The Listener (20 page)

“And now there’s Katherine. She’s fifty-three and don’t have any children at all. And she’s a widow. Katherine’s kind of squeezed-mouth. She never did say what her husband left, but she’s got a good fur coat and a car of her own and lives in a better place than Arnold, and she takes trips. She’s been a widow for fifteen years, and her husband was in real estate. She sold Chris the lot where he built his house, and it wasn’t no bargain, no sir!”

Ami Logan sighed and shook her head drearily. “You have your children and you raise them, and you don’t know a thing about them. No. I sometimes say, ‘Chris, you remember that Christmas we all made things for each other because we couldn’t afford to buy anything? And what fun it was, making the things?’ And he looks at me real cold and says, ‘No, Ma, and it’s a sign of growing old when you remember like that’.

“Well, maybe. But a person has to have some pleasure in her life, don’t she? I raised those children of mine; I put the rest of the insurance money in the bank, and I went to work wherever I could find it. Cooking. Practical nursing. Sewing. Cleaning. Washing. Waiting on store sometimes on Saturdays. I didn’t mind what it was, so long as it was honest and we had our house, even if it’s small, and it was snug, and I had my children. And after Eli’d been dead three or four years I began to sing again, knowing I had my children and my house and was strong and healthy and able to work. What more does anyone want?

“And that’s where the whole trouble is.”

Ami Logan rubbed the palms of her callused hands on the soft velvet that covered the arms of the chair. She stroked it absently, then with attention. “Now this,” she said with admiration, “is real silk velvet! Just beautiful. It gives a person a good feeling when she finds something real.

“Well, Reverend, I’m taking up a lot of your time, and I hope you don’t mind too much. I’ll make it shorter. I’ve got six thousand dollars in the bank, and my house. And I’m seventy-one years old. I didn’t feel so well last winter, so I went to my doctor — he’s an old man, too — and he said, ‘Ami, you’ve got a bad heart condition. You’ve got to stop working. Look at your feet and legs! You’ve worn them out, just like you’ve worn your heart out raising your children and working all your life’. And I says, ‘And you’re all worn out, too, and what does it matter?’

“He agrees with that, but he’s known me since Eli was killed, and he calls up Chris and tells him. And they all come down on me. Katherine says she’s been ashamed all these years with me being a cleaning woman and everything else. She would have given me money to stay at home, Katherine says, if she’d been able to afford it. And Chris says he’s ashamed, too, and has a lot of debts and can’t seem to get nowhere, and Arnold says I’m embarrassing Elsie.”

Ami Logan sat up very high in the chair, and her cheeks flushed. “Ashamed of their ma working! As if working was something to be ashamed of! Why, they’re the ones should be ashamed! I was shamed for them. And I said, ‘What makes you all so fussy about me, when you wasn’t before?’ And Chris says the doctor says they should or he’d go to some authorities, and it would be terrible. Well, I’m mad at that doctor, and I look at my children and try to think they’re worried about me, and then I began to cry. I said, ‘All right. I’ll rent this house and I’ll move with you. Which one first?’

“Well, Reverend,’ said Ami in a low and trembling voice, “they looked at each other, and then they wouldn’t look at me. Then Katherine said, ‘Oh, Ma, you know how busy we all are, and we’ve all got responsibilities of our own. Even me. The boys have children and wives. But look, Ma dear, and don’t get that tight look on your face. I can sell this house right away for you. I ought to get at least seven thousand dollars for it. There’s a gas station that wants it, a corner lot’.

“And I said, ‘You mean pull down my pa’s house, and my house, and the house you was all born in and your own pa paid for?’ I couldn’t believe it.

“Then Arnold says, ‘Let’s not be sentimental’. Anything anyone wants that Arnold doesn’t is sentimental or stupid or ridiculous. He says that with my six thousand dollars in the bank and the seven thousand dollars for the house I can go into the Methodist Home in Valley Hill. Elsie’s on the board. Nice place out in the country, they said, with other old folks like myself, and companionship. And food, and share a room with some clean old lady, and they have a lot of fun out there, and games, and go for rides.

“I get real sick, thinking even now of what they said. Thirteen thousand dollars — that’s what I’d have. But no place to lie my head, no place of my own. And no privacy. People like Elsie always poking, poking, at you. No place to hide, to get away from people. Only chatter, and marching through halls, and sitting in parlors, and waiting for death to come and tap you on the shoulder. Just waiting for death. That’s all.

“I just can’t face it, Reverend. I want to go on working until I die, free in my own house, free to shut my own door, free to go to bed and then get up and work, or maybe stay home a day when the weather’s nice.

“But the worst of it is, my children don’t ‘honor’ me like I did my parents and they did their own parents. I’m just a problem to them, a shame. Their houses don’t have a room in it for me. Their children don’t want me, except Robert. They want me to get out of their minds and stop shaming them or something and go to a kind of charity home. Me, in a charity home! Oh, I’d be paying in thirteen thousand dollars, but the sleazy way money is now, that don’t mean anything these days.

“It’s not having a place of my own to lie my head down, and not having my children honor me. That’s the very, very worst. Maybe I didn’t do right. I don’t know. I did my best, but maybe it wasn’t good enough. But I just don’t see what else I could have done. Can you? I didn’t know I shamed them, but I guess that’s why they told everybody, when I was in their houses, which wasn’t often, that I was a nurse.”

Her voice had risen to the crest of shaking despair, and she pushed herself painfully to her feet. She wobbled across the marble floor and earnestly faced the curtains. There was a sudden huge and sinking pain in her chest. She ignored it.

“There ain’t anyone in the whole world that cares about me,” she mourned. “And I didn’t know that until just a little while ago.” She clasped her hands together. “What can I do, Reverend?”

She looked anxiously at the button and peered forward to read the plate near it through her blurred glasses. She bit her lips. Then she put her hand out and touched the button.

The curtains moved aside quietly, soundlessly, and the light flowed out to hold her. She looked at the man who stood in the light. She lifted her clasped hands to her lips and pressed them deeply. “Oh,” she murmured. “Oh. Yes. I should have known.” She caught her breath. The pain was crushing, smothering.

She moved back slowly, clumsily, felt for the chair, and sat down and faced the man. They looked at each other a long time.

“I remember,” she whispered, and she smiled even while she cried. “You didn’t have no place to lie your head either, did you? No place of your own. Not when you were a grown man and out working. For people like me. You didn’t forget me. And I never forgot you, not one day in my life. Not one day in my life! You were the best I had, and I still have you.

“I’m just thinking,” she said in a dreaming voice, and her smile was young as well as mournful. “You must think about this world we got now the way I do. It was peaceful when you were a child, wasn’t it, at home with your mother, and helping her? You and I — we’ve got a lot in common.”

Her eyes closed. She dropped into a slight doze for a few moments, then awoke without a start. “Why, thank you,” she whispered. “Or maybe it’s a dream. I dreamt that you spoke to me and that I heard your voice. It was just like I thought it would be. Peaceful. ‘The peace beyond understanding’.

“I shouldn’t’ve been so hard on my children. They’ve got this awful world to live in, perhaps for a long time yet. Maybe it gives them the creeps, too, looking at it and wondering how it got this way. Maybe they’re scared about their children too. Maybe they know their children won’t honor them, either. Nobody ever honors anyone or anything now. Why, the poor world. And my poor children too. They don’t have a place, themselves, to lie their heads, a place to call their own. No matter how hard they’ll ever work, they’ll never have a real place. I had. And I’m grateful. Yes, I’m grateful. I’m even grateful for all the hard work I did, and glad I could do it. It was a different world — I don’t suppose it’ll ever come back. My poor children. They don’t have you, as I did. They don’t even want you. That’s the real bad part, not wanting you.”

She dozed again. The man moved toward her and held out his hand, and she took it and said, “Yes — oh yes.”

Ami Logan was the first person ever to die in the white marble room. When she was found she was smiling, and her face was full of joy.

She had left her money and her house to her grandson, Robert Logan. When he heard, he thought: Don’t worry, Granny. I remember all the things you told me on those Sundays about the peaceful world you lived in. I’m going to keep on remembering. Someday I’m going to do something about it. For you.

Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees,

Hypocrites! because you pay tithes on

mint and anise and cummin, and have left

undone the weightier matters of the Law,

right judgment and mercy and faith.

These things you ought to have done,

while not leaving the others undone.

Blind guides, who strain out the gnat

but swallow the camel!

Matthew 23:23-24

It was a very wet, cold, and rainy night, the wind driving and whirling sheets of water against windows and doors and all who walked on the streets. Great bellowing gusts roared out of the black sky, thundering at eaves and drumming on walls. The sidewalks ran like streams. The man who climbed the rise to the stark-white building shuddered, pulled down his hat, and tried to hold his coat about him. He cursed under his breath. He had never known his wife, Helen, to be hysterical before, not even when one of the boys had been struck by a car when he was a child. But now she was frantic, and no matter how he explained or reprimanded, the more frantic she became and the heavier she sobbed and cried. One would think John Hathaway was her brother and Alice Hathaway her niece. It was not only bewildering, it was infuriating. Worse, it was dangerous to his own prestige and threatened his convictions. “ ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged,’ ” Helen had wept, startling her husband to anger and embarrassment. For he was a judge with a reputation for absolute objectivity and respect for the Law.

Then, to his angry repudiation, she had urged him to talk about the matter with the Man who Listens. At first he had not thought her serious, but only unstrung. When his daughter, Ruth, joined in her pleading he did not speak to either of them for days. But when Helen began to show alarming symptoms of the return of her nervous breakdown he had furiously consented “at least to talk to that damned, maudlin fool on the hill. If only to shut you up,” he added with unusual savagery. What did his family know of the pressure on him, particularly in the Hathaway case, the uneasy, wordless pressure?

The damned, insistent pressure of being a judge. The misunderstanding. The hatred. What did laymen know of the Law, written precisely, meaning only what it said and no more? Oh, there were judges who interpreted the Law in a lazy fashion and so set criminals loose on the community again to plunder, murder, and steal. The frowsty judges were the real criminals, elected by people no less venal than themselves. Even worse than the judges were the juries. Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence was an excellent thing, provided one really had ‘juries of one’s peers’. Peers! Cattle!

The gravel, running with water, churned under the judge’s impatient feet. He almost forgot where he was going. If anything could have prejudiced him in favor of John Ellis Hathaway, it would have been the jury, selected after dreary days of challenging by the defendant’s lawyers and the district attorney. Was this jury the ‘peer’ of Hathaway, who was not only a prominent businessman but a distinguished scholar as well, a man of an old and excellent family which had given judges, clergymen, two governors, and three senators to the nation, and, during President Hayes’s term, a Cabinet officer? The jury was composed of little shopkeepers, three mechanics, two openmouthed young housewives who thought they resembled the current movie queen, a man who owned two battered trucks, a service-station operator. And what not. These were the ‘peers’ of Hathaway! He, the judge, had frequently caught the small and venomous smiles the jury had directed at the defendant, smiles full of envy and mean, hateful triumph that such a man was at their ultimate mercy. Yes, the jury alone would have prejudiced the judge in favor of Mr. Hathaway.

“God damn,” said the judge simply, and stopped. He was standing before the double bronze doors of the white building with its arch letters that proclaimed that within it waited the Man who Listens. The wind threw itself upon him, almost flung him down, though he was a tall and sinewy man of about fifty, accustomed to weather and hunting and fishing and camping. A diffused light streamed gently down over the bronze doors. “No,” said the judge. But his hand reached out and turned the knob. He peered carefully inside. If a single person was within he would have to retreat, for fear of gossip that his honor, Judge Meredith Hazlitt, had actually come to this place for consultation. And what the newspapers could do to that fact during this sensational trial!

Tomorrow he was to charge the jury, and it was already midnight.

He moved quickly into the empty waiting room. He closed the doors even more quickly behind him. He stood in the center of the room, his sharp hazel eyes scrutinizing everything, his sharp nostrils a little distended, his thick black brows drawn together. His father had known old John Godfrey well and admiringly. Yet this was a silly, sentimental place to come, and a dangerous one for a man like himself. However, he was rarely photographed. His face had appeared in the newspapers once eight years ago. He did not believe that judges should be well known to the populace. For that reason he belonged to only one or two clubs and attended them infrequently. Once his wife had told him that he was really out of place in America; his real milieu was England, where judges kept themselves apart and lived in their high-wigged dignity under the Crown. He had often wondered why he had been elected in the first place, for he was not popular and had few friends. He scoffed when his wife and two sons and daughter assured him affectionately that it was because of his integrity. Could such people as average jurymen be impressed by integrity? Nonsense. They preferred only some vague and medieval abstraction called ‘security’ and their daily beer and their television sets and their small, furtive sins. Judge Hazlitt, from his childhood, had looked upon the world of men and had not found it good or righteous.

He looked at the oaken door. Now, what if the Man who Listens was a judge, himself, or a lawyer? A nice contretemps! In spite of all the repeated assurances he had overheard that no confidence was ever betrayed, the judge, in reality, trusted no one except his immediate family. He thought of Helen irascibly; there were times when Helen could be a little stupid in spite of her fine mind. He turned on his heel to leave, when he heard the soft chime. He looked over his shoulder at the door. Well, he had never broken a promise yet. But he would be very careful. He laughed shortly to himself and went into the white room.

He had seen photographs of the interior, so he was not surprised at the cool and silent light on the marble walls and floor. He looked at the blue curtains, then walked quietly to them. He tried to move them apart; they were like iron, for all their surface softness. Could anyone see through them? He pressed his nose almost onto the velvet fabric but could see nothing. If this gets out, then I’m finished, he thought. He went to the marble chair and sat down, staring threateningly at the curtained alcove.

“Are you a judge?” he asked in his strong and resonant voice.

No one answered him. “Silence,” he said wryly, “is frequently an affirmation. Do I know you?”

But no one answered him. He held his dripping hat on his knees. He had walked the two miles here in the rain, taking even the precaution of not using his car. (Helen would be upset when he returned, soaking to the skin. In view of everything, she deserved that anxiety.)

“I am a judge,” he said. “I have heard that sometimes you speak — or is that correct? I’m not certain. Sometimes people see you and sometimes not. You can be assured, my dear colleague, that I’ll not press that famous button beside the curtains.”

Then he remembered that no one really knew who the man was and that it was rumored that he was not only a judge, but a psychiatrist, a teacher, a social worker, a clergyman. Even a doctor, someone had said. Of one thing he could be sure; the man hidden there was not one of the jury in the Hathaway case!

He was always a tense man, alert and coldly quick, owing to his nature and his physique and his secretly violent temperament. Yet he found himself relaxing as he always did after a fast walk. The chill was leaving his flesh; he was becoming comfortably warm. A peculiar thing was occurring, too, something which the judge had never experienced before: a sensation of kind confidence and patient waiting and brotherhood. It all appeared to emanate from the presence behind the curtain. Suddenly he was certain that he would never be betrayed, and this certainty startled him and he sat upright. He had been a constrained child, youth, and adult, confiding rarely in anyone, not even his parents and his wife.

He heard himself, to his astonishment, speaking aloud: “It’s not as if anyone has ever betrayed me in an important matter. No. But I’ve seen others betrayed. However, that should not have affected me, should it? And I did not know the circumstances of the betrayals.” He stopped and thought of his involuntary words and was more astonished than ever. He had actually confessed that he had sometimes not known ‘the circumstances’! A hot sense of humiliation came to him.

The room waited, and the man behind the curtains. The judge frowned. A judge, he thought, must always be aware of circumstances, even in his private life, and make allowances for them. Could it be that he very seldom did? But the Law did not; that is, the Law when properly administered to the letter.

“The Law, to me,” said the judge, “is a sacred thing. It is the accumulated wisdom of the centuries. Of course there have been evil laws; I can think of some amendments to the Constitution itself which are, or have been before repeal, actually evil and disastrous to the nation. I can think, at this very moment, of one amendment which should be repealed at once if we are to survive as a people. But too many hundreds of thousands of maggoty bureaucrats have a vested interest in it, and until the people are determined to shake it from the Constitution the bureaucrats will continue to fatten on it — to our terrible peril.”

The judge cleared his throat. “But, on the whole, the Law is the strength of a people. It is their assurance that we are ruled by Law and not by men — though I’ve read informed and cogent opinions lately that we are beginning to be ruled by men rather than by Law, and that always leads to despotism. Am I boring you?” he asked suddenly.

He was not a man of particular imagination, but he almost believed that he had heard a negative murmur. Or had it been a sigh, or the rustle of a late-autumn tree?

“That is why I, in my capacity as judge, adhere to the Law absolutely, as it is written, and never diverge from it. The newspapers have frequently implied that I’m merciless, which I am not. I did not write the Law, but it is my duty to uphold it.”

He hesitated and listened for the slightest sound. There was none. It was as if he were sealed in some white and shining tomb.

“I’d not be here except for my wife,” he said grudgingly after a few moments. “Helen is in many ways a very remarkable woman, extremely intelligent and logical and poised. She knows it is her duty as my wife not to discuss my cases with me, nor even to mention them. We’ve been married for twenty-six years. I had just been admitted to the Bar when we were married. My father was a wealthy lawyer. Helen and I did not need to wait until I was established. We were married a week after she was graduated from college.”

His harsh face softened as he remembered the young Helen, only twenty, in the white bridal dress she had made herself. Her old fool of a father had lost all his inherited money and had compounded that folly by shooting himself. There had been just enough money left for Helen to complete her last year at college, and she had continued bravely and steadfastly in the face of all the malicious gossip. Even when her mother, a feeble soul, had died that March twenty-six years ago, Helen had not been swerved or overcome. She had enormous courage as well as gentleness, endurance as well as sweetness. He had loved Helen from the time he had first known her, when she was only seventeen. She had not been a pretty girl; her great dark eyes had been her one attraction, and probably her expression, which combined fortitude with womanliness. But she had been rather small, a trifle stocky. It was strange that she had had so many suitors, for young men were notoriously fascinated by beauty alone. Girls, too, had been devoted to her.

“I think,” said the judge meditatively, “that it was Helen’s character. And I also think that it was really because of Helen that I was elected, and not from any value in myself!” He gave his short laugh again. “Everyone,” he added, “loves Helen. She’s a very wise woman, and very kind and discreet. That is why I cannot understand — ”

He paused. “But I didn’t come here to talk about my family. By the way, I have two sons, both at Harvard. Good boys, with Helen’s eyes. And a daughter.” He paused again, and now his mouth became soft and grave. “Ruth is twenty-three. I don’t mind saying that she is my favorite child. But fathers usually prefer their daughters, I’ve discovered.”

He looked at the curtains expectantly. They did not stir. It was now long after midnight. Was it possible that there was no one there at all, though it was said that the man waited all night? Nonsense. Relays, no doubt. The judge smiled. Even a judge could not be on duty all the time, though God knew that the world needed them!

“Ruth,” he said, forgetting that he had not come here to talk about his family. (He never talked about them to anyone, and he did not stop to wonder why he was doing it now.) “Ruth is all right again. She had married a scoundrel, one of the young Shelton boys. Good family. Not much money, but sound. Robert was the only rascal among them. A liar. A thief. Excellent university training, but a lazy bastard. I didn’t know all this when Ruth told us, when she was twenty, that she wanted to marry him. I knew old Bob, his father. One of my best friends. Too bad he’s dead. I wasn’t too impressed by Robert, and I was disappointed in Ruth. He was too airy, too charming — that’s a hell of a characteristic for a man to have, isn’t it, unless he’s a confidence man or a salesman or a politician? He is in politics now, by the way, and no doubt,” said the judge bitterly, “he’ll go far. I’d not be surprised if he became governor later on, or a senator. The people love charm these days and prefer a big smile and a big handshake to honor and intelligence. No wonder the country — ” He stopped, shook his head.

He continued in a hard voice: “When old Bob died he left each of his three sons ten thousand dollars apiece. That is all the money he had, and he was a widower. The two older boys put it into their profession, or business, and are doing well and married excellently. Robert told me he still had the ten thousand dollars — safely invested. What reason did I have to disbelieve him? None. We gave Helen eight thousand dollars when she married Robert, and I bought their house for them. Helen furnished it. Everything was radiant and happy and young,” said the judge in a louder and bitterer tone. “Robert was already vaguely connected with politics; he had, he said, a salary of about nine thousand dollars a year.

“He had nothing. He’d married my Ruth for her back ground and the money she would inherit someday — my pretty Ruth. When he discovered that I was not going to continue Ruth’s large allowance or subsidize him, then the marriage ended. It had ended a long time before Helen and I knew about it. We did notice that Ruth was becoming pale and thin and too quiet; she was always a lively girl. We thought perhaps that she was pregnant at first. It was only by degrees that I found out that he’d squandered his father’s ten thousand dollars even before he had married Ruth. He confiscated Ruth’s money. It was two years before I discovered that he’d put a mortgage on the house I had bought for them. I found that out the day Ruth went to the hospital. She was sick a long time. Nervous and physical collapse, the doctors said. And no wonder! She had continued to love that swine up to that very day. It was a dreadful time, I assure you. We thought we’d lose Ruth; she didn’t put up much of a fight to live. We finally had to call in a psychiatrist. Then we brought Ruth home. Then Helen became sick; a nervous breakdown from worry. I’ll never forget that year until the day I die. The marriage, of course, was over, though I’m not a man who believes in divorce or countenances it. Ruth received an annulment. There was a considerable scandal after that. Robert had to file a bankruptcy petition. He had nothing at all. He had spent everything he had, what Ruth had, and the mortgage money — where, how, we never did know. I could have had the bastard thrown into jail!” exclaimed the judge, his tight face red with renewed rage. His hands clenched on the arms of the chair.