Marjorie Morningstar (24 page)

In fact, the net effect of the shock was bracing. Marjorie felt that she was in a
Spartan time of life, that her grasshopper days were over. Her parents were amazed
and delighted by her announcement that she had added stenography to her program at
Hunter. “My God,” said Mrs. Morgenstern, “watch out or you’ll wind up useful.” Marjorie
did not mention that her goal was South Wind, of course, and she was very casual about
the dramatic group at the Y which she joined.

The Vagabonds were a hard-working group, putting on a new play every three or four
weeks, and Marjorie rose rapidly to be a minor leading lady. She loved the rehearsals,
the theatre talk, the late sandwiches and coffee; and though none of the men in the
company interested her, she was kept buoyant by the attention they paid her, and by
the consequent coolness and sarcasm of the girls. The men were mostly college graduates
struggling for a foothold in business, teaching, or the law. A couple of them, handsomer
than the rest and with long well-oiled hair, called themselves professional actors,
and accepted parts in each new play with the express understanding that they might
be called off at any instant to Broadway or to Hollywood. Such an emergency never
arose, however, during Marjorie’s entire association with the Vagabonds.

What she particularly valued was the freedom the theatricals gave her. “I’m going
to rehearsal” was a simple unchallengeable password out of her home in the evening.
Mrs. Morgenstern’s opinion of her daughter had risen sharply when she saw her at her
shorthand homework, actually making pothooks on a pad. Perhaps the disappearance of
Marsha from Marjorie’s life, though it was never discussed, also made a difference.
Anyway, the mother discontinued her cross-examinations almost entirely. For the first
time in her existence the girl tasted privacy, and she relished it.

One evening in November Marsha telephoned her, and after a cold exchange of greetings
she said, “I know you have no use for me and that’s okay, but I’d like to see you
for just a few minutes tomorrow. I’ll meet you anywhere. It’s very important to me.”
Marjorie couldn’t quickly think of a gracious phrasing for a refusal, and so she made
the appointment.

She had not seen Marsha since the end of the summer; the friendship of the two girls
had been quenched by the uncovering of Marsha’s affair with Carlos Ringel. Marjorie’s
first amazement had soon worn off, and she had been pleasant in her dealings with
the fat girl for the rest of their stay at Camp Tamarack. But in New York, Marsha
having graduated from Hunter, their paths did not cross; and they did not seek each
other out. Marjorie knew it was mainly her fault. She spent a great many hours thinking
about Marsha, often regretting the end of the friendship, which had left a painful
hole in her life. Sometimes she tried to condemn her own attitude as old-fashioned,
prudish. There was no such thing as an adulteress any more, she told herself. People
had affairs if they wanted to, observed a few precautions and decencies, and that
was all there was to it. But her attitude was not a matter of reason. It was as instinctive
as the humping-up of a cat at a dog, and she could not change it.

Marsha walked into the drugstore near Hunter looking puffy and pale, with marked shadows
under her eyes. There were bald patches in her old squirrel coat and the seams in
her blue kid gloves were split. She said cheerily, dropping into the booth where Marjorie
sat, “Gad, this brings back memories. I’ll be conjugating Latin verbs any second.
Let’s get some coffee fast.”

The first thing she did was to press fourteen dollars and twelve cents on Marjorie,
the exact sum she had owed her at the end of the summer. Marjorie tried hard to demur,
but at last took the coins and the crumpled bills. Next Marsha asked about the change
of address and expressed sympathy at the reverses. “I guess things are tough all over,”
she said. “Compared to my folks, yours are still millionaires. We’re really getting
it this year. Pop’s so sick of it he hardly goes down to the Street any more, and
Mom can’t even get the piano lessons these days. I’ve got to find work, Margie.” She
paused and gulped her coffee. “And not just work for me. I want enough money to take
care of my folks. They broke their backs getting me through college, God knows. They’re
wonderful and I love them, but neither of them all their lives ever learned how to
hang on to a dollar long enough to see whose picture was on it, and they’ll never
learn now. It’s up to me. I just want one thing now, money, money for my folks and
for me, and I’m going to get it.”

Marjorie said, fumbling at her purse, “Why did you give me this money then? I told
you I don’t need it.”

Marsha sharply pushed her hand away from the purse. “Sugar bun, develop some antennae
some day, will you? That was my great symbolic act—for myself—Marsha taking the vows
and the veil. I don’t want your pity, kid, I want help. Do you see Sandy Goldstone
much these days?”

“Hardly ever. Just once this fall.”

“But you’re still friends.”

“Well, we never had any fight, but—”

“Give me a letter of introduction to him.” She grinned at Marjorie’s astonished look.
“It’s just a handle, baby, a shoehorn, you always need something like that to get
started. Once I’m in his office as a friend of yours I’ll get me a job at Lamm’s,
don’t you worry.”

“Marsha, a letter from me—I’d feel so silly writing it—it wouldn’t mean a thing—”

“It’ll get me past doors.”

Marjorie agreed to write it.

When they were out on the street, and about to part, Marjorie said, “Did you and Carlos
see Noel Airman after the summer?”

Marsha said, with an amused narrowing of the eyes, “What makes you ask?”

“Just curious.”

“Why yes.” Marsha thrust her hands in her coat pockets in a coquettish pose. “We saw
quite a bit of him. He lives at II Bank Street, you know, real cosy Villagey kind
of apartment. Lot of fun. Matter of fact I still see him now and then. Maybe you’d
like to come one afternoon and—”

“Oh no, no, my God,” Marjorie said. “It’s just that—well, you can’t help being interested
in a celebrity you’ve met.”

“What are you doing for a love life if you don’t see Sandy?”

“I haven’t any.”

“What? Aren’t you dying of boredom?”

Marjorie told her about the Vagabonds. The fat girl nodded approvingly. “Good practice
for you. I still think you’re going to be a great actress, Margie. So do my folks.
They talk about you all the time. They miss you…. And none of the guys in that acting
crowd mean anything to you?”

“Well, I run around with them, but they’re bores.”

Marsha said briskly, “You know what, sugar bun? I think you’ve got a case on Noel
Airman.”

“That’s ridiculous.” But Marjorie’s heart began slamming and her face became hot.

“Oh, stop blushing and looking as though you’d dropped a garter. It’s perfectly all
right. In fact something might come of it.”

“Marsha, he’s thirty—”

“What if he were? It happens he’s twenty-eight.”

“A man who sleeps around with everybody—”

“Oh yes, you and your Old Testament upbringing. Well, he does nothing of the kind.
One at a time, and choice.” Marsha cocked her head, looking Marjorie over. “It’s hard
for me not to think of you as a baby, but really, honey, you look older and prettier
by the month. Maybe you could handle Noel at that. I’ve seen queerer matches, God
knows. What can a girl lose by trying? It would be the easiest thing in the world
for me to get you two together in an accidental way—”

“Good heavens, Marsha, will you forget it? You’re spinning something out of thin air.
I haven’t the faintest interest in Noel Airman.”

“Okay, okay.” Marsha laid her hand on Marjorie’s arm in the old gesture of patronizing
good humor. “When do you think I can have the letter?”

Marjorie was so flustered that it took her a few seconds to realize what Marsha meant.
“Oh, the letter. I’ll write it as soon as I get home.”

Before starting her homework that night Marjorie mailed the letter off. Then she found
she couldn’t concentrate on her textbooks. Marsha’s remarks about Noel haunted her.
The plain fact was—though strangely she had not faced it until now—that from the start
she had been unfavorably comparing all the men in the Vagabond Players to the social
director of South Wind. She could recollect doing so. Airman had somehow become for
her the image of an ideal man; and it had happened so quietly, so naturally, that
he now seemed always to have been the measure. To Marjorie, indeed, he was still more
than half an abstraction. She had seen him in all for less than two hours. She dimly
remembered a tall man with red-blond hair and crackling blue eyes; a man whose conversation
was all wisdom, whose tones and gestures were all gentlemanly grace, and who could
do anything in the world better than anybody else. Even at the height of her worship
of George Drobes, her glamorizing of Sandy Goldstone, she had remained aware that
they both fell rather short of perfection. Noel Airman actually did seem a perfect
man.

During the next few days, in a whirl of shifting moods touched off by Marsha’s casual
words, “You’ve got a case on Noel Airman,” she gave way to a desire to think about
Airman, and thought about nobody and nothing else. She went over and over every moment
of the evening at South Wind, piecing together his words, his actions. She daydreamed
about him through her classes, her meals at home, her Vagabond rehearsals at night.

Marsha gratefully phoned the next week to tell her that she had a job in the corset
department at Lamm’s. “My specialty, sugar bun, I’ve been studying for years how to
squeeze a mass of living putty into the shape of a woman. Won’t bother you again till
I work up to corset buyer, then I’ll phone you the good news. Give me two years.”

Marjorie, whose heart leaped when she heard Marsha’s voice, asked a lot of questions
to keep the conversation going, hoping fiercely that Marsha would in some way come
to talk of Noel again. But Marsha said at last, “ ’Bye, sugar bun, enjoy life,” and
hung up. Marjorie fought against telephoning her in the days that followed, the way
a man who has quit smoking fights against taking a cigarette. Once, late at night,
she actually dialled the number; but when she heard Mr. Zelenko’s voice she crashed
the receiver on to the hook.

Gradually her emotional turmoil subsided, though she never entirely stopped thinking
about Airman. On her nineteenth birthday, a bitter snowy day, she did a very queer
thing. She went downtown to Bank Street after school hours, and for twenty minutes
stood across the street from the shabby red brick house where he lived, staring at
the windows, while snow caked on her beaver coat and caught in her eyelashes. It occurred
to her, as she stood there in the blizzard with her breath smoking, that she was hardly
better than the squealing simpletons who gathered in fan clubs to worship an actor.
Noel Airman was as remote from her as Clark Gable, and as unaware of her existence.
But though surprised at herself, and ironically amused, she somehow was not really
ashamed. She went home half frozen but obscurely satisfied, and she did not do it
again.

The best result of this strange period was that she discovered in herself a capacity
for keeping silent and holding a cheery appearance no matter what her mood was. She
was on gossipy terms with some of the Vagabond girls, who picked over their love tangles
by the hour, but she said not a word about her own. As for her family, the man who
was occupying her thoughts did not even exist for them. All during the winter, and
into the spring—while she dreamed of him, and wrote letters she never intended to
mail and tore them up, and scribbled
Mrs. Noel Airman
on loose-leaf sheets which she instantly shredded into a wastebasket, and planned
and plotted to make her way to South Wind, and finally made the appointment with Greech
and won the job—all that time, for anything her parents or her brother knew, Marjorie
was a girl without an aim or a care in the world.

Into this same reservoir of silence she dropped the tremendous news that Greech had
hired her to work at South Wind. That very evening at dinner, as it happened, a discussion
of summer plans came up. Mrs. Morgenstern dismally observed that, while the rest of
them might have to sweat it out in the city, Marjorie at least was assured of fresh
air and sunshine at Klabber’s camp. The girl let it pass. She knew that in June she
would have to fight a wild battle with her mother, and saw no point in starting hostilities
in March.

The phone rang in the middle of the discussion. It was Wally Wronken. He said breathlessly,
“Marjorie, my Varsity Show has its opening night at the Waldorf next Thursday. Will
you come with me?”

“What! My gosh, Wally, you take my breath away. It’s awfully sweet of you, but—no,
ask someone else—that’s an important evening for you, you hardly know me—” But he
would not be argued out of it. Astonished and flattered, she finally agreed to come;
then his joy made her uneasy.

When she arrived home from school on the evening of the show there was a massive white
orchid nesting in green tissue paper in a box on the kitchen table. Mrs. Morgenstern,
peeling potatoes at the sink, said, “Who is this Wally Wronken, a gangster?”

Marjorie was smiling over the card:
Only four more hours until I see you. I may live
. She said, “Oh, a crazy kid,” and she told her mother about the Varsity Show.

Mrs. Morgenstern said, “He must be talented. And from the looks of that flower, not
badly off.”

“Unfortunately, Mom, he’s an infant. Put away the wedding invitations.”

Wally appeared at her door at seven-thirty in a skyscraping opera hat, a flowing white
silk muffler, white kid gloves, and a coat with a black velvet collar; he carried
a black cane with a white ivory handle. Marjorie managed with a great effort to keep
from laughing. His words of greeting when he saw her rather stark halter-neckline
evening dress were, “Holy cats.” In the taxi he sat gnawing the head of his cane,
smiling foolishly at her. Walking into the buzzing Waldorf ballroom, hailed and congratulated
on every side, he stumbled and grinned like a drunkard.