The Fires of Spring (28 page)

Klementi repeated the last words. “That’s the rotten part!” he cried. “That strips honor from a man. No attempt to do the thing right! Why, if I try and fail, that’s all right. Then I must stick to my fiddle playing in Philadelphia and not presume to be a conductor. I could take that. But if I don’t even try! Then I’m neither a musician nor a man. No honor, no dignity, no sincerity.”

“Sit down!” Mary laughed. “Klim, at your age you must learn to take digs like that in stride.”

“You don’t understand,” Klim explained patiently. “I learn from bad reviews, if they’re just.” He thrust a book of clippings into David’s hand. The latter leafed through them: Cleveland, Chicago, Buenos Aires. Whenever adverse comments appeared, Kol had underlined them in red. “This one!” he said. “
Insufficient practice
. How true! I should never have attempted that piece.” He shook his head and then added softly, “But to say a man did not try to do the great thing! That strips honor from a man.”

David noticed that as Kol spoke of the musician’s honor, Mary sat watching, her chin resting low on her interlaced fingers. Finally she said, “Take it easy, Klim. Concert tonight.”
Kol snapped back to his urbane self and grinned at David.

“I wish I could join you two for dinner,” he said, “but I don’t eat much before a concert.” He laughed and added, “Mary’s always hungry.” He showed them to the door and kissed Mary lightly on the hair.

In the cab the singer asked David if he would like to see the vaudeville again. When he showed his delight, even in the darkened cab, she told the driver to stop a minute, and she purchased a bagful of sandwiches and two malted milks. At the theatre she took David to her dressing room and said, “Forget what Klim said. He has a pick-up concert tonight and he’s excited. All winter he plays fiddle for Stokowski. The rest of the time he conducts wherever he can. He takes it very seriously.”

When the vaudeville started David offered to go out front, but Mary insisted that he stay in the wings. He turned his head when she dressed, yet as he did so Mary asked suddenly, “Dave! What do you honestly think of Uncle Klim?” He turned quickly to answer and saw the slim and delicate singer pulling on a sheer silk stocking. “I told you!” she warned him laughingly. “You’re supposed to look the other way.” But he stared at her, and she slowly continued her dressing.

“You’re beautiful!” he said huskily. Mary hooked her stocking in place and ruffed out her slip.

“You might as well button me up,” she said. “I can make believe I have a maid.” She lifted a dress from its hook and popped it over her head, wriggling her arms until it slipped softly into place. David watched entranced as the inanimate dress came alive with handsome curves and deep, delicious dips. He made no move to fix the buttons, and Mary laughed quietly at him. “Didn’t you ever button up the little girl’s dress at Paradise?” she teased. David blushed deeply and shook his head no. “Well,” Mary began. Then she stopped and listened to the music. “This week I’m billed fourth. Later on I guess I’ll be fifth. You know, of course, that closing isn’t really the best spot. Fifth is the choice one.”

She leaned against the door, listening to the music, while David finished the buttons on her golden dress. She felt his hands poised in the air about her bare shoulders, lingering there, warm and confused. She could sense the look that must be in his excited eyes and the tousled look of his college-cut hair. And then softly the orchestra violins began to play
the music of Victor Herbert. She dropped her right hand and allowed it to brush against the boy’s leg. Quickly his hand fell to grasp hers.

“Mary!” he whispered. “You’re so very beautiful!”

“Ssssh!” she teased. “I’ve got to sing! Don’t get me upset.” She gave his trembling hand a slight squeeze and seemed
to
float off toward the stage.

“Some girl, that!” a stagehand said as she began to sing “Kiss in the Dark.” “You know her?”

“What?” David mumbled. “Who?”

The stagehand moved away and allowed David to watch the fragile singer. She had now raised her clasped hands to her bosom and was singing the gently rising song from
No, No, Nanette
. All during her performance David watched her, studied the way in which she built her voice to climaxes, the tricks she used to turn her delicate profile to the audience, and the way she pulled her whole body backwards in her bows of acknowledgment. “Even her shoes act!” he thought.

After the first evening performance she said, “Why don’t we go out to see Klim again?” and David was about to say, “Klim’s got a concert!” but instead he mumbled, “Yeah. Why don’t we?”

At the apartment Mary rang several times, then took a key from her purse and let herself in. “I guess he’s still at the concert,” she said with airy surprise. She went immediately to the bathroom and washed her face with cold water. She reappeared wiping herself vigorously with a heavy towel. “I live here,” she said simply.

“Are you and Klim married?” David asked.

Mary’s face was covered with the towel at the moment and she rubbed herself briskly, seeking time to arrange her reply. Then she tossed the towel backwards into the bathroom and smiled at David as she started to mix a drink. “Surely,” she said over her shoulder, “you must have guessed.”

“Guessed what?” David asked.

She looked away and tinkled some bottles. “Do you like vermouth?” she asked.

David went to the sideboard and awkwardly pulled Mary away from the glasses. “What should I have guessed?” he asked.

The actress looked at him frankly and said, “That Klim’s never going to marry me.”

A surge of possessiveness came over David and he cried
like a wronged Bucks County farmer, “He ought to be horsewhipped!”

Then Mary started to laugh and pushed him back into a chair. “David!” she pleaded with a half chuckle. “It’s so hard to explain things to a college man.” She bit her lip and stood above him for more than a minute. Finally she said quietly, “Don’t you understand, Dave? Klim’s no good for a girl. And he’s too fine to waste my life by marrying me.”

The ideas were far too complex for David. He blushed, as if he should be ashamed for someone. A long silence followed during which he tried to fathom the meaning of the words, and then like any man he started to bluster. “Well, why …”

“To us!” Mary interrupted. She spun quickly and produced the two drinks. Dancing gaily, with her left shoulder dipping toward the floor, she handed David his and cried, “To my clean-faced stagedoor Johnny!”

David struggled to his feet and countered awkwardly, “To the most beautiful girl in the theatre!” The words gave him courage, and he felt very much a man, smiling across his glass at a real actress. “Skoal!” he shouted and took a deep drink.

They sat on the davenport and Mary said in a kind of sing-song voice: “Klim was very good to me. When I was starting, that is. He took me to see Sousa. As long as I live I’ll owe Klim a real debt.” Her arms were stretched along the top of the davenport and she seemed completely relaxed. She closed her eyes and said, “It’s terrible to hurt people you love.”

There was a long silence and David asked, “What do you mean?” Mary rolled her delicate head toward him and smiled. The upstretched tension of her arms made her firm breasts show clearly even beneath the loose knockabout dress she wore outside the theatre. She did not answer his question and then he did a very foolish thing. “Mary!” he gulped. “Could I kiss you?”

“Of course not!” she snapped, and her eyes chastised him so that he blushed even more furiously than before and mumbled, “I’m sorry. I apologize.”

She continued to lie back against the davenport and mused again upon an old theme: “Would you think me silly if I changed my name to Mona Meigs?”

“Nothing you could do would be silly,” he said huskily. She clenched her hands with great determination.

“From now on I am Mona Meigs! I’ll be a great singer. I’m going into the movies and everyone will know that name!”
She rose and started to walk about the room, holding her elbows back as actresses did to accentuate their breasts. She talked wildly and took long, swinging steps. “Dave! You’ll remember that name as long as you live. You’ll see it everywhere! You’ll tell people you knew me when I sang with a band and the goddamned saxophones drowned me out every lousy, rotten night. You can say you heard me sing with a second-rate orchestra when the fiddles were always too slow. And in the Earle Theatre. You can say you stood in the wings …”

David had never before seen a person totally dedicated to success. He had never watched the deep and burning longings explode in shameless frenzy and deep hunger for the accolades. He was shocked, as if a naked woman were walking before him, and he could not see the fragile line of Mary’s face, for it was hard, hard with hope.

The young singer stopped abruptly before him and stood with her hands contentiously on her hips. “Now you know!” she said, and David rushed at her as if he were an animal and clasped her thin face to his and kissed her until his lips hurt. His hands fought for her provocative bosom, and finally he was thrust backwards onto the davenport.

“Dave!” the newly christened singer cried. “Be careful! Klim might come in!” But she looked at the sprawling college student with happy pleasure in her eyes. “Anyway,” she said. “The first kiss Mona Meigs got was a good one. You ought to go out for football.”

David had intended dropping into his classmates’ rooms and asking in an offhand manner, “Any you guys see the show this week at the Earle? Well, that singer …” Instead, he was confused and said nothing to anyone about Mary.

The words she had used, and her actions, too, haunted him, and for the first four days of the week he pondered many times each inflection she had used: “What did she mean, ‘Klim is no good for girls’? Come to think of it, she meant for me to kiss her all along. But why did she fight that way? There are some things I just don’t understand. And why should she want to change her name? There at the end, too, when she was racing up and down that room, telling me what she was going to do! That was pretty silly. Most girls would give a leg to sing at the Earle …” Then his words would be driven away by memory of that magnificent white leg, and his hand would burn for the feel of her unforgettable breast.

“I better forget about her,” he commanded himself, but as luck would have it, that very week he was given charge of the night hours at the observatory, and there, seeing for the first time through a large telescope the ancient stars and the massive formations beyond the sun and the moon, all the imperishable vastness of the universe was intermingled with his feelings for Mary Meigs.

On Thursday night he was
so
bewildered that when his hours at the observatory were ended he could not sleep. At first he thought he would visit Tschilczynski, who had got him the job, but sharing the Russian’s secret made it impossible for David now to thrust his own secret—he considered the kiss a secret—upon his professor. Instead he went to see Joe Vaux. The Irishman was curled up in a chair reading Veblen, spitting contempt at passages he did not like.

“Joe?” David began. “If a girl were to say … Now just for instance, you understand. If she were to say that such-and-such a man was no good for girls, what would that mean?”

“Well, it would mean that he wasn’t any good for girls,” Joe explained.

“That much I know!” David said uneasily. “But what would it signify?”

“Well, it might mean he was a fairy.”

“Oh, no!” David protested promptly. “Not this guy! He’s a good, clean guy, and I’ve seen some fairies in my day! I can assure you, this guy isn’t a fairy! He simply isn’t.”

Joe laughed and said, “I thought you said this was a f’rinstance?”

David gaped and thought of six or seven explanations, but none was any good. “What do you think the phrase might mean?”

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do!” Joe said. “We’ll ask Eddy. He’s pre-med.” The future doctor was called into consultation, along with a half dozen vagrant minds. In considerable ignorance they discussed David’s problem and launched off into others of their own. They knew astronomy, these young men, and Chaucer and German verbs and geology and even the advanced formulae of Karl Pearson, but no one had ever told them about the human body. Their groping session lasted until dawn, and when it was over David still did not understand what Mary Meigs meant when she said that Klementi Kol was no good for girls. In his embarrassment he began
to laugh in short, hysterical chuckles. “Damnedest thing I ever heard of!” he cried to no one in particular. “In our town there was this guy. Let me tell you, he was some guy! A red head and very awkward! You’d of died to see him. Well, he got a crush on the prettiest girl in town and one night she let him walk her home. Well, at her door this yokel actually says, ‘Could I kiss you good night?’ He asks her, mind you. So she slams the door in his face!”

The freshmen laughed uproariously at this and started telling their own hilarious stories, and bells for the eight o’clock classes rang. David went to bed and that afternoon he said to Joe, “What do you say we go into Philly and see a movie?”

“Why not?” Joe agreed. “We’ve messed up the day anyway!” So they caught a train into the city, but during the trip they began to argue. Joe wanted to see the show at the Stanton and David preferred the Earle. “All right!” Joe finally cried. “We’ll match for it!”

David said a brief prayer and tossed his coin. He won, and they went to the Earle. They got there during the second act of the vaudeville, and before long Mary Meigs appeared. David slumped way down in his seat and watched the beautiful singer. Joe fidgeted and said in a loud voice, “This is what killed vaudeville.” David winced and stared at the stage. When the picture came on, it was terrible and Joe heckled his friend. “You sure pick ’em!” he chided. “Say? Does your tail still hurt from that May Queen stuff?”

“I’ll say!” David replied. He could guess what was going to happen next.

“Then let’s blow. Let’s get an Italian dinner somewheres.”

“Joe!” David said. “Let’s see the first part of the vaudeville.”

“I don’t like seals,” the Bostonian replied. He started to leave, but an imperative tug at his arm prevented him. He said nothing but sat back quietly and watched David. He saw the tense excitement that flooded his friend when the orchestra began to play, and the manner in which David bent forward to watch the seals perform. And then he saw Mary Meigs come onstage for the second time. He felt David relax and tie himself together with his arms about his knees and drink in the motions and the singing and the beauty of that slim, fragile girl.