Read Online Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk - Free Book Online Page B

door. “Might as well get in the back where it’s comfortable.
     The front is finished, for a while.”
    “George,” she said as he turned to go.
    “Yes?”
    “You’d—maybe you’d better hold on to these. I lose things, all the time.”
    The moonlight made a white blank of his glasses as he took the box. “Right,” he said,
     with no expression in his voice. He carefully stowed the box in his pocket, snuffled,
     and walked off down the road, swinging the flashlight.
    She came home after one. The apartment was dark and quiet. On her bed was a note in
     her mother’s spiky handwriting:
Sandy Goldstone called. Wanted to know how your ankle was. Called three times
.

Chapter 4.
SANDY AND MARJORIE
    Billy Ehrmann was the booby of his fraternity, and being seen with him had done Marjorie
     little good at Columbia; but once Sandy Goldstone started dating her, the Morgenstern
     telephone began to ring busily after school hours.
    Lively and pretty though she was, she needed Sandy’s sponsorship because she was a
     Hunter girl. That was almost as disqualifying, in the estimation of Sandy’s West Side
     set, as living north of Ninety-sixth Street; which was only a shade less disqualifying
     than living in the Bronx. Snobbishness, of course, is a relative thing. The older
     and wealthier Jewish families, who lived on the upper East Side, would have been distressed
     had the West Side boys dated their daughters. And these families doubtless caused
     the well-to-do Christian families to wonder what was becoming of Park Avenue and Fifth
     Avenue. The terracing of caste extended upward into an azure realm of blood, breeding,
     and property as remote from little Marjorie Morgenstern as the planet Saturn. From
     her viewpoint, however, her small move upward was skyrocketing. Sandy Goldstone had
     begun to take her out. It followed that Bill Dryfus could, and Dan Kadane, and Neil
     Wein, and Norman Fisher, and Allen Orbach. She soon had to buy a little leather-bound
     notebook to keep track of her dates. The rush of success made her rather dizzy.
    It seemed to go to her mother’s head too. Mrs. Morgenstern took her on a round of
     Manhattan shops and bought her a closetful of expensive new clothes. When the father
     objected to the bills, which were far beyond their means, Mrs. Morgenstern simply
     said, “A girl of seventeen can’t go around in rags.” Marjorie had been arguing for
     two years that girls of fifteen and sixteen couldn’t go around in rags (the rags in
     question being a quite presentable middle-priced wardrobe) but her mother had been
     deaf to the doctrine until now. Marjorie saw in her conversion a crafty plan to trap
     Sandy Goldstone, so her gratitude for the clothes was a bit tainted by cynicism. But
     she did the mother an injustice. Mrs. Morgenstern probably hoped to see her some day
     catch the department store heir, or a prize like him. Mainly, however, she was carried
     away by her daughter’s flowering beauty—the girl seemed to grow prettier every week
     in the sunshine of success—and by the mood of springtime, and by the parade of handsome
     well-dressed boys gathering in Marjorie’s wake. Satiric though the mother’s attitude
     was toward Marjorie, her daughter really rather dazzled her. At seventeen Rose Kupperberg
     had been a Yiddish-speaking immigrant girl toiling in a dirty Brooklyn sweatshop,
     dressed in real rags. As she watched her daughter burst into bloom on Central Park
     West, her own lonely miserable adolescence came back to her, and by contrast it seemed
     to her that Marjorie was living the life of a fairy-tale princess. She envied her,
     and admired her, and was a bit afraid of her, and drew deep vicarious delight from
     her growing vogue. The decline of George Drobes that went with it completed the mother’s
     satisfaction.
    For after the Villa Marlene disaster George was clearly on the wane. He maintained
     an aggrieved silence for a couple of weeks, then telephoned