And even though they flipped up the coverlet and Bill actually
lifted up the whole bed by its foot off the floor to show her there
was nothing under there, not even a litter of dust kitties, she would
not come out of the corner. When the sun came up, she did at last
come out of the corner. She took her thumb out of her mouth. She
stayed away from the bed. She stared at, Bill Pillsbury from her
clown-white face.
'We're going back to New York,' she said. 'This morning.'
'Of course,' Bill muttered. 'Of course, dear.'
Bill Pillsbury's father died of a heart attack two weeks after the
stock-market crash. Bill and Lottie could not keep the company's
head above water. Things went from bad to worse. In the years that
followed she thought often of their honeymoon at the Overlook
Hotel, and the dreams, and the canvas hand that had crept out from
under the bed to squeeze her own. She thought about those things
more and more. She committed suicide in a Yonkers motel room in
1949, a woman who was prematurely gray and prematurely lined.
It had been 20 years and the hand that had gripped her wrist when
she reached down to get her cigarettes had never really let go. She
left a one-sentence suicide note written on Holiday Inn stationery.
The note said: 'I wish we had gone to Rome.'
AND NOW THIS WORD FROM NEW HAMPSHIRE
In that long, hot summer of 1953, the summer Jacky Torrance
turned 6, his father came home one night from the hospital and
broke Jacky's arm. He almost killed the boy. He was drunk.
Jacky was sitting on the front porch reading a Combat Casey
comic book when his father came down the street, listing to one
side, torpedoed by beer somewhere down the line. As he always
did, the boy felt a mixture of love-hate-fear rise in his chest at the
sight of the old man, who looked like a giant, malevolent ghost in
his hospital whites. Jacky's father was an orderly at the Berlin
Community Hospital. He was like God, like Nature-sometimes
lovable, sometimes terrible. You never knew which it would be.
Jacky's mother feared and served him. Jacky's brothers hated him.
Only Jacky, of all of them, still loved him in spite of the fear and
the hate, and sometimes the volatile mixture of emotions made him
want to cry out at the sight of his father coming, to simply cry out:
'I love you, Daddy! Go away! Hug me! I'll kill you! I'm so afraid
of you! I need you!' And his father seemed to sense in his stupid
way-he was a stupid man, and selfish - that all of them had gone
beyond him but Jacky, the youngest, knew that the only way he
could touch the others was to bludgeon them to attention. But with
Jacky there was still love, and there had been times when he had
cuffed the boy's mouth into running blood and then hugged him
with a frightful force, the killing force just, barely held back by
some other thing, and Jackie would let himself be hugged deep into
the atmosphere of malt and hops that hung around his old man
forever, quailing, loving, fearing.
He leaped off the step and ran halfway down the path before
