The Fires of Spring (47 page)

He struck a match and held it to the hair about his navel. The tangled mat caught fire and burned briskly. Explosively it flamed up his chest, so that he blazed like a torch. He started to sing “Jingle bells! Jingle bells!” and then with a loud, smoky cry demanded the seltzer water. David pressed his thumb and there was a fizzing, a sigh of flames, and the rich smell of burnt calcium. “Some act, eh?” the Wild Man asked.

“That’s the damnedest thing I ever saw!” Mr. Fletcher said. He liked these young men. They had spirit. Without anyone but Jensen knowing what had happened the tension
of the day was relaxed. “Let’s have a drink!” Mr. Fletcher proposed.

“I must not!” Jensen replied sententiously. “We of the theatre, you know!” He practically posed as Cyril Hargreaves. “Anyway, I’ve got to be off.”

“Where to?” Mr. Fletcher demanded.

“Oh! I’ve got to get the truck down to Johnstown!” Jensen hesitated a long moment. “So that it’ll be ready when Mr. Bellotti gets there tomorrow.”

Mr. Fletcher rubbed his chin. “Why, we could drive Mr. Bellotti down ourselves. Why not?”

“That would indeed be gracious!” Jensen observed. David had never before heard him talking that way. “And why couldn’t Mr. Harper drive down with you?”

“Why not?” Mrs. Fletcher asked. But just before the Wild Man drove away he gripped David by the wrist. “Listen!” he grunted. “You see that Mom and Pop go to bed. Leave Betty and Vito alone!”

When the truck rolled off into the night there was a moment of anticlimax. “That Mr. Jensen is a remarkable man,” Mr. Fletcher said.

“Yes,” David replied. “I get sleepy just thinking of him driving that truck all night.” This had no effect, so he added, “I’d better turn in. These long treks.” Still the Fletchers made no move to leave their daughter with Vito, so David said directly, “You see, I was driving on the early morning shift … when we came through Punxsutawney.”

“I think we’ll join you,” Mrs. Fletcher said with maximum confusion. They left Betty and Vito sitting on the porch. Hours later, when the tiny couple climbed the stairs, David watched from his door and saw that little people kiss in the same way big ones do.

The Fletchers, with little Betty, followed Chautauqua into Eastern Pennsylvania, and from watching the dwarfs together David derived a subtle pleasure. They seemed to be his special wards and he discovered how good it was to do something important for other people. Once some uncertain—and therefore aggressive—boys looked at the dwarfs with disgust and started to tease them: “Midgets! Midgets!” And David chased the boys until he caught two.

“What’s the matter with you?” he argued seriously. “You got to ridicule anything different from the way you are?”

Now the boys were frightened as well as uncertain, so they
said, “Aw nuts!” whereupon David slapped them hard. This brought them to their senses and he made them come back to the tent where he introduced Vito and Betty to them. “Show them your low voice!” he said to Vito.

“Hello, kids!” Vito said, and on all sides the tension was broken. The boys went for their friends—those who had escaped David—and Vito showed them how to make marionettes, and David stood near by with little Betty, as if it were his protective love that held these two dwarfs safe in the world.

He felt better toward Jensen, too. Knowing how much the Wild Man had wanted to find Vito the perfect little pigeon, David felt that he had triumphed over the hairy-chested fellow, thus wiping away the disgrace of having Jensen star in David’s role. In fact, David felt very warm toward Jensen and talked with him night after night in the truck. “You like everybody, don’t you?” he asked the big driver.

“Even the Gonoph,” Jensen replied.

“How did you get that way?” David inquired.

“Because nobody’s got nothin’ I want,” the Wild Man said. “I got only two desires in the world.”

“Like what?” David asked.

“I’d like to live to be a hundred, and I’d like to be hung for rape,” the Wild Man replied. There was a moment of silence and then David burst into a wild guffaw. The two actors laughed at each other and told some more stories, and it was out of this very feeling of warmth toward everyone that David and Jensen devised the fabulous thing they did to the Gonoph. David was squeezing his eyes shut with delight at one of Jensen’s jokes when he suddenly slapped his leg and cried, “I’ve got it!”

“What?”

“The Gonoph! All summer I’ve been watching her and wondering what we could do to help her along.”

“That’s simple!” Jensen snorted. “Go to bed with her.” David frowned and the Wild Man coughed. “No. I guess there’s a limit to everything,” he said.

“But now I’ve got it!” David repeated, and when he explained what they could do at Willamaxon, Jensen laughed till there were tears in his eyes and he cried, “What a night that’ll be!”

But in spite of his kind feelings toward the Gonoph, David was still incapable of talking with her in the late afternoons. Even though his experience with Vito and Betty had shown
him that love rides and dismounts where it will, he found the hulking woman increasingly obnoxious. He tried to do little things for her to show his appreciation of her interest. He brought her sandwiches, for example, or jumped to lift her box into the truck; but what she wanted most hungrily—to talk with him and to touch him now and then—that he could not give. “Here’s a sandwich,” he would say, and her fishy eyes would fall upon him, lingeringly, so that he felt embarrassed and forced to run away. It was this confusion between affection for the flaccid woman and disgust at her physical grossness that betrayed David into devising his wicked plan. “We’ll give her one hell of a big night!” the Wild Man promised.

Mona and Hargreaves were having a succession of big nights. The latter, feeling that he had beaten off David’s challenge, acted with glowing freedom when on the stage and with courtly grace when off. He was thinner than ever, gray and handsome. He was unashamedly pleased to escort Mona to and from the tent, and David, watching him one night, thought, “He’s like an old bull we had at the poorhouse. Whenever a young bull came around there’d be a hell of a fight, and after that you could see from the way the old bull walked that he was pretty pleased with things.”

Mona perplexed David, and he gave up trying to understand her. She had a degree of concentration that was alien to him, and he perceived that her sleeping with Cyril Hargreaves simply did not affect in any way the hard and bitter core of her being that no man would ever know. David still caught his breath when he saw her turn suddenly upon the stage and smile at him. He felt that one cord of his heart would always be strung to that sensitive doll, so that when she moved, he moved, and he took much pleasure from the fact that if he had always been nothing to Mona, her present love, Sir Cyril, was nothing too. That was consoling.

In this quiet confusion David came back to Doylestown. The Chautauqua tent was pitched at the foot of Shewell Avenue and as they approached it Jensen said, “This is some burg! This is probably the only place in America I couldn’t find a girl to fall in love with.” But half an hour after they unpacked he was explaining to girls from Hamilton Street that he ate mostly in dirty restaurants.

When the marionette show ended lots of children milled around to say hello. There were some older folks in the crowd, too, and David looked with real excitement at one girl
who could have been Marcia. She wasn’t, and in a sense he felt relieved. Then a very satisfying idea struck him. “Jensen!” he cried. “I’m going to use the truck!”

He raced the motor and drove to the edge of town, out toward Solebury. Then he dismissed the idea of visiting the Paxson farm and thought of Paradise Park. “That’s the idea!” he cried aloud. “I’ll see the gang down there!” He whipped the truck around and hurried south. He laughed to himself, nervously, for he could picture the cashiers nodding to him, and there would be the heartache of seeing the Canals of Venice again.

But as he drove, gray buildings loomed upon the horizon. On their hill stood the poorhouse halls, impersonal in the late afternoon yet beckoning him home. He slowed the truck to less than a walk. The engine coughed and stumbled like his own unwilling spirit; but at the driveway he turned right, for he was home.

No one at the poorhouse noticed him as he parked the truck and climbed out. He took a deep breath and faced the women’s building. The flowers of late summer smiled along its cold stones. He went into the hallway and knocked on his aunt’s door. There was a whine of protest from within and the door opened.

Aunt Reba was dressed exactly as she had been when David last saw her. She wore a cotton dress with green pinstripes. It lay flat against her. She looked at her nephew a moment and said, “Come in.” She showed him a chair as if he were some inmate come to complain. “So you’re a
play
actor,
yet!
” she said with some contempt.

“Yes.”

“By
play
acting? Is it much
money?
” she asked.

“I get pretty good pay,” David replied.

“They
say
in Doylestown”—she called it
Doi-liss-tahn
—“you could have married the young
Paxson
yet. She’s taken
now
.”

David swallowed. “Who?” he asked.

“The young
Moomaugh
,” his aunt replied. “Now
there’s
a fine fellow
yet
. Already he’s got a good
chob
. And a wife with
money
. When the play acting’s
over?
You got a
chob?
”

“No,” David replied.

Where eighth street crosses Fourth Avenue in New York City a new thoroughfare begins. It is called Lafayette Street, and its first wide block is like a business square in London or Brussels. It is snugly closed at the north end, but its open vista shows the towering skyscrapers which rise at the tip of New York’s island.

This strange block bespeaks the great city of which it is a part, for along its eastern side runs the squat and massive headquarters of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. To this ugly building with its ancient Hebraic instructions carved in red stone came dispossessed Poles and Russians and all the wandering tribes on their first day in the free land. Even now shawled figures or old men in beards come back to Lafayette Street to gaze once more upon that ugly building where their hopes began.

Across the street, on the western side, cluster several neat buildings which are used as warehouses by uptown stores. And between these trim new buildings lies a meaner establishment, a remnant of the old city. Above its grubby door hangs a small wooden sign: T
HE
C
LAY
P
UBLICATIONS
. To this sign in the early winter of 1931 came David Harper with a letter.

He was met inside by a thin, acidulous woman who opened his letter, even though it was marked personal, and said,
“Mr. Clay will see you.” She led David like a schoolboy through a roaring pressroom where thousands of magazines were stacked and into an immaculately clean office. She sniffled petulantly and whined, “Mr. Clay, this is David Harper.”

A small trim man in a dark suit rose and extended a well-washed hand. “Morning,” he said with no enthusiasm. “I’m Tremont Clay.” The thin woman left.

Mr. Clay nodded primly toward a chair. “Sit down,” he said with a nasal twang. When he read the letter of introduction he wrinkled his nose and then looked at David. “How well do you know Miss Webster?” he demanded sharply, as if words were knives to cut away pretensions.

“I met her one night,” David replied.

“Out necking?” the little man asked with distaste.

“I was visiting her mother,” David lied. “She remembers me because I suggested that she send her first story to
The New Yorker
.”

Mr. Clay tossed Alison’s letter of introduction onto his desk and laughed, a miserable whining laugh. “Her first story! She wrote things for us before she was out of college.”

“Alison did?” David asked.

He heard Miss Adams cry from the outer office, “Coming in!” Shoving her way past David, she tossed onto Mr. Clay’s desk a lurid picture splashed with primary colors. A girl was having her dress torn off by a vile man. One breast was almost bare and most of her thigh. She had a look of complete horror in her eyes, which were quite large.

“No, no!” Mr. Clay said with great patience. “You! Look at this quick and tell me what you see first.” He flashed the picture before David’s face and demanded, “Whadcha see?”

“I saw … well, the eyes.”

“Certainly!” Clay said softly. Then he spoke to the woman, “Tell him he’s got three weeks to learn to make the eyes smaller. Focus here,” he said gently, tapping the breast with his pencil. He waved the woman out of his office. Then he stared at David.

“You ever been an editor?” he snapped.

“No.”

“Police reporter? Writer? Rewrite man? What have you done?”

“I’ve always been good in English,” David said forcefully.

Clay snorted. Contemptuously he kicked open a door and waved his arm toward five girls huddled over desks. “Everybody
comes in here for a job was good in English. It’s the most useless thing in the world to be good in. You ever study law?”

“No,” David said.

The little man sneered at him and said, “You wouldn’t be much use to me, would you?”

David became angry and snapped, “I’ve been around a lot. I want a job. I can handle it.”

The forcefulness of his reply pleased Clay, who suddenly banged a pile of magazines in front of David. On the cover of each a girl was being raped, one by a gorilla. “All right,” the thin little man snarled, “how many of these do you know?”

“I used to read
Great Crimes
and
Real Western
. I worked in a park one summer.”

“What’s the plot of
Great Crimes
?”

“What do you mean?” David asked.

“The plot! The plot!” Clay demanded nervously. “The way each story unfolds.”

Dizzily David tried to recall the bright, greasy books of Paradise. They blurred in his mind. “I can’t recall,” he said.