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

Afterward — when the reading was over — to sustained applause — cookies and coffee were served by young students, volunteer waitresses. Colloquy hummed anew. Cross-table talk set the dwindling candle flames fluttering, corresponding to utterance like tiny yellow tongues. And while the refreshments were being consumed, Larry sauntered over, bent down, and with lips close to Ira’s ear, whispered, his words brimming with import. “I’m seeing Edith home tonight. Okay?”

“Sure. Sure. I get it.” Ira nodded.

And audibly, “How’d you like it?” Larry asked.

“The cookies?”

“C’mon, Ira, I’m talking about art.”

Larry patted his friend’s shoulder, and again speaking sotto voce: “Someone likes you. Thinks you’re very genuine.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll tell you more later.”

“Thanks.” So easy to come out with a self-conscious, and discontented, “Tanks, tanks to dee, my wordy friend” (to parody Longfellow); but he didn’t, and was glad he didn’t.

Larry bent down again, murmured, “Come over and say good night.”

Ira winced, shut both eyes. “Can’t you do it for me?”

Larry glared a long, mock-menacing glare — and not until Ira nodded in grudging acquiescence did Larry leave.

“Know him a long time?” The question was put to Ira by Nathan, the undergraduate who had previously introduced himself and the others, the one who sported the brown mustache.

“Yars’n yars.” Ira enjoyed his riposte. There was such a little difference between a fool and a foil, it just occurred to him.

“You don’t sound like City College, much more like Columbia.” Nathan was apparently glossing over with amenity his misjudgment of Ira’s newly revealed status.

“I don’t know what City College sounds like.”

But the other was quick in riposte, quicker than Ira, as usual. “I know you’ve got to have at least a B average to matriculate.”

“Yeah? I musta got in on a rain check.” Again, without his intending, gruffness rasped in his voice. Matriculate. Jesus. Highfalutin . He cleared his throat. “What does NYU sound like?”

“You heard us tonight.”

“I sure did. You mean you, right?” He felt surly. But hell, this wasn’t the place to display ill will; he was Larry’s friend. Ira simply lowered his head.

“Do you know Miss Welles, too?”

Pumping him. “Not very.” He noticed that the others at the table were paying close attention, especially the rather svelte, sleek Jewish beauty toying with the earring. The earring slipped from her fingers, rolled toward Ira on the floor. He stooped, recovered it, and handed it to her. She said not a word, just looked at him, loftily. Goddamn her, where did she get off with that haughty crap? Next time he’d let the goddamn thing stay where it fell. But a next time there would never be. “Thanks,” he said pointedly, animosity swelling within him, his ears kindling. “You’re Tamara?”

“Yes,” she conceded.

“What happened to the guy?”

“I don’t understand. What guy?”

“You might be Tamar yourself,” Ira said. “I mean the real one. In the Bible.” He was being uncouth. Cut it out, he counseled himself.

“I don’t see the point of that. What makes you say that?”

“She musta been real good-lookin’, no?”

And this Tamara was too: svelte, sleek, basking in the glow of her warm, harmonious Jewish features. And smart. Too smart for him, Ira already knew, with her scale of appraisal, secure and deeply delineated. No docile kid cousin this one, or sister yielding to need.

“Thank you,” she said, with a formal blink of eyelids; she wasn’t going to let him take acquaintance too far.

“You mind if I ask you what happened to the guy?”

“What guy?”

The others around the candle-lit table stopped chatting and listened. He struggled with the boor inside him, unmanageable suddenly. “The guy who raped her. He was her brother, wasn’t he?”

“He was her half brother, Amnon.”

“Oh. He was only her half brother.”

“Only?”

“Yeah. So that was only half so bad.”

“For heaven’s sake!” she said, after the slightest, but curiously electric, throb of silence. “I didn’t think when I came here this evening I was going to discuss degrees of incest.”

“This kind must be the third degree.” He was strangely glib, even with a young woman as attractive as she was, just so long as no amorous notions interfered in his head. Then his heart stopped beating. “No, I know. But what happened to him?”

“Absalom killed him.”

“Who? Absalom?”

“Please!” Condescending and affronted, she clearly found the conversation distasteful. She looked away, toyed with the earring he had retrieved.

“You’re asking the right person,” the young man named Nathan complimented, slyly. “She’s Sholem Aleichem’s granddaughter.”

“Yeah?”

“Please, Nathan, don’t drop names. You know how much I hate that.”

“That’s all right. I don’t know who he is.”

A few seconds of silence. He had really messed up, messed up the vis-à-vis, but gotten a few licks in, though, in return for her haughtiness, halfway gotten even with all of them. Anh, wasn’t he a bastard? Yeah. Might as well move his freight the hell outta here. He gathered up coat and hat in brusque hold, and stood up, turned his back on them. Let ’em think he was crazy.

Jesus Christ, he didn’t seem to be at home anywhere, not here among these — these well-behaved, well-to-do students, like the kid, the grown-up guy by now, whose silver-filigreed fountain pen Ira had swiped. And he wasn’t at home at CCNY either, all of them Jewish, trying desperately to assimilate. He should have “fit in” there, but he didn’t. If his family had stayed on the East Side — at least till he was Bar Mitzvah, maybe. Not at home on 119th Street in goyish Harlem, that went without saying. He wasn’t at home anywhere. He was Larry’s friend, that was all.

Now for this last minor ordeal. Only for him it wasn’t minor. Ill at ease, worried, he approached the small group standing about the table nearest the podium. If his first meeting with Edith was trying, this leave-taking promised to be even more so. Damn Larry. She was speaking with someone else, undoubtedly a faculty member, a fairly tall man, smooth and regular-featured, with darkening blond hair (was that Mr. Vernon, the cosponsor of the Arts Club, whom Larry had mentioned, the homosexual?). And another, an eager-appearing short man with a quick, frequent laugh and a pockmarked face (was he the one Larry had said disparagingly was frantically in love with Edith?). And the poet, Léonie Adams. And the two distinguished women who had come in at the last. Nah, he’d better beat it. He rippled fingers at Larry, screwed up the side of his face in sign of farewell. But Miss Welles turned toward him, again with winning, solicitous mien. He had to say something:

“I came to say goodbye, Miss Welles.”

“I hope not as finally as that.”

“No, good night, I mean. But I told Larry I already said it.”

“I don’t mind hearing it again. Did you enjoy the evening?”

“Yeah. Parts of it.” Agitated, he jerked his head nervously. “Maybe I don’t hear right, ye know? I mean fast enough.”

She met his troubled frown with consoling smile. “That’s true for most of us. Only we’re too polite to say so. I hope you haven’t been discouraged from coming again—”

“Well, I’m outta place, ma’am — Miss Welles. I’m glad to help with the postcards. But more than that. .” He looked away hopelessly, tried to prevent the hitch of his shrug from exceeding polite limits, or what he thought were.