“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.