Evening of the Good Samaritan (9 page)

Winthrop sat a full moment without speaking; what a remarkable coincidence that Hogan should mention the airport. He did not know, of course, that the governor had vetoed it. “Tell me, Dr. Hogan, who do you think is going to be the next mayor?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised if it were the man who’s in the office right now, doctor.”

“And do you think it would make any difference to his being elected whether he proposed a sanatorium or an airport?”

“I’m afraid not very much. He’ll probably do better with the airport. It’s very dramatic.”

Winthrop nodded. “I imagine that’s what he thought, too.”

They talked for a time about a new sanatorium, which Traders City did indeed need. Winthrop called in his secretary for statistics and asked Marcus’s opinion on their accuracy. Winthrop said then, “A county project. Everybody says it ought to be a county undertaking.”

“It won’t make any difference to the patients,” Marcus said, “only to the politicians.”

Winthrop looked up sharply and clamped a sudden smile on his mouth. He had been about to say that if it were county sponsored, it would be out of his jurisdiction. “I suppose you see yourself some day heading up a sanatorium such as this, Doctor Hogan?”

“No.”

“Oh, come, man.”

“I haven’t got the makings of an administrator,” Marcus said blandly.

It was almost beyond Winthrop’s credulity that a man who could see the need for a sanatorium should not see himself as its administrator. His own vision invariably reflected self-aggrandizement.

“What did you say?” Winthrop wanted to hear him say it again.

“I said I haven’t got the makings of an administrator.”

“What have you the makings of?” He was abrupt of speech, impatient, as though suddenly aware of urgent work.

“A surgeon. What I want is the surgeon’s residency in a good hospital.”

“Ha! Do you know what the waiting lists are?”

“Yes, sir. I’m near the bottom on quite a number of them.”

“Are you near the top on any of them?”

“No. And I don’t think I’m moving up.”

Winthrop shook his head. “I’m not a juggler. And a recommendation from me may not do you as much good as some people seem to think. These men don’t admire me. Some of them are afraid of me—for reasons better known to themselves than to me—they may thank God.” He talked on, going over in his mind the while those places where he might have power. He began making notes on a desk pad.

Marcus knew that in spite of his protests, Winthrop was going to help him: he had somehow got through to this ambitious man, whom he liked despite having come prepared not to. He believed Winthrop above all else a politician, and he had the contempt of the young for all politicians.

Winthrop looked at him from beneath lowered brows. “It’s the chief surgeon has the say in most places, you know. And, of course, you don’t know any chief surgeons?”

“Not well enough apparently.”

“How old are you, Hogan?”

“Twenty-eight.”

Winthrop pushed away from his desk and got up. His energy was almost palpable, and Marcus once more envied him his multiplicity of jobs. “Can you take orders and keep opinions to yourself until you’re asked for them?”

“I think so.”

“You’d better
know
so. I suppose you’ve heard of Albert Bergner?”

“Yes, sir.”

Winthrop frowned, thinking, but there was a play of excitement about his own mouth. “You admire him, don’t you?” he said impatiently.

“Very much.”

“Then for Christ’s sake, say so.”

“I admire him in surgery, doctor.”

Winthrop whirled around and stood over him, a towering wrath: “That’s all of him that needs your approval, boy. Who the hell do you think you are to have an opinion on anything else in a man like him?”

“I think Doctor Bergner is a truly great surgeon,” Marcus said. Winthrop was right; he did not try to defend himself.

“You’re damned right he is. Fortunately, the view is shared by men of even greater distinction than yourself.” He moved to the door of his office, hunched down a few inches in order to see out of the clear glass near the frame: a nervous habit, merely. The venting of his own sarcasm, so far as Winthrop was concerned, always purged its victim of whatever offense he had given. He turned back to Marcus. “What was the name of that boat?”

Marcus was a second or two making the connection. “The
Fortune.”

“Write it down and give it to my secretary. It’s too late for me to start learning history now. And your mother’s family name, give her that too, if you don’t mind.” He stuck out his hand. “That’s all for now, Hogan.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Marcus said.

The handshake was brief and not another word was exchanged between them.

That night when Marcus was going over for his father as much as he could remember of what had been said, he felt a certain reluctance about mentioning Dr. Bergner, but if anything at all were to come out of his interview with Winthrop, it seemed likely to be contingent on the famous surgeon. Bergner still lectured once a week at Midwestern.

His father did not say anything for a moment, but the name affected him; his hesitancy averred that. “I don’t suppose there’s anyone better in your field,” he said finally.

Marcus said: “He’s got some peculiar ideas for these times, doesn’t he?”

“You may have put that just right, Marc. I don’t like some of his ideas—on the scientific breeding of men, for example, toward the select, the superman. But there ought to be ways of improving the species. And the issue should not be confused with Fascism.”

“You wouldn’t say he was a Fascist?”

“Not I, knowing as little of his work as I do. It may well be scientific.”

“Are you afraid of science, dad?”

“I like to think I am a scientist of sorts. Not like Mueller. Erich’s very patient with me. You know, Marc, I think in the end that’s how I’d have to judge Bergner, too—by his patience. A patient man is humble. A humble man is patient. Arrogance is the real enemy.”

“I wonder what Winthrop’s connection is with Bergner,” Marcus said after a moment. “Or maybe there isn’t any connection. It was just a name that came into his mind. There was a number of
non sequiturs
in that conversation.”

“There won’t be any of them in the superman.” Jonathan took his pipe from his pocket. “I’m talking nonsense.” He scraped the bowl of the pipe and knocked it out in the fireplace. “And it ought to be said before we get off Bergner, he’s well thought of by quite a number of Jewish people.”

“Speaking of
non sequiturs,”
Marcus said slyly.

His father thought about it and then laughed. “I suppose it is at that.”

T
HE DAY WAS OMINOUS
, the sky a slow whorl of grey clouds out of which escaped occasional flurries of snow. It was not a good day to drive into the dunes. Nor was it a good day to wait in the wind. Elizabeth Fitzgerald, standing before her own pale image in a Lake Front Avenue window felt as shabby as any walker in the street. She considered these the worst moments, waiting, except for those alone afterwards when there was no emotion left, only the dull ache of guilt. Once there had been a kind of ecstasy to the waiting. But that, too, was muted. Only his presence satisfied her, awakening and putting to rest all passion in an afternoon.

And yet she loved him. Long ago, she had thought of him as a lover before it had come to pass. She had from the beginning felt his presence in a room before even their eyes had met.

She stared into the drugstore window, determined to see beyond her image in the glass. Was there anything uglier, she wondered, than a cheap alarm clock? A pyramid of them had been built in display. She counted them, and re-counted them until she caught sight of Winthrop’s car a half block away. She moved quickly to the curb so that he need stop no longer than it took to shift gears. They always met at the beginning of a block, never at its end lest a traffic light delay them and expose them to chance recognition.

“You’re not dressed very warmly,” he said. He had thought she looked frail, forlorn, awaiting him, almost a stranger from the robust woman he had so long been in bond to. He had even speculated on her course if he had driven on and never come to her again. Remembering this fleeting thought, and having her beside him, he grew soft with tenderness. He removed his glove and put his hand into her pocket, closing it upon hers, cold and buried there.

“Would you like a drink, my dear? I’ve brought a bottle.”

“I don’t suppose you managed a straw?” She flashed him a sidelong glance.

He laughed, the moment’s awkwardness dispelled. “I was thinking just the other day—they’ve stopped putting window shades in the new cars.”

“And they’re going to build houses of glass. Alas for all sinners.”

He drove in silence, unsure of her mood which could fall dark as sudden as the change of pitch in her voice. He needed to brake the car quickly on South Lake Front Avenue, for the wind had caught up dust and debris and dashed it against the windshield. The once elegant buildings of the neighborhood were all condemned now, but only half torn down, the insides stripped of marble, chandeliers, and often of plumbing fixtures, good items for salvage. They were occupied nonetheless by a squatter population, the unfortunates who could not raise money for rent but somehow managed enough to buy off the police inspectors.

“By God, the city is filthy. We’ve got to clean it up.”

“You’ll have to begin with an ax,” Elizabeth said.

The words, so characteristic of her, moved him to an even greater tenderness, and he resolved with childlike naïveté to be a better man for Traders City than anything which he had done heretofore gave warrant of his likely being.

She said, “There are twenty-three alarm clocks in the window of the Walgreen Drugstore. Would you buy an alarm clock, Alex, if you didn’t need it?”

“No.”

“There comes a point in all advertising, I think, where they cross from the reasonable to the ridiculous without ever realizing it.”

“I started to collect clocks once,” he said.

Quick of wit and tongue, she said, “There are twenty-three of them in the window. Shall we go back?”

He turned his head and smiled at her.

They came soon to the lake’s edge, passing the site, a parking lot since the World’s Fair, where the present city administration had proposed to build an airport. The waters of the lake were gray-green, white-capped. The rocks along the shore line were crystaled with ice.

“It won’t take me long to build the fire,” Winthrop said.

The cabin sat a long drive back from the highway and a short walk up from the lake among the dunes. The only neighbor at any time of year was a man who raised goats and cared more about their waywardness than that of man or woman. Elizabeth had never met him, but she knew the goats fairly intimately. Once on an autumn afternoon, she had coaxed enough milk into a cup from one of them to color her tea. As was Winthrop’s habit, he stopped for a can of water at the man’s house. In that way he forestalled curiosity that might arise with the appearance of smoke from his cabin chimney.

There is in every clandestine relationship a moment which especially portends disaster, whether or not disaster ever befalls it. With Elizabeth and Winthrop the moment occurred—curiously never when they met in her studio—but in this sanded wilderness, at the instant of the door’s closing. They were helpless before one another, much less before the world in their headlong abandon to the first embrace. The act of love made them scarcely more each other’s prisoner.

Elizabeth wrapped herself in a quilt until the room was warm. She would carry the smell of dampness for some hours, and there would be no joy in the consciousness of it. More and more the future seemed to encroach upon them. Nor was it merely that they were not young any longer. She had never been young, not romantically in the way of most girls, of her own daughter who, she was sure, dreamed of one young man or another. She herself had been a child and then a woman. Exported from Ireland at the age of fifteen to a wealthy aunt in Boston, she had felt the hand of a man upon her aboard ship; the purser had made love to her and she had liked it. Oh yes! Now and then, for a fleeting instant, she would remember his face, the red cheeks, the white teeth, and the soft, almost wistful mouth. Her aunt, unaware of the purser, of course, had not been long nonetheless in deciding that the best way to cope with so high-spirited and bold a child was to see her married soon. She committed her to a quick finishing at the hands of the Sacred Heart nuns, and set about finding a suitable husband.

Winthrop looked round from where he was fanning the flames. There was sound stirring in the kettle, and the wind was moaning in the flue. She had been watching him, but seeing beyond him, looking into the fire.

“I was just thinking of the sailor who made love to me on the boat when first I came to America,” she said.

“Handsome, I’m sure.”

“Very.”

“I’m sure he had a wife and half dozen children he didn’t tell you about.”

Elizabeth smiled. “Or perhaps a child and a half dozen wives as they say about sailors. But he put me on the way, I was thinking, to a quick marriage. I don’t mean that I slept with him. But I would have liked to. Is that a terrible thing to say?”

“Was Walter the first man you slept with?”

“Yes.”

She said no more. He came and sat beside her on the sofa, but holding his hands up and away much as a doctor might, preparing for surgery, except that his precaution was due to the dirt he had got on them. “Will you turn up my cuffs, Elizabeth?”

“And the only one—else.” She pushed the cuffs up to where his wrist bones showed.

“This hasn’t been a very satisfactory life, has it?”

“I can’t think of our not having had it, Alex. But there are times it troubles me a great deal, how much it must have hurt you.”

He frowned, uncomfortable that her concern should be for him at the moment. “And you?” he said.

“I’ve not been hurt by it. Sometimes I think I’ve been saved by it. I had every right to pay for a bad marriage.”