The Listener (7 page)

Wherefore I say to thee, her sins many as they are,

shall be forgiven her, because she has loved much. . .

Luke 7:47

Mary Lanska came softly into the sitting room, carrying her flowers. It was almost midnight, and, as she hoped, there was no one else there. She dropped her little note in the box and sat down to wait. It was so warm and pleasant here, this Holy Saturday night before Easter. She looked at the flowers in their large porcelain holder with that funny sort of stuff, she thought, like cotton, they put in there to keep the water. She bent her head to smell the flowers. They had cost all her tips in the restaurant for the past week. Beautiful! She loved flowers. They were much better than a lot of people. She did not know the names of all of them, but she recognized daffodils and iris and white lilies and innocent fringed daisies. They exhaled a sweet deep perfume in the lighted quiet. She hugged them to her gently, kissed the cool lip of a lily. They had cost her a lot, but flowers were expensive at Easter. She hoped the man who listened in the other room liked flowers too. They were all she had to give him.

He must be a good man, she thought. She’d read about him in the papers. No one had ever seen him, or if they had they hadn’t told. But he was very kind, and he never lectured anybody. All he did was listen. Well, that was enough; it was more than enough. He’d help her find out what to do. She was sure of it.

She sighed. It would be nice to go home to Mass tomorrow. But Father Stephen was dead now. Besides, he would be angry at her. She hadn’t fulfilled her Easter duty for — how long? Ten years. Ten long years. How could she tell a priest that? Why, she was probably excommunicated by now! And she was afraid of the priests in this big city; they looked so sure and sharp and quick. Enough to scare a country girl to death. Very educated, not slow and easy and kind-looking like Father Stephen, who had all the time in the world to listen to you and help you. If she went to one of these big-city priests now — why, he’d probably drive her away! Not that she didn’t deserve it, at that. He’d be right. Still, she wished everything could be O.K.. Nothing had been O.K. since she was sixteen years old, when Mom died and Pa just disappeared and all the little kids were sent to the orphanage. Maybe they got adopted by nice people. She hoped so. She, their sister, hadn’t anything to give them. She’d always wanted to have something to give, but it never happened that way. At least now she had these flowers for the Man who Listens. She was twenty-eight years old, and plump and pretty, with thick yellow hair, light blue eyes, and a square, tender face full of delicate color. She did not know she was pretty. She had scoffed at Phil when he had told her, and at Francis. Francis. Tears came into her eyes, and she fumbled for her handkerchief. The chime sounded softly, and she got up and carried her flowers into the white and empty room.

She did not know what she had expected, but certainly not this suffused quiet, these white walls, the blue curtains over the alcove, the waiting marble chair. She sat down fearfully, clutching her flowers.

“I hope,” she murmured, “that someone’s here. They say someone always is. You, I guess. How could you be here all the time? Did you read my note?”

There was no sound; it was like a church when there was no one there. But all at once Mary knew she was not alone. She smiled tremulously.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she said. “Not a girl like me. You won’t want me here when I tell you. My name’s Mary Lanska. I sort of feel I should change it to Maggie or something. It’s a crying shame my name’s Mary.”

A large tear, hot and burning, ran down her cheek. She gulped.

“It was after Mom died and the kids went to the orphanage. I was sixteen and kind of independent, and I looked eighteen, almost. Mom was a good cook, and she taught me to keep house. So I got myself a job as a maid. Oh yes, that was in the little town where I come from, eighty miles from here. Rich people by the name of Mallon. He was a banker, Mr. Mallon, and owned practically everything in town. He wasn’t a good man, in the way I mean it. I don’t mean he drank or ran around — after all, he was kind of old, about fifty. And he didn’t beat up his old lady, the way my pa beat up Mom, and he didn’t wallop Phil around, either. But Phil — that’s his son — was nineteen, and too big, I guess. Four girls in the family, but Phil was the only boy. I never liked any of them but Phil. He was the only decent one. I still say so!” And she lifted her square and dimpled chin firmly.

“No, Mr. Mallon wasn’t good! Mean, and never smiled except at the bank when he had a good customer. He did a lot for his church, too, I heard, but you can’t buy God, can you? Sister M. Benedict said God was the only thing you couldn’t buy in this world. She was sure right!

“Well, anyway, Phil wasn’t the strong type. So he didn’t go away to school; he had a tutor and then went to the private school in the town. And then it was time for him to go to college. How old lady Mallon cried! You’d think Phil was going to his own funeral. And I cried, too, when I was alone at night. What would I do without Phil?

“For you see, Phil and I loved each other. We really loved each other. No one can tell me different, no sir!” She shook her head vigorously. “I loved him the minute I saw him. A real doll. Big and thin, with dark eyes like a girl’s and thick black curly hair. And how he could talk! It made stars sparkle in your heart. When he kissed me for the first time — it was a few days after I started to work there — I thought I’d die. I really did.”

The tears were coming faster now, but unheeded.

“No one in the world had ever kissed me before, except Mom, and that was when I was confirmed. No boy, no man. Nobody but Mom and Phil. I thought I’d die. Oh, I’d read the movie and romance magazines, and I knew all about love, even if I didn’t get all the big words in the magazines. Why, it was better with Phil than I’d ever dreamed! It was like a dream, and I mean it.”

Her voice dropped. “I guess it was all wrong, if you think about it, but nobody’d ever told me. Mom had too many of us to take care of; she never got around to it. Why, do you know, I was a big girl of sixteen, looking almost eighteen, and I didn’t even know how a lady got a baby! Honest, I didn’t. I just never thought of it; that shows you how stupid I was, with all the kids we had in the house. I never gave it a thought.

“Well, Phil started coming up to my room after everybody was in bed, and it was like a dream. I was so happy. I guess that was what it was — I was happy. I’d never been happy before. And in that little town they didn’t keep kids in school until they were grown, the way they do now. Especially not kids like us. I left school when I was thirteen; Morn needed me. So all at once, there was Phil, and stars and being happy, and love. Sometimes I thought I’d burst, I was so happy.

“Well, still, I had a sort of idea after a while that this wasn’t right. So I stopped going to confession. Anyway, Father Stephen was dead by then. I couldn’t go to confession and say to the new priest, ‘I think maybe I’m doing something wrong’. And then tell him. I was afraid he’d tell me I had to stop, and then I wouldn’t be happy anymore. I couldn’t live without that happiness, and Phil, and him stroking my hair on the pillow and telling me I was pretty and that I was all his love and there was never going to be anyone else. And I’m sure he meant it! Yes sir, I’m sure of that! We were going to be married when he was twenty-one and out from under his old man’s thumb, and with a job. I’d say to him, ‘Your pa won’t want you to marry me’. And he’d laugh and say, ‘Who cares? Besides, I’m only nineteen, and I can’t marry without his permission, so let’s forget everything but us’. He was always right. It was the only way.”

She paused. Her blue eyes widened as she stared at the curtain, and she shrank. “Oh! Maybe you’re a priest! Maybe you want me to get out after what I told you? Should I get out?”

The light beamed all about her. She listened intently. No voice answered her, but she was suddenly reassured that she could stay. She sighed over and over. “Well, thank you,” she murmured.

She looked at the flowers on her knee, tall and fresh and sweet, and she smiled sadly.

“Then Phil had to go away to college. ‘Don’t write me,’ he said. ‘If you do I’ll have to answer, and someway they’ll find out. Just remember I love you, and I’ll be thinking of you every minute’. Of course he was right. So I’d lie alone at night, dreaming of him. I wanted to pray for him, too, but I was afraid that God would be offended. I was beginning to be scared of Him, anyway. I guess that’s the way you feel when you know you’re doing something wrong. I’m not saying I didn’t know by then; I did. I wrote to this woman in the newspaper and didn’t sign my name, just ‘Polly’. And she answered it in the newspaper and she said I should leave ‘your place of employment at once! Go to a relative, or a close friend, or your clergyman’. That’s what she said. The only thing was I didn’t have no relatives or close friends, and if I went to the priest he’d tell me never to see Phil again, and how could I stand that? I loved him; he was all I had.

“I thought he’d be home for Thanksgiving, but there was this football game, and the whole family went to the college town to be with Phil and see the game. You wouldn’t believe it! He was playing football! They came back, and I’d listen, and they’d say, ‘What a wonderful improvement in dear Phil’. That was his mother and sisters. The sisters were all older’n me and had a lot of boyfriends, and one was engaged. About time, too; she was twenty-six, the oldest. Married one of the men in the bank.

“Well, there was Christmas coming, and Phil would be home. Except he wasn’t. You’d think the family would be mad, wouldn’t you? But they weren’t. It seems like he’d met some son of a big shot from Philadelphia, and they’d invited Phil for the holidays. He was Phil’s best friend. But old man Mallon puffed up and grinned and said his boy was coming along and it was an honor, and though the old lady cried the girls jumped around as if they’d just got diamond bracelets or something.

“And then I got this pain in my chest. It wouldn’t go away. It ached all the time, day and night. Mom died of heart trouble, and I went to a doctor. He charged me five dollars, and I was only getting ten a week. He said I didn’t have a heart condition. ‘It’s all in your mind, young lady,’ he joked, and pinched my cheek. ‘Some boy, eh? Well, go home to Mother and play the field. I don’t approve of this going steady at your age. Seventeen? Too young. Just you go out with all the nice boys you can, and dance and have fun and wear your pretty clothes and stay close to Dad and Mother for some time yet’. Much he knew about me! Anyway, the pain wouldn’t go away. It was like something eating at my heart all the time.

“Did you ever have a pain like that, loving somebody so hard? A friend, maybe, or your mother or your father? And wanting to see them like mad, and you couldn’t? Well, it was that way with me. And Phil didn’t come home for the spring vacation. He didn’t come home until June. Nine long months.

“But the minute I saw him I knew he still loved me, and that’s all that mattered. He came up to my room the very first night he was home, and it was like he’d never gone away. Every night, the whole time he was home, when he could. He’d filled out; he was a man and not a boy, twenty years old. I was so proud of him, and so happy. Why, even the air had sparkles in it! And we had only one year to go before we could be married.”

Mary wept deeply into her handkerchief. She could not stop for a long time. Then her face was flushed and swollen. She glanced furtively at her cheap watch. Why, it was half-past one! It was Easter morning. “Oh, God,” she whispered.

She smoothed a leaf of the flowers. “That boy he met at college, he came in the summer, and Phil was out a lot with him, showing him off, his sisters said. The youngest sister sure had her eye on him, and she had no looks at all. Like a plucked chicken. She used to stare at my hair, and she said I bleached it! I never bleached it in my life, and then the old lady swooped down on me and examined the roots of my hair. Like I wasn’t human, or something, and she could do what she wanted to me. I wanted to kick her hard. But that meant I wouldn’t be there anymore, and maybe new people would find out about Phil and they wouldn’t let him come and stay with me.

“Well, it wasn’t like the first summer. Phil was out and around; the family made him go. And then in August he went off to sail on that boy’s father’s yacht, and you’d think, by the way his family acted, that he’d been elected President. But before he went he came up to my room on the last night, and it was like in the very beginning, and he kept whispering how much he loved me. And he gave me the first present I ever had. The prettiest compact. I bet it cost all of six dollars, maybe even more. It looked like gold and silver. I still got it.

“Phil didn’t come home that Thanksgiving, either, and then the whole stupid family was invited to Philadelphia, and you never heard such a noise. Laughing and yelling and hugging each other. That was for Christmas. And Phil didn’t come home in the spring, and then not in June. The family was whispering around, but I couldn’t hear what they said. He came home in July for just four weeks. I was eighteen then, and he was twenty-one, and we could be married.” The handkerchief was wet and useless, so Mary let her tears flow, down onto the flowers, down onto her cheap but sturdy winter coat and neat dark blue dress.

“Again it was like the beginning, those four weeks. And I’d say to him, ‘We can be married now, Phil’. And he’d kiss me hard on the mouth and say, ‘Just be patient’. And I was. And then at the end of that four weeks his engagement to that boy’s sister showed up in the newspaper.”

Mary’s color ran from her cheeks at the remembrance of that old agony.

“I thought I’d lose my mind,” she said, her voice hoarse and low. “I thought I’d just lose my mind. I couldn’t work. I said I was sick, and I went upstairs to my room and lay down on the bed. Maybe I fainted, or maybe I slept. I don’t know. But I kept waking up and saying, ‘Oh, thank God it was just a nightmare!’ Only, it wasn’t. It’d come back to me, like a knife in my chest. I kept thinking I was dying, and then I was scared, thinking of God and how angry He was with me, and this was my punishment and I’d end up in hell for sure. No one wanted me now, not Phil, not God. Nobody.”

She could see the curtains through her tears. “Well, all that day I was sick and just about dying. And then I couldn’t go down and get dinner, and I could hear the old lady grumbling. I’d lift my head, and then I’d have to run into the bathroom and throw up. Phil wasn’t around. I waited and waited, and it got dark, and then the house was full of company; I could hear them laughing and shouting; I could hear Phil, too. I sat up and told myself it was a mistake. If it was true, and the old man forcing him into this, then we could run away together. I’d saved a little money, and Phil had a big allowance. I just had to wait for Phil.

“And right about one in the morning he came to my room in his pajamas, like always, and I was in his arms, and I was almost out of my mind again. He kept putting his hand over my mouth and then trying to close it with kisses. He kept saying, ‘Hush, hush, it’ll be all right. You’ll see’. And I was so sick, and so tired. Then suddenly I was happy again. Phil would take care of everything. I’d just about fallen asleep, I was so tired, when the light flashed on, and there was the old man.”

Mary shuddered and cringed and squeezed her eyes together.

“It was awful,” she whispered. “I pulled up the sheet around me, and Phil jumped out of bed and pulled on his pajamas, and the old man looked like he was going to go up in flames. And he looked at me! I never had anyone look at me like that! And he said, ‘The evil woman taken in adultery. You dirty tramp, in a better age than this they’d stone you to death. Get out of this house at once, you filthy creature’.

“And Phil kept saying, ‘Now, Dad, please, Dad, it’s all right, Dad. Don’t shout like that. You’ll have Mother and the girls up here. Please, Dad. It’s all right’. And all I was afraid of was that the old man would punch him. But he didn’t. He kept looking at me, like he hated me like death, and he said, ‘My poor boy, seduced by this vile wretch who dared to sleep in a house where innocent young girls are sleeping. My poor boy. Go to your room’. I almost laughed; I never wanted to laugh so much in my life, though I was crying by now. And Phil said, ‘You can’t put her out now, Dad. It’s almost morning. What will people say?’ And the old man nodded and said, ‘You are quite right. But you,’ he said to me, ‘be out of the house before my daughters get up’. ”

Mary sobbed, her yellow hair flying about her face. “You know what I said to him? ‘Mr. Mallon, I’ve got my savings in your bank. Three hundred dollars’. And he said, ‘Be there when the bank opens, and if you are in this town by five o’clock I’ll have the police after you’. And he meant it, too. And I said to Phil — he was looking so white and sort of green around the mouth — ‘I’ll be in the bus station at four o’clock,’ and I tried to smile at him so he wouldn’t look so sick.”