Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Mike Shea could count this, everybody said, a major blunder. Then Winthrop himself made one. Against George Bergner’s advice to do nothing about Shea’s libel—beyond making a public denial—until the campaign was over, Winthrop had no choice but to play it righteous all the way. Fitzgerald insisted on it and Winthrop filed suit. Shea filed counter-suit, and made the affidavits he had collected a matter of public records. Three employees of the International Building gave testimony, including a window washer whose very occupation, when published, suggested the most damning evidence of all. A state trooper testified to Winthrop’s occasional visits to a cabin in the dunes in the company of a woman.

  But through it all, Walter Fitzgerald was steadfast. He might not even have read the papers. The only thing which humiliated him, he told each of his classes, was that the University was once more in the newspapers, and he had never, never thought it would be on his account. Purposefully now he spent a little while every day in the men’s faculty lounge: he was available for any question, any scrutiny. And it was there that Jonathan Hogan spoke to him.

  “I don’t know whether it will help his cause—or sink it, but I’ve undertaken to make a few speeches for Winthrop.”

  “It’s a little late, isn’t it, Hogan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you mind my asking what prompted you to change your mind?”

  The little twitching at Hogan’s eye became more intense, his head nodding. “I’ve had my own days of persecution at the hands of the newspapers.”

  “Then you propose, by association, to prove Alexander Winthrop also innocent?” Fitzgerald said in bitter sarcasm.

  “I do not have an opinion in the matter. I do not judge.”

  “I do,” Fitzgerald snapped.

  Hogan nodded his head. “I know that well enough, professor.”

  It would not make a great difference, but a few votes came along with Jonathan Hogan into Winthrop’s camp. And they were not likely to be necessary. His supporters seemed to be holding fast. It was the die-hard Democrats who were defecting from Mike Shea—to, of all things, the Republican candidate, saying in effect to Winthrop and to the mayor, a plague on both your houses.

  But Elizabeth found her first pleasure in many days in the rallying of the Hogans to their side. It was largely a gesture of loyalty, for she knew that nothing really had changed and that Marcus must now see confirmed what he earlier suspected. Perhaps it was Jonathan Hogan’s reasoning that he was rallying to one more lost cause. She, too, and on the briefest of acquaintanceship, had been won to the man as had her daughter. He had the kindest face of any man she knew.

  “Loyalty?” Fitzgerald said. “The man doesn’t know the meaning of the word—not to country, nor to school, nor to any man.”

  “What does it mean then—his coming out for Alexander?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and then added vehemently, “but I am ashamed for Alexander that he accepted him.”

  “Ashamed? You are ashamed for that, Walter, and for nothing else?”

  “Do not defend him to me, Elizabeth. I have seen the president of a university compromise his integrity on that man’s behalf, and it is one of the greatest regrets in my life that I allowed myself to compromise also. I can see the pattern of corruption. I can feel its presence! In my own house, I can feel it closing in to destroy me. I shall do no more work for Alex now. If I could, I would undo what I’ve done for him.”

  He sat, tired and gray and full of hatred, and for the first time in so very long, Elizabeth was moved to pity. He saw what he had to see, and knew far more than he was aware of knowing. How arrogant of her to have supposed she could read him as though he were a child’s primer.

  She went to him and put a hand upon his shoulder. “Must you hate, Walter?”

  It was some seconds before he said anything, then just the word “love,” as though he were contemplating it.

  They had an early dinner that night so that Annie could wash up and be off for the weekend with her relatives. She was bitter company in the house, these days of scandal. Professor Fitzgerald went into his study and closed the door; it was his old habit which he had fallen out of during the election campaign. Elizabeth went upstairs early and read late into the night. Now and then she heard a sound in the house. She did not hear him come upstairs, but dozing off, she might have missed him. The bathroom divided their bedrooms. But on the first instant of waking in the morning, she sensed herself to be alone in the house.

  His bed had not been slept in. His study was empty, but his topcoat was in the closet. She called down into the basement and then went down. It was neat, and he was not there. Dressing, she went outdoors. She found him where he had hung himself in the tool shed, by the light of a now flickering, fading flashlight which was propped up on the potting bench. It was, to her knowledge, the first time he had even been in the building. His body was cold and stiff, but she cut him down and held him in her arms for a little while before going to call for help.

  19

  THE MOTHER SUPERIOR TOLD Martha of her father’s death. He was found to have taken his own life while temporarily insane, for he was not a man to have done it otherwise. A devout man really, Martha herself qualified. The nun nodded and said, “But of course! He is being given Christian burial.” A requiem high Mass was sung for him in the school chapel on the day of his funeral.

  Martha could not say that she grieved. She mourned her father, putting on the black which the nuns advised. Perhaps if she had knelt before the body, if she had attended the wake, seen Annie’s tear-reddened eyes—for it was Annie who could grieve in the Irish way—there might have been a greater reality for her to his death. What she felt was melancholy, not sorrow. Then her mother wrote her briefly, but frankly, of the scandal. “They say Alexander and I have been lovers …” Martha was never to forget the shock of reading those words. The room seemed to tip sidewise so that she had to hold onto the chair in order not to lose her balance. But after it was straight again, the words were still there. They were there even after she no longer felt anything, reading them.

  The two months which followed were to Martha time without definition, a clock without hands. She could not seem to relate to anything, to anybody. She studied and took her examinations. That she passed them mildly surprised her but did not especially please her. She wrote affectionate, comforting letters to her mother and to Marcus as though to console them because they did not feel that they could console her. She wrote the letters; they were in her handwriting, but she sensed no emotion, writing them. This was, she supposed, hypocrisy. But she could not find anything true within herself.

  The nuns were understanding. They were French, after all, and however explosive a combination politics and cuckoldry, they all too often went together in French history. The good nuns were, however, at a loss to understand the girl’s aloofness at such a time. She was expected, indeed she was encouraged, to confide, to weep, to beat her fists; in other words, to take full advantage of the chance to dramatize herself and thus to spend her travail in a natural and profitable manner.

  How could she explain that she felt no travail?

  Another American student who seemed in some unremembered way associated with the trauma was Genevieve Revere who had that autumn made herself quite despicable to Martha. In art class and before the lay instructor she had told how she had teased poor Sister Mathilde. Martha discovered then that she had not been the only girl to whom Mathilde had confided her crush on Revere. The poor unbalanced nun had told it to anyone she thought would carry it back to Genevieve.

  “And finally,” Revere had said, telling her tale in the art class, “finally she destroyed my painting.”

  “She did not,” Martha had said. “I destroyed it.”

  “You did! Why? It was a joke, Martha.”

  “Then it was a filthy joke.”

  “Do you mean filthy—dirty?”

  “Yes. That, too.”

  And that, Martha had discovered, perver
sely won her the unwanted devotion of Genevieve Revere. The girl renewed an old invitation to share an apartment in the Latin Quarter of Paris instead of going home. Revere had Parisian friends who gathered all the American papers for her and she became the most informed person on the Winthrop-Fitzgerald scandal on that side of the Atlantic. She got it all to Martha as though it were the duty of a friend, and as though it ought to win her friendship in return. So Martha came to know, whether or not she wanted to, that Dr. Winthrop was denounced by Judge Phipps in a front page editorial in the Dispatch on election eve, that he was defeated and a Republican victorious in Traders City, and she knew that before Christmas Dr. Winthrop withdrew his libel suit against Michael Shea.

  When Genevieve said in feigned innocence, “Why would he do that?” Martha said coldly, “Because it costs a great deal of money.” But she knew very well that was not the reason. She could not be shocked again, however. Her mother’s plain telling of the charges in the first place had been to her admission of their truth. What did happen to Martha now, however, was a sudden desire for change, to leave the convent school for freedom, for—as she wrote to Marcus because there was no one else to whom she could write or say it—“a house without eyes, a place among strangers.”

  Although she did not realize it, she had voiced her first personal protest, her first consciousness of being, perhaps, herself a victim of the tragedy.

  And then one day she was called to the visitor’s parlor where Dr. Nathan Reiss was waiting. He took both her hands in his, thanked the portress loudly, and winked at Martha when he saw the old nun take her place just outside the open door.

  “This is a beautiful chateau,” he said, and he touched his fingers to the draperies. “Gold damask. There is a poor school attached? There always is.”

  “To the elementary school,” Martha said. “I don’t think they’ve ever thought of a college for the poor.”

  “The poor it does not take so long to finish, eh? Unless they are stubborn like me.”

  Martha smiled and sat down opposite a chair she thought he might find comfortable. “Please, doctor,” she said.

  He sat down, crossed his knees, and smiled. “Would you find it very difficult to call me Nathan?”

  “I probably should … here,” she said, and then blushed because it sounded as though she were looking for an invitation.

  “I understand. But I do not have a beard so that they will not believe I am a doctor in any case.” He indicated the nun with a nod of his head. “I have been wondering—if you do not have other arrangements—would you care to be the New Year’s week guest of a very dear friend of mine, the Baroness Schwarzbach? She will write to you herself, of course, and to the sisters if that is proper. But I thought I should prepare the way first. She is very nice and gay, and she entertains people from all over the world.”

  “You are very kind, Doctor Reiss.”

  He glanced in the nun’s direction, so that what he said seemed merely mischievous, not improper. “And you are very beautiful. I may then arrange it?”

  “Thank you.”

  It was a holiday such as Martha had never known. She truly found her place among strangers, except that no one treated her like a stranger; no one treated anyone like a stranger. She discovered people, men and women, whom she would have said were casually acquainted, engaged in the most intimate discussions.

  The Baroness herself, a plump but delicately cared for woman, came into Martha’s room the first morning of her visit. “Nathan tells me there is such a tragedy, poor child. Tell me.” She seated herself in a chair at the side of Martha’s bed, and arranged something in her lap which Martha realized was a small gray poodle with glistening bright eyes, red-rimmed, and a black nose that also glistened. “You must tell me now, my dear. Do not mind Pépé.” She spoke sometimes in English, sometimes in French to Martha. Yet her accent was not French.

  Slowly, with great diffidence, Martha told the story. It was the first time she had told it to anyone, and there was some gratification in the telling. Her hostess kept making clicking noises of sympathy at which sound the dog would look up into her face and then to Martha, for all the world as though he, too, felt sympathy.

  “Tell me, my dear, is your mother French?”

  “Irish.”

  “Of one thing I was certain—not German or English.” And presently she said, “You will not wear black tonight, my dear: a touch of red for gallantry. Oh, yes! It takes great courage to commit suicide. One has to care very much about what happens because he dies by his own hand. It is the ultimate weapon, death. Is it not? Some men turn it on themselves, some upon the other. There is no mercy in killing oneself. To kill the other—one hopes for vindication, for mercy.”

  But, Martha thought, how could a madman so reason? Did then the Church’s finding of temporary insanity restore her father to grace by depriving him of reason?

  “Why men die,” the Baroness said, “it is very interesting.” She picked up a crumb from Martha’s breakfast tray and fed it to the dog, and another and another while she talked. “My first husband was killed in a diamond mine—a cave in because he went too fast. I’ve always thought it interesting that he, the master, was killed. Usually it is the natives, the slaves who are killed, and the accident has no meaning. Significance, but no meaning. My second husband was clawed to death by a wounded tiger—I have often thought because he could not bring himself to shoot straight the first time. That was Baron Schwarzbach. Poor boy. He was raised to the hunt, but he preferred Mozart.” Again the dog was presented a crumb which he licked from the tip of her finger. “That is sad, isn’t it? But the thing that is terrible—to be raised to Mozart and to crave the hunt. I understand you were disappointed in Vienna? We behaved very badly for you.”

  “You are Austrian, Baroness?”

  “But, of course. My title is French, however. The Austrians are not so generous to Schwarzbachs. Paris is my second home, or perhaps my third. I love also Naples. The most romantic part of me will live there forever … Pépé you are going to get fat! But why not? You are a Frenchman.” She got up and tucked the little dog under her arm life a muff, and picking up the nub of the flaky roll which was left, she dipped it into the last curl of butter and gave it to him. “Such a darling beast, what can I do?” she said, and shrugged so that just for the instant Martha saw the several lines drawn tightly beneath her chin all the way to her ear.

  “We must talk longer together, you and I—but another day. I will send my maid to you within the hour, child. But do not wear black to the fete tonight.”

  “May I wear my white brocade? I don’t have so much choice, Baroness.”

  The Baroness thought about it. “White with red roses. That will be very nice. Pépé, red roses. We must remember red roses.”

  At luncheon Nathan Reiss proposed that he take Martha shopping that afternoon since they must both buy New Year’s gifts. They need buy only for the other house guests and their hostess, but since there were eight other house guests it was a considerable undertaking. The excursion was gay. As Dr. Reiss said, a doctor’s holiday is like no other man’s, he has so few of them. Martha was pleased to hear him say that, for she had never quite got over the notion that he was not really a doctor.

  “Do you practice in Paris, doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “In a hospital?”

  “But, of course, only in a hospital. I am a surgeon.”

  “I know. Doctor Mueller told me.”

  “Would you like to see the hospital?”

  “Very much.”

  “But why?”

  “I could tell Marcus about it. He also is a surgeon.”

  “May I tell you something? There is no place in all Paris he will care less to hear about in a letter from you.”

  Martha laughed.

  They had bought small gifts on the Rue de Rivoli, knit gloves and ties, and stopped at the Ritz for an apéritif. At a shop on the Avenue de l’Opéra, they bought linen handkerchiefs, t
he lace trim of which, Reiss said, would raise a blister on the nose of a gargoyle.

  “Even on Pépé’s,” Martha said.

  “You noticed, too? That dog is obscene—red eyes and a running nose, and a belly like a tea kettle.” He shuddered, having shaped his hand as he might to hold the dog in it. “Perhaps we can go to the opera one evening before Epiphany. Would you like that?”

  “Very much, doctor.”

  “No, only if you call me Nathan. I will not have people say I am escorting a child who calls me doctor.”

  “Do you think I am a child?”

  “An adorable one,” he said, and gently pressed her hand.

  “Nathan, how old would you suppose the Baroness is?”

  He stood apart from her and laughed aloud. “I have known her twenty years and she is no older now. My dear, she is ageless. But if you were to look up in the social register or whatever they call it, it would tell you she was born fifty and some years ago.”

  “No!”

  “And you were going to write your fiancé about the hospital!”

  Martha smiled and took his arm to cross the street. “He’s not really my fiancé, I suppose.”

  “You aren’t going to be married?”

  “Oh, yes, but …”

  When she hesitated, he added, “But he doesn’t know it yet.” He threw up his hand, gesturing for a taxi. “We have two hours. Where would you like to go?”

  “Montmartre, if it’s possible. I have a letter to friends—of a friend.”

  “An artist?”

  “Actually, friends of Doctor Mueller’s wife.”

  “It is a very expensive time to visit artists, let me tell you. Come, we shall make an unforgettable impression.”

  As it happened, Julia Mueller’s friends had gone to the south of France for the holiday, not to the Riviera, but to Aries. They had left behind a number of very sociable acquaintances, however.