The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
He called a cab and they went to Carnegie Hall. He bought three seats in the row near the door and gave two ushers a dollar each to be ready. Then he ponderously let himself down into his seat between David and Marcia and said, “The acoustics of this hall are superb. I came here often as a boy.”
The first part of Stokowski’s program consisted of two numbers David had often heard him play in Philadelphia, the Classical and Mozart’s 39th. He had long appreciated the latter with its quiet rustle of immortality, but until this night he had never fully understood the music. Now, sitting with Morris Binder’s fat hand in his, he could actually feel the impact of music upon the big man’s spirit. Binder’s pulses quickened, and David’s own perceptions were trebled by contact with the trembling man.
During intermission Binder sat very still and would not talk, as if he were saving his energies for the inward battle. But when the musicians returned to the stage and the bassoon practiced the important notes it would soon play, he opened his lips with almost childish delight and said, “It’s the first live music I’ve heard in nineteen years.”
Tears filled his eyes when Stokowski began to conduct Beethoven’s Pastoral. David did not like this symphony. He felt that the deaf master had allowed his mind to dwell upon trivial items, so that the second movement especially seemed repetitious. He had often thought that the long-windedness of the first two movements was the only evidence Beethoven ever gave of his increasing deafness. But tonight, sitting beside an immense hulk whose mind was somehow crippled, listening to music by a man whose ears were stopped, David experienced the terrible meaning of mortality. Men are actually living chunks of matter that some day die. He forgot the music and remembered his first acknowledgment of this fact. It had occurred three days after Cyril Hargreaves had engineered it so that Max Volo’s men assaulted him. He had hated Cyril desperately and had plotted rich revenge. But he happened to open a door and saw Cyril sitting on the toilet. The pompous actor, the vain man, the strutter, and the false accent all disappeared in that brief moment. From then on Cyril Hargreaves was only a man. He ate and slept and went to the toilet, and all the men in the world were like him.
A tremor passed along Morris Binder’s hand and surged upon David’s, so that the presence of mankind was strong upon David. He thought of Beethoven in the streets of Bonn. The ugly deaf man had loved and hated and been despised. He had boils and indigestion and he liked beer and he went to the toilet, sick with fear. Yet his music transcended all this, but if one listened closely one could hear the tread of a real man, on this whirling earth, tormented as only men on this earth can be.
Now the lusty bassoon uttered its peasant dance, and Morris Binder grinned with pleasure. The storm came, and with it the storm of fear across Binder’s face. David could feel his muscles tighten, and for a moment the huge man looked panic-stricken. His hand began to shake, and the ushers moved into position.
But David put his arm about Binder’s huge neck and pressed close to him. “No!” he whispered. “You can stick it out.” The big man relaxed, and closed his eyes as the storm ended. Almost at the same instant Beethoven’s storm passed, too, and from the orchestra came the wonderful and stately rhythm of thanksgiving. There was a flood of noble sound, as if the angry deaf man had cried, “I’ll make the world sway!” The closing movement became so wooded and entrancing that it reminded Morris Binder of the days when his parents had taken him to the Catskills. David saw the valleys of the Delaware, and Marcia thought of her father’s fields, where she had tended cattle. Like Beethoven, they were people of the earth.
Slowly, magnificently, the symphony came to a close. The hall and all the people were transfused with sunlight from the splendid chords, but when the last note sounded, Morris Binder and David slumped forward in their seats. The ushers came up and whispered, “We’ll carry him out,” but the giant editor grunted and said, “Thank you. I’m all right.” He rose slowly and walked with great precision to the street. In a taxi he sat upright, as if he were a girl going to her wedding in a stiff gown, and even when he climbed his stairs, he moved like an automaton.
But once at home, he collapsed into his chair. His eyes became glassy and he stared ahead, his huge mouth agape. Marcia went to find a damp cloth and David, preparing to help the editor to bed, took off his coat. Then Binder saw the gray arcs of nervous sweat under David’s arms. “Was it as bad as that?” he asked.
“I never heard music before,” David replied.
“I felt the same way! I wish we could …” But the worst attack of all began. He reared from his chair in one violent lunge toward the ceiling and uttered a shattering scream. He crashed to the floor, and even though David and Marcia had been waiting for this great attack, they held back aghast.
The space was clear, therefore, when Miss Adams burst into the room, “You took him to the theatre!” she screamed at David hysterically. “You’re killing him! Get out, you good-for-nothing. Get out!”
The next morning at ten-thirty a taxi rushed up to Mom Beckett’s, accompanied by two policemen. A white, trembling Tremont Clay jumped out and began to cry, “Where’s Mr. Harper?”
From her door Mom, her hair plastered down with pomade, peered inquisitively. “Hey, you!” she cried. “What’s all the noise?”
“I’ve got to see Mr. Harper!” the excited publisher answered.
“Well, he’s sleepin’!” Mom replied. “He may get a job next week and he’s restin’.”
“Please call him!” Clay pleaded. One of the policemen appeared.
“Dave!” Mom bellowed. “Haul ass down here! The law!”
David appeared, unshaved and blinking. “Mr. Clay!” he mumbled. The publisher gripped him by the forearm and hustled him into the street. A crowd had gathered and suddenly the fat woman’s window shot up. “Fight! Fight!” she screamed. From a dozen doors people catapulted into MacDougal Street.
“Stand back!” the two policemen ordered, but from above them came the deafening exhortation, “Fight! Fight!” A crowd of loungers stared in the cab window at David and started to cry. “He did it! He’s the one!” Slowly the cab pulled away, and in the rear seat David stared at Mr. Clay. The little publisher licked his lips.
“Miss Adams just killed Morris Binder,” he said hoarsely.
“My God!” David gasped.
“He had a tremendous fit. She seemed to lose her head.” He covered his thin face with his hands. “It was horrible. She stabbed him at least a dozen times.”
“Why?” David demanded.
“Why!” the specialist in crime echoed. “Why does anybody …” He lowered his voice and said, “She saw that he was going slowly crazy. She …” He hammered his forehead and shouted accusingly, “Don’t ask me why! Figure it out for yourself!”
“What will they do to her?” David asked in a whisper.
“Miss Adams?” The tense little man looked angrily at David and said, “Nothing. They won’t do a damned thing, because she killed herself, too.”
“Ugh,” David grunted, as if he had been struck. “Oh, God!” His face grew dark and he cried, “Mr. Clay, I …”
“Son!” Mr. Clay interrupted, grabbing David by the shoulder exactly as David had grabbed Morris Binder the night before. “Pull yourself together. I don’t want to hear anything. You’ve got a tremendous job to do. Five magazines. I’m giving you forty a week, right now! Better times are coming, kid. This is your big chance.”
David pulled away in disgust as the taxi entered Lafayette Street. “But why would she …”
Clay gripped him furiously. “I’ll get you a helper, too. You can have practically anything you want, Harper. But you and I have got to pull these magazines through.” The little editor took a deep breath. “Here we are,” he said. “Now play the man! You’ll see a rough scene, but keep your wits.” He banged open the taxi door and muscled his way through the mob. David followed him and heard men whispering, “That’s Clay himself. He found the bodies.”
Photograph
Then more flash bulbs exploded, and with an impulsive gasp the late comers saw the long steel paper knife protruding from Miss Adams’ body. Her trim gray suit was smeared with blood. There was a sickening moment as the flash bulbs defined her hard features, and then a young policeman whispered, “I guess she was the other woman.”
David started to protest, but to his horror he saw Mr. Clay directing the photographers how to take additional pictures which would show both bodies. And then David saw what was in the little man’s mind. This story could run in the Clay magazines for years. It had everything! A brilliant criminologist, a sex-starved clerk, mania, passion, a long steel knife, and superb pictures. Why, this story could go on forever!
“Take a couple more from here,” Mr. Clay stage-directed, and inadvertently David looked down at the bleeding hulk of the betrayed giant, the proscribed lawyer, the great detective who functioned from a grubby desk, the opera savant who heard no operas, the man who loved all people and who lived alone. Now he had found his Valhalla, immortalized in Tremont Clay’s murder magazines. In death Morris Binder would become like a prehistoric monster, imprisoned forever in the glacial moraine of a filth he had helped to create.
When the last photographs were taken, when the limp bodies were dragged away, a charwoman came in to wash the defiled floor. When she was done, Mr. Clay said, “Now the place is yours!”
David was inspired to rush out of the door and never return, but at that moment a messenger boy arrived with the latest batch of manuscripts. “Where shall I put them?” he asked.
“Why, on Mr. Harper’s desk!” Mr. Clay cried, banging the old, scarred desk. “He’s head man up here now!” Gently he pushed David into Morris Binder’s huge chair. “Boy!” he cried. “Fetch a pillow!” Then he half-laughed and patted David on the shoulder. “Don’t mind,” he said. “No one could fill that chair, but you’ll come as close as anyone.” He stepped in front of David and said with great force, “A lot of my life rides with you, son. These are the days when a man shows what he’s got.”
Then David was alone in the dark room. The knife-scarred desk with its load of filth was his. As he envisaged the endless, indecent pages he would have to write, he grew ashamed and muttered, “I can’t work here! I’ll unload trucks.” But the call of a job was too great. For three long years he had been unemployed, and now he had a job again. Maybe people would laugh at a grown-up man who was a pulp editor, but had they, by God, walked the streets alone and hungry and ashamed and cold and useless and broke, watching themselves each day becoming more and more inevitably bums? Had they known the stark, gnawing rottenness of being out of work day after day in the full power of youth? Had they stood in some midnight square with not a cent to their names and thought of taking pretty girls to dinner or to the theatre or even to a goddamned lousy ten-cent movie? Had they known the longings of youth forestalled and aborted by an economic accident called depression? If they had not, David cried, let them keep their mouths shut.
But when he read the first sentences of his first manuscript—“This murder took place in my own town and if you don’t believe me you can read about it in the pittsburg papers which also have good photographs in case you want some”—he felt a moment of revulsion. His mind mumbled a kind of death chant: “Men don’t want to be free. They don’t want the feel of meadows under their feet nor the cry of wood-birds leading them on. They fear the desert and the sun that sinks behind the endless ocean. The sky must be broken by clouds and stars or it would be intolerable. And the inward clutches of the heart, disappearing in the very womb of time itself, are even more forsaken and forlorn.”
The parable of the wingless flies had come home. David’s spirit shuddered at the prospect of freedom. Like a horse caught in a fire, he whinnied shamelessly to be kept in his stall; and the name of surrender that echoed through all the fly-specked offices of the world echoed through his dark office and darker mind: Work.
But even though David was successful in convincing himself that being an editor for Tremont Clay was decent because it was work, he had a nervous moment when he reported that evening to Bleecker Street and informed Marcia of his good luck. She said, coldly, “You mean grown-up men work on such magazines?”
“You liked Morris Binder,” he argued.
“But he wasn’t a grown-up man!” she protested. She would say no more than this, and it was apparent that she was completely disgusted with David. He began to feel this disgust himself when he discovered that both Morris Binder and Miss Adams had left him all their money. Each had less than four hundred dollars, and David was bewildered as to why these lonely people had left their money to him and not to one another. Marcia explained the reason very simply.
“They were cowards,” she said. “Fear corroded their lives. I don’t know why Morris Binder was ashamed to marry her. Perhaps he felt his sickness … Maybe it was she who was afraid. They were cowards, and they killed themselves long ago. Didn’t you see that?”
He hadn’t seen the cowardice that had killed these people. In fact, he did not even yet comprehend that had they married and lived together little would have been changed except the most fundamental thing in both their lives: they could have shared their accomplishments and defeats, and bitter Miss Adams would have had no necessity to kill either the hulking editor or herself, because fear would thus have been expelled.
David understood this when he took Marcia to Morris Binder’s apartment one Saturday morning. Workmen were ripping down the fabulous horns. They were joking about the intricate system as they destroyed it, and David realized that it could never be replaced. The grandeur of that room was gone. “It gives you a sick feeing,” David said. “Like watching a cathedral being torn down.”
“David!” Marcia cried. “Morris Binder never built a cathedral! Cowards build refuges, perhaps, or maybe stuck-away chapels. But not open-air cathedrals! Not with spires and organ music!”
“What’s troubling you, Marcia?” David asked in real confusion.
“There’s danger in the world,” Marcia replied. “Brave people are needed. Every day you work for Tremont Clay proves to me I could never marry you.”
“Men have to work at lots of different things,” David protested.
“But men also have to build a life, David!” Marcia pleaded. She pointed angrily at the barren rooms in which Morris Binder had spent his long travail. “Was this a life?” she asked.
“He was a sick man! Almost a cripple!”
“No man needs to be sick in the heart,” Marcia said furiously. “That’s the test of whether you’re living or not.” David tried to reply, but she overrode him. “You’re a stranger to me!” she cried. “You’ve become a coward. I could never marry you.”
David started to refute this statement, but a workman on a stepladder ripped away a wire and began to shout, “Hey! Whaddaya know? This wire led upstairs to the dame’s room! Pretty tidy, eh?”
“Whaddaya mean?” another workman shouted.
“Curb service!” the man on the ladder explained. He jerked the wire and yelled. “Yoo-hoo! Bessie! Come on down!” The men burst into loud laughter.
David was infuriated by Marcia’s reaction to his job. “Damn it all,” he growled, as he walked to work, “for three years I had no job. Now I get hell for finding one. It just don’t make sense.” Yet at strange intervals durin
He finally went to see Mom and explained the whole situation to her, ending, “So I’ve been out of work for three years, and I finally get a job. Maybe it isn’t the best job in the world, but which would you rather have, an unemployed bum or a guy trying to make his way?”
“Well,” Mom reflected, “seems to me you came to see me in jail with two hundred bucks you were ashamed to hold on to. I told you I understood perfectly, and I did. But what I don’t understand is how them bills could have been stained any darker than the ones you get on your present job.” She leaned back from the table and studied the effect of her words. David scratched his ear.
“You mean you’d rather have me lounging around here than working?” David asked.
“Look at Claude!” she said, pointing at the poet with her manicured hand. “Every seven or eight years he turns out a book of poems. Folks say they’re the best in America. Rest of the time he sponges offa me. I got to admit that he does help out on the cookin’, God fabbid. But that seems to me an honorable way to live.”
“How about you …” David exploded.
“Wait a minute!” the big woman interrupted, placing her hand on David’s wrist. “Slow down, sonny! You started this conversation, not me. I wouldn’t never have said nothin’. But you ast me, and I’m tellin’ you.”