Marjorie Morningstar (62 page)

It was Wally Wronken to whom she finally unburdened herself. He came in from South
Wind to see his parents off to Europe. With an evening to spend alone in town, he
forlornly called Marjorie’s parents to ask how she was, and found himself talking
to her. She readily accepted his happy stammered invitation to dinner.

“I’m still furious,” she said to him. “I can hardly bring myself to discuss it.” They
were at a small expensive steak house in the theatre district. “I know what you probably
think and what my parents
certainly
think—that I ran blubbering home because the work was too hard and I wasn’t getting
all the star parts—”

Wally said solemnly, “Marge, I know you better than that.”

After a dangerous glance at him she went on, “Well, I don’t much care what anybody
thinks. But believe me, I stayed on for weeks after I saw I ought to quit, simply
because I didn’t want to have that said about me. I was going to stick the season
out no matter what. But then Morris came up last Saturday and when—”

“Morris? That’s a new name. Who’s Morris?”

“Don’t you know about Morris? Well, he’s a very nice guy, a doctor—but never mind
pulling such a long face, Wally, it’s nothing like that. And it’s about time you stopped
all that phony languishing, anyway. You’re getting too old for Marchbanks.”

“Curious, isn’t it? And you’re getting too young for Candida.”

“Thank you. I’m beginning to need such compliments—Anyway—listen, Wally, I worked
like a dog at the Rip Van Winkle. You can ask any of the kids who were there. I was
up late, night after night, sewing costumes, carpentering—I turned out to be surprisingly
handy with a hammer and saw. You never know what you can do till you try—”

Wally wrinkled his long nose at her. “Hammer and saw?
You?
”

“Dear, mostly what I did at Rip Van Winkle was build scenery. Oh, and nail up double-decker
bunks, and repair the roof when it rained in on us, and such things—”

“Marge, don’t they have men up there?”

“Don’t talk to me about men, Wally. That is, actor-men. They’re an aberration of Nature.
I swear to you, Wally, compared to the average actor, a peacock is a beast of burden.
I think they exhaust themselves with all that running a comb through their hair. You’d
think they’d gouge tracks in their scalps with those combs. And a girl is supposed
to fall down curling with ecstasy if one of them so much as asks her what time it
is. You see, there are four girls for every man at the Rip. Maybe it’s that way at
all summer theatres. I don’t know—Anyway, where was I?—Well, I found myself working
like a slave, that’s all, my hands all blisters, no sleep—and mind you, I
like
working on scenery and costumes, I like anything remotely connected with the theatre,
but there’s such a thing as enough—”

“There were other girls, weren’t there? How did you get so loaded with work?”

“It wasn’t me alone. Me and a couple of others. That’s Cliff Rymer’s fiendishly clever
system. Oh, I tell you he’s got it down pat. He’ll work the last drop of blood out
of a girl, a girl with any real desire to act, that is. He hardly bothers the boys.
Obviously he hates girls. He used to stand around and watch us hammering flats together
in the broiling sun, a couple of girls in filthy old jeans and halters, pouring sweat,
hair hanging, looking like witches—and he’d just stand there, with a look on his face
like a kid pulling wings off a butterfly. He dangles a star part under your nose,
see? A star part in one of the September shows. Like for me, Eliza in
Pygmalion
, my old standby, which they’re doing on Labor Day. Another girl was on the hook the
same way for Anna in
Anna Christie
. Naturally, if you think there’s a chance, you want to please and impress Cliff Rymer.
You’re about ready to
die
to impress him. So, you work, you smile, chin up, you take walk-ons, you kill yourself
building sets, you smile sweetly selling tickets or working as an usher—and it gets
mighty cold at night in an evening dress in that barn in Sleepy Hollow, let me tell
you. I caught the most horrible cough. It kept me out of shows, but not out of carpentering,
of course. You can hammer and saw between coughs. And Mr. Rymer is pleased and drops
another word about Eliza and you’re happy—”

The waiter set steaks before them. Marjorie said, “This is something they don’t serve
at the Rip. Gad, the food! A herd of pigs would have gone on strike, but the apprentice
actresses didn’t dare—we practically lived on peanuts and Hershey bars… Mm! These
rolls! Aren’t they exquisite? Our breakfast rolls seemed to come out of a quarry—cold,
hard, jagged. You’d tear your gums eating them. I’m not exaggerating, Wally. You’d
bite at a roll and there’d be blood on it. Oh well. This is a good steak.”

“Did you get to play any parts?”

“A few bits, yes—” She put her napkin over her mouth and had a paroxysm of coughing.
“Gad, I thought I was over this. I haven’t coughed all day. Morris had a real fit
when he heard me coughing. He’s a doctor, you know. It was Saturday afternoon, and
I was staying in bed trying to shake the thing off so I wouldn’t cough during the
show. I was supposed to be an usher. Morris said if I left the bed to be an usher
that night he’d never talk to me again. When he saw me come into the theatre in a
bare-back evening dress he just turned purple. So we had this big battle afterward.
He called me an imbecile, said I was just being victimized, and so forth. Well, my
back was up, you know, so I called him a Philistine. But he was absolutely right.
You see, I’d found out just a couple of days before that I couldn’t possibly play
Eliza. The part had been promised way back in June to a girl named Sally Trent—you
know, the blonde who did that wonderful drunk scene in the last Kaufman play—I didn’t
have a prayer. I never had had a prayer. Oh, I hated, really really hated, Wally,
to leave my dad’s money in Cliff Rymer’s little fat paws. No refunds, of course, if
you quit. But I’ve figured that out. I’ll get a job, if it’s scrubbing floors, and
pay Dad back.”

Wally said, “Rymer has a fine thing there. He’ll never run out of slave labor, will
he? No matter how many he disillusions, there’s always a new crop of girls every year
dying to go on the stage.”

“There sure is. Noel calls it a tropism of middle-class girls. He seems to be right.
I think ninety per cent of the kids at the Rip were exactly that, creatures obeying
a tropism. For all I know, I’m one too. By the way, I was Marjorie Morningstar at
long last—”

“Congratulations—”

“Thanks. I have six playbills to prove it. Though I’m an usher on three of them.”

“How is Noel?” Wally said, carefully pouring the coffee.

“Oh, fine.”

“In Mexico, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Heard from him?”

“Sure.”

“How long is he going to be there?”

“Haven’t the vaguest idea. Until his royalties on
Old Moon Face
run out, I guess.”

After a moment’s pause Wally said, “What’s all this about his going to Hollywood?”

With a pang of astonishment, which she did her best to hide, she said, “Hollywood?
That’s news to me.”

“He wrote Greech that he’s got a Hollywood offer. He’s going there when he gets tired
of Mexico.”

“Well, how nice.”

“Strange he didn’t write you about it.”

“Strange? How so?”

“Margie, have you and Noel broken up?”

Marjorie sipped coffee. “There was nothing to break up, Wally. Noel Airman’s just
a pleasant ghost. Now you see him, now you don’t. I had a marvelous time with him,
and I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds. But he’s melted into thin air now, so far
as I’m concerned, and a good thing too, no doubt—” She broke off in surprise, seeing
Wally pull a pack of Lucky Strikes from his pocket. “What happened to the Kools?”

“I don’t know. Guess I’ve graduated.” His little furtive hunched gesture of lighting
was gone; he struck a match and puffed. She had noticed too that he looked directly
at her, instead of at the ceiling or the tablecloth. “Margie, why don’t you come back
to South Wind for the rest of the summer?”

“Me? South Wind?”

“Greech would take you back in a minute. He talks about you a lot.”

“I’ll never go back there, Wally.”

His large brown eyes, looking straight at her, were clever, almost girlishly soft,
behind the glasses. “Why?”

“I never will.”

“Well, of course, it would be too good to be true, having you to myself up there.”

“Haven’t you graduated from me, as well as Kools? I’m sure you have. You just like
to make these melancholy sounds.”

Wally said, “Maybe you’re a symbol of some kind. I admit it’s gone on too long. I
seem to be evolving from Marchbanks to Major Dobbin. The funny part of it is, Margie—and
this is where the books are so wrong—Major Dobbin can turn around and be Heathcliff
to some other girl.”

“Well, well. How are you doing as Heathcliff?”

“Not complaining.”

“Good for you,” Marjorie said.

“I’m also writing a brilliant farce. Greech mistakenly thinks I’m coming back next
year. Next year I’ll be famous, and rich, and independent. In fact, can’t I beat you
into insensibility with my prowess and my prospects, and drag you off by the hair
to my cave?”

“You almost sound like Noel.”

“Let’s go home.”

“Wouldn’t you like to take me dancing? I’m having fun.”

“Why, of course. I’ll take you anywhere you say, till dawn, you know that.”

“The thing about you is, Wally, you probably don’t want to get married. You use me
as an excuse to the little girls who are beginning to try to trap you. The great lost
love, and all that.”

He stared for several seconds before smiling awkwardly. “Now
you
sound like Noel.”

“Oh, sure. The Masked Marvel, he used to call himself. He was an education, all right.”
She pulled over her shoulders the cerise shawl Noel had sent her from Mexico. “Seems
to be haunting the conversation, doesn’t he? Old trick of his. Let’s go.”

The first thing she said in the taxi was, “Remember telling me last year that Noel
wasn’t going to amount to anything? How about
Old Moon Face?
”

“I remember being very drunk on rum and pineapple juice, and I remember an orange
sun about six times normal size setting behind the trees,” Wally said. “I don’t remember
much else except wanting to choke you, or beat you with a rock.
Old Moon Face
is a superb song. I’d be an ass to deny it. When Noel is in stride, he’s terrific.”

“He’s rewritten
Princess Jones
. It’s bound to get produced one of these days,” Marjorie said. “It’ll be a sensation.
Then I guess we’ll all be boasting we knew him when.”

“Could be,” Wally said, with less good nature.

His dancing had much improved, too. She said to him during a slow fox trot, leaning
back in his arms, “I think you’ve got a girl.”

“Thousands, if you want to know.”

“No. One. Somebody’s been working on you.”

“How do you like the result?”

“Just don’t get too smooth. You wouldn’t be yourself any more.”

Later she asked him what his farce was about. He told her the plot rather reluctantly.
It seemed to her a wild and unfunny business. “It reads much funnier than it sounds,”
Wally said.

“Is there a part in it for me?”

Wally grinned. “If you’ll agree to a fate worse than death I’ll write one in.”

“Sorry, I can’t see you as the seducer of hopeful actresses, Wally. That’s Noel’s
side of the street.”

Wally glanced sidewise at her, twisting the glass stick of his highball in his hands.
“Some day you’ll have to tell me how you fended Noel Airman off. It’s one of the marvelous
achievements of the twentieth century, like Lindbergh’s flight to Paris.”

“You’re assuming I succeeded in fending him off.”

“I think I’d know if you hadn’t.”

There was another silence. For the first time since she had known him he caused her
a stir of enjoyable discomfort. “I think you would. I’m getting bored with all these
clever writers. I think I’ll marry a doctor and get it over with, just as Noel prophesied.
No use fighting it.”

“Dr. Morris?”

“Morris Shapiro is the name. Maybe, who knows? He’s really a great guy, once you get
to know him.”

“He has a discardable sound.”

“Just for that, I will marry him.”

“Marjorie Shapiro,” Wally said meditatively. “No. I don’t feel the cold clutch at
my heart. There’s no fate in it.”

“That’s exactly the name Noel predicted for me, strangely enough. Marjorie Shapiro.”

In a totally different voice, hard and a little shrill, Wally said, “Would it be too
great a strain on you, Marjorie, if neither of us said anything more this evening
about Noel Airman?”

“Why, it’s you who keep talking about him, isn’t it?”

“Let’s dance.” He stood and pulled at her hand.

When the taxi drew up in front of her home at half-past one in the morning, she held
her face up to him unthinkingly for a kiss. “Nothing doing,” Wally said.

It startled her. She was rather sleepy. She peered at him, dropping her chin. “Huh?”

He took her hand. “You won’t really marry Dr. Shapiro yet, will you? I mean, there’s
another couple of years yet.”

“Oh, you fool.” She put her hand to his face for a moment. “If it gives you pleasure
to carry on like that, I’m sure I don’t mind. I’ll warn you before I marry Dr. Shapiro.”

“Promise?”

“Okay. I promise.” She laughed. “Small danger, since you insist on worming it out
of me.”

With the humiliation of the summer-theatre fiasco—of having wasted ninety dollars
and six weeks, of having crawled home defeated and bilked, exactly as her mother had
predicted—Marjorie struck bottom in her own soul. She told herself that unless she
was paid real money for acting—the amount didn’t matter, a dollar would be enough
to start with, symbolically—but unless she earned that dollar, and fairly soon, she
had better face the fact that she was living a childish fantasy.