The room was a small solarium, its double doors open upon the dance, its opaque glass ceiling veiling them from the eyes presumably in the adjoining building. Gold, brown and white chrysanthemums banked the walls, their pungent sweetness pervasive in the room.
“Almost twenty years,” the Baroness said as they sat side by side in chairs of Danish leather. “We did not know then what lay between us and our next meeting, and isn’t it well not to know?”
The Baroness arranged her plump jeweled hands in the shape of a cupola in her lap. “Now it is you I wish to talk about. You have a beautiful son. His father must have been a splendid person. Such a tragedy. I wish you would tell me about him. Once before I tried to coax you. You were too shy. But oh, I remember your eyes the morning you received the cablegram. It was the only time in my life I was ever jealous of a woman, if you will believe me.”
“It was a very great moment,” Martha said. “I’ve even been jealous of it myself.”
The Baroness collapsed her hands and folded them. “You are enchanting still! I tried to learn about you from your friend, Mrs. Winthrop. She did not tell you? I knew that she would not. Nor did she come tonight, you see. I knew that, too. She has no understanding of women. I do not know really what she understands—not as much I expect as she thinks she does. Mind now, I liked her, but she is the sort of woman I always like to provoke. Do you know what I mean? To shock.”
Martha smiled.
The Baroness drew a deep breath. “But it was all a more serious matter. I knew she felt I was … unclean. Perhaps she was right. Where one survives and many perish, there are stories. And part of a story is always the truth. Fire is a great purgative—which is why the Christians invented purgatory.
“But we were going to talk about you.”
“I don’t mind that we’re not,” Martha said.
“Ah, but I do. I want to talk about the good things. His name was Marcus?”
“Thaddeus Marcus Hogan, Senior,” Martha said.
Some time after they had returned to Traders City Martha brought herself to ask Nathan outright how the Baroness had escaped the Nazis.
“You must not think unkindly of her if I tell you, Martha. One survives as one can at such a moment. The Nazis were corrupt and sometimes available to bribery …”
It occurred to Martha, his speaking so earnestly, explicitly, to wonder just for a fleeting instant, whether he was justifying the Baroness before her—or her captors.
“She persuaded a lieutenant, I believe—I am not sure and you can understand I would not press her for more than she wished to tell me—to take flight with her over international waters.” Nathan made a slight adjustment in his own pride, telling the next part of the story, and Martha remembered Sylvia’s saying to him at the dinner table, of the Baroness: she has other interests now. “I suppose she took him as her lover for they lived at her villa in Ischia throughout the war. But it came to the attention of the Italian partisans, and after their insurrection, they took the man and executed him.”
Violence for violence, Martha thought. But she could understand now why Sylvia was not able to talk about her meeting with the Baroness Schwarzbach in Naples in the autumn of 1945.
PART FOUR
1950
1
IT WAS ALMOST INEVITABLE that a boy like Tad, given the circumstances of his childhood, should on reading Hamlet at the age of sixteen become obsessed by the parallels he could draw to his own condition. He spent the summer before he was to enter Rodgers University with Sylvia on the farm. He was to have gone to Ireland by himself to visit old Jonathan, but Jonathan died that spring quickly and quietly of a cerebral hemorrhage. Jonathan, whose health had always been a matter of concern to others, rarely to himself, had lived to the age of eighty-one.
Sylvia, inviting the boy, knew she was to have her hands full. He did not disappoint her. There were times he would not sleep in his bed at night. Out walking all night long. Miles along the river and back, he would say, and she believed him. Even as a small boy he had loved to go off great distances by himself. But Mr. Walker, the manager of the farm, got the fright of his life one dawn when he went to the far pasture to bring the cows in for milking: he heard Tad declaiming in the woods. “Talking to himself at the top of his lungs. That boy’s not right.” His own son could let the clock alarm run down without turning over in his bed.
There was also the matter of girls. It was Sylvia’s practice to use student nurses from Lakewood among the crippled or recuperating children where she could. Tad needed to have nothing to do with the Rehabilitation house: Sylvia’s own cottage was far enough away. But Tad fell into the practice of intercepting one or another of the nurses after work, teasing her, and making outrageous proposals: to one that she go swimming with him in the nude after dark. “He said things that made me blush,” she told Sylvia, which, Sylvia, thought, was no easy accomplishment.
“What shall we do with you, Tad?” she said on the night she decided to finally have it out with him. “You’re all flame and no hearth. You can’t go wild like this, you know.”
“I haven’t hurt anyone. I haven’t done anything. You know that.” He glanced at her and then down at the fingers he had woven through one another. “I wouldn’t know how.” And after a few seconds: “I wonder who’s going to teach me that.”
“There’s time enough,” Sylvia said.
“They have dirty minds,” Tad said, “and if they’d thought I was serious, they wouldn’t have come to you about it at all.”
My God, sixteen! Sylvia thought. He was tall, but thin as a flagpole, and with the crew or mohawk or whatever kind of haircut he had, his head looked smaller than it actually was. He had been much handsomer as a child. He was managing while she watched him to interlace his legs as well as his fingers.
“Most people do have dirty minds, I think,” he went on.
“Sometimes,” Sylvia admitted.
“I don’t see how it can be a sometimes thing. Either you have or you don’t have.”
He had trapped her in that lawyerish way of his. This was what drove Nathan Reiss to fury about him. He made the otherwise graceful Nathan stampede like a baited bull, beguiling him into an untenable position—often on a moral issue. One might think the boy raised by the Jesuits from the precision of his mind. It was when he began again on a favorite recent subject of his, George Bergner, that Sylvia suddenly realized the model his fantasy was following. She always tried to answer his questions honestly: indeed she had little choice. Tad could spot a lie, she thought, even before the liar himself was sure of having told one.
“He wasn’t really a very good newspaper man, was he, Syl?”
“He wasn’t trained as a newspaper man at all. Alexander at least had written a column for a number of years. But George did very well as long as Alex was alive. He’s one of those people you meet now and then who can’t be on their own. Somebody told me once—I’ve forgotten who, maybe it was your father—that that was what the Depression did to some people.”
“And now he’s got Nathan to hang onto,” Tad said with the relentlessness of a terrier.
“I suppose you could say that.” It was true, she knew, George deferred entirely to Nathan in his public relations work for the Plan, although in the line of responsibility, it should have been to her. And Nathan used him, sometimes like a personal servant.
“Good old Polonius,” Tad said. “May I have one of your cigarets, Syl?”
“No.”
“I shall bum them from the nurses.”
“Take one.”
He lit her cigaret and his own. The maid came in and cleared the coffee things on a tray and Sylvia was pleased to see the boy untangle himself and gallop to the door to hold it open for her.
“I suppose you’d like a brandy now, too?”
It was said in jest, but he responded seriously. “No, thanks. I’ve promised mother, you know. Only wine. I hope I’ll have the guts to stand up to it at Rodgers … Syl, do I look as
young as I am?”
“My boy, you don’t look half as old as you are.”
Tad grinned with pleasure.
“I’d kill anybody who said that to me,” Sylvia said.
Tad puffed elaborately at his cigaret. “How old were you when you first slept with a man?”
“Forty-seven,” Sylvia said without expression.
Tad looked at her, his eyes bulging.
“Which serves you damned right for asking a question like that. I don’t think your mother has ever asked a personal question in her life.”
“That’s because she doesn’t care about other people. She’d rather not know—in case somebody might ask her a question or two.” He re-weighed his speculation on his mother. “You know, I think that’s true. She doesn’t have any friends except you that she cares about really. That crowd of Nathan’s—I can tell how she feels. Me too. They’re a bunch of squares. Cadillacs and caviar.”
“Both very good in small doses,” Sylvia said.
“I’ll take pigs’ feet, thank you, and small beer.”
“You’re a peasant.”
“A knave in peasant’s clothes … Syl …”
She interrupted him: “How long have you been playing Hamlet, Tad?”
He stuck the tip of his tongue between his teeth and she could see by his eyes that he was excited, pleased to have been discovered. She wished instantly she had not asked him.
“You see it, don’t you?” he said.
“I can see some adolescent nonsense brewing,” she said.
“A toy in blood,” Tad said, having got his Hamlet down well. For a moment he fixed his eyes upon her, weighing whether or not to confide his elaborate projection. Sylvia would have given a great deal to divert him. His confidences flattered her but they also dismayed her. Intuitively she knew the turns his mind must now be taking. Tad drew his chair up close to hers, jockeying it—and her—into position.
“Don’t you think it’s weird that Nathan was right there when my father tumbled down the elevator shaft? I know he smashed his hand. But that made him a real hero, didn’t it?”
“It happened, Tad. That’s all … I think you’re playing a very dangerous game with yourself.”
“Why—if it’s with myself?” he said sharply, and in a way that made her feel she must let him go on aloud, involving her, involving someone at least to answer him in ways not necessarily to his liking.
“I was there at the time,” she said. “Your father was upset, disturbed when he left the office.”
“Then why didn’t you go after him?”
It was a question she had asked herself too many times. “I couldn’t know what was going to happen, Tad.”
“But Nathan could!”
“He could not and did not!”
“All right, Syl,” he said placatingly. “But what happened to him: it set him up with mother, didn’t it? Tell me, what can I do? That’s what he always says to her—and then he goes on and does whatever he wants and she doesn’t even know it.”
“She knows it,” Sylvia said quietly. “I know it when he does it to me.” In that Tad was quite right: Reiss always consulted and then proceeding as he had wanted to in the first place, he was likely to say: But Sylvia, I thought we decided …
“Then why don’t you stop him?”
“Because it’s always too late. By then he has made whatever it was work.”
The boy threw up his hands wildly. “You’re all crazy!”
And for a soon vanished second Sylvia saw it that way too. Nathan Reiss took everyone he could use exactly where he wanted to go himself. The Plan had grown to something far beyond what Sylvia had anticipated: but was that bad? She would not say so. There was a center in New York now, a Long Island estate converted into such a convalescent home as she had made of the farm. Another was contemplated in San Francisco and among its benefactors was Alberto Gemini. Ironic, but she could not say it was bad.
“Everybody’s crazy but thee and me,” she said, “and there are times I think even thee’s a bit teched.”
But Tad said: “Remember when Grandpa Jon and I went to Scotland? I found a postcard that was written in Gaelic. I mailed it to Nathan from Holland and when I got home I asked him if he’d got the Hebrew card I’d sent him. He said: that was very thoughtful of you, Tad.”
“So?”
“He’s a phony, Syl,” the boy said passionately, begging for confirmation. “Now he claims he’s a Zionist and he doesn’t know as much about it as I do. And he doesn’t care as much!”
Sylvia took the boy’s hands in hers. “Tad, you must understand there’s a good deal of pretense in all of us. I know, Nathan’s got more than most of us. But we like people to see us as we’d like to be, not as we are. I don’t doubt for a moment that Nathan’s causes aren’t always idealistic. It’s done to impress somebody—to enhance his own prestige. I don’t know. But this is not unusual practice in church or charity. It is fairly common practice.”
“But why do they take people like him? Don’t they know what he’s doing it for?”
“They may. But it’s not a point easily established. Sometimes the line between sincerity and—illusion is very thin. I can only say that a great deal of good is often done in this world out of dubious motive.”
Tad shook his head. “I don’t dig it. I don’t.”
“You will—in time, but when you do, I hope you won’t like it any more than you do now,” Sylvia said.
The Hamlet fantasy having waxed then waned as other interests urged themselves upon him. He and Sylvia went twice a week to the music festival and Ravens’ Park, a few miles south of Lakewood. He played a rather noisy piano himself and loved to break up classical themes into a jazz beat. He invited two friends out for a week who had finished at the Barker School with him the previous spring, and they gave Sylvia a recital one night on the veranda, the three of them on piano, drums and milk cans that Sylvia swore woke every chicken in the coop a quarter of a mile away.
The day it was time for him to go home, Sylvia took him to Lakewood where he waited to drive back to Traders City with Nathan. She put the accelerator to the floor, returning to the farm, and drove directly to the Rehabilitation house where the children came flocking as soon as they saw her.
Nathan on the way into town talked about how wonderful it was going to be for Tad in the University. “I wanted you to have a car, but your mother does not think you should, and she is probably right. She would worry. You will be able to rent one sometimes. You must take your driver’s license.”
“I’m not worried about it,” Tad said. The fact was, and he wasn’t sure Nathan did not know it, too, that cars were not permitted on the campus of Rodgers University.
“What athletics will you take?”
“None if I can get out of it,” Tad said.
“None?”
“I’ll ride if I can, and swim. Maybe some tennis. No football, Nathan.”
“It is a shame. Competitive athletics are very good. When you were a child, you were very competitive. You kept me on my toes, let me tell you. I do not know. Sometimes I think the Barker School is not as well balanced as it could be.”
Tad was tempted to suggest that military school for him would have been more to Nathan’s tastes, but the fact was that baiting Nathan gave him no pleasure. Sometimes Nathan did not even know it, and sometimes when he found out, he would complain to Martha of it. Tad wondered suddenly: if I called him “father” would it please him? He hadn’t been an easy kid to bring up, he thought now of himself. Sylvia was right when she had said to him that he’d never given Nathan a chance. There were two sides, etc. etc. He fell to thinking then of what it would be like to try for the rest of his time at home to be really decent to Nathan.
Nathan said, coming out of a reverie of his own: “I am thinking of getting a sports car—a Jaguar, perhaps. What do you think your mother will say?”
“Just get her a fish net for her hair at the same time,” Tad said.
“No. I think it’s a fine idea,” Tad said, making a beginning on agreeability.
“May I quote you?” Nathan said half-jokingly.
“Sure. She’ll just say we’re both square.”
“I have never heard your mother use the word. What kind of an automobile would you prefer?”
“A Dusenberg,” Tad said.
Nathan glanced at him. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“No. I’m serious. I like old cars.”
“But did you know I drove one in a race once?”
Tad seemed to have heard the story before, but he could not remember the circumstances. “Did you win?”
“Yes. It was very exciting. … Tad, in New York when you are East, sometimes perhaps the Baroness Schwarzbach will invite you to visit her. Will you go?”
Tad thought about it. He did not care very much for the Baroness. She had a way, talking to a person, of trying to look down inside him. He was intrigued by her foreignness and the fact that she was rich in a way that no one else he knew was—except Sylvia. Sylvia didn’t show it. The Baroness did. Tad had actually visited but three times altogether, the last time in the spring when he had gone out with Nathan and his mother to be interviewed at Rodgers. That was the time she had really got to him, sitting on the side of his bed and saying: “Tell me, mein Tad, what does it feel like to become a man?”
Nathan, he assumed, visited her whenever he went East.
“I don’t expect I’ll have much time for visiting,” he said finally in answer to Nathan’s question.
“But if you do, I want to ask a favor of you: do not confide in her all the things you do not like about me. She has known me for a long time. But in a way it is with her like your mother is about you. You can be a very difficult boy sometimes, but in the end your mother will always defend you. Do you understand what I mean?”
“I understand,” Tad said.
The Evening of the Good Samaritan Page 45