Free The Listener by Taylor Caldwell

doll. Big and thin, with dark eyes like a girl’s and thick black curly hair. And how he could talk! It made stars sparkle in your heart. When he kissed me for the first time — it was a few days after I started to work there — I thought I’d die. I really did.”
     
    The tears were coming faster now, but unheeded.
     
    “No one in the world had ever kissed me before, except Mom, and that was when I was confirmed. No boy, no man. Nobody but Mom and Phil. I thought I’d die. Oh, I’d read the movie and romance magazines, and I knew all about love, even if I didn’t get all the big words in the magazines. Why, it was better with Phil than I’d ever dreamed! It was like a dream, and I mean it.”
     
    Her voice dropped. “I guess it was all wrong, if you think about it, but nobody’d ever told me. Mom had too many of us to take care of; she never got around to it. Why, do you know, I was a big girl of sixteen, looking almost eighteen, and I didn’t even know how a lady got a baby! Honest, I didn’t. I just never thought of it; that shows you how stupid I was, with all the kids we had in the house. I never gave it a thought.
     
    “Well, Phil started coming up to my room after everybody was in bed, and it was like a dream. I was so happy. I guess that was what it was — I was happy. I’d never been happy before. And in that little town they didn’t keep kids in school until they were grown, the way they do now. Especially not kids like us. I left school when I was thirteen; Morn needed me. So all at once, there was Phil, and stars and being happy, and love. Sometimes I thought I’d burst, I was so happy.
     
    “Well, still, I had a sort of idea after a while that this wasn’t right. So I stopped going to confession. Anyway, Father Stephen was dead by then. I couldn’t go to confession and say to the new priest, ‘I think maybe I’m doing something wrong’. And then tell him. I was afraid he’d tell me I had to stop, and then I wouldn’t be happy anymore. I couldn’t live without that happiness, and Phil, and him stroking my hair on the pillow and telling me I was pretty and that I was all his love and there was never going to be anyone else. And I’m sure he meant it! Yes sir, I’m sure of that! We were going to be married when he was twenty-one and out from under his old man’s thumb, and with a job. I’d say to him, ‘Your pa won’t want you to marry me’. And he’d laugh and say, ‘Who cares? Besides, I’m only nineteen, and I can’t marry without his permission, so let’s forget everything but us’. He was always right. It was the only way.”
     
    She paused. Her blue eyes widened as she stared at the curtain, and she shrank. “Oh! Maybe you’re a priest! Maybe you want me to get out after what I told you? Should I get out?”
     
    The light beamed all about her. She listened intently. No voice answered her, but she was suddenly reassured that she could stay. She sighed over and over. “Well, thank you,” she murmured.
     
    She looked at the flowers on her knee, tall and fresh and sweet, and she smiled sadly.
     
    “Then Phil had to go away to college. ‘Don’t write me,’ he said. ‘If you do I’ll have to answer, and someway they’ll find out. Just remember I love you, and I’ll be thinking of you every minute’. Of course he was right. So I’d lie alone at night, dreaming of him. I wanted to pray for him, too, but I was afraid that God would be offended. I was beginning to be scared of Him, anyway. I guess that’s the way you feel when you know you’re doing something wrong. I’m not saying I didn’t know by then; I did. I wrote to this woman in the newspaper and didn’t sign my name, just ‘Polly’. And she answered it in the newspaper and she said I should leave ‘your place of employment at once! Go to a relative, or a close friend, or your clergyman’. That’s what she said. The only thing was I didn’t have no relatives or close friends, and if I went