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

God Almighty! Some kind of wholly irrational, wholly impossible urge clamored within Ira as he typed: I’ll barter, I’ll swap you the next ten million seconds, any ten million seconds of my life, for ten seconds of lucidity way back then, ten seconds of caginess, ordinary, garden-variety common sense. How could anyone be so goddamn preordained to do the wrong thing?

“No. He’s crazy! It’s my pen.”

“You sure, Irey?” Farley’s tone of voice and countenance both pleaded loyally on Ira’s behalf. “I can give it back to him, and that’s all there is to it.”

Farley went away again. A few minutes later, the young gym instructor who was Farley’s coach came through the lane of students. He had the silver-filigreed pen in his hand, and was trailed by a tall, delicately built, steady-eyed youth with an olive complexion.

“Will you come with me,” the young instructor requested of the dazed, the benumbed Ira.

All three left the gym, climbed the flight of stairs to the main floor, and entered the office of the assistant principal, Mr. Osborne. After explaining the nature of the dispute, the young gym instructor placed the fountain pen on Mr. Osborne’s desk, was thanked with a grave nod and relieved of further stay.

Ira knew his doom, the inexorable, irreversible doom that had befallen him — nay, nay, invited to befall him.

The pen, asserted the youthful classmate quietly, had been given him on his graduation from public school by his father. Even in the void drained of reality, the lineaments of the other’s good breeding were manifest. He could bring his father to school and prove the truth of what he said.

And Ira, now nauseated to the very soul with guilt, with the dread sickness of the abject felon, asked to speak to Mr. Osborne alone. Mr. Osborne was a large, kindly, unpretentious man in his fifties, corpulent with sedentary life, and with a fine, wide, pale brow. He asked the other student to step outside the office, to wait outside the door.

A few more seconds, and Ira was alone with the assistant principal, alone with him — and with the portraits of former administrators on the wall. Ira broke down completely. Poor automaton, poor nitwit, Ira mocked himself: with what easy resolution history could be revised: he needed only to have asserted that he found the pen on the cloakroom floor near the gym, in the hall, anywhere, concocted anything plausible — and very likely gotten off with no more than a stern reprimand for not turning in lost property. And since he had implicated the most promising track man who had entered Stuyvesant in all its history, the whole matter might have been glossed over with a show of severity.

But no, Ira burst into tears and confessed all: he had stolen the pen from the other’s jacket pocket in the gym cloakroom. How many such thefts had he committed? Mr. Osborne asked. Three or four, Ira lied: he didn’t know. Mr. Osborne meditated gravely, came to a conclusion. The youth waiting in the hall outside was called into the office. He was handed the fountain pen, and at the same time directed to report back to the gym. Blubbering Ira was left alone with a thoughtful Mr. Osborne. Patiently, soberly, he listened to the delinquent’s tearful lamentations of having been robbed of his own fountain pens, robbed of his briefcase and all its contents, of everything he left behind on a desk, even a little assignment book. He had given the fountain pen as a present to his best friend.

Pathetic lump of sniveling juvenile, Ira could imagine later what he must have looked like to Mr. Osborne. Nor was it difficult to surmise what went on in the other’s mind: how best to dispose of the case before him, determine the fairest thing to do about the dripping clod of doleful adolescence. In the end, Mr. Osborne informed Ira that he was excused from classes — and from school — that he was to bring his father to Stuyvesant tomorrow, to bring him to the same office he was in now, the assistant principal’s office. Mr. Osborne would then make known the decision he had reached in the case. Meantime, Ira was to leave all textbooks now in his possession in the secretary’s office next door, and bring with him tomorrow all other textbooks belonging to the school. He would write Ira a pass that would permit him to pick up his belongings and leave the building. Mr. Osborne issued his instructions with sober compassion, but with firm authority.

Ira obeyed. He gathered up his belongings in the gym cloakroom, changed to shoes outside the secretary’s office, deposited his textbooks on her desk, where a pass was waiting for him. Then with an unnaturally light briefcase, as if all its former weight were inside him now, he pulled on his light topcoat, handed the door monitors his pass, and stepped out into the changeable March day, into the fresh breeze against his face. Overhead, before him at the street’s end, a regatta of shining clouds veered toward him between high buildings.

Doomsday. Doom everywhere. On street and edifice, the pall of doom, on vehicle and pedestrian and storefront, in passing sounds of the city the knell of doom. In every step, in breath and heartbeat. Crook. Thief. He had been caught. Too late now to regret deeds done or undone: to have kept the pen concealed, steadfastly, not made a gift of it to Farley, maybe sold it to somebody, outside the school. Waddaye say? Five bucks? No? Then three bucks. All silver. And with one of the dollars for her. Okay? Huh? Okay? Easy, instead of this — oh hell, forget it! Why hadn’t he claimed he had found it? Under a bench in the gym — anywhere?

Too late, too late and irrevocable. With his near-empty briefcase, a taunting reminder, dangling from his hand, he walked west, half cognizant of the direction he was taking, distracting remorse with motion, ruffling it with New York’s changing scene. Where was he to go? The Lexington Avenue subway at 14th would take him home — too soon, too soon to mourn in futility in the kitchen, too soon to sit shiva over climax of woe with Pop’s return from work. Ira was sure he would be expelled — why else had he been asked to hand over his schoolbooks, and bring the rest tomorrow? And what had Mr. Osborne said? “You’re not bad habitually, but this stealing of student property has to stop.” Expelled. Wish to Christ he had gone on with the rest of the grammar school graduating class, gone on to work, to a job, become a pruster arbeiter , as Mom said. If only her obdurate ambitions for the improvement of his lot weren’t so indomitable. Or he so willful, so incorrigible, so rotten. Right away finding comfort in the dollar he could flaunt. What if he were working, making a dollar like Sid or Davey or Jake who had moved into the block? What then? Oh, too late, too late. Ira had been caught stealing — from another fellow in high school. Caught stealing and confessed, confessed and about to be expelled. It was altogether different from stealing on a job. You’d be fired. You’d get another job. This was different: the pen wasn’t the company’s, wasn’t nobody’s; it belonged to somebody, to another. And now you wouldn’t be just fired. Mom would scream in Yiddish, Oh, a veytik iz mir! You’ve wrecked, broken your career. And he had lied to Farley, his best friend, and now Farley knew it.

Ira turned north on Broadway, the bustling continuum of the thoroughfare streaming by his fluctuating woe. Uptown, aimlessly walking. So you get fired. Pop got fired. So he went to the employment agency, and now to the union hall, the Waiters Local AFL, number, what was the number? Number two. Get the New York World , Ira counseled himself: look in the Boy Wanted ads, Young Man Wanted, as long as it didn’t say Christian only, Protestant only. But this, expulsion from high school, all of destiny balanced on this. You could feel it teetering on its fulcrum the second time that Farley came around and said, The guy says it’s his. One tiny grain would have changed the whole future, a single word: yes. You wouldn’t even have had to say it was his. Just: yes. But he had lied to his best friend, and was trussed up by his lie: “My uncle gave it to me.” No, no, no! It’s his, it’s his, Farley. Give it back to him. I’ll explain later. And because Farley was a sensational track star, the sports pages said, once the pen was restored to its owner, all would have been overlooked, forgotten. So easy. So easy. But then he would have had to say, I lied to you, Farley. I–I found the pen.