The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
David clenched his teeth and refused to get angry. “Leave Mona alone,” he said. “What she does is her business.”
“I’m not one to cast the first stone!” the flaccid woman cried. “I’m just disgusted with Mr. Hargreaves. Every summer it’s the same way. He looks over all the women and it’s sort of like the finger of God. ‘You’re the one!’ Then all summer he’s as nice to that girl as he can be. Teaches her everything. And promises that in the winter he’ll get her a job on Broadway. The only charge for this service is very modest! His shoes under her bed.”
“I don’t want to hear any more about it!” David insisted.
“I’m not spreading gossip!” the flabby woman protested. “I just got a hunch you’re sweet on Miss Meigs and I’m tipping you off.”
“I don’t propose to start a fight,” David replied.
“Ho ho!” the Gonoph cackled. “That’s not what’s worrying me. I like you, Dave.” She said his name in three syllables, lingeringly. “I wanted to warn you that if you tried to start anything, Lord Cyril would chop you into little bits. Have you ever seen a monkey back into an electric fan? Whirrrr! They’re gone! That’s the way it is when anybody mixes up with Cyril when he’s hot after some girl.”
David disliked being drawn into this conversation but he felt that he must flex his muscles. “I can handle Cyril,” he assured his informant.
“Cyril don’t fight!” the Gonoph said quietly. “He’s too smart for that.” She chuckled to herself. “Like the time a two-hundred-pound athalete and him was trying to lure the same girl. She couldn’t make up her mind who she was sleeping with that summer. Cyril was smarter but the other guy was better-looking. So the other guy never knew what hit him. The cops arrested him for running likker, and there it was!” She pulled her shawl more tightly about her shoulders. “I can say these things,” she mused, “because twenty years ago it was my room Mr. Hargreaves was coming to.”
David must have gasped, for the Gonoph looked at him and said, “Yes. Twenty years ago I wasn’t so bad-looking, if I do say so myself.” She tucked in her blouse and patted her fat stomach complacently.
“And is that how you finally got on Broadway?” David asked, fascinated by the Gonoph’s information.
“Oh, no!” she protested heatedly. “I’ve always been a Broadway star.” The words were strange when applied to her.
“You have?” David asked, not masking his incredulity.
“Yes, indeed. You see, my mother was an actress, too!” She paused smugly, tugged at her shawl and added, “My father was, too, but he wasn’t a very nice man.” David sensed that for the Gonoph everyone was either nice or not very nice.
“What parts did you play?” he asked.
“Little-girl parts till I grew up. Then big-girl parts. Then when I got my growth, women’s parts,” she explained.
“Which did you like best?” David asked.
“I guess the little-girl parts,” she replied, recalling some amusing incident of the past. “You see, my mother was living then. We had a family skit, The Red-Haired Orphan. It was fun but it wasn’t fun, too. My father wouldn’t follow the script. But I got to admit he did work out some funny business. That was the part that wasn’t fun. He hit me in the face with a pie. The audiences roared. We played that skit for two years, all across the country. My mother cried when my father insisted on the pie routine. But after a while I didn’t mind very much. You see, I learned the trick of putting lots of grease in my hair so the pie just rubbed out! It was as simple as that!” she said triumphantly.
“Do they use real pies?” David asked.
“No!” she explained eagerly. “They’s a special powder. Makes wonderful fluff. That’s why all the pies you see onstage are lemon meringue.” She dropped her voice. “They never see a lemon!” she confided.
“When you got your growth,” David asked, caught by the far-away quality of the Gonoph’s talk, “what parts did you play?”
“Oh, mainly any kind,” she explained. “Mainly the second sister, I guess.”
“What do you mean?” David inquired.
“I was usually the plain one to offset the pretty one,” she said. “Like in this play. They don’t want the mother too good-looking or Miss Meigs won’t seem so pretty.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “She’s no spring chicken, you know. She does have a beautiful build, though. As if you didn’t know!” She poked a pudgy finger at David’s rib.
The Gonoph continued her dismal narrative. Overhead the hot sun ceased beating on the brown canvas and the rich smell of baked grass, grease paint, human sweat and dust pervaded the Chautauqua tent. David sniffed approvingly of the fine country aroma and listened as the Gonoph droned on. “This may very well be my last play,” she admitted. “I’m getting too old for the second sister. And it’s disgraceful the way they type-cast old women in plays. Got to be pawky old devils like May Robson and Marie Dressler. They’re good, of course, but they’re hardly my type.”
She pulled her shawl about her fat shoulders. There was a sodden look in her heavy face. David found it impossible to believe that this woman could have earned a single week’s work in any theatre at any time, except perhaps as a charwoman long after the last patron had left.
“Of course,” she droned, “twenty years ago I had a better figure. And a better complexion, too. You see me twenty years ago, when I was touring with John Drew, you wouldn’t blame Lord Cyril for crawling up the stairs to my room!” A heavy, musty look came into her eyes and she grinned knowingly at David, poking him again in the ribs.
She made an indelible impression on David, deep and disturbing. He perceived that most of the laborers in any art are like the Gonoph. The third and fourth viola players. The writers whose books never quite come off, and the weaker contraltos whose voices can fill neither a theatre nor a heart. Formless, unachieving, dimly perceptive or totally blind to the principles of their art, they stumble on and fill the interstices left by the Kreislers, the Bernhardts, and the Thomas Manns. If growing up is the process of seeing things as they actually are—perhaps only two or three truths in a lifetime—then the Gonoph meant more to David than anyone else he met that summer. For through her bleary eyes he saw the world of art as it was, the tragic, fumbling, ever-seeking world in which so few achieve so much and so many accomplish nothing.
In spite of what the Gonoph had said about Mona and Cyril Hargreaves, David longed to be with the actress. True, he could kiss her five or six times each night in the play but mere kissing was not what he wanted. He desired much more or infinitely less. He yearned, for example, to hear the slim girl become involved with laughter and disgust as she told him about her experience in Hollywood. He wanted to feel her hand eagerly upon his shoulder when she chuckled and cried: “Oh, Dave! Let me tell you something really delightful!” He wanted to be with her in a thousand small and sharing ways, for he had convinced himself that she had become his other self, his alien eyes that saw so much, his extra senses, and the personification of his hopes.
But Mona’s preoccupation with Cyril, and David’s own duties with the dwarf Vito kept them apart, so that David, like most men in the world who are unhappy, tried to lose his dismay in work. “Why couldn’t I operate a doll of my own?” he asked the dwarf one day.
“You could,” Vito replied. “But you’d have a hard job learning.”
“I’d like that,” David replied. So the dwarf handed him a marionette carved into the form of a roistering sailor.
“This is Bosco,” the dwarf explained. “He’s got fifteen strings. Just watch the things he can do!” Vito deftly grabbed the controls to which the three-foot strings were attached. First he made the sailor strut, then dance, then roll his eyes, then salute. Finally Bosco grunted and sat heavily upon a painted wharf. He began to play an accordion. Then he stopped and reached for a glass of beer, from which he knocked the foam. He drank the amber liquid, rolled his eyes again, and spit lustily into a corner. Then he resumed playing his accordion,
“You do it all with strings,” Vito explained.
“I think I could learn that,” David replied, and he plunged into the job with all his energy.
The dwarf had a small, collapsible stage made of aluminum piping and beaver board. Eight lovely backdrops were painted on canvas and could be shifted by the quick motion of a wrist. Matching side drops framed the stage, and a florid red curtain, sequined in purple and gold, ran on runners like a real theatrical curtain.
The marionette stage was small. The actors were small, and even the owner undersized, but whenever David worked with Vito he felt at home. The little Italian so loved his dolls and was so quietly happy with them that his entire show assumed a fairy loveliness, and through it David entered a world of delicate fantasy, but the pleasure he found there was very real.
Vito was an extraordinary puppeteer. His remarkable voice enabled him to portray an endless number of characters. He stood on a ramp and rested his stomach on the bar that held up the painted backdrops. Leaning far over the stage he would dance his little dolls deftly in time to phonograph music. Above his head there was a gridwork of latticed boards from which hung huge wire hooks shaped like capital S’s. When a doll finished a dance, Vito would grab a hook, twist it quickly to the right length, and hang upon it the controls of the now motionless doll. Then he would grab a new actor and make it perform contortions. Out front the children would scream with delight to see a red-headed boy fighting with an ice-cream cone that spouted smoke! But often Vito would extend a thumb or finger and flick the strings of the suspended marionette. Then, on the stage below, that doll would throw back its head, or raise a hand, or kick, or do something to signify its joy at watching the immense ice-cream cone belabor the hungry boy. So with hooks, a dozen voices, and a love of dolls that bubbled from his very elbows, the dwarf could keep an entire stage alive.
It was David’s job to keep the dolls in order. Soon Vito allowed him to handle one doll in each act, but David never found one he enjoyed so much as Bosco. When he brought Bosco on, swaggering, his sailor suit messy and white cap awry, David could hear the little boys in the audience start to laugh. “Watch out there, mate!” Bosco bellowed, squatting on a bale of cotton.
A bartender came out with a huge stein of beer. The little boys roared with pleasure as Bosco deftly grabbed the beer, obviously drained the glass, and shouted, “Bring on the girls!”
As he sat on the cotton and played his accordion, Vito would bring out two girls in tight waterproof dresses. Adroitly they would dance a tough little dance. At the end of the number Bosco rose and chased them. Then Vito screamed in his highest voice, “We’ll run away if you stop playing!” At this Bosco would stamp his foot and leer at the boys in the audience. “How can I have any fun if I got to nurse this squeeze box?” With one hand David would start the phonograph again, the needle would scratch, and Bosco would resume his accordion concerto.
The act ended with the toughest little girl dancing steps that defied the law of gravity. She displayed her red panties and Bosco rolled his eyes. The waiter came back with a stein of beer and caught Bosco kissing the girl. Infuriated, he poured the beer down Bosco’s neck. And the audience roared approval.
David was delighted with the complexity of the dolls Vito had carved. There was a beer-hall pianist who smoked. A small bellows was filled with white powder and tucked inside the pianist. Attached to the bellows was a bit of tubing that ran to the cigarette. One tug on a specially marked string made the bellows close slightly. Out came the smoke! A heavy magnet was built into the beer stein and another in Bosco’s lip. They snapped together with force, and it was then a simple matter to tilt the stein and have the brown fluid run accurately into the sailor’s big mouth.
Vito said, “There’s nothing a man can do a doll can’t, if you’ve got enough strings!” But the time always came when the strings got tangled. Not one doll escaped. A control might drop. Then the damage was done! Strings that should have hung straight were twisted and crossed, and the doll was hopelessly crippled. One leg might be caught in the air, or the neck might be skewed to one side.
Then Vito would take the ruined doll and patiently study the tangled skein. At such times he never spoke, but after a while he would deftly trace a single string as it wound its way through a maze of twenty others. It would, of course, have been much simpler merely to cut the strings and start anew; but to the dwarf that would have been sacrilege.
“If a man tangled this doll,” he insisted, “a man ought to be able to untangle it.”
With an artist’s infinite patience he would labor over his wounded doll. Soon the strings would be so tangled that David would look away in despair and start to pack the other dolls. Half an hour later he would return, and there the patient dwarf would be, still unwinding the tangled life into which his doll had fallen. Then, when things looked most confused, the industrious dwarf would pull some strings together and the doll would almost miraculously step free. Each string was perfect, doing the work for which it had been ordained.
At such times David had an oppressive, almost mystic feeling that he was watching not the dwarf Vito playing with dolls, but a deity at work upon some tangled human life. And the feeling grew strong upon him that any life in this world, no matter how tangled or distressed, could be set free if only a friend knew which snarled string to unravel.
“I hope you don’t mind my taking so much time on one doll,” Vito apologized one night. Then, not waiting for comment and not looking at David, he said very rapidly, “These dolls are pretty important to me. You won’t understand this, but when I realized I wasn’t going to grow up … Well, it was pretty awful. I used to dream of stretching machines, and a special kind of cabbage that would make boys grow, and what I would do if God gave me three wishes. ‘I’d only need one!’ I said. And I wanted to die. Then I saw a marionette show.” Tenderly he wrapped up the doll he had repaired. He tried to hand it to David without looking, but his hand stabbed the air and he turned.
“I guess that marionette show changed my life,” he said. “Because look!” His eyes danced with excitement. “I can hide back here! Nobody can tell how big I am or anything else. I can have as many voices as I like and as many characters. I can make them do impossible things.” Quickly he unwound the mended doll and sent it flying through the air, looping the loop, and shouting for a ham sandwich. David noticed the Vito’s dolls were fun because they were always getting into trouble or eating or making love or dancing or singing or having a wonderful time.
Chautauqua played for seven days in each town. First Day was noisy with the band and a comedian. The Swiss bellringers filled the Second Day with music and fun. Dressed in Alpine costumes and long moustaches, they laboriously spelled out hymns and polkas. A pretty girl of nineteen played the little bells until the comedy number was given, whereupon the comedian would lift her and her bells and swing them together. It was good clean fun. Third Day brought the acrobats and an inspirational talk on the good life. Vaudeville and a gala concert filled the Fourth Day. Then, on Fifth Day, came an accordionist to fill time until, in the evening, the Great Man spoke. In the past the Great Man had been William Jennings Bryan or Russell H. Conwell or Robert La Follette; but in this dying year a worn-out schoolteacher tried vainly to fill the spacious shoes that had graced Chautauqua in the fine years up to 1924. The Sixth Day brought Vito’s marionettes and the play. All week long each entertainer had been required to say, “I never laughed so much as I did at the play you’re going to see on last night.” An intense excitement was generated, so that by the time the curtain finally went up on Cyril Hargreaves’ troupe the town was prepared to believe that the great days had returned, and gradually this excitement pervaded David, for he knew that when he kissed Mona in the last scene of the play, there would never again be another Chautauqua in that town.
This sense of doom stayed with him, especially when it fell the players’ turn to provide Sunday worship, for Chautauqua
“You have a real soft spot in your heart for Chautauqua, don’t you?” the Gonoph asked one evening.
“Yes, I do!” David admitted, grinning at the formless woman.
“I like it, too,” she sighed. “Some of the best parts I ever had were in Chautauqua. I like fat parts with long speeches. Stars don’t impress me no more, because they hog the show. John Drew, Ethel Barrymore, Minnie Maddern Fiske, I traveled with them all.”
“What was John Drew like?” David asked.
“He swore!” the pasty woman said reproachfully. “Once he accused Mrs. Fiske of coming onstage drunk and she told him to go to hell.” She clucked her tongue, and that was all David learned about John Drew.
“Did you enjoy touring with Ethel Barrymore?” he pursued.
“She has a very low voice,” the Gonoph replied.
“How about Walter Hampden?” he asked.
“He made me sick!” she confided. David tried to discover why, but the pudgy woman kept her secret, shaking her head in disgust.
“Didn’t you enjoy touring with the stars?” he pressed.
“Well, yes and no,” the woman confided. “It had its good points and it had its bad points.”
“What do you mean?” he demanded.
“Well, generally speaking, the bigger the star the poorer the part I got. I was usually a maid. Not a comic, you understand. Just the maid. That’s why I like average company best. Just an ordinary company like this one. No stars. That’s when I’ve had some really fat parts.” She came and sat with David, tapping him on the knee. “Now I’m not boasting, you understand. But this part of Mrs. Hardy is just about the fattest part in the play.” She tapped him again for special emphasis and whispered, “Have you noticed how much I’m onstage! That’s how you can tell who has the fat part! Lots of actors say they like a part where they stay offstage and are talked about. Then they rush in, beat their breast, and storm out. Everybody claps. But they don’t fool me a bit. They only kid themselves when they say that. They’re sore because they’re not onstage themselves.” She tucked in her blouse and smiled complacently. “Have you noticed that I’m onstage more than Miss Meigs? That should tell you something!”