Marjorie Morningstar (81 page)

Marjorie looked in his face for a moment. “I don’t know whether you enjoy tormenting
me, or what. You have a cute way of putting these things, so that I’d look like an
idiot if I took you seriously. If I were to turn on you right now and say, ‘All right,
take me, I’m yours,’ you’d probably scoot out of here like a jack rabbit.”

He looked offended, then he burst out laughing. “Well, what I’d do more likely is
faint from astonishment.”

“That’s it. You just enjoy mooning over me for some obscure reason, and you know it’s
safe, so you indulge yourself. You’ve been doing this to me since you were eighteen,
Marchbanks, and you’re still doing it. Look, I’m beaten, I’m crushed, I’m full of
repentance. All right? Obviously, I should have fallen in love with you. You’re a
mental giant, and you’re too attractive for words. I fell in love with someone else.
Shoot me.”

He said, “It doesn’t matter how many months I don’t see you. I guess I’ve known a
few hundred girls by now. You’re not smarter than all of them. You’re not even prettier
than all of them. The only thing is, you’re Marjorie. That seems to go on being true,
somehow.”

She glanced around the empty salon, took his hand and stood, then put her arms around
him and kissed him. “I’ve left a room full of relatives and mamas and papas,” she
murmured. “Let’s go back to them, shall we?”

“Noel hasn’t been well, by the way, Margie. You’re likely to find him changed.”

She had started to walk toward the door. She stopped and turned, a cold thrill running
through her. “Changed? Noel? How?”

“He—well, changed. He picked up some kind of fever tooting around North Africa—”

“How do you know?”

“He wrote me.”

“What’s his address in Paris?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t write from Paris.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Of course it is.”

“I really want his address, Wally.”

“Good God, I’d tell you his address if I knew it, Marjorie,” Wally said.

They walked back to her stateroom without more words.

The
Queen Mary
edged away from the pier, to the thunder of boat whistles and the crash of a brass
band. The last figures Marjorie could discern in the blurring mob on the pier were
Seth and Wally Wronken, shoulder to shoulder, waving their hats in the air. It all
seemed to go very fast. Soon the great ship was out in the river, and she couldn’t
see the pier at all through the black smoke of the tugs butting the ship and squawking.

She was on her way to Noel.

The vessel began to vibrate with its own power. Marjorie strolled forward on the boat
deck. Neither the raw wet wind tugging at her clothes, nor the alarming blasts of
the whistle from the huge red and black funnel overhead, nor the delicious small unsteadiness
of the white-scrubbed wood deck beneath her feet could give her the feeling of being
on a ship, of actually being on a ship. They steamed past the Empire State Building
and it seemed to Marjorie that she was in the building watching the ship go by, instead
of the other way around. Never in her life had she felt so totally dislocated, so
outside reality. She had expected to experience some strong emotion, passing the Statue
of Liberty outward bound, but it slipped down the side, a big green statue just like
the postcard pictures of it; and while everyone at the rail gawked, pointed, and chattered,
Marjorie forgot it was there, as she watched a gull cruising along in the air at the
exact pace of the ship, not ten feet from her face, screaming sadly.

In the widening Lower Bay the land view became flat and dull. The view out to sea
was tumbling gray clouds and heaving gray water. The ship began to roll more, in a
slow majestic way. The wind freshened and became much colder; the passengers drifted
rapidly from the rails. Marjorie found herself standing not six feet from a medium-sized
slender man with a rather young face, and grayish hair trimmed close. He was leaning
on the rail, hatless, smoking a long cigar. His coat hung over his arm, neatly folded.
As the rail emptied between them, he glanced at her with a slight pleasant smile.
She answered with a half-smile and looked out to sea again.

She had noticed this man before at the gangway desk. He had checked in directly ahead
of her. His assured manner with portfolio and travel papers, the straight way he held
himself, the dressy gray topcoat and gray Homburg hat, the diagonal bluish scar across
his forehead had caught her attention; she had guessed—in her generally excited frame
of mind—that he might be a diplomat, or perhaps some well-known playwright or newspaper
correspondent. At once she had compared him in her mind with Noel; she always did
that when she saw an interesting man. In his leanness, with his tanned bony face,
he was not wholly unlike Noel; but he was shorter, and if anything a bit slighter.

He wasn’t nearly as handsome as Noel; but he had just the look, she thought now, with
another glance toward him, that Noel strove for and for some reason missed. Possibly
not being Jewish, as this man rather obviously was not, made the difference. There
had always been something exotic about Noel. The wavy thick blond hair, the charged
blue eyes, the height, the energetic gestures, the very handsomeness, had all given
him a touch of extravagance. This man’s appearance was dry, plain, adult; almost he
might have gone unnoticed in a crowd. The contrast of gray hair and a young face,
the scar, and a curious quiet keenness in his expression were what marked him off.

He said, glancing at her again and smiling, as he met her eye, “We seem to be almost
the last brave ones. Isn’t it too cold for you?”

“Well, it’s all so new to me, I hate to go below and miss a moment of it.”

“Your first crossing?”

“Yes.”

“The weather should have been better. The city looks grand in sunlight, from the river.
This is a pretty sad sailing.” He strolled along the rail and leaned beside her. The
scar drew her eyes at this close view: faded blue, with faint stitch marks, running
from under his hair slantwise to his left eye. Somehow it was not exactly a disfigurement,
but a trait, a mark, that belonged to the face.

She said, “It’s just as well. I don’t feel sparkling, exactly. I’ve never said so
many goodbyes all at once. It’s depressing.”

He looked at the book under her arm with mild curiosity. She had taken it along upon
leaving the cabin, thinking she might settle down for a while in a deck chair. “Are
you an English teacher?”

“No, I’m not a teacher. Why?”

“It hardly seems you’d be reading
Tom Jones
for fun.”

“Well, I’ve run through all the good mysteries. This is not bad. It’s long, anyway.
I guess I’ll have plenty of time to read.”

He smiled, looking down at the tourist-class deck, which was full of young people,
chattering and laughing with exaggerated gaiety in the first moments of getting acquainted.
“I’m afraid you will, in first class.”

“Oh? Should I have gone tourist?”

“Well, no. First class looks so alluring and unattainable from below, it’s better
to find out how tame it really is, first time out. You’ll never feel underprivileged
after that.”

“You make it sound unpromising.”

“Do I? I guess I’m talking like this because the weather is so gray. You’ll love your
crossing, I’m sure.”

There was a burst of laughter from a cluster of girls along the rail below, surrounded
by young men. One of the men, in an American army uniform, said something with a baritone
laugh, and the girls shrieked again. “I can’t help feeling I’m missing something,”
Marjorie said.

“The joke might not have amused you. They look like college girls.”

“It’s fun just to laugh in company sometimes,” Marjorie said, “amused or not.”

“I think you’re better off with Fielding.”

“He’s been dead such a long time,” Marjorie said. “You’re not a teacher, are you?”

“No, just a businessman. Chemicals is my line…. Am I mistaken, or did your face fall?”

“Why, not at all. Why should it?”

“Because businessmen are dull.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Well, yes, maybe necessarily. Making money is dull work. That’s one reason why first-class
passengers tend to be dull.” He puffed at his cigar, and tossed it over the rail.
“That’s against the rules. Be sure the wind’s at your back when you do it, if you
smoke. Or the butt goes sailing into someone’s porthole, or face, and it can be very
unpleasant.”

“I’ll try to remember.”

After a moment, resting his elbows on the rail, he said, “My name is Michael Eden.”

“I’m Marjorie Morgenstern.” She looked for a flicker of reaction to the Jewish name,
but there wasn’t any. He nodded, his eyes turned to the horizon, where the land was
shrinking to a lead-colored line. She said, “I am getting cold, after all. My legs,
mainly. It’s a freezing wind. But it smells so wonderful, so clean and fresh—”

“You’ll have five whole days of it. You may as well go below and warm up, like all
the other sensible people. I like to watch the land until it’s gone.”

“You’ve travelled quite a bit, I gather,” Marjorie said.

“Yes. And you haven’t.”

“I haven’t been west of the Hudson or east of Jones Beach. I should think watching
the land vanish is just for neophytes like me.”

“Not at all. It’s the second best moment of the trip for me. The best moment is when
I see it again, the good old USA, still there, poking its big snout up over the horizon.”
He smiled at her. It was a peculiarly bleak, cool smile. “I’m just a Kiwanis Club
boy, you see. It would be the easiest thing in the world to keep me down on the farm.
I’ve seen Paree, and you can have it.”

She said, “Kiwanis Club boys don’t usually know that they’re just Kiwanis Club boys.”

For an instant a sharp look of appreciation flashed in his eyes. “Well, now and then
I read. You can’t play cards forever. Though I certainly try.”

She said, pulling her coat about her, “Say goodbye to the good old USA for me, will
you? I’m giving up.”

She found that her steward, an amiable little white-headed man with an enchanting
British accent, had put the room perfectly in order. He pressed her to have tea; she
agreed, expecting a pot of tea with perhaps a few cookies, but he brought her a lavish
spread of sandwiches and exquisite cakes. When she could eat no more, most of the
food remained.

She was in a large double bedroom on A deck with real beds, panelled walls, and smart
severe drapes and furniture, all in rich tones of brown and gray. It was the off-season,
so Marjorie was travelling in fantastic lone luxury. She took off her suit, put on
a new silk housecoat, and propped herself on a bed with
Tom Jones
. The bed rocked slowly, easily; far from making her uneasy, it was the pleasantest
sensation in the world. She had not felt so calm, so relaxed, so good, it seemed to
her, since her girlhood days, before her first fatal glimpse of Noel Airman at South
Wind. There was something miraculously liberating about being on a ship.

She tried to read, but she could not; her eyes rested unmoving on the page, while
her mind went over the conversation with the man on the boat deck. How old was he?
Hardly forty, despite the gray hair; he might not be over thirty-five.

“Mike Eden,” she said aloud, for no reason. The sound of her own voice startled her;
she nestled in the pillows, and forced her attention back to
Tom Jones
.

It became obvious to Marjorie, on the first night of the crossing, that that song
was going to remind her of Michael Eden for a long time. It was a favorite of the
ship’s musicians, a protean group of four who played Beethoven quartets in the afternoon
in one of the smaller salons, Victor Herbert melodies at dinner, and reasonably inflamed
jazz after ten at night, in the vessel’s night club, a charming little oval room called
the Verandah Grill on one of the highest decks, with tall windows looking out on the
darkling ocean and the gently swinging moon and stars.

The musicians were playing
Falling in Love with Love
when she came into the night club with Eden for the first time, shortly before midnight.
They played it twice more that evening, and several times each evening thereafter;
and they sometimes obliged with it at dinner and at the tea-time concerts, too. The
leader had worked up a florid passage for himself in the middle of the waltz. He would
step forward and soar into his solo, swaying artistically, closing his eyes with pleasure
at the sounds he was making; and when it was over he would blink and smirk around
at the ladies, with a roosterish pride quite engaging to behold.

The first evening they were in the night club, when Eden saw him perform this solo,
he stared at the violinist with eyes so wide that Marjorie asked him what was the
matter. Eden looked around at her, then out through the windows at the sea and the
low yellow moon, and then at the musician again. “Doesn’t he fascinate you?”

“Why? He’s just another conceited musician. I’ve known them by the hundreds. He’s
not even very good.”

“That’s just it. There he stands, afloat on a black sea in a black night, fiddling
a little song which is his pride and joy in a mediocre way, and so pleased with himself
he could explode. Isn’t he Everyman?”

Marjorie regarded him inquisitively while he lit another of his long thin cigars.
He smoked them almost constantly; they were an odd chocolate brown, unbanded, and
their odor was peculiarly rich and agreeable. She had seen him playing cards for hours
after dinner in one of the salons with three elderly Englishmen, and he had seldom
been without a cigar.

She said, “Do they talk much about Everyman at your Kiwanis Club?”

With a quick glance at her, he said, “We have lectures about him every Monday and
Thursday. Would you like to dance?”