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

Just where the familiar “You are the dream of love” had been stolen from it, plagiarized, the music changed pitch, faltered. “I’ll do it.” Ira stood up, went to the phonograph, cranked.

“I guess I didn’t wind it enough,” Larry said.

Oh, the man with his ten thousand, ten million synapses flickering, his billion combinations of bits of thought, shred and filament of idea. Oh, a million billion threads, motes, spirochetes—

All of which he had to sweep aside to resume, in acceptable prose, prose in some sense, the continuity of what he already knew, and knew only too well and grievously, to strive to nurture the masterpiece model he hoped to re-create.

V

The fall term ended, ignominiously for Ira, with a C-minus average. The average would have been even worse, positively gruesome, without the A in chemistry to buoy the other grades up. As it was, what with two D grades, which automatically deducted an eighth of a credit from the total, he was woefully short of the complement for a first-semester freshman. What was he gonna do, Ira asked himself in self-aware, ninny-rationalizing fashion, when he had to compete with so many quick, sharp, bright Jewish classmates who knew all the answers?

To Cornell he should have gone, congregating with the relaxed gentiles; he might have shone there by comparison. . One never knew, consorting with the easygoing goyim . Competition destroyed him. And besides, away from Minnie and Sunday-morning persuasions — and grim aftermaths — away from Stella, dawdling, chubby, and blankly ready, and a new set of grim aftermaths, away from promptings that found a frame on any textbook page, prompting him with: good chance tonight at Mamie’s. Lucky night, maybe, so hike over. All that, all that, all that, and now Larry and his Edith — the time wasted withal spent in study might have earned a B average at Cornell. He might have found a bimbo out there, or been tipped off about one by fellow classmates, a bimbo whose favors he might have bought for a couple of bucks, which he earned busboying in the college calf-eat-here-ia or something like that. Been a mensh , instead of — himself.

It was one of those dull, dreary late afternoons, a Sunday in February, the weak daylight clinging to the windowpanes of the Gordon living room, an afternoon encompassed by the cold murk outdoors like a diving bell in the sea around it. He and Larry were alone, Irma and their parents visiting with kin and in-laws, Mary the maid away on her day off. Late, dim winter afternoon enclosing the comfortable apartment, the coziness of the overstuffed armchair accentuated by the radiators in the room hissing at the rawness at bay the other side of the windowpanes. Still, for all the lowering of the day, the scantiness of conversation, the grayness of the living room, with unlit electric sconces, Ira felt the imminence of something momentous, something in reserve. He had only to be patient. There was some reason that Larry was so pale and listless. Other times it was Larry who managed the needle arm over the records on the phonograph; this afternoon it was Ira, choosing his favorite disks, while Larry sat in the flat cushion of the tilting leather armchair, sat withdrawn, in a kind of ascetic reverie.

“They always sound like each one is showing the other guy he can sing as high or low as he can.” Ira tried to divert Larry from the wan trance that sheathed him. “Caruso and Gigli: Solenne in quest’ora — Lo juro, lo juro . You know what I mean?”

A silence. . unnatural. . extensive.

“I have something to tell you,” Larry finally said. “Something I–I very much want to tell you.”

“You mean now?”

“Yes.”

Ira lifted the arm from the disk, pushed the little lever that stopped the turntable. “Yeah?”

“Something I’d like kept in confidence.”

“It’s all right. I mean, if you don’t want to tell me.”

“I do.”

Ira went to the green divan and sat down. “Who am I gonna tell it to, anyway?”

“You’re the only one I can talk to about this.” So solemn he seemed, his cheekbones without their wonted dapple, cheekbones so pale and prominent they deepened the sockets of his eyes. He looked peaked, too slender and too flat. He took a deep breath, held it, as though to reinforce it for the thing he had to say. “I stayed with Edith last night.”

Ira could only remain motionless, say nothing. Show comprehension, betray nothing, or as little of the incredulity he felt as possible. What could you say to someone who told you he stayed all night with a college instructor, his English instructor, a Ph.D.? Say something like “You did?” When the incredible became true it became magic; it worked a spell on everything within reach of the senses: on the unlit sconces on the wall, the nude on her swing melting into the darkening blue among the towers, the Corot reproductions waning, the parquet floor and the pattern on the Turkish rug merging at the boundaries. But that still left nothing to say. It could happen only once. Once in all of a whole lifetime. Say nothing. Let the blood whirl around inside your cranium. What could be more incredible?

“I’m in love with her.” Larry crossed one big white hand over the other. “I’ve been in love with her for some time. Now I know we love each other.”

Ira listened, heard, comprehended: all of a great gray cloud: as if the winter twilight were speaking inside a familiar, gemütlich living room, forming words drifting toward him. Who was there? Jesus, he had just turned off the aria from La Forza del Destino .

“I love her. I want to marry her. I want to take care of her. I want her for my own. Mine!” he added suddenly. “When I see her teaching her heart out for that dumb bunch of premeds and predents in her class, I want to take her in my arms, hold her there, protect her. She’s so tiny. She’s so girlish, small, you have no idea. And the tiny thing has to work so hard—” His voice choked, he snuffed, his eyes became moist, glistening in the gloom. He stood up, tried to speak, fidgeted for self-control.

Ira had to look away.

Silence within the room, silence so utter it whined, like a sling. And then abruptly Larry resumed talking again, unburdening himself of a turmoil of words, plans and yearnings. In a medium of the marvelous it all came, thick and fast it all came, and tumbling about Ira’s ears, now comprehensible, now incomprehensible, the multitude of things Larry and Edith had discussed, his impulses, her advice, his declarations about his future, her comments on the announcement of his drastic change of career: to hell with dentistry. Literature was his proper calling. Damn middle-class conventions. He ought to get out, leave the family, defy their crass, materialistic carpings — and so unsure was Ira of what he heard, and what he felt, that he dared not comment, too conscious of his own ignorance of that kind of interrelation, of that kind of committal. It was so beyond the scope of anything Ira had ever dreamed of, his chief concern as he listened was to guard against saying anything dumb, exposing the depth of his mawkishness, the flimsiness of his comprehension. In a situation like this, when you knew you lacked anything cogent to say — in a situation like this — and how could anyone aspire to a situation like this? A lofty liaison, a mythical affair! Nod cognizance was the best you could do, even when you had only the faintest notion of the reality of it. She was older; that went through Ira’s mind; that was different; but it made no difference to Larry. Neither did the gap in rank or station. He was a freshman, she a Ph.D., a college instructor; she was a gentile, he was Jewish. Only the bulky contrasts stood out. All right, give up dentistry, major in English, then what? The substance, the actuality, the practical functioning of romance, the fact of romance, simply swept away things that would have flitted through his mind; the romantic gave the prosaic no access, no purchase: swept away all the carnal curiosity, all the irrelevant needs, self-indulgent fantasizing, and the where and the when and the. .