Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Poets and peasants,” Sylvia said, sitting down with her secretary to compose the guest list, “why in hell couldn’t I have been born one of them?”

  Maria smiled brightly. It was not the first of her employer’s remarks she had not understood, although she served as interpreter, purchasing agent and household mediator. Maria had applied for the position supposing it from Sylvia’s advertisement to be that of a governess. She was delighted at her status, and she was hopeful of returning to America with the family. Her father had been a caterer before the war and she had been educated in one of the better convent schools. She had had some business school training afterwards at her father’s insistence, for he had no son to inherit from him. But her father was dead, the business gone, and at twenty-six, Maria became the perfect assistant to Sylvia. In the matter of the guest list she was able to give the backgrounds of most of Naples’ aristocracy, and to drill Sylvia in their titles.

  Now and then Sylvia would ask of certain of them: “He wasn’t a Fascist, was he?”

  “Never. A Monarchist.” Maria’s answer was invariable.

  The King’s own presence was all she needed, Sylvia thought, to hold court. There was a name on the list that gave her pause: Johanna Maria Rachel, the Baroness Schwarzbach. She had not to her knowledge met the woman, but something in the name rang familiarly. Or perhaps it stood out in her mind because it was not Italian.

  Maria said, in answer to her question: “It is a name familiar in banking. I believe the Baroness has been living in Ischia during the war.”

  There was a number of names on her list familiar in banking, Sylvia thought, and dispatched the invitation with the others. To satisfy her own sense of proportion, Sylvia included persons eminent in theater, music, and the arts, including the writer, Marcello Ruggeo, whom she knew to be a friend of Jonathan Hogan’s. The moment she added that name, Sylvia began to feel better about the whole affair.

  The Winthrop house in Naples, above the park on the Via Curcciola, commanded a spectacular view of the Bay from the grand salon. The mansion itself reminded her of Tamarack which had been, after all, transplanted Italian. She would not have chosen a place anywhere near so pretentious, but Winthrop said his choice had been that or a share-the-bath pensione. Its owner had spent the war in Brazil. A partisan in nuts, Sylvia suggested. Winthrop was amused, but for all that he had once run for mayor of Traders City, a town gauchely but proudly scornful of royalty, he was still much in awe of titles.

  On the morning Marcello Ruggeo received his invitation to the Winthrop dinner, his mail arrived at the same time as his newspapers. He paid a gamin of the neighborhood twenty lire to bring his papers to him every day, and that morning, having just received a package from his wife in New York, he gave the boy a chocolate bar as well. He had rather counted on the pleasure of seeing him eat it. But the youngster buried it in his coat lining and set off at a deliberate pace. He could sell it on the black market for two hundred lire, Ruggeo supposed. A cunning arab, he would piously take the twenty lire home and spend the two hundred—God knows on what—something he could further trade on the black market.

  Ruggeo left the windows open. The air was ripe with the smell of fish, its pungency a great deal more pleasant than that of the green leather in the process of home tanning on the floor beneath him.

  He glanced at his mail, and seeing nothing he wanted to open at once, read the papers first. Their reading gave him no satisfaction. The word from London bode ill for Italy at the peace table. Jonathan had prophesied better than he knew. Or fate had played it his way. Roosevelt was dead. Jonathan had been more sanguine of Italy’s chances when the Labor Government replaced Churchill. Bevin himself had said: “We must not continue to treat Italy as if Mussolini were still in power.” But it was hard to see a difference in Britain’s attitude. And Stalin had a long arm at the end of which was an iron fist.

  Ruggeo’s man, Parri, the Actionist, was now premier of a delicately balanced coalition government: his new economic policy was outlined in that day’s L’Italia Libera.

  In the north at the time of the liberation, the partisans had taken over control of the factories, displacing such managers as had Fascist histories; Parri, on becoming premier, had pledged the financial purge of those who had become rich through Fascism. Now his economic plan called for allocation of raw materials to favor small firms over the trusts entrenched during Mussolini’s rule. It was a brave program—with small chance under Allied occupation. In the name of efficiency—of getting Italy back on its feet, a favorite American expression, the Allies preferred the old management system. They admitted the faults, but resisted the reforms. Parri was seeking general elections, a popular mandate for his program. The right was stalling. The Allies, officially aloof, unofficially favored delay. The rumor of it was abroad; so was rumor of dissension among the Left. And again as Hogan had prophesied, the Communists while ostensibly backing Parri, were maneuvering at his expense, trying to make a deal with the Christian Democrats.

  Ruggeo paged through the paper and then turned to one he read for news, not for opinion. An item at the bottom of page one made him laugh aloud, a sound that might as well have been a howl of pain. The American financier, Gemini, had arrived in Rome to explore the possibilities for private American bank loans to acceptable Italian industry. Acceptable.

  Ruggeo crumpled the newspaper and flung it across the room.

  “The Resistance is dead,” he said aloud. “Write the word into history. The harvest of Fascism is Fascism. What folly to sow grain in a field unpurged of mustard seed.” He lit a cigaret and repeated the words and then sat down to write them.

  It was noontime, his fever of despair broken by the writing, and while he drank a cup of instant coffee and ate a heel of yesterday’s bread that he opened the invitation from Colonel and Mrs. Alexander Winthrop.

  He read it and sat a long time thinking about it, looking now and then from it to the twelve pages he had just finished writing. He looked around the room and contemplated each object separately, his necessities of life: the iron gas burner on the ledge of the gray marble sink, the swan-necked faucet which either leaked or drew no water at all; the half-made bed against the sweating yellow plaster wall; the bookcase stacked with manuscript, propaganda all; the uncurtained windows opening upon his neighbor’s laundry; the rug worn thin by the tread of his own feet, the fly-specked pictures of his wife and children who were waiting a welcome home to a country which the children by now had forgotten.

  “I am a novelist,” he said. “Not a statesman, not even a politician, not a propagandist.” And staring yet at the pictures, but not seeing them any longer, he thought about a cottage in some quiet valley where he could smell the earth and the smoke of a wood fire, and write of love and loneliness and a vintage of bitter wine.

  After a time he typed the article and prepared it for mailing. But before he went out with it, he wrote a letter to Jonathan who was in London, an American adviser on how to save Italy! He wrote in part: “My friend, you said in your last letter you proposed a trip to Italy during your first recess. I hope it can be arranged to coincide with the date of an affair to which I have this morning received an invitation. I am sure you will be as welcome among that company as myself …”

  The guests began arriving promptly at nine o’clock. The Marchese of Bordagne, for one, who trained his chauffeur as he might an athlete in timing the distance between his villa and the few houses he chose to visit in the city. Since he was making an exception of the “American affair”, he was so delighted to arrive on the instant that his high booming laughter rang out when he and the chauffeur checked the latter’s watch as soon as the Marchese stepped from the car. It was a reassuring sound, that laughter, when he emitted another peal of it having urged the Marchesa to make haste getting out lest they be late through no fault of his or Paolo’s, reassuring to those within the house that guests were indeed coming, and to those in the next automobile who did not wish to arrive before someone
more important than themselves. Thereafter the guests drew up in a constant, slow-moving procession, and emerged by twos and fours from limousines of ancient but enduring elegance. Jeweled tiaras sparkled. The gloss of shimmering furs, too, was caught in the soft light of the lamps set out along the walk. The great outer gates of iron grill work stood open, the crest of the DiNatale family freshly gilded shone above the entry. The hall within was a pearl-like suffusion of candle and muted electric bulbs. The walls betwixt mirrors and doors were an oyster white, and gave off the faintest odor of fresh paint which only occasionally penetrated the more prevailing fragrance of flowers. Two great urns of carnations, red and white, stood on either side of the entry to the grand salon.

  Sylvia received with as little ceremony as possible, making no effort to commend her guests to a company they knew far better than did she. She wore a close-fitting gown of pale gold lamé, her only jewelry black pendulous earrings of onyx. Maria, with almost mystical inconspicuousness, was never beyond her reach. Sylvia herself could not even judge the prestige of her party by her guests’ selection among their jewels for the occasion as she could have done at Lakewood. From the assortment of sashes and medallions worn by the gentlemen, however, she suspected they were doing all right. And Winthrop, in his one aside to her of the evening, said: “By God! This is the real thing.”

  It would be a shame if it weren’t, Sylvia thought, considering how much it had cost.

  Drinks and hors d’oeuvres were served in the middle salon as Sylvia understood to have been the custom of the house. The room was particularly felicitous, at once spacious and intimate. The ceiling beams divided scenes from Virgil and Ovid done in warm mosaic. The walls were rose-colored silk damask and were hung with portraits of the DiNatale family which showed the Spanish strain—not so much in the family, although the Spanish blood was strong in it as in numerous Neapolitan families of the class—but in the artist who had painted them. At either end of the room were smaller salons providing refuge for those wishing more intimate conversation, or in the case of the “piccolo salon”, for gentlemen wishing to smoke cigars and talk of politics.

  A woman, however handicapped by the language barrier—and gossip employs the subtlest shadings of language—can nonetheless sense its presence. A special shaping of mouths accompanies it, an ascent of the eyebrows, a little quiver of nostrils, for the most refined of human huntresses reverts at the moment to the instinct of scent, and a welling within the eyes of some untold suspicion which is at once sniggled out by the quickened observer. Of such manifestations was Sylvia aware among a coterie of guests surrounding the Countess Bardoni. That Sylvia herself was drawn into their midst by a compliment from the Countess, an austere, dark woman noted among her kind for an aspen tongue, and held there by a series of inquiries about a charity she knew they resented, led Sylvia to suppose the object of their gossip had not yet arrived. She awaited a clue among the delicate ploys.

  “Americans are impatient of nature’s healing,” Madame de Lignon said, referring to Sylvia’s rehabilitation center.

  Sylvia said: “True. We cultivate impatience as though it were a virtue.”

  “Direct, direct,” the Countess said, speaking in French. “Precision in everything except government. Is that not so?”

  “We delude ourselves about being precise there, too,” Sylvia said, intending a small witticism.

  There was a flurry of assents as though to please her.

  The moment Sylvia allowed her eyes to stray to the door provided Madame de Lignon the subtle association by which she could at last broach the subject of her curiosity.

  “We are to be honored tonight, I have heard rumor, by the company of the Baroness Schwarzbach.”

  “She accepted,” Sylvia said, and since Maria had reported most of the guests to have arrived, she added: “I’ve been wondering if she’s in the habit of making an entrance.”

  She was pressed for the meaning of her words and in trying to explain, Sylvia used the Italian phrase, bella figura. It brought her companions to the brim of mirth. She had scored a splendid mot with them unintentionally, and going over in her mind the meaning of the colloquialism she had used, she realized it had the sense of “putting up a good front.” She had asked, in effect, if the Baroness Schwarzbach was putting up a good front. Observing thereafter a quite unsubtle warming in the atmosphere, Sylvia thought: Oh, God. Now I’m one of the girls.

  On the arrival then of other guests, she escaped them with a mixture of gratitude and regret. Her own curiosity had been aroused.

  Sylvia caught sight of Jonathan from the salon door and abandoned decorum in her joy to see him. Her haste was constrained only by the snugness of her gown. “Jonathan! How marvelous you are here! And you must stay some time with us. As long as you like.” She kissed him on both cheeks, holding fast his cold, dry hands. He looked tired, the tic pronounced, but to her by far the handsomest man present. She would never understand how it was possible for anyone not to love him. Just to look at him, the kind eyes, quizzical, humorous, the shy smile, gave her pleasure. From her youth she had idolized him, and she felt deeply privileged in the right to show her love of him.

  Ruggeo watched them, amused, but his fair brow was drawn nonetheless. His very stance, feet slightly spread, bespoke belligerency. He well knew he had come to camp with his enemies. But much, he thought, was to be observed under a flag of truce.

  Winthrop shook his hand warmly and drew both men toward the salon door. There however he had to leave them, for at that moment the Baroness Schwarzbach arrived, and with her Alberto Gemini, the American banker.

  Ruggeo said, quoting a Jonathan phrase to Jonathan: “There you have it, my boy. There you have it. In the trusts we trust. I may get drunk tonight. I should have warned you.”

  “Who is she?” Jonathan said. Who Gemini was he knew.

  “It would be far easier for me to tell you what she is,” Ruggeo said under his breath.

  The name Schwarzbach occurred frequently in the financial history of Europe, but Jonathan did not know it in any contemporary reference.

  The two men drew aside not to impede the entrance of so estimable a couple to the waiting company. Gemini was a bald, sturdy man in his sixties. He might have been a wrestler in his youth, Jonathan thought, for it was easy to surmise a supple, muscled body beneath the well-tailored clothes. But the Baroness: who could tell the face of a woman beneath its facsimile? Not Jonathan. She was plump, gowned in black sequin above which she burgeoned, a vast exposure of shoulder and bosom. She wore her hair a reddish tint beyond the reach of nature. Her eyes, he could not be sure, but he thought were dusted round with sparkle. Not diamond dust, surely! Bold she was and a little vulgar, a quality Jonathan did not find unattractive when set against the austere repression locked within the eyes of a majority of the women present. He sensed rather than actually saw the electric response of the men to the pair’s entrance, and he did not suppose the cupidity which Gemini might arouse to be quite that voluble. Did none of them have mistresses, he wondered.

  “For heaven’s sake, tell me something about the woman,” Jonathan said.

  “She’s an Austrian Jew. She could and did get out in 1940.”

  “There were others,” Jonathan said. He thought at the moment of Nathan Reiss, little realizing the connection.

  “She must have come close to outstaying her welcome,” Ruggeo went on. “It was probably a scandal in the Third Reich. Afterwards, she lived out the war in a special kind of retirement in Ischia.”

  “So she bought her way out,” Jonathan said when his friend again hesitated. “It happened.”

  Ruggeo threw back his head and bared his teeth although he was not smiling. “It’s a loathsome story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

  Jonathan was watching, fascinated at the moment, a curious pattern of social activity that struck him as being very nearly ritualistic: the women, each apparently after a signal from her own husband, were disengaging themselves from the group
to which they were attached at the time of Gemini and the Baroness’ entrance, and then joining their husbands and approaching the Baroness and her escort. The movement was not quite that pronounced—and certain individuals hung back, also observing—but Ruggeo was aware of it too, Jonathan saw. His mouth set in a hard, sardonic grin.

  “Yes, I want to hear it,” Jonathan said.

  “She crossed into Swiss waters with the Gestapo officer charged with her arrest.” Ruggeo’s words became clipped. “I never saw him. Handsome, I’ve heard. Virile, we may be sure. Theirs must have been an idyllic life for five secluded years. What rumors came out of those remote hills, I don’t know. She was not herself unknown to the islanders. The estate has been in the Schwarzbach family for generations, from the days Ischia was more stylish than Capri. As I say, what rumors escaped, I don’t know. But when the partisans rose in the North last spring, a certain group arrived in Ischia also. They surrounded, captured and hung the Nordic stud at the villa gate.”

  Jonathan said nothing.

  “Decadence and barbarism, the full circle of man,” Ruggeo said, his lips pale as he again drew them tightly across his teeth.

  Jonathan put his hand to the man’s elbow. “Let’s have a drink.”

  They moved toward the long buffet, abandoned at the moment by all except the servants and a few people whom Ruggeo could call his kind, the painter, Cavelli, the Rome correspondent for the London Record whom Jonathan also knew, a composer and a scenic designer who lived together on Capri, others. British and Americans, high in the Allied Commission, were also apart, observing while making desultory conversation.

  Jonathan indicated the group surrounding the Baroness and Gemini. “Do they know the story?”

  Ruggeo shrugged. “I know it. It was never printed in the public press, if that’s what you mean. The conservative press has a strong instinct for self-preservation where a matter is likely to affect their own class. And the liberals among us, Jonathan, have a conscience. It stings us every time we hear the word, Jew.”