Free The Listener by Taylor Caldwell Page B

prettiest compact. I bet it cost all of six dollars, maybe even more. It looked like gold and silver. I still got it.
     
    “Phil didn’t come home that Thanksgiving, either, and then the whole stupid family was invited to Philadelphia, and you never heard such a noise. Laughing and yelling and hugging each other. That was for Christmas. And Phil didn’t come home in the spring, and then not in June. The family was whispering around, but I couldn’t hear what they said. He came home in July for just four weeks. I was eighteen then, and he was twenty-one, and we could be married.” The handkerchief was wet and useless, so Mary let her tears flow, down onto the flowers, down onto her cheap but sturdy winter coat and neat dark blue dress.
     
    “Again it was like the beginning, those four weeks. And I’d say to him, ‘We can be married now, Phil’. And he’d kiss me hard on the mouth and say, ‘Just be patient’. And I was. And then at the end of that four weeks his engagement to that boy’s sister showed up in the newspaper.”
     
    Mary’s color ran from her cheeks at the remembrance of that old agony.
     
    “I thought I’d lose my mind,” she said, her voice hoarse and low. “I thought I’d just lose my mind. I couldn’t work. I said I was sick, and I went upstairs to my room and lay down on the bed. Maybe I fainted, or maybe I slept. I don’t know. But I kept waking up and saying, ‘Oh, thank God it was just a nightmare!’ Only, it wasn’t. It’d come back to me, like a knife in my chest. I kept thinking I was dying, and then I was scared, thinking of God and how angry He was with me, and this was my punishment and I’d end up in hell for sure. No one wanted me now, not Phil, not God. Nobody.”
     
    She could see the curtains through her tears. “Well, all that day I was sick and just about dying. And then I couldn’t go down and get dinner, and I could hear the old lady grumbling. I’d lift my head, and then I’d have to run into the bathroom and throw up. Phil wasn’t around. I waited and waited, and it got dark, and then the house was full of company; I could hear them laughing and shouting; I could hear Phil, too. I sat up and told myself it was a mistake. If it was true, and the old man forcing him into this, then we could run away together. I’d saved a little money, and Phil had a big allowance. I just had to wait for Phil.
     
    “And right about one in the morning he came to my room in his pajamas, like always, and I was in his arms, and I was almost out of my mind again. He kept putting his hand over my mouth and then trying to close it with kisses. He kept saying, ‘Hush, hush, it’ll be all right. You’ll see’. And I was so sick, and so tired. Then suddenly I was happy again. Phil would take care of everything. I’d just about fallen asleep, I was so tired, when the light flashed on, and there was the old man.”
     
    Mary shuddered and cringed and squeezed her eyes together.
     
    “It was awful,” she whispered. “I pulled up the sheet around me, and Phil jumped out of bed and pulled on his pajamas, and the old man looked like he was going to go up in flames. And he looked at me! I never had anyone look at me like that! And he said, ‘The evil woman taken in adultery. You dirty tramp, in a better age than this they’d stone you to death. Get out of this house at once, you filthy creature’.
     
    “And Phil kept saying, ‘Now, Dad, please, Dad, it’s all right, Dad. Don’t shout like that. You’ll have Mother and the girls up here. Please, Dad. It’s all right’. And all I was afraid of was that the old man would punch him. But he didn’t. He kept looking at me, like he hated me like death, and he said, ‘My poor boy, seduced by this vile wretch who dared to sleep in a house where innocent young girls are sleeping. My poor boy. Go to your room’. I almost laughed; I never wanted to laugh so much in my life, though I was crying by now. And Phil said, ‘You