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

“No kidding.”

“Yes. Isn’t that funny? We don’t even have a campus down here. Unless you want to say Washington Square Park is our campus. That’s where all the Greenwich Village bohemians hang out.”

“Is that the place they hang out? Where the college is?”

“Well, really the college is where they hang out.” Larry smiled. “They were there before NYU.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“They live in those run-down old town houses you see all around there. Mostly small houses. Those old brownstones with a flight of stone steps in front. Cheap and run-down, you know what I mean? And that allows them to be free, free to do what they want. Live unconventionally with a woman. Not marry if they don’t want to. Paint, write, loaf.” Larry shrugged for humorous emphasis. “Anything not to hold down — be held down, I should say, by a regular job. That’s the main thing. Some of ’em are just fakes.”

“Gee!”

“The whole place is that way. Unconventional. But I like it.”

“What d’you mean? NYU?”

“Oh, no. I mean Washington Square. It’s not the stereotypical college atmoshmear.”

“Atmoshmear,” Ira repeated appreciatively.

“Yes, no atmoshmear.” Larry relished Ira’s appreciation. “There’s none of that rah-rah college spirit. No raccoon coats. At least I don’t see any. None of that Ivy League crap. Fraternities. Maybe there are I don’t know. It’s right smack in the middle of all kinds of cheap manufacturing buildings. It was once the center of the garment industry, the ex-sweatshop area. It’s down-to-earth.”

“Gee, what a college. Sounds less than CCNY.”

“Yes. The main building, the administration office, most of the classrooms, everything is in a remodeled loft building.”

“You mean it?”

“It’s a fact. Someone pointed out the building where that Triangle Shirtwaist fire took place. You must have remembered hearing about that when you were a kid?”

“No, I didn’t. My father was a milkman when we lived on the Lower East Side. So I got kind of left out of all of that trade union stuff. I’ve read about it, though. It was awful. Women jumping from the tenth floor. Boy”

“Well, it’s practically next door.”

“No kidding.” Ira shook his head. “So what d’you like about the place?”

“There’s so much ferment going on. In the English department especially. It’s so informal. You feel as if it’s the real thing.” Larry held up a large white finger. “That’s it. You don’t feel any distance between yourself and your instructor. You talk literature, you talk writing. Stuff you may be doing yourself. You talk modern poetry. You exchange opinions about anything, almost as equals.”

“Yeah? I get it now. That’s the last thing you feel in CCNY — although I like Professor Overstreet. I told you about him. But you don’t get close to him or anything like that. It’s just the way he lectures, that’s all. But otherwise—” Ira left the rest unsaid. “You think it’s because you pay tuition?”

“I don’t think so. I think Columbia would be like CCNY. Stiff and formal. And you pay tuition there. The only complaint I have is that Miss Welles assumes in Outlines of English Lit that none of us has heard of Chaucer or Milton or the Romantic Movement. So the course tends to be a little too elementary. I mean, she has to explain a great many obvious points. Gets a little boring for a few people, you know.”

“Boy, I never heard anybody complain about that in the ’28 alcove. We’re glad to get into an English course. I couldn’t.”

“Probably Miss Welles has to keep things simple because she has to cater to a bunch of predents and premeds.”

“Yeah?” Ira felt perplexed, at a loss. What kind of expectations did Larry have? Or were they called standards? He was a predent himself, and yet he criticized the presentation of literature, and criticized with such assurance, such interest, yes, as if literature took precedence over dentistry, as if he were disassociating himself from the others with the same aims. It was confusing.

Larry went on., For the benefit of those undergraduates who were disposed to go more deeply into the subject of writing, writing their own poems and short stories, Edith Welles and her colleague, John Vernon, had just instituted a new kind of student society: an Arts Club. All those students who were seriously interested in the writing of fiction, criticism, poetry, in creative writing in short, could foregather, and read their own work, and listen to that of others. Members of the faculty could do the same. Also, professional writers, or those of established reputations, would be invited to give readings of their poems, stories, or essays. Larry himself had submitted some of his lyrics for Miss Welles to appraise. She thought them very promising. Very promising indeed. And for someone taking a predent course, quite remarkable. “I certainly felt good.” Larry’s features seemed enlarged by separate glow of modest pride. “You know, hearing praise from her.”

“Boy. I would, too.”

“She suggested I join the Arts Club, that I become a member.”

“Yeah? You going to?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t miss this chance for anything. It’s a real honor. And an opportunity. It’s an incentive, you know what I mean? There are a lot of juniors and seniors in the club. I guess I’d be about the only freshman.”

Rapt, avid auditor of marvelous tidings, Ira could feel longing whet his appetite. How free, how intimate, how awake and fulfilling NYU seemed compared to antiquated, drab, regulated CCNY. Contemporaneous and vital the one, lusterless the other, except for that glint of life once a week — Professor Overstreet’s lectures. NYU was what he thought college would be when he trod on the fallen leaves on Convent Avenue. College would be responsive to his needs, would mean an expansion of his mind, would challenge with all kinds of exploration and discovery. Oh, to be on a par with English instructors, the way Larry described he felt, to listen to and meet writers and poets who actually had published books. What a privilege, as if a new empyrean had opened up. And he himself still without even a composition course or an English literature course to provide the kind of leavening that raised his spirits most: the wonders of language, the felicity — he could already recognize it as if recognition were second nature — the appositeness of word and phrase to connotation. A kind of bleary fragmentation seemed to imbue studies and courses at CCNY, a sense of futility. On the basis of his A’s in chemistry, in a kind of despairing search for a new purpose, or career, Ira asked genial Professor Esterbrook, head of the chemistry department, whether he approved of “Ira’s majoring in chemistry. “I’m sorry to tell you,” was the professor’s reply, “there’s not much future for your people in chemistry.”

For your people. In a way, Ira was relieved, secretly, relieved of striving, relieved of purpose. Go the rounds, phlegmatically, get by somehow, shrug at your mediocrity, and — sink into her on Sunday mornings as fast as she’d let you, ram it into her ravishing crimson passage in fiendish need and savage turpitude, in her, who seconds after it was over would be just Minnie his sister. So what. A nickel a day kept the baby away. A nickel a day from his twenty-five-cent allowance, when he had stopped hustling at sports events, meant a quarter a week, meant a tin of two Trojan rubbers. So he swiped a ten-cent ham sandwich on white bread in the CCNY lunchroom. Fuck ’em. The sandwich wasn’t worth a dime anyway.

And she was strange, Jesus, Minnie, she was strange, changeable. Sometimes she was wide awake by the time Mom left, not only awake, but waiting, peremptory, damn near, calling on him to hurry into the kitchen and snap the lock right after Mom left. He would have liked a few minutes of gloating, a few minutes of pawing, petting — he knew they could afford a few minutes of anticipation. But nothing doing. And he didn’t have a dime to his name to offer her, but it didn’t make any difference — as though he had partly perverted her. She had her thighs raised to him in her own folding cot, even while venting her displeasure at him for being dilatory. Lucky for him those times. “All right, all right, you can do it to me here. Hurry up. Put the rubber on. Just make sure it’s a good one. I don’t want that white stuff in me.”