The Fires of Spring (62 page)

Her carefully painted face brightened. “Would you?” she asked eagerly.

“All right,” he said, and he left the restaurant with her.

For a moment Mom sat silent. Then she slammed the table with her fist. “You!” she shouted at Claude. “Get the hell out of this restaurant!”

“Why?” Claude asked, imperturbably.

“Because you’re a stupid fool, like all men!” She shoved him out the door and then heard a noise in the kitchen. She kicked the door open and glared at the unoffending Chinese cook. “What the hell are you doin’?” she shouted. The cook looked at her with mournful eyes and said nothing. For a moment she considered firing him, but he was chopping meat with a large cleaver, so she banged the door shut and sat down at a lonely table. She slumped forward and studied the pattern on the oilcloth. Finally she groaned inwardly and walked wearily to the door. “OK, Claude. Come on back,” she yelled. As the amused poet shuffled back to his place behind the counter she sighed and said, “Now, by God, I
have
seen everything. A chauffeur! For that lousy tramp!”

Mona took David to a costumer’s who fitted him out resplendently. For two days he carried messages from one expensive suite to another, and finally he brought to Mona the news she had hoped for through all the years. She read the brief contract and saluted the mass of flowers that attended it. Then quietly she relaxed into a big chair and with an almost fragile beauty smiled up at Dave. “Thanks, kid,” she said.

The moment was so much the culmination of a life that David found rich thoughts welling into his heart: From among them all he selected one and said, “I remember the first night I saw you. At John Philip Sousa’s party. You were with
Klim.” The old words were pregnant with power, and Mona’s tense, hard beauty resolved in a placid mask of loveliness.

“They were good days we had!” she said.

She seemed so cherishable at that moment that David nervously fingered his chauffeur’s costume and said, “How could you have lived with Max Volo?”

The singer closed her eyes and clenched the contract, as if for reassurance. “Sometimes you have to take what you can get,” she said. “I didn’t actually down deep like it any more than you did when his money got you started.”

“Wait a minute!” David cried. “I gave Nora every cent Max Volo helped me to steal. I don’t owe him a dime.”

“I didn’t mean about Paradise!” Mona said quickly, reaching out for his hand. “What a kid does when he’s young, that’s his business. I meant about Max sending you to college.”

It was as if the room had suddenly exploded. Mona felt David’s hand tighten, and with her sure instinct she guessed that he had not known of Volo’s surreptitious gift to Dedham. “Didn’t you ever know?” she asked intrusively.

“No,” David said breathlessly. “I … I thought it was Uncle Klim. I almost went crazy when Klim killed himself because of you and me.” He sat heavily on the edge of the chair and Mona felt his hand grow limp.

“Klim was a good guy. So was Max. Really he was! He used to do good things for lots of people. But he liked you best. The way you ran into the fire. Tell me the truth, Dave. There were some girls in that fire, weren’t there?”

The vast ugliness of life encompassed David. Men steal and run whore houses and are buried in a barrel of cement in the East River. Desperate young girls become prostitutes and are burned to death. Girls of great promise sing for Sousa and then scratch their way up the ladder, claw by claw, and from their scratching old actors die and are buried in potter’s field. Musicians of great promise wind up as something short of genius and are betrayed by their mistresses and friends, and shoot themselves. On the mad row crazy Dutchmen who own cigar factories—in their crazy minds—die chained to walls, and outside the snow falls, the snow of indifference and forgetfulness, to obliterate the shame and misery.

“It’s snowing,” David finally said. “I’d better go.”

He rose and stood by the chair. Often, recently, he had experienced the sensation that never again would he see a
particular scene or person. He had felt so on the final night of Chautauqua, when he saw for the last time the good brown tent come down, that night when the Gonoph had asked, blushing, “Why don’t we kiss good-bye? We may never see each other again.” He had kissed her, and it had been horrible, and he had never seen her again.

Once the poet Claude had said, “Poets are simply people who see things two ways. Like children, as if they had never seen them before. Like old men, as if they would never see them again.” There was much to what Claude had said, for now David felt that oppressive and yet explosive sense of wonder: This is the last time I shall see her, and I would have walked a thousand miles on coals to see her now.

“Mona …” he began, but there was too much to say. Then he stumbled on. “I don’t care about Max Volo. I guess you and I are an awful lot alike.” Impulsively he threw himself upon the chair and buried his face against hers. In sweet relaxation she lay there and did not even place her arms about him. He kissed her for a moment and then hastened to the door.

“You can keep the chauffeur’s suit,” she said. “It’s paid for.”

Now David began to experience one of the most unbelievable phenomena of art. He had a novel completely written in his mind. His characters were vivid and more alive than people he met upon the street. The canal and its barges actually followed him about the Village, and he was living at a pitch of emotional perception such as he had never known before. Yet he could not write!

How can it be that a man can even see the finished printed page in his eye, can taste the plaudits of a job well done, and yet be unable to push a pen across a paper or strike one reluctant key? David could not guess.

He fell into a kind of endless stupor and tramped about the streets of New York in the snow. He had never previously bothered about drinking, but now when he could borrow money from Mom he wandered into one recently opened bar after another, explaining to anyone who would listen the details of his book. Even when bartenders, those compulsive listeners, turned away in boredom, David gabbled on.

Once, when he was ashamed to beg from Mom, he stumbled into Tremont Clay’s office and braved the wrath of Miss Adams. She took one look at him and gave him two dollars’
worth of galleys to correct, ignoring completely the unwritten novel. When he took them in to Mr. Clay the tired thin man looked up with eyes haggard from much night work and said, “You look awful.”

David was still partially drunk and replied, “You don’t look so hot yourself.”

“I feel terrible,” Clay admitted. “I’m probably killing myself, but it really gives me a good chuckle! Everyone around here used to think of me as the pampered rich man’s son. Now they can see why I’m president.” He rubbed his eyes and then cackled maliciously, “I suppose you saw where Forward Press folded up. I understand that Ace Publications is on the rocks, too. But not this place!”

The nervous little man fixed his hair, using his fingers as a comb and then said sharply, “Get hold of yourself, Harper. Can you keep a secret? I’m going to need you any day now. Good salary and a good job.”

“Things picking up?” David asked, shaking his head to clear his mind.

“Not yet. What I have in mind,” and the tight little man looked about him, “is that Morris Binder’s spells are getting worse. He may die any minute.”

“Jesus!” David gulped.

“I’m not cruel or merciless,” the editor insisted. “Binder can work here as long as he lives. I’ll give him a pension if he becomes incapacitated. But I think he’s going to die. I’ve got to figure out what to do if he does. How much did Miss Adams give you for this job?”

“Two dollars.”

“That’s fair, but here’s three more. An even five. Go out and get a shave. Buy yourself a clean shirt. And keep hold of yourself, Harper.”

But David took the five dollars into a bar where some men had once stood him drinks. He invited everyone to join him in a drink, and at midnight he was still there, confiding in lisping whispers that it was terrible to be waiting around to fill a dead man’s shoes. He drank himself into a stupor of forgetfulness, and in the frozen morning a MacDougal Street pants presser found him huddled in a doorway, purple with cold. He guided David to Mom Beckett’s, and she threw some water in his face. “So the Bowery bum finally came home! You look just fine! There’s a package for you upstairs.”

He stumbled up to his room where he found a book waiting
for him. It was bound in shiny black cloth and was called
The Black Prince
, by Alison Webster. It contained a short inscription from Alison: “I told you I’d get it all down on paper.” With great excitement he fumbled his way into bed and started to read the novel. Shamelessly, Alison had drawn a bitter picture of her father, the Black Prince. With cold, sure words she had delineated the man’s self-destruction and the gradual erosion of his family. It was all there, the house, the tray, the heroine who fought against it, and the moral dissolution of a man.

Strangely, it was not hard and glossy like Alison herself. It was a strong novel that tried to be even better than it was, and it bespoke a brilliant future. David’s eyes were bloodshot when he finished reading, and his head was hot with excitement. He dashed off a note to Alison: “Only you can guess how happy I am about this. It’s terrific, and you’re going to be a wonderful writer. Hooray! Hooray!”

He stumbled downstairs with his note and Mom cried, “You prime damn fool! You’re not going out still half drunk?”

“I want to mail a letter!” David explained.

“Come in and have some hot food!” she insisted, but David was already gone. He felt a wild exhilaration over Alison’s novel. He felt that it was good to know people who could do what they said they were going to, even if they hurt you bitterly in doing so. When he mailed the note he felt so expansive that he stumbled along the cold streets of the Village and sang a kind of chant to himself. Excited, like an addict of strange drugs, he concluded, “Boy! Tomorrow I’m going to get to work myself! If she can do it, I can do it!”

Then he came to Mrs. Shriftgeisser’s bakery, and the fresh eclairs looked so enticing that he bought two stale ones and munched them on the way back to Washington Square. Half an hour later he was in agony from a terrible pain. He was literally knocked double and was unable to run the two blocks to Mom Beckett’s. He fell in the snow and began to vomit. He fouled his pants, as well, and when a policeman saw his green and ashen face an ambulance was called.

Only the prompt application of a stomach pump saved his life. When he finally realized where he was, he lay back upon the hospital pillows and felt his world come gradually to a soft but irrevocable stop. He was weak and thin and unshaved. He weighed twenty-four pounds less than he had in
college, and his eyes were badly strained. His breath came in short gasps, and he was close to nervous collapse.

The doctors asked, “What did you eat?”

“Nothing,” David said.

“Look!” they snapped. “You’re lucky you aren’t dead. What was it?”

David knew that if he told, Mrs. Shriftgeisser would be arrested, and she had too often befriended him for him to betray her now. “It wasn’t anything,” he insisted.

“It was some kind of cream puff, wasn’t it?” the health inspector probed.

“I didn’t eat anything,” David answered stubbornly.

“You damned fool!” a doctor cried. “We pumped it out of you. You think we’re stupid?”

Later on, when Mom came to see him, he told her to warn Mrs. Shriftgeisser. Mom was proud of him for having defied the law. “It’s always a horse’s ass,” she observed. “Seems a man can stand up under anything but a uniform. Makes damn fools of ’em all.” She talked a lot to hide her astonishment at the physical report. “If you want anything,” she insisted, “let me know.”

When she left, David was alone, even though the ward was crowded with derelicts like himself. He was alone with the perilous thought that perhaps it would have been better had he stayed in the Square with the frightful pain in his stomach, oblivious at last to the cross-currents in which he was caught up. His novel had been dissipated by his own puling indecision. His various determinations had been derailed by any slight external disruption. Alison and Marcia were vague and lost memories, and he recognized himself to be one hell of a mess.

And there was still Mona. Even though he sensed that he would never see her again, she was deep in his blood stream. She was the virus against which he had been powerless to fight. Let the doctors diagnose his illness however they would, Mona was its name. Of her he had to be cured first. She was the fruit of the tree of his young life; he had eaten it and now he was sick with first knowledge.

He had entered the valley of despair, that somber valley which no man who grows to white hairs can escape. For some the valley is synonymous with war, or the great depressions that grip a land and its people, or the ages of discontent and failing hope. They are the terrible valleys in which the spirit founders. Other men seek out their despair in
broken loves or lost illusions or decaying dreams or the petty failure of everyday excursions. Some unfortunates stumble from one valley to another: war, depression, an age of disillusion, a lost love, failure, and then the night. But no man escapes the valleys altogether, and those who claim they do are either cowards or fools.

David, in his despair, could not know that he was sharing the experience of all men. During his first long hospital night he saw visions, tremendous spirals that twisted upward and inward, and he was lost among them. Phantasms of color whirled through space, dragging him along, so that at midnight the nurse said he had five degrees of fever.

But toward the morning hours, those during which Cyril Hargreaves had died, David’s fevered mind recalled a familiar scene that he had never once previously remembered. He was far above the world, and below him people like flies drifted here and there. A malignant spirit reached out and clutched at the flies, pulling off their wings, leaving them to stumble about in confusion. Then the harpy drew about the world a circle of red spit, and as long as the flies stayed within that prison, they could move—wingless—where they willed. They could breed or build or quarrel or leave specks in patterns, but they were free; yet once they trespassed the red circle a ponderous, impartial thumb exterminated them.