Evening of the Good Samaritan (12 page)

Dr. Winthrop came across the foyer to meet them. Martha could hear the clack of his heels on the marble floor. She had never seen such elegance although her mother had told her of this house. It belonged, Martha felt, somewhere back in history, say, the days of the Congress of Vienna. There was even chamber music playing somewhere nearby.

“Elizabeth,” Dr. Winthrop said and took her mother’s hand.

“You look well, Alexander.”

“Now I am,” he said, and Martha wondered if he had been ill. He extended his hand to her. “And so you’ve come at last to visit me, Martha.”

She put her hand in his. He released it at once for which she was grateful and a little ashamed for being so. He spoke as though she had been avoiding his house, and, of course, she had been, but she did not think he knew it. She could feel the tightness of the skin upon her forehead and knew the vein was showing in the middle. “Thank you for inviting me, Dr. Winthrop.”

He turned to her father. “Walter, at least a dozen ladies have been asking where you were. I’ve promised you to all of them. Get out of that, my friend.”

“Wouldn’t I be the great fool to try?” Fitzgerald said, making the others laugh. Martha felt proud of him.

Her mother was speaking with friends whom Martha did not know. Nor did she sense any special welcome for her and her father. They were probably musical people. She and her father went into the drawing room, her mother waving after them. A manservant passing an enormous tray of champagne stopped before them.

“May I, papa?”

He nodded and they both took glasses. “Have you not had champagne before?”

“Not out of a glass of my own,” she said.

He toasted: “To my daughter, who is as beautiful as any woman present tonight.”

Martha smiled broadly, and then, self-conscious, cast her eyes down and sipped the wine. She supposed she was rather pretty. She wore a new formal gown, green silk taffeta, tight-bodiced, the skirt wide and a little noisy when she walked. Now and then she glanced at her father over the rim of her glass. His eyes were searching around the room, presumably for some of the ladies of whom Dr. Winthrop had spoken. No one came up to them, and she supposed he was handicapped by her presence. She could never think of anything to say at the moment conversation seemed most necessary. She sipped again from the bubbly glass.

Then she said, “Did you ever read
Handy Andy,
papa?”

“Never.”

It was a book Annie had read aloud to her over and over, often at Martha’s request, Annie laughing until she had tears in her eyes which had made Martha laugh more at her even than at the book.

“There’s a very funny passage where he opens a bottle of champagne and puts all the candles out with it.”

“And hits the lord and master in the eye with the cork, does he?”

“Yes,” Martha said. “How did you know?”

“I know how they write an Irish fool,” he said coldly.

“But it was written by an Irishman, I think,” she said after a moment’s thought.

“I’m sure it was, more’s the shame.”

Something has discomfited him, and whatever it was, she had unintentionally aggravated it. He was always open to hurt but never to consolation. She had been rebuffed too often to try now to discover him. They stood for what seemed a very long time silent and privately miserable. In a way they were like prisoners bound to each other by invisible chains—at once resentful and sympathetic of the other’s plight, loving and abhorring.

Martha broke the bond, her voice too loud: “I want to speak to mother. You don’t mind, do you, papa?”

“Of course, I don’t mind. I think I’ll go up to the Trophy Room myself.”

He was gone from the drawing room before ever she found her mother so that she did not need to carry out the pretense. Instead she found a chair apart and listened to the music.

The sleighriders returned just as the announcement was made that dinner was about to be served. They dispersed to repair the disorders of the wind and reassembled in the hall as other people began to converge there, moving toward the dining hall. Marcus had assumed the sleighing party would dine together, supposing he would go in with Sylvia Fields, but something happened which he did not understand until some time later. At the moment he was about to speak to her, Sylvia turned and called out, “Tony!”

Her brother grinned and shrugged a little, waited, and gave his arm to his sister. To Marcus she said, “I expect you to ask me to dance later. You will, won’t you?”

He said, “I’ll ask, but you’d be well advised to refuse.”

“I am reckless in many things, Marcus.” And her eyes lingered a moment on his as though she craved understanding of the unexplained.

She and her brother proceeded toward the dining room. Marcus glanced at Bergner, who was watching them, a tight, wry grin on his lips.

“I feel as though I’d been jilted,” Marcus said.

“How do you think she feels?”

Marcus did not answer, not understanding.

“She’s been in love for years with a man who can’t see it.”

“But not her brother,” Marcus said.

“No. Not her brother. But sitting above the salt, she’s in a better position for suffering.” Bergner put his hand to Marcus’s elbow. “I understand my father expected you to be brought to him before this. I’d just like to be the one to make that introduction.” To his wife he said, “Louise, wait here for me. I shall be right back.”

“Give your father my love,” she said after them.

“I know where to find him,” Bergner explained, steering Marcus into the drawing room again. “I need only follow the music.”

Marcus saw the old man in the distance. At least his white hair would make one suppose he was old. Almost everyone else was at the doors on their way to dinner. Only the old gentleman sat content, the old gentleman and, apart, a very young girl. Passing, Marcus glanced her way and stopped, for at the instant of their recognition of one another, her quick smile would have stayed him on his way to the moon.

He murmured a word of excuse to George Bergner and went up to Martha, knowing himself to be also grinning, and feeling a pleasure that seemed inordinate to have been derived from a girl’s smile. He wondered if she could possibly be as glad to see him as she seemed, and indeed, as he hoped. He noticed the height of her forehead and the blue vein of shyness.

“You wouldn’t by any chance be waiting for me?” he said.

She shook her head no, and then at a turn in his expression, affirmatively, smiling again.

“And will you go into dinner with me?”

“Thank you, Doctor Hogan.”

“Your eyes are green,” he said. “I thought they were blue.”

“Sometimes they are,” she said. “It’s the dress.”

“Don’t go away. I shall come right back here for you.”

He rejoined George, suddenly more confident, much more confident than he had been at any time since entering this house.

“Father,” George said when they reached the old man, “this is Marcus Hogan.”

Dr. Bergner put on his glasses with a trembling hand that Marcus noticed steadying as the glasses touched the nose, and then very slowly, the old gentleman looked at him from shoes to pate. “You go a long ways up, don’t you?” he said. And only then rose from the chair and shook Marcus’s hand. “I thought your name was Thaddeus.”

“It is on the record, doctor,” Marcus said, “but I was called ‘tadpole’ too often as a kid and I didn’t like it.”

The old man gave a spurt of sound which had the effect of fluffing his dark mustache. “George Allan here did not care much for his name either. But I think, given the wisdom of his—how old are you?—thirty-two years, he would say now it was about what he could have expected from his father. Louise got a headache?”

“No. She’s meeting me in the hall. She sent you her love.”

Dr. Bergner grunted, and said then to Marcus, “I want to speak to you after dinner.” And to George: “Is there a place we can go to talk, Hogan and I?”

“Why don’t you try the Trophy Room?”

“Not till I’m atrophied!” his father cried, and with an air of self-pleasure, he asked Marcus, “Do you like puns?”

Marcus nodded slowly. “I’ll trade them, blow for blow with you, doctor.”

The old man took his arm and squeezed it slightly, a gesture Marcus noted was not lost on his son. There was not the best of feeling there, he realized.

Dr. Bergner, his hand still on Marcus’s arm, and starting them toward the doors, said loudly, “Where the hell is that Fields woman? She was supposed to fetch me in to dinner.”

“Sylvia’s mother,” George explained. “We’re an inbred lot out here.”

A highly powdered woman of seventy or so, a tiara of jewels on her head, came toward them. Marcus was thereafter to think of her and speak privately of her as “The Dowager.”

“Where have you been?” Dr. Bergner demanded.

“Where the king goes on foot,” the dowager said without trace of a smile. “George, Louise looks desolate out there, like a cat at a crossroads.”

The elder Bergner said, “I want you to meet Doctor Hogan, Alicia, a young man from whom I just might accept assistance one of these days.”

The dowager looked at Marcus scrutinously. “Do I know the family?”

“You will, you will,” the old gentleman said, and turning to the musicians who were now putting their instruments away, he called out quite as though he were about to castigate them, “The andante in that last Schubert, gentlemen …” He shook his head so that his jowl and mustache quivered, “… never heard it played better.”

Marcus, with a gesture to Martha to be patient, waiting for him, asked, “Doctor Bergner, where will you want to see me after dinner, sir? We didn’t settle it.”

The old man put the question to his son.

“There’s a library on the second floor. You won’t be disturbed there for years,” George said.

“But I like to be disturbed,” Dr. Bergner said, with malice in his eye. He released Marcus and gave his arm to Mrs. Fields to whom he added, “Especially by Alicia.”

George waited for him although Marcus did not ask it while he went for Martha, and when Marcus introduced her, George said, “How marvelous!” It was a remark Marcus did not like even if it were a gratuitous bit of praise and this he somehow doubted. There was, he suspected, a meanness in George Allan Bergner which perhaps came of having a father too big for him. The truth was, Marcus was feeling protective of the tall, fragile-seeming girl whose fingers rested lightly on his arm as they moved toward the dining hall. Therefore, when Bergner suggested that Marcus take Louise in and allow him to take Martha, he resented it fiercely, the more so because he could do nothing but oblige.

Martha said, “I should think we’ll all be together at the table, won’t we?” Something within herself made her want to withdraw just a little from Dr. Hogan the very instant of coming close to him, not because she in any way feared him—and she had liked him from the very first sight of him—but rather because she feared the disquiet in herself.

So Martha went into the dining hall on the arm of George Bergner. Passing her father who had a rather plump and operatic-looking woman at his side, she gravely nodded to him, and he looked pleased. His face was flushed so that she was sure he had had a drink or two, sufficient, she hoped, to soothe whatever ailed him. (Annie, no matter what she administered, be it feast or physic, would always say, “Take it. It’s good for what ails you.”)

George Bergner said, “Do you like Lakewood—from what you’ve seen of it?”

“Very much.”

“In spring it’s much nicer. Trillium everywhere and apple blossoms.”

“I know,” Martha said. “I go to St. Cecilia’s College.”

“Ah! One of their Marriageable Daughters?” Bergner said.

Martha laughed. His reference was to the placards in the village store windows advertising the school play: they were doing a version of
Pride and Prejudice
and the placards read: “St. Cecilia’s College presents
Marriageable Daughters.”

“That’s rather blatant advertising, I’d say,” he went on teasingly. “And are you all really marriageable?”

“Yes. Only some more than others, I guess.”

To Marcus, Bergner said, “Below the salt for us, wouldn’t you say?”

“Well below,” Marcus said. “I shall be lucky if I’m not put out in the yard.”

The table seemed to stretch from one end of the long room to the other, set for two hundred people and with three wine glasses at every place. Actually, there were ten tables, each far enough from the other to permit servers to pass between, but the shimmering whiteness of the linen sustained the illusion of unity. At either end of the hall a stone fireplace was bright with the blaze of six-foot logs, the glow of which, along with that of myriad table candles, reflected in the crystal chandeliers and gave the effect of prismatic, changing light.

Bergner asked to choose their seats, remarking that they would see why presently. It seemed a curious choice he made, to face—beyond the people opposite them—an enormous dark velvet drapery. The other walls were hung with tapestries. Then when everyone was seated, the overhead lights were extinguished, leaving only the candlelight, and the draperies were drawn. They had concealed a dais where presumably dinner was served on lesser occasions, but beyond that there was a series of twelve French doors, permitting the diners this night the vista of a splendid sweep of untrammeled snow.

“My God!” was Marcus’s awed tribute.

Martha said, “I wish there was a rabbit—or something alive.”

Dr. Hogan looked round at her, amused. He did not say anything. Indeed they said very little to each other throughout dinner, the Bergners on either side of them equal to every silence, intruding upon it, but in a way—at least to Martha—leaving it undisturbed. She could not remember ever having felt so perfectly at ease among strangers.

Marcus, too, was occupied largely with thoughts and emotions which Louise’s amiable chatter did not disturb. She had a fund of unmalicious gossip quite suitable to first acquaintanceship. She was really a very gentle girl, her accent Southern, and after a time she told him she had come from Richmond, Virginia. Marcus, meanwhile, anticipating his post-dinner talk with one of the great surgeons in the country, could not help going over in his mind the Traders City hospitals in which, doubtless, Dr. Bergner had the last word: Metropolitan, Mount Clement, and Bishop’s, to Marcus’s knowledge. Surely, room for T. M. Hogan, M.D., would not overcrowd the staff of one of them. Was a residency too much to hope for? A toast was proposed and drunk to the health of their host.