The Listener

by Taylor Caldwell

  She sobbed suddenly, great racking sobs. But she was smiling. “We was a family, Mama, Eli, and me. Eli worked in the brewery; he was real good; he got fifteen dollars a week, and that was a lot of money then. A lot of money. And there’s another thing. Money don’t seem to have any feeling these days, neither. Like it was synthetic too. Why, we lived high on Eli’s fifteen dollars a week! We paid on the mortgage, too. And then when Chris was born we’d paid off all the mortgage. Eli burned it right in front of me, in a china bowl, with Chris on my arm, and the other two kids jumped and jumped, and their eyes were like stars. Kids knew things those days.” She paused. “But they’ve forgotten now.”

  She examined her broken hands. But she was not thinking of them.

  “We had three kids. One was when I was eighteen; that was Katherine. The next when I was twenty; that was Arnold; it was a stylish name then. Then Chris come when I was twenty-one. We was a real family then, Mama, Eli, the kids, and me. Mama took in sewing, or she’d go out sewing. And then Eli got a raise, to twenty dollars a week. We felt rich. Real rich. Not the way people do today. Money was something then. Every dollar counted. Five cents a loaf of bread, though I made the bread most of the time. Six cents a quart of milk, but you could go about a mile and get a quart for three cents. I did. Why, we had a good, big table for six dollars a week, and all of us! Mama and I made the kids their clothes, and it cost hardly nothing for yard goods. We made Eli’s shirts and all our things, and the blankets too. We got the wool goods and put hems on them; blanket stitch. We made the quilts. And the curtains. There was the time when Chris was five, and we treated ourselves for Christmas. Curtains all through the house, new, velveteen, crimson. It didn’t cost us more than twelve dollars for the goods, and Mama and I made the curtains and hung them, and the kids cheered. They was just as happy as we were. Lovely, lovely curtains, full and rich. It was our Christmas present to each other. Of course we had stockings for the kids, too, with an orange or a tangerine, and a bag of candy, and little paper parasols, and a candy cane, and a jack-in-the-box, and some jacks, and a red ball, and a penny wrapped in gold paper, and maybe a little doll for Katherine, and some licorice drops, and nuts and an apple. It was a wonderful Christmas. The best Christmas I’d ever had.

  “It’s funny how my children’ve forgotten how wonderful it was. And the goose. I bought a goose for sixty cents, nice and fat, and I rendered the fat and we had goose grease all winter to cook with or rub on the kids’ chests when they got colds. Oh, sure, they’d get sick, but they got over it fast. Mumps, chicken pox, measles. It didn’t mean anything. Not the big fuss they make now, like everything’s going to be fatal.

  “Wonderful Christmas. Mama made her bread sauce for the goose, with onions. And mashed potatoes, and squash, and cranberries. And her own mincemeat. I just loved to see the kids helping her make it, like when I was a child. Then on Christmas Eve we sang carols, and then in the morning we went to church, and our faces were all stung and red with the cold, and we hurried home to a nice hot kitchen and all the good food waiting. And Eli said grace at the table, and he said, ‘Please be with us all our lives, dear Heavenly Father, for the sake of Thy Son, Our Lord, Jesus Christ’. ”

  Ami Logan’s face was still and dreaming and reflected the pure white light in the room. It was a young face now, without seams or drabness, the face of a young and happy woman. Then it changed.

  “That was our last Christmas all together. Mama died in February. She just died in her sleep, smiling. She hadn’t even been sick. She was forty-four years old. Why, she was even younger than Mrs. Brewster I work for! But Mrs. Brewster seems older, even though she has her hair done every five days and her skin’s smooth as silk and she’s got a figure like a girl of fifteen. And all those clothes! Even her slips cost more than our Christmas curtains did. But, somehow, she seems older. Maybe it’s all that bridge and community activities and cocktail parties and being ‘alert’. She’s real old, Mrs. Brewster. She makes me think of a poor little girl when I was a little girl myself. The little girl wasn’t all there; that’s what they called it then. She could walk and talk a little, but she made you think she was an old woman, though she just babbled kind of senseless and ran all the time. You never saw her walk. She just ran, bumping into things and falling down. And she’d giggle for hours at a time, laughing all the time, not meaning anything. She died when she was six. I can’t think of her without shivering; she’s just like Mrs. Brewster.”

  Ami Logan shivered. “It ain’t that Mrs. Brewster’s feeble minded like that little girl. It’s just that she makes me think of her, and I don’t know why.

  “Well. You see how old people’s minds wander? I hope you’re still listening.

  “It didn’t seem the same without Mama in the house, the grandma. There was just that empty place. The kids missed her. She always had a story to tell them after prayers at bedtime. And cookies. Just like Granny Ann. They kept crying for her. It made me ache, and it made Eli ache too. We sure had something to cry about! In March, Eli was coming home from work, and he slipped in front of a streetcar and it cut off his legs, and he died. Right there on the street. It was March nineteen.”

  She put her scarred hands over her face and cried. “Seems like it was yesterday, and I was all of twenty-five then. Mama. Then Eli. The streetcar company said it wasn’t their fault. Eli shouldn’t’ve run on all that ice in front of it just when it was starting up. But they was real nice. They came and offered me five hundred dollars. And I said, ‘No sir. I don’t take charity. If Eli was wrong, he was wrong, even if he was in a hurry. Me and the kids, we’ll get along all right. We’re not the kind of people who take something for nothing’. When I got Eli’s insurance — it was three thousand dollars — I paid for his funeral. It was one hundred dollars. And I got him a nice headstone, too, out in Calvary Park, and it’s big and good, even after all these years. Granite. You can hardly read the name now, but it’s in my heart, and what do you need a name on gravestones for? When it’s in your heart?”

  She sat up resolutely and looked at the curtains. “Does a name on a headstone matter? Why, Reverend, they won’t even look at your headstone when you die! But the people who remember you — they’ll remember you all their lives. You’ll never be dead to them, just like Mama and Eli and Granny Ann and Papa will never be dead to me. You’ll be with the folks who love and remember you, until the day you die, and maybe even afterwards. Don’t you believe that?”

  The room gave her a warm and gentle assent. She nodded, satisfied.

  “Well, I had that insurance money and Mama’s house. It’s a good house even now, though it’s old. It was built when people really built houses and cared how they built them, too. Brick; not that veneer brick. But real brick, two brick walls close to each other. Brick between the rooms, too, though the walls’re plastered and they’ve got paper on them. Warm as toast in winter. Cool as can be in summer. The windows are little, but they never need any work but washing. And the doors are like — well, like doors should be. Thick and strong, never warp. Good, heavy oak wood. And you never hear a squeak in the floors. They was laid right, and I keep them shining like mirrors, waxed and polished. Maybe the closets are little, but people didn’t think of lots of clothes all the time the way they do now. I put in a new coal furnace twenty years ago,” Ami Logan added proudly. “Warm as can be, and no dirt, either.”

  She lifted her head higher. “We used to have a nice lawn, too, with trees right out to the sidewalk. Then they said they had to widen the street for the cars. They cut down the trees and ran the asphalt almost right up to the steps of the porch. So people in cars can get home quicker, just to have their drinks and then eat dinners that don’t taste like much, and then go out bowling or look at TV or maybe play cards or run around the neighborhood in their cars. Looking and running. That’s all they do now. And it don’t seem to give them anything. They got faces like starving people. And they cut down the trees for them! Just so they can run home to do nothing, then run
out to do nothing faster. You know something? Nobody around today’s worth a tree. Not any tree. If a dead tree made them happier, it would be all right. But it don’t. They don’t even notice anything, not even that they’re alive. Or supposed to be. I don’t know.

  “They say,” said Ami Logan, “that you’re getting old when you think the old days were best. Maybe so. But my son Chris has got one of them ranch houses — look like big old sheds or big chicken coops — and it’s only five years old, built it himself, and he has to put a lot of new shingles on the roof every spring. But my house has thick slate, and it’s never leaked once. And the floors in his house squeak; nothing substantial under them like a big old cellar where you can put apple barrels and put down your own pickles and jams. Why, he spends more a year keeping up that big chicken coop than I spent since Eli was killed! All the rooms running into each other, too, so you can’t get away from anybody when you’re blue or want to read or just be alone, thinking. They’ve got dividers, they call them, wooden boxes full of crawling green plants, so Chris’s wife, she says, can see everybody at once and see what they’re doing! Isn’t that terrible, I ask you? No one can get away or shut a door.

  Her name’s Eva; she’s real thin and quick and you can hear her voice all over the house; she calls it being together, or something like that. No place to go to be alone and maybe pray a little. Why do they always want to huddle up together like scared sheep?

  “Maybe,” said Ami Logan, “it’s because they are scared sheep. And no wonder, with nothing real around them. Why, the walls in that house are all shiny; thought it was wood at first, but it’s only plastic, painted kind of to look like wood. If you can’t afford wood, I said, don’t put up any imitations, and Eva gives that high old little smile of hers and says, ‘Why, Mother Logan, this cost a lot more than wood!’ Don’t make any sense to me. Imitations costing more than the real thing! Maybe that’s the way with everything. Imitations costing too much.

  “Even Chris’s job don’t sound good and solid to me. Public relations for the big ice cream company here. You know it? Barton’s. If an ice cream is good, what do you need going around talking to people about it for? They’ll buy it. I’m not sure what public relations is. Anyway, he gets seven thousand dollars a year. Almost four times what our house cost us! And he can’t save a cent, not a cent, and I always save something, myself, even if it’s only two dollars a week. Can’t save anything on seven thousand dollars! Well, he says, there’s the house mortgage and the two kids and the taxes. And the dancing school for the girl and lot of things the boy belongs to. And those taxes. ‘For government services,’ says Chris to me, like I was a fool. ‘What services?’ I ask him. ‘I don’t want no government services. It’s all right to have a big army and such, with Russia, but how did Russia get to be so strong, anyway?’ (A lady I know said we did it, with our money. Is that a government service?) I don’t want nothing from any government but just to have it keep right away from me, except city government where you got to have police and firemen and schoolteachers and schools, and such. ‘With everybody having needs and wants and demands,’ says Chris, looking older at fifty than my grandfather looked at seventy, ‘you’ve got to pay for it through taxes’.

  “Well, sir, I don’t have no needs and wants and demands. I just want people not interfering with my business. That’s not much to want, is it? Well, anyway, Chris don’t only not have any savings; he’s in debt all the time. It’s that sleazy money that don’t buy nothing hardly anymore. No yellow bills, no bills saying repayable in gold or silver, no gold money. Just some bank will pay you one hundred cents. The stuff doesn’t have a feel to it, if you know what I mean, no more than the other synthetics. It gives me the creeps sometimes, looking at the world we got now.”

  She laughed wearily, coughed somewhat hard, then laughed again.

  “And there’s Arnold; he’s fifty-one. We used to call them bookkeepers when I was young, but now they call themselves CPA’s. He don’t get as much as Chris, but he’s got only one boy. A kind of nice boy, that Robert. Sensible boy. He reminds me of Eli; got the same kind of brown square face and big hands and comes in to see me sometimes on Sundays. Twenty years old. Working his way through the university.”

  Ami Logan paused to reflect, and she smiled, and her seamed face shone a little. “He’s the only one on my side. His ma ain’t like Eva. She belongs to clubs; she leaves people alone in a different way than I mean. She don’t hardly notice Arnold and Robert. All the clubs are uplift kind of things; she’s on boards. Maybe she ought to stay home and uplift around the house, such as uplifting the rugs once in a while and uplifting the bedspreads to get at the thick dust, or making her own jams and jellies and uplifting them on shelves. But real stylish; she calls herself Elise, but her name’s really Elsie; knew her before she married Arnold, and her family. She always was a girl to be poking her nose in other people’s business, even when she was a kid. But tight! Anyway, they don’t owe any money and probably got a lot saved, because Arnold’s tight too. They live in a big-front apartment house with the tiniest little rooms you ever saw. Like boxes. Arnold does the bookkeeping for the owner and so gets his rent for nothing or almost nothing. Well, that’s thrift, but they could have a house somewhere like mine. No, they ain’t thrifty; they live like dogs. Cheapest food you ever ate; why, we was real poor, dirt poor, when I was a little girl, but my ma’d be ashamed to put the kind of food on the table that Elsie puts. It don’t have any taste at all. But it’s all vitamins, Elsie tells me. Salads.

  “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’.