Big Money (34 page)

When they drew up at a lighted farmhouse under a lot of tall trees, they sat in the car a moment, shivering a little in the chilly mist that came from a brook somewhere. He turned to her in the dark and seemed to be trying to look in her face. “You know about the three monkeys, dear?” “Sure,” said Margo. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” “Correct,” he said. Then she let him kiss her.

Inside it was the prettiest farmhouse with a roaring fire and two men in checked lumberman's shirts and a couple of funny-looking women in Paris clothes with Park Avenue voices who turned out to be in the decorating business. The two men were scenic artists. Jerry cooked up ham and eggs in the kitchen for everybody and they drank hard cider and had quite a time, though Margo didn't quite know how to behave. To have something to do she got hold of a guitar that was hanging on the wall and picked out
Siboney
and some other Cuban songs Tony had taught her.

When one of the women said something about how she ought to do a Cuban specialty her heart almost stopped beating. Blue daylight was coming through the mist outside of the windows before they got
to bed. They all had a fine country breakfast giggling and kidding in their dressinggowns and Sunday afternoon Jerry drove her in to town and let her out on the Drive near Seventyninth Street.

Frank and Agnes were in a great stew when she got home. Tad had been calling up all day. He'd been to the theater and found out that there weren't any rehearsals called. Margo said spitefully that she had been rehearsing a little specialty and that if any young collegeboy thought he could interfere with her career he had another think coming. The next weekend when he called up she wouldn't see him.

But a week later when she came out of her room about two o'clock on Sunday afternoon just in time for Agnes's big Sunday dinner, Tad was sitting there hanging his head, with his hick hands dangling between his knees. On the chair beside him was a green florist's box that she knew when she looked at it was American Beauty roses. He jumpedup. “Oh, Margo . . . don't be sore . . . I just can't seem to have a good time going around without you.” “I'm not sore, Tad,” she said. “I just want everybody to understand that I won't let my life interfere with my work.”

“Sure, I get you,” said Tad.

Agnes came forward all smiles and put the roses in water. “Gosh, I forgot,” said Tad and pulled a redleather case out of his pocket. He was stuttering. “You see D-d-dad g-g-gave me some s-s-stocks to play around with an' I made a little killing last week and I bought these, only we can't wear them except when we both go out together, can we?” It was a string of pearls, small and not very well matched, but pearls all right.

“Who else would take me anyplace where I could wear them, you mut?” said Margo. Margo felt herself blushing. “And they're not Teclas?” Tad shook his head. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

“Gosh, you honestly like them,” said Tad, talking fast. “Well, there's one other thing . . . Dad's letting me have the
Antoinette
, that's his boat, you know, for a two weeks' cruise this summer with my own crowd. I want you and Mrs. Mandeville to come. I'd ask Mr. Mandeville too but . . .”

“Nonsense,” said Agnes. “I'm sure the party will be properly chaperoned without me. . . . I'd just get seasick. . . . It used to be terrible when poor Fred used to take me out fishing.”

“That was my father,” said Margo. “He loved being out on the water . . . yachting . . . that kind of thing. . . . I guess that's why I'm such a good sailor.”

“That's great,” said Tad.

At that minute Frank Mandeville came in from his Sunday walk, dressed in his morningcoat and carrying a silverheaded cane, and Agnes ran into the kitchenette to dish up the roast stuffed veal and vegetables and the strawberrypie from which warm spicy smells had been seeping through the air of the small apartment for some time.

“Gosh, I like it here,” said Tad, leaning back in his chair after they'd sat down to dinner.

The rest of that spring Margo had quite a time keeping Tad and Jerry from bumping into each other. She and Jerry never saw each other at the theater; early in the game she'd told him she had no intention of letting her life interfere with her work and he'd looked sharply at her with his shrewd boiledlooking eyes and said, “Humph . . . I wish more of our young ladies felt like you do. . . . I spend most of my time combing them out of my hair.”

“Too bad about you,” said Margo. “The Valentino of the castingoffice.” She liked Jerry Herman well enough. He was full of dope about the theater business. The only trouble was that when they got confidential he began making Margo pay her share of the check at restaurants and showed her pictures of his wife and children in New Rochelle. She worked hard on the Cuban songs, but nothing ever came of the specialty.

In May the show went on the road. For a long time she couldn't decide whether to go or not. Queenie Riggs said absolutely not. It was all right for her, who didn't have any ambition any more except to pick her off a travelingman in a onehorse town and marry him before he sobered up, but for Margo Dowling who had a career ahead of her, nothing doing. Better be at liberty all summer than a chorine on the road.

Jerry Herman was sore as a crab when she wouldn't sign the road-contract. He blew up right in front of the officeforce and all the girls waiting in line and everything. “All right, I seen it coming . . . now she's got a swelled head and thinks she's Peggy Joyce. . . . All right, I'm through.”

Margo looked him straight in the eye. “You must have me confused with somebody else, Mr. Herman. I'm sure I never started anything for you to be through with.” All the girls were tittering when she
walked out, and Jerry Herman looked at her like he wanted to choke her. It meant no more jobs in any company where he did the casting.

She spent the summer in the hot city hanging round Agnes's apartment with nothing to do. And there was Frank always waiting to make a pass at her, so that she had to lock her door when she went to bed. She'd lie around all day in the horrid stuffy little room with furry green wallpaper and an unwashed window that looked out on cindery backyards and a couple of ailanthustrees and always washing hung out. Tad had gone to Canada as soon as college was over. She spent the days reading magazines and monkeying with her hair and manicuring her fingernails and dreaming about how she could get out of this miserable sordid life. Sordid was a word she'd just picked up. It was in her mind all the time, sordid, sordid, sordid. She decided she was crazy about Tad Whittlesea.

When August came Tad wrote from Newport that his mother was sick and the yachting trip was off till next winter. Agnes cried when Margo showed her the letter. “Well, there are other fish in the sea,” said Margo.

She and Queenie, who had resigned from the roadtour when she had a runin with the stagemanager, started making the rounds of the castingoffices again. They rehearsed four weeks for a show that flopped the opening night. Then they got jobs in the Greenwich Village Follies. The director gave Margo a chance to do her Cuban number and Margo got a special costume made and everything only to be cut out before the dressrehearsal because the show was too long.

She would have felt terrible if Tad hadn't turned up after Thanksgiving to take her out every Saturday night. He talked a lot about the yachting trip they were going to take during his midwinter vacation. It all depended on when his exams came.

After Christmas she was at liberty again. Frank was sick in bed with kidney trouble and Margo was crazy to get away from the stuffy apartment and nursing Frank and doing the housekeeping for Agnes who often didn't get home from her job till ten or eleven o'clock at night. Frank lay in bed, his face looking drawn and yellow and pettish, and needed attention all the time. Agnes never complained, but Margo was so fed up with hanging around New York she signed a contract for a job as entertainer in a Miami cabaret, though Queenie and Agnes carried on terrible and said it would ruin her career.

She hadn't yet settled her wrangle with the agent about who was
going to pay her transportation south when one morning in February Agnes came in to wake her up.

Margo could see that it was something because Agnes was beaming all over her face. It was Tad calling her on the phone. He'd had bronchitis and was going to take a month off from college with a tutor on his father's boat in the West Indies. The boat was in Jacksonville. Before the tutor got there he'd be able to take anybody he liked for a little cruise. Wouldn't Margo come and bring a friend? Somebody not too gay. He wished Agnes could go, he said, if that was impossible on account of Mr. Mandeville's being sick who else could she take? Margo was so excited she could hardly breathe. “Tad, how wonderful,” she said. “I was planning to go south this week anyway. You must be a mindreader.”

Queenie Riggs arranged to go with her though she said she'd never been on a yacht before and was scared she wouldn't act right. “Well, I spent a lot of time in rowboats when I was a kid. . . . It's the same sort of thing,” said Margo.

When they got out of the taxicab at the Penn station there was Tad and a skinny little sleekhaired boy with him waiting to meet them. They were all very much excited and the boys' breaths smelled pretty strong of gin. “You girls buy your own tickets,” said Tad, taking Margo by the arm and pushing some bills down into the pocket of her furcoat. “The reservations are in your name, you'll have a drawingroom and we'll have one.”

“A couple of wise guys,” whispered Queenie in her ear as they stood in line at the ticketwindow.

The other boy's name was Dick Rogers. Margo could see right away that he thought Queenie was too old and not refined enough. Margo was worried about their baggage too. Their bags looked awful cheap beside the boys' pigskin suitcases. She felt pretty down in the mouth when the train pulled out of the station. Here I am pulling a boner the first thing, she thought. And Queenie was throwing her head back and showing her gold tooth and yelling and shrieking already like she was at a fireman's picnic.

The four of them settled down in the girls' stateroom with the little table between them to drink a snifter of gin and began to feel more relaxed. When the train came out of the tunnel and lights began flashing by in the blackness outside, Queenie pulled down the shade. “My, this is real cozy,” she said.

“Now the first thing I got to worry about is how to get you girls out on the boat. Dad won't care if he thinks we met you in Jacksonville, but if he knew we'd brought you down from New York he'd raise Hail Columbia.”

“I think we've got a chaperon all lined up in Jacksonville,” said young Rogers. “She's a wonder. She's deaf and blind and she can't speak English.”

“I wish we had Agnes along,” said Tad. “That's Margo's stepmother. My, she's a good sport.”

“Well, girls,” said young Rogers, taking a noisy swig from the gin-bottle. “When does the necking start?”

After they'd had dinner in the diningcar, they went lurching back to the drawingroom and had some more gin and young Rogers wanted them to play strip poker but Margo said no. “Aw, be a sport,” Queenie giggled. Queenie was pretty tight already. Margo put on her furcoat. “I want Tad to turn in soon,” she said. “He's just out of a sickbed.”

She grabbed Tad's hand and pulled him out into the passage. “Come on, let's give the kids a break. . . . The trouble with you collegeboys is that the minute a girl's unconventional you think she's an easy mark.” “Oh, Margo . . .” Tad hugged her through her furcoat as they stepped out into the cold clanging air of the observation platform. “You're grand.”

That night after they'd gotten undressed young Rogers came in the girls' room in his bathrobe and said there was somebody asking for Margo in the other stateroom. She slept in the same stateroom with Tad, but she wouldn't let him get into the bunk with her. “Honest, Tad, I like you fine,” she said, peeking from under the covers in the upperberth,” but you know . . . Heaven won't protect a working girl unless she protects herself. . . . And in my family we get married before the loving instead of after.”

Tad sighed and rolled over with his face to the wall on the berth below. “Oh, heck . . . I'd been thinking about that.” She switched off the light. “But, Tad, aren't you even going to kiss me goodnight?”

In the middle of the night there was a knock on the door. Young Rogers came in looking pretty rumpled. “Time to switch,” he said. “I'm scared the conductor'll catch us.” “The conductor'll mind his own damn business,” said Tad grumpily, but Margo had already slipped out and gone back to her own stateroom.

Next morning at breakfast in the diningcar, Margo wouldn't stop kidding the other two about the dark circles under their eyes. Young Rogers ordered a plate of oysters and they thought they'd never get over the giggles. By the time they got to Jacksonville Tad had taken Margo back to the observation platform and asked her why the hell they didn't get married anyway, he was free white and twentyone, wasn't he? Margo began to cry and grinned at him through her tears and said she guessed there were plenty reasons why not.

“By gum,” said Tad when they got off the train into the sunshine of the station, “we'll buy us an engagement ring anyway.”

First thing on the way to a hotel in a taxi they went to a jeweler's and Tad bought her a solitaire diamond set in platinum and paid for it with a check. “My, his old man must be some millionaire,” whispered Queenie into Margo's ear in a voice like in church.

After they'd been to the jeweler's the boys drove the girls to the Mayflower Hotel. They got a room there and went upstairs to fix up a little. The girls washed their underclothes and took hot baths and laid out their dresses on the beds. “If you want my opinion,” Queenie was saying while she was helping Margo wash her hair, “those two livewires are gettin cold feet. . . . All my life I've wanted to go on a yachtin' trip an' now we're not gettin' to go anymore than a rabbit. . . . Oh, Margo, I hope it wasn't me gummed the game.”