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

— I’m afraid I do.

Yes? Even if all that had happened were eventually to happen, given this cunning, wily, devious — and wholly unscrupulous, treacherous and relentlessly scheming entity — and now without, one must remember, for whatever it was worth, any boundaries in orthodox Judaism, any shorings, stays, restraints, the trauma could not possibly have become so single-minded nor gone so deep, so profoundly determined his behavior. . so vitiated his character, undermined integrity and decisiveness in deed and opinion.

And once again, M comes to mind, through that inveterate, nay, chronic fog of my own configuring, sitting there in a navy-blue uniform shirt — a park ranger’s perhaps or a game warden’s I bought at the flea market for myself, but it proved too small — sitting at her desk immersed in the unaccompanied cello sonata she has been working on, and she speaks now and then of unaccustomed fatigue, she, who, when young, would often not begin practicing at the piano for hours before eight P.M., speaks of fatigue, good reason for selfish anxiety on my part, that one so fine, so good, of such esteemed American “stock” and first and foremost so sound, should have chosen to join her life with mine, and not without fair insight into the nature of her choice, is — I throw up my hands, Ecclesias.

— You might as well. It’s a miracle.

I

In the winter of 1921, after completing a year in their newly initiated junior high school, Ira Stigman and Farley Hewin began attending Stuyvesant High School. It was downtown, on the east side of the city, and because attendance at the school was far in excess of its capacity, two overlapping sessions had been instituted: an earlier one for upperclassmen, and a later one, beginning before noon, for freshmen and lowerclassmen.

The new Lexington Avenue IRT subway line had recently been opened, and Ira took that to school, getting on at 116th Street, changing at 86th, to be whisked downtown past two express stations to 14th, and then walking east the few blocks to the high school. With what schoolboy joy he and Farley would greet each other in the late morning when each by different routes or different trains, taken at different stations, by some magic art would arrive at the same street corner simultaneously. What windfall of happiness Ira felt. Soon, he would have to share these walks to school with others: soon, an admiring entourage would grow up around Farley, would fall in step with him. Still, no matter how many trooped along, when he spied Ira, Farley always waited for him to come to his side, a clear indication of whom he had singled out for his chum. Ira reveled in the security of that knowledge.

For it was almost as if Ira had divined it, as if his intimation of destiny were truly inspired. At the end of calisthenics in the gym class the second week of school, a short track event was held, a sixty-yard dash diagonally across the gym floor. In the first heat, a compact, heavy-thighed youth scurried into first place, in another heat a scrawny young black sprinted to the finish line ahead of the pack. Who placed first in the heat that he was in, Ira didn’t know, only that he trailed as usual. And then came the heat in which Farley competed; he won easily. With competition winnowed down to finalists came the deciding heat. The winners of the preliminary trials were pitted against one another. Grinning in secret complacence at the foreknowledge he alone possessed, and yet with heartbeat quickened, Ira watched destiny unfold. The black youth darted into the lead ahead of the pack, ahead of the heavy-thighed boy, who was in front of Farley. And then the miracle that only Ira expected took place. Those amazing, hammering strides of Farley brought him abreast of the others two-thirds of the way, and propelled him into the van at the finish — first across the line!

It was scarcely an exaggeration to say that Farley became a celebrity that very afternoon. Admirers trailed him to the subway kiosk that same evening after school let out, and Ira, Farley’s closest friend, became a notable by sheer contiguity.

In the next few weeks, Farley was relieved from regular gym exercises and given intensive training during free periods to fit him for the hundred-yard dash. At the end of September, the first of the high school interscholastic meets was held at the Armory in uptown Manhattan. Farley was entered, and won the silver medal for second place. A newcomer, a freshman, one with the barest minimum of training, inexperienced and untried under the strain of intense competition, he was hailed as sensational. His performance was featured on the sports pages of all the metropolitan newspapers. The new “Stuyvesant High School Meteor,” the sportswriters saluted him.

In the meantime, Ira, in his laggard, groping fashion, despite his pride in Farley’s achievements, his pride in being Farley’s best friend, was chafed into vague recognition that he was unhappy in Stuyvesant: he wasn’t suited to the place. His sloppiness, his ineptitude with tools, his incompatibility with material precision, his aversion to the strict, the mechanical — he could no more define what troubled him than he could define a cloud. It was more shape than thought, an undulant image, like the face of the shop teacher, quizzically watching Ira’s clumsy use of the scratch gauge on a piece of lumber. The shop teacher said “pattern”; Ira said “pattern.” At a later date, Ira might have attempted an epigram about Proteus encountering Procrustes, but that shirked coming to grips with the plain facts of what was wrong with him.

Undoubtedly his discontent stemmed from the sheer unsuitability of his temperament, aptitude, and background for the kind of technical training Stuyvesant afforded. His inability to adjust, his dilatoriness in conforming to a new regimen, the unaccustomed late hours of freshman attendance, all seemed to give substance to a sense of having veered away from potential, strayed from some dim affinity. His first month’s grades were abysmal, much worse than Farley’s, whose were respectable by comparison. Ira failed in every subject except English.

Lord. Ira realized how in this eighth decade of his life, little in so many ways the adolescent juvenile he portrayed, or strove to re-create, resembled the “normal” youngster of that age and period. The differences were too many to go into, but the greatest difference, perhaps he deluded himself, was in the matter of his way of mooning about the opposite sex, about females.

His mind was already seared, his mind was already cauterized. He didn’t have to dream about romance, enlarge on it with all the tender frills and streamers that in the fancy of others his age composed the fringes of the youthful crush. He never had one — well, perhaps at the very outset of the fateful spring of his twelfth year, when he experienced — for how short a while — the first vague, diffuse writhing within him of infatuation for Sadie Lefkowitz. She was the sister of two delinquent brothers, one of whom was shot while holding up a crap game; the other barely escaped with his life after falling from the roof to the awning of the big Third Avenue German butcher shop from which he was trying to steal whatever he could get his hands on. Sadie lived in the tenement three doors east. She had rosy cheeks; she wore her long underwear tucked into her long black stockings (and, when last seen, was an usherette in a movie house, and for hire). But Sadie was that token, as it were, to furnish him with some notion of the adolescent yearning for its idol.