Short Stories: Five Decades (124 page)

Harold took a deep breath and slowly walked off, without a word.

Charley watched him, the narrow, unheroic, torn and bedraggled back, dragging off. The tears swelled up in a blind flood and Harold disappeared from view behind them.

Whispers in Bedlam

H
e was a typical 235-pound married American boy, rosy-cheeked, broken-nosed, with an excellent five-tooth bridge across the front of his mouth and a sixty-three-stitch scar on his right knee, where the doctors had done some remarkable things with floating cartilage. His father-in-law had a thriving insurance agency and there was a place open in it for him, the sooner, his father-in-law said, the better. He was growing progressively deafer in the left ear, due to something that had happened to him during the course of his work the year before on a cold Sunday afternoon out in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He was a professional football player. He played middle linebacker on defense and a certain amount of physical wear and tear was to be expected, especially in Green Bay.

His name was Hugo Pleiss. He was not famous. He had played on three teams, the sort of teams that are always around the bottom of their division. When coaches said they were going to rebuild their clubs for next year, the first thing they did was to trade Hugo or declare him a free agent. But with all the new teams coming into the leagues, and the consequent demand for experienced players, Hugo always managed to be on somebody’s roster when a new season started. He was large and eager to learn and he liked to play football and he had what coaches called “desire” when talking to sportswriters. While intelligent enough in real life (he had been a B student in college), on the field he was all too easily fooled. Perhaps, fundamentally, he was too honest and trusting of his fellow man. Fake hand-offs sent him crashing to the left when the play went to the right. He covered decoys with religious devotion while receivers whistled past him into the clear. He had an unenviable record of tackling blockers while allowing ball carriers to run over him. He hadn’t intercepted a single pass in his entire career. He was doing well enough, though, until the incident of his ear at Green Bay. The man who played left corner back with him, Johnny Smathers, had a quick instinct for reading plays and, as the offense shaped up, would shout to Hugo and warn him where the play was going. Smathers was small, distrustful and crafty, with a strong instinct for self-preservation and more often than not turned out to be right. So Hugo was having a pretty fair season until he began to go deaf in the ear on Smathers’ side and could no longer hear the corner back’s instructions.

After two games in which Smathers had correctly diagnosed and called dozens of plays, only to see Hugo go hurtling off in the opposite direction, Smathers had stopped talking to Hugo at all, on or off the field. This hurt Hugo, who was a friendly soul. He liked Smathers and was grateful for his help and he wished he could explain about his left ear; but once the word got around that he was deaf, he was sure he’d be dropped from the squad. He wasn’t yet ready to sell insurance for his father-in-law.

Luckily, the injury to Hugo’s ear came near the end of the season and his ordinary level of play was not so high that the drop in his efficiency had any spectacular effect on the coaches or the public. But Hugo, locked in his auditory half-world, fearful of silent enemies on his left and oblivious to the cheers and jeers of half the stadium, brooded.

Off the field, despite occasional little mishaps, he could do well enough. He learned to sit on the left of the coach at all meetings and convinced his wife that he slept better on the opposite side of the bed than on the one he had always occupied in the three years of their marriage. His wife, Sibyl, was a girl who liked to talk, anyway, mostly in protracted monologues, and an occasional nod of the head satisfied most of her demands for conversational responses. And a slight and almost unnoticeable twist of the head at most gatherings put Hugo’s right ear into receiving position and enabled him to get a serviceable fix on the speaker.

With the approach of summer and the imminence of the pre-season training sessions, Hugo brooded more than ever. He was not given to introspection or fanciful similes about himself, but he began to think about the left side of his head as a tightly corked carbonated cider bottle. He poked at his eardrum with pencil points, toothpicks and a nail clipper, to let the fizz out; but aside from starting a slight infection that suppurated for a week, there was no result.

Finally, he made hesitant inquiries, like a man trying to find the address of an abortionist, and found the name of an ear specialist on the other side of town. He waited for Sibyl to go on her annual two-week visit to her parents in Oregon and made an appointment for the next day.

Dr. G. W. Sebastian was a small oval Hungarian who was enthusiastic about his work. He had clean, plump little busy hands and keen, merry eyes. Affliction, especially in his chosen field, pleased him and the prospect of long, complicated and possibly dangerous operations filled him with joy. “Lovely,” he kept saying, as he stood on a leather stool to examine Hugo’s ear, “Oh, absolutely lovely.” He didn’t seem to have many patients. “Nobody takes ears seriously enough,” he explained, as he poked with lights and curiously shaped instruments into Hugo’s ear. “People always think they hear well enough or that other people have suddenly all begun to mumble. Or, if they do realize they’re not getting everything, that there’s nothing to be done about it. You’re a wise young man, very wise, to have come to me in time. What is it you told Miss Cattavi your profession was?”

Miss Cattavi was the nurse. She was a six-foot, 165-pounder who looked as though she shaved twice a day. She had immigrated from northern Italy and was convinced that Hugo played soccer for a living. “That Pelé,” she had said. “The money he makes!”

Dr. Sebastian had never seen a football game in his life, either, and an impatient look came over his face as Hugo tried to explain what he did on Sundays and about Johnny Smathers and not being able to hear cleats pounding perilously on his left side when he went in to stop a draw over center. Dr. Sebastian also looked a little puzzled when Hugo tried to explain just exactly what had happened at Green Bay. “People do things like that?” he had said incredulously. “Just for money? In America?”

He probed away industriously, clucking to himself and smelling of peppermint and newly invented antiseptics, orating in little bursts that Hugo couldn’t quite hear. “We are far behind the animals,” was one thing Hugo
did
hear. “A dog responds to a whistle on a wave length that is silence for a human being. He hears a footfall on grass fifty yards away and growls in the darkness of the night. A fish hears the splash of a sardine in the water a mile away from him, and we have not yet begun to understand the aural genius of owls and bats.”

Hugo had no desire to hear whistles on dogs’ wave lengths or footfalls on grass. He was uninterested in the splash of distant sardines and he was not an admirer of the genius of owls and bats. All he wanted to be able to hear was Johnny Smathers ten yards to his left in a football stadium. But he listened patiently. After what doctors had done for his knee, he had a childlike faith in them; and if Dr. Sebastian, in the course of restoring his hearing, wanted to praise the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, Hugo was prepared to be polite and nod agreement from time to time, just as he did when Sibyl spoke about politics or miniskirts or why she was sure Johnny Smathers’ wife was no better than she should be when the team was on the road.

“We have allowed our senses to atrophy.” Hugo winced as Dr. Sebastian rose on his toes for leverage and went rather deep with a blunt instrument. “We have lost our animal magic. We are only one third in communication, even the best of us. Whole new fields of understanding are waiting to be explored. When Beethoven’s last quartets are played in a concert hall, a thousand people should fall out of their seats and writhe in unbearable ecstasy on the floor. Instead, what do they do? They look at their programs and wonder if there will be time for a beer before catching the last train home.”

Hugo nodded. He had never heard any of Beethoven’s last quartets and the floor of a concert hall didn’t seem like the place a nice, well-brought-up married American boy should choose to writhe in ecstasy; but now that he had taken the step of going to a doctor, he was going to see it through. Still, with talk like that, about dogs and owls and sardines, he could see why there were no patients waiting in Dr. Sebastian’s outer office.

“A crusade,” Dr. Sebastian was saying, his eye glued to a lighted chromium funnel whose narrow end seemed to be embedded deep in Hugo’s brain. Dr. Sebastian’s breath pepperminted warmly on Hugo’s bare neck. “A crusade is called for. You have a most unusually arranged collection of bones, Mr. Pleiss. A crusade to lift the curtain of sound, to unmuffle, to recapture our animal heritage, to distinguish whispers in bedlam, to hear the rustle of roses opening in the morning sun, to catch threats before they are really spoken, to recognize promises that are hardly formulated. I never did see a bone structure like this, Mr. Pleiss.”

“Well, that feller in Green Bay weighed nearly three hundred pounds and his elbow—”

“Never mind, never mind.” Dr. Sebastian finally pulled various bits of machinery out of his ear. “We will operate tomorrow morning, Miss Cattavi.”

“OK,” Miss Cattavi said. She had been sitting on a bench, looking as though she were ready to go in as soon as her team got the ball. “I’ll make the arrangements.”

“But—” Hugo began.

“I’ll have everything ready.” Dr. Sebastian said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. Merely present yourself at the Lubenhorn Eye, Ear and Nose Clinic at three
P.M
. this afternoon.”

“But there’re one or two things I’d like to—”

“I’m afraid I’m terribly busy, Mr. Pleiss,” Dr. Sebastian said. He whisked out of the office, peppermint receding on the aseptic air.

“He’ll fix you,” Miss Cattavi said, as she showed him to the door.

“I’m sure he will,” said Hugo, “but—”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Miss Cattavi said, “if you came back to have the other ear done.”

When Hugo woke up after the operation, Dr. Sebastian was standing next to his bed, smiling merrily. “Naturally,” Dr. Sebastian said, “there is a certain slight discomfort.”

The left side of Hugo’s head felt as though it were inside the turret of a tank that was firing sixty rounds a minute. It also still felt like a corked cider bottle.

“You have an extraordinary bone structure, Mr. Pleiss.” The doctor raised himself on tiptoe, so as to be able to smile approvingly down into Hugo’s face. He spent a lot of time on his toes, Dr. Sebastian. In one way, it would have been more sensible if he had specialized in things like knees and ankles, instead of ears. “So extraordinary that I hated to finish the operation. It was like discovering a new continent. What a morning you have given me, Mr. Pleiss! I am even tempted not to charge you a penny.”

It turned out later that Dr. Sebastian resisted this temptation. He sent a bill for $500. By the time Hugo received the bill, on the same day that Sibyl came back from Oregon, he was happy to pay it. The hearing in his left ear was restored. Now, if only Johnny Smathers wasn’t traded away and if their relationship could be patched up, Hugo was sure he’d be in there at middle linebacker for the whole season.

There was a red scar behind his ear, but Sibyl didn’t notice it for four days. She wasn’t a very observant girl, Sibyl, except when she was looking at other girls’ clothes and hair. When Sibyl finally did notice the scar, Hugo told her he’d cut himself shaving. He’d have had to use a saw-toothed bread knife to shave with to give himself a scar like that, but Sibyl accepted his explanation. He was rock-bottom honest, Hugo, and this was the first time he’d ever lied to his wife. The first lie is easy to get away with.

When he reported in to training camp, Hugo immediately patched up his friendship with Johnny Smathers. Johnny was a little cool at first, remembering how many times at the end of last season he had been made to look bad, all alone out there with two and three blockers trampling over him as Hugo was dashing away to the other side of the field, where nothing was happening. But when Hugo went as far as to confide in him that he’d had a little ringing in his left ear after the Green Bay game, a condition that had subsided since, Smathers had been understanding, and they even wound up as roommates.

Pre-season practice was satisfactory. The coach understood about the special relationship between Hugo and Smathers and always played them together and Hugo’s performance was respectable, even though nobody was confusing him with Sam Huff or Dick Butkus or people like that.

The exhibition games didn’t go badly and while Hugo didn’t distinguish himself particularly, he made his fair share of tackles and batted down a few passes, listening carefully to Johnny Smather’s instructions and not being caught out of position too many times. It was a more-or-less normal September for Hugo, like so many Septembers of his life—sweaty, full of aches and bruises and abuse from coaches, not making love on Friday and Saturday, so as not to lose his edge for Sunday, feeling frightened for his life on Sunday morning and delighted to be able to walk out of the stadium on his own two feet in the dusk on Sunday afternoon. For want of a better word, what Hugo felt was happiness.