Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Marcus went around the car to help him out and up to the steps. The old man delayed him at the car door. “Do you know why George Allan came home?”

  “I understand he’s working for Winthrop.”

  “I mean to live, to live. He’s afraid I might do something like Alicia did.” He gave his dry spate of laughter. “And I just might. Remember how the University got its telescope? Three months to build a planetarium. They got it up, didn’t they? Think about Lakewood. It doesn’t matter whether you think you can teach or not. Men who want to learn, learn. You know that. Was I a teacher? Pah! And it will give you that thing they call … prestige. You know what that is, eh, Marc? That’s the extra zero you can put on your statement at the first of the month.” He took Marcus’s arm and they moved up the step slowly. “As for George Allan, every man’s son has a right to earn his own living, I say.”

  “He hasn’t done badly, Doctor Albert, considering the start you gave him,” Marcus said dryly.

  The old man looked up at him from under the thunderous brow of which Marcus had never really been afraid. Marcus smiled almost impudently, and they went on. His hand on the door knocker, Dr. Bergner said, “Bring your bride to see me next time, eh? There’s nothing wrong with my eyes—just my hands.”

  Marcus dressed at the Fields’ for the evening, Martha having waited there for him while he visited Dr. Bergner, and before leaving for Winthrop’s they had a leisurely drink with Tony and a lovely Chinese girl whom he was taking to the party. Martha knew her slightly from the University; she was in one of Jonathan’s classes. Sylvia left early, having what she called a proprietary interest these days in how things were done at Tamarack. Marcus observed the maturity Tony was reaching, but afterwards when Martha commented on it, he teased her for becoming matronly.

  Already a little late, they decided to be yet a little later and drove in the twilight to the bluff overlooking the lake. After sitting a moment in the car, they got out and stood listening to the early murmur of spring. Creeks were bursting in the first long thaw and the birds were not quite settled for the night. A sudden fanfare of chirping made them both smile, for there was the distinct sound of disgruntlement in it as though one bird had said to the other: for heaven’s sake, can’t I get any sleep in this nest? The green of maturing pussy willows flecked the tawny bushes at the crest of the ravine, the forsythia was popping open its numerous yellow mouths.

  The sky, merging coral with pink with mother-of-pearl, was strung with small, golden-bellied clouds which reflected the setting sun, and were themselves hazily mirrored in the dark, rumpled waters of the lake. When the golds and reds were faded, the watchers returned silently to the car.

  Martha was aware, arriving at Tamarack, of a deep, almost mesmeric contentment which she felt no one could intrude upon. Winthrop came up to greet them, both his hands extended.

  “My tardy congratulations, Doctor Winthrop,” Martha said. “I hope you and Sylvia will be very happy.”

  “Thank you. I’m glad you’ve come,” he said.

  For the moment Martha came very nearly liking him. She knew that Marcus did. And now she must somehow.

  “Your father’s here,” Winthrop said to Marcus, “and those other friends of yours and Sylvia’s. You shouldn’t miss the violinist, by the way.” He nodded toward the great closed doors. “He’s our new concert master.”

  Martha realized how little she really knew about him. Sylvia, she knew, was a patron of the Traders City Symphony. As she and Marcus went into the drawing room she regretted having dragged her heels to have arrived so late. They heard but the final number of the musicale. As the musicians put away their instruments, the guests broke up into small groups, immediately convivial among themselves. Martha caught sight of the Muellers with Sylvia at the far end of the room, but lost them a moment later with the commingling of people in her line of vision. It was all so different from Martha’s memory of her last party here: the room was not so large, more crowded, the guests not so aloof although, to be sure, none fell upon her and Marcus in welcome.

  Jonathan intercepted them as they moved toward their friends. He had driven out with the Muellers, and Martha thought he looked notably handsome in dinner dress, his gray hair brushed into a neat crest. He seemed in no way ill at ease. Nor would he be in any gathering, whether it be here or in Peking, Buenos Aires or Kankakee. A scholar, yet a gregarious man, he enjoyed talking with tinsmith or tycoon. He always listened with interest, even to her, Martha thought. He was naturally curious about almost everything and not at all hesitant about exposing his own ignorances, minute or monumental. Of the latter, despite his protests, she thought there must be exceedingly few.

  Martha counted it one of the truly important things to have happened in her life, friendship with Jonathan. They talked of many things together, often of religion, but neither of them to the purpose of converting the other. Martha had never quite forgotten the Christian burial given her father, the Church in its magnanimity depriving him forever of dignity of purpose, as she saw it. Jonathan had never said one word that might have been construed as deprecation of her father, although she knew how profoundly he must have disagreed with him. He was even sometimes able to explain certain of Fitzgerald’s prejudices. Martha was devout and faithful to the Church still, but she gained through Jonathan her first understanding of why that was uncritically so, and why people of other conviction or faithless, as was Jonathan, might also be as faithful as herself. One could not help it, accepting the creed in which one was reared as the measure of logic as well as ethic. It was almost impossible to criticize the doctrines one felt were true: about as difficult, Jonathan said, as pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. There was gravity of mind as well as of body.

  With Jonathan she and Marcus finally reached the Muellers who, too, had the faculty of fitting in even, Martha decided, where they stuck out. Julia was possessed of what Marcus called the joy of the earth. She was a handsome, laughing woman, well built and corseted, her white bosom brimming the snug, black velvet gown she wore that night; her cheeks were flushed and her black eyes dancing with frank pleasure. She did not have to talk to enjoy herself. Her presence, Marcus observed, had caused a number of gentlemen to join their group. He felt smug, taking a kiss by old prerogative.

  “Ah, Martha,” Erich cried, “do you know who has come…?”

  But Martha did not hear more for at that instant she saw, standing half-face from them a few feet away and talking animatedly to quite a large group of people, Nathan Reiss. He seemed not a stranger at all … and very little changed. The slightest of fleshiness beneath his chin when he smiled was the only suggestion of middle age.

  “You know the gentleman, I see,” Jonathan said, his smile somewhat sardonic.

  “I met him in Europe,” Martha said. “He’s Doctor Mueller’s friend.”

  “I know. I had the pleasure of his company driving out from the city.”

  “I should speak to him,” Martha said.

  “Why?” The question was mischievous.

  “He was very kind to me at a difficult time.”

  “But he, obviously, is not having a difficult time,” Jonathan said. His tone was half-humorous, but Martha, knowing his moods, his levities at moments of least patience, suspected that Nathan Reiss had rubbed him the wrong way.

  “He is a snob, isn’t he?” she said.

  “That, too?” said Jonathan, again a little mockingly. But he took her arm and together they moved to the edge of Reiss’ audience.

  Nathan Reiss had arrived in Traders City only the day before. He told of a harrowing escape from the Nazis, first at the Swiss border, then through France, and finally of a long and nerve-wracking wait in Spain for the necessary papers by which he could and did gain entry to America. The question in any intelligent man’s mind was: why had he waited so long to leave? It was a question Jonathan had asked bluntly on the drive from the city, and with something less, their mutual friend Mueller calculated, than his usual tact.
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  “I had obligations,” was Reiss’ explanation, and of course, Jonathan thought, one does not press a gentleman on his obligations. Erich had got him aside briefly on their arrival at Winthrop’s and explained that there was a woman involved. This Jonathan had not doubted.

  There were at the moment several women involved as well as men, attending Reiss’ discourse on the European situation. He was accounting in some detail the political intrigue behind the fall of France:

  “… One could not say he was not an honorable man. Some would say stubborn. And believe me, the Countess would agree! It was told of him, he was the only man entering her house saying, ‘No,’ and leaving it also saying, ‘No.’ Daladier, on the other hand, was flattered by the attention, the patronage of the Marquise. He is, after all, a peasant, you might say—the baker’s son. It was an extraordinary thing, let me tell you, to watch these two remarkable women playing with men like puppets in the game for France. What they were able to do, they never did. For them the only thing worth doing was the impossible. Therefore …” (He gave a shrug of despair.) “… The Moslems, they have something, you know? They cover the faces of the women.” He looked to the women nearest him. “But I would not want to be a Moslem myself …”

  He had a way, Jonathan thought, as the refugee was pressed for more of his intimate journal, of giving a boudoir atmosphere to matters of grave import.

  Martha, it should be said, cherished an uncritical belief, not necessarily in the truth of what Reiss told, but in the appropriateness of his knowing it. She had remarked during her visit at the Baroness’ the intimacy among her guests, and the casualness with which they discussed the most portentous of national affairs.

  “It is,” Reiss was saying, “the great pity, of course, that the Russians could not have been persuaded to neutrality.” (The Soviet-German Pact was in operation at this time.) “But perhaps it is better: this way we know all our enemies at once.”

  “Does Hitler know his friends? That’s what I’d like to know,” a man prompted.

  Reiss cocked his head. “I do not understand. Please?”

  Jonathan squeezed Martha’s elbow and whispered, “I wonder if Herr Doktor knows his.”

  The explaining gentleman opened with an astounding phrase: “If I were in Hitler’s shoes, I’d be damned sure I deployed half my armies to the east. The Russians are going to turn on him, you’ll see. All that nonsense about their inefficiency, bad equipment—sheer propaganda. It’s my idea they went into Finland in the first place just to pull the wool over our eyes. A red herring, how’s that? They haven’t shown anything like their real strength yet. Nobody knows what they’ve got. When the bear gets the bit between his teeth, God help us all, including Hitler.”

  Jonathan spoke to the man next to him, who was standing, glass in hand. “Excuse me. Who is the gentleman?”

  “Edgar Murray.”

  Jonathan murmured his thanks. Murray was a manufacturer of transport equipment.

  “He’s in a pretty good spot to know what he’s talking about. The Murrays have a lodge in Germany. Hitler’s taken it over for his own use, I understand.”

  “Lend-lease,” Jonathan said dryly.

  His neighbor laughed. “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Charlie Forsberg.”

  “Jonathan Hogan.” The two men shook hands. Jonathan introduced his daughter-in-law. He supposed, as they all turned back to the mainstream of the conversation, Forsberg was trying to place him. He was doing the same of Forsberg, without success.

  “It won’t be Hitler’s first mistake, if Ed’s right,” someone else joined in. The conversation was on the verge of breaking away from Reiss’ domination. “He’s gone a little too far with the Jewish business, I think.”

  There was no great outburst of approval with the observation.

  Then Reiss said, smiling, “You would be surprised, let me tell you, how far they will go to … collect … one Jew.”

  People were amused.

  Someone asked Reiss if he thought the United States would allow itself to be drawn into the war, and Jonathan wondered if the refugee knew he was being tested.

  “No. I don’t think so,” Reiss said carefully. “Perhaps—if what the gentleman proposes—I am sorry, I do not know you by name …”

  Edgar Murray identified himself to Reiss, who acknowledged by bringing his aristocratic body to attention. “I am honored. If, as you propose, Russia is persuaded to stab Germany in the back, you should then be prepared, I think. I do not truly believe Great Britain can stand up to Russia. You do not know, perhaps, how strong the Communist parties are among the working class people in Great Britain—and in France. France is the lesson of the world, let me tell you. If it were not for the Hitler-Stalin collaboration, France would still be France. I should still be in Paris myself.” He went on, very loosely documenting the effectiveness of Communism at internal subversion, and its part in the fall of France; no one seemed to think it in any way contradictory of his prior account of the fall.

  And Jonathan mused on the bitter irony of its truth outside historical context: there was no doubt in his mind that International Communism was now less a Marxist movement than an arm of Soviet foreign policy. The strongest dialectic enemy of Fascism had become its practical abettor. No one here was likely to acknowledge Hitler’s progress an outgrowth of the struggle between capital and labor, or to attribute his appeasement to the fearful horror the British and French upper classes had of joining with the Soviet in any cause, including Hitler’s containment. There were eulogists here for Mussolini, men who could say of Hitler: “If I were in his shoes …” There were, of course, admirers of Churchill, albeit his friendship with Roosevelt was hard for them to stomach. But not a man except himself, not his friend Mueller, a violent anti-Nazi, not his onetime worshiper, Sylvia Fields; no one except himself would realistically credit Stalin with being a practical politician. Sylvia, whom he suspected of once having belonged to the Party, he assumed had left it following the Hitler-Stalin pact, and was these days utterly out of patience with him who had never been in the Party. “Love looks not with the eyes but with mind,” Shakespeare said. Then, said Jonathan, hate looks not with the mind but with the eyes.

  “Then it is your opinion, Doctor Reiss,” a woman said, her words affectedly precise, “that the real enemy is Russia?” Americans, particularly Midwesterners, have a passion for precision. The word “real” is the most frequent adjective—or adverb—in their speech.

  “But of course!” Reiss cried with superb éclat.

  “I’m very glad to hear you say it,” the woman remarked and, turning to the man at her side, she added, but loudly enough for everyone to hear, “I must say I felt much better about it all, having Hitler and them on the same side.”

  Much as Martha admired Jonathan, she could not but admit that deeply within herself she felt the same way about it. Fascists were more explicitly detestable in alliance with the Russians. One needed no longer give them credit for having done some good things—as for example, Mussolini’s signing of the Lateran Treaty with the Vatican. One could now clearly understand that his motives were in no way religious.

  The moment Martha’s and Nathan Reiss’ eyes met, his smile was as quick as her own. She felt the color rise in her cheeks. He excused himself to those nearest him and made his way to her.

  “There were times I did not think this moment would ever come,” he said, and pressing her hand, lifted it to his lips.

  “You already seem at home, Nathan. But I bid you welcome anyway.”

  “I have had your little book to guide me. Do you remember?”

  “Yes.” She turned to include him, but Jonathan was gone from her side.

  “I suppose my bracelet to you is at the bottom of the sea?”

  “It must be at the bottom of somewhere,” Martha admitted. “I want you to meet my husband.”

  “So do I,” Reiss said. “A man so fortunate.”

  She wished he would not say such things. E
ven in Paris she had scarcely been able to cope with the self-consciousness they caused her. “Is the Baroness well, Nathan?”

  “If God is with her, she is well. I was not able to get her out.”

  “She is in Germany?”

  “I should suppose she is in a concentration camp somewhere. I have not been able to find out.”

  “The Red Cross, perhaps,” Martha suggested.

  “Perhaps. It is a very tragic story. I will tell you some time. But not tonight.” The pursing of his mouth, the full lower lip protruding, gave his mien a quality of sadness, regret. It made a demand on one’s sympathy. Martha remembered his having had something of the same expression after the incident at the Heldenplatz. She took his arm by way of guiding him to Marcus, and moved by this frank quest of sympathy, she pressed his arm ever so slightly. Lo! even as on that other occasion, he was immediately gay again. “I have not been in company such as this for a very long time. Lakewood I have heard of, of course, but I did not know. You do not live here?”

  “No.”

  He sighed. “One would need a great deal of money, I suppose.”

  Marcus was with Tony Fields and Miss Ling, and with them also were George and Louise Bergner. The introductions accomplished, Reiss was soon talking with Tony about sailing. He had a “social instinct,” as Martha’s mother called good breeding. Yet, Martha thought, there was something about him which would stay her from saying he was well bred. Perhaps, she realized, it was the fact that she knew him to be Jewish. He did sense quickly the interests of those with whom he was talking, and if he was shallow, as Martha suspected, he was so graceful it scarcely mattered. He could, without seeming abrupt, turn from talk of sailing ships to say to Marcus, “I wonder if your wife has told you—I tried to win her away from you in Paris?”

  “I’d be insulted if you hadn’t,” Marcus said.

  Everyone laughed.