knock at the door interrupted them. The Baroness called: “I wish only to say good night.”

Tad said: “Please come in, Madame Schwarzbach.”

“I am sorry to interrupt,” she said, seeing Covington. “Please do not disturb yourselves.”

But he and Tad were already standing. Covington withdrew to the window while the Baroness crossed to the boy and taking his face in her hands kissed him on both cheeks. Tad was in his shirtsleeves, and Covington felt an uneasiness—squeamishness, no doubt—but he could not escape the feeling of sexuality about the woman. She seemed to be savoring of the boy. He had got himself into something, coming here, Covington thought. He was on the verge of becoming Tad’s keeper. But if in fact he were that, he realized he would not let the boy come into this house again.

She turned to him more suddenly than he had supposed she could, a plump, no longer supple woman, with the consequence that the color leaped to his face. She both saw it and wanted him to know she saw it.

The awkward moment passed. He thanked her for her graciousness in inviting him. She lingered to speak of certain people she knew in Holland—or had known before the war. “I have not been entirely sociable since then,” she said. “Context. So much is context, isn’t it?”

Without knocking at the door the Baroness had left open, John, the servant of many tasks stepped into the room. “I’ve brought up your chocolate, Madame Schwarzbach. It’s hot now, but it won’t be for long.”

Covington had been aware of the man until then only as he had been of the other servants in the house. He was under thirty, built like a weight-lifter, and he spoke American—New Yorkese. There was something insolent in his manner, something of letting down barriers. Covington refused to pursue his conjecture any further. But still the man stood.

“I’ll come directly,” the Baroness said, and then raising her voice: “Please check the locks before you go to bed.”

At that directive, he left, closing the door.

The Baroness gave her hand to Covington. “I rise late in the morning,” she said, “but cook will be in the kitchen by eight. You may have your breakfast sent up. You are a wise man, Mr. Covington. I am sure we understand one another.”

When she was gone, Tad asked: “What did she mean by that?”

Covington decided instantly on a deliberate lie: “She means I ought to know my own place and stay in it.”

“To hell with
her,”
Tad said.

Which was exactly the response the teacher wanted.

B
UT WHERE THERE IS
seeking there are many ways of learning.

Covington did not go to tea, nor did Tad again visit Madame Schwarzbach. Covington spent most of his summer in Holland and a part of it in London where a colleague of Jonathan’s at the University was preparing Hogan’s economic history of the Merchant Adventurers for publication.

Tad went on a walking tour of Kentucky and Tennessee. He filled three notebooks with observations, anecdotes and fragments of the hill country songs. At the end of summer he gave Sylvia and Martha a recital. Nathan, present for part of it, suggested that Tad repeat it for the visit of the trustees for the Children’s Plan to the farm that week-end.

The suggestion and the repeat performance were well taken by all concerned. Tad also performed for the children. Everybody, he thought, seemed to be getting along just splendidly with everybody.

Martha was not aware of a change in Tad’s attitude toward her: she was too well content in his apparent amity with Nathan. But it was now this contentment Tad was scrutinizing. Nothing, he thought, was so important to her as that the surface peace be kept: give her an umbrella and call her Lady Chamberlain. But now he did not talk even to Sylvia about such things. She was in Martha’s camp. And there was Covington when he got back to Rodgers.

Tad put off to the last minute the physical check-up Nathan insisted he have before returning to school. Nathan would be looking for tuberculosis or God knows what, he suspected, from his having spent two months on mountain hospitality. It was Miss Kohler who took his chest X ray, Nathan seeing a patient at the time.

While he was waiting Miss Kohler chatted knowingly about his summer and his return to New York. She was a thin-lipped woman, not a girl in Tad’s eyes though tolerably pretty. But she made up her face in a way he disliked: wearing her lipstick beyond the contour of her lips. It caused him to think of the Baroness who always made up highly, but never in contradiction to her own features.

“Rodgers is forty miles outside New York,” he corrected Miss Kohler’s impression of where he was going.

“I suppose it’s harder to get to New York from there than from Traders City.”

“Almost.”

“Dr. Reiss doesn’t think anything of going off to New York from here. But I suppose it all depends on what you’re going for.”

Tad was a few seconds catching a sort of insinuating sound to her voice, as though she had meaning beyond meaning in the words. She cast him a sidelong glance. That he caught.

“You mean the girls,” he said nastily, being at once curious and disdainful.

She slapped an envelope into the typewriter. “You know everything, don’t you?”

“I know what I know,” he said.

“That makes two of us,” she snapped.

Very few young men could be more feline than Tad when he chose. “Shall we swap stories?”

“Shame on you,” she said. “I’ll tell Dr. Reiss.”

“Tell him,” Tad said, impatient with her, with waiting, and with himself for having muffed the chance of hearing what she had in mind. Then he said: “I’ll tell him you’re jealous.”

“Of whom?” she said sarcastically, lifting her chin.

Tad was nonplussed. “His wife,” he said.

“Ha!”

“You bitch!” Tad said, and was impotent beyond the one word epithet in his sudden fury. He got away from her desk and went into the waiting room where he paced up and down until Nathan was ready for him. Gradually his temper abated: it was all so childish, their exchange, he thought, going over the words, like two children meeting and taking an instant dislike to each other and then tearing into one another.

But the burden of her “Ha!” lingered throughout the day with him and was still with him in the morning when it was almost time to go.

Martha watched him pack his own luggage. “I can’t help feeling that two dozen pairs of socks are an extravagance. I’m sure you’ll outgrow them before half of them wear out.”

“I won’t outgrow them, mother. My feet can’t possibly get any bigger.”

She wondered if he were as glad to be leaving the house as she had been going off to St. Cecilia’s. “I think Nathan’s allowance will be more than adequate.” The moment she said it she thought of her own father: whenever a difficult moment had occurred between them he had bridged it with a question about whether she needed money.

“He’s still trying to corrupt me,” Tad said. “I thought after this summer he’d give me up for a peasant.”

Martha went to the window. Across the way a Negro maid was taking in geraniums from the summer boxes, plucking off the dead leaves and dropping them below one by one.

“It was a bad joke, mother,” Tad called to her. “I’m sorry.”

Martha turned back. “I’ve forgotten what you said.”

He put his suitcase on the floor and knelt on it to get it closed. “You’re coming out in November, aren’t you? You won’t renege again?”

“I’ll go East with Nathan on one of his trips. And I shall write to you—once a week.”

“Don’t!” He let the suitcase fly open. “If you’ve got to measure out your letters, don’t bother writing at all.”

They looked at one another mutely across the room.

“I’m sorry again,” Tad said. “But I can just see you going into that paint room of yours and hiding—from him, from yourself, from me.”

Martha said: “I’ve always been solitary by nature. I’m grateful that you take after Marcus in that respect.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t have to force yourself to write him letters, did you?”

“Strangely, Tad, there was a time when he had to force himself to write to me. During the war. He was very troubled.”

“But you’re not,” Tad said, again sarcastically.

Martha went on as though he had not spoken. “He seemed to have lost me—and you. You were here then, too.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Tad said. “One of these days we won’t even know each other when I come home.”

“He hadn’t lost me. Nor I him. But separation can do that for a time. But when people love each other, Tad, nothing is lost—except time. And we don’t ever know how much of that there is.” She said it with the air of resignation Tad detested.

He went back to work on the suitcase and finished closing it.

“Mother, when you went away to Europe, to school, how did you remember Marcus? I mean did you remember the way he looked—something special about him you fastened onto, you know …”

“I know what you mean,” Martha said. “There’s one picture of him I have to this day whenever I suddenly think of him. It was the first time I was in his house—the day I met Jonathan. We were sitting across the table at dinner and suddenly our eyes met. Nothing in my life has been more vivid, more wonderful than that moment.” Her face had come alive with the conjuring again of the moment. “That’s what it’s like to be in love,” she said. “It will happen to you some day.”

“Do you think you’ll like the girl?” Tad said, feeling a sudden diffidence.

Martha laughed. “I’ll have precious little choice in the matter.”

“Or will you be like Annie? Every girl she sees me even look at: ‘What an inferior creature!’” He mimicked the brogue, then added: “A creature yet!”

Martha looked about the room scattered with odd pieces of clothing. “How can you tell when you’re packed?”

“Wouldn’t you like to fall in love again yourself, mother?”

Martha said: “I’ve never fallen out of love.”

“Not even married to Nathan?”

She went to the dresser and began to put it in order. “No,” she said.

Tad had never got this close to an admission of what he wanted to know, of what he wanted to be the truth. But he knew her well enough not to pursue the matter directly. He plucked at the tufts of the quilt on his bed. “When you were in school in Europe, were you homesick?”

“Not homesick exactly. As you know, mother and my father did not get along very well together.”