Margo wrote desperate letters to Agnes: for God’s sake she must sell something and send her fifty dollars so that she could get home. Just to get to Florida would be enough. She’d get a job. She didn’t care what she did if she could only get back to God’s Country. She just said that Tony was a bum and that she didn’t like it in Havana. She never said a word about the baby or being sick.
Then one day she got an idea; she was an American citizen, wasn’t she? She’d go to the consul and see if they wouldn’t send her home. It was weeks before she could get out without one of the old women. The first time she got down to the consulate all dressed up in her one good dress only to find it closed. The next time she went in the morning when the old women were out marketing and got to see a clerk who was a towheaded American collegeboy. My, she felt good talking American again.
She could see he thought she was a knockout. She liked him too but she didn’t let him see it. She told him she was sick and had to go back to the States and that she’d been gotten down there on false pretenses on the promise of an engagement at the Alhambra. “The Alhambra,” said the clerk. “Gosh, you don’t look like that kind of a girl.”
“I’m not,” she said.
His name was George. He said that if she’d married a Cuban there was nothing he could do as you lost your citizenship if you married a foreigner. She said suppose they weren’t really married. He said he thought she’d said she wasn’t that kind of a girl. She began to blubber and said she didn’t care what kind of a girl she was, she had to get home. He said to come back next day and he’d see what the consulate could do, anyway wouldn’t she have tea with him at the Miami that afternoon.
She said it was a date and hurried back to the house feeling better than she had for a long time. The minute she was by herself in the alcove she took the marriagelicense out of her bag and tore it up into little tiny bits and dropped it into the filthy yellow bowl of the old watercloset in the back of the court. For once the chain worked and every last bit of forgetmenotspotted paper went down into the sewer.
That afternoon she got a letter from Agnes with a fiftydollar draft on the National City Bank in it. She was so excited her heart almost stopped beating. Tony was out gallivanting around somewhere with the sugarbroker. She wrote him a note saying it was no use looking for her, she’d gone home, and pinned it on the underpart of the pillow on the bed. Then she waited until the old women had drowsed off for their siesta, and ran out.
She wasn’t coming back. She just had the clothes she had on, and a few little pieces of cheap jewelry Tony had given her when they were first married, in her handbag. She went to the Miami and ordered an icecreamsoda in English so that everybody would know she was an American girl, and waited for George.
She was so scared every minute she thought she’d keel over. Suppose George didn’t come. But he did come and he certainly was tickled when he saw the draft, because he said the consulate didn’t have any funds for a case like hers. He said he’d get the draft cashed in the morning and help her buy her ticket and everything. She said he was a dandy and then suddenly leaned over and put her hand in its white kid glove on his arm and looked right into his eyes that were blue like hers were and whispered, “George, you’ve got to help me some more. You’ve got to help me hide… I’m so scared of that Cuban. You know they are terrible when they’re jealous.”
George turned red and began to hem and haw a little, but Margo told him the story of what had happened on her street just the other day, how a man, an armyofficer, had come home and found, well, his sweetheart, with another man, well, she might as well tell the story the way it happened, she guessed George wasn’t easily shocked anyway, they were in bed together and the armyofficer emptied all the chambers of his revolver into the other man and then chased the woman up the street with a carvingknife and stabbed her five times in the public square. She began to giggle when she got that far and George began to laugh. “I know it sounds funny to you… but it wasn’t so funny for her. She died right there without any clothes on in front of everybody.”
“Well, I guess we’ll have to see what we can do,” said George, “to keep you away from that carvingknife.”
What they did was to go over to Matanzas on the Hershey electriccar and get a room at a hotel. They had supper there and a lot of ginfizzes and George, who’d told her he’d leave her to come over the next day just in time for the boat, got romantic over the ginfizzes and the moonlight and dogs barking and the roosters crowing. They went walking with their arms round each other down the quiet chalky-colored moonstruck streets, and he missed the last car back to Havana. Margo didn’t care about anything except not to be alone in that creepy empty whitewalled hotel with the moon so bright and everything. She liked George anyway.
The next morning at breakfast he said she’d have to let him lend her another fifty so that she could go back firstclass and she said honestly she’d pay it back as soon as she got a job in New York and that he must write to her everyday.
He went over on the early car because he had to be at the office and she went over later all alone through the glary green countryside shrilling with insects, and went in a cab right from the ferry to the boat. George met her there at the dock with her ticket and a little bunch of orchids, the first she’d ever had, and a roll of bills that she tucked into her purse without counting. The stewards seemed awful surprised that she didn’t have any baggage, so she made George tell them that she’d had to leave home at five minutes’ notice because her father, who was a very wealthy man, was sick in New York. She and George went right down to her room, and he was very sad about her going away and said she was the loveliest girl he’d ever seen and that he’d write her every day too, but she couldn’t follow what he was saying she was so scared Tony would come down to the boat looking for her.
At last the gong rang and George kissed her desperate hard and went ashore. She didn’t dare go up on deck until she heard the engineroom bells and felt the shaking of the boat as it began to back out of the dock. Out of the porthole, as the boat pulled out, she got a glimpse of a dapper dark man in a white suit, that might have been Tony, who broke away from the cops and ran yelling and waving his arms down to the end of the wharf.
Maybe it was the orchids or her looks or the story about her father’s illness, but the captain asked her to his table and all the officers rushed her, and she had the time of her life on the trip up. The only trouble was that she could only come on deck in the afternoon because she only had that one dress.
She’d given George a cable to send so when they got to New York Agnes met her at the dock. It was late fall and Margo had nothing on but a light summer dress, so she said she’d set Agnes up to a taxi to go home. It was only when they got into the cab that she noticed Agnes was wearing black. When she asked her why Agnes said Fred had died in Bellevue two weeks before. He’d been picked up on Twentythird Street deaddrunk and had died there without coming to. “Oh, Agnes, I knew it… I had a premonition on the boat,” sobbed Margo.
When she’d wiped her eyes she turned and looked at Agnes. “Why, Agnes dear, how well you look,” she said. “What a pretty suit. Has Frank got a job?” “Oh, no,” said Agnes. “You see Miss Franklyn’s tea-shops are doing quite well. She’s branching out and she’s made me manageress of the new branch on Thirtyfourth Street at seventyfive dollars a week. Wait till you see our new apartment just off the Drive… Oh, Margie, you must have had an awful time.”