No One Hears but Him Read online

  Only the single Jew on the “panel” had looked at him with wry understanding when he had posed his question, “Am I not a man as you are a man?” Only the Jew had not nodded with solemn, turned-down mouth and sheep’s eyes. The Jew had smiled faintly as well as sardonically. Now he, Paul Winsor, wished he had not left so abruptly after the lunch at the hotel; he might have been able to have had an ironic and confidential conversation with the Jew. And probably, best of all, some bitter laughs, with perceptive glances. There had been another one there who might have had something to say privately: an old Irish priest with a brogue. He had given the opening prayer. The members of the Lunch Club were so very tolerant. They had a clergyman of a different faith at every lunch. The priest had not been extraordinarily comfortable either, a rough big old man with a fighter’s face and a mystic’s eyes. At Paul’s question he had frowned, as if the question had been challenging, whereas the priest seemed to believe as if there should be no challenge at all. But there was.

  Just before the lunch he had looked down from his window and had seen, in that congested vicinity, several green acres of beautifully tended grass shadowed by trees in all the glorious colors of autumn, gold, brown, russet, fiery red, pale fretted yellow. A lovely park. He had been able to see wandering paths of raked gravel, and grottoes, and marble benches scattered here and there, and a twinkling fountain or two. In the very center, on a rise of land like a small hill, had stood a magnificent white building, low and long, like a Grecian temple. He had asked another guest what it was. “Oh,” said the man with contemptuous indulgence, “some people call it the Sanctuary. A sort of chapel or shrine, built by a fanatical old lawyer long before my time; I think my father knew him. Never have seen it close to, myself. It’s a kind of disgrace to the city, though it’s supposed to be religious. It’s a wonder the clergy don’t object. You could ask the priest who’ll be at the lunch today, what’s his name? I don’t know; we always have a different clergyman. Maybe he can tell you.”

  Paul had asked the priest just before the lunch. The old priest had looked at him with small but brilliant gray eyes. He had hesitated. Then he had said, “It’s neither a shrine nor a chapel. We’re proud of it in our city. There’s an arch of gold over the entrance, THE MAN WHO LISTENS. It’s been here for many years, even before I came to this city. I think there is—a man—who listens to people in there; their troubles, their problems. Rootless people. Frightened ones, too. People who are outside organized religion, some of them. Lots of them have come to me after they went to the Sanctuary.” Again the priest hesitated. “Some of them had been at the point of committing suicide. He—he in there—had helped them. Then they had come to me, or some other clergyman.” The priest had then turned away.

  The man who listens. Whoever did, in these days, these noisy, self-congratulatory, prosperous, affluent, dynamic days? Everybody made a noise, but no one listened to anybody. Paul Winsor was intrigued; he had continued to look down at the Sanctuary until it was time for lunch. The man who listens. A clergyman, a doctor, a psychiatrist? He must be a rare bird indeed, if he could stop talking long enough to listen to anybody. No one listened now except to himself.

  Paul had forgotten all about the Sanctuary when lunch began. He had sat at the right hand of the president, a thin, skinny specimen with cold and watery blue eyes, a vicious mouth, an impeccable manner, an alert glance, a long gray head, a sharp and penetrating voice, a polite gentleman in all ways. Paul was the speaker for the month. His subject had been: “The Problems of Businessmen in a Controlled Economy.” The president had said:

  “Yes, that’s very important, considering the bureaucracy in Washington. But, and I hope you won’t mind when I say we were a little disappointed in your choice of material, we had hoped you’d have given us a talk about Racial Intolerance and Civil Rights. From your point of view, of course.”

  Paul had frowned. “My point of view? It’s a human point of view, that’s all, with a wide range of differing opinions. Why should ‘my view’ be different from anyone else’s?”

  The president had stared at him with amazement. “You’re from Georgia, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. That’s where my factory is, and where I live with my family.” Paul felt his forehead grow hot and tense. “I employ both white and colored, of course. I’ve never had any trouble. Until lately.” He had looked into those cold blue eyes and the cold blue eyes had looked back at him, and it was as if wrestlers had locked in mortal combat. He had continued bitterly, “Until professional agitators had tried to ruin it all. People with their own sinister mission.”

  The president had said with ice in his voice, “I’d hardly call it ‘sinister.’ Just a word of advice: Don’t go into that in your talk. Keep to your script,” and the smile that accompanied the words had been purely malevolent.

  But Paul, aroused as he had rarely been aroused before, had not kept to his script. He had opened with the words of Seneca—to all these brotherly-lovers!—“Am I not a man as you are a man? Why do you deny to me my manifest humanity?”

  It was obvious, halfway through his impassioned and angry talk, that only the Jew, and probably the priest, had really absorbed what he had been saying. The others, as usual, had reinterpreted rapidly as he had been talking, to suit their own prejudices and turn of mind and convictions—their lying, hypocritical, self-loving convictions! Their smug convictions. They had not heard him because they were so busily trying to fit his words into their own stilted frame of references, to make it palatable to themselves and acceptable in the context of their acquired beliefs which were so popular these days and so lauded in the newspapers and in the more “liberal” periodicals.

  What had his father once told him? “There is nothing so hateful to a hypocrite as to have his hypocrisy publicly exposed, or even exposed only to himself. Avoid hypocrites, Paul. They’ll have your lights and livers if you don’t watch out!”

  A number of men at the lunch had finally caught on as to what he meant. They had looked at him with hatred, the hatred of the Pharisee who had tried to conceal his Phariseeism under a gloss of brotherly love and equality. But the others had only solemnly nodded in assent—and damn them! had not understood at all. That was worse than the Pharisees.

  There had been no question period. Even the fools had uneasily understood that answers might be devastating. So, he had run away from them, on some vague excuse. They were probably still waiting for him to come back from the men’s room.

  But he was here, slowly walking up the gravel path to the Sanctuary. The man who listens. Another hypocrite with sweet, lipoid talk, with sweet consolations, and pat answers. “My son, I understand your Problem and regret it. But remember, We are all One with God.”

  Are we, are we? asked Paul, already hating the man who listened. If so, then there is something terribly wrong. Surely God preferred His saints—if there was a God at all—to monsters in human form, no matter the race or color, or religion if any. Surely God, though Pa had said that God was no Respecter of persons, had a special love for those who served Him in selflessness and hope. Surely He had not regarded a Hitler or a Stalin or a Khrushchev with the same “love” as he had regarded sane and just men!

  Surely God had regarded a hypocrite with detestation! Yes, He had said to them, with wrath and disgust, “Liars, hypocrites!” Or, at least Pa had told him that, as he had read from the Bible every evening to his children.

  Paul stood now before the bronze doors of the Sanctuary. “Hello, hypocrite,” he said. “I know you and your kind of clergymen. You’ll give me instant love and sympathy, and wind up, as almost everyone else does, with hatred and animosity. You’ll give me the same old disgusting cant, the same old liberal hogwash. You won’t regard me as a man but only as a ‘problem.’ And how you’ll pour your scented oil over me—until—”

  He pushed open the doors. An elderly man with a cane was the only one present in the waiting room, an old man with sunglasses, sunken in misery. The beautiful waiting room
was cool and fresh, after the warm autumn day outside. Paul sat down at a distance from the old man, but the old man looked at him through those dark glasses. Paul braced himself. He knew he was a tall, slender, fine-looking youngish man, with a scholarly face for all he was a businessman. But that did not count. It never counted. The old man said, “I hope he can help me. Do you think he can?” The ancient voice was quivering.

  Paul was surprised. He expected a remark—he was always expecting a remark—but not this one. He felt a pang of gratitude. He said, “I hope so.” He paused. Then he added, “That’s why I’m here, myself,” and was astonished at his own words.

  The old man nodded sorrowfully. “We all have our problems,” he said, a remark surely without originality, Paul thought.

  “Now my problem,” said the old man, “is that I’m almost blind. I’m going to lose even what little sight I have left; that’s what the doctors tell me. How can I stand being blind?”

  So, thought Paul, that’s the answer. He doesn’t even see me. He said, “Blindness can be of the mind, too, as well as the body. Which is worse?”

  The old man smiled at him gently. “Yes, I see. I can see you, you know. My sight isn’t all gone yet. And I think I know why you’re here. Never mind. I don’t believe in intruding on anyone. Everybody does these days; no one lets you alone.”

  Paul was not an emotional man. He had inherited a quiet reticence from his English ancestors, a cool aloofness, a polite distance. (One of his ancestors had fought with George Washington and had later been a Secretary of the Treasury.) But he was deeply moved by the old man’s words. That was the very heart of the problem. “No one these days lets you alone.” They pried; they stuck their impudent fingers into the very sensitive ulcers of the spirit which every man suffered; they peeked and peered; they demanded, in their vulgar insistence, that you tell them your secret thoughts. They were insulted if you kept yourself to yourself and insisted on your privacy. Everyone should “share” these days. You should indecently expose yourself to the most shameless eyes; you should be “warm” and “outgoing.” Especially if you were one like Paul Winsor.

  The old man said, “You see, I’m an artist, of sorts. I create, if you can call it that, patterns for rugs and draperies. Not so much of an artist, would you say? But I’ve made a lot of money, so I don’t have to worry about being indigent and subject to all the busy-loving of the social workers. What bothers me is that I won’t be able to see the color of the world any longer, or the shapes and forms. Every morning,” said the old man with a beautiful candor, “I see the dawn. And one morning I saw it come up in winter, against a cold dark sky. A crown of crimson fire, a real crown, like the crown of a Titan. It—well, it was the crown of God against complete blackness. And for the first time in my life I said to it, ‘Good morning, Father!’ I’m not a religious man. I’m an agnostic, honestly; always was. But something happened to me then, when I saw that crimson crown of fire. I think I began to believe. I was happy for the first time in my long life. And now I’m going to be blind and I’ll never see anything again.”

  Paul did not remember the last time he had felt a rush of tears in his eyes. He was glad that perhaps the old man did not see them. What could he say? What was his problem compared to this: a man who loved color and form and who would never see them again? What could he say? He said, “I’m ashamed of myself.”

  What a ridiculous thing to say! But the old man was nodding seriously. “I suppose we could all say that, if we were honest.”

  A bell chimed. The old man began to rise, then tottered. Paul went to him at once and helped him, and put the cane into his hand. “Thank you,” said the old man. “I don’t like it, though. I suppose I never will.” He looked at Paul searchingly. “Neither will you. But what does it matter? I’m going in there to ask that man how I am going to live, after I go blind. Don’t you think a person like myself should choose a time to die, instead of waiting, helplessly?”

  Paul had asked himself that a thousand times, with bitterness and anger. But he said now, “I don’t think so. If there is any reason in the universe then we have a reason to be here.” Liar, hypocrite, he commented to himself. You are just pouring the same old oil which has been poured on you, too.

  The old man laughed a little and shook his head. But he did not object when Paul led him to the door of the other room. “Good luck,” he said to Paul, and somehow Paul was reminded of the Jew’s ironical smile at the lunch. The door closed after the old man and Paul sat down again. There was a curious agitation in him now, an agitation without a name, a disturbance of the spirit with which he was unfamiliar. As a self-controlled man and a gentleman, he was annoyed. He took up a magazine and began to read. But all he could see imprinted on the page was the old man’s words, “No one these days lets you alone.” Oh, damn them. Damn them.

  After awhile the bell chimed softly and Paul looked up from his brooding contemplation of the floor. He rose and went to the door yonder. He paused, hesitating, with his hand on the knob. What a stupid business this was! He wondered what platitudes had been spewed on that tragic old man’s head. Had they been so bad that he had gone home to kill himself, out of sheer disgust, or had he become maudlin? Coming down to it, why was Paul Winsor here, himself? He dropped his hand from the knob and half-turned away. The chime sounded like a voice, so he opened the door and went into the inner room.

  There was no sign of the old man. There was nothing here but white marble walls, a white marble chair and a shrouded blue alcove. Theatrical. Paul went to the chair and stood behind it, his hands on its back. He looked at the blue curtains.

  “Good evening,” he said in his soft, southern drawl.

  No one answered. The blue curtains did not move. The white silence of the walls and the ceiling glowed down on him. Had the psychiatrist or minister taken a coffee break, or perhaps a drink to numb the foolishness he had told the old man? Well, that was understandable. And human. No matter how hypocritical the man there were moments when he had a flash of self-revelation and was nauseated. Or he turned his self-hatred on other men. Paul mused on the countless numbers of men who had hated themselves in him.

  “Is anyone here?” he asked.

  Was that a stir he had heard or only the whisper of the air-conditioning? But all at once he felt that a man was waiting behind the curtains. Paul said, “I’m a stranger in town, and I’m sorry, but I’m not going to tell you my name or very much about me, at that. By the way, can you see me?”

  No one really answered him, but a voice appeared to sound within Paul’s ear, a man’s voice infinitely kind and grave. “Yes, child,” it said. Ridiculous. He was using his imagination; Kathleen invariably told him he had too much of it. But he, Paul, though he had anticipated an affirmative answer, in spite of the heaviness of the draperies which hid everything, had really expected a patronizing “Yes, son,” or at the worst, “Yes, boy.”

  But never “child.” Only his parents had called him that, in love or admonition or impatience. Child. A child was universal, a young one, an outraged one, a suffering one. Outrage. That was worse than suffering. Any time, that was worse than pain, an affront to what one really was.

  “My problem,” said Paul, feeling both foolish and formal, “is really nothing compared to the old man’s; he was just here. I hope you gave him some consolation?”

  Paul felt an affirmation and a tenderness. Oh, that imagination of his! Paul moved from behind the chair to the seat and sat down. He placed his beautifully-formed hands on his knees, as if he were about to address his board of directors and while doing so avoid Kathleen’s amused eyes.

  “You see,” he said pedantically, and he could hear his measured words and see Kathleen’s dancing eyes, “no one treats me as a man these days. Once some people did. Not any longer. Now they look at me with hate or with their infernal ‘love.’ I think I prefer the hate; at least it’s honest and sometimes I can overcome it. When I was younger and at school my profs treated me as they treated e
veryone else. I flunked some tests, and was yelled at; I passed others, at the head of the class, and was congratulated. I was on the high school team, in Georgia, the track, you know, and if I was good—well, I was just good. If I was bad, then I was cursed in no uncertain terms.

  “Now, everything’s changed. I go North and the most stupid remark I make—and I’m no tyro at stupid remarks, I can assure you—is received as if it were Holy Writ. But that’s not what I want to say.”

  He stopped and looked at the curtain and did not know the leaping despair in his eyes.

  “I am a man! It’s true I’m a businessman and I’m successful. But I’m a man in my own right! That is what is being denied me these days. I’m not only a businessman. That’s my vocation. I’m interested in a thousand things. I’m an amateur musician of sorts; piano. I studied music, among other things. And my wife, Kathleen, has a beautiful voice. She sings when I play. Oh, my God, how can I make it plain to you?”

  He clenched his hands into the impotent fists he was always making these days. “I love sculpture. I mess around with it a little. I love architecture; I really designed our house in Georgia, though I’m no architect. I love the classics; I love ancient art. I love the theater, especially the tragedies.” He halted. “I come of a tragic people. Tragedy isn’t native to us, you see. It is others who have made us tragic.

  “It doesn’t matter. You see, I travel a great deal. You can’t get decent salesmen in this affluent age, so I do a lot of traveling myself. I meet very interesting people.” He made a wry mouth. “But, can I talk to them about music, literature, art, science, the theater, the ballet, about human events and history? No! Damn it, no! I try to talk to them as one human being to another. But they won’t let me! They either look impatient or they are puzzled. All they want to discuss with me is—Race. And Racial Problems. They deny me my identity as a man, with a man’s hopes and love of beauty and concern with humanity and history, and my future as a man. Do you realize how terrible that is—to be denied your identity as a man?”