Marjorie Morningstar (18 page)

Geoffrey said to the others in a strained light tone, “I must apologize for my father.
A man of extremes, I’m afraid…”

“A natural man,” said Sandy. “When he eats he eats, when he drinks he drinks, when
he sleeps he sleeps. I envy him.”

“I believe you do,” said Mr. Goldstone.

Sandy shrank under the cutting tone and sardonic look of his father. “Well, all I
mean—we’d all fall asleep if we dared.”

“Let’s go, Mary, or I will fall asleep,” Mr. Goldstone said. “Marjorie will excuse
us, I’m sure—”

“Not while he’s talking, Leon. He’s an assemblyman.”

“So? Don’t I know him? A police-court lawyer, hung around the Democratic Club thirty
years. What is that? Let’s go—”

“Be quiet,” said Mrs. Goldstone, with a naked note of authority, and Mr. Goldstone
subsided, growling.

When the assemblyman finished, about a quarter of an hour later, Mr. Goldstone jumped
up. Dance music started at the same time. “Come on, Mary, Sandy, let’s go.”

The mother rose. Couples were coming out on the dance floor. Sandy said, “I don’t
know, Dad—thought maybe I’d stay and have a dance or two—”

“I want you to drive. I don’t see so good at night. You know that.” Mr. Goldstone
held out his hand to Marjorie. “You give your mother and father our thanks and excuses,
Margie, okay? Lovely party, and you’re a lovely girl—”

“Thank you. Must—must you go?”

Mr. Goldstone’s eyes rested on the sleeping Uncle for a long moment. As through his
eyes, Marjorie saw with painful clarity the split seams of the dangling vest, the
stains on the blue jacket, the buttons of the striped silk shirt straining over the
huge paunch, the gray stubble on the slack chin. “Tell your uncle not to worry about
Gogarty, it’s perfectly all right—quite a fellow, your uncle—”

Mrs. Goldstone said with an amiable smile, shaking the girl’s hand, “Too bad we’re
not staying. I’d like to see you repeat that dance with him you did this afternoon.
I think Sandy would have enjoyed it.”

“Turkey leg and all, I sure would,” Sandy said. He grinned affectionately at her and,
Marjorie was sure, just a shade sadly. “You’ll have to show it to me sometime.”

In a moment they were gone, with the Connellys in their wake, all murmuring thanks
and farewells. Left at the table were Marjorie, Geoffrey, Aunt Dvosha, the gently
snoring Samson-Aaron, and five pushed-aside empty chairs.

Marjorie suffered over this debacle for six terrible days. On the seventh all was
forgotten, and her young spirit soared higher than ever. For her life turned a great
corner; Marjorie Morningstar was triumphantly born.

The girl playing Ko-Ko, prancing on stage at the start of
The Mikado
, dropped her executioner’s axe with a silly plop of hollow cardboard. The squeals
from the audience so demoralized her that she never recovered. She forgot her lines,
scrambled the action, and panicked the other players. As the show struggled feebly
on, the dialogue began to be drowned out by the coughing, whispering, and shuffling
of feet in the audience. All was confusion, shrieks, and lamenting backstage between
the acts; and it was in this climate of fiasco that Marjorie went out to face the
audience for her first appearance, with
My Object All Sublime
.

She felt it was up to her to save the show. And she was carelessly, senselessly confident
that she would do it, that she could not fail, that she was Marjorie Morningstar,
the one glittering professional among these poor frightened painted-up college girls
in red and yellow cheesecloth. Sandy was in the audience, and so were her parents
and Seth; but awareness of them dropped away as she stepped from the gloom of the
wings into the glare of the stage. The dim mass of faces beyond the footlights was
as one face, one presence, something like a new vast collective Boy she intended to
captivate.

She came out with a flourish, striking an imperial pose, and there was scattered applause.
Her scarlet and gold silk costume was the most spectacular in the show, and Marsha
had painted her strikingly, in the traditional fashion: flour-white face, huge black
eyebrows and mustaches, crimson mouth. When she began her song, the audience grew
still. In this rattled company her mere self-confidence gave her some of the authority
of a star. She performed as she had rehearsed, with a little extra vibrancy brought
out by having an audience, and after a few seconds her grotesquely dignified gambols
began to bring laughs from the darkness.

The chorus, taking heart, responded in unison for the first time, and with something
like verve:

Marjorie picked up the song, rapping out the sharp Gilbert words so that they rang
through the hall; then it was the turn of the chorus, sounding better and better as
she capered to stronger laughter. She finished squarely in mid-stage in a pompous
attitude, and bared her teeth at the audience with comic ferocity. There was dead
silence perhaps for one heartbeat. Then came an electrifying solid CRACK! of applause.

She swung into her rehearsed encore. Now the chorus and even the orchestra, catching
fire from her success, seemed to acquire precision, wit; the air of the audience began
to sparkle, as it were, with the true radiance of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Marjorie felt bodiless, floating free; she had no thought of making a mistake; she
could not; she was inventing this song like a bird. The handclapping when she finished
was stronger than before. The conductor signalled to the actors to go on with the
show. They tried to speak lines, but the handclapping drowned them; and now came a
few shouts, cleaving through the air like thrown roses, “More! More! More!”

Marjorie, frozen in mid-stage in her regal pose, felt shuddering thrills along her
spine; the hairs on her head prickled like warm needles. The conductor looked at her,
shrugged, and nodded for another encore. She had stopped the show.

She glanced around at the chorus, all staring at her with shining-eyed admiration.
She allowed herself a bashful, grateful smile at the audience, her first break out
of character, and strutted forward to sing again, her face contorted in the fierce
Mikado frown.

Her mind cooled and became detached while she paced through this encore. She was back
in the school auditorium. She saw individual faces in the audience, friends sawing
at fiddles in the orchestra, the chorus capering clumsily in wretched costumes, the
smeared rickety set. She thought, “It’s just a ratty college show, after all. But
it’s the beginning. Now I know I can do it. And I will, I will!”

With secret personal meaning, tossing her head and waving both clenched fists in the
air, defying the audience and the gods, she sang from an exulting heart:

The evening was hers. “Mikado! Mikado!” the audience called when the principals stepped
forward for their collective bow. The curtain dropped. The shouts continued. Miss
Kimble came darting out of the wings, clutching the prompter’s script, her hair flying,
her eyes and nose red, her glasses falling off as she ran. She threw her arms around
Marjorie. “You’re a star! You made the show!” She ran off again, picking up her glasses.
“Curtain! Curtain! Solo bow for the Mikado!” And when Marjorie stepped forward the
noise was louder, and the cast applauded too; and somebody dragged Miss Kimble on
stage squeaking protests and fumbling at her hair, and all theatrical discipline collapsed,
and the curtain came down on an orgy of weeping, giggling, hugging, kissing, and jumping
up and down by the entire cast.

Ko-Ko slunk off the stage unnoticed (she married a bald young dentist two weeks later
and dropped out of school). Marjorie was set upon by the cast, and by Miss Kimble,
and by the stagehands and the musicians, all pounding her back, pumping her hands,
kissing her, and shouting congratulations. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Her
face stiff from smiling, her costume soaked with sweat, she was pulled this way and
that. “Please, please, there are my folks, let them through!” Mrs. Morgenstern’s eyes
were glittering with pride. The father, quite pale, was holding a handkerchief, smiling
weakly, and it was obvious that he had been crying. She threw herself at him. “Papa,
Papa!” Then she embraced her mother, and Seth.

“I’m beginning to think you’re somebody after all,” said her mother. “You were fine,
really fine.”

Seth said, “The show was lousy, but you were okay.”

Miss Kimble pounced on the Morgensterns and began to gabble about their daughter’s
great gifts. Sandy came edging through the crowd, trying not to jostle the girls;
as she watched him come, Marjorie found herself wondering whether his blue serge suit
was unbecoming or his hair needed cutting, or whether something less obvious was wrong
with him. He looked, all at once, like an overgrown and not very bright boy. He clasped
her hand. “Hi, kid. Nice going.”

“Did you really like it, Sandy?”

“Well, you know, these things are always so fierce. You were the only one that didn’t
blow up.”

Marjorie said, frigidly, “Oh, sure. What can you expect from a college show?”

“How about getting that stuff off your face? We’ll take your folks out for a soda,
and then maybe go dancing.”

“Sure, Sandy. Love it.”

She made her way with difficulty out of the ecstatic crowd around her. Marsha fell
on her when she opened the dressing-room door. “
Where
have you been? God, Morningstar, what a triumph! Unbelievable! Hurry, hurry, hurry!
Mr. Klabber has been going stark mad. He’s waiting for you.” She pushed and pulled
Marjorie about, removing her costume and paint. “You’ve
got
the job, sugar bun, it’s a lead-pipe cinch, and believe me, it’s—”

Marjorie grabbed the fat girl’s hands, which were sloshing cold cream on her face
and neck. “Marsha, for heaven’s sake,
who is Mr. Klabber
?”

“Why, dear, haven’t I told you? He’s the owner of Camp Tamarack, where I do arts-and-crafts.
He needs a dramatic counselor next summer, the one he had got married. You’re
it!
Okay, rub it all off with the towel, now, I’ll get at your ears and—”

Outrage and disappointment clanged in Marjorie’s voice. “He runs a
camp?
A
children’s
camp?”

“Don’t be a little idiot, I tell you it’s marvelous. A free vacation, the food is
terrific—go over your lips again—what’s more, the dramatic counselor does nothing,
nothing but put on a half-hour show every week, it’s a cinch, and you get
paid
, dear, two hundred dollars for the season—there’s still a lot of black in your eyebrows—”

“Look, Marsha, I’m not—”

“
Will
you let me get in one word? I haven’t told you the main thing. Tamarack’s on the
same lake as South Wind! It’s ten minutes by canoe, two minutes by car, a fifteen-minute
walk on the road, and—” She stopped rubbing Marjorie’s ears and looked at her blank
face. “Now don’t—don’t tell me you haven’t heard of South Wind. I’ll absolutely shoot
you to put you out of your misery.”

“Go ahead and shoot,” Marjorie said crossly. “I haven’t. Wait—that’s just a camp too,
isn’t it?”

“Monkey face, it’s the adult camp, the most famous in the world. It’s unbelievably
beautiful, grounds like Windsor Castle, the social hall is like the Waldorf grand
ballroom. They put on fantastic revues there every single weekend, regular Broadway
shows. The talent they have on the social staff! The connections you can make! Why,
the head of the staff is Noel Airman, he’s written dozens of big song hits like
It’s Raining Kisses
, and the set designer is Carlos Ringel, he’s done ten Broadway shows, and he happens
to be a dear friend of mine, the evil old wretch. The dances, the parties! Not only
that, you’ll learn more about the real professional theatre than—”

There was a knock at the door. Marjorie, in her underwear, shrank behind a dressing
screen. Marsha went out and came back in a moment, grinning broadly, a little white
card in her hand. “Honestly, if old man Klabber isn’t a riot. Standing with his back
to the door, so he wouldn’t catch a fast peek by mistake! Real religious, I swear.
He had to run along, Margie. You’re to phone him tomorrow.”

Marjorie glanced at the card. “What’s all this? Jewish Educational Association?”

“That’s what he does winters. Solidest citizen you ever saw—”

“Look, Marsha, haven’t you gone way off the deep end here? How can I be a dramatic
counselor? I don’t know beans about sets, or lighting, or—”

“Sweetie, you can bone up on all that in a week. It’s child’s play. You can imagine,
if Dora Kimble can do it—”

“Herding around a lot of snivelling kids—I don’t know, Marsha…”

“Marjorie, sweetheart, I tell you the dramatic counselor’s the queen of the camp,
does absolutely nothing, lives in lone grandeur in a cabin on top of the hill, contemplating
her art—and South Wind, kitten,
South Wind
, which she can see plain as day, smack across the lake, the Promised Land. I tell
you we’ll be spending the whole
summer
at South Wind. It’s heaven on earth. You’re going to discover a new world, I swear
to you.”

The after-theatre crowd at Schrafft’s was very noisy; so when her parents and Seth
began eating their sundaes, Marjorie ventured to say in a low voice to Sandy, “Ever
hear of a place called South Wind?”

“Hear of it? I’ve been there. Mighty gay. Why?”

“South Wind?” said Mrs. Morgenstern, not looking up from her chocolate sundae. “What
do you want to know about South Wind? I’ll tell you about South Wind. It’s Sodom.
That’s South Wind.”