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

The family trio sitting beside them got to their feet, the young mother holding firmly to the child’s lifted hand, as the Broadway local pulled in. The old man carefully separated orange segments. Larry kept on speaking: “When I went to bed at night, I would think of things I would tell you tomorrow — storing them up, from my reading, Irving’s latest salesman’s gags. Do you remember the winter you stayed overnight in my room, so we could see the eclipse the next morning on the roof — when we were still in DeWitt Clinton — everything had twice the meaning when we did things together.”

“Yes? I felt that way too. All right.” Just what would he have to brace himself against? The outlines were becoming more defined.

“That night in that dusty old tent in your uncle’s summer hotel when your uncle brought that telegram from Edith, you were with me — we were together. When we shook the crowd after the soirée in her St. Mark’s Place apartment. And there was the cottage in Woodstock.”

“Yeah. And we visited her apartment in the Village together.” Ira wondered whether the crease of irony in his cheek would betray him. It didn’t.

“That’s what I mean.”

“So? Okay.”

“I’m making a kind of appeal. You were on my side from the beginning. Because you’ve become Edith’s confidant — I guess that is what you’d call it, right — doesn’t destroy for me what you were. I just don’t want you to cut me out of your life. I want to feel that I continue to share in it.”

“Oh.”

Larry made a peculiar motion, with rigid white fingers directed toward his heart. “You can’t let it all die.”

“And how do you intend to keep it alive?”

“By keeping our friendship alive: sharing your impressions about what you’re doing — if you’re writing — mostly what you’re thinking, feeling. And — anything else.”

“I don’t know, Larry. I’m not that generous, I guess.”

“No?”

“It’s the way I’m built. I don’t feel that kind of allegiance.” The more liquid the brown eyes looking into his, the more appealing the features, the more ruthless Ira had to be in Stygian caves forlorn, in subway caves forlorn. “I’m sorry, Larry, the best thing we can do is cut loose from each other. I’m going my own way.” Boy, that was brusque. Boy, that was cruel.

Larry’s breath snagged in his throat. He snuffed up tears. He would have run for cover, sought hiding place — Ira felt — if he could. The last ties were breaking. And there were others due to break, Ira reflected gloomily: he had to announce changes at home, renounce home — and Mom, say to her: or ever the silver cord be loosed, Mom, or the beaker be shattered in the chemistry lab, the threads be stripped off the screw, the battery shot, the what else is ruined? The straw Kelly bashed in at the end of summer.

“I’m thinking of leaving my long home on 119th Street, leaving Mom. Part of the time anyway,” Ira said aloud. Give the guy a decent interval, a chance to recover. Ira let a minute go by. The old gaffer at the other end still had a couple of orange segments left. Jumpin’ Jesus, the guy must be toothless to take so long. He probably was, masticating nose to chin. He probably had nothing else to do: orange peel in a bag, and licking the cleft between stuck, stiff fingers, while subway trains came and went, came and went, local and express: Bronx Park and Van Cortlandt, and Lenox Avenue, plunging into the tunnel at the end of the platform, an incandescent-stippled murk in which track and train disappeared at random. And the guy was young once; once the guy was young.

A pale, middle-aged man sat down, his hair the smoky hue of once-blond hair faded. And pouting with thought, he opened his newspaper: Polish. Hobo Canobo was the name the top of the paper seemed to spell out, almost like Hobo Canoe, Hoboken. But of course it wasn’t: in Cyrillic, half the time the alphabet was written backward. Polish was in Cyrillic, wasn’t it? Larry reached down, retrieved his briefcase. His full lips were scrolled in, features set into a determined equanimity.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Sure.” They stood up, paid their ritual respects at the edge of platform, leaning over to see what was coming. The guy was all right, wasn’t he? Leaning over that way? After the way he’d pointed to his heart.

“I think the next one’s mine,” said Larry.

“Oh, did I miss the local?”

“If I’m not mistaken,” Larry answered.

Suppress everything, Ira counseled himself: suppress everything. Anything you say is out of place. But Jesus, what a — academic, yeah, academic temptation to pitch it all away: destiny, destiny. Bullshit. Recover the old hobnob: come back to Aaron, Mavourneen, Mavourneen. Say to him: Listen, pal, doesn’t she give it up to anybody? Boy, that was vulgar: gutter smut. What the hell. Come back to each other the way they did after they parted with Edith at Woodstock. Not to jeopardize her job at the university. Not to be seen in the same train with a couple of freshman. Took different routes home, and skulked in the shadowy midship of the ferry boat when it grew dark. . to hide the ten-day growth of beard on their chin-chops. Was that ever hilarious: Larry rid of the strain of courting an older woman, Ira rid of the strain of good conduct, the two youths howled with mirth. Do it in reverse: your turn now. Never. Never. Never.

“That’s a Lenox Avenue train coming in.” Larry took another quick look down the track. “I must not have seen your local.”

“White and green headlight. I guess you did,” Ira confirmed. “It’s mine. I’ll see you in the alcove.” And as the train ranged into the station: “Where you going?”

“I’m going to tear over to the express side. I think I hear one. Abyssinia.”

Larry broke into a quick trot toward the downstairs exit. He was right about the train. And apparently in time. The Broadway express charged into the station a few seconds after the Harlem local had arrived, and the local kept waiting, until the magisterial express pulled out. And then the local, which Ira had boarded, left, gathered speed rapidly — and insolently overtook its ponderous rival. . sped by the last cars. . until almost abreast of the first — and there was Larry on his express, on the opposite seat of an opposite train, his eyes raised perusing subway ads, oblivious of Ira traveling parallel at the same speed. And so for a few seconds, and only a few, they traveled within view of each other, as if they were still pals, still cronies, once again.

I

Seemly oddly mundane, squeezed between the two narrow stylish office buildings, with ornamentation and lofty balcony and fluted column embedded in their facades — and dwarfed by their height as well — the three-story building that housed the Union Square Business School had the appearance of a chalk box — a chalk box with windows, with the wall painted blue. A flight up, Ira could see intermittent rows of typewriters in sunken typewriter tables at which girls sat, busily transcribing from steno manuals beside them. A flight above, a woman with a yellow pencil in her hair and a book in her hand walked to the window, glanced out, and moved away, her lips moving as if she were dictating to a class. Earmarks, repugnant earmarks of the business school. Ira rested his briefcase on the low stone wall surrounding Union Square Park across the street: the only thing not in view was the bookkeeping class, that damned farrago of debits and credits, and accounts receivable and payable. Hadn’t old man Sullivan back in junior high gone wild with him over his inability to determine when one debited and when one credited? Makeshift junior high school, and the blue veins crinkled on Mr. Sullivan’s temples: shtand up, shit down. She was in there somewhere. She had to be. He had such lousy luck. All that had to happen now was for Stella to skip school today. That would cap everything. Ah, no. There went the chime.