Radio and television mirror (July-Dec 1942)

How selfish she had been! She had accepted everything, but gave nothing in return, never realizing that true happiness must be paid for with sorrow THE second time we were out together, Eric told me he loved me. I laughed at him — laughed because suddenly I found myself wanting to believe him. "How do you know?" I said. He smiled too, and passed off my laughter, but there was a stubborn set to his jaw. "I know," he said in his deep voice. "I think about you most of the time, and I'm always in a hurry when I'm going to see you." "That may not mean anything particularly," I said. "But it does. You'll know it does, after we're married." At the word "married" I stiffened. Very emphatically, I said, "I'm not going to marry anyone for a long time. Maybe never." Later, after Eric had brought me home to the house where I lived with my father, I didn't feel like sleeping, so I went out into the garden and sat on a bench there, thinking. Thinking, I must admit, about Eric. He was tall and dark, and when he moved there was something purposeful about him. Not grace, but a kind of economy of movement, so that after a while it was fun to watch him. And I liked the way his mind worked, and his poise, and the way he talked. "But I don't want to marry him," my thoughts said, over and over. "I don't want to marry anyone." I couldn't entirely understand it, myself. Perhaps a psychologist could have found a name for this deep inner reluctance to surrender myself to another person. It was an emotional reluctance, much more than a physical one. Ever since I was a little girl — ever since I had seen my father's soul wither and shrink inside him when my mother ran away with another man — I had said to myself, "It must never happen to me. I must never put my happiness into the hands of anyone but myself, to crush and throw away." Other people could do such dreadful things to you. They could invade your life, change it, soil it. Even a marriage which did not end in a tragedy like that of my father's could become sordid, weary. In fact, it seemed to me, most marriages settled into a routine of what someone had once called "quiet desperation." They became treadmill affairs, as colorless as a prison. When at last I left the garden, that night, and went into the house, my resolution not to let myself marry Eric was unchanged. But all the same, I could not keep the world from being a different place from then .on. The summer was more glorious, the sun shone more brightly, the birds sang more loudly. And although I refused to go out with Eric the next time he called, and the time after that, it seemed I could not avoid him. Written by John Baxter, this story was suggested by an original radio script first broadcast on Kate Smith's CBS Variety Program heard Friday nights. Wherever I went in our little Connecticut town, sooner or later he was there too, looking at me with a challenging expression that said, "Haven't you changed your mind yet? But you will." I tried going out with him when he asked me, just to prove to myself that I was not afraid of him, and for two weeks we were together every evening, driving in his car, dancing somewhere, going into the city to the theater. And the atmosphere between us became like the atmosphere over a valley just before the thunderstorm breaks. Something was going to happen, and I had stopped trying to avoid it. I wanted it to happen. He brought me home late one evening, after Father had gone to bed. He opened the door of the car on his side and walked around to let me out. He put his arm around me tightly. I could feel the hardness of his body and the insistence of his arm, and I said breathlessly, "Good night, Eric." But he shook his head. "I'm hungry, Maggie. Do you suppose you could find something 14 KADIO AND TELEVISION MIRROR