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

With his large, white hands flowing in front of him, Larry mimicked prissiness. “‘The writer of the short story has not read T. S. Eliot. He has evidently been unaffected by the depletion of meaning, the erosion of consensus.’ What a pose! Even John Vernon said they were being gratuitously unkind, ignoring the well-sustained mood, the local color, the genuinely fresh imagery. They weren’t giving any credit to style and allusion. And touches of humor too.”

Ira felt guilty, guilty in a curiously ambivalent way: for having not only suggested but also acquainted Larry with Mom’s twice-told tale. He had dangled the lure before Larry — and thereby instigated his discomfiture — over which Ira now felt a secret satisfaction. Why? Schadenfreude? How could he be that way? He was an ingrate, perfidious ingrate. All unconsciously, so it seemed, he had sacrificed Larry, as one read about miners in coal mines sacrificing a canary to warn them of the seepage of insidious gas, that the air was no longer safe to breathe. So the sophisticated intellectuals didn’t like formal, old-fashioned plots. What did they like? What was modern? What shed light on the modern psyche? Inevitably the thought led him to an awareness of the heaving magma of his own being. Was he feeling again that same hermetic superiority he had felt before, on the El ride that first time he went to Larry’s home? That sense of possessing something deeper, deeper awareness, a greater span of sensibility, more startling fusions of fancy, even if maybe wild, uncontrolled. The notion troubled him at the same time as it elated, disturbed him with welcome contrarieties.

He wasn’t supposed to be competing with Larry. He was supposed to go into biology, not English, study organisms, not write stories. But there was Larry himself: supposed to go into dentistry, and yet he was so painfully wounded about his failure to win sought-for praise for literary work. Jesus, what kind of aberrations were taking place? He could feel them in Larry, could feel them within himself. They had been imperceptible until now, but with Larry’s vexed recital of the scornful reception of his story at the Arts Club, they were no longer imperceptible; they were appreciable; they were like a deliberate veering away from announced goal, not accidental but deliberate.

Ira had fostered the deviation. Jesus. From dentistry to writing, a careening of career, of aims and values. And if it came to the possibility of the same thing happening to him, of a drastic switch in aspiration, analogous to Larry’s, from biology to writing, God, what would he have done? There was no comparison between himself and Larry. What he had done and was capable of imagining: Minnie, Stella, violation and torment, frenzy and predicament — all in a sardonic ambience, wasn’t it? Like a herring in tomato sauce. Knocked up his sister, or thought he had, in a murderous afternoon of plane geometry. Wow. Who the hell knew, as he knew, his private amalgam of vileness and caprice? And the jobs he had held, and the diurnal squalor of surroundings, yes, squalor and sordidness all stored in that glob that he was, amorphous glob, slowly revolving in his mind as Larry spoke. “Jesus, I’m sorry, Larry.” Ira lowered his eyes.

“Nothing to be sorry about, Ira. If they’re such egotistic showoffs, it didn’t affect Edith. She just laughed. She thought the imagery was beautiful: that rind of moon above the graveyard — I told you about it. I knew she’d like it. It was genuine.”

“Oh, she’d read it before?”

“New Year’s Eve. Saturday. Before Boris came to take her to a party.”

“That’s why I couldn’t get you on the phone?”

“I just had to show it to her.”

Ira tried to trace one of the fiddlehead spirals in the carpet’s design while he retraced the events of that same Saturday evening. Ironic. Or what? Because he hadn’t been able to get Larry on the phone, Ira had strolled over to Mamie’s house. So at maybe the same minute when Larry was reading to Miss Welles, reading his retelling of Mom’s yarn, reading Ira’s relayed tale — that was funny, how that word kept cropping up — Ira was wangling his chubby little coz into the precarious privacy of the cellar. Jesus, taken separately, one episode was almost holy, like an adoration, a votive offering that Larry was making to Edith with his version of Ira’s version of Mom’s yarn. The other episode was just as unholy as the first was sacrosanct; the second was wholly unholy, impaling plump little Stella on his stalk sitting down. First time he had ever tried it, and it had worked: it was good: bounce her up and down like a piledriver — boy! But the two things, his doings and Larry’s, didn’t occur separately in his mind. They occurred together, as if fused. They were more — what? More wicked together? No. More vicious together? No. They were more sardonic, that was it. When the hell did he get that way? When did he begin to recognize and enjoy that — that blend of pure and. . and nasty? Yeah, yeah, instead of the one or maybe the other by itself. Like a dissonance in music maybe that repelled him at first, a perverse dissonance, like Wagner, like The Meistersinger when he first heard Mischa Elman play it in Izzy’s house, and was so fond of it afterward. So when? When did he begin to relish the sardonic mixture? Ira hung on to rumination another moment: after the East Side, that was when. Jewish living, feeling went poof. Well. . But wasn’t it something, Jesus, wild, when you joined the two together: sardonics? Sardonics meant discovery: like that Saturday night way back—

“My grandfather gave me black Greek olives in the synagogue on Saturday night,” Ira said, grinning. “ Havdalah , they call it. Half-a-dollah. First time I ever tasted ’em, wow! I didn’t know which way they oughta go: spit out or swallowed.”

“What?” Larry was disconcerted.

“Nah. I was just trying to take your mind off your disappointment.”

“Oh, I’m all right. You don’t think I’d let their snooty pretense get me down, do you?”

Larry shook his head, ever so slightly, sighed and locked his hands. “I’m really not interested in coming up to their expectations.” He swiveled about in his seat. “I wanted to do at least one rounded short story, conventional, yes, free of smut too, but with an underlying meaning. It’s family-type reading.” Larry tossed his head. “Somebody there — I think it was Reuben Mistetsky — very subtly wisecracked: ‘It’s decent, family-type fiction.’ Well, I don’t regret it. I just don’t have to please them. And what the hell.” He stood up, went to the phonograph, pushed the crank down. “If I’d done another kind of short story, I know just what they’d say — that I was imitating Sherwood Anderson or whomever. And yet I don’t want to imitate anyone. That wasn’t my intention. So to hell with ’em. It pleased Edith.”

“You keep calling her Edith.”

“Not before the other students, of course.”

“No.”

“It’s just easier. Less formal. It gets a little artificial to keep calling her Miss Welles, and Iola Reid, the woman she shares the apartment with on St. Mark’s Place — also an English instructor — Miss Reid. We were making out postcards for the last meeting of the Arts Club. We had coffee and cookies. She asked me herself to call her by her first name. All working together around the table. It was just natural.”

“I get it.”

“It’s a chore, you know.”

“What?”

“The postcards. We have to send out about a hundred of them. To faculty. Students. Guests. It’s too much. Vernon never helps. The club needs an executive secretary. There are all kinds of arrangements to make. The tearoom to hire for the evening. Refreshments to order. Cookies. That sort of thing.”