Free Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk Page A

was a superb
     dancer, and obviously he liked her company. His wry sense of humor, mostly directed
     at himself, amused her very much. She gave over puzzling about his diffidence, leaving
     the answer to time, and simply enjoyed herself with him.
    May drifted into June and examination week came. Marjorie had to break off the lovely
     whirl to plunge into cramming. Her method was standardized and cold-blooded. The night
     before each examination she read the textbook through with rapt attention as though
     it were a detective story; when there were two exams in a day she read both books
     in one night. Her mind, rather like a boardwalk photographer’s camera, took a picture
     of the subject which stayed pretty clear for twenty-four hours, though it grew blurry
     in a week and faded to nothing in a month. She drank gallons of coffee, ate tins of
     aspirin, slept two or three hours a night, and staggered to and from school with red
     eyes, pale cheeks, and spinning brain. It was a horrible ordeal. But Marjorie had
     concluded long ago that she got the best marks at the least cost of time and energy
     this way. She was not much interested in her studies, but self-respect required her
     to be in the top half of the class. She emerged from the grim week with a high B average
     as usual; and as usual with a fierce head cold, which developed this time into a grippe.
     She was in bed for ten days, aching and feverish.
    Aches and fever were the least of the troubles caused by this grippe. All the boys
     telephoned regularly to ask how she was getting on—except Sandy. Rosalind Green, visiting
     Marjorie on her sickbed, helpfully notified her that Vera Cashman had returned from
     Cornell, and that Sandy was squiring the blonde around again with great zest. She
     also volunteered what Sandy had confided to Phil Boehm, and Phil Boehm to her; namely,
     that Vera Cashman was a remarkably accomplished necker. This was not exactly news
     to Marjorie. She had observed the blonde’s little tricks: taking a cigarette from
     Sandy’s mouth and puffing it, absently running a finger along the back of his hand,
     dancing too close, and losing her fingers in his hair while they danced. But with
     a temperature of over 103, she could do little about the information except work up
     garish nightmares of Sandy kissing, necking, and eventually marrying the blonde.
    Helpless in bed, Marjorie consoled herself with long-drawn telephone flirting with
     the other boys, and with the reflection that she didn’t care about Sandy Goldstone
     anyway, because her future lay in the theatre. The riot of social success had obscured
     for a while the vision of Marjorie Morningstar. Now in the dragging bedridden hours
     it brightened. She sent her brother out for volumes of plays, and for the summer catalogues
     of colleges and drama schools. She read through all of Eugene O’Neill and Noel Coward,
     and much of Shaw. Her theatrical ambition flared, fed by the heat of fever, and fanned
     by the delirium of grippe, which dissipated obstacles and multiplied rainbows. The
     first thing she did when the doctor released her from bed, wan and five pounds lighter,
     was to enroll in an acting course at New York University and an elementary playwriting
     course at Columbia; the latter because Shaw somewhere said that the best way to learn
     about the theatre was to try to write for it. This turn of events greatly annoyed
     Mrs. Morgenstern, to whom Marjorie’s acting plans were the merest vapor. She disliked
     wasting the forty dollars that the enrollments cost, though she offered to put the
     money gladly on Marjorie’s back in a new dress or suit. After an argument she paid
     the fees, muttering that Marjorie could probably be cured of any career by actually
     trying to work at it.
    But Marjorie attended both courses faithfully and did well in them, despite an extravagant
     round of dates, dances, picnics, and parties that went on all summer. She dashed off
     one short