No One Hears but Him Read online

  But I know you.

  “No,” said Francis Stoddard. “You don’t know me. There are half a dozen manufacturers in this town like myself. Besides, I don’t live here. You don’t know me and I don’t know you.”

  But I know you.

  He pressed his hands to his temples. No, no, he said to himself, no one spoke. I must be going out of my mind.

  “Don’t interfere, in the Name of God, if you believe in Him. The only thing that has kept me alive is Agnes. We’ve been married thirty-two years. I had no one before I married her; I have no one now. I never did find life worth living, except when I married Agnes, and then when Pat was born. All the years I worked—I now see they weren’t worth the living. It was all useless; it doesn’t have any meaning. I have money and a good business. What is the use of it when Agnes is dying and nothing will save her? How can I live when she dies? Just going on working, piling up money, expanding—for what? I don’t need it; I won’t need it when Agnes dies. I won’t want it. I’m fifty-nine years old, nearly sixty.

  “The doctors have told me Agnes has inoperable cancer, a terrible thing that didn’t show itself until it was too late. There is nothing they can do for her. In about a month she’ll begin to have pain. Within a few weeks it will be unbearable. Then she will die in blood and suffering, screaming for them to kill her. She will beg me to kill her. You don’t know what wonderful eyes she has, such good sweet eyes. They’ll be like the eyes of a tortured dog—don’t you know that? She won’t even be Agnes any longer. She’ll be like someone—on—on a rack, shrieking to be killed, to be put out of her misery.

  “How can I stand that? How can I sit by and watch her suffer, drugged, half-dead even before she is dead? And when she’s dead—how can I live? What for?”

  He did not know how beseeching his voice was, how broken and desperate.

  “I couldn’t have stood all those years after Pat died, if it hadn’t been for Agnes. It was Agnes who kept me alive. It was Agnes who never complained or was frightened when the going was tough fifteen–twelve years ago. It wouldn’t have mattered if we’d been reduced to one room, she said, as long as we had each other. It was Agnes who could laugh during the worst days, and hold my hand and be cheerful about tomorrow. She—Agnes—is my whole life. There was nothing before her. There won’t be anything after her. Have a little mercy and try to understand and let me go and forget I was ever here.”

  He moved toward the curtain, his hands held out like a beggar. “Don’t you understand? We’ve kept it all from Agnes; I made them promise. She doesn’t know. And when I—when I do what I must do—she’ll never know in this life or in any other. She’ll never know the pain—”

  It had been three months since the sun had winked out, since the days had not been numbered, since the nights had not been hours of sleep except when stunned by sedatives, since the weeks had been without light and there had been no voices at all but a crushing silence, since all had been like an awful dream from which he could not awaken, since everything that moved in the world had become totally unreal, shadowy, without significance, since every moment had been like a moment, renewed, of continual death. The very taste, smell, sight of life had been a cemetery full of the dead, moving spasmodically and without volition. He had known death for three months, in all his body, his vague thoughts, his sudden frenzies, his gasping nights, his blind days, his longing to believe in God so that he could hate Him.

  “What is wrong, darling?” Agnes had asked him with anxiety. “You look very sick. You hardly sleep at night.”

  “Nothing, nothing,” he had replied. “You mustn’t worry. There’s just something at the plant—”

  “There usually is,” she had said with a smile. “You’ve gone through it dozens of times. Well. Maybe you need a tonic. The tonic the doctor gave me three months ago has really helped me, and you remember how thin I was getting, and tired.”

  But she was daily becoming more thin and tired. She was only lying to him now so that he would not worry about her. Soon, the pain would begin, the remorseless killing pain, which would not kill cleanly and mercifully, at once. But he would not let it happen to her.

  Who has given you the power of life or death over another, or yourself?

  In his extremity he no longer wondered if he heard or was imagining he had heard. He said, “I did, for I have the power of will and decision, and that is reserved for man, and I am a man. Don’t tell me of morality or immorality, or sin, or punishment. They don’t exist. I didn’t choose to be born. I can choose when to die.”

  Agnes, then, should have that right for herself. You should not abrogate it. She may prefer to live as long as possible—with you. How do you know what pain she can bear, that brave and loving woman? Is she a mindless and suffering animal which you have the right to exterminate? She would never forgive you.

  “She would never know, because ‘in the grave there is no remembrance.’”

  Who has told you that?

  He stood before the curtain and raised his hand as if to strike it in his anguish.

  “My reason tells me.”

  And who has told you that your wife does not know that she will soon die?

  The appalling question—or thought—was like an explosion of fire in his mind, roaring and leaping. He cried, “She doesn’t know! No one told her. She couldn’t possibly know.”

  The white room was very still. Did Agnes know? No, no. He thought about it frantically. He began to recall small things which he had hardly noticed at the time. Agnes reading, then letting the book lie in her lap, while she looked into space, her eyes very still and dreaming. Agnes at Mass every morning, in spite of her silent weariness. Agnes suddenly touching his hand and smiling, as if pleading for something. (He thought she was trying to “encourage” him about some problem “at the plant.”) Agnes kneeling by her bedside not only before sleeping, but sometimes in the darkest hours of the morning. (He thought she was praying as middle-aged women often prayed during sleeplessness—he remembered that in his mother.) Agnes becoming silent, gazing at him, and though she smiled her eyes filling with tears. (He had thought she was remembering Pat.) Agnes wandering alone in her beloved garden, not asking him to come with her as she usually did, and bending to touch a flower or lifting her head to study the evening sky, lost in thoughts he did not know. Agnes not in bed at dawn, but out on the glistening grass watching the sun come up through the gray-blue air of the morning. Agnes sleeping with her rosary twined between her fingers. Agnes suddenly exclaiming, “What a beautiful world! It must be a reflection of heaven.” (He had smiled at this, indulgently. There was only this world.)

  All these things had begun to happen only over these last three months. Someone had betrayed him, one of those lying doctors—

  The soul knows.

  “There is no soul!” he exclaimed, full of terror and grief.

  He had a shocked thought. Was it possible that Agnes knew but did not wish to burden him by letting him know that she knew? Did she want him to believe she was ignorant of the horror which was killing her? How else to explain things which had puzzled him: Her gaze at him with pity and tenderness? Her mouth shaking with words she held back? Her increasing suggestions of God’s mercy and God’s will? Her anxiety for him? Her pleas that he attend Mass with her? (He always but gently refused.) Her sudden shy kisses, the way she clung to him? Her hands on his cheeks, pressing, urgent, as if she were trying to communicate with her flesh the words she dared not say?

  “Oh, no,” he groaned. “I can stand almost anything but that, Agnes knowing.”

  If she knew then it was possible she was already in pain and did not tell him because again she did not want to burden him. How lonely she must be—if she knew. And then it came to him devastatingly that he was depriving Agnes of her last comfort, a full communication with her husband, a long and loving farewell, a final hope. He had been thinking only of the barren desolation of his own life when she died, the stony places, the lightless hours, weeks
, and days, the meaningless years when he would have to walk alone.

  You were thinking only of yourself.

  Yes, he thought with an old agony, even when Pat died it wasn’t Agnes’ grief that disturbed me. It was only my own. Yet, she was Pat’s mother. He had thought Agnes’ fortitude the piteous folly of faith; he had thought her, God forgive him, less sensitive than himself. When, later, she spoke of Pat fondly and tranquilly, he had moments of angry bitterness when he had thought she had loved the girl less than he had loved her, and had resented it. Was it possible that she truly believed Pat was still close to them and safe with God, and that her husband needed her comfort and not her tears? Yes, it was more than possible. It was true. He did not doubt it; he did not question it. It was true.

  He had deprived her of comfort after Pat’s death. He was depriving her now of the last comfort of her life by his silence. What did she think of him, a man without fortitude, without faith, without courage? He was sure that she did not despise him. She wanted to help him as a mother helps her child. But she was a woman and she needed her husband.

  She was walking the last days of her life alone and in silence, because he believed that he was sparing her. But in marriage there should be no sparing; husband and wife were one and they must share everything together, life and death, hope and pain, reunion and parting. He was condemning Agnes to death alone. Whether or not he chose the hour of her death or she died of the disease, she would be alone, going out into the darkness without the last loving reassurance and faith. To a woman like Agnes that was worse than any physical suffering. To be alone.

  “I thought,” he said aloud in the depths of his new humility and despair, “that it was only I who walked alone, bearing everything myself. And in all these thirty-two years Agnes walked alone, too, because I never asked her to walk with me. I was always ‘sparing’ her!”

  Yet, she had not been spared at all. She had had only the added torment of keeping silent before a man who would not speak to her—out of his stubborn love and pride.

  “God forgive me,” he said in the white and blue room. Now he knew why Agnes had come here. It had been for his sake because he would not talk to the priest of his parish. She had come here for the courage and the hope her husband refused her. He had refused the necessary part of life, the pain, the struggle, the despair. He had thought himself singled out among men for misfortune. What did he really know of the private agonies of his friends and neighbors, in spite of their smiles and their casual conversation? He had taken them at face value. And now he saw that all men are one and suffer the same in various degrees. Those who suffered very little—what did they know of living, the victories and the exultations, the startling joys and the triumphant overcoming? They were the truly poor.

  “I’ve lived a selfish life,” he said to the man behind the curtain. “I’ve lived bitterly and stonily. I never once left a wound to heal by itself. I’ve kept it bleeding. I’m a coward.”

  Once Agnes had said to him, after a cynical outburst on his part about religion:

  “I know that my Redeemer lives.”

  He had laughed and had patted her hand as a father would pat the hand of a child who passionately affirms her faith in a pretty fairy tale. Women’s faith! Let the dears have it if it pleased their dreams and fantasies. They knew nothing of reality.

  “It is I who knew nothing of reality,” he said. “All these years, I really believed. I thought that by—killing—Agnes, and myself, I would be finally revenging myself on God. I would throw our lives in His Face, defying Him. All men are born with faith; it is part of our nature. When we reject it we are really rejecting what we are. We are, with childish petulance, insisting that we aren’t men, that we are only animals. We are trying to provoke God—”

  All his life ran before him, the hunger, the cold, the fierceness, the struggle, the hopelessness, the winning, the pain, the despair, and he saw it now as a rich life, one for which to be grateful and joyous—for he had been given the strength to overcome misfortune. Those who never knew the battle never knew the victory. What empty lives!

  “God forgive me,” he prayed. He touched the button near the curtain. “Father, bless me, for I have sinned.”

  The curtains rolled apart and he saw the man who had listened to him so patiently. He was not surprised and not startled. He only knelt and clasped his hands together and for the first time in all these years he blessed himself and bowed his head.

  “Yes, you will give me the courage to go on, as you always did,” he said in his mind to the man. “You never once deserted me. I was the one who deserted you, in my childish resentment. You will forgive me everything.

  “Now I can go home to Agnes and tell her that I know. I can give her the comfort I never gave her before. She won’t be alone any longer. It is going to be terrible for me when she suffers, but I’ll be there to help her bear it. I will try to have her own faith and courage. It won’t be easy. Men aren’t transformed in an instant. But with your help I’ll hold on. I can probably even live with some serenity after Agnes goes—to you. With your help.

  “But you will have to tell me over and over that parting isn’t forever. You will tell me, as my wife tried to tell me, that my Redeemer lives.”

  When he went out into the autumn sunshine he was amazed. He had not even known that summer was over. Now he saw the brilliant trees, the copper forests of the sun, and life roared into his ears and the men and women on the street down there were no longer lifeless. They were human again, part of himself, and he wondered, with humility, how many of them were brave and how many of them were hiding anguish and defeat and misery under an air of busyness and compact surety, and how many knew that someone beloved was about to die or even themselves.

  If they could endure—if man could endure with his awful knowledge of himself—then he, Francis Stoddard, could endure.

  The man who had listened to him: He, too, had been a stranger in a strange land, with an accent which had invited ridicule. He had been abused and derided; multitudes had turned from him. He had known loss and grief and what seemed to many the ultimate defeat and humiliation. He had known everything that men ever knew and will know. And out of his defeat had come victory, out of his death—life. Above all things he had been brave and had forgiven.

  Pat isn’t lost to me, thought Francis Stoddard, walking in the sun once more. And who knows? By dying so soon she was, perhaps, spared what I have been suffering, and what her mother is suffering. If she didn’t receive any fulfillment she was never betrayed and never grieved. What did Agnes tell me once? That life is only an overture to living, that its greatest sound and harmony are not in this world. But overture or not, the music is still beautiful if sometimes terrible.

  No, I’m not reconciled. How could I be? But at least I’m not hopeless now. I am a complete man as I never was before. For, indeed, my Redeemer lives and because He lives all that I love will live, and I will be with them and this time there won’t be any parting.

  He had thought of immediately going home. But he turned his car, now, and drove to the rectory of the priest.

  SOUL FOUR

  The Ostracized

  “Am I not a man as you are a man?

  Why do you deny to me my manifest humanity?”

  Seneca. “Essay on Humanity”

  SOUL FOUR

  He supposed they had been offended when he had left the lunch so abruptly. He had ended his talk on a note of despair, but they had not heard the despair. Of that he was positive. They never heard anything but their self-congratulation and the applause of their colleagues for their “tolerance” and “liberalism.” When he had quoted Seneca and had demanded “Am I not a man as you are a man?” they had only nodded their heads solemnly and had looked at each other with grave eyes of assent. But they did not know what he had meant.

  He had meant it for them. They had not known or were too stupid and self-engrossed to know. They had been applauding themselves, as usual. Egotists! Mean l
ittle liars! He, Paul Winsor, preferred those who openly despised him rather than those who “loved” him. The despisers were at least honest; he could talk to them and sometimes persuade them. But the fawning liars were a most dreadful danger to him and all that he was. They provoked the violent who could not endure hypocrisy either, as he could not endure it. Let a man hate him, and there was a possibility for conciliation. But there was no reconciling the “loving” who perversely insisted on loving him in their own way—which nauseated him and made him so acutely self-conscious. And ashamed, as no man should be made to feel shame. There were times when they put their hands on his shoulder and he was outraged. How dare they touch him as they would touch a dog they did not understand but which they wished to placate, or worse, wished to seduce with a false affection? Would they be so condescending to one of their own, and violate reticence with their kind as they violated it with him?

  “Am I not a man as you are a man?” Hah. Was it so much to demand of another human being that one be treated as a man, only, neither with furious hatred and loathing nor with maudlin “love?” Either was an insult to a man’s humanity, but the last was the worst of all, the very worst of all.

  Paul Winsor. Summa cum laude, Harvard, and Harvard School of Business Administration. Businessman, now worth, at thirty-eight, half a million dollars and every dollar earned with sweat and blood. Fine little factory, employing one hundred people and more during rush seasons. Beautiful wife, Kathleen, an executive in his company. Two wonderful kids, Timothy and Ailsa. Proud of him, proud of themselves. They did not know how much he despised himself sometimes, not that there was anything in him to despise but because of the attitude of others, especially the patronizing. He must stay away from them after this, and remain with his own community where at least he was respected as an intelligent and prosperous businessman and not as a “problem” or a “national cause.” He was on the School Board, also, and on the board of his church, and a collector for all charities. A Rotarian, too. (That had taken aback some of the Rotarians on the “panel” at the lunch today. He could see them making somersaults in their minds; they were obviously trying to be pleased. It was just as obvious that they were not exactly pleased.) He was listed in Who’s Who in America, because of his business-machine invention which had made his business possible. Last year the company, of which he was president, had grossed nearly two million dollars. Quite an accomplishment for the son of a poor minister.