The Fires of Spring (48 page)

Clay leaned back and studied the young man with tousled hair. Finally he asked quietly, “You ever submit any stories to me? Under a nom de plume?”

“No,” David had to admit.

“Well,” Mr. Clay said abruptly, “that’s that. Miss Adams!” he called. “Show the young man out.”

But at the door David asked. “Did you say that Alison Webster had written stories for you?”

There was something so quizzical in the young man’s manner that Mr. Clay saw an opportunity to befuddle him further, and with ghoulish pleasure he said, “Come here a minute.” He laughed, and the sound was dreadful, like a pinched-up snicker. Deftly he pulled out a filing drawer and flicked the cards with his forefinger. “She used seven different names. Very imaginative stories of love and crime.”

“You mean she had sold you stories before I met her?” David asked suspiciously.

With malignant pleasure Clay laughed and said, “Sure. Look here, son!” Proudly the little man riffled the cards and let David see one well-known name after another.

“Do they all write for you?” he asked.

“Sure!” the tight little man chuckled. “Not by their real
names, of course. You see, we don’t pay much, but we pay very promptly.” Mr. Clay slammed the drawer shut.

But David had already reached in to see more of the names, and the heavy drawer banged on his wrist. “Damn it!” he cried, and Clay jerked the drawer open. David withdrew his hand, still holding half dozen cards. “I should keep my mitts out of other people’s property,” he laughed. “But these names fascinate me.”

“You’d really like to work here, wouldn’t you?” Clay asked.

“I sure would!” David replied.

Clay jumped to his feet and walked around David, making noises in his throat. Suddenly he snapped, “Miss Adams! Take this young feller up to see Morris Binder.” With a violent push he shoved David out into the pressroom where the cover of
Sex Detective
was being printed. That was the magazine Tremont Clay himself edited, and the girl on his cover was almost completely nude.

Scrawny Miss Adams led David up a flight of dark stairs. At the top she said, “Morris Binder’s in here,” but her words ran together as if she had said, “Ris Biner’s nere.” Then she added ominously, “If you want this job, put your thinking cap on. Morris Binder’s a very great editor.”

She kicked open a door with the nervous gesture that seemed part of Tremont Clay’s publishing house. “There he is!” she snapped, pointing across an incredibly messy office to an immense roll-top desk across which slumped an even more massive man of fifty. Morris Binder looked up. He had gargantuan, sagging jowls that hung upon his soiled shirt. His forehead was huge, and hair grew down upon it. Both his mouth and his eyes drooped at the ends, and when he moved his massive body he did so with ponderous and gasping difficulty.

“Young man to see you,” Miss Adams said briskly. “Boss sent him up.”

Slowly, like a prehistoric animal, Morris Binder turned toward David and lowered his head so that he could see above the half-glasses that sagged upon his fat nose. He grunted several times. “Ugggh. Ugggh. Yessss.” He studied David and asked, “Major?”

“English.”

“Ugggh. Yessss. Wasted years. Who was Henryson?”

David thought he should know that name. His brain began to whir, and he said tentatively, “I’d … say … he … 
was …” Morris Binder looked at him with immense sad eyes, betraying nothing. “Oh, sure!” David cried. “He was the Scottish poet who wrote about Cressida. He made her a leper, and all the evil of the world fell upon her.”

At these words the powerful eyes of the huge man lighted up. David saw this, and he knew that Morris Binder liked him. Wheezingly the immense man looked away so that his eyes were hidden by the strange half-glasses. Then deftly he twirled a long, shining letter opener in the air so that it fell quiveringly into the roll-top desk, its point far imbedded in the oak, “He’ll do,” he grunted.

He indicated that David was to sit beside him. “You’ll be my assistant,” he said. He pointed with a ponderous and pudgy finger at a calendar which had six dates circled in red. “That’s your Bible. It’s your Koran, too, and the Bhagavad-Gita. No other days matter, because those are the deadlines for my magazines. Ugggh. Ugggh.” He bent over and rummaged from the mess on his desk four lurid journals:
Great Crimes
,
Bare Confessions
,
Real Love
and
Rodeo Yarns
. “It’s our job to fill ’em up, rain or shine.”

A sudden clicking noise interrupted, and Morris Binder ponderously turned to study a wavering ticker-tape as it punched its way into his fat hand. “Crime news,” he explained abruptly. Apparently there was little happening, for he ripped the tape from the machine and threw it into the crumpled mess on his desk.

“Run off to the mail room,” he grunted, “and haul back the day’s bilge.”

David returned with a huge basket of brown envelopes. “Dump it right here,” Morris Binder said, smashing a clear space on his cluttered desk. The Manila envelopes formed a small mound, and the immense editor ripped his long steel opener from its quivering position in the oak.

“The imperative thing,” the hulking man gasped, “is not to lose any of this swill. I don’t care whether you read it or not. But the minute you lose any of this garbage it becomes immortal.”

“How do you avoid losing them?” David asked, as he watched the editor rip into the pile and scatter the manuscripts into various piles.

“Memory,” Morris Binder replied. “Here’s the trick. You learn it!” As rapidly as he could, he snatched one manuscript after another, noted it briefly, announced the title to David, and tossed it face down on the floor. His voice came in short
grunts:
My Sin at the Roadhouse
, Carpenter, Oklahoma.
Was Duryea Really Murdered?
Lassiter, Maine.
New Light on the Hall-Mills Case
, Stanley, New Jersey.
My Wicked Stepmother
, Chambers, Wyoming.

He droned on through about forty titles of crime and sex. Then he directed David to lift the manuscripts one by one and to announce their titles. David said,
“Was Duryea Really Murdered?”

“Lassiter of Maine sent that one in,” the big man puffed. “We run a story on it every seven or eight months. Wonderful murder. A nude dancer was accused. We got a lot of pictures of her nearly naked. Makes a fine spread.”

“My Sin at the Roadhouse,”
David said.

“That’s by this moron Carpenter in Oklahoma. Good standard product. Four dabs of sexual intercourse and never uses a wrong word.”

“What do you mean, wrong word?” David asked.

“Lesson one!” Morris Binder said solemnly, staring at David above his funny glasses. “No word can be used that would offend a girl of sixteen.” He rumbled off a list of extremely ugly words, the phrases of clandestine passion and eroticism. “They’re all
verboten. Nicht!
”

“I never realized that,” David replied. “The covers sort of mislead you.”

“That’s our great secret!” Morris Binder chuckled, flipping the long steel blade into the resisting oak. “Nowhere in America can you find a cleaner set of filth than what we produce. An ugly word never appears. Lots of people wonder why we don’t get into trouble. I’ve told you why. High-tone companies like Scribner and Harper and Macmillan. They get into trouble all the time. Because they have high-tone writers who insist on using the wrong words. Why, there’s never even been a
damn
in one of Clay’s filthy rags.”

David looked doubtfully at his pachydermatous new boss. He couldn’t tell whether Morris Binder was joking or not, nor was he ever to know. The immense man would not disclose his inner attitude toward the dismal magazines he edited. To him they were a set of well-established rules, and he happened to know the rules better than anyone else. All over America people lusted for stories of horrible murder and raw sexual passion. And no magazines supplied these appetites so well as Morris Binder’s, for the man had a true genius in using erotic images, gory details and suggestive incidents.

Yet Binder was a graduate with honors from Harvard. He
was expert in music and art, and he was certainly more widely read than anyone David had previously known. His memory was prodigious, and he was a criminal expert often consulted by the New York police. But in spite of these great gifts he worked for Tremont Clay.

On pay day Mr. Clay said to David, “You’re lucky. Morris Binder turned down eight men before he took you. He’s a genius, but don’t you try to work the way he does. Set up a system, the way I do.” The little man pulled his trim blue suit into position and pointed to a set of intricate files. “Even so,” he said petulantly, “I wish I had a mind like Morris Binder’s.”

With a fox-like gesture he grabbed a copy of
Bare Confessions
. He flipped the pages until he found
My Night of Sin
. His quick finger sought out a line: “Then we went to bed again, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s wonderful!” Clay said enviously. “
If you know what I mean!
Morris Binder thought that one up some fifteen years ago. It conveys everything but doesn’t say anything. No court could hold Binder responsible for corrupting youth with that phrase. Do you see how clever it is? Even a stupid person can reason that if he doesn’t know what is meant, he better find out. The peasants write our stories for us!
If you know what I mean!
” The tight little man laughed maliciously as he thought of the numberless morons of America who could be so easily titillated by auto-eroticism.

Thrusting his hands deep in his pockets the little man lectured David. “Always be on the alert for a phrase like that. We print only the cleanest material, but we must be studious to find words that suggest otherwise. And watch Morris Binder! He’s the genius around here.”

It was obvious that Tremont Clay loved his work. His magazines were the best of their kind. His covers were the sexiest, his illustrations the most provocative, and his stories the most easily followed. It was a standard, filthy product that Clay dispensed, and he did so with no illusions. As a young man he had set out consciously to debauch as many people for as much money as possible. He had been vastly successful, for now he published twenty-six magazines. On some days four different ones appeared, on pulp paper filled with specks, with pulp stories crawling with the specks of passion and human indignity. Murder, sex, despair and spiritual hunger marched beside illiterate cowmen, weird monstrosities of so-called scientific fiction, and imaginary baseball games in which
the right team always won in the last half of the ninth inning. It was incredible that a great democracy could digest each month the slops pumped into it by Tremont Clay.

There was not one magazine of the twenty-six that dealt with human beings. They dealt with symbols, tricky words, and innuendoes that suggested erotic events. Not even the blood that filled the crime stories was real. “People don’t want real stories,” Clay insisted.

Morris Binder expressed it differently. He said, “Lonely lives have got to be spiced up with something. If there’s good money in such work, I might as well get some of it.” David heard this and wondered what the great heaving man meant, for it was common knowledge that Binder received only a modest salary. “Why does he work here?” David asked himself.

Now, thanks to Alison Webster, David had both a job and a riotous place to live. At Mom Beckett’s, where Alison also roomed, he had a dingy hall bedroom on the fourth floor. An unshaded light swayed from the ceiling. A faded rug curled up along the edges of the room, and a bleak window opened onto a barren expanse of brick wall.

But there was a warmth about this room that made David think of it always with the bright happiness of youth, for this room was on MacDougal Street, just off Washington Square, and it took no great imagination to see in it the gay ghosts of Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Dreiser, John Sloan, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. But the actual warmth of the room came from none of these famous inhabitants of Greenwich Village. It came from Mom Beckett herself.

She was a big woman of fifty-odd. She was from Arizona, and the vast expanses of that sun-drenched state shone in her expressive blue eyes. For many years she had been a nurse, of sorts. She said, “They taught me how to make the bed without disturbing the patient. That paid twenty bucks a week. Then I learned to make the patient without mussing the bed. That paid lots better.” Admirers had given her various sums of money. Three elderly men had settled retirement annuities upon her, and she ran a restaurant in the Village until the day when the annuities began. “Hell,” she cried in her harsh, desert voice, “if that damn fool Al Smith don’t repeal prohibition, I’ll be a rich woman in five more years.”

She sustained a kind of running fight with all officers of the law. Prohibition agents were no more repulsive to Mom
Beckett than fire inspectors. Tax collectors and health authorities alike felt her scorn, and it was a tribute to the freedom of New York that she was tolerated. “I’ll tell you why they let me alone,” she said to David. “Nobody at City Hall can be sure which big shots used to be my boy friends.”

When David had roomed with her for two weeks he saw her in action for the first time. Hearing a great commotion in MacDougal Street, he rushed down to find Mom Beckett holding a fire inspector by the lapels of his uniform. “I’m sure,” she said in soft, wheedling tones, “that down at headquarters you’re known as quite a little hero. But on MacDougal Street,” and she burst into an Arizona bellow, “you’re nothin’ but a horse’s ass.” She thrust him away from her, and the distraught man was engulfed by hilarious ridicule.

“He’ll padlock your place!” David cried above the racket.

“A pismire like him!” Mom laughed. “Hell, he wasn’t inspectin’ my place.”

“What was he doing?” David asked.

“He was botherin’ the Eyetalian,” Mom explained. “I don’t like upstart shrimps like him.” She paused in her conversation to fling a taunt at the retreating fire inspector. Then she invited the hangers-on into her restaurant for a drink of bootleg.

She was a handsome, well-preserved woman. Her hair showed no gray, and her teeth were big and white. She wore heavy corsets and seemed to be completely laced into a buxom feminine form. David never saw her when she was mussed, not even in the midst of public brawls, in which she loved to engage. Her hair was always plastered down with a thick pomade, and her ample face was perpetually ready for an explosive smile.