Big Money

by John Dos Passos

  Agnes said they were going to lunch at a restaurant where theatrical people went. “How wonderful. I’ve never had lunch in a real restaurant. . . . He must have made a lot of money and gotten rich.” “He makes lots of money,” said Agnes in a funny stammering way as they were walking west along Thirtyeighth Street from the elstation.

  Instead of Fred it was a tall dark man with a dignified manner and a long straight nose who got up from the table to meet them. “Margie,” said Agnes, “this is Frank Mandeville.” Margie never let on she hadn’t thought all the time that that was how it would be.

  The actor shook hands with her and bowed as if she was a grownup young lady. “Aggie never told me she was such a beauty . . . what eyes . . . what hair!” he said in his solemn voice. They had a wonderful lunch and afterwards they went to Keith’s and sat in orchestra seats. Margie was breathless and excited at being with a real actor. He’d said that the next day he was leaving for a twelveweeks tour with a singing and piano act and that Agnes was going with him. “And after that we’ll come back and make a home for my little girl,” said Agnes. Margie was so excited that it wasn’t till she was back in bed in the empty dormitory at the convent that she doped out that what it would mean for her was she’d have to stay at the Sisters’ all summer.

  The next fall she left the convent for good and went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Mandeville, as they called themselves, in two front rooms they sublet from a chiropractor. It was a big old brownstone house with a high stoop and steps way west on Seventyninth Street. Margie loved it there and got on fine with the theater people, all so welldressed and citifiedlooking, who lived in the apartments upstairs. Agnes said she must be careful not to get spoiled, because everybody called attention to her blue eyes and her curls like Mary Pickford’s and her pert frozenface way of saying funny things.

  Frank Mandeville always slept till twelve o’clock and Agnes and Margie would have breakfast alone quite early, talking in whispers so as not to wake him and looking out of the window at the trucks and cabs and movingvans passing in the street outside and Agnes would tell Margie about vaudeville houses and onenight stands and all about how happy she was and what a free and easy life it was and so different from the daily grind at Broad Channel and how she’d first met Frank Mandeville when he was broke and blue and almost ready to turn on the gas. He used to come into the bakery every day for his breakfast at two in the afternoon just when all the other customers had gone. He lived around the corner on Onehundredandfourth Street. When he was completely flat Agnes had let him charge his meals and had felt so sorry for him on account of his being so gentlemanly about it and out of a job, and then he got pleurisy and was threatened with t.b. and she was so lonely and miserable that she didn’t care what anybody thought, she’d just moved in with him to nurse him and had stayed ever since, and now they were Mr. and Mrs. Mandeville to everybody and he was making big money with his act The Musical Mandevilles. And Margie would ask about Frank Mandeville’s partner, Florida Schwartz, a big hardvoiced woman with titian hair. “Of course she dyes it,” Agnes said, “henna,” and her son, a horrid waspwaisted young man of eighteen who paid no attention to Margie at all. The chiropractor downstairs whom everybody called Indian was Florida’s affinity and that was why they’d all come to live in his house. “Stagepeople are odd but I think they have hearts of gold,” Agnes would say.

  The Musical Mandevilles used to practice afternoons in the front room where there was a piano. They played all sorts of instruments and sang songs and Mannie whose stage name was Eddy Keller did an eccentric dance and an imitation of Hazel Dawn. It all seemed wonderful to Margie, and she was so excited she thought she’d die when Mr. Mandeville said suddenly one day when they were all eating supper brought in from a delicatessen that the child must take singing and dancing lessons.

  “You’ll be wasting your money, Frank,” said Mannie through a chickenbone he was gnawing.

  “Mannie, you’re talking out of turn,” snapped Florida.

  “Her father was a great one for singing and dancing in the old days,” put in Agnes in her breathless timid manner.

  A career was something everybody had in New York and Margie decided she had one too. She walked down Broadway every day to her lesson in a studio in the same building as the Lincoln Square Theater. In October The Musical Mandevilles played there two weeks. Almost every day Agnes would come for her after the lesson and they’d have a sandwich and a glass of milk in a dairy lunch and then go to see the show. Agnes could never get over how pretty and young Mrs. Schwartz looked behind the footlights and how sad and dignified Frank looked when he came in in his operacloak.

  During the winter Agnes got a job too, running an artistic tearoom just off Broadway on Seventysecond Street, with a Miss Franklyn, a redhaired lady who was a theosophist and was putting in the capital. They all worked so hard they only met in the evenings when Frank and Florida and Mannie would be eating a bite in a hurry before going off to their theater.

  The Musical Mandevilles were playing Newark the night Margie first went on. She was to come out in the middle of an Everybody’s Doing It number rolling a hoop, in a blue muslin dress she didn’t like because it made her look about six and she thought she ought to look grownup to go on the stage, and do a few steps of a ragtime dance and then curtsy like they had taught her at the convent and run off with her hoop. Frank had made her rehearse it again and again. She’d often burst out crying in the rehearsals on account of the mean remarks Mannie made.

  She was dreadfully scared and her heart pounded waiting for the cue, but it was over before she knew what had happened. She had run on from the grimy wings into the warm glittery glare of the stage. They’d told her not to look out into the audience. Just once she peeped out into the blurry lightpowdered cave of ranked white faces. She forgot part of her song and skimped her business and cried in the dressingroom after the act was over, but Agnes came round back saying she’d been lovely, and Frank was smiling, and even Mannie couldn’t seem to think of anything mean to say; so the next time she went on her heart wasn’t pounding so hard. Every littlest thing she did got an answer from the vague cave of faces. By the end of the week she was getting such a hand that Frank decided to run the Everybody’s Doing It number just before the finale.

  Florida Schwartz had said that Margery was too vulgar a given name for the stage, so she was billed as Little Margo.

  All winter and the next summer they toured on the Keith circuit, sleeping in pullmans and in all kinds of hotels and going to Chicago and Milwaukee and Kansas City and so many towns that Margie couldn’t remember their names. Agnes came along as wardrobemistress and attended to the transportation and fetched and carried for everybody. She was always washing and ironing and heating up canned soup on an alcohol stove. Margie got to be ashamed of how shabby Agnes looked on the street beside Florida Schwartz. Whenever she met other stagechildren and they asked her who she thought the best matinee idol was, she’d answer Frank Mandeville.

  When the war broke out The Musical Mandevilles were back in New York looking for new bookings. One evening Frank was explaining his plan to make the act a real headliner by turning it into a vestpocket operetta, when he and the Schwartzes got to quarreling about the war. Frank said the Mandevilles were descended from a long line of French nobility and that the Germans were barbarian swine and had no idea of art. The Schwartzes blew up and said that the French were degenerates and not to be trusted in money matters and that Frank was holding out receipts on them. They made such a racket that the other boarders banged on the wall and a camelfaced lady came up from the basement wearing a dressinggown spattered with red and blue poppies and with her hair in curlpapers to tell them to keep quiet. Agnes cried and Frank in a ringing voice ordered the Schwartzes to leave the room and not to darken his door again, and Margie got an awful fit of giggling. The more Agnes scolded at her the more she giggled. It wasn’t until Frank took her in the arms of his rakishlytailored checked suit and stroked her hair and
her forehead that she was able to quiet down. She went to bed that night still feeling funny and breathless inside with the whiff of bayrum and energine and Egyptian cigarettes that had teased her nose when she leaned against his chest.

  That fall it was hard times again, vaudeville bookings were hard to get and Frank didn’t have a partner for his act. Agnes went back to Miss Franklyn’s teashop and Margie had to give up her singing and dancing lessons. They moved into one room, with a curtained cubicle for Margie to sleep in.

  October was very warm that year. Margie was miserable hanging round the house all day, the steamheat wouldn’t turn off altogether and it was too hot even with the window open. She felt tired all the time. The house smelled of frizzing hair and beautycreams and shavingsoap. The rooms were all rented to theater people and there was no time of the day that you could go up to the bathroom without meeting heavyeyed people in bathrobes or kimonos on the stairs. There was something hot and sticky in the way the men looked at Margie when she brushed past them in the hall that made her feel awful funny.

  She loved Frank best of anybody. Agnes was always peevish, in a hurry to go to work or else deadtired just back from work, but Frank always spoke to her seriously as if she were a grownup young lady. The rare afternoons when he was in, he coached her on elocution and told her stories about the time he’d toured with Richard Mansfield. He’d give her bits of parts to learn and she had to recite them to him when he came home. When she didn’t know them, he’d get very cold and stride up and down and say, “Well, it’s up to you, my dear, if you want a career you must work for it. . . . You have the godgiven gifts . . . but without hard work they are nothing. . . . I suppose you want to work in a tearoom like poor Agnes all your life.”

  Then she’d run up to him and throw her arms round his neck and kiss him and say, “Honest, Frank, I’ll work terrible hard.” He’d be all flustered when she did that or mussed his hair and would say, “Now, child, no liberties,” and suggest they go out for a walk up Broadway. Sometimes when he had a little money they’d go skating at the St. Nicholas rink. When they spoke of Agnes they always called her poor Agnes as if she were a little halfwitted. There was something a little hick about Agnes.

  But most of the time Margie just loafed or read magazines in the room or lay on the bed and felt the hours dribble away so horribly slowly. She’d dream about boys taking her out to the theater and to restaurants and what kind of a house she would live in when she became a great actress, and the jewelry she’d have, or else she’d remember how Indian the chiropractor had kneaded her back the time she had the sick headache. He was strong and brown and wiry in his shirtsleeves working on her back with his bigknuckled hands. It was only his eyes made her feel funny; eyes like Indian’s would suddenly be looking at her when she was walking along Broadway, she’d hurry and wouldn’t dare turn back to see if they were still looking, and get home all breathless and scared.

  One warm afternoon in the late fall, Margie was lying on the bed reading a copy of the Smart Set Frank had bought that Agnes had made her promise not to read. She heard a shoe creak and jumped up popping the magazine under the pillow. Frank was standing in the doorway looking at her. She didn’t need to look at him twice to know that he’d been drinking. His eyes had that look and there was a flush on his usually white face. “Haha, caught you that time, little Margo,” he said.

  “I bet you think I don’t know my part,” said Margie.

  “I wish I didn’t know mine,” he said. “I’ve just signed the lousiest contract I ever signed in my life. . . . The world will soon see Frank Mandeville on the filthy stage of a burlesque house.” He sat down on the bed with his felt hat still on his head and put a hand over his eyes. “God, I’m tired. . . .” Then he looked up at her with his eyes red and staring. “Little Margo, you don’t know what it is yet to buck the world.”

  Margie said with a little giggle that she knew plenty and sat down beside him on the bed and took his hat off and smoothed his sweaty hair back from his forehead. Something inside of her was scared of doing it, but she couldn’t help it.

  “Let’s go skating, Frank, it’s so awful to be in the house all day.”

  “Everything’s horrible,” he said. Suddenly he pulled her to him and kissed her lips. She felt dizzy with the smell of bayrum and cigarettes and whiskey and cloves and armpits that came from him. She pulled away from him. “Frank, don’t, don’t.” He had tight hold of her. She could feel his hands trembling, his heart thumping under his vest. He had grabbed her to him with one arm and was pulling at her clothes with the other. His voice wasn’t like Frank’s voice at all. “I won’t hurt you. I won’t hurt you, child. Just forget. It’s nothing. I can’t stand it any more.” The voice went on and on whining in her ears. “Please. Please.”

  She didn’t dare yell for fear the people in the house might come. She clenched her teeth and punched and scratched at the big wet-lipped face pressing down hers. She felt weak like in a dream. His knee was pushing her legs apart.

  When it was over, she wasn’t crying. She didn’t care. He was walking up and down the room sobbing. She got up and straightened her dress.

  He came over to her and shook her by the shoulders. “If you ever tell anybody I’ll kill you, you damn little brat. . . . Are you bleeding?” She shook her head.

  He went over to the washstand and washed his face.

  “I couldn’t help it, I’m not a saint. . . . I’ve been under a terrible strain.”

  Margie heard Agnes coming, the creak of her steps on the stairs. Agnes was puffing as she fumbled with the doorknob. “Why, what on earth’s the matter?” she said, coming in all out of breath.

  “Agnes, I’ve had to scold your child,” Frank was saying in his tragedy voice. “I come in deadtired and find the child reading that filthy magazine. . . . I won’t have it. . . . Not while you are under my protection.”

  “Oh, Margie, you promised you wouldn’t. . . . But what did you do to your face?”

  Frank came forward into the center of the room, patting his face all over with the towel. “Agnes, I have a confession to make. . . . I got into an altercation downtown. I’ve had a very trying day downtown. My nerves have all gone to pieces. What will you think of me when I tell you I’ve signed a contract with a burlesque house?”

  “Why, that’s fine,” said Agnes. “We certainly need the money. . . . How much will you be making?”

  “It’s shameful . . . twenty a week.”

  “Oh, I’m so relieved . . . I thought something terrible had happened. Maybe Margie can start her lessons again.”

  “If she’s a good girl and doesn’t waste her time reading trashy magazines.”

  Margie was trembly like jelly inside. She felt herself breaking out in a cold sweat. She ran upstairs to the bathroom and doublelocked the door and stumbled to the toilet and threw up. Then she sat a long time on the edge of the bathtub. All she could think of was to run away.

  But she couldn’t seem to get to run away. At Christmas some friends of Frank’s got her a job in a children’s play. She made twenty-five dollars a performance and was the pet of all the society ladies. It made her feel quite stuckup. She almost got caught with the boy who played the Knight doing it behind some old flats when the theater was dark during a rehearsal.

  It was awful living in the same room with Frank and Agnes. She hated them now. At night she’d lie awake with her eyes hot in the stuffy cubicle and listen to them. She knew that they were trying to be quiet, that they didn’t want her to hear, but she couldn’t help straining her ears and holding her breath when the faint rattle of springs from the rickety old iron bed they slept in began. She slept late after those nights in a horrible deep sleep she never wanted to wake up from. She began to be saucy and spiteful with Agnes and would never do anything she said. It was easy to make Agnes cry. “Drat the child,” she’d say, wiping her eyes. “I can’t do anything with her. It’s that little bit of success that went to her head.”

  That winte
r she began to find Indian in the door of his consultationroom when she went past, standing there brown and sinewy in his white coat, always wanting to chat or show her a picture or something. He’d even offer her treatments free, but she’d look right into those funny blueblack eyes of his and kid him along. Then one day she went into the office when there were no patients and sat down on his knee without saying a word.

  But the boy she liked best in the house was a Cuban named Tony Garrido, who played the guitar for two South Americans who danced the maxixe in a Broadway cabaret. She used to pass him on the stairs and knew all about it and decided she had a crush on him long before they ever spoke. He looked so young with his big brown eyes and his smooth oval face a very light coffeecolor with a little flush on the cheeks under his high long cheekbones. She used to wonder if he was the same color all over. He had polite bashful manners and a low grownup voice. The first time he spoke to her, one spring evening when she was standing on the stoop wondering desperately what she could do to keep from going up to the room, she knew he was going to fall for her. She kidded him and asked him what he put on his eyelashes to make them so black. He said it was the same thing that made her hair so pretty and golden and asked her to have an icecream soda with him.