The Listener (17 page)

“Oh yes, that’s exactly what they do want!” cried Gay, whose auburn hair was very gray now. “Didn’t you know that?”

She added, “The poor people. And I don’t mean financially poor, either.”

Today, in this strange city, in this opulent hotel, Felix suddenly thought of what Gay had said. “The poor people.” He looked at fat, winking, yellowish Jim Merwin and at his wife, Lucy, who was only three years younger than Gay but appeared to be at least twelve years younger, with her touched-up hair, her smooth face, her soft white hands, her slender figure.

They had engaged a splendid room for ‘our doc’ in this same hotel; in fact, next door. “Nothing too good for you, old Felix,” said Jim Merwin, who was a year older than Felix. “Why don’t you stay over a couple of days more, and then we’ll all go back together?”

“No, thanks,” said Felix. “I have a big list of appointments tomorrow. I’m taking the midnight plane back.”

It was a beautiful spring day. “Now that I’ve gotten you quieted down and assured you that you aren’t going to die immediately, I think I’ll take a walk,” said Felix. “Anything worthwhile to see locally, besides the usual things?”

“Nope. Except that maybe you want to see that funny thing they got here. Show him that pamphlet, Luce. Crazy thing.” Felix put on his glasses and studied John Godfrey’s pamphlet. The Man who Listens. “That’s interesting,” said Felix. “Who goes there?”

“Oh,” said Lucy, “one of the local girls was telling me about it. People in trouble who want someone to listen to them. Isn’t that the craziest? Someone to listen! They need a psychiatrist, that’s what. Who else wants to listen?”

Felix took off his glasses and absently laid them down. He kept the pamphlet in his hand. He thought of Jerome, for whom he had had such large ambitions. Who could he tell of Jerome? The specialists he knew? Gay, who was contented? He put the pamphlet in his pocket. “I’ll be back in an hour or so,” he said.

He forgot the pamphlet before he was in the hotel lobby. He thought he would buy a newspaper, then find a park nearby, if there was one, and sit in the sun and read. The sun was very warm. He felt for his glasses and remembered he had left them in Jim’s room. He went to the elevator and got off on the right floor and went down the richly carpeted hall to Jim’s suite. The transom was open. Then he heard Jim say with contempt, “Felix? Don’t worry about him none! Not that you do! We shouldn’t’ve called him; that was your idea. Oh, shut up; all right, it was my idea! With all that damn pain. You can bet he’ll send me a bill as long as your arm! Always trust a Jew doctor to do that. ‘To the bank, bank, bank!’ That’s all they think of.”

“Oh, now,” laughed Lucy, with that sweet, joyous, cruel laugh of women who are amused at the spoken deprecation of others. “You think of money too, darling.”

“Sure, but not the way Jews do. Hoarding it. Bet he could buy and sell me. Look at this car of his; at least four years old, and not a big job, either. Gay’s got that old ragged fur for years; you’d think he’d be ashamed to let her be seen in it. And a house you could put in one corner of ours. Saves every cent. He was practicing and making big money when I was still a clerk in one of the sports shops I own now. Don’t you worry any about a Jew. Look what it cost me to bring him here, and the hotel room, and the bill. He’ll make me sting; you can bet on that. Get me a drink; double.”

Felix backed slowly away from the door, his face white, the muscles about his mouth rigid and hard. He, a mild and gentle man, was trembling with hate and rage and humiliation. He’d never permit Jim Merwin to enter his office again.

Yes, he would. He needed the Jim Merwins. Because he was a general practitioner, of no status.

He was sick when he reached the lobby again. He looked at the newspaper in his hand. He could not read it without glasses, he thought numbly. And he could not go into that suite — yet. Not yet, if he wanted to keep the Jim Merwins. He couldn’t trust himself. Not yet. “Damn him,” he said aloud, thinking of all his work, all Gay’s work. And then he thought of Jerome, who would be a general practitioner. He put his hands helplessly in his pockets, and one of them encountered the pamphlet. The Man who Listens. “Hell,” he said. But he went out and found a cab.

The flowering shrubs and trees about the white building were just bursting into spring bloom, pink, red, magenta, bright yellow, brilliant white, purple, rose, fuchsia. Tulips and daffodils and hyacinths stood in the warm brown earth, row upon row of them. The red gravel paths sparkled in the fine sun. Felix slowly walked up one of the paths, looking at the square white structure against the intensely blue sky. He saw a bench on which an old man was sitting, his hands on his cane. The old man was smiling at a squirrel. Felix hesitated, then stopped. He said, “I wonder if you could tell me something. Who is the Man who Listens — up there?”

The old man looked at him tranquilly. “I don’t know. No one knows. He only listens. Some people think he’s a doctor, or a teacher, or a social worker, or a priest. Half the people who talk to him never want to see him; half do. You can choose for yourself.”

“Did you ever go?” asked Felix.

“Yes, I did. I talked for a long time. But I didn’t press the button near the curtains. I want to have my own picture of him. I was going to kill myself,” said the old man with calm simplicity. “But after I talked to him, I didn’t.”

“That’s interesting,” said Felix in the pleasant voice that inspired trust. “Would you mind telling me what he said to you?”

The old man looked thoughtful. He took off his old hat and rubbed his pale bald head with the palm of his hand. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t remember that he said a thing. Perhaps he did; perhaps he didn’t. Frankly, I don’t know, and that’s all I can tell you. I only know that I had peace for the first time in seventy-five years. And that’s a long time to live in hell, isn’t it?”

He looked at Felix’s white, strained face and the pain in his blue eyes. He said kindly, “Why don’t you go and talk to him yourself? I think you need to.”

Felix colored and set his shoulders stiffly. He almost turned away. Then he glanced at the building again. He frowned. Well, it would do no harm to tell someone, anonymous, who would never see him, of the Jim Merwins. The damn Jim Merwins.

He entered the sitting room and saw two people waiting in silence, a young woman, a youth. He was a doctor, and through their silence he saw the stony shine of despair on their still faces, the hollows of suffering. A young woman, as thin as a corpse. A young man Jerome’s age. It was terrible for anyone to suffer; it was even more terrible when the young suffered. He wondered who they were. With a practiced eye he evaluated their clothing. The girl was expensively dressed. The boy wore poor shoes and a worn suit. They did not glance at the newcomer; they were absorbed in a timeless agony of their own. Felix suddenly thought: The poor people!

Impatiently he put the words out of his mind. He saw the slit where a brass plate above it invited visitors to drop a note about their problems. No offering was asked. A psychiatrist or a doctor — certainly. Who else? He sat down, feeling foolish, and waited. An old woman crept into the room, timidly. Obviously a cleaning woman, from her scored hands and clothing and the painful way she walked. Yes, even more terrible than the young who suffered was the suffering of the lonely aged who had no one, who must work until they dropped dead. He smiled encouragingly at the old woman and stood up and helped her to a chair. Her feet were swollen; edema. Heart? The pallor of death was on her cheeks; the shadow of death was in her eyes. The poor people. Damn, thought Felix. He saw the old hands, scarred, broken almost to bleeding, the nails corroded. She saw him looking; she lifted her white head and stared at him with pride, rejecting his awful pity. The old, familiar, tearing pity that had torn at him when he had closed dead and hopeless eyes in miserable rooms, when he had to tell a mother that her child was dying or a husband that his wife was breathing her last breath, when he comforted a stricken wife whose husband would never speak to her again! Somehow these things always happened after midnight, when the specialists were cozily asleep and uncaring. Or in Bermuda, or Paris, or London, or in South America. Felix thought of the tired priests and ministers and rabbis who had stood with him in those anguished moments, and how they had looked at him as at a colleague, knowing his pity and sorrow. He had felt a strange and poignant fellowship with them, these shabby men in shabby rooms.

A bell chimed softly. The young woman and youth had disappeared. Felix hesitated. The old woman said curtly, “It’s your turn.”

“I’ll wait; you go first,” he said, looking at her feet again.

“No. That wouldn’t be fair. You’re supposed to take your turn,” said the old woman firmly. She panted a little, and he heard it and frowned.

Felix went into the white room with the marble chair and the closed blue curtains. He examined everything with the objective curiosity of a physician. He went to the spot where visitors dropped their notes. He smiled a little, skeptically. There was a steel box set in the wall. So ‘they’ read the notes, then gave advice. There was a slanting cover that concealed the top and he opened it. He smelled the acridness of burning paper. Then he saw that the slit outside admitted the notes and they were burned at once at the bottom of the little shaft. He could see a faint flicker of flame far at the bottom and, caught at the side on a little roughness of the metal, the wavering flutter of a ten-dollar bill. Its end was already charred.

So no one read the notes; they were invited, he could understand, so that the visitors could first acquire confidence in expressing themselves, thus clarifying their minds. “Very sensible,” murmured Felix. “Psychologically sound.”

He walked reluctantly to the chair, then leaned on its back, facing the curtains. He was very curious again. “I like to talk to some people,” he said. “But I’d prefer not to see you, under the circumstances. By the way, there’s an old dying woman waiting outside. She probably needs to talk to you more than I do. I think I’ll call her in.” He went to the door through which he had entered. It could not be opened except on the farther side. He went to the curtains and read the little brass plate sunk in the marble wall. “Well, I hope they thank you,” he said.

The room waited. It had a calmness as of absolute eternity, where time did not exist. Felix thought of his everlastingly crowded waiting room; the walls inside were lined, too, and sometimes patients had to wait outside in the hall. The specialists would often pass in the hall and would look expectantly at the faces. A kidney case here, an arthritic patient there; obviously this was a heart case, another as obviously cancer, or this or that. Old Felix would refer this one or that one; it had been an excellent idea to have an old G.P. in this building. He never asked or hinted for a cut, either. Yes, an excellent idea.

Felix could see his waiting room sharply and clearly, the frightened faces of the patients, the dun clothing, the shoddy shoes, the bandannas of some of the poorer women, the children whose faces were twisted with apprehension. And then, when he appeared, the sudden lightening, the hope, the diffident smiles. Well, that was all very nice! But the thin sheaf of checks at the end of the month wasn’t so heartening, as his secretary pointed out; he was lucky to get a check for every six bills; he was lucky, sometimes, ever to get anything at all. He turned bills over to the collection agency only when he was positive that the patients were trying to cheat him or when they had the ability to pay at least in small installments. He was a fool. He was fifty-two and, outside of the score or so of the Jim Merwins, he’d never been able to attract the ‘right’ kind of paying patient, who could sponsor those who could not pay.

He found himself sitting in the chair. He faced the curtains. “I suppose you’re a doctor,” he said. “Well, meet a fellow sufferer. I’m a G.P. Are you?”

He did not hear a sound, a voice, or a rustle, or a movement. Yet all at once he was certain he had heard a murmur of affirmation somewhere. He looked about sharply. He’d been imagining things! Your mind could play tricks on you in such a quiet place, where there was no time, no intrusion, nothing but yourself facing — who?

“I heard you are here twenty-four hours a day,” he said with his faint, skeptical smile. “Well, I’m like that too. On call twenty-four hours a day. I’m lucky if I’m able to get five hours’ sleep a night, a few nights a week. Don’t you get tired too?”

Again he thought he heard a murmur, but this was a negative one. He rubbed his ears until they were pink. “You don’t?” he said incredulously. “When do you sleep?” The white walls and ceilings smiled at him. He sat upright. “Don’t you have parents? Brothers? Sisters? Children?”

The gentle warmth flowed about him, assenting. He forgot to wait for a voice. He did not know how it was, but he was content with the sensation of listening, of assent or dissent. He had not thought of his old grandfather for years, in his skullcap, sitting near the kitchen stove in his mother’s house, warming his hands in the winter and rocking in the comfortable chair she had always kept for him. His grandfather had rarely spoken; he had only listened, and very often he had smiled. It was enough; he understood, and answered, without words.

“You remind me of my grandfather,” Felix said suddenly. “Are you old? Very old?”

Was that assent, or dissent, or both? Felix sat back in the chair. He said nothing. He thought of Gay and Jerome and the little worldly evidences of success he possessed and of the Jim Merwins. Time passed; or, rather, it seemed not to be at all. Felix started, came to himself. “I suppose,” he said, “I should tell you my troubles.”

Then — he must be losing his mind! — he was positive that someone had been listening to his thoughts all this time and that the man behind the curtain knew everything about him. This unnerved Felix a little. A skeptic, he had smiled at extra-sensory perception, though he had admitted that there might be ‘something to it, something that will be explained easily enough sometime’. Was the man who was listening gifted with ESP? All at once Felix was certain of it. He was more than ever unnerved. He cleared his throat. He had had to learn, while still a child at school, to conceal emotions that could become vehement. People disliked vehemence or anything else that threatened their superficial lives or disturbed their determined ‘happiness’. They were particularly offended by people in trouble, or at least by those who revealed in expression, abstraction, or gesture that they were in trouble. Everything must be ‘happiness’.

“A damn-fool phrase,” said Felix aloud. “ ‘Happiness’. That’s for babies. I wonder when we’ll grow up as a nation and learn there’s no ‘happiness’? You should see my waiting room, or the waiting room of any doctor, or the wards in the hospitals! Yet even the patients, when leaving, will put on a smirk as if to show the displeased world that they are ‘happy’, too, even if death is in their bodies. So they’ll be accepted by the ‘happiness cultists’ and not be rejected as unpleasant reminders that there’s pain in the world, and death and funerals.”

He shifted, hotly vexed, in his chair. “I spent four years in Europe,” he said. “Yes, there was a war on — another damn-fool phrase. ‘A war on’. As if there isn’t all the time, somewhere. But, discounting the war, the people seemed more adult, in some way. No one expected anyone to be ‘happy, happy, happy’. If you were, then you were to be congratulated. But no one demanded it as a rite you must perform in public, as a social duty. No one thought you were inferior or degraded if you were in misery, as they do in America. What the hell is all this ‘happiness’ bit, anyway?”

He looked at the curtains. “But that isn’t what I came to tell you. It’s just something that’s been like a flea irritating my mind all the time.”

He was a nervous man but always concealed his nervousness except in his constant cigarette-smoking. He felt for his cigarette case. Then the desire passed and he withdrew his hand from his pocket. The tension in his neck and shoulder muscles was ebbing away; it was a strange sensation, this ease, one he hadn’t felt for a long time.

He said abruptly, “I’ve wanted ‘happiness’ for my son, Jerome. I’ve wanted an easier life for him, not like mine. I’ve wanted him to have success, so that he can — ”