Radio romances (July-Dec 1945)

44 MY love, I said, when it came, would never be a little or a light thing. It would be an overwhelming thing, without doubt or questioning, and it would possess me. I would give of it stintlessly, able to meet any test it asked of me. That was the kind of love I used to dream of when I thought of marriage and a home and children. I knew myself, I thought; I knew what I wanted. I heard other girls talk of how they wanted to marry a handsome man, or a rich one, or somebody who "was somebody." And I used to feel sorry for them, and infinitely superior. I didn't care about those things; if the man I loved was any one of them, that would be fine. But I knew that I would have to love him for himself first, and that nothing else would matter. How sure I was! How very, very sure. And how I failed, in my heart, when the time came! It was a natural failure, I suppose, when you remember the way I was brought up. But that doesn't excuse me. It was a failure many of us make, in many relationships besides love, without thinking or being aware of it. That still doesn't excuse it. Or me. When love came, bringing its own kind of pain and its own special betrayal, I was twenty-two. I was teaching school in a midwestern town of about ten thousand people. Y°u know the kind. Quiet, tree-shaded streets, except where the factory was. Nice, substantial homes, except, of course, for the section where poor people lived. Main Street with a few movies and the drugstore on the corner where the gang held out, the Country Club where you were invited sometimes for the Saturday night dance, everybody knowing about everybody else, especially those people in town who "were anybody," like Mr. Clarke who lived in the biggest house in town and owned the block on Main Street that contained the department store and the drug store. Like Mrs. Harwell, who was on the school board, the library board, and headed all the charity committees, who was regarded as the social leader of Newtown. I'd been born and brought up in Newtown and I liked it. I'd never had the urge to go away, to a big city. I liked the friendliness, and the living with trees and lawns and growing things. And I liked my teaching. I had just finished the State Normal School for teachers the year my mother died, and getting a position in the Newtown grammar school right away meant a lot to me. It meant that in spite of the fact I had no family, I still belonged, I was not alone. I had the same friends, did the same things, and even kept on living in the same big, old house. I could do that by fixing up the downstairs spare bedroom and my father's den into a two-room apartment for myself, and renting out the rest of the house. It was an ideal arrangement. I had my own side entrance and could come and go as I pleased, and yet it was not like living completely alone. My tenants, the Millers, had been friends of my parents', and Max, their youngest, was in the grade I taught at school. So I worked all winter, and had my summer vacations at the Lakes, and went to parties and had dates with the boys I'd known all my life. And all the time I was waiting. Waiting for the day that love would come and take possession of my heart. And when it did, I wasn't ready. One night I had to go to the public library to look up some special references for my history class. I wasn't in the mood to study. It was one of those April nights that don't belong to April at all, but to late May. It was warm and soft, and the moon was bright. It was a night for — oh, for anything but sitting in a stuffy library reading musty books. A night to be driving along a country road with the top down. A night to be dancing on the terrace at the Club. A night to be walking arm in arm on a shadowy street with Somebody — somebody I was waiting for. I got my books at the reference desk and carried them over to one of the long tables. A young man was there, on the opposite side, reading and making notes. I glanced at him. He was slimly built, though his shoulders were broad, and his concentration was so intense it was as if he were reading with his whole body. Every line, every movement was absorbed, and he didn't even look up as I sat down. I opened my notebook and then glanced at him again. His face was lean, too, and his hair was dark and his eyes — his eyes were arresting. A sort of dark grayblue. I had never seen him before. With a kind of impatient dissatisfaction, I reached for my books. And my gesture sent the whole pile toppling. The top ones spilled over onto the papers spread out in front of him. "Oh, I'm sorry!" I cried in that sort of stage whisper people use in libraries. "I didn't mean — " And then as his eyes Phyllis tvas afraid of her love for Robert, until courage and faith grew up to kill the fear. And then she discovered that because she had courage, she had the whole world on her side