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

After Ira had a Sunday dinner at Larry’s, the two lolled on the green sofa in the living room. Later, taking turns winding up the Victrola, they played selections from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade . Was anything more musically fearful than those rending counter-clashes of the shipwreck of Sinbad’s vessel? Twice they played each side of excerpts from Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony , which Ira loved inordinately. And then the two walked out together into the quiet evening air to a small park nearby, and sat down on one of the benches.

Larry adverted to Bermuda, to the several trips he had made there, even as a small child, to stay with his photographer uncle.

“Did you always travel with your mother when you visited your uncle in Bermuda?” Ira asked.

“Not the last time. I traveled alone. That was last summer.”

“I remember now, you told me.” Again Ira noted the air of reverie that settled on Larry’s handsome features in the dim light, the outline of some profound recollection.

“You’d be surprised how many schoolteachers spend their summer vacation in Bermuda. American schoolteachers go there by the thousands.”

“You don’t mean like Miss Pickens, who took a slow boat.” Ira grinned.

“Oh, no. She went to Europe. I mean young schoolteachers.” Larry’s voice continued fraught with the imminence of disclosure.

“Oh, yeah? I didn’t know that.” Already romance infused the night air, a mysterious kind of momentous confession. Hermetic, arcane, Ira could feel it enclosing them irresistibly within the scant lamplight, within the vacant park. “Young is how old?”

“Just out of normal school. That’s only two years of college in most parts of the country.”

“Yeah? That’s all?”

“You’ll keep what I tell you between you and me?”

“Listen, Larry, for you to tell me, it’s like a — I don’t know what to say. It’s like I took a pledge to keep my mouth shut. You know what I mean?”

“That’s why I trust you.”

Summer night in the small, intimate, empty park. Sunday evening, setting its seal on things ended, a seal of pristine, lovely reminiscence. His face set with seriousness, Larry began his account of his shipboard encounter with a young, beautiful schoolteacher. She hailed from Maryland. She had turned twenty-one, he eighteen. It was his initiation into sex, an initiation so beautiful, commencing on the deck of the ship, sailing under starlight, on a night in which wave crests glistened under a waning moon, and soft sea breezes caressed cheeks and stroking hands, so beautiful, it seemed to Ira, that it was as if Larry had been with a fairy princess. His friend, here talking quietly beside him on the park bench, had spent the whole night in the cabin of a beautiful, mature woman, making love to her in a ship far out at sea, making love to her in a vessel gliding through dark, boundless ocean. Glamorous even the listening was, laden with all the magic of romance, romance beyond anything Ira deemed happened in the real world.

He was transported by the sheer loveliness of what he heard, and yet, enchanted though he was, he listened without envy. Such things were not for him; he was barred, however much he might long for them, barred by himself from such raptures: sea and ship and tender caress. The closest he had ever come was to trail a thin, spinsterish schoolteacher from P.S. 103 to CCNY when he was still a boy in grade school. The best he could do now was. . sordid. . in a dingy bedroom, opposite the mortar-spattered brick wall of the airshaft. . like the wall surrounding those blacks as they watched the ball game at the Polo Grounds from the top-floor windows of their tenements, or those five minutes laying homely, scrawny Theodora in her stuffy, ill-lit room draped with shmattas , robbed of even the moment of possessing a comely woman like Pearl. Well. .

When he and Larry finally parted, after having walked the distance to the subway station, Ira went down the steps to the platform enfolded in a glorious cloud of loveliness. At least he had been allowed to participate in it, allowed to know what it was in the reality of a friend’s experience, to know what one should seek, even if the seeker felt himself flawed irreparably. Could one dare to strive afterward for that rare, transcendent bliss, even if already marred by the squalid? And yet he knew that was what he wanted to win, hopeless as his yearning was, Larry’s world, full of love and refinement and gentle surrender.

XXIV

In mid-July a letter waited for Ira when he came back from work as Hymie’s plumber’s helper, and two evenings later, another. Mr. Sullivan’s rebuke had come true after all. Both contained notices of greatest import. The first letter was from Cornell University congratulating him on having placed twenty-third among the first twenty-five in the city-wide competitive examination for a scholarship to Cornell. He was therefore entitled to free tuition for a period of four years at the university. Added was the school’s request for an early reply. The letter also contained assurances that part-time work was available at the university, and that preference would be given to needy scholarship students. He could doubtless earn enough to pay for dormitory room and meals. .

Ecclesias, Ecclesias, the missed, the spurned opportunities, and the missed, the spurned decent life I might have had.

— Yes, the heart wants everything, both ends and the middle. How would you have met M, I ask you for the millionth time? How would you have written a notable novel?

The novel I can dispense with, Ecclesias. With M I can’t. It’s not only what would I have done without M that concerns me, but as much — and more — what would she have done without me. And this is no self-flattery. For her tender, her concealed, her reticent girlishness, her artist’s sensibility, her nobility, her truly unique and yet wholly unsnobbish requirements for companionship, all that contrasted with an innate sadness born of the recognition of the hypocrisy and pretense of her middle-class rearing. And at the same time, her matchless self-restraint, her diligence, sense of propriety, all taken together, would have closed her in upon herself. This recognition would have congealed the passionate, sensitive girl within her, and kept her from flowering. So I feel, knowing her a little, Ecclesias, that someone truly worthy, not myself but M, was freed to grow and win a belated maturity, and through her, I too. For she would have survived without me, unhappily perhaps, but survived; I without her not at all. Through her I was vouchsafed not only a measure of growth, but of life itself.

— So now you’re reconciled to the course of events?

No. Not reconciled. Resigned perhaps, not reconciled. I want all my blunders undone, my lamentable choices annulled, a different itinerary through life, that would have bestowed Cornell, and M—

— Go, and catch a falling star, get with child a mandrake root . I trust you know the next line or two.

Alas, I do know Mr. Donne. But why couldn’t I have been a zoologist and have had M for a wife?

— You had M for a wife. The case is closed.

Indeed. Closed and enclosed — what mutinous turbulence suddenly springs up against the enclosure, within the bosom, Ecclesias, a futile rebellion.

The second letter was from CCNY. The letter endorsed Ira’s application to enroll as a candidate for a bachelor’s degree in science. He was given instructions where and when to appear at the college in order to register for courses.

So now the choice was his; options had been presented to him, destiny set in motion toward the future. For once in his life, everything had worked out to his advantage. Because his last math course had been in solid geometry, a course in which he excelled, he was sure he had done outstandingly in math. He had breezed through geometry. Biology, his other science choice, he had just finished at DeWitt Clinton with an A. He was a shark in biology. Chemistry had begun to fall dramatically in place in the second semester; comprehension of fundamental principles had come on with a rush; so he felt quite sanguine about his doing well in that. And even all the trouble he had had getting through Spanish in high school, so that it had taken him four years in high school to complete three years of the course, now turned out to be boon. Spanish was still fresh in his mind, even if he wasn’t proficient. Competitors who had completed their three-year courses on time, had completed them a year ago, would have had to cram for the test. He hadn’t had to. Taking everything into consideration, he was plain lucky.