Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Get her out of the room.” Hugo gestured toward Miss Cattavi. The things he had to tell Dr. Sebastian could not be said in front of a woman.

“Miss Cattavi, please …” Dr. Sebastian said.

“Animal,” Miss Cattavi said, but she went out of the room and closed the door behind her.

Moving out of range, Dr. Sebastian went behind a desk. He remained standing. “I could have sworn that your ear was in superb condition,” he said.

“Superb!” Hugo was sorry he had taken his hand off the doctor’s throat.

“Well, you can hear your team’s signals now, can’t you?” Dr. Sebastian said.

“If that’s all I could hear,” Hugo moaned.

“Ah.” Dr. Sebastian brightened. “Your hearing is better than normal. I told you you had an extraordinary aural arrangement. It only took a little cutting, a bold clearing away of certain extraneous matter.… You must be having a very good season.”

“I am having a season in hell,” Hugo said, unconscious that he was now paying tribute to a French poet.

“I’m terribly confused,” the doctor said petulantly. “I do better for you than you ever hoped for and what is my reward—you come in here and try to strangle me. I do think you owe me an explanation, Mr. Pleiss.”

“I owe you a lot more than that,” Hugo said. “Where did you learn your medicine—in the Congo?”

Dr. Sebastian drew himself to his full height. “Cornell Medical School,” he said with quiet pride. “Now, if you’ll only tell me—”

“I’ll tell you, all right,” Hugo said. He paced up and down the room. It was an old house and the timbers creaked. The sound was like a thousand sea gulls in Hugo’s ear.

“First,” said Dr. Sebastian, “just what is it that you want me to do for you?”

“I want you to put my ear back the way it was when I came to you,” Hugo said.

“You want to be deaf again?” the doctor asked incredulously.

“Exactly.”

Dr. Sebastian shook his head. “My dear fellow,” he said, “I can’t do that. It’s against all medical ethics. If it ever got out, I’d be barred forever from practicing medicine anyplace in the United States. A graduate of Cornell—”

“I don’t care where you graduated from. You’re going to do it.”

“You’re overwrought, Mr. Pleiss,” the doctor said. He sat down at his desk and drew a piece of paper to him and took out a pen. “Now, if you’ll only attempt, in a calm and orderly way, to describe the symptoms.…”

Hugo paced up and down some more, trying to be calm and orderly. Deep down, he still had a great respect for doctors. “It started,” he began, “with hearing the other team’s signals.”

Dr. Sebastian nodded approvingly and jotted something down.

“In the huddle,” Hugo said.

“What’s a huddle?”

Hugo explained, as best he could, what a huddle was. “And it’s fifteen yards away and they whisper and sixty thousand people are yelling at the top of their lungs all around you.”

“I knew it was a successful operation,” Dr. Sebastian said, beaming in self-appreciation, “but I had no idea it was that successful. It must be very helpful in your profession. Congratulations. It will make a most interesting paper for the next congress of—”

“Shut up,” Hugo said. He then went on to describe how he began understanding what the signals meant. Dr. Sebastian’s face got a little graver as he asked Hugo to kindly repeat what he had just said and to explain exactly what was the significance of “Brown right! Draw fifty-five.… on two!” When he finally got it straight and noted that it was a secret code, different for each team, and that the codes were as jealously guarded from opposing teams as the crown jewels, he stopped jotting anything down. And when Hugo went on to the moment when he knew that the opposing quarterback was thinking, “No.… It won’t work, they’re overshifting on us,” in just those words, Dr. Sebastian put his pen down altogether and a look of concern came into his eyes.

The description of the poker game only made the doctor shrug. “These days,” he said, “we are just beginning to catch a glimmer of the powers of extrasensory perception, my dear fellow. Why, down at Duke University—”

“Keep quiet,” Hugo said, and described, with a reminiscent thrill of terror, the radio breakdown in the cockpit of the airplane and hearing the conversation between the pilots.

“I’m sure that could be explained,” the doctor said. “A freak electronic phenomenon that—”

Hugo cut in. “I want you to hear what happened to me with a girl,” Hugo said. “There was nothing electronic about that.”

Dr. Sebastian listened with interest as Hugo relived the experience with Sylvia. Dr. Sebastian licked his lips from time to time but said nothing. He clucked sympathetically, though, when Hugo described the laughter four stories up and Croker’s replay in the shower.

Hugo didn’t say anything about his conversations with the coach. There were certain things too painfull to recall.

In a rush, Hugo let all the rest of it out—Vietnam, the clubbing by the policeman, the interior sneer of the magistrate, Mrs. Fitzgerald’s dangerous radical leanings, the President’s speech, the television repairman’s chicanery, his mother’s judgment of his wife.

Dr. Sebastian sat there without saying a word, shaking his head pityingly from time to time.

Hugo went on, without mercy for himself, about the green dress and mink cuffs at a time when you’d bet for sure a woman would be thinking about other things. “Well,” he demanded, “what’ve you got to say about that?”

“Unfortunately,” Dr. Sebastian said, “I’ve never been married. A man my size.” He shrugged regretfully. “But there are well-documented cases on record of loving couples who have spent long years together, who are very close together, who have a telepathic sympathy with each other’s thoughts.…”

“Let me tell you what happened in church this morning,” Hugo said desperately. The doctor’s scientific ammunition was beginning to take its toll. The fearful thought occured to him that he wasn’t going to shake the doctor and that he was going to walk out of that door no different from the way he had entered.

“It is nice to hear that a big, famous, attractive young man like you still goes to church on Sunday morning,” the doctor murmured.

“I’ve gone to my last church,” Hugo said and gave him the gist of what he had heard the minister think while he was delivering his sermon on sex and violence.

The doctor smiled tolerantly. “The men of the cloth are just like us other poor mortals,” he said. “It’s very probable that it was merely the transference of your own desires and—”

“Then the last thing,” Hugo said, knowing he had to convince the doctor somehow. He told him about writhing on the floor of the church, the spring breezes, the smell of flowers, the unutterable ecstasy during Rock of Ages .

The doctor made an amused little moue . “A common experience,” he said, “for simple and susceptible religious natures. It does no harm.”

“Three hundred people watching a two-hundred-and-thirty-five-pound man jerking around on the floor like a hooked tuna!” Hugo shouted. “That does no harm? And you yourself told me that if people could really hear, they’d writhe on the floor in ecstasy when they listened to Beethoven.”

“Beethoven, yes,” the doctor said. “But Rock of Ages? ” He was a musical snob, Dr. Sebastian. “Tum-tum-tah-dee, tum-tum-dah,” he sang contemptuously. Then he became professional. He leaned across the desk and patted Hugo’s hand and spoke quietly. “My dear young man, I believe every word you say. You undoubtedly think you have gone through these experiences. The incidents on the playing field can easily be explained. You are highly trained in the intricacies of a certain game, you are coming into your full powers, your understanding of your profession leads you into certain instantaneous practical insights. Be grateful for them. I’ve already explained the cards, the minister, your wife. The passage with the lady you call Sylvia is a concretization of your sense of guilt, combined with a certain natural young man’s sexual appetite. Everything else, I’m afraid, is hallucination. I suggest you see a psychiatrist. I have the name of a good man and I’ll give him a call and—”