The Fires of Spring (19 page)

He sat down and spoke very earnestly with David. “When you are at home with Immanuel Kant and Beethoven and Rubens and Thomas Jefferson … Then you’re living.” He paused and studied the placid lake where lovers were rowing, and he said, “You haven’t much time, David. You don’t know Mozart or Tschaikowsky. I’ll wager you haven’t read Turgenev or Goethe. I suppose you don’t even know Balzac?”

“He’s a writer, isn’t he?” David asked.

“He’s no one thing, Balzac. He’s an architect and a musician and a poet. Let’s call him a novelist. He and Thomas Hardy …” Suddenly the musician slapped his forehead. “I’ll bet you don’t even know Hardy, do you?” He brought David a copy of
Jude the Obscure
, and if David had once imagined himself to be Hector, he now actually was Jude. With breathless anxiety he read the book and shuddered. He learned the meaning of the terrible jest the new fat man played at the poorhouse. This fat man sat in the long hall as the men came up from dinner, and he said in a sepulchral voice as each inmate walked past, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” Then he bellowed and slapped his leg and roared at his own humor. When David finished reading
Jude
, he thought the fat man’s joke obscene.

He said to Klementi, “The book gives me an awful feeling inside, as if Jude were I.”

“He is you,” Kol replied. “Only by a miracle have you been saved. Don’t you understand? If you were a poorhouse boy in Poland, or Russia, or even France … God, your life would be desolate, now and forever. In America, things are … well … different.”

“Are you an American?” David asked.

Kol looked away and after a long time said, “Artists are citizens of everywhere.”

In August the red-bound novels of Balzac began to appear as Klementi Kol promised they would. The first one was a curious thing, ill suited for a boy to read:
Memoirs of Two Young Married Women
. For a brief moment David thought it was merely another cheap love story bound in hard covers. He found to his intense delight that Balzac was never
merely
anything, not merely a love story nor merely an adventure story nor merely an analysis. Balzac was a complete interpretation of life, and the great novelist’s tortured style was much to David’s liking. From the very first chapter the boy sensed that here was a writer whose words could be lived.

The second Balzac novel Klementi sent him was in most ways the finest book David read as a boy:
The Quest of the Absolute
. It told about a half-demented Dutchman trying to make the philosopher’s stone. Clays was his name and he lived in Douai. Into his fruitless search he poured all of his resources, and found nothing. As David read the story he was transfixed with the reality of it. He wondered: “How could Balzac write this if he did not know my poorhouse?” Yet there it was, in the simple grandeur of that story: all that David had felt about the meaning of life up to that time. Clays was so much like Old Daniel that David sometimes had a wonderful feeling of the old man’s continued existence.

One aspect of the story David could not understand. Clays was attached to certain paintings by Dutch masters. It was as if the paintings had living personalities. He spoke to Klementi about this one day. “Why was the selling of those paintings such a tragedy?” he asked.

“Haven’t you ever seen paintings?” the musician asked.

“I have a Rembrandt in my room,” David replied.

“But the real thing?” Klementi asked. “No? Then we must go!” He made David hire a substitute for one day. That morning he met the boy at Paradise and took him into Philadelphia on a Route 55 trolley. At the end of the line the musician and his guest walked up to Broad Street and down that ample thoroughfare. “This is where I play music in the wintertime,” Klementi said. David looked at the red Academy of Music. On a poster he saw Stokowski’s picture. He thought the face looked interesting. Another poster showed Klementi Kol himself, thin and fiery, about to play
his violin. Farther down Broad Street Klementi stopped at a dirty, ordinary-looking graystone house. “This is it!” he said with some excitement.

“What’s here?” David inquired.

“This is the Johnson Collection!” Klementi said in the manner of a priest indicating a fragment of the true cross.

They climbed a short flight of stone steps and went into a dark hall. A very old man in a blue suit hurried up, nodded to Klementi, and clapped his hands. Slowly another old man pulled some cords and turned on the lights. About him, in rich, crowded display, hung the gems of the Johnson Collection.

The first original picture that David ever saw was a small, brightly lighted scene of a drunken man on a donkey which was being urged on by three fauns with men’s bodies and horses’ hoofs. They were by a seashore. A funny little boat stood behind the men, and on the opposite shore appeared a tiny town of towers.

“Oh!” David cried. “That’s just like the town Daniel told me about. That’s in Italy, isn’t it?” He hurried up to the picture. Klementi smiled and thought: “That lovely Cima, golden and happy through the centuries, spelling its charm again.”

“How do you say that name?” David asked.

“Cheemah dah Konayleeahno,” Klementi replied. In the dark museum, cluttered with the glories of Europe, the musician gave David his first lesson in Italian, showed him the Rembrandts and the Rubenses, the Botticelli, the Breughel, and the superb Flemish primitives.

“Which one do you like best?” David asked.

“Well, most people say that very small Van Eyck is the gem of the collection. I don’t like it much.”

“I don’t either. It’s too small.”

Klementi smiled. “I think I prefer the one you saw first. It’s such a happy thing! Before concerts I come down here to look at it and I feel deep and happy all over!”

“You mean the one I liked? That’s yours, too?”

“Not exactly,” Klementi said. “I waver. Really, I guess it’s the Crivelli.” He led David upstairs to a dark room. The old attendant followed them and turned on the lights. “This one,” Klementi said.

David stood before a beautifully decorated picture in which two grief-stricken baby angels mourned for the dead Christ they held between them. The agony of the scene was so
apparent and the crucifixion of Christ so terribly visible in that gaunt body that David could say nothing. He and the musician looked at the masterpiece. The boy needed not one word of art instruction, none of the jargon or the cant of painting. This was a superb picture, a terrifying yet glorious thing, satisfying to the point of overflowing.

“Can anybody come in here?” David asked. “They knew you.”

“Certainly anyone can come in!” Klementi said. “It’s a gift to all the people of Philadelphia.”

David looked around the room. There was the dark and speckled Guardi, the lusty Wouwermans, the Signorelli, and the calm beauty of Cuyp. “Oh!” he cried. “Those are the painters that Clays had, aren’t they? Cuyp was one of them!”

For almost two months Mr. Stone did not speak to David. The austere short-change artist was still outraged that David should have brought a prostitute into the middle of his party, and he would not even nod aloofly to David as he did to the other cashiers. Finally David said to himself. “I’ve been a damned fool. I’ll go apologize.”

But Mr. Stone saw him first and said, “Hello, kid. I’m sorry about that night. How’s a poorhouse kid supposed to know?” He explained that for thousands of years men have known two kinds of women—and have treasured each—“but a wise man never mixes them.”

“I don’t bother with Nora any more,” David said.

“You’re wise,” Mr. Stone replied, and then so suddenly that David guessed how much the lonely man had missed him, the cashier said, “I’ll tell you what, kid. I’ve never told anyone the real tricks of short-changing bills. How’d you like to work with me for a day or two?” It was arranged in the head office, and David sat with the icy, gentleman ticket-seller.

“The government makes bills so that smart men like you and me can grow rich,” Mr. Stone explained. “Everytime a boob lays down a big bill, make believe it’s a one and keep the change for yourself.”

“I try to,” David replied.

“Ah, but you have no system. Work out an iron-clad routine. If a man places any kind of a bill larger than a one before you, give him the correct small change at once and try to shoo him on.”

“I can do that,” David said with determination.

“That’s what I mean, kid,” the gray-haired man said with
the only enthusiasm he ever showed, a slight tightening of his eyelids. “I almost came over to see you last month … To tell you that if you hadn’t of had guts enough to pick up that whore when you saw we didn’t want you to, I’d of had no respect for you. I could of bashed your brains in, but I admired you, at the same time.”

“I sort of felt she was my friend,” David explained.

Mr. Stone ignored him and said, “You’re a good, steely-nerved kid.” He then briefed David on ways to defraud the boobs. “Confidentially,” he whispered, “I make about two hundred dollars a week on bills.”

David applied himself to Mr. Stone’s theories. Like all other cashiers he found the two-dollar bills to be the short-changer’s delight. Even customers who habitually tore off the corners of such bills nevertheless forgot they had them. David got a glint in his eye whenever he saw one of the lucky twos.

He concentrated so upon his evil artistry that he was able to forget Nora. Sometimes he saw her straggling through the Park. Once she stopped by his booth and asked, “Your high-class friends tell you to stay away? I’m sorry, kid. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.” David treated her as if she were a customer complaining about short change.

“That’s all right, Nora,” he said, but when she was gone he was appalled at himself for having spoken so abruptly.

He forgot her next morning when it was announced that henceforth the Company would install change-making machines for each cashier. Coins rolled from the machines into a metallic tray with enough clatter to remind even the most forgetful customer of his money. Mr. Stone met David at lunch and reasoned, “It should help with the bills.” He moved his machine far to the left so that customers would have to reach in the direction of their own motion. His theory was correct. Grabbing for their noisy nickels and dimes did divert attention from the bills. Mr. Stone said he was making more money with the machine than without it.

Max Volo studied the new system for two days and then slipped into David’s booth with a completely different angle. “It’s sensational!” he exploded. “To you I’m giving it free for a workout.” Deftly he filed away two spots in the coin chute. Into these spots he rested a quarter and a dime. Then he was ready.

“Watch this woman!” he cried. He short-changed her a dime and a quarter.

“That’s not the right change!” she whined.

“It’s stuck again!” Max said patiently. “Knock the chute right there.” The woman did so and the dime rolled down. Happily, she picked it up and smiled at Volo. When she was gone, Max flipped a quarter into his pocket.

“If she still squawks about the quarter, why you let her knock the other side of the chute!” It was uncanny, the way Max had the machine rigged. The special dime and quarter never rolled loose, and only one could be dislodged at a time. David worked the system all one day, and he was astonished at how often a man who had been short-changed thirty-five cents would be as pleased as a child when he was permitted to recover the dime all by himself.

Max Volo sold the idea to forty-three cashiers for $10 apiece. Mr. Stone didn’t buy. He had figured it out for himself the second day.

Preoccupied with art and music and reading and short-changing, David would have kept his promise not to see Nora if it had not been for the Sheik. At the Canals of Venice the cashier was caught selling old tickets, and David was promoted to the second-best job in Paradise. He moved his
PLEASE
sign to the new box and lamented to Mr. Stone, “I notice whenever a guy sells tickets twice he lets his board go to pieces.” Mr. Stone laughed and said that so far as he was concerned the easiest way to anything was always the poorest.

The Sheik was a low-grade moron who hauled gondolas from the low level of the Canal up to the high level where the passengers climbed aboard. The Sheik was powerful, with heavy eyebrows and a guttural moan in which few words could be distinguished. The men at Venice had to watch the Sheik, for the moron delighted to help young girls out of the gondolas, but he grabbed their arms too tightly and had to be kept below on the lift, where he had worked for eighteen years.

David first spoke to him at a taffy machine, where the Sheik stood watching the mechanical arms twisting the sweet burden of mint and honey. “My God, ’at smells good!” the monster drooled. He sniffed the air like a dog.

“Would you like me to get you some?” David asked.

“Fanks,” the Sheik slobbered. “I jus’ like to smell. Hurts ma toof,” he explained, disclosing a jagged molar.

“Then we’ll have a drink,” David suggested. They had two
loganberries, and the hulking man clapped his hand on David’s shoulder.

“I like you,” he grunted. “How ’bout you get me job up front. I like to he’p the priiy gi’ls.”

But the Sheik was kept below. Occasionally David rode with him through the dark papier-mǎché scenes of Venice. The ride was distinguished because the gondolas drifted noiselessly past animated scenes in which mechanical peasants kissed dairymaids who kicked one leg high in the air. There was a palace, too, labeled in big letters
THE DOGES PALACE
. David often wondered where the apostrophe should be put, but most customers saw only the mechanical princess who blew kisses to each gondola. She was the one the Sheik got into trouble with.

One day, when there were few people in Paradise, David and some handlers rode the canals to check on leakage. As their gondola swung around a corner leading to the palace, the inspecting party looked up in disgust. In a bestial, indecent manner the Sheik was making love to the mechanical princess.

He was not fired. He was half-crazy, true, but he was also very strong and it would take two men to replace him. He was made to buy a new dress for the princess, and he was teased a great deal. One of the men brought him a little doll to play with. He grinned and kept hauling the heavy gondolas onto the lift.