“Might as well give me the rest of my allowance, Mom. Then I won’t have to trouble you again.”
“No trouble, I assure you.” Mrs. Morgenstern drew another dollar and a half from the purse. She always managed, thought Marjorie, to make the payment of the allowance a triumph. Marjorie often felt that she would go hungry and barefoot rather than ask for her allowance again. A hundred times she had planned to gain independence by writing short stories, or tutoring, or getting a weekend job as a salesgirl. These plans usually sprouted just before she had to ask for her allowance, and tended to wither right after she got it.
“Thank you, Mother,” she said, remotely cool and formal as she accepted the money.
At this moment her father came into the hallway, carrying the Sunday Times in a disordered sheaf under his arm. He wore a red silk smoking jacket in which he looked uncomfortable. Marjorie kissed him. “Morning, Dad. Sorry I’ve got to run.”
The father said, “Horseback… Can’t you find something less dangerous than horseback, Margie? People get killed riding horseback.”
“Don’t worry. Marjorie will come back in one piece. ’Bye.”
Marjorie’s father had come to the United States at the age of fifteen, an orphan, a fleck of foam on the great wave of immigration from Eastern Europe. In his first bewildered week in a wretched cellar on the lower East Side of New York, he had become friendly with a boy who worked for an importer of feathers. He too had gone to work sorting and classifying feathers: filthy work that paid two dollars a week. Now, thirty-three years later, the importer was dead, the boy who had brought him into the feather business was Mr. Morgenstern’s partner, and the Arnold Importing Company was a well-known dealer in feathers, straws, and other materials for ladies’ hats, a tributary of New York’s millinery trade. From two dollars a week, Marjorie’s father had painfully worked up to about fifteen thousand a year. Every year since his marriage he had spent every dollar he earned on the comfort of his family and the improvement of their station in life. Except for his part ownership of the struggling little corporation and the salary he drew, he was a penniless man. Yet he lived on Central Park West.
“Do you think she’ll be all right?” he said, peering at the brown door through which his daughter had vanished.
“Why not? All the kids around here ride. More coffee before it’s cleared away?”
“All right.”
At Marjorie’s vacant place in the dining room was the ruin of the bun she had half bolted, smeared with lipstick. “Why is she suddenly so interested in horseback riding?” said Mr. Morgenstern. “She had one lesson this week.”
“Why do you think?” His wife poured coffee from the silver pot she used on Sunday mornings.
“Not that fat fool Billy Ehrmann?”
“There’s another boy in the party.”
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know. Fraternity brother of Billy. He can’t be too bad.”
The father pulled out the business section of the Times and glanced at it, sipping coffee. After a while he said, “What about George?”
“George, I think, is finished. Marjorie doesn’t know it yet.”
“But you know it, I suppose.”
“Yes, I do. It’s a long way down here from the Bronx.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have moved from the Bronx.”
“Now what makes you say that?” The mother looked out of the window, still pleased and thrilled by the view of the park.
“Personally I have no objection to George. A steady boy,” the father said. “Could fit in the business.”
“A nobody.”
“Well, I don’t like these Manhattan boys,” the father said. “They’re too smart. They’re cold fish. I talk to them, and suddenly I remember I’ve got an accent. I can hear it. After thirty years they make me feel like a greenhorn.” Marjorie’s father had only a slight accent, and the mother had virtually none, yet neither sounded native-born, and they knew they never would. “I don’t trust these boys. They look like they’d try any smart trick with a girl they could get away with.”
“Marjorie can take care of herself.”
“She can, can she?”
Mrs. Morgenstern had been maintaining the opposite viewpoint not less recently than two o’clock that morning while waiting up nervously for Marjorie. This kind of discussion went on all the time between the parents. They could take either side with ease. It all depended on which one started to criticize the daughter. The father stared at his paper and the mother stared out of the window.
After a while the mother shrugged. “She’s entitled to the best, isn’t she? The West Side is where the good families live. Here she has the best chances of meeting somebody worth while. We went all over that ground.”
“She told me all about sex yesterday afternoon,” the father said. “Studied it in Hygiene, she says. She knows the whole business like a doctor. She knows a lot more about it than I do. Talked about chromosomes, and tubes, and eggs, and the male this, and the female that. I was embarrassed, I’ll tell you the truth, and the strange thing is I felt sorry for her.”
“Well, she can’t help what they teach her in school. Is it better to know nothing at all, the way we were?”
“Maybe she knows too much. Did she ever tell you the five arguments that prove God exists and five answers that prove he doesn’t? She learned them in a course. But she never goes to temple except to a dance, she’s forgotten any Hebrew she ever knew, and if she doesn’t eat bacon she eats shrimp cocktails, I’ll bet a hundred dollars on that.”
“This is America.”
“We’ve spoiled her. I’m worried about her, Rose. Her attitudes—She doesn’t know what money is. A wild Indian couldn’t know less. I do some magic with a fountain pen and a checkbook and she has a dress or a coat or a riding habit—”
“I saw you going over the checkbook last night. Is that what this fuss is all about? The riding habit? A girl needs clothes.”
“I’m talking in general. From a money standpoint this move to Manhattan was crazy. We’re eating capital.”
“I’ve told you twenty times you’re going to have to give yourself a raise.”
The father stood and began to walk back and forth. He was a stout little man with a moon face, curly graying hair, and heavy black eyebrows. “It’s a funny thing about a business. You take out more money than comes in and after a while there’s no business.”
Marjorie’s mother had heard nothing but moans from her husband about business through good times and bad. She was not inclined to regard the depression seriously. Her husband’s steadily rising income from his feather importing business had seemed miraculous to her in the first years of their marriage, but now she took it quite for granted. “These are the years that count for Marjorie. This new boy she’s riding with, whoever he is, he’s a Columbia boy, a fraternity boy, isn’t he? That means a good family. Would she have met him if we’d stayed in the Bronx?”
“She’s only a sophomore. She may not get married for years.”
“It won’t put us in the poorhouse.”
“Then there’ll be Seth.”
“We’ll worry about Seth when the time comes.”
“Well, we won’t have any problems if she breaks her neck today riding a horse.”
“She won’t break her neck.”
“I heard you arguing with her. She’s only had three lessons.”
“What is there to riding a horse?”
The father paced to the window. “It’s a beautiful day. There go some horses… That wouldn’t be her, yet. Look, the park is green. Seems like only yesterday it was all covered with purple snow. The snow in the parks looks purple, did you notice that? There must be a scientific explanation.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’m worrying about spring hats in November and fall hats in February. A year goes by like a week, it seems.”
“She’ll be all right, I tell you.” The mother came and stood beside him. They were the same height, and she too
had a round face. Their expressions were much alike, except that the man’s face had sterner lines at the mouth. They might have been brother and sister. He looked about ten years older than his wife, though they were nearly the same age.
“Doesn’t it seem strange to you?” said the father. “It does to me. How long ago was she crawling on the floor with wet diapers? What’s become of the time? Horseback—”
“We’re getting old, Arnold.”
“Nowadays they make jokes about the marriage brokers,” said the father. “All the same, with the old system she’d be meeting nothing but boys of exactly the right age and background, and no guesswork.”
“With that system you wouldn’t have the problem of Marjorie at all,” said the mother sharply.
The father smiled and looked sly. After more than twenty years it was still a sore point with Mrs. Morgenstern that he had once almost been matched with a rabbi’s daughter. “I’m just saying that this is also a strange system. It’s going to cost us plenty, putting her near these good families of yours. And one night at one of these dances, what’s to stop her from falling for a good-looking fool from a rotten family? And that’ll be the end of it. Remember that first one at the camp when she was thirteen? That Bertram?”
The mother grimaced. “She has more sense now.”
“She has more education. That’s a different thing. She has no more sense. A lot less maybe. And as for—well, religion—the way things are nowadays—” He broke off, looking out of the window.
“All this,” said the mother uneasily, “just because the girl goes for a horseback ride? Don’t forget one thing. She gets the man she loves. She gets what she wants, not what we pick. That’s the right way.”
“She gets what she wants?” said the father. “In this world? Not even in America. She’ll get what she deserves.”
There was a long silence. He finished his coffee, picked up the newspaper and walked into the living room.
Chapter 2. PRINCE CHARMING
“Here you are, miss.” The taxi stopped in front of the Chevy Chase Riding Academy, a converted garage with a huge tin horse painted a dirty brown hanging over the entrance. A cloud of horse smell came rolling into the cab. She could hear the beasts stamping. The cab driver, glancing around, took in the stiff new riding habit and the uncertain look. He grinned, baring yellow horselike teeth. “Go ahead, kid. You’ll live.” Marjorie gave him a haughty look, and tipped him a quarter to prove that she was an aristocrat who loved horses. Handkerchief to nose, she went up the manure-littered ramp, stepping daintily with her toes pointed inward to avoid the unhappy duck-waddling effect which she had noticed in other girls wearing riding clothes.
Rosalind Green, a stocky sallow girl, came waddling to meet her from the gloomy stalls, in a new riding habit of a hideous olive color. “Hello, we were about to give you up. They’re getting the horses ready.”
“Sorry I’m late.” Marjorie followed Rosalind through rows of stalls where horses were snorting, stamping, jingling, and neighing.
The two girls had become acquainted in the El Dorado elevator. Rosalind, a year and a half older, was a consistent A student, but she lacked humor and was dull at dances and parties. Ordinarily she might have hated Marjorie for her small waist, slender ankles, and quicksilver chatter. But she was so sure of her own superiority that she could forgive her. Rosalind had been born on Central Park West; she was a junior at Barnard; and she was engaged to one Phil Boehm, the son of a famous heart specialist. She had nothing to fear from the clever, pretty little climber from the Bronx, a mere sophomore at the free public college, Hunter. Rosalind frankly patronized Marjorie. Marjorie put up with it because of Rosalind’s usefulness in introducing her to the Columbia fraternity set. They spent hundreds of hours talking about clothes, hair, paint, movies, and boys. Marjorie had lost touch with her girl friends in the Bronx, and had found no real chums at Hunter. Rosalind at the moment was her best friend.
“Here she is, Jeff,” Rosalind called.
At the far end of the stable five horses—very big, eager, and gay—were prancing and pawing under a naked electric bulb. Jeff, a sunburned little groom in shabby breeches and wrinkled boots, stood among the animals, tightening girths and shouting orders at Billy and Sandy, who were saddling their horses. He glanced sourly at Marjorie. “How well can you ride, miss?”
“Not well at all,” Marjorie said promptly.
A humane light flickered in the groom’s eye. “Well, good for you. Most of them won’t admit it, and then—Whoa, you stupid bastard.” He punched the dancing horse in the ribs.
Phil Boehm said, “That’s my horse. Don’t get him mad.” He sat slumped on a dirty bench beside Sandy’s girl, Vera Cashman, a handsome blond sophomore from Cornell, who looked sleepy and cross.
“Give her Black Beauty, Jeff,” said Sandy, with a smile and a wink at Marjorie. He was deft and quick with his horse’s trappings. His breeches were faded, and his boots looked not much better than the groom’s. The riding costumes of the rest of the party were almost as new as Marjorie’s.
“Give me the gentlest horse you’ve got,” Marjorie said, “and give him a sleeping pill before we start.”
Sandy laughed.
Billy Ehrmann, red-faced and perspiring, was heaving at a strap under his horse’s belly. At this moment, with a fierce yank, he managed to undo everything, and fell on the floor under the horse, with the saddle and stirrups in a jingling pile on top of him. The groom, looking extremely disgusted, picked up the saddle and pulled Billy to his feet. “I thought you said you could do this, mister.”
“Got to learn sometime,” panted Billy, brushing manure from his fat face and his jacket.
“Not on a busy Sunday, mister, please.” Jeff flipped the saddle on to the horse’s back, and Billy shambled toward the bench, saying “Hi, Marge,” with a sad grin.
Marjorie smiled at him, thinking what bad luck it was that Billy, of all the fraternity crowd, had attached himself to her. Billy’s one claim to distinction was that his father was Supreme Court Justice Ehrmann, whose name seemed to be on most of the letterheads of New York charities. Marjorie had been greatly impressed at first to learn who Billy was, upon meeting half a dozen of the fraternity boys one evening at Rosalind’s apartment; but she had soon found out that he was a good-natured dolt with no trace of his father’s merit. Still, he was a Columbia boy. He had taken her to the dance last night. So as he walked by, exuding a horse smell which caused her to gasp and fall back a step, she smiled.
Jeff was eying her critically as he saddled Billy’s horse. “I got an idea, miss. Give you Prince Charming…. Hey Ernest! Let’s have Prince Charming.”
Marjorie said, “Gentle?”
“Gentlest son of a bitch alive.”
A Negro boy in jeans lounged out of a far stall and into another stall. “Prince Charming coming up,” he called. After a moment or two he began to lead out a horse; began, that is, because the process took a while to complete. Not that the horse was unwilling. It came out readily enough, but it never seemed to stop coming. The Negro appeared to be unreeling the beast from a large spool inside the stall. It was by far the longest living thing Marjorie had ever seen. At last the rear end came into sight, with a limp straggling tail.
The animal was not only very long, it was a most peculiar mottled red. The Negro boy threw a saddle on its back and led it toward Marjorie. Its long head hung down, nodding. Its face, like every other horse’s, seemed to Marjorie to express a weak-willed stupid animosity.
“What do you call that color?” she said to the groom.
“The color don’t make no difference,” said Jeff, spitting tobacco juice. “That horse is one goddamn gentle son of a bitch.”
“I just wondered.”
“Well, it’s roan.”
Roan. The word conjured up wide Western plains and thundering hooves.
“Let’s mount, folks,” shouted the groom. He held the stirrup for Marjorie, and she tried to get up on the hor
se, but couldn’t. The creature was half again as high as the old mare she had been riding in the armory. She looked around helplessly with one foot in the stirrup, and the seat of her breeches straining. Sandy Goldstone came to her grinning, seized her other leg, and threw her on to the saddle. “Thanks,” she gasped.
“Them stirrups the right length?” Jeff said.
“Oh yes, yes, absolutely perfect.” The groom went and mounted his horse. Marjorie realized at once that her stirrups were too long. Her toes barely touched them.
“Okay folks, single file now going up the street, and no trotting in traffic.”
They went out of the stable into warm blinding sunshine. Marjorie found it nightmarish to be riding along a city street on a horse. The hooves of the seven beasts made a terrible clatter on the asphalt. She kept reaching and clutching for the stirrups with her toes, thinking that a fall on the pavement would certainly fracture her skull. Prince Charming plodded calmly among the honking taxicabs and grinding busses. Every little toss of his head scared her. She clung to the saddle, though she knew it was bad form, though she could see the Cornell blonde grinning at her with contempt. She now cared about nothing except to get through this hour and off this animal undamaged.
When they came to the soft black dirt of the bridle path in the park the horses began to trot. Prince Charming surprised Marjorie with his easy comfortable gait. She found her stirrups and rode to the trot as she had been taught. Her confidence came back and she relaxed a bit. They trotted past the Tavern on the Green. She saw a good-looking boy at a table on the terrace follow her with his eyes as she went by.
Sandy Goldstone rode up beside her, reining in his big coffee-colored horse with a careless gesture. “Was that a joke about not riding well? You’re doing nobly.”
She gave him a mysterious smile. “You’re not bad yourself.”
“Spend a couple of months every year in Arizona. Guess I ought to be able to ride a horse… Margie, there’s no reason for me to hang back and police you, really, is there? This nag’s impatient.”