Big Money

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.

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 Columbia.”

“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?”

In the middle of the night there was a knock on the door. Young Rogers came in looking pretty rumpled. “Time to switch,” he said. “I’m scared the conductor’ll catch us.” “The conductor’ll mind his own damn business,” said Tad grumpily, but Margo had already slipped out and gone back to her own stateroom.

Next morning at breakfast in the diningcar, Margo wouldn’t stop kidding the other two about the dark circles under their eyes. Young Rogers ordered a plate of oysters and they thought they’d never get over the giggles. By the time they got to Jacksonville Tad had taken Margo back to the observation platform and asked her why the hell they didn’t get married anyway, he was free white and twentyone, wasn’t he? Margo began to cry and grinned at him through her tears and said she guessed there were plenty reasons why not.

“By gum,” said Tad when they got off the train into the sunshine of the station, “we’ll buy us an engagement ring anyway.”

First thing on the way to a hotel in a taxi they went to a jeweler’s and Tad bought her a solitaire diamond set in platinum and paid for it with a check. “My, his old man must be some millionaire,” whispered Queenie into Margo’s ear in a voice like in church.

After they’d been to the jeweler’s the boys drove the girls to the Mayflower Hotel. They got a room there and went upstairs to fix up a little. The girls washed their underclothes and took hot baths and laid out their dresses on the beds. “If you want my opinion,” Queenie was saying while she was helping Margo wash her hair, “those two livewires are gettin cold feet… All my life I’ve wanted to go on a yachtin’ trip an’ now we’re not gettin’ to go anymore than a rabbit… Oh, Margo, I hope it wasn’t me gummed the game.”

“Tad’ll do anything I say,” said Margo crossly.

“You wait and see,” said Queenie. “But here we are squabblin’ when we ought to be enjoyin’ ourselves… Isn’t this the swellest room in the swellest hotel in Jacksonville, Florida?” Margo couldn’t help laughing. “Well, whose fault is it?” “That’s right,” said Queenie, flouncing out of the shampoosteaming bathroom where they were washing their hair, and slamming the door on Margo. “Have the last word.”

At one o’clock the boys came by for them, and made them get all packed up and check out of the hotel. They went down to the dock in a Lincoln car Tad had hired. It was a beautiful sunny day. The Antoinette was anchored out in the St. Johns River, so they had to go out in a little speedboat.

The sailor was a goodlooking young fellow all in white; he touched his cap and held out his arm to help the girls in. When Margo put her hand in his arm to step into the boat she felt the hard muscles under the white duck sleeve and noticed how the sun shone on the golden hairs on his brown hand. Sitting on the darkblue soft cushion she looked up at Tad handing the bags down to the sailor. Tad looked pale from being sick and had that funny simple broadfaced look, but he was a husky wellbuilt boy too. Suddenly she wanted to hug him.

Tad steered and the speedboat went through the water so fast it took the girls breath away and they were scared for fear the spray would spoil the new sportsdresses they were wearing for the first time. “Oh, what a beauty,” they both sighed when they saw the Antoinette so big and white with a mahogany deckhouse and a broad yellow chimney. “Oh, I didn’t know it was a steamyacht,” crooned Queenie. “Why, my lands, you could cross the ocean in it.” “It’s a diesel,” said Tad. “Aren’t we all?” said Margo.

Tad was going so fast they crashed right in the little mahogany stairway they had for getting on the boat, and for a second it cracked and creaked like it would break right off, but the sailors managed to hold on somehow. “Hold her, Newt,” cried young Rogers, giggling. “Damn,” said Tad and he looked very sore as they went on board. The girls were glad to get up onto the beautiful yacht and out of the tippy little speedboat where they were afraid of getting their dresses splashed.

The yacht had goodlooking officers in white uniforms and a table was all ready for lunch out under an awning on deck and a Filipino butler was standing beside it with a tray of cocktails and all kinds of little sandwiches cut into fancy shapes. They settled down to lunch in a hurry, because the boys said they were starved. They had broiled Florida lobster in a pink sauce and cold chicken and salad and they drank champagne. Margo had never been so happy in her life.

While they were eating the yacht started to move slowly down the river, away from the ramshackle wharves and the dirtylooking old steamboats into the broad reaches of brown river that was splotched with green floating patches of waterhyacinths. A funny damp marshy smell came on the wind off the tangled trees that hid the banks. Once they saw a dozen big white birds with long necks fly up that Tad said were egrets. “I bet they’re expensive,” said Queenie. “They’re protected by the federal government,” said young Rogers.

They drank little glasses of brandy with their coffee. By the time they got up from the table they were all pretty well spiffed. Margo had decided that Tad was the swellest boy she’d ever known and that she wouldn’t hold out on him any longer, no matter what happened.

After lunch Tad showed them all over the boat. The diningroom was wonderful, all mirrors paneled in white and gold, and the cabins were the coziest things. The girls’ cabin was just like an oldfashioned drawingroom. Their things had been all hung out for them while they’d been eating lunch.

While they were looking at the boat young Rogers and Queenie disappeared somewhere, and the first thing Margo knew she and Tad were alone in a cabin looking at a photograph of a sailboat his father had won the Bermuda race with. Looking at the picture his cheek brushed against hers and there they were kissing.

“Gee, you’re great,” said Tad. “I’m kind of clumsy at this… no experience, you know.”

She pressed against him. “I bet you’ve had plenty.” With his free hand he was bolting the door. “Will you do like the ring said, Tad?”

When they went up on deck afterwards, Tad was acting kind of funny; he wouldn’t look her in the eye and talked all the time to young Rogers. Queenie looked flushed and all rumpled up like she’d been through a wringer, and staggered when she walked. Margo made her fix herself up and do her hair. She sure was wishing she hadn’t brought Queenie. Margo looked fresh as a daisy herself, she decided when she looked in the big mirror in the upstairs saloon.

The boat had stopped. Tad’s face looked like a thundercloud when he came back from talking to the captain. “We’ve got to go back to Jacksonville, burned out a bearing on the oilpump,” he said. “A hell of a note.”

“That’s great,” said young Rogers. “We can look into the local nightlife.”

“And what I want to know is,” said Queenie, “where’s that chaperon you boys were talkin’ about?”

“By gum,” said Tad, “we forgot Mrs. Vinton… I bet she’s been waiting down at the dock all day.”

“Too late for herbicide,” said Margo and they all laughed except Tad who looked sourer than ever.

It was dark when they got to Jacksonville. They’d had to pack their bags up again and they’d changed into different dresses. While they were changing their clothes Queenie had talked awful silly. “You mark my words, Margo, that boy wants to marry you.” “Let’s not talk about it,” Margo said several times. “You treat him like he was dirt.” Margo heard her own voice whining and mean: “And whose business is it?” Queenie flushed and went on with her packing. Margo could see she was sore.

They ate supper grumpily at the hotel. After supper young Rogers made them go out to a speakeasy he’d found. Margo didn’t want to go and said she had a headache, but everybody said now be a sport and she went. It was a tough kind of a place with oilcloth on the tables and sawdust on the floor. There were some foreigners, wops or Cubans or something, standing against a bar in another room. Queenie said she didn’t think it was the kind of place Mother’s little girl ought to be seen in. “Who the hell’s going to see us?” said Tad still in his grouch. “Don’t we want to see life?” Rogers said, trying to cheer everybody up.

Margo lost track of what they were saying. She was staring through the door into the barroom. One of the foreigners standing at the bar was Tony. He looked older and his face was kind of puffy, but there was no doubt that it was Tony. He looked awful. He wore a rumpled white suit frayed at the cuffs of the trousers and he wiggled his hips like a woman as he talked. The first thing Margo thought was how on earth she could ever have liked that fagot. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Tad’s sullen face and his nice light untidy hair and the cleancut collegeboy way he wore his clothes. She had to work fast. She was just opening her mouth to say honestly she had to go back to the hotel, when she caught sight of Tony’s big black eyes and dark lashes. He was coming towards the table with his mincing walk, holding out both hands. “Querida mia… Why are you here?”

She introduced him as Antonio de Garrido, her partner in a Cuban dance number on the Keith circuit, but he let the cat out of the bag right away by calling her his dear wife. She could feel the start Tad gave when he heard that. Then suddenly Tad began to make a great fuss over Tony and to order up drinks for him. He and Rogers kept whispering and laughing together about something. Then Tad was asking Tony to come on the cruise with them.

She could see Tad was acting drunker than he really was. She was ready for it when the boys got up to go. Tad’s face was red as a beet. “We got to see the skipper about that engine trouble,” he said. “Maybe Señor de Garrido will see you girls back to the hotel… Now don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“See you in the morning, cuties,” chimed in young Rogers.

After they’d gone Margo got to her feet. “Well, no use waiting around this dump… You sure put your foot in it, Tony.” Tony had tears in his eyes. “Everything is very bad with me,” he said. “I thought maybe my little Margo remembered… you know we used to be very fond. Don Manfredo, you remember my patron, Margo, had to leave Havana very suddenly. I hoped he would take me to Paris, but he brought me to Miami with him. Now we are no more friends. We have been unlucky at roulette… He has only enough money for himself.”

“Why don’t you get a job?”

“In these clothes… I am ashamed to show my face… maybe your friends…”

“You lay off of them, do you hear?” Margo burst out. Queenie was blubbering, “You should have bought us return tickets to New York. Another time you remember that. Never leave the homeplate without a return ticket.”

Tony took them home to the hotel in a taxi and insisted on paying for it. He made a big scene saying goodnight. “Little Margo, if you never see me again, remember I loved you… I shall keel myself.” As they went up in the elevator they could see him still standing on the sidewalk where they had left him.

In the morning they were waked up by a bellboy bringing an envelope on a silver tray. It was a letter to Margo from Tad. The handwriting was an awful scrawl. All it said was that the trip was off because the tutor had come and they were going to have to pick up Dad in Palm Beach. Enclosed there were five twenties. “Oh, goody goody,” cried Queenie, sitting up in bed when she saw them. “It sure would have been a long walk home… Honest, that boy’s a prince.” “A damn hick,” said Margo. “You take fifty and I take fifty… Lucky I have an engagement fixed up in Miami.” It was a relief when Queenie said she’d take the first train back to little old New York. Margo didn’t want ever to see any of that bunch again.

They hadn’t finished packing their bags when there was Tony at the door. He sure looked sick. Margo was so nervous she yelled at him, “Who the hell let you in?”

Tony let himself drop into a chair and threw back his head with his eyes closed. Queenie closed up her travelingbag and came over and looked at him. “Say, that bozo looks half-starved. Better let me order up some coffee or something… Was he really your husband like he said?”

Margo nodded.

“Well, you’ve got to do something about him. Poor boy, he sure does look down on his uppers.”

“I guess you’re right,” said Margo, staring at them both with hot dry eyes.

She didn’t go down to Miami that day. Tony was sick and threw up everything he ate. It turned out he hadn’t had anything to eat for a week and had been drinking hard. “I bet you that boy dopes,” Queenie whispered in Margo’s ear.

They both cried when it was time for Queenie to go to her train. “I’ve got to thank you for a wonderful time while it lasted,” she said. Margo put Tony to bed after Queenie had gone off to her train. When they objected down at the desk she said he was her husband. They had to register again. It made her feel awful to have to write down in the book Mr. and Mrs. Antonio de Garrido. Once it was written it didn’t look so bad though.

It was three days before Tony could get up. She had to have a doctor for him. The doctor gave him bromides and hot milk. The room was seven fifty a day and the meals sent up and the doctor and medicine and everything ran into money. It began to look like she’d have to hock the ring Tad had given her.

It made her feel like she was acting in a play living with Tony again. She was kind of fond of him after all, but it sure wasn’t what she’d planned. As he began to feel better he began to talk confidently about the magnificent act they could put on together. Maybe they could sell it to the cabaret she’d signed an engagement with in Miami. After all Tony was a sweettempered kind of a boy.

The trouble was that whenever she went out to get her hair curled or something, she’d always find one of the bellhops, a greasylooking blackhaired boy who was some kind of a spick himself, in the room with Tony. When she asked Tony what about it he’d laugh and say, “It is nothing. We talk Spanish together. That is all. He has been very attentive.” “Yes, very,” said Margo. She felt so damn lousy about everything she didn’t give a damn anyway.

One morning when she woke up Tony was gone. The roll of bills in her pocketbook was gone and all her jewelry except the solitaire diamond she wore on her finger was gone too. When she called up the desk to ask if he’d paid the bill they said that he had left word for her to be called at twelve and that was all. Nobody had seen him go out. The spick bellhop had gone too.

All that Margo had left was her furcoat and fifteen cents. She didn’t ask for the bill, but she knew it must be about fifty or sixty bucks. She dressed thoughtfully and carefully and decided to go out to a lunchroom for a cup of coffee. That was all the breakfast she had the price of.

Outside it was a warm spring day. The sunshine glinted on the rows of parked cars. The streets and the stores and the newsstands had a fresh sunny airy look. Margo walked up and down the main stem of Jacksonville with an awful hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. She looked in haberdashery store windows and in the windows of cheap jewelers and hockshops and read over carefully all the coming attractions listed at the movingpicture houses. She found herself in front of a busstation. She read the fares and the times buses left for Miami and New Orleans and Tallahassee and Orlando and Tampa and Atlanta, Georgia, and Houston, Texas, and Los Angeles, California. In the busstation there was a lunch counter. She went in to spend her fifteen cents. She’d get more for the ring at a hockshop if she didn’t barge in on an empty stomach, was what she was thinking as she sat down at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee and a sandwich.