Different Seasons - Stephen King [247]
'No. I didn't love her. The things I've said about her sound like the things a man who is falling in love would notice-her eyes, her dresses, her laugh.' He lit his pipe with a special boltlike pipe-lighter that he carried, drawing the flame until there was a bed of coals there. Then he snapped the bolt shut, dropped it into the pocket of his jacket, and blew out a plume of smoke that shifted slowly around his head in an aromatic membrane.
'I admired her. That was the long and short of it. And my admiration grew with each of her visits. I suppose some of you sense this as a story of love crossed by circumstance.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Her story came out a bit at a time over the next half-year or so, and when you gentlemen hear it, I think you'll agree that it was every bit as common as she herself said it was. She had been drawn to the city like a thousand other girls; she had come from a small town
in Iowa or Nebraska. Or possibly it was Minnesota-I don't really remember anymore.
She had done a lot of high school dramatics and community theatre in her small town-good reviews in the local weekly written by a drama critic with an English degree from Cow and Sileage Junior College-and she came to New York to try a career in acting.
She was practical even about that-as practical as an impractical ambition will allow one to be, anyway. She came to New York, she told me, because she didn't believe the unstated thesis of the movie magazines-that any girl who came to Hollywood could become a star, that she might be sipping a soda in Schwab's Drug Store one day and playing opposite Gable or MacMurray the next. She came to New York, she said, because she thought it might be easier to get her foot in the door there and, I think, because the legitimate theatre interested her more than the talkies.
She got a job selling perfume in one of the big department stores and enrolled in acting classes. She was smart and terribly determined, this girl-her will was pure steel, through and through-but she was as human as anyone else. She was lonely, too. Lonely in a way that perhaps only single girls fresh from small midwestern towns know. Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness-the ache of the uprooted plant. Miss Stansfield, admirable as she may have been, determined as she may have been, was not immune to it And the rest follows so naturally it needs no telling. There was a young man in her acting classes. The two of them went out several times. She did not love him, but she needed a friend. By the time she discovered he was not that and never would be, there had been two incidents. Sexual incidents. She discovered she was pregnant. She told the young man, who told her he would stand by her and 'do the decent thing'. A week later he was gone from his lodgings, leaving no forwarding address. That was when she came to me.
During her fourth month, I introduced Miss Stansfield to the Breathing Method-what is today called the Lamaze Method. In those days, you understand, Monsieur Lamaze was yet to be heard from.
'In those days'-the phrase has cropped up again and again, I notice. I apologize for it but am unable to help it-so much of what I have told you and will tell you happened as it did because it happened 'in those days'.
So 'in those days', over forty-five years ago, a visit to the delivery rooms in any large American hospital would have sounded to you like a visit to a madhouse. Women weeping wildly, women screaming that they wished they were dead, women screaming that they could not bear such agony, women screaming for Christ to forgive them their sins, women screaming out strings of curses and gutter-words their husbands and