Marjorie shook her head, smiling, and said nothing.
“I’m going to the rehearsal from here. Come along,” Marsha said.
“Sorry. I have a million things to do this afternoon.” It was all a little too much, Marjorie was thinking. Marsha Zelenko—of all people in the world, Marsha Zelenko—was a personage around the Princess Jones production, and could come and go at rehearsals. Why was she yearning to become an actress? What was so good about being sponsored by Mrs. Lemberg, and praised by Marsha Zelenko to her little gray-headed fiancé, Lou Michaelson? The glamor seemed to be going out of the theatre. She fumbled at her purse.
In a sudden dry tone Marsha said, “I’m paying, remember? Don’t fool around.”
Marjorie looked at her and put down the purse. “With pleasure, moneybags. With pleasure.”
“Are you really through with Noel, Margie? For good?”
“Obviously.”
“Is there another guy?”
“Oh, there have been others, and there’ll be others, Marsha. But no more Noels, thanks. Pixies bore me.”
“How about fauns? I’d say Noel Airman is more on the faun side. Looking better than ever, by the way.”
“Fauns, pixies, brownies, satyrs, you can have them all. I don’t like mythical creatures. They’re too airy. I don’t like a man you can see through, like a double exposure. Do you know, by some chance, a nice solid man?”
“Sure, Lou Michaelson,” Marsha said. She snapped open her purse, took out a twenty-dollar bill, and dropped it on the check. Lighting a cigarette in a holder with a long narrow red mouthpiece, she squinted at Marjorie through smoke. “Okay. I won’t go to the rehearsal. Will you help me shop for my trousseau? I’m up to nightgowns on the check list. Help me pick out some real yummy things to please Lou.”
“Well—sure, I guess so. I can do that. I’d like to.”
“And you’ll come to my wedding, won’t you? It’s a week from Sunday.”
“Of course. I’d love to.”
“Wonderful. Got a guy to come with you?”
“I’ll provide a guy, if I want one.”
“Shall I invite Noel?”
“No, don’t.”
Marsha’s eyes glinted. “Okay, I won’t.”
“Where and what time?”
“Six-thirtyish.” Marsha tilted her head archly. “Guess where. Just guess.”
“I haven’t an idea in the world. Some hotel?”
“Remember the El Dorado? Lou lives there. It’ll be in his apartment.”
Marjorie said, “Well, well. You’re practically producing Noel’s show, and you’re going to live in the El Dorado. What next?”
Marsha shrugged, grinning. “The wheel of fortune, hey, sugar bun? It’s all too ironic for words, but—What are you puckering your forehead about?”
“Michaelson… Did this Mrs. Michaelson limp?” Marjorie said. “A small dumpy old woman, always wore black, limped?”
“She did have a clubfoot, Lou says—”
“Why, I knew her,” Marjorie said. “She and my mother were on some charity committee of the El Dorado—Red Cross, or something. She was in our apartment a dozen times. I’ll be damned. You’re marrying old Mrs. Michaelson’s son. My mother will die.”
They looked each other in the face, and at the same instant burst out laughing. They laughed very hard. Marsha touched a tiny handkerchief to her eyes. “Ah, God, it’s a marvelous life, Margie, I’m telling you, if you don’t get easily discouraged and cut your throat. It’s a temptation now and then, I grant you. Come on, let’s shop.”
It was very cold in the wet sunny street after the rain. Marjorie said, “Well, this ought to be gay, shopping for a trousseau. Good practice for me, let us hope.”
Marsha said abruptly, “I thought you had a million things to do this afternoon.” And when Marjorie stared at her in confusion, she said, “When will you get wise to yourself? If you were through with Noel Airman you’d have gone to the rehearsal like a shot. And you wouldn’t have given a hoot whether he came to the wedding or not. However, not another word from me will you hear. I’m the original genius at conducting one’s love life. Taxi!”
Chapter 34. MARSHA’S FAREWELL SPEECH
Setting out for the El Dorado, Marjorie was unaccountably nervous. Her palms were wet, and she was swallowing often and hard, as though she were about to go up in an airplane, or take a stiff college final. When she emerged on West End Avenue, low black clouds covered the sky except in the west, beyond the Hudson, where the sun was going down in a dismal yellow glare. The queer light, the raw air, made her shiver. She had intended to walk to the El Dorado; instead, she caught a cab.
She had not been at the El Dorado for more than two years, but the red-faced doorman, in a purple uniform newly frogged with gold, touched his hat and said, “Evening, Miss Marjorie.” It was like a dream to find herself walking through this luxurious lobby, a stranger and a visitor—a visitor, moreover, to Marsha Zelenko. She was glad that the elevator man was new. It would have been too unsettling to be taken up to Marsha’s wedding by her old white-headed friend Frank. She looked at herself in the coppery mirror and saw a troubled young woman, somewhat thinner, perhaps prettier, certainly much more sober than the girl who had last looked out at her from this mirror.
Lou Michaelson lived in Apartment 15 F. The Morgensterns had lived in 17 F. Marjorie knew how the apartment would be shaped, where the hallways would turn, where the windows would look out to the park.
A Negro butler in a white coat opened the door, and the first person she saw in the apartment was Noel Airman, leaning in the archway of the living room with his arms folded, surveying the buzzing guests with a faint smile. She was not very surprised, though the sight of him made her breath come hard. His tan was gone; he looked pale and tired. His jacket was an old tweed he had often worn at South Wind.
He didn’t see her as she went past him. She gave her beaver coat to the servant, and darted down the hallway to the bedrooms. Marsha’s mother, in a long blue gown decked with a huge spray of green orchids, was chattering in the bend of the hall with a group of guests. She held out both hands to Marjorie. “Darling! So sweet of you to come. This is Luba Wolono, dear, you know, the great concert artist, my old, old friend. Luba’s going to play for the ceremony. Luba, this is Marjorie Morningstar, the actress, Marsha’s oldest and dearest friend. And this is Mr. Packovitch, and this is Mr. Maggiore—” Marjorie wasn’t sure whether she had ever heard of Luba Wolono, but it sounded like the name of a concert artist, and the woman certainly looked like one: almost six feet tall, white-faced, and dressed in floor-length black, with long black hair parted as with a hatchet in the middle and pulled straight back. Luba Wolono gave Marjorie a small mournful smile. The guests stopped staring at the concert artist and turned to stare at the actress.
“Where’s Marsha?” Marjorie said.
“Bedroom, first door on the right, dear. She’ll adore seeing you. You look lovely—”
When Marjorie turned the knob of the closed bedroom door there were shrieks, giggles, and screams of “No, no!”
She slipped inside. “I’m not a man, relax.”
Marsha stood in the center of the room with one side of her skirt pulled up, showing her thick leg, an ornate blue garter, a bare tan thigh, and most of a black girdle. Three girls were pulling and hauling at her, all talking at once. The bedroom was full of heavy carved black furniture, and a big black-framed photograph of Mrs. Michaelson brooded over it on the far wall. Marsha shouted, “Marjorie, what can you do about a goddamn lousy stuck zipper? Lend us a hand, will you? Otherwise the rabbi’s going to get one hell of a thrill when I come out of here.”
The girls squealed. “These are my cousins from St. Louis,” Marsha said. “They’re so excited they’re helpless. Elaine Packovitch, Sue Packovitch, Patricia Packovitch, Margie Morgenstern.” The girls stopped plucking at Marsha long enough to inspect Marjorie and chirp greetings. They varied in age from about eighteen to twenty-s
ix, and they all looked very much like Marsha at her least attractive stage. They were dressed in terrible flounces—pink, green, yellow.
Marjorie came to Marsha’s side and peered at the skirt hem jammed in the zipper. “Let’s see—”
Marsha said, “Isn’t it fantastic? Two years selling girdles, and I jam my own goddamn zipper on my wedding day. There’s an omen for you. My hands are shaking so, I can’t do anything.” Marjorie wrenched and pushed deftly for a second or two, and the skirt dropped free. “Well, bless your little heart. What would I do without la Morningstar?” Marsha straightened her skirt at the mirror. “What time is it, somebody?”
One of the cousins said, “Five to six.”
“Thirty-five minutes to go. God, where’s my hat? It was right here—oh, there it is—” Marsha put on a small white hat with a white nose veil. “Somebody close the blinds, the wind’s giving me the willies.” It had grown quite dark, and rain was rattling on the window glass. A cousin snapped the Venetian blind shut. Marsha’s brown eyes were brilliant with excitement; her face was flushed, and her upper lip quivered. She wore a suit of navy blue silk, unornamented and severely cut, with a white orchid on her shoulder. She said, “Okay, now. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue—Wait, did I borrow anything?”
After a major squalling conference, with the Packovitch girls pressing earrings, bracelets, watches, and jewelry on her, she took a handkerchief from Marjorie, tucked it in a pocket, and dropped heavily on the bed. “Okay. The ox is ready for the knife.”
Marjorie said, “How do you feel?”
“Absolutely floating, what do you think?” Marsha stared at her and smiled slyly. “Oh, listen, I’d better warn you. You-know-who is here, after all.”
“I saw him as I came in.”
“I’m sorry. I swear it isn’t my doing. Lou got carried away at rehearsal and invited him, and then I couldn’t very well—”
“Marsha, really, it’s quite all right.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“He didn’t see me.”
“Well, for crying out loud, what are you sitting here with me for? Go on out there. There are some other cute boys. Lou’s partner Milton Schwartz isn’t bad, if you can stand lawyers. I can’t, but it’s too late now, of course—”
The cousins giggled and the oldest, who had something like a hare lip, said indistinctly, “Marsha, you haven’t changed one bit.”
Marjorie said, “I’d just as lief stay here and hold your hand—”
“Sugar bun, I have a cousin on each hand, and one to hold my head if I start throwing up. Shoo. Scat. Go out and make the men feel good. Just don’t start anything with the rabbi. I don’t want him unfrocked before he ties the knot.” Marjorie went out amid the giggling of the cousins, leaving Marsha perched laughing on the bed, her head thrown back, her knees drawn up, directly under the gloomy picture of Mrs. Michaelson.
There were rows of empty gilt folding chairs in the living room. The guests were jammed around the sides of the room and in the foyer, laughing and talking loudly. The air was heavy with tobacco smoke and women’s perfume. They were a middle-aged crowd, the men running to dark suits, double chins, baldness, and cigars, and the women to fine dresses ruined by bulging figures. Obviously they were all, or almost all, Michaelson’s friends and relatives. They looked, Marjorie thought, like customers in a Broadway restaurant: well-to-do, pleased with themselves, and dull, with interchangeable faces. Noel wasn’t in the room. She worked her way to the window seat—the Michaelson cushion was purple, the Morgenstern cushion had been green and gold—and sat as she had sat for hundreds of evenings in her seventeenth and eighteenth years, hands folded in her lap and ankles crossed, looking through blurry panes at the black park and the flaring city. The automobiles, as always, reminded her of beetles as they ran along the twisting lamplit park roads, their headlights phosphorescent in the rain. The skyscrapers below Fifty-ninth Street loomed black, pierced with square yellow windows, and swathed in a pinkish fog. The view stirred an ache in Marjorie. This was the lost city. Here it was, unchanged, unconquered, and she was past twenty-one. She had sat like this by the window at seventeen, thinking that twenty-one was the golden time, the time when fame and money and a brilliant marriage would burst over her in an iridescent shower. It had seemed to her then that twenty-two was the start of the downward slope; that twenty-four was an autumn year; that thirty was decrepitude. She could remember these thoughts across the stretch of lost time and smile at them. But how much wiser was she now? What was the truth about herself, her life, her hopes, her dream of becoming Marjorie Morningstar?
“You’re Marjorie Morgenstern.” It was a pleasant voice, and a young one, cutting through the chatter behind her. The young man held two highball glasses in his hands. He wore a dark gray suit, and he had a handsome round face that might have been girlish, except for the solid square jaw. Thick black hair framed his forehead in a round line. He was about Noel’s age.
“Yes, I’m Marjorie Morgenstern.”
“I hope you like scotch and soda.”
“At the moment I could go quite mad about one. Thank you.” She took the glass and drank deeply. “This is very nice of you.”
“I’m Milton Schwartz.”
“Oh? Lou’s law partner.”
“Right.”
“The man he plays handball with.”
Schwartz smiled. “That’s a good police-court way to identify me. I plead guilty to playing handball with Lou Michaelson.” He looked at her for a moment. “You know me, Marjorie. At least I know you. We’ve danced. Two whole dances.”
“Oh?”
“At the Ninety-second Street Y. The dance after the play. The night you played Nora in A Doll’s House.”
She regarded him more carefully. He might indeed be any one of the hundreds of boys she had danced with at one time or another since her fifteenth year; not bad-looking, with Jewish light and warmth in the eyes, and an urbane alertness about the face, the posture.
Noel Airman crossed her line of vision beyond Milton Schwartz’s shoulder. Hands in the pockets of his worn gray flannel trousers, Noel was lounging through the knots of guests toward a large black reading stand in a corner of the room. She turned brightly to Schwartz. “Of course. I should have remembered. I was pretty numb that night. It was such a bad show—”
“Except for you it was pretty bad. But you were radiant.”
“Thank you—”
“I’m not being polite. Actually your performance wasn’t good for the show. You were so much better than the others, the whole effect became worse than it might have been. Sort of like throwing a white light on a painted set.”
“Why, thank you again, that’s very nicely put.”
Schwartz was rolling the highball glass between his palms. “I wanted to say a lot to you that night. That’s why I cut in. But then I got tongue-tied at the idea of dancing with a professional actress. I’ve always been a bug on dramatics, and—”
“I’m not a professional. Not by a long shot.”
Noel was poking and peering at the black stand, which, Marjorie now realized, might be a piece of electric equipment, possibly a diathermy machine. What on earth was it doing in the living room?
Schwartz said, “Don’t say that. I know a good bit about you. I used to work with the Vagabonds. I went backstage that night and got the low-down on you. The legal mind at work. I tried to call you for a date three or four times after that, but I got discouraged. You were never at home, and—”
She flashed a brilliant smile at Schwartz and laughed as though he had made a devilishly clever joke. Noel’s eyes had moved for a fraction of a second toward her, and away again. She laid a hand on Schwartz’s arm. “It was sweet of you to go to all that trouble. I wish I’d known.”
He scanned her face, his mouth moving in a slow pleasant smile. “You’ll think I’m a fool, but when Marsha mentioned at the office last week, quite by accident, that her friend Marjori
e Morgenstern was coming to the wedding, I all but knocked her down, hugging her.”
“Did you really? I must have been better as Nora than I thought. Don’t forget, those were Ibsen’s lines. I’m just a would-be bit player, just another West End Avenue girl. If you’re cherishing any other picture of me, you’ll be sorry you ever got to know me any better.” She said all this with great vivacity, her eyes fixed on Schwartz’s.
He said, “There’s no end to how much better I’d like to know you.”
“I thought lawyers were slow to commit themselves.”
“You came alone tonight, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Let me take you home, or out, or anything you say, after this is over.”
She hesitated. Nothing could annoy Noel more, of course. “That’s very kind of you….”
“Marjorie! Marjorie, please!” Mrs. Zelenko was waving at her from the middle of the room, smiling very brightly.
“Excuse me,” she said to Schwartz.
Marsha’s mother slipped an arm through hers, and drew her out of the living room; Noel Airman and Milton Schwartz both looked after her. The three Packovitch girls were whispering together in a corner of the foyer. They noticed Marjorie and whispered more excitedly behind their hands. Mrs. Zelenko muttered, “Don’t look concerned or anything. It’s nothing at all, bridal nerves, I guess. I had a bad case of it ten minutes before my own ceremony, heaven knows. But you’d better talk to her—she’s asking for you—”
“Of course.”
Rounding the corner of the hallway, they encountered Lou Michaelson, with two men in black. His wavy gray hair was oiled down and sharply parted, showing freckles on his scalp. He introduced the rabbi and the best man to Marjorie. “Just a few more minutes,” he said, with a flustered smile that uncovered one gold tooth. “I can’t believe it. How’s Marsha, Mom?”
“Wonderful, wonderful, Lou. We’re just going to her.”
The mother opened the door of the bedroom carefully. Marsha lay face down on the bed, under the picture of Mrs. Michaelson. She said in a strange voice, grainy and dry, “I just want to talk to Marjorie, Tonia. You can go along.”