Evening of the Good Samaritan (4 page)

Men like Winthrop had sustained him. The president of United States Copper had put his arm about him. A killing kindness: was this the intention? They could not care very much, those men really, about his anti-Fascist, antiwar activities; only the Walter Fitzgeralds, the pious and the patriotic, cared about them. The trustees almost to a man were
laissez faire
capitalists, and it was doubtless known among them, though not likely to have been discussed that night with Hawkins, that he was economic advisor to a group of labor organizers about to go to work in the steel industry. The best service he could do them now would be to withdraw from their council. He had been defended and isolated. But what could they have done? Suppose they had fired him? They would have not merely brought him down then, they would have compromised Hawkins and the University. They had acted honorably. Who could gainsay that? It fell to him now to be as explicit in his loyalties.

Adieu, gentlemen, he thought, leaving the streetcar.

“Good night, professor,” the motorman called after him for they had long been friends on the same run.

He turned and waved his hand.

The newest thing about the house he shared with his unmarried son was the sign at the walk:
T. M. HOGAN, M.D.
The house itself was set a distance back from the street unlike the other buildings in the block. It afforded a garden in front. Otherwise from the parlor and from Marcus’s office there was a fine view of the neighborhood’s back porches. Frontside, the houses were ugly enough. The area was changing fast. Mrs. Turley, the Negro woman who kept house for them, often said, “Mr. Hogan, you ought to go and live among the white folks now and sell this place for money while you can. It all going to be colored people soon.”

She was right: he hadn’t much inheritance to leave his sons. As he climbed the steps he could see Marcus sitting forward on the sofa, his shoulders hunched. It occurred to him that the boy was waiting, had probably been waiting for word for some time.

“Dad?”

He looked in at the living room door.

“It’s a wonder you wouldn’t phone a man,” Marcus said.

The older man put away his coat. He took off his collar and tie and hung them on the banister. “I’m sorry, Marc. I thought you’d be at the clinic. It all came out fine: they voted me everything but a raise.”

“I heard it on the radio finally,” Marcus said. “Complete exoneration.”

“I feel let down all the same,” Jonathan said.

Marcus laughed and shook out a cigaret from his packet, offering it to his father.

“Thanks, no. I’ll have my pipe. I’ve smoked too much tonight.” He went to the mantle and filled his pipe from the jar there. “You know, the chairman of the Board of Trustees came up and put his arm around me. Think of that: United States Copper.”

“I don’t suppose any of it rubbed off,” Marcus said.

Hogan sat down wearily and struck a match on the bottom of his shoe. “I’d be a great fool to think this restored things to where they were. And yet …” He shrugged. “Even Fitzgerald shook me by the hand. The important thing is that we trust one another: that’s what he said.” He puffed the fire into his pipe.

“Who’s Fitzgerald?”

Hogan started to explain. Suddenly he was very tired, and he could feel something hard, numbing, running up through his head. “He’s in the philosophy department.”

“Isn’t he the one who was after your hide?”

“One of them. Ah, but he’s Irish, Marc. That’s the difference.”

“Meaning what?”

The numbness eased off as he rubbed his forehead. “Oh, just that. He’s sentimental. If his victim doesn’t die of the blow he struck him, Fitzgerald’ll be the first man out to congratulate him.”

“The damned hypocrite,” Marcus said, for he had watched his father age these last few weeks.

Hogan pulled at his pipe, thinking, and then laughed. “You know, I shook him up a bit tonight though. The minute he stuck out his hand to me, I said to him, ‘Professor, there’s something you can do for me, now.’ ‘Anything, anything at all, Jonathan,’ he said. In fact, I think he said, ‘Jonathan, my boy.’ And I said, ‘I want you to speak to your friend Winthrop about my son. Like Winthrop,’ I said, ‘he’s interested in public health. He’s got some fine ideas on chest surgery, but what he needs is a good residency.’”

Marcus grinned. He sat, finally relaxed himself, his hands dangling between his high, bony knees, the cigaret smoke trailing sensuously up the back of one hand. “What did he say?”

“He wants to look you over himself tomorrow afternoon.”

“I’ll be damned,” Marcus said, and sat for some seconds thinking about it. His father had spoken lightly, but it was in Marcus’s mind that he might very well be judging his own position by the extent to which Fitzgerald was willing to go now to make amends. “Let’s have a beer.” Marcus got up. In the kitchen he opened two bottles.

“Will you go to see him, Marc?”

“Why not? Any nurse can do what I’m doing in the clinic—and downstairs here. At the rate I’m going, it’s going to take a war to make a surgeon of me.”

Jonathan frowned, the pulse starting up where it sometimes appeared at his temple; together with the tic, it distorted a face that ordinarily was handsome.

“I’m sorry I said that. It wasn’t necessary. I didn’t like what I saw on the campus tonight. I was over there. There was a meanness in the police.”

“There always is, Marc, among men who would rather obey than think. Self-discipline is one of our more recent luxuries.”

“I’ll say,” Marcus said and both men laughed.

Marcus touched his glass to his father’s. “Skoal,” he said.

“Skoal.”

M
ARTHA FITZGERALD WAS ALWAYS
of two minds about week-ends: most of the girls who lived within fifty miles of St. Cecilia’s College went home on Friday afternoons. It was a lonely moment for her after they had trooped down to the North Shore station, watching until the train pulled out. At home she could herself go to a play or a concert, or even to a dance if somebody’s brother didn’t have a date of his own making. And she could gorge herself on Annie’s cooking. But after the hollow moment of watching, she generally went off on a long walk with one of the lay faculty or with classmates, and had tea in the village—tea consisting of raisin toast sopping with butter and a chocolate milk shake. And staying, she could spend all of Saturday morning in the studio—without the boondogglers. Sometimes she thought she was the only one in art class who took it seriously—except for a girl called Genevieve Revere of whom Martha was in awe, and vaguely, a little afraid. Genevieve was always talking of Paris and how she expected to be there soon. Once she suggested that if Martha could spend her junior year abroad they could run away from school together and have an apartment in the Latin Quarter. Martha had been appalled at the idea.

Sister Mathilde was already in the studio when Martha arrived, herself working, her black sleeves turned up to where the white undergarment showed at her wrists. She was young and she painted beautifully despite an almost palsied shaking of her hand. She had had a nervous breakdown, it was said, and most of the girls considered that quite as important an accomplishment as her painting.

Martha put on her smock and went to work at her own easel after the merest exchange of greetings. They were accustomed to silences in the studio. Even out of it, she had little to say to Sister Mathilde. There was in the nun’s way of looking at a person a sort of probing as though to discover deep, important things that made Martha fear saying something trite in her presence. She soon forgot Mathilde altogether and gave a start when the nun, standing beside her, said, “Come here a moment with me, my dear.”

Martha followed her to an easel near the window which the nun then turned around to where the water color propped up on it caught the full morning sunlight. Martha thought at first that its subject was something anatomical or biological—like intestines, except that they were green; snakes, she decided, curling around a barkless tree. By then she had glimpsed the name on the easel: Genevieve Revere. Her first reaction was one of shock, realizing that the nun was looking at and showing the girl’s work when she was not there. Martha did not say anything. She could not. The nun, who was several inches beneath her in height, turned to look up at her. Her eyes were moist, glistening, and she was even paler than usual. Martha could never tell whether she was pleased or angry because of the set of her mouth, the lips perpetually curved upwards ever so slightly at the corners.

“Isn’t it extraordinary?” the nun said then. “Isn’t it wicked?”

“I like most of her painting,” Martha said in feeble defense of someone she did not really care for as a person.

“Oh, my dear, the girl is wonderfully talented. She can paint like an angel. She’s done this deliberately, you see. She wants to get even with me.”

“For what, sister?” Martha said, but she did not care at all. She was shocked discovering that the nun was trembling, the dark veil over her white coif aquiver. She would have given anything for the nerve to move, to run. One expected anger in a nun, laughter, reproach … but never this … whatever thing it was, so personal.

“For loving her soul, and trying to save it, while she makes riot of it. I do penance for her every day of my life. I know what sin is, Martha. My father and mother were divorced when I was thirteen years old. My brother hanged himself in the hallway of our house, and now I have to do penance for her, too, this wicked, beautiful child.”

Genevieve Revere was not a child, Martha knew. She was nineteen years old, and another of the reasons Martha feared her was that she dared to say out that she hated Sister Mathilde; she made fun of her, called her a Puritan witch, a creep, a ghoul. She would stand at the blackboard before art class started, this tall, violent, vitriolic girl, and draw voluptuous nudes on which she would deftly stroke swatches and sweeps of clothes against the metronomic rattle of Mathilde’s beads as the nun came up the stairs. Only Mathilde’s breathing could be heard in the instant of her entry and then the plunking sound of the chalk as Genevieve dropped it ostentatiously onto the blackboard railing.

Martha felt herself leaden, bound head and foot, chained as ever was Prometheus, and as gnawed at as was he. Sister Mathilde was looking up into her face as though herself in an ecstasy of pain. “Can you tell that I’m weeping?” the nun asked. Martha shook her head. “I am. The tears are running hot and scalding down my throat. I love that child. I want her for God.”

Martha could not look at her any longer, and yet the nun’s eyes clung to her own, drawing, sucking back her gaze. Then Mathilde turned to the painting, the green water color, the bare tree bound round with snakes, and lifted a trembling finger which she pointed at the tree. “You understand her allegory, don’t you? You can see the tree is meant to represent me.”

“No,” Martha said.

“Oh, yes. I can see it quite plainly.”

Afterwards Martha could never remember the impulse, or the sound she made; she always thought it must have been a scream, but no one answered it. What she did remember was the impact in each of the five fingers on her right hand as they struck the drawing board, and she recalled the scrape of her fingernails, and the sound of the tearing and crumpling of paper. The nun, she knew, turned away to the window, and Martha, throwing down the destroyed water color to the floor, managed at last to move toward the door, faster then, and then faster, almost away.

“Martha!”

She paused on the threshold and looked back.

“Thank you, my dear,” Mathilde said and bowed her head over her clasped hands, the knuckles of which she pressed against her mouth.

Martha ran down the back stairs so that she might encounter no one, tore off her smock and escaped outdoors wearing a borrowed coat. She walked to the lake alone although it was forbidden, but even the cold wind sifting snow about her face could not drive out or make orderly the tumult and revulsion. She tried to pray a little, and then to understand. To understand without feeling. She was eighteen and suddenly she remembered an older friend now on the faculty telling her of having been kissed by a priest once when she was eighteen. She had not been able to take Holy Communion for months and months afterwards, compounding her own sins thereby, and unable to account the reason to anyone, or for that matter, to herself. “It just wore off—like most things do,” her friend had answered her query. And remembering it now, Martha was oddly comforted.

She walked along the crisped sand where the water had come up in a slow eddy and had been caught and transmuted to ice. She thought then of Hans Christian Andersen’s
Snow Maiden
and the devil carrying the mirror up to heaven that he might mock the angels. She had never altogether understood the story as a child, but something like that seemed to have just happened to her. Bits of driftwood lay among the dunes, the color of flesh, and shaped by the constant wash of the lake, some pieces, to the delicacy of an elbow or a shoulder or a breast. She took her hand from her glove, for it was cold, and with only the remotest consciousness of an association, warmed it beneath her coat at her own breast.

She walked to within sight of Dr. Winthrop’s mansion, high on a bluff to the north. He was her father’s friend, not hers. Martha turned back. In the school basement she lingered at the radiator until she was warm, and then went upstairs and knocked at the door of the dean’s office. She asked permission to go home for the rest of the week-end.

Mother St. John bade her telephone home and if they would expect her, she might go, of course. A wise woman, the nun did not even ask a question. But after Martha had gone, she thought a moment on the girl’s usual Saturday morning activities, and then wrote a note on her calendar pad unmeaningful to anyone except herself. She wrote: “Leonardo da Vinci.”

M
ARTHA HAD ATTENDED CONVENT
boarding school through high school and into this, her second year of college. It never occurred to her to wonder why she, an only child, was sent away to school. She was only a little happier there where she had practically no time to herself than at home where she was left very much alone. Her mother was away a good part of most days. And Annie’s care, as far back as Martha could remember—beyond food, her insides, a clean head and an occasional Irish fairy story—consisted largely of saying “Don’t” to things she was unlikely to have done more than once in any case: Don’t go too near the lily pond; don’t climb the rose trellis; don’t eat the snow berries. Her mother maintained music rooms in the International Building on Lake Front Avenue where she taught piano and voice. Martha very nearly stopped there that Saturday afternoon on her way home. She did not do it, however, knowing her mother did not approve such surprises; she liked to have everything prescheduled. Martha dearly loved houses where people just dropped in.