He jumped to his feet, feeling imprisoned and choking.
“It isn’t fair!” he cried. “Why do I have to grow old? I’m young, young!”
He ran to the curtain, overcome with a despair he had never known before, and he struck the button only half-knowing he had done so, and while it was rolling aside he repeated, “I’m young, I tell you, I’m young! I’m not really a full adult yet!”
And then he saw the man who had listened to him. He stared, stupefied, blinking helplessly, and swallowing very hard. He began to fall back, slow step by slow step. He reached the chair and felt behind him and clutched it. The awful fear was on him again, and another emotion which he did not as yet recognize as profound and shattering shame, for never once before in his life had he felt that shame.
He could not take his eyes from those somber eyes which gazed at him so sternly—he was certain that admonition and sternness gleamed from them at him, and that if the man was not actually despising him he understood him fully.
I was only thirty-three when I completed my work, the man seemed to be saying to him. I was in years only your own age. I was not a child, a youth, even in my human flesh. I had not been a child since I had been twelve years old, though I was subject to my family as you were never subject. I was a man, and never have you been a man.
“God help me,” Johnnie muttered. “It was not only my fault. It was my father’s, too. I’m not judging him, not condemning him. I am only speaking the truth, as I never spoke it before. He was wrong. He should have helped me to be a man, and not have encouraged me to be an everlasting child. But he is not more wrong than millions of other fathers in this country. They are making perpetual children of their sons. They are denying them their manhood and their responsibilities as men.”
He looked at the man pleadingly, but the stern eyes did not appear to soften or show sympathy.
“All right,” said Johnnie with a humility totally once unknown to him. “I’m not a complete moron. I think I knew all the time, and that it was my fault, even more than my father’s. I wanted it that way! I wanted to be a kid all my life, having fun. Yes, I think I knew. The priests tried to talk to me, and my mother, and Sally. But—I was afraid. I was afraid,” he repeated, marveling in disgust at himself. “I was afraid to be a man!”
He saw himself completely, big, bluff, overgrown, a little too heavy, revoltingly boyish, tousled like a two-year-old!, manicured, bathed, healthy—and useless. A stupid, middle-aged juvenile, big-footed and relentlessly young and grinning, denying his adulthood, denying that he had been an adult for eighteen years! Thinking of himself as a teen-ager, and who had invented that actually cruel and repulsive term, anyway? After puberty a child was a man, with a man’s powers of body, and a man’s maturity. After Confirmation he had been responsible for his own sins and his own life—hadn’t the priests told him that? He alone was responsible, and he had refused the manifest responsibility. Why? Because he had been afraid to be a man. His father must have guessed his terror and in his love had tried to soothe and reassure him. He was wrong, said John Martin. It was his duty as a father to lead me into adulthood and to have set me free. He was not kind to me at all. He and I—we made me, together, what I am.
But he died of seeing what I really was. Yes, I know that now. Just as my mother died.
He thought of his own children, the boy, Michael, with his strong young face, and the little twin girls, merry and blue-eyed and humorous. He had never seen them before as he saw them now in the full light of the awful revelation of himself. Why, they were fine kids! They needed a father, not the sort of father he had had, but a man who could guide them and teach them and not romp with them like a child, himself, playing with toys which quickly bored him. Why, now he could remember the cool speculation in his son’s eyes, the reserve. Of what had the boy been thinking? John Martin winced. I know, he thought. He thinks I’m a stupid big bastard, and that’s what I am. That’s all I am. What a terrible thing it is when a boy thinks that of his father!
And Sally. Patient, kind, loving Sally, his wife. Why in hell had she wanted to marry him, anyway? Beautiful Sally. He had never realized she was so beautiful, with her shining brown eyes and her tenderness to him and his children, and her goodness. I don’t deserve her, he thought. Does she despise me? Not half as much as I despise myself. Is it too late, now? Perhaps not. She did send me here. I wonder if she saw him—too?
He looked at the silent man who was gazing at him. Now the tears of an adult came to his eyes. He went slowly to the man and slowly dropped to his knees, and he bent his head and kissed the man’s feet.
He said, “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy—”
He stayed on his knees for a long time, praying as he had never prayed before in his life. Slowly the self-disgust and the new self-hatred left him as he knew he had been heard, and forgiven and that he had put his childhood and his youth forever from him. When he stood up, he was clothed in manhood.
“Please don’t ever leave me,” he whispered. “It isn’t over. I have such a long way to go.”
When he was out in the hot August sun again it came to him that he was looking at a world he had never known, a world of men and duty and stern responsibility and struggle. He was not sure he liked it yet. But he would have to like it! It was his world. It was the world of himself and his children. My God, Michael! he thought. My son. I can’t begin soon enough.
Then he saw Sally coming up the long graveled walk toward him, Sally with her pale and anxious face and mute, questioning eyes. He started to run toward her as a child runs to his mother, and then he stopped himself. He walked firmly down the path to her with quick but controlled steps. She halted while she waited for him. He took her hand.
“Hello, Sally,” he said, and smiled. “Let’s go home, to the kids.”
Her whole face began to shine radiantly. He saw her wet eyes, her trembling mouth. Not caring for the people sitting in the shade on the marble benches, he bent down and kissed her.
“Let’s go home,” he repeated.
SOUL SIX
The Senior Citizen
“The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree—
they shall bring forth fruit in old age.”
Psalm 92:12–14
SOUL SIX
The mauve-blue twilight lay over the snowy city and the street lamps began to bloom like faint golden balls. A cold and ruthless wind lifted the snow and threw it into the air in powdery “ground blizzards.” It was the dinner hour for the majority of the city’s working people, but in the great apartment houses men were just arriving from offices and preparing for a relaxing cocktail. Now, one by one, the floors of office buildings glowed as cleaners moved about and one by one the apartments lit up and draperies were drawn against the winter night. Weather like this was unusual for the city; the inhabitants enjoyed it, if young. The old shivered.
Except Bernard Carstairs, who was sixty-five and abroad in the twilight and walking from the Senior Citizens Center to his home in one of the apartment buildings nearby. He strode like a young man, though he was somewhat too heavy for his height, which was only average. He had put on these extra pounds since his forced retirement six months ago, and neither he nor his doctor liked them. “Better than getting shriveled, though, like a lot of you retired men,” the doctor had said to him. “Bernie, biologically you are less than fifty. A damned shame, a damned shame.” On this they were both agreed. “Better look around for something to do,” the doctor had added, looking pityingly at his friend, who had hardly a gray thread in his fine crop of dark-brown hair. Bernard’s blue eyes were strenuous and young and alive, and he needed glasses only to read fine print. His features were blunt, his cheeks taut and well-colored, his lips firm and strong, his chin defiant though now there was a roll below it due to his increased weight, a roll which had not been there a year ago. All his actions were vigorous and definite, and he had never had an ache or pain in his life before, until now. Sometimes he was so weary that
he could scarcely move, and for this weariness his doctor had prescribed a tonic. “It won’t do any good, I’m afraid,” said the doctor. “You’ve got an active mind and it’s going to seed, and it doesn’t like it, and so it reflects itself in your body and complains.”
“Well, what shall I do?” asked Bernard. “I was only a minor executive in the company. If I’d been major maybe they’d have kept me on. But, I didn’t have much ambition, I suppose. I was the contented kind; I didn’t like the rat race of competition; never did. I did my work more than adequately, but Kitty and I, not having children, jobbed along nicely, saving, seeing friends, having social affairs, joining a few do-good clubs, sleeping well, eating well, having a nice apartment, some good clothes, a car every three years, taking vacations in the summer. It was enough for us—me. I didn’t particularly like my job, but it was all I knew. I married young and took the first fairly good job I could find, bookkeeping, and I figured—hell—it was a living, and then I went slowly up the ladder to my last position, where I was paid twelve thousand a year, with a pension plan, and Social Security, and fringe benefits, and I thought—hell—the other guys in the big jobs were dropping dead all the time or getting ulcers and having no fun, and here I was, contented and safe, with a secure future after retirement, and why should I worry? Or want more pay, which would only go to taxes anyway? No, I didn’t like the job, much, but I did it well; treadmill like they say, but a comfortable one. I guess I’m just an ordinary guy.”
“Who isn’t?” said the doctor.
Bernard looked at him shrewdly, and his blue eyes were not the eyes of “an ordinary guy.” “Some aren’t, Doc,” he said. “And a hell of a lot of us settle just for contentment—like me. It isn’t enough.”
“‘Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day,’” said the doctor. “St. Paul.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Better find out, Bernie. No one can find it for you; just you.”
Bernard’s wife was fifty-five, busy with many pleasant things. She loved her husband. But after the first two months of euphoria over his retirement at sixty-five, and a first trip abroad, she found her husband’s constant presence wearisome. He was not the kind to grow old over the TV set, nor the sort to bury himself in “community activities” or in busy-work, or tinkering. He had no hobbies; he did not even play golf. He had never cared much for alcohol, but now he was drinking too much beer, and he walked some, and yawned. He had not, during his busy, active days at the office, and his social affairs at night, become much of a reader. He had declared that when he retired he would “read all the good books I’ve missed.” But he was essentially an “outward” man; reading constantly, for weeks, had wearied him. His education had not gone beyond high school; he found many of the allusions in the better books bewildering and unknown to him. He began to haunt the library. But his muscular body rebelled at so much quietude and inactivity. Unfortunately, too, he did not find the classics relevant to modern life; they had been written for a contemplative people and Bernard was not contemplative in the least. They had been written for those who had many long twilight hours, and Bernard disliked twilight hours intensely. They had been written for those who calmly accepted life and lived serenely, but Bernard had not been trained to a fatalistic attitude nor was he basically serene.
No, he had not liked his position as assistant traffic manager in his company; but he had not really disliked it, either. It was a living. For the major part of his life he had considered that quite enough; he was “only an ordinary guy.” Now that he was retired he could not claim that he missed “the old gang at the office.” He didn’t miss them at all. He had never gone back for a visit even once.
Financially, he was comfortable. He and Kitty had always saved a fixed sum of his income, and he had three nice annuities due on his sixty-fifth birthday. He also had his Social Security check, and his pension, which amounted to fifty percent of his salary. Sometimes he and Kitty vaguely considered “a house in the country, or in the suburbs, anyway, where we can potter around in the garden and raise prize roses or something.” But both he and Kitty were city people, and Kitty had all her friends in the city and so did he. Moreover, the very thought of moving, of disorder, of decisions to make regarding old furniture and buying new, repelled both of them. They owned the nice and pleasant apartment where they lived and which they had occupied for twenty-five years. They knew every corner, every door. They felt homesick when they merely considered leaving it all for a strange raw place in the suburbs.
The thing was that the apartment had become, lately, less a home to Bernard than a comfortable, warm prison. While Kitty was off at her luncheons he sat in the living room and tried to read, and he would become conscious of the total silence about him, the lack of movement, the hiatus. Then he would go out and walk restlessly, staring at shop windows, visiting the zoo in nice weather, wandering in the library, buying groceries, going to afternoon movies.
For the first time he began to think of the years ahead. How long would he live? Then another thought would intrude itself: “Not long. One of these days I am going to die, maybe in a couple of years, maybe ten years, maybe fifteen. Is that all there is, just sitting around like this, waiting to die? What has become of my life? And what will I do with the rest of it?”
“Why don’t you see what you can do at the Senior Citizens Center?” Kitty had asked a week ago. She had infused enthusiasm in her voice, and Bernard understood at once. He was getting on Kitty’s nerves, and he didn’t blame her. He was getting on his own nerves. His strong and youthful body seemed to be straining at its seams; he had never been very conscious of his mind, in the busy years. Yet somehow it had come alive with all sorts of uneasy and disquieting questions and restlessnesses these days. To please Kitty he had gone to the Senior Citizens Center this morning, and he had stayed the day.
It was a terrible mistake. Bernard was not a man for violent emotions, but today, contemplating and talking to the men and women of his own age at the Center, or older, had given him his first taste of active and overpowering despair. What had merely been a vague uneasiness in his mind these past months became panic and terror. It was not that the sight of the aging appalled him so; it was their complacent acceptance of uselessness and their empty waiting for the death that lurked in all the shadows of the various comfortable rooms of the Center. Some rocked and talked together before a nice fireplace, their hands folded. They talked of their children and their grandchildren and the trips they had taken the last summer. (They did not talk of any future for themselves; they had placidly accepted the fact that they had no future.) Some of them droned on endlessly about the important positions they had once held and how their superiors had regretted their retirement. Some of them were engaged in the “hobby shops,” creating mediocre and clumsy objects which no one would ever buy, like, or use. Some of them played pinochle, or bridge. There was a small library, and tables covered with magazines. Every day earnest youngish women came in to give “talks” about gardening and other hobbies, about health and exercise, about “great books,” and Bernard heard that clergymen came here also once or twice a week to hearten “our wonderful Senior Citizens” and to tell them how really important they still were to the world. (“How?” asked Bernard of one of the older men he had met. The other had had no answer.) There was, tactfully on the part of the clergymen, no talk of death and the everlasting life.
Some of the younger Senior Citizens ladies engaged in volunteer hospital work, but they found it tiring at their age. They preferred their plastic photographic folds of featureless grandchildren and boasting of their sons and their daughters or growing gently spiteful at the spouses of those sons and daughters. No one listened to them, of course; the other ladies also had their plastic folds of photographs and wanted to talk of them. Some of the men were sometimes occupied in charity drives, and house-to-house calls. They met “such interesting people.” Social workers, ardent young wome
n with intense faces, came every morning, with solicitous “help” for those whose Social Security checks were all they had, and with psychiatric jabber about “adjustment,” or with urgings to the indolent to engage in the half-dozen hobby shops, or take more exercise. “After all,” said the ardent young ladies, “you must Continue to Take an Interest in Life.”
The majority nodded contentedly and went back to their dozes or their cards and their conversation about their grandchildren. A few, a very few, looked at the girls cynically, and sighed.
“I think,” said the vigorous Bernard to one of the social workers, “that what most of us need is a job.”
He received applause from the few, and an affronted stare from the majority, and a look of bafflement from the girls.
“Come now, Mr. Carstairs,” said one of the girls, “you know very well that no employer these days will hire a man of your age, or older. There are the pension plans to be considered, and the Social Security, and the natural infirmities of the old which make them a hazard in some employment, and employees’ benefits which no employer wants to pay for in the case of the—well, the older folks. And there are the government forms, which demand—”
“Too much goddamned government!” Bernard had exclaimed, and was astonished at himself, for he had always thought it very comforting to people to know that the government was looking after their interests these days. “Maybe if we didn’t have Social Security and all the pension plans and fringe benefits most of us here would have jobs and be of use to the world, and not thrown-away garbage. That’s all we are: thrown-away garbage. Even worse, we’re a burden to the young husbands and fathers who have to pay out those Social Security checks to us in the form of taxes.”