Marjorie Morningstar (3 page)

“This is America.”

“We’ve spoiled her. I’m worried about her, Rose. Her attitudes—She doesn’t know what
money is. A wild Indian couldn’t know less. I do some magic with a fountain pen and
a checkbook and she has a dress or a coat or a riding habit—”

“I saw you going over the checkbook last night. Is that what this fuss is all about?
The riding habit? A girl needs clothes.”

“I’m talking in general. From a money standpoint this move to Manhattan was crazy.
We’re eating capital.”

“I’ve told you twenty times you’re going to have to give yourself a raise.”

The father stood and began to walk back and forth. He was a stout little man with
a moon face, curly graying hair, and heavy black eyebrows. “It’s a funny thing about
a business. You take out more money than comes in and after a while there’s no business.”

Marjorie’s mother had heard nothing but moans from her husband about business through
good times and bad. She was not inclined to regard the depression seriously. Her husband’s
steadily rising income from his feather importing business had seemed miraculous to
her in the first years of their marriage, but now she took it quite for granted. “These
are the years that count for Marjorie. This new boy she’s riding with, whoever he
is, he’s a Columbia boy, a fraternity boy, isn’t he? That means a good family. Would
she have met him if we’d stayed in the Bronx?”

“She’s only a sophomore. She may not get married for years.”

“It won’t put us in the poorhouse.”

“Then there’ll be Seth.”

“We’ll worry about Seth when the time comes.”

“Well, we won’t have any problems if she breaks her neck today riding a horse.”

“She won’t break her neck.”

“I heard you arguing with her. She’s only had three lessons.”

“What is there to riding a horse?”

The father paced to the window. “It’s a beautiful day. There go some horses… That
wouldn’t be her, yet. Look, the park is green. Seems like only yesterday it was all
covered with purple snow. The snow in the parks looks purple, did you notice that?
There must be a scientific explanation.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’m worrying about
spring hats in November and fall hats in February. A year goes by like a week, it
seems.”

“She’ll be all right, I tell you.” The mother came and stood beside him. They were
the same height, and she too had a round face. Their expressions were much alike,
except that the man’s face had sterner lines at the mouth. They might have been brother
and sister. He looked about ten years older than his wife, though they were nearly
the same age.

“Doesn’t it seem strange to you?” said the father. “It does to me. How long ago was
she crawling on the floor with wet diapers? What’s become of the time? Horseback—”

“We’re getting old, Arnold.”

“Nowadays they make jokes about the marriage brokers,” said the father. “All the same,
with the old system she’d be meeting nothing but boys of exactly the right age and
background, and no guesswork.”

“With that system you wouldn’t have the problem of Marjorie at all,” said the mother
sharply.

The father smiled and looked sly. After more than twenty years it was still a sore
point with Mrs. Morgenstern that he had once almost been matched with a rabbi’s daughter.
“I’m just saying that this is also a strange system. It’s going to cost us plenty,
putting her near these good families of yours. And one night at one of these dances,
what’s to stop her from falling for a good-looking fool from a rotten family? And
that’ll be the end of it. Remember that first one at the camp when she was thirteen?
That Bertram?”

The mother grimaced. “She has more sense now.”

“She has more education. That’s a different thing. She has no more sense. A lot less
maybe. And as for—well, religion—the way things are nowadays—” He broke off, looking
out of the window.

“All this,” said the mother uneasily, “just because the girl goes for a horseback
ride? Don’t forget one thing. She gets the man she loves. She gets what she wants,
not what we pick. That’s the right way.”

“She gets what she wants?” said the father. “In this world? Not even in America. She’ll
get what she deserves.”

There was a long silence. He finished his coffee, picked up the newspaper and walked
into the living room.

“Here you are, miss.” The taxi stopped in front of the Chevy Chase Riding Academy,
a converted garage with a huge tin horse painted a dirty brown hanging over the entrance.
A cloud of horse smell came rolling into the cab. She could hear the beasts stamping.
The cab driver, glancing around, took in the stiff new riding habit and the uncertain
look. He grinned, baring yellow horselike teeth. “Go ahead, kid. You’ll live.” Marjorie
gave him a haughty look, and tipped him a quarter to prove that she was an aristocrat
who loved horses. Handkerchief to nose, she went up the manure-littered ramp, stepping
daintily with her toes pointed inward to avoid the unhappy duck-waddling effect which
she had noticed in other girls wearing riding clothes.

Rosalind Green, a stocky sallow girl, came waddling to meet her from the gloomy stalls,
in a new riding habit of a hideous olive color. “Hello, we were about to give you
up. They’re getting the horses ready.”

“Sorry I’m late.” Marjorie followed Rosalind through rows of stalls where horses were
snorting, stamping, jingling, and neighing.

The two girls had become acquainted in the El Dorado elevator. Rosalind, a year and
a half older, was a consistent A student, but she lacked humor and was dull at dances
and parties. Ordinarily she might have hated Marjorie for her small waist, slender
ankles, and quicksilver chatter. But she was so sure of her own superiority that she
could forgive her. Rosalind had been born on Central Park West; she was a junior at
Barnard; and she was engaged to one Phil Boehm, the son of a famous heart specialist.
She had nothing to fear from the clever, pretty little climber from the Bronx, a mere
sophomore at the free public college, Hunter. Rosalind frankly patronized Marjorie.
Marjorie put up with it because of Rosalind’s usefulness in introducing her to the
Columbia fraternity set. They spent hundreds of hours talking about clothes, hair,
paint, movies, and boys. Marjorie had lost touch with her girl friends in the Bronx,
and had found no real chums at Hunter. Rosalind at the moment was her best friend.

“Here she is, Jeff,” Rosalind called.

At the far end of the stable five horses—very big, eager, and gay—were prancing and
pawing under a naked electric bulb. Jeff, a sunburned little groom in shabby breeches
and wrinkled boots, stood among the animals, tightening girths and shouting orders
at Billy and Sandy, who were saddling their horses. He glanced sourly at Marjorie.
“How well can you ride, miss?”

“Not well at all,” Marjorie said promptly.

A humane light flickered in the groom’s eye. “Well, good for you. Most of them won’t
admit it, and then—Whoa, you stupid bastard.” He punched the dancing horse in the
ribs.

Phil Boehm said, “That’s my horse. Don’t get him mad.” He sat slumped on a dirty bench
beside Sandy’s girl, Vera Cashman, a handsome blond sophomore from Cornell, who looked
sleepy and cross.

“Give her Black Beauty, Jeff,” said Sandy, with a smile and a wink at Marjorie. He
was deft and quick with his horse’s trappings. His breeches were faded, and his boots
looked not much better than the groom’s. The riding costumes of the rest of the party
were almost as new as Marjorie’s.

“Give me the gentlest horse you’ve got,” Marjorie said, “and give him a sleeping pill
before we start.”

Sandy laughed.

Billy Ehrmann, red-faced and perspiring, was heaving at a strap under his horse’s
belly. At this moment, with a fierce yank, he managed to undo everything, and fell
on the floor under the horse, with the saddle and stirrups in a jingling pile on top
of him. The groom, looking extremely disgusted, picked up the saddle and pulled Billy
to his feet. “I thought you said you could do this, mister.”

“Got to learn sometime,” panted Billy, brushing manure from his fat face and his jacket.

“Not on a busy Sunday, mister, please.” Jeff flipped the saddle on to the horse’s
back, and Billy shambled toward the bench, saying “Hi, Marge,” with a sad grin.

Marjorie smiled at him, thinking what bad luck it was that Billy, of all the fraternity
crowd, had attached himself to her. Billy’s one claim to distinction was that his
father was Supreme Court Justice Ehrmann, whose name seemed to be on most of the letterheads
of New York charities. Marjorie had been greatly impressed at first to learn who Billy
was, upon meeting half a dozen of the fraternity boys one evening at Rosalind’s apartment;
but she had soon found out that he was a good-natured dolt with no trace of his father’s
merit. Still, he was a Columbia boy. He had taken her to the dance last night. So
as he walked by, exuding a horse smell which caused her to gasp and fall back a step,
she smiled.

Jeff was eying her critically as he saddled Billy’s horse. “I got an idea, miss. Give
you Prince Charming…. Hey Ernest! Let’s have Prince Charming.”

Marjorie said, “Gentle?”

“Gentlest son of a bitch alive.”

A Negro boy in jeans lounged out of a far stall and into another stall. “Prince Charming
coming up,” he called. After a moment or two he began to lead out a horse; began,
that is, because the process took a while to complete. Not that the horse was unwilling.
It came out readily enough, but it never seemed to stop coming. The Negro appeared
to be unreeling the beast from a large spool inside the stall. It was by far the longest
living thing Marjorie had ever seen. At last the rear end came into sight, with a
limp straggling tail.

The animal was not only very long, it was a most peculiar mottled red. The Negro boy
threw a saddle on its back and led it toward Marjorie. Its long head hung down, nodding.
Its face, like every other horse’s, seemed to Marjorie to express a weak-willed stupid
animosity.

“What do you call that color?” she said to the groom.

“The color don’t make no difference,” said Jeff, spitting tobacco juice. “That horse
is one goddamn gentle son of a bitch.”

“I just wondered.”

“Well, it’s roan.”

Roan. The word conjured up wide Western plains and thundering hooves.

“Let’s mount, folks,” shouted the groom. He held the stirrup for Marjorie, and she
tried to get up on the horse, but couldn’t. The creature was half again as high as
the old mare she had been riding in the armory. She looked around helplessly with
one foot in the stirrup, and the seat of her breeches straining. Sandy Goldstone came
to her grinning, seized her other leg, and threw her on to the saddle. “Thanks,” she
gasped.

“Them stirrups the right length?” Jeff said.

“Oh yes, yes, absolutely perfect.” The groom went and mounted his horse. Marjorie
realized at once that her stirrups were too long. Her toes barely touched them.

“Okay folks, single file now going up the street, and no trotting in traffic.”

They went out of the stable into warm blinding sunshine. Marjorie found it nightmarish
to be riding along a city street on a horse. The hooves of the seven beasts made a
terrible clatter on the asphalt. She kept reaching and clutching for the stirrups
with her toes, thinking that a fall on the pavement would certainly fracture her skull.
Prince Charming plodded calmly among the honking taxicabs and grinding busses. Every
little toss of his head scared her. She clung to the saddle, though she knew it was
bad form, though she could see the Cornell blonde grinning at her with contempt. She
now cared about nothing except to get through this hour and off this animal undamaged.

When they came to the soft black dirt of the bridle path in the park the horses began
to trot. Prince Charming surprised Marjorie with his easy comfortable gait. She found
her stirrups and rode to the trot as she had been taught. Her confidence came back
and she relaxed a bit. They trotted past the Tavern on the Green. She saw a good-looking
boy at a table on the terrace follow her with his eyes as she went by.

Sandy Goldstone rode up beside her, reining in his big coffee-colored horse with a
careless gesture. “Was that a joke about not riding well? You’re doing nobly.”

She gave him a mysterious smile. “You’re not bad yourself.”

“Spend a couple of months every year in Arizona. Guess I ought to be able to ride
a horse… Margie, there’s no reason for me to hang back and police you, really, is
there? This nag’s impatient.”

“None at all, Sandy. Go ahead.”

Sandy streaked away. The riding party passed through a dank muddy tunnel, and came
out into a sun-flecked avenue of cherry trees, perfumed and cool. Marjorie was stunned
by the charm of it. For the first time she perceived what horseback riding was about.
She turned her eyes to the pink blossoms nodding under the blue sky in the breeze,
and lost herself in pleasure.

When they emerged into open sunlight she noticed that Prince Charming was falling
behind the other horses. The blonde, next to last in the party, was glancing back
over the widening gap with amusement. Marjorie clasped the saddle and kicked Prince
Charming in the ribs. Nothing happened except that she lost her stirrup and had to
clutch for it with her foot. Prince Charming, an old civil servant of a horse, continued
to reel off the same number of yards per second.

Far up the path the rest of the riders went round a bend and were hidden from view
by green trees. “Giddyap!” Marjorie said. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? They’re
beating you. Giddyap!” She made clicking noises and kicked both heels and shook the
reins. Prince Charming ground along philosophically. They came to the bend and rounded
it. There was a long straight stretch of black path ahead, completely empty except
for a settling cloud of dust.