Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk Page B

elderly people. Marjorie surmised they
     were rich by their fine clothes, the strange dry twang of their voices, and the champagne
     buckets flanking their table.
    George tried to order filet of sole. But the headwaiter recommended the house specialty,
     roast Long Island duckling, with such bland patience that George was crushed. “All
     right then, duck for two. And champagne,” he added belligerently.
    “Yes, sair. Piper Heidsieck, sair? Mumm’s, sair?”
    “Just any good champagne.”
    “Very good sair, Mr. Taub.”
    Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour went by. No food came. George’s lower
     jaw lolled open, his lip pulled in over the teeth. He said to Marjorie, “I haven’t
     had anything to eat since breakfast. I’m dying.” He pounded his glass with a knife
     and demanded service, glaring like a cornered animal at the headwaiter. With pleasant
     deference, the man explained that at the Villa Marlene everything was cooked to order.
     George asked for some rolls and butter, some salad, anything. “Right away now, sair.”
     More time went by. The people at the next table, finishing their dessert and coffee,
     were having a lively argument as to whether President Roosevelt was a criminal or
     just a lunatic. “Franklin is a deeply mediocre person, that’s all,” said one withered
     little man with a hairy mole on his chin, who was leaning back smoking a long cigar.
     “He was mediocre when we were working together in the Navy Department, and he’s still
     mediocre.” George turned a fork over and over, snuffling, and Marjorie gnawed a knuckle.
    Forty-five minutes after they had been seated, the waiter brought two sizzling small
     ducks, a basket of French bread, salad, and vegetables. While he fussed over the vegetables
     the headwaiter came with glittering carving instruments and artistically dismembered
     the fowls. Meantime Marjorie and George wolfed up most of the bread with indecent
     speed. The headwaiter finished carving the birds and handed the table waiter a platter
     full of little wings, thighs, breasts, and legs. He then walked off to the kitchen
     with the two duck carcasses, which were covered with meat; evidently at the Villa
     Marlene it was bad form to eat the body of a duck. Marjorie groaned, “Good God, make
     him bring those ducks back. All that meat—” George merely made a gobbling noise, his
     mouth full of bread, his eyes on the meat that remained.
    But almost immediately—the transformation took no longer than the devouring of the
     food and the drinking of a couple of glasses of champagne—the look of everything changed.
     The headwaiter, leaning in the doorway with his menus, no longer seemed to Marjorie
     a bullying snob, but a genuine jolly host, rosy-faced and beaming, an innkeeper out
     of Dickens. The food was lovely, marvelous, the best she had ever eaten. The Villa
     Marlene really was charming, after all, with its wallpaper of pink French courtiers
     dancing a minuet, its dim orange lights, its lilac-scented air. The rich people at
     the next table were elegant aristocrats of the old school, and it was delightful to
     be dining so near them. George’s spirits came back too. His spine straightened, color
     returned to his cheek, and liveliness to his eye. He lit a cigar and sipped his champagne,
     leaning back with one elbow on a chair arm, in the exact pose of the old man who thought
     that Franklin was deeply mediocre. Marjorie decided that George had a sensitive handsomeness
     far surpassing the magazine-cover good looks of the college boys (who had left more
     than an hour ago). She drank several glasses of champagne, and began to feel mightily
     exhilarated.
    “Everything all right?” said George, squinting through his cigar smoke.
    “Everything’s divine,” said Marjorie. The headwaiter filled their glasses with the
     last of the champagne and put the bottle neck down in the bucket.
    “Thank you, madame.” He bowed. “Some brandy, sair, Mr.