Mr. Morgenstern’s shoulders straightened, and a happy smile came over his tired pale face. “Well, as a matter of fact my desk is piled to the ceiling. I had no girl, so—I don’t want to spoil your Sunday—”
“You won’t spoil it. Let’s go right now.”
“Nothing doing.” Mrs. Morgenstern’s tone to her husband was stern. “How many doctors do you need to tell you no more Sunday work? Tomorrow’s plenty of time. If you’re so full of pep, we can go this afternoon and visit Aunt Dvosha. It’s a nice drive to the sanatorium.”
Marjorie said, “Sanatorium? What’s the matter with Aunt Dvosha?”
“She got a blood condition, from eating nothing but vegetables,” the mother said. “She’s got to stay in bed for two months, and get injected with liver, and eat nothing but hamburgers, heart, tongue, stuff like that.”
Marjorie burst out laughing, then checked herself. “Is it serious?”
“Not at all, not now,” the mother said, smiling. “She’s eating like a lion in a zoo.”
Mr. Morgenstern said peevishly, “Since when is dictating letters work? It’s less work than driving a car forty miles. For the first time in her life Margie wants to work for me, and you—”
“No working on Sundays, that’s all there is to it,” said the mother.
Marjorie said, “Papa, how much will you pay me?”
Mr. Morgenstern pursed his lips, trying to look businesslike, but warm delight radiated from his face. “Well, nowadays they start a girl at seventeen a week. But you can’t get a girl worth a two-cent piece for less than twenty. Are you any good?”
“I think I’m not bad.”
“Well, I’ll start you at twenty. If you’re no good I’ll fire you. I don’t want useless relatives hanging around the office.”
“Fair enough.”
Mrs. Morgenstern said, “Don’t tell me we’re really getting another wage earner in this house. It’s too good to be true.”
“Well, it’s true,” the girl said.
“I’ll believe it after you’ve been doing it three weeks,” Mrs. Morgenstern said. “More power to you, darling, but it’s very hard work in that office and very dull.”
“I know.”
“Can it be that she’s growing up?” the mother said to the father.
Determined as Marjorie was to keep a pleasant manner—this conversation was the result of a sleepless night in which she had come to some hard decisions—this last remark of her mother’s pricked her. She said, “Mom, what’s our rent here? Eighty a month, isn’t it?”
“Eighty-two, why?”
“I’d like to pay my share. If I keep this job, I’ll pay in twenty dollars a month. All right?”
Mrs. Morgenstern stared at her daughter, and for the first time her amused look softened. “You mean that, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. That’s overdue, too, I think. I’m sure you think so.”
“Marjorie, as far as I’m concerned the main thing is that you want to do it. I’m very glad to hear you talking this way. We don’t need your money, thank God, and—”
“We certainly don’t,” the father broke in. “If the time ever comes that I can’t put a roof over my children’s head—”
“It’s all settled,” Marjorie said. “I’m paying my share of the rent starting next week. Five dollars a week, twenty a month. If I keep the job.”
Seth said, “She’s having a soul crisis, that’s what.”
“It’s a lot of foolishness,” the father said. “What are you doing, Margie, getting ready to move out?”
“I’m twenty-two, Pa, that’s all.”
“As long as you’re single this is where you stay.”
“I want to stay.”
“All right. As long as that’s understood.”
The mother said, “Margie, it’s all very fine, and you can do it, of course, if that’s what you feel like doing. But you’re not being practical. You only use one room and a bath. Twelve a month is more like it.”
“Fine,” Marjorie said promptly, “I’ll pay twelve then.”
The mother smiled. “Well, good for you. Always grab a bargain.”
“I think it’s a bargain. But you named the price,” Marjorie said. “I’m glad to have the extra eight dollars, believe me.”
“Marjorie, what’s all this about? Why are you coming to work?” the father said.
“She’s seen the light,” Seth said. “It’s a conversion phenomenon. We’re studying these things in psychology. The shock of losing the part in the play did it, It needs a shock to set it off, but underneath it’s been coming a long time—”
Marjorie wrinkled her nose at him, and said to her father, “Isn’t it high time I made myself somewhat useful in the world? Anyway, I want to save some money.”
“For what?” asked the mother.
“Never mind.”
“A present for Noel?”
“No. Not a present for Noel.”
“A mink coat,” Seth said.
“That’s right. A mink coat.”
“That’s not it,” the father said.
Mrs. Morgenstern said, “What does Noel think about all this?”
“I don’t know.”
Mrs. Morgenstern laughed. “She doesn’t know.”
“I don’t.”
“Where is Noel? He hasn’t called all week.”
“In Paris.”
After a slight general pause, Seth said, “You’re fooling.”
“No, I’m not. He’s in Paris. Or he’ll be there in a day or so. He left on the Mauretania last week.”
Mrs. Morgenstern said cautiously, “Did you see him off?”
“Yes.”
“Why did he go?”
“He wanted to.”
“What’s he going to do there?”
“Study.”
“Study? A man thirty-two years old?”
“Yes, study.”
“Study what?”
“Philosophy.”
Mrs. Morgenstern opened her mouth, then closed it without saying anything, rolling her eyes at the ceiling and at her husband.
The father said very gently, “Marjorie, how long is he going to be there?”
“I don’t know. Quite a while. Years, maybe. He’s going to go to Oxford too.”
Mrs. Morgenstern said, “Marjorie, please excuse me, but I think Noel Airman is a little crazy.”
“He may well be crazy,” Marjorie said. “I don’t know. I’ve only known him three years. I haven’t figured him out.”
The father said, “Did you have a fight?”
“No, he just went—it’s quite all right, you needn’t look so concerned, Papa. I’m perfectly okay. I swear I am.”
“It’s another conversion phenomenon,” Seth said. “Delayed. That big flop he had was the shock—and then—”
“Oh, shut up,” Mrs. Morgenstern said. “I’m sorry we ever sent you to college. Blah, blah, everything is a crisis or a phenomenon. You’re still wet behind the ears. Go talk on the telephone for an hour to Natalie Fain.”
“Who’s Natalie Fain?” Marjorie said. “I’m losing track here.”
Seth stood. “Thanks for reminding me, I do have to call her. Marge, Mom’s jealous. Believe me, Natalie’s beautiful. She’s a dream. She reminds me of you.”
“God help her,” Marjorie said.
“It’s true,” Seth said. “Why, she’s even going to be an actress like you. She’s very serious about it. She was the star in Pinafore at her high school last month—showed me the write-up in her school paper. Terrific.”
Marjorie groaned, putting her hands to her head. “Not Pinafore, Seth. The Mikado.”
“No, Pinafore,” Seth said. “Don’t you suppose I know the difference? What’s the matter with you?”
Marjorie’s purpose in going to work for her father was simple enough. She intended to save money as rapidly as possible, take a boat to Paris, and get Noel back once for all to marry her.
Cruel and c
rushing though his huge letter was, it did not seem to her—now that she had had a few days to think it over—as final as he had intended it. Its weakness lay in its excessive finality. If he were so utterly through with her, would he have bothered to take twenty typewritten pages to say so? The man who had to cross an ocean to free himself of a girl was far from free of her when he bought his ticket—whatever he said in a letter. So Marjorie figured.
She missed terribly a friend or a counselor of some kind; she even thought of talking the problem over with her mother. Time after time Mrs. Morgenstern had been proven right in her wrangles with her daughter; even if, with her heavy hand, she had made it impossible for Marjorie to take her advice when it might have done some good. The girl believed that she was able now to ignore her mother’s manner and benefit by her sense. Once or twice she made a tentative start at talking to her; but then she shrivelled and shut up. The hungry eagerness with which her mother responded, and began to pry, brought out all her old barbed defenses. It was absolutely not possible, after all, to reveal to her that she had slept with Noel, and no intelligent talk was possible except in the light of that ugly fact. Marjorie knew that both her parents suspected the truth. Her excuses for coming home late at night, toward the end of the affair, had grown pretty lame. But she decided to let them go on suspecting, lonely though it left her, rather than give her mother the victory of knowing the truth by the confession of her own mouth.
As for her father, she felt it would be easier for her to stab him with a kitchen knife than to tell him.
She considered confiding in Marsha Michaelson, and she did have lunch with her a couple of times. But somehow the meals ended quickly, the talk was inconsequential, and they spent the afternoons shopping together. It was Marsha, now, who was distant and unresponsive; she wouldn’t pick up the cues for intimate talk. She chattered as fluently as ever, but there was no trace of the old gushes of warmth. It was as though Marjorie had said or done something for which Marsha couldn’t forgive her. All she would talk about was plays, movies, and home decorations. After a six-month honeymoon abroad, and four months in Florida, the Michaelsons had bought a big old house in New Rochelle. She overwhelmed and hideously bored Marjorie with gabble about period furniture, modernized kitchens, the breaking and building of walls, and the depredations of rabbits and moles in flower beds. She made the suburbs sound fully as revolting as Noel had always claimed they were. Marsha had become too thin; at this point dieting made her look worse, not better. Knobby bones showed at her throat. Her face had a sunken brown look almost like a mummy’s, and her lips seemed to be drawn over her teeth most of the time in a tight grin.
A letter arrived from Noel after she had been working for her father about a month. Postmarked in Florence, typed on yellow paper, it bore no return address. I don’t want to hear from you, dear, it began. I just thought you might want to know that I didn’t throw myself off the Mauretania halfway across out of sheer longing for you, or anything. In fact I’m fine, brown as a peon and having a gay if somewhat confused time. He had intended to enroll in the Sorbonne as soon as he arrived, he wrote, but Paris looked too marvelous when he got there, and he decided to put off his studies till the fall. He had already been in Switzerland, Holland, and Norway, as well as France and Italy. There was much talk in the letter of a woman named Mildred and a couple named Bob and Elaine, all of whom he had met on the boat. Mildred dominated the group and seemed to be paying some or all of everybody’s expenses. Mildred wanted to see The Hague, so she hired a limousine…. Nothing would do for Mildred but she must fly to Rome that very night, so back went all our clothes in the suitcases…. It was a fair guess, Marjorie thought bitterly, that Mildred was the woman in the red suit. She was first angered. Then she had a spell of revulsion for a day or so when she thought she was free at last of her passion for Noel. Then that mood passed, and she was exactly where she had been before, only more anxious and exasperated.
It was impossible for her to get interested in other men. She tried. She trotted in her parents’ wake to temple affairs, to weddings, even to a mountain hotel when the calendar dragged around at last to another summer. There was humiliation in being peddled here and there, a very obvious unmarried daughter; but at least she was still the prettiest girl wherever she went, so the process was bearable. Neither she nor her mother could really envy brides who looked narrowly to their husbands when Marjorie was around, and often as not slipped an anchoring arm through their elbows.
In her rounds through the marriage market—for this was what she was doing, and she didn’t try to tell herself otherwise—Marjorie encountered many pleasing young men, and a couple of extraordinarily attractive ones. But with the best will in the world she couldn’t warm to them, couldn’t sparkle, couldn’t appear alive. The ordinary responses of sex seemed to have been drained from her. There was something so forbidding about her that most of the men didn’t try to kiss her. To those who did, she yielded with an unprotesting limpness that usually ended the matter.
It wasn’t that Marjorie was being loyal or faithful to Noel. She couldn’t help herself. She would have liked to fall in love with another man, or so she believed; that was why she gave a date to any reasonably presentable fellow who wanted one. Nor was it that all the men compared so very unfavorably with Noel. If none of them had his peculiar mercurial charm and gaunt good looks, there were several who had other attractions. Her mind and her heart were sealed shut, and that was all. She was a wife. She had long ago gotten over regarding Noel as a paragon. She knew his weaknesses all too well. Unhappily, she had committed her soul and her body to him, and now he owned her and was in her blood—marriage or no marriage.
How persuasive Marsha had been, urging her to sleep with Noel, Marjorie thought—how persuasive, and how wrong! It had all been a lot of patter from books and plays, no more. She wondered what manner of love affairs Marsha’s experiments could have been, to leave her so misinformed about sex. It was all very well to prate of trying a lover, and seizing one’s chance of joy, and creating sweet memories to warm one’s old bones; but the brute fact was that having an affair with a man was a plunge into change, shocking irreversible change, like an amputation. It was not a dip in a pool, after which one came out and dried the same body with the same hands. And as for the much-touted memories, far from treasuring them, she found them a continuing torment, which she would willingly have burned from her brain cells. The sex had been, in the best moments, shaking, lovely; but even in those best moments it had been darkened by reservations, fear, and unconquerable shame. Yet for this sex, good or not so good, she had paid a steep price. Marjorie felt rifled of her own identity. She felt that Noel had it, that Noel was now her other larger self, that she was a walking shell. The instinct to stay alive, to preserve herself, was enlisted on Noel Airman’s side; now, when her eyes were at last open to his glaring faults. That was the miserable fallacy in Marsha’s arguments. Getting out of the bed, breaking off the affair, didn’t end the matter at all. It was only the beginning of the heart of the experience, which was an ever-deepening ordeal of pain and depression. Marjorie found the first gray hairs on her temples—just a fugitive silvery strand or two—that autumn. They were premature; she was only twenty-three; but her father had grayed early, and evidently that was to be her pattern. The discovery was terribly depressing, and yet it gave her an indefinable twisted pleasure.
She tried not to think of what would become of her if she failed to recapture Noel. Panic swept her whenever she really faced the thought that he would never take her in his arms again, never marry her. Never! It was impossible. What could she ever bring to another man but a ransacked body and an empty heart? Her hope in life depended on getting Noel back. Determined as he was to escape her, she was yet more determined to bring him to bay.
And she believed that in the end she was going to win. All Noel’s show and power were on the surface; she knew now that at heart he was rather weak. When hard-pressed he ran. A man who ran could be ca
ught.
Noel still seemed to her to have the makings of a good husband, even if he had dwindled much from the blond god of South Wind, and the shining hero of the dress rehearsal of Princess Jones. She wasn’t sure how much creative talent he really had, after all. She hated to concede this, even to herself, because it made her feel like the world’s idiot, after the way she had praised every word he wrote, in her blind girlish worship. But the time had come for her to face facts. Advertising, publicity, promotion, probably would be his fields, as he had himself said; and he was too good at such work to be miserable at it forever. In his first weeks with Sam Rothmore, Noel had done a brilliant job. At the advertising agency his work had been superb—his superiors had told her so—until the day he walked off the job without notice. He surely had a way with words. His discourses in the long letter were vivid and bright. A sentence like Your left spur has been the American idea of success, and your right spur the Jewish idea of respectability was not the writing of an ordinary person. It occurred to her that Noel should really have been a lawyer. His charm, persuasiveness, and fluency, with his ability for sharp analysis, might have carried him far—perhaps to a judgeship like his father’s! But it was too late for that now, of course; the question was how best to salvage his abilities, in the light of his wild temperament and spotty history.
Her hope was that this flight to Paris was the last gasp of the old Noel, the last effort to fight off “respectability.” Noel cared for the good things in life too much, she was sure, to become a philosophy teacher; yet she was perfectly willing to live on an academic salary if that was what he really wished. All she wanted was her husband, the man in whose bed she belonged. She was in no hurry to follow him to Europe; he had to exhaust this fling. Instinct told her that he wanted her, at bottom, more than anything else in the world. He missed her now, and was missing her more and more. She could feel the tugs on the cord which fettered him to her across the wide ocean, in the occasional jaunty jeering letters he sent her, always without a return address, usually postmarked Paris, once Cannes, once London. In the end—this was her view in the optimistic turns of her up-and-down emotional storms—while he might never return to her of his own accord, he would be overjoyed to see her come after him; he would throw up smoke screens of cynical words to mask his surrender—to time and fate, as much as to her—but he would surrender with relief.