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

Otherwise, he cared nothing for a book if it wasn’t a narrative, if it didn’t appeal to his feeling and imagination, the way a story did. It didn’t have to be prose; it could rhyme, it could be poetry, as long as it told a story: like The Ancient Mariner . And yes, once he found a book in the empty flat upstairs. It was called the Prisoner of Chillon —by somebody named Byron. That was wonderful. “My hair is white but not with years, nor grew it white in a single night as men’s have grown through sudden fears.” What a wonderful story! The prisoner made friends even with the spiders. But you had to read the prologue over and over again, the invocation it was called, before you understood it: “Immortal spirit of the chainless mind, brightest in dungeons, Liberty thou art. .”

Maybe it would be that way with other poems if he wanted to spend the time figuring them out: But all he asked for was a story, that was all he craved; stories not only moved fancy, they held you, and while they did, they told you how people felt, what they saw and heard, and how they lived. That was the important thing: They were part of a world, one that maybe didn’t exist anymore, but that was the only way you could know it.

Oh, stories told you everything; you could guess what they often only barely suggested, you could daydream in their world, you could live in it; you could change what happened in your own mind, and then figure out the different kind of story that would have happened. And names, all kinds of names stayed in your head, like real people, not mythology, “characters” they were called, like Jean Valjean and Huck Finn and D’Artagnan, and David Copperfield and Martin Eden. They took you into their world, yes, the way Farley did. They took you into their world, even more than Farley did. You were more in their world than in the Jewish world, in their world where you wanted to be, and now that he was what he was and couldn’t break away from their world and didn’t want to, maybe some day he’d find a way out of his Jewish slum world into their world.

He knew more about their world than any Jewish kid in the block, any Jewish kid he knew, any kid he knew, Farley, anyone in the class. He knew, because he had to know, because it was his only hope, because he had nowhere else to go and only a rubble of what was left inside to dwell on: his Jewishness: Mom, matzahs on Passover, Zaida greedily pumping the fresh bulkies to test which was the tenderest. Jewishness, it would be like leaving nothing. Nearly. .

XIX

Mr. Lennard arose a little more quickly than usual from big George Repke’s lap in the back seat, arose, flushed and turned pale. Not because he had been caught in the act of sitting in a boy’s lap by Mr. O’Reilly on his opening the door. No, but because Mr. O’Reilly was escorting a mild, white-haired gentleman with a white mustache and goatee into the classroom. Mr. O’Reilly introduced the distinguished-looking newcomer to Mr. Lennard. The two shook hands, and after a minute or two, Mr. O’Reilly left. Flushed again, and glowering at the class menacingly and uneasily — obvious warning signs against misbehavior — Mr. Lennard introduced Dr. Zamora: He was the supervisor of Spanish in the New York high schools, and he had dropped in to learn how “our junior high school was progressing in the study of Spanish.” Did the class understand? Of course they did, and Mr. Lennard expected everyone to do his best.

“Naturally, Doctor Zamora,” Mr. Lennard addressed the bland and quietly attentive supervisor, “the term has just begun, and I’m afraid you won’t find us quite up to our best.”

“I am prepared to make allowances,” Dr. Zamora smiled. And to the class: “ Cómo están ustedes? ”

To which they answered in ragged variance, some, “Muy bien, Señor. ” And some, “ Buenos días, Señor .” Mr. Lennard bit his lip, frowned — in ominous displeasure.

And he continued to frown as the class fumbled every question or worse, gazed mutely at Dr. Zamora. For one thing, after Mr. Lennard’s clear American-Spanish, Dr. Zamora’s Spanish-Spanish was confusing. Behind Dr. Zamora’s back, Mr. Lennard’s glower deepened. Still, Dr. Zamora seemed unfazed, patient, undiscouraged. “ Quién es Don Zuixote? ” He asked. The question had an air of finality about it, as if he wished to leave on an optimistic note. “Don Quixote,” his white mustache and beard transmitted to the mystified class. “ Si, Don Zuixote de la Mancha. En Inglés, si ustedes quieren contestar. Quién es el? You may answer in English,” Dr. Zamora encouraged. “Who is Don Quixote?”

And now Mr. Lennard came to Dr. Zamora’s assistance, but tacitly. Behind Dr. Zamora, at his very shoulder, and so close to his periphery of vision no student would have had the impudence to do that to a teacher: With his round lips writhing eloquently, aided by fervent grimace, Mr. Lennard kept forming visual syllables: Don Quicksote! Don Quicksote!

At last Ira understood. “Don Quicksote!” he blurted. “I read about him. He had a fight with a windmill.”

Mr. Lennard deflated with relief.

“ Sí, sí ,” said the kindly Doctor Zamora. “ Pero en Español dicemos , Don Quixote. In Spanish we say, Don Quixote. Repeat after me, please: Don Quixote de la Mancha. Everyone.”

“Donkeyhotay de la Mancha,” the class parroted with right good will.

“ Muy bien. Once more: What is the name of the most famous character in Spanish literature?”

“Donkeyhotay,” a few began and the rest swelled the chorus.

“ Muy bien . And the author of Don Quixote was named?” Dr. Zamora scanned the class.

Ira raised his hand. “His name was Cervantes.”

“ Se llama Cervantes. Muy bien .”

Mr. Lennard exuded gratification.

XX

September neared its end; the hot weather moderating, the mens’ straw hats disappearing. .

It was the first fall of the new decade, decade of the ’20s, that portentous and turbulent and innovative decade, probably to prove the most important decade of the century, decade of Einstein, decade of Bohr, decade of Eliot, decade of Joyce, Stein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Duncan, of Martha Graham, the Dadaists, of Spengler, of Hubble and Shockley, of island universes, innovations in cinema, Kellogg Pacts and Reparations, of Lenin and Trotsky’s success in defeating the White Russians, of aborted revolutions elsewhere, assassinations of the German Communist leaders, Luxembourg and Liebknecht, of Lenin’s death and Stalin’s ascendancy, of the Leagues of Nations manqué, of the triumph of American Isolationism, the repudiation of Woodrow Wilson’s dreams, of Republican Party sweeps at the polls, decade of Prosperity and Normalcy, epoch of Cal Coolidge, of cartoons of Germans trundling wheelbarrows full of devalued deutsche marks to buy a few groceries, of money-raising drives and benefit performances on behalf of starving Armenians cruelly massacred by the Turks, of wildly soaring stocks, and fortunes made overnight on Wall Street, and culminating at the end of the decade in the great Stock Market crash in 1929 when erstwhile millionaires hurled themselves from high windows. .

Yes, but the kid was only fourteen, Ira brooded. And besides, he had already become so self-engrossed, become internalized by a veritable psychic implosion. Nay, he had become tsemisht, the stunned, dynamited fish, and consequently, less responsive than he might otherwise have been to the great changes and upheavals occurring in art, in science, in the economy, changes within nations and between them.

True. But why introduce that now? Perhaps he ought to reserve all, or some of it, till later, unfolding events parallel with young Ira’s development. Well, perhaps he’d come back to it, to that and the hobble-skirts the women wore, to that and the stores that appeared on 125th Street selling army-navy surplus. The best thing to do, he thought: Best thing he could do — maybe — would be to excerpt sundry articles, dispatches, editorials from, say, the New York Times, and let it go at that, let the reader wade through the sociopolitical spate of happenings of the century’s third decade in the appropriate studies of the period, and form his own impression. Lazy man’s way, way of default and ineptitude.