The Listener (16 page)

“Marcia was heartbroken. She is too gentle to fight. She had no money with which to fight. I had five hundred dollars. We brought up the whole matter in court. It was finally decided — the judge looked tired and embarrassed, himself — that Marcia should be restored to her position but that she must never violate the principle of ‘separation of Church and State’ again.

“I’ve studied that Amendment to the Constitution. It speaks only of the fact that the government must never set up any particular religion as the State religion, such as they have in Britain and the Scandinavian countries. No particular religion must be recognized as the one and only religion.

“What did Marcia’s speaking of God in history have to do with any established religion? The Old Testament speaks of God as the foundation of nations. So does the New Testament. ‘A people without a vision will perish’.They have removed the ‘vision’ from our people, the vision of God in the affairs of men. Who are ‘they’? I don’t know. I only know they’re there. I only know that any teacher who mentions God is under danger of discharge. Who are ‘they’?”

He leaned forward eagerly. “Don’t you think, for our children’s sake, that we should find out and expose them? Are they politicians? Evil people? Stupid people? I don’t know.” His eagerness expired. “I am only a teacher, God help me.”

The light became brighter, closer, as if a colleague had moved nearer to him in sympathy and profound understanding. “Yes, you do understand,” he murmured.

After a while he said faintly, “I tried at first. At first there was no pressure on the teachers. We taught our subjects and did the very best we could. If one child suddenly looked at us with bright comprehension and enlightenment and with the joy of discovery, it filled our whole day with warm satisfaction. My subject, by the way, is mathematics, the ‘Apollonian art’. Quite often, as I explained and mentioned the ‘art’, the whole class would come alert. Mathematics wasn’t something dry and dead. It wasn’t just an abstraction. It was a great and exciting mystery. The whole universe is governed by the law of mathematics. The children would understand then. Everything, from the feeble movement of an amoeba to the rush of the farthest and most tremendous constellation, was governed by the basic law of mathematics. Without mathematics, the encompassing art and law of mathematics, the universe would become chaos and cease to exist.

“I think,” said the teacher, “that one of the most beautiful days of my life was when one of my pupils gave me a poem he’d written about mathematics. Not a good poem by poetical standards. But a fervent poem of what mathematics meant to him, not as a future CPA, but as a soul.

“I haven’t,” said the teacher, “had a pupil like that for the past eight years. And what I must teach now mustn’t tax ‘the child’. They come to me, in the junior year at high school, without as much knowledge as we had in the seventh grade of grammar school. They lounge around in their seats, chewing gum, winking at each other, exchanging notes, suddenly laughing boisterously, yawning, dozing, primping, combing their hair, putting on lipstick, chewing candy, suddenly and senselessly giggling. Four of my girl students, this year alone — and they only sixteen — have had to leave school for reasons of pregnancy.”

Again he scrubbed his face with his dry hands. “Who are these young people? Who has been destroying them systematically? Their parents, their teachers, their schools? Who has been denying them life and joy and excitement? I don’t know. I only know I am tired. I am exhausted by trying to maintain discipline in my classes. Trying to maintain order in my classes takes up all my time. Not teaching. Just hopeless attempts at control. The lurching youths — they lurch out of their seats and start for the door with wild, uncontrolled, and hating faces. I say, ‘Where are you going?’ And they answer, ‘None of your goddamn business’.

“I complain to the principal. He says, ‘It is the parents’ fault’. The parents say, ‘It is the teachers’ fault’. ”

The teacher stood up. He cried loudly, “It is the fault of all of us! This dreadful decay of the human spirit, the human nobility, the human reason! It is America’s fault, trivial, fun-loving, laughing, moneyful, amusement-seeking, circus-wanting, demanding, whining, dancing, greedy! A people without a vision! A people which must die!”

He sat down, as if struck. “Because they have too much money. Because they have no duties, no responsibilities. Because everything comes to them without effort. If other people despise us, it is our own fault. We are ancient Rome.”

He sat in silence. The light became colder, and there was a question in it.

“A big, fat, and profitless people. ‘Wind without rain is profitless’. ”

He looked at his hands clenched together, the fingers whitened by intense pressure. He studied them a long time.

“I was afraid,” he whispered. “I was afraid for my job. A few thousand dollars a year. But now I am done with it all. I’ve been offered a position in an accountant’s office. Twice as much as I receive now. No children, no ugly, huge, fat children, no screaming shrill parents, no frightened principals, no exigent school boards. No school palaces like hothouses. A good salary, without struggle, without despair. And Marcia and I can be married at last.”

He looked at the still curtains, which seemed to wait. The question was all about him, urgent.

“What did you say?” he said.

He looked about him helplessly. “What can I do?” he muttered. “Teaching is — was — all my life. But no one wants to be taught. I’m tired. I’ve given up. The fat, rosy, stupid faces! The big fat legs! The empty eyes! The big tooth-filled grinning mouths! Their huge porcelain teeth: they are more important to them than knowledge, than their immortal souls. I’m not my students’ guide any longer; they drag me along in their senseless lurching as a man is dragged along by an elephant.”

The light became colder, fainter.

“When did I begin to give up?” he pleaded. “When Marcia was suspended? When the parents hounded me? When the principal murmured to me that ‘we must go along with the times’? When no one wanted what I had to give?”

He looked anxiously and with despair at the curtains. “You are a teacher! You taught all your life, didn’t you? Are you still teaching — teaching the stupid multitudes, over and over? Why?”

He jumped to his feet. “I don’t care any longer! I’ve lost my spirit, too. I’m quitting. I’m not going to struggle to teach the Apollonian art to morons, or try to teach it. Why should I inspire them? Why should I struggle against the system? Are they my children? Tell me, are they my children?”

He had had no intention of pressing the button, but now his despairing extremity interfered with his prudence. He ran to the curtains and pressed the button.

The curtains rolled apart, as if weary. And then he saw the light and who stood in the light.

He stood there for a long time. He cried a little. He blew his nose and cried again. “Pardon me,” he said. “I haven’t cried for a long time. I’ve been too afraid.”

He looked at the Man who Listens, and his whole face trembled.

“Yes,” he said, “you were, and are, a teacher. You’ve never stopped teaching and trying to teach, have you? You never gave up. Did you ever encounter parents such as I encounter, and authorities? Of course you did. It didn’t matter to you, did it? The eating, restless, pushing multitudes — you still taught them, didn’t you? When they laughed at you and lurched away from you and cursed you, you still taught them. When the higher authorities denounced you, you still taught. You labored, as I did, in a wilderness.

“Because you had Authority.”

He looked humbly at the man in the light.

“And I have authority, above parents, above school boards who are afraid of their own positions. A teacher always has authority to teach the truth. If only one — How many did you have all your life? Very few. If only one looks at you with sudden understanding, it is enough, isn’t it? It is more than enough.

“How tired you must have been! Are you tired now? No, I don’t think so. One out of multitudes is enough for you. One eye suddenly brightening, one face suddenly becoming alert, one hand suddenly writing down what you said — it was enough, it is more than enough. It is the whole world. And what a class you had — have! Compared with mine, it was almost hopeless. It is almost hopeless.

“But if you could — can — still teach, then so can I. I can refresh myself every day, thinking of you. I can go on, because you went on, and still go on.”

He went to the man, very slowly. He touched his hand. “Teacher,” he said, “let me teach again. And Marcia. We can marry; it’s just that we were afraid. And now I can say, ‘I can do all things in Him who strengthens me’.

“I will, with your help, reteach the ancient values and the ancient principles. I will be a teacher again. We still have the ancient Authority and grandeur. If we abdicated them, it was our own fault. We must take them up again. Against the whole world.”

. . . and brought to him all the sick . . .

Matthew 14:35

Dr. Felix Arnstein smiled at his patient. “You could have called anyone locally, Jim,” he said. “I’ve told you; it’s your gall bladder. And now this time are you going to let me make arrangements for taking the damn thing out when we get home?”

“Now, now, Felix,” said the yellowish fat man with the eyes like varnished raisins. “I’ve been reading all about it. There’s this diet.”

“I gave you a diet ten years ago,” said Felix Arnstein. “Remember? If you’d kept to it, or even tried it out once in a while, the thing wouldn’t have blown up this way. Now the bladder is full of stones; we showed them to you on the X-rays.”

“Diet!” snorted Jim Merwin, winking at his slender, pretty wife, who seemed younger than her forty-five years.

“If a man can’t eat what he wants — !”

“Some can. Some can’t,” said Felix, trying to remain amiable. (He wondered if Miss Lillis had been able to soothe his patients in his home city who had had appointments with him today, or if they had immediately flounced off to consult another man. That was the devil, being a general practitioner. He ought to have gone back to the hospital for another two years and then he could now call himself an internist.) “I know,” he continued, “that some men can eat their bellyfuls of fish and others will have an attack of giant hives if even the smallest slip of clam appears in their soup. You’re one of the boys who ought to have started dieting in your teens. You didn’t. And now you’re over fifty and have a bag of stones that would choke an elephant. What do you say about having it removed next week when you get home? It doesn’t make medical history anymore when a gall bladder is taken out; it’s routine.”

“Nah,” said Jim Merwin. This time he winked at Felix. He was a winking man, by nature and deliberation. It gave him a reputation for being big and generous and good-natured and brought him prosperous business. “I don’t have the time, fella. I’m not like you medical guys, always able to run to Jamaica or Florida or Sorrento. I got to work. I got to make money. I’ve got five kids, ain’t I?” He was a university graduate; it made him one-of-the-boys to use illiterate expressions.

Felix Arnstein was a small, slender man with an unexpectedly plump face. He had a very delicate fair complexion, expressive blue eyes, and thin fair hair. He had been trained, by necessity, to keep an amiable expression on his face. But sometimes, as of now, it was almost impossible. Jim Merwin, with his chain of sports-equipment shops, was at least a millionaire. He belonged to all the country clubs which were firmly closed to Felix; he had a house at Cape Cod, as well as his fine house in their mutual distant home city, and he visited Florida and other choice spots several times every winter. But that, of course, was business, and tax-exempt, including Lucy Merwin’s expenses. She had once been his stenographer; she took ‘notes’ on their excursions. She had stenography notebooks to prove it.

Felix was tired. Lucy had called him in panic, long distance, at four o’clock this morning. Jim had been taken sick with one of his ‘attacks’ while attending a convention in this strange city. “Really terrible this time, Felix,” she had pleaded, weeping. “No, your tablets don’t help! . . . What? . . . Oh, Felix! You know Jim wouldn’t have anyone but you! And in a different city, and a hotel, at that! He wouldn’t trust anybody but you! Look, I’ve already called the airport, Felix. There’s a plane at five-thirty. You can just make it if you hurry. You can be here at seven. Just pick up the tickets at the airport. Felix, you’ve got to come!” She sobbed. “I think it’s a heart attack this time, or maybe that gall bladder has ruptured, as you said it might. Or something. . . . No! He’s too sick to get up and fly home just now. He’s all doped up, though it doesn’t stop the pain much.”

So Felix Arnstein had wearily dragged himself out of bed. He had hardly warmed it; he had been out on an emergency call until less than four hours ago. His patient, a close friend, had died of a heart attack only half an hour after Felix’s arrival. It had been a bad blow, a shock. He said to his wife, Gay, as she looked at him with sleepy concern, “Go back to sleep, honey. I must go out. I’ll leave a note for you on the breakfast table.” He did not tell her he was leaving town.

The Jim Merwins of this world were the backbone of a general practitioner’s life. They paid large bills and did not complain. It gave them a sort of
é
clat to receive such bills, even from a general practitioner. “Give me a general doc every time,” they would say, and they would wink if they were winking men like Jim Merwin. “Not these specialists who’re always out golfing or on vacations and never at home on the weekends. What them specialists know, fellers like Felix Arnstein’s already forgotten.”

Maybe so, maybe so, Felix would think to himself a trifle sourly. But the specialists were cleverer men than he, and so they’d arranged to be born of wealthier parents who could afford to send them to medical school and give them a large allowance besides. Or the specialists had not married in poverty as he had married. They had waited until they were at least partially established. But he was already thirty-one when he completed his internship; there had been three years when he had had to stop everything to work to pay his way. Three years between his university degree and the medical school: Gay would have waited, but she had already waited for him for over ten years, and he loved her and needed her. She had continued to work in the largest department store for two years after they were married, until their son, Jerome, had notified them of his coming. Felix then had an income almost as large as a mechanic’s, after expenses.

He was sharing an office with another doctor on the third floor of a made-over old house in a very unfashionable neighborhood. They also shared one part-time secretary-receptionist, two filing cases, one telephone, and a handsome set of medical books bought secondhand — and unread — from a specialist. “He never opened the damned things from the day he got them from his parents when he set up shop,” said Dr. Robert Sherman to his colleague. “But he didn’t need to; he just walked into a fine big office next to his dad’s, with a secretary in silk stockings and a peekaboo blouse and a receptionist who looked like a model. That’s all. Just took over his dad’s rich practice. He had it made.”

If I’d just stayed in the hospital for another two years, Felix would think, I’d have had it made too. But I couldn’t. Gay and I had waited too long as it was.

Jerome had brought his ‘luck’ with him. At least his coming had forced his parents to search for a little larger apartment, though more expensive and in a better neighborhood. Felix was retiring, but he had an air of integrity, and Gay was charming, as bright and vivacious as a bird, with auburn hair and shining blue eyes. They soon attracted the attention of their neighbors in the apartment house. Many of them were elderly people with no children, and some were childless widows. Gay’s obviously pregnant state had drawn the solicitude of the ladies in the self-operating elevators. She was also the youngest woman in the building, and her trusting little smile and eager ways excited maternal feelings in the older, lonelier women. The ladies visited her, clucking, warning, advising. One was the widow of a physician, who had left her comfortably wealthy. Of course she took an interest not only in Gay but in Felix. She gave a cocktail party for them a week before Jerome was born, and all the guests liked the young couple. The next step came when some called Felix in emergencies when their own doctors were sick or otherwise unavailable. The following step was when they decided to stay with Felix.

Jerome was a handsome little fellow with his mother’s hair and eyes, his father’s reserved but engaging ways. He became the pet of the whole apartment house, from the janitor to the owner, who lived on the top floor. Felix’s fortunes began to look up definitely. He and Gay talked of a ‘little home somewhere, for Jerome’s sake, with grass and trees’. (They did not talk of more children; they could not afford them.)

Then the war came, and Felix had to go. As he was not a specialist, he never rose above the rank of lieutenant. He did not see Gay and Jerome again for four years. Four terrible years. He saved what he could; he knew Gay saved all she could from her allotment. What he did not know was that Gay had gone back to work, leaving Jerome in the wise old care of the physician’s widow. He did not know until Gay, laughing through her tears after their first embrace when he came home, showed him a bankbook with five thousand dollars in it. “Our down payment,” she said. “See, it’s in another bank. I saved two thousand from your pay too.”

Jerome was five years old. They bought a pretty little suburban house for not more than twice its actual worth; inflation had begun. Dr. Sherman, who had not been drafted, moved out of the office. Felix had it for himself now. He had eight thousand dollars in the bank, after the house was bought, a large mortgage, a secondhand car; half his former patients returned to him. He and Gay had never had a week’s holiday in their married life or even before that.

Gay had an elderly great-uncle, a sullen, irascible old man with bunions, a hearing aid, and a high suspicion of everyone but Gay. He was obviously not a man of material substance. After he had had a heart attack, he wanted, he said plaintively, to move into the old folks’ home, to forget and be forgotten. A widower with no children, he had been living alone for forty years in a side-street hotel, in one room. He had once been a diamond cutter, and Gay could not recall ever having seen him in a new suit or wearing a new hat. She had been kind to him for years, for no reason except that she was naturally kind. She insisted that he move into her house, ‘and Felix will be there all the time — at least some of the time — to watch over you’. Felix did not think highly of the idea. Old Harry Stern had never been one of his favorite people, but Gay, who had worked so hard for this house, deserved to have her uncle here if she wished. So old Harry Stern moved in, with his endless complaints, his prayer shawls, his skullcaps, his peevish comments on Gay’s cooking, his shouts at Jerome, his insistence on ancient ritual, his heavy colds, his fiendishly stinking cheap cigars, and his habit of bursting into tears for his dead wife, whom he had treated very unkindly when she had been alive.

He died suddenly while Felix was struggling to re-establish his practice. A lawyer called, with a will, after Felix and Gay had buried the old man with all the ritual they knew he had wanted. Old Harry Stern had been living on an annuity which he had shrewdly bought forty years ago and which had paid him one hundred dollars a month for life. He had left ten thousand dollars in cash to Gay.

Felix judiciously restrained his jubilation in respect for the dead. He found himself suddenly very fond of sly old Harry. He made a substantial payment on the mortgage, which reduced monthly interest and payments. Then he rented an office — a small one — in a good medical section of the city, in a new splendid building all white brick, chrome, and self-opening doors and switchboards and parking lots and big windows. “I think,” he said cautiously to his wife, “that we’re finally on the way.”

He, and only he, was the general practitioner in the building. Worse, even most of the specialists were younger than he. They did not despise him; secretly they had let him have the office in their jointly owned building for much less than they could have rented it to a bright young specialist with sound parental money behind him. General practitioners referred patients to specialists, especially if the specialists were handy, on the same floor or the next, and especially if the specialists were kind and displayed fellowship and had G.P’.s to dinner occasionally and introduced them ‘around’. “We are certainly on the way,” Felix said to his wife when he paid off the mortgage entirely. He now had at least eighteen men like Jim Merwin as patients, and as they usually overate or overworked or abused their bodies in countless other ways and firmly believed in regular ‘check-ups’ and all the latest ‘shots’, Felix, who would by nature have detested them, spoke of them as ‘our bank accounts’.

Jerome was seventeen and in a good private school when he had informed his father that he wished to be a doctor. He was already eight inches taller than Felix, and an excellent student. “That’s no news to me,” said Felix, smiling at his son tenderly. “I’ve watched you for years reading my medical books. What kind of a specialist do you want to be?” he added jovially.

“I don’t want to be a specialist, Dad,” said Jerome, who was as reticent as his father. “I want to be a general practitioner. Like you.”

“Good God! Why?”

“Because I want to be the kind of man you are.”

“I? What in the name of hell do you mean by that stupid statement?”

Jerome had blushed. He was naturally inarticulate. “Well,” he said uncomfortably, “I just think that this country needs fewer specialists and more G.P’.s. That’s all.” He took a deep breath and plunged on, awkwardly, “You can’t divide up the human body into so many compartments! If you’re sick in one part, you’re sick all over. Besides — well, I think of a G.P. as a ‘healer’. A helper, if you know what I mean. A friend. A specialist’s all steel and chrome and impersonal. You see — well, it’s this way: I like people.”

“You do, eh?” said Felix a little grimly, thinking of the Jim Merwins. “I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” said Jerome, smiling at him with Gay’s own smile.

It was all nonsense; it was all stupid. He’d expected better than this for Jerome. But the boy, in his way, was as stubborn as himself. Felix threatened not to send him to medical school. Jerome only smiled. “Do you want a life like mine?” cried Felix. “Never knowing if you can get a full night’s sleep? At the beck and call of everybody, at any hour of the day or night? Delivering a baby for about fifty dollars? Those who can afford more go to an obstetrician. Wangling and waiting for years to get a little spot on the hospital staff? You don’t know the snobbery in the medical department, my boy. The specialists despise you, though they keep their doors open for your patients. The nurses even despise you. The staff officers despise you. You can never belong even to the better Jewish clubs; you can’t afford them, anyway. Do you know what my income is, even now, after all these years, after expenses? Twelve thousand dollars a year! And I’m lucky to get that. And you want to be a man like me!”

“Yes,” said Jerome.

“You have no ambition. Why, that little squirt of a proctologist down the hall from me clears over twice what I do in a year, and he’s only thirty-five. I’m fifty. When he’s my age he’ll have a suite of rooms, assistants, and be a rich man.”

Jerome only smiled.

Jerome was in a good university now, with an excellent medical school, and he was nineteen. He and his father had no more arguments. Felix hoped and prayed that the boy’s teachers would be able to persuade him where he had failed. Gay said, “If Jerome is half as good as you, dear, and has your integrity and gets half the love you do from your patients, I’ll be very happy.”

“Love!” said Felix. “From the Jim Merwins?”

“They’re not the only ones, dear.”

“Sure. The others don’t pay their bills, or they take years to do it. A doctor’s always the last to get paid.” He touched her hand. “I bought you that mink coat eight years ago, and it wasn’t good quality to begin with.”

But the Lucy Merwins changed their minks at least every other year. They had their own bright convertibles. Gay drove an ancient secondhand car, a cheap one even when new. Lucy Merwin had diamonds. Gay had only, even now, the one-carat engagement ring Felix had given her and which had taken him over four years to pay for in full. They spent two weeks every winter in a motel near Miami Beach, and two weeks in the summer at a little cottage ‘on the lake’ which had no utilities. When they had paid their real estate taxes and the school taxes, the twelve thousand dollars a year had shrunk to less than ten. They lived frugally; Gay did all the housework herself. They saved to send Jerome through medical school. They had two annuities on which they were paying, and a life insurance policy for twenty-five thousand dollars. And Felix was fifty-two. He needed some new equipment for his office. He was also saving for an X-ray machine. This would annoy some of the specialists, but he had become desperate on reaching the age he now was. “There’s no place in America any longer for G.P’.s,” he would say to Gay. “No one wants, or needs, personal attention.”