Marjorie Morningstar (7 page)

The frosty Coca-Cola brought little relief to Marjorie’s empty stomach. George sipped
his drink moodily. The college boys, shepherded by the headwaiter, weaved to a large
round table in the dining room, shouting jokes. They could not have looked more uniform—all
stringy, bristle-headed, jaunty, long-jawed, with gold rings and cuff links, very
white shirts, and baggy brown jackets and gray trousers. Marjorie resented them because
George looked so unlike them, because only one of them glanced at her, and because
they were going to eat. Sandy Goldstone, she thought, was handsomer than any of them.

One by one couples were called in to dinner, and others arrived to sit around looking
hungry. After a while George noticed that some of the newcomers were getting tables.
He jumped up and sawed his arms in the air until the headwaiter came. “We were ahead
of those people!”

“Sorry, sair, Mr. Taub. They have reservations.”

“I had a reservation two hours before they did.”

“Right away, sair. Not long now, Mr. Taub.”

When the bar was almost empty, and the waiter was yawning and washing the tables,
the headwaiter came smiling. “This way, sair.” He put them at a flower-decorated table
on the glassed porch, next to a large party of elderly people. Marjorie surmised they
were rich by their fine clothes, the strange dry twang of their voices, and the champagne
buckets flanking their table.

George tried to order filet of sole. But the headwaiter recommended the house specialty,
roast Long Island duckling, with such bland patience that George was crushed. “All
right then, duck for two. And champagne,” he added belligerently.

“Yes, sair. Piper Heidsieck, sair? Mumm’s, sair?”

“Just any good champagne.”

“Very good sair, Mr. Taub.”

Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour went by. No food came. George’s lower
jaw lolled open, his lip pulled in over the teeth. He said to Marjorie, “I haven’t
had anything to eat since breakfast. I’m dying.” He pounded his glass with a knife
and demanded service, glaring like a cornered animal at the headwaiter. With pleasant
deference, the man explained that at the Villa Marlene everything was cooked to order.
George asked for some rolls and butter, some salad, anything. “Right away now, sair.”
More time went by. The people at the next table, finishing their dessert and coffee,
were having a lively argument as to whether President Roosevelt was a criminal or
just a lunatic. “Franklin is a deeply mediocre person, that’s all,” said one withered
little man with a hairy mole on his chin, who was leaning back smoking a long cigar.
“He was mediocre when we were working together in the Navy Department, and he’s still
mediocre.” George turned a fork over and over, snuffling, and Marjorie gnawed a knuckle.

Forty-five minutes after they had been seated, the waiter brought two sizzling small
ducks, a basket of French bread, salad, and vegetables. While he fussed over the vegetables
the headwaiter came with glittering carving instruments and artistically dismembered
the fowls. Meantime Marjorie and George wolfed up most of the bread with indecent
speed. The headwaiter finished carving the birds and handed the table waiter a platter
full of little wings, thighs, breasts, and legs. He then walked off to the kitchen
with the two duck carcasses, which were covered with meat; evidently at the Villa
Marlene it was bad form to eat the body of a duck. Marjorie groaned, “Good God, make
him bring those ducks back. All that meat—” George merely made a gobbling noise, his
mouth full of bread, his eyes on the meat that remained.

But almost immediately—the transformation took no longer than the devouring of the
food and the drinking of a couple of glasses of champagne—the look of everything changed.
The headwaiter, leaning in the doorway with his menus, no longer seemed to Marjorie
a bullying snob, but a genuine jolly host, rosy-faced and beaming, an innkeeper out
of Dickens. The food was lovely, marvelous, the best she had ever eaten. The Villa
Marlene really was charming, after all, with its wallpaper of pink French courtiers
dancing a minuet, its dim orange lights, its lilac-scented air. The rich people at
the next table were elegant aristocrats of the old school, and it was delightful to
be dining so near them. George’s spirits came back too. His spine straightened, color
returned to his cheek, and liveliness to his eye. He lit a cigar and sipped his champagne,
leaning back with one elbow on a chair arm, in the exact pose of the old man who thought
that Franklin was deeply mediocre. Marjorie decided that George had a sensitive handsomeness
far surpassing the magazine-cover good looks of the college boys (who had left more
than an hour ago). She drank several glasses of champagne, and began to feel mightily
exhilarated.

“Everything all right?” said George, squinting through his cigar smoke.

“Everything’s divine,” said Marjorie. The headwaiter filled their glasses with the
last of the champagne and put the bottle neck down in the bucket.

“Thank you, madame.” He bowed. “Some brandy, sair, Mr. Taub?”

“Why I daresay, I daresay,” said George. “You, Marjorie?”

“I—I’d better not, thanks.” Marjorie’s teeth felt curiously tight, and she seemed
to be hearing her own voice with an echo to it, as though she were shouting down a
well.

“Now then,” said George, when the waiter had brought coffee and set brandy before
him in a shimmering bubble of glass, “are you ready?”

“Sure,” said Marjorie. “For what?”

“The surprise.”

With a qualm, Marjorie now thought of the hints, the winks, the fondling of her knee.
“Why, I guess so. But I’m feeling awfully good as it is, George—I don’t need anything
more, George—”

Inexorably George’s hand went plunging into his jacket pocket. Marjorie knew what
was coming, before she saw the little blue leather box in his hand, before he opened
it, before the two rings lay winking and glittering at her in a bed of purple velvet.

“Oh, George… George!”

“Pretty, aren’t they?” His eyeglasses gleamed at her.

“Beautiful, they’re beautiful. But—George—really, I’m dumfounded—”

“It doesn’t have to be next week or next month,” George said eagerly. “Or even next
year. We just ought to know where we stand, and let everybody else know—”

Marjorie put her champagne to her mouth and sipped it deliberately, looking at George
over the rim of the glass with young scared eyes.

At fifteen, at sixteen, she had daydreamed away a thousand blissful hours picturing
this event, panting for the time when it would come. Now here it was. But she had
not been panting for it recently. If anything, she had been shutting it from her mind,
telling herself that she was too young to be thinking of engagements, ignoring the
fact that during the preceding year and a half she had considered herself more than
old enough. Defiant of her mother’s nagging, she had kissed George, and necked with
him, and sworn she could never love anyone else, during all that time; and now here
were two rings staring her in the face.

Even now, backed to the wall, Marjorie could not admit to herself that her mother
was right, that George was a decent but dull fellow, that she had made a donkey of
herself over a girlish infatuation, that she was destined to do much better. She was
touched by the offer of the rings, and grateful to George. She was merely irritated
with him for his clumsy pressing of the issue. She was only now beginning to grow
up a bit, to discover life and her own self. Why was he in such a hurry? Why must
he ask her to take herself out of the world at seventeen? It wasn’t fair.

She put down the glass. “Wow, this is wicked stuff. I’m floating four feet off the
floor.”

George said eagerly, waving a finger at the headwaiter, “Let’s crack another bottle,
really celebrate—”

“Good Lord, no.” She looked at her watch. “Darling, do you know it’s after ten? We
won’t get home till morning in all that traffic. Mama will have kittens. Let’s go.”

“But we’ve got so much to talk about, pooch. This is an important night in our lives—”

“Dear, we’ll have enough time on the road to talk out everything, hours and hours
and hours—”

So George asked for the check. The headwaiter brought him the change on a metal platter,
and said with a beautiful bow, “Was your dinner satisfactory, Mr. Taub?”

“Perfect, perfect, thank you.” George fumbled a five-dollar bill from the plate and
gave it to him, and left two dollars on the table for the waiter.

“Thank you, sair. Bon soir, madame. Bon soir, Mr. Taub.” He bowed again, George bowed
back. They went out into the cool night, and the door closed behind them.

George shook his head and said with a stunned look, “Have I gone crazy? Why did I
give that bastard five dollars?”

He tipped the man in the parking lot a dime. The man cursed loudly in German as they
drove off.

Penelope’s noises seemed worse as they bumped along the dark side road. The groan
under the floorboard had changed to a screech like an electric butcher saw on bone.
“Dear,” said Marjorie in some alarm, “how about that noise?”

George cocked his ear and gnawed his lip. “Well, nothing to be done about it. Can’t
tear down the transmission now, on the side of the road. I don’t know. Sometimes she
just works through these noises and purrs like a cat again. We’ll see.”

Coming to the parkway, they could see strings of white headlights stretched to the
horizon in one direction and strings of red tail lights in the other, moving in the
moonlight with the slimy slowness of worms. “Oh dear,” said Marjorie.

“Well, Sunday night is bad,” said George. It took him ten minutes of narrow maneuvering
to wedge into the solid westbound line. “Okay,” he said with relief, grinning at her,
“homeward bound.” He reached over and tousled her hair, and she was unpleasantly reminded
of Sandy Goldstone. “Don’t worry, you’ll be in your little brown bed by midnight.”
He pulled the box of rings out of his pocket. “Take another look at them? I think
they’re honeys.”

“George, they must have cost a fortune.” She eyed the rings in the dim yellow light
of the parkway lamps. They were a matched pair in white gold, the wedding ring plain,
the engagement ring set with a small rose-cut diamond.

“What’s the difference? They’re yours.”

“No, really. After all, I know how hard things have been and—”

“Well, it sometimes helps to have a jeweler in the family.” George looked roguish.

“George, did your Uncle Albie give them to you?”

“Marge, it’s perfectly all right. It was his own idea. Naturally I’ll pay him some
day as soon as I’m able.” The grinding noise of Penelope was now so loud that George
was shouting a little.

“Shouldn’t we wait till then?” Marjorie’s teeth were shaken by the motion of the car.

“What?”

Marjorie repeated it, louder.

George, clutching the wheel, which was beginning to shimmy, shouted, “What kind of
silly remark is that? Good Lord, Marjorie, I’m drudging away in the Bronx, trying
to save up enough to finish my M.A. and Ph.D., and you’re flitting around downtown
meeting new guys every day, going to Columbia dances and what all—how do you suppose
that makes me feel? I’m worried. I can’t tell what you—”

He broke off, his whole body stiffening, his arms rigid on the wheel. Penelope suddenly
was collapsing in a frightful way, shaking and bumping and crashing, with a smell
of red-hot iron filling the car and trickles of smoke coming up through the floorboard.
George swerved off the parkway; the stricken car went bouncing over soft earth. He
shut off the ignition, reached roughly across Marjorie to shove open the door, and
pushed her out. “Get clear.” Marjorie stumbled away through the grass, soaking her
stockings, then turned and watched George cautiously open the hood and shine a flashlight
at the engine. He ducked under the chassis and flashed the light here and there. Penelope
stood hub-deep in weeds, leaning to one side. On the road cars flowed by with a rich
hiss of tires, nobody stopping to look at the wreck or offer help. George stood and
waved. “Okay, come back. Stripped a gear, I guess. There’s no fire.”

Walking back to the car, Marjorie became aware of something bulky in her hand. She
held it up, and was astonished to see that she was still clutching the jewel box.
“Now what?” she said to George.

“Phone for a tow car. Nothing else to do.” He shrugged his bowed shoulders, patted
the hood of the car, and peered through the swarm of cars. “There’s a police phone,
I think, on that lamp post down there. Come with me, or stay here? I’ll just be a
couple of minutes.”

“I—I guess I’d better stay off the ankle, George.”

“All right.” He opened the car door. “Might as well get in the back where it’s comfortable.
The front is finished, for a while.”

“George,” she said as he turned to go.

“Yes?”

“You’d—maybe you’d better hold on to these. I lose things, all the time.”

The moonlight made a white blank of his glasses as he took the box. “Right,” he said,
with no expression in his voice. He carefully stowed the box in his pocket, snuffled,
and walked off down the road, swinging the flashlight.

She came home after one. The apartment was dark and quiet. On her bed was a note in
her mother’s spiky handwriting:
Sandy Goldstone called. Wanted to know how your ankle was. Called three times
.

Billy Ehrmann was the booby of his fraternity, and being seen with him had done Marjorie
little good at Columbia; but once Sandy Goldstone started dating her, the Morgenstern
telephone began to ring busily after school hours.

Lively and pretty though she was, she needed Sandy’s sponsorship because she was a
Hunter girl. That was almost as disqualifying, in the estimation of Sandy’s West Side
set, as living north of Ninety-sixth Street; which was only a shade less disqualifying
than living in the Bronx. Snobbishness, of course, is a relative thing. The older
and wealthier Jewish families, who lived on the upper East Side, would have been distressed
had the West Side boys dated their daughters. And these families doubtless caused
the well-to-do Christian families to wonder what was becoming of Park Avenue and Fifth
Avenue. The terracing of caste extended upward into an azure realm of blood, breeding,
and property as remote from little Marjorie Morgenstern as the planet Saturn. From
her viewpoint, however, her small move upward was skyrocketing. Sandy Goldstone had
begun to take her out. It followed that Bill Dryfus could, and Dan Kadane, and Neil
Wein, and Norman Fisher, and Allen Orbach. She soon had to buy a little leather-bound
notebook to keep track of her dates. The rush of success made her rather dizzy.