Evening of the Good Samaritan by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page B

his oratory, mayor of Traders City. The near West Side was notorious for those extremes. They had come to him because, he supposed, of a momentary meeting of his eyes with the mother’s over a child at the clinic: she had seen there something she must have taken for compassion. He had meant it for no more than reassurance. But people take what they must have to live.
    “Will we pay you now, doctor?” Mrs. O’Shaughnessy said.
    “Don’t be insulting the man,” her husband said. “He’s not like the quacks in our neighborhood, setting up to bleed the poor in more ways than one. Economic royalists—of an international complexion—if you know what I mean.” O’Shaughnessy began to warm to his own rhetoric. “They’re the first to vote for the spending of millions, but the last to pay their own taxes. I’ve a book I’d highly recommend you read, doctor. It’ll open your eyes to what’s going on in the country today. I’ll bring a copy along to you the next time. Well, good day to you.”
    “That will be two dollars,” Marcus said quietly.
    “Eh?”
    “You heard the man and he’s right. If you’ve money to be sending away for books, you’ve the money to pay him his fee.”
    “Two dollars,” O’Shaughnessy said, subdued. “And seven cents each, both ways, it’ll cost us twenty-eight cents carfare besides.”
    “You could have gone to one of the quacks in the neighborhood and saved the carfare,” Marcus said evenly.
    O’Shaughnessy took several folded bills from his pocket and separated two of them from their sparse companions. Marcus’s sarcasm was quite lost on him. “I’d rather pay twice the amount to an Irishman.” He handed Marcus the money with a flourish. “God bless you, Doctor Hogan.” He slapped his hat on his head and walked proudly out of the office in front of his wife who followed after him, carrying the baby.
    Marcus swore softly, locked the office door and returned to his desk long enough to put the two dollars into a tin box, and to enter the amount in his cash book. He scanned the week’s entries, totaling them almost simultaneously.
    “By God,” he said aloud to himself, “this week I made more than O’Shaughnessy.” His good humor restored, he picked up the phone and called Dr. Winthrop’s secretary for an appointment.

7
    T HE OFFICE OF THE Health Commissioner of Traders City was in the basement of City Hall, and it was scarcely more elegant in decor than the furnace room, the door to which was only a few yards away. The hickory benches and tables, at which were filled out complaints, petitions and justifications—those on the level not to be settled across a luncheon table, that is—were yellowed with age and pocked with marks of indelible lead. The only decoration on the pale green wall was a large calendar provided by a purveyor of ice, lumber and coal. One would not have been likely, appraising the office, to suppose that the man who ran it owned an art collection recently estimated to be worth six hundred thousand dollars. Winthrop himself was more at ease in the office than in the midst of his art collection, if truth be told. He loved politics and where better could a man keep his ear to the ground than in the basement of City Hall?
    Nor, after all, did Winthrop spend so much time in the office. He was a useful public servant in any administration. He had served under three mayors, and under the auspices of both political parties. He was a persuasive speaker, a good arbiter, and there were few better expediters in the city. He had been drafted into the civic service by a “reform” mayor who had a very simple measure for integrity in public officers: it seemed to him indisputable logic that a rich man was incorruptible. Per se. Traders City was, in fact, very proud of its simplicity and of its size: the population was almost three million.
    Alexander Winthrop would have preferred the law to medicine, and he often pointed that out as though certain