The Listener

by Taylor Caldwell

  Gay had an elderly great-uncle, a sullen, irascible old man with bunions, a hearing aid, and a high suspicion of everyone but Gay. He was obviously not a man of material substance. After he had had a heart attack, he wanted, he said plaintively, to move into the old folks’ home, to forget and be forgotten. A widower with no children, he had been living alone for forty years in a side-street hotel, in one room. He had once been a diamond cutter, and Gay could not recall ever having seen him in a new suit or wearing a new hat. She had been kind to him for years, for no reason except that she was naturally kind. She insisted that he move into her house, ‘and Felix will be there all the time — at least some of the time — to watch over you’. Felix did not think highly of the idea. Old Harry Stern had never been one of his favorite people, but Gay, who had worked so hard for this house, deserved to have her uncle here if she wished. So old Harry Stern moved in, with his endless complaints, his prayer shawls, his skullcaps, his peevish comments on Gay’s cooking, his shouts at Jerome, his insistence on ancient ritual, his heavy colds, his fiendishly stinking cheap cigars, and his habit of bursting into tears for his dead wife, whom he had treated very unkindly when she had been alive.

  He died suddenly while Felix was struggling to re-establish his practice. A lawyer called, with a will, after Felix and Gay had buried the old man with all the ritual they knew he had wanted. Old Harry Stern had been living on an annuity which he had shrewdly bought forty years ago and which had paid him one hundred dollars a month for life. He had left ten thousand dollars in cash to Gay.

  Felix judiciously restrained his jubilation in respect for the dead. He found himself suddenly very fond of sly old Harry. He made a substantial payment on the mortgage, which reduced monthly interest and payments. Then he rented an office — a small one — in a good medical section of the city, in a new splendid building all white brick, chrome, and self-opening doors and switchboards and parking lots and big windows. “I think,” he said cautiously to his wife, “that we’re finally on the way.”

  He, and only he, was the general practitioner in the building. Worse, even most of the specialists were younger than he. They did not despise him; secretly they had let him have the office in their jointly owned building for much less than they could have rented it to a bright young specialist with sound parental money behind him. General practitioners referred patients to specialists, especially if the specialists were handy, on the same floor or the next, and especially if the specialists were kind and displayed fellowship and had G.P’.s to dinner occasionally and introduced them ‘around’. “We are certainly on the way,” Felix said to his wife when he paid off the mortgage entirely. He now had at least eighteen men like Jim Merwin as patients, and as they usually overate or overworked or abused their bodies in countless other ways and firmly believed in regular ‘check-ups’ and all the latest ‘shots’, Felix, who would by nature have detested them, spoke of them as ‘our bank accounts’.

  Jerome was seventeen and in a good private school when he had informed his father that he wished to be a doctor. He was already eight inches taller than Felix, and an excellent student. “That’s no news to me,” said Felix, smiling at his son tenderly. “I’ve watched you for years reading my medical books. What kind of a specialist do you want to be?” he added jovially.

  “I don’t want to be a specialist, Dad,” said Jerome, who was as reticent as his father. “I want to be a general practitioner. Like you.”

  “Good God! Why?”

  “Because I want to be the kind of man you are.”

  “I? What in the name of hell do you mean by that stupid statement?”

  Jerome had blushed. He was naturally inarticulate. “Well,” he said uncomfortably, “I just think that this country needs fewer specialists and more G.P’.s. That’s all.” He took a deep breath and plunged on, awkwardly, “You can’t divide up the human body into so many compartments! If you’re sick in one part, you’re sick all over. Besides — well, I think of a G.P. as a ‘healer’. A helper, if you know what I mean. A friend. A specialist’s all steel and chrome and impersonal. You see — well, it’s this way: I like people.”

  “You do, eh?” said Felix a little grimly, thinking of the Jim Merwins. “I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Jerome, smiling at him with Gay’s own smile.

  It was all nonsense; it was all stupid. He’d expected better than this for Jerome. But the boy, in his way, was as stubborn as himself. Felix threatened not to send him to medical school. Jerome only smiled. “Do you want a life like mine?” cried Felix. “Never knowing if you can get a full night’s sleep? At the beck and call of everybody, at any hour of the day or night? Delivering a baby for about fifty dollars? Those who can afford more go to an obstetrician. Wangling and waiting for years to get a little spot on the hospital staff? You don’t know the snobbery in the medical department, my boy. The specialists despise you, though they keep their doors open for your patients. The nurses even despise you. The staff officers despise you. You can never belong even to the better Jewish clubs; you can’t afford them, anyway. Do you know what my income is, even now, after all these years, after expenses? Twelve thousand dollars a year! And I’m lucky to get that. And you want to be a man like me!”

  “Yes,” said Jerome.

  “You have no ambition. Why, that little squirt of a proctologist down the hall from me clears over twice what I do in a year, and he’s only thirty-five. I’m fifty. When he’s my age he’ll have a suite of rooms, assistants, and be a rich man.”

  Jerome only smiled.

  Jerome was in a good university now, with an excellent medical school, and he was nineteen. He and his father had no more arguments. Felix hoped and prayed that the boy’s teachers would be able to persuade him where he had failed. Gay said, “If Jerome is half as good as you, dear, and has your integrity and gets half the love you do from your patients, I’ll be very happy.”

  “Love!” said Felix. “From the Jim Merwins?”

  “They’re not the only ones, dear.”

  “Sure. The others don’t pay their bills, or they take years to do it. A doctor’s always the last to get paid.” He touched her hand. “I bought you that mink coat eight years ago, and it wasn’t good quality to begin with.”

  But the Lucy Merwins changed their minks at least every other year. They had their own bright convertibles. Gay drove an ancient secondhand car, a cheap one even when new. Lucy Merwin had diamonds. Gay had only, even now, the one-carat engagement ring Felix had given her and which had taken him over four years to pay for in full. They spent two weeks every winter in a motel near Miami Beach, and two weeks in the summer at a little cottage ‘on the lake’ which had no utilities. When they had paid their real estate taxes and the school taxes, the twelve thousand dollars a year had shrunk to less than ten. They lived frugally; Gay did all the housework herself. They saved to send Jerome through medical school. They had two annuities on which they were paying, and a life insurance policy for twenty-five thousand dollars. And Felix was fifty-two. He needed some new equipment for his office. He was also saving for an X-ray machine. This would annoy some of the specialists, but he had become desperate on reaching the age he now was. “There’s no place in America any longer for G.P’.s,” he would say to Gay. “No one wants, or needs, personal attention.”

  “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 goo
d 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.”