U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [423]
. . . I guess that's why I'm such a good sailor."
"That's great," said Tad.
At that minute Frank Mandevil e 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 straw-263-berrypie from which warm spicy smel s had been seeping through the air of the smal 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 wel enough. He was ful of dope about the theater business. The only trouble was that when they got confidential he began mak-ing Margo pay her share of the check at restaurants and showed her pictures of his wife and children in New Rochel e. She worked hard on the Cuban songs, but noth-ing 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 al right for her, who didn't have any ambition any more except to pick her off a travel-ingman 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 al sum-mer than a chorine on the road. Jerry Herman was sore as a crab when she wouldn't sign the roadcontract. He blew up right in front of the office-force and al the girls waiting in line and everything. "Al right, I seen it coming . . . now she's got a swel ed head and thinks she's Peggy Joyce. . . . Al right, I'm
through."
Margo looked him straight in the eye. "You must have
-264-me confused with somebody else, Mr. Herman. I'm sure I never started anything for you to be through with." Al 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 al day in the horrid stuffy little room with furry green wal -paper and an unwashed window that looked out on cindery backyards and a couple of al anthustrees and always wash-ing hung out. Tad had gone to Canada as soon as col ege was over. She spent the days reading magazines and mon-keying 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 al 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 til next winter. Agnes cried when Margo showed her the letter.
"Wel , 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 mak-ing 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 Vil age Fol ies. 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
-265-take during his midwinter vacation. It al 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 til ten or eleven o'clock at night. Frank lay in bed, his face looking drawn and yel ow and pettish, and needed attention al 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 al over her face. It was Tad cal ing her on the phone. He'd had bronchitis and was going to take a month off from col ege with a tutor on his father's boat in the West Indies. The' boat was in Jacksonvil e. 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. Mande-vil e'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."