Evening of the Good Samaritan (61 page)

“Couldn’t find another damn thing to read. Have a drink?”

“No thanks,” Tad said. He took off his raincoat. George’s coat lay over a chair beside the door, his hat atop it. “How was the testimonial?”

“Stupendous. Absolutely stupendous. The ladies gave him an ovation—and that.” He gestured toward the dresser, spilling the drink, a few drops, over himself.

“They’re a corny outfit.” Tad went to the dresser where a case lined with white satin stood open. It held, each piece fitted into its own slot, a set of surgical instruments. “How come this? I thought they came with the hospital. Or are they giving him one of those, too?”

George guffawed. “A symbol, my boy. Rehabilitation. Or it might just be that somebody on the board of Jewish ladies has a friend a manufacturer of surgical instruments.”

Tad did not like the remark, and Bergner was a little drunk and for it the more offensive. But neither did Tad care very much for the Conference of Jewish Women when they gave Nathan Reiss a testimonial luncheon.

“The Jewish people are very sentimental. Don’t you think so?” George sat down carefully on the edge of the bed, this time shepherding the glass in his hand.

But Tad, catching the aroma of brandy, plunged back in memory to the scene on the dock when Dr. Winthrop died. He remembered Louise Bergner taking the brandy Sylvia had brought and spilling it over her husband who lay gasping like a guppy, otherwise unattended while Nathan tried to resuscitate the dead. Tad’s own heart began to pound.

“He saved your life once, didn’t he, Mr. Bergner?”

“Yes,” George said, “one of the chosen.”

Nothing he could have said would have been more likely to fire Tad’s imagination. He moistened his lips. “But he couldn’t save my father’s life—or Dr. Winthrop’s. They weren’t among the chosen.”

Bergner opened his mouth and then closed it again without saying what had come into his mind.

“Mr. Bergner, did you know the boat was going to tip that day—I mean just before it happened, didn’t you know it was going to happen?”

Bergner did not understand the preciseness of the distinction in time Tad was trying to make. “My boy, if I’d known that, I wouldn’t have been aboard it, not even for Nathan Reiss.”

Tad had reached the place of taking the meanings he wanted from the man’s words. He felt himself exhilarated, in command, and almost cruelly superior at the moment to George Bergner. Nor had he ever felt so alert: memory and the present vividly merged. He could relive his very feeling on the dock, his chagrin at being excluded, his loss of the opportunity to show off his nautical skill to Dr. Winthrop. Nathan had seen to it he was not aboard, presumably to make room for Mr. Bergner. “You didn’t want to go at all, did you?” he said, attempting to make his voice casual, even as the hunter might disarm his prey.

And George, looking at his glass, was diverted. “I didn’t,” he said. “That’s the truth. And now I wish to Christ I hadn’t gone.”

“Why?”

Bergner took a long swallow of the brandy. The color rose in blotches to his face with the impact of the drink. “It’s the story of my life,” he said between choking coughs. “I don’t think you want to hear it any more than I want to hear it. Where the hell is Nathan?” He looked at his watch.

“I knew you were going over,” Tad said. “I knew it the minute Nathan let the boom swing free.”

Bergner grunted his disparagement. “You were a child.”

“I knew how to sail that boat,” Tad said, “and I was watching. I had the field glasses and I could see everything.”

Bergner wiped the tears brought on by the coughing from the corners of his eyes. His eyelids were so puffy Tad could scarcely see his eyes. “Just what could you see?”

“That Nathan was smiling and that you were scared.”

Bergner laughed. “A blind man could have seen that.”

Tad blurted out the words purposely, lest the opportunity to say them be lost, the words that would commit him beyond retreat: “Nathan deliberately tipped that boat, Mr. Bergner.”

Very slowly the look of sour amusement faded from George’s face. He sat a few seconds as though in a stupor. Then he got up and trundled across the room to the writing desk where he poured himself another drink. With it in hand, he turned to the boy who stood clutching the back of a chair on which he sometimes leaned, and sometimes pushed about, the activity an unconscious compliment to the manipulations of his mind.

Bergner said: “I’m going to give you a small piece of advice, my boy, just two words of it: shut up. If you don’t, you may wind up like me, drinking this stuff.”

“Or like my father—another accident?”

“What are you saying this to me for? I didn’t like your father. But he didn’t like me either. And I did him no more harm than he did me. I’d have been his friend if he’d let me. When decent people turn you down, you run after dogs.” George began to whine, a self-pitying stream of irrelevant invective against his own father, against Marcus Hogan, his wife, himself. Only when he touched on Nathan Reiss could Tad attend him with patience. But he was powerless to stem the half-drunken, maudlin ramblings. “You know what I am?” George said finally. “Another cripple. A broken reed. So don’t lean on me. I don’t hear anything, I don’t know anything, I don’t do anything. I belch and I break wind. That way I know I’m alive.”

Tad’s excitement fell almost as quickly as it had risen. He had taken his plunge—into blubber.

He went to the writing table and picked up the Bible, reading at random where the book was open: “Wherefore the sin of the young men was very great before the Lord: for men abhorred the offering of the Lord.

“But Samuel ministered before the Lord, being a child, girded with a linen ephod.

“Moreover his mother made him a little coat, and brought it to him from year to year, when she came up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice.”

Tad read the paragraphs again, taking from them a special understanding. He closed the book and hugged it to him.

George, watching him, grew philosophic. “Bible, bed and bottle … as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.”

Nathan Reiss let himself into the room, looked about it as though to see who was there, and then without speaking to either Tad or Bergner closed the door and took off his hat and coat. Tad had not heard the key in the door and he thought there was something different about Nathan as he came in, a preoccupation whereby he forgot to put on the smiling mask. But in his own far from normal state he was in no position to judge the normalcy of Nathan.

“So, George. What are you drinking to this time?”

“I hadn’t thought of it, Nathan.” He lifted his glass. “Your health and long life.”

Reiss glared at him from under drawn brows. “I should have as many lives as you drink toasts to me.” Finally he acknowledged the boy’s presence. His smile was quick but brief, a shot of teeth. “Hello, Tad.” He went toward the bathroom. At the door he paused. “George, did you make the reservation?”

“Jacques’ Restaurant at seven,” George said.

“Will you go down please and arrange a cab to be waiting for us?” He closed the door behind him.

“Your obedient servant,” George said in self-mocking humility. He drained his glass, and on sudden impulse, cried to Tad: “Catch.” He tossed the glass underhand to the boy who had to lunge in order to catch it. George picked up his own coat and hat. “He must be back here by eleven o’clock. We are taking the train since there are no flights.”

Reiss opened the bathroom door, and made no secret of the fact that he had been listening. “No flights, did you say, George?”

“That’s what they tell me downstairs. All planes grounded in the fog.”

“For how long?”

George said gravely: “I’ll try and find out for you, Nathan.”

Tad grinned, but Reiss returned to the bathroom without knowing the mockery in George’s subservient response.

“Have fun,” Bergner said to Tad, and went out.

Tad, waiting, took up the Bible again and tried to find the page in Samuel, but before he found it, his mind shot restlessly elsewhere. He put down the book and moved to the dresser where he gazed down on the glittering display of steel, cold as the snow-white satin in which they were shrouded. He had never wanted to be a doctor, only a veterinarian as a small child, and that because he was fonder then of animals than people. He ventured to draw from its sheathing one of the knives, and put it back at once: the sight of it made him nauseous for he could imagine its incision into the flesh. He went to the window, unlocked, and tried to open it.

Nathan came from the bathroom. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to open the window.”

“For what reason?”

“Fresh air,” Tad said. “The room stinks of brandy.”

“It stinks of more than that,” Reiss said, and passing the dresser on his way across the room, he asked: “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

Tad was a moment remembering the occasion. “Yes, of course.”

Reiss looked at him. “You look feverish, dissipated. Like him.” He jerked his head, indicating the door by which George had gone out. He opened the window with very little difficulty. “It is a fine evening for fresh air,” he said sarcastically.

Tad had observed in awe the ease with which Reiss had managed the window. Outside the fog hugged the building like a dirty sheet. Instinctively he drew away from the window.

“Are you afraid of heights?” Reiss said. “I think your father was.”

“I am not afraid,” Tad said, but he moistened his lips, and was aware that something very like fear was overtaking him.

“Sometimes it is better to be afraid.”

“Nathan, why won’t the Baroness see me?”

Reiss smiled in his old fashion for the first time since he had come. “For whatever reason, it is not because she is afraid. Go and put some cold water on your face. You look sick.”

“I’m not sick!”

“Do as I say. Look at yourself in the mirror.”

Tad obeyed him, but out of the need to move, to lift his feet, to counter the sudden, self-shaming weakness that had come on him. Nor did the vision of his own face in the mirror, the flushed cheeks, the pale lips, the staring eyes, restore him. He felt himself utterly inadequate. More than ever he had loathed Nathan Reiss he loathed himself at that moment. He washed his face and drew several deep breaths before rejoining his stepfather who was at the dresser gazing down at the instruments.

Voices grew loud in the hallway as people approached and passed their doorway. Someone shouted: “Hold it!” presumably to the elevator operator and the voices faded.

Reiss closed the display of instruments with a contemptuous flick of his wrist. “Are you ready?”

Tad said: “Nathan, I told George this afternoon that I thought you deliberately tipped the
Lorna Doone
when and he and Dr. Winthrop … when Dr. Winthrop died.”

Reiss looked at him, a curious gaze, but not one of surprise. Having said the words, Tad could say no more. He required all his strength to stand up straight and keep his head steady.

Reiss said: “You have a long memory. What, may I ask, did George say?” Reiss waited, but the boy did not answer, and he went on. “I should not be surprised if he agreed with you. Ah, but I would be surprised. George has the fat tongue of a coward. Do you know what I thought, Tad, when I saw you trying so desperately to open that window? I was afraid you were contemplating suicide.”

Tad calculated the few steps between himself and the hall door. Hit and run. But by the calculation he was able to say: “So you opened it for me … and didn’t even hurt your hand.”

“Poor boy,” Reiss said, and then rather crossly: “Take your coat and let us go. This room is reeking of malignancy.”

Tad, out of an old training, waited at the door for the man to precede him. He knew an instant of terror in the brief interlude of darkness when Nathan snapped off the room lights before they moved into the hall. But in the flood of light and space to which they passed that terror, too, became a part of a larger chagrin. Reiss went back and tried the door to be sure that it was locked. Returning and leading the way he said: “Many people would have believed your father a suicide if I had not been there.”

“I don’t believe it,” Tad said.

Reiss shrugged. “I am only telling what was said to everyone except your mother.” At the elevator he smiled, his reproachful, lower lip-hanging smile. “Perhaps you had better press the signal yourself.”

Tad merely stared at the man as though with his eyes he hoped to penetrate to the inside of him. Reiss touched the signal button and waiting, adjusted his tie, which at another time Tad would have thought a ridiculous gesture of indifference. Now he was steeped in his own frustration. “It doesn’t matter what I think now, does it, Nathan? You’ve got everything the way you want it—and all the old answers. It’s too late for new ones, isn’t it?”

“Shall I tell you the truth?” Reiss said. “If it mattered more to me just now, Tad, I should feel very sorry for you. Why not pretend a little longer that we enjoy each other? Let us try to make the best of this expensive dinner I am proposing—as the climax, let us say, of the father and son ceremony.”

The elevator stopped and Reiss got in. The operator said testily to Tad: “Down, sir?”

He got in mutely.

Bergner was waiting for them at the Park Avenue entrance to the hotel, his hand on a cab door as though he were prepared to run alongside the vehicle if that were necessary to hold it. As soon as Tad and Reiss were inside, the driver thrust them back in their seats with the violence of his start from the curb. Reiss spoke sharply to him and a moment later they were engaged in an acrimonious exchange. “I’m not your private chauffeur, see?” the driver said. “If I get a ticket, I’m the guy what’s got to pay for it. It says ‘no standing’ and me they don’t let stand.”

Tad was grateful for the diversion, numb as were his own senses. You could answer a curse, but cursing a smile turned back the curses on yourself. Once he had been able to infuriate his stepfather—like a small stinging gnat. In his rashness, he had lost even that measly strength.

When they reached Greenwich Village the driver had to stop to get his bearings in the fog.