The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
“She will!” Dave cried. When he got back to the house he took Alison to her room and then dashed to tell Mom the news. “I’m going to write a story about Arizona!” he announced.
“Was you ever there?” Mom asked, leaning her elbows on a table.
“Sure. When I bummed across country.”
“Well, if you was there, why’n hell do you want to tell anybody else about that lousy pile of sand?”
“I stayed three nights in a hobo camp near Phoenix. I’ll never forget it.”
“Don’t bother anybody else about it,” Mom advised. “I know all of Arizona, and there ain’t a story worth tellin’.”
“Where is there one, in your opinion? MacDougal Street?”
“Writin’ is the bunk!” Mom insisted.
“Then why were you so excited when Alison published a story?” David argued.
“Because I like to see people do what they want to do. You should of seen the party we threw when the little Jewish girl across the street married the Italian boy. They were doin’ what they wanted to do.”
On the first night that he was supposed to write, he talked with Mom till two. They kicked around theories of life, why people get drunk, should two people of like interests get married, and the prospects of repeal. It was much the best talk David had participated in for months. Claude joined them at midnight and swung the topics around to immortality and birth control. In the morning Alison asked, “How’d the story go?” and David blinked.
“I … I was planning it,” he said.
He planned it the next night, too, with more help from Mom and Claude. They drank beer till one and Mom spoke of the early days in Arizona. She said that the only person in God’s earth she knew who was lower than the MacDougal Street fire inspector was an Indian garage mechanic in Tucson. “He had three monkey wrenches. He used the big one to wreck big cars, the little one to wreck little cars, and the middle-sized one to ruin radiators. And he’d look at you with big black eyes. I hauled off and knocked him out one day,” she said. “Cost my old man two thousand dollars. That damn fool Indian had sense enough to claim I had ruined his sacroiliac!”
Finally, on the fifth night, David actually started to write. To a hobo camp in Arizona came three men on their way to California. Beyond the vast flats rose a vision …
He tore the paper up and started again. To a hobo camp in Arizona came four men on their way to California. They could see the purple hills, and one of them—David could see him now, terrible and haunting with a scar along his cheek— droned on about the bitter winters in Dakota …
In the morning Alison took one look at the yarn and said in a gentle voice, “Dave! You don’t have to write every story as if you were Maxim Gorky.” She told him what a magazine like Fashion expected: a challenging lead, well-developed characters, plot and a zippy close.
Sweating in his room—“I can do this!” he told himself—he slaved out the story. Ruthlessly he cut away those parts which were close to him and substituted bits of local color so that the hobo camp became a delightful place filled with splendid characters who mouthed the world’s wisdom. Toward morning he leaned back and studied what he had written. “Sounds like an eleven-year-old boy describing a poorhouse,” he grunted.
But Fashion bought it! Then David acted like every other young writer with his first success. Upon news of acceptance he borrowed thirty dollars from Morris Binder and took Alison on a terrific outing. When the Fashion check arrived he took Alison and Mom and Claude to the theatre. Then, when the story actually appeared, he celebrated for a third time and wound up in debt. But he felt wonderful! Like an author!
On his way to work he maneuvered himself past as many newsstands as possible and eyed the trim piles of Fashion. “Boy!” he thought. “There she lies!” When he saw a woman on the subway with the magazine he snooped to see what she was reading. It was not his page and he felt strangely offended. Toward the end of the month he had the dismal experience of seeing Fashion lying in a muddy gutter, and there was a pang of tragedy in that moment. Even more disturbing was the day when the next issue of the magazine appeared. It was indecently prompt, David thought.
He was then inspired to read his story carefully, but he could form no clear opinion of it. At times his writing seemed better than he remembered it, but after he put the magazine aside he realized with astonishment that what he remembered was not his story but the ads that had run beside it. He saw with disillusioned clarity that his words had been used to lure readers back to the advertisements. “Well,” he said, “the words were good enough for that.”
Alison deemed him a success. She allowed him to take her out several times on the express condition that he would not spend more than eighty cents on her dinner. He found her an increasing enigma. Her petty calculations about people disturbed him, and her mathematics was astonishing. She said, “Mom oughtn’t to wear twenty-dollar dresses. Not with the money she has.”
“What difference does it make?”
“Well,” she explained, “if I bought two cheap twenty-dollar dresses, what would I have? Two undistinguished sacks. But if I paid sixty dollars, as I did for this one …”
“That’s twenty dollars more than you were talking about,” David pointed out.
“Yes, but I just sold another story, so I have the extra twenty.”
David blinked and asked, “Does that make sense to you?”
“Well,” she detoured, “I swore I’d never be like Mom and Pop. Cheap.”
“I thought your home was fine,” David said reflectively.
“It was. On my money. Why do you suppose I wrote trash for Tremont Clay? To support my family. Why do you suppose I write so hard now? To support my father.”
“Do you send him money?” David asked.
“Only momentarily. He holds it briefly and then passes it on to a Baltimore bootlegger.”
“You mean he’s a drunk?”
“He’s worse. For years he’s been trying to drink it faster than the bootlegger can haul it in. He might have won, too, but with my money the bootlegger bought himself a motor boat.”
Once, coming home from a play, she sat with her knees crossed so that a man opposite her stared all the way from Times Square to Christopher Street. On the stairs David said, “Weren’t you sitting pretty high?” and she explained: “Good-looking girls ought to do that once in a while. Helps other girls.”
“What do you mean, Alison!”
“Oh, it’s not easy for an ugly girl to get married. When I was fat I never had a date. That galoot who was staring at me will go home now and make passes at the ugly girl next door. That’s how life keeps moving.”
But she herself would never permit David to kiss her. “I can’t get mixed up with you,” she warned him. “Not you nor anyone. I’ve got work to do.” Then one day she disappeared. She was gone for a week, and when she returned she was slimmer and more desirable than ever. She was subdued, too, and seemed glad when David asked her for a date. On the way home she even assented when he suggested that they sit on a bench in Washington Square. It was a beautiful, city night, with stars barely peeking through the metropolitan glare. There was a barking of dogs and the muffled whispers of lovers. Suddenly she swept herself into David’s arms and allowed him to kiss her. She ran her hungry fingers along his neck and with a gasp he expressed his astonishment when she began kissing him as if she had longed for this moment.
Awkwardly he mumbled, “What’s the matter, Alison?”
“My father died,” she blurted out, and immediately she was engulfed in passionate tears. She kissed David many more times and then tore herself from him and sat staring at the sky. Slowly, as if from a great distance, she began talking, more to herself than to David. “Do you remember when you were sick at my home? The big tray on which I brought you breakfast? That was Pop’s tray. It was my job to feed him, when he could eat.
“Three or four times a month he’d get blind, roaring, three-day drunk. Never kept a job.” She
Compassionately David tried to put his arm about her to console her, but she drew away from him. “Don’t ever touch me again!” she said in harsh, bitter tones. She rose rapidly and hurried across the Square to Mom Beckett’s. In the morning she waited for Mom in the restaurant and said, “I’ll be leaving at the end of the week. I’m taking an apartment on Washington Square.”
“Why?” Mom asked.
“You know why,” the slim, brittle girl replied. “I need a good address. In a couple of months I’ll be a full-time editor. In my business if a girl says she lives on MacDougal Street everybody asks, ‘Wonder who she’s sleeping with?’ But when I say, ‘Washington Square,’ the same people whistle and say, ‘Mmmm! She’s got dough!’ ”
Mom grinned a big toothy grin and said, “You’ll get ahead.”
Alison knew that this was not intended as a compliment, but she stared right back at the big woman and said, “They’re beginning to lay people off. You watch. David Harper is going to be fired. A lot of people in my office are going out. Well, this is the time they separate the men from the boys. I’m not going to be fired, Mom.”
“I’m sure you won’t be,” the big, friendly woman agreed.
At dinner Mom reported the news to David. He was disturbed that Alison should think him about to be fired and he was disappointed that she should be leaving Mom’s. He dashed upstairs and banged on Alison’s door. “Go away!” she commanded. When he banged again she opened the door slightly and said in a harsh whisper, “Go away, Dave! Just because I was silly on that bench … I’ll never see you again.”
“What’s the matter with me?” he blurted out in bewilderment.
“Nothing,” Alison said through the door. “It’s us. The world. It takes a tough person to live through the next years. Together we’d be soft.” In proof of her own hardness, she slammed the door against his face.
She never talked with him again that year. In slim perfection she left Mom Beckett’s and took an apartment on the Square. Sometimes at night David would see sports roadsters parked by the door, and he would sneak up to see where the cars were from. They were expensive and from Yale or Princeton. He studied the masthead of Fashion and saw that she had been promoted to head of the fiction department. Sometimes he would see her crossing the Square. Now she usually walked with important-looking people. They would huddle together, listening to someone’s chatter, and then explode apart with merry laughter. David hated them.
The days of hunger were upon him, and he knew no vanity. He would call her at the office or at her home. She would tell him wearily to stop bothering her. Once she taunted him. “How’s the great American novel?” she inquired. When he did not reply, she said, “Mine’s almost done. Stop calling me!”
He stooped to silly tricks, deluding himself with daydreams. He said to Miss Adams, “I’ve heard it gossiped that I was going to be fired. I can’t be! I’m going to be married.”
The little woman’s face grew very cold. “Don’t do anything hasty, David! Please!” Then she peered carefully toward Clay’s office and whispered, “There’s going to be some layoffs pretty soon. Business is terrible.”
“Will I …”
The hard gray woman looked at him compassionately. “You were the last editor taken on, weren’t you?”
“They certainly wouldn’t fire Morris Binder, would they?” he asked.
Miss Adams flushed deeply and snapped, “He can always work here. Where else could he work?”
David saw that his question about Binder had somehow wounded the little woman, and he felt sorry for her. He said, “So you’d advise me not to get married?”
“Don’t do it. Bad times are ahead.”
He also took his aching troubles to Mom. She prescribed her sovereign specific for all worries: gin. They got quietly drunk together while Claude cooked a stew. The big, compassionate woman listened for hours as David explained, in ever thicker syllables, what a hard life Alison had experienced. “You mustn’t blame her, Mom. It’s not her fault.”
“I know!” Mom commiserated. “She’s a tender, beautiful, gentle girl.”
Then David would walk the streets of the Village, the old streets where so many young men had tramped for this best of all reasons. As his brain cleared he saw with fierce clarity that nothing had helped him forget Alison, not lying to Miss Adams, nor getting drunk, nor sharing his troubles with Mom. The hunger of life was upon him, the full wild hunger of manhood. “Oh, Alison!” he would mutter to the night.
He thought that no boy could ever become a man who had not felt this fire. He thought that no man could know himself until he knew exactly how important women were to him. He recalled the perfect beauty of his affection for little Nora amid the damp smells of Venice. He thought of Mona and the long days waiting for news from Hollywood. He recalled with passionate clarity the cool beauty of the girl he had lost, Marcia Paxson. Then his hungry mind would wander across the Square to Alison’s house. And there it seemed to crash into an immovable obstacle. Alison, the calculating, determined, ambitious woman, would never, he realized, take off the armor in which she had sheathed herself. What was behind that steel? In spite of all he had learned, David had stubbornly made assault after assault against her hardness, hoping to reveal a human being. The quest, he now acknowledged, could never end successfully.
And yet from Alison he had learned how important women were to him. They were more important than writing a book, or holding a job, or protecting his vanity. He knew! To him that year they were more important than bread.
Then, with shocking force, David was wrenched away from a consideration of his own troubles. It was late in 1931 and David was editing a love story for Passionate Love. He had already used “You can guess what happened next,” and was searching his mind for something as good to describe the third passage at arms.
The day was unseasonably warm and Morris Binder had been agitated by a sex murder which had occurred the night before in Yonkers. There were no clues, and even though there were excellent pictures of the girl’s parents weeping and looking down a cellar door, Binder was dissatisfied. He abhorred an unsolved crime. So he stayed close to the ticker, hoping for a clue. David spoke to him several times and noticed that the big man’s face was florid. “Is it hot in here?” David asked. When the huge editor said he felt all right, David returned to his tale of seduction.
Suddenly behind him a terrible, penetrating, strangling shriek filled the room, and he heard a chair crash. He leaped from his desk in awful fright and shouted for Morris Binder. But the immense man lay stretched on the floor, his face a dark purple, his hands clenching and unclenching. He was dying from strangulation, but David could not know this.
Then the door burst open and little Miss Adams dashed toward the heaving body. Swiftly she pried open the massive jaws and thrust a rubber eraser between them. Then, twisting her finger like a hook, she pulled out the swollen, gashed tongue. As the air eased its way to the stricken man’s tortured lungs Miss Adams sat beside him on the floor, holding the wounded tongue.
Mr. Clay came in. He was dressed in a precise gray suit, but his hands were sweating, and he rubbed them nervously. Awkwardly he nudged Miss Adams on the shoulder and asked, “He all right?”
“Yes,” she said. “Get the people out of here.”
In the hall Mr. Clay said, “It’s a frightful business. Sometimes he gets these seizures three
“Can’t he be cured?” David asked.
“No,” the nervous little man said. “And a word of caution. Whenever this happens call for Miss Adams. You see, she lives above him over by the river. He has a bell … But if she shouldn’t be around …” He shivered with disgust. “Pull his tongue out and hold it. I’ve had to do it twice …” His face became ashen and he hurried into the men’s room, where David could hear him retching.
Three days later Morris Binder collapsed again. He uttered his frightful, animal cry, stumbled about the room like a stricken bull, and crashed into his own filing cabinets. David forgot his instructions and went to the prostrate man’s assistance. He was prying open the massive jaws when Miss Adams burst into the room. She fairly dived at David and smashed him against the desk. “Get away!” she screamed, and she began to mother the gasping body.
David sat hunched against the desk, watching the gruesome ritual by which life was coaxed back into its immense citadel. Mr. Clay came in, sweating worse than before. Seeing David on the floor, he could guess what had happened. “Come here!” he commanded.
In the hall he issued a stiff reprimand. “I warned you to call Miss Adams. It’s her job. In a sense, it’s her privilege.” With acute agitation he wiped his hot face. “She’s always loved Morris Binder. I think she sits down below day after day, waiting for the scream.”
From then on David waited, too. There seemed to be no clue as to when the attacks would strike, only the animal screams and feet hurrying up the stairs. The effect on David was strange and powerful. He was reminded that men may be angels, but they are animals, too. They are driven by uncontrollable forces and only the love of other people makes it possible for them to survive. Men are lonely and are stricken in the night. They lock their jaws against themselves. They scream like animals, and even though they ridicule love and the forces of destruction, they are themselves theatres for the operation of such forces. Men are gross and they fall upon the floor. Tragedy is near them; and in the distance women wait, no more secure than they.