A couple of days passed in blank weakness. Then she was able to drink a little orangejuice and hot milk and could raise her head on her elbow and look at the baby when they brought it to her. It looked dreadfully little. It was a little girl. Its poor little face looked wrinkled and old like a monkey’s. There was something the matter with its eyes.
She made them send for the old doctor and he sat on the edge of her bed looking very solemn and wiping and wiping his eyeglasses with his big clean silk handkerchief. He kept calling her a poor little niña and finally made her understand that the baby was blind and that her husband had a secret disease and that as soon as she was well enough she must go to a clinic for treatments. She didn’t cry or say anything but just lay there staring at him with her eyes hot and her hands and feet icy. She didn’t want him to go, that was all she could think of. She made him tell her all about the disease and the treatment and made out to understand less Spanish than she did, just so that he wouldn’t go away.
A couple of days later the old women put on their best black silk shawls and took the baby to the church to be christened. Its little face looked awful blue in the middle of all the lace they dressed it in. That night it turned almost black. In the morning it was dead. Tony cried and the old women all carried on and they spent a lot of money on a little white casket with silver handles and a hearse and a priest for the funeral. Afterwards the Sisters of Mercy came and prayed beside her bed and the priest came and talked to the old women in a beautiful tragedy voice like Frank’s voice when he wore his morningcoat, but Margo just lay there in the bed hoping she’d die too, with her eyes closed and her lips pressed tight together. No matter what anybody said to her she wouldn’t answer or open her eyes.
When she got well enough to sit up she wouldn’t go to the clinic the way Tony was going. She wouldn’t speak to him or to the old women. She pretended not to understand what they said. La mamá would look into her face in a spiteful way she had and shake her head and say, “Loca.” That meant crazy.
Margo wrote desperate letters to Agnes: for God’s sake she must sell something and send her fifty dollars so that she could get home. Just to get to Florida would be enough. She’d get a job. She didn’t care what she did if she could only get back to God’s Country. She just said that Tony was a bum and that she didn’t like it in Havana. She never said a word about the baby or being sick.
Then one day she got an idea; she was an American citizen, wasn’t she? She’d go to the consul and see if they wouldn’t send her home. It was weeks before she could get out without one of the old women. The first time she got down to the consulate all dressed up in her one good dress only to find it closed. The next time she went in the morning when the old women were out marketing and got to see a clerk who was a towheaded American collegeboy. My, she felt good talking American again.
She could see he thought she was a knockout. She liked him too but she didn’t let him see it. She told him she was sick and had to go back to the States and that she’d been gotten down there on false pretenses on the promise of an engagement at the Alhambra. “The Alhambra,” said the clerk. “Gosh, you don’t look like that kind of a girl.”
“I’m not,” she said.
His name was George. He said that if she’d married a Cuban there was nothing he could do as you lost your citizenship if you married a foreigner. She said suppose they weren’t really married. He said he thought she’d said she wasn’t that kind of a girl. She began to blubber and said she didn’t care what kind of a girl she was, she had to get home. He said to come back next day and he’d see what the consulate could do, anyway wouldn’t she have tea with him at the Miami that afternoon.
She said it was a date and hurried back to the house feeling better than she had for a long time. The minute she was by herself in the alcove she took the marriagelicense out of her bag and tore it up into little tiny bits and dropped it into the filthy yellow bowl of the old watercloset in the back of the court. For once the chain worked and every last bit of forgetmenotspotted paper went down into the sewer.
That afternoon she got a letter from Agnes with a fiftydollar draft on the National City Bank in it. She was so excited her heart almost stopped beating. Tony was out gallivanting around somewhere with the sugarbroker. She wrote him a note saying it was no use looking for her, she’d gone home, and pinned it on the underpart of the pillow on the bed. Then she waited until the old women had drowsed off for their siesta, and ran out.
She wasn’t coming back. She just had the clothes she had on, and a few little pieces of cheap jewelry Tony had given her when they were first married, in her handbag. She went to the Miami and ordered an icecreamsoda in English so that everybody would know she was an American girl, and waited for George.
She was so scared every minute she thought she’d keel over. Suppose George didn’t come. But he did come and he certainly was tickled when he saw the draft, because he said the consulate didn’t have any funds for a case like hers. He said he’d get the draft cashed in the morning and help her buy her ticket and everything. She said he was a dandy and then suddenly leaned over and put her hand in its white kid glove on his arm and looked right into his eyes that were blue like hers were and whispered, “George, you’ve got to help me some more. You’ve got to help me hide. . . . I’m so scared of that Cuban. You know they are terrible when they’re jealous.”
George turned red and began to hem and haw a little, but Margo told him the story of what had happened on her street just the other day, how a man, an armyofficer, had come home and found, well, his sweetheart, with another man, well, she might as well tell the story the way it happened, she guessed George wasn’t easily shocked anyway, they were in bed together and the armyofficer emptied all the chambers of his revolver into the other man and then chased the woman up the street with a carvingknife and stabbed her five times in the public square. She began to giggle when she got that far and George began to laugh. “I know it sounds funny to you . . . but it wasn’t so funny for her. She died right there without any clothes on in front of everybody.”
“Well, I guess we’ll have to see what we can do,” said George, “to keep you away from that carvingknife.”
What they did was to go over to Matanzas on the Hershey electriccar and get a room at a hotel. They had supper there and a lot of ginfizzes and George, who’d told her he’d leave her to come over the next day just in time for the boat, got romantic over the ginfizzes and the moonlight and dogs barking and the roosters crowing. They went walking with their arms round each other down the quiet chalky-colored moonstruck streets, and he missed the last car back to Havana. Margo didn’t care about anything except not to be alone in that creepy empty whitewalled hotel with the moon so bright and everything. She liked George anyway.
The next morning at breakfast he said she’d have to let him lend her another fifty so that she could go back firstclass and she said honestly she’d pay it back as soon as she got a job in New York and that he must write to her everyday.
He went over on the early car because he had to be at the office and she went over later all alone through the glary green countryside shrilling with insects, and went in a cab right from the ferry to the boat. George met her there at the dock with her ticket and a little bunch of orchids, the first she’d ever had, and a roll of bills that she tucked into her purse without counting. The stewards seemed awful surprised that she didn’t have any baggage, so she made George tell them that she’d had to leave home at five minutes’ notice because her father, who was a very wealthy man, was sick in New York. She and George went right down to her room, and he was very sad about her going away and said she was the loveliest girl he’d ever seen and that he’d write her every day too, but she couldn’t follow what he was saying she was so scared Tony would come down to the boat looking for her.
At last the gong rang and George kissed her desperate hard and went ashore. She didn’t dare go up on deck until she heard the engineroom bells and felt the shaki
ng of the boat as it began to back out of the dock. Out of the porthole, as the boat pulled out, she got a glimpse of a dapper dark man in a white suit, that might have been Tony, who broke away from the cops and ran yelling and waving his arms down to the end of the wharf.
Maybe it was the orchids or her looks or the story about her father’s illness, but the captain asked her to his table and all the officers rushed her, and she had the time of her life on the trip up. The only trouble was that she could only come on deck in the afternoon because she only had that one dress.
She’d given George a cable to send so when they got to New York Agnes met her at the dock. It was late fall and Margo had nothing on but a light summer dress, so she said she’d set Agnes up to a taxi to go home. It was only when they got into the cab that she noticed Agnes was wearing black. When she asked her why Agnes said Fred had died in Bellevue two weeks before. He’d been picked up on Twentythird Street deaddrunk and had died there without coming to. “Oh, Agnes, I knew it . . . I had a premonition on the boat,” sobbed Margo.
When she’d wiped her eyes she turned and looked at Agnes. “Why, Agnes dear, how well you look,” she said. “What a pretty suit. Has Frank got a job?” “Oh, no,” said Agnes. “You see Miss Franklyn’s tea-shops are doing quite well. She’s branching out and she’s made me manageress of the new branch on Thirtyfourth Street at seventyfive dollars a week. Wait till you see our new apartment just off the Drive. . . . Oh, Margie, you must have had an awful time.”
“Well,” said Margo, “it was pretty bad. His people are pretty well off and prominent and all that but it’s hard to get on to their ways. Tony’s a bum and I hate him more than anything in the world. But after all it was quite an experience . . . I wouldn’t have missed it.”
Frank met them at the door of the apartment. He looked fatter than when Margo had last seen him and had patches of silvery hair on either side of his forehead that gave him a distinguished look like a minister or an ambassador. “Little Margo. . . . Welcome home, my child . . . What a beautiful young woman you have become.” When he took her in his arms and kissed her on the brow, she smelt again the smell of bayrum and energine she’d remembered on him. “Did Agnes tell you that I’m going on the road with Mrs. Fiske? . . . Dear Minnie Maddern and I were children together.”
The apartment was a little dark, but it had a parlor, a diningroom and two bedrooms and a beautiful big bathroom and kitchen. “First thing I’m goin’ to do,” said Margo, “is take a hot bath. . . . I don’t believe I’ve had a hot bath since I left New York.”
While Agnes, who had taken the afternoon off from the tearoom, went out to do some marketing for supper, Margo went into her neat little bedroom with chintz curtains on the walls and took off her chilly rumpled summer dress and got into Agnes’s padded dressinggown. Then she sat back in the morrischair in the parlor and strung Frank along when he asked her questions about her life in Havana.
Little by little he sidled over to the arm of her chair, telling her how attractivelooking she’d become. Then suddenly he made a grab for her. She’d been expecting it and gave him a ringing slap on the face as she got to her feet. She felt herself getting hysterical as he came towards her across the room panting.
“Get away from me, you old buzzard,” she yelled, “get away from me or I’ll tell Agnes all about you and Agnes and me we’ll throw you out on your ear.” She wanted to shut up but she couldn’t stop yelling. “Get away from me. I caught a disease down there, if you don’t keep away from me you’ll catch it too.”
Frank was so shocked he started to tremble all over. He let himself drop into the morrischair and ran his long fingers through his slick silver and black hair. She slammed her bedroom door on him and locked it. Sitting in there alone on the bed she began to think how she would never see Fred again, and could it have been a premonition when she’d told them on the boat that her father was sick. Tears came to her eyes. Certainly she’d had a premonition. The steamheat hissed cozily. She lay back on the bed that was so comfortable with its clean pillows and silky comforter, and still crying fell asleep.
Newsreel LVII
the psychic removed all clothing before’séances at Harvard. Electric torches, bells, large megaphones, baskets, all illuminated by phosphorescent paint, formed the psychic’s equipment
My brother’s coming
with pineapples
Watch the circus begin
IS WILLING TO FACE PROBERS
the psychic’s feet were not near the professor’s feet when his trouser leg was pulled. An electric bulb on the ceiling flashed on and off. Buzzers rang. A teleplasmic arm grasped objects on the table and pulled Dr. B.’s hair. Dr. B. placed his nose in the doughnut and encouraged Walter to pull as hard as possible. His nose was pulled.
Altho’ we both agreed to part
It left a sadness in my heart
UNHAPPY WIFE TRIES TO DIE
SHEIK DENTIST RECONCILED
Financing Only Problem
I thought that I’d get along
and now
I find that I was wrong
somehow
Society Women Seek Jobs in Vain as Maids to Queen
NUN WILL WED GOB
I’m broken hearted
QUEEN HONORS UNKNOWN SOLDIER
Police Guard Queen in Mob
Beneath a dreamy Chinese moon
Where love is like a haunting tune
PROFESSOR TORTURES RIVAL
QUEEN SLEEPS AS HER TRAIN DEPARTS
Social Strife Brews
COOLIDGE URGES ADVERTISING
I found her beneath the setting sun
When the day was done
Cop Feeds Canary on $500 Rich Bride Left
While the twilight deepened
The sky above
I told my love
In o-o-old Ma-an-ila-a-a
ABANDONED APOLLO STILL HOPES FOR RETURN
OF WEALTHY BRIDE
Margo Dowling
Agnes was a darling. She managed to raise money through the Morris Plan for Margo’s operation when Dr. Dennison said it was absolutely necessary if her health wasn’t to be seriously impaired, and nursed her the way she’d nursed her when she’d had measles when she was a little girl. When they told Margo she never could have a baby, Margo didn’t care so much but Agnes cried and cried.
By the time Margo began to get well again and think of getting a job she felt as if she and Agnes had just been living together always. The Old Southern Waffle Shop was doing very well and Agnes was making seventyfive dollars a week; it was lucky that she did because Frank Mandeville hardly ever seemed able to get an engagement any more, there’s no demand for real entertainment since the war, he’d say. He’d become very sad and respectable since he and Agnes had been married at the Little Church Around the Corner, and spent most of his time playing bridge at the Lambs Club and telling about the old days when he’d toured with Richard Mansfield. After Margo got on her feet she spent a whole dreary winter hanging around the agencies and in the castingoffices of musical shows, before Flo Ziegfeld happened to see her one afternoon sitting in the outside office in a row of other girls. By chance she caught his eye and made a faint ghost of a funny face when he passed; he stopped and gave her a onceover; next day Mr. Herman picked her for first row in the new show. Rehearsals were the hardest work she’d ever done in her life.
Right from the start Agnes said she was going to see to it that Margo didn’t throw herself away with a trashy crowd of chorusgirls; so, although Agnes had to be at work by nine o’clock sharp every morning, she always came by the theater every night after late rehearsals or evening performances to take Margo home. It was only after Margo met Tad Whittlesea, a Yale halfback who spent his weekends in New York once the football season was over, that Agnes missed a single night. The nights Tad met her, Agnes stayed home. She’d looked Tad over carefully and had him to Sunday dinner at the apartment and decided that for a millionaire’s son he was pretty steady and that it was
good for him to feel some responsibility about Margo.
Those nights Margo would be in a hurry to give a last pat to the blond curls under the blue velvet toque and to slip into the furcape that wasn’t silver fox but looked a little like it at a distance, and to leave the dusty stuffy dressingroom and the smells of curling irons and cocoabutter and girls’ armpits and stagescenery and to run down the flight of drafty cement stairs and past old greyfaced Luke who was in his little glass box pulling on his overcoat getting ready to go home himself. She’d take a deep breath when she got out into the cold wind of the street. She never would let Tad meet her at the theater with the other stagedoor Johnnies. She liked to find him standing with his wellpolished tan shoes wide apart and his coonskin coat thrown open so that you could see his striped tie and soft rumpled shirt, among people in eveningdress in the lobby of the Astor.
Tad was a simple kind of redfaced boy who never had much to say. Margo did all the talking from the minute he handed her into the taxi to go to the nightclub. She’d keep him laughing with stories about the other girls and the wardrobewomen and the chorusmen. Sometimes he’d ask her to tell him a story over again so that he could remember it to tell his friends at college. The story about how the chorusmen, who were most of them fairies, had put the bitch’s curse on a young fellow who was Maisie De Mar’s boyfriend, so that he’d turned into a fairy too, scared Tad half to death. “A lot of things sure do go on that people don’t know about,” he said.
Big Money Page 25
