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

“It’s not as easy as it sounds,” said Larry. “I’ve heard my sisters talk about it. All kinds of record-keeping and preparations for lessons. And sometimes very annoying disciplinary problems. I prefer dentistry.”

“What?”

“I’m going into dentistry. I talked it over with Victor, my brother-in-law. I think I’m—”

“You said dentistry? You mean you wanna be a dentist?”

“Yes. That’s what I said.”

“You?”

The train was slowing down again. Ira felt oddly as if it were himself slowing down, all kinds of fancies, flighty illusions, slowing down, all that new marvelous promise, pristine look of things, hope of a world elsewhere. . somewhere. . maybe. . all the more yearned for because. . because — aw, he was screwy. Larry didn’t have to get out of the trap he was in, the vise, yes, vice, between the jaw of delirious craving and the gnawing jaw of guilt. Ira gazed hopelessly downward to the street passing diagonally below the mixed din of the train. Maybe you could be romantic and a dentist if you were normal, he mused. He watched the seedy little storefronts down below slide by.

Seedy little storefronts had already become incandescent in the shadow of the El, in the premature twilight of the El, their wares becoming more distinct as the train slowed down before a station. Cross streets opened up more leisurely too, presented their grubby vistas a little longer, before the drab, monotonous brick walls, inset with fire escape and window glass, engulfed them again. In the succession of bleary tenement facades, a worn old man, a blowsy housewife, a child, looked out from behind closed windows. How random they appeared, like those flat chesspieces in the slits of flat chess cards. Random, forlorn, keeping lackluster vigil for some kind of fulfillment that Ira was certain would never be realized.

Pity stirred him, pity for them, pity for self, a peculiarly generalized pity; and as the train entered the station, Ira wondered whether Larry noticed the same things he did, and felt the same way. But no, Larry was talking about how much he liked to use his hands, that he had good hands for dentistry — he splayed out his strong white fingers. In a strange, confused way, Ira became conscious of a sense of superiority, about those same things Larry had introduced him to only — only when? A few weeks ago? The modern, the disclosure of the mood of the contemporary, his time, its latencies, the way the street, the buildings, yes, the imago — cast off its stultifying shell. Odd. He had never thought about that before; who cared about that before? Not when he was part of Billy’s world, the outdoors, the gun club world. But that goddamn football, that freak explosion of temper, yeah, freak, and not so freak. As if it were the cost of his new kind of liberty, somber liberty. He was freer than Larry, that was it: nothing to reckon with, nothing to hold him back, family, warmth, what did he call it? Gemütlichkeit . Comfort. Ease. Dental office. Fees. It rhymed. Hell, he — the child in black armor — had broken barriers Larry never dreamed of. . had committed, Jesus, horrendous, transpontine acts — nutty name, nutty acts — and paid for them in toll of dread.

Once more the trainman stepped out of the car door, took his post at the gate handles. You could almost smell the urine in the toilets when the train came to a halt.

“So don’t you have any friends?” Ira asked. “You know, I mean, how come you don’t have friends like yourself?”

“I think I told you.”

“Oh, yeah, there I go, not listening again. No, I remember.”

“Yes. Some of them — my age — they’re a lot richer than I am — I mean my family — but they’re climbers, and I hate climbers.”

“Yeah? I thought you had to be poorer to be a climber.”

“Oh, no. That’s not always the case. They’re just vulgar, that’s all. They have no class, you know what I mean? Nearly everyone I know my age — it’s clear, it’s obvious: they try so hard to ingratiate themselves. They’re Jewish, but pretentious and tasteless — and so-o middle class.” Larry drooped in comic despair. “So conventional, so material. Ah! I can’t tolerate them, the way they equate everything to money. Dollars and sex!” He suddenly straightened up for emphasis. “And that’s no joke, either. They’ve got cars too, big allowances. Murray, for example — he’s a freshman at Columbia — wants me to go everywhere with him. But God! You’d go crazy listening to him about his fraternity, tuxedos and proms, the heiresses he’s dated, and how much rent their folks pay for their apartments on Central Park West. The pull they have at City Hall. His father’s investments. His father’s Packard limousine. A chauffeur too. And yes, the law degree Murray expects is going to make him an independent millionaire by the time he’s thirty. Who cares about that? The guy is still vulgar.”

“Yeah?” Ira only half understood. Middle class, what did that mean? Those rich people? More than just that, they had hot water, steam heat, like almost everybody who lived west of Park Avenue in Harlem, real-allrightniks as Jews said. And they had cars, too. Chauffeurs. No, there was something more than that. He had read the term before in some book, but only now did the term come to life. They were more like the people he delivered fancy groceries to, or steamer baskets, when he worked for Park & Tilford, people who lived on Riverside Drive or West End, whose dumbwaiter ropes he pulled. But why was Larry so disparaging about them? What was wrong with being in the middle class? Didn’t everybody on 119th Street, everybody Jewish, try to climb up — yeah, “climber,” that was the word Larry used — climb out of the dumps they lived in, the coldwater flats like his? Success, yeah, all his relatives strove for that. Was that what he himself disliked about them, without knowing why? Them, his relatives, Pop too. His Jewish interim friends on the street, who shot pool, patronized the delicatessen after the movies, ate pastrami sandwiches and drank celery tonic. Middle class. That was their ambition: success. Boy. And Billy’s father, the engineer? Wasn’t he middle class? So what about Farley’s father, the undertaker? Ira uttered a short helpless laugh as the train moved on again. “Jesus, there’s so much I don’t know.”

Larry looked at him inquiringly.

“I mean, you said middle class. Everyone wants to be in the middle class. Everybody I know wants to be in the middle class. My mother wants to be in the middle class.”

“That’s the trouble.”

“Why?”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to escape. Middle-class standards. Middle-class values. That’s why I write, I think, why I’ve been writing, trying to write poems, ever since I attended Ethical Culture. Even before I began going to high school.”

“But you’re going to be a dentist.”

“There’s nothing wrong with assuring myself of leisure, you know what I mean? Of decent surroundings. But I don’t have to think the way the middle class does. And I don’t think the way they do. I know it. I don’t value the things they value. I have other values, to me much more important, values most of them don’t have the vaguest ideas about. Poetry. Art. Theater.”

“You’re way over my head.” Ira grinned, sighed without knowing why. “Yeah.”

“Wait till you meet my family, you’ll understand.”

“But you love them? Don’t they know you’re writing poems that are sort of against what they — they believe in?”

“Not against that exactly. Just free of it. Of course, I don’t think they always understand. And when they do, well, that’s just a youthful phase, as far as they’re concerned. They can’t think of lyrics beyond the kind they would hear in Rose Marie or Indian Love Call or some other musical comedy hit on Broadway. Maybe not my sisters so much. My brother and my parents are terribly conventional.”