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

Wakefulness thudded brutally against the compassionate swaddling envelope of sleep; wakefulness pounded by reminders, hard and edged, that cleaved through oblivion into consciousness that it was morning. The bedroom airshaft window framed a gray slurry of daylight. Pop had already gone to his breakfast-luncheon stint. He would meet Ira in front of the school at ten o’clock. Ira was to wait there for him. . He dressed, in tense, apprehensive silence, ate the buttered roll Mom served him, gulped down his sugared mix of coffee and boiled milk in the dismally familiar stark kitchen. The backyard light over the uncurtained top of the window presented the gray washpole preening washlines in the blue baleful sky of March. Cruel aubade and foreboding fanfare ushering in the dread of the coming crisis. With Mom’s injunctions almost unheeded, scarcely penetrating the density of his fear, he readied for school much too early. Better to patrol the sidewalk in front of Stuyvesant than stay in the house knowing what Mom felt, looking at her grief-harrowed face. He had only one book to return, the English grammar.

“You’re not to stray blindly about,” Mom enjoined before he left.

“When?”

“Afterward. If ill fate takes over.”

“No, you told me that ten times.”

“You promise? Swear.”

“I swear. Ah, Jesus, leave me alone.”

“I implore you. You know it would destroy me.”

“I won’t destroy you. I’ll be home.”

“Have mercy on your mother, Ira.”

“Yeah. Yeah. G’bye.” He left. .

Immune to the March day, he moved toward the Lexington Avenue and 116th Street subway station, moved on joints all but fused with anxiety: moved through and by and into an unreal, gritty, pitted world, a world with only a single channel open: via three bright streets to a sallow subway platform, and then via stale train atmosphere downtown. Only local trains stopped at 116th Street. He got on the first to arrive, and stayed on it all the way: to stall, to wear down oppressive time, to segment it with local stops, with change of passengers to churn the haunted lethargy. Then came the walk from 14th Street to Stuyvesant, and the restless wait. He had gotten to the rendezvous more than half an hour early. He paced. . on the quiet sidewalk in front of the school building. .

And there came Pop, in workaday coat, features sharp and strained under the brim of his weathered gray felt hat, his nose capillaried as it was when he left for St. Louis. Ira tried to smile in grateful greeting, was rebuffed, left dangling, downcast before Pop’s glare. Ira led the way into the school, past the monitors at the door, explained with dull indifference that left no doubt that Mr. Osborne had ordered him to bring his father to school.

Into the scholastic atmosphere, made strange by Pop’s presence, through corridors inset at times by an open classroom portal, through which blackboards glimpsed, and hands driving chalk. . a hand rolled a map down, the flat, tinted world like a window shade.

The two climbed the short flight of stairs to the main floor, heard gym activities remotely below. Trailed by Pop, who muttered, “Wait a second,” Ira paused before the door of the secretary’s office, stepped inside, and laid the English grammar book on the nearest desk. Mr. Osborne’s office was next. Ira entered, in the van of Pop, and waited the second of the two to be recognized.

“Come right in. Please!” Mr. Osborne stood up. Big frame, not corpulent, fleshy, his large pale countenance and brow tinged with warmth and sympathy. His whole approach was cordial, his hand outstretched in greeting to Pop. “Mr. Stigman. I’m pleased to meet you.”

“Yeh, t’enks. I’m gled too.” His words clipped with extremity of tension, with nervousness, Pop shook hands with Osborne.

“I brought my other book, and left it.” Ira indicated the secretary’s office.

Mr. Osborne nodded, beckoned soberly to a chair. “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Stigman.” He motioned again. “Do take your coat off.”

“No, no. I don’t need. T’enks.” Pop sat at the edge of his seat.

Mr. Osborne sat down. His whole attitude bespoke moderation: thoughtfulness, tempering, from the way his large hands were clasped on his desk to the creases on his brow. “I’m sure you know what’s happened?”

“Yeh. I know.” Pop’s nod was dreary.

“I find it very—” Mr. Osborne opened his hands, lifted them slightly, let them fall. “Difficult. Unpleasant — very — to deal with a parent about a subject of this kind. I’m sure you understand — I’m a parent myself. But it’s my duty to do so. Your son stole another student’s property. A fountain pen, a rather valuable one in this case. If that were the only time he stole anything, gave way to temptation, one might—” Mr. Osborne bent his august brow in weighty deliberation as if seeking, but then freed himself from quest, “one might take a different view of the matter. Condone. You understand, Mr. Stigman?” And when Pop made no reply other than pinch his face up even more: “But this was only one of such acts Ira’s committed: acts of continued and deliberate theft.” His brown eyes rested on Pop in sincere pain.

Pop glowered at Ira. He began to snivel.

“And yet he’s by no means a criminal. Not by any means. I can tell by his behavior, by his remorse. I can tell by your attitude, by his parents’ attitude. He’s been brought up to know the difference between right and wrong. There’s no question about that in my mind. He obviously knew he was doing something wrong.”

“I won’t do it again, Mr. Osborne,” Ira wept. “I swear I won’t do it again.”

“I’m quite sure you won’t.”

“So can you give me another chance? Please?”

“That’s exactly what I can’t do.” His deliberation lent emphasis to quiet negation. “That’s the reason I asked you to bring your father to school: to explain to you, Mr. Stigman, just why it’s in your son’s — it’s in Ira’s best interest to end all connection with Stuyvesant High School. To attend a high school somewhere else, a different high school, where none of this is known.”

“I’ll give him high school.” Pop nodded ominously. “I’ll give him. He’ll get it yet, Mr. Osborne.”

“No, it isn’t punishment that we’re after,” Mr. Osborne strove earnestly, speaking with controlled gesture. “God knows, Mr. Stigman, he’s already inflicted that on himself to no small degree. No, the thing I’m trying to explain, Mr. Stigman, has nothing to do with punishment. The thing I hope I can make clear is why he no longer can attend Stuyvesant High School. That is why I wished to speak to you personally. So there would be no misunderstanding. It’s not punishment that concerns me here. Protecting Ira, protecting his future, is of far greater importance than punishment. He has involved another student in the theft, an outstanding athlete, by the way. The boy whose pen Ira stole now knows who it is. The word will certainly spread. All the others who’ve lost property, and I assure you that, unfortunately, they’ve been no small number, will suspect Ira, and you can imagine the consequences for him. His position here will become impossible. He simply can’t stay here. . And,” Mr. Osborn sat up, grave and irreversible in judgment, “it’s in his best interest not to stay in Stuyvesant.”

“Yeh,” Pop agreed, his brown dog eyes full of woe, meeting Mr. Osborne’s a moment, then sweeping to Ira’s. “ Geharget zolst di veren .”

In their peculiar-shaped cravats, wing collars, like Mr. O’Reilly’s, like Pop’s when he married, the former administrators looked down from the walls, in their repose forever captured in oil, their heavy watch chains undulating through Ira’s tears.