Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

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.