Marjorie Morningstar Read Free Page A

life. Except for his part ownership of the struggling little corporation and the
     salary he drew, he was a penniless man. Yet he lived on Central Park West.
    “Do you think she’ll be all right?” he said, peering at the brown door through which
     his daughter had vanished.
    “Why not? All the kids around here ride. More coffee before it’s cleared away?”
    “All right.”
    At Marjorie’s vacant place in the dining room was the ruin of the bun she had half
     bolted, smeared with lipstick. “Why is she suddenly so interested in horseback riding?”
     said Mr. Morgenstern. “She had one lesson this week.”
    “Why do you think?” His wife poured coffee from the silver pot she used on Sunday
     mornings.
    “Not that fat fool Billy Ehrmann?”
    “There’s another boy in the party.”
    “Who is he?”
    “I don’t know. Fraternity brother of Billy. He can’t be too bad.”
    The father pulled out the business section of the
Times
and glanced at it, sipping coffee. After a while he said, “What about George?”
    “George, I think, is finished. Marjorie doesn’t know it yet.”
    “But you know it, I suppose.”
    “Yes, I do. It’s a long way down here from the Bronx.”
    “Maybe we shouldn’t have moved from the Bronx.”
    “Now what makes you say that?” The mother looked out of the window, still pleased
     and thrilled by the view of the park.
    “Personally I have no objection to George. A steady boy,” the father said. “Could
     fit in the business.”
    “A nobody.”
    “Well, I don’t like these Manhattan boys,” the father said. “They’re too smart. They’re
     cold fish. I talk to them, and suddenly I remember I’ve got an accent. I can hear
     it. After thirty years they make me feel like a greenhorn.” Marjorie’s father had
     only a slight accent, and the mother had virtually none, yet neither sounded native-born,
     and they knew they never would. “I don’t trust these boys. They look like they’d try
     any smart trick with a girl they could get away with.”
    “Marjorie can take care of herself.”
    “She can, can she?”
    Mrs. Morgenstern had been maintaining the opposite viewpoint not less recently than
     two o’clock that morning while waiting up nervously for Marjorie. This kind of discussion
     went on all the time between the parents. They could take either side with ease. It
     all depended on which one started to criticize the daughter. The father stared at
     his paper and the mother stared out of the window.
    After a while the mother shrugged. “She’s entitled to the best, isn’t she? The West
     Side is where the good families live. Here she has the best chances of meeting somebody
     worth while. We went all over that ground.”
    “She told me all about sex yesterday afternoon,” the father said. “Studied it in Hygiene,
     she says. She knows the whole business like a doctor. She knows a lot more about it
     than I do. Talked about chromosomes, and tubes, and eggs, and the male this, and the
     female that. I was embarrassed, I’ll tell you the truth, and the strange thing is
     I felt sorry for her.”
    “Well, she can’t help what they teach her in school. Is it better to know nothing
     at all, the way we were?”
    “Maybe she knows too much. Did she ever tell you the five arguments that prove God
     exists and five answers that prove he doesn’t? She learned them in a course. But she
     never goes to temple except to a dance, she’s forgotten any Hebrew she ever knew,
     and if she doesn’t eat bacon she eats shrimp cocktails, I’ll bet a hundred dollars
     on that.”
    “This is America.”
    “We’ve spoiled her. I’m worried about her, Rose. Her attitudes—She doesn’t know what
     money is. A wild Indian couldn’t know less. I do some magic with a fountain pen and
     a checkbook and she has a dress or a coat or a riding habit—”
    “I saw you going over the checkbook last night. Is that what this fuss is all about?
     The riding habit? A girl needs