Marjorie Morningstar

The father said, “Oh, hello. I didn’t know you were coming too.”

  “It’s all a mix-up, it doesn’t matter,” Mrs. Zelenko said, still holding Marjorie’s two hands and beaming. “Darling, I know you girls are going out for lunch, but do come back and talk to us old folks afterward, won’t you? I’m dying to hear all about your theatre career—”

  “I can dispose of that in about two seconds, Mrs. Zelenko. It’s non-existent.”

  “I don’t believe it. All beginnings are hard, but if I ever had confidence in the future of anybody—”

  Marsha came into the room, shoulders up, mincing like a model. Marjorie was truly astonished to see this slim tanned woman in a Persian lamb jacket, striking black Paris dress, and killingly stylish tiny hat and veil. Only the wide smile and eager eyes were Marsha’s. “Well! My long-lost darling!” She threw her arms around Marjorie, giving off fumes of costly perfume, then stood back and surveyed Marjorie in a swift shiny-eyed glance. “You louse, why do I bother? No girl who values her ego should ever be seen with you.” She had quite the largest diamond on her left hand that Marjorie had ever seen.

  “Don’t say that, Marsha, I think you look grand,” said the uncle.

  Mr. Zelenko said, “Why are you going out to lunch, anyway? We have enough food, more than enough—”

  “Delicatessen, all this family knows is delicatessen,” Marsha said. “If I ever nurse a baby, I’ll probably give it mustard out of one breast and beer out of the other. No, thanks.”

  “Don’t be so funny,” said the mother, with a glance at the uncle. “I didn’t have time to cook this morning and you know why, Miss Lazy-bones—”

  The man in the chair laughed and said, “I bought a lot of fish and cheese, Marsha. There’s a fine smoked whitefish—”

  “Oh, never mind, Lou, the girls want to gab about you, naturally,” Mrs. Zelenko said. “Let them go.”

  “How about introducing me to Marjorie, Marsh? I’ve heard so much about her,” the man said, getting out of the chair. He wore a creased gray suit and was slightly shorter than Marsha.

  Marsha glanced from one parent to another. “What? Didn’t either of you two nitwits think of introducing Lou and Marge, for Christ’s sake? Marjorie, this is my fiancé—Lou Michaelson.”

  The little man held out his hand. He had a friendly sweet smile that was almost boyish, despite the worn face and the curly gray hair. His small teeth were widely separated and he had two gold caps in front. “Hello, Marjorie. This is a real pleasure after everything Marsha’s told me. You’re just as pretty as she said. Naturally I’m prejudiced, so I can’t agree you outshine her.”

  Marjorie was too surprised to say anything. She mechanically shook hands.

  “Imagine that. You just let Lou sit there,” Marsha said.

  Mr. Zelenko said, “I was in the kitchen, trying to sort out the food. There’s at least forty bagels—”

  Lou Michaelson said, “Marsha told me there wasn’t anything in the house to eat. I just thought I’d surprise you, and bring some lunch—”

  Marsha said, “Oh, what’s the difference, for crying out loud? We’re off.” She threw an arm around Mr. Michaelson, kissed his ear, and rubbed off the lipstick. “Meet me at five at the Plaza for a drink?”

  “This is the day I play handball with Milt, dear.”

  “When don’t you play handball with Milt? I think you’re trying to cure me of the cocktail habit, my friend.” Her tone was affectionate and bantering. She said to Marjorie, “These health fiends.”

  “Well, I can call it off today,” Mr. Michaelson said slowly. (He said everything slowly.) “It’s only Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Except it does me a lot of good, you know, Marsh.”

  “Bless you, sure it does. You just trot on up to your little old Y, and beat Milt to pieces. Meet me at the Pierre six-thirty.”

  “It’s a date, Marsh.”

  When the two girls came out to the bright sunny street, Marsha no longer appeared so transformed. The heavy features of the face were the same, after all, though Marsha had quite starved away the pudginess. So Marjorie thought, as the girls blinked and smiled at each other in the first shock of sunlight.

  “Game to walk, or do we take a cab?” Marsha said. “It’s such a marvelous day.”

  “Walk, by all means.”

  Marsha slipped an arm through hers. They went down the narrow street, holding their hats in the gusty breeze. “It’s delicious to see you,” Marsha said, her voice lower than it had been in the apartment, and less brassy. Marjorie pressed her arm. They passed the gray stone walls of Central Park West and went into the park. Marsha held up her head, sniffed the air, and sighed. “What is it about this park in March? It’s dead, but you can always hear the horns of spring, can’t you? Look at that baby-blue sky. I could cry.”

  “Why should you cry, of all people?” Marjorie said. “You’ve got the world by the tail. I’m awfully happy for you.”

  Marsha said, laughing, “Just my luck, you know, that you’d practically trip over Lou in my living room. I was going to tease you. Tell you he was six feet tall and looked like Clark Gable and owned a yacht and so forth. Not but what there isn’t plenty to brag about in Lou, but still—you know, now that you’ve seen him, it’s like you’d peeked at the end of a mystery story. Quiet-looking, isn’t he? He’s spent a lifetime being self-effacing, but he’s really clever, in his special way, and he’s a thoroughly wonderful guy.” She glanced at Marjorie walking silent beside her, and her grin became a bit wistful. “What did you think of Lou, really, Margie? Did you get any impression of him?”

  “Fiancés are all alike to outsiders, aren’t they, Marsha? I only saw him for a moment. He seems like a very swell guy, and entirely glassy-eyed over you, which is the main thing.”

  “You’re a pretty swell guy, too,” Marsha said. Their high heels went clickety-click-click on the stone walk, raising little sharp echoes. The water-stained benches were empty. Nobody was in sight but a park attendant with a burlap bag, spearing old newspapers on the muddy brown lawn. “Lou takes some knowing. He’s incredibly smart about some things, and incredibly naïve about others. It’s really been a revelation to me that such people exist. Not only exist, but flourish. The main thing is, as you say, he’s a hell of a sweet person. And he certainly does think I’m the cat’s pajamas. But imagine me hooked to a handball fiend! D’you know, when I first met him he’d just come from playing handball? This grizzled character, hairy-chested, all rivers of sweat, and grinning from ear to ear. He’d just beaten a twenty-one-year-old kid, a bruiser, six feet tall. He plays with this partner of his, this Milt Schwartz, three times a week at the Y on Ninety-second Street. What’s more, he wins as often as he loses. He’s fifty-two, and Milt’s twenty-nine, and Milt was on the handball team at CCNY.”

  “Amazing,” Marjorie said. “Did you meet Lou at the Y?”

  “No, no, in Florida. At this hotel where my folks were staying. I’ve only known him a month. This has been a real abduction on a white horse, kid. I’m still slightly dizzy. I must have told you long ago that I was going to send my folks to Florida some day—”

  “Yes, you did—”

  “Of course. Those were my two obsessions, to get my mom a fur coat, and to send them to Florida. You don’t really know them, Margie. They’re like a couple of children, but they’re really wonderful, and what they went through to keep me going to Hunter nobody will ever know but me. Anyway—I was going to send them to Florida or die. Well, by this year I’d saved the money, so I sent them. And that did it. Marjorie, believe it or not, my destiny actually hung on the fact that my father knows how to play fan-tan. Fan-tan, can you imagine? Lou loves the game. Don’t ever call a life misspent till it’s over, kid. My father has wasted years playing every kind of card game known to man, and he couldn’t have done more to ensure his little daughter’s future if he’d worked like a stevedore all those years. This thing is so fantastic, Marge, it depends on such a hairlike thread of coincidences, that I
’m absolutely convinced it’s fate. Why did I park my folks at the Vista View Hotel, if not because it’s run-down and cheap? What was a rich man like Lou doing at such a joint? Only Lou would have such reasons. His mother died year before last. She started going to the Vista View thirty years ago when it was a good hotel, and she just kept going there, and taking Lou along. He lived with her all her life, you see, he’s never married. So, like a sleepwalker, he went right on going to the Vista View after she died. They have a nice handball court, he says. And he and Alex got to playing fan-tan. And then he sat with my folks at meals because he was lonesome, and of course they bent his ear about their divine Marsha. And he was just impressed to death with Alex’s sad old line of Voltaire and Ingersoll and Haeckel and Clarence Darrow; he thinks my father’s a brilliant original iconoclast. And you can’t disillusion him, because by Lou’s lights that’s just what he is. And he thinks Tonia, of course, is the greatest pianist he’s ever heard, and that’s true too, because he’s never heard any pianists. So along comes Marsha, the daughter of these two brilliant personages—fortunately starved down within an inch of her life. Kid, I ran into a rush act the like of which few females have known. When Lou makes up his mind to do something, get out of his way. I never had a chance, if I’d wanted a chance. I’d known him three days when he went downtown in Miami and came back with this.” She waved the hand with the ring. “Nothing subtle, but persuasive in its way. I held out for a week or so, because—Well, I don’t have to tell you what reservations I must have had—but that’s it, and here I am, telling you about my engagement.” Marsha laughed. “I’m a little more used to it now. There are some unexpected charms to it. I look forward to civilizing him, honestly. It’s his mother’s fault, not his. She was one of these shrewd old religious widows. Owned a lot of real estate, managed it herself until she put Lou through law school, then they both managed it, and really rolled up a fortune. She never cared about anything but business and a couple of dozen charities that she practically ran herself. Lou’s still running them, by the way. So he just never learned anything. He thinks I’m practically supernatural, because of what I know about books and music and painting. And yet he’s keen, damn keen, believe me, in his own way. You listen to him analyze the values in a building on Seventh Avenue, let’s say, and you won’t believe your ears. He knows all about it—from how good the credit of a mattress firm on the third floor is, to the diameter of the steam pipes in the basement, and all about the buildings on the rest of the block, too, on both sides of the street. I’ve already gone to work on him. I dragged him to the opera the first night we were back in New York. Luckily it was La Traviata. He loved it. He couldn’t have been more amazed. He kept saying, ‘Why, it’s great, it’s really interesting.’—Holy cow, is that rain?” She put her hand to her face and looked up at the sky. “Where the hell did those clouds come from? That’s March for you.”

  They scampered through spattering drops, holding their hats. They were hardly inside the hotel lobby when a drenching shower fell in the street. They were still laughing and panting as they settled at a window table in the dining room and ordered drinks. The gray slanting rain was driving people from the street, scurrying with newspapers over their heads. Even the hansom cabs were retreating from the plaza, the drivers huddled in ponchos, the dejected horses streaming water from their tails and drooping ears. “Am I mistaken,” Marsha said, “or is it always raining when I see you? Remember your graduation? I expected to see Noah and his ark come floating past Schrafft’s that afternoon.”

  “Seems a hundred years ago,” Marjorie said.

  “It’s just a little over a year.”

  Marjorie expelled a long breath. “I know. Just a little over a year.”

  Their cocktails came. Marsha said, “I can still see Noel with water dripping from his hat… And then in Schrafft’s, ordering a pear and cottage cheese salad, and saying it was a penance.” She paused. Marjorie lit a cigarette and sipped her drink. Marsha drummed the fingers of her left hand on the table, and the diamond twinkled and blazed in shots of colored fire. “Dear me, and when I think how big I was still talking that day—wasn’t I? Sure. A year ago I was still going to be a head buyer at Lamm’s, and then a theatrical producer some day, all that. Ah, well. Here’s to blasted dreams.” She lifted her glass and drank.

  “Marsha, you can’t regret giving up department store drudgery. Why, it’s horrible.” She told Marsha of her brief spell as a salesclerk, making her laugh heartily with a description of Mr. Meredith.

  Marsha’s face became serious, and she stared out at the rain. “I can’t say I regret it, sugar bun, no. Not when I’ve found a real sweetheart like Lou to take me out of it and look after my folks. But frankly, I was all ready for Lou when I met him. I tried for two years at Lamm’s. No go. A high IQ is a drug on the market, do you know that? It only disables you for most jobs, which consist ninety per cent of doing some goddamn dull thing over and over. Of course you tell yourself at first that you’re not shining in this low menial work because you’re cut out to be a big shot, and as soon as you get to the top you’ll show them. You tell yourself this, that is, until you hear a dozen lamebrains, misfits, and good-for-nothings all around you saying the same thing week in and week out. Then what? Then you tell yourself, as long as you can, that you’re different. I don’t know. I’m ambitious, sure, but I’ve never been able to keep up lies about myself to myself for very long. It’s taken me a while to find out what I’m all about, but the long and short of it is, I ain’t got it.”

  “Marsha, you—”

  “I’m very far from pitying myself, sugar bun. But I did keep my beady little eyes open. I gradually learned that big shots mostly work twice as hard, and are twice as thorough about dull detail, as the small fry. That’s the big open secret, baby. I don’t know where the hell the idea got around that big shots just sit on their can and make decisions a couple of hours a day, and for the rest play golf and drink champagne and commit adultery. I tell you, for every step up the ladder, there’s more work and more attention to detail, and more chances to make a big fat jackass of yourself real fast. I had my chance. I flubbed it with a loud crash. Never mind the details. I think in Technicolor, you might say, always the rosy final picture, never the dull in-between details. Oh, being the boss’s son helps, we all know that. But other things being equal, I swear to God most of being a big shot is first of all being a work horse, and second of all applying arithmetic to everything in the whole bloody world, and never making a mistake in addition or subtraction. Me, I’ve always stunk at arithmetic, just like my dear wonderful useless father. End of Marsha Zelenko, smart career woman, envy of two continents, as she dashes back and forth between New York and Paris, the dreaded arbiter of the haute couture. The name is Mrs. Lou Michaelson, and I love it. Let’s have another drink.”

  The two girls sat smoking, looking out at the pouring rain. When the cocktails came Marsha said, “I certainly hope Noel’s show is going to be a hit.”

  “So do I, of course,” Marjorie said.

  Marsha said, “I’m not just being polite. Lou has money in it.”

  “He has?”

  “Not much. A couple of thousand. Mrs. Lemberg is a client of Lou’s. The show looks pretty good at this point, I must say. I love the songs, especially the—Why are you looking so blank?”

  “Who’s Mrs. Lemberg?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Marsha, I haven’t been seeing Noel since—oh, I don’t know, last March, April.”

  Marsha smiled. “I mentioned your name a couple of times at the rehearsals. He didn’t pick me up on it. Just went breezily on to something else. But his face changed a bit, kid, if you’re interested.”

  “I’m not, and I’m sure you’re mistaken.”

  “He hangs around with a tall dumb-looking redhead from the chorus.”

  Marjorie hoped her face didn’t show how the words stabbed. “Good for him and for the redhead. He’s a connoisseur of chorus girl
s. That’s just what he needs. More power to him.”

  “You’re crazy, she bores him,” Marsha said. “I know what he needs. But it’s none of my business. Pardon the long poking nose.”

  “Perfectly all right. Who’s Mrs. Lemberg?”

  “She’s backing the show. Don’t you really know any of this? Oh, goody, here’s the food. If you call this nasty heap of dry grass food. I’d like to set fire to it. And you, you pig—curried chicken and rice! Wait till I’m safely married, baby. Jolly Marsha, star of the freak show, four hundred pounds of quivering female pulchritude… But about Mrs. Lemberg… Lord, I’d give an eye for just one spoonful of mayonnaise on this green filth. But I can’t, I just can’t. With my lousy glandular system, I’d swell like a blimp before your very eyes.”

  Marjorie said, “Well, about Mrs. Lemberg—”

  With a mischievous grin, Marsha finally told her. Mrs. Lemberg was an old friend of Lou Michaelson’s mother, another rich widow. Most of her money was in Brooklyn apartment houses, formerly managed by Mrs. Michaelson, and now by Lou. Mrs. Lemberg had met the producer of Princess Jones, Peter Ferris, at Palm Springs. He was a handsome young actor and stage manager, who had become friendly with Noel in Hollywood; and he had talked Mrs. Lemberg into putting up the money for the production. She always consulted Lou in business decisions, so she had telephoned him in Florida about the show. “Naturally, when I heard it was by Noel Airman I jumped,” Marsha said. “I raved on to Lou about how brilliant Noel was, so he telephoned back that same night, and told la Lemberg to go ahead, if she felt like gambling on Broadway. And I got him to buy a little piece of the show, just for luck. Now he’s so steamed up about it and so pleased with himself he can’t sit still. He keeps saying he’s just begun to live. At rehearsals, he’s like a child of six at a circus—Well, that’s the fact of it, baby. It’s a small world, hey? If I’d ever dreamed the day would come when I’d help Noel Airman get his first musical show produced—The craziest things happen if you live long enough, don’t they?”