The Fires of Spring (35 page)

“Don’t you worry about Uncle Klim,” she assured him, but when they hailed a taxi at West Philly she said nervously, “You’d better not come up tonight.”

At the apartment house a crowd had gathered and when Mona saw the gawking people she cried, “Oh, my God!” Then quickly she spoke to the driver. “Right on past, please.”

The cab squealed to a halt on Walnut Street and Mona jumped out into the snow. As David paid the driver he could hear the voices: “A shot! From up there! The police knocked the door down! But what do you expect? He was a Rooshian.” The voices continued and all that they said added up to one fact:
He
was dead.

Mona took David firmly by the arm. “Let’s walk for a minute,” she said. Underneath a street lamp they stopped and Mona stood for some time tapping her high left heel against the packed snow. “He shot himself,” she said over and over. Then she looked pathetically at David and asked, “What can I do now?”

“What do you mean?” he asked numbly.

“Mean?” she cried. “My clothes! They’re all up there.”

“What can we do?” David asked.

“Do?” Mona screamed in great anger. “Goddamnit! Don’t stand there like a college boy. Think of something!”

She walked up and down the dark street and started pounding
her right fist into her left palm. “I could brazen it out and say I didn’t know him. But that’s no good. Think of something! You’re supposed to be so bright.”

David’s mind was working as eagerly as Mona’s and he, too, banged his hands together. Suddenly he stopped and cried, “I’ve got it! Klim’s notebook. I was looking at it tonight. You remember that critic up in Boston? Klim’s been fighting with him again. He had the clippings underlined in heavy red.…”

Mona grabbed him furiously. “You’re positive?”

“I saw them.”

Mona began to sob. “Dave! Dave! Do you think I’d have the nerve to sell them that story? Frustrated genius?”

David took her by both hands. “If anybody can, Mona, you can.”

In a flash Mona saw the possibilities. “You let me talk, Dave,” she insisted. And when she explained to the police, and showed them the clippings, and when they tracked down Klim’s bitter letter protesting about the artist’s honor, it was obvious that another demented genius had committed suicide.

Mona escaped lightly. In fact, if there was a villain it was the Boston critic. His picture appeared in several Sunday supplements:
DID HIS BITTER PEN KILL GREAT MUSICIAN
?

The consciousness of guilt rested heavily upon David. Even though the critical two-year examinations loomed ahead, he could not study, for no matter what the book he held, across it moved the shadowy figure of Klementi Kol, silent but accusing.

Mona summoned him into the city one evening. She had a suite at the Bellevue. She seemed more slim and silvery than ever. She began to reassure David. “You’ve seen how the papers handled it,” she said. “They gave me a good play all over the East, and not too sexy. Frankly, I think …”

David stared suddenly at Mona and said, “We did a terrible thing to Klim.”

“Don’t make a fool of yourself, Dave!” the determined actress commanded. “Let me tell you something, David. To do her best work a girl has got to be in love. And not pretty-pretty book love like Klim’s. But honest-to-God all-or-nothing love. And don’t ever let anyone tell you different.”

“Would you mind very much, Mona, if I went on back to college?”

“You goddamned men!” she cried with sudden ferocity.
“You make me sick! You never know what you want! I never knew a single man who would look at life as it is.”

Mona was twenty-seven then, and she felt greatly inspired to tell David that in spite of her love for Klim, the musician’s death had been a boon to her, for it had forced her to stop depending upon an enervating support; but she took one look at David and thought: “How could I say that to a dumb kid like him?” So she dropped her arms about his quivering shoulders and said, “You’ve got to forget this, Dave. Klim was good to an endless number of people. Once he sent a young French girl to music school, but she ran off with a meat wholesaler and gave up music. That was when he met me. He said: ‘We all hurt other people, especially those we love.’ He said that civilized people were the ones who had learned to hurt according to rules. Dave, would it rest your mind if I told you he knew about you for a long time? He did.”

David pressed his face against Mona’s shoulder and then asked, “Then why did he kill himself?”

“It was coming in like that, and both of us so guilty for ourselves. Even though he knew about us, that was like rubbing his face in it.” She dug her nails into David’s back, right through his coat and shirt, the tips of her polished nails biting at him. “I loved Klim as I’ll never love anyone. I loved him. But I thought that if I ever saw him again, standing by the bed at night, looking at me as if he wanted me more than anything in life, and yet absolutely powerless …” She trembled for a moment, and then David became increasingly aware of the fingernails, and like a different man—not David Harper at all—he pulled himself free and lifted Mona in his arms, carrying her to the gaudy bed.

But when he returned to Dedham late the next afternoon he found that her reassurances had disrupted him even more completely than his own recriminations. Now he wondered not only about Klim, but about himself: “How could I have slept with her again?” he demanded, abusing himself for such an action. I don’t want anything to do with her. All the way in on the train I tell myself that. I tell her that Klim haunts me … and then we go to bed!”

Even this deep disgust had to give way to a greater, for as he recalled events of that night he remembered one of Mona’s explanations: “Klim was good to a lot of people. He sent a French girl to school.” He stopped motionless above the observatory cameras and thought, far away in his
mind: “Klim sent me to school, too. Oh, God! What have I done?”

The enormity of his crime ate at him, and for a while he considered leaving Dedham. He even packed the half dozen books he thought he would like to keep, but the prospect of slinking off without sure knowledge oppressed him and he rushed one afternoon into the dean’s office.

“Could you tell me,” he blurted out, “who gave me my scholarship?”

The dean smiled in the reassuring way that deans and undertakers acquire. “It’s an unannounced grant, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then how could I possibly announce it?” he asked, turning his palms up.

“It’s very important, sir!” David begged, but the dean shook his head. Then David asked suddenly, “If he were dead? You could tell me then, couldn’t you?”

The dean made no promise but went to a locked file and carefully procured a folder. He shuffled through the papers. “Harper. Harper,” he muttered. Then he looked up at David and grinned reassuringly. “He’s alive, Harper.” He returned the folder and locked the file. Then he put his arm on David’s shoulder and said, “From what I hear of your work he must be very proud of you. We are, David. Do you mind being told that all the faculty hopes you will do wonderfully well in your exams? Good luck, and don’t let anything trouble you for the next weeks. Not anything.”

David was astonished at how reassuring the dean was, but as soon as he left the office he saw through the stratagem: “That damned liar!” he muttered. “Why, of course it was Klim! That damned liar wouldn’t tell me because he wants me to do well in his lousy rotten exams. Well, to hell with them! And to hell with him, too!”

In fury at the trickery David spent two weeks doing nothing. He could not bear to see Mona and books were an abomination. Then one day in the Philadelphia
Ledger
he saw the name
Doylestown
in a date line. He didn’t even read the story, for he was humbled with shame. “I’ve got to pass those exams!” he said. “I could never go home if I were a failure.” He did not think of the poorhouse as home, nor of his Aunt Reba as part of his home; his home was a town with towers, and he could never return to it a failure.

Then he knew what he wanted. He dashed out onto the
highway leading past Dedham and flagged down a car. “Could you take me into Swarthmore?” he asked, and when he reached that college town he asked where he might find Marcia Paxson. He was directed to a quadrangle built like an English monastery, and in a few minutes he met Marcia.

“David!” she cried. “It took you four years to get here!”

“Could I talk with you, Marcia?” he asked. She seemed very strong and clean as she stood in the doorway of the monastery, and she knew that David had come to talk with her because she was like that.

“Is it about the singer and Mr. Kol?” she asked. “Were you involved?”

“Well, not exactly,” David began with great reassurance. Then he saw her quiet Quaker face and said, “Yes.”

“Why don’t we walk?” she asked. She led him to a winding path along a small stream, and for a moment he could imagine himself back in the springtime woods of Bucks County. She waited for him to speak, but she was hardly prepared for what he said.

“You and I were pretty lucky,” he finally began. “We grew up in the only town I ever heard of around here that has a real castle. And our town had two of them. I guess it was foolish to waste money building castles, but did you ever see them, Marcia? I guess I saw them in every light and every way there is. When I came to school in the morning I used to look at the red one where the museum is. But the other one was even more … Well, it was particularly mine. I’ve never told another person in the world this, but whenever we had a tough game or an important examination I used to walk out and take a look at that … Well,” he coughed and they were silent for some time.

Then he said, “The night I walked out to see you I got back to Doylestown just about dawn, and I thought I’d seen that castle in about every possible way, but that morning was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Believe me, that was something to see!”

They wandered for a long time through the woods and finally the time came when they had to turn back. “Wouldn’t you like to take dinner here?” she asked. “With me?”

“I’d like to!” David said. “But wouldn’t Harry …”

In the subtle way that Quaker girls have of conveying ideas, Marcia swung her body provocatively sideways and implied without speaking that Harry Moomaugh was no
problem. Then she said, “And after dinner I could drive thee back to college.”

It was the word
thee
that David had wanted to hear, that and his own memories of the castles he had watched as a boy. “It’s good to see you, Marcia,” he said.

“There’s no reason why this has to be your only visit,” she said. “That is, after you’ve passed your exams.”

David actually jumped away. He had come twenty-three miles so that Marcia might goad him back to work, and yet when she did just that he was angry and afraid of her. But as soon as he recovered from his instinctive action he took her hand in his and said, “Marcia, you’re more than a castle to me. I haven’t studied for a month.”

“I guessed that,” she said. Then she added, “But you’ve got to! How could you bear to go home if you did less than you could?”

David stopped and kicked at the spring earth. It was rich with the promise of flowers and it was powerfully sweet. Quietly he pulled Marcia to him and kissed her. “I needed someone to say that,” he whispered.

But before he could get started studying, Mona summoned him back to Philadelphia. They met in a cheap hotel he had never before heard of, and she got right down to business. “I’m desperate, Dave,” she said.

“Are the police …”

“Oh, no!” she interrupted impatiently. “But the Hollywood deal has come through.”

“That’s wonderful!” he cried.

“I know, I know,” she half-growled. “But I don’t have a cent of money. Look at me! Look at this dump!”

“I could let you have …”

“How much?” she asked eagerly. “I’ve got to have some clothes. I can’t go out there like a dime-store girl.”

“I could let you have $260.”

Mona dropped her hands and laughed with a touch of hysteria. “You’re sweet, Dave. No wonder I like you so much. But I got to have about five thousand dollars.”

“Five thousand?” David repeated dully.

“Yes!” Mona snapped. “If I go out there looking as if I need money, I’ll get pushed around like I was a poor relation. But I’m going to land there in style. This is everything for me! Dave, I’m over twenty …” She stopped and added reluctantly, “I’m more than twenty-five, and I’ve got
to land a job out there.” Suddenly the fight went out of her. “I’m scared, Dave. I don’t have hardly a cent. I don’t even have anything to hock.”

She sat heavily on the edge of her cheap white-metal bed and began to bite her lip. She would not cry, but she did have tears in her eyes. “What can we do?” she asked.

David stood above her in acute embarrassment. His mind worked rapidly: “Tschilczynski never had $5,000. Maybe his wife has! Oh, but she’s a Greek and she’d hold on to it in the face of God himself. Joe Vaux has nothing. I can’t ask Marcia. Can’t let her know I came back here after the other night. Her father would have $5,000. But Marcia would surely … Say!” He banged his fist into his hand and cried, “Mona! I know where you can get it!”

“Where?” the actress cried, bounding at him.

“Do you know Max Volo?”

“The big shot?” she asked, obviously impressed.

“Yes. He’d lend me five thousand.”

“Dave!” Mona cried delightedly. “Why, Max Volo is one of the biggest men in Philly!”

“He’d have to know what it was for,” David said cautiously. “It would be bad for you to get mixed up with a man like him.”

“Ho! Ho!” Mona chortled. “You let me take care of myself!”

“You want me to try him?” David asked carefully.

“I’m not afraid of Max Volo,” Mona said evenly. “Not if he has $5,000. I can handle punks like him, just fine.” She shoved David from the door.

“It may take some time for me to find him,” David warned.

“I’ll be here,” the actress said.

On the street David considered what he should do. Volo wouldn’t be in the phone book, and he had no idea how to find him. Then he thought of Betty, with the gold tooth. Hadn’t Max said, “A house on Race Street”?