The tight little woman told him to sit down. “This is very good,” she said. Primly she lifted single pages from the unfinished chapters and read odd lines. “You’ll be able to have this published,” she said, and then she added other phrases, short, crisp comments about style and characterization. “You’ll be a fine writer some day,” she said.
David was too agitated to speak. Here was the first person in the world to have seen a story upon which he had truly worked, and she was saying that it was good. She used four or five words that he had dreamed might one day be spoken of his writing: movement, a swinging style, good words, people. There could never again be a moment like this, and he could not speak.
“But you’ve a great deal to learn!” Miss Adams said, as if she were beginning a lesson that would last for years. “Have you ever given yourself a course in writing? No? would you mind terribly if I used a pencil?” She took an editorial pencil—Hardness #1—and started to draw lines through words and to insert provisional substitutes. Then she showed David his opening paragraph: Whenever the distant horns sounded. I ran to the top of the hill to watch my beloved the barges drift down the canal. Although I was twelve and had many chores it was my chief pleasure to see the snout-nosed boats barges come up to go into the locks and mysteriously rise and or fall. But on this day the barge was different, and it changed my life forever. It was red-nosed, as if it had come from a bleeding fight, and on its prow stood a man with one leg, watching the mules. Behind him was a deckhouse, and at the door stood a young girl of eleven. I remember that she wore her hair in pigtails, and that was my first sight of Lucia Berry.
“See how the style is tightened up by knocking out words!” Miss Adams said with deep pleasure. “You use too many adjectives and adverbs. I despise words like forever, never, whenever. They’re mock poetic. Avoid them. And don’t use but or and to begin sentences. They’re cheap and mock-philosophical connectives.”
“You just used and yourself,” David argued.
“I’m talking,” Miss Adams snapped. “I’m not trying to write a good book. And David, please don’t use words like beloved. If your little boy loves the barges, let him show it. Don’t use soft words. Same way with your descriptive adjectives. Bleeding fight? That doesn’t make sense. A young girl of eleven? Redundant. A girl of eleven is young. And why would a barge drifting downstream need mules? Or how can a barge in a lock rise and fall at the same time?”
“I like the sound of some words,” David insisted.
“Even so, they have to make sense! Now the phrase I dislike most … I guess it’s the worst phrase in writing. And it changed my life forever. That’s really a cheap trick. It went out of style years ago. If that barge changed the boy’s life forever, show it. Don’t say it.” She raised her pencil to rub out the offending line completely, but David put his hand over it.
“It’s for that I’m writing,” he said simply.
“What do you mean?” she asked. Two men came in with bills. Impatiently she motioned them on back to Tremont Clay. Then she returned to David, her eyes blazing with excitement. “What do you mean?” she repeated.
“I used to live with a lot of old men,” David began.
“Where?”
“In a certain place,” he answered. “Strange and sometimes wonderful things had happened to those men, but they weren’t aware of it. They never knew. When I write I want everything that happens to be absolutely clear. If I think the reader won’t catch it, I’m going to say it right out.”
“It’s still an outmoded trick.”
“I don’t care,” David insisted. “If my boy begins to like jelly beans on a certain day, and if that’s important, I’m going to say so.”
Miss Adams started to re-argue the point, but her eye hit the opening lines again. With a firm stroke she crossed out boats and wrote in barges. “It’s got to be either a barge or a boat. Make up your mind.”
“I was avoiding repetition,” David explained.
“Nothing wrong with good repetition.” Then she crossed out distant again. “A horn can’t be distant and still be heard,” she said.
This was too much for David and he looked angrily at the prim woman. “Do you like it better now?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “The dead wood’s cleared away.”
“And so is the music,” David argued.
“You’re writing a novel, not a poem,” she said.
“I don’t see any difference,” David challenged.
“Between a novel and a poem?” she asked, her voice rising.
“No!” David snapped. The two men returned for her signature. “Later,” she cried peremptorily and shooed them out the door. Then David leaned forward across her desk and a torrent of words, long imprisoned in his mind, burst forth. “I’d like to write as if every page were a poem. I’d like to pour words out whether they mean anything or not. If I were describing a brick wall I’d like to flood the pages with feelings and touches and even smells, and I wouldn’t care whether anyone read what I wrote or not. The words you’ve crossed out, Miss Adams, are the ones I want.”
Miss Adams coughed and leaned forward to meet this challenge. “Art is mostly discipline,” she said.
“I don’t want discipline!” David cried. “No, I don’t! I’ve been all over this country and it isn’t mean and tight the way you say. There are mountains so big you could never describe them. And little streams that would take a million words to tell how they cross from one field to another. I know a poet who says that a novel is like a golden kettle. You throw all the world into it.”
Miss Adams cleared her throat primly and said, “Up in Vermont my mother has a kettle like that. She keeps it on the back of the stove and tosses odds and ends into it. Do you know what comes out?”
“What?” David asked.
“Mush.”
There was a pregnant pause as Miss Adams stared at the young man. He was the one who dropped his eyes. Slowly, he said, “Miss Adams, you can help me. I’ve had a vision. I’ve seen a wonderful land, and the people were even better than the land. When I think about them I want to sing. You say it’s mush.”
“Art is a cruel discipline,” she insisted. “Go look at the great painters. Or the best architects. The central problem is to find a clean, hard line. Clean, sharp, pure.”
“It sounds too icy and forbidding,” David said.
“The finest art is,” she assured him. “It’s a lonely paring away of everything that isn’t needed. If you can apply such standards to your vision …” She paused and then said, “I used to have that vision. Morris Binder had it, too. I was to be the great editor. Young novelists would work with me. He would be the lawyer that went to the Supreme Court. Now …”
The vision faded and she leaned back and studied David. He was twenty-six. At that age her brother had owned a hardware store. At twenty-seven her father had had four children. Morris Binder, forced on by Jewish parents who knew the toll of sloth, had graduated from law school at twenty-three; but David seemed scarcely a man. Could it be, she wondered, that this clean face with no scars of defeat could have had a vision? Nervously she shuffled his manuscript together.
“So you want to write a great book?” she sighed.
“Yes,” he said.
“Then don’t let anything interrupt you. If you need money, see me … or Morris Binder. We stayed up most of last night and I read this to him. He thinks it’s wonderful, David, but he’s a loose thinker, as you know. He’s prone to excesses, and he’s never disciplined himself. But please don’t talk to him about it. He’s sick … He’s very sick.” She did not cry. She never cried, but she slumped in dejection, as if the burden of waiting for those frightful screams was greater than she could carry. “I’d be deeply pleased,” she said, “if you’d let me study the chapters after you finish them. And remember. Don’t let anything interrupt.”
But a violent emotional experience did interrupt, and for more than a month David wrote nothing. It started with a phone call from
Mrs. Paxson. She said that David’s letters had been waiting when they got back. They didn’t know where Marcia was. She had been divorced in Nevada and no one had heard of her since.
David borrowed some money from Mom and hurried down to Solebury. The Paxsons met him with Quaker austerity but not unfriendliness. He had been the cause of their daughter’s dismay, but he was also one of the billions who shared the earth with them and that sovereign fact entitled him to their full sympathy. “Marcia felt a great burden of sin,” Mrs. Paxson said quietly. “She knows she wronged Harry Moomaugh cruelly. If we had leper colonies around here, I’m sure thee’d find her there, expiating her guilt.”
“We may not hear from her for a long time,” Mr. Paxson said. “She may even seek thee out first.”
“I’ll want to marry her that day,” David said.
The Paxsons would not commit themselves. “Integrity in children is hard to bear,” Mrs. Paxson said. “Marcia may refuse thee, as thee refused her.” David was embarrassed to know that Marcia had told her parents of his behavior.
The Paxsons offered him money, since his clothes were obviously inadequate, but he refused and hitch-hiked his way back to Washington Square. Since he must talk with someone, he elected Mom Beckett. She was unusually sympathetic. She sat in the restaurant and poked at her coiffured hair. “I’m always amazed,” she said, “at the capacity good people have for kicking themselves in the stomach. That alley cat Mona! Hell! She could absorb anything and come out all right. But a girl like this one you’re telling me about … Oh, heavenly days, the punishment they give themselves. But there’s this about it, Dave. If such girls ever get settled, God, what lovely wives they make!”
Mom had fifteen different ideas as to how Marcia could be tracked down. “We could hire a private dick,” she proposed eagerly.
“The Paxsons made me promise not to,” David objected.
“Well, I could lend you three hundred dollars and you could slip out to Nevada and pick up her trail. That way you’d be the eye.” Her fertile mind suggested other ways, but David, who knew that Marcia must ultimately solve the problem for herself, rejected them all.
He lay about his room, stared at the brick wall, and said, “Now tomorrow, damn it, I’ll go over to Morris Binder’s.” But after he had stayed away for eight days Miss Adams came boldly to his room.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You can’t take criticism?”
“I can’t get started again,” he said.
“David!” the little woman cried, laying down her handbag. “This is your life! This is your immortal life, David!” She looked at him in despair and said, “If it’s money, if it’s a place to stay …” When she saw the depth of his stupor, she went away, but that afternoon he got a special-delivery letter from her. “Only a few people can write, and of them only a few ever get started. Don’t waste yourself, David.” She enclosed ten dollars to be spent as he wished. She said, “Maybe a trip into the country would help. Bus fares are very low.”
Her letter shocked David into action. He was appalled that a woman as cold as Miss Adams should care what he did or why. “I’ll get hold of myself,” he swore, and he went to the public library and said to the librarian, “I’m out of work and I’d like a good, tough book to sort of hold myself together.” She smiled warmly at him and said. “Have you ever read Washington Square, by Henry James?”
“I never heard of it!” David said. He took the small and often rebound book out into the Square itself and started to read. The old passion for identification swept over him. He imagined—as was indeed the case—that James had chosen for his sedate scene the very house in which Alison now lived. He pictured Alison as the banker’s daughter and it was late at night, over a cup of coffee at Mom’s, when he finished the book. Then he understood what Miss Adams had meant by control and line and purity in art. The novel had impressed him deeply, but at the same time he clung to an old idea of his: “If a man could write just as he wished, he’d write like Balzac.” He went to bed tired and happy, resolved that in the morning he would try—to the limit of his capacity—to write like Balzac.
But in the morning there came a tender knocking at his door. He rose, irritated with himself at having been so long in bed, and looked into the hall. There stood Mona.
She wore an expensive mink coat, a saucy hat, very high-heeled shoes, and a severely plain dress that must have cost a hundred dollars. There were no lines under her eyes, and she was so beautiful that David’s heart sank.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
Quickly, and in real fright, she ducked into his room, quietly closed the door, and slumped back against it in a gesture of despair. “You’ve got to help me!” she insisted.
David drew away from her and studied her coldly. “What’s happened now?” he asked.
She put her beautiful hands over her face and shook her head as if in unbelief. “I’m scared silly,” she said. “You’ve got to hide me for a while.” She dropped her hands and looked at David as if she were a little girl detected in the act of stealing jam.
“Cut it out!” David growled. “That pleading look is pretty silly in a mink coat.”
In one motion she hurried across the room and took David’s hands. “This is no joke!” she cried with deep emotion. “Max Volo is at the bottom of the East River. In a barrel of concrete. If they find me, they’ll shoot me. They think I know who did it.” She licked her lips and stared up at David, holding onto his strong arms. “And I do know! I saw them kill Max. I was in a closet, hiding.”
Reluctantly, David led the nervous and alluring girl to a chair. “I’ll see if Mom has a drink,” he fumbled.
“I don’t need a drink,” Mona objected. “All I need is time to think this out.”
David studied her with distaste. “Think what out?” he asked.
“Don’t look at me like that!” she snapped. “You look at me as if I did it! David, they have men out right now looking for me!” She sprang from her chair and grabbed David by the shoulders. “Don’t you understand? I’m scared to death!”
“Mona! Don’t talk silliness. You were never afraid of anything. You’re just stalling for time till you figure out some way to use this to your advantage. All right, you can use my room.” In real disgust he went to his bureau.
“You aren’t going to leave?” she whined petulantly.
He reached for his clothes and awkwardly slipped into them. Grabbing a few shaving items he jammed them into his pockets and opened the door. “I won’t say anything,” he promised.
Mona began to cry. “Dave!” she mumbled. “When I went off with Max Volo, it was only to save you trouble. You had no money …”
“And Max did!”
“I did it to help you, Dave. A hundred times I said. ‘I’ll send Dave that hundred bucks.’ Here!” She clawed open her purse and handed David a handful of bills. “Thanks, kid,” she said. “You were a godsend that time.”
“Put them away!” David said, stepping into the hall.
“I feel like a devil, shoving you out of your room.” Mona sniffled. “You don’t have to go, do you?”
“Yes,” he said. He closed the door softly and went downstairs to Mom’s room. The big, handsome woman was dusting her incongruous collection of small marble statues. Demure milkmaids and angels predominated, but there was one utterly indecent group of Pan and two wood nymphs.
“That’s from Messina! Italy!” she said proudly. “Ain’t it a pistol?”
“You ought to have a curtain around that one!” David gasped.
“A little guy with a squinted-up face carved that one special for a fellow I was touring Europe with.” She stood back to survey the scabrous statue and laughed. “He was quite a fancy boy, that one.”
“Who? The carver?”
“No!” Mom chuckled. “The fellow I was with.” She leaned back and began: “He was the son of an Oklahoma oil millionarie, and he wore a wristwatch …”
“Mom,” David inter
rupted. “Did you see Mona Meigs come in this morning?” The big woman put her cup down.
“Is she in this house?” she demanded. When David nodded she went to the door and bellowed for Claude. The bearded poet appeared and she stormed at him, “I thought I told you no whores was allowed in this house?”
Claude smiled at her patiently and said, “So I understood.”
“Then how in hell did she get up to David’s room?”
“She must have sneaked in the front door when someone was leaving.” The bearded man looked so sincere in his explanation that Mom accepted it.
“Very good!” she said. “If she sneaked in, throw her out on her ass!” She went to the foot of the stairs and began to shout, “Hey! You two-bit tramp! Get the hell down here!”
“Mom!” David pleaded, pulling her back into the room, “I think it’s serious this time. Her friend …” He mumbled. “The man she was living with was murdered. She says it’s a gang killing.”
“And she wants to hide out here?” Mom snorted. “With all the cheap torpedoes that lounge in my bar, she wants to hide upstairs so we all get shot. Get her to hell out!”
“Let her stay a couple of days. I’ll find a bed somewhere.”
“No!” Mom insisted. “Dave,” she said, “men never understand women like that tramp. Out she goes.”
“I’m through with her, Mom. I’m cured, but supposing she’s telling the truth?”
“All right! Claude! You go get the papers.” She dispatched him as if he were a child, and he nodded as if he were a servant. He tossed one of her shawls about his thin shoulders and ran into the street. In a few minutes he returned with proof of Mona’s story. Max Volo in his barrel of concrete had been dredged up from the East River. It was a gang killing, and the police feared for the life of a beautiful young woman who was supposed to have the clues. Mom read the stories slowly, like one who had never bothered much with books, and said, “Claude! You take her up some chow. She can stay here three days.”
David would not go back to his room. He was through with Mona forever; yet as he wandered about the streets of his Village—Gay, Jones, Bedford, Grove—he became terribly confused, for although he now despised the bright and cruel singer, his entire novel was founded upon her, and she was tied about the ventricles of his heart so that her slightest movement had the power to suffocate him. She was in him and of him and she possessed his imagination. She was the superb and challenging woman that all men meet; she was Lilith breathing fire into the nostrils of dead Adam. And yet the more David thought of her in those days, the more certain he was that he must never go near her again.