The Fires of Spring (38 page)

Oh, that’s rotten luck, Mona!
Marcia pressed her head against the door jamb. Sunset light from the fields fell upon her strong head and along her starched, precise dress. David looked at her with far-away eyes, as if she were part of an ancient Quaker sampler.
That’s really tough, Mona!
It was Marcia’s intention to accompany David to Chicago. She’d study social work, for she knew that even if she had a dozen children—and she would enjoy a dozen—she would have to continue some meaningful work. For as she studied the married people who filled the various Meetings she perceived clearly that those men were happiest whose wives were best. She knew fifty men who had married fluffy young girls who remained fluffy young wives, forever. She would not believe that those men were happy, for in the strangest ways they betrayed their unhappiness. “So what if David does like this singer! He knows it’s all wrong. Like Harry and me.”

Chautauqua? Yes! It used to come to Doylestown when I was a kid
. “He’s still a kid,” she mused. “Look at him!
He doesn’t know what he wants or what he’d like to run away from.” She guessed it might be his fear of responsibility, and she berated herself for not having told him that her father had agreed to support the marriage for the first three years. “I’ll tell him when he hangs up,” she said.

What’s this about marionettes?
She twisted her head and looked across the noble fields of Solebury, the soft green fields. How exciting spring had always been! Year after year! The crackling of ice along the Delaware. Then soft days with pussywillows by the barn. Next lilacs and the full tide of earth bursting into fruitfulness! And this spring was finer than any she had known before. David was with her, and often they kissed, not schoolboy kisses, either. True, he was shy and seemed to pull away, spiritually, but she imagined that most good men—certainly the men she saw in Meeting—had been that way: unwilling to tie themselves to one person, but when tied, faithful and sharing till the last wintry day. A dove flew across the sunset fields and she thought of the haunting line she loved so well: “And peace proclaims olives of endless age.” Then David’s voice broke the spell.

I’ve had my heart crossed. Hoping some job like this would come along
. He wrestled with the cord and could not free his hand. “Marcia!” he cried. “Take down this address.” With his elbow he pointed to the pencil. She walked slowly to the phone and wrote as he dictated: “Delaware Chautauqua, Delaware, Pa.”

David hung up. He was so excited that he had to move about the room, but as soon as he had left the phone he hurried back to study the paper with Marcia’s writing. He waved it in the air. “How do you like that?” he cried.

“What’s it mean?” Marcia asked.

“Why, it means I’ve got a real job!” he replied.

Marcia put her hand to her mouth. Something in the way David accented the adjective
real
conveyed his full meaning. But with a stolid determination to hear the worst she asked, “Isn’t a fellowship at the University of Chicago a real job?”

David looked away from his inquisitor and thought of what he was about to surrender: Tschilczynski’s Chicago fellowship, the chance of being a college professor, the quiet grandeur of Quaker life in Eastern Pennsylvania, and Marcia, too, and the fields of Bucks County. He realized the folly of his decision, but he saw its substitute and found it glowing: a march across the country with a traveling circus, Mona
and the dark nights when her desires and ambitions mingled and overflowed, strange people in strange towns!

“I’m not ready to get married, yet,” he said.

“Married!” Marcia cried, with her right hand to her lips. “Who …”

“We both know,” David replied. “We were to spend the summer here studying each other and then get married in late August. Marcia …”

“Are you afraid of getting married?” she interrupted.

“In a way, I am,” he said. There was a great agitation in his mind, for this quiet Quaker girl disturbed him deeply. “Oh, don’t you see?” he cried angrily, ashamed of his own confusion. “I’m not as old as you are. Spiritually, I mean. If I can get away for a couple of years and see this country … I’m not sure of myself, Marcia. You might not want to marry me when you see the kind of man I become. If we could wait …”

Marcia studied the freshly plowed fields and saw in them the urgency of life, which, like the growing season, is so very short. “I can’t wait,” she said simply. “I can’t suspend life while you wander about. Why must you beat your head against the world? You know in your heart that in the end you’ll love me. Then it’ll be too late, because I will not wait. If you go, I’ll marry Harry Moomaugh.”

David felt that it would be decent for him to protest, but he was tremendously relieved that Marcia had worked out an alternative plan for her life. He shook her hand and said, “I’m sure you’ll be very happy.” Immediately he was ashamed of himself, disgusted, and he pleaded, “Marcia! Why won’t you wait?”

She replied with the great frankness that marks Quaker conduct. “For men life seems endless,” she said. “But for girls it isn’t. While you loaf around, I’ll have had two children. While you dream of this or that, I’ll be running a farm.” She looked across her father’s fields and gripped David’s hand. “It’s almost as if we were two trains on different schedules. We weren’t intended to meet nor to share the same stations.” She stamped her foot. “Damn it all!” she cried. “God certainly can louse up his timing!”

For the first time since David had known her, she seemed like an ordinary girl, warm and petulant, and David found her deeply appealing. Almost instinctively he tried to kiss her, but she pushed him violently away. “No!” she commanded harshly. “That’s past! Go on up and pack! But
when I’m married, you’re never to visit. And when you’ve traveled all summer with your cheap singer and seen that everything is empty, not what you wanted at all, don’t come cringing back, David! I’d slam the door in your very face.”

The Cyril Hargreaves Troupe of Broadway Players consisted of six actors and a telephone. Hargreaves himself was sixty-six, a splendid, well-preserved cenotaph with an aquiline nose, a handsome face like parchment and the remnants of a grand manner. Emma Clews, aged forty-four, was a flaccid, dumpy veteran of twenty-three summers on Chautauqua. She was terrible. Mona Meigs, twenty-seven and hungry for better things, was leading lady. David Harper, twenty-two and aching for the full experience of life, was the juvenile. The dwarf Vito Bellotti was comedian, and the fabulous Wild Man Jensen, a former football star at Illinois, was general muscle man and bit player.

But in a certain sense the telephone was the hero of the troupe, for this was the year 1929, the last year that the good, brown tents of Chautauqua went through the East, and although there was money to burn that year, Chautauqua was slowly dying. Radio, the movies, and the motor car had killed the venerable institution and David was an attendant at the wake. Everything was conducted parsimoniously, and since the play they gave called for some dozen characters, it was necessary to feature the telephone. Whenever it came time for one of the missing characters to speak, the phone rang and Cyril Hargreaves picked it up. “No!” he would ham. “You don’t say! That’s delightful! Listen to this,” and he would repeat word for word the absent actor’s dialogue. He played his own role and those of the six missing subordinates. “We save some thousands of dollars that way,” he explained.

The play for that summer was
Skidding
. It dealt with the fortunes of Judge Hardy’s family in Pocatello, Idaho, and in the play the dwarf Vito had the role that was later to become world famous. Vito was the rambunctious son, Andy Hardy, and the happy little dwarf clowned his way through the part so delightfully that even when a more famous actor assumed the role in the movies, David always thought of Andy Hardy as little Vito had portrayed him.

In fact, David was in that wonderful and sentient moment of his life when he seemed to have no skin upon him, no lids upon his eyes or veils across his mind. He sensed immediately
the tremendous effect of each of the other five members of the troupe upon him; and in many ways this summer of 1929 was the most terrifying and meaningful of David’s life. He worked hard and grew thin. He drove the Chautauqua truck long hours and for weeks at a time was so sleepy that life seemed like a shadow hung between day and night; and always about him were the five members of the troupe, pressing upon him in various ways. Once he said to himself: “It’s as if I were nothing but exposed nerves,” and even though the experience was exhausting he felt at the time that this was the way men of greatness had lived: they felt more, they sensed more, they allowed people about them to impress them more deeply, and their nerves were forever exposed.

For example, Cyril Hargreaves, a man of sixty-six, became David’s competitor in love, was successful, had David almost killed, and never once lost his temper. He was a tall, icy man and spoke in acquired British accents. He was originally from Oklahoma, a fact to which he had not alluded in forty-eight years. He was stilted, arrogant, pompous, and extraordinarily selfish, but he was also a full-grown man of passion, and after David contended with him, David too became a man.

Trouble started on the first day, when Cyril quietly let David know who was boss. He said, “Mr. Harper, in a prosperous year I could not possibly have tolerated an amateur like you in my troupe. Whether you appear onstage or not is of no possible consequence to me, but if you once fail to ring the telephone when I’m supposed to give a speech the fine is twenty-five dollars.”

Cyril also made it clear that during that summer he would escort Miss Meigs to and from the tent, to and from her meals and to and from her bed. When this became apparent, David tried to protest, but Mona stopped him. “You’re a grown man now,” she said.

“Then why did you invite me for the summer?” he demanded.

“I tried to explain over the phone, but you were being cute like a college boy. We had to have a cheap actor. The cheapest we could get.”

“That’s a hell of a reason,” David snorted.

“And the second reason,” Mona continued, “was that I knew damned well you were rotting out on that farm with
Miss Apple Blossom of 1928. You were mighty happy to have me save you.”

“Can’t we at least have dinner tonight?” he begged.

“I eat with Cyril.”

He looked at her with bewilderment. He had not before realized that two people who had been passionately involved with each other could submerge their one-time desire. In confusion he asked, “Don’t you love me any more?”

“Love you?” the actress repeated incredulously. “Who ever said I did?”

“But … In Klim’s apartment?”

“What’s that got to do with love?” she parried, leaving him for her dinner with Cyril.

Emma Clews explained things to David. She was round and dumpy and had a sallow complexion. Each thing about her was indiscriminate and blended softly into its neighbor. She had watery eyes, straggly hair, a chin that rested upon her bosom, which sagged onto a protruding stomach, which hung upon fat legs. Her blouse of soft silk joined haphazardly a woolen skirt which bulged at awkward points, and about her shoulders she wore a knitted scarf, for she was always cold.

She was known as the Gonoph, why, no one ever said. She had big yellow teeth which she exposed when she smiled, and she was one of the worst actresses imaginable, delivering all words with identical emphasis, like a mother who refuses to take sides among her equally ill-favored children.

For some reason that David could not guess, Mona despised the Gonoph and ridiculed her bitterly. “Why don’t you borrow a razor blade and cut your throat?” she used to ask.

The Gonoph grinned, baring her horse teeth. “Wouldn’t you be sorry if I did?” she chided. “Wouldn’t you just?”

“Tell you what!” Mona suggested. “You cut your throat! Then later Cyril can tell you how shocked I was. I don’t think!”

The Gonoph grinned and tucked in her blouse, patting her fat stomach. “So now it’s Cyril this and Cyril that! I’ve watched better girls than you try that game!”

“Name one!” Mona challenged.

“Me!” the fat woman said quietly.

“Oh, go to hell! Borrow a razor blade and cut your throat!”

When Mona had stamped off, the Gonoph smiled at David. “All right. She can sleep with Cyril this summer, but
it won’t get her a job on Broadway next winter. Mark my words!”

David said without thinking, “She wouldn’t sleep with Cyril. He’s old!”

“Actors never get old,” the Gonoph laughed. “That’s why ordinary men dislike them so much.”

“But not Mona!” David insisted.

“All right!” the Gonoph surrendered. “But why do the hotel stairs creak at night?”

That question was the beginning of David’s intense dislike for the pasty, dumpy Gonoph. In time he came to think of her as a sodden mass of unleavened dough, yet it was this inept and abominable actress who taught him how to act. It was also she who taught him the essential quality of love. It could be said that of the entire troupe she was the one who scraped her nails most often across his exposed nerves and that therefore she was the one from whom he learned the most.

From the dwarf Vito he learned how to manipulate marionettes, for in the afternoon he and Vito gave a show for children. Vito was forty-one inches high, in no way misshapen. He had a Falstaffian voice that rumbled in his chest like beer barrels rolling along a gutter, but he could make it birdlike in imitation of giddy girls. He rarely allowed his affliction to sober his wonderful good spirits; but he had never known a girl of his own size and his mind dwelled upon love as if it were something forbidden him. In spite of his immense voice, he always whispered when he asked such questions as: “Are you in love with Miss Meigs, Dave?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t worry, kid. You’ll get to love these puppets as if they were human.” David thought of the Sheik and his love for the mechanical princess. He was about to speak when he saw that the dwarf Vito actually did love his stringed dolls.

And finally, there was Wild Man Jensen and his pigeons. But the Wild Man was something very special, and when the summer was over David had merely to recall the man’s name and the great sun that warms the earth seemed to be with him.