The Listener

By Chloris Boone

Widowed Hope Long travels to Santa Barbara, California to visit her dying grandmother, Fanny Listener, who listens to troubled talkers in a small cottage behind her house. Someday Hope will become the listener, but today Fanny wants to tell Hope something before she dies. Fanny tells Hope that she is one of three triplets and further, that Fannie's husband had sold a male baby to a wealthy family and that little boy sang and danced his way into the hearts of millions of Americans. She did

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781681393933

Book preview

THE

LISTENER

Chloris Boone

Copyright © 2015 Chloris Boone

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2014

ISBN 978-1-68139-392-6 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-68139-393-3 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

THE LISTENER

Widowed Hope Long travels to Santa Barbara, California to

visit her dying grandmother, Fanny Listener, who listens to troubled talkers in a small cottage behind her house. Fanny Listener has become famous. Someday, Hope will become the listener; but today, Fanny wants to tell Hope something before she dies.

Suffering a series of small strokes, Fanny tells Hope that she is one of three triplets and further, that Fannie’s husband has sold a male baby to a wealthy family, and that little boy sang and danced his way into the hearts of millions of Americans. She did not tell Hope that Small Paul is now in the freezer behind bookshelves in the cottage.

Fannie’s maid, Rose, is in the kitchen and tells Hope that movie stars, celebrities, and Rose’s own priest have regular appointments; and this morning, the listener is listening to the husband of a senator.

Hope finds an injured dog and grows to love Sammy.

After Fannie’s death, store to door. Rob is still in love with his dead wife and is looking for a replacement to care for his baby Elizabeth. Rob and Hope begin a tepid sexual relationship; and Charity, one of Hope’s sisters, shows up and says that the third sister will come soon, and that Rob Burr is Hope’s half-brother. An investigation into Small Paul’s murder begins.

When the third triplet arrives, they demand that Hope give them what they see as their share of Fanny’s estate, but Hope has a will leaving it all to Hope, and she will not share.

Complex and original, The Listener is layered with information for the readers pleasure

Chapter One

Seven days ago, off the coast of Maui, a

large airplane had exploded over the Pacific causing the death of David Long. David’s widow, Hope Long, then in their small furnished apartment in San Juan, Puerto Rico, having no ties to that place, had been glad when David’s father, Charles Long, had invited her to visit him in Ojai, in central California, not far from Santa Barbara where Hope’s grandmother lives.

Having neither personal power nor wealth, projecting bland societal conformity in dress and manner, Hope holds little interest for Dr. Long who had expected someone brighter in return for his airline ticket. But then, not much, he attempts these days to give him full reward. To release his disappointment, he has, for the last two days, treated Hope as if she were a large, somewhat dull child, which response, though earned in part by Hope’s noncommittal placidity, has made her anxious to leave.

Well, Dr. Long, she said, standing by the great front door of David’s family home, her bags packed, and standing nearby. It has been good to see you again. The memorial service was quite touching. Thanks for inviting me. I appreciate your hospitality.

What is this? You are leaving? You are not supposed to leave now. I need you here . . .uh, uh . . .

Hope. My name is Hope.

Why, yes, of course, it is. I know your name. David often referred to you as ‘my wife,’ but I met you in 1984 at your wedding in San Francisco, and we were properly introduced. Hope. Of course. Why have you all of your luggage here?

I told you at dinner last night, Dr. Long. I must go to Santa Barbara today because my grandmother is very ill, and I must care for her. Didn’t you hear me when I told you?

Charles Long, confused by his daughter-in-law’s determined plans for departure, went to sit on a small bench near the door, opposite his still standing guest. He looked closely at her, craning his neck forward, searching her face with his watery eyes, trying to relate to her in order to prevent her from leaving him alone in his big house. Surely, there must be some commonality of interest or duty that could bind her to his needs. But her bland, tired face offered him nothing; and he, try as he might, could not summon up reason to stay her leaving. Then, like a ray of light from darkness, he thought of a surefire trick to keep her with him.

But uh, uh . . .

Hope, Dr. Long.

Uh, yes, Hope. Surely, you remember from dinner last night that I told you of my intention to go over some legal matters with you today. Mrs. Sanchez has prepared a lovely luncheon for us, and you and I can go into the library now and discuss financial details until she calls us. Please, dear uh, uh . . . Hope, leave your luggage there for now and join me as we had planned.

He stood on his wobbly legs, shuffled forward, took her arm, and steered her into the room from which he had come a few minutes earlier. Once in the room, he motioned her to a chair across from his writing table that stood in the center of the large room, ten feet from his desk, away from windows, doors, and distractions. Once seated on his table, he rummaged about in the long drawer under its top and brought forth a leather bound will, several bank statements, and financial reports and last, but not the least, a velum-bound estate plan with a summary of his insurance portfolio. While he was so occupied, Hope gazed around the rich, elegant room, which held many walnut bookcases packed with hundreds of good books, beautiful leather chairs, a marvelous carpet of intricate design, and well-framed landscape watercolors positioned under viewing lights. A large vase of fresh lilies was situated on a small table before an oil painting of two blonde, chubby-cheeked, smiling boys dressed in sailor suits. Hope recognized one of the boys from his nose and eyes. She thought the picture was probably David and his older brother who had died in the war. Brock? Yes, surely, it was a painting of David and Brock. Such sweet, dear-looking children. And both now dead. And dead, too, their mother who had seemed little more than a ghost from some distant past when spoken of by David in the early years of their marriage. And then forgotten or at least not mentioned in the following short years. Where was her picture? Why was she not represented in some pictorial way in this formal room? Surely, wives were usually given places in scenes such as this. Maybe Mrs. Long was the subject of a picture on the desk over there, the picture turned away from the room. Suddenly, it seemed important to find Mrs. Long’s picture, and Hope rose and went over to the desk by the window, turned the picture toward her, and looked to find a bearded face with glaring, angry eyes and a mouth pursed in bitterness. She put the picture down and walked back to her chair, Charles Long, without looking up from his will, said, My father, and kept on reading, and then put all papers down and, facing Hope, began to speak in his old man’s cracked voice, a voice still capable of speaking well with purpose.

Well, uh, Hope, it seems that only you and I remain as representatives of this family, a family that I thought would continue with many grandchildren to carry forth our traditions.

What traditions are those, Dr. Long?

Why, of scholarship and integrity, courage, and good work. I, of my father’s three sons, am the only living inheritor of his estate, and my sons, both excellent in every way were to carry on after me. My wife had relatives back in Nebraska, but those people were different from my stock, and I have lost contact with any of them. When my wife died, quite a few of them showed up for her funeral, but they were her relatives, not mine, and I haven’t so much as gotten a card from any of them since September. Not one of them has contacted me about David’s unfortunate accident. I wash my hands of any obligation to those people. Alice’s sister was positively rude to me at the chapel. Rude. She actually felt free to chide me for what she considered Alice’s alienation from her siblings. Rude. I would not have that woman near me if I were dying. And actually, I guess if I understand my physician correctly, I seem to be in a bit of a decline. Circulatory problems, it seems. But I get along. I am quite resourceful in maintaining myself. Still, I need someone here to oversee things as it were, just things needed to keep this place going smoothly. I thought you might want to stay longer and help me for a while.

Hope looked across to the old man sitting very upright and seemingly serene in his well-tailored clothing, he was looking at her calmly as if he had just reported on the content of some novel he had read and found slightly interesting. Pain, shock, grief, regret, or even pity was absent from his face or even from his voice, which had conveyed little more than resentment and contempt at his life’s events. How could he just sit there and talk about all that sadness and not indicate personal feelings appropriate to his tale? Just like David, really. Or rather, David had been like his father—distanced from ordinary feeling, from normal response to emotional loss. How sad. But she did not pity Charles Long. He, obviously, did not need or want her pity.

So, tell me, Dr. Long, I was married to David for eight years; and after our first year of marriage, other than gifts and cards at Christmas, his parents never wrote to him. Why didn’t you ever write or call?

We would have if we had felt it necessary. David called now and then for a chat. We understood his work and what he was trying to achieve. The National Science Foundation’s radio telescope in Puerto Rico with its work on high-resolution microwave searchings for extraterrestrial intelligence was of great interest to David’s mother and to me. When David lost his federal funding for his project and landed his new position at Keck on Maui, his mother and I knew all about it. My wife died before his actual acceptance at Keck, but he kept me informed. I did think, however, that it was incorrect that neither you nor David came to Ojai for her funeral service. Highly improper.

But we were in Las Campanas, Chile. David could not leave the Las Campanas telescope right then. He was tied to his project on fiber-optic cables. It was crucial for him to remain there.

Well, your funeral spray was quite nice. I suppose David had his reasons. But still, for me, personally, I found it regretful. And you, I believe, did not communicate at that time in any way.

I’m sorry I just felt like you people, did not expect anything from me. I only met his mother once when we got married.

Well, be that as it may. I do not wish to continue this aspect of our conversation. Now we will review my estate. You, as the only survivor bearing our family name in the event of my death, should know of the provisions I had made for David, provisions that under law, unless I change my will, would descend to you. Bring your chair closer, uh, Hope. You will find these papers interesting, I am sure. Papers were presented and explained.

Hope had studied science; she knew the presence near her was a force field of vibrating energy formed into a body of a trillion cells, each cell performing millions of tasks in communication with all other cells, with all space and time, but she did not think of that. She wanted to get away.

No, Dr. Long, she said, David did not have any insurance.

Chapter Two

Hope had a roadmap and a good sense of

direction, so it was not hard for Hope to leave Ojai, travel down from the mountains to the Pacific, and then turn north on the highway to Santa Barbara. It was about five fifteen, just before dark, and the sun had sunk below the great ocean leaving behind some of its light that made the sky a luminescent gold, then pink, then palest lavender before blackness and stars that shown like diamonds on velvet. But Hope, in her rented car from LAX, zooming along, traveling in rote, looked only at the road, trying to puzzle out what Charles Long had told her, wondering if he had really imagined that she would be willing to give up her life to be his attendant servant. Sure, why not? She had done it for his son. That is all Dave had ever seemed to want her to be, that and a breeder for his tribe. But four miscarriages and a stillborn baby girl had made him give up on that plan. Why had she ever fallen in love with such a jerk anyway? Not for his looks, for sure. Dave had been classic string bean jerky nerd to such a degree that cartoons about nerds seemed to have used him as a model. Skinny, tall, flailing arms and bony legs, glasses, thin white skin, gray eyes, and a head of hair that sprang up in cowlicks front and back. But a great grin, good teeth, and a wonderful wit with credentials for a great career. And he had chased after her, told her he wanted her on their first date, and had rushed her into a civil marriage within six weeks of their meeting. No one else had wanted her at that time. A few girlfriends are not enough to give life definition, goals, and dreams. As her instructor in her first and only physics class, as a scholar ten years her senior, and as a man rumored to have been married to an aspiring actress earlier in his life, he seemed someone before whom one should stand in awe from her vantage as a sophomore in science at Stanford. And then, school was over. She dropped out, took up cooking and cleaning in their small apartment, learned to keep her own counsel, learned never to say where were you? and concentrated on her reproductive system and its abilities and, sadly, inabilities, as they moved from place to place following the star of his career, of his dreams, and of his will. Viewed as necessary baggage by her husband, kept slightly off balance by his quirky sexuality followed by indifference, she faltered. And who will teach us in matters of the heart? Hope’s mother, until her death from lung cancer three years ago, was a brooding, silent housewife uninclined to demonstrate love or giving. Her father, an absent figure for the most part, knew gaiety and laughter, sought warm love and close companionship, but not with her mother when Hope was near.

Used to an absent father, Hope accepted an often-absent husband and tried not to analyze too closely the man she needed. So how was Hope to know that she had married a narcissist, a man in love with his own sexuality and male feelings, who would not admit to himself his orientation and sought to cover his secret fantasies by following a safe path made good by time? Today, Hope still has not figured it out. It is beyond her realm of reality to think of her husband as other than emotionally flawed, distant and uncaring in the years of their marriage. Now dead, Hope will attempt to make him kinder and more loving in her memories of him. It would do her no good now to analyze what is no more. But his father, still living, turning on the lights in his big house in Ojai, probably crabbing about a cold plate under his meal, now he can be analyzed to an amazing degree and such analyzation should be attempted. But Hope is tired.

The days in Ojai had been barren and wasted as far as she was concerned. David’s father only talked of himself and his assets whenever they had found themselves together. The fact that his son had died without life insurance or benefits of any kind for her causes her great concern. She has just left a life of constant moving and travel, rented furnished apartments, and leased cars paid from a modest salary (she thought), and a total lack of savings other than what was left in the joint checking account that she had closed to travel to California to stop by and see Dave’s dad and then to travel on to stay with her grandmother in Santa Barbara until she could pull herself together. But Charles Long had not asked about any of that. Well, so what and who cares? He could keep whatever he has for as long as he lives and then leave it all to his dog if he wanted. As far as she was concerned in her life, David and his father were both dead.

Broody and close to tears, Hope finds herself on the freeway in downtown Santa Barbara. When she gets to State Street, she makes a right and travels for thirty blocks through the center of one of America’s most beautiful cities but sees little of it because of her edgy, rattled condition. At the thirty-two hundred block of State Street, she turns right on Alamar and starts counting blocks until at block six, she reads a street sign that says Paseo Del Sueno, makes a right, and goes to the end of two blocks to a house surrounded by a ten-foot hedge of Eugenia. Pulling over, she parks her car, locks it, and goes up to the front door of a Mexican-styled large house, noting its tiled roof and the tiles inserted into its stucco face. She pauses, looking about, listening, feeling the air, which is still and cool. A feeling of peaceful calm comes to her, a remembrance from her childhood when she stood on this veranda on just such a night. She rings the bell, and the porch light is turned on. A huge dark oak door that is shut before her now opens. Her grandmother, wrapped in a dark blue wooly blanket, opens the door. Yes? asks Fanny Listener, How can I help you?

Two decades ago, when last seen by Hope, Fanny Listener had been a vigorous, well-muscled woman with thick gray curly hair, a fast-moving, fast-talking seventy-three-year-old dynamo. Could this frail old soul be grandmother? Where had the remembered grandmother gone?

Stepping forward to touch the weak softness of the old woman’s hand, taking her hand into her own warmth, Hope said, I’m a day early, but I hope you will let me in.

Hope? Why are you blonde? You do not look like my baby girl. I have been waiting and waiting for my granddaughter to come because I must tell her something. Are you sure that you are my Hope? Fanny peered from faded, bleary eyes into the soft face illuminated by the porch light, seeing at last something tender, something remembered, something that made the old woman say, Come in. It’s cold tonight. Come to the fire and warm yourself.

Time stands still in a well-cared-for home. Unlike grandmother, the house looked and felt as Hope remembered: her eyes saw the old, dignified furnishings polished well by careful service, her nose twinked memories of other winter fires, wool rugs, and floral arrangements, other faint traces of long-established habitat, and her ears caught the faint creaking of the ever settling structure beyond the quiet interior. But that old woman was a stranger, and now, Hope felt also a stranger to this place. Each was uncertain, uneasy, and yet needful of the other. Polite conversation was centered on Hope’s recent events until Fanny asked Hope to make them both a small dinner and stood to lead to the kitchen, hugged Hope, smiled tenderly at her, and told her again how glad she was to be with her. And then, like a good girl, she did as her grandma said and made them a simple supper, which they ate in peaceful quietude, and then helped her grandmother to her room and into bed. There would be lots of time to talk on other days. This day now nearly ended. She went out to her car and got her luggage, took it in, locked up the house, walked around the house looking at all of its many interesting treasures, got a glass of water, used the facilities in the old bathroom, checked grandmother once again, and went into her old room to find sleep under the well-remembered cotton patchwork quilt stitched with little girls holding umbrellas.

For the first time in many years, she slept like a rock until bright sunlight bounced from the hedge that surrounded the yard and reflected lightly on her window. She looked out beyond the ruffled curtains to see above the hedge a brilliant blue sky. The smell of coffee was in the air. A feeling of peaceful happiness was in her heart. She was here. It was not a dream. She was in grandmother’s house. The clock on her highboy dresser said ten o’clock. Surely not. How could she have slept twelve hours straight? She pulled on her robe, used again the old bathroom with its Spanish tiles, and went to the kitchen to find a middle-aged woman with jet-black hair cleaning the oven. The woman, on her knees, wearing rubber gloves and holding a scrubbing cloth, looked up at hope, smiled and said good morning.

Good morning to you too. I had forgotten how blue the sky is here. I am Hope. I don’t think we’ve met. Where’s my grandmother?

I am Rose. As you can see, I clean for her and help her in some ways. Your grandmother is at work. She begins her work each day at seven o’clock and returns at one o’clock. She has asked me to make you some breakfast, which I will be glad to do, said Rose, rising from her task, taking off her gloves, and extending her right hand in friendship.

Hope, glad for Rose’s kind manner, extends her hand and shakes the warm, soft hand of her grandmother’s housekeeper, finding satisfaction in their simple exchange. Then, after hearing that Hope wants only coffee, Rose puts back on her gloves to finish cleaning the oven. As she works, she chats with Hope who now is sitting on a stool by the counter. Rose, Hope finds, is full of information, and also likes to talk. While