She felt very little pain and, strangely, not much surprise. “No. In fact, it’s quite all right, Noel. It’s probably for the best.”
“You do think so?”
“I suppose so. I hope so. It’s a little sudden, but that’s all right, too.”
“Kill or cure, Marjorie. Clean break. It’s the only way.”
“I’m sure you know all about how to do these things.”
“You’re going to be bitter?”
“No. Really not.”
“Don’t. Some of it’s been harrowing, I know, but we’ve had a marvelous time, on the whole, and we haven’t maimed each other for life—and we’re at an absolute impasse, really, there’s nothing else to do—”
“Noel, it’s all right. I’ll live. It’s far from unexpected.” She was astonished to find herself putting a handkerchief to her eyes, and she stopped it. “I’ve thought of making this break myself often, believe me. I sort of wish I’d done it first, that’s all. No girl likes to be kicked out. You can understand that.”
“Marjorie, you’re kicking me out. You know you are.”
“Am I? I guess I’ve got this conversation turned around in my mind.”
“I’ve never been through a battle like this in my life. You’ve beaten me.” He looked haggard, almost forty, she thought, slumped with his hands jammed in the pockets of his shabby overcoat, his long hair disorderly, thick blond bristles all along his jaw. “You never gave an inch. It had to be on your terms or none at all. Well, no, that isn’t quite so. At South Wind you started out like any other girl. But ever since your uncle died, it’s been this way. No girl ever thrust terms on me before. You’ve made me try to conform, you’ve actually done that. But it’s hopeless, Marjorie. It’s been driving me slowly out of my head. I’m still a little panicky at the narrowness of my escape. I’ve been in a panic ever since that seder at your house. Going through black depressions and golden exaltations like a real nut. It’s got to end, it’s got to.” His voice trembled.
“That seder. My mother’s bright idea—”
“Brighter than you think, maybe. Ask your mother what her real motive was, some day. Some day when this is all long in the past, Margie, and she’s dandling her third grandson on her knee, on your lawn in New Rochelle—little Ronald Shapiro—you ask her—”
“All right, shut up!” Marjorie said. “One blessing at least is that I’ll hear no more now of that damned Dr. Shapiro.”
Noel said, “You’re right. I keep harping like a stupid boor on one old dull joke. I beg your pardon.”
“Just remember this, Noel, I never told you to go to work for Sam Rothmore. You did it all by yourself. All I said was that while you worked for him it was only fair that you do a decent job. I think going to work at Paramount may have been a terrible mistake. That’s what’s been depressing you. You should have stuck to your composing, and not lost faith in yourself. I never lost faith in you. I still haven’t. I told you that song was going to be a big hit. And I’ll tell you something else. Princess Jones is going to materialize, and it’s going to be glorious. You’re going to be tremendously successful on Broadway, probably in a year or two, if only you work at it. You’re on the verge.” His face was coming to life again. He sat up and his eyes brightened. She began to put on her coat. “Only you’d better stick to your writing, and not go off on any more wild-goose chases like being a rabbi, or inventing new philosophies about Hits, or whatever. I wish you the best of luck, I swear to God I do. I’ll never regret knowing you. It’s been an education. I’ve got to get home. Goodbye.”
“Wait.” He stopped her as she moved to get up.
“Really, I’ve got to go, Noel. Mom’s in bed with a cold—”
“You sit.”
She did not fight hard against the push. “What is it? I can only stay another minute. It’s all over—”
“There’s a few more things we’d better get straight. So long as we’re being frank with each other, and you’re regarding this as part of your education. Which is an astonishingly sensible way to look at it. But you’re a sensible girl, unusually sensible. Your advice to me is very acute. Thanks for it, and here’s some in return. If I were you, I’d forget Marjorie Morningstar. I’ve been rough and mean with you about that, purposely. The fact is, you do have some talent. You really do. You make a sweet exciting figure on the stage. Your voice is weak and thin, but that can be corrected. For someone without any training, you have a surprising flair for projecting a character. Only—”
Her eyes were moistening. “Dog, you might have said this long ago—”
“Marjorie, my sweet, you’re not an actress. You’re not built to take the strain and smut and general rattiness of a stage life. You’re a good little Jewish beauty, with a gift for amateur theatricals. Take my advice, direct all the temple plays in New Rochelle, and be the star in them, and let it go at that—”
“You supercilious son of a bitch, I’m not going to live in New Rochelle.”
He could not have looked more comically astounded if she had flipped up her skirts in his face. “Dear me, Marjorie! Such language.”
“Any other advice for me, Father Time?”
“You’re angry.”
“Oh, not in the least. I’m just swimming in pleasure at being jilted and patronized and called a stupid bourgeois Jewess seven different ways all in a few breaths—”
She stopped because he caught her wrists in a bony cold very painful grasp. He said gruffly, “I love you. Don’t you understand, you little torturer? You’ve executed the vengeance of your non-existent God on me. I’ve never loved or wanted any girl in my life as I do you. But I’m not going to commit suicide to have you, nor put myself in a booby hatch, nor turn myself into a nice tame stepson of Sam Rothmore. You’re an absolute infant. You don’t know what you’ve done to me. You’ve damn near destroyed me. I ache with pleasure right now, just touching your skin. What does it mean to you? Nothing. You’re ten years away from understanding passion, and nothing can hurry you into fathoming it, absolutely nothing. It’ll all come in time. Your passion will force itself up out of the stony soil of your Jewish prejudices, like a tree, and some unknown dolt of a steady-earning doctor or lawyer will pluck the fruit. And I’ll be old or dead, or for all I know rich and famous, as you say, but I’ll never never have Marjorie Morgenstern, and she’s all I want.”
She was crying, and she could see Mrs. Kleinschmidt watching them from the barroom, but she didn’t care. “Why did you ever come back to me? It was all over after South Wind. Why are you whining? You know you started it all up again. You did it.”
“Sure I did. And I made the one frightful blunder that’s all but driven me insane. I resolved to play the game by your asinine rules—to be faithful to you, can you imagine that? Not to touch a girl. That’s been at the root of this whole series of aberrations. I’ve been in a state of unnatural tension for months. It’s served to halo you with a ridiculous glamor, and it’s made all kinds of idiotic behavior seem normal and even spectacularly clever, like going to work for Rothmore. It’s been nothing but collegiate sex hunger, turning a grown man inside out. I doubt I’d have had the courage to this moment to call it quits with you if Imogene hadn’t come along and broken that spell. Now at least I can think and analyze without a rosy haze of sex yearning to discolor all the values—What’s the matter? What are you staring at?” He pushed her down as she started to rise stiffly, like a machine. “Good Lord, don’t tell me you believed Imogene! Don’t tell me you really thought for five seconds that I’ve been sleeping upstairs!”
“I did—I did—”
He made a despairing sound. “I thought you were being really subtle, pretending to ignore it, letting me sweat. Marjorie, how childish and unrealistic can you be? Imogene and I have been on a racketing sex binge for days. I’ve never been through anything like it. She’s learned things in Oklahoma that I—”
His teeth felt hard and sharp against her palm as she slapped him with all her stren
gth. She stood. “I’m in love with you, you rotten tramp,” she said. “That’s why I believed her. Get your feet out of my way. I’m going home.”
He was looking at her with a lopsided grin as she slipped past him. “Fair enough. Goodbye, my love.”
She turned on him. “You’re a disgrace. To your father, to yourself, to the Jews, to anybody who has any part in you. I’ll never stop thanking God for being free of you. Even if you become the most famous man in the world. Goodbye, Noel.”
He slumped grinning on the bench, dishevelled, dingy, looking as desirable as ever. Her hands wanted to touch his hair. She ran out of the saloon. It had begun to snow, in a queer bluish twilight. With snow-flakes whirling about her, stinging her hot cheeks and making her eyes blink, she ran two blocks to the subway. She rode uptown for fifteen minutes before realizing, when a colored woman came into the car with snow clinging to her rabbit fur collar, that it was strange to be having snow in April.
Chapter 31. DR. SHAPIRO
Noel’s first letter, lying at the door in the morning mail a couple of weeks later, gave her a frightening throb of gladness.
She had been dragging through the days, waking to mental misery, walking with it, and lying down with it, seeing him in crowds and in magazine illustrations, picturing him as the hero in the novels from the lending library; telling herself she was well out of it, and believing it, and yet no less miserable for this belief. She hurried with the letter into her bedroom, like a cat with a stolen fish head; closed the door, and stood staring at the envelope, passing her fingers over the thin air-mail paper and the gaudy green and yellow Mexican stamp. Then she read it. It was a long breezy typewritten account of his automobile trip, with enthusiastic descriptions of Mexican scenery and food. She skipped through the paragraphs, searching for a line about herself and himself. But there was nothing. It was headed “Hi, darling,” and signed “Love, Noel.” She flung the letter on the bed. Later she read it over and over. She tore it up after a few days without having answered it or noted his address in Mexico City; nevertheless, she knew the address.
For weeks thereafter she kept watching the mail. She knew it was irrational to hope for mail from him without answering his letter, but her conduct had little to do with logic.
She haunted the producers’ offices and the drugstore more assiduously than ever, and with as little result as ever. But she had learned by now that discouragement was the bread of Broadway, and she kept at her rounds; if nothing else, the pain of being ignored by the theatre distracted her from the pain of having been dropped by Noel.
During this time Marjorie’s evenings filled with dates, once the “kids” (as the young unemployed actors and actresses at the drugstore called each other) found out that she was free. She tried necking once or twice, to get her mind off Noel, but it was disheartening flat foolishness, and she gave it up. She went docilely to temple dances, crowding her date calendar still further with young lawyers, businessmen, and doctors. The contrast between her temple friends and the “kids” made for what slight amusement she could find in the days. Marjorie didn’t encourage any of them. She accepted their invitations calmly, and dined or danced with them placidly, and yielded a kiss at her door, after some formal reluctance, in a way that made it seem an old-fashioned courtesy.
Oddly enough, the one person among all her new dates who woke a stir of interest in her was a man named Dr. Morris Shapiro. She met him at a Zionist lecture to which she was more or less dragged by her parents. When he was introduced to her, she inadvertently burst out laughing on hearing the name. Then to cover her embarrassment at this startling rudeness, she went out of her way to be pleasant to him; and he soon was taking her out every week or so. He turned out to be not a bad fellow, about thirty-two, with an excellent sense of humor and a sharp mind. After a while she began to enjoy his company, in a fashion, and to overlook his scanty hair, black-ringed eyes, and puffy pallor. He was obviously and frankly smitten with her. Eventually she told him why she had laughed at him at their first meeting; he pleased her by being genuinely amused. He said that he was grateful to Noel for his clairvoyance, and stood ready to fulfill Marjorie’s destiny any time she said the word.
“I might believe you were my destiny if your name were Max,” Marjorie answered. “That’s the big discrepancy.”
“The importance of being Max,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me? I’ll go to court and get it changed, if that’s all you want.”
She laughed at him.
Noel’s second letter came when she had almost given up looking at the mail. There it was at last, the bright Mexican stamp poking through the usual trash of bills, charity requests, and circulars. It was another brisk typewritten travelogue. There was one faint personal touch in the last line: “Be civilized and write a guy a postcard, won’t you? Don’t be melodramatic. Nobody loves me. Noel.”
She didn’t tear up this one.
Noel’s song had been published, and it was a great success; she was hearing it at night clubs and restaurants and on the radio. Inevitably, whenever the tune started up, she would see Noel at the piano in Sam Rothmore’s inner office, with his long blond hair falling on his forehead, the blue eyes blazing. She fought off the temptation to write him for two weeks. Late one night, coming home from an evening of dancing with Morris Shapiro, in a lively mood (she had landed a summer-stock job that day), with the strains of Old Moon Face running in her head, she sat at her desk and dashed off this note:
Dear Noel:
Nobody loves you indeed. I pity you. I suppose the two señoritas sitting on your lap as you read this don’t count. Give them my best.
Your Mexican trip sounds fascinating, and I wish I could figure out some respectable way to join you, but I can’t. So you’ll have to be satisfied with your sculptor and the señoritas. And, of course, your memories. By the way, they’re playing Moon Face all over town, and it sounds just as good as it did that day in Sam Rothmore’s office. Congratulations. I guess you’re rolling in royalties.
I’ve moved up a bit in the world too. All the pavement-pounding has at last paid off, after a fashion. I’m going to the Rip Van Winkle Theatre for the summer. I guess you know all about the place. Katharine Hepburn graduated from there, so why not Marjorie Morningstar? All the kids say it’s the best of the summer theatres. I’m the new heroine of the drugstore. Seems I practically broke into Cliff Rymer’s office, took him by the throat, and made him listen to me read Pygmalion. I really did. Desperation makes one do strange things. I’m only an apprentice actress, so I won’t get paid, but at least I’ll get my room and board. I’ll be off my parents’ backs, thank God. Most important, I’ll be acting at last.
Yes, I’m still chasing that dream, or tropism, or whatever you called it, and I still say you’ll live to apologize to me backstage on my opening night.
However, it may amuse you to know that my love life now includes a Dr. Shapiro. There would be something eerie about it, except that his name isn’t Max, it’s Morris. I told him about your standard joke, and he offered to change his name to Max, the fool. But don’t worry, your predictions aren’t coming true. Dr. S. is great fun (we’ve just been dancing) but it’s still Marjorie Morningstar for me, I’m afraid, unless our medical friend acquires a white horse somewhere and carries me off. Which he may be capable of, at that.
Well, you rascal, have yourself a time. Don’t drink too much tequila, or you might wake up married to a tubby little señorita with thick ankles one bright morning. And wouldn’t that be a sad end to the Masked Marvel!
In signing it, she paused a long time. At last she wrote Sincerely; but once on paper, it looked too stiff and had a hint of hurt pride in it. So she recopied the second sheet of the letter, just to be able to sign it Best.
She left the letter on the desk and went to bed. In the morning she hesitated over mailing it. She knew that the only sensible course was to throw away Noel’s letters, and never write to him. But the digs about Dr. Shapiro seemed pretty neat,
even by daylight. She sent the letter.
The same day a printed invitation to Wally Wronken’s college graduation exercises came in the mail, together with a note on scratch-pad paper: I’m not asking you to be my date. Just come. Please.
Slightly curious to see poor Wally in his cap and gown, she went to the commencement. To her surprise, he was the salutatorian, and he received a minor prize for French studies. On the platform he looked pallid, terribly earnest, and not nearly as young as before. After the exercises she went up to him, as his sister was unfolding a small Kodak, and shook his hand. The parents and sister looked amazed. “I was very proud of you, Wally. I’m sure your family was, too.”
Wally said, “Ruth, take a picture of me and Margie. Just one, Marge. All right?” Before she could say anything he had her by the waist, and was turning her toward the camera. The sister, with a grudging glance, snapped the picture. “There, you’re compromised forever,” Wally said.
“Send me a print. I’ll probably show it proudly to my grandchildren,” Marjorie said.
The print came in the mail just before she went to Sleepy Hollow. On the back was written, World renowned actress, just before her rise to fame. Exhaustive research fails to reveal identity of strange man in cap and gown with glasses and long nose. She laughed and dropped it in the rosewood box where she kept favored souvenirs. She meant to write a note thanking him, but it slipped her mind.
About the middle of June, she received a mimeographed instruction pamphlet from the Rip Van Winkle Theatre which contained an unpleasant surprise. There was a page and a half of cloudy verbiage on the subject of money, but what it boiled down to was that Marjorie had to pay fifteen dollars a week for room and board. At the end of the summer, if box-office receipts were normal, all this subsistence money would be paid back to her, with a bonus, the size of which would depend on work performed. Katharine Hepburn, the pamphlet pointed out, had earned a bonus of seven hundred dollars, when she was utterly unknown.