Big Money

Margo Dowling

When Margie got big enough she used to go across to the station to meet Fred with a lantern dark winter nights when he was expected to be getting home from the city on the nine fourteen. Margie was very little for her age, Agnes used to say, but her red broadcloth coat with the fleece collar tickly round her ears was too small for her all the same, and left her chapped wrists out nights when the sleety wind whipped round the corner of the station and the wire handle of the heavy lantern cut cold into her hand. Always she went with a chill creeping down her spine and in her hands and feet for fear Fred wouldn’t be himself and would lurch and stumble the way he sometimes did and be so red in the face and talk so awful. Mr. Bemis the stoopshouldered station agent used to kid about it with big Joe Hines the sectionhand who was often puttering around in the station at traintime, and Margie would stand outside in order not to listen to them saying, “Well, here’s bettin’ Fred Dowlin’ comes in stinkin’ again tonight.” It was when he was that way that he needed Margie and the lantern on account of the plankwalk over to the house being so narrow and slippery. When she was a very little girl she used to think that it was because he was so tired from the terrible hard work in the city that he walked so funny when he got off the train but by the time she was eight or nine Agnes had told her all about how getting drunk was something men did and that they hadn’t ought to. So every night she felt the same awful feeling when she saw the lights of the train coming towards her across the long trestle from Ozone Park.

Sometimes he didn’t come at all and she’d go back home crying; but the good times he would jump springily off the train, square in his big overcoat that smelt of pipes, and swoop down on her and pick her up lantern and all: “How’s Daddy’s good little girl?” He would kiss her and she would feel so proudhappy riding along there and looking at mean old Mr. Bemis from up there, and Fred’s voice deep in his big chest would go rumbling through his muffler, “Goodnight, chief,” and the yellowlighted windows of the train would be moving and the red caterpillar’s eyes in its tail would get little and draw together as the train went out of sight across the trestle towards Hammels. She would bounce up and down on his shoulder and feel the muscles of his arm hard like oars tighten against her when he’d run with her down the plankwalk shouting to Agnes, “Any supper left, girlie?” and Agnes would come to the door grinning and wiping her hands on her apron and the big pan of hot soup would be steaming on the stove, and it would be so cozywarm and neat in the kitchen, and they’d let Margie sit up till she was nodding and her eyes were sandy and there was the sandman coming in the door, listening to Fred tell about pocket billiards and sweepstakes and racehorses and terrible fights in the city. Then Agnes would carry her into bed in the cold room and Fred would stand over her smoking his pipe and tell her about shipwrecks at Fire Island when he was in the Coast Guard, till the chinks of light coming in through the door from the kitchen got more and more blurred, and in spite of Margie’s trying all the time to keep awake because she was so happy listening to Fred’s burring voice, the sandman she’d tried to pretend had lost the train would come in behind Fred, and she’d drop off.

As she got older and along in gradeschool at Rockaway Park it got to be less often like that. More and more Fred was drunk when he got off the train or else he didn’t come at all. Then it was Agnes who would tell her stories about the old days and what fun it had been, and Agnes would sometimes stop in the middle of a story to cry, about how Agnes and Margie’s mother had been such friends and both of them had been salesladies at Siegel Cooper’s at the artificialflower counter and used to go to Manhattan Beach, so much more refined than Coney, Sundays, not to the Oriental Hotel of course, that was too expensive, but to a little beach near there, and how Fred was lifeguard there. “You should have seen him in those days, with his strong tanned limbs he was the handsomest man…” “But he’s handsome now, isn’t he, Agnes?” Margie would put in anxiously. “Of course, dearie, but you ought to have seen him in those days.” And Agnes would go on about how lucky he was at the races and how many people he’d saved from drowning and how all the people who owned the concessions chipped in to give him a bonus every year and how much money he always had in his pocket and a wonderful laugh and was such a cheery fellow. “That was the ruination of him,” Agnes would say. “He never could say no.” And Agnes would tell about the wedding and the orangeblossoms and the cake and how Margie’s mother Margery died when she was born. “She gave her life for yours, never forget that”; it made Margie feel dreadful, like she wasn’t her own self, when Agnes said that. And then one day when Agnes came out of work there he’d been standing on the sidewalk wearing a derby hat and all dressed in black and asking her to marry him because she’d been Margery Ryan’s best friend, and so they were married, but Fred never got over it and never could say no and that was why Fred took to drinking and lost his job at Holland’s and nobody would hire him on any of the beaches on account of his fighting and drinking and so they’d moved to Broad Channel but they didn’t make enough with bait and rowboats and an occasional shoredinner so Fred had gotten a job in Jamaica in a saloon keeping bar because he had such a fine laugh and was so goodlooking and everybody liked him so. But that was the ruination of him worse than ever. “But there’s not a finer man in the world than Fred Dowling when he’s himself… Never forget that, Margie.” And they’d both begin to cry and Agnes would ask Margie if she loved her as much as if she’d been her own mother and Margie would cry and say, “Yes, Agnes darling.” “You must always love me,” Agnes would say, “because God doesn’t seem to want me to have any little babies of my own.”

Margie had to go over on the train every day to go to school at Rockaway Park. She got along well in the gradeschool and liked the teachers and the books and the singing but the children teased because her clothes were all homemade and funnylooking and because she was a mick and a Catholic and lived in a house built on stilts. After she’d been Goldilocks in the school play one Christmas, that was all changed and she began to have a better time at school than at home.

At home there was always so much housework to do, Agnes was always washing and ironing and scrubbing because Fred hardly ever brought in any money any more. He’d lurch into the house drunk and dirty and smelling of stale beer and whiskey and curse and grumble about the food and why didn’t Agnes ever have a nice piece of steak any more for him like she used to when he got home from the city and Agnes would break down, blubbering, “What am I going to use for money?” Then he would call her dirty names, and Margie would run into her bedroom and slam the door and sometimes even pull the bureau across it and get into bed and lie there shaking. Sometimes when Agnes was putting breakfast on the table, always in a fluster for fear Margie would miss the train to school, Agnes would have a black eye and her face would be swollen and puffy where he’d hit her and she’d have a meek sorryforherself look Margie hated. And Agnes would be muttering all the time she watched the cocoa and condensed milk heating on the stove, “God knows I’ve done my best and worked my fingers to the bone for him… Holy saints of God, things can’t go on like this.”

All Margie’s dreams were about running away.

In summer they would sometimes have had fun if it hadn’t been for always dreading that Fred would take a bit too much. Fred would get the rowboats out of the boathouse the first sunny day of spring and work like a demon calking and painting them a fresh green and whistle as he worked, or he would be up before day digging clams or catching shiners for bait with a castingnet, and there was money around and big pans of chowder Long Island style and New England style simmering on the back of the stove, and Agnes was happy and singing and always in a bustle fixing shoredinners and sandwiches for fishermen, and Margie would go out sometimes with fishingparties, and Fred taught her to swim in the clear channel up under the railroad bridge and took her with him barefoot over the muddy flats clamming and after softshell crabs, and sportsmen with fancy vests who came down to rent a boat would often give her a quarter. When Fred was in a sober spell it was lovely in summer, the warm smell of the marshgrass, the freshness of the tide coming in through the inlet, the itch of saltwater and sunburn, but then as soon as he’d gotten a little money together Fred would get to drinking and Agnes’s eyes would be red all the time and the business would go to pot. Margie hated the way Agnes’s face got ugly and red when she cried, she’d tell herself that she’d never cry no matter what happened when she grew up.

Once in a while during the good times Fred would say he was going to give the family a treat and they’d get all dressed up and leave the place with old man Hines, Joe Hines’s father, who had a wooden leg and big bushy white whiskers, and go over on the train to the beach and walk along the boardwalk to the amusementpark at Holland’s.

It was too crowded and Margie would be scared of getting something on her pretty dress and there was such a glare and men and women with sunburned arms and legs and untidy hair lying out in the staring sun with sand over them, and Fred and Agnes would romp around in their bathingsuits like the others. Margie was scared of the big spuming surf crashing over her head, even when Fred held her in his arms she was scared and then it was terrible he’d swim so far out.

Afterwards they’d get back itchy into their clothes and walk along the boardwalk shrilling with peanutwagons and reeking with the smell of popcorn and saltwater taffy and hotdogs and mustard and beer all mixed up with the surf and the clanking roar of the roller-coaster and the steamcalliope from the merrygoround and so many horrid people pushing and shoving, stepping on your toes. She was too little to see over them. It was better when Fred hoisted her on his shoulder though she was too old to ride on her father’s shoulder in spite of being so small for her age and kept pulling at her pretty paleblue frock to keep it from getting above her knees.

What she liked at the beach was playing the game where you rolled a little ball over the clean narrow varnished boards into holes with numbers and there was a Jap there in a clean starched white coat and shelves and shelves of the cutest little things for prizes: teapots, little china men that nodded their heads, vases for flowers, rows and rows of the prettiest Japanese dolls with real eyelashes some of them, and jars and jugs and pitchers. One time Margie won a little teapot shaped like an elephant that she kept for years. Fred and Agnes didn’t seem to think much of the little Jap who gave the prizes but Margie thought he was lovely, his face was so smooth and he had such a funny little voice and his lips and eyelids were so clearly marked just like the dolls’ and he had long black eyelashes too.

Margie used to think she’d like to have him to take to bed with her like a doll. She said that and Agnes and Fred laughed and laughed at her so that she felt awful ashamed.

But what she liked best at Holland’s Beach was the vaudeville theater. They’d go in there and the crowds and laughs and racket would die away as the big padded doors closed behind them. There’d be a movingpicture going on when they went in. She didn’t like that much, but what she liked best in all the world were the illustrated songs that came next, the pictures of lovely ladies and gentlemen in colors like tinted flowers and such lovely dresses and big hats and the words with pansies and forgetmenots around them and the lady or gentleman singing them to the dark theater. There were always boats on ripply streams and ladies in lovely dresses being helped out of them, but not like at Broad Channel where it was so glary and there was nothing but mudflats and the slimysmelly piles and the boatlanding lying on the ooze when the tide went out, but lovely blue ripply rivers with lovely green banks and weepingwillowtrees hanging over them. After that it was vaudeville. There were acrobats and trained seals and men in straw hats who told funny jokes and ladies that danced. The Merry Widow Girls it was once, in their big black hats tipped up so wonderfully on one side and their sheathdresses and trains in blue and green and purple and yellow and orange and red, and a handsome young man in a cutaway coat waltzing with each in turn.

The trouble with going to Holland’s Beach was that Fred would meet friends there and keep going in through swinging doors and coming back with his eyes bright and a smell of whiskey and pickled onions on his breath, and halfway through the good time, Margie would see that worried meek look coming over Agnes’s face, and then she’d know that there would be no more fun that day. The last time they all went over together to the beach they lost Fred although they looked everywhere for him, and had to go home without him. Agnes sobbed so loud that everybody stared at her on the train and Ed Otis the conductor who was a friend of Fred’s came over and tried to tell her not to take on so, but that only made Agnes sob the worse. Margie was so ashamed she decided to run away or kill herself as soon as she got home so that she wouldn’t have to face the people on the train ever again.

That time Fred didn’t turn up the next day the way he usually did. Joe Hines came in to say that a guy had told him he’d seen Fred on a bat over in Brooklyn and that he didn’t think he’d come home for a while. Agnes made Margie go to bed and she could hear her voice and Joe Hines’s in the kitchen talking low for hours. Margie woke up with a start to find Agnes in her nightgown getting into bed with her. Her cheeks were fiery hot and she kept saying, “Imagine his nerve and him a miserable trackwalker… Margie… We can’t stand this life any more, can we, little girl?”

“I bet he’d come here fussing, the dreadful old thing,” said Margie.

“Something like that… Oh, it’s too awful, I can’t stand it any more. God knows I’ve worked my fingers to the bone.”

Margie suddenly came out with, “Well, when the cat’s away the mice will play,” and was surprised at how long Agnes laughed though she was crying too.

In September just when Agnes was fixing up Margie’s dresses for the opening of school, the rentman came round for the quarter’s rent. All they’d heard from Fred was a letter with a fivedollar bill in it. He said he’d gotten into a fight and gotten arrested and spent two weeks in jail but that he had a job now and would be home as soon as he’d straightened things out a little. But Margie knew they owed the five dollars and twelve dollars more for groceries. When Agnes came back into the kitchen from talking to the rentman with her face streaky and horrid with crying, she told Margie that they were going into the city to live. “I always told Fred Dowling the day would come when I couldn’t stand it any more. Now he can make his own home after this.”

It was a dreadful day when they got their two bags and the awful old dampeaten trunk up to the station with the help of Joe Hines, who was always doing odd jobs for Agnes when Fred was away, and got on the train that took them into Brooklyn. They went to Agnes’s father’s and mother’s, who lived in the back of a small paperhanger’s store on Fulton Street under the el. Old Mr. Fisher was a paperhanger and plasterer and the whole house smelt of paste and turpentine and plaster. He was a small little grey man and Mrs. Fisher was just like him except that he had drooping grey mustaches and she didn’t. They fixed up a cot for Margie in the parlor but she could see that they thought she was a nuisance. She didn’t like them either and hated it in Brooklyn.

It was a relief when Agnes said one evening when she came home before supper looking quite stylish, Margie thought, in her city clothes, that she’d taken a position as cook with a family on Brooklyn Heights and that she was going to send Margie to the Sisters’ this winter.

Margie was a little scared all the time she was at the convent, from the minute she went in the door of the greystone vestibule with a whitemarble figure standing up in the middle of it. Margie hadn’t ever had much religion, and the Sisters were scary in their dripping black with their faces and hands looking so pale always edged with white starched stuff, and the big dark church full of candles and the catechismclass and confession, and the way the little bell rang at mass for everybody to close their eyes when the Saviour came down among angels and doves in a glare of amber light onto the altar. It was funny, after the way Agnes had let her run round the house without any clothes on, that when she took her bath once a week the Sister made her wear a sheet right in the tub and even soap herself under it.

The winter was a long slow climb to Christmas, and after all the girls had talked about what they’d do at Christmas so much Margie’s Christmas was awful, a late gloomy dinner with Agnes and the old people and only one or two presents. Agnes looked pale, she was deadtired from getting the Christmas dinner for the people she worked for. She did bring a net stocking full of candy and a pretty goldenhaired dolly with eyes that opened and closed, but Margie felt like crying. Not even a tree. Already sitting at the table she was busy making up things to tell the other girls anyway.

Agnes was just kissing her goodnight and getting ready putting on her little worn furpiece to go back to Brooklyn Heights when Fred came in very much under the influence and wanted to take them all out on a party. Of course they wouldn’t go and he went away mad and Agnes went away crying, and Margie lay awake half the night on the cot made up for her in the old people’s parlor thinking how awful it was to be poor and have a father like that.

It was dreary, too, hanging round the old people’s house while the vacation lasted. There was no place to play and they scolded her for the least little thing. It was bully to get back to the convent where there was a gym and she could play basketball and giggle with the other girls at recess. The winter term began to speed up towards Easter. Just before, she took her first communion. Agnes made the white dress for her and all the Sisters rolled up their eyes and said how pretty and pure she looked with her golden curls and blue eyes like an angel, and Minette Hardy, an older girl with a snubnose, got a crush on her and used to pass her chocolatepeppermints in the playground wrapped in bits of paper with little messages scrawled on them: To Goldilocks with love from her darling Minette, and things like that.

She hated it when commencement came, and there was nothing about summer plans she could tell the other girls. She grew fast that summer and got gawky and her breasts began to show. The stuffy gritty hot weather dragged on endlessly at the Fishers’. It was awful there cooped up with the old people. Old Mrs. Fisher never let her forget that she wasn’t really Agnes’s little girl and that she thought it was silly of her daughter to support the child of a noaccount like Fred. They tried to get her to do enough housework to pay for her keep and every day there were scoldings and tears and tantrums.

Margie was certainly happy when Agnes came in one day and said that she had a new job and that she and Margie would go over to New York to live. She jumped up and down yelling, “Goody goody… Oh, Agnes, we’re going to get rich.” “A fat chance,” said Agnes, “but anyway it’ll be better than being a servant.”

They gave their trunks and bags to an expressman and went over to New York on the el and then uptown on the subway. The streets of the uptown West Side looked amazingly big and wide and sunny to Margie. They were going to live with the Francinis in a little apartment on the corner on the same block with the bakery they ran on Amsterdam Avenue where Agnes was going to work. They had a small room for the two of them but it had a canarybird in a cage and a lot of plants in the window and the Francinis were both of them fat and jolly and they had cakes with icing on them at every meal. Mrs. Francini was Grandma Fisher’s sister.

They didn’t let Margie play with the other children on the block; the Francinis said it wasn’t a safe block for little girls. She only got out once a week and that was Sunday evening, everybody always had to go over to the Drive and walk up to Grant’s Tomb and back. It made her legs ache to walk so slowly along the crowded streets the way the Francinis did. All summer she wished for a pair of rollerskates, but the way the Francinis talked and the way the nuns talked about dangers made her scared to go out on the streets alone. What she was so scared of she didn’t quite know. She liked it, though, helping Agnes and the Francinis in the bakery.

That fall she went back to the convent. One afternoon soon after she’d gone back from the Christmas holidays Agnes came over to see her; the minute Margie went in the door of the visitors’ parlor she saw that Agnes’s eyes were red and asked what was the matter. Things had changed dreadfully at the bakery. Poor Mr. Francini had fallen dead in the middle of his baking from a stroke and Mrs. Francini was going out to the country to live with Uncle Joe Fisher. “And then there’s something else,” Agnes said and smiled and blushed. “But I can’t tell you about it now. You mustn’t think that poor Agnes is bad and wicked but I couldn’t stand it being so lonely.” Margie jumped up and down. “Oh, goody, Fred’s come back.” “No, darling, it’s not that,” Agnes said and kissed her and went away.

That Easter Margie had to stay at the convent all through the vacation. Agnes wrote she didn’t have any place to take her just then. There were other girls there and it was rather fun. Then one day Agnes came over to get her to go out, bringing in a box right from the store a new darkblue dress and a little straw hat with pink flowers on it. It was lovely the way the tissuepaper rustled when she unpacked them. Margie ran up to the dormitory and put on the dress with her heart pounding, it was the prettiest and grownupest dress she’d ever had. She was only twelve but from what little she could see of herself in the tiny mirrors they were allowed it made her look quite grownup. She ran down the empty greystone stairs, tripped and fell into the arms of Sister Elizabeth. “Why such a hurry?” “My mother’s come to take me out on a party with my father and this is my new dress.” “How nice,” said Sister Elizabeth, “but you mustn’t…” Margie was already off down the passage to the parlor and was jumping up and down in front of Agnes hugging and kissing her. “It’s the prettiest dress I ever had.” Going over to New York on the elevated Margie couldn’t talk about anything else but the dress.

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 winter 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.

Afterwards they walked on the Drive. He talked English fine with a little accent that Margie thought was very distinguished. Right away they’d stopped kidding and he was telling her how homesick he was for Havana and how crazy he was to get out of New York, and she was telling him what an awful life she led and how all the men in the house were always pinching her and jostling her on the stairs, and how she’d throw herself in the river if she had to go on living in one room with Agnes and Frank Mandeville. And as for that Indian, she wouldn’t let him touch her not if he was the last man in the world.

She didn’t get home until it was time for Tony to go downtown to his cabaret. Instead of supper they ate some more icecream sodas. Margie went back happy as a lark. Coming out of the drugstore, she’d heard a woman say to her friend, “My, what a handsome young couple.”

Of course Frank and Agnes raised Cain. Agnes cried and Frank lashed himself up into a passion and said he’d punch the damn greaser’s head in if he so much as laid a finger on a pretty, pure American girl. Margie yelled out that she’d do what she damn pleased and said everything mean she could think of. She’d decided that the thing for her to do was to marry Tony and run away to Cuba with him.

Tony didn’t seem to like the idea of getting married much, but she’d go up to his little hall bedroom as soon as Frank was out of the house at noon and wake Tony up and tease him and pet him. He’d want to make love to her but she wouldn’t let him. The first time she fought him off he broke down and cried and said it was an insult and that in Cuba men didn’t allow women to act like that. “It’s the first time in my life a woman has refused my love.”

Margie said she didn’t care, not till they were married and had gotten out of this awful place. At last one afternoon she teased him till he said all right. She put her hair up on top of her head and put on her most grownuplooking dress and they went down to the marriage-bureau on the subway. They were both of them scared to death when they had to go up to the clerk; he was twentyone and she said she was nineteen and got away with it. She’d stolen the money out of Agnes’s purse to pay for the license.

She almost went crazy the weeks she had to wait for Tony to finish out his contract. Then one day in May, when she tapped on his bedroom door he showed her two hundred dollars in bills he’d saved up and said, “Today we get married… Tomorrow we sail for La ’Avana. We can make very much money there. You will dance and I will sing and play the guitar.” He made the gesture of playing the guitar with the thinpointed fingers of one of his small hands. Her heart started beating hard. She ran downstairs. Frank had already gone out. She scribbled a note to Agnes on the piece of cardboard that had come back from the laundry in one of Frank’s boiled shirts:

AGNES DARLING:

Don’t be mad. Tony and I got married today and we’re going to Havana, Cuba, to live. Tell Father if he comes around. I’ll write lots. Love to Frank.

Your grateful daughter,

MARGERY

Then she threw her clothes into an English pigskin suitcase of Frank’s that he’d just got back from the hockshop and ran down the stairs three at a time. Tony was waiting for her on the stoop, pale and trembling with his guitarcase and his suitcase beside him. “I do not care for the money. Let’s take a taxi,” he said.

In the taxi she grabbed his hand, it was icy cold. At City Hall he was so fussed he forgot all his English and she had to do everything. They borrowed a ring from the justice of the peace. It was over in a minute, and they were back in the taxi again going uptown to a hotel. Margie never could remember afterwards what hotel it was, only that they’d looked so fussed that the clerk wouldn’t believe they were married until she showed him the marriagelicense, a big sheet of paper all bordered with forgetmenots. When they got up to the room they kissed each other in a hurry and washed up to go out to a show. First they went to Shanley’s to dinner. Tony ordered expensive champagne and they both got to giggling on it.

He kept telling her what a rich city La ’Avana was and how the artists were really appreciated there and rich men would pay him fifty, one hundred dollars a night to play at their parties, “And with you, darling Margo, it will be two three six time that much… And we shall rent a fine house in the Vedado, very exclusive section, and servants very cheap there, and you will be like a queen. You will see I have many friends there, many rich men like me very much.” Margie sat back in her chair, looking at the restaurant and the welldressed ladies and gentlemen and the waiters so deferential and the silver dishes everything came in and at Tony’s long eyelashes brushing his pink cheek as he talked about how warm it was and the cool breeze off the sea, and the palms and the roses, and parrots and singing birds in cages, and how everybody spent money in La ’Avana. It seemed the only happy day she’d ever had in her life.

When they took the boat the next day, Tony only had enough money to buy secondclass passages. They went over to Brooklyn on the el to save taxifare. Margie had to carry both bags up the steps because Tony said he had a headache and was afraid of dropping his guitarcase.