The Fires of Spring (21 page)

“With this,” David replied, handing her a roll of bills.

“I can’t take your money, Dave,” she said. “You and me’s different.”

He flushed and said quickly, “Yes! We are different! That’s why I don’t want you to go back to Max’s.” She was about
to explain to him that winter was coming and that she had to depend on Max, but caution told her not to speak.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll stay here tonight. It’ll be fun.” Then, while David returned to his booth, she slipped out and talked with Max. “He’s a good clean kid, you know that, Max. I’m dropping out of the Coal Mine, but I’ll see you in Philly.”

So Max was the first to know—after the Sheik—and before the Park closed the quick little man stopped by Venice and said, “Somebody tells me you’re stealing one of my girls.” David colored and grew furious, but Max ignored this. “It’s a good idea, kid, but I got a better one. Why leave her when winter comes? Why don’t you move into Philly and work in the theatre I’m buyin’ into? What a time we could have!”

Not realizing the extreme inappropriateness of his reply, David said, “I can’t quit school. I’m only fifteen.”

Max leaned against the booth and laughed outright. “You’re too young to quit school but you’re runnin’ off with one of my girls. This is gettin’ to be a screwy world. What’s Mr. Stone goin’ to say?”

“It’s none of his business,” David replied bravely. “Now why don’t you beat it. You see that gorilla over there?” He pointed to the dripping Sheik. “First thing you know, I’ll sic him on you.” He was surprised at his words and quickly laughed at his own joke.

“This whole thing is costing me money,” Max said, not joking.

“Beat it!” David replied, and he was no longer joking, either.

That night, when Paradise closed, he hurried along the canals and found Nora waiting in the palace. “We can turn off the light now,” he said. Outside, the Sheik frowned and then grew happy as Nora said, “Let’s leave it on, at least till I pile my clothes in the corner. I don’t want to look like a ragamuffin in the morning.” David was glad she said this, for he had never seen a girl undress, and the soft ripple of her clothes was a delight. He watched her fold each piece neatly and then turn to face him as she had faced the camera for Max Volo.

“You’re like a cat we had in the barn,” he said.

“If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a cat,” she objected. Then, reaching high above her head so that she looked more than ever like a stretching cat, she turned out the light. The Sheik hung about the palace for some hours until all talking died,
and then he crept away and went to the bed David had arranged for him in the village.

David found that actually sleeping with a girl was much different from being with her for a passionate hour. “It’s like being married,” Nora said snugly, making herself into a capital C inside the curve of his body. But to David it was more than being married. He had never before, in his memory, slept with another human being. The sudden warmth of this body next to his, the smell of hair, and the noise of breathing were strange to him. Nor could he decide what to do with his arms. “Nora!” he finally had to cry, “roll over. My arm’s about to drop off.”

“It’s asleep,” she said drowsily. “Shake it.”

Only fitfully could David doze that night. He tried to stay awake to savor the feel of that rare warmth. Impulsively at times he drew the sleeping body closer to him, as if to make her compensate for all the nights he had slept in his cold poorhouse bed. When she rolled over, her sharp hipbones dug into him and he laughed with pleasure. He felt them and compared them to his own. Nora’s were like needles. Then he felt her knees and could not understand why they were so rounded. He was much annoyed that sleeping face to face was impossible, and so he made himself a curve inside Nora’s curve, and she sleepily threw her arms about his chest and strands of her hair crept across his face, and her knees jabbed into the V in back of his legs, and she was like a warm blanket to his back, and in that position he fell asleep.

If Nora had meant to David only the newness of sex, her fascination for him would soon have worn away; but she became also the symbol of human warmth, something he had not known before, so that when Mr. Stone and his friends lectured him about Nora they always met a wall of stubbornness, for they did not see Nora as David saw her. “She’s a wretched thing,” Mr. Stone said on his last visit to David’s booth. “The whole Park is talking about this and you’re going to ruin yourself.”

“It’s nobody’s business!” David insisted.

“It’s everybody’s business when a good kid makes a damn fool of himself,” Mr. Stone argued. “Remember when you started taking second fares? I told you how you should always watch which way a man was headed and then ease him along. Well, right now, kid, you’re headed for the junk heap.” The gray man looked at David with open disgust and asked for the last time, “You won’t change your mind?”

“Nora is all right,” David countered.

“Of course she is!” Mr. Stone snapped. “She’s a clean, sweet Sunday-school girl. You know that and I know. But does the Park know? Kid, did you ever hear about the dog and the railroad tracks? This dog was hopping across the tracks when a locomotive snipped off the end of its tail. The dog yelped and turned around to see what had happened. Another train came along, whoosh! And cut off the dog’s head. And the moral of this story is: Never lose your head for a little piece of tail!” He stamped away from the booth, and that afternoon the relief cashier said, “I hear you’re all mixed up with Max Volo’s girls. That’s bad, kid.”

David’s only support came from an unexpected source. During the second week of his shameless attachment to Nora, Klementi Kol stopped by to see him. “Mr. Stone asked me to talk with you,” the tall conductor said. “He thinks you’re ruining your life.”

David polished his change board vigorously and said, “Mr. Stone is wrong.”

“Of course he is!” Kol agreed. “He’s never been in love. But a boy who isn’t interested in girls isn’t much of a boy. It’s no good saying, ‘Wait till you’re thirty and some nice girl comes along.’ There’s no good to that, is there?”

David looked up at the tall Pole and said, “Are you kidding me, Mr. Kol?”

The musician looked away and asked quietly, “How would I dare?”

“Then wait a minute!” David cried eagerly. He called the assistant manager and told him to watch the booth. “I don’t care if you sell a thousand old tickets,” he said. Then he crawled out to join Mr. Kol. “I need to talk to you,” he said.

They went to a bench by the lake and the conductor said, “In Warsaw I used to watch families weep when their sons fell in love with prostitutes or actresses. But it never signified. A young boy who has not fallen desperately in love has missed getting started in the world of feeling. At any age love is wrong only if it means nothing.”

“I don’t understand,” David said.

“You!” the musician said slowly. “You must be the criterion of any love.”

“What’s a criterion?” David asked.

The conductor grew impatient. “There’s only one test, David. Does the love you feel make you a bigger and a
stronger person? Do you spend your mind and heart and goodness on this little prostitute, or only your body? Always ask yourself that about any love, for by this test thousands of proper marriages in Philadelphia, or Warsaw, are filthy, terrible things. But if any love makes you stronger and more determined to share, then it’s much finer than most people ever attain.”

David and his mentor stared at the lake. Boats with white sails drifted back and forth, toyed with by vagrant winds that could not make up their minds. The carrousels played
Faust
, and dust, like jewels, hung in the air. David said simply, “I had more than three hundred dollars saved. I don’t know for what. I made Nora take it, because she ought to have things.” His lip began to tremble and the musician looked away. After a long silence David said, “A man came to our poorhouse once … Mr. Kol, I saw a lot of old men die. But this man had a cough and I thought the rest of us would go crazy listening to him. He couldn’t clear his lungs, and finally he died. Nora has that kind of cough …” He lost control of his voice, and his eyes filled to the brimming point. He wanted to rub them but was ashamed to do so.

Klementi Kol waited for a moment and then observed, “If a relationship is spiritually sound, a minor question still remains. Can it hurt you in some other way? Will it cost you your job? Will it prevent you from getting ahead? Might it alienate your friends?
Alienate
means to
make angry
, like Mr. Stone. There’s nothing more difficult in life than answering those questions about a sexual relationship that is spiritually very right.” The tall man looked steadfastly at the lake and said, “You’ll see more men kill themselves spiritually that way than any other. They love a girl but feel she won’t help them to get ahead, whatever that phrase means. And so they make the terrible compromise, and when they’re fifty, they’re ahead … and they are desolate.”

No person in recent years had made so much sense as Klementi Kol, and David wanted to ask him many questions, but he still had not gained control of his voice, and after a moment Kol continued. “I am sure old men forget what it was to be young and to be wholly in love. Not even I can remember those breathless moments. That’s why they give old men important jobs and big salaries and orchestras to lead. To pay us back for the terrible loss we have sustained.”

The musician stared at the lake, and David felt that it was
he, Kol, who needed comfort. In a low voice the boy asked, “Then you don’t think I’m being a fool?”

“Of course you are!” Kol laughed. “But I can’t give you Balzac one week and then deny life the next.” Great laughter was in his eyes and he held David’s hands. “You’ll love this little girl, and she’ll die, and you’ll break your heart and wish that you had never lived, and some day you’ll be a man. For hearts are like springs. They snap back.”

It was then that David knew how deeply he loved Nora. He said, “I’ve talked her into going out to Denver, Mr. Kol. It’s very high there, you know, and she can get a job. A waitress, maybe. Next summer, when school’s out, I’ll go to Denver myself …”

“You’ve taken a lot of responsibility, haven’t you?” Kol asked.

“Maybe we’ll stay in Colorado,” David said eagerly. “Maybe she’ll get well.”

“That’s possible,” Kol said quietly. “But promise me one thing, David. Before you do anything big like going to Denver, promise you’ll talk to me or Mr. Stone.”

“I thought you were disgusted with Mr. Stone.”

“In some ways he’s a very intelligent man. Neither of us wants you to get into trouble, David.”

“I’ll behave myself!” David promised. “And I’ll sure keep out of trouble.”

As the season drew to a close, David worked diligently at short-changing. He must save enough money to start Nora in the West. He added two hundred dollars to the fund he had already provided, and she said, “I don’t need so much dough! I’ll go by bus and have a job in no time.” But he continued to cadge dimes and quarters from the customers, and he continued also to use the Sheik’s palace.

“It’s very damp in here for you,” he pointed out to Nora.

“It was worse at Max’s,” she reasoned. “That was dirty damp. Here the water keeps movin’.”

“You’ll find it good and dry in Denver,” he assured her. Like a schoolboy he rattled off a table of facts about humidity. He was surprised at how methodically he and Nora now talked.

“It’s like I said,” she laughed. “We’re as good as married!” They came to know each other casually, often to sleep without awareness of sex, and always to think of the other’s well being. In fact, David began to think that his love for the
frail girl had worn down, and he began to wonder what courses he should take in high school that year. Then one afternoon the Sheik coughed.

The sound was lonely and gruesome, echoing along the canals. David jumped up from the barren iron bed and cried, “Who’s out there?” He jerked on his pants and leaped for the door, where he met the immense Sheik. “What are you doing here?” David cried.

“I jus’ standin’ here,” the badly frightened moron replied.

“Well, get out!” David ordered, and then he saw the peephole through which the Sheik had observed the iron bed. Instinctively he swung about and clouted the monster above the ear. The big man moved back along the runway and pleaded, “I di’n do no wrong!” The ape-man would have stumbled off except that Nora, frightened by the noise, came to the door and thus stopped his retreat. The sight of the hulking brute terrorized her, and she struck at him, clawing his face. Then she fled through the superstructure.

The Sheik was stunned by her behavior and gritted his teeth, moving ape-like toward David. “You tol’ ’at priiy gi’l!” he bellowed.

There was no way for David to escape, and he cried, “Sheik! Go back!” But the big man, his face smarting more from Nora’s scratches than from David’s solid blow, lunged on. He clutched at David and pulled him into the now-empty palace room. With a crunching sound he tried to crush the boy in his massive arms, but David doubled up his knees and dealt him a vile blow in the pit of the stomach. There was a thud, and the big man slipped backwards. From the floor he leered up at David and mumbled, “I gonna kill you!” He struggled to his feet and dived brutally at the boy, so that they crashed together into the palace wall and ripped it.

A gondola came round the corner and smart-aleck boys started to joke about the mechanical princess, but the girls started to scream. “Look at the fight!” Slowly, inevitably, the gondola drifted right beneath David’s head. With a violent effort, he pushed his left hand against the prow and regained the castle room. The gondola banged against the walls, and the boys riding it began to shout.

Now there was silence, and the gasping moron spread his fingers very wide to grab at David. He caught one arm and ripped David off his feet. “You tol’ the priiy gi’l!” the great brute mourned, as if he were sorry that he must destroy David. But the young athlete summoned fresh strength and
beat the Sheik heavily about the face. Blood trickled from the monster’s eyes and nose, but he continued to wail, “You tol’ ’a priiy gi’l.”