The Fires of Spring (61 page)

But a violent emotional experience did interrupt, and for more than a month David wrote nothing. It started with a phone call from Mrs. Paxson. She said that David’s letters had been waiting when they got back. They didn’t know where Marcia was. She had been divorced in Nevada and no one had heard of her since.

David borrowed some money from Mom and hurried down to Solebury. The Paxsons met him with Quaker austerity but not unfriendliness. He had been the cause of their daughter’s dismay, but he was also one of the billions who shared the earth with them and that sovereign fact entitled him to their full sympathy. “Marcia felt a great burden of sin,” Mrs. Paxson said quietly. “She knows she wronged Harry Moomaugh cruelly. If we had leper colonies around here, I’m sure thee’d find her there, expiating her guilt.”

“We may not hear from her for a long time,” Mr. Paxson said. “She may even seek thee out first.”

“I’ll want to marry her that day,” David said.

The Paxsons would not commit themselves. “Integrity in children is hard to bear,” Mrs. Paxson said. “Marcia may refuse thee, as thee refused her.” David was embarrassed to know that Marcia had told her parents of his behavior.

The Paxsons offered him money, since his clothes were obviously inadequate, but he refused and hitch-hiked his way back to Washington Square. Since he must talk with someone, he elected Mom Beckett. She was unusually sympathetic. She sat in the restaurant and poked at her coiffured hair. “I’m always amazed,” she said, “at the capacity good people have for kicking themselves in the stomach. That alley cat Mona! Hell! She could absorb anything and come out all right. But a girl like this one you’re telling me about … Oh, heavenly days, the punishment they give themselves. But there’s this about it, Dave. If such girls ever get settled, God, what lovely wives they make!”

Mom had fifteen different ideas as to how Marcia could be tracked down. “We could hire a private dick,” she proposed eagerly.

“The Paxsons made me promise not to,” David objected.

“Well, I could lend you three hundred dollars and you could slip out to Nevada and pick up her trail. That way you’d be the eye.” Her fertile mind suggested other ways, but David, who knew that Marcia must ultimately solve the problem for herself, rejected them all.

He lay about his room, stared at the brick wall, and said, “Now tomorrow, damn it, I’ll go over to Morris Binder’s.” But after he had stayed away for eight days Miss Adams came boldly to his room.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You can’t take criticism?”

“I can’t get started again,” he said.

“David!” the little woman cried, laying down her handbag. “This is your life! This is your immortal life, David!” She looked at him in despair and said, “If it’s money, if it’s a place to stay …” When she saw the depth of his stupor, she went away, but that afternoon he got a special-delivery letter from her. “Only a few people can write, and of them only a few ever get started. Don’t waste yourself, David.” She enclosed ten dollars to be spent as he wished. She said, “Maybe a trip into the country would help. Bus fares are very low.”

Her letter shocked David into action. He was appalled that a woman as cold as Miss Adams should care what he did or why. “I’ll get hold of myself,” he swore, and he went to the public library and said to the librarian, “I’m out of work and I’d like a good, tough book to sort of hold myself together.” She smiled warmly at him and said. “Have you ever read
Washington Square
, by Henry James?”

“I never heard of it!” David said. He took the small and often rebound book out into the Square itself and started to read. The old passion for identification swept over him. He imagined—as was indeed the case—that James had chosen for his sedate scene the very house in which Alison now lived. He pictured Alison as the banker’s daughter and it was late at night, over a cup of coffee at Mom’s, when he finished the book. Then he understood what Miss Adams had meant by control and line and purity in art. The novel had impressed him deeply, but at the same time he clung to an old idea of his: “If a man could write just as he wished, he’d write like Balzac.” He went to bed tired and happy, resolved that in the morning he would try—to the limit of his capacity—to write like Balzac.

But in the morning there came a tender knocking at his door. He rose, irritated with himself at having been so long in bed, and looked into the hall. There stood Mona.

She wore an expensive mink coat, a saucy hat, very high-heeled shoes, and a severely plain dress that must have cost a hundred dollars. There were no lines under her eyes, and she was so beautiful that David’s heart sank.

“What do you want?” he demanded.

Quickly, and in real fright, she ducked into his room, quietly closed the door, and slumped back against it in a gesture of despair. “You’ve got to help me!” she insisted.

David drew away from her and studied her coldly. “What’s happened now?” he asked.

She put her beautiful hands over her face and shook her head as if in unbelief. “I’m scared silly,” she said. “You’ve got to hide me for a while.” She dropped her hands and looked at David as if she were a little girl detected in the act of stealing jam.

“Cut it out!” David growled. “That pleading look is pretty silly in a mink coat.”

In one motion she hurried across the room and took David’s hands. “This is no joke!” she cried with deep emotion. “Max Volo is at the bottom of the East River. In a barrel of concrete. If they find me, they’ll shoot me. They think I know who did it.” She licked her lips and stared up at David, holding onto his strong arms. “And I do know! I saw them kill Max. I was in a closet, hiding.”

Reluctantly, David led the nervous and alluring girl to a chair. “I’ll see if Mom has a drink,” he fumbled.

“I don’t need a drink,” Mona objected. “All I need is time to think this out.”

David studied her with distaste. “Think what out?” he asked.

“Don’t look at me like that!” she snapped. “You look at me as if I did it! David, they have men out right now looking for me!” She sprang from her chair and grabbed David by the shoulders. “Don’t you understand? I’m scared to death!”

“Mona! Don’t talk silliness. You were never afraid of anything. You’re just stalling for time till you figure out some way to use this to your advantage. All right, you can use my room.” In real disgust he went to his bureau.

“You aren’t going to leave?” she whined petulantly.

He reached for his clothes and awkwardly slipped into them. Grabbing a few shaving items he jammed them into his pockets and opened the door. “I won’t say anything,” he promised.

Mona began to cry. “Dave!” she mumbled. “When I went off with Max Volo, it was only to save you trouble. You had no money …”

“And Max did!”

“I did it to help you, Dave. A hundred times I said. ‘I’ll send Dave that hundred bucks.’ Here!” She clawed open her purse and handed David a handful of bills. “Thanks, kid,” she said. “You were a godsend that time.”

“Put them away!” David said, stepping into the hall.

“I feel like a devil, shoving you out of your room.” Mona sniffled. “You don’t have to go, do you?”

“Yes,” he said. He closed the door softly and went downstairs to Mom’s room. The big, handsome woman was dusting her incongruous collection of small marble statues. Demure milkmaids and angels predominated, but there was one utterly indecent group of Pan and two wood nymphs.

“That’s from Messina! Italy!” she said proudly. “Ain’t it a pistol?”

“You ought to have a curtain around that one!” David gasped.

“A little guy with a squinted-up face carved that one special for a fellow I was touring Europe with.” She stood back to survey the scabrous statue and laughed. “He was quite a fancy boy, that one.”

“Who? The carver?”

“No!” Mom chuckled. “The fellow I was with.” She leaned back and began: “He was the son of an Oklahoma oil millionarie, and he wore a wristwatch …”

“Mom,” David interrupted. “Did you see Mona Meigs come in this morning?” The big woman put her cup down.

“Is she in this house?” she demanded. When David nodded she went to the door and bellowed for Claude. The bearded poet appeared and she stormed at him, “I thought I told you no whores was allowed in this house?”

Claude smiled at her patiently and said, “So I understood.”

“Then how in hell did she get up to David’s room?”

“She must have sneaked in the front door when someone was leaving.” The bearded man looked so sincere in his explanation that Mom accepted it.

“Very good!” she said. “If she sneaked in, throw her out on her ass!” She went to the foot of the stairs and began to shout, “Hey! You two-bit tramp! Get the hell down here!”

“Mom!” David pleaded, pulling her back into the room, “I think it’s serious this time. Her friend …” He mumbled. “The man she was living with was murdered. She says it’s a gang killing.”

“And she wants to hide out here?” Mom snorted. “With all the cheap torpedoes that lounge in my bar, she wants to hide upstairs so we all get shot. Get her to hell out!”

“Let her stay a couple of days. I’ll find a bed somewhere.”

“No!” Mom insisted. “Dave,” she said, “men never understand women like that tramp. Out she goes.”

“I’m through with her, Mom. I’m cured, but supposing she’s telling the truth?”

“All right! Claude! You go get the papers.” She dispatched him as if he were a child, and he nodded as if he were a servant. He tossed one of her shawls about his thin shoulders and ran into the street. In a few minutes he returned with proof of Mona’s story. Max Volo in his barrel of concrete had been dredged up from the East River. It was a gang killing, and the police feared for the life of a beautiful young woman who was supposed to have the clues. Mom read the stories slowly, like one who had never bothered much with books, and said, “Claude! You take her up some chow. She can stay here three days.”

David would not go back to his room. He was through with Mona forever; yet as he wandered about the streets of his Village—Gay, Jones, Bedford, Grove—he became terribly confused, for although he now despised the bright and cruel singer, his entire novel was founded upon her, and she was tied about the ventricles of his heart so that her slightest movement had the power to suffocate him. She was in him and of him and she possessed his imagination. She was the superb and challenging woman that all men meet; she was Lilith breathing fire into the nostrils of dead Adam. And yet the more David thought of her in those days, the more certain he was that he must never go near her again.

Then, on the third day, David heard newsboys hawking their headlines: “Blonde Tells All!” When he bought a paper, Mona smiled up at him. Her legs were generously displayed, and she was surrounded by eight self-conscious and admiring policemen.

Now it was Mona’s lurid escapade that became David’s reason for not writing. Inadvertently he was dragged into the whirlwind of her experience. She became known as “The Bravest Girl in America!” Instead of being censured for having lived with a cheap crook like Max Volo, she was enshrined for having had the courage to identify the killers. She played for a week in a New York vaudeville theatre and then went on tour. She sang and danced and gave a monologue telling about how she had sat for two days in a “mean, filthy tenement room, getting up courage to tell the police.”

When the
New York Times
carried an editorial about her,
Tremont Clay himself came to see David. “Morris Binder tells me you know this girl!” he snapped.

“That’s right,” David agreed. So Clay handed David two hundred and fifty dollars for a series of lurid and provocative articles about Mona and her gallantry. Thanks to Clay’s superb editing, the result was a girl who was a cross between a wanton sex maniac and Joan of Arc. The stories were so enticing that a feature syndicate bought them, and from Washington Mona wired: “You’ve made me famous! Hollywood is nibbling for the story of my life. Me to star!”

She returned to New York in triumph and did a stand in a Village night club, where an immense bar had been opened to celebrate the death of prohibition. Life-sized posters were made of her wearing practically nothing, and one day she returned to Mom’s. “Tell David to come to see me,” she ordered Claude. “Give him this.”

When David saw her address—upper Fifth Avenue—he threw away the card, but she came back and found him sitting at a table with Mom. They were talking about Marcia Paxson and about how a person could remember scenes of childhood more vividly than things experienced a week ago. “Dave,” Mona said. “I got to ask one more favor of you.”

“You cheap sonofabitch!” Mom snorted. “Why don’t you get to hell out of here?”

Mona did not flinch. Her fine, hard face looked as clean and young as when David had first seen her. Her breasts still seemed firm and small. Her neck was thin and lithe, and she leaned forward in a kind of halted excitement. “I need your help for two days,” she said.

“For Christ’s sake!” Mom exploded. “Can’t you see this kid has had a bellyful of you? Claude! Throw this lousy tramp out on her ass!”

“The big chance has come.” Mona said quietly.

That awful phrase of youth—the big chance—struck David very hard. It was this that he once prayed for: Mona’s big chance. He had given her money when he needed it, and he had always felt that his planet was strangely intermingled with the force of her sun, so that no matter if he were thrust, like Jupiter, millions of miles from that glowing sun, he would still mysteriously wander through the dark places of the universe, held somehow by that bright creature. “OK, Mona. What do you want?”

“I want you to be my chauffeur for two days. I got to impress those bastards.”

“My driver’s license is no good,” David explained.

“I don’t mean to drive!” she protested quickly. “Just to bring me messages. In a snappy uniform.”

“My God a’mighty!” Mom cried, staring at David in disbelief.

At first David was tempted to reply: “Mona, how dare you propose such a thing?” But he perceived that she would see nothing indecent in her request. Sick in his stomach, he asked quietly, “You want me to get dressed up? Like a chauffeur?”