Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Martha and Marcus laughed.

  “Something else she would say in that vein:—she was a rather bad-tempered woman, I am afraid—‘If you do that again,’ she would say, ‘I’ll give you a straight zero.’ And she would describe it with the tip of her pointer.” Mother St. John herself illustrated with a finger. “Then one day she broke the pointer over one of the student’s heads. The child sustained no permanent ill effects fortunately, and I remember that Sister Joanna was a much better teacher without the pointer.”

  It was an entirely pleasurable ten minutes Marcus spent in the nun’s company, and when she rose to leave him and Martha, she said, “We shall miss Martha next year, shan’t we?”

  “I haven’t got used to the notion of her going yet,” Marcus said.

  “It will be quite time enough when she is gone,” the nun said, matter-of-factly, and gave him her hand. “Come and see me sometimes, if you will, Doctor Hogan. I very much admire your father. He behaved with such dignity through his ordeal. I have sometimes thought that if our curriculum allowed such refinements as political economy, I should be tempted to ask him to give the course.” She glanced away from him for an instant, and then back, the twinkle again in her eyes. “Perhaps it is as well we are so small a school.”

  She padded away from them, her footfalls muffled in the grass. In the classroom corridors, Martha recognized the footsteps of almost all the nuns.

  Marcus said, “What a remarkable woman! What does she teach? You told me once.”

  “Psychology and English poetry.”

  “Not ancient history.”

  “No. Mr. Cummins comes out from the University. He’s very young.” He had been appointed although Martha’s father had recommended someone else. Martha’s father did not entirely approve of Mother St. John either, and he was a little offended that he had not been proposed as a trustee of St. Cecilia’s. He was, after all, a prominent Catholic layman, an educator, and had a daughter in the college. Martha thought now that he would hit the roof when he heard St. Cecilia’s was to have a smoking room. She decided it would be one more of many tales which she did not carry home.

  “Marcus, if we were to leave now, could we go down to the lake for a few minutes? I’d love to see it a last time and I shan’t have a chance tomorrow. It’s commencement.”

  “I wish you would stop speaking with such finality. You’re neither gone yet, nor forgotten.”

  But later, as they sat upon a log at the bottom of the ravine and watched the green-blue water come up time and again and stretch itself upon the sands, she spoke again in somber words: “If I should die this very day, Marcus, I would have had more happiness, I think, than most people—and almost all of it this spring.” Marcus merely squeezed her hand. She went on: “I feel deeper, more mature. Maybe I’m not, but I think I am. Marcus, I love you very much.”

  He looked at her then, both frowning and smiling, and getting up, drew her into his arms and held her until they could feel the sands running out from beneath their feet.

  Whenever Marcus drove Martha back from school they stopped at the studio and her mother had tea sent up from the second floor restaurant. There were two rooms, one the music room in which were a grand piano, a music rack and two chairs. The other room was cluttered and overfurnished, almost gaudy, in somewhat heady contrast to the very proper house near the University campus. A bowl of red roses filled a corner table.

  “I was always told as a child in Ireland,” Elizabeth Fitzgerald said, as she gathered up several books and put them on the shelves, “of the Spanish part of my ancestry, but as I look around this room, I wonder if it wasn’t their explanation for a visiting gypsy.”

  “Aren’t they called tinkers in Ireland, mother?”

  “Indeed they are, and they’re not dealt with in nearly so romantic a fashion as here, let me tell you. It would have had to be a kidnaping.”

  After a second’s pause, Martha said, “The roses are lovely. They’re the first you’ve cut, aren’t they?”

  Her mother glanced at Marcus, amused, and said to her daughter, “Do I embarrass you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I used to embarrass your father. I think that’s why he married me—to put the cloak of respectability about me.” It was, she knew, why her aunt had fostered the marriage. “They are slow with our tea today, aren’t they? Perhaps we should have gone home for it. The garden is lovely now. You must come one afternoon soon, Marcus. I don’t suppose you get to spend much time out-of-doors, do you?”

  “It depends on where I have to park the car,” Marcus said in his dry way. “If I have a long walk to it, I’m allowed to breathe fresh air on the way.”

  The tea was brought up by a waiter Elizabeth Fitzgerald had not seen for some time; he had been off ill and she was most solicitous. Marcus was, quite by chance, watching her at the instant she discovered the man had brought service for two only. A change as severe as a mask passed over her face. The color drained from it except at two points where her skin drew tightly over the cheekbones.

  “You have made a mistake, Peter,” she said, her calm voice belying entirely the change in her face. “Tea was ordered for three.”

  “Oh, madame, pardon me. I have forgotten.”

  “I suppose you had better take it all down and start over.” She turned to Marcus. “You can wait a little longer, doctor?”

  Their eyes met and held in an exchange he did not suppose he would ever forget. The color returned to Elizabeth’s face. Marcus moistened his lips and said, “Of course,” although he knew he must leave within ten minutes.

  She looked up at the waiter. So did Marcus; he could not help himself. The man’s face was a bulging red. She said only, “Please, Peter,” and he was gone.

  Marcus took a cigaret from his pocket and lit it. He did not offer one to his hostess, and he could not bring himself to look toward Martha. She had been at the window when the waiter came. Nor was it likely she would have understood anything, seeing. One needed a certain curiosity, an experience. Possibly one needed to be a man and to have felt, as he admitted to himself now that he had felt, the sexual attractiveness of this dark, proud woman and her gypsy haven. He had known, he was sure, from the night of Winthrop’s party. That was one thing; but Elizabeth Fitzgerald’s confirming that he knew was something else. It was something between them now. He got up and went to the window where he put his arm about Martha and brushed her temple with his lips. He had never before touched her in her mother’s presence. And he had never felt such tenderness toward her as now when she pressed his hand between her arm and her ribs.

  “Will you come to Sunday dinner at our house?” Marcus said. “I’ll invite the Muellers—and it’s time you met my father.”

  “I should love to, Marcus. May I, mother—Sunday?”

  “I should think so,” Elizabeth said.

  She got up and left them then, going into the music room. She played some very dark Beethoven, but Marcus and Martha smiled at each other through it, and kissed deeply, searchingly as not before. Marcus was on the very edge of saying the word, of proposing that they marry soon. But he held back—not from the obvious considerations of her youth and his poverty—but because somehow there was a curious, knight-errant sort of feeling to his emotion, as though he were doing it to save her, or to do right by her—as God knows, she did not need have done. So he talked of Sunday and of all the Mueller children, whom, he hoped profoundly, they would leave at home.

  Martha and her mother went out into the garden almost as soon as they reached home that afternoon. It was always her mother’s habit, even if it were raining, to walk in the garden when she got home. But this was the poet’s sort of June day. The oak trees were shedding seed pods, dropping them down like clusters of dragonfly wings, the peonies were blowzy, but the roses were in high glory. The garden was entirely her mother’s. As a little girl Martha had always had a patch of her own to cultivate, but she did it less from love of the garden than from the desire to p
lease her mother. Her father rarely came beyond the terrace, but he would often come out there and look down, nodding approval. He liked to boast among his colleagues of his wife’s garden: “All her own work. I’ve never lifted a hand in it. She has a boy to help sometimes, and he’ll be a gardener when she’s through with him.”

  “I remember the roses at home always this time of year,” her mother said. “They run right up to the cottage near the manor. We used to sit on the wall at twilight—it doesn’t get dark until after ten in the summertime there—and watch the sheep. It was so still at times you could hear them munching the grass. And their bleating was the loneliest sound.”

  “What’s a linnet?” Martha asked. “You know, ‘Full of the linnets’ wings.’”

  “It’s a bird—fairly common in Ireland. It feeds on the seeds of flax … You’re very much in love, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Terribly.”

  “You’re so young, Martha.”

  “Am I? For what?”

  “To be so serious.”

  “I’d be serious even if I weren’t in love,” Martha said.

  “Do you talk about marriage?”

  “No.”

  Her mother laughed a little. “I sounded like your father. I didn’t quite mean it that way. I don’t propose to question the honor of Marcus’s intentions.”

  “Does papa question them?”

  “He considers it part of his duty, being your father.”

  “Marcus and I understand why we don’t talk about it. We should have to say all sorts of things we didn’t really mean—to explain something that doesn’t need explaining as long as we don’t talk about it. I don’t suppose that makes much sense to you, does it?”

  “I’m always on the side of reticence. But I’d never thought it possible for people in love.” She plucked a leaf and turned it between her eye and the light. It bore an insect’s perforations. “Oh, dear—and so soon. I shall have to spray tonight. Martha, I want to ask a very great favor of you, my dear. That’s not how I should put it either.” She laid her hand on Martha’s, one of the rare times she reached out to her, for that was implicit in the gesture. “I want us to go abroad together this summer—you and I.”

  Martha was too stunned to speak for a moment. She glanced at her mother, and then away quickly; her mother’s eyes were a well of longing, full of tears, reminding Martha again of Sister Mathilde. Never, never before had her mother allowed anything so personal between them. It was inexplicable to Martha, and although she tried to resist it, the resentment in her grew quickly.

  “I don’t want to, mother, not if I have to go to school there in the fall.”

  “I see.” Her mother withdrew her hand.

  “If we were to go this summer, could I go back to St. Cecilia’s in the fall?”

  “No, Martha, that part is quite set. Our going this summer is entirely up to you.”

  Martha felt herself disarmed by the responsibility. It was her own impotence that angered her. “It’s because of Marcus, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “And you know I’m helpless. I’ve just told you we were not making a lifetime of plans. If we weren’t so sensible, so honest, you wouldn’t be able to take this advantage, mother.”

  “You’re not making any sense at all, Martha.”

  “I know I’m not. It doesn’t make sense to me to go to Europe this summer. None! None!”

  “I didn’t expect it to,” her mother said quietly. “If you will remember what I said to you …”

  Martha interrupted: “Is papa willing that we go? He didn’t even want me to go this fall.”

  “Until you met Marcus. Do you think he has taken easily to the idea of your being in love with him—with Jonathan Hogan’s son—a Protestant, a man ten years your senior?”

  “I know he hasn’t. And I know you’ve made that easier for me, mother. I grant that.”

  “I’ve not made it easier or more difficult, Martha. Understand that.”

  “But now you’ve made it impossible!” Her voice broke on the word.

  “Martha, listen to me for just one moment, please.” She spoke then, very carefully: “If I were in the position with your father to make things easier—or for that matter, more difficult—to have any deep influence with him whatsoever—I should not need to ask that you and I go abroad together this summer. I said in the beginning it would have to be a favor you did for me. I hoped not to have to explain it to you.”

  “You don’t, mother.” Martha was now having to do battle with her own tears. Her mother had won over hers, and she had won over her daughter, too. Martha was already beginning to feel the distance spread between her and Marcus. And this the happiest day: so she had proclaimed it.

  When Martha wiped the tears from her eyes, her mother said quietly, persuasively, “You are very young—you have a lifetime—and it isn’t practical, let alone possible, for you to get married soon anyway. The religious issue between you and Marcus is going to take a great deal of time and tact.”

  Martha nodded, hoping her mother would stop. These were the very things she and Marcus avoided saying. She had thought her mother understood.

  “I don’t pretend it will be easy for you, Martha. You and I have never been—close, as they say. I’ve always felt it my duty to encourage a more intimate relationship between your father and you—since I was failing both of you in so many ways.”

  “You don’t have to talk like this, mother. I was surprised, that’s all. I agree to go.”

  “I don’t want you just to agree. You see, Martha, I owe your father a great deal … In twenty years, we have done some rather cruel things to each other. People do, you know.”

  “I know,” Martha said.

  “Your father is also ten years older than me. You’ll find the distance lengthens as you get older.”

  Martha did not say anything.

  They had reached the tool shed at the end of the garden and turned back. “I just wonder if there isn’t time for Walter and me to find a happier life together—before we’re left to it alone, happy or no. I expect that would please you, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Martha said, but she did not have any feeling about it at all. In fact, she much preferred being with her mother when they did not talk. There was something more “giving” about her when she seemed to be holding back, or doling out her communication. Martha sensed now, her mother having mentioned the difference in hers and Martha’s father’s ages, that she was in some way referring to their sexual relationship. Martha had occasionally thought about it, but not very much; she did not really know what happened to people in that way when they got older.

  “I want to try a couple of months’ separation from Walter—and then when I come back and we have the year alone together …” Her voice stopped. She was looking straight ahead at the house, and Martha, glancing sideways at her, saw the straight, hard line of her mouth. Then she threw back her head and opened her mouth, breathing deeply. “We shall visit your uncle in Ireland. We shall have a glorious summer, Martha. I promise you!”

  15

  IT WAS AN AGONIZING commingling of feelings Martha and Marcus went through about one another after that; the sense of parting hung over their every meeting. Sometimes an impatience to have it quickly accomplished came upon them and then a refusal to believe it was happening at all. “The moment is all,” Marcus said more than once, and afterwards mocked himself for its melodrama. It was indeed much better for them that she go abroad this year, and going, that she go quickly: a year should greatly clarify his own future at the rate he was getting on now with Bergner. They would come to agreement on this at every meeting, he and Martha, and then crash into each other’s arms for the moment that was all.

  Marcus was not able to be home for the Sunday he had first invited Martha, nor the Sunday following, so that when finally he was able to arrange the dinner he had proposed it turned out to be a farewell party as well as one of introductions.

  Mrs. T
urley, the Hogans’ housekeeper, fussed and polished. “You got no business bringing that elegant girl down here, Dr. Marcus. You ought to get your father to sell this big old house.”

  It was an old complaint. The house was not very old and not very big, but it was the house in which Marcus and his brother had grown up, and from which his mother had been buried when Marcus was twelve and Trent seventeen. It had seemed a very big house to him then, for Trent at the time had been a freshman at Rodgers. Because of the flu epidemic, he had not been allowed home even for the funeral.

  “Our guest is not that elegant,” Marcus said.

  Marcus brought Martha himself, timing it that they might have an hour or so before the Muellers arrived. His father was waiting on the front porch, and came down the steps to meet them.

  Martha complimented him soon upon his garden. Marcus had never mentioned it and, to be sure, it bore comparison to her mother’s only in that whatever was growing took root in the ground.

  “It runs rather heavily to carrots this year,” the elder Hogan said. “I have a feeling that if I’d put in the radishes, I’d have found them by now. Don’t you think so?”

  “If you’d put in any more carrots,” Marcus said, “we’d be hard put to find the house.”

  Martha laughed. “I like carrots,” she said.

  “I wish I could say the same,” Jonathan Hogan said. “I like the idea of carrots. How is your father?”

  “Well, thank you. He sends you his very best regards.”

  “Shall we go in?” Marcus said. Fortunately it was a cool day, the wind off the lake sufficient to make it more comfortable indoors than out.

  Martha stood a moment in the hallway, looking at the pictures hanging there, of old-fashioned people in various styles of clothes and poses. Then she looked into the living room. “You don’t mind my exploring, do you?”

  “No. That’s what we’re here for,” Jonathan Hogan said, “to stand inspection.”

  “You sound just like Marcus,” Martha said.

  “More and more, the older he gets,” Marcus said. When they were in the living room, he asked, “Is it what you expected?”