The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “How do you think she feels?”

  Marcus did not answer, not understanding.

  “She’s been in love for years with a man who can’t see it.”

  “But not her brother,” Marcus said.

  “No. Not her brother. But sitting above the salt, she’s in a better position for suffering.” Bergner put his hand to Marcus’s elbow. “I understand my father expected you to be brought to him before this. I’d just like to be the one to make that introduction.” To his wife he said, “Louise, wait here for me. I shall be right back.”

  “Give your father my love,” she said after them.

  “I know where to find him,” Bergner explained, steering Marcus into the drawing room again. “I need only follow the music.”

  Marcus saw the old man in the distance. At least his white hair would make one suppose he was old. Almost everyone else was at the doors on their way to dinner. Only the old gentleman sat content, the old gentleman and, apart, a very young girl. Passing, Marcus glanced her way and stopped, for at the instant of their recognition of one another, her quick smile would have stayed him on his way to the moon.

  He murmured a word of excuse to George Bergner and went up to Martha, knowing himself to be also grinning, and feeling a pleasure that seemed inordinate to have been derived from a girl’s smile. He wondered if she could possibly be as glad to see him as she seemed, and indeed, as he hoped. He noticed the height of her forehead and the blue vein of shyness.

  “You wouldn’t by any chance be waiting for me?” he said.

  She shook her head no, and then at a turn in his expression, affirmatively, smiling again.

  “And will you go into dinner with me?”

  “Thank you, Doctor Hogan.”

  “Your eyes are green,” he said. “I thought they were blue.”

  “Sometimes they are,” she said. “It’s the dress.”

  “Don’t go away. I shall come right back here for you.”

  He rejoined George, suddenly more confident, much more confident than he had been at any time since entering this house.

  “Father,” George said when they reached the old man, “this is Marcus Hogan.”

  Dr. Bergner put on his glasses with a trembling hand that Marcus noticed steadying as the glasses touched the nose, and then very slowly, the old gentleman looked at him from shoes to pate. “You go a long ways up, don’t you?” he said. And only then rose from the chair and shook Marcus’s hand. “I thought your name was Thaddeus.”

  “It is on the record, doctor,” Marcus said, “but I was called ‘tadpole’ too often as a kid and I didn’t like it.”

  The old man gave a spurt of sound which had the effect of fluffing his dark mustache. “George Allan here did not care much for his name either. But I think, given the wisdom of his—how old are you?—thirty-two years, he would say now it was about what he could have expected from his father. Louise got a headache?”

  “No. She’s meeting me in the hall. She sent you her love.”

  Dr. Bergner grunted, and said then to Marcus, “I want to speak to you after dinner.” And to George: “Is there a place we can go to talk, Hogan and I?”

  “Why don’t you try the Trophy Room?”

  “Not till I’m atrophied!” his father cried, and with an air of self-pleasure, he asked Marcus, “Do you like puns?”

  Marcus nodded slowly. “I’ll trade them, blow for blow with you, doctor.”

  The old man took his arm and squeezed it slightly, a gesture Marcus noted was not lost on his son. There was not the best of feeling there, he realized.

  Dr. Bergner, his hand still on Marcus’s arm, and starting them toward the doors, said loudly, “Where the hell is that Fields woman? She was supposed to fetch me in to dinner.”

  “Sylvia’s mother,” George explained. “We’re an inbred lot out here.”

  A highly powdered woman of seventy or so, a tiara of jewels on her head, came toward them. Marcus was thereafter to think of her and speak privately of her as “The Dowager.”

  “Where have you been?” Dr. Bergner demanded.

  “Where the king goes on foot,” the dowager said without trace of a smile. “George, Louise looks desolate out there, like a cat at a crossroads.”

  The elder Bergner said, “I want you to meet Doctor Hogan, Alicia, a young man from whom I just might accept assistance one of these days.”

  The dowager looked at Marcus scrutinously. “Do I know the family?”

  “You will, you will,” the old gentleman said, and turning to the musicians who were now putting their instruments away, he called out quite as though he were about to castigate them, “The andante in that last Schubert, gentlemen …” He shook his head so that his jowl and mustache quivered, “… never heard it played better.”

  Marcus, with a gesture to Martha to be patient, waiting for him, asked, “Doctor Bergner, where will you want to see me after dinner, sir? We didn’t settle it.”

  The old man put the question to his son.

  “There’s a library on the second floor. You won’t be disturbed there for years,” George said.

  “But I like to be disturbed,” Dr. Bergner said, with malice in his eye. He released Marcus and gave his arm to Mrs. Fields to whom he added, “Especially by Alicia.”

  George waited for him although Marcus did not ask it while he went for Martha, and when Marcus introduced her, George said, “How marvelous!” It was a remark Marcus did not like even if it were a gratuitous bit of praise and this he somehow doubted. There was, he suspected, a meanness in George Allan Bergner which perhaps came of having a father too big for him. The truth was, Marcus was feeling protective of the tall, fragile-seeming girl whose fingers rested lightly on his arm as they moved toward the dining hall. Therefore, when Bergner suggested that Marcus take Louise in and allow him to take Martha, he resented it fiercely, the more so because he could do nothing but oblige.

  Martha said, “I should think we’ll all be together at the table, won’t we?” Something within herself made her want to withdraw just a little from Dr. Hogan the very instant of coming close to him, not because she in any way feared him—and she had liked him from the very first sight of him—but rather because she feared the disquiet in herself.

  So Martha went into the dining hall on the arm of George Bergner. Passing her father who had a rather plump and operatic-looking woman at his side, she gravely nodded to him, and he looked pleased. His face was flushed so that she was sure he had had a drink or two, sufficient, she hoped, to soothe whatever ailed him. (Annie, no matter what she administered, be it feast or physic, would always say, “Take it. It’s good for what ails you.”)

  George Bergner said, “Do you like Lakewood—from what you’ve seen of it?”

  “Very much.”

  “In spring it’s much nicer. Trillium everywhere and apple blossoms.”

  “I know,” Martha said. “I go to St. Cecilia’s College.”

  “Ah! One of their Marriageable Daughters?” Bergner said.

  Martha laughed. His reference was to the placards in the village store windows advertising the school play: they were doing a version of Pride and Prejudice and the placards read: “St. Cecilia’s College presents Marriageable Daughters.”

  “That’s rather blatant advertising, I’d say,” he went on teasingly. “And are you all really marriageable?”

  “Yes. Only some more than others, I guess.”

  To Marcus, Bergner said, “Below the salt for us, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Well below,” Marcus said. “I shall be lucky if I’m not put out in the yard.”

  The table seemed to stretch from one end of the long room to the other, set for two hundred people and with three wine glasses at every place. Actually, there were ten tables, each far enough from the other to permit servers to pass between, but the shimmering whiteness of the linen sustained the illusion of unity. At either end of the hall a stone fireplace was bright with the blaze of six-foot logs, the glow
of which, along with that of myriad table candles, reflected in the crystal chandeliers and gave the effect of prismatic, changing light.

  Bergner asked to choose their seats, remarking that they would see why presently. It seemed a curious choice he made, to face—beyond the people opposite them—an enormous dark velvet drapery. The other walls were hung with tapestries. Then when everyone was seated, the overhead lights were extinguished, leaving only the candlelight, and the draperies were drawn. They had concealed a dais where presumably dinner was served on lesser occasions, but beyond that there was a series of twelve French doors, permitting the diners this night the vista of a splendid sweep of untrammeled snow.

  “My God!” was Marcus’s awed tribute.

  Martha said, “I wish there was a rabbit—or something alive.”

  Dr. Hogan looked round at her, amused. He did not say anything. Indeed they said very little to each other throughout dinner, the Bergners on either side of them equal to every silence, intruding upon it, but in a way—at least to Martha—leaving it undisturbed. She could not remember ever having felt so perfectly at ease among strangers.

  Marcus, too, was occupied largely with thoughts and emotions which Louise’s amiable chatter did not disturb. She had a fund of unmalicious gossip quite suitable to first acquaintanceship. She was really a very gentle girl, her accent Southern, and after a time she told him she had come from Richmond, Virginia. Marcus, meanwhile, anticipating his post-dinner talk with one of the great surgeons in the country, could not help going over in his mind the Traders City hospitals in which, doubtless, Dr. Bergner had the last word: Metropolitan, Mount Clement, and Bishop’s, to Marcus’s knowledge. Surely, room for T. M. Hogan, M.D., would not overcrowd the staff of one of them. Was a residency too much to hope for? A toast was proposed and drunk to the health of their host.

  “Wouldn’t it kill them here to drink to his election?” Bergner said, directing his remark to Marcus across Martha.

  “Bad manners, do you think?” said Marcus, remembering Sylvia’s appraisal of the company.

  “Where I come from,” Louise said, “only gentlemen go into politics.”

  Bergner said, “Where you come from, dear, there are only gentlemen. Gentlemen and squalor. That’s almost a pun, isn’t it? My father would be proud of me.” He laughed unpleasantly.

  Marcus, addressing himself to Bergner, asked, “Who is the dark woman at Dr. Winthrop’s right?”

  “That’s my mother,” Martha said.

  “Is it? She’s very beautiful.” He was grateful that the girl was too shy to more than glance at him for the moment, and he deliberately avoided meeting Bergner’s eyes which he knew to be waiting his. The fact was he had been startled at the discovery, and he was for some time thereafter preoccupied with it. He could not escape associating it with what he knew of Sylvia Fields, and her proximity with her brother, Dr. Bergner and her mother, to the head of the table. It was not entirely unwarranted to suppose the man with whom she was in love was Winthrop. But Mrs. Fitzgerald sat on his right, and in some remote corner of his memory, Marcus had registered a bit of University gossip.

  Martha asked, “Mr. Bergner …”

  “Please call me George,” he interrupted. “I’m not that old despite the recession.” He pointed to his hair line.

  “George,” she amended. “My father is the man down fourth from my mother. He has white hair. Do you know who the woman is sitting on the far side of him?”

  Bergner, having looked, said, “Why, that’s Gertrude Milgrim, the opera singer.”

  “How wonderful!” Martha said. “But poor papa! He can’t even carry a tune.”

  Bergner laughed aloud, an inordinate burst that angered Marcus and prompted Louise to lean across the table and ask, “What did she say?” Then to Martha, “What did you say, honey?”

  Marcus answered. “She said her father was unmusical and isn’t it strange that he should get an opera singer as his dinner partner.”

  “That’s what I like best about Alexander,” Louise said. “He mixes just all sorts of people.”

  Martha, having observed that Marcus did not repeat precisely what she had said, sensed something to be remiss. It occurred to her then that her father might be under the pall—in George Bergner’s terms—for being several down the table from the top. His own father was sitting across but one from her mother. She said, meaning that a friend is not compromised by a mere seating arrangement, “Dr. Winthrop is my father’s best friend.”

  “So I’ve heard.” Bergner touched his wine glass to Martha’s. “To friendship.”

  Had he looked at Marcus then he would have seen the color of wrath and he might not soon have forgotten it.

  Well over an hour later as they left the table, Martha asked Marcus, “Would you like to meet my mother?”

  “I should—very much,” Marcus said, and deliberately abandoned Louise to her husband. And as they moved among the intermingling guests, he murmured, “A deserving couple.”

  Martha said, “What did you say?”

  “Something nasty, I’m afraid. But not nasty enough.”

  And so he met Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a woman whom her daughter resembled only in height and a certain proud bearing. He supposed Mrs. Fitzgerald to be a person of great passion and deep reserve. That her daughter worshiped her was plain, and it was likely too that she craved more love of her mother than was allowed her … if he were right in the other matter.

  Professor Fitzgerald came up to him and shook his hand. He said, “I’m glad to see you here.” But he did not even mention the young doctor’s name.

  Marcus observed Sylvia Fields watching him, and as soon as the chance came, he introduced Martha to her and her brother. Sylvia, even bitter in love, he felt, would be a far kinder person than George Bergner. He tended, of course, to romanticize in his appraisal of all women.

  Something with which Marcus had not reckoned was Tony Fields’ readiness to take over the only person as young as himself present. George Bergner, who had by then caught up, was the first to see it outside Marcus. Elaborately he set about repairing the damage he knew he had done to any possible friendship between himself and Marcus. It was, though Marcus did not know it then, the pattern in all his relationships: his was a long history of amendment, restitution. In fact, he got on toward his goal with people by overcompensating to them for an earlier and deliberate affront: not to accept him at such a moment would be tantamount to rejecting an apology. His way to Marcus’s heart was to be won, it seemed, by hacking down young Tony Fields. He began a loud recital of Tony’s athletic achievements; the implication plainly was that Tony was a playboy. To Fields himself he said:

  “Isn’t this your time of year to be off somewhere skiing, Tony?”

  “I’m working,” the boy said.

  “Oh. A marvelous experience, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a loathsome experience. Work is a Puritan notion, the only thing out of all the tenets of Christianity they hung onto and the one thing guaranteed to keep the human being on the level of the jackass.”

  He was talking nonsense, but everyone within earshot was amused, Marcus observed.

  Tony, his handsome face flushed with excitement and the pleasure of hearing his own voice, elaborated: “What the devil difference is there in me sitting at a desk behind a stack of Poor’s industrial ratings on the one side and a stack of Moody’s industrial ratings on the other, and the donkey chasing after the carrot in front of his nose? By heavens, the donkey at least cares what’s in the carrot!”

  Bergner said, and then abandoned the defense, “Tony, you’d better care, old boy. You’d better care.”

  “But I care very much,” Tony said. “I’m rather fond of carrots.”

  Martha turned that sudden and wonderful smile of hers on the boy, and Marcus thought that with Bergner to defend him he would not need a prosecutor.

  Martha was no more than a little amused by Tony Fields, and she gave him more attention than she truly wanted to,
but it occurred to her the moment he introduced them that Marcus wished to disengage himself. She supposed he thought her very young.

  Then, just as he was about to go off with Dr. Bergner, Marcus looked around. “Please don’t go far,” he said. “I shall be back.”

  Marcus strode self-consciously alongside Dr. Bergner. It was hard to keep step with him, especially on the highly polished floors, for he had the habit of pulling up suddenly every few steps to draw several deep breaths before proceeding. High blood pressure, likely. The servant guiding them threw open the library door, and then touched a switch which lighted several milk glass sconces along the wall as well as the reading lamps. Marcus’s first thought was that the room had remained unchanged, possibly undisturbed, from the day a decorator had put his imprimatur on it. The servant lighted the fireplace and told them where the bell cord hung if they should wish anything.

  Bergner was rubbing his hands together, looking round the room. “Well, well,” he said, “sixty feet of red vellum, twenty of blue. What’s that?” He trembled a finger at a row of white leather bindings, gold-tooled, near where Marcus stood.

  Marcus said, “Dickens, of all things.” He took a volume from the shelf. “I got my Dickens in six point type and paper as rough as an elephant’s hide. These aren’t even cut.”

  Dr. Bergner took his glasses from his pocket and put them on, tilting his head back then to look at Marcus through them. “Wouldn’t it offend you to see grubby little finger marks all over that exquisite paper?”

  “Not much,” Marcus said and put back the book.

  Dr. Bergner gave the guttural explosion which in him passed for a laugh and put away his glasses. He chose a chair in front of the fire and indicated the one in which he expected Marcus to sit. “Why don’t you have some brandy, Hogan? I’d like to see that—that tassel in operation. I shouldn’t be surprised if it plays ‘Swanee River.’”

  “Will you have something yourself, doctor?”

  “No, damn it. Doctor’s orders, ha!” He scowled. “Who’s this man Fitzgerald?”

  Marcus told him.

  “He’s an ass. I listened to him prate all through dinner. ‘Materialistic scientists.’” He mocked Fitzgerald’s accent. “He’s an Irish bigot. I supposed till now he was a politician—one of those indispensables to a man who wants to be mayor of our metropolis.” Again Dr. Bergner groped for his glasses. He did not keep them on for any length of time ever, merely needing them when he wanted to take a good look at a man, as he did now at Marcus. He said abruptly, “What qualifies you, Hogan—aside from the fact that your mother’s grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother missed the first boat to America—to become an associate of mine?”