Family Circle seems one of
the most unlikely homes for JDM fiction. Begun in 1932 as a giveaway periodical
in then-newly emerging supermarkets such as Safeway and Piggly Wiggly's, the
magazine was aimed squarely at housewives, with features on cooking, cleaning,
sewing and childrearing. There were also the seemingly mandatory features on Hollywood stars, although these articles contained
nothing that would be considered gossip or innuendo. Indeed the premier issue
featured Joan Crawford and Bing Crosby on the cover. And, like almost every
other magazine of the era, Family Circle contained fiction -- usually two
original short stories per issue -- written by third-rung mainstays of the
industry of the time, authors like George Sumner Albee, Dana Burnet and Nelia
Gardiner White, people whose work is virtually unknown today to all but a
handful of readers.The artwork that accompanied these stories was illustrated
by some of the great names of the era, artists like Peter Stevens, Richard Hook
and Ernest Chiriaka, and their artwork in Family Circle is indistinguishable
from their work in the higher-class slicks.
John D. MacDonald came to
Family Circle relatively late in the game, at a point where his short story
writing had taken a back seat to his novels. "That Strangest Month of
All" appeared in the October 1959 issue of the magazine and was one of
only two shorter works he would have published that year. Coming in at a tidy
5,000 words, the author employed an oft-used premise that bears a close
resemblance to Stanley Ralph Ross' 1952 short story "You Got To Have
Luck" (and probably dozens of other tales), where a housewife, living in a
remote location, is home alone and terrorized by an escaped bad guy. In Ross's
tale it is a convict, in MacDonald's, an escaped mental patient. And MacDonald,
as he often did when featuring a female protagonist, uses the plot to tell a
morality tale, where wishing for more, or simple unhappiness seems to be the
causation of the events that follow. Not a very progressive notion, especially
in a male writer (see his "Jail Bait" and "Pickup") but I
think here the author was attempting something a little deeper than simply a
story about a woman in peril. Much of the writing deals with the mental process
of fear, as the heroine (in third person limited narrative) is suddenly
confronted and then held captive by a powerful lunatic.
"She was a wife named
Susan, a slim tanned woman with a soft cap of black hair, a lively face, but
with a brooding inward look, an air of containment. She was called Susan. Not
Sue. Not Suzy."
Susan and family
(MacDonald's typical four-member family unit) live on an old farm, fourteen
miles from an "industrial city" and barely within visual distance
from their nearest neighbor. Husband Paul has left for work and the school bus
has left, carrying her two children to morning classes. It is a day of
"incomparable stillness and clarity," with the sun shining in a
cloudless sky and warm enough for Susan to put on her "treasured and
threadbare yellow sun suit" so she can finish sanding an old drop-leaf
table out in the large backyard.
"Autumn had always been
for her a time of haunting nostalgia, a longing for something she could not
even identify. A time for what Paul called her 'gypsy' mood. It left the
children uncertain and Paul troubled. They seemed to sense she was off in some
place where they could not reach her."
As she works on her project
Susan is surprised to see a helicopter flying low over her farm, and then the
sound of sirens in the distance. A fire, perhaps? Children gone missing?
"As she worked, she
became aware of a curious feeling of restlessness, a tiny threshold of
irritation. She turned suddenly and looked behind her and found herself staring
into the eyes of a man who stood a dozen feet away. She looked at him and knew
the meaning then of the helicopter and the sirens."
And not just any man.
"He was big, as big and
hard and solid as the trunk of one of the old oaks. He wore gray denim
coveralls that seemed to be some sort of uniform... She looked into the man's
face and saw an animal emptiness that stopped her breath. The shaved head and
the hard high cheekbones and the flattened cartilage of the nose gave him
almost a cartoonist's version of brutality. But what horrified her was the
slackness of the lower part of his face and the pale uncomprehending opacity of
his eyes... She remembered a long-ago time when she had been cornered by a
vicious dog. She had stood very still then, a small frightened girl, sensing
that any attempt to run would be the necessary trigger."
Susan attempts to smile and
holds her hands out so he can see she is carrying nothing. He has trouble
speaking when he asks if anyone is in the house. When the sirens sound again he
"raised his head sharply, the flattened nostrils widening," grabs her
by the arm and drags her inside. As the sirens fade she "stood there in
her terror [and] one part of her mind thought quite calmly, saying 'This is the
way it happens.'"
After giving him a drink of
water, she notices that the man has been shot through the hand.
"He stood for a moment
with his eyes shut, and her sudden pity was as keen and unexpected as a knife.
He was exhausted. His hurt hand was horrid. Dumb creature in pain. And what of
all the tales of the thorn in the pad of the lion? Were they true? ... She
thought, 'And for you there is no place.
No place in this world.'"
After bandaging his hand she
gets him to sit calmly in a kitchen chair. But suddenly the phone rings and all
thoughts of paws and lions are thrown out the window as he leaps up
threateningly. Susan quickly convinces the man that the call is probably from
her husband, and to ignore it would bring the police here. She picks up the
receiver and Paul tells her that there is an escapee from the local lunatic
asylum loose, one who has already killed three people, and for her to lock
herself in the house and to keep the kids inside when they return from school.
The thought of the school bus returning and her children coming home awakens a
realization within her.
"You must think, she
told herself. This is an almost mindless thing. You can't run from him, even
when the school bus stops. You can't save everything. So it comes to a choice.
At any cost to you, Susan, you must warn them. Before the school bus
comes."
She quickly devises a plan
to lure the man upstairs under the pretext of hiding him in the attic. Once
there she will break a jar of turpentine onto the floor, light it and jump out
onto the roof, with the belief that the flames will prevent the man from following
her. The plan almost works, but Susan is unable to light a match quickly enough
and darts out of the window. Unable to follow her because of the heavy boots he
is wearing, he grabs the nearest object -- a can of orange paint -- and hurls
it at her, hitting the standpipe she is holding onto and splattering the paint
all over her and onto the roof. Then she sees him emerging from the window,
boots now off, climbing out with little difficulty and toward her...
The basic plot and
resolution of this story are fairly predictable, and I recall that the first
time I read this back in 1982 I was thoroughly unimpressed by it, thinking that
MacDonald surely could have done better by this point in his career. "That
Strangest Month of All" was, after all, written only one year before he
published two of his finest novels, The End of the Night and Slam the Big Door. But re-reading it nearly thirty years later
reveals an interesting subtext that was lost on me in my younger years: the
process the protagonist goes through in a moment of real peril. The ending of
this short story -- which I won't reveal other than to state the obvious, that
Susan does indeed survive -- contains several interesting touches that never
would have been articulated in earlier JDM work, including some poignant
revelations about the escapee's past and Susan's processing of her ordeal
moments after it is resolved. MacDonald had come a long way from "Jail
Bait," where a similar situation seems almost like divine retribution for
wanting something different in life than marriage and children. JDM's short
story output had been reduced to a relative trickle by this point in his life,
but the quality of the product was far and away superior to his early pulp
work. This should have come as no surprise to me, but writing this blog has
become a learning experience.
In 1982 Family Circle celebrated its 50th
Anniversary, and its September issue of that year contained loads of
retrospectives and histories of the various departments and features of the
magazine over the years. To celebrate all of the fiction the magazine had
brought to newsstands over five decades, the editors chose only one story to
reprint, and that story was "That Strangest Month of All." It
appeared with a brief introduction and a smaller reprinting of the original
story art, a meticulously accurate illustration by Dick Hook. It was, perhaps,
an easy editorial decision to choose an author who, in 1982, was at the height
of his bookselling power, but the story itself is good enough to have left no
doubt as to the wisdom of its selection.
"That Strangest Month
of All" has yet to be anthologized.
But they didn't put his name on the cover. Not very bright of them.
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