Evening of the Good Samaritan (51 page)

“I had visitors this afternoon at the office,” Reiss said. He opened and closed one after another of the drawers of his desk, looking for something which after a moment he seemed to forget. “Two investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation came to see me.”

He spoke with such ominous portent that Martha very nearly laughed with relief when he added: “They were inquiring about Sylvia.” He looked at her as though incredulous that she too was not shocked.

Martha said: “What did they want to know?”

“Did she ever try to recruit me into the Communist Party—questions like that. I did not know things like that about her, Martha.”

Martha’s tendency to mirth passed quickly. “Do you know them now, Nathan?”

“I have sometimes thought,” he said, ignoring her question, “but who would believe a woman in her position …” He went on for some time, breaking off his sentences in the inarticulateness of his distress. It was as though he had been deliberately compromised, deceived.

Finally Martha said: “Nathan, how does it affect you? I don’t understand.”

“They will be wanting to know if she is using the Children’s Plan for subversion, won’t they?”

“Subversion among whom, for heaven’s sake? The children?”

“Do not be so sure of yourself, Martha. I know what investigators are like. They probe and hunt and look for pieces. And let me tell you, many pieces can be put into places they were not cut out for. I know.” He burst out laughing. The sound was not pleasant. Martha waited. “I have just made a very bad joke on myself. It does not matter.”

“I still don’t understand,” Martha said. “What other questions did they ask?”

“If she talks politics with me … oh, and yes: did she post a bond for me when I came into this country. That was their final question.” He resumed the search of his desk, this time bringing out his citizenship papers which he glanced through and then put away again.

“Is that what’s upset you?”

Again he did not answer directly. “She did not! Erich Mueller … and, thank God, the president of the Bankers Trust Company of Traders City.”

“Yes, by all means let’s thank God for the Bankers Trust Company of Traders City,” Martha said mockingly.

“My dear wife,” Reiss spoke with exaggerated calmness: “I did not escape the Nazis to be made a dupe of by the Communists.”

It was, Martha thought, like arguing religion with a fanatic. Or politics with a Communist. Her inclination was strong to drop the matter there, as she always did with him. But she foresaw in it even further isolation within herself, and at a time she felt able to cope with sensibility as well as her senses. “Dear man, listen to me for a moment. If you believe in what you are doing, isn’t that the important thing? Is there politics in straightening a child’s back? Was there politics in your mind when you brought your good right hand back to where you can use it?”

“That is precisely what I mean, Martha. I do not want to lose everything again for something I do not care that about.” He snapped his fingers. “I am going to withdraw from the Children’s Plan. If I do so now it will mean something. Later may be too late.”

Martha gazed down at him. She was sitting on the corner of his desk. “It will mean something to whom, Nathan?”

“You are deliberately misunderstanding me.”

“I’m not, Nathan. I’m trying to understand you. Does the Children’s Plan mean nothing to you any longer?”

“That is not what I am saying. Very well. They asked me a list of associations—did I know Sylvia Fields Winthrop had belonged to them. They are on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. Where will I be, its director, an immigrant, when they add the Children’s Plan to the list?”

“Nathan,
you
are putting together pieces that don’t fit. I’ve known Sylvia since 1936. In those days I was as politically innocent as you are, as I think you are—and if ignorance is innocence. I’m not sure about that. I don’t know if she was actually a Communist or not. It’s just possible they wouldn’t have her, you know. I think it was Marcus who said that to me once. But after the Hitler-Stalin pact, like a lot of people, she was disillusioned. And really today, Nathan, I think I’m further to the left than Sylvia is.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” he said.

“I don’t know why the investigators are asking about Sylvia. I suppose they have to in times like these—they have to go over all the names of people who were once associated with such organizations. I should suppose it’s proper and necessary—and this is much to my point: I should suppose that Sylvia, especially for the sake of the Plan, would welcome such an investigation.”

Reiss’ whole expression changed. Martha repeated: “Especially for the Plan.”

“I see,” Reiss said. “I see what you mean.”

“The Fields Foundation is not on the Attorney General’s list, I shouldn’t think.”

Reiss looked at her and laughed a little. “Hurd Abington—can you imagine?”

“No. But I can’t imagine Sylvia belonging there either,” Martha said.

Reiss leaned back in his chair, his lower lip protruding, a habit of his that always put her in mind of a repentant child, and said: “If you are right…” He glanced up at her, his eyes soft with regret… “I hope I have not done her harm.”

Martha slid off the desk and went to the window where she could turn her back to him. How revelatory that last remark! She could conjecture from it the whole interview with the interrogators, his anxiety to be cooperative, to ingratiate himself with them, and inevitably she remembered again: “I am not a Jew.” Her anger was quick and fierce with him, not for what he was. She knew that, had known it, but for his willingness to expose himself to her in utter indecency, forcing her to look at him at his cowardly worst.

She tried unsuccessfully to control the trembling of her shoulders.

“What is it, Martha?”

She shook her head and he repeated his question. She turned and faced him. “You have no shame.”

“You are right,” he said, satisfied to have wrung from her the accusation. He left the chair and himself half-sat on the desk, his arms folded, and smiled ruefully as he watched her face for the effect upon it of his words. “I have never claimed to be more than worthless. But I have an honorable wife whom I adore. My conscience and my queen. Do not waste your anger on me, Martha. I have given you what I had to give. We both—you and I—give everything … and nothing. It is enough for an unimportant man like me. I am sorry if it is not enough for you.”

Martha drew a deep, long breath. She had won and lost which was the pattern of their lives. “It is enough,” she murmured.

Reiss picked up the phone and dialed Mount Clement Hospital to set up his schedule for the morning. Martha touched his hand, almost as though for luck, passing him to leave the room.

But in a larger scene and with the variation of more people present, Martha went through virtually the same experience a few days later. On a Sunday evening they were returning from Fox Lake and stopped at the farm as was their custom. Sylvia persuaded them to stay to supper. Nathan went on to Lakewood for an hour and then returned. Supper was served on the screened porch.

Winthrop was surprised to discover that he enjoyed his weekends on the farm. The children’s dormitory was a half-mile from the house so that he saw them only when he wanted to. He found that crops and a garden for home consumption gave him pleasure in nature that he had never known at the Tamarack estate, a place he now referred to rather ashamedly. He liked to tease Tad, pretending to be more ignorant of the farm than he actually was, just to hear the boy explain with elaborate patience to him the facts of farm life.

“Sylvia’s finally got me aboard a horse again,” he remarked at supper. “At my age that’s a dangerous pastime.”

Tad wanted to know which horse he was riding. Being told, he said: “It’s not very dangerous.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Winthrop said. “It relieves my mind if not my backside.”

“Do you sail, Uncle Alexander?”

Winthrop said: “I float,” and Tad grinned.

“I hope you and Sylvia will come out to the lake soon,” Martha said. “I remember you were fond of boats.” She was remembering an occasion in her childhood when she, her mother and father had gone sailing with him on Judge Phipps’s yacht.

“That would be very nice,” Winthrop said, but he was puzzled at what made her think he was fond of boats. Actually he had a strong tendency toward seasickness.

“I remember you put on the pilot’s cap and papa took your picture.”

“Ah, now I remember,” Winthrop said.

Reiss said: “We shall invite the Bergners and make a weekend party of it. What do you say, Sylvia?”

Sylvia did not answer right away. She had been under numerous if more subtle pressures from both her husband and Reiss to restore the Bergners to her social calendar. She glanced at Martha and seeing no reaction to mention of them wondered if living with Nathan Reiss wore down one’s sensitivities. But of course the last hour in Marcus’s life was not as vivid to Martha as to her: only the loss had been vivid. And as Alexander said, you could accuse George of many things, but you couldn’t actually blame him for Marcus’s death. Willy nilly hers and George Bergner’s paths crossed and recrossed whether or not she accepted him.

She merely said: “I don’t like week-end parties.”

“Then an afternoon, a picnic perhaps,” Reiss persisted.

Tad was looking at her. Sylvia said: “That would be lovely.”

“Good,” Reiss said. A moment later he took her plate and asked if he might bring her coffee.

“I can get it,” she said, starting up.

He persuaded her. “There is something I have been wanting to tell you.”

Across the porch, her attention presumably given to Winthrop’s account to Tad of the goatherds who lived in caves outside Athens, Martha overheard her husband telling Sylvia of the visit to his office of the
F.B.I
, investigators. Distinctly she heard him say: “Martha thought you ought to be told and I had to agree with her.”

“I must say I’m not surprised, all things considered,” Sylvia said.

Nathan said: “Please?” He could make his curiosity seem very offhand.

“Alex is about to set a new editorial policy with the
Star.
I should think it would stir up a certain amount of … uneasiness.”

“Ah, I see. Then it has nothing to do with the Children’s Plan.”

“I should hope that it won’t, Nathan.”

Reiss glanced at his wife. Martha, aware of his eyes did not meet them however. Reiss took Sylvia’s hand for a moment. “I was very noncommital when they asked their questions.”

Sylvia laughed. “Thank you, Nathan. But I assure you, my life is an open book. The name Fields was always good for a headline. It was all in the newspapers. But perhaps they don’t have time these days for that kind of research.”

Martha went outdoors managing to do it without attracting attention and walked the pebbled path to the garden. The evening star shone brightly in the twilight. By way of not thinking, she tried to remember a poem of which both she and Marcus had been very fond. At last she was able to conjure the lines from Yeats by which she had made the association:

“… how love fled and paced upon the mountain overhead and hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

G
EORGE BERGNER HAD BEEN
uneasy from the day Winthrop returned to Traders City. He had the feeling of being at the wheel of a machine the steering apparatus of which was about to go out of control: when he acted he got a response, but something did not feel right, something was unsure to his touch. He had prepared the staff for Winthrop’s return; he had also let it be known that he expected the boss to be around for a while and then to take off on some new project. But this Winthrop showed no signs of doing. Bergner remained General Manager of the
Star,
but Winthrop consulted primarily with the editor and neither of them saw fit to fill George in on what was going on. He would have liked by his manner, his aplomb, to seem confident, at least a man in the know, but his own secretary gave him the jitters with her solicitude. It was not long until he was getting sympathy from all sides.

But he stayed at his desk, sifting rumors that came from the front office, reading signs in the requisitions that came to him for approval. For example, he got a day’s cheer out of the fact that the foreign editor was authorized to send his own man to Korea: that was not likely to happen if the
Star
was going on the block. He had heard that rumor, too. The country was suddenly in another fighting war in Korea, ill-prepared, most of our troops home, decoyed out of Korea by the Russian withdrawal from their sector. The State Department was under even more severe fire, the charges of disloyalty and security failures exploding like buckshot.

On the day the Korean correspondent was sent out, George was suddenly informed of what had been going on at the top. Winthrop called him in and showed him the copy for a lead editorial. It bore the head:
JUST WHO IS JOE McCARTHY?

George kept his eyes on the piece, but he did not read it. He knew then that he had been expecting something of this sort. When he looked up, he said: “You’re the boss, Alex. When do you plan to run it?”

“Soon. It’s a couple of years late now.”

George lit a cigaret. “You shouldn’t have left a boy to do a man’s work.”

“I didn’t. I left a man who got old too soon, that’s all.”

“You’ve got a newspaper. I’m not sure you’d have had one otherwise.”

“Both Sylvia and I would have been willing to take that chance. We’re going to take it now.”

“Will you grant me this much, Alex: I’ve brought the
Star
to where it’s got enough circulation to make your message count?”

“I’ll grant you that—and more, George. Fifteen years ago, left to my own devices I’d have done what you did. I’ve not forgotten you helped get me out of the basement of City Hall.”

George picked up the copy again and this time read a few lines. “You know, Alex, you ought not to run this until you’ve got a first-rate cartoonist to take up the theme.”