Marjorie Morningstar

  “I’m a little concerned for you,” Marjorie said. “I can’t help that, I’m afraid—”

  “I’m not a drug addict, Marjorie. I’ve learned to live with a pretty unstable nervous system, that’s all.” He looked at her, and laughed. “You’re skeptical. I don’t blame you. We Americans always disapprove of anything that lightens the rub of life on the nerves—anything from painkillers for a woman in labor, to booze for the downcast. We get it from the Puritans. I can’t imagine how we ever became reconciled to cigarettes. Advertising, I guess. We don’t smoke tobacco, we smoke pretty girls. You know, a sensible Chinese smokes twenty pipes of opium a day and we think he’s an Oriental degenerate, but believe me, he’ll live longer and be happier than a two-pack-a-day man in the States.” Eden yawned, smiled in apology, and began to talk about the traditional drug plants and their properties, and about the new synthetic drugs made from coal tar. His knowledge was encyclopedic, and for a while Marjorie was interested. She was waiting, of course, for an explanation of his horrifying panic seizure, thinking that this talk was a mere delay while he collected himself.

  But he went on and on in this vein, calm and copious, and she began to get a little sleepy. He took from his bedside table a fat volume, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and read from it a long passage in wild archaic English about drug plants. What happened next she was never quite sure. When she opened her eyes the porthole showed bluish-gray, and she was lying on a bed, still in her evening dress, covered by her camel’s hair coat and by a light quilt. Eden sat in an armchair beside her, reading by lamplight, freshly shaved, and dressed in the gray tweed suit he had worn on the first day of the voyage. She sat up, exclaiming, “My God!” Eden told her she had staggered to the bed midway in his reading of the Anatomy, muttering that she would be more comfortable lying down, and had fallen asleep in thirty seconds. “I hadn’t the heart to wake you, it was only a couple of hours to dawn, anyway. We ought to be able to see land now. How about coming topside?”

  She said sullenly, blinking and yawning, “I don’t know which is more thoroughly ruined, my dress or my reputation. How could you let me stay here? You’re a cad, that’s what.”

  But she accepted a fresh toothbrush from him, washed her face, and put herself to rights. They went up on the boat deck, and she noted with relief that there were several weary-looking couples still in evening dress here and there on the ship. “It isn’t six yet,” Eden said. “Last night out anything goes. Don’t look guilty, that’s all. We’re probably the most innocent pair on the ship.”

  Tired and sleepy as she was, the first glimpse of the faint greenish hump on the horizon dead ahead of the ship sent a wave of pleasure and wonder through her. She caught at Eden’s arm. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” he said. “The Old World. You’re looking at France. Over the horizon is Paris and the Eiffel Tower and, of course, Noel Airman.”

  Chapter 44. IN PURSUIT OF NOEL

  Two days later, still dazed and unsettled by the strangeness and suddenness of her shift in plans, Marjorie was flying in an Air France plane from Paris to Zurich with Mike Eden, in a clear brilliant afternoon. She had found out with Eden’s help that Noel had gone vacationing in Switzerland; and she was going to try to track him down there.

  The ordered loveliness of the landscape unrolling slowly beneath her threw her into a near-trance of sweet excitement. She could not understand why the books had not dwelled more on the physical beauty of Europe. The continent seemed to her one green pleasure park, dotted with picture-book cities; and smoothed and polished for centuries, by the people who had lived and died there, to the perfection of a single master painting. That this pretty place was the setting for all the carnage in the history books, and the current horrors of the Nazi era, passed her imagination. The jagged march of the Alps, purple and white against an azure sky, shocked her with delight.

  The wheels of the plane skidded on the runway; and then there was the mess at the customs, in the crowded buzzing airport, with signs in four languages everywhere, and people around her apparently gabbling in seventy languages; and then she and Mike were riding in a cab in violet twilight through a light-spangled city that looked half like a medieval tapestry and half like a futuristic movie. All this time she remained in her state of bemused pleasure.

  Then she saw the swastika.

  It leaped at her eye—huge, gilded—as the cab slowed, coming to the hotel. She touched Eden’s arm. “What’s that building?”

  “What do you suppose? German consulate.” He was irritable and glum; he usually was, at this hour of the day, even without the fatigue of travel.

  The bellboy took their bags inside the hotel. She hung back on the sidewalk. “Mike—”

  “Yes?”

  “Is it very silly of me? I want to go and look at that consulate building.”

  “Let’s go in and register and bathe, for crying out loud. Then you can contemplate its charm all evening. It’s no treat to me. I’ve seen a swastika.”

  “Just for a minute.”

  His true smile came slow and weary across the pallid face. “The bird and the snake. Sure, come ahead, feast your eyes.”

  They walked down the sidewalk to the German consulate. She stood staring up at the gilded eagle and swastika on a huge bold medallion over the doors. After a while she said, “They’re real, aren’t they? They really exist.”

  “Oh yes,” Eden said dully. “They exist.”

  She went to bed that night with her spine still somewhat a-crawl, having obtained a sleeping pill from Mike Eden. He had made no reference to the Nazis during dinner. He had talked about France, and Italy, and about Noel Airman’s charm and wit. But she knew he had been aware of the slightly shocked state into which she had been thrown by the mere sight of the gilded swastika. Marjorie had seen plenty of swastikas before, in newsreels and magazines; but this was the first one she had seen with her own eyes that really meant business, so to say.

  For a long while the pill did not work. It loosened and warmed her limbs, and calmed her nerves, but her mind remained tight and sharp in the darkness; and at last she sat up, turned on the bed lamp, and smoked, sorting out the astonishments of the past two days. Most astonishing of all, much more so than Mike Eden’s sudden casual invitation to her to fly to Zurich with him, had been her ready acceptance. But since the moment she had first seen this strange haunted man at the gangway of the Queen Mary—at least since the moment she had first talked to him at the rail, as the ship steamed down the Narrows—it seemed to Marjorie that she had cut her moorings from everything familiar and solid in her existence, including her own standards of propriety.

  Once she had thought that Noel Airman had opened a new world to her, a world of novel manners and values; but now she was beginning to see his free ways and shocking talk as a sort of negative print of her own world; Noel’s innovation had been to call the black of West End Avenue white, and the white black. Outside that limited world, outside her perpetual little tug of war with Noel, outside her girlish dream of becoming Marjorie Morningstar, there was, there had always been, a roaring larger world in which men like Mike Eden moved; by chance, blindly pursuing Noel, she had stumbled into this larger world, and it scared and excited her.

  Eden had called Paris from Cherbourg as soon as a telephone line had been passed from the dock to the ship; and in no very long time—he didn’t say how he had managed it—had come to her with Noel’s Paris address. Noel was off skiing in the Alps, he added, and wasn’t expected back for ten days. He had then offered to escort her to Paris and see her settled in a reasonably cheap hotel, before proceeding on his way to Germany; and he had been amazingly deft and quick in clearing through customs, getting French money, treating with porters, and transferring baggage from the ship to the Paris train. They had arrived in Paris toward evening, in the rain, and she had seen nothing of the city but one small quiet restaurant where she had had an elegant dinner (while Eden consumed a bowl of raw salad and a whole loaf o
f bread) and the dowdy Mozart Hotel, where he had put her up.

  Just before saying good night to her, standing in the hotel lobby waiting for the creaky elevator, Eden had abruptly said, “You’ve got ten days to kill. Why slosh around Paris by yourself? This is the dreariest time of the year here. I have to spend a week or so in Zurich before I go to Germany. Come along. I’ll take you driving in the Alps. Maybe we’ll track down Noel. There aren’t too many places he can be. It may be your only chance ever to see the Alps. They’re worth seeing.”

  The best answer she could think of, trying to catch her breath, was, “I’m not sure that’s a decent proposal.”

  “Of course it’s decent,” Eden said without a smile, “and you haven’t the slightest doubt of it.”

  “I thought shipboard acquaintances invariably turned into horrible bores on land.”

  “I guess all rules have exceptions. You’re holding up very well. I just think you’d enjoy the Alps. Will you come?”

  In the second or two before she answered, Marjorie thought of many things: of the loneliness and strain of spending ten days alone in a great foreign city, waiting for Noel to get back; of Eden’s brief but revolting collapse on the ship, and his peculiarly swift recovery; of her growing suspicion that he was engaged in undercover or illegal transactions of some kind in Germany; of what her mother would say about her travelling around Europe with a man like Eden, if she ever found out. Hesitating, she looked at his face, calm and pleasant, though unchanged in its shadowed remoteness. She was not at all in love with him. The sight of him with a hypodermic needle in his hand had withered, probably for good, any such notion that might have been floating far back in her mind; but she did feel affection, and pity, and concern for him. Despite his bizarre traits, he was, in his good moods, rare company; and if there was such a thing as a decent man, he was decent.

  She said, “How shocked would you be, I wonder, if I said yes?”

  “Shocked?” His smile was agreeable and mild. “I’d be very pleased. You make me feel good when you’re around, that’s all.”

  She said, “Well—I haven’t any dignity left, that’s one sure thing. I’ve chased Noel this far, I may as well go yodelling after him up and down the Alps, eh?” She laughed rather ruefully. “I guess I’ll come, Mike. Thanks for asking me. It sounds like fun.”

  “Well, good. It will be, I promise you.”

  “If my mother knew what I was doing she’d kill me. But I might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a goat. I don’t suppose there’s a living soul who’d believe at this point that we aren’t having an affair. I don’t care.”

  “Now suppose,” Eden said, a rather acid grin coming on his face, “I really ought to mention this—suppose we do meet Noel, travelling together like this? We just might.”

  “Oh, him. I imagine it’ll enhance my glamor in his eyes. It’s probably just the jolt he needs.”

  Perched on a bed in Zurich, finishing her cigarette, Marjorie smiled and yawned. Completely adrift though she was, her uppermost feeling was perky pleasure at her own daring, now that she was actually in Switzerland with Eden. Whatever was going to happen in the next ten days would not be dull. For all she knew, this time tomorrow night she might be dining with Noel—or with Noel and Eden together, a stimulating prospect.

  The pill took hold. She slept through twelve dreamless hours.

  In the morning there was a sealed note under her door in Eden’s writing, with some Swiss banknotes: “Sorry, had to go out early on business. Phoned several ski lodges. No luck on Noel yet. I’ll be back for cocktails and dinner, probably phone your room about five. You can get around this town with English and your high-school French. Don’t buy too many cuckoo clocks. You owe me $50, I changed that much for you. Mike.

  Conscious of handwritings now, she scanned Eden’s carefully. It was vertical, clear, disappointingly plain; she had expected marked elegance from a man who had made a study of handwriting. Noel’s she recalled, was much more impressive; gracefully shaped letters, t’s crossed with a strong upward slant, and curious striking capitals. All one could say for Eden’s was that it was very easy to read.

  She went out and strolled around Zurich, feeling lost and sheepish. It was a neat, wealthy-looking city, but not exciting once she was used to the multiple-language signs, and to the slightly different look of streetcars and policemen, and to the clean clear air, which in her experience didn’t go with city streets. To pass the morning, she shopped for a wristwatch for Seth and had lunch in a sidewalk restaurant, where the coffee and the little chocolate pastries were exquisite.

  She returned to the hotel at three-thirty and took a nap; woke after five, and called his room. There was no answer. She bathed and dressed, taking her time; at half-past six she telephoned him again; no answer. Ready for dinner, dressed even to her hat, yearning for a cocktail, hungry, she sat reading Tom Jones and smoking nervously until half-past seven. She glanced at Eden’s note to make sure she had not misunderstood it; telephoned his room again; and, fighting off alarm, called the desk clerk and asked whether Mr. Eden had checked out. No, came the polite reply in a moment, he was still registered; no, he had left no message for her.

  At eight she went to the bar, drank a cocktail quickly, and returned to her room. At half-past nine she ordered dinner in her room, and picked without relish at the food. At midnight he still had not called. She sat up till one-thirty reading over and over a week-old New York Times which she had bought in the lobby. She read through the help wanted ads, the shipping news, and the financial section, becoming bitterly homesick for New York as her worry over Eden mounted. At last she turned out the light, tossed and dozed miserably till the sun came up at seven, and then slept for a couple of hours. The first thing she did on waking was to reach for the telephone. Eden’s room did not answer.

  She killed the morning in sightseeing, and the afternoon at a movie house showing two very old American films. Half a dozen times she went to the telephone booth in the ladies’ room of the movie house and called the hotel, but there never was a message for her. Marjorie was increasingly torn between fear for Eden’s safety, and commonsense embarrassment at her own melodramatic worries. One of the movies happened to be a spy story; and all the paraphernalia of mysterious blondes, papers concealed in toothpaste tubes, and sudden vanishings, so familiar in the blown-up gray images of the movie screen, made her feel exceptionally silly each time she dropped down into dry real life and went to call the hotel. That Eden had been spirited away by the Nazis—which was what she was imagining, if her vague fears had any tangibility at all—was simply too much to believe. More likely he was exactly what he said he was, a businessman dealing in drugs and chemicals; and his reticence and nervousness, if they had any meaning, probably were attributable to currency manipulations, or shading of the drug trade laws, the usual shifts and dodges of a businessman clipping corners to make more money. In a year in her father’s importing office, she had learned quite a bit about this commonplace aspect of international commerce. Everybody did it, more or less.

  She knew, too, that Eden was startlingly absent-minded, and quite capable of forgetting a dinner appointment and ignoring her for a couple of days. Several times on the ship he had failed to meet her at an appointed place and time, absorbed in his card games; and during one entire day he had paid no attention to her at all, sunk in a poker game that had carried over from the night before. For all she knew, Eden was off somewhere now playing cards, while her mind was dancing with lurid pictures of him being chained and tortured.

  With such reasonings she staved off any action that day. Humiliating though it was, she did talk to the desk clerk at length after dinner. He was calm, amused, condescending; Mr. Eden often stopped at the hotel, he said, and went off for a couple of days while retaining his room; Miss Morgenstern had nothing at all to worry about, he would undoubtedly be back in a day or so. She went off scarlet-faced to the elevator, and spent another dismal night in her room.

  The
next day was a dragged-out ordeal of worry, aimless wandering, and desultory shopping. To her tremendous relief, Eden did telephone her from his room, shortly after she came back to the hotel late in the afternoon. He sounded very exhilarated, insisting on having a drink with her at once, though she protested she was grimy and tired. They met in the bar. He looked worn and rather white, but his spirits had never been higher. He had already hired a car, he said, and they would start on a week-long jaunt around the Alps in the morning. He talked in a rush, his dark-ringed eyes twinkling with gaiety. “Frankly, Marge, I may play it dirty, and do my level best to avoid meeting Noel. What the hell, he’s going to have your company for the rest of his life, isn’t he?”

  He did not even refer to the fact that he had been away for three days; he blandly talked as though nothing unusual had occurred, nothing that had to be explained or even acknowledged. Marjorie found this disingenuous silence most awkward; she wanted to ask questions. But clearly that was not to be. There was nothing accidental in Eden’s ebullient talk of the trip, and pretense that the events of the past three days were not worth mentioning. He gave her the positive feeling that if she broke into that subject she would encounter a freezing snub, and possibly an abrupt end to her acquaintance with him. Perforce she took his gay tone, as soon as she could, and kept it up through the evening.

  Next day they drove up into the mountains in the midget French car he had hired; and for a week they went from one alpine resort to another, sometimes stopping a day at a hotel, sometimes two. The desk clerks tended to blink a bit when Eden asked for separate rooms, but they were always obliging. He had been joking, of course, about avoiding Noel. He made many inquiries and phone calls. Once they thought they had located him; but when they arrived at the hotel, it turned out that a man named Erdman was there.