The girls went often to concerts and art galleries. Marsha seemed to know all the free ones, and also how to get passes to the ones that cost money. Marjorie began to find some honest pleasure in classical music and in painting, for the first time in her life. She also discovered in herself, rather to her surprise, real ability to work and to learn, once her interest was caught. She bought books on stage direction, makeup, lights, and sets, and she mastered them rapidly. Marsha was taken aback at her technical comments on the Broadway productions they saw together. “Baby, you’re giving old Klabber too much for his money,” she jeered.
It gradually became clear to Marjorie that the Zelenkos were really living on Mrs. Zelenko’s earnings as a piano teacher. There was a prevailing genteel fiction in the household that the teaching was a lark whereby she picked up a little pin money, while Mr. Zelenko earned the family’s bread through his operations in the Street. Marjorie gathered, however, from fragments of spats she heard, that the net effect of Mr. Zelenko’s wily dealings in the Street was to wipe out, each week, about half the income from Mrs. Zelenko’s piano lessons.
Marjorie also realized after a while that Marsha culled her intimate gossip about celebrities from theatre magazines, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter. Indeed, before the two girls went away together for the summer, Marjorie was well aware that her friend was in certain respects a phony.
Yet she was not much alienated. If Marsha’s Broadway intimacies were only pretended, her love and knowledge of the theatre were real. She did have a lively natural gusto for the arts. She was full of bounce, quick to be offended but quicker to forgive. Above all, she was the first person Marjorie had ever encountered who seemed to value her for the right reasons. The boys in Marjorie’s life had been dazzled by her small waist, her charming bosom, her fine legs, her quick good-natured coquetry. She was very glad she had these assets, but she had always felt a slight contempt for those who liked her merely for them.
As Helen Johannsen had predicted, Marsha began borrowing in the third or fourth week of their acquaintance. She made sporadic repayments. But they fell more and more steeply behind her borrowings, and the account became embarrassingly confused. One day, after a half-hour attempt to straighten out the debits and credits, Marsha said, “Oh, look, baby, this is awful. You may as well know that I’m a complete featherhead about small change. It’s meaningless to me, it’s like cigarettes or matches or something. I know it shouldn’t be, Lord knows I’m not that rich, and I know it isn’t to others. Will you do me a big fat favor and keep a little book on me?”
Marjorie said uneasily, “Oh, that’s ridiculous. Let’s forget all about it, a dollar thirty-five or forty-five, what does it all matter—”
“No, no. Please. Keep an account, you’re damn methodical when you want to be. When we get paid at the end of the summer we’ll settle up. I’m just helpless about little money. Big money I can keep track of like a CPA.” She caught a satiric wisp of a smile on Marjorie’s face and flared, “I’ll tell you where I’ve handled big money, kiddo. On the Street I was Pop’s assistant one summer when things were so good we were living at the Peter Stuyvesant, not in that hole on Ninety-second Street. And believe me, I was never off one cent in ten thousand dollars.”
Marjorie agreed to keep the book, but quickly saw it was not a good idea. It released Marsha of all compunction about borrowing. “Just mark it in the little black book, dear,” she would say, thus managing to relieve Marjorie of some money and patronize her at the same time. When they went off to Tamarack the account had grown to twelve dollars and change, and Marjorie, increasingly irked, was really keeping the black book with dogged accuracy.
Chapter 11. NOEL AIRMAN
With a small hissing ripple at the bow, the canoe slipped over the black water toward the winking lights and distant music of South Wind.
It was a windless, moonless night ablaze with stars. Marjorie sat in the bow with her suitcase between her knees, chilled through despite the sweater thrown over her shoulders. The thin cotton of her orange blouse and green bloomers, prescribed dress for counselors at Camp Tamarack, gave little warmth. She hugged her bare knees and crouched, trying not to shiver.
Marsha paddled expertly, with hardly a splash.
“What music is that?” Marjorie hoarsely whispered, breaking silence for the first time when they were a few hundred yards from the Tamarack shore.
Marsha laughed, a thin far sound in the open air. “You don’t have to whisper, baby. Mr. Klabber is fast asleep behind us, you know. That’s the orchestra. Steak roast tonight. The guests sit around the campfire, and sing, and stuff themselves, and get swozzled on beer, and the band plays for them.”
“I thought there’d be dancing.”
“Oh, all the dancing you want, afterward. They have the dress rehearsal of the show while the guests are at the roast out of the way. You’ll really see something.”
A shudder made Marjorie’s teeth grate. “I’m freezing, do you know that? It’s a wonder you don’t catch pneumonia, doing this night after night.”
“Why, honey bunch, it’s warm tonight. Sometimes it’s really frigid on this lake, when the wind starts cutting up. You’re having beginner’s luck.”
“I see.” Another racking shiver passed through her. “Maybe I’m just scared.”
Marsha laughed again. “That’s something you’ll get over, too. This is a cinch. I’ve been doing it for three years, and here I am, fat and sassy as ever.”
“Yes, I know,” Marjorie said in no very amicable tone, and the conversation lapsed.
Marjorie strained her eyes toward South Wind, wondering whether the adult camp was going to prove another disappointment, another of Marsha’s lies that would blow up in her hands. In the first four weeks of the summer, her attitude toward her friend had drastically changed. If she was not wholly disenchanted, she now regarded everything Marsha said with caution or downright disbelief. For she had gradually found out that Marsha had induced her to come to Camp Tamarack with lies, bald outrageous lies; and even at the camp she had tried to cover her first lies with more and more falsehoods, progressively lamer.
It was true enough, as Marsha had said, that the dramatic counselor lived in comfort in a cabin atop a hill overlooking the lake, and that she didn’t have to herd children. It was also true that from the cabin Marjorie could see, three miles away on the far shore of the lake, the grounds and buildings of South Wind—a charming panorama, like a land in a child’s picture book, all rolling green lawns, sculptured darker green clumps of trees, and fantastically shaped white and golden towers.
The rest was fabrication, cynical and deliberate. Mr. Klabber’s “cast-iron rule” against visits by the counselors to South Wind, far from being a joke, was observed with terrified strictness by every girl on the staff—except Marsha. Indeed, they avoided talking about the adult camp, as though it were a leper colony in the neighborhood. Marsha’s story at first was that it took a week or so for the counselors to warm to each other and start arranging sneak excursions to South Wind. But as time passed it became clear that Marsha alone regularly visited the adult camp, at a risk none of the others would even discuss taking. Her method was to paddle across the lake after dark in a canoe, tie it to a diving raft anchored beyond the floodlights, and swim to shore. There she borrowed towels, clothes, and makeup. She couldn’t beach the canoe because the owner of South Wind, Mr. Greech, always chopped up with his own hands and burned on the shore any unfamiliar rowboats or canoes he came on at night, in order to discourage non-paying visitors.
The other counselors, mostly scrubbed dumpy girls with muscular bodies, regarded Marsha as an eccentric, and her canoe excursions—which they knew about but never reported—as unwholesome and dangerous foolishness. Marjorie had at last forced Marsha to admit all this in an acrimonious quarrel, late one night in the second week. Even then, Marsha had tried to cover herself by calling the other counselors cowardly lumps, sexless clods, and so forth. Marjorie had walked out o
n her in disgust while she was talking, and the two girls had hardly spoken for a week.
But the sun was bright and warm at Tamarack, the smell of the pine needles delightful, the sleep in the mountain air sweet, and Mr. Klabber’s meals excellent and huge. Moreover, Marjorie had scored an instant great success with her shows, and was admired and popular, so her spirits were good. She worked hard, and handled her little actresses with natural good humor and grace. Mr. Klabber frankly said she was the best dramatic counselor he had ever had. She was unavoidably thrown together backstage with Marsha, who painted the scenery and sewed the costumes with a squad of stage-struck girls. Her grudge melted in the workaday joking backstage, though her attitude toward the fat girl remained tinged with distrust.
Marsha had importuned her day after day to try a canoe excursion to South Wind with her, swearing by all the gods that it was the simplest, safest, gayest kind of escapade imaginable. Marjorie had resisted for weeks. But tonight, at last, she had given in. After four weeks of twittering little girls, of orange blouses and green bloomers, of the dull elephantine small talk of the other counselors, and of Mr. Klabber’s prosy piety, she was famished for a little fun. Marsha had promised to get her safely to the other shore without the necessity of swimming in the dark. Carlos Ringel, the set designer of the South Wind shows, would meet them at the raft, she said.
Marsha paddled in silence for perhaps a quarter of an hour before Marjorie saw the low flat black streak on the water. “There’s the raft,” she said, “and no sign of Carlos Ringel.”
“Now, dear, don’t fret. Carlos will be there.”
After another long pause filled with discreet rhythmic plashing, Marjorie said, “What do we do, exactly, if we run into this—this Mr. Greech?”
“Why, honey, you’re just another guest. There’s a thousand of them. He doesn’t know all their faces. Course, the sooner we get out of these horrible duds the better. We go from the cove straight to the singers’ cottage, where we dress. It isn’t a hundred feet and it’s all bushes and shadows.”
“What does he look like?”
“Who, Greech? Satan.”
“Oh, really.”
“I mean it. Satan with a potbelly and white knickers. You’ll see.”
Marjorie uttered a small involuntary groan, pulling the sweater more closely around her. Marsha said, “For Pete’s sake, sugar bun, why are you so nervous? What’s the worst that can happen to you? Do you think he’ll eat you? Or that Klabber will? Stop being a child. We’re going to have a hell of a marvelous time tonight, and don’t you forget it.”
“Marsha, I’d rather not get kicked off the first job I’ve ever held for moral turpitude, that’s all.”
The fat girl giggled. “Moral turpitude. Baby doll, your idea of moral turpitude is having two helpings of pie after dinner. But I love you just the same. Now you relax, do you hear?”
As the canoe drew nearer the raft, the adult camp began to come alive with little lights, like a lawn full of fireflies. Voices and women’s laughter came floating over the water with the music. The floodlights showed a mass of red canoes—there seemed to be hundreds of them—beached bottoms up in serried lines along the shore. The social hall was floodlit too, a snowy modernistic building with a huge gilded round shell at the back. Above the entrance a broad white shaft towered up through the trees, with enormous letters on it in slender gilded script, SOUTH WIND MUSIC HALL. The swimming dock reached far out into the lake, a sweeping arc lit by red and green lanterns.
Marsha pointed with her paddle at a canoe emerging from a shadowy part of the shore. “There comes Carlos, Old Faithful himself—grumbling like anything, I bet, but there he is.”
They came alongside the bobbing, clanking wooden raft which was built on oil drums, and Marjorie’s hand was clasped by a thickset black figure. “Easy does it,” said a rasping voice, and she stepped first on a dripping drum and then on the burlap-covered raft. Marsha climbed out of the canoe with Marjorie’s suitcase.
“Carlos, this is Marjorie—”
“Hi. Hurry, kiddies, rehearsal’s started already.” He helped them into his canoe, and impelled it toward the shore with powerful plunging strokes. Marjorie, hunched in the bottom at his feet, was embarrassed by his silence. “Sorry to put you to all this trouble, Mr. Ringel.”
“No trouble. Quiet now, we’re getting in close, never know when he’s skulking in the bushes.”
The canoe crushed through sweet-smelling branches wet with dew and scraped on the beach. “Take your friend on ahead, Marsha, I’ll get rid of the canoe.” A quick fearful scurrying through brush and briars, and they were panting inside a brightly lit cottage, the rafters of which were festooned with girls’ underwear, stockings, and bathing suits. Sitting up on a bed reading The Saturday Evening Post was a beautiful tall blond girl, stark naked. “Hullo,” she said to Marsha. “Brought a friend this time, hey? You’re early.”
“It’s a quarter past nine.”
The blonde glanced at her watch and yawned. “Damn, so it is. I’m due on stage in ten minutes.” She rose and strolled around picking up clothes, not at all troubled by the absence of blinds on the windows.
Marsha said, “This is Marjorie Morgenstern—Karen Blair.”
“Hi,” said Karen, waving a brassiere at Marjorie and then putting it on. “Help yourself to anything—combs, powder—need underwear?”
“Thanks, I brought everything.”
“Well. Glad you aren’t all moochers on the other side of the lake.”
“What are you complaining about? I can’t get into any of your things, you beanpole,” Marsha said.
Karen zipped shut a pair of green shorts and a white shirtwaist, and slid her feet into moccasins. “See you, kiddies.” With a wave of long limp fingers she was gone.
“Noel Airman’s current flame,” Marsha said, taking clothes out of a closet.
“She’s stunning,” Marjorie said. “Are they going to be married?”
“What, her? Strictly a bed partner for the summer. She’s thirty-one, and dumb as a post. Been married and divorced three times.”
“Good heavens, she doesn’t seem much more than twenty—”
“Look close around her eyes and mouth next time, honey. She sure does.”
“How old is he?”
“Noel? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, maybe.”
“He’ll be at the rehearsal, won’t he?”
“He’s directing it, dear,” said Marsha, a shade impatiently. She went into the bathroom with an armful of clothes.
Marjorie knew that Noel Airman was the head of the entertainment staff at South Wind, the social director who wrote and staged the shows. In the city Marsha had played and sung at the piano many of his tunes from the camp revues. Airman sounded like an extraordinary person indeed. Some of his musical skits had been performed in Broadway revues. He had had a number of songs published; two of them, Barefoot in Heaven and It’s Raining Kisses, were current hits. Marjorie was much excited at the prospect of meeting such a celebrity. As she dressed she was thinking that the blond girl was the first honest-to-goodness mistress she had ever seen, though she had been reading books and seeing movies and plays about them all her life. Karen Blair did not look the part, somehow. There was a disappointing absence of any air of sin or guilt about her. Perhaps, thought Marjorie, it was just another of Marsha’s lies.
Marsha came out of the bathroom painted and slimmed, in the brown Mexican blouse and copper-spiked leather belt of the city days. Marjorie was used to the sight of her in the baggy orange and green uniform. “Gad, look at you!”
“Human, eh?” Marsha said, mincing. She slipped her arm through Marjorie’s, and they stood before the mirror together. “The two sirens from across the water. Not bad.”
“Bet you could beat that blonde’s time,” Marjorie said. “You ought to try flirting with Noel Airman.”
“What, and have Carlos strangle me and leave my body in the bushes?”
“Oh, nonsense. Wh
at claim has he got on you?”
“Why, none in the world, the old slob—let’s go.” Marsha turned out the lights. “Now remember, if we meet Greech ignore him. You’re just a guest. He knows me, so that’s no problem.”
“He—he does know you?”
“Well, good grief, honey girl, I’m here three nights a week, I couldn’t go dodging him forever. Carlos has told him some kind of cock-and-bull story. Greech makes an exception for me. I’m supposed to have a summer cottage around here. Come on.”
The air in the dim lane was heavy with the sweet smell of mountain laurel. Marsha walked confidently into the darkness. “This way, Marge.—So far as flirting with Noel Airman goes, he’s not for the likes of us, baby. He’s another Moss Hart or Cole Porter. He’ll probably marry someone like Maggie Sullavan when he gets around to it.”
“He’s not Jewish, is he?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“But—‘Noel’—”
“Oh hell. I’ve known Jews named St. John.”
The lane turned and widened, and they walked out on a deserted open lawn, queerly yellow-green under floodlights, like the grass of a stage setting. In the center of the lawn a white concrete fountain lit by red, blue, and yellow spotlights cascaded a foam of changing color. Rustic benches and summerhouses dotted the grass. Here and there on the lawn were tall noble old oaks, ringed with whitewashed stones, in which the floodlights hung. Beyond the lawn lay the lines of canoes, the red-and-green arc of the swimming dock, and the black lake. “Good God,” murmured Marjorie, “it’s so quiet.”
“Saturday afternoon this lawn is like Times Square.” Marsha struck across the grass toward the social hall and Marjorie hurried at her side. “They’re all at the steak roast now.”