Evening of the Good Samaritan (10 page)

“I’d better wash my hands,” he said.

“Alex.” She kissed him deeply, but with only their lips touching, until he felt her cold hand upon his flushed cheek. He took the hand in his own and kissed the palm of it.

When, later, they were having coffee laced with whisky, and both of them staring into the fire, Elizabeth said, “Ah, but it’s not at all too late for you, really, Alex. Time, but not too late.”

He did not attempt to dissemble. He found himself soon telling her of Mike Shea’s proposal.

She nodded now and then soberly, and put her hand on his, sometimes squeezing it, a message he tried vainly to interpret. Nor did he understand quite what she meant when presently she asked, “Is he a trustworthy man, Mike Shea?”

He could not bring himself to ask her to be more explicit. “All politicians are trustworthy—in politics,” he said off-handedly.

“In some ways, Alex, you are too good a man.” She went no further. She could not force him to meet an issue he did not want raised.

“I hope you’re always my only jury,” he said.

She laughed and brushed back the strands of her black hair with the heel of her hand and then tucked them into the braid.

“I wish now I had studied law,” he said, thinking again of his prospect.

She said, “Walter will be so proud of you.” The association arose because Winthrop, when first he had met Walter Fitzgerald, had thought him a lawyer; he had heard Fitzgerald talking about the Scopes trial, his tongue acid, scathing, picturesque in the way of trial lawyers, in the way, in fact, although Winthrop had not known it then, of William Jennings Bryan, the prosecutor, whom Walter had admired to the point of imitation.

“I’m not so sure,” he said. “If I run, I’ll have the New Deal behind me, and you know how Walter feels about them lately.”

“What about Judge Phipps?”

Winthrop ran his hand through his hair. “I think I’ll be able to sweeten up Walter before him.”

She leaned her head back on the sofa. “Ah, Alex, you will be very fine for Traders City. I shall have to register now so that I can vote for you.”

“I have a hurdle or two to jump over first,” he said.

“Your Lakewood society friends—what will they say?”

“I don’t give a damn what they say. I never have.”

She glanced at him, smiled, and said, “Good,” although both of them knew it was a lie. He cared very much, but he also knew that no amount of his caring would make any difference. And that, in turn, contributed to an independence that bordered on the stubborn in him.

“Elizabeth, there’s always the chance …”

She interrupted, pouncing as though she had been waiting for that beginning: “Always … there has been the chance, Alex.”

“It never mattered before. What I mean is—it was never worth anyone’s while …”

“I know what you mean, Alex.”

He felt uncomfortable nonetheless, the words having come closer to the truth as he first said them than he liked. In spite of everything, intended frankness, a persistent love between them, her understanding that was almost foresight in its depth—in spite of all, however, he felt the guilt compounding. Nor did it help when Elizabeth said: “Martha will just have to take her chances, now, too.” He got up and tinkered with the fire tongs, kicked at the logs. He stood then, looking at her, his back to the grate, his lip out so that his expression was one of perplexed hurt.

“I said that, Alex, because it had to be said, and really it’s the
only
thing that does have to be said. We must start back soon. The wind sounds worse.”

“I’d give a great deal to have your daughter like me, Elizabeth.”

“Someday it may happen quite naturally.”

“I always say the wrong thing with her.” He flung his hands in the air, that curiously awkward gesture of his which had put his father in mind of a seal. “She makes me feel like an oaf, a bumpkin.”

“What I suspect you feel, Alex, is that she’s looking through to your very soul. She has that way about her, but I assure you she’s not. There is an innocence beyond the dream. We are not all alike despite what these psychologists say.” She drew the quilt more tightly about her. “If you will go about your business now—I’ll dress.”

It was strange, he thought, and on that day it was chilling, to realize that she always undressed but would never dress before him.

He stood a moment longer. “Elizabeth, you haven’t stopped loving me?”

A smile crossed her lips, so sudden and brief he could not say if it were sweet or bitter. “No. Not yet.”

A
MARVELOUS THING ABOUT
parliaments and politicians is the haste with which they can do something if it cannot be done at all otherwise. When history will wait, legislators quibble. In three years the New Deal had got through Congress a mountain of legislation, some good, some bad, but all aimed at national recovery on the level of everyman. There had been fervor before in Washington in living memory, the first Roosevelt’s administration and Wilson’s, surely, but it lacked the scope, the reach the New Deal had into far cottages and urban industry. Virtually no one who lived by the sweat of his brow was unaffected by it, and by 1936, those who lived by investment or on the managerial level, were also affected, for as of January 1, all industrial payrolls registered Social Security withholding payments.

It could not be said that there was a large-scale crossing of traditional loyalties, particularly in the Lakewood suburb of Traders City. It may well have been there that Roosevelt was first called “a traitor to his class.” But here and there the younger scion of a moneyed family tended to go along with the President’s social philosophy even if neither he nor the President could precisely identify it. There was not time to precisely identify anything: too many people over the nation had little more by way of identification than their hunger.

George Allan Bergner had grown up in Lakewood society, had married fashionably, but had taken early to the New Deal. He had virtually graduated into it from Harvard Law School. That reaction to his father’s conservatism was partially responsible George knew, but was unlikely to admit lest it seem to diminish the independent image he wished people to have of him. He and his father quarreled with the relentless zeal of religious partisans. Dr. Bergner thought equalitarianism a mischievous nonsense, and never missed the opportunity to point out to his son the ingratitude of the masses.

“What have they got to be grateful for?” George would cry.

“True, true,” the old man would say. “They’d be much better off never to have been born at all, most of them.”

What George could not or would not understand was that half the time his father was deliberately overstating his own views by way of provocation. It was a compound of mischief and contempt on the old man’s part, and scarcely less reprehensible than bigotry. All this Alexander Winthrop understood very well. He had seen its origins in George’s school days when Dr. Bergner’s first impatient wrath was wreaked on John Dewey and “his damn fool pragmatism.” Nor had George ever been an honor student. Winthrop’s friendship with Doctor Bergner had developed over the years when George was away at school and then at Washington, and it was one of those contradictory attractions between men: Winthrop, himself the son of a tyrant to whom he had not been able to stand up, accepted on more or less equal terms by Dr. Bergner who failed to see the possible coming resemblance between Winthrop and his own son when he reached Winthrop’s age.

That Winthrop understood the Bergners, father and son, made it no easier to spend an evening in their company. He arrived at the house, expecting to have dinner alone with Dr. Bergner. It was the evening of the day he and Elizabeth had gone to the dunes, and he had looked forward to it, by no means at ease with his own conscience. He had hoped to set things somewhat right with himself promoting young Hogan with the old doctor.

George gave him too ostentatious a welcome for comfort: Winthrop knew he must have already got the political bug in his ear. From the outset he was playing to his father, even while speaking to Winthrop. Winthrop doubted he had played to Louise since the day he had asked her to marry him. Louise had a pale, ethereal quality, blonde and quite pretty, and Winthrop had often thought that if only she would keep from talking, she would be excellent company.

Over their first drink in the “small room” between the parlor and the conservatory, George said, “I signed that petition for you today, Alex.”

Winthrop looked at him questioningly.

“Draft-Winthrop-for-mayor.”

“Oh, that,” Winthrop said, unwilling to admit he had not known such a petition existed. For a man who worked behind the scenes, Mike Shea was quick.

“How wonderful!” Louise cried. “I didn’t even know Lakewood had a mayor.”

“Mayor of Traders City, dear,” her husband said coldly.

“I sometimes live there too,” Winthrop said to soften her embarrassment. Dr. Bergner was going through the faintly audible “putt-putt-putt” which always preceded his wheeze of laughter. Louise might be pretty, but she was remarkably stupid, and Winthrop observed not for the first time the satisfaction this seemed to give the old man.

“Where do you think the county chairman will stand?” George asked.

“Squarely behind the winner of the primary. It’s my opinion he’ll stay off his feet till then.”

George gave a snort of amusement.

Dr. Bergner said, “Who? Who’s that you’re talking about?”

“Mike Shea, county Democratic chairman.”

“He’s never run for office before in his life, has he?” the old gentleman said.

“He’s not running now, father,” George said. “We were speaking of his support, whether Alex would have it if he runs for mayor.”

The old man grunted and tipped back his head to drain the last of the sherry from his glass. He was ferocious looking, white-haired, but his brows and mustache were still almost black. Louise had once confessed to Elizabeth Fitzgerald after a party that she had nightmares about her father-in-law.

He said derisively, “Doing business with a man like that—and you call yourselves progressive.”

“Politics are practical, if they’re anything, father,” George said ponderously.

“
If
they’re anything. It’s politics, not religion that’s the opiate. Give everybody a piece of paper on which to mark his X—Why? Be damned to everybody. Form without substance! Ballots for the masses. A fraud, that’s what it is. Do they know any more what you’re doing for having put their mark on a piece of paper after your name?”

“At least, we tell them, father.”

“And do they know any more for
that,
I ask you?”

“I think it’s rather beside the point,” George said. “The important thing is that we tell them.”

“Important to whom?”

“All right, father, important to us!”

“Ha! One would think I raised him a papist.” The old man looked around to find his daughter-in-law. “I want a drop more sherry.” He took her arm. “You and I understand one another, don’t we, my dear? You would vote for me, wouldn’t you? It makes a man proud we enfranchised the women, let me tell you …” His voice faded as he led her to the buffet.

“The bastard,” George said under his breath. George was fair complexioned, his cheeks now as ruddy as a schoolboy’s, his eyes watery with anger, frustration. He could be no more than thirty, but he was going bald, and what hair he had circling his head was curly. He looked more like a tonsured boy in a pet than a man in wrath.

“Can’t you see, he’s deliberately provoking you, George?” Winthrop said.

“Of course, I see!”

More than once while they were talking Winthrop questioned in his own mind the wisdom of putting his campaign in the hands of a man who could be maneuvered into purposeless fury. Still, no one knew better than he the helplessness of a son in the presence of an autocratic father. And George had the contacts: he made that plain at once, describing the predilections of a dozen influential men, and how they could be got round—a curious recital for a man who had just sanctified the universal ballot.

He and Winthrop agreed to meet the following morning.

After dinner Winthrop went upstairs in the elevator with the old gentleman to his study, George having taken his wife home early. Louise complained of a headache, and small wonder, the tensions between father and son. Once they were gone, Winthrop started to enjoy himself. He liked the house as he did no other except possibly Elizabeth’s—and there were rooms there he had never seen, and rooms he wished he had not seen—but here he recognized a house which had been built by a man who knew exactly what he wanted and brooked no compromise. The style was Georgian, the rooms high-ceilinged, not large but sometimes breaking into one another as the parlor into a small sitting room into the conservatory, giving at once a sense of space and intimacy. Not a piece of furniture in the house, Dr. Bergner had told him once, that was not rosewood or cherry, and not a piece that was not signed or, in the case of antiques, authenticated. “But you’d never know it, would you, Alex? That’s the thing. It isn’t the crown that makes the king now, is it?”

Alex always considered it an education to come here. He regretted that the old gentleman took him upstairs in the elevator with him. The walls along the stairway were hung with family pictures, starting with daguerreotypes and ending with a tinted photograph of a young girl sitting stiffly on a wrought iron bench as though tightly corseted. A fine oil painting of her hung in the parlor. In the days when they had walked up, Dr. Bergner would say, “That’s my late wife. You didn’t know her, did you?”

Winthrop had not even known his own mother. He had grown up in the care of many nurses, one after another of whom took a tearful departure of the child, having quarreled with his father. From his childhood he remembered the scent of many bosoms where he doubted a man had ever laid his head.

Dr. Bergner gave him a brandy and then settled himself in an old platform rocker. It was the only ugly chair in the house and, perversely, the old man preferred it to any other. “Well, Alexander. Mayor, is it? Why not Governor? Or President?”