Big Money (23 page)

They didn't let Margie play with the other children on the block; the Francinis said it wasn't a safe block for little girls. She only got out once a week and that was Sunday evening, everybody always had to go over to the Drive and walk up to Grant's Tomb and back. It made her legs ache to walk so slowly along the crowded streets the way the Francinis did. All summer she wished for a pair of rollerskates, but the way the Francinis talked and the way the nuns talked about dangers made her scared to go out on the streets alone. What she was so scared of she didn't quite know. She liked it, though, helping Agnes and the Francinis in the bakery.

That fall she went back to the convent. One afternoon soon after she'd gone back from the Christmas holidays Agnes came over to see her; the minute Margie went in the door of the visitors' parlor she saw that Agnes's eyes were red and asked what was the matter. Things had changed dreadfully at the bakery. Poor Mr. Francini had fallen dead in the middle of his baking from a stroke and Mrs. Francini was going out to the country to live with Uncle Joe Fisher. “And then there's something else,” Agnes said and smiled and blushed. “But I can't tell you about it now. You mustn't think that poor Agnes is bad and wicked but I couldn't stand it being so lonely.” Margie jumped up and down. “Oh, goody, Fred's come back.” “No, darling, it's not that,” Agnes said and kissed her and went away.

That Easter Margie had to stay at the convent all through the vacation. Agnes wrote she didn't have any place to take her just then. There were other girls there and it was rather fun. Then one day Agnes came over to get her to go out, bringing in a box right from the store a new darkblue dress and a little straw hat with pink flowers on it. It was lovely the way the tissuepaper rustled when she unpacked them. Margie ran up to the dormitory and put on the dress with her heart pounding, it was the prettiest and grownupest dress she'd ever had. She was only twelve but from what little she could see of herself in the tiny mirrors they were allowed it made her look quite grownup. She ran down the empty greystone stairs, tripped and fell into the arms of Sister Elizabeth. “Why such a hurry?” “My mother's come to take me out on a party with my father and this is my new dress.” “How nice,” said Sister Elizabeth, “but you mustn't . . .” Margie was already off down the passage to the parlor and was jumping up and down in front of Agnes hugging and kissing her. “It's the prettiest dress I ever had.” Going over to New York on the elevated Margie couldn't talk about anything else but the dress.

Agnes said they were going to lunch at a restaurant where theatrical people went. “How wonderful. I've never had lunch in a real restaurant. . . . He must have made a lot of money and gotten rich.” “He makes lots of money,” said Agnes in a funny stammering way as they were walking west along Thirtyeighth Street from the elstation.

Instead of Fred it was a tall dark man with a dignified manner and a long straight nose who got up from the table to meet them. “Margie,” said Agnes, “this is Frank Mandeville.” Margie never let on she hadn't thought all the time that that was how it would be.

The actor shook hands with her and bowed as if she was a grownup young lady. “Aggie never told me she was such a beauty . . . what eyes . . . what hair!” he said in his solemn voice. They had a wonderful lunch and afterwards they went to Keith's and sat in orchestra seats. Margie was breathless and excited at being with a real actor. He'd said that the next day he was leaving for a twelveweeks tour with a singing and piano act and that Agnes was going with him. “And after that we'll come back and make a home for my little girl,” said Agnes. Margie was so excited that it wasn't till she was back in bed in the empty dormitory at the convent that she doped out that what it would mean for her was she'd have to stay at the Sisters' all summer.

The next fall she left the convent for good and went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Mandeville, as they called themselves, in two front rooms they sublet from a chiropractor. It was a big old brownstone house with a high stoop and steps way west on Seventyninth Street. Margie loved it there and got on fine with the theater people, all so welldressed and citifiedlooking, who lived in the apartments upstairs. Agnes said she must be careful not to get spoiled, because everybody called attention to her blue eyes and her curls like Mary Pickford's and her pert frozenface way of saying funny things.

Frank Mandeville always slept till twelve o'clock and Agnes and Margie would have breakfast alone quite early, talking in whispers so as not to wake him and looking out of the window at the trucks and cabs and movingvans passing in the street outside and Agnes would tell Margie about vaudeville houses and onenight stands and all about how happy she was and what a free and easy life it was and so different from the daily grind at Broad Channel and how she'd first met Frank Mandeville when he was broke and blue and almost ready to turn on the gas. He used to come into the bakery every day for his breakfast at two in the afternoon just when all the other customers had gone. He lived around the corner on Onehundredandfourth Street. When he was completely flat Agnes had let him charge his meals and had felt so sorry for him on account of his being so gentlemanly about it and out of a job, and then he got pleurisy and was threatened with t.b. and she was so lonely and miserable that she didn't care what anybody thought, she'd just moved in with him to nurse him and had stayed ever since, and now they were Mr. and Mrs. Mandeville to everybody and he was making big money with his act The Musical Mandevilles. And Margie would ask about Frank
Mandeville's partner, Florida Schwartz, a big hardvoiced woman with titian hair. “Of course she dyes it,” Agnes said, “henna,” and her son, a horrid waspwaisted young man of eighteen who paid no attention to Margie at all. The chiropractor downstairs whom everybody called Indian was Florida's affinity and that was why they'd all come to live in his house. “Stagepeople are odd but I think they have hearts of gold,” Agnes would say.

The Musical Mandevilles used to practice afternoons in the front room where there was a piano. They played all sorts of instruments and sang songs and Mannie whose stage name was Eddy Keller did an eccentric dance and an imitation of Hazel Dawn. It all seemed wonderful to Margie, and she was so excited she thought she'd die when Mr. Mandeville said suddenly one day when they were all eating supper brought in from a delicatessen that the child must take singing and dancing lessons.

“You'll be wasting your money, Frank,” said Mannie through a chickenbone he was gnawing.

“Mannie, you're talking out of turn,” snapped Florida.

“Her father was a great one for singing and dancing in the old days,” put in Agnes in her breathless timid manner.

A career was something everybody had in New York and Margie decided she had one too. She walked down Broadway every day to her lesson in a studio in the same building as the Lincoln Square Theater. In October The Musical Mandevilles played there two weeks. Almost every day Agnes would come for her after the lesson and they'd have a sandwich and a glass of milk in a dairy lunch and then go to see the show. Agnes could never get over how pretty and young Mrs. Schwartz looked behind the footlights and how sad and dignified Frank looked when he came in in his operacloak.

During the winter Agnes got a job too, running an artistic tearoom just off Broadway on Seventysecond Street, with a Miss Franklyn, a redhaired lady who was a theosophist and was putting in the capital. They all worked so hard they only met in the evenings when Frank and Florida and Mannie would be eating a bite in a hurry before going off to their theater.

The Musical Mandevilles were playing Newark the night Margie first went on. She was to come out in the middle of an
Everybody's Doing It
number rolling a hoop, in a blue muslin dress she didn't like because it made her look about six and she thought she ought to look
grownup to go on the stage, and do a few steps of a ragtime dance and then curtsy like they had taught her at the convent and run off with her hoop. Frank had made her rehearse it again and again. She'd often burst out crying in the rehearsals on account of the mean remarks Mannie made.

She was dreadfully scared and her heart pounded waiting for the cue, but it was over before she knew what had happened. She had run on from the grimy wings into the warm glittery glare of the stage. They'd told her not to look out into the audience. Just once she peeped out into the blurry lightpowdered cave of ranked white faces. She forgot part of her song and skimped her business and cried in the dressingroom after the act was over, but Agnes came round back saying she'd been lovely, and Frank was smiling, and even Mannie couldn't seem to think of anything mean to say; so the next time she went on her heart wasn't pounding so hard. Every littlest thing she did got an answer from the vague cave of faces. By the end of the week she was getting such a hand that Frank decided to run the
Everybody's Doing It
number just before the finale.

Florida Schwartz had said that Margery was too vulgar a given name for the stage, so she was billed as Little Margo.

All winter and the next summer they toured on the Keith circuit, sleeping in pullmans and in all kinds of hotels and going to Chicago and Milwaukee and Kansas City and so many towns that Margie couldn't remember their names. Agnes came along as wardrobemistress and attended to the transportation and fetched and carried for everybody. She was always washing and ironing and heating up canned soup on an alcohol stove. Margie got to be ashamed of how shabby Agnes looked on the street beside Florida Schwartz. Whenever she met other stagechildren and they asked her who she thought the best matinee idol was, she'd answer Frank Mandeville.

When the war broke out The Musical Mandevilles were back in New York looking for new bookings. One evening Frank was explaining his plan to make the act a real headliner by turning it into a vestpocket operetta, when he and the Schwartzes got to quarreling about the war. Frank said the Mandevilles were descended from a long line of French nobility and that the Germans were barbarian swine and had no idea of art. The Schwartzes blew up and said that the French were degenerates and not to be trusted in money matters and that Frank was holding out receipts on them. They made such a
racket that the other boarders banged on the wall and a camelfaced lady came up from the basement wearing a dressinggown spattered with red and blue poppies and with her hair in curlpapers to tell them to keep quiet. Agnes cried and Frank in a ringing voice ordered the Schwartzes to leave the room and not to darken his door again, and Margie got an awful fit of giggling. The more Agnes scolded at her the more she giggled. It wasn't until Frank took her in the arms of his rakishlytailored checked suit and stroked her hair and her forehead that she was able to quiet down. She went to bed that night still feeling funny and breathless inside with the whiff of bayrum and energine and Egyptian cigarettes that had teased her nose when she leaned against his chest.

That fall it was hard times again, vaudeville bookings were hard to get and Frank didn't have a partner for his act. Agnes went back to Miss Franklyn's teashop and Margie had to give up her singing and dancing lessons. They moved into one room, with a curtained cubicle for Margie to sleep in.

October was very warm that year. Margie was miserable hanging round the house all day, the steamheat wouldn't turn off altogether and it was too hot even with the window open. She felt tired all the time. The house smelled of frizzing hair and beautycreams and shavingsoap. The rooms were all rented to theater people and there was no time of the day that you could go up to the bathroom without meeting heavyeyed people in bathrobes or kimonos on the stairs. There was something hot and sticky in the way the men looked at Margie when she brushed past them in the hall that made her feel awful funny.

She loved Frank best of anybody. Agnes was always peevish, in a hurry to go to work or else deadtired just back from work, but Frank always spoke to her seriously as if she were a grownup young lady. The rare afternoons when he was in, he coached her on elocution and told her stories about the time he'd toured with Richard Mansfield. He'd give her bits of parts to learn and she had to recite them to him when he came home. When she didn't know them, he'd get very cold and stride up and down and say, “Well, it's up to you, my dear, if you want a career you must work for it. . . . You have the godgiven gifts . . . but without hard work they are nothing. . . . I suppose you want to work in a tearoom like poor Agnes all your life.”

Then she'd run up to him and throw her arms round his neck and
kiss him and say, “Honest, Frank, I'll work terrible hard.” He'd be all flustered when she did that or mussed his hair and would say, “Now, child, no liberties,” and suggest they go out for a walk up Broadway. Sometimes when he had a little money they'd go skating at the St. Nicholas rink. When they spoke of Agnes they always called her poor Agnes as if she were a little halfwitted. There was something a little hick about Agnes.

But most of the time Margie just loafed or read magazines in the room or lay on the bed and felt the hours dribble away so horribly slowly. She'd dream about boys taking her out to the theater and to restaurants and what kind of a house she would live in when she became a great actress, and the jewelry she'd have, or else she'd remember how Indian the chiropractor had kneaded her back the time she had the sick headache. He was strong and brown and wiry in his shirtsleeves working on her back with his bigknuckled hands. It was only his eyes made her feel funny; eyes like Indian's would suddenly be looking at her when she was walking along Broadway, she'd hurry and wouldn't dare turn back to see if they were still looking, and get home all breathless and scared.

One warm afternoon in the late fall, Margie was lying on the bed reading a copy of the
Smart Set
Frank had bought that Agnes had made her promise not to read. She heard a shoe creak and jumped up popping the magazine under the pillow. Frank was standing in the doorway looking at her. She didn't need to look at him twice to know that he'd been drinking. His eyes had that look and there was a flush on his usually white face. “Haha, caught you that time, little Margo,” he said.