Marjorie Morningstar (28 page)

Marjorie wandered down a curving road behind the dining hall toward the tennis courts,
thinking that her first day at South Wind could not have been worse if her mother
had planned every detail. She was a bit of female clutter on the landscape; moreover,
she was Marjorie Morgenstern—stamped, branded with the name for good, all in a few
seconds. Her irritation and anger focused on Wally Wronken; she felt quite capable
of not speaking to him all summer. She lit another cigarette, but it reminded her
of Wally, and it tasted awful anyway. She threw it away after one puff.

At that moment she saw the Uncle.

He was carrying a tin tub of garbage down wooden steps from the back door of the kitchen.
She recognized him instantly, though he wore a kitchen uniform: small white hat, white
undershirt and trousers, and an amazingly dirty apron. There couldn’t be two men in
the world with such a paunch; besides, as she stood frozen in surprise, watching him
empty the garbage, she faintly heard him singing the song to which they had danced
with the turkey leg. “Uncle! Uncle, for heaven’s sake! Hello!” She ran up a slope
through daisies and long grass. “What on
earth
are you doing here, Uncle?”

“Havaya, Modgerie! Vait, I come to you! Up here it don’t smell so fency. Vait, vait,
I come down.” She halted midway on the slope. He approached, grinning broadly, mopping
his streaming red face with a handkerchief. “Is a surprise, no?”

“Surprise? I’m stunned—”

“Modgerie, ve keep it a secret, no? By Modgerie and the Uncle a little secret. Better
ve don’t tell your mama, she’ll only make a big hoo-hah. I tell you, darling, by the
golf course vas too lonesome. Here is more fun, nice fellers, plenty to eat—hard vork,
but vot is vork? I make plenty money, too—not like by the golf course—”

“The golf course?” she said, more and more bewildered. “What’s the golf course got
to do with it? Why are you here?”

The Uncle smiled in a placating way, showing the black gap in his teeth. “You vent
to find me by the golf course, no? Your mama thinks I’m still there. Ve von’t tell
her notting different, vy does she have to know I’m a dishvasher?”

After Marjorie asked a good many questions, it came out that Mrs. Morgenstern had
arranged a caretaker’s job at South Wind for the Uncle, a week or so before Marjorie’s
departure. This explained her sudden mysterious good cheer, of course. She had succeeded
in placing a chaperone of sorts over her daughter at “Sodom,” after all. Greech had
taken the Uncle on without salary (and with Mrs. Morgenstern paying the railroad fare)
as a kind of janitor and watchman for the lodge on the golf course. But then two dishwashers
had quit. Greech had offered him the kitchen job at twenty-five dollars a week, and
he had accepted it gladly.

It penetrated the old man’s mind very slowly that Marjorie was amazed to find him
at the camp at all. “Vot? She didn’t tell you notting? How is it possible?”

“She didn’t, Uncle. Not a word. I swear I thought I was seeing a ghost for a minute.”

“A nice fat ghost, hah?” He shook his head. “So! For you it’s some disappointment,
no? A fat old uncle you need around your neck, hah? Like a cholera, you need it. It’s
too bad, Modgerie, I’m sorry—your mama is a smart vun—”

“Uncle, it doesn’t matter, really—”

“Listen, Modgerie, a mama remains a mama, she can’t help it. By her it’s still Friday
night in the Bronx, the Uncle has to keep an eye on the baby. So vot? You think I
spoil your fun, Modgerie? Have a good time, darling, vot do I know? I’m busy in the
kitchen.”

She had been looking at his hands uneasily. Now she caught one as he made a gesture.
“Uncle, what’s the matter? What are these?” There were several gaping little red wounds
on his fat fingers. They were neither bleeding nor healing. They were like mouths,
open, dry, and red.

With a laugh, Samson-Aaron pulled his hand away. “You vash dishes you get cut. Dishes
break. Soap keeps vashing in the cuts, so they don’t heal, so vot? You lay off from
vashing dishes they heal up.”

“I don’t like the look of them. Did you see the doctor?” Marjorie stared at the red
gaps.

“Modgerie please, it’s notting.” He put both hands behind his back. “Don’t be like
your mama, alvays questions.”

“I just don’t know if you ought to be doing this, Uncle.”

“Vot, I’ll disgrace you? Modgerie’s uncle is Sam the dishvasher? I von’t say a vord
to nobody, depend on the Uncle.”

She threw her arm around his neck. “It’s not that. You’re—It’s hard, dirty work, you
know—”

“So? I never vashed dishes? I vashed dishes in the Catskills, Modgerie, before you
vere born. Vot is it? Caretaker, vatchman, that’s the jobs I don’t like. Jobs for
old men, for cripples. I’m strong like a horse—Vait, I show you something.” He fumbled
under his apron, brought out a tattered sweat-blackened wallet, and pulled a snapshot
from it. “Did you see yet a picture of Geoffrey’s vife? Here, look at a doll, a sveetheart—”

Geoffrey had been married for six months. The picture showed him standing on the porch
of a tiny house, in shirtsleeves, with his arm around a thin girl in flat shoes and
a house dress. She was squinting into the sun, and her hair was pulled flat in a plain
knot, so Marjorie could form no notion of her looks. Geoffrey, fatter and with much
less hair, was grinning foolishly, his chest thrust out, a beer bottle in his hand.

“She’s lovely, Uncle. What’s her name?”

“Sylvia. Her father is a doctor in Albany, a big specialist. You know vot? She calls
him Milton. Says it sounds more like him than Geoffrey, God bless her. A doll, hah?”
He showed the black gap again in a happy grin, curiously like Geoffrey’s, and lowered
his voice. “Modgerie, in October they have a baby already.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“You see vy I vash dishes maybe, Modgerie? Vy should I take money from Geoffrey ven
he needs it? I send it back! Comes October I send
him
money. For the baby, a present. The baby should sleep in the finest crib money could
buy. A crib from Samson-Aaron the gobbage pail. A good idea, hah?”

A voice roared from the rear of the dining hall. “Hey
Sam
, you fat old bastard, you drop dead or something?”

“Okay, okay—” yelled the Uncle. He chuckled. “That’s Paul, the other dishvasher. A
good feller, a Hungarian, plays good chess. So?” He caressed Marjorie’s cheek lightly.
“I see you sometimes, Modgerie, hah? I got a secret, you don’t tell Mama, I don’t
tell her your secrets. It’s a bargain? I see you sometimes ven nobody’s looking, I
give you maybe a Hershey bar.” He ambled toward the kitchen, shouting, “Vot’s the
matter, Paul, you vash a dish good and break your back?” He toiled up the stairs,
his paunch shaking, waved at Marjorie from the top stair, and disappeared.

Marjorie marched straight to the public telephone booths in the main building across
the hall from the office, and put in a call to her mother. The fishy fumes of the
office paint brought tears to her eyes. In the next booth Mr. Greech was alternately
growling and howling incomprehensibly at his secretary in New York. The operator told
her that the circuits to New York were busy. She went out on the porch to escape the
fumes while she waited. The afternoon had clouded over; a dank wind was lashing the
oak trees, and there was a smell of rain in the air. Marjorie dropped dejectedly on
the porch steps, her chin resting on her hands.

All magic was leaking out of South Wind, like air out of a punctured tire. She liked
Samson-Aaron; no, she loved him, shabby old glutton though he was. But the injection
into South Wind of a family face soured the very light of day. South Wind had been,
in Marjorie’s visions, a new clear world, a world where a grimy Bronx childhood and
a fumbling Hunter adolescence were forgotten dreams, a world where she could at last
find herself and be herself—clean, fresh, alone, untrammelled by parents. In a word,
it had been the world of Marjorie Morningstar. The shrinking of the camp’s glamor,
her own lowly status, the mischance with the name, were bad enough. And here came
the Uncle, dragging behind him the long chain of all the old rusty realities. She
could feel the weight of that chain; she could feel the clamp, cold on her ankle,
fixed there by the invisible far-stretching hand of her mother. It was unendurable.

“Rain again, for Christ’s sake!” grated Mr. Greech, making her jump. He stood directly
behind her, scowling at the black sky, slapping the flashlight on his palm, looking
fully as satanic as he had last year. Being on South Wind soil did something to Mr.
Greech. “When in the name of hell am I going to get these buildings painted? Do you
realize we’ve had rain for fourteen straight days?” He bellowed this last observation
directly at Marjorie.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He looked at her with a blink, as though a stone had spoken. “What? What did you say?”

“Mr. Greech—pardon me, I hate to trouble you—it’s a small matter—”

“What, what?”

“My uncle—he’s washing dishes, I see.”

“Who? Oh yes, old Sam. Well, sure, he’d rather make twenty-five a week than nothing
a week. So would I, by God, and it doesn’t look as though I will this season.”

“It’s just—well, it’s hard work.”

“Of course it is. That’s why I pay him.”

“He’s—well, he’s an old man—”

“What’s all this, now? See here, your mother told me he’s stronger than I am. He’s
not chained in the kitchen. He jumped at the job. He seems to be thriving. In fact,
the cook tells me he’s eating like ten men. I’m going to talk to him about that, by
the way, I’m not running a hog-fattening farm in that kitchen. Now, what exactly are
you
fussing about? What’s eating
you
?” He thrust at her with the flashlight on each
you
.

She withered under his tone and his stare. “Well, I just thought—I don’t know—I suppose
if it was his own idea…” She trailed off. Greech was walking away from her into the
office.

In a few minutes the telephone call went through. As Marjorie waited, receiver in
hand, to hear her mother’s voice, this thought flashed through her mind:
When I object to her sending the Uncle here without my knowledge she’ll say, “What’s
the matter, are you planning to do something up there you don’t want us to know about?”
She was trying to think of a crushing answer when her mother came on the line. After
assuring her that she was well and the camp was splendid, Marjorie said, “Quite a
surprise you prepared for me!”

“What surprise?” said Mrs. Morgenstern blandly.

“Samson-Aaron.”

“Oh. The Uncle. Well, how is he?”

“Just fine.”

“That’s good. Give him my regards.”

After a little pause Marjorie said, “Don’t you think you might have told me he’d be
here?”

“Didn’t I?”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“Well, that’s right, I guess it was the week when you were so busy with exams. Well,
you have no objections to his being there, do you?”

“It’s a little late to be asking me that, I would say.”

“What’s the matter,” said Mrs. Morgenstern, “are you planning to do something up there
that you wouldn’t want us to know about?”

“I’ve already done it,” said Marjorie. “I’ve been having an affair with Mr. Greech
since March. How do you suppose I got the job?”

“Don’t be smart.”

“He’s washing dishes.”

“Who?”

“The Uncle.”

“What! No, he isn’t. He’s a caretaker.”

“Not any more. He makes money washing dishes. Wants to buy a nice present for his
grandchild.”

There was a silence. Mrs. Morgenstern said, “Well, I can see that’s not too nice.
Your uncle washing dishes. I’ll write him to go back to caretaker.”

“Let him alone! You’re hopeless, Mom.”

“What are you so touchy about? One of these days you’ll be glad the Uncle is there.”

“I’m sure that’s why you did it, Mom—to accommodate me.”

“What do you want of me, Marjorie? Why did you call? Do you want me to write him to
come home? Say so, and I’ll do it, that’s all.”

Several seconds went by, while Marjorie weighed the neat impasse. It would have been
hard for her under any circumstances to force the Uncle out of South Wind, once he
was there. Now that she had seen his pride and pleasure in earning money, it was impossible.
“Thank you, Mama, I don’t want anything. I thought you might be interested to know
that he’s all right, and that I’m all right, and that everything couldn’t be lovelier.”

“It fills me with joy, dear.”

“Fine. Give my love to Papa.”

“I will. Goodbye. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“Thanks, Mom, that gives me plenty of rope. ’Bye.”

Another round lost.

But once Marjorie became used to two unpleasant and very unwelcome facts: that she
was still Marjorie Morgenstern, and that she was not likely to fascinate Noel Airman
(at least not straight off), she perked up and began to enjoy South Wind. She hardly
ever saw the Uncle; and if they did come on each other by accident they smiled and
exchanged a few quick pleasant words, and that was all. It was still gratifying to
look across the lake to Klabber’s camp on a fresh sunny morning, and to realize how
far she had come in a year. It was fun rehearsing in the shows, even if she did nothing
but kick her legs in a chorus of office girls. She began to find a certain arid pleasure
in the office work. Keeping her desk clean and severe, getting her work done on time,
drawing a grunt of praise from Greech for letters typed up swiftly and without errors—however
petty, these things were satisfying.

Every day the look of the camp improved. The weather turned fine, too. By the first
of July, after a week of continual sunshine, the fountain was flowing, the grass was
velvet-neat, the buildings were dazzling white and gold, and the grounds were alive
with noisy merry people in summer clothes of carnival colors. They were a helter-skelter
group of ordinary young New Yorkers; a few girls spoke with comic Brooklyn and Bronx
grotesqueness, and a few of the men were excessively crude, but most of them were
just like the young people she had known all her life. They ate, danced, drank, and
played at all the sports with great gusto. Gaiety and freedom were in the air. The
food Greech fed them was a curious mélange of traditional Jewish delicacies—gefilte
fish, stuffed neck, chopped chicken liver—and traditional Jewish abominations, like
shellfish, bacon, and ham; the guests devoured the delicacies and the abominations
with equal relish. Marjorie had to comb the bacon off her eggs for the first week
or so, until the waiter became used to her old-fashioned ways.