Marjorie Morningstar (35 page)

“Dad, I—” she stammered and laughed. “This is too marvelous to believe—out of the
blue sky—why, thank you. Maybe I ought to get it in writing—”

“Don’t worry. It’s nothing more than you’re entitled to. Mom says there’s six, seven
weeks before you have to go back to school. You could have a fine trip, and still—”

“What!” She peered at him. He kept his eyes on the oars. “You don’t mean travel
this summer
?”

“Darling, the time to travel is whenever you’ve got the chance.”

“But I’m working, Dad, I have a job here—why, I assumed you meant next spring when
I’m through with college.”

“According to your mother, Greech isn’t paying you.”

“Yes, but—well, I like it here. Just to pick up and start travelling now, when I—it’s
such a crazy idea, somehow.”

“Well, as I say, we got to talking, and this question of travelling came up, and as
long as you mentioned it yourself…” His voice trailed down.

She swerved around and sat up straight, staring at her father. He kept his eyes on
the leather-covered oar handles, and rowed in even unsplashing strokes. After a while
she said frigidly, “Couldn’t Mom tell me this herself? Why did she have to put you
up to it?”

He looked at her from under his graying eyebrows. There were heavy reddish shadows
under his eyes. “What’s the difference who thought of it?”

“She must really hate Noel to want to part with seven hundred dollars.”

“Marjorie, please don’t think that we’re trying to—”

“What’s the matter? He’s Judge Ehrmann’s son, isn’t he? How high does she want to
fly? I should think she’d be jumping for joy. Not that those things mean anything
to Noel or to me, but—”

“I think he’s a very clever good-looking man, so does your mother.”

“Oh, Papa, please tell me what it’s all about. Mom will anyway, sooner or later, she
has the diplomacy of a steamroller. What’s she got against him? The name Noel? He
hates it too, he’ll probably get rid of it one of these days.”

“She remembered some things, Marjorie, that—this is very hard, darling…”

“Go ahead.”

“… Things Belle Kline told her, that she heard from the Sigelmans. I have nothing
against the man, but if all this is true—I’m sure it is—he’s—well, he’s not your kind.
He’s a—you know—a Village kind of fellow, he’s been mixed up with God knows how many
girls, married women too. He isn’t no good, I don’t want to say that, but he’s—he’s
lazy, with all kinds of talent and opportunities he’s accomplished nothing. He sleeps
all day in the city, writes a song only when he’s ready to starve. He doesn’t talk
to his father. And they say he’s an atheist.”

“He isn’t an atheist. He believes in God. He told me so.”

“Marjorie, you’re not going to tell me a religious man would lead such a life.”

“I didn’t say he was religious in your terms. He is in his own way. What right have
you got to be intolerant of his religion, whatever it is? Just because he doesn’t
believe he’ll be struck by lightning if he eats a ham sandwich does that make him
a fiend, a criminal, an axe murderer?
You
try eating a ham sandwich sometime. See if you’re struck dead. Maybe Noel’s religion
is a little more enlightened than yours. It’s just a faint possibility, isn’t it?”

The father rested on his oars, breathing heavily, and looked up at her, his brow deeply
furrowed. “He loves you?”

“Yes.”

“He said so?”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to get married?”

“No.”

“You’re not?”

“Of course not. People in love don’t necessarily have to get married.”

“They don’t? What do they do, then?”

“They have a glorious time and enjoy each other’s company as long as it lasts. The
longer the better.”

“I see. They enjoy each other’s company.”

“Exactly. I enjoy Noel’s company more than I have anything in my life.”

“I believe you.” The father sighed, slid the oars into the water, and twisted the
bow of the boat toward the shore. “Time we went back.”

She sat stiff and angry, her thighs numb from the hard seat, and smoked another cigarette
while he pulled toward the shore. His head was down as he worked the oars, and the
sombrero hid his face. After a while the sombrero fell off and rolled in the muddy
bilge water. He rowed on, apparently not noticing the loss of the hat. The pink of
his scalp showed through the gray wavy hair at the top of his head. Marjorie picked
up the sombrero and shook dirty drops off the yellow straw. “Dad, your hat.”

He let go of the oars. They swung forward and rattled downward in the oarlocks until
stopped by the leather handles. He covered his eyes with one hand and leaned on a
knee.

“Dad—”

Tears spilled through his fingers and dripped into the sloshing water at his feet.
He made no sound.

“Oh, Papa, don’t! For God’s sake don’t cry, there’s nothing to cry about, I swear
to God Almighty there isn’t.” Her throat swelled. Dry sobs broke from her, sounding
like laughter. “Papa, please, don’t let’s have a crying spree out here on the lake,
people are out canoeing, they’ll see us.” She fought with all her will to keep her
eyes dry. “It’s so absurd, nothing’s happened to me—”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s all right, give me my hat.” He put the sombrero on backward
and drew his forearm across his eyes. “All right.” He pulled the oars up through the
locks, and rested them on his knees. His face was dry when he looked at her, and white.
“You say nothing has happened.”

“No, no, nothing.”

He blew out a long breath. “All right. That’s one thing.” Slowly he began to row again.

She said, “You don’t think much of me, do you?” The father looked at her with a suffering
face. “Mind you, as long as we’re being so frank, Dad, I’m not sure there’d be anything
wrong about it. You and Mom have inculcated me with your prejudices, and apparently
I’ve got them for good. Noel is too decent and fine a person to make me do anything
I don’t want to do, for whatever reason. We have the most marvelous time together
and it’s never been a problem.”

“Our prejudices.” The father nodded. “How long have you known him, a month?”

“Well, we met a year ago—but yes, a month, really.”

“Marjorie, I should have talked to you more, I know, I should have taken more interest
in you, I’ve been a neglectful father. The business, the business, the time slips
by—”

“I’m not complaining, Papa, for heaven’s sake. I’m all right—”

“I asked your mother over and over, is everything all right with Marjorie? I begged
her to go easy on you, to talk with you, not to insist on her own way all the time.
I told her a girl needs guidance, not to be pushed, pushed, pushed all the time. Marjorie,
your mother knows it, she can’t help herself. She says you’re stubborn and you shout
her down, the least thing she says, and it’s true, I’ve seen it. A girl needs her
mother. You’ve got to be tolerant. Both of you. You’ve got a better education than
her but she knows life, she’s very smart, even if you don’t like some of her ways.”

“I know all this, Papa, but—”

“Look, darling, I don’t want to fool you, this trip is your mother’s idea. But I beg
of you, do what she says. Go away from South Wind tomorrow. Take this trip.”

“You don’t trust me. It’s interesting to know.”

“Oh, my God in heaven, trust you? Don’t you know what an ignorant baby you are?” He
raised his voice for the first time in the harsh powerful tone she had often heard
him use in business talks on the telephone. It scared her a little. He glanced around
self-consciously at a red canoe sliding by not far away with two sunburned girls in
it. He said in a lower tone, “If you go away on the trip will he disappear, will he
marry somebody else? You’ll be back in September, you can see him all you want, if
you’re still interested in each other.”

Ordinarily the chance to travel out West by herself would have sent Marjorie wild
with joy. It was characteristic of her mother, she thought bitterly, to make the offer
with such a big black hook sticking nakedly out of the bait that it was impossible
for her to take it. “Well, Papa, the argument works both ways. If I don’t go West
till the spring will the Rockies disappear? I don’t want to leave South Wind. I’m
having the best time of my life, and I’ve learned more in a month here than I learned
in four years at Hunter.”

“Well, I don’t want you to learn too much. Is that plain enough for you?” His voice
was harsh again. He looked her straight in the face. “What’s the matter with you?
I’m over fifty, Marjorie, and you’re not ten years old, nobody’s getting fooled here.
At least talk straight, for God’s sake. Don’t you know what your situation is here,
what a risk you’re running? Your whole future is in it. You can break yourself in
pieces in a month, in a week—”

“Oh, those are just your damned old-fashioned ideas, yours and Mom’s! This isn’t a
melodrama, Papa, and Noel isn’t the villain with a big black mustache, and sex isn’t
so world-shaking as you think it is, and I wouldn’t break in pieces if I had an affair,
you’re living in a dreamworld, Papa! I’d be just the same as before, maybe a little
wiser and sadder. But I’m not going to, I tell you, I’m not going to, do you hear?
You can believe me or not, as you please. And I’m not going out West, either. You
can tell Mom to keep her seven hundred dollars.
I’m not going to leave South Wind
.”

The father bared his teeth as though in pain. “Marjorie, what have we done that was
so wrong? Where have we missed out? What’s happening to you?”

“Oh God, Papa, it’s just that it’s 1935 and we’re in the United States, that’s all.”
The tears were streaming down her face and her cheeks were dripping. “Don’t sound
so pathetic about me, please, I’m not a lost soul—Oh God, look at me, now I’m bawling.”
She dashed her hands across her face and smiled mechanically. “Please, Dad, let’s
drop it, shall we? We’ll all live. And hurry, I’m late for work.”

He pulled hard for the shore, his lower lip between his teeth, his thin white legs
braced against the floorboard, the sombrero flapping with each stroke.

At the end of the elaborate Sunday dinner in the dining hall, around two in the afternoon,
the musicians in their hot nest over the kitchen broke off a languid Victor Herbert
medley, clapped sombreros on their heads, threw garish serapes over their sweat-stained
shirts, and began a lively paso doble. Into the center of the dance floor there leaped
a tall figure in yellow, cracking a bull whip. It was Noel Airman, amazingly Mexican-looking
in sideburns, mustache, and brown paint; only the deep-set glittering blue eyes identified
him. His suit was trimmed, his boots studded with silver; he wore a silver-tasselled
sombrero and silver-worked pistols; a belt of bullets slanted across his chest. “Buenos
días, señoritas, señoras y señores!” Flashing a wild white-toothed grin, he lashed
out again with the whip, and women guests yelped as the end of it flicked near them.
With a laugh and a swift rattling announcement in Spanish, he disappeared. Half a
dozen couples in gaudy Mexican costumes came swirling out of the kitchen door, where
the waiters usually passed in and out with trays.

The last of the girls to emerge was Marjorie Morgenstern, almost asphyxiated by the
food smells and furnace heat of the kitchen. The dancers had been held up for ten
minutes between a stove and a steam table, waiting for the roast beef to be cleared
away in the dining hall. But they stamped lustily and shouted “Ole!” and the girls
threw roses at the guests with roguish sweaty smiles. Marjorie went through the fake
folk dance in a vertiginous stupor, stumbled off to the kitchen, stumbled on again
for the clamorously demanded encore and stamped some more, wondering when this bank
of grinning New York faces would stop swooping and whirling about her.

Then she sat with her parents at a table bordering the dance floor, mopping her brow.
The waiters rolled forward a scratched dusty upright piano. Noel came out of the kitchen,
cracking the whip. With another flood of Spanish, gesturing flamboyantly, he dropped
the whip on top of the piano, and began to play and sing Mexican songs.

Noel had originated the fiesta four years ago in his first summer as social director,
after six months of itinerant loafing in Mexico. He enjoyed it; his energetic preparations
in the past week had contrasted markedly with his bored workaday attitude toward the
revues. Greech granted him a good budget for costumes and decorations and put the
entire working force of the camp at his disposal, for the Mexican fiesta at South
Wind on the first Sunday in August was becoming almost as popular as the July 4 and
Labor Day weekends.

Marjorie forgot her resurgent headache, her tiredness, and the discomfort of her sweat-soaked
costume, listening to Noel sing. It was better, in a way, that his voice was untrained
and his breathing faulty. He really sounded like a Mexican. In the plaintive slow
songs the melancholy shaking of his head, the reedy quaver of his high notes, made
a melting effect that she loved. She did not applaud, but was dreamily grateful when
waves of handclapping kept him at the piano.

Her mother startled her by murmuring in the middle of a love song, “He’s wonderful.”
Marjorie looked at her. Mrs. Morgenstern was watching Noel with glistening eyes, smiling
slightly and tapping the table in a slow rhythm with one finger. “Why didn’t they
have more of this last night in the show instead of those stupid jokes?”

“He would be better,” said Mr. Morgenstern, “if you knew what the words meant. He
ought to sing in English.”

“Sh,” somebody said from the next table.

After several encores Noel broke into English to thank them; then he announced the
fiesta program. In the afternoon there would be folk dancing and singing on the lawn
and after that the bullfight. In the evening a Mexican supper would be served in the
open by torchlight, followed by a masked carnival and a display of fireworks over
the lake. He urged them to put on costumes, and to come to the social hall for free
sombreros, Spanish combs, mantillas, and shawls. Buzzes of laughter and excited talk
filled the dining hall as he cracked the whip once more, shouted “Adiós! Hasta la
fiesta!” and went bounding out the front door to a burst of music.