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

Behind his back they called him “Shitdown Shullivan,” but nobody dared smile when ordered to “Shit down” in his class. He taught English — he was a C.P.A. and moonlighted after school hours as an accountant for several small firms.

“Yoursh truly, Johnny Dooley,” Mr. Sullivan taught his class how to conclude a business letter. “Bad, worsh, wursht,” Mr. Sullivan mocked the scholar faltering over the comparison of an adjective. Or he might vary reproach with “Shikk, shikker, dead.” And for the poor, stumbling reader’s benefit: “Vosh von haben gaben schlobben, gaben schlobben haben.” And one day, to Ira’s zany-pretending, shame-faced chagrin, when he was called on to read and explain the passage from James Russell Lowell’s “The Vision of Sir Launfal” that went “Daily with souls that cringe and plot, we Sinai’s climb and know it not.” Ira did explain; but with so much protective, self-disparaging antic of demeanor that Mr. Sullivan snapped in waspish rebuke, “Thatsh right. Make ’em laugh. You know more than any of ’em. But make a boob o’yourshelf. Shit down!”

Flustered, ears burning, Ira sat down. Mr. Sullivan had found him out, had seen through him. Mr. Sullivan knew who he was.

Mr. O’Reilly, the principal, was gaunt and gray, with a tic ever creasing his lean, severe face. In his sober vestments, unvarying dark clothes, he looked more like a priest than a school principal. Perhaps it had once been his aim to be a priest. He must have worn the wing collar and tie of conservative attire of those days, or perhaps even more conservative, more old-fashioned, the high, stiff collar and cravat that Pop wore in his wedding portrait of 1905. Whenever Ira tried to visualize him, Mr. O’Reilly always wore a high, stiff collar — but turned backwards, like a priest’s. Energetic, though surely in his early seventies, he was wont to enter an English class with startling quickness, shut the door behind him, and stand listening a minute, his probing blue eyes scanning the faces before him. Then, with rapid, decisive nod and movement of hand, he would take over the class. First, he would detach his starched cuffs and placing them like upright cylinders on the desk, take a piece of chalk in his hand, and face twitching, write on the blackboard: “Time flies we cannot their speed is too great.” And he would ask for a volunteer who thought he could punctuate the string of words correctly? No one could. He had an endless store of these devices; he seemed to come with a fresh supply for every grade: “What do you think we shave you for nothing and give you a drink.” How should the barber punctuate this sign so it would be free of ambiguity? These and so many more.

They gave Ira an insight — dimly — of a world he never knew, and never would know: an insight into the traditional Catholic parochial school world with its rigid, fixed, age-old accretion of subject matter, often ingenious, but always invariant, and reassuring because it was invariant — like the whole gamut of correct usage: shall and will: They shall not pass! “My right is crushed,” Marshal Foch wired Clemenceau, the French premier, “My left is in retreat. I will attack with my center.” The whole gamut: the difference between lay and lie, may and can, who and whom, like and as, drilled over and over again, as if, Ira reflected afterward, life depended on their correct usage, the life of street urchins, slum adolescents like himself. Obviously, the seeds fell on fertile ground sometimes. But one couldn’t help ponder on the vast gap between the septuagenarian and juveniles in his charge. It was more than mere age, the span of years — superfluous to say so. It was a qualitatively different age, qualitatively different in traditions — different in prospects, perspectives, in the midst of a war that would mark the rending of Western attitudes, perceptions, would mark the repudiation, the rejection of the precepts Mr. O’Reilly tried to instill, so earnestly and for the most part vainly.

Ira wished he could recall verbatim that strange, anomalous moment when Mr. O’Reilly suddenly seemed to depart from himself and began expounding for the class some elementary ideas — as he interpreted them — of Nietzsche. Nietzsche, of all people! Strength is the main thing, said Mr. O’Reilly: You can do anything in the world you want, bad or good, commit any sin (and lowering his voice, as if he knew how greatly he was violating propriety), behave badly with women. But strength was what people admired and respected: power. What a strange disquisition from an aged Victorian, confessing to a class of adolescents who barely understood — who he knew would barely understand — this almost furtive disclosure of the repudiation of his straitlaced nineteenth-century respectability: “I became a school teacher, and not a businessman,” he told the class, “because those marbles or tops I didn’t lose, the other boys stole from me.” And years later — how many? a mere fifteen — when Ira visited Mr. O’Reilly to present him with a copy of the novel his pupil of P.S. 24 had written, the once taut, strenuous, commanding presence was now only a tremulous, frail, lonely old man in a bathrobe, who remembered not at all the kid he had counseled once, wisely, but to as little avail to overcome his provocative grin as Mr. O’Reilly his tic.

And there was an elderly woman who also taught English, Miss Delany, even older than Mr. O’Reilly — frail and decrepit and slow, her white hair a foggy yellow with age. They said she kept a peepot in her closet. She was the one who made everybody in the class memorize Cardinal Wolsey’s farewell speech in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII : “Farewell! a long farewell to all my greatness!” Why? again why? What was the relevance, the timeliness, the usefulness that would justify trying to inculcate such lofty sentences in the mind of slum juveniles like himself, kids of immigrant parents or rambunctious offspring of uncouth Irish?

He himself bore the memorized speech within him all his life, like some kind of noble monument of the spirit. But did anyone else? Not to flatter himself, did anyone else? Why should they? Relevance was important; timeliness and usefulness played important roles in retention. Why was he so sure that only he retained the great speech after so many years, and no one else did? And if he did, why did he? If it were true that he alone did, why was it? Was that a sign he was already showing an inclination toward literature, a susceptibility, something that Mr. Sullivan had discerned and no one else had? Ira didn’t know. He had lived with the quotation so long that he even thought he detected a certain ambiguity about it, as if the Bard had forgotten the initial figure of speech or the initial thrust of the metaphor. The little wanton boys that swam on bladders in a sea of glory were finally swept away by a rude stream that would forever hide them. But he was maundering.

Mr. Lennard was a homosexual, a flagrant fag. What were they called today? Deviants, fairies, gays? (A pox on ’em for besmirching such a pretty word as gay.) Well, deviants, fags, fairies, they would have to wait—

Listen. Ira was sure he heard the continuous cry of cranes or geese overhead. How early for them to return: the 17th of February. That meant an early spring, or was that an old wives’ tale, an Indian sign? E come i gru van cantando lor lai, facendo in aer di se lunga riga , Dante wrote, if the words were rightly remembered. . Knock off, go outdoors and see if you can locate their long arrowhead formation, not always easy, they were so diaphanous when high, melting into azure space.

— Press the red Escape button, and save.

I thank you, Ecclesias. .

XIII

In 1918 also, it seemed to him in retrospect that his reading preferences underwent a change. Whether the change occurred because he attended grammar school now and was entitled to a library card that gave him the privilege of drawing books from the downstairs, or adult, reading room; or whether, like an apparition inseparable from his recollection of that distant period, the change from the mythic to the actual took place accidentally — and drastically — he was no longer sure. It made a good story, he told himself. There it was: the evening in spring when he thought he had at last found the treasure he had so long sought — the Purple Fairy Book —and checked it out with other books he was borrowing, sliding the pile of three or four volumes along the oak counter where the thin, spinsterlike librarian in the pince-nez stamped one’s library card. So far so good, except for one thing: There was something awry with the time frame of the picture, with the ambience of the moment of his borrowing the books. He was on the downstairs, the adult floor of the library — that was his distinct impression — and the lady with the pince-nez was the head-librarian: As befitted her rank, she was the one who always stamped books downstairs. The chances of the Purple Fairy Book , or of any fairy book, being downstairs were very slight. Hence it was something he had concocted in his own imagination, a sheer figment: When he got home, and opened his treasure to revel in new variants of the exquisite and chivalrous, the book turned out to be Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn . Outrage at misfortune changed into absorption; as he read, he became engrossed; vociferous disappointment changed into enjoyment, into mirth, into complete ravishment. Oh, this was wonderful, wonderful, the real world, the homey, though real world. Though not his in the asphalt grids of Harlem, but by the side of that faraway Mississippi River, still the story dealt with the plain and everyday, funny and real and wonderful. Were there others like it? There must be.