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

Too bad. Wily of him — of the trio of ’em, what?

Four hummingbirds skirmish squeakily for supremacy over the feeder. Their menacings and tiny swashbucklings seem to consist of pointing their bills like miniature rapiers at one another — while they hover on translucent wings. One of them, apparently the ruling cock, sits on a strand of barbed wire hard by, ready to defend the food supply against all intruders. I am becoming a naturalist. . What of Henry Thoreau? The guy never married; why not? Why did he write in Walden Pond : “What demon possessed me to behave so well?” Why? What demon possessed me to seem to behave so ill?

It was early in the summer of 1922. By the end of the school year, and thanks in part to his excelling in plane geometry, to his pride in being so proficient in something, Ira had begun to feel secure in his new high school. He liked it. There was a swimming pool across the the street, a few houses west, where he could indulge his fondness for water sports. And now that he thought of the swimming pool, the recall brought in its train the neighborhood about the school — on 59th Street and Ninth Avenue, a block or two away from the Hudson River, a block or two away from piers and freight yards and other sites in a direction he never explored. The area was considered too tough. Was the neighborhood just north, uptown, from the ill-famed Hell’s Kitchen? he wondered. He knew no student who went home that way; perhaps there were none, or if of high school age, since the neighborhood was largely Irish Catholic, what few went on with their education after public school attended parochial school. He didn’t think they were ever cautioned against going that way. They simply never did.

Their route — that of the overwhelming majority of them — lay eastward, along 59th Street. They passed by a block of seedy and rundown tenements, in some of which lived black children who loitered on stoops and before doorways. And yet, oddly enough, by contrast, interspersed among the tenements were well-kept buildings of a clinic, a medical school, a hospital.

The next intersection was Ninth Avenue, dominated by the Ninth Avenue El. Under its perpetual shade, like that of an endless canopy, the stores and shops kept incandescents burning in their show windows at all hours of the day. Most of the students walked another block east to Columbus Circle, where the Seventh Avenue and Broadway subway crossed Eighth Avenue at the southwest corner of Central Park. There, cast in bronze, the great Navigator himself, Columbus, stood on his pillar of marble contemplating the noisy, incessant swirling of pedestrian and motor vehicle below. Behind him, at the corner of Central Park, a lady charioteer, also cast in bronze, directed her motionless steeds into traffic. To the east, across the street from the south end of the park, stretched a wall of luxury hotels and apartment houses, where gloved and uniformed doormen assisted passengers of taxis and limousines stopping in front of numerous marquees. Last vistas these were, together with the hurly-burly of people and automobiles on the street, as one descended with a swarm of fellow students from daylight down to the dusky amber of subway visibility.

Fifty-ninth Street was a local-train stop, and Ira usually boarded the first local that came along, whether it went to his destination, which was at Lenox Avenue and 116th Street in Harlem, or to the local stations on Broadway. It didn’t matter. Mopey schoolboy.

At 116th Street and Lenox, where Ira left the subway, he still had three long crosstown blocks to walk — from Lenox to Park Avenue — and three short, “regular” city blocks. He made a chart of the different ways he could go home: there were indeed eighteen different ways. Many years later, with the aid of Pascal, he calculated that since there were eighteen different ways to go home, and eighteen different ways to hie him to the subway after leaving the house, there was a total of 324 different ways he could do both. Perhaps, in the three years he attended DeWitt Clinton, zigging and zagging through mean and grubby routes to and fro, he succeeded in filling the full complement of combinations.

The truth, the actuality, buffets the mind: the fourteen years he lived in that slum street in Harlem! The hundreds of times he walked to the subway at Lenox Avenue (for even when he later attended CCNY he sometimes took the Lenox Avenue local downtown to 96th Street, and changed there for the Broadway train uptown). What was he driving at? Those years, those passages, how could one avoid being instilled by a chronic despond: of not belonging, of refusing community, of existing under duress. But the psyche is an extraordinary entity. Without knowing it, it converts the mean and the baneful, the despised, into a symmetric exultation, out of the same components wreaks a clandestine furor.

But I am out of my depth. Le Bateau Ivre . .

IV

He was still a youth of sixteen in that summer of 1922, the end of his first year at “Clinton,” though he was ranked as a sophomore. . The ad in the Help Wanted column of the New York World looked promising — and without the usual restrictions of “Gentile Only.” “Conductors Wanted,” the ad read. “Newly Franchised Bus Line. Fifth Avenue-Grand Concourse. No Experience Needed. Training on Job.” Ira applied at the address given in the ad. It was the bus company’s office-garage at 130th Street and Madison Avenue. There he was interviewed briefly by a corpulent executive in a pink-and-blue-striped silk shirt. Asked how old he was, Ira lied shrewdly: eighteen. And what references could he give? Park & Tilford, ever reliable, ever respectable: the store on Broadway, Ira prevaricated inventively, was rumored about to close, like the first one he had worked in on Lenox Avenue and 126th Street; so he had taken the day off to look around for a new job. The portly, perspiring boss seemed favorably impressed: Ira could have the job, and the company would train him, but — he had to deposit a hundred dollars cash as security.

A hundred dollars! Now Ira understood why bus conductor jobs were still vacant, why they hadn’t been grabbed up long before he came along. A hundred dollars!

“You’ll be handling our money,” the portly man explained, mopping his face, “and we want to make sure you’re going to be honest, that’s all. You get your hundred bucks back when you quit.”

“I can’t pay part each week till it’s a hundred dollars?” Ira was surprised at his accession of acumen.

“No, that’s not the way we work. You can’t start here unless you put up your security. You could walk off the job at the end of the day with thirty, forty dollars in your pocket, the whole day’s receipts.”

“All right, Mr. Hulcomb, I’ll see. If I get it, I can still come in tomorrow?”

“Oh, certainly. The job’s yours if you put up your security. We’ll keep it open for a day. But you can’t expect us to hold it for you longer than that.”

“No, sir.”

That terminated the interview. And at home, the same evening, with Pop there, Ira relayed the substance of the formidable stipulation: “I can get a job that pays twenty-four dollars a week, if I give them a hundred dollars security. The boss said they’d break me in to be a bus conductor, but first I’d have to give them the security.” He gave an account of the other relevant circumstances.

“How is it I was a trolley car conductor on the Fourth and Madison Avenue line in the War, and I didn’t have to give security?” Pop queried. “What do they need security for?”

“And so much money,” Mom added. “ A gantser hunderter .”

“He says that’s so I’ll be honest.”

“You could have assured him you would be honest for much less,” said Mom. “What? One nickel mistake, and you forfeit your hundred dollars? A covey of connivers.”