I See You Read online

  Helen said tensely, “It won’t be easy to think up something.”

  “No,” said Elyot cheerfully.

  “It could be dangerous.…” said Helen.

  “How could an experiment, only twelve hours long, hurt anybody?” scoffed Elyot. “I am willing. If I draw one of my own it will serve me right. I am hoping to get something new and strange to me. I’d like to see what would happen.”

  “So would I,” said Helen tremulously.

  “Nothing much would happen,” said Sonia as if to comfort her. “Unless somebody tried to play a joke on one of us.”

  Helen showed alarm at once and it seemed that Sonia’s suspiciousness was going to kill the fragile notion that was Elyot’s idea. Elyot, however, braced against this.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he cried. “We’ll let Mac here do the drawing. He couldn’t possibly rig anything.”

  The man in the wooden chair winced, very slightly.

  Helen said, rather quickly, in a caressing tone, “Oh, yes. Please, Mac, you draw for us. I’d like that. That would seem as if we were—oh, putting ourselves in the hands of more than chance.…”

  The man in the wooden chair was rigid.

  “Wait a minute,” snapped Elyot. “Don’t bring religion into this. I’m talking about an experiment.”

  “I just mean,” said Helen, “like consulting the Oracle at Delphi.”

  “Or superstition, either,” said Elyot sourly. “It’s common sense to let Mac—”

  Sonia said loudly, “Now, wait a minute. Are we actually going to do this? And another thing. Must we tell? Tell what we draw, I mean?”

  “Hmmm.” Elyot became thoughtful. “A good question.”

  “I wouldn’t consider it, if I had to tell,” said Sonia bluntly.

  “Naturally, we wouldn’t tell until the day was over,” Elyot conceded. “But how can we evaluate an experiment if we don’t know the results?” he demanded.

  “Just the results, all right,” said Sonia. “Like good, bad, or indifferent.” Her green eyes were shrewd.

  But Elyot said slowly, “If you take a vow and then can’t keep your word—if you say you will and then just goof off—you are not even a minimum human being.” Elyot was absurdly serious, but it stung.

  Sonia said shortly, “All right. We’ll try it. And Mac does the drawing. That’s if he will …”

  The man in the wooden chair spoke up. “I’ll draw for you if you want me to.” He had a lovely voice, warm and deep.

  “It’s agreed then,” cried Elyot delightedly. “We’ll do it on Monday. Who’s got any pennies?” He began to shed pennies upon the table top. Kevin MacCleery could hear them clattering. He listened, because he could not see. He was blind.

  He was thinking: Children, playing games. What did they know about the things fate could do to a person? They were believers, they implied. Believers in what? In their own total responsibility? If they did what was right instead of doing what was wrong, then they would have happy lives? Or succeed? Ah, children! Eager, naïve, ridiculous babies. Failures, they called themselves. Yet fate had left each of them two eyes.

  Kevin MacCleery had lost his sight eight months before. He was twenty-nine years old, a little senior to these others. He had been trained for architecture. He had done what was right, worked hard, disciplined himself, and he had had his feet on a path. But a man who cannot see cannot create a building.

  So Kevin MacCleery was burrowing here, in his mother’s house. Ever since his personal catastrophe, he had kept safe here, and more than half dead. The world came to him faintly through his ears. He had made do with radio for months, but this was becoming hard to bear. In the last few weeks, he had taken to dropping in on Elyot when the girls from the top floor were there.

  His mother encouraged this. She was so glad, she said, that he was making friends. She had even brought up coffee and cookies; he had had to tell her not to do that again.

  He and his mother were in an impasse. Mary MacCleery was a widow with this big old-fashioned house into which she took boarders. She also worked by day in a dress shop. Thus she managed. For Kevin to burrow here cost very little. What he ate. That was all. Clothes, he cared nothing about. He was not competing anymore. What did it matter?

  Kevin was a burly, muscular young man with a pleasant blunt-featured face, and a shock of black hair. He asked his mother to cut his hair once in a while. So she fed him and she cut his hair. Otherwise, she could not help him at all.

  Everything she said irritated him almost unbearably. Poor Mary MacCleery could express herself only in clichés. Banalities. She advised him, lovingly, to “try to make the best of it.” He said best was a superlative of good, and where was there any good in being blind? She had wanted him to get a guide dog and go out. He had asked why. Nothing to see. She had begged him to learn Braille. He said that he had read the classics and what esoteric and unpopular stuff he might want to read now would not be available. She uttered hopeful phrases about employment and being useful that had made him, on at least one occasion, shout “Basket weaving!” at her.

  He was always sorry, later, but he could not help it. He could not communicate with his mother. He burrowed here. There was nothing to fill the hours, either by night or by day.

  So, to go and sit in Elyot’s room, and listen, had become important to him. He found this possible because of Elyot’s character. Elyot had no sensitivity. He was so wound up in the champing of his wits that he did not curb his tongue for the sake of anyone’s feelings. Elyot could say, for instance, “Mac couldn’t possibly rig anything,” meaning “the poor so-and-so is blind.” As Elyot knew, and did not pretend not to know—and if he pitied it, Elyot never said so.

  The girls were all right too. Sonia had been, from the first. She had accepted his presence and his condition with a good-natured indifference welcome to him. Sonia was a little aloof, a little mysterious, but she did not fuss. Helen was sometimes inclined to coo, but Kevin could put up with it. He could remember Helen’s looks.

  In fact, he could remember how they all had looked, when he had had his sight. When he had been on his path, he had thought of them as a rum lot. The younger three among his mother’s boarders, able to afford no better place to live. Unfortunates, all three. Ungifted. Handicapped. There was Elyot’s grotesque physique, Helen’s unprettiness, Sonia’s fat. They had seemed to him, in those days, doomed to a mediocrity worse than failure. Comparatively speaking. Compared to his own strong body, good looks, energetic brilliance, and his achievements, his ambition, and his destiny.

  Now, of course, it was different. They could see and he could not.

  He had come to understand them better, as he listened to all that they said, and heard perhaps a little more. He had heard just now the self-drama in Helen’s melancholy and the touch of selfish lethargy behind Sonia’s reluctance.

  He, himself, thought the idea was mildly interesting. It was just like Elyot, of course, who was one of the brainy idiots one finds in the world. Someone pursuing reason through the mazes of reality and not even noticing that he was in a maze. Kevin would gladly draw their lots for them. He would be the instrument of chance, their blind fate. It seemed appropriate.

  Saturdays were just chunks of time for Kevin MacCleery but Sundays were always especially trying. His mother asked him to go to church with her in the morning, as usual, and he as usual refused to go. After church she stayed at home to “be with him.” She cooked a special dinner. She tried to chat. By midafternoon, the lame talk between them died of her frustration and his guilt. He could not help it; she drove him nearly wild. Kevin went away from her and drifted upstairs.

  Elyot had guaranteed to be out of his room on Saturday evening, from six o’clock on, and most of Sunday afternoon. So Kevin, hearing the room to be empty, opened the unlocked door and groped his way to the table. He was tempted. Perhaps he could remember the keyboard of a typewriter. Perhaps he could put a motto or two round a penny and none of them would know. A dirty t
rick. But he sat down at the table. Life, he thought bitterly. This is an adventure. I might be able to type a stupid line.

  His left hand felt for the tobacco tin and fumbled within it. There were several wrapped pennies in the tin now. His right hand found paper. He fed it into the machine. His fingers felt thick.

  When he thought he had them placed, he began to type. He hit a few keys and felt for the lever that changes to another line. Was it set for double spacing? Couldn’t quite be sure. He hit more keys. Impulsively he pushed the key that locked in capital letters. He wouldn’t trust himself to shift and capitalize properly. The typewriter clicked, sounding agreeably busy. He practiced, and felt a brief elation. This collapsed suddenly.

  Life? Kevin ripped the sheet of paper out. He folded it and began to tear. He did not know whether his fingers had been where he wished them to be. He did not know whether what he had put on paper was gibberish or not. How could he ever know? He couldn’t see.

  His right toe felt for the wastepaper basket. He let the strips of paper fall out of his hands. So much for the adventure.

  “Toujours gai,” he would type out for them. Or “Look on the bright side.” But he could not. And it was best that he did not. Let the children have their little game. Let him not spoil it with his experienced bitterness. His part was to draw for them, in the morning. Then he could listen, in the evening, to the results of their adventure. It was something. It was the most that he would have.

  Kevin went listlessly back down the stairs and heard his mother say, “Would you like some music, dear? There is the symphony, so nice …”

  Nice! “Oh, Mother,” he said, “for heaven’s sake let me be!”

  Mary MacCleery’s throat ached. She knew that what came out of it always struck him wrong. “Well, then,” she piped, “If you don’t mind, dear, I should do a little housework.”

  “Yes, Mother. I’m sorry.”

  “I know.’

  “You’ll never know,” he muttered.

  She watched his big body, his good body, her beloved son’s body, shamble off toward his bedroom where she knew he would lie in the dark, beyond her reaching.

  Mary MacCleery went upstairs to see to her house. She thanked heaven for this house, and the extra rooms she could rent out for money so that she could keep and feed her son. She believed in counting her blessings and looking on the bright side. She did not always find the mottoes easy to live by.

  On Monday morning at a quarter to eight Elyot, shaved, dressed, poised for the day’s work, opened his door for Helen and Sonia. Kevin MacCleery was just coming up the stairs.

  “Now, then,” said Elyot, pleased that everyone was prompt, “here we are. Gather round.”

  The four of them gathered round the tobacco tin.

  “Have you got it, Mac?” Elyot’s hand took Kevin’s and with no pity and no nonsense, and no particular tact, he put the blind man’s hand upon the tin.

  “Got it,” Kevin said.

  “First, swear?” said Elyot, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. (Sonia’s eyes were sleepy; Helen’s were bright.) “You do solemnly swear,” said Elyot to them, “that this will be Motto Day? From eight o’clock this morning until eight o’clock tonight?”

  “I swear,” said Helen.

  “I swear,” said Elyot.

  Sonia said, “Me, too. Hurry up. Dish them out, Mac.”

  Kevin’s fingers pursued the pleasant weight of pennies round the tin’s inside. “For you, Helen,” he said quietly.

  “Thanks, Mac.” The wrapped penny went out of his fingers.

  “For you, Sonia.”

  “Thanks, old bean.” Sonia’s lazy voice.

  “For you, Elyot.”

  “Good.”

  “And for me,” said Kevin. His fingers took up a penny.

  Silence. Then, “Want me to read yours for you, Mac?” said Elyot briskly, accepting this development without fuss.

  Kevin said, “No. No, thanks. I’ll find out.”

  “A meeting is called at eight o’clock,” said Elyot.

  “All right. So long.”

  “See you later, Mac.”

  “Bye.”

  “Au’voir.”

  “See you later,” said Kevin.

  The absurd little ceremony made Kevin smile, as he followed them slowly down the stairs. After all, it was interesting. It was something to think about.

  He could smell bacon and he went into his mother’s kitchen. Her anxious voice said, “Two eggs, dear?”

  “Fine.” He could hear the eggs crack. His fingers held the penny. “I swear,” he said, under his breath. His lips curved.

  Mary MacCleery, watching, felt weight lift off her heart. Let him keep smiling, please, God! But she must be very careful. She put the plate of bacon and eggs before him without speaking.

  Her son said, “Mother, would you please read aloud what’s written on this?”

  “Of course, dear.” She did not ask why. Her voice was nervous. She took the crumpled bit of paper. “It’s typed,” she said. “It’s just three words.”

  “What words?”

  “Why, it says, ‘of the party.’”

  “Says what?”

  She hadn’t heard ano te like this in his voice for months. “Just ‘of the party.’ I don’t understand.” Her voice trembled. She could see the familiar bitterness and disappointment fading to the familiar resignation on his face.

  “What did you do, Mother?” he asked, in a moment. “In Elyot’s room last night?”

  “Why … I told you. I went round the house to check—you know Mrs. Barnes doesn’t always empty things as she should. I … what have I done? I didn’t know,” she cried in a high-pitched defensive voice. She had done wrong, doing right. She always did, somehow. She never pleased him.

  “The tobacco tin on Elyot’s desk?” His voice was cold and stern and she trembled.

  “Well, I emptied it, dear. I thought it was just paper. So I threw it into the fireplace and lit a match. I thought I’d get rid of it. Well, of course, as the paper burned I saw the pennies. Then I realized that Elyot must have had them wrapped up in paper for some reason. There were some more slips of paper in the wastepaper basket. So I just wrapped the pennies up again.

  “Perhaps it was childish,” said Kevin mournfully, “but it was interesting. But you wrecked the whole experiment.”

  “Darling, what did I do? I didn’t mean anything wrong.”

  “Clumsy,” he said, brutal with irritation. “It doesn’t mean anything, now. You saw to that. You got hold of my stupid practicing …”

  “Practicing? On the typewriter? Oh, were you practicing, dear?” Her voice fluted with hope. It made him furious. Poor Mary MacCleery, looking on the bright side, said, “But the typing is perfect, darling. There’s not a single mistake!”

  He said, “Mother, heaven help us, you mean well. I know that.” His teeth clenched. His head drooped.

  She said timidly, “Tour eggs, getting cold …” She never knew how she managed to fail him, and it was breaking her heart.

  “All right,” said Kevin. “You didn’t know. It can’t be helped. It’s ruined, but never mind.”

  She bit her lip until it hurt. She must not speak. Whatever would come out of her mouth would only rub him the wrong way. She loved him; she wanted to help him; she meant well. Oh, God knew it! But there was only one thing that she could do, just now. Keep silent and let her tears roll silently.

  The house was very quiet when everyone had gone to work on Monday morning. Outside, cars rushed by. A dog barked. A child cried out. Sometimes, of course, the old house creaked.

  Kevin could find his way about the downstairs part of the house very well by now. He was free to roam. He could turn on the radio. He could find his food in the kitchen. He could answer the telephone, were it to ring—which it seldom did.

  So he moved about this morning, restless, sorry for the wreck of the little experiment. He could imagine the others, puzzled, angry, disappointe
d. It was ruined forever, so he judged. He didn’t think they could work themselves up to the same pitch, another time. He could not, himself. So, too bad. Too bad.

  After they had sworn, so solemnly.… He had sworn, too.

  “If you can’t keep your word,” Kevin heard Elyot’s voice saying in scorn, “you’re not even a minimum human being.”

  Elyot had said they must commit themselves, blindly. I am blind, thought Kevin. What was it that I swore? I swore to live by whatever was on that piece of paper, for twelve hours. And what was on the paper? Three nonsensical words. “Of the party.”

  How can I live by them? What party? I am of no party, unless it will be the sad party of four, tonight, when I will have to tell them how the whole experiment went sour.

  Wait. Now, wait … I am of the party of four that drew pennies out of the tobacco tin. I dealt myself in. What does it mean to be of the party? Partisan? On their side? Then what I should do is let them all know, right away, what has happened. I mustn’t let them flounder all day. I must get word to them. Yes, that’s it. I must warn them. But how can I?

  He moved restlessly from room to room. There was only one way and he wasn’t sure that it was possible. Finally, he stood with the telephone in his hands. Did he know enough about where the three others worked to reach them on the telephone?

  He had sworn. This was his duty. All right. Kevin dragged the phone, on its long cord, to where he could sit in an easy chair. His fingers were clumsy on the dial. He moved the dial round. “Operator,” said a voice.

  “Operator, how do I get Information?”

  “Dial 113 for Information,” singsonged the voice.

  “I am blind,” burst our Kevin desperately. “Please help me to remember how the letters are set on the dial.”

  He seemed to hear, in the silence, something breaking. Then the voice said, in a perfectly human, nonprofessional manner, “Of course. Now follow me. The hole at the top of the right is one only—no letter—then the next one round to the left is ABC. Have you got that?”