The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
Later, while they ate spaghetti on Thirteenth Street, Joe commanded the waiter to bring the wine list. “I don’t like wine,” David objected.
“But tonight! Special!” Joe laughed. He raised his glass and said, “To Mary Meigs.” Darvid gasped and was ashamed to look at his friend. “To a damned pretty girl!” Joe added. They drank the toast and then David said, “I knew her at Paradise.”
“You talk like Dante!” Joe quipped.
“It was a park,” David explained. “She sang for Sousa.”
As they crossed through the City Hall, as they climbed the stairs of the dirty station, and as they rode homeward David told Joe of each item he could remember about Mary. With guesswork and perception the Bostonian asked leading questions: “So this Klim is the guy who’s no good for girls! And so you, like a country bumpkin asked her for a kiss!” He laughed in commiserating fun at David. “You’re deep and complex!” he said sagely. “Like a saucer of skim milk.”
“So that’s that,” David said as they reached the quadrangle.
Joe stopped dead and grabbed him by the hand. “What do you mean, that’s that! You’re certainly going back to sleep with her, aren’t you?”
The words were very sharp, the words that David had been refusing to admit into his reveries. “I’ve got to take some pictures at the observatory,” he said hurriedly.
“Good!” Vaux cried. “I’ve always wanted to see that place.” He accompanied his friend to the silent and rounded room where the telescope and cameras were kept and where the stars alone gave light.
“Your eyes get accustomed to it,” David explained. He went about the business of setting up the camera.
“I know how you feel about this singer,” Joe said. “Same thing happened to me in Boston. There was a damned good-looking young girl wanted to get married. The three of us on our block who might have—even though she was an Italian, she was Catholic, you see—all wanted to go away to school or sea or something. So she married the worst bum on the block. And during Christmas vacation I was lounging in the candy store … Dave, if you stood in that candy store a week and just watched, you could write a book. So she came in wearing a thin coat and I could cut my tongue out but I said, ‘What’s the matter, Becky? Louis can’t buy you a real coat?’ And she stuck her face into mine and said, ‘No.’ And she looked at me a long time and it was perfectly clear she wanted me to take her home, and it was clear to everybody else in the store, and we went home right in broad daylight, because no one on our block is scared of Louis, and we weren’t inside the room three minutes before we were in bed, and only last summer she slapped my face for kissing her.”
David worked at the camera and set the huge gears in motion so that the telescope would follow the motion of the earth and remain fixed upon a single star, as his mind followed Mary Meigs and focused upon her tender beauty. He could think of nothing to say to Joe.
So the tough Irishman continued his monologue and said: “All you got to do is stand in that candy store and you can see that the world is a poorhouse …”
“Have you ever seen a poorhouse?” David asked.
“I see one all about me!” the fiery student replied. “A poorhouse of the spirit!”
“Joe! Listen!” David began. “You were very smart guessing about Mary Meigs. But sometimes you shoot off at the mouth too much. What would you say if I told you I lived in a poorhouse?”
The shadowy Irishman stopped making huge gestures with his hands and asked, “You what?”
“I lived in a poorhouse. From the time I was a kid. It’s not so bad. As a matter of fact, I had a pretty good time there.”
“You actually lived in a poorhouse!” Vaux repeated mechanically. “What was it like?” For hours the inquisitive Irishman cross-examined David on everything that had happened in the poorhouse. The stars came and went, and in the east the moon rose, a thin crescent motioning its two fingers for the dawn to follow. When David spoke about certain things—the old men hanging themselves in the springtime and Mr. Crouthamel—Vaux stormed up and down in the growing light.
“But that was only a small part!” David protested. “Those things were incidents. The important part was the happiness and the love I saw there.”
Joe stopped walking and glared at his friend. “You blind fool!” he cried. “You didn’t see the terror because you live in a dream world you crept into when you were a baby. You don’t see social injustice because you’re lost in it yourself.”
“Don’t talk like that!” David objected. “I was immersed in poverty. Up to my heart, if you like. But it wasn’t the way you say. What harm did it do me? Poverty never hurts anyone unless it breaks his spirit. I got to college all right. And I’ll get through college.”
“Stop it!” Joe shouted. “You! They buy you off! They give you a cheap scholarship and you never see what’s happening to you.”
“There’s no point in shouting,” David said, piling the photographic plates into rows. “You see it one way. I see it another.”
But Vaux was obsessed with the poorhouse and he would not let David go to bed. “This old fellow who drowned himself in the water tank. You say you didn’t know him very well. Tell me, how did it feel at night, after a basketball game, when you went back to the poorhouse?”
“I felt I was going home.”
“Home!” Joe exploded.
“Yes. The old men were always waiting to hear the score. It was very exciting.”
“Now this Crouthamel. How did he make his money in the first place? How many families did he actually force into the poorhouse?”
“Look, Joe!” David interrupted. “You have it all wrong. Of the families that came, only one couple really down deep insisted on getting out. They weren’t in the poorhouse a week.”
“Dave!” Vaux shouted. “Don’t say that again. It’s irrelevant and horrible. Of course, only one couple was strong enough to fight what the capitalist system had done to them. But haven’t you ever conceived of society as a system in which the useless ones are protected and sustained as a sort of public trust? You and I know that four-fifths of the people on this earth don’t mean a damn to man or God. They’re miserable, useless things. Suppose you were a crook! Why, you could steal from those damned fools day after day and they’d never know it. But they’re society! They are the blood of my heart.”
He flung his arms about in wild gestures. Immense morning shadows spun through the observatory, a kind of visual prediction of the person Joe Vaux would one day become. “And you live in the body of the poorhouse and you don’t see it!” he cried. “Dave! I want you to tell me one thing. You’ve talked about this man Crouthamel four times tonight. And you’ve told me about how your aunt got sick and wanted to die because her money was all gone. Yet you’ve never once altered your voice to show that you give a damn for her misery. Why?”
“It’s time for breakfast,” David said nervously.
“No!” Vaux insisted. “Let’s have this out, Dave. Why?”
David, nineteen years old and uncertain of himself, stood with his right foot on the observatory ladder. He wanted deeply to tell Joe all the things he felt, but he was aware that he could never do that, not to Joe nor to anyone else. He once thought that Nora might have understood, but now he was convinced that there were certain things he would never discuss … not with anybody.
“I’ll tell you this much, Joe,” he said slowly. “The first thing I can remember in my life was a very cold night in Sellersville. I was with my mother then. She was so poor she used to tie the bread up in a bag and hide it under her pillow so that neither she nor I would eat any. She rented a house from Mr. Crouthamel, the worst house in the whole town, except one. She missed a rent payment and Mr. Crouthamel told her she would have to move into that other house. I remember going down to see it in the snow. There was a plum tree in the back yard, but all Mom could see were the bedbugs. They were crawling from the boards, even without beds being there. Mom brought me back to the house we w
“The sight made Mom feel wonderful. She caught me up and cried: ‘It’s no sin to be poor!’ She carried me to a neighbor’s house where a German family was just getting up for breakfast. She burst into the door and cried: ‘I can go without, but not this boy!’ She made them give me breakfast. I remember everything very clearly. A big German breakfast. Meat and fried potatoes and pie. Mom wouldn’t eat any, so I asked for a second piece of pie and she said: ‘Don’t be a pig!’ But two ministers heard about us and paid for moving us into the other house. They gave us some food and some clothes. Joe, the bugs were terrible. Mom wouldn’t go to sleep. She sat up all night killing them. She died in that house. So I went to live at the poorhouse, where Aunt Reba got a job. And if I sat here in this room and watched her right hand burn off, I wouldn’t feel a bit of pain.”
Joe sat looking at the floor for some time and then said in a very low voice, “If you carry a thing like that around with you long enough it’ll eat away your mind. You must get it out of your system. Talking’s good, but discharging the poison is better.”
“What do you mean?” David asked.
“It’s all explained in books. You ought to read Jung and Adler. Haven’t you figured it out? Crouthamel treated your mother rotten. Your aunt treated you rotten. So you take delight from the fact that Crouthamel got even with your aunt. And you say: ‘To hell with the poor people! I was poor, once.’ That’s evil, Dave.”
David knew that Joe’s quiet words were true. He shoved his foot back and forth along the ladder and asked, “What do you think I should do?”
“I’m no doctor,” Vaux replied. “But you should take into your heart the problems of everyone who is hungry or lonely. You should work against the poorhouses of the world.” The wiry Bostonian laughed at the pompousness of his words and said, “I’m going to bed.”
David remained in the empty observatory. It was incomprehensible that this tough alley fighter from Boston should be able to thrust so neatly into the heart of things, probing at the seat of sickness. But David thought: “I’m not like him. In math or any kind of studying I can go right to the center of the problem. But with people … Even myself … People are surrounded by a glowing fog I can’t penetrate. I see them as characters in a book or magnificent figures in a painting. I don’t see them as naked people. Or going to the toilet. I guess I’ve loved ninety-nine people out of every hundred I’ve met. But I’m not interested in them the way Joe is. I don’t care if a man loses his job or starves. Because I know that if I were with him I would do anything for him or even starve with him, and find him the best friend I ever had. Joe talks about abstract things, but I don’t care about them. It’s real people I like. I can’t think of a person on earth I don’t like …” He closed the book in which he kept his records, then added, “That is, except Aunt Reba.”
Joe Vaux was completely convinced that some day the revolutionists would break into all homes and ask to see the calluses upon the hands of the workers. “And it’s a fair bet,” he argued, “that those who have done no physical labor will be liquidated.” This reasoning confused David, because in Joe’s mind it was always someone else who was to revolt. It was they, the downtrodden, the masses. Joe and David would be hauled before their tribunals to be judged by them.
“But who are they?” David inquired.
“The hungry masses,” Joe replied.
“Look!” David argued. “This country is getting richer and richer every year. There are no downtrodden masses, Joe.”
Vaux looked sorrowfully at David and sighed. “You still refuse to see? You think we’ll go on, year after year, making more money?”
“I don’t see why not,” David replied. “Joe! I know the downtrodden masses. They’re just like you and me, only with less courage.”
Vaux became angry and cried, “You know the old ones. You ought to spend this summer catching up on yourself, Dave.” He dumped in David’s room his studies of the French and Russian revolutions. “Old men from poorhouses didn’t lead those babies,” he joked.
“I want to know what laboring ten hours a day means,” he said as the college term ended. Then he left for a summer of work with a construction gang in Fall River.
David stayed at the observatory all that fine, hot summer of 1926. He had been engaged to make a systematic mapping of the Milky Way in an effort to track down the variable stars. At intervals he would photograph a small portion of the sky. The developed plates would show a thousand mottled stars, and David would place two of them side by side in an oscillograph box with rapidly flashing lights. Almost magically, one variable star—among the thousands visible—would begin to dance in the darkness, so that even the most untrained eye could see that there was the star that was different.
David liked his work. He slept most of the day, read Joe Vaux’s books, and thought about Mary Meigs. He could still recall every incident of his meeting with her. He was increasingly confused over the fact that a girl could have a thin, delicate body and a perfect face and still swear and betray angry passions. He decided that it was because Mary was older than the girls he knew in college, and it never occurred to him that in their dormitories college girls were the same way.
He was ashamed of his thoughts about Mary—about wanting to be with her again on Klementi’s davenport—because he could not dissociate her from Klementi; and whether Klim was good for girls or not was irrelevant, for David was indebted to him. “I’ll never see her again,” he swore to himself in schoolboy fashion.
Then Kol himself played David a mean trick. He called the college one day and left a curt message: “Tell Mr. Harper Klementi Kol wants to talk with him.” David studied the message and called Philadelphia. “Yes,” Kol said brusquely. “I want to ask you about something. You’d better come up here.”
David was sweating when he hung up the receiver. What had Kol discovered? Did he want to talk about Mary Meigs? David felt a resentment against the musician and against the world. “I don’t want to get mixed up in things!” he cried to himself as he hurried to the station. “Damn it all! I want to read this summer.”
At Kol’s apartment there was a note. “D.H. Come to the Academy. We’re recording.” So David hopped aboard a trolley and reported to the famous music hall. He slipped quietly into a back seat and listened as Stokowski prepared his men in Schubert’s Seventh, that bright and brassy thing of a hundred themes. And as he listened he stared nervously at the violins, where Klementi Kol sat very straight.
“How did you like it?” Kol asked when the recording was completed.
“He uses so many melodies!” David replied cautiously. “Any one of them could be made into a symphony.”
“The word is prodigal,” Kol explained. “Why don’t we go down to the gallery?”
“I’d like that,” David agreed. They walked the few steps down to the Johnson Collection, where in the quiet, cool rooms a few art lovers studied the gems which the rich and parsimonious lawyer had surreptitiously purchased over many years. Already David thought of these pictures as his friends: the laughing Cima, the cool Cuyps, the sleepy Hobbemas, and the wrenched and bleeding primitives.
But this day Klementi asked the guard to move two chairs into the small room where the Rembrandt studies were. There he sat with David and pointed to the earthy picture of the massive beeves, hung on hooks, half-butchered, with their suet gleaming in the light. “Prodigal is the word,” Kol repeated.
“What do you mean?” David hazarded. He was looking at Kol, not at the Rembrandt.
“Lots of men,” Kol explained, “have so much talent they can waste ideas. Like the Schubert symphony. But there are others who have one talent, and they husband it very carefully. And often they’re better than the prodigal geniuses like Schubert. I’m thinking of Brahms, for example. And Watteau.” There was a long pause and David guessed that next Kol would speak of Mary Meigs. But instead the tall musician turned in his chair and looked at David, saying, “I met Immanuel Tschilczynski at a chamber-music session the other night. Could it be true what he said? That you plan to become a mathematician?”
David felt relieved, as if the attendants had come into that little room and lifted one of Rembrandt’s beeves from his chest. He laughed and said, “Yes. That’s right.”
He was unprepared for what happened next. Kol jumped up into the air like a strong, tribal dancer and cried, “But you have the talent! When I knew you at Paradise you could write! You had the vision, too, and I thought that maybe you would spend your life on something worthy. But to be a mathematician! What’s that, David?” He flailed his arms about and a wretched thought assailed the young student.
“Sometimes he is just like a girl!” David said under his breath.
Then the musician sat down and put his hands on David’s and said very quietly, “Leschetizky once told me that several of his finest students were like you. They knew they were going to be great pianists. But they fought against it. They struggled and cried out against their own destiny. Leschetizky told me that’s why they were wonderful when they finally surrendered. There was the fire of hell in them.”