The Listener

by Taylor Caldwell

  “When an Italian boy is confirmed, he knows he’s a man now, not a little child. It isn’t any shock to him, Father. He’s been taught to become a man almost from the day he was born. That’s how it was with our little Joe.”

  She took out her handkerchief hastily and dried the sudden flood from her eyes. “Every Italian man and woman wants a big family of children. What else is there in life but God and a loving family? And aunts and cousins and nephews and nieces and grandmothers and grandfathers? If we have trouble, all of us are there, helping. It’s not only our duty; it is joy for us.

  “But Giuseppe and I — we had no children. We waited year after year. We went to shrines and doctors. We wore medals. We went to Mass every day and took Holy Communion. We prayed all the time. Our family and our friends were sorry for us, and they prayed too. But no children came. I began to think that perhaps I had offended God in some terrible way. We would sit in our nice big house, Giuseppe and I, and cry our hearts out. The doctors weren’t sure why there were no children; some said it was Giuseppe’s physical fault or mine. I had two operations. But no children. We had built a big house, six bedrooms, all empty and silent — waiting for children.

  “And then, when we had given up hope and I was thirty-six and Giuseppe was forty-one, little Joe was born!”

  Her face became radiant, full of smiles and tears. She moved forward in the chair, clasping her hands.

  “A big, pretty boy, as fat as butter and full of dimples. Why, he smiled before he was a month old! We almost went out of our minds with joy. The doctor said it was a miracle. It was. We were building a new church, and Giuseppe gave all its stained-glass windows, because we were so grateful.

  “We brought up Joe just as we’d been brought up in the old country. All the love in our hearts. But discipline, too. Not that he needed much of that. He was a lovely boy from the very beginning, gentle, full of fun, kind, sweet, strong. But serious! Sometimes too serious. We would play with him. But when he was about twelve we found out he was playing with us just to please us! He didn’t want to play anymore. He was always studying. We sent him to the best schools, and he studied and studied.

  “We began to dream of the day when little Joe would be married. He was fifteen then, and after school he would come into the restaurant to help us. Of course that was only right — a boy or girl should help parents from the very beginning. We began to look over our friends. Who had the prettiest, sweetest, most obedient and industrious girl? The nicest girl? Giuseppe and I would talk alone in the kitchen long after all our guests had gone and discuss each girl in turn as Joe became sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. And we’d talk about our grandchildren; at least eight of them, all like Joe.

  “We had only Joe, but we’d have a lot of grandchildren, and we’d be a real family at last. We could hold up our heads with the best of them. We’d fill up all the rooms in our house. Joe would follow his father or, if he wanted to, he could take up any kind of work. It didn’t matter. But he and his wife would live with us, and there would be all those lovely, laughing, shouting, loving grandchildren.

  “We should have known!” said Agnes with anguished bitterness. “We should have known when we saw Joe paying particular attention to the priests at the table we used to keep for them. We thought he was just being respectful and kind, as we’d taught him, and having reverence for the priesthood. He’d sit down with the priests, talking, their heads bent together. We never disturbed them; after all, it is an honor for priests to be especially interested in your children. When the priests would leave they’d say to us, ‘You have a wonderful boy there, Agnes and Giuseppe. A noble soul’. As if we didn’t know it! But we didn’t know then what the priests meant!

  “I did notice, though, that Joe would be more quiet than usual after he had talked with the priests. And I didn’t know that before he came home from school he’d go first to see Father Vincent; he’s the priest of our parish. If I had known, I’d have screamed to the heavens and I’d have told Father Vincent to let my boy alone!

  “Joe’s eighteen now. He’ll be graduated from his school in June. Then a month ago he came home with Father Vincent. My lovely boy! And they told me, very gently, that Joe wants to be a priest! My son — who was to give me grandchildren — a priest! My only son! My only son! My only child! Wasn’t it the duty of the priests to tell Joe that he should forget the priesthood and stay with his parents who need him more?”

  Agnes sobbed desperately. “Father, in there, please don’t misunderstand me. It is an honor from God if He chooses one of your children to be a priest or a Sister. But — one of your children! Not your only child who was born when you’d given up hope of having a child. If I had seven or eight children and Joe was only one of them, I’d say, ‘Thank God that He singled Joe out for this honor, for this very great honor’. But we have only Joe, who was our hope for grandchildren. The only hope for our old age. We need him more than-than ”

  She bent her whole body forward and sobbed and could not restrain herself. “My only son,” she wept. “My only son. He doesn’t want to be a parish priest. He wants to be a mission priest. He wants to go far away and, he says, bring those who know nothing about God to God. Like one of the Apostles. We’d never see him then, or only once in a while. Our little Joe, our only son.”

  She moaned over and over. “He has a vocation, they tell me. He wants to go to the seminary in September. When Giuseppe and I heard about it, I collapsed. And Giuseppe gets grayer and grayer every day, but he says, ‘Mama, when God calls, a man can only obey’. And Joe tries to comfort me. He said to me yesterday, ‘Mama, I know how you feel. But, Mama, would you want me to ignore God when He is calling me? Mama?’ I can’t speak to Joe, Father. I feel my heart is all bleeding ribbons. The world is such a wicked place now. What will it do to Joe?

  “I think about that. What will the world do to Joe, this world that’s getting darker and more evil every day? All those priests behind the Iron Curtain — they kill them, Father! When will they start killing the clergy all over the world and not just behind the Iron Curtain? Father, when you read books and magazines, nobody writes about God. Nobody wants God. They want television sets and ranch houses and new automobiles and washing machines, and bigger pay, and bowling alleys and movies and night clubs. They don’t want God, Father. They want what they call ‘security’.

  “A mother thinks about these things. When she has an only son. She is his mother; she bore him and nursed him, and taught him, and loved him. She is afraid of what the world will do to him if he becomes a priest. She knows they will make fun of him and call him a ‘Holy Joe’, and that no one will really understand him. Or want him around. If he’s at a party — I’ve seen it myself — the people are uncomfortable until he leaves. They don’t want what he has to give!”

  She put her hands over her face. “They never did, Father. They never did. And that’s what is so terrible for a mother who has an only son.

  “But you’re a man. You don’t know what a mother feels. Did your mother ever feel afraid for you? Are you her only son? Did she pray for you when you were far away? Was she frightened that they might kill you?

  “Oh, if only I could talk to a mother like myself! She would understand!”

  Agnes got to her feet, blind with her tears. She ran to the curtain and pushed the button.

  Instantly the curtains blew aside, and the full glory of the light shone out on Agnes. She looked and looked, then slowly fell to her knees.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Your mother knew. She knew what it meant to be a mother like me. With an only son. An only son. She knew what it was to be afraid, didn’t she? She knew what the world was.

  “But she never tried to stop you, to keep you from going. She knew you had to leave her to go and tell the people about God. But I wonder what she felt in the lonely night when her son was not in her house.”

  Agnes lifted her hands and clasped them together. “I am going to be like your mother, as much as I can. I am going to
say, as we say in the old country, ‘Go with God’. To little Joe. Because, unless I say that, he loves me so, he won’t go.”

  She stood up. She tried to smile through her tears. “And I’m going to finish that black sweater for him to wear in the seminary. Did your mother ever make you something like that to keep you warm? Yes, she did. ‘The robe without seams’. ”

  SOUL TEN

  The Pharisee

  For I have known them all already, known them all:

  Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

  I have measured out my life with coffee spoons —

  T. S. Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

  Alexander Damon sat down in the comfortable armchair near the window of his room in the city’s most modem and most expensive hotel. He was a tall, thin man of considerable elegance and grace of movement, in his middle forties, with brilliant blue eyes, smooth dark hair, and well-bred features. He looked at his watch. It was only half-past four. He had driven five hundred miles today and was proud of it. At this rate he would reach Reno the day after tomorrow — and begin the boring business once again of waiting six weeks for a divorce. He was not a gambler and disliked gambling not on principle but because a man of his particular temperament found no interest in gambling. Gambling, even as a recreation, demanded at least a minimum of attention, and when he had leisure it was necessary for him to employ it in a more disastrous way. Three wives: Sue, Ellen, and Moira. Boring, pointless women. He had liked Moira more than the others, Moira with her red hair and quick but gentle disposition, her light brown eyes and white skin. Within three years, however, he had tired of her as he had tired of his other wives. I must have a calamitous propensity for picking out the shallowest women, he would say to himself. What liars women are! Each one of them — Sue, Ellen, Moira — gave me the impression that there was something stimulating and alive about them, something exciting, something that would lead somewhere, something of ‘infinite variety’. Something significant. But always, they merely turned out to be the usual dull and desperately boring woman. “. . . The women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.”

  He looked restlessly through the window. He was very tired. He saw the late autumn crowds moving along the street in the usual bright topaz air of autumn. It was a handsome city, for a huge metropolis, and had, he thought condescendingly, somewhat of the air of New York. It was clean and tall, faintly Southern in atmosphere, though it was not in the South. Perhaps it was the shine in the sky, the way the light fell on sharp slabs of buildings as on colored marble. For a minute or two the city held his interest. And then the interest was gone, not fading away, but suddenly, blackly gone, like a large light blown out in darkness. Following that oblivion of interest came the familiar nausea in the pit of his stomach, and with it the usual black, empty despair, speechless, motionless, sightless. It robbed his whole body of vitality, slackened his muscles, sucked out his life. It was not the active kind of despair that drove a man to suicide, though it was as intense. It was merely a profound inertia and apathy. Sluggishly, as the light outside failed, he turned his head and looked at his suitcase, its fine smooth leather dimly glimmering in the rapid dusk. He glanced at his watch. Five o’clock. He was very particular about time — about the time. That alone, he would tell his doctors impatiently, was proof that he had control. He always waited until half-past five. He put his watch to his ear; it was running. But it was running very slowly. That last half hour was inevitably the worst. It was not that he craved the damned stuff; he hated the taste of it; he thought those who looked at the whiskey in their glass with beaming approval and anticipation to be liars. Who, honestly, could stand the taste of alcohol and enjoy it? The acridness of it, the sting of it, the first sickness of the first drink, the first strong metallic finger laid at the root of the tongue! Who could enjoy that?

  The liars pretended that they enjoyed it, but they wanted, as he always wanted, only the effect. If it was taste they wanted, there were better tastes, God knew, even ginger ale or orange juice. They had meager little natures, most people, and so the effect they wanted was meager also. Thank God he had a large appetite for experience of all kind. At least he used to have it.

  Here it was again! He stood up and began to walk around the room, prowling. Should he go outside and take a walk and then stop in at some bar? No, the presence of others wearied, angered, or disgusted him. Anger came, especially. There was always some jovial soul who was ready to speak to a man alone, and so inevitably he would get into some argument with the lout. As few people were intelligent, the lout, without fail, would turn out to be one of those whose interests centered in sports, women, local news and scandal, or the nefarious doings of the local politician or school board. Worse still, if the lout was a stranger in the city, on business, he always had a wallet full of photographs of his retarded-looking children and a wife who was composed solely of teeth, fat legs in toreador pants, and pixie hair. (Thank God Moira had had the intelligence not to cut her long red hair. She, at least, looked unlike other women in a country, a world, that was becoming to look more and more faceless all the time.) The lout, after a few drinks, would become maudlin. “Have any children?” he’d say.

  Damn Moira. When had he wanted to leave her, divorce her? Six months ago. Why? He could not remember, but it was between one breath and another.

  He passed by the dresser, stopped. The usual beguiling dinner menu which always tasted exactly like the food in New York, Philadelphia, London, Cincinnati, Brooklyn, Paris, Chicago, Rome! No variety. Were all the chefs trained in one particular school? Vichyssoise was a blanched, pasty insult to the palate wherever you ate it. The menu could be in French, or Italian or English or German — it never varied. Even cheese, which had once had a sharp and distinctive flavor in its many varieties, had become bland, with an aftertaste of starch. Bland. The whole world was turning into a whitish, bland featurelessness. He was sick of it. He was sick of all of it. He wished some disaster would come to it, some fiery fury — not that he hated the world.

  He was civilized enough to tolerate it. It was only that he wanted some point to it, some excitement, something which would — What? He did not know.

  There was a pamphlet on the dresser, small but of excellent paper, with a photograph on the cover: ‘The John Godfrey Memorial Building’. Alexander loved buildings of all kinds. This one looked strange. It had the aspect of a small marble Parthenon, though without columns. He turned on a lamp and examined it closer. Really interesting. Flat roof. Whole thing set on a slow rise, surrounded by trees, marble benches, flower beds, winding walks. Too small for a museum, too small for a library or a religious building. What, then?

  Listlessly he began to lay it down. What did it matter? He would never see that building; he was not concerned with the mystery of it in this anonymous city. He liked the idea of leaving a mystery, however small and worthless, behind him. It had become a kind of fetish with him over the years. “You and your damned chic! Do you know how boring you are sometimes with your little airs?” Moira had cried. Had he become fed up with her at that very moment?

  He looked at his watch. Twenty after five. In ten minutes he would open his suitcase and take out his bottle of bourbon. Then he would have a quiet hour or two with himself, the darkness and despair slowly seeping out of him. He would call room service then. “I will call room service,” he said aloud in a determined voice, as if reminding a heedless companion who would forget to eat if not guided. “At eight o’clock; no later.” After all, he had to be on the way by seven in the morning, at the latest.

  He had dropped the pamphlet on the dresser. It suddenly became interesting; why leave this insignificant local mystery behind? Moira and her ‘conceits’. Damn Moira. Damn everybody. He opened the pamphlet and sat down, smiling indulgently at both himself and the pamphlet. It would turn out, this building, to be the DAR center or something, or a place for flower arrangements, or a ‘study group’. He put on his black-rimmed glasses and opened
the pamphlet. His hand felt heavy yet weightless, and the black despair was taking him more and more.

  But the prose in the pamphlet was not ebullient and coquettish, as he had expected. There was a close-up of the arch over the tall bronze doors: ‘The Man who Listens’. Aha. A clergyman, no doubt, or a social psychologist, or a marriage counselor, or a teacher, or some other uplifter or do-gooder. Alexander read. This building had been built ten years ago by an old local lawyer, John Godfrey, in memory of his wife, Stella. A sort of coy Taj Mahal, by God! Doddering old fool. Fountains inside, no doubt, and pretty little green arbors, and the stink of hothouse vegetation. Exotic, top-heavy deadly flowers. Soft lighting. How demure could even an old man get?

  “This building,” the pamphlet informed him, “was built for the reason that Mr. Godfrey believed that few listened these days to anyone. He believed that it was desperately necessary for men to listen to each other, as they had listened to meistersingers, priests, poets, and philosophers in the past. He believed that time had taken on a kind of ‘fragmentation’, and that though there was more leisure than ever before in the world there was less time, less solidity, less meaning, fewer roots, and no real security. Therefore, more despair and loneliness.