U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [418]
. . what hair!" he said in
-175-his solemn voice. They had a wonderful lunch and after-wards they went to Keith's and sat in orchestra seats. Margie was breathless and excited at being with a real actor. He'd said that the next day he was leaving for a twelveweeks tour with a singing and piano act and that Agnes was going with him. "And after that we'l come back and make a home for my little girl," said Agnes. Margie was so excited that it wasn't til she was back in bed in the empty dormitory at the convent that she doped out that what it would mean for her was she'd have to stay at the Sisters' al summer.
The next fal she left the convent for good and went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Mandevil e, as they cal ed them-selves, in two front rooms they sublet from a chiropractor. It was a big old brownstone house with a high stoop and steps way west on Seventyninth Street. Margie loved it there and got on fine with the theater people, al so wel -dressed and citifiedlooking, who lived in the apartments upstairs. Agnes said she must be careful not to get spoiled, because everybody cal ed attention to her blue eyes and her curls like Mary Pickford's and her pert frozenface way of saying funny things.
Frank Mandevil e always slept til twelve o'clock and Agnes and Margie would have breakfast alone quite early, talking in whispers so as not to wake him and looking out of the window at the trucks and cabs and movingvans pass-ing in the street outside and Agnes would tel Margie about vaudevil e houses and onenight stands and al about how happy she was and what a free and easy life it was and so different from the daily grind at Broad Channel and how she'd first met Frank Mandevil e when he was broke and blue and almost ready to turn on the gas. He used to come into the bakery every day for his breakfast at two in the afternoon just when al the other customers had gone. He lived around the corner on Onehundredand-fourth Street. When he was completely flat Agnes had let
-176-him charge his meals and had felt so sorry for him on account of his being so gentlemanly about it and out of a job, and then he got pleurisy and was threatened with t.b. and she was so lonely and miserable that she didn't care what anybody thought, she'd just moved in with him to nurse him and had stayed ever since, and now they were Mr. and Mrs. Mandevil e to everybody and he was mak-ing big money with his act The Musical Mandevil es. And Margie would ask about Frank Mandevil e's partners, Florida Schwartz, a big hardvoiced woman with titian hair, "Of course she dyes it," Agnes said,
"henna," and her son, a horrid waspwaisted young man of eighteen who paid no attention to Margie at al . The chiropractor downstairs whom everybody cal ed Indian was Florida's affinity and that was why they'd al come to live in his house. "Stage-people are odd but I think they have hearts of gold," Agnes would say.
The Musical Mandevil es used to practice afternoons in the front room where there was a piano. They played al sorts of instruments and sang songs and Mannie whose stage name was Eddy Kel er did an eccentric dance and an imitation of Hazel Dawn. It al seemed wonderful to Margie, and she was so excited she thought she'd die when Mr. Mandevil e said suddenly one day when they were al eating supper brought in from a delicatessen that the child must take singing and dancing lessons.
"You'l be wasting your money, Frank," said Mannie through a chickenbone he was gnawing.
" Mannie, you're talking out of turn," snapped Florida.
"Her father was a great one for singing and dancing in the old days," put in Agnes in her breathless timid manner. A career was something everybody had in New York and Margie decided she had one too. She walked down
Broadway every day to her lesson in a studio in the same building as the Lincoln Square Theater. In October The Musical Mandevil es played there two weeks. Almost
-177-every day Agnes would come for her after the lesson and they'd have a sandwich and a glass of milk in a dairy