Marjorie Morningstar

by Herman Wouk

Those four walls of illusion are: religion, philosophy, sex, and money.

the time when fame and money and a brilliant marriage would burst over her in an iridescent shower.

Jewish light and warmth in the eyes, and

just another West End Avenue girl.

“Why is it, I wonder, that I was destined never to have anything I really wanted?”

shoulder and murmur soothing words. “I’m so alone, darling,” Marsha sobbed. “So absolutely alone. You’ll never know what it means. I’ve always been alone. So alone, so damned alone. And now I’ll always be alone. Forever, till I die.”

Marjorie

in this moment changed her mind completely about her own wedding, and decided to have the hugest and most splendid ceremony she could engineer, instead of a modest home affair.

Now it’s youth for security. When you haven’t got charm or good looks, your bargaining power is limited.”

have a feeling I’ve known you for a long time, and am going to know you a lot longer. I want to ask you whether you’ve had anything like the same feeling, or whether I’m off in the clouds. This is a very crazy and stupid question, I grant you.”

“Look, Marjorie, why don’t we get out of here? A good heart-to-heart talk between the principals is usually a sound idea. I’ll tell you all about myself. It suddenly seems interesting to me, my life story.

Milton Schwartz wasn’t important to her. He would probably be telephoning her in a day or so; and

what difference did it all make, anyway? She hadn’t promised to let him take her home. She was very bored with the problems of being a girl. She stepped into the elevator.

Marjorie felt very much as though she were on the horse which had bolted with her in Central Park when she was seventeen.

Yet how could she have refused to see the dress rehearsal of Princess Jones?

gray-headed little husband, the theremin, the Packovitch girls, Milton Schwartz, and Marsha’s wild tirade before the ceremony. The present moment, here in Noel’s hotel suite, meshed smoothly with the old days—before the break over Imogene, before the brief era of Morris Shapiro.

She was chic, her smile was winning, It was a very gay beginning—”

what was decently indecent for a girl of twenty-one, doing this for the first time?

She could do it; but she feared she might actually forfeit Noel forever.

He had been all too patient with her, too long.

She didn’t want an end with Noel. She wanted him ...

The certainty that there was anything praiseworthy in virginity had long since been ridiculed out of her.

It was too bad the alteration in her had come not from a happy marriage, she reflected, but from an illicit affair, which had just exploded in her face.

But I have brains enough to know that a bed takes up a very small space in a house, and that you don’t spend a marriage sleeping with a person but waking with her.

Maybe I’m a defeated mediocrity salving his bruised ego,

he were so utterly through with her, would he have bothered to take twenty typewritten pages to say so?

but even in those best moments it had been darkened by reservations, fear, and unconquerable shame.

What could she ever bring to another man but a ransacked body and an empty heart?

“But if you don’t believe in it, how can it shelter you?”

Marjorie, though thrilled by the look, was also disturbed and a bit panicky. She could hardly doubt what was coming and she was unsure of herself. After five years, at the end of the long, long road, she was still in a quandary about Noel Airman!

yet she also felt somewhat trapped, almost as she had at the Villa Marlene with George Drobes so many many years ago, in the instant

“Who’s the lucky woman, Noel?”

For five years she had waited to hear those words spoken by this man.

The picture was complete. And now, and not a moment before, Marjorie knew beyond any possible doubt what the answer was.

The answer is no, Noel. I won’t marry you. It’s impossible. I’m terribly sorry.”

He who will not when he may, When he will, he shall have nay.”

she never regretted refusing Noel. Once that tooth was out, the hole rapidly healed.

at night she slept, untroubled by the sense of exasperated futility that had broken her rest during her years of haunting Broadway and battling with Noel.

She couldn’t be blind to the fact that she also was vaguely hoping for something more to come of this lunch, if not with Wally, then with somebody else, somebody successful and interesting, somebody whom she might meet by starting to go around with Wally again.

in bars, in grills, in cars, in restaurants, in night clubs, with men—George Drobes, Sandy Goldstone, Wally Wronken, Noel Airman, Mike Eden, Morris Shapiro, and dozens of others who had come and gone more casually.

It occurred to her too, as the cigarette went from white tube to gray ash, shrinking fast, that whatever subconscious hope she had of winning Wally was not only nonsensical but almost depraved. She had been Noel’s mistress.

But how could she possibly marry him, or even take to dating him again, without telling him the truth? How much of a liar was she? And yet, how could she ever tell Wally Wronken that

she had been Noel Airman’s bed partner, after all? How could she face the moment that would follow the shattering of his picture of her—the one good girl in a world of chippies?

Marrying him seemed natural and inevitable; part of the ordinary sequence of things, like graduating from college at the end of her senior year.

when and how should she tell him about Noel?

Clearly he had assumed she was a virgin; it had never occurred to him to question the fact.

she was just another girl stumbling through life as best she could.

The fact was, she had passed herself off as a good Jewish girl. Twentieth century or not, good Jewish girls were supposed to be virgins when they married. That was the corner she

was in. That was the dull brute fact she faced. For that matter, good Christian girls were supposed to be virgins too; that was why brides wore white.

to turn her face down and cry bitterly. She cried a long time, in an excess of the deepest bitterness and shame, before he shyly brushed the tears from her face with his hand.