The Fires of Spring (66 page)

But if a man happens to find himself—if he knows what he can be depended upon to do, the limits of his courage, the positions from which he will no longer retreat, the degree to which he can surrender his inner life to some woman, the secret reservoirs of his determination, the extent of his dedication, the depth of his feeling for beauty, his honest and unpostured goals—then he has found a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.

Among the many people he had known, David could recall only one real enemy, his aunt Reba Stücke, and he finally got even with her in a manner so bizarre that for the rest of his life he had to laugh with joyous pleasure whenever he remembered that evil woman. By the same stratagem he gained his freedom from the sentimental bondage in which he had been held by Mona Meigs. It happened this way.

When Marcia brought him the incomplete novel she said, “It’s wonderful, Dave! You be second cook till it’s finished. I’ll be proud to be chambermaid.” Then she frowned ever so slightly and said, “I can see from the book that you really loved Miss Meigs.”

David blushed and asked, “Is it as clear as that?”

“It’s very clear,” Marcia said seriously. “Are you still in love with her?”

David had sense enough to reply, “Not the way I am with you,” and the frown disappeared. Then he added, “It’s just that no man could ever forget Mona completely. I saw a man die one night, and his last question was about her.” Marcia frowned again, a woman’s flickering frown that seemed to cut deep because it stayed so very briefly.

Then the will was probated.

Actually, there was no will. Reba Stücke had been so grasping that she was emotionally unable to write a will. She simply could not imagine giving up her hoarded money to anyone, so the court said that by default it must go to David. They sent him eight hundred and sixty dollars and many papers to sign. He said to Marcia, “We don’t want to start our married life with money from that old witch.”

“You bet we don’t!” Marcia agreed, and they decided to give it to the Friends’ Service Committee, but they were prevented from such an obvious gesture by Mona’s letter:

David handed the scrawl to Marcia, who read it slowly and shook her head. “What are you going to do?” she asked. Then she noticed that he was laughing.

“Do?” he chuckled. “This solves everything!” He laughed all the way to the bank, where he made out a cashier’s
check, and on to the postoffice, where he mailed a registered letter, and all during the rest of the day, so that forever afterwards when he thought of Aunt Reba a warm glow suffused him, and he felt wonderful. He might be in a restaurant, and he would begin to chuckle for no apparent reason, and then Marcia would know that he was thinking of Aunt Reba’s poorhouse money out in Hollywood, spent in niggardly amounts to support an actress and a song writer who lived together in open sin.

So whenever David laughed, Marcia laughed too, for she knew that at long last the poorhouse, and Aunt Reba, and perhaps even Mona had been exorcized by the subtle warmth of comedy. “At last he’s ready to get married,” she whispered to herself.

The wedding was held in a small white room on East Seventeenth Street. The guests arrived by mid-afternoon. From Bucks County only the Paxsons appeared, and they sat apart in one corner of the room, ashamed and confused at their daughter’s headstrong history yet pleased that she was at last marrying David Harper.

David’s friends attended the Quaker wedding self-consciously. Tremont Clay wore formal dress and felt ill at ease. He thought that this young man had let him down. Mom Beckett and Claude sat together, holding hands, and as always at a wedding Mom had tears in her eyes. Her mascara smeared, and she was not a lovely sight. Vito was in the front row where he could see, while little Betty, pregnant again, was to accompany Marcia to the wedding chairs. Wild Man Jensen was to walk with David. In the rear Mrs. Allegri wiped her nose even before the procession started, but Mr. Allegri commanded her sharply to stop. He pointed out that it couldn’t be much of a wedding with no priest or flowers.

Four elderly Quakers entered from a side door and sat facing the small Meeting. Three were men, and they looked like Solebury farmers, transplanted into the city. The woman was small and nervous. With sharp eyes she indicated where everyone was to sit, jumped up to adjust the curtains, and marked the minutes by a tapping foot. These four were that day the repositories of God’s will, and through them David and Marcia would be married.

At four-thirty Marcia and the dwarf Betty Bellotti walked into the room, followed by David and Wild Man Jensen. The
bridal pair sat on two plain chairs that faced the audience. There was silence, and the peace of God descended upon that room, and behind him David could hear the three men breathing heavily. He could hear the woman tapping.

He looked among the strange faces and felt that he could never find courage to rise and begin the ceremony. Slowly, as if testing his strength, he gritted his teeth, but strength fled from him, for he heard Marcia gasp and followed her eyes across the room. Then he gasped too, for sitting in the corner was Mrs. Trueblood.

She was an elderly woman, thin and tall. She had a slightly peaked nose and eyes that burned like embers in a dying grate. She was always dressed in black and spoke at Yearly Meetings. Marcia had not invited her, nor had David. She had no doubt come as the representative of Solebury Meeting in this official marriage of a daughter of Solebury. She sat primly, unwanted, unlovely, bitter; and the wedding couple was shaken by this Coleridgean wedding guest.

Twenty minutes of silence elapsed, and David thought of Mrs. Trueblood and Harry Moomaugh and Alison Webster and Mona Meigs and of each item of sin that rested on him that day. In the audience, members began to wonder if he had forgotten his words, but Mr. Paxson stared at him and almost imperceptibly nodded his head. David took a deep breath and rose to face the members of the Meeting.

“In the presence of God and these our friends assembled,” he said softly, “I take thee, Marcia, to be my wife …” He continued the simple ritual, placed the ring upon Marcia’s finger, and kissed her. Marcia acknowledged to the Meeting—and through it to the world—that she was taking David to be her lawful husband. With these simple words the marriage was consecrated.

They sat down, and there came a greater silence. As in the old poorhouse Meeting, a fly droned endlessly about David’s head and inadvertently he looked beside him, half expecting to see mad Luther Detwiler sitting with his hat on; but instead he saw his wife, and he remembered how he had first seen her, in just such a quiet Meeting, and he thought: “It seems so right.”

But the essential wrongness of this marriage could not go unchallenged. Mrs. Trueblood rose and pointed her long beak at the couple. “Marcia Paxson Moomaugh Harper,” she said in godlike tones, “thee has been a wilful child. Thee has been headstrong, has loved thine own ways and has shown
no aptitude for true marriage. What token is there that thee has changed?”

In their corner Mr. and Mrs. Paxson stared at the floor. David looked away in shame, but Marcia stared back at Mrs. Trueblood. The woman constructed a long and thoughtful analysis of marriage as a sacrament. The very presence of God Himself was dragged into the small room, and flies buzzed while she excoriated divorce and broken vows. She spoke as a prophet from the Old Testament, and her voice had a monitory ring that frightened David and left him quivering when she finally sat down, clothed in lonely dignity, trembling from the force of what the Lord had made her say.

Again the room was silent and David could hear labored breathing. It was the moment of consecration, when two people, strangers up to now, were being fused into one. David thought of the fiery charges Mrs. Trueblood had made. She seemed to be like Morris Binder: “There are good men and bad men. Good girls and bad girls. Never leave the reader in doubt. Good girls wear simple colors like honest yellow or blue.”

But human beings, David among them, could not be so labeled. There was sin upon him, yes. In the drowsy, quiet room he thought of this sin. He concluded that sin was any folly which hurt or even ruined the man who persisted in it. Sin was the erosion of spirit that finally left fields of the soul gullied, their substance washed away, their stalks of grain bent and fruitless. Each human being was subject to sin and each bore his penalties in peculiar and often terrible ways.

But sin was not evil. No, evil must be in a lower category. Evil was wrong-doing directed not at one’s self but at another. Evil was sin persisted in, arrogantly and to no known purpose. And it was this confusion between sin and evil that so blinded the world. Tremont Clay was an evil man, and in the quiet room David looked at the dapper man and thought: “I’ll never stoop so low again.” For Clay had set out consciously to debauch the world, and he had established good rules for accomplishing his purpose. He did not even sin against himself in doing so, for the magazines did not corrode him; but they were evil, and David would always despise himself for having helped that work along.

Then he saw the mascaraed face of Mom Beckett. She stared impassively ahead, her hand clutching Claude’s. He watched her for a moment and realized that he had no words
of description for her. Neither sin nor evil seemed to apply to that strange and provocative woman.

As he studied his friends and thought of their problems—Jensen was still unemployed; Vito’s first child had been a dwarf, but they had hopes that the second might not be—he became angry with Mrs. Trueblood. “There’s no reason why she should have spoken so!” he muttered to himself, staring at the uncompromising Quaker saint. He could not believe that his marriage with Marcia was perpetually condemned because it happened to have been conceived in sin. That was beside the point. There was a phrase from Marcia’s favorite poem: “And peace proclaims olives of endless age.” There was no reason why that should not describe their dedicated marriage. They would live as if their lives were an atonement for the errors they had made.

He thought of his own country. It had started its noble life with the greatest crime of all: matricide. Its finest patriots were stained with the intolerable crime: treason. Its corporate life was still stained with minor forms of slavery. And yet from these lewd beginnings a nation of free and reasonably good men had risen and prospered and shown a light to all the world. David thought of the little Italians fighting over their bocce far from home, and they were better here. He recalled the shivering Jews in Lafayette Street, and here they were free. Either a nation or a man—or a marriage, for that matter—can start in sin and accomplish the perfection to which it aspires. Only the wilfully evil are proscribed and nugatory. David looked humbly at his feet as if he were unworthy of this cleansing truth.

Then from a side bench a man in gray rose and began to speak. Neither David nor Marcia knew this Quaker, nor would they ever know his name, but his words fell over the ugly architecture of their past like snow upon the buildings of Washington Square. He said, “The most misleading concept in religion is that of the recording angel. I cannot believe that God remembers or cares to remember a single incident of our lives. I am the recording angel. My spirit and my body are the record. My good deeds show in me, and my wrong deeds can never be hidden. My spirit either grows to fullness or declines to nothing. God has no need of recording devices. We must not think of Him as a vengeful or shopkeeping dictograph. He has created a better instrument than a strip of all-recording film. He has made me. He needs only look at me, and all is recorded.

“Therefore we must conclude that we retain the privilege of erasing past mistakes. Sometimes I think we Quakers do not attend carefully enough to the teachings of the Catholic Church. I refer especially to their doctrine of final salvation. I know it is repugnant for some Friends to contemplate a totally evil man’s being saved in the last gasp of life, but if what I have just said about God’s establishing us as his immortal recording devices is true, I for one believe this to be possible.”

He spoke briefly of marriage as the beginning of a new memory. Then he sat down. The flies buzzed on, and the sun, falling low in the west, slipped in beneath the curtains as it had each Sunday in the poorhouse church.

The words of the man in gray had a powerful effect upon Marcia, and she felt that this day was indeed the beginning of a new life. The phrase was trite, but it had been good enough for Dante centuries ago and it was still the best single description of a Christian marriage. She thought with a great tenderness of the brown-haired fellow beside her. She knew his every fault: his pusillanimous nature, his fuzzy idealism, his pantheism, his uncritical belief in people, and his financial irresponsibility. But she remembered what Mom Beckett had said: “Hell, there ain’t no good single men. A girl picks out the best she can lay her hands on and then tries to make somethin’ of him.” She kept her eyes on the floor and knew without question that her man would live with dignity. His book would be good, too, perhaps not the perfect thing he had imagined, but good.

Slowly she became aware that David had turned toward her. She looked up and saw him bidding her to stand. He shook hands with her. Behind her the spiritual seers of the Meeting also shook hands. In the audience friends and strangers grasped one another’s hands, and the wedding was over.