Marjorie Morningstar (23 page)

also a program of the show, with a full-page picture of Wally, pale and owlish and
seeming about fifteen years old. Some of the comic songs he had written were reprinted
in the program. Greech looked them over; they were surprisingly smooth and clever.
“Well, well, this is all fine, but a college show isn’t a South Wind show—”

“I realize that, Mr. Greech, but honestly, I wrote this whole show, book and lyrics,
in three weeks. Noel will probably have to throw out a lot of my stuff, but I’ll write
tons, tons!”

Greech pursed his lips and shook his head. “Now, Wally, I don’t doubt that, but trouble
is, I need an assistant stage manager on the lights and props and all, same as last
year, and I don’t need a writer. I’m up to my belly button in writers.”

“Why, I’ll do the lighting, Mr. Greech, and all the rest too, that won’t bother me,
providing it’s understood that primarily I’m working as a writer—”

While he spoke Greech was pleasurably calculating that he could now do without the
sarcastic sketch writer, Milt Quint, who cost him two hundred dollars a year. Wally
obviously had enough talent to write skits. He said sorrowfully, “Well, no, Wally,
I’m afraid it’s impossible.” He waited a moment to let the dejection deepen on the
boy’s face. “Fact is, have to let you in on a little confidential secret, I’m not
even hiring Quint this year. I’m planning to use old show material. I can’t pay a
writer this year, that’s the point.”

“Oh.” Wally paced, hugging his elbow. His look became very sad. “You can’t pay anything
at all?”

“Nothing.”

“But—well, frankly, I knew I wouldn’t get as much as Quint, but—I don’t know, can’t
you even pay fifty dollars?”

“I can’t pay fifty cents, Wally.”

The boy sighed, picked up his briefcase, and put the papers back into it. Greech had
a moment of worry. At fifty dollars Wally was a bargain. He said, “It isn’t that I
don’t admire your progress, Wally. Those songs are fine. Looks to me that we have
a big South Wind writer coming along in you, maybe a big Broadway writer.” Gratitude
and delight shone on Wally’s face. “For all I know, if things get better next year
and you have the experience of one season under your belt, you may be worth two hundred
to me easily. Or three hundred or a thousand. After all, Noel isn’t going to direct
South Wind shows forever. In fact I’m lucky to have him this year. He’s outgrowing
us. Grooming the next social director is what I’m mainly interested in—”

Wally burst out, “Look, I’ll work for nothing. Provided that my official title is
writer, and that I sleep in the writers’ cabin this year, not with the caddies.”

Greech picked the big flashlight off the desk—it was his trademark at the camp, his
mace, and he kept it in the city office half as a joke and half as a token of his
majesty—and slapped it against his palm, staring out of the window at the whirling
snow. The radiator hissed and the windows rattled. “You’ll do everything you did last
year around the stage—lights, props, and such?”

“Yes. Can I—will you pay my railroad fare this year? Seeing I’ll be doing all this
writing, too—”

Greech smiled and held out his hand. “Well, Wally, we won’t quibble about details.
You’re in the writers’ cabin. If you work out as a writer, why, come in and see me
at the end of the season about the fare.”

Wally smiled uncertainly, shook hands, and left. Greech put the flashlight down with
satisfaction. Not a bad interview; at the price of a cot in a staff bungalow he had
a writer for the season. It was not even going to cost railroad fare.

Coming out of Greech’s office, Wally was amazed to see Marjorie in the waiting room,
sitting bundled in a beaver coat. She was much prettier now than she had been in the
summer, and he had thought her then the prettiest girl alive. “Gosh, hello! Aren’t
you Marjorie—Marsha’s friend?”

She smiled, a little nervously. “I’m Marjorie. How are you, Wally?”

“Fine! Glad you remember my name—Say, what brings you to the gates of hell?” He dropped
his voice, glancing at Greech’s stenographer.

“I’m trying for a job as an actress.”

“Why, that’s great—that’s marvelous! Hope you make it. I’m going back this year. I’m
going to be a writer.” He said it with exaggerated nonchalance.

“I thought Noel Airman wrote the shows—”

“He writes the songs, mainly. Also occasional skits. There’s always been at least
one skit writer. Sometimes other songwriters, too—”

“Is—ah, is Noel coming back this year?”

“Noel? I guess so. He has this musical comedy,
Princess Jones
, that may get produced—but not this summer, I don’t think. Say, can’t I see you some
evening? Are you in the phone book?”

Marjorie hesitated. “I’m busy almost every evening, Wally. I’m with a theatre group,
the Vagabond Players, at the Ninety-second Street Y. We’re rehearsing
Pygmalion
.”

“Really? I’m in the theatre too, now, you might say. I’m the author of the Varsity
Show this year at Columbia.”

“Well, congratulations! That’s a great honor—”

There was a buzz at the stenographer’s desk. She called, “Miss Morningstar—”

Marjorie jumped up. “My father is Arnold Morgenstern, Wally, first Morgenstern in
the Manhattan phone book. That Central Park West address is wrong, we’ve moved.”

“Okay.” Wally seized her hand, dropped it as though it were hot, and went stumbling
out.

Greech looked much less like Satan than he had on the grounds of South Wind, Marjorie
thought. In the flat yellow light of a Manhattan office, with snow falling past the
window behind him, with a brown muffler around his neck, he was just another drab
little businessman like her father. The big flashlight seemed a bit silly, lying on
a desk in New York. “Take off your coat, my dear. I keep this room too hot, I know—confounded
draft from the window on my neck all the time—”

“Thank you, Mr. Greech.” She slipped out of the coat, glad she had worn her tailored
gray-blue tweed, the best outfit she owned.

Greech was astonished at the way the girl had matured. She had seemed hardly more
than a child last summer, trailing in the wake of the unsavory Marsha, and then coming
to his office by herself at the end of the season with her stammered inquiry about
working as an actress. “How’s Marsha?” he said.

“All right, I guess, I haven’t seen her for months. She’s working in Lamm’s department
store.”

“Oh? Doing what?”

“Corset department, I think.”

“Well, now,” said the camp owner, “it seems you’re still determined to work at South
Wind, eh?”

“It’s what I want to do more than anything in the world.”

“But you still can’t sing and dance, can you?”

“Well, I can be in a chorus, I think. But I’m a dramatic actress, mainly—”

“I told you, though, my dear, that we only do one dramatic show every couple of weeks,
and so we don’t have much use for—”

“I remember everything you told me, Mr. Greech. I’ve learned shorthand and typing.”

Greech sat forward with a squeak of the swivel chair. “You have!”

“Well, you said that sometimes if a girl could make herself useful around the office,
you took her on as a dramatic actress.”

“Why, that’s so, but—” He stared at her. It was much more than he usually expected
or hoped for. His practice was to staff his office with would-be actresses. They cost
him nothing, and they filled out the dancing chorus in the revues; and around the
office they did unskilled chores like tending the front desk and the switchboard,
keeping the files, and running errands. For stenographic work he had the wives of
the headwaiter and the golf instructor, both trained secretaries who worked for nothing
in order to spend the summer with their husbands. Greech had never before encountered
an actress who had taken the trouble to learn stenography.

He said after a moment, “Well, of course, we expect that. But you understand that
we can’t afford to pay our secretaries, it’s a question of whether the dramatic experience
is worth it to you—”

“Oh, certainly. I didn’t expect you’d pay me.”

Her clothes, he saw, were not only fetching, they were expensive; and he began to
scent possibilities in the situation. “How about taking a letter right now, to show
what you can do?”

“Well—” He did not miss the fleeting consternation on the lovely young face. “I’ll
try. I’m pretty raw, you know, Mr. Greech, but I’m still studying, you see. The course
doesn’t end till June.”

He gave her a pencil and pad, and dictated a little faster than his usual rate. She
tried desperately, became more and more flurried, and stopped. “I’m horribly sorry,
Mr. Greech, I can’t—I know it’s not too fast—I just need practice, I’m taking two
hours of dictation a week, I’ll be much better—”

He shook his head sadly. “Well, my dear, at the moment you’re not a professional stenographer,
and not a professional actress, and still—of course you’re a very bright and pretty
girl, but I’m in business here.”

She was groping in her wide black purse. She pulled two letters out and gave them
to him. One was from Miss Kimble at Hunter and the other from the director of the
Vagabond Players, a Mr. Graub. Both stated that Marjorie Morgenstern had a brilliant
future as an actress. “Very nice, my dear, but this is all amateur stuff.”

“The Vagabonds charge admission,” the girl said faintly.

Greech smiled, and handed the letters back to her. “Now, Margie, I admire your spirit.
But you have to consider that a three-month vacation at South Wind, which is what
you’d be getting, costs something like eight hundred dollars. Sometimes in unusual
cases we do work out a sort of compromise arrangement. Sort of split the difference,
you see. Now if you could pay four hundred dollars for the summer, why I think, seeing
that you do have a lot of promise for the future, we might—What’s the matter?”

The girl put her hand to her face for a moment, bowing her head, and when she looked
up and tried to smile her eyes were wet. “I—nothing’s the matter, I’m a little disappointed.
I appreciate what you say. But I haven’t got four hundred dollars. I haven’t got any
money.” She stood and picked up her coat, wilted, awkward.

He said in a fatherly tone, “Well, of course, you’re a little young to have much money,
but surely your parents are interested enough in your acting career to help out—”

“My parents!”

“Conceivably we could work something out for two hundred fifty, three hundred, something
like that—”

“Mr. Greech, my parents don’t want me to act. They don’t want me to go to South Wind.”
She put on her coat, adding in a shaky voice, “Thanks anyway. Maybe next year.”

Greech stood. He had a divining-rod instinct for small sums of money, and he was certain
that at least a hundred dollars could be wrung out of this girl. But her charm had
softened him, and anyway, even with her limited shorthand ability, she was a better
bargain than most of his office actresses. “Marjorie, if you promise to keep it confidential
between us,” he said, “I’m going to gamble on my intuition. I think you’ll be a fine
actress some day. I’m just not a businessman, I guess. I’m going to give you the job.”

The girl peered at him mistily. “I don’t have to—to pay?”

“Well, just your own railroad fare, naturally, but that’s a mere trifle, some thirty
dollars round trip—is it a deal?”

She grasped his outstretched hand tightly. “You’ll never be sorry! God, I can’t believe
it—”

He patted her hand and released it. “Now then. I thought your name was Morgenstern.
What’s all this Morningstar business?”

She smiled shyly at him. “Well, that’s my stage name. Might as well start with it
now, I thought. Is it all right?”

Greech shrugged; she was a child, after all. “Yes, dear, it’s very pretty.”

She went out, leaving in the hot yellow-walled office a faint fresh scent like lilac;
quite different from the heavy theatrical perfumes of the usual actress applicants.

Actually, his instinct had been right. Marjorie did have a hundred seventeen dollars
in the bank, the remains of Klabber’s pay. She had been on the verge of offering it
to him when he cracked.

Marjorie went home in a cloud of joy which even the cramped dark West End Avenue apartment
could not dispel. She shut herself in the little bedroom, hardly as large as the maid’s
room had been in the El Dorado, and spent the rest of the afternoon curled on her
bed with a novel, often dropping the book on her lap and drifting into dreams of the
coming summer.

They had been in the new apartment for half a year. The Morgensterns had been forced
out of the El Dorado the previous October by a catastrophe in the millinery market,
a sudden wild seesawing in the prices of felt and straw which had all but wiped out
the Arnold Importing Company in a month. The details of the collapse were vague to
Marjorie, although her fourteen-year-old brother seemed to understand it, and tried
to explain it to her at the time with a grasp that seemed highly precocious. All the
girl really knew was that the golden days at the El Dorado came to a stop in funereal
family conferences, an extraordinary rush of telephoning, and then a horrid invasion
of grunting furniture movers with grimy slings and barrels, their brutal voices echoing
through the stripped, gutted apartment.

It seemed to her at first that this was the end of all her hopes, that she could never
face any of her friends again, that she was cut off from decent society. But a week
after the family was installed in the small back apartment on West End Avenue she
was quite used to it and thinking of other things. Making beds and washing dishes
came naturally to her after a Bronx childhood; she did not particularly miss the maidservant.
Mrs. Morgenstern declared that she was happy with the decreased housekeeping, and
had never really liked having a stranger in the kitchen. She also insisted that Marjorie
had a lovely view of the Hudson. It really was possible to see a blue patch of river
from the girl’s bedroom by leaning out far enough to risk falling ten floors to a
concrete yard. Otherwise the view was the usual New York one: window shades, bedrooms,
and dirty bricks. But Marjorie decided it didn’t matter much what one saw out of the
windows. The lobby of the building did have marble pillars, plenty of gilding, and
Persian rugs in good repair. They were still far from the Bronx.