Marjorie Morningstar (42 page)

“It’s seven-thirty. I’m glad you could sleep a little. You’ll need it.”

“How is Geoffrey?”

“Pretty good, considering.”

“Did you bring Seth?”

“No. Time enough for him to face these things later in life.”

Marjorie stumbled to the mirror of the cheap bureau and straightened her hair. Her
evening dress, ridiculously inappropriate for the morning and for the grim occasion,
was crumpled and stained. Her face was a smear of ruined cosmetics. She had long silver
rings in her ears. It was impossible to be seen like this, a picture of wrecked frivolity,
like a torn paper hat in a trash can. “Mom, look at me. Can’t I have five minutes
to go to my cabin and fix myself up?”

“It’s raining.”

“I don’t care.” She turned away from the mirror. Her mother’s eyes were a little red,
but otherwise she looked exactly as before, wearing the brown coat in which she had
driven off yesterday afternoon. “Oh, Mom, it was so awful.” She embraced her mother.

Mrs. Morgenstern held her close, patting her shoulder. “Well, never mind now, Greech
told me all about it.”

“Mom, he seemed perfectly all right when he left the party. A little tired but—I wanted
to walk with him, he wouldn’t let me—”

“Darling, are you going to argue with God? It happened because his time came.” She
cleared her throat. “Now there’s lots to do. I’ve got the undertaker coming, and the
family knows about it. The funeral is in New York at eleven-thirty, so there’s not
much time—”

“Eleven-thirty this
morning
?”

“The law is to bury them at the first possible moment.”

“Mom, I’ll be back in five minutes, I swear I will.”

As she ran past the room where the Uncle lay, she heard voices, and scuffling noises
like the moving of furniture. Outside, the drizzle was so thick that she could see
only the near trees. The social hall was a dim shape in the mist. She was running
past the fountain unthinkingly when she noticed that it was drained and muddy; then
she remembered, and turned her face away, horrified.

As she hastily washed and dressed, putting on a dull gray cotton dress, she was planning
how best to have her luggage packed and sent home. She would have no time, she realized,
to do it herself. She did not make a decision to leave South Wind. She simply knew
that she was not coming back. For a moment she hesitated at the mirror. Her face looked
yellowish without makeup, actually ugly, she thought. The dry pale lips were impossible.
She touched them faintly with red.

A long black automobile materialized out of the mist as she ran back to the infirmary.
It was standing in front of the camp office, and a man in black was sitting at the
wheel.

“Oh God, it’s all going so fast,” she murmured.

Her first thought when she saw Geoffrey was that he must have put on sixty pounds
since getting married. His face was puffed out, and his bulging lines were beginning
to suggest the shape of the Uncle. He stood in the hall of the infirmary, talking
in a knot of people, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. The door of the room where
Samson-Aaron lay was shut, and Geoffrey’s back was against it. He nodded mournfully
when he saw Marjorie. She went through the others to him and embraced him. His tweed
jacket was damp, and he wore no tie. “Geoffrey, I’m so sorry—”

“Thanks, Marjorie, I know you are. You loved him. I’m sorry you had to bear the brunt
of it. Thank you for—”

“Oh, God in heaven, Geoffrey, don’t thank me!”

“This is my wife—Sylvia, this is Marjorie.”

The wife looked like her snapshots, a stranger, a blond thin-faced girl in a grossly
distended maroon maternity dress, leaning against the wall with her hands behind her.
She said, “Hello, Marjorie,” and Marjorie remembered not to smile, and returned a
solemn-faced nod.

Her father and mother, with Greech and the doctor, were talking to the undertaker,
a black-haired man in striped pants, gray spats, and wing collar. He looked rather
like a shoe salesman in a Fifth Avenue department store, at once eager and grave.
He was saying, “Naturally, Mrs. Morgenstern, I brought the plain box. We always defer
to the relatives’ wishes. But really, it’s gone out, the plain box, really it has.
And for the ceremony itself, if I may merely suggest it, a nice silver-trim mahogany
casket should be substituted—”

“What’s gone out?” Mrs. Morgenstern said. “The law? The law doesn’t go out. The law
says the plainest possible box. It’s not a question of expense. That’s the whole Jewish
idea, a plain box. Dust to dust.”

“I assure you, madam, I’ve conducted several hundred Jewish funerals with the finest
caskets, and only the most old-fashioned—”

Mr. Morgenstern took Marjorie’s arm, and led her a few steps away. His face was white
and frightened. “Are you all right?”

“Certainly, Dad.”

“You don’t look good.”

“It was quite a night.”

“You’ll drive in with us.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“What’ll be afterward?”

“I’m not coming back here.”

“Good. Good.”

The undertaker was saying, “In the last analysis, madam, the son, rather than the
sister-in-law, should decide. Really, Mr. Quill, I appreciate this isn’t the best
time to talk of such things, but I’m sure you’ll want a casket. We’re using the box
temporarily, but—”

“Do what my aunt says,” Geoffrey said tiredly, wiping his eyes.

The undertaker stared at him. “Very well, sir. Naturally your wish is ours, but the
casket is really not costly when you consider—”

“A plain box,” said Mrs. Morgenstern.

Greech, dressed in a gray business suit, still holding the flashlight, was leaning
against the other wall. Now he said, “And when it’s all done, send the bill here.”

The undertaker said doubtfully, “Here?”

“South Wind, Incorporated,” Greech said. “Maxwell Greech.”

Mrs. Morgenstern regarded him with astonishment. “Mr. Greech, that’s very decent of
you, but we can very well take care of our own—”

“My grounds. My employee,” Greech said harshly, slapping the flashlight. “First death
ever at South Wind. He was working for me. Send the bill to me.”

The undertaker brightened. “Well, sir, I think that’s admirable. A crisis brings out
the finest in people. I’m in a position to observe that. Now, so long as South Wind
is paying, why, perhaps the casket may be—”

“A plain box,” said Greech. “Everything exactly as Mrs. Morgenstern says.”

The undertaker now looked, for the first time, as sad as Marjorie had thought undertakers
should look. “Very well, a plain box,” he said.

The door opened behind Geoffrey, and there emerged from the room a large long box
of coarse yellow wood nailed together roughly, very like a crate except for the coffin
shape. It was maneuvered into the hallway by a couple of strangers in undertaker garb,
the doctor, two men from the kitchen staff, and—of all people—Wally Wronken. The box
seemed to have nothing to do with Samson-Aaron, though Marjorie knew his body was
inside it. The raw death, the real thing, so strange and horrifying and exciting,
was over. This was a funeral. Greech, Mr. Morgenstern, and Geoffrey put their hands
to the burden. It went by Marjorie, and she could see fresh saw marks on the boards.
Wally looked her in the face sombrely as he trudged by. The women followed the coffin
outside.

The drizzle was breaking up. The sky was dazzling white. The far trees and the still
lake were visible, and the air was much warmer. There were thirty or forty people
in summer clothes gathered on the lawn near the hearse. They fell back and watched
as the box was slid inside the automobile.

Noel Airman stepped out of the crowd, dressed as always in his black turtle-neck sweater,
his blond hair gleaming in the morning light. She walked to him automatically, and
he took her hand. “Marge, tell me anything I can do.”

“Thanks, it’s all over, I guess, Noel. We’re going.”

The pallbearers and mourners were in a group behind her, and the guests and staff
were massed several paces behind him. She and Noel were alone in an empty middle space,
like parleyers of opposed armies. She felt conspicuous; people were watching them,
she knew, with inquisitive awareness of their romance. She said in a quiet voice,
“I’m not coming back.”

He looked very surprised; then he nodded. “I can understand your feeling that way,
Marge. But in a week or two, maybe—”

She shook her head. “I won’t come back.”

“I’ll come in to see you then, maybe Thursday—more likely Sunday—”

“Thanks. I hope you will.”

“I wanted to come along into town for the funeral, Marge, but it just isn’t possible.
The show… I can’t get anyone to take over.”

“Of course you can’t leave, I know that. Excuse me, Noel.” She beckoned to her roommate
Adele, who stood not far behind him. The singer came to her, white-faced except for
a gash of lipstick, the sun showing her hair black at the roots under the red dye.
Marjorie quickly arranged to have her things packed up and sent home. While they talked,
cars were rattling the gravel of the driveway, rolling and backing to form a cortege:
the hearse, then a black limousine, Geoffrey’s rusty little gray Chevrolet, a South
Wind station wagon, and the old Morgenstern Buick.

Wally was at her elbow. “Your mother says come along, Margie. Just a couple of minutes
more. She says you’ll need a coat—”

Adele said, “I’ll get it, Marge. Which one?”

“I don’t know—I guess my blue raincoat—”

“
I’ll
get it.” Wally ran down the lawn.

The sun broke through as Marjorie walked to the cortege, making the fenders and windows
of the cars gleam, and warming her back. She paused with her hand on the Buick’s door,
and looked back for the last time at the grounds of South Wind. The Buick stood in
front of the camp office, so that she had a clear wide view down to the beach and
the social hall. The lake glittered white. The tower of the social hall was a glare
of white. On the lawn the rain-soaked grass twinkled in myriads of tiny rainbow sparklings,
and the trees dripped in little glitters. In the middle of the scene, dry and squat,
its black iron pipe thrusting up through the gray plaster cascade, was the dry fountain.
She shuddered, climbed into the car, and sat alone in the rear seat.

Wally appeared at the window, holding up her crumpled coat. “Margie, I’ll help Adele,”
he panted. “You’ll get everything in perfect shape.”

“Thanks, Wally.”

“He was a wonderful guy.”

“Yes. Goodbye, Wally.”

Honking, the cortege started, and moved down the road. The public-address horn over
the camp office blared, “Breakfast now being served in the main dining room.” The
crowd on the lawn was already melting, straggling to the doors of the dining hall.
It occurred to Marjorie that she was very hungry; but it was too late to do anything
about it. Looking through the rear window, she saw Wally and Noel standing side by
side on the porch of the camp office, watching the procession depart.

The cars bumped slowly along the rough muddy camp road, splashing brown water high
in the air; then they went out through the entrance arch, and glided down the main
highway. Marjorie looked back at the glinting coppery image of Lady South Wind atop
the arch, remembering the elation and triumph with which she had passed under it in
June. It was a little startling when her mother said, “A lot different coming out
than going in, hey?” Mrs. Morgenstern, twisted round in the front seat, was regarding
her daughter wryly.

“Yes, Mom. A lot different.”

“Well, it’s still more different for the Uncle.”

“I know.”

After a silence Mrs. Morgenstern said, “Tell the truth, Marjorie. It’s Sodom, isn’t
it?”

Marjorie hesitated. Then she said, “Oh, more or less, Mom, more or less, I suppose
it is. Now you tell me this. Why is it so beautiful?”

The mother grimaced. “That’s an old question.” She faced the front.

The cortege rolled smoothly down the highway to New York.

Only many hours later—when the funeral was over, and the cars were leaving the cemetery
on Long Island where the Uncle had been lowered into the brown earth—did the thought
at last strike Marjorie, through all the fog of shock and fatigue, that the death
of Samson-Aaron had stopped her from having an affair with Noel Airman; and that nothing
else in the world could have stopped it.

Not many girls get an offer of a star part in a Broadway production the day after
they graduate from college; but Marjorie Morgenstern did.

Just before the commencement exercises began—when she was joking and skylarking with
the other senior girls in a dressing room at Carnegie Hall, putting on her cap and
gown—the dramatic coach, Miss Kimble, came darting in all red-eyed and red-nosed.
She pressed on the bewildered Marjorie a damp kiss, a hug redolent of pine soap, and
a letter to the Broadway producer, Guy Flamm. “It’s no open sesame to the pearly gates,
Lord knows. But believe me, dear, any contact is important when you’re starting on
Broadway. You’re on your way to a glorious destiny. I know it. Give my love to Guy,
and God bless you.” With this, and another kiss, and another pine-scented hug, Miss
Kimble disappeared.

Marching into the crowded concert hall, to the strains of
Pomp and Circumstance
played loudly but uncertainly by the college orchestra, Marjorie stared straight
ahead, face rigid, shoulders thrown back, seeing nothing but the bunched red curls
of Agnes Monahan in front of her; and, out of the corner of her eye, a stretch of
blurred staring faces, and hands holding white programs. The rented coarse black gown
she was wearing gave out a musty smell, as though it had been lying long disused in
a loft. She was extremely conscious of the black square cap on her head and the tassel
dangling near her eye. In the dressing room she had joked with the other girls about
the absurdity of the costume and the hollowness of this commencement in a hired hall,
with its sad farewell to ivy-covered subways and hallowed carbon monoxide. But as
she marched down the aisle her eyes misted, and she forgot for the moment that she
had been despising her schoolwork for years, and that she had hated Hunter because
it wasn’t Cornell or Barnard.