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.
Chapter 14. MARJORIE AT SOUTH WIND
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 plu
mp 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.”
Marjorie wandered down a curving road behind the dining hall toward the tennis courts, thinking that her first day at South Wind could not have been worse if her mother had planned every detail. She was a bit of female clutter on the landscape; moreover, she was Marjorie Morgenstern—stamped, branded with the name for good, all in a few seconds. Her irritation and anger focused on Wally Wronken; she felt quite capable of not speaking to him all summer. She lit another cigarette, but it reminded her of Wally, and it tasted awful anyway. She threw it away after one puff.
At that moment she saw the Uncle.
He was carrying a tin tub of garbage down wooden steps from the back door of the kitchen. She recognized him instantly, though he wore a kitchen uniform: small white hat, white undershirt and trousers, and an amazingly dirty apron. There couldn’t be two men in the world with such a paunch; besides, as she stood frozen in surprise, watching him empty the garbage, she faintly heard him singing the song to which they had danced with the turkey leg. “Uncle! Uncle, for heaven’s sake! Hello!” She ran up a slope through daisies and long grass. “What on earth are you doing here, Uncle?”
“Havaya, Modgerie! Vait, I come to you! Up here it don’t smell so fency. Vait, vait, I come down.” She halted midway on the slope. He approached, grinning broadly, mopping his streaming red face with a handkerchief. “Is a surprise, no?”
“Surprise? I’m stunned—”
“Modgerie, ve keep it a secret, no? By Modgerie and the Uncle a little secret. Better ve don’t tell your mama, she’ll only make a big hoo-hah. I tell you, darling, by the golf course vas too lonesome. Here is more fun, nice fellers, plenty to eat—hard vork, but vot is vork? I make plenty money, too—not like by the golf course—”
“The golf course?” she said, more and more bewildered. “What’s the golf course got to do with it? Why are you here?”
The Uncle smiled in a placating way, showing the black gap in his teeth. “You vent to find me by the golf course, no? Your mama thinks I’m still there. Ve von’t tell her notting different, vy does she have to know I’m a dishvasher?”
After Marjorie asked a good many questions, it came out that Mrs. Morgenstern had arranged a caretaker’s job at South Wind for the Uncle, a week or so before Marjorie’s departure. This explained her sudden mysterious good cheer, of course. She had succeeded in placing a chaperone of sorts over her daughter at “Sodom,” after all. Greech had taken the Uncle on without salary (and with Mrs. Morgenstern paying the railroad fare) as a kind of janitor and watchman for the lodge on the golf course. But then two dishwashers had quit. Greech had offered him the kitchen job at twenty-five dollars a week, and he had accepted it gladly.
It penetrated the old man’s mind very slowly that Marjorie was amazed to find him at the camp at all. “Vot? She didn’t tell you notting? How is it possible?”
“She didn’t, Uncle. Not a word. I swear I thought I was seeing a ghost for a minute.”
“A nice fat ghost, hah?” He shook his head. “So! For you it’s some disappointment, no? A fat old uncle you need around your neck, hah? Like a cholera, you need it. It’s too bad, Modgerie, I’m sorry—your mama is a smart vun—”
“Uncle, it doesn’t matter, really—”
“Listen, Modgerie, a mama remains a mama, she can’t help it. By her it’s still Friday night in the Bronx, the Uncle has to keep an eye on the baby. So vot? You think I spoil your fun, Modgerie? Have a good time, darling, vot do I know? I’m busy in the kitchen.”
She had been looking at his hands uneasily. Now she caught one as he made a gesture. “Uncle, what’s the matter? What are these?” There were several gaping little red wounds on his fat fingers. They were neither bleeding nor healing. They were like mouths, open, dry, and red.
With a laugh, Samson-Aaron pulled his hand away. “You vash dishes you get cut. Dishes break. Soap keeps vashing in the cuts, so they don’t heal, so vot? You lay off from vashing dishes they heal up.”
“I don’t like the look of them. Did you see the doctor?” Marjorie stared at the red gaps.
“Modgerie please, it’s notting.” He put both hands behind his back. “Don’t be like your mama, alvays questions.”
“I just don’t know if you ought to be doing this, Uncle.”
“Vot, I’ll disgrace you? Modgerie’s uncle is Sam the dishvasher? I von’t say a vord to nobody, depend on the Uncle.”
She threw her arm around his neck. “It’s not that. You’re—It’s hard, dirty work, you know—”
“So? I never vashed dishes? I vashed dishes in the Catskills, Modgerie, before you vere born. Vot is it? Caretaker, vatchman, that’s the jobs I don’t like. Jobs for old men, for cripples. I’m strong like a horse—Vait, I show you something.” He fumbled under his apron, brought out a tattered sweat-blackened wallet, and pulled a snapshot from it. “Did you see yet a picture of Geoffrey’s vife? Here, look at a doll, a sveetheart—”
Geoffrey had been married for six months. The picture showed him standing on the porch of a tiny house, in shirtsleeves, with h
is arm around a thin girl in flat shoes and a house dress. She was squinting into the sun, and her hair was pulled flat in a plain knot, so Marjorie could form no notion of her looks. Geoffrey, fatter and with much less hair, was grinning foolishly, his chest thrust out, a beer bottle in his hand.
“She’s lovely, Uncle. What’s her name?”
“Sylvia. Her father is a doctor in Albany, a big specialist. You know vot? She calls him Milton. Says it sounds more like him than Geoffrey, God bless her. A doll, hah?” He showed the black gap again in a happy grin, curiously like Geoffrey’s, and lowered his voice. “Modgerie, in October they have a baby already.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“You see vy I vash dishes maybe, Modgerie? Vy should I take money from Geoffrey ven he needs it? I send it back! Comes October I send him money. For the baby, a present. The baby should sleep in the finest crib money could buy. A crib from Samson-Aaron the gobbage pail. A good idea, hah?”
A voice roared from the rear of the dining hall. “Hey Sam, you fat old bastard, you drop dead or something?”
“Okay, okay—” yelled the Uncle. He chuckled. “That’s Paul, the other dishvasher. A good feller, a Hungarian, plays good chess. So?” He caressed Marjorie’s cheek lightly. “I see you sometimes, Modgerie, hah? I got a secret, you don’t tell Mama, I don’t tell her your secrets. It’s a bargain? I see you sometimes ven nobody’s looking, I give you maybe a Hershey bar.” He ambled toward the kitchen, shouting, “Vot’s the matter, Paul, you vash a dish good and break your back?” He toiled up the stairs, his paunch shaking, waved at Marjorie from the top stair, and disappeared.
Marjorie marched straight to the public telephone booths in the main building across the hall from the office, and put in a call to her mother. The fishy fumes of the office paint brought tears to her eyes. In the next booth Mr. Greech was alternately growling and howling incomprehensibly at his secretary in New York. The operator told her that the circuits to New York were busy. She went out on the porch to escape the fumes while she waited. The afternoon had clouded over; a dank wind was lashing the oak trees, and there was a smell of rain in the air. Marjorie dropped dejectedly on the porch steps, her chin resting on her hands.