Marjorie slammed the door of their room behind her, and stood with her back to it. “Mother, we’re going straight home.”
“What? Are you crazy?” said the mother mildly, taking off her hat at the mirror. “We just got here.”
“How could you, Mom? How could you?”
“How could I what? Can I help it if the Goldstones like the Prado? Does that mean we’re not allowed to come here? It’s still a free country, even if Sandy is at the Prado.”
Two bellboys in gold-braided scarlet suits wheeled in the trunks. Marjorie strode to the window and stood in a silent rage while Mrs. Morgenstern cheerfully directed the bellboys in placing and opening the luggage, including Marjorie’s trunks. As soon as they were gone Marjorie whirled on her. “I said I was going. What’s the point of opening everything up?”
“You want to clean up and have a swim, don’t you? There’s no sense going back into that furnace today.”
“I want to leave right now.”
Mrs. Morgenstern pulled her dress over her head. “Well, I’m not stopping you. I’m going to have a swim before lunch, myself.” She took her bathing suit into the bathroom, dropping Marjorie’s new suit on the bed. “Personally, I think you’re being very foolish. What’s so wrong about having a boy you know at the hotel? It’ll be more fun—”
“Good heavens, Mom, how thick is your skin? Didn’t you see how his mother looked at us?”
“Mary Goldstone’s a lovely person. She looks at everybody that way. She’s a little nearsighted.”
“She thinks you’re sharpening your teeth for Sandy. And that’s just what you’re doing, and I won’t be a party to such—”
“Listen, Marjorie, you can’t fool me. You like the boy.”
“And what if that’s so? This is the very worst thing to do about it—going chasing after him to a hotel—”
“You weren’t doing too well by not chasing him, dear.”
“Mom… Mom, that is nobody’s business but my own. When will you ever understand that?”
Mrs. Morgenstern came out of the bathroom in flapping slippers and bathing suit, with a towel around her neck. “Sometimes one little push makes all the difference.—Coming for a swim?”
“No, I am not.”
Mrs. Morgenstern opened the door. “See you at lunch, then—unless you take the train home, of course. If you do, give my love to Papa.”
Marjorie paced the room, fuming. The sun beat straight into the room, white and hot. She was wet through with perspiration. Below the window was the pool, crowded with hilarious young people. There were some especially good-looking boys, she observed, their hair black and disorderly from the water. She stopped in her pacing and fingered her new swim suit. It was the latest style: flesh-colored rubber, perfectly decent, yet at twenty feet giving one the look of total nakedness. The room was really unbearably hot.
There was dancing after dinner on the terrace overlooking the sea. She danced for hours with Sandy. They went for a stroll on the beach in the moonlight afterward; and when they had rounded a bend that hid them from the hotel they sat and talked idly in the gloom, looking at the stars and streaming sand through their fingers, while the white surf at their feet tumbled and roared. After a while Marjorie hesitantly ran her finger across the back of Sandy’s hand. The effect was explosive. When they walked back to the hotel half an hour later their relationship was advanced about to the high point that Marjorie had reached with George Drobes. She and Sandy were both dizzy, confused, uncertain, exhilarated, and extremely pleased with themselves.
Chapter 5. SANDY’S AMBITIONS
Sandy’s tan Pontiac convertible was quite a change from Penelope: red leather seats, gleaming chrome knobs, and a motor that at sixty miles an hour made less noise than the murmuring tires or the radio pouring clear jazz. The car was his own, not his father’s. He drove it as though he owned it, too; negligently, with one arm resting on the window ledge. George always sat up straight, driving like a motorman.
“How do you feel this morning?” Sandy said.
Marjorie, tying a pink kerchief over her tossing hair, said, “Just wonderful. How about you?” She wore a pink cotton frock and tiny gold sandals, with a bathing suit underneath. They were going to swim in a deserted cove some ten miles down the highway from the Prado.
“I’m puzzled,” Sandy said. “I can’t make you out.”
She stared at the long-jawed profile partly masked by sunglasses. His mouth was straight and serious. “You can’t make me out? Seems to me I’ve made myself a little too plain for comfort.”
“Yes? What was all that, last night?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. The moonlight, maybe. Or maybe it’s just that I like you a bit more than I should,” she said rather sharply.
Grinning, he dropped a strong hand on her knee and gave it a brief squeeze. “That would be nice to believe.” She wanted to object to the squeeze, but the hand was gone. She curled in the far corner of the front seat, out of easy reach of him.
If he was puzzled, so was she; extremely puzzled. She had been puzzling, since she woke, over what had happened the night before. Fixed ideas of hers had been shattered. She had thought an instinct of feminine honor prevented a girl from necking with one man when she loved another. George Drobes, even if he no longer filled the world from pole to pole, was still her accepted lover. Evidently no such instinct existed. She had also believed that a surrender to necking marked a dramatic turn in one’s emotions. But this morning her attitude toward Sandy remained the same: undefined, but friendly and curious rather than passionate. He seemed more familiar, that was all. It was her own self that was less familiar. Marjorie had surprised herself, and she was waiting with oddly pleasant nervousness to see what strange thing she would do next.
They turned off the highway and went bumping down a lonely dirt road through thick pines. Marjorie’s nervousness increased. She was an addict of lending-library novels. Girls were always getting seduced in these books when they went off to a lonely place with a young man to swim; it was almost standard procedure. Sandy Goldstone, big, brown, and powerful, driving in silence with a shadow of a smile around his mouth, looked not unlike the seducers of fiction. Marjorie enjoyed reading about these ravishings, of course, and often dwelled on the vague paragraphs describing the ecstatic feelings of the girls, wondering what sex was really like. But the real thing close at hand wore an aspect of gritty discomfort. Sandy seemed too docile a sort to ravish her, but she rather wished they had stayed at the Prado to swim.
At the beach she slipped behind the car to step out of her frock. The act of taking it off, she thought, might inflame Sandy. She delayed and dawdled behind the car, combing her hair and fixing her makeup. When she came out she saw him lying face down on the sand near the broken remains of an old rowboat, stripped to his bathing trunks, with his head under a ragged yellow newspaper. The sun was blazing, but there was a cool breeze. The cove was about a mile across, fringed by white-gold sand and tangled brush. Marjorie stood by the car for a while, savoring the peaceful silence, the splash of the surf, the smell of pine on the breeze; she was watching him cautiously. He made no move. She went to Sandy and sat beside him, but he did not look up. The sun was almost hot enough to burn her bare skin. Sandy was perspiring in little rivulets.
“Sandy?” She noticed that his breathing was remarkably easy and regular. “Sandy—Sandy Goldstone, damn your hide, have you fallen asleep on me?”
Thoroughly vexed, she kicked him in the ribs; there was such a thing as being too safe from rape. He jerked, grunted, rolled over, and sat up with a guilty grin, rubbing his eyes. “Doggone. Damn near fell asleep, didn’t I? Sun always does that to me.” He jumped to his feet. “Let’s go.”
Marjorie knew only public-beach bathing, with its crowds, trash cans, frankfurters, lifeguards, and squalling children. It was all different to walk to the flat clean edge of the land and plunge into the empty sea. They splashed and dived and swam. When she was exhausted she sat
on the sand and watched Sandy cavort and snort joyously in the water for another quarter of an hour.
“Do you really want to be a doctor?” she said when he reclined dripping beside her.
“Sure.”
“What medical schools have you applied to?”
“Well, I don’t know if I will apply, Marge. With my grades it’s just about hopeless. I have a high C average.”
“But—” She stared at him. “Then you’re not going to be a doctor.”
“Looks that way.”
“Then what will you do?”
“Doggone, you sounded just like my father then.”
“No, really, Sandy—”
“Know what I’d like to be, more than anything? A forest ranger. No, don’t laugh, I mean it. Ever been to Arizona? It’s heaven on earth in those national parks. Sky, stones, cactus, desert, the sun and the stars—nothing else. Know what a forest ranger makes? About thirty-five a week. That’s all I’d want, for the rest of my life, if I could be a ranger in Arizona.”
“That’s—well, it’s an original ambition, anyway.”
“I put in an application last summer. I didn’t even want to finish college. My father stopped that. Said I was going to finish college even if I spent the rest of my life digging ditches.”
“What’s your father like, Sandy?”
“Oh, quite a guy. Quite a dynamo.” Sandy sat up, brushing sand from his thick legs. “Slightly disappointed that I’m not the same type. Only son, too. I feel kind of sorry for him sometimes.”
“Don’t you like the idea of—you know, running Lamm’s some day?”
“Sure, I like it—or I would like it, the way you say it. Think it’s that simple? I’ve been in charge of the men’s hats section this summer. That’s all, just men’s hats. He’s let me make all the mistakes. He’s checked everything in that section every night down to the cash register receipts. Then at dinner he’s been climbing all over me. Last week I came to his office and said maybe I’d better quit for a little vacation before going back to school. ‘Quit?’ he says. ‘Didn’t you open your mail this morning? You’re fired. You’re a failure, a complete failure—’ Sure enough, I got my mail and he’d written me a three-page memo, in his own handwriting, telling me the store couldn’t afford to keep me around any more this summer at the rate I was making mistakes. Then he carefully listed every mistake I’d made since I’d been there. And he ended up with this—I remember every word—‘If you don’t improve I promise you I’ll give this store to a charity foundation rather than leave it in the hands of such a fool.’ ” Sandy scooped up a fistful of sand and scattered it in the wind. “Oh, he’s a wonderful guy. He’s right, you know. You’ve got to be tough to run a big store. You’ve got to be right on the ball every second.” He took her wrists and pulled her to her feet. “Come on, another dip? Let’s go up to the point. It’s deep enough to dive off that rock.”
They were sitting on the rock, panting after a lively swim, when a squat brown fishing boat went wallowing by, leaving a smudgy trail of smoke across the water. “There’s something I’d like to do,” said Sandy, “run one of those tuna boats out of San Diego down around Lower California. They make fortunes. I can navigate—What’s the matter?”
She was shaking her head and laughing at him. “You’re like a nine-year-old kid.”
“Oh?” he said, and with an easy sweep of a long bony arm he was holding her and kissing her.
But it was an outdoors, hearty kind of kiss with no menace, so Marjorie yielded to it. While she was kissing Sandy she tried hard to remember how it felt to kiss George, so as to determine which one she really loved. Marjorie believed that the kisses of true love had a unique taste, a vibration which one could never mistake. But the fact was that while Sandy’s mouth and manner differed from George’s she apparently enjoyed kissing one just about as much as the other. Sandy soon took her by the shoulders and held her a little away from him. “What the devil are you thinking about?”
“Who—me?” she said, blinking. “Why, why dear, I’m not thinking at all, I guess.”
“You give me the strangest feeling.” He looked at her with his head cocked sidewise. “As though you’re adding figures in your head, or something.”
“You’re crazy. How dare you say such a thing?” She pulled away from him and perched at a distance on the rock. “I shouldn’t be kissing you at all. Anyhow, if you expect the kind of kissing you get from Vera Cashman, I’m sorry. I lack her practice.”
Sandy scratched his head. “Let’s go back to the hotel. I’m dying for a beer.”
“Just a moment. How about Vera Cashman, now that the subject has come up?”
“Has it come up?” Sandy said. “How did that ever happen?”
“I just don’t understand your pawing me and all the way you do, when you’ve got a girl.”
“Vera’s moved to California.”
After a moment Marjorie said lightly, “Oh? When did this happen?”
“Couple of weeks ago. Her father went broke, and—Margie, don’t look so damned skeptical, it’s the truth. He’s a Long Island builder. A big development of his went smash. He got out of the state about one jump ahead of the sheriff, my father says.”
“Well, well. You must be heartbroken.”
“It’s all but turned me gray.”
“Looking for a replacement, no doubt.”
“Margie, honey, I just thought you’d like to come for a swim, and—”
“Well, I won’t do. I don’t go in for the things Vera goes in for—and wipe that silly grin off your face. Despite last night, it’s true. I don’t.”
“I never said you did, Margie.”
Before they left the beach, all the same, she went in for a little more of it.
It was a shock to see George after the week at the Prado. Age seemed to have overtaken him all at once, to make him thinner, paler, shorter, sadder, and more slope-shouldered. He took her to an engagement party of one of his college friends. From the start, everything about the evening depressed Marjorie: the all too familiar Bronx apartment house, one of an unbroken line of gray houses along a dirty narrow street; the dark stairway to the fourth floor, with its memory-wakening smells of immigrant cooking and baby-breeding, of stale paint and fresh wet laundry; the cramped apartment blazing with electric bulbs, the cheap furniture, the paintings that were copies of copies, the worn best sellers on the shelves (The Story of Philosophy, Babbitt, The Forsyte Saga, The Bridge of San Luis Rey); the loud voices, the barbarous pronunciation (awfice, yeah, daaance, lor stoodent, idear, tawk); the singsong cadence which jarred on her the more because she was still trying to free her own speech of it; the unvarying cream soda, sponge cake, and sugary purple wine; the inexorable vanilla ice cream rushed in paper boxes from the drugstore by a small brother to climax the party; the proud fat parents, the proud fat bride in a red evening dress from Klein’s, with a bunch of tea roses in a huge silver ribbon on her shoulder; worst of all, the sly giggling jokes that everybody made about George and herself. She pleaded a headache and left, too soon; the silence was very awkward as she and George walked out of the door. Then she felt so sorry for him and so guilty that she kissed him madly when they parked on the Drive (Penelope was repaired at last, after a fashion, and could be driven in a clanking dying way). She found herself responding to George’s kisses just as she always had, which further confused and upset her. Alone in her bedroom that night, wretched with self-disgust, she resolved not to neck again with either Sandy or George until she knew what her true feelings were.
She found she could keep the resolve with Sandy but not with George. Sandy reacted good-humoredly to her first repulse. “Well, well. Just a faded summer love, eh?”
She said, “Don’t be absurd. There’s no sense going on and on with a thing that leads nowhere. Anyway we don’t mean that much to each other.”
“Marjorie, you know I can’t live an hour without you.”
“Go hang yourself, you grinning a
pe.”
That was that. But George had enjoyed special privileges for a year and a half, and had come to regard them as his right. She couldn’t withdraw to a cooler status without a showdown and possibly a break, for which she was far from ready. She could not bear to hurt George, and she did not want to lose him; not while she was so befuddled. So she dragged on with him as before, though made increasingly miserable by it.
When Marjorie returned to Hunter for the fall term she found that according to general gossip she was all but engaged to the heir apparent of Lamm’s department store. Standing on line in the hot jammed basement of the school to draw her textbooks, she was slyly congratulated half a dozen times, and she saw girls pointing at her and whispering. Her denials met with winks, prods, and giggles. She had no idea how the rumor had started, and she didn’t much care. The teasing was a welcome diversion from the dreariness of sinking back into the Hunter routine.
Marjorie had never liked the school. Her dearest wish had been to go out of town to college, but her parents had been unwilling to let her leave home so young, and moreover had not been quite able to afford the expense when Marjorie was finishing high school. So, reluctantly, the girl had enrolled in this subway college, which to her was a hell, a nerve-racking place full of the twitters and colors and smells and giggles and screeches of too many unlovely shoving girls. In time she became dulled to it and stopped resenting her fate; but she always moved alone through the perfumed swarm, though she had the usual lunchroom companions and bridge-playing acquaintances. With the move of the family to Central Park West she felt more than ever that her presence in this soprano-buzzing hive was an unlucky mistake. But it was too late to make a change. A bit too pretty, too well dressed, and too cool, she was not popular at Hunter, and she had taken little part until now in any of the activities. But if she heard the school sneered at she would angrily defend it by saying that a girl couldn’t get half as good an education anywhere else. This was more or less true; the competition for marks was keen and the girls on the whole brighter than average. She would have traded all the fine education she was getting, however, for a small part of the polishing and the fun that she had once hoped to find in an out-of-town college. In this she was more like the other girls than she quite realized. Hunter was a concentration camp of such displaced girlish dreamers, would-be coeds forced by lack of money into the mold of subway grinds.