Frank and Agnes were in a great stew when she got home. Tad had been calling up all day. He’d been to the theater and found out that there weren’t any rehearsals called. Margo said spitefully that she had been rehearsing a little specialty and that if any young collegeboy thought he could interfere with her career he had another think coming. The next weekend when he called up she wouldn’t see him.
But a week later when she came out of her room about two o’clock on Sunday afternoon just in time for Agnes’s big Sunday dinner, Tad was sitting there hanging his head, with his hick hands dangling between his knees. On the chair beside him was a green florist’s box that she knew when she looked at it was American Beauty roses. He jumpedup. “Oh, Margo… don’t be sore… I just can’t seem to have a good time going around without you.” “I’m not sore, Tad,” she said. “I just want everybody to understand that I won’t let my life interfere with my work.”
“Sure, I get you,” said Tad.
Agnes came forward all smiles and put the roses in water. “Gosh, I forgot,” said Tad and pulled a redleather case out of his pocket. He was stuttering. “You see D-d-dad g-g-gave me some s-s-stocks to play around with an’ I made a little killing last week and I bought these, only we can’t wear them except when we both go out together, can we?” It was a string of pearls, small and not very well matched, but pearls all right.
“Who else would take me anyplace where I could wear them, you mut?” said Margo. Margo felt herself blushing. “And they’re not Teclas?” Tad shook his head. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.
“Gosh, you honestly like them,” said Tad, talking fast. “Well, there’s one other thing… Dad’s letting me have the Antoinette, that’s his boat, you know, for a two weeks’ cruise this summer with my own crowd. I want you and Mrs. Mandeville to come. I’d ask Mr. Mandeville too but…”
“Nonsense,” said Agnes. “I’m sure the party will be properly chaperoned without me… I’d just get seasick… It used to be terrible when poor Fred used to take me out fishing.”
“That was my father,” said Margo. “He loved being out on the water… yachting… that kind of thing… I guess that’s why I’m such a good sailor.”
“That’s great,” said Tad.
At that minute Frank Mandeville came in from his Sunday walk, dressed in his morningcoat and carrying a silverheaded cane, and Agnes ran into the kitchenette to dish up the roast stuffed veal and vegetables and the strawberrypie from which warm spicy smells had been seeping through the air of the small apartment for some time.
“Gosh, I like it here,” said Tad, leaning back in his chair after they’d sat down to dinner.
The rest of that spring Margo had quite a time keeping Tad and Jerry from bumping into each other. She and Jerry never saw each other at the theater; early in the game she’d told him she had no intention of letting her life interfere with her work and he’d looked sharply at her with his shrewd boiledlooking eyes and said, “Humph… I wish more of our young ladies felt like you do… I spend most of my time combing them out of my hair.”
“Too bad about you,” said Margo. “The Valentino of the castingoffice.” She liked Jerry Herman well enough. He was full of dope about the theater business. The only trouble was that when they got confidential he began making Margo pay her share of the check at restaurants and showed her pictures of his wife and children in New Rochelle. She worked hard on the Cuban songs, but nothing ever came of the specialty.
In May the show went on the road. For a long time she couldn’t decide whether to go or not. Queenie Riggs said absolutely not. It was all right for her, who didn’t have any ambition any more except to pick her off a travelingman in a onehorse town and marry him before he sobered up, but for Margo Dowling who had a career ahead of her, nothing doing. Better be at liberty all summer than a chorine on the road.
Jerry Herman was sore as a crab when she wouldn’t sign the road-contract. He blew up right in front of the officeforce and all the girls waiting in line and everything. “All right, I seen it coming… now she’s got a swelled head and thinks she’s Peggy Joyce… All right, I’m through.”
Margo looked him straight in the eye. “You must have me confused with somebody else, Mr. Herman. I’m sure I never started anything for you to be through with.” All the girls were tittering when she walked out, and Jerry Herman looked at her like he wanted to choke her. It meant no more jobs in any company where he did the casting.
She spent the summer in the hot city hanging round Agnes’s apartment with nothing to do. And there was Frank always waiting to make a pass at her, so that she had to lock her door when she went to bed. She’d lie around all day in the horrid stuffy little room with furry green wallpaper and an unwashed window that looked out on cindery backyards and a couple of ailanthustrees and always washing hung out. Tad had gone to Canada as soon as college was over. She spent the days reading magazines and monkeying with her hair and manicuring her fingernails and dreaming about how she could get out of this miserable sordid life. Sordid was a word she’d just picked up. It was in her mind all the time, sordid, sordid, sordid. She decided she was crazy about Tad Whittlesea.
When August came Tad wrote from Newport that his mother was sick and the yachting trip was off till next winter. Agnes cried when Margo showed her the letter. “Well, there are other fish in the sea,” said Margo.
She and Queenie, who had resigned from the roadtour when she had a runin with the stagemanager, started making the rounds of the castingoffices again. They rehearsed four weeks for a show that flopped the opening night. Then they got jobs in the Greenwich Village Follies. The director gave Margo a chance to do her Cuban number and Margo got a special costume made and everything only to be cut out before the dressrehearsal because the show was too long.
She would have felt terrible if Tad hadn’t turned up after Thanksgiving to take her out every Saturday night. He talked a lot about the yachting trip they were going to take during his midwinter vacation. It all depended on when his exams came.
After Christmas she was at liberty again. Frank was sick in bed with kidney trouble and Margo was crazy to get away from the stuffy apartment and nursing Frank and doing the housekeeping for Agnes who often didn’t get home from her job till ten or eleven o’clock at night. Frank lay in bed, his face looking drawn and yellow and pettish, and needed attention all the time. Agnes never complained, but Margo was so fed up with hanging around New York she signed a contract for a job as entertainer in a Miami cabaret, though Queenie and Agnes carried on terrible and said it would ruin her career.
She hadn’t yet settled her wrangle with the agent about who was going to pay her transportation south when one morning in February Agnes came in to wake her up.
Margo could see that it was something because Agnes was beaming all over her face. It was Tad calling her on the phone. He’d had bronchitis and was going to take a month off from college with a tutor on his father’s boat in the West Indies. The boat was in Jacksonville. Before the tutor got there he’d be able to take anybody he liked for a little cruise. Wouldn’t Margo come and bring a friend? Somebody not too gay. He wished Agnes could go, he said, if that was impossible on account of Mr. Mandeville’s being sick who else could she take? Margo was so excited she could hardly breathe. “Tad, how wonderful,” she said. “I was planning to go south this week anyway. You must be a mindreader.”
Queenie Riggs arranged to go with her though she said she’d never been on a yacht before and was scared she wouldn’t act right. “Well, I spent a lot of time in rowboats when I was a kid… It’s the same sort of thing,” said Margo.