Big Money (24 page)

“I bet you think I don't know my part,” said Margie.

“I wish I didn't know mine,” he said. “I've just signed the lousiest contract I ever signed in my life. . . . The world will soon see Frank Mandeville on the filthy stage of a burlesque house.” He sat down on the bed with his felt hat still on his head and put a hand over his eyes. “God, I'm tired. . . .” Then he looked up at her with his eyes red and staring. “Little Margo, you don't know what it is yet to buck the world.”

Margie said with a little giggle that she knew plenty and sat down beside him on the bed and took his hat off and smoothed his sweaty hair back from his forehead. Something inside of her was scared of doing it, but she couldn't help it.

“Let's go skating, Frank, it's so awful to be in the house all day.”

“Everything's horrible,” he said. Suddenly he pulled her to him and kissed her lips. She felt dizzy with the smell of bayrum and cigarettes and whiskey and cloves and armpits that came from him. She pulled away from him. “Frank, don't, don't.” He had tight hold of her. She could feel his hands trembling, his heart thumping under his vest. He had grabbed her to him with one arm and was pulling at her clothes with the other. His voice wasn't like Frank's voice at all. “I won't hurt you. I won't hurt you, child. Just forget. It's nothing. I can't stand it any more.” The voice went on and on whining in her ears. “Please. Please.”

She didn't dare yell for fear the people in the house might come. She clenched her teeth and punched and scratched at the big wet-lipped face pressing down hers. She felt weak like in a dream. His knee was pushing her legs apart.

When it was over, she wasn't crying. She didn't care. He was walking up and down the room sobbing. She got up and straightened her dress.

He came over to her and shook her by the shoulders. “If you ever tell anybody I'll kill you, you damn little brat. . . . Are you bleeding?” She shook her head.

He went over to the washstand and washed his face.

“I couldn't help it, I'm not a saint. . . . I've been under a terrible strain.”

Margie heard Agnes coming, the creak of her steps on the stairs. Agnes was puffing as she fumbled with the doorknob. “Why, what on earth's the matter?” she said, coming in all out of breath.

“Agnes, I've had to scold your child,” Frank was saying in his tragedy voice. “I come in deadtired and find the child reading that filthy magazine. . . . I won't have it. . . . Not while you are under my protection.”

“Oh, Margie, you promised you wouldn't. . . . But what did you do to your face?”

Frank came forward into the center of the room, patting his face all over with the towel. “Agnes, I have a confession to make. . . . I got into an altercation downtown. I've had a very trying day downtown. My nerves have all gone to pieces. What will you think of me when I tell you I've signed a contract with a burlesque house?”

“Why, that's fine,” said Agnes. “We certainly need the money. . . . How much will you be making?”

“It's shameful . . . twenty a week.”

“Oh, I'm so relieved . . . I thought something terrible had happened. Maybe Margie can start her lessons again.”

“If she's a good girl and doesn't waste her time reading trashy magazines.”

Margie was trembly like jelly inside. She felt herself breaking out in a cold sweat. She ran upstairs to the bathroom and doublelocked the door and stumbled to the toilet and threw up. Then she sat a long time on the edge of the bathtub. All she could think of was to run away.

But she couldn't seem to get to run away. At Christmas some friends of Frank's got her a job in a children's play. She made twenty-five dollars a performance and was the pet of all the society ladies. It made her feel quite stuckup. She almost got caught with the boy who played the Knight doing it behind some old flats when the theater was dark during a rehearsal.

It was awful living in the same room with Frank and Agnes. She hated them now. At night she'd lie awake with her eyes hot in the stuffy cubicle and listen to them. She knew that they were trying to be quiet, that they didn't want her to hear, but she couldn't help straining her ears and holding her breath when the faint rattle of springs from the rickety old iron bed they slept in began. She slept late after those nights in a horrible deep sleep she never wanted to wake up from. She began to be saucy and spiteful with Agnes and would never do anything she said. It was easy to make Agnes cry. “Drat the child,” she'd say, wiping her eyes. “I can't do anything with her. It's that little bit of success that went to her head.”

That winter she began to find Indian in the door of his consultationroom when she went past, standing there brown and sinewy in his white coat, always wanting to chat or show her a picture or something. He'd even offer her treatments free, but she'd look right into those funny blueblack eyes of his and kid him along. Then one day she went into the office when there were no patients and sat down on his knee without saying a word.

But the boy she liked best in the house was a Cuban named Tony Garrido, who played the guitar for two South Americans who danced
the maxixe in a Broadway cabaret. She used to pass him on the stairs and knew all about it and decided she had a crush on him long before they ever spoke. He looked so young with his big brown eyes and his smooth oval face a very light coffeecolor with a little flush on the cheeks under his high long cheekbones. She used to wonder if he was the same color all over. He had polite bashful manners and a low grownup voice. The first time he spoke to her, one spring evening when she was standing on the stoop wondering desperately what she could do to keep from going up to the room, she knew he was going to fall for her. She kidded him and asked him what he put on his eyelashes to make them so black. He said it was the same thing that made her hair so pretty and golden and asked her to have an icecream soda with him.

Afterwards they walked on the Drive. He talked English fine with a little accent that Margie thought was very distinguished. Right away they'd stopped kidding and he was telling her how homesick he was for Havana and how crazy he was to get out of New York, and she was telling him what an awful life she led and how all the men in the house were always pinching her and jostling her on the stairs, and how she'd throw herself in the river if she had to go on living in one room with Agnes and Frank Mandeville. And as for that Indian, she wouldn't let him touch her not if he was the last man in the world.

She didn't get home until it was time for Tony to go downtown to his cabaret. Instead of supper they ate some more icecream sodas. Margie went back happy as a lark. Coming out of the drugstore, she'd heard a woman say to her friend, “My, what a handsome young couple.”

Of course Frank and Agnes raised Cain. Agnes cried and Frank lashed himself up into a passion and said he'd punch the damn greaser's head in if he so much as laid a finger on a pretty, pure American girl. Margie yelled out that she'd do what she damn pleased and said everything mean she could think of. She'd decided that the thing for her to do was to marry Tony and run away to Cuba with him.

Tony didn't seem to like the idea of getting married much, but she'd go up to his little hall bedroom as soon as Frank was out of the house at noon and wake Tony up and tease him and pet him. He'd want to make love to her but she wouldn't let him. The first time she fought him off he broke down and cried and said it was an insult and
that in Cuba men didn't allow women to act like that. “It's the first time in my life a woman has refused my love.”

Margie said she didn't care, not till they were married and had gotten out of this awful place. At last one afternoon she teased him till he said all right. She put her hair up on top of her head and put on her most grownuplooking dress and they went down to the marriage-bureau on the subway. They were both of them scared to death when they had to go up to the clerk; he was twentyone and she said she was nineteen and got away with it. She'd stolen the money out of Agnes's purse to pay for the license.

She almost went crazy the weeks she had to wait for Tony to finish out his contract. Then one day in May, when she tapped on his bedroom door he showed her two hundred dollars in bills he'd saved up and said, “Today we get married. . . . Tomorrow we sail for La 'Avana. We can make very much money there. You will dance and I will sing and play the guitar.” He made the gesture of playing the guitar with the thinpointed fingers of one of his small hands. Her heart started beating hard. She ran downstairs. Frank had already gone out. She scribbled a note to Agnes on the piece of cardboard that had come back from the laundry in one of Frank's boiled shirts:

 

A
GNES
D
ARLING
:

Don't be mad. Tony and I got married today and we're going to Havana, Cuba, to live. Tell Father if he comes around. I'll write lots. Love to Frank.

Your grateful daughter,

M
ARGERY

 

Then she threw her clothes into an English pigskin suitcase of Frank's that he'd just got back from the hockshop and ran down the stairs three at a time. Tony was waiting for her on the stoop, pale and trembling with his guitarcase and his suitcase beside him. “I do not care for the money. Let's take a taxi,” he said.

In the taxi she grabbed his hand, it was icy cold. At City Hall he was so fussed he forgot all his English and she had to do everything. They borrowed a ring from the justice of the peace. It was over in a minute, and they were back in the taxi again going uptown to a hotel. Margie never could remember afterwards what hotel it was, only that they'd looked so fussed that the clerk wouldn't believe they were married
until she showed him the marriagelicense, a big sheet of paper all bordered with forgetmenots. When they got up to the room they kissed each other in a hurry and washed up to go out to a show. First they went to Shanley's to dinner. Tony ordered expensive champagne and they both got to giggling on it.

He kept telling her what a rich city La 'Avana was and how the artists were really appreciated there and rich men would pay him fifty, one hundred dollars a night to play at their parties, “And with you, darling Margo, it will be two three six time that much. . . . And we shall rent a fine house in the Vedado, very exclusive section, and servants very cheap there, and you will be like a queen. You will see I have many friends there, many rich men like me very much.” Margie sat back in her chair, looking at the restaurant and the welldressed ladies and gentlemen and the waiters so deferential and the silver dishes everything came in and at Tony's long eyelashes brushing his pink cheek as he talked about how warm it was and the cool breeze off the sea, and the palms and the roses, and parrots and singing birds in cages, and how everybody spent money in La 'Avana. It seemed the only happy day she'd ever had in her life.

When they took the boat the next day, Tony only had enough money to buy secondclass passages. They went over to Brooklyn on the el to save taxifare. Margie had to carry both bags up the steps because Tony said he had a headache and was afraid of dropping his guitarcase.

there was nothing significant about the morning's trading. The first hour consisted of general buying and selling to even up accounts, but soon after eleven o'clock prices did less fluctuating and gradually firmed

 

TIMES SQUARE PATRONS LEFT HALF SHAVED

 

Will Let Crop Rot In Producers' Hands Unless Prices Drop

 

RUSSIAN BARONESS SUICIDE AT MIAMI

 

. . . the kind of a girl that men forget

    
Just a toy to enjoy for a while

 

Coolidge Pictures Nation Prosperous Under His Policies

 

HUNT JERSEY WOODS FOR ROVING LEOPARD

 

PIGWOMAN SAW SLAYING

 

It had to be done and I did it, says Miss Ederle

 

FORTY-TWO INDICTED IN FLORIDA DEALS

 

Saw a Woman Resembling Mrs. Hall Berating Couple Near
Murder Scene, New Witness Says

 

several hundred tents and other light shelters put up by campers on a hill south of Front Street, which overlooks Hempstead Harbor, were laid in rows before the tornado as grass falls before a scythe

 

When they play Here comes the bride

         
You'll stand outside

 

3000 AMERICANS FOUND PENNILESS IN PARIS

 

I am a poor girl

    
My fortune's been sad

I always was courted

     By the wagoner's lad

 

NINE DROWNED IN UPSTATE FLOODS

 

SHEIK SINKING

 

Rudolph Valentino, noted screen star, collapsed suddenly yesterday in his apartment at the Hotel Ambassador. Several hours later he underwent

The nineteenyearold son of a veterinary in Castellaneta in the south of Italy was shipped off to America like a lot of other unmanageable young Italians when his parents gave up trying to handle him, to sink or swim and maybe send a few lire home by international postal moneyorder. The family was through with him. But Rodolfo Guglielmi wanted to make good.

He got a job as assistant gardener in Central Park but that kind of work was the last thing he wanted to do; he wanted to make good in the brightlights; money burned his pockets.