Marjorie Morningstar (74 page)

He smiled. “Let’s have the cigarettes.”

She passed the pack to him. With her first puff she leaned back and sighed. Her glance
went to the window. The moon hung in the sky over the buildings, a solid disk of reddish
bronze, without a trace of white. “Well, bless me,” she said, pointing. “Look, the
eclipse is total. I got to see one, after all. Makes it easy to date this night, doesn’t
it, darling?”

“Marjorie,” Noel said, in a strained tone, “I would appreciate it just as much if
you weren’t quite so brave and pathetic about all this. You’re a big girl. It could
have been more fun, and it will be, I promise you. I love you.”

She looked at him, smiling, while tears came from nowhere and ran down her face in
streams. “Why, darling, I wasn’t being pathetic. I’m very glad. I love you too.”

She put her face in the pillow. The tears were pouring; she could not possibly stop
them, and she was ashamed of herself because she was crying.

One year later, almost to the day, Marjorie Morgenstern was frantically fighting her
way up the third-class gangplank of the steamship
Mauretania
, against a solid stream of people leaving the ship. She was clutching the rail, panting
heavily, murmuring excuses and apologies with every step, her breath smoking in the
raw fishy-smelling air. She was not halfway up the plank when gongs sounded, and a
loudspeaker bawled,
Last call. Visitors ashore. Last call.
The ship’s officer at the head of the gangplank held out a hand to stop her as she
set foot on deck. “So sorry, miss. You’re too late.” The accent was like a movie Englishman’s,
the manner pleasant but firm.

She looked him straight in the face. He was red-faced and lean, no taller than she.
“I have to talk to my—my fiancé. Just for a minute. But I
have
to talk to him.” She stood her ground with difficulty, jostled by dozens of visitors
funnelling into the gangway.

He took in her smart clothes with a glance, and looked over his shoulder at a clock.
His voice became less formal. “Very important, I guess it is?”

“As important as anything can be.”

With a bleak grin he nodded her past him, and she went running down stairs to the
lower decks.

The stateroom number was correct; she recognized Noel’s luggage piled on the berth.
It was a tiny dim interior cabin on the lowest deck, stuffy despite a roaring ventilator.
She glanced up and down the passageway; he was nowhere in sight. Hurriedly she began
a search of the passageways, turning here and there, not knowing which turn might
luckily lead her to come upon him. Past bashfulness or diffidence, she shouldered
into noisy cabins where farewell parties were breaking up, looked around to make sure
he wasn’t in the room, and went away without a word, leaving people snickering behind
her. The gongs kept sounding with startling loudness; over and over the loudspeakers
called,
Visitors ashore, please. Last call. All ashore at once, please.
The passageways had been crowded when she came aboard, but they were rapidly emptying;
she walked through several that were deserted. She began to run. She ran through empty
writing rooms, through a lounge, through a dining room, through a bar. She made another
panic-stricken tour of the passageways, finding herself in the same ones over and
over, like a rat in a maze.

She had had several nightmares like this: nightmares of looking for Noel through endless
twisting corridors. This might almost have been another nightmare, except that it
was too coherent, too vivid, too matter-of-fact. It was really happening; she knew
that. But an eerie dreamlike feeling possessed her, a feeling that she had actually
looked for him—or had dreamed that she had looked for him—in just this way, through
these very passageways, long, long ago. She turned corners knowing in advance that
she would see a queerly shaped fire extinguisher on the wall, or a bearded steward
in a white coat walking toward her; and the extinguisher, the steward, were there.
She had had this weird illusion before, but never half so strongly or so persistently.

Somebody touched her arm. In the instant before she turned, she sensed it would be
a rosy-faced cabin boy in a blue uniform; and it was. “You a passenger, miss?”

“No, I—”

“All visitors have to leave this minute, miss, sorry. They’re taking in the gangplanks.”

She looked around desperately. The passageway was empty except for herself and the
boy. “Thank you.” She hurried to the gangplank.

“Find your friend, miss?” said the little red-faced officer.

She gave him a harried smile, and followed a solitary fat man down the gangplank.
She walked up and down the pier behind the fenced-in visitors, staring up at the colossal
steel side of the
Mauretania
, scanning the waving, laughing, shouting passengers lining the rails. Great cranes
reached down and plucked up the gangplanks. Sailors on the ship began hauling in the
huge manila lines. A band started to play a brassy march, but the music was nearly
drowned in the snorting and clanking of the cranes, and the cheers and yells that
filled the immense shed.

She wasn’t sure it was Noel when she first saw him, because he wore a new dark green
hat of an odd flat shape; but she recognized the loose camel’s hair topcoat, and the
slouch of the shoulders. He was at the rail of one of the lower decks, far forward.
She hurried to a point opposite him and waved from the back of the crowd. He didn’t
see her. He held a highball glass in his hand, and he was talking to a plump woman
in a red suit, who also was drinking a highball. Marjorie worked through the jammed-together
people to the fence, alternately pushing and apologizing. As she came to the front
of the crowd, there were three horrifying whistle blasts. She waved her arms and shrieked,
“Noel!” in the instant of near-quiet after the last blast. He heard it; he glanced
along the pier, and then he saw her. He shook his head as though in wonder, smiled,
and rather sheepishly waved. He said something to the woman in the red suit, pointing
at Marjorie; the woman looked at her and laughed, and said something that made Noel
laugh. He raised his glass to Marjorie, shouted something she didn’t hear, and drank.

She yelled, “Write to me!”

He cupped his hand to his ear.

“Write to me!
Write to me
, I say!” The people on either side of her at the fence stared and smiled, but she
was beyond self-consciousness. “WRITE TO ME!”

He shrugged to indicate that he couldn’t hear her. He spoke to the woman in the red
suit, and she shrugged too, looking intently at Marjorie. She was too far away for
Marjorie to see her features clearly; she appeared to be about forty, and not unattractive.

Marjorie held up the flat side of her purse, made a gesture of writing on it and sealing
an envelope, then pointed to Noel and to herself. He grinned, and shook his head vehemently.
She repeated the gesture with emphasis. He shook his head equally emphatically, and
pantomimed putting a pistol to his temple. Before her eyes she saw the
Mauretania’s
rivets slide slowly to the left. A cheer went up from the people on the pier, and
colored paper streamers rained from ship to shore. The band struck up
Rule Britannia.
Marjorie again made the writing gesture, and with a tearful smile shook her fist
at Noel. He laughed, raised the glass to her again, drained it, and tossed it into
the widening water between the pier and the ship. The woman in the red suit threw
back her head, laughing, and patted him on the shoulder.

Marjorie took out her handkerchief and waved and waved, as long as she could distinguish
Noel. She thought she saw his hand wave in answer once or twice. With the rest of
the crowd she ran to the head of the pier, and watched the tugs pull the vast ship
out into the muddy choppy Hudson and turn it around. It was a very clear sunny day;
windows of houses along the New Jersey palisades glittered white. Far up the river
the George Washington Bridge stood out sharp and gray against the blue Hudson and
the green far Jersey hills. The freezing wind off the river smelled like the ocean
at low tide; it cut at her legs, making her shiver inside her fur coat. She could
see a dot of red at one point of the lower deck rail that might have been the plump
woman, she could not make out Noel at all. But she stood and watched while the tugs
pushed the bow southward to the ocean, and the water began to boil white around the
towering stern. She watched the ship go down the river, getting smaller and smaller.
She was almost the last of the visitors to leave the pier.

She took the letter from her purse in the taxicab and read it again on the way home.
It was twenty pages long, typed in Noel’s neat clear double-spaced way on his customary
thin yellow paper. The
e
was awry, bent to the left and pushed up above the typing line, as it had been ever
since she had started getting letters from Noel, three years ago. She had not yet
read the letter carefully. Finding it at the door, in the morning mail, she had surmised
at once from its bulk what it was, and had skimmed it at top speed for the immediate
facts. Though he said in it that he would be several days at sea when she received
it, she had at once scanned the
Times
sailing list and then rushed down to the Cunard pier, where she had pestered the
pursers until she found out that Noel was a third-class passenger on the
Mauretania
.

She started to read the letter once more; but she began to feel a little ill, possibly
from reading in a bumpy cab, and she folded it away in the purse.

She was glad to find nobody in the apartment when she got home. She heated the coffee
that was left on the kitchen stove, and the smell made her realize that she was very
hungry. This surprised her. She would have guessed she would be unable to eat for
a couple of days after a blow like this. Perhaps it was that the blow, however cruel
and distressing, wasn’t entirely unexpected. Anyway, she was roaring hungry. She ate
a roll with butter and thick chunks of cheese; then poured more coffee and ate another
roll and more cheese. She ate whatever she pleased these days, and as much as she
pleased. One of the rewards of having troubles like hers—a small reward, to be sure—was
that she no longer had to worry about dieting. In the year of her affair with Noel
she had grown very fashionably thin. Her waist was not much more than two spans around,
and her hips had never been slimmer.

She went to her room, feeling remarkably good after the food; sat at her dressing
table, and stared in the round mirror for a long time at her jilted friend, Marjorie
Morgenstern. It was surprising how little upset she was. But this calm did not especially
reassure her. Past twenty-two, she had learned something about the way she reacted
to shocks. The bad time lay ahead. It might not even start for a couple of days, but
she knew that when it came it was likely to be pretty frightful.

Well, she thought, contemplating her mirror image, Noel had thrown her over at last,
and this time with a seeming massive finality. The twenty-page letter could hardly
be more clear. And with characteristic perversity, he had discarded her when she was
at her most attractive; when for the first time her career showed some promise; when
she had given him all she had to give, and when he was in love with her as he had
never been—though he obstinately refused to acknowledge it.

It was no vanity to believe she was looking better than ever. Though her mouth and
eyes were somewhat lined with fatigue, the glass showed her a young woman who could
be called nothing but beautiful. She had had a few modelling jobs recently. But for
her medium stature she might have had more. She was not attractive in the stereotyped
pattern of the fashion models; her cheeks weren’t sunken, her eyes didn’t glare or
smolder, and there was nothing bony about her. But she had a well-cut face with firm
flesh and good color, abundant dark brown hair, and a sweetly curved slender figure.
Her best feature remained her large eyes, blue and very alive, with a touch of secrecy
in them that was new, and all the old humor and sparkle. The main change in her appearance
in the past year, she guessed, was that she looked like a woman, not a girl. A powerful
femininity glowed from within her. She was aware of it from its effects. Men had never
pursued her harder than in this year, when, possessed by Noel, she had been completely
incapable of paying any attention to them. It was too bad the alteration in her had
come not from a happy marriage, she reflected, but from an illicit affair, which had
just exploded in her face. When marriage didn’t make a girl smug and sloppy like Rosalind
Boehm, or tight-nerved and falsely gay like Marsha Michaelson, it could work just
such a soft charming change; she had seen it make ugly girls into pleasant women,
and pretty girls into stunning women. Here she was—pretty as any, over twenty-two,
and in the ash can.

But life went on, even for the brokenhearted and the numb in spirit. She glanced at
her wristwatch, went wearily to the telephone, and dialled. “Hello? Is Len there?
This is Margie Morningstar…. No, no, don’t bother him, Mike. Just give him a message
when there’s a break in the rehearsal, will you? Tell him I’m sorry I’m late, something
came up…. No, everything’s okay, I should be there in half an hour. Are they up to
my scene?… Well, fine. ’Bye.”

She quickly changed into the warm brown wool dress she had been wearing at rehearsals
because of the dank drafts backstage at the Lyceum. Marjorie had come far in the past
year. She had a real part in a real Broadway play, and everyone in the company knew
her as Marjorie Morningstar.

She opened her purse to put in a fresh pack of cigarettes; and there was the letter,
bulky and depressing. She didn’t especially want to drag the lugubrious document around
with her; not to rehearsal, certainly, where she had to appear gay and fresh. She
thought of the old rosewood box. It was tucked away on an inconvenient high shelf,
but it did lock, and she still had the key somewhere. She found the key, climbed on
a chair, and got the box down. It was covered with dust and it opened with a creak.
It was so full of old junk that the papers popped up when she raised the lid. Every
year or so she glanced through the contents of the box. The process was growing less
and less amusing, and she had often thought she would burn it all and throw the box
away. In a city apartment, however, burning papers was no easy matter. One couldn’t
very well do it on the kitchen range, and there was no fireplace. As a result the
old rosewood box kept getting fuller, year by year. A squirrelling instinct made Marjorie
think of it whenever she had a paper that she didn’t want to destroy at once, or one
she was afraid to throw even in fragments into a wastebasket. The security precautions
she took against her mother’s inquisitiveness were second nature now. Mrs. Morgenstern
still poked around in the girl’s room, but she hadn’t found anything interesting since
her nineteenth year, even in the wastebasket.