← Harold's Old Time Radio
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- [00:01]
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At Amica Insurance, we know it's more than a life policy. It's about the promise and the responsibility that comes with being a new parent. Being there day and night and building a plan for tomorrow, today for the ones you'll always look out for. Trust Amica Life Insurance. Amica empathy is our best policy.
- [00:31]
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A woman's Story. The sponsor's opening message will be given here. Love is of man's life, a thing apart, his woman's whole existence. This is the story of what love did to the life of one woman. Her name is Mary Breen.
- [01:34]
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I'm Mary Breen. I remember so well the morning I told my mother I was going to marry Toby. We were in my room. Mother was sitting in the chintz chair by the window. She listened quietly while I told her I planned to be married immediately. Then she tried kindly and gently to persuade me to wait. She said Toby and I weren't old enough for marriage. Weren't ready for it. Of course I wouldn't listen. Mother finally gave her consent and saw that I had a lovely wedding. As we parted, she held me very close and whispered, be happy, my darling. That's all I want. That was five years ago. I was 19 and Toby was 20. He was a salesman with a big wholesale house. We rented a little bungalow on the very edge of town and named it Tori. The first two letters of his name and the last two letters of mine. We furnished it with bright gay colors and laughed and loved our way through the first year of our marriage. It was during the second year that strange things began to happen. Very gradually, Toby began to change. I noticed first that he no longer talked over with me some exciting business prospect. That had been one of the things he'd loved doing. Telling me all about it and planning on what we'd do if the deal went through. Then Toby began staying away in the evenings. More and more business, he'd say, and I wanted to believe him. I started to really worry the day Mr. Radcliffe, our landlord, came to see me to say that our rent hadn't been paid for two months. I told him I was sure it was a mistake and I'd had my husband take care of it that evening. There was something else I wanted to talk to Toby about when he came home that evening. Something exciting and thrilling. I wanted to tell him that we were to have a baby. Seemed a little silly to give him news like that. And Mr. Radcliffe's message at the same time. But I did. I saved the news about baby till last. Toby was furious about Mr. Radcliffe's visit. He said he'd mailed the rent for those two months and there was nothing he could do about the mail service and Radcliffe had better keep his shirt on. About the baby. He said he didn't see how we could afford it. I tried to keep him from noticing the tears that came to my eyes, but I couldn't. Then he kissed me and said not to worry. We managed somehow, and maybe having a baby would be fun. It was a week later that a taxi stopped in front of our house. Much to my delight and surprise, Helen and Bruce Crane came running up the walk. They were dear friends and I hadn't seen them in the year they'd been living in another city. They were in town for just five hours. Their bags were checked at the station and they'd come to pick up Toby and me to do the town. I told them Toby wouldn't be home for dinner and I had no idea where to locate him. He was out with a client. It wasn't hard for them to persuade me to go along with him anyway, and I hurriedly changed my clothes and set out for an evening of fun. Bruce directed the taxi to take us to a well known roadhouse famous for its steak dinners. The Castle, it was called. It was while we were eating dinner that Toby walked into the castle. Toby and a beautiful blond girl with her hand in his. I saw Helen and Bruce exchange a look of understanding and in a very short time we left. Toby hadn't noticed us at all. The Cranes took me home and stayed with me till their train time. They didn't mention what had happened until they were leaving. And then Helen said, don't worry, Mary. I'm sure it didn't mean a thing. I was awake when Toby came home, but pretended to be sleeping. The next day was Sunday. The day I always looked forward to suddenly became a day that I dreaded. Toby was gay and told me a story of having spent the evening before with a client, sitting in a smoky hotel suite talking business. I. I couldn't let him go on, so I told him I'd seen him at the Castle. I was shocked at Toby's reaction. He said I was spying on him, that he had a perfect right to do as he pleased. He said marriage hadn't given him anything but a lot of responsibilities, that a man was entitled to have fun. He said an intelligent wife would have taken it all as a matter of course, as one of the conditions of marriage. When I finally answered him, I felt cold, calm, and very sure. I told Toby that if that was true. I didn't want marriage. He laughed at me. He said I was lucky. I knew what was going on and most wives didn't. I don't remember what I said then, but it made Toby furiously angry. We quarreled horribly and he went into the bedroom and packed his clothes. I didn't try to stop him. I didn't want to. He sent no word to me. So far as I was concerned, he'd vanished from the face of the earth and that's the way I wanted it. I went home to face the lonely months until my baby was born. I named him David and tried not to see that he had Toby's features and wild blonde hair. When David was three months old, I got my old job back in the big bank downtown. Two years passed and I didn't hear from Toby. I don't know why, but neither of us seem to think about a divorce when the war came. It didn't change my life very much, except that before long I had a more responsible position in the bank and I was busy each evening with civilian defense work. I was interested in the war. I loved the thrilling stories of the men of the Air Corps and read the newspaper reports each day. One evening I read a heartrending story of a great American bomber and its gallant crew. A bomber that had seemed to defy every law of God and man by getting back to its base, almost a total wreck. The crew wasn't named in that first story, but the name of the bomber was Tori. Tori for Toby and Mary. That had been the name we'd given Mr. Radcliffe's little bungalow. But then I thought Tory wasn't a word. Weed, coin. It had been used in telling the history of America. Why shouldn't there be a bomber named Tory? A bomber with a crew that had never heard of that little bungalow? The Tory was patched up somehow, and it flew again to even greater glory. Finally came the story with the names of the crew. Captain Toby Breen had named the ship. Captain Toby Breen had been decorated for extreme bravery. Captain Toby Breen was the world's flying hero. Mother read the stories, too, and we talked about Toby as we would of someone we'd known slightly who had surprised us by becoming famous. There was nothing in the paper for a while, and then we read that Captain Toby Breen was in America to tour the great war industries of the nation in the interest of production. I knew, of course, that Captain Toby Breen was my husband David's father. And yet I had a feeling that all of this concerned Me? Not at all. I felt exactly that way until the evening I came home to find Toby in our living room. We looked at each other without saying a word. Mother got up from the davenport, lifted David from his father's lap and left the room. And there we were, Toby and I. We started to talk. And somehow, as he covered the story of the years we'd been apart, he seemed to be talking of someone else, not of the man who sat before me. I listened to all Toby had to say and turned and walked from the room. I went out of the house and I just walked for an hour or more. When I returned, Toby was gone. House was dark. I went upstairs to the nursery and kissed my sleeping son. Then I opened the door of my bedroom. The light was on. Mother was sitting in the chintz chair by the window. She'd waited to talk with me. She told me she'd gone in to Toby when she'd heard the front door close after me. And Toby had said to her what he'd been unable to say to me. He told her how deeply and dearly he loved me. How little he could understand the person he'd been five years ago. He said that was why he couldn't come right out and ask me to forgive him and to take him back. He told her how he'd come to name his bomber the Tory. How thoughts of me and the child that he'd never seen were always with him as he flew the great ship. Suddenly I realized that Mother, my mother, was pleading Toby's case. I reminded her of the day she told me she thought I could never be happy with Toby. And how right she'd been. She nodded her head yes. She remembered. She'd been afraid it would end as it had ended. We were just children when we were married. Spoiled children. One of us would surely fail and the other would meet that failure with emotion instead of with understanding. When she finished, I said, and now, Mother? What now? We're still the same people. We're still Toby and Mary. Still Toby and Mary, she said. But Toby and Mary, grown up. I asked her what assurance I had that Toby had really changed. Then. Mother reminded me of the time when I was a tiny girl and had secretly stolen a rag doll from the playhouse of the girl next door. The tears of my little playmate and the spanking from my mother had been all the lesson I'd needed. Mother smiled as she said, in spite of that one mistake, you didn't grow up to be a thief. She kissed me good night then and left the room I'm here alone now, this very minute. I should go to bed. I'm terribly tired. But I'm going to stay up all night. It'll take that long to finish the love letter. I'm going to write to to the.
- [13:52]
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Sponsor'S closing message will be given at this point in the broadcast. Next week at this same time, you'll hear the story of a woman whom the world called a criminal, a woman sentenced to spend her life in a mental institution. Listen to her tragic story as she'll tell it on this program next week.
- [14:42]
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