Marjorie Morningstar (98 page)

“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.

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.

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, minutely 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.

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?”