U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [420]
-256-a baby, Margo didn't care so much but Agnes cried and cried.
By the time Margo began to get wel 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 wel and Agnes was making seventyfive dol ars a week; it was lucky that she did because Frank Mandevil e hardly ever seemed able to get an engage-ment any more, there's no demand for real entertainment since the war, he'd say. He'd become very sad and respect-able 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 tel ing 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 footbal season was over, that Agnes missed a single night. The nights Tad met her, Agnes stayed home. She'd looked Tad over careful y and had him to Sunday dinner at the apartment and decided that for a mil ionaire's son he was pretty
-257-steady and that it was good for him to feel some responsi-bility 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 smel s of curling irons and cocoa-butter 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 pul ing on his over-coat 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 wel polished 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. Tad was a simple kind of redfaced boy who never had much to say. Margo did al the talking from the minute he handed her into the taxi to go to the nightclub. She'd keep him laughing with stories about the other girls and the wardrobewomen and the chorusmen. Sometimes he'd ask her to tel him a story over again so that he could remember it to tel his friends at col ege. The story about how the chorusmen, who were most of them fairies, had put the bitch's curse on a young fel ow who was Maisie De Mar's boyfriend, so that he'd turned into a fairy too, scared Tad half to death. "A lot of things sure do go on that people don't know about," he said.
Margo wrinkled up her nose. "You don't know the half of it, dearie." "But it must be just a story." "No, honestly, Tad, that's how it happened . . . we could hear them yel ing and oohooing like they do down in their dressing-room. They al stood around in a circle and put the bitches'
curse on him. I tel you we were scared."
-258-That night they went to the Columbus Circle Childs for some ham and eggs. "Gee, Margo," said Tad with his mouth ful as he was finishing his second order of butter-cakes.
"I don't think this is the right life for you. . . . You're the smartest girl I ever met and damn refined too." "Don't worry, Tad, little Margo isn't going to stay in the chorus al her life." On the way home in the taxi Tad started to make passes at her. It surprised Margo because he wasn't a fresh kind of a boy. He wasn't drunk either, he'd only had one bottle of Canadian ale. "Gosh, Margo, you're wonderful. . . . You won't drink and you won't cuddlecooty." She gave him a little pecking kiss on the cheek. "You ought to un-derstand, Tad," she said, "I've got to keep my mind on my work."