Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  The restaurant at which Mike Shea proposed he and Winthrop meet was itself suggestive of conspiracy. Ordinarily, Mike did his entertaining at the Athletic Club although he was about as athletic as a cart horse. Nor could he resist having the tables turned on him when Winthrop would propose that they go instead to the Union League Club. Whatever his public opinion of “bankers, manufacturers and trusters,” Mike dearly loved entrance to their secluded chambers. But this time he was adamant: Patsy’s Steak House on Dearborn. When Winthrop got there, Mike was already settled in one of the private dining rooms.

  “I haven’t been in this place since Prohibition,” Winthrop said, taking the hand Mike offered across the table. Mike had an interesting handshake: he gave an intimation of a clasp, and then quickly, before a man got hold of it, he collapsed his hand; it was all much in the way of a boxer’s feinting and then riding with a punch.

  “It’s a quiet spot,” said Mike, “and you know, the older I get the more willing I am to stay out of the main stream.” Mike had always stayed out of the main stream; but invariably he was to be found under the bridge.

  “If you’ve some good lager beer,” Winthrop said to the waiter.

  “The very thing I had in mind,” said Mike. “There’s nothing goes with steak like a glass of good beer. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a little neat whisky first, Alex?”

  They talked of a number of things having no great importance, Winthrop aware of Mike’s gentle probing. Mike often spoke of “the whole man.” “You’ve got to take the whole man into consideration,” he would say, and it amused Winthrop to watch the old kingmaker scratching together bits of information about himself. They talked of baseball, the Traders City teams having gone south for spring practice. “I go down myself every year,” said Mike, “except elections.” He sighed and immediately veered away from the subject of politics so that Winthrop doubted that was what he had in mind. “I’ve a locker in the Lions’ clubhouse, you know, and they’ve given me a cap that sits down on my ears like the old Jew’s derby.”

  Winthrop laughed.

  Mike took a long pull at his beer. “My God, the Germans know how to make beer, don’t they?” He brushed the foam from his lips with the back of his hand and then wiped his hand with the napkin.

  “A queer business, that, at Midwestern University, wasn’t it?”

  Winthrop noted with some gratification the past tense. “Ah, it’s the same thing all over the country these days, Mike.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that, Alex. I don’t like to see us standing out from the crowd for something like that. Mind, a little rebellion’s a useful thing, as somebody said. But enough’s enough. You wouldn’t say that Hogan fellow’s a Communist, eh?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But he’s damn useful to them sometimes, wouldn’t you say?”

  Winthrop said, “So is the American Legion, Mike.”

  Mike looked startled for a moment, so startled, in fact, that Winthrop got his first intimation that Mike had been thinking of proposing him for elective office. “Well, I suppose there are times when the Lord God Almighty gives the devil a hand, if it comes to that,” Mike said slowly.

  “That’s just what I meant: it takes two to make a fight. Those kids didn’t want a riot, but when the Legionnaires marched in to lay down the law to them …” He shrugged.

  Mike sent his tongue on a quick tour of the dry, craggy lips. “It’s a fine organization all the same, Alex.”

  “Sure it is. I’m a member myself.”

  The flesh crinkled up around the pale blue eyes. “I’m glad to hear you say that, Alex. Shall we have another bottle of beer and tell them to put on the steaks?”

  Winthrop was, thereafter, careful not to overstate his views. He had nothing radical to say, and his remark about the Legion had been made as much to shake Mike up just for fun’s sake as to affirm conviction. It was a dangerous bit of play to indulge in with a politician, and when the steak was finished and the apple pie before them, and Mike had not yet come to any issue worth the luncheon check, Winthrop wondered if he had not pulled a boner. But instead of becoming conciliatory, he allowed his impatience to mount and to turn, not on himself, but on Mike: what was so important about a machine boss that he could command a public servant’s appearance for two hours of babble in the middle of the day?

  “I hear we’re not getting the airport,” he said when a moment lay open in the conversation, and he said it by way of dusting Mike’s wounds with salt, for he knew that the Democrats were counting heavily on Public Works to ingratiate the incumbent mayor with the voters.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said Mike. “It’s all a matter of negotiation among the right people. The criminal thing is—the time it wastes.”

  Winthrop was amused at Mike’s calling negotiation a waste of time, but Mike himself was in deep earnest. He went on while he unwrapped the tinsel from a cigar, “I tell you, the willful practice of politics, unless you’re a politician, is a terrible waste. It’s no good having to spend all your time if you’re mayor, say, making up to people for having rubbed them the wrong way. For me, it’s different. I’m a politician. I’ve been carrying coals to Newcastle all my life, just to make sure the fires never go out.”

  Winthrop took a box of safety matches from his pocket and handed them to Mike across the table.

  “Now take yourself, for example,” Mike said, having lit his cigar, and his hard blue eyes penetrated the smoke he sent up between them, “you’re a natural politician. You know when to palaver a man, and you know when to strike a match on his behind.”

  “I suppose I’ve never had to be on the beggary end of things, Mike. It makes a difference. If there’s not been one way to something, I’ve always found another.”

  “Aye, but the point is,” said Mike, “you’re a natural. When you go into a room, it’s not long before a man knows whether he can do business with you or he can’t.”

  It was as good a moment as any. Winthrop folded his arms, an amused, patient smile stretching the corners of his mouth. “What have you got in mind, Mike?”

  “Oh, this and that,” said Mike with a limp gesture of his hand. He took his cigar from his lips and examined it. He looked up at Winthrop suddenly. “Do you think the governor was altogether wrong, Alex, when he put his foot down on the airport?”

  “No,” he said without hesitation, but the God’s truth was that until that instant he had not given the matter any critical thought whatsoever. “After all,” he proceeded carefully, “he’s not running for reelection this year himself, and the man running for mayor is an absolutely unknown quantity—politically speaking.”

  “But I’m supporting him,” Mike said in a tone more mischievous than aggrieved.

  “I was looking at it from the governor’s point of view.”

  Mike sat chuckling for a moment. The governor had been elected two years before on a Democratic landslide the basis of which was the early New Deal popularity. Mike had had nothing to do except pass the cigars the day after election. “Tell me the truth, Alex—if you were running for mayor yourself, would you want my endorsement?”

  Winthrop shot out his lower lip, as much to discipline the lip itself as to hedge for time. “I’ll put it this way, Mike: a man can disown his son without offending nature, but neither you nor I would give two cents for the kid who spits in his old man’s eye. Would we?”

  Mike’s shoulders shook although not a sound of amusement came from him. “That reminds me of the Irishman getting off the boat.” And the old man told a story the merits of which Joe Miller himself would have likely doubted. But Winthrop was caught. He settled his eyes on Mike’s and put a grin on his mouth, but all the while his mind was searching the possibilities. To what extent Mike was committed to the incumbent mayor he did not know, but Mike himself was certainly in the saddle for the time being; his only trouble occurred when a mayor of the city got so strong a vote he could virtually take over the party from Mike, and t
his fellow in office had never been tried. It was a bad omen for him, surely, that the governor had cold-shouldered him so soon. In a way, of course, it might be Mike Shea and the city machine the governor was “nixing.” Oh, and did not Mike know that, the wily old fox!

  In almost the same voice he settled the Irishman in America, Mike asked, “Alex, what would you say to having a run yourself in the primary against the mayor?”

  For once he was silent, looking from Mike to the spoon he picked up and turned round in his fingers and then to Mike again.

  “It’s the greatest sport of them all,” Mike said, temptation in his voice. “It’s something every man in public service has the right to experience—the voice of the people crying out their approval.”

  Something in Mike’s fervor and choice of words had the opposite effect on Winthrop to that intended: there was something disturbing as well as exciting in the voice of the people; they could shout a man down as soon as up; they went through his life, turning it over page by page, and even the illiterate of them could read between its lines. Winthrop shook his head, and at the moment meant it.

  “I wouldn’t embarrass you with my endorsement,” Mike said. “After all, I’m expected to see which way the frog jumps before placing my money.”

  “It isn’t that, Mike.”

  Shea ignored the protest. “As a matter of fact, to make the run more exciting, I might put my tag on the mayor still. It would not be the first time I bet against myself.”

  Winthrop put his elbows on the table. “Mike … you want a winner, no matter where the bets are.”

  Mike wagged his head in affirmation. “My mother, God rest her, knew me no better. And that, Alex, is why I’d like to see you run—to try your strength. You may not win at all, you know. The people are notoriously ungrateful.” Mike could reverse himself with the ease of an eel. “You couldn’t just run on your record, fine as it is. You would have to present yourself and make a few promises. You cut a beautiful figure on the speaker’s platform—you know that, Alex? There’s the look of the boy about you—the All-American who grew up to be mayor of Traders City and God knows what next in this grand country of ours. You’re a young man, Alex.”

  “I’m not far from fifty.”

  “Fifty! Holy Mother of God! I swear to you, if I was fifty again, I’d run myself.” Shea talked a bit of the man who had died in office; he spoke devoutly, for great things had indeed been expected of the deceased. But in any case, Mike always spoke highly of the dead.

  Winthrop had surrendered entirely to thoughts of himself. There was no escaping the truth that he wanted elective office at this moment more than anything in life … more even, God forgive him, than the thing that might very well stand in his way: his relationship with Elizabeth Fitzgerald. He knew of no one who actually was aware of the relationship, but he was sure that a number of people suspected it.

  “I’m not a family man, Mike, for one thing,” he said in tentative protest.

  “You’re a bachelor! Sure, the men will envy you and the women covet you. That’s an asset in these times. Many’s the poor gob who’s wished himself without a family having to put them and himself on relief.”

  “And I wouldn’t want the muckrakers poking around in my private affairs,” Winthrop said, coming as close to putting the fact before Mike as he intended to.

  “Isn’t that the beauty of being a bachelor?” Mike cried. “The people make allowances. I tell you, whether or not allowances are needed, the people make them. The man you don’t have to allow anything to just isn’t human.” Mike gave himself a thump on the chest. “My own heart is a Pandora’s Box.”

  Winthrop tilted his chair back and laughed heartily; it was a great, booming laugh that seemed to bounce off the ceiling. He put his hands in his pockets. “Let me think about it for a day or so, Mike. I’ll let you know.”

  “You’ll have to file before the end of the week.”

  “If I file at all.”

  Mike studied the nub of cigar that had gone dead in his fingers. “You might find, Alex, that a good man to have in your corner—he might even run things for you, and I’d say he’s a comer himself, having got his start with the New Deal in Washington—young George Bergner. You know him, don’t you? Sure, you must, he lives in Lakewood. And you must know his father?”

  Winthrop nodded. The elder Bergner was one of the top surgeons in Traders City and a friend. Young Bergner was a lawyer … which, Winthrop supposed,—but with no great bitterness—could happen when father was a gentleman.

  “That’s up to you, of course,” Mike said. He put out his hand across the table. “I’m glad we had this little talk, Alex. I know you’re a busy man, but I’m glad you thought of old Mike at a time like this.”

  Winthrop grinned and gave a good squeeze to the bag of bones which seemed to collapse in his grasp.

  Mike massaged his knuckles. “You’ll get over that handshake after a few thousand rounds.” He looked up then and puckered his face. “If you don’t mind, Alex, I’m going to stay and talk a while with Patsy. I’m thinking of getting a storage locker, and I’d like to buy my steaks where he does—if I can get his price.”

  Winthrop took his coat from the old-fashioned stand. He did not wear a hat if he could help it. His foot trod against a brass spittoon, tucked under the stand. Patsy’s was equipped for all comers. He glanced for an instant at the pictures around the walls—signed, in one case, up the dancer’s leg, the signature scratched among the mesh of the stocking—“Texas”—all the nightclub entertainers of the twenties had left their love with Patsy, who in those days called himself “The Dago Kid” and had managed to scratch his own name on the fat underbelly of Traders City.

  “So long, Mike.” Winthrop saluted him from the door.

  “Alex.” The old man beckoned him back, and waited until he had his full attention. “As we used to say at home … Mind, I said nothing.”

  8

  WINTHROP, INSTEAD OF RETURNING directly to his office, turned up his overcoat collar and began to walk; apple pie was not the best solace for a nervous stomach. But with the food before him, he ate as some men smoked, to ease the tensions. He belched, wind into the wind. Inhaling then, he got the taste of soot in his mouth. They were poisoning the city with their smokestacks and their steam engines. To burn hard coal, they said, would mean economic ruin. He wondered. The city was ringed with elevated steel rails on which ran electric trains—power generated, of course, by coal. But the plants could be moved out of the city … and with them a population of voters. And downstate the only industry was coal—soft coal. He stood a moment at the foot of Marquette, the Wall Street of Traders City. The skyscrapers were fewer—and newer—and there was room for a great many more. The feel of the prairie was still to be got at the heart of the city; there seemed a reluctance to build up. For mile after mile, the city clung to the ground and groped, when it moved, aimlessly into the flats, leaving the sky to the winds. It was a great shame that a city of such promise should wallow on the ground because its generation of pioneers had given way to their politician sons and businessmen, to corporate bigness, where little men were allowed authority and big men hamstrung in the chain of it.

  He found himself outside the McCormick Building, on the thirty-first floor of which were the law offices of a firm that included George Allan Bergner. Bergner would be either there or in Washington, or in the state capital; but he was not wallowing in the flats of Traders City wherever he was. George had got religion: the New Deal, hallelujah: the great day a-coming. Government not just of the people, by the people, but government for the people: the NRA, the AAA, the CCC, the PWA and the WPA ad nauseum—or ad glorium? Alexander Winthrop was not prepared to say. He was not prepared, that was the trouble. For the first time in his life he was not prepared to take full advantage of an opportunity.

  This was not entirely true, he realized, turning reluctantly back toward his office. What was true was that for the first time his course of action in a gi
ven opportunity was not his alone to determine.

  He made it a practice not to look around the waiting room, going into his office. Too often a friendly glance to the wrong person at such a moment discovered him half-committed before he ever got into negotiation. Normally a man of high spirits, he rather enjoyed acting glum and preoccupied pushing by the oak railing and into his milk-glassed inner office.

  When Winthrop got to his desk and his secretary reminded him that he had a date with a Doctor Marcus Hogan, he was for the moment puzzled. Then he remembered, and threw back his head in laughter. He laughed with the deep physical gratification to be got from the ironic. But when the laughter passed, all he could feel was the sharper edge of his own problem.

  “Is he here?”

  “He’s been waiting for almost an hour, doctor.”

  Winthrop smiled and his voice was nastily silken. “Then why didn’t you call me, my dear? He’s a friend of Professor Fitzgerald’s.”

  Marcus had not minded the wait. He envied men whose days were more crowded than his own. And Dr. Winthrop’s secretary had provided him with a fine collection of medical journals. She had got a faint scent of the dispensary from him and had hoped to tell him of her own pains—but at the last moment failed of courage.