Evening of the Good Samaritan (28 page)

Meanwhile, he sailed with Tony, and helped him close the greater part of the Fields’ house after Sylvia moved out of it. And he was in those days a frequent visitor of Louise Bergner.

His attentions to her amused George, and rather flattered him, aware as he was of Reiss’ general acceptability in Lakewood. George actually stood up to his father when Reiss’ frequent presence in the house became an issue with the old man.

Dr. Bergner had liked Reiss at first. There was no doubt in the old man’s mind that Reiss knew his profession; he might be a social fraud, but medically he seemed more sound than most Europeans Bergner had encountered over the years. He considered it a myth that Viennese made the best doctors, that Vienna hospitals were superior to others on the Continent. And, of course, Reiss undertook to confirm this suspicion for him with numerous documentation. But with the old gentleman Reiss committed one of his few blunders. He supposed, when Dr. Bergner was probing him on his origins, that the old man was getting at him again—as he had on previous occasions—for his orientation toward the moneyed class, and Reiss decided to disarm him by admitting that he was an orphan who had made his own way out of the ghetto into the most fashionable salons of Europe.

From that day on the old doctor had no more time for him. He had been proposing in his own mind to add another study to his work on heredity: as well have a eunuch as an orphan! With the cantankerousness of age, he found thereafter that when most he wanted Louise’s attentions she was occupied with Reiss. In the midst of his complaints one day, George turned on him and accused him of anti-Semitism.

“Nonsense, nonsense. A Jew would have served me fine; I have several in the book. Need them for the whole picture.”

“That goddamned book,” George said.

“When you read it, you’ll have the right to curse it, George Allan. There’s always been anti-Semitism, and I dare say there always will be—or a reasonable facsimile of it, but you didn’t learn yours from your father. Send Louise up to me. She understands me better than you do.”

As on all similar occasions, George left the room in a rage at his own impotence.

And, as though further to confound him, Dr. Bergner shortly proposed that Nathan Reiss be added to the teaching staff of Lakewood Hospital where he might at the same time take his own internship and prepare for the state examinations.

T
HE
TRADERS CITY STAR
gathered some fine talent, mixing idealism with money. The editor-in-chief had been long associated with a chain of newspapers headquartered in Washington, D. C; the head of the foreign desk came home from London to take on the job, having been European correspondent to a national magazine for over a decade. A book supplement to the Sunday paper was created under the editorship of a young firebrand; its criticism was sharp and manly. “Books Alive” was its signet, and if all the books reviewed were not that lively, the reviewing of them was. A man of national reputation took on the music desk. Theatre went to an acid Irishman who had abandoned Dublin at about the time Sean O’Casey had, and for much the same reason. The announced purpose of the paper was service to all members of the community, and there was not to be found in its pages anywhere the class and race distinctions in its reporting long a practice of its chief competitor.

There was, to say the least, a rather heady atmosphere in the editorial office in the early days, but from where George Bergner sat, the harsher facts of publishing and circulation had to be dealt with. The
Star,
for the time being, used the plant and printing facilities of one of the afternoon dailies, but a week before publication of its first edition, Winthrop had not been able to obtain a franchise to a major wire service: persuasion had to go forth at a very high level and among a diversity of publishing members who subscribed to the services. The vote to allow the
Star
a franchise to the one service it had to have was terrifyingly close. The same situation prevailed with the so-called “feature” syndicates, as though it weren’t going to be hard enough to introduce any new comic or cartoon, much less the rejects of the papers already operating in the city.

A contest for subscriptions was set up for delivery boys, the first prize a year’s scholarship to college.

Winthrop himself worked as hard as did George, and not only on the top level of persuasion: he personally contacted more than four hundred news dealers and made it plain that Christmas wasn’t half so far away as it seemed. Nor did he hesitate to use his old contacts among the ward politicians of guaranteed persuasiveness in their own neighborhoods. There are at least two definitions to liberalism.

George recruited the drivers for the trucks that had to dispute the streets of Traders City with Judge Phipps’s deliverers, a rugged crew that rode herd on city traffic on their ordinary rounds. He signed on ex-cops and ex-rumrunners alike.

Sylvia spent her honeymoon in the
Star
offices, and in truth, neither she nor Winthrop could have found a tour more to their liking. She had never been a woman for passive observance, and nothing in her experience till then had so obliged both her talents and her energies. They shared a camaraderie, the Winthrops, Bergner, and the editorial staff, that all of them would remember; the long days’ work, negotiation and manipulation, and then good drinks and supper together afterwards at Cellini’s Restaurant or sometimes at Winthrop’s flat. Vanities and jealousies had no part in the organization of the
Star.
These waited upon more leisured times. Winthrop himself believed in what he was doing, not in what he hoped to do. What dreamers there were among the staff got to him through Sylvia, the trouble-shooters through George. The three of them had maturity enough—and each in diverse ways, experience enough—to forestall in them any dilettantist meddling. As close as Sylvia came to it was an idea which in time proved both solid and profitable.

A week after the
Star
was successfully on the streets, she persuaded George one day to drive down with her to the Stockyards Tavern. It was a rambling, dust-bound building, tawdry in its best days, still vaguely Spanish like a gypsy who had lost her way in the wasteland of the city. One got the feeling within the building of being in an underground cave with the wide, low-ceilinged passageways. The walls were hung with faded prints of prize steers, of trotting champions and hunters, and with photographs of bearded meat packers. The windows were dirty enough to seem but lighter patches of wall on which someone had been playing ticktacktoe. It was not a place frequented by ladies, even those of more colorful complexion than Sylvia. She felt a certain tribute when two of the drovers standing at the bar removed their hats as she came in. The bartender saluted her.

“There’s a certain delicacy in choosing a table,” Sylvia explained. “It must be out of range of their conversation, yet within walking distance for Tom, the bartender.”

“This is not exactly the place to bring a man on your honeymoon,” George said, “especially when he’s not your husband.”

Sylvia took off her gloves. “Alex just wouldn’t fit.” She looked around, her attitude somewhat proprietary. “I used to be a social worker down here—among other things.”

George grinned. “Workers of the world, unite?”

“You’ve got nothing to lose but your entrails. There’s a great little neighborhood back of the Yards.” She looked up at the bartender. “How are you, Tom?”

“Fine, miss, thank you.” He gave a jerk of his head. “Your friend called up he’ll be a mite late. He’s misplaced his papers, can’t find his hat.” Tom, a round-faced man with a warm smile but cold blue eyes, had the strong tune of Gaelic in his voice.

“Is he sober?” Sylvia asked.

Tom shrugged. “We’ll know if he comes. What’ll you folks have to drink?”

“Harper’s for me with a little soda,” Sylvia said. “Tom, this is Mr. George Bergner. Tom Jefferson.”

George looked up sharply. The two men nodded. Tom said, “It’s Jeffries is my name, sir, but you can’t change a woman’s notion once she’s got it in her head. And I could be mistook for worse.”

“Harper’s is fine,” George said. He could not share Sylvia’s fellowship here, but he could and did relish the idea of being in her confidence. She was one mare that money had made go, he thought, and he was a lot surer of himself in her company than he was with Winthrop. It might be said in passing he had been very happy to dance at their wedding. When Tom went back to the bar, George asked, “Who’s the fellow who’s out looking for his hat?”

“Did you ever hear of Billy Kirk?”

“No.”

“He’s a native-born Southsider, and he’s been known to claim—at different times, of course—every nationality in the world. He used to run around with the newspaper crowd in the early twenties, that wild, gorgeous bunch of geniuses. It’s said that Billy ghosted some of their best columns on nights when they were drunk enough to let him.”

George shrugged, but good-naturedly, and waited. He was scarcely more sanguine of the man, meeting him: he had little faith in “characters,” much less in ghosts. Kirk was small and sinewy, wrinkled of face and jacket, his watery eyes veined like geographic globes. He smoked a pipe that hadn’t been scraped out since his days of regular employment on the
Drovers’ Tattler,
some fifteen years out of print. It was soon evident that Kirk felt as much affinity with George as George felt with Kirk’s pipe.

“You know, Miss Fields, none of the respectable spectacles of publishing will hire me. Not that they wouldn’t like to. It’s their lawyers who stand in the way. There’s nothing more squeamish than a lawyer before the fact—or less after it.”

“Mr. Bergner is our lawyer,” Sylvia said with mischievous relish.

“Well, I knew the minute I saw him
he
wasn’t going to hire me.” Kirk threw down his whisky neat.

Sylvia laughed. “It was not my idea to tie you down to regular employment, Billy. Rather, I was hoping to interest our people in leasing two or three pieces from you a week.”

Billy gazed mournfully into his empty glass. “I suppose you’d want nothing but hilarity.”

“I don’t know. I’m fond of some of your sad stories, that one, for example, about the man who shot his horse in the tavern doorway.”

“That was a saloon, my dear. The only thing you can shoot in a tavern door is your wife if you’re lucky enough to see her first. Ah, but you’re right: that is a
sad
story. I’ll wager all the same it would make Mr. Berger here laugh.”

“Bergner,” George corrected. “And I doubt it.”

Billy Kirk smiled at him disarmingly, showing a row of strong, yellowed teeth. He brought a dirty Manila envelope up from under his chair, and took out several neatly and freshly typed pages, the condition of which was not what George had expected. He divided the stories between Sylvia and Bergner. “Frogs along the Potomac,” he read the title aloud of the top story he gave to George. “That’s an idea on how to sustain a filibuster without wear and tear on Senatorial rhetoric. It came to me one night listening to Bertie Rice trying to tell a story at the Rotary banquet. Every few sentences he would suppress a burp and politely excuse himself before going on—and you know, before he finished, I would have given anything to hear just one good belch out of him.”

George was amused in spite of himself. The story had bite and grace. He asked Kirk, “Do you write things like this to specifications?”

“If we got the same specifications,” Kirk said, almost with a drawl. “I write shaggy dogs and dirty dogs, and yalla dogs. And then, some of them are just plain dogs. It takes a heap of livin’ to make a Kirk a house.” He circled his lips with the tip of a very red tongue.

Afterwards, when she and George were driving back to the office, Sylvia said, “I also know a writer of children’s books. He’s awfully good, illustrates them himself—clever, fantastic things, yet real. The kind of creatures children talk to in gardens when they’re alone.”

“Uh-huh,” George said.

“I guess I’ve said that badly, but I have an idea he could do a really good comic strip. What I should like to see one day, George, a
Star
Syndicate. Let’s give them back something for the trash they’ve given us. Why not?”

George glanced at her. “As your brother always says when he wants something done: ‘Siccum, Sylvia.’”

I
T WAS AN EVENING
in late June when Louise Bergner called, a time easily remembered afterwards because when the phone rang, Marcus and Martha were listening to the news of Germany’s invasion of Russia. Louise sounded distraught or possibly drunk, but when she said at the end, “Marcus, please don’t let on I called you,” he sensed the urgency behind her vague message. Martha rode out to Lakewood with him.

The house, when they approached it, was lighted from attic to cellar, a sign Marcus thought as ominous as total darkness. In the best of times, George and his father living under one roof was not an easy arrangement, and now that the old man was ailing and difficult—as Marcus well knew from his weekly visits—there was almost constant friction. What Dr. Albert wanted of his son, Marcus did not know any more than he thought George himself knew. George was more successful at the moment as general manager of the
Star
than most men’s sons at his age. Marcus did not like him, but decency compelled him to defend the son to the father, the more for knowing that Dr. Bergner made no secret of his preference for Marcus to his own flesh and blood.

Martha waited in the car.

Going up the walk Marcus saw George at the window, shading his eyes, trying to see who had driven in. Behind him in the room, Louise was squeezing her nose in a limp handkerchief. Marcus glimpsed a quick gesture of impatience on George’s part, a brusque admonition to his wife. It was easy to imagine him trying on his father’s disposition where he could get away with it. Marcus gave the bell knob a hard, long turn. Since he had come, he wanted everyone in the house to know it.

George opened the door to him. “Well,” he said with scant hospitality, “isn’t it late for you to be on the road?”