Listening

He had been walking up Fifth Avenue for about ten minutes when the cat fell. He had been walking along, minding his own business, not looking about him—though it was a beautiful day, the first of spring, with a warm, keen wind ruffling the vapor trails in the sky and dislodging the pigeons from cornices where they sat sunning. He was preoccupied, to tell the truth, worrying over what he could ever find to say about Mrs. Schaber’s lesson, which he was on his way to observe.

Listening, she taught. “What in God’s name is listening? ” he had asked Mark Calvert, who worked in the same department. “Oh, it’s a form of musical appreciation—little Schaber’s a bit of a nut, but she’s quite a fine musician, too, in her way.” He had not even met her, so far as he was aware—she was just another of the two-hundred-odd faceless names on the college faculty list. So now he had to give up his free day, this beautiful mild, melting, burgeoning day, to go and invigilate her class and decide whether or not she was able to teach kids to listen. Is there a craft about listening—an art that has to be learned?—he wondered. Don’t we begin listening from the very moment we are born?

At that moment the cat hit. He was approaching the Twenty-eighth Street intersection when he heard the horribly distinctive sound—a loud, solid smack, accompanied by a faint, sharp cry; indeed he had seen it also, he must have seen about the last six inches of its fall, as he glanced up from his moody stride, and so was able to verify that cats do not always land on their feet—this poor beast, which must have come from about twenty floors up, landed flat on its side and then lay twitching. Its eyes were open but it must, please heaven, be on the point of death—ought he to do something about it? What could one do?

In no time a small crowd had collected.

“It fell from way up there,” a woman kept saying hysterically. “I saw the whole thing—I was just crossing the street—”

“Do you think we should take it to a vet?” someone suggested.

“Oh, what’s the use? The poor thing’s dying anyway.”

“Tell the super in the block? That looks like a valuable cat—”

“Lucky it didn’t land on somebody—could probably kill a person—”

As they discussed it, the cat twitched again. Its eyes closed definitively.

“Oh, its poor owner. She’ll wonder what happened to it—”

“Shouldn’t have left her window open if you ask me—”

He left them and walked on. He was going to be late if he didn’t hurry. It had looked like a valuable cat. Its fur was a rich mixture of browns and creams in which dark chocolate predominated, its eyes a wild fanatic blue. It seemed to belong to the luxury class, along with costly monogrammed luggage, gold accessories and jeweled watches: objects of conspicuous expenditure. And yet, poor thing, it had been alive, had its own nature—that faint piteous cry still hung in his ears, an expostulation against undeserved agony.

He had seen Mrs. Schaber before, it turned out; he recognized her as soon as he entered the classroom. She was the odd little woman whom he had passed one day in the main lobby while she was deep in conversation with a deaf and dumb student. He had been much struck by her at the time, two or three months back. She was quite short, only about five foot, with her dark hair coiled in a bun low on her neck. She wore jeans, a flannel shirt, a sweater tied by the arms around her waist, espadrilles; she looked like a student. But her face was that of a woman in her mid-forties—somewhat lined, especially around the mouth. Her eyes were large, brownish green, almond shaped, set wide apart; and her face was long and oval, with a particularly long jaw and upper lip, and a lower lip that extended, sometimes above the upper one, giving her a look of comical pugnacity. But what had attracted his attention on that occasion was the extreme vivacity of her face—dozens of expressions chased each other across it: sympathetic, hilarious, grave, intent, sorrowful, ecstatic, ferocious—while her hands, meanwhile, twinkled away with unbelievable speed, flicking their soundless deaf-and-dumb-language to the student she was addressing.

“Is she deaf and dumb too?” he had asked Charlie Whitney, with whom he had been walking on that occasion.

“Schaber? Lord, no! Talk the hind leg off a mule!”

She was doing so now, addressing her students in a flood of loquacity. But she broke off to greet him with a rather constricted smile.

“Oh—Professor Middlemass—good morning! Would you like to sit here? Or would you rather walk about? Please do just what you want—make yourself at home! I was—I was beginning to explain to the students that this morning I am going to play them tapes recorded on my trip to Europe and Africa last year. I shall analyze the background of each tape before I play it. Then, later in the lesson, I shall demonstrate the relation of the sounds they have heard to musical patterns and structures and explain how this in its turn demonstrates the relevance of music to language.”

Nodding vaguely—she had rattled this out so fast that he hardly took in her meaning—he settled down to listen, observing that eighteen out of her nineteen students were present, and that they were watching her with expressions that ranged from indulgent amusement through skepticism and mild boredom to absorbed devotion. Only one boy looked wholly bored: he was stretched back in his seat with his blond hair stuck out in front, his head bowed forward. He appeared to be studying his shoelaces through the strands of his hair.

The tapes, when Mrs. Schaber began to play them, were a bit of a surprise: they were so extremely quiet. She had been allotted a soundproof music studio for her demonstration, and this was just as well, for some of the sounds were just barely audible. “Now, this is the Camargue: you can hear grasses rustling and, very far off, the noise of the sea. And after five minutes you will notice a faint drumming in the distance. That is the sound of hoofs: the wild horses. They never come very close; you will have to listen carefully.

“Now this recording was taken in Denmark, in the bog country: you can hear reeds and dry rushes; the sound is not dissimilar to the tape of the Camargue that I played you earlier, but this one was taken inland; there was a different quality to the air; it was less resonant. Also, after about three minutes of tape, you will hear a stork shifting about in its nest; I was standing close to a cottage that had a stork’s nest on its roof.”

Mrs. Schaber went on to describe in some detail what materials storks used in building their nests and then played her tape. As she listened to it herself, her face wore a recollecting, tranquil, amused expression.

Gradually, while the lesson proceeded, Middlemass observed how the students were becoming polarized by her exposition. The ones who had looked indulgent or bored at the start were now gazing drearily at the ceiling, picking their noses or their teeth, chewing gum, manifesting exasperation and tedium; others were watching Mrs. Schaber with fanatical attention. The blond boy still stared at his feet.

Toward the end of her batch of tapes came some that had been recorded in the Congo rain forest. Middlemass had always been fascinated by the thought of the jungle, ever since reading Duguid’s Green Hell; he had not the least intention of ever walking into a jungle himself, but he occasionally liked to imagine doing so. Now he listened with careful interest to the rich silences, the ticking, cheeping, chirring, shrilling, buzzing, scraping sibilances that Mrs. Schaber had collected; for the first time he began to feel some groping acceptance of what she was proffering. He noticed, also, that the blond boy had taken his hands out of his pockets and had his head cocked in an attitude of acute attention.

During the second half of the lesson, Mrs. Schaber proceeded to play short snatches of music and demonstrate their resemblance to vocal patterns and to some of the natural sounds that she had presented earlier. This, Middlemass thought, was really interesting; the whole lesson began to cohere for him, and he changed his mind about what he would say in his report, which, half-phrased in his head already, had not been particularly enthusiastic. “Too divorced from reality—students did not seem very engaged—Mrs. Schaber has a gift, but it seems devoted to inessentials—” Now he resolved to say something more favorable.

At this point there came an interruption to the lesson. A secretary tapped at the door to say that Mrs. Schaber was wanted in the main office. “The police have just called up from your home, Mrs. Schaber; I’m afraid your apartment has been broken into, and they want you to go home and say what has been taken.”

“Oh my god!” The poor little woman looked utterly stricken; her expressive face changed to a Greek mask of tragedy, mouth wide open, eyes dilated.

“Shall I go with you to the office?” Middlemass offered, touched by compassion because he had been filled with rather disparaging thoughts about her during the first half of her lesson and because she did seem as if she had sustained a mortal blow. The blond boy had already risen to his feet, moved compactly forward, and taken her arm. But Middlemass accompanied them anyway; he felt the need somehow to demonstrate his friendly feeling and sympathy.

While Mrs. Schaber talked on the phone in the secretary’s room, it became plain that matters were even worse than she had feared.

“Oh no, not all my tapes?” she cried out. “What could they want those for? Smashed—wrecked—oh, no!”—pressing her clenched fist against her thin chest as if she were trying, forcibly, to push her anguished, expanded heart back into position. Wordlessly, the secretary went to fetch her a cup of coffee. The blond boy stood silent with his eyes fixed on her face. When she had laid the receiver back in its rest and was staring across the room, quite dazed, with fixed, sightless eyes, Middlemass asked her gently:

“Is it very bad?”

“They have taken a whole lot of stuff,” she muttered, “and all the rest they have destroyed—smashed up. Everything—”

Inattentively, she gulped at the coffee the secretary had handed her.

“I keep wondering whether I forgot to lock the door—when I went out this morning—the super found it open, that was why he phoned the police—I was so nervous—in a hurry—did I forget to lock it?”

“Oh, no!” Middlemass exclaimed, horrified. “You don’t mean to say that you were nervous because of me—because your lesson was going to be observed—that on account of that you might have forgotten to lock up—?”

“Of course I was nervous!” she said. “Naturally I was nervous! Excuse me—they want me right away—I must go back to the classroom and collect my things—”

“I am most sorry this has happened,” he said, following her back along the corridor, wondering if his words were getting through to her at all. “I had been enjoying your lesson so much—it seemed to me one of the most interesting and original discourses that I have ever listened to—”

In his own ears, his voice sounded horribly forced and insincere. He wondered if that was one of the things he had learned from her lesson. How to detect the falsity in human utterance? And yet what he had said was the truth—meant to be the truth, he told himself. He noticed the blond boy’s eyes on him, assessing, skeptical.

“I’m going to give you a very good report,” he told poor Mrs. Schaber, as she began collecting her gear in the classroom. “If that helps to cheer you up at all—”

“Well—thank you—of course it does,” she answered distractedly, shoveling tapes into a big worn woolen bag, filled already with a mass of untidy odds and ends. It was evident that she heard him only with a single thread of attention; the rest of her mind was elsewhere. “It’s like having lost a whole continent, a whole world,” she murmured. “Years and years of work.”

“Well, you’ve still got the Congo forest, because you had it here,” the blond boy reminded her, and at that she suddenly gave him her flashing urchin grin, thrusting forward the long lower jaw and lower lip, nodding her head up and down.

“That’s true! One forest left—perhaps it will seed itself. But there’s not all that amount of time left.”

When Mrs. Schaber had gone, Middlemass walked out of the college. He felt too disturbed to want to eat in the cafeteria and talk to colleagues; he wanted a long period of time and solitude to settle his feelings. Poor little woman, so stricken and bereft—he thought of her returning to her wrecked apartment, like a bird to its robbed nest. And the worst of it was the anxiety as to whether it had been her own carelessness that had invited the thieves; he knew how such an idea would haunt him, if he had been the victim. He imagined her trying and trying again to resurrect the process of her departure in the morning, to discover whether she had in fact let the door unlocked—had she taken the key out of her purse, had she put it back—as if it could make any real difference to the disaster itself.

Walking along Fifty-seventh Street, Middlemass tried to calm his mind by wandering into a number of art galleries, at random, looking first at a show of nineteenth-century portrait photographs, then at some watercolor landscapes, then some classic Matisses, magically soothing, then some semiabstract sculpture, recognizable articles broken into fragments and reunited into strange disjointed forms—then a show of cartoons—a collection of Japanese prints—one of book illustrations from the ’nineties. He was moving westwards all the time; he thought he would presently buy a sandwich and eat it in the park. The day was still idyllically fine and warm.

In a small room adjoining the exhibition of book illustrations there was a show by a minor artist whose name was unknown to him; the title of the exhibition was simply “Collages.” Through the open door he caught a glimpse of quiet, restful black and white forms. He stepped inside, meaning to give the show a quick two minutes and then go in search of his sandwich.

The collages, contained inside plain wood frames, were made up from all kinds of materials—fabrics, press cuttings, bits of wood, of metal, of oilcloth, tar cloth, wire netting, string, bent wire, gauze, clay, foam rubber—all dyed or stained either black or white. They had been assembled, molded, pressed, organized into shapes that were vaguely human, vaguely monstrous in outline: straining bodies were suggested, extended limbs, odd movements of exuberant dance, of cowering terror, of sad, limp resignation. The titles, on labels beside the frames, were all single words: Waiting; Fearing; Hoping; Expecting; Exulting.

Despite a general feeling of distaste for what he considered rather pretentious, facile stuff, without the merit of true creativity, Middlemass found himself oddly struck by these forms—they seemed to touch on some nerve in him that was not normally affected but had, perhaps, been bruised already that day. He walked slowly around the room, considering the occupant of each frame in turn—as if they had been creatures in cages, he told himself.

Returning, finally, toward the door, he looked at the last frame, which had the title “Begging.” A crippled, bandaged creature crouched, huddled, in the middle of the frame; its head, composed of wire netting, seemed to be swathed in wrappings and gave the impression of blind, listening urgency. One of its limbs, a bent pipe wrapped in tarred rag, extended, pleadingly, right out of the frame, and was flattened at the extremity into the approximate form of a hand; to this hand a small white square of paper in the shape of a visiting card had been fastened by staples.

Moving closer, to discover whether the tiny characters on the card were real letters, real words, he received a shock. Neatly printed across the white, in black India ink, he read his own name: JOHN MIDDLEMASS, M.D.

He gasped and then laughed. Turning to the girl at the desk, in an attempt to cover the extraordinary agitation he felt at this strange, this outrageous portent, he said:

“What an amazing thing! The name—this name here, in the picture—on the card—it’s my name, John Middlemass!—Only I’m not a doctor,” he added.

“Is that so?” The girl—thin, dark, long-haired, wan—looked at him with a wholly uninterested, lackluster indifference which immediately seemed to reduce the coincidence to minimal proportions. After all, her look suggested, somebody in the whole of New York has to have that name—what’s so peculiar about your having it? Why are you making such a to do? “Perhaps the artist got it out of the phone book,” she suggested, yawning. “But you’re not a doctor, you say?” she added kindly, as if to humor him.

“No, no, I’m a teacher—” Feeling foolish, as if he had made a fuss about nothing at all, he left the gallery and went to buy his sandwich. Bacon, lettuce, and tomato. Then he walked up Madison Avenue, feeling the sun warm on his shoulder blades, and turned left, toward the park. He could hear sparrows chirping and one shrill bird cry, far in the distance, that took him back in memory to a spring holiday on Cape Cod.

The day was so warm that all the park benches were filled. Finally, unable to find a seat on one, he settled on a slope of warm rock near the pond, looking south toward the Plaza Hotel. The water in the pond was low, and patches of reeds stood out on small mud islands; as he ate his sandwich, he noticed how neatly gulls landed on the surface of the water to swim and drink and preen themselves and how clumsily pigeons, unable to land on the water, thumped down on an island of rock and then waddled to the edge in order to drink. Planes droned overhead, and helicopters stuttered; an ambulance siren wailed and gibbered not far off on its way across town.

Presently Middlemass began to be aware of the couple who sat on the end of the bench nearest him, a girl and a boy, intent on their conversation with each other. It was not so much the human pair he noticed as their animals. The boy had a dog, which he allowed to roam loose: a kind of black mongrel with traces of retriever. A loose-jointed, floppy, active dog that went on forays, dashing off splashily round the verge of the pond, and returned every now and then, damp, smiling, panting, to lavish affection on its master.

But the girl had a cat; making the second cat I’ve seen today, thought Middlemass with a sudden shiver, remembering his earlier horrible experience. What a strange day it had been! But that was how life piled up in the city, one event splashing on top of another like lava from a volcanic eruption, hardly time to assimilate an experience before the next one came tumbling about you.

This cat, though, the cat in the park, was a very different creature from that poor, dead, expensive, elegant piece of fur that had no doubt long since been shoveled off the sidewalk and into some garbage can. This cat in the park was half white, half ginger in color. It was an old cat; its fur was patchy, molting, dusty, its ears were tattered, its nose was scarred, its tail looked moth-eaten. The girl had it on a leash, but she was paying no attention to it, and while she talked to her boyfriend the cat sulked, squatting behind the bench on which the pair sat, with its head thrust forward, as if it found the whole park, the dusty ground, the beaten-up grass, the muddy pond, the dingy sparrows, hopelessly distasteful, as if it were fed up with the world and its own ancient disheveled body.

Every now and then the black dog, returning from one of its excursions, would suddenly, with a kind of delighted surprise, rediscover the sulky cat and would then roll it over and over, tousling and biting it, rubbing its fur in the dust. The cat retaliated with what seemed a kind of resigned rage, spitting and kicking, tail bushed out, ears flattened.

“Don’t do that, Buster,” the boy would call absently, and the girl would say, “Oh, it’s all right, never mind, Ginger quite enjoys it really,” a statement which Middlemass, watching, considered to be quite patently untrue; it seemed to him that the cat disliked the dog’s teasing roughness to the whole of its capacity for feeling.

Presently the couple rose to walk away. The dog instantly darted off ahead, delighted to be on the move again; but the cat, as if obstinately determined not to cooperate in any way during this disagreeable outing, now refused to budge. Before, it had sat sulkily ignoring its surroundings; now it wished to delay and sniff round the legs of the bench. The girl, impatient to be gone, jerked crossly at its lead, and, when it still would not follow, dragged it up bodily by the leash so that it hung in its collar, choking and scowling.

“Don’t do that to the cat,” Middlemass wanted to call out. “Pick it up properly!” But rage choked him, quite as much as its collar was choking the cat. When the girl put it down it did slowly begin to follow, trotting a few steps, then stopping to sniff things at the side of the path; its pace was not nearly fast enough to satisfy its mistress, who several times either dragged it along bodily, sliding on its feet, or again hoisted it up on the end of the leash. Middlemass felt an intense relief when the couple had passed out of view. He hated that girl; he really loathed her—But the cat was an old one, he told himself; it must have become used to such treatment years ago—No, it was no use; how could the horrible girl be so insensitive to the feelings of the creature she lived with?

His hands were clenched so tightly that the knuckles, when he finally relaxed them, felt swollen and quite painful. He looked down at his hands, thinking ruefully, not so elastic as they used to be. I am growing old. I should have interfered. Why didn’t I? Because if I had, the girl would only have thought that I was a meddlesome old busybody. “Mind your own business, Mister,” she would have said. “This cat belongs to me and I can do what I like with it.”

Interfering gets you nowhere. And where does noninterfering get you?

The day had clouded and cooled. He walked over to Fifth Avenue to catch a bus home, thinking about the various disagreeable tasks that awaited him: tax forms to be filled out, bills to be paid, household articles to be repaired, business letters to be written. However inconspicuously we endeavor to conduct our lives, creeping along, keeping our heads well down out of the line of fire, still in the end we fall prey to circumstances, he thought, and I suppose the final knockout is not one single blow, so much as a whole series of minor assaults, to which, in the end, we wearily succumb.

I’d just as soon be nibbled to death by ducks, he remembered somebody saying; where in the world could that extraordinary phrase have come from?

His bus drew to a stop, and he climbed on to it and walked along the aisle, hoping for a seat in the back row, so that he need not travel sitting sideways, which he disliked. My life, he thought, is assembled out of an endless procession of unimportant choices.

The back row was all occupied, so he took the last of the side seats, in hopes that presently somebody might get off, and then he could switch seats. The bus had a long way to go, all down Fifth Avenue. As it slowly jerked and clanked through the heavy afternoon traffic, his mind went back to Mrs. Schaber; poor woman, she would be at home now, examining her wrecked possessions, listening to the callous comments of the police, who,s as Middlemass knew from experience, never offered the slightest hope of getting back any of the lost property. They were not interested in that; the only thing that concerned them at all was the possibility of identifying the thieves.

“It’s like losing a whole world,” she had moaned.

But at least, thought Middlemass, she had a world to lose.

At Twenty-eighth Street he suddenly thought of the cat—the first cat. It must have happened just about here. You’d never guess it now. People were darting to and fro on the pavement at that point, with their usual manic speed. The patch of blood would have been sanded over and swept away. So we come; so we go. What had made him think of the cat? Before that his mind had been on Mrs. Schaber and her loss.

Then he heard the sound again: a faint, querulous grumbling mew; the sigh of meow let out by a cat who is shut up, bored, exasperated, wishing to remind its owner of the tedium of its plight: a kvetch in cat language.

For a moment Middlemass wondered if perhaps he might be going mad; haunted by the ghost of a cat; of two cats. But then, turning his head slightly, he saw the girl close beside him on his right, sitting at the window end of the row of back seats, had a covered basket on her lap. And as the quiet, complaining conversational mew came again, she bent her head close over the basket, opened the lid a crack, and murmured to the occupant: “Hush. Hush! We’ll be home very soon.”

Looking up she met the eyes of Middlemass. He smiled at her—she was a small, thin, dark girl, not unlike the one at the desk in the gallery. And, like the girl in the gallery, she did not return his smile, just gave him a steady, thoughtful look, as if it would take much more than a smile to make her trust him, or allow him to impinge on any of her concerns.

Rebuffed, he turned his head away and rose to his feet; the bus had reached his stop, anyway.

Returned home, he sat down at his desk, impatiently turning his back on the untidiness which, hurrying out into the sunny morning, he had promised himself that he would later set to rights.

He pulled an official college report form toward him, and, in the blank for Instructor’s Name, printed mrs. marcia schraber. In the blank for Subject, he wrote listening. In the blank for Observer, he wrote his own name, Prof. John Middlemass, and the date. Then, in the section headed “Comments” he began to write:

“Mrs. Schraber has something very important to teach her students, but I am not sure what it is. . . .”

There he stopped, holding the pen, staring at the blank form and his own name printed across the Observer space, while his mind’s eye went back to fix, again, on that melancholy, huddled, crippled figure, gagged, blindfold, beseeching, mutely extending his own name out of the wooden frame.