Marjorie Morningstar (53 page)

Rothmore puffed on his cigar, his lids heavy, staring at Marjorie. “Margie, there’s
damn little talent in the world, and when you see it, you want something to come of
it, that’s all. I’ve seen a lot of young men come and go. Noel’s got something, and
he’s a charming low-life somehow, and if he could be straightened out, why, he’d be
an asset to Paramount, and to me. But at the present rate—”

“You see the picture, I trust,” Noel said to Marjorie. “Sam’s joined the Save-Noel-from-Himself
Club.”

Rothmore looked at Noel, shook his head, and signalled for the check. “Sometimes I
wonder,” he muttered.

He tried to persuade them to come into his limousine, saying that they could have
the car and chauffeur for the evening after dropping him at his home. But Noel wouldn’t
hear of it. The old man lumbered into the long black car. Just as the chauffeur was
about to close the door Rothmore jammed his cigar in his teeth, leaned forward, and
said to Noel, “Your report on the
Redbook
serial was all right. I phoned it out to the Coast. They’ve put in a bid. Twelve
thousand.”

Noel’s rather glum look vanished in an eager grin. “Why didn’t you say so a little
sooner, you old sadist?”

“Your other two reports weren’t bad, but those I want to think about a bit more. You’re
learning slowly, slowly.” He glanced from Marjorie to Noel, and the tough downward
lines around his mouth softened in a smile of grudging approval. “Maybe you’ll be
all right. Good night. Good night, Margie.”

When Mrs. Morgenstern first suggested inviting Noel and his parents to the family’s
Passover dinner, the seder, Marjorie thought it was an appalling idea. On reflection,
however, she decided that there was some hard good sense in it.

With Noel doing well at Paramount, with their relationship becoming each week more
intimate and hopeful, it did seem to her that the time had come for his parents and
her own to confront each other. She also thought Noel had better see the Family and
glimpse her religious background. At fourteen and fifteen she had hated seders, bar-mitzvas,
and all the rest, and she had taken pleasure in shocking her parents with atheistic
talk. In recent years, however, she had found the seder oddly appealing, and she wanted
to see how he would react. The complex rituals and symbols of the Passover feast—the
matzo, the horseradish, the four cups of wine, the pounded nuts and apples, the hard-boiled
eggs in salt water, the great goblet of wine for Elijah—these things, with the old
family songs and the annual jokes at the same points in the Hebrew service, had attractive
bitter-sweet nostalgia for her. It was fun in a way, too, to see the Family once a
year, and find out which of the cousins had married, and see the new babies, and marvel
at the rapid growth of the old babies. There was a risk, of course, that Noel and
his parents would be dismayed and put off by the seder; but she didn’t think it was
much of a risk, and anyway she was prepared to take it.

She was rather afraid to bring the subject up with Noel. But to her astonishment he
agreed very readily to come. He knew nothing whatever about seders, except that matzo
was eaten; but when she described the ceremonies to him he said, “Why, it sounds very
colorful and alive. My father will undoubtedly make a bloody ass of himself, as usual,
but that might prove amusing, too.”

“I should warn you that all the relatives from miles around get together at this thing,
and the children, and the grandchildren, and it’s a pretty noisy mess.”

“Oh.” Noel looked thoughtful, then he brightened. “Well, don’t you think that may
be a good thing? I may well go unnoticed in the crush. Of course, all your relatives
will gossip about us, but if you don’t mind I don’t.”

“Honestly, Noel, you’re a chameleon. If there was ever anything I dreaded, it was
mentioning this thing to you. And here you are, being just as nice as pie about it.”

“Darling, you really do me an injustice. I have a heart of gold. My only faults are
that I’m totally selfish and immoral. Tell your mother it’s okay—my folks and all.”

He arrived late. The seder guests were already crowded in the smoky living room, with
children darting between their legs and around the furniture, laughing and squealing.
Four babies in baskets and portable cribs were howling in Marjorie’s bedroom, and
their young mothers, wild-haired and with blouses coming out of their skirts, were
rushing to and fro through the foyer, brandishing bottles, diapers, pots, and rattles.
Noel grinned at Marjorie, cocking his ear to the noise, as he slipped out of his coat.
She said, “Well, didn’t I warn you?”

“Why, it sounds very exuberant. My father here?”

“Yes, and your mother, and they’re both in evening clothes. They go from here to a
Democratic banquet.”

The doorbell rang, and Marjorie’s cousins, Morris and Mildred Sapersteen, came in
with their son, Neville. Marjorie was amazed to see how the child had grown. She remembered
him as a particularly loud-bawling blond infant, but he was now a large redheaded
boy. “Gosh, how old is Neville, anyway?” she said to the father, who was carrying
a black suitcase. Neville’s mother began taking off his coat, which was no simple
thing to do, since he was rearing and tearing to get at the children in the living
room, shouting, “Hi, Suzy Capoozy! Hi, Walter Capalter!”

“He’s five, just turned five,” Morris Sapersteen said. He was Uncle Shmulka’s oldest
son, a writer of advertising copy, a sad-faced young man not much bigger than his
father. He set down the suitcase with a sigh. “Gosh, you’d never believe how heavy
those things can be.”

“What have you got there?” Marjorie said.

“Airplanes.”

“Airplanes?”

“Forty-seven airplanes. Neville won’t go anywhere without them.”

Neville, disentangling his arms from the sleeves of his coat, was off into the living
room like a rocket. Marjorie introduced Noel to the Sapersteens. Morris’s wife, Mildred,
a thin freckled girl with very large front teeth, and black straight hair cut like
an inverted bowl, was a piano teacher of sorts, and sometimes played at family gatherings.
She looked very tired.

Morris opened the suitcase. It was really crammed to the top with toy airplanes of
every shape, color, and size, all tumbled in a tangle of wheels and wings. “Where
can I put this, Margie? Just so he can get at them when he feels the need for them.
I don’t want it to be in the way—”

Marjorie indicated a corner in the hallway. “It’s a nuisance,” Mildred Sapersteen
said, “but we’ve tried taking him places without them, and it sets up all kinds of
traumas. The planes have become a sort of security symbol for him.”

Noel said gravely, “A substitute for the father image, would you say?”

“Well possibly,” Mildred said, “but we think it’s a compensatory mechanism for a rather
small sex organ. It’s well within the normal range, but—Morris, leave the lid up,
he goes into a frenzy if he sees it down—”

“I’m leaving it up, I’m leaving it up,” Morris said. “I say it’s a surrogate for masturbation,
myself, but whatever it is, he won’t go anywhere without these damn planes, that’s
for sure. Whew! There we are.” He stood and peered into the clamorous living room.
“Well, I see the panic is on. Let’s go, Mildred. Where is he, anyway?”

When they were out of sight Noel collapsed against the closet door, shaking with laughter.
“That’s right,” Marjorie muttered, “laugh at my crazy cousins—”

“Crazy!” Noel gasped. “Honey, nearly every young married couple I know talks that
way. I bait them for hours sometimes, and they never tumble. Morris, leave the lid
up, or he’ll get a trauma—” He choked, his shoulders quivering. “Now you know why
I won’t get married…. Forty-seven airplanes—”

Mrs. Morgenstern, flushed, and with an apron over a fine new purple dress, poked her
head into the foyer. “What are you two billing and cooing about in a corner? We’re
starting the seder. Come in.”

The flower-festooned glittering table, extended with all its leaves and eked out with
a card table, stretched from the windows to the far wall of the long narrow dining
room, under a blaze of bright white electric bulbs. An auxiliary table had been improvised
in the living room, visible through the opened French doors, and the children were
shepherded out there by Mildred Sapersteen, who volunteered to stay with them, so
as to keep an eye on Neville. The children objected raucously to being steered away
from the adults’ table, and Neville, in the course of his objections, put his foot
through a pane in the French doors. But the glass was cleared away, the children pacified
with a round of Pepsi-Cola; and against a background of rich lively noise, mingled
with the quarrelsome chattering of the children and the muffled but powerful howls
of the babies in the bedrooms, the seder began.

The liveliness did not extend to the table of the adults. Here, as the ceremonies
proceeded, there gradually fell a strained queer quiet, unlike the atmosphere of other
years. The little people of the Family, old gray tailors, candy-store keepers, mechanics,
and their wives, were terrorized by the presence of a judge and his lady; and their
grown-up sons and daughters, usually a joking and irreverent band of ordinary young
Americans, wore awkward company airs. The fact that the Ehrmanns were in evening clothes
did not help matters. Tiny Uncle Shmulka, the laundry sorter, jammed in his cheap
frayed brown suit against the resplendent judge, kept trying in vain to shrink away,
and not contaminate the great man with the rub of poverty. Seth, too, sat clumsy and
glum beside Mr. Morgenstern, supporting his father’s opening chants over the wine
and the matzo with his uncertain baritone voice, and shooting occasional suspicious
looks at Noel.

Noel, though his behavior was faultless, seemed to make the Family even more uneasy
than his parents did. A chill radiated from him, causing much of the lameness of the
singing, the stumbling of the Hebrew responses, and the embarrassed side glances among
the relatives. The skullcap perched on his thick blond hair somehow looked as incongruous
as it would have on an animal’s head. His bearing was sober, his comments courteous;
Marjorie could not accuse him of deliberately trying to appear out of place and trapped.
Nor was there anything intentionally offensive in the way he kept looking around.
But the effect was to make the Family, including Marjorie, feel increasingly like
painted Africans performing a voodoo rite. Mrs. Morgenstern didn’t improve things
by trying to explain the ceremonies to Noel. She would get all tangled up in theology,
and dead silence would drop over the table while she painfully bumbled her way through;
and Noel all the while would nod brightly, saying that it was really terribly interesting.
This happened over and over.

Worst of all, however, was the absence of the Uncle.

Until this year, Marjorie had not realized how central Samson-Aaron had been to the
seder. Her father always had sat at the head of the table, as he sat now, conducting
the service out of the beautifully illustrated Hagada printed in England. Samson-Aaron
had seemed merely the funmaker, the heckler, of the feast. Now Marjorie saw that he
had been nothing less than the soul of it; and he was gone. He had warmed the air.
Single-handed, he had dispelled the stiffness of a year’s separation, and the frost
of all the permanent quarrels, of all the sad unchangeable differences in income.
His bubbling jokes, his bellowing of the songs, his pounding of the rhythms with fist
and foot, his cavorting, his fabulous eating and drinking, had gradually wakened the
spirits of the Family, brought the old ties of blood to life, and welded the scattered
estranged group, at least for the evening, into something like the close-knit tribal
Family of the old country. Without him, the seder was but a moribund semblance; and
it was enacted with less and less heart as the evening went on, under the fixed smiles
of Judge and Mrs. Ehrmann, and the cool observant eyes of their son.

If anyone promised to save the seder as an institution, it was Neville Sapersteen.
He was giving the occasion what liveliness it had. The children’s table was a vortex
of noise and motion, all of it churning around Neville. Snatching the other children’s
Pepsi-Cola, breaking matzos over their heads, drinking off the salt water, throwing
plates, forks, pepper, flowers, hard-boiled eggs, Neville was exhibiting enough vivacity
for ten children. His mother stayed one step behind him, as it were, catching the
plates before they broke, putting back the flowers, wiping up the wine, comforting
the other children while Neville drank their Pepsi-Cola, and persuading them not to
break matzos over Neville’s head, on the grounds that revenge was an unworthy motive.
Marjorie’s back was to the living room, so that she missed much of the byplay; but
at every sudden burst of noise she would look around fearfully, to make sure that
nothing jagged or wet was sailing her way.

Matters broke out of control very suddenly in the living room, just as Mr. Morgenstern
was putting down the three wrapped matzos after reciting
This bread of affliction
. There was an explosion of laughter and yammering, with Neville’s voice rising in
infuriated soprano shrieks over the din. His mother yelled, “Morris, Morris, come
quick! The airplanes! They’re into the airplanes!” While Morris struggled frantically
to get out of the seat where he was wedged between two fat aunts, half a dozen children
came giggling and shrieking into the dining room, swooping toy airplanes in their
hands and making noises like airplane motors—”
Braah! Braah!
” After them charged Neville, his face dark purple, waving his fists and uttering
hideous choked sounds. The children dived under the table and under chairs; they flew
between the legs of their pursuing parents, in and out of the clutching arms of Mildred
and Morris Sapersteen, into the bedrooms and round and round the living room, all
the time roaring “Braah! Braah!” Neville did a remarkable simulation of running in
fourteen directions at once, whimpering, screeching, and snapping his teeth. The seder
stopped dead for ten minutes, while all the parents joined the chase. The airplanes
were at last rounded up, and the children herded back to their chairs; it was a difficult
business, because they kept snatching new airplanes from the suitcase after being
deprived of the ones they had, and galloping around again.