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

Jake was stubbiest of everyone in the “crowd,” though not as slight as the stunted Baer brothers. He had a fine oval face, curly auburn hair, and a tip-tilted, oily nose. No one was as artistic nor as physically adept as he was. He could pick out tunes on the old player piano in the Shapiro living room. He was master of the tango, and even dropped Izzy Winchel’s homely sister on her head in her backward terpsichorian flings. A pool shark, the best of the bunch; so exceedingly proficient was he that at those times when he was between jobs, seeking an increased salary, he managed to support himself by betting on his skill at the pool table. Ira had sat in the Fifth Avenue poolroom, a flight up on the corner of 112th Street, and watched Jake play, his oily nose under the green lampshades gleaming. And of course, Jake was an artist. For years he had worked as an apprentice for a firm of commercial artists. For years, Ira heard about his friend’s work with an airbrush. Besides that, Jake had enrolled early in the National Academy of Design, and he often brought home samples of his work, admirable in their technical skill, Ira thought, charcoal drawings of plaster casts of classic sculpture — shapely nudes and bearded Greek deities.

The two often walked to the Metropolitan Museum together. Jake would admire the skill and craftsmanship of painters — as a professional; the way some of them rendered armor or other metals, or the composition of a painting. Rarely, or so it seemed to Ira, did the aesthetic quality, artistic depth, “meaning” of a painting ever make an impression on Jake — just once in a while, certain painters, like Robert Eakins, Winslow Homer. It was curious, and Ira more than once told himself so, that what Ira was looking at and admiring was more than the painting per se, was the things he might have encountered in his reading concerning the painter: Leonardo, del Sarto, Rafael, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens. And yet Jake did admire Rubens, did admire Rembrandt, called Ira’s attention to Frans Hals, to Vermeer. It was odd, an artist strangely deficient in intellect, so Ira would think later, then correct himself, try to seek a deeper reason: perhaps an artist deficient in awareness of even rudimentary ideas. Jake confessed that he often sat for long periods of time, sometimes for hours, when he had the leisure, sat for hours, conscious only afterward that not a single thought had entered his mind.

During all those months of his commercial art apprenticeship, and there were a good many, out of the small allowance or allotment from his pay granted him by his stepmother to defray the expense of carfare and lunch, day in, day out, Jake bought his meals at the Automat. His victuals never varied. At the cost of one dime, his luncheon consisted of a small crock of Boston baked beans and a glass of milk.

Said Jake, as Ira shook his head in admiration at the charcoal sketch of a bust of Zeus Jake had brought home from the academy, “You know what we have to do now? Everybody in the class has to draw an original composition.”

“What does that mean?”

“From our own imagination. No copy of anything. It has to be what we thought up ourselves.”

“Do a pinochle game in the back of Maxie Dain’s father’s store,” Ira suggested facetiously. “Oh, I know, the pool hall.”

“Nah, that’s not imagination.”

“But you’re a shark at pool. Look, doesn’t that long-distance pool-stick rester make a triangle with the pool stick?”

“Yeah, but he’d say it was like a mechanical drawing. You know what I was thinking? I was thinking of a Bowery bum. He’s sitting in a doorway, and he’s dreaming about a stein of beer and a pretzel. It’s like a cloud over his head. The same as some of the Christian holy picture clouds in the Metropolitan.”

There were others of whom a lackadaisical memory retained scraps. Sid Desfor, who lived in the same house Jake did. A gangly, humorous, whimsical youth, and generous too, oldest sibling of three, Sid began an apprenticeship in a photographer’s studio immediately after graduating from public school. The photography studio was across the Harlem River, which Sid had to cross on the El train. And he was always seized by an inordinate desire to urinate as soon as the train crossed the river. Sid appreciated Milt Gross, quoted him often, and considerately cut out the humorist’s column for Ira to read. His father owned the tailor shop on the other side of the street, and Sid twice made Ira a present of a tobacco pipe found in a man’s suit to be altered.

All had spending money on weekends, but Ira rarely — once school began — except for the few coins he could mooch from Tanta Mamie. At Baba’s house, pickings became less and less as aunts and uncles married and went to live elsewhere, in Flushing chiefly. It was less a dreary time in actuality, Ira reflected, than it was in recollection. For he knew that he spent many an afternoon in the fall playing association football, “touch football,” in Mt. Morris Park, in the playing field on the West Side. He had become an excellent punter, and fairly adept at catching the larger, slower-moving football, so he was always in demand when sides were chosen — quite the opposite of his rating in baseball. Hence there must have been some joy during those months following his admission to DeWitt Clinton High School, some joy in the abandonment of the flight and the chase, the shout and touchdown.

But it was as if one had to compel a reluctant memory to acknowledge happy recollection. On Saturday nights, to the music of the Victrola in Izzy Winchel’s living room, the “gang” foregathered there, finding dancing partners with Izzy’s older sister and her friends. Ira had no facility as a dancer, and fought off acquiring any. He didn’t know why. Petrified by self-consciousness, he also detested the music the others reveled in, the triteness of sound, the embarrassing mawkishness of lyric — without being able to put his dislike into words.

Sunday mornings the group usually found itself in the upstairs poolroom on the corner of 119th Street and Third Avenue, on the same level as the Third Avenue El, which could be blamed for spoiling a shot when a train pounded by. A more dreary, stultifying atmosphere than that of the poolroom on Sunday mornings Ira couldn’t recall. Penniless, and hopeless duffer at pocket pool that he was besides, he would sit on a chair against the wall, listen to the crack of pool balls, the patter of players and their epithets, watch his friends strain above the green baize lit up by the low-hanging shaded electric lights, lift cue sticks to slide scoring markers on their wires overhead.

Frowzy, vacuous, dismal. It didn’t occur to him then that these companions-by-default were the first American-born generation of Jews, the bridge between the poor East European immigrants who landed here and the American Jews their offspring became. And his distaste of their pursuits and recreations already indicated an indefinite rejection of the typical path the mass had taken. He was aware only of his own unhappiness, of his misfitting, of not belonging, of his disdainful boredom. And yet, despite his moroseness, sometimes, discontent and apathy at others, he often realized that they made allowances for him, because he did go to high school. Even though he was offish and intolerant, lived, sought to live, in a different world, they were generous beyond his deserts. Sid, especially, chipped in to buy him a ticket to the movies, chipped in for the pastrami sandwich in the delicatessen after the show, even paid Ira’s half of a pool hour to give him a chance to go through the motions.

No. He hadn’t been fair to them, as he wrote in his yellow typescript, when he thought of them in later years, and the injustice of his former attitudes became even more pronounced when he grew old.