We had several highballs. Maybe she wouldn’t have talked otherwise. She was very awkward with me at first, though pleasant; seemed a bit awed. It turned out pretty interesting. She had a little battle with the daughter about piano practice before fireworks, and won it. The girl flung off inside and began thumping away. I was reminded forcibly of the way Marjorie’s mother used to put her foot down in the old days; Marjorie has much the same dry good-humored firmness.
We sat around out on the lawn on deck chairs, drinking, watching the sunset. She asked me the usual questions about Broadway and Hollywood. But I must say she had no offensive celebrity-worshipping eagerness, the toothy bug-eyed kind of thing, like Mrs. Michaelson. I felt she wanted to know about me, and I answered frankly. Her comments were intelligent and to the point, as they always used to be. She discussed my plays well, and pleased me by praising The Meadow Sweet. I guess an author always has a weakness for his failures, but it’s quite true, as she said, that that’s the only time I stepped outside mechanical farce and really tried.
Just for the hell of it, I mentioned my encounter with Noel Airman in Hollywood. She was interested, but in an absent way; she didn’t spark at all. If anything, she seemed amused when I told her he was married to a fat German photographer who’s a fad with the movie crowd. She said she’d met Mrs. Airman in Paris. When I told her Noel had ended as a third-rate baldish television writer, with his wife more or less supporting them both, she nodded. “Noel was never much of a writer, you know,” she said. “He should have been a teacher, I think, or a lawyer. He had a good mind, and a vivid way of putting things. But I guess he was too erratic for the academic life.”
I couldn’t help saying—I’ll admit it was small of me—”Time was when you thought Noel was a pretty good writer, Margie.”
To my amazement she denied it. She said that from the beginning, at South Wind, she’d insisted that I showed professional promise and that Noel was a mere dilettante. She claimed she’d encouraged me to become a writer, all but discovered me. She became a little annoyed when I mildly tried to disagree. There isn’t the slightest doubt that she believed every word she said. She’s rewritten history in her mind, and now she’s the one who always knew Walter Wronken had it in him. What would have been the use of reminding her that she’d almost driven me wild once by suggesting that I study Noel’s brilliant writing to improve my own? I get irritated now, twenty years afterward, thinking of that moment. But it no longer exists for her, or indeed for anybody on God’s whole earth except me—and only for me because I’m cursed with a writer’s memory.
I told her about my marriage and divorce. She had read, or heard, about my breakup with Julia, and was pleasantly sympathetic. What with the highballs, and the clouds all yellow and red in the setting sun, I waxed a little melancholy and philosophical about the problems of being married to an actress. At one point I said, “This much you can be sure of, you’re a hell of a lot happier than Marjorie Morningstar could ever have been.” She turned and stared at me, and for a flash there was contact between us. Just for an instant, the old Margie was there in the blue eyes of Mrs. Schwartz. And she said, “Good God, do you remember that? You would. You and your steel-trap mind. I don’t believe I’ve thought of that name in a dozen years… Marjorie… Morningstar…” There was something extremely poignant in the way she drew out the syllables, and smiled. It was the old sweet, warm smile. That hasn’t changed.
She kept pouring the drinks. Her capacity is astonishing; it seemed to make no difference whatever, except that she talked more easily. I had to beg off from a couple of refills, because I was getting a little dizzy. The only time she did anything strange was when her daughter started to play Falling in Love with Love in the house, not too well. She got up, highball in hand, and started to waltz. There was something slightly bizarre about that, a gray-headed woman in a swirling blue cotton dress, waltzing soundlessly by herself in the sunset, with her long evening shadow gliding behind her on the lawn. The song reminds her, she said, of a man she met on her trip to Europe, who was doing some kind of cloak-and-dagger work rescuing Jews. Something came over her when she talked about him. Her voice began to sound more like the voice I remembered (it was getting dark, too, and maybe that helped). It lost some of its flatness, some of the authoritative parent sound. Also her daughter came out about then, and got permission to go off to the fireworks, and Margie seemed to relax when she was gone. She went on for quite a while about this man. I gathered he meant a lot to her, even as a memory. Which was in itself interesting. My picture had always been that Noel was the big love of her life, and I’d been quite sure I knew everything about Marjorie Morgenstern up to the day she married (except whether she ever actually had an affair with Noel—something I simply couldn’t believe then, though I suppose now she did). But here obviously, in this man she met on the ship, was a missing piece of the jigsaw, possibly even the key piece.
After that she told me about her brother Seth getting killed at Okinawa flying for the Navy, and then about a baby boy of hers, the second, that had choked to death in its crib at the age of two months, the doctors never figured out why. And about her father going broke and having a heart attack, and her husband putting him back on his feet at terrific cost, and about her mother-in-law being bedridden in her house for four years, dying slowly of some blood disease. She was quite detached, not in the least self-pitying about all this, even when she said at one point, “I’ve come by these gray hairs honestly, you see.” It all added up to a lot of soap-opera afflictions, I guess. I can see why those programs are popular. Childless people, people without families like me, don’t know about such things, but the average housewife sees herself being dramatized, I suppose. I began to be ashamed of having thought Marjorie dull and boring at first. Yet she is dull, dull as she can be, by any technical standard. You couldn’t write a play about her that would run a week, or a novel that would sell a thousand copies. There’s no angle.
Out of all the talk about her troubles, we somehow got on the subject of religion. She’s a regular synagogue goer, active in the Jewish organizations of the town; apparently that takes up a lot of her time. Her husband is active too. They seem to be rather strictly observant; Marjorie has separate milk and meat dishes in the kitchen, and all that. I tried to pin her down on what she really believed (we’d had enough to drink by then so that such a discussion wasn’t embarrassing). She was curiously evasive. She said that the professors of comparative religion were like bright kids with clocks. They could take a religion apart and show how it ticked, but they couldn’t put it back together so it would work for anybody. I mildly suggested that the day was past, maybe, when religion could work for any educated person. She flared a bit; said religion still worked for a hell of a lot of people. She said her parents would never have survived the death of Seth without it, and that she didn’t know whether she and Milton could have stayed in one piece after the baby died if they hadn’t had their religion. At this point I was probing, perhaps cruelly, to strike bottom. I said, “Well, Margie, maybe that only proves the power of a dream.” Like a flash she answered—and her voice sounded just as it did in the old days, full of life and sparkle, “Who isn’t dreaming, Wally? You?”
The fireworks started around then, all green and golden and red, over the sound. We stopped talking for a while and watched. It was quite a display, what with the clear night, a crescent moon, and evidently a very large budget at the beach club for the Fourth of July celebration. Rockets, Roman candles, and burst after burst of the showering things, every color in the world, popping and banging every other second, and at the last a super-special white one that seemed to fill the sky and make it bright as day. Then it was dark, and there I was with my gray-headed old flame, both of us rather high, and her family coming home. So I went inside and telephoned for a cab.
I said, while we sat around on her flagstone terrace waiting for the cab—figuring that it was now or never to clear this little mystery—”Well, I hope you’
ve acquired some patience with your gray hairs. Fifteen years ago you stood me up on a date, just because I was twelve minutes late. I think you owe me an explanation and an apology. I never got either, you know.”
She looked blank, as I expected. I reminded her how she’d telephoned me, and was supposed to meet me in the lobby of the St. Moritz and have lunch at Rumpelmayer’s. Remembrance came over her face, with the old coquettish look, decidedly odd framed in gray hair, and yet not unattractive. “Good God, what a memory, Wally. That all happened in another century. As I recall, I thought you’d forgotten the date, that’s all. I suppose I went out and had lunch at a drugstore.”
I told her how excited I’d been, how I’d changed my tie four times for this date of dates, and finally rushed out to buy a new tie because I didn’t like any I tried on. Her eyes became big and round, and a very strange smile hovered around her mouth. “Ye gods, is that why you were late? You went out to buy a new tie?”
“Just to impress my lady fair,” I said. “I went out to buy a tie, Marjorie. Why did you telephone me? Why did you want to have lunch with me?”
She laughed, a low peculiar laugh, looking slowly around at the house, the trees, the lawn, the water, as though she were coming out of a trance. “Who knows, Wally? It was fifteen years ago. Probably I wanted free tickets to your show for my folks, or something.” I was leaning on the parapet, smoking. She got out of her chair, walked over to me, and kissed me coolly on the mouth. “That’s for going out to buy a tie, just to impress me, Wally. I’m sorry I stood you up. I can’t remember why, but I’m sure it was very silly of me.” The voice was the voice of Marjorie Morgenstern, and the kiss gave me a strange little thrill, remote as it was.
That’s about all there was to the historic meeting. The cab was honking at the entrance to the driveway a moment later. It was only then that she came out with the real reason she’d kept me around so long, feeding me highballs. She’s the president of the women’s branch of the local community chest—and would I come and speak at the annual dinner? The girls had been egging her on for years to write to me, but she hadn’t been able to drum up the nerve. She’d had enough to drink at this point, she said, to have the gall to ask me. Well, what could I say? I said yes, of course. As a matter of fact I don’t really mind. With the show opening in a month or so, it’s not a bad idea to set the girls gossiping about me in a well-to-do suburb like Mamaroneck. Those women buy a lot of matinee tickets. Though I daresay I’d have done it for Marjorie, whether it made sense or not.
And there you are. The circle is closed.
Or is it? The mystery is solved. Or will it ever be, really? Writing this entry has stirred me up in an unaccountable way. I’ve gone on and on, and I meant to dispose of the whole thing in a page or so. I feel dissatisfied. I haven’t managed to say what I wanted, or to indicate the quality of the meeting at all.
The thing is, this was a triumph I promised myself fifteen years ago. I can remember so clearly how I daydreamed of presenting myself to Marjorie, a successful playwright, when she’d be just another suburban housewife gone to seed. Well, I did it at last, and it wasn’t a triumph at all. There’s the point I’m trying to get at. The person I wanted to triumph over is gone, that’s the catch. I can’t carry my achievements backward fifteen years and flaunt them in the face of Marjorie Morgenstern, the beautiful elusive girl I was so mad about. And what satisfaction is there in crowing over the sweet-natured placid gray mama she has turned into? For that matter, what satisfaction is it to the poor ambitious skinny would-be writer of twenty years ago, little Wally, the South Wind stage manager, that I met Mrs. Schwartz and got such awe and deference? It’s too late. He doesn’t exist either.
But why should I care about all this? That’s the strange part. It’s all so dead, so forgotten. Marjorie doesn’t haunt me; I haven’t thought about her, except casually and without a trace of emotion, in a dozen years. Seeing her now, I can only be glad she didn’t yield to my frantic puppy worship. The only remarkable thing about Mrs. Schwartz is that she ever hoped to be remarkable, that she ever dreamed of being Marjorie Morningstar. She couldn’t be a more run-of-the-mill wife and mother.
What troubles me, I guess, is the thought of the bright vision that has faded. To me, she really was Marjorie Morningstar. I didn’t know whether she had any talent. I didn’t care. She was everything sweet, radiant, pure, and beautiful in the world. I know now that she was an ordinary girl, that the image existed only in my own mind, that her radiance was the radiance of my own hungry young desires projected around her. Still, I once saw that vision and loved it. Marjorie Morgenstern… What music that name used to have for me! I still hear a faint echo, sweet as a far-off flute playing Mozart, when I write the name. No doubt the land is full of nineteen-year-old boys to whom names like Betty Jones, Hazel Klein, Sue Wilson have the same celestial sound. It’s a sound I shall hear no more.
And if she wasn’t the bright angel I thought, she was a lovely girl; and where is that girl now? She doesn’t even remember herself as she was. I am the only one on the face of God’s earth, I’m sure, who still holds that picture in a dim corner of memory. When I go, that will be the end of Marjorie Morningstar, to all eternity.
Yet how beautiful she was! She rises up before me as I write—in a blue dress, a black raincoat, her face wet with rain, nineteen years old, in my arms and yet maddeningly beyond my reach, my beautiful young love, kissing me once under the lilacs in the rain. I have known most of the pleasant things I can expect in this life. I’m not famous or distinguished, but I never really hoped I would be; and my limits have been clear to me for a long time. I’ve had the success I aimed for. I’ll go on working, and I’ll have more success, I’m reasonably sure. I’ve had the love of good-looking women. If I’m fortunate, I may some day have what Milton Schwartz has, and what’s been denied me: a wife I love, and children, and a warm happy home. But one thing I know now I will never have—the triumph I once wanted above everything on earth, the triumph I promised myself when I was a heartsick boy, the triumph that slipped through my fingers yesterday, once for all. I will never have that second kiss from Marjorie under the lilacs.
About the Author
Herman Wouk is best known for the linked monumental books The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978), which were both number one bestsellers and remained on the New York Times list for over a year. Of his earlier works, The Caine Mutiny (1951) won the Pulitzer Prize, and Marjorie Morningstar followed, the most widely read American novel of 1955. The Language God Talks (2010), his most recent book, retraces much of Wouk’s own life: birth in the Bronx to Russian immigrant parents, Columbia education, early radio comedy writing, years in the wartime Pacific as a reserve naval officer, and renowned novelist. In the Judaic field Wouk has written This Is My God (1959), a popular guide to the faith, and The Will to Live On (2001). Among his plays, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is an ongoing international success.
The papers and manuscripts of The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, and his subsequent works—including the memoir-novel Inside, Outside, his own favorite among his books—can now be found at the Library of Congress. The library of Columbia University has the archive of his earlier works, among them City Boy, Youngblood Hawke, and Don’t Stop the Carnival. The author’s many honors include honorary degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv.
He currently lives in Palm Springs, California, where he is writing a new book.
Works by Herman Wouk
Novels
Aurora Dawn (1947)
City Boy (1948)
The Caine Mutiny (1951)
Marjorie Morningstar (1955)
Youngblood Hawke (1962)
Don’t Stop the Carnival (1965)
The Winds of War (1971)
War and Remembrance (1978)
Inside, Outside (1985)
The Hope (1993)
The Glory (1994)
A Hole in Texas (2004) br />
Plays
The Traitor (1949)
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1953)
Nature’s Way (1957)
Nonfiction
This Is My God (1959, revised 1988)
The Will to Live On (2000)
The Language God Talks (2010)
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CONTENTS
Welcome
Dedication
Part 1: Marjorie
Chapter 1. Marjorie
Chapter 2. Prince Charming
Chapter 3. George
Part 2: Marsha
Chapter 4. Sandy and Marjorie
Chapter 5. Sandy’s Ambitions
Chapter 6. Marsha Zelenko
Chapter 7. An Evening at the Zelenkos’
Chapter 8. The Uncle
Chapter 9. The Bar-Mitzva
Chapter 10. Mr. Klabber
Chapter 11. Noel Airman
Part 3: Sodom
Chapter 12. Wally Wronken
Chapter 13. A Kiss Under the Lilacs
Chapter 14. Marjorie at South Wind
Chapter 15. Shirley
Chapter 16. The Red Glasses
Chapter 17. The Rowboat
Chapter 18. The Toreador
Chapter 19. The South Wind Waltz
Chapter 20. No Dishes to Vash
Part 4: Noel
Chapter 21. Return of Marsha
Chapter 22. Guy Flamm
Chapter 23. The New Noel
Chapter 24. The Engagement Party
Chapter 25. Muriel
Chapter 26. Sam Rothmore