Big Money

Margo Dowling

When Margo got back to the city after her spring in Miami everybody cried out how handsome she looked with her tan and her blue eyes and her hair bleached out light by the Florida sun. But she sure found her work cut out for her. The Mandevilles were in a bad way. Frank had spent three months in the hospital and had had one kidney removed in an operation. When he got home he was still so sick that Agnes gave up her position to stay home and nurse him; she and Frank had taken up Science and wouldn’t have the doctor any more. They talked all the time about having proper thoughts and about how Frank’s life had been saved by Miss Jenkins, a practitioner Agnes had met at her tearoom. They owed five hundred dollars in doctor’s bills and hospital expenses, and talked about God all the time. It was lucky that Mr. Anderson the new boyfriend was a very rich man.

Mr. A, as she called him, kept offering to set Margo up in an apartment on Park Avenue, but she always said nothing doing, what did he think she was, a kept woman? She did let him play the stockmarket a little for her, and buy her clothes and jewelry and take her to Atlantic City and Long Beach weekends. He’d been an airplane pilot and decorated in the war and had big investments in airplane companies. He drank more than was good for him; he was a beefy florid guy who looked older than he was, a big talker, and hard to handle when he’d been drinking, but he was openhanded and liked laughing and jokes when he was feeling good. Margo thought he was a pretty good egg. “Anyway, what can you do when a guy picks up a telephone and turns over a thousand dollars for you?” was what she’d tell Agnes when she wanted to tease her. “Margie dear, you mustn’t talk like that,” Agnes would say. “It sounds so mercenary.” Agnes talked an awful lot about Love and right thoughts and being true and good these days. Margo liked better to hear Mr. Anderson blowing about his killings on the stockmarket and the planes he’d designed, and how he was going to organize a net of airways that would make the Pennsylvania Railroad look like a suburban busline.

Evening after evening she’d have to sit with him in speakeasies in the Fifties drinking whiskey and listening to him talk about this business and that and big deals in stocks down on the Street, and about how he was out to get that Detroit crowd that was trying to ease him out of Standard Airparts and about his divorce and how much it was costing him. One night at the Stork Club, when he was showing her pictures of his kids, he broke down and started to blubber. The court had just awarded the custody of the children to his wife.

Mr. A had his troubles all right. One of the worst was a redheaded girl he’d been caught with in a hotel by his wife’s detectives who was all the time blackmailing him, and threatening to sue for breach of promise and give the whole story to the Hearst papers. “Oh, how awful,” Agnes would keep saying, when Margo would tell her about it over a cup of coffee at noon. “If he only had the right thoughts… You must talk to him and make him try and see… If he only understood I know everything would be different… A successful man like that should be full of right thoughts.”

“Full of Canadian Club, that’s what’s the matter with him… You ought to see the trouble I have getting him home nights.” “You’re the only friend he has,” Agnes would say, rolling up her eyes. “I think it’s noble of you to stick by him.”

Margo was paying all the back bills up at the apartment and had started a small account at the Bowery Savings Bank just to be on the safe side. She felt she was getting the hang of the stockmarket a little. Still it made her feel trashy not working and it gave her the creeps sitting around in the apartment summer afternoons while Agnes read Frank Science and Health in a singsong voice, so she started going around the dress shops to see if she could get herself a job as a model. “I want to learn some more about clothes… mine always look like they were made of old floursacks,” she explained to Agnes. “Are you sure Mr. Anderson won’t mind?” “If he don’t like it he can lump it,” said Margo, tossing her head.

In the fall they finally took her on at Piquot’s new French gown-shop on Fiftyseventh Street. It was tiresome work but it left her evenings free. She confided to Agnes that if she ever let Mr. A out of her sight in the evening some little floosey or other would get hold of him sure as fate. Agnes was delighted that Margo was out of the show business. “I never felt it was right for you to do that sort of thing and now I feel you can be a real power for good with poor Mr. Anderson,” Agnes said. Whenever Margo told them about a new plunger he had taken on the market, Agnes and Frank would hold the thought for Mr. Anderson.

Jules Piquot was a middleaged roundfaced Frenchman with a funny waddle like a duck who thought all the girls were crazy about him. He took a great fancy to Margo, or maybe it was that he’d found out somewhere that her protector, as he called it, was a millionaire. He said she must always keep that beautiful golden tan and made her wear her hair smooth on her head instead of in the curls she’d worn it in since she had been a Follies girl. “Vat is te use to make beautiful clothes for American women if tey look so healty like from milkin’ a cow?” he said. “Vat you need to make interestin’ a dress is ’ere,” and he struck himself with a pudgy ringed fist on the bosom of his silk pleated shirt. “It is drama… In America all you care about is te perfect tirtysix.”

“Oh, I guess you think we’re very unrefined,” said Margo. “If I only ’ad some capital,” groaned Piquot, shaking his head as he went back to his office on the mezzanine that was all glass and eggshellwhite with aluminum fittings. “I could make New York te most stylish city in te vorld.”

Margo liked it parading around in the Paris models and in Piquot’s own slinky contraptions over the deep puttycolored rugs. It was better than shaking her fanny in the chorus all right. She didn’t have to get down to the showrooms till late. The showrooms were warm and spotless, with a faint bitter smell on the air of new materials and dyes and mothballs, shot through with a whiff of scented Egyptian cigarettes. The models had a little room in the back where they could sit and read magazines and talk about beauty treatments and the theaters and the football season, when there were no customers. There were only two other girls who came regularly and there weren’t too many customers either. The girls said that Piquot was going broke.

When he had his sale after Christmas Margo got Agnes to go down one Monday morning and buy her three stunning gowns for thirty dollars each; she tipped Agnes off on just what to buy and made out not to know her when she pranced out to show the new spring models off.

There wasn’t any doubt any more that Piquot was going broke. Billcollectors stormed in the little office on the mezzanine and everybody’s pay was three weeks in arrears, and Piquot’s moonshaped face drooped in tiny sagging wrinkles. Margo decided she’d better start looking around for another job, especially as Mr. A’s drinking was getting harder and harder to handle. Every morning she studied the stockmarket reports. She didn’t have the faith she had at first in Mr. A’s tips after she’d bought Sinclair one day and had had to cover her margin and had come out three hundred dollars in the hole.

One Saturday there was a great stir around Piquot’s. Piquot himself kept charging out of his office waving his short arms, sometimes peevish and sometimes cackling and giggling, driving the salesladies and models before him like a new rooster in a henyard. Somebody was coming to take photographs for Vogue. The photographer when he finally came was a thin-faced young Jewish boy with a pasty skin and dark circles under his eyes. He had a regular big photographer’s camera and a great many flashlight bulbs all silvercrinkly inside that Piquot kept picking up and handling in a gingerly kind of way and exclaiming over. “A vonderful invention… I vould never ’ave photographs taken before because I detest explosions and ten te danger of fire.”

It was a warm day in February and the steamheated showrooms were stifling hot. The young man who came to take the pictures was drenched in sweat when he came out from under the black cloth. Piquot wouldn’t leave him alone for a second. He had to take Piquot in his office, Piquot at the draftingboard, Piquot among the models. The girls thought their turn would never come. The photographer kept saying, “You let me alone, Mr. Piquot… I want to plan something artistic.” The girls all got to giggling. At last Piquot went off and locked himself in his office in a pet. They could see him in there through the glass partition, sitting at his desk with his head in his hands. After that things quieted down. Margo and the photographer got along very well. He kept whispering to her to see what she could do to keep the old gent out of the pictures. When he left to go up to the loft upstairs where the dresses were made, the photographer handed her his card and asked her if she wouldn’t let him take her picture at his studio some Sunday. It would mean a great deal to him and it wouldn’t cost her anything. He was sure he could get something distinctively artistic. She took his card and said she’d be around the next afternoon. On the card it said Margolies, Art Photographer.

That Sunday Mr. A took her out to lunch at the Hotel Pennsylvania and afterwards she managed to get him to drive her over to Margolies’ studio. She guessed the young Jewish boy wasn’t so well off and thought Mr. A might just as well pay for a set of photographs. Mr. A was sore about going because he’d gotten his big car out and wanted to take her for a drive up the Hudson. Anyway he went. It was funny in Margolies’ studio. Everything was hung with black velvet and there were screens of different sizes in black and white and yellow and green and silver standing all over the big dusty room under the grimy skylights. The young man acted funny too, as if he hadn’t expected them. “All this is over,” he said. “This is my brother Lee’s studio. I’m attending to his clientele while he’s abroad… My interests are in the real art of the future.” “What’s that?” asked Mr. A, grumpily clipping the end off a cigar as he looked around for a place to sit down.

“Motionpictures. You see I’m Sam Margolies… You’ll hear of me if you haven’t yet.”

Mr. A sat down grouchily on a dusty velvet modelstand. “Well, make it snappy… We want to go driving.”

Sam Margolies seemed sore because Margo had just come in her streetclothes. He looked her over with his petulant grey eyes for a long time. “I may not be able to do anything… I can’t create if I’m hurried… I had seen you stately in Spanish black.” Margo laughed. “I’m not exactly the type.”

“The type for a small infanta by Velasquez.” He had a definite foreign accent when he spoke earnestly. “Well, I was married to a Spaniard once… That was enough of Spanish grandees and all that kind of thing to last me a lifetime.” “Wait, wait,” said Sam Margolies, walking all round her. “I see it, first in streetclothes and then…” He ran out of the room and came back with a black lace shawl. “An infanta in the court of old Spain.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to be married to one,” said Margo. “And to live in a house full of noble spick relatives.”

While Sam Margolies was posing her in her streetclothes Mr. A was walking up and down fidgeting with his cigar. It must have been getting cloudy out because the overhead skylight grew darker and darker. When Sam Margolies turned the floodlights on her the skylight went blue, like on the stage. Then when he got to posing her in the Spanish shawl and made her take her things off and let her undies down so that she had nothing on but the shawl above the waist, she noticed that Mr. A had let his cigar go out and was watching intently. The reflection from the floodlight made his eyes glint.

After the photographer was through, when they were walking down the gritty wooden stairs from the studio, Mr. A said, “I don’t like that guy… makes me think of a pimp.”

“Oh, no, it’s just that he’s very artistic,” said Margo. “How much did he say the photographs were?”

“Plenty,” said Mr. A.

In the unlighted hall that smelt of cabbage cooking somewhere, he grabbed her to him and kissed her. Through the glass front door she could see a flutter of snow in the street that was empty under the lamps. “Aw, to hell with him” he said, stretching his fingers out across the small of her back. “You’re a great little girl, do you know it? Gosh. I like this house. It makes me think of the old days.”

Margo shook her head and blinked. “Too bad about our drive,” she said. “It’s snowing.” “Drive hell,” said Mr. A. “Let’s you and me act like we was fond of each other for tonight at least… First we’ll go to the Meadowbrook and have a little bite to drink… Jesus, I wish I’d met you before I got in on the dough, when I was livin’ in bedbug alley and all that sort of thing.”

She let her head drop on his chest for a moment. “Charley, you’re number one,” she whispered.

That night he got Margo to say that when Agnes took Frank out to his sister’s house in New Jersey like she was planning, to try if a little country air wouldn’t do him good, she’d go and live with him. “If you knew how I was sick of this hellraisin’ kind of life,” he told her. She looked straight up in his boiled blue eyes. “Do you think I like it, Mr. A?” She was fond of Charley Anderson that night.

After that Sunday Sam Margolies called up Margo about every day, at the apartment and at Piquot’s, and sent her photographs of herself all framed for hanging but she would never see him. She had enough to think of, what with being alone in the apartment now, because Agnes had finally got Frank away to the country with the help of a practitioner and a great deal of reading of Science and Health, and all the bills to pay and daily letters from Tony who’d found out her address saying he was sick and begging for money and to be allowed to come around to see her.

Then one Monday morning she got down to Piquot’s late and found the door locked and a crowd of girls milling shrilly around in front of it. Poor Piquot had been found dead in his bathtub from a dose of cyanide of potassium and there was nobody to pay their back wages.

Piquot’s being dead gave Margo the creeps so that she didn’t dare go home. She went down to Altman’s and did some shopping and at noon called up Mr. A’s office to tell him about Piquot and to see if he wouldn’t have lunch with her. With poor old Piquot dead and her job gone, there was nothing to do but to strike Mr. A for a lump sum. About two grand would fix her up, and she could get her solitaire diamond Tad had given her out of hock. Maybe if she teased him he would put her up to something good on the market. When she called up they said Mr. Anderson wouldn’t be in his office until three. She went to Schrafft’s and had chickenpatties for lunch all by herself in the middle of the crowd of cackling women shoppers.

She already had a date to meet Mr. A that evening at a French speakeasy on Fiftysecond Street where they often ate dinner. When she got back from having her hair washed and waved it was too early to get dressed but she started fiddling around with her clothes anyway because she didn’t know what else to do, and it was so quiet and lonely in the empty apartment. She took a long time doing her nails and then started trying on one dress after another. Her bed got all piled with rumpled dresses. Everything seemed to have spots on it. She was almost crying when she at last slipped her furcoat over a paleyellow eveningdress that had come from Piquot’s but that she wasn’t sure about, and went down in the shabby elevator into the smelly hallway of the apartmenthouse. The elevatorboy fetched her a taxi.

There were white columns in the hall of the oldfashioned wealthy family residence converted into a restaurant, and a warm expensive pinkish glow of shaded lights. She felt cozier than she’d felt all day as she stepped in on the thick carpet. The headwaiter bowed her to a table and she sat there sipping an oldfashioned, feeling the men in the room looking at her and grinning a little to herself when she thought what the girls at Piquot’s would have said about a dame who got to a date with the boyfriend ahead of time. She wished he’d hurry up and come, so that she could tell him the story and stop imagining how poor old Piquot must have looked slumped down in his bathtub, dead from cyanide. It was all on the tip of her tongue ready to tell.

Instead of Mr. A a freshlooking youngster with a long sandy head and a lantern jaw was leaning over her table. She straightened herself in her chair to give him a dirty look, but smiled up at him when he leaned over and said in a Brooklyn confidential kind of voice, “Miss Dowlin’… excuse it… I’m Mr. Anderson’s secretary. He had to hop the plane to Detroit on important business. He knew you were crazy to go to the Music Box opening, so he sent me out to get tickets. Here they are, I pretty near had to blackjack a guy to get ’em for you. The boss said maybe you’d like to take Mrs. Mandeville.” He had been talking fast, like he was afraid she’d shut him up; he drew a deep breath and smiled.

Margo took the two green tickets and tapped them peevishly on the tablecloth. “What a shame… I don’t know who I could get to go now, it’s so late. She’s in the country.”

“My, that’s too bad… I don’t suppose I could pinchhit for the boss?”

“Of all th egall…” she began; then suddenly she found herself laughing. “But you’re not dressed.”

“Leave it to me, Miss Dowlin’… You eat your supper and I’ll come back in a soup an’ fish and take you to the show.”

Promptly at eight there he was back with his hair slicked, wearing a rustylooking dinnerjacket that was too short in the sleeves. When they got in the taxi she asked him if he’d hijacked a waiter and he put his hand over his mouth and said, “Don’t say a woid, Miss Dowlin’… it’s hired.”

Between the acts, he pointed out all the celebrities to her, including himself. He told her that his name was Clifton Wegman and that everybody called him Cliff and that he was twentythree years old and could play the mandolin and was a little demon with pocket billiards.

“Well, Cliff, you’re a likely lad” she said. “Likely to succeed?”

“I’ll tell the world.”

“A popular graduate of the New York School of Business… opportunities wanted.”

They had the time of their lives together. After the show Cliff said he was starved, because he hadn’t had his supper, what with chasing the theatertickets and the tuck and all, and she took him to the Club Dover to have a bite to eat. He surely had an appetite. It was a pleasure to see him put away a beefsteak with mushrooms. They had some drinks there and laughed their heads off at the floorshow, and, when he tried to get fresh in the taxicab, she slapped his face, but not very hard. That kid could talk himself out of anything.

When they got to her door, he said could he come up and before she could stop herself she’d said yes, if he acted like a gentleman. He said that wasn’t so easy with a girl like her but he’d try and they were laughing and scuffling so in front of her door she dropped her key. They both stooped to pick it up. When she got to her feet flushing from the kiss he’d given her, she noticed that the man sitting all hunched up on the stairs beside the elevator was Tony.

“Well, goodnight, Cliff, thanks for seeing a poor little workinggirl home,” Margo said cheerily.

Tony got to his feet and staggered over towards the open door of the apartment. His face had a green pallor and his clothes looked like he’d lain in the gutter all night.

“This is Tony,” said Margo. “He’s a… a relative of mine… not in very good repair.”

Cliff looked from one to the other, let out a low whistle and walked down the stairs.

“Well, now you can tell me what you mean by hanging around my place… I’ve a great mind to have you arrested for a burglar.”

Tony could hardly talk. His lip was bloody and all puffed up. “No place to go,” he said. “A gang beat me up.” He was teetering so she had to grab the sleeve of his filthy overcoat to keep him from falling. “Oh, Tony,” she said, “you sure are a mess. Come on in, but if you pull any tricks like you did last time… I swear to God I’ll break every bone in your body.”

She put him to bed. Next morning he was so jittery she had to send for a doctor. The sawbones said he was suffering from dope and exposure and suggested a cure in a sanatorium. Tony lay in bed white and trembling. He cried a great deal, but he was as meek as a lamb and said yes, he’d do anything the doctor said. Once he grabbed her hand and kissed it and begged her to forgive him for having stolen her money so that he could die happy. “You won’t die, not you,” said Margo, smoothing the stiff black hair off his forehead with her free hand. “No such luck.” She went out for a little walk on the Drive to try to decide what to do. The dizzysweet clinging smell of the paraldehyde the doctor had given Tony for a sedative had made her feel sick.

At the end of the week when Charley Anderson came back from Detroit and met her at the place on Fiftysecond Street for dinner, he looked worried and haggard. She came out with her sad story and he didn’t take it so well. He said he was hard up for cash, that his wife had everything tied up on him, that he’d had severe losses on the market; he could raise five hundred dollars for her but he’d have to pledge some securities to do that. Then she said she guessed she’d have to go back to her old engagement as entertainer at the Palms at Miami and he said, swell, if she didn’t look out he’d come down there and let her support him. “I don’t know why everybody’s got to thinkin’ I’m a lousy millionaire. All I want is to get out of the whole business with enough jack to let me settle down to work on motors. If it hadn’t been for this sonofabitchin’ divorce I’d been out long ago. This winter I expect to clean up and get out. I’m only a dumb mechanic anyway.”

“You want to get out and I want to get in,” said Margo, looking him straight in the eye. They both laughed together. “Aw, let’s go up to your place, since the folks are away. I’m tired of these lousy speakeasies.” She shook her head, still laughing. “It’s swarming with Spanish relatives,” she said. “We can’t go there.” They got a bag at his hotel and went over to Brooklyn in a taxi, to a hotel where they were wellknown as Mr. and Mrs. Dowling. On the way over in the taxi she managed to get the ante raised to a thousand.

Next day she took Tony to a sanatorium up in the Catskills. He did everything she said like a good little boy and talked about getting a job when he got out and about honor and manhood. When she got back to town she called up the office and found that Mr. A was back in Detroit, but he’d left instructions with his secretary to get her her ticket and a drawingroom and fix up everything about the trip to Miami. She closed up her apartment and the office attended to storing the furniture and the packing and everything.

When she went down to the train there was Cliff waiting to meet her with his wiseguy grin and his hat on the back of his long thin head. “Why, this certainly is sweet of him,” said Margo, pinning some lilies of the valley Cliff had brought her to her furcoat as two redcaps rushed forward to get her bags. “Sweet of who?” Cliff whispered. “Of the boss or of me?”

There were roses in the drawingroom, and Cliff had bought her Theatre and Variety and Zits Weekly and Town Topics and Shadowland. “My, this is grand,” she said.

He winked. “The boss said to send you off in the best possible style.” He brought a bottle out of his overcoat pocket. “That’s Teacher’s Highland Cream… Well, so long.” He made a little bow and went off down the corridor.

Margo settled herself in the drawingroom and almost wished Cliff hadn’t gone so soon. He might at least have taken longer to say goodby. My, that boy was fresh. The train had no sooner started when there he was back, with his hands in his pants pockets, looking anxious and chewing gum at a great rate. “Well,” she said, frowning, “now what?”

“I bought me a ticket to Richmond… I don’t travel enough… freedom from office cares.”

“You’ll get fired.” “Nope… this is Saturday. I’ll be back bright and early Monday morning.”

“But he’ll find out.”

Cliff took his coat off, folded it carefully and laid it on the rack, then he sat down opposite her and pulled the door of the drawingroom to. “Not unless you tell him.”

She started to get to her feet. “Well, of all the fresh kids.” He went on in the same tone of voice. “And you won’t tell him and I won’t tell him about… er…” “But, you damn fool, that’s just my exhusband.” “Well, I’m lookin’ forward to bein’ the exboyfriend… No, honestly, I know you’ll like me… they all like me.” He leaned over to take her hand. His hand was icycold. “No, honest, Margo, why’s it any different from the other night? Nobody’ll know. You just leave it to me.” Margo began to giggle. “Say, Cliff, you ought to have a sign on you.” “Sayin’ what?” “Fresh paint.”

She went over and sat beside him. Through the shaking rumble of the train she could feel him shaking. “Why, you funny kid,” she said. “You were scared to death all the time.”