The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
But Morris Binder taught David more than this. This gross and tragic man introduced his young assistant to the final quartets of Beethoven, and as David listened to the great, deaf German’s music, considering how Beethoven had written it—lonely, silent, racked with disease—he knew that even though man is an animal, he is the divine animal.
There was practically no form of social intercourse in which Morris Binder could indulge. He could not dine out, for at any moment a seizure might possess him and send him howling to the floor. The opera, which he much loved, was forbidden him as were the stage and the ball park. Occasionally the police took him to an ice hockey game. They sat in a box near the men’s room, and if he suffered an attack, they held him on the floor and then dragged his inanimate body to the washroom, where they bathed his face.
He lived in three rooms on East Ninth Street, not far from the East River, a lonely giant of a man. Above him lived Miss Adams, waiting for the cry in the night, and she walked him back and forth to work as if he were a schoolboy.
He had one passion which he exercised to the full. Even more than murder he loved recorded music, and the largest of his three rooms was a miracle. He took David there one Friday afternoon. “We’ll hear some music,” he proposed. It was snowing, and Miss Adams walked between them. At the apartment house she said, “I don’t like music. Have a good time.” She said good night and climbed her extra flight of stairs. Morris Binder turned the key in his lock and cried, like a child with a toy, “You’re going to see something!”
By the window a street lamp burned, and from its muted rays David could see a gothic room lined with record cabinets and albums of all colors. Above him, from seven different angles, hung horns and loud-speakers. By a closet door stood four boxes atop one another, housing the mechanical gear.
“It’s a hobby of mine!” the editor said eagerly. “Stand anywhere you wish!” Like an eager boy he went to the machinery and started to click switches. On WJZ an orchestra played dinner music. Suddenly, from all directions the room exploded into sound! The seven speakers were so attuned as to produce an organ effect that completely filled the mind. “Good, eh?” the huge man beamed.
Then he began to switch certain speakers off and augmented others. The glorious sound rose and fell in cascading brilliance. Then the fat man turned off the radio and started the record player. He said, apologetically, “Sometimes the record changer doesn’t work, but listen!” He now turned on all the speakers, and from the horns came a whisper of sound, a haunting sound of strings. Morris Binder stood with his head bowed and seemed to drink in the climbing music. David felt himself caught up in the glorious tentacles of the music and lifted about the room. The strings raced and danced and snarled and pleaded. “What is this?” David finally asked.
“One of the Rasoumowsky quartets,” the fat man replied. “Opus 59 in C Minor.”
“Did Beethoven write it?”
“Of course!” the huge man grunted, and David saw that his eyes were closed. For a moment David listened to the shimmering harmonies and for the first time in his life understood the poet’s phrase “breathless in adoration.”
“It’s wonderful!” he finally cried. Morris Binder opened his eyes.
“This?” he asked incredulously. “This is really rather poor Beethoven. Would you like to hear the last quartet?”
“If it’s better than this, sure!” David cried.
Morris Binder turned off the record changer and plodded out to the kitchen. Soon he reappeared with a tray containing beer, Roquefort cheese, rye bread, and rollmop herrings. As the pièce de résistance he produced a jar of anchovies. “If you don’t like this kind of food, please don’t tell me.” He whisked out a napkin and tied it around David’s neck. “This is the kind of meal Beethoven would have loved!” he said.
Then he went to his albums and returned with an English set. “This is the superb quartet,” he said. “Opus 135 in F. It’s not so long nor so moody as 130 and 132. But no man can write better music than this.” He put the imported records on the changer and then slumped into a big chair, grabbing a chunk of bread and cheese as he sat down.
The music was unlike any David had ever heard before. It was patient music, building up slowly from the sounds of sixteen strings, but at times it seemed like more than a full orchestra, for the strings played upon every memory a young man could have. Gradually, as if there were no meaning to time, the wonderful quartet continued. Morris Binder made himself a huge sandwich of anchovies. He took a deep draught of bootleg beer and sighed, “God! This is wonderful!”
But then the inevitable Beethoven took over. In the last movement of the last quartet, as if he were a dying man, his strings began breathlessly to gallop. There were unpredictable and agonizing silences. There was a hurry of plucked notes as if death were at hand. The fleetingness and tragedy of living filled the room and drowned the taste of anchovies and beer and rollmops alike. Morris Binder stopped eating and listened transfixed as the music galloped to its close. The needle struck raspingly into the groove and the changer clicked. There was a moment of dreadful silence, as if Beethoven had actually died in that grotesque room. Then Binder said, “Let’s hear that again.”
Later, David found that whatever the huge man played induced a strange longing, so that when the last record of a set ended the editor invariably cried, like a child, “That was glorious! Let’s hear that again!” And he would set the needle on the last record and play it once more, as if its harmonies had lingered in the air unfinished, as if he might never again hear that particular fall of notes, as if …
Harshly, one night, when Morris Binder played the last record of Brahms’ Third many times, David realized why the mammoth man acted so. “He knows,” David said, “that he may die. At any time. He may never hear this record again. How can he leave it?”
So whenever Morris Binder said, his eyes glowing, “Would you mind if I play that one side again?” David always said, “I’d like it.” And he began to notice people and music and the look of the sky as if that were the last day he himself would ever live. When he did this, he saw that people were inexpressibly superb. He had never before actually seen a face: the way light falls across thin bones or bumps of fat to make a character, or the way some men walk sideways as if afraid to meet life head on. He had not seen Washington Square, not truly, until he looked at it one night coming home from Morris Binder’s. Then he saw it fully, as if that were the last time on this earth he would ever see it, and there was a beauty about that Square he had never before even dimly perceived.
He went often to Morris Binder’s and acquired a taste for anchovies and beer. In the gothic room with its absurd horns, he learned to know music that would sing in his memory forever: Dvorak’s American quartet, Borodin’s nocturne, the songs of Mahler. He became like Binder and wished to hear a single record a half dozen times, knowing that one good thing is better than a dozen poor. He recalled the lilting words of Shakespeare:
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O! it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor …
But there was another music at Morris Binder’s, and that was what made Beethoven and Dvorak so breathtaking. For David could never know when the huge man would thrust volcanically from his chair and fall upon the floor in writhing agony. Then Miss Adams, who hated music but who listened, would dash downstairs and minister to the fallen angel. “Why don’t you get out of here?” she screamed at David one night. “You’re bad for him! All this noise and excitement.” She looked at David with such hatred that he fled the apartment even before Binder had recovered.
Next morning at Tremont Clay’s he avoided her, but she surprised him by seeking him out. “Forgive me,” she said quietly. “Especially since I have such bad news. You’re to be fired.”
“Me!” David gasped.
“Yes,” she said gently. “Mr. Clay wants to see you. But
Mr. Clay spoke in crisp, nasal tones. “We’ve got to kill your magazines,” he whined. “No reflection on you. As soon as things get better, you’ve got a good job here.”
“When do you think that’ll be?” David asked.
Mr. Clay sat down and fidgeted with a color drawing for one of his covers. “My guess is three years,” he said. He saw David’s face whiten and impulsively he jumped from his desk and grabbed the young editor. “You’re a good man, Harper,” he said with unaccustomed warmth. “These are the days when you have to prove it. Dig yourself in somewhere. You be the fellow that pulls through!” Then, ashamed of his outburst, he shoved David toward the door.
But Miss Adams whispered, as David went dejectedly past her desk, “I’ll always have a little something for you to do.”
And he was out in Lafayette Street, opposite the immigrant station, with no work and less than a hundred dollars. He looked at the red building where so many immigrants had brought their hopes and he said: “Hell, if all that gang could make the grade … Why, they didn’t even know the language!”
But things were tougher in 1932 than they had been when immigrants were flooding our unsatiated labor markets. Now there were no jobs. Mom had said, “Whatever you do, don’t go back to college. Worst bums I ever knew kept goin’ back to university. Get a job takin’ money on the subway. That leaves your mind free for writin’.”
There were no jobs on the subway. There were no jobs at Macy’s, at Bloomingdale’s, nor with construction companies. There were no jobs sweeping streets nor with trucking firms. No men were wanted. Not anywhere. Yet the newspapers were filled with ads saying: “Energetic Man Wanted. Must have own car.” David applied for one of these, and even though he had no car, was immediately hired.
“The job’s easier with a car,” a fast-talking man explained. “But if you don’t mind work you can do almost as well without. This here electric sweeper weighs forty-three pounds. That’s a big feature. Housewives love its free and easy motion.”
The brisk talker gave David and thirty other young men a rapid one-day course on salesmanship and the operation of the cleaner. At the end of the day the man coughed and said, “Of course, there’s no salary on this job. That’s good, because it means there’s no ceiling on what you can make.” He gave a nervous laugh. “Fifty, hundred, three hundred a week! You set the limit. Ha ha!”
But his figures proved merely to be the number of families who said “No.” By the fifth day David was glad when women simply slammed the door in his face. That was much better than listening to tragic stories of “My man’s a good man. He’s a hard worker, but he can’t find a thing.” There were so many tears each day, stories so desperate that David found himself helping to buy lunch for children who obviously had not eaten for days.
A deadly pall hung over New York that March of 1932. The full tide of unemployment reached the meaner streets and crept slowly toward the healthier thoroughfares. The women said: “I don’t see how we can live unless something happens,” and by the end of his second week David had to quit. He had not sold a cleaner.
The brisk-talking salesman slowed down now and said, as David turned in his papers. “We’ve got a wonderful cleaner here. But people can’t afford to buy it. What’s gonna happen in this country? Tell me that!” And when David left, he saw eighteen young men waiting to be hired as salesmen.
He now had fifty-three dollars left in bank, and if it had not been for Mom, he would have been helpless. As she had done before with almost a hundred young men, she allowed him to stay in his room without rent. She affected not to know that Claude was slipping David plates of food, and she even paid him a small salary to sweep up the place. He was now a janitor, and he plunged into his work with great energy. He made the restaurant spotless, something it had never been before. He even prevailed upon Mom to let him repaint the front of the house, and from his vantage point aloft a teetering ladder he watched the wonderful ebb and flow of life along MacDougal Street.
He came to know Mom better and discovered that she was one of the few people in life who had made peace with herself and with the world. She made no money from her restaurant, partially cleared taxes by renting rooms, and occasionally did well with a shipment of bootleg. Since she had three annuities ready for her old age—the gifts of admiring elderly men—she exercised no caution in spending her bootleg money, and it was well known that she quietly helped many young people to obtain a precarious footing in the jungles of New York.
Sometimes she would become maudlin drunk and pat David on the arm in a way that reminded him of the Gonoph. “You mark my words!” she would sniffle. “Some day I’ll be studied at Columbia University. Why? Because I was the only friend Claude ever had.” She stumbled about her very neat room and found one of the poet’s books, printed at her expense. “You ever seen snow in Greenwich Village, after it’s been on the streets a couple of days?” She became belligerent. “How would you describe it? You’re no poet! But listen to that bearded goat.” She fumbled with the pages and then read: “I shuffle through the worn-out snow.” She put the book down and stared antagonistically at David. “I read that crap you wrote for Fashion. Boy, did that stink! Here, you can borrow this for a while. Knock off work and study it.”
She sent David to his room with the slender volume. These days he was not even trying to find a job, content with his make-believe janitor’s position. He stayed in his room for days analyzing Claude’s peculiar verse. He found Claude’s work amazingly compact. Words were used as scalpels to cut into the meaning of life. He had never thought of using words in that precise and restricted manner. He lay on his bed, nothing to do, no work, no prospect of any, and thought about writing.
Words seemed to him the sacred instruments through which the spirit’s finest messages were conveyed. It was well and proper for the Metropolitan to boast of having acquired a picture worth $200,000. David was sure the glowing canvas was more valuable than that, for it was rare and spoke of the world’s vast beauty; but what, he mused, would a nation pay for the only copy of Don Quixote? Let’s suppose there were no printing presses or monks to copy manuscripts. How would the bidding go for a book like The Way of All Flesh? Or Hamlet? Who could price such works? Or a solitary copy of The Eve of St. Agnes? Or the King James Version?
Unemployed, he lay on his bed and tried to think of nothing. The hunger for Alison was still with him, but he put her out of his mind. He forced himself to ignore stricken Morris Binder, and he thought no more of jobs. His head became a whirl of nothingness, and after a while he found himself staring out of his window at the solid brick wall. He realized to his astonishment that he had never before seen that wall. It filled his window. Nothing else was there, but he had not seen the wall.
Each brick was of a subtly different color. Between the bricks the mortar was also as varied as life. During each hour of the day the wall changed its appearance. Each change of the sun’s position illuminated the fine texture of brick in new ways. Here a fragment of plaster clung to one brick and shot a long shadow across three other bricks, so that their desert-brown shapes turned to purple. There a jagged crack lay blood red to the sun. As the day faded there was vivid motion of light along the face of the wall. Flecks of gold danced upon each irregular shape, and sandy colors, mingled with red and purple and gold and yellow, shone evanescent in the late afternoon.
Night fell, and the heavenly pantomime ended. Purple shadows, like spent blood, swept across the bricks, and David lay palpitating with emotion. In his life the moment had come, the breathless moment that has no name. It was the instant of dedication, when the illimitable and yet finite future lay ahead as brilliantly clear as the bricks had been. He said: “Writing is like that. Seeing what no one has ever seen before and writing it down so simply that everyone will say, ‘Of course! I knew that all along.’ If I can see, I can write. If I
The darkness was about him, and the illuminating wall was gone, but within his own mind a light showed that would never go out. This was the moment without a name, when a young man stood alone and soberly acknowledged what he might accomplish. He could not guess it then, but he was sharing the fragile and explosive instant that comes with shocking and disrupting force to fumbling young men: “Why, I could be President!” “If he wrote an opera, why couldn’t I?” “Why shouldn’t I be the best architect?” “Somebody’s going to marry her, why not me?”
Violently, he snapped on his light and attacked his typewriter as if it were his enemy. He would describe those bricks exactly as he had seen them, but as he wrote he was interrupted by Mom’s strident voice: “Hey! Dave!”
“What’s up?” he shouted.
“Someone to see you!” Then, in a lower voice, Mom said, “Go on up.”
From the stairs below David could hear the approach of soft steps. Now his visitor was rounding the first landing, now approaching the last dark flight. David peered into the shadows and slowly perceived the emerging form of a woman. It was Mona Meigs.