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.