“Yes, Marjorie, you know an awful lot, I realize that. I’m glad you’re so well educated. Only when you’re really in love, you want them, that’s the point.”
“Well, there we don’t agree, Dad. There are different ways of being in love.”
He pushed the oars out through the locks and began to row slowly. He was looking at his moving hands when he spoke again. “About travel, though, you have something there. Once you have children you don’t travel. No.” He paused. “Strangely enough, your mother and I were talking about that very thing last night. We couldn’t sleep. We—well, you know, we were talking. We were saying that after all, going to Hunter, you’ve—well, you’ve never been anywhere. And it being a free school, you’ve saved us maybe a thousand dollars or so by not going out of town. So—well, the idea is, would you like to travel? I think we could arrange it. We’re not that poor.”
He had turned the boat so that the white sun was directly in her eyes. She squinted at him, shading her brow. “What’s all this? Would I like to travel? I’d give an arm to travel.”
“Well, if you want to travel, why don’t you?” he said rapidly. “Take yourself six, seven hundred dollars. Make a trip out West. California, Yellowstone Park, the Grand Canyon. You’re old enough to travel by yourself. You’ll meet all kinds of interesting people.”
“Dad, I—” she stammered and laughed. “This is too marvelous to believe—out of the blue sky—why, thank you. Maybe I ought to get it in writing—”
“Don’t worry. It’s nothing more than you’re entitled to. Mom says there’s six, seven weeks before you have to go back to school. You could have a fine trip, and still—”
“What!” She peered at him. He kept his eyes on the oars. “You don’t mean travel this summer?”
“Darling, the time to travel is whenever you’ve got the chance.”
“But I’m working, Dad, I have a job here—why, I assumed you meant next spring when I’m through with college.”
“According to your mother, Greech isn’t paying you.”
“Yes, but—well, I like it here. Just to pick up and start travelling now, when I—it’s such a crazy idea, somehow.”
“Well, as I say, we got to talking, and this question of travelling came up, and as long as you mentioned it yourself…” His voice trailed down.
She swerved around and sat up straight, staring at her father. He kept his eyes on the leather-covered oar handles, and rowed in even unsplashing strokes. After a while she said frigidly, “Couldn’t Mom tell me this herself? Why did she have to put you up to it?”
He looked at her from under his graying eyebrows. There were heavy reddish shadows under his eyes. “What’s the difference who thought of it?”
“She must really hate Noel to want to part with seven hundred dollars.”
“Marjorie, please don’t think that we’re trying to—”
“What’s the matter? He’s Judge Ehrmann’s son, isn’t he? How high does she want to fly? I should think she’d be jumping for joy. Not that those things mean anything to Noel or to me, but—”
“I think he’s a very clever good-looking man, so does your mother.”
“Oh, Papa, please tell me what it’s all about. Mom will anyway, sooner or later, she has the diplomacy of a steamroller. What’s she got against him? The name Noel? He hates it too, he’ll probably get rid of it one of these days.”
“She remembered some things, Marjorie, that—this is very hard, darling…”
“Go ahead.”
“… Things Belle Kline told her, that she heard from the Sigelmans. I have nothing against the man, but if all this is true—I’m sure it is—he’s—well, he’s not your kind. He’s a—you know—a Village kind of fellow, he’s been mixed up with God knows how many girls, married women too. He isn’t no good, I don’t want to say that, but he’s—he’s lazy, with all kinds of talent and opportunities he’s accomplished nothing. He sleeps all day in the city, writes a song only when he’s ready to starve. He doesn’t talk to his father. And they say he’s an atheist.”
“He isn’t an atheist. He believes in God. He told me so.”
“Marjorie, you’re not going to tell me a religious man would lead such a life.”
“I didn’t say he was religious in your terms. He is in his own way. What right have you got to be intolerant of his religion, whatever it is? Just because he doesn’t believe he’ll be struck by lightning if he eats a ham sandwich does that make him a fiend, a criminal, an axe murderer? You try eating a ham sandwich sometime. See if you’re struck dead. Maybe Noel’s religion is a little more enlightened than yours. It’s just a faint possibility, isn’t it?”
The father rested on his oars, breathing heavily, and looked up at her, his brow deeply furrowed. “He loves you?”
“Yes.”
“He said so?”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to get married?”
“No.”
“You’re not?”
“Of course not. People in love don’t necessarily have to get married.”
“They don’t? What do they do, then?”
“They have a glorious time and enjoy each other’s company as long as it lasts. The longer the better.”
“I see. They enjoy each other’s company.”
“Exactly. I enjoy Noel’s company more than I have anything in my life.”
“I believe you.” The father sighed, slid the oars into the water, and twisted the bow of the boat toward the shore. “Time we went back.”
She sat stiff and angry, her thighs numb from the hard seat, and smoked another cigarette while he pulled toward the shore. His head was down as he worked the oars, and the sombrero hid his face. After a while the sombrero fell off and rolled in the muddy bilge water. He rowed on, apparently not noticing the loss of the hat. The pink of his scalp showed through the gray wavy hair at the top of his head. Marjorie picked up the sombrero and shook dirty drops off the yellow straw. “Dad, your hat.”
He let go of the oars. They swung forward and rattled downward in the oarlocks until stopped by the leather handles. He covered his eyes with one hand and leaned on a knee.
“Dad—”
Tears spilled through his fingers and dripped into the sloshing water at his feet. He made no sound.
“Oh, Papa, don’t! For God’s sake don’t cry, there’s nothing to cry about, I swear to God Almighty there isn’t.” Her throat swelled. Dry sobs broke from her, sounding like laughter. “Papa, please, don’t let’s have a crying spree out here on the lake, people are out canoeing, they’ll see us.” She fought with all her will to keep her eyes dry. “It’s so absurd, nothing’s happened to me—”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s all right, give me my hat.” He put the sombrero on backward and drew his forearm across his eyes. “All right.” He pulled the oars up through the locks, and rested them on his knees. His face was dry when he looked at her, and white. “You say nothing has happened.”
“No, no, nothing.”
He blew out a long breath. “All right. That’s one thing.” Slowly he began to row again.
She said, “You don’t think much of me, do you?” The father looked at her with a suffering face. “Mind you, as long as we’re being so frank, Dad, I’m not sure there’d be anything wrong about it. You and Mom have inculcated me with your prejudices, and apparently I’ve got them for good. Noel is too decent and fine a person to make me do anything I don’t want to do, for whatever reason. We have the most marvelous time together and it’s never been a problem.”
“Our prejudices.” The father nodded. “How long have you known him, a month?”
“Well, we met a year ago—but yes, a month, really.”
“Marjorie, I should have talked to you more, I know, I should have taken more interest in you, I’ve been a neglectful father. The business, the business, the time slips by—”
“I’m not complaining, Papa, for heaven’s sake. I’m all right—?
??
“I asked your mother over and over, is everything all right with Marjorie? I begged her to go easy on you, to talk with you, not to insist on her own way all the time. I told her a girl needs guidance, not to be pushed, pushed, pushed all the time. Marjorie, your mother knows it, she can’t help herself. She says you’re stubborn and you shout her down, the least thing she says, and it’s true, I’ve seen it. A girl needs her mother. You’ve got to be tolerant. Both of you. You’ve got a better education than her but she knows life, she’s very smart, even if you don’t like some of her ways.”
“I know all this, Papa, but—”
“Look, darling, I don’t want to fool you, this trip is your mother’s idea. But I beg of you, do what she says. Go away from South Wind tomorrow. Take this trip.”
“You don’t trust me. It’s interesting to know.”
“Oh, my God in heaven, trust you? Don’t you know what an ignorant baby you are?” He raised his voice for the first time in the harsh powerful tone she had often heard him use in business talks on the telephone. It scared her a little. He glanced around self-consciously at a red canoe sliding by not far away with two sunburned girls in it. He said in a lower tone, “If you go away on the trip will he disappear, will he marry somebody else? You’ll be back in September, you can see him all you want, if you’re still interested in each other.”
Ordinarily the chance to travel out West by herself would have sent Marjorie wild with joy. It was characteristic of her mother, she thought bitterly, to make the offer with such a big black hook sticking nakedly out of the bait that it was impossible for her to take it. “Well, Papa, the argument works both ways. If I don’t go West till the spring will the Rockies disappear? I don’t want to leave South Wind. I’m having the best time of my life, and I’ve learned more in a month here than I learned in four years at Hunter.”
“Well, I don’t want you to learn too much. Is that plain enough for you?” His voice was harsh again. He looked her straight in the face. “What’s the matter with you? I’m over fifty, Marjorie, and you’re not ten years old, nobody’s getting fooled here. At least talk straight, for God’s sake. Don’t you know what your situation is here, what a risk you’re running? Your whole future is in it. You can break yourself in pieces in a month, in a week—”
“Oh, those are just your damned old-fashioned ideas, yours and Mom’s! This isn’t a melodrama, Papa, and Noel isn’t the villain with a big black mustache, and sex isn’t so world-shaking as you think it is, and I wouldn’t break in pieces if I had an affair, you’re living in a dreamworld, Papa! I’d be just the same as before, maybe a little wiser and sadder. But I’m not going to, I tell you, I’m not going to, do you hear? You can believe me or not, as you please. And I’m not going out West, either. You can tell Mom to keep her seven hundred dollars. I’m not going to leave South Wind.”
The father bared his teeth as though in pain. “Marjorie, what have we done that was so wrong? Where have we missed out? What’s happening to you?”
“Oh God, Papa, it’s just that it’s 1935 and we’re in the United States, that’s all.” The tears were streaming down her face and her cheeks were dripping. “Don’t sound so pathetic about me, please, I’m not a lost soul—Oh God, look at me, now I’m bawling.” She dashed her hands across her face and smiled mechanically. “Please, Dad, let’s drop it, shall we? We’ll all live. And hurry, I’m late for work.”
He pulled hard for the shore, his lower lip between his teeth, his thin white legs braced against the floorboard, the sombrero flapping with each stroke.
Chapter 18. THE TOREADOR
At the end of the elaborate Sunday dinner in the dining hall, around two in the afternoon, the musicians in their hot nest over the kitchen broke off a languid Victor Herbert medley, clapped sombreros on their heads, threw garish serapes over their sweat-stained shirts, and began a lively paso doble. Into the center of the dance floor there leaped a tall figure in yellow, cracking a bull whip. It was Noel Airman, amazingly Mexican-looking in sideburns, mustache, and brown paint; only the deep-set glittering blue eyes identified him. His suit was trimmed, his boots studded with silver; he wore a silver-tasselled sombrero and silver-worked pistols; a belt of bullets slanted across his chest. “Buenos días, señoritas, señoras y señores!” Flashing a wild white-toothed grin, he lashed out again with the whip, and women guests yelped as the end of it flicked near them. With a laugh and a swift rattling announcement in Spanish, he disappeared. Half a dozen couples in gaudy Mexican costumes came swirling out of the kitchen door, where the waiters usually passed in and out with trays.
The last of the girls to emerge was Marjorie Morgenstern, almost asphyxiated by the food smells and furnace heat of the kitchen. The dancers had been held up for ten minutes between a stove and a steam table, waiting for the roast beef to be cleared away in the dining hall. But they stamped lustily and shouted “Ole!” and the girls threw roses at the guests with roguish sweaty smiles. Marjorie went through the fake folk dance in a vertiginous stupor, stumbled off to the kitchen, stumbled on again for the clamorously demanded encore and stamped some more, wondering when this bank of grinning New York faces would stop swooping and whirling about her.
Then she sat with her parents at a table bordering the dance floor, mopping her brow. The waiters rolled forward a scratched dusty upright piano. Noel came out of the kitchen, cracking the whip. With another flood of Spanish, gesturing flamboyantly, he dropped the whip on top of the piano, and began to play and sing Mexican songs.
Noel had originated the fiesta four years ago in his first summer as social director, after six months of itinerant loafing in Mexico. He enjoyed it; his energetic preparations in the past week had contrasted markedly with his bored workaday attitude toward the revues. Greech granted him a good budget for costumes and decorations and put the entire working force of the camp at his disposal, for the Mexican fiesta at South Wind on the first Sunday in August was becoming almost as popular as the July 4 and Labor Day weekends.
Marjorie forgot her resurgent headache, her tiredness, and the discomfort of her sweat-soaked costume, listening to Noel sing. It was better, in a way, that his voice was untrained and his breathing faulty. He really sounded like a Mexican. In the plaintive slow songs the melancholy shaking of his head, the reedy quaver of his high notes, made a melting effect that she loved. She did not applaud, but was dreamily grateful when waves of handclapping kept him at the piano.
Her mother startled her by murmuring in the middle of a love song, “He’s wonderful.” Marjorie looked at her. Mrs. Morgenstern was watching Noel with glistening eyes, smiling slightly and tapping the table in a slow rhythm with one finger. “Why didn’t they have more of this last night in the show instead of those stupid jokes?”
“He would be better,” said Mr. Morgenstern, “if you knew what the words meant. He ought to sing in English.”
“Sh,” somebody said from the next table.
After several encores Noel broke into English to thank them; then he announced the fiesta program. In the afternoon there would be folk dancing and singing on the lawn and after that the bullfight. In the evening a Mexican supper would be served in the open by torchlight, followed by a masked carnival and a display of fireworks over the lake. He urged them to put on costumes, and to come to the social hall for free sombreros, Spanish combs, mantillas, and shawls. Buzzes of laughter and excited talk filled the dining hall as he cracked the whip once more, shouted “Adiós! Hasta la fiesta!” and went bounding out the front door to a burst of music.
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Morgenstern said to the father. “Maybe we ought to stay for a while.”
“Why don’t you? It’ll be fun,” Marjorie said.
The father said, “Rose, I don’t want to drive at night.” His manner was listless. He was avoiding Marjorie’s eye.
Mrs. Morgenstern said, “Well, when will the bullfight be over, four o’clock? It’s only a two-hour drive to Seth’s camp. We’ll stay for the bullf
ight. Wait till you see Samson-Aaron. You’ll die laughing.”
“Is it something so new to see the Uncle make a fool of himself? I can do without it,” said the father.
Marjorie stood. Her mother’s word always prevailed in these disputes. “Fine, I’ll see you later. Come to the lawn early and get good seats.”
“Where are you going?” said the mother.
“My bungalow. I have to change costume.”
“I’ll go with you.” The mother pushed back her chair. “I’d like to see where you live.”
They left the father sitting at the table gloomily rolling his cigar between his lips.
“That Noel is certainly talented,” said Mrs. Morgenstern, walking by her daughter’s side across the lawn. “Where did he learn to sing like that?”
“Oh, he doesn’t really sing well.” The sun was baking hot on Marjorie’s head, but a breeze plastered her clothes, chilly and clammy, against her skin. Her legs were strangely light as she moved them. Under the strain of fatigue and headache, and the emotional tension of the weekend, Marjorie’s sense of reality was giving way. Things seemed to be happening about her in a brightly colored noisy dream. “It’s just that he’s unaffected, which makes him more refreshing than most singers.”
“But his piano playing is certainly unusual. Why, he could make a living just doing that, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Morgenstern.
“He organized his own band when he was nineteen,” said Marjorie.
“You don’t say. It’s amazing. The man can do everything, can’t he? You should have seen him at the rehearsal this morning with the Uncle and the bull. He’s very clever, the things he thinks of.” They passed into the shady path through the trees. Marjorie glanced sidelong at her mother, wondering what all this was leading to. “I’ll tell you though, Marjorie, it worries me the way the Uncle carries on. It’s like he behaves at a wedding, you know, jumping, dancing, in this heat. The man is over sixty and he weighs a ton and he acts like I don’t know what, a college boy, a crazy man.”
“Mom, you can’t do anything with Samson-Aaron. That’s just how he is.”