The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
Now the pause came from Punxsutawney. David was afraid Mr. Fletcher might hang up, but after an endless moment the voice resumed. “We—Ill, Mr. Harper …”
“I could drive back right now!” David pleaded.
“Why don’t you do that?” the voice said quite solemnly.
David rushed back to the tent and found Vito. “When I got beat up,” he began, “you handled the show fine. By yourself. Could you do it once more? This afternoon?”
“Sure,” Vito said. “What’s up?”
“Do we have any of those folders left about the play?” David countered. He rummaged in the truck and found one. Stuffing it in his pocket, he wheeled the truck about and hastened back to Punxsutawney.
He was sweating badly when he met Mr. Fletcher, and the real-estate man was equally nervous. “I’m David Harper. This is my driver’s license.” There was a moment of embarrassed introduction and then David produced the folder. “This is Vito Bellotti,” he said. “He has a good job and makes a decent living.”
Mr. Fletcher took the crumpled paper and looked at it for a long time. “Why don’t we drive out to the house?” he suggested. He called his wife and said, “I’m bringing a young man out for a short visit. Can you fix some cakes and milk?” Then he laughed nervously and said, to David, “Of course, you being an actor, you’d probably prefer beer.”
“Oh, no!” David laughed uneasily. “Milk’s OK for me.”
Punxsutawney was a little town, but Mr. Fletcher turned at several corners, and each time David felt sweat break out upon his arms, for he had no idea what he was to say. Finally the car stopped and Mr. Fletcher said, “Well! Here we are!” He led David up a studiously winding flagstone path to where a woman in a white-and-blue apron waited at the door. “This is Mr. David Harper,” Mr. Fletcher said. “He’s an actor.”
They went inside and David peered quickly through each room to look for the little girl, but she was not there. “Some refreshment?” Mrs. Fletcher asked, and David knew from her nervousness that she had been told the purpose of his visit. Then his mouth went completely dry as Mrs. Fletcher listened and said, “That sounds like Betty coming now!”
A door closed and there was an echo of small feet. Then Betty appeared. She was forty inches high and weighed about eighty pounds. She had a pleasant face correctly proportioned for her body, and her eyes were bright and happy. She went directly to David and held out her small hand. “You’re David Harper!” she said. “It was good of you to come all the way back here on my account.” She smiled graciously and asked him to be seated, so that it was no trouble at all for him to say, “I thought it would be good if you and your parents could be my guests at the play tonight.”
On the trip back to Kittanning, she rode in the truck with David, and her parents followed in the Fletcher car. David was at ease with Betty and joked with her, and even when he saw the brown tent and knew that soon he must introduce her to Vito, he was not afraid, for he sensed that all her life Betty’s sensible parents had taught her not to be worried about her size. But at the critical moment when the truck actually stopped and his hands fell from the wheel, the back of his knees began to sweat furiously, and he saw that Betty was twisting her handkerchief.
Then Jensen appeared and David bellowed, “Hey! Wild Man! Come over here!”
The rugged football player stopped and turned toward the truck. At first he did not see Betty, but when he realized what kind of girl sat beside David he walked slowly over and opened the door. He studied her as if she were a painting of a grand lady, long dead, and a look of immense approval came over his face. “She’s beautiful!” he cried, as if she were not a living girl. Then he let out a roar: “Vito! My God! Come here!”
That night, after the play, the Fletchers insisted that everyone drive back to Punxsutawney for a celebration. Vito rode in the car with little Betty. They made a fine pair, like dolls beside a clock in a Frenchwoman’s boudoir. David rode in the truck with Jensen. They were silent for the first few miles and then Jensen, tired of the silly antagonism that had eaten David, said, “Looks like you beat me to the finish. She’s some little pigeon!”
“You know what I bet?” David asked. “I bet he marries her!”
“He’s a fool if he don’t!” the Wild Man replied. “But we got to arrange something!” Jensen added. “Come life or death. Dave, that little Eyetalian midget must not drive down to Johnstown with us tonight. You understand?”
They shook hands, and at the party Jensen started at once to build Vito’s reputation as a solid citizen. Jensen offered Mr. Fletcher a cigar, patting him condescendingly on the shoulder. “Looks as if you invested in Commonwealth and Southern!” the Wild Man said.
Mr. Fletcher blushed. “Well, sir, as a matter of fact I do have a few shares.”
“I play around with it a little myself,” Jensen confided. “A sheet to windward.”
Mr. Fletcher looked at him strangely, as if trying to untangle that last phrase, whereupon Jensen added, “Sort of like Mr. Bellotti’s father.” This time Vito looked up in astonishment. “Yes,” Jensen mused expansively, “Mr. Bellotti’s father was a wealthy man in Sicily. But he had a great love for democracy. And that’s what got him into trouble with the Black Hand.” He snarled a bit. “It was in nineteen-and-three. Had to fly the country.”
“What was the matter?” Mr. Fletcher asked.
Jensen hesitated to see if Vito wished to carry on the tale, but the dwarf was sitting with his mouth open. “He was the leader of the democratic forces,” the Wild Man explained.
“I thought the Black Hand wanted democracy,” Mrs. Fletcher said.
“Politics!” Jensen replied, cryptically. Then he changed the subject. “What did you think of Mr. Bellotti’s voice?” he asked. “D below B to F above C.”
Mrs. Fletcher played the piano. “How’s that?” she asked.
Jensen pounded himself on the chest. “Very low voice,” he said. And the action reminded him of his greatest parlor trick. David, sensing this, gasped.
“Mr. Fletcher!” the Wild Man asked impulsively, “Have you ever seen a man practically burn himself to death?”
“No! Jensen!” David cried. “Mr. Fletcher! Don’t let him do it!”
But before anyone could stop him the Wild Man peeled off his shirt. He stood before the party bare to his waist, displaying an immense chestful of black and tangled hair. “You got a seltzer bottle?” he asked. He handed it to David. “He’s my fire department!” he explained.
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 rolle
“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.
PART 5
The Valley
Where eighth street crosses Fo
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: THE CLAY PUBLICATIONS. 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.