Radio and television mirror (July-Dec 1942)

IOUISE GARRETSON stared unseeingly out of the train window at the dingy, busy platform. She felt listless and oppressed. In her mind she was hearing, not the sound of the bustle of porters and trucks, but the rattle and bang and murmur and rumble that had awakened her on her first — and only — morning in New York City. Her blue eyes misted over with tears. She had not even had time to grow used to the ceaseless, noisy stirring of life in the city. Miserably, she remembered how happy she had been that morning two days ago — no — a lifetime ago. She remembered how she had jumped out of bed and run to the window and feasted her eyes on the unfamiliar sight of a city beginning the business of the day. She had watched people scurrying through the traffic and disappearing down stairways, which she realized must lead to the Subways. She had watched cars and trucks. fighting for the right of way and stopping and starting at the silent command of the red and green lights on the corners. Like thin, small echoes, she had heard the cry of a newsboy and the shout of a truck driver and the steady, impatient honkings of horns. All at once, she had felt that she must hurry and become a part of all . this. There was so much she wanted to see and do and know, before she had to settle down and find a job. She had dressed quickly, almost feverishly, and soon stood before the mirror, appraising . herself. She had been sure of herself, then. Her hat was smart and her new Spring coat fitted her tall, lithe figure as though it had been tailored for it. No, she had smiled at herself, no one would guess the scrimping and slaving, the years of secret longing that had gone into the building of this moment, when she was free, at last. She had been sure she looked like any one of the millions of girls in New York. And she was glad. As the train had carried her Eastward, she had cast off the fetters of the past, the farm, the drudgery, the sordidness. Her crippled, querulous father and her gaunt, overworked Aunt Matilda had become dream figures, who had nothing to do with this new Louise Garretson, who was going to conquer life and shape her own destiny. The train began, slowly, to move out of the station. Louise shivered and her left hand tightened around the crumpled telegram in her coat pocket. Her mind went back to that morning again. She had been so happy, so unsuspecting, as she rode down in the elevator and fairly danced to the desk to turn in her key. "Good morning," the room clerk. Adapted by Dena Reed from an original radio story by Phillip Bloom, heard on Grand Central Station. had beamed at her. Then, "There's a telegram for you, Miss Garretson." A yellow piece of paper. "Your Aunt Matilda died suddenly this morning. Come home. Father." That was all. Louise had crumpled the telegram and thrust it into her pocket. For one still moment, she had told herself she didn't care, she would never go back, nothing was so important as her right to live her own life. The next moment, she had known that her life was not her own. For the next moment, standing there in the lobby, she had become a little girl again, a frightened little girl, dragged from her bed and carried, through smoke and flames and falling walls, to safety. She had lived again through the terror of shivering in the cold and watching her father run back to the burning house, to appear a few minutes later, carrying her mother and, not a second too soon, pushing his limp burden out of the reach of the collapsing beams. She had felt again the horror of the moment when she saw the porch give way under her father and the heavy, charred rafters bury him. For although they had RADIO AND TELEVISION MIRROR