Marjorie Morningstar (27 page)

“I opened it by mistake. I thought it was a circular. How should I know you’re getting
letters from Sodom?”

“Well, as long as you opened it by mistake, why not pretend you didn’t open it, and
we’ll all be happy? I’m hungry—”

“Is it true or isn’t it?”

“Is what true, Mom?”

“Are you or aren’t you on the social staff of Sodom?”

“Isn’t that my business?”

“Excuse me, it’s my business if my daughter decides to go to the dogs. At least I
should be notified.”

“Nobody’s going to the dogs.”

“If you intend to go work in Sodom you’re going to the dogs.”

Marjorie faced her mother. She was a couple of inches the taller of the two. Mrs.
Morgenstern was looking up at her with her nose wrinkled, arms stiff at her sides.
“Please, Mom, won’t you come out of the Middle Ages? South Wind is not Sodom. It’s
a perfectly respectable summer place, much more respectable than the Prado, if you
want to know. You were perfectly willing to take me to the Prado, where more damn
necking goes on night and day, and those divorcees in tight corsets are always flirting
with the damn musicians, kosher or not kosher—”

“Where does all this language come from, Marjorie? Damn, damn. Did you pick that up
at Sodom? Or from Marsha?”

Very wearily Marjorie said, “I haven’t seen Marsha in nearly a year and you know it.”

“Yes, and when I said you’d get tired of her, what did you say? She would be your
dear bosom pal for the rest of your life, I was an old fool from the Middle Ages,
I was this, and I was that. Well, who was the fool? I was right about Marsha and I’m
right about South Wind. It’s no place for you, Marjorie. All right, some decent people
may go there—older people, people who know how to handle themselves—you’ll be a babe
in the woods, you’re only nineteen—”

“Nineteen and a half and I’ll be nearer twenty in July. You were married at eighteen.”

All the lines in her mother’s face pulled down satirically. “You’re comparing us?
I was on my own at fifteen, earning a living. When I was eighteen my hands were rougher
than yours will be when you’re fifty. I went bleeding and yelling in a taxi, from
a sweatshop on Spring Street to the hospital, when you were born—a sweatshop where
I broke my back sixteen hours a day and made three dollars a week—”

“What’s all this? Would you rather I hadn’t gone to college? Plenty of girls I knew
in high school are working now. I’ve done what I thought you wanted, nothing else—”

“Darling, of course we wanted you to go to college. Papa and I want you children to
be everything we couldn’t be. That’s why I don’t want you to be broken to pieces at
nineteen in Sodom.”

Marjorie passionately launched the argument that to become an actress she needed the
training she would get at South Wind. But Mrs. Morgenstern was at her most irritating.
“Actress, my eye. A good husband and children is what you’ll want in a year or two,
darling, once you’ve had a taste of dragging like a tramp around Broadway.” Seeing
her daughter’s angered look, she added hastily, “Maybe I’m wrong, maybe you’re another
Ethel Barrymore. All right. Let’s say so. Did Ethel Barrymore have to go to a place
like South Wind? When she was nineteen there were no such places. She still became
a great actress.”

After running into a couple of more roadblocks like this, which Mrs. Morgenstern could
throw up in an argument with unending ingenuity, Marjorie said, “Well, I don’t exactly
know what you can do about it. I’m going, that’s the long and the short of it.”

“Suppose I forbid you?”

“It makes no sense. I have a career to think of. I can’t give it up because you have
a wild prejudice against adult camps.”

Mrs. Morgenstern regarded her with silent surprise and a tinge of grudging respect.
She was accustomed to much noise and flailing about by Marjorie in such disputes.
Relatively calm determination was something else, something new. She said cautiously,
“Papa will feel exactly as I do.”

Marjorie answered with the same caution, “I think I can talk to him. I can’t to you.”

“And if he says no?”

“I’m going to South Wind.”

“Anyway?”

“Anyway.”

“I see. And afterward?”

“What about afterward?”

“You still have to finish school.”

“I know.”

“You expect to come home, eat our food, have us buy your clothes, as though nothing
had happened?”

“Now, Mama, are you suggesting that you’ll tell me never to darken your door again?”

After a short hesitation Mrs. Morgenstern said, “Well, you say yourself you’re an
independent woman, with a career of your own to think of. You don’t need our advice,
our guidance. You shouldn’t need our support.”

Marjorie looked at her mother for a long time, her face very pale. She said nothing,
but slowly she began to smile.

“What are you smiling at? Let me in on the joke.” There was the faintest faltering
in Mrs. Morgenstern’s tone.

Marjorie felt like a prisoner who, leaning against a cell door, tumbles unexpectedly
into sunlight and freedom. “I don’t, Mom,” she said. “I don’t need your support. Remember,
you said if I weren’t careful I’d turn out useful? I am useful. I type. I take shorthand.
And I’m not bad-looking. I’m worth fifteen dollars a week on the open market. It’s
no fortune, but girls are living on it, heaven knows, all over town. Let me know when
you want me to move, Mom.”

The mother stared. Marjorie gave her a minute to think of an answer. There was none.
She patted her affectionately on the arm. “I’m hungry, Mom dear,” she said. “Guess
I’ll wash up.”

She walked out of the living room, as off a stage, in a gentle queenly way, hearing
phantom cheers and applause from her many vanished selves.

Marjorie came to South Wind on a lovely June afternoon.

There was no sheriff waiting with a subpoena to take her back to New York; and when
in her bungalow (the same one Karen Blair had occupied) she opened her trunk, Mrs.
Morgenstern did not pop out at her. Neither occurrence would have entirely startled
the girl. The mother’s defeat in the first skirmish over South Wind had been temporary;
she had rallied her forces for a month of energetic nagging, snipping, fault-finding,
and obstructing, only to surrender with queer docile suddenness a week before Marjorie’s
departure. She had seen the girl off at the train in excellent humor, even calling
out her standard parting joke as Marjorie went up the steps of the coach car, “Don’t
do anything I wouldn’t do.” Marjorie had made the standard reply, “Thanks, that gives
me plenty of rope,” only halfheartedly, wondering what devilment her mother was up
to. Mrs. Morgenstern was a last-ditch fighter by nature, and her philosophic resignation
struck the girl as extremely suspicious.

Nevertheless, though Marjorie could hardly believe it, here she was in South Wind.
She unpacked, still expecting the telegram, the telephone call, the sudden turn of
events that would send her home. Nothing happened. She walked down to the social hall
with a book under her arm, feeling more secure and more triumphant with each passing
quarter hour; and at the bar she bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time in
her life. She still did not enjoy smoking, so she chose Wally’s mentholated brand;
and strolling out on the lawn, puffing a cigarette, she felt quite grand and grown
up.

Her elation was somewhat spoiled by the seediness of the camp. Seen by daylight in
June, after a winter of neglect and hard weather, South Wind radiated little of the
glamor it had had a year ago by moonlight. The fountain in the center of the overgrown
lawn was dry. The spout, a rusty iron pipe, stood out a foot above the cracked concrete
cascade, which was splotched with sickly green moss. All the buildings needed paint.
The white had gone to dirty rust-streaked gray, and the gilding had mostly peeled
off, showing tin or wood underneath. The dock was being torn, sawed, and hammered
at by workmen. Three tan boys in sweaters and bathing trunks were slapping red paint
on the mottled canoes. Everything seemed smaller—buildings, lawn, fountain, lake,
oak trees—everything. In her winter visions the lawn had been a public park, the oaks
towering old monarchs, the social hall a great building marvelously transplanted from
Radio City; she had honestly remembered them that way. But the lawn was just a good-sized
hotel lawn, the trees were just trees; and the social hall was not much more than
a big barn topped by a phony modernistic shaft, which badly needed replastering.

But there was Airman himself, coming out of the camp office! Weedy, golden-haired,
long-striding, in the black turtle-neck sweater that seemed to be his badge of office,
he at least, of all the attractions of South Wind, retained his first lustre. He saw
her, and turned his steps across the lawn. “Hi, Marjorie. Got here at last?”

“About half an hour ago, Noel.”

“Good. Welcome.”

“Thanks.” Her face was stiff in a smile. “How about the show this weekend? Can I help?”

“No, it’s all set. Just a scratch revue, old stuff—there won’t be two hundred people
here. Got another cigarette?” But when she held out the pack, he fended it off. “Good
God, you too? You and Wally. The younger generation certainly has depraved tastes.”
He pointed to the book. “What are you reading?”

She handed him Plato’s
Republic
at once, glad of the chance to cover her cursed mistake of buying Wally’s brand of
cigarettes.

She really was reading the
Republic
. Shortly after Billy Ehrmann had informed her that his brother was interested in
philosophy, she had found herself taking philosophy books out of the library. It had
seemed natural to do so, just as, when George Drobes had been her god, it had seemed
natural, in fact inevitable, to elect biology as her major subject in college. Biology
had now become stupefyingly dull to her; Plato and John Dewey, on the other hand,
seemed full of good things, and amazingly easy to read.

Airman wrinkled his nose at the book and at her. “What are you doing, catching up
on next fall’s homework?”

“No, I’m just reading it.”

“Just reading Plato?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re silly. Why don’t you get hold of a decent mystery?” He gave back the book.

“I wish I could. I think I’ve read ’em all.”

He rubbed his elbow, smiling at her with a trace of interest. “Seen my brother Billy
lately?”

“I don’t see your brother Billy.” It sounded too sharp; but his kindly tone flicked
her nerves. “I mean, years ago when I was a freshman we ran around in the same crowd.
That’s all.”

He ran a knuckle over his upper lip, inspecting her. “Maybe we can use you in the
show at that. Come along.”

Most of the staff people were the same. Carlos Ringel, fatter and very pasty-faced,
was waddling around the stage, shouting to someone in the wings, who was shouting
back. The performers sat here and there on the floor of the hall, dressed in sweaters
and slacks; several of the girls were knitting. The couple who had done the jungle
dance last year were stomping near the piano, doing a Hindu dance. The rehearsal pianist
was the same, and he seemed to be chewing the same cigar, and to need the same shave.
Noel introduced her to everyone as Marjorie Morgenstern; she lacked the courage to
correct him. Then he turned her over to a little plump man with tiny fluttering hands,
Puddles Podell, a comedian who had exchanged some horribly coarse jokes with Marsha
in the bar last year. Puddles took Marjorie out on the back porch of the hall and
taught her a burlesque sketch called
Fifty Pounds of Plaster
.

“It’s strictly the hotel bit, sweetheart,” he said, acting out the scene with a thousand
little hand gestures. “Just say whatever comes into your head. We’re honeymooners,
see—affa-scaffa, wasn’t it a beautiful wedding, abba-dabba, at last we can be alone,
abba-dabba—” The point lay in two lines at the end. The honeymooners rushed indignantly
on stage, supposedly out of the bridal suite, to complain to the desk clerk.

“What’s the matter with this hotel?” Marjorie had to say. “The ceiling in our room
is coming down. Fifty pounds of plaster just fell on my chest.” Whereupon Puddles
said, “Damn right—and if it had fallen two minutes sooner, it would have broken my
back.”

When the joke emerged, Marjorie turned scarlet and burst out laughing. The comedian
paused and stared at her. “Are you laughing at the
bit
?”

They played the skit on the dance floor for Noel, who slouched low in a folding chair.
“I guess she’ll be okay,” Puddles said to Noel. “What do you think?”

Noel nodded. “Marjorie, it’s a longish road from
Fifty Pounds of Plaster
to
Candida
—but nobody can say you’re not on your way. Try it on stage, Puddles.”

Wally Wronken came into the social hall just as the sketch was starting, and squatted
on the floor beside Noel’s chair. Almost at once he began talking earnestly to Noel,
who listened, shrugged, and raised his hand. “Hold everything—Margie, do you object
to acting in this skit?”

“Object? Why, no.”

“That’s not the point, Noel,” Wally said. “It isn’t funny with her in it,
that’s
the point. She looks too pretty on stage, too wholesome.”

Puddles came to the footlights. “That’s what’s bothering me, Noel. We always used
one of the strippers in this bit. Margie looks like my baby sister or something, it
kills the gag.”

Glaring at Wally, Marjorie exclaimed, “Look, I’m
delighted
to do it, please let’s get on with it.”

Noel shook his head, yawning. “I’m not very sharp today. Thanks, Wally. You’re out,
Margie, sorry. We’ll get someone else to do this immortal scene.”

She stalked off the stage and out of the social hall, humiliated, furious. When Wally
tried to talk to her, she cut him dead.

It was only four o’clock; two hours before dinnertime, and nothing to do. She went
up to the camp office, hoping to make herself useful there. But it was an utter chaos
of tumbled furniture, strewn papers, stained cloths, and paint cans and ladders; it
was being repainted a very fishy-smelling green. Greech ran here and there in his
shirt sleeves, his face streaked green, snatching up a ringing telephone, bawling
at the painters. He shouted when he saw her, “Get out, get out. No time for you, no
use for you. Clear out. See me Sunday. Don’t come in here again.”