According to the Scott McKenzie song about San Francisco which had been popular during one of those years, summertime was supposed to be a love-in there. Polly Chalmers, who had been no one's idea of a hippie even back then, had somehow missed the love-in. The building where she and Kelton lived was full of jimmied mailboxes and junkies who wore the peace-sign around their necks and, more often than not, kept switchblades in their scuffed and dirty motorcycle boots. The most common visitors in this neighborhood were process servers, repo men, and cops. A lot of cops, and you didn't call them pigs to their faces; the cops had also missed the love-in, and were pissed about it.
Polly applied for welfare and found she had not lived in California long enough to qualify-she supposed things might be different now, but in 1971, it had been as hard for a young unwed mother to get along in San Francisco as it was anywhere else. She applied for Aid to Dependent Children, and waited-hoped-for something to come of it. Kelton never missed a meal, but she herself lived hand to mouth, a scrawny Young woman who was often hungry and always afraid, a young woman very few of the people who knew her now would have recognized. Her memories of those first three years on the West Coast, memories stored at the back of her mind like old clothes in an attic, were skewed and grotesque, images from a nightmare.
And wasn't that a large part of her reluctance to tell Alan about those years? Didn't she simply want to keep them dark? She hadn't been the only one who had suffered the nightmare consequences of her pride, her stubborn refusal to ask for help, and the vicious hypocrisy of the times, which proclaimed the triumph of free love while simultaneously branding unmarried women with babies as creatures beyond the pale of normal society; Kelton had been there as well. Kelton had been her hostage to fortune as she slogged angrily along the track of her sordid fool's crusade.
The horrible thing was that her situation had been slowly improving. In the spring of 1972 she had finally qualified for state help, her first A.D.C check had been promised for the following month, and she had been making plans to move into a slightly better place when the fire happened.
The call had come to her at the diner where she worked, and in her dreams, Norville, the short-order cook who had always been trying to get into her pants in those days, turned to her again and again, holding out the telephone. He said the same thing over and over:
Polly, it's the police. They want to talk to you. Polly, it's the police.
They want to talk to you.
They had indeed wanted to talk to her, because they had hauled the bodies of a young woman and a small child from the smoky third floor of the apartment building. They had both been burned beyond recognition.
They knew who the child was; if Polly wasn't at work, they would know who the woman was, too.
For three months after Kelton's death she had gone on working.
Her loneliness had been so intense that she was half-mad with it, so deep and complete that she hadn't even been aware of how badly she was suffering. At last she had written home, telling her mother and father only that she was in San Francisco, that she had given birth to a boy, and that the boy was no longer with her. She would not have given further details if she had been threatened with redhot pokers.
Going home had not been a part of her plans thennot her conscious plans, at least-but it began to seem to her that if she did not re-establish some of her old ties, a valuable inside part of her would begin dying by inches, the way a vigorous tree dies from the branches inward when it is deprived of water too long.
Her mother had replied at once to the box number Polly gave as a return address, pleading with her to come back to Castle Rock... to come home. She enclosed a money order for seven hundred dollars. It was very warm in the tenement flat where Polly had been living since Kelton's death, and she stopped halfway through the task of packing her bags for a cold glass of water. While she was drinking it, Polly realized that she was making ready to go home simply because her mother had asked-almost begged-her to do so. She hadn't really thought about it at all, which was almost certainly a mistake. It was that sort of look-before-you-leap behavior, not Duke Sheehan's puny little dingus, which had gotten her in trouble to begin with.
So she sat down on her narrow single-woman's bed and thought about it. She thought long and hard. At last she voided the money order and wrote a letter to her mother. It was less than a page long, but it had taken her nearly four hours to get it right.
I want to come back, or at least try it on for size, but I don't want us to drag out all the old bones and start chewing on them again if I do, she had written. I don't know if what I really want-to start a new life in an old place-is possible for anyone, but I want to try.
So I have an idea: let's be pen-pals for awhile. You and me, and me and Dad.
I have noticed that it's harder to be angry and resentful on paper, so let's talk that way for awhile before we talk in person.