Marjorie Morningstar (89 page)

With such reasonings she staved off any action that day. Humiliating though it was,
she did talk to the desk clerk at length after dinner. He was calm, amused, condescending;
Mr. Eden often stopped at the hotel, he said, and went off for a couple of days while
retaining his room; Miss Morgenstern had nothing at all to worry about, he would undoubtedly
be back in a day or so. She went off scarlet-faced to the elevator, and spent another
dismal night in her room.

The next day was a dragged-out ordeal of worry, aimless wandering, and desultory shopping.
To her tremendous relief, Eden did telephone her from his room, shortly after she
came back to the hotel late in the afternoon. He sounded very exhilarated, insisting
on having a drink with her at once, though she protested she was grimy and tired.
They met in the bar. He looked worn and rather white, but his spirits had never been
higher. He had already hired a car, he said, and they would start on a week-long jaunt
around the Alps in the morning. He talked in a rush, his dark-ringed eyes twinkling
with gaiety. “Frankly, Marge, I may play it dirty, and do my level best to avoid meeting
Noel. What the hell, he’s going to have your company for the rest of his life, isn’t
he?”

He did not even refer to the fact that he had been away for three days; he blandly
talked as though nothing unusual had occurred, nothing that had to be explained or
even acknowledged. Marjorie found this disingenuous silence most awkward; she wanted
to ask questions. But clearly that was not to be. There was nothing accidental in
Eden’s ebullient talk of the trip, and pretense that the events of the past three
days were not worth mentioning. He gave her the positive feeling that if she broke
into that subject she would encounter a freezing snub, and possibly an abrupt end
to her acquaintance with him. Perforce she took his gay tone, as soon as she could,
and kept it up through the evening.

Next day they drove up into the mountains in the midget French car he had hired; and
for a week they went from one alpine resort to another, sometimes stopping a day at
a hotel, sometimes two. The desk clerks tended to blink a bit when Eden asked for
separate rooms, but they were always obliging. He had been joking, of course, about
avoiding Noel. He made many inquiries and phone calls. Once they thought they had
located him; but when they arrived at the hotel, it turned out that a man named Erdman
was there.

Marjorie was disappointed; still, she went on having fun. The trip was unforgettable,
from the first day to the last. The flimsy little car groaned up almost vertical mountainsides,
weaving laboriously back and forth along hairpin turns, dodging past goats, dogs,
peasants, and occasional huge limousines. On the afternoon of the first day Marjorie
found herself looking across an empty gorge, thousands of feet deep, at a girl tending
goats on the sharp green rocky slope opposite, which reflected blinding sunlight from
patches of snow. She could hear the goats bleat, she could see every color in the
girl’s florid costume; yet she calculated it would take her less time to get back
to Paris, almost, than to cross over to that girl in her roadless mountain-peak pasture.
It was all like that. They drove through villages of squat timbered cottages, steeply
piled along narrow cobbled snowy streets, which looked more like opera settings than
human habitations. There weren’t many tourists in the hotels, and almost no Americans.
She became used to dining at long boards with Italians, Frenchmen, Germans. One evening
a jolly drunken group of Germans in a little hotel pulled them into a songfest, with
many maudlin assurances that Germany and America would always be friends, and that
Hitler was not as bad as the papers said. At another hotel they fell in with a party
of middle-aged French couples who pressed them into coming on a picnic, where the
men did a boomps-a-daisy dance on the snowy grass, imitating Mussolini and Hitler,
to the squealing delight of their wives. Wherever they went people took them for honeymooners—all
but the perplexed desk clerks who knew of their sleeping arrangements.

They would drive in an afternoon from soft springtime to whistling white winter; from
lilac-filled gardens to ice-blocked roads; from warm sunny cities with great department
stores and clanging trolleys to black naked rock slopes in a whirl of falling snow.
They ate sandwiches and drank wine by the side of tumbling white cataracts, with icy
Alps all around them, receding to little purple ridges as far as the eye could see.
Marjorie had never had such a sense of space, such a sense of the world as a great
jagged rock covered with a layer of grassy earth, and lapped in sweet air.

Once she said to Eden, “I have to keep reminding myself that we’re still on the same
planet where the Bronx is. It seems to me we’re on Venus or the moon.”

Eden was in excellent humor all during the holiday, despite a tendency to nervous
exasperation, especially with slow-moving waiters and porters. Late in the afternoon
he had a way of falling into black depression, but a meal with plenty of wine usually
brought him out of it.

Though their relationship was almost comically chaste, indeed the subject of much
of Eden’s joking, Marjorie was aware of bass notes of sex under it. They were having
too much fun; the hours were too keenly edged, the lighthearted kiss at the end of
the evening (seldom more than one) too sharply pleasant. She often wondered what she
would do if Mike were to make a pass at her.

Had anyone told her at the start of the European trip that she would soon be traipsing
around Switzerland with a forty-year-old widower she would have been insulted. Forty
had always seemed to her the age at which men began to break down and retire. Yet
Eden treated her as a contemporary, if a young one. A girl of twenty-four, she began
to realize, was nothing more or less than a woman getting on. It was a rather startling
thought. The few gray hairs she was plucking out around her temples seemed absurdly
premature to her; the dances at Columbia were present to her mind as events that had
happened only the other day.

They came to Lucerne, a city of green flowered gentle slopes and charming medieval
houses, bordering a lake set in a ring of giant mountains. Late in the afternoon,
when the town lay in shadow and the sunlight slanted pink on the snowy peaks, Mike
rented a speedboat and they roared far out on the still blue lake. He seemed to be
in his afternoon glum spell; he wasn’t talking, or even looking at her. Marjorie was
herself very tired, and the travelling had begun to wear down her nerves. The speedboat
ride wasn’t fun; she would rather have had a nap. She was thinking that perhaps she
had had about enough of this peculiar excursion with this very peculiar man; and she
could not help wondering how hard he had really been trying to find Noel.

Mike cut the motor, and the streamlined red hull drifted in silence. He lit a cigar.
“Well, that’s it. End of the trail. As the sun sets on mighty Pilatus we bid farewell
to Mike and Marjorie, our gay tourist friends, and to picturesque Switzerland, land
of lakes, mountains, and eternal snows.”

Marjorie said, “I thought we had till Friday.”

“Well, I made a phone call a little while ago. I have to go back to Zurich in the
morning.”

“And then?”

“And then? Picturesque Germany, land of Gemütlichkeit, leather aprons, beer, pretzels,
song, and merry laughter.”

A chill breeze ruffled the water, and wavelets slapped against the hull. It was very
lonely and quiet on the lake. Strings of street lamps were already twinkling in Lucerne.

After several minutes, during which they both smoked and looked in silence at the
red sunset arching across the dome of the sky, Eden said, “Noel’s back in Paris.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been calling every day. He just showed up this afternoon. Seems he changed his
mind and went to Venice, after all. Can’t say I’m not grateful to him. Unpredictable
fellow.”

Ashamed of her suspicions, Marjorie said, “Thanks, Mike. Did you talk to him?”

“To Noel? No, he’d been in and gone out. Talked to his landlady. Woman with a thick
German accent. You’ll find her hard to understand on the telephone.” He lapsed into
silence again. He appeared sullen. Every now and then he glanced at her, a puzzling
dark look. The sunset was fading fast, and it was getting colder minute by minute.
At last, when Marjorie was about to suggest that they go back to shore, he said in
an odd sharp tone, “I’m sorry about those three days in Zurich. Hope you weren’t scared
or worried.”

Startled by the abrupt cracking open of the forbidden subject, Marjorie said cautiously,
“Well, yes, I was worried. Pretty damned worried, that last day.”

“I can imagine. I couldn’t phone. I’m sorry.”

“Well, you’re all right, so what’s the difference?”

“Marjorie, it’s quite true, as I told you on the ship, that I’m going to Germany on
business. But I’m also doing some illegal rescue work. I’m a fool to tell you, but
I want to. I hope I can count on you not to get excited or melodramatic or anything.”
The words seemed to break from him in a rush. She stared at him. After a long pause
he went on, more slowly, “Well, that’s it. I know I can count on you not to mention
it, or discuss it, or do anything at all but forget it, once we’re back on shore.
People’s lives are involved.”

“Why… of course. Is it very—is there a lot of danger?” She didn’t know quite what
to say. She was more surprised at the fact of his telling her, than at the information.

“No, very little. I mean, these things are relative. It’s not as safe as studying
Semitic languages at Oxford, let’s say.”

Thrown off balance though she was, Marjorie couldn’t help smiling. Eden smiled too,
and said eagerly, his eyes glittering with unusual liveliness, “I’ll tell you something
though, Margie, in a queer way there’s a hell of a lot of fun—though that’s not quite
the word—in rescue work. I’ve been doing it for a couple of years. It’s stimulating
to be outside the law. It makes you look sharp, it simplifies the day’s job. Above
all it makes every hour you stay uncaught very pleasant. And as for depression, anxiety—all
that pattern simply vanishes. The fact is, and this is the only way I can put it,
when I go back to the United States I seem to be living in a black-and-white movie.
As soon as I cross the German border, I’m in color again. I grant you it’s a hell
of a warped way to feel, and it leaves out the fact that I’m sick to the stomach with
fear all the time I’m there, but still that’s the truth of it.” He looked in her face
and laughed. “I’m shocking you.”

“Nothing you say could shock me at this point. You’re a man from Mars. When are you
going back into Germany?”

“I’ll take an evening train to Stuttgart tomorrow.”

“Don’t they check everybody pretty carefully on the trains?”

“That’s the idea. I do everything in the most legal and obvious way, as any American
businessman would.”

“Are you scared?”

“I’m always scared. A bit more than usual, maybe, this time. They’ve checked on Hilda.
I haven’t been exactly an hysterical old lady about her, it seems, after all.”

Marjorie sat up, looking at his shadowed face. “What? What about her?”

She could see his Adam’s apple move. “Nothing worth changing plans for. Nobody’s exactly
seen her eating a Jewish baby for breakfast, you might say. But at least nobody’s
saying I’m seeing burglars under the bed any more. It’s odd that that should give
me satisfaction, but it does. They gave me such a horselaugh at first.”

Marjorie shivered. The speedboat rocked in the wash of another boat going by at top
speed; the boy and girl in the cockpit waved gaily and shouted something in German
as they sped past. The exhaust roar echoed back over the dark water for half a minute
or so, and faded to a distant murmur. Marjorie said, “Mike, who’s ‘They’? Or can’t
you talk about that?”

He hesitated. “Well, hell, I don’t know why not. You’ve read about all this in the
papers, I’m sure. It’s no secret. I work with a group, an organization…. Remember
the Underground Railway in American Civil War days? More or less the same thing. Instead
of slaves, political refugees, and some Jews. There’s several of these outfits, and—”

“Are you working with the communists?”

Eden wrinkled his nose. “What? Whatever makes you think I’d work with
them
? Silly bastards. Tried to peddle the Marxian brand of happiness pills to the Germans,
and just got undersold out of the Hun market by Hitler with his Jew-killing superman
capsule. No, this crowd is more innocuous. Just a lot of idealistic boobies who think
Germany can be a small America some day. They think they’re fighting Hitler. What
a joke! Actually they’re a lot of megalomaniacs, pure and simple, only on the right
side. Their cause is hopeless. They’re trying to hold back the tide with a teaspoon.
But for my purposes they’re not bad to work with.”

A deeper twilight was coming over the lake as the last streaks of red disappeared
from the snows of the mountain peaks. The nearer mountains looked almost black. Marjorie
was shivering despite her new blue suede jacket; she hugged her arms, crouching on
the red leather seat of the drifting boat. “You say they’re trying to stop the ocean
with a teaspoon. What do you think you’re trying to do? Maybe you’re a bigger booby.”

“No, I’m not a booby at all. I have a small attainable goal, and what’s more I believe
I’ve actually achieved it, or am damn close to it….”

“Mike, what did they find out about Hilda? How can you go back if—”

“Don’t go building it out of all proportion in your mind. They say it’s all right.
This stuff on Hilda is far from definite, mind you. They’ve never steered me wrong
yet…. Well, good Lord, Margie, don’t look so terror-stricken. Can’t you picture how
helter-skelter our communications are? If we held off because of this or that vague
suspicion we’d never do anything. Let’s face it, the likes of me isn’t wanted in Germany,
and I don’t suspect that, I know it. But I’ve been in and out now for three years.
I transact a lot of legitimate business. The desk clerks in a dozen hotels know me
by sight. I even know the conductors on some trains. It’s very hard to describe to
you what it’s like, but I can only tell you it’s like skiing, or serving in a submarine,
or something. You have to be vigilant and there’s an ever-present hazard, but also
there are standard techniques and procedures, and thousands, literally thousands of
people are doing it, most of them not any brighter than I am, and surviving very nicely.
Moreover, I have all kinds of extra safety factors. My commercial connections, my
American passport—God Almighty, why do I have to justify myself to you, anyway?” He
shot his hand forward and pressed the ignition key, but the motor didn’t catch.