The Listener (18 page)

He stared at the curtains. “Why, damn it, so he may be accepted by the Jim Merwins of the world and join their clubs and not be outside the pale! So he can play golf with them, and bet with them, and be invited to their houses, and have as good a car as they have, and a house at least as fine as theirs, and marry some nice girl of good family who has money! A social success! Not to be outside the pale!”

He felt sick with his embarrassment and shame. But he made his voice challenging. “Do you know what that means — being without the pale? Do you know what it means, being a Jew? I do!”

The room appeared to enfold him with sadness and comprehension, and yet with hope. “You’re a Jew!” he exclaimed incredulously. “A Jew? A Jewish doctor?”

He stopped, straining toward the curtains. Then he sighed. “If you are and you have a son, you’ll understand why I wanted more for Jerome than I had for myself. Oh, Gay gets impatient with me. She says, ‘What does that matter? Pale, nothing. Everybody’s outside of some pale. If they only admit one or two Jews to Jim Merwin’s clubs, and they Supreme Court judges or something, they also have a quota on Catholics. A Catholic member has to die before another is admitted, and they have to be top-drawer. Just to associate with the Jim Merwins! The Italians and the Poles are outside some invisible pale, and so are millions of others, through lack of education or money or background or family. Why, some Jews put other Jews outside a pale of their own! It’s a nasty human custom’. ”

Felix laughed shortly. “I suppose, in a way, that Gay’s right. But I don’t want Jerome to encounter anymore pales than he has to. I want him to be hap — ” He stopped, and his fair skin became brightly pink. “Oh, damn,” he murmured sheepishly.

Then he was defiant again. “All right, so I’m stupid. Let’s forget what I said. I’ve been wandering. I don’t, I think, want Jerome to have enough money so he can associate with the Jim Merwins. At least I don’t now. But I do want him to be a specialist so he’ll have an easier life than mine, a more secure life, and not be a grubber like me, with my door and my telephone open twenty-four hours a day. For the sick.”

Had the room become slightly cooler, more withdrawn, more thoughtful? He could sense it. He stroked his eyebrows in agitation. “Perhaps,” he said, “I don’t mean it quite that way. After all, I’m a physician, and the sick are my charges. Yes, my charges. It’s funny, but I don’t know if I’ve consciously thought of them like that before.”

Then after a little he brightened. “Well, yes, I have. Underneath, I mean. I’ve been mixed up, I think. That’s what comes of being a father. At one time all physicians were priests, thousands of years ago, and they didn’t marry and they didn’t have children. They dedicated their lives to healing the sick and comforting them and giving them courage to face death. Can you understand an attitude like that? I think I can. Now.”

He was silent for a long time, thinking. His thoughts flowed quickly, bringing thousands of pictures before him. The strain left his face. He began to smile.

“I’ve just thought of something. When Gay inherited that ten thousand dollars from old Harry Stern, she said to me, ‘Now you can go back for a few years’ more study. If you want to. To become a specialist. If you want to’. And she looked at me with her pretty eyes and waited.”

Felix sat up straight, excited. “Do you know what I said? ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter’. I thought I was thinking that we’d better use the money to pay off the mortgage or something. But I wasn’t! Away back in my mind was the thought that I just wanted to be a G.P., with my door and telephone open twenty-four hours a day for people who knew that specialists had certain hours, and appointments rigidly scheduled, and a telephone-answering service which they didn’t bother to check if they had a dinner appointment or a golf date, or a weekend coming up at someone’s country home.

“As if,” said Felix with contempt, “people can schedule when to be sick or dying or injured, or when to have a baby! I know one obstetrician who actually does schedule the babies! If he wants a winter holiday, he takes his patients to the hospital and induces birth. Sometimes it’s all right. And sometimes it isn’t! But even the women who lose their babies swear by him. He has charm. I don’t.”

He brooded on that. Then he said, “But I have something else. My patients trust me. When they call their priest or minister or rabbi, they call me too. Even when they know I can’t help them any longer. Now that’s something, isn’t it?” His tired face was bright and excited. He forgot to control his emotions. He jumped up and walked rapidly up and down the room, gesticulating, murmuring to himself.

“People are people. They can pretend to be civilized and brave and sophisticated, but when it comes to death they are all the same. When they take off their clothes and put on the white shirts I have for them, before examination, they’re all the same. The same human faces, the same emotions, the same fears, the same hopes, the same loves and hates. They are only men. Even,” he said, “the Jim Merwins.”

He stopped. All his hatred for Jim Merwin was gone. Why, the poor, fat, suffering, cowardly bastard, he thought fondly. He’s scared to death of an operation. He thinks he might die. Then what about his money and his clubs and nice smooth Lucy? He knows she’ll marry again before he’s cold. And those kids of his! He doesn’t know, nor Lucy, either, that the shine in his eyes, his pampered eighteen-year-old daughter, is coming to me to be cured of syphilis. His innocent little ewe lamb. It would kill them both to know, and so I haven’t told them. I’ve just given the sneaking little bitch a few hard lectures which her parents should have given her years ago, and put the fear of God in her. That’s what a doctor is for. That’s what a G.P. is for. If I’d been a specialist — Why, a specialist would have sent her bills her allowance couldn’t cover, and so Jim would know. I charge her five dollars a shot, which is one fourth her weekly allowance. She’ll be cured soon, and she’s a different girl now. Thanks to me.

He looked at the curtains, and again he had the thought that he had been heard.

“I’m thinking,” he said, “of all the people who might die because they can’t afford specialists. I don’t mean the poverty-stricken, who get the same treatment free from specialists that the rich get. I mean the lower middle class, the people I have. They can pay so much, and they know it. So without the G.P. they’d get no treatment at all, and they’d go on suffering the rest of their lives. Or they’d die.”

He smiled at the curtains. “Do you know the most wonderful thing my son ever said to me — that anyone ever said to me? ‘I want to be a man like you’. Now what greater satisfaction can a man have than that? A man like me. I’m going to write Jerome a letter tonight! I’m going to tell him I’m proud of him because he wants to heal the sick, whether he gets paid or not, whether or not he’ll ever get rich. He won’t. But that doesn’t matter, does it?”

He took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes. “For why was a man born, anyway, except to help his fellow man, to heal him, to comfort him?”

He went closer to the curtains. He looked at the button. He hesitated. Then he pushed the button quickly. The curtains rolled apart.

He saw the light and who stood in it.

His face worked strongly. He said, “Yes. You healed the sick, didn’t you? And you were outside the pale, weren’t you? I — Gay and I — we belong to a book club. We’ve just read a book about you and what you did.

“You never wanted to be accepted or be a social success. If I remember right, the poor and the sick came to you in droves, and you never turned them away because they had no money. You never had a fine house, or servants, or good clothing. That didn’t matter. You were a doctor. I suppose you still are.

“That awful thing on your head — Do you know something? Every real doctor wears it around his heart.”

Peace be unto you.

John 20:21, 26

Mrs. Ami Logan watched Felix Arnstein go into the room beyond. She, too, had a practiced eye. Some kind of businessman, she thought, or maybe a lawyer or a doctor. Don’t make too much money; you can see that. Good clothes, but I’ve seen better. That suit wasn’t so new, either. But he had nice ways. Not the kind of ‘nice’ ways some folks had, being pretty sweet about ‘the poor working people’ and all the time they didn’t give a darn about ‘the poor working people’. It just sounded nice to them and their friends coming in for cocktail parties. She’d heard more talk about the ‘rights’ of the working people for the past twenty years than she’d ever heard before, and it didn’t mean a thing. Not a thing. Funny. The ladies who employed her would talk for hours — just hours — to their cocktail friends about progress and Labor. You could hear their high voices, talking, talking, getting excited; you could listen from the kitchen, where you’d be setting out the plates of ham and cheese and all kinds of fancy meats that wouldn’t set well on your stomach, and awful salads with things in them, though you knew they cost a lot of money. And all kinds of little foreign cakes, and ices. Not that you’d get even a snitch of it; the ladies of the house were sharp about that. Watching every mouthful.

And then when your feet wouldn’t be feeling nothing anymore they’d come into the kitchen with shiny eyes after all their talk, and then their eyes wouldn’t be shiny no more. They’d say, real sharp, “Let me see. What time did you come, Ami? Does that really make nine hours? Oh no! It’s just eight hours and forty minutes! Ami! Now, let me see; where’s that pad and pencil? I’ll figure it out, and the carfare.”

They did, too. To the last cent. If they could break a cent in half with their teeth, they’d do it. They looked like they wanted to do it. And they’d never think of driving you to your bus stop, a mile away, sometimes at night.

But that man who just went in. He hadn’t looked at her like she was Labor. He’d looked at her like she was a human being; he’d looked at her feet. Well, that had made her mad, a little. After all, when you’re on your feet sometimes twelve hours a day your feet’d get like cushions and ache like sin. Besides, he was young; he didn’t know what it was to be seventy-one — and no place to lie your head, soon. Still, he’d been real nice, getting her a chair and wanting her to go in first. She didn’t want his pity, though! She didn’t want no darn person’s pity. She’d worked all her life, and she could go on working. If she still could have a place to lie her head. And be independent.

She’d been independent all her life. Why, she’d been out working after school since she was nine years old, washing dishes in the neighborhood when some woman was sick in bed or just had a baby, and cleaning windows and shoveling snow and churning ice cream and taking care of little kids, and sweeping porches and cellars, and putting out the ashes. Hundreds of things. Ami tossed her head. It hadn’t hurt her none, no sir. It was being lazy that hurt people, and having things easy and never getting their hands dirty. Why, give her a good broom any time and not one of those electric brooms like they called them! They just didn’t seem to get the rugs as clean. And the vacuum cleaners. Sure, they was easy; nobody took up their wall-to-walls anymore; nobody ever beat carpets and hung them out in the air.

She could smile a little now. It was spring outside, and she recalled the forgotten drums of spring in the city, the slap-slap-slap of carpet-beaters everywhere, the carpets hanging on the line. It was part of spring. Just like the smell of tomato catsup and grape jam cooking was the smell of fall coming from the houses. It was the sounds and the smells that made people remember. Peaceful. People had a lot of peace in the old days. They worked harder. But they had a lot of peace. It was a long time from sunup to sundown, a long, quiet, happy time. Sometimes, in the summer, a breeze would come up and you’d hear all them Chinese glass things singing on the porches in the lovely quiet, especially on Sundays after church. And then the look of the white linen cloths on rocking chairs on the porches, with the little tatting on the edges. And somebody singing a hymn in the back yard. They had flowers and grass and trees in the back yards then. Now they had asphalt and garages. And everybody getting into cars after dinner and running up and down the streets, staring at the other cars or rushing down to the lake, where they’d sit and stare some more, and the kids would throw all kinds of trash around on the beach or the grass and whine, whine, whine! In the old days the mothers and fathers would sleep after hot noon Sunday dinners, and the kids would sit on the steps of the porches and talk, and maybe, if somebody wasn’t looking, they’d throw rubber balls at each other — the boys — but the little girls would just sit all nice and stiff and starched, with the lace gimps on their dresses, and their sashes and hair ribbons and their black patent-leather slippers, and they’d hold their dolls and maybe comb the dolls’ hair.

Then around four the parents would wake up and come out all fresh and pink, and they and the kids would take a long walk to the park and sit under trees and eat ice cream cones and listen to the band, or maybe they’d go visit relatives and drink tea or coffee and eat a good, rich, homemade five-layer chocolate cake on other porches. Ami could hear the soft glittering rustle of the trees in the warm sun of many years ago, the clump-clump of a horse’s hoofs on the cobbles, the distant, sleepy rattle of a streetcar, a child’s clear and contented laugh, the Sunday murmur of a mother’s voice, and church bells. Even the poor didn’t worry much in those days. There was something to live for; it was so sweet and pleasant. She had been one of the little girls on the hot splintered porch steps, and so she knew. Her mother would put up her hair on Saturday night, after the bath in the washtub; she had pretty brown hair, but very straight, and Mama would roll her hair on long rags so that in the morning she’d have smooth and glassy tubes hanging around her face. Mama and Pa had been very poor, but somehow it hadn’t seemed poor. Somehow. It was so peaceful. And people had pride and gumption.

There was always an old grandmother or aunt in the houses too. They got the tenderest pieces of the Sunday chicken or the roast beef because of their teeth. She could see her own grandmother, in the gray-print calico and her fresh white apron. Granny could make the best cookies for kids and tell the best stories. And Mama and Pa treated her like a princess, too. Or a queen. Once, for Christmas, they’d paid three dollars for one of them big old Spanish combs with all color beads at the top, and Granny had put it in the thin white bun of her hair and it had stood up, real pretty, over her head. She, Ami, would never forget that comb. Granny had left it to her; it was in her trinket box. She’d take it out and look at it, and sometimes she’d put it in her own hair, just for fun. It was like a little crown. That’s what Mama and Pa had thought of it, too: a little crown for Granny. Kids who didn’t have old grannies and grandpas in the house were jealous of those who did. It was something to have them. Peaceful.

She could hear Granny sing right now:

“Rock of Ages, cleft for me!”

Rock of Ages. But there wasn’t no rock of ages for anybody anymore, anywhere. Now it was all plastic and ranch houses and stuff that wasn’t made of good cotton, linen, wool, and silk. Even the carpets were what they called ‘miracle fibers’. She hated them. Well, all this stuff was just like people now. What did they call it? Synthetics? Yes, well. People were synthetics now too. And no peace. Never any peace, never any long warm Sundays, or white winters, or Christmases with real trees, and real candles on them, and red popcorn strings, and peppermint-candy canes, and those wonderful, wonderful glass ornaments that came from Germany, angels, to hang on the trees, and little bags of candy, and helping their mothers make the mincemeat. Chop, chop. Cracking the nuts, washing and steaming the raisins, cutting up the citron, stirring the sugar with good butter that tasted like butter, sifting the flour — all in hot steamy kitchens with the wood stove and the sound of sleigh bells outside. So peaceful. No wars, no hurry, no telephones splitting the air, no radios screaming, no nylon sheets, no movies. Just people in their houses, loving each other and making every holiday something to remember all your life, even if you didn’t have a lot of money in your pocket. It was love. There just didn’t seem to be any love left now. Just that sex they was all talking about these days, even the kids!

Synthetics. That’s what they all was these days, their houses, their cars, their children, their amusements. And, above all, themselves. No wonder you didn’t see happy people no more these days. They just weren’t real! That was it, they just weren’t real!

There wasn’t even God — much. Not God like He used to be. Every house had a sign in it: ‘In God we trust’, or ‘God bless our home’, or ‘Jesus, be with us’. You’d just look at the signs, and you knew God wasn’t far off; He was right here, at the table where the papas said the grace, even though it was just corned beef and cabbage on the table. God was right here when it was very cold in your bedroom but snug under the feather beds, with the big bright stars showing even through the frost on your windows. He was right here when you got up in the morning; He was with you all day long, too, at school and when you worked. Why, sometimes, if you listened real close, you could hear Him breathing! You could hear Him singing in the trees, or in the high winds at midnight in the winter, when everything was so white and the moon was shining. People thought of Him all day long. He was just part of their lives. Where was He now? Who’d driven Him away? The radios blasting all the time, or the TV sets, or the cocktail parties, or the shows? No. It wasn’t that. People had just driven Him away. They didn’t want Him around. And that’s why there wasn’t no peace any longer. That’s why parents weren’t honored anymore but just thought of as nuisances that you hid away or thought were ‘problems’. That’s what they called them in the newspaper columns: ‘problems’. Granny wasn’t no ‘problem’. She was Granny. A queen.

One of these days, thought Ami Logan, taking off her misted glasses to wipe them, people would begin to think that God was a ‘problem’ too. Or maybe they’d already come to that. They didn’t talk about Him easy in the houses anymore. In fact, they didn’t talk about Him at all! But how could synthetics talk about God? God was real, and they weren’t.

It was terrible that they’d driven Him away. That left nothing for the kids and the grannies and the grandpas. That left nothing at all for anybody.

It was funny. Pa worked in a machine shop. They didn’t call him Labor, then. He was a man. He wasn’t Labor. He was a person. Independent. He’d have his beer on the porch at night, and his neighbors would come and they’d talk politics and get real excited. And sometimes swear. Who were the Presidents then? She didn’t remember. Presidents come and then they go. Nobody remembered them, except when they did some kind of harm, and then the people cursed them. But it was a kind of happy cursing. Washington was a long way off. Now it was kind of everywhere. Who wanted it? It was like something looking over your shoulder all the time and breathing down your neck. Making you hurry, hurry, hurry. ‘Growth’. For what? And Washington wanted your money; she had to pay out taxes on what she earned by her hard work. For what? Who wanted your money and made Washington scream for it like it was a pack of policemen? It didn’t make sense. What a person earned was always his own, earned with the sweat of his brow, like the Bible said. Now, it looked like, it wasn’t yours. It was somebody else’s. Why? Did they earn it on their knees in somebody’s kitchen or doing somebody’s laundry? No sir. They didn’t. But they wanted your money all the same, even if they hadn’t earned it themselves. She wondered what Pa would say about all this. He’d say, “The country’s gone to the dogs, for sure. And maybe we’d better roll up our sleeves and get it back for ourselves.” Yes, that’s what Pa would say. And all the men like him. They talked all the time about the Revolution and the Boston Tea Party. Maybe what the country needed was another Tea Party.

But what could you expect from a people that wasn’t real no more, people who was only synthetics, with no idea of duty and work and God? And no notion of earning their own way and asking nobody for a cent that wasn’t theirs?

Oh, they said all these drugs and things kept people alive longer these days. What for? Just to be ‘problems’? Not to be honored when they was old? Just to be thrown out like a dying cat or dog? That’s what came of people driving God out. It wasn’t how long you lived that counted. It was how you lived. But people sure set a lot of store on how long you lived, like living was all there was. Just living in a world that didn’t have no peace and no God.

That was a nice little man who’d just gone in there. An hour ago? He had problems too. He looked kind of white, like he was sick. He was sorry for me. I didn’t tell him I was sorry for him too! Dear God, I’m just sorry for everybody.

Rock of ages, cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in Thee!

But, thought Ami Logan, I ain’t got anyplace to hide anymore. It’s all open, everywhere. No shelter. Like you lived in a desert. ‘The Shadow of a Rock in a weary land’.

Funny she should remember that just now. A weary land. That’s what it was, everywhere, a weary land, in spite of all the new cars and the rushing around and the fun and parties and the washing machines and people talking about going to the moon. What was it they was running away from, that they wanted to go to the moon? Themselves? That’s what comes of having no peace and no God. That was what was making her feel so old, and she only seventy-one, and Granny was real chipper and did a lot of work when she was eighty-five, and went to church every Sunday and the Ladies Aid every Wednesday night, walking miles. Granny had lived to be ninety. She’d have lived longer if she hadn’t fallen down the porch steps and broke her hip. It was a terrible time then. Mama and Pa almost lost their minds, worrying about her. Who worried about people any longer? Except themselves? Who cared about their parents? They were ‘problems’.

The chimes sounded for her. She started. She was all alone. She pushed herself heavily to her swollen feet and legs. She walked slowly to the door; her legs felt like logs. She opened the door and went into the quiet, white marble room with the blue curtains.

She stood near the closed door for some moments. No one suggested that she sit down. No one suggested that she do anything. It was peaceful in here. The Man who Listens. He was waiting so quietly for her. He had all the time there was. All the time there was, like when she was a kid on a warm Sunday afternoon, with the church bells ringing and the Chinese glass things on the porch tinkling.

She sat down in the marble chair, putting her large raffia bag next to her swollen knee. She folded her bloated and scoured hands on her lap. She said roughly, “You a minister, mister? That’s what I heard.”

The warm white light gently enfolded her. So peaceful!

“I can’t complain,” she said proudly. “I’ve worked most of my life, ever since I was nine. I’m not coming here for pity. It’s just I’m a ‘problem’. That’s what the newspapers call me, and my children.” She paused. “My children.” She sat up in the chair. “It’s funny, but nobody thought anyone else was a problem when I was a kid. But you don’t know anything about me, do you?”

The room waited, tenderly enfolding her. “I’m a mother,” she said.

The light became even more gentle. “I wonder,” she said, “if you’ve got a mother living who’s a problem to you.” She waited. “Did your mother work for you, hope for you, maybe, and worry about you? Did she make your clothes and everything? And cook for you? Did she pray for you when you was out? Did she wake up in the morning, thinking about you, and if she’d done the best for you? Did she make you go to school and tell you about God?”

The room’s light appeared to hover about her. She looked at it. She was not a tearful woman, but now there were tears in her eyes. “She did? Well, then, maybe you can help me. I never asked help of nobody before. I just feel I kind of need it now.” She added hurriedly, “Not that I’m asking for money! No, it’s not that.”

She scrubbed at her eyes with her broken knuckles. “It’s something else that kind of eats at me. It’s not having any place to lie my head. Now.”

She looked at the wet tears on her knuckles and grunted. “Haven’t cried since Chris was eight and had diphtheria and I thought he was dying. Maybe I’m getting old, after all. Maybe they’re right. Mister, did you tell your mother to go into a home? Or maybe I should call you ‘Reverend’. That’s what they called ministers when I was a child. Reverend. Reverend, did you ever want to send your mother to a home? Give her to somebody else to take care of?”