Marjorie Morningstar (63 page)

So she set out on an earnest and grim quest for the dollar. She fanatically studied
all the theatrical trade papers, and listened hungrily to every scrap of gossip at
the drugstore about new plays. Again she trudged to the producers’ offices to try
out for any part that seemed in any way suited to her. Again she could never get past
the contemptuous office boys and telephone girls. Her amateurishness seemed written
on her forehead, a mark of Cain. The same thing happened when she decided to try for
radio jobs. The advertising agencies, unimpressed by her condescension, turned her
away at the outer railings of their offices. So did the networks.

She made the round of the semi-professional groups on the fringe of Broadway, including
two communist enterprises and a little company that sent out shows to tour churches
and Kiwanis clubs. She answered every advertisement for actresses that she saw; she
followed up every lead that came to her ears in the drugstore, however unpromising.
It became clear after a couple of months that she could get all the theatrical work
she wanted—of a certain kind. There were radio groups and experimental theatre groups,
university groups and temple groups, charity groups and educational groups; an almost
infinite number of groups, diverse as they could be in origin, and similar in two
characteristics: a willingness to use actresses, and an unwillingness to pay them.

At any place where money was to be made by an actress, Marjorie was shut out as though
she were black.

Only the fact that this had been the experience of all the kids in the drugstore consoled
her. Some of the girls were beautiful, and in her opinion strikingly talented. Evidently
this preliminary discouragement was a part of the game. The kids had a folklore of
reassuring stories. Helen Hayes had gone through years of rejection. The new star
of the new hit comedy had hung around these very booths in despair only two years
ago, ready to go home to Nebraska for good. With such tales went a litany of cheering
phrases. “One of us is going to make it…. There’s always room at the top…. All it
takes is one break….”

Marjorie began to pay more attention to the talk at the drugstore about other ways
of earning money. Some of the kids supported themselves by working as movie ushers
or salesclerks. They tried to get part-time or evening jobs, so as to be free in the
afternoon when the drugstore buzzed with life. A few of the prettiest girls and handsomest
boys worked as photographers’ models. There were less savory recourses. A couple of
girls, it was whispered, were posing in the nude, or at least with bared chests, for
painters and photographers; and some resorted to posing for lingerie and stocking
advertisements, which was considered not much better. One emaciated redhead defiantly
admitted working as a taxi dancer. A tall shabby southern boy with a shock of wheat-colored
hair was supposed to be keeping body and soul together by writing pornography, though
this seemed incredible to Marjorie, because he was so sweet-natured, and so familiar
with Ibsen’s plays.

Marjorie finally decided to ease her conscience by trying any kind of paying work.
She asked a starved blonde from Canada, who had just gone to work in Gorman’s department
store, to help her get a job. The girl was skeptical; Marjorie, sleek and furred,
comfortably nested with her parents on West End Avenue, didn’t seem to be salesgirl
material. But Marjorie convinced her that she meant it. The girl took her to the personnel
office, and Marjorie was readily inducted into the working class with a punch card.

She was placed in the women’s underwear section, substituting for a girl who had mumps.
For the first hour or so of the first day she worked at Gorman’s, Marjorie really
enjoyed it. There was an exciting novelty about standing at her ease in the black
dress of a salesgirl on the wrong side of a counter, while women in hats and coats
thronged by noisily, looking preoccupied and mean. It was gay to make change, to chirp
brightly about nightgowns and panties to customers, to crouch and search around in
the stacks of boxes, to fill out sales slips with a sharp fresh-smelling pencil. She
was, in fact, Katharine Hepburn, playing a store clerk in the first reel of a smart
comedy. The trouble was that the young millionaire played by Gary Cooper didn’t show
up. Instead a stringy rouged woman in an old squirrel coat lost patience with Marjorie’s
ignorance and began squawking insults at her, and Marjorie answered angrily, and the
woman yelled for the section manager, and Mr. Meredith descended with a smile on his
mouth and a glare in his eyes. Marjorie got a sharp hissed reprimand. Mr. Meredith
apologized to the hag, while Marjorie sulked at the other end of the counter, feeling
spat upon.

So much for Katharine Hepburn. Thereafter, through that day and the next and the next,
and all the days she served in the store, the job was nothing but exasperating drudgery
through a long day under a paralyzed clock; daily it gave her a tired spine, aching
feet, rubbed nerves, and a growing hatred of women.

Mr. Meredith, her section manager, began keeping her after hours to teach her about
the bewildering stockpiles of underwear. He was a tall mustached man of about fifty
with waxy pink good looks, a fetid breath vainly masked by wintergreen drops, and
a continual false smile. Marjorie found it decidedly queer to go rummaging through
piles of frilly lingerie with Mr. Meredith, and to listen while he fingered brassieres
and slips and talked about them. But she put up with it. The reward at the end of
the week for all this slavery was twelve dollars. Her father had been giving her half
that much each week just for being his daughter. But she brought the pay envelope
home with some pride.

Mr. and Mrs. Morgenstern, however, took a disappointing attitude toward their daughter’s
new self-reliance. The father seemed saddened. “Does my daughter,” he said, “have
to work as a clerk selling underwear? Are things that bad in this house?” Mrs. Morgenstern
said that Marjorie was a fool to drudge in a department store when she could make
more money with less effort working for her father. Marjorie couldn’t very well explain
to her parents that the Arnold Importing Company seemed to her a black pit which would
swallow her forever, once she fell in.

She said, “I thought you wanted me to be useful, earn my own keep—”

“I don’t know what’s the matter with you,” the mother said. “You do everything backwards
and sideways. You’re a stenographer. Papa needs another girl in the place. Twenty
dollars a week. So you work like a horse for twelve dollars a week in Gorman’s behind
a counter.”

“Don’t you see that working for Dad wouldn’t count, wouldn’t mean anything?” Marjorie
said.

Mrs. Morgenstern rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “If I had a college education
maybe I would follow you. When I went to school, twenty was eight more than twelve.”

It was a heavy effort to get herself to answer the alarm clock and go down to the
store, and the fact that her virtue went unrecognized made it harder. She arrived
at Gorman’s the following Monday already on edge from a breakfast wrangle with her
mother, wherein she had finally been driven to exclaim that becoming a stenographer
in the Arnold firm was the fate she most feared. Mr. Meredith, who had an eerie way
of popping at Marjorie around pillars and corners, flashing his false smile, especially
when she was being rude to some unbearable customer, chose this morning to do an extraordinary
amount of popping. Also, the girl who had had the mumps returned to work, and showed
instant jealousy, fear, and hatred of Marjorie. She sneered at her mistakes, snarled
at her when she leaned on the counter to rest, and kept whining and snivelling that
somebody had mixed up the stock so that it would never get straight again. She was
a fat girl named Viola, with a short upper lip and two large front teeth. The lunch
in the clerks’ cafeteria, greasy meatballs and spaghetti, disagreed with Marjorie,
shaky as she was. After lunch Mr. Meredith, with an odd change of manner, came fawning
around, and started to talk to her about yoga exercises. He recommended a couple of
books, and suggested that Marjorie might like to come with him to a meeting of his
yoga group. He talked on and on, at very short range, overwhelming Marjorie with bad
breath and wintergreen. Her head ached as though a tomahawk were sunk in it. Far down
the counter the fat girl glared and glared; at last she came up with a look of fixed
hate, and broke in to whine to Mr. Meredith about a mess in the stock which Marjorie
had made. They both went out of sight around the corner of the counter. That was the
last Marjorie saw of either of them. She left the floor, went to her locker, got her
coat, and walked out into the sunshine. She never even shopped in Gorman’s again.
But she remembered Mr. Meredith and Viola for years afterward, with extreme vividness,
as though she had worked with them half a lifetime.

Morris Shapiro said to Marjorie that night, strolling home with her from a movie,
“The point is you don’t need the money. When you need it, the Violas and the Mr. Merediths
just become acceptable details of life.”

“I need money,” Marjorie said. “Badly.”

“Not as badly as somebody does who has her stomach to fill,” Morris said. “And that’s
the only kind that makes a good salesclerk.”

“Well, I’m not beaten. I’m not going to work for my father yet. There must be some
other answer—”

“Margie, how good a stenographer are you?”

“Fair typist. My shorthand never was much.”

“How would you like a job at a hospital? There’s a vacancy in the admitting office
at my hospital. I’m pretty sure they’d take you on—you’re presentable, that’s important—”

Marjorie glanced at Shapiro walking beside her in a baggy tweed suit, hatless, in
the parti-colored neon light of the Broadway sidewalk. This pale plump middle-sized
doctor was certainly no Noel for looks or conversation. But he had his own charm.
He was masculine, self-confident, and kind. Had Noel not anticipated Morris with such
prophetic caricature, things might well be different now between them, she thought.
How could the fiend have foreseen a doctor named Shapiro with a mustache?

“It would be very odd, working at the same place with you. You’d probably get all
disillusioned with me in a week.”

“I won’t be disillusioned if your work’s no good. You’ll get fired, that’s all.”

She walked beside him in silence for a while. “All right, I’m willing to try,” she
said.

The hospital job turned out to be perfect for her. It ran from eight in the morning
to two in the afternoon and there was nothing to it but typing, keeping files, and
now and then relieving the switchboard operator. The pay was only ten dollars a week,
but her afternoons were free for haunting the drugstore, which seemed a decisive advantage.

In point of fact, however, her passion for the drugstore somewhat declined as her
interest in Morris Shapiro increased. In his white rumpled coat, with his stubby hands
scrubbed bright pink, and the smell of tobacco smoke and medicine about him, he was
an authentic doctor, not a mere date; and he had new charm. Often when her work was
through, she would have lunch with him; they would sit drinking coffee and talking,
and the latest theatre gossip would seem a less urgent matter, safely to be left to
tomorrow.

He was a Research Fellow. In the hospital, where long hard work was a matter of course,
Morris Shapiro was regarded as an almost maniacal worker. She became curious about
his work. But she had to badger him for a long time before he would believe that she
really wanted to know about it. Once he started talking he talked copiously, half
forgetting her, his face alive and his eyes bright. It was current practice, he told
her, in cases of fractures that wouldn’t heal, to put pieces of bone from another
part of the patient’s own body into the breach. Morris was doing original work in
clinic cases, using bone from other people’s bodies in the same way. He had had some
striking successes, and hoped eventually to write a monograph that would modify surgical
practice in the field.

Marjorie stared at the tired, puffy-faced slouching young man in the creased white
coat, forgetting that he was almost bald and hardly taller than herself. “I had no
idea that you were doing anything as important as that.”

He shrugged and lit a cigarette from a burning butt. “It’s just like a Ph.D. thesis.
You have to think of some trivial new angle and work it up, that’s all. If I write
a good monograph I might wind up with an appointment on some hospital staff. It’s
just part of the game.”

He would never concede that he was doing anything but maneuvering for promotion. She
grew used to this pose and made no effort to argue against it, while she admired his
masked passion for his work.

In due time they got around to necking. She told herself for a while that it was every
bit as exciting as it had been with Noel. Then she gave up the effort to maintain
that illusion, because it was making her irritable, and spoiling her pleasure in Morris’s
company. It wasn’t true. Noel was gone. The special charged and frightening excitement
of her first love was gone too, no doubt forever. But she liked and admired Morris
Shapiro. She couldn’t pretend to herself that Morris’s conversation had any of the
color and sparkle of Noel’s rainbow cascades of words, but he was clever, good-humored,
and refreshingly honest.

The greatest enemy of the slowly, shyly burgeoning romance was her mother. Mrs. Morgenstern
could not contain her enthusiasm for Dr. Shapiro. She kept extolling Morris and pointing
out how superior he was to unreliable nervous types, such as, for instance, songwriters.
Morris’s father was a textile manufacturer and a trustee of the temple; he attended
services every Saturday in a frock coat and a high hat. Marjorie’s mother and Mrs.
Shapiro were old acquaintances. Mrs. Morgenstern let slip at one point that the girl’s
meeting with the young doctor at the Zionist lecture had been far from accidental;
the fruit of a plot, indeed, contrived by the two mothers for over a year. Morris
had been dragged to the lecture as Marjorie had been dragged. His mother had pointed
the girl out, and the young doctor’s disgruntled skepticism had changed at once to
hot attention. Mrs. Morgenstern thought this was a good joke, perfectly safe to divulge,
after Marjorie had been at the hospital a month or so. She had no idea what a horrible
yellow blight it threw over the doctor in Marjorie’s eyes. Suddenly Morris seemed
to her once more the comic caricature husband predicted by Noel. She hated his pudginess
and his mustache, his scanty hair and plodding good nature, and the unlucky name Shapiro.
It took her a week or so to get over it. But she finally decided that she was twenty-one,
after all, and that it was time to stop being influenced by her mother’s likes and
dislikes. It was as childish to reject a man because her mother was trying to push
him down her throat, as it would be to accept him. She began to be pleasant to him
again.