The Listener

by Taylor Caldwell

  He has work to do. He don’t have an office; he goes in one of them big hospitals. Intern. Another two years. Then he’s on the staff, with a nice salary.

  “You should see my boy, Morris. Dedicated, like they say. Eyes like a prophet. ‘We’ll have a break-through, Papa,’ he says, all excited. ‘Then we’ll know what causes it and how to cure it. You should see the kids who come to this hospital, Papa. People think cancer’s just for old people, but do you know something? More kids die of cancer before they are fifteen than of all the other diseases put together! We need more money. There’s this cyclotron, and the isotopes. We’ll have a break-through’.

  “You’d think he was doing it all by himself. He never stops working. His salary gets bigger. He gives most of it to the cancer funds. I wouldn’t take a cent, though he offers. What do I have now but Morris? And I keep hoping he’ll find a nice girl and there’ll be kids. A man needs a grandson. I keep hinting. And he just smiles and talks cyclotron and the need for money. Hospitals always need money. Why, Morris says, what people spend on popcorn every year would build big cancer hospitals! Popcorn! That’s a funny thing. Death — and popcorn. When you think of it, it seems like it was always that way, don’t it?”

  He cocked his head. He thought that he had heard a murmuring, sad assent. “You say something?” he said politely.

  He waited. His hands were wet, and his face, and he scrubbed them with his handkerchief.

  “I don’t know why I’m wasting your time, Doctor. You hear these things every day. It’s an old story. It don’t get any better, though, does it?

  “And now Morris is thirty-five. When he comes home for the holidays a year ago I notice he looks sick, but he’s smiling. Sick and thin. Like he has consumption. I get scared. They don’t feed him right in the hospital. ‘No, Papa,’ he says, I’m perfectly all right’. And he talks cancer some more. You’d think there wasn’t anything else in the world. But I think about Morris. And so I get this young fellow to be by the store and I go to Morris’ hospital. I know the old doctor there, chief of staff. I say to him, ‘My boy’s sick. Tell me. Don’t keep me in suspense’.

  “The doctor’s an old friend. Loves Morris like a son. And so he tells me.”

  The room was silent. Then suddenly it was broken by faint cries and the sound of weeping. They went on for a long time.

  “It’s what they call occupational hazard,” stammered Barney. “Excuse me. A grown man shouldn’t cry like a baby. But Morris has got cancer; in the brain. They can’t do nothing about it. All those cyclotrons and X-rays. Maybe Morris got careless. Nobody knows. The cancer’s slow-growing, they tell me. Maybe a few months more, maybe another year. They pat me on the back, and the old doctor breaks down, and I got to comfort him! Funny, eh, and Morris is my boy!

  “Morris? He’s still alive. I go to see him last week, and I says to him, ‘Morris, come home. You look like a skeleton. Come home with Papa, Morris’. And he says, ‘Papa, don’t you know I must be about God’s business?’ That’s what he says. And what can I say?

  “I can’t sleep. The telephone’s by my bed. I look at it in the store. Any day. Any minute. They don’t know. And Morris is working in the hospital, like he’s in good health. ‘God’s business!’ Any minute. He’ll work till he dies. Saving people. With all that pain! And knowing he’s going to die. Any minute.”

  Barney folded his arms on his knees and bent his head upon them and moaned over and over. The light increased about him. He looked up, dazed.

  Then he got to his feet. “Anyway, I feel better, just telling you, you a doctor, too. I’ve got to go back. Maybe there’s a telephone call. Who knows? I tell you, it’s like something bleeding away inside, waiting. Only a father can understand. You a father? Only a father, watching his son suffer, waiting for him to die. Because he lived for other people and not himself. You know something? I can’t go to the temple now. I’m scared I’ll start screaming.”

  Barney hesitated. He looked shyly at the curtains. And then at the button. Then slowly he approached the curtains and pushed the button.

  The curtains flowed aside instantly, and Barney stepped back, trembling. He stood and looked, with the tears on his cheeks.

  He said very gently, “Yes, I guess your father knew what it was like. Just like me. Yes, I guess so. So, I guess I’m not alone, after all.”

  He gravely put on his hat. “I see, Landsman, that they put another kind of yarmilke on you, didn’t they? They always do. They always do.”

  He went to the door, turned and looked at who stood in the light. “I guess, maybe, I’ll go to see my rabbi. The store can wait. Even the telephone. God and me, we’ve got ‘business’ too.”

  SOUL SIX

  The Magdalene

  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 tre
mulously.

  “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.