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

XI

Edith had been instrumental in securing an instructor’s position at NYU for Iola Reid. She was taller than Edith, and because she was so slender and willowy, she looked quite statuesque. Just turned thirty, like Edith, Scandinavian in origin and appearance, Iola had straw-colored blond hair, which she wore in a tightly bound braid around her head. Her face was thin, her nose too, and barely saved from prominence by the general air of cultivation her countenance conveyed. And she wore, almost invariably, a green costume or green accessory (as against Edith’s wide spectrum of colors); green dress, green earrings, green pendants.

All kinds of fascinating flecks of information pertained to her past, in one case sensational. All of them were divulged by Edith in matter-of-fact tones to her young lover and his friend (to their great wonder every now and then). Iola had been brought up with her brothers and sisters on a potato farm in Idaho. She was the oldest of the siblings, and after her mother died, the widowed father, either in fury or sexual furor, chased his daughter with an ax over the fields. Iola still dreamt of the terrible episode, and awoke at night screaming.

She was to all intents and purposes engaged to a Rhodes scholar, Richard Scofield, presently studying for his master’s degree in English literature at Oxford. Oxford, hoary with tradition, epitome of cloistered scholarship, fraught with awesome prestige! Oxford! Could anything sound more utterly entrancing? Olympian, Jesus. Maybe that’s what he had once dreamed CCNY would be like. Edith described Richard as extraordinarily polished, charming, and handsome. While on a visit to Paris, he had been raped by a homosexual friend in a taxicab. Raped by a homosexual in a taxicab? A grown man? Not the nine- or ten-year-old urchin he was when that rusty sonofabitch had lured him to Fort Tryon Park. And as if in answer to Ira’s thoughts, Edith implied that perhaps the episode had not been altogether a rape — that Richard, she had reason to believe, leaned, ever so slightly, in that direction. “Bisexual” was the term she used. “Bisexual,” that new term for Ira. John Vernon, her faculty cosponsor of the Arts Club, and an avowed homosexual (though he had been married), was “licking his chops,” said Edith, waiting for Richard to return. And the whole affair, John Vernon’s interest in Richard, and the episode in Paris, had naturally given Iola grave misgivings, distressed her with incertitude as to whether she could truly count on Richard to go through with his pledge of marriage.

What tiny, tiny inflections of tone entered Edith’s recital of all this, so barely perceptible that Ira could imagine afterward that he had only heard his own suspicions, hearkened to his own suspect promptings. No, Edith couldn’t possibly allow even a word of her account to dip into envy; she was too good, too kind; she was above finding relish in the possibility of Iola’s hopes going astray. Maybe they were going astray; who knew? Why did he get the idea that Iola was deliberately fostering some kind of symmetry with regard to himself, symmetry, vis-à-vis Edith, to counterbalance Edith’s affair with Larry? Ira felt a tug of enticement, albeit discreet, a tug of rivalry, a cool inducement to be her squire. And those private, faint signals, hints of incipient archness, that enlisted him into alliance, not of derision for the other couple, but of calm detachment, maybe imperceptible gravitation in the direction of her orbit. . Perhaps if he weren’t so obtuse, and mistrustful of himself, he might have seen through Edith’s sangfroid, accorded due significance to those millimicron signals, as Ivan, the physics whiz, would have called them, that she transmitted. But boy, would he make a dumbo of himself if he was wrong. And wrong he surely was. What else? And do what, anyway? Edith had already told him and Larry that after Iola’s father had chased her, she became frigid, lost all interest in sex. So what did he think? That she was like Stella, ready to yield at a touch? Or like Minnie, with a little wheedling, lewd arousing — flap his hard-on with a rubber on it, ready to go? Or was Edith just getting back at Iola, because Iola envied Edith’s growing reputation at the university, as Edith claimed, because Dr. Watt was very favorably impressed with the syllabus of her modern poetry course, and with the large body of students who attended her lectures? Or worse: Iola, Edith said, was jealous of her love affair, her infatuation, as Iola egregiously referred to it, with her freshman lover.

Look at that: Ph.D.s both, and they behaved almost like anybody else when they envied or were jealous of each other. Almost like everybody else, except their grudges were honed so fine, they hurt without lacerating, unlike the way Jews volleyed their grudges about, as did other tenement denizens on 119th Street. No, the edges of polite grudges were so fine, you had to be warned they could wound, you had to be told afterward they had wounded. Ira could hardly recognize the edges himself. Would he ever? Or was he wrong? All he felt sometimes in the exchanges between the two women was just a kind of — a faint rumor. . Was that the way you knew? It might have come out of your own head—

No, he had gone astray. .

Ira had poked about for causes all that afternoon and evening, dully, spiritlessly, like a blind man rummaging, only worse, hopelessly, as though the bottom had dropped out of his purpose, left him without any élan, any direction.

“I’ve suddenly lost all my zing,” he confessed to M, his steadfast M, always so quick to console.

Oh, he recognized the symptoms of his malaise, although that did little good, symptoms of the sudden onset of acute depression. Old story. And yet, he wasn’t quite sure, wasn’t quite sure he hadn’t brought the condition on himself. He had locked himself out, or rather in, painted himself into a corner, as they said: the corner of solipsism. He had oversimplified himself, for one thing; he wasn’t that much of a simpleton — and moreover, he would be repeating that obtuseness leitmotif later on. But mostly the fault was, the blockade was, solipsism: it wasn’t what he felt at this junction that was of primary consideration; it was what Larry felt or did, and was going through. Ira had lost sight of that. He knew he had to continue the tale, but in his need to portray his own sensations and emotions, he had almost forgotten those sharp, those acrid moments of quarrel that broke out between Larry and his family: over his staying out late or his staying out overnight, over his losing weight, his emaciation. All this, even before he announced that he intended to abort his career as dentist, devote himself to poetry and to writing. Those were the important things, those sudden and embarrassing eruptions of scolding and upbraiding by his parents or sisters — all three sisters — at family gatherings — and Larry’s own irate and desperate rejoinders.

For it was true that to such a pitch had differences reached between Larry and his immediate kin that for a while Ira feared that their passionate concern for Larry’s welfare, their furious resentment of Edith, might lead to her undoing. They might complain about her behavior to the head of the English department, Dr. Watt. They might excoriate her disgraceful carrying-on with a freshman. Exposing her love affair with Larry might lead to her termination from NYU, might ruin her chances for college teaching positions elsewhere. That Larry’s family never did any of these things was to their credit. They also probably reasoned that there were other approaches to the problem, that time might be on their side, just as Sam advised.

He had quit. He was stuporous, and he slept; the miserable day had passed. Something else he had wanted to interpolate, but it had been forgotten, and the omission irked him now. Where was that goddamn ballpoint, or his alertness now to satisfy the need for making a memo of these volatile ideas, if such they could be called? He slept, awoke, went for a two-block walk along Manhattan Street, north of the mobile home court. Two blocks in one direction marked the limit of his present pedestrian boundary; retracing his steps made four blocks in all.