Evening of the Good Samaritan (44 page)

The slightest arch appeared in the Baroness’ lightly penciled eyebrows.

“He tried, you know,” Sylvia said. “I don’t suppose I have the story right. I didn’t want to hear the story—from him, I mean. I’m nobody to confess failures to, I’ve got enough of my own.” She laughed uneasily. Having started to talk about Reiss she could not seem to bring the matter to a head. It was unlike her, priding herself as she did on her directness.

“My dear, you should not have discomfited yourself. Nathan could always beat his breast in public with the utmost ease. I thought it to be part of his charm. I was always forgiving him for something.”

“I suppose most women do find it that,” Sylvia said flatly.

The Baroness sat in a silence Sylvia was glad to respect. The road through the village was rough, rutted from the fall rains. The driver used his horn to persuade men and mules out of his way.

“Tell me,” the Baroness said, “what does Nathan suppose happened to me?”

“The concentration camp was what he feared.”

The Baroness lifted her head. “And now that we know what took place in the concentration camps, do you suppose when you go home, he will be grieving his great loss?” Her voice was like velvet: “You must relieve his melancholy.”

Sylvia did not answer.

“Do you know what did happen to me, Madame Winthrop?”

Sylvia was slow to reply: “I did hear a story.”

“Of a crucifixion?” Sylvia nodded. “It is true. And if you will tell the story to Nathan, I am sure it will ease his conscience.”

Sylvia finally glanced at her, knowing the woman to be waiting to meet her eyes. The Baroness’ own eyes were glittery, like polished stone, and she exploded a smile on Sylvia that reminded her instantly of that with which she had looked archly up into the face of Alberto Gemini. For all her affectionate words about Martha, the Baroness was using Sylvia to carry back to Traders City a far from tender message. She did not know her very well.

How she was to get through luncheon Sylvia didn’t know. The nerves at the back of her head were as taut as iron bands. Indeed her whole head felt as though clasped within a rigid mask.

Suddenly the Baroness observed that they had passed through the village. She leaned forward and tapped on the glass partition. The chauffeur opened it.

“Turn around and go back to the village,” she said in Italian. “We wish to see the monastery.”

The chauffeur shook his head and answered, also in Italian: “It is gone. It was bombed out at the time of Anzio. Not even the shell is left. They have made a new school in the village of the old stone. Do you wish to see it?”

“On the way back,” she said, and then: “No, no. I do not want to see anything on the way back. Drive ahead!”

S
YLVIA CAME HOME TO
stay in the spring of 1946, Winthrop moving to the Commission headquarters in Rome. He expected to return himself within the year.

Martha watched from the terminal window as the big plane landed. She saw the ramp and steps adjusted and the door opened, the hostess stepping out. She recognized Sylvia instantly: so characteristic the directness with which she emerged, looked up to the sky and then took over the management of her own affairs. Two children came down the ramp with her, one a boy on crutches. Behind them was a woman obviously in their party, strong and dark complexioned, who Martha surmised was a nurse. Sylvia was Sylvia still, lean, silver-haired, her curls close-cut around the small, plain hat. She would always look well-groomed, expensively dressed, but never chic.

“Oh, my God, you look good,” she cried, gathering Martha into a hug.

“So do you. You even smell good.” The perfume was also expensive.

“Which is more than can be said …” Sylvia left the sentence unfinished. She introduced the children: “This is Angelina.” She was a girl of eight perhaps with a vicious red and purple scar that sliced her cheek like an apple that had been cut into and was going bad. “And this is Francesco.” Francesco was the boy on crutches. He had but one leg. “Angie and Frankie. This is Mrs. Hogan. And this is Maria, who has been all Italy to me. Martha, we are going to do such things, all of us. We stopped in New York for consultation. But soon New York will come to Traders City, the hospital we shall have here.” She looked around. “Did George send the limousine? Good. We’ll fill that up with the luggage, and we can ride with you. Where’s Tad?”

“In nursery school.”

“My God!”

They drove first to the Winthrop flat where temporary rooms had been prepared for the children and Maria. Not far from the Washington Park Zoo, Sylvia explained to them. “I always speak to them in English,” she said to Martha, “primarily because I don’t want them to learn my bad Italian. Their own is bad enough, God knows. You cannot believe what they have been through. And how many there are like them. All over Europe, Martha.”

“All over the world,” Martha amended.

“It gets bigger as it gets smaller, doesn’t it?”

In the late morning Martha and Sylvia drove out to Lakewood, and Sylvia spoke at length of her plan for making a children’s rehabilitation center out of the farm north of Lakewood. “It’s going to take a lot of doing, the State Department and all, even temporary visas. But I’ve promised Alex I shan’t get into any fights. He’s being wonderful about it. I go into things heart, soul and headlong. I keep thinking: if only they could see the children, these to-the-letter-of-the-law bureaucrats.”

“That might make it harder—their seeing the children,” Martha said.

“Yes, I see what you mean. People don’t like to look at them, do they? But they’re going to, Martha. Before and after, they’re going to see them. I want Marcus, you know. I’ve never thought of this project without him. And Alex agrees. I hope you’ll be on my side—when I put it up to him.”

“I don’t think you’ll need me,” Martha said.

At Martha’s persuasion Sylvia drove out by the Lake road: she preferred the faster one herself. But she remarked that she was glad they had come that way. The trees were nearing the fullness of their foliage and the road banks were purple and yellow with violets and buttercups and dandelions.

“We saw Tony, you know. The Sorbonne, no less. Our Tony becoming a scholar. He’s grown a beard and he actually lives in a garret. My God, how I’d like to have done that at his age.”

“Grown a beard, too?”

Sylvia laughed. “I couldn’t even get away with Greenwich Village. But it’s going to be all right. All you have to do is live long enough.”

As they approached the stone gates of Tamarack, Sylvia cried out: “My God, look at that sign!”

An advertisement of billboard proportions announced:
TAMARACK ESTATES, ONE AND TWO ACRE PLOTS
.

Sylvia came close to turning the car around at a right angle sharply changing her direction. “No, we won’t even stop. We shall call the farm Tamarack. It’s never had a name except the Fields farm. I’m glad Alex isn’t here to see this. But then it might not affect him at all. He might even call it progress. Maybe it is.” She drove into the village of Lakewood deep in her own thoughts. “Alex has done a touchy job well, Martha. And he involved the people. That’s what’s good about him: he isn’t jealous of his authority. He can stand people up on their own.” And after a moment: “Look at George Bergner. He’s done better with the
Star
—because Alex had confidence in him—than we’d have done ourselves if we’d been here. We’d have got into all sorts of things. George just holds steady.”

“We don’t see the Bergners,” Martha said.

“And the Muellers?”

“Sometimes. Erich is a very funny man—trying to be a politician. Only it’s not funny, his crusade for peace. And he’s beginning to make us understand what the atomic bomb really meant.”

“They’ll be calling him a Communist,” Sylvia said.

“I don’t think so.”

They went to lunch at the Green Tea Pot where Martha had often gone when she was at St. Cecilia’s. The waitress recognized them both.

“Isn’t it nice to be recognized?” Sylvia said. “You know, I’d always thought it would be Alexander who’d be homesick, he’s so American. I miss him very much. I keep feeling as though I’d forgotten to bring something important.”

Sylvia forced herself finally to inquire about Nathan Reiss. She supposed that for the rest of her life whenever she met him or spoke of him she would think of the Baroness. It was one of the things she would have liked to blot out of her memory, and of course it was therefore the more vivid: the child’s throwing of the stone on the road above Naples, the chauffeur’s back, his handsome profile as he told of the vanished monastery; and then the most shocking thing of all to Sylvia: the Baroness’ caressing of his hand, leaving the car, careless of whether Sylvia observed it or not. In such capacity had Nathan Reiss also served her, and the crucified Nazi …

She had gone back to the children of Naples’ streets from that luncheon with the gladness of salvation to be among them. She cherished the very nits in their hair. And she had not been able to tell Winthrop about the woman. Nor—if Reiss were to learn of her survival—was it to be from Sylvia.

“He’s been quite wonderful to Marcus,” Martha concluded. “I don’t know what we should have done without him.”

So be it, Sylvia thought. A man was entitled to forget. She would even go so far as to say he was entitled to escape.

Louise Bergner managed to gather a great many of the old Lakewood crowd to celebrate Sylvia’s homecoming: almost everyone present still called her Sylvia Fields, and more than once through the evening Martha though that when Alexander Winthrop was mentioned it was rather as though he had been a guest among them at some time. They were much more solicitous about what had happened to the Fields estate than to Tamarack. Someone suddenly did inquire about Winthrop’s art collection. “We decided to break it up,” Sylvia said. “We’ve kept a few pieces.” To which a gentleman replied, a seeming
non-
sequitur but not really, “A chip off the old block, you are, Sylvia.”

It was Marcus’s first time in the Bergner house since the old doctor’s death. Virtually nothing in it had been changed or rearranged and Louise presided with the fussy concern of a curator who has been given a lifetime benefice. He found himself wondering if she were not acting out a fantasy, given this house to play with, a transportation backward into a South she had known only from books or some grandparent’s tale: George would fit nicely, the combination businessman-politician-publisher whose intimate demands were minimal. And George, paunchier of belly than when Marcus had last seen him, and with his bald pate burnished brown, would take easily to the arrangement. He would come home to entertain, but not to be entertained, to oblige the forms by which he assumed society was best governed. It was a curiosity of logic in men like him that they supposed the forms strengthened by their own digressions, even as they thought their digressions a show of strength in themselves, not weakness. He observed, too, how much Nathan was at home here: part of the drawing room
décor.
He was in a way the liaison, the interlocutor between the undeceived and the self-deceived.

Louise gave her hand to Marcus every time they came together as though it were the first time that evening, and she would say, “It’s so good to see you again,” or “It was so good of you to come,” so that Marcus wondered if she had not been put up to this overextension of grace. And when she said, “You
are
looking well, Marcus,” he responded:

“Why shouldn’t I, feeling as well as I do?”

“But you did have a difficult time adjusting after the war?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Now, Nathan says, you’re doing just beautiful.”

“Nathan ought to know,” Marcus said dryly.

She took him by the arm. “Come and meet my daughter. She’s been dying to meet you and Martha. I want her to talk to Martha. She’s a very talented painter, my Eleanor. I wish her father’d let her go to Paris. I’d just love her to meet Tony … but what mother wouldn’t?” When last Marcus had seen the Bergner children, Eleanor had been a gawky twelve-year-old, her brother a thumbsucker at ten, both of whom their grandfather was about to put in boarding school. Louise presented a girl who was standing tiptoe to womanhood and Marcus was struck with two thoughts almost simultaneously: it was at such a moment in Martha’s girlhood he had met her; and Eleanor Bergner now bore a very strong resemblance about the eyes and nose to her paternal grandfather.

“Eleanor,” her mother said, “this is our dear Doctor Hogan.”

“Not so dear,” Marcus remarked slyly. “According to Doctor Reiss, not nearly dear enough.” The girl smiled winningly and Marcus said, “Shall I take you to meet my wife?”

But Marcus fell to thinking about the old gentleman who had built this house in the style he had most admired, who had dominated the pale woman in the faded picture at the top of the stairs and who had hoped for a son who would stand up to him. He wondered how much of himself the old man might have seen in this slight but passionate-eyed girl and how it would have fitted into the theory of eugenics he had spent his life documenting. Marcus could remember the smell of kerosene in this house and the taste of ashes: it was like a tragi-comic nightmare, remembering the downstairs-upstairs search. And he wondered now if he had not had some intimation of what would happen to that manuscript before it had been too late. He had, he supposed, lacked something of courage himself that night. He had had in him a core of naïveté or weakness which allowed him to avert his mind lest it perceive evil and he be compelled to confront it. The only gesture he had been able to make in the end was a pious taunt on the comparability of book-burnings—after the fact. One avenges no one but oneself. He had gone forth from that night blaming George for something he could, pressing responsibility, assume not a little blame for himself.

“I know,” Sylvia was saying, “there are good arguments for making use of Lakewood Hospital.” Everyone favored her plans for a children’s rehabilitation center. Nor had she heard once any demur on the grounds that most of the children would be foreign. Lakewood had a conscience commensurate to its pocketbook, and many people were anxious to subscribe. Lakewood Hospital, its facilities enlarged preparatory to and during war, was presently too large for the community. Marcus, however, was opposed to confining the Plan to one hospital, especially one as far out of the way as Lakewood. He agreed that the farm, as a sort of clearing house—for preparation and recovery—was fine. “But,” Sylvia went on, “there is an overriding reason—for me—not to use it: Doctor Hogan does not think we should.”