Different Seasons

by Stephen King

  Johanssen interrupted McCarron's story at this point. They were old friends, and I suppose that gave him the right to ask the question that had surely crossed all our minds.

  "Did you love her, Emlyn? Is that what all this is about, this stuff about her eyes and smile and how you 'thought of her at odd moments'?"

  I thought that McCarron might be annoyed at this interruption, but he was not. "You have a right to ask the question," he said, and paused, looking into the fire. It seemed that he might almost have fallen into a doze. Then a dry knot of wood exploded, sending sparks up the chimney in a swirl, and McCarron looked around, first at Johanssen and then at the rest of us.

  "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 theater 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 un-stated 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 Drugstore 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 theater 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," 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 fathers never would have believed they knew. All of this was quite the accepted thing, in spite of the fact that most of the world's women give birth in almost complete silence, aside from the grunting sounds of strain that we would associate with any piece of hard physical labor.

  Doctors were responsible for some of this hysteria, I'm sorry to say. The stories the pregnant woman heard from friends and relatives who had already been through the birthing process also contributed to it. Believe me: if you are told that some experience is going to hurt, it will hurt. Most pain is in the mind, and when a woman absorbs the idea that the act of giving birth is excruciatingly painful--when she gets this information from her mother, her sisters, her married friends, and her physician--that woman has been mentally prepared to feel great agony.

  Even after only six years' practice, I had become used to seeing women who were trying to cope with a twofold problem: not just the fact that they were pregnant and must plan for the new arrival, but also the fact--what most of them saw as a fact, anyway--that they had entered the valley of the shadow of death. Many were actually trying to put their affairs in coherent order so that if they should die, their husbands would be able to carry on without them.

  This is neither the time nor the place for a lesson on obstetrics, but you should know that for a long time before "those days," the act of giving birth was extremely dangerous in the Western countries. A revolution in medical procedure, beginning around 1900, had made the process much safer, but an absurdly small number of doctors bothered to tell their expectant mothers that. God knows why. But in light of this, is it any wonder that most delivery rooms sounded like Ward Nine in Bellevue? Here are these poor women, their time come round at last, experiencing a process which has, because of the almost Victorian decorum of the times, been described to them only in the vaguest of terms; here are these women experiencing that engine of birth finally running at full power. They are seized with an awe and wonder which they immediately interpret as insupportable pain, and most of them feel that they will very shortly die a dog's death.

  In the course of my reading on the subject of pregnancy, I discovered the principle of the silent birth and the idea of the Breathing Method. Screaming wastes energy which would be better used to expel the baby, it causes the woman to hyper-ventilate, and hyperventilation puts the body on an emergency basis--adrenals running full blast, respiration and pulse-rate up--that is really unnecessary. The Breathing Method was supposed to help the mother focus her attention on the job at hand and to cope with pain by utilizing the body's own resources.

  It was used widely at that time in India and Africa; in America, the Shoshone, Kiowa, and Micmac Indians all used it; the Eskimos have always used it; but, as you may guess, most Western doctors had little interest in it. One of my colleagues--an intelligent man--returned the typescript of my pregnancy pamphlet to me in the fall of 1931 with a red line drawn through the entire section on the Breathing Method. In the margin he had scribbled that if he wanted to know about "nigger superstitions," he would stop by a newsstand and buy an issue of Weird Tales!

  Well, I didn't cut the section from the pamphlet as he had suggested, but I had mixed results with the method--that was the best one could say. There were women who used it with great success. There were others who seemed to grasp the idea perfectly in principle but who lost their discipline completely as soon as their contractions became deep and heavy. In most of those cases I found that the entire idea had been subverted and undermined by well-meaning friends and relatives who had never heard of such a thing and
thus could not believe it would actually work.

  The method was based on the idea that, while no two labors are ever the same in specifics, all are pretty much alike in general. There are four stages: contractive labor, mid-labor, birth, and the expulsion of the afterbirth. Contractions are a complete hardening of the abdominal and pelvic-area muscles, and the expectant mother often finds them beginning in the sixth month. Many women pregnant for the first time expect something rather nasty, like bowel cramps, but I'm told it's much cleaner--a strongly physical sensation, which may deepen into a pain like a charley horse. A woman employing the Breathing Method began to breathe in a series of short, measured inhales and exhales when she felt a contraction coming on. Each breath was expelled in a puff, as if one were blowing a trumpet Dizzy Gillespie fashion.

  During mid-labor, when more painful contractions begin coming every fifteen minutes or so, the woman switched to long inhales followed by long exhales--it's the way a marathon runner breathes when he's starting his final kick. The harder the contraction, the longer the inhale-exhale. In my pamphlet, I called this stage "riding the waves."

  The final stage we need concern ourselves with here I called "locomotive," and Lamaze instructors today frequently call it the "choo-choo" stage of breathing. Final labor is accompanied by pains which are most frequently described as deep and glassy. They are accompanied by an irresistible urge on the mother's part to push ... to expel the baby. This is the point, gentlemen, at which that wonderful, frightening engine reaches its absolute crescendo. The cervix is fully dilated. The baby has begun its short journey down the birth canal, and if you were to look directly between the mother's legs, you would see the baby's fontanel pulsing only inches from the open air. The mother using the Breathing Method now begins to take and let out short, sharp breaths between her lips, not filling her lungs, not hyperventilating, but almost panting in a perfectly controlled fashion. It really is the sound children make when they are imitating a steam-driven locomotive.

  All of this has a salutary effect on the body--the mother's oxygen is kept high without putting her systems on an emergency basis, and she herself remains aware and alert, able to ask and answer questions, able to take instructions. But of course the mental results of the Breathing Method were even more important. The mother felt she was actively participating in the birth of her child--that she was in some part guiding the process. She felt on top of the experience ... and on top of the pain.

  You can understand that the whole process was utterly dependent on the patient's state of mind. The Breathing Method was uniquely vulnerable, uniquely delicate, and if I had a good many failures, I'd explain them this way--what a patient can be convinced of by her doctor she may be unconvinced of by relatives who raise their hands in horror when told of such a heathenish practice.

  From this aspect, at least, Miss Stansfield was the ideal patient. She had neither friends nor relatives to talk her out of her belief in the Breathing Method (although, in all fairness, I must add that I doubt anyone ever talked her out of anything once she had made up her mind on the subject) once she came to believe in it. And she did come to believe in it.

  "It's a little like self-hypnosis, isn't it?" she asked me the first time we really discussed it.

  I agreed, delighted. "Exactly! But you mustn't let that make you think it's a trick, or that it will let you down when the going gets tough."

  "I don't think that at all. I'm very grateful to you. I'll practice assiduously, Dr. McCarron." She was the sort of woman the Breathing Method was invented for, and when she told me she would practice, she spoke nothing but the truth. I have never seen anyone embrace an idea with such enthusiasm ... but, of course, the Breathing Method was uniquely suited to her temperament. There are docile men and women in this world by the millions, and some of them are damn fine people. But there are others whose hands ache to hold the throttles of their own lives, and Miss Stansfield was one of those.

  When I say she embraced the Breathing Method totally, I mean it ... and I think the story of her final day at the department store where she sold perfumes and cosmetics proves the point.

  The end of her gainful employment finally came late in August. Miss Stansfield was a slim young woman in fine physical condition, and this was, of course, her first child. Any doctor will tell you that such a woman is apt not to "show" for five, perhaps even six months ... and then, one day and all at once, everything will show.

  She came in for her monthly checkup on the first of September, laughed ruefully, and told me she had discovered the Breathing Method had another use.

  "What's that?" I asked her.

  "It's even better than counting to ten when you're mad as hell at someone," she said. Those hazel eyes were dancing. "Although people look at you as if you might be a lunatic when you start puffing and blowing."

  She told me the tale readily enough. She had gone to work as usual on the previous Monday, and all I can think is that the curiously abrupt transition from a slim young woman to an obviously pregnant young woman--and that transition really can be almost as sudden as day to dark in the tropics--had happened over the weekend. Or maybe her supervisor finally decided that her suspicions were no longer just suspicions.

  "I'll want to see you in the office on your break," this woman, a Mrs. Kelly, said coldly. She had previously been quite friendly to Miss Stansfield. She had shown her pictures of her two children, both in high school, and they had exchanged recipes at one point. Mrs. Kelly was always asking her if she had met "a nice boy" yet. That kindliness and friendliness were gone now. And when she stepped into Mrs. Kelly's office on her break, Miss Stansfield told me, she knew what to expect.

  "You're in trouble," this previously kind woman said curtly.

  "Yes," Miss Stansfield said. "It's called that by some people."

  Mrs. Kelly's cheeks had gone the color of old brick. "Don't you be smart with me, young woman," she said. "From the looks of your belly, you've been too smart by half already."

  I could see the two of them in my mind's eye as she told me the story--Miss Stansfield, her direct hazel eyes fixed on Mrs. Kelly, perfectly composed, refusing to drop her eyes, or weep, or exhibit shame in any other way. I believe she had a much more practical conception of the trouble she was in than her supervisor did, with her two almost-grown children and her respectable husband, who owned his own barber-shop and voted Republican.

  "I must say you show remarkably little shame at the way you've deceived me!" Mrs. Kelly burst out bitterly.

  "I have never deceived you. No mention of my pregnancy has been made until today." She looked at Mrs. Kelly curiously. "How can you say I have deceived you?"

  "I took you home!" Mrs. Kelly cried. "I had you to dinner ... with my sons." She looked at Miss Stansfield with utter loathing.

  This is when Miss Stansfield began to grow angry. Angrier, she told me, than she had ever been in her life. She had not been unaware of the sort of reaction she could expect when the secret came out, but as any one of you gentlemen will attest, the difference between academic theory and practical application can sometimes be shockingly huge.

  Clutching her hands firmly together in her lap, Miss Stansfield said: "If you are suggesting I made or ever would make any attempt to seduce your sons, that's the dirtiest, filthiest thing I've ever heard in my life."

  Mrs. Kelly's head rocked back as if she had been slapped. That bricky color drained from her cheeks, leaving only two small spots of hectic color. The two women looked grimly at each other across a desk littered with perfume samples in a room that smelled vaguely of flowers. It was a moment, Miss Stansfield said, that seemed much longer than it actually could have been.

  Then Mrs. Kelly yanked open one of her drawers and brought out a buff-colored check. A bright pink severance slip was attached to it. Showing her teeth, actually seeming to bite off each word, she said: "With hundreds of decent girls looking for work in this city, I hardly think we need a strumpet such as yourself in our employ, dear."r />
  She told me it was that final, contemptuous "dear" that brought all her anger to a sudden head. A moment later Mrs. Kelly's jaw dropped and her eyes widened as Miss Stansfield, her hands locked together as tightly as links in a steel chain, so tightly she left bruises on herself (they were fading but still perfectly visible when I saw her on September 1st), began to "locomotive" between her clenched teeth.

  It wasn't a funny story, perhaps, but I burst out laughing at the image and Miss Stansfield joined me. Mrs. Davidson looked in--to make sure we hadn't gotten into the nitrous oxide, perhaps--and then left again.

  "It was all I could think to do," Miss Stansfield said, still laughing and wiping her streaming eyes with her handkerchief. "Because at that moment, I saw myself reaching out and simply sweeping those sample bottles of perfume--every one of them--off her desk and onto the floor, which was uncarpeted concrete. I didn't just think it, I saw it! I saw them crashing to the floor and filling the room with such a Godawful mixed stench that fumigators would have to come,

  "I was going to do it; nothing was going to stop me doing it. Then I began to 'locomotive,' and everything was all right. I was able to take the check, and the pink slip, and get up, and get out. I wasn't able to thank her, of course--I was still being a locomotive!"

  We laughed again, and then she sobered.

  "It's all passed off now, and I am even able to feel a little sorry for her--or does that sound like a terribly stiff-necked thing to say?"

  "Not at all. I think it's an admirable way to be able to feel."

  "May I show you something I bought with my severance pay, Dr. McCarron?"

  "Yes, if you like."

  She opened her purse and took out a small flat box. "I bought it at a pawnshop," she said. "For two dollars. And it's the only time during this whole nightmare that I've felt ashamed and dirty. Isn't that strange?"