Three days passed. His mother called every morning and evening, wanting to know if Marjorie had heard from him. This, with the mournful atmosphere in her own home, the unspoken questions and terrible worry in the faces of her parents, became unendurable. Marjorie got up very early one morning, left a similar note for her parents, and went to a hotel in Lakewood, a New Jersey resort a couple of hours from the city. It was the wrong time of the year for Lakewood. The hotel she stayed in was almost empty; the town was deserted. There was nothing to do but read, go to movies, or walk around the lake. Marjorie read magazines, newspapers, books, whatever she could lay her hands on, without the slightest idea of what she was reading. She was at the hotel six days, and the time passed as though she were in delirium. She couldn’t remember afterward any details of what she had done in those six days; they were blanked from her mind as by amnesia. She came home with a severe cold and a temperature of a hundred and three. She had not eaten at all, and she had lost twelve pounds. She came home because her mother telephoned her (unlike him, she had disclosed where she was going). “He’s back, and he called this morning. Better come home.”
“How did he sound?”
“I don’t know. Come home.” Mrs. Morgenstern didn’t seem very cheerful.
Sick as Marjorie was when she arrived home, she brushed off her mother’s alarm at the way she looked and her insistence that she go to bed. She telephoned his office. It was four in the afternoon, a raw snowy day, already growing dark. He said abruptly, coldly, that he would like to see her as soon as possible for a little while.
In the same clothes she had worn travelling home, dishevelled and shivering, she went straight downtown and met him, at a dingy bar near his office. Naturally it would be at a bar; it had always been at a bar. He was already at a table, in a gloomy far corner.
There was a long quiet pause after they greeted each other and ordered drinks. Bad as she looked, he looked worse. He had actually aged. His face was white, lined, and wretched. He studied her face during that pause, and she felt as though she were about to be executed. When he finally spoke, what he said was, sadly and gruffly, “I love you.” He opened a jeweler’s box and put it before her. She stared dumfounded at what she thought must be the largest diamond in the world.
It was a good thing they were in a dark corner, because she had to turn her face down and cry bitterly. She cried a long time, in an excess of the deepest bitterness and shame, before he shyly brushed the tears from her face with his hand.
He never said anything about Noel thereafter; not for the rest of their lives. But she never again saw on his face the pure happiness that had shone there during the drive across the George Washington Bridge in the sunset. He loved her. He took her as she was, with her deformity, despite it. For that was what it amounted to in his eyes and in hers—a deformity: a deformity that could no longer be helped; a permanent crippling, like a crooked arm.
My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time…
The song popped into Marjorie’s head as her mother was buttoning her into her wedding dress, in an anteroom of the Gold Room of the Pierre Hotel, less than an hour before the ceremony. So great was her nervous tension that, once established, the melody drummed on and on in her brain. She was holding her veil high in the air with both hands, for it interfered with the buttoning, and as she stood so, with both arms high, she had begun to hum, and then to sing, unaware of what she was singing.
My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time…
After a few moments she heard herself, and quietly laughed, realizing why she was singing it. She had held her arms up in just this way on the stage at Hunter College, strutting through her first acting triumph as the Mikado. The electric excitement of that forgotten moment had welded the words and the tune in her brain to the act of throwing her arms high. Six years later—the better part of a lifetime, it seemed to Marjorie—the weld was still there. But how everything else had changed!
“What are you laughing at? Am I tickling you?” her mother said.
“An old joke, Mama, nothing…. Hurry, for heaven’s sake, the photographer should have been here long ago.”
“Relax, darling. You’ll be married a long, long time.”
All through the photographing, all through the frenzied last-minute rehearsals of cues with the caterer’s hostess in charge of the sacred formalities, all through the hot hurried last embraces with her ecstatic mother, her beaming father, both looking astonishingly young and well in fine new evening clothes—and with her white-faced grim brother, stiff and unyielding as a post in his first top hat, white tie, and tails—and with her weeping mother-in-law and desperately punning and smoking father-in-law—all that time the song ran on and on in her mind…. My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time… It cut off sharply when the procession began and she heard the organ, far below in the ballroom, playing the wedding march.
For there was an organ, of course. And there were two cantors, a handsome young man and a marvelously impressive gray-bearded man, both in black silk robes, and black mitres with black pompons. There was a choir of five bell-voiced boys in white silk robes, and white hats with white pompons. There was a broad canopy of white lilies, on a platform entirely carpeted and walled with greenery and white roses. There were blazing blue-white arc lights, a movie photographer, and a still photographer. There was a rose-strewn staircase for her to descend; there was a quite meaningless but quite gorgeous archway with gates at the head of the staircase, covered and festooned with pink roses, through which she was to make her entrance. There were banks of gold chairs, five hundred of them, jammed solid with guests, and with spectators who had read the announcement in the Times and knew the bridegroom or the bride. After the ceremony there was to be as much champagne as anyone could drink, and as many hot hors d’oeuvres as the greediest guest could stuff into himself. There was to be a ten-course dinner beginning with imported salmon, featuring rare roast beef, and ending in flaming cherries jubilee. There was to be a seven-piece orchestra, more champagne, a midnight supper, and dancing till dawn.
It was the Lowenstein Catering Company’s number-one wedding, the best there was, the best money could buy—sixty-five hundred dollars, tips included. Marjorie and her bridegroom had discussed accepting the money, instead, as a wedding present from her father. Mr. Morgenstern, who had accumulated the money and set it aside for the wedding over twenty years, had diffidently made the offer. They had decided instead to have the wedding, rococo excess and all. Their decision filled all four parents with joy. It was obviously what everybody wanted.
Marjorie stood behind the closed rose-covered gate at the head of the stairs, with the perspiring hostess at her elbow, listening to the music as the wedding procession filed in below from the lobby of the ballroom. She couldn’t see anything through the heavy sweet-smelling screen of roses, but she knew what was happening. In the number-one Lowenstein wedding—the only one featuring the rose gate—all the others came in first and took their places; then the bride came down the flower-strewn steps in lone splendor, white train dragging, while her father waited for her at the foot of the staircase. Then he was to take her arm, and escort her to the canopy. Marjorie had seen this pageant several times at the weddings of other girls. The day before, at the rehearsal, she had been amused by the amateurish theatricalism of it all. At the same time, she secretly rather liked the idea of making such a grand entrance. Her only worry was that she might trip on her train and sprawl headlong down the stairs. But the hostess had assured her that every bride had had exactly the same fear, and not one had ever tripped.
The music stopped. That meant they were all in place: the four parents, the rabbi, Seth, the best man, and his betrothed, Natalie Fain, the maid of honor. Marjorie could hear the gossiping chatter of the guests. She swallowed hard, clutched her little bouquet of white orchids and lilies of the valley, and glanced at the hostess. The little flushed woman inspected her from head to toe, minu
tely adjusted her train, pulled Marjorie’s hotly clasped hands with the bouquet to the exact center of her midriff, kissed her damply, and nodded at the yawning waiter with the gate rope in his hand. He hauled on the rope. The gates swung open, and Marjorie stood in a white spotlight under the arch of pink roses, revealed to public view.
There was a general gasp and murmur below, then a total hush. The organ began to play Here Comes the Bride. Slowly, regally, Marjorie came down the staircase, hesitating on each step, in time to the music.
Perhaps the spotlight shining in her eyes made the tears well up; perhaps it was the emotions of the moment. She blinked them back as well as she could, glad that she was veiled. She could see dimly the guests below, stretching in orderly ranks forward to the canopy. Their faces were turned up to her. There was one look on all of them: stunned admiration.
Marjorie was an extremely beautiful bride. They always say the bride is beautiful, and the truth is that a girl seldom looks better than she does at this moment of her glory and her vanishing, veiled and in white; but even among brides Marjorie was remarkably lovely. For years afterward Lowenstein’s hostess said that the prettiest bride she ever saw was Marjorie Morgenstern.
The Goldstones were there, in one row near the back; and Marsha and Lou Michaelson, and the Zelenkos, and Aunt Dvosha, and Uncle Shmulka, and Geoffrey Quill, and Neville Sapersteen in a dark blue suit, and the banker Connelly, and Morris Shapiro, and Wally Wronken—these familiar faces and dozens of others she recognized, though her eyes scarcely moved. She had taken but two or three steps downward when she also saw, in the very last row of the array of black-clad men and beautifully gowned women, the tall blond man in brown tweed jacket and gray slacks, with an old camel’s hair coat slung over one arm, incongruous as he was startling. She had not even known Noel Airman was in the United States; but he had come to see her get married. She could not discern his expression, but there wasn’t a doubt in the world that it was Noel.
She didn’t waver or change countenance at all; she continued her grave descent. But in an instant, as though green gelatins had been slid one by one in front of every light in the ballroom, she saw the scene differently. She saw a tawdry mockery of sacred things, a bourgeois riot of expense, with a special touch of vulgar Jewish sentimentality. The gate of roses behind her was comical; the flower-massed canopy ahead was grotesque; the loud whirring of the movie camera was a joke, the scrambling still photographer in the empty aisle, twisting his camera at his eye, a low clown. The huge diamond on her right hand capped the vulgarity; she could feel it there; she slid a finger to cover it. Her husband waiting for her under the canopy wasn’t a prosperous doctor, but he was a prosperous lawyer; he had the mustache Noel had predicted; with macabre luck Noel had even guessed the initials. And she—she was Shirley, going to a Shirley fate, in a Shirley blaze of silly costly glory.
All this passed through her mind in a flash, between one step downward and the next. Then her eyes shifted to her father’s face, rosily happy, looking up at her from the foot of the stairs. The green gelatins slid aside, and she saw her wedding again by the lights that were there in the room. If it was all comical in Noel’s eyes, she thought, he might derive from that fact what pleasure he could. She was what she was, Marjorie Morgenstern of West End Avenue, marrying the man she wanted in the way she wanted to be married. It was a beautiful wedding, and she knew she was a pretty bride.
She reached the bottom of the stairs. Her father stepped to her side. Taking his arm, she turned a bit and squarely faced into Noel Airman’s expected grin; he was not ten feet from her. But to her surprise Noel wasn’t grinning. He looked better than he had in Paris: not so thin, not so pale, and he appeared to have gotten back all his hair. His expression was baffled, almost vacant. His mouth hung slightly open; his eyes seemed wet.
The organ music swelled to its loudest. Marjorie marched down the aisle with solemn gladness to her destiny, and became Mrs. Milton Schwartz.
Chapter 48. WALLY WRONKEN’S DIARY
July 5, 1954.
At desk 9:40. I feel fine and I’m hoping to do a good run of work today. However, it isn’t often that one solves an old mystery in one’s life, so the event is worth noting before I get down to business.
Yesterday I saw Marjorie Morgenstern—Mrs. Marjorie Schwartz, that is—for the first time in about fifteen years. She lives in Mamaroneck, in a big old white house on the sound, with a lot of lawn and huge old trees, and a nice view of the water, about an hour from town.
I happened to see her by accident. I had to go to New Rochelle to visit one of the backers of the show, a real estate man named Michaelson, who’d been raising some questions about my royalty contract. He’s a shrewd old character, over seventy, I’d say, extremely well off, dabbles in the theatre a lot. He understood the tax angle of my contract immediately, and made a couple of suggestions I may use. That part of it all went fine.
He turned out to be married to one Marsha Zelenko, the girl who first brought Marjorie into the social hall at South Wind, aeons ago. Marsha, whom I knew as a fat slovenly girl, more or less given to sleeping around, is now a leathery rail of a woman, bright false blond, frightfully up to date in the suburban way—expensive clothes that look out of place amid grass and trees, and dizzy bright chatter that is just a bit sour, a bit off-key, like a cruel parody of Manhattan small talk. And this drawn starved brown face, and the biggest mouthful of grinning teeth you ever saw. “Have some of this scotch, it’s twenty-four years old. Do you write long-hand, or on the typewriter?” And a lot of questions about the Hollywood stars I’ve known. That kind of thing. No children. Both her parents live there with them, and that’s the ménage.
She couldn’t wait to tell me that Marjorie lived in Mamaroneck, only five miles away. When I expressed mild interest, she practically dragged me to the telephone in a half nelson, dialled the number, handed me the receiver, and walked out, closing the library door with the damnedest arch look any man ever saw, all cannibal teeth and popping eyes.
A boy’s voice answered. He sounded about ten. “Yeah? Hello?” I asked to speak to his mother. He dropped the phone and bawled, “Ma, some man for you.”
Then she came on the telephone. “Hello?”
“Marjorie?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
Her voice sounded exactly the same: sweet, a bit husky. I’d forgotten how low the timbre was. Marjorie on the phone always gave almost a contralto effect, though you didn’t notice it when you were with her. And there was the same slight hesitation in her voice—what is it, precisely? A manner of speaking half a beat late, a touch of shyness or something; anyway, it always seemed to me the essence of femininity, and it was still there.
When I told her my name, and where I was calling from, the pause lasted more than half a beat; two or three, maybe. Then, “Hello, Wally. It’s wonderful to hear from you.” Not bursting with joy, not even particularly surprised; very warm and sweet. Of course, I must come right over, she said; she’d be delighted to see me. Her daughter would be especially thrilled to meet a playwright, because she was so wild about the theatre.
Marsha drove me over in a yellow Cadillac a block long. We turned into the driveway of this handsome old white house, with a glass-button sign on the fence at the entrance, Schwartz. A gray-headed lady was sitting on a flagstone terrace out front on a deck chair—one of the grandmothers on a Sunday visit, I figured. We got out of the car and walked to the terrace, and it was something of a shock when the gray-headed lady turned out to be Marjorie. The fact is, she looks very much like Mrs. Milton Schwartz, and not much like the Marjorie Morgenstern I last saw at a much too plush wedding at the Pierre, a decade and a half ago.
Despite the gray hair (which is premature, she’s not quite forty) she remains an attractive woman, slim, with a pleasant face and a sweet manner, and a sort of ghostly resemblance to the Marjorie of yesteryear. She has a fourteen-year-old daughter, Deborah, who looks more like the girl I knew than Mrs. Schwartz does. A
ll that is to be expected, I guess. It’s an unsettling thing, all the same, to see your first love a gray-headed mother of four kids. I couldn’t help thinking how wise she had been to discourage me in the old days. A man of thirty-nine is not well suited to a woman of forty. I’ve been through affairs and a divorce and I still feel like a comparatively young man trying to settle down. She made a joke about her gray hair, but there was no bitterness in it; a little wryness, maybe, but a contented wryness, if that means anything.
Contented, she obviously is. There was no mistaking the look she gave her husband when he came in with their two boys from a father-and-son softball game, in old clothes, all sweaty and dirty; nor the real kiss, nor the way she rubbed her face for a second against his shoulder. He’s a good-natured late-fortyish man, broad-shouldered, sort of plump, grizzled hair going at the temples. He handled the situation very well, if it was a situation, of finding me there with Marsha and Marjorie. After all, the successful old beau showing up in the suburbs is a worn gambit for comedy. But Schwartz was pleasant, even engaging; not a trace of self-conscious resentment, no snide remarks; instead, a genuine invitation to hang around for highballs, and deferential compliments about my plays. I didn’t see much of him because he showered and changed and went off with the boys to their beach club to watch fireworks. The boys are standard-issue boys, eleven and nine, I’d guess. Marjorie fussed over them before they went off to the club, the way any mama should. She had to remain at home because the maid had gone off unexpectedly, and they have an infant daughter. That was how I got to talk to her a bit. I made several offers to leave (Mrs. Michaelson had gone earlier, much to my relief, because she had guests coming for cocktails), but Marjorie insisted that I stay. Later I found out why. I might have guessed. But like a fool I was flattered, so I stayed.