The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
“I’ve been thinking about that all day,” David admitted.
“Walkin’ around in the blizzard, eh? Look, kid, let me give you one piece of advice. Knock yourself out for principle. Give away your dough. Knock yourself out for revenge, or power, or ambition. But never knock yourself out for love.”
“What do you mean?” David asked.
“Just this. Power and ambition and writin’ and all that crap is sort of extra. I guess good men bother themselves quite a bit about such stuff. But don’t ever bother about love. Don’t crucify yourself on that cross, because lovin’ is so easy and natural there should never be no pain to it. If you still got that itchy feelin’ for Mona, why hop to it. Save your ponderin’ for somethin’ tough and big. Love is too simple to make a fuss over.”
The warden said that David would have to go, and as he left Mom shouted across the corridor, “Remember! Outa my bed by Saturday!”
Giving Mom $200 was a simple act of decency. What David did next was the act of faith. He wandered home through the silent streets, and at Mom’s he slipped in by the main door so as to avoid the restaurant. He climbed the steps, not to Mom’s room, but on up to his own. Mona was sitting hunched by the radio, and he said, “Turn it off, Mona,” and when she had done so, he grinned at her and said, “I gave you the first hundred-dollar bill I ever had, because when you took that screen test it was my test, too.” He thrust his last bill into her hands and said, “Right now I’m dead sure you’ll be a great actress. You’re part of me, and you just can’t fail.”
In their old clothes and poverty they looked at each other: at the faded dress and the worn coat, at the thin shoes and the thin faces. It would have been difficult to say which of the two had enough spiritual reserve left over to comfort the other, and yet when they went to bed their love-making was even more violent than it had been in the old days, except that now David sought release even more desperately than Mona. Outside their window the still-falling snow drifted down between the buildings like a veil drawn across the dirty panes.
Toward nine that night they rose and put on their old clothes. In David’s mind unappeased longings lunged recklessly about. He said, “This may sound silly, Mona, but I’d like to take a walk in the snow.”
“Why not?” she asked.
They slipped past the restaurant, and David saw the gangster still lounging at the bar. Claude remained on his stool, lost and lonely without Mom. In the muffled streets snow still fell, and standing at the head of one of them David felt that all the poets who had sung of snow upon rolling hillsides should see it just once as he saw it then. In the country snow is merely an additional adornment, but in a sprawling city it is—for brief moments until traffic and soot engulf it—the most beautiful dress that nature ever wears. It clothes the drabness and it hushes the strident noise. It erases the architect’s willful blunders, and it hides away the garbage. It brings an absolute beauty to the shapes of tall buildings and makes serene the drunken lurchings of mean old houses that should have been torn down long since. And when, in addition to all this, a thousand electric stars play upon it, throwing ghostly banners across its placid surface, new-fallen city snow is a thing of cold and perfect beauty.
Mona and David plowed westward, and at last they came upon the Hudson. For some minutes they watched a lonely ferry boat battling its way to Jersey, and then David understood in one flashing moment what this day had been about. For in the crying distance the ferry boat sounded its mournful fog horn, and it was like a barge along the Delaware canal, petulantly crying for the lock keeper. In that single moment David saw the entire novel he had been wanting to write. As if all the tiny lights that played upon the snow had been collected into one penetrating beam, a light from somewhere illuminated the chaotic ideas that had been festering in his mind and reduced them to order.
“I’ve got it!” he cried across the snowstorm. “Mona! I’m going to write a novel about the canal where I grew up. I knew an old man … We called him Old Daniel … He lives on a canal barge, and you’re his daughter!”
“If I’m in the book,” Mona observed, “it’ll be a wow!”
“You are the book!” David said, and then as if voices were speaking to him he heard the opening lines of his novel: “Whenever the distant horns sounded, I ran to the top of the hill to watch my beloved barges drift down the canal.” He stopped in great happiness, as if at last the oboe in a chattering orchestra had sounded the note about which the musicians could organize their music.
“You’re shivering,” Mona said. “Let’s go home.”
With her hundred dollars Mona bought herself a new wardrobe. Helping her do so was a fascinating experience for David. To buy one dress, for example, she went to at least ten stores. She made out a list of contingencies. “If I buy a blue dress,” she reasoned, “I’ll have to have blue shoes and a new hat. But if I buy one of those snappy grays, I’ll need a new hat and a new sweater, but I can use my old shoes.” With these combinations in mind she plodded from store to store. “Do you think it sticks out a little too far in back?” she would ask David. “After all, I do have just a wee bit of an unnnh! back there.” She tossed her hips like a burlesque queen.
Each dress looked perfect to David’s enthusiastic eye, but Mona found something wrong with them all. Once David said, “Why don’t you grab one and have done with it?” She stared at him with scorn. “That’s all right for you,” she said. “Most of the time you look as if your mom baked the bread and then made your suit out of the sack. But all I’ve got to go on is my looks.”
When the ordeal was completed, it seemed as if Mona had spent not one hundred dollars but five or six hundred. And much of it had gone for odds and ends of things, so that she bewildered David by appearing always different, as if she had an endless supply of dresses. She fascinated him in other ways, too. He came to know the solid joy of living with another person. He loved the play of her personality as he saw it intimately. He liked to come back to his room—after doing nothing, for there were no jobs—and to find her there listening to the radio. It was warm and meaningful to be associated with another human being.
The radio was a source of pain to Mona. She kept it going as much as eighteen hours a day, her head swaying in time to popular airs. If a woman’s voice began to sing “Dancing in the dark …” she would leap to her feet, and it was apparent that she was comparing the singer’s voice to her own. Finally the moment would come when she could no longer bear to hear the song, for either the singer was better than she, and therefore intolerable, or the singer was much worse, and it was agony to hear a fine song tortured by ineptitude. She would snap the radio off and walk angrily up and down the room, beating one fist into the other palm. Sometimes tears would come to her eyes and she would cry, “Damn it! Damn it! Listen to that bag murder that song! And she’s got a job!”
Each passing day frightened her, and she often stared at David. “Tell me, kid. Do the lines show in my face? Christ, it’s terrible to be living now. No work and getting older.”
When she smoked she used a long cigarette holder, carefully placing its tip far back in her mouth. “What’s the trick?” David asked. She removed the holder and tapped her beautiful teeth. “Keeps the china closet clean,” she explained. “Some day those teeth’ll be my fortune.” Nor would she drink red wine. “Stains the china,” she said. With great care she watched her diet, often refusing to eat, even though Mom’s food cost nothing. When Mom gave David enough money for two movie tickets, he took Mona, but the movies were no relaxation. Tensely she followed each scene until envy destroyed her. She would whisper, “Look at that bitch! She’s got legs like a piano mover’s. That lousy tramp!” Often she darted out of the theatre, and David would find her hunched up before the radio torturing herself there rather than in the movies.
Once on the radio she heard Vito’s voice and she went practically mad with excitement. “He could get me a job!” she cried, hammering David on the chest.
They went t
“They always say that,” Vito whispered to David. “Everybody up here crawls with talent.”
“Do you have any speaking parts?” Mona begged the men.
“We’ll take your name,” they said gravely. “If anything turns up, we’ll call you.”
Then Mona tortured herself about the telephone. She insisted upon keeping the door open, in case the phone might ring. This annoyed the man next door, because the incessant radio kept him awake. He protested and Mona stormed out into the hall. “You goddamned old sonofabitch!” she began, heaping upon him the black bilgewaters of her frustration. He protested to Mom, who told him to go to hell.
Finally, one day the phone rang, and Mona practically fell down the stairs in her dash to answer it. But it was only Vito. He wanted them to come up to his place for supper. She agreed, but when she got back to the room she began to tremble. “Dwarfs!” she said. “Dave, if I get too nervous, take me home. Promise me that.”
The dwarfs had a tiny apartment, befitting their size, and Betty was pregnant. David kissed her warmly and cried, “I hope it’s a big, bouncing boy!” But the sudden stillness that greeted this phrase was so awkward that David knew these little people had been thinking constantly of that ugly problem: “Will our child be normal?”
Hitherto such a silence would have embarrassed David. He would have blushed and been ashamed of himself, but his association with Mom had cured him of such nonsense. He saw that if there is anything people deeply need and want it is the frank discussion of submerged and mouldering problems.
“Yes,” he said boldly, “I hope it’s a boy and I hope it’s a big fellow. Think how much a big boy would love a mother like you, Betty.”
As if a dam had broken, little Vito began to talk fast. “Even if he was small, do you think we’d be an embarrassment to him? Of course, we’d bring him up with the knowledge that he was going to be small. Betty tells me that as soon as she could understand, her parents taught her she would be small. Mine tried to hide it from me. Of course, my people hadn’t read any books when they got to America.”
“How is your father?” Mona asked Betty in cold, controlled accents.
“My father lost his memory in the crash,” Betty said quietly. “He shot himself.”
Mona rose nervously and asked, “Mind if I turn on the radio!” She got some music and turned it very loud. “Listen to this!” Then, as suddenly, she turned it off and looked at Vito. “How soon could you tell if a child … If he’s going to be big?”
The little man said, “About six months, I think.”
Betty interrupted. “My parents said they knew about me in eight months, but with a boy I guess you could tell sooner.”
Impulsively Mona sat beside the little woman and said, “I’ll make a small bet. One copper penny that your kid’s going to be a big one. But take my advice, Betty. Don’t let Vito near him, because big or small, Vito’ll string him up for a puppet.”
“Speaking of Chautauqua,” Vito cried happily, “what happened to the Gonoph?”
“I don’t know,” David replied.
“Wasn’t she the world’s worst?” Vito asked. “I have a small part in Mother Turner’s Triumph. I’m a dopey old woman, and all I do is say to myself, ‘How would the Gonoph say this line?’ I’m a sensation.”
“Does radio pay pretty well?” Mona inquired.
“Not the kind I get,” Vito said.
“He’s a monument to the fleeting voice!” Betty laughed. “He used to tell me, ‘Listen at 2:15.’ But if a car shifted gears I missed him. I don’t bother any more.”
The little people were effusive in their good-byes. “You must both come again,” they insisted. “We haven’t had so much fun in years.” Little Betty took Mona’s hand and said, “Really, come back.”
On the street Mona said, “You were good for them, Dave. They wanted to talk about the baby.”
“I was afraid you’d wreck things,” David admitted. “You were swell.”
“You can trust me,” she assured him. “I don’t like death, that’s all. I don’t like growing old or people who aren’t getting along.” She shivered and said, “It’s terrible to be without work.”
“I’m glad I saw you in action tonight,” David said. “Because I know a wonderful guy who has fits. I’ve been afraid to take you there.”
Mona and Morris Binder got along fine. They understood each other at once. All during the summer they played music together, and drank beer, and ate the weird foods that Binder liked so much. Twice Mona was present when Morris fell into cataleptic trances. She held his head until Miss Adams could arrive.
The big man told David that Mona was a great girl. “You planning to get married?” he asked.
“We might,” David said, but even as he spoke he knew that Mona would marry no one until she attained success. When the next winter came he died many deaths for her. He would see her scanning the theatrical news. With her last pennies she would buy Variety and devour the argot of her trade. For those few hours she was herself, lost, lost in the world of make-believe. But reading of show people made her as tense as a caged thought, and she would burst from her small room and haunt the casting offices. She taught Claude to trim her hair, and the poet would work on it three or four hours a week, snipping single strands here and there to accentuate the curl.
But when snow fell and the season actually began, Mona became inconsolable. Neither she nor David had any money—a loan from Mom now and then—and there was no way for Mona to hide the fact that she was an actress, broke and out of work. David was not surprised, therefore, when he found the note. It was stuck between the bristles of his brush: “Don’t try to find me. Good luck, trouper.”
For two days David lived in his empty room, and each hour brought some new pang of regret that Mona was gone. Finally he took her message to Morris Binder, who said, “I’m sorry to see that note. She was a good girl.” The ponderous man did not try to console David. “Things like this happen all the time,” he said. “Each man gets his share. I think you accept them better on herring and beer than on almost any other philosophical underpinning.”
Then, one night David found where Mona had gone. Mom gave him a quarter and he went to a cheap movie. When it came time to go home, he could not face the prospect of his dreary room. Before Mona had shared it with him it had been a good room. Now he felt that no room from which a woman was missing could be very satisfactory. So in his loneliness he went into an all-night restaurant on Eighth Street and ordered coffee and doughnuts. He liked the steamy friendliness of the place, and with a show of bravado, plunked his last dime on the counter, slipping his thumb into his belt as if he were an important man with a few idle moments to kill.
A night wanderer entered and sought attention. “Say!” he cried. “Did you see the pictures in tonight’s paper?” The customers ignored him and he ordered some coffee. Then he tried again. “You ever see such awful pictures of an axe murder?” Again he was rebuffed, and finally he thrust the paper under David’s nose. “They sure chopped him up, di’n’ they?” he demanded. But David’s eye was attracted to the lower right-hand corner where Mona Meigs and Max Volo were shown in an expensive night club under the heading: “Philadelphia Promoter and His Lovely.”
This was the dark winter of 1933. It was a cold and frightening time. A political interregnum ruled the nation, and there were ugly rumors. Plants closed, and men like Betty Fletcher’s father committed suicide.
David had now started to organize thought-chapters for his novel. He would wander about the fine old streets of the Village composing whole chapters in his mind. Some days he would repeat a single phrase more than a hundred times, constructing around it an ever-towering edifice of ideas. Even on the most snowy days he could visualize canal barges drifting down a summery canal. When he had perfected a chapter in his mind, he would feel good, almost as
Of course, he had no money. In anticipation of Repeal, Mom permitted him to rebuild the bar, and for this she gave him such odds and ends of change as he had to have. He also reported daily to Miss Adams, but usually she said, “Nothing today, David.”
But occasionally she gave him a half dozen galleys to proofread. Sometimes he saw Mr. Clay, who was much older now. The trim gray man edited five magazines and Morris Binder took care of the rest. The other editors had all been fired.
On press days Miss Adams often said, “Here’s a bunch of art work for the engravers. And they have some packages for us.” She gave him thirty cents, a nickel up, a nickel back, and twenty cents for himself. He took the parcels to an engraver’s on East Thirty-ninth Street. Then he would run as fast as he could, all the way back to Lafayette Street, and thus save a nickel, so that he earned twenty-five cents a day.
But the nickel saved was never a nickel earned; for on his way home he would stop by Shriftgeisser’s Bakery, where an old German woman sold him two stale chocolate eclairs for his hard-earned nickel. So he wound up with only twenty cents after all. But he loved the eclairs! His mouth would water when he saw them, stale though they were. He enjoyed his first bite through the soft chocolate, through the flaky egg crust, and into the cool whipped-cream filling. He ate his eclairs in six big bites, walking down Fourth Street. He usually finished the second one by the time he reached Washington Square, so that no matter what the weather or his disappointments, when he saw that friendly Square he felt good.
For most novelists, the next process after thought-writing is the actual preparation of a first draft, but for David this step was long postponed. His insecurity kept him from doing any sequential work; his agitated emotions imprisoned him in perpetual suspense, and the best he could do was to wander about the Village, erecting cloudy mental images of Bucks County. He lived on the hope that once he sat down to write, perfect scenes and passages would burst magically upon his paper. The novel was as good as written. So he loafed in Washington Square.