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

Anticlimax, Ira told himself. The two anarchists were dead as doornails, and history seemed to mark time with disjointed postmortems.

Ira took notice of Dalton, the short thickset man, a lawyer, Ira learned, who was drinking a glass of bootleg gin. “I find the purport, the message, if you wish, objectionable,” Dalton loudly interjected about Edna Millay’s poems. “It’s wholly negative and despondent. The death of the two martyrs hasn’t ended the fight for civil liberties. It isn’t over.”

And Louise, tall, goddesslike, and certain, responded, “That’s entirely irrelevant. It’s a bad poem.”

Which elicited from the thickset man a heated: “You’ve just made me realize it’s bad because it’s limited to her own emotions.”

“And just whose emotions should it have come out of?”

“It concerns us all. It’s not a private matter,” Dalton continued. “It’s of epic proportions. All who worked so hard on the case, and made so many sacrifices for the two men, and often at great personal risk. Men and women at every level from a needle trades worker to a history professor.” He became vehement. “We may become discouraged at times, but we’re not demoralized. She’s , Millay’s, demoralized. I can assure you the seed hasn’t been planted under a cloud, as she expresses it. And it hasn’t been planted in sour soil, as she says. And we haven’t forfeited our patrimony.”

Disjointed postmortems. Ira felt gloomy. He didn’t know why, either. It wasn’t just the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti that made him feel that way: more grumpy than gloomy. His own thoughts maybe, his everlasting hemming himself in with what he was. Last time, liquor had freed him temporarily — and even then, look what happened: he had begun to take his clothes off in the subway. Suppose he had started unbuttoning his pants, before the trainman shook him awake — in front of everyone!

Anyway, he wasn’t going to let the bathtub gin get the better of him on this occasion. He nursed his drink, sipped a little — now and then — and tried to forget his glass altogether, put it down on the floor next to his chair, when his fingertips chilled. Yeah, history felt as if it had gone to pieces, had exploded, slow-motion shrapnel floating around in ugly unidentifiable scraps. And yet nothing really stopped — Tunney was still going to fight Dempsey again, Chaplin was still getting divorced. The newspapers were just as full today as they were when he was conked on the bean with newspaper bludgeons: my head is bloody but unbowed. Baloney. Maybe he felt let down because he had given Mr. Kelly notice he was quitting next week. That was part of it. He had told Burgess too.

“I’m sorry you’re goin’,” said Burgess. “I wish they was all like you.”

Who was the “they”? Ira teased the tiny hint absently: Jews, who else? That seemed to put an end to things. Nice guy, Burgess. You wished what he wished for — and then you didn’t. You knew it couldn’t be, and you knew what you were. And Ira had looked forward so to the evening at Edith’s. He had a haircut at that strict German-Jewish barber’s on Park Avenue, scrubbed and washed leisurely, with no geology field trip to take up the afternoon — all his summer courses over — walked as slowly as he could to Lexington Avenue and 116th Street, and then to the West Side shuttle, leisurely, not to sweat up again.

Ha. Arrived. Introduced. In the room the women come and go, talkin’ of Bartolomeo. . The guests seemed steeped now in twilight. How pleasant the living room was without busy electric lights. The guests waded about in the sepia twilight with glasses in their hands, shadowy, two-dimensional silhouettes, moving or standing or sitting languidly around an urn, you could say, an urn containing the bones of the two martyrs, if your imagination was as crazy as his was. Bet he’d remember that beautiful half-light, long after he forgot about Sacco and Vanzetti, that beautiful half-light: late afternoon’s chiaroscuro, and all figures in it two-dimensional. Serene notions about things that weren’t serene drifted around in the twilight, if you could forget sex for a minute — it — what’d he call it? Id? Spikes of sunshine through chinks in the shop skylight, and old red mule dozing on its paws beside you, like a sleeping dog. They didn’t crucify you, they electrocuted you was what it meant; if only he were a poet. . Came Juno in darkening pink — there was a poet, flesh and blood and svelte, and with long gams. Followed by tall, proper Professor Berg, breaking away from John Vernon. Boy, try to connect John Vernon, not-a-bad-guy homo, with Larry, whom Edith had not so long ago tried to rescue, Larry who wasn’t here, and with himself who was here, and boy, figure that out. And now Lewlyn teetering between Edith and the other woman in England — how could he dream such a thing? Ira couldn’t, and yet he did; he watched his own future teeter with Lewlyn’s. Boyoboy—

“Oh, it’s quite possible, even for one with Puritan inhibitions like mine, given the incentive.” Professor Berg elevated his glass.

“To be silly.”

“To be imaginative.”

Louise laughed incredulously. “You!”

“Yes. I can just see you with your nipples stained a deep purple.”

Ira could feel his toes curl.

“Berry, you must have spent half the night thinking that one up.” Louise looked around, in the tranquil sepia, at the other silhouettes. “Did anyone else hear that? Berry is becoming gamy. Berry, how bawdy.”

“I thought it was rather felicitous, you know: tit for tat. Ha-ha-ha!”

“Oh, no! To what depths have we sunk.”

“I definitely do not think Longfellow is a modern poet.”

“I didn’t say that.” Louise moved off purposefully in search of an ashtray, though there was one at Ira’s side. “I only repeated Tom Wolfe’s taunt. And I spared you his four-letter words. Why carp at me?”

“He’s so much bigger than you are. And a male besides. It so happens I’m heterosexual.”

“You may be, but your chemistry is all wrong.”

They moved out of range, as Lewlyn crossed the room and sat down beside Ira. “You’ve been very quiet.”

“I was just listening.” Ira grinned weakly. “I’ll tell you the truth. I’m afraid — after the last time.”

“The last time? Edith told me how eloquent you were.”

“Yeah, but was I ever stewed. I started to take my clothes off in the subway.”

Lewlyn threw his head back and laughed into the soft gloaming of the room. “Did you?”

“I only stopped because the trainman shook me.”

“Not because you discovered your pajamas were missing.”

Should he say “I don’t wear pajamas”? Ira debated. No. And aloud, “No.”

Lewlyn’s chuckle tapered to seriousness: “I came over to find out what the men at your shop said about the executions.”

“They didn’t say. Gee. This one bunch didn’t say. They just—” He interrupted himself when he saw Edith approach.

Lewlyn stood up — and belatedly, almost forgetting, Ira got to his feet.

“Oh, please don’t,” Edith said.

“I’ll take the piano stool,” said Lewlyn.

“I probably can’t stay more than a minute,” Edith said. She didn’t look as radiant as the last time, even though Lewlyn was present, but solemn, despite glint of gold-and-ruby earrings. “Isn’t Berry a scream? Poor Berry. Trying so hard to break through his straitlaced New England background.”

“What was that Tom Wolfe said?” Lewlyn asked.

“Oh, he shouted across the faculty desks at Berry — and I wouldn’t be surprised if Dr. Watt heard all the four-letter words in his office: ‘You still think Longfellow is a modern poet.’ Louise would get wind of it. Am I interrupting you two?”