Radio Mirror: The Magazine of Radio Romances (Jan-June 1945)

u „„„ tn nnund thickly and I couldn't look away. We talked. There waes sudde'nTso muchto say, to find out about each other. He Was TtaUoned at the camp below town. Had just been sent back there frlm Africa for a six-weeks' special gunnery course. He was unfrom mrica lu , ..y know," he leaned forward on I"3 low, "ITa blammg my luck tonight. I'm on a three-day paSss and Tii's noTenough tfme to go home for Christmas, So here^ I am in a town where I don't know anyone! "You know me!" I said. H JE oretended to consider that seriously. "Lets see—I know you'd fit very nicely into some lucky man's Christmas stocking^ know you have hair the color of the wheat back on our farm, and brown eves and a look of going places. But I don't know your name!" "Oh that" I laughed. "It's Doris Reynolds." Just a name. A name I had taken from a magazine three years before when I ran away from home. A new name that would help me forget all the hurt. I had been sixteen then . . . Excitement was mounting in me like fever. "If you re free, supposing we plan the holiday together. Would you like that? "More than anything else!" Tom said with eagerness. I lay awake most of the night thinking about it. My room in the boarding house was dismally cold. But I was warmed by an emotion I had never experienced before. Certainly not in connection with this season of the year which I had come to hate. The forced good-will-among-men which lasted for twenty-four hours only and had never brought me anything. The static smile of .department store Santa Clauses. All the gushing and silly, sentimental trappings ... I had loathed everything about Christmas. And now I was actually looking forward to this one! At the store the next morning, Regina, who was one of my best friends, looked at me speculatively. "My, you look happy! New man?" she guessed. We were putting out trays of perfume, preparing for the day's rush, and I smiled at her over a whole row of "Toujours Amour." "Oh Regina, he's wonderful." "They always are!" she chuckled. Regina was a dear really, but The children were watching me eagerly — and then I saw in the doorivay a familiar figure that made-my breath catch. old-fashioned in her ideas. I thought of her as hopelessly "settled," almost old — twenty-six. When her husband went overseas she and their two children had moved in with her parents, and she had taken this job in the store. "What about Jake?" she asked. Jake was supposed to be a matrimonial prize. He was an assistant buyer and a nephew of Mr. Bristol, the president of the store. "Oh, I'll handle him," I said airily. He had called me early that morning to find out what had happened to me. It seems he had spent hours searching for me long after the fire was extinguished. Regina was taking a doll out of a bag. A doll dressed like a WAC officer. "For Bunny, my youngest," she said. "Isn't it cute?" I held it for a moment and black memories rushed in on me. "She'll love it," I said. ". . . Every year I used to start praying for a doll a whole month before Christmas. But I never got it." /~)NCE, my mother had tried to fashion a doll for me. But Steve " burned it. On Christmas Eve before I had a chance to play with it at all. Steve was my stepfather. Big, rough, with a brute quality about him that made our home a nightmare. My mother, a sweet, timid soul, had re-married when I was five, and Steve had hated me from the start. I reminded him too much of my own father, who had died when I was two. Steve could not bear the thought that my mother had belonged to another man, had been terribly happy with that other man. Shortly after her second marriage she became an invalid. We were entirely dependent on my stepfather. There was not another human being we could turn to . . . And Steve became almost sadistic in his treatment of me ... I had tried so desperately to blot all that out. When I ran away from home after mother's death I even changed my name. There was very little of the shy, sensitive girl who had been Jean Adams in the woman who was now Doris Reynolds! Some of the bitterness of those memories must have showed in my face because Regina put her hand on my arm. "I think a girl has to grow a bit hard outside when she's as soft and sweet inside as you are, Doris," she said gently. "It's a (Continued on page 49)