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

“Want me to do it? I mean turn on the lights.” Ira felt silly.

“I’d appreciate it. Before it gets pitch-dark in here.”

Ira stood up, found the wall switch. The sudden onset of light discovered a somber Larry on the green divan. Exhausted, limp with indecision, he was gnawing at his upper lip, and still toying with his pipe. The fine black shell briar contrasted with the pallor of his large hands. “Well, that’s that.” Again random movements of body and feature expressed altering patterns of lassitude. Resignation seemed to replace agitation — a dissatisfied resignation. “I’m lucky I had you here, Ira, to talk to.” He overrode Ira’s self-belittling protest. “No, that’s all right. I know what you’re going to say. But I’ve never been in such a stew in my life. I’m lucky you were here, that’s all. It’s—” Resignation tinged his voice with bleakness. He sighed. “Edith’s right. See what develops? It’s just too short notice. I adore her, but — I’m going to get out of NYU next year. That much I’ve made up my mind to do. Without question.”

“CCNY?”

“Gradually lessen my dependence on my folks — without killing them, you might say. Transfer credits. Maybe get part-time work of some kind.”

“Hey, you know something? I think I oughta give you a chance to get to bed. Early. You’re worn out.”

“I suppose Edith is too. Well, in a little while. . Let’s rustle up a bite of supper. See what’s in the larder. Soup. Leftovers. I know we always have some.”

“Oh, sure. Anything.”

“ Soupe du jour ,” Larry said mirthlessly. “Soup du Jew.”

“Want any help?”

“No, no. I’ll do it. Do me good. Help bring me back to the — everyday. Let’s go into the kitchen.”

Ira followed him, watched him empty a bowl into a pan. “It’s Hungarian goulash. It would be.” He set the pan on the stove, returned to the icebox, brought out a half head of lettuce. “We make our own French dressing. Vinegar and olive oil, okay?”

“Sure, I like it.”

“Toast?”

“Great.”

As he did everything else, Larry set the table with a flair, and despite weariness prepared the supper with a flourish. Ira watched him in silence. It was a welcome silence, a minute in which to try to think, to ponder in secret, laboriously probe, grope into the future that allowed only the shallowest of shallow speculation, grope through a haphazard labyrinth. Jesus, for Larry to ask him what to do? When he hardly knew what there was to do, just barely could name the options. Let’s see: to further his, Larry’s, love affair, his aim of marrying Edith, Larry said he was ready, he felt impelled, to leave home, to go on the bum, he said: to change himself, leave Edith for a while, leave his family, and all that comfort, spending money — he called it allowance — fine clothes, his own room. And leave his friend, bosom companion, Ira.

The thought traveled inward to himself, to the fateful choices he, Ira, had made. He had relinquished the appropriate high school because of Farley, and then had renounced a future, maybe, for the sake of Larry’s friendship, but Ira didn’t enter into Larry’s considerations. Not that he felt hurt. It was a lesson, a sobering one. But it was crazy. Crazy. Larry wasn’t going to set out, give way to that kind of impulse, especially when Edith counseled him not to; he would do what she counseled. Oh, it was confused, it was confused, but as before, the shape in the hovering obscurity of his mind took on the same, strangely auspicious lineaments: Larry would have to do the thing that Ira prefigured, that Ira predestined was for his own ultimate benefit. Wasn’t that crazy too? Oh, it was, it was. The same thing, the same thing. Had he ever been in love, Larry had asked him, somewhere in the course of talking, ever known puppy love. Jesus, what a joke. He had burst through barriers beyond love, known the urge to murder, known the quaking of green walls when Minnie said, “All right.” And pratting his fat, foolish little cousin in the cellar. When did he have time for love? He didn’t need time for love; just enough time to tear off a piece of hide in a despicable, precarious snatch. Wow! What the hell, nutt’n like it. The risk, peril, win the jackpot of the transcendental abominable.

No, he was clinging to Larry, because therein lay his future; that’s all he could tell himself — a hundred times. It was a future whose nature he couldn’t discern, but latent with. . with fulfillment. He was in its grip; he imagined at the same time as he disbelieved; he disbelieved at the same time as he adumbrated. Somehow the dim, formless aspiration within himself had to be coagulated, eventually, this nameless essence of a fatal sense of human plight, his own, of aberrations, hideous, zany, and sad, far more than Larry had ever imagined. No, Larry could never apprehend the infernal torments of the kind of suffering he, Ira, had inflicted on himself, not even by moving out of the house.

But there it was again: that awful twist in his sophomore year in DeWitt Clinton that became a murderous warp that conferred uniqueness, conferred election, even though others were brighter than he was, like Larry, had quicker minds, dexterity, had all the attributes of greater intelligence, taste, judgment, still — was it delusion? — his, yes, he knew it was shameful — would he admit incest to anybody? Or did his impressing his fourteen-year-old cousin to his lechery confer a destiny that would not be denied? What madness! He had willed Larry’s choice, willed Larry to remain with his family. As though in Larry’s wake, like those cyclists behind the pace-setting motorcycles in the Velodrome, Ira would be drawn along to a destiny that was still only cloudy aspiration, fantasy. Still, fantasy had prefigured reality, as Michelangelo said the statue was in the marble.

Ira had ridden the jolting, windy platform of the Ninth Avenue El, and had heard his new acquaintance preen, soon after he had quoted from Louis Untermeyer’s anthology those clarion lines of modern poetry like a fanfare for a new world, preen that he was going to be a dentist. . and that schoolteachers didn’t earn very much money. And then he knew something was wrong, something didn’t fit. And now Larry, privileged, romantic Larry had attempted, in the high frenzy of his new love affair with Edith, to make it fit, to sacrifice the one he was to become, but he thought better of it , yes, acceded to practicalities. There he was — handsome Larry adding salt and pepper to the French dressing, judiciously tasting the mixture — wanting to become what Ira already was, had been for so long, the feckless, impractical, suffering sap — incurable sap, and incurably self-aware. The model Larry wanted to fit into fit Ira better than it did him, and perhaps this was the basis of the great friendship. Ira felt that this had occurred, if that slosh and slap of insight that went on continually inside his head had any truth in it. He had the terrible stamina, he had the range. He had no bounds, no hobbles on his imagination. He had striven with madness, suffered the utmost wrenching of the mind. Kill her! Kill her. . Still, in the midst of madness, he solved problems in plane geometry, problems demanding reason — how was that? — he found solace in applying theorems about tangents and secants, apothems and chords.

It fit Ira better, yes; he saw as naturally as breathing the stodgy facades the El passed, with faces in the windows awaiting lackluster advents. Still, Larry’s perceptions didn’t have to be on that level; they could have been deprived out of his own milieu. Listen to him saying, listen to him repeating, “I know she’s looking out for my welfare. But I ought to experience life. At the very least, I ought to get a place in the Village, a cheap room. Anything. I have a small bank account — my Aunt Lillian left me a small legacy. Break away. Be on my own. I ought to. I ought to. I have to feel the necessity of what I’m doing.” And again the question: “What would you do?”