Marjorie Morningstar (96 page)

Once she bought a drug trade journal and wrote to some of the companies that advertised,
inquiring after Mike Eden. He had been careful to withhold from her the name of the
firm he worked for. She had no luck, and she gave up the attempt; there were hundreds
of such companies. After four or five months—especially after Hitler invaded Poland,
and the headlines and radio bulletins filled everyone’s conversations and thoughts,
and the refugee work grew tumultuous—her interest in Mike lost substance. She still
daydreamed and worried about him, and wondered whether he was alive or dead. But he
began to seem almost like someone she had heard or read about rather than actually
known.

One Friday evening early in November, Seth came home from school in the blue and gold
uniform of the Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. It was the first the family
knew of his having joined. As if this were not shock enough for his sister and parents,
he announced at the dinner table that he intended to become engaged to Natalie Fain,
the Barnard freshman whom he had been dating regularly for a year. Seth was a few
weeks short of being nineteen. Poland had already been crushed, and the queer lull
called “the phony war” had ensued in Europe; there was hope that real fighting might
never break out. All the same it chilled Marjorie to see her gangling baby brother
in military garb, the pink pimply razor-nicked face ridiculously stern under the white
cap with gold insignia. If fighting came, this child would have to fight! As for his
becoming engaged, they would all have laughed at him, and Mrs. Morgenstern would perhaps
have told him to go wipe his nose—if not for the uniform. It blasted grown masculinity
at them; it would not be denied.

The Friday-evening dinner at the candlelit table was different from all the hundreds
of Sabbath meals that this little family had eaten through the years. The stuffed
fish was as tasty as ever, the chicken soup with noodles as boring as ever, the pot
roast and potato pudding as fat and satisfying as ever. But time had struck a brazen
gong in the Morgenstern home. The father, whose round face had lost many worry lines
when Marjorie returned from Europe cured of Noel, kept glancing at his son, and the
worry lines came back, with some new ones. Mrs. Morgenstern relieved the mournful
silence with brave jokes about seasickness and child marriage; and she addressed Seth
all evening as Admiral, but her face was far from merry. As for Marjorie, she was
simply stricken dumb. She could hardly eat. A picture haunted her: Aunt Marjorie,
her wan face without makeup, her graying hair pulled straight back in a bun, serving
as babysitter while Seth and Natalie in evening clothes went off to the opera; Aunt
Marjorie, the querulous fat spinster in steel-rimmed glasses, reading “The Three Pigs”
to a couple of pudgy children in yellow pajamas.

Next morning she telephoned Wally Wronken. He seemed extremely pleased to talk to
her, and readily made a date to meet the following day at twelve-thirty in the lobby
of the St. Moritz Hotel, where Wally now lived, and to have lunch at Rumpelmayer’s.

Marjorie came five minutes early for the date, dressed exactly as she had been for
her meeting with Noel in Paris. She was aware of this, and slightly bothered by it;
but the black and pink outfit was the best she had, and there was no point in looking
anything but her best. She sat in a lobby armchair and smoked a cigarette, swinging
her ankle; uneasy, almost distraught, more than a little ashamed of herself. The admiring
glances of men sitting near her or walking by gave her no satisfaction. She knew by
now that she was reasonably good-looking, and that it didn’t take much to win stares
from men; neatly crossed legs in good stockings were enough.

She was uneasy because Wally had been, if anything, too pleasant, too smooth, too
glad to hear from her, too willing to take her to lunch. She greatly feared she had
heard condescension in his voice. He had, of course, every right to condescend. He
was the success, the young man of twenty-three with a hit on Broadway; not a smash
hit, true, nothing that presaged a major literary career, but still a comedy that
was in the fourth month of its run. Wally had sent her a pair of matinee tickets;
she had seen the play with Seth. There had been several empty seats in the house,
and she had not particularly liked the play, but the audience had laughed and applauded
solidly. It was a farce about the radio broadcasting business, full of echoes, she
thought, of successful farces of the past ten years. Her objections to Wally’s writing
remained in general what they had been at South Wind. It was commercial, mechanical;
he was too eager for success, too ready with cynical imitation. But she had to acknowledge
his competence; cheap and slight though Wally’s play might be, it was superior to
Noel’s
Princess Jones
, with its precious and pallid whimsey, which she had, in her lovesick blindness,
mistaken for high wit. Wally’s reach was at least proportioned to his grasp. Moreover,
he had set out to break into Broadway as a writer, and he had done it, while her own
dream of being Marjorie Morningstar had blown away like vapor. She had not found it
hard to write him a note of warm congratulation. He had answered with warm thanks,
and there things had rested between them until she had taken the initiative and telephoned
him.

The clock over the hotel desk crept past twelve-thirty. Her uneasiness mounted. She
was regretting the impulse that had led her to call him up; she had in fact been regretting
it ever since she hung up the receiver, disagreeably suspecting him of condescending
to her. What was she doing, really? Was she trying to change things between them at
this late date and get him to marry her, now that he was a success? It was nothing
so definite or so stupid. She wasn’t at all sure how she would feel when she saw him.
More than anything else, she wanted to be reassured that she was still attractive,
and Wally had always done that for her during the racking years with Noel.

Her conscious intention had been to tell him about Seth, and about her own fears of
being an old maid. She wanted to laugh with him over the nightmare picture of herself
baby-sitting for Seth’s offspring, and so get herself back into good humor. But Marjorie
had come a long way in self-knowledge. She couldn’t be blind to the fact that she
also was vaguely hoping for something more to come of this lunch, if not with Wally,
then with somebody else, somebody successful and interesting, somebody whom she might
meet by starting to go around with Wally again. It was this not very admirable notion
that lay at the root of her uneasiness, and that made her shame and humiliation increase
with each passing minute after twelve-thirty.

Those minutes lengthened. She lit another cigarette, promising herself to leave when
it was smoked out. Disordered miserable thoughts possessed her. As a drowning man
is said to do, she saw years of her life tumble past her mind’s eye. She saw herself
in other hotel lobbies, in bars, in grills, in cars, in restaurants, in night clubs,
with men—George Drobes, Sandy Goldstone, Wally Wronken, Noel Airman, Mike Eden, Morris
Shapiro, and dozens of others who had come and gone more casually. It was a strange
set of customs, she thought, that drove a girl to conduct the crucial scenes of her
life outside her own home; usually in a public place, usually over highballs, usually
when she was a little tight or quite tight. As girls went nowadays, she was probably
respectable, even a bit prudish. Yet this had been her story.

It occurred to her too, as the cigarette went from white tube to gray ash, shrinking
fast, that whatever subconscious hope she had of winning Wally was not only nonsensical
but almost depraved. She had been Noel’s mistress. She knew that Wally, Broadway-wise
though he was, somehow had convinced himself that this was not so. He had said things
to her that left no doubt in her mind what he believed. At the time she had seen no
point in undeceiving him, so she had lied by omission, by saying nothing. Evidently
he had found it necessary or pleasant to idolize her; she had felt herself under no
obligation to disillusion him with uncomfortable confessions.

But how could she possibly marry him, or even take to dating him again, without telling
him the truth? How much of a liar was she? And yet, how could she ever tell Wally
Wronken that she had been Noel Airman’s bed partner, after all? How could she face
the moment that would follow the shattering of his picture of her—the one good girl
in a world of chippies? The fact that he made free with chippies—it was obvious that
he did—had nothing to do with it. He wasn’t supposed to be pure; she was. It might
not make sense, but that was exactly how things stood.

The butt had been growing warm in her fingers; now the glowing end stung her skin.
She crushed the cigarette out and stood, brushing ash from her black skirt. It was
eighteen minutes to one. She went to the house phone and called his room. The telephone
rang and rang, but there was no answer. Her face became fiery. Obviously he had been
polite to her on the phone and then had completely forgotten the date. He was a Broadway
playwright, and she was an aging West End Avenue girl from his dead past, trying to
clutch at a shred of his glamor. He probably thought of her as little more than an
autograph hunter. She put the receiver down, walked out of the hotel, and dazedly
got into a cab.

The cab had hardly turned the corner when Wally Wronken, dressed as for a birthday
party, with a gardenia corsage in a box under his arm, came whirling through the revolving
door, scanning the lobby anxiously. He walked up and down the lobby, he walked through
Rumpelmayer’s, he questioned the headwaiter and the bellboys in the lobby. He went
up to his suite and called Marjorie’s home, but she wasn’t there. He ate a cheerless
lunch by himself in his living room overlooking Central Park, where the trees were
bright with the colors of autumn.

He telephoned her the next day to apologize, but she wasn’t in. He telephoned her
several times during the ensuing week. By the time he did get to talk to her it was
too late—if it had ever not been too late. She was pleasant, distant, and preoccupied.
She had met another man.

It was fifteen years before Marjorie found out what had delayed him.

There was a fitting irony, perhaps, in the fact that it was Marsha Michaelson who
brought her together with this man; Marsha, at times her dearest friend, at times
her worst enemy; Marsha, who had greased her descent into Noel’s bed. She met him
at a dinner party in Marsha’s New Rochelle home, the evening after her aborted lunch
date with Wally. A long time later she found out that Marsha had planned the dinner
with the purpose of bringing them together. He was Michaelson’s young law partner,
the pleasant round-faced man who had cut off the noise of the berserk theremin at
the wedding by pulling the plug out of the wall. She dimly recalled that he had almost
made a date with her before Noel had spirited her away on that fatal night. Placed
side by side at the table, they fell into conversation easily because they had met
once before; and by the time the meal ended they were talking with rapid easy intimacy,
all but oblivious to the rest of the party. She hoped he would ask to see her again.
He did. He wanted to see her the next day. She knew that by the usual rules she should
put him off for a week or so; instead she said yes with an eagerness that made her
blush a little.

After the second date, she knew she wanted to marry him. The headlong torrent of her
feelings scared her, but she couldn’t help herself. It wasn’t at all a blind urge
to get herself married off at last. Since her return from Europe she had been meeting
eligible men and having as many dates as she wanted; but none of them had waked her
feelings. With this man, her heart had come to almost instantaneous hot life. There
was something undignified, something not quite adult, she felt, about falling for
someone new so soon and so hard; after all, the days of George Drobes were over, weren’t
they? But her own skepticism and disapproval made no difference whatever to her emotions.
Nothing seemed to matter but the fact that she was falling in love.

He was far from perfect. He was a bit short, though athletically built, not quite
a head taller than herself. His speech was slow, calm, and direct, with just a touch
of quiet humor, in sharp contrast to the quick nervous wit and fantastic vocabulary
of Noel, and the stinging insight and mordant eloquence of Mike Eden. Marjorie had
been almost sure that in the end she would meet and marry another of these wild talkers,
since the type seemed to be her weakness, but Milton’s measured speech and deliberate
thinking seemed to suit her well enough. The fact was, some of his ideas on politics
and religion were decidedly old-fashioned—she might have said banal, describing somebody
else who seemed less reliable, sound, and sure. He wanted, for instance, to have a
traditionally religious home, and was obviously pleased to learn of Marjorie’s family
background. It was amazing how little all that concerned her, anyway. The one thing
she couldn’t understand—that she fiercely regretted—was that she had failed to warm
to him the first time she had met him at Marsha’s wedding.

After her third date she was in agony, because she was sure she had looked badly,
and talked stupidly, and cooled his interest. After the fourth date—all four dates
were in one week, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday—she knew he was falling in
love as hard and as fast as she was, and that he was going to propose.

He never did propose. They met early Sunday morning after that crucial Saturday-night
date, and were together all day long and all evening, driving in his new gray Buick
far out into New Jersey, supposedly to see the fall foliage. They did drive through
marvelous vistas of red and yellow flame, but they didn’t take much notice. They lunched
and had dinner at roadside taverns; they parked for hours in the moonlight. By the
time he brought her home, about half-past four in the morning, they were discussing
the wedding date, and where they would live, and how they would break the news to
their parents. Only when she found herself alone in her bedroom, staring dazed at
her face in the mirror—the most familiar face in the world, looking like a stranger’s
to her, the makeup smeared, the hair in disorder, the eyes heavily shadowed but shining
joyously—only then did she begin to realize what an upheaval had taken place in her
life.