“Are you from New York, Mr. Airman?” said the mother.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Manhattan?”
“Yes. The Village, at the moment.” Noel lit a cigarette. His eyes flickered to Marjorie’s for a second. He slouched back, his arms folded, looking at the mother with his head aslant.
“Oh, the Village. Do you put on shows in the winter also?”
“I’m a songwriter, Mrs. Morgenstern.”
“Oh, a songwriter.”
Marjorie said, “Noel’s had skits in Broadway shows, and he’s had dozens of songs published, Mom. You remember It’s Raining Kisses, that big hit.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Well, I don’t know how on earth you could have missed it. It was the biggest smash hit of 1933.”
Noel said, “Well, not quite.”
Marjorie said, “Dad, you heard it. It was always on the radio, all the orchestras everywhere played it—”
The father said, “I guess the days when Mama and I followed the popular songs are far behind us.”
“Well, what’s the difference?” said the mother. “A hit song is something. Listen, Irving Berlin isn’t poor.”
Noel grinned. “One hit song doesn’t quite make me Irving Berlin.”
“You’ve had lots of hits,” Marjorie said.
“Well, I’ll have to start looking for your songs,” Mrs. Morgenstern said. “How do you spell your name again?”
Noel spelled it.
“Noel Airman, eh? That’s an interesting name. I didn’t catch it before. Well, so you’re not Jewish. I didn’t think you were.”
Marjorie said, “Good Lord, Mom, what difference does that make? It happens he is Jewish, but for that matter most of the staff isn’t, and—”
“But Noel,” said the mother, peering at him. “Noel means Christmas, doesn’t it? Nobody calls a Jewish boy Noel. You might as well call a Catholic boy Passover.”
Noel threw back his head and laughed. Marjorie gnawed her lips. He said, “Mrs. Morgenstern, I couldn’t agree with you more, but I’m stuck with Noel.” He waved at the waiter. “I must buy you a drink.”
“Thanks, I’ve had all the lemonade I want,” said Mrs. Morgenstern.
But Noel ordered another round for everybody. Then he explained that he had given himself the name when his first song was published.
“Oh, then it’s a pen name, that’s what it is,” said the father. “Like Mark Twain, or Sholem Aleichem.”
“Well, I wish the resemblance were closer, but that’s the idea, Mr. Morgenstern.”
The mother said, “What is your other name then, if I may ask, your real name?”
After a tiny pause Noel said, “Saul Ehrmann. Not so very much of a change, you see.”
“No, not at all,” said Mrs. Morgenstern. “Ehrmann… I know a Judge Ehrmann. But he spells it with two n’s.”
Noel expelled a sigh, and shrugged. “So did I, Mrs. Morgenstern. He’s my father.”
“What? Judge Ehrmann is your father?” She turned on Marjorie. “He’s Billy’s brother! Really? For heaven’s sake, why didn’t you say so?”
“Mother, you’ve been so busy asking questions nobody could possibly have gotten a word in.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Well! Judge Ehrmann’s son!” Mrs. Morgenstern looked at Noel with more friendliness. “Of all the coincidences! Why, we have a great many acquaintances in common. I know your mother quite well from the Federation, and—don’t you have a sister Monica? Married to the older Sigelman boy? The Sigelmans of the Snow Maiden Dry Cleaners?”
“That’s my sister.”
“Of course. Well, Mrs. Sigelman, that’s your sister’s mother-in-law, happens to be the best friend of one of my oldest friends, Belle Kline. I know them well. Lovely family, the Sigelmans. What’s your sister’s husband’s name? Horace, isn’t it?”
“Horace,” said Noel.
“Very good-looking boy. Very bright. He’s in business with his father, isn’t he?”
“He’s in business with his father.”
Marjorie said, “I think I’d like to dance.”
“Well, and you a songwriter!” said Mrs. Morgenstern. “Come to think of it, Belle did tell me once about the older Ehrmann boy writing songs—I just never connected your name—with your father a judge I should think you’d be in the law.”
“Well, you see, Mrs. Morgenstern, I flunked out of law school with the lowest marks in the history of Cornell University.” Noel was sitting up straighter, hugging his elbow.
Mrs. Morgenstern laughed, then looked uncertainly at Marjorie and back at Noel. “Don’t tell me that. Not in your family. Too much brains—”
Marjorie slid out of the booth. “If you won’t dance with me, Noel, I’ll find someone who will.”
Noel said pleasantly to the parents, “Will you excuse us?”
“Go ahead,” said the father. “Have a good time. Don’t sit around talking with a couple of old fogies.”
“But I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.” Noel stood. His smile was warm and candid. “Maybe later we can chat some more about the Sigelmans, and all.”
She clung to him in the dance, fearing a chilliness in the way he held her. She waited a long time for him to speak. One dance ended and another began. She said, “You can certainly be poisonous, can’t you?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“ ‘We’ll chat some more about the Sigelmans.’ Just dripping with venom.”
“It was a small joke for your benefit. Sorry if it seemed anything else.”
She looked up at him. He pressed her waist slightly, his face in the habitual cast of satiric good humor. “What are you looking at, Margie? You’ll get a crick in your neck.”
“Trying to figure you out.”
“Oh, that dreary game. Well, the face is no help. Look, I’m not upset, or surprised, or mad, or anything, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“I have a memory, you know,” Marjorie said. “I remember what you said about the mothers. The frightful giveaways, the same face as the daughter twenty years later, with all the beauty gone and just the horrible dullness left.”
“I like your mother.”
“Oh yes! The way you were bristling at her…”
“Well, that’s a reflex. The mouse and the cat. I haven’t been through that business in eight or nine years, I’d almost forgotten how it went.”
“Mom’s being particularly left-footed tonight.”
“Now look, Marjorie, don’t start apologizing for your mother. She’s fine. In fact she’s perfect. Had she been any different I’d have been disappointed. She has a Shakespearean exactness and intensity of character. All is as it should be. I don’t know, I guess I’m irresistibly drawn by the authentic. I like you both.”
“Oh fine. Lumping me with my mother. I’m really lost.”
“I love you,” Noel said in a different voice. She looked once quickly into his eyes and stopped talking. They danced. After a while she saw her parents sitting on the folding chairs, watching her. When the music ended Noel said, “You’d better make up your mind what the script is, my darling, and then stick to it. Do you want to dance with other guys, or sit with your folks, or what? Don’t get into knots, don’t worry about my feelings, just do exactly what you want to do. Your folks are sitting over there, right behind you, following all your moves.”
“I know where they are. I want to dance with you.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes.”
“And the inquisition?”
“Let me handle that.”
The next number began. He took her in his arms. “All right, then.”
Shattering blasts of Mexican music brought her awake the next morning; she half started out of the blankets and then fell back with a groan, glancing at her wristwatch and covering her ears. The loudspeaker for the women’s area hung in a tree directly over Marjorie’s bungalow. It was Fiesta Day. It was exactly eight o’clock. Mercilessly
the office had started the music on the dot.
Her temples were throbbing. In her irritation and tension last night she had drunk several highballs after the ale. The fingers in her ears were of no avail whatever in shutting out the Mexican Hat Dance raging and crashing overhead. The loudspeaker seemed to be inside her head, leaping about with excess power. She staggered to the medicine chest and swallowed two aspirins, noting unhappily that the air felt warm through her flimsy nightgown. A white bar of light thrust through the trees and the screened window of the bathroom, hurting her eyes. She moaned. Cavorting about the camp all day, in greasy brown makeup and a heavy Mexican costume, promised to be hot nasty work, not suited to her state of nerves.
She had invited her parents to come on the fiesta weekend, calculating that the excitement and fuss would distract their attention from herself and Noel, especially since Samson-Aaron had been recruited to play the toreador in the bullfight. The first Sunday in August was Fiesta Day at South Wind, and the annual custom was to give the bullfighter role to the fattest man in the camp. The Uncle had had no competition. The toreador’s costume, outsize though it was, had had to be enlarged to fit him. He was the vastest of all the toreadors, and—Noel had told Marjorie—with his natural bent for foolery he promised to be the funniest.
She was wriggling into the green flouncy skirt of her costume when she remembered that she had Greech’s permission to go rowing with her father before getting to work as a señorita. “I’m losing my mind,” she muttered. She put on her bathing suit and went to the bar for a cup of coffee, feeling no desire for breakfast. Workmen out on the lawn were hammering bright decorations on the little booths for dispensing tamales, enchiladas, and rum drinks, and over the noise of the hammers the loudspeakers merrily blared a cascading rumba. The coffee and the aspirins lifted and soothed Marjorie’s spirits. Seeing her father come out on the boat dock in a bathing suit and a sombrero (sombreros were distributed free by the management on Fiesta Day), she finished her second cup and hurried to meet him.
“Señor Morgenstern at your service, my dear,” the father said with a bow. The sombrero was set on the back of his head, showing his gray hair.
“Buenos días, señor,” she said. “I’ve got to get to work in an hour, so let’s hurry. How’s Mama?”
“Fine. She’s watching the Uncle rehearse the bullfight. Such foolishness—”
Marjorie had not been in a rowboat all summer. It moved over the water much more sluggishly and heavily than a canoe. The brim of the sombrero flapped as Mr. Morgenstern pulled at the oars. The sun was very hot, though it was not yet nine. She thought her father must be uncomfortable in his one-piece bathing suit, a black baggy woolen garment which accentuated the dead office white of his thin arms and legs. She wanted to suggest that he roll the suit down to his waist, but an awkward shyness stopped her.
When they were well away from the shore he slid the dripping oars back into the boat and pressed his hand over the middle of his chest. “Whew. Getting old. I used to love rowing more than anything. We would come down from the Bronx every Sunday, your mother and I, and row in Central Park. I would row for hours. It was before you were born. I used to point at the big houses on Fifth Avenue and say, ‘See, that’s where we’ll live some day.’ Listen, we came pretty close, after all—Central Park West.” He sighed deeply and smiled at her in a defensive sad way. She was thinking how marked her father’s accent really was. When she lived at home she was too used to it to take notice. “Twenty-three years ago. Seems like a lifetime to you, doesn’t it, my darling? It goes by fast, I warn you. I’ll tell you something strange, I’m not much different from what I was then. I don’t feel like a different person. It’s just that the machine is wearing out. Twenty-three years. Twenty-three years ago I was twenty-eight. Probably your friend Noel’s age.”
The mention of Noel’s name gave her a little nervous throb. “He’s twenty-nine.”
“Hm. Of course I was an old married man, not a bachelor.”
She lit a cigarette and lounged sideways on the thwart, her back against one gunwale and her legs dangling over the other, wondering tensely whether her father would dare discuss Noel. He had never once talked about any of her romances with her; the subject seemed to paralyze him with bashfulness. He was looking at her with his eyes crinkled in a half-smile. “Did you put on a little weight? Or is it just the bathing suit?”
“It’s me. I’m getting big as a hippo. It’s horrible.”
“Don’t be foolish. You’re a beautiful girl. Except—well, girl isn’t the word any more, Marjorie, you’re a woman. When did it happen? It seems to me like last year you were running around the house calling your toy elephant a ‘helfanet.’ You probably don’t even remember.”
Marjorie smiled. “You and Mom have talked about that ‘helfanet’ so often, I think I do remember.”
Mr. Morgenstern shook his head and took off the sombrero. “The sun is good. A little sun on my face won’t hurt me.”
“Dad, why don’t you take a vacation? You look so tired. And you’re so white.”
“That’s what your mother keeps saying. You’re both right.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, turning the sombrero slowly in his hands. Marjorie suddenly thought of George Drobes and the brown hat. George seemed to be as remote in time as the “helfanet.” The father said, “Tell you the truth, Margie, two, three days away from the business I get terribly restless.”
“You should learn to delegate the responsibility, Dad. For your own sake you’ve got to.”
He gave a mournful little laugh. “Well, it looks like Seth is too lazy to be a doctor after all. Another seven years, he’ll be in the business, then I can take it easy. What’s seven years?”
“Good Lord, Dad, in seven years I’ll be twenty-seven. An antique.”
“Well, you’ll see. It goes by before you can turn around. I hope by then you’ll have a couple of children. The younger you have them the better. The more you have the better. Marjorie, if I had breath before I died to tell you one thing, I’d say to you, ‘Have children!’ ”
She laughed. “That’s because you have such nice ones.”
“No, because it’s the truth. Nothing else in life stands up, in the long run.”
“Well, then it’s all pointless, isn’t it? You raise children, so that they can raise children, who will also raise children—what is it all getting at?”
“Yes, yes, darling, I once said that too. When you have your first child, you’ll know.”
She said impatiently, “If what you say is so, then why can’t you explain it to me right now? So far as I’m concerned, children would be a nuisance before I’m thirty. By then I ought to be about ready to retire from the human race and become a breeding machine.” (This was a phrase she had picked up from Noel—an apt one, she thought.) “But before that, I want to have everything else in life worth having. Any moron can have children. They all do, regularly as rabbits.”
“I see.” The father nodded slowly. He perched the sombrero on top of his head. He made her feel obscurely ashamed, sitting there in the silly long black bathing suit and the silly hat, with his sagging belly, thin limbs, and dull white skin. Only his face was familiar. It was a little like coming on him in the bath. Her instinct was to avert her eyes. “Tell me, Marjorie, what is it in life that’s so worth having?”
“All right, I’ll tell you. Fun is worth having. And love. And beauty. And travel. And success—My God, there is so much worth having, Dad!” It felt very queer to be talking to her father about herself in earnest, as though he were Noel Airman or Marsha Zelenko. It was like blurting confidences to a new friend whom she wasn’t sure she could trust. But she was enjoying it. “The finest foods are worth having, the finest wines, the loveliest places, the best music, the best books, the best art. Amounting to something. Being well known, being myself, being distinguished, being important, using all my abilities, instead of becoming just one more of the millions of human cows! Children, sure,
when I’ve had my life and I’m not fit for anything else any more. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, Dad.” Her tone softened as he seemed to flinch. “I’m sure I’ll love them once I have them, and all my values will change, and I’ll be content to settle down to nag my daughter to be a good girl and wash her ears and not use the telephone so much, just like Mom. But Dad, think about it. Is that the best I can ever be? Look at me! I’m just beginning. Am I so unfit for anything else? Must I turn into Mom overnight?”
“Your mother has been a pretty happy woman, I think,” said Mr. Morgenstern, clearing his throat. “Despite all you think she missed. Talk to her.”
“Oh, Dad. Me talk to her? You know it’s hopeless.”
“She’s a smart woman. You may not like some of her ways, but—”
“Listen, I love her, Dad. But I can’t talk to her. I’ve never been able to, and I never will be able to. We’re two cats in a sack, that’s all.”
“It’s too bad. There’s a lot she could tell you, a lot.” He pushed the hat back on his head. “Should I row some more?”
“Why? It’s nice, just drifting.”
“How do you intend to get all these fine things, darling?”
“Acting. You know that.”
“It’s a very uncertain trade. Most theatre people starve.” He smiled. “A rich husband is a better bet.”
“Maybe I’ll be one of the exceptional actresses. I can try.”
After a silence he said, “Well, it’s very interesting. We should talk to each other like this more often.”
“Yes, we should, Dad.”
“I’ll tell