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

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How now, Ecclesias?

VI

And as they had often done before during an idle hour and a fair one, Ira and one or another of his college cronies strolled along the sidewalk next to the main building of the college. Across the street was Jasper Oval, the playing field. There, in fair weather, freshmen and sophomores, “frosh” and “sophs,” attired in their World War uniforms, marched and countermarched over the bare ground to the command of junior officers; by column right or left, or by the right flank or left or to the rear. With their Springfield rifles, the cadets went through a manual of arms: port arms, present arms, order arms — just as Ira had done exactly a year before, in the spring of his sophomore year, and as Larry did still. The Gothic gray-and-white college main building on one side, the bare ground with the Mili Sci cadets marching on the other, both shared the unstinting sunlight of rejuvenating spring. Drawn up in close order, in platoon, led by the colonel as choral master, they could often be heard singing the infantry song:

“Oh, the Infantry, Infantry, with the dirt behind their ears,

The Infantry, the Infantry, that never, never fears.

The Cavalry, Artillery, the Corps of Engineers,

Will never catch up with the Infantry in a hundred thousand years.”

That was fun. But what a pain it seemed to give the blond staff sergeant; he stood so stiffly at attention, he gave the impression his skin would have rippled otherwise with embarrassment. The junior officers also stood by much too politely, as if they too were enduring a minor ordeal.

“The old shithead hopes he’ll build up esprit de corpses that way,” Larry imparted sarcastically. “Honest, isn’t he the biggest joke on campus?”

Everyone agreed.

The first campus rebellions, pacifist rebellions, against compulsory ROTC had already begun the year before in the spring of 1926, and would reach a crescendo in the three years that followed with the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and all the naval disarmament treaties. There was even talk that the League of Nations would outlaw war. Suddenly, the junior officers lecturing on the elements of military science deported themselves in a very defensive manner: “We’re not here to promote war,” Lieutenant Jacobs repeatedly argued. “We’re here to train you how to prevent the enemy from massacring you in the event of war. If you didn’t know how to deploy your troops against enemy machine-gun fire from lower ground, or how to deploy them against a cone of fire from above, then you’d be massacred. And that’s what we’re here to prevent.”

The tall, sandy-haired major, soldierly even in civilian clothes, defending Mili Sci in CCNY’s largest lecture hall, packed with quiet though hostile students, interrupted his address when the redoubtable Professor Morris Raphael Cohen entered, entered like a Jewish thunderhead. “Of course I’m no match for Professor Cohen in a debate,” the major smiled deferentially.

“Then you shouldn’t talk!” snapped Professor Cohen — to tumultuous cheers from the assembled undergraduates — and Professor Cohen took over the forum. Ira felt a twinge of embarrassment — and then and afterward, a sneaking wave of sympathy for the major. He found himself disavowing the renowned professor’s tart riposte (as well as any ethnic allegiance with him). What arrogance, what intellectual intolerance. Strange and paradoxical too that involuntary demurral, mere sympathy and emotion, should better limn the shape of things to come than a highly touted intellect.

That spring too, a memorable occasion for Ira, Edith gave a cocktail party in the evening, to which Larry and he were invited. Chief guest was Marcia Meede, the same scintillating personage whom a little more than a year ago Larry had so proudly escorted to her seat, together with her enigmatic friend, at a poetry reading of the Arts Club. Spiky in brilliance the lady was, unanswerable her retort and epigram. Fortunately, or unfortunately, she was snub-nosed and homely, affording fantasy no leeway to stray, though attention often did. What long dark stretches of homage he had to maintain for the honor of being there. A short time ago, she had returned to America after completing a study of the mores and customs of the natives of a South Sea island. It was a spectacular, a daring and pioneer venture for a young woman, a venture — so Edith informed Ira later — that Dr. Boas, the eminent head of the anthropology department at Columbia, where Marcia was studying toward her doctoral, was very reluctant to have her undertake, gave his consent to only after much trepidation. Needless alarm, Ira snickered to himself, after Edith told him. She had been under the protection of a U.S. naval base there, to which she retired at night. Besides, who would have dared assail such spiky brilliance as Marcia’s? It was like a spiked collar on a mastiff. She could quell anybody, anybody’s incipient hard-on, with the swift deployment of her sharp rejoinders backed by her invincible homeliness. Jesus, he had such vulgar thoughts, but he couldn’t help it. How could her husband stand her? He was with her at the party: Lewlyn Craddock, tall and engaging, wearing greenish tweeds, a genial, pleasant man with a ready chuckle that often punctuated his dry, nasal tone of voice. He had just been appointed to an instructorship in the sociology department at CCNY — Edith laughed at the slight awkwardness of introducing a pair of CCNY undergraduates to a CCNY instructor — and he laughed too, agreeably and warmly, when he shook hands with them, showing not the least condescension, but asking them about their intended careers and favorite courses and whether they felt the college answered their needs. And he listened with a kind of self-effacing gravity to the replies. Though abashed at first to be on such equal terms with a CCNY instructor, one who didn’t keep his distance the way the others did, Ira soon felt at ease with the man, talked freely to him, and listened to him in turn. He had been to England on a grant from his theological seminary, during his wife’s stay in Samoa. He spoke glowingly of long jaunts through the English countryside as a relief from his research into European methods of birth control, the purpose of the grant.

“Are you a — are you still a—” Ira gesticulated. “You’re a clergyman?” Thank God he remembered the proper word.

“I’m an Anglican priest.”

“A priest?” It was hard to suppress that start of surprise. “So excuse me, how is that?”

“Are you referring to the cloth or the collar?” Lewlyn chuckled.

“Color? Oh, collar! No. I mean—” Ira thumbed in the direction of Marcia. “You’re her husband. You got a wife.”

“Marriage of priests is permitted in the Anglican Church,” said Lewlyn. No chuckle accompanied his reply, and he seemed thoughtful. “We resemble the Catholic Church in most ways, except for obedience to the Pope. And we don’t take vows of celibacy. Does that answer your question?”

“Yeah, thanks. I don’t know much about the Christian religion. Just what I’ve read, and that’s not much. So if somebody says priest, I think of the Catholic Church. Around where I live, almost everyone’s Irish.”

“Where is that?”

“In East Harlem. On 119th Street.”

“119th Street!” Lewlyn exclaimed. “We do too.”

“You do? Where?”

“In an apartment house near Columbia University.”

“Oh, that’s different. Gee. Some difference.”

Lewlyn chuckled. “I suppose it is.”

Drinks in hand, a mix of grapefruit juice and bootleg gin, delivered by the Italian janitor of the house, the two had moved into a corner of the room. Sitting on the burlap-covered couch, Marcia was speaking to an admiring group of Edith’s colleagues at the university, Boris and John Vernon among them, and two or three others of the English faculty, whom Ira knew only slightly, and poets, friends, Léonie, who had given the reading at the Arts Club the same evening Marcia had attended. Ira could hear her say that Scribner had paid her a handsome advance on her doctoral dissertation to be published as a book. And there was Edith across the room, smiling her indulgent, amiable smile, speaking to Larry, while her eyes searched for Lewlyn; then catching Ira’s gaze, answering with amused, deprecating expression, as if sharing something.