The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
“All right! Let me say it slower. You’ve been a bootlegger, pretty much of a bum at times. How does this apply to you?”
“Very easy!” Mom said with great force. “It’s like this. How a woman makes her livin’ is unimportant. On the street, bootleggin’, griftin’. It’s part of a woman’s nature, because the best she can hope for is to grub her dough off’n some man. But for a man it makes all the difference in the world. A man has got to hold his head up, or he’s plumb lost. I’m a bootlegger, OK. Claude ain’t. He won’t touch the stuff, says it’s a filthy business.”
“Yet he lives off your dough.”
“Not exactly,” Mom said. At this moment the poet rang up a small sale. “You see, we’ve agreed to call that his work. That’s his job. In a way, he owns the restaurant. He reinvests his wages, you might say. He takes only dimes and quarters as he needs them and now and then a pair of shoes. That ways things are honest. No real man would be satisfied with less.”
“You’re saying I should quit my job?”
“If you’re askin’ me, yes.”
“But what in God’s name can I live on? I want to get married.”
“You can write,” Mom said.
The two friends looked at each other. Mom’s face was a heavy mask, well made up and placid. She was in no sense accusing David, but spiritually she was assuming the role formerly held by Miss Adams. “You can write,” she said, adding silently, “and a guy who can do that is silly to …”
“What do you think I should do, Mom?”
“I think maybe you should help Claude. You could be assistant cook.”
David bit his lip and asked, “You’ve met Marcia Paxson. Would she marry me if I was assistant cook?”
“I can tell you, she won’t marry you unless you are. Or the equivalent.”
For three days David considered his problem. During these days he thought a great deal about Morris Binder. He reviewed the man’s bleak life, and his terrible indecency in having Miss Adams listening from an equally bleak room above him. He thought of the trivial impact these people had made upon their city. They had been cliff dwellers and they had accomplished nothing: no children, no love, not even a home; no singing accomplishments, nothing but a series of filthy magazines stretching from the sewage pits of society to the minds of morons.
“Forty years from now I could be like that!” he shuddered. He began to see his life as a limited journey. There were only a few places he could visit, a few objectives to be attained, and when his brief efforts were over, the journey and its memories would be forgotten. During these days of review he came to hate New York City, both in the morning when he walked down Third Street and late at night when he came home along Fourth. He recalled how blessed by nature had been his poorhouse life; but here in the city it sometimes seemed as if there were no life. There were no birds nor turning furrows in the spring. Nights were often wintry but never frosty, and some seasons slipped past without his even knowing they had come; for there were no dogtooth violets, no mosses by the creek nor cattails fluffing in the autumn breeze.
By the fourth day his mind was made up. He stopped at a corner shop and bought a big bouquet of flowers. Then he went up to his room and grabbed the folder in which his forgotten and unfinished novel lay gathering dust. He tucked it under his arm and stepped out in MacDougal Street. Immediately, from the fat woman’s window across the way came the strident cry, “Lover! Lover! Lover!”
A group of little boys surrounded him and teased him as he walked toward Bleecker Street. Even after he had turned the corner he could hear the fat woman crying, “Lover! Lover!” At Sixth Avenue the boys left him, and he trudged across to Seventh. There a new group of idle urchins began to joke with him, and among them was Mrs. Allegri’s boy. Like a bolt he left the crowd and went screaming down the street: “Here comes Harper with the biggest goddamn bunch of flowers …” Mrs. Allegri met her son at the stoop and slapped his face soundly. “Have some manners!” she commanded. Little Mr. Allegri got up from his peach basket and shouted, “Marcia! Here he is!” The excited man led David through the dark hall and into Marcia’s room. “Behold the lover!” he cried approvingly. “I’ll fetch a vase.”
When David was alone with Marcia he said abruptly, “Now I know what you were talking about. I quit my job …”
Like a woman, Marcia popped her knuckles to her teeth and cried, “What will you do for a living?” David grinned.
“Mom has offered me a job as assistant cook. What she means is that she’ll stake me until I finish writing … Well, I’ve been working on a novel.”
“Yes,” Marcia said. “I imagined that was your surrender.”
“What do you mean?”
They sat on the edge of the bed and Marcia held his hands. “From the time I first met you in the poorhouse, I knew we’d get married, Dave. When Daddy read your poem aloud, I wanted to know a boy like you. At basketball games I used to watch every jump you made, and the bright wonder in your eyes came to be in mine, too. But when I saw you in the hospital I knew that you had surrendered. What it was I didn’t know, but it was something big. It was a novel, eh?”
“This sounds foolish,” David said in embarrassment. “But I guess I was going through a period of pretty wild self-intoxication. I thought I was going to be a second Balzac.” The old fire came upon him and he simply had to rise and move about. “God! What novels I was going to write! I guess I did it mostly to keep my spirits …” He stopped abruptly and handed Marcia the folder. “Will you read this? And if it’s any good, will you marry me?”
“Dave!” the glowing girl replied, “I’m going to marry you whether it’s any good or not. You don’t have to be a success. Just so long as you haven’t quit where the big dreams are concerned.”
“When can we get married?” David asked.
“Right away! We’ll live at Mom’s, and then later on I’ll have courage enough to go back to Bucks County. I want to live near the canal and to go shopping in Doylestown as Mrs. David Harper. I want you so very much, and if I’m ever tough or cold or haughty, I want you to slap my ears down.” She held out her arms to David, and they fell backwards onto the bed. After they had been ominously silent for some minutes Mr. Allegri coughed very noisily in the hall and banged on the door.
“I brought you some wine!” he announced. “And some cookies!” He placed a tray upon a chair, and all the Allegris and some of their friends piled into the room.
“An engagement!” Mrs. Allegri beamed.
And David thought: “It’s like coming home to yourself at last.”
For this is the journey that men make: to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn’t matter much what else they find. Money, position, fame, many loves, revenge are all of little consequence, and when the tickets are collected at the end of the ride they are tossed into the bin marked FAILURE.
But if a man happens to find himself—if he knows what he can be depended upon to do, the limits of his courage, the positions from which he will no longer retreat, the degree to which he can surrender his inner life to some woman, the secret reservoirs of his determination, the extent of his dedication, the depth of his feeling for beauty, his honest and unpostured goals—then he has found a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.
Among the many people he had known, David could recall only one real enemy, his aunt Reba Stücke, and he finally got even with her in a manner so bizarre that for the rest of his life he had to laugh with joyous pleasure whenever he remembered that evil woman. By the same stratagem he gained his freedom from the sentimental bondage in which he had been held by Mona Meigs. It happened this way.
When Marcia brought him the incomplete novel she said, “It’s wonderful, Dave! You be second cook till it’s finished. I’ll be proud to be chambermaid.” Then she frowned ever so slightly and said, “I can see from the book that you really loved Miss Meigs.”
David blushed and asked, “Is it as clear as that?”
“It’s very clear,” Marcia said seriously. “Are you still in love with her?”
David had sense enough to reply, “Not the way I am with you,” and the frown disappeared. Then he added, “It’s just that no man could ever forget Mona completely. I saw a man die one night, and his last question was about her.” Marcia frowned again, a woman’s flickering frown that seemed to cut deep because it stayed so very briefly.
Then the will was probated.
Actually, there was no will. Reba Stücke had been so grasping that she was emotionally unable to write a will. She simply could not imagine giving up her hoarded money to anyone, so the court said that by default it must go to David. They sent him eight hundred and sixty dollars and many papers to sign. He said to Marcia, “We don’t want to start our married life with money from that old witch.”
“You bet we don’t!” Marcia agreed, and they decided to give it to the Friends’ Service Committee, but they were prevented from such an obvious gesture by Mona’s letter:
Dear Dave
I suppose your all fixed up now with a good job I wouldent for the world bother you again but Ive had some trouble and I feel dead certin that its all over and that my big chance is just arround the corner Theres a new company starting with some MGM characters and Im dead certin to land big with them I had a bit part in the last John Barrimore turkey but you probably dident see me as I was like Vito on the radio Dave theres this very good friend of mine Richard Hansen and he writes these wonderful songs any day I expect him to click but big Could you let me have a couple of hundred bucks its a good risk because as you know I pay back loans and Dick says I can have the first money he gets from Paramount on his songs If you could hear them youd know he was dead certin to be a big success …
David handed the scrawl to Marcia, who read it slowly and shook her head. “What are you going to do?” she asked. Then she noticed that he was laughing.
“Do?” he chuckled. “This solves everything!” He laughed all the way to the bank, where he made out a cashier’s check, and on to the postoffice, where he mailed a registered letter, and all during the rest of the day, so that forever afterwards when he thought of Aunt Reba a warm glow suffused him, and he felt wonderful. He might be in a restaurant, and he would begin to chuckle for no apparent reason, and then Marcia would know that he was thinking of Aunt Reba’s poorhouse money out in Hollywood, spent in niggardly amounts to support an actress and a song writer who lived together in open sin.
So whenever David laughed, Marcia laughed too, for she knew that at long last the poorhouse, and Aunt Reba, and perhaps even Mona had been exorcized by the subtle warmth of comedy. “At last he’s ready to get married,” she whispered to herself.
The wedding was held in a small white room on East Seventeenth Street. The guests arrived by mid-afternoon. From Bucks County only the Paxsons appeared, and they sat apart in one corner of the room, ashamed and confused at their daughter’s headstrong history yet pleased that she was at last marrying David Harper.
David’s friends attended the Quaker wedding self-consciously. Tremont Clay wore formal dress and felt ill at ease. He thought that this young man had let him down. Mom Beckett and Claude sat together, holding hands, and as always at a wedding Mom had tears in her eyes. Her mascara smeared, and she was not a lovely sight. Vito was in the front row where he could see, while little Betty, pregnant again, was to accompany Marcia to the wedding chairs. Wild Man Jensen was to walk with David. In the rear Mrs. Allegri wiped her nose even before the procession started, but Mr. Allegri commanded her sharply to stop. He pointed out that it couldn’t be much of a wedding with no priest or flowers.
Four elderly Quakers entered from a side door and sat facing the small Meeting. Three were men, and they looked like Solebury farmers, transplanted into the city. The woman was small and nervous. With sharp eyes she indicated where everyone was to sit, jumped up to adjust the curtains, and marked the minutes by a tapping foot. These four were that day the repositories of God’s will, and through them David and Marcia would be married.
At four-thirty Marcia and the dwarf Betty Bellotti walked into the room, followed by David and Wild Man Jensen. The bridal pair sat on two plain chairs that faced the audience. There was silence, and the peace of God descended upon that room, and behind him David could hear the three men breathing heavily. He could hear the woman tapping.
He looked among the strange faces and felt that he could never find courage to rise and begin the ceremony. Slowly, as if testing his strength, he gritted his teeth, but strength fled from him, for he heard Marcia gasp and followed her eyes across the room. Then he gasped too, for sitting in the corner was Mrs. Trueblood.
She was an elderly woman, thin and tall. She had a slightly peaked nose and eyes that burned like embers in a dying grate. She was always dressed in black and spoke at Yearly Meetings. Marcia had not invited her, nor had David. She had no doubt come as the representative of Solebury Meeting in this official marriage of a daughter of Solebury. She sat primly, unwanted, unlovely, bitter; and the wedding couple was shaken by this Coleridgean wedding guest.
Twenty minutes of silence elapsed, and David thought of Mrs. Trueblood and Harry Moomaugh and Alison Webster and Mona Meigs and of each item of sin that rested on him that day. In the audience, members began to wonder if he had forgotten his words, but Mr. Paxson stared at him and almost imperceptibly nodded his head. David took a deep breath and rose to face the members of the Meeting.
“In the presence of God and these our friends assembled,” he said softly, “I take thee, Marcia, to be my wife …” He continued the simple ritual, placed the ring upon Marcia’s finger, and kissed her. Marcia acknowledged to the Meeting—and through it to the world—that she was taking David to be her lawful husband. With these simple words the marriage was consecrated.
They sat down, and there came a greater silence. As in the old poorhouse Meeting, a fly droned endlessly about David’s head and inadvertently he looked beside him, half expecting to see mad Luther Detwiler sitting with his hat on; but instead he saw his wife, and he remembered how he had first seen her, in just such a quiet Meeting, and he thought: “It seems so right.”
But the essential wrongness of this marriage could not go unchallenged. Mrs. Trueblood rose and pointed her long beak at the couple. “Marcia Paxson Moomaugh Harper,” she said in godlike tones, “thee has been a wilful child. Thee has been headstrong, has loved thine own ways and has shown no aptitude for true marriage. What token is there that thee has changed?”
In their corner Mr. and Mrs. Paxson stared at the floor. David looked away in shame, but Marcia stared back at Mrs. Trueblood. The woman constructed a long and thoughtful analysis of marriage as a sacrament. The very presence of God Himself was dragged into the small room, and flies buzzed while she excoriated divorce and broken vows. She spoke as a prophet from the Old Testament, and her voice had a monitory ring that frightened David and left him quivering when she finally sat down, clothed in lonely dignity, trembling from the force of what the Lord had made her say.
Again the room was silent and David could hear labored breathing. It was the moment of consecration, when two people, strangers up to now, were being fused into one. David thought of the fiery charges Mrs. Trueblood had made. She seemed to be like Morris Binder: “There are good men and bad men. Good girls and bad girls. Never leave the reader in doubt. Good girls wear simple colors like honest yellow or blue.”
But human beings, David among them, could not be so labeled. There was sin upon him, yes. In the drowsy, quiet room he thought of this sin. He concluded that sin was any folly which hurt or even ruined the man who persisted in it. Sin was the erosion of spirit that finally left fields of the soul gullied, their substance washed away, their stalks of grain bent and fruitless. Each human being was subject to sin and each bore his penalties in peculiar and often terrible ways.
But sin was not evil. No, evil must be in a lower category. Evil was wrong-doing directed not at
Then he saw the mascaraed face of Mom Beckett. She stared impassively ahead, her hand clutching Claude’s. He watched her for a moment and realized that he had no words of description for her. Neither sin nor evil seemed to apply to that strange and provocative woman.
As he studied his friends and thought of their problems—Jensen was still unemployed; Vito’s first child had been a dwarf, but they had hopes that the second might not be—he became angry with Mrs. Trueblood. “There’s no reason why she should have spoken so!” he muttered to himself, staring at the uncompromising Quaker saint. He could not believe that his marriage with Marcia was perpetually condemned because it happened to have been conceived in sin. That was beside the point. There was a phrase from Marcia’s favorite poem: “And peace proclaims olives of endless age.” There was no reason why that should not describe their dedicated marriage. They would live as if their lives were an atonement for the errors they had made.
He thought of his own country. It had started its noble life with the greatest crime of all: matricide. Its finest patriots were stained with the intolerable crime: treason. Its corporate life was still stained with minor forms of slavery. And yet from these lewd beginnings a nation of free and reasonably good men had risen and prospered and shown a light to all the world. David thought of the little Italians fighting over their bocce far from home, and they were better here. He recalled the shivering Jews in Lafayette Street, and here they were free. Either a nation or a man—or a marriage, for that matter—can start in sin and accomplish the perfection to which it aspires. Only the wilfully evil are proscribed and nugatory. David looked humbly at his feet as if he were unworthy of this cleansing truth.