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

I COULD tell this as if it were a (airy story. I could almost begin it "Once upon a time". . . I could say that once there was a little princess who lived in a fairy palace; she was the center of her own small universe, the pole about which revolved everyone and everything that came in contact with her. She was very beautiful, this little princess. Everyone said so, and no one ever thought to impress upon her that her beauty was an accident, a gift bequeathed by her parents and her parents' parents, and not of her own doing at all. She never stopped to realize that those ancestors of hers might as easily have bequeathed her an ugly face, or a grotesquely twisted body. Neither did the princess have any brothers or sisters; she never learned what give-andtake means; she never learned to share. She grew up believing that there was no one, anywhere in the world, who could say no to her, and mean it. And that is the wuy things were with the self-centered, self-engrossed little princess when she met her fairy prince, when she first heard his rich, deep voice, and felt it touch responsive, unsuspected chords in her heart. Yes, I could make a fairy story of it —for I was that princess. But a fairy story ends happily after the coming of the prince, and my story didn't go that way at all. I'm going to try to be honest in telling you what I was, and how I came to be that way, and I can in honesty say that it was not all my fault. Partly, the blame was my parents'. The girl who came to Stonewall Inn one Indian-summer day, and found her prince charming in the person of Mike Torrey, and all of life spread out for her taking — a spoiled girl with a completely askew sense of values — was, certainly, the Shelley Drake I'd made myself t0 be since I had grown up. But the foundations had been laid long before — even before I was born. Mother and Dad, two lonely people who had wanted love, and a home, and children, all of their lives, had found each other heartbreakingly late. I Was the answer to a dream they had hardly dared expect to realize, and I don't think they ever got over the wonder of having a child. Mother had been the ugly-duckling daughter in a family 0f lovely girls, and her delight, when it became obvious that I was going to have her sisters' good looks, was boundless. I'm sure she decided that I would, no matter what the sacrifice, have everything she had always wanted and that she would live her desires for pretty things, for admiration, vicariously in me. Dad, as fathers will, would have thought his daughter the loveliest thing in the world anyway. And so I was spoiled and petted and adored Dad's salary was small, and our little brown-shingled house on Pelham Street was a far cry from a fairy castle but it was that for me, for in it every spoken wish came true. There was a beautiful doll's house in one room (mother had needed a new coat that winter) and a slide and see-saw in the basement, (Dad had a hard time payine for the coal that year), and everything else I ever asked for. Most of the girls I knew, even the ones whose parents were much better off than mine wore hand-me-down or made-over clothes sometimes, took turns with toys had household chores they were expected to do, learned to give and take to share, to assume responsibility. But not I. I didn't participate in the roughhouse e»£eer P^k nei^borhood children, elothesPtrymbuecChaUt1 VpTtT ^ ageniu] Sth^nX^™ too lavish clothes for me * far grJwauo^fnHhe f,air,yland in wh*h I s'ew up — and out of which r ,.,.,.. frightening* shaken durutg 'm/Vst MoTher fnft1 SCh^.' When Da* A and T^ere I w °W*1 *"" * feW weeks Iater inere I was, stunned and alone and wnHHUlPP!d t0 wrest a livi"g from the Tin *?t make myse" a Place 7n it I don t know what I would have done £„ iAndrews. from next door in an'"!,r J° my terrified, "What shalM do? hadn't said, tartly, "You certainlv can sew, Shelley. You get yourself $ dow,n to Haters' Store and see if they Go^nenrV,reb°dy V> alterations Goodness child, you can't just sit!" Its really too bad that they did need an alteration hand at Harperi'-I know £ thaTL,11 Wi tave ***" b<*er »«rt . * JJ>b had been refu*ed me, ndmiMTd a,"d " third' for '"en f-ilh.8 • ,aVe learn«*. bitterly and fnghten.ngly, what it was like to have likeTYay "° '° me' what il was "Re to have to struggle for what I wanted. It would have been beTter if a year later Mrs. Sheldon, who was on tZne»K°f " V.fry exclu*ive toy shop on the other side of the city, hadn't !7mh I? S HarDers' and bought a dress; if I hadn t been called to alter it for her We got to talking, she and I, about Shelley closed herself au,ay in a dream u>orld, waiting for a prince to beckon. But in place of the prince there came a man, ruthlessly shattering her make-believe