Radio romances (July-Dec 1945)

This Little Time was Ours In Washington, we could be together. " There's only you," you said, "when your soft hands touch me." How can a wife let her hands get rough! Jergens Lotion hand care is so simple and lovely. We'd forget to take pictures when our fingers touched. "That a girl's hands can be so soft!" you said. But you must have seen my Jergens Lotion, darling. It's Jergens care that helps a girl's hands stay soft. Stars in Hollywood use Jergens hand care, 7 to 1. Gain sure softness-protection for your hands, too, with Jergens. Brings your skin 2 ingredients many doctors use to help drying, coarse skin to unfor gettable softness. Hands soon look younger, smoother! Like professional hand care. Yet Jergens Lotion is easy, quick to use. No oiliness; no annoying stickiness lOtf to $1.00, plus tax. For the softest, adorable Hands, USE JERGENS LOTION phone ringing." With a muttered goodnight I strode into the hall and picked up the receiver. "Yes," I said grumpily. And when the answer came, I felt as though somebody had poked my heart, it jumped so. Because there was the same challenging quality in Carl Byrnes' voice that I had seen in his face, so that I recognized it before he told me his name. "Janet isn't in," I told him, wondering because he had never called her at the house before. "I know it — she's here with me. It was you I wanted, Miss Tanner." "Yes?" "It was you, today, wasn't it — on Carmel Street? I thought so, but I just didn't think fast enough to ask if I could take you anywhere." "That's perfectly all right." In spite of myself, my heart hadn't settled down yet. What did he want, I wondered? "After all, we've never really met." "No," Carl Byrnes said. "But I saw you once, and I remembered you perfectly well. And about not meeting, Miss Tanner — couldn't we remedy that right now? If I took Janet all the way home — as I usually don't because she won't let me — could we talk a bit?" Don't try your wiles on me, young man. I'm not a child. I took a firm grip on the phone and said, "Of course. Come right ahead." But when I hung up I discovered I was a little breathless. Nonsense. If he wants' to know what I think about him and Janet, I'll tell him what I think. I went back to the porch rocker, fortified with some knitting, and waited. IN ABOUT half an hour they came, he * and Janet, slowly walking up from the bus stop. Close together. Not talking. No car tonight; he must be trying to show me that he can ride on the bus just like other people. "My goodness," I murmured half aloud, "maybe I am a child, or else a very old woman. I ought to be ashamed." I was ashamed — not only because of my peevish desire to find fault with Carl, but because I felt somehow that sitting there in the half-dark, watching them come up the street so close together, was an invasion of something private between them. I slipped into the house, just in time to be coming out of the livingroom as they entered the hall. Janet put a hand on my arm as she introduced Carl to me, a hand that was chilled and tense. All her hope that I would like him, that I would feel differently toward him was in that hand and in the look she gave me. She said, "I'm rather tired; I'm going right up." She gave me a last glance over Carl's head, held his hand for a moment, and disappeared up the stairs. I had smiled at Carl, but at his answering smile I froze again, inside. It was everything that disturbed me about him — his charm, the sureness born of having always had and done everything he wanted. I couldn't welcome this man into Janet's life, when I was so certain that he only wanted to stay there for a little while, until he went on his way again. I led the way out to the porch and sat down, taking up my knitting again. There was silence for a minute; then Carl looked at me and I could see, in the dusk, the white flash of his grin. "You look about twenty when you smile," he said. I stopped rocking. "People usually take me for — for older than I am." I hadn't meant to say that at all!