Marjorie Morningstar

  The butt had been growing warm in her fingers; now the glowing end stung her skin. She crushed the cigarette out and stood, brushing ash from her black skirt. It was eighteen minutes to one. She went to the house phone and called his room. The telephone rang and rang, but there was no answer. Her face became fiery. Obviously he had been polite to her on the phone and then had completely forgotten the date. He was a Broadway playwright, and she was an aging West End Avenue girl from his dead past, trying to clutch at a shred of his glamor. He probably thought of her as little more than an autograph hunter. She put the receiver down, walked out of the hotel, and dazedly got into a cab.

  The cab had hardly turned the corner when Wally Wronken, dressed as for a birthday party, with a gardenia corsage in a box under his arm, came whirling through the revolving door, scanning the lobby anxiously. He walked up and down the lobby, he walked through Rumpelmayer’s, he questioned the headwaiter and the bellboys in the lobby. He went up to his suite and called Marjorie’s home, but she wasn’t there. He ate a cheerless lunch by himself in his living room overlooking Central Park, where the trees were bright with the colors of autumn.

  He telephoned her the next day to apologize, but she wasn’t in. He telephoned her several times during the ensuing week. By the time he did get to talk to her it was too late—if it had ever not been too late. She was pleasant, distant, and preoccupied. She had met another man.

  It was fifteen years before Marjorie found out what had delayed him.

  There was a fitting irony, perhaps, in the fact that it was Marsha Michaelson who brought her together with this man; Marsha, at times her dearest friend, at times her worst enemy; Marsha, who had greased her descent into Noel’s bed. She met him at a dinner party in Marsha’s New Rochelle home, the evening after her aborted lunch date with Wally. A long time later she found out that Marsha had planned the dinner with the purpose of bringing them together. He was Michaelson’s young law partner, the pleasant round-faced man who had cut off the noise of the berserk theremin at the wedding by pulling the plug out of the wall. She dimly recalled that he had almost made a date with her before Noel had spirited her away on that fatal night. Placed side by side at the table, they fell into conversation easily because they had met once before; and by the time the meal ended they were talking with rapid easy intimacy, all but oblivious to the rest of the party. She hoped he would ask to see her again. He did. He wanted to see her the next day. She knew that by the usual rules she should put him off for a week or so; instead she said yes with an eagerness that made her blush a little.

  After the second date, she knew she wanted to marry him. The headlong torrent of her feelings scared her, but she couldn’t help herself. It wasn’t at all a blind urge to get herself married off at last. Since her return from Europe she had been meeting eligible men and having as many dates as she wanted; but none of them had waked her feelings. With this man, her heart had come to almost instantaneous hot life. There was something undignified, something not quite adult, she felt, about falling for someone new so soon and so hard; after all, the days of George Drobes were over, weren’t they? But her own skepticism and disapproval made no difference whatever to her emotions. Nothing seemed to matter but the fact that she was falling in love.

  He was far from perfect. He was a bit short, though athletically built, not quite a head taller than herself. His speech was slow, calm, and direct, with just a touch of quiet humor, in sharp contrast to the quick nervous wit and fantastic vocabulary of Noel, and the stinging insight and mordant eloquence of Mike Eden. Marjorie had been almost sure that in the end she would meet and marry another of these wild talkers, since the type seemed to be her weakness, but Milton’s measured speech and deliberate thinking seemed to suit her well enough. The fact was, some of his ideas on politics and religion were decidedly old-fashioned—she might have said banal, describing somebody else who seemed less reliable, sound, and sure. He wanted, for instance, to have a traditionally religious home, and was obviously pleased to learn of Marjorie’s family background. It was amazing how little all that concerned her, anyway. The one thing she couldn’t understand—that she fiercely regretted—was that she had failed to warm to him the first time she had met him at Marsha’s wedding.

  After her third date she was in agony, because she was sure she had looked badly, and talked stupidly, and cooled his interest. After the fourth date—all four dates were in one week, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday—she knew he was falling in love as hard and as fast as she was, and that he was going to propose.

  He never did propose. They met early Sunday morning after that crucial Saturday-night date, and were together all day long and all evening, driving in his new gray Buick far out into New Jersey, supposedly to see the fall foliage. They did drive through marvelous vistas of red and yellow flame, but they didn’t take much notice. They lunched and had dinner at roadside taverns; they parked for hours in the moonlight. By the time he brought her home, about half-past four in the morning, they were discussing the wedding date, and where they would live, and how they would break the news to their parents. Only when she found herself alone in her bedroom, staring dazed at her face in the mirror—the most familiar face in the world, looking like a stranger’s to her, the makeup smeared, the hair in disorder, the eyes heavily shadowed but shining joyously—only then did she begin to realize what an upheaval had taken place in her life.

  It didn’t seem like an upheaval. Marrying him seemed natural and inevitable; part of the ordinary sequence of things, like graduating from college at the end of her senior year. Earlier in the week she had fought against this feeling, had tried to summon objections to marrying this stranger, had tried to maintain the modesty and reserve she knew she ought to have. But her old identity had all but melted in his presence. She felt like his wife before the week was out. It was an effort to keep up the pretense that she didn’t feel that way. Her relief was overwhelming when, sometime during the drive in New Jersey, he told her that he hoped she wouldn’t consider him presumptuous or crazy, but he couldn’t help thinking of her as his wife. It was shortly after he made this confession, and she made a similar one, that they parked in a leafy side lane and kissed with enormous gusto and began to speak of their marriage as a thing settled.

  They went rapidly past the mutual delight of finding out how much they loved each other, and talked about how many children they would like to have, and what their religious feelings were, and how much money he had to live on; all the time necking as a man and a woman do who have discovered each other, but with the necking secondary, part of the exchange of confidences as it were, rather than an attempt to get pleasure for the moment out of sex. About the ridiculous speed of it all, Marjorie felt that she ought to be ashamed and worried—but she couldn’t summon shame or worry from any corner of her spirit. His touch, his kiss, his hands, his voice, were all familiar, sweet, and wonderful. He actually seemed part of her, in a way that Noel Airman, despite his hypnotic fascination, never had. Nor was she too surprised to find that a man so different from Noel could stir and please her. She had learned from the encounter with Mike Eden that there really was more than one man in the world—the piece of knowledge that more than anything else divides women from girls. As long as there were two, there could be three, or ten; it was a question of good luck or God’s blessing when she would encounter the one with whom she could be happy.

  She fell asleep that morning dreaming confusedly and deliciously of diamond rings and bridal dresses, as the windows turned gray in the dawn.

  She woke a couple of hours later to an immediate and wretched problem: when and how should she tell him about Noel?

  For she had not yet done so. No consideration in the world could have brought her to tell him, before she was sure he loved her and wanted to marry her. It might have been calculating and not quite honest to let his feelings flame up without telling him. She thought that perhaps it had been dishonest. But she didn’t care. Her life was at stake. She knew
she would have to tell him now, and the prospect made her sick, but she was ready to do it.

  The question was whether it was right for her to reveal the engagement to her parents—right away, in the next ten minutes, at breakfast—instead of waiting until he knew about Noel. Quite possibly he might want to break off with her. Clearly he had assumed she was a virgin; it had never occurred to him to question the fact. Like Wally Wronken, he had fallen into the accursed way of regarding her as a goddess, instead of realizing that she was just another girl stumbling through life as best she could. Supposing now she told her parents, and forty-eight hours later would have to tell them that it was all off? How could she endure it?

  Marjorie went and did the natural, perhaps the cowardly, probably the inevitable thing. She told her parents at breakfast. This was what she had agreed with him to do. He was going to tell his parents, and they were coming with him to the Morgenstern home in the afternoon. To stop the rolling event, she would have had to telephone him and tell him to hold off because she had a serious disclosure to make to him first. Quite simply, she hadn’t the guts to do it. So she plunged ahead, hoping for the best. In the whirl of her parents’ joy—for they knew him, approved of him violently, and had been holding their breaths during the stampeding week when what was happening became pretty plain—at the center of the whirl, she sat in a quiet shell of black fear.

  He came, radiating pride, love, and masculine attraction, the bridegroom in his hour of power. His parents were—parents: a plump short gray woman, a spare tall gray man, both well spoken, well dressed, and at first quite stiff and cold, especially the mother. The Morgensterns, for their part, were cautious, faintly defensive, and at the same time assertively proud of their daughter. Tense and scared though she was, Marjorie was able to find amusement at the way the prospective in-laws, suddenly dumped together in a room, sized up each other with hackles raised. His mother kept remarking, not always relevantly, that he was her only child, that he owned his own new Buick convertible, and that she knew of no young lawyer half as successful as he was. These statements, sometimes coming abruptly out of nowhere, tended to stop the conversation dead. The atmosphere warmed slightly when Mrs. Morgenstern served tea and a marvelous apple strudel she had baked in a hurry that morning. Then it turned out that his father was the president of his Zionist chapter; and since her father was the president of his chapter, that helped a lot. The first real thaw came when it developed that the mothers had emigrated from neighboring provinces in Hungary. Shortly thereafter, when it appeared that both fathers admired President Roosevelt, and that both mothers couldn’t stand the lady who was president of the Manhattan chapter of Hadassah, the ice was fairly broken. It was observed, and it was considered extremely remarkable, that Marjorie resembled her mother and that the bridegroom resembled his mother. His father, after the second piece of strudel, swung over to extreme joviality, and uncovered a gift for making puns and a taste for chain smoking. As the two sets of parents disclosed facts about themselves little by little, for all the world like bridge players playing out their cards, it became clear that at least in background it was a fairly balanced match. True, his father was a native-born American. Mr. Morgenstern’s accent sounded loud and pungent that afternoon in Marjorie’s ears. On the other hand, Marjorie soon gathered that his father had not been successful in business. He spoke vaguely of stocks and bonds, became respectful when Mr. Morgenstern described the Arnold Importing Company, and made no puns for a while afterward. Mrs. Morgenstern managed to say to Marjorie, when they were together in the kitchen for a moment, that she was sure the son was supporting the parents (as usual, Marjorie was very annoyed at her, and as usual, she turned out in the end to be quite right). She also remarked that she couldn’t for the life of her see what right his mother had to be standoffish, inasmuch as West End Avenue wasn’t at all the same above Ninety-sixth Street, and they lived on the corner of 103rd. However, Mrs. Morgenstern quickly added—when she saw the dangerous light in Marjorie’s eye—that they were lovely people, and she couldn’t be happier about the whole thing.

  In time Mrs. Morgenstern brought out cherry brandy, and scotch, and the occasion became reasonably lively. The parents began debating whether this meeting constituted the religious occasion in the course of a courtship known as “T’nayim.” Marjorie had never heard of T’nayim before. Her parents were emphatic and unanimous in declaring that this get-together certainly amounted to T’nayim. His mother was equally sure it was far too early for T’nayim, and that all kinds of other things had to be done first, though she was most foggy as to what those things might be. His father stayed out of the argument, contenting himself with seven cigarettes in a row and a number of unsuccessful puns on the word T’nayim. In the end Mrs. Morgenstern settled the matter, in her customary way, by going into the kitchen and coming out with a large soup plate from her best china set. She called the couple to the dining-room table, and told them to take hold of the plate and break it on the table. They did so, looking puzzled at each other. The fragments flew all over the floor, and the parents embraced each other, shouting congratulations and weeping a bit. That, evidently, was T’nayim.

  The parents were happily planning the wedding, the honeymoon, and the general future of the couple when the bridegroom-to-be announced that he was taking Marjorie out for a drive. This was a tremendous joke to the two fathers, who had by then drunk a lot of scotch between them. The winks, guffaws, and elbow-nudges were still going on when they left. At the last moment, just as Marjorie was preceding him out the door, her future mother-in-law sprang at her, fell on her neck, kissed her, said she loved her, and fell into a paroxysm of wild sobbing, which she declared was due to an excess of happiness. Mrs. Morgenstern firmly peeled her off Marjorie, and the couple left her being quieted by the other three parents.

  They drove out to New Jersey again. The tavern where they had dined the night before, he said, had the best food and drinks in the whole world; didn’t she agree? She agreed. She said little during the drive. He did all the talking. He drew perceptive amusing sketches of both her parents, and was especially shrewd about her mother. “She’s going to give me trouble,” he said, “but she’s all there.” He told her a lot about his own parents. He pressed her to name a date for the wedding, but she turned him off in one way and another. He talked about the places they could go to for a honeymoon trip despite the war: the Canadian Rockies, South America, Hawaii, Mexico. He had an odd notion that Alaska might be fun. He wanted to go as far from home as possible; he wanted to be alone with her, he said, somewhere on the outer rim of the world. All the time he talked she sank deeper into fear and misery, though she kept up a smiling face. It seemed impossible to break into this run of pure bubbling high spirits with the revelation about Noel. Yet she knew that she had to do it tonight. They drove across the George Washington Bridge in a gorgeous sunset. He became quiet and just drove, now and then reaching over and touching her face with his hand. He was a picture of a supremely happy man.

  She had her rebellious moments during that sorrowful ride, behind the smiling face. This was the twentieth century, she told herself. He was an honor graduate of Harvard; he ought to know what life was all about! Obviously at thirty-one he himself wasn’t a virgin. Most likely he hadn’t been at her age, twenty-four. She hadn’t claimed to be one. Inwardly she raged at the injustice of his assuming that she must measure up to the standards of dead Victorian days. Virginity was a trivial physical detail, meaningless between two people truly in love; anybody knew that, all the books said it. Her guilt over having had one affair was childish. Everybody had affairs nowadays, the world had changed….

  In all these reasonable thoughts, however, Marjorie could find no trace of relief or hope. The fact was, she had passed herself off as a good Jewish girl. Twentieth century or not, good Jewish girls were supposed to be virgins when they married. That was the corner she was in. That was the dull brute fact she faced. For that matter, good Christian girls were supposed to be
virgins too; that was why brides wore white. She couldn’t even blame her Jewish origin for the harrowing trap she was in, though she would have liked to.

  They came to the tavern. They had one drink, and another. He wasn’t talking much, just holding her hand, worshipping her, and once in a while saying something nonsensical and sweet. She had all the opportunity she needed to talk, but she couldn’t.

  Then, all at once, at the very worst moment, just after the food was set before them, the story somehow broke from her in a stammering rush of words; every word like vomit in her mouth.

  That ended the evening. He remained cordial, but he was quenched. She had never seen such a change in a man’s face; he went in a few minutes from happiness to sunken melancholy. Neither of them could eat. About her affair with Noel, he said never a word. It was as though she hadn’t told him. When the food was taken away, he asked her correctly and pleasantly whether she wanted more coffee, or some brandy, or anything else. Then he drove her home, saying nothing at all on the way. She remembered that drive for years as the worst agony she ever endured. It was like being driven to a hospital, dying of a hemorrhage.

  She telephoned him early next morning after a ghastly night. His mother answered, full of concern and excitement. He wasn’t at home or at his office. He had gone off, leaving a short note saying he was very tired and was taking a vacation for a week or so in the mountains. But he hadn’t said what hotel, or even what town he was going to. What on earth had happened? Had something gone wrong? His mother was not successful in keeping a note of pleasure out of her voice, if she was even aware of it. Marjorie evaded her questions, and hung up.