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

Larry, Ira’s new acquaintance, had left, but apprehension obliterated everything from his mind except to obtain pardon for his misdeed. “You asked me, sir, to report back to you, Dr. Pickens. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all very well.” Leonine Dr. Pickens gathered up attendance books and papers. “I still intend to bring your insulting, your gross misconduct to Mr. Dotey’s attention.”

“Please, Dr. Pickens. Please. I — it was just that one time,” Ira begged. “Please! You can ask any teacher if I ever did that before.”

“I don’t intend to do anything of the kind. It was as disgraceful an exhibition of bad manners as anything I’ve experienced in my years of teaching. Utterly. And I can think of only one thing proper for that kind of behavior, one that may cure you from ever repeating it again. And that is a visit to Mr. Dotey’s office. And that’s where we’re going.”

Ira’s eyes began to fill with tears. He would have reached out, if he dared, and seized Dr. Pickens’s hand. “One chance, Dr. Pickens. I’m just asking for one chance.”

“Can you give me a single good reason, young man, why I should grant you one?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir, what? That you have a good reason? I don’t believe it.”

“We were doubled up in the seats, and I couldn’t help it.”

“That’s the very reason”—Dr. Pickens’s finger described an uncompromising arc from himself to Ira—“the very reason why it was your obligation to show greater self-control. Better manners were clearly called for in this kind of emergency situation, and did you show them, a senior? You displayed the very opposite.”

“I know.”

“Then you have nothing to say for yourself.”

Ira was at wit’s end. Tears began to trickle from his eyes. He would have to gamble. He would have to tell the truth, trust that it was as compelling to Dr. Pickens as it was to him. “I felt like I found a friend. He was rich and he wasn’t Jewish, and he liked me.”

Dr. Pickens drew back, as if (Ira’s fervent hope) glimpsing or confronting something grave, unique, beyond discourse. His close-set gray eyes searched the face in front of him with a relentlessness that intensified his leonine aspect. A second passed in silence, two, and then he cleared his throat forcefully. “I think you’re telling the truth.”

“I am, Dr. Pickens. I am. That’s why it happened.”

“Well, don’t you ever let it happen again in my classroom.”

“No, sir! I won’t!”

Dr. Pickens deliberated another moment, retributionally, without serious intent. “Very well. You may leave.” His gesture of dismissal seemed peculiarly remote from the white-maned, florid, age-pocked features Ira saw blurred through tears. “You may leave.” Dr. Pickens twiddled two fingers in impatient dismissal.

“Thanks, Dr. Pickens! Thanks!” His heart on wings within him, smearing his wet cheeks, Ira raced to his next class.

And now having had my cup of tea, Ecclesias, I am alone in my mobile home study. The evaporative cooler throbs at my back, while outside the west window, all but one sunflower droops in heavy-headed ripeness. I tell myself it is time to pick up the thread of narrative where I left off, forget the Kurdish rebellion and Sadat and Begin, forget the copperheads and the assassins, and behold: at this very moment, a roadrunner, neck outstretched and tail rising and falling like a feathery bascule, pauses, scans, speeds over the parched, buff adobe dirt, and disappears behind the newly heeled-in trees in the nurseryman’s strip of land on the other side of the fence. Lo digo seguitando .

With the return of Miss Pickens by the next session of Elocution 7, the two combined classes were separated into their original sections, and, of course, each section met in its own classroom. Ira was in Miss Pickens’s class, and his congenial seat companion, fortunately or unfortunately, was in the class conducted by her brother. Still, the new acquaintanceship continued to grow: by hasty encounters in the hall between periods, on the stairway, and the once-a-week coinciding of lunch periods in the lunchroom on the sunny top floor of the high school. The new acquaintanceship grew until it struck a kind of balance against Ira’s other friendships and interests.

It was on an afternoon in early October, a clear, bright afternoon, as befitted October, that Ira and Larry Gordon met by chance on the steps before the school. Ordinarily, Ira might have spent the hour or two after school in the “den,” an enclosed coign or utility closet under the staircase that led from the main floor down to the assembly hall, the assigned gathering place of rifle team members. It was the place where the team discussed prospective rifle matches, where letters of invitation were written to other high school rifle teams, where guns were cleaned, all amid shoptalk and banter. Billy was absent from school that day, and though Ira had a key to the den, he had a hunch that maybe. . if he went directly home, well, one could never tell. Usually his hunches, his ever-present, ever-hopeful hunches, proved empty, but then, once in a while, once in a long while, they materialized: that time Mom had to wait so late in the afternoon in the Harlem Eye and Ear Clinic seeking relief for the terrible noises in her ears; and that time she stayed with Ella in her 116th Street and Fifth Avenue apartment when Ella had a baby, and — hell, oh, you never could tell. But there was Larry descending the steps before the school at exactly the same time as Ira came out the door amid a noisy swarm of fellow students.

He and Larry greeted each other warmly, and fell into step, walking east with the jabbering throng of schoolmates.

“I don’t think you really told me where you live,” Larry said.

“It’s a dump. It’s really crummy.”

“That’s what you said before. You said something about living in a tough neighborhood.”

“I’ll say.” Ira took refuge behind one of Farley’s quips, “Where I come from they’re so tough they play tiddlywinks with manhole covers.”

Which brought a gratifying chuckle from Larry, but without deviation of purpose, “But where? Harlem, that much I know.”

“Yeah, Harlem is right. Slummy old Harlem. 108 East 119th Street.”

“Where’s that?”

“Did you ever ride on the New York Central? The overpass?” Ira gestured.

“The New York Central Railroad? I used to go with my father, and my mother too sometimes, when my grandfather and grandmother were alive. They were the original Hungarians. My grandfather came from Buda Pesht. He owned a small department store. In New Haven — you know where Yale is?”

“No. Is that where it is?”

“You know, Yale is a Hebrew word: ya standing for Jahveh , and El, the lord.”

“Yeah?” Ira glanced upward, narrowly, at the taller Larry, in step beside him. How did he know that? He was gentile. Knew more than Ira did. Well, because of Yale. Of course.

“My father thought of selling his dry-goods business, and taking over, but my three sisters, my brother Irving, were all against leaving New York. My mother, too. And the dry-goods business in Yorkville — you know, it’s a German neighborhood, and both of my parents speak German well. So Grandpa Taddy’s store was sold. Just as well. New Haven isn’t as exciting as it once was. We used to go there on Christmas. Everyone was off from school. Wilma and Sophie were both going to Hunter Normal then.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I didn’t mean to get off the subject.” Larry smiled down at Ira, spread the fingers of his large hand.

“Oh, that’s all right.”

“What’s the New York Central got to do with where you live?”