The Listener

by Taylor Caldwell

  The doctor said evasively, “And you had swellings under your jaw line, too?”

  “Yes! What was it? Strep? I took some of the penicillin tablets you left for one of the kids. Look, do I have to go to this Dr. Hampshire?”

  “Yes. Right now. You may call your office from here, if you wish, and tell them you’ve been delayed. And I’ll call Dr. Hampshire.”

  “Can’t I make it next week, or after we come back from our cruise?”

  The doctor did not say, “You’ll probably never come back from that cruise.” Instead he said, as if after giving the matter thought, “No, I’d feel better about it if you had the examination now. For Emily’s sake. She’s been worried about you for weeks.”

  This was another surprise. So they were on a first-name basis, were they? And why had Emily been worried? Of course he had lost some weight, suddenly and very recently, and he had been feeling sudden exhaustions and palpitations, and there had been that day when he had vomited after breakfast and had thrown up some blood. Ulcers. Well, that was the badge of success, as they said.

  “Ulcers?” he said to the doctor.

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Never mind.” If he told about that blood there’d be more delays, and barium meals and X-rays; he knew all about it. Young Hartford had ulcers, and his descriptions had been graphic.

  “I’ve never been sick a day in my life,” said Eugene as he dressed.

  “Good,” said the doctor. He waited until he was certain that Eugene was on his way to see Dr. Hampshire, and then the young doctor called his older colleague. “Eugene Emory,” he said. “I’ve known him for years, but he hardly notices anybody. He’s tough. He can take it. Leukemia. But I’d like to make sure. Acute, I’m afraid.” He attempted to laugh, feebly. “Try to make it chronic, will you, Ed? Then perhaps we can prolong his life.”

  The doctor thought about all the advances made in the treatment of leukemia. Sometimes life could be prolonged, even in such devastating acute cases. But it was a life under absolute sentence of death. Of course, thought the doctor, we all live under sentence of death, but so long as we aren’t aware of it all the time we can forget it. People with leukemia, though, can never forget it. Not even in fantasy.

  Less than an hour later Eugene Emory returned. He sat at the young doctor’s desk, and there was death in his face. He said, “I don’t believe it.”

  “You must, Eugene. If you have any affairs that need putting in order — you can’t evade the fact that you are going to die. And too soon, I’m afraid.”

  Eugene said nothing. He lit a cigarette with pale thin fingers. He stared over the doctor’s head.

  “We begin to die the moment we are conceived,” said the doctor. “Sooner or later, we die. I may die tonight, under the wheels of an automobile, or next year, of a coronary thrombosis, or tomorrow, falling down those damned steep steps at our club. Death is something we can’t escape. The only thing that’s wrong with it is that we don’t begin to tell our children about it in the very earliest childhood, so that they will live with the fact and think of it regularly, so that it becomes familiar to them and not something terrible, or something which, through mysterious luck, they can avoid. Not to tell a little child all about death — and the hell with the ‘psychic trauma’ of it! — is about the most cruel thing you can do to the child. To tell him soothingly that only the very old die is to make a liar of yourself, and the child will soon find out and despise you. And children are born tough and resilient; they aren’t fragile flowers who must be protected from life. They can take the fact of death easier and more naturally than we can; it becomes harder for us every year.”

  He added, “Death is as much a part of life as birth.”

  “I never lived,” said Eugene, as if talking to himself. “I never knew how to live; I only knew how to work.”

  He stood up. “How long?”

  “A month, perhaps. With luck, perhaps two months. But no longer.”

  “There’s nothing you can do?”

  “Various things. But they’re not too successful in acute cases; they work best in the chronic. How do you like the idea of going into the hospital today, for blood transfusions, radiations, and so on?”

  Eugene gave it thought. His face became more ghastly by the moment. He passed his hand over his fading light hair. “Why should I?” he said.

  “Well, it might make you a little more comfortable — ”

  “And that’s all? And then I’ll just linger around there until I die?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, no. I’ll keep on going until I have to stop. It will make it easier on my family, too. By the way, am I going to run into any — trouble?”

  “Probably. I’ll give you some tablets to relieve the pain. You said you’ve been having pain over your bones. It may or may not get worse.”

  The doctor hesitated. “Why don’t you talk to the minister of your church?”

  “I don’t know him,” said Eugene flatly. “I’ve only seen him in his pulpit at Christmas and Easter. But Emily knows him well, and the children.”

  “Why don’t you talk to him about this yourself?”

  “Thank you, no. I’m not going crawling to — You know what I mean.”

  The really furious, incredulous, and helpless rage had begun then. It was all the more terrible in a man of his laconic and restrained temperament, his logical mind, his factual experiences. Always he had been able to control his life, to direct it, to fight circumstance and overcome it, to turn things aside. He knew that his juniors called him ‘The Univac’, and it had amused him. He had only to appear in a courtroom, quick and light-footed, his face concentrated in an expression of single-mindedness, to make the opposing lawyer’s heart sink. He rarely lost a case, and those only the most desperate. His life, his work were in full control, in absolute order, full of precision. He hated fuzziness. He would often say, “There’s nothing inevitable.”

  Now he was faced with the inevitable. The rage increased. It was not a frightened, quivering rage, a pusillanimous one. It was the rage of a man who has never lived, and when he is on the threshold of living his life is taken from him.

  He had known for the past two years that he must begin to give Emily more companionship; their children were almost adults now, and they would soon be leaving home. Once a son or daughter left home for school, he or she really never came home again, except as a visitor. Eugene was not a ‘dedicated’ man, as others called him approvingly. He had wanted money only to guarantee him and his family a reasonable amount of security, and he had accomplished that now. And next came pleasure, and travel, and leisure, for himself and Emily. His wife had not been lonely or unhappy or neglected. She had known for what he was working so strongly and admired him for it. When he had suggested the cruise a few days ago she had said, “Really? Wonderful! Now we can begin to enjoy ourselves, can’t we, darling? While we’re still young and healthy.”

  They had spent hours that night planning the cruise. All over South America; they would sail in October and so would have two months to prepare. The girl and boy would be at college then. They would not return from the cruise until just before Christmas. “And then, in February, we’re going to Florida,” said Eugene. He had kissed his pretty wife, whose dark brown hair was so glossy and fresh. “It’s time we lived. And now we’ve got all the time in the world. I’ll get busy with arrangements at the office.”

  He now had no time at all.

  A month. Two months. He did not tell his wife. He could so control himself that when she talked enthusiastically about the cruise and gave him more colorful pamphlets he could bring up a convincing and interested smile. They had their passport pictures taken; they applied for passports. Eugene had never been very ruddy of complexion; his deepening pallor only made his wife believe that the cruise was really very urgent. He had always been thin. She bought extra vitamins for him and gave him eggnog at bedtime. He indulged her lovingly. He could express his affection only
with a glance or a touch or a quick half-ashamed embrace, but she knew how he loved her. She never saw the little tablet he occasionally took now when his physical distress was overpowering. She never knew that he went to a private hospital with his doctor for an occasional blood transfusion “to make you a little more comfortable.” She thought he slept at night. He did, sometimes, after a drug.

  And then one day he realized that two weeks had passed, or was it three? He had more blood tests. “We’re holding our own a little,” said the doctor.

  “A reprieve?”

  “Well — you can’t always tell with this damned thing.”

  “The governor won’t call three minutes before midnight?”

  “No. Have you told Emily yet?”

  “No. I don’t want her to know. Until at the very last, perhaps the last hour.”

  “You could die in your sleep.”

  “All the better, for Emily.”

  He went to the office every day, as usual. If he spent an hour or two now and then on the couch in his office, there was little comment. He had told his partners, “I have some kind of anemia. I have to take liver shots for them. Nothing serious, but I need considerable rest. Now, the latter part of October — we have the Hadley case coming up, and I won’t be here.”

  I won’t be here.

  Sometimes he thought of killing himself, in a way that would appear to be an accident, for Emily’s sake. But he was a lawyer, and he knew all about the clever probings of insurance companies. And there was the police, too.

  He had nowhere to turn. He had no hobbies and few friends. He tried to read, for reading had always been his best pleasure. But he would find himself staring blankly at a page for five or ten minutes at a time, unaware of it. Emily was busily preparing her wardrobe. She would put on a smart dress and turn about for his admiration. Then he would take her hand and kiss it quickly, and put it from him as quickly. Oh, God, he would say in himself, but with blasphemy.

  A less disciplined man would have broken down. He almost did when Emily insisted on his buying some clothing for the cruise. “I love this dark blue twill,” she said. He bought it. He almost remarked in his desperate rage, “Bury me in it.”

  He tried to drink. His drinking had always been sparing. But he could take no more than two drinks, for then he became nauseated and he was afraid of vomiting and precipitating a fatal hemorrhage. Four weeks. He was still alive. “Still holding our own a little,” said the doctor. “For how much longer?” The doctor did not answer.

  Then he read of a certain blood specialist who was doing some excellent work in prolonging the lives of leukemia victims. He told Emily that he must take a short trip. “I will be back on Wednesday,” he said.

  He had seen the specialist. The doctor could give him no hope. He was dying. He could die any day now. He thought of Emily waiting for him in their pleasant suburban home. His strength became less. He must tell her, prepare her. Then while waiting for the time to leave for the airport he took a short walk in the late August sunlight in this city where John Godfrey had built his marble temple.

  Eugene stopped to look at the gardens, then he saw the building and remembered the story of it which he had read some time ago. His white mouth trembled with disgust. He found himself walking up one of the winding red gravel paths, and then he was in the sitting room, waiting with these placid, uninteresting people. Waiting for what? The specialist had told him to come here; he had forgotten the advice almost immediately. But subconsciously he must have been drawn to it.

  If I can come to this, he told himself, then I’m pretty far gone in my intellect.

  He had a habit now of falling into brief dozes. He heard a chiming and he started, awake. He was the only one in the room now, and he knew it was his turn. The Man who Listens. Eugene stood up, then looked at the outer door and took a step toward it. He stopped. He had nothing to lose. And he might find some amusement here.

  He entered the white room with its marble chair and curtained alcove. What? he thought. No crystal ball? No swami? No mystical lights and floating trumpets? And why all this light? Weren’t they afraid their fakery would be discovered?

  He hadn’t put a note in the box. That would give ‘them’ a clue for ‘the spirits’, so the properly muted answer could be returned.

  “I don’t,” he said to the curtain alcove, “believe in spiritualism. I don’t believe in any life after death. I’m dying, and I know that when I am dead I am finally, thoroughly, dead.”

  He did not sit down. He walked about the gleaming white room as he walked about a courtroom, outlining his case, his hands in his pockets.

  “I don’t know who you are behind those curtains,” he said. “Moreover, I don’t care. Doctor, clergyman, psychiatrist. There is nothing any of you can do for me now. I am dying. I may be dead tonight, tomorrow. But I will certainly be dead within a month. I don’t know why I’m here. All my affairs are in order — ”

  He paused, swung about, and stared at the curtains. All my affairs are in order. “What did you say?” he demanded. Was his mind playing him tricks now? He thought he had heard: “Are they?”

  “All in order,” he repeated. It was hot August outside, but here it was as refreshing as a garden filled with fountains. It was as pleasant a place to wait as any. Or he could walk in the gardens outside; he had noted, even in his cold anguish, that they were beautifully cared for, and the trees had been exceptionally lush in this August heat, and the paths were evidently thoroughly raked at least once a day, and there had been, along some paths, a suggestion of cool green arbors waiting. Emily would like these gardens. He would — he would be dead before the first leaves fell from those trees outside. He would never show Emily these gardens, or any other gardens, anywhere else in the world.

  “If I have ever had any hobby at all, it was helping Emily in the gardens at home,” he said aloud. “And on Sunday afternoons. I never could understand how she could contrive to have such a massed effect at the end of the lawn, a cypress effect, with heavy shade, and a stone bench to sit on. We would go there together, to rest, to have a drink, and smoke. Sometimes when it was too hot to sleep we’d go there, and it was cool. It reminds me of a garden somewhere. I can’t remember. It was a picture of some garden with cypresses, in the moonlight, and a large flat stone — I think there were some figures in the background, sleeping. And someone — ” He shook his head. “I was only a child then. It must have been in some book.”

  His heart jumped then, as if suddenly startled or struck, and he put his hand on his chest. His logical mind assured him quickly that this was not a physical symptom but an emotion. He could not remember having this emotion before, as of sorrow for someone deeply loved and understood and vanished. The very taste of sadness was on his tongue; the sickness of grief was heavy in his body.

  “Now what is wrong?” he muttered. After a moment he began to pace again. “I don’t know why I am here. I am forty-nine years old, married, a successful lawyer, and I have two handsome children, a wife who loves me, and money, and a charming home. But now I must die. I have leukemia.

  “Why are we permitted, all our lives, to prepare only for life and not for death? Why do we evade the very thought of death? Our friends, parents, wives, husbands, children never talk of it. It’s like an obscenity, a subject not mentioned in polite company. Yet it’s around us all the time. Perhaps I wouldn’t feel this way about it — this furious rage — if I had been taught from childhood to know that it was everywhere. I knew it was everywhere, of course, when I became a man, but like everyone else I had been sedulously protected from its presence. I was never permitted to see my father in his coffin, when he died when I was eight years old.

  “People died all about us, and it was hushed up, like a terrible scandal. When my children asked about it, I grinned at them and hugged them comfortingly. What a fool I was. I should have said to them, ‘You were born so you can die’. ”

  He stopped and looked challengingly at the curtains. �
�The child psychologists would disagree. The children must never be ‘hurt’. They must be protected until they are men. And then they are suddenly pushed out of the nursery, unprepared not only for living but especially not for death. Well, I’m going to do some good with this thing I have. I am going to call my young son and daughter to me tomorrow and say, ‘I am dying. Look at me very carefully and remember what a dying man looks like. Remember that he hates death, and fears it, and is enraged at it. It’s an ugly thing to happen to a man. It will happen to you, sooner or later. It isn’t glorious and beautiful and it doesn’t inspire spiritual thoughts. It’s hateful, and it’s the end, and there’s nothing more, except darkness and silence and never thinking again, or laughing, or working. Prepare yourselves for it and accept it. You have no other choice.”

  He clenched one fist and slapped it hard into the palm of the other hand. “No choice! We had no choice to be born, we live without a reason for living, and we die as ignorant as the day we were born. But at least if we accept it from the time we can first walk and speak, it will lose some of its terror. Do you agree?”