Marjorie Morningstar (41 page)

“Doctor, how is he? What is it? What can we do?” Marjorie said.

The doctor looked at her, and the absorbed expression of a mechanic at his trade passed
from his face. He was a staring fat young man. “Marjorie, it’s very bad.”

With a throb of astonishment, she said, “Is he dead?”

“I can try a shot of adrenalin directly in his heart. He has no heart action, you
see.”

“Doctor, do whatever you can, please.” She was speaking calmly, and she was aware
of being the center of the sombre circle, the dramatic figure in the scene. She was
also beginning to feel a ghastly nauseous dread.

He set about the injection. The tension was out of his movements. Marjorie turned
away as the waiters rolled the Uncle over and bared his chest. She covered her eyes
and slumped against Noel. He held her with one stiff arm.

She heard Greech say, “Is there anything else we can do, Doctor? Shall we phone the
Tetersville Hospital? They’ll do anything I say—”

“Well, if he should come out of it he’d need an oxygen tent at the least, he’d need—I
think it’s pretty bad. I can tell better in a minute.”

“Meantime we can call,” Greech said, “and tell them to get ready.”

“All right, Mr. Greech,” the doctor said.

Greech told one of the girls to telephone the hospital.

“Marjorie,” the doctor said. She looked at him. He was getting up from beside the
Uncle, replacing the hypodermic in his bag. “Has he been complaining of pains in the
chest? Dizziness? Any history of heart trouble?”

She answered a series of questions dully. The Uncle lay as before, wet and relaxed
on the grass. She was beginning to understand that he must be dead, after all.

“He was very thirsty. That was almost the last thing he said. He was terribly thirsty,”
Marjorie said.

The doctor looked at Greech. He knelt and examined the Uncle again. He stood and took
off the stethoscope. “Marjorie, I’m sorry, your uncle is dead. By all odds it was
a heart attack. He didn’t drown.”

She nodded. “I see. Thank you, Doctor.” She said to Noel, “I’m afraid I have a lot
of telephoning to do.” Then she looked again at the body of the Uncle. Tears filled
her stinging dry eyes. With a feeling that it was a melodramatic thing to do, but
unable to stop herself, she fell beside the Uncle and threw her arms around his chest.
“Uncle, Uncle, oh God, oh my God. Samson-Aaron is gone. What happened, Doctor? How
did it happen?”

The doctor looked down at her, and she was surprised to see that he was crying. “Margie,
I don’t know. Nobody will ever know. He’s the only one who could have told us, Margie,
don’t you see? And he never will.” She peered up at him, tears rolling down her face,
her arms still around the Uncle. The doctor said, “Maybe he—he could have felt the
attack coming on when he was crossing the lawn, don’t you see, and sat on the edge
of the fountain to catch his breath. Or maybe, if you say he was so thirsty, maybe
he tried to take a drink in his palm and got dizzy and toppled in. We can’t tell,
don’t you see? Once he’d fallen in, for whatever reason, there’d be fright, panic,
violent agitation—he must have died in seconds, or he could have pulled himself out.
He was a strong man. That’s a comfort, Marjorie. It was only seconds, whatever it
was. He never really knew. He was alive, and then he was dead—”

“In the fountain. Oh God, in the fountain,” Marjorie said, and she bowed her head
on the Uncle’s chest, on the cool skin and the wet curly hair, and sobbed.

The needle hardly stung. The doctor promised her that the sedative would not put her
to sleep, and it did not. After a few minutes a strange warm loose feeling trickled
into her arms and legs. Her trembling died away. Noel was sitting at the foot of the
bed, watching her, smoking. “Let me have a cigarette,” she said. She sat up and held
it to the match. “I’m sorry.”

“Good God,” Noel said, “you’ve been remarkable, don’t apologize. This thing is hell.”

“Where have they put him?”

“He’s here in the infirmary.”

“Well, I want to see him. Then I have to phone.”

“Look, why don’t you lie down for a while? The phoning can be done for you. It’ll
be better that way.”

“No. Let’s go.” She stood, straightening her wrinkled wet dress.

The long sheeted figure on the bed looked like something in a movie. Greech stood
beside the doctor, who sat by the dead man, rapidly scrawling with a fountain pen
on a long printed form. The yellow plasterboard room was lit by one white bulb hanging
on a black cord. It had the usual strong medicine smell, and there was another smell
completely new to Marjorie, a rather pleasant one, yet scary because she believed
this was what the books called the smell of death. The doctor glanced up at her. She
said, “I’d like to see him.”

“It isn’t a good idea, Margie,” Greech said.

“It’s all right,” the doctor said, standing and pulling back the edge of the sheet.

Now Marjorie saw that the Uncle had died. His face was not a living face. It was smiling
and greenish. His hands rested loosely on each other on the front of the wet Palm
Beach suit, and the many open cuts were not red but nearer purple. In a powerful momentary
hallucination she heard his voice, as though he were alive. The voice said, “
No dishes to vash
.” She shook her head and said to the doctor, “He’s dead.”

“Oh yes,” the doctor said sadly. “He’s dead.”

She remembered a fragment of her religious training. She took one rough cool hand
of the body in hers and said in Hebrew, “
Hear O Israel, the Lord Our God is One God
.” She turned to the others, still holding the hand. “That’s the last thing you’re
supposed to say when you die. I don’t suppose he had a chance to say it.” She put
the hand back, and covered the Uncle with the sheet.

Greech was wiping his eyes. “Marjorie, anything I can do for you—”

“Thanks, Mr. Greech, right now I have to call my mother.”

Noel went with her to the camp office. The loud-ticking wall clock read three-forty.
It took the sleepy country operators fifteen minutes to get through to her mother.
She sat with Noel by the light of one desk lamp, smoking, talking about a new novel
he had loaned her. The warmth and calm of the sedative possessed her body. She felt
quite equal to the ordeal of the next day or two. She thought over the dresses in
her closet back home to select the darkest and plainest for the funeral.

Her mother’s voice sounded shrill and scared, “Yes, yes, operator—I tell you this
is Mrs. Morgenstern, hello, hello, who’s calling me, who is it?”

“Mom, hello, it’s me.”

“Marjorie! Hello, Marjorie! What is it, darling, for heaven’s sake, four o’clock in
the morning?”

“Mom, I’m sorry, I hate to tell you, it’s the Uncle.”

“What?”

“It’s the Uncle, Mom.”

There was a pause. Then, a hoarse cold tone, “How bad is it?”

“It’s over, Mom.”

She heard a gasp, and a sob. Then, crying, Mrs. Morgenstern said in Hebrew, “
Blessed be the true Judge
.” After another pause, “What was it? What happened?”

“Heart.”

“Heart?”

“Yes.”

“When? How? My God.”

“Just now, Mom. It just happened. Mom, come. Come here.”

“Did you call Geoffrey?”

“I don’t know his number.”

“I’ll call Geoffrey. I’ll call the family. How are you? Are you all right? My God,
Samson-Aaron! I told him—Samson-Aaron—Marjorie, are you all right?”

“I’m all right.”

“Marjorie, don’t let them touch him or do anything, do you hear? Nothing. Sit by him.
We’ll have to take him home.”

“All right, Mom. I won’t let them do anything.”

“That’s right, nothing. We’ll be there in a couple of hours.
Samson-Aaron!
Goodbye, Marjorie, I’ll call Geoffrey.”

Marjorie hung up, feeling with some shame that the conversation had been too trivial,
too matter-of-fact, for the awful grandeur of the subject, the death of Samson-Aaron.
It had been shorter than many telephone talks with her mother about having dinner
at a friend’s home.

“How did she take it?” Noel said. “sounded all right at this end.”

“You don’t have to worry about my mother. I have to go sit with him, she says. Let
me have another cigarette, please.” Noel followed her outside. She was quite uninterested
in Noel now, except as an intelligent acquaintance, useful to have at hand until her
mother arrived and took over the responsibility. She was abstractedly aware that they
had been making love on the terrace when Samson-Aaron had fallen in the fountain and
died. But it was something that had happened on the other side of a break in time.
She was numb to all the past before the death of Samson-Aaron. The present was the
death, and only the death. A few people were clustered chattering at the fountain,
and a few more moved shadowily here and there on the lawn. When they saw her they
dropped their voices and stared, and murmured to each other. The darkness, the moonlight,
the sweet odor of mountain laurel in the breeze off the lake, were all exactly as
they had been on twenty other nights when she had walked very late with Noel across
the lawn. The strangest part of this new side of time was how unchanged everything
was. The death of the Uncle made no more difference in the natural world than the
death of a slapped mosquito.

In the one lamplit room of the dark infirmary, the death smell was now pervasive.
The camp nurse sat beside the sheeted form, her face creased with sleep, her eyes
puffy, her uniform partly unbuttoned. A bed lamp threw an amber glow on part of the
sheet, leaving the rest in shadow. The nurse put her magazine aside guiltily. “Marjorie,
I’m terribly sorry about your uncle—”

“Thanks, I’ll sit with him now.”

“But the doctor told me to.”

“No, I will.”

The nurse looked at Noel, obviously glad of the chance to be rid of the assignment.
“Well, I don’t want to interfere with the wishes of a relative. But it is a strain—”

“She’s all right,” Noel said.

“I’ll be in the doctor’s office,” said the nurse, escaping, “if there’s anything you
want.”

“All right.” Marjorie sat in the chair.

Noel whispered, “I’ll get a chair and sit with you.”

“You don’t have to, Noel.” She spoke in a natural offhand way. “Why don’t you get
some sleep? You must be absolutely dead, after that fiesta and all. Gosh, it seems
long ago, doesn’t it? And it’s only been a few hours.”

Noel glanced uneasily at the body. “I can’t leave you alone in here.”

“Don’t you understand?” she said wearily. “It’s over. It’s just that my mother wants
me to be sure they don’t do anything to him that isn’t according to our religion.”

Noel took her hand and pressed it to his lips and then against his cheek. Her own
was limp and warmly numb. The gesture made no impression on her. He stared at her
face, and went out.

She resisted a temptation to lift the sheet. At this point, she thought, it would
be morbid thrill-seeking; Samson-Aaron was dead, and he was entitled to the privacy
of being dead. Marjorie was conscious that, for all the horror and the dread, the
death was a marvelously exciting and dramatic experience; she felt, with a little
shame, that she was taking too much pleasure in it, despite her real grief and pain.
It was all too complex and new for her, and not in the least what she had ever expected
of a death. It was, in a strange wretched way, fun; this was true, though she would
never be able to explain it, nor would she even dare to mention it to anybody for
the rest of her life. Wherever Samson-Aaron was—she felt that his spirit was somewhere
around, not very far from his vacated body—he would not be angry with her for her
queer and undignified reaction. Maybe it was due to the sedative; maybe she was no
longer responsible for her thoughts.

Her nerves suddenly tightened, and she felt scared and sick. She picked up the magazine
and flung it open in her lap.

“This won’t work, Marjorie.” Greech stood in the doorway, slapping his flashlight
on his palm. “Somebody else has got to do this, not you. Where’s the nurse? I woke
her up myself—”

She explained about her mother’s instructions.

“That’s all right,” Greech said. “I’ll give orders that nothing’s to be done till
your mother comes.”

“I’d better be sure, Mr. Greech. I’d never forgive myself if—Really, I don’t mind—”

“Get out of that chair,” Greech said. Marjorie automatically obeyed, dropping the
magazine. Greech sat, and put the flashlight on the bed table. “Nobody has done anything
on these grounds without my permission in fifteen years, and nobody ever will. That
means constables or anybody else. I swear that. I’ll sit with him till your mother
comes. Now do exactly as I say. Get the nurse. Both of you go into one of these empty
rooms, and you lie down.”

She hesitated, glanced once more at the covered dead Uncle, and left him with the
little fat man in white knee pants.

But then it was all a dream, after all, because there was Samson-Aaron in lavender
tights out on the grass in the sunlight in the middle of the cheering circle of guests
on yellow chairs, capering with the bull, and her mother was saying to her, “What
was all that foolishness about Samson-Aaron being sick or dead or what? He’s perfectly
fine.”

“Mom, it must have been a dream, but honestly it was so real, so vivid, I couldn’t
help telephoning you—”

A hand was laid on her shoulder. She turned her head to look up, and all her nerves
shrank with horror. Marsha stood behind her, with streaming greasy hair, wild eyes,
and a pustular face. She held a sharp kitchen knife in her hand, and she plunged it
straight at Marjorie’s throat, giggling.

Marjorie forced her eyes open. The hand was her mother’s. The window behind her was
a dim rainy daylight blue. Mrs. Morgenstern said, “I’m sorry, darling, you’d better
get up. Geoffrey just came.”

“Oh my Lord, did I fall asleep? What time is it?” She sat up, throwing aside the rough
brown blanket, her spine still crawling from the nightmare, the recollection of the
death flooding in on her.