Evening of the Good Samaritan (24 page)

Martha tried to conceal the depth of her own need for breath. “Thank you, Nathan … for everything,” she said, facing him guardedly.

“I wish you were thanking me for more,” he said, his eyes still limpid beneath the half-closed lids.

But he kissed her lightly on either cheek, without touching his hands to her, and then taking her arm, led her out from among the sheltering palms and into the dance once more.

From where she sat at the end of the ballroom, her head tilted back as though she were listening to the man who had her ear, a jeweled hand supporting her chin, the Baroness watched them return to the dance. She touched her hand to her companion’s knee.

“Excuse me, my friend, what time is it now?”

“My God, it is but three minutes since you asked.” But he looked at his watch. “Four minutes, Baroness. It is half past one.”

She nodded in satisfaction. “You were saying?”

The night was interminable, Martha thought, and she must wait up until after the ball and the giving of gifts among the household. One had to be born to this; Americans might play at it, but they could never understand it. The only people in Paris she could truly understand were now propped up by the elbows at the Ritz or some other bar, singing “Back Home in Indiana” or “The Sidewalks of New York.”

At five o’clock in the morning, the gifts distributed and hot coffee passed, the Baroness called for attention.

“A Happy New Year to our friends across the sea!” A footman had turned in the short wave radio and now turned it up. “A Happy New Year from Times Square, Broadway and Forty-second Street, United States of America.” And among the cheers weaving up and down on the waves of sound came the thin strain of “Auld Lang Syne,” to which everyone present joined his voice in the accent and words of his own tongue.

Martha wept openly, and gave her cheek to a kiss from the Baroness, thanked her, and went up to her room.

Later in the morning, New Year’s, she was awakened by the arrival of a cablegram:

HAVE PLACE FOR YOU NOT AMONG STRANGERS. COME HOME AND MARRY ME NOW. EDUCATION WILL FOLLOW. CABLE YES AND MOTHER WILL CABLE SCHOOL. I LOVE YOU WITH ALL MY HEART. MARCUS.

Within the week Martha sailed for home, and on January 31, 1937, she and Marcus were married in the parish house of the church in which she had been baptized almost twenty years before.

A
LEXANDER WINTHROP WAS NOT
a man likely to long remain idle in any case, but the circumstances of his defeat in the mayoralty campaign of 1936 were such that instead of his being frustrated, he was sped to new ambitions, his energies in full flood, no longer dissipated in that most enervating of human experiences, a misalliance. And in one of the sweet uses of adversity, he became better known nationally from that time on than might have been his lot as mayor of Traders City.

One of the first things he did, defeated, was call personally on the Presidential Cabinet Secretary in whose Washington office George Bergner had been working. His purpose was to save George, insofar as he could, from the acrimonious aftermath of the defeat. His visit was the beginning of a strong friendship between him and the Secretary. He came very near to taking an administrative post in Washington himself. He was forestalled, however, by the deathbed decision of old Alicia Fields to set up a foundation in the family name for medical research. She asked him to be its first administrator.

She did not put conditions, but he supposed he knew what was at the back of her mind: it had been in her mind, back and front, for many years. It had graced his own more than once while Sylvia was working so earnestly for his election. He had always had a comradely sort of feeling for Sylvia; she was passionate about a number of things, an attitude he admired although he thought his own candidacy her first sensible cause. As for feminine attractions, he would once have said the old lady had more for him than had her daughter. His feelings had somewhat altered. He did not commit himself except on the Fields Foundation, but the old lady died happy, secure in the conviction that her wish would prevail. She had always said he was a man of conscience.

He had been so long a man of conscience, he reveled in becoming a man of expedition. After Martha’s marriage Elizabeth went to live in Ireland, but by then she might as well have stayed in Traders City for all her presence would have affected him: nothing severs an attachment so fast as the rebuff of a correspondent at the moment of mutually wrought disaster. He no longer measured himself by what he had long supposed her scale; nor did he hark back to his father and his own ill-bought inheritance. What he was, he was. He liked to think that he was now able to see realities, and it was in this period that he acquired a habit which stayed with him the rest of his life: he would sound a table with his knuckles, a wall, a piece of brass or stone, and was likely to say, if the sound pleased him, “That’s the real thing.”

The Fields Foundation, endowed from the outset with sixty million dollars, was certainly “the real thing.” Its first large grant, to a project already going forth jointly in Great Britain and the United States and, incidentally, recommended to Winthrop’s attention by the Cabinet Secretary, received notice in all the national magazines. It also provided Judge Phipps with the editorial grist his mill ground best.

The publisher prided himself on having brought Winthrop down in 1936, and there was no doubt he had helped. But no one ever credited the
Dispatch
with the influence Phipps claimed for it—no one could. But a number of people kept trying to discredit it: the fogy sheet, the bogy sheet, the newspaper on a crusade to nowhere. Phipps encouraged the notion of a personal feud between himself and Winthrop. Having long since abandoned hope of gaining distinguished friends for the
Dispatch,
the judge cherished its enemies. He managed to get enough facts about the grant to compound with his prejudice into a story of international intrigue, Washington betrayal, and Winthrop’s disbursement of a proud American fortune: a fortune gleaned from the plains of the Middle West to be squandered on imperial English soil. It made great local copy at the time, but no impression whatever on the trustees of the foundation or on politics, national or international. History was beginning to outrun the judge.

Mike Shea, through these years, watched both men cagily. He spent his four years after 1936 shoring up the dikes, knowing the tide was against him, but looking always to the day it would turn. He even supported the governor in 1938, for in his Irish heart he loved lost causes, albeit he could rarely afford to champion them. The governor went down inevitably. As Mike said dryly, he could have done it without his help: almost every village and city in the state that year, including Traders City, went Republican; the popularity of the national administration was ebbing fast. But in 1940 there was war in Europe, Roosevelt won over Willkie, and in Traders City, hanging on for dear life to the President’s coattails, Mike Shea and his Democratic candidate for mayor rode back into office. Winthrop, on an impulse, sent Mike a telegram of congratulations.

Mike called him up. “Alex, that was a grand gesture.” And after a while: “Alex, I don’t suppose you’d consider going back as Health Commissioner for this administration?”

Winthrop laughed heartily. “No, Mike, thanks, I had nothing like that in mind.”

“Ah, you’re too big for it now, of course,” Mike said. “And to tell you the truth, I’m damn glad of that. I don’t know where we’re going to get the jobs to go round this time. But let me know if there’s anything I can do for you now, won’t you?”

It left a bad taste in Winthrop’s mouth, the realization that the same old pork barrel was rolling into the city again. But back of the impulse on which he had congratulated Mike was advice from Washington. For over a year now, every time he and the Secretary got together, they had explored—very informally and in mutual confidence—the need for a new morning newspaper in Traders City. Winthrop had begun to take it seriously, for the Fields Foundation by then required only part of his time. The Secretary, apparently, was also serious. He called Winthrop one night in February of ’41 and told him he was sending George Bergner out to see him.

Winthrop, therefore, was not surprised when George arrived at his office the following afternoon with some rather fully developed plans. What did surprise and then amuse him was that Bergner spoke as though the whole idea was his, as though he had no notion the matter had been gone over for months by the Secretary and Winthrop. Perhaps he did not know it, and just possibly it had been his idea in the first place. But Winthrop could not help feeling that George was going at it in the way of a promoter selling a product already half-sold, ignoring the previous salesmanship lest he have to share the commission. That Bergner was a promoter, he knew; how much more he was, he wondered. George was speaking rather too fervently just now to be his superior’s emissary.

Winthrop went to the window and stood, his back to George, the better to think while he listened. George was saying how enthusiastic the President was over the idea. Winthrop was staring down at the new bridge which the President himself had come to Traders City to dedicate the year before. He had had the good sense not to praise its engineering: somebody had stretched an extra mile of construction contract out of the approaches with two otherwise inexplicable hairpin curves. He could see, out of the corner of his eye, Bergner’s polished shoe describing impatient circles.

Winthrop said, “Does the President want to see me himself—if he’s all that enthusiastic?”

“I’m sure an appointment could be set up, Alex.”

“I’m sure it could, too. That was not what I asked.”

“He did not specifically say so—to my knowledge. As a matter of fact, it’s the Secretary who is carrying the ball to the White House.”

Winthrop returned to his desk. “As a matter of fact, George—just between ourselves—wasn’t it the Secretary’s idea in the first place?”

Bergner’s face flushed. It was getting a bit puffy under the eyes. He had been eager and young and saved, diving into the arms of the New Deal out of college. He, too, was needing artificial stimulants now. He said with considerable dignity, “All ideas coming out of our office are the Secretary’s.”

“You wouldn’t be willing to give up your job—for something here, would you?” Winthrop tested.

“I’d be a damned fool if I wouldn’t,” George said bluntly.

Something in the exchange played a trick on Winthrop’s memory: it was like a twice played scene. Then he remembered the association, his asking Marcus Hogan if he saw himself head of the new sanatorium he proposed during their first interview. He wondered, in passing, if Hogan’s answer would be the same today as then.

Strangely, George’s mind had also turned to a Hogan. He said, “I remember old Jonathan Hogan saying why he had to get out of Washington: he couldn’t understand how so much that was decent got done by men so indecent in their competition to do it.”

“It’s that bad,” Winthrop said. Bergner was not a man to prosper on competition. It was to his credit now that he could admit it.

“Either you go up, or you ought to get out.”

“What’s your job down there?” Winthrop asked.

“The manufacture of titles for people about to be kicked upstairs.”

Winthrop laughed. It was surprising that George had survived this long with the Secretary: there was surely no more competitive man in the administration, and probably no more competent. “Is the Secretary as much an autocrat as they say?”

“Let me put it this way, Alex: he’s the best offensive man on the team.”

Winthrop leaned back in his chair. “Why the hell don’t you teach school somewhere and get out of politics, George? Or hang up your shingle again. You’re a lawyer.”

“There ought to be a pretty good place for a lawyer like me in the office of a liberal newspaper,” George said doggedly.

“What do you mean by a liberal newspaper? A war sheet, that’s what your boss wants, isn’t it? Something to stack up against Phipps’s isolationism. Isn’t that it?”

“That’s it only in part, Alex …”

Winthrop interrupted. “And what the devil do you fellows think—that we’re still in the days of James Gordon Bennett? Three million dollars to put the first edition on the streets—without a plant, that is—and that’s a careful estimate.”

“The Secretary figures it closer to four.”

“That’s because he’s a liberal,” Winthrop said. “Why doesn’t he come home and start it himself?”

“He’s an old man, Alex.”

“These are times when the old men thrive. The young ones’ll be going to war soon. Where does he think this four million dollars is coming from?”

“I have the names with me of several men interested in the investment.” George said the words blandly, reached down to the floor for his briefcase and opened it there.

“And the staff—where are you going to get them?”

“There are some good men who’ll come over to us. There aren’t many liberal newspapers in this country.”

“If they’re not damn fools they’ll stick to their conservative jobs. They’ll be in business longer.”

George did not attempt to interrupt. He brought up a folder and separated one page from several, putting it before Winthrop. Winthrop glimpsed the names without looking directly at it: he wanted only the notion of who they were. Texas money, he observed, and New York. He mused aloud: “I wonder how Mike Shea would feel about this.”

Without hesitation and unsmiling, Bergner said, “The city will need two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of space during the first year.”

Winthrop leaned back in his chair and laughed: Mike Shea would soon be paying off on a telegram. He said, scarcely touching the piece of paper in front of him, “You can put that away, George.”

“Don’t you want to see who the potential investors are?”

“No. I do not. If it’s to be my newspaper, I’ll choose my own investors.” He got out an address and phone book from his desk drawer. “Where do you think you’d like to put your desk, George?” He spoke half-jokingly.