“Well, the ceremony starts up again now, Noel, and some of the best songs come—”
“How much longer?”
“Oh, not much, not even an hour. I appreciate that you’ve been very patient—”
“Well, it’s been interesting, but frankly I do have the idea now.”
She said at once, “Noel, it’s perfectly all right if you want to leave now. Everybody will understand.”
“I’ll settle for some more of that Palestine brandy.” He poured a stiff drink—he had been drinking brandy steadily since the dessert—swallowed half of it, and stared at the amber liquid. “Curious taste. Rough, not quite civilized. Primitive, potent, exotic. Well suited to the occasion.”
The change in tone was marked when the seder resumed. The glory was departed. The guests were all stuffed with food, and sleepy with wine and brandy, and more interested in talking about the wonderful judge than in following the ceremony. Mr. Morgenstern had to rap for quiet several times.
There soon ensued a lot of glancing toward Noel and Marjorie among the Family, with winks, and nods, and whispers. Marjorie began to be uneasy. The rite that came next was the traditional occasion for teasing sweethearts and engaged couples. Noel, oblivious, was leafing through the Hagada in a bored way, sipping plum brandy. Even Aunt Dvosha became lively and gay, whispering across the two vacant chairs to Uncle Shmulka. The arch faces she made at Marjorie would have frightened an alligator. In the expectant quiet that settled over the table, Uncle Harry said, “Okay, who opens the door this year?”
The relatives giggled, pointing at Marjorie. Noel looked up. “What on earth—?” he said mildly.
“This is it, Noel,” Harry said. “The door’s got to be opened, you know.” There was more laughter.
Noel said, “For whom?”
“Elijah, the prophet Elijah. Don’t you know? Elijah comes in now and drinks his cup of wine.”
Noel said, “Well, he’s no friend of mine, but I’ll be glad to open the door.” At the howls of mirth that followed, he turned to Marjorie. “Was that funnier than I thought?”
“Margie and Noel open the door,” squealed Aunt Dvosha, and collapsed on the table, laughing.
Noel said, “I begin to understand…. Well, let’s go.” He took her hand and stood amid ribald guffaws.
Marjorie, completely scarlet-faced, said, “It means nothing at all, nothing.” They went out to jocular shouts. “Just some nonsense about making a wish, but a boy and a girl are supposed to go together.”
“Well,” Noel said, as she halted in the hallway. “Do we open it now?”
“No. One moment.” A chant began in the dining room. “Now. Go ahead, open the door.”
With a wry smile, Noel did so. The empty tiled outside hall, and the rows of doors, looked strange. He glanced at her. “Damned if I didn’t feel a cool wind on my cheek. The power of suggestion—”
“I’ve felt that wind every year since I was four,” Marjorie said.
“How long does Elijah stay?”
“Just for a minute.”
“Am I supposed to kiss you, really?”
“Not at all. Skip it, by all means.”
He kissed her lightly. He had drunk a lot of brandy; he smelled of it. In a swift motion he had his coat out of the closet, draped over his arm. “Margie, make my excuses to your folks, will you? I’m going out on the town with the prophet Elijah.” She stared at him. He said, “Really, it’s best. They’re sweet people, and I’ve had a wonderful time, the judge’s oration notwithstanding. It’s been a revelation to me, really it has. But I think at this point I’d better run along.”
She said faintly, “It’s probably an excellent idea. Goodbye.”
“I’ll call you,” he said. He looked at the empty air in the hall. “Elijah, wait for baby!”
The door closed.
Chapter 28. IMOGENE
She didn’t become uneasy until three days had gone by without a call from him. It wasn’t possible this time, somehow, to telephone him in the free-and-easy way she was growing used to; not after his abrupt departure from the seder. She wasn’t really angry about it; he had on the whole behaved well during a very trying evening, she thought, and the outcome might have been far worse; still, his manner of leaving had been a rebuff of a sort, and the next move had to come from him.
It was only on the fourth morning that she woke wondering whether she had misjudged him, after all; whether he was actually a shallow snob, capable of thinking less of her because she had poor relatives, and a few strange ones like Aunt Dvosha and the Sapersteens.
It was a relief when the phone rang at ten after eleven, the time he almost always, for some reason, chose to call her from the office. “Miss Morgenstern? One moment, please.” It was the cold correct voice of the Paramount switchboard operator.
“Hello? Marjorie? How are you?”
“Why—why hello, Mr. Rothmore… Sam… I’m fine, thank you—gosh, what a surprise!”
“Hope I didn’t wake you up—”
“Oh no, good Lord, what do you think of me? I’ve been up for hours—”
“Thought you might have acquired the habits of our no-good friend, a little bit. Where is he, by the way, do you know?”
“Isn’t he at the office?”
“Hasn’t been here for three days, and his phone doesn’t answer.”
Marjorie said with impulsive alarm, “He must be sick.”
“Have you seen him or heard from him in the past three days?”
“Monday night was the last I saw him.”
“Is that so? Well, Tuesday morning he didn’t show up. I don’t think he’s sick. I sent a messenger down to his apartment yesterday. Place was dark. No answer to the bell. He’s off somewhere, nobody knows where.”
“Why Sam, it’s—it’s very strange that he’d just go off, without telling your office.”
“Goddamn strange,” Rothmore said sadly. “Goddamn strange. Margie, what are you doing for lunch? Come down and have lunch with me.”
“Why—” She thought frantically for a moment about clothes. “Why, of course. I’d love to, Sam.”
She immediately called Noel and let the telephone ring and ring. He had a trick, when he didn’t want to be disturbed, of unscrewing the base of the phone and wadding up the bell with paper. He had fixed it that way during the two weeks he had rewritten Princess Jones, and she had sat in his apartment laughing at the dull little angry buzz it made. The noise was irritating, and if it went on long enough he would occasionally take the receiver off the hook. But this time the ringing continued until it got on her nerves, and she slammed down the receiver. She dressed quickly in an old blue suit, making several last-minute changes of hats and costume jewelry.
She had not seen Rothmore before at his desk, in his huge main office. The desk was immense, the wainscoting very dark, the carpeting very thick underfoot, and there were many modern paintings richly framed on the wall. He got up slowly, holding out his hand. The severe look he had darted from under his brows at the opening door faded to a pleasant tired smile. “Hello. Heard from our vanished friend since I talked to you?”
“No.”
“Messenger boy just went down and tried to kick the door in. No luck. Come with me. I’d like to show you something.”
He led her to a small office facing out on Times Square, with two desks in it. “Noel shares this office with another man. Here’s his desk. He left it open Monday. I had to dig into it this morning for some correspondence that’s overdue.” One after another he pulled out the drawers. They were overflowing with jumbled papers, books, letters, printers’ galleys, copies of The Hollywood Reporter and other trade papers, office memoranda, and the rest of the debris of a desk job, all in an unbelievably slovenly chaos. There were some half-eaten stale sandwiches and a few empty Coca-Cola bottles. Marjorie stared, speechless. Rothmore said, “I don’t know how he did it. Except maybe by emptying his wastebasket into the desk every day since he’s been here—or all
the wastebaskets of Paramount, more likely.” He shut the drawers with contemptuous back-hand thrusts. “Well, I’m glad he’s been doing something to earn his keep. The wastebaskets should be emptied, though not necessarily by story editors.”
Marjorie faltered, “I thought he was doing pretty well….”
Rothmore looked at her over his thick glasses. “Let’s go get some coffee.”
Over exquisite cold salmon in a small French restaurant, he told her the story of Noel’s career at Paramount. She was at once fascinated and repelled by the disclosures, and her nerves were shaken. Rothmore was not bitter, but he was not kind, either. This was the other side of Noel’s sarcastic anecdotes. After the glimpse of the desk drawers, Marjorie could hardly hide from herself where the truth probably lay. According to Rothmore, Noel had been lazy and insolent from the first day. He had been rebellious before there was anything to rebel against; and his resentment had been directed not at anything in his own job, but at the entire process of business. “I mean, Margie, the man would say things like, ‘Naturally, we’ve got to make sure our pictures show a profit,’ in a sneering tone. As though it were some goddamn guilty secret that a business has to make a profit. Childish, you know, unless a person’s a communist, and he’s no communist, I managed to make pretty sure of that. But I’m damned if I know what’s eating the man. I mean why? Why the petty lies? Why the inefficiency? He’s one of the cleverest fellows I’ve ever met, but he couldn’t hold a job as a twelve-dollar-a-week file clerk, his methods are so disorderly. He’d lie about the most trivial things, get me in silly jams—you know, saying he’d answered a letter, or sent back a set of galleys, when he hadn’t. When it caught up with him, he’d say in the airiest way that the thing had slipped his mind, or some stupid answer like that. Totally irresponsible. Why, today I found in his desk letters, important letters, he should have showed me, weeks old. It isn’t normal, Marjorie. No man is that lousy. He had to work at it, to be that bad. Now, why?”
Marjorie said miserably, “Maybe he isn’t cut out for business, that’s all. He was very efficient at South Wind, staging shows. A lot of creative people just can’t stand business.”
“Well, my answer to that ought to be, why did he take Paramount’s money? But I’ll skip that. Margie, he’s very valuable when he wants to be. He’s got a fine grasp of pictures, and I mean a business grasp. For some perverse reason he kept taking the high artistic tone, I guess because that made it easy to insult me, but I’d put him up against anybody to analyze a story property—a musical, a novel, a farce, anything—for its basic values. Why, he pulled a story out of an obscure magazine that we bought for twelve hundred, and I’m bound to tell you if he didn’t do anything else all year he earned his keep with it. We’re making a big A picture of it. And I told him so, and gave him a bonus. Maybe that was my mistake. But I was trying everything, you see. I tried being tough. I tried being nice. I tried giving him his head. I tried riding him. Hell, all I was after was to straighten him out. Nothing helped. From the day he came to the day he left he was the same mess. Pouting one minute, charming the next, smart as a whip today, stupider than the most idiotic clerk tomorrow, fast as a snake, slow as molasses, blow hot, blow cold, the most aggravating man I’ve ever encountered. I’m a pretty stubborn customer, Marjorie, and I don’t as a rule start anything I can’t finish, but this has beaten me. I’m all through with Noel Airman.” Rothmore sipped his coffee, lit a cigar, and sat staring at her from under his brows, taking little gulps of air. He seemed to be waiting for her to plead Noel’s case. She found nothing to say. There was a panicky undercurrent to the speed and hunger with which she went on devouring her food, shaking her head gloomily at Rothmore’s story. He said after a while, “Well what do you think? You must know him better than anybody.”
“Sam, he’s a total enigma to me, a black mystery. He has been, since the first day I met him.”
“It’s none of my business, but have you been giving him a bad time? A girl can mess up a man’s work, like nothing else.”
She faced him. “That’s not it. Take my word for it.”
“Well, maybe he’s just no good, as he keeps saying. I can’t say he hasn’t pretty well proved his point.”
“What do you think of his songs, Sam, really?”
“His songs?”
“That’s what he’s really interested in, after all.”
Rothmore said, “There’s no comparison, none at all, between where he could go as an executive and as a songwriter.”
“But obviously he doesn’t care about being an executive.”
Rothmore puffed at his cigar. “Look, he’s past thirty. He’s a competent songwriter, pretty competent, but frankly they’re a dime a dozen. And they’re not like Noel, you know, the Brill Building crowd. They’re ignoramuses, lowbrows, neurotic bums, these fellows who write an occasional hit song. I’m not talking about a Johnny Mercer, a Cole Porter. He isn’t that, or he would have shown the form long ago. If you ask me, he writes songs with his fingertips, the way he does everything else. I don’t know what the trouble is. I’m no psychoanalyst. Maybe he’s so afraid of being a failure he won’t put his back into anything, so he can always tell himself that he’s never really tried. I have a brother like that. I started him in four different businesses. He was always my mother’s darling, but he’s never earned an honest dollar. He can whistle all the themes from Beethoven’s quartets. My brother Leo. Never married. Hangs around with the Philharmonic musicians.” Rothmore motioned to the waiter for the check. “More coffee?—I’ll tell you, I think he’s got a hit in that Old Moon Face. What ruins him, probably, is these occasional hits. If he’d only fail completely at it, he’d concentrate on something with a future. But your friend’s curse, Margie, I’m afraid, is that he never fails completely at anything. He’s got too much ability for that.”
“I’ve told him over and over he’s got to concentrate on one thing.” Marjorie could not keep the heartsickness out of her voice. “Has he showed you his musical comedy, Princess Jones?”
“No.”
“Well, I think it’s brilliant, Sam, I really do. He’s had awful luck. I’m not trying to excuse him, but—” She told Rothmore of the misfortune with the producer Kogel.
He moved a shoulder disparagingly. “That’s the theatre business. You’ve got to be able to take such knocks. Still, if you say this show’s good, maybe it is. He has remarkable ability, I know that.” Rothmore’s eyes flickered at her. “He talks a lot about you. Pretends to laugh at you, but—he’s damned selfish, but I do think he’s in love with you. You’re his hope, if he has any.”
“I can’t imagine what’s happened to him, Sam. I’m going to find him, one way or another.”
Rothmore helped her from her chair. “Margie, I said I’m stubborn, and I am. If you can get him to promise you that he’ll start afresh, and really try, I’ll forget about this little vacation, and take him back. It’s got to be a promise to you. Otherwise—” He shrugged. “He’s an attractive young man, God knows, but there’s just so much time you can waste trying to straighten out one bent pin.”
When they parted on the street, Rothmore said, “He owes me money. Not much, but he was supposed to pay it back this week. If that’s what’s bothering him, tell him to come back and stop being such a damned baby. We’ll work out an easy way to pay it off, five dollars a week deducted from his check, or something.”
This upset her more than anything else he had told her.
Noel’s window was open slightly at the bottom, and the Venetian blind was drawn up. This was as much as Marjorie could see from the street. She rang the outer bell. Surprisingly, there was an immediate answering buzz, and the hallway door yielded to a push. She went up the dimly lit stairs, full of an indefinable fear. She seemed to be seeing the torn blue linoleum on the steps, and smelling the incense odors from the ground-floor apartment, for the first time. Every detail of the staircase stood out—the old-fashioned molding along the wall, the dirty V
ictorian balustrade, the extinct gas jet near the top, below the single dim light bulb. She rounded the top of the stairs with a slight effort, dreading what might confront her, but his door at the end of the hallway was shut. She walked to it and rang the bell.
The girl was taller than Marjorie, and dressed in a blue housecoat. She seemed pretty, but it was hard to tell because the light of the window was directly behind her. She said, “Oh!” and then, “I was expecting a boy with groceries.”
The two girls looked at each other. Marjorie could hear water drumming in the bathroom. She said in a pleasant calm tone, “Is Noel Airman here?”
The girl said, “Are you Marjorie?”
“Yes. I’m Marjorie.”
“Well, come in. He’s taking a shower. He’ll be right out.”
The bed was neatly made, and the room looked as it always did, except for the new calfskin suitcase open in the corner, overflowing with pretty white and pink lingerie. The girl went to the bathroom, pounded a fist on the door, and shouted, “Hey! Your friend Marjorie’s here.” She smiled at Marjorie with easy good humor. She was redheaded, and lusciously attractive. The water stopped running, and Noel’s voice called, “What?” The girl said, “Marjorie’s here, I tell you.”
There was a silence. Then Noel shouted cheerily, “Fine. Give her some coffee. I’ll be right out.” The water gushed again.
“Sit down, honey, and take your coat off. Coffee’s just hotting up. I’m Imogene Normand.”
The girl stood with her hands in her housecoat pockets, smiling down at Marjorie, who was tensed in the armchair, her coat flung back from her shoulders. “Don’t start throwing things at Noel when he comes out. I landed in New York without five dollars to my name, and Noel let me park here. He’s been staying on the fourth floor with his painter friend, the fellow with the beard, Van something. He comes down to shower because all his things are here.”
Imogene said this with such offhand pleasant sincerity, with such utter absence of embarrassment or guile, that Marjorie’s muscles relaxed slightly, and she even smiled. “Well, I’m glad you told me. I was going to stab him with the bread knife. You’re awfully pretty.”