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

“Well, maybe I can go back.”

“To Stuyvesant?”

“No, ma’am. To some other high school.”

“Mom, can we have a sandwich?” Farley interposed.

“Supper is in a little while. As soon as Katy and Celia get home. They’ve gone with Sister Wilma to the aquarium.”

“I’m hungry now, Mom. So is Irey.”

“You are?”

“Yeah. You didn’t even ask me how I made out at the meet.”

“Oh. Of course you did well.”

“Yeah, but I won a gold medal this time, Mom. I came in first. I beat Le Vine.”

“Oh, you did?” Her hand rested on the icebox latch.

“Wait’ll you see it.” Farley opened his canvas bag, drew out the little wooden box.

Footsteps could be heard coming down the stairs.

“Show it to your pa, too.”

“Hey, Dad, what do you think o’ this?” Farley queried as brushy-mustached Mr. Hewin entered.

Mr. Hewin paused, glanced at the medal on its white satin cushion, continued on his way to the kitchen sink. “You win that?”

“Yeah. I placed first, Dad.”

Lifting his eyebrows to signify acknowledgment of his son’s achievement, Mr. Hewin turned on the faucet, washed his hands. He was probably embalming a cadaver upstairs — for he turned away from the sink, lingering only long enough to dry his hands, while he surveyed his son with preoccupied approval. Then he went upstairs again.

So undemonstrative, Mrs. Hewin, so matter-of-fact, Farley’s father. Ira thought of how Mom and Pop would have behaved in a similar situation — if he had brought home a gold medal, if he had won a gold medal — for anything. All the mazel tovs that would have poured out, and the blessings and praisings of God. Even Pop: “ S’iz takeh gold? ” His features kindled by the yellow disk: “ Azoy? A bisl nakhes! ” How different. And, yes, what did Le Vine’s parents do or say to console him in his defeat? Jewish surely, with that twist of disappointment contorting his face: Jewish, but a different breed from his own Galitzianer kind. His parents already Americanized, not like Mom and Pop, but gants geler , as Mom would have said: yellow-ripe — like the parents, Ira was sure, of the fellow whose silver-filigreed pen he stole, or like those of that smart aleck who displaced him in the law office. Different already. Mrs. Hewin brought out a platter of meat — a large pale platter, on which rib bones showed above red beef already carved.

“Can we have some milk, Ma? Irey worked up an appetite, too,” Farley prompted. “Didn’t you, Irey?”

“Not — yeah. I mean only a little bit.” Ira’s mouth watered.

“I told you I could beat Le Vine, Ma,” Farley reiterated placidly. “He came in second this time.”

“It was wonderful, Mrs. Hewin.” Ira tried to hold fervor in check, in keeping with everyone else. “I sat at the finish line. I — gee! The way Farley ran.”

Mrs. Hewin turned from making sandwiches to look at her son. “I suppose you’ll be all over the newspapers.”

“I talked to reporters.”

“You did?”

“All kinds o’ reporters were there. You didn’t see those bulbs pop, Irey — me and O’Neil together?”

“No. I was outside already.”

“Wow! Thanks, Ma.”

“Gee, thanks, Mrs. Hewin!”

“Do you think you can wash your track suit now?” Mrs. Hewin filled two glasses with milk. “That and your sweat suit. We can already smell when you’re coming.”

“You can’t wash them, Ma,” Farley objected plaintively.

“I can’t? You’d be surprised.”

“Aw, no. You wash all the luck out of it, Mom.”

“That wouldn’t be all you washed out of it. And don’t you air all the luck out of it too, when it’s out in the yard hanging on the line?”

“Luck doesn’t air out, Ma.”

“Oh, no? Faith, and what if it rained?”

“Ma, you can’t wash it; that’s all I know.”

“Can you wash your hands?”

“I guess so.”

Mrs. Hewin put the bottle of milk back in the icebox, followed by the platter of meat, while both youths washed their hands at the kitchen sink. She wet her lips, seemed to form words silently a moment as she closed the icebox door. “I wouldn’t want you to lose.”

“I’m not going to lose, Ma.”

“No?”

Farley swigged a draft of milk. “I know I’m not. All I got to do is keep on training. I can get that gold medal every time.”

How little sentiment she allowed herself to dole out: just a kind of pensiveness, a slight swelling out of bosom as she regarded her son. “Well, if you’re going to stay with your Aunt Maureen in New Rochelle, could you wade out in the water with them on?”

“Aw, Ma!”

Later that same evening, when the two went out, and walked over to the lamplit street next to the church, Farley’s friends were there waiting to meet him. A few of them had been to the track meet too, and had seen Farley triumph in the 100-yard dash. St. Pius Academy hadn’t even placed. Still, when he displayed his newly won gold medal, even the owl-eyed Malloy, who had been so antagonistic before, forgot resentment in his unfeigned enthusiasm. “Hurray for the Irish!” he cheered at sight of the trophy.

Absolved, Ira basked in the glow of Farley’s victory. Absolution and victory. And yet, it was to be the last such totally intimate restoration of their friendship. They would join together again, after track meets, in which Farley now regularly placed first — except for the initial meet following that summer’s vacation, which he had spent in New Rochelle, swimming: “Softened my muscles,” Farley explained. But he beat Le Vine in the next meet, and never placed second again while in high school. “Schoolboy wonder,” the sportswriters called him. He was surrounded by new friends, droves of them, out of whose circle he never failed to single Ira out with his cheery greeting, “Hey, Irey.”

Still, friendship thinned, not because of Farley’s growing fame and number of admirers, but as the bond of interest between the two attenuated. They diverged — inevitably. Reunions became less and less frequent, and more and more transient: an exchange of greetings followed by congratulations offered for his almost routine victories. Ira attended track meets less and less often. Soon to be a student of DeWitt Clinton High School, he would have no reason for going but to watch the performance of a rival of his own school, a Stuyvesant runner, and one who came in first with unfailing regularity. Ira could read about it in the sports section of the following Sunday’s newspaper. He ceased going. .

I

He had lost a whole semester when he entered DeWitt Clinton in September of 1921. He could no longer expect to graduate from high school with the February class of 1924, but with that of June. At least, though, he was back in high school again. It was a bleak time for him, without close schoolfriends, without close friendships of any kind, chastened by the ordeal of expulsion. He was humbled by a growing awareness of his inadequacies, amounting almost to stupidity, his slowness to grasp instruction, compared to most of his classmates, above all his inability to cope with abstractions, whether delivered orally in class or appearing on the printed page. And always contending with, always succumbing to, his vile cravings, cravings that preempted studies, ousted and routed concentration, cravings bringing terror and anxiety in their train, perpetual shadows inexorably etiolating his youthful spirits, his normal appetites, his readiness for diversion, his cheerfulness.

A smear of dreariness, Ira harked back in cheerless recollection. And worse to come, psychologically, and soon. Well, no need to anticipate it. It would arrive, flaw him irreversibly, rend integrity, with that little rift within the lute , he echoed the Tennysonian snatch. Had a lot of truth in it, sardonic snatch aside: a fifty-year widening, for example, made the music moot. No hurry, no hurry. That little rift within the lute that would make junk of any second novel. Immobilité de junk , as Rimbaud never said. But what would he do with it? Ira already found himself wondering. With one of his characters disallowed, disavowed, invisible. The thought came to him that he could excise material from his future writing, writing many, many pages hence, and inject it like a geologic dike extraneously into a different strata. No, it would never do. Let it be, let it rest. When that time comes, do what you can. You’ve enough to do rendering a straightforward account, without trying to skate on your ear. You’re not clever enough.