Tomorrow! Read Online Free PDF Page A

dark, almost black hair perfectly curled down her back between tan shoulder blades, her blue eyes straight ahead, her smile too fixed—winning the cup and beginning to move away from him, not meaning or wanting to. . . .

    Her college years. She knew a little about the trouble with herself, by then; nobody, no intent professor or research graduate, expected to look up from some glass maze and see a dream girl working at the bench opposite; nobody could quite believe glamour and brains could live together. And her family: a mother openly outraged that she’d birthed a brainy daughter, publicly maintaining that beauty, by which she meant a body, was a woman’s one useful asset and brains were the certain road to inconspicuous poverty; Beau, the indulgent father, scared of his wife, happily awed by his child-scared and awed first by his own mother—indulging Lenore when he could but never making any assertion of family values, never leading, always either following Netta or pursuing Lenore like a nervous secretary. . . .

    It was a dilemma all right, and Chuck was accustomed to it. He didn’t exactly blame Lenore for reaching no decision, for drifting along, a lovely college girl, “back at home,”
    awaiting events, like myriads of other girls. Maybe she was spoiled. Maybe she was really lacking in initiative like her dad. Maybe she shared, deep beneath the intelligent mind, the realism and pert but warm aliveness that appeared to be her whole self, some taint of her mother’s infinite cupidity; perhaps she had caught some contagion from her mother’s striving to escape an inferior background. Maybe Lenore wasn’t the woman the girl had been. But maybe she was.

    “I think she still loves you,” Chuck’s mother murmured across her sewing.

    His brown eyes gleamed. ‘Wish I thought so.”

    “If you’d only . . .” Beth Conner broke off. No use telling Charles to take any “bull by the horns,” any ‘‘bit in his teeth”; it wasn’t his way. He went at life, even when everything he valued was involved, slowly, quietly, in his steady fashion.

    “If I’d only what ?”

    She bit a thread. “Lenore hasn’t changed a particle—so far,” she said. “But she’s getting worried about herself. Restless.”

    “Keep quiet!” Nora expostulated. “I’m studying!” She sank her teeth into an apple, glued her eyes to a geography.

    Concealed behind its brown covers was a paper-backed novel with a near-naked, huge-bosomed young woman printed on its sleek exterior and the title Sins in Seven Streets. A period of perhaps five minutes passed while Nora “studied,” Ted completed a math problem and Mrs.
    Conner read. Charles turned the pages of the paper unseeingly, his mind steadfast on Lenore. But even he was startled when the alarm went off.

    “What’s that?” he exclaimed. Mrs. Conner glanced swiftly at her two younger children, Nora first. Then she said drily, “What is it, Ted?”

    “You’ll see.” Pride was commingled with misgiving in his tone. The room was suddenly flooded with hollow-sounding din as the TV set switched itself on. “Invention,” Ted explained modestly. “So we wouldn’t miss Tootlin’ Tim.”

    Tootlin’ Tim was apparently on the air, for a studio audience laughed and the Conner household was filled with the lunging, sepulchral explosion which represents the combined efforts of hundreds of persons, with nothing to do· and no sense of humor, to express what they regard as amusement.

    The same sound from the same source—radio laughter—was surging through millions of Middle Western homes at the same instant. It is an utterly savage sound, mirthless and cruel, usually inspired by the sadisms which constitute most popular humor. It is a sound that would stun to silence the predatory night noises of the wildest jungle, a sound of madness, more frightful than screaming.

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    The same sound from the same TV program intermittently belched through the Bailey living room