Marjorie Morningstar (79 page)

“For what?” asked the mother.

“Never mind.”

“A present for Noel?”

“No. Not a present for Noel.”

“A mink coat,” Seth said.

“That’s right. A mink coat.”

“That’s not it,” the father said.

Mrs. Morgenstern said, “What does Noel think about all this?”

“I don’t know.”

Mrs. Morgenstern laughed. “She doesn’t know.”

“I don’t.”

“Where is Noel? He hasn’t called all week.”

“In Paris.”

After a slight general pause, Seth said, “You’re fooling.”

“No, I’m not. He’s in Paris. Or he’ll be there in a day or so. He left on the
Mauretania
last week.”

Mrs. Morgenstern said cautiously, “Did you see him off?”

“Yes.”

“Why did he go?”

“He wanted to.”

“What’s he going to do there?”

“Study.”

“Study? A man thirty-two years old?”

“Yes, study.”

“Study what?”

“Philosophy.”

Mrs. Morgenstern opened her mouth, then closed it without saying anything, rolling
her eyes at the ceiling and at her husband.

The father said very gently, “Marjorie, how long is he going to be there?”

“I don’t know. Quite a while. Years, maybe. He’s going to go to Oxford too.”

Mrs. Morgenstern said, “Marjorie, please excuse me, but I think Noel Airman is a little
crazy.”

“He may well be crazy,” Marjorie said. “I don’t know. I’ve only known him three years.
I haven’t figured him out.”

The father said, “Did you have a fight?”

“No, he just went—it’s quite all right, you needn’t look so concerned, Papa. I’m perfectly
okay. I swear I am.”

“It’s another conversion phenomenon,” Seth said. “Delayed. That big flop he had was
the shock—and then—”

“Oh, shut up,” Mrs. Morgenstern said. “I’m sorry we ever sent you to college. Blah,
blah, everything is a crisis or a phenomenon. You’re still wet behind the ears. Go
talk on the telephone for an hour to Natalie Fain.”

“Who’s Natalie Fain?” Marjorie said. “I’m losing track here.”

Seth stood. “Thanks for reminding me, I do have to call her. Marge, Mom’s jealous.
Believe me, Natalie’s beautiful. She’s a dream. She reminds me of you.”

“God help her,” Marjorie said.

“It’s true,” Seth said. “Why, she’s even going to be an actress like you. She’s very
serious about it. She was the star in
Pinafore
at her high school last month—showed me the write-up in her school paper. Terrific.”

Marjorie groaned, putting her hands to her head. “Not
Pinafore
, Seth.
The Mikado
.”

“No,
Pinafore
,” Seth said. “Don’t you suppose I know the difference? What’s the matter with you?”

Marjorie’s purpose in going to work for her father was simple enough. She intended
to save money as rapidly as possible, take a boat to Paris, and get Noel back once
for all to marry her.

Cruel and crushing though his huge letter was, it did not seem to her—now that she
had had a few days to think it over—as final as he had intended it. Its weakness lay
in its excessive finality. If he were so utterly through with her, would he have bothered
to take twenty typewritten pages to say so? The man who had to cross an ocean to free
himself of a girl was far from free of her when he bought his ticket—whatever he said
in a letter. So Marjorie figured.

She missed terribly a friend or a counselor of some kind; she even thought of talking
the problem over with her mother. Time after time Mrs. Morgenstern had been proven
right in her wrangles with her daughter; even if, with her heavy hand, she had made
it impossible for Marjorie to take her advice when it might have done some good. The
girl believed that she was able now to ignore her mother’s manner and benefit by her
sense. Once or twice she made a tentative start at talking to her; but then she shrivelled
and shut up. The hungry eagerness with which her mother responded, and began to pry,
brought out all her old barbed defenses. It was absolutely not possible, after all,
to reveal to her that she had slept with Noel, and no intelligent talk was possible
except in the light of that ugly fact. Marjorie knew that both her parents suspected
the truth. Her excuses for coming home late at night, toward the end of the affair,
had grown pretty lame. But she decided to let them go on suspecting, lonely though
it left her, rather than give her mother the victory of knowing the truth by the confession
of her own mouth.

As for her father, she felt it would be easier for her to stab him with a kitchen
knife than to tell him.

She considered confiding in Marsha Michaelson, and she did have lunch with her a couple
of times. But somehow the meals ended quickly, the talk was inconsequential, and they
spent the afternoons shopping together. It was Marsha, now, who was distant and unresponsive;
she wouldn’t pick up the cues for intimate talk. She chattered as fluently as ever,
but there was no trace of the old gushes of warmth. It was as though Marjorie had
said or done something for which Marsha couldn’t forgive her. All she would talk about
was plays, movies, and home decorations. After a six-month honeymoon abroad, and four
months in Florida, the Michaelsons had bought a big old house in New Rochelle. She
overwhelmed and hideously bored Marjorie with gabble about period furniture, modernized
kitchens, the breaking and building of walls, and the depredations of rabbits and
moles in flower beds. She made the suburbs sound fully as revolting as Noel had always
claimed they were. Marsha had become too thin; at this point dieting made her look
worse, not better. Knobby bones showed at her throat. Her face had a sunken brown
look almost like a mummy’s, and her lips seemed to be drawn over her teeth most of
the time in a tight grin.

A letter arrived from Noel after she had been working for her father about a month.
Postmarked in Florence, typed on yellow paper, it bore no return address.
I don’t want to hear from you, dear
, it began.
I just thought you might want to know that I didn’t throw myself off the
Mauretania
halfway across out of sheer longing for you, or anything. In fact I’m fine, brown
as a peon and having a gay if somewhat confused time
. He had intended to enroll in the Sorbonne as soon as he arrived, he wrote, but Paris
looked too marvelous when he got there, and he decided to put off his studies till
the fall. He had already been in Switzerland, Holland, and Norway, as well as France
and Italy. There was much talk in the letter of a woman named Mildred and a couple
named Bob and Elaine, all of whom he had met on the boat. Mildred dominated the group
and seemed to be paying some or all of everybody’s expenses.
Mildred wanted to see The Hague, so she hired a limousine…. Nothing would do for Mildred
but she must fly to Rome that very night, so back went all our clothes in the suitcases
…. It was a fair guess, Marjorie thought bitterly, that Mildred was the woman in the
red suit. She was first angered. Then she had a spell of revulsion for a day or so
when she thought she was free at last of her passion for Noel. Then that mood passed,
and she was exactly where she had been before, only more anxious and exasperated.

It was impossible for her to get interested in other men. She tried. She trotted in
her parents’ wake to temple affairs, to weddings, even to a mountain hotel when the
calendar dragged around at last to another summer. There was humiliation in being
peddled here and there, a very obvious unmarried daughter; but at least she was still
the prettiest girl wherever she went, so the process was bearable. Neither she nor
her mother could really envy brides who looked narrowly to their husbands when Marjorie
was around, and often as not slipped an anchoring arm through their elbows.

In her rounds through the marriage market—for this was what she was doing, and she
didn’t try to tell herself otherwise—Marjorie encountered many pleasing young men,
and a couple of extraordinarily attractive ones. But with the best will in the world
she couldn’t warm to them, couldn’t sparkle, couldn’t appear alive. The ordinary responses
of sex seemed to have been drained from her. There was something so forbidding about
her that most of the men didn’t try to kiss her. To those who did, she yielded with
an unprotesting limpness that usually ended the matter.

It wasn’t that Marjorie was being loyal or faithful to Noel. She couldn’t help herself.
She would have liked to fall in love with another man, or so she believed; that was
why she gave a date to any reasonably presentable fellow who wanted one. Nor was it
that all the men compared so very unfavorably with Noel. If none of them had his peculiar
mercurial charm and gaunt good looks, there were several who had other attractions.
Her mind and her heart were sealed shut, and that was all. She was a wife. She had
long ago gotten over regarding Noel as a paragon. She knew his weaknesses all too
well. Unhappily, she had committed her soul and her body to him, and now he owned
her and was in her blood—marriage or no marriage.

How persuasive Marsha had been, urging her to sleep with Noel, Marjorie thought—how
persuasive, and how wrong! It had all been a lot of patter from books and plays, no
more. She wondered what manner of love affairs Marsha’s experiments could have been,
to leave her so misinformed about sex. It was all very well to prate of trying a lover,
and seizing one’s chance of joy, and creating sweet memories to warm one’s old bones;
but the brute fact was that having an affair with a man was a plunge into change,
shocking irreversible change, like an amputation. It was not a dip in a pool, after
which one came out and dried the same body with the same hands. And as for the much-touted
memories, far from treasuring them, she found them a continuing torment, which she
would willingly have burned from her brain cells. The sex had been, in the best moments,
shaking, lovely; but even in those best moments it had been darkened by reservations,
fear, and unconquerable shame. Yet for this sex, good or not so good, she had paid
a steep price. Marjorie felt rifled of her own identity. She felt that Noel had it,
that Noel was now her other larger self, that she was a walking shell. The instinct
to stay alive, to preserve herself, was enlisted on Noel Airman’s side; now, when
her eyes were at last open to his glaring faults. That was the miserable fallacy in
Marsha’s arguments. Getting out of the bed, breaking off the affair, didn’t end the
matter at all. It was only the beginning of the heart of the experience, which was
an ever-deepening ordeal of pain and depression. Marjorie found the first gray hairs
on her temples—just a fugitive silvery strand or two—that autumn. They were premature;
she was only twenty-three; but her father had grayed early, and evidently that was
to be her pattern. The discovery was terribly depressing, and yet it gave her an indefinable
twisted pleasure.

She tried not to think of what would become of her if she failed to recapture Noel.
Panic swept her whenever she really faced the thought that he would never take her
in his arms again, never marry her. Never! It was impossible. What could she ever
bring to another man but a ransacked body and an empty heart? Her hope in life depended
on getting Noel back. Determined as he was to escape her, she was yet more determined
to bring him to bay.

And she believed that in the end she was going to win. All Noel’s show and power were
on the surface; she knew now that at heart he was rather weak. When hard-pressed he
ran. A man who ran could be caught.

Noel still seemed to her to have the makings of a good husband, even if he had dwindled
much from the blond god of South Wind, and the shining hero of the dress rehearsal
of
Princess Jones
. She wasn’t sure how much creative talent he really had, after all. She hated to
concede this, even to herself, because it made her feel like the world’s idiot, after
the way she had praised every word he wrote, in her blind girlish worship. But the
time had come for her to face facts. Advertising, publicity, promotion, probably would
be his fields, as he had himself said; and he was too good at such work to be miserable
at it forever. In his first weeks with Sam Rothmore, Noel had done a brilliant job.
At the advertising agency his work had been superb—his superiors had told her so—until
the day he walked off the job without notice. He surely had a way with words. His
discourses in the long letter were vivid and bright. A sentence like
Your left spur has been the American idea of success, and your right spur the Jewish
idea of respectability
was not the writing of an ordinary person. It occurred to her that Noel should really
have been a lawyer. His charm, persuasiveness, and fluency, with his ability for sharp
analysis, might have carried him far—perhaps to a judgeship like his father’s! But
it was too late for that now, of course; the question was how best to salvage his
abilities, in the light of his wild temperament and spotty history.

Her hope was that this flight to Paris was the last gasp of the old Noel, the last
effort to fight off “respectability.” Noel cared for the good things in life too much,
she was sure, to become a philosophy teacher; yet she was perfectly willing to live
on an academic salary if that was what he really wished. All she wanted was her husband,
the man in whose bed she belonged. She was in no hurry to follow him to Europe; he
had to exhaust this fling. Instinct told her that he wanted her, at bottom, more than
anything else in the world. He missed her now, and was missing her more and more.
She could feel the tugs on the cord which fettered him to her across the wide ocean,
in the occasional jaunty jeering letters he sent her, always without a return address,
usually postmarked Paris, once Cannes, once London. In the end—this was her view in
the optimistic turns of her up-and-down emotional storms—while he might never return
to her of his own accord, he would be overjoyed to see her come after him; he would
throw up smoke screens of cynical words to mask his surrender—to time and fate, as
much as to her—but he would surrender with relief.