Radio mirror (May-Oct 1939)

sfcy': ,'V » H ■ I jUffii from the room. It wasn't that he didn't love the child. . . . Or was that the trouble, after all? Could you love that which had taken the life of one so beautiful? "Cathleen!" he cried into the darkness, meaning not his daughter, but her mother. The name itself was a constant barb, thrust into his heart. He would never have called the child Cathleen, if — she — hadn't begged him to, that night just before she died. He knew he must forget all that. It was over, and from tonight he was starting afresh. Hope Cabot would be here soon — tall, cool as a breeze from her native New England, quietly wholesome — and this was the night he would ask her to marry him. He must not be unfair to her: he must not remember, too much, what was past. Would she accept him? He believed she would. She was not young, but she was strong and courageous; she would not shrink from a household like this, with a man like a tree halfshivered with lightning, and the very air sick with the hatred of a bitter child. The butler stood in the doorway. "Miss Hope Cabot," he announced. WHEN the door banged in the nursery, Nora said to Cathleen, "Well — and that must be relieving of your feelings considerably." "A bang, Nora, can be relieving of the feelings," Cathleen told her somberly, "but not of a deep pain in the heart." Nora's broad Irish face was unimpressed. "Ah," she remarked, "so you and your dear father were speaking out again?" "School, school, school! I hate school. They never teach anything that interests you — the teachers are all ugly to look at — and who's there to talk about what's in my head?" "Aaaah!" said Nora. "And if I haven't dropped my thread!" Resignedly, Cathleen retrieved the errant spool. "Why do you mend my middy blouses?" she complained. "Why can't you be letting them rot like the bones of the shipwrecked at sea?" "So you did get that book out of the library!" Nora said accusingly. "Why can't girls always wear pink organdy dresses . . . with white tulle veils . . . and a train of violets . . . ?" Cathleen wandered to the window, looked out to the purplegray flood of the Hudson flowing past Riverside Drive and the Parkway. Soon the stars would be out. . . . "And in my hair," she went on, "that great star. Nora, did I tell you the star visited me last night?" "And what did he say?" murmured Nora, still sewing. "First he just shimmered. With gold. Like the sky after sunset. And then he said, 'Why Cathleen — if you aren't as beautiful as your dear mother whom I've just visited not ten minutes ago!' " She paused, then, her voice a-brim with grave conviction: "That's what he said, Nora." "And then what did you say?" Nora asked, in a voice that seemed curiously muffled, as if she had a frog in her throat. "Why, I sang him a song. Like the one my mother used to play." She pronounced the difficult words carefully: "Claire — de — Lune, by De-bus-sy. Isn't that right, Nora?" "Aye — and like a wild sweet bird she sang that Frenchman's song, her white hands drifting on the piano keys like flowers on a stream." Cathleen's own hands beat together in rapture — for this was a ritual, and she knew what came next. "And then, sometimes she'd say, Nora — " "She'd say," Nora took up the tale, " 'Now I'll be singing for our lonely Irish hearts a Gaelic song, written by another Frenchman long ago.' " Rocking back and forth in her chair, the sewing forgotten in her lap, Nora crooned: "Ta ribin o mo cheadhsearc ann mo phoca sios — " "There is a ribbon from my only love in my pocket deep," sang Cathleen, her eyes far away on some dream land; "and the women of Europe, they could not cure my grief, alas!" "It's time you were going to bed, Mavourneen," Nora said abruptly. "For tomorrow's the fine day you go to the dentist." "What!" Blazing, Cathleen snapped back to the present. "Saturday afternoon is mine. Everybody in the world knows it's mine! I won't go, do you hear me, I won't go!" "Your respected father said — " "To hurt me, to hurt me, that's all! I won't gol" "Now then," Nora said sternly, "to bed!" THE NEXT afternoon she was almost late, and all because she had to pretend to Nora that she was going to the dentist's. The clock in the jeweler's window next door said exactly three when she hurried into the little music store on Madison Avenue, and Mr. Ted looked up from behind the counter and said, "Well, Cathleen, I was afraid you'd passed us up today." "Oh, no! I wouldn't!" Cathleen said in a shocked whisper. Mr. Ted, who waited on her every Saturday afternoon, led her to one of the sound-proof booths in the back of the store. "And how's your father today?" he asked. "He's better," she told him primly. "I brought him some white lilacs yesterday, and he just smelled and smelled them, and then he smiled — you know, I've told you about my father's dear smile — and OCTOBER, 1939 25