Evening of the Good Samaritan (47 page)

The color rose to George’s face and Sylvia knew she had touched something vulnerable. It did a great deal to restore her own equability. She was able to contemplate point by point her conversation with Hurd Abington.

“Marcus,” she said, “do you remember Doctor Albert’s papers that he was always working on—his doctorate or whatever you’d call it—on a superior line of human beings?”

“I remember it,” Marcus said evenly. “I was in it. He did a search of my mother’s family.”

“Did you collaborate with him?”

“I don’t think he wanted a collaborator. He wanted an audience.” Marcus looked at George.

“Did you persuade him not to publish it?” Sylvia said, following Abington’s train of remarks.

“I was not given that prerogative,” Marcus said quietly.

There followed a few seconds of silence and George gazed up at Sylvia where she stood looking from one to the other of them. He said: “I suppose you’re wondering what became of father’s papers? Tell her, Marcus.”

Marcus hesitated but an instant. “I don’t see that it matters now.”

But George said: “Marcus burned them the night of my father’s death, I presume at Father’s request.”

Marcus turned very pale and his hand trembled so violently as he tried to set his glass on the table that the glass upset and tumbled to the floor. He caught hold of the arms of the chair and pushed himself up. “I’m not going to be able to work with this man, Sylvia. I’m sorry, but I’m not.” He had been clenching and unclenching his fists. He looked at his hands, the palms of them, and then rubbed them together. He was quite overwrought. “I don’t even seem to be able to stay in the same room with him,” he said, and made his way to the door, bumping first into a chair, and then a typewriter table which he pushed violently, blindly out of his way. He went the length of the office without stopping, and out.

Reiss leaped up from where he had sat, all but mesmerized. All of them had become momentarily paralyzed. Reiss said, “Excuse me,” and ran after Marcus, calling out his name.

“Well, George,” Sylvia said, “I feel the way Marcus does.”

“For God’s sake, Sylvia, can’t you see that the man’s unstable? He should be in a rehabilitation hospital himself.”

“That, too,” Sylvia said with bitter calm.

“I don’t know what you’re accusing me of, but I think Alex ought to be apprised of the whole situation. I work for him, you know. I don’t want a damn thing out of your Children’s Plan …”

George stopped. There was a noise or a shout from the hall beyond the office. Sylvia started running, and Bergner lumbered after her. She reached the office door to hear Reiss shout again and again for help. He and Marcus seemed to be scuffling at the elevator gate, Marcus half in, half out. Other people were running down the hall from other offices. Reiss thrust his hand through the wire cage, trying to reach the mechanism. But Sylvia saw Marcus teeter backwards as the doors began to close. The elevator within plunged down. Reiss screamed, his hand caught in the gate. The gate, its mechanism interrupted, snapped open, releasing his hand. But Marcus, with much the pendulum-like motion of a drunk man, lurched forward and hurtled silently down the shaft, twenty-one floors to his death.

Reiss was doubled up, holding his hand between his arm and his breast, the blood from it streaming down all the way to the tops of white shoes. He lay down on the floor and writhed with the pain.

T
HE RAIN BEAT NOISILY
upon the roof. It was the harsh rain of September after which the birds go south and nothing in the garden grows any more. Because it allowed no other sound to reach her ears it was to Martha the best of sounds. She would not hear the chiming of the tower clock, the cars that passed without stopping, or stopping when she would have sped them on; she would not hear the clatter Annie made in the kitchen by the sudden crescendos in which she would know her to be venting in her own loud way her Irish grief. In such deluged silence one could stand before the easel making a mirror of one’s mind on canvas. One could put a bold dark stroke in space—and see it there forever.

She put down brush and palette and went to the window, wiping her hands in a rag. On a day like this Tad, with Sylvia in the country, would be having a story before the fire or playing Chinese checkers. Looking down at the garden she thought that some of the green tomatoes should be brought indoors to ripen. It was a good thing to think about: green tomatoes ripening, and grapes that needed to be picked before the first frost. The grapes grew well planted along an arbor where the tool shed once had stood. Something always grew even in the soil of graves: that much she could believe. The rain coursed down the roof, bubbling over the drainpipe at the joint beneath the eaves where the shoot was blocked by bits and pieces which might once have been a bird’s nest. “My heart is like a singing bird whose nest is in a watered shoot…” She closed out the poem from her mind knowing instantly where the lines would take her. But even as she turned back to the easel another line slipped into her consciousness to take her thence anyway: “I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get in the wine.”

One must paint and paint and paint and think of oneself as one, thus making two of one, company for each other and in that way neither of them cries. When next she went to the window, she saw the black umbrella bobbing along the far side of the hedge. From the gait of its carrier she knew her to be Annie, and this being Saturday afternoon, she would be on her way to confession. Marcus had come to believe that all creeds were vain, and so now did she, unutterably vain. Which did but speed Annie the more often to tattle into the ear of God.

Secure in being alone in the house, Martha went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea. Tea and toast: a sane and salutary ritual. A note from Annie was propped against the toaster in the center of the kitchen table. “I’ll be stopping for tea with your father’s cousin,” the note said in part. Her father’s cousin was also Annie’s cousin, and once or twice less removed, but Annie always spoke of her as “your father’s cousin”—whether to give herself station or Martha “a rub” Martha did not know. There were certain defects Annie expected to find in all natures, and if they did not show up outright, Annie assumed they were there all the same.

The kettle was about to boil when the front doorbell rang. It rang twice more before Martha moved from the kitchen. She went because there was in the ringing the suggestion of someone who would not—possibly who could not—go away. It was an impulse of mercy that sent her to a door she often left unanswered.

Nathan Reiss stood on the lower step, the rain falling between them like a scrim. She drew back and held the door open to him: he stepped into the hallway on her wordless invitation.

“I am alone,” he said. “Do you mind that I have come?”

She did not know whether she minded or not. The sense of urgency she had supposed in the ringing of the bell did not altogether abate. “I am making tea,” she said. “Better bring your coat into the kitchen where it will dry.”

He needed to take a silk scarf from his bandaged hand before he could remove his coat. The last time she had seen him he had been wearing a cotton glove so that she supposed he had recently had another operation.

“Is it painful, Nathan?”

“Only when I am impatient—which is most of the time. They have accomplished nothing. In three months you would expect some change, wouldn’t you?”

“Three months is a long time,” she said. She gave him a fresh towel with which he wiped the rain from his face. She arranged the tea tray on the cart. “We’ll have it in the library. Can you manage the fire there? Annie may have already set it.”

He smiled, and seeing the smile, she was glad that he had come. “I can do almost anything,” he said, “except the thing I want to do most.”

“It will take time,” she said, and remembered saying the same banal phrase to Marcus of his condition after the war. She searched the pantry for something sweet to serve with the tea. Without Tad home, Annie provided a scant assortment. She returned from the pantry to find him reading Annie’s note where it lay on the table.

“Forgive me,” he said, looking up. “I did that automatically. I was not thinking about what I was doing.”

“Annie’s notes are scarcely private. I’ve been trying to figure out why she always tells me that she’s visiting my father’s cousin when it’s her cousin also, and one I don’t think my father ever actually met. Perhaps that’s it,” Martha answered herself.

Reiss went on into the library and when Martha came with the tea tray, the fire was already glowing.

“Do you have a very strong family feeling?” Reiss inquired.

“About Tad I suppose I do,” Martha said.

“I mean about your parents, your own origins.”

“No. When I was a child I often thought I must be an orphan. Most children think that sometimes, I understand, but I never really got over it. I came in time to understand it.”

“Your mother I remember to be a beautiful woman, but with a beauty different from yours.”

“Nonetheless, I am reasonably sure she is my mother,” Martha said in sly jest.

But Reiss was serious: “No one could doubt it, comparing wit as well as comeliness.”

“That’s a nice word, comeliness,” Martha said. “One does not hear it often.”

“I remember liking the sound of it myself and then I found it in the dictionary.” He explained himself with a sort of innocent candor she found beguiling.

Martha tried the tea for strength. As the fire flared up, the sluice of rain occasionally hissed in the chimney. She thought: the harshness of the letter “s” had all but disappeared from Nathan’s speech.

“Something brought me here this afternoon,” Reiss said. “You have never asked me, but I felt that I must come even if I must ask myself.”

“I have asked no one, and I’m not always grateful to those who come anyway. But I am glad to see you, Nathan.”

“It is enough. More in my present condition I could not endure. One must not be too kind to the infirm. Which is what you have just said to me, isn’t it?”

“In a way, I suppose it is.”

“One comes to understand,” he said. “I have been terribly spoiled—for an orphan.”

She brought his tea to him and set it on the low table before the fire. He was looking at the painting above the mantel. “Is that yours, Martha?”

“Yes.”

He said nothing except a murmured thanks for the tea.

“You’ve seen worse, haven’t you?” she said, amused at his silence.

“Much worse,” he said quickly. “And the pictures I have liked better were probably much worse also.”

Martha laughed. She brought her own tea and sat beside him.

“The Baroness tried very hard to give me a proper education, but always I have had the one-track mind, to be a surgeon.”

“What do they say of your hand, Nathan?”

“Maybe. That is the most they will say: maybe.” He looked at her. “Which is better than never, isn’t it?”

Martha touched her fingers to the plate of confection on the table, moving it a little toward him. “These cookies have Tad to recommend them,” she said. “But one’s taste must run to raisins to like them.”

He caught her hand where it fell on the couch as she leaned back and drew it gently the half-distance between them. “I hurt you, Martha, because I would heal you. Sometimes that is the way.”

Martha did not withdraw her hand from his. They sat thusly, mute, for a long time, the tea growing cold on the table before them, and the fire brighter in the grate.

“Oh, Nathan, I am desolate,” she said at last. “I often wish for death and I think of my father and try to remind myself that I am his daughter.”

“You are also your son’s mother.”

“Yes. I think of that even more often.”

“It is not good to be alone when one is hurt—and useless.”

She glanced at him, her eyes soft with sympathy.

“That is even worse,” he said, “to see you look at me like that.”

Suddenly the tears rose to Martha’s eyes—pity for him, for herself, God might know. She did not.

“I have made you cry,” he said. “Perhaps I should have tried to make you laugh.”

She shook her head.

He lifted her hand and turning it palm upward, put it to his lips. She allowed her fingers to caress his face.

Again their hands rested, folded between them.

“The tea will be cold,” she said, but leaned her head back on the sofa and closed her eyes.

“We are alive, Martha,” he said, his mouth close to her ear. “Can you feel it?”

“Yes.”

“Alive,” he whispered and kissed her mouth.

E
VERY NIGHT AFTER SUPPER
Sylvia and Tad were in the habit of waiting for Martha’s phone call. Sylvia tended to worry if it came late. She had tried to persuade her to come more often than she did or to stay on for a time entirely. Tad loved the farm, and it was much better for him than the house on Oak Street, Martha agreed. But she could not bring herself to leave the house. She had not slept a night away from it since Marcus’s death. That night when the call had not come by seven-thirty Sylvia called Traders City. It was Annie who answered the phone. She had got home from her cousin’s to find a note saying that Martha would be away for the week-end. She had assumed Miss Martha was in the country with them, the very thing she had prayed for that afternoon.

“She’ll be wanting to surprise us,” Sylvia said. “Let’s not spoil it. Thank you, Annie.”

She spoke to reassure both Annie and Tad who was within hearing. Hanging up the phone, she said to the child: “Go upstairs to Maria. I’ll come up as soon as I hear from your mother.”

“Surprise?” Tad said.

“Maybe,” Sylvia said, putting on an air of conspiracy.

But alone she began to pace up and down the long, low room, pausing now and then to listen to the sounds from upstairs: Francesco’s noisy thump across the floor. He was almost accustomed to his new leg. It no longer pained him to wear it and he had put away his crutches. He would be taking them home soon, a gift to a child who needed them still, but a gift with a legend: he would be the proudest boy on Via del Duomo.