The Fires of Spring (60 page)

“Ha ha!” David laughed. The gossip was encouraged.

“So we all think her husband, that’s Harry Moomaugh, the great athalete, gave her the gate. And I don’t know a finer fellow than Harry Moomaugh.”

Like one of Mona’s habitués, David leaned on the counter and asked, “What’ya make of it? These rumors, I mean?”

“My personal opinion,” the clerk whispered, “is that it’s a judgment. I ain’t a religious man, exactly, but I think it’s God’s judgment. Yessir, them Paxsons was always high and mighty.” He learned back with a self-satisfied air, his elbows resting on syrup jars. “You can quote me as sayin’ that this here business has really slowed them Paxsons down to a walk.”

David tossed the man a nickel. “What’s Moomaugh doing?” he asked.

“He’s courtin’ a decent girl.”

Something in the way the tall man grinned infuriated David. With great asperity he asked, “You went to school with the Paxson girl, didn’t you?”

“Why yes,” the clerk admitted.

“And you were always in love with her, weren’t you?”

“Well …”

“And she never gave you a tumble, did she?”

“Well …”

Quickly David reached across the counter and grabbed the clerk by the neck. “I oughta paste you!”

The store manager hurried up. “What’s wrong?” he cried.

David shoved the clerk away and said, “You oughta wash his mouth out with soap. He’s been a bad boy.”

The clerk quickly recovered his footing and smiled. “I’ll tell the people you were in,” he said. “You’d be the circus handyman, wouldn’t you?” The store manager began to laugh, and David stumbled out of the store and across the bridge.

He bummed his way back to New York. For most of the trip he was in a kind of daze, but when he passed through the Holland Tunnel and reached the ugly and familiar streets of New York, a great energy possessed him, and he rushed immediately to Morris Binder’s and begged the big man to let him use the typewriter. “I hocked mine,” he said.

Without stopping he hammered out fifteen pages of his novel, and on every page the golden glory of Bucks County and the canal transfused the words. At last he was started! The opening words of his book rushed forth exactly as he had planned them months before:

Whenever the distant horns sounded, I ran to the top of the hill to watch my beloved barges drift down the canal. Although I was twelve and had many chores, it was my chief pleasure to see the snout-nosed boats come up to the locks and mysteriously rise and fall. But on this day the barge was different, and it changed my life forever. It was red-nosed, as if it had come from a bleeding fight, and on its prow stood a man with one leg, watching the mules. Behind him was a deckhouse, and at the door stood a young girl of eleven. I remember that she wore her hair in pigtails, and that was my first sight of Lucia Berry
.

Four times David wrote to Marcia and each time the
letter was unanswered. He had the uncharitable suspicion that perhaps the Paxsons had sequestered his letters, so he borrowed money from Mom and called Solebury. The operator said, “The Paxsons are out of town. I don’t know when they’ll be back.”

In anger and confusion he returned to his writing, working at Morris Binder’s long hours each day. Twice he was banging at the typewriter when the huge editor rose for breakfast. “What is it, David?” the fat man inquired.

“It’s a book,” David said. Like a pregnant woman, he felt embarrassed to talk about the ideas he was carrying. He felt that too much talk might bring his offspring bad luck.

One night Morris Binder said, “Your young friend seems to be doing all right with her gangster!” And he showed David a clipping from one of the more lurid newspapers. It showed Mona Meigs looking back over her shoulder at a photographer. Max Volo was speaking to a tall, thin man. The caption asked whether it was true that Philadelphia’s Max Volo was going to muscle in on the slot-machine racket in New York?

David did not comment on the picture. He felt that Mona Meigs was gone permanently from his life. He still trusted in her ultimate success; in fact her success would be sweet to him, just as Alison’s success in writing would be pleasing, for he felt a proprietary interest in his friends. But he hoped that the lonely days when he sought refuge with Mona were past.

He worked hard that beautiful September evening. Morris Binder played Beethoven, softly but with all seven horns, and the night grew splendid with tired eyes and ears heavy with sound. The delight was shattered, however, by a scream more frightful than any David had yet heard. For a moment he sat frozen at the typewriter, and then Miss Adams burst into the room and caught up the head of the stricken man.

It was a long time before she could bring him under control, and there was copious blood upon her hands when she did. This she ignored, rocking back and forth with the huge head in her arms, murmuring, “Poor man! He’s getting worse.”

“Is there anything I can do?” David inquired.

“You can get out!” the gray, combed woman cried.

So David left, and when he entered the moonlit Square where lovers grasped for autumn as if it were spring, he thought with dismay of the novel he had left unboxed on
Morris Binder’s bed. He was constrained to run back for it, but decided that doing so would only agitate Miss Adams more. He would get it in the morning, but even before he woke there was a rude banging on his door. At first he could not recall where he was, and then a small boy from Tremont Clay’s popped his head in the door and cried, “They want you at the office right away!”

David shaved in a hurry, while the little boy stood first on one foot and then the other. “Let’s go!” he kept repeating. On Third Street David tried to ascertain what had happened, but the boy knew nothing. “They want you, that’s all,” he said. There was a cold chili about David’s heart as he approached the building on Lafayette Street, for he thought that perhaps Morris Binder had finally … He expelled the thought from his mind.

As soon as he entered the office, Miss Adams caught him by the arm and pulled him over to her desk. She had his novel before her. “Did you write this?” she asked.

“Yes,” David said defensively.

The tight little woman told him to sit down. “This is very good,” she said. Primly she lifted single pages from the unfinished chapters and read odd lines. “You’ll be able to have this published,” she said, and then she added other phrases, short, crisp comments about style and characterization. “You’ll be a fine writer some day,” she said.

David was too agitated to speak. Here was the first person in the world to have seen a story upon which he had truly worked, and she was saying that it was good. She used four or five words that he had dreamed might one day be spoken of his writing:
movement, a swinging style, good words, people
. There could never again be a moment like this, and he could not speak.

“But you’ve a great deal to learn!” Miss Adams said, as if she were beginning a lesson that would last for years. “Have you ever given yourself a course in writing? No? would you mind terribly if I used a pencil?” She took an editorial pencil—Hardness #1—and started to draw lines through words and to insert provisional substitutes. Then she showed David his opening paragraph:
When
ever
the
distant
horns sounded. I ran to the top of the hill to watch my
beloved
the
barges drift down the canal. Although I was twelve and had
many
chores it was my
chief
pleasure to see the snout-nosed
boats
barges
come up to
go into
the locks and mysteriously rise
and
or fall.
But
on this day the barge
was different,
and it changed my life forever.
It was red-nosed, as if it had come from a
bleeding
fight, and on its prow stood a man with one leg,
watching the mules
. Behind him was a deckhouse, and at the door stood a
young
girl of eleven. I remember that she wore her hair in pigtails, and that was my first sight of Lucia Berry
.

“See how the style is tightened up by knocking out words!” Miss Adams said with deep pleasure. “You use too many adjectives and adverbs. I despise words like
forever
,
never
,
whenever
. They’re mock poetic. Avoid them. And don’t use
but
or
and
to begin sentences. They’re cheap and mock-philosophical connectives.”

“You just used
and
yourself,” David argued.

“I’m talking,” Miss Adams snapped. “I’m not trying to write a good book. And David, please don’t use words like
beloved
. If your little boy loves the barges, let him show it. Don’t use soft words. Same way with your descriptive adjectives.
Bleeding
fight? That doesn’t make sense. A
young
girl of eleven? Redundant. A girl of eleven
is
young. And why would a barge drifting downstream need mules? Or how can a barge in a lock rise
and
fall at the same time?”

“I like the sound of some words,” David insisted.

“Even so, they have to make sense! Now the phrase I dislike most … I guess it’s the worst phrase in writing.
And it changed my life forever
. That’s really a cheap trick. It went out of style years ago. If that barge changed the boy’s life forever, show it. Don’t say it.” She raised her pencil to rub out the offending line completely, but David put his hand over it.

“It’s for that I’m writing,” he said simply.

“What do you mean?” she asked. Two men came in with bills. Impatiently she motioned them on back to Tremont Clay. Then she returned to David, her eyes blazing with excitement. “What do you mean?” she repeated.

“I used to live with a lot of old men,” David began.

“Where?”

“In a certain place,” he answered. “Strange and sometimes wonderful things had happened to those men, but they weren’t aware of it. They never knew. When I write I want everything that happens to be absolutely clear. If I think the reader won’t catch it, I’m going to say it right out.”

“It’s still an outmoded trick.”

“I don’t care,” David insisted. “If my boy begins to like
jelly beans on a certain day, and if that’s important, I’m going to say so.”

Miss Adams started to re-argue the point, but her eye hit the opening lines again. With a firm stroke she crossed out
boats
and wrote in
barges
. “It’s got to be either a barge or a boat. Make up your mind.”

“I was avoiding repetition,” David explained.

“Nothing wrong with good repetition.” Then she crossed out
distant
again. “A horn can’t be
distant
and still be heard,” she said.

This was too much for David and he looked angrily at the prim woman. “Do you like it better now?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “The dead wood’s cleared away.”

“And so is the music,” David argued.

“You’re writing a novel, not a poem,” she said.

“I don’t see any difference,” David challenged.

“Between a novel and a poem?” she asked, her voice rising.

“No!” David snapped. The two men returned for her signature. “Later,” she cried peremptorily and shooed them out the door. Then David leaned forward across her desk and a torrent of words, long imprisoned in his mind, burst forth. “I’d like to write as if every page were a poem. I’d like to pour words out whether they mean anything or not. If I were describing a brick wall I’d like to flood the pages with feelings and touches and even smells, and I wouldn’t care whether anyone read what I wrote or not. The words you’ve crossed out, Miss Adams, are the ones I want.”

Miss Adams coughed and leaned forward to meet this challenge. “Art is mostly discipline,” she said.

“I don’t want discipline!” David cried. “No, I don’t! I’ve been all over this country and it isn’t mean and tight the way you say. There are mountains so big you could never describe them. And little streams that would take a million words to tell how they cross from one field to another. I know a poet who says that a novel is like a golden kettle. You throw all the world into it.”

Miss Adams cleared her throat primly and said, “Up in Vermont my mother has a kettle like that. She keeps it on the back of the stove and tosses odds and ends into it. Do you know what comes out?”

“What?” David asked.

“Mush.”

There was a pregnant pause as Miss Adams stared at the young man. He was the one who dropped his eyes. Slowly,
he said, “Miss Adams, you can help me. I’ve had a vision. I’ve seen a wonderful land, and the people were even better than the land. When I think about them I want to sing. You say it’s mush.”

“Art is a cruel discipline,” she insisted. “Go look at the great painters. Or the best architects. The central problem is to find a clean, hard line. Clean, sharp, pure.”

“It sounds too icy and forbidding,” David said.

“The finest art is,” she assured him. “It’s a lonely paring away of everything that isn’t needed. If you can apply such standards to your vision …” She paused and then said, “I used to have that vision. Morris Binder had it, too. I was to be the great editor. Young novelists would work with me. He would be the lawyer that went to the Supreme Court. Now …”

The vision faded and she leaned back and studied David. He was twenty-six. At that age her brother had owned a hardware store. At twenty-seven her father had had four children. Morris Binder, forced on by Jewish parents who knew the toll of sloth, had graduated from law school at twenty-three; but David seemed scarcely a man. Could it be, she wondered, that this clean face with no scars of defeat could have had a vision? Nervously she shuffled his manuscript together.

“So you want to write a great book?” she sighed.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then don’t let anything interrupt you. If you need money, see me … or Morris Binder. We stayed up most of last night and I read this to him. He thinks it’s wonderful, David, but he’s a loose thinker, as you know. He’s prone to excesses, and he’s never disciplined himself. But please don’t talk to him about it. He’s sick … He’s very sick.” She did not cry. She never cried, but she slumped in dejection, as if the burden of waiting for those frightful screams was greater than she could carry. “I’d be deeply pleased,” she said, “if you’d let me study the chapters after you finish them. And remember. Don’t let anything interrupt.”