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

In his first draft, he had made it seem — yes, damn it! — as if Ira were choosing one of two kinds of America open to him: Billy’s kind of America, the open-air, the active, the adventurous, the gregarious, and Larry’s kind, well-to-do, cultivated, settled, conservative, clannish. But hell, the dominant conflict at this stage wasn’t that at all. . And even if it were, he was incapable of convincingly portraying such intellectual distinctions, nor of the deliberations these would require of his central character in the making of his choice for the future. No. He was drawn blindly toward what offered the greatest possibility of the satisfaction of need, of appeasement of the remorseless inner disquiet, perhaps provide an avenue for its release, even partial. Larry seemed to offer that.

So Ira was left with (as he had said before) a canvas he had to paint over, whose original showed through, or something of the sort; he had to overwrite an untidy palimpsest. Only if his central character was relatively free, free from the continual and often unbearable spiritual warp, a veritable gnarling of the psyche, could he, the author, even hope to continue to pursue his original intention of representing Ira as choosing between Billy’s and Larry’s America. Though there may have been a grain of truth in the way Ira was initially affected by Larry’s appearance on the scene, it was nothing decisive, only a grain. Ira was already under a ruinous cloud, with Faust’s skull all atwitter at the table. Choices were dictated by other things than sensible considerations, choices were dictated by — the unspeakable, the unspeakable, and by preoccupations with schemes, ruses, connivings, that would succeed in gaining the unspeakable. How to win Minnie’s surrender; nothing he craved for more. Better, more obsessively sought after, for being a sin, an abomination! Boy, that fierce furor, with her alternately foul and tender outcries of the essence of wickedness. Always in his mind. Always in mind. He wouldn’t miss it, exchange it, for anything else in the world.

Now with this new element fouling up the act, foully deflecting it anyway, what say you, Ecclesias, guardian? I’m in a quandary, am I not? What?

— I’m listening.

I need guidance.

— You’re too reckless to be guided, too unruly, headstrong, injudicious.

Yes? Then favor me with a single word of advice. A precaution. Anything. I’m not going to revise five or six hundred pages. Just a word then. Please. Anything I can do?

— Salvage.

Salvage?

— Yes.

Salvage what? The results are bound to be a mess.

— You managed to accomplish that in person; then why not in fiction?

Now wait a minute.

Next Friday evening at Larry’s home. Jesus, try to eat right when you sit down at their table. It’s gonna be high-toned. Don’t chompkeh, Ira admonished himself, the way Pop always rebuked you for doing. Don’t gobble, gulp, smack your lips, suck your teeth. Should he say to Larry before they went to his house, “Look, I’m a fresser . Do you know what that is?” Larry had already seen how Ira ate in the lunchroom. Still, he wanted him to come to his house for supper — no, for dinner. So he’d put on his best suit, his best secondhand suit that Mom had bought after she tore another buck off the price. What a geshrey , their haggling. Oh, Jesus H. Put it on, put it on — make a joke out of it. Tell him. Not at the table, but before. Mom holding the ass of the pants up to the light, ridiculing the dealer (in Yiddish, it didn’t sound so bad). Shameless trickster, you call these weazened threads cloth? Go. Cheat. Two dollars and a quarter. Not a penny more. While Ira squirmed into a corkscrew. All that. . and try your best when you’re in Larry’s house. Say “Yes, ma’am” to his mother. Say “sir?” to his father when you don’t understand, Ira drilled manners into his head. You know: on your best behavior they call it. But that’s next week. Call Billy tonight. Skip Polo Grounds football tomorrow. Go canoodling (as Billy and he called canoeing) Saturday, but don’t camp overnight. Right? Right. That gives you Sunday morning. Sunday morning, when Mom goes off with the shopping bag. Can’t miss that. A diller, a dollar, a shopping-bag scholar. His sister says, “Don’t come too soon.” Ha. Ha.

His plans went agley that very weekend, the day following his ride on the El with Larry. He telephoned Billy early in the morning. They met at the boathouse. In brisk, breezy, fine weather, they canoodled across to the rocky New Jersey side. Soon after, they built a small campfire, and toasted cheese sandwiches in a frying pan — cheddar cheese and package bread Billy had brought. Ira had never tasted cheese so tangy until he met Billy, and he had asked Mom to buy it. Cheddar cheese, he told her, remember, it’s called cheddar, cheddar, like — but he couldn’t remember anything Yiddish that rhymed with it — unless you mispronounced cheder . Anyway she couldn’t buy it in the stores on Park Avenue. It wasn’t kosher. That was last Sunday, when Minnie had her period. So what the hell good was anything? Anyway, they kicked around a football, which Billy had tossed into the canoe when they set out, after they cleaned up the frying pan and coffeepot.

And then what the hell had gotten into Ira? That was the question. First manifestation of the flaw, first definite, tangible manifestation of his emerging neurosis. Billy had gotten off a poor punt. It went astray, way out of bounds, almost to the water’s edge. And Ira had suddenly let loose a string of goddamns and fucks. “Why the fuck can’t you kick it so I can catch it?” A barrage of profanity and obscenity — at Billy, his pal, Billy, so often his benefactor, as now, whose canoe it was, whose provisions, whose air mattresses to flop on, whose football. “Why the fuck can’t you kick the ball straight?”

Billy, even at the distance between them, turned visibly pale, his jaw suddenly clenched. He could have fought, Ira felt, if it had come to that, but he said nothing. They could have come to blows, such was the impact of his insult. Easier for Billy to fight him than to say anything, but he said nothing. And here they were, the two alone beside the Hudson on the Jersey side.

The fit of wrath left Ira — in minutes. Billy threw a forward pass instead of kicking the ball in return. Fury like a gust, a squall, struck and went on. Ira apologized. He apologized several times, “I didn’t mean it. I don’t know what the hell hit me. Okay, Billy?” Ira pleaded.

He showed a cheerful face; good sport, determined, but unable to wrinkle his nose. Equable, he let the past go by. He comported himself as naturally as always, with free swing of arm, torso, attention to the thing in hand, the football. But despite Ira’s humorous urging—“Go on, kick it, Billy. I don’t care if it lands in the water, I’ll get it”—Billy continued to throw passes. And Ira knew the damage had been done, irreparably done, forever and forever. He had lost his best friend’s friendship; he had lost Billy’s respect.

He had exposed to Billy’s view the loathsome pit within himself, exposed the hideous disfigurement under the mask, become a different person in Billy’s eyes. And no way to undo. . expunge the new perception, reverse the shock he had inflicted, no way ever. The damage had been done. .

They regained equilibrium with regard to each other, but it was an altered equilibrium, subdued and correct. They paddled back after a while across the Hudson to the boathouse. They moved quietly. They lifted the canoe back to its rack among the others, stowed gear away in the locker, walked together as far as Billy’s street, and parted, awkwardly.

So his little plans went awry. And sooner than he expected, and in a way he never foresaw, he lopped off that option; he lopped off his ties to that kind of America. A severance had taken place on the New Jersey shore. . on their favorite camping site, where the pebbles and stones were fewest, between the river and the Palisades. And on such a bright, brisk November day! A Saturday that should have been so carefree and happy, that should have left a carefree and happy memory, became instead an ugly turning point in friendship, irreversible and dismal. “Why the fuck can’t you kick that football straight?” A spewing up of the vile turbulence within himself, disclosing beyond mistaking to a tolerant, unsuspecting Billy Green. .