Marjorie Morningstar (15 page)

Marjorie worried for days over the prospect of sitting through Seth’s bar-mitzva banquet
with the Goldstones. She unburdened herself to Marsha. The fat girl was more amused
than concerned. “Of course we start from different premises,” she said. “I don’t care
a hang whether you captivate the Goldstones or not. I’m against the match. Maybe when
I meet Sandy I’ll change my mind, but as of now—”

“Marsha, you know it’s not a question of a match, but—look, I do like Sandy and—the
family stages such brawls, sometimes, that’s all—”

“Sugar bun, the Goldstones have a family too. Everybody does. Actually it’s one of
the world’s mysteries why all relatives are such a gruesome lot of spooks. You’d think
mathematically somebody would be related to the human section of the human race, but
it doesn’t seem to work out that way. Probably it’s got something to do with Einstein’s
theory—relativity, you know—”

Marjorie said, “Very funny.”

“I just can’t see that it’s a problem, dear—”

“God Almighty, don’t you think there’s something bald about hauling these virtual
strangers—millionaires, as it happens—into the bosom of the family along with their
handsome son—he
is
handsome, believe me—and plunking me down at a table with them for the evening in
full view of all my aunts and uncles? I think it’s the next thing to announcing an
engagement, that’s all, and I don’t think Sandy’s folks are going to be amused by
such shotgun tactics—let alone Sandy—”

They talked some more, and then Marsha suggested that she invite George. That would
baffle the family, she said, and neutralize any suspicion in the Goldstones; George
would act so proprietary that Sandy would be lucky to dance twice with her all evening.
Marjorie thought this over, and concluded that it was an inspiration. That night she
sent him one of the engraved bar-mitzva invitations, adding on the back a prettily
worded note begging him to come. She wrote, instead of phoning him, because at the
moment matters stood rather awkwardly between her and George. Their last date had
ended in a long wrangle in the front seat of Penelope. George had nagged and nagged
at her to tell him what he had done wrong, how he had offended her, what she wanted
him to do to make things as they had been in the old days. To these classic questions,
of course, Marjorie had been unable to invent any good fresh answers.

A week went by; two weeks; three. No response from George. She wondered whether the
letter could have gone astray in the mail, and two or three times she almost telephoned
him. She was very glad she hadn’t when his answer at last arrived. It lay on the desk
in her room, an ominously fat envelope, when she came home from rehearsal. She tore
it open, and after glancing at the first paragraph she fell on the bed and feverishly
skimmed through the letter, so shocking in George’s familiar neat script and green
ink. He was not coming to the bar-mitzva, he said, and he did not expect to see Marjorie
again. It was a dry letter, totally different in tone from anything George had ever
said or written to her before. The gist of it was that he had found another girl;
and Marjorie could not at all doubt that this was the truth. He spoke with detached
clarity of the way she had drifted from him since her move to Manhattan. It was hopeless,
he said, to see her any more, and now that he had met this girl—a Bronx girl, much
closer to him in background and interests—he had no desire to.

In the last paragraph, which was a short and annoyingly good-humored farewell, half
a line had been crossed over and thickly blotted out; it was almost the only mar on
the four evenly written sheets. Marjorie stared at the long green blotch and held
it up to the light, trying to make out the words, hoping that under the blotch lay
a revealing little sentence that would show George’s true feelings, cancel the whole
letter, and put him back in his place as her adoring suitor. But the blotch was impenetrable,
and remained so.

The blow stunned the girl for a week, and she went through agonies of jealousy and
remorse, and fantasies of revenge, which amazed her with their violence. But she did
nothing. There was really nothing to do. In a heroic last surprise George had stood
up from the chopping block, seized the axe, and hit her with it; and that was that.

She braced herself to sit out the bar-mitzva with the terrifying Goldstones and with
Sandy.

It was strangely impressive, after all, when Seth stood before the Holy Ark draped
in his new purple-and-white silk prayer shawl on Saturday morning, chanting his reading
from the Book of Malachi.

The temple was full, and hushed. Perversely, perhaps with a touch of injured self-effacement,
Marjorie sat far in the back. Her mother had tried to get her to sit on the front
bench with the rest of the family, but Marjorie had said no, she would stay in the
rear to welcome any late-coming friends or relatives.

Seth’s voice rang clear and manly over the massed rows of black skullcaps and white
prayer shawls, sprinkled here and there with the frilly hats and rich furs of women.
It was a Conservative temple, so the men and women sat together. For years in the
Bronx Marjorie had railed at the orthodox practice of separating the sexes; in the
twentieth century women weren’t second-class citizens, she said. This was one reason
why the parents had joined a Conservative temple on moving to Manhattan. Another and
more powerful reason was the desire to climb. The wealthiest Jews were Reform, but
the Morgensterns were not ready for such a bold leap away from tradition, to praying
with uncovered heads, smoking on the Sabbath, and eating pork. The Conservative temple
was a pleasant compromise with its organ music, mixed sexes, shortened prayers, long
English sermons, and young rabbi in a black robe like a minister’s. Mr. Morgenstern,
indeed, was a little uncomfortable in the temple. Now and then he would grumble that
if Abraham Lincoln could wear a beard, so could an American rabbi. When he had to
recite memorial prayers for his father he always slipped into a small old orthodox
synagogue on a side street, feeling perhaps that this was the only form of worship
that really counted either with God or with his father’s ghost. He quieted his conscience
by paying the membership fee in both places.

His one reason for putting up with the temple was the hope of instilling some trace
of religion in his daughter. But Marjorie had little use for any version of the faith.
She regarded it as a body of superstitious foolishness perpetuated, and to some degree
invented, by her mother for her harassment. The parents managed to drag her to the
temple once in a while on Friday evenings when she had no date, but it was always
under protest. She gave her father much pain, unintentionally, with her whispers about
the rabbi, a very well-spoken young man with a cultured resonant voice, who talked
of current magazines and best-selling novels as well as of the Bible; a style, the
father would have thought, perfectly suited to his daughter, if not to him. Marjorie,
however, was all satire and disdain.

But today, despite herself, the girl found awe creeping over her as her brother’s
voice filled the vault of the temple, chanting words thousands of years old, in an
eerie melody from a dim lost time. A cloud passed away overhead and morning sunlight
came slanting through the dome windows, brilliantly lighting the huge mahogany Ark
behind Seth with its arch of Hebrew words in gold over the tablets of the Law:
Know before Whom you stand
. Marjorie had thrilled the first time her father translated the motto for her; and
that thrill came back now as the letters blazed up in the sunlight. Seth sang on,
husky and calm, and it occurred to Marjorie that after all there might be a powerful
propriety in the old way of separating the men and the women. This religion was a
masculine thing, whatever it was, and Seth was coming into his own. The very Hebrew
had a rugged male sound to it, all different from the bland English comments of the
rabbi; it sounded like some of the rough crashing passages in
Macbeth
which she so loved.

She caught her breath as Seth stumbled over a word and stopped. The silence in the
pause was heavy. He squinted at the book, and a murmur began to run through the temple.
Seth glanced up, smiled at the bench where his parents sat, and placidly resumed his
chanting. Marjorie unclenched her fists; the people around her chuckled and nodded
at each other. She heard a woman say, “He’s a good boy.” She could have kissed him.
Her little jealous pique was lost in a rush of love for her baby brother, the prattler
with blond curls and huge eyes, fading in the tones of the chant as though he were
being borne away by a ship. Time had taken him away long ago, of course, but only
in this moment did she quite realize that it was so, and that it was for ever.

Later, at the buffet lunch in the mobbed social hall of the temple, a knot of boys
came tumbling past Marjorie through the crowd, yelling and pushing each other, clutching
sandwiches and soda bottles. In the middle of them was Seth, flushed and glittering-eyed,
his arms full of presents wrapped in tinsel and colored paper. She darted through
the boys, threw her arms around her startled brother and kissed his cheek. “You were
wonderful, Seth! Wonderful! I was so proud of you!”

Recognition and warmth dawned through the boy’s glaze of triumphant excitement. “Did
I do all right, Margie? Really?”

“Marvelous, I tell you, perfect.”

“I love you,” said Seth, in a most incongruous quiet tone, and kissed her on the mouth,
leaving a taste of wine. The boys jeered at the lipstick smear on Seth and shoved
and bore him away, and Marjorie stood transfixed, alone in the merry crowd, in a turmoil
of surprised emotion. Seth had expressed no open affection for her since the day he
had learned to talk.

She made her way through the throng to the buffet, but nothing tempted her on the
long table crowded with platters of sliced turkey, tongue, and beef, chopped chicken
liver, chicken salad, tuna salad, half a dozen kinds of fish, and fruit salad, all
manner of vegetables, bread, rolls, and pastries. She was too wrought up to eat. Unnoticed
by the busily eating guests, she wandered to the bar and stood sipping a scotch and
soda, watching a thousand dollars’ worth of food and drink vanish like sand heaps
in the tide.

This lunch stemmed from an old-country synagogue custom called a kiddush, or wine-blessing.
The parents of a bar-mitzva boy were obliged by long tradition to serve wine to all
worshippers. In the United States this custom had evolved—as they say elephants have
evolved from one-celled creatures—into a noonday feast hardly less imposing than the
main banquet after sundown. Wine-blessing played little or no part in it, though it
was still called a kiddush.

The caterers had given the old folkway modern form and variety. There was a five-hundred-dollar
kiddush, a thousand-dollar one, and so forth. Mrs. Morgenstern had been miserably
tempted by Lowenstein’s famous twelve-hundred-dollar extravaganza, which included
whole boiled salmons in jelly, a cascade of raspberry soda on a terraced frame of
snow, and a Star of David in solid ice bordered by blue neon. But the father, panic-stricken
by the mounting expense, had frozen at the thousand-dollar kiddush. The Morgensterns
did not have enough friends and relatives at the temple to eat up all the food, but
that was no problem. On many another Sabbath there might be only four or five rows
of worshippers, lonesome in a barren stretch of purple cushions and brown wood; but
when a bar-mitzva was scheduled the house of God was seldom less than full. Marjorie
had noticed the same phenomenon in the old synagogues of the Bronx.

A gay commotion started up on the far side of the hall—handclapping, singing, stamping.
She finished her drink, worked across the room, and found all the aunts, uncles, and
cousins of the family clustered in a corner, chorusing a wild Yiddish tune full of
childhood echoes, and beating out the rhythm with feet and hands. In a small clear
space ringed by laughing faces and pounding palms, Uncle Samson-Aaron was cavorting
with Uncle Shmulka. Shmulka was bald, slightly under five feet in height, and emaciated
by a lifetime of sweating in the furnace room of a steam laundry, therefore quite
a frail partner for Samson-Aaron. The two uncles stomped here and there, cutting pigeon
wings and various other capers, with Shmulka sometimes swinging precariously in the
crook of the Uncle’s massive elbow, his feet clear off the floor. Samson-Aaron held
a bottle of rye whiskey in one hand and a brown turkey leg in the other. As he came
bounding and roaring past Marjorie, his face blazed up with delight. “Modgerie! Hollo,
Modgerie! Shmulka, go vay, who needs you?” Shmulka went rolling to the sidelines,
grinning with relief, and Samson-Aaron seized her hand with two fat fingers of the
hand that held the bottle. “So? Vun dance in honor of Seth, no, Modgerie?” The family
laughed and cheered; he was irresistible; without coyness Marjorie let him pull her
into the ring. Samson-Aaron did not fling her about as he had Shmulka. All at once
he was precise and courtly, and Marjorie remembered that he was supposed to have been
a slim dandy in the old days, in the old country. She could almost see the thin gay
youth inside the fleshy envelope of the old man with teeth missing in front and shaking
red jowls. Marjorie had learned the steps of the dance at family celebrations in her
childhood; she followed the Uncle easily. Samson-Aaron’s eyes shone. “Next time at
your vedding, ha, Modgerie?” He exaggerated the elegant gestures of an old-world beau,
crooking his arms and swinging his huge rear and huger paunch in an amazingly funny
burlesque. Marjorie burst out laughing as she danced. The Uncle laughed too, and before
she knew what had happened she was holding the turkey leg; he had placed it neatly
in her hand as they cut a figure. The family cheered again. Marjorie, warming to the
joke, brandished the leg and did a spirited little jig; and it was several seconds
before she realized that she was waving the turkey leg perhaps ten inches from Mrs.
Mary Goldstone’s nose. Sandy’s mother stood at the rim of the circle, staring at her
through silver-rimmed glasses, somewhat as though she were a dancing horse.