Big Money (33 page)

The apartment was a little dark, but it had a parlor, a diningroom and two bedrooms and a beautiful big bathroom and kitchen. “First thing I'm goin' to do,” said Margo, “is take a hot bath. . . . I don't believe I've had a hot bath since I left New York.”

While Agnes, who had taken the afternoon off from the tearoom, went out to do some marketing for supper, Margo went into her neat little bedroom with chintz curtains on the walls and took off her chilly rumpled summer dress and got into Agnes's padded dressinggown. Then she sat back in the morrischair in the parlor and strung Frank along when he asked her questions about her life in Havana.

Little by little he sidled over to the arm of her chair, telling her how attractivelooking she'd become. Then suddenly he made a grab for her. She'd been expecting it and gave him a ringing slap on the face as she got to her feet. She felt herself getting hysterical as he came towards her across the room panting.

“Get away from me, you old buzzard,” she yelled, “get away from me or I'll tell Agnes all about you and Agnes and me we'll throw you out on your ear.” She wanted to shut up but she couldn't stop yelling. “Get away from me. I caught a disease down there, if you don't keep away from me you'll catch it too.”

Frank was so shocked he started to tremble all over. He let himself drop into the morrischair and ran his long fingers through his slick silver and black hair. She slammed her bedroom door on him and locked it. Sitting in there alone on the bed she began to think how she would never see Fred again, and could it have been a premonition when she'd told them on the boat that her father was sick. Tears came to her eyes. Certainly she'd had a premonition. The steamheat hissed cozily. She lay back on the bed that was so comfortable with its clean pillows and silky comforter, and still crying fell asleep.

the psychic removed all clothing before'séances at Harvard. Electric torches, bells, large megaphones, baskets, all illuminated by phosphorescent paint, formed the psychic's equipment

 

My brother's coming

                                     
with pineapples

              
Watch the circus begin

 

IS WILLING TO FACE PROBERS

 

the psychic's feet were not near the professor's feet when his trouser leg was pulled. An electric bulb on the ceiling flashed on and off. Buzzers rang. A teleplasmic arm grasped objects on the table and pulled Dr. B.'s hair. Dr. B. placed his nose in the doughnut and encouraged Walter to pull as hard as possible. His nose was pulled.

 

Altho' we both agreed to part

    
It left a sadness in my heart

 

UNHAPPY WIFE TRIES TO DIE

 

SHEIK DENTIST RECONCILED

 

Financing Only Problem

 

I thought that I'd get along

                                            
and now

I find that I was wrong

                                            
somehow

 

Society Women Seek Jobs in Vain as Maids to Queen

 

NUN WILL WED GOB

 

I'm broken hearted

QUEEN HONORS UNKNOWN SOLDIER

 

Police Guard Queen in Mob

 

Beneath a dreamy Chinese moon

    
Where love is like a haunting tune

 

PROFESSOR TORTURES RIVAL

 

QUEEN SLEEPS AS HER TRAIN DEPARTS

 

Social Strife Brews

 

COOLIDGE URGES ADVERTISING

 

I found her beneath the setting sun

    
When the day was done

 

Cop Feeds Canary on $500 Rich Bride Left

 

While the twilight deepened

    
The sky above

    
I told my love

In o-o-old Ma-an-ila-a-a

 

ABANDONED APOLLO STILL HOPES FOR RETURN

OF WEALTHY BRIDE

Agnes was a darling. She managed to raise money through the Morris Plan for Margo's operation when Dr. Dennison said it was absolutely necessary if her health wasn't to be seriously impaired, and nursed her the way she'd nursed her when she'd had measles when she was a little girl. When they told Margo she never could have a baby, Margo didn't care so much but Agnes cried and cried.

By the time Margo began to get well again and think of getting a job she felt as if she and Agnes had just been living together always. The Old Southern Waffle Shop was doing very well and Agnes was making seventyfive dollars a week; it was lucky that she did because Frank Mandeville hardly ever seemed able to get an engagement any more, there's no demand for real entertainment since the war, he'd
say. He'd become very sad and respectable since he and Agnes had been married at the Little Church Around the Corner, and spent most of his time playing bridge at the Lambs Club and telling about the old days when he'd toured with Richard Mansfield. After Margo got on her feet she spent a whole dreary winter hanging around the agencies and in the castingoffices of musical shows, before Flo Ziegfeld happened to see her one afternoon sitting in the outside office in a row of other girls. By chance she caught his eye and made a faint ghost of a funny face when he passed; he stopped and gave her a onceover; next day Mr. Herman picked her for first row in the new show. Rehearsals were the hardest work she'd ever done in her life.

Right from the start Agnes said she was going to see to it that Margo didn't throw herself away with a trashy crowd of chorusgirls; so, although Agnes had to be at work by nine o'clock sharp every morning, she always came by the theater every night after late rehearsals or evening performances to take Margo home. It was only after Margo met Tad Whittlesea, a Yale halfback who spent his weekends in New York once the football season was over, that Agnes missed a single night. The nights Tad met her, Agnes stayed home. She'd looked Tad over carefully and had him to Sunday dinner at the apartment and decided that for a millionaire's son he was pretty steady and that it was good for him to feel some responsibility about Margo.

Those nights Margo would be in a hurry to give a last pat to the blond curls under the blue velvet toque and to slip into the furcape that wasn't silver fox but looked a little like it at a distance, and to leave the dusty stuffy dressingroom and the smells of curling irons and cocoabutter and girls' armpits and stagescenery and to run down the flight of drafty cement stairs and past old greyfaced Luke who was in his little glass box pulling on his overcoat getting ready to go home himself. She'd take a deep breath when she got out into the cold wind of the street. She never would let Tad meet her at the theater with the other stagedoor Johnnies. She liked to find him standing with his wellpolished tan shoes wide apart and his coonskin coat thrown open so that you could see his striped tie and soft rumpled shirt, among people in eveningdress in the lobby of the Astor.

Tad was a simple kind of redfaced boy who never had much to say. Margo did all the talking from the minute he handed her into the taxi to go to the nightclub. She'd keep him laughing with stories about the
other girls and the wardrobewomen and the chorusmen. Sometimes he'd ask her to tell him a story over again so that he could remember it to tell his friends at college. The story about how the chorusmen, who were most of them fairies, had put the bitch's curse on a young fellow who was Maisie De Mar's boyfriend, so that he'd turned into a fairy too, scared Tad half to death. “A lot of things sure do go on that people don't know about,” he said.

Margo wrinkled up her nose. “You don't know the half of it, dearie.” “But it must be just a story.” “No, honestly, Tad, that's how it happened . . . we could hear them yelling and oohooing like they do down in their dressingroom. They all stood around in a circle and put the bitches' curse on him. I tell you we were scared.”

That night they went to the Columbus Circle Childs for some ham and eggs. “Gee, Margo,” said Tad with his mouth full as he was finishing his second order of buttercakes. “I don't think this is the right life for you. . . . You're the smartest girl I ever met and damn refined too.” “Don't worry, Tad, little Margo isn't going to stay in the chorus all her life.”

On the way home in the taxi Tad started to make passes at her. It surprised Margo because he wasn't a fresh kind of a boy. He wasn't drunk either, he'd only had one bottle of Canadian ale. “Gosh, Margo, you're wonderful. . . . You won't drink and you won't cuddle cooty.” She gave him a little pecking kiss on the cheek. “You ought to understand, Tad,” she said, “I've got to keep my mind on my work.”

“I guess you think I'm just a dumb cluck.”

“You're a nice boy, Tad, but I like you best when you keep your hands in your pockets.”

“Oh, you're marvelous,” sighed Tad, looking at her with round eyes from out of his turnedup fuzzy collar from his own side of the cab. “Just a woman men forget,” she said.

Having Tad to Sunday dinner got to be a regular thing. He'd come early to help Agnes lay the table, and take off his coat and roll up his shirtsleeves afterwards to help with the dishes, and then all four of them would play hearts and each drink a glass of beefironandwine tonic from the drugstore. Margo hated those Sunday afternoons but Frank and Agnes seemed to love them, and Tad would stay till the last minute before he had to rush off to meet his father at the Metropolitan Club, saying he'd never had such a good time in his life.

One snowy Sunday afternoon when Margo had slipped away from
the cardtable saying she had a headache and had lain on the bed all afternoon listening to the hissing of the steamheat almost crying from restlessness and boredom, Agnes said with her eyes shining when she came in in her negligee after Tad was gone, “Margo, you've got to marry him. He's the sweetest boy. He was telling us how this place is the first time in his life he's ever had any feeling of home. He's been brought up by servants and ridingmasters and people like that. . . . I never thought a millionaire could be such a dear. I just think he's a darling.”

“He's no millionaire,” said Margo, pouting.

“His old man has a seat on the stockexchange,” called Frank from the other room. “You don't buy them with cigarstore coupons, do you, dear child?”

“Well,” said Margo, stretching and yawning, “I certainly wouldn't be getting a spendthrift for a husband. . . .” Then she sat up and shook her finger at Agnes. “I can tell you right now why he likes to come here Sundays. He gets a free meal and it don't cost him a cent.”

 

Jerry Herman, the yellowfaced bald shriveledup little casting-director, was a man all the girls were scared to death of. When Regina Riggs said she'd seen Margo having a meal with him at Keene's Chophouse between performances, one Saturday, the girls never quit talking about it. It made Margo sore and gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach to hear them giggling and whispering behind her back in the dressingroom.

Regina Riggs, a broadfaced girl from Oklahoma whose real given name was Queenie and who'd been in the Ziegfeld choruses since the days when they had horsecars on Broadway, took Margo's arm when they were going down the stairs side by side after a morning rehearsal. “Look here, kiddo,” she said, “I just want to tip you off about that guy, see? You know me, I been through the mill an' I don't give a hoot in hell for any of 'em . . . but let me tell you somethin'. There never been a girl got a spoken word by givin' that fourflusher a lay. Plenty of 'em have tried it. Maybe I've tried it myself. You can't beat the game with that guy an' a beautiful white body's about the cheapest thing there is in this town. . . . You got a kinda peart innocent look and I thought I'd put you wise.”

Margo opened her blue eyes wide. “Why, the idea. . . . What made you think I'd . . .” She began to titter like a schoolgirl. “All right, baby,
let it ride. . . . I guess you'll hold out for the weddin' bells.” They both laughed. They were always good friends after that.

But not even Queenie knew about it when after a long wearing rehearsal late one Saturday night of a new number that was coming in the next Monday, Margo found herself stepping into Jerry Herman's roadster. He said he'd drive her home, but when they reached Columbus Circle, he said wouldn't she drive out to his farm in Connecticut with him and have a real rest. Margo went into a drugstore and phoned Agnes that there'd be rehearsals all day Sunday and that she'd stay down at Queenie Rigg's flat that was nearer the theater. Driving out, Jerry kept asking Margo about herself. “There's something different about you, little girl,” he said. “I bet you don't tell all you know. . . . You've got mystery.”

All the way out Margo was telling about her early life on a Cuban sugarplantation and her father's great townhouse in the Vedado and Cuban music and dances, and how her father had been ruined by the sugartrust and she'd supported the family as a child actress in Christmas pantomimes in England and about her early unfortunate marriage with a Spanish nobleman, and how all that life was over now and all she cared about was her work. “Well, that story would make great publicity,” was what Jerry Herman said about it.