Evening of the Good Samaritan (3 page)

Fitzgerald was stunned that Jonathan Hogan should come to him for help. If he had had his way, Hogan would have been dismissed from the University. He had made no secret of the opinion. It was a peculiar irony that it was he who was now silenced in effect, not Hogan, and the obligation of sportsmanship put upon him. And yet, the more he thought about it, he found an odd satisfaction in Hogan’s having come to him.

“Where did he go to school?”

“Rodgers University.”

“You’ve always looked to the East, haven’t you?” He could not resist the barb. “May I ask where he interned?”

Hogan named a small hospital on the west side of Traders City. “He’s had a couple of years’ residency there, too. But their surgery is, shall we say, conservative.”

“And what is he doing now?”

“Trying to get the tuberculars out of the county jail into the county sanatorium.”

Fitzgerald gave a short laugh. Hogan’s directness was disarming. “I suppose you’d like me to speak to Winthrop. Is that it?”

“I thought you might like to talk to the boy first. See if he’s worth your intervention.”

Few men, and especially Walter Fitzgerald, can resist doing an enemy a kindness. Hogan had chosen his moment well, and only a little cynically. He suspected, as did a number of people, a relationship to exist between Alexander Winthrop and Fitzgerald’s wife. Presumably Winthrop would be indulgent of Fitzgerald in other matters. Fitzgerald, the unfortunate ass, continually boasted of his and Winthrop’s friendship. Hogan did not know Winthrop except by reputation. He was on the University Board of Trustees, he was City Health Commissioner, a man of politics, money and enormous influence in Traders City medicine. He also conducted, and it was curious that a man in his position should, the medical column in
The Dispatch.

“Let me be blunt, Hogan. Is your son political?”

“Not since his undergraduate days. Sacco and Vanzetti was his last cause. He just about tolerates me.”

Fitzgerald looked at him sharply, suspicious again, afraid of having his leg pulled. It prompted Hogan to wonder if his recommendation might not do the boy more harm than good. Yet in the end, Marcus must recommend himself. The problem was to get him Winthrop’s attention. “Of course, it’s a wise father that knows his own son,” he added.

Fitzgerald said, “Have him come round to my house tomorrow afternoon. Do you know where I live?”

Hogan nodded. He had come to know quite a lot about Walter Fitzgerald this semester, including the fact that along with ontology, cosmology and metaphysics, Fitzgerald lectured his students on atheistic communism and how to detect its disciples. He said, “Many thanks, professor,” and again shook hands with him.

Fitzgerald was already at the cloakroom, surrendering his tab to the attendant, when he realized that the encounter with Hogan had so improved his sense of well-being that he was no longer eager to go home. He would not go back, however; he abhorred indecision in a man … and rather admired it in a woman. He did have work to do, and he too had a family although they were certainly not waiting up for him like mice; Mueller was a sloppy man to be a scientist. The cloakroom attendant came out and helped him on with his overcoat. He was surprised. He did not expect such courtesy in young people any more. He would have laid odds this lad was no radical.

“Walter, let me drive you home.”

Alexander Winthrop had come up quite unbeknownst to him, a rare and gratifying occurrence. He generally knew where Winthrop was in a room. “Have you time to stop for a nightcap?”

“Why not?”

Fitzgerald took Winthrop’s coat from the boy’s hands and held it himself. “I’ll be glad of the ride. It’s a bitter night.”

“In more ways than one, eh?”

“I’m glad to hear you say it.” He had suspected unanimity to have been hammered out of the board as out of a jury.

“Don’t mistake me, Walter. I like that young upstart of a president.” Winthrop shrugged himself more comfortably into his coat.

“Oh, so do I.”

“You should. He hired you. But I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t.” He took a folded bill from his pocket and proposed to give it to the attendant.

The boy demurred. “No charge, sir, thank you.”

Winthrop said, “Do I insult you?”

“No, sir.”

“Then don’t insult me.” He tossed the money on the half-door ledge, and taking Fitzgerald by the elbow, steered him to the side door where his chauffeur was waiting.

The Fitzgerald house on Oak Street was not far from the campus and would in time be absorbed into it as were already most of the gray stone houses in the neighborhood. With their ample lawns and gardens and the great tall trees, these were the homes built before the turn of the century by the professional elite of Traders City, lawyers, architects, engineers, whose children now were likely to be raising their families in the north shore suburbs. The Fitzgeralds had bought the house soon after their marriage when they had come to the Midwest and largely with money provided by Elizabeth’s Boston aunt. Elizabeth had chosen the neighborhood because of the University and seeing further into her husband’s future than he himself dared look. She had kept the twelve-room house herself until he had grown used to the place so much beyond his own concept of their means. Then she had hired a maid and set herself to the earnest study of music. In the early days Walter had had to ride the streetcar an hour each way to the seminary where he taught and through slums as drab if not as old as those in which he had grown up in Philadelphia.

“I like the smell of this house,” Winthrop remarked, drawing a deep breath. He often said these words, for the moment he opened the closet door to hang up his own coat he caught the pungency of cedar. And often there were flowers in a vase beside the hall mirror. Elizabeth Fitzgerald had a small greenhouse in the garden where she cultivated plants and blooms in all seasons.

Fitzgerald thanked him. Mention of the smell of a house always carried for him the association of cooking cabbage which had seemed ever prevalent in the hallways of his youth. Rubbing his hands together he crossed the hall to his study, but Winthrop, instead of following, strode directly to the sliding doors of the parlor where, from outdoors, he had seen the light. With the softest of knocks and not waiting at all, he admitted himself. Fitzgerald followed him, having no choice. But he was very much aware that Elizabeth disliked being burst in upon. However, she looked over her shoulder and smiled, seeing them. She gave Winthrop her hand across the back of the sofa and drew him around to the fire.

“I’ve sent Michaelson out to the kitchen,” Fitzgerald said, speaking of Winthrop’s chauffeur. “Has Annie gone upstairs?”

“If she has, she’ll soon come down again. She can tell the minute a man comes into her part of the house.” Elizabeth was about to rise. “Will you want tea or drinks, Walter?”

“I’ll attend to it myself,” he said, and she sat back. “Brandy, Alex?”

“That’ll be fine, thanks.” Winthrop stood, his back to the fireplace, his hands in his pockets, springing up and down a little on his toes. The room seemed smaller when he was in it, restless, generally impatient with the prospect of either small or precise talk. An evening among scholars, for all that he admired them, set his nerves on edge. He belonged, he said, among railsplitters, not hairsplitters. Nonetheless, no other honor had so gratified him as election to the Board of Trustees of Midwestern University.

“Sit down for a little while, Alex,” Fitzgerald said.

“I will, I will—thanks.” He was a large-boned man, a shade under six feet, solid but not fat. He had a square, tough jaw and a mouth not quite strong enough to go with it. He often, in determination, had to shoot out his lower lip by way of satisfying that inner demand for an outward show of purpose. His eyes were black, though sometimes in direct light—or seen in a moment of affection—they seemed to be a dark, limpid purple. Neither lotion nor brush could keep order in his soft black hair; at forty-eight he showed not a trace of gray in it.

Fitzgerald started out of the room. “Shall I close the doors?”

“Do,” his wife said. “There’s a draft when they’re open.”

And remarking that the drapes across the garden windows should be heavier, he went out and rolled the door noisily closed behind him.

Winthrop’s lips still bore the amused, tolerant smile he often gave Fitzgerald in Elizabeth’s presence. “Can
you?”
he said.

“Can I what?”

“Tell the minute a man comes into
your
part of the house?”

“I knew you were here,” she said, and picking up the book she had been reading, turned its pages idly.

He stared down at her, observing the heightened color in her high-boned cheeks. It quickened the course of his own blood. “Do you mind that I came like this?”

“It’s rather tortuous, isn’t it?” Still she did not look at him.

He broke his hands apart, and moving with the pent vigor of someone doing one thing when he wants to do another, shifted a chair around and then back to where it was and finally sat down in it. “Was there a point to his closing the doors, do you think?”

“I doubt it.”

“The only time my conscience bothers me is when I think the least of him,” Winthrop said. “Who the devil else would close the doors on us like that?”

“Sometimes I think he knows—has known for some time.”

Winthrop gave a short, dry laugh.

“I don’t suppose it really matters—except for Martha. I will not have her scandalized.”

“What are you reading?” he asked, but not caring, wanting only to change the subject.

She did not answer. “Did it go against Walter tonight?”

“Haven’t you got it backwards, my dear? It wasn’t he that was on trial.”

“It was … in his own mind.”

Winthrop did not have much humor; therefore he was often more direct than even he would have preferred. “That’s a mighty small place for a man my size to get in and out of every time.”

“He worships you, Alexander.”

“What does it mean, you saying that to me, Elizabeth?”

“Only that Walter hoped your vote would justify him among the trustees.”

“I assure you, his name never came up.”

“And Hogan—what happens to him?”

“Unless something treasonable shows up in his record—and I’m sure it won’t—he stays. I voted with the rest of them. I don’t give a damn about Hogan. I think it’s a good thing we’ll know what he’s up to for a while. But to tell you the God’s truth, Elizabeth, I don’t think he’s any more dangerous than your husband.”

She looked at him frankly and smiled. It crossed her mind that he had himself got a liberal education that night from whatever source. “Some new poems,” she said, indicating the book. “They’re very nice.”

He glanced at the door for there was the sound of footsteps in the hall. “May I see you tomorrow?”

She nodded. “After two.” They would meet in her music studio downtown as was their custom.

The steps receded, Walter apparently having forgotten something.

“Elizabeth … look at me.”

She lifted her head and steadily they gazed at one another across the untraversable few feet between them. She could see the strength and tenderness of him, the dangerous weakness, for the lidded desire all but spilled from his eyes.

“I have never wanted you more than at this moment,” he said, meting the words out slowly to watch them affect her.

She cast her eyes down and spread her strong hands like wings upon the book.

“Elizabeth …”

She got up then and went around the couch away from him. Only then did she meet his eyes again. “I am going upstairs now, if you will excuse me, Alexander,” she said.

And still he looked at her. “I love you,” he said, but no louder than a whisper.

“I know,” she said, and briefly pursed her lips to him before turning and moving with unhurried grace from the room.

Fitzgerald was coming with the tray from the kitchen when she reached the hall. “Good night, Walter. I’m going up now.”

“Good night, my dear. I’m sorry it took me so long.” To Winthrop he said, going into the parlor, “it’s too bad Elizabeth went off so soon. You mustn’t mind, Alex.”

“She said good night to me,” Winthrop said.

Fitzgerald took this to mean that his wife had been brusque. “God knows, she’s not an easy woman. All temperament. But she soon gets over it. They say there’s Spanish blood in her family—a lot of it in the part of Ireland she comes from.”

“She looks Spanish,” Winthrop murmured, as though the subject had just come up. Even Walter had told him this many times before. Elizabeth did look Spanish, with her dark hair parted in the middle and tightly drawn to a bun at the back of her head, the long neck, the oval face with olive coloring, the black eyes and heavy lashes.

“You’re coming to dinner all the same on Sunday, aren’t you, Alex? It is your Sunday and she’ll be expecting you.”

“For God’s sake, let’s have the brandy,” Winthrop said.

N
OT LONG AFTER WINTHROP
and Fitzgerald had left Anders Hall, Jonathan Hogan took his departure also, going out alone and past the porter’s desk at the main entry. How quickly the hounds of notoriety had given up his scent. A few hours earlier the reporters had followed him into the building, the porter unable to restrain them. Now good news was no news where he was concerned. He took a short cut cross-campus to the streetcar line. There was in the southern sky a trail of stars that vanished into the yellow smoke over the steel mills. Snake-quick tongues of flame flicked into the night. They would be after him again, of course, the yellow press: they would watch his every move.

He boarded the first streetcar south. The car was overheated, the brass-barred windows mud-brown still from the last thaw, the straw seats lumpy. He caught the disinfectant smell associable with public lavatories so that he supposed the women talking together in a Slavic tongue were coming off their cleaning jobs downtown. Most of the male occupancy would go on the midnight shift at the mills. One could thank God, of course, that there was a midnight shift. One could be grateful for a number of things this night if he were Jonathan Hogan. But he could also be realistic, and there was nothing like a southside streetcar ride to sober a man giddy with too easy a triumph. He had been exonerated, true. But he had also been rendered impotent outside the classroom for a long time to come if not for the rest of his life.