Marjorie Morningstar (61 page)

She stopped because he caught her wrists in a bony cold very painful grasp. He said
gruffly, “I love you. Don’t you understand, you little torturer? You’ve executed the
vengeance of your non-existent God on me. I’ve never loved or wanted any girl in my
life as I do you. But I’m not going to commit suicide to have you, nor put myself
in a booby hatch, nor turn myself into a nice tame stepson of Sam Rothmore. You’re
an absolute infant. You don’t know what you’ve done to me. You’ve damn near destroyed
me. I ache with pleasure right now, just touching your skin. What does it mean to
you? Nothing. You’re ten years away from understanding passion, and nothing can hurry
you into fathoming it, absolutely nothing. It’ll all come in time. Your passion will
force itself up out of the stony soil of your Jewish prejudices, like a tree, and
some unknown dolt of a steady-earning doctor or lawyer will pluck the fruit. And I’ll
be old or dead, or for all I know rich and famous, as you say, but I’ll never never
have Marjorie Morgenstern, and she’s all I want.”

She was crying, and she could see Mrs. Kleinschmidt watching them from the barroom,
but she didn’t care. “Why did you ever come back to me? It was all over after South
Wind. Why are you whining? You know you started it all up again. You did it.”

“Sure I did. And I made the one frightful blunder that’s all but driven me insane.
I resolved to play the game by your asinine rules—to be faithful to you, can you imagine
that? Not to touch a girl. That’s been at the root of this whole series of aberrations.
I’ve been in a state of unnatural tension for months. It’s served to halo you with
a ridiculous glamor, and it’s made all kinds of idiotic behavior seem normal and even
spectacularly clever, like going to work for Rothmore. It’s been nothing but collegiate
sex hunger, turning a grown man inside out. I doubt I’d have had the courage to this
moment to call it quits with you if Imogene hadn’t come along and broken that spell.
Now at least I can think and analyze without a rosy haze of sex yearning to discolor
all the values—What’s the matter? What are you staring at?” He pushed her down as
she started to rise stiffly, like a machine. “Good Lord, don’t tell me you believed
Imogene! Don’t tell me you really thought for five seconds that I’ve been sleeping
upstairs!”

“I did—I did—”

He made a despairing sound. “I thought you were being really subtle, pretending to
ignore it, letting me sweat. Marjorie, how childish and unrealistic can you be? Imogene
and I have been on a racketing sex binge for days. I’ve never been through anything
like it. She’s learned things in Oklahoma that I—”

His teeth felt hard and sharp against her palm as she slapped him with all her strength.
She stood. “I’m in love with you, you rotten tramp,” she said. “That’s why I believed
her. Get your feet out of my way. I’m going home.”

He was looking at her with a lopsided grin as she slipped past him. “Fair enough.
Goodbye, my love.”

She turned on him. “You’re a disgrace. To your father, to yourself, to the Jews, to
anybody who has any part in you. I’ll never stop thanking God for being free of you.
Even if you become the most famous man in the world. Goodbye, Noel.”

He slumped grinning on the bench, dishevelled, dingy, looking as desirable as ever.
Her hands wanted to touch his hair. She ran out of the saloon. It had begun to snow,
in a queer bluish twilight. With snow-flakes whirling about her, stinging her hot
cheeks and making her eyes blink, she ran two blocks to the subway. She rode uptown
for fifteen minutes before realizing, when a colored woman came into the car with
snow clinging to her rabbit fur collar, that it was strange to be having snow in April.

Noel’s first letter, lying at the door in the morning mail a couple of weeks later,
gave her a frightening throb of gladness.

She had been dragging through the days, waking to mental misery, walking with it,
and lying down with it, seeing him in crowds and in magazine illustrations, picturing
him as the hero in the novels from the lending library; telling herself she was well
out of it, and believing it, and yet no less miserable for this belief. She hurried
with the letter into her bedroom, like a cat with a stolen fish head; closed the door,
and stood staring at the envelope, passing her fingers over the thin air-mail paper
and the gaudy green and yellow Mexican stamp. Then she read it. It was a long breezy
typewritten account of his automobile trip, with enthusiastic descriptions of Mexican
scenery and food. She skipped through the paragraphs, searching for a line about herself
and himself. But there was nothing. It was headed “Hi, darling,” and signed “Love,
Noel.” She flung the letter on the bed. Later she read it over and over. She tore
it up after a few days without having answered it or noted his address in Mexico City;
nevertheless, she knew the address.

For weeks thereafter she kept watching the mail. She knew it was irrational to hope
for mail from him without answering his letter, but her conduct had little to do with
logic.

She haunted the producers’ offices and the drugstore more assiduously than ever, and
with as little result as ever. But she had learned by now that discouragement was
the bread of Broadway, and she kept at her rounds; if nothing else, the pain of being
ignored by the theatre distracted her from the pain of having been dropped by Noel.

During this time Marjorie’s evenings filled with dates, once the “kids” (as the young
unemployed actors and actresses at the drugstore called each other) found out that
she was free. She tried necking once or twice, to get her mind off Noel, but it was
disheartening flat foolishness, and she gave it up. She went docilely to temple dances,
crowding her date calendar still further with young lawyers, businessmen, and doctors.
The contrast between her temple friends and the “kids” made for what slight amusement
she could find in the days. Marjorie didn’t encourage any of them. She accepted their
invitations calmly, and dined or danced with them placidly, and yielded a kiss at
her door, after some formal reluctance, in a way that made it seem an old-fashioned
courtesy.

Oddly enough, the one person among all her new dates who woke a stir of interest in
her was a man named Dr. Morris Shapiro. She met him at a Zionist lecture to which
she was more or less dragged by her parents. When he was introduced to her, she inadvertently
burst out laughing on hearing the name. Then to cover her embarrassment at this startling
rudeness, she went out of her way to be pleasant to him; and he soon was taking her
out every week or so. He turned out to be not a bad fellow, about thirty-two, with
an excellent sense of humor and a sharp mind. After a while she began to enjoy his
company, in a fashion, and to overlook his scanty hair, black-ringed eyes, and puffy
pallor. He was obviously and frankly smitten with her. Eventually she told him why
she had laughed at him at their first meeting; he pleased her by being genuinely amused.
He said that he was grateful to Noel for his clairvoyance, and stood ready to fulfill
Marjorie’s destiny any time she said the word.

“I might believe you were my destiny if your name were Max,” Marjorie answered. “That’s
the big discrepancy.”

“The importance of being Max,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me? I’ll go to court
and get it changed, if that’s all you want.”

She laughed at him.

Noel’s second letter came when she had almost given up looking at the mail. There
it was at last, the bright Mexican stamp poking through the usual trash of bills,
charity requests, and circulars. It was another brisk typewritten travelogue. There
was one faint personal touch in the last line: “Be civilized and write a guy a postcard,
won’t you? Don’t be melodramatic. Nobody loves me. Noel.”

She didn’t tear up this one.

Noel’s song had been published, and it was a great success; she was hearing it at
night clubs and restaurants and on the radio. Inevitably, whenever the tune started
up, she would see Noel at the piano in Sam Rothmore’s inner office, with his long
blond hair falling on his forehead, the blue eyes blazing. She fought off the temptation
to write him for two weeks. Late one night, coming home from an evening of dancing
with Morris Shapiro, in a lively mood (she had landed a summer-stock job that day),
with the strains of
Old Moon Face
running in her head, she sat at her desk and dashed off this note:

In signing it, she paused a long time. At last she wrote
Sincerely
; but once on paper, it looked too stiff and had a hint of hurt pride in it. So she
recopied the second sheet of the letter, just to be able to sign it
Best
.

She left the letter on the desk and went to bed. In the morning she hesitated over
mailing it. She knew that the only sensible course was to throw away Noel’s letters,
and never write to him. But the digs about Dr. Shapiro seemed pretty neat, even by
daylight. She sent the letter.

The same day a printed invitation to Wally Wronken’s college graduation exercises
came in the mail, together with a note on scratch-pad paper:
I’m not asking you to be my date. Just come. Please
.

Slightly curious to see poor Wally in his cap and gown, she went to the commencement.
To her surprise, he was the salutatorian, and he received a minor prize for French
studies. On the platform he looked pallid, terribly earnest, and not nearly as young
as before. After the exercises she went up to him, as his sister was unfolding a small
Kodak, and shook his hand. The parents and sister looked amazed. “I was very proud
of you, Wally. I’m sure your family was, too.”

Wally said, “Ruth, take a picture of me and Margie. Just one, Marge. All right?” Before
she could say anything he had her by the waist, and was turning her toward the camera.
The sister, with a grudging glance, snapped the picture. “There, you’re compromised
forever,” Wally said.

“Send me a print. I’ll probably show it proudly to my grandchildren,” Marjorie said.

The print came in the mail just before she went to Sleepy Hollow. On the back was
written,
World renowned actress, just before her rise to fame. Exhaustive research fails to
reveal identity of strange man in cap and gown with glasses and long nose
. She laughed and dropped it in the rosewood box where she kept favored souvenirs.
She meant to write a note thanking him, but it slipped her mind.

About the middle of June, she received a mimeographed instruction pamphlet from the
Rip Van Winkle Theatre which contained an unpleasant surprise. There was a page and
a half of cloudy verbiage on the subject of money, but what it boiled down to was
that Marjorie had to pay fifteen dollars a week for room and board. At the end of
the summer, if box-office receipts were normal, all this subsistence money would be
paid back to her, with a bonus, the size of which would depend on work performed.
Katharine Hepburn, the pamphlet pointed out, had earned a bonus of seven hundred dollars,
when she was utterly unknown.

Marjorie was appalled at having to ask her parents for fifteen dollars a week. But
somehow she choked it out at dinner that night. The father and mother looked grave;
then Mr. Morgenstern, with one of his infrequent wistful smiles, reached over and
patted Marjorie’s hand. “My God, don’t look so guilty. It won’t kill us.”

“Oh, I feel so useless, Pop, such an overgrown parasite—”

“It’ll be all right.”

“I’ll earn it all back, I swear I will. I’ll bring back a bonus.”

“Say, you’ll probably bring back seven hundred dollars, like Katharine Hepburn.”

“If she lasts out the summer,” said Mrs. Morgenstern.

So Marjorie went off to the Rip Van Winkle Theatre. Six weeks later, on an extremely
muggy August afternoon, she appeared bag and baggage at the Morgenstern apartment,
looking flushed, tired, and dirty. She vanished into her room with hardly a word of
greeting to her mother. At the dinner table she showed up fresh and elegant, but full
of mysterious wrath, and coughing violently from time to time. Her answers to questions
about her work at the summer theatre and her reasons for coming home were short and
uninformative. She kept up this lowering silence for a couple of days, and spent most
of the time on her bed in a housecoat, reading and coughing. The cough gradually improved,
but her mood didn’t seem to.