Evening of the Good Samaritan (56 page)

Tad was looking over the books which had been placed on his bedside table:
Tom Brown’s School Days,
The Mystery of Sanders’ Cave, Space Cadet.

“I’ll bet Nathan was mad,” he said.

Martha laughed. “Perhaps. But he didn’t show it.”

“He smiled,” Tad said, and drew his own lips wide across his teeth in mimicry.

“I don’t much like that, Tad,” she said.

“I’m sorry.” He looked restlessly about the exquisite room. He toured the lithographs hanging on the walls, French caricatures of the courts of law. “When are we going home?”

“Tomorrow,” Martha said.

“What kind of books are there in your room?”

“Come and see,” Martha said.

Nathan was dressing for dinner. Martha’s gown hung at a closet door, freshly pressed and brought upstairs by a pretty young servant who batted her eyes at Dr. Reiss.

Nathan said: “We have not had a chance to talk, Martha.” He watched them in the mirror before which he was adjusting his black tie. “I have become very interested in Zionism while you were away this summer. I never was before, you know. There are some very interesting people …”

Tad said: “Did you get the postcard I sent you, Nathan—the one in Hebrew?”

“I was just thinking about it,” Reiss said. “That was very thoughtful of you, Tad, to send it to me.”

Tad examined the half-dozen books on the table between the beds and selected one to his liking,
The Plague
by Camus. “May I take this one, mother?”

Martha glanced at it. “Do you think you will understand it?”

Tad shrugged. “I liked
L’Etranger.”

When Tad had returned to his room Nathan said: “A boy his age should not be allowed to read everything, do you think?”

“I think he should be allowed to read what he wants to read.”

“Then you will have to explain it to him.”

“I generally try,” Martha said. She could not remember Nathan’s having read a book since they were married.

After a moment Nathan said: “Do you mind very much coming to this house, Martha?”

She looked at him in the mirror, her own brows arched in wry humor. “Not if you don’t, Nathan.”

He finished bowing his tie before asking: “What do you mean, Martha?”

“I have always remembered the Baroness with affection. She was very kind to me, and she gave me something I might not otherwise have got—a respect for my father and how he died. When last you and I spoke of her, you were concerned that she thought you had betrayed her.”

“It was all a misunderstanding, a confusion,” Nathan said. “But I have explained and she has accepted. When she wrote to me that she was coming to New York I did not tell you, and I was very glad you were not here. I can tell you that now. You do not like to see me humiliate myself. And when one has to explain, it is humiliating, is it not?”

“I shouldn’t think so. But that’s the difference between us.”

“Are you not glad to see me?” he said reproachfully.

“I am glad to see you, Nathan. And I shall be very glad to get home.”

“This was a mistake—is that what you are saying? I’m sorry Martha. I thought you would be pleased—for just one day. And it is very important to me in many ways.”

“I understand,” she said and began to dress.

He watched her with critical satisfaction and when she had finished her make-up and tucked the last strand of her hair into the braided bun, he brought from his pocket a pearl and diamond chip pendant. Watching her in the mirror he fastened the clasp at the back of her neck. “Always I have tried to give you jewels,” he said, “and always you have tried to give me a book.”

“Wouldn’t it be dreadful the other way around?” Martha said with gentle humor.

She wore the jewelry with reluctant grace.

Martha, meeting the distinguished company the Baroness had gathered for the evening, began to understand the ways in which it was important to Nathan. The Baroness was building—indeed seemed to have built—an American salon probably the match of that which Martha remembered with such awe in Paris. Philanthropy would be in common among most of the guests—some in the arts, some in medicine, and in the course of the evening she was able to trace the associations by which she assumed Nathan to have become interested in Zionism. She had not seen him so voluble and attentive to so numerous an audience since the days of his arrival in Lakewood. The difference here, however, was that he could move with the ease of belonging: the Baroness’ prestige was behind him: there was a certain hauteur in his manner that Lakewood would have much admired could he have managed it for them. Perhaps now he would be able to carry it over. That particular vision of the future gave her no great cheer. She felt herself removed to an even more distant observation point of the life in which she presumably participated.

It was late in the evening when dancing had started in the first floor gallery that the Baroness took Martha by the arm and drew her apart. “Now, my dear, you and I may talk. In all my houses I have always insisted on little coves of privacy.” The Baroness looked amused, glancing up at Martha, and Martha wondered if she had been aware at the time of the cove of privacy into which Nathan Reiss had led her on the night of the New Year’s ball in Paris. “This will do,” the Baroness said.

The room was a small solarium, its double doors open upon the dance, its opaque glass ceiling veiling them from the eyes presumably in the adjoining building. Gold, brown and white chrysanthemums banked the walls, their pungent sweetness pervasive in the room.

“Almost twenty years,” the Baroness said as they sat side by side in chairs of Danish leather. “We did not know then what lay between us and our next meeting, and isn’t it well not to know?”

The Baroness arranged her plump jeweled hands in the shape of a cupola in her lap. “Now it is you I wish to talk about. You have a beautiful son. His father must have been a splendid person. Such a tragedy. I wish you would tell me about him. Once before I tried to coax you. You were too shy. But oh, I remember your eyes the morning you received the cablegram. It was the only time in my life I was ever jealous of a woman, if you will believe me.”

“It was a very great moment,” Martha said. “I’ve even been jealous of it myself.”

The Baroness collapsed her hands and folded them. “You are enchanting still! I tried to learn about you from your friend, Mrs. Winthrop. She did not tell you? I knew that she would not. Nor did she come tonight, you see. I knew that, too. She has no understanding of women. I do not know really what she understands—not as much I expect as she thinks she does. Mind now, I liked her, but she is the sort of woman I always like to provoke. Do you know what I mean? To shock.”

Martha smiled.

The Baroness drew a deep breath. “But it was all a more serious matter. I knew she felt I was … unclean. Perhaps she was right. Where one survives and many perish, there are stories. And part of a story is always the truth. Fire is a great purgative—which is why the Christians invented purgatory.

“But we were going to talk about you.”

“I don’t mind that we’re not,” Martha said.

“Ah, but I do. I want to talk about the good things. His name was Marcus?”

“Thaddeus Marcus Hogan, Senior,” Martha said.

Some time after they had returned to Traders City Martha brought herself to ask Nathan outright how the Baroness had escaped the Nazis.

“You must not think unkindly of her if I tell you, Martha. One survives as one can at such a moment. The Nazis were corrupt and sometimes available to bribery …”

It occurred to Martha, his speaking so earnestly, explicitly, to wonder just for a fleeting instant, whether he was justifying the Baroness before her—or her captors.

“She persuaded a lieutenant, I believe—I am not sure and you can understand I would not press her for more than she wished to tell me—to take flight with her over international waters.” Nathan made a slight adjustment in his own pride, telling the next part of the story, and Martha remembered Sylvia’s saying to him at the dinner table, of the Baroness: she has other interests now. “I suppose she took him as her lover for they lived at her villa in Ischia throughout the war. But it came to the attention of the Italian partisans, and after their insurrection, they took the man and executed him.”

Violence for violence, Martha thought. But she could understand now why Sylvia was not able to talk about her meeting with the Baroness Schwarzbach in Naples in the autumn of 1945.

I
T WAS ALMOST INEVITABLE
that a boy like Tad, given the circumstances of his childhood, should on reading
Hamlet
at the age of sixteen become obsessed by the parallels he could draw to his own condition. He spent the summer before he was to enter Rodgers University with Sylvia on the farm. He was to have gone to Ireland by himself to visit old Jonathan, but Jonathan died that spring quickly and quietly of a cerebral hemorrhage. Jonathan, whose health had always been a matter of concern to others, rarely to himself, had lived to the age of eighty-one.

Sylvia, inviting the boy, knew she was to have her hands full. He did not disappoint her. There were times he would not sleep in his bed at night. Out walking all night long. Miles along the river and back, he would say, and she believed him. Even as a small boy he had loved to go off great distances by himself. But Mr. Walker, the manager of the farm, got the fright of his life one dawn when he went to the far pasture to bring the cows in for milking: he heard Tad declaiming in the woods. “Talking to himself at the top of his lungs. That boy’s not right.” His own son could let the clock alarm run down without turning over in his bed.

There was also the matter of girls. It was Sylvia’s practice to use student nurses from Lakewood among the crippled or recuperating children where she could. Tad needed to have nothing to do with the Rehabilitation house: Sylvia’s own cottage was far enough away. But Tad fell into the practice of intercepting one or another of the nurses after work, teasing her, and making outrageous proposals: to one that she go swimming with him in the nude after dark. “He said things that made me blush,” she told Sylvia, which, Sylvia, thought, was no easy accomplishment.

“What shall we do with you, Tad?” she said on the night she decided to finally have it out with him. “You’re all flame and no hearth. You can’t go wild like this, you know.”

“I haven’t hurt anyone. I haven’t
done
anything. You know that.” He glanced at her and then down at the fingers he had woven through one another. “I wouldn’t know how.” And after a few seconds: “I wonder who’s going to teach me that.”

“There’s time enough,” Sylvia said.

“They have dirty minds,” Tad said, “and if they’d thought I was serious, they wouldn’t have come to you about it at all.”

My God, sixteen! Sylvia thought. He was tall, but thin as a flagpole, and with the crew or mohawk or whatever kind of haircut he had, his head looked smaller than it actually was. He had been much handsomer as a child. He was managing while she watched him to interlace his legs as well as his fingers.

“Most people do have dirty minds, I think,” he went on.

“Sometimes,” Sylvia admitted.

“I don’t see how it can be a sometimes thing. Either you have or you don’t have.”

He had trapped her in that lawyerish way of his. This was what drove Nathan Reiss to fury about him. He made the otherwise graceful Nathan stampede like a baited bull, beguiling him into an untenable position—often on a moral issue. One might think the boy raised by the Jesuits from the precision of his mind. It was when he began again on a favorite recent subject of his, George Bergner, that Sylvia suddenly realized the model his fantasy was following. She always tried to answer his questions honestly: indeed she had little choice. Tad could spot a lie, she thought, even before the liar himself was sure of having told one.

“He wasn’t really a very good newspaper man, was he, Syl?”

“He wasn’t trained as a newspaper man at all. Alexander at least had written a column for a number of years. But George did very well as long as Alex was alive. He’s one of those people you meet now and then who can’t be on their own. Somebody told me once—I’ve forgotten who, maybe it was your father—that that was what the Depression did to some people.”

“And now he’s got Nathan to hang onto,” Tad said with the relentlessness of a terrier.

“I suppose you could say that.” It was true, she knew, George deferred entirely to Nathan in his public relations work for the Plan, although in the line of responsibility, it should have been to her. And Nathan used him, sometimes like a personal servant.

“Good old Polonius,” Tad said. “May I have one of your cigarets, Syl?”

“No.”

“I shall bum them from the nurses.”

“Take one.”

He lit her cigaret and his own. The maid came in and cleared the coffee things on a tray and Sylvia was pleased to see the boy untangle himself and gallop to the door to hold it open for her.

“I suppose you’d like a brandy now, too?”

It was said in jest, but he responded seriously. “No, thanks. I’ve promised mother, you know. Only wine. I hope I’ll have the guts to stand up to it at Rodgers … Syl, do I look as young as I am?”

“My boy, you don’t look half as old as you are.”

Tad grinned with pleasure.

“I’d kill anybody who said that to me,” Sylvia said.

Tad puffed elaborately at his cigaret. “How old were you when you first slept with a man?”

“Forty-seven,” Sylvia said without expression.

Tad looked at her, his eyes bulging.

“Which serves you damned right for asking a question like that. I don’t think your mother has ever asked a personal question in her life.”

“That’s because she doesn’t care about other people. She’d rather not know—in case somebody might ask her a question or two.” He re-weighed his speculation on his mother. “You know, I think that’s true. She doesn’t have any friends except you that she cares about really. That crowd of Nathan’s—I can tell how she feels. Me too. They’re a bunch of squares. Cadillacs and caviar.”