Marjorie Morningstar (66 page)

In more than a year of loitering around the drugstore, she had seen one girl after
another become embroiled in affairs with the would-be actors. Possibly this had qualified
them to portray true emotion on the stage, but there was no way of knowing. Getting
rid of one’s virginity was no immediate passport to a Broadway role; this was true
even when the helpful man was a professional producer, as a few of the girls had found
out. The visible effect on the girls was that they became tired-looking and red around
the eyes, slept later, drank more, and acquired coarser speech and manners. Some became
less reluctant to pose for underwear advertisements and nude pictures. Seeing all
this, Marjorie concluded that if she ever did have an affair for the sake of learning
to portray true emotion, she wouldn’t have it with an unsuccessful young actor or
a vulpine producer.

Wally Wronken occasionally took her to dinner. He was out of college, living with
his parents, dejectedly making forty dollars a week in the advertising section of
his father’s office-furniture business. He worked on plays every evening from nine
to twelve, and had already completed three farce comedies, which he had submitted
without success to producers.

“Wally, you’ll never get anywhere writing in your spare time,” Marjorie told him.
“You should devote your life to it.”

“Well, I’m an adult now, theoretically. I’d rather pay for my own ties and shirts.
I still think I’ll get somewhere, if I can stick on this schedule. Of course it eats
into my social life, but I don’t give much of a damn about my social life, tell you
the truth. Dinner with you is something else, of course.”

The thought mischievously recurred to her at these dinners that if she were going
to have an educational affair she would do well to confer the favor on Wally Wronken.
He deserved it more than anybody for his fidelity and his reverence. He still made
no effort even to take a goodnight kiss. Bashfulness wasn’t the reason any more; he
had clearly learned his way around girls. But he had evidently struck, in his own
mind, some philosophic equilibrium in regarding Marjorie as an untouchable divinity.
He talked about the plots of his plays with her, and took her comments seriously.
He always made her feel good when she saw him. It was refreshing to be treated like
a goddess, especially after being treated more like a tackling dummy by some overhopeful
young actor or director. But it was also rather dull. She played with the idea of
having an affair with Wally mainly because she knew it was impossible.

Her mother liked Wally (having duly checked on the Wronken family), and often suggested
that Marjorie could do worse than take him seriously, now that both of them were moving
along in years. “He’ll probably get over the writing foolishness, and there’s his
father’s business waiting for him,” she said. Marjorie shrugged this off, as she did
most of her mother’s broadening hints about getting married.

She did feel guilty about living unproductively at home, so she tried to keep her
temper. Once, being harried to go to a temple dance, she said mildly to her mother
that at twenty-one she didn’t feel life had quite passed her by. “I’ll be married
before I’m twenty-five, Mom, I promise you.”

“Who’s rushing you? It’s just that before you marry a man you’ve got to meet him,
unless I’m mistaken.”

So she went to the dance. She met a Dartmouth senior there, a pink-faced short boy
who fell for her insanely and implored her to come as his date to the Winter Carnival
in February. His father was a wealthy manufacturer of stoves. Mrs. Morgenstern gave
her no peace. “What harm will it do you to go to Dartmouth for a weekend? Will you
freeze to death?”

“Mom, he’s a child, he’s almost two years younger than I am.”

“Maybe you’ll meet a professor you’ll like.”

“I’ll make a bargain with you, Mom. Stop nagging me about Morris Shapiro, never mention
the name to me again, and I’ll go to Dartmouth.”

The mother, after a moment’s hesitation, said, “It’s a bargain.”

February came, and Marjorie had to keep her word. She remembered the Winter Carnival
forever afterward as a whirling hallucination of red-faced drunken children in crimson,
green, yellow sweaters, milling, yelling, dancing, necking, riding sleds, tromping
knee-deep in snow; she remembered the scratch of wool, the wet chill of snow and the
burn of raw whiskey; and aching wet feet, frostbitten fingers and toes, red running
nose and horribly hurting ears. Worst of all was being jammed with a dozen hideously
young girls in the bedroom of a fraternity house, and feeling something between an
old maid and a chaperone. Among these girls she was an object of side glances, whispers,
and giggling politeness. They were mostly about seventeen. They had full breasts,
they scampered around in fetching lingerie, and they talked among themselves with
arrogant wisdom in schoolgirl slang Marjorie had almost forgotten. It was frightful.
Even the pink-faced boy realized at last that she was suffering, and mournfully put
her on an early train back to New York. Next day she went to the drugstore and bathed
in the relief of being with attractive girls in their twenties, among whom she was
still one of the young ones. For weeks there hung over her the nightmare scare she
had had in the fraternity house at Dartmouth—the feeling of having passed overnight,
unmarried, into the older generation.

She was amazed, one morning in mid-February, to read this note in the theatre gossip
of the New York
Times
:

The shock and the thrill blew her habitual reticence apart. Housecoat and nightgown
flying, she scurried from her bedroom to the kitchen. “Mom, have you seen this?”

Mrs. Morgenstern looked up from the eggs she was frying. “What now?”

Marjorie read the item aloud with an edge of triumph in her voice. The mother’s eyebrows
went high. She dished up the eggs and poured coffee. “Well, sit down and have some
breakfast, if you’re not too excited to eat.”

“I’m not excited at all,” Marjorie said. “But it is interesting, isn’t it? I always
knew he had talent. Not everybody agreed with me, but of course I’m used to that.”

“Have you heard from him lately?”

“You know I’ve been through with Noel Airman for a year, but I certainly wish him
well. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Who’s this Peter Ferris?”

“I don’t know. Some new producer, I guess.”

The mother picked up the paper and frowned over it. “
Princess Jones
, hey? Hm. You think it’s going to be a hit?”

“I think it will be. It’s brilliant.”

“How do you know?”

“Noel read the book and played the score for me, ages ago.”

“What’s it all about?”

Marjorie hesitated. But there was something too exhilarating about knowing the story
of an incoming Broadway show. She talked as she ate her eggs, and the mother listened
attentively to the story of the American heiress marrying a bankrupt young prince,
and trying to reform the cheese-making industry of a sleepy little Balkan country
on the pattern of American assembly-line efficiency. After a while Mrs. Morgenstern
began looking confused and wrinkling her nose. Marjorie was getting all tangled in
sub-plots. She broke off. “Oh, it’s impossible to tell the story of a musical show.
If I told you
Of Thee I Sing
it would sound twice as crazy, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a light, gay,
satiric fantasy, that’s all, with music and dancing.”

“Well, maybe it’s over my head.”

Marjorie made a face, and carried her coffee with the
Times
into her bedroom. She read the few printed lines over and over. Her own name in the
theatre column could hardly have made her feel more excited and happy.

She took to pouncing on the paper at the door every morning, and opening it to the
amusements section without glancing at the front page. For a couple of weeks there
was nothing more; then a note appeared that Noel had returned to town with the producer
to assemble a cast. She walked numbly through the next few days, seeing him every
time she turned a corner on the street. But there are a lot of people in New York,
and the chances of any two of them meeting by accident twice within a year aren’t
high; she didn’t encounter Noel.

Soon the papers began reporting the signing of featured players for
Princess Jones
. Several of the drugstore kids tried out for the chorus and for bit parts, with the
usual lack of success. Marjorie daydreamed of going to the theatre and turning up
demurely in the tryouts. But in practical fact she was too short to be a show girl,
she couldn’t sing, she couldn’t dance, and she knew there was no speaking part in
the show which she could play. Had she been Noel’s girl, he might have written in
a few lines for her; but it would be impossibly humiliating, she felt, to try to crawl
to him now for favors. Chances were that he was entangled with some starlet or actress,
and had forgotten her. And good riddance, Marjorie assured herself. She stuck to that.

Still, it gave her a secret elation to hear the drugstore crowd talking about
Princess Jones
as they did about any other incoming production. Some of the gossipers asserted that
it was a sure smash hit, and that the brokers were already buying up huge blocks of
tickets. Others said it was a threadbare old-hat piece which wouldn’t last a week.
Such contradictory rumors inevitably sprang up about all new shows. One morning, a
girl who had tried out for the chorus sang several of the numbers for the drugstore
crowd. Marjorie sat quiet in a corner, her spine alive with thrills, as the girl piped
the familiar words and tunes, and her memories woke of Noel’s Village apartment, the
dying fire in the littered fireplace, the smell of beer, toasted hot dogs, and cigarettes,
and Noel at the piano, singing with the remembered commanding lift of his jaw.

March 4, 1937

Marjorie’s lip curled as she read this letter. The offhand reference to Noel’s show
was the key, of course. Marsha wanted to pump her about
Princess Jones
. The show was in its first week of rehearsals, and Marjorie was having a hard time
keeping herself from strolling past the theatre, so any distraction was welcome. She
telephoned Marsha, thinking that it would be amusing to find out whether the engagement
was another of her facile lies. Marsha seemed exceptionally wild and gay on the telephone.
“Sugar bun, it’s heaven to talk to you. One o’clock is great, just marvelous. Where?
Someplace glorious. Let’s have lunch at the Plaza.”

“The Plaza?”

“Why not? Nothing but the best for la Morningstar, n’est-ce pas?”

“Marsha, la Morningstar is an unemployed vagrant.”

“Nonsense.”

“I wish it were nonsense.”

“Well, darling, this is the chance of a lifetime then. I’ll treat you.”

“Nothing doing. If some fool man takes me to the Plaza that’s different, but—”

“Margie, I’m rolling in money. Wait till I tell you. I jingle when I walk. I clank.
My one problem is getting rid of it, I swear. Pick me up at my apartment at a quarter
of, and we’ll walk across the park. It’s a gorgeous day.” She told Marjorie her new
address.

“I’ll pick you up, Marsha, but as for the Plaza—”

“Wonderful, sugar bun. ’Bye.”

Marjorie mustered up her best daytime clothes. Marsha sounded engaged, all right—engaged
and triumphant—and Marjorie was in no mood to be triumphed over.

The new address turned out to be a shabby-genteel apartment house on West Sixty-second
Street with a self-service elevator. Marjorie pressed the button, the red light flashed
In Use
, and the elevator whined down from a remote floor, making a noise with its cables
that sounded like
No don’t, no don’t, no don’t
. It was still whining when the street door opened and a short man with white hair
came in and stood yawning beside her, holding a large brown paper bag in both arms.
Marjorie smelled the spice of delicatessen, and took a second look at the tanned plump
face of the man. “Hello, Mr. Zelenko! Remember me?”

The man glanced at her. His face brightened, and he extended a few fingers from the
side of the paper bag. “Well! The great Morningstar! More beautiful than ever!”

Riding up in the elevator, Marjorie said, “I’m so happy to hear about Marsha.”

“Yes, Lou’s a wonderful fellow. You’ll have to meet him sometime. Lou’s quite a fellow.”

A Bach fugue was resounding through the apartment, played with all of Mrs. Zelenko’s
old power and skill. It made Marjorie feel old to hear the Bach and smell the Turkish
tobacco odor of the Zelenko home. The apartment, though larger than the one on Ninety-second
Street, had much the same look. Coming into the living room, she recognized the African
mask on the wall, the Chinese screen, the green Buddha and the hookah, amid some unfamiliar
exotic hangings, statuettes, and lamps, and some new Grand Rapids chairs and tables.
A little gray-headed man who looked like Mr. Zelenko, evidently an uncle or some relative,
sat in an armchair near the window, with his face tilted toward the ceiling, his eyes
closed, and the tips of his fingers pressed together. The mother broke off her playing
sharply. “Margie! For heaven’s sake, why didn’t that fool Alex tell me you were here?”
She came and hugged Marjorie. She was tan, too, and not quite as fat as Marjorie remembered;
her hair was freshly waved and freshly blond. She said, “Well, you look absolutely
wonderful as always, you’ve become just piercingly beautiful, dear, it does my heart
good to see you—”