“That Sandy seems to be a nice kid. Columbia?” said George. Marjorie nodded. “Is he the one who took you to the dance?”
“Heavens, no. I went with a fat fool named Billy Ehrmann. He’s the one I went riding with, too. But he just got all panicky when my foot began to hurt. So Sandy took charge and brought me home. Sandy has a knockout of a girl. A rich Cornell blonde from Scarsdale.”
“He’d prefer you, if he were smart.”
“Everyone isn’t as smart as you.”
“How’s your ankle now?”
“I hardly notice it any more. Once the doctor got the boot off it was fine.”
“All the same,” George said, regarding the thick white lump of bandage, “I guess the drive in the country is out, isn’t it? Too bad. I had plans.”
“Did you?”
“All kinds of plans.”
Marjorie felt a thrust of combative affection for him. “I don’t know why I can’t go, George, if you really have plans. My ankle hardly hurts, really—”
George brightened. “Could you? I not only have plans, I’ve made a reservation, I’ve—” He stopped short. “But it’s all got to be a surprise. Can you come?”
“I’ll ask Mama.”
The traffic crawled honking under a low orange sun between parallel green lines of trees and gray lines of concrete. Dandelions choked the strips of lawn dividing the auto lanes. Penelope was groaning and clanking over the top of a hill in second gear; they were moving too slowly to travel in high. Far ahead on the winding Long Island parkway Marjorie could see thousands of cars in two thick black streams, writhing in a dirty blue haze of exhaust fumes.
George hit the horn, and Penelope uttered a jerky noise like the laugh of a sick old man. “Dear, it doesn’t help to do that,” Marjorie said.
She shifted uncomfortably, crossing the bandaged ankle over the other leg. A loose spring in the seat was pinching her. The decay of Penelope had much advanced in a year. The green paint was cracking off in big patches of rust, the upholstery had popped open in half a dozen places, and the glass in the windshield was held together with surgical tape. Worst of all was the noise from underneath, a queer intermittent rasping groan. George said it was a loose transmission, not worth fixing, and nothing to worry about. But it worried Marjorie.
The whole excursion rather worried her. She was beginning to regret she had allowed her mother’s objections to stampede her into going. With a ready-made excuse in the injured ankle, she could easily have avoided this long drive on the first nice Sunday in May, when the parkways were always horrible. But it was almost a matter of honor to insist on doing anything that her mother opposed, the more so when George was concerned. George himself was acting strangely. He was taking her to dinner at the Villa Marlene, he said, the most expensive restaurant on Long Island. How could he afford it, she wondered, and why was he doing it? He had evaded her questions with mysterious winks and grins.
To take her mind from the jam, and her headache, and George’s queerness, and Penelope’s noise, she suggested a game of Twenty Questions. They played for over an hour, until the traffic thinned beyond Mineola and they began running with more speed through a charming countryside of green rolling estates and brown potato farms. She beat him four times, which irritated him and made her feel better. Twenty Questions had always been their favorite pastime on long rides. At first George had always beaten her; for a while they had played even; now he rarely won. Marjorie’s college education was fresher than his, and he had no time to read. He said at last that he was bored with the game, and they rode in silence. The cool fresh country air cleared Marjorie’s headache, but her uneasiness deepened as they drove along in a splashing sunset and then in blue twilight. She tried to get George to talk, but he wouldn’t; now and then he reached over and fondled her knee and winked. She wasn’t pleased by the possessive gesture but she didn’t know how to stop it. George had fondled her knee hundreds of times in the past with her enthusiastic approval.
The first view of the famous restaurant was disappointing. Marjorie had expected floodlit vistas of garden, avenues of trees, perhaps a pond with white swans. But it was just a weathered gray wooden house with a faded gilt sign over the doorway, a patchy little lawn, and a few overgrown trees and lilac bushes. The parking lot in the back was full of Cadillacs and Chryslers; Penelope, chugging into a space between two sleek convertibles and dying with a snort and a backfire, looked strikingly out of place. A parking attendant hurried up. With a swift glance at the car, at George’s clothes, and at Marjorie’s bandaged ankle, he said in a German accent, “Sorry, restaurant all full.”
“Thanks,” said George, “we have a reservation. Let’s go, Marge.”
They walked around to the front and mounted the stairs. A big gray-headed man in a tuxedo, with a handful of huge brown menus, opened the door under the gilt sign and blocked their way. “Sorry, restaurant all full.”
“I have a reservation. Drobes is the name.”
The man glanced at a scribbled list in his hand. “Sorry, sair. No Traub on the list.”
“Not Traub. Drobes. This is ridiculous.” George raised his voice. “I made the reservation at noon. For six o’clock.”
The headwaiter took another look at the list. “Mr. Traub, sair,” he said in a tone of heartbroken reproach, “it is quarter past seven.”
“That’s too bad. We got caught in the parkway jam. We’ve been driving two and a half hours, and now we’re here and we’re hungry.”
“You have to wait, Mr. Traub. Maybe long wait.”
“Okay, we’ll wait. Come on in, Marge.”
The headwaiter stepped back, shrugging, and showed George and Marjorie through a brightly lit dining room full of cheerful chattering diners into a shadowy parlor that served as a bar, furnished with dingy brown plush armchairs and sofas. Now that beer and wine were legal, restaurants like the Villa Marlene were taking further liberties with the expiring law. In one corner at the bar a group of college boys with shaven heads were making drunken noises. There were about a dozen other couples in the bar, some drinking, some just sitting. They were all very well dressed, and they all had in common an expression of suffering hunger. “Let’s have a table as soon as possible, we’re famished,” said George.
“Sunday night bad, Mr. Traub. Do my best, sair,” said the headwaiter, addressing George with the back of his head. He bolted away to greet some newcomers at the door, dropping two of the menus as though by mistake on the arm of George’s chair.
After much hand-waving and finger-snapping George caught the attention of a waiter in a red mess jacket hovering by the college boys. The waiter came, flourishing his pad; stared at Marjorie’s slippered foot, peered down his nose at George, and said, “What you want, sair?”
“One rye and ginger ale and one Coca-Cola.”
The waiter looked revolted, made a note, and walked back to his post by the college boys, where he stood unmoving for perhaps fifteen minutes. George began to fidget. Then he began to wave his hands and snap his fingers. The college boys meanwhile were boisterously ordering another round of drinks. The waiter bowed, smiled, scribbled, and came hurrying past George, who reached out and jabbed him in the side. The waiter halted, looking down at George as though he had meowed.
“How the hell about those drinks?” said George.
“Coming right up, sair.”
“Why do we have to wait a quarter of an hour for them?”
“Sunday night is bad, sair.”
The frosty Coca-Cola brought little relief to Marjorie’s empty stomach. George sipped his drink moodily. The college boys, shepherded by the headwaiter, weaved to a large round table in the dining room, shouting jokes. They could not have looked more uniform—all stringy, bristle-headed, jaunty, long-jawed, with gold rings and cuff links, very white shirts, and baggy brown jackets and gray trousers. Marjorie resented them because George looked so unlike them, because only one of them glanced at her, and because they were going to eat. Sandy G
oldstone, she thought, was handsomer than any of them.
One by one couples were called in to dinner, and others arrived to sit around looking hungry. After a while George noticed that some of the newcomers were getting tables. He jumped up and sawed his arms in the air until the headwaiter came. “We were ahead of those people!”
“Sorry, sair, Mr. Taub. They have reservations.”
“I had a reservation two hours before they did.”
“Right away, sair. Not long now, Mr. Taub.”
When the bar was almost empty, and the waiter was yawning and washing the tables, the headwaiter came smiling. “This way, sair.” He put them at a flower-decorated table on the glassed porch, next to a large party of elderly people. Marjorie surmised they were rich by their fine clothes, the strange dry twang of their voices, and the champagne buckets flanking their table.
George tried to order filet of sole. But the headwaiter recommended the house specialty, roast Long Island duckling, with such bland patience that George was crushed. “All right then, duck for two. And champagne,” he added belligerently.
“Yes, sair. Piper Heidsieck, sair? Mumm’s, sair?”
“Just any good champagne.”
“Very good sair, Mr. Taub.”
Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour went by. No food came. George’s lower jaw lolled open, his lip pulled in over the teeth. He said to Marjorie, “I haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast. I’m dying.” He pounded his glass with a knife and demanded service, glaring like a cornered animal at the headwaiter. With pleasant deference, the man explained that at the Villa Marlene everything was cooked to order. George asked for some rolls and butter, some salad, anything. “Right away now, sair.” More time went by. The people at the next table, finishing their dessert and coffee, were having a lively argument as to whether President Roosevelt was a criminal or just a lunatic. “Franklin is a deeply mediocre person, that’s all,” said one withered little man with a hairy mole on his chin, who was leaning back smoking a long cigar. “He was mediocre when we were working together in the Navy Department, and he’s still mediocre.” George turned a fork over and over, snuffling, and Marjorie gnawed a knuckle.
Forty-five minutes after they had been seated, the waiter brought two sizzling small ducks, a basket of French bread, salad, and vegetables. While he fussed over the vegetables the headwaiter came with glittering carving instruments and artistically dismembered the fowls. Meantime Marjorie and George wolfed up most of the bread with indecent speed. The headwaiter finished carving the birds and handed the table waiter a platter full of little wings, thighs, breasts, and legs. He then walked off to the kitchen with the two duck carcasses, which were covered with meat; evidently at the Villa Marlene it was bad form to eat the body of a duck. Marjorie groaned, “Good God, make him bring those ducks back. All that meat—” George merely made a gobbling noise, his mouth full of bread, his eyes on the meat that remained.
But almost immediately—the transformation took no longer than the devouring of the food and the drinking of a couple of glasses of champagne—the look of everything changed. The headwaiter, leaning in the doorway with his menus, no longer seemed to Marjorie a bullying snob, but a genuine jolly host, rosy-faced and beaming, an innkeeper out of Dickens. The food was lovely, marvelous, the best she had ever eaten. The Villa Marlene really was charming, after all, with its wallpaper of pink French courtiers dancing a minuet, its dim orange lights, its lilac-scented air. The rich people at the next table were elegant aristocrats of the old school, and it was delightful to be dining so near them. George’s spirits came back too. His spine straightened, color returned to his cheek, and liveliness to his eye. He lit a cigar and sipped his champagne, leaning back with one elbow on a chair arm, in the exact pose of the old man who thought that Franklin was deeply mediocre. Marjorie decided that George had a sensitive handsomeness far surpassing the magazine-cover good looks of the college boys (who had left more than an hour ago). She drank several glasses of champagne, and began to feel mightily exhilarated.
“Everything all right?” said George, squinting through his cigar smoke.
“Everything’s divine,” said Marjorie. The headwaiter filled their glasses with the last of the champagne and put the bottle neck down in the bucket.
“Thank you, madame.” He bowed. “Some brandy, sair, Mr. Taub?”
“Why I daresay, I daresay,” said George. “You, Marjorie?”
“I—I’d better not, thanks.” Marjorie’s teeth felt curiously tight, and she seemed to be hearing her own voice with an echo to it, as though she were shouting down a well.
“Now then,” said George, when the waiter had brought coffee and set brandy before him in a shimmering bubble of glass, “are you ready?”
“Sure,” said Marjorie. “For what?”
“The surprise.”
With a qualm, Marjorie now thought of the hints, the winks, the fondling of her knee. “Why, I guess so. But I’m feeling awfully good as it is, George—I don’t need anything more, George—”
Inexorably George’s hand went plunging into his jacket pocket. Marjorie knew what was coming, before she saw the little blue leather box in his hand, before he opened it, before the two rings lay winking and glittering at her in a bed of purple velvet.
“Oh, George… George!”
“Pretty, aren’t they?” His eyeglasses gleamed at her.
“Beautiful, they’re beautiful. But—George—really, I’m dumfounded—”
“It doesn’t have to be next week or next month,” George said eagerly. “Or even next year. We just ought to know where we stand, and let everybody else know—”
Marjorie put her champagne to her mouth and sipped it deliberately, looking at George over the rim of the glass with young scared eyes.
At fifteen, at sixteen, she had daydreamed away a thousand blissful hours picturing this event, panting for the time when it would come. Now here it was. But she had not been panting for it recently. If anything, she had been shutting it from her mind, telling herself that she was too young to be thinking of engagements, ignoring the fact that during the preceding year and a half she had considered herself more than old enough. Defiant of her mother’s nagging, she had kissed George, and necked with him, and sworn she could never love anyone else, during all that time; and now here were two rings staring her in the face.
Even now, backed to the wall, Marjorie could not admit to herself that her mother was right, that George was a decent but dull fellow, that she had made a donkey of herself over a girlish infatuation, that she was destined to do much better. She was touched by the offer of the rings, and grateful to George. She was merely irritated with him for his clumsy pressing of the issue. She was only now beginning to grow up a bit, to discover life and her own self. Why was he in such a hurry? Why must he ask her to take herself out of the world at seventeen? It wasn’t fair.
She put down the glass. “Wow, this is wicked stuff. I’m floating four feet off the floor.”
George said eagerly, waving a finger at the headwaiter, “Let’s crack another bottle, really celebrate—”
“Good Lord, no.” She looked at her watch. “Darling, do you know it’s after ten? We won’t get home till morning in all that traffic. Mama will have kittens. Let’s go.”
“But we’ve got so much to talk about, pooch. This is an important night in our lives—”
“Dear, we’ll have enough time on the road to talk out everything, hours and hours and hours—”
So George asked for the check. The headwaiter brought him the change on a metal platter, and said with a beautiful bow, “Was your dinner satisfactory, Mr. Taub?”
“Perfect, perfect, thank you.” George fumbled a five-dollar bill from the plate and gave it to him, and left two dollars on the table for the waiter.
“Thank you, sair. Bon soir, madame. Bon soir, Mr. Taub.” He bowed again, George bowed back. They went out into the cool night, and the door closed behind them.
George shook his head and said with a stunned look, “Have I gone crazy? Why did I give that bastard five dollars?”
He tipped the man in the parking lot a dime. The man cursed loudly in German as they drove off.
Penelope’s noises seemed worse as they bumped along the dark side road. The groan under the floorboard had changed to a screech like an electric butcher saw on bone. “Dear,” said Marjorie in some alarm, “how about that noise?”
George cocked his ear and gnawed his lip. “Well, nothing to be done about it. Can’t tear down the transmission now, on the side of the road. I don’t know. Sometimes she just works through these noises and purrs like a cat again. We’ll see.”
Coming to the parkway, they could see strings of white headlights stretched to the horizon in one direction and strings of red tail lights in the other, moving in the moonlight with the slimy slowness of worms. “Oh dear,” said Marjorie.
“Well, Sunday night is bad,” said George. It took him ten minutes of narrow maneuvering to wedge into the solid westbound line. “Okay,” he said with relief, grinning at her, “homeward bound.” He reached over and tousled her hair, and she was unpleasantly reminded of Sandy Goldstone. “Don’t worry, you’ll be in your little brown bed by midnight.” He pulled the box of rings out of his pocket. “Take another look at them? I think they’re honeys.”
“George, they must have cost a fortune.” She eyed the rings in the dim yellow light of the parkway lamps. They were a matched pair in white gold, the wedding ring plain, the engagement ring set with a small rose-cut diamond.
“What’s the difference? They’re yours.”
“No, really. After all, I know how hard things have been and—”
“Well, it sometimes helps to have a jeweler in the family.” George looked roguish.
“George, did your Uncle Albie give them to you?”
“Marge, it’s perfectly all right. It was his own idea. Naturally I’ll pay him some day as soon as I’m able.” The grinding noise of Penelope was now so loud that George was shouting a little.