By Strangers Quickly Told
A novel by
R.G. Ryan
Sometimes you must lose that which you most love in order to find that which you most need.
Set in 1947 against the backdrop of post-war America, By Strangers Quickly Told is the story of Maggie Wheeler—an Ozark mountain maiden who loved Clark Gable—and her lifelong dream of living in New York City. It follows Maggie on her journey from being the daughter of a poor, Arkansas sharecropper to her life as a nanny for a wealthy Irish family in the big city and her subsequent love affair with a popular jazz musician.
It is a story of dreams born and dreams shattered; love found and love snatched too quickly away; of hope lost and hope restored. And in the end, Maggie finds that wherever there is misery, mercy is close by.
Chapter One
Huntsville, Arkansas, June 1947
Although the last frame of celluloid had clattered its way through the dusty projector some twenty minutes past, and the Saturday matinee moviegoers had all left the theater—chitchatting animatedly about the wondrous story to which they had just been witness—Maggie Francis Wheeler remained in her seat enraptured by the images that still played vividly across the silver screen in her mind. Only in this story, she was the girl in the strong arms of Clark Gable; the one living a life of nearly unimaginable passion and beauty in that most magical of places, New York City—a place where Maggie felt she was destined to live.
Maggie, at twenty-two, was a tallish young woman nicknamed “spitfire” by her brothers. This was partly due to a generous mane of flaming red hair, but also the unflinching manner in which she stood up to each and every challenge that came her way. Lightly freckled, green-eyed and slender, Maggie possessed a natural beauty of which she seemed to be completely unaware—a fact that only served to increase her appeal to Huntsville’s woefully thin ranks of eligible bachelors who, thus far, had completely and utterly failed in their clumsy attempts at capturing her fancy.
It was hard being the only girl among the seven children born to Earl and Velma Wheeler, but hard was what the Wheeler family knew. Congressional Medal of Honor or not, Maggie was still coming to terms with the death of her oldest brother, Pete, one war casualty among thousands.
She didn’t care that he had died “bravely.”
Dead was dead.
The war, coming on the heels of the Great Depression, had devastated Huntsville as it had other small towns throughout the country. Many of their brightest and best were lost and the local economy, which was driven by farming, had suffered greatly from the removal of such a large portion of the workforce.
Huntsville was the only city in the region that still had a theater with a working projector and someone who knew how it operated. Since the end of the war the tiny theater’s usual ration of one movie a month had increased to about one every week shown on Friday night and at the Saturday matinee and Maggie saw them all. Not that she could afford such luxury, but being the industrious girl that she was, she had worked out a deal with Mr. Ross, the theater owner, to clean the theater in return for a small salary plus unlimited admission to each film that came through.
Six months had passed and the arrangement had proven, thus far, to be mutually beneficial. However, it wasn’t doing much for helping to elevate Maggie’s spartan existence. With the economy fighting to rebound, jobs were scarce, people’s finances were stretched to the limit, and many young girls, within whose breast beat just as fierce a passion for adventure as in Maggie’s own, found themselves living at home and doing whatever was necessary to help support the family.
Maggie feared such an existence, feared it with every fiber of her being. Not because of discontent with her family, for she loved them and loved being with them. Nor was it a fear of responsibility. Maggie Wheeler was by all accounts one of the most responsible young women in all of Huntsville. Her reasoning was more closely associated with a fear of death. It was a fear against which she had grappled tirelessly for as long as she could remember. A fear that said her life would come and go, amounting to nothing more than a passing comment on the lips of strangers—a story quickly told and just as quickly forgotten.
She stood, walked to the front of the theater and began collecting the trash that had been left on the floor between the rows of seats. It seemed to grow more plentiful with each showing. Funny, she thought, the same people who thought nothing of throwing an empty popcorn box on the floor of the theater wouldn’t be caught dead doing the same thing out on the sidewalk. Why then did they feel the freedom to do so in here?
“Excuse me.”
The male voice had come out of the darkness at the back of the theater. Her scream had come from a place of pure terror.
“Oh! Oh, my goodness. You pert-near scared me half to death,” she said, squinting her eyes in an attempt to see who had spoken.
“Well now, that certainly wasn’t my intent. Not my intent at all,” the as yet faceless man said in a lilting Irish brogue.
“Who’s there?” she inquired.
A man stepped out of the shadows and walked slowly down the aisle toward her. Funny, she thought, that she felt no fear of this man even though there wasn’t another soul in the theater.
“Oh dear,” he said with an embarrassed smile, “where’s my manners?”
She liked the look of him right away. He was tall, at least as tall as her father but quite a bit leaner. As he removed his hat she could see dark, wavy hair shot through with streaks of gray. If pressed to guess his age she would’ve said forty or forty-five. He was clean-shaven and dressed in a dark wool suit the likes of which she hadn’t seen on any man outside of her idols on the silver screen, making her own hand-made gingham dress seem more plain and pathetic than it already was.
As she walked gingerly between the seats to where he stood in the aisle he smiled kindly and held out his hand.
“The name’s O’Bannon, Patrick O’Bannon,” he said.
The name sounded vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place it. Maggie shook his proffered hand causing him to wince slightly at the strength in her grip.
“I’m pleased to meet you Mr. O’Bannon. My name is—”
“Maggie Wheeler,” he said, completing her sentence. “I know who you are, Maggie.”
Maggie blinked her startlingly green eyes rapidly as she fought to form a proper response to his statement.
“You’re not one of those government fellas, are you?”
He threw back his head and let loose with a full-throated laugh.
“Oh, that’s good. That’s really good. I’ve been accused of being many things in me life, Maggie darlin’, but that one takes the cake. Government fella,” he said bursting into a fresh spasm.
Maggie wasn’t exactly sure what he had found so amusing about her question, but being the polite girl that she was, she decided to join his laughter anyway. There was an easy quality to it as if it were something he did on a regular basis. She liked the sound of his laughter almost as much as she liked his looks, which, she was forced to admit, she liked quite a lot.
With a broad smile she said, “So, I guess that’s a ‘no?’”
“No, I mean, yes, I mean…well now, just what do I mean?”
“If you’re trying to tell me that you aren’t a government fella, I get it,” Maggie said as she leaned casually against the back of the seats behind her.
“Well, at least we’ve got that settled,” he said with an exaggerated nod of his head. “May I sit?”
“Oh, sure, go right ahead.”
He sat facing her.
“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here in this empty theater, speaking with you in such a familiar fashion.”
“I’ll admit it is a mite strange. But I always like to give people the benefit of the doubt. Besides,” Maggie said playfully, “if’n you was to try to do me any harm, I’ve got five brothers.”
“Oh, don’t you worry about a thing, Maggie. You’ve got nothing to fear from Patrick O’Bannon. Actually,” he said, pausing for effect. “I came here to make you a proposition.”
His words stirred a feeling in her soul that was at once thrilling and terrifying.
Mainly thrilling.
By Strangers Quickly Told
Available Fall 2010
From
