Evening of the Good Samaritan (17 page)

Marcus stood among the outdoor exhibit of paintings. He was trying to guess which of the canvases was Martha’s, when a girl said to him, “That’s Martha Fitzgerald’s,” and indicated a landscape with some extraordinarily ominous clouds hanging over a meadow.

“Oh, very nice,” he murmured.

“Those clouds were supposed to be light and fluffy—like dumplings,” the girl said. She was herself plump and wonderfully open-faced, the sort of girl he would have expected to see in a meadow, a peasant’s blouse over her large bosom and her brow damp with honest sweat. He would probably discover she was third generation St. Cecilia bred. “It was really a very nice day,” she concluded in critical comment on Martha’s painting.

“Well,” Marcus said, “dumplings have a way of turning out like that sometimes, don’t they?”

The girl giggled and fled, but now and then as he moved on, he was acutely conscious of her eyes upon him. He suspected that for a time he was going to show up in her dreams. And if she were to show up in his, it would surely serve him right for such conceit.

“Marcus …”

He turned when Martha spoke, and saw the nun with her, a small, bright-eyed woman whose rimless glasses sat on the bridge of her nose so that she had to cock her head back to look up at him. She had a nice smile, her lips closed, and his first opinion was that here was a woman in control of herself and at peace with her world. He knew Martha greatly admired her.

“Mother, may I present Doctor Hogan? Marcus, this is Mother St. John.”

She gave him a small hand, her own grasp brief, firm. “I’m so glad you could come, doctor.”

“Thank you.” He knew from the way Martha had introduced them, from the tone in her voice, that this meeting was the reason Martha had most wanted him to come. Mother St. John was the dean of St. Cecilia’s. His experience with the religious hitherto had been entirely among the nursing orders who tended, on the whole, to have been recruited from working class families.

“Shall we find a place to sit for a few moments?” the nun said. “Have you had refreshment, doctor? Martha will bring you tea, perhaps?”

“We are to have tea with my mother in town afterwards,” Martha said.

“Oh, yes. I’d forgotten.” She led the way among the trellised roses to where the garden furniture had been set out. “Please smoke if you wish, doctor. You don’t smoke, do you, Martha?”

“No, mother.”

“So many of the girls do. I am going to recommend a smoking room one of these days—not because I wish to encourage the habit among them, but if having to walk a mile in the dead of winter to find a place of concealment does not discourage it, one might doubt that a smoking room would matter one way or the other—except to the dignity of the college.”

She would be very strong on dignity, Marcus supposed, and modern in her outlook. Martha had said so, but he had nonetheless felt that a medieval aura hung about all members of a religious community, and vaguely he approved it—as most assuredly Mother St. John would not, he soon discovered. She remarked in the train of a conversation Marcus immediately forgot, alert as he became to her meaning, “I should not think anything done solely for its own sake to be entirely good—whether it be art or prayer, philosophy or the study of ancient Persia. So many people, I am told, study and translate among the ancients today because they cannot abide the superficialities of our times. I think this rather terrible: one must use the past as a guide, not a crutch. Don’t you think so, doctor?”

Marcus rubbed the back of his neck, thinking. “I think—Mother St. John—that anyone who needs a crutch is going to find one. I realize that is not a direct answer to your question.”

“When I was a child,” the nun went on, her hands in her lap, loosely one within the other, and with the sun catching the glitter of the small gold crucifix on her ring, “I had a teacher—a sister of another order—” Marcus caught the twinkle this brought to her eye; it disappeared quickly, “—who always used a pointer in class. It must have been several feet long and at least an inch thick at one end. I remember she would say, ‘Now, look at the blackboard, and I shall go through it again.’”

Martha and Marcus laughed.

“Something else she would say in that vein:—she was a rather bad-tempered woman, I am afraid—‘If you do that again,’ she would say, ‘I’ll give you a straight zero.’ And she would describe it with the tip of her pointer.” Mother St. John herself illustrated with a finger. “Then one day she broke the pointer over one of the student’s heads. The child sustained no permanent ill effects fortunately, and I remember that Sister Joanna was a much better teacher without the pointer.”

It was an entirely pleasurable ten minutes Marcus spent in the nun’s company, and when she rose to leave him and Martha, she said, “We shall miss Martha next year, shan’t we?”

“I haven’t got used to the notion of her going yet,” Marcus said.

“It will be quite time enough when she is gone,” the nun said, matter-of-factly, and gave him her hand. “Come and see me sometimes, if you will, Doctor Hogan. I very much admire your father. He behaved with such dignity through his ordeal. I have sometimes thought that if our curriculum allowed such refinements as political economy, I should be tempted to ask him to give the course.” She glanced away from him for an instant, and then back, the twinkle again in her eyes. “Perhaps it is as well we are so small a school.”

She padded away from them, her footfalls muffled in the grass. In the classroom corridors, Martha recognized the footsteps of almost all the nuns.

Marcus said, “What a remarkable woman! What does she teach? You told me once.”

“Psychology and English poetry.”

“Not ancient history.”

“No. Mr. Cummins comes out from the University. He’s very young.” He had been appointed although Martha’s father had recommended someone else. Martha’s father did not entirely approve of Mother St. John either, and he was a little offended that he had not been proposed as a trustee of St. Cecilia’s. He was, after all, a prominent Catholic layman, an educator, and had a daughter in the college. Martha thought now that he would hit the roof when he heard St. Cecilia’s was to have a smoking room. She decided it would be one more of many tales which she did not carry home.

“Marcus, if we were to leave now, could we go down to the lake for a few minutes? I’d love to see it a last time and I shan’t have a chance tomorrow. It’s commencement.”

“I wish you would stop speaking with such finality. You’re neither gone yet, nor forgotten.”

But later, as they sat upon a log at the bottom of the ravine and watched the green-blue water come up time and again and stretch itself upon the sands, she spoke again in somber words: “If I should die this very day, Marcus, I would have had more happiness, I think, than most people—and almost all of it this spring.” Marcus merely squeezed her hand. She went on: “I feel deeper, more mature. Maybe I’m not, but I think I am. Marcus, I love you very much.”

He looked at her then, both frowning and smiling, and getting up, drew her into his arms and held her until they could feel the sands running out from beneath their feet.

Whenever Marcus drove Martha back from school they stopped at the studio and her mother had tea sent up from the second floor restaurant. There were two rooms, one the music room in which were a grand piano, a music rack and two chairs. The other room was cluttered and overfurnished, almost gaudy, in somewhat heady contrast to the very proper house near the University campus. A bowl of red roses filled a corner table.

“I was always told as a child in Ireland,” Elizabeth Fitzgerald said, as she gathered up several books and put them on the shelves, “of the Spanish part of my ancestry, but as I look around this room, I wonder if it wasn’t their explanation for a visiting gypsy.”

“Aren’t they called tinkers in Ireland, mother?”

“Indeed they are, and they’re not dealt with in nearly so romantic a fashion as here, let me tell you. It would have had to be a kidnaping.”

After a second’s pause, Martha said, “The roses are lovely. They’re the first you’ve cut, aren’t they?”

Her mother glanced at Marcus, amused, and said to her daughter, “Do I embarrass you?”

“Of course not.”

“I used to embarrass your father. I think that’s why he married me—to put the cloak of respectability about me.” It was, she knew, why her aunt had fostered the marriage. “They are slow with our tea today, aren’t they? Perhaps we should have gone home for it. The garden is lovely now. You must come one afternoon soon, Marcus. I don’t suppose you get to spend much time out-of-doors, do you?”

“It depends on where I have to park the car,” Marcus said in his dry way. “If I have a long walk to it, I’m allowed to breathe fresh air on the way.”

The tea was brought up by a waiter Elizabeth Fitzgerald had not seen for some time; he had been off ill and she was most solicitous. Marcus was, quite by chance, watching her at the instant she discovered the man had brought service for two only. A change as severe as a mask passed over her face. The color drained from it except at two points where her skin drew tightly over the cheekbones.

“You have made a mistake, Peter,” she said, her calm voice belying entirely the change in her face. “Tea was ordered for three.”

“Oh, madame, pardon me. I have forgotten.”

“I suppose you had better take it all down and start over.” She turned to Marcus. “You can wait a little longer, doctor?”

Their eyes met and held in an exchange he did not suppose he would ever forget. The color returned to Elizabeth’s face. Marcus moistened his lips and said, “Of course,” although he knew he must leave within ten minutes.

She looked up at the waiter. So did Marcus; he could not help himself. The man’s face was a bulging red. She said only, “Please, Peter,” and he was gone.

Marcus took a cigaret from his pocket and lit it. He did not offer one to his hostess, and he could not bring himself to look toward Martha. She had been at the window when the waiter came. Nor was it likely she would have understood anything, seeing. One needed a certain curiosity, an experience. Possibly one needed to be a man and to have felt, as he admitted to himself now that he had felt, the sexual attractiveness of this dark, proud woman and her gypsy haven. He had known, he was sure, from the night of Winthrop’s party. That was one thing; but Elizabeth Fitzgerald’s confirming that he knew was something else. It was something between them now. He got up and went to the window where he put his arm about Martha and brushed her temple with his lips. He had never before touched her in her mother’s presence. And he had never felt such tenderness toward her as now when she pressed his hand between her arm and her ribs.

“Will you come to Sunday dinner at our house?” Marcus said. “I’ll invite the Muellers—and it’s time you met my father.”

“I should love to, Marcus. May I, mother—Sunday?”

“I should think so,” Elizabeth said.

She got up and left them then, going into the music room. She played some very dark Beethoven, but Marcus and Martha smiled at each other through it, and kissed deeply, searchingly as not before. Marcus was on the very edge of saying the word, of proposing that they marry soon. But he held back—not from the obvious considerations of her youth and his poverty—but because somehow there was a curious, knight-errant sort of feeling to his emotion, as though he were doing it to save her, or to do right by her—as God knows, she did not need have done. So he talked of Sunday and of all the Mueller children, whom, he hoped profoundly, they would leave at home.

Martha and her mother went out into the garden almost as soon as they reached home that afternoon. It was always her mother’s habit, even if it were raining, to walk in the garden when she got home. But this was the poet’s sort of June day. The oak trees were shedding seed pods, dropping them down like clusters of dragonfly wings, the peonies were blowzy, but the roses were in high glory. The garden was entirely her mother’s. As a little girl Martha had always had a patch of her own to cultivate, but she did it less from love of the garden than from the desire to please her mother. Her father rarely came beyond the terrace, but he would often come out there and look down, nodding approval. He liked to boast among his colleagues of his wife’s garden: “All her own work. I’ve never lifted a hand in it. She has a boy to help sometimes, and he’ll be a gardener when she’s through with him.”

“I remember the roses at home always this time of year,” her mother said. “They run right up to the cottage near the manor. We used to sit on the wall at twilight—it doesn’t get dark until after ten in the summertime there—and watch the sheep. It was so still at times you could hear them munching the grass. And their bleating was the loneliest sound.”

“What’s a linnet?” Martha asked. “You know, ‘Full of the linnets’ wings.’”

“It’s a bird—fairly common in Ireland. It feeds on the seeds of flax … You’re very much in love, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Terribly.”

“You’re so young, Martha.”

“Am I? For what?”

“To be so serious.”

“I’d be serious even if I weren’t in love,” Martha said.

“Do you talk about marriage?”

“No.”

Her mother laughed a little. “I sounded like your father. I didn’t quite mean it that way. I don’t propose to question the honor of Marcus’s intentions.”

“Does papa question them?”

“He considers it part of his duty, being your father.”

“Marcus and I understand why we don’t talk about it. We should have to say all sorts of things we didn’t really mean—to explain something that doesn’t need explaining as long as we don’t talk about it. I don’t suppose that makes much sense to you, does it?”

“I’m always on the side of reticence. But I’d never thought it possible for people in love.” She plucked a leaf and turned it between her eye and the light. It bore an insect’s perforations. “Oh, dear—and so soon. I shall have to spray tonight. Martha, I want to ask a very great favor of you, my dear. That’s not how I should put it either.” She laid her hand on Martha’s, one of the rare times she reached out to her, for that was implicit in the gesture. “I want us to go abroad together this summer—you and I.”