Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

The rest of the team had done so well at the match that even with his execrably poor shooting, they won the bronze medal; but only after it was disclosed that a member of the other team mistakenly awarded the bronze medal was disqualified on account of his failure to meet minimum scholastic standards. Christ, the three leading teams were so closely bunched, anything approaching the first score of his novitiate would have won them the gold. And even as far as their receiving the bronze they were too late. By the time the disqualification was discovered, the medals had been bestowed on others, never to be retrieved, as if strewn to the wind.

Ira found himself trying to coalesce into epigram the fatuity of a never-received bronze medal for his abysmal marksmanship. But as so often happened to him, his attempt ended not with an epigram, but with a rank double entendre.

What a title, he mused as he typed, what a title that would make — with the tacit reservation that it could always be deleted: The First Murderer in “Macbeth.” What a title, Ecclesias, wouldn’t you say? And alter the quotation slightly in the epigraph:

I am one, my liege,

whom the vile blows and buffets of the world

have so incensed that I care not what

I say to spite the world.

And there again, we’re back with Baudelaire, he reflected: saying instead of doing.

Still, there would abide with him — owing to his membership on the rifle team — many precious sequences, American sequences, he would term them. They were even more American than with Farley, because free of the implicit Irish Catholicism restricting Farley’s outlook, and of which one was always aware, freer because traditionally and actually freer, neutrally Protestant, unclouded by bias. Billy Green, the only regular member of the team not to graduate the following year, became the new team captain — and Ira, by default, the new manager.

A more disarming, modest, clear-headed, even-tempered youth than Billy Ira had never met. “Boyish” was the word that might best describe him: boyish in the best sense, in the American sense: self-reliant, sportsmanlike, outdoors-oriented, adventurous and yet supremely sane. He was about Ira’s height, which was then considered slightly above average, muscular, compact, with seemingly endless endurance and stamina, endless patience, courage, and good humor, Yankee fair of countenance, brown-eyed, with trait of crinkling his small nose upward, indicative of a whole range of tolerant negations, from belittling difficulties, to skepticism, to disapproval. One of two children of a widowed father, a hydraulic engineer by profession, and away from home a good deal of the time, Billy lived with his older sister in a well-kept apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Except for a cleaning woman who came in once a week to take care of the general housekeeping, Billy was mostly on his own, made his bed, got his own breakfast, helped his sister prepare supper, and helped with the dishes and the tidying-up afterward: all the chores that Mom did, and that suddenly became extraordinary when Ira pictured himself doing them.

Billy’s self-reliance seemed to Ira the very epitome of the polar opposite of himself with his increasing feeling of a corrupting infection, a vulnerability he had inflicted on himself, as if all of him were haunted in the sad traces of his Jewishness, while Billy was so free, wholesome, airy as the outdoors, so cheerfully mettlesome. And living with his sister — there was the greatest contrast! All right, she was older, yes, but living with his sister, alone, night after night in separate beds. And Ira knew nothing ever happened between them. He just knew. Oh, God, to be alone with Minnie night after night — alone with Minnie! The very thought made him giddy, whirled by alternating impulses of shame and desire.

Billy owned golf clubs, a football, tennis rackets, ice skates, and hockey sticks. And he owned his own canoe! Canoe, paddles, camping gear of every kind, campfire cookware, and sleeping bags. And it was all housed in a boat club of which he was a member. Boat club and dock were on the banks of the Hudson only a few blocks away from where he lived. Would Ira like to go canoeing?

“Would I? Boy!”

They launched the little craft together, and with Ira in the bow, a tyro with a paddle, they paddled out into the Hudson. Even when Ira weakened against the tide, Billy manfully, with a determined grin, manifesting no dismay, uttering no complaint, no reproof, but as if what he did was a welcome test, brought the canoe back to the dock. Later, after Ira had learned to manage a paddle more adeptly, the two canoed all the way across the wide Hudson, so alone, so close to the green expanse of flowing water. They went camping overnight on the opposite bank. Vivid in memory still, those precious vignettes: the New Jersey constable interrogating the two friends in the morning as they sat about the small campfire preparing breakfast. And with Billy so self-possessed, so candid and natural in rejoinder, what middle-aging American would not have recalled his own boyhood at the sight of two half-grown youths in the morning, seated amid the river-worn boulders next to the softly lapping waters of the Hudson, and then gone off smiling?

As Ira’s skill improved, the two indulged in harebrained stunts. Following closely the tubby paddle wheeler, the broad-beamed, brick-red St. George’s ferry, just after it left its slip on the Manhattan side, they rode the churning white crests in the wake of the ferry, plunged down into the tumultuous troughs, paddling for their lives and shouting with glee, within an ace of being swamped, while passengers in the stern stared in wonderment or reproof at the madcap, juvenile folly. If only he could have been reborn! Late and soon, many were the times the wish clashed against the dismal actuality. If only, if only he could have been reborn. On the majestic Hudson, paddling in the dark, alone on that great breadth of water, or on shore, in nighttime silence, snug in sleeping bag, under the steep gloom of the Palisades: if only that one thing — why did it have to happen to him? Why? Because he made it happen.

On the New Jersey bank during the Easter vacation, when they camped out several nights, Ira greedily devoured for the first time, along with the fried bacon and beans for supper, slabs of bread sopped in bacon grease. Who would believe he could digest it? He could and did. Around a driftwood fire, after a day of canoeing, anyone could digest anything. And in the morning, unforgettable April morning during the Easter vacation, they dared each other to dash into the water from the shore. Ira had never experienced the like. He doubted whether he ever would again, would ever try the stunt again. When he came wading back to shore, after that headlong fling into the frigid water, he couldn’t speak; he could just barely breathe. His scrotum had shrunken flat, his testicles had burrowed out of sight within him. The very breeze that only short seconds ago had seemed so cool now laved his skin like a balmy zephyr of midsummer. If only he could have been reborn! Walking through the uptown shopping street near Billy’s home, after the canoe was stowed away in the boathouse, Ira sampled, for the first time in his life, freshly made potato chips that Billy bought. What a heavenly flavor and crunch: potatoes transmogrified! Billy laughed at his friend’s ecstasy. And striding along Broadway from Billy’s apartment house to the subway station, their target rifles in their canvas cases slung over their shoulders, they explained to the tolerant Irish cop who stopped them that they were captain and manager of the DeWitt Clinton High School rifle team. .

Oh, America, America! There was no going on beyond the outcry of remembered affection, because history would not bear out its promise, as it seemed to the youthful understanding: only if he were different. Nor could he have entered on an equal footing into that expansive, affirmative, vibrant society — even if he were sound in temperament, instead of being already badly warped. Still, he had had a glimpse, thanks to his membership on the rifle team, thanks to Billy Green, of that dynamic form and ferment that was America, and of the joy due youth, of the sportiveness due youth, a glimpse of the means that made for joyous wholesomeness. Beyond him now, poignantly appreciated, but beyond him, the pristine play, to one already ineffaceably scarred, mutilated by mutilations incessantly craved. Still, in the flush of novelty, under the spell of campfire, the outdoors, pulsing with infectious self-reliance, independence, hardiness, the chill night winds and freedom in his blood, he would come home at last, full of vigor and boldness, to a surprised Mom and Pop and Minnie. And while washing the weekend’s scarce-washed sweat and dust from face and hands, announce: “This is going to make a new man of me!”