Evening of the Good Samaritan (32 page)

“We’re starting on the Russians now in Lakewood, God help them. It’s going to be very fashionable. There’s a rumor circulating that after
this
war is over, there’s going to be another Russian revolution, and the Whites will take over again. ‘Ha!’ you say, but don’t. I could raise ten million dollars for such a cause in one night.”

“For the brave Russian people,” Martha mused.

“That will be the day.”

They glanced at each other and smiled. The time had come. “Alex won’t admit it, but he didn’t know about the picture, Martha. We are both deeply sorry.”

Martha laughed, a small sound of self-derision. “It was colorful though, wasn’t it?”

“I’m sure it hurt you very much.”

“Not as much as other things last night, Sylvia, and Jonathan took the paper out with him this morning like a dead fish, and we could laugh.”

“He must be very wretched, poor man.”

“They might have left him his dignity, even if he was wrong,” Martha said. “That’s the worst of it, he’s beginning to feel he may be wrong—and if he is wrong, what is right is utterly abhorrent to him.”

“‘Thou shalt not kill.’ That’s all he’s saying, isn’t it?”

“I am not a pacifist,” Martha said. “Marcus says there are killings every day in hospitals by doctors who are criminally inept. There are accidents: men crushed in machines, or children burned horribly and to no purpose except that we must die, all of us. My father thought he was dying for something, at least. A soldier dies for something. I don’t know that living is always so important, is it?”

“I don’t know either, but I want to live. Don’t you?”

“Yes. Terribly.”

Sylvia asked, “Are you afraid, Martha?”

She lifted her chin. “I am, a little. I shouldn’t want Marcus to know it, though. It’s having got this far, I suppose, when twice before I didn’t. Sometimes I feel that if I manage to bear a child—a child that breathes and lives—I must pay forfeit for it.”

“What morbid Irish nonsense!” Sylvia cried, and herself began to move about the room. There were times she could no more sit still than could her husband. “I know,” Martha said.

“And feeling that way, you went to that rally last night?”

“I had a feeling about that, too,” she said, and then smiled in her sudden reassuring way and tilted her head back. “I shall be hung for a witch in the end, if I’m not careful, shan’t I?”

T
HE BOY WHO WAS
to be named Thaddeus Marcus Hogan, Jr., was born on October 31, 1941, in every way well equipped, it seemed, to cope with living. Assured that her son was a fine healthy baby, Martha asked Marcus who or what he looked like. Marcus said, “Let me put it this way: If anyone were to nickname him Tadpole at this moment, it would be sheer flattery.”

When the baby was brought to her, Martha said, “I think he looks like you, Marcus.”

To which he answered, “Thank you, dear.”

From his office he called Jonathan who was attending a conference in the East.

At home, he and Annie drank a toast. “It’s a sign, doctor, surely, to be born on Allhallows’ Eve. Maybe he’ll grow up to be a priest.” And she gave Marcus a nudge with her red knuckles. “Would you mind that?”

“You know, Annie, it’s something that never occurred to me. I shouldn’t want to say until I’ve talked it over with him.”

Annie breathed a great sigh. “Ah, sure, it’s given me a new leash on life.”

Marcus grinned and realized by the ache in his jaw muscles that he must have given them a great deal of exercise throughout the day. Nonetheless, alone in the house except for Annie, he felt himself on the verge of depression as the October darkness fell. Looking down from the terrace, he could see beyond the hedge the little ghosts and grotesques of Hallowe’en pass by in search of mischief. Their jack-o-lanterns bobbed like will-o’-the-wisps. The smell of burning leaves hung in the dry, sharp air. Was it a good time to be born? “Too young for this war”: he had heard the phrase more than once in Maternity. He had himself been born in 1908. A better time? He had been born too young for
that
war … but not for this one if the country was to be involved as it must surely be. There were not many doctors in a better position to serve, and he a surgeon. But to excise disease was one thing, to probe young flesh for lead another; to open cleanly and exactly was what he strove to make his genius. The wounds of war, he knew, were ghastly imprecise. He went indoors and made a note: he needed to remember that Martha asked him to have the handy man check the sacking around the rose bushes.

How desolate the house without Martha in it; how desolate the house for Martha without him in it. But now there was Thaddeus Marcus Hogan, Jr.—Tad. He said the name aloud, getting used to the idea of there being an actual person to go with it. And there was Jonathan who could not bear his house alone either, but who kept it, Marcus knew although it had not been said, for Mrs. Turley’s sake. It would fall to him, he supposed, to do something about that tie. A modest pension could be arranged, and she would have to—and very well could—accommodate herself to the notion than Jonathan Hogan could survive without her care, assuming he could survive with it.

Marcus was very grateful when Alexander Winthrop called up to congratulate him and then asked if he could, by any chance, join him and Sylvia at the Union League Club for dinner. They were in town for theater that night.

The occasion being festive, Sylvia chose the menu and Winthrop the wine: fish and a
filet mignon,
champagne before they went to the table, and for dinner Vouvray and a Côte du Rhone, ’24.

“This is a great compliment to you, Marcus,” Sylvia said when he closed his eyes with pleasure at the Rhone. “The steward has just three bottles more for Alex of this vintage.”

“A good wine is the next best thing to a good friend,” Winthrop said, “and a good friend to have in that case is the wine steward. I’m going to arrange to have a dozen bottles of the next great year sent you, Marcus, to put away for the boy’s twenty-first birthday.”

“That’s very kind of you, Alex. I didn’t realize you had such confidence in my forebearance.”

Winthrop laughed.

“Nineteen sixty-two, oh, my God!” Sylvia said.

“We’ve got a lot of living to do between now and then.” Winthrop looked at his wife with an amused affection, which made Marcus think it was going along fine, their marriage, obliging both with what each needed. Pride had never been a stumbling block for either of them.

“We sure as hell better,” Sylvia said in the broad way she sometimes had, reminding Winthrop of her mother. “We won’t be doing much of it after that.”

It was while they were having brandy, and having checked his watch that Winthrop remarked with a casualness Marcus suspected to be deliberate, “Have you given any thought to having someone with you since Doctor Albert died?”

“Not much.” But that very evening it had crossed his mind when he was thinking of the war.

“Reiss is doing fine at Lakewood … and he started with something of a handicap.”

“His religion?” Marcus said after a moment. Winthrop nodded. “It doesn’t seem ever to have been much of a handicap.”

“And why should it?” Sylvia said with a quickness that made Marcus suppose she might be behind Winthrop’s awareness of the man.

“I was not suggesting that it should. But it does seem to have been confining to a number of his people in our times, doesn’t it?”

“He’s a good doctor,” Winthrop said. “Doctor Albert’s whim paid off nicely. You ought to watch him, Marcus. You may need someone. You can’t tell these days.” The chain of association was crudely obvious.

Marcus lit a cigaret. “Do you think he’s the real thing, Alex?” He was using Winthrop’s own phrase.

“What do you mean?”

“Is he sincere? Does he give a damn about medicine or only money?”

“He’s ambitious as they come, but his knife is clean.”

Marcus smoked in silence.

Sylvia said, “Whether he’s genuine or not, he always does the right thing, Marcus. It almost comes natural to him.”

Almost, Marcus noticed. He grinned. “A dozen roses came for Martha this afternoon. I didn’t send them. Did you?”

“No. It sounds like Nathan,” she said.

“Or George,” Winthrop said. “That’s where I found out you were a father. He’s got a lot of
savoir faire
these days, our George.”

Marcus held his tongue, but Sylvia caught the flash in his eyes. She said, “I’m sure it was Reiss. Wasn’t there a card?”

“I didn’t look,” Marcus said. “At the time of childbirth a man feels he has to suffer in any way he can.” He knew he was being flippant, but he did not—on this occasion at any rate—want to say the things coming into his mind. He had not told anyone of George’s destruction of his father’s manuscript. Too many people, judging the old man on personality, his lectures—into which he had been known to introduce gratuitously his theories on the scientific breeding of men—might well have applauded George. Midwestern University had at one time quietly suggested that Dr. Bergner stick to the manual.

When the time came he walked the Winthrops to the theater, and while there bought tickets for Martha and himself for a month hence:
Watch on the Rhine.
He bought the best seats in the house, since he proposed them as a present to Martha. He assumed she would like them better than a dozen roses. He went from the theater to a phone booth in the nearest drugstore. He called his answering service first and then Erich Mueller. It was Mueller himself who answered the phone.

“Erich? This is Marcus Hogan. I’ve got a pocketful of cigars and an eight-pound son. May I come and see you for an hour?”

“What a question!”

Mueller kissed him on both cheeks, needing to stand on tiptoe to reach him. “So! Now you are a father! If you do not first succeed, try, try again. See?” He called up the stairs, “Julie, come! Here is the new papa.”

Julie kissed him and made a noisy fuss over him as only the French can. Marcus saw that she was pregnant.

Mueller said: “A boy, just like that!” and snapped his fingers.

Marcus said: “If you do not first succeed …”

“Oui!”
Julie cried and patted her distended belly while all of them laughed.

They had the good dark coffee that would keep his nerves marching up and down all night, Marcus thought, coffee in tall, narrow cups with the whipped cream in the upper half, and Mueller asked about Jonathan. He was the more solicitous of him for being out of patience with him and his cause.

Afterwards, while Julie was putting away the coffee things, Marcus asked Mueller how much he really knew about Nathan Reiss.

“How much do I need to know about a man? He is a good doctor. They will tell you that up where he is doing this dreadful thing they require in this state, a new internship—a year out of a man’s life. Just because he is educated elsewhere, he is stupid? I do not think so.”

“He would not have had to do that in some states, as I understand it,” Marcus said. “New York, for example.”

“Because he is a Jew, you think he should have stopped in New York?”

“That’s not worthy of you, Erich.” Marcus was the more irritated because it was the second time that night something of the sort had happened to him.

“I don’t think it’s worthy of you to have said it, Marc. If I misunderstand you, forgive me.”

“You do misunderstand me. There is a man in New York—a refugee whose history I know. He has done heart surgery and I have been thinking of going out there to observe him.”

“Ach, then you must forgive me, Marc, what I said. It is how Nathan himself says: Many people ask him why he did not stay there. He is very sensitive.”

“Not any more than the rest of us,” Marcus said.

“Why do you not like him?”

“I’m not sure that I don’t. I’ve not seen very much of him.” Marcus gave a short laugh. “But I begin to get the feeling that somewhere back in the years, he was tied into my life, my destiny—to give it a fancy word: Winthrop to Bergner to me to Reiss to Winthrop to me.”

“But of course! That’s how it is, Marc, we are all waiting someone to complement. We are nothing alone.”

“I should like to have some say in it, that’s all.”

“Now it is
quid pro quo.
Is that what you mean?”

“Exactly.”

“But that is marvelous, Marc! I knew Doctor Winthrop would like him. They are both so—vital. We are all linked to one another, Marc, believe me.”

“Like sausages,” Marcus said irreverently.

Mueller made a noise of mock disapproval.

“Erich, why was he so long in getting out of Europe? Wasn’t it risky?”

“But of course. I will tell you, Marc, but I ask you to keep it in confidence. You will understand why he wants it that way. He was out already and went back. The Baroness … Look, Marc, we are men. She was for many years his mistress. She did everything for him. In the beginning he was an orphan boy of eighteen she wanted to sleep with, I suppose. I don’t know. I’ve been told there are women like that. He was a beautiful boy, I am sure. But she is a very foolish woman. She thinks money can buy everything …” Mueller paused in the story as his wife came into the room. He said to her, “You go upstairs now, Julie,
tout de suite,”
and he gave her a brief slap on the backside as he might a child.

When she was gone he continued: “She thought money could even buy off the Nazis. And it did for a time. Then one day she could look down from her window and see the Jews scrubbing the streets of Vienna on their knees. Then she knew it was very late. She telephoned Nathan in Switzerland and he said one word to her: the name of her villa in the Austrian Alps. She got to it all right and she knew—the international lake, you see. And he came for her at night in a boat and waited. And when finally she did not come he went up to look for her and he saw the Nazis taking her away. They were armed, he was not. He is very much ashamed, but he did not try to rescue her. He saved himself only.”

Marcus studied the end of the cigar he was smoking. “What happened to her?”

Mueller shrugged. “Who can tell? There is no word. I should think a concentration camp. It is not a story you can blame a man if he does not tell about himself, is it?”