Marjorie finally decided to ease her conscience by trying any kind of paying work. She asked a starved blonde from Canada, who had just gone to work in Gorman’s department store, to help her get a job. The girl was skeptical; Marjorie, sleek and furred, comfortably nested with her parents on West End Avenue, didn’t seem to be salesgirl material. But Marjorie convinced her that she meant it. The girl took her to the personnel office, and Marjorie was readily inducted into the working class with a punch card.
She was placed in the women’s underwear section, substituting for a girl who had mumps. For the first hour or so of the first day she worked at Gorman’s, Marjorie really enjoyed it. There was an exciting novelty about standing at her ease in the black dress of a salesgirl on the wrong side of a counter, while women in hats and coats thronged by noisily, looking preoccupied and mean. It was gay to make change, to chirp brightly about nightgowns and panties to customers, to crouch and search around in the stacks of boxes, to fill out sales slips with a sharp fresh-smelling pencil. She was, in fact, Katharine Hepburn, playing a store clerk in the first reel of a smart comedy. The trouble was that the young millionaire played by Gary Cooper didn’t show up. Instead a stringy rouged woman in an old squirrel coat lost patience with Marjorie’s ignorance and began squawking insults at her, and Marjorie answered angrily, and the woman yelled for the section manager, and Mr. Meredith descended with a smile on his mouth and a glare in his eyes. Marjorie got a sharp hissed reprimand. Mr. Meredith apologized to the hag, while Marjorie sulked at the other end of the counter, feeling spat upon.
So much for Katharine Hepburn. Thereafter, through that day and the next and the next, and all the days she served in the store, the job was nothing but exasperating drudgery through a long day under a paralyzed clock; daily it gave her a tired spine, aching feet, rubbed nerves, and a growing hatred of women.
Mr. Meredith, her section manager, began keeping her after hours to teach her about the bewildering stockpiles of underwear. He was a tall mustached man of about fifty with waxy pink good looks, a fetid breath vainly masked by wintergreen drops, and a continual false smile. Marjorie found it decidedly queer to go rummaging through piles of frilly lingerie with Mr. Meredith, and to listen while he fingered brassieres and slips and talked about them. But she put up with it. The reward at the end of the week for all this slavery was twelve dollars. Her father had been giving her half that much each week just for being his daughter. But she brought the pay envelope home with some pride.
Mr. and Mrs. Morgenstern, however, took a disappointing attitude toward their daughter’s new self-reliance. The father seemed saddened. “Does my daughter,” he said, “have to work as a clerk selling underwear? Are things that bad in this house?” Mrs. Morgenstern said that Marjorie was a fool to drudge in a department store when she could make more money with less effort working for her father. Marjorie couldn’t very well explain to her parents that the Arnold Importing Company seemed to her a black pit which would swallow her forever, once she fell in.
She said, “I thought you wanted me to be useful, earn my own keep—”
“I don’t know what’s the matter with you,” the mother said. “You do everything backwards and sideways. You’re a stenographer. Papa needs another girl in the place. Twenty dollars a week. So you work like a horse for twelve dollars a week in Gorman’s behind a counter.”
“Don’t you see that working for Dad wouldn’t count, wouldn’t mean anything?” Marjorie said.
Mrs. Morgenstern rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “If I had a college education maybe I would follow you. When I went to school, twenty was eight more than twelve.”
It was a heavy effort to get herself to answer the alarm clock and go down to the store, and the fact that her virtue went unrecognized made it harder. She arrived at Gorman’s the following Monday already on edge from a breakfast wrangle with her mother, wherein she had finally been driven to exclaim that becoming a stenographer in the Arnold firm was the fate she most feared. Mr. Meredith, who had an eerie way of popping at Marjorie around pillars and corners, flashing his false smile, especially when she was being rude to some unbearable customer, chose this morning to do an extraordinary amount of popping. Also, the girl who had had the mumps returned to work, and showed instant jealousy, fear, and hatred of Marjorie. She sneered at her mistakes, snarled at her when she leaned on the counter to rest, and kept whining and snivelling that somebody had mixed up the stock so that it would never get straight again. She was a fat girl named Viola, with a short upper lip and two large front teeth. The lunch in the clerks’ cafeteria, greasy meatballs and spaghetti, disagreed with Marjorie, shaky as she was. After lunch Mr. Meredith, with an odd change of manner, came fawning around, and started to talk to her about yoga exercises. He recommended a couple of books, and suggested that Marjorie might like to come with him to a meeting of his yoga group. He talked on and on, at very short range, overwhelming Marjorie with bad breath and wintergreen. Her head ached as though a tomahawk were sunk in it. Far down the counter the fat girl glared and glared; at last she came up with a look of fixed hate, and broke in to whine to Mr. Meredith about a mess in the stock which Marjorie had made. They both went out of sight around the corner of the counter. That was the last Marjorie saw of either of them. She left the floor, went to her locker, got her coat, and walked out into the sunshine. She never even shopped in Gorman’s again. But she remembered Mr. Meredith and Viola for years afterward, with extreme vividness, as though she had worked with them half a lifetime.
Morris Shapiro said to Marjorie that night, strolling home with her from a movie, “The point is you don’t need the money. When you need it, the Violas and the Mr. Merediths just become acceptable details of life.”
“I need money,” Marjorie said. “Badly.”
“Not as badly as somebody does who has her stomach to fill,” Morris said. “And that’s the only kind that makes a good salesclerk.”
“Well, I’m not beaten. I’m not going to work for my father yet. There must be some other answer—”
“Margie, how good a stenographer are you?”
“Fair typist. My shorthand never was much.”
“How would you like a job at a hospital? There’s a vacancy in the admitting office at my hospital. I’m pretty sure they’d take you on—you’re presentable, that’s important—”
Marjorie glanced at Shapiro walking beside her in a baggy tweed suit, hatless, in the parti-colored neon light of the Broadway sidewalk. This pale plump middle-sized doctor was certainly no Noel for looks or conversation. But he had his own charm. He was masculine, self-confident, and kind. Had Noel not anticipated Morris with such prophetic caricature, things might well be different now between them, she thought. How could the fiend have foreseen a doctor named Shapiro with a mustache?
“It would be very odd, working at the same place with you. You’d probably get all disillusioned with me in a week.”
“I won’t be disillusioned if your work’s no good. You’ll get fired, that’s all.”
She walked beside him in silence for a while. “All right, I’m willing to try,” she said.
The hospital job turned out to be perfect for her. It ran from eight in the morning to two in the afternoon and there was nothing to it but typing, keeping files, and now and then relieving the switchboard operator. The pay was only ten dollars a week, but her afternoons were free for haunting the drugstore, which seemed a decisive advantage.
In point of fact, however, her passion for the drugstore somewhat declined as her interest in Morris Shapiro increased. In his white rumpled coat, with his stubby hands scrubbed bright pink, and the smell of tobacco smoke and medicine about him, he was an authentic doctor, not a mere date; and he had new charm. Often when her work was through, she would have lunch with him; they would sit drinking coffee and talking, and the latest theatre gossip would seem a less urgent matter, safely to be left to tomorrow.
He was a Research Fellow. In the hospital, where long h
ard work was a matter of course, Morris Shapiro was regarded as an almost maniacal worker. She became curious about his work. But she had to badger him for a long time before he would believe that she really wanted to know about it. Once he started talking he talked copiously, half forgetting her, his face alive and his eyes bright. It was current practice, he told her, in cases of fractures that wouldn’t heal, to put pieces of bone from another part of the patient’s own body into the breach. Morris was doing original work in clinic cases, using bone from other people’s bodies in the same way. He had had some striking successes, and hoped eventually to write a monograph that would modify surgical practice in the field.
Marjorie stared at the tired, puffy-faced slouching young man in the creased white coat, forgetting that he was almost bald and hardly taller than herself. “I had no idea that you were doing anything as important as that.”
He shrugged and lit a cigarette from a burning butt. “It’s just like a Ph.D. thesis. You have to think of some trivial new angle and work it up, that’s all. If I write a good monograph I might wind up with an appointment on some hospital staff. It’s just part of the game.”
He would never concede that he was doing anything but maneuvering for promotion. She grew used to this pose and made no effort to argue against it, while she admired his masked passion for his work.
In due time they got around to necking. She told herself for a while that it was every bit as exciting as it had been with Noel. Then she gave up the effort to maintain that illusion, because it was making her irritable, and spoiling her pleasure in Morris’s company. It wasn’t true. Noel was gone. The special charged and frightening excitement of her first love was gone too, no doubt forever. But she liked and admired Morris Shapiro. She couldn’t pretend to herself that Morris’s conversation had any of the color and sparkle of Noel’s rainbow cascades of words, but he was clever, good-humored, and refreshingly honest.
The greatest enemy of the slowly, shyly burgeoning romance was her mother. Mrs. Morgenstern could not contain her enthusiasm for Dr. Shapiro. She kept extolling Morris and pointing out how superior he was to unreliable nervous types, such as, for instance, songwriters. Morris’s father was a textile manufacturer and a trustee of the temple; he attended services every Saturday in a frock coat and a high hat. Marjorie’s mother and Mrs. Shapiro were old acquaintances. Mrs. Morgenstern let slip at one point that the girl’s meeting with the young doctor at the Zionist lecture had been far from accidental; the fruit of a plot, indeed, contrived by the two mothers for over a year. Morris had been dragged to the lecture as Marjorie had been dragged. His mother had pointed the girl out, and the young doctor’s disgruntled skepticism had changed at once to hot attention. Mrs. Morgenstern thought this was a good joke, perfectly safe to divulge, after Marjorie had been at the hospital a month or so. She had no idea what a horrible yellow blight it threw over the doctor in Marjorie’s eyes. Suddenly Morris seemed to her once more the comic caricature husband predicted by Noel. She hated his pudginess and his mustache, his scanty hair and plodding good nature, and the unlucky name Shapiro. It took her a week or so to get over it. But she finally decided that she was twenty-one, after all, and that it was time to stop being influenced by her mother’s likes and dislikes. It was as childish to reject a man because her mother was trying to push him down her throat, as it would be to accept him. She began to be pleasant to him again.
There were evenings during the month that followed when she almost believed that she had come to the happy end of the long rough road; there were times when she sat at her desk in the admitting office, idly scrawling on a pad, Mrs. Morris Shapiro.
Chapter 32. DINNER AT THE WALDORF
Noel seemed to spring up out of the pavement.
This time it was Noel, all right. She had seen him coming at her in crowds a thousand times in the past months, but he had always melted into a tall stranger as he came close. This was Noel. He stood on the corner opposite her, waiting for the green light, looking back and forth at the traffic. His hands were thrust in the pockets of a camel’s hair topcoat; his blond hair stirred in the wind. The lift of his long jaw, the imperious turn of his shoulders, were unmistakable. He was very brown.
The light changed. He came striding toward her. His unconcerned eyes fell on her, and the abstracted look blazed into recognition and excitement. He seemed to lunge. The long arm swept around her waist and he pulled her up on the sidewalk. “Don’t get killed, please, in the middle of Lexington Avenue. You’re still precious to me.”
“I’m trying to get a cab. I’ve just come from the hairdresser. My hair’s damp,” Marjorie said idiotically.
“Right now you’re going to get a drink. With me.”
“Noel, it’s impossible, I swear it is. I haven’t got a minute to spare, not a second. Help me get a cab, if you want to make yourself useful.”
He looked around and waved an arm, and there was a cab. He bundled her in and dropped beside her. “Waldorf, driver.”
“If you’re going to the Waldorf that’s perfectly all right, Noel. I’m taking this cab on from there, straight home.”
“Of course.” Noel sat back comfortably. His eyes shone at her, brilliant and seeming more blue than ever in his tanned face. “Ye gods, it’s no illusion, it never has been. All you are is the most beautiful living thing. How are you?”
“The old palaver,” she said, wishing that she didn’t sound so shaken and hoarse. “Obviously the Masked Marvel hasn’t changed. I’m fine, thank you.”
“Why are you in such a hurry? Won’t you have one drink with me—five minutes? I have a lot to celebrate, if you haven’t, and—”
“I can’t, Noel. I’m terribly late as it is.”
“It’s only a quarter past five.”
“I’m late, I say.”
“I’ll admit I’m an evil wretch, and all that, but—”
“Noel, I have an appointment at six, and I have to go home and change, it’s that simple.”
“Will you have a drink with me tomorrow?”
“Well, I don’t know, I guess so, I can’t remember at the moment what I’m doing tomorrow—anyway, tonight is just out of the question—”
“So’s tomorrow.”
“What?”
“I wanted to see how determined you were. Tomorrow I’ll be in Hollywood. Or piled up in the Rockies, if my luck runs out.”
“You’re—what? Hollywood?”
“My plane leaves at nine tonight. I have to go back to the hotel and pack and clear up some business. I don’t have any more time than you.”
“Are you staying at the Waldorf?” He nodded. “Dear me, Noel. Hollywood, Waldorf-Astoria… Riding high, aren’t you?”
“On the foaming crest, kid. Healthy, relaxed, loaded with money, happy as a lark. And how are you, really? Take off those gloves. I’d like to see your pretty hands.”
“You crazy fool, I’ll do nothing of the kind. We’re almost at the Waldorf, and—what are you going to do in Hollywood?”
“Take off your gloves and I’ll tell you.”
She stripped off her gloves in two hasty gestures. “I’ve never known such an imbecile and I never will. There.” She made her fingers into claws. “Pretty enough?”
“Excellent.”
“What?”
“No rings. I take it Dr. Shapiro isn’t making good time.”
“The hell he isn’t,” she said, and was instantly angry at herself. She covered as best she could with a mysterious subtle smile.
“Is he your date tonight?”
“Here’s the Waldorf. Goodbye, Noel. Have fun in Hollywood.”
“You’d kick me out of your cab and just ride off, would you?”
The cab stopped. She said, “That’s exactly right, dear. ’Bye.”
“How do you think I’m looking?”
“Thinner. But all right.”
“I’ll ride home with you.”
“Oh no! Nothing doing.”
“Margie, I may ne
ver see you again. You’ll marry Dr. Shapiro and it’ll be impossible. I’d rather look at you for five minutes than spend a lifetime in Hollywood. Please. One drink. I’ll put my watch on the table. When the five minutes are up I’ll vanish.”
“You devil, you don’t care a snap whether you lay eyes on me again or not. You’ve been staying at the Waldorf for weeks probably, and I haven’t heard a peep from you.”
“I got in from Mexico day before yesterday, Margie. I knew you didn’t particularly want to hear from me. However, you’re right about the whole thing, as usual.” His face gloomed over. He got out of the cab. “I’m being a grovelling ass. Goodbye.”
She held her hand out to him through the open cab door. “I didn’t mind seeing you. You’re making me feel like a pig. I do have this date, Noel—”
“Margie, I honestly believe you. Goodbye and God bless you. You look wonderful. I’ll write you.” He shook her hand, his countenance pleasant and friendly again.
She was out of the cab before she quite realized it, saying, “You’re not going to put me in the wrong like this. Five minutes is absolutely all. It’s too much.”
The cocktail hour was at full blast. It took more than five minutes to get a waiter, and more than five additional minutes for the drinks to come. Marjorie watched the creeping clock hands over the bar as she chatted with Noel. At a quarter to six she abandoned the idea of changing her clothes; she would take a cab straight to the hospital. She had undertaken to carve the turkey and help prepare the buffet for the doctors’ Thanksgiving party. Morris was going to act as bartender. It wouldn’t matter, she thought, wearing her street clothes to the party; most of the nurses would be dressed that way. The decision made her feel less harried.
Noel said he was going to Hollywood to write the score for a second-rate movie, with his old collaborator, Ferdie Platt. “Ferdie’s fallen on sad days working for a quickie outfit like Panther Pictures. Too much golf, booze, and girls, I guess. I wrote him a postcard from Mexico, just for the hell of it, and his long air-mail special-delivery letter came back. Obviously he’s using the temporary notoriety of Moon Face as a handle. I don’t care. I’ll have a chance to see the lay of the land. Two hundred fifty a week is a comedown for Ferdie. For me it’s not a bad start.”