NEWSREEL LII 2 страница

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spell it was lovely in summer, the warm smell of the
marshgrass, the freshness of the tide coming in through the
inlet, the itch of saltwater and sunburn, but then as soon
as he'd gotten a little money together Fred would get to
drinking and Agnes's eyes would be red all the time and
the business would go to pot. Margie hated the way
Agnes's face got ugly and red when she cried, she'd tell
herself that she'd never cry no matter what happened
when she grew up.

Once in a while during the good times Fred would say
he was going to give the family a treat and they'd get all
dressed up and leave the place with old man Hines, Joe
Hines's father, who had a wooden leg and big bushy white
whiskers, and go over on the train to the beach and walk
along the boardwalk to the amusementpark at Holland's.

It was too crowded and Margie would be scared of get-
ting something on her pretty dress and there was such a
glare and men and women with sunburned arms and legs
and untidy hair lying out in the staring sun with sand over
them, and Fred and Agnes would romp around in their
bathingsuits like the others. Margie was scared of the big
spuming surf crashing over her head, even when Fred held
her in his arms she was scared and then it was terrible he'd
swim so far out.

Afterwards they'd get back itchy into their clothes and
walk along the boardwalk shrilling with peanutwagons
and reeking with the smell of popcorn and saltwater taffy
and hotdogs and mustard and beer all mixed up with the
surf and the clanking roar of the rollercoaster and the
steamcalliope from the merrygoround and so many horrid
people pushing and shoving, stepping on your toes. She
was too little to see over them. It was better when Fred
hoisted her on his shoulder though she was too old to ride
on her father's shoulder in spite of being so small for her
age and kept pulling at her prettv paleblue frock to keep
it from getting above her knees.

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What she liked at the beach was playing the game where
you rolled a little ball over the clean narrow varnished
boards into holes with numbers and there was a Jap there
in a clean starched white coat and shelves and shelves of
the cutest little things for prizes: teapots, little china men
that nodded their heads, vases for flowers, rows and rows
of the prettiest Japanese dolls with real eyelashes some
of them, and jars and jugs and pitchers. One time Margie
won a little teapot shaped like an elephant that she kept
for years. Fred and Agnes didn't seem to think much of
the little Jap who gave the prizes but Margie thought he
was lovely, his face was so smooth and he had such a funny
little voice and his lips and eyelids were so clearly marked
just like the dolls' and he had long black eyelashes too.

Margie used to think she'd like to have him to take to
bed with her like a doll. She said that and Agnes and Fred
laughed and laughed at her so that she felt awful ashamed.

But what she liked best at Holland's Beach was the
vaudeville theater. They'd go in there and the crowds and
laughs and racket would die away as the big padded doors
closed behind them. There'd be a movingpicture going on
when they went in. She didn't like that much, but what she
liked best in all the world were the illustrated songs that
came next, the pictures of lovely ladies and gentlemen in
colors like tinted flowers and such lovely dresses and big
hats and the words with pansies and forgetmenots around
them and the lady or gentleman singing them to the dark
theater. There were always boats on ripply streams and
ladies in lovely dresses being helped out of them, but not
like at Broad Channel where it was so glary and there was
nothing but mudflats and the slimysmelly piles and the
boatlanding lying on the ooze when the tide went out, but
lovely blue ripply rivers with lovely green banks and
weepingwillowtrees hanging over them. After that it was
vaudeville. There were acrobats and trained seals and men
in straw hats who told funny jokes and ladies that danced.

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The Merry Widow Girls it was once, in their big black
hats tipped up so wonderfully on one side and their
sheathdresses and trains in blue and green and purple and
yellow and orange and red, and a handsome young man in
a cutaway coat waltzing with each in turn.

The trouble with going to Holland's Beach was that
Fred would meet friends there and keep going in through
swinging doors and coming back with his eyes bright and
a smell of whiskey and pickled onions on his breath, and
halfway through the good time, Margie would see that
worried meek look coming over Agnes's face, and then
she'd know that there would be no more fun that day. The
last time they all went over together to the beach they lost
Fred although they looked everywhere for him, and had
to go home without him. Agnes sobbed so loud that every-
body stared at her on the train and Ed Otis the conductor
who was a friend of Fred's came over and tried to tell her
not to take on so, but that only made Agnes sob the worse.
Margie was so ashamed she decided to run away or kill
herself as soon as she got home so that she wouldn't have
to face the people on the train ever again.

That time Fred didn't turn up the next day the way he
usually did. Joe Hines came in to say that a guy had told
him he'd seen Fred on a bat over in Brooklyn and that
he didn't think he'd come home for a while. Agnes made
Margie go to bed and she could hear her voice and Joe
Hines's in the kitchen talking low for hours. Margie woke
up with a start to find Agnes in her nightgown getting into
bed with her. Her cheeks were' fiery hot and she kept say-
ing, "Imagine his nerve and him a miserable trackwalker.
. . . Margie. . . . We can't stand this life any more, can
we, little girl?"

"I bet he'd come here fussing, the dreadful old thing,"
said Margie.

"Something like that. . . . Oh, it's too awful, I can't

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stand it any more. God knows I've worked my fingers to
the bone."

Margie suddenly came out with, "Well, when the cat's
away the mice will play," and was surprised at how long
Agnes laughed though she was crying too.

In September just when Agnes was fixing up Margie's
dresses for the opening of school, the rentman came round
for the quarter's rent. All they'd heard from Fred was a
letter with a fivedollar bill in it. He said he'd gotten into a
fight and gotten arrested and spent two weeks in jail but
that he had a job now and would be home as soon as he'd
straightened things out a little. But Margie knew they
owed the five dollars and twelve dollars more for gro-
ceries. When Agnes'came back into the kitchen from talk-
ing to the rentman with her face streaky and horrid with
crying, she told Margie that they were going into the city
to live. "I always told Fred Dowling the day would come
when I couldn't stand it any more. Now he can make his
own home after this."

It was a dreadful day when they got their two bags and
the awful old dampeaten trunk up to the station with the
help of Joe Hines, who was always doing odd jobs for
Agnes when Fred was away, and got on the train that took
them into Brooklyn. They went to Agnes's father's and
mother's, who lived in the back of a small paperhanger's
store on Fulton Street under the el. Old Mr. Fisher was
a paperhanger and plasterer and the whole house smelt of
paste and turpentine and plaster. He was a small little
grey man and Mrs. Fisher was just like him except that
he had drooping grey mustaches and she didn't. They fixed
up a cot for Margie in the parlor but she could see that
they thought she was a nuisance. She didn't like them
either and hated it in Brooklyn.

It was a relief when Agnes said one evening when she
came home before supper looking quite stylish, Margie
thought, in her city clothes, that she'd taken a position as

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cook with a family on Brooklyn Heights and that she was
going to send Margie to the Sisters' this winter.

Margie was a little scared all the time she was at the
convent, from the minute she went in the door of the grey-
stone vestibule with a whitemarble figure standing up in
the middle of it. Margie hadn't ever had much religion,
and the Sisters were scary in their dripping black with their
faces and hands looking so pale always edged with white
starched stuff, and the big dark church full of candles and
the catechismclass and confession, and the way the little
bell rang at mass for everybody to close their eyes when
the Saviour came down among angels and doves in a glare
of amber light onto the altar. It was funny, after the way
Agnes had let her run round the house without any clothes
on, that when she took her bath once a week the Sister
made her wear a sheet right in the tub and even soap her-
self under it.

The winter was a long slow climb to Christmas, and
after all the girls had talked about what they'd do at
Christmas so much Margie's Christmas was awful, a late
gloomy dinner with Agnes and the old people and only
one or two presents. Agnes looked pale, she was deadtired
from getting the Christmas dinner for the people she
worked for. She did bring a net stocking full of candy and
a pretty goldenhaircd dolly with eyes that opened and
closed, but Margie felt like crying. Not even a tree. Al-
ready sitting at the table she was busy making up things
to tell the other girls anyway.

Agnes was just kissing her goodnight and getting ready
putting on her little worn furpiece to go back to Brooklyn
Heights when Fred came in very much under the influence
and wanted to take them all out on a party. Of course they
wouldn't go and he went away mad and Agnes went away
crying, and Margie lay awake half the night on the cot
made up for her in the old peoples' parlor thinking how
awful it was to be poor and have a father like that.

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It was dreary, too, hanging round the old people's house
while the vacation lasted. There was no place to play and
they scolded her for the least little thing. It was bully to
get back to the convent where there was a gym and she
could play basketball and giggle with the other girls at
recess. The winter term began to speed up towards Easter.
Just before, she took her first communion. Agnes made the
white dress for her and all the Sisters rolled up their eyes
and said how pretty and pure she looked with her golden
curls and blue eyes like an angel, and Minette Hardy, an
older girl with a snubnose, got a crush on her and used to
pass her chocolatepeppermints in the playground wrapped
in bits of paper with little messages scrawled on them: To
Goldilocks with love from her darling Minette, and things
like that.

She hated it when commencement came, and there was
nothing about summer plans she could tell the other girls.
She grew fast that summer and got gawky and her breasts
began to show. The stuffy gritty hot weather dragged on
endlessly at the Fishers'. It was awful there cooped up
with the old people. Old Mrs. Fisher never let her forget
that she wasn't really Agnes's little girl and that she
thought it was silly of her daughter to support the child
of a noaccount like Fred. They tried to get her to do
enough housework to pay for her keep and every day there
were scoldings and tears and tantrums.

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

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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 canary-
bird 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

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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 pret-
tiest 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 jump-
ing 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 el-
station.

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 Man-
deville." 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

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his solemn voice. They had a wonderful lunch and after-
wards 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 them-
selves, 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 well-
dressed 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 pass-
ing 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 Onehundredand-
fourth Street. When he was completely flat Agnes had let

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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 mak-
ing big money with his act The Musical Mandevilles. And
Margie would ask about Frank Mandeville's partners,
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. "Stage-
people 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.

"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

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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 theoso-
phist 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 wait-
ing 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 smil-
ing, 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

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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 heat-
ing 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 head-
liner 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

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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 win-
dow 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

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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. Some-
times 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 maga-
zines 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 look-
ing, and get home all breathless and scared.