Wally was at her elbow. “Your mother says come along, Margie. Just a couple of minutes more. She says you’ll need a coat—”
Adele said, “I’ll get it, Marge. Which one?”
“I don’t know—I guess my blue raincoat—”
“I’ll get it.” Wally ran down the lawn.
The sun broke through as Marjorie walked to the cortege, making the fenders and windows of the cars gleam, and warming her back. She paused with her hand on the Buick’s door, and looked back for the last time at the grounds of South Wind. The Buick stood in front of the camp office, so that she had a clear wide view down to the beach and the social hall. The lake glittered white. The tower of the social hall was a glare of white. On the lawn the rain-soaked grass twinkled in myriads of tiny rainbow sparklings, and the trees dripped in little glitters. In the middle of the scene, dry and squat, its black iron pipe thrusting up through the gray plaster cascade, was the dry fountain. She shuddered, climbed into the car, and sat alone in the rear seat.
Wally appeared at the window, holding up her crumpled coat. “Margie, I’ll help Adele,” he panted. “You’ll get everything in perfect shape.”
“Thanks, Wally.”
“He was a wonderful guy.”
“Yes. Goodbye, Wally.”
Honking, the cortege started, and moved down the road. The public-address horn over the camp office blared, “Breakfast now being served in the main dining room.” The crowd on the lawn was already melting, straggling to the doors of the dining hall. It occurred to Marjorie that she was very hungry; but it was too late to do anything about it. Looking through the rear window, she saw Wally and Noel standing side by side on the porch of the camp office, watching the procession depart.
The cars bumped slowly along the rough muddy camp road, splashing brown water high in the air; then they went out through the entrance arch, and glided down the main highway. Marjorie looked back at the glinting coppery image of Lady South Wind atop the arch, remembering the elation and triumph with which she had passed under it in June. It was a little startling when her mother said, “A lot different coming out than going in, hey?” Mrs. Morgenstern, twisted round in the front seat, was regarding her daughter wryly.
“Yes, Mom. A lot different.”
“Well, it’s still more different for the Uncle.”
“I know.”
After a silence Mrs. Morgenstern said, “Tell the truth, Marjorie. It’s Sodom, isn’t it?”
Marjorie hesitated. Then she said, “Oh, more or less, Mom, more or less, I suppose it is. Now you tell me this. Why is it so beautiful?”
The mother grimaced. “That’s an old question.” She faced the front.
The cortege rolled smoothly down the highway to New York.
Only many hours later—when the funeral was over, and the cars were leaving the cemetery on Long Island where the Uncle had been lowered into the brown earth—did the thought at last strike Marjorie, through all the fog of shock and fatigue, that the death of Samson-Aaron had stopped her from having an affair with Noel Airman; and that nothing else in the world could have stopped it.
PART FOUR
Noel
Chapter 21. RETURN OF MARSHA
Not many girls get an offer of a star part in a Broadway production the day after they graduate from college; but Marjorie Morgenstern did.
Just before the commencement exercises began—when she was joking and skylarking with the other senior girls in a dressing room at Carnegie Hall, putting on her cap and gown—the dramatic coach, Miss Kimble, came darting in all red-eyed and red-nosed. She pressed on the bewildered Marjorie a damp kiss, a hug redolent of pine soap, and a letter to the Broadway producer, Guy Flamm. “It’s no open sesame to the pearly gates, Lord knows. But believe me, dear, any contact is important when you’re starting on Broadway. You’re on your way to a glorious destiny. I know it. Give my love to Guy, and God bless you.” With this, and another kiss, and another pine-scented hug, Miss Kimble disappeared.
Marching into the crowded concert hall, to the strains of Pomp and Circumstance played loudly but uncertainly by the college orchestra, Marjorie stared straight ahead, face rigid, shoulders thrown back, seeing nothing but the bunched red curls of Agnes Monahan in front of her; and, out of the corner of her eye, a stretch of blurred staring faces, and hands holding white programs. The rented coarse black gown she was wearing gave out a musty smell, as though it had been lying long disused in a loft. She was extremely conscious of the black square cap on her head and the tassel dangling near her eye. In the dressing room she had joked with the other girls about the absurdity of the costume and the hollowness of this commencement in a hired hall, with its sad farewell to ivy-covered subways and hallowed carbon monoxide. But as she marched down the aisle her eyes misted, and she forgot for the moment that she had been despising her schoolwork for years, and that she had hated Hunter because it wasn’t Cornell or Barnard.
Her mind was in a turmoil of sentimental regret and excited anticipation. She had read Guy Flamm’s name often in the theatre columns; he wasn’t one of the famous producers, but a producer he most certainly was. The unexpected letter from Miss Kimble in her pocket meant more to her than the diploma she was about to receive. It was the real accolade for whatever she had done at school; more than any diploma, it might light the way to the future.
She was wondering, too, whether Noel was in the audience, and, if so, how she would manage matters after the ceremony. Her mother, she knew, would inevitably want to go to Schrafft’s; and Noel, who could eat with pleasure in the noisiest, dirtiest cafeterias, had once said that the middle-class miasma at Schrafft’s gave him the black horrors.
After some remarkably uninteresting speeches, the roll call of the graduates began. Rank on rank, seven hundred girls marched to the stage, and as their names were called, they each received from the dean a handshake and a white cylinder tied with lavender ribbon. It went as regularly and swiftly as bottle-capping. Little lonely handclaps rose here and there in the hall for each girl. Only the prize winners and a few expert politicians in the class evoked any real applause. Marjorie tensed as her turn drew near, and her regret became acute at not having worked hard enough to lift herself out of this black line of nobodies.
“Felice Mendelsohn…”
“Agnes Monahan…”
“Marjorie Morgenstern…”
A bit dizzily, she walked across the open space to the dean. To her amazement there was a general outbreak of handclaps. She glanced to her left at the banks of faces. Even some of her classmates were applauding. The dean’s eyes relaxed from a formal grinning glitter to friendliness; her hand was hot, moist, and strong. “Good luck, Eliza.” It was over. Marjorie Morgenstern, bachelor of science, was leaving the huge stage of Carnegie Hall with a diploma in her hand. “Katherine Mott… Rosa Muccio… Florence Nolan…” Evidently her production of Pygmalion in November—she had organized and staged it herself, after the dramatic club had rejected the idea as too ambitious—had won her a trace of distinction, after all.
She wept a few minutes later, as did many girls about her, when the graduating class closed the ceremony with the alma mater hymn:
Fame throughout the wide world is the wish
Of every Hunter daughter true…
She had always considered it a silly song—”fame throughout the wide world” indeed, for this sad crop of subway riders!—and it seemed silly now, too. But it was the end, and so she wept.
The lobby, jammed and steamy, was pervaded by the smell of rain and wet overcoats. Marjorie shouldered her way through, clutching the diploma, went outside, and saw her parents at the outer edge of the crowd under the marquee, talking to Noel. It was raining very hard, slantwise; the wind on her ankles was icy. She pushed through to her parents and hugged them, then briefly clasped Noel’s hand. “Quite an ovation you got,” he said. He wore an old brown hat with a shapeless brim, and a brown herringbone topcoat slightly frayed at one elbow. Fists jammed in his
pockets, shoulders stooped, a vague smile on his face, he looked ill at ease and almost seedy. His white lean face fully showed his thirty years.
“That was probably you and my folks,” she said, “clapping hard enough to raise echoes.”
All at once arms were flung around her, and her face was momentarily buried in wet gray squirrel fur. “Sugar bun, congratulations! Welcome to freedom!”
“Marsha! Hello—”
“Honey, you don’t mind, do you?” Marsha’s face had the old eager look, but she seemed to be much thinner. “Saw the commencement announced in the Times this morning, had to beg out of the corset department long enough to see la Morningstar graduate. Darling, you looked sublime, but the rest of the class—gargoyles, my dear, where does Hunter collect them?” She turned to the parents. “Look at your folks, will you? How do they manage to get younger and younger?” She glanced roguishly at Noel. “And if it isn’t the great Mr. Airman!”
“Hello, Marsha,” Noel said with a smile, his tone faintly weary.
Marsha said, linking her arm with Marjorie’s, “Did you hear that claque in the balcony when they called your name? That was me. I damn near split my gloves getting it started—”
The wind veered and spattered cold rain over them. Mrs. Morgenstern said, wiping her face, “Well, it’s silly to stand here in the wet. Schrafft’s is just a few doors down—”
Marjorie was troubled by Noel’s demeanor in the restaurant. He slumped very low in his chair, smoking, and glancing around at the brown-panelled walls and the parties of middle-aged women in big hats eating ice cream and shrilling at each other. Automatically, not watching his fingers, he was tearing apart the paper doily at his place. Marsha kept chattering about the graduates. When the waitress came the parents ordered ice cream and the girls cocktails. Noel scanned the menu with drooping eyes. “I’ll have a cottage cheese and Bartlett pear salad with watercress.”
Marjorie peered at him. “Good heavens, you never eat such junk. Have a drink.”
“It’s a penance. This is like going up a holy staircase on my knees,” Noel said. “I may as well do it all the way.”
Marsha’s eyes gleamed at Marjorie. “What have you done to him? He’s a broken man.”
“Broken,” Noel said. “Saddled, bridled, bitted, and tamed. Children ride me in Central Park for a dime.”
The parents smiled uncomfortably. Mrs. Morgenstern said, “Listen, don’t complain, Noel. That’s steady work.”
Noel laughed and said without rancor, “Mrs. Morgenstern, how would you like to see me make twenty-five thousand a year?”
“I think Marjorie might like it,” the mother said.
“Would you?” Noel said to Marjorie.
“Look, Noel, what do I care? Do whatever you think will make you happy.” It was an impossible situation, Marjorie thought, especially with Marsha grinningly absorbing every word.
Talk started up of what Marjorie was going to do with herself now. Mrs. Morgenstern said she ought to go to work as a secretary in the father’s office. “Just to find out what it feels like to make a dollar,” she said. “The whole world looks different once you’ve made a dollar.”
“That’s absolutely true,” Marsha said.
Marjorie turned on her. “You, of all people!”
Marsha, tossing her head, took a cigarette and a silver lighter from her purse. “Honey, if the Theatre Guild is holding a part open for you, that’s another matter.” She flicked a flame to the end of the cigarette. Marjorie had an impulse to drop the Guy Flamm bombshell into the discussion. But she suppressed it; time enough to talk about that when she knew what the outcome would be. Marsha went on, “I’ve always believed in you, and I still do. But it’s just true, you’re only half alive, you’re only a child, really, until you’ve earned money. You might as well pile up a reserve for the pavement-pounding next fall. And find out, incidentally, how most of the world lives. It’s a big gap in your education.”
“On that theory,” Noel said, “she also should go out and get an arm torn off in the subway or something. One way or another, most of the world lives maimed.”
“What kind of talk is that?” the father said with unusual harshness, and there was silence until the waitress returned.
Marsha lifted her manhattan and said cheerily, “Well, here’s to the star about to dawn on the world.”
Noel lifted a forkful of cottage cheese toward Marjorie and ate it.
Mr. Morgenstern pushed his ice cream aside after a few spoonfuls.
“You’ll excuse me, people. We’ll celebrate a little better tonight at dinner. The office is in a bad mess.”
Noel stretched out a long arm, seized the check from the waitress, and put on his dingy hat and coat. “Well, rising star, talk to you tonight. I have to go, too. Have to see about that twenty-five thousand a year.”
Mrs. Morgenstern chatted for a while with the girls, questioning Marsha about her department store job with more kindliness than she had shown in the old days. When she left, the two girls glanced at each other and burst out laughing. “How about another drink?” Marsha said.
“Why not? I have no homework tomorrow.”
Marsha caught the waitress’ attention, and made a swift circle with her forefinger over the two drinks. “Sublime feeling, isn’t it?”
“Marsha, how much weight have you lost, forty pounds? You look splendid.” Marsha simpered and put her hand to her hair, which was cropped, thinned, and curled close to the head. The thick paint and purple lipstick were gone; she wore only a little light makeup. The loss of weight had brought the outlines of bones into her face. Her frame was still bulky, but the black suit and plain white silk shirtwaist made it less noticeable. Gone, too, were the gaudy earrings. Her one ornament was a large curious gold crab pinned to a shoulder.
Marsha said, obviously enjoying Marjorie’s scrutiny, “Oh well, dear, I’ve done as well as I can by the old hulk, I guess. Lamm’s has been an education, it beats Hunter seven ways. I’m not assistant corset buyer yet, so I suppose I shouldn’t have gotten in touch with you, but—”
“Don’t be an idiot, Marsha, I’m very glad you came.”
“Well, honey, you know you regarded me more or less as a leper not even two years ago. Maybe after a summer at South Wind you feel a little kindlier toward me. At least you’ll agree I didn’t invent sex.”
“I was kind of young, you know, Marsha.”
“Oh, darling, I wish to God you’d been right, instead of just young. It’s a nasty pigsty of a world, and that’s the truth. But I broke with Carlos way back when I went to work, in case you’re interested—and I’ve been a good girl ever since, honestly. Not through choice, I won’t claim that much saintliness. I’ve had no chances worth speaking of. But the hell with all that. Bless you, you little devil, you’ve harpooned Moby Dick! Who would have thought it? Noel Airman, brought low by little Marjorie! I’m proud of you, honey, and if you remember, I told you you could probably do it.—Well, don’t sit there with a face like a boiled lobster, tell me everything.”
“I haven’t harpooned him, don’t be absurd.” Marjorie drank to cover her delighted confusion.
“Oh, please, baby. I never saw a man so thoroughly and hopelessly gaffed. How did you do it? What’s your secret? Spare no details.”
“Oh, Marsha, it’s awful. I’m in terrible trouble, if you want to know.”
“Poor baby. Are you pregnant? It’s nothing to worry about—”
Marjorie choked over her drink, sputtered into her napkin, and coughed and coughed. It was some seconds before she could gasp hoarsely, “Ye gods, Marsha. You’ll never change, will you?”
With a hugely amused grin Marsha said, “Sorry, honey, I’ve never been able to resist shocking you. You always react like a Roman candle.”
“Oh, shut up and give me a cigarette.” Marjorie began to laugh. “No, I’m not pregnant. As a matter of fact I think I’ll shock you now. I’m not having an affair with Noel.”
Marsha l
ooked searchingly at her face. “I believe you.”
“Well, thank you—”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” Marsha said. “Have you any idea what a feat you’re pulling off? Men like Noel don’t put up with your West Side brand of inconclusive mush. What’s been happening?”
Marjorie still felt her old mistrust of Marsha, but the need to unburden herself overcame it. “Well, Marsha, it’s all so weird I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“Are you engaged?”
“Far from it.” She began to describe the summer at South Wind, and soon was pouring out the story. Marsha listened like a child, her eyes glowing, sometimes holding her cigarette unregarded until ash fell on her suit. When Marjorie narrated the death of Samson-Aaron she stammered and her voice became shaky. Marsha shook her head. “You poor kid.”
Marjorie was silent for a little while. Then she said, “I had the strongest possible feeling that I’d never see Noel again. I didn’t want to. He wrote and I didn’t answer. He phoned and I pretended not to be in.”
“Did you go out West?”
“No. Mom took me to one of those hotels in the mountains where you meet nice young men. She never said she was against Noel. She hasn’t, to this day. Well, I met nice young men, hordes of them. Doctors and lawyers with mustaches, half of them. They come out in force in the mountains in August, like goldenrod. I was the belle of the place, if I do say so. The other mamas would gladly have poisoned my noodle soup if they’d dared. Well, when I came home there was a big rush of dates, and—this all sounds pretty boastful, doesn’t it?”
“Darling, we’re old friends,” Marsha said. “Curse your pretty face, I know every word of it’s true.”
“All I’m getting at is, I was twice as bored as if I’d been a wallflower. All those fellows seemed so dreary, after Noel! Marsha, I hold no brief for him, but he’s—well, you know, he’s somebody—”