Radio and television mirror (Jan-June 1941)

I'd stop, too, if he did. He glanced along the street, and up at the sky, and said with an entrancing, twisted smile: "Suppose I told you I keep my car out there, in hope there'll be another rainy day and I can take you home again? What would you say?" And then we were out on the street and he was saying — "It's clear now, but I think I'd better drive you home anyway, just to make sure." He said it so casually and with such a gay smile that I couldn't very well frown at him and refuse. It was not like the day when there actually had been rain. We had talked easily that day. Today we knew he should not be taking me riding, though I had accepted his invitation. And he did most of the talking. There were remnants of a snow fall in the streets. When I got home my mother said it had been kind of him to bring me, but her lips tightened a little when I told her who he was. I decided not to worry her by letting him bring me home again. I could have him leave me somewhere else, at a friend's house. But Clay had a second thought, too. After that day he invited me to ride only when it was really bad walking. It was winter, though, with plenty of bad walking, and it became an unspoken agreement between us that on bad days he would take me home. One day he suddenly suggested, "Maybe we'd have time to drive through a corner of the park. What time must you be home?" Wind with snow flurries in it was tearing through the park. Dry, frosty branches crackled and tossed beneath it. The drive was broken up into patches of rough ice. "At — dinnertime," I said. There had come to be these days when I rode with him, and no other days at all. The gaps between, that some people called days, were mere punctuation, periods, dashes, spaces. I let him drive into the wind and cold of the park. It would mean another half hour with him. BUT it was not at all like driving on the main road. In the park we were too alone. I was too aware of him, of the throb of his voice, and his glance, and his nearness. There was a strange tension between us, as if we were in flight together. And in a voice that said, "I love you — love you — love you," I made myself say instead, because this couldn't — just couldn't — go on: "Let's — let's drive out and find coffee and waffles somewhere. It's so cold here." He didn't answer at once. But we drove along until we found a coffee shop. We sat at the solid, glistening white counter and after we had ordered, neither of us spoke. We could never acknowledge this thing that was happening to us — not only to me, but to him. For half an hour I had known that I was in love, and that it wasn't only I who was in love, and that we never could acknowledge that we were. I laughed shakily and said: "Mother will be furious that I spoiled my dinner." I was glad he laughed, too. Then we sat there a long while, talking, and other days we were there again. Once it had mattered little what we talked about, as long as we were together and talked. That wasn't so any more. I remembered every question he asked about me, APRIL, 1941 treasuring it as though it were a gift. And everything he told me, about him, seemed something precious he entrusted to me. We never, either of us, spoke of his wife. I knew, and he knew that I knew. That was all. Soon there were days when he looked sleepless and ill. Sometimes it was evident he hated to be with me, hated himself for wanting to be with me. But also it was evident that he could not bear to stay away. He was reading his lines badly now, on the microphone, making nothing of them unless they happened to express feelings of his own. And if they did, he gave them too much significance, dwarfing everyone else in the cast but me, making of the others a faint background for me. There was not a day when my heart did not break for him — for myself — for her. There was nothing, I said to myself, that we could do about it, nothing that would be of any use. He would have told me if there were anything. Divorce? It sounds so simple. But it was not simple. Or he would not go on silently suffering as he was suffering, instead of asking his wife to divorce him. The day we were asked to remain for separate rehearsal, just he and I, he realized for the first time that he was breaking, and that I was. For the hour, he got back his selfcommand and helped me through, as he had done the first day I rehearsed with him. But there was no joy now in reading well. Or in anything. I had no sense of anything except of waiting — waiting and yet knowing there could be nothing to wait for. Rehearsal ended, I fled through an unlighted room where audiences sat at certain hours. It was the shortest way to the elevators. I meant Clay to understand, by my not saying good night, that I'd be waiting for him at his car. We'd have to talk it through tonight, whatever came of it. Then it occurred to me that he might not have understood, and I turned to go back and tell him, and — I was in his arms. I had not heard his step on the thick rug. I had not known the sense I felt, of his nearness. His arms closed around me. In the halfdusk his lips found mine. My arms clasped around his neck, I gave back kiss for kiss. Now he knew. That tortured question in his eyes would never harrow me again. He knew. A torment had ended, but a new torment was already beginning. We clung as though all the world were trying to tear us from each other, (Continued on page 67) 19