MARGO DOWLING 1 страница. When Margo got back to the city after her spring in Miami everybody cried out how handsome she looked with her tan and her blue eyes and her hair bleached

When Margo got back to the city after her spring in
Miami everybody cried out how handsome she looked with
her tan and her blue eyes and her hair bleached out light
by the Florida sun. But she sure found her work cut out
for her. The Mandevilles were in a bad way. Frank had
spent three months in the hospital and had had one kidney
removed in an operation. When he got home he was still
so sick that Agnes gave up her position to stay home and
nurse him; she and Frank had taken up Science and
wouldn't have the doctor any more. They talked all the
time about having proper thoughts and about how Frank's
life had been saved by Miss Jenkins, a practitioner Agnes
had met at her tearoom. They owed five hundred dollars
in doctor's bills and hospital expenses, and talked about
God all the time. It was lucky that Mr. Anderson the new
boyfriend was a very rich man.

Mr. A, as she called him, kept offering to set Margo up
in an apartment on Park Avenue, but she always said noth-
ing doing, what did he think she was, a kept woman? She
did let him play the stockmarket a little for her, and buy
her clothes and jewelry and take her to Atlantic City and
Long Beach weekends. He'd been an airplane pilot and
decorated in the war and had big investments in airplane
companies. He drank more than was good for him; he was
a beefy florid guy who looked older than he was, a big
talker, and hard to handle when he'd been drinking, but
he was openhanded and liked laughing and jokes when he
was feeling good. Margo thought he was a pretty good
egg. "Anyway, what can you do when a guy picks up a
telephone and turns over a thousand dollars for you?" was
what she'd tell Agnes when she wanted to tease her.
"Margie dear, you mustn't talk like that," Agnes would
say. "It sounds so mercenary." Agnes talked an awful lot

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about Love and right thoughts and being true and good
these days. Margo liked better to hear Mr. Anderson
blowing about his killings on the stockmarket and the
planes he'd designed, and how he was going to organize
a net of airways that would make the Pennsylvania Rail-
road look like a suburban busline.

Evening after evening she'd have to sit with him in
speakeasies in the Fifties drinking whiskey and listening to
him talk about this business and that and big deals in stocks
down on the Street, and about how he was out to get that
Detroit crowd that was trying to ease him out of Standard
Airparts and about his divorce and how much it was cost-
ing him. One night at the Stork Club, when he was show-
ing her pictures of his kids, he broke down and started to
blubber. The court had just awarded the custody of the
children to his wife.

Mr. A had his troubles all right. One of the worst was
a redheaded girl he'd been caught with in a hotel by his
wife's detectives who was all the time blackmailing him,
and threatening to sue for breach of promise and give the
whole story to the Hearst papers. "Oh, how awful," Agnes
would keep saying, when Margo would tell her about it
over a cup of coffee at noon. "If he only had the right
thoughts. . . . You must talk to him and make him try
and see. . . . If he only understood I know everything
would be different. . . . A successful man like that should
be full of right thoughts."

"Full of Canadian Club, that's what's the matter with
him. . . . You ought to see the trouble I have getting
him home nights." "You're the only friend he has," Agnes
would say, rolling up her eyes. "I think it's noble of you
to stick by him."

Margo was paying all the back bills up at the apartment
and had started a small account at the Bowery Savings
Bank just to be on the safe side. She felt she was getting
the hang of the stockmarket a little. Still it made her feel

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trashy not working and it gave her the creeps sitting
around in the apartment summer afternoons while Agnes
read Frank Science and Health in a singsong voice, so she
started going around the dress shops to see if she could get
herself a job as a model. "I want to learn some more about
clothes . . . mine always look like they were made of old
floursacks," she explained to Agnes. "Are you sure Mr.
Anderson won't mind?""If he don't like it he can lump
it," said Margo, tossing her head.

In the fall they finally took her on at Piquot's new
French gownshop on Fiftyseventh Street. It was tiresome
work but it left her evenings free. She confided to Agnes
that if she ever let Mr. A out of her sight in the evening
some little floosey or other would get hold of him sure as
fate. Agnes was delighted that Margo was out of the show
business. "I never felt it was right for you to do that sort
of thing and now I feel you can be a real power for good
with poor Mr. Anderson," Agnes said. Whenever Margo
told them about a new plunger he had taken on the mar-
ket, Agnes and Frank would hold the thought for Mr.
Anderson.

Jules Piquot was a middleaged roundfaced Frenchman
with a funny waddle like a duck who thought all the girls
were crazy about him. He took a great fancy to Margo, or
maybe it was that he'd found out somewhere that her pro-
tector, as he called it, was a millionaire. He said she must
always keep that beautiful golden tan and made her wear
her hair smooth on her head instead of in the curls she'd
worn it in since she had been a Follies girl. "Vat is te use
to make beautiful clothes for American women if tey look
so healty like from milkin' a cow?" he said. "Vat you need
to make interestin' a dress is 'ere," and he struck himself
with a pudgy ringed fist on the bosom of his silk pleated
shirt. "It is drama. . . . In America all you care about is
te perfect tirtysix."

"Oh, I guess you think we're very unrefined," said

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Margo. "If I only 'ad some capital," groaned Piquot,
shaking his head as he went back to his office on the mez-
zanine that was all glass and eggshellwhite with aluminum
fittings. "I could make New York te most stylish city in
te vorld."

Margo liked it parading around in the Paris models and
in Piquot's own slinky contraptions over the deep putty-
colored rugs. It was better than shaking her fanny in the
chorus all right. She didn't have to get down to the show-
rooms till late. The showrooms were warm and spotless,
with a faint bitter smell on the air of new materials and
dyes and mothballs, shot through with a whiff of scented
Egyptian cigarettes.The models had a little room in the
back where they could sit and read magazines and talk
about beauty treatments and the theaters and the football
season, when there were no customers. There were only
two other girls who came regularly and there weren't too
many customers either. The girls said that Piquot was
going broke.

When he had his sale after Christmas Margo got Agnes
to go down one Monday morning and buy her three stun-
ning gowns for thirty dollars each; she tipped Agnes off
on just what to buy and made out not to know her when
she pranced out to show the new spring models off.

There wasn't any doubt any more that Piquot was going
broke. Billcollectors stormed in the little office on the mez-
zanine and everybody's pay was three weeks in arrears, and
Piquot's moonshaped face drooped in tiny sagging
wrinkles. Margo decided she'd better start looking around
for another job, especially as Mr. A's drinking was getting
harder and harder to handle. Every morning she studied
the stockmarket reports. She didn't have the faith she had
at first in Mr. A's tips after she'd bought Sinclair one day
and had had to cover her margin and had come out three
hundred dollars in the hole.

One Saturday there was a great stir around Piquot's.

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Piquot himself kept charging out of his office waving his
short arms, sometimes peevish and sometimes cackling and
giggling, driving the salesladies and models before him
like a new rooster in a henyard. Somebody was coming to
take photographs for Vogue. The photographer when he
finally came was a thinfaced young Jewish boy with a pasty
skin and dark circles under his eyes. He had a regular
big photographer's camera and a great many flashlight
bulbs all silvercrinkly inside that Piquot kept picking up
and handling in a gingerly kind of way and exclaiming
over. "A vonderful invention. . . . I vould never 'ave
photographs taken before because I detest explosions and
ten te danger of fire."

It was a warm day in February and the steamheated
showrooms were stifling hot. The young man who came
to take the pictures was drenched in sweat when he came
out from under the black cloth. Piquot wouldn't leave him
alone for a second. He had to take Piquot in his office,
Piquot at the draftingboard, Piquot among the models.
The girls thought their turn would never come. The pho-
tographer kept saying, "You let me alone, Mr. Piquot.
. . . I want to plan something artistic." The girls all got
to giggling. At last Piquot went off and locked himself in
his office in a pet. They could see him in there through the
glass partition, sitting at his desk with his head in his
hands. After that things quieted down. Margo and the
photographer got along very well. He kept whispering to
her to see what she could do to keep the old gent out of
the pictures. When he left to go up to the loft upstairs
where the dresses were made, the photographer handed
her his card and asked her if she wouldn't let him take
her picture at his studio some Sunday. It would mean a
great deal to him and it wouldn't cost her anything. He
was sure he could get something distinctively artistic. She
took his card and said she'd be around the next afternoon.
On the card it said Margolies, Art Photographer.

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That Sunday Mr. A took her out to lunch at the Hotel
Pennsylvania and afterwards she managed to get him to
drive her over to Margolies' studio. She guessed the young
Jewish boy wasn't so well off and thought Mr. A might
just as well pay for a set of photographs. Mr. A was sore
about going because he'd gotten his big car out and wanted
to take her for a drive up the Hudson. Anyway he went.
It was funny in Margolies' studio. Everything was hung
with black velvet and there were screens of different sizes
in black and white and yellow and green and silver stand-
ing all over the big dusty room under the grimy skylights.
The young man acted funny too, as if he hadn't expected
them. "All this is over," he said. "This is my brother
Lee's studio. I'm attending to his clientele while he's
abroad. . . . My interests are in the real art of the fu-
ture.""What's that?" asked Mr. A, grumpily clipping the
end off a cigar as he looked around for a place to sit down.
"Motionpictures. You see I'm Sam Margolies. . . .
You'll hear of me if you haven't yet."

Mr. A sat down grouchily on a dusty velvet model-
stand. "Well, make it snappy. . . . We want to go driv-
ing".

Sam Margolies seemed sore because Margo had just
come in her streetclothes. He looked her over with his
petulant grey eyes for a long time. "I may not be able to
do anything . . . I can't create if I'm hurried. . . . I had
seen you stately in Spanish black." Margo laughed. "I'm
not exactly the type."

"The type for a small infanta by Velasquez." He had
a definite foreign accent when he spoke earnestly. "Well,
I was married to a Spaniard once. . . . That was enough
of Spanish grandees and all that kind of thing to last me
a lifetime.""Wait, wait," said Sam Margolies, walking all
round her. "I see it, first in streetclothes and then . . ."
He ran out of the room and came back with a black lace
shawl. "An infanta in the court of old Spain."

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"You don't know what it's like to be married to one,"
said Margo. "And to live in a house full of noble spick
relatives."

While Sam Margolies was posing her in her street-
clothes Mr. A was walking up and down fidgeting with
his cigar. It must have been getting cloudy out because
the overhead skylight grew darker and darker. When Sam
Margolies turned the floodlights on her the skylight went
blue, like on the stage. Then when he got to posing her in
the Spanish shawl and made her take her things off and
let her undies down so that she had nothing on but the
shawl above the waist, she noticed that Mr. A had let his
cigar go out and was watching intently. The reflection from
the floodlight made his eyes glint.

After the photographer was through, when they were
walking down the gritty wooden stairs from the studio,
Mr. A said, "I don't like that guy . . . makes me think
of a pimp."

"Oh, no, it's just that he's very artistic," said Margo.
"How much did he say the photographs were?"

"Plenty," said Mr. A.

In the unlighted hall that smelt of cabbage cooking
somewhere, he grabbed her to him and kissed her.
Through the glass front door she could see a flutter of
snow in the street that was empty under the lamps. "Aw,
to hell with him," he said, stretching his fingers out across
the small of her back. "You're a great little girl, do you
know it? Gosh. I like this house. It makes me think of the
old days."

Margo shook her head and blinked. "Too bad about
our drive," she said. "It's snowing.""Drive hell," said
Mr. A. "Let's you and me act like we was fond of each
other for tonight at least. . . . First we'll go to the
Meadowbrook and have a little bite to drink. . . . Jesus,
I wish I'd met you before I got in on the dough, when
I war livin' in bedbug alley and all that sort of thing."

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She let her head drop on his chest for a moment. "Char-
ley, you're number one," she whispered.

That night he got Margo to say that when Agnes took
Frank out to his sister's house in New Jersey like she was
planning, to try if a little country air wouldn't do him
good, she'd go and live with him. "If you knew how I was
sick of this hellraisin' kind of life," he told her. She looked
straight up in his boiled blue eyes. "Do you think I like
it, Mr. A?" She was fond of Charley Anderson that night.

After that Sunday Sam Margolies called up Margo
about every day, at the apartment and at Piquot's, and sent
her photographs of herself all framed for hanging but she
would never see him. She had enough to think of, what
with being alone in the apartment now, because Agnes had
finally got Frank away to the country with the help of a
practitioner and a great deal of reading of Science and
Health, and all the bills to pay and daily letters from
Tony who'd found out her address saying he was sick and
begging for money and to be allowed to come around to
see her.

Then one Monday morning she got down to Piquot's
late and found the door locked and a crowd of girls mill-
ing shrilly around in front of it. Poor Piquot had been
found dead in his bathtub from a dose of cyanide of potas-
sium and there was nobody to pay their back wages.

Piquot's being dead gave Margo the creeps so that she
didn't dare go home. She went down to Altman's and did
some shopping and at noon called up Mr. A's office to tell
him about Piquot and to see if he wouldn't have lunch
with her. With poor old Piquot dead and her job gone,
there was nothing to do but to strike Mr. A for a lump
sum. About two grand would fix her up, and she could get
her solitaire diamond Tad had given her out of hock.
Maybe if she teased him he would put her up to something
good on the market. When she called up they said Mr.
Anderson wouldn't be in his office until three. She went to

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Schrafft's and had chickenpatties for lunch all by herself
in the middle of the crowd of cackling women shoppers.

She already had a date to meet Mr. A that evening at a
French speakeasy on Fiftysecond Street where they often
ate dinner. When she got back from having her hair
washed and waved it was too early to get dressed but she
started fiddling around with her clothes anyway because
she didn't know what else to do, and it was so quiet and
lonely in the empty apartment. She took a long time doing
her nails and then started trying on one dress after an-
other. Her bed got all piled with rumpled dresses. Every-
thing seemed to have spots on it. She was almost crying
when she at last slipped her furcoat over a paleyellow
eveningdress that had come from Piquot's but that she
wasn't sure about, and went down in the shabby elevator
into the smelly hallway of the apartmenthouse. The ele-
vatorboy fetched her a taxi.

There were white columns in the hall of the oldfash-
ioned wealthy family residence converted into a restaurant,
and a warm expensive pinkish glow of shaded lights. She
felt cozier than she'd felt all day as she stepped in on the
thick carpet. The headwaiter bowed her to a table and she
sat there sipping an oldfashioned, feeling the men in the
room looking at her and grinning a little to herself when
she thought what the girls at Piquot's would have said
about a dame who got to a date with the boyfriend ahead
of time. She wished he'd hurry up and come, so that she
could tell him the story and stop imagining how poor old
Piquot must have looked slumped down in his bathtub,
dead from cyanide. It was all on the tip of her tongue
ready to tell.

Instead of Mr. A a freshlooking youngster with a long
sandy head and a lantern jaw was leaning over her table.
She straightened herself in her chair to give him a dirty
look, but smiled up at him when he leaned over and said
in a Brooklyn confidential kind of voice, "Miss Dowlin'

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. . . excuse it . . . I'm Mr. Anderson's secretary. He
had to hop the plane to Detroit on important business. He
knew you were crazy to go to the Music Box opening, so
he sent me out to get tickets. Here they are, I pretty near
had to blackjack a guy to get 'em for you. The boss said
maybe you'd like to take Mrs. Mandeville." He had been
talking fast, like he was afraid she'd shut him up; he drew
a deep breath and smiled.

Margo took the two green tickets and tapped them
peevishly on the tablecloth. "What a shame . . . I don't
know who I could get to go now, it's so late. She's in the
country."

"My, that's too bad. . . . I don't suppose I could
pinchhit for the boss?"

"Of all the gall . . ." she began; then suddenly she
found herself laughing. "But you're not dressed."

"Leave it to me, Miss Dowlin'. . . . You eat your sup-
per and I'll come back in a soup an' fish and take you to
the show."

Promptly at eight there he was back with his hair
slicked, wearing a rustylooking dinnerjacket that was too
short in the sleeves. When they got in the taxi she asked
him if he'd hijacked a waiter and he put his hand over his
mouth and said, "Don't say a wold, Miss Dowlin' . . .
it's hired."

Between the acts, he pointed out all the celebrities to
her, including himself. He told her that his name was
Clifton Wegman and that everybody called him Cliff and
that he was twentythree years old and could play the man-
dolin and was a little demon with pocket billiards.

"Well, Cliff, you're a likely lad," she said.

"Likely to succeed?"

"I'll tell the world."

"A popular graduate of the New York School of Busi-
ness . . . opportunities wanted."

They had the time of their lives together. After the

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show Cliff said he was starved, because he hadn't had his
supper, what with chasing the theatertickets and the tuck
and all, and she took him to the Club Dover to have a
bite to eat. He surely had an appetite. It was a pleasure
to see him put away a beefsteak with mushrooms. They
had home drinks there and laughed their heads off at the
floorshow, and, when he tried to get fresh in the taxicab,
she slapped his face, but not very hard. That kid could
talk himself out of anything.

When they got to her door, he said could he come up
and before she could stop herself she'd said yes, if he
acted like a gentleman. He said that wasn't so easy with
a girl like her but he'd try and they were laughing and
scuffling so in front of her door she dropped her key. They
both stooped to pick it up. When she got to her feet flush-
ing from the kiss he'd given her, she noticed that the man
sitting all hunched up on the stairs beside the elevator was
Tony.

"Well, goodnight, Cliff, thanks for seeing a poor little
workinggirl home," Margo said cheerily.

Tony got to his feet and staggered over towards the
open door of the apartment. His face had a green pallor
and his clothes looked like he'd lain in the gutter all night.

"This is Tony," said Margo. "He's a . . . a relative
of mine . . . not in very good repair."

Cliff looked from one to the other, let out a low whistle
and walked down the stairs.

"Well, now you can tell me what you mean by hanging
around my place. . . . I've a great mind to have you ar-
rested'for a burglar."

Tony could hardly talk. His lip was bloody and all
puffed up. "No place to go," he said. "A gang beat me
up." He was teetering so she had to grab the sleeve of his
filthy overcoat to keep him from falling. "Oh, Tony," she
said, "you sure are a mess. Come on in, but if you pull any

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tricks like you did last time . . . I swear to God I'll
break every bone in your body."

She put him to bed. Next morning he was so jittery she
had to send for a doctor. The sawbones said he was suffer-
ing from dope and exposure and suggested a cure in a
sanatorium. Tony lay in bed white and trembling. He
cried a great deal, but he was as meek as a lamb and said
yes, he'd do anything the doctor said. Once he grabbed her
hand and kissed it and begged her to forgive him for hav-
ing stolen her money so that he could die happy. "You
won't die, not you," said Margo, smoothing the stiff black
hair off his forehead with her free hand. "No such luck."
She went out for a little walk on the Drive to try to
decide what to do. The dizzysweet clinging smell of the
paraldehyde the doctor had given Tony for a sedative had
made her feel sick.

At the end of the week when Charley Anderson came
back from Detroit and met her at the place on Fiftysecond
Street for dinner, he looked worried and haggard. She
came out with her sad story and he didn't take it so well.
He said he was hard up for cash, that his wife had every-
thing tied up on him, that he'd had severe losses on the
market; he could raise five hundred dollars for her but
he'd have to pledge some securities to do that. Then she
said she guessed she'd have to go back to her old engage-
ment as entertainer at the Palms at Miami and he said,
swell, if she didn't look out he'd come down there and let
her support him. "I don't know why everybody's got to
thinkin' I'm a lousy millionaire. All I want is get out of
the whole business with enough jack to let me settle down
to work on motors. If it hadn't been for this sonofabitchin'
divorce I'd been out long ago. This winter I expect to clean
up and get out. I'm only a dumb mechanic anyway."

"You want to get out and I want to get in," said Margo,
looking him straight in the eye. They both laughed to-
gether. "Aw, let's go up to your place, since the folks are

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away. I'm tired of these lousy speakeasies." She shook her
head, still laughing. "It's swarming with Spanish rela-
tives," she said. "We can't go there." They got a bag at
his hotel and went over to Brooklyn in a taxi, to a hotel
where they were wellknown as Mr. and Mrs. Dowling.
On the way over in the taxi she managed to get the ante
raised to a thousand.

Next day she took Tony to a sanatorium up in the
Catskills. He did everything she said like a good little boy
and talked about getting a job when he got out and about
honor and manhood. When she got back to town she called
up the office and found that Mr. A was back in Detroit,
but he'd left instructions with his secretary to get her her
ticket and a drawingroom and fix up everything about the
trip to Miami. She closed up her apartment and the office
attended to storing the furniture and the packing and
everything.

When she went down to the train there was Cliff wait-
ing to meet her with his wiseguy grin and his hat on the
back of his long thin head. "Why, this certainly is sweet
of him," said Margo, pinning some lilies of the valley Cliff
had brought her to her furcoat as two redcaps rushed for-
ward to get her bags. "Sweet of who?" Cliff whispered.
"Of the boss or of me?"

There were roses in the drawingroom, and Cliff had
bought her Theatre and Variety and Zit's Weekly and
Town Topics and Shadowland."My, this is grand," she
said.

He winked. "The boss said to send you off in the best
possible style." He brought a bottle out of his overcoat
pocket. "That's Teacher's Highland Cream. . . . Well,
so long." He made a little bow and went off down the
corridor.

Margo settled herself in the drawingroom and almost
wished Cliff hadn't gone so soon. He might at least have
taken longer to say goodby. My, that boy was fresh. The

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train had no sooner started when there he was back, with
his hands in his pants pockets, looking anxious and chew-
ing gum at a great rate. "Well," she said, frowning, "now
what?"

"I bought me a ticket to Richmond. . . . I don't travel
enough . . . freedom from office cares."

"You'll get fired.""Nope . . . this is Saturday. I'll be
back bright and early Monday morning."

"But he'll find out."

Cliff took his coat off, folded it carefully and laid it on
the rack, then he sat down opposite her and pulled the
door of the drawingroom to. "Not unless you tell him."