Evening of the Good Samaritan (42 page)

“Americans are impatient of nature’s healing,” Madame de Lignon said, referring to Sylvia’s rehabilitation center.

Sylvia said: “True. We cultivate impatience as though it were a virtue.”

“Direct, direct,” the Countess said, speaking in French. “Precision in everything except government. Is that not so?”

“We delude ourselves about being precise there, too,” Sylvia said, intending a small witticism.

There was a flurry of assents as though to please her.

The moment Sylvia allowed her eyes to stray to the door provided Madame de Lignon the subtle association by which she could at last broach the subject of her curiosity.

“We are to be honored tonight, I have heard rumor, by the company of the Baroness Schwarzbach.”

“She accepted,” Sylvia said, and since Maria had reported most of the guests to have arrived, she added: “I’ve been wondering if she’s in the habit of making an entrance.”

She was pressed for the meaning of her words and in trying to explain, Sylvia used the Italian phrase,
bell
a figura. It brought her companions to the brim of mirth. She had scored a splendid
mot
with them unintentionally, and going over in her mind the meaning of the colloquialism she had used, she realized it had the sense of “putting up a good front.” She had asked, in effect, if the Baroness Schwarzbach was putting up a good front. Observing thereafter a quite unsubtle warming in the atmosphere, Sylvia thought: Oh, God. Now I’m one of the girls.

On the arrival then of other guests, she escaped them with a mixture of gratitude and regret. Her own curiosity had been aroused.

Sylvia caught sight of Jonathan from the salon door and abandoned decorum in her joy to see him. Her haste was constrained only by the snugness of her gown. “Jonathan! How marvelous you are here! And you must stay some time with us. As long as you like.” She kissed him on both cheeks, holding fast his cold, dry hands. He looked tired, the tic pronounced, but to her by far the handsomest man present. She would never understand how it was possible for anyone not to love him. Just to look at him, the kind eyes, quizzical, humorous, the shy smile, gave her pleasure. From her youth she had idolized him, and she felt deeply privileged in the right to show her love of him.

Ruggeo watched them, amused, but his fair brow was drawn nonetheless. His very stance, feet slightly spread, bespoke belligerency. He well knew he had come to camp with his enemies. But much, he thought, was to be observed under a flag of truce.

Winthrop shook his hand warmly and drew both men toward the salon door. There however he had to leave them, for at that moment the Baroness Schwarzbach arrived, and with her Alberto Gemini, the American banker.

Ruggeo said, quoting a Jonathan phrase to Jonathan: “There you have it, my boy. There you have it. In the trusts we trust. I may get drunk tonight. I should have warned you.”

“Who is she?” Jonathan said. Who Gemini was he knew.

“It would be far easier for me to tell you what she is,” Ruggeo said under his breath.

The name Schwarzbach occurred frequently in the financial history of Europe, but Jonathan did not know it in any contemporary reference.

The two men drew aside not to impede the entrance of so estimable a couple to the waiting company. Gemini was a bald, sturdy man in his sixties. He might have been a wrestler in his youth, Jonathan thought, for it was easy to surmise a supple, muscled body beneath the well-tailored clothes. But the Baroness: who could tell the face of a woman beneath its facsimile? Not Jonathan. She was plump, gowned in black sequin above which she burgeoned, a vast exposure of shoulder and bosom. She wore her hair a reddish tint beyond the reach of nature. Her eyes, he could not be sure, but he thought were dusted round with sparkle. Not diamond dust, surely! Bold she was and a little vulgar, a quality Jonathan did not find unattractive when set against the austere repression locked within the eyes of a majority of the women present. He sensed rather than actually saw the electric response of the men to the pair’s entrance, and he did not suppose the cupidity which Gemini might arouse to be quite that voluble. Did none of them have mistresses, he wondered.

“For heaven’s sake, tell me something about the woman,” Jonathan said.

“She’s an Austrian Jew. She could and did get out in 1940.”

“There were others,” Jonathan said. He thought at the moment of Nathan Reiss, little realizing the connection.

“She must have come close to outstaying her welcome,” Ruggeo went on. “It was probably a scandal in the Third Reich. Afterwards, she lived out the war in a special kind of retirement in Ischia.”

“So she bought her way out,” Jonathan said when his friend again hesitated. “It happened.”

Ruggeo threw back his head and bared his teeth although he was not smiling. “It’s a loathsome story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

Jonathan was watching, fascinated at the moment, a curious pattern of social activity that struck him as being very nearly ritualistic: the women, each apparently after a signal from her own husband, were disengaging themselves from the group to which they were attached at the time of Gemini and the Baroness’ entrance, and then joining their husbands and approaching the Baroness and her escort. The movement was not quite that pronounced—and certain individuals hung back, also observing—but Ruggeo was aware of it too, Jonathan saw. His mouth set in a hard, sardonic grin.

“Yes, I want to hear it,” Jonathan said.

“She crossed into Swiss waters with the Gestapo officer charged with her arrest.” Ruggeo’s words became clipped. “I never saw him. Handsome, I’ve heard. Virile, we may be sure. Theirs must have been an idyllic life for five secluded years. What rumors came out of those remote hills, I don’t know. She was not herself unknown to the islanders. The estate has been in the Schwarzbach family for generations, from the days Ischia was more stylish than Capri. As I say, what rumors escaped, I don’t know. But when the partisans rose in the North last spring, a certain group arrived in Ischia also. They surrounded, captured and hung the Nordic stud at the villa gate.”

Jonathan said nothing.

“Decadence and barbarism, the full circle of man,” Ruggeo said, his lips pale as he again drew them tightly across his teeth.

Jonathan put his hand to the man’s elbow. “Let’s have a drink.”

They moved toward the long buffet, abandoned at the moment by all except the servants and a few people whom Ruggeo could call his kind, the painter, Cavelli, the Rome correspondent for the
London Record
whom Jonathan also knew, a composer and a scenic designer who lived together on Capri, others. British and Americans, high in the Allied Commission, were also apart, observing while making desultory conversation.

Jonathan indicated the group surrounding the Baroness and Gemini. “Do they know the story?”

Ruggeo shrugged. “I know it. It was never printed in the public press, if that’s what you mean. The conservative press has a strong instinct for self-preservation where a matter is likely to affect their own class. And the liberals among us, Jonathan, have a conscience. It stings us every time we hear the word, Jew.”

“If we are truly liberals,” Jonathan said, “that should not happen.”

“Be honest, old friend. Doesn’t it happen to you? Could you read such a story, and in the context of its time not say that it should not have been written?”

“It happened in the context of its time,” Jonathan said. “Forgive me, Marcello, but you have spoken with such hatred, I should like to hear her version of the story. I doubt that I ever shall. I am not attracted to such society any more than it is attracted to me. I can only say there are Jews who did not die in Buchenwald or Auschwitz and who do not live as does the Baroness. You and I have no premium on conscience. I will not judge.”

Ruggeo mocked him: “The true liberal. He will not judge. Not even the war criminals. Not even Hitler.”

“He is judged,” Jonathan said quietly. “I’m not sure he didn’t judge himself.”

“Rubbish!” Ruggeo cried. “Godalmighty rubbish!” In one long tilt of his head he emptied the glass of gin and bitters. He gave a sweep of his arm, a gesture that encompassed the titled and the elite of the evening. “Why don’t you join them? They say the same thing. Hitler made a mistake. He went a little too far. A few less Jews and a few more Communists, and such a party as this might have been given in his honor.” Ruggeo thrust his empty glass into the hand of the attendant to be refilled. His voice purred at Jonathan with sarcasm. “But you can say this for him: he died like a gentleman, took his own life. Not like our ragamuffin screaming for the rabble’s mercy at the end. I’ve heard it, Jonathan! Their only regret in having supported Mussolini was not that he became a tyrant, but that he proved a coward.” He took the refilled glass from the server’s hand.

Jonathan did not protest. He had not said anything quite like that, but Ruggeo was gathering an audience. Aware of it himself he addressed only Jonathan and more quietly. “Tell me the truth, my friend: what part of my story offended you the most—the lechery or the lynching?”

“The lynching,” Jonathan said without hesitation.

Ruggeo laughed. And having started, he did not seem to be able to stop laughing, not loudly, but gasping out the repetitious sounds. Suddenly he stopped. “And so with me! A revolutionary!” his voice was thick with self-derision. “Christ! Christ, liberate us from the inhibitions of your Christianity!”

Jonathan sipped his own drink, and taking Ruggeo’s arm persuaded him away from the buffet. “We are in danger of distracting attention from the main event,” he said. “Introduce me to your friends.”

Sylvia, just before dinner was announced, did a dangerous thing: she slipped into the dining hall and made an alteration in the seating arrangement. She had with scrupulous care decided on tables of twelve, distributing important personages at each of them, thereby avoiding in an order of precedence she had no hope of understanding. The change she made brought the Baroness Schwarzbach to her own table. She did it, not because of the attention paid the Baroness on arrival, but because of the attitude of the grand dames when they had involved her in a moment of intimacy. She was by no means certain her solicitude wasn’t that of a lamb shielding a tigress. But in the end, Sylvia could only be Sylvia obliging her strong if not very feminine sense of fair play. She left Gemini where she had placed him in the first place, near her husband.

The Baroness at table had great charm. She spoke three languages fluently, Italian, French and English, finding the particular nuance she wished in one language for her conversation in the other. She deferred often to the other women at the table, rarely to the men, ingratiating herself the more with both for it. In a less articulate person, her curiosity, her moments of almost naive wonder at incidents, opinions ventured, would have seemed coy, Sylvia thought. But in her they seemed genuine, and afterwards she would exclaim: “Ah-ha, ah-ha!” as though having arrived at belated understanding. And two or three times during the evening she explained to Sylvia, “I have been removed from so much that has happened.”

Sylvia wished to God she knew more about her and wondered if Maria had deliberately failed her in this particular biography. She was not a girl for gossip, Maria, especially about her own people to an American.

Out of her experience Sylvia could not have asked more of the way dinner went. The wines drew nods of satisfaction: Soave Bertani with the fish, Haut Brion with the fowl, the Pommery champagne with dessert. Only once during dinner did she catch the eye of Jonathan. He seemed earnestly occupied with the wife of a British admiral whom she had seated between him and his friend, Ruggeo. When it was time to leave the tables, a group of musicians began to play in the grand salon.

The Baroness spoke briefly to her hostess: “You have arranged marvelously. I should not have thought it could be done.”

Sylvia felt herself, of all silly things, to be blushing. “Thank you very much,” she murmured.

The Baroness added: “It might have been presumptuous of me to say so. I am glad that it was not.”

“I’m not so sure of myself,” Sylvia said.

The Baroness looked up at her, and for the first time Sylvia realized she was very nearly an old woman. “If I ask you to have luncheon with me, will you do it?”

“I should be honored,” Sylvia said.

Alberto Gemini intercepted them. The Baroness said: “In America, I understand, you are not acquainted with each other, Madame Winthrop?”

Gemini said: “I’ve just found out you’re a Fields, Mrs. Winthrop. I knew your mother. A fine lady—and no flies on her either.” His small blue eyes blinked at the Baroness. “Like you, Johanna. To the point.”

“Alberto, I do not like to be compared with anybody’s mother, even the delightful Madame Winthrop’s.”

Sylvia laughed. Gemini said:
“Tou
ché,” in an unmistakable American accent. Sylvia was remembering his history: A Brooklyn boy, the son of an Italian silversmith, he had laid the foundation of his fortune during World War I.

Before leaving them to join the men for cigars and brandy, Gemini said: “I’m going to have to leave soon. If I don’t see you, Johanna, I’ll be in touch with you. I’ll see what can be done.”

“You are most kind,” the Baroness said, and gave him both her hands. Her smile up into his face embarrassed Sylvia. Surely he must see the falseness of its mock adulation. And of course he did! and was as pleased with it as with the real thing. He was a man who would relish saying to himself and even more to others: she hates my guts, but …

With stolid awkwardness he lifted the Baroness’ hand to his lips. He took leave of Sylvia with better grace, a hand shake much more his style. He had no humor in his eyes, she thought, and from the back, his red neck bulging above the stiff white collar, he looked more Prussian than either American or Italian. He made his way through people with the aplomb of a bulldozer. He had only one thing to recommend him: money.

In his wake, the Baroness’ eyes clouded over with a cold cynicism that she immediately batted out of them, turning to her hostess. Nonetheless, Sylvia felt herself an innocent abroad.