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

In the meantime, on Tuesday, came a musician friend of M’s and freelance writer for the Albuquerque Journal , an oboist, Leslie H, together with her escort, John O, a tuba player, for the purpose of obtaining an autograph of Ira’s youthful novel (Leslie H having been discouraged from seeking an interview because of exaggerated rumors of Ira’s reclusiveness). Ira used the occasion of their visit to inquire about rooms, locations and rents — with Jane in mind — likely places to advertise for roommates, such as the UNM bulletin board; and in addition, to enlist Leslie H in assisting in Jane’s settling in Albuquerque, if so inclined. .

III

With graduation assured, with discipline relaxed, Ira’s class was left to its own devices, the individuals free to move around the classroom if they wished, free to talk. More than ever, the classroom seemed snug, sheltering them for a last time from the vicissitudes of a new stage in their lives, only hours away from beginning, the pragmatic and demanding outside world. Snow on the windowsills sealed up the cozy interiors of rows of wooden desks and slate blackboards, as if they were old dispensations, while the wooden clock above the blackboard ticked away the last minutes it would be in their view. No one misbehaved; misbehavior no longer seemed fitting, all but purposeless, when most of class would soon be on a par with the teacher in earning their own livelihood. Some read: reading material of their own choosing, books, magazines. As the genial homeroom teacher, Mr. Conway, suggested, some were engaged in writing a farewell letter of appreciation to Mr. O’Reilly; others sat in a circle around Mr. Conway discussing job opportunities and their ambitions. For some reason, when looking around the room, Ira’s throat became choked with unshed tears. Was it because he sensed the imminent, irreversible parting, not only of ways but of mind — of mind, of outlook? They were going to work, most of them; they were going to be shaped by concerns, by all kinds of aims and cares and activities from which he would be excluded, just as he was going to be shaped by those that would exclude them. Even though they and he might live on the same street, as some did right now, and see one another often, still they would be disparate forever. If they were different now, it was still only latent; they would differ soon, irrevocably. He made up his mind then and there not to attend the graduation exercises.

“Not even for me, for my sake?” Mom beseeched that evening. “That little crumb of comfort, my reward for these eight years of nurturing you, you would deny me? Why?”

“I don’t wanna go,” he said sullenly.

“You’re ashamed of your Jewish parents, is that the reason?”

He blustered: “Don’t bother me! There’s lots of other Jewish kids gonna be there.” (And yet he recognized that that, too, might be an unadmitted element of his refusal.) “I wanna go to work. Everybody else is going to work. Nearly everybody. They got jobs already.”

“ Noo , wouldn’t that be better?” Pop looked up from Der Tag . “I ask you. The father may be a worker. The son not. Many and many a Jewish boy goes to work. How would it harm him? He could go nights to high school if he chose. That would be an upstanding son. He’d bring in his share of his keep. It would be easier for everyone. And you not? You’re beginning to snuffle about a Persian lamb coat. A great deal sooner you could save for it; how your hoard would grow if he went to work, no?”

“Go deep under the sod, both of you!” Mom bridled. “Whether I want a Persian lamb coat or not, he goes to high school!”

“ Shoyn ,” Pop baited. “She glowers.”

“And why shouldn’t I, when a father connives to have his son become a toiler, a turf-layer?” Mom retorted. And to Ira: “Becoming it would be, too, God forbid, that the earth close over you also for whom I wept and strove all these years.”

“I’ll get my diploma anyway!” Ira yelled. “I’m going back there next week to junior high.”

“Go. True son of mine you are, indeed.”

Cajoled by principal and teachers alike to enroll in the newly instituted commercial junior high school, those few of the class who did not go to work remained in P.S. 24, although the very few who insisted on attending a senior high school did so of their own choice. Graduates of other “grammar” schools in Harlem and its vicinity, lured by the prospect of learning shorthand, typing, bookkeeping by attending school only one more year, swelled the roster of the junior high. (For the first time, Ira saw black students in the classroom — subdued, self-effacing, but black!) He had always despised commercial courses, at least since becoming conscious, being made conscious by Gentiles and fellow Jews alike, that all Jews thought about was business: beezness.

But: “Knowing how to type and take shorthand, how to keep accounts and speak Spanish will be useful to you all the rest of your lives,” Mr. O’Reilly induced. “You’ll be repaid many times over for the time you spent taking these courses to learn these subjects. Remember what I told some of you about the marbles that those I didn’t lose were stolen from me. Don’t let the same thing happen to you. It won’t, if you take these courses. They’re true business courses. You’ll learn to be alert in these matters. And in today’s world you have got to be. And if you take them in P.S. 24, you’ll be getting as good instruction right here as they get in the High School of Commerce downtown, right here in the school you’ve always gone to and with the teachers you know and who know you.” Mr. O’Reilly’s tic tocked away as he talked.

Mr. Housman, the Geography teacher, became instructor of typing and shorthand, teaching both subjects with all the assiduous care and neatness of one who had but recently learned the skills himself. He showed the class how to erase errors in typing by tucking a sheet of paper under the erasure like a dustpan to catch the crumbs of rubber before they lodged in the new machines — and cuffed Ira soundly when he was caught ignoring the practice.

Mr. Sullivan taught bookkeeping as well as first-year high school English, and found it impossible to understand how Ira could be so discerning in the one and so abysmally obtuse in the other. And he said so in no uncertain terms. But why in hell you debited when you debited, and credited when you credited, eluded Ira continually, though classmates not as bright as he was seemed to understand quite readily. And how to keep an asset from slipping with protean ease into a liability — and back — was beyond his power. It was beyond Mr. Sullivan’s power also to explain the difference either — in any permanent way — so both teacher and pupil despaired. Mr. Kilcoyne, the dairyman from Yonkers, taught Civics, and Mr. Lennard, on the strength of numerous vacations spent in Puerto Rico, became transformed from an American History teacher to a Spanish teacher.

IV

Wracking arthritic nights, and the old man. . In his excruciating rigidity he needed M to lift him to a sitting position in bed. No need dwelling on it. A peculiar insight this pain bestowed, hackneyed and vivid at the same time: He was no more than a suffering member of the animal kingdom. .

Last night he intended having a discussion with M about his son Jess, a discussion he hoped to tape; but conditions were inopportune, and he never brought the matter up. Now it swung in a dull, slow arc in his mind. After his return from Africa — from Tanzania, where he had taught school, from Johannesburg where he had operated a computer, from a long hitchhike to Dakar — Jess seemed by his estranged manner to have come to the decision no longer to communicate his innermost thoughts and problems with his parents, his father in particular. And with some brief interludes, he continued the practice — expanded it, until only the most surface topics were subject of discourse, those addressing the least personal concerns. He shunned, he guarded against any kind of serious interchange. And with Jane’s revelation of Jess’s actions, a complex of hypotheses emerged in Ira’s mind: That had his son spoken of his “problems,” had he and his father interchanged reflections, or better, he and both his parents, his behavior might have been modified to a point where he could not have treated Jane so shabbily, as was evidently the case, and with such appalling cruelty and callousness.