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

“It’s what?” Larry asked.

“It’s cerulean. Don’t I say it right?”

“Oh, yes. Cerulean. That’s just the right word.” Approval distended Larry’s handsome countenance into smiling beguilement. “Better than my lapis lazuli. I got that word from Browning. Where did you get yours?”

“You mean you expect me to know?”

Later that evening, after Larry had loaned him the Untermeyer anthology, the two youths left Larry’s home to walk to the subway line, a much longer walk than to the El, but in the end, after change and reversal at 96th Street, a ride that would bring Ira nearer home. A new book under his arm, a new kind of book to read, a new friend. Impressions of Larry’s parents: his father spoke without an accent; only flaw in his English, perhaps deliberate, he said um-possible for im-possible. Not taciturn, but spoke little, grave in appearance, though now and then his face would light up with pleasure at something Larry said. He was clearly his father’s favorite, the son of his advancing years. In his sixties, Ira guessed, a man above average height, not lean, not overweight either, flat-fronted, Mr. Gordon was dark in complexion, had a full, gray mustache, and wore his thick, speckled gray hair in close-cropped, military style. Probably when younger, he looked more like his daughter, Irma, Larry’s next-older sister, than like Larry.

Jews were like chameleons, Ira had begun to notice. Live in Hungary a couple of generations, and they commenced assuming Hungarian features — the way Baba looked Slavic, with blue eyes and snub nose, descendant of Jews who lived among the goyim in Galitzia. So did Mamie: Slavic. But not Mom, with her dark hair and broad nose. And not Moe either with his broad nose. Still, Moe was fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and blond. Well, exceptions and mixes, and some, like himself, ran true to the ancestral, patriarchal stock, the map of Jerusalem on his pan.

Larry’s mother was pretty, actually pretty. Mother of five children, she seemed much younger than her husband. She was a brunette, with a puffy cloud of hair untouched by any glint of gray. Her features were fresh, scarcely marked by a wrinkle — and regular (almost gentile) — another surprising characteristic Ira thought he discerned among many Hungarians, classically proportioned features, a finely delineated nose, like Larry’s, far too regular to be Jewish, with a smooth skin and brown eyes radiating cheerfulness. And yet she wasn’t a true Hungarian; she was Jewish. And besides, Hungarians were supposed to have descended from Attila’s feral oriental Huns. All very puzzling. Anyway, Mrs. Gordon was most cordial, solicitous, loquacious, and hospitable.

And there was Irma, resembling her father, and even Larry to some extent, but lacking the well-nigh classic symmetry of his countenance. Like her father, darker in hue than Larry, her lips prominent in their swelling roundness, so much so that she had developed the noticeable trait of rolling her lips inward to thin them. It seemed nothing short of a preoccupation.

So much for Ira’s first impressions of some of Larry’s folks. But what had happened to him in the past twenty-four hours since he had written this passage to cause a new listlessness? It was a change in plans. He had intended to advert again in passing, as he had to Larry’s folks, advert to the Untermeyer anthology — and then append the journal entry that he had been unable to append the day before. This time he, or rather old Ecclesias, would certainly have RAM enough to contain the journal entry still waiting without. There ought to be RAM enough, even if he included here something he had omitted, namely, reflections on the young Ira’s deplorable table manners, his eating habits, his jerky, ravenous, noisy, chomp-chomp, despite efforts to deport himself with restraint, with a little decorum. It seemed to Ira, even after these sixty years, he could still see Larry’s gentle gaze resting on him, tentatively, sympathetically. He had planned to include all that and still have room or rather RAM for the journal entry. But in the twenty-four hours that had passed, the projected collage had waned in interest. The urge to interrupt his yarn had passed.

XX

Once again events sped up, piled up in the course of the last few months of Ira’s senior year at DeWitt Clinton, in the spring of 1924. There was home life, with its permutations and combinations, grim, pent-up pending and rending, and vicious release. There was the gun club, mix of routine, boredom, and playful pastime. And there were classes, and the subjects elected: solid geometry, under the tutelage of Dr. McLarin, for Ira a delight. Then there was the second half of his biology course, his proficiency and avidity making him ever more certain that biology or some aspect of it would be the field of his vocation. Even the second half of his chemistry course at last emerged from preliminary confusion. His work in English was mediocre as ever. And, alas, the last half of third-year Spanish dragged along well into his senior year.

He and Larry enrolled in the same Elocution 8 class (though they now knew better than to sit in proximity), a class under the auspices of Mr. Staip. As far as stature was concerned, Mr. Staip was a gnome of a man, probably less than five feet tall; and yet he was capable of reducing his students, most of them standing head and shoulders above him, to mere gnomes themselves, subservient and docile. If ever there was a martinet of speech, it was Mr. Staip. He shrank his students to stammering puppets by the sheer fastidiousness of his pronunciation. No consonant or vowel but received its due when he uttered it, crisply, distinctly, and he expected, nay, he exacted the same from his quailing students. And very few could measure up to his demands.

That spring, as baseball got underway, Ira still hustled soda: at the Polo Grounds, at the new Yankee Stadium, occasionally at a prizefight in Madison Square Garden. Larry’s curiosity had been aroused by Ira’s accounts of his work there. And assured by Ira that he could obtain permission for him to put in a stint as a soda hustler, if only for the novelty of the experience, he met Ira one morning at the main gate of Yankee Stadium — not far from Larry’s home. Ira vouched for his friend before the ever-irascible Benny Lass, as two years before Izzy Winchel had vouched for him. After a cursory glance, Larry was admitted.

To Ira’s chagrin, it shortly became evident that for Larry the reality of work at the ballpark corresponded little to Ira’s entertaining descriptions of it. By the time the first inning was over, Larry had expressed his indignation to Ira at what a disgusting ratio obtained between commission and sales price, between remuneration and the amount of hard work entailed in earning it. Their paths crossed several times during the course of the afternoon, and each time, Larry’s offended demeanor, his asides, bordering on humorous reproach, left little doubt he felt imposed on, deceived. By the time the day’s work was over, he was thoroughly outraged by the meanness and surliness of personnel and fellow hustlers, the rudeness of fans. Once again, as at that moment on the El a year ago, Ira felt a peculiar superiority within the terms of Larry’s own, proper realm, realm of sensibility, because he sensed that somehow, compensating for the drudgery, the labor, the brusqueness, the affront, the rough and tumble of the workaday world yielded valuable aspects of the commonplace, though why he valued them he didn’t know. They became his, perhaps uniquely his, recognizable signatures of his surroundings, almost a kind of currency, limited in exchange, but highly prized by people like Larry. Well. . he didn’t know. He knew that certain kinds of perceptions affected him, and not Larry — something he could scarcely put into words: that Larry was irked by the piddling pay for so much hard work, and also because his charm and poise and good breeding were ignored in the hurly-burly of excitement and competition. He should have borne all that as Ira did, with a certain wry tolerance, in exchange for access to the raw and the turbulent, to all that was going on, a chance to see and feel the crude power of the mass, and not allow sensitivity and wounded vanity, even considerations of fairness, to get in the way. What if Billy had been in Larry’s place? How differently Billy would have reacted: wrinkled up his short nose, like the good sport he was. And grinned.