Marjorie Morningstar

  Marjorie was disappointed; still, she went on having fun. The trip was unforgettable, from the first day to the last. The flimsy little car groaned up almost vertical mountainsides, weaving laboriously back and forth along hairpin turns, dodging past goats, dogs, peasants, and occasional huge limousines. On the afternoon of the first day Marjorie found herself looking across an empty gorge, thousands of feet deep, at a girl tending goats on the sharp green rocky slope opposite, which reflected blinding sunlight from patches of snow. She could hear the goats bleat, she could see every color in the girl’s florid costume; yet she calculated it would take her less time to get back to Paris, almost, than to cross over to that girl in her roadless mountain-peak pasture. It was all like that. They drove through villages of squat timbered cottages, steeply piled along narrow cobbled snowy streets, which looked more like opera settings than human habitations. There weren’t many tourists in the hotels, and almost no Americans. She became used to dining at long boards with Italians, Frenchmen, Germans. One evening a jolly drunken group of Germans in a little hotel pulled them into a songfest, with many maudlin assurances that Germany and America would always be friends, and that Hitler was not as bad as the papers said. At another hotel they fell in with a party of middle-aged French couples who pressed them into coming on a picnic, where the men did a boomps-a-daisy dance on the snowy grass, imitating Mussolini and Hitler, to the squealing delight of their wives. Wherever they went people took them for honeymooners—all but the perplexed desk clerks who knew of their sleeping arrangements.

  They would drive in an afternoon from soft springtime to whistling white winter; from lilac-filled gardens to ice-blocked roads; from warm sunny cities with great department stores and clanging trolleys to black naked rock slopes in a whirl of falling snow. They ate sandwiches and drank wine by the side of tumbling white cataracts, with icy Alps all around them, receding to little purple ridges as far as the eye could see. Marjorie had never had such a sense of space, such a sense of the world as a great jagged rock covered with a layer of grassy earth, and lapped in sweet air.

  Once she said to Eden, “I have to keep reminding myself that we’re still on the same planet where the Bronx is. It seems to me we’re on Venus or the moon.”

  Eden was in excellent humor all during the holiday, despite a tendency to nervous exasperation, especially with slow-moving waiters and porters. Late in the afternoon he had a way of falling into black depression, but a meal with plenty of wine usually brought him out of it.

  Though their relationship was almost comically chaste, indeed the subject of much of Eden’s joking, Marjorie was aware of bass notes of sex under it. They were having too much fun; the hours were too keenly edged, the lighthearted kiss at the end of the evening (seldom more than one) too sharply pleasant. She often wondered what she would do if Mike were to make a pass at her.

  Had anyone told her at the start of the European trip that she would soon be traipsing around Switzerland with a forty-year-old widower she would have been insulted. Forty had always seemed to her the age at which men began to break down and retire. Yet Eden treated her as a contemporary, if a young one. A girl of twenty-four, she began to realize, was nothing more or less than a woman getting on. It was a rather startling thought. The few gray hairs she was plucking out around her temples seemed absurdly premature to her; the dances at Columbia were present to her mind as events that had happened only the other day.

  They came to Lucerne, a city of green flowered gentle slopes and charming medieval houses, bordering a lake set in a ring of giant mountains. Late in the afternoon, when the town lay in shadow and the sunlight slanted pink on the snowy peaks, Mike rented a speedboat and they roared far out on the still blue lake. He seemed to be in his afternoon glum spell; he wasn’t talking, or even looking at her. Marjorie was herself very tired, and the travelling had begun to wear down her nerves. The speedboat ride wasn’t fun; she would rather have had a nap. She was thinking that perhaps she had had about enough of this peculiar excursion with this very peculiar man; and she could not help wondering how hard he had really been trying to find Noel.

  Mike cut the motor, and the streamlined red hull drifted in silence. He lit a cigar. “Well, that’s it. End of the trail. As the sun sets on mighty Pilatus we bid farewell to Mike and Marjorie, our gay tourist friends, and to picturesque Switzerland, land of lakes, mountains, and eternal snows.”

  Marjorie said, “I thought we had till Friday.”

  “Well, I made a phone call a little while ago. I have to go back to Zurich in the morning.”

  “And then?”

  “And then? Picturesque Germany, land of Gemütlichkeit, leather aprons, beer, pretzels, song, and merry laughter.”

  A chill breeze ruffled the water, and wavelets slapped against the hull. It was very lonely and quiet on the lake. Strings of street lamps were already twinkling in Lucerne.

  After several minutes, during which they both smoked and looked in silence at the red sunset arching across the dome of the sky, Eden said, “Noel’s back in Paris.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve been calling every day. He just showed up this afternoon. Seems he changed his mind and went to Venice, after all. Can’t say I’m not grateful to him. Unpredictable fellow.”

  Ashamed of her suspicions, Marjorie said, “Thanks, Mike. Did you talk to him?”

  “To Noel? No, he’d been in and gone out. Talked to his landlady. Woman with a thick German accent. You’ll find her hard to understand on the telephone.” He lapsed into silence again. He appeared sullen. Every now and then he glanced at her, a puzzling dark look. The sunset was fading fast, and it was getting colder minute by minute. At last, when Marjorie was about to suggest that they go back to shore, he said in an odd sharp tone, “I’m sorry about those three days in Zurich. Hope you weren’t scared or worried.”

  Startled by the abrupt cracking open of the forbidden subject, Marjorie said cautiously, “Well, yes, I was worried. Pretty damned worried, that last day.”

  “I can imagine. I couldn’t phone. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, you’re all right, so what’s the difference?”

  “Marjorie, it’s quite true, as I told you on the ship, that I’m going to Germany on business. But I’m also doing some illegal rescue work. I’m a fool to tell you, but I want to. I hope I can count on you not to get excited or melodramatic or anything.” The words seemed to break from him in a rush. She stared at him. After a long pause he went on, more slowly, “Well, that’s it. I know I can count on you not to mention it, or discuss it, or do anything at all but forget it, once we’re back on shore. People’s lives are involved.”

  “Why… of course. Is it very—is there a lot of danger?” She didn’t know quite what to say. She was more surprised at the fact of his telling her, than at the information.

  “No, very little. I mean, these things are relative. It’s not as safe as studying Semitic languages at Oxford, let’s say.”

  Thrown off balance though she was, Marjorie couldn’t help smiling. Eden smiled too, and said eagerly, his eyes glittering with unusual liveliness, “I’ll tell you something though, Margie, in a queer way there’s a hell of a lot of fun—though that’s not quite the word—in rescue work. I’ve been doing it for a couple of years. It’s stimulating to be outside the law. It makes you look sharp, it simplifies the day’s job. Above all it makes every hour you stay uncaught very pleasant. And as for depression, anxiety—all that pattern simply vanishes. The fact is, and this is the only way I can put it, when I go back to the United States I seem to be living in a black-and-white movie. As soon as I cross the German border, I’m in color again. I grant you it’s a hell of a warped way to feel, and it leaves out the fact that I’m sick to the stomach with fear all the time I’m there, but still that’s the truth of it.” He looked in her face and laughed. “I’m shocking you.”

  “Nothing you say could shock me at this point. You’re a man from Mars. When are you going back into Germany???
?

  “I’ll take an evening train to Stuttgart tomorrow.”

  “Don’t they check everybody pretty carefully on the trains?”

  “That’s the idea. I do everything in the most legal and obvious way, as any American businessman would.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “I’m always scared. A bit more than usual, maybe, this time. They’ve checked on Hilda. I haven’t been exactly an hysterical old lady about her, it seems, after all.”

  Marjorie sat up, looking at his shadowed face. “What? What about her?”

  She could see his Adam’s apple move. “Nothing worth changing plans for. Nobody’s exactly seen her eating a Jewish baby for breakfast, you might say. But at least nobody’s saying I’m seeing burglars under the bed any more. It’s odd that that should give me satisfaction, but it does. They gave me such a horselaugh at first.”

  Marjorie shivered. The speedboat rocked in the wash of another boat going by at top speed; the boy and girl in the cockpit waved gaily and shouted something in German as they sped past. The exhaust roar echoed back over the dark water for half a minute or so, and faded to a distant murmur. Marjorie said, “Mike, who’s ‘They’? Or can’t you talk about that?”

  He hesitated. “Well, hell, I don’t know why not. You’ve read about all this in the papers, I’m sure. It’s no secret. I work with a group, an organization…. Remember the Underground Railway in American Civil War days? More or less the same thing. Instead of slaves, political refugees, and some Jews. There’s several of these outfits, and—”

  “Are you working with the communists?”

  Eden wrinkled his nose. “What? Whatever makes you think I’d work with them? Silly bastards. Tried to peddle the Marxian brand of happiness pills to the Germans, and just got undersold out of the Hun market by Hitler with his Jew-killing superman capsule. No, this crowd is more innocuous. Just a lot of idealistic boobies who think Germany can be a small America some day. They think they’re fighting Hitler. What a joke! Actually they’re a lot of megalomaniacs, pure and simple, only on the right side. Their cause is hopeless. They’re trying to hold back the tide with a teaspoon. But for my purposes they’re not bad to work with.”

  A deeper twilight was coming over the lake as the last streaks of red disappeared from the snows of the mountain peaks. The nearer mountains looked almost black. Marjorie was shivering despite her new blue suede jacket; she hugged her arms, crouching on the red leather seat of the drifting boat. “You say they’re trying to stop the ocean with a teaspoon. What do you think you’re trying to do? Maybe you’re a bigger booby.”

  “No, I’m not a booby at all. I have a small attainable goal, and what’s more I believe I’ve actually achieved it, or am damn close to it….”

  “Mike, what did they find out about Hilda? How can you go back if—”

  “Don’t go building it out of all proportion in your mind. They say it’s all right. This stuff on Hilda is far from definite, mind you. They’ve never steered me wrong yet…. Well, good Lord, Margie, don’t look so terror-stricken. Can’t you picture how helter-skelter our communications are? If we held off because of this or that vague suspicion we’d never do anything. Let’s face it, the likes of me isn’t wanted in Germany, and I don’t suspect that, I know it. But I’ve been in and out now for three years. I transact a lot of legitimate business. The desk clerks in a dozen hotels know me by sight. I even know the conductors on some trains. It’s very hard to describe to you what it’s like, but I can only tell you it’s like skiing, or serving in a submarine, or something. You have to be vigilant and there’s an ever-present hazard, but also there are standard techniques and procedures, and thousands, literally thousands of people are doing it, most of them not any brighter than I am, and surviving very nicely. Moreover, I have all kinds of extra safety factors. My commercial connections, my American passport—God Almighty, why do I have to justify myself to you, anyway?” He shot his hand forward and pressed the ignition key, but the motor didn’t catch.

  She leaned forward and put her hand on his, restraining him from turning the key again. “You said you had a small objective. You said you’d achieved it—”

  “I think I have. I can’t be sure. In any case—” He leaned back and stared at her. In the fading light from the pellucid sky, where several pale stars winked now, his scar was almost invisible, and he looked very young. She could picture him at the age of twenty-five, and it seemed to her she might have fallen in love with that ugly young man. He said, “Well, you unquestionably consider me a crackpot anyway, so I’ll tell you. What difference does it make? You’ve got to understand, first of all, that I really have nothing in common with this group, I don’t sympathize with them politically or anything, it’s strictly a practical arrangement. I fell in with them by accident. When I first came to Germany in ’35, travelling for a chemical firm, I was still suffering from suicidal depressions. There was an analyst living in Berlin whom I’d known in Vienna in the old days, Dr. Blum, Jewish, supposed to be one of the top men in the world, and I went to see him. He didn’t help me, as it turned out, I helped him. He was trying to get out of Germany. It was easy in those days, the only question was getting your money out too. The problem now is to get out with your skin. I carried five thousand American dollars across the border for Dr. Blum in my inside coat pocket. It was a cinch, the Nazis weren’t searching Americans, especially not a Nordic-looking bastard like Herr Eden, with his Heidelberg scar.

  “I can’t tell you, Margie, what it did for me, pulling off that little coup. To begin with, it saved my life. I didn’t care at that point whether I lived or died, in fact I had a slight preference for being dead—that’s why I’d gone to see Blum. And mind you, I didn’t get much of a kick out of pulling Blum out—selfish frigid goat, risking his family’s lives for the sake of a lousy five thousand dollars—Blum had, however, three lovely grandchildren, a blond boy of five and twin girls, real angels. When I met Blum and his family at the train in Paris, and saw those three children step safe on French soil, something came to life in me, something that had been dead since the accident…. Aren’t you freezing? Shall we go back? We can talk about all this in a warm restaurant somewhere—”

  Marjorie glanced toward the winking lights of Lucerne. “You won’t talk where there are people. I’m not cold, Mike—”

  “Well, Blum had friends in the same fix, and I went back a couple of more times and did it again. I realize now what a stupid procedure that was—a tourist, even a businessman, popping back and forth across the border like that. I’d have been picked up sure after a couple of more trips. But one of these birds knew someone in this group, and put me in touch with them.

  “This outfit, you see, isn’t primarily interested in getting Jews out of Germany, or even their own people, though they do that too occasionally. They have dizzy grandiose schemes of revolt against Hitler. They keep moiling and fussing and sneaking around, making elaborate plans, and building up arsenals, and running mimeograph machines at night, and raising money abroad and sneaking it in, and it’s all a lot of pathetic nonsense, for my money. But they do have a functioning apparatus, and some powerful friends in England and America. I run certain little errands for them, errands an American businessman can bring off with the least risk, and in return, pretty much on a quid pro quo basis, they help me sneak out my few silly Jews… because that’s all I’m interested in.”

  Marjorie put her hand on his. He broke off, squinting at her. “What’s the matter?”

  “Certain little errands, you say.”

  “That’s right.”

  “If you’re caught running them—what?”

  “I’d undoubtedly get kicked out of Germany, for good.”

  “Nothing worse?”

  He said irritably, pulling away his hand, “What are you getting at? That I’m not as good an insurance risk as a psychology teacher? I know that, but I might not be alive at all if I’d remained a psych teacher. The Gestapo is most unlikely t
o get too rough with me. They’re insane butchers, to be sure, but they turn all smiles and they sweat pig grease as a rule at the sight of an American passport. Look, I’m scared enough, Marjorie, it doesn’t add anything to warn me I’m not playing tennis in Central Park. I know.”

  “All I’m saying is that maybe you ought to wait before going back—”

  “I’d get bored waiting.”

  “That’s not a rational answer.”

  “Who said I’m a rational person?” He laughed coldly. “You guessed I was Jewish. I don’t even know if you’re right about that. My great-grandfather was a German Jew. When he came to America he changed his name to Eden, and dropped all his connections with Jews. Our family name—on my oath, this is true—was Einstein. No relation to the Einstein, but don’t you think that’s funny? The one name that’s apt to survive the next twenty centuries wasn’t good enough for my family.

  “But I guess my Jewish blood, or whatever it is, has stayed alive. Because I’ve found a reason for existing, a satisfaction I can’t even describe, in pulling a few Jews out of Germany. I go after the ones that, for one reason or another, the big rescue organizations can’t or won’t budge. There’s an amazing number of them, Marjorie, Jews by the tens of thousands, just sitting in that fiery furnace, waiting for it to cool off. It’s their home, you see. They won’t go. They can’t get themselves to leave home. There are graves they can’t bear to leave behind. They clutch childishly at straws of optimism. Well, I talk to them, yank at them, take jewels or money out for them—anything that’ll get them moving. They’re usually annoyed and not very grateful, but I get them out. Most of the ones I go after have little kids. I’m happiest when there’s a kid in the picture. Who knows which of those kids is going to be a Heine, or Disraeli, or Einstein, or Freud? Or one greater than all of them?”