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

Not many years later, when Ira was attending DeWitt Clinton, one, then another, and finally the third of the filled teeth began to ache unbearably. Each in turn had to be extracted, and each one, beyond the taste of blood of the torn gum, emitted a foul, putrescent stench in his mouth.

It was in early winter, in the old brick building that housed the DeWitt Clinton swimming pool across the street from the high school, when he came away from his frolicking in the winter, that the last of the three teeth began to ache. Peculiar associations, but inseparably bound together. With what indignation another white-jacketed dentist extracted the molar: would Ira tell him the name and address of the practitioner? Who had done his dental work? Ira no longer remembered. And after that, in the years to come, whether because of the gap left between teeth so early in life or not, all the other teeth loosened, abscessed and then loosened, and had to be extracted. So that at an age even earlier than Zaida’s, Ira first acquired his dentures. Ira acquired his, though not at quite such a bargain price as his grandfather.

But he had to get back to Ira Stigman, before he disintegrated under the impact of so many collateral concerns.

It was a weekend evening in the kitchen of Larry’s home, his parents and Irma away, perhaps the Hungarian domestic home, and only Larry and Ira there. Between them on the table was a stack of fifty penny postcards and several sheets of paper on which were typed and handwritten the names and addresses of the invitees to the next poetry recital. Site of the occasion would be as usual, the Village Inn Teahouse on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, and the time 8:00 P.M. this coming Saturday. As secretary of the Arts Club, Larry had undertaken the task of sending out the notices, thus relieving Edith of doing so. And Ira was only too glad to be co-opted as assistant.

“It’s a helluva bore.” Larry slipped the elastic off the pack of postcards. “I’ll write the addresses; you write the notices on the other side. Here’s the model form: Time. Date of meeting. Place. Name of poet reading: Margaret Larkin. Get it? Soon as I’m finished addressing, I’ll help with the notices. Maybe that’ll speed things up, instead of each of us turning out one apiece.”

“ Takeh. Takeh . What d’ye call it, conveyor-belt production?”

“What’s takeh ?” As usual, Larry was amused at hearing a Yiddish expression new to him, and eager to learn it too.

“Tick-tockin’,” Ira quipped, applying fountain-pen scrawl to the first postcard. “Actually, it means ‘indeed.’”

“ Takeh ,” Larry repeated.

“ Takeh emes , they say, Indeed the truth, though they might be lying like hell.” Ira enjoyed Larry’s grin. “Who’s this Margaret Larkin?”

“She writes an easy-to-read, almost light verse. Charming most of the time. Feminine. I’ve met her at Edith’s. Handsome, still fairly young. I think she’s also a Westerner.” He handed Ira a newly addressed postcard. “Kind of verse I like. She writes her name backward in her poems sometimes: Nikral.”

“Yeah?”

“She has one about standing cigarettes up like candles in front of her lover’s portrait. Clever.”

“Hmm,” Ira sighed for no reason: bohemian fancy. It was so whimsical. Ah, to have experienced that kind of life, at least once.

“When they get too cerebral, like T. S. Eliot, or obscure — well, just like The Waste Land —count me out. There’s no pleasure in reading it.” Larry slid a postcard over toward Ira. “Don’t turn it over right away. The ink’s still wet.”

“No. T. S. Eliot is obscure?”

“Deliberately so. I resent it, too. I think I’m fairly sensitive to imagery, someone else’s imagery in a poem. But when they get so highfalutin symbolic, I don’t feel I need to dig and scratch around for all the allusions. To hell with ’em!” Larry’s demeanor left no doubt about his distaste.

“Yeah?”

“You’d agree if you read him. There’s no—” Larry raised his fountain pen in disapproval, circled his hands. “There’s no connection that I can see between one part and another. And sometimes between one line and another. The whole thing’s a disjointed collection of lines, some fine, some — well. .”

“Where do you read T. S. Eliot?”

“At Edith’s. She has about the best collection of modern verse in town.”

“Yeah?”

“Wallace Stevens, Millay, Genevieve Taggard, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, A. E. Robinson, Léonie Adams, William Carlos Williams, Cummings, Frost, Elinor Wylie—”

“Wow!”

“She never hesitates to buy a new book of poems she thinks is good. Wilfred Owen, Yeats, Sassoon, Sitwell — some of them she doesn’t think are so hot, either. But she needs them for her course.”

“Oh.”

“Everyone who’s taken the course says it’s great.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“One of the things I’ll regret about leaving the place. . Let’s see.” Larry reached over the table to look at the last card he had given Ira: “I don’t want to send two of these to the same person: Berry Burgoign.” he consulted the chart. “Next is Madge Thomson — she’s in the English department too. Specializes in early English: Beowulf , and that kind of thing. Very homely, but nice. Fluttery. Giggles. She’s like an adolescent.”

“Yeah? You met all of ’em?”

“I think so. Not Professor Watt.”

“Who’s he?”

“Head of the English department.”

“Oh.” Ira waved a postcard to dry the ink. “Jesus, I haven’t met a soul at CCNY. All I know is Mr. Dickson, the guy I’m taking English Composition with — English 1.” He turned over another postcard. “I just know him in class,” Ira added dejectedly. “What about the folks? Any more trouble?”

“No. I think they’ve decided to let things ride. We’re sort of playing a cat-and-mouse game. Each one waiting for the other to make the next move.”

“Yeah? And you?”

“Oh, I’ll stay out the term, of course. That satisfies them . And what I do next — well, it all depends. I think I know what I’m going to do — CCNY. But there’s no use my talking about it any further until — well, things jell a little more.”

“Yeah.” Ira watched Larry tighten the cap on the barrel of his fountain pen. It was a new substantial Waterman, not like his own bleary, old one. He could say: you know, a fountain pen got me into trouble once. Yeah, he could say. He could say. . He suddenly saw Minnie’s face brighten with pleasure when he dangled a stolen fountain pen in front of her — for bait. He could say, yeah, he had a cousin Stella — he looked for the next name on the list. It was the very one Larry had been talking about, the one who laughed like an adolescent. To Larry, she laughed like an adolescent. Not worth bothering about. To Ira, that spurred the predator. “Homely?” Ira turned the yellow card over, read the name. “This Dr. Madge Thomson?”

“Homely as a hedge fence.” Larry smiled indulgently. “That’s what Edith says. Cute expression, isn’t it?”

“Hedge fence? Yeah. Gee,” Ira said regretfully. “You know, you live somewhere in a different part of the world. You’re really brought up differently. You say, ‘Homely as a hedge fence.’ Why the hell a hedge fence?” They both stopped writing, as Larry waited for Ira to finish. “To me it could be beautiful. A hedge fence. A hedge. The country, the—” He gesticulated, held his hands apart. “Wide, trimmed, you know, with little green leaves. Homely as a hedge fence. It’s attractive.”

Larry chuckled, his handsome face indulgent as he gazed at Ira. It was almost as if he wasn’t sure whether Ira was serious or spoofing. “She’s not pretty. Believe me.” He shook his head for emphasis. “How would you say it? I mean ‘homely.’”