Evening of the Good Samaritan (37 page)

“However did we manage without you?” Elizabeth remarked at tea a few days later.

“I’m beginning to wonder, myself,” Marcus said. He had by now examined not merely the children, but half the cottagers and farmers for miles around. Word spread quickly that an American doctor was staying at the manor and ills that would never have got beyond the chemist’s shop were put into his confidence. In addition he refereed badly, not sure of the rules, the Saturday afternoon cricket match between the village boys and the manor boys, but the sum of his errors was impartial. It fell to his charge on Sunday morning to take the Protestant children to the Established Church, while Elizabeth went with her handful to the Roman Catholic, and he promised afterwards to come to tea with the vicar whose church mouse he suspected to be richer. But the country poor, except in the case of famine, have at least their dignity. It was a good tea in a threadbare house: fresh-made bread, sweet butter and gooseberry jam. The vicar’s proudest luxury was his pipe tobacco brought him from London by Philip McMahon which he stored in a crock in the well alongside the butter. Marcus enjoyed a pipe with him, while he heard tales of the manor in the old days and of its present owner whom he was not to meet. McMahon was member of Parliament from the district and now in London.

What Marcus came to remark most in Ireland was the sufficiency of the people to themselves: their lives were spent more in mending and making than in getting. Not that the majority wouldn’t have traded all for a one-way ticket to America; he knew that. And if he had not known it, Elizabeth reminded him.

“It will change, Marcus. It must. But I’m glad it may not happen in my lifetime. Work is better for man than leisure—if it’s work he can see the shape of and take pride in. To be sure, too much of either will kill him, one the body, the other the spirit.”

“And you are content here?”

“To the deep heart’s core.”

“You don’t miss company of your own sort?” He was remembering her at Winthrop’s ball on the night he had met her, exquisitely groomed and gowned, the center of interest among the people of Traders City to whom music was almost as important as Society. She was said to have been a fine teacher.

“I’m glad you’ve come, Marcus. It is enough.”

“Perhaps you’ll return for a visit some day?”

“No, no. Not ever. You see I’m the greatest snob of them all.”

He understood.

“But I want you and Martha and the child to come to me.”

“Do you?” He probed more deeply than she dared probe him.

“I do, as God is my witness. But you are right about… till now. I was never loved as I wanted. I would have found it cruel to watch you. I might even have been cruel—as I managed often enough to my unfortunate husband. I would have loved a man like you until the death even as will my daughter. There, I’ve said it, Marcus. But there is nothing in us deeper than the need to love, Martha and me…”

“I know …” he said, trailing out the word as though it pained him. He stood as in a daze, intent, his face a grimace, piteous as a beggar who has abandoned shame. Except that charity could not help him.

It crossed her mind to try to break him down completely then. She thought she could do it. But she dared not say it would be best, not she, the father of whose child had hung himself in the garden.

And this was but an instant’s trembling. Marcus drew a long breath and was again the master of his own presence. He took out a cigaret. His hand was almost steady as he lit it.

“You ought to apply for your discharge, Marcus,” she said. “You’ve had enough. You ought not to have to go back.”

“But I want to more than anything else,” he said, although he avoided her eyes, saying it.

The music she played for him was Chopin and Schumann and then the darker sonatas of Beethoven. She had put on a velvet gown that evening and wore gold pendulous earrings that shone in the lamp light. The light also shimmered through the jewels of the Spanish combs she wore in her crown of black hair. Her long neck and bare throat reminded him of the marble fragment he had wept over in the Salerno ruins.

He got up and crossed the room and, bending down, kissed the back of her neck. She continued playing so that he went to the door where it was open, and leaned against the frame, looking out. A crest of white mist hung behind the ridges of the hills. Presently she finished and came and stood beside him.

“We shall have the long twilights soon now,” she said. “Almost till midnight it will linger day. And I’ll remember, standing here alone.”

He did not say anything. Nor did he move.

“Marcus.”

He turned his head. He was only a little taller than she so that she reached up her hands and took his face in them and kissed him on the mouth. “Good night, my dear one,” she said, still holding his face in her hands, “my dearly loved one.” She left him, and taking her shawl, went up the path.

He stood some moments watching the way she had gone. Then, feeling the wind with a mist in it, he went inside and closed the door. Taking the lamp to the table, he sat down and commenced a letter home.

“My dear,” he wrote. “I know my silence puts a heavy burden on you. My presence when the time comes may put even a heavier one. You may have to come and get me—which is a manner of speaking, you understand. Not literal. But you must remember I have said this for I may not be able to say it again. Tonight I am alive. Alive. I know because I love …” He paused and thought for a moment and decided to end the sentence there: “I know because I love.”

D
URING THE LATER WAR
years Martha spent a part of almost every day at the South Side
USO
Canteen. It was difficult for her at first, slow as she was to find rapport with strangers, but the shyness of so many of the boys quickened her sympathy and hence her tongue, and the boldness of some of her anger and hence, also, her tongue. She would have much preferred, after Jonathan left, to keep Tad with her all his waking hours and to spend her leisure painting again, solitary, but not altogether lonely: there was not an hour of the day she did not think of Marcus. For a while it did not alter her communion with him that he wrote so rarely. There was in the mystical aspect of her religious life the power of conjuring a presence.

But she suspected some time before receiving the letter he wrote her from the North of Ireland that Marcus had lost the intimate sense of her, and from that letter on her own conjuring began to fail her. And as well, she decided. They would not return to one another unchanged. “You may even have to come and get me,” he had written, meaning, she supposed, that they should have to fall in love all over again, and perhaps she be the wooer. Gladly, gladly. But imagination cannot conjure without the heart’s certainty. In the end she waited and accepted memory and tried not to seek the future in it, lest the memory itself diffuse and she be left with nothing of him.

She had not known until the letter from Ireland that Marcus had been in Italy, and while she conjectured from the new
APO
number that he was next in France or Holland, she did not know it for certain. When her mother wrote, following his visit, Martha resented her ardent praise of him. As though she needed to be told of Marcus’s virtues. Could she love him more for her mother’s praise of him? If he weren’t Marcus she might love him the less for it. She wondered sometimes if she were not jealous of her mother and that ten-day interlude: she was hard put to take unselfish pleasure in it.

After breakfast every morning Tad played in the library where he could watch for the mailman’s coming. He and the mailman always shook hands after a fashion: Tad would run to the front door when he saw him and stick his fingers out through the mail slot. The mailman would take hold of them and give them a shake of sorts. Then when Tad withdrew his hand the letters would cascade in upon the floor. At the age of three, he could recognize a letter from “Grandma n’Ireland” although he could not pronounce the
R
in Ireland. Any other overseas mail he came to attribute to his Grandpa Jon. He was going to need to be a wise child to recognize his father, Martha thought. And there was bitterness for the silence: she could not entirely suppress it.

Tad was keeping his regular vigil for the postman when, through the first snow of December, a Western Union messenger turned up the walk. The child cried out in his excitement, seeing the uniform, and both Annie and his mother came running. They flung open the door even as the man put his finger to the bell, and stopped all, in deadly apprehension of the message that must pass from his hand to theirs. Then Martha took the telegram and signed for it, and before the door closed them unto themselves, Annie began to pray aloud.

Martha could not pray. Stonily, remote from child and friend both, she tore open the envelope. Marcus had been taken prisoner of war by the Germans.

Throughout the day she grew more and more accustomed to the idea. It was not death; from such anticipation, she felt only relief at the other. Many people called, for the name was published with the latest local casualties: even strangers phoned among whose own close relatives were prisoners of war from whom they had heard through the Red Cross. To them she was very grateful. It was supposed from comparison of
APO
numbers that Marcus had been taken at the breakthrough in Belgium. It soon became uneasy consolation, however, that for him the war was over; there now existed too much documentation of Nazi cruelty, and if she allowed her imagination any play at all it suggested that a doctor would be to them a prize capture. And as so many people said, the pity of all this was its happening at The Bulge, when we had been led to feel that victory was all but won.

In the afternoon Nathan came. She had not seen him for a month although regularly a check came from the office to her. He looked vigorous and strong, and as always, on the verge of saying something rather too intimate. It was his manner only, but she never failed to be on the defensive with him.

“You look well, Nathan.”

“It is a handicap—would you believe me? Such an upsided world.”

Martha smiled.

“Oh, no. I see old ladies looking at me as much as to say … but you know what they would say. It is not so bad, Martha, what happened to Marcus. He is an officer, you must remember that. And he is Aryan. He will be treated well. You will see.”

“It is so terrible,” Martha said, “to know a little and know nothing, to sit and drink tea and know that someone whose right it is to be sitting with you—is sunk in God knows what desolation.” She looked within her cup. “And yet the tea is tea, not gall, not vinegar.”

Nathan leaned forward in his chair, his hands clasped between his knees. “You are so beautiful when you are tragic.”

“I am not tragic,” she said. “I am only helpless. Nathan, I swear to you, if I were near and saw anyone hurt Marcus, I should physically attack them. Like a beast with claws. It is not right that war is there and we are here. However shall we face them coming back to us?”

He threw up his hands. “Make heroes of them. That is all. What is it but a spin of the wheel—who shall be heroes and who cowards? Once I was ashamed. Twice. But no more. Nothing you will say, nothing anybody says. I do what I can do. What is shame? It is a perfume, no, a disinfectant. That’s what it is. We shake it over ourselves so people will think we are clean.”

“I did not reproach you, Nathan.”

“Your eyes did. But I am no longer going to hide from them.”

“There is no need,” she said, but without looking at him.

He left his chair and, standing in front of her, he touched his long, cool fingers to beneath her chin. “I would rather you looked at me no matter what I see in your eyes.” He caught her face and held it until she looked up at him. “Poor little unhappy one. How you suffer. May I tell you some news about myself?” He waited for her to answer. But she drew away from the touch of his hand. He returned to his chair. “I have been nominated to the Board of the County Medical Association.”

“How very nice, Nathan. I am sure you deserve it.”

“Thank you.”

“Marcus will be very pleased.”

There was an instant of dissonance in his aplomb—or she might have imagined it. “You are too kind,” he murmured. She suspected he meant quite the opposite, having taken her words for patronizing. “But you understand, nomination is not election. I wish your husband were here.”

“So do I.”

“Of course you do. That is why I am hoping you will do what he would do. I want you to write some letters for me, Martha. Only one or two. They are to very important men in the profession.”

“Do I know them?” she asked after a moment.

“Marcus knows them. They were friends, associates, of Doctor Bergner. You will say you are writing on behalf of your husband to recommend personally his colleague. If you are generous, you will say you met me when I was a distinguished Jewish surgeon on the Continent.” Observing the unguarded reservation in her eyes, he spread his hands. “I am at your mercy, you see. But sometime you were at mine, weren’t you?” The color flared up in her cheeks and he added quickly, “But, my dear, I did not mean our moment… of intimacy at all! What I meant, we are all sometimes at one another’s mercy, the most irreproachable of us. It is so. And if you were to tell of me what you observed in Vienna, it would not create a very distinguished impression, especially with these gentlemen. My friend, Mueller, by the way, is writing such a letter as I am asking of you. And if it is too difficult for you, but, of course, I will understand.”

Martha lifted her chin. “You were a distinguished surgeon. I have no reason to doubt it.”

“And a Jew.” His eyes also challenged her to remember the worst of him, his denial of it.

“I think it would be out of place for me to say that, Nathan.”

“Perhaps you are right. But you will write the letters?”

Having got so far beyond the mere matter of a letter of recommendation, she could not hesitate.

“To whom am I to write the letters, Nathan?”

He wrote out the names and addresses of two prominent Traders City physicians. Martha knew them by reputation only, and she knew that they were Jewish.