The Fires of Spring (49 page)

Her restaurant served very poor food, because she could never keep her Chinese cooks very long. As a young girl, she had traveled with her father through Western camps and had grown to respect Chinese cooks, but they would not tolerate her peremptory manners. “By God!” she stormed, “in my day they’d a horsewhipped you, Ching Lee.”

“Not your day, my day!” the cooks would flare.

“You get the hell out of here!” she would storm.

“You bet I get out!” the cooks would scream, and before they left they would usually wreck the place, and there would be a violent scene, and Mom would end it, standing very neat and laced up, at the door, shouting up MacDougal Street at
the back of the fleeing cook, “I dare you to come back here, you yellow bastard!”

Then she would come into the restaurant and slump disconsolately in a chair, staring at a tall bearded man who guarded her cash register. “Damn you, Claude!” she would snarl. “You musta been castrated when you were a baby. Why’d you let that lousy Chink insult me? Why he coulda killed me for all you care!”

Then the gentle bearded man behind the counter would grin at Mom and say, in a low voice, “Now who’s going to cook?”

“You’ll have to cook,” Mom always replied. And that’s why the food was so bad. Because Claude was a poet. He never made any money, nor did he ever have any, except what Mom gave him. He was in his late forties, a thin, gentle fellow who had written some excellent verse, which had been published to critical acclaim. Mom had paid the bills for his books, and it was pretty well established that Claude either was then or had been her lover. He was like some strange tropical flower that bloomed at intervals of nine or ten years. His whole output was not over a hundred poems, and he had not produced a volume since 1926.

But he had a delicate touch—in everything except cooking—and it was from him that David learned the soft, fiery, passionate, steely-cold, infuriating, tender and earth-moving quality of words. One night, after a departing Chinese cook had upset forty pounds of rice and a gallon of molasses, Claude stood scratching his beard as he surveyed the mess that he would have to clean up. Behind him, in the restaurant, two writers were arguing. One said, “The Village is like a refuge from the banalities of this city.”

“No!” the poet said quietly. “We live in the hidden valley between the breasts of Manhattan.”

“Say!” one of the men said. “That’s good, Claude. Can I use that?”

But the poet was already at work mopping up the rice and molasses. Yet the felicitous phrase hung in David’s mind for days, like a fly caught in a web. Then one day he took a ferry ride to Weehawken and on his return chanced to see the skyline of Manhattan with the uptown and downtown skyscrapers forming metallic breasts. His Village lay in between.

Mom’s restaurant was in the basement, and contained two dozen small wooden tables with red-and-white-checked oilcloth
covers. In one corner stood a piano at which Claude sometimes strummed. An old bar, now officially closed, remained along one wall, and by gradual degrees Mom had reopened it as a full-fledged bar. Bootleg was delivered openly from trucks that backed up to the blue door of her restaurant. Four or five times a year her place was raided, and she was often heavily fined. But by common agreement, the police never looked into the big room next to the one in which Mom slept. For in spite of her unending feud with the law, the police tolerated her as a necessary evil. Men were going to buy liquor somewhere, and Mom behaved herself, more or less.

She looked upon David as she looked upon all young men who worked at writing or editing. “If you’re an honest-to-God man, why ain’t you got an honest-to-God job?” she demanded.

“If you despise writers so much,” David countered, “why do you make such a fuss over Claude?”

Mom didn’t bat an eye. She looked firmly at David and said, “Some unfortunates is got to write. They can’t help themselves. But why should a clean young fellow like you consciously mess up his life thataway?”

“Mom,” David laughed. “They tell me you pay to have Claude’s books published.”

“Sure I do!” the big woman replied. Then her rasping Arizona voice continued, “In America they’s some kind of men can’t make a livin’. Somebody’s gotta support ’em, even if it’s a woman.”

And across time came Old Daniel’s voice saying the same words: “Sometimes good men don’t prosper,” and David felt both frightened for himself and strangely alive; for he felt that he was reliving a part of his life, as if time repeated itself, as if there were only a few things in all the world worth knowing, as if Old Daniel and Professor Immanuel Tschilczynski and Mom Beckett were the same person, hammering away at the same truths.

“Why are you trying to scare me?” he asked the big, handsome woman.

“Kid,” she said, “in my time I’ve fed more’n forty writers here. Give ’em handouts like they was paupers. ’N I suppose you wanta be a writer, too?”

“That’s right,” David said grimly, as if he were taking a solemn oath.

“Well, you’re a horse’s ass,” Mom said, with deep pity.

When David realized that he was going to room only one floor away from Alison Webster, he inadvertently whistled and thought, “Oh, boy!”

But whatever plans that exclamation implied were abortive, for Alison had neither the time nor the inclination to indulge in fooling. She had fled Baltimore and come to New York to make her fortune in the way young men, centuries ago, had come to Paris, to London or to Rome. When David met her in Mom’s restaurant she was thinner and did her red hair in bangs that had become fashionable. Her complexion was improved, and she wore trim, stylish clothes to match it. She seemed much neater than her surroundings. In short, she was a New York girl, and, like all of them, the product of a small town.

“You look like a new person!” David exclaimed. “Would you let me take you out to dinner?”

Alison pursed her lips and then smiled generously so that her superb white teeth flashed in the dingy restaurant. “Let’s do!” she said with exaggerated eagerness. She led David to a fashionable Chinese restaurant where she instructed him in the best dishes. But he noticed that she merely toyed with her portion.

“Aren’t you going to eat the shrimps?” he asked.

“Dave!” she laughed. “Don’t you know? Fat girls don’t rate in this city.” Apparently his jaw dropped, for she added, “You look hungry, Dave. Here. You finish them.”

“Aren’t you hungry?” he countered.

“Sure I’m hungry!” she cried, pushing the dish at him. “I’m always hungry! But I won’t be a blubbery pig.” She patted her lean stomach.

“I must admit,” David laughed as he chomped on the delicious shrimp, “that you look twice as pretty.” Then he noticed the excited, beautiful cast of her face. “You were fat and freckly when I knew you. Alison, why did you kid me about writing? You’d already sold a lot of stories to Tremont Clay.”

“How do you like Clay’s emporium?” she countered.

“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “it’s a way to make a living.”

“That’s how I feel about
Fashion
,” she replied.

“That’s a pretty glossy magazine, isn’t it? Flashy and frothy?”

“Sure it is!” Alison agreed. At times she could be an eager country girl, but immediately she resumed her New York pose and said, pushing away her dessert, “That’s how you
learn. When I knew all Tremont Clay could teach me, I stopped writing for the pulps. But if you think the flashy
Fashion
touch is easy … Say, David! How’d you like to do a story on Chautauqua? You know, Stylized! Lots of schmalz.” She became excited and in a flash sketched with her long hands a complete layout. “We’d have a montage with William Jennings Bryan, that ham, and a clown falling off the page.”

“There never were any clowns on Chautauqua,” David explained.

“So what! That’s what people expect. Give it to them.”

“Articles aren’t my line,” David said. “If I ever wrote about Chautauqua it would be … Well, it would be very hard for me to do.”

“I know that!” Alison said haughtily. “Genius stuff. But I’m talking about a quickie. Call it ‘The Old Brown Tents.’ New York highbrows’d love it.”

“I can’t write that way,” David insisted. Alison became furious, but the Chinese waiter appeared with the bill, and David used it as an opportunity to change the subject.

But in the street Alison pursued her attack. “You want to be a writer. Mom told me you said so. Then write! Write anything. Advertisements, pulps,
Fashion
goo, even rhymes on toilet walls. People who dream of the great book but never start …” Her flashing eyes searched Washington Square and fell upon an old bum panhandling dimes. “Such people,” she said harshly, “are self-deceiving sons-a-bitches.”

The next day she returned to heckle David about the Chautauqua article. “I spoke to Mrs. Clint,” she said, “and she agreed that a zippy article on the traveling tents would be good. Chance for a lot of nostalgia.”

David said simply, “It’s not my line.”

To his surprise, Alison showed no irritation. “Maybe you’ll want to write later. By the way, what’s your troupe doing now?”

“Mona Meigs, she was the lead you know. She and Cyril Hargreaves are in the repertory theatre uptown.”

“And the dwarf?”

“He married the little girl we found him. He does radio work, bits here and there.”

“And my hero? What was his name?”

David began to laugh and feel good. “Jensen! The Wild Man! He has a job on Wall Street.” Impulsively David reached out and tried to kiss Alison, but she pushed him away.

“You liked Jensen a lot, didn’t you?” she asked.

“Just thinking of that galoot makes me feel good all over.” David said expansively. Again he tried to kiss the handsome girl who was studying him, but again she eluded him.

“What became of that awful dumpy woman?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” David replied.

Seven weeks later Mom started to bellow from the restaurant. “Hey, Dave! Dash on down and see what I see!” David galloped downstairs and there stood Mom with a copy of
Fashion
. On page 37 appeared an article by Alison Webster: “The Good Brown Tents.” It was flashily done and contained a brilliant montage of William Jennings Bryan, some Swiss bellringers and a clown falling off the page. Even though Alison had falsified the clown on Chautauqua, the idea was effective. Mom Beckett cried, “Stitch my britches with barbed wire! Look at that clown!”

The big woman went out into the street and called in all her neighbors. “We got two geniuses in this dump now!” she cried. And when Alison got home there was a celebration, and the poet Claude made a wreath of vine leaves for her, out of green paper, and Mom broke open some red wine and champagne, and Alison sat flushed and happy, smiling so that her white teeth were brilliant against her red lips, and David felt very happy.

Morris Binder was an excellent teacher. Secure in his own preeminence, he was prodigal in sharing tricks with David. “Learn the rules,” he advised. “Get your girls straight first. In this racket girls are either good or bad. Mostly they’re good. Establish this in the first few paragraphs. The girl is good to her mother. She sings in a church choir. She’s pretty. She wears a simple white dress and has no breasts. She wears curls. She goes to the movies and has ice cream afterwards. She likes one young man. It’s possible for two men to like her, but she can never like more than one. Blue is also a good color for a good girl. Avoid the unusual shades. She can be either blonde or brunette. Never a redhead. She doesn’t wear sweaters. Never drinks or smokes. She has clean white teeth and frank eyes. But above all, she has nothing to do with sex. She doesn’t even know about it. If sex enters the story it’s always forced upon her. By a bad man. She absolutely cannot have a child unless she’s married. A girl who does is automatically bad. We have no place for wronged girls. They’re either good or bad. But a good man by immediately marrying
a good girl who has been wronged by a bad man automatically makes her a good girl again. You got that straight!”

The immense man wheezed a few times and then described the bad girl. “For one thing, she wears sweaters. She can drink or smoke, but if she does she’s automatically bad. She can be interested in sex, but only as a weapon to tear down some good man. She can’t enjoy it with a bad man. She sometimes has a baby out of wedlock, but she mustn’t love the baby. That’s reserved for good girls. She isn’t good to her parents, doesn’t go to church, can visit plushy night clubs. She wears strange colors like chartreuse instead of honest yellow. She sports an expensive hairdo and probably has money. Money is always bad. She has a car of her own, a convertible, which she uses in seducing clean young men. She never kisses. She embraces. And so on.”

“It sounds silly to me,” David said.

“Maybe it is,” the big editor wheezed. “But it’s what most Americans think. And when they read one of our stories, Socko! Right in the first line! They know whether the girl is good or bad.”

“What about the men?” David asked.

“The important thing is always to have bad men chasing good girls or good men in the toils of bad girls. That’s what makes a story.”

“How can you spot the good men?” David asked.

“Well,” Morris Binder said reflectively, “good men aren’t interested in sex. They like games and church and their mothers. They work hard for small salaries. But sometimes the good man is very rich, in which case he doesn’t care for the wealthy girls of his set, who are always bad. I think it’s better if he doesn’t go to college. We haven’t quite made up our minds as to whether college men are good or bad. Of course, if he’s an athlete—especially an end or a basketball player—he can be good. Backfield men are showoffs and seducers. Tennis players are pansies. Give me a garage man or an honest laborer! Everybody knows they’re good.”

The huge editor continued for several days, dropping hints here and there about the four types of Americans: good and bad men and women. There were no in-between categories, no shades of behavior. This confused David, for he tried to fit his friends into Morris Binder’s four groups. They didn’t fit. Marcia Moomaugh, for example, was obviously a good girl. She was strong and clean and fine, yet she was interested in sex and was therefore typed by Tremont Clay’s magazines
as bad. And what about himself? Clearly, he was bad! He had been involved with girls, had stolen money from Paradise, and had despised his aunt. Yet he did not feel like a bad man. He felt merely like a man of confused purposes, and he guessed that most people he had known were like him in that respect.