Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “There’s something you and I have got to remember, Nathan. We’re both hired help. Whether we like it or not, that’s what we are, hired help.” He decided to make a double batch of martinis.

  Louise brought her empty glass.

  “So,” Reiss said, smiling, “we are all in the same boat as they say. Do you like sailing, George?”

  It was a few seconds before George realized that he had meant the question literally. “I love it,” he said self-mockingly, “as long as it isn’t my boat.”

  “Good. Martha will make the arrangements with Louise and Sylvia.”

  Louise put her hand through her husband’s arm. She was always affectionate after the first drink. After the third, he knew how she really felt. “Shall we go?”

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “Very much. I’ve been feeling so out of things till now.”

  “Then accept with pleasure, my dear. Accept with pleasure.” And transferring the bottle from one hand to the other, George folded Louise’s hand within his, his index finger still doubled from where he had left off counting the jiggers. It became an obscene gesture he had learned in college and had not to his recollection used since. He was much surprised to see his wife blush.

  8

  TAD SAT ON THE pier and dangled his feet in the water. Sometimes, with the motion of the lake, the long grass swayed and touched his outstretched toes, and sometimes he could catch a spike of it between his big toe and the one next to it. This was but a passing distraction and he began presently to weep again the tears of the righteous. Righteousness does not last very long with a small boy, however, and he had to stare hard at the receding sailboat with the three men aboard and imagine himself upon it—as it was his right to be—in order to prime the source of his tears. He had the most distinct recollection of his mother’s saying that he, Tad, and Nathan sailed the Lorna Doone beautifully, and his Uncle Alexander had expected him to be aboard. But at the last moment he had been bumped off, and he knew it was because Mr. Bergner was too fat.

  He had behaved badly, he knew, and he did not expect his mother to speak to him until lunch time or until he could go to her and tell her he had apologized to Nathan. He was always having to apologize to Nathan. Not actually. His apologies bored both Nathan and him. All he had to do was tell his mother he had apologized. He discovered he could even get away with the subterfuge if Nathan were present. Afterwards, when they were alone, Nathan would say, “So. You apologized, did you? Where was I at the time?” “Right there,” Tad would say, or, “You must’ve been there.” “And what did I say?” Nathan would tease. “You said I was a good boy.” “And are you?” Tad would sometimes shrug or sometimes say in a speculative manner, “No, I guess I’m not.” And Nathan would laugh and shake his finger and say, “That is one more thing we must not tell your mother. She thinks you are a very good boy.” It was a funny game to play, mixing up good with bad, right with wrong. He did not really like Nathan, but that was part of the game, too, pretending that he did. Except on occasions like this morning when Nathan had bumped him off the boat, and he said, “I hate you.” Nathan had patted him on the head and said, “How can you say that, mein Tad, when I love you?” “That’s a lie!” Tad said, and everyone had been shocked. Thus had he learned what he thought a very important thing about adults: you could say anything was the truth to them, but you couldn’t say a lie was a lie.

  He did not expect his mother to speak to him, but he had expected his Aunt Sylvia to come out and say, “Oh, there you are!” and suggest that he and she go horseback riding.

  The people next door had not come out this weekend, and the caretaker’s boy and another youngster from the village were fishing from their pier. They wouldn’t catch anything but bullheads, but bullheads were most delicious, skinned and fried outdoors. If he went over and fished with them, or even just watched them, they would invite him to the fishfry, especially if he had fifteen cents for a bag of potato chips. He stood up and started to take the leather strap of the field glasses from around his neck. Nathan had put the glasses in his hands by way of consolation. “You can watch what I do wrong and tell me.” To the others he had said, “Tad is a very fine sailor.” Tad had felt like throwing the glasses into the lake, and he might have done it had not his Uncle Alexander been there.

  He was starting up the steps when he heard the commotion on the water. He turned and saw almost at once that the sailboat was in trouble. The boom looked to be swinging loose. Men in the two fishing boats in its vicinity were trying to start their motors, and one got going, speeding toward the Lorna Doone. The boys on the next pier were shouting and pointing. Tad lifted the field glasses and had just got them focused when he heard his mother’s voice and Aunt Sylvia’s, and then their running footsteps. On the boat he could see Nathan hanging onto one of the other men who seemed to be falling over the side, tilting the Lorna Doone terribly. Then he saw Mr. Bergner bracing himself near the stern, not doing anything but sitting, hanging onto either side.

  Tad did not hear the questions, exactly, but he said, “It’s Uncle Alexander. He’s sick. They’re going to tip if they don’t watch out.” The mainsail described a semi-circle, the boom loose. “Why doesn’t Mr. Bergner help?”

  His mother took the glasses from him at that moment, but with his naked eyes he saw the Lorna Doone go over, the men disappear for the moment.

  “It’s all right,” Martha kept saying. “Nathan has him … and the other boats are coming.”

  “Where’s George? Is he in the water?” That was Mrs. Bergner asking a foolish question, Tad thought, since there was no place else he could be after the boat tipped over.

  “I see his head,” Martha said, then she began to pray: “Sacred Heart of Jesus …” Annie prayed, but he had not heard his mother pray since he was very small.

  Tad became aware of Sylvia’s hands upon his shoulders; they were as hard as the claws of a hammer when he tried to free himself of their grasp. “I wish I was there,” Tad said. “I could have saved them.”

  “I wish you were, too,” Sylvia said, but squeezed his shoulders until it was quite painful.

  “Maybe I ought to go in and call a doctor,” Mrs. Bergner said.

  Martha said, “Nathan is a doctor. There now, they’re all being hauled aboard that motor boat. It’s going to be all right! Thank God—oh, thank God!” Martha thrust the glasses back in Tad’s hands and ran up the steps. “I’m going to call for an ambulance anyway.”

  Sylvia said harshly, “It’s not going to be all right. I can tell it in my heart. Go into the house with your mother, Tad.” She tried to give him a turn and a shove and then added, but distractedly, “I’ll call you if I need you.”

  “I want to stay with you, Aunt Sylvia.”

  So the boy stayed and watched the dreadful ceremony of the living trying to stave off the death of one of their own. He watched, fascinated, the deftness of Nathan’s hands working at the chest, then the arms of Dr. Winthrop. Then Tad saw with horror what he presumed was Nathan kissing the mouth of Alexander, so that he supposed his uncle dead, but the kiss was so long, and the sound was a sucking sound such as Tad could never bear to hear a poor landed fish make when it gasped for air. Aunt Sylvia’s face was gray and stiff as she knelt on the dock beside her husband. Martha brought brandy, and when Nathan said he did not need it, she gave it to Louise who poured it all over Mr. Bergner’s face. Mr. Bergner looked like a balloon, Tad thought, getting more and more puffed up. Tad heard the siren of the ambulance, and a dozen boats were coming where there had not been but two in sight before.

  Finally Nathan shook his head, the water dripping from his hair and nose. “It was a coronary in the first place, Sylvia.”

  “He just d-d-d-doubled up,” George said, stuttering with the chill, “and then toppled over.”

  Sylvia slowly put her head down upon the chest of her husband, whimpering, and everybody else turned away.

  Martha picked Tad up in her arms and carried him up to
the house. He too was crying because he knew Sylvia was. In the house, Martha sat in the big chair and held him. She smelt like flowers and her breast was soft where he had one fist in it. He would have liked to put his face there, but he was too big, and he had already made himself as small as he could.

  9

  THE STRANGE THING WAS that in the days after she had heard of Alexander’s death, Elizabeth thought oftener of Walter than of him, and sometimes walking down the hill to the Coast Road and along it to the village, she would say aloud to herself, “Alexander’s dead,” and try to think just what it meant to her. The fact was that Alexander had been dead to her for a long time. A certain wild feeling might flare within her remembering of a moment—as when the door of the cottage among the dunes closed them first alone together—but it passed more quickly than the throb of the heart or a murmur of pain. All the rest of the time, if she thought of him at all, it was in his peculiar relationship to Walter: the man who Walter thought the greatest success in the world. He admired all the unimportant things in Alexander, and dismissed his virtues. Something had got in the way of Walter’s understanding very early in life, perhaps in the discipline he tried to put on himself when he thought he could become a priest. He had still been of that mind when he and Elizabeth had met in her aunt’s house: a maiden lady’s notion of the ideal match, her wild Elizabeth and the ascetic boy. He had had God in his heart, as the old saying went, but the devil in his britches. When he had given it all up and let the devil out, his condition was soon worse; he must have thought himself spoiled in two ways instead of one, as a priest and as a man.

  Love. What had man to give to man but love? What of worth but love’s kindness? Yet one remembered one’s own cruelties and deceptions. She often thought of the Sunday afternoon when Martha had tried to look deep into her eyes while she asked, “Mother, do you really like Doctor Winthrop?” And she had said as lightly as she could that she did like him. When the girl was gone, hurt, thinking she had lied to her, Elizabeth had thought to herself: I have given up my soul for love of him and now I have given up my child’s soul. Which was not so. Martha had found her own way to the goodness and decency there was in Alexander, she had fought for compassion within herself and had found it. It was in her letters, in her reticences as well as in her revelations: she wrote of Alexander and his death remembering Marcus, Elizabeth thought, although Marcus’s name never appeared in the letter.

  Elizabeth had herself grieved over Marcus’s death as no one else could know. The death of a phantom lover she could say now in the half-sentimental, half-cynical self-examination of a woman who knows her passion forever spent. She wondered if anyone except herself could understand Martha’s marriage to Nathan Reiss. To embrace a demon fulfilled a lust for death. How near to insanity that could take one, she thought she knew. But day by day, the living hands reached out to pull one back: friends, work, the child, above all the child, and in time the demon could be made to seem respectable, and lies to oneself only lesser truths.

  The last of Elizabeth’s war refugees had long since returned to England to homes or government schools. A priest had come down from Belfast to try to persuade her to turn McMahon Manor into an orphanage; when she declined, he had broached, with much clearing of his throat, the possibility of making it a home for “waywards.” “Father,” she had said with an old deviltry, “I didn’t know there was prostitution in Ireland.”

  The priest, with a blandness to match her own, had said, “There isn’t, Mrs. Fitzgerald, which is why we have to find a home for the prostitutes.”

  But to create a charity for its own sake was not Elizabeth’s way to self-fulfillment. She had been able and most willing to do a job when there was no one as well situated as herself to do it with the war orphans. She could be charitable for the sake of others, but not for her own sake, a distinction the priest necessarily disapproved. He did not press the matter, however: Philip McMahon was nearing seventy, and his sister a well-preserved sixty, he thought, and then confirmed it among the parish records. But even if the McMahons were longer-lived than himself, the church was the natural heir to an Irish estate without Irish beneficiaries. He reminded Elizabeth of this and was content in having fulfilled the mission assigned him.

  It was while walking along the Coast Road on a summer day so clear she felt she could reach across the water and touch Scottish soil that Elizabeth thought first of going up to London to see Jonathan Hogan. He had not come to visit her and Philip that summer, and he was no longer teaching. When last Philip had seen him, he had taken rooms within walking distance of the British Museum, devoting himself entirely to research on his book. She wondered if she should write him first and decided against it. A little obstacle, if she allowed herself to contemplate it, could become a great barrier. She had not been out of Ireland in over thirteen years. Her brother phoned his London housekeeper to open the flat for her and Elizabeth brought her wardrobe somewhat up to date in Belfast.

  Philip drove her to Dublin and chided her on what sort of a rendezvous she was going to have with Hogan to be getting herself up this way.

  “It’s with an old, old, man, I’m afraid,” she said, and yet there was a curious gaiety in her heart.

  “For the love of God, Elizabeth, don’t you know any young ones? I’m sick to death of sitting down opposite myself to a glass of port and a game of chess.”

  “But you do like Jonathan,” she said.

  “So that’s how it is,” Philip said, and got the car up a kilometer or two faster.

  It was a moment later that Elizabeth said, “That’s how what is?”

  Philip took his gloved hand from the wheel long enough to remove the empty pipe from his mouth. He set it in the ashtray, a suction-cupped American import that could be fastened atop the dashboard. “I’d rather he was a man who liked to hunt a bit.”

  “I remember he loved to garden,” Elizabeth said. “I remember Martha coming home and telling me the first time she met him.”

  Philip grunted and drove on a distance before he asked, “Will I have the cottage aired? Or will you want the south wing opened up for him?”

  Elizabeth looked around at him, startled. “Whatever gave you an idea like that?”

  “My dear Elizabeth, I know you well enough by now, sister of mine. You’ve never gone on a mission and come home to me empty-handed yet.”

  “Once I did, Philip,” she said, and looked ahead at the road they were about to climb, ribbed with ruts, but hedged along by the fragrant honeysuckle. “When I first came home.”

  “Empty-handed! You brought me yourself, didn’t you? And little I knew all that was coming with you.”

  “Has it been that bad truly?”

  “That bad or that good. It depends on which side of Parliament you’re sitting.” He shifted gears and concentrated on getting the car up the hill. Going down he said, “You haven’t told me yet which rooms to have opened.”

  “I think none.” But presently she added, “We shall have to see.”

  10

  THE SHAWL FELL FROM Jonathan’s knees but he let it lie, for the sun was warm and there was scarcely any breeze. The scent of the freshly scythed hay was in the air, and from his chair at the cottage door he could see the farmer forking it into cocks. There was a timelessness to the scene which would not be so much longer. Even in Ireland in another generation what farmers were left would do their work entirely by machinery, and he who had said “shame” for all his lifetime on those who cherished the past above the present was glad that there was still a solitary gleaner on the land. He was reminded of Isak Dinesen’s story, Sorrow Acre, which if he were to have to choose from seventy years of reading he would call the greatest short story ever written. But at seventy-seven one did not have to choose. One knew. He lifted a blue-veined, loose-skinned hand to shade his eyes and watched the swallows swoop and soar, two by two. They also seemed to know. For all of the uncertainties of youth, courtship never wavered in its goal. He lifted his face to the sun the
n and closed his eyes. “What is so rare as a day in June? Then if ever come perfect days …” He always felt that an Englishman should have written those lines, a Lake poet, Wordsworth probably. But it was an American, a Massachusetts Lowell.

  He had himself married a Massachusetts woman, high-born as they came in America, and in a way it had prospered both his sons—in a democracy. He had courted her in Boston while he was in graduate school there. He could remember the striped coat he wore on the afternoon he first took her boating. It seemed, even from this distance, to have been as loud as Joseph’s. What was a man that he remembered his own coat before he could remember the girl, and then only a whispering smile of her while he could still feel the texture of the coat?

  “Jonathan, are you sleeping?”

  “I’m dreaming.” He turned his head only and, squinting from the after-glare of the sun, saw Elizabeth with her basket and flower shears. “What kind of a man is it who can remember the coat he wore on his first date and can’t remember the girl?”

  “It probably fit you badly.”

  How she indulged him! Now she was even making excuses for his youth.

  “Well, the girl fit me better, I shall say that. That was in Boston about 1900. I don’t suppose you were born yet.”

  “I was already gathering rosebuds where I might,” Elizabeth said, and picked up the shawl from where it had fallen at his feet. She must have been an absolutely stunning beauty, he thought, for she was a handsome woman still, her head high, the gray-streaked black hair drawn tightly away from the patrician forehead. “Jonathan, do you know what day it is?”

  “I do. They’ll be getting on the boat today. I’m glad they’re not flying, you know. And not for their sake especially. For my own. I want them to come soon, but not suddenly. That’s an old man’s distinction, I expect.”