Read Marjorie Morningstar Online

Authors: Herman Wouk

Tags: #Coming of Age, #Fiction / Jewish, #Jewish, #Fiction / Coming Of Age, #Fiction, #Literary, #Classics, #Fiction / Classics, #Fiction / Literary

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BOOK: Marjorie Morningstar
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“Well, well. You must be heartbroken.”

“It’s all but turned me gray.”

“Looking for a replacement, no doubt.”

“Margie, honey, I just thought you’d like to come for a swim, and—”

“Well, I won’t do. I don’t go in for the things Vera goes in for—and wipe that silly
grin off your face. Despite last night, it’s true. I don’t.”

“I never said you did, Margie.”

Before they left the beach, all the same, she went in for a little more of it.

It was a shock to see George after the week at the Prado. Age seemed to have overtaken
him all at once, to make him thinner, paler, shorter, sadder, and more slope-shouldered.
He took her to an engagement party of one of his college friends. From the start,
everything about the evening depressed Marjorie: the all too familiar Bronx apartment
house, one of an unbroken line of gray houses along a dirty narrow street; the dark
stairway to the fourth floor, with its memory-wakening smells of immigrant cooking
and baby-breeding, of stale paint and fresh wet laundry; the cramped apartment blazing
with electric bulbs, the cheap furniture, the paintings that were copies of copies,
the worn best sellers on the shelves (
The Story of Philosophy, Babbitt, The Forsyte Saga, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
); the loud voices, the barbarous pronunciation (awfice, yeah, daaance, lor stoodent,
idear, tawk); the singsong cadence which jarred on her the more because she was still
trying to free her own speech of it; the unvarying cream soda, sponge cake, and sugary
purple wine; the inexorable vanilla ice cream rushed in paper boxes from the drugstore
by a small brother to climax the party; the proud fat parents, the proud fat bride
in a red evening dress from Klein’s, with a bunch of tea roses in a huge silver ribbon
on her shoulder; worst of all, the sly giggling jokes that everybody made about George
and herself. She pleaded a headache and left, too soon; the silence was very awkward
as she and George walked out of the door. Then she felt so sorry for him and so guilty
that she kissed him madly when they parked on the Drive (Penelope was repaired at
last, after a fashion, and could be driven in a clanking dying way). She found herself
responding to George’s kisses just as she always had, which further confused and upset
her. Alone in her bedroom that night, wretched with self-disgust, she resolved not
to neck again with either Sandy or George until she knew what her true feelings were.

She found she could keep the resolve with Sandy but not with George. Sandy reacted
good-humoredly to her first repulse. “Well, well. Just a faded summer love, eh?”

She said, “Don’t be absurd. There’s no sense going on and on with a thing that leads
nowhere. Anyway we don’t mean that much to each other.”

“Marjorie, you know I can’t live an hour without you.”

“Go hang yourself, you grinning ape.”

That was that. But George had enjoyed special privileges for a year and a half, and
had come to regard them as his right. She couldn’t withdraw to a cooler status without
a showdown and possibly a break, for which she was far from ready. She could not bear
to hurt George, and she did not want to lose him; not while she was so befuddled.
So she dragged on with him as before, though made increasingly miserable by it.

When Marjorie returned to Hunter for the fall term she found that according to general
gossip she was all but engaged to the heir apparent of Lamm’s department store. Standing
on line in the hot jammed basement of the school to draw her textbooks, she was slyly
congratulated half a dozen times, and she saw girls pointing at her and whispering.
Her denials met with winks, prods, and giggles. She had no idea how the rumor had
started, and she didn’t much care. The teasing was a welcome diversion from the dreariness
of sinking back into the Hunter routine.

Marjorie had never liked the school. Her dearest wish had been to go out of town to
college, but her parents had been unwilling to let her leave home so young, and moreover
had not been quite able to afford the expense when Marjorie was finishing high school.
So, reluctantly, the girl had enrolled in this subway college, which to her was a
hell, a nerve-racking place full of the twitters and colors and smells and giggles
and screeches of too many unlovely shoving girls. In time she became dulled to it
and stopped resenting her fate; but she always moved alone through the perfumed swarm,
though she had the usual lunchroom companions and bridge-playing acquaintances. With
the move of the family to Central Park West she felt more than ever that her presence
in this soprano-buzzing hive was an unlucky mistake. But it was too late to make a
change. A bit too pretty, too well dressed, and too cool, she was not popular at Hunter,
and she had taken little part until now in any of the activities. But if she heard
the school sneered at she would angrily defend it by saying that a girl couldn’t get
half as good an education anywhere else. This was more or less true; the competition
for marks was keen and the girls on the whole brighter than average. She would have
traded all the fine education she was getting, however, for a small part of the polishing
and the fun that she had once hoped to find in an out-of-town college. In this she
was more like the other girls than she quite realized. Hunter was a concentration
camp of such displaced girlish dreamers, would-be coeds forced by lack of money into
the mold of subway grinds.

It was obvious as the new term got under way that her status at Hunter was changing.
Popular girls who had shown no interest in her before were smiling at her, even stopping
to chat with her in the corridors. At lunch time she tended to become the center of
the conversation circle. A couple of scouts from the formidable Helen Johannsen clique
became friendly with her. One day she found herself at lunch with a group that included
Helen herself, the sharply clever, beautiful blond senior who was editor of the school
paper, leader of the Sing, and exalted general boss of Hunter politics. After lunch
Helen took her arm and walked out with her in the sunshine, drawing her on to talk
about herself. Marjorie, dazzled and flattered, talked freely. When she shyly disclosed
that she wanted to be an actress, Helen advised her to try out at once for the dramatic
society’s production of
The Mikado;
there wasn’t a doubt in the world, Helen said, that she would get a leading part.
Then she startled Marjorie by remarking, “I hear you know my old friend, Sandy Goldstone.”

“Do
you
know Sandy?”

With a little curving smile Helen said, “I’ve modelled a bit at Lamm’s, off and on…
Dear, I’m no competition for you, don’t look so alarmed. I’m a little old for Sandy.
Anyway, you don’t suppose he’d ever be serious about a Christian girl, do you?” She
glanced at Marjorie, a good-humored approving inspection. “I believe you’ll do all
right.”

Marjorie, blushing and feeling all arms and legs, said, “My Lord, I barely know him.”

“Sure, dear,” Helen said, and they both laughed. Marjorie saw nearby girls, after-lunch
strollers like themselves, stare admiringly at the sophomore laughing arm in arm with
Helen Johannsen.

Marjorie accepted the jealous stirrings she felt as a sign that she might be in love
with Sandy, after all.

Chapter 6.
MARSHA ZELENKO

She tried out for
The Mikado
, and to her astonishment landed the title part without any trouble.

From the day rehearsals began the rest of the world became vague to her. She sat in
class with the other badly made-up girls in skirts and sweaters, scribbling in her
notebook as always; but it was a kind of reflex between her ears and her hand, by-passing
her brain. At the end of many an hour she could not have said whether the lecturer
had been droning about fruit flies or Anatole France. Sometimes her pen would slow
and stop; her eyes would drift to the gray window, to the autumn gale blowing slant
streaks of rain on the glass, to the reflected yellow lights that seemed to hang magically
in the air over the purplish street; the tune of
My Object All Sublime
would start running in her mind, and she would fall in a trance of imaginary play-acting,
adding new comic business to her role. The rehearsal period after classes was like
a birthday party that came every day. In a word, she was stage-struck.

One evening rehearsals stopped early for costume fitting. The players came up one
by one, giggling and squealing, to be measured under a bright light in the center
of the stage, supervised by a fat girl with thick braided black hair. Marjorie had
been wondering for days who this girl was. She had seen her sitting by herself in
a back row of the auditorium, coming and going as she pleased at these closed rehearsals,
sometimes strolling forward to whisper to the director, Miss Kimble, who always listened
carefully. Miss Kimble in her youth had sung in the chorus of a real Shubert road
company of
Blossom Time
; so although she was now just a skittish old maid in baggy tweeds, teaching music
at Hunter, Marjorie was inclined to respect anyone she respected.

When Miss Kimble called, “All right, the Mikado next, please,” Marjorie came up the
steps of the stage to the stout girl with mixed curiosity and shyness.

“Ah, the star herself.” The girl’s voice was husky and grown-up. She wore a flaring
maroon skirt, a blouse of coarse brown linen with garish embroidery, and a wide tooled-leather
belt spiked with copper ornaments. She said to her assistant, a spindly girl with
a tape measure, “Chest and hips, that’s all. We’ll have to hire her costume from Brooks.”

Miss Kimble said, or rather whined, “Marsha, we’re over the budget already—”

“You can fake a lot with cheesecloth and crepe paper, Dora,” said the stout girl,
“and I’m doing what I can, but you can’t fake a Mikado.”

“Well, if you’re sure you can’t—”

“Thanks,” Marjorie muttered in the girl’s ear.

Marsha turned her back on Miss Kimble, and said in a tone too low even for the spindly
girl to hear, “Don’t mention it. You
are
the star, you know, dear.” Thereafter she ignored Marjorie.

Next evening she was at the rehearsal again. When it was over she came to Marjorie
and made a couple of comments on her performance which were penetrating and useful,
more so than any of Miss Kimble’s directions. “Let’s go out and have a cup of coffee
and talk,” she said. As they walked arm in arm along Lexington Avenue, bending their
heads before the cutting dank wind which swayed signs and flapped scraps of newspaper
by, Marsha suddenly said, “Say, I’m starved. Let’s have dinner together. I know a
wonderful place—”

“I’m expected home for dinner, I’m sorry—”

“Oh. Of course. Well, then, come and have coffee and watch me eat until you have to
go home. Yes?”

They went to an old brownstone house on a side street, and up a flight of stairs to
a doorway framed by a huge grinning gilt dragon mouth;
Mi Fong’s Jade Garden
, the sign over the dragon’s ears read. They passed through the fanged jaws into a
crimson-lit room smelling of incense and strange cookery. Marjorie was very glad she
had not committed herself to eat. She half believed that cats, dogs, and mice were
cooked in Chinese restaurants. The pervading odor seemed more or less to confirm the
idea. Here and there in the gloom a few diners with odd faces were eating odd-looking
things out of oddly shaped dishes. Near the door one fat woman with a mustache was
using chopsticks to lift a morsel of meat out of a tureen, from which there protruded
a big horribly white bone. Marsha sniffed the air. “God, these places destroy my figure
but I’m mad about them—Hi, Mi Fong. How’s your wife? Better?”

“Rittle better, thank you, Missa Masha.” A short Chinaman in a white coat bowed them
to a latticed booth lit by red paper lanterns. “Same boot? Quiet, peaceful? Rittle
drink first, maybe?”

“I guess so. Marjorie, how about trying a Singapore sling? Mi Fong makes the best
slings in town.”

Marjorie faltered, “I don’t know if I want a drink. Coffee—”

“Oh, God, it’s a bitter night, you’ve got to warm your bones. Two, Mi Fong—He’s a
marvelous person,” Marsha said as they hung up their coats. “His wife paints beautifully.
They live in back. I have a screen she did. Gorgeous, and she practically gave it
to me. The food is sublime, I tell you, and it costs next to nothing. If you have
forty cents on you, you can have a feast. If you haven’t I’ll lend it to you—”

“Oh no, no, thanks anyway.”

With the drinks the Chinaman brought a plate full of fat brown curved things. Marjorie
asked what they were, and Marsha exclaimed, “Darling, don’t tell me you’ve never eaten
fried shrimps. I’ll die.”

“I’ve never eaten any kind of shrimps.”

“Bless my soul, haven’t you?” Marsha looked at her with a tinge of amusement. “Well—here’s
to your glorious debut as the Mikado.”

Marjorie raised the tall glass, which looked black in the red light. The Singapore
sling tasted cool, slightly sweet, not at all strong. She smiled and nodded.

“Nectar,” said Marsha. “Don’t have more than one, though. Once an evil old man who
was trying to make me got me to drink three. Wow.”

“Did he make you?” said Marjorie, trying to be as devilish as her companion.

“What do you think?” said Marsha, with an arch air of being offended. She heaved a
sigh. “Ah, well. He wasn’t really so old, but he sure was evil. Of course that was
his chief charm. I’m still mad about him, to tell you the truth.” She picked up a
plump shrimp and bit it in half with long white teeth. Her face lit up, the dark eyes
gleaming. “Ah, Lord, they say it’s a vale of tears, Marjorie, and yet there are such
things as fried shrimps. Do have one.”

“No, thanks.”

“Well, you’re missing a bit of heaven on earth. But to business. Do you know how much
talent you have?”

“Who, me? I’m not sure I have any.” Marjorie took a long pull at the Singapore sling.
It went flickering down into her stomach and out along her nerves, it seemed, like
little cool flames.

BOOK: Marjorie Morningstar
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