Marjorie Morningstar (8 page)

It seemed to go to her mother’s head too. Mrs. Morgenstern took her on a round of
Manhattan shops and bought her a closetful of expensive new clothes. When the father
objected to the bills, which were far beyond their means, Mrs. Morgenstern simply
said, “A girl of seventeen can’t go around in rags.” Marjorie had been arguing for
two years that girls of fifteen and sixteen couldn’t go around in rags (the rags in
question being a quite presentable middle-priced wardrobe) but her mother had been
deaf to the doctrine until now. Marjorie saw in her conversion a crafty plan to trap
Sandy Goldstone, so her gratitude for the clothes was a bit tainted by cynicism. But
she did the mother an injustice. Mrs. Morgenstern probably hoped to see her some day
catch the department store heir, or a prize like him. Mainly, however, she was carried
away by her daughter’s flowering beauty—the girl seemed to grow prettier every week
in the sunshine of success—and by the mood of springtime, and by the parade of handsome
well-dressed boys gathering in Marjorie’s wake. Satiric though the mother’s attitude
was toward Marjorie, her daughter really rather dazzled her. At seventeen Rose Kupperberg
had been a Yiddish-speaking immigrant girl toiling in a dirty Brooklyn sweatshop,
dressed in real rags. As she watched her daughter burst into bloom on Central Park
West, her own lonely miserable adolescence came back to her, and by contrast it seemed
to her that Marjorie was living the life of a fairy-tale princess. She envied her,
and admired her, and was a bit afraid of her, and drew deep vicarious delight from
her growing vogue. The decline of George Drobes that went with it completed the mother’s
satisfaction.

For after the Villa Marlene disaster George was clearly on the wane. He maintained
an aggrieved silence for a couple of weeks, then telephoned Marjorie. She was as sweet
to him as ever, and they continued to see each other. But Marjorie’s conscience troubled
her less and less about dating new boys. George was losing his two great advantages
with Marjorie, advantages which often are enough to bring about marriage if nothing
interferes. When she was fifteen he had bent down to her from the celestial altitude
of twenty; that altitude, however, had dwindled, as Marjorie rapidly matured and George
slowed near his final level. And he had been the first man to thrill her with kisses,
so the ancient universal spell of sex had in Marjorie’s eyes come to halo George Drobes
personally. George’s one remaining chance lay in nailing the girl down while she was
still under that fragile delusion; and a dim sense of this must have been behind his
desperate Villa Marlene gamble. Penelope’s breakdown lost George much more than a
means of transportation. It deprived him of a dark front seat. Since Marjorie was
no girl to neck in hallways or on park benches, George was stymied.

The single shred of hope for him was that Marjorie as yet hadn’t necked with anyone
else. But this was not from want of opportunity or candidates. Evening after evening
she was finding herself in dark front seats more luxurious than Penelope’s, with the
old problem on her hands. It was delightful to be taken to the best dancing places,
to be able to chatter knowingly about the Biltmore and the Roosevelt and the St. Regis,
about Guy Lombardo and Hal Kemp and Glen Gray; but in the end it all came to the same
thing. Central Park West and the Bronx were no different in this respect. Marjorie
found the sameness of boys at the end of an evening rather comical—the heavy breathing,
the popping eyes, the grasping damp hands, the hoarse unconvincing romantic mumbling—but
after innocently laughing at them a couple of times, she realized what a mistake that
was. It was too effectively discouraging. They drove her home in a fury and never
spoke to her again. The idea was to fend off the advances, not the boys. Moral indignation
was hopeless; it was like getting angry at the weather. Every boy tried.

Moreover, Marjorie couldn’t help feeling that they had some small right on their side.
They were entertaining her lavishly. Were they to have no reward? In theory, she knew,
her company for the evening was supposed to be the reward. Theory often required some
squaring with facts. Under continual pressure, she soon worked out two rules:

This policy seemed to work inasmuch as the boys grumbled and complained and whined,
but usually called her up again after a few days. However, she acquired a reputation
for being “frigid.” Sooner or later every boy brought out the word to salve his self-esteem
at being fobbed off with one kiss. The diagnosis didn’t trouble her. In the Hunter
lunchroom she had listened to an enormous amount of conversation about necking. She
knew that girls who necked freely were thrown over by boys just as often as those
who didn’t. Marjorie had about reached the conclusion that boys were on the whole
more fascinated by sex withheld than by sex granted; and since this is nearly the
sum of wisdom on the subject of young love, she managed for the time being to keep
out of trouble.

The one exception in all this, oddly enough, was Sandy Goldstone. Though he took her
out more often than the others, he did not even try to kiss her good night. Marjorie
was grateful at first for his unusual restraint. Then she began to wonder whether
it wasn’t a gambit of dark villainy. Then, when he persisted in this genial undemanding
conduct, she grew a bit annoyed. The way things were, chivalry seemed to require a
man to make some attempt at necking, however brief and formal. However, he was a superb
dancer, and obviously he liked her company. His wry sense of humor, mostly directed
at himself, amused her very much. She gave over puzzling about his diffidence, leaving
the answer to time, and simply enjoyed herself with him.

May drifted into June and examination week came. Marjorie had to break off the lovely
whirl to plunge into cramming. Her method was standardized and cold-blooded. The night
before each examination she read the textbook through with rapt attention as though
it were a detective story; when there were two exams in a day she read both books
in one night. Her mind, rather like a boardwalk photographer’s camera, took a picture
of the subject which stayed pretty clear for twenty-four hours, though it grew blurry
in a week and faded to nothing in a month. She drank gallons of coffee, ate tins of
aspirin, slept two or three hours a night, and staggered to and from school with red
eyes, pale cheeks, and spinning brain. It was a horrible ordeal. But Marjorie had
concluded long ago that she got the best marks at the least cost of time and energy
this way. She was not much interested in her studies, but self-respect required her
to be in the top half of the class. She emerged from the grim week with a high B average
as usual; and as usual with a fierce head cold, which developed this time into a grippe.
She was in bed for ten days, aching and feverish.

Aches and fever were the least of the troubles caused by this grippe. All the boys
telephoned regularly to ask how she was getting on—except Sandy. Rosalind Green, visiting
Marjorie on her sickbed, helpfully notified her that Vera Cashman had returned from
Cornell, and that Sandy was squiring the blonde around again with great zest. She
also volunteered what Sandy had confided to Phil Boehm, and Phil Boehm to her; namely,
that Vera Cashman was a remarkably accomplished necker. This was not exactly news
to Marjorie. She had observed the blonde’s little tricks: taking a cigarette from
Sandy’s mouth and puffing it, absently running a finger along the back of his hand,
dancing too close, and losing her fingers in his hair while they danced. But with
a temperature of over 103, she could do little about the information except work up
garish nightmares of Sandy kissing, necking, and eventually marrying the blonde.

Helpless in bed, Marjorie consoled herself with long-drawn telephone flirting with
the other boys, and with the reflection that she didn’t care about Sandy Goldstone
anyway, because her future lay in the theatre. The riot of social success had obscured
for a while the vision of Marjorie Morningstar. Now in the dragging bedridden hours
it brightened. She sent her brother out for volumes of plays, and for the summer catalogues
of colleges and drama schools. She read through all of Eugene O’Neill and Noel Coward,
and much of Shaw. Her theatrical ambition flared, fed by the heat of fever, and fanned
by the delirium of grippe, which dissipated obstacles and multiplied rainbows. The
first thing she did when the doctor released her from bed, wan and five pounds lighter,
was to enroll in an acting course at New York University and an elementary playwriting
course at Columbia; the latter because Shaw somewhere said that the best way to learn
about the theatre was to try to write for it. This turn of events greatly annoyed
Mrs. Morgenstern, to whom Marjorie’s acting plans were the merest vapor. She disliked
wasting the forty dollars that the enrollments cost, though she offered to put the
money gladly on Marjorie’s back in a new dress or suit. After an argument she paid
the fees, muttering that Marjorie could probably be cured of any career by actually
trying to work at it.

But Marjorie attended both courses faithfully and did well in them, despite an extravagant
round of dates, dances, picnics, and parties that went on all summer. She dashed off
one short playlet, based on the story of Jael and Sisera transposed to Nazi Germany,
which earned an enthusiastic scrawl in red ink from the instructor. Her pleasure in
this endorsement—which she happily brandished under her mother’s nose—was somewhat
lessened by the fact that the seven other student playwrights in the course seemed
to be half-witted eccentrics; especially one bright-eyed old maid, who brought two
cats meowing in a suitcase to every class session. Her dramatic instructor, an old
actor with a shock of perfectly groomed white hair, a hearing aid, and a British accent,
said she showed much promise, and gave her the best ingenue parts to act out in class,
staring hungrily at her legs while she emoted.

It was a pleasant and diverting summer, but the shadow of Sandy Goldstone’s neglect
of her lay over it. Mrs. Morgenstern must have suggested twenty ways of getting Sandy
to see her again, all of which Marjorie vetoed with growing irritation. She saw Sandy
often at parties and night clubs, always with the blonde, who managed more than one
poisoned simper at her. He even danced with Marjorie a few times. He seemed as fond
of her as ever, behind his smoke screen of ambiguous joking. But he never called her.

Mrs. Morgenstern was not one to float becalmed on an unfavoring drift of events. One
steamy morning in mid-August she said to Marjorie at breakfast, “This weather is getting
impossible. How would you like to go to the Prado for a week or so?”

“Mom, the
Prado
?”

“If you can spare the time from your dramatic studies, that is—”

“Of course I can, but—why, the Prado’s for millionaires—”

“It’s not that bad. A lot of my friends are there. They say it’s a very nice place.
They’re not millionaires.”

“I’d be mad about it, Mom, but—the Prado—”

“Well, we’ll see. I’ll talk to Papa.”

Next morning they were on a grimy Long Island train, with Marjorie’s fancy wardrobe
in three trunks in the baggage car. Mr. Morgenstern was remaining in the city; the
summer was his busiest season. They had stopped briefly in his office in the garment
district to pick up some cash, and Marjorie had all but fainted in the windowless
little office smelling so strongly of ink, stale coffee, and the peculiar dust of
the feathers and straws lying baled in the shop. Mr. Morgenstern, in a gray tie and
coat despite the killing heat, with a face almost as gray as his coat and almost as
wet as the dripping water cooler behind his chair, had limply counted out some bills
and wished them a pleasant time.

The Prado did not look at all like what it was, a kosher hotel. It had smooth green
lawns, a white crushed-stone driveway, broad terraces, red clay tennis courts crisscrossed
with new whitewash, and a huge blue swimming pool full of bronzed young people diving,
splashing, and laughing. Beyond the hotel and its immense formal gardens lay a white
curved beach and the hissing sea. Not long ago it had been a fashionable hotel barred
to Jews. But the fashion had changed, the smart set having gone farther out on the
Island. A few Christians, mostly politicians and theatre people, still came to the
Prado, but it was now a known Jewish resort, and all anybody needed to stay there
was enough money to pay the bill. That was sufficient restriction to keep it luxurious
and elegant, despite its social decline.

Staring around at the marble pillars, Persian carpets, and fine statuary and paintings
of the lobby, Marjorie did not see Sandy Goldstone at the hotel desk until he called,
“Hi, Marge!” A white canvas bag of golf clubs was slung over his shoulder, and he
was brown as a Mexican. The woman with her arm through his, small and plump, in a
smart white sports dress, with streaks of gray in her dark hair, picked up silver-rimmed
glasses on a delicate chain around her neck, and peered at Mrs. Morgenstern. “Why,
hello, Rose. You here?”

“Hello, Mary,” Mrs. Morgenstern said. “Sandy, how are you?”

“Well, what a surprise. Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?” said Mrs. Goldstone.
“You knew we were here. I’d have arranged lunch—”

Marjorie glanced at her mother, who suddenly appeared sheepish and confused. “Why,
I guess—the thing is, Mary, we just decided to come on the spur of the moment. Mr.
Morgenstern wouldn’t let us stay in the city, it’s so awful in there. I don’t think
you’ve met Marjorie yet, have you? Marjorie, Mrs. Goldstone.”

The silver-rimmed glasses turned and glittered at the girl. “How do you do?” The hand
was cool and dry, the handshake brief.