Lisa Rogak - Haunted Heart

Donald took a job as a door-to-door salesman around Portland, pushing Electrolux vacuum cleaners to housewives who were establishing families and contented households as they settled into the beginnings of the postwar baby boom. Knowing that he’d spend each night in the same house, with the same woman, did nothing to soothe the restlessness Donald had indulged during the years he roamed all over the world, during stints at sea that lasted for months at a time. “As my mother once told me, he was the only man on the sales force who regularly demonstrated vacuum cleaners to pretty young widows at two o’clock in the morning,” said Steve years later. “He was quite a ladies’ man, according to my mother. In any case, he was a man with an itchy foot, a travelin’ man, as the song says. I think trouble came easy to him.”

Neither an adopted nor a biological child could keep Donald with his family. He was stuck in a place he didn’t like with a family he didn’t particularly want. And the housewives who invited him into their homes for more than his vacuum cleaners couldn’t hold him either. He missed the adventure of the open road and sea, and waking up in the morning—or in the middle of the night—and never knowing which enemies he’d face.

So one night, when Steve had just turned two, Donald casually told his wife that he was going to the store for a pack of cigarettes. He walked out the door and kept on going. They never saw him again. The drama of his departure would be comically cliché, if not for the permanent damage it did to every member of the King family.

Ruth was a resourceful Mainer, frugal and practical by nature.

After her husband walked out, Ruth packed up her two kids, swallowed her pride, and depended on her relatives, as well as Don’s family in Chicago, to put them up for a short time each while she looked for a job to keep them afloat. Steady jobs for a once-divorced, once-abandoned female pianist with two small children were not in great abundance, even in the great economic boom of the postwar years, so she took what she could get, which most often was menial labor as a housekeeper or bakery clerk.

The small King family would stay in a room in an aunt’s or cousin’s house or apartment until Ruth felt they were about to wear out their welcome, then they’d move on to the next sympathetic relative with a room to spare. Their perambulations took them far beyond Maine. During the first four years after Donald left and while Stephen was two to six years of age, they lived in Chicago; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Malden, Massachusetts; and West De Pere, Wisconsin.

Sometimes, to Ruth’s great consternation, she had to split up the family. At one point Steve stayed with Ruth’s younger sister Ethelyn and her husband, Oren Flaws, in West Durham, Maine, while Dave stayed with Mollie, another sister, in Malden, Massachusetts.

Ruth King rarely let her boys see her dejection at their poverty and constant moves. Instead, she dealt with their circumstances with a sense of humor and by telling her young sons stories. Both her optimism and storytelling would have a lasting influence on Steve.

The boys often shared a bedroom, more often a bed, and had to deal with threadbare hand-me-down clothes and broken toys from cousins who were often resentful at the attention Steve and David received. In the midst of such tumult, and with a few relatives who were clearly not thrilled about having a couple of youngsters underfoot, the two young boys quickly learned to look after each other, finding a comfortable refuge in books. They often read to each other. When Ruth got home from work, she’d grill them to make sure that they’d been reading the whole time she was gone.

In later years, Steve told a story from when he was four years old and playing outside with a friend who lived near a railroad line. He was supposed to wait to be picked up or to call Ruth when he wanted to come home, but he showed up back home an hour later, clearly in shock, his face white as a sheet.

While they were playing, Steve’s friend had wandered over to the tracks and been hit by a freight train. “My mother told me they picked up the pieces in a wicker basket,” he said years later. “My mom never knew if I had been near him, and I have no memory of the incident at all, only of having been told about it some years after the fact.”

The family’s constant changes of address continued. When Steve was in kindergarten, Ruth packed up the family to live with Donald’s family in Chicago for a time. This was something new, a real connection to Steve’s father. Through all their moves, Steve and Dave had learned to keep quiet whenever they were around grown-ups, but it became especially important when they were staying with Granny Spansky, Donald’s mother. Steve was even better behaved around her for two reasons.

First, if he kept his mouth shut and just listened, maybe he’d hear her talk about why his father had left. After all, she was Donald’s mother, she had to know what happened to him. But if she did know the whereabouts of her son, she wasn’t talking.

Second, she was nothing like his mother’s relatives back in Maine, who were reserved, quiet, and steered away from uncomfortable and difficult subjects. Granny Spansky reminded Steve of the evil witches in the stories he and Dave read to each other. “She was a big, heavyset woman who alternately fascinated and repelled me,” he said. “I can still see her cackling like an old witch through toothless gums. She’d fry an entire loaf of bread in bacon drippings on an antique range and then gobble it down, chortling, ‘My, that’s crisp !’ ”

After they left Granny Spansky’s house, they moved to West De Pere, Wisconsin, to live with Ruth’s sister Cal for a while, then they moved on to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where they lived with Don’s sister Betty for a few months before finding an apartment of their own nearby. But Steve already knew it wouldn’t last. Either they’d be evicted—once they were kicked out of an apartment after the babysitter fell asleep and a neighbor saw Steve crawling on the roof of the building—or they’d wear out their welcome and the sisters would be calling each other long-distance to see who would take Ruth and the boys this time. Before long, it was time to move again.

When Stephen was six years old, Ruth and her sons moved to her sister Lois’s house in Stratford, Connecticut. Finally, it looked as if Ruth’s fortunes were starting to turn. After working for a few months, she had saved enough money to rent an apartment of their own nearby.

Once Steve got to school, he was always the new kid in the class, often more than once in one school year. But he quickly learned how to cope. If one of his classmates began to pick on him, it didn’t last that long; Steve combined his intelligence and wit to gently disarm his fellow students—always in a nice way, he’d been on the receiving end of nasty and knew it only made the target hate the tormentor more—along with his teachers, and so he rarely had any trouble.

But from the beginning, Steve was a sickly kid. Whether from the stress of the family’s constant moves or living in poverty, he spent most of the first-grade year home from school, confined to his bed. First he came down with measles, followed by strep throat, which then spread to his ears. He ended up with a nasty ear infection that wouldn’t go away no matter how many antibiotics he took.

To combat boredom while at home, he devoured every book he could get his hands on, including a wide assortment of comic books of the day, but he also began to create his own stories. One day he copied the words out of the cartoon balloons into a notepad, adding some description about setting or a character’s appearance whenever he felt it was necessary. He gave it to his mother, who read it and showered praise on him, until he admitted that he didn’t really write it after all, it was mostly copied.