Free The Listener by Taylor Caldwell Page A

to the priest he’d tell me never to see Phil again, and how could I stand that? I loved him; he was all I had.
     
    “I thought he’d be home for Thanksgiving, but there was this football game, and the whole family went to the college town to be with Phil and see the game. You wouldn’t believe it! He was playing football! They came back, and I’d listen, and they’d say, ‘What a wonderful improvement in dear Phil’. That was his mother and sisters. The sisters were all older’n me and had a lot of boyfriends, and one was engaged. About time, too; she was twenty-six, the oldest. Married one of the men in the bank.
     
    “Well, there was Christmas coming, and Phil would be home. Except he wasn’t. You’d think the family would be mad, wouldn’t you? But they weren’t. It seems like he’d met some son of a big shot from Philadelphia, and they’d invited Phil for the holidays. He was Phil’s best friend. But old man Mallon puffed up and grinned and said his boy was coming along and it was an honor, and though the old lady cried the girls jumped around as if they’d just got diamond bracelets or something.
     
    “And then I got this pain in my chest. It wouldn’t go away. It ached all the time, day and night. Mom died of heart trouble, and I went to a doctor. He charged me five dollars, and I was only getting ten a week. He said I didn’t have a heart condition. ‘It’s all in your mind, young lady,’ he joked, and pinched my cheek. ‘Some boy, eh? Well, go home to Mother and play the field. I don’t approve of this going steady at your age. Seventeen? Too young. Just you go out with all the nice boys you can, and dance and have fun and wear your pretty clothes and stay close to Dad and Mother for some time yet’. Much he knew about me! Anyway, the pain wouldn’t go away. It was like something eating at my heart all the time.
     
    “Did you ever have a pain like that, loving somebody so hard? A friend, maybe, or your mother or your father? And wanting to see them like mad, and you couldn’t? Well, it was that way with me. And Phil didn’t come home for the spring vacation. He didn’t come home until June. Nine long months.
     
    “But the minute I saw him I knew he still loved me, and that’s all that mattered. He came up to my room the very first night he was home, and it was like he’d never gone away. Every night, the whole time he was home, when he could. He’d filled out; he was a man and not a boy, twenty years old. I was so proud of him, and so happy. Why, even the air had sparkles in it! And we had only one year to go before we could be married.”
     
    Mary wept deeply into her handkerchief. She could not stop for a long time. Then her face was flushed and swollen. She glanced furtively at her cheap watch. Why, it was half-past one! It was Easter morning. “Oh, God,” she whispered.
     
    She smoothed a leaf of the flowers. “That boy he met at college, he came in the summer, and Phil was out a lot with him, showing him off, his sisters said. The youngest sister sure had her eye on him, and she had no looks at all. Like a plucked chicken. She used to stare at my hair, and she said I bleached it! I never bleached it in my life, and then the old lady swooped down on me and examined the roots of my hair. Like I wasn’t human, or something, and she could do what she wanted to me. I wanted to kick her hard. But that meant I wouldn’t be there anymore, and maybe new people would find out about Phil and they wouldn’t let him come and stay with me.
     
    “Well, it wasn’t like the first summer. Phil was out and around; the family made him go. And then in August he went off to sail on that boy’s father’s yacht, and you’d think, by the way his family acted, that he’d been elected President. But before he went he came up to my room on the last night, and it was like in the very beginning, and he kept whispering how much he loved me. And he gave me the first present I ever had. The