Margo wrinkled up her nose. “You don’t know the half of it, dearie.” “But it must be just a story.” “No, honestly, Tad, that’s how it happened . . . we could hear them yelling and oohooing like they do down in their dressingroom. They all stood around in a circle and put the bitches’ curse on him. I tell you we were scared.”
That night they went to the Columbus Circle Childs for some ham and eggs. “Gee, Margo,” said Tad with his mouth full as he was finishing his second order of buttercakes. “I don’t think this is the right life for you. . . . You’re the smartest girl I ever met and damn refined too.” “Don’t worry, Tad, little Margo isn’t going to stay in the chorus all her life.”
On the way home in the taxi Tad started to make passes at her. It surprised Margo because he wasn’t a fresh kind of a boy. He wasn’t drunk either, he’d only had one bottle of Canadian ale. “Gosh, Margo, you’re wonderful. . . . You won’t drink and you won’t cuddle cooty.” She gave him a little pecking kiss on the cheek. “You ought to understand, Tad,” she said, “I’ve got to keep my mind on my work.”
“I guess you think I’m just a dumb cluck.”
“You’re a nice boy, Tad, but I like you best when you keep your hands in your pockets.”
“Oh, you’re marvelous,” sighed Tad, looking at her with round eyes from out of his turnedup fuzzy collar from his own side of the cab. “Just a woman men forget,” she said.
Having Tad to Sunday dinner got to be a regular thing. He’d come early to help Agnes lay the table, and take off his coat and roll up his shirtsleeves afterwards to help with the dishes, and then all four of them would play hearts and each drink a glass of beefironandwine tonic from the drugstore. Margo hated those Sunday afternoons but Frank and Agnes seemed to love them, and Tad would stay till the last minute before he had to rush off to meet his father at the Metropolitan Club, saying he’d never had such a good time in his life.
One snowy Sunday afternoon when Margo had slipped away from the cardtable saying she had a headache and had lain on the bed all afternoon listening to the hissing of the steamheat almost crying from restlessness and boredom, Agnes said with her eyes shining when she came in in her negligee after Tad was gone, “Margo, you’ve got to marry him. He’s the sweetest boy. He was telling us how this place is the first time in his life he’s ever had any feeling of home. He’s been brought up by servants and ridingmasters and people like that. . . . I never thought a millionaire could be such a dear. I just think he’s a darling.”
“He’s no millionaire,” said Margo, pouting.
“His old man has a seat on the stockexchange,” called Frank from the other room. “You don’t buy them with cigarstore coupons, do you, dear child?”
“Well,” said Margo, stretching and yawning, “I certainly wouldn’t be getting a spendthrift for a husband. . . .” Then she sat up and shook her finger at Agnes. “I can tell you right now why he likes to come here Sundays. He gets a free meal and it don’t cost him a cent.”
Jerry Herman, the yellowfaced bald shriveledup little casting-director, was a man all the girls were scared to death of. When Regina Riggs said she’d seen Margo having a meal with him at Keene’s Chophouse between performances, one Saturday, the girls never quit talking about it. It made Margo sore and gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach to hear them giggling and whispering behind her back in the dressingroom.
Regina Riggs, a broadfaced girl from Oklahoma whose real given name was Queenie and who’d been in the Ziegfeld choruses since the days when they had horsecars on Broadway, took Margo’s arm when they were going down the stairs side by side after a morning rehearsal. “Look here, kiddo,” she said, “I just want to tip you off about that guy, see? You know me, I been through the mill an’ I don’t give a hoot in hell for any of ’em . . . but let me tell you somethin’. There never been a girl got a spoken word by givin’ that fourflusher a lay. Plenty of ’em have tried it. Maybe I’ve tried it myself. You can’t beat the game with that guy an’ a beautiful white body’s about the cheapest thing there is in this town. . . . You got a kinda peart innocent look and I thought I’d put you wise.”
Margo opened her blue eyes wide. “Why, the idea. . . . What made you think I’d . . .” She began to titter like a schoolgirl. “All right, baby, let it ride. . . . I guess you’ll hold out for the weddin’ bells.” They both laughed. They were always good friends after that.
But not even Queenie knew about it when after a long wearing rehearsal late one Saturday night of a new number that was coming in the next Monday, Margo found herself stepping into Jerry Herman’s roadster. He said he’d drive her home, but when they reached Columbus Circle, he said wouldn’t she drive out to his farm in Connecticut with him and have a real rest. Margo went into a drugstore and phoned Agnes that there’d be rehearsals all day Sunday and that she’d stay down at Queenie Rigg’s flat that was nearer the theater. Driving out, Jerry kept asking Margo about herself. “There’s something different about you, little girl,” he said. “I bet you don’t tell all you know. . . . You’ve got mystery.”
All the way out Margo was telling about her early life on a Cuban sugarplantation and her father’s great townhouse in the Vedado and Cuban music and dances, and how her father had been ruined by the sugartrust and she’d supported the family as a child actress in Christmas pantomimes in England and about her early unfortunate marriage with a Spanish nobleman, and how all that life was over now and all she cared about was her work. “Well, that story would make great publicity,” was what Jerry Herman said about it.
When they drew up at a lighted farmhouse under a lot of tall trees, they sat in the car a moment, shivering a little in the chilly mist that came from a brook somewhere. He turned to her in the dark and seemed to be trying to look in her face. “You know about the three monkeys, dear?” “Sure,” said Margo. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” “Correct,” he said. Then she let him kiss her.
Inside it was the prettiest farmhouse with a roaring fire and two men in checked lumberman’s shirts and a couple of funny-looking women in Paris clothes with Park Avenue voices who turned out to be in the decorating business. The two men were scenic artists. Jerry cooked up ham and eggs in the kitchen for everybody and they drank hard cider and had quite a time, though Margo didn’t quite know how to behave. To have something to do she got hold of a guitar that was hanging on the wall and picked out Siboney and some other Cuban songs Tony had taught her.
When one of the women said something about how she ought to do a Cuban specialty her heart almost stopped beating. Blue daylight was coming through the mist outside of the windows before they got to bed. They all had a fine country breakfast giggling and kidding in their dressinggowns and Sunday afternoon Jerry drove her in to town and let her out on the Drive near Seventyninth Street.
Frank and Agnes were in a great stew when she got home. Tad had been calling up all day. He’d been to the theater and found out that there weren’t any rehearsals called. Margo said spitefully that she had been rehearsing a little specialty and that if any young collegeboy thought he could interfere with her career he had another think coming. The next weekend when he called up she wouldn’t see him.
But a week later when she came out of her room about two o’clock on Sunday afternoon just in time for Agnes’s big Sunday dinner, Tad was sitting there hanging his head, with his hick hands dangling between his knees. On the chair beside him was a green florist’s box that she knew when she looked at it was American Beauty roses. He jumpedup. “Oh, Margo . . . don’t be sore . . . I just can’t seem to have a good time going around without you.” “I’m not sore, Tad,” she said. “I just want everybody to understand that I won’t let my life interfere with my work.”
“Sure, I get you,” said Tad.
Agnes came forward all smiles and put the roses in water. “Gosh, I forgot,” said Tad and pulled a redleather case out of his pocket. He was stuttering. “You see D-d-dad g-g-gave me some s-s-stocks to play
around with an’ I made a little killing last week and I bought these, only we can’t wear them except when we both go out together, can we?” It was a string of pearls, small and not very well matched, but pearls all right.
“Who else would take me anyplace where I could wear them, you mut?” said Margo. Margo felt herself blushing. “And they’re not Teclas?” Tad shook his head. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.
“Gosh, you honestly like them,” said Tad, talking fast. “Well, there’s one other thing . . . Dad’s letting me have the Antoinette, that’s his boat, you know, for a two weeks’ cruise this summer with my own crowd. I want you and Mrs. Mandeville to come. I’d ask Mr. Mandeville too but . . .”
“Nonsense,” said Agnes. “I’m sure the party will be properly chaperoned without me. . . . I’d just get seasick. . . . It used to be terrible when poor Fred used to take me out fishing.”
“That was my father,” said Margo. “He loved being out on the water . . . yachting . . . that kind of thing. . . . I guess that’s why I’m such a good sailor.”
“That’s great,” said Tad.
At that minute Frank Mandeville came in from his Sunday walk, dressed in his morningcoat and carrying a silverheaded cane, and Agnes ran into the kitchenette to dish up the roast stuffed veal and vegetables and the strawberrypie from which warm spicy smells had been seeping through the air of the small apartment for some time.
“Gosh, I like it here,” said Tad, leaning back in his chair after they’d sat down to dinner.
The rest of that spring Margo had quite a time keeping Tad and Jerry from bumping into each other. She and Jerry never saw each other at the theater; early in the game she’d told him she had no intention of letting her life interfere with her work and he’d looked sharply at her with his shrewd boiledlooking eyes and said, “Humph . . . I wish more of our young ladies felt like you do. . . . I spend most of my time combing them out of my hair.”
“Too bad about you,” said Margo. “The Valentino of the castingoffice.” She liked Jerry Herman well enough. He was full of dope about the theater business. The only trouble was that when they got confidential he began making Margo pay her share of the check at restaurants and showed her pictures of his wife and children in New Rochelle. She worked hard on the Cuban songs, but nothing ever came of the specialty.
In May the show went on the road. For a long time she couldn’t decide whether to go or not. Queenie Riggs said absolutely not. It was all right for her, who didn’t have any ambition any more except to pick her off a travelingman in a onehorse town and marry him before he sobered up, but for Margo Dowling who had a career ahead of her, nothing doing. Better be at liberty all summer than a chorine on the road.
Jerry Herman was sore as a crab when she wouldn’t sign the road-contract. He blew up right in front of the officeforce and all the girls waiting in line and everything. “All right, I seen it coming . . . now she’s got a swelled head and thinks she’s Peggy Joyce. . . . All right, I’m through.”
Margo looked him straight in the eye. “You must have me confused with somebody else, Mr. Herman. I’m sure I never started anything for you to be through with.” All the girls were tittering when she walked out, and Jerry Herman looked at her like he wanted to choke her. It meant no more jobs in any company where he did the casting.
She spent the summer in the hot city hanging round Agnes’s apartment with nothing to do. And there was Frank always waiting to make a pass at her, so that she had to lock her door when she went to bed. She’d lie around all day in the horrid stuffy little room with furry green wallpaper and an unwashed window that looked out on cindery backyards and a couple of ailanthustrees and always washing hung out. Tad had gone to Canada as soon as college was over. She spent the days reading magazines and monkeying with her hair and manicuring her fingernails and dreaming about how she could get out of this miserable sordid life. Sordid was a word she’d just picked up. It was in her mind all the time, sordid, sordid, sordid. She decided she was crazy about Tad Whittlesea.
When August came Tad wrote from Newport that his mother was sick and the yachting trip was off till next winter. Agnes cried when Margo showed her the letter. “Well, there are other fish in the sea,” said Margo.
She and Queenie, who had resigned from the roadtour when she had a runin with the stagemanager, started making the rounds of the castingoffices again. They rehearsed four weeks for a show that flopped the opening night. Then they got jobs in the Greenwich Village Follies. The director gave Margo a chance to do her Cuban number and Margo got a special costume made and everything only to be cut out before the dressrehearsal because the show was too long.
She would have felt terrible if Tad hadn’t turned up after Thanksgiving to take her out every Saturday night. He talked a lot about the yachting trip they were going to take during his midwinter vacation. It all depended on when his exams came.
After Christmas she was at liberty again. Frank was sick in bed with kidney trouble and Margo was crazy to get away from the stuffy apartment and nursing Frank and doing the housekeeping for Agnes who often didn’t get home from her job till ten or eleven o’clock at night. Frank lay in bed, his face looking drawn and yellow and pettish, and needed attention all the time. Agnes never complained, but Margo was so fed up with hanging around New York she signed a contract for a job as entertainer in a Miami cabaret, though Queenie and Agnes carried on terrible and said it would ruin her career.
She hadn’t yet settled her wrangle with the agent about who was going to pay her transportation south when one morning in February Agnes came in to wake her up.
Margo could see that it was something because Agnes was beaming all over her face. It was Tad calling her on the phone. He’d had bronchitis and was going to take a month off from college with a tutor on his father’s boat in the West Indies. The boat was in Jacksonville. Before the tutor got there he’d be able to take anybody he liked for a little cruise. Wouldn’t Margo come and bring a friend? Somebody not too gay. He wished Agnes could go, he said, if that was impossible on account of Mr. Mandeville’s being sick who else could she take? Margo was so excited she could hardly breathe. “Tad, how wonderful,” she said. “I was planning to go south this week anyway. You must be a mindreader.”
Queenie Riggs arranged to go with her though she said she’d never been on a yacht before and was scared she wouldn’t act right. “Well, I spent a lot of time in rowboats when I was a kid. . . . It’s the same sort of thing,” said Margo.
When they got out of the taxicab at the Penn station there was Tad and a skinny little sleekhaired boy with him waiting to meet them. They were all very much excited and the boys’ breaths smelled pretty strong of gin. “You girls buy your own tickets,” said Tad, taking Margo by the arm and pushing some bills down into the pocket of her furcoat. “The reservations are in your name, you’ll have a drawingroom and we’ll have one.”
“A couple of wise guys,” whispered Queenie in her ear as they stood in line at the ticketwindow.
The other boy’s name was Dick Rogers. Margo could see right away that he thought Queenie was too old and not refined enough. Margo was worried about their baggage too. Their bags looked awful cheap beside the boys’ pigskin suitcases. She felt pretty down in the mouth when the train pulled out of the station. Here I am pulling a boner the first thing, she thought. And Queenie was throwing her head back and showing her gold tooth and yelling and shrieking already like she was at a fireman’s picnic.
The four of them settled down in the girls’ stateroom with the little table between them to drink a snifter of gin and began to feel more relaxed. When the train came out of the tunnel and lights began flashing by in the blackness outside, Queenie pulled down the shade. “My, this is real cozy,” she said.
“Now the first thing I got to worry about is how to get you girls out on the boat. Dad won’t care if he thinks we met you in Jacksonville, but if he knew we’d brought you down from New York he’d raise Hail Columbi
a.”
“I think we’ve got a chaperon all lined up in Jacksonville,” said young Rogers. “She’s a wonder. She’s deaf and blind and she can’t speak English.”
“I wish we had Agnes along,” said Tad. “That’s Margo’s stepmother. My, she’s a good sport.”
“Well, girls,” said young Rogers, taking a noisy swig from the gin-bottle. “When does the necking start?”
After they’d had dinner in the diningcar, they went lurching back to the drawingroom and had some more gin and young Rogers wanted them to play strip poker but Margo said no. “Aw, be a sport,” Queenie giggled. Queenie was pretty tight already. Margo put on her furcoat. “I want Tad to turn in soon,” she said. “He’s just out of a sickbed.”
She grabbed Tad’s hand and pulled him out into the passage. “Come on, let’s give the kids a break. . . . The trouble with you collegeboys is that the minute a girl’s unconventional you think she’s an easy mark.” “Oh, Margo . . .” Tad hugged her through her furcoat as they stepped out into the cold clanging air of the observation platform. “You’re grand.”
That night after they’d gotten undressed young Rogers came in the girls’ room in his bathrobe and said there was somebody asking for Margo in the other stateroom. She slept in the same stateroom with Tad, but she wouldn’t let him get into the bunk with her. “Honest, Tad, I like you fine,” she said, peeking from under the covers in the upperberth,” but you know . . . Heaven won’t protect a working girl unless she protects herself. . . . And in my family we get married before the loving instead of after.”
Tad sighed and rolled over with his face to the wall on the berth below. “Oh, heck . . . I’d been thinking about that.” She switched off the light. “But, Tad, aren’t you even going to kiss me goodnight?”
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