Marjorie Morningstar (19 page)

“Mom, I didn’t ask you—”

“She’s not far wrong,” said Sandy.

“Why are you suddenly interested in South Wind?” said Mrs. Morgenstern, peering at
her daughter. “If you think you’re going there this summer, start thinking again.
My daughter is not going to South Wind.”

“Oh Lord, I’m sorry I started the subject. Let’s talk about something else.”

Later, when she and Sandy were dancing at the Biltmore, he described a couple of weekends
he had spent at South Wind. From what he said, and from what Marsha had told her,
she began to picture the adult camp as a coruscating evil wonderland bathed in a reddish
glow.

She let a week go by. Then one evening after dinner she casually mentioned that her
Mikado
performance had brought her the offer of a job at a children’s camp teaching dramatics.
Mrs. Morgenstern was pleased at first, saying it was high time Marjorie found out
what it felt like to earn a dollar. But when she put her daughter through the question
grinder and Marsha’s name came out, her face changed. “It doesn’t sound good.”

“Mom, Mr. Klabber is the president of the Jewish Educational Association. Why, he’s
like a rabbi, Marsha says—”

Her mother was staring at her. “Tell me, what has all this got to do with South Wind?”

“South Wind?” said Marjorie, with a merry little laugh. “Why, whatever makes you ask
about South Wind?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Morgenstern. “First you start asking questions about South
Wind, and next thing you have a job at a girls’ camp—”

“Mom, we were talking about South Wind
weeks
ago.”

“Well, I don’t know, it’s one thing right after the other. Is there a connection or
isn’t there?”

Marjorie, thoroughly exasperated at her mother’s clairvoyance, calculated that a lie
would break down. “It happens,” she said lightly, “that South Wind is on the same
lake, that’s how I happened to hear of it. If you call that a connection. It has nothing
to do with Mr. Klabber’s camp—”

“That’s where the dog is buried,” said Mrs. Morgenstern. “You think you’ll have a
good time for nothing at South Wind all summer. Don’t you know you can’t get in there
at night if you aren’t a paying guest? They have guards with guns, and dogs—”

“How do you know so much about it, if it’s such an awful place?”

“It’s just by accident, I assure you. Papa’s lawyer, Mr. Pfeffer, was suing the place,
they didn’t pay a big linen supply bill. He drove up there and took us with him. It
was all free, the owner was trying to be nice to him. That owner. A devil. The right
owner for Sodom.”

The upshot was that the mother agreed, with many skeptical reservations, to go with
Marjorie to Mr. Klabber’s office later in the week. She was most happily surprised
when she met the camp owner, and he seemed equally gladdened at the sight of her.
He was a small old man with a large bald head, thick greenish glasses, and very hairy
ears. The hand he held out to Marjorie had a dry papery feel. The walls of his tiny
office were lined with diplomas, plaques, and certificates hailing his work in Jewish
education.

He began with elaborate compliments about Marjorie’s talent. Mrs. Morgenstern wasted
little time on these preliminaries. “First of all, Mr. Klabber, I’d like to ask you
about South Wind.”

Mr. Klabber managed the feat of looking sad through an unchanged smile. “Ah, yes.
South Wind—”

“It’s near your camp, isn’t it?”

“Unfortunately, yes. I say unfortunately. It’s a most attractively laid-out place,
but—”

“It’s Sodom.”

“That’s a strong term, madam. I grant you it’s more than a little bohemian—” The camp
owner turned hurt eyes upon Marjorie. “But surely, my dear, you told your mother our
rule about South Wind? No? But surely Marsha told you.” He turned back to the mother.
“Why, we have an iron rule, Mrs. Morgenstern, a cast-iron rule. Any Tamarack counselor
seen at South Wind at any time during the summer is summarily dismissed. She packs
and leaves on the next train, be it by day or be it by night.”

Mrs. Morgenstern cast a pleased glance at Marjorie, who could not help looking stunned.
“Good for you!” This news seemed to settle the matter for the mother. Haggling ensued
over Marjorie’s salary, in which the girl took very little part. Mr. Klabber, citing
Marjorie’s youth, tried to get her for fifty dollars. Mrs. Morgenstern, pointing to
her genius as displayed in
The Mikado
, asked for at least three hundred. After extended arguing the mother allowed herself
to be beaten down to the usual price of two hundred dollars, and handshakes all around
closed the deal.

That night at the Zelenko apartment Marsha assured her that Mr. Klabber’s cast-iron
rule was the joke of Tamarack. “Darling, the counselors all
live
over at South Wind.” She brought down tattered paint-stained play booklets from her
closet shelf. “Here’s some of the stuff we’ve put on. He doesn’t care if you repeat.
We’ve still got most of the sets up there. We can lay out the whole season tonight.
Nine weeks, nine shows—God, sugar bun, what marvelous fun we’re going to have…”

During the next weeks Marjorie spent more and more time with Marsha and her parents,
and less and less with Sandy Goldstone. On the West Side she still formally held the
title of Sandy Goldstone’s girl, and only she knew how hollow the title was. Thus
glamorized, she could go out as many nights a week as she wished. Dates were so frequent
and so commonplace that they were losing charm. Nobody could ever have made Marjorie
believe, when she was seventeen, that there could be anything finer than going out
every night in the week with boys from Columbia and the out-of-town colleges. But
now, one year later, a date with a wealthy boy like Norman Fish, who went on droning
about jazz bands, Haig & Haig pinchbottle, and convertibles, began to seem like a
ridiculous waste of time when she could be with Marsha Zelenko.

She was in the dark cluttered Zelenko flat four or five nights each week, talking
about summer plans, or about the Broadway theatre, or about painting and music. By
silent mutual consent Marsha seldom visited the Morgenstern apartment. The mother’s
open dislike of Marsha fell little short of rudeness. The disorder at the Zelenkos’,
the balalaika music, the cherry brandy, the wreathing Turkish tobacco smoke, all made
a congenial, a sort of tropic climate for the luxuriantly unfolding friendship. It
tended to droop and curl among the cool modern furnishings, the heavy cream satin
floor-to-ceiling drapes, and the big spaces of the El Dorado apartment, always hospital-clean
under the fanatical housekeeping of Mrs. Morgenstern.

The girls went often to concerts and art galleries. Marsha seemed to know all the
free ones, and also how to get passes to the ones that cost money. Marjorie began
to find some honest pleasure in classical music and in painting, for the first time
in her life. She also discovered in herself, rather to her surprise, real ability
to work and to learn, once her interest was caught. She bought books on stage direction,
makeup, lights, and sets, and she mastered them rapidly. Marsha was taken aback at
her technical comments on the Broadway productions they saw together. “Baby, you’re
giving old Klabber too much for his money,” she jeered.

It gradually became clear to Marjorie that the Zelenkos were really living on Mrs.
Zelenko’s earnings as a piano teacher. There was a prevailing genteel fiction in the
household that the teaching was a lark whereby she picked up a little pin money, while
Mr. Zelenko earned the family’s bread through his operations in the Street. Marjorie
gathered, however, from fragments of spats she heard, that the net effect of Mr. Zelenko’s
wily dealings in the Street was to wipe out, each week, about half the income from
Mrs. Zelenko’s piano lessons.

Marjorie also realized after a while that Marsha culled her intimate gossip about
celebrities from theatre magazines,
Variety
, and
The Hollywood Reporter
. Indeed, before the two girls went away together for the summer, Marjorie was well
aware that her friend was in certain respects a phony.

Yet she was not much alienated. If Marsha’s Broadway intimacies were only pretended,
her love and knowledge of the theatre were real. She did have a lively natural gusto
for the arts. She was full of bounce, quick to be offended but quicker to forgive.
Above all, she was the first person Marjorie had ever encountered who seemed to value
her for the right reasons. The boys in Marjorie’s life had been dazzled by her small
waist, her charming bosom, her fine legs, her quick good-natured coquetry. She was
very glad she had these assets, but she had always felt a slight contempt for those
who liked her merely for them.

As Helen Johannsen had predicted, Marsha began borrowing in the third or fourth week
of their acquaintance. She made sporadic repayments. But they fell more and more steeply
behind her borrowings, and the account became embarrassingly confused. One day, after
a half-hour attempt to straighten out the debits and credits, Marsha said, “Oh, look,
baby, this is awful. You may as well know that I’m a complete featherhead about small
change. It’s meaningless to me, it’s like cigarettes or matches or something. I know
it shouldn’t be, Lord knows I’m not that rich, and I know it isn’t to others. Will
you do me a big fat favor and keep a little book on me?”

Marjorie said uneasily, “Oh, that’s ridiculous. Let’s forget all about it, a dollar
thirty
-five or
forty
-five, what does it all matter—”

“No, no. Please. Keep an account, you’re damn methodical when you want to be. When
we get paid at the end of the summer we’ll settle up. I’m just helpless about little
money. Big money I can keep track of like a CPA.” She caught a satiric wisp of a smile
on Marjorie’s face and flared, “I’ll
tell
you where I’ve handled big money, kiddo. On the Street I was Pop’s assistant one
summer when things were so good we were living at the Peter Stuyvesant, not in that
hole on Ninety-second Street. And believe me, I was never off one cent in ten thousand
dollars.”

Marjorie agreed to keep the book, but quickly saw it was not a good idea. It released
Marsha of all compunction about borrowing. “Just mark it in the little black book,
dear,” she would say, thus managing to relieve Marjorie of some money and patronize
her at the same time. When they went off to Tamarack the account had grown to twelve
dollars and change, and Marjorie, increasingly irked, was really keeping the black
book with dogged accuracy.

With a small hissing ripple at the bow, the canoe slipped over the black water toward
the winking lights and distant music of South Wind.

It was a windless, moonless night ablaze with stars. Marjorie sat in the bow with
her suitcase between her knees, chilled through despite the sweater thrown over her
shoulders. The thin cotton of her orange blouse and green bloomers, prescribed dress
for counselors at Camp Tamarack, gave little warmth. She hugged her bare knees and
crouched, trying not to shiver.

Marsha paddled expertly, with hardly a splash.

“What music is that?” Marjorie hoarsely whispered, breaking silence for the first
time when they were a few hundred yards from the Tamarack shore.

Marsha laughed, a thin far sound in the open air. “You don’t have to whisper, baby.
Mr. Klabber is fast asleep behind us, you know. That’s the orchestra. Steak roast
tonight. The guests sit around the campfire, and sing, and stuff themselves, and get
swozzled on beer, and the band plays for them.”

“I thought there’d be dancing.”

“Oh, all the dancing you want, afterward. They have the dress rehearsal of the show
while the guests are at the roast out of the way. You’ll really see something.”

A shudder made Marjorie’s teeth grate. “I’m freezing, do you know that? It’s a wonder
you don’t catch pneumonia, doing this night after night.”

“Why, honey bunch, it’s warm tonight. Sometimes it’s really frigid on this lake, when
the wind starts cutting up. You’re having beginner’s luck.”

“I see.” Another racking shiver passed through her. “Maybe I’m just scared.”

Marsha laughed again. “That’s something you’ll get over, too. This is a cinch. I’ve
been doing it for three years, and here I am, fat and sassy as ever.”

“Yes, I know,” Marjorie said in no very amicable tone, and the conversation lapsed.

Marjorie strained her eyes toward South Wind, wondering whether the adult camp was
going to prove another disappointment, another of Marsha’s lies that would blow up
in her hands. In the first four weeks of the summer, her attitude toward her friend
had drastically changed. If she was not wholly disenchanted, she now regarded everything
Marsha said with caution or downright disbelief. For she had gradually found out that
Marsha had induced her to come to Camp Tamarack with lies, bald outrageous lies; and
even at the camp she had tried to cover her first lies with more and more falsehoods,
progressively lamer.

It was true enough, as Marsha had said, that the dramatic counselor lived in comfort
in a cabin atop a hill overlooking the lake, and that she didn’t have to herd children.
It was also true that from the cabin Marjorie could see, three miles away on the far
shore of the lake, the grounds and buildings of South Wind—a charming panorama, like
a land in a child’s picture book, all rolling green lawns, sculptured darker green
clumps of trees, and fantastically shaped white and golden towers.

The rest was fabrication, cynical and deliberate. Mr. Klabber’s “cast-iron rule” against
visits by the counselors to South Wind, far from being a joke, was observed with terrified
strictness by every girl on the staff—except Marsha. Indeed, they avoided talking
about the adult camp, as though it were a leper colony in the neighborhood. Marsha’s
story at first was that it took a week or so for the counselors to warm to each other
and start arranging sneak excursions to South Wind. But as time passed it became clear
that Marsha alone regularly visited the adult camp, at a risk none of the others would
even discuss taking. Her method was to paddle across the lake after dark in a canoe,
tie it to a diving raft anchored beyond the floodlights, and swim to shore. There
she borrowed towels, clothes, and makeup. She couldn’t beach the canoe because the
owner of South Wind, Mr. Greech, always chopped up with his own hands and burned on
the shore any unfamiliar rowboats or canoes he came on at night, in order to discourage
non-paying visitors.