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

Billy was a good sport, and Larry wasn’t. Billy gave little heed to monetary factors; Larry did. Larry wanted to write poetry, short stories, but not at the price of his comfort, not at the price of not being a dentist — so Ira felt — not at the risk of too great exposure to the unceremonious, certainly not at the expense of participation in it. And yet, such was Larry’s attraction, the charm of his comfortable, Jewish, cultivated life, that Ira found it impossible to resist its appeal. And Larry was so generous: he loved to share, to guide; he took pleasure in initiating Ira into whole domains of which he knew almost nothing, the names only: ballet, the stage, modern sculpture, opera, architecture, orchestral music. Larry loved to lead, and Ira was only too ready to follow.

Billy noticed the new attachment (he and Larry had long since met, each a sort of curiosity to the other); and even though Ira felt changed in Billy’s eyes since his uncontrolled outburst on the New Jersey shore, they still shared common interests: the rifle team, canoeing, camping, and golf. Even so, Billy continued to take Ira to the golf course in Van Cortlandt Park, paid the admission fees, and supplied the clubs (as the winter before, ice skates for ice hockey). “Still trying for Cornell?” Billy asked with stoic tactfulness.

“Oh, sure.” But actually Ira had begun to doubt. He had applied for the requisite permission to take the examination, and he intended to take it, but would he go if he placed? Larry had applied to NYU, to the college’s new branch or extension opposite Washington Square Park. In two years he could complete his “predental,” as it was called, his academic prerequisites in the humanities, before going on to dental school. Tuition was charged at NYU, but not at CCNY, a city college, and except for texts and incidentals, free. Ira had applied there as a matter of course, because of his circumstances, his indigence, and as his only hedge against his likely failing to place in the Cornell scholarship examinations. But truth was he already felt himself drifting away from his original goal, drifting or drawn away, just as he had done from his strong affinity for Farley. And though he might adjure himself that he mustn’t allow the same thing to happen again, that he ought to keep his sights fixed on Cornell, keep steadily in mind his goal of a career in biology, and prepare himself as best he could for the coming examination, he kept repeating Mom’s bracing maxim Der viller iz mer vi der kenner , “He who aspires excels him who knows.” Still, despite everything, not so much an involuntary veering away from target was taking place as a wavering of resolve to fix his aim on it. A quibbling within himself whether doing so was worthwhile began to take place without the respite of common sense.

XXI

June 1924. His last June at DeWitt Clinton, the last month of the last term he would be a student there. Soon the finals, soon the “Regents,” the New York State uniform examinations, soon the Cornell scholarship exams. In Elocution 8, which Ira shared with Larry, all members of the class were expected to deliver an address satisfactory to Mr. Staip in order to pass the course. The address was to be about some outstanding personage, was to employ the aid of only minimal notes, and was to be not less than five minutes in length. Ira chose to speak on the English poet William Ernest Henley. Ira would never forget that he began by contrasting Poe and Henley, the one dying in a cellar after a drunken debauch, the other undauntedly fighting off tuberculosis all his life. He concluded his speech with a recitation of the ringing “Invictus.” And when he finished declaiming the last lines,

“I am the master of my fate;

I am the captain of my soul,”

to his utter astonishment, he saw the audience in front of him break into spontaneous applause — joined in by, of all people, Mr. Staip himself. The next minute he accorded a startled and all but incredulous Ira the unheard-of privilege of being excused from class for the balance of the period! Suffused with delight, his head whirling at his unprecedented triumph, Ira made his way down into the study hall. . there to mull over the ways of fate that had plunged him down here in disgrace and consternation from Elocution 7 in September, and now in breathless honor from Elocution 8 in June.

When next he met Larry, he seemed reserved, so scanty his praise as to seem no more than circumspect acknowledgment. Ira wasn’t sure what he expected after his oratorical achievement: something warm, bantering, humorously derogatory — something akin to the way Billy would have behaved: “Hey, what a fluke. Hey, who coached you in that?” Billy would have said. But this perfunctory mention, as if it were niggling recognition, was it envy? Had he taken Larry by surprise? Moved into the vanguard of subject matter where he didn’t belong, subject matter akin to the literary? Had he troubled Larry by show of unsuspected gifts — those in which Larry regarded himself as superior?

For whatever reason — it was probably that Larry felt reservations about Ira’s choice of personage, his choice of poet or poem — Ira felt hurt, hurt and resentful. Nah, what was he thinking about: attaching himself to Larry? Thinking of alternate ways of majoring in biology: at CCNY. Ridiculous; he was making the same mistake as he had made before, of letting blind feeling rule him. If he won a scholarship, Cornell was the place to go, to Cornell, the college Billy was applying to. Larry’s grudging acknowledgment was timely warning that he , Ira, ought to consider his best interests as objectively as he could.

“Hey, what did you do last weekend?” Ira asked Billy when he saw him next in school.

“Went canoodling. It was great.”

“Alone? Stay overnight?”

“Yeah, I went alone, but days are so long now, you can paddle for hours. You can go across the Hudson and back before dark — if you want to. I didn’t. I just sat under the Palisades afterward — talked to other fellows with canoes. Say, a couple of them brought a whole grocery store over: hot dogs and rolls. Apple pie. Blueberry pie. Cheese.”

“Wow! You build a fire?”

“A small one, and we swapped stories about camping. One of ’em got lost in the woods for three days. But he had about every Boy Scout badge there is, so it didn’t bother him. Say, you know it was still light until nine o’clock?”

“Is that when you came back?”

Billy grinned. “No, quite a few stars were out.” His face took on as beatific a look as would ever appear there. “I stayed out till nearly eleven.”

“Yeah? You got anybody goin’ with you Friday?”

“No.”

“All right we go canoodling together? Just Friday. I wanna hustle at the ball game Saturday. You know — I gotta make a few bucks Saturday — and Sunday, too. I don’t have to get up early, but I’ve gotta be there.”

“What about your friend? On Friday. Larry. Aren’t you seeing him?”

“No, not this time.”

Bright breezy afternoon awaited them as they stepped out of the kiosk of the Broadway subway station at 160th. Sun and wind, agreeable atmosphere pervading a normal scene, the stationary pedestrian and vehicle, and the pace of those in motion. If only he hadn’t said what he had said to Billy that terrible minute, minute of flaring insanity, as if Pop’s nature had taken hold of him. No, he couldn’t unsay it, couldn’t undo it, even though he thought he knew why: Van de Graaff crackling bolt, generated by his guilt, but nothing so spectacular: just uncontrollable short circuit across his hairline cleavage. He knew why. Then leave, leave, of course, leave it, separate himself from the source, from home, from Minnie, an inescapable vortex in which he was caught. Yeah. Two bucks for Sunday. Two bucks she demanded! She really had him over a barrel.