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

There were small variations in the collegiate rounds sometimes: hiking home with Aaron Hessman, classmate who lived a few blocks farther south — in Jewish Harlem. Not altogether dull, Aaron H, not altogether humorless, but already dried by academic overachievement, and wound up with a shoulder-hitch tic. He was well on his way to a Phi Beta Kappa key, well on his way to a tutorship in Latin: Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni . Crack breaststroke swimmer too, he had impersonated brawny Ivan, physics whiz, who swam like a plumb bob, swam as if he meant to thrash the pool dry, and walk its length instead.

Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni . Alas, how swiftly the fleeting years have gone by. How could so powerful a swimmer as you, Aaron, drown off Rockaway Beach a year after you won your coveted key and your summa cum laude , and your Latin tutorship? It seemed impossible — unless you intended to. . to be the first of the class of ’28 to go.

— And indeed you will be the last.

To have traded places with Aaron.

— To your narrative, my friend.

Delighted classmates, sitting about the large scarred oak table in the middle of the ’28 alcove, stopped whatever they were doing to listen to Larry sing one of the skits he had helped concoct last summer at Kopake in the Catskills. As always, with his charm, his personableness, his air of worldliness, his facility as entertainer, Larry had already become a popular figure in the class. Many were drawn to him, as long ago many were drawn to Ira’s childhood chum Farley. There were adulators who sought to curry favor with him, but as with Farley, only certain ones were allowed into the inner circle, of which Ira was the closest to the center. On the scarred alcove table, Larry, the sad little Jew, wearing his World War khaki uniform, swayed with stereotypical Jewish woe to the tempo of his song:

“Vot is life, dot’s the question vot I ponder.

Vot is life, over here or over yonder?

It’s a game of chence, of circumstence—

Oy, gewalt! I burned a hole in my only pair of. .”

Larry paused, and against expectation, instead of pants, sang: “trousers.”

The alcove applauded, and Ira grinned, amused and sardonic as ever. Larry was certainly funny: with that fresh batch of gags, anecdotes, comic lyrics he’d brought back from Kopake, and now Lemansky’s, there was no doubt about his ability to amuse. And there was no doubt the stuff was amusing, too. But it was — what was it? — the way Larry appraised it, the value he set on it, personal value, the way he identified with it, that was new, new and different. He no longer related to the stuff with a show of derision, a mocking counterbalance of appraisal, but as if it were stock in trade, a commodity of value to be purveyed in the marketplace of entertainment. A paradoxical change had taken place in him, as if this recent accession of comic triviality were an embellishment of his personality, an enhancement of it, not something he might advert to in passing, with absence of self-emphasis, an absurdity naturally apropos, but rather as if the anecdotal and the droll were prized substance of his character, his gift to any group. Ira had the most difficult time with himself trying to “figure out,” as he would put it, just what the difference was between the Larry that was and the Larry now — and between himself and Larry — when it came to things of this sort, to humor in particular. Was it the performer taking over in Larry, was that the difference? The performer filling a vacuum left by the exhaustion of the poetic impulse that had burgeoned within the college freshman of only a couple of years ago? It was a strange thing, something to contemplate, a decline, a deterioration of sensibility, that at the same time as it seemed a matter of choice, seemed the effect of spiritual compulsion. It was like an optical illusion, the nugatory imbuing one aspect, pathos the other.

Ira felt a throb of poignancy at the unmistakable proliferation of the commonplace in Larry. How the constellation of personality could change, how it could alter — as Ira had read celestial constellations would change after many millennia — and the whole configuration of temperament scarcely be recognizable as what it once was. By intuitive modulations of affinity, he had taken advantage of Larry’s temperament in an earlier phase. By a different method he was now ready to take advantage of it in the next. Inbred, alert predator, who could not be anything else, as if it were a matter of inevitability, he could only function by exploiting his friend, his benefactor, who had been so generous to his grubby, slum-misshapen chum, misshapen in more ways than Larry ever dreamed, who had instilled something of deportment in Ira, something of couthness: from that first dinner at Larry’s home, of lamb chops and creamed spinach. It was a recurrent, ambivalent theme with Ira, his attitude toward his friend’s bloom and blight. And even though Edith had attributed Larry’s change, his petering out of poetic impulse, to his “shallowness,” still, her dictum continued to leave Ira unsatisfied. While he profited by her disparagement, and stood to gain by it, it left him uneasy: something unaccountable about it, or if applicable, how wide was the scope of its application? If that was shallowness, what was depth? How deep did “depth” have to go to prove itself? Or did a guy burn out, the way Farley had “burned out,” a schoolboy outrunning the foremost sprinter of his day, outrunning the gold medalist Abrams in the Olympic relays.

— You’ve already expatiated on that at length, my friend.

And so I have, so I have. But I suppose it’s become an obsession with me, Ecclesias, because I traveled the same road as Larry did, and if I traveled it “farther” than he did, I’m no longer sure which one of us suffered more when the road ended in trackless morass. . I lived. His heart slowly atrophied. And something else has come to me in belated fashion, something I should perhaps merely make a note of at this stage, and reserve dealing with at a later time: consider that central trope of my first novel: why did I “choose” the central character’s near-fatal contact with the third rail as a climax? The third rail that all but immolated the child, virtually gutted his future? And I was so oblivious I didn’t know my seemingly detached fable de me narratur .

IV

It was in Ira’s junior year that he was at last able to program into his schedule the Biology 1 course that he had been so eager to register for the afternoon of his first day inside the college — and that had become after two years mere memory of an aspiration and no more: desiccated and crushed autumn leaves trodden underfoot in the euphoria of sauntering along Convent Avenue high in blue sky above the city — before encountering the workaday, lackluster interior of the auditorium where he was to register, the chalked courses on blackboards, the crowd of competing students busy at their seats, or impatiently waiting in long files. No, there was nothing like that now — in registering for courses in his junior year. He had all the time in the world to make out his schedule, and do it in leisurely fashion without fear of seeing the course erased on the blackboard before he reached the desk.

But what the hell was the use? In two years’ time, he had become nobody. And less and less every day. Together with scarce-known classmates, he walked out of the auditorium, through the dull halls, past the gray-white Gothic exterior walls, down the steps into the quadrangle among the trimmed ginkgo trees. .

And Bio — by the time classes began, the subject left him as cold, if not as clammy, as the pickled frog he shared with a fellow student, and dissected parts of as ineptly and lackadaisically as he drew the batrachian’s innards, barely wresting a C from a quiz, and skittering toward a C for the course. Oh, he understood what Mendel was all about, the methodical monk in the apron and little eyeglasses, understood the dominant and the recessive in sweet peas, and what happened when they were crossed. So what? But this genetics business — why the hell did they have to wrack his brains with all these crossword-puzzle-looking charts?