The Fires of Spring (65 page)

David was inspired to rush out of the door and never return, but at that moment a messenger boy arrived with the latest batch of manuscripts. “Where shall I put them?” he asked.

“Why, on Mr. Harper’s desk!” Mr. Clay cried, banging the old, scarred desk. “He’s head man up here now!” Gently he pushed David into Morris Binder’s huge chair. “Boy!” he cried. “Fetch a pillow!” Then he half-laughed and patted David on the shoulder. “Don’t mind,” he said. “No one could fill that chair, but you’ll come as close as anyone.” He stepped in front of David and said with great force, “A lot of my life rides with you, son. These are the days when a man shows what he’s got.”

Then David was alone in the dark room. The knife-scarred desk with its load of filth was his. As he envisaged the endless, indecent pages he would have to write, he grew ashamed and muttered, “I can’t work here! I’ll unload trucks.” But the call of a job was too great. For three long years he had been unemployed, and now he had a job again. Maybe people would laugh at a grown-up man who was a pulp editor, but had they, by God, walked the streets alone and hungry and ashamed and cold and useless and broke, watching themselves each day becoming more and more inevitably bums? Had they known the stark, gnawing rottenness of being out of work day after day in the full power of youth? Had they stood in some midnight square with not a cent to their names and thought of taking pretty girls to dinner or to the theatre or even to a goddamned lousy ten-cent movie? Had they known the longings of youth forestalled and aborted by an economic accident called depression? If they had not, David cried, let them keep their mouths shut.

But when he read the first sentences of his first manuscript—“This murder took place in my own town and if you don’t believe me you can read about it in the pittsburg papers which also have good photographs in case you want some”—he felt a moment of revulsion. His mind mumbled a kind of death chant: “Men don’t want to be free. They don’t want the feel of meadows under their feet nor the cry of wood-birds
leading them on. They fear the desert and the sun that sinks behind the endless ocean. The sky must be broken by clouds and stars or it would be intolerable. And the inward clutches of the heart, disappearing in the very womb of time itself, are even more forsaken and forlorn.”

The parable of the wingless flies had come home. David’s spirit shuddered at the prospect of freedom. Like a horse caught in a fire, he whinnied shamelessly to be kept in his stall; and the name of surrender that echoed through all the fly-specked offices of the world echoed through his dark office and darker mind: Work.

But even though David was successful in convincing himself that being an editor for Tremont Clay was decent because it was work, he had a nervous moment when he reported that evening to Bleecker Street and informed Marcia of his good luck. She said, coldly, “You mean grown-up men work on such magazines?”

“You liked Morris Binder,” he argued.

“But he wasn’t a grown-up man!” she protested. She would say no more than this, and it was apparent that she was completely disgusted with David. He began to feel this disgust himself when he discovered that both Morris Binder and Miss Adams had left him all their money. Each had less than four hundred dollars, and David was bewildered as to why these lonely people had left their money to him and not to one another. Marcia explained the reason very simply.

“They were cowards,” she said. “Fear corroded their lives. I don’t know why Morris Binder was ashamed to marry her. Perhaps he felt his sickness … Maybe it was she who was afraid. They were cowards, and they killed themselves long ago. Didn’t you see that?”

He hadn’t seen the cowardice that had killed these people. In fact, he did not even yet comprehend that had they married and lived together little would have been changed except the most fundamental thing in both their lives: they could have shared their accomplishments and defeats, and bitter Miss Adams would have had no necessity to kill either the hulking editor or herself, because fear would thus have been expelled.

David understood this when he took Marcia to Morris Binder’s apartment one Saturday morning. Workmen were ripping down the fabulous horns. They were joking about the intricate system as they destroyed it, and David realized that
it could never be replaced. The grandeur of that room was gone. “It gives you a sick feeing,” David said. “Like watching a cathedral being torn down.”

“David!” Marcia cried. “Morris Binder never built a cathedral! Cowards build refuges, perhaps, or maybe stuck-away chapels. But not open-air cathedrals! Not with spires and organ music!”

“What’s troubling you, Marcia?” David asked in real confusion.

“There’s danger in the world,” Marcia replied. “Brave people are needed. Every day you work for Tremont Clay proves to me I could never marry you.”

“Men have to work at lots of different things,” David protested.

“But men also have to build a life, David!” Marcia pleaded. She pointed angrily at the barren rooms in which Morris Binder had spent his long travail. “Was this a life?” she asked.

“He was a sick man! Almost a cripple!”

“No man needs to be sick in the heart,” Marcia said furiously. “That’s the test of whether you’re living or not.” David tried to reply, but she overrode him. “You’re a stranger to me!” she cried. “You’ve become a coward. I could never marry you.”

David started to refute this statement, but a workman on a stepladder ripped away a wire and began to shout, “Hey! Whaddaya know? This wire led upstairs to the dame’s room! Pretty tidy, eh?”

“Whaddaya mean?” another workman shouted.

“Curb service!” the man on the ladder explained. He jerked the wire and yelled. “Yoo-hoo! Bessie! Come on down!” The men burst into loud laughter.

David was infuriated by Marcia’s reaction to his job. “Damn it all,” he growled, as he walked to work, “for three years I had no job. Now I get hell for finding one. It just don’t make sense.” Yet at strange intervals during his editorial work, Marcia’s image would whir across his desk, mocking him for being an intellectual garbage man.

He finally went to see Mom and explained the whole situation to her, ending, “So I’ve been out of work for three years, and I finally get a job. Maybe it isn’t the best job in the world, but which would you rather have, an unemployed bum or a guy trying to make his way?”

“Well,” Mom reflected, “seems to me you came to see me in jail with two hundred bucks you were ashamed to hold on to. I told you I understood perfectly, and I did. But what I don’t understand is how them bills could have been stained any darker than the ones you get on your present job.” She leaned back from the table and studied the effect of her words. David scratched his ear.

“You mean you’d rather have me lounging around here than working?” David asked.

“Look at Claude!” she said, pointing at the poet with her manicured hand. “Every seven or eight years he turns out a book of poems. Folks say they’re the best in America. Rest of the time he sponges offa me. I got to admit that he does help out on the cookin’, God fabbid. But that seems to me an honorable way to live.”

“How about you …” David exploded.

“Wait a minute!” the big woman interrupted, placing her hand on David’s wrist. “Slow down, sonny! You started this conversation, not me. I wouldn’t never have said nothin’. But you ast me, and I’m tellin’ you.”

“All right! Let me say it slower. You’ve been a bootlegger, pretty much of a bum at times. How does this apply to you?”

“Very easy!” Mom said with great force. “It’s like this. How a woman makes her livin’ is unimportant. On the street, bootleggin’, griftin’. It’s part of a woman’s nature, because the best she can hope for is to grub her dough off’n some man. But for a man it makes all the difference in the world. A man has got to hold his head up, or he’s plumb lost. I’m a bootlegger, OK. Claude ain’t. He won’t touch the stuff, says it’s a filthy business.”

“Yet he lives off your dough.”

“Not exactly,” Mom said. At this moment the poet rang up a small sale. “You see, we’ve agreed to call that his work. That’s his job. In a way, he owns the restaurant. He reinvests his wages, you might say. He takes only dimes and quarters as he needs them and now and then a pair of shoes. That ways things are honest. No real man would be satisfied with less.”

“You’re saying I should quit my job?”

“If you’re askin’ me, yes.”

“But what in God’s name can I live on? I want to get married.”

“You can write,” Mom said.

The two friends looked at each other. Mom’s face was a
heavy mask, well made up and placid. She was in no sense accusing David, but spiritually she was assuming the role formerly held by Miss Adams. “You can write,” she said, adding silently, “and a guy who can do that is silly to …”

“What do you think I should do, Mom?”

“I think maybe you should help Claude. You could be assistant cook.”

David bit his lip and asked, “You’ve met Marcia Paxson. Would she marry me if I was assistant cook?”

“I can tell you, she won’t marry you unless you are. Or the equivalent.”

For three days David considered his problem. During these days he thought a great deal about Morris Binder. He reviewed the man’s bleak life, and his terrible indecency in having Miss Adams listening from an equally bleak room above him. He thought of the trivial impact these people had made upon their city. They had been cliff dwellers and they had accomplished nothing: no children, no love, not even a home; no singing accomplishments, nothing but a series of filthy magazines stretching from the sewage pits of society to the minds of morons.

“Forty years from now I could be like that!” he shuddered. He began to see his life as a limited journey. There were only a few places he could visit, a few objectives to be attained, and when his brief efforts were over, the journey and its memories would be forgotten. During these days of review he came to hate New York City, both in the morning when he walked down Third Street and late at night when he came home along Fourth. He recalled how blessed by nature had been his poorhouse life; but here in the city it sometimes seemed as if there were no life. There were no birds nor turning furrows in the spring. Nights were often wintry but never frosty, and some seasons slipped past without his even knowing they had come; for there were no dogtooth violets, no mosses by the creek nor cattails fluffing in the autumn breeze.

By the fourth day his mind was made up. He stopped at a corner shop and bought a big bouquet of flowers. Then he went up to his room and grabbed the folder in which his forgotten and unfinished novel lay gathering dust. He tucked it under his arm and stepped out in MacDougal Street. Immediately, from the fat woman’s window across the way came the strident cry, “Lover! Lover! Lover!”

A group of little boys surrounded him and teased him as
he walked toward Bleecker Street. Even after he had turned the corner he could hear the fat woman crying, “Lover! Lover!” At Sixth Avenue the boys left him, and he trudged across to Seventh. There a new group of idle urchins began to joke with him, and among them was Mrs. Allegri’s boy. Like a bolt he left the crowd and went screaming down the street: “Here comes Harper with the biggest goddamn bunch of flowers …” Mrs. Allegri met her son at the stoop and slapped his face soundly. “Have some manners!” she commanded. Little Mr. Allegri got up from his peach basket and shouted, “Marcia! Here he is!” The excited man led David through the dark hall and into Marcia’s room. “Behold the lover!” he cried approvingly. “I’ll fetch a vase.”

When David was alone with Marcia he said abruptly, “Now I know what you were talking about. I quit my job …”

Like a woman, Marcia popped her knuckles to her teeth and cried, “What will you do for a living?” David grinned.

“Mom has offered me a job as assistant cook. What she means is that she’ll stake me until I finish writing … Well, I’ve been working on a novel.”

“Yes,” Marcia said. “I imagined that was your surrender.”

“What do you mean?”

They sat on the edge of the bed and Marcia held his hands. “From the time I first met you in the poorhouse, I knew we’d get married, Dave. When Daddy read your poem aloud, I wanted to know a boy like you. At basketball games I used to watch every jump you made, and the bright wonder in your eyes came to be in mine, too. But when I saw you in the hospital I knew that you had surrendered. What it was I didn’t know, but it was something big. It was a novel, eh?”

“This sounds foolish,” David said in embarrassment. “But I guess I was going through a period of pretty wild self-intoxication. I thought I was going to be a second Balzac.” The old fire came upon him and he simply had to rise and move about. “God! What novels I was going to write! I guess I did it mostly to keep my spirits …” He stopped abruptly and handed Marcia the folder. “Will you read this? And if it’s any good, will you marry me?”

“Dave!” the glowing girl replied, “I’m going to marry you whether it’s any good or not. You don’t have to be a success. Just so long as you haven’t quit where the big dreams are concerned.”

“When can we get married?” David asked.

“Right away! We’ll live at Mom’s, and then later on I’ll have courage enough to go back to Bucks County. I want to live near the canal and to go shopping in Doylestown as Mrs. David Harper. I want you so very much, and if I’m ever tough or cold or haughty, I want you to slap my ears down.” She held out her arms to David, and they fell backwards onto the bed. After they had been ominously silent for some minutes Mr. Allegri coughed very noisily in the hall and banged on the door.

“I brought you some wine!” he announced. “And some cookies!” He placed a tray upon a chair, and all the Allegris and some of their friends piled into the room.

“An engagement!” Mrs. Allegri beamed.

And David thought: “It’s like coming home to yourself at last.”

For this is the journey that men make: to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn’t matter much what else they find. Money, position, fame, many loves, revenge are all of little consequence, and when the tickets are collected at the end of the ride they are tossed into the bin marked
FAILURE
.