Marjorie Morningstar (97 page)

It didn’t seem like an upheaval. Marrying him seemed natural and inevitable; part
of the ordinary sequence of things, like graduating from college at the end of her
senior year. Earlier in the week she had fought against this feeling, had tried to
summon objections to marrying this stranger, had tried to maintain the modesty and
reserve she knew she ought to have. But her old identity had all but melted in his
presence. She felt like his wife before the week was out. It was an effort to keep
up the pretense that she didn’t feel that way. Her relief was overwhelming when, sometime
during the drive in New Jersey, he told her that he hoped she wouldn’t consider him
presumptuous or crazy, but he couldn’t help thinking of her as his wife. It was shortly
after he made this confession, and she made a similar one, that they parked in a leafy
side lane and kissed with enormous gusto and began to speak of their marriage as a
thing settled.

They went rapidly past the mutual delight of finding out how much they loved each
other, and talked about how many children they would like to have, and what their
religious feelings were, and how much money he had to live on; all the time necking
as a man and a woman do who have discovered each other, but with the necking secondary,
part of the exchange of confidences as it were, rather than an attempt to get pleasure
for the moment out of sex. About the ridiculous speed of it all, Marjorie felt that
she ought to be ashamed and worried—but she couldn’t summon shame or worry from any
corner of her spirit. His touch, his kiss, his hands, his voice, were all familiar,
sweet, and wonderful. He actually seemed part of her, in a way that Noel Airman, despite
his hypnotic fascination, never had. Nor was she too surprised to find that a man
so different from Noel could stir and please her. She had learned from the encounter
with Mike Eden that there really was more than one man in the world—the piece of knowledge
that more than anything else divides women from girls. As long as there were two,
there could be three, or ten; it was a question of good luck or God’s blessing when
she would encounter the one with whom she could be happy.

She fell asleep that morning dreaming confusedly and deliciously of diamond rings
and bridal dresses, as the windows turned gray in the dawn.

She woke a couple of hours later to an immediate and wretched problem: when and how
should she tell him about Noel?

For she had not yet done so. No consideration in the world could have brought her
to tell him, before she was sure he loved her and wanted to marry her. It might have
been calculating and not quite honest to let his feelings flame up without telling
him. She thought that perhaps it had been dishonest. But she didn’t care. Her life
was at stake. She knew she would have to tell him now, and the prospect made her sick,
but she was ready to do it.

The question was whether it was right for her to reveal the engagement to her parents—right
away, in the next ten minutes, at breakfast—instead of waiting until he knew about
Noel. Quite possibly he might want to break off with her. Clearly he had assumed she
was a virgin; it had never occurred to him to question the fact. Like Wally Wronken,
he had fallen into the accursed way of regarding her as a goddess, instead of realizing
that she was just another girl stumbling through life as best she could. Supposing
now she told her parents, and forty-eight hours later would have to tell them that
it was all off? How could she endure it?

Marjorie went and did the natural, perhaps the cowardly, probably the inevitable thing.
She told her parents at breakfast. This was what she had agreed with him to do. He
was going to tell his parents, and they were coming with him to the Morgenstern home
in the afternoon. To stop the rolling event, she would have had to telephone him and
tell him to hold off because she had a serious disclosure to make to him first. Quite
simply, she hadn’t the guts to do it. So she plunged ahead, hoping for the best. In
the whirl of her parents’ joy—for they knew him, approved of him violently, and had
been holding their breaths during the stampeding week when what was happening became
pretty plain—at the center of the whirl, she sat in a quiet shell of black fear.

He came, radiating pride, love, and masculine attraction, the bridegroom in his hour
of power. His parents were—parents: a plump short gray woman, a spare tall gray man,
both well spoken, well dressed, and at first quite stiff and cold, especially the
mother. The Morgensterns, for their part, were cautious, faintly defensive, and at
the same time assertively proud of their daughter. Tense and scared though she was,
Marjorie was able to find amusement at the way the prospective in-laws, suddenly dumped
together in a room, sized up each other with hackles raised. His mother kept remarking,
not always relevantly, that he was her only child, that he owned his own new Buick
convertible, and that she knew of no young lawyer half as successful as he was. These
statements, sometimes coming abruptly out of nowhere, tended to stop the conversation
dead. The atmosphere warmed slightly when Mrs. Morgenstern served tea and a marvelous
apple strudel she had baked in a hurry that morning. Then it turned out that his father
was the president of his Zionist chapter; and since her father was the president of
his
chapter, that helped a lot. The first real thaw came when it developed that the mothers
had emigrated from neighboring provinces in Hungary. Shortly thereafter, when it appeared
that both fathers admired President Roosevelt, and that both mothers couldn’t stand
the lady who was president of the Manhattan chapter of Hadassah, the ice was fairly
broken. It was observed, and it was considered extremely remarkable, that Marjorie
resembled her mother and that the bridegroom resembled
his
mother. His father, after the second piece of strudel, swung over to extreme joviality,
and uncovered a gift for making puns and a taste for chain smoking. As the two sets
of parents disclosed facts about themselves little by little, for all the world like
bridge players playing out their cards, it became clear that at least in background
it was a fairly balanced match. True, his father was a native-born American. Mr. Morgenstern’s
accent sounded loud and pungent that afternoon in Marjorie’s ears. On the other hand,
Marjorie soon gathered that his father had not been successful in business. He spoke
vaguely of stocks and bonds, became respectful when Mr. Morgenstern described the
Arnold Importing Company, and made no puns for a while afterward. Mrs. Morgenstern
managed to say to Marjorie, when they were together in the kitchen for a moment, that
she was sure the son was supporting the parents (as usual, Marjorie was very annoyed
at her, and as usual, she turned out in the end to be quite right). She also remarked
that she couldn’t for the life of her see what right his mother had to be standoffish,
inasmuch as West End Avenue wasn’t at all the same above Ninety-sixth Street, and
they lived on the corner of 103rd. However, Mrs. Morgenstern quickly added—when she
saw the dangerous light in Marjorie’s eye—that they were lovely people, and she couldn’t
be happier about the whole thing.

In time Mrs. Morgenstern brought out cherry brandy, and scotch, and the occasion became
reasonably lively. The parents began debating whether this meeting constituted the
religious occasion in the course of a courtship known as “T’nayim.” Marjorie had never
heard of T’nayim before. Her parents were emphatic and unanimous in declaring that
this get-together certainly amounted to T’nayim. His mother was equally sure it was
far too early for T’nayim, and that all kinds of other things had to be done first,
though she was most foggy as to what those things might be. His father stayed out
of the argument, contenting himself with seven cigarettes in a row and a number of
unsuccessful puns on the word T’nayim. In the end Mrs. Morgenstern settled the matter,
in her customary way, by going into the kitchen and coming out with a large soup plate
from her best china set. She called the couple to the dining-room table, and told
them to take hold of the plate and break it on the table. They did so, looking puzzled
at each other. The fragments flew all over the floor, and the parents embraced each
other, shouting congratulations and weeping a bit. That, evidently, was T’nayim.

The parents were happily planning the wedding, the honeymoon, and the general future
of the couple when the bridegroom-to-be announced that he was taking Marjorie out
for a drive. This was a tremendous joke to the two fathers, who had by then drunk
a lot of scotch between them. The winks, guffaws, and elbow-nudges were still going
on when they left. At the last moment, just as Marjorie was preceding him out the
door, her future mother-in-law sprang at her, fell on her neck, kissed her, said she
loved her, and fell into a paroxysm of wild sobbing, which she declared was due to
an excess of happiness. Mrs. Morgenstern firmly peeled her off Marjorie, and the couple
left her being quieted by the other three parents.

They drove out to New Jersey again. The tavern where they had dined the night before,
he said, had the best food and drinks in the whole world; didn’t she agree? She agreed.
She said little during the drive. He did all the talking. He drew perceptive amusing
sketches of both her parents, and was especially shrewd about her mother. “She’s going
to give me trouble,” he said, “but she’s all there.” He told her a lot about his own
parents. He pressed her to name a date for the wedding, but she turned him off in
one way and another. He talked about the places they could go to for a honeymoon trip
despite the war: the Canadian Rockies, South America, Hawaii, Mexico. He had an odd
notion that Alaska might be fun. He wanted to go as far from home as possible; he
wanted to be alone with her, he said, somewhere on the outer rim of the world. All
the time he talked she sank deeper into fear and misery, though she kept up a smiling
face. It seemed impossible to break into this run of pure bubbling high spirits with
the revelation about Noel. Yet she knew that she had to do it tonight. They drove
across the George Washington Bridge in a gorgeous sunset. He became quiet and just
drove, now and then reaching over and touching her face with his hand. He was a picture
of a supremely happy man.

She had her rebellious moments during that sorrowful ride, behind the smiling face.
This was the twentieth century, she told herself. He was an honor graduate of Harvard;
he ought to know what life was all about! Obviously at thirty-one he himself wasn’t
a virgin. Most likely he hadn’t been at her age, twenty-four. She hadn’t claimed to
be one. Inwardly she raged at the injustice of his assuming that she must measure
up to the standards of dead Victorian days. Virginity was a trivial physical detail,
meaningless between two people truly in love; anybody knew that, all the books said
it. Her guilt over having had one affair was childish. Everybody had affairs nowadays,
the world had changed….

In all these reasonable thoughts, however, Marjorie could find no trace of relief
or hope. The fact was, she had passed herself off as a good Jewish girl. Twentieth
century or not, good Jewish girls were supposed to be virgins when they married. That
was the corner she was in. That was the dull brute fact she faced. For that matter,
good Christian girls were supposed to be virgins too; that was why brides wore white.
She couldn’t even blame her Jewish origin for the harrowing trap she was in, though
she would have liked to.

They came to the tavern. They had one drink, and another. He wasn’t talking much,
just holding her hand, worshipping her, and once in a while saying something nonsensical
and sweet. She had all the opportunity she needed to talk, but she couldn’t.

Then, all at once, at the very worst moment, just after the food was set before them,
the story somehow broke from her in a stammering rush of words; every word like vomit
in her mouth.

That ended the evening. He remained cordial, but he was quenched. She had never seen
such a change in a man’s face; he went in a few minutes from happiness to sunken melancholy.
Neither of them could eat. About her affair with Noel, he said never a word. It was
as though she hadn’t told him. When the food was taken away, he asked her correctly
and pleasantly whether she wanted more coffee, or some brandy, or anything else. Then
he drove her home, saying nothing at all on the way. She remembered that drive for
years as the worst agony she ever endured. It was like being driven to a hospital,
dying of a hemorrhage.

She telephoned him early next morning after a ghastly night. His mother answered,
full of concern and excitement. He wasn’t at home or at his office. He had gone off,
leaving a short note saying he was very tired and was taking a vacation for a week
or so in the mountains. But he hadn’t said what hotel, or even what town he was going
to. What on earth had happened? Had something gone wrong? His mother was not successful
in keeping a note of pleasure out of her voice, if she was even aware of it. Marjorie
evaded her questions, and hung up.

Three days passed. His mother called every morning and evening, wanting to know if
Marjorie had heard from him. This, with the mournful atmosphere in her own home, the
unspoken questions and terrible worry in the faces of her parents, became unendurable.
Marjorie got up very early one morning, left a similar note for her parents, and went
to a hotel in Lakewood, a New Jersey resort a couple of hours from the city. It was
the wrong time of the year for Lakewood. The hotel she stayed in was almost empty;
the town was deserted. There was nothing to do but read, go to movies, or walk around
the lake. Marjorie read magazines, newspapers, books, whatever she could lay her hands
on, without the slightest idea of what she was reading. She was at the hotel six days,
and the time passed as though she were in delirium. She couldn’t remember afterward
any details of what she had done in those six days; they were blanked from her mind
as by amnesia. She came home with a severe cold and a temperature of a hundred and
three. She had not eaten at all, and she had lost twelve pounds. She came home because
her mother telephoned her (unlike him, she had disclosed where she was going). “He’s
back, and he called this morning. Better come home.”