Radio and television mirror (Jan-June 1942)

moon — that he was jealous of my old friendship, and that when we returned I must give Martie up entirely. For an instant I felt the injustice of this — but then I told myself that it only proved the depth of his love. He could not share me, not even a little. I went over and linked my arm in his. "Let's go down and explore Rio before lunch," I said. I forgot the look of cold, stubborn resistance that had come over his face when he saw the radiogram. I forgot it then, but I was to remember it later. There's no point, really, in telling you very much about that first year of my marriage. It seemed at the time very uneventful — too uneventful. And yet things were happening — little things, taking place beneath the smooth surface of my life. I didn't even kno"w of their existence until, inexplicably, another incident, as seemingly trivial as any of the others, showed my husband to me in a new light. We had been to a Broadway theater, and in the crush of people, coming out after the performance, we met Mollie. She was an old beggarwoman into whose outstretched palm I had often put a coin in the days when I was a Broadway star myself. Now she recognized me, and smiled, and waited for Bob to give her some money. Instead, he brushed past her, holding me firmly by the arm so that I had to follow. "She's probably got as much as we have right now," he muttered. To me, that wasn't the point, although I knew Mollie always had enough money to stake out-of-work actresses to their week's room-rent. What hurt me was Bob's rudeness, the way he closed his mind to the feelings of others, even of his wife. From the theater we went on to a night club where Bob would spend many times the largest amount he could have given Mollie. I couldn't swallow the sandwich and wine he ordered for me, and pushed them away untouched. gOB didn't seem to notice anything wrong. There were some people we knew at the night club, and his attention was taken up by them, particularly by a man named Harrison — a middle-aged man whose cruel, heavy-lidded eyes never smiled,' although his voice was loud with forced joviality. I thought him one of the most repulsive people I had ever met. He was with a much younger girl, an exquisite thing whose slim figure and rose-petal complexion were oddly at variance with the calculating, disillusioned expression that came over her face when she looked at Harrison. Before I could stop him. Bob had asked her to dance, and I was left with Harrison. He wanted me to dance too, but I pleaded a headache and refused. I couldn't stand the thought of being in his gross embrace. Suddenly I hated the place — the bored, overdressed people capering on the dance floor, the too-loud orchestra, the taste and money lavished by people who knew their job on decorations which were hardly noticed, the poorly prepared food at ridiculous prices, the smoke, the liquor, the extravagance. I had been part of all this once— but I'd been one of those who really worked to supply the entertainment, and I realized that I must have built up in myself, without knowing it, a contempt for those wealthy people who frequented places like this. But — no, I admitted honestly, it wasn't just the place that depressed me tonight. I kept thinking of the unpleasant incident at the theater, and from it my thoughts went back — back to moments in the months since we returned from our honeymoon. The time when Bob came home to find that I had invited my sister Norine and her husband to dinner, and was so pointedly polite that they never came again . . . The night I first realized that Bob enjoyed having his masculine business friends see my beauty, enjoyed the knowledge that they envied him his possession of me. I had been flattered at the time. Now I was not so sure. . . . The long evenings when Bob working late at the office, left me to dine alone {Continued on page 64) FEBRUABY, 1942