“Well,” said Margo, “it was pretty bad. His people are pretty well off and prominent and all that but it’s hard to get on to their ways. Tony’s a bum and I hate him more than anything in the world. But after all it was quite an experience… I wouldn’t have missed it.”
Frank met them at the door of the apartment. He looked fatter than when Margo had last seen him and had patches of silvery hair on either side of his forehead that gave him a distinguished look like a minister or an ambassador. “Little Margo… Welcome home, my child… What a beautiful young woman you have become.” When he took her in his arms and kissed her on the brow, she smelt again the smell of bayrum and energine she’d remembered on him. “Did Agnes tell you that I’m going on the road with Mrs. Fiske?… Dear Minnie Maddern and I were children together.”
The apartment was a little dark, but it had a parlor, a diningroom and two bedrooms and a beautiful big bathroom and kitchen. “First thing I’m goin’ to do,” said Margo, “is take a hot bath… I don’t believe I’ve had a hot bath since I left New York.”
While Agnes, who had taken the afternoon off from the tearoom, went out to do some marketing for supper, Margo went into her neat little bedroom with chintz curtains on the walls and took off her chilly rumpled summer dress and got into Agnes’s padded dressinggown. Then she sat back in the morrischair in the parlor and strung Frank along when he asked her questions about her life in Havana.
Little by little he sidled over to the arm of her chair, telling her how attractivelooking she’d become. Then suddenly he made a grab for her. She’d been expecting it and gave him a ringing slap on the face as she got to her feet. She felt herself getting hysterical as he came towards her across the room panting.
“Get away from me, you old buzzard,” she yelled, “get away from me or I’ll tell Agnes all about you and Agnes and me we’ll throw you out on your ear.” She wanted to shut up but she couldn’t stop yelling. “Get away from me. I caught a disease down there, if you don’t keep away from me you’ll catch it too.”
Frank was so shocked he started to tremble all over. He let himself drop into the morrischair and ran his long fingers through his slick silver and black hair. She slammed her bedroom door on him and locked it. Sitting in there alone on the bed she began to think how she would never see Fred again, and could it have been a premonition when she’d told them on the boat that her father was sick. Tears came to her eyes. Certainly she’d had a premonition. The steamheat hissed cozily. She lay back on the bed that was so comfortable with its clean pillows and silky comforter, and still crying fell asleep.
Newsreel LVII
the psychic removed all clothing before’séances at Harvard. Electric torches, bells, large megaphones, baskets, all illuminated by phosphorescent paint, formed the psychic’s equipment
My brother’s coming
with pineapples
Watch the circus begin
IS WILLING TO FACE PROBERS
the psychic’s feet were not near the professor’s feet when his trouser leg was pulled. An electric bulb on the ceiling flashed on and off. Buzzers rang. A teleplasmic arm grasped objects on the table and pulled Dr. B.’s hair. Dr. B. placed his nose in the doughnut and encouraged Walter to pull as hard as possible. His nose was pulled.
Altho’ we both agreed to part
It left a sadness in my heart
UNHAPPY WIFE TRIES TO DIE
SHEIK DENTIST RECONCILED
Financing Only Problem
I thought that I’d get along
and now
I find that I was wrong
somehow
Society Women Seek Jobs in Vain as Maids to Queen
NUN WILL WED GOB
I’m broken hearted
QUEEN HONORS UNKNOWN SOLDIER
Police Guard Queen in Mob
Beneath a dreamy Chinese moon
Where love is like a haunting tune
PROFESSOR TORTURES RIVAL
QUEEN SLEEPS AS HER TRAIN DEPARTS
Social Strife Brews
COOLIDGE URGES ADVERTISING
I found her beneath the setting sun
When the day was done
Cop Feeds Canary on $500 Rich Bride Left
While the twilight deepened
The sky above
I told my love
In o-o-old Ma-an-ila-a-a
ABANDONED APOLLO STILL HOPES FOR RETURN
OF WEALTHY BRIDE
Margo Dowling
Agnes was a darling. She managed to raise money through the Morris Plan for Margo’s operation when Dr. Dennison said it was absolutely necessary if her health wasn’t to be seriously impaired, and nursed her the way she’d nursed her when she’d had measles when she was a little girl. When they told Margo she never could have a baby, Margo didn’t care so much but Agnes cried and cried.
By the time Margo began to get well again and think of getting a job she felt as if she and Agnes had just been living together always. The Old Southern Waffle Shop was doing very well and Agnes was making seventyfive dollars a week; it was lucky that she did because Frank Mandeville hardly ever seemed able to get an engagement any more, there’s no demand for real entertainment since the war, he’d say. He’d become very sad and respectable since he and Agnes had been married at the Little Church Around the Corner, and spent most of his time playing bridge at the Lambs Club and telling about the old days when he’d toured with Richard Mansfield. After Margo got on her feet she spent a whole dreary winter hanging around the agencies and in the castingoffices of musical shows, before Flo Ziegfeld happened to see her one afternoon sitting in the outside office in a row of other girls. By chance she caught his eye and made a faint ghost of a funny face when he passed; he stopped and gave her a onceover; next day Mr. Herman picked her for first row in the new show. Rehearsals were the hardest work she’d ever done in her life.
Right from the start Agnes said she was going to see to it that Margo didn’t throw herself away with a trashy crowd of chorusgirls; so, although Agnes had to be at work by nine o’clock sharp every morning, she always came by the theater every night after late rehearsals or evening performances to take Margo home. It was only after Margo met Tad Whittlesea, a Yale halfback who spent his weekends in New York once the football season was over, that Agnes missed a single night. The nights Tad met her, Agnes stayed home. She’d looked Tad over carefully and had him to Sunday dinner at the apartment and decided that for a millionaire’s son he was pretty steady and that it was good for him to feel some responsibility about Margo.
Those nights Margo would be in a hurry to give a last pat to the blond curls under the blue velvet toque and to slip into the furcape that wasn’t silver fox but looked a little like it at a distance, and to leave the dusty stuffy dressingroom and the smells of curling irons and cocoabutter and girls’ armpits and stagescenery and to run down the flight of drafty cement stairs and past old greyfaced Luke who was in his little glass box pulling on his overcoat getting ready to go home himself. She’d take a deep breath when she got out into the cold wind of the street. She never would let Tad meet her at the theater with the other stagedoor Johnnies. She liked to find him standing with his wellpolished tan shoes wide apart and his coonskin coat thrown open so that you could see his striped tie and soft rumpled shirt, among people in eveningdress in the lobby of the Astor.