The Fires of Spring (45 page)

David shifted gears and drove the truck slowly back to town. At the hotel Jensen and the dwarf were waiting. Hargreaves, his face bruised from David’s blow, had gone disconsolately to bed. “Your head’s cut!” Jensen said. “The flying pole get you?”

“No,” David explained. “Mona socked me with her shoe.”

“Why don’t you lay off that alley cat?” the Wild Man asked. “You’re headin’ for a lot of trouble, Dave. Cyril was fit to be tied.”

David flared up. “I’d keep out of this!” he suggested.

The Wild Man ignored his comment and continued to drawl, “I’ve seen lots of tough cheap women, Dave, and Mona’s head of the class.”

David felt that he must fight such words. He clenched his fists and the Wild Man patiently groaned. “OK!” he sighed. “If it’s gonna make you feel better! I fall down go boom! See?” With sudden force he fell full length on the floor.

At that moment there was a hissing sound from the stairway. Everyone turned to see the Gonoph. She was dressed in a flowered wrap beneath which her formless body sprawled in uncorseted abandon. “David! Hsssst!” she called.

Jensen jumped up and punched David in the ribs. “Go ahead! To the victor belongs the spoiled.”

Hesitantly David crossed the lobby. “You wait out in the truck,” the Gonoph stage-whispered to Jensen and the dwarf. She winked at them broadly and tried to hold back a chuckle.

On the first landing the excited woman stopped and turned to look at David. “You’re cut!” she said. “Did Miss Meigs do that?”

“Yes,” David replied, confused by what was happening.

The Gonoph pried beneath his matted hair and inspected the wound. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

“No,” David replied. They continued walking up the flight of stairs and at the top the Gonoph put both her fat hands on David’s.

“Is Miss Meigs your heart’s desire?” she asked.

David looked at the floor. “Yes,” he said.

The pudgy woman gripped his hands and said, “Why don’t you sneak in and see her?” Then she began to laugh and pointed at a door down the hall. As boys in school pester an angry teacher, so the Gonoph had tied Cyril Hargreaves into his room. There was no way he could break loose without
ripping off his doorknob. “Mona’s room is that one,” she said.

David started to walk toward it, but the shapeless woman in the wrap-around hurried after him and whispered, “Cyril knocks three times and then two times. He’s always used that for his signal.” She patted David on the shoulder and went chuckling to the other end of the hall.

At Mona’s door David gave the signal. From inside there was an exhausted, “All right.” He opened the door slightly and slipped into the dark room. “What a day!” Mona sighed.

“Mmmmm-Hmmmm!” David grunted.

“I should think you’d had enough excitement!” Mona said harshly, twisting in her bed. “That damned fool David Harper ought to have his head examined.” She tossed again. “Did he hurt you?”

“Mmmmm-Hmmmm!” David grunted again.

“Where?” she asked.

David slipped across the room and to the bed. He reached for Mona’s hand and placed it on his head. There was a long moment of silence while Mona explored the long-familiar head and the unexpected quantity of hair. There was a slight gasp, and she whispered, “Dave!”

He placed his hand softly upon her lips. “Yes,” he whispered. Mona shuddered and then lay still. He dropped his hand from her lips and felt for her firm breasts. He caressed the long curves of her body, the protruding hipbones, and the pointed, exciting knees. She did not speak until he pulled away her gown completely so that she lay once again as she had been, a timeless feast for all the sensations of the body. Then she said in a low voice, “It’s good. It’s very good, Dave.”

While they were lost in embracing there came a banging from down the hall. “What’s that?” Mona cried. Then she guessed and pulled David terribly close to her. “Is that Cyril?” she asked. When David nodded his head into her neck she twisted her head upon the pillow as she had done in Klim’s apartment when the great passion was upon her. “He’ll rush in here!” she moaned.

“He’s locked in!” David laughed, violently. “He’s all locked up. The Gonoph did it!”

When the two lovers fell back upon the bed, exhausted, the distant knocking continued, and Mona suddenly snapped her fingers. “Of course! She told you what the signal was!” But she did not laugh. No, she buried her pounding head
against David’s and whispered softly, “She must love you very much.”

And that was when David made his third discovery of the summer. He found that love is never to be defined, that it grows and changes with every year of life, that each person knows it as a different miracle. Love can beat and scream at the edge of a tornado and then surrender completely an hour later. It can wander and search over the face of the earth and alight nowhere. It can crawl in gutters or hide in the late afternoon behind crocheted gloves serving tea in a garden. Nothing can shame it. Nothing can make it more splendid than it already is. Shared, wantoned or hidden forever, it can fill a life. There is no understanding love, and there is no defeat so precious as trying. No aspect of life is more complex, and none so simple. A look, a word, and the heart is torn forever; a touch, and it is mended. Love is brave and cowardly. In the same person it is secret and garrulous. But above all, love establishes its own rules and no man can know its complete manifestation in the heart of another. It can even drive a person to stand watch in a long hall while the heart’s desire is lusting with another.

In the days that followed. Cyril Hargreaves was coldly correct. He called David “Mr. Harper” and was studiously formal to him both off- and onstage. Once he reprimanded David for mispronouncing a word. He treated Wild Man and the Gonoph in the same austere manner, for he had not yet determined who had been David’s accomplice.

The Gonoph was delighted with what had happened after the fire. She told David three times about the scene in the long hall. Cyril had finally torn the rope loose, but in doing so had ripped off the door handle. There was no way for him to get out. “He yelled like he was stuck in the belly,” the pudgy woman reported, chuckling as she recalled the incident. “He wakened up the clerk, who let him out with a screwdriver. Then he stormed down the hall to see Mona. ‘Go away!’ she said. I was hiding in the women’s toilet, laughing near to death. ‘Who’s in there?’ he shouted at Mona, and people began to come into the hall. Sir Cyril just didn’t care. ‘Who’s in that room with you?’ he kept shouting, so finally she unlocked the door and threw it open and the light was on and there wasn’t anybody there. ‘Go on to bed!’ Miss Meigs said, and all the people in the hall laughed. I stuck
my head around the corner and saw him stomping down the hall as if he was in a play. He slammed his door shut and the next morning the clerk had to let him out again with a screwdriver.”

Because of some ancient slight the Gonoph took real pleasure in Cyril’s discomfort. “Look at him!” she would whisper to David during the play. “Lord Cyril’s really got a worm eating him! Look at him!”

She now talked with David in their afternoon sessions as if he were her lover, as if he had crept to her room instead of Mona’s. “Didn’t we have a good time that night?” she chuckled, delighted that no one had thought of such a trick before. She spoke more kindly of Mona, too. “She’s not so bad, really,” the fat woman mused. “On Broadway she might get by. Of course, she don’t have it for Hollywood. That takes class, and she’s getting on. But I got to admit, she can act.”

She was extremely proud of David’s part in the fire. “I saw you go back in,” she said quietly. “I was proud of the way Jensen worked on the pole, but, after all, his girl was caught under the pole. You …” She leaned back to survey her young man. She liked his sandy hair and muscled neck. “You didn’t have to go.” She wrote to the Bellehaven paper for pictures of David and sent six copies to friends who had acted with her in one play or another.

And the more David talked with her the more pathetic she seemed. She came to represent, for him, the tragic contradiction of art. She was empty and forlorn, yet onstage she stood for solid family virtues. Cyril was vain and selfish and arrogant, but in the play he was a wise, kindly judge. Vito was a grown man, caught in midstream and tortured by the doubts of ever finding a girl he could marry, but in the play he was a boy. Mona wrestled each night with her vast ambitions, but onstage she was a young girl burdened with success.

That was the nature of art. Deaf Beethoven wrote the fabulous symphonies. Dying Keats sang of life’s subtlest beauties, and Van Gogh, mad as the night owls, showed all the world how to see yellow and blue. David looked at the Gonoph, vacant-minded, and thought of the great artists he had loved: Stendhal, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Melville, Giorgione, Duccio. They were tricksters, all of them. There could never be a judge’s wife so stupid as the Gonoph, just as there could never be a boat so blue as the one Van Gogh painted.
This fundamental duplicity of art fascinated David, and he tried to comprehend it through comprehending the Gonoph.

One day he asked her, “Why did you help me to trick Cyril?” and she chuckled, pulling her shawl about her shoulders, “I like to have everyone find his heart’s desire.” He was caught in a passionate desire to know all he could about this formless woman.

“Why did you decide to go on the stage?” he asked, and she replied, “What else was there for me to do? I guess you might honestly say I was a born actress.”

“Have you ever had good reviews? That is, rave notices?” She thought a while and said, “In Tulsa, Oklahoma, I got a very good review for a Swedish maid. I was pretty good in that. Comedy, you know.”

He asked her many questions, and when he was through he knew no more about her than when he started, for she always returned to a few simple statements. “You must be careful at night,” she warned.

“Why?” David asked.

“Sir Cyril’s gunning for you,” she said solemnly. “He’ll get you.”

“Not me,” David boasted. But Cyril did even the score. It happened in a small Pennsylvania town called Slaghill.

That day at Slaghill started with a bang, for two detectives appeared at the tent to arrest the young man who took tickets. He had been selling them twice and had bilked Chautauqua of something like ninety dollars. Now he was off to jail.

“Ninety dollars!” David gasped. “I used to make that much in a day!” He began to shiver and felt alarmed when he and Cyril had to go to the prison to represent Chautauqua. They spoke very formally to each other and to the thief, who sat dejectedly in a barren cell.

“Couldn’t you keep your hands off other people’s money?” Cyril asked severely. The young college man did not reply and the actor continued, “All through the years the theatre has suffered from dishonesty in the box office.”

“Let’s leave him alone,” David suggested. “Is there anything we can do for you?” he asked the frightened young man. The ticket-taker looked back through the steel bars and shook his head. He was twenty-three years old, a sandlot baseball player, and David could remember him in the mornings, playing baseball with the kids around the tent.

Cyril wiped his brow with a carefully folded handkerchief
and said good-bye. “If there’s anything you need, let us know. You were stupid to have stolen money when the tickets were all numbered.” He huffed and puffed a bit of everyday morality and left, but David turned at the door and saw the panic-stricken baseball player, and it seemed to David that he saw himself sitting there behind the bars.

“God, that must be awful!” he mumbled to Cyril.

“The man’s a common thief,” Cyril snapped, and that was all he would say.

When the two actors returned to the tent, a group of small boys surrounded them immediately. “Are you Dave Harper?” they cried. “Well, the biggest car you ever saw wants to see you. It’s in back!” David hurried through the tent and was greeted with a tough bellow.

“Hiya, kid! Ya look swell!” He recognized some of Max Volo’s bodyguards and spoke to them. “Max is over here,” they explained, adding in a whisper, “Do ya kiss the babes on the stage? Babes go for actors, don’t they?”

“Hello, kid!” Volo said quietly. He wore a much better suit than when David had last seen him.

“Hello, Max!” David replied. “What you doing up here?”

“On my way to New York,” Volo said. “Took a detour to see you. And Mona.”

“Mona doesn’t show up till seven-thirty,” David explained.

“I can wait,” Volo replied.

“How was Hollywood?” David asked.

“Oh, so-so,” Volo replied. He sent his attendants on into town for supper but stayed himself to talk with David. “How you like this racket?” he asked.

“It’s fun,” David said.

“They tell me you play with dolls!” He persuaded David to unwrap Bosco and make him drink beer. “Say!” the little crook cried. “You’re good! Part of the reason I dropped by was to see if you’d go to work for me when the tour’s over. I got me nine movie houses in Philly. I think I move into New York, maybe. I could use you for a manager. Maybe even a field manager. Wonderful dough!”

“I don’t think so, Max,” David replied.

“You’re the boss! Say!” he said sharply. “I hope you ain’t in love with Miss Meigs.”

“No, I’m not,” David assured him.

“Good!” Volo said. He walked up and down and then asked, “She tell you about Hollywood? What a flop she was! And on my five grand! She put on dog like she was a queen.
The whole town was laughin’ at her. I did my best to get her fixed up with some important people. But she loused up every deal. I don’t mind tellin’ you, kid, she treated me like I was dirt. But I got a terrific yen for that twisty blonde.”

Volo’s gang came back. They brought him a cheese sandwich, melted, and two malted milks. He insisted that David take one. At seven-thirty Mona appeared, followed by Cyril and the Gonoph. Volo sidled up and Mona shook hands with him. “Hello, Max,” she said in a flat voice.

“Hello, kid!” he replied, eagerly. “I’d like to talk to you.”

“It’s almost curtain time,” she said, but he pulled her into the outer shadows. He talked with her seriously for some minutes and came back to the dressing area trembling with rage.