Henry Roth

Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels

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INTRODUCTION by Joshua Ferris

Mercy of a Rude Stream is Henry Roth’s sophomore effort, his follow-up, after sixty years of near silence, to his classic debut novel Call It Sleep. Roth began writing the heavily autobiographical Mercy in 1979 and revised it until his death in 1995; had he lived longer, he would have likely continued writing his life until the two — the writing and the living — had fully caught up to one another. The first volume, A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, was released in 1994; the second volume, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, a year later. The latter two volumes were published posthumously.

Mercy tells the story of Ira Stigman. Like Roth, Ira was born to Jewish immigrants from Austro-Hungarian Galicia. Like Roth, Ira lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as a young boy and suffered when his family moved to Harlem. Like Roth, Ira escapes penury and drift, and squalor, and hopelessness, and mindless toil, and the countless dead ends and cul-de-sacs awaiting even the hardest-working immigrants in “the golden realm,” and makes himself a writer. He succeeds because he’s resilient and shrewd, and because he’s possessed of native literary talent. The culminating event of the novel is Ira’s departure for Greenwich Village: he leaves behind his beloved mother and his tyrannical father and the sister with whom he was incestuously involved for the embrace and nurture of a NYU professor named Edith Welles, the fictional counterpart to Roth’s real-life lover Eda Lou Walton.

Mercy is a rare species of literary epic: an autobiography that doubles as a historical novel. The action of Mercy—set primarily between 1914 and 1927 but interlaced with dispatches from the 1980s and ’90s, and including intermittent reflections of the years in between — encompasses nearly the entirety of the twentieth century: from the outbreak of World War I to the advent of the personal computer. But Roth’s novel isn’t a product of painstaking research; he reconstructed his lost world out of pure memory. Working throughout his seventies and eighties — he lived to be eighty-nine — he filled his bildungsroman with the finely grained details that one can expect only from a firsthand account.

Roth had a brilliant photographic memory. But he wasn’t didactic; he also had the novelist’s instinct. Where fact and fiction begin and end in Mercy is never an easily discernible divide. The basic outline of Ira Stigman’s life as chronicled in the book — his development through adolescence and into his young adulthood — closely mirrors that of Henry Roth’s. But if Mercy is largely shorn of the Joycean artifice of Roth’s earlier book and pointedly tries to narrate life as it was lived, Roth happily sacrifices biographical truth in Mercy to the more pressing emotional one that had revealed itself to him decades later. There’s little doubting the detailed accuracy of his reconstructed Harlem, or his rich evocation of immigrant life in New York City in the first decades of the last century, but the embellishments are there to serve Roth’s hard-fought artistic purpose.

And it was hard-fought. After writing Call It Sleep, Roth floundered. By the time of that book’s publication, in 1934, he was deeply committed — as many on the American left were in the 1930s — to the communist ideal. He was internally riven by the need to square his “bourgeois” talent for detailing the rich inner life of the individual with the proletarian dictates of socialist art. He was badly affected by his first book’s reception in left-leaning periodicals, and was determined to write something the Party would be proud of. With an advance from Maxwell Perkins, who admired Call It Sleep, he set out to do just that, but failed. Thereafter he worked, as a good communist must, various hard-scrabble trades. He started a family. He squandered time and fell out of sight. It would take a profound disillusionment with Soviet communism and a long personal reckoning before Roth would seriously take up writing again, only to conclude, after so long and so much trouble, that he only ever had one subject: himself.

An omnibus edition of Mercy is an exciting event, a chance to introduce it to a new generation of readers. But even old readers need to take a new look, now that the sweeping scope of Roth’s work has been fully contained between two covers.

Mercy was originally published as four separate books. The first, A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, was artistically the least successful of the four. It’s likely that Roth had trouble finding the right balance, the right pacing, the right rhetorical and fictional tactics with which to begin his monumental undertaking. There was much to do in that initial salvo: introduce Ira, his parents, and their extended family; introduce as well a latter-day Ira who lives with his wife, M, in Albuquerque and who discourses with his computer, Ecclesias, on the challenges of composing a book identical to Mercy; establish a dialectic between these two Iras — typographically, rhetorically, circumstantially, and philosophically distinct, and separated in time by nearly seventy years — that would come to shape and inform the following three volumes; re-create a bygone world of Yiddish-speaking immigrants ensconced in a vanished Harlem with all its thrumming, threatening vibrancy; situate that world within the larger context of the First World War; and convey to the reader Ira’s personal drama: his crushing solitude, his aimlessness, his sensitivity, and his nascent gifts as a writer. Henry Roth was seventy-three years old when he began the book and had been more or less blocked for the previous forty years. He was racing against time and in declining health. To be writing again, indeed to be redeeming his life by writing it, must have felt like an extraordinary relief almost indistinguishable from panic.

As the epic begins, we first meet Ira as an eight-year-old boy. He has just moved from the Lower East Side, where life passed by in an unconscious blur because he was surrounded by fellow Jews, and because he was so young. The Stigmans move as far north as 108 East 119th Street — some blocks north of Harlem’s Jewish enclave — because cold-water flats can be had cheaply there, and Ira’s father is a wickedly parsimonious man. The new dwelling also has a front window, which is especially important because Ira’s mother has depressive tendencies and relishes the light and the view. But for Ira, the move is nothing short of exile from Eden. Hostility in goyish Harlem awakens the boy from his daydreams; “Irishers” rule the street, and scorn, even in that slice of melting-pot America, is reserved especially for the Jew.

At the same time that he’s awakening to the inevitability of being “a lousy Jew,” as the Irishers would have it, and in his wish for assimilation, he rejects his all-too-Jewish extended family. They have arrived at the outbreak of the war, fleeing not only international hostilities but the pogroms that made daily life for European Jewry an unrelieved nightmare. Ira hopes to find in these new arrivals the kind of people he left behind on the Lower East Side — protectors, mentors, and friends. His kin, he hopes, will be “bountiful, endowed with a store of beguiling anecdotes, with rare knowledge of customs and places which they were only too happy to impart on their doting little kinsman. In short, they would somehow be charmingly, magically, bountifully pre-Americanized.” Instead, he encounters:

Greenhorns with uncouth lopsided and outlandish gestures, greenhorns. . engaged in all manner of talk too incomprehensible for him to understand, speaking “thick” Yiddish, without any English to leaven it. . dull, colorless, greenhorn affairs.

These dual disappointments — the move to Harlem, the arrival of greenhorns — come swiftly at the start of Mercy and establish the central conflict of the remaining volumes: Ira is no longer sure of who he is or with whom he should identify. As he puts it many years later in conversation with Ecclesias, the move to Harlem was “the beginning of attrition of his identity.”

Beyond these opening moves, not much more happens in that first volume. My fear is that some earlier readers might have given up prematurely on Roth’s project. Its grand ambitions, its scope and life, flowered slowly, in installments.

With Mercy now presented in its entirety, the infelicities of A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park are easy to forgive. The preamble that once made a slight novel now serves beautifully as the prologue of an epic one. Where, and with whom, Ira belongs, is the book’s main business. Ira’s search for himself is what makes Mercy more than a sociological document, more than a panorama of the immigrant experience, more than a finely wrought reconstruction of a lost world, more than a portrait of the artist as a young man, and more than a diary of an old man looking back. Mercy is all of those things. But above all it’s a quintessentially American novel about the rootless individual forced to reinvent himself out of whole cloth and against great odds.

Much of the initial interest in Mercy came from two sources of curiosity, one artistic in nature and the other prurient. What would Henry Roth, the precocious genius who reworked the squalor of immigrant slums into a delicate masterpiece of high modernism, deliver after sixty years of drought? And did he really sleep with his sister?

Incest is the dark throb at the heart of the book—“earthmurks drowned in lust,” as Augustine put it, an apt phrase for an Augustinian hero — but the fact of it, its simple presence within an autobiographical novel, threatens to overshadow the psychological portrait of the individual marred and molded by it. Now that the gossipy murmur over Henry Roth’s real-life relationship with his sister has lost its initial shock value, we would do well to stick to news that stays news, and ask: How did Ira’s sexual deviance affect his search for himself in Henry Roth’s novel?

For starters, Roth suggests that that deviance might never have occurred had Ira found meaning in the religious devotion his Galitzianer grandfather brought with him from Austria-Hungary. The “attrition of his identity” would have been arrested by “the boundaries of Orthodox Judaism. . [its] shorings, stays, restraints.” But by the time he was ten, when the incest started, it was too late: Ira was already assimilated, naturalized, and could find no comfort in the ways of the old world. What did those greenhorns and their “outcry, their foreignness, their Yiddishkeit” have to do with Ira and his life? Wise to the American street and untethered from religious customs, he was no longer one of the clan. He had “pledged himself to a new resolve, to a new ‘pledge allegiance,’ a new covenant he couldn’t name, an American covenant.” Ira’s is an American search precisely because America itself has come between him and his inheritance of a stabilizing, inhibiting tradition.

But though he wills himself into a secular American, America refuses to let Ira Stigman repudiate his Jewishness. The Irishers remind him when he walks the street, and his teachers remind him when he goes to school, and his bosses and coworkers remind him when he works an odd job: despite all the country’s promises of freedom, he’s first and foremost — and nowhere so much as in his own self-consciousness — a Jew. This ontological burden follows him everywhere like an odious shadow and conspires to exclude him from everything good. “So everything beautiful was Christian, wasn’t it? All that was flawless and pure and bold and courtly and chivalric was goyish. He didn’t know how to feel sometimes: sadness; he was left out. .” Judaism becomes a vexing identification. It fixes Ira Stigman’s identity in stone and denies him “everything beautiful” while offering him no accommodating solace, living law, or sense of self.

But Ira’s alienation isn’t a simple matter of his Jewishness; he thinks himself corrupt in the soul for the sexual relationship he initiates with his younger sister, Minnie. The disclosure of incest is a surprising moment in the book; the fact that Ira even has a sister is coyly hidden until it can no longer be contained, and it bursts upon the page with the force of a sobbing confession. Everything we think we know about Ira must be recontextualized in light of his abrupt revelation, and everything that comes after lies under its black shadow. Roth never lets us forget it: for long stretches there’s a reminder every few pages, passages of confusion, self-flagellation, bleak regret. Roth presents the incest — and the burden of it, even foremost in his mind — as a vicious circle: deeply in thrall to its pleasures, Ira seeks it out hungrily; once it’s over, he’s beset by guilt; that guilt keeps him alienated from the rest of the world; in his alienation, he seeks out the stygian pleasures of incest. But not without consequence: this “canker in the soul” impedes all of his future friendships and potential love affairs. It blights him, forever foreclosing an American future free of guilt, disease, and self-hatred.

Roth suggests that the source of the incestuous act might reside in the “sad traces of his Judaism”; the link seems only natural to one for whom Judaism is bound up in the inbred filth of a slum. It’s a dismaying conclusion very much of its time. The cause is much simpler, and Roth dramatizes it again and again within the book — namely, the fact that Ira is prey as often he is predator. When still a very young boy, Ira is lured to Fort Tyron Park by a deeply menacing stranger called “Mr. Joe.” Mr. Joe is forced to abort his attempt to take Ira’s pants off inside the park when a young couple unexpectedly pops out of a nearby thicket. He makes Ira watch as he “pulls off” beside a tree, so thoroughly revolting his impressionable victim that masturbation is thereafter unavailable to Ira as an option of release. Even incest is preferable. Mr. Lennard, Ira’s junior-high Spanish teacher, proves worse than Mr. Joe. When Ira is forced to ask this terrible man’s permission to leave school early, Mr. Lennard removes his pince-nez and “breathe[s] on a lens, before delicately applying his silk handkerchief”—the menacing pause of a pederast operating with impunity. Soon he is molesting Ira on his desk, insisting the boy “make it stiff!” and ensuring Ira’s deep confusion about sexual matters as he enters adolescence.

How should one judge the sexual deviance of the abused innocent who has known only incest and predation? For in addition to being molested, Ira has witnessed firsthand his uncle Louis’s attempt to seduce his mother, overheard his mother’s account of her own incestuous relationship with her brother Moe, and has reluctantly shared a bed with his mother when his father travels to St. Louis. Roth repeatedly demonstrates how sex for young Ira is equated with perversion and violence. Consider even this passing scene: “Ira saw the big brute [his boss, Yeager] a few days later waylay one of the pretty girl clerks seeking an item in the cellar aisles, seize her, and force her over backward while he planted kisses on her. Her pleading—‘Please, Mr. Yeager! Let go! Mr. Yeager!’—went unheeded.” There is no sex in Mercy free of menace.

Roth doesn’t ask forgiveness for Ira — in fact, he exaggerated the incest to make his alterego more monstrous, more akin to his own distorted self-image — but he can’t help but dramatize the insular, alienating circumstances that could easily lead a young boy to prey upon his sister, and for brother and sister to take refuge in one another. The title of the book, from a passage in Shakespeare, imagines mercy for past crimes. Roth not only confesses those crimes — which were his own — but painstakingly re-creates them, perhaps in a final bid for mercy.

Despite his status as a Jew and the buried shame of his home life, Ira manages to make friends, and the consuming joy of friendship gives him some idea of who he might be — or who, at any rate, he longs to be. Roth introduces us to Farley Hewins, the son of an Irish undertaker who captures something of all that is “flawless and pure” in America. Farley bears no resemblance to a greenhorn. He is “a blond, trimly built youth, somewhat more mature than the rest, handsome, blue-eyed, with a rounded jaw, a light voice and a buoyant gait.” Roth might be describing a young Douglas Fairbanks. On Sundays, the two boys hitchhike out to the suburbs where Farley’s aunts and uncles live, and here, among these quintessential Americans, Ira gets a vicarious taste of what he’s really after: “In the steadiness, in the tranquility of Farley’s unassuming assurance, his good-humored poise, and the affectionate regard with which he was greeted and held by his kin, Americans all, part and parcel of America in their warm, tidy, suburban kitchens into which the breeze from the green outside seeped through the screen door, Ira could almost imagine that acceptance of himself was only a shadow away.”

Farley is but one in a series of friends through whom Ira cycles as he attempts to touch directly an idealized America open only to its more deserving Christian sons and daughters. After Farley we get the dauntless and Huck Finn — like Billy Green. “ ‘Boyish’ was the word that might best describe him, boyish in the best sense, in the American sense: self-reliant, sportsmanlike, outdoors-oriented, adventurous and yet supremely sane.” Billy Green is not merely the antithesis of everything contained inside Ira’s hermetic tenement world and an antidote to his incestuous pathologies; he is the apotheosis of America.

Billy Green gives way to Larry Gordon, a worldly and wealthy young man with artistic aspirations. Ira assumes the attractive young man must be a Gentile. He’s too assured, too assimilated, too “regular” to be anything but. Wanting to impress when he first meets Larry, Ira causes a ruckus in his elocution class. He’s asked to explain his behavior after class, and his words reveal, nakedly, devastatingly, how lowly he finds himself, and how deeply he longs for approval from his Gentile peers. “I felt like I found a friend,” he explains to the offended teacher. “He was rich and he wasn’t Jewish, and he liked me.”

But as it turns out, Larry is Jewish, complicating in interesting ways the type of boy Ira befriends: this one is one of his own. An expansive friendship grows up between them: Larry introduces Ira to modern poetry while Ira, somewhat more reluctantly and confounded by the appeal, introduces Larry to Yiddish phrases and greenhorn customs. Ira is everything the well-heeled Larry finds exotic. In the more sophisticated boy’s company, Ira, who has scorned the greenhorns who attach to him by blood, becomes the greenhorn incarnate.

This series of friendships has been Ira’s ad hoc way of escaping the oppression of the immigrant ghetto, and of living, if only temporarily and vicariously, the healthy, incest-free life bestowed as a birthright upon other Americans. But if Ira is going to find his true self in some more lasting way, he’s going to have to leave Harlem behind entirely. It won’t be easy. He’s poor. He’s denied certain rights simply because he’s Jewish. And he disdains the capitalist enterprise that so many of his relatives and fellow Jews consider the essence of the American dream. It increases his sense of isolation: the country cares only about “things that had the least meaning for him, that he didn’t give a damn about.” The traditional escape from material poverty would have been, for Ira as for Roth, indistinguishable from suicide.

What speaks most forcefully to him is the world of books. Books “took you into their world. [Y]ou were more in their world than in the Jewish world. [M]aybe some day he’d find a way out of his Jewish slum world into their world.” They rescue the boy from his squalid surroundings and self-loathing and, later, introduce the possibility of a more permanent escape when it occurs to him that he might be capable of writing a book himself.

This awareness dawns slowly over the course of his friendship with Larry and later with Edith Welles. In ways overt and inadvertent, through their appetite for the exotic and their own artistic striving, Larry and Edith awaken Ira to a fateful fact: his source of shame — the low roots, the deprivations and depravities of an immigrant childhood — is, for the budding artist, an embarrassment of riches. James Joyce’s Ulysses, an early copy of which Edith gives to Ira in upstate New York after Larry scorns it, shows him how to put those riches to good use. To slip the bonds of Jewish immigrant life, Ira will have to return to it, tunnel deep inside it, and transform it into art. To escape requires embrace.

We get a sense of Ira’s artistic potential early on in the book, when he spots a star shining over Mt. Morris Park. He can be no older than nine or ten when he thinks like a writer for the first time. The revelation is worth quoting at length:

And he passes below the hill on Mt. Morris Park in autumn twilight, with the evening star in the west in limpid sky above the wooden bell tower. And so beautiful it was: a rapture to behold. It set him a problem he never dreamed anyone set himself. How do you say it? Before the pale blue twilight left your eyes you had to say it, use words that said it: blue, indigo, blue, indigo. Words that matched, matched that swimming star above the hill and the tower; what words matched it?. . Not twinkling, nah, twinkle, twinkle, little star — those words belonged to someone else. You had to match it yourself: swimming in the blue tide, you could say. . maybe. Like that bluing Mom rinses white shirts in. Nah, you couldn’t say that. . How clear it is. One star shines over Mt. Morris hill. And it’s getting dark, and it’s getting cold — Gee, if instead of cold, I said chill. A star shines over Mt. Morris Park hill. And it’s getting dark, and it’s getting chill.

Like Farley and Billy Green before him, Larry Gordon is eventually discarded and replaced. Ira, like Roth, is a shrewd young man, as people of any greatness must be if they hope to escape the inauspicious circumstances of their birth and finally achieve something of lasting merit, and to that end must choose Edith over Larry. Edith represents a natural progression: she is a Gentile, an intellectual, a mentor, and in time, she will become a patron and a lover. Confusing Ira for an innocent, she confides in him. She takes him into her complicated (and progressive) personal life, and he doesn’t judge her for what she discloses. The two develop a trusting friendship, so that when it comes time for Ira to confess his own transgressions, which he does under great duress, like a character out of Dostoyevsky, Edith doesn’t judge him. She forgives him — shows him mercy — so that he may forgive himself. Edith restores the romantic ideals Ira finds in books, which he thinks closed to him forever on account of the incest. With their restoration comes the permission to dream, to live, to write.

Mercy is an epic of the outsider, a chronicle of self-survival and self-discovery and the realization of the self. It’s also a masterpiece of immigrant fiction. It’s what would have been called, even a few decades ago, a great Jewish-American novel, written by a pioneer of Jewish-American fiction. But though it applied at the time of Call It Sleep, to call anything a great Jewish-American novel now, with Malamud and Bellow under our national belt, and with a different Roth retired but transcendent, and a new generation of American Jews writing vital and varied fictions, is ghettoizing. No one calls Philip Roth a great Jewish-American writer, or Junot Díaz a great Latino-American novelist.

I would argue that to fully understand the more junior, and more celebrated, Roth of American letters, to comprehend clearly the complex, rebellious, and often loving relationship between father and son that Philip Roth constructs repeatedly in his fictions, one has to understand Henry Roth and his generation of Jewish Americans. One has to understand Henry Roth’s characters in Mercy, especially Ira Stigman’s father, utterly cowed by the world of goyim, and Ira himself, whose unease and obsequiousness, whose sycophancy before American goyim, is what Philip Roth takes aim at in books like Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint. And one has to understand the complex interplay between Chaim Stigman and his son. Ira’s engagement with the world of Gentiles, with Edith Welles and the bohemians of Greenwich Village, demonstrates extraordinary social progress from the vantage point of his father, who, when not slavishly serving Protestants of one stripe or another, pointedly avoids them. But Ira’s integration into a broader America is characterized by the outsider’s feelings of inferiority and subservience that Philip Roth’s autobiographical avatars would simply not abide. From Roth to Roth, then, we can assess the wildly changing dynamic of Jews in America, and American society more broadly, as it shifts from a nation that shuns immigrants, and Jews in particular, to one that embraces and celebrates them. The progression from Roth to Roth is the very same that allows us, with Mercy of a Rude Stream, to finally drop the designator “Jewish” from “Great American Novel.”

MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM

VOLUME I: A STAR SHINES OVER MT. MORRIS PARK

TO LARRY FOX

“SO HERE’S A HAND MY

TRUSTY FRIEND.”

I have ventur’d,

Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,

This many summers in a sea of glory,

But far beyond my depth. My high-blown pride

At length broke under me, and now has left me,

Weary and old with service, to the mercy

Of a rude stream that must for ever hide me.

Henry VIII, III.ii

Not to dare quibble with peerless Will, I still question how ’tis that his little wanton boys on bladders are first descried swimming in a sea of glory, and lastly being swept away by a rude stream — which suggests a torrent, not a sea, unless of course an ocean stream, like the Gulf Stream, but that’s scarcely rude. Tide, the alternate word, might have been more exact, but not nearly so felicitous.

Also I would like to observe that while his use of the word mercy is ironic, mine is not. It is literal. The rude stream did show me Mercy.

PART ONE

I

Midsummer. The three incidents would always be associated in his mind, more durably, more prominently than anything else during that summer of 1914, his first summer in Harlem. How remarkable, too, that the coming of Mom’s kin, the move to Harlem, and the ominous summer of 1914 should all have coincided — as if all his being and ways were undermined by the force of history disguised in the simple fact of the accession of new relatives. A thousand times he would think vainly: If it had only happened a few years later. Everything else could be the same, the war, the new relatives; if only he could have had, could have lived a few more years on the Lower East Side, say, until his Bar Mitzvah. Well. .

It was in August [Ecclesias, or m’aiutate], the pair of newspaper hawkers charged into 115th Street bawling headlines in Yiddish, dissonant and confused. Each vendor toted a portentous accordion of Yiddish newspapers slung from a leather strap across his shoulders. “Wuxtra! Wuxtra!” each bellowed: “Malkhumah!” followed by a garble of Yiddish. The eight-year-old Ira had just come into the front room where his grandparents were seated next to the windows in the shade of the awnings, enjoying a breath of fresh air. Like them, his attention was drawn to the shouting below, and he looked down into the street for the cause. Beneath the window, the sun glared on the torrid sidewalk, shimmered on the black macadam. And the street, so lethargic and quiet until a minute ago, was now disturbed by two men flushed crimson roaring a hoarse gibberish of which only one word was intelligible — and repeated and repeated: “Malkhumah! Malkhumah!” War! Out of neighboring doorways of houses and stores came a scattering of buyers, some hurrying after the yammering pair of vendors, others waiting for them. The buyers frowned at the headlines, displayed them to one another, spoke, gesticulated, called up to people leaning out of windows.

“He cries war,” said Zaida.

And, “Woe is me,” said Baba.

“What is that coin I see them paying for the newspaper?” Zaida asked.

“I think it’s a nickel, Zaida,” Ira answered. “Five cents.”

“This kind?”

“Yeh.”

“Run, child. Fetch me one.” He handed the nickel to Ira, who with coin in hand sped down the two flights of stairs to the scorching street, pursued the vendors, still bawling their wares. He proffered the nickel; the newspaper was whipped out in exchange. And with the hectic cry still pursuing him, Ira raced back to the house, mounted the stairs with eager haste, and came panting into the front room.

“Indeed, war,” said Zaida after a glance at the lowering Yiddish headlines. “They’re slaughtering one another again.”

“Who?” Baba said.

“Austria and Serbia.”

“Oy, gevald!” Baba groaned. “My poor daughter. My poor Genya, and with child again in the midst of that peril. The Lord protect them. The Lord have mercy on them!”

“Madmen! Destroy! Destroy! Nothing else will suffice,” Zaida fumed. “Fortunate, we escaped in time from that charnel house. Praise His Holy Name.”

Thus the Great War came to Harlem: roaring news vendors hawking warm newsprint in the hot street; the diffident youngster offering a nickel to the sweating, red-faced herald of disaster. .

II

It was July of that year, still one month before the outbreak of war. Mom’s immediate kin were due to arrive in America in another few days. From the little hamlet of Veljish in Austria-Hungary, whence they had set forth, they would soon take up residence in Harlem. Their apartment, a large one with six rooms, only two flights up, and supplied with steam heat, electricity and hot running water — and even striped awnings above the two front-room windows — was located in the middle of the block — in the middle of 115th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues. It was called in Yinglish a shaineh b’tveen, meaning — literally — a lovely between. It was not only a thoroughly Jewish and congenial block, but one most conveniently located to shopping as well. Just east of it was the Jewish pushcart district that found shelter under the wide steel overpass of the New York Central Railway on Park Avenue. There the immigrants could haggle freely in Yiddish with the peddlers. The apartment also had the additional advantage of being across the street from the apartment of Tanta Mamie and her family (undoubtedly that was another reason why Ira’s two Americanized uncles, Moe and Saul, had chosen the place). Mamie could speak to Baba or Zaida, or one of her immigrant siblings — and they to her — from window to window, without anyone leaving the house.

Meanwhile, Mom, in anticipation of the joy that being near her family would bring, and Pop, in anticipation of the rewards that becoming an independent milkman might bring (made possible by moving close to the milk-shed, the freight yards on West 125th Street), abandoned their breezy East Side eyrie four flights up on the corner of Avenue D and 9th Street, and with their eight-year-old son, Ira, moved, united in hope, to Harlem. In her eagerness to be near her kin, and still stay within her husband’s limited means, Mom had resigned herself to living in three rooms “in the back,” the cheapest she could find in “Jewish Harlem,” three sweltering little rooms, on 114th Street, just east of Park Avenue. Into this cramped, airless little flat, the Stigman family moved as soon as school was over and summer vacation began.

The immigrants arrived: Mom’s father and mother; Zaida, bearded, orthodox Jew, already a patriarch in his mid-fifties, discontented and irascible; Baba, his patient and shrunken wife (she had loved her spouse greatly once, Mom said, but his all-consuming selfishness had drained her of affection). She had borne him a progeny of eleven children. The last two, twins, would have been Ira’s age, Mom told him, had they survived, but they died in infancy. Of the nine remaining, five were daughters and four were sons. All had now emigrated to America, except Genya, second child, Mom’s younger sister. Most attractive, according to Mom, of all of Zaida’s brood, Genya had married a man earning a fine income as an expert appraiser of lumber. They both decided to stay on in Austria-Hungary with their infant son.

Oh, the things that happen, Ecclesias, the things that happen, to me, to us, to my beloved wife and me, this 14th of January 1985, to our heirs, to our country, to Israel, the things that happen. My good friend, the writer Clarence G, was wont to storm at generational novels (he had Thomas Mann’s work in mind). “I hate generational novels, don’t you? They drive me crazy!” he would exclaim. I think I agree with him, but this is different, Ecclesias; how different I have yet to discover myself. .

Nine surviving offspring, five daughters and four sons, and all but Genya in America (Genya and daughter later vanished in a Nazi death camp. Husband and son, because of their shared expertise, were allowed to live — and to watch the two women herded into a lorry, and to hear the young girl cry: “Papa, I’m too young to die!”). All but Genya were in America. Mom came over first, brought here by Pop, who, in common with other immigrant husbands already in the new land, scrimped and saved, and in his case, stinted to the point of alimentary collapse, until he had accumulated enough to buy steerage passage for his wife and infant son. “We saw leviathans, great sea-creatures following the ship,” Mom tried vainly to awaken Ira’s memory. “You don’t remember? And you cried for milk, for which we had to pay extra: milk, the only word you could say in Polish.”

After Mom came to America, Mamie followed, Baba’s third child and Mom’s second younger sister, mettlesome and assertive Tanta Mamie. Once here, she boarded with Zaida’s brother, Granduncle Nathan, a thriving diamond merchant of somewhat flawed scruples. The poor girl was virtually indentured in his household as a domestic — until she found work in the garment industry, and thus earned enough to rent a room of her own in Manhattan. Almost at the same time she met her future husband, Jonas, an immigrant of equal acculturation as herself, a gnome of a man who worked in the adjacent building as a cloak’s operator, “by clucks.” At first, he courted her at lunchtime, then after-hours, when he would escort her to her room, and at length, to show serious intent, took her to the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue on Saturday night to hear the famous Yiddish thespian, Tomashevsky. They married, set up housekeeping, not on the East Side, where Mom and Pop already lived, but in a small apartment in Jewish Harlem, in the same b’tveen where Baba and Zaida and their unmarried children were later to reside.

Next in order of birth, and next to emigrate to the United States, was Moe, Baba’s fourth child and first-born son. Unlike his sister Mamie before him, Moe boarded with Ira’s family, by now living on 9th Street, high above the horse-car trolley tracks on Avenue D. Moe eschewed the needle trades; he preferred to work in heavy industry: he applied to steel fabricating shops, to a storage battery plant, but was turned away because he was a Jew. He found work in a café, and there toiled inordinate hours as a busboy, regarded in those years as the necessary apprenticeship to becoming a waiter. Of above-average height, for the epoch, though not tall, Moe was solid and robust in build (he had worked in logging camps in the Carpathian forests). Blue-eyed, fair, anything but the “typical” East European Jew in appearance, Moe was the guileless, outspoken country bumpkin. Endowed with Mom’s kindliness, her open-handedness, her lenience and her ready laughter, Moe was unaffectedly fond of his first-born nephew, first-born grandchild of Ben Zion Farb, the patriarch. Moe, or Morris, the name he preferred, would return from the sawdust-strewn café where he worked, trudging home on a summer night, to the big corner house on Avenue D; and with his nephew hanging on to his hand, make for the candy store at the foot of the house. There he would buy five or six or more penny Hershey chocolate bars, and bestowing one of these on his clamorous nephew, strip the wrappers off the others, and crowd the dainties one after another into his mouth, until for a minute he radiated chocolate spokes, like misplaced rays of the Statue of Liberty.

Moe was the second of Mom’s immediate kin to make the crossing (Utter rustic! In Hamburg, where the young simpleton had to stay in a lodging house overnight before boarding ship the next morning, he blew out the gaslight ere he went to bed, and had it not been for the timely arrival of a bed-fellow, Moe’s journey to America would have ended then and there).

Next came Saul, devious, surreptitious, hysteric Saul, who also became a busboy like his brother, but unlike his brother, as soon as he reached the status of waiter, he spurned working in Jewish restaurants. The best hotels, the most exclusive dining rooms — where the “white slaves” worked, as Pop called the German waiters, when he himself became a waiter, too — were the only places Saul would deign to wait at table.

The sun reflected off the windshield of a passing car. The light burst into lurid spectrum, shattering the darkness of Ira’s half-closed eyes focused on the computer screen. Ira mused on the meaning of the Syrian-controlled PLO hit squads reported by radio to be slipping into other countries for the purpose of assassinating Arafat’s henchmen. And the mind with its involuntary shorthand signaled: Arafat was cozying up to Hussein, and he to Iraq, while Syria was to Iran. Did that mean Arafat was becoming mollified, resigned to reaching a compromise with Israel? Doubtful. Highly.

Saul strove after all things American: “Especially loose shiksas,” Mom murmured to her young son in embarrassment. “It’s not seemly.” Among the scanty images of his uncle, incubated over the years since childhood, two were preserved intact: Saul’s vindictive swatting, with a rolled-up copy of the Journal American, of a couple of copulating horseflies on the sunny granite rocks of Mt. Morris Park. By some chance Ira had accompanied Saul, and the younger, lately arrived uncle, Max, to the park. . Another time, of an evening, as Ira stood by, listening: In reply to Pop’s proposal that he and Saul both pool a couple of hundred dollars each, and as partners invest in a certain luncheonette, Saul bragged, lifting a reckless, yet Semitic, face to the light of the street lamp: “I’ve spent more than that on a whore for a night.”

“Shah!” Pop exclaimed, shocked — and cautionary of the young ears heeding.

These four siblings, Mom and Mamie, Moe and Saul, were already in the New World. Some time in the spring of 1914, Zaida sold his little gesheft in Veljish, his little general store, and used the proceeds to defray the cost of second-class passage to America. Second-class passage was much more expensive than third-class, and the expense of transporting six adult passengers practically exhausted Zaida’s resources. But since only thus could he assure himself and his family a kosher diet during the crossing, the six arrived second-class. They came to America in style, though almost penniless. Zaida would rely on his two sons in America to take care of him — and of Baba — until his immigrating offspring could help shoulder the burden, which they did, unquestioningly.

Two parents and their four children arriving in the new world: two sons, two daughters, all four unmarried.

At one stroke the number of Zaida’s and Baba’s offspring in America was doubled; at one stroke Ira acquired not only two grandparents, but four new uncles and aunts. Six close relatives all at once. It was a little bewildering at first.

Ella was the oldest of these four new siblings. Quiet, plain, self-effacing, she was extraordinarily gifted in needlework. (Years later, Ira would muse on what these, like millions of other immigrants, might have achieved in the new world, given the least guidance, the least assistance.) Products of Ella’s handiwork were the delightful Hebrew samplers on the walls of the new apartment, the only adornments other than savings bank calendars. Ella’s were the traditional lions of Judah rampant over the tablets of the Law embroidered on the sapphire velvet of the bag in which Zaida stored his phylacteries and prayer shawl; hers the charming gold-threaded designs on the scarlet velvet matzah caddy that graced the table on the Passover.

Next in age, and quite unlike her older sister temperamentally and in many other respects, was Sadie. She was very homely; she was rambunctious; she was rashly impulsive and willful. She was illiterate as well. Perhaps due to her extremely defective vision, which, in the hamlet where the family dwelled, had gone uncorrected for lack of an oculist, Sadie was the only illiterate one of Zaida and Baba’s brood of nine surviving children. So myopic was she that twice she poked her head through the panes of closed windows in the Harlem apartment. Taken by Mom to be fitted for glasses, when Sadie was asked to read the eye chart, she began a pathetic alphabetic chant of “Ah, beh, tseh, deh. .” Commented Mom dryly: “The oculist understood what he had to do.” Later, when she was engaged to be married to Max S, a waiter, from whom her illiteracy was concealed, Sadie, by now fitted with eyeglasses, gave herself over to an earnest attempt to learn to read a little English under her juvenile nephew’s tutelage. The effort was vain. Fitful, spasmodic, she seemed unable to focus on print — and after awhile, the adolescent Ira was unable to focus on teaching her. Her twitchings, her flutterings of helplessness aroused him — which she noticed — and sessions were suspended.

After her vision was corrected, Sadie too displayed exceptional manual aptitude. Following her initiation into the ways of the American shop (and the ways of getting there and home), she became highly adept in the making of feather ornaments for ladies’ hats, earning by piecework higher wages than Ella did with her fancy embroidery. Her very good wages, after deductions for room and board to the common household fund, left her a tidy surplus; part of this, of course, she deposited in the savings bank, and part of it she spent on finery and cosmetics. It was the cosmetics that drove her older brother Saul beside himself. Not only long since Americanized, but well acquainted with the subdued elegance of the suave patrons he waited on in the high-toned hotel dining rooms — and the high-tone harlots he pined for — he objected violently to the strong perfumes, the thick shingles of face powder, the lurid rouge with which his sister bedizened her features. A frenetic he was, and his sister, in her willfulness, a match for him: fierce spats broke out between them, in which “whore” and “whoremonger” were bandied about, until such a vortex of acrimony was reached, especially on a Sunday, when all were still in bed, that the other siblings were drawn in, egging on or protesting. The apartment became a babel, an uproarious babel in Polish, Yiddish, Slavic and broken English, a babel only Zaida could quell. And quell it he did, wading in with cane and yarmulke and flailing adversaries and adherents right and left without distinction. Two or three of these hideous squabbles Ira witnessed: Impecunious little shnorrer that he was, Sunday mornings were the best times for him to visit Zaida and Baba’s house, to collect a few coins, the small gratuities of kinship. Once, he entered the house just as his uncle Saul leaped out of bed, and rushing over to Sadie’s bed, slapped her; she retaliated in kind. Instantly the apartment became bedlam. Poor, patient, wrinkled Baba retreated to the kitchen murmuring to herself unhappily; and Zaida, uttering towering imprecations, restored order in customary fashion: with cane and yarmulke.

So there was Ella, there was Sadie, and what hatred she and Pop harbored for each other! Die blindeh, he dubbed her: the blind one — because she stood her ground, refused to be intimidated by his wrath, as Mom so often was in those early years. Not in the least cowed, Sadie would fling back at her brother-in-law: Mishugener hint! Mad dog! (And too often, alas, Ira secretly agreed with her.) “Why didn’t I learn to read?” she confided bitterly to her young instructor during those fruitless and now ambiguous sessions, when it was becoming all too evident that his flighty, twitching pupil couldn’t curb her restlessness, nor Ira his carnal hopes. “I didn’t learn to read,” Sadie said, “because I was sent to be a little serving-maid in your parents’ home in Tysmenitz where they lived with your father’s father — on his bounty. At a time when I should have received some schooling I was there instead, tending to you, an infant.” Her brown eyes behind thick glasses trained an angry gaze at her nephew; whose own glance wavered between distraction of her thick, plastery powdered nose and fierily rouged cheeks, and distraction of his guilty desires. “And do you know what your father would do to me, when your mother was heavy with you, when your mother was in labor, and I took care of the housework? He would fart in my face.”

“Yeah?” Ira projected sympathy. Strings were a single strand; ropes were twined: ambivalence about the genuine: What if Baba’s twins had lived, the boy and the girl, the girl, the girl his age to teach English to? Maybe. .

There were Ella and Sadie. The former married Meyer D, owner of the then-thriving kosher butcher shop across the street, where Baba traded, and continued to trade when she realized Meyer was an eligible bachelor. He was a heavyset man, taciturn, quite middle-aged, his sole diversion apparently a game of pinochle played in a café on 116th Street. So Ella was married first, and then Sadie. She married the tall, slender Max S — who discovered too late, so well dissembled was it, that his bride was an illiterate (Ut azoy und ut azoy, ran the Yiddish ditty, nahrt m’n uhp a khoosin. “This way and that way the groom is duped.” Max S made light of the revelation. He had found what he sought, a compatible, faithful and diligent Jewish wife.

Ira’s two new uncles were the youngest members of his grandparents’ family. Of the two, Max F was older than his brother Harry — and far more beguiling, whimsical and humorous. Average in height (for those times), Max was close-knit and well-proportioned; his eyes blue, his nose snub, Slavic, like Baba’s — and like Mamie’s too. His hair was chestnut in hue, and surpassingly thick and wavy. In addition to being ingenious, inventive, a great “fixer,” Max was a self-styled Hero (It was one of the first English words that Max learned; his use of it puzzled Ira at first, who associated the word with a warrior of great daring. Only afterward Ira realized that Max meant “ein Heldt,” which in Yiddish didn’t necessarily signify a person of great valor, but a stalwart person, or even one who was merely hale and hearty.). Max actually undertook to prove he was a Hero — and an ingenious one as well: With a contraption of hooks connected by cords to a heavy comb, he sank the teeth of the comb into his dense locks, and engaging the hooks at the other end under a weighty bureau, he lifted the bureau from the floor. Could Samson himself brag of more heroic hair?

An hour after the new arrivals had installed themselves in the apartment — it was to be Ira’s earliest, earliest recollection of his uncle Max — the young immigrant invited his boy-nephew to guide him to the pushcart mart under the railroad overpass on Park Avenue. There, he asked Ira to inquire as to the price of two small carrots. They cost one cent. Max produced the copper, and Ira made the purchase. How neatly, how deftly Max scraped the carrots clean with his penknife — and then proffered his nephew the smaller of the two roots:

“But it’s raw!” Ira drew back. “Nobody eats a raw carrot, Uncle.”

“Ess, ess,” Max urged (in Yiddish). “Taste. It’s sweet.” And to Ira’s surprise, so it was: sweet and crunchy. The memory, the fading composite of the vaguely smiling Max, the produce on the pushcarts, the penknife peeling a carrot, the warmth of summer, and the contrast between the shadow under the huge steel canopy of the railroad trestle and the bright sunlight on the sidewalk, would condense for Ira into the first inference he was ever conscious of as inference: From that summery composite, he could deduce the kind of life that was lived by Mom and her family, by Zaida, Baba and the rest in the lethargic, Galitzianer hamlet named Veljish. The moist, orangy, peeled carrot at the core of recollection substantiated all that Mom had told him: about the meagerness of rations, about the larder kept under lock and key, about Zaida’s autocratic sway, his precedence in being served, in being served the choicest — and to satiety. As to his progeny, “The child who is given good bread and butter ought not look for more.” That was Zaida’s maxim.

III

And now would follow one of those episodes, the first of many Ira was ashamed of, that seemed to indicate the beginning of attrition of his identity, an episode that Ira always connected with his removal from the East Side to Harlem.

Shake your head in reproach, my friend; let your fingertips join in a cage, and ponder: You brought home for the first time in your public school career a report card marked C C C, unsatisfactory in deportment, in effort and in proficiency. It was so disgraceful a report card, you tried to inveigle Mom into signing it without Pop’s seeing it, but she refused. .

Harry, Ira’s youngest uncle, was sixteen years old. Still regarded as a child by Baba — and his earnings not required toward the support of the prosperous household, to which five wage earners contributed, for Max too had found work — Baba was eager to have her youngest son enrolled in an American public school, and given the advantages of an American education — like those enjoyed by her oldest grandchild. Moreover, enrolled in the same school as Ira, the uncle could learn the routines and protocols of classroom attendance from his nephew.

Unfortunately for Harry, and for Ira too, by the time school opened in September, Mom and Pop had decided to move from 114th Street, east of Park Avenue, to 119th Street, east of Park Avenue. A difference of five blocks, yet the move was a fateful one. Not only were they relocating to a much less desirable b’tveen, a goyisher b’tveen instead of a Jewish b’tveen; but the school nearest Ira’s house was an elementary school: P.S. 103 on the corner of 119th Street and Madison Avenue. It accepted children up to the sixth grade only, which meant that the oldest children in P.S. 103 averaged about twelve years of age — while Harry was already sixteen!

Why did this unfortunate situation come to pass? Because Mom had become unhappy with their first choice of rooms in Harlem. Not only were they small and sweltering. That could be endured. After all, the rooms did have hot running water, and would have steam heat in the winter, like Mamie’s and Baba’s. No, Mom had become unhappy because the rooms were “in the back.” The view out of the windows was lifeless and unchanging; the same backyards met the eye day after day. It reminded her too much of her old home in Veljish: dormant. Inanimate. She became despondent. She craved a window to lean out of and contemplate the changing scene below. She craved a dwelling with windows “in the front.” Such had been their home on 9th Street. All the windows looked out on the front: On one side, Avenue D, full of movement of old and young, of people waiting on corners for horse-drawn trolley cars. Why, Woodrow Wilson himself had appeared on Avenue D doffing his stovepipe hat to the public on either hand. Only four flights down, you could see the light glint on his zvicker, the pince-nez eyeglasses the presidential candidate wore. You could see 9th Street out of the other windows. You could see the East River. Ah, a wonderful thing was a five-room flat on the corner. “I lacked only one thing,” said Mom. “What nonsense: lyupka.”

But front-room dwellings in Jewish Harlem were exorbitant — by Pop’s standards. Everything Jewish was dear, dear because Jewish and dear in dollars and cents. Outside of Jewish Harlem, however, rents dropped sharply, especially rents for cold-water flats. And Pop, intent on saving every nickel for his project as milkman-entrepreneur, decided to sacrifice a Jewish milieu for a cheaper rent. So outside of Jewish Harlem they moved: to a four-room cold-water flat, a flight up, “in the front.” Their new residence was the five-story, dingy, gray and brown brick tenement that occupied the lot at 108 East 119th Street.

It was here, even if they had to give up certain amenities — hot running water, electricity, steam heat, private bathroom — it was here that their needs most nearly dovetailed: Mom had a window on the street to lean out of, Pop had to pay only $12 per month for rent. And miraculously, a block away on Lexington Avenue, there was a stable where he could put up his newly purchased old horse and milk-wagon. What a convenience, what an auspicious omen! What if their new home was on the borderline between Jewish and goyish Harlem? Jews would be sure to move there in the not-too-distant future. What if they had to use gas light for illumination, and not electricity? They were used to that on the East Side. What if the bathroom-toilet was not in the house, not intramural, but in the hall, and the bathtub looked like an immense green-painted tin trough set in a wooden coffin of matched boards, and the paint came off and stuck to your bottom in hot water? They had no hot running water anyway, and bathed in warm water from the kettle rarely. Rent was only $12 per month; that was the important thing. Mom had immediate access to a window on the street, Pop a convenient stable for his horse and milk-wagon.

But for all the satisfied needs and auspicious omens, only misfortune ensued. For Ira, misfortune was long lasting. It altered his entire life for the worse. For Harry it was short-term — painful, but brief. Had Baba not been so persuaded by her acculturated American son, Saul — with Pop to confirm him — that Harry would fare best under Ira’s guidance, and instead of enrolling her youngest living offspring in P.S. 103, enrolled him in the large and conveniently located school on 116th Street west of Fifth Avenue, P.S. 86, a combined elementary and grammar school that went all the way to the eighth grade, the lanky stripling Harry might have passed relatively unnoticed among the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds attending the school. And of much greater importance: He would have been in a school that was largely Jewish in composition, and at the very least, tolerant of the new immigrant. In P.S. 103 he became at once, from the moment of his appearance, the object of derision, of Irish derision (and what derision had a sharper edge?). He became the object of taunts and Jew-baiting: target of spitballs, rubberbands, blackboard erasers and pieces of chalk. That was inside the school. Outside the school, the target of bolts of horse manure and stones, and later on, in cold weather, of ice-filled or gravel-filled snowballs. Over and over again, in full view of his cringing, craven nephew (whose final recourse was to disown his kin, slink into a bystander role, even appear to participate in the hounding), his uncle would stand at bay attempting to drive off a swarm of maddening Irish gamins.

Apparently in despair of ever resolving the situation, Miss Flaherty, the principal, relieved Harry of regular classroom attendance, and gave him private lessons in English within the sanctuary of the “Principal’s Office.” In between times he was dispatched on errands: to buy bananas at the fruit stand on the corner, to deliver messages to individual teachers, to carry stacks of textbooks or supplies from repository to classroom. The apparition of the lanky, glum greenhorn coming through the door in the midst of a lesson was something Ira would never forget: the snickering, the suppressed catcalls, the taunts, despite the general reprimand of the teacher, would remain clearly in memory all the rest of his life — ineffaceable emblem of his first repudiation of his own kith and kin, cruelly assailed. After many decades, Ira would speculate on what would have been the result had Harry been enrolled in an East Side school, with its myriad of recent immigrants providing the very latest ones with a kind of protective matrix. How much happier that outcome for both himself and his adolescent uncle would have been. As it was, not only was Ira’s first report card marked C C C, failure in all three categories of performance, but his second and his third report card as well. Not till his fourth would the marks improve to B B B, and whether Harry’s quitting school in favor of getting a job had anything to do with the improvement, Ira would never know. He doubted it.

He doubted it because this was not the only instance of rejection of his own kind. The seed of rejection had already been sown — before his abandonment of his youthful uncle — sown weeks and weeks before, before school opened, sown at the first sight of his new kinfolk. At the moment of their entering their new apartment in Harlem, rejection inherent in the chagrin and disenchantment he felt at his first encounter with them. It was then, at that very instant, that irrevocable disappointment made its corrosive inroad: When the two taxicabs drew up to the curb in front of the apartment house, the two taxicabs bearing the six immigrants and their baggage — and their two shepherding sons, Moe in the one cab, Saul in the other — and the newcomers alighted in the sunlit street, Mamie, ever volatile in emotion, and close to fainting with rapture, screamed from the window: “Mominyoo! Mominyoo! Tateh! Tateh!” And Mom, though more self-controlled, carried away by excitement, and tears of joy welling from her eyes, and everyone, even little Stella, Mamie’s child, all crowding into the two front-room windows, screaming down at the uplifted faces screaming upward to mingle in joyful Yiddish cacophony that brought people to the windows of neighboring houses, it was then and there the desolate breach opened between himself and himself that was never to close.

For during the days and weeks preceding their arrival, as Mom’s anticipation grew, her longing, perhaps entangled in the nostalgias of her own girlhood, transmuted itself within Ira into fantasies as remote from the actuality he was soon to encounter as dream: into noble images of uncles and aunts, kindly, munificent, affectionate and indulgent. He imagined, in childish fancy, that the newcomers would be like “Uncle Louie”—Pop’s nephew, though older — Americanized, a government employee, a letter carrier in postman blue; who had served in the United States Army, could reminisce entrancingly about Indians and buffalo, about mountain and desert; and above all, was boundlessly generous with his pretend-nephew, fond and generous, never leaving after a visit, whether to the house on 114th Street, or the one on 119th, without first bestowing on Ira a handful of small change, an entire handful to a child who otherwise could rarely boast of possessing an entire nickel. Though Pop might cry, “Beloy! Beloy!” Desist! Desist! Uncle Louis would override him with his square, gold-dentured smile, his brown eyes arch behind his gold-rimmed glasses. “Beloy! Beloy!” was to no avail with Americanized Uncle Louie! What jingling, silvery rich coins were Ira’s. .

He thought the new relatives would be just like Uncle Louie, bountiful, endowed with a store of beguiling anecdotes, with rare knowledge of customs and places which they were only too happy to impart on their doting little kinsman. In short, they would be somehow charmingly, magically, bountifully pre-Americanized. Instead — they were greenhorns! Greenhorns with uncouth, lopsided and outlandish gestures, greenhorns who, once they cried out how big Leah’s infant had grown since they last saw him, paid no more attention to him, greenhorns engaged in all manner of talk too incomprehensible for him to understand, speaking “thick” Yiddish, without any English to leaven it, about the ways of the New World, the kosher shopping nearby and the work to be found here, and about relatives and friends and affairs in the little hamlet they had left behind: dull, colorless, greenhorn affairs.

Once again — Ira would reflect later — had their advent into the New World taken place in the ambience of the East Side, their outcry, their foreignness, their Yiddishkeit would not have seemed so garish. But here, already translated from that broader, homogeneous Jewish world, already glimpsing, perceiving on every hand, in every cautious exploration of the surrounding neighborhoods, how vast and predominant was the goyish world that surrounded the little Jewish enclave in which he lived, almost at once, a potential for contrast was instilled, a potential for contrast that waxed with every passing day on 114th Street. From erstwhile unawareness, awareness became insupportable; contrast became too much to bear: The newcomers’ crudity and grimace, their green and carious teeth, the sense of oppressive orthodoxy under Zaida’s sway — how they rushed to the sink at his behest to rinse their mouths in salt water — their totally alien behavior combined to produce in Ira a sense of unutterable chagrin and disappointment.

After he returned from his excursion with Max in the pushcart district, a feeling of isolation, of such intense disenchantment pervaded Ira, that to escape from his disconsolateness, he asked Mom if he could go downstairs. She consented, and in token of her joy, gave him a nickel to spend on anything he fancied. He descended the two flights of stairs, came out of the hallway into vacant, bright and comfortless 114th Street; and finding no one there his own age to strike up an acquaintance with, he trudged aimlessly west toward Fifth Avenue, then into the first candy store he came to, and bought a cheery box of Cracker Jacks. Munching the sweet, molasses-covered popcorn, he turned south toward the 110th Street corner of Central Park.

The Cracker Jacks did little to relieve him of his dejection. After he had consumed half a box, they afforded no comfort at all, rather an obligation to eat all he had paid for, despite his becoming cloyed with them. He felt inconsolable; he had been tricked somehow by the perversity of reality, a wayward reality that flouted all his cravings, his needs, his hopes. Greenhorns, crude, embarrassing uncouth greenhorns, of no avail against the vacancy gaping ever wider within him since moving to 114th Street. How homely they were, what impenetrable Yiddish they spoke, with what contortions they accompanied speech. They were here to learn about America themselves, to learn American ways, to earn their living in America, not to treasure him, or slip coins into his hand.

No, no, no. They had no money themselves: Max and his two carrots for a penny, Max splurging a whole penny to buy a treat. He had come here to find work, because you couldn’t make a living in that hamlet, Veljish, and his two aunts to find work and husbands. Otherwise they’d become old maids, as Mom had told him. Nahh. You’d have to wait until they got jobs before you could hope for a nickel. . He veered toward the curb. Always the same cloying sweetness, molasses sweetness, covered each cluster of popcorn. It made you thirsty. The happy picture on the box of frolicking kids at a baseball game promised way, way more than was inside. Nah. He wished he had his nickel back. He dropped the empty box into a small puddle at the curb. Never again.

Prosperous Fifth Avenue. . He trudged south. This part of Fifth Avenue always seemed fat to him, fat and prosperous: like chicken schmaltz. Full of “all-rightnicks,” complacent, well-fed, contented Jewish people. Fat couples in summer wear with their kids licking ice cream cones. Even the stores and the restaurants looked prosperous, looked fat. Only he, mopey he, threaded among the self-satisfied strollers, discontented. So. . that. . anh. . that yearned-for passage, passage from himself to them, Mom’s relatives, was barred, utterly untenable. The longed-for communion, lost sense of belonging that gnawed at him, almost without his knowing, ever since leaving 9th Street, that he hoped they would provide, the way Uncle Louie did, so briefly, with his sympathy and understanding, his largesse and laughter, they never would, they never could provide. Ludicrous to think so. The new kind of loneliness that he had begun to feel ever since coming to Harlem deepened. Grotesque greenhorns his delightful envisagings had become. What a dope.

He entered the park: sunny, restless ripples on the lake, rowboats floating on spangles of water, troubling the smother of reflected brilliance. Shifting pedestrians, noisy kids running about, infants in prams, mothers seated on the green benches, admonishing, gossiping, couples sauntering. Two paths opened before him as soon as he entered the park, two paved walks diverged. He could take the one that skirted the lake west toward the boathouse. He could take the other that skirted the lake toward the south. To walk west was to walk parallel to 110th Street, parallel to the car tracks on which the electric “dinky” ran, the little, lurching, battery-powered crosstown trolley that everybody made fun of. To walk south was to walk “downtown.” To Ira, 110th Street was a kind of subjective southern border of Harlem. The sprawling Harlem Casino, used for Jewish marriages, fancy Bar Mitzvahs, and other special occasions, that stood on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 110th seemed the anchor of the solid rows of choice elevator apartments that stretched from Fifth Avenue west, imposing elevator apartments of eight or ten stories, in a solid front toward Lenox Avenue and Seventh Avenue, all the way to the imaginary west boundary of Harlem, the lofty El curving in charcoal sweep around the northwest corner of the park. Beyond that, affluent Central Park West became workaday Eighth Avenue.

Ira already had determined these boundaries, determined his own boundaries, because he had no one to ask, because he had scouted the precincts alone. Alone; that was altogether different from the way he had reconnoitered the environs of 9th Street when they first moved in, always, always in company of other kids, Izzy or Moish or Ziggy or Hersh or Yussie. With one or another or all, almost in awe they had stood in the shadow of the dark, brooding Fulton Street Fish Market under the bridge to Brooklyn, the looming gas tanks on East 14th Street, like huge drums by the drumstick smokestacks. Or the other docks on the East River, where you could watch scows with all kinds of cargo aboard, lumber or coal or cobblestones, shepherded by different tugboats to their moorings, see the great hemp hausers looped around the iron stanchions. Or hie westward to Avenue A, and the Free Baths with the slippery tile floors. Ah. But now solitary.

In whichever direction one chose to go after entering the park, west or south, one walked alongside the iron-pipe fence that bounded the small lake. On the other side of the lake, a bosom of stone swelled up from the water, a granite bosom, surmounted by shrubs and trees that grew thicker and thicker until they met the sky at the top in a high, shady grove. The grove seemed to beckon, offering seclusion in keeping with his own sense of isolation. He walked south, skirting the lake, until he came to a paved walk leading upward. . Stone steps and paved walk and stone steps once more, until he reached the summit. From there, narrow wooded trails led down toward the lake, patches of whose glittering water he could glimpse from above. From the summit too he could see the facades and windows of apartment houses on 110th, and even a “dinky” trolley jigging along its tracks. It had rained the day before, and near at hand, rills still ran through channels over bits of twigs and last year’s brown leaves.

He was thirsty. And yet, not so thirsty he couldn’t easily have waited until he got back to the faucets in the kitchen of Zaida and Baba’s new house. But his thirst seemed bound up with vague new longing spawned by disenchantment, as if intense disappointment distilled its own anodyne to assuage it. Fancy suddenly imbued him. Fancy suddenly buoyed him up, lifted him high above despond, scattered disgruntlement: He was a Scout, lone explorer in trackless America, self-sufficient, resourceful and intrepid, roving through the visionary land, and arrived at this rivulet in the primeval forest. For a moment the countervailing thought crossed his mind that the rill at his feet might have been peed in; though it looked clear, maybe wasn’t safe to drink. But he had to be resolute — he was a bold, buckskin-clad Scout, the wide-ranging explorer, slipping silent as a shadow through the trackless wild: He had pledged himself to a new resolve, to a new “pledge allegiance,” a new covenant he couldn’t name, an American covenant; he had to drink to confirm it: Kneeling, he bent facedown to streamlet, sipped a few mouthfuls. .

IV

It was still vacation time, a few days before school, P.S. 103, opened. So persistently had Ira nagged Mom to revisit 9th Street, to revisit the East Side — out of a longing grown all the more intense now that he found himself in Irish-dominated 119th — that she finally consented. Truth was she too wanted to meet old neighbors and acquaintances in the old surroundings. On a morning before Labor Day, he and Mom made ready to go.

Spruced up, in fresh blouse, best knee-pants, he skipped along beside Mom in happy jaunt as the two walked east along 116th Street all the way to the Second Avenue El station, where Pop had directed them to go. There they boarded the almost-empty train, rode downtown on clacking wheels, stopping at countless local stations, while Ira, jubilant, kneeled on the straw-colored train seat and gazed out of the open window at the roofs and rusting metal eaves of the rows and rows of low, dull brick houses that lined the El route.

They came at last to the 8th Street station! Scarcely heeding her admonitions to be careful, Ira skipped down the El stairs to the street, beyond the farthest boundary of his and his friends’ wanderings, Second Avenue; still, even from there he could already descry to the east familiar landmarks: First Avenue, the green corner of the little park on Avenue A, where the Free Baths were, where he and Izzy and Heshy and Mutke and the other East Side kids dowsed under showers during the summer, slid on their pink butts for a sleigh ride over the slippery tiles.

They walked on; and soon he was in his old haunts, Avenue C, with its lines of pushcarts and stir and gabble of haggling and cry of wares — in Yiddish — and flow of crowd of shoppers, Jewish crowd, hands waggling and whiskers prominent. Already he could see the tall red-brick house — his! — on the corner of Avenue D. . the windows up there near the edge, high, his, and a little patch of the river, the cool East River always at beck, beyond the junkyards with the carrion stink of dead cats, where they played follow-the-leader over old boilers and scrap machinery, past the blacksmith shop reeking of seared hooves, and that little wooden house where the sandy-haired Polish janitor’s kid had called him a sheeny; and Ira’s, “Wait, till I get you downstairs.” How bold he had been then, a good fighter, the other kids said; and he had posed for his tintype with fists outstretched in approved boxer’s stance: had to hide under the bed and listen to Mom lie that he wasn’t home, when some irate mother of a kid whose nose Ira had bloodied came storming up to the house. And now he had become apprehensive, he had become uneasy.

“Oh, I wanna go back,” he suddenly cried out in English — he was sure Mom would understand. “I wanna go back to 9th Street. I wanna come back here. I don’t wanna live in Harlem.”

“Bist mishugeh?” Mom said startled. “Are you mad?”

“It’s full of Irishers. They always wanna fight.”

“And you can’t? Since when?”

“Yeah, but everybody! Everybody is Irish. They’re all on their side.”

“Noo, you’ll have to learn to avoid a quarrel — with a good word, a jest. How can I help you? This is an ancient story of Jews among the goyim. You got a Jewish head. You’ll have to learn to fend for yourself.”

“Yeah, but even 114th Street was better!”

“I’ll sit there looking out at brick walls? And what? If your father is a lunatic and seeks only dreck? Twelve shmoolyaris a month. Pay another dollar or two, and rent something with electricity, with hot water — No! A twisted head. And every penny he had to save to buy milk from the farmers, to buy oats, to buy hay. And he works day and night. Another would be satisfied to work for a boss. What can I do?”

“Ahh!”

“Go, don’t be a fool. I have there my sisters, my mother, a little happiness. He has his stable nearby. You’ll have to make the best of it.”

Ira was silent. It was useless. They passed the cheder-entrance across the street, passed the weathered wooden platform in front of Levi’s Dairy for whom Pop had once worked, the platform where Ira had sat with other kids a summer afternoon, and still remembered Mutke saying, “So if there was a Silver War, when was the Golden War?” They reached the candy store where his uncle Morris had been so generous, even saved up enough purchase-tickets to take Ira and Mom to the premium store and buy his nephew a tricycle, which was stolen from him the first day. How he wept! It was his street, his world, his life. Here. Where were the kids?

“I’m going upstairs to see Mrs. Dvorshkin. Do you want to come?”

“No, I’ll go around the block. Maybe they’re around that furniture factory. They make bows and arrows from the thin pieces the factory throws away.”

She didn’t understand. “Noo. Be careful.” She climbed the low stoop. “Don’t wander too far.” She went inside the hall.

A minute longer he tarried in front of the house. In that hallway he had tried to kiss pretty, dark Annie. She had scratched his face. And across the street lived Izzy with whom Ira had gone into partnership, devising a try-your-luck you-never-lose machine, an arrow over a board with sectors divided on it, and a stick of chewing gum in each sector, and an entire package in one. By the carbide lights of the pushcarts on Avenue C, they had set up shop, tempted passersby to wager a penny. The two had made a profit, divided it up and come home — late: It was after nine o’clock, Pop’s milkman’s bedtime hour. And what a thrashing Pop gave him! But he could have been a businessman, a Jewish businessman. It was fun, it was exciting to be with the Saturday night crowds, after the Sabbath was over, to yell: “Try your luck, you never lose!” But now on 119th Street, among all the goyim jeering at Jews: “Mockies: Make money, oy.” Some even had learned how to say it in Yiddish: Makh gelt, waggling hands under chin — He hated it.

Ah, the East River — he walked toward the corner — the only time, or nearly the only time Pop seemed friendly, at ease with Ira, as he with him, was when the two went out on the big wooden dock at the end of the cobblestone street, and sat there on a bulky beam above the water, in torrid summer, when the river breeze was like the river’s gift, a benison cool and encompassing.

No. Nobody around the block. He turned back. Maybe he’d better go upstairs to Mrs. Dvorshkin’s, where Mom was; maybe Heshy was there: the top floor, five flights up, one floor above the floor the Stigmans had lived on; go all the way up there, one flight below the roof. Oh, the time Pop laughed, when he and Ira both went up to the roof on a cold day: Pop hung two calves’ feet in a smoking chimney, just as they did in his own country far away across the ocean in Galitzia.

Was that Izzy’s shout? Ira stopped at the threshold. Lucky! He was about to go in, but they had spied him, before he had seen them. And look: They had a wagon, Heshy and Izzy, coming toward him from Avenue C, the one pushing, the other steering with ropes tied on the front axle, and Heshy picking up speed, now that they had seen him. Ira ran out into the gutter to meet them. “Izzy! Heshy!”

Oh, it was as if he still lived there, the way Izzy pulled the wagon over to the curb in front of a pile that a horse had left, and all three pranced for joy at meeting again: swarthy, quick Izzy, with his thick eyebrows and flat, spreading nose. Heshy with his likable smile and sandy hair that had a slightly rancid odor as if it had been buttered with old butter. They jabbered about the past and the times spent together, and who lived in his “house” now, and how they had gotten the baby-carriage wheels — in exchange for roller skates “wit liddle windows in de steel w’eels a’ready.” They were now partners in the “Try-your-luck machine.”

“You gettin’ fat,” Heshy said. “You like it where you live?”

“No, it’s lousy. It’s no good!” Ira could almost have wept. “It’s full of lousy Irish goyim. They call me Jew bestit all the time, an’ they wanna fight.”

“You’re a good fighdah,” Izzy reminded him. “So give ’em.”

“Not there,” Ira hung his head sullenly. “Everybody cheers on their side.”

“Nobody’s Jewish?” Heshy asked incredulously.

“Nearly nobody.”

“So why did you move dere?” Izzy asked.

Ira tried to explain.

“Where do you go to cheder?” they asked.

“I didn’t go once yet.”

“O-o-h! You don’t go to cheder? Dere’s no cheder?”

“Yeah, but my fodder wanted the money for a milk wagon.”

It took them a few seconds to absorb the sobering import of Ira’s answer. “Wanna ride?” Heshy invited.

“Nah, it’s your wagon. Lemme push.”

“Nah, you get on.”

“No. I’m suppose to push first.”

“Get on,” they insisted.

In vain he protested. That was not the custom, not proper: It was their wagon. He was supposed to push first; that was the code. It was only after he had pushed them around the block to their entire satisfaction, then and then only did he earn a claim to the driver’s seat, to hold the steering ropes. Everybody knew that was the accepted order of things. But the other two wouldn’t hear of it. He was their guest. And look how clean he was! A clean shirt, clean knee-pants. He could right away get dirty pushing.

In the end, it was they who prevailed; it was they who pushed him! Unhappy in the driver’s seat, and protesting his unmerited privilege, he let them take turns pushing him from Avenue D half the way to Avenue C, and back. “Now let me push,” he importuned. No one could any longer deny it was his turn to push. Instead, they excused him. No, he didn’t have to. It was all right. His mother might come down; she wouldn’t know where he was. He better stay here. They could coast down together on the slope in front of the “ice house” across the trolley tracks on 10th Street. They only had to push the empty wagon up. And with Izzy steering, and Heshy bent over providing traction, they left him on the corner of Avenue D.

His throat thickened with unaccountable sorrow; latent tears pressed against his brow. He was a guest now among his own kind. He, who had been so undifferentiated from the rest until only two months ago, was now excluded from belonging. Intuition divined it all: His special treatment was a sign that he was banned from return.

Mom noticed how quiet he was on the long ride home. “Noo, did you enjoy yourself?” she asked.

“Yeh.”

“You have so little to say about it? You were so eager to go.” She looked at him more closely. “Why have you become so sulky?”

“I’m not sulky. I don’t wanna talk Yiddish in the train.”

“Who is listening to us?”

“I don’t wanna talk.”

“Foolish child. Until 116th Street?”

Ira made no reply.

“Do you need to relieve yourself? Is that the trouble?”

“No. I went in the street.”

“Are you hungry?”

”No,” he replied irritably. “Leave me alone.”

“Then I won’t speak — until we reach home.” She leaned over, whispered teasingly. “Afterward I may?”

“I’m gonna take off my good clothes an’ go to the liberry.”

“Aha. Another story with a bear. Will it be open still?”

“Till six o’clock they let you in.”

V

How swiftly the changes had taken place within him, in these few months, from the time they first moved into the house on 119th Street to the time his Uncle Harry quit school. He was different now, different from that very first day, after he had helped Mom unpack the sugar barrel in which the crockery came packed, wrapped in Yiddish newspapers. When he grew bored, he had left the kitchen, and descended the linoleum-covered stairs warily, like a young animal appraising new surroundings — and stepped quietly through the long, shadowy hallway between the janitor’s flat and the one occupied by the cigar makers. He had seen them sitting next to the open window on the ground floor rolling cigars. Daylight shone on the battered brass letter boxes in the foyer. Just outside, on the stone steps of the stoop, three kids were sitting, three kids his own age, the backs of their heads bleached to tow by the summer sun. He had stood on the top stone step just outside the door, waiting — while they talked, talked in hard, clear, Gentile voices — waiting for some sign of recognition, some acknowledgment of his presence. The one who sat in the middle — Heffernan — Ira would learn the kid’s name later — turned his head: “You livin’ here?”

“Yeh,” Ira offered eagerly. “We just moved in.”

“We don’t want no goddamn Jews livin’ here.”

“No?”

“No.” The boy was blue-eyed, with winning countenance, fair of skin and with upturned nose: “You lousy Jew bastards, why dontcha stay where you belong?”

Stabbed, Ira retreated into the hall, climbed up the stairs again, and stormed into the kitchen.

“What is it?” Mom asked.

“They’re sitting on the stoop, the Irishers.”

“So. Let them sit.”

“They don’t like me. They called me a dirty name. They called me a Jew bestit.”

“That’s news indeed,” Mom said. “What better to expect from goyim? Don’t play with them. Go somewhere else. Go to Baba’s. Go to 114th Street, where we lived. I’ll look out of the window until you leave the corner.”

“I don’t wanna go there.”

“Then stay here and help me unpack the Passover dishes.”

“I don’t wanna stay here, I wanna go downstairs.”

“Then what do you want of me?”

“We shouldn’t have moved here.”

“Again?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m more concerned that I still haven’t found my red coral beads, my wedding present from my Aunt Rachel in Lemberg.” Mom tore the Yiddish newspaper from around the silver Passover salt cellar. “Such heartless thieves, these movers. I haven’t come across it anywhere. The lovely coral. Gevald. Where is it?” And to Ira, in vexed tones: “Don’t be like your father. Don’t quail so before a goy.”

“I’m not quailing!” Ira flared. “There’s three kids down there on the stoop.”

“Then what can I do? Do you want me to contend with them?”

Full of rancor, he left the kitchen, passed through the two freshly painted, intervening bedrooms to the front room, with its furnishings still in disarray, and leaned out of the open window on the street. He leaned out of the unobstructed window; the other opened on the fire escape, on the black iron balcony shared with the neighbors next door. On the stone steps of the stoop below sat the same three kids, the same blond-haired kid in the middle, the lousy Irish bestit who’d called him a dirty Jew. He’d show him.

Hiding his fierce spite from Mom, acquiescing with a noncommittal, “Yeh,” to her preoccupied behest that a soft word would keep him out of trouble, he went back through the kitchen and down the stairs again. Sunlight shining on their fair hair, their backs were turned toward him. With fist doubled, he sneaked out of the doorway behind Heffernan — and struck him as hard a wallop on the cheek as he could. The kid rocked with the impact. Then Ira fled back into the hall, and upstairs.

He said nothing to Mom. Once more at the window, he could see them below, still sitting on the stoop. And then one of the trio left. Ira went downstairs again, came out of the hall onto the stoop. Fists clenched, prepared for fray, he descended to the street, eyes fixed vindictively on Heffernan: The kid smiled back, deprecating, amiable, in sign of truce.

It was what he should have done, Ira would tell himself over and over again years later: fought, fair or foul, but fought. He would remember “Greeny,” a few years older than himself, but a total greenhorn, a young Jewish immigrant from Russia whose family came to America only a few months before Ira’s relatives. Greeny had fought his Irish tormentors on 119th Street. He had been licked, nose bloodied, both his eyes blackened, but he fought again — and again. He reached the point where the Irish accepted him; they took him to the parochial school gym to learn to box, seconded him when he was matched in a bout — and played a dirty Irish trick on him by telling him to stuff himself with food, and guzzle all the beer he could, because that would make him strong: He retched all over the ring — to the boundless hilarity of the spectators. Still, they accepted him: long nose and Jewish accent and all. He became a member in good standing with the gang on 119th Street.

It was what he should have done, Ira told himself, and recalled that even then, that first day on 119th Street, the lesson wasn’t lost on him — though it did him no good either. He lacked the moral courage — so it would seem to him — the pluck, the persistence, to cope against such odds. He grew flabby, too. Shortly after the second term began, the spring term, 3B, he brought home a note from the school nurse advising his parents that he suffered from “malnutrition”—poor nourishment, his teacher explained — at which Mom scoffed: “I don’t give you enough bulkies and butter to eat, and lotkehs and sour cream, or what?” Flabby, overweight, he lost agility and stamina. And in that fateful street-fight in late winter, the recent snowfall treacherous underfoot, he was being bested by his skinny, wiry Irish adversary, on whose large two front teeth the saliva glistened distractingly — when of a sudden Mom came rushing into the circle of hostile partisans. “Gerara!” She raised a threatening arm against Ira’s opponent.

“Aw, g’wan yuh lousy Jew!” His adversary defied her. Still, he retreated before the menace of Mom’s upraised arm; he jeered and retreated.

And Ira — Ira burst into tears. He would never live down the humiliation. What more woeful stigma of ignominy than to be rescued from defeat by your pale and agitated Jewish mother, by your taunted and frantic Jewish mother, wading in to your defense. Weeping, Ira ran from his exulting opponent, ran through the circle of jeering kids, ran for the house. He felt as if his spirit were crushed forever.

And, alas, so it was. His East Side cockiness was gone. Though he fought other Irish kids in the street thereafter, it was always in the hope that some adult would intervene, or someone warn of an approaching cop, or any other pretext would crop up as an excuse for disengagement. Never did self-assurance return, never did he win, never expected to. Oh, this was grievous, this plummeting of self-assurance — he could tell it was happening to him — this erosion of self-assertiveness in the kid once so pugnacious. He could feel the undoing of self, the atrophy of the one he was on the East Side.

And when to this, in earliest spring, a little pack of Irish kids, mostly younger than himself, followed him home after school from the corner of Park Avenue on the way to the stoop, chanting: “Fat, fat, the water rat, fifty bullets in your hat!” he turned once or twice to scare them off. And away they scampered, pell-mell in elated flight. He climbed upstairs, entered the kitchen, where he found Pop alone reading his Yiddish newspaper. Ira got out a library book, and lost himself in a fairy tale. .

Suddenly a sharp knock at the door startled them. Opening it, Ira stood face to face with Mrs. True, the young Irish matron from upstairs on the fourth floor. And surrounding her, some of those same Irish gamins who had baited him only minutes ago: He had thrown her little five-year-old Danny to the sidewalk, she accused Ira, and the child had suffered a deep gash on his head. She was a pretty brunette, Mrs. True, and the wrathful flash of her brown eyes set off her pert, rosy features. In vain, Ira denied responsibility. He never pushed her little Danny, or anyone: The kids called him names, and he just turned around to scare them, so they ran away, they shoved each other — No, they didn’t! the other kids clamored: Ira had knocked down little Danny.

And all at once, Mrs. True drew back her hand and slapped Ira in the face. As if the blow were an incitement, it released in Pop all his terrified fury. Ira never could recall afterward with what rod he was chastised, whether with a stick or a stove poker. He was being sacrificed to avert more disastrous reprisal. He could only recall that he groveled, screaming, “Don’t, Papa, please, Papa! No more!” He screamed and moaned without bringing a stay to Pop’s ferocious blows. And had it not been for Mrs. Shapiro, new tenant in the “back,” dumpy, shapeless Litvak Mrs. Shapiro, there was no telling where the scourging might have ended. Pop had lost all control, and was already treading his son underfoot, stamping on him, so that even Mrs. True’s look of satisfaction had turned into one of aversion. Mrs. Shapiro interposed herself between the howling child on the floor and his insensate father, interposed herself stolidly, stubbornly.

“What, you’ll destroy your own son for a goya’s sake?” she said in Yiddish. And she refused to move, or be moved by Pop’s raving curses, but obdurately stood her ground, and even withstood his savage thrust. And now, Mom, apprised by her son’s screaming as soon as she entered the lower hallway of the house, rushed up the stairs and into the kitchen.

“Mama!” Never had her face seemed more heaven-sent than now, furious in his defense.

“Lunatic!” she screamed hoarsely at Pop. “Wild beast! Mad dog! What you’ve done to the child! Be cloven in two!” Formidable in wrath, she confronted Pop with outthrust face, and arms spread ready to come to blows. He retreated. And the next second, Mom turned fiercely on Mrs. True. “Vot you vant?” she demanded.

Mrs. True and her entourage of kids silently withdrew.

He would remember that fearsome afternoon, as a kind of atonement for all he had been, a kind of extinction of all that he once felt was right and commendable about himself — but no longer was. He would have to learn other ways; he would have to try to. . stay out of fights, stay out of trouble, disputes, learn to say yes, slur over differences, smooth over gritty places with a soft word, as Mom advised. Or with a noncommittal, conciliatory: “Yeah? I didn’t know that.” He could almost feel the once self-assured East Side kid shriveling within himself, leaving behind. . a kind of void.

VI

Eddie Ferry became his fast friend, little Eddie Ferry, son of the widowed janitress who moved in on the ground floor. Together, the two friends constructed tin-can telephones, stretched the connecting string from ground floor a flight up the tenement stairs, from flat to flat. Together, they hiked west along Gentile, fancy 125th Street, sampling show-window displays as they went, their goal always the same: the rewarding, well-stocked hardware store far to the west, just short of the Eighth Avenue El. There they clung, slid squeaky, streaky fingers along the plate glass of the double show windows — from street to entrance on one side, and back on the other side, from entrance to street: Ah, the ravishing display of brass telegraph sets, and coils of copper wire to go with them, and dry batteries and electric bells and camping gear, fishing rods and lustrous Daisy air rifles — if only they had the money!

Eddie taught his friend how everything worked. He knew all about electricity; he knew how to make homemade batteries out of the zinc and carbon rods of discarded ones and ten cents’ worth of sal ammonia, which you could buy in the drugstore. He didn’t mind that Ira was Jewish; he said Ira wasn’t like the other Jews, dirty Jews: like Davey Baer, and his younger brother Maxie, who moved into the red-brick tenement across the street, and always beat Eddie tossing picture cards of baseball players, or flipping checkers or matching pennies. Only rarely, a very few times, flaring up at something Ira said or did that displeased him—“Yuh lousy Jew!” Eddie flung at Ira.

But it seemed only natural; he didn’t mean anything by it, just grabbed the nearest handle to twist in show of disapproval. Ira learned to buffer the epithet with a deprecating grin — covering slight embarrassment, the same way that Eddie grinned when his harassed mother fumed about the tenants, saying: “I don’t give a fart what they think.” (Did the poor woman really say, “I don’t give a fart,” Ira would wonder years later. Or did she say, “I don’t give a farthing.” It would be awhile before he learned that a farthing was a coin.) It was with Eddie, in the lee of his Irish boldness, that Ira first began those explorations into the reaches of other parts of the city, westward to Riverside Drive, all the way to Grant’s Tomb, to the freight tracks beside the awesome, broad Hudson River; or eastward, on 125th Street, past glamorous vaudeville theater marquees, by chophouses with treife, alluring T-bone steaks on the cracked ice in the show window — and those strange, repulsive, green, mottled creatures with great claws, moving sluggishly on their icy bed. “Them’s good; them’s lobsters,” Eddie assured the doubting Ira.

“Good? Them? With all those green legs?” Ira screwed up his face in revulsion. “How c’n you eat them?”

“What d’yuh mean how c’n you eat it? Jesus, you Jews must be dumb. Yuh cook ’em an’ break the shell with a nutcracker. Them two big things in front ain’t legs. Them’s claws.”

“Like that?” Ira conciliated.

Eddie’s was the world Ira now yearned for, to be allowed to share, allowed access to. He was only too ready to gloss over differences, lull the felt sense of strangeness the East Side had implanted in him, in the sanctity of kosher food, in custom, in observance. They were all impediments to entering Eddie’s world, world of rooftops and flying kites, of journeys to the marvelous turning bridges over the Harlem River like the one at the end of Madison Avenue, where a whole bridge swiveled slowly around to allow a ship to pass, and the bewildering network of tracks in the huge freight yards on the other side of the river, in alien Bronx. Or way over east, past little Italy, where people spoke a strange language, haggled over produce in long, sometimes strident syllables, gesturing violently all the time, strange produce on pushcarts and in stores, that even Eddie didn’t know the names of—“Aw, dem’s for wops”—to the floating swimming pool in the East River, where, under Eddie’s tutelage, Ira finally learned to float in the water, and — miraculously — to dog-paddle. Amid the naked, splashing, shrieking kids—“Everybody pisses in de water; so don’t swallow even a mout’ful,” Eddie advised, “or it’ll make ye puke.” Together they climbed the fecally malodorous rocks to the summit of the Mt. Morris Park. .

Something had been preying on his mind, something that demanded to be taken into account, demanded a retracing of steps for the sake of authenticity. Its omission awoke in him a sense of panic, an irrational fear, akin to the catastrophe long ago that arrested normal progress, and now unforeseen stretched tentacles into his psyche in the present. Never mind, he tried to reassure himself — append the omitted material, and go on; the substance is trifling. And yet, without it, the narrative would remain defective, the portrayal incomplete: Ira and his parents were not the first Jews living on 119th Street. He was not, in short, without alternative of Jewish kids to hobnob with, enticing to the writer as that sort of extreme predicament might be.

Another Jewish family lived in his own house, Mrs. Schneider across the corridor, though there were no boys his age. Jewish families may already have lived in the landlord Jake’s hulking tenement, on the corner of Park Avenue, though none of the kids played in the block. A scattering of Jews already lived in the six-story apartment house on the other corner of Park Avenue (apartment house because it boasted hot and cold running water — and steam heat), comfortable enough for the family of the Jewish pharmacist to occupy, Biolov, whose pharmacy — drugstore — was on the corner also, and whose plump, condescending wife wheeled the fanciest baby carriage in the neighborhood. But none of the kids of the corner apartment house, if they were big enough, played in 119th Street. Only the kids of the appallingly destitute Jewish family living in the red-brick, six-story, cold-water tenement across the street played on the block: scrawny, dark-skinned Davey, and his equally scrawny, dark-skinned younger brother, Maxie. They had a sister, Dora, between them in age, and in complexion like them, shrinking and fugitive as a mouse; also an infant brother with a frightful rash. A thin, dark-skinned mother, and a short, affable father were their parents.

They lived in such bleak destitution that even Ira, grown accustomed to squalor, and not too observant of it either, was taken aback on entering their home. Would he ever forget the scabby baby in his scarred, smeared, old high chair catching a cockroach in his splotched fist, and offering to throw the insect into his doting and gently reproving papa’s glass of tea. Mr. Baer was a gambler, Mom said: He refused to do anything, except spend his time at the card tables. And wizened Davey and Maxie too were expert gamblers. Whatever the game they played, always they played with the same ruthless concentration, clawing and squalling for advantage. It was too much for Ira to withstand. He learned early to shun gambling with them.

They met, perhaps that very first afternoon, when he so treacherously struck Heffernan. The brothers were newcomers to the street like himself. Their common Jewishness confirmed, and encouraged because they now numbered three, they set out on a ramble. They entered Mt. Morris Park at the corner of 120th and Madison, stared in wonder at the lofty, rocky, tree-grown hill rising in the midst of the park, and lifted perplexed eyes to the wooden bell tower rearing up on top of the hill. They came out at the uptown end of the park, at 124th Street, where they turned west, passed the hushed, sedate brownstones, and marked the staid, gray public library set in the midst of the brownstones. They crossed bustling Lenox Avenue, and still forging westward through a rich, subdued neighborhood of dignified townhouses, they reached prosperous Seventh Avenue. Elegant stores at the foot of tall, exclusive apartment buildings lined the way; Pierce Arrows and Packards were parked along the curb. The three stood and gazed; at the 125th Street corner of the wide and prosperous avenue the tall, impressive Hotel Theresa dominated its well-to-do neighbors. And at the very corner where they stood, on 124th Street itself, how sumptuous, how decorous, tubs and tubs, a whole row of wooden tubs with short evergreen trees in them, all closely aligned, so that the branches of the trees interlocked, were set out on the sidewalk. They formed a green hedge in front of a restaurant; they formed an outdoor café.

The three crept up to the dense front of leaves and boughs, and peeped through: On the other side stood neat round tables covered with blue-and-white checkered cloth, and in the midst of each round table stood a trim, creamy vase with flowers in it. The blond, bow-tied waiter, in his plum-striped jacket, lifted his head from the cutlery he was setting out on one of the tables, and his eyes came to rest on the other side of the hedge where they stood. He gave no sign of having caught sight of the trio of Jewish gamins. He picked up a napkin, appeared to flick a crumb from a table, and still intent on his duties, stepped toward the sidewalk entrance of the café. But Davey had already divined the waiter’s purpose, and signaled the others to poise for flight. And fortunately they did, for they dashed past him as he came out running. And pell-mell east they fled through 124th Street, as fast as they could, and he after them. But he chased them only a short distance. For when they looked over their shoulders, they saw he had given up pursuit — or had only feigned it. So they also stopped running, stopped in the middle of the secluded street, and Davey and Maxie, with hands cupped around mouths, uttered a defiant, half-scared bray of deliverance.

VII

The summer came and went, and he still hadn’t attended cheder, excused by the upheaval of moving from the East Side to 114th Street in Harlem — and then to 119th Street. Attendance also entailed a twenty-five-cent tuition fee to consider, which for the time being Mom was only too relieved not to defray: Pop was at the lowest ebb of his fortune, when his shining delusion of obtaining bulk milk directly from farmers at the West Side milk-shed faded, and with it his dream of becoming an entrepreneur. The big companies — so a word here and a word there picked up from his parents’ conversation interlaced into meaning — the big companies prevented Pop from carrying out his scheme; they foiled his plans; they warned farmers not to sell him milk. In pitying or in derisive tones, sometimes Mom, sometimes Zaida, or Ira’s uncles would say:

“Of course, the big companies will let him establish his own milk route? Borden and Sheffield will play with him? Go.”

For a short while, Pop’s nondescript milk-wagon stood at the curb in front of the house, and for a while, between the shafts, the poor old nag — of which Ira felt ashamed among all these goyim—tossed her feed bag upward to catch the last of the oats in it, stamped at the flies on her legs above the manure — stamped when the Irish kids pulled long hairs from her tail with which to plait rings— And then horse and wagon disappeared: to Ira’s relief. But only to be replaced by another horse and wagon, much like the first only this time with the words HARLEM WET WASH stenciled on the sides in large white letters — and inside the wagon, gray bulging bags full of soiled laundry to wash, or still dripping to be returned. . That too disappeared, and Pop was jobless, frantic and jobless. Mom’s gold wedding band, and the diamond ring she had bought on installments from Ira’s Granduncle Nathan, when they still lived on the East Side, the Passover silverware and Pop’s gold watch went into pawn — and Ira was excused from cheder attendance.

He was excused from cheder, and yet, despite his failure to attend, he still retained his glibness at reading Hebrew. Piety still held sway during those first months of their removal from 9th Street to Harlem. He even accompanied Zaida on his Saturday morning worship in the dingy, cheerless little synagogue on the ground floor of a house on East 115th Street, with its few rows of hard benches, its musty prayer books, whose dog-eared pages bearded Jews like Zaida turned with moistened thumb in their peculiar way. Davening, they hawked up rheum and voided it on the bare wooden floor, smearing the gob underfoot, davening, davening, swaying irregularly and resolutely in worship. Those first weeks, Ira even returned with Zaida at dusk for vesper services on Saturday, the havdalah, led by Schloimeh F., Zaida’s uncle, imperial on the Sabbath in his black silk top hat as he walked to shul. With forked white beard only inches above the scroll on the lectern, he prayed, clearing his throat luxuriantly. Ira, dutiful grandson, trying to win praise, waited out the havdalah in the bleary little ground-floor synagogue. And after the Sabbath was over, and the bare electric lamps on the ceiling were lit, he too shared in the post-Sabbath snack: the small bumper of wine given him by one or another of the beaming and more affluent congregants, a chunk of pickled herring, slice of rye bread, and — the astounding, the transfixing, fat, jet-black Greek olives that one suddenly relished despite revulsion.

So those first weeks were spent, Harlem continually displacing the East Side, plying new impressions into old memories, like those raffia braids he would weave in school to make mats out of, new bunches of raffia plaited into the old. After Saturday morning services he followed Zaida upstairs into the kitchen — or was invited upstairs to light the gas stove, since he was too young to sin — and stood there awhile afterwards talking to meek Baba, while her husband’s dinner warmed. Served, Zaida fell to voraciously — halted in mid-mouthful: “Here, my child, before you go, relish this.” He picked up a boiled chicken foot from his plate, bit out the one meaty bubble at the base of the toes, and handed his grandson the yellow shank and skimpy talons.

“Thanks, Zaida.”

Before the end of the summer Pop’s fortunes mended. At his brother-in-law Moe’s urging, Pop became a busboy in the same restaurant where Moe worked as a waiter, Karg and Zinz. Forthright, muscular, kind-hearted Moe, striving to help out his poverty-stricken sister. But before Pop quit — or was fired — he created a scene of terrible proportion — only years later did Ira learn, from Pop himself, laughing at the farce of his own creating (he did have that aptitude, in common with his son, of perceiving the absurdity of predicament brought on by himself): He had been pestered, he alleged, by one of the owners, Mr. Zinz, who continually looked askance at everything Pop did (alas, his inveterate chafing at any kind of subordination). He gave Pop “arguments” about his work. In vain, Moe counseled: “He’s the boss, he’s paying you, and you’re making a good collection from the tips of the five waiters in the place; you’re making a living. Every waiter gets ‘arguments,’ if not from the boss, from a customer. Every waiter knows,” Moe concluded, “when they give you an argument, you put it in your pocket.”

To no avail. Pop hurled a water pitcher into the large plate-glass mirror on the wall. Someone, a customer, called a cop who arrived just as the tall, enraged Mr. Zinz was about to administer a thrashing to Pop, changing his clothes down in the restaurant cellar. “Look at him, and look at me,” Pop appealed to the big Irish cop. “Can I do something to him? He was going to beat me up, so I threw the pitcher, somebody should call the police.” And he had “squeezed out a few tears,” Pop added by way of cynical parenthesis. The officer threatened to arrest Mr. Zinz.

Pop’s violent act caused a rift between Mom and the rest of her family: Though Zaida censured, with characteristic acerbity, called Pop a lunatic, Mom sided with her wronged and persecuted husband — as she would for some while longer, until the truth of his nature finally became inescapable. Pop in turn dismissed the estrangement with typical contempt — and with typical ingratitude. “I don’t need their help. I’ve mastered this learned calling,” he said scornfully, “I’ve learned this complicated skill. I need my in-laws, you know where? In the rear! I’m a seasoned waiter.”

He made good on his boast. With newly bought dickey and secondhand tuxedo, he succeeded in passing himself off as a waiter, and in a short time became a competent one. His income increased, but to what extent, he kept a secret — as always.

The pawned valuables were redeemed. And once again, Mom brought up the subject of Ira’s attending cheder. It was now Ira who resisted: “I don’t wanna go!”

“Go you must. What do you mean you don’t want to go? You’ll become entirely a goy. I have the twenty-five cents. There’s no longer excuse for your not going. How will you prepare for your Bar Mitzvah? And what will Zaida say? I don’t want to hear any more protests. I’ll find out the nearest malamut.”

“Anh!”

Whining was of no use. She hauled Ira to the Hebrew teacher who conducted his cheder in his living room on 117th Street east of Madison Avenue, and after concluding arrangements, she left Ira there. It was now late spring. Because of the ill-will between his own and his grandparents’ family, months had passed since he had accompanied Zaida to the shul. And to Ira’s chagrin — and bafflement as well — his rote reading of Hebrew, which he could babble with such facility only a short time ago, had deteriorated. Where once he had been warmly commended by his grandfather — and by his last malamut, who especially on Sunday mornings, when alone with his pupil in the bare cellar-store cheder, had often rewarded Ira with a copper for his fluency — he was now the object of frequent promptings, disapproving cluckings and head-waggings and disciplinary ear-wringings. Nor did his old facility ever come back — nor his eagerness to please. Heeding the text became onerous. He seemed to retrogress rather than improve. Reproof by word for his performance gave way more and more to reproof by deed: ear-tweakings, arm-yankings, an impatient slap on the thigh.

“I don’t wanna go!” Ira stormed at Mom after a few weeks. “I’m not going!”

“You are going! I’ll tell your father. He’ll soon give you to understand.”

“I don’t care. Let him hit me, that’s all. I’m not going! The rabbi stinks. His mouth stinks. It stinks from cigarettes and onions!”

“Go tell it to your grandmother. He complained to me how remiss you are. You heed nothing. At all admonition you cavil, you shrug. What has happened to you? A year ago — more than a year ago, the malamut on 9th Street told me himself you were ready to begin khumish, to begin Torah. Woe is me! If he saw what a goy you are today, darkness would shroud his eyes.”

“I don’t care.”

“And what will you know at your Bar Mitzvah, if you don’t go to cheder? And Zaida, what will he say when he hears you daven like a mute?”

“Who cares? I don’t see him. I never go to Baba’s house. I can go to cheder just before Bar Mitzvah.”

“Oy, gevald! Plague take you! I won’t let you become a goy! In this you won’t prevail. We’ll find another malamut.”

She told Pop about what had taken place. “The way you bring him up, that’s what he’s become,” was Pop’s brusque reply. “The right kind of mother would slap his face roundly and make him attend. So you save a twenty-five-cent piece of your allowance if he doesn’t go to cheder.”

“Gey mir in der erd! I said we ought to find another malamut.” Mom flushed angrily. “What the man can contrive: I save a whole quarter of a dollar if the scamp doesn’t go to cheder. Is that a thing to consider? I would gladly give twice that from my allowance if he went to cheder, and went eagerly. What my father will say when he hears of it.”

“Devout Jew. Let him hear of it. I’m not good enough for him. Let his grandson grow up a goy.”

“What has that to do with it?”

“Go relieve yourself. You want him to go, send him.”

“And you not? You’re his father.”

“He’s your pampered son.”

Mom kept silent a few seconds, then sighed heavily. “I see, I already see. As you were, so is he. Did you care to go to cheder? Only your father’s stick compelled you. You tormented your younger brother Jacob when he studied Talmud, no?”

“Gey mir in kehver!” Pop snapped open the Yiddish newspaper. “I don’t want to speak about it anymore.”

“Go also into the dolorous year,” Mom addressed Ira. “The grief you cause me.”

“All right, I’ll go,” Ira conceded. “Jeezis!”

“Spare us so much Jeezising in the house, or I’ll deal you one,” Pop warned.

A few weeks more Ira attended, sullenly — until the exasperated malamut himself dismissed his pupil: “Go, tell your mother to seek another malamut. You need, you know what you need? To be whipped to shreds. You’re nothing but a goy.”

“Then woe is me!” Mom mourned when Ira came home and told her. “You have a goya for a mother who doesn’t believe; she has a goy for a son. But I tell you now: Once we become reconciled with your grandfather, you’ll have to go.”

VIII

So the weeks went by without his attending. . Summer passed. . came the fall — November neared. Election Day floats rumbled through the street. Drawn by plodding horses, heavy drays bore prominent signs on them, signs leaning against each other like the walls of a tent, each wall proclaimed: DELANEY FOR ALDERMAN! HONEST AND EXPERIENCED! OR VOTE FOR O’HARE THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE. OR VOTE A STRAIGHT DEMOCRATIC TICKET! VOTE FOR THE PARTY OF THE PEOPLE! Election Day approached. Throughout the block, all available juveniles were marshaled — or volunteered jubilantly — to form teams foraging for wood, combustibles of every kind and condition, discarded furniture, mattresses, packing crates, planks, egg crates, milk boxes snitched from the front of grocery stores, barriers from street excavations. All of it was stored down the cellarways before tenements, piled almost to sidewalk level, the tolerant Irish janitors looking the other way — A fever of collection seized the juvenile and the half-grown. Ira too was infected: he who protested so vociferously when Mom pleaded with him to provide her with a little kindling from broken fruit boxes or other scraps of wood, the way other kids did on the street, so she could build a bed of fire to ignite the coal poured on top of the kindling in the cast-iron kitchen stove. No. He refused.

“Shemevdik! Folentser!” Mom fumed: “Cowering shirker!”

Without effect. But now he was tireless in his enthusiasm to gather fuel, excelling his Irish peers. “They got a float! They got a float!” came the excited cry throughout the block — on the very afternoon of Election Day. “McIntyre an’ Kelly an’ dem — dey got an election float. Dey’re pulling it under de Cut!”

Danny Heffernan and Vito and Eddie and Ira and Davey and Maxie, and a half-dozen more sped to Park Avenue under the Cut, the railroad overpass. And just around the corner, they saw it: approaching from 120th Street, an electioneering dray, with its VOTE FOR JAMES LEAHY still on its oilcloth tent, being tugged by a swarm of kids, and half-grown louts too, toward 119th Street. The newcomers threw themselves into the task of moving the vehicle along Park Avenue. “Steer it, O’Neill! Steer it, Madigan!” The wagon would make the biggest election night bonfire 119th Street had ever witnessed, the biggest in Harlem.

And then: “Cheese it! The cops!”

Bluecoats uptown, three of them, came charging down upon the culprits. Dropping the shafts, letting go of the spokes of the wheels, everyone took flight. In an instant the slowly moving vehicle came to rest, abandoned and forlorn in the gray afternoon light in front of a pillar of the overpass. The cops pursued. Yelling, the juvenile pranksters scattered in all directions. The police hurled their truncheons after them; police clubs bounced on the pavement, rang on the asphalt, bounding after the scampering urchins in malevolent pursuit. Delirious with escapade, Ira raced into his hallway, and up the stairs. Panting, he sat down in the kitchen: “Ooh, the policemen threw their clubs!” he announced.

“At whom?” Mom was blanching cabbage leaves on the oilcloth-covered washtub work surface. “You’re gasping for breath. What is it?”

“We were pulling one of those big wagons to burn in the street tonight. Election night.”

“Oy, gevald! To burn it? A whole wagon? This too I need for you to learn. Oy, veh iz mir! No wonder the police threw their clubs at you!”

“Yeh! Bong! Bong! Bong! The clubs jumped in the air after us.” Ira giggled suddenly. “We ran. Everybody ran.”

“They could have split your head. Your father is right: You’ll be ruined by these wild Irish. They’ll bring you upstairs with a broken head. You can’t find good Jewish boys to play with?”

“Where’m I going to find them? There’s Davey and there’s Maxie, and all they like is gambling.”

“If you’d go to cheder, you’d find them.”

“And if they live on 114th Street, or on 115th Street? Or by Fifth Avenue?”

“Go there. Play there.”

“So why don’t you live there!”

“I’ll show you why.” She waved her hand, but her eyes were worried. “You do wrong; you sin: What can I do if he wants to live here? You mock at my sorrows.”

“Yeah? You didn’t want to live here? You didn’t want to move to Harlem? To Baba, to Zaida? We don’t even see them. Who wanted to live in the front? You.”

“You’re becoming like a stone,” she said.

Even without the election float, the bonfire on election night was spectacular. The blaze raged in the middle of the block, and sparks flew as high as the six-story roofs, while at street level the flames luridly mirrored themselves in grocery-store and tailor-shop glass fronts. The heat was felt yards away, and most of the tenement occupants, Mom and Pop included, leaned out of their windows watching the display — until the firemen arrived. They scattered the blazing debris with a powerful stream from the hose which they had connected beforehand to the hydrant. And suddenly the street darkened. A Sanitation Department truck rolled into the street the next afternoon. Men shoveled up the charred and still-dripping litter into the vehicle. The odor of molten tar filled the street. Ira and the other kids watched the ruined area of asphalt being patched: the laborers tamping the macadam with their heavy implements, the jumbo steamroller traveling and returning. .

That was seventy years ago, Ira reflected: That was more than seventy years ago. My God! Who’s alive? Yonnie True, Eddie, Mario, Vito, the barber’s two sons, Petey Hunt? As if he had suddenly dislodged them, the images came tumbling into mind: The pipes, the copper-lined box over the flush toilet in the hall froze during a cold snap, and thawing again, torrents of water cascaded down. “A tub! A flood! The janitor!” Mom rushed from the kitchen to the hallway toilet and back. “Gevald! Run, Ira! The goya! The janitor!”. .

Because of the falling-out between his parents and Mom’s kin, he could no longer avail himself of the hot water and bathtub in Baba’s house (for a short time Mamie too was included in Pop’s blanket ill-will). How black grew the grime encrusting his feet, unwashed the whole winter long, so black, the crust that coated his ankles was something to admire, like a dark peel — to pare off, to part with almost regretfully, as he did in Baba’s bathtub in the spring when reconciliation between families finally took place. “What were your happiest years in America?” he once asked Mom, fully expecting her answer would be the East Side, corresponding to his own sense of well-being, his sense of belonging.

But no: “Those first years in Harlem were my happiest years,” Mom replied: “When Baba was still alive, and all my kinfolk lived close by.”

“Those were?”

“Yes.”

Sitting in the rocking chair in Baba’s front room, he would croon mindless tunes to himself, as the Sabbath drew to an end, as the Sabbath twilight grew, before the turning on of lights, while the women chatted endlessly, Mom and her three sisters and Baba.

And again, because it was Saturday night, and Mom was loathe to tear herself away, and Pop was working an “extra,” as he called his supernumerary waiting at tables at a banquet, Mom would send Ira out to the Hebrew National Delicatessen on 116th Street and Madison where he bought two kosher frankforts (though not kosher enough for Zaida, who still swallowed saliva, while eschewing), a quarter of slant-sliced, crisp white bread, a paper-twist of mustard. Swiftly returned upstairs, the Sabbath over, he waited impatiently for Mom to boil the frankforts. And so ravenously did Ira bolt down his food, a bit of frankfort with a mouthful of scarcely masticated bread, that more than once he heaved up the whole mess into Baba’s flush toilet — and came out wailing at the loss of his most prized victuals. “What can I do,” Mom laughed at him, “if you eat like a wild animal?”

That was Ira, the kid in midwinter, with the drear night coming on, swinging his tin can by a loop of wire, while the flames from slivers of wood, roasting the small spud inside that Mom had given him, spurted through the vents punched in the bottom. As through a dark medium, between stone stoop and curb, bundled-up figures hurried home from work, hurried past him through the winter night, and he, for once carefree, whirled his roasting spud in front of the house — until Mom called him in her contralto voice from the window that it was time he came upstairs for supper. . They were like strata, these new impressions, goyish impressions, strata built up by goyish ways and diversions drifting down over memories of 9th Street and the East Side: Halloween, when the Irish kids filled the feet of long black stockings with coal ashes (a few, a very few, with flour), stocking-slings that thudded cruelly against one’s back, printing a dusty, pale stamp of impact on jacket or mackinaw (if one didn’t wear them inside out, as some did to escape parental reproof). “Sliding ponds,” long, icy ribbons slicked out of snow to glide on, but a hazard to steel-shod horses, suddenly skating in mid-stride. Snow-forts on opposite sides of the street, and the wild melee and abandon of snowball fights, snowballs often with chunks of ice embedded in them.

IX

Lightning, sulphurous as pebbles rubbed together, burned far off in sweltering summer. The nice Gentile neighbor — who wasn’t Irish, and said wawtch for watch, and Wawrshington for Washington, lifted him up from the stoop stair to sit on the stone ledge that capped the sides of the stoop after the dented brass banister ended — was so surprised how wet and smelly his armpits were that she sniffed her hands twice with wrinkled nose, and exclaimed in dismay. And yes, that same stone ledge, where everyone did stunts by holding on while hanging upside down over the cellar a flight below — what a scare it gave him! The skinny ones could do it — safely — like Eddie, or like Weasel, after Eddie and his mother moved away.

But Ira weighed twenty pounds more than they did; and when he tried the stunt, the ledge tipped, the ledge tipped! Terrified, he flung his body back to the stoop. What would Mom have said had he and the ledge plunged down into the cellar? That might have been the end of him. Think of it: the end of him at nine years of age, plunging down into the cellar, holding onto the heavy stone ledge and screaming as he hurtled down. Benny Levinsky, whose big brother with the hook nose was a crook and was shot by a cop when he ran away after holding up a crap game, Benny fell off the roof of the treife butcher shop on Third Avenue, German butcher shop, where the beautiful fat sausages hung — the beautiful plump knockwursts and balonies. Oh, they made meat look so nice in a goyish butcher store — even Mom said so — with the bones of a roast raised like a crown and pot roast all neatly tied around with twine, and a turkey with breast pouting and enticing — not like a kosher butcher store where meat looked dead and a chicken hung from its hook in the show window as if it was sorry it looked so unappealing. Benny was trying to steal a salami, even though it was treife, but fell off the roof instead right on top of the butcher store awning. Wasn’t he lucky? All he got was a kick in the ass. So at nine, if Ira had fallen down the cellar, he would have been extinct.

Ira’s mind went blank. Ecclesias; never to have known seventy more years. Never to have known M. Whom would she have known, or loved? All would have been changed. . as howling in terror he hurtled down into the cellar.

What a dub he was playing ball (and was struck in the eye once passing 117th Street, walking home from Baba’s); sat on the curb sobbing, while the owner of the baseball crept up, grabbed it where it had rolled near Ira, and ran. The kindly Jewish housewife asking: “What is it?” And uttering curses at the players — who had by now disappeared. And Ira sobbing as he sat on the curbstone at the corner of 117th and Park Avenue.

Baseball. The very thing he was worst at: A dub, a ham, he couldn’t catch, he couldn’t hit, he couldn’t run: He was the last man chosen in the toss-up — in baseball, in handball, in boxball — chosen after everyone else, if another player was still needed. He was scarcely chosen; he was included with a reluctant groan. Apt at no sport, except touch football (the ball was so large, had to be caught so differently — with arms and body, not hands — and he learned to punt exceptionally well), and swimming — he was at home in the water. But at nothing else was he apt; neither at tops nor at marbles nor at flipping checkers. In the spring when he was in 4A in school, the teacher took him to the playground in Mt. Morris Park, and each one took hold of a long ribbon, and circled the Maypole, singing. The strangeness, the innocence would never wear off. And he rubbed plum pits on the rough granite curbstones in midsummer to make a whistle, after he dug out the seed, the bitter seed. But there was something not usual about the way Ira stayed close to Mom on the stoop in midsummer, even learned to tat on a handkerchief between wooden hoops, the way Mom did. She laughed at him before the neighbors, apologetically. What a marvelous green pool of light filled the western sky one evening after a shower. He would never see the like again, emerald, emerald rare to gaze at in wonder. Kids sneaked into the movies (he could still see the Levine kid caught and roundly cuffed by the movie-manager in front of the theater). Mom took him to a vaudeville show once, of which she understood only a little: the jugglers and the tap dancers. And the Jewish Hawaiians, their grass kilts swaying to the plink of ukuleles as they sang:

“Tocka hula, wickie doolah, Moishe, lai mir finif toolah. I’ll give it beck to you in a day or two. I’ll go to the benk; Sollst khoppen a krenck. Uhmein!”

Unfortunately, Ira was so regaled by the absurdity of the song — Moishe, lai mir finif toolah, meant, “Moses, lend me five dollars”—that he moved his head abruptly — and struck Mom in the nose. She slapped him involuntarily. .

If you went to the movies, alone and on Saturday, it was better to go there with three cents, and wait outside for a partner with two cents (that kind of ratio was more conducive to successful admission than the other way round); and ask an adult who was about to go in, “Mister, will you take us in?” Two for a nickel on Saturday morning was kids’ price. . And once inside, you could see the roly-poly man — was his name Bunny? — Ira never thought him very funny (who some years later was convicted of involuntary homicide in the death of a female guest at some scandalous Hollywood orgy, rupturing her vagina into which he had crammed cracked ice). Nor that lugubrious, downtrodden character, Musty Suffer. But oh, when Chaplin came on the screen, what rib-cracking laughter in those early two-reel films! And how desolate one felt too, after coming out of a movie with Davey and Maxie, who had somehow scraped a nickel together (perhaps their father had won at cards, perhaps there was a little more to spare after the baby died), who insisted on watching the features and the shorts over and over again, to come out into the real world, the real afternoon sunlight filtering through the El on Third Avenue where the movie was, how forlorn one felt, jaded, wasted in spirit. He would never do that again.

They sneaked into the subway, again he and Davey and Maxie, and a couple of Irish kids, and because the others made such a nuisance of themselves, scurrying about and jumping up to hang on the straps, the trainman put them off at the last stop, Bronx Park at 180th Street. Far, far from home. The others giggled nervously, or sat sheepishly on the benches of the platform. Far away from home, from Mama, Mama. He began to blubber: “I wanna go home! I wanna go home! My mama’s waiting!”

It was too much for one of the station guards. “Now, get on there, and see you behave yerselves.”

“Thanks, Mister! Thanks! Thanks!” Ira was rapturous with gratitude.

And he did behave himself (as he had before, self-conscious and constrained), but not the others: they tore about the train as they had previously. And they teased him: “Crybaby. Crybaby. I want my mama.”

“Yeah, but I–I was the one who made the man let you back on the train!” Ira defended himself. And for the remainder of the return trip, he separated himself from the rest, sat by himself, refused to recognize the others.

Mom gave him a nickel when he was promoted to 5A, and the Irish kid he had once fought and lost to that first time, McGowan, grown taller, but still with the same dripping front teeth, sat beside Ira in the backyard at 114 East, waiting for Ira to decide how the nickel was to be spent. Whether they should spend it in the untidy little candy store next to Biolov’s, owned by the slow-moving, old, old Jewish couple, patiently attending to the Irish kids: “Gimme t’ree o’ dese, two o’ dem, four o’ dem — no, gimme four more o’de udders.” Ah, the euphoria of sitting in the shade of a wooden fence in the backyard at the end of school! He was promoted, with B B B on his report card, and Mom’s blessing in heart. He was promoted, with a nickel in his pocket, and an Irish friend beside him, who said yes to whatever he said, but didn’t understand, his mind elsewhere, maybe couldn’t understand that delicacy of mood, the brief precious bliss of lounging in the backyard amid the golden fences at the beginning of summer.

It should have gone into a novel, several novels perhaps, written in early manhood, after his first — and only — work of fiction. There should have followed novels written in the maturity gained by that first novel.

— Well, salvage whatever you can, threadbare mementos glimmering in recollection.

In part for reasons of health (his lungs were affected, Mom hinted), in part because of his socialist convictions, Uncle Louie lived on a farm in Stelton, New Jersey. And he once took his adoring pretend-nephew there. After they got off the train, Ira rode on the handlebars of Uncle Louie’s bicycle the rest of the way to the small farm. And how wretchedly he had behaved there: He had fought with Uncle Louie’s two sons, teased Rosie, Uncle Louie’s daughter, mimicked her when she was practicing on her cardboard dummy piano keyboard. And when Auntie Sarah scolded him for almost drowning a duckling in a pan of water — and ducking its head under, too — he had blubbered loudly: “I wanna go home!” (What a nasty brat he was; no wonder only Mom could abide him.)

He stole a nickel from Baba — he had noted that she kept her pocketbook in the second drawer of the bureau — which she kept locked. But above the second drawer, the top drawer was left unlocked. How clever of him to pull the top drawer all the way out and get at her pocketbook. Even Zaida acknowledged, after he had chastised his grandson, that he was an ingenious little rascal.

He threw dice in the shade under the Cut once, rolling the tiny dice to the concrete base of one of the urine-malodorous, cross-braced pillars that held up the railroad overpass. It was the only time he ever had any luck gambling, throwing six or seven — or eight! — consecutive passes. Had he been a seasoned gambler like Davey or Maxie, he would have cleaned up; instead, he kept drawing off his winnings after each pass — to the angry disgust of the Irish kids who faded him: What the hell was he afraid of, with a run of luck like that? But he was. So he won only a dozen pennies. (With five of which he bought a hot dog and sauerkraut on a roll from the itinerant Italian hot dog vendor. And conscious of Davey and Maxie, who had been too broke to play and were now watching him with their bright brown eyes, as alertly and mutely as two hungry dogs ready to snap up any morsel, Ira impulsively tendered Davey the last of the tidbit. It was marvelous to watch Davey take a nip of the tiny morsel, and without pause, but with the same sweep that he received the morsel, hand the even tinier remainder to his kid brother.)

Those were a few, a very few, of the strands out of which a child’s life was woven in East Harlem in the teens of the twentieth century, Ecclesias. Futile to ask what his life would have been like among his own kind in the Jewish ghetto he had left.

— You say a child’s life?

Well. His.

— When will you redress the omission, introduce the crucial factor? In good time, Ecclesias, in good time. .

X

It was late on a sunny morning when he climbed the rough granite steps leading to the summit of Mt. Morris Park hill. A trio of kids were playing tag about the bell tower. A solitary individual sat on one of the green park benches. Vacant otherwise, the benches bordered the inner circle of the iron-pipe barrier separating the summit from the hillside. Down below, Harlem streets and avenues stretched away in different directions. On Madison Avenue, at the base of the hill to the east, stretched the Fourth and Madison trolley tracks. At eye level, an irregular view revolved: the tops of brownstone roofs, the spire of a red-brick church on 121st Street, stodgy tenement facades, and bordering the west of the park, decorous and well-kept apartment houses. Smoke and shreds of cloud hovered in the sky to the pale horizon. And directly overhead — the thing he had come to see — hung the great bronze bell, motionless in the open belfry atop the massive wooden beams of the tower.

Breathing a little faster because of the climb, Ira walked about the tower, looking aloft, enjoying the sight of the huge bell among its equally huge timbers open to the sky — and wondering how the bell could have been used long ago as a fire alarm, which was what he once heard somebody say. How could anyone have climbed the hill and rung the bell in time to summon the firemen before the house burned down?

Unhurried and with little commotion, the trio of boys played their sporadic game of hide-and-go-seek, dodging behind the tower or trotting to the pipe railing about the summit. The lone adult sitting on the park bench watched them negligently — until Ira came close enough to speak to, and then to his surprise, the man greeted him. He engaged Ira in conversation. He said he could see that Ira liked hills and woods and country. Did he?

Ira did. He loved the country. So did the stranger. He knew some wonderful places too, not far away either, after a real nice trolley car ride. Did Ira like to ride in an open-air trolley car? Ira loved open-air trolleys. Then they could go out together — ride out and see a real wild place and ride back.

The man must be fooling. He wouldn’t take Ira on a long trolley-car ride. A trolley-car ride cost five cents. Everybody knew that. No, the man was going to go out there himself anyway. Be nice to have company. He’d pay the carfare, if Ira wanted to go.

Ira hesitated. The stranger was smiling, but he was in earnest too. Ira stared at him, trying to make sure the other meant what he said: He was blue-eyed, loose-limbed and slender. He wore his brown felt hat crimped all around, “pork-pie” style, Ira had heard the other kids on the block call it. And there was a sort of rustiness about his clothes, as if weathered, but not mussed or wrinkled. No, he was serious. And he was so friendly, good-humored and relaxed.

“I have to go home first, and eat. My mama’ll worry.”

“That’s all right. After you eat your dinner. We got plenty o’time.”

“Yeh?”

“I’ll be on 125th Street. When you finish your dinner, you just wait for me on the corner of Fifth Avenue. We’ll take the trolley and have some fun.”

“All right.”

“My name’s Joe. What’s yours?”

“My name is Ira.”

“O.K. I’ll meet you on the corner, Ira: Fifth Avenue and 125th Street. Remember?”

“Yeh.”

Ira said nothing to Mom. She might spoil his adventure. And lunch over, he hurried to 125th Street, early, and waited on the corner of Fifth Avenue, where the trolley ran west, just as Joe had directed him. And there he came, lanky, now that he was walking, and looking straight ahead as if he was about to saunter by nonchalantly, as if they hadn’t made an appointment to meet there; so noncommittal, he would have gone on if Ira hadn’t intercepted him, greeted his grown-up friend with, “Here I am, Joe!”

Oh, yes. He recognized Ira, indulgently. They would take the trolley here on the corner, an open-air trolley — and ride to the wonderful park he knew, Fort Tryon Park, at the end of the line, the last stop after a nice, sightseeing ride.

They rode and rode, on the open-air trolley, where the seats were like benches that went from one side to the other, and the conductor stood on the running board when he came to collect the carfare. After the trolley turned north on Broadway, and Ira could see the Hudson River, they rode uptown, uptown till street numbers went way up toward the 200’s, and traffic grew less, and you could see real country, open fields and groves of trees, and isolated houses. They rode so far and so long that something began to stir within Ira: uneasiness.

Yes, it was a wonderful park, full of big shade trees. It was wild and secluded, like a forest. A narrow trail, overshadowed by leafy branches, slanted down a sharp declivity through ever thicker woods. But something wasn’t right; no; to be so alone. . with Mr. Joe. They should go back, now that Ira had seen the place, even though the Mister talked so kind, so cheerfully, as he went ahead, or stopped and looked around so good-naturedly.

“Here’s a nice place.” He led the way — from the path around a big boulder, stopped, surveyed the vicinity with a calm turn of the head. And then, gently, but with unmistakable insistence: “Take your pants down.”

“Wha’?” The full import of his situation, his peril, his helplessness, toppled down on him with crushing force.

“Take your pants down.” The voice was still easy, but more inflexible.

“I don’t wanna.”

“I said take your pants down.”

“I don’t wanna.” Too frightened for tears, Ira began trying to force tears by whimpering: “Lea’ me alone! I wanna go back.”

“C’mon, kid. I ain’t gonna hurt you. Get those pants down.” Mr. Joe became all lanky arms, unsmiling face, strong fingers at Ira’s belt, his other hand pushing Ira’s hand away. “Let go, I told you I ain’t gonna hurt you.”

But worse than hurt lay in store, if he didn’t submit, worse, worse: terror. One hand strove with Ira’s two. And in another moment the same hand was raised, impatiently. “C’mon, you little bastard.” Mr. Joe’s palm poised to slap—

When out of the thicket, up above from the covert that secluded Mr. Joe and Ira, the undergrowth swished, sounds approached, a woman’s blithe giggle, a man’s quick chuckle, mingling, and near and nearer, blessedly, angelically descending the inclined way, and now at hand: The young couple appeared, brightly out of shade, apotheosis, never again so blooming, shining-eyed, blushing Irish as she, nor as husky Irish as he, white shirt open at neck, laughter on lips, strong and eager. Barely surprised at seeing Ira and Mr. Joe, the two lovers glanced in momentary self-conscious check of amorous intent. They smiled, in friendly apology, veered away, and brushing away undergrowth as they proceeded downhill disappeared among the bushes.

It was enough, their passing, their grazing so close to the shameful, nameless knot that bound the victimizer and his victim together, Mr. Joe a hairsbreadth from discovery of his guilt, and Ira so bound to him, he couldn’t even run to the passing lovers, the young man and woman, to say: “He, Joe — the Mister — him, he wants me—” Ira felt he himself shared in the shame and the guilt to have accompanied Mr. Joe out here.

It was enough to end the impasse. And both knew it. “Let’s go back,” said Mr. Joe.

Ira followed him with alacrity, uphill along the path. But then Joe stopped. Just before they came out into the open, and could already hear the automobiles on the street, the trolley cars, voices calling out, reassuring, Joe stopped. He led Ira behind a clump of trees, and reassured by the proximity of other beings to him, his own to them, close enough to be heard, could almost run to, Ira followed. Unbuttoning his own fly, Joe began a tranced pumping of the swollen thing he had in his hand — until — his breath became animal audible — he suddenly grabbed Ira’s buttock, and began squirting a pale, glairy substance against the bark of the tree.

Mr. Joe buttoned his fly. The two walked the short distance to the street, to the trolley tracks, boarded a car when it came.

Mr. Joe paid the fare, and they rode back, street after street, their numbers so happily, happily diminishing. Ira didn’t care if all this time Mr. Joe kept his hand on his young friend’s thigh. To overjoyed eyes, the trolley reached and rounded familiar West 125th Street, and then traveled east: Seventh Avenue, the Hotel Theresa— Oh, he could walk happily home from here, but he stayed: Lenox and Fifth and Madison, and the welcome, welcome gray-painted trestle of the railway overpass with the station bustle and ticket office below: Park Avenue! He was home! “I have to get off here,” Ira stood up. “My mama’s waiting.”

“Sure. See you later.” Smiling amiably, Joe reached up and pulled the bell cord.

Ira alighted from the trolley; turned immediately downtown around the beer-parlor corner, downtown to face home. Hurrying along Park Avenue, past the plumbing-supply corner on 124th Street, he glimpsed the edge of Mt. Morris Park a block to the west. Seen now, as he would see it, at the end of each street he passed, the park — and the hill above and the bell tower — seemed fixed within a harrowing nimbus — as everything was: houses, people, store windows, pillars of the overpass, everything was steeped in something sinister, sinister, diluted by deliverance, but ineradicable, an inescapable smut.

Don’t say anything to Mom. Pop’ll murder you.

XI

He too, Ira thought, ironically, he too could date his writing A.C. and B.C.: After Computer and Before Computer. Because what he wrote now (today, this 4th of February, ’85) was in essence — largely — of what he had typewritten, beginning almost exactly six years ago, in February of 1979. So he faced himself, and would face himself from time to time with asides of another period, a period when he was typing — when he was still able to type, his hands still able to stand the impact of the keys of his Olivetti manual typewriter.

Such was the case today: The yellow second-copy page waiting for him to transcribe it to disk began: This is Tuesday, April 3, 1979. The morning is clear, temperature a bit chillier than seasonable. I passed the night in considerable pain. M, my selfless spouse, will again have to drive me to the Presbyterian Hospital this afternoon for the blood and urine tests that determine how well the body has been tolerating the “gold” injections, remedy of last resort, or almost, of arresting the depredations of this pernicious disorder, hight in medical language rheumatoid arthritis, abbreviated hereafter as RA (Joyce would be happy at the correspondence, being batty on the subject that RA in Hebrew meant anything bad, the whole spectrum of bad). Outside my study window at the moment, the first transitory bronze buds blur the cottonwood boughs.

Menachem Begin is in Cairo. He is reported to be enjoying the cool, though correct, reception accorded him by the Egyptians (and refrained from mentioning that part of the labor that went into constructing the Pyramids he viewed was that of Hebrew slaves). To me the man is without appeal, both in presence and address, something like our own Cal Coolidge of long ago mapped into a fiercely partisan Israeli context. But all that’s irrelevant, dubiously whimsical, I tell myself. El Arish is to be returned to Egypt on May 27, 1979. Most of the Arab world is focusing its hatred on Sadat; and yet, even his Arab enemies are divided — as always, praise be to Allah.

Is it genuine, durable, I ask myself: Will the peace between the two countries hold? Or should one regard the whole business as a piece (peace) of consummate trickery on the part of Anwar Sadat, a genius at machination and trickery, who apparently succeeded in lulling the Israeli government, the Israeli high command, into complacency — and then with Syria for ally, attacked on Yom Kippur. As usual, the minor detail tends to attain undue prominence in memory because human and dramatic: the debate between the two allies whether the attack should be launched at dawn or dusk, when the sun would be behind the one, and in the other’s eyes. Truly, the man is a genius of trickery, and with the help of portly German-Jewish Henry Kissinger—“Vee biliefe. . und dun’t preempt”—regained oil fields captured by Israel and so vital to her economy without firing another shot; and now, with the blessings of Prexy Jolly Jimmy, is about to recover the entire Sinai.

And yet, what other alternative than to do so? Not whether Begin is personally, or politically, attractive to me is the important thing; but whether his agreements and concessions have placed Israel in mortal danger — or brought a real peace a step closer. .

It was more than he could hope to disentangle at the moment. He frowned at the ensuing pages, yellow, slippery, tissue-thin second-copy he had saved money in purchasing — like Pop with his ineffable, inveterate buying by price alone, inferior merchandise. “Doesn’t the merchant know the cost of his goods?” Mom would try to reason with Pop. It did no good: He would still buy the printed piece of floor covering rather than genuine linoleum of some quality; and in a short time his purchase was scuffed to dead brown underlay, the painted floral design flaked off. Mom’s practical common-sense importunings did no good.

Had the pages slithered about? The narrative on the ensuing page began in the middle — and he knew, he knew that events of that year — or was it the year before? — were of great significance to him personally, to him as narrator. It would be best — he looked at his watch: 3:20 P.M. — it would be best to take time out, save the working copy on the screen, and try to impose some order on what followed. He could hear his tongue click in annoyance at the unpleasant prospect of making a little sense of the disarray before him. But there was no help for it. Somehow he would have to assemble it, account for it, dispose of it — clear it out of his way. Like Plato’s infinite mind (was the thought worth recording, as he poised mentally to terminate, to “save”; no, it was silly: the notion of infinite mind existing on an infinite floppy disk).

XII

Kids who owned the new steering-sleds, as the latest models were called, sleds with iron runners, scooted down the snowy slope on the west side of Mt. Morris Park. How few were the times of joyous abandon: when the kids who owned steering-sleds allowed you to fling yourself on top of them as they belly-whopped down the slope in full career. Uncle Max built his impoverished nephew a sled out of a wooden box and scrap-wood runners — and stood to one side, sheepish and noncommittal at the ridicule that greeted his nephew when he joined the others with his crude homemade sled. With their steel runners, they could even belly-whop down the snow-covered stone stairs of the Mt. Morris Park hill. Ira’s flimsy sled came apart after a few tries on just a gentle incline. Yes, spraddled out into a silly apple-box with the label still on it, and pieces of board with nails sticking out of the erstwhile runners, a sorry cripple, a caricature of a sled, abandoned in the snow. .

And with Harry, the ordeal of his elementary schooling over, the two tried hawking Yiddish newspapers after school, crying the headlines through the darkening streets of Jewish Harlem, but with little success. They had no great “Wuxtra” to peddle like the great extra in August a few months ago, and passersby knew it. . So their cry was in vain, and most of their papers went unsold, and in a day or two they gave up the venture.

But for over seventy years there would remain in Ira’s mind the projection of a kid in knee-pants and long black stockings hustling, panicky and shrill through a Harlem street into the twilight of the past. .

And ever and again in idleness, he would experience a harking back to a time — or forward to a time — not haphazard as the present had become, but seamless again, as it once had been; a harking back, an inarticulate yearning that somewhere, somehow, the scattered pieces of his random world would coalesce into unity once more. Else, why did he stand here on this street corner, in his solitary rambling, familiar street corner in bustling Jewish Harlem, suddenly transfigured, full of aureate promise, a redemption beyond the big dope he was, the “big ham,” the kids on the block called him, beyond Pop’s exasperated cry in Yiddish: “Lemekh! What a lame Turk you’ve turned out to be!”

— Oh, yes, you did have little jobs, didn’t you? You tried to earn something.

Before school. He got up early in the morning, in the slum-bleary winter morning, and delivered fresh rolls and butter or cream cheese to homes on 119th Street, between Park and Madison, where the houses were a little better — and more Jewish. Yes, the grocer in the same block hired him. Shadowy, the kid running up and down stairs with fresh bulkies. Though Pop was always pleased when Ira earned a dollar or two, and his attitude during the time of his son’s earning would change — he would become friendly; he would tease Mom that Ira’s earnings should be deducted from her allowance. “Gey mir in der erd!” she would flush, and cry out, “Gey mir in der erd!”—it was Mom who objected to her son’s before-school delivery route, his early-morning exploitation, poor child. “I don’t need the few shmoolyaris,” she said, calling the despised dollar a shmoolyareh, as was her wont. And he worked after school in a small, frowsy storefront shop where the owner and his wife, who lived in the rear, made fancy buttons; and Ira was taught how to make fancy buttons too: by spreading a patch of cloth on top of the bare metal button, and with a lever-operated press, force the cloth to unite with the metal. Working, as was his wont, lackadaisically, he caught his thumb between punch and button, and howled with pain.

He was sent on errands: once to deliver buttons to a tailor shop on east “A hundert und taiteent stritt.” Of course, Ira duly went to east a hundred and eighteenth street, found no tailor shop there, and reported back, with the buttons undelivered.

“I said a hundert und taiteent stritt,” the boss repeated in a dudgeon.

“I went there!” Ira clamored: “A hundred and eighteenth street.”

“No! Oy, gevald! Vot’s wrunk vit you? Taiteen, taiteen, not eighteen!”

And: at age eleven (How brief the age of innocence: The troll is on the bridge, Billygoat Gruff.). At age eleven, he worked in Biolov’s drugstore. Every day after school, and Saturdays all day. Doing all kinds of things, from chores to running errands: mopping the tiled floor, polishing the showcases — with a sheet of newspaper. “A little more elbow grease,” said the short, bald, affable Mr. Biolov. Elbow grease. It was the first time Ira had heard the expression, and for a moment he thought such a substance really existed. Delivering prescriptions, running errands. And all this for $2.50 per week. And when he lost, or his pocket was picked of a five-dollar bill Mr. Biolov had given him with which to buy drugs at the wholesale drug depot on Third Avenue, Ira had to work two weeks to make up for the loss. Mortars and pestles, yes, yes, in which drugs were ground, mixed in the back room of the drugstore. Syrup simple was sugar-water, wasn’t it? Sarsaparilla went with castor oil. Mr. Biolov was a “shtickel duckter,” Mom said, meaning he was a “bit of a doctor.” He gave first aid to accident victims who were brought into the drugstore, until the ambulance arrived. He took cinders out of eyes; he knew when to prescribe Seidlitz Powder and when to prescribe the dried berries that Mom brewed into a tea and were so pleasantly laxative; and when to prescribe citrate of magnesia — which was kept on ice, was cold and bubbly and lemony, and sent you to the toilet just as fast almost as castor oil. Sarsaparilla. Spirits of ammonia. Oil of peppermint. There were jars and jars of every sort of compound on the shelves, not ordinary jars, but all uniform in shape, made of pretty enamel, with wide mouths and glass stoppers.

In the back of the drugstore were special boards with long grooves in them which Mr. Biolov filled with the paste he made by grinding drugs together, and then cut the long worms of paste into pills, rolling them afterward in powdered sugar. In each corner of the store window stood two glorious glass amphorae, each one full of liquid, one brilliant green in color, the other brilliant ruby. Between them, in the middle of the show window, a fake monkey performed his tedious, tireless trick of pouring the same fluid from one glass to another. And once, made curious by Mr. Biolov’s secretive manner, Ira peeked into the little package he was given to deliver: a peculiar shallow rubber cup around a ring: puzzling; it wasn’t a condom; he had already seen those; he knew about them: scumbags they were called in the street. He too retrieved a package of them that were thrown into the waste basket, and tried blowing them up, but the rubber had deteriorated, and they popped. Best of all, he liked fetching people to the telephone booth in the store; they almost always gave him a nickel tip for the service; and more than once, when he called an Irish girl to the phone, a pretty Irish girl, with pink cheeks and eyes glistening, hurrying down the stairs after him through a cabbagey-permeated tenement, the deeply-breathing, far-away-looking girl gave him a dime. He could guess why, though he couldn’t understand why. Rankling over Mr. Biolov’s callousness in making him work two weeks for nothing, Ira worked a few weeks longer, and then quit.

And now it was summer again; random, rambling summer. There were certain trees on Madison Avenue that grew between the sidewalk and Mt. Morris Park, which shed a small green seedpod that came twirling down. “Polly-noses,” the kids named them; they could be split and were sticky and stuck to the bridge of one’s nose. It was on a summer night that Ira licked the only kid he ever licked in Harlem, Jewish Morty Nussbaum who lived on the top floor of 108 East. Morty had wanted to show Ira how to “pull off”—when the two were sitting in warm weather up on the roof, and both had gotten their peckers out. And then suddenly Ira refused to go on. Memory seemed to scramble into separate ugly clots: of a lanky individual in a pork-pie hat and rusty-neat clothes, of what he wanted to do to Ira, and of what he did afterward against a tree trunk. Despite Morty’s urgings that it was good, Ira balked; instead he rebuttoned his fly. How could anything be good that was as loathsome as that? Later, over some trifling dispute, he beat Morty in a fistfight, beat him easily. And even as Ira knew he was winning, he was conscious at the same time of the Irish kids egging the two on, two Jewish kids. And though exultant at winning, when Morty all at once admitted defeat, Ira disregarded the Irish kids’ injunction that he pound Morty on the back while yelling in traditional boast of triumph: two, four, six, eight, nine, I can beat you any old time. Soon after, Morty and his family moved away.

In the summer, you could walk and walk and walk all the way to the Museum of Natural History. You had read in the 6A Current Events news-sheet that several large meteorites that fell from out of the sky now rested in front of the museum doors. You didn’t have to go inside — maybe they wouldn’t let you — but it didn’t matter, because it was the meteorites you wanted to see, and they were outside. You wanted to see them, because it said in small print down at the bottom of the Book of Norse Mythology that the reason why Siegfried’s sword was so sharp might have been that it was made from a meteorite, and meteorites often contained special steel, so hard that after the sword was forged and sharpened, it could be dipped in a brook, and would shear tiny bits of lint and fleece floating against it. Imagine how sharp that was! Something to marvel at while walking and walking along the paved paths inside Central Park in the green, green of summer — past stylish people sporting silver-headed canes, past the nursemaids and the fancy baby carriages, fancier even than Mrs. Biolov’s, the fanciest on the block — until the long, long walk brought you to the immense museum building whose entrance was at the bottom of a short flight of stairs. And down the stairs you went timidly, to stand in awe before the stark, pitted boulders: those were meteorites fallen from heaven to earth.

“Siz a manseh mit a bear,” Mom twitted him fondly, when he had trudged home at last, and told her what he had discovered.

“It’s not a manseh mit a bear!” he flared up. “It’s about the Norse gods: Odin and Thor and Loki. And about Siegfried and Brunhild. You don’t know what a wonderful sword he had.”

“Azoy?” she placated. “My clever son. A bulkie and fresh farmer’s cheese would go well after such a long journey, no?”

Stories with a bear, Mom called them. But he liked them much better than he did those by Horatio Alger, the kind of stories that Davey Baer liked: Tom the Bootblack or Pluck and Luck, the kind the other kids liked: Tom Swift and his motorcycle, and how resourcefully he could fix it with a piece of fence wire; or the Rover Boys who were so honest, and played baseball so well; or Young Wild West in fringed buckskin fighting treacherous “Injuns,” though Ira couldn’t tell why. And some of the fairy tales, and stories about witches and hobgoblins scared him so, he was afraid of the dark, afraid to go down into the cellar alone and fetch a pail of coal out of the padlocked crib; fearful even when he had to take the garbage can down to the big trash cans in front of the house at night — how he shirked, how he fought doing that chore! The closed cellar door at the foot of the feebly lit stairs before he turned to enter the hallway to the street filled him with panic.

Still, those were the stories he prized above all others, stories he loved: of enchantment and delicacy, of princelings and fair princesses. So often the princesses were not only fair, but they were the fairest in Christendom. You couldn’t help that. Maybe they wouldn’t mind if he was Jewish. And King Arthur’s knights, they sought the Holy Grail, the radiant vessel like a loving cup out of which Jesus had drunk wine. So everything beautiful was Christian, wasn’t it? All that was flawless and pure and bold and courtly and chivalric was goyish. He didn’t know what to feel some times: sadness; he was left out; it was a relief when Jews weren’t mentioned; he was thankful: he could fight the Saracens with Roland. Or he could appreciate seeing Mr. Toil everywhere, when the boy in the Grimm fairy tale ran away from his teacher, Mr. Toil, even leading the band of musicians — as long as he wasn’t Jewish. .

XIII

M came into his study. She had two skeins of wool she wanted to show him, one jet-black, one oxford-gray. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of weaving the worn places in the chaleco again,” she said.

“The one on your back?” he asked: M was wearing the salt-and-pepper woven chaleco she had bought in Mexico — where was it? Not Tlaqui-paqui, or however it was spelled, where the young weaver worked in dim light at a loom (and Ira also bought a chaleco). That was in the late ‘60s.

“Yes. It’s true it doesn’t owe me anything,” she said. “But I like it.”

“And where will you get such a rarity again,” he agreed.

Such a rarity again — he thought afterward, after she left for the piano in the living room. My love, it would take a Taj Mahal in belles lettres to do you justice, tall, spare woman grown old, your once tawny hair, gray. Wrinkled, your lovely countenance, but still noble. Where did the millions of moments go, the million millions of moments spent together? She had just returned from shopping, and she said: “Do you think the cold weather kept the shoppers away? They were out in droves today. Of course the last two days weren’t very conducive for shopping. No one wanted to brave the cold.”

“No, that’s right.”

“And I brought you a present for your birthday: a turkey pastrami loaf.” She displayed it, a small brick of meat, tightly sealed in plastic.

He thought of an electric slicer, of getting one, but she wouldn’t approve: One more thing in the house, she would say in her equable, sensible fashion. He settled for, “Oh, great! Thanks.”

“I guess we’ll have to throw away those two coupons for Hardee’s two-for-the-price-of-one roast beef sandwiches. Tomorrow is the last day, and we’re having Margaret for company.”

“Do you know McDonald’s is now advertising a thirty-nine-cent hamburger?”

“The competition must be fierce.”

“There’s another thirty-nine-cent hamburger chain that’s just opened in town. You saw it with me the other day.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I wonder what a thirty-nine-cent hamburger looks like?”

“Let’s buy a half-dozen—” he suggested. “Since the McDonald’s place is so near.”

“I’ll probably put all three meat patties in one bun.”

That was why she remained so thin and distinguished in figure: three patties in one bun. And he, plebeian: “Oh, I like my tissue-paper buns. I’m used to eating that way.”

And all this, he reflected — after she was well launched rehearsing a piece at the piano, a familiar piece whose name he would be ashamed to admit he didn’t know — he would find out another time — all this, because he had asked her if she knew where one of his short stories was kept, or stored: She was so methodical, so efficient, all the enviable things he wasn’t. She knew, and faithfully brought him the carton, requiring only that she would have to sit down while she rummaged for the one he wanted: It was a sketch he had done for The New Yorker, and been lucky enough to have it accepted. Done in 1940, and what would he think of it now; would it fit into what he was doing, fit into the structure, or the mood? Forty-five years ago, forty-five years closer to the self-involved, self-indulgent, ill-at-ease, lonesome, moody, aimless scapegrace he was then. . tailored, to be sure, for The New Yorker. Would the piece still contain enough truth in it, fidelity to something he once was, to warrant the work of retyping, of inclusion here?

SOMEBODY ALWAYS GRABS THE PURPLE

Up a flight of stairs, past the vases and the clock outside the adult reading room, past cream walls, oak moldings, oak bookcases, and the Cellini statue of Perseus was the children’s room of the 123rd Street Branch Library. Young Sammy Farber drew a battered library card out of his pocket and went in. He was a thick-set, alert boy, eleven or twelve years old. He flattened his card on the desk and, while he waited for the librarian, gazed about. There were only a few youngsters in the reading room. Two boys in colored jerseys stood whispering at one of the bookcases. On the wall above their heads was a frieze of Grecian urchins blowing trumpets. The librarian approached.

“Teacher,” Sammy began, “I just moved, Teacher. You want to change it — the address?”

The librarian, a spare woman, graying and impassive, with a pince-nez, glanced at this card. “Let me see your hands, Samuel,” she said.

He lifted his hands. She nodded approvingly and turned his card over. It was well stamped. “You’d better have a new one,” she said.

“Can I get it next time, Teacher? I’m in a hurry like.”

“Yes. Where do you live now, Samuel?”

“On 520 East 120th Street.” He watched her cross out the Orchard Street address and begin writing the new one. “Teacher,” he said in a voice so low it was barely audible, “you got here the Purple Fairy Book?”

“The what?”

“The Purple Fairy Book.” He knuckled his nose sheepishly. “Everybody says I’m too big to read fairy books. My mother calls ’em stories with a bear.”

“Stories with a bear?”

“Yeah, she don’t know English good. You got it?”

“Why, yes. I think it’s on the shelves.”

“Where, Teacher?” He moved instantly toward the aisle.

“Just a moment, Samuel. Here’s your card.” He seized it. “Now I’ll show you where it is.”

Together they crossed the room to a bookcase with a brass plate which said “Fairy Tales.” Sammy knelt down so that he could read the titles more easily. There were not a great many books in the case — a few legends for boys about Arthur and Roland on the top shelf, then a short row of fairy tales arranged according to countries, and finally, on the bottom shelf, a few fairy books arranged by colors: Blue, Blue, Green. Her finger on the titles wavered. Red. . Yellow. . “I’m sorry.”

“Ah!” he said, relaxing. “They grabbed it again.”

“Have you read the others? Have you read the Blue?”

“Yeah, I read the Blue.” He stood up slowly. “I read the Blue and the Green and the Yellow. All the colors. And colors that ain’t even here. I read the Lilac. But somebody always grabs the Purple.”

“I’m pretty sure the Purple Fairy Book hasn’t been borrowed,” the librarian said. “Why don’t you look on the tables? It may be there.”

“I’ll look,” he said. “But I know. Once they grab it, it’s goodbye.”

Nevertheless he went from table to table, picking up abandoned books, scanning their titles, and putting them down again. His round face was the image of forlorn hope. As he neared one of the last tables, he stopped. A boy was sitting there with a stack of books at his elbow, reading with enormous concentration. Sammy walked behind the boy and peered over his shoulder. On one page there was print, on the other a colored illustration, a serene princeling, hand on the hilt of his sword, regarding a gnarled and glowering gnome. The book was bound in purple. Sammy sighed and returned to the librarian.

“I found it, Teacher. It’s over there,” he said, pointing. “He’s got it.”

“I’m sorry, Samuel. That’s the only copy we have.”

“His hands ain’t as clean as mine,” Sammy suggested.

“Oh, I’m sure they are. Why don’t you try something else?” she urged. “Adventure books are very popular with boys.”

“They ain’t popular with him.” Sammy gazed gloomily at the boy. “That’s what they always told me on the East Side — popular, I don’t see what’s so popular about them. If a man finds a treasure in an adventure book, so right away it’s with dollars and cents. Who cares from dollars and cents? I get enough of that in my house.”

“There’s fiction,” she reminded him. “Perhaps you’re the kind of boy who likes reading about grown-ups.”

“Aw, them too!” He tossed his head. “I once read a fiction book, it had in it a hero with eyeglasses? Hih!” His laugh was brief and pitying. “How could heroes be with eyeglasses? That’s like my father.”

The librarian placed her pince-nez a little more securely on her nose. “He may leave it, of course, if you wait,” she said.

“Can I ask him?”

“No. Don’t disturb him.”

“I just want to ask him if he gonna take it or ain’t he. What’s the use I should hang around all day?”

“Very well. But that’s all.”

Sammy walked over to the boy again and said, “Hey, you’re gonna take it, aintcha?”

Like one jarred out of sleep, the boy started, his eyes blank and wide.

“What d’you want to read from that stuff?” Sammy asked. “Fairy tales!” His lips, his eyes, his whole face expressed distaste. “There’s an adventure book here,” he said, picking up the one nearest his hand. “Don’t you like adventure books?”

The boy drew himself up in his seat. “What’re you botherin’ me for?” he said.

“I ain’t botherin’ you. Did you ever read the Blue Fairy Book? That’s the best. That’s a hard one to get.”

“Hey, I’ll tell the teacher on you!” The boy looked around. “I’m reading this!” he said angrily. “And I don’t want no other one! Read ’em yourself!”

Sammy waited a moment and then tried again. “You know you shouldn’t read fairy books in the library.”

The boy clutched the book to himself protectively and rose. “You want to fight?”

“Don’t get excited,” Sammy waved him back into the chair and retreated a step. “I was just sayin’ fairy tales is better to read in the house, ain’t it — like when you’re sittin’ in the front room and your mother’s cookin’ in the kitchen? Ain’t that nicer?”

“Well, what about it?”

“So in the liberry you can read from other things. From King Arthur or from other mitts.”

The boy saw through that ruse also. He waved Sammy away. “I’m gonna read it here and I’m gonna read it home too, wise guy.”

“All right, that’s all I wanted to ask you,” said Sammy. “You’re gonna take it, aintcha?”

“Sure I’m gonna take it.”

“I thought you was gonna take it.”

Sammy retreated to one of the central pillars of the reading room and stood there, watching. The same play of wonder and beguilement that animated the boy’s thin features while he read also animated Sammy’s pudgy ones, as though the enjoyment were being relayed. After a time the boy got up and went to the desk with the book still in his hand. The librarian took the card out of the book and stamped the boy’s own card. Then she handed him the book. Sammy’s round face dimmed. He waited, however, until the boy had had the time to get out of the reading room and down the stairs before he put his worn library card in his pocket and made for the exit.

“Somebody Always Grabs the Purple”

The New Yorker, March 23, 1940

Well. . it was touching, but not too touching. It was The New Yorker after all, of that period, with its aim, as it was perhaps today, though he scarcely read the magazine, with its aim of diverting the reader, presumably the fairly discriminating, well-to-do reader. It had been written according to the directives his literary agent at the time impressed on him: that he was never to get the reader to identify with the central character of a story, but to feel slightly superior to him. And so the kid in the sketch was himself and not himself. Ira thought ironically of the Hamlet alternative of being or not being. It was both always, it could only be a unity when both were together. It was strange though, and more than a little retarding — was that the right word? — arresting, inhibiting, to view this evidence of the writer he was, he once was, the preserved specimen of the writer he had been: the arrogant, egotistic, self-assured author of his first novel. Rereading his product of forty-five years ago drained him of what he was today. . something better than he had been, he thought, he hoped. Ah, how could you have let that life, all that life and configuration and trenchancy and conflict escape you? when it was still accessible, still at hand, retrievable, still close.

God, fourteen years spent in that slum of Harlem, with its changing composition and context, its squalid designs — let it get away from you, a mountain of copy, as the journalist would say, local color, novelty, from the moment you stepped into the street, stepped in or out the hallway. You blew it, that was the current expression; he would think of it a million times more, after M had lifted him up in bed, because his rheumatoid arthritis all but immobilized him after a night’s immobility. He took his hot shower, to limber him up a little, and came out of it, mourning rather than reflecting: Ah, the lost riches — what was it? The Joycean, sordid riches?

Perhaps because his view of it had changed: He couldn’t accept only a surface perception of it anymore. Was that the effect of Marxism? Of the Party’s influence? He had to consider, to recognize, somehow to indicate implicitly in his writing the cruel social relations beneath, the cruel class relations, the havoc inflicted by deprivation concealed under the overtly ludicrous. No more the Olympian mix of Anatole France’s irony and pity. And that was why he rebelled against Joyce with such animosity today. Anyway, something had barred the way, at the same time, as it undermined the way. That something they would call today loss of identity. And with loss of identity came loss of affirmation. And without either identity or affirmation, the great panorama of fourteen years of life in and out of 119th Street in Harlem was denied him — in fact, if one wanted to amplify it, ramify it, even adulthood was interdicted, adequate adulthood.

So he felt gloomy, pensive. . You know why I can’t delineate it now, Ecclesias.

— I know you know why.

What summer day was it he went striding in the freshness of morning, in the happiness of a newborn school vacation, to the Metropolitan Museum, solitary? (Set it down, set it down: No one else on 119th Street wanted to go.) Hiking between the dark, weathered, low stone wall that girded up the embankment of the park inside, separated it from the avenue and the row after row of mansions, the immeasurably opulent mansions across the avenue. Under the trees, in leaf, on Fifth Avenue, sturdily striding Ira, admiring, reveling in the lordly bay windows of imposing edifices pouting in pride, with each shade drawn down to the same distance. And the marble lintels, the organ-clusters of chimney pots rising from slate roofs with verdigris copper trim. While on the avenue, the double-decker buses ran, the ten-cent-fare buses that only the rich could afford.

“Where are you off to, young man?” asked the stout gentleman with the straw-colored mustache who was standing beside the lady with eyeglasses who was also waiting for the bus at the curb.

“Me? I’m goin’ to the museum.”

“Really? So early in the morning?”

“Yeh. It’s far away.” Had he by now learned to be wary of gentle strangers? Or did the presence of a woman give him a sense of security? “And after I go there and see, I have to come back all the way too.”

“Of course.”

The two waiting for the bus turned toward each other, a faint smile on each face, and he was on his way again. The moment would abide in memory like a fine stanza of a poem, or a few bars of fine melody that consoled in later years. In these hollow, later years, Ecclesias, when the silver cord is loosed, and the bearings burned, the threads stripped off the screw, or the contact lens blown away by the breeze.

XIV

The Great War had come much closer — he would have to make his way as best he could among roughly typed sheets in disorder, and his memory a farrago. Much closer. Already Ira had seen and heard elderly Jews in Mt. Morris Park rise angrily from benches and brandish canes at each other, while they exchanged insults in Yiddish: “Pompous German! Coarse Litvack!”. .

Waylaid en route to the floating East River swimming pool by a scowling little gang of Italian kids, he was menaced with: “Which side you on? What’re you? A German? You from Austria?”

Ira surmised what might be in store. “Nah. Not me.”

“What’re you then?”

“I’m a Hungarian. Hungarians don’t like Austrians.”

His accosters were nonplussed. “Talk Hungarian,” their leader challenged.

“Sure. Choig iggid bolligid. That means I like you.”

“How do we know?” a henchman demanded.

“I can say it again,” Ira offered.

“Say that you’re on the ‘Tollian side in Hungarian,” the leader probed.

“Choig iligid bolligid Tollyanis.”

“Let him go,” the leader decreed.

And go Ira did. .

The Great War came closer. The Huns impaled babies on their bayonets — though Mom ridiculed stories of German atrocities. “What, the Russ is better? Czar Kolki [kolki meant bullet] iz a feiner mensh? Who in all the world is more benighted than the Russian mujik? Who doesn’t remember their pogroms, the Kishinev pogroms, in 1903? Pogroms led by seminary students, especially on Easter — Kishinev when I was still a maid. And after they lost to the Yaponchikis when I met your father, immediately they take it out on the Jews. Go! More likely the Russ impaled the infant on his bayonet.”

And for once, Pop agreed wholeheartedly. “Don’t you remember Mendel Beiliss when we still lived on the East Side?” Pop prodded Ira. “Where is your head? You don’t remember the turmoil there was when the Russ tried and sentenced him? And why? The Jew butchered a goyish child for his blood to make matzahs for Passover. And the mujik believed it.”

“Maybe a goy saw us eating borsht on Passover.” Ira suggested. “That’s red.”

“Go, you’re a fool.” said Pop. “A mujik is a mujik and he’ll die a mujik. Who doesn’t know a mujik?”

“I’ll tell you, child,” said Mom. “It’s thus with Jews: When two monarchs are at war, and one scourges the other’s Jews, the second one says, ‘Since you scourge my Jews, I’ll scourge your Jews.’” Mom laughed mirthlessly. “You understand?”

The Great War drew closer. Oh, the confusions in a child’s mind! Uncle Louis, still wearing his postman’s uniform, came to the house with the Socialist Call in his pocket, and unfolding the newspaper on the green oilcloth-covered kitchen table, read from it what Eugene Debs said about the war — and always drew Mom into the orbit of conversation: “You hear, Leah? Debs said it was a capitalist war in which the workers paid with their lives for capitalists of one country to become more powerful than the capitalists of another country, to take over their trade, their colonies — which were seized by force from the simple people who lived there, stolen, you might say. But no matter who won, the workers would still be wage-slaves.”

Pop listened intently, his whole face taking on a new appearance, as if illuminated; Mom more distantly. “Woodrow Wilson talks about defending democracy. You have no idea of how much the anti-Semitism in the Post Office has grown.”

“Where is a Jew liked?” Mom asked rhetorically. “Nowhere. He makes good cannon fodder. That’s the way it is in Russia, in all of Europe. Even in Austria where Franz Josef tolerates the Jew. He won’t allow Black Hundreds to instigate pogroms, as they do in Russia under the Czar. So the Jew is a little safer, he can breathe a little freer. Still is the Jew liked? Need I ask? One thing they like him for: Give me your Jew to be a soldier. He at least has learned to read and write.”

Uncle Louie regarded her admiringly, looked away, his lips spreading as he swallowed. And to Pop: “You almost became a soldier yourself.”

Pop beamed; he loved to reminisce: “When I returned to Austria where I was inveigled into marrying her.”

It was joke Mom didn’t appreciate. “Naturally, you quarreled first with Gabe,” she reminded him. Gabe was Pop’s oldest brother, and lived now in St. Louis. There was a whole web of relatives on Pop’s side of the family, almost all of whom had immigrated to Chicago or St. Louis, relatives too numerous and too remote to hope to keep track of. As disclosed by Mom, it was mostly their scandalous behavior in America or Galitzia that provided Ira with the meager sense of kinship with them he possessed.

What if they had settled in New York, as Pop eventually did? Then there would have been two clans, the long-established Americanized first generation, the “yellow-ripe” Americans, as the Jews termed the acculturated immigrant, and the “green” Americans, Mom’s family. What a web that would have made as he shuttled back and forth between Zaida’s orthodoxy and traits, and Uncle Gabe and Sam in St. Louis, and Uncle Jacob in Chicago. It was safe to say there would have been an affinity, or similarity, between Uncle Jacob and Zaida, but not much, or much less, with the other two uncles on his father’s side. Though they were close to Zaida in age, temperamentally, Ira gathered from Mom’s report, their outlook and behavior were much closer to that of his more recently arrived uncles.

Oh, it would have been some web — Ira paused to thank his lucky stars he didn’t have that to struggle with. The merest outline of what he recalled would suffice — if it wasn’t already superfluous:

Sam, Pop’s next older brother, strong and strapping, had been a soldier, and had fallen in love with someone else’s wife — to the great disapproval of his father, the stern, bearded Jew with ear-locks, next to the portrait of his equally severe-looking wife on the front-room wall. And they quarreled, Sam and his father, who had lifted his cane to strike his son only to have it snatched from his hand by his son and be struck with it himself. Sam fled to America with the other man’s wife. So Mom, the source of all these stories, related, and that Gabe had married a woman considerably older than himself. Clara by name, and a termagant. “Oy, is that a Clara,” said Mom. “And jealous. And a shrew. Fearful!” Pop’s nearest brother in age, Jacob, the one in Chicago, the one who had irruptions on his skin, was a weakling, and often when studying Talmud was baited by his younger brother, Pop, until the two came to blows. And once Jacob was so badly beaten by Pop that he had to hide out from his father’s retribution. He slept in an outbuilding, was fed surreptitiously by his mother late at night. There was an older sister, Khatche, who married a dandy by the name of Schnapper, an extremely handsome man and a libertine. They too lived in the Middle West, though not in St. Louis or Chicago. And so tortured was she by the knowledge of her philandering husband’s ill-concealed and continual amours, that one day she poured kerosene over herself and set herself on fire (Mom lowered her voice in the telling). And Ira would note, yes, years and years later, when visiting Fannie, a very pretty, regular-featured woman — no mistaking she was Schnapper’s daughter — Ira would note how the old man, Schnapper himself, now in his nineties, sitting by the window on the ground floor, would appraise every female that went by: It was like a reflex, the way he would twitch at the sight of a skirt. And since Pop was the youngest of his parents’ children, while Uncle Louis was the first-born of Pop’s older sister, that was how it came about that the nephew was older than the uncle.

And Pop’s father — though Mom said that the night before she and her child were to leave for America, Ira, a tot of two years and a half, had danced so fetchingly before his grandsire that tears had sprung to the old man’s eyes as he leaned on his cane watching — Pop’s father Ira never remembered. Out of another age, truly, Ira would feel — as he did about some of his very old grammar school teachers — this grandfather in his eighties who died in 1914, soon after the outbreak of the War. Seized as a rich Jew by Czarist soldiery, when they invaded Galitzia he was held for ransom. He was thrown from the wagon into the ditch when the Russian troops fled in disorder before the counterattacking Austrian army. The weather had already turned cold; he suffered frostbite, and was only rescued because some peasant passing by heard the old man’s groans and recognized him as Saul, superintendent of the baron’s distillery, and known far and wide for his skill as a veterinarian. The peasant took the octogenarian to his hut, cared for him until relatives were notified and came for him and brought him back under their own roof. But the exposure and shock were too much for his aged constitution, and Saul, the superintendent, Shaul Shaffer, as he was known, died soon after — in the fall of 1914, the fall of the same year Baba and Zaida and their offspring came to America. Pop hadn’t quarreled with his in-laws yet. He went to their home, when Ira was there, and squatted on a footstool close to the floor. It was the first time Ira had ever seen anyone sit shivah, as the seven days of mourning were called. .

“Yes,” Pop resumed, addressing Uncle Louie. “They threw me into jail, into the sraimoolyeh (wasn’t that a comical word for jail?). Pop laughed. “Because I came back to Austria, and I hadn’t reported for conscription. So they threw me into jail. They didn’t know I was an American citizen already — or they didn’t want to know. Gabe made me a citizen before I was of age, so I could vote a straight Republican ticket. In 1900 I became a citizen. I was born in 1882. I was only eighteen, and a birth certificate I didn’t have. So Gabe said, say you’re twenty-one; Gabe was my witness I was twenty-one.”

“And why did the Austrians let you out of jail?” asked Uncle Louis.

“Whether because they found out I was an American citizen, or because I didn’t pass the examination — big and strong I’m not — the warden came in, and ‘Out! Out!’ he said.” Pop laughed, and laughed again: “There was somebody else there — we were three, four in the cell — you should anshuldig mir, he could make a fartz whenever he wanted. Say to him, ‘Fortz, Stanislas.’ Hup! A Fortz. Kheh, kheh, kheh!”

XV

The war came closer. Confused by strange stirrings within him, strange rumors without, the Great War would always remain cloudy, a nebulous complex of memory without regard for time or relevance. Mamie, mother of two daughters now, always bought Ira a flannel shirt for his birthday, a new gray flannel shirt. Of what relevance to the Great War was that? The question made him feel as if he were answering some kind of catechism: In the impoverished life in that taken-for-granted, dreary cold-water flat, gas-mantle-lit still, the kitchen alone was heated in winter — by the twinkling row of blue beads of the single long burner of the gas oven. The kitchen alone was warm, fetid sometimes, while the other three rooms on the other side of the closed door to the rest of the flat were ice cold. And so he went to bed under the frigid goose-feather-stuffed ticking. Unquilted, the feathers in it shifted and bunched from one end to the other, and one had to pedal an imaginary bicycle the first few minutes after getting into bed in order to generate a pod of warmth. Yes, they came from Europe: The featherbeds were heirlooms made of goosedown.

“In the winter when we had nothing to do,” said Pop, reminiscing nostalgically, “everybody sat around the big table in my father’s house, and we took the big feathers from the goose, the big wing feathers, and the tail feathers, and we stripped off the feather from the quill. Even those we saved, the little feathers from the quill.” And the ticking also had two or three coins enclosed in it — Ira could feel the coins sometimes when they collected in a corner, but the ticking was sewn so tightly, you couldn’t get them out. (They were charms, he learned later, included with the feathers to bring fecundity and good fortune.) And kind-hearted Mamie gave her nephew a pair of high-laced boots, not new, but oh, how treasured! High boots to wear in snow of any depth.

“On your soil they didn’t grow,” Mom said ironically. “Well, may you mirror yourself in them.”

Unaccountable stirrings and compulsions: He was in 6A or 6B, the last year of his attendance in P.S. 103, the “elementary school,” as it was called. What prompted him to skulk across the street that afternoon, after dismissal, opposite the big oak doors of the main entrance? And to wait until Miss Driscoll came out, his teacher. Tall, slender, unsmiling, aloof Miss Driscoll, of the refined, delicate features. With guilty, nameless excitement, he stalked her, block after block, to 125th Street, keeping her just barely in sight ahead of him. To what mysterious abode was she bound? What mysterious rites would be performed there, or what languors would she surrender to, or to what secret lover?

Miss Driscoll sauntered west along busy 125th Street, alone and dignified, while Ira, in her wake, wove in and out among pedestrians. Now north along mundane trolley-traveled Amsterdam Avenue, flanked by nondescript five-flight brick walk-ups whose roofs and stoops each rose a jog higher up the hill than the last. But Ira was sure that at the end was an inkling of breathless revelation, a rare insight, a discovery. North to the 130s, and still north. Miss Driscoll turned east again, downhill, between the walls of a huge stadium and gray and white buildings, like churches he had seen in pictures in fairy tales, or formidable castles, gray and white. And then — she turned a corner around one of the castles at the bottom of the hill, and as if by magic, disappeared. . But there was a door open at the corner where she had turned, at sidewalk level, where the buildings enclosed a big square, with flagpole and trees and a lofty clock in a turret of gray and white stone. So that was where she went? There were other people about, some women, like Miss Driscoll, but most of them young men, and many of them carrying books or briefcases. So it was just another school. Was that all? Disappointed and chagrined, he turned to retrace his steps in the hour before dusk, leaving behind the gray and white buildings that looked like churches or castles. .

How many times would he pass that same door on his way to class, pass it so many times he all but forgot it was the same door. One could brood, one could brood, that the fecklessness, nay, the folly of the youth was even greater than the simple fecklessness of the kid he had been. But what the hell good was it to be aware of the fact?

Came those first intimations as well — signals whose significance he would recognize later, he would be able to name later when he strove to realize them — intimations of a calling. Something innate burgeoned inside you, identifiable, and yet mostly wordless, an urge that was yours alone. The kid in his mackinaw on the way home from the library on 124th Street, at 6:00 P.M. at closing time in the upstairs reading room. Tucked under his arm are the volumes of myths and legends he loved so well. And he passes below the hill on Mt. Morris Park in autumn twilight, with the evening star in the west in limpid sky above the wooden bell tower. And so beautiful it was: a rapture to behold. It set him a problem he never dreamed anyone set himself. How do you say it? Before the pale blue twilight left your eyes you had to say it, use words that said it: blue, indigo, blue, indigo. Words that matched, matched that swimming star above the hill and the tower; what words matched it? Lonely and swimming star above the hill. Not twinkling, nah, twinkle, twinkle, little star — those words belonged to someone else. You had to match it yourself: swimming in the blue tide, you could say. . maybe. Like that bluing Mom rinses white shirts in. Nah, you couldn’t say that. . How clear it is. One star shines over Mt. Morris Park hill. And it’s getting dark, and it’s getting cold— Gee, if instead of cold, I said chill. A star shines over Mt. Morris Park hill. And it’s getting dark, and it’s getting chill. .

PART TWO

I

The time draws near. . Logy, and still under the spell of the mad dreams of last night, feverish and despairing, and affected by the influence of the drug he had taken in the early morning to ease the extreme pain of RA, he was loathe to proceed. But more than all that, because the time drew near.

Oh, it was not only the War — what was the War to a kid turned twelve? A surface comprehension, a sporadic awareness: the collection of peach pits for gas masks — in school — a patriotic speech, a comic strip, a poster, a song, a few words now and then, addressing the subject at home and in the street. He joined the Boy Scouts briefly, on a summer evening sitting on the curb with Davey Baer in front of the 124th Street Library opposite the north end of Mt. Morris Park — and he was soon diffidently selling Liberty Bonds in the evening to crowds gathered about a patriotic rally staged by his troop on Seventh Avenue and 116th Street. Heterogeneous fragmentary aspects that made few lasting and deep impressions — until that April day when America was already at war.

— But that was a year later. You were twelve.

Indeed. That was in 1918.

— And you’re speaking of the year before, 1917.

Just before the United States entered the war. Yes.

— But the critical point, or moment, was 1918.

Yes.

— Then why not let it wait?

Why not indeed.

— You’ll sooner or later have to get over that hurdle.

Yes.

— I told you at the outset, when you deliberately omitted that most crucial element in your account, that you would not be able to avoid reckoning with it.

You did, Ecclesias. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for it.

— And are you now?

Yes. I became so.

— When you had to. It finally became inescapable.

Yes. Face-to-face with it as a consequence of continuing. Which is something, you notice, Ecclesias, I managed to evade in the only novel I ever wrote: coming to grips with it.

— It was adroit. You made a climax of evasion, an apocalypse out of your refusal to go on, an apocalyptic tour de force at the price of renouncing a literary future. As pyrotechnics, it was commendable, it found favor, at any rate. Proceed.

Pop suddenly decided he wanted to go to St. Louis; he yearned to revisit his brothers there; or was it some nostalgia too for those very first months in 1899 when he came to America? And interwoven with this, the usual illusion that in some way he might make a fresh start with the help of his brother Gabe, who by steady devotion to the Republican Party (and also by his allegiance to Freemasonry) had risen to a position of some importance within the ranks of the Republican Party: It was through Gabe’s good offices that his brother Sam had secured the position of Inspector of Sanitation in the St. Louis Street Cleaning Department. In the same way, Gabe had secured for his nephew, also named Gabe, a position in the Comptroller’s office. Uncle Gabe, Pop’s brother, had become a power in the Republican Party not only because of his long and unswerving devotion to it, but even more because he had chosen to live in a largely “colored” neighborhood, and served the interests of his district with great sympathy and such exceptional dedication, he could be counted on eventually “to deliver the colored vote.” “Maybe, maybe,” said Pop, “I’ll have luck this time.” Success or failure was almost always a matter of luck with Pop—mazel—almost never a matter of good or bad judgment. “Maybe, maybe I’ll have luck. Gabe could help me. He’s got a lot of pull. You understand what pull means?” He interrogated Mom, and translated the word into Yiddish for her benefit: “Pull means he has the ear of the mayor and the assemblyman, and other g’vir among the politicians. He knows maybe where is a good luncheonette to open in City Hall. With pull and a few hundred dollars to help me out, I could also became a makher.”

“You quarreled with him last time,” Mom reminded him.

“Last time was last time. What has that to do with this?”

Mom grimaced.

“Then if nothing comes of it, still I would see my brothers. You have a whole tribe here in New York. Whom have I to turn to? Nobody.”

“And when you were there, in St. Louis, much good it did you.”

“Go, you speak like a fool. How can you compare the youth of eighteen I was then to the man I am now? I have a trade. I’m a waiter. I understand the restaurant business. A luncheonette, if I opened one with Gabe’s advice, I wager would be a success. Let him only intercede for me among the politicians. Look what he did for my brother Sam, for my nephew Gabe S. And for young Sam, I hear he’s helping him open a cigar store on a busy avenue.”

“Let it be so,” Mom acquiesced. “As long as you leave me my allowance to run the household.”

“I’ll leave you, I’ll leave you. What, I’ll depart without leaving you your eight dollars a week? The rent is paid, the gas bill is paid,” Pop lapsed into davening singsong. “Two weeks’ allowance I’ll leave you. And the rest we’ll see.”

“Noo,” Mom raised resigned eyebrows, adding wryly: “I’ll be without a husband — abandoned, like Mrs. Greenspan across the street. And when the family hears, what they’ll say.” She rocked her head.

“Let them gabble,” said Pop. “Much good they’ve done me. Let me only have a little luck, I’d show them.”

It was a relief for Ira to know that his father would be gone — for days on end — a relief, and yet also a little disquieting. The respite of Pop’s absence, gladness of the new freedom he would enjoy meanwhile, was overlaid with Mom’s anxiety over the absence of the family breadwinner.

In a week, Pop was packed to go, the clasps of his second-hand satchel on the kitchen floor reinforced with washline. Tense, his face pinched, his nervousness manifest in every movement, tiny red and blue capillaries webbed the end of his nose, conspicuous despite their minuteness, like the threads on a bank note. “Noo, Leah,” he said, brusque with nervousness, “let us bid farewell and embrace.”

“Let us bid farewell,” said Mom.

They embraced, the thin, slight man with eyeglasses, the heavy, buxom woman, full-lipped, almost stolid. Like two strangers, embarrassed by the formality, they separated. “Go in good health,” said Mom.

“I don’t want to hear any bad report of you,” Pop said to Ira.

He stooped, kissed Ira with strangely soft, tender lips, and picked up his satchel.

“You’ll write,” said Mom.

“What else? Of course.” His face darkened with apprehension, he opened the door. “Goodbye.” Closed it behind him.

“May he go in a happy hour,” Mom said, but without conviction. . sighed, “Ai, how he runs. Runs. God help him. Strange man. What can one do?” And after a troubled pause, “I’ll go to Baba’s for a little while. And shop on the way home. Do you want to come along?”

“No, I’ll read.”

“You’ll read your eyes out. Shall I light the gas mantle now? It will soon be dark.”

“No, it won’t be,” he said sulkily. “I can still see by the window.”

She was gone an hour or two, returned just as dusk began to settle on the washpole and washlines in the backyard. She seemed not so much forlorn as resentful, angrily cheerless. Frowning, she prepared supper — one of Ira’s favorite dishes, breaded veal cutlet — and then tried to restrain his voracity. “Now twice left behind. The first time in Tysmenitz with that stern, unbending mother-in-law, now here. Well, let him go — in a good year,” she added, vexed at herself for being upset. “It’s not Tysmenitz, where I waited on sufferance of my in-laws, months, till passage arrived, and with an infant. I can see by your face you don’t care to hear these things.”

“No, I don’t. That’s Europe.”

“Much difference that made — No, indeed,” she corrected herself. “You’re right. That’s what I ought to say: That was Tysmenitz, and I was alone, half among strangers. This is New York, America. My family is here. I have relatives. Still, where is he running? Will he find better reception with the brother he quarreled with years ago? They need him? As I need a plague. He hunts for rusty horseshoes. A settled man would long ago have found a suitable livelihood: If not in ladies’ wear, like Mamie’s Joe, then in other things. He’s a waiter, then remain a waiter. My brother Moe is now a head waiter in the same restaurant where he began as a waiter. My Chaim has become known in half the dairy restaurants on the East Side, and without doubt, half the vegetarian restaurants as well. What to do?”

“All right!” Ira countered impatiently.

“Indeed all right. I made some compote.”

“All right.”

She got up from the table to serve him. “Upstairs lives a Mrs. Karp. The man goes to work day in day out. At what? He’s a curtain maker. He doesn’t seek to become a boss overnight. I’m sure they’re saving money. Because she told me when the time is ripe, and they have the money, with God’s help they hope to buy out a small curtain-making factory. The boss himself might accept part payment. His children shun curtain making. Their minds are set only on going to college. So prudent people plan. She will help; her youngsters will help. They’re practical. They trust each other. They devise the future together. With him, everything is a secret, his earnings, his schemes.”

“All right!” Ira interrupted.

“In truth, why do I trouble you with this.” She set the compote before him. “The heart speaks of its own accord.”

He did homework until bedtime. He disliked arithmetic drill; most arithmetic that had to do with dollars and cents: interest on money in the bank, commission on sales, profit in trade. He hated long division. Only when there was a figure to deal with did he like doing the example: an oblong, a square, a triangle that gave you a formula to apply. He disliked geography, he tolerated history. But reading, ah! That was the trouble; he spent too much time reading, at the expense of everything else. He hadn’t read so much on 9th Street; he couldn’t even recall where the library was on the East Side. He knew where the cheder was, but not the library. Now it was almost the other way round. He knew the location of at least four different libraries. And he could read English so much better; he could guess words in a fairy tale or legend, even if he couldn’t say the word right. Ira smiled at himself. Once when he was reading aloud in 3B, he said “kircle” for circle. Even the teacher laughed.

II

Squat, dumpy Mrs. Shapiro visited them in the evening (would Ira ever forget her kindness and her courage in the face of Pop’s fury). Alerting them by a knock on the door, Mrs. Shapiro would announce herself on the other side of the portal. She had begun dropping in during the evening the last few weeks because Pop was working as a “sopper”: Pop was waiting at tables for all three meals lately, for dinner — in addition to his regular stint of breakfast and lunch — in order to accumulate all the finances he could in readiness for opportunities in St. Louis. Because she dearly loved to hear the roman, the serial romance that was printed daily in Der Tag, Mrs. Shapiro had been taking advantage of Pop’s absence. Ira insulated himself from Mom’s flow of Yiddish, grinning sarcastically now and then, when he heard Mom say, “Kha! Kha! Kha! hat er gelakht.” What a way to say, “Ha, ha, ha, he laughed.”

Mom said nothing at first of Pop’s departure, since Pop hadn’t been home evenings anyway, but after a while she confided in her neighbor that Pop was in St. Louis. They talked about his absence a great deal, and Mom read a long letter from Pop in Yiddish all about his St. Louis. He was very favorably impressed. He was hopeful of prospects there, of achieving success in the easier pace of life there — not like New York, snappish and full of khukhims. And he got along fine with the shvartze. Gabe thought a luncheonette or a café would do well in the precinct where he himself lived, mostly surrounded by shvartze. They preferred to patronize establishments owned by whites, rather than those owned by people of their own race. Besides, they hardly knew the first thing about running a restaurant.

“He sounds very much as if he would like to go live there in this St. Louis,” said Mrs. Shapiro. “And you?”

“I? If he thinks I would go live in St. Louis, then he’s truly demented. I would go live there with those cold relatives of his?”

“Azoy? And what would you do?”

“We haven’t reached that point yet,” Mom rejoined shortly, but resolutely.

“Pop says it’s a big city,” Ira chimed in. “Maybe there wouldn’t be so many Irishers there. I could have friends.”

“If not Irishers, then blacks. Would that suit you better?”

“It would be different.”

“Such an ungifted people,” said Mrs. Shapiro. “And homely. Oy, gevald.”

“And shleppen with the furniture. You would have to go to a different school too. You complain about Irishers—goyim, rabid anti-Semites. How do you know what you’ll have to suffer there?”

“Pop says they’re friends. There’s more Irishers in P.S. 24 than in P.S. 103,” Ira countered. “Next year I’m going to go to P.S. 24. So I have to change schools anyway. How do you know you wouldn’t like it better in St. Louis?”

“You hear the child?” Mom turned to Mrs. Shapiro. “Childish wits are childish wits. When we moved here to Harlem, he wept to go back to the East Side. Now that he’s accustomed to living here, he wants to move to St. Louis.”

“You have here grandmother and grandfather,” Mrs. Shapiro reminded Ira. “And aunts and uncles—”

“I’ll have aunts and uncles there too,” Ira interrupted.

“But so few blocks away: on 115th Street.”

“Go,” Mom dismissed him. “Here I have sisters and a mother. Here I have learned my way around. I know where to shop for clothes, for a bedspread, where to buy horseradish and fresh pike and cracked eggs. A Jewish bank teller greets me in the savings bank. What will I know, a new goyish city? So far away into the wilderness. Immediately they’ll be mimicking my every step and tread. There’ll be havoc if he takes it into his head to move there. I won’t go! At least I have my kin here; I can endure this penury. What will it be like among his folk? They’re alien. Aloof. And you don’t think he’ll be embroiled with them in a short time? Then where will I turn? I’ll stay here. Let him send me my weekly allowance. No, Mrs. Shapiro?”

“Indeed. Indeed,” said Mrs. Shapiro.

“All right.” Ira looked worriedly at Mom’s vexed, obdurate face. And yet, infringing on the uneasiness that her disquiet awoke in him, odd contrarieties beckoned: shapeless notions of life in St. Louis, a distant world, a more spacious one, a fresh and better one than here in Harlem. Which did he want? Here without Pop, there, with him in St. Louis? Here without Pop, beyond the danger ever of another terrible beating like the one after Mrs. True came in to complain — and Mrs. Shapiro — here she was this evening, so expressionlessly had saved him from who knew how much worse. No, he had never told anyone — and whom was there to tell? — that he had dreamt that night of trying to pick up a knife with which to stab Pop, but it was stuck fast to the table, as if a magnet held it. And he had dreamt it another time too, so bright the sharp blade! No, he would like it better without Pop, or with Pop in a new world, with new relatives, relatives who spoke English. He couldn’t say.

After Mrs. Shapiro left, Mom seemed to reverse herself; she became annoyed at her own agitation: “What am I babbling about? They already haven’t had to do with him, his brothers? They don’t know Chaim and his giddiness and his antics? I babble. It’s nothing. You’ll have a father — give him a week or two.” She nodded in abrupt confirmation. “What? They’ll bear with him as I do? They’ll pity him as I do? As yesterday is today. Are you ready for bed?”

“Yeh.”

“You’ll sleep in my bed.”

“Where will you—” He didn’t know how to finish. “I’ll sleep in yours and Pop’s bed?”

“Indeed. To have you close by me, should anything happen.”

“What’s gonna happen?”

“Who knows. I’m alone. That I know. Go, pee.”

He still wet his bed sometimes, humiliating him, but he couldn’t help it: He dreamt he was peeing in the gutter often, or down at the foot of the outdoor cellar steps. He left the kitchen, went out into the passageway, dark because the janitor always turned out the skimpy fish-tail burner in the stair hallway on the odd flights — after nine o’clock. From the passageway to the toilet door; even in the dark, you could still see the glimmering white of the toilet bowl — it was near the window was the reason why — past the long, long tin bathtub in its wooden coffer; he urinated. Be awful if he wet — nah, he wouldn’t, not tonight. He found, grabbed the chain in the dark, yanked, held for the usual length of gush. Returned, undressed to his underwear, looked at Mom questioningly, before asking her. “Where do you want?”

“You sleep next to the wall,” she said. .

III

Two or three evenings later, early, supper scarcely over, too early for Mrs. Shapiro to knock, the voice on the other side of the door replied to Mom’s “Whozit?” with, “It’s Louie, Louie S.” Mom flushed, opened the kitchen door, and tall and thin in his postman’s uniform, in came Uncle Louie.

“Uncle Louie!” Ira leaped up in rapturous greeting. “Uncle Louie!”

“Yingle,” he smiled his broad, square, gold-dentured smile. He’s growing to a big yingotch, keyn ayin-horeh,” he said to Mom. That was the other wonderful thing about Uncle Louie: He could speak Yiddish like any other Jew, and yet speak English like a real American, a Yankee. “Noo, Chaim is in St. Louis, Leah. I got a postcard from him. When did he leave?”

“This Monday. He wrote you? Come sit down,” Mom invited. “How is your family? How is Sarah? And the children?”

“Everyone is well, praise God. Sarah is busy with the house and children. We bought a piano for Rose.” He turned his gold-toothed smile toward Ira.

“Yeah?” Ira dropped his eyes and grinned sheepishly.

“Noo, mazel tov,” said Mom. “A little zjabba,” she joked. Zjabba meant a frog, and could also mean coffee: java, kava.

“No,” he declined. “A scheinem dank. Chaim wrote you.”

“He wrote me,” said Mom. “A long letter. He’s staying with Gabe and Clara.”

“So he wrote me. And how long?”

“That is”—Mom smiled speculatively—”that is something only Chaim knows.”

“He wrote me that he felt as if he had just come to America. To a new land. Indeed,” Uncle Louis meditated. “His words sounded to me as if he sought more than to visit Gabe and Sam, and the rest of the mishpokha. Is that so?”

“Me he told — what can I say? A visit and more. I know Chaim. Nothing that happens to him can happen to him by itself — if you understand me: Everything draws after it another notion, an opportunity. Perhaps Gabe will help him in business. Gabe is a politician; perhaps he will use his influence, he will guide him where best to open a luncheonette, a cafeteria, among the shvartze, such things. Will Gabe help him? He doesn’t know Chaim? It’s foolishness. And I don’t say this to belittle him. He doesn’t have that kind of head. And me he doesn’t take either into account nor into his confidence. Not that I have that kind of head either.”

“But calm. But reasonable.” Uncle Louis shook his head in demurral. “You know what you endure without help. And the chronic catarrh?”

“Today it’s to be borne. A mere piping in the ear.”

“A mere piping,” Uncle Louie repeated sympathetically, and nodded. “Does it seem so, or can it be heard?”

“Only misfortune knows.”

Louie stood up, bent his head toward Mom’s, so close their cheeks almost touched. She flushed. It was the only thing Ira was sure he wasn’t imagining, that Mom’s features suffused, not that Uncle Louie’s eyes were fixed on Mom’s bosom or hers moved quickly away from his mailman’s blue thigh. It was the strangest thing what you could imagine if you wanted to. And you wanted to, and nearly knew why.

Louie straightened up, his glance compassionate. “No, I hear nothing, Leah.”

“It’s a malady, and no more. I’m happy when it whines so faintly. An affliction, noo.”

“I fear so.” Louie sat down. “A few more joys in your life would do no harm, I’m sure. Companionship, change, another climate, to learn English, to see a little of the world—”

“Passion and Kholyorado,” Mom laughed.

“Indeed passion and Colorado,” Louie reiterated. “Who knows? High in the mountains, in thin, clear air, the whistling might vanish altogether.”

“In the other world. Ben Zion, my father, inflicted many a blow on me because I was so stubborn. If she says no, he would cry, you can slay her.”

Louie shook his head ever so slightly, turned his attention to Ira. “Well. Yingle, you remember that flock of chickens your father and I raised in East New York.”

“I remember!” Ira said eagerly.

“East New York? Azoy. You couldn’t have been more than three years old.”

“A big, big red rooster,” said Ira. “And Aunt Sarah scolded me from the window. Maybe I was gonna hit him with a stick.”

Uncle Louie laughed his wide, gold-toothed laugh. “A yin-gotch,” he said admiringly to Mom.

“Ah, was that ever a handsome rooster,” said Mom. “And they were all stolen one night, every chicken.”

“I like Chaim,” Uncle Louie said earnestly. “He sees so much to laugh at, when he isn’t nervous. And good-hearted he is. But a settled judgment, that he lacks, no? It’s sad, what else is to say? And Gabe knows that too.”

“At present it’s better for me that way. I know he’ll come home. I won’t have to journey—” she gesticulated. “St. Louis I need to add to my sorrows. And you, you’re in New York tonight.”

“A mail sorter is sick — perhaps the whole week. I’m staying with Fannie in Brooklyn. Leah, why don’t we go for a short walk. It’s pleasant out. Almost like summer. A short walk to that park you have nearby.”

“Mt. Morris Park,” Ira offered eagerly. “I like it there.”

“I wear only my postman’s jacket,” said Louie. “It’s so much like summer.”

“Mom, come on with Uncle Louie!”

Uncle Louie helped Mom get into a light coat, and they left the house, the gas mantle-light still burning. Ira was overjoyed. To be near Uncle Louie, walk with him, while he talked about the farm in Stelton and about the crisis in the world, the certainty of war, to Mom’s “Thank God, I have no son to be a soldier. Now almost three years,” she added: “A curse fallen on the world. And how is Sarah?”

“Sarah is Sarah,” Uncle Louis said, and made a regretful sound with his tongue. “It’s not enough for her to be a housewife and mother of three. And I earn a good salary; I don’t have to tell you—”

“This way,” Ira directed as they reached Madison Avenue. “Here’s my school.”

“Yes.” Uncle Louie took Mom’s hand to guide her.

“What does she wish?” asked Mom.

“That we should move from Stelton, from among the socialists, somewhere else, somewhere in New York. Buy a larger house there, and take in a few paying guests.”

“Yiddisher business,” said Mom.

“Indeed.”

“Well, if she wishes. All the work will fall on her.”

“I know. And we would have more money, perhaps. But I’m not a businessman, Leah. She doesn’t understand that. To me to speak to other socialists, to other free-thinkers, to hear a good speaker enlightens one. And afterward a discussion—” Louie’s lean face became animate, his long arm blurred the space it swept through. “About the future, about how different people will be, when religion no longer divides us, and gelt, as we say, when women will have equality, in politics, in marriage, in love. Sometimes I even have an urge to write about it, especially about how changed the life of women will be. Free love I’m sure will come in the future. We can talk for hours on that. And we get angry and excited, and we’ll still be friends. Sarah doesn’t understand that.”

“Azoy?”

IV

The early spring evening was truly balmy. The streetlights shone softly from the dark interior of Mt. Morris Park, along whose perimeter the three walked, shone wistfully on the few lampposts climbing the hill to the summit. The night sky bent overhead benignly, accommodating Mt. Morris Park hill and its dark tower on top that thrust its belfry among the misty, wavering stars strewn to the west. Strollers passed at a tranquil pace. Autos too, and infrequent trolleys, seemed to roll by more quietly than usual. Madison Avenue had never seemed so calm and reassuring. Why didn’t Pop ever do this? Ira wondeed. He never did, never. Too nervous always, always on edge. He walked just to get there, to get there as soon as he could, to get there and get it over with — not the way Uncle Louis did, enjoying the walk itself, talking as he sauntered, lean and tall in his postman’s uniform. Gee. And talking about things Pop never brought up, interesting things, things full of promise, not about the relatives or the rent or the gas bill or Mom’s allowance—

“When I hear Debs speak,” Louis was telling Mom in Yiddish, “I feel as if my own heart were speaking.”

“So eloquent is he?” There was a trace of formality in Mom’s tone — and in her bearing too, as she walked along beside Louis, something guarded or self-consciously distant. “I’ve read about him in Der Tag. He’s not Jewish. But a truly fine person he appears to be.”

“He’s a socialist,” said Louis. “And among socialists, Jew or Gentile doesn’t matter. He has fought against oppression and persecution of all people. Not only Jews, the downtrodden, Southern colored man as well.”

“Azoy?”

“Show me another person, show me a Jew, who has done as much for the poor and the working man as Debs has. He’s spent time in prison for them.”

“I know.”

“It’s his dream that the workers should rule,” Louis continued enthusiastically. “The writer Jack London wrote about it — the Dream of Debs: The workers need only unite and hold firm. They could bring all the factories to a stop. They could bring the bloated capitalist to his knees. Nothing would move, not a train wheel, not a sewing machine in a sweatshop. All would have to go to the workers.”

“It’s a worthy dream,” Mom said, and then laughed shortly. “But indeed a dream. Does the common worker understand that? What common worker in America doesn’t seek to be a businessman? Why did he come here? Like my Chaim today: He yearns to own a restaurant, a cafeteria. Even I have learned that word ‘luncheonette.’ I say it right, don’t I? And so it is with most Jews. It’s America, the golden realm. In Europe the steamship companies showed us pictures of ordinary laborers carrying sacks of gold coins on their backs. What will the socialists do with the storekeeper, with the vegetable peddler, with the Galitzianer herring peddler on Park Avenue — he owns only two or three barrels of herring? Still, he’s a proprietor. Why else has my Chaim gone to St. Louis? To be a proprietor, a boss, as they say in English.”

“But some of us, and not a few, have ideals,” Louis countered earnestly. “Some see further than the Galitzianer herring peddler. He came here to get ahead, and why? Because he lived under a benign tyrant, Franz Josef. But those who lived under the Czar came here seeking freedom. Many were Bundists, Jewish socialists. And socialists seek freedom for all mankind, and first and foremost freedom from wage slavery.” Louis lifted his head. “If not for idealists, if not for those who strive for the good of all mankind, the whole human race would be lost. And I’ll tell you, Leah, with these small people, like that Galitzianer herring peddler, the socialist isn’t concerned. They hardly count. It’s the big industrialists that count, Mr. Schwab of the steel company, Mr. Ford, that anti-Semite, the railroad magnates, the shipping companies; in Massachusetts, the cloth manufacturers. They together with the banks and the Wall Streetniks, they’re the ones who count. But on whom do they depend? On whose backs have they built their fortunes? On the backs of the workers. In the steel mills, in the mines, in the factories. Without him where are they? Where is even the banker, where is J. P. Morgan? Once the toilers in their millions, the steel mill worker, the railroad worker, the miner, get together, the owner, the magnate, the capitalist is finished. Do you realize it was a Jew who thought of this first? Karl Marx.”

“I’ve read of his name in the Jewish newspaper,” said Mom. “His father converted, that I know, a rabbi’s son and an apostate. My father, Zaida, says he was a bitter enemy of the children of Israel, like all apostates. How terrible, a Jew himself.”

“And because of that, you don’t believe his words?”

“Oy, gevald, Louis, what do I know? What shall I say? I admire your ideals, but to me it doesn’t seem practical. You’re a mailman. You’ve told us yourself how anti-Semitic the goyim are there. These are people with some education, no? And you expect them to unite? You don’t see how everyone tries to rip the skin off everyone else. Even I, from my Chaim, for my paltry allowance. What can I do? I must do as the rest.”

“Chaim will drag you down to his level. You deserve better than Chaim.”

“That’s something else.” Mom nodded sideways. “What I deserve depends on who is the judge. To Ben Zion Farb anyone willing to marry me was the husband I deserved — I was already a lumpish maid of twenty-two years. I don’t have to tell you that by eighteen in Galitzia a girl was already looked on as—”

“Don’t say that. I’m a free-thinker. And we’re not in Galitzia.”

“True, but I speak of what was. Attainments I had none. And with four sisters all pining for their turn to marry. Freg nisht. My father Ben Zion was frantic. And all of us stuck in forlorn little Veljish, with only a marriage broker to depend on for escape. And didn’t I weep when my father took me on a visit to my aunt Rebecca in Lemberg. ‘Let me be a servant girl here,’ I begged him. ‘Father, let me stay.’ He had to threaten me with his cane before I would leave.”

“I know. I know the whole story. It’s a tragedy.”

“Noo.”

“You have such a fine nature.”

“It helps to have a fine nature,” Mom said dryly.

“Ah, Leah, you shouldn’t talk that way,” Louis shook his head. “Your heart, your goodness will never change. It is what draws me to you. Sarah,” he raised a finger to stress his words, “Sarah is truly the one without tenderness. Sarah is cold. Not you.”

“For me it’s too late, Louis, all this you say and wish. The way I live is the way I shall die.”

“You’re a young woman still, Leah. And believe me, an attractive woman.”

“Can one be affluent without means; so I’m young without youthful thoughts.”

They walked on awhile without speaking. “Noo, Yingle.” Louis smiled his broad smile at Ira walking with springy step on the bare ground between the paved sidewalk and the palings about the park.

“I love to walk on the ground,” Ira declared.

Uncle Louis laughed. “You see, Leah, how much he loves natural life, the earth itself.”

“He longs to be a khunter,” Mom said with peculiar emphasis, the kind Ira had long ago recognized was meant to conceal meaning from him. The word sounded almost like hunter, but not quite. He could guess he wasn’t supposed to understand more than that. Still, the word had a familiar sound in English. Could it be? Mom’s features looked mischievous in the lamplight, amused and prim at the same time.

“I didn’t say khunter,” Ira explained to Uncle Louie. “I said hunter. Sometimes I like to read that kind of a book, a book about a hunter.”

They both laughed, Mom’s laughter high-pitched.

“Your socialism believes in free love, no? As I’ve heard others say in English.”

“Many of us believe it. Yes.”

“And to me that’s something to laugh at. Freia lokh.”

She was punning on the sound of the English word love in Yiddish, and Ira understood the pun: Lokh in Yiddish meant hole.

“Leah, no.” Louie took a deep breath. “S’ gants andrish. It means the woman has the same right as the man if she loves another—”

“Even if she’s already married?”

“Even if she’s already married.”

“Azoy?”

They had walked a single length of the park, to 124th Street and now, walking back, they reached 120th Street again. In silence, they turned east to Park Avenue, Uncle Louie holding Mom’s arm across the street. Back at the house once more, he lingered tentatively before the empty stoop. Mom too hesitated.

“Do you want to come upstairs?” she asked.

“Do you want me to?”

“It’s immaterial to me. My neighbor calls on me every evening since Chaim is gone. If you don’t mind, she’ll probably join us.”

“Oh, your neighbor may call on you?” Louie asked.

“I read her the roman in Der Tag every evening,” Mom replied, and went on to explain that she read the romance in the paper for Mrs. Shapiro because she was illiterate.

“I see. And her husband, doesn’t he read it to her? Or is it only in Der Tag?”

“He treats her like dirt,” said Mom. “A gross, ugly little cap maker. And skimps at everything, even more than Chaim. A dog. Compared to her spouse, my Chaim is a paragon.”

“Aha,” said Louie. “Well, then I won’t come upstairs. Stay in the best of health, Leah.”

“And you also, go in the best of health,” said Mom.

“Good night. Good night, yingle.” Louie smiled his broad gold-dentured smile, slipped his hand into his pocket—

“He doesn’t need it,” Mom tried to dissuade but couldn’t. Despite her protest, a jingle of small change passed from Uncle Louis’s hand to Ira’s.

“Thanks, Uncle. Thanks!”

Even in the dim light of street lamp and hall, Ira could see Uncle Louis’s expression under the visor of his postman’s cap change from a smile to something intent as he looked at Mom. Then he turned away, strode off, lean and tall, his postman’s uniform growing a lighter blue with every step he took toward the corner streetlight.

Alone again with Mom, Ira counted his riches as the two climbed up the stoop. “He gave me twenty-two cents, Mama.”

“You shouldn’t have taken it. Shnorrer,” Mom chided.

Ira mumbled in demurral. “He wanted to give it to me. I didn’t ask.”

“The only thing you failed to do was to ask.” Mom said ironically over her shoulder, as they climbed the murky gas-lit stairs. “I don’t need him, and I don’t need his gifts.”

“Huh?”

“You’re a poor man’s child indeed. Why should I scold you? It’s a pity.” They turned at the first flight landing and entered the gloomy hall. “Don’t leave the house if he comes to visit again. You hear? You stay with me while your father is gone.”

“Yeh?”

“How soon he came calling. How soon.” Mom unlocked the door. “It’s a good thing I thought of Mrs. Shapiro. It shows that sometimes kindness has its rewards.” She turned up the gas mantle-light, which had been left barely on, and as her uplifted features grew more luminous, “Lyupka,” she grimaced wryly, and uttered a peculiarly mocking sigh.

It was a Polish word, or a Russian word, or a Slavic word from Galitzia, but anybody could guess: lyupka. She didn’t like it, she didn’t approve. What was lyupka? Like the movies? Kissing and hugging. Why did she twist her lip that way? It made him so avid to understand. Why had her face turned so red and scornful? Lyupka. That must be what the big kids meant when they said those words in the street: fucking, screwing, laying, all those words: piece of hide, piece of ass, pussy, cunt—khunter, the word Mom had made fun of; was that it? And what those rubbers were for that Biolov threw in the garbage can, and the kids fished out? Scumbags, the big kids called them. You shoot into them when you come. Shoot what? Come what? That lousy bum that wanted him to take his pants down in the way-far-away park, and squirted like egg-white against the tree. . Oh! Then was that lyupka? When that Irish couple came down just in time, all excited, was that a different kind, or what? Was Uncle Louis’s like that kind of lyupka. .?

He got under the featherbed, too warm with the advent of spring; he slid to the outer edge of the ticking, slid close to the wall, as he had been doing since Pop left. He never slept close to Mom. Wasn’t supposed to. Why? That had something to do with lyupka. Even as his hearing distinguished the sounds of Mom undressing in the kitchen, behind his shut eyelids appeared Mom’s image when he had come rushing into the house that time — when was it? — when they didn’t want to have anything to do with Baba and her family, “Oy, gevald, I didn’t lock the door!” Mom had cried. She was standing in the round iron washtub, feet in the water, bathing, her great big everythings naked. She grabbed a towel, and shielded herself with it. “Shut the door. Go in the front room!” she bade. He did as he was told. You weren’t allowed to see. That was lyupka. That was why Pop had given him that awful licking with the butt of the horsewhip because he and the other kids had played bad with the little girls on Henry Street where they lived, because their mother complained they played bad. “Genuk! Shoyn genuk!” Enough! Like Mrs. Shapiro, Mom wouldn’t let Pop push her away. But what blue stripes Ira had on his back afterward. So. . that was it, lyupka. He could see Mom still on the screen of closed eyelids, but he was falling asleep. .

And awoke — to his horror! He was playing bad against Mom’s naked legs, lying on his side and pushing, rubbing, squeezing his stiff peg between Mom’s thighs. She woke up.

“I didn’t mean it!” Ira wailed in his shame. “I was dreaming—”

She laughed indulgently. “Go back to sleep.”

He rolled quickly away, and still panting, lay with his back to her as far away as he could. What was that bliss that seemed about to well over? That drove him, made him do that to Mom in a dream. . just a little more it would have, it wanted to: lyupka.

He slept in his own bed thereafter.

— I foresaw you’d have difficulties.

It wasn’t difficult to foresee.

— Shall I waft you into the future a quarter century hence aboard a freight train bound east?

I cry you mercy, Ecclesias.

— What will you do?

Do without.

— Chugga. Chugga. Chugga. Whe-e-e! The whistle at the crossing. Dark is the night over Texas. And cold. And stars thick as traprock come tumbling out of the moonless heaven.

Yeah. But Procul O, procul este, por favor.

V

It was a Saturday evening when Uncle Louis called again, this time out of uniform. He looked even leaner, sinewy and tall, flat-chested. Something about the way he watched Mom, with unwavering eyes behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, something about his voice made Ira try to keep his gaze fixed on his book, Boys’ Book of King Arthur. But something, that same something, charged the air of the kitchen, and despite himself, impelled Ira to raise his eyes from the page and steal a greedy glance at the two, while they sat about the green oilcloth-covered table, conversing. He could sense their matter-of-fact tones were dissembled; he was almost sure of it, though he wasn’t sure why. They were talking about the War, a capitalist’s war, Uncle Louis described it; working men fought and bled for the advantage of capitalists. Thank God their children were still young, and were spared that charnel house, said Mom. Would Pop be exempt from the draft? “My stalwart,” Mom laughed. “He wrote me that Gabe had a new proposal: a concession for a cafeteria in City Hall. A businessman, owner of a business, married and a father, he would be safe from the military service, no?”

“But you would have to go to St. Louis.”

“I am to write him forthwith.”

“Are you going?”

“Never.”

“And if he stayed? If he insisted on staying in St. Louis?”

“Let him send me my stipend here.”

“Leah,” Louis began — Foreign words, Polish or Slavic, suddenly occluded the rest of what he said.

“I know,” Mom answered in Yiddish. She shook her head. “I’m considering writing him this very evening.”

“Leah, don’t torment me!”

“S’ narrishkeit,” Mom said. “It’s foolishness.”

Ira knew the word, knew for certain that his surmise was right: It was all about lyupka.

“You have a wife,” Mom continued, clearly, firmly in Yiddish: “A wife and three children. You’re asking for grief.”

“But if I’m consumed?”

Mom shrugged slightly. “You have a wife — if you’re consumed.”

“It’s not the same thing. You know it’s not the same thing. You have a husband.”

“Indeed. You’ve spoken truly.”

“You love him? Speak truly yourself.”

“It no longer matters. Years ago, on the East Side, I already knew: Love is denied me. Where Love should be, there is a hollow, a vacancy.” She lapsed into Polish, glanced at Ira — who anticipated her by a moment, and dropped his eyes to the book. “The yeled,” she warned.

“Then tell Chaim to stay. Why not tell Chaim to stay?” Louis pleaded. “He craves success, a business of his own. He may find both, he may find himself in St. Louis among his brothers — in the place he first came to in his youth. You would give him happiness, respect, all the things he craves. And us, you would give us life. I don’t have a vacancy too in my life? You would fill the vacancy in my life. You would fill the vacancy in both our lives. You would give us both love! Leah, only think what happiness that would mean!”

“No, Louis, once it would have mattered: When I stood in the kitchen, on 9th Street, and the hollow thought would come over me: something, a folly: lyupka. But now — it’s truly a folly. I’ll tell you one thing more, and then let’s make an end—”

“No, Leah! I throw myself at your feet. Leah!”

“That would look seemly indeed. I beheld my brother Morris in his nakedness once, and I became consumed. I confess it. It’s shameful to—” Mom reverted to Polish or Slavic, and then into Yiddish again. “But the truth. Consumed. And so I am now—” the fingers of her two hands spread wide. “And so I am now: ausgebrendt. I made up my mind then and there—”

“Leah, what are you saying? I’m not your brother. I’m Louis S. Give me what I yearn for: Your love. Satisfy me!”

“In vain, Louis. I won’t submit.”

“You care for me not at all?”

“Louis, for the last time, I have no more to do with love. Ich bin gants ausgebrendt. Believe me.”

Louis sat still a few seconds, then stood up, dark, brooding, regarding Mom. “Noo,” he said with bitterly ironic intonation. “When does your neighbor come in to hear the latest installment of the roman, Leah?”

“Today the Sabbath is over,” Mom rejoined. “Der Tag isn’t published on the Sabbath.”

“No. Naturally.” He sighed deeply, remained standing, bony hand against his lips. “You need not write Chaim about me. You won’t see me again — alone.”

“I’ll say nothing about you,” Mom replied. She looked in Ira’s direction. “Where do you go now?” she asked matter-of-factly.

“To Fannie and Will’s home. They always have an extra bed.”

“Greet them for me.”

He nodded almost curtly, grim, opening the kitchen door at the same time as he said, “Good night, Leah,” closing it behind him before Mom could answer.

And no gift of small change either. The print swam under Ira’s gaze: unseeing eyes followed Mom from sink to china closet, where she got out the wooden penholder with the steel pen in it, and the bottle of blue ink. Why couldn’t he have Uncle Louis for a father? Even though he had misbehaved in Stelton, at Uncle Louis’s farm, still he would rather live on a farm like Uncle Louis’s. But Mom, she was the one who hated farms; she hated dorfs, little hamlets, she said. She had seen all she wanted of them. But even if Uncle Louis didn’t live in a village, on a farm, she didn’t want him anyway. What a shame: He was lean and dried out, as Mom said, yes, and he had a “touch” on his lungs, which was why he became a soldier. But he knew all about the Wild West, he knew about America, he knew about Debs, he knew about socialism, about a better world where they wouldn’t always say, Jew, Jew-boy, mocky, sheeny-bastard.

Mom sat down, and began scratching away with her pen on a sheet of lined paper of the pad Pop had bought. So what would a father like Uncle Louis have meant? It would have meant speakers on platforms under the electric lights in Stelton at night. Drowsy, humid night and mosquitoes. His name was Cornell, Ira still remembered. It would have meant warm sunshine and open country, and gardens where vegetables grew, and cows and chickens, and long dirt roads he could explore.

He shouldn’t have teased Rosy when she practiced on the cardboard piano. He was supposed to marry Rosy — because long ago, when they all lived in East New York where goats were tied in empty lots and snow was deep in the winter, long ago she had shown him her red crack, and he had shown her his petzel, and he had told everyone afterward that he was going to marry her. Oh, how different it would be if you loved your father: The Irish kids ran to meet theirs when they came home from work, still daylight in the summer, and hung on to their fathers’ hands: “Hey, Dad, how about a nickel? What d’ye say, Dad?” And their fathers smiling, trying not to, but fishing a coin out of their pockets. If he tried that, he’d get such a cuff alongside the head, he’d go reeling.

Mom paused in her writing. “You won’t say anything.”

“What?” Ira asked.

“That Louis was here— Once. He was here once. That much you can say.”

“He was here once?” Ira repeated dutifully. “Did we go to the park?”

“Very well. We promenaded.” And then on the impulse of afterthought: “I’ll tell him myself. I’ll let him know. At least something.” She resumed writing.

So that was how it went: from the little red crack and the petzel, it grew up to be lyupka: Louis pleading with Mom, “Satisfy me.” And how would it be done? The way he dreamt with that strange welling up when he rubbed against Mom. That was how it went. That rusty, lanky bum didn’t need ladies — and then he did it himself against a tree. And if Mom had said, yes, instead of “I won’t submit.” If Mom had said, yes, would Louis have become his father? Pretend you were sleepy, then what would they do? “Look what I have, Leah,” said Morris. Oh, if she would only go to St. Louis—

“I’ll have to go into Biolov’s tomorrow and buy a two-cent stamp,” Mom said. “I wrote him in Yiddish. You think you can write on the envelope in English?”

“I think so. What do I write?”

“The address he left on this slip of paper.”

“I can write that.” Ira studied Pop’s handwriting. “The first is Hyman Stigman.”

“Then write.” Mom moved the envelope toward him. “Put aside the book a minute.”

“You’re not going?”

“Who listens to him?” she transferred pen and ink. “Here. Be careful.”

VI

He had no choice, Ira thought. He recalled nothing of the momentous declarations that Woodrow Wilson made as the United States was drawn ever closer to entering the Great War. The declarations, charges, countercharges. 1917 was almost seventy years ago. (He sat gazing at years so jammed together they seemed opaque.) What could be said, said that was genuinely remembered? Surely he must have heard mention over and over again of how vast was the slaughter in Europe, of the growing crisis in U.S.-German relations, of the sinking of the Lusitania, the death of Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary—“Franz Yussel,” the Jews humorously dubbed him. Once again Ira felt course through him that pang of lost opportunity: Ah, in 1934, when he had finished his first novel, when he was only twenty-eight years old, when he was a full half-century closer in memory to those events and still could turn to people who remembered them, who could refresh his own memory of those critical days leading up to America’s entry into the Great War. Alas, a kid’s memory, that was all he had, the battle of Verdun reenacted on a vaudeville stage, a spectacle that perhaps his Uncle Max had taken him to: Sparks flew from gutted buildings, burning walls toppled, distant artillery thudded. .

He had long passed his three score and ten. Who had time now to research the historic events of his eleventh year, to recreate 1917 in 1980? Still, something, however brief, was needed to provide a bygone setting. What? At the moment, he had no other alternative than to consult the nearest thing at hand, the microscopically compressed synopsis of the most important events of 1917, according to The World Almanac of 1972. 1917, the year Pop went to St. Louis, and Uncle Louie tried to woo Mom. Fateful year for Ira, when he rubbed against Mom in dream, and felt that strange welling up — and shame. Fateful year for Ira, when he was beginning to get a glimmering of what Uncle Louie desired, and Mom wouldn’t grant. And his own ambivalence afterward, fantasizing: What if Mom had said yes to Louie — lean Uncle Louie and plump Mom. Pretend to sleep and listen. . and imagine. . sanction what never happened.

Why? Ira asked himself: Why was he so crazy? Interlarding the bomb blast at the San Francisco Preparedness Day parade of the year before, and the death sentence imposed on the innocent labor leaders, Mooney and Billings, with Louie’s furor and Mom’s rapture. Why? Abnormally, precociously attuned to Mom’s deprivation, probably. That was it, his deprived mother consumed at the sight of Moe’s phallus, Ai, vot my mannikin gevesen zoi vie, Moishe: “One needs a horse for you. A horse for you.” Verbrent, from two in the morning, when he left for his milk-wagon, alone I flamed, with a stout brother snoring in the next room. “Oy, gevald.” Fateful year for Ira: Even if she had said yes to Pop, and they would have moved to St. Louis, how different life would have been.

1917—U.S. ENTERS WAR

When Germany began unrestricted submarine war, the U.S. Feb. 3, broke relations, refused negotiations until the (German) order was rescinded. Wilson Feb. 26, asked Congress to order arming of merchant ships; when Senate refused, Wilson armed them by executive order Mar. 12. An intercepted note of German Foreign Sec. Zimmerman to German minister in Mexico suggested Mexico be asked to enter war to recover U.S. Southwest Feb. 28. U.S. declared war on Germany Apr. 6, adopted selective conscription May 18, registered men 21–30 June 5. .

Soon after he returned from his trip to St. Louis, as Mom foresaw he would, Pop was notified he had to go into war-essential work — otherwise he faced imprisonment or draft into the armed services. “You are required to present evidence of employment to your local draft board before the 30th instant,” Ira helped Pop translate the document into Yiddish for Mom’s benefit. The document had come in a large, daunting envelope, and bore the bold black heading: WAR LABOR RESOURCES BOARD. “Below you will find a partial listing of essential work. If you have any questions with regard to whether the work you are presently engaged in is essential to the war effort, inquire at your local draft board in person or by telephone. You are hereby advised to do so at once.”

“Noo, read. Let us hear what is needful labor,” said Pop.

Ira ran his eye over the columns of occupations listed below: “Cons — Construction. That means they build,” Ira read aloud and translated each category as best he could. “Dock worker, Farmer, Food Processor, Fisherman, Highway Maintenance, Machinist, Welder, Transport Worker, i.e., Trainman, Conductor, Motorman, Track Maintenance, et cetera—”

“Vus heist ‘tsetra’?” asked Mom.

“You don’t understand?” Pop said patronizingly. “Ten years in America, and she knows nothing!”

“Then you’re the clever one,” Mom retorted. “Where am I to learn? Over the pots and pans, or among the Yiddish pushcart peddlers?”

“Then learn now. ‘Tsetra’ means other things.”

“Can’t you say so without making a ceremony of it?”

“Shah!” Pop stalled her indignation. And to Ira: “Food Protzess, what does that mean again?”

“Like salami,” Ira ventured. “Or all kinds of goyish things to eat. You know: like ketchup in the restaurant. I think.”

“Then perhaps they defer cooks?” Mom suggested.

“Go,” Pop scoffed. “Cooks! If they defer cooks, they’ll defer noodle-porters too.”

“Then what?”

“I’ve found a remedy.”

“Indeed? So soon?”

“A trolley-car conductor. Read again, Ira, from that tsetra.” Ira reread the list of transport workers.

“That would stop their mouths — a trolley-car conductor,” said Pop.

“Do you know how? What do you know about trolley cars?” Mom asked.

“What is there to learn? If a thick Irisher can learn, I can learn. They drop a nickel in the glass pishkeh. You grind it until it falls into a little tray at the bottom. You pull a cord. You give out a transfer. They’ll teach me the other things. I’ll go find out where to apply.”

“But the streets,” Mom reminded. “Such a frightful myriad of streets! You’ll have to learn them too. Gevald!”

“The woman gabbles!” Pop dismissed her fears with a practiced gesture. “In New York I have nothing to worry about. How did I learn the streets as a milkman? I learned. Shoyn. And I had to drive a horse and wagon through them too.”

“That was the East Side,” Mom reminded him. “There are—” she clutched her cheek—“Brooklyn, the Bronx, and who knows where else?”

“What? Is it better to molder in a stockade than to learn a route in — ah! — anywhere: In Brooklyn, in the Bronx. Noo.”

So Pop became a trolley-car conductor. The route assigned to him could not have been more conveniently located: the Fourth and Madison Avenue line that crossed 119th Street only a block away. His was the “relief shift,” as it was called: from midmorning to well into the evening. Reporting for work or returning home, he wore the uniform of the trolley-car conductor, a navy-blue jacket and a visored cap with badge. Ira caught sight of him once or twice when school let out — he still attended P.S. 103 on Madison Avenue and 119th Street — saw his father on the rear platform of the passing trolley, cranking coins down the transparent chute into the till below.

All would have gone well. Pop’s job met the official criterion that the work be essential. It was essential. But after awhile, the constant lurching of the trolley — so he complained, though it may have been his nervous tension — began to affect him. He suffered more and more from diarrhea. Finally it became chronic. Diarrhea on a trolley car! Sometimes his bowel spasms were so severe, he was unable to contain himself long enough until the trolley reached its terminal, in whose offices were toilets. Instead he had to signal the motorman to halt the trolley in midroute, while he ran into one or another of the lunchrooms along the avenue and relieved himself.

“Mein ormeh mann,” Mom commiserated (in a way that Pop both welcomed and rebuffed). “My poor husband. Perhaps if you eat only wholesome food, hard-boiled eggs, a little chicken broth, coffee with scalded milk, such things as prevent diarrhea. Or strong tea with lemon. But best of all, scalded milk with a thick skim — that will stem the wild flux.”

“How? Where? To keep scalded milk with a thick skim in a trolley car? Had you come to St. Louis as I asked, I wouldn’t be suffering these pangs. But you refused. So I’m twice a poor man, poor in money, poor in health.”

“And what if you had gone to St. Louis and opened a cafeteria and failed, then what? How would you be any better off? A bankrupt, the military would surely have seized you.”

“Uh, she has me bankrupt already!”

“No? You become so bewildered in transactions.”

“Go whistle, and not talk,” said Pop. “I have brothers there in St. Louis, no? Even if I failed in business, Gabe is a political fixer. He would have interceded for me. He wangled a garbage collection inspector’s job for my brother Sam; he could have found some safe crevice for me to escape the military.”

“Who could know things would come to this bitter pass,” Mom continued her self-restrained exoneration. “You needed only to send me my allowance, you could have stayed in St. Louis until the Messiah came.”

“Azoy? Without a wife? Two separate abodes. I might as well have landed in the military, stout soldier that I would have made. And a fatherless household. It’s clear what you wished.”

“To you it’s clear,” Mom said stonily.

“No? And if I didn’t send you your allowance?”

“Then I would accompany Mrs. Shapiro to the synagogue that sends them to homes to wash floors.”

“And you think I would live alone? All by myself.”

“My paragon. Blessed be the day you found another.” Mom leveled her sarcasm evenly. “Chaim, it was you yourself who chose to be a trolley-car conductor.”

“Much I could do about it.”

“You could have chosen to be a milkman again. Milk all people with children must have.”

“Go, you don’t know what you’re talking about! Milkman. Do you see milk-wagons today? Milk-wagons drawn by a horse?”

Mom was silent, then tilted her head in acknowledgment — and sighed. “Indeed. Were my griefs as rare.”

“Aha. Today the milk companies want only drivers who can operate those little hand-organs, with a crank in front that you spin, and the whole cart shudders. That’s the sort of drivers they want today.”

“Perhaps they would have taught you if you hadn’t fallen out with Sheffield and with Borden’s.”

“You speak like a fool.”

“Then I don’t know. Oy, it’s a dire affliction.” Mom swayed from side to side — stopped: “Do you want to hear a panacea? Don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m in a good mood to laugh,” Pop retorted with a grim jerk of his head.

“You go past 119th Street every day. One way, the other way. Again and again. Let the kaddish wait for you there. I’ll give him a bag with food you can eat. You’ll tell us a time — when you pass. He leaves school. He runs home. I have the food ready. He runs back to the corner with it.”

Pop meditated in harassed uncertainty.

“Cornmeal mush is also good for this kind of spasm. With a pat of butter on it. Your favorite dish,” Mom urged. “I’ll have it hot. And on Fridays a little broth in a jar, a bit of boiled fowl in a clean napkin. Ira will wait with it on the corner. He knows where.”

“A shlock auf iss!” Pop snapped furiously. “They and their accursed war. May they be destroyed with it one by one and soon!”

“Amen, selah,” said Mom.

So day after day, a few minutes after he came home from school, Ira was dispatched with a brown paper bag containing Pop’s midafternoon meal. Always Ira waited on the corner on the uptown side because the terminal was only a dozen or so blocks away in uptown Harlem, and in the few minutes while allowing the preceding trolley a little more lead time, Pop managed to consume most of his meal. Ira stationed himself at the newly opened variety store opposite the gray school building and waited for Pop’s trolley to arrive. . and waited. . and invariably daydreamed, wool-gathered—

Until suddenly out of the haze of reverie, there was Pop in his blue conductor’s uniform leaning out of the rear platform of the trolley, calling irately in Yiddish: “Dummkopf! Bring it here! The smallest task you bungle!” And almost at the point of leaping off the trolley step to fetch the paper bag himself — and probably fetch Ira a blow for his laggardliness as well.

Poor Pop! The home-cooked meals helped at first, but only for a while, and then he relapsed again into chronic diarrhea. It was no use. The cause of his disorder, he maintained, his shrotchkee, as he called it (the very sound of the Yiddish word suggested gastric turmoil), was the lurching and jouncing of the trolley car, nothing else. And coffee with scalded milk, and strong tea with lemon, or hard-boiled eggs wouldn’t help and didn’t help. The constant motion caused a commotion of his bowels. He cursed the “jop,” he cursed his luck — and time and again, he reminded Mom how much she was to blame for his plight because she refused to move to St. Louis. “Had you granted me a few weeks, abided here a few weeks,” he fumed, “till I accumulated enough money to send you passage by train and have the furniture moved, we would have been reunited as in a new land. What am I saying? For you it would have been better than in a new land. It would have been easier. It’s the same land. And a little you’ve learned — true, it’s a smattering — but a greenhorn you’re not anymore: You’ve learned to ask where and how much, and to say yes and no.”

“Indeed.”

“We would have quit this accursed New York.” Pop rubbed his abdomen. “Who would have needed your hard-boiled eggs and your scalded milk with skim? Perhaps in time we might have bought our own home on the outskirts of the city, as my brothers have, lived decently, with a tree in front and grass in the yard.”

“Another Veljish,” said Mom. “Here in New York, here in Harlem are my relatives. I made my choice. Here I remain.”

“You’ll pay for remaining here, just as you’ll pay for my suffering,” Pop warned ominously. “A ruinous choice you’ve made. You’ll see.”

“And you didn’t want to come here with your pitiful milk-wagon?”

“I but followed after you. Who knows what I would have done otherwise? I could have driven a horse for other kinds of deliveries. Like your cousin Yussel with the red beard. I could have delivered bread from the bakers to the grocers.”

Mom maintained her grave composure: “Chaim, tell me: How do these goyim stand it, the rocking of the trolley car?”

“Because they’re goyim,” said Pop.

“It’s not because they’re always on edge like you? It’s not because they have a skittish stomach?”

“Why should they have a skittish stomach?” Pop echoed in nugatory denial. “Did they have to skimp as I did until I saved enough money for your passage to America?”

“Who told you you had to starve? To live on a sweet potato the peddler baked in his street oven, or a boiled ear of corn, or a duck dinner for fifteen cents, and who knows how the duck met his end. So it would have taken another month or two to buy my passage.”

“Another two months, then I surely would have had to pay full fare for him. Who would have believed he was only a year and a half.” Pop’s retort was quick in coming. “In Galitzia you were reasonable when it came to waiting; you were patient. Why not when I would have been in St. Louis?”

“A good reason.”

“What?”

“Chaim, to talk about it further is in vain.”

VII

Where could he try it out, when a petzel stiffened into a peg? Dora Bahr, Davey’s scrawny sister. Their tenement cellar-door opened on the yard. You could hide behind it. Or Meyer Shapiro’s younger sister, if you could get her alone and if she wanted — or one of the little Irish shiksas—“Mary, Mary, what a pain I got,” the Mick kids singsang. “Let’s go over to the empty lot. You lay bottom. I lay top. Mary, Mary, what a pain I got.” Pop should never have left for St. Louis. You wanted that feeling again that came with rubbing against Mom — that’s what Uncle Louie must have wanted. Uncle Moe too, exhibiting his great tower of red flesh — and that rusty bum who wanted Ira to take his pants down. And then pumped his big thing against a tree. And most startling of all, Mom too, even if no longer — she said—ausgebrendt in Yiddish. “Burned out.” So girls too. And for her own brother Moe, more, more than for Pop, but not allowed. All for that feeling. Where could you get it? With whom? The Hoffman kid on the roof; that was lousy, sitting down pulling your own peg, like that rusty bum. It had to be somebody to pry into: living, warm, like Mom’s thighs, a girl it had to be, like Rosy S, Louie’s daughter, who showed him she was a girl, with a fire-red slit instead of a petzel. Who liked it, who wanted it the same way he did, who got the same wonderful feeling between her thighs he almost got with Mom, when she woke up and laughed. What girl? Where?

And then one evening, long before his shift was up, Pop came home with both eyes blackened, nose bruised, blood still adhering to his nostrils. He had tried to eject a drunken sailor from the trolley car and been badly beaten, badly enough so that the dispatcher had sent him home.

Mom wept; so did Ira. And Pop too at his malign fate.

“Oy, gevald!” Mom cried out. “What woe is mine! Did you have to wrangle with a drunken sailor?”

“I with him? He attacked me. He wouldn’t pay his fare when I told him to. I merely said he would have to get off.”

“Then let him be. And let him be slain,” Mom lamented. “May the war take its toll of him!”

“It’s my jop,” said Pop. “And if there was an inspector aboard the car, and I was a fare short, I would be fired.”

“Ai, my poor husband!” Mom clasped her slightly built spouse to her large bosom. “Would I could take your place! Would I were there to defend you. I have shoulders. I have strength!”

“Now you comfort me!” Pop extricated himself from Mom’s arms. “I thought that with America in the accursed war, it would last two months, three months. When so many men were soldiers, businessmen too, I could easily establish myself in a luncheonette in St. Louis. Or with Gabe’s finagling — I’m his brother—ai, fortune, fortune. Such good fortune betide Woodrow Wilson and his advisers. Gabe said: Have nothing to do with the stinking Democrats. How right he was. How right, how right! Ten days longer I’ll suffer there on that verflukhteh trolley car — until my black eyes recover — fortunately I took off my glasses when I went to put him off.”

“Oy, gevald!” Mom grieved. “I thought so.”

“Noo, what else?”

“And then?” Mom asked.

“And then let them be destroyed with their jop. Ten days, two weeks more. The most. I’ll sneak to the employment office: not to the union hall full of patriots, but to a plain employment office goniff. Where is there a jop for a waiter, I’ll ask. They must be jops in the unheard-of thousands.”

“And if they come after you? Those who seek the shirkers, the dreft-dodgers, as one hears on all sides the hue and cry?”

“Luzn seh mir gehn in d’red. I’ll tell them: Go be a conductor on a trolley car yourself, when you have to discharge every half-hour. Let us see what you’ll do. I’m like an invalid, no? Cremps. Cremps. Cremps. You want a soldier with cremps in the militaire?”

“Indeed,” said Mom. “Oy, that they may not seize you!”

“Seize me!” Pop scouted. “I’ve already been seized.”

“And I would ask them a general doesn’t need a waiter? An officer doesn’t need a waiter? He doesn’t have to be a stalwart, a hero—”

“As long as he knows how to set a table, how to serve, that’s enough.” Encouraged, Pop interrupted. “Better to be a waiter to a general, a colonel, than a trolley-car conductor. Allevai,” he added fervently after a moment. “Wages they would have to pay me to support my family. Even if they never gave me a tip, it would still be better than spasms of the bowels on the back of a trolley car.” His fingers stroked his discolored cheekbones. “And black eyes when you try to collect a fare. Such an ugly fate may my friend, President Wilson, have to endure!”

VIII

Pop worked for another two weeks, reported to the personnel office that he no longer could work on the trolley line because of the disorder of his bowels. He requested a release so that he could seek other essential work. He was accorded a release, and he handed in his badge (visored hat and navy-blue jacket were his by-purchase, and Mom sold them in the same secondhand store on 114th Street where she so often and with such tenacity — to Ira’s intense embarrassment — haggled for his secondhand clothes).

The day following his separation from the trolley line, Pop was already working. So scarce were experienced waiters, the employment agency sent him to one of the most exclusive restaurants in the city: the Wall Street Stock Exchange Club dining room. No tips — the diners were enjoined from paying them and he from accepting them. He received a fixed salary and a percentage of the bill, and that was all — not as much as he might have received otherwise in as high-toned a restaurant but he was free weekends, and could seek, and easily find, “extra jops by a benket.” But at least he was over that trolley-car plague, he congratulated himself, adding. “Anything is better than that. A living I make. My bowels are at peace. And seek me out I’m sure they won’t.”

“No? Would it were so. Why?” Mom asked.

“I work among magnates. Not only magnates? Magnates of magnates.”

“Azoy? So rich?”

“Yesterday I waited on J. P. Morgan.”

“Azoy!”

“And Bernard Baruch the day before.”

“Gotinyoo! And they allow a plebeian like you to approach them?”

“Who else will set a salad in front of them? Naturally, the headwaiter takes charge. He takes the orders. He oversees all that I do. I take the plate of food from the cart, place it on the table. Everything is done according to rule. But I hear them talk, one to the other.”

“And what do they say, such powers as these?” Mom marveled.

“What they wish. Morgan will say to Baruch: ‘What do you think of such and such a stock, Bernie?’ And he will answer: ‘I’ll tell you, John, such and such a gesheft has a great future.’ They talk about the war, about Wilson, his kebinet, about great transactions.”

“Hear, only hear!” said Mom. “And none of these mighty asks whether you are—” She hesitated. “I have such a clogged head I’ve forgotten the word. You’re not needed for the War?”

“The headwaiter is only too happy to have an experienced waiter on the floor,” said Pop. “And a lively one, not some broken down alter kocker from a private club. He’s as quiet as a mouse, the headwaiter, whether I’m essential, whether I’m not essential, as they call it.” Pop used the English word. “There I’m essential. Sometimes Morgan or some other of the mighty brings in a guest, an admiral, a high state official. Believe me, they look the other way. Had I only known before. I would have heeded them with their essential like the cat.”

“Gott sei dank,” said Mom.

What Pop said was true. He worked in the Stock Exchange restaurant throughout the entire War. He was completely ignored or deliberately overlooked. Not so Uncle Moe, now a headwaiter in Radsky’s famous dairy restaurant on Rivington Street.

Husky, sanguine Uncle Moe was drafted.

“Mein Moishe,” Baba lamented, wept, rocked back and forth with anguish. “Veh iz mir, oy, veh iz mir. My good child, my devoted, happy son, my Moishe. Ai! Ai! Ai! They’re sending him into that charnel house. God give me strength to endure it.”

Grieving continually, from the day that Moe received his induction notice, she shrank visibly — she withered. Neither would she be distracted nor humored, refusing all solace. “May I not live to see the day that anything happens to him.”

Nor would she respond to Zaida’s chidings: “You must eat! You must live! How will you help him by starving to death? You’ll make a widower of me with your mourning, that’s what you’ll accomplish.”

Morris was sent away to camp. She pined; she scarcely spoke. Her face became brown, shriveled and wrinkled. Fortunately Tanta Mamie lived across the street. She did most of the shopping for the household, and much of the cooking too. Listlessly Baba sat beside the window under the summer awning, sat for hours with two fingers on her cheek and one across her lips, gazing, gazing out on the street. A physician was called in, and he tried to reason with her. “She wants to die before she lives to see her son dead,” he told an exasperated Zaida. “See that she drinks enough. If she won’t eat, force her to drink. Otherwise, she may have to go to a hospital.”

“A shvartz yur!” Zaida clawed frantically under his yarmulke. “Such a punishment to befall me. If she won’t eat, she won’t eat. But at least cook. I die of hunger here. If not for Mamie, I would wane away to a stalk, a dry reed. Oy.”

But it was Baba, not Zaida, who became more and more wasted as the weeks of Moe’s training went by. She would surely have been taken to the Mt. Sinai Hospital — Mom told Ira — if Moe hadn’t come home on furlough when he did. Together with others of the family, Ira was at Baba’s to greet him. They had refrained from writing him about Baba’s unhappy condition while he was at camp, and now they waited grimly for him to see for himself. Under his broad khaki campaign hat, Moe looked at his repining mother with the strict stare of one accustomed to command. “What’s wrong with you, Mamaleh?”

“They’re sending you to the slaughter. I don’t want to live.” Her tears lingered in the wasted furrows of her cheeks.

“Azoy? You already know I’m going to be sent into the slaughter?” Moe’s voice was ironic, and his strong hands quiet on his khaki-clad thighs, but he never took his eyes off Baba. “A Yiddish soldier truly carries a heavy load. He has two commanders. One, his mother, the other, his colonel. Fortunately he is exempt from the Torah, or God knows how he could stand it all.”

“Tell her, tell her!” Zaida urged. “Such madness has seized her that she will hear nothing. God commanded the remnant of Israel to live. Talk to a stone.”

“Mamaleh,” Moe said. “None of my friends should be worse off than I am. I live like a count. As I live. Like a lord.”

“Go, with your idle talk. Don’t torture me.”

“I swear to you, Mamaleh. You see this?” Moe turned his arm sideways the better for her to view the insignia on the sleeve of his uniform: three chevrons with a quarter-moon under them. “S’heist mess sergeant,” he explained the meaning of the stripes. “The Almighty blessed me when he made me a headwaiter. Not one in the entire camp knew how to order food for so many men: how to feed so many men, how to tell the cooks what to do. And who and how was to arrange the service for such a horde of men. It’s called mess, Mamaleh. Your Moishe is in charge. Zoi vie an offizier bin ich.”

Baba looked from the sleeve to her son’s broad, light-skinned face, with the scar on the brow; she searched with sad skepticism his blue eyes.

“Believe me, Maminyoo,” said Moe earnestly: “With these stripes I will never be sent into carnage. I could even become rich— The suppliers prod me on every side with money. If I only dared accept.”

“Moishe, child. Ai,” Baba moaned in disbelief.

“No? Ask, ask whom you wish, a total stranger. Ask, what is a mess sergeant. Treife I must eat. But to be sent into carnage, never. Who will buy for the whole regiment? It takes a Yiddisher kupf.” Moe spoke as though he were commanding Baba to understand. “I have authority, I alone. Would I buy from this dealer, and not from the other, he nudges me with fifty dollars. Believe me. But I refuse. Not that it’s worth my life to be honest, but I do it for your sake. Not to risk my ‘rank,’ as it’s called in English. These,” he pointed to his chevrons. “You understand? You have nothing to pine about.”

Perhaps Baba wanted to believe. As long as Moe was home, her appetite perked up. She even went shopping, hovered over her firstborn son with the freshest bulkies, lox and smoked white fish, every delicacy she could think of; she baked kishka, stuffed derma; she cooked borsht and kreplach, lintzes and lotkehs and carrot pudding, gefilte fish and chicken. Moe took precedence before Zaida, who was glad enough to yield: At last his wife was active again, dressed herself in her best black satin on the Sabbath, wore her pearls, served dinner and dined — ate, because Moe refused to eat unless she did. Her cheeks filled out, almost visibly absorbing nourishment; her blue eyes seemed to emerge from their caverns, like iris, her color returned. She wanted to believe. And again and again, her gaze rested on his Moe’s mess sergeant’s insignia, as on a talisman. Her son would be spared.

And then came the dread last hours of Moe’s furlough, the dread time when everyone except Baba knew, even Ira, and everyone had been enjoined not to betray, not to hint, that in a matter of days Moe’s division would be sent overseas — across the Atlantic where the U-boats lurked — to France, to the battlefield. The secret was well kept, the conspiracy of silence remained intact, even till the last moment: Cheerfully, Moe embraced everyone, once more hugged his weeping, clinging mother, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands groping for his chevrons. He told Max and Harry to look after her, and with Zaida and Saul, left the house. The whole family was crammed into the two front windows, waving and calling; and Moe, with upraised arm, kept returning their farewells, until at Madison Avenue, the trio rounded the corner and were out of view. A few feet behind them, scarcely noticed, the eleven-year-old Ira trailed.

A clear, temperate summer day. 1917. Pedestrians seemed more numerous on Madison Avenue, lolling at the fronts of houses or sauntering unconcernedly along. Ahead of Ira, Moe and his two escorts, Saul and Zaida, reached the corner of 116th Street and Madison, crossed to the northwest corner, and wheeled west toward Fifth Avenue. They crossed Fifth Avenue. Ahead of them in the middle of the very long block between Fifth Avenue and Lenox was the marshaling yard, the open court of P.S. 86, the very large gray-stone public school building. Buses were already parked in front of it, buses full or part full of uniformed men. An empty bus, another and still another lumbered up beside the others and double-parked. At the sight of them, Zaida and Saul, who hadn’t said a word all this time but walked as in a daze, suddenly burst out into frenzied lamentations. Howling in despair, each one hung onto Moe’s arm. And Moe, stalwart, the more so with his weeks of training, his countenance under his khaki campaign hat ruddy with effort, dragged them along like a tug between two barges. When they saw it was futile to try and hinder him, each let go. Each abandoned himself to extremity of grief: Zaida tore at his beard, tore out bunches of whiskers, wailing at the top of his voice. Saul snatched at his hair, flung himself about, screaming hysterically. Passersby stopped to watch, automobiles slowed down, people leaned out of windows.

At the very edge of the curb, Moe halted. And still filial and forebearing, “I pray you, Father, spare me,” he said. “Let me be. If not, and you too, Saul, go no further. It’s bad enough I’m a soldier. I wear a uniform. Don’t add to my trials.”

They quieted down, lapsed into suppressed groans. Scared, cringing with embarrassment, near tears, Ira watched them near the marshaling yard mingle with other servicemen and their kin walking toward the buses.

“Will yez look at them Jews,” said the cop on duty to a hanger-on beside him in front of a store, a beefy, blue-coated cop talking to a lean civilian: “Didjez ever see the loik? Ye’d think the guy was dead already.”

IX

So Moe went off to the war across the ocean. For awhile, Baba believed her family’s reiterated fabrication that Moe was still in Camp Yaphank in New Jersey; but then, as the weeks passed, and she saw no sign of him, and though the letters were full of good cheer, she recognized the letter paper was European and asked to see the envelopes. They were never shown her and she saw through the deception. “‘How long will you cajole me with falsehoods?’” Mom told Ira that Baba chided her. “‘You are all frauds. As if I didn’t know where the fighting and the killing were taking place.’” Finally Zaida told her the truth: Moe was in France.

To everyone’s surprise, Baba took the news with strange fortitude. “With God’s help and those stripes on his arms, my Moishe will live,” she said. Nevertheless she brooded a great deal, grew gaunt and worn. She shopped, she went about her household tasks, and though it no longer took a tirade on Zaida’s part to make her eat, she seemed to fade; she seemed to fade waiting. . waiting from letter to letter from her son, but always as if vitality were slowly draining away. Thus the weeks and months of a distant war went by. Aunt Mamie, so buxom, so brash, offered the doughboys who did guard duty under the Grand Central overpass fresh Jewish pastry and hot, sugary café au lait in her enameled milk-bucket with the narrow neck. And Mom, unreticent and frank in her immense pity, would say in barely intelligible English to some young soldier patrolling the viaduct: “You heff such beautiful, strung lecks now. Gott shuld helf you’ll heff them when you come beck.”

And the young American lad would laugh: “Aw, don’t worry, Mom. We’ll be O.K.”

Oh, the terrible years, who can bear them, Ecclesias?

That August afternoon in 1914, when he had been sent into the heat-shimmering street to buy the “Wuxtra” the two vendors cried, Ira was now old enough to connect in his own mind as links, the one with the other, two isolated events, no longer isolated, but as if one was precursor to the other, even if the other came so late you almost forgot the first: a warm Yiddish newspaper bought in the street, and Moe in khaki off to war, off to France — and Saul howling and Zaida pulling out handfuls of beard. . And the cop on the corner sneering to a bystander, “Will yez look at them Jews? Ye’d think the guy was dead already.” Ira had the meaning within him, brooding on it, though he couldn’t tell what it was. He could only think of it just so far: that he contained both episodes in feeling, and they were fused together in his mind but that was all. Other things were fringes to that same indelible fusion: Moe sent letters from France, letters and souvenirs to the nephew he was so fond of, so much more fond of than was Pop — fond of him like Mom almost: brass artillery shell casings, engraved and stippled, a pair of French opera glasses, three German iron crosses. .

Winter came on, and after the return to school from the Christmas holidays, winter brought a new date to write on top of composition papers: 1918. 1918. History swirled about him in little spindrifts. Debs was in jail. IWW meant “I Won’t Work.” Draft dodgers were cowards. Cartoons in the newspapers showed that mosquitoes had bigger souls than profiteers. Bolsheviks wore bristling whiskers and carried round bombs with ignited fuses.

Ira brought the three iron crosses to school to his 6B teacher, Miss Ackley. Miss Ackley was known as the most formidable teacher in the whole school. She was large of body and raucous of voice: “Oh, the audacity! The audacity of this boy!” she would exclaim, while she administered punishment by gripping the culprit’s cheeks between thumb and strong fingers until he yelped with pain. (Audacity, Ira took note, in the midst of chastisement: What a beautiful new word!) Miss Ackley screamed in horror when Ira inventively misinformed her that his uncle had taken the iron crosses from the cadavers of German soldiers on the battlefields of France.

“Take them away!” She seemed close to fainting. “Take them away!”

He was getting even with her, the sudden, expanding buoyancy of his mind told him. Intuitively, he had lied just right, just where it would have the most effect. She had gripped his jaws at least a half-dozen times. Mostly because he had been guilty of disorderly conduct, giggling during penmanship exercises. He couldn’t make Palmer ovals. He tried, but they always changed shape and course and jumped wildly outside their boundaries of blue lines until they looked like smoke blowing in the wind; and he dipped his penpoint too deeply into the inkwell on the desk, so the up-and-down line exercises merged into blotted walls. Shlemiel, as Pop said: A shlemiel in everything. And shlemiels were punished. So Ira grinned to himself, when Miss Ackley nearly fainted at the sight of the iron crosses, because of a lie he made up about dead German soldiers stretched out on the battlefield, and Moe plucking iron crosses off their chests. Maybe he did. .

Entrusted into each pupil’s safekeeping when he (or she) “graduated” from P.S. 103, the elementary school on 119th Street and Madison Avenue, was his “blue record card.” On it was recorded his scholastic performance up to and including the completion of his sixth year of school. After that, he no longer attended elementary school; he attended grammar school. Ira was directed to take his blue record card to P.S. 84, the grammar school that extended from 127th to 128th Street near Madison Avenue, and there present himself, together with his blue record card, to one of the teachers in charge of admitting the new pupils. It was an all-boys school, and each boy, his blue record card in hand, stood in one of several lines before the stout oak lunch tables at which sat a teacher registering the newcomers.

It was a February day, the first week in February, 1918. In another few days he would be twelve years of age. And farewell to childhood. .

X

You keep a battery of such pretty signs on the top of your keyboard, Ecclesias. Or should I say, array?! @ # $ % ^ & () — +. . I am seventy-nine years old. In one way, I look forward to dying; in another I am filled with too great a sense of gratitude to M to yield, even in the mind, to the wish of having my life come to an end. Other than that, what’s the use of living? Or what’s the difference? I ring changes on the same theme, the same old theme. I wonder if “the branch that might have grown full straight,” of which Kit Marlowe speaks, retains forever within it a sense of that lost straightness, lost rectitude. Let’s imagine my father, a Zionist. In a few months, the Balfour Declaration will be published. Let’s away to Israel, let’s away to a kibbutz. I would know chiefly hard work, rigor, danger, but also kinship, precious kinship, dignity. But alas, I wouldn’t have known M—

— You’re back on the same treadmill, my friend, or the same roller-bearing race — call it what you will: ball-race. Fate or history devised it. But more to the point, it was only because you could compel yourself beyond it, and thanks to M, you attained a measure of growth, something approaching maturity, an approximate maturity, a passable facsimile. Or to put it another way, for almost five decades you were well-nigh immobilized by your inability to go beyond childhood. Isn’t that true?

Well, my liege. .

The multipurpose lunchroom, drab, indoor-playground-basement where everyone waited his turn to be registered was steamy and rank that winter’s day, a brumous day—

— Proceed. That isn’t the crisis.

And what shall I do when I come to it?

— Do you remember the shaft that Siegfried threw, the unseen Brunhilde aiding? And that leap?

That quantum leap? Yes.

— Have faith in an existential universe, in the dialectic of five decades.

I’d rather, Ecclesias, my friend, have taken that blue record card and hidden or destroyed it. Never attended P.S. 84 at all. Who would have known? Mom and Pop. But otherwise? What primitive trust institutions had those days. Give the juvenile his blue record card to convey from school to school. What control was there? Or what verifying that the pupil had really presented himself and been enrolled in the school to which he had been transferred? Oh, probably there was a list of pupils, their names separately transmitted. But if not, then to hell with the damned card. Chuck it in a trash can in front of a tenement and disappear. Do you remember Kelsey who ran away from home at the age of twelve?

— Yes, good Jewish boys don’t run away from home at twelve. And Mama’s good Jewish boy at that. You would never have known M, and never have striven for and achieved, if only partially, redemption—

Oh, that sounds so jeezly Miltonic—

— Rebirth then, renewal, rehabilitation.

I might not have needed it.

Steamy and rank, the stagnant air of the dreary basement playground was fraught with the exhalation of the slate urinals in the toilets at one end. In the low ceiling, wire cages protected nests of electric lights. Underfoot, muddy slush splotched the dark concrete floors. The small, barred windows looked out on a narrow play-yard on one side, and the street on the other. Against the darkly wainscoted walls stretched rows of heavy, scarred wooden benches. On one of these benches, adjacent to the line in which Ira stood waiting his turn, sat a trio of Irish kids, bigger than kids, adolescents; their size, their air of assurance marked them as eighth graders. “Let’s see your record card,” said one — in a tone that brooked no refusal.

Docile, though hesitant, Ira handed over his blue record card. They examined it a moment, looked around, then all three spat on it. One threw it on the floor, and the others ground the card underfoot. In another second, with an eye on the teacher at the desk, they darted out of the side door into the street.

. . Once again it came to Ira, as he sat recording the incident: how sad. How sad he hadn’t fought every step of the way — like Greeny, even if he lost a tooth, an eye, was stabbed, even if he lost his life — like that kid in the slums whom the toughs in the block called a sissy for wearing a wristwatch: Soldiers had begun to wear them in the trenches. If he had to be wrested from the East Side, if it was his fate to have been pried out of protective homogeneity, then to have fought, and the very attitude, the toughening and belligerence, would have been manifest, would have deterred further abuse, victimization — Oh, hell, he hold himself, paused to reflect: Probably that was the reason why he had chosen Bill Loem for the central character of his second and aborted novel: Bill fought. And he, the novelist, had gone overboard because of that, romanticized his fictional character, glorified his belligerence, interpreting it as socialist militance. Everything interwove, as better minds than his had discovered long, long ago. But to try to follow them was vain: One could not follow into the past; one could only be edified, and seek to apply the principle. And had he been able to, he wouldn’t be sitting here writing about his failure to do so. Alas. Docile dolt, already wearing steel-framed eyeglasses.

“What’s this?” The teacher at the table frowned when Ira presented his blue record card. The teacher was Mr. Lennard, Ira was to learn later, a history teacher, a man with lips full to puffiness, whose blue eyes stared up at Ira through a pince-nez.

“Some big boys grabbed it and spit on it and stood on it,” Ira quailed.

“Which ones?”

“They ran away.”

His frown mingled resignation with annoyance. “You’ll have to help me out then. Is that Tysmen where it’s smeared — what? Austria-Hungary.”

“Tysmenitz,” Ira said. “That’s how my father says it. With a ‘z’ near the end.”

“With a ‘z’ near the end.” Mr. Lennard’s gold-nibbed fountain pen formed new letters on top of the smudged-over ones. “And you were born — what day?”

“I was born February eighth, 1906.”

“It distinctly says January here.” Mr. Danroe said sharply. “January tenth. Is that a six at the end or a five? Nineteen-oh-five.”

“Oh, I forgot!” Ira pleaded. “I forgot!”

“You forgot what? What did you forget?”

“My mother made a mistake. She thought they meant when she was married.” Ira knew better: Mom had deliberately lied in order to enroll him in school a term earlier. “She didn’t talk English good.”

“You’re in 7A-2. Here’s your homeroom number, 219.” Mr. Lennard handed Ira a slip of paper with the numerals he had just written on it. “Report there tomorrow morning before eight-thirty. Next boy,” he terminated Ira’s admission process. And as an afterthought: “You’ll have to straighten out that other thing at the office.”

Such was Ira’s induction into P.S. 24, the school in which he was destined to spend, not the next two years, as he had expected, before going on to high school, but three: two years to earn his public school diploma, and a third, when with typical flabbiness of purpose, he allowed himself to be cajoled into swelling the attendance of the newly instituted educational excrescence known as a junior high school. It was a commercial junior high school at that: offering courses he detested, bookkeeping, typing, stenography. Was there ever such a shlemiel? Was there ever such a shlemazl? But of that later. To speak of it now made Ira feel as if he were shifting so abruptly he was grinding the gears of time. Of that later. More pertinent was the D D D he received on his first report card; D D D his first month’s grades: D in deportment, D in effort, D in proficiency. He had fetched bottom, a dismal, total failure.

Both Mom and Pop had had enough acquaintance with report cards to know what the marks meant. “It’s worth sod over it,” Pop signed the report card with hasty flourish. “Send him to school. A golem made of lime; he’ll go to high school and college, yeh, yeh, as I will go.” Disapproval cleared the way for vindication. “You enjoy deceiving yourself? Then deceive yourself,” Pop mocked his wife. “He’s fated for the life of toiler, and be fortunate if he succeeds in that.”

“All at once he’s become a toiler, a turf layer,” Mom retorted sarcastically, but with tears forming in her eyes. “I’ll not allow it. I’ll wash floors, but to high school he’ll go.”

“I know, I know,” said Pop. “She already has him in high school. Listen to me: Better you took two stones and pounded loose the foolish notion in your head.”

“Never!” Mom declared. “When the midwife laid him on my breast, I blessed him: ‘May you achieve noble renown,’ I said. And he will yet. My blessing will not be denied. Let his report card read D D D, let it — What!” she suddenly recollected: “His malamut didn’t come to the house to praise him? Your son is a rabbi in the making. He can daven like a grown-up already. He retains like marble — What has happened to you?”

“I don’t know,” Ira answered sullenly.

“Try to expound with him,” Pop flipped the report card along the green linoleum-covered table back to Ira. “And heed what a malamut says— You know what: a heave with a spade and a toss on the dunghill.”

“My clever spouse,” Mom retorted.

XI

The more he recounted, the more dreamlike it all became. He heard his wife return from her weekly shopping expedition, tall, slender in her gray coat. “Do you want some help?” he asked, knowing only too well how slight his help could be in the present state of his capability.

“Yes, in a minute,” she smiled her ladylike smile of forty-five years of intimacy, and made for the bathroom. .

The grocery bags had been weighty, taxing him to the utmost, his carrying them through the long corridor of the mobile home, through the living room with its Baldwin piano and into the large kitchen-dinette, where Bizet’s symphony greeted him from the small radio on top of the refrigerator. No negligible burden. Breathing heavily, he had set the bags down on the chairs, rather than lifting them to the table, he who had once lugged hundred-pound sacks of grain and scratch and pellets for the waterfowl he raised, not as if the sacks were light, but nothing formidable either: Without strain he regularly emptied five or six sacks into the three sugar barrels in the barn where he stored the poultry feed. And he had even carried M on his shoulder and set her down in the car those months that she suffered from an “undiagnosable” form of Guillaume-Barre syndrome, paralyzed, in a Maine farmhouse, when the boys were young.

Well. . Today especially, though he regarded himself as largely inured to the pain, it seemed excessive. This morning he had felt as if he would break in half when M lifted him to a sitting position in bed.

“It’s all a dream, hain’t it?” the old farmer, senile psychotic committed to the Augusta State Hospital, had looked at Ira with innocent, faraway blue eyes, after Ira had humored the doddering geriatric away from his intention of getting his “overholts” on to do chores: “It’s all a dream, hain’t it?” Ira had dwelled on that word: “hain’t,” haint, old dialect for “haunt,” meaning the same thing: a dream haunted. If only mankind knew it. But one got nowhere, got nowhere with that; it was only at the end of life, it might seem that way: a dream haunted. Until then it was anything but dream, anything but haunted. It was Longfellow’s earnest reality. Even these twinges, pangs, aches, alas, were real. His eyes moved away from the keyboard to the daunting pile of mss. in separate manila envelopes. Not quite a foot high. Would he live long enough to retrieve all this prose from paper to disks? It was doubtful.

Ira did better the following month: C C C; his improvement noted in a comment to that effect on the back of the report card. It was the beginning of Easter Week, the beginning of the Easter holidays, overlapping with those of Pesach, the Passover. Sunny, warm weather had begun, the blithe days of the spring of 1918, two months after his twelfth year. Mom housecleaned for the Passover, laid bedding out of the window to sun, sprinkled corners under the sink with roach powder, doused bedsprings with arrant-rank kerosene, and who knew what else. She would soon be unwrapping the Passover dishes on the top shelf of the china closet; Pop would be polishing the engraved silver wine cups, the silver salt cellar on its three little feet — and the silverware too, all brought over from Europe, wedding gifts: with benchmarks in the handles whose dates could still be distinguished: 1898. Oh, there would be matzah soon, of course, kharoses soon, of course, horseradish on matzah chips and homemade red wine, maybe not too sour this time. And the Four Questions to ask, beginning, Mah nishtanoo haleila hazeh: Wherefore is this night different from all other nights? And hard-boiled eggs in salt water, of course; and the thing Ira was especially fond of, the pictures in the Haggadah: Moses smiting the Egyptian, bam! with a long staff. And the Red Sea opening — and closing again to engulf Egyptian horse and rider. That was fun. Gefilte fish, and chicken soup with matzah balls were delectable. But the chicken, well, all boiled out and no flavor. But that was the only indifferent part; afterwards, Mom always served compote made from dried fruit: pears and prunes and raisins.

— Yes?

Two big pots of water were simmering on the gas stove; they were meant to temper the cold water that came out of the bathtub faucets. The pair of brass faucets in sink and bathtub both ran cold water. Why have two faucets in sink and bathtub, and both running cold water? Ira never understood. But so they did. And to mitigate the keen chill still lingering in the water from winter, it had to be mixed with water heated on the gas stove. Oh, the water from the brass faucets made a good cold glass of water to drink, but not to bathe in. Br-r! And you had to let some cold water gush into the bathtub first, the long, tin bathtub in its wooden coffin-box of brown-stained matched boards. Because if you didn’t, the hot water softened the green paint on it — when that Irish, goyish anti-Semite of a landlord finally, after many pleas, consented to have the bathroom daubed: green paint that came off on your tochis, yeah, smeared green on your ass. He should live so, that landlord, as Mom said, with his green bile that he daubed the kitchen and the bathtub with: Such a long bathtub was never seen, long enough, and deep too, you could float full-length on your fingertips if there was enough water in it — in the summer, for sure, when you filled it up with lukewarm water from the tap.

But this time of the year, there would be just enough water in it to bathe in, to be clean for the Passover, Passover of 1918 during the Great War.

What else can I tell you?

— Mucho mas. You are the painter who painted himself into the corner of childhood.

It isn’t that, I still insist, though very likely it helped. Undoubtedly it helped. All right? Enough conceded? It was those awful thrashings, atrocious thrashings Pop perpetrated made all the difference—

— You were thrashed as heinously on the East Side. Oh, I know what you’re going to say: Would God you knew about — or there existed — institutions protective of abused children. Probably, had you taken the black-and-blue emblazonings on your back to any cop on the beat, you would have been given shelter, protection. But granted you knew nothing about such things, feared them more than the scourgings you received, screwball though your father was, how often were you the nasty, sneaky little scamp?

Yes, but I didn’t make my point.

— I already know it.

Then why accuse me? As long as I had, at least, an external milieu that was supportive, the homogeneous, the orthodox East Side, estrangement from an unstable and violent father might be borne. But here in Harlem, both home life and the street had an element of insecurity, were disparaging when not hostile (except for Mom, who out of her indulgence probably contributed most to the disastrous impairment of the psyche).

— I am well apprised of it. Verfallen is Yeroshulaim.

Indeed. The audacity! As Miss Ackley screamed at me that somnolent September afternoon, at the beginning of school, when I built a sail of a blotter pierced through by the inclined pencil; and zephyr billowed through the open window and wafted my boat along the desk.

— You can’t stay there.

No.

Mr. O’Reilly stopped Ira in the hall, singled him out from a file of pupils passing by during departmental change. “I want to see you in my office,” he said. Mr. O’Reilly was the principal of P.S. 24—His office was the principal’s office!

Quaking, Ira entered, sat down and waited. In a few minutes, Mr. O’Reilly came in. White-haired, clerical-looking, wearing a wing collar, his lean cheek twitched with a severe tic. “That grin on your face is going to get you into trouble, young man,” Mr. O’Reilly said.

“I didn’t know I was grinning, Mr. O’Reilly,” Ira faltered.

“I know it. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t have to tell you your people have a hard enough time in this world, without your making things worse for yourself.”

Worriedly, Ira tried to smooth his cheek.

“I happen to understand that you don’t mean anything by it,” Mr. O’Reilly continued, clipping his words. “You don’t mean anything bad or mean. But not everybody will understand that. They’ll think you’re sneering at them. Do you know what a sneer is? It’s making fun of people. Nobody likes that.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. O’Reilly.”

“Try to get the better of it,” Mr. O’Reilly’s face twitched. “Just make up your mind you will.”

“I’ll try, Mr. O’Reilly.”

“Before you get into trouble.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re excused. Just a minute, I’ll give you a note for your teacher.”

XII

Home and school, home and school, and the walk in all weather connecting the two. With textbooks strapped together, with varying gait, chance meetings with schoolmates, he passed and repassed the rocky hill and bell tower of Mt. Morris Park on the one hand, and on the other, across the trolley tracks of Madison Avenue, the deteriorating brownstones, a few carved out by a grubby store at the bottom, across the street the abandoned red-brick church that changed denominations (to Ira’s naive surprise: How could a church consecrated to one denomination unconsecrate itself, draw out the hallowness from its interior to make room for another faith?). A new and imposing Eye and Ear Hospital was built on Madison Avenue, along his route. And he passed and repassed 125th Street, shopping mart of show windows in low buildings a story or two high. How many times? Two years, and then a third. He made the trip at least 500 days, often as many as four times a day, going and coming, when he hurried home for lunch, unless Mom gave him a couple of bulkies with chopped tomato-herring or a Muenster-cheese filler, and a nickel to buy two slabs of gingerbread in the bakery at the corner of the school, which stuffed him but he didn’t like them; or a napoleon, that miracle of custard and flaky pastry.

Like a riffled deck of cards, scarce seen, the compacted days of the past sped by; but now and then a pause, when a card was glimpsed: Once on the way home for lunch, he found a dollar bill on the sidewalk, so conspicuous, so verdant, he couldn’t believe everyone else had overlooked it except himself. . He pounced on it, pocketed it, and in high glee sprang over the corner hydrant no-hands — and struck his shin so cruel a blow on the iron breast of the cap protruding midway from the hydrant that ever since, superstitiously, like Pop, he braced for calamity after windfall. And again hurrying home for lunch, he hitched a ride, as he had seen so many kids do, at the rear end of a Madison Avenue trolley car; and when it went past 119th Street, fearful it would take him too far out of his way, he jumped off, couldn’t maintain his footing over the cobblestones between tracks and fell, bruising his knee so badly, a great crimson blotch glowed where his long black stocking met his knee-pants.

How Mom fumed when she spied the damage he had done: “The evil year take you! Twenty cents thrown out! New stockings! Cholera take you!”

“I still got one left,” he whined.

“Indeed. Veh, veh, veh! I nurture a dolt! Out of the miserable pittance he doles out to me, buy your shoes, your clothes, the food on the table!” Angry scarlet mounted from throat to brow. “May the sod cover you. Eat, eat. You’ll be late for school. Oy, gevald!” She stripped his stocking down. “Unbutton your shoe. What an oaf is capable of. Only look at that!” She soaked a cloth under the faucet, wrung it out. “You could have been killed.”

“I didn’t mean it,” he wept. “I tried to get home fast.”

“Fest,” she repeated the English word while he winced under the pressure of the wet cloth. “Sollst mir fest gehen in d’red!”

The school janitor slapped him for posturing on a bench in the indoor playground — lunch room, something the other kids did hundreds of times, but always Ira seemed more conspicuous, more provocative. The shop teacher slapped him on the ear, but so hard that it rang all afternoon and still rang that evening when Pop came home from work. Mom reported it, and to Ira’s surprise, Pop wrote an indignant postcard to the principal, Mr. O’Reilly. What he wrote, Ira never knew, but it had its effect on Mr. Ewin, the shop teacher, because he came up to Ira, deprecating and smiling, jollied Ira about the incident. That time only one of his ears rang — Ira couldn’t help snicker at his everlasting improvidence — only one ear rang, and he had reported it. The next time both ears rang, and went unreported: He had expended ten cents for a fat, crimson firecracker (the kids in the school had disclosed the location of the store that bootlegged the illegal jumbos). What a firecracker! Mom was out when he got home after school. Who could resist lighting a match and touching the flame to the fuse? Now to throw the firecracker down the bedroom airshaft, filthy airshaft, where the sun only penetrated, magically, once a year, and the rats ranged freely over the garbage, the moldering newspapers, wrecked furniture, smashed bottles, and even a bashed-in pisspot, all compacted into the refuse below. What a scare that would give everybody, but especially the rats, when the red tube, fuse sputtering spitefully, exploded. He ran to the bedroom window to hurl the firecracker out but — the window was closed! Never closed in summer, but closed this time! An instant of indecision, and barely was it out of his hand when the firecracker exploded. His hand throbbed; his ears rang. He told nobody.

— So little left of the once-teeming density of living.

It’s because of the evasion, Ecclesias.

— Even so. But not only for that reason.

The ports are closed, closed to verbatim and the desiccated diurnal out there. Oh, once in awhile, through some rift or aperture, Louis, the Lucksh, as Leo Dugonitz called him (Hungarian Leo Dugonitz), lucksh meaning noodle because Louis was so elongated in height. . as we walked along the side of Mt. Morris Park after school, Louis introduced us to the new hit song: Jada, jada, jada, jada, jing, jing, jing. Bizarre but funny, a moment rescued from oblivion, three eighth-graders wending their way home from school. Well, I’ll tell you, given everything else against me, I was about to say, or as it probably would have proved to be the case, a mediocre, ordinary personality, now slowly underwent the disfiguring change that imposed a certain distorted distinction, enforced a brooding isolation, a complex uniqueness. Isn’t that strange?

— Yes.

I think so anyway. . To be sure, I have no evidence and alas, there is no way of doing the same thing twice, choosing the alternate for comparison.

— Except mentally, imaginatively, not materially.

Strange though, for awhile it seemed forgotten, during youth and manhood; most of the time, it seemed surmounted.

— But not truly, not in the psyche.

No, that’s right, Ecclesias.

— Then why do you exhume it all so often?

I hadn’t meant to tell you until this instant, Ecclesias: to make dying easier, more welcome, for myself and my fellow man, perhaps.

Jada, jada, jada, jada, jing, jing, jing. Sometimes he played touch football when impromptu sides were chosen on the playground, the dirt playground in Mt. Morris Park. He was generally a welcome candidate when it came to touch football. Not that he was very fleet of foot, but punting the ball came naturally to him — his passing was poor, again because of his inept hands — but he could punt: Somehow he had learned the knack of sending the ball up with just the right spin off the instep of his foot, with a high follow-through afterward that sent the ball forty or fifty yards. His punting won acclaim. Also he had a certain confidence about catching a football that he didn’t have about catching a baseball or a handball, even though he now wore eyeglasses: The ball was larger, softer than a baseball and not caught by hands usually, but caught in a basket formed of abdomen and arms. Only trouble was, punting tore the right toe away from the rest of the shoe, which brought down upon him Mom’s standard execrations, because the shoemaker charged ten cents to repair the break. Ira dreamed of the day he could earn enough, save up enough, to buy football shoes — with leather cleats — and a football too, so he wouldn’t have to stand around waiting to be chosen, though he usually was — but only after the friends of the kid who owned the ball were all duly included. And what if Ira was the odd man?

Like the blades of a condenser in which time is stored: Geography, History, English, Arithmetic, Physical Training, Manual Training, the weekly school assemblies, pledges of allegiance to the flag, reading of the Scriptures by Mr. O’Reilly. Once, because he had recited the poem so eloquently in class, his English teacher, henna-haired Miss Delany, asked him to recite it in the assembly: Walter Scott’s “Breathes there a man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said: this is mine own, my native land. . ” But the words which he had spoken with such feeling in the classroom became stiff and mechanical in the assembly. Ira knew his teacher was disappointed with his performance. Why couldn’t he do the same thing well a second time, or time after time, regularly, uniformly, the way some people could? The way an actor did, the way that a certain soldier did who went to every school and gave enthralling imitations of the noises made by different pieces of ordinance, different shells and machine-gun fire: Whiz-bang! Whoosh! Whe-e-e Pom-pom! Ticaticatica. . And he sang:

Chief Bugaboo was a Redman who

Heard the cry of War.

Swift to the tent of his bride he went,

The beautiful Indianola:

“Oh, me wanna go where the cannon roar.

Oh, me help the white Yank win this war.

Oh, me tararara gore,”

Blankety blankety blank blank blank.

“Over There,” and “Johnny Get Your Gun,” and “Keep the Homefires Burning” had quite crowded out “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” At home Mom still opposed the War, to Ira’s irate, patriotic protests. The names of Lenin and Trotsky were in the air, grotesque demons in the Hearst newspapers, demons to everybody, it seemed to Ira, except to Jews. Bolsheviks were Reds. All Reds were wild-eyed; all Reds had bristly, unkempt whiskers in the cartoons, and carried round bombs with fuses graphically sputtering. So did anarchists. What a horrible word, anarchist! But Mom, and Pop too, paid no attention to what the American newspapers said; Baba and Zaida especially: All they wanted was for Moishe to be safe, for Moishe to come home again safe and sound. They had no patriotism, no “Breathes there the man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said”. . Souls of rattlesnakes and mosquitoes were shown in the cartoons in the newspapers Pop brought home from the Stock Exchange restaurant. The greatly magnified souls of cooties and ticks and other detestable insects were shown, and lastly the souls of Slackers and Profiteers: They were invisible under a thousandfold magnification. Kaiser Bill — everybody knew Kaiser Bill — with his spiky mustache and spike helmet. And Charlie Chaplin too capturing the Kaiser. Oh, how funny that was! Who else was a hero? And there were aces who shot down five enemy planes. And everywhere Montgomery Flagg’s red-white-and-blue Uncle Sam in top hat trailed the pedestrian with stern gaze: I Want You! “Ashcan” depth charges were dropped on submarines. Baron von Richthofen flew a red Fokker; the “Big Bertha” shelled Paris. Marshal Joffre, Marshal Foch and General Pershing, and all the people in President Wilson’s cabinet — one of Ira’s classmates, some kids were just naturally bright that way, made up a whole sentence with everyone in President Wilson’s cabinet punned into place.

In 1918 you read “The Lady of the Lake” in grammar school, in 1918 you read the “Lay of the Last Minstrel” (Who was she? Yee-hee-hee!). But how pretty some of the words were: “’Tis merry, ’tis merry in the good greenwood where the mavis and merle are singing.” And you had to bring Mom to school because of your grin — at which your singing teacher took offense — for nothing, as Mr. O’Reilly had warned you, and you were humiliated, standing in front of the class saying you were sorry, and blubbering: Hatchet-faced, bespectacled Miss Bergman. Ira hated her forever, hated her to this very day.

How he hated Miss Bergman! He would hate her all his life, hatchet face in eyeglasses, hate her for the gratuitous humiliation she had inflicted on him, punishing him so inordinately for a grin that somehow twisted his face into a mask that people didn’t like. And even now, as he typed, old man as he was, his resentment at the injustice done him returned. Sixty-five years later! Who else of her music class would remember all through life, as he remembered — and appreciated — and could still sing — the songs she had taught them:

A tinker I am. My name’s natty Dan.

From morn till night I trudge it. .

Of course, everyone whispered, a “stinker I am” (and perhaps his grin over that had gotten him into trouble). Still, how he enjoyed the song, relished that double entendre about being a lad of mettle.

He had departed from his text, the yellow second sheet beside him, wandered from himself abroad, as Tom O’Bedlam said, included all sorts of unforeseen, extraneous material. It was the prevalence of the war undoubtedly, the ubiquitousness of the war in everyone’s life that swerved him off course. Lame excuse, but (he heard himself sigh): Again and again, what bitterness welled up in him over the accident, at the terrible deformation that was its consequence. Bootless his grudge against fate, and yet he couldn’t help it: indicative of the depth to which the inner life had been scarred, a whole life long, mutilated, a whole life long. Fortunately, fortunately, and more than fortunately, there was M.

Well. .

The first image that always occurred to Ira, the teacher whose face Ira always saw first when he thought of P.S. 24 (perhaps after that of Mr. O’Reilly), was his General Science teacher, Jewish and tired-looking — he, too, like Mr. Sullivan and some of the others, may have had second jobs after school — Mr. Steifen: looking over his shoulder at the class with worn, weary face, as he demonstrated how to find the center of gravity of the cardboard triangle hanging in front of the blackboard. . or as he showed the awesome weight of the earth’s atmosphere, when he turned off the heat of the Bunsen burner under the sheet-steel gallon can, screwed the top on tightly, and while he spoke, so patiently, sadly, a mysterious force suddenly crumpled the can; it fell in upon itself before the awed, incredulous eyes of his pupils, as if by wizardry.

Next, in no definite order, Mr. Kilcoyne. He taught Civics or Government, or something of the sort. A big man, in his early forties, not too tidy, an oyster of mucus might adhere to his fibrous mustache — which some of the kids said was foam off the beer he drank in the café on 125th Street where he had his lunch. He commuted to work from the small dairy farm he owned in Yonkers. His familiarity with every aspect of dairy farming, and his willingness to impart his knowledge, made him easy prey for the tough, case-hardened gamins in his class: who, choosing the right moment, perhaps after a talk on the order of succession to the presidency, might pop up with: “How d’you milk a cow, Mr. Kilcoyne” (usually not so blatantly irrelevant as that, but something close).

Mr. Kilcoyne hesitated.

“We never seen a farm,” Victor Pellini pleaded.

“No. Well, the first thing you’ve got to do is wipe the udder clean, with a cloth and good sudsy warm water—”

“De udder?” Hands were raised, those of harriers in wait, accomplished accomplices — like Vito or Guido Spompali. “De udder what?”

“No, no. I didn’t say other. Udder. That’s the bag under the cow. That’s where the teats hang from.”

“Is dat what you grab?”

“One in each hand, yes.” Mr. Kilcoyne milked the air. “And after you strip ’em. .”

But the kids had heard enough. Heads ducked under desks whose owners sought figment property on the floor, while faces contorted in glee. Tits. A teacher talking about tits. What could be funnier? Gone for that period at least was the succession to the presidency of the United States.

Dickensian, Ira thought. Not altogether: It happened often enough so that it survived a half-century in memory; more than that, it survived three score and seven, as Lincoln might have said. The predominant farm-type individual with his normal-school teaching degree, the once-average American faced by sly little first-generation urban rapscallions: “So you grab ’em by de tits, Mr. Kilcoyne?”

“Teats. An udder has teats.”

Mr. Kilcoyne might have been duped. But Mr. Sullivan was not to be fooled with. The first day of class he brought out his shillelagh, a massive cudgel, which he slammed twice or thrice on the desk, and invited anybody to get funny. Nobody did. He was a badly crippled man, stunted, grotesquely stooped, and compelled to get about with two canes. A gentle, long-suffering man underneath his pose of cantankerousness, with a disproportionately large head on whose temples blue veins crinkled like miniature lightning, Mr. Sullivan never touched a pupil, relying instead on his bitter, sarcastic comments that stung the most mischievous into behaving, and very few ever misbehaved in Mr. Sullivan’s class. He had a vestige of a brogue, and something that was worse, a speech defect that in any other teacher would have destroyed all possibility of his controlling a class of Harlem slum toughies, shillelagh or not. Perhaps it was merely an attribute of his brogue: he “shushed” every “s.” “Shtand up,” Mr. Sullivan would say. “Shit down.”

Behind his back they called him “Shitdown Shullivan,” but nobody dared smile when ordered to “Shit down” in his class. He taught English — he was a C.P.A. and moonlighted after school hours as an accountant for several small firms.

“Yoursh truly, Johnny Dooley,” Mr. Sullivan taught his class how to conclude a business letter. “Bad, worsh, wursht,” Mr. Sullivan mocked the scholar faltering over the comparison of an adjective. Or he might vary reproach with “Shikk, shikker, dead.” And for the poor, stumbling reader’s benefit: “Vosh von haben gaben schlobben, gaben schlobben haben.” And one day, to Ira’s zany-pretending, shame-faced chagrin, when he was called on to read and explain the passage from James Russell Lowell’s “The Vision of Sir Launfal” that went “Daily with souls that cringe and plot, we Sinai’s climb and know it not.” Ira did explain; but with so much protective, self-disparaging antic of demeanor that Mr. Sullivan snapped in waspish rebuke, “Thatsh right. Make ’em laugh. You know more than any of ’em. But make a boob o’yourshelf. Shit down!”

Flustered, ears burning, Ira sat down. Mr. Sullivan had found him out, had seen through him. Mr. Sullivan knew who he was.

Mr. O’Reilly, the principal, was gaunt and gray, with a tic ever creasing his lean, severe face. In his sober vestments, unvarying dark clothes, he looked more like a priest than a school principal. Perhaps it had once been his aim to be a priest. He must have worn the wing collar and tie of conservative attire of those days, or perhaps even more conservative, more old-fashioned, the high, stiff collar and cravat that Pop wore in his wedding portrait of 1905. Whenever Ira tried to visualize him, Mr. O’Reilly always wore a high, stiff collar — but turned backwards, like a priest’s. Energetic, though surely in his early seventies, he was wont to enter an English class with startling quickness, shut the door behind him, and stand listening a minute, his probing blue eyes scanning the faces before him. Then, with rapid, decisive nod and movement of hand, he would take over the class. First, he would detach his starched cuffs and placing them like upright cylinders on the desk, take a piece of chalk in his hand, and face twitching, write on the blackboard: “Time flies we cannot their speed is too great.” And he would ask for a volunteer who thought he could punctuate the string of words correctly? No one could. He had an endless store of these devices; he seemed to come with a fresh supply for every grade: “What do you think we shave you for nothing and give you a drink.” How should the barber punctuate this sign so it would be free of ambiguity? These and so many more.

They gave Ira an insight — dimly — of a world he never knew, and never would know: an insight into the traditional Catholic parochial school world with its rigid, fixed, age-old accretion of subject matter, often ingenious, but always invariant, and reassuring because it was invariant — like the whole gamut of correct usage: shall and will: They shall not pass! “My right is crushed,” Marshal Foch wired Clemenceau, the French premier, “My left is in retreat. I will attack with my center.” The whole gamut: the difference between lay and lie, may and can, who and whom, like and as, drilled over and over again, as if, Ira reflected afterward, life depended on their correct usage, the life of street urchins, slum adolescents like himself. Obviously, the seeds fell on fertile ground sometimes. But one couldn’t help ponder on the vast gap between the septuagenarian and juveniles in his charge. It was more than mere age, the span of years — superfluous to say so. It was a qualitatively different age, qualitatively different in traditions — different in prospects, perspectives, in the midst of a war that would mark the rending of Western attitudes, perceptions, would mark the repudiation, the rejection of the precepts Mr. O’Reilly tried to instill, so earnestly and for the most part vainly.

Ira wished he could recall verbatim that strange, anomalous moment when Mr. O’Reilly suddenly seemed to depart from himself and began expounding for the class some elementary ideas — as he interpreted them — of Nietzsche. Nietzsche, of all people! Strength is the main thing, said Mr. O’Reilly: You can do anything in the world you want, bad or good, commit any sin (and lowering his voice, as if he knew how greatly he was violating propriety), behave badly with women. But strength was what people admired and respected: power. What a strange disquisition from an aged Victorian, confessing to a class of adolescents who barely understood — who he knew would barely understand — this almost furtive disclosure of the repudiation of his straitlaced nineteenth-century respectability: “I became a school teacher, and not a businessman,” he told the class, “because those marbles or tops I didn’t lose, the other boys stole from me.” And years later — how many? a mere fifteen — when Ira visited Mr. O’Reilly to present him with a copy of the novel his pupil of P.S. 24 had written, the once taut, strenuous, commanding presence was now only a tremulous, frail, lonely old man in a bathrobe, who remembered not at all the kid he had counseled once, wisely, but to as little avail to overcome his provocative grin as Mr. O’Reilly his tic.

And there was an elderly woman who also taught English, Miss Delany, even older than Mr. O’Reilly — frail and decrepit and slow, her white hair a foggy yellow with age. They said she kept a peepot in her closet. She was the one who made everybody in the class memorize Cardinal Wolsey’s farewell speech in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII: “Farewell! a long farewell to all my greatness!” Why? again why? What was the relevance, the timeliness, the usefulness that would justify trying to inculcate such lofty sentences in the mind of slum juveniles like himself, kids of immigrant parents or rambunctious offspring of uncouth Irish?

He himself bore the memorized speech within him all his life, like some kind of noble monument of the spirit. But did anyone else? Not to flatter himself, did anyone else? Why should they? Relevance was important; timeliness and usefulness played important roles in retention. Why was he so sure that only he retained the great speech after so many years, and no one else did? And if he did, why did he? If it were true that he alone did, why was it? Was that a sign he was already showing an inclination toward literature, a susceptibility, something that Mr. Sullivan had discerned and no one else had? Ira didn’t know. He had lived with the quotation so long that he even thought he detected a certain ambiguity about it, as if the Bard had forgotten the initial figure of speech or the initial thrust of the metaphor. The little wanton boys that swam on bladders in a sea of glory were finally swept away by a rude stream that would forever hide them. But he was maundering.

Mr. Lennard was a homosexual, a flagrant fag. What were they called today? Deviants, fairies, gays? (A pox on ’em for besmirching such a pretty word as gay.) Well, deviants, fags, fairies, they would have to wait—

Listen. Ira was sure he heard the continuous cry of cranes or geese overhead. How early for them to return: the 17th of February. That meant an early spring, or was that an old wives’ tale, an Indian sign? E come i gru van cantando lor lai, facendo in aer di se lunga riga, Dante wrote, if the words were rightly remembered. . Knock off, go outdoors and see if you can locate their long arrowhead formation, not always easy, they were so diaphanous when high, melting into azure space.

— Press the red Escape button, and save.

I thank you, Ecclesias. .

XIII

In 1918 also, it seemed to him in retrospect that his reading preferences underwent a change. Whether the change occurred because he attended grammar school now and was entitled to a library card that gave him the privilege of drawing books from the downstairs, or adult, reading room; or whether, like an apparition inseparable from his recollection of that distant period, the change from the mythic to the actual took place accidentally — and drastically — he was no longer sure. It made a good story, he told himself. There it was: the evening in spring when he thought he had at last found the treasure he had so long sought — the Purple Fairy Book—and checked it out with other books he was borrowing, sliding the pile of three or four volumes along the oak counter where the thin, spinsterlike librarian in the pince-nez stamped one’s library card. So far so good, except for one thing: There was something awry with the time frame of the picture, with the ambience of the moment of his borrowing the books. He was on the downstairs, the adult floor of the library — that was his distinct impression — and the lady with the pince-nez was the head-librarian: As befitted her rank, she was the one who always stamped books downstairs. The chances of the Purple Fairy Book, or of any fairy book, being downstairs were very slight. Hence it was something he had concocted in his own imagination, a sheer figment: When he got home, and opened his treasure to revel in new variants of the exquisite and chivalrous, the book turned out to be Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Outrage at misfortune changed into absorption; as he read, he became engrossed; vociferous disappointment changed into enjoyment, into mirth, into complete ravishment. Oh, this was wonderful, wonderful, the real world, the homey, though real world. Though not his in the asphalt grids of Harlem, but by the side of that faraway Mississippi River, still the story dealt with the plain and everyday, funny and real and wonderful. Were there others like it? There must be.

So he would envisage his initiation into realistic fiction to himself, so he would account for the transition. From then on, anything that first caught his fancy after a few pages read in the library was taken home to peruse at leisure on the kitchen table, under bluish gas mantle-light. Sometimes just the title alone was enough to base a judgment on, whether to take the volume home or leave it. And sometimes something heard about the book, that it was recommended as classic, that it was a necessary ornament of the cultivated person and ought to be read.

He once took home Marx’s Das Kapital, which brought a trace of polite amusement to the face of the librarian. . And so he came to read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables—Less Miserables — because he had somewhere seen reference made to it as being a great book, a great work of fiction, a classic; that it was his duty to read it. He had to try to like classics; he had to try to find out why they were classics, why those who were learned, those in authority, said a certain book was a classic, so that somehow, even if he didn’t fully comprehend, he would be exposed to the aura, humbly submit to sublimity. The other kids might say, nah, the book was no good. They were far more independent-minded — and smarter — than he was. He was submissive, he knew, uncertain, just trying to learn certainty, find a path to it, lacking the aggressiveness of his mates, who were so sure of the rightness of their preferences. He was dumb, and he had to hide it. So it was, in that muzzy state, with muzzy motivation, he brought home Les Misérables. And for days and days, he lived with Jean Valjean, the escaped convict who purloined the abbot’s silverware and candlesticks, the lime-streaked workmen plodding through the streets of Paris impenetrable in lowly disguise — until that act of simple heroism that saved the carter’s life furnished the first clue of his identity to the relentless police inspector, who, caught between duty and humanity, flung himself from a promontory into the sea.

Ira wept, numberless times. And he grieved over the lessening pages that brought him nearer the end of his companionship with Jean Valjean — to the end of the book that he kept under his bed in the little dark bedroom, that he woke up to on Saturday and Sunday as to a precious gift waiting for him to reclaim it. He tarried and reread, dreamed. Hundreds of new words lurked within the pages, unfamiliar words within the hundreds of pages of narrative, and yet they offered no obstacle to understanding. He had no dictionary — even the thought of owning one never entered his mind. He scarcely needed one. It was as if feeling all by itself guided him through context, and once the word’s meaning was surmised, it seemed to lodge in his mind ever after, dwell there for him to admire its luster and resonance.

And so at random he sampled books like objects of a haphazard and voracious whim: After Huckleberry Finn, The Call of the Wild, from The Sea Wolf to Lorna Doone; through Riders of the Purple Sage to The Three Musketeers, from The Prisoner of Zenda to The Hunchback of Notre Dame to The Count of Monte Cristo, and Poe’s ghastly tales, and H. Rider Haggard’s She, and Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur, and. . how strange: In the world of print, the world between the covers of a book, in the world of “true” stories, as before in the world of myth, he submitted to being a Christian, just as the heroes of the book were — except for Ben-Hur, who was Jewish-Roman or a Roman Jew — it didn’t matter. Ira submitted to being a Christian. What else could he do when he liked and esteemed the hero? All he asked of a book was not to remind him too much that he was a Jew; the more he was taken with a book, the more he prayed that Jews would be overlooked.

And there was something else that he could sense but couldn’t define — it never occurred to him to try to define: Just as the mythic had held him before, the “true” held him now, even more strongly. But held him how? Or why? He couldn’t tell. The story had to go a certain way, not the way of a history book, or — no! — geography, or Current Events, not that way. But the way that made you want to follow, because you cared, because you wanted to share in or maybe had to share in the trials and tribulations of the central character. Ira didn’t know. He could feel the way the story had to go, without knowing just why, the way you learned to read Hebrew over and over again in cheder on the East Side, without knowing just what you read. .

There seemed no end in sight to the terrible World War that raged on in Europe. On the surface (the surface to which thus far Ira had committed his twelve-year-old character, a surface, Ira knew, could no longer be plausibly maintained), the war was a composite of Zaida’s fantastic Yiddish execrations (fantastic, it occurred to Ira, because forced, helpless, forced, hypertrophied, as a chained goose might be force-fed through ages of captivity): May those who incited wars be flayed, burned, throttled, beheaded, crushed, mangled — His stock of futile imprecations appeared to be inexhaustible.

And Baba’s repining. Her vigor returned sporadically, as if in spurts, only when accusing her kin of withholding the truth from her, that husband and children alike were lying to her: Moe was dead. “God will requite you for this — deluding me as you did when he was sent off to the slaughter.” And rocking back and forth in woe: “Mocking me with my own heart plucked out of me. You’ll see.” She wept, so terrible in Ira’s sight, her transparent tears welling up out of closed eyelids. In vain, the others tried to revive her faith that God and Moe’s chevrons with the half-moon under them would preserve him from harm. She doubted the authenticity of Moe’s letters home, disbelieved that the stippled shell casings and the iron crosses that Ira brought her as proof that Moe was alive were his.

The World War raged on. The Boche, the Hun, in hated spiked helmet stood on the edge of the trench, arms uplifted in surrender: Kamerad! he cried. But on the ground, between his bestriding legs, his fellow-Hun treacherously aimed his machine gun at the viewer. Liberty Bonds. Patriotic rallies. Ira was still a Boy Scout, had taken his oath of allegiance to observe the rules of the Boy Scouts in the basement of his beloved library on 124th Street. There also, or sometimes in the scoutmaster’s home, he learned how to tie knots, timber hitches and bowlines and sheepshanks; which knots were suitable for what purpose, and always to eschew granny knots. He studied Dan Beard’s books on the lore of the wild, how to set up a lean-to, build a campfire with only two matches, distinguish between different animal tracks in the snow; how to apply tourniquets and treat venomous snakebites; how to carry people out of a burning house and resuscitate them afterward.

He was inept at everything, even that simple role he played when the scouts staged an exhibition of their skills: The scoutmaster and his assistant sat on the edge of their chairs on the platform, while Ira clumsily demonstrated tying a bandanna into an arm-sling. But oh, he learned that sphagnum moss could filter turbid water into a clear and potable drink. He learned that the tips of pine trees pointed north, helping to orient those lost in the woods; and where to look for the Pole Star in the night sky, and why General O’Ryan’s Division wore the peculiar constellation on their shoulder patches, the constellation Orion.

On the gravelly bank of the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, after a hike down a trail from the Palisades, the troop gathered around the campfire the assistant scoutmaster had built, over which was suspended, from a notched stick, in approved scout fashion, a kettle full of stewing vegetables to whose ingredients all the Boy Scouts had contributed. In the tonic chill of the advancing autumn afternoon, with the shadows of the Palisades already encroaching, the pockmarked, affable assistant scoutmaster ladled out the concoction into his mess-cup and tasted it, with care — the stuff was hot! And then, in order not to soil his scoutmaster’s uniform, stooped over and consumed a whole mouthful. He ate it! Soup greens and all, with the very parsnip in it that Ira had contributed. Whoever ate that? And a boiled onion too! A celery stalk! At home Mom used those only to flavor the chicken soup. Nobody ate them. At home Mom strained all that out, and threw them into the garbage can: They were soup greens. But here, if you were a Boy Scout you ate them. And lo and behold, they were good.

— Obviously, the memory appeals to you.

Yes. Without nostalgia. Every precious memory now is tarnished. A mild way of saying it, Ecclesias. Tarnished, frayed, gnawed, blighted. Alas. No, not nostalgia, probably because usurped by overweening fear and anxiety. . Fortunately, I have you to speak to, Ecclesias, or I doubt if I could manage to keep going, so hampered, burdened.

“Thank you for the tea,” he had said to M, as he left the kitchen for his study. She had invited him to partake of a snack of lunch early, earlier than usual, because her cellist was due to arrive soon, within the half-hour. M was to perform with him this Sunday at Keller Hall at UNM, a piano-cello piece of her own composing. His beloved wife: saying this morning at breakfast, while a Hebrew melody was being broadcast: “It doesn’t have the usual augmented seconds. It’s technical. Someday I’ll play it for you so you’ll understand the difference.”

From the ends of the world they came and met, Ira thought (again for the thousandth time); and she, despite his psychic deformity caused by woe and guilt, loved him enough to cleave to him, made their day-to-day life, their domestic quotidian, a means to his salvation. One could vary the statement a multitude of ways; it came down to the same thing: If life, his life, were worth living, it was she who made it so. And though she was quite aware (he was certain) of the vexations and trials that were the penalty of her love, well. . obduracy was a trait to be thankful for sometimes— No, not obduracy, New England tenacity, Pilgrim steadfastness. There was something to be said for breeding, for lineage, for stock.

XIV

At last, at last, Kaiser Bill abdicated. At last, it was Armistice Day! At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Fire engine sirens went berserk, church bells pealed and jangled from every belfry, factory whistles hooted and auto horns tooted. Anything capable of adding to the din did, whether it was only a penny whistle, a tin horn, a toy drum, a human throat. School was let out. Impromptu parades of antic mobs funneled through 125th Street. Doughboys were smothered with kisses; people danced and frolicked in the street. Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!

Moe had survived, miraculously survived, unscathed. “OK everything love and kisses Moe,” his cablegram was read and reread. Zaida davened prayers of deliverance. “Baruch ha Shem, baruch ha Shem, Moishe lebt!” he repeated for the benefit of skeptical Baba. “Er lebt! Would I tell you he lived if he didn’t? He comes home, no? You’ll see him. Ira, child, read her the paper, the telegram. Say it in Yiddish.”

“A hundred times,” said Baba. “A hundred times until I believe.”

“A hundred times!” Ira objected. “It says, OK everything—”

“Say it in Yiddish.” Baba just sat and listened, sat and seemed barely to breathe, as if the bliss of her son’s resurrection within her were sufficient to sustain her. Then she sighed, slumped and uttered a barely audible: “Woe is me that I rejoice. For everyone spared, a hundred others are mourned. Woe is me,” she slapped her lips. “God forgive me my joy.”

But Moe was not to come home at once. He wrote that he had been assigned to the Army of Occupation, and he wasn’t sure when he would return to America again. Weeks, months were to pass before he did. In the meanwhile, to keep Baba from pining again, Mom and Mamie, but Mom especially, since Baba communed with Mom more than with any of her other children, spent much time there — usually during the early part of the afternoon, when Ira was still in school; although he frequently came home when Mom was away, lingering at Baba’s house. . and might not come home until four or later in the afternoon. Strange, perhaps not so strange, how well he remembered the lock on the kitchen door of the flat. Black, with a small brass nipple protruding that when pushed down released the tongue that locked the door, pushed up, would hold the tongue in check. Oh, yes, that and many other things about their domicile he remembered, some things because he couldn’t forget. Then or now. .

How ancient a device are these dots, this string of dots, Ecclesias?

— Not so very ancient, probably. Not before printing, certainly. It’s a good question. I had thought at first that you would find yourself in straits for having omitted or excluded so key a witness, one that imposed thereby severe constraints upon yourself, but now I rather think it’s—

Clever?

— No, not exactly, since you didn’t plan it to begin with, but rather, shall I say, enabling:

It comes of being two beings, one a mere hull and moderately sage; while the other a chimney of the extinct volcano — we have such in the state — a flue, a memento of fiery throes, though today sans lava.

— No need to go to such graphic lengths of metaphor.

Not with you, of course. Is it too early to introduce here Fred Skelsy, whom I met years later in Los Angeles?

— Point is he ran away from home at the age of twelve, is that it? Yes.

— In due course. You’ve a long way to go before then. There’s something to be said for observing the actual order of events.

The timeline?

— Yes.

XV

It was 1919—February 8th. His Bar Mitzvah.

PLUMBER’S PROGRESS (an excerpt) — so ran the next line of his “script,” his typescript guide on the yellow second sheet beside him. He had evidently written the piece on another occasion and meant to consider it for inclusion here. But where was it? Always when he filed something, some of his writing, always it seemed to him, the niche he chose for filing it was the most obvious one in the world, and always he couldn’t remember where it was. So now. He had searched in all the “obvious” places. With him, filing was truly forgetting. Well, he had had his reservations about the piece anyway.

He wool-gathered, mulled. Last night, in a debate on professional boxing presented by the noncommercial Channel 5, he had seen the spindly young Welshman — bantamweight? featherweight? — knocked out by his Mexican opponent; knocked out, the young Welshman suffered a brain concussion from the blow and died: Such a polite, sterling young Briton, saying, yes, sir, no, sir, to the attending physician and the referee. (And, Jesus Christ, why did all those goddamn promoters have the unmistakable Semitic hook, despite their anglo names! They made him cringe, especially that wise guy in floppy felt hat, contemptuously refuting those who thought professional boxing ought to be outlawed: “The only place where that’s true is in the Communist countries.” What an unwitting boost for Communist sanity! Oh, God! O Popule me!) The shock he felt witnessing the fatal punch still lingered; and led his thoughts to the summer of the year 1919, when Jack Dempsey knocked out Jesse Willard — and where he, Ira, was at the time, and what his mind was fixed on and obsessed with. But that was later, only a short time later.

He thought he would introduce here, as preamble to that Bar Mitzvah of sixty-six years ago — preamble, ambience (preambience, Meister Joyce) — a description of their Harlem living quarters where his parents and he had lived these fourteen years, from 3A in P.S. 103 to a mangled B.S. degree at CCNY. All dark and comfortless, said the brutally blinded Gloucester in King Lear. Four “straight” rooms, as railroad flats were called then, comprised their living quarters; the rent at the outset was $12 per month. All dark and comfortless. The toilet, the “bad room,” was the sound of the word in childhood, was entered via the narrow hallway separating opposite flats. Soon after the end of the World War, a doorway was cut through the partition separating kitchen from bathroom, a doorway between the kitchen window and the sink, thus giving direct access to the bathroom. At the same time, the gas lighting fixtures, the gas pipes, were removed, and electric ones installed in their place — and the rent raised $3 per month. He had thought he would take the reader on a tour of their quarters, a slumming tour: So he had written, realizing as he wrote what treacherous ground he had ventured on here, the ground between his original approach to his material and his changed attitude toward it. Did he mean a changed view of what might be called the Joycean allure of sordidness, surface allure Ira had repudiated?

Their cold-water flat was entered via the kitchen door from the darkness of the narrow corridor separating the two opposite flats. The corridor ran almost the entire length of the two opposite flats, ending at doors inset with frosted glass, token doors that provided seldom-used entry to the front rooms at the other end of the flat. . It was a “dumbbell”-type tenement: One passed from kitchen to Ira’s dingy narrow bedroom, the crypt, Mom called it “kaiver,” or tomb, passed to his parents’ wider bedroom that followed, both rooms sharing the same grimy, narrow airshaft; and then, without benefit of door, through wide archway to the front room, ending in windows on fire escape and street.

A large, round, green oilcloth-covered table stood in the center of the kitchen, a built-in, glassed-in china closet covered one wall, an illustrated calendar hung on the wall between the gas stove and the icebox. At the foot of Ira’s “single” bed, a small chest of drawers accommodated both his scanty linen and the bed’s. Tenpenny nails driven into a wooden cleat nailed to the wall sufficed for clothes hangers. In his parents’ bedroom, a large built-in wardrobe with drawers at the bottom provided them with storage space. Initially the front room, the parlor of the home (weather permitting), had displayed a black pier-glass between the two front-room windows, as well as a long black horsehide couch. But these had been replaced by a secondhand glass-topped “set” bought from Broncheh H, a prosperous relative renovating her own living room. The set was quite attractive, the separate pieces of finely turned walnut, but it crowded the room. Bric-a-brac, miniature Dresden sheep, wolves and deer, ranged on the pseudo-mantelpiece above the sheet-metal shield to the flue opening. On the opposite wall hung portraits of Pop’s dour and departed father and mother in sepia orthodoxy of peyoth and shehtl, or wig. And most important feature of all, most decisive in fact, were the two front windows. The one on the right was masked by fire escape (on which, as slum-dwelling kids still did, Ira slept many a sweltering night). The window on the left was Mom’s chief consolation, and often Ira’s as well (Pop was too retiring to avail himself of its prospects). Unobstructed by fire escape, the window on the left was the one out of which to lean, observe the street’s changing aspects, or — Ira’s special joy — watch the trains go by, so smoothly, quietly, on the gray Grand Central overpass. . and read the names on the Pullman cars: GRAND RAPIDS, TUCKAHOE, BRISTOL, and that most beautiful of all names, so full of reverie, of intimations of solitude and distant horizon: WYOMING.

There was another window where he spent much time, the vile airshaft window outside his bedroom. Geologic strata of filth had settled at the bottom, headless dolls, assorted trash and an amalgam of garbage — over which the bloated brown rats foraged: He had bought a Daisy air rifle out of savings from his allowance when he worked in Biolov’s drugstore, with which he aspired to exterminate the rodents down below. But he never even hit one — or scared one as far as he could tell: The BB’s rolled out of the barrel when he pointed the gun down. So he had to content himself with firing matchsticks at the bleary opposing wall of the airshaft, into crannies where bricks had fallen out and spiders had built thick, dirty, velvety webs. Once or twice the head of the matchstick struck the wall before falling into the web, ignited and incinerated part of it. Two matchsticks would be more effective than one, he reasoned, and would annihilate the web in one fell swoop. To his dismay he plugged the bore of the air rifle. What to do?

Who to the rescue came but Uncle Max — Uncle Max, that great fixer. He came to the house and did what? He charred the matchsticks inside the air-rifle tube by heating the tube over the flame of the gas stove. How grateful Ira was, how speechless with admiration at his uncle’s ingenuity — until he discovered that the air rifle when fired wouldn’t propel a BB beyond the barrel. The solder that sealed the tube airtight had melted. Whimsically, whimsically.

Ha, yes (Ira returned from serving himself a cup of tea; M was away on manifold errands). Was it to ease the strain that made him break in upon himself this way, upon his narrative, such as it was? Undoubtedly. But life was in the making, while he remade his: Tomorrow, Jane would arrive from distant Toronto, at his and M’s invitation, his son Jess’s girlfriend, now curiously estranged, to talk about the affair with Jess’s parents, with his father especially, also curiously estranged from the son he once doted on. He knew the moment of dramatic rupture, Ira thought; and he had written an account of it as well; but that would have to wait. Order — Ira supposed the formulation of the idea went back to Aristotle — the perception of order was inherent in beauty. Order. And the only ordering that he had ever achieved reposed in a single novel and was ever after lost; perhaps undone might be a better word. Still, disorder had its attraction too, or was it only when perceived as subordinate to a higher order. . or was it a substitute for the unobtainable, a sop to his addiction to words, to prose, good, bad or indifferent, to narrative. Lord.

So the moony urchin without his air rifle sat quietly beside the airshaft window studying the ways of the rats, unmolested, traversing their province below. (He awoke one night as a rat scampered across his face.) Well, in a wry vein and easy.

But when he thought of his Bar Mitzvah, did he mean the festivities, the celebration? Everything turned bitter, turned dreary, scarifying. It was not only not funny; it was beyond him to be funny about it. Oh, well, perhaps, not altogether: The comic was ingrained in him, part of him, gift or antidote to plight, or the soul’s immunity: from his halting, stumbling recital of a brief portion of the Sabbath reading from the Torah scroll in the synagogue, with an embarrassed Zaida at his side prompting, embarrassed and deprecating over his woefully ignorant grandson, he who had once been so glib and praiseworthy at producing the sound of the language—lushin koydish, it was called.

From synagogue to Pop’s home-staged feast set before most of Ira’s homely relatives — Zaida too, food and utensils kosher, of Mamie’s providing — seated on rented chairs, at rented tables, stretching from parents’ bedroom to front room, never-heated rooms in winter, where the frost seemed well-nigh impacted, in spite of reeking kerosene stove borrowed from Mrs. Shapiro for the occasion, and the fishtail gas burners flaring yellow overhead. The parental bedstead had been knocked down to make room for conviviality, and together with the mattress had been stowed in the rear of the long passageway. Nothing to be distressed by, nor even by Pop’s nervous and high-strung hosting, nor by Yiddish din within goyish hearing, nor even by the oration Pop chose for his son, and under threat of the usual dire consequences, compelled him to memorize and deliver, which Ira did, in English, standing surly and glum between rooms, back to one doorpost, staring at the other, thanked God and his parents for having brought him up a Jew. He could have smirked at all that in his amorphous, chaotic mind, and even grinned tolerantly at the memory in later years.

But the Bar Mitzvah brought the realization he was only a Jew because he had to be a Jew; he hated being a Jew; he didn’t want to be one, saw no virtue in being one, and realized he was caught, imprisoned in an identity from which there was no chance of his ever freeing himself. The kid who had once been like a drop of water in the pool of water that was the East Side, indistinguishable from the homogeneity about him, who had wept and wailed to be allowed to return and felt the tears of separation rise in his throat, during his brief return, wanted none of it now, chafed at his lot, fantasized obliteration of the imposition, feigned with burgeoning cynicism that he was not a good Jewish boy: “Thanks, Tanta Mamie” (who brought him his gray flannel shirt); “Thanks, Zaida and Baba” (who gave him a two-dollar bill); “Thanks, Tanta Ella” (who gave him a fountain pen); “Thanks, Uncle Max” (who gave him a retractable fountain pen); “Thanks, Uncle Nathan” (Zaida’s brother, the jeweler, who gave Ira a slender gold watch-chain — but nobody gave him a watch! If only his uncle Moe were there, and not in Germany far away.). Dissembling stood him in good stead, for behind his happy, staple smile he knew he was already concealing vice that would have horrified them. He loathed the ceremony; he loathed himself in it. Becoming a Jew, becoming a man, a member of the community was a sick mockery, became a sick memory.

— But that wasn’t it alone.

No, exactly. It was like a resonance, Ecclesias, if that’s the right word, a reinforcement within the psyche. As you can see: a self overt, a self covert, a self candid, a self stealthy. Nothing uncommon.

— No, but with you supremely exacerbated, into a veritable virtuosity.

I agree.

XVI

Though the intimations had been many before, Bar Mitzvah brought realization into sharp focus, not of the parting of his ways from Jewishness, but of never wanting to return. Vitiated for him, repugnant virtually all aspects of what he was to learn in time bore the name Diaspora. He knew it then only as Jewishness, detested it, was held to it, to the extent that he was held by a single bond: his attachment to Mom, his love for her, for the artless eloquence that imbued so much of her speech, for her martyrdom on his behalf, and for her nobility in spite of her sentimentality, humble nobility again and again shining through the rifts of its sentimental husk: “I didn’t know how noble you were, Leah,” Mom told Ira that Zaida said to her once — and removed his yarmulke and bowed: “Forgive me, Leah. I abused you when you were young.” (Almost too much to bear, the picture of that selfish, intolerant old Jew removing his yarmulke and doing obeisance to his daughter, his firstborn, plain and seemingly unfavored, as her Biblical namesake.)

Once more the school vacation had begun, once again it was summer, the early summer of 1919. Warm, but not so stifling as that August afternoon in 1914, when Zaida sent him downstairs, nickel in hand, to buy the Yiddish “Wuxtra.” It was more like the afternoon — and time of year — when Mamie and Mom and he and blonde little Stella waited in the newly furnished Harlem apartment for the immigrants to arrive. Another child had been added to the family since then: carrot-topped Pola, Mamie’s second daughter. . But now it was Moe that everyone waited for, the former immigrants too, all waited for Moe, safely back from France. Saul and Max had gone to the mustering-out center to escort their brother home. Everyone kept leaping to the front windows at the sound of an approaching motor car, kept looking to the west for a sign of the glorious appearance of the taxicab that would bear the one in whom all their hopes were centered: Moe, son and brother and uncle, home from the World War.

It was just at that moment when Mamie was admonishing her seven-year-old daughter, Stella, not to lean out so far, and Ira, stealing glances at his cousin’s plump legs, slumped further down in his chair so that he could see up further, and fantasizing with fierce intensity that Stella was older, when a car was heard slowing down, chugging to a stop with a squeal of tires against the curb. “He’s here!” Stella shrilled. “Uncle Moe is here! I saw him first!”

Crying “Moishe! Moe!” everyone rushed to the windows. Down below, doors were opened on both sides of the yellow-and-black-checkered cab before the house. Nimble Max stepped out on the street side as Saul stepped out on the sidewalk. And after him, Moe, burly and radiant in khaki. At the same time, across the street, from the candy store with the placard in the window printed freehand, WELCOME HOME MOE, out rushed Dave Eshkin, rolypoly, curly-haired proprietor, in his chocolate-flecked white apron: “Moe! Moe! Hallo, Moe!” he cried as he ran to greet Moe with outstretched arms. “The whole block is heppy you home! Gott sei dank, you home! Look, everybody, from the windows! He’s here!” Dave shouted upward at the increasing number of spectators leaning out of windows: “It’s Moe!” And was met by a medley of cries descending from all levels, “Mazel tov, Moe! Hooray, Moe!” Some came out of doorways to shake hands with him.

“Moe! Moishe! Uncle Moe!” Everyone in the front room who could crowd into a window or beside it, so many, Ira would think afterward with a shudder: What if the wall gave way with such a mass of relatives pressing against it. “Hallo, Soldier! Hooray, Moe! Here’s Moe!” reverberated from houses on both sides of the street, as some shouted from windows, others beckoned to those behind them to join in the triumphal chorus. Smiling with peculiar composure, Moe looked up, his blue eyes steady in the shadow under his campaign hat. Saul paid the taxi driver, Max lifted the duffel bag out of the cab. The three brothers entered the house, leaving behind cheering, waving spectators from sidewalk to roof.

Harry rushed down the stairs to meet them. Everyone else rushed to the door — neighboring doors opened; the sound of other doors opening on the floors below and above was heard, other tenants shouted their greetings. And there he came — up the stairs — a golden khaki apparition. “Moe! Moishe! Oy, mein kindt! Oy, baruch ha shem, blessed be the name of the Lord!” Everyone in the apartment surrounded him, clung to him, clamored with joy.

Moe entered, with jaw set in his bronzed-fair countenance, his lips thickened to pouting. Campaign ribbons were bunched on his chest. Gone was the quarter-moon under the three chevrons on his arm; in its place nestled a castle above an additional black loop. He no longer spoke in his former good-natured way, but with a dry, grating voice — and with scarcely an intonation. He sat down heavily on a chair.

“Oy, gevald, what they have done to my merry little Moishe?” Dressed in some dark, satiny cloth, Baba sat motionless, staring at her son. “My precious, happy child, my good child, my first son, they’ve turned you into a stone.”

“Not a stone, Mamaleh. A soldier. A staff sergeant beside. They wanted me to reenlist, Mamaleh; my colonel told me, ‘Reenlist, Morris’—he called me Morris—‘you’re my regimental sergeant.’”

“But you’re home now,” Baba appealed. “My Moishe, my Yiddish child, come back to us.” She raised both hands, imploring: “Moishe, hear!”

“A regimental sergeant, and I wished myself a hundred times dead.”

“Leave him alone,” Zaida commanded. “In time he’ll come to himself. He’s home. He’ll become Moishe again— May they be slaughtered, all who stunned him in that charnel house he had to abide. Ai, ai, ai, will they ever come to their senses? Ai! What lies and rots under the earth because of their madness. Kaddish, v’ yiskadaish, shmai raboh.”

“I’ll go to shul with you, this evening, Father, if I may. God knows what will help me.”

“Noo, come to the shul with me this evening? What else?”

“Why is everyone so troubled?” Mamie interjected. “What’s wrong with us? We stand about him as if, as if, God knows, as if the Almighty didn’t return him to us unscathed. He’s here! He lives! And nothing maimed. It will all be forgotten soon. What is it with us? He’ll be a headwaiter again. Perhaps soon he’ll go into business. He’ll open a restaurant. He’ll be a success. With life he’ll be all this. Come, let’s rejoice. Gevald, what is this? I know what you need, brother!” Mamie shook her finger at Moe. “I know very well. I’ll bring it, and you’ll be another man. At once!” She hurried into the kitchen, came back in seconds with a glass tumbler and a seltzer siphon. “You’re still my little brother,” she wheedled as she proffered the glass. “Here. This will restore you. Like old times when you were a busboy: a glass of seltzer. This will make you our Moishe again. Here, quicken your heart!” She pressed the lever of the cold-sweating siphon, squirted a tumblerful of bubbling water into the tumbler he held, until it almost brimmed over— “Drink, drink, dear brother. It’s good and cold, the way you always liked it. You’ll belch heartily. See if that won’t restore you.”

Everyone stood or sat about watching him, avid for him to imbibe, to enjoy. “L’chaim,” he raised the tumbler to his lips, swallowed — one mouthful: His teeth clamped the rim of the glass, crunched, as if it were some kind of brittle food. He pitched back in his chair. His campaign hat snapped away from his cropped, blond head and fell behind him to the floor. The hand — holding a broken glass — dropped to his lap, staining the khaki-covered thigh. He had bitten a great piece out of the tumbler, and now its jagged edge gleamed between clenched teeth.

“Gevald! Gevald! Moishe! You hear me? Wake up!” Zaida fanned his son’s face with his yarmulke. “Moishe! Moishe!” Zaida lashed Moe’s cheek with his yarmulke. “Gevald! Help, someone! Don’t let him swallow! Saul! Max! Before he’s destroyed!”

Mamie screamed hysterically. So did Ella and Sadie. Ira wept, Stella sobbed. Saul tore at his cheek, screaming, “Moe! Moe! Come back!” Baba seemed about to faint, her eyes shut, and would have pitched out of her chair were it not for Mom, who seized her swaying mother and called hoarsely to Harry to run for a doctor. Only Max kept silent. His face pale, the lobes of his nostrils distended and oily, he kept his brown eyes fixed on the edge of glass between his brother’s teeth. Moe’s tongue arched, his jaw dropped. Deftly, as if they were forceps, Max jabbed two fingers between his brother’s lips, and extracted the shard of glass.

“I’ll give you ten seconds to get up that fuckin’ hill, you sonofabitch.” Snarling, Moe glared at his brother with glazed eyes, at the same time drawing the broken tumbler as if it were an imaginary weapon against his thigh. Then he dropped the glass and slumped.

“Oh, woe is me, out to perish before our very eyes,” Baba moaned. “Oh, I die.”

“No, no, he’s coming to himself,” Mom assured her. “Mama, listen to me. Open your eyes. See! See! He breathes. He moves. Your son is saved.”

Moe revived. He looked at the spreading water stain on his khaki breeches — and smiled, his old smile, simple and stolidly arch, as if he were a youth on the East Side again, saying: “Ich khom mikh bepisht?”

“You didn’t bepiss yourself, brother,” Mamie brought her face almost against his. “It’s only seltzer water. It’s nothing.”

“Nothing it isn’t,” Moe smiled. “Seltzer cust gelt.” He laughed weakly. “Noo, Mamaleh, I’m home. I’m your Moishe.”

“My poor child,” Baba wept.

“Don’t fall on his neck, all of you!” Zaida shouted. “Leave him alone!”

“I’m all right, Father,” said Moe, and smiled at Baba: “Mamaleh, don’t weep. I’m a soldier no longer: Ich bin aus-soldat, aus-sergeant.” And to Mamie: “Noo, Shwester, where’s the seltzer?”

“I’m afraid to give you any more,” said Mamie. “Shall I give him more?” She asked for advice.

“No. Don’t!” Everyone else concurred. “Wait. Wait till he’s come to himself entirely.”

Moe chuckled indulgently. “Try me with the siphon, sister. The spout—” he chuckled again, sought his campaign hat behind him. “I haven’t teeth enough to break the spout. Ah, azoy.”

So, although the Great War had ended months ago, for Ira, watching his uncle in khaki uniform gulping seltzer water directly from the dull metal spigot of the siphon and belching afterward with beatific grin, it was only then the Great War ended.

PART THREE

I

“

I want to be a soldier, Uncle Louie,” Ira said, when Louie in postman’s uniform next gladdened the house with a visit. “I want to go to West Point and learn to be an officer.”

Uncle Louie smiled his gold-crowned smile, and shook his head: “They don’t like Jews at West Point.”

“They don’t?” His disappointment spread within him like some sort of mildew, vitiating his dreams irrevocably. Uncle Louie wouldn’t lie; Uncle Louie knew; he had been a soldier himself. “They don’t, Uncle?” Ira repeated. He seemed to look at something stricken within himself.

The shake of Uncle Louie’s head was slight, his sympathetic smile full of consolation. “No.”

“And where do they like Jews? Where?” Mom bantered.

“He can’t wipe his butt properly, and he’s going to be an officer,” said Pop.

“No, Chaim, he’s only a boy,” Uncle Louie demurred. “A child. I was a soldier, too. It’s natural for a child here in America to want to be a soldier. My two boys also want to be soldiers. It isn’t Galitzia where they cut off a Jewish boy’s toe so he won’t be conscripted—”

“Didn’t they do that to Ben Zion, my father?” said Mom.

“What else?” said Louie. “We Jews did that to a thousand, thousand infant boys to keep them out of the military, that they won’t have to eat pork, worst victuals, or, treife of all, to go into battle — and who knew? at times against other Jews, fellow-Jews in the opposing army. Why? We had no country, no?”

“And here we have?” Mom challenged.

“No, I mean only there was a time, in old times, when we did go into battle for a country that was ours: in Eretz Israel. We fought the Canaanites. We fought the Philistines. We fought the Romans. It wasn’t always this way, cutting off a toe to avoid conscription. Before we were Jews, we were Hebrews. You know that yourself, Chaim.”

“Oh, that was long ago.”

“True, but we still celebrate Chanukah, no? I’m a free-thinker, but I celebrate it, too. And the Bundists in Russia? Jews who had the courage to oppose the Black Hundreds — with weapons. Noo?”

“Well, should I let him grow up to be a soldier?” Mom asked ironically.

“No. But it’s America. Why did we come here? It’s capitalist America — we know that — and we have our quota of anti-Semites here. But let it become socialist America and you would see: It would become the country of all creeds, all people. Jews as well — and those with no creeds at all, like myself. Such a land all would be willing and ready to defend.”

Mom grimaced in skepticism, then wagged her head.

“Just wait,” Louie emphasized. “It has already happened in Russia. And who leads the Red Army? Trotsky, a Jew.”

“Do you know I waited on him more than once in a restaurant on Second Avenue. I still see him, with his little beard—”

“Uncle Moe was a soldier!” Ira burst out. “He was a sergeant. He had a stripe more than a sergeant. You were a soldier, Uncle Louie. So why can’t I be an officer if I want to?”

“I told you, Yingle, they don’t like Jews. A soldier — well. But not an officer, they want an officer to be like themselves, people they think they can trust.”

“Go, stop nagging,” said Pop.

“With Jews for cannon fodder they’re satisfied,” said Mom. “Czar Kolki, may he rot, abhorred Jews too. But to be soldiers, ah, that delighted him. The Bolsheviki have my wholehearted support.”

“Well, would you consent to his being an officer for the Bolsheviki?” Louie asked.

“Who knows?” said Mom. “In the meantime one thing pleases me. If they don’t like to train Jews to be officers, I am obliged to them.”

“Have no fear,” Pop scoffed. “An officer. He’s meant to be a malamut.”

“You never spoke to him about the Dreyfus case, Chaim?” Uncle Louie addressed Pop.

“Go, expound with him,” said Pop.

“I told him about Dreyfus,” said Mom. “He knows. The Jewish officer they disgraced. You don’t remember?”

“I remember something,” Ira admitted grudgingly.

“Noo?” said Mom.

“He was a captain,” Uncle Louie explained. “And not only that. He was on the French General Staff, too. You understand what that means? It means that he could betray all the secret plans of the army. But so strong was the hatred of Jews that when it was discovered that somebody gave away these plans, he was found guilty. He gave them away to the Deutscher, they said, and sent him to Devil’s Island. To Devil’s Island noch.” Uncle Louis’s bony, hairy hand stressed his words. “A Major Esterhazy, a Gentile, was guilty of giving away the secrets of the French army—”

“I would spit in his face, if I could but see him,” Mom interrupted.

“They feel safe only with their own kind,” said Uncle Louie. “Do you understand? That’s why you don’t have Jewish generals. Bist doch geboyren in Galitzia,” Uncle Louie reverted to Yiddish, and smiled his wide, golden smile. “A Yeet. Do you know the first words you learned to speak in English?” He lowered his voice: “Goddemnfuckenbestit.”

If only Pop would talk to him like Uncle Louie, could show him the way, could have been there before, prepared the way. But there were only Mom and Pop — and those just ripened into America, his uncles and aunts. And it was always money, money, business, business with them. Te de benk, te de benk, te de benk! The goyish kids chanted in drum-beat staccato: “Football, baseball, svimming in de tenk. Ve got money, but ve put it in de benk. . ” It was no use. He might have sniffled maybe, if he were alone. America didn’t want him. Even though he was willing not to be a Jew, to try to be different, to avoid business, profit, commission and interest — the things he hated about the arithmetic books: If a gross of penholders cost. . If a ton cost. . If a barrel cost. .

What made him think all at once about H. S. M. Hutcheson’s book, The Happy Warrior, which he had finished reading only a few days before. Why did that passage come back to tease his mind: about the hero being a gentleman on a modest income of fifty pounds a year from a legacy consisting of shares in an Indian textile mill. How did that faraway mill by itself make him a gentleman? Those funny, swarthy people he had seen in geography books, barefooted, in crazy white diapers. How could that make an Englishman a gentleman? They didn’t count, that was why. So what did that have to do with him, with the Dreyfus Uncle Louie was talking about, with West Point that didn’t like Jews? If only he had Uncle Louie to explain it. What to do when you couldn’t find the way something went? Thoughts always ended in a. . in a tangle.

Why did he have to think about those Indians in their big diapers when no one else did? Out of a whole book, a long book, why should that have come back to him? He wasn’t an Indian. No, it was that he didn’t count. So he noticed what he wasn’t supposed to about what didn’t count. So they didn’t want him at West Point. He could never not notice what he wasn’t supposed to. Even if he tried. . He watched Pop listen avidly to Uncle Louie talking about the possibility of taking in a few guests for the summer in his new place in Spring Valley. . No, just because he thought about things that didn’t count didn’t mean he didn’t count. Just because he thought about Indians in white diapers in spinning mills that made the hero a gentleman of leisure — and Ira himself was Jewish and the son of a waiter, and they lived in a Harlem dump, too — didn’t mean he wasn’t a different kind of “high degree,” as the fairy tales used to say. He could put words to what he felt. If you could put words to what you felt, it was yours. You couldn’t tell that to anybody, but it was true. You didn’t have to have realms and estates to be a nobleman the way the book said. You could put words to the way life went, the way life felt, and be a nobleman too — even if nobody knew your title: maybe Mom, maybe Uncle Louis, maybe Mr. Sullivan. .

And finally came 1920, a newly minted decade, and with it, graduation from public school: It was a winter graduation, at the end of January. Schooling was over for the majority of Ira’s classmates; schooling was at an end forever. Petey O’Hearn had already been hired as a helper on an ice-wagon. Frankie Spompini (so adept at braiding raffia mats, so neat) was bound for his uncle’s barber shop. Scrawny Davey Bayer, who lived in Ira’s block, hoped to get a job as an office boy. Sid Deffer, who already worked after school in a photography studio, had his job there assured. Leo Dugonz, the Hungarian classmate of Ira’s with whom he got along well, had applied for a job at a materials testing laboratory and been told to come in with his diploma and his working papers.

Almost the whole class was going to work, almost everyone had his working papers or was going to get them. A kind of euphoria was in the air: euphoria at the last of school, euphoria at the future. Only a small number of Ira’s classmates were going to high school, or like himself, were persuaded to go to the new junior high school that had just been innovated in P.S. 24.

II

Question in his mind at the moment was whether to interlard his narrative with events of strong personal interest, or reserve the information for another, a separate vehicle (his handwriting, incidentally, was now reduced to near illegibility). Events of strong personal or immediate interest in one vehicle, and the autobiographic narrative in another, or both together, that was the question. It would simply be easier to do them together, or both on the same document. As a matter of fact, he had already begun to do so, or rather had already done so without preliminary statement, without preface. So. . even if not of greatest literary style, but more or less spontaneously, why not continue? It was more convenient.

He had called Jane over the weekend to find out her condition, mood and circumstances since her return to Toronto. He found her, according to her report, in fluctuating mood, and he again brought up the subject of the feasibility of her coming to Albuquerque. M protested that he wasn’t giving due consideration to the responsibility his apparent magnanimity incurred — and she had called to him sharply to terminate the long-distance conversation. He had answered that he had an ulterior motive in having Jane here, one that he thought could be of profit both to Jane and himself. In short, he thought he could guide her, with very little expenditure of time and effort since she was an experienced journalist, in the writing of something that, to put it bluntly, would sell. He saw a story with an unusual twist. And this, this hunch, if nothing else, because she was so intent on getting a copy of the one tape of their conversation that he had decided to retain (he promised to send it, and did).

Of further interest was her stating that listening to the other tapes made it clear to her that she had been repeating the same thing over again and been unable to understand what a rational solution of her plight required (something that M and Ira had also concluded).

So matters in barest outline ended, with Ira promising to find out more about immigration laws and chances of her obtaining residency here, and also — key question — what her own inclinations in this direction were. She still sounded uncertain.

In the meantime, two other matters of moment cropped up: one with his computer, old friend, Ecclesias, aggravatingly replicating the old saw: Abort. Ignore. Repeat. So that for the entire weekend he was without means of communicating — while the computer was being subject to diagnostic tests at Entre, the purchase place and, exasperation of exasperations, nought was found wrong with it or the software. Returning and reinstalling the device in his study, he changed surge suppressor, removed fluorescent lamp, tape recorder adapter, changed location of cordless phone — and, perhaps sole source of the malfunction perhaps not, closed the little gate before the drive port less gingerly, more aggressively. Fortunately (!), he was able to coerce his unwelcome idleness into filling out his income tax return, at least to within sight of completion.

In the meantime, on Tuesday, came a musician friend of M’s and freelance writer for the Albuquerque Journal, an oboist, Leslie H, together with her escort, John O, a tuba player, for the purpose of obtaining an autograph of Ira’s youthful novel (Leslie H having been discouraged from seeking an interview because of exaggerated rumors of Ira’s reclusiveness). Ira used the occasion of their visit to inquire about rooms, locations and rents — with Jane in mind — likely places to advertise for roommates, such as the UNM bulletin board; and in addition, to enlist Leslie H in assisting in Jane’s settling in Albuquerque, if so inclined. .

III

With graduation assured, with discipline relaxed, Ira’s class was left to its own devices, the individuals free to move around the classroom if they wished, free to talk. More than ever, the classroom seemed snug, sheltering them for a last time from the vicissitudes of a new stage in their lives, only hours away from beginning, the pragmatic and demanding outside world. Snow on the windowsills sealed up the cozy interiors of rows of wooden desks and slate blackboards, as if they were old dispensations, while the wooden clock above the blackboard ticked away the last minutes it would be in their view. No one misbehaved; misbehavior no longer seemed fitting, all but purposeless, when most of class would soon be on a par with the teacher in earning their own livelihood. Some read: reading material of their own choosing, books, magazines. As the genial homeroom teacher, Mr. Conway, suggested, some were engaged in writing a farewell letter of appreciation to Mr. O’Reilly; others sat in a circle around Mr. Conway discussing job opportunities and their ambitions. For some reason, when looking around the room, Ira’s throat became choked with unshed tears. Was it because he sensed the imminent, irreversible parting, not only of ways but of mind — of mind, of outlook? They were going to work, most of them; they were going to be shaped by concerns, by all kinds of aims and cares and activities from which he would be excluded, just as he was going to be shaped by those that would exclude them. Even though they and he might live on the same street, as some did right now, and see one another often, still they would be disparate forever. If they were different now, it was still only latent; they would differ soon, irrevocably. He made up his mind then and there not to attend the graduation exercises.

“Not even for me, for my sake?” Mom beseeched that evening. “That little crumb of comfort, my reward for these eight years of nurturing you, you would deny me? Why?”

“I don’t wanna go,” he said sullenly.

“You’re ashamed of your Jewish parents, is that the reason?”

He blustered: “Don’t bother me! There’s lots of other Jewish kids gonna be there.” (And yet he recognized that that, too, might be an unadmitted element of his refusal.) “I wanna go to work. Everybody else is going to work. Nearly everybody. They got jobs already.”

“Noo, wouldn’t that be better?” Pop looked up from Der Tag. “I ask you. The father may be a worker. The son not. Many and many a Jewish boy goes to work. How would it harm him? He could go nights to high school if he chose. That would be an upstanding son. He’d bring in his share of his keep. It would be easier for everyone. And you not? You’re beginning to snuffle about a Persian lamb coat. A great deal sooner you could save for it; how your hoard would grow if he went to work, no?”

“Go deep under the sod, both of you!” Mom bridled. “Whether I want a Persian lamb coat or not, he goes to high school!”

“Shoyn,” Pop baited. “She glowers.”

“And why shouldn’t I, when a father connives to have his son become a toiler, a turf-layer?” Mom retorted. And to Ira: “Becoming it would be, too, God forbid, that the earth close over you also for whom I wept and strove all these years.”

“I’ll get my diploma anyway!” Ira yelled. “I’m going back there next week to junior high.”

“Go. True son of mine you are, indeed.”

Cajoled by principal and teachers alike to enroll in the newly instituted commercial junior high school, those few of the class who did not go to work remained in P.S. 24, although the very few who insisted on attending a senior high school did so of their own choice. Graduates of other “grammar” schools in Harlem and its vicinity, lured by the prospect of learning shorthand, typing, bookkeeping by attending school only one more year, swelled the roster of the junior high. (For the first time, Ira saw black students in the classroom — subdued, self-effacing, but black!) He had always despised commercial courses, at least since becoming conscious, being made conscious by Gentiles and fellow Jews alike, that all Jews thought about was business: beezness.

But: “Knowing how to type and take shorthand, how to keep accounts and speak Spanish will be useful to you all the rest of your lives,” Mr. O’Reilly induced. “You’ll be repaid many times over for the time you spent taking these courses to learn these subjects. Remember what I told some of you about the marbles that those I didn’t lose were stolen from me. Don’t let the same thing happen to you. It won’t, if you take these courses. They’re true business courses. You’ll learn to be alert in these matters. And in today’s world you have got to be. And if you take them in P.S. 24, you’ll be getting as good instruction right here as they get in the High School of Commerce downtown, right here in the school you’ve always gone to and with the teachers you know and who know you.” Mr. O’Reilly’s tic tocked away as he talked.

Mr. Housman, the Geography teacher, became instructor of typing and shorthand, teaching both subjects with all the assiduous care and neatness of one who had but recently learned the skills himself. He showed the class how to erase errors in typing by tucking a sheet of paper under the erasure like a dustpan to catch the crumbs of rubber before they lodged in the new machines — and cuffed Ira soundly when he was caught ignoring the practice.

Mr. Sullivan taught bookkeeping as well as first-year high school English, and found it impossible to understand how Ira could be so discerning in the one and so abysmally obtuse in the other. And he said so in no uncertain terms. But why in hell you debited when you debited, and credited when you credited, eluded Ira continually, though classmates not as bright as he was seemed to understand quite readily. And how to keep an asset from slipping with protean ease into a liability — and back — was beyond his power. It was beyond Mr. Sullivan’s power also to explain the difference either — in any permanent way — so both teacher and pupil despaired. Mr. Kilcoyne, the dairyman from Yonkers, taught Civics, and Mr. Lennard, on the strength of numerous vacations spent in Puerto Rico, became transformed from an American History teacher to a Spanish teacher.

IV

Wracking arthritic nights, and the old man. . In his excruciating rigidity he needed M to lift him to a sitting position in bed. No need dwelling on it. A peculiar insight this pain bestowed, hackneyed and vivid at the same time: He was no more than a suffering member of the animal kingdom. .

Last night he intended having a discussion with M about his son Jess, a discussion he hoped to tape; but conditions were inopportune, and he never brought the matter up. Now it swung in a dull, slow arc in his mind. After his return from Africa — from Tanzania, where he had taught school, from Johannesburg where he had operated a computer, from a long hitchhike to Dakar — Jess seemed by his estranged manner to have come to the decision no longer to communicate his innermost thoughts and problems with his parents, his father in particular. And with some brief interludes, he continued the practice — expanded it, until only the most surface topics were subject of discourse, those addressing the least personal concerns. He shunned, he guarded against any kind of serious interchange. And with Jane’s revelation of Jess’s actions, a complex of hypotheses emerged in Ira’s mind: That had his son spoken of his “problems,” had he and his father interchanged reflections, or better, he and both his parents, his behavior might have been modified to a point where he could not have treated Jane so shabbily, as was evidently the case, and with such appalling cruelty and callousness.

But then came the counterthought: It might very well be that his treatment of Jane before the point of crisis in their relations was reached was such that Jess already felt it needed concealing, and hence the cause of the prolonged lacuna in any meaningful communication between son and parent. Said M: “Is your solicitude about Jane based on your resentment of Jess?” And how could Ira deny that it was a component of his attitude: the sense of desolation at being rejected by the one he loved, rejected, excluded. He had never done that with Mom. To the extent possible, immigrant woman though she was, scarcely acquainted with American mores, to the extent that he could, he had told her of his activities, his experiences, and his reflections on his experiences (not so with Pop; he never had, being the spurned one himself from the outset). And yet — he had to admit to himself — his statement was not altogether true: What agonizing perpetrations he had withheld from Mom, what sordid troughs of deed. So there was an analogy here, a limited one, to be sure, between Jess’s refusal to communicate with his father, and his own with Mom. What if he had said: “Mom, I—” What if he had confessed: “Yes, Mom, I—” No, it was impossible. .

He would never be sure, unless somehow the pertinent record could be uncovered or unless he was willing to go to the trouble of trying to locate it. (The public school record, he was reasonably certain, was still extant; but the record of Park & Tilford’s employees, who knew? Was Park & Tilford still in existence?) He would have to make a stab at it, decide arbitrarily which preceded which, if they didn’t take place more or less simultaneously. At any rate, one thing he could certainly count on: that for awhile the two things that played such important though different parts in shaping his life must have overlapped. Interesting, he reflected, this process of introspective delineation, introspective ordering of autobiographical material; it was something in the nature of a chess game, though he knew very little about chess: a supposition in one direction was blocked by a contradictory recollection.

If he had obtained the after-school job with Park & Tilford before he met Farley H in junior high — and it was there Ira certainly met him — then he must have begun work at Park & Tilford when he was still only thirteen, for he was fourteen at almost the same time the new junior high school classes began, which was February. Were juveniles of that age, under the age of fourteen, allowed by law to be hired to do after-school work by well-established businesses? Ira wasn’t sure. Some research, perhaps only a few phone calls could dispel the uncertainty (and he much preferred to work within well-defined contexts). But what the hell. Again, if he went hitchhiking with Farley of a summer’s day, in his junior high school year, which was his fourteenth, why wasn’t he busy at his duties at Park & Tilford? (On the other hand, the two might have gone hitchhiking on a Sunday, although the memory had the aura of a weekday.)

Amid the welter of conflicting impressions, probably his best assumption was that he had actually been hired by Park & Tilford when he was thirteen much to his present (as well as his past) surprise, had worked there during most of eighth grade, and into part of junior high, when he met Farley. If so, that would entail revising some of what he had previously dealt with — not that he would. So, to begin with, Park & Tilford — and there was one very definite bit of “evidence” to buttress his assumption, a bit of incontrovertible mental memorabilia: He recalled beyond all question that he reported for work that first day at Park & Tilford wearing his “new” blue serge Bar Mitzvah suit. That argued proximity to his thirteenth year, argued in favor of the year 1919 as the date he was hired, of his being in the eighth grade.

V

Pop’s countenance was wreathed with cordiality when Ira came home that Friday afternoon. Pop even called him Ira’leh, the name he reserved for Ira when most pleased with his son — or wanted him to run an errand or do some other favor. Ira looked at Mom for explanation.

“The mailman brought you this after you left for school a second time.”

“After lunch?” Ira reached out for the letter.

“May it augur well,” said Mom.

And Pop in jolly mood: “One of your grandmothers awoke for your sake.”

Ira extracted the letter from the already opened envelope: “Gee, I got a job! Park and Tilford! After school! Yea!”

“Tockin yea,” said Pop. “Such a goyish, fancy store to admit a Yiddle. Something unheard of.”

“Did they ask you?” said Mom.

“No. But I wrote on the application where it asked religion: Jewish.”

“Wunderbar!”

“It must have been Mr. Sullivan then,” Ira said. “He told me where to apply. He’s a bookkeeper after school.”

“Aha,” said Mom. “You see: the goy. They say he’s this, he’s that. A mensh is a mensh, goy or Jew. He took pity on you.”

Which made it all the more likely, Ira meditated, that he had gotten the job in his thirteenth year, while still in eighth grade where Mr. Sullivan was impressed with Ira’s aptitude in English; for had it been the following year when he was in Mr. Sullivan’s bookkeeping class, that crippled and cantankerous worthy, humane though he was, might very well have had his doubts about recommending so dense a scholar as Ira for any kind of job (and he did so again later).

He was to report for work Monday to the Park & Tilford store on 126th Street and Lenox Avenue. Weekdays, his regular hours of employment were from three-thirty in the afternoon until 6:00 P.M. Saturdays, all day, from 8:30 A.M. to closing time at 6:00 P.M. His pay would be five dollars per week.

Oh, it was long, long, long ago. . Mom cautioned him as he dressed with nervous haste in the morning before school, to show respect to everyone, do as he was told with cheerful mien — and try not to get his blue serge suit soiled before reporting for work that afternoon, to all of which he made irritable acknowledgment. And in his best shirt and tie, with an extra nickel for lunch, and with Mom’s blessings, off to Madison Avenue, explaining to schoolmates he met along the route past Mt. Morris Park the reason he was “all dressed up.” And to Mr. Conway, his homeroom teacher as well, just in case the class was kept for misbehavior. They weren’t. And as soon as school was dismissed for the day, away Ira went.

And away he went toward Lenox Avenue, trying to restrain his gait, not break into a trot — and break into a sweat that would mar his holiday nattiness, spoil the impression he was about to make as someone suitable for the cloudy negotiations he would soon be engaged in, as the manager’s right-hand man, or assigned to other financial duties requiring charm and tact and deference. He waited for a minute outside the richly arranged store windows for his excited panting to subside, took a fresh grip of his strap of books, and with the letter in the other hand, he entered the richly aromatic, richly subdued mahogany demesne. The elderly, dignified gentleman in wing-collar and white boutonniere in his lapel, who was stationed behind the tobacco and mineral-water counter, directed Ira to the manager’s desk.

It was in the center of the store, and Ira approached in a haze of anxiety and deference. On a podium, before a rolltop desk surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, sat Mr. Stiles, like a monarch reigning over a dozen clerks in tan jackets busily writing on yellow pads on a long dark counter, in front of which well-dressed patrons were seated on high revolving stools. They were ordering all manner of select comestibles, judging from the glistening array of glass jars on the counter, or the bags of aromatic coffee the clerks were busily removing from under the two showy red and gold electric grinders behind them.

Saturnine and thin, Mr. Stiles looked up from his desk. He had straight, mousy hair, combed back and parted on the side. His tongue nudged the quid of tobacco behind his cheek as Ira proffered the letter.

“So you’re Ira Stigman?” he returned the letter.

“Yes, sir.”

“Ever work for Park and Tilford before?”

“No, sir.”

Mr. Stiles leaned over the side of his armchair, drooled a trickle of tobacco juice into the brass cuspidor just below, and stood up. “All right, Ira, come with me.”

“Yes, sir.” Ira felt as if his eagerness to please would burst through his skin.

He followed Mr. Stiles down a flight of stairs into the brightly lit cellar. Rows and rows of shelves filled with all manner of tins and glass jars stretched away toward the rear. In front, at the bottom of the stairs, two men in tan jackets were removing grocery items — canned goods, small fancy packages and string-tied paper bags — from the expanse of a wide zinc-sheathed table dominated by two tremendous spools of string. The two clerks fit the items neatly into a huge wicker hamper. Mr. Stiles introduced Ira to a short, sturdy, brisk man with curly brown hair, standing assertively on legs, not bowed but oddly concave, and speaking — with an unmistakable Jewish accent. He was Mr. Klein. He was the shipping clerk. He held a sheaf of small invoices in his hand. In the buttonhole on his jacket lapel, he wore the small bronze star that Ira had come to recognize as the badge of the World War veteran.

“Where’s Harvey?” Mr. Stiles asked.

“Down here somewhere. Harvey!” Mr. Klein called.

“Rightchere.”

“He’s over at the sink.”

Mr. Stiles crooked his finger at Ira to follow. Midway of the cellar, at one side, the sleek, muscular porter was churning soapy water in the deep, enameled utility sink, churning the water with a mop. “Right here, Mr. Stiles.” He held the mop handle between powerful hands. His palm was pale against the mop-handle, his face gravely alert; on his tan jacket he too wore the same emblem as Mr. Klein.

“Harvey, that elevator sump is getting pretty bad, don’t you think?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Stiles.”

“Will you show this young fellow — Ira?”

Ira bobbed with alacrity.

“Show him how to clean it out, would you?”

“Yes, sir!”

“When he finishes that, send him over to Mr. Klein. He’ll tell you what to do next,” Mr. Stiles instructed.

“Yes, sir.”

At Harvey’s suggestion, Ira hung up his jacket in the toilet next to the sink. Harvey wrung out the mop between the rollers of the big pail, emptied it into the sink, got a wide, flat shovel out of the sink closet, gave it to Ira, and carrying the pail himself, led Ira over to the elevator used to lift or lower freight to and from the sidewalk. The elevator platform had been raised out of the way to street level. Down below, a couple of feet lower than the cellar floor, the massive spindle around which the elevator cable was wound stretched like a bridge above the surface of a square pond of inky, malodorous water. “You just stand on that axle,” said Harvey. “I’ll hand you the bucket an’ shovel.”

That was his stint: to clean out the sump by scooping up the muck with the shovel and emptying it into the bucket. When he had filled the bucket as nearly full as he dared, because he had to hoist it to floor level while balancing himself on the motor housing, he clambered up, lugged the bucket to the utility sink and dumped it. So this was the nice job he had dressed up so neatly for, Ira thought sullenly. Lousy bastard manager, why didn’t he let the porter do it? That’s what the porter was for. Still — the presentiment kept recurring as he crouched to scoop up the foul sludge — maybe he was being tested. They were testing him, he bet. If only he weren’t wearing his good Bar Mitzvah suit, his only good suit for weddings and special occasions, why did they have to do it just then? But that wasn’t their fault; that was his fault for harboring such nutty illusions, for being so anxious to please. For all the care he took to keep clear of spatters, he already had a dozen spots on his knee-pants. And look at his knees — smudges from the sump walls climbing out. Well, he couldn’t help it. Whatever Mom said, he was earning money, five dollars per week.

He must have emptied the bucket a dozen times. Slowly the tarry water-level lowered. And each time he made the round trip to the sink and back, he used the occasion to make covert reconnaissance of the cellar. There, beyond the sink, was a very large icebox with glass doors. One side was locked, the other unlocked. Behind the glass doors of the locked side, he could see fruit he had never dreamed of: orange-colored smooth shapes, small and large, others chocolate-colored, others purple, all luscious-seeming and all choice. There were other fruits still that he recognized but had never tasted: grapes green and long, grapes round and ruddy, apples of unmistakable ripeness and succulence: pears, plums, peaches, apricots, cherries, tangerines. What a store! If he ever got his hands on them.

Behind the glass of the unlocked icebox were homelier, but still-tempting foods: cheeses, whole wheels of them, whole pineapple-shapes of them, and small crocks of cheese too — at least, the labels said so: cheddar cheese in wine. Whoever heard of cheddar cheese? Who ever heard of cheese in wine? Probably it wasn’t kosher; that was why he had never heard of it. Packages of butter and cartons of eggs. Just wait, just wait till he knew his way around. And look at that aisle across the way: fancy cans of salmon. Cans of lobster and crab that weren’t kosher, and what was that small jar? Beluga what? Caviar. Sardines he knew. But what were anchovies? Tiny little tins, he’d have to ask somebody. And that next aisle that he skirted about shiftily with empty bucket when no one was paying attention: Woo! Kumquats in syrup, what the hell were kumquats, chestnut glacé, figs he knew, but gooseberries, loganberries — maybe Mr. Kilcoyne could tell him. He knew all about fruit and vegetables. And that! Strangest of all: at the end of the cellar, double-padlocked, sealed, dusty, dirty, thick steel-bar lattice— Oh, he knew what that was, could see through to spider-webbed, dusty bottles: Inside was all that was against the law. Prohibition, that was why.

At length, after many pailfuls had been scooped up, miry patches of concrete began to show through the muck; then the damp floor of the sump itself, which he tried to scrape clean. He called Harvey for his verdict.

“You do it any better, you spoil it, kid.”

“What?”

“Just go on and wash that bucket and shovel.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s right. And the sink, who’ll clean that?”

“You want me to clean it?”

“Ain’t nobody else gonna do it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then see what Mr. Klein wants.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Klein wanted him to wash his face and hands first. And when Ira returned from the sink, “How’d he do?” Mr. Klein asked Harvey, on his way to the stairs with pointed ladder, pail and squeegee.

“Oh, comme çi, comme ça,” Harvey twirled the squeegee easily.

Mr. Klein winked at his assistant, who stole up behind Harvey as he mounted the first step, and with tweety, clucking chirp, goosed him.

Harvey’s whole frame convulsed: “Jesus, man, don’t do that!” Water splashed out of his pail. “Man!” His eyes opened into a glare. “Jesus, man, I’ve told you. I almost jumped off a box car when someone did that to me while I was coming north!” He sidled warily up the stairs.

“Ever see anybody so goosy, Walt?” Mr. Klein grinned at his returning assistant.

“Me? Never.” Walt, short and round, who also wore a veteran’s emblem in the lapel of his tan jacket, reached for an item on the zinc-sheathed table. “I’ve seen goosy colored guys, but he’s the goosiest. You know, Black Jack Pershing commanded a black regiment when he went after the greasers in Mexico. Can you imagine what those guys were like? All Pancho Villa woulda had to do was order his troops to goose ’em.”

“Yeah. Pershine wouldn’t hev no army left.”

“The Mexicans woulda had a field day, Klein.”

“Yeh.”

“Jesus, you didn’t git my gag. Did you?” he addressed Ira.

“I don’t know. A field day?”

“Listen, Ira is your name?” Mr. Klein asked. “You see these small brown bags and this sugar in the barrel — did you ever weigh anything?”

“Lay anything?” asked the clerk named Walt.

“All right. You can go upstairs to the counter,” said Mr. Klein. “I got a new assistant.”

“Anything you say.” And to Ira: “Look out for that guy. He’s a slave driver.”

“Okay, already.” Mr. Klein dismissed his assistant, who walked from behind the counter and proceeded to climb up the stairs. And addressing Ira, he pointed to a barrel: “You see this? You know what it is?”

Ira looked. The barrel was half full of familiar white crystals. “It’s sugar.”

“Det’s right.” Mr. Klein pointed an accusing finger at Ira. “Can your mother get sugar?”

“Gee, no. She has to go all over.”

“So now you understand. The sugar is scarce nowadays. We give only a half pound to a customer. We’re Hooverizing. Other things don’t make so much difference, but sugar I want you to weigh it out, not more and not less. But just!” The index finger of the threatening hand curled around to join the thumb in a threatening loop. “I’ll show you the first one. You’re Jewish?”

“Yeh.”

“All right. So you got a Jewish kupf. Now watch me. This is a half-pound weight.” He set the round half-pound counter on one of the white platforms of the scale, and rapidly at first and then more slowly, let the sugar dribble from the scoop in his hand into the paper bag, the weighted platform barely lifted. “Farshtest? Okay. Det’s all. Try to be fest, but it should be right.” He then showed Ira how to tie up the bag, yanking twine from a giant cone of it at the end of the table, whipping twine around the small paper package and forming a bight to snap the twine. “You’ll get the heng of it,” he watched Ira at his first awkward attempt, then went back to matching groceries to his invoices, stowing the items in one of the big hampers. Once in awhile, he would stop and consult a small red New York City street guide that he kept next to him on the zinc-sheathed table. “You know where 124th Street is?” he asked in peculiarly Jewish statement, when Ira had weighed out and tied about twenty or so bags.

“124th Street? That’s where I go to the library.”

Mr. Klein regarded Ira gravely a moment. “You go to the library. So, all right. Come with me.”

“Now?”

“Of course now. V’im lo akhsav, matai? Do you know any Hebrew?”

“No.” Ira followed him. “Yeah, maybe baruch atoo adonoi.”

“And you went to cheder.”

“Yeah. But I didn’t like it there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I liked it better on 9th Street.”

“That’s where you lived?”

“Yeah. 749 East 9th Street.”

“So why did you like it better there?”

Ira shrugged. “Everybody in the block went to cheder.”

“Aha. So okay.” Mr. Klein stopped before the locked glass door of the icebox, took the ring of keys off its clip on his belt. “You know what a steamer besket is?” He unlocked the glass door, stooped down, and as Ira was about to repeat wonderingly, “steamer basket,” brought out from the bottom shelf the most breathtaking basket Ira had ever seen, beautiful in its wicker weaving, its high, graceful handle, and piled high with most of the glorious fruit with which that part of the icebox was stocked, a mound of diverse fruits interspersed with bonbons, mints and jellies and jars of mixed shelled nuts. The contents were all bounded by a stiff, transparent canopy of celluloid, made fast to the basket rim by several windings of cord.

“Gee!”

“Now, listen,” said Mr. Klein severely. “I want you should deliver this to the party that’s on the ticket here. To them and nobody else. Farshtest? It cost more gelt than I make week. So no—” He frowned, cocked his head, and once again shook a cautionary manual circle at Ira. “No mistakes. It says where and who. It’s all right on the ticket here. Merrill. You should go to 27 West 124th Street. You ain’t a kid. Just make sure.”

“And when do I go?”

“When do you go?” Mr. Klein laughed shortly, hopelessly. “I told you. Tonight. This evening. Right now. You’ll get your jecket and your kep, and you’ll go this evening. You got the name and the address. It’s dark already, so make sure you’re in the right place.”

“I know how the numbers go.”

“Sehr gut. And after you deliver it, you go home. Thet’s all. Now get your jecket and kep, and come to the table.”

The gorgeous basket was waiting for Ira on the tabletop and beside it stood Mr. Klein: “It’s all paid for. Just make sure you’re in the right place. Merrill is the name. See the tag? 27 West 124th Street. Near Fifth Avenue—”

“I tell you, I know the place!”

“No becktalks, you hear?”

“All right.”

“And pavollyeh, you know what that is?” he lowered his voice as he nodded his head. “Easy. Don’t squeeze it. Hold it like that. It’s Park and Tilford.”

Ira curved his arm through the high handle and around the basket gingerly.

VI

A car bomb explodes beside a mosque, bringing Shiite reprisal against Israel, and distracting the writer from his narrative. In fact, the Syrians may be behind the provocation. When will the cold-blooded, pitiless slaughter end? Who knows — if in fact it will ever end? Scapegoat of the world, Israel. Equally gruesome, but naturally affecting me less, Vietnam warring against the Khmer Rouge, the Soviets in Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq mass-murdering each other’s civilian populations. What does that amount to, as they were wont to say in Maine. The blood-libel still lives in many parts of the world. Dr. Maarouf al Dawalibi, advisor to the king and the Saudi Arabian delegate, said at a conference on religious tolerance held in Geneva last December: “The Talmud states that ‘If a Jew does not drink every year the blood of a non-Jewish man, then he will be damned for eternity.’”. .

As one broods on this piece of lunacy, there seems to be only one solution: Get rid of religion! If the human race is to be preserved, is to be prevented from annihilating itself, then Marxist-Socialist atheism offers the only salvation, Marxist-Socialist-atheist-cum-coercion. The Jews go, the Mea Shearim kinkies with their foot-long earlocks go, as do the rabid cuckoos of other persuasions, with their purdahs and muezzins. What other way out is there? They’ll be destroying one another with fanatic frenzy till kingdom come. But no, but no, I’m wrong. That’s not the decisive element in the peace-making process. Oh, hell, I’m wildly wrong. What religious difference enters into the warfare between Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge, between China and Vietnam, China and Russia, South Korea, North Korea, Iraq, Iran? Damn little, or none. So? Where am I? What is, or what are, the true reasons for strife between nations that generate this slaughter? The same “old” thing: material interests. Economic considerations, strategic advantage, expansion of territory, increased power. . Alas.

My mood is further thickened by a long-distance call last night from Jane in Toronto. Most unsettling, most distressing. This time not about my son Jess and his behavior in the framework of my “theories.” No, my theories are underlined. Jess begins to assume justification: His remark, which she produced, jotted down in red ballpoint on a slip of paper when he temporarily quit the premises, re his no longer being able to cope with her demons, now takes on validity in the light of fresh information. As M said, and that was the least or most favorable thing one could say, that she, Jane, was making no effort to cope. More, much more, could be added, could be brought to bear that would give the picture its grievous, disturbing chiaroscuro: She has been subject to a violent tirade (whose particulars she said were in a letter on the way) by her male roommate, who insulted her, inveighed against her on all sorts of grounds, which she construes as arising from his own frustrated love affair with some infidelitous woman. “Mapped,” as it were, or translated into the temperament of the other individual, his tirade has a disquieting similarity to Jess’s aspersions, figurative attribution of demons. In both cases the accusations seemed to arise from the same cause: Jane’s aberrant state or eccentric behavior. To label her conduct eccentric would put the most charitable construction on her actions: Less charitably, they smack of paranoia.

Secondly, and probably of great import, her doctor has suggested that Jane enter a psychiatric hospital “for a rest, a bed and decent meals.” One can make too much of this, or it may be no less than one makes of it: the girl needs psychiatric help. Her opposition to the doctor’s suggestions, based on two counts, was adamant, almost irrationally inflexible: No, she was not going to leave the place she now lodges in, with her “batty” roommate, from whom it would seem any normal person would flee, no matter where (Is it that her cat keeps her there?). She is also disallowed unemployment support, or a dole, because presumably she is cohabiting with the room-owner, or partner.

The doctor’s suggestion, to return to that, which was also accompanied by the explanation that she could not be admitted to a “normal” or general hospital because her physical condition didn’t warrant ordinary medical care, the doctor’s suggestion may have been a way of buffering the alarm, dissipating the stigma of staying in a mental institution. She resisted the suggestion, because she would then be segregated with mental cases — though I assured her as one who had spent four years as a psychiatric aide that she would be safe enough and need have no fear, less perhaps than sharing living quarters with somebody who raved dementedly at her.

No. She was not to be budged. Not an iota of consideration would she give the idea. Employed in the Augusta State Hospital thirty-five years ago, I invented the mnemonic, CIO, the initials of the words for the signs whose absence indicates psychosis in a patient: Contact. Insight. Orientation. And it begins to appear, say a strong hint anyway, that Jane lacks the second of the three mainstays of normalcy. What a shattering intimation!

VII

Harvey and Ira passed each other on the stairs, as Ira climbed up from cellar to store level. Lavishly electric-lit and yet mellowed by spreading stained-glass lampshades, the store looked rich and reserved. Though it was near closing time, a surprising number of customers still sat on the stools in front of the counters, mostly men. Perhaps they were businessmen picking up some article on the way home. Clerks in tan jackets behind the dark counters respectfully jotted down orders on pads, held up an item for a customer’s approval. How dignified, polite — Ira tried not to stare. Or sniff too overtly. What was that square tin the clerk was displaying? Supreme Olive Oil. And the other clerk — that was Walt — saying, “Capers, yes, sir.” What were those? Mr. Stiles was absent from his central podium. Mr. MacAlaney was the assistant manager, Mr. Klein had told Ira, and was the one who made up the steamer baskets. A bronze-blond, curly-haired man who wore gold-rimmed glasses looked up from his pad on the counter, saw what Ira was carrying, and squinted strictly.

“Only half a day today?” The dignified, white-haired clerk in the wing-collar inquired from his station behind the tobacco counter.

“Huh? I’m still workin’. I got this, this basket I gotta deliver.”

“Oh, yes, that’s right. Where to?”

“Here in Harlem. 124th Street.”

“Mr. Klein let you off early?”

Ira looked at the large store clock on the wall above the shelves of obviously select tobacco in jars and cans. The time was twenty minutes to six. “I don’t know.”

“He’s a good fellow that way, Mr. Klein. And sharp. You two ought to get along fine.”

“I gotta go.”

“That’s right. You’ve got to go there still. Is the basket heavy?”

By now, Ira sensed something ulterior in the stately old clerk’s queries, ulterior and unkind, quizzical. Meant to delay him? Make sport of him? You two ought to get along fine. Crafty ascendancy had to have its butt, especially if it was a Jewish one. “No, sir. It’s not heavy.” He made for the door.

“It’s just a feather.”

A smarting laugh followed him as he opened it. Fuckin’ old bastard, what’d I do to him? He merged with the home-going crowd on Lenox Avenue, heaved into the street from the darkly crammed subway kiosk at 125th Street. His first day on the job — elation took the sting out of resentment: He did that dirty, lousy work, cleaned out under the elevator — what’d he call it? Sump. Some sump. And wait’ll Mom saw his blue knee-pants. Ooh, ooh, pants from his nearly new Bar Mitzvah suit. Oy, yoy, yoy. Wait till he told her he weighed out sugar. Like gold, she’ll say. And Mr. Klein, gee, lucky he was Jewish. You two ought to get along fine, the old bastard — but Mom would say, Azoy? She’d say, Tockin gliklikh. Lucky. Tockin. And this basket. Wait till he told her about that. What fruits and jellies. You should see. More than Mr. Klein’s wages.

Ira waited for the cop on his high pedestal at the intersection of 125th and Lenox to pivot his Stop and Go signal-vanes, wave white-gloved hands and whistle. “I’m big now,” Ira told himself. . crossed to the south side of 125th.

They are all dead, they are all dead—the thought cleaved to him as he was about to press the “escape” key and “save” what he had done for the day. You hear, Ecclesias, they are all dead. If I was thirteen at the time, and the year was 1919, and am now seventy-nine, it is sixty-six years later. Surely, not one was less than five years older than I was — who can be alive? Not that pompous old roué of an ex-wine and fine liquor clerk, dust and skeleton. Not Mr. Stiles, not Mr. MacAlaney — oh, perhaps the youngest of them: Tommy perhaps, Quinn’s helper on the delivery truck. Still, there are some World War I veterans alive, quavering, ailing, feeble. Who knew them as World War I veterans then? They were just World War veterans, or Great War veterans. There would be no other, Woodrow Wilson promised, no other, no second Great War.

— And you?

Yes, and I. My stint is soon over, Ecclesias.

“It’s four o’clock,” says the dear and matter-of-fact voice of M, who has borne with me and sustained me these many years. “Want me to ring the curfew?”

“I’ll have to think of that. Is that the right term? Curfew? Or knell?”

VIII

With basket still delicately perched on hip, he walked along Lenox Avenue to the next block, and turned east into 124th Street. Night and new responsibility altered the appearance of the otherwise familiar route. Halfway toward Fifth Avenue, the rows of brownstones on either side of the dark, quiet street faced each other. But not after the short avenue called Mt. Morris Park West; that was the west boundary of Mt. Morris Park. After that, there was only a single row of brownstone houses, and instead of facing other brownstones, they faced the lamp-lit park. The library’s gray front still lay ahead. Anxiously he kept his eyes on the decreasing numbers above the transoms — what would he do if the number were wrong, if he couldn’t find the place? That was the thing he dreaded most, dreaded above all else, that dogged him all the time: his bungling of errands. “A hundert un taiteent Street,” the owner of the button shop had sent him to, and Ira had gone to 118th Street. And that time he waited for Pop on the wrong corner with his tuxedo-package for a banquet — never, never would he forget his joy at seeing a man approaching: Pop, at last! In every way it was Pop — Ira ran to meet him — and it wasn’t! And waiting for the Madison Avenue trolley car with Pop’s meal. . and daydreaming, until Pop yelled at him from the trolley platform.

Oh, no! He’d have to hurry back to the store if he were wrong. Would it still be open? What a disgrace! Or horrible alternative: He’d have to carry the basket home to 119th Street — the beautiful basket through ugly 119th Street — and up the ugly stairs. And Mom saying, Vus i’ dis? and Pop saying, Uhuh! Er hut shoyn ufgeteen. He did it again. And of course, the manager would fire him. The first day. No, maybe he could run back in the morning before school. Even if he was late: “I’ll go, I’ll go, Mr. Klein. Please tell me where.” But maybe all the fruit wouldn’t be fresh anymore — Ah! here it was: 27 in shining gold numbers, and with automobiles in front of it.

He climbed the outer flight of stairs — prayerfully. And just as he pressed the doorbell button, he felt a strong misgiving. Was he supposed to go upstairs? Wasn’t he was supposed to go downstairs, where the steel door was? He turned to skip down, but too late: The front door was already opening, and the courtly gentleman, smiling cordially and expectantly, with head lifted to greet an adult guest, looked down—

“I made a mistake,” Ira pleaded. “I–It’s—” He pointed downstairs, “It’s from Park and Tilford.”

“Oh? Really? Is it for Merrill?” The gentleman inquired urbanely.

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Merrill. 27 West.”

“Raymond, do let him in,” a woman’s voice called from the interior.

“Certainly, dear. Come in.” The courtly man laughed delightedly as Ira entered the hall, and in utter confusion, was guided to a spacious drawing room, where someone said, a seated lady said: “Not a Prohibition agent, thank Heavens!” And the laughter of everyone rolled over him like a billow.

And now he saw what he had done: Under the brilliant facets of the chandelier hanging from the high ceiling, ladies, displaying long ropes of pearls and beads and wearing small, clinging hats, sat on contoured velvety chairs smoking cigarettes in long cigarette holders. And attending them stood gentlemen in dark suits and narrow trousers, with small neckties knotted in high, starched collars and gold watch-chains suspended before their vests. Two women in small aprons and frilly caps, bearing trays laden with curiously shaped morsels of food, moved about among the gathering, offering the delicacies, more often declined than accepted. And a man in striped trousers and a swallow-tail jacket replenished the shallow bowls of long-stemmed glasses out of a bottle with a napkin around it. A bubbly wine winked at the rim of the glass, and there was a scent of wine even through the cigarette smoke. He had butted into a party.

Awkwardly holding out the basket, Ira pulled off his cap. “This is the basket,” he stammered.

Again laughter rolled toward him. With a kind smile, the gentleman who let him in relieved Ira of his burden with a “Thank you.” And glancing at the tag: “You, Myrtle!” he accused one of the ladies lightly. “Only you could have thought of this!”

“Gorgeous! What delectable fruit. Oh, look at those cunning little pots of jam!” The guests chorused, as he set the basket down on a round, veined, marble-topped table.

“I think we’d better open it now, don’t you, dear?” the courtly gentlemen asked one of the seated women in dark green dress with green involucres.

“I should think we’d better, while everyone’s here. We’ll never make an impression on it otherwise.” Everyone laughed. “Jenny, would you open it please? Thank you,” she spoke to one of the maids in the frilled caps. And to the other lady: “Myrtle, you have an absolute genius for creating an effect.”

The lady who was addressed had heavily rouged lips, purple-shadowed eyes and rings on most of the fingers on both hands. “I didn’t foresee I would have such a charming accomplice.” How arch her voice. Her eyes rested on the abashed Ira.

“I’ll show you out,” said the courteous gentleman.

“Thanks, mister,” Ira followed him only too eagerly.

“You can see your way down the stairs?”

“Yes, sir. Sure.”

“Here’s something for your trouble.”

“I didn’t—” Ira began to say, stopped when he felt the two coins in his hand, said fervently: “Thanks.”

“Thank you. Good night.” The door closed between the smiling gentleman and Ira.

He descended the steps to the street, with its line of automobiles at the curb, and as he turned east, noted that two or three of the vehicles had chauffeurs in them, black limousines with uniformed chauffeurs who eyed him as he passed. Rich. Gee. So high class. He examined the coins in the light of the library windows. Fifteen cents. Boy. Spending money.

Out of habit, he crossed the street, followed the course of the iron palings before the park until he reached the Fifth Avenue entrance, went in and skirted the base of the hill on the Madison Avenue side. Rich, so that was rich? That was being rich, that was — oh, he knew the word: taste. Taste. And manners. It made you dream: high ceiling and crystal chandelier and ladies with double ropes of pearls and holding bubbly wine glasses. And the mustached gentleman who lit the lady’s cigarette. Dotted gold and chocolate wallpaper with little ribs in it. Checkered floors. Rich. Was it just a lot of money that made you that? Ira could feel a kind of sinking of spirit as he walked toward 120th. No. It was what Uncle Louie said. . You had to be that way — not Jewish. Not just rich, but with that special luster, that style. Where was there a world like that for him? Where?

With the fifty-cent allowance each week that Mom accorded me out of my wage, I saved up enough to buy an Ingersoll dollar watch with a “radium” dial. You could hold the watch under the featherbed in the thickest gloom and the dial would cast a faint light within the tiny grotto, enough to illuminate it. What an enticement! Like the angler fish (See Webster’s Collegiate, definition 2). Would I have walked home that evening thinking those thoughts, already in that particular rut I was avid to deepen, as if I knew nothing more than my surrogate knew? Or not plotting, machinating, wheedling toward oh, that Sunday morning, with what I could contrive with fifteen cents?

— Obviously not.

What a burden, Ecclesias. One sometimes sits back, and tries physically, yes, physically, to clear away the cloudy placenta that encloses one, and tries to sense, by an effort of will, perceive, if only for a moment, what life would have been like without it. Would I not have been buoyant to the skies? Fifteen cents, yippee! A chocolate éclair bought with my own nickel in the corner bakery next to P.S. 24, or a flaky, custardy napoleon. What else, what else could a kid buy with his fifteen cents in the year 1919? Admission to a movie. An ice-cream soda for a dime. My lambikin at the other end of the mobile home, what would she have bought in the glorious, strict innocence of her girlhood? An Eskimo Pie? When Uncle Bub came to visit them in Chicago, rich Uncle Bub, and took the family out to dinner: Oh, baked Alaska she always ordered. But I—

— You saved up your money, and bought an Ingersoll watch.

I went spelunking.

IX

The Park & Tilford branch where I worked was on 126th Street and Lenox Avenue, and P.S. 24 was on 127th–128th Street between Madison and Fifth. A distance of only about three city blocks separated the two places, an easy distance to cover in the half-hour between the closing of the school day and the beginning of my stint at the store.

On weekdays, when not running errands, fetching some item from another P & T store, getting the assistant manager’s, Mr. MacAlaney’s, Gillette blades rehoned at the shop that performed that kind of service on Third Avenue, or delivering a sumptuous basket of fruit to someone’s home, I made myself useful about the store: I replenished the shelves down in the cellar, or refilled the coffee bins upstairs, or weighed out staples in brown paper bags on the scales on the expanse of the zinc-sheathed table downstairs. Most often, though, I spent my time assisting Mr. Klein, the shipping clerk. Stocky, spry and decisive, Mr. Klein was responsible for stowing grocery orders — with due regard to logistics — into the huge hampers that were loaded aboard the trucks every morning. Weekday afternoons I helped him pack the hampers to be ready for loading aboard the trucks the following morning. Saturdays, I was dispatched aboard one of the trucks myself.

The year was 1919, and in the larger and imposing apartment houses, goods were still delivered via dumbwaiter. Hence dumbwaiters became almost a way of life for me. This was true on Saturdays and frequently on weekdays too, a way of life and an ordeal: dumbwaiters in the dim basements of apartments on West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, dumbwaiters in Broadway apartment houses, dumbwaiters in the new concrete complexes in the Bronx. Unfamiliar with their location, especially at first, with a poor sense of direction and often too muddled by overanxiety to follow directions when given, I wandered at times in a veritable panic among square columns and labyrinthian cement partitions, seeking the dumbwaiter whose roster contained the name corresponding to the name on the list of groceries in my wooden box.

Ah, to locate at last the right name next to the right button, press it, and hear the door open overhead, see light slash across the dark shaftway, and announce, “Park and Tilford,” place my box of groceries in the double-tiered conveyor, yank on the scratchy rope, until I had reached approximately the right altitude, and then try to satisfy instructions from above, “A little higher,” or, “A little lower,” and finally, “Wait. Hold it!” And at length, after being thanked, haul my box down at an accelerating clip that brought the dumbwaiter conveyor thudding to the bottom. Delivery accomplished, a fully successful mission meant being able to retrace my steps to the street on which the truck was parked, and doing so within a reasonable time. All three drivers, Shea, Quinn and Murphy — and Quinn’s regular helper, Tommy Feeney, only a little older than myself — were vastly amused with me, when at last I came out of the maze, blinking at the daylight.

Once, after the Thanksgiving holidays, I found an extra dollar in my pay envelope, $6 instead of $5; and I went about bragging that I had been given a raise for exemplary services. Said the stately, wing-collared, old roué, once purveyor of fine wines and liquors, but now, with Prohibition, reduced to waiting behind the cigar and tobacco counter: “The P and T never gives raises.”

I thought he was just being mean because I was Jewish, but it turned out he was right: I had earned the extra dollar because Quinn had claimed two hours’ overtime for himself and crew — probably, at least in part, on account of my bemused, belated meanderings in quest of dumbwaiters in the cavernous, concrete basements in the Bronx, and then in quest of the correct egress. .

In the old-fashioned, smaller apartment houses and the sedate brownstones, especially those on the north and west side of Mt. Morris Park and others in the neighborhood of the store, deliveries were usually made without benefit of dumbwaiter. When Mr. Klein sent me out with Shea, who drove the Model-T truck that made only local stops, I would revert to an older and simpler form of delivering my groceries. I would climb up the stairs with the apple-box under my arm. I liked that way of delivering groceries much better than I did via dumbwaiter, because that way, there were no agonizing uncertainties and bewilderments, and besides, I might get a tip.

I also got a chance to see how a different class of people lived, refined Gentiles, not like those in the slum I lived in, the “dumps,” as everyone called them: the cold-water flats on East 119th Street, but Gentile people in comfortable circumstances, whose homes didn’t always have a picture of Jesus on the wall pointing to his exposed, crimson heart. Sometimes I would be rewarded by the sight of a dignified gentleman in leather house-slippers and velvet smoking jacket with satiny collar, puffing at a meerschaum pipe. Sometimes, I would be invited into the kitchen by the lady of the house, still wearing her lovely, figured, silk dressing gown. And more than once, while engrossed in my task of unloading the groceries on the kitchen table, I might feel the fingers of a hand run delicately through my hair, and look up at the roguish, dimpled face of a woman who seemed to wonder at herself for doing what she did: “You don’t mind?”

“No, ma’am,” I would assure her in worldly fashion. “Some other ladies did that already.”

“Did they? I’m not surprised. What a woman wouldn’t give for a curly head of hair like yours.”

X

. . He heard a thud in the living room, heard a thud, and couldn’t identify it: “Are you all right?” he called.

“I was just being careless,” M called back. “I’m all right.”

“You fell. Poor kid. What’d you trip over?”

“I won’t tell you.” Her voice was girlish. She had already gotten to her feet and was walking toward the kitchen.

Girlish. The mind singled out the thought amid the welter of recollections of her previous falls, her all-too-frequent tumbles: that time in Florence when they were walking one evening with Mario M, the Italian translator of his novel, when she tripped over some unevenness in the sidewalk and fell before anyone could catch her. Her glasses were broken, her brow and nose lacerated. Foot-drop was the cause, the aftermath of her months’ long immobilization, a quasi-paralysis brought on by an undiagnosable form of myelitis, akin to Guillaume-Barre syndrome. So much had to go before, so many episodes, so much “history” was needed to render with any justice the sketchiest of preambles to the subject of her girlishness, girlishness behind the wrinkled, dear exterior of the grandmother. It was within that girlishness he had achieved his regeneration, such as it was, attained an improved adulthood — what to say? — an image of a self more acceptable, a less repugnant identity.

. . And reached that stage — ironically, always ironically — when he was already within the defunctive zone, the end zone, when again and again thoughts reverted to dead friends, vanished times, lost opportunities. Worst of all, they, those dead friends and vanished times, too, had left so little trace within him, so little enduring deposition of themselves, so that he could accurately recall, substantially recall, the topical contentions, the subject matter, the eddies of difference or agreement or opposition that formed and changed in those days, the chafings and chafferings, the diversions and discontents, the actual content of them, in their detail, with their particular formulations. Ah, he had not listened enough! Most often only simulated listening. He had not been involved, had not come to grips, profoundly, thoughtfully agreed, or passionately disagreed. He had been essentially unaffected.

He thought of Joyce: How many times it had been noted that, by abandoning Ireland in order to embrace the “great universal culture” of Europe, Ireland was nonetheless all he wrote about — confined, parochial Ireland. In short, he couldn’t assimilate the great cosmopolitan “universal” Western culture that surrounded him on the European continent, to which he now had unlimited access. Why? Or why not? Another Irishman, Bernard Shaw, also of Dublin, though not a Catholic, had quit Ireland some twenty years before Joyce, without fanfare, posture or manifesto, but as a practical step, gone to live in England and had exploited easily, without let, Europe’s foibles, mores, divertingly, successfully. In a word he had been able to “use” European culture as a writer, a playwright. Why? Quite simply, perhaps too simply, because he contended actively with current ideas and biases and issues.

Joyce had not, deliberately had not. He skipped Ireland precisely to dodge having to deal with ideology. “Silence, exile, cunning,” borrowed from some religious order, had been his practice (he said). And why had he adopted that rule? He had made a virtue of necessity, in all likelihood. He had become locked into himself, for some reason, even as Ira had become locked into himself, locked into his “mind forged manacles,” to quote Blake. To have striven with him, to have riven them, fought to emancipate himself from his vast ego, might indeed have brought him closer to his touted slogan than the course he took, might not indeed have taken its toll of desuetude. Whereas to accept his hermetic ego, exploit it, projecting his Freudian bonds on Bloom, the nominal Jew, promised him the foremost place in twentieth-century English letters, a promise that was fulfilled. He stored up creative static for one supreme discharge.

And to an incomparably lesser extent, so did he, Ira; he did likewise, who now was left with the realization that the good heart, the kind and affectionate, the discerning, loyal and understanding heart was far more precious than artistic acclaim. Here in this defunctive zone, where he felt himself verging ever closer to all that had vanished, at last came this wisdom, accrued from the woman who would not be deterred from loving him — and with the wisdom won from her came its minion: humility. Pity Joyce — Ira thought in passing — not only did the guy marry a functional illiterate, but unlike Blake, such was the man’s monumental ego he made no effort to raise her to his level, as Blake did, which had he done, might have gone far to restore him to his folk, by her sweet discernment, her intelligent devotion: “In God’s intention a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage. . ” So said John Milton. One might ponder here whether a meet and happy conversation might not in the end make all the difference between a fruitful and a sterile erudition, between a fruitful reunion with his people, and a sterile dallying with his medium. .

XI

I became knowledgeable about the store, perhaps too knowledgeable — especially about the basement. I knew where every variety of viands was kept, what aisle, what shelf. Only the fresh fruit locked in the icebox, and that musty, spider-webbed wine and whiskey bunker, cross-barred and double-locked and sealed with stamped, leaden seals were beyond my prying — and my tasting. Left alone to replenish stock from newly arrived cartons, whenever possible I nibbled or savored any contents that were accessible, or wicked ingenuity could contrive to make so: a bright cherry or two from a jar of maraschinos, the ineffable briny delights in a wee tin of curly anchovies — which could be opened with its own key — tea biscuits and sea biscuits and dried fruit.

And I filched: a veritable gamut of dainties: a small can of fancy salmon in the pocket of my mackinaw, foil-coated wedges of Gruyère cheese, prudently distributed about my person. Eggs. During the era when the “Great Engineer,” Herbert Hoover, administered the program of economic relief for Europe, and the “high cost of living” was on everyone’s tongue, eggs were $1.20 per dozen. I brought an egg home in each pocket whenever I chose, at reasonable intervals. “Oy gevald, goniff, you’ll be caught!” was Mom’s permissive remonstrance. And sugar: The staple had become so scarce that Park & Tilford allowed only a half pound per order per customer. Not only did I purloin half-pound bags for domestic consumption, but I even made a deal with the Jewish ticket agent on the downtown side of the Lenox Avenue and 125th Street IRT subway station (which I used several times a week, and was given ten cents’ carfare to do so): a half-pound of sugar in exchange for free admission to the subway platform. It’s a wonder I wasn’t caught. But I wasn’t.

Luck held up marvelously until one afternoon when I suffered so painful an experience, it seemed to warn me of worse to come if I didn’t mend my ways (I didn’t; I just modified them slightly in the direction of greater caution). With Mr. Klein on the sidewalk, tallying incoming freight, and Harvey, the porter upstairs, attending to his duties, I sneaked over to the unlocked dairy icebox, where I had spotted earlier a freshly breached wheel of Swiss cheese. Beside it rested the broad cheese-knife. Stealthily, with eyes fixed on the stairs, ears cocked for an approaching tread, I proceeded to widen slightly the angle already cut out of the cheese. Unfortunately, I failed to notice which edge of the knife was against the cheese and which edge against my thumb, the thumb I was pressing so impetuously against the knife.

A moment later I knew only too acutely which edge was where. Blood was spurting profusely from the semisevered thumb. It was as if the cheese had reversed roles and sliced me! In panic, I dropped the knife and fled the scene — and then realized I had left the icebox shelf sprinkled with blood. And the Swiss cheese as well! And the knife too! I dashed back, dabbed frantically at the incriminating evidence but only succeeded in smearing it around. I rushed to the toilet, unreeled yards of toilet paper, and with handkerchief wrapped around my thumb to absorb if not staunch the bleeding, I soaked the toilet paper to a pulpy sponge under the faucet of the utility sink, wiped, mopped, wiped, got fresh sheets, wiped and blotted, expecting any second Mr. Klein or Harvey might come down, or worse still, Mr. MacAlaney, the assistant manager, to assemble a steamer basket. No one came down. Somehow I managed to remove all traces of telltale gore from everything, and doing all this with one hand, because the thumb of the other still dripped. I would bear the scar across my thumb for the rest of my life.

I rewound the handkerchief over sheets of toilet paper, tried to expose only the least bloody area, with not too much success, and secured the bulge of bandage with a dozen or more loops of twine from the big reel of twine on the zinc shipping table. The whole thing looked and felt like an idiot’s prosthesis, about as inconspicuous as a small bedroll.

Mr. Klein and Harvey came down together, Harvey with a dustpan full of broken glass embedded in mayonnaise.

“What’s with your hand?” Mr. Klein asked.

“I caught it on a broken — I mean a broken piece of glass.”

“Where?”

“In the trashcan. I went to stuff some wrapping paper in it.”

Harvey regarded me narrowly and walked off.

“You look like you got a hemorrhage,” said Mr. Klein. “You better go upstairs to Mr. Stiles. He’s got all that stuff for cuts in the cabinet. Maybe you need a couple of stitches. Maybe you should go to a doctor. Let’s see it.”

“Nah, it’s nothing.”

“Let’s see it. It could be something you could get blood-poisoning from.”

“Nah.”

“The store’ll pay for it. They’re insured. What’s the matter with you? They got doctors for that.”

“Nah. I’m all right.”

“Don’t blame nobody but yourself then. Boy, bist dee a yold—you know what a yold is? How’re you gonna peck a big besket of groceries with a hend like thet?”

“I can do it. I still got my other hand.”

“If you start to bleed on the peckeges from groceries, I’m sending you up to Mr. Stiles. You’re goin’ home.”

So. . the old man writing. . too imbued with literary irony to allow of self-pity, literary irony he loved so well; the old man scrivening to ward off time, while his wife in her turquoise bathrobe stands at the kitchen sink doing dishes. Recollections formed so long ago become discreet, immutable.

XII

I sit in Murphy’s truck, parked in front of a drab six-story walkup in the Bronx. An hour passes, an hour and a half. A shy young boy comes out of the doorway bearing a big wedge of coconut cream pie — for me. The boy goes back into the house; I gobble up the pie. After another interval, Murphy appears — curiously content in manner, curiously amiable. After the day’s deliveries have all been done, my full day’s work on Saturday is over. Murphy drives back to the garage, letting me off at West 119th Street. Sunday the store is closed. When I report for work the following Monday afternoon, I am interrogated by Mr. Klein: “Murphy keep you waiting outside that apartment house?” And at my vacant nod, he grins — so does Harvey; so does everyone else within hearing.

Why do Quinn and his helper, Tommy, watch me with such amusement when I sop up all the gravy around my roast beef sandwich with fresh slices of bread? They eat only one slice of bread throughout a meal; they use it as a backstop; their plates are piled high with corned beef and cabbage or baked Virginia ham and boiled potato. And the burly Irish waiter in his white apron, his shoes planted in the thick sawdust on the floor, smiles too. It is my first meal in a diner, my first conscious acceptance of a nonkosher meal. .

And now I stand emptying a burlap sack of fragrant coffee beans into the black, lacquered bin with the gold lettering that spells MOCHA; while on the other side of the counter, the well-bred lady and gentleman, seated there on the revolving stools, watch me. And in a self-conscious moment, my grip on the sack slackens; it slips from my grasp: Coffee beans patter on the floor. “Well, I got most of ’em in anyway,” I remark extenuatingly. How merry and spontaneous their laughter.

And now with a steamer basket under my arm, I walk uncertainly on the deck of an ocean liner moored to her pier on the North River, a Cunarder, engines slowly, distantly throbbing, the deck agog with passengers, their friends and well-wishers. All are bundled in wool and fur against the cold, brisk wind blowing off the river. White jacketed stewards dart in and out of the doorways of lounge and salon. Directed by a crewman, I find my way to the Purser’s Office and wait there, trying to make up my mind to knock on the door but hoping someone will come out and obviate the necessity of my doing so. Ship personnel pass me, entering and leaving. And finally, in his navy-blue uniform, the Purser (I am sure) charges out of the door with harried countenance and voice raised in irritation: “Who is this man? Where is he?” He speaks a different kind of English from that I’m accustomed to.

And I, flinching: “I got a steamer basket here for — for somebody here on the ship. Mr. and Mrs. — ” I clutch at the tag.

“Oh, is it you they meant, sonny?” He nods, as if he’s become aware of a prank. A smile displaces his irritation.

“Yes, sir. I got this basket — for this ship — Mr.—”

“All right, sonny,” he looks at the tag. “We’ll take care of it. You’ve come to the right place.”

“Yes, sir.” I hand over the elegantly heaped basket of fruit under their crinkly celluloid covering.

He seems to be laughing wickedly to himself as he takes the basket and disappears inside.

And relieved at having delivered the expensive burden in my care, I make my way back to the gangway. I move among clusters of fashionably dressed people, people jolly yet tense in leave-taking, in parting, their gestures and behavior quickened by the cold river wind sweeping over the deck. One group in particular becomes imprinted on my memory: two handsome, slender, tall young men in dark suits with narrow trousers bend in bright mirth at some witticism someone in the group has uttered. And one of the women sharing their mirth, polished in appearance, clad as befits her station in a rich fur, turns her face toward mine. She is middle-aged; her eyes glisten, yet her thoughts seem elsewhere; her eyes glisten, yet they seem remote from the laughter on her lips. The instant of our mutual survey dissolves — like the scanty smoke whipped into the taut, cold sky above the row of striped vertical stacks. I hear myself reciting the enchanting words recently read in our new textbook in English—The Ancient Mariner—which I couldn’t help reading to the end, and rereading:

The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!”

Ouoth she, and whistles thrice.

XIII

P & T YULETIDE — A SKETCH

It was Christmas Eve. And we rode homeward, Tommy and I, in the back of Quinn’s roomy panel truck, the new White. Save for a few undeliverables, all of the huge hampers were empty at last. Near midnight it was, and we lolled on the pads that were used to cover the hampers to protect the contents against the frost. The truck sped southward. And we in the back giggled in weariness at every inane remark. The truck turned east, bounded in and out of the crosstown trolley tracks of deserted 125th Street. Occasional oncoming headlights lit up Tommy’s thin-lipped, gap-toothed Irish face. Tomorrow was Christmas. Tomorrow was everyone’s day off.

“You know, you ain’t like a Jew,” said Tommy. “You’re a regg’leh guy.”

I shrugged involuntarily. “Well, I’ve been livin’ with Irish and ’Tollians now five years. Five and a half.”

“That the street we’re goin’ to?”

“Yeah, ll9th Street.”

“For Christ sake, don’t say nothin’ about me goin’ way over east,” Quinn said over his shoulder.

“All this is overtime. When we punch in at the garage, it’s all overtime.”

“Fer all of us,” Tommy added.

“Yeah, I know. It’s like Thanksgiving when I thought I got a raise.”

“He went aroun’ braggin’, I’m gittin’ six bucks a week. Did yuh hear about that, Quinn?”

“Yeah,” Quinn replied. “You got a lot to learn, kid.”

“I know it. I forgot, that’s all.”

Quinn chuckled. “You’re lucky they didn’t.”

Tommy burst into laughter. “You forgot. That’s what I mean. If you was like a real Jew, you’d never forget.”

“Well, it was Wednesday we worked those two extra hours,” Ira explained apologetically. “Then came Thanksgiving. And it was next week we got paid for it. So.”

“Thanksgiving ain’t a holiday fer Jews?”

“It don’t matter,” Ira shrugged.

“It don’t? I know Christmas ain’t.”

“No. It’s just like any day.”

“So what the hell d’you do tomorrow?”

“It’s like a Tuesday. Like a Wednesday. Only no school, that’s all.”

“You poor bastard.”

“Well, don’t rub it in. He can’t help it,” said Quinn.

“I ain’t rubbin’ it in. Honest, Quinn, I feel sorry for him because he’s a regg’leh guy. Dey don’t have no Christmas, dat’s all. No toikey dinner, no eggnogs, no Christmas tree an’ presents under it. You never believed in Santa Claus when you was a kid?”

“No.”

“See what I mean?”

“Yeah, but they got their own holidays.” Quinn kept his head fixed forward on the deserted highway, his hands moving in slight corrections of the wheel, as he spoke. “I had a buddy in the army, ‘Shnitzel,’ we called him, tall, skinny guy. He was a Jew. He told me all about their holidays. You know that guy fasted on Yom Kipper? Didn’t eat a thing an’ our unit was on leave too, way back o’ the front lines. He was always tellin’ me about Torah. That’s your holy book, right?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s in the Torah, he’d say. Or what’s that other thing? Talmud, yeah? It’s in the Talmud. He was a helluva good scout, though. He was my buddy. I used to kid him: Does the Torah tell you how to fade the dice? I asked. No, he said. It’s way too holy for that. Well, does the Talmud then? No, he said. Then what good is it? He knew I was kiddin’ him. He said, no, but the Talmud’ll tell yuh how much interest to charge. I thought that was a good one. I once asked him, What does the Talmud tell you to do if you’re goin’ over the top with fixed bayonets an’ you meet another Jew? I say. What does a Christian do? he says to me. Yeah, but we’re from different countries, I says to him. Well, so are we, he says. Yeah, but look at the fight you an’ me got into wit’ Craneby an’ his corporal pal, when he said you ain’t got no country — remember? He said your flag was the three balls over a pawnbroker’s shop. Boy, what a battle. They’da beat the shit outa him if I wasn’t there. I nearly slugged him myself once when he was gonna crawl out into no-man’s-land an’ get a bran’ new Luger that was layin’ there fer a souvenir. Fer Christ sake, I said, don’t you know them goddamn Heinies ain’t got a machine gun trained right on it. How the hell would a brand-new Luger git out there. His name was Abe, but we called him Shnitzel. Nearly everybody else in the fuckin’ army was Al, but we called him Shnitzel. Because he was a Jew, I guess. We kidded him for bein’ a Heinie. That was a hot one, him bein’ a Heinie.” Quinn fell silent, watched the road, steered into the open away from the tracks, yawned. “Ah, Jesus. We ain’t got all the answers. I don’t give a shit what anybody says, Father McGonnigle, or nobody else.”

“Yeah? I wasn’t rubbin’ it in,” Tommy reiterated. “We was just talkin’.”

“So what d’you do tomorrow?” I asked him.

“Me? Sleep.”

“Sleep!” I echoed. “Christmas?”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t git outa bed for the Pope.”

And suddenly the tension within me seemed to discharge. The awesome figure of the supreme Pontiff, seen in the rotogravure sections of the newspapers, loomed up solemnly in the darkness near the closed panel doors of the truck. In all his regalia, with crosier in hand and tiara on head, he sternly adjured Tommy to get out of bed — and was defied. It seemed so ludicrous, so gigantically ludicrous, that all at once I was convulsed with laughter; I squealed, I howled, I rolled on the pad. Tommy joined me without knowing why; and Quinn up front chortled wearily: “What the hell’s got into yuh, kid?”

“I don’t know. It’s so funny!” I gasped. “He said he wouldn’t get outa bed for the Pope.”

“What d’you mean? I don’t have to git outa bed fer nobody if I don’t wanna on Christmas,” said Tommy. “Right, Quinn?”

“Hell, you’ll be up before anybody else gets up, time you get home,” said Quinn. “The Pope won’t have to get yuh up.”

“Hey, that’s right. I bet it’s already Christmas,” said Tommy. “God rest you merry gentlemen,” he lifted his voice in song, “let nutt’n you dismay. For Jesus Christ, our Saviour, was born on Christmas day — you know that one, Quinn?”

“I’ve heard it.” Quinn prolonged another yawn.

“We don’t have to do everything the Pope tells us anyway, Irey,” Tommy explained. “That’s why we goes to Confession. Ketch on? If we done everything the Pope told us, we’d be a priest. We couldn’t take a liddle floozie out or nothin’.”

“Yeah?”

“Here’s Park Avenue. I hate this goddamn avenue.” Quinn braked the truck. The green glow through the glass of the New York Central ticket office door lapped against the pillars of the railway overpass. He rounded the corner steering south. “I wish the Pope’d git rid o’ these—” Quinn nipped off his words. “Even when ye c’n see straight, when y’ ain’t been drivin’ all day — and it ain’t night, like now — them goddamn pillars look like they’re everywhere. All I gotta do is pile up against one. Wouldn’t they be askin’, What the hell’re you doin’ way over there? A new White panel truck. The P an’ T’d gimme a raise, wouldn’t they? They’d gimme a roost in the tail.”

“See that? Yer gittin’ special service fer Christmas,” said Tommy.

“What’d you say? 119th Street?” Quinn asked.

“Yeah.”

In minutes we were at the little A & P grocery at the corner, the feeble blue light within the store barely visible. Quinn stopped the truck, came around the back and opened the panel doors. “Br-r!” he heaved his shoulders against the cold, stood waiting for me to get out, the fingers of his hands strangely locked together, knuckles upward, prayerfully.

“Thanks, Quinn.” I scrambled out.

“Merry Christmas.”

“Huh? Yeah. Merry Christmas, Quinn.”

“Merry Christmas, Irey!” Tommy called from inside the vehicle, his hand waving a pale greeting in the gloom.

“Yeah, Merry Christmas.”

Quinn slammed the panel doors shut, and returned to the driver’s seat. The truck got underway. I watched it a moment: gather speed, become a red bead of taillight passing foreshortened pillars. By the time I trudged through the opaque shadow under the trestle, the red bead of taillight had risen up the hill on 116th Street. It disappeared west, as I reached Jake’s somber mass of masonry on the corner.

119th Street. Past midnight, deserted in all directions, familiar yet unfamiliar. Heels clicking loudly, I plodded toward my stoop. Never saw so many, so many crowded stars, all shining together, studded thick as Mom’s horseradish grater. Dark drugstore, dark candy store, dark stoop before me, dark windows overhead. Only in midblock, the streetlight sprouted above the short green lamppost. After the wild hilarity in the back of the truck, after so many hours together, I was now solitary. After so many dumbwaiters and basements and back stairs, and servants met and greetings heard, now silence, now weariness.

Maybe even sadness, despite the jingle of small change in my pocket: “There’s something for you in the grocery box. Merry Christmas!” Was it that I felt left out, excluded again, with a kind of inbred exclusion. God save you, merry gentlemen. Was that how it went? Gentlemen. The hero of the book I had read by H. S. M. Hutcheson — what a lot of initials! — was a gentleman, the book said. A small legacy of fifty pounds from an investment in spinning mills in India made him a gentleman: those shiny black people in the crazy white diapers in the geography book made him a gentleman. Why did I have to think of everything? I mounted the stone stoop, passed the battered brass letter boxes, entered the long hallway, sealed in quiet, with the small, haggard electric light at the end, at the foot of the stairway.

A figment of fatigue, above me on the turn of the landing, brandishing his crosier at me, the Pope stood in brocaded shadow. I shivered, mounted the stairs toward him. He vanished. I reached the sable window beside which the figure had stood, through which nothing could be seen. Jesus, the trouble was always the same: alone, alone. I found scant solace in jingling the small change in my pocket, as my fingers singled out the housekey. Christmas for the world, Christmas for Irish cops and Irish janitors, for Italian barbers and Italian ice men and white-wing street sweepers.

I could hear Merry Christmas unspoken booming in my head.Jesus, was I ever tired. And alone.

XIV

Scarcely had the first term of the pristine junior high school begun when Ira felt himself drawn to a newcomer in the class, a blond, trimly built youth, somewhat more mature than the rest, handsome, blue-eyed, with a rounded jaw, a light voice and a buoyant gait. He was taller than average, though not a great deal, and Ira noticed at once how fine the other’s hands were — neither large nor small, but so neat and compact they seemed small for his size. How untroubled he seemed, frank and free. His name was Farley Hewins. He had come from St. Thomas Parochial School, adjoining the St. Thomas church on 130th Street, the red-brick church only two blocks away from P.S. 24 on Madison Avenue. .

No, I don’t think so — Ira became aware of the hum of the computer, like the hum of consciousness: No, your timing is wrong again, your timing and your sequence, your causality. Once again you can say, what difference will it make to another, your attributions and accuracy? This is a work of fiction. But the fact is it makes a difference to me, aye: Once again, perhaps at the beginning of the senior term, certainly before that senior grammar school term was over, Farley Hewins appeared — in Mr. Sullivan’s class. And once again, or rather for the first time, I was to do what I repeated later: allow irrelevant or superficial considerations to influence a decision that was to have the most far-reaching effect on my life, that was to make all the difference. No, it was not inertia on my part, though that was certainly a factor, as were my passivity and gelatinous mentality (And to what extent did that dark and troubling, furtive enormity play a role? To a great extent, undoubtedly), my gelatinous mentality that made me vulnerable to Mr. O’Reilly’s cajolings that we stay on in the newly formed junior high for our first year in high school.

No, it was the appearance of Farley Hewins before the last term in grammar school was over, when our friendship was formed. And before the term was over, our friendship had cemented. It was he, happy, easy, without definite goal, who elected to stay on in the newborn junior high, and I with him. Again — Ira looked moodily away from the monitor to the brown curtain behind it that blocked out the window’s glare.

Some kind of sharp differences had arisen between Farley and the head of the parochial school, Father McGrath, differences over just what Ira paid too little attention to heed in his joy at finding an affinity, a companion. It had been because these sharp differences with Father McGrath had come to a head that caused Farley to prevail on his parents to consent to his leaving the St. Thomas Parochial School, leaving it even before he was graduated. Most likely it may have been the good Father’s insistence that Farley enroll in St. Pius Academy, a parochial high school, after graduation from St. Thomas. All his classmates did so — those who were going on in school — Farley alone chose not to. (Ira was to hear an allusion to the friction between priest and pupil later — from remarks made by former schoolmates.) Farley preferred, nay, he was determined, to attend Stuyvesant High School, a technical school, after graduation from grammar school, and this undoubtedly was the cause of the sharp differences between himself and his Catholic mentor. And because of that too, Farley no longer felt at ease in the school. His discontent met sympathy at home. He left St. Thomas’s — quite abruptly — to enroll in P.S. 24, only a block away from his home. His appearance in Mr. Sullivan’s class awoke in Ira the same kind of attraction Ira had felt years ago for Eddie Ferry, the Irish janitor’s son.

It was the same kind of attraction, only much wider in scope: Here was someone who took life in stride (the metaphor was destined for literal realization in the coming months and years). Happy, untroubled as were his blue eyes, tranquil, at home in the world, Irish, Catholic, and yet compatible, without prejudice almost, blithe and cordial with his new Jewish acquaintance. The attraction was mutual. In a matter of days, the two became fast friends. Farley took to Ira’s Jewishness as he did to everything else: casually. And he even went a step beyond: he mitigated Ira’s Jewishness with unexpected tact and clemency, as if loyalty called for no less, called for the dispersion of religious differences. His reason for attending P.S. 24 Junior High instead of going on to Stuyvesant after graduation was carefree — and characteristic—“I just feel like mopin’ around the old neighborhood for awhile longer.”

As the weather grew warmer, they went hitchhiking, the first time Ira had ever done so. Because Ira worked at Park & Tilford, they hitchhiked on Sundays — to Tarrytown, to Dobbs Ferry, to New Rochelle. In each of these towns, Farley had an aunt or an uncle. They fed the wayfarers peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (again a new experience for Ira), or blueberry muffins and milk fresh from the cow, or redolent, cinnamon-savory apple pie. In the steadiness, in the tranquility of Farley’s unassuming assurance, his good-humored poise, and the affectionate regard with which he was greeted and held by his kin, Americans all, part and parcel of America in their warm, tidy, suburban kitchens into which the breeze from the green outside seeped through the screen door, Ira could almost imagine that acceptance of himself was only a shadow away, no greater than the transient film of bemusement that covered their faces at first sight of Farley’s choice of friend.

So the two, inseparable pals, on warm Saturday evenings, “moped” about Farley’s haunts, in the environs of St. Thomas’s Church, palavered, kidded with his former classmates at the parochial school, their moment of skew regard of Ira abating when he recounted asinine predicaments at Park & Tilford, thus reassuring them he was too foolish to be wary of. And he succeeded, for they soon lapsed into normal pinch-lipped, mock-solemn, Irish chaffering. They called one another hoople-head or satchel-back; they bragged gravely: “Where I come from, the canaries sing bass.” And: “Where I come from, they play tiddlywinks with manhole covers.” Sometimes, and in neutral silence, Ira heard mention of missions and novenas, masses, Holy Communion. And once or twice, he was given an intimation of the reason for the antagonism that had developed between Farley and Father McGrath, a strong hint of an issue Ira had never suspected before: “You’ll be running for a bunch of black Protestants against Catholics, that’s what you’ll be doing,” said Steve, in eyeglasses, impassive in his sobriety, the most owlish of Farley’s friends.

“I’ll be running for myself, and I’m a Catholic,” Farley rejoined with uncommon heat. “That’s what got me sore at Father McGrath. I don’t have to go to St. Pius for my salvation. I go to church.”

“Yeah, but if you’re running for St. Pius, everybody’ll know you’re running for the glory o’ Catholics, not Protestants.”

“That doesn’t make me any better runner. And going to Stuyvesant doesn’t turn me into a Protestant either. That’s what I told Father McGrath. And that’s what I’m gonna do. Suppose I do go to St. Pius and don’t turn out to be so hot? Then everyone’ll say the same thing: He’s a Catholic. He can’t run. And I won’t be in the school I want to be in either.”

It took several minutes for the air of ill-will between Farley and his ex-schoolmates to dissipate.

It was Farley’s running ability that had made the Father so importunate. From the very outset, Ira had been impressed, chagrined at first and then startled at the phenomenal bursts of speed with which Farley overtook a vehicle that had slowed down to pick them up when they were hitchhiking. Farley was already holding the door open while Ira was still laboring to catch up. Suddenly Farley’s running ability took on a new and totally undreamed-of dimension.

Toward the end of the first term of junior high school, as the spring term neared summer, it brought fresh revelation of Farley’s potential in track events. Three of the new junior high schools in the uptown area were to take part in a track meet. On the appointed day for the meet, 128th Street, the street fronting P.S. 24, was roped off, lanes were chalked off for the sixty-yard dash, thick pads laid down to cushion high jump and broad jump. Competition began. Ira was soon eliminated from all events; he trailed in the very first heat of the sixty-yard dash — and failed in everything else, just as he expected. Farley did creditably in both broad jump and high jump, placing second and third to black students from further uptown. But it was in the sixty-yard dash that he was nothing short of sensational: He won every heat easily and just as easily outstripped the pack in the finals. Easily. Running with knees high, and fists clenched. Easily. Drawing away to the finish line from all those straining in pursuit. Incredulously Ira watched; even though he knew how fleet of foot his friend was, Ira’s chest still swelled with pride, with surrogate glory. Fleet, yes, that was one thing. But this kind of fleetness was no longer a matter of local repute, acknowledged by local praise. No, anyone could feel that Farley’s fleetness of foot had an extraordinary latency about it, an inkling of universal acclaim, a destiny. .

XV

Aching, aching, hurting, hurting (this cursed rheumatoid arthritis), and loving, loving that darling aged spouse of mine. What a silly thing to say. But true. Silly as bald truth so often is. That she enabled a rebirth in me into something I can more nearly live with, you well know, Ecclesias; I have said it before (and likely will again). It is all in vanity, according to your dictum, yours and Omar Khayyám’s: It comes to naught, to the same thing as if it hadn’t happened. Had there been no sense of regeneration, but rather had I remained as I was, what I was, contemptible, despicable in my own eyes, it would still have come to naught, alas. But once again I can only say, at my unsubtle level of thought, that beyond life’s limit, beyond death life is meaningless, as meaningless as the mark zero over zero, meaningless, that which an infinitely small instant before did have meaning. And so one has to speak of that, and to those still standing before the mortal instant when vanity is consummated. And therefore, my love, my love, I live, for whom I must live, who needs me. And for what little good my living may do the living.

The half tablet of Percocet works, Ecclesias, revives; perhaps until the combined agency of the daily dose of Cortisone and Imuran (whatever that is) exert their efficacy—“take a’holt,” as my good, kind and gentle friend in Maine, old Gene Perry, was wont to say. So old age sums up life: with a sigh and shake of the head. . But how soon these artificial highs flag, Ecclesias, these minimal stimulations of a spot of coffee and a half tablet of Percocet. But rather the Keatsian drowsy numbness than the pain.

Farley’s father was an undertaker; perhaps he was the undertaker for the parish, little as the term meant to Ira. Little as the word “sexton” meant to him too, the word on a plaque next to the door of the front entrance of the brownstone house on Madison Avenue where the Hewin Funeral Parlor was located — and where the Hewins lived: on 129th Street, exactly midway between the parochial school Farley had left and the public school he now attended. .

Ah, yes, Ira reflected, reverting with new insight into the dispute between Farley and his Jesuit headmaster, the matter must have become intense, the pressure intense, with so much at stake, a runner of Farley’s exceptional potential. Disagreement must have reached an extreme pitch of rancor to have warranted his parents’ acquiescence in their son’s quitting the parochial school before graduation, lopping off so abruptly the last months of attendance. The cleric must have exceeded all reasonable bounds in his importunings (probably spurred on by the track coach at St. Pius): threatened the boy with Hell’s fire, for all Ira knew. Just a jot too much brimstone, Ira mused: the parents became indignant, and who could blame them? So the young schoolboy suddenly appeared on Ira’s horizon.

Fate. Overtones of Inquisition, of Stephen Dedalus in the toils of sacerdotal authority. And lingering grudge though he bore against the Church — Ira nodded at his own words in amber on the monitor—“And with damn good historic reason too,” he muttered. Would God, Joyce the necromancer himself and Ira’s erstwhile literary liege, have succumbed to priestly persuasion, and taken holy orders himself? How old one had to become, one like himself, slow and phlegmatic, to begin to apprehend a little of institutionalized material interests, of the motivations of the seasoned manipulator, the casuist. .

It was queer at first, even a little dismaying, to have a friend who lived in a funeral parlor, the Hewin Funeral Parlor. But friendship had a way of quickly overcoming hesitations and misgivings, and making the friend’s ambience a natural one. Ira soon became accustomed to seeing the ebony, glassed-in hearse beside the curb in front of the house, often with its retinue of two or three black limousines behind it. A little less frequently, when Ira arrived at Farley’s home as his father, assisted by Farley’s older brother, James, directed the movement of pallbearers down the flight of stairs from the funeral parlor to the hearse, it was a difficult matter to make a show of respectful detachment.

Upstairs, above the funeral parlor, were the sleeping quarters of the family, the parental bedroom and those of Farley’s siblings, those still unmarried and living at home (James was married, so too was an even older sister, Margaret). Two younger sisters occupied a common bedroom, and Farley his own. It was there the two chums spent much of their time together when not traversing the streets; it was there that later, months later, when both attended Stuyvesant High School, they did their homework together. Below the funeral parlor, in the basement, were dining room and kitchen — and many a snack did Ira consume there, as Farley’s guest, waited on by his mother, a low-spoken, nunlike woman with hirsute upper lip and gold-rimmed eyeglasses. Cold mutton sandwiches, fresh pork, and strange, un-Jewish, square slabs of corned beef between slices of Ward’s Tip-Top packaged bread spread with salt butter.

It was then that Farley’s father might come downstairs from mortuary duties in the parlor above to wash his hands at the kitchen sink. A robust, vigorous and serious man with a brushy brown mustache and blue eyes like Farley’s, he was also a man of few words. He rarely wasted them on the two friends; he would march to the kitchen sink, wash his hands, dry them and leave, with scarcely a glance at those present, and without greeting. It was only when mourners or friends of the deceased gathered in the kitchen, that he might be drawn into conversation, become voluble, and once or twice, even vehement: When someone brought up the subject of Ireland, when talk veered to the subject of Irish freedom. “The Irish will never be free!” he declared emphatically as he dried his hands on a towel. “They haven’t got brains enough to be free. Will you tell me how any people that keeps fightin’ each other will ever be free?”

“Aw, come on, Tim. They’ve got the British lion on the run this time. He’s tired o’ bein’ pelted with grenades. It’s only a question o’time Ireland’ll be free.”

“Free to pelt each other with grenades, and that’s what they’re doin’ now!”

Rich scent of liquor from somewhere among the bereaved, as Ira munched his cold sandwich — and marveled at his being so taken for granted in this Irish-Catholic milieu. Farley would wink at him, deprecatingly, which Ira interpreted as reassurance, his cue to act as Farley did: noncommittally, as one accustomed to this sort of disagreement, the way Farley’s two younger sisters moved with total unconcern through the midst of it, from kitchen to backyard, their little iron jacks and ball and skipping rope in hand.

It was there in Farley’s kitchen, at moments like these, that Ira for the first time glimpsed a certain similarity of condition, of oppression between the Irish and the Jews, something that had never occurred to him before on 119th Street, under the domination of the pugnacious and ascendent Irish: “He’s Oirish,” Mom would mimic them, her throat swelling up with extravagant pride. “The mayor is Oirish. Jack Dempsey is Oirish. Everyone of note is Oirish. Is it true?” she would ask. “Are they all Irish?” It seemed true; it seemed as if they had come from a long line of masters, of wielders of authority. But now for the first time, he realized, and not in words so much as in feeling, that they had come from a background of oppression and deprivation and subjection.

But once here, they menaced and Jew-baited Jews cruelly, who had also come from oppression and deprivation and subjection. Why? Wherein lay the difference? Because they already spoke English when they came here? Or because the Irish had come from a land of their own that held them together, in spite of everything, and the Jews had not, but came from Galitzia or Poland or Russia, where they were still Jews. If only Uncle Louie were around to ask. How different that made the two peoples, if that was where the difference lay. The one came from the “ould sod;” the word rolled off their tongues, “the ould counthry,” said the people with black armbands down in the kitchen. Was that made them witty and scrappy and defiant, and so likeable? Whereas Jews came from everywhere, Rumania, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, all laden with cares and anxieties, woebegone so often and commiserative in their woe — and scheming and scheming, against the other’s carefree and resilient existence. If only Uncle Louie were around. Still, what did the Irish always jab you with when they wanted to mock you? “You got the map o’ Jerusalem all over your puss.” And no one he knew ever came from there.

The funeral parlor was sometimes unoccupied: No casket rested on the black-draped stand; not in use, that too had been removed. It was then that the funeral parlor reverted to a large, sandy-carpeted living room: a place for Farley and his chum to loll at ease among the crucifixes and the religious pictures — and wind up and play the phonograph, something that gave Ira the greatest pleasure. He fell in love with John McCormack’s angelic tenor; it captivated Ira to the point of memorizing every song McCormack sang — and reproducing it with nearly impeccable brogue: “Oh, Mavourneen, Mavourneen, I still hear you callin’. .” And, “There’s a weddin’ in the garden, dear, I can tell it by the flowers. .” And, “A little bit of heaven fell from out the sky one day. .” Farley grinned at his chum’s rapturous infatuation.

One sits here musing, ruminating, Ecclesias, this 25th of March, ’85, a warm Monday: the first day the thermometer has risen into the ’70s. Rejected by father, long ago, and rejected by son, the one on whom (to repeat) I doted, to make it the more poignant. If not rejected then excluded, so self-enveloped he is, so occult his personal life, as I cheerlessly quipped, a mind-field. And the result? Antagonism. M cogently stated it: antagonism.

Without question, antagonism is what I feel, and in all likelihood, I manifest it too. .

Jane said less was a writer manqué; his prose gives that impression. But certainly — I think — there’s no competition on that score. No, it is the sense of his condescension, his air of infallibility, and there’s no denying, he is exceptionally gifted intellectually, though not apt manually. Still, he manages to surmount that particular shortcoming by dint of his quickness at perceiving the principle governing a device or the nature of its functioning. And undoubtedly, as I have more than intimated before, my sudden impulse to succor Jane in her abandonment by Jess, my strong affection for her, stems from that same antagonism, my sense of being wronged, and seeking an ally against the common miscreant.

So much for our shared emotional bonds. I do think, to reiterate, that if she could harness her feelings, her hurt, give them form, which implies both objectification and craftsmanship, she could produce a commendable piece of writing. .

XVI

1920. The summer drew near. It was the end of his first term of junior high school, and the summer drew near, summer of his fourteenth year. Green, green is the age of fourteen — or it should have been.

With what gloating Mr. Lennard, now become a Spanish teacher, in one of whose classes Ira was, and Farley in another — with what ceremony he would smooth the back of the pants, the cloth over the buttocks of a misbehaving pupil, after bending the offender over a front desk, and with greenish eyes behind his pince-nez ravished by the sight of the protruding posterior, administer a number of whacks with the “slappamaritis,” a paddle with holes in it (“to let the air out,” he jested). He had ordered it made for him in the woodworking shop. Everyone knew Mr. Lennard was a fairy, but no one ever reported him to the principal, Mr. O’Reilly. Or so it seemed. No one ever complained about him at home, as far as Ira knew; and why no one ever did, he could only guess: The others were like himself. Adolescents, perhaps they feared they wouldn’t be believed; they feared to be branded squealers; or as in Ira’s case, they feared they might have to confront an adult, a teacher, a person in authority, feared to get into trouble, if, for nothing else, than for knowing what they were not supposed to know.

No one ever reported Mr. Lennard, and yet everyone knew he was a fag, and an arrant fag. He would often sit in the lap of one or another of the bigger boys in the back row of the classroom, while class was in session. With his free hand slipped under his thigh, the hand not holding the textbook, Mr. Lennard would toy with the scholar’s genitals. Incredible. And yet, how smoothly, composedly, Mr. Lennard would arise, if by chance the classroom door was opened, arise, adjust his pince-nez while looking up pleasantly over the open textbook at the visitor.

1920. Summer was near. (Ira had brought his aged, numb fingertips together for awhile.) Things were happening, simultaneously, integrally. One couldn’t dwell too long on this or that aspect of the fourteen-year-old’s existence, or else one ran the risk of excluding or forgetting the rest. The young adolescent still lived in the same home, but his role in it had changed. Once when Ira’s fountain pen clogged while he was doing his homework, in a fit of temper he jammed the point against the paper, jammed the penpoint completely out of shape. Pop raised his hand to strike him, then seemed to remember that his son was now post — Bar Mitzvah; he counted as a man in the congregation; Pop desisted. Yes, Ira had the same home, and yes, he was fourteen. He was fourteen. Usually, Pop left quite early Sunday morning to wait at table as an extra — an “extra jop,” as he called it, a breakfast sponsored by some fraternal order in “Coonyailant.” Less frequently, his extra job might be a formal luncheon, and then he might linger in the house until nine or ten in the morning. Those were the exceptions. The rule was the fraternal breakfast, which meant a very early departure. .

Soon after he left the house, Mom too would leave. Mom did much of her shopping Sunday morning, when the produce displayed by the pushcart peddlers under the Park Avenue trestle was freshest. She also brought dainties home for the late Sunday breakfast: bagels, lox at ten cents per quarter pound, cream cheese in bulk, purchased in her favorite “dairy” store in the same area of Park Avenue as the pushcart district. The same pot of coffee that she had brewed for Pop in the morning would still be on the gas stove for Ira to warm up, if he chanced to wake before she returned.

I told you all this before, Ecclesias.

— So you have.

No need to be impatient. Does anyone else, will anyone else see through my motives?

— I suspect many will. Most people, or let me say, most intelligent people, are far more acute than you give them credit for being, in fact, far more acute than you are.

Yes, worse luck, but are they as canny intuitively as I am? As innately endowed with a sense of form?

— Well. . there’s little doubt you’re only too well acquainted with many of the signatures of the sordid. But that’s little reason to preen.

Agreed. Nevertheless, to keep the narrative from falling into separate niches and vignettes, it is necessary to summon up, to present the various aspects of his life at this time in their entirety, and as near to one another as possible.

— So you were fourteen, and your father ordinarily left early for an extra job, and your mother brought home for your delectation bagels and lox on a Sunday—

Or bulkies and golden smoked whitefish. Or a chunk of smoked sturgeon, believe it or not. Devoted Mama. If there were a crowbar that one could drive under a boulder of the psyche, and tumble the boulder out of the way, I would. But there is none—“Oh, there’s none, there’s none, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “No, no, there’s none,” and Time, T sub one equals a constant in Time, T sub one equals a date that is not to be eradicated. Ah, if the psyche were like this computer monitor, Ecclesias, where a change of word, a change of phrase, sends a ripple of change through the whole screen! A sort of spreadsheet of the soul. There can be no such ripples on the cuneiforms of the mind, once impressed. Or can there?

XVII

It was a time when Mom’s chronic catarrh, without seeming to grow worse, began to impair her hearing — while continuing to produce noises of varying degrees of loudness in her head; tinnitus, it was called. Poor Mom. She learned to predict, and with considerable accuracy, the changes in the weather according to the loudness or softness of the noises in her ears. Meteorological turbulence conferred on her an auditory one. Mater, martyr, that was only another stage in her martyrdom. It was a time also when aunts and uncles were marrying or being given in marriage, or in Saul’s case, driven into marriage: bestowing or receiving diamond engagement rings and then wedding rings and going under the khuppa. And taxis would arrive each time at the curb before the Stigman tenement (sent there by ever-generous Moe); and Mom all corseted and dressed up in an ample new gown with loop-handle at the bottom, prepared to leave; and Pop, beside himself with nervous haste and frenzied apprehension, would rush wife and child out of the kitchen and down the flight of shabby steps into the dark street, pell-mell into the cab: “Oy, vus yuksteh?” Mom would complain. “D’yukst aros de kishkas!” And what was his irascible reply but: “Klutz! D’yukst vie a klutz.” And away, away to the wedding hall on 110th Street and Fifth Avenue they would speed, festivity bound, nuptial merriment and glatt kosher fressen. .

But oh, Moishe, Moishe, Ira’s dear Uncle Moe, long since out of uniform and now confident of his ability to confront his world as a full-fledged businessman; and oh, Ira, his nephew, pubescent and only too rapturous at being bound in the fateful concatenation of consequences. For it was Moe’s opening of a restaurant, the Mt. Morris Restaurant, that year in partnership with his brother Saul, a partnership from which Pop, a waiter of six years’ experience, was excluded, not because he lacked funds that invested would entitle him to a voice in the running of the business and a satisfactory share in its hoped-for profits. No, Pop was excluded because his business acumen was held in slight regard, and his temperament was felt to be incompatible with that of his two brothers-in-law. They even had their reservations about hiring him as a waiter.

It was the opening of the Mt. Morris Restaurant that inaugurated the train of fateful consequences. The Mt. Morris Restaurant, which all agreed was an appropriate name, being so near to Mt. Morris Park less than a half-dozen blocks away, was located on Fifth Avenue and between 115th and 116th Streets. The name was also seen as appropriate because it paid tribute to its director and senior partner, Moe, whom people had of late begun to call Morris. Set in the midst of a decidedly Jewish neighborhood, lower-middle-class in composition, thriving and sanguine in the thriving and sanguine 1920s, and skillfully managed, the servings generous, the place immediately appealed to a wide clientele. The cuisine was rich and thoroughly in accord with Jewish tastes; and though by no means strictly kosher, no meat was served, which made the meals “half-kosher,” which provided further incentive to semi-assimilated Jews to patronize the place. Moe’s warm personality, his large and expansive presence, and the widespread knowledge in the neighborhood of his recent service in his country’s armed forces proved an additional attraction. The restaurant prospered.

Its immediate precincts became the locus of informal family gatherings. There, of a Sunday, as the weather waxed warm, Mom’s sisters, pregnant, or with firstborn, and Baba, and Mamie with her offspring, would bring along small folding chairs, or borrowing one or two from the restaurant, would gather in a homey conclave across the avenue, directly opposite the restaurant, and seat themselves in a group before the tarnished, brown-brass railing that fronted the local savings bank. They would sit and shmooz away the hours, admonish kids, comment on the changing scene of promenaders and autos, on the ebb and flow of the clientele that entered and left the prosperous restaurant. Often, when the rush of business became very great, Moe or Saul would appear in the restaurant doorway and call to Mamie, or to both Mamie and Ira’s other aunt, Ella, to come in and give the overburdened cook a hand. Mom they never called.

“Would that I too could work a shift in the kitchen to help the cook of a Sunday afternoon,” Mom confided to Ira sadly. “And thus I might earn a dollar or two.”

“So why don’t they call you?” Ira asked.

“Don’t you know? They rebuffed your father for a partner, so they’re uneasy with his wife. You understand? With their sister, with me. Saul, sweet Saul, gives me to understand that Ella is thin, and that one gross bottom like Mamie’s is enough in the kitchen. Beside that of the cook’s. Another would block the kitchen passage. That’s his reason, my fine brother. Noo. He knows how dearly I love mocha tarts; so to make amends, you’ve heard him invite me into the restaurant to have a piece of mocha tart and coffee. But I never go in, as you’ve seen.”

“You never go in. But gee, I love that pineapple cake.”

“It’s different with you. You’re a child. If they won’t give my husband a chance to better himself in life, I won’t accept their favors. I’m not a shnorrer. Take away your false blandishments, and take him in as a partner — But, ah, what am I saying?” Mom reversed herself. “It is my curse. I don’t know my Chaim’l? How long would he be a partner before he fell out with them? Before he would assault my brother Saul with the first weapon that came to hand. It’s a punishment. I’ve been condemned.”

Ah, the multimeshed events that impinged on Ira that year. How to deal with them? How to deal with them from a double perspective, and an impeded one?

It was during that same summer that Pop decided to embark on his own venture in food purveyance: He opened a small delicatessen on 116th Street between Lexington and Park Avenues. Both Moe and the expert Saul judged the choice of location unwise, pointing to the absence of “businesses” in the neighborhood, meaning other stores, and the relatively light pedestrian traffic passing through. But Pop counted on the 116th Street subway station of the new IRT line that had just been put into service to provide him with the necessary volume of passersby. He was wrong, alas. Temperamentally unsuited for running that kind of business, one that catered to the public; fitful, injudicious, vacillating, curt because of his misgivings, and often curt with customers, after the first flurry of the opening of the place, Pop saw his clientele soon fall away. He impressed Mom into service, preparing soups and kishka, stuffed derma, and other Jewish dainties that he thought might increase patronage, in addition to giving the place a homey atmosphere: She spent many hours of the day there, and weekend evenings, leaving Ira to shift for himself, which he did, in his way, avoiding the store, shunning the store for all he was worth.

Nothing new there; just more of the same to brood over.

— Grimly.

Yes, my golden opportunities.

— Not golden. Gilt.

Spell it any way you like.

The gesheft failed. Or rather, Pop through desperate connivance managed to unload it on another, a buyer from New Jersey, by having a string of Mom’s relatives from near and far come into the place at sufficient intervals to give an appearance of sufficient patronage. The very next morning, early, Ira was given the buyer’s check to certify it in Pop’s name: The mopey kid was sent out to a bank in a New Jersey town, to linger about the bank’s door until the place opened.

And did it open or didn’t it? Was it a weekend or holiday? And did he come back, his mission a failure, as usual? Who could remember now, who could retrieve the recollection of the actuality? Only the fair summer morning in the verdant square, like that of a commons of a small town, while he waited for the bank doors to open; only that afterward Pop exulted when the buyer had become kharuseh, when he thought better of the deal, and wished to withdraw, renege — but too late: Pop had cashed the check. “Khah! Khah! Khah!” Pop guffawed. Happy man, he hadn’t quite lost his shirt. But the link had yet to be forged, the link had yet to be closed, as one good turn deserved another. And irony of ironies, her name was Link (though the name meant lung in Yiddish).

XVIII

Ida Link. She lived in the same house at the foot of which Pop had his delicatessen. A peroxide blonde in her early thirties, with a ruby wen on her chin, thoroughly city-wise, street-wise, native-born, stylish saleswoman of ladies’ clothes on Delancey Street, Ida Link fawned on Pop. As soon as she learned he had unmarried brothers-in-law, she frequented the store and even lent a hand about the place. She dazzled Pop with her modish figure, her platinum hair, her glib, cheery address and Broadway spriteliness. It wasn’t long before Pop’s enthusiastic account of her charms brought Moe into her presence.

Poor Moe. The woman was as close to being a tart as it was possible to be without being an outright whore.

“Wouldn’t you recognize my Chaim’s contrivances,” said Mom to Ira, and lowering her voice because the topic was shameful. “All Delancey Street knows her. Every saylissmon [as she pronounced the word for salesman] on Delancey Street knows her. Every saylissmon of every sort. A common strumpet. Does she have innards? They’re gone with yesterday. My poor brother, he loves children so. And he loved you. He’ll have children in the other world.”

Nobody told Morris, of course, or Zaida or Baba, hoping he or they would hear about Ida’s flagrant promiscuity from other sources. They never did. And perhaps it might not have done much good if they had. For if Pop was dazzled, Moe was bewitched. Poor Moe, for all the rudiments of worldliness he had learned in the army, Ida’s ways, her figure, her poise, her up-to-date breeziness, her lemon-ice hair were irresistible. The engagement went on apace, went on remorselessly to its consummation: the taxicab duly arrived at 108 East 119th Street; Morris stomped on the nuptial glass under the canopy; Pop probably got at least a token expediter’s fee for his marriage broker’s services.

And in the meantime, intertwined with all this, came the first hint of Park & Tilford’s closing, of the closing of the Lenox Avenue store. Ira didn’t believe it at first. Someone was just teasing, spoofing, the way they asked you to fetch a skyhook or some other implement that didn’t exist. It was a joke. But the hint swelled to rumor, rumor to certainty. Ira was heartbroken. He had found such an enjoyable niche here. Everything he did was familiar, yet laced with enough variance to be interesting. The performance of his duties was almost effortless most of the time, or didn’t require too much effort. And he was appreciated, and that was the thing he liked most: everyone’s amused tolerance — well, maybe not the old cigar and tobacco clerk’s, but everyone else’s, including Mr. Stiles’s, the manager. He felt at home here, that was it, accepted by outside the Jewish world, the way he felt with Farley: that precious element of confidence, of approval by those not his own, where it mattered, especially now, especially now.

“Wouldn’t do you any good anyway, if you’re going to Stuyvesant,” said Mr. Klein. “You’d never get here in half an hour. They’d have to hire another boy anyway.”

“Yeah,” Ira agreed glumly.

“You could ask. There’s a store downtown. Mr. Stiles’d recommend you.”

“It wouldn’t be the same.”

“The same,” Mr. Klein echoed. “What’s the same, tell me? Nothing’s the same. You work. You get used to the layout in a new store, the different clerks — or shipping clerks. You learn something new.”

“Are you going?”

“With Park and Tilford? No. I’m getting a different job. A different company— What do you want to go to Stuyvesant for anyway? Stuyvesant is for engineers. You know what chance you have to be an engineer? Like you can fly. It’s not for Jews.”

“I don’t wanna be an engineer.”

“So what’re you going there for?”

“My friend’s going there.”

“Oh! Now I understend,” Mr. Klein nodded as if in fresh confirmation of Ira’s fecklessness. “You know, you’re a smart kid, a lot smarter than I thought when you came here. But it don’t come out. Why do you hev to play dumb. Why? Tell me. Why do you hev to go to a school where your friend goes? You told me you wanted to be a teacher. There you stend a better chence. So what d’you wanna teach?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“So you go to a general high school. Then you go to City College, and you come out with a diploma, and you teach. Well?” Mr. Klein paused, regarded Ira with his unsmiling, unyielding demeanor. “You can make your whole life what it’s gonna be by what you do now. If you do the right thing, and there’s not gonna be another war, you could have a happy life. You grow up, you marry, you have kids, you’re a teacher. This way, where are you?”

“I can still go to City College.”

“And if your friend goes someplace else? He’s Jewish?”

“No.”

“I can see you’re in for trouble.”

“All right,” Ira sulked.

“Tsuris, kid, you’re askin’ for tsuris. If you were my kid brother, I’d give you right away a few good smacks you should wake up. You remember what they used to sing in the army? What’s become with hinky dinky, parlez vous? You’re a little hinky dinky in the head, even smart like you are.”

“OK.”

“OK is right. Let’s start peckin’ the beskets.”

“So what do they got to close the store for?” Ira burst out angrily.

“Farshtest nisht?” Mr. Klein picked up the sheaf of invoices and stepped back the better to survey Ira — who once again couldn’t help note the man’s peculiar, cocky stance: not bowlegged, but with rigidly locked knees: concave in front. “Can’t you see the neighborhood is changing? It’s getting shvartze uptown, more and more. It’s getting Jewish downtown, high-tone Jewish Broadway, Riverside Drive. They don’t buy Park and Tilford. But mostly, even if they did, there’s no more whiskey, no more wine, no more brandy, no more cordials, no more beer. Farshtest? That’s where the big profit used to come from. Ask the old pooritz behind the tobacco counter, the duke from kacki-ack with his wing-collar. He had two helpers once, and that little percentage on sales the clerks get, he got the highest in the place. Ask the alter kocker. That was a nice bonus.”

“I don’t wanna ask him. I believe you.” Ira’s tone was hostile.

“Listen, don’t get smart.” Mr. Kline handed him the first batch of items to stow in the basket. “Put the gless between the cocoa and the split peas.”

“They’ll deliver from one place, from only one place. The big downtown store. And only in Manhattan. That’s all. The other store, the one on Broadway on 103rd Street? Only with a kid with a box. Local. With kids like you. The cellarman sends you out.”

Ira worked on, stowing goods away mechanically, resentfully. He felt bereaved, and as always when changes theatened, apprehensive. .

The school vacation began. To his great disappointment, Farley went to New Rochelle to stay with an aunt and be near the water. He came back once and sought out Ira: the immense, the ineffable delight of coming lonesomely home from the library — and finding Farley in the kitchen, in the homely, Jewish Stigman kitchen: Farley, tanned, hair sun-bleached, blue-eyed, in the kitchen where he had been talking to Pop.

“Farley!” Ira shouted at the sight of him. And Pop couldn’t refrain from imitating his son’s joyous cry: “Farley!” They spent a few hours together, hunted for snipes — they had both taken up cigarette smoking — puffed away at discarded butts, while seated on a bench below the bell tower on Mr. Morris Park hill. And then they separated a few minutes before three-thirty in the afternoon, when Ira went to work.

That was all he saw of Farley until the summer was over and school began again after Labor Day. But in the interim, when not working, Ira spent most of the day reading, at home in the morning, in the library after lunch, and going to the store directly from the library, as he did customarily from school to store. Books, books, books, the only solace now, without Farley, and the added unhappiness of knowing the store was soon to close. Books. Narrative after narrative, novels, short stories, tales of adventure. He knew, he was only too aware there were other things to read: The shelves were full of books marked History, Biography, Science, Philosophy, Poetry — no, that wasn’t quite true: He took home a book of love poems once.

Otherwise, he cared nothing for a book if it wasn’t a narrative, if it didn’t appeal to his feeling and imagination, the way a story did. It didn’t have to be prose; it could rhyme, it could be poetry, as long as it told a story: like The Ancient Mariner. And yes, once he found a book in the empty flat upstairs. It was called the Prisoner of Chillon—by somebody named Byron. That was wonderful. “My hair is white but not with years, nor grew it white in a single night as men’s have grown through sudden fears.” What a wonderful story! The prisoner made friends even with the spiders. But you had to read the prologue over and over again, the invocation it was called, before you understood it: “Immortal spirit of the chainless mind, brightest in dungeons, Liberty thou art. .”

Maybe it would be that way with other poems if he wanted to spend the time figuring them out: But all he asked for was a story, that was all he craved; stories not only moved fancy, they held you, and while they did, they told you how people felt, what they saw and heard, and how they lived. That was the important thing: They were part of a world, one that maybe didn’t exist anymore, but that was the only way you could know it.

Oh, stories told you everything; you could guess what they often only barely suggested, you could daydream in their world, you could live in it; you could change what happened in your own mind, and then figure out the different kind of story that would have happened. And names, all kinds of names stayed in your head, like real people, not mythology, “characters” they were called, like Jean Valjean and Huck Finn and D’Artagnan, and David Copperfield and Martin Eden. They took you into their world, yes, the way Farley did. They took you into their world, even more than Farley did. You were more in their world than in the Jewish world, in their world where you wanted to be, and now that he was what he was and couldn’t break away from their world and didn’t want to, maybe some day he’d find a way out of his Jewish slum world into their world.

He knew more about their world than any Jewish kid in the block, any Jewish kid he knew, any kid he knew, Farley, anyone in the class. He knew, because he had to know, because it was his only hope, because he had nowhere else to go and only a rubble of what was left inside to dwell on: his Jewishness: Mom, matzahs on Passover, Zaida greedily pumping the fresh bulkies to test which was the tenderest. Jewishness, it would be like leaving nothing. Nearly. .

XIX

Mr. Lennard arose a little more quickly than usual from big George Repke’s lap in the back seat, arose, flushed and turned pale. Not because he had been caught in the act of sitting in a boy’s lap by Mr. O’Reilly on his opening the door. No, but because Mr. O’Reilly was escorting a mild, white-haired gentleman with a white mustache and goatee into the classroom. Mr. O’Reilly introduced the distinguished-looking newcomer to Mr. Lennard. The two shook hands, and after a minute or two, Mr. O’Reilly left. Flushed again, and glowering at the class menacingly and uneasily — obvious warning signs against misbehavior — Mr. Lennard introduced Dr. Zamora: He was the supervisor of Spanish in the New York high schools, and he had dropped in to learn how “our junior high school was progressing in the study of Spanish.” Did the class understand? Of course they did, and Mr. Lennard expected everyone to do his best.

“Naturally, Doctor Zamora,” Mr. Lennard addressed the bland and quietly attentive supervisor, “the term has just begun, and I’m afraid you won’t find us quite up to our best.”

“I am prepared to make allowances,” Dr. Zamora smiled. And to the class: “Cómo están ustedes?”

To which they answered in ragged variance, some, “Muy bien, Señor.” And some, “Buenos días, Señor.” Mr. Lennard bit his lip, frowned — in ominous displeasure.

And he continued to frown as the class fumbled every question or worse, gazed mutely at Dr. Zamora. For one thing, after Mr. Lennard’s clear American-Spanish, Dr. Zamora’s Spanish-Spanish was confusing. Behind Dr. Zamora’s back, Mr. Lennard’s glower deepened. Still, Dr. Zamora seemed unfazed, patient, undiscouraged. “Quién es Don Zuixote?” He asked. The question had an air of finality about it, as if he wished to leave on an optimistic note. “Don Quixote,” his white mustache and beard transmitted to the mystified class. “Si, Don Zuixote de la Mancha. En Inglés, si ustedes quieren contestar. Quién es el? You may answer in English,” Dr. Zamora encouraged. “Who is Don Quixote?”

And now Mr. Lennard came to Dr. Zamora’s assistance, but tacitly. Behind Dr. Zamora, at his very shoulder, and so close to his periphery of vision no student would have had the impudence to do that to a teacher: With his round lips writhing eloquently, aided by fervent grimace, Mr. Lennard kept forming visual syllables: Don Quicksote! Don Quicksote!

At last Ira understood. “Don Quicksote!” he blurted. “I read about him. He had a fight with a windmill.”

Mr. Lennard deflated with relief.

“Sí, sí,” said the kindly Doctor Zamora. “Pero en Español dicemos, Don Quixote. In Spanish we say, Don Quixote. Repeat after me, please: Don Quixote de la Mancha. Everyone.”

“Donkeyhotay de la Mancha,” the class parroted with right good will.

“Muy bien. Once more: What is the name of the most famous character in Spanish literature?”

“Donkeyhotay,” a few began and the rest swelled the chorus.

“Muy bien. And the author of Don Quixote was named?” Dr. Zamora scanned the class.

Ira raised his hand. “His name was Cervantes.”

“Se llama Cervantes. Muy bien.”

Mr. Lennard exuded gratification.

XX

September neared its end; the hot weather moderating, the mens’ straw hats disappearing. .

It was the first fall of the new decade, decade of the ’20s, that portentous and turbulent and innovative decade, probably to prove the most important decade of the century, decade of Einstein, decade of Bohr, decade of Eliot, decade of Joyce, Stein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Duncan, of Martha Graham, the Dadaists, of Spengler, of Hubble and Shockley, of island universes, innovations in cinema, Kellogg Pacts and Reparations, of Lenin and Trotsky’s success in defeating the White Russians, of aborted revolutions elsewhere, assassinations of the German Communist leaders, Luxembourg and Liebknecht, of Lenin’s death and Stalin’s ascendancy, of the Leagues of Nations manqué, of the triumph of American Isolationism, the repudiation of Woodrow Wilson’s dreams, of Republican Party sweeps at the polls, decade of Prosperity and Normalcy, epoch of Cal Coolidge, of cartoons of Germans trundling wheelbarrows full of devalued deutsche marks to buy a few groceries, of money-raising drives and benefit performances on behalf of starving Armenians cruelly massacred by the Turks, of wildly soaring stocks, and fortunes made overnight on Wall Street, and culminating at the end of the decade in the great Stock Market crash in 1929 when erstwhile millionaires hurled themselves from high windows. .

Yes, but the kid was only fourteen, Ira brooded. And besides, he had already become so self-engrossed, become internalized by a veritable psychic implosion. Nay, he had become tsemisht, the stunned, dynamited fish, and consequently, less responsive than he might otherwise have been to the great changes and upheavals occurring in art, in science, in the economy, changes within nations and between them.

True. But why introduce that now? Perhaps he ought to reserve all, or some of it, till later, unfolding events parallel with young Ira’s development. Well, perhaps he’d come back to it, to that and the hobble-skirts the women wore, to that and the stores that appeared on 125th Street selling army-navy surplus. The best thing to do, he thought: Best thing he could do — maybe — would be to excerpt sundry articles, dispatches, editorials from, say, the New York Times, and let it go at that, let the reader wade through the sociopolitical spate of happenings of the century’s third decade in the appropriate studies of the period, and form his own impression. Lazy man’s way, way of default and ineptitude.

From somewhere Farley’s father had received a pair of tickets of admission to a new movie showing in a prestigious movie house on Broadway: Title of the movie was The Golem. The tickets had been given to Farley, and he and Ira rode the subway downtown to see the show.

They viewed a dark, frenetic movie, dark and frenetic as the makeup under the Cabalist rabbi’s eyes, as he pronounced, with sound effects from the musicians in the pit, the awesome tetragrammaton that brought the image of clay to life. But unforgettable, the sorcerer-rabbi’s swiftness in snatching from the newly animate figure the little plug in his bosom, where life resided, snatched it not a moment too soon against the ponderous defense of the lumpish, sentient giant, who toppled backward to the ground.

The plug became symbolic over the years, but of what, Ira was never sure: essence, crystal of life’s principle, a vestige of 1920, of himself and Farley, hurrying full of anticipation out of the subway kiosk into Broadway’s crowded sunshine and then toward the movie theater. No, there was something else, Ira leaned backward into the sway of office chair — something else: his Jewishness, wasn’t it? That he had to deal with afterward, in a serious vein, not as humorous counters, something, the little he knew, the essential plug he had retained of his Jewishness, of Jewish tradition. Odd. And when he tried to pluck it out. . creative inanition followed.

XXI

In packaging half-pound bags of sugar and other dried food, he had long ago learned how to turn the string back upon itself, and thereby form a little bight against which the string could be snapped. He was tying up the one-pound bags of lentils after he weighed them. “He’ll give me permission if I tell him what it’s for,” Ira spoke to Mr. Klein.

“I don’t want no mix-ups. I want you to come in Friday. Not at half-past-three. Twelve o’clock. I’m gonna be shorthanded for filling the beskets for Saturday,” said Mr. Klein. “I’m gonna be shorthanded all day. Why do you have to ask him? Suppose he says no.”

“He won’t say no,” Ira assured him. “He’s let other fellers go. I know.”

“Listen, if you’re smart you wouldn’t ask him. Do like I tell you. I know about school. I got nephews and nieces that go to school. You don’t come back after lunch, farshtest? And then Monday you bring a note from home: Your mother was sick. Something like that. You have to mind the baby—”

“There’s no baby in my house.”

“Don’t be a pain in the ess,” said Mr. Klein. “So something else. She’s gonna have a baby.”

“I could say I got sick, and then I went home.”

“All right. Say you got sick.”

“So I’ll have to bring a note Monday.”

“So bring a note Monday.”

“So he’ll wanna know why I didn’t tell him first.”

“Listen,” Mr. Klein smacked his tongue. “Ich bin dir moichel. You know what that means? Don’t bother me. They’ll have to get me somebody from another store. I was just trying to get you a little extra work on Friday; you’ll make a little extra cash. Az nisht iz nisht Only trouble is you know where everything is. I’ll hev to tell a new man where everything is.”

“I tell you I don’t need any notes,” Ira urged vehemently. “I’ll ask him two days before. All right? Then you’ll know.”

“Two days before, you’ll spoil everything,” Mr. Klein retorted.

“Why?”

“Because you got such a head. Go on. Keep weighing the lentils. Once you tell him that, he’ll know why you’re taking off.”

“All right. You wanna bet?”

“Yeah, I wanna bet,” Mr. Klein said with clipped satire. “Finish. Finish. That’s enough. Give me a hand here.”

“All right.” Ira carried the bags to the shelf marked LENTILS. “So when’re they gonna close?” he asked, returning.

“By the end of the year. The lease is up. Maybe they’ll give them an extension: January. But maybe P and T don’t want it no more,” he shrugged. “It’s not like it once was in the store, with the champagne and the whiskey for New Year’s. Here, take.” He handed Ira a can.

“Kumquats,” Ira read. “Something else I never tasted.”

Mr. Klein laughed. “Boy, you’re a—bist a — bist a—You know what a yold is?”

“Yeah.”

“Harvey,” Mr. Klein addressed the approaching porter, “we’re gonna have a big time here Friday.”

“Yessir, don’t I know it. All that’s gotta happen is for that elevator to break down.”

“Thet’s all. Thet’s right.” He looked fixedly at Harvey. “Thet’s all we need.”

“I ain’t gonna stay here afterward,” said Ira.

“After what? After they close the store? Nobody’s gonna stay here.”

“No. I mean after they move all that stuff.”

“There’s two more months. Maybe more. And then you can help move everything else.”

“I don’t wanna stay here.”

“You didn’t taste everything yet.” Mr. Klein grinned provocatively, and handed Ira a paper-wrapped, odorous wedge, Parmigiano or Romano cheese, Ira would have guessed.

He flushed sullenly. “I don’t taste everything.”

“No? What didn’t you taste?” His head wagged, encompassing in its motion the width and breadth of the cellar. “You hear that, Harvey? He don’t taste everything. Only what ain’t kosher.”

“What ain’t?” Harvey asked.

“Kosher? Everything ain’t.”

“Yee, hee, hee!” Harvey went off, snapping his polishing cloth.

XXII

Class was dismissed at the usual hour, at three. Ira waited until the classroom was empty and he was alone with Mr. Lennard. “I wanna ask you a favor, Mr. Lennard. For Friday.”

“What is it?” Mr. Lennard removed his pince-nez, breathed on a lens, before delicately applying his silk handkerchief. Exposed, his green eyes appeared even more strict as they appraised Ira, strict yet peculiarly blurry. Lips so puffy, and deep, small craters on either side of the bridge of his nose. “I’ll be glad to do you a favor if I can.” He seemed to shade his face under the hand replacing his pince-nez.

“My shipping clerk where I work,” Ira felt as if he had begun at the wrong place, but went on, “Mr. Klein. He asked me if I could come in Friday right after lunch. At Park and Tilford.”

“Why?”

“They got a lotta extra work. They’re moving all the—” Ira gesticulated. “All the stuff from the locked-up cellar: the wine, the whiskey. Beer. I don’t know what. They don’t sell it anymore.”

“Oh, yes.” Mr. Lennard permitted himself a smile. “They don’t, do they? No, we’re all prohibited from touching the stuff.”

“No?” Ira misunderstood, disappointed. “I said I could. He wanted me to do him a favor, Mr. Klein, and come in early.”

“Oh, it’s all right with me,” Mr. Lennard revived hope. “But it won’t be all right with Mr. O’Reilly. Or with the Board of Education. I have to account for your attendance. Supposing something went wrong. You were hurt, and were supposed to be in school. And if I marked you present — you see where that leaves me?”

“Oh,” Ira grimaced repentance. “Yeah. Mr. Klein said I should bring in a note afterward.”

“Exactly, from your parents. That relieves me of responsibility. But the way you’re going about it—” For some reason, Mr. Lennard relaxed in veiled cordiality. “Of course, only you and I need to know the real reason.”

“Yes, sir. Thanks.” Without knowing why, Ira felt cheated — by himself, or so he felt, as usual: dumb, placed himself at disadvantage. “I’ll get a note.”

Mr. Lennard looked up at the clock above the blackboard. “When do you begin work at the store? Three-thirty, isn’t it?”

“Today? Yes, sir. The store is just on Lenox Avenue.”

“You’ve got a few minutes.” Mr. Lennard’s voice was inviting and at the same time inflexible; it hinted at something Ira had heard before. It couldn’t be. It was: echo of that trim, rusty tramp in wooded Fort Tryon Park. It couldn’t be. It was: Mr. Lennard had gone to the door and given the knob that kind of twist that locked it. He returned, still composed, but emanating a darkness, relentless, unmistakable. “Let’s sit down here.” He indicated one of the spotted, gouged wooden surface-tops of a twin desk.

Ira sat down obediently, and Mr. Lennard sat beside him on the other desktop. He opened his fly, speaking casually: “You’ve grown a lot since that day your birthday was mixed up. I still remember it.” He opened Ira’s fly. “Do you pull off now?”

“No.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t.” He began a slow pumping on his own erection while he teased Ira’s limp penis out. “With all that hair on your cock?”

“Somebody tried to show me on the roof,” Ira shrank within himself. “I didn’t like it.”

“You didn’t come, is that it?” Mr. Lennard increased the movement of both hands. “Ever screw anybody?” And at Ira’s silence, “Come on, get a hard-on. Make believe you’re trying to take somebody’s ass.”

Too numb even to be resistive, just too numb; become part of what was around him, not himself: slate blackboards, erasers in the channels, stumps of chalk, school clock, inkwells in the scarred desktops. Long window pole beside the big school windows gaping at blue sky. Mr. Lennard’s hands bobbed up and down. “Come on, squeeze it, squeeze it, get a hard-on. See a nice big ass in front of you. Like your mother’s or your sister’s. You’ve seen it, haven’t you? Bend ’em over. Nice and big — o-oh.” His hands quickened to a flutter. “You get wet dreams. Nice wet dreams. Bring ’em out here in front of you. Come on. Get a hard-on.”

Specter of that rusty, lanky tramp the Irish couple saved him from. “Mr. Lennard, I gotta go. I’m gonna be late.”

“No, you won’t. Let’s go!” He hissed fiercely through his teeth. His features had become concentrated in hectic determination; his pince-nez vibrated so with the intensity of his pumping his own and Ira’s limp penis, he removed his hand from his own, squeezed the clip that removed his glasses, placed them on the desk in the next aisle. “Come on, boy! Make it stiff.”

“I can’t, Mr. Lennard. I’m in school. I can’t.” Whining, shrinking, his instinct clung to the only available escape. “Please, Mr. Lennard. I have to go — Mr. Klein is waiting.”

“Oh, hell!” Mr. Lennard terminated effort abruptly. “Button up.” He got to his feet, snatched his pince-nez from the desk, fixed it on his nose, then angrily went to the door, buttoning his fly. “All right, you’re excused.” He turned the knob. “Don’t forget to bring me a note tomorrow.” He threw the door open, looked out into the hall, scowled at Ira quickly approaching, school-book strap in one hand, his free hand forcing the last button into place on the fly of his knee-pants.

Past his unforgiving teacher, out of the classroom door, into the hall, brass knobs of closed classrooms marking his frightened progress. Self-accused, befouled, bewildered, harried by sick nightmare, he scurried down the iron staircase, alone between thick glass partitions’ dull translucence, the uriney basement. Why did it have to happen to him? Stupid. Mr. Klein told him what to do. Anh. The door, heavy oak school door. Out. Out. That lousy, rotten — bugger! Into the street, oh, better the street. Yell for everybody to hear, Mr. Lennard is a lousy, rotten bugger! Jesus, getting late.

He quickened his pace. He strode as fast as he could, feeling the bind of tightening calf muscles. Revulsion permeated his every fiber, an all-encompassing disgust. A teacher, no less. Like that morning in the gutter, soon after coming to live on 119th Street, the barber’s son and Petey Hunt: “Goggle a weeny,” they baited each other. “Gargle a weeny.” Oh, God, it was all true, it was all true. Everything. They didn’t imagine it. They didn’t exaggerate. It was all true. Fags. Fairies. Fluters. Teachers or rusty bums in the park: What could they see, pulling, holding his dink, his ass, pulling? What? Mother’s big ass, sister’s ass. Oh, he knew what, he knew what. But he wouldn’t say. Play dumb and get away. Play dumb and escape. Ira broke into a trot. Get to the store as fast as he could. Forget.

No, not necessary. Not necessary.

— What an odd way to put it.

I know. I know. So do you, Ecclesias.

— It’s still odd.

Odd or not, that’s my dilemma.

— You chose it.

As a precondition, yes. What are you going to do? Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight and burned is Apollo’s laurel bough. . What can you do? What can you make? As Mom would say in her pathetic Yinglish. Old mole of Hamlet threading underground, or the Ancient Mariner’s undersea sprite.

— But then.

Yes, old mole. ’Tis called a bind. Did ever a literary wight get himself into such pickle?

XXIII

In a daze, he trotted by quiet yellow-brick and brownstone, and now and then a pedestrian, a girl on Fifth Avenue, curls and rosy cheeks, like a calendar girl, in a meadow, by a brook, not this, this loathesomeness of people inside. How? How could it be? Whom to ask? Not Farley, no, couldn’t ask anyone. Only if Uncle Louie were Pop, ask how the everyday, the everyday prosaic proper waylaid. .

To the side entrance of the store he loped, strap of books under arm. And reaching the door, he was startled out of his inner turbulence by the sight of all three P & T delivery trucks at the curb next to the side entrance of the store. He went inside, always like slipping into the store’s shadows and aromas, skipped down the flight of steps to the basement — to meet Mr. Klein’s disapproving glance from the other side of the zinc-lined table. But frowning or not, his face welcome, familiar and trusted those snapping brown eyes, reorienting him to the known, the dependable, the consistent.

“Always you’re here ten minutes early, fifteen minutes early.” Mr. Klein stabbed the small, red city guide book at Ira. “Today, when I need you,” he wagged his head. “Nearly fifteen minutes late. What’s the matter with you? You know I’m shorthended like hell. You can see.” He threw the guidebook down on the table at the edge of the heap of groceries.

“It was my teacher,” Ira extenuated, shoved strap of books under counter.

“That’s the one who’s giving you permission for tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“So what’d he keep you so long? It took so long to say yes or no? And which is it?”

“He said yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. I’m sure.”

“All right. Let’s get to work,” he grabbed his sheaf of invoices. “Wine vinegar, wine vinegar, wine vinegar. You see it?”

“Yeah. There.”

“All right. So the sugar must be next, the box of thyme. Now, don’t ask questions. I don’t know how to say it myself—”

“I’m not askin’ questions.”

“What’s the matter?” Mr. Klein’s brow etched in long frets.

“Nothing.”

“Nothin’? That’s all? All right. So thyme, th-ime, abi gesint. A big can crebmeat. Where? Artichokes— You hear what’s goin’ on?” He handed Ira the items.

“Yeah. What? I never heard that.” Ira noted the thumping noise coming from the wine and liquor vault as he duly stowed the goods into the hamper. “They’re fixing something? Hey, look. There’s Murphy. There’s Quinn. Everybody’s in the basement. What’re they doing over there? There’s Tommy. Who’s that guy?”

“Who’s he?” Mr. Klein kept up a rapid handing over of staples and delicacies. “Who’s they you mean. There’s three of ’em.”

“Oh,” Ira’s gaze followed the stalwart man in the gray fedora. “Where’s three?”

“There. In there with the delivery men. You hear ’em? That’s the boxes they’re strapping. With iron straps. All the booze has got to go tomorrow; everything’s got to be stamped and sealed and with a number. Where the hell is that vanilla?”

“So what’re they gonna do?” Ira picked up the small flask of vanilla, fitted it into a niche in the hamper. “Are they gonna lock everything up again?”

“Bist mishugeh? They were locked up. They’re goin’ to a bonded warehouse tomorrow.”

“A bonded warehouse.” Events of the past hour began to scatter before wholesome activity. “What’s a bonded warehouse?”

“Don’t stop,” Mr. Klein handed over a package. “From everything right away you want to make a discovery: It’s a place nobody can touch the alcohol, that’s all. Volstead. The Volstead Act. That means Prohibition.”

“Why didn’t you— Why wasn’t you—” Ira wrenched the words free. “My big brother?”

Mr. Klein showed genuine surprise: “Why do you need a big brother?” His sympathy was tentative, unsentimental, but honest. “I thought something was the matter.”

“Yeah.”

“So what’s the matter?”

“I got a dirty, rotten, lousy teacher.”

“That’s all? So tell your father.”

Ira fell silent, his throat too tight for utterance.

“All right, I’m your big brother,” Mr. Klein plied his helper with comestibles. “Don’t touch the beer and schnapps tomorrow. That’s my advice.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, it’s a big fine for a minor like you. You’re called a minor. You can’t handle alcohol. You can’t even go near it, you understand? Alcohol — it makes you shikker. Wine, beer. So stay away, whatever anybody else does, stay away— Here, take: watermelon preserves.”

“Tommy too?”

“He’s a goy. Nobody’ll say— No, he’s full-time workin’.” Mr. Klein contradicted himself. “I don’t know how old he is. You, you’re only a schoolboy.”

“I don’t like it anyway.”

“No? All the bekheles wine you don’t drink Pesach? And a kiddush? You know what is a kiddush ha shem? Here: Pettypoise peas. Three cans. Together. Mussels. Vichy. No, hell, what am I thinking? I was in France. I drank it. Vichy s-swah. Sugar.”

“Kiddush, I know. What’s the ha shem?”

Mr. Klein burst into a laugh. “What’s the ha shem! Oy, bist dee a Yeet,”

“Well, the wine anyway is like vinegar in my house. Sharp. My mother makes it in like a big pot in the front room.”

“So that means ha shem,” Mr. Klein said ironically. “Listen, stay away from every kind of bottle tomorrow, you hear? I’m your big brother. There’s gonna be khoisakh in this cellar tomorrow. I can tell already.” He cocked an ear toward the hammering in the wine vault, nodded significantly. “Here: fruit salad. How is it today you’re workin’ like a — like a — like the way you should. Here: a box guava jelly. Next to it. Same order: package tea. Jazz-mine. Another sugar.”

Ira knew he would have no trouble getting Pop to write a note of excuse from school as soon as he heard it would mean his son’s earning a little extra cash. Ever querulous about anything that jeopardized her son’s schooling, it was Mom who demurred, even this slight departure from regularity: “For a paltry shmoolyareh,” she denigrated, “to fall behind in school. I don’t need it. First of all, I want to see you graduate.”

“Yeah,” Ira scoffed. “From bookkeeping and touch-system typing and stinking shorthand. And—” he brooded, surly a moment, “that rotten Spanish.”

“So why did you take it? Who forced you? I don’t know better, alas; I can’t counsel.” She thumped fleshy hand on bosom, “And he—” her fingers spread open toward Pop reading the Yiddish newspaper at the table, “—knows as much as I—”

“I know he seeks to become a malamut.” Pop looked up.

“Then let him become a malamut. But always before it was Davit Clinton, Davit Clinton High School.”

“Stuyvesant is as good as De Witt Clinton.” Ira felt a recurring surge of resentment “I should never have gone to that lousy junior high.”

“Noo?”

“Shah! Yenta.” Pop had gotten writing material from the corner under the china closet. “What shall I tell him? First write me down his name.”

“I got a pencil.” Ira declined the proffered penholder. He spelled out the name as he wrote: “L-e-n-n-a-r-d. Mr. Lennard.”

“Azoy?”

“Yeah. I told him Mom has chronic catarrh and doesn’t speak English, so I have to take her to the clinic—”

“Aha. I don’t need no chronic catarrh. I have to write yet chronic catarrh. Am I a doctor? You have to take her to the clinic. She’s sick. You have to go with her. That’s not enough?”

Sullen, Ira shrugged, the way he always smoothed over Pop’s scorn of his son’s suggestions, knit up his wounded pride. He watched Pop write the date. For so slight a man as Pop was, his script had the doughtiest of flourishes. “Dear is with an ‘a,’ no?”

“Yeh, d-e-a-r.”

“Today a half-day, tomorrow a whole one,” said Mom. “I won’t stand for it.”

“There won’t be any again. I’m gonna quit soon.”

“Aha!” Pop uttered brusque satire. “Shoyn? Enough. The task is ended? You’re already spent?”

“I’m not spent. Everybody says they’re gonna close anyhow. I told you.”

“Then you have to lead the way. What else?”

“Let him be,” Mom interceded. “Whatever he earned, he earned. That was all to the good.”

“But his five dollars a week you grabbed at once.”

“Then I’m the loser, not you.”

“You lead him. Let us see if he ends where you hope.” Pop signed the slip with an inch-high Herman Stigman. “Here’s your notel,” he added in Yiddish diminutive.

Ira folded the paper silently. How could you breach Pop’s contempt? How could you confide: Like yesterday, say, my teacher did this, my teacher did that. You know what he did? Right away it would be his fault, not Mr. Lennard’s: Why did you let him do it? Why didn’t you run out? No, maybe he was wrong. Maybe Pop would write a note, the way he did to Mr. O’Reilly when the shop-teacher cracked Ira on the ear. But then, Mom: Right away, Oy, gevald! The outcry that would ensue: Gevald geshrigen! Outlandish Jewish outcry. Nah.

— It was because you already felt guilty, wasn’t that the chief reason?

Yes, because I might betray something even more heinous than Mr. Lennard’s molestation.

— Isn’t it time you cleared the air, exposed the clandestine burden? You can’t go on indefinitely in this fashion, with an unaccountably eccentric orbit, like a visible astral body with an invisible satellite. Beside, the enigma is beginning to wear thin.

Very well. Soon.

XXIV

Eagerly, Ira greeted Farley, when the two met down in the school basement a few minutes before the bell rang. How much he needed Farley’s cheerfulness, his laugh. If only he could tell Farley: Mr. Lennard tried to jerk me off. Then how do you know about jerking off? Mr. Lennard tried to pull me off. Then how do you know about pulling off? All right, Mr. Lennard played with my dink; he took his out and tried to make me get a hard-on — ah, then what, then what? Farley would say what to do. Maybe tell someone else. Then what? Ah, the hell with it. Mr. Lennard was excusing him from school this afternoon. That was all that mattered. Ira told Farley about the permission he had received from Mr. Lennard to skip school after lunch — and about the liquor to be moved from the cobwebby vault down in a corner of the cellar of the store:

“They’re gettin’ the hooch out,” said Farley. “Hooch,” what a funny word; they both laughed.

Ira’s anxiety subsided a little; it was easier now to place Pop’s note on Mr. Lennard’s desk. He scarcely glanced at it. School was school — Ira went to his seat: Routines were routines, almost as if they were in a plaster cast — like that Golem in the movie. Gee, you’d never guess. The attendance roll was called. With noncommittal countenance, Mr. Lennard slipped Pop’s note between the leaves of the wide attendance book and flattened the gray cover. A few minutes later, when the gong rang to summon the school to the Friday assembly, Mr. Lennard stepped out into the hallway, and with strict, impersonal mien oversaw the deportment of his class as they filed out of the classroom and marched through the hall toward the staircase. Everything tended toward the customary; the customary leveled out everything.

Still, a certain imprint showed through, like that of a lingering dream, as they pledged allegiance to the flag, sang “The Star Spangled Banner.” And seated again, heard Mr. O’Reilly read the 23rd Psalm. How different that was now, different from what it was on the East Side, when he first heard the lady principal read it. Mr. Lennard stood so devotionally, so reverently near the window. Oh, to bring back those innocent days on the East Side, when he thought “my cup runneth over” meant my kupf runneth over. “He anointeth my head with oil,” so of course your kupf runneth over — like Mom’s cottonseed oil — from your head down your cheeks.

On the platform, Mr. O’Reilly was talking about the Russian Bolsheviks, and his face twitched with earnestness as he spoke: The Bolsheviks were evil people; they were dictators; they abolished free speech, free newspapers and meetings; they confiscated anything they wanted; they shot anyone who stood up for his rights; they closed churches and synagogues; they mocked at God. Ira listened, but always with reservations, maybe Jewish reservations, maybe that was the trouble: Mom said the Bolshevicki killed Czar Kolki, Czar Kolki who detested Jews, Czar Kolki who encouraged pogroms, Czar Kolki, the Bullet. For that alone, she kissed the Bolshevicki. What was the use? It was best to forget everything — if you could — not think of who was right, not think of such matters. Like what? Like Civics? No. He hated Civics anyway. Not Geography either. He hated that too. History. Maybe sometimes: General Herkimer wounded and dying but still directing the battle, Captain André, the spy, with the map of the fortress in the heel of his shoe, General Wolfe, General Montcalm, dying in the same battle. That sort of history he liked, but not the Henry Clay and the great Missouri Compromise or anything of that kind. The Bolsheviks were one thing, according to Mr. O’Reilly. The Bolshevicki were another, according to Mom, saying of their execution of Czar Nicholas, “Gut, gut, verfollen zoll er vie e likt.” Even Pop agreed; Uncle Louie was enthusiastic: A new world had opened up for the worker, Jew or Gentile. But not Zaida; he didn’t believe Communist Russia would make much if any difference to the Jew. Would they let him trade, make a nice living? Everything the Bolshevicki took away from the prosperous Jew. Synagogues were closed. Then what good was it if you couldn’t worship God? Kerensky, Kerensky and the Duma, that was the way the new regime should have gone. But did the Bolshevicki allow it? They drove him out as well as the people elected like those in the United States. So who knew how the Jews would fare?

But you had to think of something: If he could only turn his head and look at Farley, that would make you feel better, but he couldn’t. Fix on the American flag hanging motionlessly over with its staff in its iron sleeve on the side of the platform, the Bible on its lectern, the partitions pushed back to open up the classrooms into an assembly hall, George Washington in profile high on the wall above and behind Mr. O’Reilly. . Sit still, sit at attention, and after awhile, see nothing, hear nothing, think nothing, like the three little brown monkeys in the Japanese store on 125th Street where they made those wonderful rice cakes. . Pop had wanted him to go to work; Mom wanted him to go to school. Pop wanted him to go to work because he was a folentser, an idler, a sloth; Mom wanted him to go to school to become an edel mensh, a refined person. But look what had happened to him already. Mr. Lennard had gone to college; he was an edel mensh. But look what he did. Tried to pull both of them off right in the eighth-grade homeroom. You had to think about that. And why did it happen to you, that and so much else? It happened to you because of the one who cherished you so much and you clung to: Mom. She moved you to Irish Harlem, so she could live in the front, yes — and she acquiesced that day, that day, that day, that morning, that morning, she acquiesced: oh boy, oh, boy. O-o-oh! “That grin will get you into trouble,” said Mr. O’Reilly. And if he knew what kind of trouble — never mind — and yesterday, Mr. Lennard. So who was right? Who was better? Even thinking about it made him — like he was double: as it did just now: self-despising — and at the same time, stuck to what made him self-despising. Wait till Sunday, oh, boy! Wait till Sunday. Bolshewitskies. Bolshewhiskeys. Who cared, one way or the other?

On assembly days, periods were shortened, made shorter still by little written quizzes, quizzes exchanged with classmates, who graded them according to the right answers to be found in the book or written on the blackboard by the teacher. The quizzes were graded, often grinned at in collusion, and returned. He was just no good in commercial studies, that was all. Even Farley was better than he was in Gregg shorthand, in touch-typing, in bookkeeping. Farley won commendation from Mr. Sullivan, who just couldn’t find words harsh enough to give vent to his exasperation at Ira’s sheer stupidity, his total incompetence at comprehending the rudiments of bookkeeping. Again, he didn’t care. It was always money, money, money. Business, beezeniss. Oh, all the time.

The noon gong sounded at last. At the word “Dismissed,” Ira seized his strap of books and tore down to the basement in the van of the class — then sped out into the street. He hadn’t brought any lunch; no need to: He’d tear open one of those boxes of — what did they call them? Arrowroot — first chance he got. Oh. Tomorrow on the delivery truck, it would all wear off. And Sunday — his pace quickened — Sunday morning, there was Sunday morning. And after awhile, Mom returning with bagels and lox or smoked whitefish. Sunday morning delicacies. Yeh, yeh, yeh. Sunday morning delicacies— Wasn’t he crazy? Wear it off and wear it on again. But then he could run away from it, could run afterward right over to Farley’s house. The whole thing would wear off again, would be absorbed by Farley’s cheeriness, Farley’s buoyancy.

XXV

He turned into quiet 126th Street, westbound. Even from half a block away he could see Murphy’s truck, the old White; but as he approached the side entrance to the store, he spied a forbidding-looking man, powerful, authoritative, posted beside the truck. Impassively, he watched Ira open the door, enter, waver at the sight of still another burly stranger inside. Ira scampered down the stairs: Mr. Klein was there—

“I got here on time, didn’t I?”

“Nice, very nice,” Mr. Klein spoke, munching a sandwich.

“Hey, who’s those guys?” Ira thumbed upward.

“Never mind. You stay right here.”

“You told me already ten times.” Ira shoved his books under the counter.

“No becktalks!” Mr. Klein brought out his formidable rejoinder. “Those fellers are from the government. Prohibition agents. They work only by the wine and whiskey. Upstairs. Outside. Downstairs. The same thing. Farshtest? They got their work; we got to load these beskets. We’re still going to be open two, three months. Let’s see you be a whiz-beng, like yesterday.” With sandwich in hand, he reached out for the sheaf of yellow invoices; then, with sandwich clamped between jaws, slid grocery items toward Ira—

Toward Ira — who grinned.

“So what’s so funny?” Mr. Klein removed his sandwich. “Those four items go together. Here, these four — the box ladyfingers, the two pounds apricots, sticks cinnamon, kadota figs, that’s all together with the bag sugar.

“So what’s so funny?” Mr. Klein repeated.

“You and your sandwich.”

“Why? It’s good corned beef.”

“It makes you talk like corned beef.”

“Oh, a kleege, hey? On a day like this you eat like you can. You shoulda been in France. That’s how we ate at the front. That’s how we ate. That’s how we kept from dying of hunger under fire. Out a’ cans. They called them — what the hell’d they call them — you’re gettin me sidetrecked. I forget already. You see? Something lousy you don’t wanna remember. Now, wild rice — we scraped out the cans sometimes scraped ’em right out, crusted like gunk, treife like hell. Who cared? Anything to eat when you’re in the trenches. Understand? So a sandwich maybe I hold like a dog a bone; it’s funny — to you.” Something harried closed momentarily like a shutter over his features. “What’s gettin’ into me? What did I give you just then?”

“I didn’t look.”

“You should always look. What’re you here for?” He peered down into the hamper. “Two pounds walnuts.”

“My uncle came home from the army—”

“Oh, you had an uncle in the army. Olives. Here’s capers. That makes two jars. The eggs stay out separate. Heng on. It’s a whole bacon—”

“My uncle came home. He was a mess sergeant first—”

“Oh, he was a mess sergeant noch—”

“Then he was a reggeleh sergeant. So my aunt gave him a glass of seltzer—” Ira stopped. The stalwart stranger in the fedora he had seen yesterday was accompanying Murphy, wheeling a noisy handcart to the street elevator. “Is Quinn here, too? And Tommy? I didn’t see the new big White.”

“They’ll be here soon. And Shea too. Nobody took a full load today. That’s why—” He used the last of his sandwich to point at the mountain of groceries on the zinc-sheathed table. “You saw somebody outside?”

“Yeah, and inside another one. Gee, big like an ox.” Ira stole glances at Murphy and his escort, as the two ascended in the cellar-to-street elevator. In a few seconds their legs disappeared, but even before that, as the elevator platform rose, Ira caught whiffs of the sickly smell of whiskey. He could see the jagged edges of broken bottles lying on their side in the dark, shallow bilge in the elevator sump. “I can tell what I got to do tomorrow.”

“What? Oh.” Mr. Klein described the object of Ira’s gaze. “Maybe it’s gonna be done today. If Mr. Stiles sees it.”

“So how’m I gonna stop an’ do it today?”

“I didn’t say you.” Mr. Klein plied Ira with groceries. “They could highjeck the whole load. You know what we got here? For a bunch gengsters to highjeck is what we got here.”

“What?”

“Bist tockin a yold. Go ahead. Peck. English marmalade. Uh! Look at that! Snails. A mishigoss. I saw them in France. I thought only a Frenchman—”

“I know. And we got frogs’ legs too.”

“Peck!” Mr. Klein raised his voice.

“All right, all right. So why was the guard standing by Murphy’s truck?” Ira demanded. “And the guy inside?”

“Maybe now you’ll begin to understand something. Here. Pay attention. This sugar goes with the other order, the one I just gave you.”

“I’m the one paying attention. You’re not.”

“No becktalks I said! There’s a guy up there with a pistol. He’s a Prohibition agent, I told you. The other guys, too. They all got guns. That’s enough. We’ll talk from something else. We’ll never get finished.”

“Oh, boy.” Ira sighed.

“You’re enjoying yourself, or what?”

“I am?”

“Noo. Hustle. Hustle. This is curry. You got six things that go with it. English marmalade. Not too tight. Guerkins, jerkins. Almond paste. Buckwheat groats. You see why Jews don’t buy from Park and Tilford. You know what buckwheat groats are? Plain kasha. And costs five times more.”

“Yech!”

“What do you mean, yech? Kasha? With chicken schmaltz. What could be better? That’s all they eat in the Russian army. Here’s sugar. Did you fast on Yom Kippur?”

“Me? Never. I just take off from school. You?”

Mr. Klein’s answer was a barely tolerant look. “Here’s a big order: eight, nine items.” His eyes traveled from invoice to hamper. “Put ’em all over here on this side. Coffee. Two cans pineapple. What’s this?” He squeezed the small brown bag. “Ginger root. Peckage melba toast. Marrons glacés. Jar pâté de. .”

Mr. MacAlaney, blond assistant manager, came down the stairs, sniffed with wry face, his sharp, blue eyes behind his glasses seeking the source of the odor of alcohol, located it. He stepped close to the elevator sump for confirmation, then getting his key ring out of his pocket, went to the icebox. He came back a minute later with a prim expression on his face, and a pink, sensuous globe of fruit in his hand.

“What’s that?” Ira turned to Mr. Klein, as Mr. MacAlaney climbed up the stairs. “That fruit.”

“Mengo. Mengo,” said Mr. Klein.

“Mengo?” Ira tried to match the word with anything he had ever heard or read.

“Don’t eat it. You can puke from it. Here: a bottle Lea and Perrins. Pimentos, a jar, George Washington coffee, a jar—”

Not only Murphy and his stalwart escort came down the stairs but Quinn and Tommy too. “Hey!” he and Ira greeted each other. Tommy winked broadly, and he and Quinn followed Murphy toward the vault.

“So far, it’s not bad. One besket’s nearly full.” Mr. Klein stopped long enough from handing out groceries to look at his watch. “Only two o’clock. You’d still be in school yet.”

“Yeah, my Spanish period. I nearly forgot.”

“Forgot what? The Spanish? Here’s the last item: asparagus tips.”

Glowering, Ira tucked away the item, found subterfuge. “I forgot to bring my lunch.”

“So whose fault is that?” And after a few seconds, “You stay here.” Mr. Klein went into the aisles, brought back a box of Lorna Doones, opened them and put them under the table. Ira stuffed two at a time into his mouth. They were grainy; they made him thirsty. “Can I get a drink?”

Mr. Klein indicated the utility sink with nod of brow. “Come right beck.”

Ira opened the faucet wide to let the water rush cool, and as he reached for a paper cup, Quinn came out of the toilet next to the sink. He smelled strongly of liquor. “I gotta ask Klein somethin’,” he said, and both returned to the counter.

“Hey, Klein,” Quinn slouched, willowy. “You were in Belleau Wood, weren’t you?”

“Château-Thierry. Argonne.” Klein replied in clipped tone of voice. And to Ira: “All right. New besket.”

“I thought you were in Belleau Wood.”

“No. I had enough with Château-Thierry and Argonne.” Unsmiling, Mr. Klein signaled for Ira to give him a hand; they dragged the full basket to one side.

Quinn kept talking: “I had a buddy — his name was Schein, Abe Schein. Like Klein. Tallest Jew I ever seen, taller than I am, lots. Jesus, he was lanky. We called him Shnitzel for the hell of it. Shnitz. He was always talkin’ Torah, Torah. You remember Christmas Eve, remember? I told you somethin’ about him.” he addressed Ira. “It’s in the Torah. Sometimes I’d kid him: Hey Shnitz, does the Torah tell you how to fade the dice?”

“You told me that already.”

“I did, didn’t I?” Once again, Quinn assumed the same strange posture he had taken when he waited for Ira to scramble off the rear end of the big White: He locked the fingers of both hands together, knuckles upward, his gray eyes fixed on remoteness: With locked hands so low in front of him, there was no telling whether he was praying or despairing.

“Shoyn shikker,” Mr. Klein muttered under his breath. “All right,” he rustled the yellow sheaf aggressively. “We got first: lobster. Small ken. Jar, cheddar in wine, the one closed with the wire—”

“Wouldn’t go to a whore. ‘Why don’t you git frenched,’ I sez. ‘You say it’s against yer religion to lay ’em. Try that. That ain’t layin ’em.’ ‘Go away,’ he sez. ‘Fer Christ sake, the Heinies might pick you off t’morrow. A guy tall as you. You stand out woise’n a second-louie in his Sam Brown belt — Git yer piece some way.’ Nope. Torah. Torah. Jumpin’ Jesus.”

“Mint jelly, a gless.” Mr. Klein kept his voice raised. “Coffee, a beg. Sugar. Cubes beef consommé—Where is it?”

“It’s that tin box.”

“You see? You’re really smart already. I thought it was crystallized ginger. Shikker auf toit,” he directed a subdued aside at the stooping Ira.

Quinn pressed his locked hands further down. “You know how you go up to the front. Klein, you an’ your buddy, side by side — Yer in a long file. You oughta know.”

“I know. I know already,” Mr. Klein said abruptly.

“It pays to be a short guy like you,” said Quinn. “You ain’t no runt. But Shnitzel, he’d make anybody—”

“I know what you’re goin’ to tell me! All right?” Mr. Klein interrupted, all but snappish.

“Yeah, but he didn’t make a sound, Klein,” Quinn’s voice burred harshly. “Not a fuckin’ sound.” Quinn suddenly sucked in his breath. “I never knew where he went. I never knew when he went. We wuz talkin’ about different things. Not a goddamn tree in sight, blown to hell. What a pity he sez. Like they wuz innocent. An’ me about the thirteen-, fourteen-year-old kids here gittin’ free lays in gay Paree from married women with hot pants whose hubbies were at the front—”

“All right!” Mr. Klein said with explosive emphasis. “I gotta get these orders out. What’s the use talkin’ about it? We’ve been through it. We lived it. The mortar shells, the machine guns. So who needs more? Quinn, it’s a big Saturday tomorrow. Like Thenksgiving nearly, and with no help. Some other time.”

“Okay. But I been talkin’ to Shnitzel ever since. A harp an’ a Jew. But he was my buddy an’ the way he went, it was like he was gone an’ never left me. Been different if I’d seen him get his. But this way—”

“Okay. So what’re you gonna do? It happened to everybody nearly.”

“Not this way.”

“All right, not this way. So a sniper got him. You tell yourself once and for all a sniper got him.” Mr. Klein’s vehemence turned on Ira. “Where were we on the orders?”

“Yeah, hey, Shnitz! Hey!” Quinn unclasped his hands. “Tell me about them thirty-six holy men that has to be here. Ah, Jesus.” He made for the outside stairs.

Mr. Klein turned to Ira. “Where were we on the orders?”

“Nonpareils, you gave me a box of nonpareils.”

“Nonpareils,” Mr. Klein began, consulted the invoice, and looked up — looked up, and kept his eyes fixed in pained wonder. Above the noise of the rolling handtruck, while Murphy pushed the load of steel-strapped boxes, he and the stalwart agent escorting him were engaged in loud dispute.

“Oy, gevald,” Mr. Klein growled, all but inaudibly. “Sit zan du khoisakh. C’mon. Take! Here is a bottle maple syrup, Oregon prunes, two pounds—”

XXVI

It seemed that Murphy and the agent accompanying him behind the rolling handtruck were furious with each other. They weren’t at all. Their loud voices were raised, but not in wrath — in uncompromising disagreement. “I’m tellin’ youz, youz wuz.” Murphy pressed the elevator button.

“How the hell could you tell it was me. It was night and a dark one, too,” contended the Prohibition agent. “It was pitch dark. Only light we had was a starshell. We didn’t light a match. We bummed lights off each other’s smokes.”

“That’s right. Cigarette end, only light we had. That’s why it took me so long to figure out it was you: your voice. An’ your build, maybe. You wuz a captain, wuzn’t you?”

“Maybe. I was a major at the end. What the hell’s that got to do with it?”

“I’m tryin’ to tell ye.” Murphy watched the elevator platform descend. “All right, fergit it. You wuzn’t there.”

“Yes, but the whole goddamned Argonne. You know how many American troops were in that battle?”

“All right, I’m wrong.” As the elevator platform settled at floor level, Murphy hunched to shove the handtruck aboard, stopped. “You wuz in the Boer War, right? You wuz a soldier o’ fortune you said. You wuz a private. Remember tellin’ us that big kick you got givin’ the compliments o’ General Kitchener to majors an’ colonels, an’ havin’ ’em salutin’ you?”

The stalwart Prohibition agent seemed to become rigid, motionless, his eyes never leaving Murphy’s face. “Well, I’ll be goddamned!”

“You fought that big Jew. When you were with the Rough Riders in Cuba.” Murphy pressed on. “You said all the romance is gone out a’ war. Wasn’t that what you said?”

“Were you in that same big shellhole?” the stalwart man’s face seemed gray under the cellar’s unshaded incandescents, as if the burden of the coincidence taxed all his credulity. “There must have been a hundred of us pinned down that night.”

“I’m tellin’ ye.” Murphy thrust the handtruck forward.

“Wait a minute. Get that box too,” said the Prohibition agent.

“Yeah. Quinn, you comin’?”

Quinn left the side of the table, walked over, picked up the box Tommy had just brought, and joined the others on the elevator platform. Murphy tapped the elevator button on the side of the wall, and all three ascended out of sight. They left behind a strange kind of atmosphere in the cellar, something Ira had never felt before: an intrusion of danger, a peculiar imminence of past peril.

“Come on!” Mr. Klein cried angrily. “Wake up. Tonight is Shabbes b’nakcht. All right, so you don’t have to be ehrlikh. But the candles your mother lights, no? — Listen, Tommy, do me a favor: go beck to strepping the rest of the boxes.”

“All right. Don’t git huffy,” Tommy answered.

“Go beck! I wanna finish here by closing time. The whole day is one big headache already.” Acrimony held Mr. Klein in its grip. “Oy, a shvartz yur! To get something done with these Irish shikkerim,” he lamented as soon as Tommy turned his back. “Come! Two cans French-cut string beans. Grenadine syrup, a bottle. Van Camp’s. Chicken à la king, three cans. Sugar. Move.” Mr. Klein kept passing groceries. “Look what you’re doin’!” he chided.

“Yeh, yeh, I am.” Ira retorted, but he couldn’t get the ominous feeling out of his mind.

“If they don’t find them items in the beskets when they deliver tomorrow, you know who they’ll blame?” Mr. Klein thrust his head forward in harassment. “Me, not you. So—”

“Yeah, but I’m putting ’em in right! You can see I am.”

“All right,” he conceded. “Those guys get me upset, it’s terrible. I’m in that — in that shlakht haus again. Once, a shell hit so close, I didn’t know my own name for two days. Did I give you the tarragon vinegar?”

“Yeah.”

“So that finishes that slip.” He put the invoice behind the others. “I’m gonna take a leak. I don’t want you to move from the table, you hear? You’re the shipping clerk.” He gave Ira the sheaf of invoices. “Every clerk upstairs writes different. But you got a Jewish kupf. So figure out. I don’t wanna lose no more time. This day should be over, Oy!” He left.

Was that the way war felt? Ira couldn’t shake the sense of foreboding as he tried to decipher the scrawl on the invoice. Killing. Battle. What did he say? No romance—

“Hey, Irey! Hey, kid!” The cry came from the street: It was Murphy’s voice.

“Yeah!” Ira yelled.

“Push the button, will ye? The down button.”

Ira hurried to the elevator, pressed the lower button. “OK,” he yelled.

The elevator descended, three men aboard it, Quinn, Murphy, the tall stalwart Prohibition agent, the one who had been at Argonne. But now their demeanor had changed. They were jovial, friendly.

“There’s nothin’ like a good slug o’ booze to make you forget,” said Quinn.

“Or remember, too,” Murphy rejoined, barely humorous as was his wont. “By Jesus, I don’t think I ever woulda remembered. Hey, I remember! Didn’t you say, ‘What’s the use? You chew tobacco an’ spit the juice.’”

“Yeah. Hard to believe. I thought that night never would pass,” the agent puffed on his cigarette, offered the pack to the others. “Talk about steady machine-gun fire. They knew we were in there. If our mortars hadn’t opened up in the morning, and that barrage — say, I recognize your voice now.” He went into a gale of laughter, bent over, coughed cigarette smoke, wheezed with laughter again. “If that wasn’t the funniest goddamn story I ever heard! It’s still funny.”

“That was me, all right.” Murphy pushed the handtruck off the elevator. The others followed.

“What the hell was so funny I don’t know,” said the agent. “Every time somebody asked you what it felt like at the end of that rope, we’d go off.” He laughed again, head back, laughter full and prolonged. “The Germans could hear us. We didn’t give a damn.” He laughed again.

Quinn laughed. Murphy began to laugh too. He was a short man but tough in mien, with a rocky jaw and long arms. He banged the handtruck. His normally fair skin suffused: “A rough sea, ye know, an’ night, an’ about ten guys over me yellin’, ‘Git goin’!’ An’ there ain’t a goddamn lifeboat under me or nothin’. Black water, that’s all. The whole fuckin’ ocean.”

The wooden boxes on the handtruck in his hands shook, as if in lieu of mirth — to which the roaring merriment of the other two men added dimension.

The laughter continued. Ira, too, was infected. It really was funny. He lifted his face, grinning appreciatively toward the laughing faces above him, saw the Prohibition agent’s countenance turn sober, heard him say with quiet urgency: “Where is it, Murph?”

“Back o’ the icebox. The big locked one.”

“Hope it’s good.”

“Bushmill. Johnny Walker. Haig.”

The agent whistled between his teeth: “You don’t miss a trick.”

“Not when it’s all P and T.”

“Any man deserves a sup o’ poteen after bein’ dipped in the drink,” said Quinn. “There’s more Lily cups at the sink.”

“Right.” The agent swallowed. “I’m McCrory.” He took a few steps toward the stairs. “Craig, will you come down here?

“Okay, Major.” The beefy, short-necked man appeared.

“That’s Murphy. That’s Quinn. Remember the story I told you about standing in the mud in a helluva big shell crater all night? There’s the soldier hanging from a rope when his troopship was torpedoed?” He pointed at Murphy. “Would you believe it?”

“No!” And once again a roar of laughter.

“Ira!” Mr. Klein’s angry shout was loud enough to be heard through the swelling guffaw — and stern enough to frighten Ira.

“Here. I’m coming!”

“I told you not to leave the place, didn’t I?” Mr. Klein’s impatient glare tracked Ira returning. “You didn’t peck a thing. Look, it’s the same slip.”

“You took so long,” Ira countered.

“So you shoulda done more!”

“They called me to the elevator. To get it down,” Ira answered.

Under fretful eyebrows lowered over the invoices, Mr. Klein seemed to be trying to block out the view of the group near the elevator. “A shvartz gelekhter,” he growled. “Here, take: three bottles Perrier water.”

“They were in a shellhole together,” Ira said.

“Six Knox gelatin.”

“The one who’s going in the back now is a major. I heard Murphy tell him—”

“Pay attention!” Mr. Klein scolded.

“Oh, Jesus!” Ira muttered rebelliously.

“Three cans pie cherries. Take. Gib dikh a rick. Salt water teffy. Another dozen eggs — beck on the counter. Extract cloves. Smoked kippers, six cans. Gluten bread. Coffee, cocktail onions, a jar—”

“You ain’t givin’ me a chance to pack,” Ira complained.

“All right. No becktalks.” Nevertheless, Mr. Klein slowed down — slightly. “If you knew what I feel, you’d do everything on the double. It’s not enough once for them to be in that murder? Murder, and mud, and rats!”

One after the other, each of the four agents took turns walking around the opposite end of the cellar, even the agent supervising Tommy — and Tommy himself, and Murphy and Quinn. “Shikkerim!” said Mr. Klein. “A brukh uf zeh! Look! Look! Three on that elevator, and a double load whiskey.” He scowled at the elevator creaking upward. “This is Prohibition? S’ toigt shoyn uf a kapura.” He slapped his own cheek with the sheaf of invoices: “What am I worrying about? Let Park and Tilford worry. Baker’s chocolate. Hearts of palm. Butterscotch sauce. Coffee. Sugar. Yams, two cans. That’s another besket.”

Under Mr. Klein’s forceful dispensing, they made good progress. The second hamper for the customers was full and pulled out of the way alongside the first: They would be Quinn’s and Tommy’s delivery stint for tomorrow. The summit of the mountain of groceries on the counter had subsided considerably, subsided to a widespread heap. Now to fill Murphy’s big hamper for the east Bronx. That would leave only Shea’s smaller basket to take care of. Shea’s smaller basket was rarely filled all the way to the top, its contents destined for local stops.

“Oh, what has become o’ hinky dinky, parlez-vous? Oh, what has become of all the Jewish soldiers, too?” Quinn sang as he came down the stairs from the street— “All the sons of Abraham are eatin’ ham fer Uncle Sam, hinky dinky—” He passed in front of the table. “Them trucks’re goddamn near down on their springs,” he said out of the side of his mouth — and walked around toward the iceboxes. “Hinky, dinky, parlez-vous.”

XXVII

“

Ira,” Mr. MacAlaney called down from the top of the stairs leading up to the store. “You down there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know what the Camembert cheese looks like?”

“Yes, sir. It’s in a round wooden box.”

“Bring up a box.”

Conscious of Mr. Klein’s stern look following him, Ira left the table for the icebox. Quinn was there, and Tommy with a bottle of beer. At the sight of Ira, Quinn allowed himself a chuckle. Tommy proffered his bottle. “I can’t,” Ira grabbed one of the quaint wooden boxes of Camembert, “Mr. MacAlaney is waiting.”

“Don’t be a prick like Klein,” Tommy’s lips curled jaggedly, so Irish in crooked truculence. “Taste it. You ain’t a Jew like them others. Remember what I told you Christmas when we were deliverin’?”

“Ye’ll never git another chance,” Quinn rubbed his eyelids. “Not after today. Imported lager like that. Home brew’ll be all that’s around. Shnitz used to say it’s the only beer good enough for them thirty-six holy men that keeps the world goin’.”

“Hebrew an’ Homebrew,” Tommy quipped.

“Try it, Irey,” Quinn prodded.

Ira took a swallow, burbled lips in distaste, hurried off, their laughter trailing him. He climbed up the first steps, stopped short: on the top of the stairs, next to glinty-eyed Mr. MacAlaney waiting for his parcel, Mr. Stiles was talking to Harvey, who was leaning on the handle of his wide dry-mop. “No, I want you to do it this time,” Mr. Stiles was saying to Harvey. “Get the glass outta there. What is there? Three or four bottles broken. You can smell it all the way up to the store. There’s a law too about minors handling alcohol,” he concluded impatiently. “And with that elevator going up and down, he’ll forget to watch himself. You do it this time. I don’t want any trouble.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll be glad when the stuff’s out of here.” Frowning, Mr. Stiles turned away.

Only too keenly aware of his own yeasty breath, Ira kept his head lowered, held up the box of Camembert, wished it smelled more, and as soon as Mr. MacAlaney relieved him of it, retreated down the steps. “Hoo!” he sighed noisily, returning to the table.

“Oy, a shvartz yur!” Mr. Klein exploded. “What have you been drinking? You stink like a vershtinkeneh zoo!”

“Tommy gave me some beer.”

“You’re a minor. You’re a schoolboy. You could get everybody in trouble! I told you to stay away.”

“It was only a taste.”

“Mr. Stiles should catch you! He’d give you a taste. He’d fire you.”

“Tommy’s drinking. Everybody!” Ira flared up.

“It’s none of your business. You’re working with me. Eat another cracker. I should see this booze outta here already.”

Quinn came around and headed for the elevator: “Take it easy, Klein,” he grinned indulgently. “Don’t git your bowels in an uproar. We’ll be skidooin’ outta here soon. Oh, mademoiselle from gay Paree, parlez-vous. Oh, mademoiselle from gay Paree, what a hell o’ dose she gave to me, hinky, dinky, parlez-vous. Them fuckin’ snipers. How come Shnitzel took a drink an’ you don’t, Klein?” He grinned, made for the elevator pit. And reaching the wall, he lifted his hand to the wall-button: “Hey, up der! Ready for me to bring her down?”

“Hold ’er a second till I git the truck on,” came Murphy’s answering cry.

“Say when,” Quinn waited with upraised hand.

His displeasure smoldering on his dark features, Harvey came down the stairs, crossed in front of the table.

“You gonna go under the elevator?” Ira asked.

Harvey fixed Ira with an irritated glance, kept on his way.

“Gee, he’s sore,” Ira said under his breath. “He’s gotta do my job, I bet.”

“No, it’s whiskey bottles on the bottom,” Mr. Klein admonished sharply. “Pay attention. A peckage rusk. A peckage pralines. A whole Gouda—” he sniffed it. “It’s all right. We can peck it with the rest. It’s local. Haguda.” He handed the string-bound cheese to Ira. “You know from the haguda? Mah nishtanu he laila hazeh?”

Harvey reappeared carrying the familiar bucket and flat shovel — as the cry came from the street: “Let ’er go, Quinn.”

“Ever see Senegalese troops, Major?” Murphy raised his voice above the creak of the elevator beginning its descent.

“Senegalese? You mean black Senegalese? I may have. I saw about every kind in France.”

“They look like monkeys in frog uniforms.”

Quinn tilted his head slowly in oblique look at Harvey.

“I don’t think I ever saw ’em in action?” Two pairs of knees came into view.

“Action. That’s a good one!” At hip-level, Murphy shifted the handtruck. His uproarious laugh crested the elevator’s drone. “Weren’t they corkers! We’d have ’em on our right, and as soon as the Heinies knew they had the Senegalese in front, they’d attack. You never heard such a squealin’ an’ scramblin’. They’d leave a hole big enough fer a regiment.”

“Is that right?”

“Maybe they’re runnin’ yet.” Murphy’s rocky face came into view under the elevator lintel. “They could be all the way to Africa—” He spied Harvey waiting with bucket and shovel — and cleared his throat with a peculiar sound, as if he were warning the major — who was already aware. For a moment or two only the elevator’s creak was heard in descent, and then when the platform was still inches from the cellar floor, Murphy shoved the handtruck forward. Steel wheels banged on concrete. “It’s okay, Harv. I was just talkin’.”

“You’re talkin’ about colored people. They just as brave as any white man.” Already annoyed by the prospect of his task, Harvey’s features became like basalt. The nails on his outspread fingers gleamed. “I’ve seen lots o’ whites shit in their pants when they come under fire. Don’t tell me about bein’ brave. The enemy fired at us. We fired at them.”

“All right,” said the major. “Harvey is your name? It’s all right, Harvey. It’s just one of those misunderstandings. But no point getting worked up about it. He didn’t mean to insult you. He didn’t know you were around.”

“I get sick of you white smart-asses like him.” Harvey still trained his ivory eyes on Murphy. “Makin’ fun of us, like we were yellow. I wore a U.S. uniform. I was infantry like you. Fourteenth Infantry Regiment. You never heard about us retreatin’ ’thout orders.”

“Who the hell wuz talkin’ about you!”

“You wuz talkin’ about colored.”

“I wuz talkin’ about Senegalese.”

“That’s colored!”

“The hell with you!” said Murphy. “What d’ye want me to do? Kiss yer ass?”

“The hell with you!” Harvey retorted.

Both men had raised their voices. “See? What’d I tell you?” Mr. Klein rasped. “Sit balt sein du a malkhumah.”

The two angry men could be heard throughout the cellar. The youthful, tow-haired agent in the vault with Tommy came forward, with Tommy trailing him, and the short-necked man on the stairs came partway down.

“Let’s cut it out,” the major said curtly. His voice was restrained, and his forefinger moved like a dial between the two adversaries. “Both of you. We’ll all be in hot water in a minute. You better watch the noise. The store is still open.”

“I don’t want to get in no hot water, Major. I just came over to do what Mr. Stiles told me: clean out the broken bottles down in de pit.”

“All right, it’s all yours.” The major put one foot on the elevator platform, raised his face to call up into the late-afternoon sky: “Everything okay up there, Ordwin?”

“Yes, sir,” came the response from the street.

“When’s that Model-T driver due back?” the Major spoke to Mr. Klein.

“Shea? He should be beck already. It’s efter five.”

“What’s keeping the man?” The major stepped aside to allow Harvey to press one of the elevator buttons, and frowning, watched the ascending elevator platform block off all view of the outdoors.

“Gott sei dank, the trucks are upstairs in the street, not down here,” Mr. Klein said in a dry undertone.

“Down here? The trucks?” Ira repeated, sure of his wonder at the absurdity.

“Why do you think there’s a Prohibition man in beck of the door,” Mr. Klein demanded — and without waiting for an answer: “He protects a flenk. Sit a sakh helfin,” he added. “You know there’s bottle goods up there in the trucks cost twice what I get a week, one bottle?” With the orders in Shea’s hamper nearly all packed away, Mr. Klein allowed himself to relax. “Thet was before Prohibition. So what will it cost now?”

“You mean those dirty old bottles I used to see through that little window?” Ira hoped his ignorance would prolong the brief recess.

“Those dirty old bottles, yeh: chempagne. You know what is chempagne: Mouton and Lafite and Rothschild? Esk the alter kocker upstairs in the wing-collar. He’ll tell you.”

“So what?”

“Oy, gevald!” Mr. Klein arched backward in despair. “So what?”

“You mean somebody’ll try t’take ’em?” Ira demanded, miffed at being so uncharitably found mystified.

“You never heard from hijeckers? Shlemiel!”

“Lorring,” the major called toward the liquor vault. “I want all the rest stacked in front of the elevator ready to go. Get me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you two, and that young fellow in there, pull everything out here?” the major addressed Quinn and Murphy. “Set it right here, will you? Okay, Lorring,” he called again. “You know what to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where is that man?” Still frowning, the major turned to Mr. Klein.

“I don’t know. The Model T sometimes — he has trouble.”

“We should have been out of here by now.” The major glanced down at Harvey in the elevator sump shoveling glass and murky water into the bucket, pursed his lips in a silent, reflective whistle. “We’ve been in the neighborhood too damned long. If he has trouble, we could have a lot of it.” He strode over to the stairs, climbed up.

“Now there’s three up there.” Ira felt a not unpleasant vertigo of tension. “You don’t think anything is goin’ to happen?” He stopped to listen to the conversation.

“You know, Harv, I got nothin’ against you. You’re all right.” Murphy didn’t seem unsteady. He raised his arm and rested his hand against the wall, under the elevator switches. “But the trouble with some o’ you boys is — I don’t mean you — just because you had a little French pussy over there, you start struttin’ aroun’. Them French floosies just thought youz wuz Yanks wit’ a deep tan.”

“Yeah. You’re right, Murphy.” Harvey’s accommodating laugh belied the deeply sober eyes lifted up toward Murphy’s arm. “Yee-hee-hee! That’s right.”

“You’re damn right,” said Murphy. “You know I don’t git along good wit’ people sometimes because I don’t softsoap ’em. I don’t give a fuck what color they are. I coulda made sergeant three times over if I’da brown-nosed.”

“I know, Murphy. You don’t have to tell me. I know that the first time I saw you.” Placating in tone, Harvey kept his eyes rolled upward.

“Just because I’m short, some people think I’m a pushover. Shit, it wuz jist because I wuz a runt, everybody picked on me when I was a kid. I had to learn how to fight, you know what I mean?”

“Ain’t that the truth?” said Harvey.

“So if I sez dem Senegalese wuz yeller, dem sons o’ whores wuz yeller.” He slapped the wall. “Dey couldn’t fight der way into a crowded bar.”

“Man, you’re gettin’ too close to them switches.” Harvey no longer feigned negligence. The timbre of his voice became peculiarly rich — and vibrant. “You better get your hand away from that wall, and let me finish before I get outta here.”

“Yeah?” Murphy tapped the down button. The elevator jarred in preliminary movement. He tapped the up button. “I’ll tell ye somethin’ else: Some bright colonel put some you guys in them same monkey uniforms them Senegals had on, thinkin’ to give the Heinie a surprise. He attacked.” Murphy thumped the elevator button, reversed it. “Those guys scrambled outta the trenches so fast, you couldn’t see ’em fer the dust. Hell, they must be runnin’ yet.” He thumped the elevator buttons again.

The shovel left leaning against the ledge, Harvey clambered out to the cellar floor. He stood head and shoulders above Murphy. “I ain’t looking for no trouble, Murphy. I ain’t looking for no fight. But I tell you, man, I ain’t running away from it. I’m ready any time you is. Any place.”

“You better run upstairs,” Mr. Klein nudged Ira. “No! No! Get that shavetail. Tell him there’s trouble.”

But they could already hear the major’s voice on the stairs as he came hurrying down: “What the hell’s happening to that elevator?” He took in the situation at a glance. “You men at it again? I’m really surprised. I’d think, by God, you two men would know better. You were soldiers. But you’re acting like — like half-grown kids. Men who wore the same uniform. Who fought the same war. Who fought for the same cause, for the same ideals — and died for it, your own buddies: freedom and democracy. And remember we won it. We won it! You going to throw it all away down here in this damned cellar?”

“I wasn’t looking for no fight, Major. I told the man.”

“I know it, Harvey.” The major’s chin pressed down grimly on his chest. “Sometimes we say too damned much we don’t mean. Come on, Murph, come on, both of you.” He put his arms about both men’s shoulders, and as all three walked in front of the table and around: “Let’s hear that story again, Murph. Anybody doesn’t get a laugh out of that’s never been in a shellhole.” They disappeared in the direction of the iceboxes.

“Put everything on top. All the rest,” Mr. Klein ordered wearily. “He’ll find it. Wait. Let me make sure. It’s the lest one: cayenne pepper, yes?”

“It’s here,” said Ira.

“Knockbrod, Swedish, a peckage. White raisins, two pounds. Sage, a box. Onion flakes, a box. Mocha java, they want in the bean.” He felt the bag. “Sugar. Turkish paste. Two cans button mushrooms. All right. What’s this box coriander doing here?” He clucked in annoyance, “A day like this could heppen anything.” He tossed the box into the hamper. “Coriander.” He shuffled the invoices into a neat batch, slipped them under the open clip of the clipboard, and screwed up his face into a yawn — just as a burst of laughter came from the aisle where the iceboxes stood, where Murphy was retelling the story.

Tommy pushed the loaded handtruck up to the elevator pit; behind came the towheaded agent, Lorring, dragging an open crate of assorted straw-covered bottles. “Where’s Murphy?” he called to Mr. Klein. “The elevator ain’t down. Didn’t I hear the major?”

Mr. Klein silently thumbed in the direction of the iceboxes.

“Okay, men, let’s unload her. Pile ’em here.”

There was a stir on the stairs. Shea came down. “I couldn’t get that goddamn hunka tin started fer love or money. I blew out the fuel lines. I took out the plugs—”

“Oh, Major,” the towheaded agent called toward the other end of the cellar. “That last driver’s here!”

“Oh, is he? Okay.” The major appeared, and with him, Harvey and Murphy, now grinning at each other.

“Where they keepin’ it?” Shea sidled over to Mr. Klein.

“I know like my grendmother,” Mr. Klein replied testily. “In beck from the icebox someplace. Esk Tommy.”

“I’ll find it,” Shea moved toward the icebox aisle.

“Who’s gonna drive those trucks to the warehouse?” asked Mr. Klein rhetorically. “The agents. Or who? Ever see such a mishigoss? Now all is needed is highjeckers.”

“Thanks, Harvey.” The major lifted his hand to the elevator button as Harvey pulled the shovel up from the ledge. “That bucket all right down there?”

“Yes, sir, Major. That bucket’s too low to touch.”

“Okay, Harold,” the major called up. “We’re bringing her down. Hit that button, will you — I almost said soldier.”

“Right, Major.”

“I’ll tell ye somethin’, Harvey,” Murphy rocked slightly, spoke with muzzily contorted features. “When you climbed outta that hole, it all come back, you know what I mean? I was back there again, you know what I mean? An’ there wuz McGrath, only guy I could git along wit’ follerin’ me goin’ over the top. Der was McGrath. Big guy like you, only white.”

“There’s all kinds o’ ways o’ goin’,” Harvey commented.

“Yeah. Right.”

“Okay, men,” said the major. “Let’s pitch in while it’s still light. Everything okay up there, Harold?”

“Can’t see a thing to worry about up here, Major,” came the voice from the street.

“I’m going to send Lorring up anyway. Okay, Lorring. Sentry. Make it casual. Any car stops, take cover. Right? I’ll take care of the loading.”

“Right, Major.” Lorring left for the stairs.

With so many hands to transfer the load from cellar to elevator platform, the shipment was loaded in a few minutes.

“First time I ever wished we were still on daylight saving time.” The major surveyed the load on the elevator. “Have we got the last of it yet?”

“That’s it, Major,” said Murphy.

As Tommy got on the platform “Comin’, Murphy?”

“Hold it,” the major said. “Not this time. Last thing we want is to get held up by a stuck elevator.” He waited for Tommy to step off. “Tell you the truth, Murphy,” he raised his arm to press the elevator button. “I’m beginning to feel like a Georgia nigger with the sun going down on his back.”

The men overhead laughed. The elevator ascending, the major turned — to face Harvey — and was slightly taken aback. “I’m sorry, Harvey, no harm meant. It’s just a damned habit, and a bad one. Damn!”

“That’s all right, Major,” said Harvey. “I understand.”

“I’m glad you do.” The major extended his hand.

They shook hands, parted. And just as he was about to join the others climbing up the stairs, Quinn came down. “Where to?” asked the major.

“The john, Major. I’m caught short.”

“We’re ready to go.”

“Be right back.” Winking at Mr. Klein’s glum, averted face, Quinn passed the counter.

The elevator platform overhead shook with the tread of those unloading it. Harvey knelt at the edge of the sump, pulled the bucket out, straightened up, and with bucket in one hand, shovel in the other, passed in front of the table. “Comme çi, comme ça, Miste’ Klein.” His thick, limber wrist gleamed as he swung the shovel like a pendulum. Deliberately flat-footed, he shuffled a few steps: “C’est la guerre.”

“You got a big cleanup job yet in that wine and whiskey corner. You know that?” Mr. Klein advised him, gratuitously.

“You’re tellin’ me? Mister Stiles got me a man-size hoe, a real he-hoe.” Harvey looked at Ira. “I might need a helper too.”

“Hey, Quinn, where the hell are ye!” came the cry from the street.

Quinn’s voice preceded him as he rounded the corner: “Oh, the French, they are a funny race, parlez-vous. The French, they are a funny race—”

“Don’t listen to him!” Mr. Klein swept his arm protectively toward Ira as if to brush him out of range.

“How am I gonna help it?”

“Oh, the French, they are a funny race,” Quinn halted an instant as he came face-to-face with Harvey before the table: two countenances, almost at the same level, the one brown and solidly boned, the other by comparison pale and narrow.

“Quinn,” Mr. Klein jerked his head toward the inner stairs leading down from the store. “Cut it out. Somebody’s comin’ down.”

All eyes fixed on the stairs: In his tan jacket, holding the bannister, Walt skipped the last step to the cellar floor: “Boy, you can’t smell the stink o’ the booze for the cigarette smoke.”

“They should know what’s goin’ on down here. It’s busy upstairs.”

“They’re startin’ to come in. Last-minute trade.” Walt swung into an aisle.

“The French, they are a funny race—”

The honking of auto horns in the street almost drowned out his voice. “Hey, Quinn!”

“They’ll be comin’ down after you,” Mr. Klein warned.

“Fuck ’em. You’d think I was hidin’ in a fuckin bunker.” Quinn teetered unsteadily. “The French, dey are a funny race. Dey fight wit’ der feet an’ fuck wit’ der face—”

Against the raucous clamor of auto horns came down from the street: “Quinn!”

“Hinky dinky, parlez-vous.” Quinn licked the corners of his mouth, wobbled as he moved toward the stairs. “Well, the man’s had a drop too much, y’know. I had to take an extra one for me Jew buddy, Shnitzel—” He mounted the stairs to the street. “Comin’, comin’! Where the hell’s the fire, you guys?” He climbed up out of sight.

Through the elevator shaft, from the street above, the din of racing motors peaked: to an explosion— All three ducked.

“Jesus, man!” Harvey exclaimed behind his lifted shoulder.

“O-o-h!” Ira cowered.

The two men stood rigid, motionless, eyes meeting in tense inquiry.

“Hear that?” Walt returned, hands gripping canned goods. He tossed a can on the counter; it was dented. “It’s chicken à la king. I dropped it.”

Another loud bang followed.

“It’s nothing. It’s nothing with nothing. It’s a beckfire,” Mr. Klein reassured.

All heads slightly tilted toward the din of racing engines above, heard gears engage, the sound of motor vehicles grinding into motion. . The noise diminished, faded, ended.

“I told you it was nothing,” said Mr. Klein.

“I bet a few of ’em musta jumped off the stools.” Walt mounted the stairs.

“Only thing I ain’t live through yet. I live through ‘bout everything else.” Harvey’s face changed significantly. “What about you, Miste’ Klein? What d’you take?”

Mr. Klein wagged in dour negation. “I don’t take nothing. What should I take? I don’t need it.”

Harvey laughed suddenly, teeth gleaming in the dark height of his features. “I don’t either, Mister Klein. Just so not to lose democracy, like the major say.” Swinging pail and shovel, he continued on his way.

“A kleege shvartze,” Mr. Klein admitted. “Noo,” he waved a hand in sweeping dismissal. “It’s efter five o’clock. Shabbes b’nakcht. You know what I’m gung do?” He smacked his lips audibly. “Stay here.” He stepped quickly into the aisle directly ahead, returned with a bottle. “Perrier water. It’s French seltzer. It’s a little warm,” he brought out Lily cups and an opener from under the now bare, dented and gleaming table. “A little warm shott nisht. It’s still good.”

“It’s funny seltzer,” Ira expressed his reservations after a sip or two.

“Det’s not seltzer, like you buy for two cents plain,” Mr. Klein instructed. “This comes from the ground det way. Drink. It’s like a kiddush ha shem.”

XXVIII

Oh, well — the loud thumping on the keys under the piano-tuner’s hands, the turning of his tuning wrench, invaded Ira’s consciousness: The piano-tuner had to bang them, M explained before leaving; he had to hear the beats. Oh, well, Ira listened to the notes increasing in pitch, becoming blue when visualized: He wasn’t the first writer to have gone astray, gone off course, off the preplanned track. He wasn’t the first, wouldn’t be the last: he had written himself into a corner, exactly as cartoonists were given to depicting.

Why? Why had he departed from the script, from the first draft he had typewritten — in ’79? Was that the reason? The first draft had been written five, no, it was now six years ago; had he changed that much? The first draft had stressed, crudely but more to the point, predictably, black-white confrontation, predictably, almost stereotypically. This latest, committed to the computer, had indicated reconciliation.

Why? To avoid the stereotype? Perhaps. But he didn’t write that way as a rule, that consciously, cerebrally. He wrote subject to consonance with emotion, in phase with it, like the key and that piano-tuner’s fork (it occurred to him). So why the departure? Was it any better? Who knew? Did it reflect an increased maturity, an increased understanding? Again who could say? Increased understanding, perhaps; but increased maturity at age seventy-nine sounded a little ludicrous. Gratifying to think so — if it was so. But if so, it was achieved at the cost of painting himself into a corner, a cul-de-sac, blind alley — you name it, Ecclesias. Things as they were changed upon the computer.

— Heaven and Wallace Stevens forgive you. My advice is: Proceed as if you hadn’t departed from your original course, or not too much, and resume the track, the incidents you felt necessary to provide unity to your initial envisaging. The thing’s a fake anyway; I don’t mean in the sense that it’s a deliberate deception. You spoke of painting yourself into a corner. You long ago painted yourself into a corner; your very premisses, not to pun, virtually hemmed you into a corner. So what is this you speak of, this present admission, recognition? A double encompassing: a circle within a corner. Nevertheless, round it out, round it out.

It’s all so far away, Ecclesias. I hadn’t dreamt when I began in ’79, as late as ’79, in the seventy-third year de mon âge quand tous mes hontes j’ai bu, long ago, how desiccated, to quote Baudelaire, it would all become in a few years, not unimportant, but not that important, shamefully, crushingly important. Is that the word I mean: un-important?

— It soon won’t matter, these existential considerations will soon be consigned to dust.

I agree, and disagree, Ecclesias. Beyond the limit, nothing matters; the human condition no longer matters. But this side of the limit, everything matters: Israel, the sense of a folk; Mario, surrogate son, Italian — Florentine translator of my one novel — arriving in Albuquerque in a few days; poor Jane, who if anyone loved not wisely but too well, she did: my son. And pays for it now — I hope they are withdrawal symptoms — beyond all measure; has paid. . I could sit back and dream. With that imagination with which I was endowed, churned up by or further churned up by — how the one thing ties into another! — I could conceive, I do conceive, the wildest, most erotic, wacky, and yet fully sustainable, plausible novelistic situations. I hope she herself can use her own traumas eventually in a literary way, without my, alas, dominating behest, use her woe to win plaudits, material rewards, other derivative consolations.

XXIX

A few minutes before six o’clock, Mr. Klein dismissed Ira, reminded him to get his books, and sent him on his way before the store closed: out the side entrance into the early autumn’s near-sunset: Lying on curb, sidewalk, gutter, partly in the glow athwart the corner from the lights on humming Lenox Avenue, partly in ebbing twilight’s lengthening shadows lay tufts and shreds of the day’s activities, testimonies to Prohibition: chiefly antic stalks of straw in which the wine bottles had come wrapped that had somehow sifted through the boxes. He should have taken a leak before he left, he told himself, was on the point of going to the toilet but was distracted from his purpose by Mr. Klein’s peremptory generosity in excusing him the last few minutes, perhaps to prevent him from going near the bottle still hidden there, Harvey’s trove. Well, there was the park: Cut across from Fifth to Madison at the foot of the hill and duck into the Comfort Station.

So he thought. But when he reached the Comfort Station, hurriedly turned the knob of the GENTS door, it was locked. Six P.M. The need to urinate became more urgent, now that the way was barred and he kept thinking about it. He hadn’t gone to the toilet since midafternoon, he realized, not since he had eaten the Lorna Doones, drunk water at the utility sink at around. . when? Jesus, if it only were a little later: dark. He was too big to take a leak in the park. People passing, ladies — he couldn’t see a cop, but maybe. Better make it snappy. Gee, that French seltzer, too. It was a big bottle, and Mr. Klein had finally persuaded him to take another swig. Cost so much. Get going. What did they say? Your teeth were floating, they said. His teeth were floating. Books tucked under arms, he began to jog. Jack and Jill climbed up the hill to fetch a pail of water — Oh, no!

Think of something else, he panted. As soon as he would get to 119th Street, duck down into a cellar, anybody’s cellar: Take a leak. Between Madison and Park. Owoo. Jack and Jill went up the hill — No! Yes. That made it easier. Jill was Jack’s sister. So up he got and home did trot. Yeah, yeah. He got into bed, he got into bed, he got into bed; my poor brother, she said, my poor brother, she said. . So. . My poor brother, she said. Hurry up before. . Where was their mother? Where was their father? So hurry up before: working in the delicatessen store. Puffing, he reached 119th Street. Get home. Just a little more. That holds it back. Get home before. Gee, a kid, when you could stand on the curb and pee. But now that sticking out; but even without. Hurry up! Park Avenue, yeah. Park Avenue, yeah. Under the Cut.

He was running full tilt when he reached Park Avenue, dashed under the trestle, past the cross-braced pillars: Right here; peed a hundred times here— But suddenly he had to dodge a car speeding toward him out of uptown shadows, a shadow itself without lights. He was duly cursed at by the driver — and afforded respite by his own start of fear, his own scare. Chest still heaving, he slowed his gait to a walk. All right. Nearly home.

Against the background of twilight to the east, indigo above the black band of the Third Avenue El, Weasel stood in front of the tenement stoop whirling a tin can on a loop of wire, flames spurting from vents in the bottom. Odor of woodsmoke conjured up sadly a lost state, past autumns when he’d done the same.

“I seen you runnin’ in front o’ the auto. You wanna look out,” Weasel said. Weasel himself walked with a limp; he had tried jumping from the stoop stairs to the cellar floor, and broken his foot.

“Yeah, the bastid didn’t have any lights till just before. I didn’t even see him,” Ira said.

“What wuz you runnin’ for?”

“I had to take a leak.” Ira raised his hand in parting.

“Go down the cellar,” said Weasel. “Why don’tcha go down the cellar?”

“Nah, I’m nearly up to my house already.”

“Go on down the cellar,” said Weasel. “It’s faster. Come on, I’m goin’ down, too.” He set his little improvised oven on the curb.

And suddenly the urgency returned — imperiously. Ira shoved the wrought-iron gate open before him, ran down the cellar steps, tore open his fly, and began urinating against the wooden, battered cellar door. Weasel followed.

XXX

I would like to finish that, Ecclesias. I have so much to do: puttering mostly: a new window fan to install; a knob to affix to the copper teakettle lid, which my darling M forgot and left empty on top of a high-gas flame (the copper looks as if it had smallpox now); and some sort of shelf beneath the stand on which I’ve set the printer, a shelf that would hold the box of fanfold paper. Such things. And I have already spent part of the morning — of April 17, ’85, a Wednesday — at Entre, the shop where I bought the IBM PC jr., on which I learned to use the word processor. In another hour from now I leave, or rather, M will drive me in the car to Dr. David B, my rheumatologist, for a general checkup and the renewal of a few prescriptions, Percodan, mainly, a strong analgesic, which requires a new prescription each time renewed. So the day is and is about to be spent, and I shall scarcely have to get done with this disagreeable incident, alas, more than disagreeable: odious.

The damned things that happen to innocence, or ignorance, in the slums, that happen in alien slums, in heterogeneous ones, that probably might not have happened in homogeneous ones, at least, so I fancy, in ones dominated by orthodoxy, like the East Side, or by folkways, like Little Italy. And of course, they wreak havoc with the personality. That does not exclude similar traumatic episodes that may affect scions of the middle-class or the wealthy; given the terrible vulnerability, impressionableness of pubescence that exempts no one from irreparable damage at that period in life. I wonder how such things are dealt with in China, the Soviet Union, in other socialist states?

I am grateful for this electronic device. My gratitude should be extended or generalized into gratitude for modern science or technology (I write this the following day), despite the detractors of modern science and technology, such as one whose pronouncements I read recently, whose name I have forgotten for the moment but it is well known, who seems able to solve the Joycean three-dimensional crossword puzzle with relative ease, but referred to the personal computer as so much expensive junk cluttering up the house — or words to that effect. The gentleman doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The short period of discipline necessary to gain sufficient control over the device has repaid itself immeasurably (nor do I believe I speak for myself only); it has made possible a new — or renewed — bond between the one who would express his feelings and thoughts and the vehicle for that expression.

Even the preliminary fussing, sometimes less, sometimes more, required to set the “machinery” in motion: the slightly disconcerting message of “BOOT FAILURE,” or even when all goes well, the routine requests for time and date and the need to answer them, the ascertaining of the number of “bytes” still available on the disk, provide a warming-up process for the mind as well, for the incomparably more subtle organic computer in front of the electronic one. What is man’s future? One cannot help asking oneself, coming away from radio dispatches of battles between two Moslem sects in Lebanon, leaving some fifty dead and three times that number wounded — at the same time as men in space dramatically attempt, though they fail, to reactivate a nonfunctioning satellite. Will man’s cortex prevail over his hypothalamus?

And so many other notions, considerations, come up between the writer and his narrative, beginning in the morning, notions drifting through the mind, as M helps her rheumatically wracked husband sit up in bed, plants a morning kiss of affirmation on a brow, grotesque, I’m sure, in its graphic signals of pain: What to do about all those people, all those “characters” I have introduced here, dealt with, whose ends I know, and others to come, whom I have survived in the flesh and won’t in the narrative; and of the years I shall never live to deal with, nor care to, for that matter, years following my marriage to M, years in machine shops and tool rooms during the Second World War, years, vicissitudes in Maine, and the four-year tenure of employment in a psychiatric hospital in Augusta, the years spent raising waterfowl, the years of M’s and my ludicrous, bitter summer seasons with our pathetic, feckless, impossible tenant: Pop, my father. . years that I shall not have time for, that I shall not have time to attempt to render into literary form. M (who is at her desk this moment writing music — to meet a deadline: that of submitting it to her coach this coming Saturday) — M is all about me, M is part and parcel of my consciousness. She is part and parcel of the trials and tribulations of my attaining to my present consciousness. She, more than anyone, confers the kind of purpose that holds me to my task as a writer; she imbues me with a sense of worth, and above all, unity, a mighty fortress that defends the present from the past.

XXXI

Two streams of urine flowed in an intertwining chain down obscure door and jamb, dripped to gritty threshold. “You got a piss hard-on, ain’t ye?” Weasel observed.

“Yeah, ye can see? I couldn’t help it.”

“You pull off a lot?”

“No.”

“You don’t?”

“No,” with slight affront. “What d’ye mean?” Ira was sure he knew what Weasel meant: the same thing last year, on the roof, that Bernie Hausman had tried to show him, the only kid he had ever beaten in a fistfight in Harlem. The same thing Mr. Lennard had tried to make him do. He knew, of course, he knew: that lanky, rusty bum in Fort Tyron Park — against a tree. Oh, he knew.

He knew, Ecclesias, of course he knew.

— But never connected the two, associated the two?

I can vouch that he never did.

— Is it possible?

In his case, yes. We’re dealing with someone almost completely autodidactic.

— He wasn’t ready for this next phase.

He was and wasn’t. It was he who had to provide the inferences that bridged boyhood to puberty, inferences sufficient to support his precocious sensibility. His timbers of mentality and judgment, inference, in a word, were much too slight to sustain so heavy a load of grossly misinformed and disinformed fancy.

“Pull off. Like this.” Weasel’s demonstration conformed to pattern. “You wanna pull off now?”

“No.”

“Me an’ Tierny pulls off.”

“Yeah?”

“You oughta see him. What a handmade prick he’s got. All right?”

“No.”

“No. Why? You Jews don’t have to go to Confession— Oh, I know: You’re fuckin’ somebody, aintcha?” Weasel persisted through Ira’s silence. “Hanh? Who you fuckin’?”

“You left that fire burning in the tin can up by the sidewalk.”

“Dat’s nutt’n,” Weasel hesitated, became confused by Ira’s irrelevance; and when Ira backed away to button his fly, Weasel did the same. “You want one o’ my spuds? I got two bakin’ in der.”

“No. I’m goin’ upstairs right away.”

“Oh, the navies old and oaken, oh, the Temerairie no more.” Random quote, Ira ruminated: epigraph taken from Melville of a poem by Hart Crane. Why did he think of it? The appeal of the rhythm, the mood, the nostalgic purity of ocean and wind? Oh, the ambiguities, ambivalences the writer contended with and had to find his way through to some semblance of coherence. The contradictions, the subterfuges, the concealments — that had to be resorted to: He had refined the sensitivity he had been born with into an instrument capable of noting the weakest ephemerid within his mind, the permissible, the impermissible: Had he been a nineteenth-century novelist, or in fact, a true novelist mirroring the society about him, then so much that pertained to himself he could have projected onto a fictive character, into a fable about others. But alas, trapped in this mode of his own devising, albeit the divorce between present personality and a prior one was unforeseen, he had no alternative but to acknowledge the actuality: his own surge of curiosity to assay the experiment — and its failure.

You see, the whole “evolution” was reversed in my case, Ecclesias. It should have been the other way round, was, if I’m not mistaken, for most adolescents—

— Very likely.

I can envisage its development, even given the same set of characters, the same scenario — eliminating improbable fantasy, such as running away from home, an act which this, by now, totally Mama-dependent kid was incapable of. Given his thirteen, fourteen years of age, again all other things being equal, given the same heterogeneous Harlem slum setting, in a word, given the rule, not the devastating exception, then some similitude or “normal” development might still have been possible. You follow me, Ecclesias?

— I’m afraid I do.

Yes? Even if all that had happened were eventually to happen, given this cunning, wily, devious — and wholly unscrupulous, treacherous and relentlessly scheming entity — and now without, one must remember, for whatever it was worth, any boundaries in orthodox Judaism, any shorings, stays, restraints, the trauma could not possibly have become so single-minded nor gone so deep, so profoundly determined his behavior. . so vitiated his character, undermined integrity and decisiveness in deed and opinion.

And once again, M comes to mind, through that inveterate, nay, chronic fog of my own configuring, sitting there in a navy-blue uniform shirt — a park ranger’s perhaps or a game warden’s I bought at the flea market for myself, but it proved too small — sitting at her desk immersed in the unaccompanied cello sonata she has been working on, and she speaks now and then of unaccustomed fatigue, she, who, when young, would often not begin practicing at the piano for hours before eight P.M., speaks of fatigue, good reason for selfish anxiety on my part, that one so fine, so good, of such esteemed American “stock” and first and foremost so sound, should have chosen to join her life with mine, and not without fair insight into the nature of her choice, is — I throw up my hands, Ecclesias.

— You might as well. It’s a miracle.

VOLUME II: A DIVING ROCK ON THE HUDSON

FOR FELICIA JEAN STEELE

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

— William Blake, “London”, From Songs of Experience

With profound acknowledgment

for the work of my devoted agent, Roslyn Targ,

and Robert Weil, editor supreme.

PART ONE. STUYVESANT

I

In the winter of 1921, after completing a year in their newly initiated junior high school, Ira Stigman and Farley Hewin began attending Stuyvesant High School. It was downtown, on the east side of the city, and because attendance at the school was far in excess of its capacity, two overlapping sessions had been instituted: an earlier one for upperclassmen, and a later one, beginning before noon, for freshmen and lowerclassmen.

The new Lexington Avenue IRT subway line had recently been opened, and Ira took that to school, getting on at 116th Street, changing at 86th, to be whisked downtown past two express stations to 14th, and then walking east the few blocks to the high school. With what schoolboy joy he and Farley would greet each other in the late morning when each by different routes or different trains, taken at different stations, by some magic art would arrive at the same street corner simultaneously. What windfall of happiness Ira felt. Soon, he would have to share these walks to school with others: soon, an admiring entourage would grow up around Farley, would fall in step with him. Still, no matter how many trooped along, when he spied Ira, Farley always waited for him to come to his side, a clear indication of whom he had singled out for his chum. Ira reveled in the security of that knowledge.

For it was almost as if Ira had divined it, as if his intimation of destiny were truly inspired. At the end of calisthenics in the gym class the second week of school, a short track event was held, a sixty-yard dash diagonally across the gym floor. In the first heat, a compact, heavy-thighed youth scurried into first place, in another heat a scrawny young black sprinted to the finish line ahead of the pack. Who placed first in the heat that he was in, Ira didn’t know, only that he trailed as usual. And then came the heat in which Farley competed; he won easily. With competition winnowed down to finalists came the deciding heat. The winners of the preliminary trials were pitted against one another. Grinning in secret complacence at the foreknowledge he alone possessed, and yet with heartbeat quickened, Ira watched destiny unfold. The black youth darted into the lead ahead of the pack, ahead of the heavy-thighed boy, who was in front of Farley. And then the miracle that only Ira expected took place. Those amazing, hammering strides of Farley brought him abreast of the others two-thirds of the way, and propelled him into the van at the finish — first across the line!

It was scarcely an exaggeration to say that Farley became a celebrity that very afternoon. Admirers trailed him to the subway kiosk that same evening after school let out, and Ira, Farley’s closest friend, became a notable by sheer contiguity.

In the next few weeks, Farley was relieved from regular gym exercises and given intensive training during free periods to fit him for the hundred-yard dash. At the end of September, the first of the high school interscholastic meets was held at the Armory in uptown Manhattan. Farley was entered, and won the silver medal for second place. A newcomer, a freshman, one with the barest minimum of training, inexperienced and untried under the strain of intense competition, he was hailed as sensational. His performance was featured on the sports pages of all the metropolitan newspapers. The new “Stuyvesant High School Meteor,” the sportswriters saluted him.

In the meantime, Ira, in his laggard, groping fashion, despite his pride in Farley’s achievements, his pride in being Farley’s best friend, was chafed into vague recognition that he was unhappy in Stuyvesant: he wasn’t suited to the place. His sloppiness, his ineptitude with tools, his incompatibility with material precision, his aversion to the strict, the mechanical — he could no more define what troubled him than he could define a cloud. It was more shape than thought, an undulant image, like the face of the shop teacher, quizzically watching Ira’s clumsy use of the scratch gauge on a piece of lumber. The shop teacher said “pattern”; Ira said “pattern.” At a later date, Ira might have attempted an epigram about Proteus encountering Procrustes, but that shirked coming to grips with the plain facts of what was wrong with him.

Undoubtedly his discontent stemmed from the sheer unsuitability of his temperament, aptitude, and background for the kind of technical training Stuyvesant afforded. His inability to adjust, his dilatoriness in conforming to a new regimen, the unaccustomed late hours of freshman attendance, all seemed to give substance to a sense of having veered away from potential, strayed from some dim affinity. His first month’s grades were abysmal, much worse than Farley’s, whose were respectable by comparison. Ira failed in every subject except English.

Lord. Ira realized how in this eighth decade of his life, little in so many ways the adolescent juvenile he portrayed, or strove to re-create, resembled the “normal” youngster of that age and period. The differences were too many to go into, but the greatest difference, perhaps he deluded himself, was in the matter of his way of mooning about the opposite sex, about females.

His mind was already seared, his mind was already cauterized. He didn’t have to dream about romance, enlarge on it with all the tender frills and streamers that in the fancy of others his age composed the fringes of the youthful crush. He never had one — well, perhaps at the very outset of the fateful spring of his twelfth year, when he experienced — for how short a while — the first vague, diffuse writhing within him of infatuation for Sadie Lefkowitz. She was the sister of two delinquent brothers, one of whom was shot while holding up a crap game; the other barely escaped with his life after falling from the roof to the awning of the big Third Avenue German butcher shop from which he was trying to steal whatever he could get his hands on. Sadie lived in the tenement three doors east. She had rosy cheeks; she wore her long underwear tucked into her long black stockings (and, when last seen, was an usherette in a movie house, and for hire). But Sadie was that token, as it were, to furnish him with some notion of the adolescent yearning for its idol.

“Sweet Adeline, my Adeline,” the Irish and Italian half-grown youths his age sang at night before the lighted window of Biolov’s drugstore near the corner of Park Avenue, harmonizing above the muted rumble of trains, “each night I pray that you’ll be mine.” Ira was much further along than most of them were, much further in wickedness, evil, unspeakable evil. And such self-awareness did what to him? It barred him from the exercise of run-of-the-mill, of street-average thrills. “G’wan,” Petey Hunt prompted in his tough, side-mouthed, Irish way, encouraging Ira to make his move toward plain, freckled Helen standing in the tenement doorway of a summer evening. “G’wan, ask her for a lay. We all laid her. She’ll give ye a lay.”

“No.” Ira shrank back.

Already undone. Always on that same amber screen, Ira would see enacted the moment when the irrevocable wrenching of his life began, the unutterable, shattering ecstasy that twisted his being out of shape, forever. It was like that experiment Mr. Goldblum had conducted in the eighth grade to demonstrate to the startled class the pressure of the atmosphere. Suddenly the shiny gallon can crumpled — everlastingly out of shape. He had done it; it had happened: the smooth, regular container became deformed.

What had happened to him was cross-grained, unnatural, a ruinous deflection. It was the blacks who had taught him just how awkward he was, the blacks he was to work with as a laborer on WPA projects. He would tell himself the same thing later that he was telling himself now. In the natural course of things, of slum life, of slum vitality, slum venery, when Mrs. G, Jewish, deserted by the ultra-Orthodox husband she couldn’t abide, leaned on her broom in her shift and, wan and forlorn, gazed at him from her window across the street, across the street and a flight up from the sidewalk, like his. That was when a black kid of fifteen or sixteen, his own age then, might have gone over on blatant pretext to put his hunch to the test.

But you couldn’t. Ira argued with himself: you couldn’t. You would have had the spunk knocked out of you by Pop.

Yes, but when did this ruinous deflection occur? Not before his parents moved to Harlem in 1914, but afterward. Why blame Pop — or blame Pop alone? Think of what disaster Mom contributed, the very bane itself.

Blame them? Yes and no. Blame, try to fix it on anyone; it slides off. The crux of the matter is or was — and we are back at it again — that severance from folk, that severance from homogeneity that — beatings by Pop or not — would have allowed multiform exit, multiform access to the diversity in unity of the surrounding milieu.

In the primitive typescript which he had written in 1979, Ira had set down the following:

“The tried and true, or should one say, the trite and true figure of speech to describe the function of what is to follow is that of the keystone; without it, the subsequent narrative tumbles to the ground. And yet, it is this particular and essential keystone that for a long time I sought to substitute for with a makeshift. In other words, that I stubbornly balked at using because of its shameful disclosure of the character of friend Ira Stigman.

“I have been three days debating with myself, consenting one day, refusing the next, and in the end, consenting again. My acquiescence. I believe, is not owing to scantiness of fictive ingenuity in finding plausible expedients that would still preserve the integrity of the arch. But militating against such subterfuge, unfortunately, is that in the preceding account, I prepared for the introduction of the genuine article, prepared for it so strongly by the prominence I accorded my bosom companion, Farley Hewin, my cheery, staunch refuge from ruined Jewishness, that, in spite of my self-recrimination, the logic of the commitment brooks no departure from veracity.”

II

Worsening the situation of his bad grades, literally disastrous for him, was the fact that Ira in this new school kept losing things — his possessions — invariably because of inattention, carelessness, failure to keep strict guard over his property. And the moment his vigilance lapsed, the articles disappeared; they were appropriated, stolen. His entire briefcase, as his book satchel was called, the new walrus-hide briefcase Tanta Mamie had bought for him as a graduation present, which he had treasured unused until he went to a “real” high school, the briefcase and its contents, books, notebooks, mechanical drawing aids, all disappeared. He came home blubbering, anticipating the storm of recrimination such loss would provoke. And it did. Mom and Pop volleyed the cost of replacement at each other — and at him. Only his sneakers hadn’t been taken, for the simple reason he hadn’t packed them into his briefcase that day, because there was no gym. So it went, even afterward, when his briefcase was replaced: sometimes a protractor would be taken, sometimes a compass, sometimes a ruler. And always he kept losing his fountain pens, one after the other, all those presented him at his Bar Mitzvah, and even the Waterman that Max bestowed on him later, a unique fountain pen with a retractable gold pen point. All, all went, purloined the minute he left them unguarded.

School attendance became sown with pitfalls, nightmarish at times. Every hour, every day, contained its start of anxiety, frantic search, rancorous reassurance — and too often the savage anguish of loss. Worries over his possessions thudded into his inattentiveness, and his inattentiveness seemed to become ever more habitual, an invincible caesura of consciousness. . goddamn dope, forever daydreaming, woolgathering. Bad enough, but the fantasizing was far worse, his cunning conspiring to fulfill his fantasy. It was like a thickening shadow across the delight he felt being in the same school with Farley, a thickening shadow blotting out the vicarious glory of being Farley’s boon companion. He began to steal.

In vindictive fury at first, after he rushed back from the hall at change of class, to find his fountain pen gone from the groove on the desk in which he had left it — only a minute before! His last and only fountain pen! Lousy bastards, sonofabitch bastards! He’d get even. He’d snitch someone else’s pen. Frig him, whoever he was. . And what a cinch it turned out to be! Nothing to it. It was so easy, he’d get another one. Never have to worry about fountain pens anymore. Once you did it, had the nerve to do it, once was all that you needed to learn the knack; at the beginning of the gym period everyone divested himself of his jacket, changed shoes for sneakers, and went out on the gym floor to begin calisthenics. Ira loitered behind. Brushing, as if by accident, against a nearby jacket, exposing the inner breast pocket, brought to light the clip of a fountain pen. It took only an instant to extract, and in an instant the pen was his — his, and slipped safely into his own pants pocket.

“And thus he became predator.” Ira read the words of his first draft, the yellow typescript beside him: became! He could feel the grim sneer that bent his own lips: he became a predator from that day on. Ira appended the text: “Indeed, it seems to me not in the matter of fountain pens alone, but as if their theft was symptomatic of the metamorphosis the entire psyche was already undergoing.”

Ah, yes, the point I was about to make, Ecclesias, and then forgot, as often happens to the writer, and probably more often to the aged one; so that the intended aside seems like a luxury, a self-indulgence. I once wrote a novel, as you know well, Ecclesias, when I was young.

— Yes?

And the poor little nine-year-old tyke was victimized by the society around him, by forces in the environment around him, the good little nine-year-old tyke I might have written.

— Wasn’t he?

Yes, of course. In the novel. But the reflection is a false one; it’s quite distorted.

— Perhaps. But let me ask you: why do you say that?

I say it because it is false to me, to the one I am, to the one I actually was.

— At the time of writing?

At the time of writing, yes. That’s exactly the point — I think of Joyce’s Dedalus here, and of Joyce himself — censoriously as usual: trying to formulate my chief objection, and to test it against the evidence: that what I found most objectionable in Joyce, most repelling, was that he had brought to an extreme the divorce between the artist and the man; not merely brought to an extreme; he had flaunted it, gloried in it: the icon of the artist detached from his autonomous work, disavowing moral responsibility for his creation, paring his nails with divine indifference. Joyce had amputated the artist from the man. What baloney.

But to my point, the writer I was imagined, given trifling variations of detail and time, that he was faithfully projecting, enacting, faithfully engrossing himself in his milieu, nay, faithfully representing himself in relation to his milieu. Do you follow me? The guy really believed he was purveying the truth, realizing actualities.

— Do you deny that the writer was victimized?

But not in that way! He was part of the process. And it is his part in the process he unconsciously suppressed, unconsciously omitted, and hence the picture is distorted. I can say the same thing another way: the writer was under the delusion that he was portraying truth, but in fact, he wasn’t.

— How do you know he is now?

I don’t — with any absolute certainty; only the relative certainty that I have at least taken into account, born witness to, hitherto ignored relevancy.

— Could it be at the expense of art? Could it? You are silent.

I don’t know.

The theft of the fountain pen led to the theft of another, and still another. Their acquisition conferred on Ira something akin to freedom, a new kind of freedom, unwonted freedom from concern; not only from that shudder of alarm over whether he had or hadn’t taken his fountain pen with him when he changed classes, and would now have to pay the penalty for his neglect (even if he did, there were more where those came from); but the freedom accorded by callousness, the license that sprang from callousness, callousness that dispersed the thought of the unhappiness he brought the one he had despoiled, callousness that bartered sympathy for power, that toyed with depravity.

And then came the inevitable, the inevitable in its devious way. Came the day when in the breast pocket of one of the jackets that he brushed against was clipped a magnificent fountain pen, the upper barrel glistening in silver filigree. Silver! Vine and arabesque! He clawed at it; it was his.

His!

For a long while he kept his superb trophy hidden in his favorite cache, the dusty floor underneath the lower drawer of the built-in wardrobe in Pop and Mom’s bedroom, kept it wrapped up in a piece of brown paper bag beside its run-of-the-mill mates. The round knobs on the dingy-white drawer, the dark maw within when the drawer was pulled all the way out, the accumulated dust on the floor whereon his fountain pens were secreted became accomplices of his stealth, abettors of his crime. The preciousness of his unique prize, the silver-filigreed Waterman, continually glided through his mind, continued to twine about it, like the silver filigree around the barrel of the pen.

On a sunny weekend toward the end of March, he and Farley lazed together in the sandy-carpeted mortuary — once again reinstated as the Hewin family parlor — lazed and chatted about the track meet Farley was scheduled to compete in next month. He felt sure he would place. Coaching and practice had greatly improved the two things in his running that most needed improving: his start and his stride. He had already been unofficially clocked in the 110-yard dash in the awe-inspiring time of 11.6 seconds.

Every now and then, Ira would wind up the phonograph, put on “Mavoureen” with John McCormack singing, and, paying only token attention to Farley, drift off into enchanted reverie under the spell of the Irish tenor and his mellifluous brogue. Clipped to the inner breast pocket of Ira’s jacket was the silver-filigreed fountain pen. He had brought it with him. Why? Because it was safe to sport it on weekends, with no school, and no owner to claim the beautiful object as his, not Ira’s. Because the pen tantalized Ira’s consciousness so continually, he had to wear it — even if he didn’t display it. He had to wear it concealed or he had to give it away, because what was the fun of wearing it concealed?

Farley was talking about Hardy, the black youth who always came in second to Farley at workouts. “You never saw anybody eat the stuff he does,” Farley laughed. “You know, Irey, he’ll eat a hot dog, mustard and sauerkraut — and an ice cream cone all together.” Farley stopped speaking when Ira drew the pen out of his pocket. “Hey, that’s nifty.”

“Here, have a good look at it.” Ira extended his arm and brought the pen within Farley’s reach.

Farley rotated the barrel, admiring the filigree. He admired it, frankly, just as Farley would, without envy, happy in his friend’s possession of something so handsome and so costly. “Hey, never saw anything so nifty, Irey!” he congratulated.

And with that suffusion of affection, of blood swamping the brain, Ira presented Farley with the pen. Oh, no. Farley tried to return it. He couldn’t accept it. It was too valuable, too beautiful, to be given away. But Ira insisted; he wanted Farley to have it. That was why he had brought the pen with him today. One of his rich uncles, a jeweler, Ira fabricated, had given him the pen, and he wanted Farley to have it. He himself had a satisfactory, plain Waterman — which he showed Farley. No need to have both. He wanted Farley to have this one. In the end, Ira persuaded him to accept it. For Farley, appreciation paled the hue of his blue eyes. In spoofing ritual of exchange, he tendered Ira a new yellow pencil from his father’s supply. For Ira, the moment was like a rush of vertigo: immense joy danced in his head — but it was immense joy suddenly bonded to a wraith of qualm; it was immense delight in Farley’s pleasure at receiving the gift — but coupled with a specter of foreboding.

Excused from participating in calisthenics, and the other activities of the triweekly gym program, Farley had been appointed “monitor” of the gym class. Each student occupied a preassigned spot on the gym floor, and Farley was accorded the privilege — or the honor — of checking off the attendance on a chart on which names corresponded to spots. Grimacing in broad, familiar wink at Ira, who grinned back in acknowledgment of his special status, Farley came through the columns of students as the short, burly gym instructor barked the tempo of the drill. Ira was checked off on the chart, and Farley went on. . A minute later, he was back, his features furrowed questioningly, his blue eyes darkened with seriousness.

“Hey, Irey,” he said in a subdued tone, “there’s a guy up front in the next row, says it’s his pen. It was yours, wasn’t it?”

“Sure it was mine. He’s crazy!” Ira blustered.

Farley left. In another minute he returned, even more serious this time. “He says he’s going to the office if he doesn’t get it back. Do I give it back to him?”

Ira’s world began to buckle, to crumple into a shapeless wad. He felt his very being wobble about and lurch, abandoned by any guidance, bereft of any center. Still he persisted, clung stoutly to the untruth, to the integrity of his lie bound in the integrity of his gesture of friendship to Farley.

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.

Walk.

Through the crowded, noisy, fitful avenue, past indifferent landmarks, the Flatiron Building, past hectic intersections, Herald Square, Times Square, onward plodding: Columbus Circle, dully recognizing the changing character of the neighborhood, from commercial to apartment house, from utilitarian building to ornate, many-storied, multi-balconied edifice. At 96th Street, he quit Broadway, turned west toward the Hudson, entered on the lofty viaduct above the riverbank. On the paved paths down below — mothers, nursemaids, tending prams, the infants in them so snugly, colorfully bundled against the variable, brisk river wind. Strollers. That man twisting his mustache tighter, the way Mom twisted the end of a thread before addressing the eye of the needle. How enjoyable was every sight and sound, if every sight and sound didn’t drag a lead weight after it. Look at the water of the broad Hudson, choppy, whitecaps nicked out of the cold gray river by the wind.

The Palisades across the river, with the huge Domino Sugar clock on the face of the bluff, giant hands telling the time: between 3:45 and 4:00 P.M. He could imagine the clock like a vast branding iron, every moving minute, every trailing hour, searing into his memory. He had walked until his legs had grown sluggish, bare hands grown cold, fingers cramped gripping the useless near-empty briefcase. He sat for a while on the green park bench, rested just long enough so that when he got to his feet again sinews had stiffened, joints ached. He trudged on. The sun slanted, abandoning the cliffs to long shadows, shadows that whetted the breeze to a cold edge. It would soon be lamplighting time, soon be gloaming. The paved walks below had all become deserted, a bare, desolate net of dim paths of pavement thrown over the sloping, darkened lawns that separated the empty, silent river below from the auto traffic on the viaduct above, the viaduct where he plodded. As if hoarding the waning light, the steel tracks of the New York Central freight lines gleamed on their dull gray beds of gravel, metallic streaks dividing river from land, the river that lapped against the massive blocks of granite, sustaining the railroad bed, blocks dumped higgledy-piggledy into the water.

Just a few years ago, he had gone swimming there with the Irish bunch in the street, gone in all innocence, in the years of trust and innocence. They wouldn’t let the other few Jewish kids on the block come along.

“We don’t want youse Jew-boys wid us,” Grimesy snarled at Davey, Izzy, Benny. But him they had accepted. Why? Why had they let him go with them?

And afterward, when they had dried off, and put their clothes on to go home, a cattle train full of steers passed, the animals lowing behind the bars of their rolling pens, rolling toward the abattoir downtown. They threw rocks at them, the bunch of Irish kids did, at the parched beasts on a sweltering afternoon on their way to be killed. Ira had felt a pang, then. Always thoughtless cruelty became unfunny; the glee leaked out of it as if he himself were the butt of it, the victim. He couldn’t help it. Maybe because of Mom, maybe because he was a Jew.

There was the path, there, upstream, that they used to take; you could barely see it now, serpentine through the dead grass, under leafless yet feathery-thickening trees, there; it reappeared like a slash down the steepest slope to the railroad tracks. Oh, he had gone that way a dozen times: nine years old, ten years old, eleven years old — when was the infantile paralysis year? Swam and soaked the disease-preventive camphor balls Mom had tied in a little bag about his neck. He should never have grown older. The words came out in English out of the oft-heard Yiddish with their malicious twist: “Zolst shoyn nisht elter vern.” And now, too late, he would leave the viaduct to take the same path again: Zolst shoyn nisht elter vern. . There it was, just as when he was nine and ten and eleven. Follow it. . Follow it through the grass, down the slope, not so steep as it looked, across the clean, shiny tracks on the ties on the gravel, across the shiny tracks unfazed by the frowning ties on the busy gravel. . crunching footsteps to the tumbled river-rocks where the water dyed their margins darker than the dry granite above. Sun sheared off now, lopped off by the Palisades. Domino Sugar clock; what time was it as he made his way? Past the secluded, jagged little pools of water in the crevices of the giant jumble of rock. Here was the flat rock off which everybody dove. Flat rock, diving rock, curl your toes around the edge and belly-whop into the cool river. “An’ no wires, or nothin’ underwater to get tangled in,” said Feeny, and everyone agreed. What had he done? What would happen to him now?

He couldn’t think, that was his trouble. So he would be expelled from Stuyvesant; so his good name would be ruined. So he would be known as a thief, as a goniff. He alone knew that before; now it would be known by all. . And what if, what if he also knew, it were also known, that he had been caught too, committing something worse than theft, an abomination? As it well might be, but a single slip. Then throw your briefcase into the water now. Forestall everything: if he threw his briefcase into the water, he’d have to jump after it to get it back. And then? He wouldn’t have to think about anything anymore. Sure, the water was cold, gravel-color cold. It would sting. But if he took a deep breath, a real, tired deep breath. . in the water. . it might all be over. . before the water got through his clothes. . his secondhand topcoat, his secondhand jacket. What was there to be afraid of? He might not even feel it. Anybody could slip off a rock in the river, even a flat one. . like this. . just swing the briefcase into the restless, dented water, as far as you can, into the water, rippling all the way to the gloomy Palisades. Come on. Soon be dark, and no more nerve. If he could only think. Yisgadal, v’yiskadash, sh’mey rabo, the mourner’s chant, was that how it went? What did it mean? That’s how it sounded. Pop would sit on a wooden box, the way he did when his father died, after he learned about it in a letter from Europe, slit the buttonhole of his vest with an old Gem razor blade, and sit on a box, sit shiva. And Mom, Mom, Mom! Wait—

Wait: now he knew. The river had just told him. He didn’t have seykhl enough to discover it by himself. It didn’t matter. It was true. No, it wasn’t loony; it was true. If it wasn’t true, then nothing was true; and if nothing was true, what difference did anything make? But here he was, standing with his briefcase on the diving rock on the Hudson, with his briefcase to throw in the water before it was nighttime. Why would he be standing here if it didn’t make any difference? If nothing was true? Then something was true. Here he was, at day’s end living; in a moment to drown.

He turned around on the block of stone, turned his back to the river. So now suffer. Everything. The outcries at home. The expulsion from school. The shame. That was only the outside, the outside wreckage. What he was, what he already was inside, he would have to bear. He didn’t know what he meant, only that the agony would be worse, and he had chosen to bear it, bear the havoc of himself, the only thing true. .

He climbed up toward the paved, lonely, darkling lanes, went underneath the viaduct, went on toward Broadway, into motor-din, store-light, headlights, human cries; he plodded south. It would be a long way to 119th Street, a long way to Park Avenue. But that was nothing compared to what lay in store for him. Just a long hike compared to what waited at the end. . just a long hike — nothing, compared to destination. . Yes, what was anything compared to himself?

III

An hour later, Ira trudged home. It was after dark, well after dark, and long after even a belated arrival from Stuyvesant’s second session might have warranted. A moment he stood in the hallway under the transom light, and then numbly opened the kitchen door: perceived the blank window shade drawn full-length down the window on the other side of the room; perceived the green oilcloth on the kitchen table, the silly, little-figured red apron hanging from the rim of the black iron sink; perceived the gas-stove burner on; green-painted icebox with alarm clock on it and box of household matches, green-painted icebox in the corner of green-painted blistered walls next to the bedroom door where the mop handle leaned. And Pop seated at the table, and partway through supper, his dog-brown, worried eyes lifted to Ira as he entered. Heard Mom exclaim in relieved Yiddish, berating, “A plague take you, Ira. Where have you been since school let out?”

Followed at once by Pop’s sardonic “Uh-huh! I can see by the crestfallen nose on his face something’s gone wrong for him again.”

Words clotted in Ira’s throat; speech jammed. He crossed the room, took the mop handle from the corner, and handed it to Pop.

“Are you crazy?” Pop turned pale.

Passage had to be forced, passage for confession, his covenant with the river: “I was caught stealing a fountain pen. Another boy’s fountain pen. The—” Ira hardened himself for retribution. “The assistant principal wants you to come to school with me tomorrow.”

But instead of retribution, Pop threw the mop handle down. He looked, he was — could it be? — stricken close to tears. He threw the mop handle down, and fled from the kitchen into the gloom of the bedroom. Strange, the merest mote of a revelation formed in Ira’s mind: Pop wasn’t as strong as he was. Pop couldn’t mete out what his son was ready to endure. Soft inside. So that was what he was?

“I think I’m going to get kicked out of school.” Ira spoke stolidly, stood stolidly. “They took away my books. They want me to bring the rest tomorrow.”

“Oy, a brukh af dir!” Mom drove the execration home with a fierce nod of her flushed, broad face. “Get buried, won’t you! For all the torment you cause us! Dolt! Clod!”

And as suddenly as he had fled, Pop was back. “I hope to see you dead!”

“They were stealing from me!” Ira broke into wailing lament. “They stole my new briefcase, all my fountain pens.”

“Dummkopf! If you’re not smart enough to keep track of your own belongings? Whom are you deceiving?” Mom flung at him. “Others also have briefcases, have fountain pens. And who knows what else? And still they manage to keep them! Choke on your excuses!”

Pop heaped rage on rancor. “I hope you rot out of my sight! Rot! And this child I nourish? May flames char him to cinder. This thief I pamper?” He turned savagely on Mom. “It’s all your fault. It’s all your doing. You send him to high school. Hah! I would send him — you know where? To dig in the ground. To lay turf. For that he’s suited. And may he lie under it!”

“Oy, vey, vey!” Mom groaned, stooped, stooped to pick up the mop handle. “Blunderer! Great ox! Oh, you’re nothing to me but grief!”

“Send him to high school! She needs, she craves, a learned son. Nah! You have him: as learned as a canker. I told you!”

“You told me. Good.” Mom opposed Pop’s vindictiveness with her own anguish. “Can you say anything more than that? May a black year befall him. Oh, my grief!” And to Ira, “Yes, stand there like a post. Gott’s nar. Take off your hat and coat and sit down. How did they discover you were a thief?”

“I stole a silver fountain pen from a rich kid, from a rich kid’s pocket. And I gave it to Farley. He went around with it in the gym. You know: where we go — for exercise.” He lamented in English: “The gym. And the kid — he saw it. He wanted it back.”

“Then why didn’t you give it to him?”

“Don’t know. I told Farley it was mine. I gave it to him.”

“A fool,” said Pop. “You see? A fool ought never be born. A fool should be stomped on! You idiot! Why am I so cursed? With her for a mother, with him for a son.”

“Gey mir in der erd.”

Ira sobbed.

“Weep! Now you weep?” Mom said bitterly. “It would have been better had your eyes fallen out, your hands fallen off, before you stole the pen. And what do they want of you now? The pen was returned, no?”

“Yeah, but I told you already. I told the assistant principal I stole it. He wants Pop to come to school.”

“Ai, be torn to shreds!” Pop bared his teeth in a fresh outburst of tortured rage. “Only be torn into shreds! Ai, yi, yi, to shame me further! To tell me I have shit for a son. For this I have to take time off from work to learn what a wretched dolt I’ve raised?” He swept the saucer of compote away from him. “Here. Feed this to your next husband!”

“Why do you say that to me?” Mom’s throat mottled angrily. “I haven’t taught him the ways to righteousness a thousand times? How many times have I shown him how a good Jewish child behaves? If a demon possessed him, what do you want of me?”

“Go. Enough. Speak to the wall. He’s yours, and yours he remains. One thing he’ll soon learn: what it is to be a crude breadwinner. Every day, every day, to go to work, to a job, to a boss, to labor for a pittance. Let him fill his own craw. He doesn’t deserve anything better than that; he never has. You’ve fattened a gross sloth, and now you’ll both find it out. Who knows, with toil he may scratch up a seed of wisdom.”

Followed a long grievous silence, while Pop, grim-faced, taut, made an effort to peruse his Yiddish newspaper, sigh-groaned audibly, irregularly, again and again. .

“When did you eat last?” Mom asked.

“Me? I don’t know. Before I left for school. Ten o’clock. The bulkie you gave me.”

“I would feed him.” Pop flapped the newspaper. “Chopped sorrows.”

“What you would do I already know,” Mom retorted.

“I’m not hungry,” said Ira.

“No? I’m sure. Even your spectacles are stained. Go wash your unhappy countenance. I have pot roast and gravy on the stove. The noodles are already cold.” Tears came to her eyes. She snuffed, went to the sink and blew her nose. “Noo? What are you waiting for?”

“I have to go to the toilet.”

“Then go.”

He entered the shadowy bathroom, held the door open until he located the dangling light pull, and as he tugged it, heard Mom say before he shut the door, “So he’s a fool. But a child of indigence he is too. And of sorrow. Even if it were a golden pen, it doesn’t matter. He’s my child.”

In the green-painted bathroom, against one shiny, uneven wall, stood a small chest of a dozen tiny drawers that Biolov had been about to discard, and Ira had retrieved; against the other wall stretched the long green-painted bathtub in its casket of matchboards. Ira lifted the chipped toilet seat, and was surprised at how little he had to urinate; after all, he had been weeping — the odd notion occurred to him — all those hours of roaming. He yanked at the toilet chain, tugged the light pull, and returned to the kitchen.

“And where were you straggling all this while?” Mom held the loaf of heavy rye bread against the flame-flowered cotton cloth of the mussed housedress covering her deep bosom, while she applied the gray carving knife with its tarnished concave blade toward herself through the thick crust. “All this time. When did you leave school?”

“I don’t know. Gym is the first period. That’s all I went to.” He could feel appetite revive. “Maybe nearly one o’clock.”

“And all that time roaming. Go to the sink.”

“I didn’t want to come home.” Ira removed his glasses, smeared soap on his face, cupped hands under spouting cold water, wiped face on towel, wiped glasses. “I walked, that’s all.”

“And where?”

“Why are you asking stupid questions?” Pop interjected. “You’ll have to pay the cobbler for his shoes. Then you’ll know.”

“True. And his father is also a man of means.” Mom set the thick-hewn slice of bread before Ira, who began devouring it ravenously. “Wait, I’ll cut some meat.”

“I didn’t know where to go, that’s all.” Ira tore away a mouthful. “I walked by the river. On Riverside Drive.”

“And why Riverside Drive?”

“I don’t know. It was by the river.”

“Aha! I understent. You went by the water.”

“By the water,” Pop scoffed, brown eyes hard with animus. “Immediately he’s leaped in. How the woman submits to his contriving.”

“Chaim, let me be,” Mom said quietly. “I haven’t woe enough? And you haven’t fear? Whom are you deluding?” She met Pop’s set gaze with her own — until he looked away. And then she hacked at the meat in the pot, conveyed a chunk to the plate, tilted the pot to spoon gravy to cover the slab of meat, added noodles.

“Here. Eat.” She set the plate down before Ira — and again confronted Pop. “He’s my child. He may die for his golem’s brain, and the suffering he’s causing me. And you as well. He gets it from you, after all. Let’s tell the truth,” she challenged him, “how did you steal out of Galitzia the first time?”

Pop put down his newspaper, thrust forward a startled, tense countenance toward Ira. “Look what she scratches out of the dirt! What has the one thing to do with the other?”

“I’m asking you.”

“Gey mir in der erd!”

“You filched the passage money to America. True or not?”

“Kiss my ass.”

“From your father. From his wallet.”

“Go drop into your tomb.”

“There!”

“She throws that up to me — how I quit Galitzia. How else was I going to leave? I had no money. My brothers were in St. Louis. I wanted to go, too.”

“Well?”

“Whose money was it? You horse’s head! My father’s, no?”

“But you did steal it.”

“Gey mir vidder in der erd! How else was I to get it?”

“Oy, vey,” Mom sighed. “When you returned to Austria, were you hanged for your misdeed?”

Pop wagged his head at her irately. “Would God I had never returned! A demon sent me back to Galitzia. To her! To you! The devil sent me back. But what — if fortune fails you, what can you do?”

Mom seemed too spent for anger. “Believe me, if fortune failed you, it failed me.” She sat down, speaking calmly. “What would have been the harm if I hadn’t suited you? I would have been an old maid. Ben Zion would have married his other daughters under me. As if he had any other choice. Sooner or later the Lord would have sent me a fat, sleek Jew of a widower, with a fine beard and a great paunch and a houseful of children. What would I have lacked? Do you want some more noodles? My pitiful son.”

“I want some more bread.” Ira chomped.

Mom stood up. “And what time does your father have to be at the school tomorrow?”

“I think maybe ten o’clock. Mr. Osborne comes in. He’s the assistant principal.”

“I’ll have time to finish a breakfast serving,” said Pop. “I’ll slip away between breakfast and lunch.” He nodded, addressing Ira.

“Thank you for your thoughtfulness.”

And Mom, bringing Ira another slice of bread, added, “Throw yourself at his feet. Implore his forgiveness. Tell him you’re the poor son of impoverished parents. You saw the silver pen. You snatched it. You couldn’t help yourself. Never again will you be guilty of such foolishness. You can speak English. Then speak. Plead.”

“He had to own a fountain pen.” Pop rested elbows on the open sheets of Yiddish newsprint on the table. “Haven’t I seen a hundred times yeshiva youth in the subways, pale, famished Talmud students going to the yeshiva near where I work? And what were they carrying in their hands? A plain bottle of ink. A steel pen in a wooden holder. Only this princeling had to have a fountain pen. Without it he couldn’t learn, he couldn’t record wisdom. And not only to have one fountain pen, but another to give away. You hear?”

“Shoyn farfallen,” said Mom. “Enough torment.” And to Ira, “If you’re not allowed back into the school, what will you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll come home.”

Ira shook his head sullenly.

“You’ll come home,” she repeated. “No one need know. I don’t want you roaming the streets.” She sat down again, studied him with meditative eyes deep with sadness. “May God help you tomorrow with this assistant principal”—she assayed the English words. “May He help you indeed. But if not, if you’re cast out of the school, that’s not the end of life, you hear? You’re a dolt, and you’ve learned a terrible lesson. Only don’t lose your will for your career.”

“Career,” Pop echoed. “Keep filling his head with nonsense. He needs a career like I need an abscess. You’ll see his career, and you’ll see your dead grandmother at the same time, Leah.”

“I can still hope,” Mom said. “What else can I do but hope? You’re his father. Do you wish to see him wholly destroyed? Nothing to become of him?”

“Ira has already given me good tokens, good signs of what to expect. Do I need more? And pray, spare me your questions.” He averted his face, drawn again with inner torment. “I can assure you he is a fool.”

“In truth. But who had the silver pen, and who didn’t? Would the other need to steal one?”

“You’re altogether clever. Would the other be the clod this one is? In his home tonight, fear not, the other’s parents are rejoicing. And well they might: not only have they recovered a treasure. Their son showed wit; he showed judgment. He wasn’t going to let the opportunity escape to recover what was his. There’s a son.”

“Dolt,” said Mom. “May your heart ache as mine does. A little compote? I know you’re fond of stewed pears.”

“Yeah. And another slice of bread.”

IV

Ira knew where he was at. He let the spate of memories flow through his mind: oh, those first years in rural Maine, in Montville with his family, his beautiful, young M, the two boys, in the latter half of the forties at the end of World War II. The ditch he dug in which to lay the copper tubing from the brimming, truly — how should one say — sylvan, precious pool of spring water on the hillside, to the kitchen sink. The half-stick of dynamite at the end of his pickax, half-stick of dynamite skewered harmlessly on the pickax point. Stop. Stop. The hardships, especially for M, the quasi-romantic impracticality of it all. But they had been together then, young relatively, though he was already forty by that time. But together! The hillside, crowned with stout rock maple trees, leafless at the close of winter, the sap gathering, the syrup making. Why did some things in the past become so much lovelier than they were, even as the ugly became hideous? One had to lower the sluice gate on the bygone somehow, or be swept away by the flood of reminiscence.

Ah, Ira hadn’t even slept well last night. He had admitted to his friend and rheumatologist, Dr. David B, that in order to overcome the pain and lethargy of rheumatoid arthritis he frequently had to resort to ingesting a half-tablet of the narcotic Percodan. Dr. B remarked that he resembled Algernon Charles Swinburne in that respect. Swinburne too had depended on drugs to sustain his muse. And of course there was De Quincy and there was Coleridge, both of whom became addicted to opium. The effect of the half-tablet, the “high,” the elevation of mood inspired thereby, was brief, but enough to overcome his inertia, and that was usually enough to enable him to proceed from that point on. The drowsiness that sometimes followed could be overcome by taking one or another of the proprietary caffeine tablets. The million vagaries, gestalts, that occurred to him during these times of lethargy were also valuable, Ira mused.

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.

“Please, let’s have no misunderstanding on that point,” Mr. Osborne said. “We’re here to protect all the students. To protect Ira as well.”

“No, no, I understent. I understent good.”

“Then I can only repeat: as of this hour Ira is no longer a student of Stuyvesant High School. In a word — and a very harsh word it is indeed, Mr. Stigman, I’m sorry — he’s expelled.”

Ira sobbed.

“However, let me say this.” Mr. Osborne rocked the blotter holder on his desk, studied the green underside incuriously. “In order that there be nothing against his record of this disgrace — because of the kind of boy he is — obviously not wicked — and the father he has — I’ve asked that his record card be removed from the files, and destroyed. He’ll have no record of shame to live with. He’s only been here two months, fortunately, and we can wipe the slate clean — with very little loss — with respect to time spent here at his studies.”

“Yeh. Yeh. I see you a — you a kindly man.” Pop bobbed in grievous praise. “T’enks. He should — ah!” he despaired of Ira. “Aza lebn af dir!” he flung at him.

“You can start anew in any high school of your choice,” Mr. Osborne mediated. “You need never mention Stuyvesant High School.” He stood up, jotted soberly on a pad, tore off a slip of paper, tendered it to Ira. “Give that to the monitor at the door.” Then he extended his hand to Pop, who had also gotten to his feet. “I don’t need to repeat how painful this has been — for me as well as you.”

“Yeh. T’enks. More I don’t got — I don’t hev to say. I’m sorry I make you so much trouble. I’m sorry I got such a son.” Pop nodded brusquely. “I’m, I’m — just a vaiter. A vaiter in a restaurant. On my tips I try to send him to high school. You see how it helps.”

“Don’t give up hope, Mr. Stigman. We’re not dealing with a habitual delinquent here. Your son isn’t a criminal. Misguided, yes, but not a criminal.” Mr. Osborne spoke as all three moved toward the door. “The way the entire thing came to light proves it. Actually, it’s a rather incredible thing.” He stopped at the door. “Goodbye, young man. I suggest in the future you try to control your impulses. Do you understand what I mean when I say ‘control your impulses’?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve already caused your parents immense suffering. And yourself as well. I hope you profit by this lesson.”

“Yes, sir.”

They left the building. . walked in utter silence west, almost as if they were strangers; their common unhappiness, the son’s blame and shame, the father’s wrath and contempt, served as repulsion against the weak bond of their kinship. . They walked until they came to the small park, Stuyvesant Square Park, on Second Avenue, where there they parted. Pop’s restaurant was located farther downtown. Ira’s destination nowhere, for the time being.

“Thanks, Pop,” Ira quavered.

“T’enks it would be indeed,” Pop answered in stony Yiddish, “were I to see you buried.”

The ultimate, the epitome of rejection, Pop turned his back and walked off: the short, slight man in his black overcoat strode away, neither deigning nor able to communicate anything except his utter estrangement.

Alone, this terrible ordeal having ended, the outcome settled, Ira felt his constricted spirit expand again. He sat down on one of the park benches to assay his release, to scan the landscape of his dishonorable freedom. It seemed boundless, and equally shapeless. All he could discern about it at the moment was its sensation. The air was cool, variable, sunlit, terminally March. Overhead, tattered clouds jostled silently under luminous blue serenity. And under them, buildings, windows, and on the ground, people, pedestrians and vehicles, figures in motion or at rest.

Some kind of stage in his life had ended; that much he was sure of, but who could define it? He couldn’t. Ended. Ended, as if a perverse destiny were fulfilling itself. Yesterday was mortal, yesterday, at the Hudson River’s edge, had come to an end. He perceived something was in store, an earnest outcome for this anguish. But what? How was it that others’ lives, Maxie’s, Sid’s, moved along in predictable, in sensible ways, toward a future with a label? His didn’t, and he didn’t know how to make it move that way.

Impulse. What had Mr. Osborne said? Self-control. He didn’t know how to make his life happen in a self-controlled, sensible manner. And he paid for it. He hadn’t wanted to go to junior high school, but he had listened to Mr. O’Reilly, and stayed in P.S. 24—and met Farley. And he hadn’t wanted to go to Stuyvesant; he’d wanted to take a general course, like that given by DeWitt Clinton — but he had followed Farley. He didn’t know what he wanted, that was the trouble.

Others knew what they wanted. Most wanted to make money, to be a success. He didn’t. The other Jewish guys on the block were ambitious; he wasn’t. That was the trouble: something had zigzagged within him, caused an irreparable quirk, made him a lemekh, a bungler, a freak. And now he had to find out how to deal with that kind of quirk, take it into account, try to fit life together again, if it could possibly be fitted together. Sometimes he had a feeling he stood in a large, clean, airy room where marvelous, nameless, intricate machinery was working out his destiny — in secrecy.

Under the opposite benches, sheltered by the green slats of the seats, small, grimy mounds of melting snow still lingered. Last refuge of winter, they seemed, crouching under the green benches, grim-sprinkled winter brought to bay by the spring thaw. The matted lawn on the other side of the pipe fence back of the benches glistened sodden; the trees were feathery with buds; the breeze felt cool and rinsed. All footprints of pedestrians from wet to dry on the paved walk. Bark of trees so damp and swarthy, and building rooflines stretched tight. That was springtime. And this was he, Ira Stigman, sitting here, kicked out of high school. He felt an urge to commemorate the date in his small homework assignment book. He drew it out of his breast pocket, along with an indelible pencil. No fountain pen on his person today. He touched the point with the tip of his tongue, and wrote in purple letters. March 23, 1921: “The Devil laughed today.”

And now, he’d better get up and leave the park, he counseled himself, leave, before somebody early on his way to the second session recognized him. He had promised Mom he would come home right away, as soon as the calamity came to an end, and it had come to an end. He stood up. He began walking toward the 14th Street subway station.

For whom had he suffered? And to what end? Jesus, that was strange: to think you had suffered toward some end. He knew he had suffered — because he was a sap. Wasn’t that enough reason? No. It wasn’t enough. That was river’s message, gray river saying the same thing with a million choppy tongues all the way to the Palisades below the Domino Sugar clock — saying the thing that saved his life on the diving rock on the Hudson. It wasn’t reason enough. He didn’t suffer just because he was a sap. He made life live inside him. Only he could weave among a thousand people window-shopping, drift past the store windows, coats and hats and dummies, among living people, jabber-jabber, shuffle-scrape, in coats and hats like dummies too in living flesh and skirts that moved, and toot-toot and honk-honk and ding-dong auto and trolley din, and to him it meant something. That was the answer. Because he was alive, different.

Alive, different, all the way to the angle corner of Broadway, Union Square Park, where the cop blew his whistle, and whipped traffic through with his arms; alive, different, until he reached the dark kiosk, and went down the stairs with the horde. He’d never really figure it out, dope. But that was the answer. Vile and rotten and different. Why? Look at the way his mind could stretch out in all directions — in every direction away from himself, and bring it all back, and bring it to life inside him. Who else could do that who just got kicked out of Stuyvesant High School?

V

That was to be the original ending of Volume I of Mercy of a Rude Stream, so he had signified on the disk on which he kept a skeleton outline of the contents of the sections into which his work was divided: of necessity, according to the capacity of his computer. It was now four days since he had returned home from surgery, as it was termed these days (instead of an operation), to repair the hernia. He was almost back to normal, in body and mood, thanks in great part to M.

How he had marveled about this mystery, her, yes, impregnable devotion to him, while he was still in the hospital, chafing, fretting unduly at the colloidal personality of his average American roommate, his-cheap, plastic tastes, his inane mental content, his preference for the sintered sham, for the gilded and gelded, with a wife like him, and friends as well, the TV programs he was addicted to.

He hated them instead of pitying them—that was the difference, that was where he was wanting, and M was not. He hated them because he wasn’t one of them, he supposed (he had mulled about the matter for hours on end). He wasn’t one of them. He was an everlasting Falasha, as he had written in his journal. Well — the miracle was that M loved him so, this daughter of the same dominant society that he detested for its banality, and that detested him, he was sure, with equal intensity for his alien views, elitism, his alien response to their mass-produced, disposable values. M loved him, cared for him, tended to him, looked after him with such solicitude — and such wisdom. She wasn’t the only one in this goyish world of the Western Diaspora whom he respected, even formed deep attachments with — by no means — there were dozens, and not only intellectuals either — but her he worshiped, “this side of idolatry,” worshiped her as devoutly as a flawed, fluctuating soul could worship another fallible, human being, could worship his mate of many years. She had awakened in him affirmations and compassions that dispelled the lethargy of his habitual cynicism, his alienation, restored him to a wider humanity, and who could tell? Her constancy and devotion might have been the spiritual catalyst in effecting that qualitative transformation in himself, a regeneration of personal commitment that was instrumental in the birth and growth of a wider personal commitment: his partisanship for his own people in Israel. Ironic too. . she was not Jewish. .

Volume I. Finished. Done with. He had thought about it this morning, as he showered, breakfasted, and the rest, and he wished he could set down, or rather formulate, the thought as it first occurred to him: with the same pristine lilt of wording. But he was rarely able to do that, to remember the exact form of the advent of the thought, unless he had the means at hand, and the impulse, to jot the thing down at the moment of occurrence. He had not had either. So — the insight had gone unrecorded (no new experience for writers); he would now have to grope, cumberously, toward an approximation of the original formulation. It was to the effect, or bore within itself the incipient realization, that his “creative” days were done — no, that wasn’t quite it; that he had recognized for a long time. The central point was that it was not his attempted innovations of narrative that were of interest to people; his endeavors in that respect had undoubtedly long since been dealt with by others — and surpassed. He simply hadn’t been around when all this was happening. People, the reading public, were interested in him, to the degree they were, not because they expected exceptional literary output from him any longer, but because they were curious about the vicissitudes he had undergone, vicissitudes marked by an element of freakishness.

He should have known that from the first, but as usual was slow to apprehend; it had taken him all of Volume I to perceive it. What had happened to the author of that anomalous classic of Lower East Side childhood, as certain critics referred to it? That was the meaning surely of the frequent requests he received from journalists and others, freelance writers, for interviews. They reflected a degree of public curiosity regarding the extraordinary hiatus of production that was the dominant feature of his literary career. They sought information from him and about him on which to base hypotheses as to the cause. He wasn’t prepared to advance any, since he was the last person in the world equipped with the necessary intellectual, philosophic, social apparatus to do so.

And not to forget, though he would be better off if he did, the letter he had received yesterday from David S of the Washington Post, a very sincere letter, requesting an interview; and his own decision not to grant it. Interviews preyed on his mind in anticipation, for fear that he would reveal the extent of his unfamiliarity with modern literature, his absence of profundity, the skimpiness of his critical faculties. Interviews took more out of him than they should, or were worth. Besides, he had already been done, well done, and as he would like to say, though he would probably veto the inclination, overdone. Most likely, though, his most compelling motive in denying the request for the interview was his desire to preserve the integrity of the unexpected turn his writing had taken, or was about to take, unexpected acknowledgment of the individual he had been, and still had to abide with.

“No, I’ll conduct my own interview, Ecclesias,” Ira muttered as he proceeded to SAVE the working copy he had already typed on the screen. Some faint but promising notion had crossed his mind as he did so; faint and remote, but at his age (and before), the faint, rare notions had to be retrieved at once, hermetically enclosed, or they volatilized. . Had the elusive, the evanescent thought been simply that he would soon be dust? He didn’t know; it wasn’t able to get him back on track anyway. But how he plodded, how he shuffled as he walked the length of the mobile-home hall to the kitchen. There M, her piano practice over, stood with bent head in faded pink variegated apron over blue shirt, paring vegetables to go into the Belgian cast-iron orange enamel stew pot — how beautiful her lofty brow under gray hair. He plodded, shuffled, he who had once been just like — how repelled he was by quoting that snobbish, evasive Jew-tweaker — TSE-TSE. No, Ira thought: old Bert Whitehouse in Norridgewock, Maine, a scad of years ago while he was writing his novel in 1933, had said it just as graphically in his way as Eliot had in his: “Once I could scale a four-rail fence one-handed; now I stumble over an inch-thick board on the ground.”

And why should the public at large be interested in the inventions he might have to offer now? They represented anything but contemporary configurations; they were those of a half-century ago. This was a different age, and demanded — and needed — new interpretations and new judgments made from the vantage of a fifty-year gradient. It would take another century or more to disclose the proximity, the near-contemporaneity, of the seeming gap.

From his fifteenth year to his nineteenth, from his expulsion from Stuyvesant to — and perhaps beyond — his freshman year at CCNY. The facts here were very good. He knew he could recall with fair accuracy many facets of that period, some charged with dreadful meaning, some no more than diverting reminiscence. He was Mr. Editor. He was boss. He’d get on the linear choo-choo, and bowl along to the provisional terminal, no, the provisional hub, a junction point, in railroad parlance. How could he — that was it — delete, shorten, condense? What did he have here?

“It is as difficult to set down,” he had written, “as difficult to set down as it is to recall the proper sequence of the farrago of events in the months succeeding my expulsion from high school. I returned to P.S. 24—”

And here Ira paused, paused and shook his head. These half-truths, half-truths he was forced to labor under, forced himself to labor under.

— Well, then, who are you? Editor or contributor?

Both and neither, Ecclesias. I know this is the time of my deepest un-doing; I grow drowsy with the numbing dolor of it. This is the time. This is the time. All things apart from this are like so many streamers, mere fringes, fronds—

— Not quite, not quite. Among them are also life-determining episodes.

Yes. But the main thing is that it was during those years that I tore apart the ligatures, my psychic ligatures, sundered them irreversibly. The spring was pulled beyond its intrinsic elasticity, its constant, never to resume its original form. God, how one can ruin oneself, be ruined; it’s inconceivable.

— Alors, mon ami.

VI

So back to P.S. 24 Ira returned. One of his aims, he was quite sure, was to obtain a transcript of his record in grammar school, and especially of his year in junior high school, since he would have to present this as credit toward continuation of high school. Ira Stigman had been expelled from Stuyvesant for fighting (that became his standard explanation, and strangely, no one questioned it), and his records had been destroyed. He needed them to enroll in another high school. Secondly, he appealed to crippled, mock-bellicose Mr. Sullivan, because he had once had such a high opinion of him in his English class (and such a low one in bookkeeping), for help in finding a job. He met Ira’s appeal, or better said, his prevarication, with charity, and even with some indignation at what he regarded as summary punishment for so commonplace an offense. He wrote a letter of recommendation to the head of a small law firm whose books he kept. And on the strength of it, Ira applied for the position of office boy, either that day or the next — and he was hired.

Mr. Phillips, his new employer, gave the impression of being a reasonable man, even-tempered and deliberate, with a trait of smoothing the sides of his long straight nose between thumb and forefinger. He invited Ira to sit down at a desk and write a letter of application for the position. He found the letter satisfactory, except for one flaw: Ira had spelled his name with only one “1” instead of two. He would have to be much more careful in the future to note such details as this if he expected to satisfy the exacting requirements of a law firm, Mr. Phillips stressed.

But he was a washout as a law-firm office boy. Without more ado: a lamentable washout. A ludicrous failure. He could not even get a message straight over the telephone; in his anxiety and apprehension he couldn’t even hear straight; he couldn’t distinguish spoken words. Also, it was a rare occasion when he found his way to the right courtroom, the right session, the right hearing at the right time. Rare as rare could be. Shlimazl! Pop was right. And if by some stroke of luck he did follow instructions correctly, did get to the right courtroom at the right time, then he mooned past the announcement of the case for which he had been sent there for the express purpose of asking for postponement or deferral. Mr. Phillips smoothed the sides of his long nose a fortnight or two; his junior partner fumed, tutted, growled something about a chump. And Mr. Phillips’s secretary was wracked by puzzling hysterias. .

The firm moved its location to new, more commodious quarters. The entire office decor underwent a change: the stout old friendly oak filing cabinets and the grainy yellow oak desks were replaced by sleek, coffee-colored metal. Along with that change came a change of office boys. Another youth took Ira’s place, a youth of about Ira’s age, but slender, large-eyed, knowing, a little amused, a little condescending. He reminded Ira of the fellow student from whom he had stolen the silver-filigreed fountain pen. Mr. Phillips explained that the newcomer was to take Ira’s place beginning the next week. Ira was a good boy, Mr. Phillips affirmed, but not suitable for work in a law firm. He was sorry, but he would have to let him go.

To tell the truth, Ira wasn’t too unhappy. He found the work boring, devoid of color and encounter, of the tangible tartan of the city’s aspects he loved to contemplate. Except that he would have to go home and tell Mom that the source of his nine dollars per week had dried up, he felt more relieved than regretful at being fired. He knew he was just too much of a mope to cope with the job, with the abstractions he already perceived composed most of it.

So ended his brief untenable and tenuous association with the law, lawyers, and the legal process. He resolved never again to work in an office of any kind. It was enough to be a boob without having to cringe in humiliation of having others discover the fact.

If only there weren’t so many interruptions, Ira mused, so many distractions in the life of the narrator. He could go on from episode to episode in a tale told autonomously from end to end. (His old complaint; was it pretext or legitimate?) Distractions were too many for him, or too beguiling, or he — his will — was too weak to resist. Once it had been strong enough, once it had, when he wrote his one and only novel.

He had managed to exclude distractions and involvements for as long as four years, until the opus was done. Ah, youth — and he had had a plethora of distractions and involvements. Sexual often, though not always: a love affair that went to hell; and that pas de deux, de trois, de quatre. And illness too had interrupted, but again, not for long. He had then clung tenaciously to his narrative, which was something he could no longer always do. And, dear reader, as Jane Eyre would say, and a whole swarm of other literary narrators of fiction, in the good old days when ye scrivener snuggled up to the reader, dear reader, if you don’t like it you can lump it, whatever “lumping it” meant. Dear reader. There might not ever be any readers, dear or otherwise, though he made every effort to preserve means of communication with them, future means of communication: those floppy disks wherein he addressed Ecclesias. Dear reader.

But then, those were not the days, and these were, when he spent, or rather wrecked, an entire day, with a gut gone haywire — or perhaps he should say, spent altogether too many of them that way, recuperating from various surgeries or miasmas of mood and malaise, all or most of them, very likely, payments or penalties, retributions from excesses of the way, way back. But then too, and that perhaps was the worst of it, in that long past when he wrote his youthful “classic of Lower East Side childhood,” he hadn’t tried to pry off and peddle segments of the novel, as he did now, still hoping to make an impression on modernity (and garner a few bucks while he was at it), and in consequence, hadn’t received the rebuffs he did now, and likely deserved, from various and sundry well-thought-of periodicals.

His stuff was now old hat, and for all he knew, stereotyped as well. But the rejections brought him face to face with the fact that he was an old man of seventy-nine, and his literary wares those of a seventy-nine-year-old man, waning and wanting, and perhaps pathetic. Be better, more dignified, if he shut up, maintained an air of remote reserve, because that way his deficiencies would remain unexposed. Good idea.

Well. . As he wrote his literary agent: he would refrain from submitting further fragments of his writing. It was all or nothing now, and if it was to be all, then it would have to be posthumous. Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni. .

Roving again in the vicinity of 14th Street, on the east side of Union Square Park, passing by the ornate facades and arched windows of the lofts and office buildings of the time, he glanced at a BOY WANTED sign posted on a doorway: Inquire at the Acme Toy Company Upstairs. Again he found what he so lackadaisically sought, and was all but afraid to find: a job interview. The blowsy, stertorously breathing, cigar-puffing Jewish proprietor behind his mussed desk in his small, cluttered office was Mr. Stein, he informed the young applicant. Mr. Stein appeared to be in his late fifties. Beside him stood his son, Mortimer, a tall, dark young man in his twenties, who scrutinized Ira through the slits of intolerant brown eyes.

Together, they quizzed Ira, at the same time as they briefed him about what they expected of him. Did he intend to go back to school? Experience had already taught Ira the answer to that one. Oh, no, he assured Mr. Stein, he had quit school for good. They needed somebody all year round. They needed somebody who was quick to learn, somebody with a good head, because they had a big inventory with hundreds of different items in different bins, and somebody who was wide awake and honest and careful. Ira gave them Park & Tilford as a reference, stressing that he had learned the location of hundreds of items down in the cellar. Of course, the P&T store uptown had closed, and he was out of a job. His half-truth bore some weight. And further, they wanted somebody who was not afraid of a little hard work (pronounced “ard-vark” by the owner). Oh, no, not he.

Although the son remained darkly skeptical, the father hired Ira:

“Vee’ll geeve you a chence,” he decided. The wages would be eight dollars and fifty cents a week, payable Saturday afternoon.

That first day he worked there, that first day he was hired, was already Saturday. Then he had been led into a contradiction again: payday on Saturday; and if so, why hadn’t he been paid? Had he worked too short a time, or wasn’t Saturday payday? Answer he could find none. Only that the few cents with which Mom had supplied him to go job-hunting, now that he had found one, he expended on buying lunch, and skimpy enough it was. When time came to hie him home, he had no carfare — and as usual was reluctant to ask. Why? Too deeply submerged in the past to fathom now. One nickel. Did he fear refusal? Did it mean to the kid that he was betraying some kind of weakness in having made no provision for a subway ride home? Did it deflate his seemingly sturdy self-reliance, hint at schoolboy dependence? God knows.

The kid hoofed it all the way from 15th Street to 119th Street. Over a hundred blocks in a straight line: five miles, as they reckoned it in New York, and this at the end of most of a day’s work. The hike didn’t hurt him, of course, borne along on those young, resilient legs, legs wearying only toward the end, the last few blocks of pavement over which he forged ahead with the single-minded resolve of a homing pigeon. He could see himself in the kaleidoscope of passage, in the shade of buildings in the late sun of late spring, see his straining face among the other innumerable faces and figures limned for an instant on the storefronts he strode past, as if progressing along a system of ill-reflecting mirrors. And turning the corner, at last, around the Phoenix Cheese Company’s wholesale depot at Lexington Avenue into familiar 119th Street, his own sleazy street, his shelter, his home.

Why did he remember chiefly the unpleasant, the disastrous incidents connected with the job, Ira queried himself, the all-too-frequent mishaps of which he was the cause? Why was he so intent on proving he was a shlemiel? For no other reason than that he was. It was not a case of his protesting too much; he simply was. Ah, yes, wonderful: Ses ailes de géant l’empêche de marcher.

Who was to know that? Strangely enough, his blunders and casualties infuriated the younger Mr. Stein far more than the father. The senior Mr. Stein seemed not so much amused with Ira as always on the verge of being amused: what antic would he furnish next? It was Mortimer who made life miserable for Ira, made him so continually ill at ease that he virtually guaranteed Ira’s commission of some egregious slip, which in turn vindicated Mortimer’s rancor as it stoked further cause. Ira broke unbreakable dolls. He stepped into whole cartons of fragile Christmas-tree baubles. Immediately after, he spied the older man at his desk wheezing alarmingly with averted face: “Die insurinks vill pay for it,” he said indulgently to his son, who, Ira supposed, wanted him fired at once. “My madicine dey don’t pay for. So — de yold is better vie madicine.”

But Mortimer was not to be appeased. One afternoon, returned from lunch, when he was at his most sluggish, Ira was called on to help Mortimer unload a big case of teddy bears. And while Mortimer stood high above his helper, one foot on a stepladder, the other on an upper bin, Ira tossed him teddy bears to stow away at the very top tier of the shelves. And Ira’s aim astray more than once, Mortimer had to catch himself and the teddy bear at the same time. Suddenly, as Ira bent over to get at the bottom layer of teddy bears, whack! a teddy bear bounced off his skull. No teddy bear could ever make an impact that hard by merely being dropped — of that Ira was sure. It had to be aimed and hurled — deliberately and with maximum force. And even though Mortimer, high on his perch near the ceiling, served up a conciliating smile and an unconvincing “I’m sorry,” Ira resolved to quit. That Saturday he did, without notice.

Ah, what it would have been like, Stigman — Ira let his head loll back — without the canker, susceptible to all phases of existence, unaware, or scarcely, of the poverty, of the penury and the squalor all about you? What else did the kid know, besides what he perceived, what he discerned within the confines of the slum his milieu? Mostly those things that books told him, the too often insubstantial library-world, at a far remove from his own. Still, the mind did open sometimes upon literary avenues, and some were feasible, might reward the traveler for his journey.

We go this way only once, said Thoreau; and he, Ira, had all but gone to the end of that way already. Nonetheless, it was a privilege to reconstruct the route, and on a computer. Could Ira repress that, that which now strove for utterance? No, he couldn’t. It was the consequence of his having taken a half-tablet of Percodan, Percodan, which always tended to make him loquacious. Millie M, Marcello’s wife, had given him Jane Eyre to read, the first and only Brontë novel he had ever read — and he could hear the quality of her prose pulse in his. A hundred and forty years ago she lived. She died in childbirth, but she spoke to him now, her spirit still alive and vital, toiling at the same craft, speaking through the medium of the same craft, speaking with a fine, vibrant woman’s voice over a span of a century and a half, relating what it was to be alive then, imparting a sense of life through all the fuddy-duddy tags of religiosity, gothic implausibilities, supernatural folderol, bursting through Freud and the grave, through custom, culture, ethos, to impart a sense of the young woman of her time to an old man of his. And now look ahead — he thought — look ahead 140 years. Say Kaddish not only for your grandchildren, but for your great-grandchildren; rend your garments now, sit humbled by bereavement, sit shiva—which you never have done for the living — in a word, mourn for the unborn, for the departed of the future.

In that utterly changed world of 2125, with its changed mores, changed ambience, changed awareness, will any look back at you? Look back from a humanity whose nature you can scarcely guess at now: more extraordinarily different probably than Jane Eyre’s world was from yours. Still, the only holistic world they will have to look back at will be such as this, through all the lame and ludicrous anachronisms — this mélange of fact and fiction. A hell of a lot of difference a misplaced year is going to make 140 years from now. Indeed, Ecclesias, if you wish to know, you have much to be grateful for in this digression. Not only because it relieves the heart, but it illuminates mortality in continuity, or continuity in mortality, reconciles the soul, yes, a very little bit, the human soul to its fate. So, let this be an indefinite interlude. .

VII

He had earned enough money for Mom to buy him his clothes for the coming school year: a few pieces of underwear — BVDs — socks, a pair of cheap shoes, and enough secondhand outergarments to last until he again brought home wages next summer. And how unabashedly she haggled with the secondhand clothes dealer on 114th Street, flushed with indignation, holding up to the light the seat of the touted pants to exhibit the worn fabric — heedless of the shopkeeper’s disclaimers and Ira’s cringing complaints. With his raiment provided, Ira felt excused from further responsibility for his own welfare until next year. Food and shelter, a bed to sleep in, he took that for granted; it was his by virtue of his parents’ obligation — or really, Mom’s obligation, since she was so dedicated to his getting an education. The carfare too, the dime she tendered him every day for transportation to and from high school, he felt equally complacent about. Hadn’t he contributed sufficiently to his present source of supply when he worked in the summer? Apparel was the one thing that — to his way of thinking — didn’t accrue naturally in the household, demanded supplemental cash, cash from the outside, cash that it was his duty to earn. And he had earned enough to defray the cost of secondhand raiment. He had discharged his duty. And as soon as he believed he had done so, he felt he was entitled to quit the job, to loaf with clear conscience.

So with bathing suit wrapped in a towel to form a small bundle, and the bundle tucked under his arm, Ira strolled west through 125th Street’s shopping mart, its string of one-story shops, west, under the Sixth Avenue El, west, to the soaring, dark 125th Street subway overpass, and under it all the way to the St. George’s ferry slip at the Hudson River shore. That was as far as shank’s mare could take him. From there he had to board the ferry, which cost a nickel, and ride to the other side of the river, the New Jersey side at the foot of the Palisades. A highway ascended to the Palisades, but partway up, an avenue branched off through a residential section, and here he would hike north, above the river and parallel to it, hike along a narrow sidewalk by comfortable homes set back on sloping lawns, under the shade of trees in the full leaf of late summer. And now and then note a house rising in quiet affluence from curved, paved driveways where motorcars were parked.

America, flourishing, prosperous, where modish women in picture hats pulled on long white gloves as they walked to their automobiles. Almost without benefit of words, but as if thoughts were clouds imbued with meaning, he would mull on the imponderable gulf that separated him from everything he beheld — and was enchanted by — that separated him, the immigrant, from the American-born, the Jew from the gentile. Oh, it was more than just that, Ira would ruminate. To be the kind they were you had to come from the kind they were a long, long time. Always. No old Jews with whiskers, no Shloime Farb with his forked gray beard, clearing his throat luxuriantly as he bent over the Torah scrolls, Shloime Farb in top hat on Shabbes, no cheder, scant as the memory was, East Side pushcarts, babble of Yiddish, matzahs and Moses in the Haggadah engraving clubbing the felled Egyptian taskmaster. This world had no warm Yom Kippur afternoons strolling past the ground-floor synagogue, no feeble old Jews in their shrouds prostrating themselves in atonement — scary — nothing to flaw the wholeness of the kind they were who lived in those well-kept homes beneath the trees where he walked. And worst of all, he was sure, he was sure, no secret canker had already begun to mar the contented wholesomeness they seemed to possess when he saw them clipping the hedges about their neat, elevated lawns, or seated in vivacious conversation opposite each other in their swinging gaily striped chairs. No. Their heartiness, their soundness, removed them.

A mile or so he would ramble thus along the tree-lined avenue — until he came to a painted arrow that marked the entrance to a path downhill whose other end opened on an artificially sandy beach. It was a privately owned swimming area on the Hudson, complete with dressing room, lockers, and a diving platform extending into the river. A fee of ten cents was charged for the use of a locker; otherwise, admission to the dressing room was free. There, Ira would change to his two-piece bathing suit, deposit his clothes in an out-of-the-way spot outdoors, walk to the sandy beach, and swim out into the “clean,” pleasantly brackish depths of the wide Hudson estuary. He was a good swimmer. His roly-poly build, so often disadvantageous in land sports, served to advantage in water. He would swim out to the rusting hulks of the Liberty ships, quondam military transports during the Great War, now idly tugging at the moorings in midstream. Airplanes, pontoon planes, were often anchored partway between the rusting ships and the shore, and Ira would hang on to a strut or guy wire for a breather. And once, while he was perched on a pontoon, a navy patrol boat churned up, and an officer ordered him to clear off. He did, but in his haste to comply, he dove off — and struck his head against something solid, was stunned, but managed to stay afloat until he recovered enough to swim back to shore.

Alone, so rash and alone, and often far from shore, from rescue, had he been the victim of serious accident, or been seized by cramp, he would certainly have drowned. And always in those spasms of momentary panic, when he imagined some Leviathan under him, or bucking the combined flow of river current and outgoing tide, when dry land seemed unattainable, he always thought of Mom: he shared in her inconsolable grieving for him.

“Why do I let you go?” she said to Ira more than once, so often that her words would remain fixed in his heedless mind. “I don’t know myself why I do. I let you go because you have to learn about America. You must learn alone, because help you I can’t. Neither I nor your father.” And she would laugh ruefully. “Mrs. Shapiro chides me that I’m like a goya. ‘You have a heart of stone,’ she says. ‘A stony heart like a goyish mother.’ She doesn’t know. If I lost you I would fall lifeless. I go about numb until you come home.”

Too late to enroll in the current term, Ira had enrolled in the summer session of the night high school — at the very same large gray school building he had passed so often — and would again — on his way to and from the Lenox Avenue subway station on 116th Street. Second-year English, his junior high school record entitled him to take, second-year Spanish, and elementary algebra. After oppressive, sultry, electric-lit classrooms, sauntering through 116th Street, the crosstown trolley thoroughfare and the Jewish shopping equivalent to goyish 125th Street. He would saunter along with other working youth, as if he too were on his own as they were, and not just temporarily thrown in with them, bantering, chatting — about what? Classes, courses, jobs.

Ira could recall one exchange distinctly. He was sharply reproved by a gentile student — already a young man, several years older than he was — for some facetious remark he made impugning Calvin Coolidge. Ingratiating himself, as usual, when with gentiles, by recourse to mild Jewish denigration, he said humorously that Jews called Coolidge “Koilitch,” which was the Yiddish word for stale challah, day-old Sabbath loaf, because it was so dry and colorless. His night-school classmate’s rejoinder was prompt and pointed: Jews of all people had no business making light of the man who had led the country into its greatest period of prosperity. “Look at the way business is booming,” he averred. “And who’s getting the most benefit out of it? The Jews. That’s the trouble with them. They don’t know when they’re well off.” He was so emphatic in his condemnation that Ira made no reply.

Booming business. Commercial, industrial, financial prosperity. Exactly the things that had the least meaning for him, that he didn’t give a damn about. But Ira couldn’t tell him that. Such values were part of his fiber, as an American and as a white-collar worker, a clerk striving to get ahead. He would have been outraged if Ira had told him he didn’t give a damn about Prosperity and Booming Business and the buoyant stock market. He would have called Ira a Red, a Bolshevik, one of the mangy, rabid, bewhiskered guys in cartoons in the Hearst newspapers who rushed wildly about wielding round bombs with fuses ignited. He would probably have told Ira to go back where he came from, or go back to Russia.

VIII

From the day of his expulsion from Stuyvesant, Ira continually thought of Farley. What did Farley think of him now? Could he, Ira, make amends? How could Ira get in touch with him? Did he dare get in touch with him? Had Farley told his parents? Ira yearned to see him. It was after his job in the warehouse, loading compartments with toys, had come to its inglorious end, though still a month before the close of the school year, on a clear, fine Saturday afternoon in late May, that Ira made his way to the Armory on upper Broadway where the high school interscholastic track meet was to be held. It was the last interscholastic track meet of the school year. Advance notices of the meet had been featured in the sports pages of all the metropolitan newspapers, especially by the World, which carried the most Boy Wanted ads. Farley’s name figured often, as the one runner who could seriously vie for first place with the reigning star of the 100-yard dash, the junior from Utrecht High in Brooklyn, Le Vine. Anonymous among the first bands of students surging from subway to Broadway, Ira made his way to the Armory. He knew just where to sit — to obtain the best view of the finish of the one event he cared about. He sat at the very end of the Armory, where the finish line of the 100-yard dash was clearly visible from the first few rows of seats in the balcony above the track.

He arrived early, on purpose, paid his twenty-five cents admission, hurried upstairs to choose a seat in the first tier, the tier next to the tubular brass balcony barrier. In a little while, the bulk of the crowd began to pour in, ebullient, colorful high school youth, hailing classmates, waving school pennants, striding over the stiles of seat backs to join friends — carefree, as he was not — gregarious, boisterous, outgoing, all the things that he really was not. More than a little furtive, troubled lest one of his former classmates might recognize him, perhaps, even, if he was there, the very youth whose silver-filigreed fountain pen Ira had stolen, stolen and bestowed on Farley, the silver-filigreed fountain pen now resting securely in its owner’s pocket. No. No one seemed even remotely conscious of his presence. He was safe, secure in his commonplace aspect, secure in his lackluster nonentity.

He watched with pleasant indifference the first events of the track meet, the padded ten-pound shot thudding on the Armory floor, the high jump competition in mid-Armory, the running broadjump, watched with almost euphoric lack of partisanship the race over the low hurdles, the 440-yard run — won by a mature black student from DeWitt Clinton, Ira noted, with prodigiously developed thighs; the mile run, won by somebody with a Greek name and a pedestrian stride, whom Ira remembered from the last track meet. And then came the trials for the 100-yard dash. At the remote starting line, Ira saw no sign of Farley. The heat was won easily by Le Vine, the gold medalist who had bested Farley the last time they competed. He might have been Jewish, though his name was spelled as if it were French, or altered to look French. Slender, dark, graceful, he walked with triumphant, springy step from under the balcony where he and the other sprinters disappeared into the end zone after crossing the finish line.

It was in the fourth and penultimate heat that Ira thought he descried Farley: that firm gait, sturdy figure without tension, dull-blond hair — and the big S on the shirt of his track suit. A cheer went up while the distant runners crouched, leaned forward. The far-off pistol cracked. Up the sprinters reared, and running. And how swiftly they neared, looming forward out of a hundred yards away, swiftly! In mid-distance, one runner took the lead: Farley. Through the din and cry and yell of the crowd he sped, so controlled his stride, his feet hammering out long paces on the boards, his small bony fists clenched, his blue eyes burning fixedly. He won his heat — lra’s best friend once! — he won as handily as did Le Vine, perhaps more handily. In silence Ira beheld him emerge from under the balcony: into a great swell of cheering; and smiling a little, open lips in deep breath, chest rising, he walked back on springy track shoes to the starting line.

The high hurdles were run, and the finals of the 220-yard dash. Ira watched idly. Till once again, Le Vine, with the conspicuous orange U on his chest, Farley, with the S on his, and others, finalists in the 100-yard dash, were warming up at the far end of the Armory, practicing starts, exploding from a crouch into a swift tattoo of feet. They were summoned to the starting line. There they crouched, as if all their weight rested on, was perched on, not their feet, but only their fingertips. The crowd hushed, became a nap of faces, pennants, figures, a tapestry covering the long oval of the balcony. The starter raised his pistol — and one of the finalists broke away. He returned. Once more the line of runners stood up, jigged tensely, drummed toes on the boards. Once again called to their marks, and set — the pistol cracked.

Five sprinters, all hammering the wooden boards with precise, disciplined, superhuman stride. They seemed abreast midway, then strewn apart. Then clearly in the van Le Vine, leading with smooth, even stride; he seemed to glide. And at his heels, trailing obliquely: Farley. And then they looked abreast in the same plane, Le Vine and Farley. They were abreast. As though the dynamism of the heart drove, not mere training, or inculcation, but the inherited stamina of ages that would not be denied, Farley took the lead. Five, four, three strides from the finish line Le Vine contended, in agony and in vain striving against those pistons of flesh and bone of his rival pounding the floor a stride ahead of him. In vain Le Vine hurled himself writhing at the tape. Farley had swept it away.

The Armory reverberated to the roar of the crowd. Ira felt his eyes fill with tears. Farley came out from under the balcony, breathing hard, with unassuming smile. The other runners filed after him, Le Vine, panting, unable to mask the frown of the bitterness of defeat.

“Farley!” Ira could no longer contain himself, his finger swiping like a sickle at the tear under his eyeglasses. “Hey, Farley!”

Farley looked over his shoulder, stopped in stride: “Hey, Irey!” He took a step back toward the balcony. No mistaking the gladness of his mien, his voice. “Hey, where you been?”

“No place.” Suddenly the focus of curiosity of those about him, Ira felt as if he had been snapped out of obscurity into fame. Farley was his friend, after all, his pal for all to see, his pal was the fleetest runner in all the high schools of New York. Acknowledgment of his status by those about him condensed into fixed appraisal.

“Come on down,” Farley called.

“Nah.”

“C’mon!”

“Now?”

“Sure. Right now.”

“They don’t let you, till it’s over.”

“Who said so? Come on.”

Farley disappeared under the balcony. Hastily and depreciating, cynosure of fellow spectators, Ira made his way up the stairs to the exit midway of the aisle, and then, uncertain with trepidation, with confusion of feelings, he descended the stairs leading to the Armory floor. A uniformed policeman waited — permissively.

“Hey, Moran, that’s him,” said Farley.

Just being addressed by Farley brought a flush of pleasure to the middle-aged cop’s face. Bits of perceptions, notions, swirled through Ira’s mind: contrast, heavy wool blue uniform, scant track suit; unity of the Irish; pride of the Irish; avuncular admiration — the freedom, the sheer naturalness of the deep-breathing sixteen-year-old victor.

“Hey, why didn’t you come around!” And an instant later, “Come on. Let’s go. I gotta get my sweat suit on.”

“Where?”

“Over to the other end.”

They had been clinging to each other’s hands.

“I can’t go.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t. You know why.”

Farley understood. “Listen.” He jogged in place. “Soon as I can I’ll meet you outside this door. It’s right near Broadway. Okay? I’ll get my medal, and scoot out. Gimme about half an hour. Okay?” He was already trotting toward the starting line.

“Do you want to go back up or do you want to go out now?” the cop asked Ira.

“No, I’ll go out.”

The cop swung open the heavy side door of the Armory, held it open on the sunlit throb of the street, surveyed the outdoors until Ira passed, then swung the door to. Isolated, happy, glowing with reprieve, Ira waited next to the building. Waited. . For all his happiness — the realization grew as the minutes went by — it would never be again the viable friendship it once had been. That was a thing of the past, but still rich with affection, rich with reminiscent bloom. And what joy to see Farley, to see him run and win, to share in his triumph.

And now, there he was! To see him in person come out of a door at the other end of the building, see him and hear him, stride up, blue-eyed, bareheaded, his light voice raised in familiar greeting, small canvas duffel bag hoisted in breezy approach.

“Boy, didn’t I beat it outta there? They wanted me to hang around for more pictures of me and the coach. But I said I couldn’t. I had to skiddoo.”

“Yeah?” Ira could feel the glow of his own happiness.

“Let’s mope home, all right?”

“Oh, sure. That was wonderful. Boy. Watching you.”

“I knew I’d beat him this time.”

“They give you the medal already?” Ira asked. “It’s real gold?”

“Yeah. Wanna see it?”

“Do I?”

Farley opened the bag as they walked, found the small, neatly wrought box among his track togs, opened it, displayed the colored ribbon and the rich gold disk with its raised athletic figure reaching out for a laurel wreath.

“Boy!”

“Nifty, huh? I did it in eleven two.”

“Boy!”

“If I had a start as good as his, I bet I’d do it in eleven flat. Maybe better.”

“Eleven flat! Wow!”

“He gets away in a flash. Like Hardy, that black guy in school who eats hot dogs and ice cream at the same time. Remember him? He got away like a rabbit. But I caught up with him.”

“Yeah.”

“The coach kept me practicing against him. Making me try to catch up with him sooner.”

“Gee, it was wonderful.”

They talked, talked tirelessly, without let, talked whole city blocks behind them, the long crosstown blocks as little noticed in their immersion in each other as the short downtown blocks. They talked about everything, everything that had happened since they separated: school and law office, training and interscholastic meets, hopes, intentions, expectations, two months of news and information tumbling chaotically out of each one’s mouth. Farley had been on the point of moping over to Ira’s house to find him. Why hadn’t he come around? No, he’d never told his parents. “What d’you think I am? I told ’em you had to go to work.”

“Oh. So they don’t know.”

“No. Nobody knows. O’Neil, my coach, knows. Couple of others. Gym teachers. And the guy. I see him every gym period. Marney. He never says anything. Why didn’t you tell me the pen wasn’t yours? You coulda got away with it. Easy.” Farley was so matter-of-fact, casual, forgiving. “All you had to do was say you found it.”

“I know. I know. Don’t I know.”

“What’d old man Osborne say to you?”

“He said everybody would — everybody would hear about it. I had to quit Stuyvesant for my own good.”

“Nah! Nobody even knows, nobody in the class. Nobody ever said anything to me.”

“He said there’d be others—”

“What d’you mean?”

“Other fellas lost fountain pens.”

“Other fellas? You mean—” Farley turned his head in midstride, his blue eyes puzzled. “What the hell got into you, Irey?”

“I don’t know.”

But he did, or thought he did, at least in part, but all of it was too, too snarled now, too unspeakable, yes, not merely the stolen briefcase, stolen fountain pens, straightedges, and protractors. No, too far gone. . driven into the self, remorseless and cruel and incorrigible, his stealing of the fountain pens only part of the forbidden he felt within himself, only part of the corroding evil. Stealing was easily overcome; he might never steal again, never really steal from another person. He had the power of choice. The other was amalgamated, was fused with bodily rapture, with a name never to be named. The other he couldn’t refuse.

Ira and Farley rounded Madison Avenue. And there was the church, and a block south of it, the Hewin Funeral Parlor.

“C’mon in. I’m hungry. What about you?” Farley invited. His lips squirmed. “And thirsty, wow. A sandwich and a glass o’ milk.”

Ira balked. “I better not.”

“I told you I didn’t say anything.”

“No?”

“They don’t know anything about it,” Farley stressed. “My mom’s asked about you lots o’ times. ‘What happened to your Jewish friend who was so quiet and shy?’ She likes you.”

“Yeah? What did she say about the pen?”

“You mean I didn’t have it anymore? I lost it. I’m tellin’ you, Irey. Come on in.”

They went in together, Ira following diffidently through basement gate and hallway, into the kitchen.

“You’re quite a stranger.” Always so joyless-seeming and resigned, nunlike Mrs. Hewin regarded Ira through gold-rimmed eyeglasses. The heavy down above her upper lip curved with her mouth in a rare smile.

“Yes, ma’am. I had to go to work.”

“So Farley told me. But not all the time. You don’t work all the time, do you? You don’t work every day?”

He hadn’t reckoned with quick, unsettling Irish wit. “No, ma’am.” He delved for a plausible reply, unearthed a sorry one, a bedraggled one. “I didn’t think I should — bother Farley. I’m working. He’s going to high school.”

“Oh, pshaw! I’ve yet to see anything like that bother Farley. The only thing I’ve known to bother Farley is that he can’t drive one of the limousines.”

“I can, too,” Farley protested.

“Of course you can. Ever since you were ten.” She turned to Ira. “I was so sorry when Farley told me you had to go to work. I know how much you wanted to go to high school. Do you like the work you’re doing?”

“My job? No. First I worked in a law office. But they fired me already. I was working in a toy warehouse until about a week ago.”

“Oh.” So faintly amused, the heavy down on her upper lip was all the more conspicuous. “Why did they fire you at the law office? Did they think you were too honest to make a good lawyer?”

“No, ma’am. I–I guess I wasn’t smart enough.”

“Tush! Are you ever going back to high school?”

“I’m going at night.”

“You are?” She studied him appreciatively. “I’m glad to hear it. Pity is it takes so long to get a diploma in night school. You’ll be a grown man when you graduate.”

“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. .

PART TWO. DEWITT CLINTON

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.

Though he made no close friends in school, he drew nearer to Jewish acquaintances, new and old, on 119th Street. The street had changed in character over the years, since that day in 1914 when he and his parents had moved in — as he had changed from that pugnacious little East Side Jewish kid then to his present indeterminate Harlem self today. The street had in the intervening years become largely Jewish — with a Jewish grocery store in the middle, a kosher butcher shop across the street, a tailor shop too that was Jewish. A new candy store had opened in the middle of the block. In the back of it, strident pinochle games took place. And on the corner and around it on both sides along Park Avenue a Jewish greengrocer, Jewish butter-and-egg store, a Jewish hardware store, notions, and other minuscule Jewish gesheftn of that sort. Those Irish families who hadn’t quit the neighborhood before the influx of Jews, who had chosen to stay on and live in tenements predominantly Jewish, had retreated to the block of red-brick, three-flight cold-water flats near Lexington Avenue. Next to the five-flight tenements of gray brick and brown, under their imposing eaves, the short block of red dwellings looked dwarfish indeed; and they were old as well, perhaps the oldest houses on the street, judging by the intriguing iron stars each had on its front, ornamental bolts at the end of massive iron rods that were concealed between floors and yoked opposite walls together.

— Ah, Stigman, Stigman. Fourteen years you resided there. Couldn’t you have simply chronicled the changes that took place in the street? Vicissitudes of vicinity. There’s a high-flown title for you. Fourteen years spent in polyglot Harlem, as against a few years on the homogeneous Lower East Side — which you warped out of shape anyway by the neutron mass of your later experience. Ah! Documented that motley squalor, that poverty: stoop and hallway and roof, street and cellar and backyard; and the sort that lived there, and when. Ah, what more did you need? There was a mine there for the literary man: see the Irish kids in their confirmation suits, white ribbon on their arm — wasn’t that what the little gamins wore? See Veronica Delaney in the pride of princess-loveliness with her mincing gait and black beauty spot on her chin. And the box-ball games, and the rubber baseball games, and kids climbing down the sewer for the lost ball, or up, all the way up one of the cross-braced pillars, and over into the New York Central trestle, the overpass, daring the exposed third rail for the sake of a ten-cent rubber ball.

— And the mock-Homeric street-gang fights and the brawls, and the thousand, thousand sorrows and predicaments and situations. Mr. Maloney, man of 250 pounds or more, plodding heavily up the stairs. He was foreman of a street repair crew, and when the tenants downstairs raised too much of a row, he tapped the floor with a sledgehammer. And the poor Jew-girl — Cuckoo-Lulu, the Irish kids called her, lived on the ground floor back, flaunted a bedraggled rusty fox-fur on her neck in mid-July. Easy lay, easy flighty lay, even for you to muster up predatory courage to take advantage of, and you would; except that her father was already far gone with melanoma, his face a gruesome misshapen cinder block or lava boulder. And you would. Despite that. Except that Mom perceived your intentions — and for the first time, her face suffused, lectured you on the dreadful uncleanliness of women, and the dreadful diseases they could transmit to the unsuspecting male.

— Poor Mom, taking all the blame, as women had done since Eve. And you still would, despite that, entice — Cuckoo-Lulu. But her family suddenly moved away. So instead, you studied ways to augment your guile, improve deception beyond Mom’s detection.

“O Lulu had a baby.

She named him Sunny Jim.

She put him in a pisspot

To loin him how to swim.

He sank to the bottom

He floated to the top.

Lulu got excited

And grabbed him by the—

O what a lulu!

Lulu’s dead and gone.”

— What a delicacy, that song by half-grown micks. . Oh, where were you, Stigman? On every flight of scuffed-linoleum, brass-edged steps of the stairs you climbed were stories (pun), were tales (pun again), hundreds of them. There was even a local newspaper, a house sheet run by an elderly Irishman — the Harlem Home News—into which to delve for “copy,” if you had an iota of initiative, were willing to do an iota of research to exploit: whole volumes of prose awaited the turn of your hand.

No use, Ecclesias. You know full well where I was.

— Alas, yes.

It was a period then when of necessity Ira sought the company of the Jewish youth his age whose families had moved into the area, and those who still lived in the same block, like Davey Baer. Davey had graduated with Ira from P.S. 24 and gone to work as an office boy and wore a fashionable tight, white, removable stiff collar that pleated his scrawny neck into accordion folds. And Davey’s younger brother, Maxie, now also earning wages, looking much like his older brother, swarthy and slight — and one of the group. They, and other Jewish youth, more recent arrivals on the block, or in the immediate neighborhood, became, as it were by default, Ira’s provisional companions during that barren, that grievous period. Izzy (who became Irving) Winchel, with blanched blue eyes, a hooked nose, had aspirations of becoming a baseball pitcher. Utterly unscrupulous, the nearest thing to a pathological liar, and phony as a three-dollar bill; his arrant cribbings and copyings still hadn’t saved him from flunking out of Stuyvesant. He did peculiar things with words: mayonnaise became maysonay, trigonometry trigonomogy. Maxie Dain, short of stature, quick, alert, well-informed, best-spoken of any in the group (perhaps because his family had moved here from Ohio), ambitious, an office boy in an advertising firm, and Ira was sure a capable one. Maxie Dain’s father, blocky and affable, owned the new candy store, whose rear was depot for card games. Jakey Shapiro, short of stature and motherless; his short and cinnamon-mustached widowed father had moved here from Boston, married svelte Mrs. Glott, gold-toothed widow, mother of three married daughters, and janitress of 112 East 119th.

It was in her abode, in the janitorial quarters assigned her on the ground floor rear, that seemingly inoffensive Mrs. Shapiro set up a clandestine alcohol dispensary — not a speakeasy, but a bootleg joint, where the Irish and other shikkers of the vicinity could come and have their pint bottles filled up, at a price. And several times on weekends, when Ira was there, for he got along best with Jake, felt closest to him, because Jake was artistic, some beefy Irishman would come in, hand over his empty pint bottle for refilling, and after greenbacks were passed, and the transaction completed, receive as a goodwill offering a pony of spirits on the house.

And once again those wry (rye? Out vile pun!), wry memories of lost opportunities: Jake’s drab kitchen where the two sat talking about art, about Jake’s favorite painters, interrupted by a knock on the door, opened by Mr. Shapiro, and the customer entered. With the fewest possible words, perhaps no more than salutations, purpose understood, negotiations carried out like a mime show, or a ballet: ecstatic pas de deux with Mr. McNally and Mr. Shapiro — until suspended by Mr. Shapiro’s disappearance with an empty bottle, leaving Mr. McNally to solo in anticipation of a “Druidy drunk,” terminated by Mr. Shapiro’s reappearance with a full pint of booze. Another pas de deux of payment? Got it whole hog — Mr. Shapiro was arrested for bootlegging several times, paid several fines, but somehow, by bribery and cunning, managed to survive in the enterprise, until he had amassed enough wealth to buy a fine place in Bensonhurst by the time “Prohibition” was repealed. A Yiddisher kupf, no doubt.

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.

One gem stood out in the lusterless setting of his friends’ pastimes: a phonograph record. It had come with the Victrola Izzy’s parents bought: on one side were “Humoresque” and “Angels’ Serenade,” on the other the “Prize Song” from Der Meistersinger, the latter transcribed for violin, and both sides performed by Mischa Elman. The music on one side Ira found transparent, easy to follow and easy to appreciate. The other perplexed him; it seemed disagreeably impenetrable. Over and over again, while the others played pinochle or open poker on Izzy’s kitchen table, Davey Baer whacking a card down with a crack of knuckle on wood, a knack he had learned literally on his ne’er-do-well father’s knee, Ira, with a tenacity born of sheer anomie, played and replayed the “Prize Song”. . until suddenly he understood it! Finally cacophony became deliberately ordered sounds, not just ordinary harmony, but unique sounds and cadences that once comprehended became inevitable, that made a unison of its own. So that’s what they meant when he read about Wagner, when they wrote that Wagner was not only a great composer but an innovator. So that’s what they meant by great music. After a while the music went through your head. It was a different kind of tune, altogether different at first, but it slowly became familiar, and when it became familiar, it sang — in its own way, and yet it was right.

To be entirely faithful to the narrative, this modern aside, written probably in late ’79, ought to be deleted, Ira thought. But it gave an intimate, even touching picture of his life with M, when they were still living in Paradise Acres, a mobile home court in the North Valley of Albuquerque. He had written the fragment soon after he had had his first “total hip replacement”—when the full brunt of rheumatoid arthritis staggered his entire system:

“Loath to write, loath to continue. . After M unfastened the depleted hummingbird feeder, and concocted a fresh batch of scarlet-tinted sugar water, and filled the vessel, she went back to the piano. I found pretext for procrastination (while she was practicing in the living room) in hobbling out to the small hanger under the metal awning above my study window, and suspending the feeder therefrom.

“‘When are you going to get me a grand piano?’ M teased when I reentered the house.

“‘You get anything your heart desires. Where will you put it?’

“‘In your study.’ Her own studio, of about fourteen by fifteen feet floor space, what with Naugahyde couch, armchairs, record player, and coffee table, not to mention the small Steinway piano, had about run out of free area. ‘A grand piano would allow my mended hip so much more freedom.’

“‘Well, why not?’ I agreed, and went back to my room. Once in it and seated before the typewriter I found myself sorting out implications. I looked about my study: a grand piano in here would mean that my cot against the wall would have to go. And this old, scarred desk that I write on, against which the filing cabinet abuts — those would have to go as well. And a small bookcase or two. And the captain’s chair I sit on. Now the room could accommodate a modest-sized grand piano. And of course, I too would be gone. The inference seesawed within volition: the longing to depart, the regret at leaving M.

“Well. . above my study window hangs the ruby-red feeder. And already the first hummingbirds hover devotionally about it, their wings vibrating with a speed that makes them diaphanous. Imbibe, I urge, you feisty-looking clothespins on a toothpick. Go ahead, imbibe. Drink to my prospective memory. And to memoriam harum rerum.”

II

Soon after he was admitted to DeWitt Clinton that fall, Ira reapplied for work at Park & Tilford, was rehired, and was assigned to a store on Broadway and 103rd Street. It was within easy subway distance from the high school, also on the West Side. Yet Ira worked there for only a couple of months. The place, the people, were altogether different, and so were his duties. Gone were the free and the old-fashioned, traditional ways of doing things — even though they had taken him so long to learn. No trucks set out from the store to upper reaches of Manhattan and the Bronx. Whether there were any deliveries by truck anymore, Ira never found out. Perhaps all that was centralized in the very large P&T downtown, as his former mentor, Mr. Klein, had once remarked. But there was no Mr. Klein for shipping clerk; in fact, there was no shipping clerk. Instead there was a cellarman, who had charge of everything down in the cellar, which effectively interdicted nibbling, sampling, noshing, snitching. He was a hulking, prematurely gray-haired bully, a brute if there ever was one. Yeager by name. It was the first time in his life Ira had ever come in contact with anyone who seemed to relish cruel petty tyranny, callous domineering for its own sake, far worse than Ira’s father. Whenever afterward he heard the word “bully,” it was Yeager who personified it, Yeager who came to mind. Clearly of German origin, and yet anti-Jewishness seemed to play very little part in his hectoring and bluster, at least very little that was overt or specific, for the other after-school delivery boy, a gentile, younger than Ira, and with a shriveled arm, came in for the same kind of brutal hazing that Ira did. His first day on the job, assigned the task of transferring canned goods from carton to shelf, feeling at home, at ease, doing the things he had learned so well to do, he began whistling.

“Cut out that whistlin’!” came Yeager’s threatening bawl. “There ain’t no dogs down here.”

Ah, the vain retorts sixty-five years too late, to launch at one undoubtedly long since dust: “But I thought there was a dog here,” he might have snapped.

And all the consequences that would flow therefrom, all the consequences that could be envisaged. “What d’ye mean by that?”

“You know what I mean.”

“What’re you, a wise guy?”

“Just as wise as you are.”

“Hey, you wanna get the shit kicked outta you?”

“Try it.”

Oh, the violent reprisals. And the lawsuits. Or the even more vicious countermeasures, such as Bill Loem of a later volume would have taken at that age (and did). The quart bottle, held in both hands, and brought down treacherously, rashly, and with utmost force on the back of Yeager’s head — and the job finished by slashing the throat of the prostrate figure with the jagged shards of the same bottle. It was the kind of deed Bill Loem would have committed.

Alas, Ira reflected, he himself was a murderer by nature: he never forgave. . And even thinking not only about the incident now, but his reaction to it, threw light on the attraction Bill held for him, and Bill’s hold on him: that he dared to do, and did, what Ira, and how many million others, only daydreamed of doing.

Ira saw the big brute a few days later waylay one of the pretty girl clerks seeking an item in the cellar aisles, seize her, and force her over backward while he planted kisses on her. Her pleading—“Please, Mr. Yeager! Let go! Mr. Yeager!”—went unheeded — as if Yeager were indeed the frightening plaster golem he looked like, his long body encased in his white work apron. Ira gaped, cringing in revulsion at the golem’s rut — like that in the movie. Sneak over to the manager of the store, was all Ira had to do, squeal on the sonofabitch — if he had the nerve. He didn’t.

The end of the job came when Ira’s schoolboy workmate attempted to tuck a more than usually heavy box of groceries under his arm. To Ira, the episode would shine in retrospect as the only one in his whole boyhood informed with a redeeming element, a genuine show of courage. The box slipped from under the youngster’s shriveled arm, and the boy was powerless to prevent the box’s downward slide with his withered limb. Contents spilled out — before he managed by dint of knee and good arm to keep his entire burden from tumbling to the cellar floor.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Yeager barked. “What’re you, a cripple?”

“He is a cripple!” Ira blurted out. “He couldn’t help it!”

Contrite and silent, the youngster picked up the fallen canned goods.

“Gimme dem,” Yeager ordered gruffly. “Dey got dents in ’em.” And to Ira: “You takin’ care of him? Or what?”

“No.”

“Den stay out of it.”

Still, Ira could tell that Yeager was taken aback, if only by his altered tone of voice and the way he stalked off. Ira was startled at himself. And when he calmed down and helped his skinny, crippled workmate repack his box and tuck it safely under his arm — without permission from Yeager — Ira felt more than startled: scared. Scared that he had involuntarily been, been for only a moment, what he would have to be from now on, if Yeager was to be what he had shown himself to be just now. He would have to stand his ground, Ira sensed, and he couldn’t: the very thought scared him. He had caught a glimpse of Yeager’s vulnerability, and Yeager knew it: his bullying was nothing but a sham, a false front. Now Ira was vulnerable. He’d have to cringe and toady to stay on good terms with someone he knew was a fake. And he couldn’t. Then what? He’d have to quit.

Saturday evening, after he received his pay envelope, Ira left the store, never to return.

III

Ira could feel changes taking place within him. In February of 1922 he was sixteen. By then, Einstein had become a celebrity, a household word, and a comfort to Jews everywhere. It was said that only twelve people in the entire world could follow his abstruse theories of the universe. A Yiddisher kupf, Jews bragged. Sir Oliver Lodge, world-famous physicist and spiritualist, may have been miffed at the unceremonious discard of his theory about the role of a universal ether. But Mom gloried in admiration of the supreme Jewish intellect: “Aza kupf!” she exclaimed in sheer transport. In its own rollicking, inimitable fashion, the Police Glee Club also paid tribute to the great physicist. When they were invited to entertain the students of DeWitt Clinton during their regular assembly on Friday, the cops vocalized with zest:

“How high is up?

How low is down?

How fast is slow?

And when do we get the dough?

When it’s nighttime in Sicily,

You can’t get a drink in Massachusetts.

How high is up?

How low is down?. .”

Dr. Paul, the school’s principal, sharing the platform with the singers, could hardly have been amused. His stiff posture, his grave face, made all the more dread by a slight stroke that paralyzed his cheek, all indicated he scarcely thought the ditty edifying. But of course the assembled students cheered and clapped in lusty approval.

Oh, there were spiral nebulae in the cosmos, island universes strewn light-years away; whole universes, not mere solar systems, remote Milky Ways. Oh, so much to free one from oneself, or almost, to set one dreaming, entranced by vastness, freed by insignificance, if only, oh, if only he weren’t trapped. Why was he trapped? Why did he have to be trapped? Far worse would happen to him than what happened when he lost his briefcase, worse than happened to him over the silver-filigreed fountain pen, if he were caught! Oh, the unspeakable, the abominable act, the limitless punishment it would merit. And yet, what ruse, what provocative coaxing, what consummate opportunism, shifty suborning, did he resort to, stoop to, until the blistery green kitchen walls lilted with consent. Incorrigible, unscrupulous, sardonic, treacherous, turning to advantage solace and tears, comfort and sympathy to ploys for undermining defenses. What use was his never-ending, ever-reiterated, never again? Like steel against flint, remorse struck sparks out of fear to rekindle desire, desire that inflamed.

Oh, yes, the world was changing: a mélange. There was the Teapot Dome scandal, about oil and Mr. Doheny, yes? And Disarmament Conferences, no? And the “Yellow Peril,” that the jingo, scare-headline-patriotic Journal American warned about, the Hearst newspaper Ira never read, except when Pop brought it home from the restaurant. Oh, there was Henry Ford and his Dearborn Express, blaming the Jews for being insidious, grasping, in league against America, spreading Bolshevism, atheism, seeking to infect a wholesome America with their godless virus. . Everyone was sure Lenin and Trotsky would soon be overthrown — in another year at most. There were Palmer Raids, chain gangs, vigilantes, Ku Klux Klan in white robes and hoods, and lynch mobs who “strung up” Negroes. And there was William Farnum, the movie actor with the mobile eyebrows, and the lightning draw, and unerring aim, and the effortlessly acrobatic Douglas Fairbanks and melting Mary Pickford and Bull Montana — and wonderful, wonderful Charlie Chaplin.

And there was Normalcy and the High Cost of Living, and Prosperity, of course. Pop worked. Mom hoarded for a Persian lamb coat. Ira’s uncles Max and Harry, who had failed to finish school, abandoned their original trades, glove-making and fur-matching, and joined Morris and Sam in the restaurant business: they opened a cafeteria in Jamaica, in Queens, and prospered beyond their fondest hopes.

And for Ira, a new experience, a wholly novel and at last marvelous scholastic experience, far beyond mere gratification, the preening of excelling, or even getting high grades. Ennobling, he would have said, except people would have laughed at him; and yet that was how he felt, raised in his own esteem, elated, vouchsafed at least in one region of mental wholeness. For the first time in his life, he felt he not only comprehended a subject fully, in all its aspects, but comprehended the foundations on which the subject rested. The subject was plane geometry. It became a saving unity for him, a kind of beatitude in his aimless, deeply troubled, dejected, self-distrustful life. Plane geometry endlessly minted new truths out of old, miraculously reared a breathtaking edifice of proofs rooted in a few axioms. It was like annealing dull truisms into lucid truths.

At first, at the very beginning of the spring term, Ira was in a panic: why did you have to prove something so intractably obvious already? How could you demonstrate the manifest? Opposite angles were equal! They just were. By what method, what procedure, did you go about showing the patent was the true? You would have to rummage among, beg assistance from that lowly handful of postulates that he had scarcely deigned to notice at the outset because they were so self-evident. That was how you did it: supplements of equal angles were equal. . oh, that was it! He soon doted on the subject — often to the neglect of other subjects. A’s in blackboard recitations, A’s in quizzes, became routine.

And now, my friend, and now, my friend — Ira clamped the palms of his hands between knees — that time approaches, the crisis.

— That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang. .

Yes. But not yet.

— Or let this cup pass from me.

Yes. But it was later, Ecclesias. It was in the fall, not the spring. It was in the second half of Euclid looks on beauty bare-ass and all that, not the first half. You know something, Ecclesias, I can show that Jesus himself proved that God didn’t exist.

— Pray, don’t bother.

It’s a fact, though. He said: If it be possible, let this cup pass from me. It didn’t pass from him. So it wasn’t possible. A valid inference, Ecclesias? If it wasn’t possible, then how can God exist, to whom all things are possible? Neat, no?

— No. You’re forgetting something. Jesus added a proviso to the effect: nevertheless as Thou willest, not I.

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.”

“No. He didn’t say mistake, he said honest,” Ira contested.

“But a whole hundred dollars! Gotinyoo!”

“It’s only security.”

“And where’s the security for your hundred dollars? Do they give you a receipt?” Pop asked.

“I think so.”

“Oh, you think so. I wouldn’t give him without a receipt.”

“No.”

“And how soon do they repay?”

“I told you. The boss said the same day you quit. That’s what he told me.”

“A whole summer, and every week twenty-four dollars,” Pop considered receptively.

Deliberations continued for a long time. Nobody could deny that it was a bona fide bus company. Their buses ran along uptown Fifth Avenue for everyone to see. So. . they wanted a deposit. So. . Why were bus conductors considered so deceitful and dishonest? Would a coin cling to their palms more than an ordinary person’s? Noo. The upshot of their deliberations was, after much cautioning and behest, Pop would advance the hundred dollars.

“Don’t dare filch a nickel,” Mom warned. “You know well what happened to you.”

“Yeah.”

And Pop, in semi-humorous vein, recalling his own problems as a trolley car conductor, cautioned, “Get diarrhea, and you can bid farewell to the bus line.”

“I won’t get diarrhea.”

“And be discreet with drunkards and ruffians,” Mom admonished. “Always a soothing word allays a quarrel.”

“Uh! Here she is with drunkards and ruffians.” Pop took umbrage. “Because a mad, drunken sailor attacked me without warning in the trolley car years ago? His hands should be lopped off.”

“Indeed,” Mom placated. “I mean only that he should avoid facing up to a blustering goy. Let him be slaughtered. Call the driver for help. For a nickel it’s worth being assaulted?”

“I won’t be assaulted.”

His hundred dollars for security advanced, Ira was furnished with a visored cap, on which he paid a deposit out of his first week’s pay, as well as a numbered badge that attached to the cap. He was “broken in” in a single day by an experienced conductor, a veteran of only a few weeks himself. In the four round trips he made that day he learned the route, more or less, the main intersections of the Bronx, hitherto vague terrain. He learned the route and the ropes, he would aphorize later: the number of tugs on the bell cord that signaled stop, start, and emergency stop.

The buses were double-deckers — like the high-toned ones that ran downtown on Fifth Avenue along Central Park. But the fare was only a nickel, not a dime, and the buses were anything but high-toned. His initial training took place on the second shift, the slackest hours of the day, to enable him to concentrate on learning the street names along the route, the main intersections, and to familiarize himself with manipulating the “clock,” the handheld nickel counter, to make change in careful but collected fashion, and to gauge the exact moment when a passenger was safely on or off the bus, and then tug the bell rope without another moment’s delay.

He was on his own the following day, a solo conductor completely in charge of the job. He was assigned the same run: from afternoon to final return to depot at midnight. All by himself, reigning on the rear platform, in official capacity, the long afternoon. He gained confidence, congratulated himself on having settled into the job, even though he had had to hurry up front to the driver from time to time to ascertain where they were for the inquiring passenger’s benefit.

Near midnight, the bus on the last run — back to depot, where he would be held accountable for the day’s receipts — the strain of the new job, the anxiety, the staggering responsibility he felt those first hours, all told on him now: he became drowsy standing up. Streetlights, house lights went by like those of a strange city, withdrawn and aloof. He felt as if the bus had come from nowhere, was going nowhere. A few blocks from the Harlem River, a passenger got on the bus; the last passenger of the night, he dropped his jitney in the clock, and climbed the spiral staircase to the upper deck. The bridge, the swiveling bridge at Madison Avenue over the Harlem, would be approaching soon. Ira’s instructions had been to climb upstairs and warn all passengers to be seated, because the superstructure of the bridge was so low, and so close to the upper deck. He climbed up to the upper deck, stood waiting—

“Hey! Hey, you, conductor! Duck!” The alarmed cry came from the lone — and seated — passenger. “Watch it!”

Fortunate for Ira that he reacted in the nick of time. The dark steel superstructure whisked by overhead, only inches away from his visored skull.

“Jesus, fella,” said the lone passenger. “Waddaye tryin’ to do? Kill yerself?”

Ira learned, slowly as always, but he learned: that with rare exception, all women — and the fatter and more elderly the more prone — alighted from the bus facing the rear. One well-padded matron tumbled backward at a slight forward lurch of the bus. He pulled the bell cord in a trice thrice, and leaped down from the bus to assist her to her feet, apologizing profusely all the while. Jewish, and seeing that he was also, she deprecated the mishap. “It’s gurnisht. It’s nothing with nothing.” Pretty young girls daintily descending the spiral staircase, with flouncing dress inverted over high, lovely thighs like lilies, drove him into ecstasies of yearning when he chanced to look up. Transfixed, and all too often he brooded bitterly though transfixed, he would hear his impatient driver yell back at him, “Hey, Ira — a little faster on the bell!” And arriving at the sylvan Kingsbridge terminal, “Chrissake, Ira, what about a li’l more pep. Ye’ll have the next bus on my tail.”

“Yeah. Okay. I’ll try to make it snappy.” And all the time he mourned that he no longer could say, was disabled from saying, to the lissome damsel descending, as others his age would have said, “Watch your step, good-lookin’.” And being encouraged by an appreciative smile, as he had seen others so encouraged, Lotharios, cheeky and sportive: “What’s your phone number, good-lookin’? What about a date?” He no longer had access to that surface world, but was interdicted, like a mosquito larva under water of a ditch sprayed with kerosene. “To whom the goodly earth and air are banned and barred, forbidden fair,” he thought, echoing Byron in The Prisoner of Chillon. “Okay, I’ll try to make it real snappy.”

The buses were old, “older’n the hills,” declared one of the drivers. Obsolescent buses from a New Orleans bus line, bought by Hulcomb for a song, at the price of junk, so another driver asserted. They rattled and jounced, they growled and smoked. Tony Oreno, a driver with whom Ira was often paired, slightly built, and tending to be queasy, was twice sickened by fumes from the exhaust. He pulled up to the curb, got out, and retched at the side of the bus. Another driver, Colby, reported he had to bear down on his horn while he leaned out of the cab window to shout and wave at the cop directing traffic on Fordham Road not to halt traffic on the Grand Concourse — because the bus wouldn’t stop; the brakes were gone! Fortunately, the cop understood the desperate message — and obliged. Colby managed to steer his way to a stop.

Fares were tallied as soon as collected by the handheld “clock,” a kind of register of the day’s fares, which was furnished each conductor at the beginning of his run. The nickel was thrust into a slot at one end of the clock, which rang a small bell inside as it passed, at the same time increasing the number on the digital counter by one; then the nickel fell into the conductor’s palm. Conductors had to have some cash of their own in order to make change; and at the beginning of the tour each one had to declare how much cash he had on his person. At the end of his tour a most peculiar routine awaited him. He was expected to empty his pockets — of every cent of money. Receipts for the day were shown by the number of fares registered on the clock. These were deducted from the pile of cash the conductor heaped on the counter. And all surplus in excess of that claimed by the conductor at the outset — and again, before the accounting was made — was confiscated by the company: on the grounds that the surplus obviously indicated negligence on the conductor’s part in ringing up fares; so of course the surplus belonged to the company. Shortages too indicated negligence on his part in collecting fares; so of course he was docked.

With the lesson of his expulsion from Stuyvesant still vibrating in Ira’s consciousness, and with Pop’s hundred dollars amplifying the fearful reverberations of dishonesty — and with “spotters” on the lookout, about whom Ira had been alerted the very first day he was broken in — he was scrupulous to the point of penalty. His honesty was so far above reproach that it bred small shortages at the end of the day, disparities he had to make good out of his own stock of cash. Less than a week after he had begun work, he was transferred from the second to the first shift, the early-morning shift, which began at six and entailed a brisk walk in the freshness of nascent day from fetid tenement to the corner of 110th Street and Fifth Avenue, downtown terminal of the bus line. Irrelevant detail and treasured memory: the corner of Central Park, tree and grass, rocky outcrop and pond, still, and under canopy of wavering, fragile blue of predawn, humid, scented with verdure. .

It was while Ira lolled in the dingy, cigarette-reeking, cigarette-strewn anteroom, along with other conductors waiting their turn to “check in” at the end of their shift, that he was drawn aside by one of the older men, Ira’s senior by about forty years, Collingway, sour of visage and hard-bitten. “Listen, kid, lemme tell ye sompt’n. Yer makin’ it tough fer the rest of us. Ye know that? Goddamn tough.”

“Me?” Ira was startled open-mouthed. “How come?”

“Yer makin’ us look bad.”

“You? W-what’d I do?”

“Fer Chrissake, git wise to yerself. Yer toinin’ in every fare. Didn’t nobody tell ye yet? We all take a little rake-off. You ain’t. Waddaye think we look like?”

“Yeah, but there’s spotters.”

“Don’tcha know ’em yet? Foley an’ that other guy who sneaks in sometimes. You seen him in the back talkin’ to Hulcomb — the guy wit’ the cauliflower ear. Fitz, they call him.”

“Oh, that one? I saw him on the bus. That’s Fitz?”

“Oh, you did?” Collingway rubbed in his sarcasm. “You saw him on a bus. You keep up what yer doin’, and Hulcomb’ll hire a altogether different set o’ spotters fer a day, maybe a coupla private dicks from a detective agency. All they’d need is ride the buses one day, an’ half of us’d be shit outta luck. Maybe he’s got ’em already — because o’ you. If he wuzn’t so fuckin’ tight he sure would.”

“But nobody told me!”

“Chrissake, ye didn’t think the guy breakin’ you in wuz gonna spell it out fer ye?”

“But nobody else told me.”

“I’m tellin’ ye. Yer gonna git in wrong wit’ the drivers too. We all buy ’em a little somp’n: a cold drink or a sandwich — ever buy any of ’em a pack o’ butts?”

“No. Nobody asked me.”

“Aw c’mon! Ye know what’ll happen to you?” Collingway jerked his head significantly. “Somebody’ll give ye a few good belts in the gut. The way they give it to one prick. He puked up his lunch, an’ he quit.” Collingway paused, to watch the effect of his words on Ira. “Christ, it’s easy. You git a pack o’ dem guineas in the mornin’, just drop de clock — like dat.” He let the clock roll around his index finger and hang there. “Git it?” His hand above the clock was curled into a hollow. “Most of ’em knows: they’ll slip you the jit. Or some old fat slob gits on, a Jew-woman maybe. She’s safe. Jesus, you ought to be able to tell ’em by now. A nigger gits on.”

Still, Ira was afraid. Pop’s hundred dollars was at stake. The very thought of getting caught made the terrible memory of the Stuyvesant crisis well up anew, as if just suffered. “Don’t dare steal a nickel,” Mom had enjoined. But against that now jangled Collingway’s sour, parting words: “You’ll sure as hell git in dutch wit’ everybody. Keep it up an’ you’ll find out.”

No use telling Mom or Pop about it. He knew what they’d say. Should he tell them anyway, and quit? Ask for Pop’s hundred dollars back? Or keep on doing the same thing as always: ring up every fare? But his receipts would continue to be more than theirs — every day, every day. He’d get beaten up. He could just envisage one of the drivers punching him in the gut over some pretext: the bell. “I told ye, ye punk! Hurry up on that bell.” Bell. Belly; where nobody could see. Pop at least had gotten black eyes. Oh, Jesus. Why hadn’t he asked Collingway how much should he try to swipe: a dollar? More?

Dispatched from 110th Street in the early morning, the driver took the bus uptown along Fifth Avenue to the side of Mount Morris Park on 120th Street; there, he steered east a block to Madison Avenue, and then north again to the bridge over the Harlem River, the “turn-bridge,” and crossed over into the Bronx. A few blocks more, and the bus rolled into Grand Concourse— It was from then on, culminating in the wild melee on 149th Street, under the gloom of the Jerome Avenue elevated, confused in the lingering gloom before dawn, that hordes and hordes of Italian day laborers stood in wait, stood in droves. Like an invading army before the breach in the wall of a medieval city, they stormed the bus. They charged inside; with shout and outcry, with paper bags exuding garlic in fleeting passage, they swarmed up the spiral staircase, scaled the upper deck, jovial, boisterous, helter-skelter, crammed into every niche and foothold. They plied Ira with coins, jabbed them into the clock or jabbed them into his hand, heedless in their rush to find a seat — or just standing room. Pinned at last to the back rail of the bus, Ira could scarcely move, even less than they could. The day laborers took over, as a single body. They collected fares from delinquents on the steps of the spiral staircase, or from deep inside, where Ira could never hope to penetrate the crowd. They pulled the bell cord—“Let her roll.” They chorused directions at the driver—“Hey, walyo, give it the gun. Hey, walyo, step on it!” Irrepressible, garrulous, their Italian intonations impacting on English, in lusty good humor, young and grizzled gray, they hailed with hoot and guffaw fellow laborers stranded on street corners, and waving furiously for the already overloaded bus to stop, gesticulating hugely when it didn’t.

At last the growling, burdened, backfiring bus brought them to their destination — the far reaches of the Bronx. It was there, all along the Grand Concourse, that an immense building boom was in progress, there the lofty iron framework of new high-rise apartment houses loomed up near and far. That was the end of the line, and there, chaffering, bawling, with thrashing limb and brandishing redolent paper bag, they discharged, a cascading throng that made the bus rock with their departure — and there, for the first time, Ira was richer by about a dozen pilfered nickels.

He got the hang of it, became adept. Not only was the pack of day laborers in the morning a source of easy pickings, but he came to recognize “safe” passengers, the innocents who boarded the bus during the day: youngsters proffering nickels before they were well on the platform, Jewish mamas, old codgers with canes. He brought the driver refreshments and cigarettes, as the other conductors did, won grudging approval from hard-bitten Collingway, grudging because he didn’t think Ira was raking off enough.

“What’re ye scared of? You can go a little more. We’re all takin’ at least two bucks.”

Still, Ira felt he had reached his limit. A dollar, a little more than a dollar maybe, was already more than twenty nickels, more than twenty fares, twenty passengers, twenty people on the bus. No. He was scared. And then there was all that anxious calculating he had to do on the last run, before the bus pulled into the office-garage at shift change: when he waited his turn to report to the watchful clerk, the checker at the counter. Ira had to remember how much cash to claim as his own, and had claimed, how many fares the clock registered, how much cash he actually possessed, subtract the difference, maybe claim more or withhold a small amount not to excite suspicion when time came supposedly to disgorge all pockets in front of the checker. Do all this, and be an efficient conductor too, for it was still early afternoon when the first shift ended, and the bus fairly well patronized. A lot of finagling was required to keep records straight amid distractions and fluctuations of receipts during that last hour, and Ira was never good at mental arithmetic, and this was mental arithmetic under stress. It entailed going over and over his perverted accounting, to reassure himself he wasn’t about to betray himself. Over and over — while restraining a kid from getting off too soon, or cautioning a yenta to hold fast please, or turning away giddy at the sight of lilylike gams floating down the spiral stairs — and being snappy on the bell. He got by. Craftily, he made a practice of erring one way or the other by ten or fifteen cents, showing surprise when he was “over,” chagrin when he was “under,” like a somewhat slowwitted dub, perplexed by manifest evidence of his clumsy probity.

And then one early morning he was sure everything was over for him. He saw himself fired. He saw Pop’s hundred dollars taking wing. Should he blubber? Should he bluff? Clutch at what excuse? Oy, gevald, at home, what? Pop would broil him. Pop would roast him. And Mom—!

First run of the morning, and the bus loaded to the rafters with wop laborers, the bus bowling along Grand Concourse. And behind it, a sedan trailing unnoticed. And in it, who but Mr. Hulcomb, chauffeured by one of the clerks. Oh, God, he must have spotted me! Ira panicked. Inured and deft, he had purloined even more than his usual quota — he couldn’t remember how much, couldn’t give an accounting — but that didn’t matter. If the bus was stopped, if a head count was made, he’d be fifteen or more fares under the clock. It would be just today that that barrel-built, grizzly, fierce old dago anarchist with half-foot handlebars each side of his snoot had posted himself next to Ira and collected fares in every direction, officious helpmeet warden, Cerberus growling at the remiss. “C’mon. Giva de kid.” And dumped the whole handful into the pocket of Ira’s alpaca jacket. Jesus, if Mr. Hulcomb didn’t see that, he couldn’t see anything! It wouldn’t do to ram nickels into the clock now; pinned against the back rail, he’d be seen from the car. And if he tried it when the bus stopped, his two superiors would hear the jitneys jingle in mad succession. They’d know. Ira’s goose was cooked!

“Hey, you! Conductor! Hey, Stigman!” Hulcomb was shouting out of the car window.

“Yes, sir,” he quavered. If only he could blow away like dust. Just leave everybody else on the platform staring back at the pursuing vehicle, except him, vanished from sight.

“Hey, Stigman, you hear me?”

“Yeah. Wha’?” Torture: maybe third degree in a police station, confession and courtroom, maybe judge in black robe, maybe jail, maybe bail, maybe—

“Tell that driver he’s goin’ too fast. He’s way over the speed limit. Tell him to slow down! Tell him I said so.”

“Yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, Mr. Hulcomb. I’ll — right away! Hey, lemme through, will you please?” Ira appealed to his passengers. “That’s the boss.”

“Fuck him.” They refused to budge.

“I gotta—” Tony would never hear Ira over the battering of the engine. If he pulled the rope three times, Tony’d stop the bus. No good. “Please, everybody!” Ira pleaded at the top of his voice. “Please! Come on, gents. Please! You up front, tell him to slow down, the driver, please. The boss just told me. Hey, Tony! He’ll lose his job!”

“All right,” they relented. “Hey, Giovanni, hey, Paul, tella de driver de fuckin’ boss is on his tail.” And someone with a croaking voice up front relayed, “Hey, paisan, we don’t wantcha t’ git in no trouble. De kid says slow down. Ye got de fuckin’ boss on yer tail. . Wha? Yeah? Heh, heh, heh. Ye know what he sez?”

“Who?”

“Him. De driver. He says fuck de boss.”

“Yeah?”

“He says tell dat fat sonofabitch to drive dis bucket o’ bolts widout pukin’.”

“Heh! Heh! Heh! Ye hear dat, kid?”

Nevertheless, the bus slowed down to a lumbering speed. The trailing sedan dropped behind, and once out of sight, “Let ’er rip!” arose the clamor within, and once again they bowled along. Never was relief so delirious. Ira had escaped! He could have jigged for joy, hopped anyway, in spite of all the pressure of brawn fixing him against the rear rail. Wow! No, he’d have to cut it out. Even though they knew he finagled. It wasn’t worth it, that’s all. Scared the hell out of him. Ira had nearly died then. He didn’t care what Collingway said. Take the goddamn nickels they shoved into his hand and plug ’em into the clock, that’s all. Feed the clock with them, ring ’em up. Buy the driver his soda pop, his butts, his sandwich, out of his own dough. Be better than this. Don’t tell anybody what the receipts were, make it lower than it was: by two dollars. Still, by the sidelong look Collingway would sneak at his face when he spoke, he knew Collingway suspected he was lying. Would somebody beat him up? Or what? The third week of August came to an end.

It was one of those peculiar instances, Ira thought, instances of diversion that the main narrative could do well without, and yet that never or rarely failed to intersect real life. So it struck him now pondering that past. For he could recall the summer morning in the street, 119th Street, the shafts of early sunlight slanting from tenement rooftop eave to gutter and sidewalk, shafts fraught with motes. Grubby 119th Street, slummy 119th Street, humid with New York summer, though the day was scarce begun, pristine shafts athwart the tenements, in a street still quiet in the early morning.

And there was Izzy Winchel, thorough scamp and unflinching pathological liar, persuading Ira to ditch the bus conductor’s job for a more lucrative, exciting one: a good racket, the one Izzy was plying — hustling soda at the ball games in the Polo Grounds. Ira shrank at the prospect. Hustling, yelling out the names of soda flavors to those mobs of people, in front of those mobs of spectators, calling attention to himself, eyed by thousands. No, not he.

“You can make all you make on a bus all week in just two days,” Izzy coaxed. “On a weekend when the stands’re packed for a doubleheader. They’re so excited, they give you a five for a bottle o’ near beer, and you give ’em change for a buck. I got away with it lotsa times.”

“No. I can’t do it. I don’t have that nerve.”

“How d’ye know ye can’t? Once you get in, you’ll find out how easy it is. If the customer calls you back: ‘Oh, excuse me, I made a mistake.’ The whole thing is to get in. And I can get you in. I know Benny Lass — he comes out in front o’ the ballpark. He’s the guy who picks you out.”

There was no getting away from Izzy. He was attached to Ira, for no reason that Ira could fathom — except because he went to high school, and Izzy had flunked out, because Ira was a whiz in plane geometry, and Izzy had tried to cheat his way through the exam, so flagrantly he was caught and automatically flunked — and then had dropped out of school — or perhaps because they were so different temperamentally, Ira shy, Izzy brazen. Ira studious, Izzy a fake. Ira didn’t know. Maybe Izzy out of his unmitigated perfidiousness felt he had to protect Ira in his timid innocence.

“Come on. I’ll take you there,” Izzy urged. “I’ll get you in. I’ll show you what to do. Getcha father’s hundred dollars back. I’m tellin’ ye. You better get in now.”

“Yeah?”

“You never know what’ll happen to it, that’s why. And hustlin’ soda, you don’t need to make no deposits. They’ll give you a white jacket and a hat free. I’ll bet you’ll hustle in the World Series. That’s where you’ll make a day’s pay without even tryin’. And see the game too, don’t forget that. Frankie Frisch and Babe Ruth and Gehrig and Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson.”

“I’m not so crazy about baseball.” Ira warded off Izzy’s enthusiasm-laden words with a shrug. “I’m a ham. You know.”

“So you’ll sell more.” Izzy promptly closed the loophole. “You like football, don’tcha? Notre Dame plays in the Polo Grounds. Army. Cornell.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s prizefights, too. You get in good with Benny Lass, you can hustle at Madison Square Garden. You can see the champeen bouts: Benny Leonard, what a fighter, and Battling Levinsky, maybe Dempsey.”

That same evening, “I’m gonna ask for the hundred dollars security back,” Ira announced.

“Uh-huh,” said Pop. “What is it? Why? You still have three weeks before school, no?”

“Everybody steals there — I mean the conductors,” Ira explained virtuously. “I’m afraid. I turn in more money than they do.”

“Noo?”

“They don’t like it. One of ’em told me, a lousy antee-semitt bastard, you keep makin’ us look bad, you better look out.”

“Azoy?” said Mom. “Zol er gehargert vern.”

“Ah, what they talk about,” Pop scoffed. “You mind your own affairs, nothing will happen. I know these loudmouths.”

“For three weeks more pay that he brings home, I can dispense with the risk he runs. If they begin to talk that way, they’ll bother him even more. I can do without.”

“Izzy Winchel said he can get me a job at the Polo Grounds.”

“Meaning what?”

“Polo Grounds, that’s where they play baseball.”

“Baseball. And what has that to do with you?” Mom asked.

“You sell soda water there,” Ira answered testily. “It comes in bottles — don’tcha know? All kinds of flavors.”

“Aha, you’ll be a peddler.”

“It’s not a peddler! It’s called a hustler.”

“Then let it be hustler,” said Mom. “Abi gesint. Without beatings, God avert, and without stealing.”

“Then let it be that way. But get back my hundred dollars,” Pop decreed. “Don’t fail to get it at once.”

“No. As soon as my day off.”

It was Thursday. He put in an early appearance at the checker’s window. “What’re you doin’ here today?” The younger and the more easygoing of the two checkers, Lenahan, dark-haired and noncommittal, blew a tight cone of cigarette smoke. The two “backup” conductors in the office in case of emergency listened idly.

“I’m quitting. I came in to get my hundred dollars.”

“Your what?”

“My hundred-dollar security. It’s my father’s.”

“What’re you quittin’ for? You’re doin’ all right. We like your work.” It was the older checker, the thin guy, Hallcain, who shaded his watchful eyes with a green visor.

The question found Ira unprepared. Why hadn’t he anticipated it? “I—” Should he mention hustling? The ballpark? They might try to persuade him not to quit.

Behind Mr. Hallcain, Mr. Hulcomb at his desk took note of the proceedings. Together, Ira felt their disapproval, disapproval verging on hostility, bear down on him like a menace. “I’m going to go back to high school,” he said, clutching at another excuse.

Mr. Hulcomb arose from his desk, came over to the counter, and took charge. “What’d you say?”

“I’m going back to high school.”

“That’s a hell of a time to tell us now!” Mr. Hulcomb seemed to stamp his heavy black eyebrows down on his glistening scowl. “Why didn’t you tell us that when you came for a job? We’d never have hired you. That wasn’t what you told us, was it?”

“No. I didn’t know I was goin’ to go back. My mother wants me to. I didn’t wanna.”

Mr. Hulcomb paid no attention to Ira’s alibi. His lips swelled with repressed wrath. “You hire Jews, that’s what you get. No notice or anything. They’ll quit on you cold, every time.”

“I can’t help it.” Ira lowered his head sullenly, stubborn and cowed into sullenness, and in his desperation only hoping that Mr. Hulcomb wouldn’t see through his flimsy alibi and remind Ira that the opening of school was still three weeks off. “I got my receipt. You said I could get the money back as soon as I quit. That’s why my father lent it to me.” He didn’t have to look around at the two backup conductors on the bench behind him to feel their absorption, their fixity of attention.

Neither did Mr. Hulcomb. As if by implicit consent, almost as if consternation were like a tiny unseen whirlwind that brought them together, he and the two clerks held a short, tense, muted council, reached a decision quickly. Mr. Hulcomb went back to his desk.

“All right, Stigman. We haven’t been to the bank this morning yet. Come back this afternoon — about four o’clock,” Hallcain instructed, with reassuring adjustment of his green visor. “We’ll have your security money.”

Even Ira could figure that out, or thought he could. By four in the afternoon, the whole first shift would have turned over its day’s receipts. Then the company would have enough to pay him his hundred dollars. But he didn’t want to conjecture; he didn’t want to speculate. He was worried enough as it was. All he wanted was Pop’s hundred dollars back.

He waited until almost five to give the office a chance to collect the money. When he entered the stinky waiting room, only Hallcain was there, behind the counter, strands of thin blondish hair across the top of his head, separated by visor edge. Would he say, “Come back tomorrow”? That would be the unmistakable signal for Ira’s moaning retreat home, his whining to Pop about another fiasco. And then all kinds of wrath, all kinds of invective, all kinds of trouble. .

Approaching the counter, Ira displayed his receipt, laid his badge down beside it. To his pent, soaring joy, he watched Hallcain count out a hundred dollars in tens and fives, and with an air both severe and peremptory, push the little stack of bills toward Ira. Fives and tens, they were receipts! What the hell was the difference, as long as they added up to a hundred. Ira picked up the bank notes, uttered a fervent thanks. For once he could march into the kitchen proudly and say, “Okay, Pop, here’s your money.” And for once he did.

Mom blessed him: “Zolst gebentsht vern.”

And Pop, as he counted over the bills: “Indeed a novelty. Something went well for a change. That such a thing has come to pass requires invoking a shekheyooni. Indeed. That we have survived to witness this day.”

“And beside his clothes for the coming year, he bought a fuzball he longed for — for months.” Mom rocked for emphasis. “And a swimming suit with a white woollen shirt top. Noo.”

“And added a flourishing increment toward your Persian lamb coat,” Pop baited in fine fettle — as he arranged the currency by denomination in his black billfold. “And what interest do I gain? Ten weeks, nearly ten weeks of twenty dollars in your till. I should gain a small rebate on the weekly allowance you mulct from me.”

“Gain proper burial,” Mom rejoined, ruffled at once.

V

Almost immediately after Ira quit his job as bus conductor, the very next weekend, he was inducted by Izzy Winchel into the Polo Grounds. He met him on 119th Street, about 9:00 A.M., and they proceeded at a fairly rapid pace to the Third Avenue El on 116th Street. There they took the uptown train, and once across the Harlem River, by some changing of trains on the other side, their new route led to the Polo Grounds. There must have been some junction with the west side of the El in those days that enabled them to travel from Third Avenue to the west Bronx, to Coogan’s Bluff, as the sportswriters called it. They climbed down from the El platform to an El-shaded sidewalk that seemed even gloomier than usual because of the high, dark wall that reared up from it, and through which opened the main entrance to the ballpark. . gloomy and forbidding in the morning, though later in the day, when the ticket booths were opened, and the sun was higher, and the fans queued up, compact and restive, poised to dash for the best seats in the grandstands, most of that initial dourness was dissipated. Posted at the dark entrance, when Izzy and he arrived — to join a small flock of other hopefuls, other candidate hustlers, slouched, reading tabloids, or shifting about — was a single uniformed guard, an elderly man, large of frame, his hair gray, his face weathered and expressionless, and yet with the peculiar gravity of a man biding his time, patiently enduring it.

“That’s old Rube Waddell,” said Izzy, and his voice still harbored a trace of veneration.

“Who?”

“The watchman. They gave him that job after he was down and out. You heard of Rube Waddell.”

“No. Who’s he?”

“A pitcher. He was some pitcher, Waddell. Boy, in his time.” Izzy’s blanched blue eyes shone. Hook-nosed, weak-chinned, barefaced liar, he was unperturbed even when caught in the most blatant prevarication; pitching was his one fane of sincerity.

And such was Izzy’s limitless brash, but he made good on his boast. After they waited around a few minutes, out came Benny Lass in the white coat and white visored cap of the ballpark hustler — and was instantly surrounded by claimants to vendor jobs. It was he who chose them — and later, since he was in charge of the cloakroom also, it was he who issued those he had selected white uniforms like his own. Strident, Jewish, though sharp of feature, vituperative, harried, and tyrannical, he chose the regulars first, the “old-timers” who worked in the Polo Grounds every day that a game was scheduled. In return for always being chosen, in return for being regulars, old hands had to report for work at games that it was known in advance would be poorly attended, that “wouldn’t draw flies,” as well as those with “big gates,” games on holidays and weekends, doubleheaders, crucial series.

Izzy, veteran hustler, assured of recognition and admission, simply towed reticent Ira after him. “Hey, Benny, he’s a friend o’ mine. Give us a break, wi’ye? I’ll go good for him.”

Benny glanced at Ira, sharp-featured, sharp-eyed behind glasses. And to Izzy, “You, ye prick, you’ll go good for him? You goddamn fuckin’ chiseler! You’d short-change your own gran’mother, ye muzzler!”

“Aw, give us a break, Benny.” Izzy rode the tirade unfazed. “He’s from my own block. I know him. He’ll work hard. You can see he won’t try to get away with nothin’. Come on, Benny, waddaye say?”

His consent sour and obscene, Benny thumbed Ira in, cringing, but elated — and bewildered.

“See? I tol’ ye.” Izzy led the way.

And the way wound through the shadows under the grandstands, with glimpses of the ballpark, the diamond, vast tiers of seats, seen through the exits that opened at regular intervals from the shadowy route to the bright grass of playing field and pennant-studded sky overhead.

Other hustlers joined them. They hurried along until they came to a large, damp, vaultlike structure, a kind of depot, the main depot, Ira soon learned, a very large multipurpose chamber, in which the first thing that met the senses was the redolence of roasted or roasting peanuts. Bonded to the tang of peanuts were the sight and sound of a motley crew — mostly young people — of prospective hustlers, all seated about a number of very large wicker hampers, much like those in which groceries were packed to be loaded aboard Park & Tilford delivery trucks, hampers loaded to the top with peanuts. Men and boys, perhaps six or seven to a hamper, sat about the rim. They jabbered incessantly, while bagging peanuts.

Ira followed Izzy to one of the more sparsely occupied hampers, ranged himself alongside him, and tried to imitate his manipulations. Several small steel cylinders, measuring scoops, rested on the mound of freshly roasted peanuts. A scoop to a bag was the rule, although some of the hustlers, “for the hell of it,” to relieve monotony, added extra peanuts, excessive surplus, to see how many could be gotten into a bag and the bag still be closed. The bags were small and brown; in bagging peanuts, the open end of the bag was folded over: two small “ears” protruded. Like tiny paper prongs, the ears were held between thumb and forefinger, and the bagful of peanuts whirled about to close it. Ira’s forefingers soon became raw from the unaccustomed abrasion.

Chatter, chatter, jabber, jabber across the expanse of warm peanuts (with which he soon became sated, discouraged by their seeming inexhaustibility). Talk of ball clubs and their standings in their league, of ballplayers, their batting averages and their idiosyncrasies, their prowess with bat and ball, spitballs, knuckleballs, fastballs, Heinie Groh’s bottle bat, the Babe’s home runs and Meusel’s throwing arm. And when not that, what size they estimated the crowd would be, and who might get a break selling peanuts or ice cream, and who never got a break but was always condemned to selling soda pop — and what flavors sold best. It was an opportunity for Ira to look about, and he did.

The place was lighted mainly by weak light from several high windows, although a few electric lights served as supplements. Against one wall was a low, very long, deep wood-sheathed tank with a metal lining, filled with cracked ice, and piled full of hundreds, perhaps thousands of bottles of soda pop — of every hue, from that of orange to the mahogany of sarsaparilla. At the far end of the tank, steel trays were stacked, soda pop trays, partitioned into small crates, like those Pop had once delivered milk in. Ranged against other walls, all about the room, were other utensils and equipment for preparing and vending food and drink to the fans. There were long, narrow baskets each containing a rectangular, nickel-plated utensil at one end. A sort of rectangular double boiler, they kept hot dogs warm inside, Izzy told him — and in the same breath, indicating the ordinary, simple market baskets thrown together in a rough heap next to the others, “That’s for the shleppers—after they’re finished selling scorecards at the gates. And the Irish mick kids too, Harry M. Stevens’s pets, from his church.”

“What d’ye mean?”

“Peanuts.” Izzy reached for a scoop. “They’re a cinch. There’s a hundred bags to a basket, a dime a bag. And they don’t weigh nothin’. Not like twenty bottles o’ soda. Fifteen cents a bottle.”

He had already told Ira that hustling soda would be his lot — as it was Izzy’s. “Yeah, but what d’ye mean, shleppers?”

“They’re the real regulars. They come in early in the morning,” Izzy explained. “Ye see, there’s more than one place where you can load up when you finish selling a tray of soda — I’ll show you later. There’s both ends of the stands. And upstairs, too. Didn’t you see the upper stands? You can’t come runnin’ back to this place every time when you’re empty. We’ll walk aroun’ afterward. I’ll show you where to go. And in the bleachers, too. They stink.”

“What d’ye mean?”

“The bleachers, the cheapest seats. You can’t make a pretzel there most of the time, but once in a while, all of a sudden they get thirsty from sitting in the sun. So you can sell a few bottles — hey, look, here comes another basket of peanuts!”

A general cry of protest arose. “Hey, I thought we wuz done!”

“Last basket,” said one of the two men who had trundled the hamper in on a dolly.

“Last basket, my prick,” was the consensus. “Why’n’tcha bring it in before?”

“It just got roasted.” Both porters seemed distinctly Jewish, middle-aged, settled men; and the man who spoke, beside his deprecating mien, even had a Yiddish accent. Said the other, “What d’ye want from us?”

“Fuckin’ shleppers, “said Izzy. “See what I mean?”

“Come on! Come on! Some o’ you guys on the empty baskets.” Benny Lass’s whiplike voice named members of the crew around each basket. “None o’ you muzzlers leave till it’s finished — if you wanna get your white coats.”

“Balls,” said those summoned, but got up nevertheless and addressed themselves to the fresh basket.

He hadn’t called either Izzy or Ira. “Is that what they do?” he asked.

“They’re like trusties, the shleppers,” Izzy explained. “They’re like porters. They get here early in the morning and start loading up the soda in the different tanks all over the ballpark. Then later they cover ’em with ice on top. Shleppers, you know what I mean? Sometimes on doubleheaders, or World Series, even we gotta help shlepp. But those bastards, they get scorecards afterward. You know scorecards? With all the ballplayers’ names in them? They sell themselves. A nickel apiece, and they get hundreds of ’em right next to the gate where the fans come in. Then they get peanuts to hustle, somet’n easy. Or ice cream cones. Those little trays over there near the door. They ain’t breakin’ their ass for nothin’, don’t worry.”

Ira was beginning to understand: little trays near the door. “Ice cream cones in those?”

“Yeah. Fifteen cents a throw. Same as soda. Wait’ll you see Moe.” Izzy grinned.

“What d’you mean?”

“With his ice cream. Sometimes he gets peanuts after scorecards, but when he gets ice cream, he’s — you’ll see him. He’s short; he’s got a hooked nose an’ big blue eyes.” Izzy chuckled. “Everybody knows him.”

“You talkin’ about Moe?” the hustler bagging peanuts on Ira’s left asked. He was swarthy, short but supple. “That sonofabitch, he’d eat the linin’ out of a cunt. Did you ever see him down at the beach? That’s always where he goes when there’s no game.”

“Yeah?”

“He never goes in swimmin’. Lays around the beach. Jesus, he can see a pussy through a bathin’ suit.”

“That’s Moe, all right,” Izzy confirmed. He turned to Ira. “He was a shlepper, and a cake of ice fell on his foot. So he gets all the breaks,” And to the other hustler, “Ain’t he the cats with ice cream, Steve?”

“I don’t know why the hell Walsh gives it to him. He brings half of it back melted.” Steve swung a bag of peanuts closed. “Jesus.” He glowered dangerously. “I thought we’d be outta here by now. Play a few innings o’ handball.”

“They must be expectin’ a big crowd,” Izzy surmised.

With as many hustlers as possible crowded about the hampers, the peanuts were bagged at last. They were free to leave. It was now about 11:30 A.M. They streamed out of the big utility room. “Here’s where you come back an’ get your checks.” Izzy indicated the large zinc-covered counter, with drawers under it, and a heavy drawbridge like a portcullis in front. The place had been at Ira’s back while he bagged peanuts. It was adjacent to the main passage through which they’d entered.

“Get checks?” Ira asked.

“Later. When he calls you. You stand in front there.” And as they came out from the cavernous utility room into the gloom under the stands, “I’ll show you later. Right now you gotta get your white coat an’ hat. Or you can’t get in again. Get the idea?”

Ira followed Izzy to the cloakroom — presided over by Benny Lass. All of the hustlers crowded in front of the cloakroom counter, and with imprecation and reviling, Benny hurled their uniforms at the boys. Ira’s hat was too small.

“I’ll change it for you,” Izzy volunteered. “He needs about a seven and a quarter, Benny.” Izzy proffered the hat.

“Why the hell didn’t he ask for it? What the hell is he? Dumb? What the fuck kinda hustler you gonna be?” Benny demanded. “Can’tcha open yer mout’?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Next time you’ll wait till the last one.” Benny threw the larger-size white hat at Ira.

What had he been saying to his wife, darling woman? No, she wasn’t at the washing machine, which was installed just outside his study door. He thought she was at the washing machine, because the appliance whirled merrily about, and he thought she was there. Women didn’t have to wait in attendance on washing machines any longer, thanks to technology. The machines were computerized; after they were set spinning, they went through cycles on their own, rinsed on their own, drained, stopped on their own.

What had he been saying to her? But he was digressing. Then digress within the digression. Was he afraid he wouldn’t return to the main theme? Oh, the past was there, not like an inert lump, to be sure, malleable still, but only within limits. After he had said what he had said to her, she murmured to herself at the washing machine, almost to herself, “I can’t stand it when you get depressed. When you get depressed, I get depressed. I want you to be happy.” Ah, beloved wife. . so interwoven within him, as he within her. What would they do without each other? She was steady enough to survive losing him; what would he do in the other event?

But he chose to ignore the question, admittedly more difficult, and thought instead of their lunch of tea and toast, peanut butter, apple butter. Ira had said to her, “I wrote a piece about my experiences as a plumber’s helper in Freshman Composition, second half of my freshman year. The instructor thought it merited printing in The Lavender, the CCNY literary magazine.”

“How old were your teachers?” M asked.

“One, Dickson, I think may have still been in his twenties, late. He gave me a D in the course. And Kieley was middle-aged, fifty or so.

“But in the second semester of Freshman Composition, which I took in sophomore year, everything turned around. We were instructed to write descriptions for our weekly theme papers, and my grades were suddenly quite good. Mr. Kieley — I think his specialty was Edgar Allan Poe, and maybe he too was partial to the bottle — would get up and say, ‘Once again the star of the class has given us a fine specimen of a description.’ It was mine. Now why the hell didn’t they encourage this guy? At nineteen, think of it, how close I was to all this: the bus conductor, the ballpark soda hustler. A hundred other things I could have dug up for long themes, or maybe salable sketches, given the encouragement, the incentive.”

“Teachers work pretty hard,” said M. “They may not have had energy enough left to spend on you.”

“No, I don’t think that was the case. When CCNY gave me the Townsend Harris medal for notable achievement — and what a sinker of a bronze medal it was! — I told them that I hoped they didn’t let other guys flounder around at a loss the way I did. At that age you’re usually not autonomously activated, not confident; that’s true only of the mature writer. At that age, unless the guy is a prodigy, he needs assignments, a definite theme, a project.”

“We were taught one thing at Chicago,” said M. “How to write acceptable exposition. How to get our thoughts in connected form, cut out waste in a paragraph.”

“I would have been out on my ear,” said Ira. “I never learned how to do it.”

Ha! At his desk again, he threw his head back, vocalized his breath. He couldn’t say why he did so: compound of regret, wordless expletive imbued with all the days and years gone by, expletive inveighing against time alone, the abstract past. .

Self-conscious at first in his white raiment, Ira trailed Izzy out of the ballpark. They had a couple of hours to themselves, during which most of them ate their noonday meal. A few blocks away was the restaurant where many of the hustlers had dinner. It was a restaurant combined with a saloon, but one that served nothing more potent than “near beer,” a brew whose alcoholic content did not exceed one half percent. There were white tablecloths, waiters, a large dining room with mirrors, buffalo horns adorning the walls — and a large reproduction of Custer’s Last Stand. Depicted in it, the last, doomed remnant of blue-coated U.S. Army regulars vainly held off hordes of torso-naked, buckskin-fringed Indian braves. Frenzied with victory, they wielded tomahawks against the few survivors, or ripped the gory and all too realistic scalps from the heads of fallen foes. Custer himself stood proud and erect, aiming pistol, brandishing sword. Never did scalped heads look so meaty.

Ira ordered — frugally as usual — a roast beef sandwich and a glass of near beer. That consumed, and a nickel tip left, he accompanied Izzy back to the ballpark, or rather to its immediate environs across the street. The sun at its height shone down on a bare tract of ground, a large parking lot. Empty at present, as it would be for the next hour — by which time they would have to report back — the area lent itself to a “handball” game. Only too aware of his hamminess, Ira stayed out, but Izzy played, and so did the swarthy workmate around the peanut hamper, Steve, who was not, as Ira learned from Izzy, from Puerto Rico, but from the Philippines. He had been a lightweight boxer, was a dependable and aggressive hustler, and this season had been advanced to selling peanuts. He belted a ball, fielded a ball, with the same pugnacity he did everything else, bagging peanuts, tossing a bag to a fan in the middle of a row — and as redoubtable in concentration, catching the dime thrown to him afterward. Ira found himself wondering what a lone, or seemingly lone, Filipino did in New York. He couldn’t imagine, but knew better than to ask.

On the same ground where the hustlers now played, several dwellings, “railroad flats,” had evidently stood before, and had been razed to the ground, the rubble cleared away to make room for a parking lot. The only house still left standing, the one overlooking the parking lot, was a five-flight “dumbbell” tenement. Bereft of its former neighbors, it presented an expanse of rough, mortar-slopped brick wall, almost shaggy in appearance, and without a single window in it, except for those in the recess where the airshaft had been. In the windows of the recess on every floor sat Negro men, women, and children quietly watching the activities below.

Though Ira accorded little meaning to the sight, social meaning, and did not even consciously try to remember it, it would remain in his mind always, preserved by contrast or innate pathos — or simply by inherent design.

The rough, mortar-spattered wall from which the bricks of an abutting wall had obviously been torn away left a grayish-red, crude expanse. And opening on El and street and ballpark, a row of windows occupied by black faces, one above the other, framed in a vertical succession to the ledge atop the roof. Below them, on the bare dirt of the parking lot, Harry Stevens’s hustlers in their white uniforms played ball.

Across the way, under the El, fans were already lining up in front of the ticket booths. Gates would be opened in an hour or so — which behooved the players to end their game, and to go in for their assignments. He soon found out that meant the hustlers had to assemble in front of the window where both assignments and “checks” were issued. Once again, he followed Izzy to the big wooden portcullis, already lowered, behind which with pencil in hand and pad in front of him on the counter sat Walsh. He was in charge, an Irishman, in his early thirties, and with a crimped bridge of nose that spoke of a prizefighting past. Beside him, his assistant, Phil, sallow, Jewish, chain-smoker, who continually hawked up yellow-green phlegm and spat it on the floor. On the other side of the counter, in the dusk under the grandstands, the white-coated hustlers waited, a half-moon bunch, for the wares that Walsh and Phil would assign them to peddle for the day. Together with the assignment of wares they were tossed a menu card, on which was printed in bold letters the item the hustler sold, and its price; this was worn above the visor, affixed to the white cap. At the same time a numbered badge and a small stack of “checks” were issued, ten of them, square aluminum tabs, each indented on the edge and stamped “$1,” all held tightly together by a rubber band.

Preference was given those who were to vend popular or favorite items. First to be chosen were the peanut vendors, many of them young Irish kids; then the ice cream vendors, the hot dog vendors. Last to be chosen, and composing the majority, were the soda pop hustlers, lowest on the scale of hustling. Even here, though, preference was shown to the more aggressive veterans by calling out their names first, which entitled them to fill up their trays at the depots before those called after them, which gave them an edge in selling. Izzy was called about midway among those assigned soda, but he stayed with Ira until the very end, when only two or three novices were left, in order to vouch for his friend. Ira was now equipped, except in temerity, to sally forth into the world of baseball fans, proclaiming his shibboleth, as inculcated by Izzy: “Gitcha cold drinks here!”

A quarter hour still remained before the gates were opened. Empty of fans, the green grandstand seats stretched about on both sides, and from box seats next to the playing field to the high tiers in the back. They had their choice of seats, and Izzy and Ira joined the scattering of white coats at the side of the safety net up front watching the Giants finish their batting practice. McGraw was with them — who could fail to recognize that bloated figure that filled his uniform as if pumped into it? “Atta boy, Kelly,” some of the kids among the scattered hustlers cheered the Giants’ first baseman. “C’mon, high-pockets, slam one right over the fence!” Others picked up the cry. It was pleasant sitting there: warm and yet in shade, and so near the players in their white pin-striped suits one could see every move. Ira had watched a big league team, certainly, never been so close to big league ballplayers, seen their grace and dazzling fielding, their unerring throw — from catcher to second, from third to first. “Yay!” he tentatively joined Izzy in cheering.

A sudden rigor seemed to fall on the field; the figures on the diamond became motionless. His coarse, mean face hardened into a scowl, McGraw turned away from the players, strode toward the railing before the box seats, his wrath seeming to swell with every step. “Who the hell’s askin’ you fer yer two cents? If you Jews don’t shut up, I’ll have you thrown outta the park. Shut your goddamn trap!”

He turned his back on them, strode toward the players before the net. Ira would never forget the expression on the face of the young pitcher warming up next to the rail. It was beyond finding words for: a mixture of youthful embarrassment, boyish apology — within the enforced respectful mien. Ira and Izzy sat there another second or two, stunned by the outburst, and then all of them got up and went elsewhere. In the bewilderment of his own silent rancor at the affront — that the manager of the world-famous Giants would talk like an ignorant slum-bred mug, a 119th Street hard guy — unbelievable, vicious — Ira couldn’t help wonder what the Irish kids thought, what the Irish kids felt, called Jews for the first time in their lives. He tried to imagine the kind of double rejection that may have gone on in their minds. Or the moment of indignant identity the epithet may have enforced. One thing was sure: he knew he would never root for the Giants as long as he lived.

So began his first day with his steel tray loaded with twenty bottles of soda pop, according to directions given by Izzy — orange in the ascendancy, lemon, grape, cream soda, root beer, sarsaparilla, carefully picked out among the jumble of bottles under and between chunks of ice. And those favored hustlers privileged to load up first were already back again for a second load before he was out with his initial one. He paid the checker at the door with three $1 checks, walked hesitantly out through the dugout: from the muted obscurity under the grandstands into the vast crescendo of daylight flooding the thronging, clamoring stands. Multitudes in tier upon tier of seats converged on him in cynosure, he thought, a weight of gape and gaze through which he could muster only the feeblest of feeble “Gitcha cold drinks,” a cry that was swept away by concentrated inattention, like a fart, as they said, in a windstorm. Not a soul paid him the least heed.

“C’mon!” Izzy hurried past with an empty tray. “Don’t be scared. Hustle! Hustle! Git a col’ drink here!” He paused long enough to demonstrate, raising face and voice boldly at the crowd. “Ice-cold drink here! Hey, go ahead, there’s one!” he prompted Ira. “Git him before that muzzler on top comes down. Run up the steps.”

Ira hurried upward. “Wha’ flavor you want?” He could scarcely raise his voice above a peep.

“Got any ginger ale?”

“No. Root beer, orangeade, cream soda—”

“All right. Give us the cream.”

So he made his first sale, snapped off the bottle top, asked the fans to pass the bottle, which they did, and the quarter the other way, and the dime change in return — which awoke a surge of thirst in the immediate neighborhood of the transaction, so that he sold another three bottles then and there.

Encouraged, emboldened, as much by the sale as by the realization that he was universally ignored, he increased the volume of his cry — to which nobody paid any more attention than before — until once again, out of the illimitable haphazard of the crowd, “Hey, you got an orange?”

“Yes, sir, yes, sir.” He served up an orange drink.

Despite the increased volume of his appeal, other hustlers — Ira could see — had some kind of magic in their cry, a compelling urgency. Fans bought soda in rows he had just passed half a minute before. He was flaccid, he lacked something, goddamn it, what? There was Greeny (they said he was going to college), tall, spindly-lean, a dynamo, he never seemed to tire, to get discouraged, or slacken; he had sold four trays already, and Ira hadn’t quite got rid of two. Half the bottles in Ira’s first tray had become warm before game time, and he had gone back to the depot, got credit for them with metal checks of smaller denomination, and reloaded with a new and dewy supply — which increased his self-confidence to the point where he felt justified in bellowing his wares. Dispensing a lukewarm drink embarrassed him, intimidated him. A fan might call him to account. Other hustlers, like Izzy, brazened it out, didn’t give a damn. They got their dough and scrammed out of sight. He didn’t have the nerve, the barefaced, the public, dishonesty.

It was a question of nerve, Ira told himself, his failure of nerve, not his scrupulousness, not his honesty, that slowed him down. His scanty aggressiveness too, he had to admit, was a primary factor in his mediocrity as a hustler. He replenished his tray with cold, fresh bottles of soda, instead of driving doggedly on with tepid ones as the others did. He was a plain, mopey, good-natured slob. And he was indolent; he loitered. He climbed up to the top of the stands, where the near beer bar and hot dog counters were, looked down over the slope of tiers solid with fans, and beyond them to the infield, the outfield, the base lines, the greensward, and lingered, watched, listened, enjoyed, daydreamed. All the things he shouldn’t be doing.

But he couldn’t help it: all that restlessness and tumult: the way Frankie Frisch’s cap flipped off his head when he dove headlong into first base to beat out the throw from infield. The way the umpire called a strike, as if he intended to overawe everyone within hearing. The way a Texas Leaguer, so they called it, dropped right in the middle of everybody. No wonder your soda grew lukewarm. .

Ira scratched the back of his head meditatively. He had come to a divergence within himself, a kind of fork in the road of narrative. All he needed now to do to close off the account of his novitiate at the Polo Grounds was to state merely the predictable — and the actual.

When time came, almost at the end of the ball game — when not even the most determined soda hustler could hope for another sale — when time came for everyone to check in, to cast up accounts, Ira had sold thirty-six dollars’ worth of soda, which entitled him to three dollars and sixty cents, ten percent of proceeds. That was his take for the day. Izzy, on the other hand, had sold over fifty-five dollars’ worth, and Greeny almost seventy dollars’ worth, which indicated what persistence and resolve could accomplish, or the differential between a good hustler and a poor one (only a single soda hustler sold less than Ira, a kid who must have watched most of the ball game). But Ira was a neophyte, after all.

“You didn’t do too bad,” Izzy encouraged. “You didn’t know all the ropes. You didn’t know where all the places to fill up were. There’s places on the upper stands, too. Did you know that? You went up there, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. You could fall out of ’em, they’re so steep.”

“You sometimes can get a good break up there,” Izzy assured.

Ira had made three bucks and sixty cents for his first day’s work. But there was something else. His — and his fellow hustlers’—work still wasn’t done. Not till all the grandstands were cleared of soda pop bottles. After the game was over and the fans departed, by now in the late middling of afternoon, a pair of hustlers were assigned a block of seats, each hustler given a basket. And his chore? To collect all the bottles left under the seats. Only then was it permissible for him to leave the Polo Grounds — if he wanted to be rehired the next day.

It seemed to Ira that he had reached a fitting place to finish the section, a logical and satisfying place. Later, he could resume again his documenting of the tyro’s further experience and development as a hustler. That was one option; the other was Freudian. For Ira the choice was a simple one: the Freudian, his forte, in preference to the social.

VI

Ira stood on the runway behind the top tier of the grandstands, surveying the multifarious movement below, spying Izzy hustling way over at the left wing, Greeny charging up the stairs on thin, long legs, and that ugly, stunted, raw-nosed Jew, Moe, who was always given the sinecure job — ice cream or peanuts to hustle. He started to ask why. Why so many Jews in the place? Ira pondered. What kind of symbiosis existed between them and the Irishman, Harry M. Stevens, whose baronial reign held sway as franchised caterer at the ballpark, stadium, and racetrack? Clearly because Harry M. Stevens had long since learned none were so enterprising as Jews, none so immune to the temptation to slacken efforts in behalf of watching, of enjoying the game?

Business before pleasure, that was it. Gelt, gelt, money, that was it. The more commission they earned, the more Stevens grossed. Of minor importance to them who had just scored, who stole a base. And yet, though true in general, there was always the exception. There was Eppie, short for Epstein, as old as Ira’s grandfather, and still speaking with heavy, thick Yiddish drawl, a Litvak, Eppie, sauntering along with a half-basket of peanuts, taking it easy. He was a privileged character in the Stevens establishment; he came and went when he pleased, responsible to no one but to Harry M. Stevens himself. Rumor had it he had been with Stevens when the latter owned only a modest stand outside the Polo Grounds, in the way back when, long before the War, in the heyday of Christy Mathewson and Honus Wagner, when Walter Johnson could throw a fastball that crossed the plate no bigger than a pea, when ballplayers sneaked over the fence to get a beer.

Eppie was a Giant fan, a staunch, unswerving Giant fan. It was hard to believe: an old immigrant Jew, yet a Giant fan (especially after Ira had heard McGraw’s uncouth, insulting bawling at the hustlers that morning!). It was like Zaida being a Giant fan. Who could imagine it? Looking up from davening the Mishnah or minchah, or whatever the prayers were called, to ask the latest standings of the ball clubs. Ira expected that kind of enthusiasm in the younger generation of Jews, his generation. He took their partisanship for one or another of the baseball clubs for granted; he hardly thought about it. But with someone as old as Eppie, who was about Zaida’s age, it came as a kind of shock, the realization that the cleavage had begun long ago, the branching away from Orthodoxy. It made the cleavage dramatic to have someone Jewish as old as Eppie a baseball fan; it dramatized that there was a cleavage, and it had long been going on, not something hit-or-miss, as he felt about his own muzzy shrugging off of being Jewish. He had even thought he was one of the first ones — oh, no, it had been going on always.

His eye caught Moe, limping, big-nosed, down at the very lowest aisle. It was more than a mere aisle; it was the passageway between the box seats at the edge of the ball field and the first row of seats of the grandstand. His scorecard stint finished (“Scah-cod!”). At each gate, the shleppers, Benny Lass and Moe among them, had bawled in monotone at the incoming flood of fans, “Getcha scah-cod. Can’t tell the players without a scah-cod.” Moe had elected ice cream for his second item to vend. He seemed to cry his wares within a narrow range of seats, as if he were on a tether, limping a given distance to the right, then after a space, a pause, returning and limping to the left, his gaze lifted under his white visored hat. His mouth forming the words “ice cream,” inaudible through the mingled noise of intervening voices jeering, cheering, rooting, he stood transfixed at the center of his tether — for a single moment — and tore himself away, and traveled a long distance.

In direct sunlight too, he oscillated, the sun’s rays glaring on his tray of vanilla ice cream. What was wrong with the guy? What was the jibe they had made about him around the peanut hamper? Ira had forgotten to ask Izzy afterward. Moe was his name; that much Ira remembered. Curious, and guilty at having loitered so long, Ira walked down the steps, dutifully hawking his wares; and reaching the bottom, turned toward the section of grandstand Moe had been frequenting. Why? He hadn’t sold anything. Still wondering why, Ira reached the end of Moe’s seeming tour, and retraced his steps. Moe had kept looking up. So did Ira — and suddenly felt: a vertigo: a stunning inner gasp without a sound. The woman, not young, in her forties, not pretty, buxom — was she sitting deliberately with her thighs spread? Cunt, the word came unbidden to Ira’s lips. Big red cunt in a black muff that at the moment of spying engulfed him with desire, plummeted him in a sudden, swooning spasm. Like Moe, he couldn’t tear himself away, but did, had to. Secret that was stolen, evil, stealthy, yes, that — he went on, his head bowed, shaken by a kind of wildness, grimness: realization there at the foot of the packed grandstand. Look what he was. Look, where it was leading him, where it was dragging him, like the way he got started, that same feeling all mixed in it, not stealing silver pens, but right in his inside, like his will, like the thing he wanted. That way: lurk, waylay, oh, Jesus. Why did he have to hear about Moe, see him do that? Why always that goddamn accident he was always in the way of, like he was set for it to happen? Jesus, that was exciting, that was exciting.

Moe approached, limping on crippled foot, his big Jewish nose prominent — and his eyes, as though he were suffering, suffering, his eyes seemed like red-rimmed, great, sick circles of crimson around terrible sadness. The vanilla gobs of unsold ice cream cones in his tray were all part melted, had begun to sink below the rim of the cone. That’s all he sold ice cream for; that’s all he lived for. Jew, Jesus, homely crippled Yid. But you’re worse than him—

“Hey, fella! You got a cold grape soda?” Reality, hearty American reality, boomed out from three rows up.

“Grape? Yeah. Huh? Grape soda?”

VII

He welcomed the electronic routine of the computer, recording date and time and the code for the eighty-column print on the monitor. Ecclesias, his friend, both his friend and life-support system, helped bring him back from the past — that would be the simplest way to say it — bring him back from that complex confusion, loss, anxiety, frustration of those years before M, and even after, those years, long years of grievous depression and literary desuetude in Maine. These were the interminable years of immobilization. He hadn’t felt that way in a long time, not for months, but once again, as so often in the past, a conjunction of circumstances had brought it on. And he had dreamed too, dreamed most of the night, it seemed, apprehensive of what he would do next morning, how to start the next day’s work, sorting plans, proposals, introductions. No, he had weighed returning to beginnings: prefacing the beginning of his work in progress with a foreword. But no, that would never do; that was like a reformed drug addict — or even cigarette smoker — saying to himself, “Now that I’ve given up the drug, the weed, just to show how free I am of it indeed, I’ll tantalize it, toy with it, flout it by trial.” Anybody, even a fool, would know that wouldn’t work.

He had considered prefacing the day’s work by saying as much. Or, discarding preface, eschewing names and exordium, and beginning in media res, proclaiming: no, James Joyce, the bastard is like a literary black hole. You aren’t meant to go on writing after that, after you’ve come in contact with him. You can’t escape him, once you’ve entered his stupendous gravitational field; you’re lost, caught in the vortex of the event horizon where time piles soon to stop. And that’s what he tried to do, that Pied Piper of Dublin, make time stop, erect so colossal a roadblock against change, there could be nowhere left to go, nothing left to do, except stand before his works, his image, to worship him as icon — such was the monstrous immensity of the man’s ego. And he had just that kind of submissive votary in his avid exegete Stuart Gilbert: every fault of his fetish became a hallowed attribute, every weakness, every dodge, every cop-out, a stroke of genius. .

Ira had in the previous month set himself the task of reading Stuart Gilbert’s explication of Joyce’s Ulysses; and that had been its effect — to throw him under the sway of the sorcerer again, him whom he had so explosively, so violently repudiated, repudiated to the pitch of irrationality. Repudiation had begun seething in him ever since Moira P, professor of Irish studies at UNM, had nominated Ira as the guest of honor at the Joyce festival to be held in Albuquerque. It was in celebration of Bloomsday that the festival was held, and it was on Bloomsday that Ira, the erstwhile Joycean disciple, had reached the point of rupture with his great master. It was exactly on Bloomsday that James Joyce’s Jewish Junior had blown his top. He would! What a time to kick over the apple cart. But he had to. Like all revolutionary, drastic rectifications, whether of soul or of society — or of tecton — his readjustment had gone to extremes, gone to excess, before he regained any sort of equilibrium. He had gone off the deep end. He felt embarrassed by it, but it couldn’t be helped, or rather, couldn’t be recalled.

And why the rupture? That was the important thing, far more important than the form it took, its immoderation. Why the rupture? Because of the clearly felt, the profoundly felt, need to bring to an end the self-imposed exile within himself, come to grips with the new reality of belonging, of identifying and reuniting with his people, Israel. The vanities, the insanities, of Joyce, for so they seemed to Ira, despite all the extraordinary artifice, the prodigious virtuosity, the verbal interlacing — or what to call it? — circuitry, intricate upon intricate, interconnected inlay, unbelievable in its cunning as the network on a ceramic chip, all served to conceal the fact that the human element, the interchange, the unavoidable confrontation between man and man, man and woman, especially with regard to the latter as intellectual equals, bringing into play respect for their minds as well as amorousness for the sexual roles, without both of which true tenderness could not be felt, nor delineated — was never addressed in Ulysses.

One and all, men and women, to him whose false superiority consisted of his supreme virtuosity of the word, as if that alone ordained him high priest of beauty and truth — and that alone was enough to relieve him of any responsibility to his fellow humans and to his folk — to their aspirations, their centuries of suffering and their struggle. His virtuosity obviated all kinship. Oh, there were a hundred indictments he could hurl at Joyce; and reading Stuart Gilbert’s salaaming adulation, ground-kissing obeisances, incited a hundred more. On every page: commencing with the scarce nominal Jew that the great Guru foisted on the reader, a Jew without memory, without wry anxiety, exilic insecurity, not merely oblivious of his heritage, but virtually devoid! Of the Kishinev pogrom the year before, nothing, of Dreyfus, nothing, nothing to say to Dlugacz, or whatever his name was, the Hungarian butcher, no sally about the pork kidney: was it kosher? No inference, no connection between a newspaper offering plots in Palestine and the possibility of a Jewish community in Dublin. No recall of Friday candles, no recall of matzahs. Jeez, what a Jew, even one converted while still a juvenile — no cheder, no davening, no Yom Kippur, no Purim or hamantashen, no barucha, no Hebrew, no Yiddish, or naught but a negligible trace. And despite the lack, daring to depict the Jew’s “stream of consciousness,” the inner flow of a Jew’s psyche, an Irish quasi-Marrano of the year 1904. What unspeakable gall that took, gall and insufferable egotism! Gall and ignorance! And Madame Tweedy, out of a “Spanish”-Jewish mother. Had Joyce even looked at Sephardism, Ladino, the Inquisition — let alone, for all his highly touted erudition, Yiddish, Hebrew, or Chaldee, as the truly erudite Milton termed Aramaic? Didn’t Mama remember anything either to tell her half-Sephardic daughter about? Not a brass candlestick, not a dreidel, a challah on Friday night, the agony of 1492, the expulsion? No. As long as Mama’s name was Lunita, satellite of her Gaia-Tellus daughter, shoyn genug, wunderbar! Torquemada, the quemadero, the auto da fé, what was that? Consider, Master Jew-Joyce, the effect of the altercation with the Citizen (when Bloom was actually at his Jewiest — and note: when presented from the outside, the outside!), wouldn’t that have devastated you the rest of the day, hung over you like the ancient pall of exilic woe? And here was the difference, aye, the crucial difference, between your Irish Catholic self, qua-Jew, and the genuine article. Bloom would have gone home to his wife, even if she was cuckolding him, if he loved her, or she him, even a little, for the comfort she might give him (she was “part” Jewish, you know), for all that he suffered, outcast among the gentiles, a Falasha, alien, even though she had descended from a converso? Granted that Molly were totally a shiksa, she would have consoled him; she would have understood something by now of the Jewish condition — not to the extent that Ira’s beloved gentile M understood, but after these many years, something, something, of the Jewish plight. Instead of turning to her, Bloom did what Joyce himself would have done, treated a wife like an appurtenance, slack-Irish, never thought about the thing again — by the master artificer of allusion, of interspersal, of intertexture, juggling color and orgon, art and rhetoric and logo. Instead, the Yid is farcicalized (as Pound observed, calling Joyce anti-Semitic, the very cream of the jest, coming from Pound). Instead, the earth shakes as Bloom flees via hansom cab, the seismic shocks registered at grade 5, at the observatory. All of a sudden, gratuitous goyish flapdoodle of Elija Bloom ascending to heaven at an angle of forty-five degrees, like a shot off a shovel. Who said that? Joyce himself. Why? Yes, why this intrusion, this irrelevant commentary on his own story, and by the most self-conscious, superb literary craftsman of his time? And the most notably “tolerant” of Jews in an age rife with intolerance? Yes, why? First and foremost: failure of courage, the courage of sensibility, without which, as Eliot said in different words, there could be no great art; cowardice in the contemplation of violence, even if the man himself might be physically afraid, no matter. And all this rationalized by his championing of so-called Aristotelian stasis, when what he actually meant was fear of contemplating violence, violence at every stage the usher of change, of development, of maturation, of casting off the old, of growth into the new — resisting all this, until finally, he wove himself a chrysalis, a verbal shroud called Finnegans Wake. Cowardice, that disguised its shrinking under Olympian buffoonery: at the very moment of truth, twisting the knife in the Jew in his quandary, in his millennial Diaspora, with gratuitous burlesque temblor, burlesque Ascension in chariot of fire, all this in the name in fidelity to gigantism, to Cyclops, Polyphemus. Bahl Pound saw through it, cagey, crusty Pound, in spite of all his batty political economy and his loony anti-Semitic “usura,” a man. A man worthy of respect — and sympathy too — so Ira felt — for the stupefying torment and remorse the realization his own monumental misguidance inflicted on him. One glimpse — had Joyce permitted himself that, had he summoned up the courage to take one glimpse into the harried Jewish soul, pariah and scapegoat of Europe — and the author’s whole Homeric house of cards would have tumbled to the ground. Nay, more than that: he would have begun to grow up, develop, change, he would have begun to win the state of mind of a modern man. He would have liberated himself from the self-imposed constriction of myth, freed himself from his Procrustean spoof, and sued for reunion with his folk. It wasn’t the nightmare of history from which he was trying to awake; it was the daylight of the present he fought not to awake to.

Well, he had said his say, thrown off the spell of the arch-necromancer. He had to have his say, however chaotic, or he would never have been able to proceed, sucked in by that dread black star. No. He would not continue perusing Gilbert’s book on Ulysses, Ira decided. By no means. You could not fool with old habits, old addictions, old vices; precisely because they were old, were deeply ingrained, they were never, never dead, never entirely banished. Part of one always, they waited, in suspended animation, like a dormant virus. No. Dear acolyte Mr. Gilbert was going back on the shelf, banished there for good, as far as Ira was concerned. Bloom had become a Zionist, Stephen ambushed Albion’s Black and Tan. Nor could Ira help, grinning to himself, taking note, one last time, of the large number of Jews who figuratively, and literally, clasped Joyce to their bosoms, because he was among the very, very few of that generation of literary men not openly anti-jew. Joyce didn’t portray Bloom as a grasping, avaricious, unscrupulous Fagin or a contemporary Shylock, or as Hemingway’s Cohen presuming to Western culture, Western grace in default of Western virility, or as Eliot’s Sir Alfred Monde, Sir Ferdinand Klein, Bleistein, or the Jew in the window in “Gerontion.” One of Ira’s Jewish friends, a Jewishist and Hebrewist of note, even pointed to the delicacy the great writer showed to Jewish sensibilities by having Bloom attribute his wife’s infidelities, not to her Jewish blood, but to her “hot Spanish blood.” But to hell with Joyce and his holy writ. And with genuflecting Stu Gilbert to boot. It was with M that he, Ira, had found the way to adulthood. With M, the adult, sensitive and sensible, admirably intelligent, courageous, artistically creative, wife of his bosom, mother of his kids, he was safe, his soul growing in his pride in and admiration of his beloved spouse, which awoke finally to identity with his people, Israel.

He was free again, free to return to his narrative, employing Joyce’s method, many of Joyce’s devices, though freed of his impediments. True. But why, Ira couldn’t help wondering the other night, when he could feel the Joycean incubus settle on him. As if encumbered by the fabled Old Man of the Sea, held in his relentless clutches, all this when half asleep, he had worried the night through, talked in his stuporous state, imagined he was taping his somnolent discourse — why, why had he dreamt of Ida, Ida Link, his last living aunt, aunt by marriage, the deceased Uncle Moe’s widow, dreamt that she was feeding him a sandwich made of a full pound of butter between two slices of bread? He had nibbled at it, trying to accommodate filler to its jacket, its filly, he had thought.

At the same time his aunt was telling him about Moe, and not a word could Ira understand. Which meant what? And so vivid. Then she showed him Moe’s workbench, a strange contraption with a work surface of thick gray glass, translucent windows, as once of old, bathroom doors were fitted with. Did that recall his cousin Stella and her bath in Tanta Mamie’s house, and of the high jinks of the Rabelaisian fanfrelucky yet to be told? It was a weird contraption that Ida kept turning round and round until it was flush with the wallpapered wall. Why? Years ago, when she owned a store in Flushing purveying ladies’ “foundations” (Ida was large of girth herself — just right for Moe), after her husband’s death, she had asked Ira if he would lend her, waive, whatever the legal term was, the one thousand dollars Moe had bequeathed his nephew Ira. He did — when, as M sagely and discreetly remarked, “Your own family was in need. I wore torn petticoats and slips for months.” M darling. But what? What did his consuming of that inordinately pinguid sandwich mean? That the long-delayed legacy would soon be restored? That would be oneiromancy, not Freudianism. But then how convenient if the “debt” were restored, not that he didn’t wish Ida all the ripeness of old age mortality was vouchsafed, ripeness and over-ripeness as well.

And perhaps—last aside—all this convergence of the peripheral was intended to forestall that dread, that rending of the soul, soon now and soon. .

VIII

Ira became in time a regular hustler, after a fashion, a lackadaisical one, but conversant with most of the tricks of the trade, if lacking the cheek to foist them on his customers. He was accepted, for some reason or other, by Benny Lass in the morning at the shape-up outside the ballpark. Rarely did Ira earn more than five dollars for his day’s work, at a time when Izzy earned nine or ten, and the indefatigable Greeny twelve or more. Oh, once in a while, he was favored with a windfall. When? Probably it was during the World Series, or during those “crucial” games at season’s end that would determine who won the pennant. Probably it was then, when Harry M. Stevens needed all the hands he could muster — not in the hustling department, there he had a plethora of hands, but in the fiscal, the managerial cadres, the overseers, the checkers. In these departments he was understaffed, he was woefully shorthanded.

And there, behind the counter, henna-haired and balcony-bosomed, smoking a cigarette in a silver cigarette holder, presided Mrs. Harry M. Stevens, Jr., lacking only a lorgnette to complete her stylish demeanor, as she moved toward the till with leisurely noblesse. She had a large tally sheet in front of her, and in it she kept a record of all the “checks,” the notched metal counters that each hustler bought from her. Business was extremely brisk, feverish in fact. Her strongly built husband, red-haired too, tended to other duties: overseeing the emptying of cases of soda in the cooling tank, in which by now much of the ice had melted into ice water. He also stood guard at the door, and collected the metal checks from the vendors on their way out of the depot, after loading up their trays inside. Even their redheaded, rotund, well-nurtured son seemed to be making himself useful in an agreeable way: topping ice cream cones with balls of vanilla ice cream. And Harry M. Stevens, the renowned proprietor himself, white-haired, doughty, and baronial, stood in the dugout that connected depot to grandstands, smoking a cigar and waving on his assiduous vassals to ever greater achievement: “Go on, get it! It’s out there!” he urged. And to Ira: “Come on, boy! Get a move on!”—imperiously uttered, as might a monarch, easily irked and short of temper, spurring his subjects forward into the fray (and yet, as Ira sensed, the mogul had a saving touch of compassion in him, a touch of Irish sentiment). .

So, there stood his daughter-in-law, waiting behind the zinc-covered counter, svelte and stately Mrs. Harry M. Stevens, Jr. Her movements were a bit fastidious, or a bit disparaging, as befitted the heiress of a catering empire, to which she was just now lending a helping hand, graciously easing the heavy burden on her father-in-law in his need. Usually Phil, experienced and loyal Jewish henchman, tended to that job, the job of presiding over the main depot, but Phil was sick, suffering from severe bronchitis. Ira stepped up to the counter.

He had already noticed, he had long ago become uncomfortably aware, that he either shed some kind of perverse emanation or was invested with a peculiar propensity that had the effect of mussing up the smooth flow of clerical work, of generating all kinds of hitches in mechanical routines, tics in established procedures, aberrations in formalities. Perhaps it was because he himself was so often just not present in mind, sufficiently absentminded that like an induction coil he induced a corresponding or reciprocal absence of attention within the mind of his counterpart in the transaction, frequently his counterpart on the other side of the counter.

He placed two one-dollar bills on the zinc-lined surface before Mrs. Harry M. Stevens, Jr., and asked for a two-dollar roll of nickels. He was running short of small change. And the lady, with decorous but businesslike bearing, accepted the two one-dollar bills and laid on the counter a paper-wrapped roll of coins. The exchange completed, her long cigarette holder in hand, she stored the paper money in the drawer and turned away. But not before Ira, his hand curling around the roll of coins, knew he had struck it rich, struck a treasure. His heart leaped up with guilty rapture. He pocketed the roll instantly — and scooted out of the place. He lost himself at once in the grandstands, climbed up to the top, then up the ramp to the upper stands. There, as luck would have it, or because he stood there dazzled, he sold in a sudden jiffy of demand a half-dozen bottles of soda. And now justified in replenishing his near-empty tray, he went into the auxiliary depot in the back of the upper stand and refilled with freshly iced bottles, and also managed to get a little extra small change beside. He came out of the depot carrying twenty bottles of soda pop as if they weighed nothing, as if he were walking on air, levitated by the soda pop itself. What bliss! She had given him a roll of quarters instead of a roll of nickels, a roll of quarters worth ten dollars, instead of a roll of nickels worth two dollars. Boy, would that make a day’s pay, boyoboy! Eight bucks ahead without scarcely lifting a finger! She would certainly never remember him, never remember the incident when time came for her to “check in,” to cast up accounts. She would be — no, she wouldn’t be — the till would be eight bucks short. In her wry dismay with herself, would be eight bucks short. In her wry dismay with herself, would she redress the discrepancy with a trifling eight bucks from her own ample purse? Or would the Stevens dynasty joke about the incident at cocktails before dinner that evening?

He had bought himself a small pipe a short while ago, small enough to fit easily into his pants pocket without bulging out too much, and he filled the bowl with tobacco from the pouch to which he had transferred the Prince Albert tobacco from the can this morning before leaving the house. He struck a match, applied the light, and puffed away exultantly. The lucky break was worth giving himself a break. The afternoon was cool, already autumn.

From where he stood, at the very top of the uppermost stand, at the very back of the last tier of seats, cloud and sky and Bronx rooftop, smudge of smoke, and blue neck of water in the distance. Below him, just below the grandstand roof, back of the mob of fans, he puffed on his miniature pipe a minute, and then — why not give himself a real break? He had already garnered a day’s pay and more. He deserved more than a minute’s relaxation. Why not enjoy part of an inning, watch a batter or two at the plate?

Way over at the farthest end of the grandstand wing, behind the steel pillars holding up the roof of the grandstand, was a ragged parcel of empty seats — he knew why they were empty. Not only were they at the farthest remove from the diamond below — sitting there, you could hardly see the home plate, hardly see the game any better than if you sat in one of the high tenement windows where black faces crowded together — not only because of the distance, but because the pillars supporting the roof partly blocked the view. Only during the World Series were fans driven to sit in them, only a belated few.

He would loaf for only a minute, Ira promised himself, take a few puffs. Just long enough to savor at its fullest the exultation of the wonderful break that had befallen him: ten bucks’ worth of quarters instead of two bucks’ worth of nickels. No matter how far behind Izzy or Greeny or any other soda hustler he was, he was still bound to finish ahead at the end of the day. With an eight-buck break like that!

He felt the roll in his pocket. How could the grand lady have missed telling the difference? The weight alone, even if your fingers didn’t recognize the heftier round, the sleek, packed, solid, geometric cylinder of ten bucks’ worth of quarters in comparison to the unprepossessing, light roll of nickels. Well, she didn’t, that was all; she wasn’t used to it. Rich — and who did that look like up at bat? Ira craned forward to see around a column. There. He could just barely descry the batter. Who was he? What player? He pushed his eyeglasses closer to his eyes, squinted, studied the batter knocking the dirt from his spikes with the end of his bat—

“Would yo’ mind movin’ over a seat?”

Odd, how nearby words could come through the great swell and roar of rooting fans watching the batter outrace a bobbled bunt. Odd too, he knew right away the voice was a woman’s voice, and before he looked up, he recognized the voice of that of a Negro woman, and a young one. But he didn’t know how pretty she was, until he raised his eyes and saw her: light-molasses brown, maple syrup he used to help pack in the hampers for Mr. Klein when he worked in Park & Tilford.

“Oh. Oh, yeah.” Ira stood up. “I’m not supposed to be sittin’ here anyway. I’m supposed to be hustlin’. I didn’t know this was your seat.”

“Yo’ jest sit there if yo’ want to. I’ll slide by you.” She did. Back of her knees rubbing his knees. Her sky-blue attendant’s uniform was sliding over past him. He knew there were toilets in the upper ends of the wing. They had always been empty, except once or twice, he had noticed, during packed stands, attended by a heavy colored woman. This attendant was pretty, regular-featured, her speech smooth Southern, friendly. His heart began to hammer. Jesus. A scramble of goofy impulses commandeered his mind. He couldn’t talk, only sidelong, tried looking dumb to see who was looking his way, their way. The game had reached a tense pass. And pass indeed: the pitcher was deliberately throwing wide to the next batter. Try to double-play next guy. The crowd booed the manager’s strategem. Jesus, if any other hustler came up, and saw him sitting next to a — this high-yeller, comely colored girl — he’d better get up. Two more puffs. .

“That pipe sho’ smell good. What they call that tobacco?”

“Yeah? What they call it is Prince Albert.”

“Smell good.” She pulled out a cigarette. “Yo’ make much sellin’ soda?” She held him there by speech alone, her tinkly musical dialect. “I see a lot o’ yo’ all sellin’. You sellin’ all the time. I see money comin’ in all the time.”

“Yeah?” Well, it wasn’t his fault she sat down beside him. So what? He prepared his excuse: he had just sat down for a second. “Well, maybe it looks like money comin’ in. But all we get is ten percent of all we sell,” he informed her, scarcely looking at her. “Ten cents on every dollar.”

“Oh.” She raised light brown eyes to the sign on his hat. “How much that make you make fo’ the day?”

“I’m not a good hustler.”

She laughed, high and lilting.

He hadn’t meant to be funny. “Not as good as some of ’em, I mean. Like today,” he explained, “I only sold maybe forty-five dollars’ worth. Some of ’em sell twice—” He stopped because she brushed against him, moved her hand sleekly in her uniform pocket, rummaging—

“You want a light?” he asked.

“Mmm. I got matches. I know.”

“Here’s my pipe.” He proffered the ember in the bowl. “Or do you want a regular light?”

“Mm-mm. No, that smell good.”

She inclined her head, almost straight her hair, unkinked. Puffing her cigarette alight in his pipe bowl, she inflamed him as well. His breath became short, curtailed, inadequate to the demands of his thumping heart. “Wha — what do you make in there?” Rigid, Ira could barely indicate the ladies’ rest room at very end, the uppermost walkway.

“I gets fi’ dollars a day an’ tips. An’ ain’t very many tips. Man tol’ me in the office I’d make twice as much in tips. And I ain’t made over a dollar. First time I tried it, but I ain’t doin’ it again. They tell you anything.” She laughed.

“Maybe down in the lower stands they do better.” Ira looked straight ahead.

“I don’t know. I jest know I need the money. Look what my little dog did to me this mo’nin’. Scratch my bes’ stockin’ befo’ I go to work.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Look at the run in it.” She showed the calf of her leg, round, muscular, honey-colored skin visible under the shirred run.

Blood pounded, rammed against skull. The packed grandstands below fluttered and swam on the thump of his own pulse. They all could hear it, couldn’t they? The rush of blood hammering, hear it all the way to the pinch hitter out there, him with two bats swinging as he walked to the batter’s box, the home-plate umpire who came into view to brush the dust off home plate, yes, the batboy trotting by, couldn’t they hear? He bent down, dropped his hand below the handle of the tray of soda — touched the bare caramel-hued skin. “Run,” he said, his tongue just moving of its own accord — but never had he felt so starkly certain before, so animal-certain. Why? What was he suddenly? Because she was colored? He didn’t know. “Ballpark’s the right place for a run.” His jumbled thoughts found words.

“They goes together, you mean. Tha’s right.” She suddenly laughed her high, fluted laugh. Would anyone look their way? But no one did. Pinch hitter in the batter’s box, and the crowd roaring in wild hope. “You cute,” she said.

“You too.” And now there was nothing more to say, nothing that didn’t go beyond saying, beyond barrier of spoken small talk into commitment. “You live around here?”

Her shapely hand, fingernails above the same rosy flesh as his, floated to her temple, smoothed the long waves of barely tinted coppery hair. “I live in Harlem.”

“Where? I do too.”

“You do? Where you live?”

“On East 119th Street.”

“East 119th Street? I live on West 137th. West of Lenox.”

“Listen,” Ira heard himself saying, heard a frightened automaton within him speaking with temerity, “you want me to come to where you live?”

“Oh, yo’ just foolin’. Yo’ jest like the rest of ’em.”

“No, I’m not.” She had put him to the test, put him on his mettle before he knew it.

“How I know you ain’t?”

Bewildered boldness answered, “I got a lucky break today. I’ll show you. Look.” He drew the green roll of quarters out of his pocket, let her peek. “Look at that.”

“What dem?”

“Quarters. Ten dollars’ worth.” He opened his curled hand wider.

“Mm-mm! They nice.” She looked from the roll of coins to him. “Yo’ comin’ with them?”

“I hope so. Comin’ with them.” The roll of coins was already like a hard-on as he stared at her. Just like a dusky shade on pink skin, hers. And she must have known it suited her too: round pink disks covering her earlobes, a hint of pink under her attendant’s uniform, cloudy pink against taffy. “You ain’t talkin’ about all o’ ten dollars, are you?” he said, adopting dialect. To a mingled, myriad-throated cry below, the pinch hitter swung and missed, hopped to regain his balance. “I gotta go. How much you charge?”

She laughed, with faintest hint of embarrassment; and after a moment of hesitation, “Three dollah.”

“I got that right here. That’s only twelve of ’em. So where do I go?”

“Oh, you jest foolin’.”

“I tell ye I got the dough.” He pocketed the roll of quarters, searched under him, gripped the handle of his tray. “It’s just that I’ve never been to a — you know.”

“Well, I ain’t regular. I don’ walk the streets.”

“All right. So where?”

“You goin’ remember?”

“I’ll remember. I’ll write it down as soon as I get upstairs.”

“Pearl Canby,” she said. “Two thirty-seven West a Hundred Thirty-seven. West o’ Lenox. Room eighteen. You remember all that?”

He repeated the number. “At night?”

“Uh-huh. Like after nine or ten. That make sure I’m home.”

“Am I right?” Ira repeated the directions.

“Room eighteen,” she corrected. “Ground flo’. My little dog bark when he hea’ you, but don’ pay him no mind. He jest bark.”

A long fly ball— “All right.” Ira stood up, stepped into the aisle, repressed his cry of wares as he climbed to the walk at the top behind the last tier. The ball went sailing to Bob Meusel of the phenomenal throwing arm — not a hit, but a good sacrifice fly. Would the runner at third make a try for the plate, or hold? Ira didn’t dare look. Her name and address preempted all else. Pearl Canby. Two three seven one three seven, he kept repeating to himself; until he got his stub of pencil out: to jot in haste on the back of the menu on his soda placard, standing on a cement runway behind the last tier, with the dense roar of the crowd in front of him. Would he go? Nah. Yeah. She was right. And three whole dollars yet! Wait a minute. He reached into his pants pocket, felt his warm pipe. No, it wasn’t burning. But ah! That slippery roll, slippery, stiff roll. Gee, so that was what the lucky break was for: Mrs. Stevens should know. Three dollars: twelve quarters made three dollars. Ten dollars was forty quarters. He was flush, Jesus, he was flush. Was he game enough? Jeez, she was cute: peach color nearly.

There was McGraw, right at home plate, arms akimbo, the tunbellied bastard Shakespeare called Falstaff arguing with the ump. Guess what? Meusel’s throw from outfield must have beaten the runner to the plate. And look at that crowd of black faces in the top-floor window of the mortar-lumpy wall above the parking lot outside the ballpark: gleamy teeth and brown skin and gleamy eyeballs. All excited, gleefully meshed together. Jesus, to be one of them. Just for that compactness, that oneness. .

I can’t do anything with it, Ecclesias.

— No? Why not?

You know very well why not: the stile I have set in my way.

— Something not there is scarcely a stile. Or do you mean style?

Oh, no. The blockade, stockade. The taboo. The unspoken. The unspeakable. Do you have any advice?. . Do you?

— Only that the unspoken and unspeakable must become spoken and speakable, and the taboo broken and ignored. This has been taking place over the months and years.

I realized that.

IX

It wasn’t the silly two dollars and twenty-five cents he had paid her, before dropping his pants, paying for a condom retail, re-tail. The whole thing had turned out to be like a slash through his existence, not delirious, not something stunning — oh, no, not even entitled to the word “sordid”; just untidy, sleazy, at best a cross between feverishness and something damn near somnambulism.

After the Friday-night supper, the traditional Friday-night supper, the same, ever the same. Pop was as usual in a relaxed mood, hastily sniffing challah in order to relieve the sting of a dab of the freshly ground horseradish he had just eaten with the gefilte fish. And the flavorless boiled chicken. Oh, hell, the same: Fraytik af der nakht is dokh yeder yid a maylekh, went the ditty: every Jew was a king on Friday night. He was some Jew, he was, he, not Pop: a circumcised Prince of Wales.

He had delayed, wavered, couldn’t make up his mind. . observed the way the melted wax slipped down the two candles, until the wax itself provided a warm spillway over the lips of the golden brass candlesticks: formed pearly stalactites. And Pearl was her name too.

Pearly, pearly, seminal goo,

I got a hard-on for you.

How painful were the associations that you couldn’t avoid, that intruded unbidden into your consciousness, like waiting for the other shoe to drop. The channel in the mind had been dug, and there was no refilling it. How could you undig the dug, the ditch? And there went the associations unreeling again.

He sat there long after the last petal of candlelight guttered out, couldn’t get himself to break the spell of even a vitiated Shabbes. To go — oh, if he went now, right now, he could make it: make it easily to the 135th Street station. Stride over to Lenox Avenue, and take the Lenox Avenue subway. Two stations. Nine o’clock and west of Lenox. But the worst of it was, as so often happened to him, to the seemingly easy arrangements he made, she no longer appeared in the upper stand as attendant in the ladies’ room. He never saw her in the ballpark again, as he hoped to, in his uncertain, ever temporizing frame of mind. He hoped to be reencouraged, coaxed, urged on. But she wasn’t there. She wasn’t even there the rest of that same afternoon, in a sense: so that he could speak to her again, sit down negligently in the same spot he had sat before. No. A portly black man, light in color as she was, and attired obviously well, in a tan suit and a panama hat, despite the advent of fall, easy, well-fitting, tailored suit yes, sat there all the rest of the afternoon, in intimate, relaxed conversation. Ira felt a twinge of jealousy. And after that, the next afternoon, only one of those fat black women occupied her place, and again, two or three times before the World Series ended.

One Hundred Thirty-fifth Street. Crosstown trolley there also, Ira knew, like 125th Street, like Jewish 116th Street: promenade street, window-shopping street; maybe now becoming the dividing line between white and black. He recalled Farley’s more than mere annoyance whenever he mentioned “they” were moving downtown. “They” threatened his family’s home. The safe old brownstone, on 129th and Madison Avenue, and the undertaking parlor there were sure to be engulfed by the spreading sea of color. Nearest he’d ever seen Farley look so hostile, so baffled, as if his father’s business worries had filtered down into the son’s consciousness, undermined the son’s security. . And Park & Tilford too, on 126th and Lenox Avenue, gone, the decorous, fancy grocery store, gone, never to return. He hadn’t been in that section of town in months, years, not since the time he used to hunt up different libraries in hope of discovering new brands, new series, of fairy books: in the years of myth and innocence — before the Great War. No, not innocence, ignorance. How could you be innocent on 119th Street?

Pearl. Mulatto. Octoroon. Pretty, milk-chocolate mellow, smooth high yellow, that skin under the stocking run: three dollars the price, the cost, and he had the money, even had a few of the same quarters left. “You’re just foolin’,” she had laughed, laughed seriously; she wouldn’t believe him. Well? She was right. He really didn’t have to go. Ah, the hell with it. Three bucks, and way up there in black Harlem. Beside, he’d never laid a woman, a real full-grown woman with big tits. Maybe if he did, he’d, maybe if he did, he’d — so what was the difference? That nobody else did it? Did what he did; that it was bad, double bad, double, triple, quadruple bad? Horrible bad. Unspeaka-babble bad. Abomination bad. He was fated to do it. That was what the river said, when he stood on the flat diving rock. Now the comely, café-au-lay-he-oh, la-ay he-e oh waited on 137th Street. A light, hardly almond. Compare that to. . his pig-men-tation. Yeah.

The dishes done, Mom and Pop divided the Yiddish newspaper between them. They read. They read what? All of that immense world of 1922, all that was happening in Yiddishkeit, in goyishkeit, in the United States here with President Harding, with his Cal Koylitch for vice-president, and there in Russia with Lenin and Trotsky, and the hundred thousand other events he paid no attention to: the killing of scabs in the coal mine strike in Illinois. And about Sacco and Vanzetti, the poor Italians, accused of murdering that paymaster in South Braintree, Mass., just because they were wops, anarchists, in jail. And how more and more all over Europe the Jews were being persecuted. Open up his Spanish book, or better, his chemistry book in which he was floundering so, with its moles and molals and molar solutions and normal solutions, and gram molecular weights. Even his English book: try to work out a secret code — that was the assignment over the weekend — a cryptogram, like the one in Poe’s “Gold Bug”—but he stunk at that. Or in lieu of that, he was given the choice of writing a book review, and he stunk at that too: underlying ideas, character, local color, suspense, anh! He could get it out of the way, though, if he did it now — not plane geometry, no. He saved that for the last: that was tsimmes, his dessert, but get the others out of the way. .

Pearl. Her face seemed to grow lighter all the time: Pearly gates, not bad. He could still make it, even now, without hurrying. . You got nerve? Phantasmagoria, said Poe. What a word. Phantasmagoria in excelsis deo on the church’s high obtuse-angled lintel. Trouble was Pop had switched the last few Sundays with those Catholic police and firemen and who knew what other communion breakfasts and fraternities and Rotary Club and from Tammany Hall in Coney Island to “extra jops” at evening banquets for Elks and Shriners and Odd Fellows. So Pop was home when Mom went out shopping for the week. What lousy luck. Ira had hoped maybe after school, but Jesus, no luck. Hoped for a chance to flip up the little goddamn brass nipple that loosed the tongue in the lock. He thought of the goddamnedest things: but boy, that was exultation, wow! When he snapped the lock in the door. But Jesus, no chance; it hadn’t happened. Saturdays were no good; there was always the Harlem Five-and-Dime, where she worked all day. And tomorrow a college football game for him to hustle at. Even so, there would be time. . So on Sunday, no belly lox from Park Avenue, no fresh bagels, no news from Baba, Zaida, Mamie, the aunts, the uncles, and who was pregnant, to listen to afterward, could make up for the lost chance, even though he felt worry-free afterward, and thankful not to be gripped in the cruel clutch of doubt, instead of feeling wicked. Still, what the hell was wicked?. .

So it would be a long walk — no, no, a short ride, a ride; so beat it over to Lenox Avenue.

Mom looked up when Ira got to his feet, but Pop only glanced sideways past the curved sheet of newspaper.

“I’m just going to go out,” Ira said. “Maybe I’ll go across the street to the candy store.”

“You need to stay with those gamblers?” Pop queried, frowning. “You’ll grow into a gambler.”

“I won’t grow into a gambler.”

“No? Keep on going there, and you’ll see.”

Mom intervened, “Believe me, if you would go visit Zaida and Baba, you’d perform a mitzvah. They haven’t seen you in I don’t know when.”

“What do they want me for?”

“Go. Only yesterday Baba said to me, ‘When your sonny-lad has no money, he comes to visit us. Now that he works and earns a few dollars, he has no need of us.’ You know, my son,” Mom summed up, “you’re a little like your father.”

“Aha!” Pop’s head snapped back. “Immediately she hales in his father.”

“It’s not true? When you need somebody, you pet and stroke him, no?”

“Leah, it’s a Friday night. Spare me your recitals, your complaints.”

Ira raised his voice impatiently. “I’ve been here in the same house already since I came home from school. I want to go out.”

“Then go out. But why do you have to go into that candy store with its gambling den in the rear to play cards?” Pop demanded sharply. “And lose money to those sharpers? You think I can’t tell from your long nose when you lose money?”

“All right, then I’ll go somewhere else. I’ll walk.” Ira shifted tactics.

“Don’t you want a coat? Nights are growing keen,” Mom suggested.

“Well.” He stood motionless a second or two, thoughts almost crackling audibly in his ears with the swiftness of projected eventualities. “No — okay. I’ll put on that little sweater under my jacket. So I’ll walk,” he directed a faint jibe at Pop.

“Don’t roam about too long. You’re a toiler these days. You have to go to work tomorrow.”

“Yeh.”

“He toils through thick and thin,” Pop scouted. “Once a week, through fast and loose. Wait, just wait,” he prolonged dire prophesy, “he’ll have a wife and child on his hands someday. He’ll learn what it is to toil; he’ll learn the affliction of running from place to place in search of livelihood. Shall I wait in Local Number One to be called? Shall I run to Waiters Local Two?”

“And why do you think I strive?” Mom asked — and answered herself. “Only to keep him from becoming that kind of menial toiler.”

“Af mayne playtses.”

There he went again: on his shoulders.

“Why does one have children? To whom will you turn in old age?” Mom contended.

“Hah! As long as I can serve a customer, as long as I can go on the dining-room floor, I need no one to help me. In old age. He’ll help me? The Messiah will come,” Pop chortled unpleasantly. “When that day comes that I have to turn to him for aid, may God help me indeed. You think I’m like your father?”

“Now he brings in my father,” Mom retorted. “What have you got against my father?”

“Nothing. To find a more pious Jew you would have to search every cranny in America. But has he done a day’s work since he came to this golden land? Has he ever done a day’s work, even in Galitzia?”

“Well, with him,” Mom condoned, “his study of holiness provides us, his wife and many daughters, with the right to enter paradise.”

“And you believe it?”

“No. But then, God forgive me, I’m half a goya.”

Pop smiled sardonically, jerked his chin up. “Half a goya. But the other half is a Jew, no? Then which half recognizes the pious old fraud for the shirker he is?”

Disgruntled, silent, Ira lined his jacket with his lightweight gray sweater. The way they argued made him almost lose interest in his venture. Almost. But boy, now if ever. Those pink earrings. Pearl in pink earrings. Three bucks from a ten-dollar roll of free quarters. How it went together, one innuendo — was that the word? — nuance, nuance, no. Suggestion. Risky risqué. . Don’t stand there blowing, flattening afflatus between the edge of teeth and lip. Go find her.

But when he got there, entered the muted, still, stuffy hallway, knocked at the door in the rear of the “basement” floor, Pearl’s number, the black girl who answered his knock, the black girl who opened the door was — was scrawny and homely and black-coffee brown.

“Pearl?” he asked, gaping in uncertainty. “I’m sorry. Isn’t there a Pearl here?”

“You mean the girl who live hea’ befo’?”

“I don’t know. Yeah, I guess so. She told me she did.”

“She found her a man. They said she gone live with him, ef that’s the one yo’ mean.”

“Pearl?”

“I didn’t pay no mind to her name.” Asperity gleamed from her dark brown features. “Come on in. You don’ want to stan’ outchea. You lookin’ fo’ a girl?”

“Yeah, but I—”

“Yo’ get what you come fo’. Come on in.” She opened the door wider. “I’m Theodora.”

“Theodora?” he repeated stupidly, stock-still.

“That’s what I said. This is my place.”

Her scrawny body, as she turned to indicate her lodgings, appeared to be negligently, yet acceptably clothed: a white, open-throated blouse over a flat torso, a maroon skirt above bare, dark feet in sky-blue, fur-trimmed house slippers. Sinewy, undernourished, or just skinny? In her twenties still. He wouldn’t know her tomorrow; he wouldn’t know her in an hour, that swart visage, skin barely sheathing tendons. .

“Ain’t you comin’ in?”

“I musta made a mistake. I was lookin’ for Pearl.”

“You lookin’ fo’ somebody that ain’t heah. But I’m heah. Come on in, honey, I take care o’ you. Come in.” She stepped over the threshold, encircled his waist with thin arm. “Yo’ jes’ a mite shy, ain’t you?” She ushered him in. “No need to be. I know yo’ kind. I like yo’ kind, honey. Yo’ ain’t the kind that like to slam a woman in bed. See ef I don’t treat you right.” She shut the door. “Yo’ didn’t make no mistake, honey. That girl an’ her dog went off with the service agency man.”

“The who?”

“The man who hire her. He cullud too. But that don’ matter. You can get a little lovin’ rightcha, honey.” Deftly, she undid the single catch in front of her maroon skirt, held it to one side before dropping it on a sofa. As if she had stepped out from between portieres in a single step, she stood with lean legs forked from a jet-black muff — under a white blouse: “You got it, honey. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat.”

“Yeah, but I—” Shaken, Ira stared, wavered, stared, assailed by a last sortie of caution. “So all right. So how much you charge?”

“All depend on what kind o’ fun you wants to pay fo’.” She could make her black muff squirm.

“Just plain.”

“I gets two dollars an’ twenty-fi’ cents.” Her attitude indicated payment in advance. “An’ twenty-fi’ cent mo’ fo’ a bag.”

He hesitated just briefly, but he paid her, a single greenback and the balance in quarters — and an extra quarter for a condom.

So that was it, that was it. He knew all along that was the way it was done, but he’d never done it. She showed him. In the depth of her dark, skinny, upraised thighs, legs doubled to receive him, forked like a mahogany-human oarlock. And could she wriggle it! She rowed him home. He rode her, but she rowed him. Scull, skull, her workaday, dark face opposite his, until. . his oncoming orgasm transformed the face he stared at into something desirable, something beautiful, her body his to lift in his embrace, and despite fleeting awareness of the false endearments on her full lips, his to will they were genuine. He pumped furiously, reached culmination. . and it was all over.

In the minute or two afterward, buttoning up his fly, even through eagerness to get out, came inklings of his surroundings: how stuffy her room was, not a window open, and the weather wasn’t so cool yet. And all kinds of hangings around the walls too, shmattas, Mom would have said; was that to muffle the sound? Who put the shma in shmattas, oh, boy. Like a séance place. When had he ever been to a fortune-teller place? He never had. Seen it in a movie, maybe, a vaudeville skit, a mystery. Everything in deep shadow as if starved for light. Was every one of the rooms like that, the whole house a cathouse? She was friendly afterward, kind, cheerful, yes sympathetic, giggled watching him wriggle into his jacket. Sensation, that was it, that’s what he bought. Blew his nuts into her. Oh, nothing as excited as he had been in the Polo Grounds that moment when he felt the skin on Pearl’s leg through the run in her stocking. Oh, no. And Jesus, nothing like Pearl’s long-waved copper-tinted wealth of tresses. Instead, on Theodora’s twat and head, when he clumsily caressed them: fine-drawn wires, a wiry poll, a wiry bush. His palms would remember their surprise of contact long afterward. What would Pearl’s wavy coppery locks have been like? Well, it couldn’t be helped. But still, he couldn’t resist the impulse afterward — what a strange thing: he had kissed her on the brow, her round, shiny, mahogany brow. How she had giggled. He was silly. Sure. But he felt that way: kindly disposed. Why? Because she was considerate, she understood he was a novice, or what? Because he felt guilty? But he didn’t. He felt foolish. No transgression (he was well versed in that). No, just fornication in the dim light of that tiny little rose table lamp, her thin shadow thighs up, and yes, penumbra about umbra pussy, not the weak contrast as when there was only fuzz, but total eclipse. Well, so that was it: going to a whore. A businesslike screw, orgasm, cost you, with the condom, two and a half bucks.

And it was over so fast. Jesus, he just pumped a few times, and it was over; he just, and it was — but it was (and his eyes fixed anew in astonishment, a turbid astonishment at his ignorance — and the simplicity of the discovery). Oh, he had plans now as soon as — oh, it was a little squishy, but it would make it easy, once he tried, wheedled, and she succumbed. You heard the noise she made, wooo, wooo, wooo, as she did only that one time, woooah! Woooah! Wooo-a-a-ah! Now he’d tell her, the right way. That’s what you have to do. But now you’d have to, now that she got monthlies, now you’d have to. . yeah. Oh, Jesus, if he ever, Jesus, if he ever. Nah! But that was it. Jesus, you dope. You saw dogs — yeah, but that wasn’t the way it started — Jesus, you gotta try it. Soon as — tell her you found out it’s altogether different. Then maybe anytime. Don’t have to beg. Oh, gee. Anytime when any chance.

He quickened his pace, as if the opportunity were already present. Dark 119th Street, ahead of him, walking at a good clip toward the Cut, the dark trestle, the way she was on the bed — he smirked at himself — her twat licorice embedded in dusky chocolate.

He crossed Park Avenue, stepped up on the curb, before Yussel’s house, as they called the massive five-flight pile of grimy brick on the corner right next to the trestle, the home of Yussel, the landlord. Now wait a minute. What was it? In the winter, when he wasn’t hustling, and he was broke, and couldn’t buy a condom. . So he’d have to be careful. That was it. Just be real careful. Wait till he told her. Oh, he’d be careful. Yeah, yeah. But better keep up hustling even in the winter: the prizefights in Madison Square Garden, the wrestling matches, when they featured Zbysko. How much were they? You couldn’t say rubbers, scum bags, to a druggist. You had to say safeties, you had to say condoms — what was the name on that little tin he saw her take one out of? Name over the crested helmet? Trojans. Trojans. That was it. But why Trojans? They lost the war, didn’t they?

X

“

Absolute, absolute, ’solute,” Mr. Fay, Ira’s teacher in American history, would say when stressing a point. The Louisiana Purchase, Gadsden Compromise, Tippecanoe and Tyler too, about Henry Clay or the great Indian chief Tecumseh, about General Grant at Cold Harbor. Or old Thomas Jefferson lying on his deathbed at Monticello, where he could watch the American flag undulate on its staff, old Thomas Jefferson already haunted by premonitions of the impending disaster inherent in black slavery — Mr. Fay, with his gray mustache, so dignified, tall, spare, an American, conducting the class in American history.

“Hello, Mr. Fay,” grinning, embarrassed in his hustler’s white jacket and cap with the frankfurter menu card on it, while with both hands he held extended in front of him the handle of the long hot dog basket and rolls, Ira hailed his history teacher at the Princeton-Columbia football game. What a change took place in Mr. Fay when Ira greeted him. No longer encountering one of his students qua student, no longer juxtaposed by classroom polarity, but instead a football fan, there with his son, Ira guessed, a loyal supporter of his college football team at an Ivy League game, the teacher — and his student, a hot dog vendor. “How are you, Mr. Fay?”

“Is that you, Stigman? Why, yes, yes, it is! Business going briskly, eh?”

“Oh, so-so, Mr. Fay.”

“Good weather for it, I should think.”

“Yes, sir.” Cordiality and laughter.

It was now November, the first week of November, and fall’s thin, sharp edge — oh, one could feel it even in cities, even in New York streets — thin, honed edge shaving away the last of balmy Indian summer, slitting the last ties that bound one season to the next. That was the way autumn freed itself, Ira daydreamed, hiking home from the everlasting 116th Street and Lenox Avenue subway station. “Autumn” was a nicer word than “fall”—he glanced up at the windows of gray old P.S. 103. How long ago, how far away 6B, gee, when he was a kid. With the — oh, look at them, paper pumpkins in the window, and witches wearing cone hats riding broomsticks. And turkey gobblers in the taller windows, and more paper pumpkins with triangles for eyes and nose. Halloween over, and Thanksgiving coming in. Once, when he wore knee-pants, he and the other kids on 119th Street had socked one another with flour-filled — or ash-filled — long black stockings on Halloween. Goyish holiday Halloween was, but not Thanksgiving. No more. It could be Jewish, could be anyone’s holiday, “Tenksgeeve”; even Mom had learned to say it.

He was thinking, no what was he thinking? Autumn, with his razor-edged cutlass between his teeth, bandanna over his head boarding the good ship Summer: what kind of ship? Sloop or galleon, frigate, schooner, pinnace, boy, the names that ships once had; they were so beautiful. Brigantine. Caravel. Argosy, Antonio called his in The Merchant of Venice. . from the Greek Argonauts. .

Ira had continued to hustle, and not solely on Saturday football games, but on other occasions.

There was Madison Square Garden: the prizefights! “Lade-e-z and gentlemen.” Joe Humphreys, the announcer, in the middle of the ring, took off his straw kelly, and with it damped down the rowdy crowd. Stentorian (oh, he knew that word): “In this corner, wearing purple trunks, the worthy contender for the welterweight crown, Cyclone Mulligan, at one hundred and forty-three pounds and a hawf!” Oh, how that low-browed throng of spectators loved that hawf; nearly everyone echoed it, Joe Humphreys’s fancy, high-toned, Bostonian Brahmin hawf. Hawking soda pop at the Garden, between rounds, then ducking down out of the fans’ way, squatting on the steps; they’d lynch you if you didn’t. But he was absolutely riveted by the spectacle anyway, watching Benny Leonard with his black hair slicked down, and never mussed, slipping a right hook, dodging a left. What muscles, how they glided under the skin, bunched and rippled. And then again, peddling “red hots” at football games: given a hot dog basket and hawking: “Get your red hots here!” And they weren’t any more red hot in their double containers, after a short while in the chilly grandstands, than — than your nose.

But if he bought a hot dog himself, at a football game, just as soon as he came out of the depot, it was still hot, and he could get three rolls with it. The checkers didn’t count rolls, only franks; so it made a meal: three rolls squashed around one hot dog, little bit of meat, mustard, plenty of free sauerkraut, and gobble — lurking in an out-of-the-way dugout — while he watched Kaw of Cornell make those wonderful broken-field runs. Or the Four Horsemen, they were called, Notre Dame’s backfield playing against West Point: the cadets in gray uniforms, like those worn in the War of 1812. West Point, that faded dream, and those beautiful girls, shiksas, and gentile people with the colorful pennants, all jumping up and down cheering in those puffed-up, cozy raccoon coats. But Ira knew too much; that was the trouble. He knew too much that was sad, that was wrong, blighting knowledge, yes.

Still Ira made a few bucks, at the same time that he went to high school, earned a few dollars once a week anyway, and maybe a weeknight at Madison Square Garden too, skimped on his homework assignment, unless it was a Friday, skipped downtown, and waited for Benny Lass at the main entrance. .

He was a junior, and not too good in any subject, save one. And in that he got A, A, A, every quiz, every test, every recitation: it was the second half of plane geometry, the concluding semester of a sophomore course, but he was retarded because he had lost a term when he was expelled from Stuyvesant. But, ah, for once Ira felt in command, for once he sensed the unity of the subject he studied, the coherence of every part of it: oh, gee, he hated to have the subject end.

So there he was, Ira at the beginning of November 1922, the latter part of his sixteenth year, and technically a junior at DeWitt Clinton, though not quite, Ira sauntering through 119th Street homeward toward the gray trestle on Park Avenue. And with not a worry in the world, not an overt worry in the world. With a canker in the soul, yes, but then he kept that under control by buying a little tin of two condoms now and then, because most of the time Sundays had become his again. Pop had shifted from evening banquets to regular breakfast communion “extras” in Rockaway Beach. He earned a little less than he did at the evening banquets in Coney Island. But he hated the stairs in the Coney Island banquet hall. The Rockaway dining room had no stairs between it and the kitchen. That was worth a dollar, a dollar and a half less. So Sunday mornings, in the fall and winter, Ira could lie abed, usually awake, lurking, wait till Mom took her black oilcloth shopping bag, and went shopping for the week among the pushcarts under the Cut.

“Minnie. Okay?”

She said all kinds of dirty words at first; where did she learn them? After he showed her how different it was, “Fuck me, fuck me good!” He wished she wouldn’t, though he liked it. He wished she wouldn’t, because it incited him, spurred him on too much. He wished she wouldn’t, though he grinned about it afterward: so prust, as they would say in Yiddish, so coarse: “Fuck me, fuck me good.” It made him come before he wanted to, though he knew he ought to come fast to be safe, but not so fast as her dirty words made him, that and her crying out, “Ah, ah, oooh wah, ooowah!” Still, it made him feel proud too, and even prouder when she almost whooped with rapture, “Oooh, you’re a good fucker. Oooh, don’t get off yet!” But he had to, right away quick, as soon as it was over, quick and into his own bed, or start dressing. And he hardly had to coax anymore. She was ready as soon as he snapped the lock; a minute after Mom left, he pressed the little brass of the lock down: tink-tunk. Everything with celerity, everything coordinated. Nearly. She slid out of her folding cot, and into Mom and Pop’s double bed beside it; while he dug for the little tin of Trojans in his pants pocket, little aluminum pod at two for a quarter. And then she watched him, strict and serious, her face on the fat pillow, her hazel eyes, myopic and close together — like Pop’s — watched him roll a condom on his hard-on, readying her pussy while he hurried toward her, opening her flower to him when he reached the bed. What dirty words she greeted him with: “Fuck me like a hoor. No, no kisses. I don’t want no kisses. Just fuck me good.”

“All right. All right.”

“That rubber all right? I don’t want that white stuff in me—”

“No, no. I just bought ’em. Okay. A-a-h.”

“O-oh. They’re like the ones before?”

“Yeah. Real Trojans. Yeah. Come on.”

“O-oh. So you can give me a dollar, too.”

“All right. Later. Later.”

Afterward she might even haggle with him for more than a dollar. “You worked in Madison Square Garden last night. I want a new sash on me; I want to get a wide sash with a bow.”

“How much d’you think I made yesterday? Two dollars and a half! You made some money yourself working in the five and ten Saturday.”

“Mama doesn’t give me anything. Everything is for you. For you and for her Persian lamb coat — I don’t count.”

“Aw, come on.” He had to get things settled fast, because you never knew when Mom would be back. If you argued too long, and delayed until after Mom returned, he’d have to sneak the money to Minnie anyway, but she would look sulky, cheated. And that was bad. Hearing them disputing once, Mom had looked puzzled. “All right, all right. I’ll give you the dollar and a half. Only don’t make a fuss. Jesus!”

— Oh, horror, horror.

That’s right, Ecclesias. That’s why I turned to you. As a buffer against my demon, my dybbuk, my nemesis — haven’t I changed? O me, Angnel, come ti muti!

— Your pseudo-recondite self.

But I have change, haven’t I? Still, for all that, I could sit back this very moment, and raise my eyes to the window, the curtained window above the word processor, above imaginary you, Ecclesias, and wish myself fervently never to have been.

— And well you might. But what good does your fervent wishing do? Evidently something blocks the act itself. What is it?

I have an illusion I owe something to the species, as a specimen.

— Your offering may be of value. There’s no telling. In any case, since you’ve chosen this mode of oblation, chosen to live, to scrive, then there’s no undoing the done. There’s only the outwearing it, the outwearying it, the attenuating of remorse, and guilt. That’s all you can do, as far as you personally are concerned. And of course, there’s always room for enhanced comprehension. How deep can one delve into platitude? As to your wish never to have been, that will soon be granted, if that’s any comfort.

It isn’t; it isn’t the same thing at all.

— There’s no expunging of the been, of the past, if that’s what you mean. How can you expunge that which has ceased to be? Carry on, as the British say. What else is left? At worst — what is it at worst? Senescent erotic fantasy. At best, you’ve breached a mighty barrier within yourself, and done so, witting or unwitting, for the benefit of others. If in your own lifetime you’ve achieved an accession of reality — to give it a name, and a clumsy one — a long-belated transformation of view that conforms more closely with the actual, that’s all the consolation available to you at this stage of the game.

Was grinsest du mir, heilige Schädel? said Goethe, said Faust (said Ira?) to the skull on the table.

— Did Faust say that? But I still don’t know why you’re quoting Goethe.

Yes, contented was he, and why not, when everything was under control. It was like a sneaky mini-family, a tabooed one, and discovered by him, by cunning exploitation of accident, to seal off a little enclave within, utterly unspeakable, vicious, yes, near brutally wicked, oh, wicked was too insipid, all the evil consummate, rolled up, concentrate, essence, wild, and made him feel so depraved that anything went, anything he could think of, rending all the enclosures: Mephisto wrapped in a bedsheet in front of a mirror, the pier glass mirror, in a moment of playfulness: “Look at that, Minnie. I’m a Roman in a Roman toga, sticking out with a rubber Trojan.”

And she giggled, but only enough not to delay proceedings. “Don’t fool around. Hurry up.”

Wasn’t he lucky though?

Even at this late hour, and yours truly a man near eighty; for these things are like to one who has sniffed the coocoo, and never lost the beatitude; that was the worst of it, the ambivalence of sin, if you call it that, of depravity, the amphi-balance of it, the Escher fugue, the optical illusion, the Jekyll-Hyde slide, the fleur du mal.

Lucky, supremely lucky, the luck of having Pop a waiter, on a Sunday morning again, and long gone to Rockaway Beach to wait on table on a breakfast “benket.” Well, it got so actually it wasn’t limited to Sunday mornings. Hell, no. At sixteen going on seventeen, and lusty, and Minnie at fourteen plus, and now in Julia Richmond High School. And she was dating boys, and going out a bit, and to dances, and someone must have broken her cherry already, and he was the one reaping the full benefit, because there was never any blood, though she would never let him inside before. Maybe the guy had hurt her. “No, just between. I don’t want that white stuff in me.”

And then she finally surrendered, after he told her about Theodora, and how it was done, how it had to be done, for her to get the real thrill he got out of it, not her way, and how it was safe, it was safe, too.

She knew about it. “So you got one o’ those?” she asked.

“Yeah.” His head began to reel.

She knew. She knew. “So is it a good one?” White-and-pink cheeks had she, somewhat a severe face, cold, unresponsive, even for a fourteen-year-old kid, translucent hazel eyes. She wrinkled her nose skeptically under wavy red bangs. “Is it brand-new? It’s clean?”

“Brand-new,” he protested, and more vehemently, “What d’you think? I’ll use a secondhand one? I’ll show it to you. Look.”

And almost as if against her will, but consumed with need, want, heat, his pitiless aphrodisiac wheedling, she stood up, from homework table, green-oilcloth-covered — she made for the closed bedroom door, closed, now that the other rooms were cold, and only the kitchen gas-heated. “So come on.”

What delirium, surprise and dividend, even though she was so peremptory, serious; yet the green-painted blistery kitchen walls did a jig, a veritable jig — still, she didn’t notice anything, he everything: the walls dimpled, the walls jigged, they rippled to and fro as the little brass nipple loosed the tongue-plunk of the lock, close sesame, magic-charm plunk that freed the walls from being walls, changed them to shimmering, rich green drapes. Freed them and him and everybody, liberated, when you were really going to do it to her, sink it inside your sister, really into Minnie. She was letting him into her. What luck he’d bought the little tin, after — after Theodora. Yip silently with joy. Yip, yip, yahoo. Look at those walls doing a Highland fling in ecstasy, a lilt in kilts. Yippee.

Delirious he, so prosaic she, as if begrudging a needed item, a staple of oestrus. But what the hell, begrudging or not, his, his to have, to have, to fuck her on edge of bed, his bed, first bedroom, on his bed athwart, just two feet away hardly from airshaft window, and the cold no longer felt. Don’t lose a second before Mom came home. For a minute into Minnie, sink it in her, sin it in her. Quick, go. O-o-oh, look at her: carmine between lifted thighs. Quick! Roll it on, pale sheath over fiery shaft.

“Okay?” Ira asked when they came back out of the bedroom into the kitchen. He’d been super-lucky: the second time this week. The first time was in Mom and Pop’s bed Sunday — that was good. He had used his last condom, but was it ever good! She made so much noise he was nearly afraid. So early in the morning. And on Sunday. All the neighbors home. Jesus, if they ever guessed he was doing it to his own sister. He fucks his sister, the micks would say. Hey. How about us gittin’ a piece of her ass, too? He knew them.

“Okay?” Ira repeated when Minnie didn’t answer — though he suspected it wasn’t.

“Oh, don’t ask me. It was all right.” She sounded none too ravished, as she followed him into the kitchen. “Sometimes you get bigger at the end,” she complained. She yanked at her stocking.

“I had to hurry,” he conciliated. Actually, he felt sheepish, because the surprising opportunity had caught him unprepared. It had overaroused his ardor with wild, evil greed of transgression, the dire joy of perpetration. The flood of the heinous had been too much for him to withstand. He had barely synchronized with her. “You wanna try again?” he offered belatedly. “I can wash the rubber again.”

“No, I don’t wanna.” She cut off further allusion sharply. “Don’t wash it again. Don’t do me no favors” She halted abruptly. “What d’you mean, again? Wasn’t it a new one? You said it was brand-new.”

“Oh, sure, sure,” he lied vehemently. He had washed it once.

“Then I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Yeah? So okay. Okay,” he snapped at her. Hell with her. Main concern was to get back to the kitchen table speedily. Roll back the tongue of the lock fast. Compose everything back to normal. Get to the toilet with the squishy condom. . He opened the toilet door, exited from the kitchen, dropped the rubber in round mini-whirlpool, flushed it down in noisy maelstrom, out of sight of the dingy white enamel.

And back in the kitchen again, he sat down to his textbooks, features engrossed, maybe even hostile, as he often was, when she asked him a question in English, and he shook her off or derided her. Easy to be surly this time, complemented by her glowering. Gave authenticity to what they were ostensibly engrossed in doing: studying high school homework, ignoring each other. So it wasn’t so good. So she didn’t plead, Fuck me, fuck me good. So she didn’t animal-yearn, O-o-wah, o-owah. He had laid her. Got his. Settle down now. Safe.

“Is it all right?” she asked, guarded, darkly.

“What?”

“When you went in the toilet.”

“Oh, sure,” he blustered, then contemptuously, “Jesus! What d’ye think?”

“Aw, you stink,” she said.

“Oh, yeah? Just because of this once.” She was belittling his prowess. He could tell she meant he had gotten more out of it than she had. “I told you I was in a hurry.”

“No more! That’s all. If it’s such a hurry.”

“But Sunday in the morning was—”

“Not even Sunday. No more.”

“All right, no more,” he agreed cynically. He could get around that one — next time.

“Briderl. You stink, if you wanna know.”

“Aw, go to hell. Waddaye want? So once I got too excited.” And then it suddenly occurred to him that he might have cause for concern. “Oh, Jesus!”

“Whatsa matter?”

He stood up. Had he pulled that chain long enough? Swirled the damned thing down? Really down for good, not just out of sight? He stepped hastily toward the bathroom door.

“I hear Mom,” said Minnie.

Flop down again, or else Mom might think — might think he was dodging. Flop down to chair, bend over book.

And in came Mom, bringing fresh, cold air with her, as if in the container of her coat, breathless from the climb, her short, heavy self toting handbag; and at once, down on the table with it — and right for the bathroom!

Oh, Jesus Christ, oh, Jesus Christ. If he didn’t, if he didn’t! Minnie was right: never again, never again! Go to Theo, Theodora, Theotorah, Theowhorah. Anything. He still knew the way. Go to anybody, take a chance, get a dose, anything — Ira shut his eyes, waited. No. No. The toilet flushed and gurgled. No. No. It was all right. Got away with it. Of course. What the hell was he so scared about?

Mom came back into the kitchen. “Noo, kinderlekh. You must be hungry by now. No? When Mamie goes to buy a corset, she’s a worse kushenirke than even I am. What am I? I’m a lady by comparison. If she didn’t torture that shopkeeper on 116th Street to prostration with ‘Ah, it’s so dear; you make too much money on it, it’s outrageous, it’s exorbitant. What is it? Is it made of gold? It’s only a corset. From cloth, from bone.’ She has a nerve of brass.”

“Oh, is that where you were?” Minnie asked. “I wondered. So did she buy it?”

“Indeed. Finally. ‘Ai, vey, vey,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘Frau, you should wear it in good health. To earn what I have just earned cost me a parcel of health.’ ‘One has to look well about you before loosening purse strings,’ she said. ‘Heh, heh, heh,’ he laughed. A clever Jew he was. ‘Look well about you. That’s a shred of comfort. About you indeed. May you rejoice in the wearing of it about you too.’ Then I hurried home as fast as I could. A little coffee and milk and a bulkie?”

XI

Oh, Ecclesias, would that I had been spared the need to mention these painful events. Could they have believed that no sister ever existed? No. The story cannot continue without this admission. And I damn near don’t give a hoot about the literary quality, friend Ecclesias.

— You don’t? It seems to me you’re overlooking something much more important than that, important as that is. You’ve showed your hand.

Yes, the tale’s run away with me. Spell it howsoe’er you like.

— Once again, levity is out of place. You’re in most formidable difficulties.

Yes. I might as well confess to what has been all along a kind of spirit beneath the deep: Ira’s incestuous relations with his sister, Minnie.

— Confess it? It’s obvious. Has been that quite awhile. But now that you’ve introduced her as a character, what will you do with your planned treatment of the thing later on, the revelation, the frightful disclosure you held in reserve?

I don’t know. Perhaps I wish to curtail what comes later on. Leave off much nearer than that. Truncate. I could, you know.

— Yes. Or you could begin again: introduce the omitted character—

No. None of that. For one thing, it’s not reasonable for me to expect to live that long — or better said, to be able to draw on the necessary vitality to accomplish what you propose. I’m in mid-seventy-nine. I’ll ignore her again.

— That’s scarcely tenable.

Who makes the rules? It’s either that or collapse. He lives in two worlds, your client-friend Ira, the overt and covert, the inner and outer, the abysmal and the surface. Why not? Joyce divided himself into a flimsy Jew and an Irish super-intellectual. The one rarely stopped dwelling on his short arm, the other rarely stooped to dwell on it. He seemed immune to the prurient interest, but nevertheless, “before the play were played,” he frequented a whorehouse. From whence the sudden infusion of sensuality? Does anything better illustrate the artificiality of Joyce’s device, the cleaving in two of the person who was essentially one? And that individual was none other than Joyce himself. But however daring his innovations were, that innovation, that admission, he lacked the nerve to make. And therein lies what may be called the fatal flaw in the Ulysses. The guy masturbating at the sight of a seminaked limp leg, the guy shoving a carrot up his ass, the voyeur peeking up the statue’s hind end, the guy pseudo-suffering at the thought of his own cuckolding, but in all probability wishing he were there to behold the act, the guy polluting the liver, was Joyce himself. I’m not going to prolong my insights any further, beyond saying I think they’re apt and they’re honest. I’m so super-verbalist, super-designer of irrelevancies, super-scholastic. I’m just striving to restore one individual to himself. I’m not proclaiming that I go into the stithy or the smithy of the human soul for the thousandth time — and then recoiling at the threshold, as soon as he smelled the smother and stench of seared hooves, After you, M’sieu Bloom-Dedalus. . But why — I should refrain from asking, but can’t quit — did that sister of Jimmy’s who became a nun refuse to say a word about her renowned brother? “Answer me that, my Trinity scholard, out of your san-screed into our herian.” Beginning with the Pontiff Ellman, what all those erudite Jewish worshipers of the Master wouldn’t give to learn the answer to that one.

XII

Smugly he walked east on 119th Street toward Park Avenue, the recollected little spat of the other day summoning smirk to his lips. Oh, everything was under control nicely. He had even bought a fresh tin of brand-new ones that would obviate all caviling incurred by her suspicion of his parsimonious reuse. Trouble was he might have to wheedle again: wheedle, wheedle, little Yeedel. What a tempest’s in your needle? Hey, not bad: need, needle. Rotten bastard, Ira thought, you, you had to wake that bestial taloned talent in you. Perfidious, yeah, that would spread his predatory rut about her like a seine from which she couldn’t escape. And you know, the funny thing, pal, she said, “I love you so much, and you’re so lousy.” She loved him so much, and hee! Hee! He was so lousy. That’s why when it was right, just right, like the time before, once, then the dirty words suddenly stopped, and she, “Oooh, oooh, my dear brother, my dear brother!” It was, you know, the word flicked into his mind again: it was a snug enclave. Ha, ha, ha, ho, ho, ho. Robert Louis Stevenson, and his little shadow: he had a little enclave that went in and out with him. Little enclave in the family.

Was it his fault? He stole the silver fountain pen, yes, that was his fault, but this just happened, didn’t it? No one could blame him. He stole the silver fountain pen after this happened, didn’t he? Yes, yes. So? They swiped his briefcase, they swiped his fountain pens. Till next Sunday morning. . Go over to Mt. Morris Park, he thought, and get into a game of association football.

That was what he would do, he resolved: forget about the same thing, same thing, same thing. Skip upstairs, lay down briefcase. Hurry up, while it was still light. Dunk a bulkie in sweet café au layhee, and off to Mt. Morris Park. .

The approaching figure planted itself squarely in front of Ira. Spongy purple old overcoat, though it wasn’t cold, and face purplish as if it were cold. Who? Challenging and hard-bitten, the other addressed Ira, “You’re a lucky sonofabitch!”

“Oh! It’s you, Collingway.” Ira recognized his accoster as his fellow conductor of this past summer. But he looked so lean, hunched over with vindictiveness, different from the guy who had mingled semi-feigned asperity with advice when the two worked together on the Grand Concourse bus line.

“What’s yer name again?” the other asked.

“Stigman. Ira. You remember. You know what? I didn’t recognize you at first. You looked all—” Ira drew in his shoulders, as if shrunken.

“No? I reco’nized you all right. You’re the Jew-kid I had to tell to draw off a couple o’ bucks every day, so’s you wouldn’t make the rest of us look bad.”

The brunt of rancor in his voice, the flinty spite uttered sideways by the purple-writhing lips, made Ira cringe. Guilty, superstitious almost, guilty of enjoying good fortune, of being bestowed with a superior, enviable lot: keyn ayin-horeh, he could just hear Pop, or Mom too, say in Yiddish. Avert the evil eye! To be free of work, as he was, free of worry too, going to high school, while the other had to stand on the platform of a jouncing, beat-up bus — and soon to be winter — collecting fares, fretting over slow, decrepit passengers, and maybe like himself when he worked there, that awful time the boss’s car trailed and he thought he was caught, sure, always anxious for fear some spotter might nab him — no wonder the guy eyed him up and down so full of hate.

“Talk about luck,” Collingway continued. “Jesus, you got it by de shitload. You’ll never have to worry about nutt’n wit’ de kind o’ breaks you git.”

“You mean this?” Ira raised his briefcase apologetically. “You mean I’m goin’ to high school?”

“Shit, no! Jesus Christ!” Collingway rasped, wagged his head in utter disgust. “Jesus H. Christ! Don’t ye read the fuckin’ papers?”

“Yeah, once in a while.” Ira hesitated, perplexed.

“Once in a while?” The other’s countenance sprouted veritable quills of contempt. “What the fuck do ye read dere? De funnies? You see any buses runnin’ on Fift’ Avenue lately?”

“No. . gee, that’s right. I didn’t. So what happened? What did you do? You lose your job?”

Collingway could only vent his despair with a soughing sound. And finally, “Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch. I had to buy my way into dat fuckin’ job. What the hell chance have I got as old as I am? I had to buy my way in. An’ this punk—” he addressed an imaginary third party.

“So what happened?” Ira pleaded.

“Lose my job! Shit, that was nothin’. That goddamn bunch o’ crooks went bankrupt. Every goddamn one of us conductors lost his hundred bucks.”

“Your security!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, our security! Not a fuckin’ one of us got his hundred bucks back again!”

Ira whistled.

“Only you, you lucky sonofabitch, you quit in time.”

“I didn’t know it. I had to go back to school.”

The other shook his head in sheer bitterness. “Yeah, you can laugh, you lucky bastard.”

“I’m not laughing. I’m sorry,” Ira protested. Lucky Jew bastard would be next. Ira could hear it coming. Boy, would he like to remind the louse how much he stole from the bus company himself; maybe if he and the rest hadn’t stolen so much he’d still have a job. But he wasn’t going to get into an argument with that farbisener hint, as Mom would have called him. Angry dog, he looked like a wolf.

“Yeah. You’re sorry. In a pig’s ass you’re sorry.”

“I am. I gotta go.” With an arbitrary wave of the hand, Ira parted abruptly, before Collingway could say anything in opposition. “I’ll see you.”

Frig you. Ira felt resentment mount after he had distanced himself from the other by a few steps. Good for you, you bastard: you made someone else steal, a kid, who was scared to, scared because he had learned his lesson, made him steal, so the company wouldn’t notice your own gypping. To hell with you. Bet he made over a hundred dollars long ago. Way before the company went broke. So he had to buy his way into the job? So he was too old, he said. That didn’t mean Ira owed him the hundred dollars. That’s how he made Ira feel.

By the time he reached the stoop, the ironic absurdity of it all brought a grin to Ira’s face. These guys gypping the bus company, and then the bus company gypped them. But this guy, he deserved it. Just because somebody else got away, he blamed them. . Gee, that was lucky, though. . for a change. Maybe he was being lucky. That ten-dollar roll of quarters. Hey, and Pearl — but that turned lucky too: homely Theodora showed him how to put it in where it belonged. And he got Minnie to let him in, put it in that way. Don’t get to be like Pop: superstitious. His luck had changed before he went to Theodora. He got the ten-dollar roll from Mrs. Stevens first. Had nothing to do with talking to Pearl, with screwing Theodora. He got his hundred dollars security back before everything else, before he was even a hustler. So maybe he was just plain getting a little lucky for a change. Twice in one week. He might even be lucky right now. He had a new tin in his pocket. He’d tell her, Look, this time I’m not so excited.

Complacency with self changed to eagerness as he climbed up the stone stairs of the stoop.

After an unrewarding glance through the scrolled apertures of the dented brass letter box, he entered the long dreary hall, mounted the battered steps to the landing, weakly lighted by the window there that opened on the clutter of washpoles and fences of the neighboring backyard. Then up to the “first floor,” as the first flight was called, through the ever-crepuscular hallway — with its green dumbwaiter door nailed shut — to the kitchen door under clear afternoon transom light, with a few flecks of paint still adhering to the glass.

He opened the door into the kitchen. All seemed tranquil and customary in form and movement — reassuring: bobbed, steel-gray-haired Mom at the sink in black-figured fire-engine-red housedress, her puffy feet in faded felt mules. She was paring onions over the black sink. In the large wooden bowl on the washtub cover, freshly peeled onions imbued the atmosphere of the kitchen with their pungency.

“Ah, my precious Iraleh.” Mom bunched together light brown onion skin. “I wanted to go to the window to watch you come home.”

And his inane “Yeh? Here I am, Mom.”

“So I’ll work a minute longer. What’s new?”

“I’ll tell you right away. I’ll get my football shoes outta the bedroom.”

He passed Mom disposing of the onion skin in the metal garbage pail behind the silly little pink curtain that hung from the sink, masking cleaning implements and roach powder behind it. It was not the pink of the curtains that brought Pearl’s earrings to mind, at first, but the light tan onion skin, not only tan, translucent, smooth and lambent. Would he ever forget her? So beautiful. What would it have been like? Well, the prosperous man in the panama hat had her. Make shift, they said. So. . there was still Minnie. He got his football shoes from their shadowy cardboard carton at the end of the bed, tied the laces together in order to sling the shoes over his shoulder. He heard the kitchen door open, Minnie’s voice, Mom’s exchanging greetings. So she had just come home from school, too. He returned to the lighted kitchen.

Her bulging leather book satchel already on the table, she was slipping out of her blue overcoat when he came in. In white middie blouse with blue ribbon about collar, she bent her bobbed, wavy red hair to open the satchel. Her brow was furrowed for some reason, fretting over annoyance of some kind, her greeting was sour. “Hello. Where you going?”

“Going for a little football.”

“Where? In Mt. Morris Park?”

“Yeah. Whatsa matter? You look—” He left the rest unsaid.

“Oh.” She allowed a long dissatisfied pause. “That Latin. You’re lucky you don’t have to take it.”

“I couldn’t anyway. I could only take Spanish.”

“Wish I never took it. But at Hunter College, if you’re gonna teach. .”

“I wonder why?”

“Why what? Why do you think? It’s so hard. And you can’t help.”

“No. I didn’t mean that. Why do you have to take it?”

“I told you. If you’re gonna teach.”

“Oh.”

“And you’re such a big helper.”

“Well, I didn’t take it.”

She folded her coat, brushed by him on the way to the bedroom closet. Boy. He watched her leave the kitchen. Boy. He’d better go, catch the last of the daylight, but couldn’t: something unusually stiff about her. He hesitated.

“My poor daughter,” said Mom. “S’iz azoy shver.”

“Yeah.”

“A little light coffee and a bulkie?”

“No. I better run. It gets dark so fast.” Still, he lingered. Something, something. . uneven. . worrisome. . what?

Returning, Minnie was careful to circle about him, sat down on a chair. “I gotta begin studying right away.” She pulled her Latin text out of the satchel on the table. “We’re gonna get a test tomorrow on all the conjugations of the four kinds of verbs. Four kinds yet.”

“Yeah? You look like you’re really gonna study,” he probed.

“What d’you think?” She opened her textbook. “My teacher is Miss Robin. An old maid, and is she a meshugener? You never know what she’ll ask you. She says she’ll give you a test on all the verbs. So you study all the verbs. Instead she’ll give you a whole page to translate. Everybody thinks she’s crazy.”

“A little light coffee with a bulkie, my daughter?” Mom suggested. “You look as if your little heart needed cheering up.”

“Oh, I’m — no — oh, all right. A real light coffee.”

“And a little something to dunk in it?”

“You got any of that rugeleh left?”

“Indeed. Good. Good. It’s going to go stale.”

“I like it that way. Just right for dunkin’.” She began poring over the open page.

Ira studied her for a minute. Was she really peeved, and over what? Offish. The Latin test, and his inability to help. Fortunate. Yes, fortunately he didn’t take Latin, so he always had an excuse for not helping her — but it was a double-edged excuse — his mind complacently impinged pros on cons — because he couldn’t exact a promise of opportune recompense for helping her, as he had done at times in other subjects in the past. . But he was getting the real thing now, so was she; so it didn’t matter so much. Still, he wished he had studied Latin, as she was doing now, because he might have got a few more dividends that way. What the hell: he was forever correcting things in retrospect. And yet such little things made such a big difference. That lousy junior high he attended, and that fag Mr. Lennard’s half-assed teaching of Spanish. If he’d gone to DeWitt Clinton from the beginning, he probably would have taken Latin. For someone taking a “general course” to prepare for college, Latin would have been right. And there she was struggling with it. Boy. To have taken a look at her textbook, even now, and said — right in front of Mom — with that faint ulterior slur, You need some help? And when she said yes, how innocently he could have rejoined, with tutorial-level voice: Okay. But don’t forget. You owe me a favor. What delicious dirty double-meaning. Amo, amas, amat, he had heard her repeat in the beginning. He should have tried to catch up with her. And then — he could have softened her up, mollified her with a little help — what a cinch, right? Yeah, right now, siphoned off her annoyance with him — why? What for? Oh, of course: because of that last time, what else? Just on account of his coming too fast?

He hitched his football shoes over his shoulder. Boy, they were dandies, with a hard toe for getting off a good punt, and cleats that clawed the ground for abrupt stops and shifts. He stretched his hand out to turn the doorknob, then remembered — just as Mom was opening the kitchen window to get the milk bottle out of the window box cooler. Maybe spending an extra minute regaling her might cheer her up. And at the same time, he’d gain Mom’s congratulation for his cleverness and his good mazel by relating briefly the encounter with the ex-fellow conductor cheated by the bus company of his hundred dollars.

“Azoy?” Mom paused with hand on the bedroom doorknob, smiling as he sharpened the point of the anecdote: that this guy was the worst goniff in the place. “One moment. Mineleh, I’ll get the milk.”

Mom laughed when he finished his account. But Minnie never lifted her head. Boy, she was still sore. Or was it more than he thought? Something significant? Mom lingered while Ira lingered, and Ira lingered because Minnie’s frown was threatening and impenetrable.

“So why don’tcha go?” Minnie invited disagreeably.

“Whatsa matter with you?” Ira answered in kind.

“Kinderlekh,” Mom admonished. “What for? Akh. At once you begin to feud.” She laughed in spite of herself. “I’ll fetch a bit of health, Mineleh.” She blinked in the direction of the chopped onions in the wooden bowl on the washtub. “I’ll clear my eyes by leaning out of the window and watching my shining son leave.” She made for the bedroom and, trailing her inveterate sigh, shut the door behind her.

Must be some reason Minnie glowered so. Ira waited, waited for the most favorable interval: between the sound of Mom’s heavy tread and the estimated time for her to reach the front-room window. “Whatsa matter?” Blunt inquiry was safe. He heard the front-room window open.

“Shut up. Nothing.”

“I gotta go. What? Just because that once?”

Sidelong, her eyeglass-darkened girlish features scowled in contempt, her girlish voice fraught with resentment. “No. Who cares about that? I didn’t get my period yet. I’m three days late.”

Let the ceiling fall, the house cave in on him, for him that would be no fearful dread — compared to this, to which all he could say — dazedly — was: “You didn’t?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Whatta you mean I’m sure?”

“Jesus.” In stunned silence he stood; the whole world plunged to smithereens about him. “I gotta go. Mom’s by the window.”

“So go ahead. You wanted to know. I told you. Maybe I shouldn’t.” Suddenly she didn’t sound mean at all, no, but surprisingly, almost solicitously, deeply troubled. “Go ahead. It’s nothing.”

“Gee, I hope not. You been late like that before?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s nothing, I told you.”

“Three days?”

“Go ahead. Mom’ll be wondering why she doesn’t see you.”

“All right. Jesus.” He went out into the hall. With dragging step to the landing, with spiritless tread down the stairs, his football shoes an unwelcome burden over his shoulder. Out of the house doorway, down stone stoop, he forced an unwilling countenance into dissembling. Hard as hell to writhe adamant visage from its grim set, as if pressing against opposing steel springs, forcing recalcitrant wedges to prop up fear-stricken features into a blithe mask that looked up from the sidewalk, looked up at Mom’s fleshy, fond face looking down, saying in Yiddish, “Have a good run. Only don’t forget supper. The sire will be home.”

“Yeah, I know. It gets dark anyway, Mom — before.” He raised his voice, but could scarcely lift his eyes to her projecting face more than once. “I’ll be home, Mom. Don’t worry. All right?”

“Oy, s’iz git kalt.” The window overhead slid with slight thud to its sill.

“Oh, Jesus. On the sidewalk, and in the street, the kids, a few pedestrians, and across the street, just then climbing the stoop of one of the twin red-brick tenements where Davey Baer and his family still lived, was Mrs. McIntyre, dos tseyndl, Mom dubbed her, in charity, not derision, the little fang, because Mrs. McIntyre had only one front tooth; so prominent when she smiled. And she loved Mom, as so many of the neighborhood goyish women did, despite her faltering English. Mrs. McIntyre literally beamed, brightened, with pleasure when she talked with Mom, as if talking to Mom were a joy, an honor. But oh, Mom, what your son’s got himself into. Or did you, Mom? A noble woman, Zaida called her. So don’t blame her. Only yourself. Boyoboy. He drove himself to stride with enforced alacrity toward the everlasting trestle on Park Avenue.

Everlasting trestle. Everlasting shadow under it. . often agreeable, relished in hot weather, not now. Into shadow under overarching steel; and out of shadow into abating light of afternoon. . crossing to the west curb, hoofing toward Madison Avenue, each step more dispirited. Right here, in midblock, Collingway had accosted him. Yeah, lucky bastard, yeah. The goy gave him a gitoik, Pop would have said: the evil eye. Keyn ayin-horeh, Ira should have said to himself: avert the evil eye. Been superstitious like Pop. Mazel. Jesus Christ, how lucky he thought he was. Boy, he would rather have lost that hundred bucks. . a hundred times over, if he had it to lose, than be in this fix. A hundred, hundred, hundred times over. Ten thousand, ten thousand, ten thousand times over. So Pop would have torn him into little bits, when he came home without the security.

But what was that to this? Three days late, she said. Three days! She said it was nothing. So don’t worry — if she said it was nothing, so it was nothing. Jesus, he shouldn’t have washed that condom. Washed it and reused it. Been a cheapskate, like Pop. Oh, no, Jesus no. And it looked all right afterward, dried, turned inside out, rolled up, looked as good as that first time, when she said it was so wonderful. Maybe it split. Maybe that’s why he felt something different when he came. Oh, Jesus, warmer, delightful, moister all of a sudden. Maybe that was why he came so soon. A dillar, a dollar, a ten-o’clock scholar. .

Why had he met Pearl, gone to Theodora? His luck. All right, don’t be like Pop. Luck. Brains. Why didn’t he keep on going to Theodora? He knew the address, how to get there, and how much. And it was safe. And no trouble, nothing happened. He just said goodbye, walked back to the subway. Two stations downtown and good old 116th Street. And he could have bought his own condoms next time, instead of hers: the extra quarter could have bought two. So he knew the ropes now; why didn’t he go? Because he was a cheapskate, like Pop. Why did he have to hump his sister? Because he got started doing it. Then why didn’t he do it the way he used to do it before? Sandwiched it, the way it tickled her, the way that wouldn’t let him go in. He never worried when he used to do it that way. Oh, shut up, shut up, shut up. Oh, if it ever—

He reached Madison Avenue, turned toward 120th and the corner of Mt. Morris Park. Oh, Jesus. He didn’t want to play football. Association, or any kind. You gotta. Forget it. You gotta forget, you gotta forget, you gotta forget this morning, you gotta forget, you gotta forget today. Taps. No, no, dummy, that wasn’t taps; that was reveille. March on. March on. Sing the Marseillaise.

Ahead of him in the brown, bare playground in the park he could see and hear the cry and chase of a touch football game. Boy, to be like them. Shut up. Grab a bench and get your cleats on. It’s nothing, she said.

“Hey, fellas. How about a game?” he called as soon as he passed through the 120th Street entrance.

“Hey, Irey, c’mon. You’re on our side. Hey, Ginsburg, here’s somebody else. You can play now.”

Ira had become too closely identified with his narrative, and not merely with that, but with the impasse he had reached by this re-creation of his sister into the narrative. He worried that he could only examine his own mind, however deranged, and not hers. How did she feel? How had this depravity affected her? He felt he was incapable of such comprehension. He had no answers, none at all. He thought perhaps he saw a glimmer of a solution by reverting to the role which he had adopted for himself at the beginning of the novel: that of amanuensis — no, rather that of editor of his own first draft.

Yet, the present suddenly erupted into frightful events, frightful atrocities wrought by lunatic fanatics. The so-called black box lay at the bottom of the sea that might explain the circumstances of the explosion that sent three hundred and more human beings, passengers in the Air India jumbo jet, together with the aircraft, to their destruction. The Sikhs were thought to be the perpetrators. . Dragging on into a second week, the Shiite Moslems in Beirut held some forty Americans hostage, and demanded that Israel redeem them by the release of seven hundred Shiite prisoners (and some of the hostages had Jewish-sounding names, according to the dispatches). . A horrendous plot by Irish terrorists to blow up summer and seaside resorts had been foiled. . In Japan, a bomb had exploded in the luggage destined to be loaded aboard another Air India plane, and several baggage handlers were killed. What else? Where else? Everywhere else. Planes in flight returned to the airports of departure because of false rumors that explosives were aboard. In all the media, talk of safeguards to be taken, actions to be avoided, reaction, and overreaction.

And to add mordancy to it all, one of his and M’s friends showed up unannounced, for the nth time, despite the fact that Ira and M had asked the ineffable jackanapes to phone before he called in person. Would he? By no means. He was not to be dictated to. Ira had retired to his study, after slamming the door. Worst of it was, that locked in as he was, M had thought his ire extended to her, because he had refused to answer her knock, thinking it to be the insufferable boor he was excluding, and what with the noisy evaporative cooler churning away in his study, Ira hadn’t heard her voice.

His poor lamb, become upset, by him! But honestly, could anyone imagine such boundless boorishness that would deliberately refuse to telephone before calling, even though repeatedly asked! And to barge in just as Ira wrote the last lines trying to portray, trying to recapture, the fearful panic he had gotten into at Minnie’s disclosure, the onset of those disastrous depredations the predator was to wreak on himself!

Result of this all was, he had been unable to fall asleep that night — not until he took a Valium. He had sat up two or three hours, then he became worried that if he sat up any longer, he might have another attack of “adrenaline failure,” the shock of adrenaline insufficiency that he had suffered a few months ago. It had necessitated his being taken by ambulance to the hospital, and spending a couple of days there. To obviate that, he took the tranquilizer.

And he awoke the next morning — a wreck. Well. But it had been while he was lying sleepless beside M, fast asleep, that something like an illumination blossomed within him, something like a whisper of grace, a dispensation that would enable him to go on through this slough of his past. It was to turn for respite to M’s love for him — that’s what he lived for; that was the meaning and mainstay of his life. At last, yes, that such as he, intolerable egoist, had learned that more important than his writing (whether it would eventually be deemed significant or not) was the showing, the activity, of his love for her. All else was subordinate. The miracle was that he should conceivably have reached that stage. He couldn’t sleep, no, but the epiphany consoled insomnia. Jane Eyre, Lizzy Bennet of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which he had almost finished reading, hovered over the sleeping figure beside him, his wife. She was as good, as gentle, as well-bred, faithful, loving, wise as they, and courageous and competent and gifted beyond them.

And he a Jew, apology of a Jew, apology of a man, redeemed by her. What was that other notion floating about, muddled as usual? That as Hitler had destroyed the core of Orthodox Jewry, its vital, fertile nucleus proliferating in Eastern Europe, then what was left of Orthodoxy outside Israel, except for the fossilized kinkies, flaunting their earlocks and fur shtramls? Only the diluted remnant of rabbinical Jewry here in America. By assimilation, by intermarriage, by deliberately reduced fecundity, the remnant would painlessly disappear, except for the professional practitioners, the rabbis, watching their flocks dwindle. As in a vision, he saw the far-flung Diasporas wither, the boundaries of each, even that of the Soviet Union, surviving despite policies of attrition, nevertheless in the end contracting like a stagnant pool. Only in Israel could Judaism thrive, only in its own land survive and evolve.

XIII

The hours and days, whole days! went by, an ache, a woe, the hours stretching Ira on the rack of days, howling in silence in ever-growing anguish. Back home from school in the afternoon, in the earlier and still earlier darkening afternoon of the kitchen, the ebbing of daylight, the obscurity of the room became a sinister setting for the single window on the backyard, became the repository of his anguish: the washline pole opposite the window, the spiked footholds in the rising gray mist, the washlines on their pulleys drawn in different directions — the little house next to them, only two stories high, where Leo Dugonicz had once lived, and before him the Italian barber and his family. And across the fenced yard, Yussel’s gloomy, massy, six-story, cold-water fortress on the corner. Every scrap of deprivation and poverty became a bit of congealed, of concealed anguish. To all his agonized inquiries, no, no, and again, no, was all the answer he received. She hadn’t got her period. No. Nights he could put himself asleep only by summoning up behind his eyelids the façade of the Metropolitan Museum, to which even from his ninth year, he had hiked. . hiked, hiked alone, and with Jake Shapiro, all the way from grubby 119th Street and Park Avenue to the corner of Central Park, the pond and rowboats on it and across the pond the granite outcrop rising to a summit of shrubs and trees. All familiar. And then the walk, the long, lovely excursion along Fifth Avenue until the corner of the Museum building. Could he remember the steps, the broad steps leading up to the great wings of the stone facade on either side? How many steps? And the doors? And the famous names above the doors, and the tubular brass turnstiles inside the wide marble anteroom, and the guards in blue uniforms on duty? That was easy to summon up. And the lofty, lavish, palatial interior, all around majestic and light. But what was the first thing you saw after you were inside? The first thing that met your wandering gaze was the tapestries, the Gobelin tapestries on the high matched marble walls, with all kinds of Biblical scenes, was that it? Turbaned rulers and martyrs, armored soldiers with spears and ladies in costumes of long ago. Remember? That statue of Good and Evil, big as could be, that stood beside the marble stairs: he was standing on her, you thought, at first; but it was he standing on him. Both the same; so it looked like a fight, a wrestling match, evil overthrown and on the ground, always evil overthrown and on the ground, except Ira. So now he’d have to pay for it, as he did for the lost briefcase, as he did for the swiped silver fountain pen — but Ira didn’t for that roll of quarters he copped, and he didn’t with scrawny Theodora in that stuffy room showing him how he could go in for two dollars and a quarter. How did he know he wasn’t paying for going to Theodora now? She showing him how, and he’s paying for it now. Didn’t she giggle when he started to do it the wrong way? He said, nearly ashamed, “That’s the way I started with my”—and stopped himself in time—“my first one.”

Go up the marble stairs then, Ira dreamed — ah, the way those marble stairs whisper under your shoe soles, s-s-s-sh. And the wide pale marble balustrades slide beneath your palms. Wonder, is that alabaster, what they call? Oh, Jesus, it wasn’t even so good that time; it wasn’t even so good. Shut up. What’s the first thing you see? That new Hercules, Herakles, they call him, over the marble railing on the first flight, with one foot against the boulder pulling back the bow? He might see that first. But if he didn’t, then on top of the stairs is that Madonna in blue with the little Jesus. That’s Mary. Goyish. Ira looked away at first, but then read the name on the fancy gold frame: Raphael. Oh, Raphael, Ira knew him. Then. . Then. . Then. . There’s that deep deep, first deep breath. .

During waking hours at home, plane geometry sustained him, majestic plane geometry, assuaging plane geometry, the only entire, pure world, only entire, pure world that offered him unquestioning sanctuary, benign, set before him a problem or a proposition, shared with him his rapture that the solution should be so inevitable, so wondrously spare and immaculate — and so ingenious, even dazzling sometimes. Who would have dreamed that the angle between two tangents or two secants drawn from a point outside the circle would equal half the difference of the intercepted arcs? How could it be? Why should it be? And yet it was. Such a beautiful world whose parts all fit together. Even if a proof stumped you, as long as you knew there was one, you could prove it finally, because for once you knew how a world, a system, went together. He exulted because he excelled in class, at recitations, at the blackboard. His grades in plane geometry were perfect — to the detriment of his other schoolwork, which he did perfunctorily, just to do it. No other subjects had the force to hold at bay the horrible fate, the horrible demon every hour closer to exacting its toll. His fear penetrated everything else, slipped through English or Spanish or history, as if the print were pores, a filter, a grille. She still didn’t get her period. She still didn’t get it.

Days. He couldn’t tell when, how late, how long after, maybe three after she first told him, there came a day when he knew he had reached his limit, the limit of his endurance. When she said no, he knew. He had entered the screaming phase, not a phase, a nightmare universe; he had entered the realm of the unendurable. When she said no, the modes of the world no longer held sway, the behavior, the accepted strands of common sense, the sensible aspect of things, their causes and acts no longer dictated, no longer ruled or applied, became flaccid. When she said no, he felt as if certain ligaments had given way within him, mind-ligaments, as if in a certain place within his brain they parted, like fibers, fraying under the strain. They would never come back, reverse to their original soundness, never wholly mend. He could feel their sickening twisting irrevocably writhing out of place. Or wilting? So what should he do? Kill her. If he killed her, that would be an end. Kill her. How? Choke. Hit. Stab. A big rock. Push her out of the window. Maybe best. But kill. That was the word, the name of the loathsome shape spawned out of the terrible, irreparable rending within him. He was a murderer. He could murder. He could plan: how, when to kill; but kill. She was killing him, kill her. . But wait, wait: one more assignment. Wait. No, it wouldn’t help, it couldn’t prevail over his anguish. But wait, wait. He’d do only the problems he pleased, the starred ones; the hell with the assignment, do only the starred ones, ill-starred, do just those, the hard ones—

Balefulness impeded the hand that reached for the textbook, Wentworth’s Plane Geometry; ferocity strove with him as he drew the book toward him. They were the winners, the starred examples. What was the problem in that thin shrieking madness, what was given? Given. Given. The figure in the text, always so friendly, so laden with sly challenge within its wily frame; the figure lay dead. Mom stood with broad back toward him at the sink. Lethe. Last bliss. Straight lines intersecting on nepenthe.

He heard Minnie come in from the bedroom. He looked up, not in hope, in last despairing corroboration of despair. But no, something was different about her demeanor. Altogether. Unmistakable. An emanation, a ripple of promise, contrary to the expected negation. She smiled at him, and nodded. He gaped for confirmation: aimed his unremitting stare at her, mimed in silent entreaty behind Mom’s back. All right?

And received nods, several, unmistakable, emphatic. She made for the bathroom.

Glory. Oh! Oh! Oh! Beatitude! But he couldn’t rest. He had to know: certainly, positively, explicitly, absolutely. She had to tell him. Tell him, tell him. He waited for her to come out of the bathroom. What could he say or ask? Something that was neutral, something that Mom never could possibly suspect. What? “Okay? Your homework?”

“Everything’s okay,” she replied shortly.

And still not satisfied, he glanced at Mom, and dared, his eyes intransigent, sounding Minnie’s face, her features, his own lips like grapnels importunate to engage her in reconfirmation formed noiseless words, “Got your period?”

Impatiently and with vehement nod, “Yes!”

Oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy! Every nerve in him sang hallelujah! He couldn’t stay in the house. He had to get out, get out and prance, tear through the streets, hug himself and rejoice, yell crazy anthems without meaning. Jesus Christ, what a break! He stood up, fairly sprang toward the bedroom, announcing, “I’m going down.” He grabbed his jacket from the bedroom coat tree.

“Where are you going?” What could Mom guess?

“Down. Around the block. No place.”

“And the coat. It’s cold — soon as it’s dark.”

“Nah. I’ll be right back.”

“You want to do me a favor, since you’re coming back soon?”

“Sure. Sure.” Ira was all heartiness, all willingness. “I’ll buy a kosher elephant. What d’you want?”

“Go, ninny.” She smiled. “I’ll give you the money. He knows me, the dairy storekeeper around the corner. If he has cracked eggs, no matter how many he has, let it be a dozen. Tell him I was in his store this morning, and he didn’t have them.”

“Okay. Cracked eggs, a dutsin, a dutsin, a wild, woolly mutsin. Hutsin, clyutsin, shmutsin, abutsin.” He shifted weight from foot to foot in impromptu jig. “Let’s go, Mom. It’s nearly a half dutsin o’clocko—makh shnel!”

“What’s got into you? The boy is mad,” Mom said with tentative amusement.

He cocked an eye, postured zanily. “I just made a wonderful discovery. Wunderbar.”

“He’s crazy,” Minnie censured with unfeigned disapproval.

“Nar.” Mom tendered him a quarter. “Don’t forget. He knows me, Mrs. Stigman, tell him: the lady from 119th Street, he always saves the cracked eggs for—oy, gevald, bist takeh meshigeh!”

In one motion, Ira snatched the quarter from her hand and threw open the kitchen door. “Adee-ee — you.” An instant later he was out in the hall.

Though he strode, strode as rapidly as he could through the darkening street, in spirit, he leaped, he capered — no wonder they said “high spirits.” “Ta-ra, ta-ra”—he broke his silence from time to time with low outcry. But he wished he could bellow, trumpet, blare out his relief. No, never again, not e’er again, no ne’er again. He’d throw the goddamn condoms away. Blow ’em up into big balloons till they burst. Pretty bubbles in the air. No, sir, he wouldn’t throw them away either. He’d go to Theodora again. He knew the way. The price. Yes, yes, yes. Or somebody else. Maybe better-looking. Oh yeah, yeah, forgot. You goddamn liar. Oh, boy, oh, boy, was he ever made of — iridescence was the word: efflorescence, concupiscence. Hah, ha, ha. Effervescence. Boyoboy! What other essences were there? He was it, he was all of ’em. Gossamer. Downy little flames overlapped into plumed vanes beating in splendor. Gee whiz, the way the words spouted up inside you! Was it gossamer from Coleridge? Jeez, it was a Life-in-Death before, though, wasn’t it? Jeez, only two people knew about it, he and Minnie. Not like some guy laid some bimbo, all a-blabber: hey, you ought to see that broad I laid last night, and maybe he was a lotta bull. And maybe he wasn’t. But for him, Ira, silence. Silence. There was no brag, no parading, nothing but shame. Genie in a vase. Pandora’s box. His sister’s box! Can you imagine bragging about that? Jesus, it almost made him shut his eyes in the enormous twinge the very thought caused him. Hey, fellers, I thought I knocked up my sister! Was I scared. Boyoboy. Holy Jesus Christ, of all the things he had ever heard those guys say: pratt and blow and lap and go down on it, back scuttle, and every other goddamn thing he once believed was just make-believe, but even if it was true, nobody ever said I laid my sister. Yeah, the Italian kids said, aw, yer mudder’s ass, yer sister’s cunt — but what was that compared to: my sister’s cunt?

Subsiding slowly to the level of self, he turned at Madison toward the park. Sure, they were still playing football in the very last light of dusk. He could see and hear them when he got there. But he didn’t need football, didn’t feel like it; last thing he felt like was to get off a punt. No shoes, anyway. But no urge to, he meant. Gee. He’d walk around the park once; that would calm him down still further. Walk by all the places he knew, past the Eye and Ear Hospital, around the corner of 124th Street, where he used to leave the park behind on his way to P.S. 124 further uptown on Madison Avenue. Or to Farley’s house, also on Madison. God, he couldn’t even tell him; he couldn’t tell Farley, his best friend once, Ira couldn’t tell anybody.

And then west alongside the park, and past the gray library so many, many times ago. And then the brownstones on the same street where he had delivered groceries for P&T. And then around Mt. Morris Park West where the small apartment houses stood that he liked to walk up to, with his box of groceries under his arm, while Shea guarded the Model T. Which one was that house, he wondered, which one? Where you went in the back, and there was a service elevator you could operate yourself with a cable — like a real elevator man: you remember what a trick it was to get the elevator platform just even with the apartment house floor? Jiggle up an inch — too far. And down again — o-o-ps. What fun. What bigger fun, if he wasn’t already doing bad, doing bad, yes, kid-word: doing bad with Minnie when she had only a small round white ass, like a penny balloon. Penny balloon, but it was big as a cloud in his mind, already casting an encompassing shadow. Still, it was only that, only a shadow then, not this scare, murder, murder, kill her.

Stop!

120th Street. Walking east. The nearer to Madison Avenue, the grubbier 120th became. Yes, but they had hot water, they had steam heat just the same — two people could take two bathtubs full. No wonder. To the car tracks on Madison Avenue, and the corner of Mt. Morris Park, and the beginning again. Getting too dark for football. The players had quit. Twilight-empty, quiet, the playground. So back to 119th Street. And drab, darkling way home. Elation had completely worn off. Something remained now, as if exposed: not just the self, the familiar self, as his had been, before, as he had been before. No. He could have killed her, he, Ira Stigman, the coward, he could have killed his sister; that’s how torn he was inside. And he felt that way still: the separation, the twist. A sorrow had dislodged something in him. He had worried too far: like prying apart something that wouldn’t come together again, wouldn’t come together right, had left a weakness, a chronic vulnerability to unhappiness. Nah, it would go away. It was like any other tear or rip or something like that within the self. It would heal; he’d get over it. No, he wouldn’t, that was the trouble. No, even that cheese knife with which he had cut himself left a white scar on his thumb. This one was dark. Odd, how you could feel your worry twist, wrench, and wouldn’t let go. What was it like? Clockworks did that, when he opened the Big Ben that had stopped running. A toothed wheel caught each second, each time further, further. Something broke. Or snapped. Or. .

“Noo,” said Mom, “the cracked eggs?” when he entered the kitchen.

“All right, I’ll go right now!” He retreated hastily.

“Never mind. Give me the quarter back. I’ll go there myself tomorrow. You have a head like my wooden chopping bowl.”

“That’s right,” Minnie seconded. “He’s got a head like a tack, my darling brother.”

XIV

In the spring term of his junior year, beginning in the winter of 1923, there moved into the six-story pile of an apartment house above Biolov’s drugstore on the corner of 119th Street and Park Avenue (exactly opposite Yussel’s drab fortress) one Bob S and his divorced mother. Bob and Ira soon recognized each other as fellow students at DeWitt Clinton. Bob was a senior, scheduled to graduate a year ahead of Ira. Jewish, purposeful, self-confident, above average height, with black straight hair parted precisely in the middle, he wore “shell-rimmed” glasses on the bridge of a pointed nose, reminiscent of his soda-hustler boss Benny Lass, and, of course, of Harold Lloyd. Bob was unusually quick mentally, acute; he ranked high academically, was involved in high school politics, a member of the debating team, and of Arista too, the high school honor society. Bob’s goal, preset and undeviating, all but preenacted, was to become a lawyer. That too found Ira less than enthusiastic: he had worked in a law office once, and once was enough.

But the two did live in the same street, if only for a short while. They did take the same train after school — and before school. They became acquainted, willy-nilly, on Ira’s part, for lack of a more companionable friend, one not so interested in school elections for student offices, in the school newspaper, not so pat about his future. But in the course of acquaintance, Ira learned something else about his new friend, something that interested him, intrigued him, in fact: Bob was on the DeWitt Clinton rifle team.

Ira loved rifles. He had never had anything to do with a real firearm, only that Daisy BB gun of years ago, which he had trusted, so hopefully and so childishly, would eliminate the rats down in the airshaft, and had proved such a debacle when put to the test. Naturally, Ira told Bob about the air rifle, entertained Bob with accounts of his disappointments and mini-fiascos connected with the air rifle. And perhaps Ira may have mentioned the few times he had splurged a quarter in the penny arcade on East 125th Street, where in addition to other diversions, such as life-size fortune-telling Gypsy puppets and electric-shock handlebars, there was also a shooting gallery, where you got ten.22 Shorts for your two bits, a wild extravagance, and could plink away at either stationary bull’s-eyes that rang when struck or gliding iron-clad ducks that obediently bowled over when plunked. Yes, Ira very much liked rifles.

It wasn’t very long before Bob invited Ira into the “cage.” It occupied a corner of the gym, and a cage it quite literally was: a small space completely enclosed with very heavy fencing wire. Its gate was of the same material and could only be opened with a key, which only team members possessed. Inside the cage, a.22 target rifle, of regulation weight and size, hung suspended from a sensitive metal arm or spar. The actual target was on the other side of the gym floor, about twenty-five yards away, but aligned with it inside the cage was a tiny target the size of a calling card in front of the needlelike pointer. When the trigger was pulled, the pointer impacted on the card, leaving a pinprick in the miniature target ring corresponding to the spot the actual bullet would have struck the real target twenty-five yards distant across the gym.

Bob fired four or five “shots” by way of demonstration, and exhibited the group of pinholes in the little card. He suggested that Ira try his hand at the contrivance too. He did. Although Ira knew that his training, if it could be called that, consisted mainly of endeavoring to exterminate rats down in the airshaft with a Daisy air rifle, still, the experience had taught him something, if only intuitively: to hold his breath while aiming, to aim by holding the knife-edge front sight under the target and within the center of the V of the rear sight. And following his own previous practice, Ira aimed and fired. He scored a bull’s-eye, a pinprick in the ten-ring. But could he have still been thinking of Minnie, before the reassuring discovery, before the disclosure that had saved his life? And then the next four shot were grouped close by.

Bob was elated. To have discovered a promising rookie in such unpromising circumstances, a lackadaisical, myopic denizen of a cold-water flat on slummy 119th Street — that was abundant cause for congratulation! Moreover, Bob, who was team manager, was due to graduate from DeWitt Clinton this summer, as was the team captain and another two seasoned veterans of the team. It was imperative that adequate replacements be found as soon as possible. Bob kept the miniature target card to show to the team captain. On the strength of Ira’s performance with the mock.22, he was invited to show what he could do with a real firearm, one that fired live ammunition. He accompanied the team to the downtown armory in whose tunneled basement the firing range was located. No faculty adviser accompanied them. The team seemed to be completely on its own — as if part of a confraternity of others on the firing range: men in plain clothes, men in army uniforms, in police uniforms, men who fired revolvers and automatic pistols in nearby shooting ranges.

Ira was given a half-dozen.22 Long Rifle cartridges to fire — at the regulation target, with a ten-ring the size of a dime, and at the regulation distance, twenty-five yards — and he fired two rounds prone, two kneeling, and two offhand. His score was sufficiently impressive so that he was inducted as a permanent alternate member of the team, a substitute.

Weekly practice sessions followed in the basement of the armory. His scores fluctuated from commendable to mediocre. .

His scores did, did they? Ira drifted off in tangential reverie. Didn’t your performance depend more and more on where you stood, in what quarter of mood and moon you stood, in comparative repose or frantic agitation, after fitful sleep or sound one? He shrugged at himself: who the hell could correlate the one with the other? Only that there were the two planes the adolescent was living on: the wholesome overt, the abysmal hidden. What terrible torsion — or distortion — the two wrought between them, alternately, a charged field or an inert one: between plates of a condenser, between leaves of a Leyden jar — Leyden, yes, leydn in Yiddish meant suffering.

Ira suffered after the taboo — in spite of all, frenzied with wild accessions of desire because of the taboo, infusing him with vile ecstasy. It affected even Minnie, despite her previous disavowals; her demurrals gave way, moaned into surrenders. He suborned her, subverted her. Ah, better than in Pop and Mom’s bed on a Sunday morning were those rare, swift, hurried minutes of unexpected afternoon furor, when they were alone together. Those green, blistery kitchen walls visibly swayed with frantic evil, triggered by her passion’s fierce onslaught—“So all right, come on.” Oh, that trailing at her heels to the bedroom, rolling on two condoms to assure her, a quarter’s worth at once! Ecstasy of the iniquitous. Double condom coupling, yeah, to slow him down, be safe, sure, but pump that “o-oh, my darling brother” out of her. .

Double-sheathed, but he was safe. He was safe, and she was safe. Still he worried, couldn’t help it — even if she was only a day late, couldn’t help it. Balance the wild ecstasy with wild panic: immediately the rift within him widened. Common sense was impotent against it. Fuckin’ your own sister, fuckin’ your own sister — he couldn’t say it to himself any other way. Boy, if she got a big belly, boy, if she got a big belly, a bouncing baby boy, if she got a big belly. Some joke! And again and again, he would think: try to reflect, conjure away his cage, like the rifle cage down in the gym, yeah, cage and rifle: he saw the connection: why, that slum kid on the high school rifle team, by himself, unperverted — had it only been by himself as he was supposed to be, might have been, would have been nothing but another example of the happy success story that America stood for. Here he was, ex-immigrant Jewish kid mingling with regular and mostly non-Jewish Americans: Bonnar with his bewitching Southern accent, and of course Billy Green wrinkling his nub of a nose, immune to be coming rattled, incapable of losing his temper. He was the son of an engineer. Corey Valens was the son of a judge. What well-bred, gentile, tolerant teammates they were: friends, decent, yes, normal, levelheaded — that was the word — well. . actually it was the fact that they were normal that made his awareness of the hideous torque within him, his deviation, all the more unbearable. .

Supposing none of this, no return to high school after that first disaster, the expulsion from Stuyvesant, just menial, ordinary non-skilled or semiskilled work, being part of the mass, then what? Probably that would have forestalled the other. Or if not, and yet only too likely, given the amorphous lump he was — become the sloven loafer — what then? Outcast, sooner or later, depraved, since he had the propensity. Perhaps dragging Minnie with him, having knocked her up. Awful to think about — made the saliva, full to brimming the well of his mouth, too unpalatable to swallow. .

The team’s first match since Ira’s joining them was against the rifle team of Morris High in the Bronx. And who but the best marksman of the team, Granshaw himself, a senior, rocky, aggressive, relentless-eyed Granshaw, was unable to attend. As permanent alternate, Ira was called on to take the other’s place. It was an afternoon when he felt easy, and he had reason to, his mind free of anxiety, a Friday afternoon when he felt free, felt all but negligent, with a weekend beginning. He fired the required number of rounds in the compulsory positions. And the result? The DeWitt Clinton High School newspaper ran a banner headline on its front page next week:

ROOKIE RIFLEMAN RACKS UP SENSATIONAL SCORE!

And below the headline, the subheadline:

IRA STIGMAN SCORES HIGHEST IN TEAM.

And in the text below, the first paragraph began:

Leading the DeWitt Clinton marksmen to a crushing defeat over Morris High in their invitational match Friday, rookie rifleman Ira Stigman fired a 188 out of a possible 210. The steady-nerved rookie had no difficulty finding the ten-ring again and again. And so little did the strain of his first competition faze him, he was heard to chuckle frequently when reloading. .

Never was he able to equal that score again. In fact, in the interscholastic rifle match, in which all the high schools of greater New York participated the following year, when he was already a veteran marksman, had his marksmanship been no better than average, even mediocre, let alone the “sensational” shooting of his debut the previous spring, the team would have won gold or silver medals. But his performance was wretched, poorer than that of the rookie just recently recruited and regarded as a tyro.

In his previously written first-person account, he most certainly had spared the reader the details of this episode with his sister and the rifle team, Ira reflected. And just as well. It was always easier to talk about Farley, about footraces. But no exorcism could be achieved talking of the 100-yard dash.

Following the near-orgy he had enforced on her the Thursday before, with the luxury of privacy till almost midnight, when Pop and Mom, with Zaida, Baba, and most of the tribe, attended the benefit play for the Galitzianer Verein, she wept, for other reasons than safety or dissatisfaction: “You’re gonna ruin me for somebody else,” she sobbed.

And his cynical, exultant, feral jibe: “Aw, c’mon, we don’t even kiss. All we do is what you say, ‘Fuck me, fuck me good,’” and then he snickered at her.

“Aw, shut up, you louse.”

He had had no condom the second time, exited in time, he thought. But he scarcely needed specific cause for the gnawing to begin, no longer belatedness to incite worry. The plies of self — or so they felt — once parted, as they had, near the close of that demented fear of a year ago, were ever disposed to become so again, and he obsessively undone with them. Even if he thought he was safe, ought to be safe, had no reason to think otherwise (hell, for Chrissake, you’re all right. You’re crazy), the plies of self unraveled, and whatever courage, carefreedom, was woven in them dispelled. Supposing he no longer — supposing he didn’t live at home, moved away, out of range of this, this recurring opportunity, away, away, would the fear (fear of what? Worry, just call it worry, peculiar invading sadness, despond, despond) haunt him anyway? No, it wouldn’t, would it? How could it? It always had to be some reason, that reason. Trigger, like that of the target rifle. Springe: what a beautiful old word, not a spring, but a snare. Had to be that, like the pedal of a steel trap. The crushing weight on top of a figure 4 that baited the rabbit. How many ways were there to say it? Or was fear built into it by now? Built into him, built into the act? Try somebody else. Find out. Does Theodora live in the same place? If not, so somebody else. Find out. Ask. Nah. Who else?

The rest of the team had done so well at the match that even with his execrably poor shooting, they won the bronze medal; but only after it was disclosed that a member of the other team mistakenly awarded the bronze medal was disqualified on account of his failure to meet minimum scholastic standards. Christ, the three leading teams were so closely bunched, anything approaching the first score of his novitiate would have won them the gold. And even as far as their receiving the bronze they were too late. By the time the disqualification was discovered, the medals had been bestowed on others, never to be retrieved, as if strewn to the wind.

Ira found himself trying to coalesce into epigram the fatuity of a never-received bronze medal for his abysmal marksmanship. But as so often happened to him, his attempt ended not with an epigram, but with a rank double entendre.

What a title, he mused as he typed, what a title that would make — with the tacit reservation that it could always be deleted: The First Murderer in “Macbeth.” What a title, Ecclesias, wouldn’t you say? And alter the quotation slightly in the epigraph:

I am one, my liege,

whom the vile blows and buffets of the world

have so incensed that I care not what

I say to spite the world.

And there again, we’re back with Baudelaire, he reflected: saying instead of doing.

Still, there would abide with him — owing to his membership on the rifle team — many precious sequences, American sequences, he would term them. They were even more American than with Farley, because free of the implicit Irish Catholicism restricting Farley’s outlook, and of which one was always aware, freer because traditionally and actually freer, neutrally Protestant, unclouded by bias. Billy Green, the only regular member of the team not to graduate the following year, became the new team captain — and Ira, by default, the new manager.

A more disarming, modest, clear-headed, even-tempered youth than Billy Ira had never met. “Boyish” was the word that might best describe him: boyish in the best sense, in the American sense: self-reliant, sportsmanlike, outdoors-oriented, adventurous and yet supremely sane. He was about Ira’s height, which was then considered slightly above average, muscular, compact, with seemingly endless endurance and stamina, endless patience, courage, and good humor, Yankee fair of countenance, brown-eyed, with trait of crinkling his small nose upward, indicative of a whole range of tolerant negations, from belittling difficulties, to skepticism, to disapproval. One of two children of a widowed father, a hydraulic engineer by profession, and away from home a good deal of the time, Billy lived with his older sister in a well-kept apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Except for a cleaning woman who came in once a week to take care of the general housekeeping, Billy was mostly on his own, made his bed, got his own breakfast, helped his sister prepare supper, and helped with the dishes and the tidying-up afterward: all the chores that Mom did, and that suddenly became extraordinary when Ira pictured himself doing them.

Billy’s self-reliance seemed to Ira the very epitome of the polar opposite of himself with his increasing feeling of a corrupting infection, a vulnerability he had inflicted on himself, as if all of him were haunted in the sad traces of his Jewishness, while Billy was so free, wholesome, airy as the outdoors, so cheerfully mettlesome. And living with his sister — there was the greatest contrast! All right, she was older, yes, but living with his sister, alone, night after night in separate beds. And Ira knew nothing ever happened between them. He just knew. Oh, God, to be alone with Minnie night after night — alone with Minnie! The very thought made him giddy, whirled by alternating impulses of shame and desire.

Billy owned golf clubs, a football, tennis rackets, ice skates, and hockey sticks. And he owned his own canoe! Canoe, paddles, camping gear of every kind, campfire cookware, and sleeping bags. And it was all housed in a boat club of which he was a member. Boat club and dock were on the banks of the Hudson only a few blocks away from where he lived. Would Ira like to go canoeing?

“Would I? Boy!”

They launched the little craft together, and with Ira in the bow, a tyro with a paddle, they paddled out into the Hudson. Even when Ira weakened against the tide, Billy manfully, with a determined grin, manifesting no dismay, uttering no complaint, no reproof, but as if what he did was a welcome test, brought the canoe back to the dock. Later, after Ira had learned to manage a paddle more adeptly, the two canoed all the way across the wide Hudson, so alone, so close to the green expanse of flowing water. They went camping overnight on the opposite bank. Vivid in memory still, those precious vignettes: the New Jersey constable interrogating the two friends in the morning as they sat about the small campfire preparing breakfast. And with Billy so self-possessed, so candid and natural in rejoinder, what middle-aging American would not have recalled his own boyhood at the sight of two half-grown youths in the morning, seated amid the river-worn boulders next to the softly lapping waters of the Hudson, and then gone off smiling?

As Ira’s skill improved, the two indulged in harebrained stunts. Following closely the tubby paddle wheeler, the broad-beamed, brick-red St. George’s ferry, just after it left its slip on the Manhattan side, they rode the churning white crests in the wake of the ferry, plunged down into the tumultuous troughs, paddling for their lives and shouting with glee, within an ace of being swamped, while passengers in the stern stared in wonderment or reproof at the madcap, juvenile folly. If only he could have been reborn! Late and soon, many were the times the wish clashed against the dismal actuality. If only, if only he could have been reborn. On the majestic Hudson, paddling in the dark, alone on that great breadth of water, or on shore, in nighttime silence, snug in sleeping bag, under the steep gloom of the Palisades: if only that one thing — why did it have to happen to him? Why? Because he made it happen.

On the New Jersey bank during the Easter vacation, when they camped out several nights, Ira greedily devoured for the first time, along with the fried bacon and beans for supper, slabs of bread sopped in bacon grease. Who would believe he could digest it? He could and did. Around a driftwood fire, after a day of canoeing, anyone could digest anything. And in the morning, unforgettable April morning during the Easter vacation, they dared each other to dash into the water from the shore. Ira had never experienced the like. He doubted whether he ever would again, would ever try the stunt again. When he came wading back to shore, after that headlong fling into the frigid water, he couldn’t speak; he could just barely breathe. His scrotum had shrunken flat, his testicles had burrowed out of sight within him. The very breeze that only short seconds ago had seemed so cool now laved his skin like a balmy zephyr of midsummer. If only he could have been reborn! Walking through the uptown shopping street near Billy’s home, after the canoe was stowed away in the boathouse, Ira sampled, for the first time in his life, freshly made potato chips that Billy bought. What a heavenly flavor and crunch: potatoes transmogrified! Billy laughed at his friend’s ecstasy. And striding along Broadway from Billy’s apartment house to the subway station, their target rifles in their canvas cases slung over their shoulders, they explained to the tolerant Irish cop who stopped them that they were captain and manager of the DeWitt Clinton High School rifle team. .

Oh, America, America! There was no going on beyond the outcry of remembered affection, because history would not bear out its promise, as it seemed to the youthful understanding: only if he were different. Nor could he have entered on an equal footing into that expansive, affirmative, vibrant society — even if he were sound in temperament, instead of being already badly warped. Still, he had had a glimpse, thanks to his membership on the rifle team, thanks to Billy Green, of that dynamic form and ferment that was America, and of the joy due youth, of the sportiveness due youth, a glimpse of the means that made for joyous wholesomeness. Beyond him now, poignantly appreciated, but beyond him, the pristine play, to one already ineffaceably scarred, mutilated by mutilations incessantly craved. Still, in the flush of novelty, under the spell of campfire, the outdoors, pulsing with infectious self-reliance, independence, hardiness, the chill night winds and freedom in his blood, he would come home at last, full of vigor and boldness, to a surprised Mom and Pop and Minnie. And while washing the weekend’s scarce-washed sweat and dust from face and hands, announce: “This is going to make a new man of me!”

Oh, America! Mingling for a brief interval the free and lusty air of nature with the Jewish atmosphere of the cold-water flat on 119th Street in East Harlem.

The whole thing is nuttier than a fruit cake, Ecclesias; to an old man, sex is nuttier than a fruit cake.

— Why tell me? It didn’t evolve to suit your criteria of rationality. It evolved out of other and deeper needs, needs of survival, not reasons.

Remorseless needs.

— Yes, of course.

The monotony of the procreative cycle is hypnotic. So it affects me. The very consideration of everything having to do with sex makes me drowsy. And most of all, the perpetual compulsion of it.

— You wouldn’t be here otherwise, if the compulsion were any less.

Ah, yes, do tell. I am one, my liege, whom the vile blows and buffets of the world— I wonder what M is doing? She is so quiet; she must be writing music. I have made a tentative resolution that I would note down her very, very slight foibles, her predilections and customs. She likes to buy new clothes, shmattas. The poor girl was so deprived as a child in that indigent, earnest Baptist clergyman’s household she was reared in, though not so indigent as her calculating mother pretended, that she finds new clothes irresistible. And later, as wife of an impractical and impecunious husband, and mother of two boys, a schoolteacher in Maine earning a rural schoolteacher’s salary, how long she had to wear patched and rent slips and petticoats. So now she loves to buy a gay new blouse. Important to me too, Ecclesias, is her practice of gathering up the few gray strands of hair that may have strayed in front of her fine brow, and train them, as it were, annex them to the main fold of coiffure with a bobby pin. Interesting, isn’t it? I didn’t know that.

— Very interesting.

It’s a fact, just the same.

XV

On the very first day of classes after the summer vacation of 1923, it had so happened that the person who was scheduled to be Ira’s regular teacher in Elocution 7, a course for seniors, was Miss Pickens. She was absent that day. Her ocean liner had been delayed by storms, so rumor ran, on her return trip from Europe. Her older brother, the august, gray-maned, thespian Dr. Pickens, head of the elocution department, made shift to substitute for his absent sister by combining her class with his in one and the same room. As a result, the classroom was jammed; and only by making every seat do double duty, accommodate two students instead of one, could the crowd be contained. Even so, there was a shortage of sitting room; some few had to improvise a seat out of a textbook on a radiator.

It chanced — ah, it chanced — that the one whose seat Ira had hastily and randomly chosen to share was occupied by a well-groomed, well-dressed young man, his straight black hair silky and parted to one side, his tweed jacket heathery and rich, trousers spotless and creased, his cordovans dull brown, richly tooled. A gentile, Ira supposed, as he edged into his half of the seat. The other’s fine well-fitting raiment, well-bred manner, regularity of feature, dappled, lambent skin, his untroubled lineaments, all bespoke the gentile. He was not only a gentile, but affluent too. Ira thought of that silver fountain pen he had purloined long ago, so it seemed. That kid’s parents must have been affluent too, but probably Jewish. How different gentile affluence was — even in youth: poised, polished, mature; if the other weren’t beside him in a high school classroom, Ira would have taken him for a worldly young man, one who had outgrown high school, a collegian at least. .

During the prolonged confusion caused by latecomers finding seats, or rather, half-seats and parts of radiators and windowsills, Ira struck up a conversation with his neighbor. Ira remarked, with his usual unerring ingratiation where gentiles were concerned, that the seats were admirably fitted for half-assed people. And with that droll observation, the two were off on a course of repartee whose twists and turns Ira no longer remembered, except that he was intent on entertaining his seatmate: and his chief resource was his lowbrow witticisms, lowbrow and snide. He succeeded in his aim; he was very amusing to his partner, and his partner was liberal in appreciation. It seemed only minutes, and they were beguiled with each other.

Attendance was taken by Dr. Pickens — somehow. The combined classes were called in a businesslike way to order, and dutifully the new acquaintances nipped off further sallies. But not for long: the momentum of mutual entertainment was too great to arrest. Ira began whispering again, and induced a reply. They were too engrossed in each other’s inimitable wit to take more than fleeting notice of the frowns of annoyance Dr. Pickens directed their way, until — just as Ira was ventriloquizing in sidemouthed whimsy, “It’s gonna be slim pickin’s either way, ye know—”

“That big galoot in the third row, fifth seat, stand up!” Dr. Pickens thundered, glaring at both.

Ira would always recollect with admiration his seat partner’s courage at that critical moment. While Ira shrank back in fear before the blast of pedagogical censure, his classmate gamely stood up.

“Not you!” Leonine and histrionic, Dr. Pickens boomed in devastating tones, “That big galoot beside you. Stand up!”

Larry, for that was his name, sat down. And Ira stood up. He already quaked in fear at the penalties he might have to pay for his misbehavior: gross disrespect before so august and commanding a figure as Dr. Pickens, head of the department of elocution, gross disrespect within the assembled view of two combined classes as witness.

“What is your name?”

Faintly Ira answered, “Ira Stigman.”

“What do you mean by talking when the class has been called to order, talking when I’m addressing the class? Are you a senior?”

“Yes, sir.”

“A senior, and not have the common decency of behaving yourself in a difficult situation like this! A senior and not have the courtesy owing a teacher of DeWitt Clinton High School! What do you mean, you big galoot? You’re not fit to be a senior! You’re not fit to be in this class!”

“I’m sorry,” Ira mumbled.

“Get out! Get out of here at once! Out of this room! Out!” Dr. Pickens blared. And shaking a finger fraught with menace, “Report to me after class. And don’t fail to.”

“No, sir.” Hangdog, in a swirl of fear, Ira made his way through the crowded aisle of shod feet and briefcases to the door. Even as he closed it behind him, he glimpsed a fellow classmate already slipping from his perch on a radiator to occupy the vacancy Ira had left. Down the stairs he went into the study hall, to wait for the end of the period, and who knew what punishment to be meted out, what sentence. Trepidations such as he hadn’t felt since the Stuyvesant ordeal came flooding back. He hadn’t stolen anything, but he was guilty of grave affront to a head of a department, and a most haughty one at that. There was no limit to the amends he would be required to make. The cleavage of nameless dread began its remorseless movement, impervious to the exhortations of common sense. Already he summoned up in imagination the lean, crease-jowled, draconian Mr. Dotey, the dean. Already Ira heard Mr. Dotey’s pronouncement, that worst of all penalties — no, not quite; Ira knew the worst — to bring one of his parents to school: Mom or Pop. To have to go through that again!

He had taken a seat close to the assembly-hall doors, and sat swaying the minutes away, while he chafed, cold damp fingers together — all too soon the fateful gong rang for the change of classes. Plowing among fellow students, he made his way up the three flights of stairs to the room from which he had been expelled.

Larry, Ira’s new acquaintance, had left, but apprehension obliterated everything from his mind except to obtain pardon for his misdeed. “You asked me, sir, to report back to you, Dr. Pickens. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all very well.” Leonine Dr. Pickens gathered up attendance books and papers. “I still intend to bring your insulting, your gross misconduct to Mr. Dotey’s attention.”

“Please, Dr. Pickens. Please. I — it was just that one time,” Ira begged. “Please! You can ask any teacher if I ever did that before.”

“I don’t intend to do anything of the kind. It was as disgraceful an exhibition of bad manners as anything I’ve experienced in my years of teaching. Utterly. And I can think of only one thing proper for that kind of behavior, one that may cure you from ever repeating it again. And that is a visit to Mr. Dotey’s office. And that’s where we’re going.”

Ira’s eyes began to fill with tears. He would have reached out, if he dared, and seized Dr. Pickens’s hand. “One chance, Dr. Pickens. I’m just asking for one chance.”

“Can you give me a single good reason, young man, why I should grant you one?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir, what? That you have a good reason? I don’t believe it.”

“We were doubled up in the seats, and I couldn’t help it.”

“That’s the very reason”—Dr. Pickens’s finger described an uncompromising arc from himself to Ira—“the very reason why it was your obligation to show greater self-control. Better manners were clearly called for in this kind of emergency situation, and did you show them, a senior? You displayed the very opposite.”

“I know.”

“Then you have nothing to say for yourself.”

Ira was at wit’s end. Tears began to trickle from his eyes. He would have to gamble. He would have to tell the truth, trust that it was as compelling to Dr. Pickens as it was to him. “I felt like I found a friend. He was rich and he wasn’t Jewish, and he liked me.”

Dr. Pickens drew back, as if (Ira’s fervent hope) glimpsing or confronting something grave, unique, beyond discourse. His close-set gray eyes searched the face in front of him with a relentlessness that intensified his leonine aspect. A second passed in silence, two, and then he cleared his throat forcefully. “I think you’re telling the truth.”

“I am, Dr. Pickens. I am. That’s why it happened.”

“Well, don’t you ever let it happen again in my classroom.”

“No, sir! I won’t!”

Dr. Pickens deliberated another moment, retributionally, without serious intent. “Very well. You may leave.” His gesture of dismissal seemed peculiarly remote from the white-maned, florid, age-pocked features Ira saw blurred through tears. “You may leave.” Dr. Pickens twiddled two fingers in impatient dismissal.

“Thanks, Dr. Pickens! Thanks!” His heart on wings within him, smearing his wet cheeks, Ira raced to his next class.

And now having had my cup of tea, Ecclesias, I am alone in my mobile home study. The evaporative cooler throbs at my back, while outside the west window, all but one sunflower droops in heavy-headed ripeness. I tell myself it is time to pick up the thread of narrative where I left off, forget the Kurdish rebellion and Sadat and Begin, forget the copperheads and the assassins, and behold: at this very moment, a roadrunner, neck outstretched and tail rising and falling like a feathery bascule, pauses, scans, speeds over the parched, buff adobe dirt, and disappears behind the newly heeled-in trees in the nurseryman’s strip of land on the other side of the fence. Lo digo seguitando.

With the return of Miss Pickens by the next session of Elocution 7, the two combined classes were separated into their original sections, and, of course, each section met in its own classroom. Ira was in Miss Pickens’s class, and his congenial seat companion, fortunately or unfortunately, was in the class conducted by her brother. Still, the new acquaintanceship continued to grow: by hasty encounters in the hall between periods, on the stairway, and the once-a-week coinciding of lunch periods in the lunchroom on the sunny top floor of the high school. The new acquaintanceship grew until it struck a kind of balance against Ira’s other friendships and interests.

It was on an afternoon in early October, a clear, bright afternoon, as befitted October, that Ira and Larry Gordon met by chance on the steps before the school. Ordinarily, Ira might have spent the hour or two after school in the “den,” an enclosed coign or utility closet under the staircase that led from the main floor down to the assembly hall, the assigned gathering place of rifle team members. It was the place where the team discussed prospective rifle matches, where letters of invitation were written to other high school rifle teams, where guns were cleaned, all amid shoptalk and banter. Billy was absent from school that day, and though Ira had a key to the den, he had a hunch that maybe. . if he went directly home, well, one could never tell. Usually his hunches, his ever-present, ever-hopeful hunches, proved empty, but then, once in a while, once in a long while, they materialized: that time Mom had to wait so late in the afternoon in the Harlem Eye and Ear Clinic seeking relief for the terrible noises in her ears; and that time she stayed with Ella in her 116th Street and Fifth Avenue apartment when Ella had a baby, and — hell, oh, you never could tell. But there was Larry descending the steps before the school at exactly the same time as Ira came out the door amid a noisy swarm of fellow students.

He and Larry greeted each other warmly, and fell into step, walking east with the jabbering throng of schoolmates.

“I don’t think you really told me where you live,” Larry said.

“It’s a dump. It’s really crummy.”

“That’s what you said before. You said something about living in a tough neighborhood.”

“I’ll say.” Ira took refuge behind one of Farley’s quips, “Where I come from they’re so tough they play tiddlywinks with manhole covers.”

Which brought a gratifying chuckle from Larry, but without deviation of purpose, “But where? Harlem, that much I know.”

“Yeah, Harlem is right. Slummy old Harlem. 108 East 119th Street.”

“Where’s that?”

“Did you ever ride on the New York Central? The overpass?” Ira gestured.

“The New York Central Railroad? I used to go with my father, and my mother too sometimes, when my grandfather and grandmother were alive. They were the original Hungarians. My grandfather came from Buda Pesht. He owned a small department store. In New Haven — you know where Yale is?”

“No. Is that where it is?”

“You know, Yale is a Hebrew word: ya standing for Jahveh, and El, the lord.”

“Yeah?” Ira glanced upward, narrowly, at the taller Larry, in step beside him. How did he know that? He was gentile. Knew more than Ira did. Well, because of Yale. Of course.

“My father thought of selling his dry-goods business, and taking over, but my three sisters, my brother Irving, were all against leaving New York. My mother, too. And the dry-goods business in Yorkville — you know, it’s a German neighborhood, and both of my parents speak German well. So Grandpa Taddy’s store was sold. Just as well. New Haven isn’t as exciting as it once was. We used to go there on Christmas. Everyone was off from school. Wilma and Sophie were both going to Hunter Normal then.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I didn’t mean to get off the subject.” Larry smiled down at Ira, spread the fingers of his large hand.

“Oh, that’s all right.”

“What’s the New York Central got to do with where you live?”

“Just about everything. If you’d looked out of the window when the train passed 119th Street, three houses, you’d’ve seen where we live.”

“Which way?”

“Oh. East.”

“Is that so? You know, my brother Irving just set up a ladies’-housedress-manufacturing plant on East 119th Street.”

“Yeah? Where?”

“In a loft east of Third Avenue.”

“Is that so? On 119th?”

“Ladies’ housedresses are all the rage today. Finished goods. He has about a hundred operators there.”

“Huh!” Ira exclaimed. “A hundred. Well, just walk a block west from your brother’s place. Now you know where I live.”

“That is a coincidence.”

“I’ll say. And you, where do you live?”

“I live on 161st and Sommers in the Bronx. It’s a very quiet neighborhood, nice but not too showy, just across the Harlem River. We own our own house.”

“Oh, you live in a private house?”

“No. It’s a small apartment house. One family to a floor. We live a flight up.”

“Yeah, we do too.” Ira grinned.

“How do you go home?”

“Me? I have to take the Broadway subway and switch to Lenox at 96th. You take the Bronx Park train?”

“No. I take the Ninth Avenue El.”

“No foolin’. The Ninth Avenue El?”

“Yes. It lets me off a few blocks from where I live.”

“Oh. But it’s in the Bronx?”

“Yes. The near Bronx.”

Walking with Larry in public was different, Ira realized, from encountering him those few times in hall and lunchroom. Exchanges in school were mostly confined to school, had the school environment to buttress them. Here in the street, Ira felt a certain awkwardness of new acquaintance. Also, personal appearance mattered more. It was not only that Ira was conscious of the contrast between Larry’s “rich” clothes and his own rumpled, seedy ones; but that Larry’s appearance, Larry’s bearing, drew the attention of passersby, women especially, young and (to Ira) middle-aged, to which Larry seemed to pay no attention, as something he took for granted. He wore no eyeglasses; he was at least three inches taller than Ira. Not only were his features extraordinarily regular, and his skin the fresh, dappled smoothness of cherished rearing, but his whole body was finely proportioned, again “regular”—except for his thick eyebrows, like wings above his soft, brown eyes, and arms, longer than average, even disproportionate, and his hands: they were exceptionally large. Taken together with the regularity of bodily proportion and feature, Ira was suddenly reminded of the cast of Michelangelo’s David in the Metropolitan Museum: the frowning eyebrows, the big expressive hands, one in front, one reaching over his shoulder for the sling. “Are you still on the rifle team?” Larry asked.

“Yeah.”

“Really like it?”

“Yeah, sure. You don’t go in for any sports?”

“I’m in The Pirates of Penzance. In the chorus. I don’t know if you can call it sports.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, you told me. You sing.”

“Are you going to see it?”

“Nah, it’s gonna cost a dollar. It’s at night.”

“It’s very good. It really has a good cast. And I don’t say that because I’m in it.”

“I know. I saw a piece of it in the assembly. I liked it.”

“That was our preview. For publicity. We sang ‘A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox.’”

“That’s right. It was funny.”

Larry laughed, a deprecating, introductory laugh before something amusing: “When the stage director isn’t listening, some of us in the chorus sing, ‘A pair o’ socks, a pair o’ socks, a most ingenious pair o’ socks.’”

Ira grinned — self-consciously. How little attention Larry paid to the crowd of students moving with them, some of whom turned to smile in appreciation of his freely delivered snatch of song.

Musical, his voice, and flawless the way he held a tune. “‘I am the captain of the Pinafore, and a right good captain too.’”

They were nearing Ninth Avenue, the dark El structure’s shadow charring the avenue below. And like so many beacons in the bustling gloom beneath the El, the United Cigar store’s electric lights were already blazing around the margins of the show window.

“Do you smoke?” Larry asked.

“I had a little pipe — I liked it — but I left it in my white jacket when I was hustlin’ soda.”

“Hustling soda? Oh, yes, you did tell me,” Larry added quickly. “Selling it.”

“Yeah. So now I smoke—” He was about to say yenems, other people’s, but that was Yiddish; Larry wouldn’t understand. So Ira grimaced, shrugged negligently instead.

“I like a pipe too,” said Larry. “I’ve got a calabash I bought in Bermuda. And a Dunhill. But they’re too bulky to take into class. And you have to carry a tobacco pouch too. You smoke cigarettes, don’t you?”

“Oh, sure, sure.”

“Let’s stop in here. I’ll get a pack of Camels, okay? I like Camels. Do you?”

“Yeah. I don’t like Luckies—”

“Not a cough in a carload.”

“Yeah. They’re raw as hell. Maybe after you get used to ’em. My grandfather smokes Melachrinos. Not even half a Melachrino at a time. They’re mild, but boy, do they cost. You know what he does?”

They had almost reached the corner. “Puts a toothpick in the end of his cigarette?” Larry was beguiled.

“Oh, no. He puts ’em in a paper cigarette holder and takes maybe three and a half puffs. Then he dinches it.”

“Dinches it? I never heard that one. Clinches it?”

“All right, clinches it.”

They paused at the corner. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?” Larry asked.

Well, it had come, the ineluctable question. In a way he had invited it, Ira thought, but it had to come sooner or later; it always did. So, if this was as far as — what? — their friendship would go, they could always joke with each other once in a while in school. “Yeah, I’m Jewish,” Ira stated, as appeasingly as he could.

“I just wanted to make sure. I am too.”

There could be no more generous spoofing on the part of a gentile. It was charitable in the extreme, a humorous unguent alleviating the chronic sore spot.

“Oh, yeah?” Ira prolonged his drawl — making sure his disbelief registered.

“I am!” Wings of Larry’s dense eyebrows converged. “What did you think I was?”

“Aw, you’re kidding!”

“I’m not!”

They had stopped — because Ira had — on the very curb of the street corner, stopped and stood there, toes on the granite curb, while the crowd flowed past them into the deep shadow and across the avenue through openings in trolley and auto traffic. Strange pause. It was like something inside the self, not merely bodily arrest. The guy wasn’t kidding; he couldn’t be kidding. That would be taking things too far, and they never could have gotten this far, if he were that kind of a guy. There were goyim, sure, the straight-faced practical jokers; but hell, he had learned to tell those a mile off. And there were others like Billy, who never showed the slightest sign of even being conscious of Ira’s Jewishness. This called for reexamination, for keenest scrutiny. Yes, there he was, still, Larry, regular Arrow Collar countenance, well, almost, under gray felt hat, in fine navy-blue wool topcoat over matching tweed jacket, and wearing a blue knit tie. In good taste everything, you just felt it, even if you didn’t know what good taste was, refinement, oh, what the hell, had to be gentile, with that kind of luster — but no. Or maybe not: the lips were a little too thick, rolled out: Jewish softness there, Jewish sympathy. No, Larry couldn’t possibly pretend to being so earnest. He must mean it—

Reorientation felt almost physical, as if accepted landmarks were reinterpreted by a sudden jolt. “Boy, I never been so fooled before in my life. Honest.”

“Let’s get across the street,” Larry nudged. “What did you think it was?”

“A goy. What else? You — you’re Bar Mitzvah and everything?”

“Of course. I used to teach Sunday school, too.”

“Sunday school!” Ira echoed incredulously. “Sunday school is for—” He was glad the El train passing above rattled over his near display of ignorance.

“At Temple Beth El on Fifth Avenue. I just loved teaching Old Testament stories. They mean a lot to me still.”

“They do? Old Testament stories? You mean from the Jewish religion? Right? From the Bible? In English?”

“Oh, certainly in English. Oh, a few of us knew some Hebrew. But very few. The stories I taught were in English. They were the same stories I loved hearing myself when I went to Sunday school. You must know them: about Saul and David and Absalom. Samson.”

“I know about ’em. I learned them from reading English too — I mean not from reading Hebrew.”

“Really? I thought of you as being a lot more Jewish than I was.”

“But we didn’t learn it that way. I mean in the cheder—you know what a cheder is?”

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard about it. My brother-in-law Sam told me about it. He’s a lawyer. And he knows quite a bit of Hebrew. And some Yiddish words too. That’s where you were taught religion, wasn’t it?”

“If you wanna call it that. This one was on the East Side. Jewish East Side. Mostly. I learned in Harlem, too. But we learned to say prayers, you know what I mean? To daven. You know what I mean?”

“That means to pray, doesn’t it?”

“To pray in the shul, in the synagogue. You shake when you’re doing it.” Ira mimed as a way out of engagement with the subject any further.

But Larry was still interested. He smiled tentatively. “I lost out on a lot of that kind of learning.”

“Lost out? Say, it’s not like that temple on Fifth Avenue. I know that one. It’s beautiful. These are little dumps like huts in the backyard.”

Larry shook his head. “I didn’t know they were that bad.”

“Hell, I hate ’em.”

“Really? And you didn’t find the Biblical subjects inspiring?”

“Nah. Maybe I might have — if I learned them the way you did. But I didn’t get any Biblical subjects.”

“There’s so much inspiring about the Bible. I mean, it relates to so much in the American tradition, the English tradition, I should say. But the American tradition is much more meaningful. Do you know that King Saul and Custer have a lot in common?”

“Huh! General Custer?”

“I’m writing a poem about both men. A Jewish king and gentile general—”

“A poem? You’re writing a poem?”

“A long poem. A connected series, half narrative, half sort of lyric.”

But Ira continued standing stock-still, frowning and incredulous. “A poem? You’re still in high school.”

“That doesn’t matter. People younger than I am have written great poems. And no one’s ever done this before. It’s very exciting: man opposing fate. There’s a universality about it, whether it’s Saul on Mt. Gilboa, or Custer at Little Bighorn.”

Larry led the way into an aromatic, brilliantly lit cigar store. With what a worldly flair he ordered a package of Camels from the promptly obliging gray-mustached clerk, even as he continued to address Ira—“Of course, I can’t speak Yiddish,” he said with complete self-composure, as Ira felt himself curdle slightly with self-consciousness — and effortlessly returned the clerk’s thanks while picking up his purchase and the change. “I can speak a little Hungarian. Mostly because of Mary, our maid. My folks use a Hungarian word or two with her. I’ve picked up a few words.” He led the way back out into the open air. “And sometimes on the school holidays when we visited my grandparents in New Haven. They were both born here, but my great-grandparents on both sides came here from Hungary.”

“Yeah? You got any of ’em left? A grandfather or somebody?”

“No, I was the baby of the family. You?”

“I still got a grandfather and grandmother.”

“You have? Were they born here?”

“Hell, no. I wasn’t even born here!”

“You weren’t?”

“I was born in Galitzia. In Austro-Hungary. There once used to be an Austro-Hungary.”

“Of course. I know. Before the Great War.”

“So we’re some kind of landslayt, nearly.”

“I know that word. Landsleute. It’s the same in German. That’s what I’m taking.”

“Yeah? It’s Yiddish too.”

“Is it? I know a few words of Yiddish. Tsuris. I’ve heard Sam say that. Troubles. Keyn ayin-horeh. He says that when somebody praises my niece. Actually, I think I know more Hungarian words than I know Yiddish — I spent so much time with my Uncle Leon in Bermuda. He’d say something in Hungarian once in a while.”

Silently, resentful of his own bewilderment at the peculiar displacement going on within him, he watched Larry’s big capable hands tear a square of foil from the top of the yellow package of Camels, tap the package expertly until several cigarettes extruded. He did everything with such superb assurance — and facility. “Cigarette?” He proffered the pack.

“Yeah. But you’re goin’ upstairs, to the El, aren’t you?”

“Oh, we can shmooze down here awhile. I hope you’re not in any hurry. Are you?”

Shmooze. It was as though Larry were dedicated to authenticating his Jewishness, placing a seal on it. “Well. .” Ira hesitated, took a cigarette. “No, I’m not in a hurry.” Probably Mom was home anyway. The thought, the evil prompting, flared up in his mind: tell her about Larry next chance, the handsome acquaintance. Stir her up that way. Yeah. What the hell. Larry wrote poems, he could tell her. A poet. Jewish, you’d never know — but something sobering, suddenly sobering, perplexing, preempted: what kind of Jewish? What kind of world?

They found a niche of refuge under the slant of the El stairs. Wonderful, the way Larry could hold a lit match in the cup of his large, white hand. “Then how did you learn prayers at the cheder, as you call it? Didn’t you translate out of the Hebrew?”

“Oh, no, I told you. The old guy with the whiskers slapped you around when you didn’t make the right sounds. Komets-aleph, ‘o’; komets-beth, ‘bo’; komets-gimel, ‘go.’ You ducked as soon as you saw his pointer drop from his hand to the page.”

As though the scene were animate before his eyes, Larry listened with lips parted in pleasure. “Is that so?”

“Oh, sure. We learned Hebrew in a little shack in the backyard, or a cellar store. Till I was eight and a half. I got pretty good at it, too. The melamed, you know, the teacher, told my mother when I was about seven that I could have had a real future. But then we moved to Harlem.”

“I practically grew up in Bermuda. My older brother and sisters lived in Yorkville a short while. I spent only a short time there, and now we’re in the near Bronx.” Larry inhaled. “I told you I’m the baby of the family.”

“Oh, now I see. You mean you got older brothers and sisters.” Ira raised his arm in gesticulation. “That’s why.”

“Haven’t I? Two are married and have children.” And speaking through cigarette smoke, “Then I have an older sister, Irma. She’s the next older. She lives with us. She’s a private secretary. My older brother, you know about him. He’s in the ladies’-housedress-manufacturing business. He’s going to be married soon — to his secretary.”

“So he lives with you too?”

“Oh, yes. My brother Irving. He was in the army. Wilma and Sophie both taught school. They’re both married now and have children. I have the sweetest, loveliest niece.” Larry’s face brightened with genuine pleasure. “I get so much sheer delight out of the way she talks and moves. Do you know she’s already writing an opera?”

“Oh. A what?” And then Ira, startled, added, “An opera? How old is she?”

“She’s four. Listen.” He began singing, “‘Some people like banana splits and other things. But I like my chocolate soda!’ Isn’t that a wonderful aria?”

“Yeah.” Ira felt a presentiment of embarrassment — and with nothing to say, except an amenable, “Four years. That’s all? I got a cousin who’s nearly fourteen years old. Stella. My Aunt Mamie’s kid. She wouldn’t know an aria from a—” A new prompting coalesced into consciousness. “—a hole in the wall. Yeah.” He puffed on his cigarette.

“Is your family very close?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Close-knit. I mean, do they have strong family ties? Are they affectionate with one another, with you? Do you have any affection for them?”

“Oh, no. Jesus!”

Larry studied Ira in his vehemence. “Is that so?” He shook his head. “You’re so different. In a lot of ways, it seems. We’re a very close-knit family. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the Hungarian influence. Anyway, we are. Both my brothers-in-law are like members of the family. My sister Wilma is married to a lawyer, I told you: Sam, Sam Elinger. Incidentally, he went to CCNY for his B.A. You were talking about going there.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“And my oldest sister, Sophie, is married to a dentist, Victor.”

“Yeah? Gee.” Something warned Ira not to say what he was about to; it had such a Jewish mercenary overtone. But the momentum of the remark prevailed despite misgiving. “Your sisters are well-married?”

Larry looked a little pained, for the first time almost disapproving. “I wouldn’t say they were well-married. They’re happily married.”

“Oh. I guess that’s what I meant.” Ira felt chastised, confirmed in his misgiving. You don’t say “well-married,” he instructed himself, like zey hobn gemakht a gitten shiddekh. It wasn’t proper. Happily married. Yeah? Who was happily married in Baba’s family?

“What about your folks?” Larry asked.

Ira’s lips moved without sound: well. He suddenly felt glum. He had told Billy that Pop was a waiter; that was nothing to Billy. It would probably be nothing to Larry either: just another curiosity about Ira that Larry found so quaint, why so fetching, like Ira’s stock of gags, picked up in a hundred places. Or what? And all this taking place within the mind while thousands of people, vehicles, were making new configurations in tumultuous passing, and overhead too, rattle of the rolling coffins, the El trains.

Within the mind and within an instant, so it seemed: when an instant kindled, it never went out, was never extinguished, it lasted fiery forever, receding. How was that? Even that stylish young dame, yes, hoity-toity, slinky dame, in her purple cloche, staring at Larry as she passed, had lasted forever, had lasted ever since then.

Ira looked up from the cigarette, glowing within gray ash at one end, yellowing in a ring where he put it to his mouth at the other. “I’ll tell you,” he said, then grinned — that grin that Mr. O’Reilly had warned him against, when? Then, when it first began with Minnie — ah, that must be the crazy, hidden bridge between him and Larry, the bond of strangeness or something, that had even got him into trouble with Dr. Pickens. His goofy, no, his clandestine, worry-haunted ways made him different, more different all the time, possessed him with an utter uniqueness, spasmodic in new situations, uncouth often as well, an ultra, ultra something which only a Mr. Sullivan, crippled, deformed Mr. Sullivan, could see through: “thatsh right, made a boob o’yourshelf—”

“My father is a lokshn-treger,” Ira said — deliberately in Yiddish, the very thing he sensed would intrigue Larry; but why? Why did he surmise so often the rightness of the results he could produce in another, when he sought to, without knowing why they were effective — with Farley, with Billy Green, even Eddy Ferry, the janitor’s kid, long ago in early boyhood? And now Larry. Something goyish he had adapted himself to (he had thought Larry was a goy), or something goyish he preferred, he was becoming.

“A what?” Larry’s laugh was bright and forthcoming. “He’s a what? A what treger?”

“He’s a lokshn-treger, a noodle porter.”

“Noodles. Oh, yes.”

“My father’s a waiter.”

“Oh,” And again Larry laughed, his features all eagerness. “Is that what you call him — I mean, a waiter?”

As Ira had guessed, in nothing so wily as this. He had completely deflected Larry from fact to word, from word to mirth. “Lokshn-treger,” Ira repeated. “It’s Yiddish.”

“Is that Yiddish? I know that word, tragen! It’s German for ‘carry.’” He was delighted at the discovery. “Is that how you say Nudeln? Lokshn?”

“Yeah. A loksh is any kind of gawky sap. I made that up outta Yiddish. Where are you in German?”

“This is my third year. My parents speak some too. You know — because my grandparents did. When Hungary was part of Austro-Hungary. Lokshn-treger. Noodle porter.” He savored the sound, highly entertained. “Why don’t we take the El train together,” he urged. “We can talk while we ride uptown.”

“It’s about a league outta me way,” Ira declined with antic solecism. “Listen, I got only a few puffs left on my butt, so that means the curfew tolls the knell of parting day, and I gotta go.”

Not even his heavy-handed humor could dispel the disappointment settling about Larry’s soft brown eyes. He let a billow of smoke all but escape from his open lips, then withdrew it again on the inhale. “I’ll tell you what: this Friday let’s take the El together. All right? We won’t have to worry about preparing for class the next day.”

“Okay.”

“Front of the school. Friday. Right?”

“Right.”

“I’ll see you before then.”

“Right. Abyssinia.”

“What? Oh, I get it. Abyssinia.”

They parted, Larry dropping the cigarette as he mounted the El steps, Ira his in the gutter on the way east to the subway. If that wasn’t strange, strange, and flattering too, even if Larry wasn’t a gentile. Wonderful, wasn’t it? He was a gentile, and suddenly Jewish. Like magic. Something Ira had seen change that way just by being stared at for a time: an optical illusion. But Larry couldn’t change back again, could he? Was that why Jews were circumcised? What an idea. Lucky he hadn’t known Larry was Jewish when he pleaded with Dr. Pickens that first day. He might not have got off. And suppose Dr. Pickens knew? Boy, talk about things doubling back on themselves. Like Jessica, Shylock’s daughter: pretended to be a boy, masqueraded as a boy. But she was a boy! In Shakespeare’s time, said the English teacher, boys played women’s parts; Portia’s too, so there you were, being yourself, but not supposed to be yourself. .

Ira made his way east on noisy, restless 59th Street. . And what would he tell Billy about Friday? Just say nothing. Not show up. Billy would wait awhile in the gun room. . Still, wasn’t that funny, though, the way Larry laughed at lokshn-treger, noodle porter. . as if he enjoyed hearing things out of that lousy world that Ira lived in. Only some of it, yes. But Billy wasn’t interested in any of it. He really was a gentile; that was the difference; Larry wasn’t. Could you be a gentile in part? Half-assed Jewish, bringing some of his own selected rotten world to Larry. .

Boy, the guy was rich. His clothes, tweed jacket. That sheen on his skin, brought up delicate. He was the baby of the family, he said: that was why. .

Sky, open space of Columbus Circle hove into view. . Bermuda, Larry said he had spent so much time in Bermuda. Was that why he talked that way? About calabash pipes and Dunhill pipes, cost a fortune. And what was that Ethical Culture School where he said he went for a while? He had drama and ballet there. Not just dancing, two-step, fox-trot, shimmy. Ballet, gee. Where the hell was that jitney for the subway?

Life is real, life is earnest, Ecclecias. No? You never can be diverted, can you?

— Occasionally. You certainly managed to evade that snare. If I knew anything about the game, I’d say gambit, but that’s only another cliché.

You’re right. Any will do.

— Fairly adroit. You were virtually on the gaff, to vary the metaphor once again, but managed to escape. Having told you something about his immediate relatives, he asked you about yours. Which was only natural—

Oh, I expected to regale him with tales about my immigrant Zaida and Baba and uncles and aunts. And tales of the East Side.

— He asked you whether you had any brothers and sisters. That’s more to the point.

So he did. You see the fix I’m in?

— Then what will you do later?

What I did then. Yes, I have a younger sister. Let it fade.

— When will you admit her to the realm of a legitimate character, acting, active, asserting herself, an individual?

I don’t know, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to write about her in all the emotional dimensions she deserves. But I have to do something. I’ll have to: sometime opportune, in passing mention. . a flake of this terrible, unspeakable inter. . inter. . interlude. Ssss. Interplay, flay, slay, clay, lay. Curiously enough, though she was omitted altogether in my first draft, I arbitrarily, mind you, introduced her (and I shall come to it) with very little apology, as I remember, or ceremony, simply because to continue without her became unfeasible. So, you have your answer, Ecclesias, at least in part.

XVI

Came Friday, Ira simply absented himself from the gun room. Why waste time in lame excuses? He joined the millrace of schoolmates, out of the open front-door sluices, down the stairs. Larry was already waiting on the sidewalk corner.

Once more together out of school jurisdiction, where they were allowed to smoke a block away from the building. And now with a solid kernel of intimacy formed — formed and inviting augmentation — they crossed Tenth Avenue amid droves of schoolmates, and sauntered the more slowly to enjoy each other’s company through motley, clamorous 59th Street. Did Ira ever read modern verse? Larry asked.

“Wha’?”

“Modern poetry?”

Ira felt at a loss, puzzled. When did poetry become modern? Where was the dividing line? What the hell did he mean by that, anyway? When Ira had read The Idylls of the King, which was a pain in the ass, that wasn’t modern. He really thought — no, actually, he didn’t think about it, but if he were pressed for an answer, he would, well, come close to saying: how could anyone write a poem that was studied in high school, if he wasn’t already dead? Tennyson was dead. So was Leigh Hunt with his “Abou Ben Adhem.” Coleridge was dead, Coleridge of the wonderful Ancient Mariner. Shelley was as dead as the Ozymandius he wrote about. Keats with his “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” had died of T.B. Byron — everybody knew he kicked the bucket at Missolonghi. And The Lay of the Last Minstrel—ha, ha, ha — the Last Minstrel’s lay — Walter Scott was pushing up the daisies. They were all dead. Longfellow with his spreading chestnut tree, FitzGerald with Omar’s book of verses underneath the bough — poets you liked, or didn’t like, if you studied them in school, they were dead as doornails. Q.E.D. What the hell was modern verse?

“Edna St. Vincent Millay,” Larry prompted unasked. “Vachel Lindsey, Sandburg, Teasdale, Aiken, Robert Frost.”

Jesus, he didn’t want to appear too dumb; still, Ira had to admit he didn’t know any of the names. He didn’t know whether to adopt a contrite or bumptious stance. “I never heard of ’em,” he confessed.

“No?” Larry wasn’t in the least condescending. “I’ve got a copy of Untermeyer’s Anthology of Modern Verse. It’s a good introduction to modern poetry. Very good.”

“Yeah? Where’d you get it?”

“My sister Sophie gave it to me for a birthday present.”

That wasn’t exactly what Ira had intended to find out by his question, but—

“I could lend it to you,” said Larry. “I’d love to lend it to you, if you’re interested.”

“I guess so.” People bought, gave, owned books; was he so stupid not to know it? Or betray not knowing it? “I’m used to going to the library,” he explained. “That’s why I asked.”

“I don’t know whether public libraries have the Untermeyer collection or not. But one thing I’m sure of, you’d enjoy it.”

“Yeah?”

“‘Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,’” Larry recited. “That’s Vachel Lindsay: ‘Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, pounded on the table, beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom’—I’m not sure of just the way it goes—‘Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom!’”

“Chee!” Ira was spellbound. It was like an incantation. “That’s modern? That’s how modern poetry goes?”

“Isn’t it wonderful? The rhythm: ‘Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black, cutting through the jungle with a golden track—’”

“Wow!”

“I thought you’d like it.”

He felt the familiar, the commonplace, become puzzling. The street opened up toward him, throbbing, as if he were at the flaring end of a great horn, overwhelmed by an unexpected confusing crescendo. Buildings seemed to skew about. Wearisome perspectives shed their gadding and humdrum crusts. What did it mean? It was something like the way Larry transformed from gentile to Jew; only this went the other way. What did this mean, Larry reciting modern poetry? How could he be so coequal, so at home in all this; as if it were an everyday going-on, as if he were part of it, used to it? Modern poetry. Here and now. All around.

“‘I saw God! Do you doubt it?’ You’ll like this one by James Stephens,” Larry overflowed. “He calls it ‘What Tomas Said in a Pub.’ You know what a pub is. It’s English: a bar, a saloon.”

“Yeah?”

“‘Do you dare to doubt it? I saw the Almighty Man! His hand was resting on a mountain! And He looked upon the World, and all about it—’”

Black youngsters in tattered garb, like stamens surrounding a gangly adolescent girl on the stoop of a tenement along the route to the subway on 59th Street, giggled at the spectacle of Larry’s large white hand in wide, unrestrained sweep in keeping with his recitation.

And Ira, dazed by a new kind of, new kind of what? A new kind of meaning, of being, of feeling, almost like coming out of a labyrinthian basement into daylight. That was it: it was today! “It’s like that?”

“Yes.” Larry smiled with pleasure. “Did it take you by surprise?”

“I’ll say. You mean all these writers — these poets — they’re alive? I know it sounds foolish. But that isn’t just what I mean. I mean—” He was silent, a long perplexed interval. And then in nearly painful revelation, “It’s going on. That’s what I mean. Right now.”

“That’s right. I know what you mean,” said Larry. “People are still writing poetry. It didn’t end with Longfellow. Or with William Cullen Bryant. ‘Thanatopsis.’ Or Idylls of the King. That’s the trouble with the way English is taught in our high school. Any public high school, nowadays.”

“Oh, yeah? Then how?”

“Well, compared to the English ones I attended. Compared to the Ethical Culture School I went to for a few months here. You’re a good example of what’s missing in our English courses. I don’t mean to be funny. There’s no sense of the contemporary in any course I’ve taken in DeWitt Clinton. That’s the problem with teachers like Dr. Pickens. Know what I mean? There’s a clean break between what’s gone before and now. You get the idea? I’m not trying to be superior. Or highbrow. But it’s going on. Just what you said. The only time I had that sense of timeliness here was at Ethical Culture. They made sure you got a sense of relevance with everyday life. Know what I mean? Maybe we’ll get a chance at something like it in the last term of our senior year. You know you have a choice of your preference? Mine’s going to be modern drama. What about you? What’s yours?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it. But you act like you’re living right with ’em. I think that’s what I mean.” Ira scratched an itch in a wrinkle on his brow, then a more imperious one in the convolute of his ear.

Ira felt suddenly under strain. It was like an avalanche of newness, all this modern poetry. Larry wrote poems. Larry understood, was initiated, belonged. He. . actually wrote something that was his own, about. . about. . experiences, no, about what he felt, no, not that either. They had the shape of what he felt. He did it by himself, for his own. . not, one couldn’t say, for his own good. . he did it for — no, not for a contest. Hey, Jesus, you could scratch all over, it was so unsettling, even a mere glimpse of that kind of purpose, just for the sake of doing, finding the shape that fit, that kind of a game.

Ira found himself wishing he hadn’t agreed to ride the Ninth Avenue El with Larry. So new an outlook would take a lot of time — and examining and dwelling on — a lot of ruminating to get used to — if you wanted to get used to it, to learn something about it, how it was done, what changed you.

Maybe he ought to disabuse Larry now, Ira thought. Sure, it was flattering to be with Larry; he imparted a sense of the rich and the glamorous. But Ira didn’t want to go on. That was it. He recognized in himself something unwillingly complementary, something receptive, nay, susceptible, to this — this strange new shedding of exteriors of everything, shedding of fixed panoramas, of used perceptions you could call it. But that was just what he had done with his own interior, torn away, not on purpose, but by mistake, torn away from the regular, the customary, the wonted, yeah. And now if he did the same with the external world, that contemporaneous world that Larry was exhibiting, Ira didn’t know what would happen; if he allowed himself to be exposed to that disquieting new process, that new relation to the outside world, one that changed the outside world. God, he could feel he was too susceptible, too beguiled by new departures in the perceived; given to forsaking the rote, gee, he’d have nothing left, be nobody. At least now, yeah, he was a crumb, all right? Humping his own sister, Minnie. But he was on the rifle team; he could go out with Billy in a canoe, paddle across the Hudson, accommodate to Billy’s world, hang on to Billy’s world, feel a little — a little bit better. American wholesomeness. Oh, hell, he couldn’t say.

They paused at the foot of the El stairs. Ira hoped Larry might loosen their previous agreement to ride on the Ninth Avenue El together, render it tentative, say something like “Are you coming up?”

Larry didn’t. Instead, he said as they neared the El steps, “Let’s not smoke. I got an idea.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re taking the El anyway. Let’s not stop. Let’s not stop riding together till 125th Street. Why don’t you come home and have supper with us.”

“Me?” Ira was startled into brusque bodily withdrawal.

“Yes. And take the Untermeyer anthology home with you afterward.”

“Yeah, but look at me! I didn’t even shave this morning.”

“You’re all right. You look fine. I’ll lend you my new Gillette, if that’s all that’s worrying you. It wouldn’t matter anyhow. We don’t stand on ceremony. We don’t dress for dinner and that sort of thing.” He smiled winningly.

“Oh, no. Oh, Jesus!”

“Here we go again. Why not?” This time his brown eyes were merry instead of disappointed. “My mother would love to have me bring home a guest. I never do. She’d be delighted. She keeps complaining that I don’t have any friends. And I don’t. I didn’t in Bermuda either. I simply haven’t found anybody interesting.”

“Yeah, me!”

The heavy irony in Ira’s voice seemed to startle Larry. “What’s wrong with that? I mean, why not you? I can choose my friends.”

“Well, I like—” Ira let gesture indicate his meaning. “But I—”

“But what? You don’t have an inferiority complex, do you? Or something like that?”

“Yeah, I think I do.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I do,” Ira insisted. “I know it in myself.”

“Why should you have an inferiority complex? I don’t see why. What did you do to get it?” Larry was unconvinced, but diverted.

“What did I do? You remember Hamlet: about filling up the porches of you ear? I could clutter ’em up. But I ain’t a-gonna,” he clowned verbally. “Nah, it isn’t that.” Ira decided to change tack. “It’s Friday. Gefilte-fish-and-chicken-soup night. I didn’t tell Mom.” It was a deliberate subterfuge. Mom had long ago been alerted that on Fridays he might go off with Billy: not to be alarmed about her son’s absence on Shabbes bay nakht.

They reached the stairs, and as they climbed up to the platform, Larry said, “I know it’s short notice. Here, I’ve got two nickels. No, that’s all right”—he declined Ira’s proffered coin, and followed him through the turnstile. “Is your family religious?”

“Religious?” Ira shrugged. “No. My mother only lights candles on Friday. You know, she holds her hands in front of her face and prays.”

“Yes?”

“You never saw it?”

“No.”

“No? Maybe I ought to invite you to our house so you could. I would, if we didn’t live in such a dump.”

“You needn’t feel so apologetic about it,” Larry appealed. “It doesn’t matter. Really. As a matter of fact, I’d be glad to go to your home. I have so little experience — contact — with any kind of Jewish Orthodoxy. I don’t want to brag — I can have all kinds of Jewish friends, liberal, rich — oh, my. I mean, the wealth of their families makes mine look — very modest in comparison.”

“Yeah?”

Larry’s thick eyebrows neared each other in sign of distaste. “But talk about bores! I can almost predict what they’re going to talk about. Dances. Dates. Cars. Fraternities. Beside, they fawn, and I hate that.”

“Yeah?” Ira snickered. “You know, that’s funny. I never invited anybody to my house — I mean, the way you just did. In all my life, I can’t remember once. Maybe it’s their accents, I don’t know.” From being odd, it became something to wonder about as he strolled next to Larry over the gray, weathered planks along the airy platform. “We don’t — we don’t do things that way.”

“No?”

“A relative maybe. Once in a blue moon. Your family — I mean, they’re all Jewish?”

“Yes, but we’re all agnostics.”

“Oh.”

“It’s like saying we don’t know.”

“Yeah. I know what it means.” With each step he took along the platform, the spear of light advanced on the tracks below: agnostic. “You know, when I was fourteen, I told my mother and father I didn’t believe in God. My father called me an apikoros, an Epicurean. That Greek name actually came into the Yiddish. Can you imagine? Apikoros.”

“Is that so?” Again Larry seemed eager to learn. “Apikoros. I wish I knew a little more Yiddish. I told you, only my brother-in-law, Sam, can speak a few words of Yiddish. He’s the lawyer. Mitzvah. There, I remembered another one. Sam knows some of the prayers in Hebrew — he’s the one I told you went to CCNY.”

“Still, you teach Sunday school, you said. In that temple on Fifth Avenue. But you don’t know any Hebrew?”

“It isn’t necessary.”

“No?”

“I love the stories, as I told you. They stimulate me. Just the other day I couldn’t help daydreaming about Absalom escaping. Would his father, King David, finally forgive him? Or would he be an exile all his life? You know what I mean?”

“I see. . You think about others, other things, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t think about yourself. What you would do?”

“I express what I would do through them. Is that what you mean?”

“I think so.”

Larry stopped in stride. “You know, I don’t think I quite followed you that time: not thinking about myself.”

They turned to retrace their steps. “I can’t think about anything but myself,” Ira admitted. “Half the time I hardly hear anybody else. Honest. That makes me so dumb.” Perhaps that would put a brake on Larry’s cultivation of literary matters way over Ira’s head; it might curb the friendship as well.

His remarks seemed to have the opposite effect. “I don’t believe you don’t listen. No. I think you listen all the time, I think you don’t listen to things that don’t interest you. I wish I could do that. It’s really a kind of polite waste of time. I get enough of that.”

“Yeah?”

“Too much. And most of it doesn’t matter. I don’t know whether you listen or not. What makes you interesting is that you never parrot anybody. Everything comes out of your own experience.” His large hands delivered his meaning with an expressive trajectory. “Everything comes from the inside.”

Ira’s facetious “Yeah? Where else?” brought a smile to Larry’s face. “No, I wish I could. I can’t. You can get away from yourself: Absalom, King Saul, Custer. Not me.”

“Then seriously, I think you ought to try to write. I’m sure you’d come up with something pretty good. Have you never tried to write?”

“Me? Compositions in English. What d’you mean? I’m gonna be a bugologist,” Ira said.

“Well, I don’t see that should keep you from trying to write. I wish you’d come over to our place and let me read you two or three of my poems. Or you read them yourself. You’d get the idea of expressing — of giving form to your feelings. I can’t explain it — just by example: of what I do. I’d love to hear your comments too.”

“Hey. How would I know what to say?”

“Simply whether you liked the piece or not.”

“That’s all?”

“Just as you did a few minutes ago.”

“All I said was ‘wow.’”

“That’s enough,” Larry glowed with good humor. “‘Wow’ is good enough.” He canted his face to show his affectionate appreciation. “Beside, I don’t consider myself on the same level as the poets I quoted from the anthology. They’re mature poets, most of them. I’m at the beginning stage, but I still think I have something to say.”

Something to say? Ira could only wonder — and keep silent.

“I’ve got another idea,” said Larry. “Next Friday night. Have supper with us, and stay overnight.”

“Wha’?”

“I’m putting in a bid right now for next Friday night.”

“Not overnight. Say. Even if there’s no rifle match—”

“Can’t you arrange it? You said you wrote the invitations.”

“Yeah, but I work at the football games Saturday. Till Thanksgiving. This one’s going to be at Yankee Stadium.”

“The new stadium? You can practically walk there!” Larry urged triumphantly. “It’s so close by, you can see it from the end of our street. You can shower before bedtime. We’ve got two baths. I’ll lend you a set of pajamas. We’ll have breakfast together.”

“Two baths. .”

“All right? Let’s make it definite.”

“No.”

“No? But this time you can tell your mother in advance where you’ll be. You’ll be in safe hands. I know how mothers can be.”

“No. I’ll come Friday night for supper, but that’s all. That’s enough.”

“You’re not going to inconvenience anybody. You’ll be perfectly welcome. My parents have been hearing me talk about you for some time. So they won’t be surprised. I’ve got an extra couch in my room. You’ll be comfortable. And we’re all completely informal, you know. My parents. Irma may be there, my older sister. My brother Irving — and of course, Mary, our maid—”

“I’ll come for supper,” Ira said stubbornly, aware he was being stubborn. “Nothing else, no. That’ll be enough.”

“Enough?” Larry was amused at Ira’s strenuous reluctance. “You sure?”

“I’m sure. I’m sure.”

The platform began to quiver before the approach of a train.

“Okay.” Not the least vexed, Larry leaned forward to view the square-nosed wooden train noisily devouring the track as it approached the platform. “Honestly,” he said, raising his voice, “why don’t you want to stay overnight? I’ve got a big full-sized bed. You can have that if you prefer. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“No. I said no.”

“Are you just plain shy?”

“No. I wet my bed,” Ira replied gruffly. “It’s called pisher in Yiddish. I’m a pisher.”

Larry burst into a spontaneous, hearty laugh. “That’s a new one I’ve just learned. Pisher.”

“Yeah?”

“And now I just remembered another word Sam uses sometimes: minyan for a group of ten. . Oh, megillah, yes! Megillah, that’s another. Megillah. Pisher and minyan.”

“Boy, you’re gonna build up a vocabulary.”

They waited for the train to come rattling to a stop. The blue-uniformed guard, with gloved hands on lever handles, dull bars connecting with the gates shiny with leather buffing where grabbed, clanked open the low steel gates to the train. .

XVII

Dissatisfied, Ira let his arms hang down beside him, fingers of arthritic hands painfully opposing his flexing. Even as he typed, he was aware of minuscule notions darting about in his mind — and vanishing as if sifting through the same neurons that engendered them. And some were probably important, but what the hell, every prose writer experienced that. Some are coming, some are wenting, said dear old fuddy-duddy Longfellow, do not try to snatch ’em all. No. But there was much more to it than mere volatile fancies, conceits. Ah, there went one! As if he had to throw a body block at the idea to stop it before it dodged by him. He had to get back to himself. That was the important thing. Like Antaeus, the giant, to his own Mother Earth. Too inflated a metaphor maybe, but it conveyed the central thought, the nub, the imperative. He had to get back to himself. It was a primal necessity. This matter of juggling the devastating business of his incestuous “relations” with Minnie, never originally intended to be revealed, in the first place, and now a determining, nay, the determining force in Ira’s thoughts and behavior. Like that of a dark binary star on a visible one, it had altered the entire universe. His task now was to juggle, to wield a preponderant, unintended element that he had introduced into the rendering of his portrayal of why his central character opted for the future he did, why he stumbled upon a literary career, brief though it may have been; he would have to incorporate that new element in the total design — somehow.

In his first draft, he had made it seem — yes, damn it! — as if Ira were choosing one of two kinds of America open to him: Billy’s kind of America, the open-air, the active, the adventurous, the gregarious, and Larry’s kind, well-to-do, cultivated, settled, conservative, clannish. But hell, the dominant conflict at this stage wasn’t that at all. . And even if it were, he was incapable of convincingly portraying such intellectual distinctions, nor of the deliberations these would require of his central character in the making of his choice for the future. No. He was drawn blindly toward what offered the greatest possibility of the satisfaction of need, of appeasement of the remorseless inner disquiet, perhaps provide an avenue for its release, even partial. Larry seemed to offer that.

So Ira was left with (as he had said before) a canvas he had to paint over, whose original showed through, or something of the sort; he had to overwrite an untidy palimpsest. Only if his central character was relatively free, free from the continual and often unbearable spiritual warp, a veritable gnarling of the psyche, could he, the author, even hope to continue to pursue his original intention of representing Ira as choosing between Billy’s and Larry’s America. Though there may have been a grain of truth in the way Ira was initially affected by Larry’s appearance on the scene, it was nothing decisive, only a grain. Ira was already under a ruinous cloud, with Faust’s skull all atwitter at the table. Choices were dictated by other things than sensible considerations, choices were dictated by — the unspeakable, the unspeakable, and by preoccupations with schemes, ruses, connivings, that would succeed in gaining the unspeakable. How to win Minnie’s surrender; nothing he craved for more. Better, more obsessively sought after, for being a sin, an abomination! Boy, that fierce furor, with her alternately foul and tender outcries of the essence of wickedness. Always in his mind. Always in mind. He wouldn’t miss it, exchange it, for anything else in the world.

Now with this new element fouling up the act, foully deflecting it anyway, what say you, Ecclesias, guardian? I’m in a quandary, am I not? What?

— I’m listening.

I need guidance.

— You’re too reckless to be guided, too unruly, headstrong, injudicious.

Yes? Then favor me with a single word of advice. A precaution. Anything. I’m not going to revise five or six hundred pages. Just a word then. Please. Anything I can do?

— Salvage.

Salvage?

— Yes.

Salvage what? The results are bound to be a mess.

— You managed to accomplish that in person; then why not in fiction?

Now wait a minute.

Next Friday evening at Larry’s home. Jesus, try to eat right when you sit down at their table. It’s gonna be high-toned. Don’t chompkeh, Ira admonished himself, the way Pop always rebuked you for doing. Don’t gobble, gulp, smack your lips, suck your teeth. Should he say to Larry before they went to his house, “Look, I’m a fresser. Do you know what that is?” Larry had already seen how Ira ate in the lunchroom. Still, he wanted him to come to his house for supper — no, for dinner. So he’d put on his best suit, his best secondhand suit that Mom had bought after she tore another buck off the price. What a geshrey, their haggling. Oh, Jesus H. Put it on, put it on — make a joke out of it. Tell him. Not at the table, but before. Mom holding the ass of the pants up to the light, ridiculing the dealer (in Yiddish, it didn’t sound so bad). Shameless trickster, you call these weazened threads cloth? Go. Cheat. Two dollars and a quarter. Not a penny more. While Ira squirmed into a corkscrew. All that. . and try your best when you’re in Larry’s house. Say “Yes, ma’am” to his mother. Say “sir?” to his father when you don’t understand, Ira drilled manners into his head. You know: on your best behavior they call it. But that’s next week. Call Billy tonight. Skip Polo Grounds football tomorrow. Go canoodling (as Billy and he called canoeing) Saturday, but don’t camp overnight. Right? Right. That gives you Sunday morning. Sunday morning, when Mom goes off with the shopping bag. Can’t miss that. A diller, a dollar, a shopping-bag scholar. His sister says, “Don’t come too soon.” Ha. Ha.

His plans went agley that very weekend, the day following his ride on the El with Larry. He telephoned Billy early in the morning. They met at the boathouse. In brisk, breezy, fine weather, they canoodled across to the rocky New Jersey side. Soon after, they built a small campfire, and toasted cheese sandwiches in a frying pan — cheddar cheese and package bread Billy had brought. Ira had never tasted cheese so tangy until he met Billy, and he had asked Mom to buy it. Cheddar cheese, he told her, remember, it’s called cheddar, cheddar, like — but he couldn’t remember anything Yiddish that rhymed with it — unless you mispronounced cheder. Anyway she couldn’t buy it in the stores on Park Avenue. It wasn’t kosher. That was last Sunday, when Minnie had her period. So what the hell good was anything? Anyway, they kicked around a football, which Billy had tossed into the canoe when they set out, after they cleaned up the frying pan and coffeepot.

And then what the hell had gotten into Ira? That was the question. First manifestation of the flaw, first definite, tangible manifestation of his emerging neurosis. Billy had gotten off a poor punt. It went astray, way out of bounds, almost to the water’s edge. And Ira had suddenly let loose a string of goddamns and fucks. “Why the fuck can’t you kick it so I can catch it?” A barrage of profanity and obscenity — at Billy, his pal, Billy, so often his benefactor, as now, whose canoe it was, whose provisions, whose air mattresses to flop on, whose football. “Why the fuck can’t you kick the ball straight?”

Billy, even at the distance between them, turned visibly pale, his jaw suddenly clenched. He could have fought, Ira felt, if it had come to that, but he said nothing. They could have come to blows, such was the impact of his insult. Easier for Billy to fight him than to say anything, but he said nothing. And here they were, the two alone beside the Hudson on the Jersey side.

The fit of wrath left Ira — in minutes. Billy threw a forward pass instead of kicking the ball in return. Fury like a gust, a squall, struck and went on. Ira apologized. He apologized several times, “I didn’t mean it. I don’t know what the hell hit me. Okay, Billy?” Ira pleaded.

He showed a cheerful face; good sport, determined, but unable to wrinkle his nose. Equable, he let the past go by. He comported himself as naturally as always, with free swing of arm, torso, attention to the thing in hand, the football. But despite Ira’s humorous urging—“Go on, kick it, Billy. I don’t care if it lands in the water, I’ll get it”—Billy continued to throw passes. And Ira knew the damage had been done, irreparably done, forever and forever. He had lost his best friend’s friendship; he had lost Billy’s respect.

He had exposed to Billy’s view the loathsome pit within himself, exposed the hideous disfigurement under the mask, become a different person in Billy’s eyes. And no way to undo. . expunge the new perception, reverse the shock he had inflicted, no way ever. The damage had been done. .

They regained equilibrium with regard to each other, but it was an altered equilibrium, subdued and correct. They paddled back after a while across the Hudson to the boathouse. They moved quietly. They lifted the canoe back to its rack among the others, stowed gear away in the locker, walked together as far as Billy’s street, and parted, awkwardly.

So his little plans went awry. And sooner than he expected, and in a way he never foresaw, he lopped off that option; he lopped off his ties to that kind of America. A severance had taken place on the New Jersey shore. . on their favorite camping site, where the pebbles and stones were fewest, between the river and the Palisades. And on such a bright, brisk November day! A Saturday that should have been so carefree and happy, that should have left a carefree and happy memory, became instead an ugly turning point in friendship, irreversible and dismal. “Why the fuck can’t you kick that football straight?” A spewing up of the vile turbulence within himself, disclosing beyond mistaking to a tolerant, unsuspecting Billy Green. .

XVIII

The ride to Larry’s home the following Friday after school Ira would always say was windier than windy Troy. The trainman who opened the El train gates at the station not objecting, the two chose to ride with him on the rear platform of the El, the roar platform, Ira had quipped, their fedoras jammed down on their heads, topcoats buttoned up to the collar against the gale that mounted from one station to the next. They shouted snatches of information about themselves, about anything of interest. What delightful family reunions the Gordon clan had almost every weekend. They were gemütlich, that was a German word, “cozy, I think,” Larry translated. “There’s really no word in English that gives you quite the full meaning of it. Homey. Agreeable.”

Information, in shouted remark, together with much humorous comment about his family, passed from Larry to Ira during the trip, that first trip to the Bronx. Larry evidently loved his family. He loved them — all of them. Jesus, how could that be? No, no, Ira could feel himself almost physically raise up barriers to ward off dwelling on the contrast between the two. Now there was something intriguing. How much new he could learn.

Larry was a better friend to have, to cultivate, especially now that Ira felt he had broken his precious link with Billy. With Larry there could be still a way. . to a world elsewhere. He was dreaming. He had smashed something in himself: a romantic something. He couldn’t be romantic, he who gave his sister a dollar in the slept-in-smelling bed. And when she asked, “Is that rubber thing all right?” he said, “Sure, what d’ye think?” Romantic? For him the unexpected lucky break in the afternoon, after school, that was romantic, boy, when the green, blistery walls trembled as if they were stammering with joy, his joy at Minnie’s quick, curt “All right, so, c’mon.” That was romantic. He’d never get over it, never get over it. It towered above him, hulked over Larry’s romantic image, barred the way forever, oh, forever. When the class read Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, look how different, Ira told himself, look how different. The teacher told the class that the huge, black-armored knight that blocked Sir Gawain’s path was death, and not to be feared, because only a child was inside (even if it was nutty to think that a kid could sustain such huge bulk of armor, but. .): that was Tennyson’s meaning, yeah, and the class accepted it. But for Ira what did the parable summon up? Himself and Minnie, himself when he was twelve, and she was only ten — child she, with a smooth little round ass. And after it happened, the bad, the bad, the bad took over. Now he was death, the child in black armor; he was death, the one who killed the romantic.

Pulling on his discolored leather gloves more firmly, the crabbed-looking Irish trainman came out of the car, straddled the space between cars, and grasped the burnished steel lever handles on each side of him, while he waited for the train to come to a stop.

“You’re going to major in bio, aren’t you?” Larry asked.

“Huh?”

“I mean in college.”

“Oh, yeah. Bio. Bugology.”

The gates snapped open. Tête-à-tête, in the brief quiet of station pause, the two stood against the gate opposite the one the few passengers left by or came in. Only at certain express stops, when the local opened gates on the opposite side, did Larry and Ira have to shift sides on the platform. Larry knew when.

“Biology, boy, I love that stuff,” Ira added. “I’ve been getting A’s in everything.”

“It doesn’t pay very well. That’s the only trouble with it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You said you might teach.”

“Oh, yeah, high school. I wanna teach bio.”

The gates snapped shut.

“That’s what I mean,” Larry said. The trainman pulled the bell cord overhead. “Schoolteachers don’t earn very much.” The train began moving.

“They don’t?” Ira felt unaccountably disconcerted, as if something mundane had intervened where he least expected it, roiled up glamour, smudged Larry’s romantic luster. And what about those poems Larry wrote, and was taking him home to show him? Like the modern poems that he had recited, poems that liberated one from stale perspectives, made free and vibrant the grimy streets and filled them with promise. Money? Earning? All that freedom was suddenly hedged, that shimmering romantic freedom Larry seemed to possess a minute ago constrained. Something was amiss, something didn’t fit. “I don’t know what high school teachers get paid,” Ira said, disturbed by his own display of vacancy.

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“That’s the first thing you ought to find out. I could ask my sister Sophie — or Wilma — what a high school starting salary is. Of course, they both taught in the elementary school, and they didn’t have to support a family. You might.”

“Me?”

“I don’t mean at the start, at the beginning of your teaching career. But sooner or later. You don’t intend to be a bachelor, do you?”

“I don’t know. I mean — well, I never thought.” Support a family? Boy.

“I’m sure the starting salary is a little more in high school than elementary school, but it can’t be too much more.”

“No.” Ira suddenly understood. It was practicality, practicality that tethered the entrancing world of Larry’s modernity, that hobbled its visionary freedom. Practicality that trammeled the romantic. Jesus, what a dope. He didn’t understand anything. “That’s why I was telling you about taking the Cornell scholarship exam.” Ira tried to exonerate his improvidence, gain purchase on defined, on accepted, attitudes. “Maybe I could be a zoologist, a real zoologist in a lab or something. But. .” He reverted to refuge in levity. “I’m a melamed, that’s all.”

“A what?” Larry invited, alert to apprehend.

“A melamed,” Ira raised his voice against the train clatter and rush of wind. “That’s the guy who teaches you to read Hebrew. My father calls me that.”

“What do you mean? It’s a joke?” Larry laughed a little helplessly. “A melamed? Do I say it right? Doesn’t he want you to be one? Or does he?”

“Oh, well. He doesn’t really care. I mean—” Ira tossed a shrug. “It was my mother who wanted me to go to college. And I figured teaching school is about the best thing I can do. Listen, you know what a shlemiel is?”

“Oh, I’ve heard that expression. It’s funny. Sam uses it too. It means not very — what? — capable, bright.”

“Well, I’m a shlemiel. That’s what my father means.”

“Just because you prefer teaching as a career?” Larry awaited a reply, and receiving only a vague, mute, indeterminate gesture, he went on: “I like teaching. Honestly I do. I told you I love teaching in Sunday school. But not as a profession. It’s absolutely the lowest-paid one of all. It’s really a pity, but—”

“Yeah, but you gotta remember,” Ira interjected. “With us, in my family, except for my father, Pop, but with Mom, in the rest of my family, and where we live, it’s got a lotta respect. You know what I mean? My son is a high school teacher. Ousgeshtudiert. You know what ousgeshtudiert means?”

“Ausgestudiert is German. It means learned, scholarly.”

“All right. And besides, for me, by teaching high school, I’d make a lot more money that I ever made — even though I don’t know how much, how much high school teachers get paid.” Ira grinned sheepishly. “I know it’s more. And long vacations too. It’s easy too. It’s just as if I’m keeping on going to school. So instead of being one of the pupils, I’m a melamed.” Ira watched the black railroad ties slur together, separate a moment, slur together — almost emblematic of what he was trying to say. “You know what my principal, Mr. O’Reilly, used to tell us? Those marbles he didn’t lose, the other kids stole from him. That’s why he became a schoolteacher. That’s me.”

“It’s not as easy as it sounds,” said Larry. “I’ve heard my sisters talk about it. All kinds of record-keeping and preparations for lessons. And sometimes very annoying disciplinary problems. I prefer dentistry.”

“What?”

“I’m going into dentistry. I talked it over with Victor, my brother-in-law. I think I’m—”

“You said dentistry? You mean you wanna be a dentist?”

“Yes. That’s what I said.”

“You?”

The train was slowing down again. Ira felt oddly as if it were himself slowing down, all kinds of fancies, flighty illusions, slowing down, all that new marvelous promise, pristine look of things, hope of a world elsewhere. . somewhere. . maybe. . all the more yearned for because. . because — aw, he was screwy. Larry didn’t have to get out of the trap he was in, the vise, yes, vice, between the jaw of delirious craving and the gnawing jaw of guilt. Ira gazed hopelessly downward to the street passing diagonally below the mixed din of the train. Maybe you could be romantic and a dentist if you were normal, he mused. He watched the seedy little storefronts down below slide by.

Seedy little storefronts had already become incandescent in the shadow of the El, in the premature twilight of the El, their wares becoming more distinct as the train slowed down before a station. Cross streets opened up more leisurely too, presented their grubby vistas a little longer, before the drab, monotonous brick walls, inset with fire escape and window glass, engulfed them again. In the succession of bleary tenement facades, a worn old man, a blowsy housewife, a child, looked out from behind closed windows. How random they appeared, like those flat chesspieces in the slits of flat chess cards. Random, forlorn, keeping lackluster vigil for some kind of fulfillment that Ira was certain would never be realized.

Pity stirred him, pity for them, pity for self, a peculiarly generalized pity; and as the train entered the station, Ira wondered whether Larry noticed the same things he did, and felt the same way. But no, Larry was talking about how much he liked to use his hands, that he had good hands for dentistry — he splayed out his strong white fingers. In a strange, confused way, Ira became conscious of a sense of superiority, about those same things Larry had introduced him to only — only when? A few weeks ago? The modern, the disclosure of the mood of the contemporary, his time, its latencies, the way the street, the buildings, yes, the imago — cast off its stultifying shell. Odd. He had never thought about that before; who cared about that before? Not when he was part of Billy’s world, the outdoors, the gun club world. But that goddamn football, that freak explosion of temper, yeah, freak, and not so freak. As if it were the cost of his new kind of liberty, somber liberty. He was freer than Larry, that was it: nothing to reckon with, nothing to hold him back, family, warmth, what did he call it? Gemütlichkeit. Comfort. Ease. Dental office. Fees. It rhymed. Hell, he — the child in black armor — had broken barriers Larry never dreamed of. . had committed, Jesus, horrendous, transpontine acts — nutty name, nutty acts — and paid for them in toll of dread.

Once more the trainman stepped out of the car door, took his post at the gate handles. You could almost smell the urine in the toilets when the train came to a halt.

“So don’t you have any friends?” Ira asked. “You know, I mean, how come you don’t have friends like yourself?”

“I think I told you.”

“Oh, yeah, there I go, not listening again. No, I remember.”

“Yes. Some of them — my age — they’re a lot richer than I am — I mean my family — but they’re climbers, and I hate climbers.”

“Yeah? I thought you had to be poorer to be a climber.”

“Oh, no. That’s not always the case. They’re just vulgar, that’s all. They have no class, you know what I mean? Nearly everyone I know my age — it’s clear, it’s obvious: they try so hard to ingratiate themselves. They’re Jewish, but pretentious and tasteless — and so-o middle class.” Larry drooped in comic despair. “So conventional, so material. Ah! I can’t tolerate them, the way they equate everything to money. Dollars and sex!” He suddenly straightened up for emphasis. “And that’s no joke, either. They’ve got cars too, big allowances. Murray, for example — he’s a freshman at Columbia — wants me to go everywhere with him. But God! You’d go crazy listening to him about his fraternity, tuxedos and proms, the heiresses he’s dated, and how much rent their folks pay for their apartments on Central Park West. The pull they have at City Hall. His father’s investments. His father’s Packard limousine. A chauffeur too. And yes, the law degree Murray expects is going to make him an independent millionaire by the time he’s thirty. Who cares about that? The guy is still vulgar.”

“Yeah?” Ira only half understood. Middle class, what did that mean? Those rich people? More than just that, they had hot water, steam heat, like almost everybody who lived west of Park Avenue in Harlem, real-allrightniks as Jews said. And they had cars, too. Chauffeurs. No, there was something more than that. He had read the term before in some book, but only now did the term come to life. They were more like the people he delivered fancy groceries to, or steamer baskets, when he worked for Park & Tilford, people who lived on Riverside Drive or West End, whose dumbwaiter ropes he pulled. But why was Larry so disparaging about them? What was wrong with being in the middle class? Didn’t everybody on 119th Street, everybody Jewish, try to climb up — yeah, “climber,” that was the word Larry used — climb out of the dumps they lived in, the coldwater flats like his? Success, yeah, all his relatives strove for that. Was that what he himself disliked about them, without knowing why? Them, his relatives, Pop too. His Jewish interim friends on the street, who shot pool, patronized the delicatessen after the movies, ate pastrami sandwiches and drank celery tonic. Middle class. That was their ambition: success. Boy. And Billy’s father, the engineer? Wasn’t he middle class? So what about Farley’s father, the undertaker? Ira uttered a short helpless laugh as the train moved on again. “Jesus, there’s so much I don’t know.”

Larry looked at him inquiringly.

“I mean, you said middle class. Everyone wants to be in the middle class. Everybody I know wants to be in the middle class. My mother wants to be in the middle class.”

“That’s the trouble.”

“Why?”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to escape. Middle-class standards. Middle-class values. That’s why I write, I think, why I’ve been writing, trying to write poems, ever since I attended Ethical Culture. Even before I began going to high school.”

“But you’re going to be a dentist.”

“There’s nothing wrong with assuring myself of leisure, you know what I mean? Of decent surroundings. But I don’t have to think the way the middle class does. And I don’t think the way they do. I know it. I don’t value the things they value. I have other values, to me much more important, values most of them don’t have the vaguest ideas about. Poetry. Art. Theater.”

“You’re way over my head.” Ira grinned, sighed without knowing why. “Yeah.”

“Wait till you meet my family, you’ll understand.”

“But you love them? Don’t they know you’re writing poems that are sort of against what they — they believe in?”

“Not against that exactly. Just free of it. Of course, I don’t think they always understand. And when they do, well, that’s just a youthful phase, as far as they’re concerned. They can’t think of lyrics beyond the kind they would hear in Rose Marie or Indian Love Call or some other musical comedy hit on Broadway. Maybe not my sisters so much. My brother and my parents are terribly conventional.”

Conventional. There was another inert term suddenly come to life, emerging from the abstract, and becoming troublesome. He wasn’t used to that kind of thinking: categories, that was it. The classes that people belonged to. And people who were conventional. In Billy’s America nobody worried about that. He never once heard Billy mention anything like that around a campfire, or while they toted guns to a rifle match. Too intangible. Billy never said anything about society. “Hell, I know!” Ira burst out. “I know what you mean. ‘Class,’ you were saying. I don’t mean middle-class. Not classy. Class. I get the idea.”

“Now you know what I mean by social climbers now.”

“Yeah. When you talked about society, I just thought of a party I barged into the first day I worked for Park & Tilford. I had a steamer basket to deliver — a real expensive one — and I went to the wrong door. Upstairs instead of downstairs. I’m always pulling boners like that. Talk about high class.” Ira grinned, scratched. “It wasn’t the champagne I could see the butler serving, and the maids — you know, the dough. I came away thinking what they were was more than money. Class.”

Larry regarded him with his soft gaze, his brown eyes appreciative; then he shook his head. “You’ve got some wonderful stories.”

“Yeah?”

“You make everything so graphic, it’s really fascinating.”

That was enough. Ira scrolled the pages down. No, the El ride, the journey, couldn’t contain any more, anyway ought not to. Maybe interesting stuff, but a plethora. Then what? Delete? All that followed? What a shame. He sat, quietly, soberly, with hands cradled in lap, pondering. How rescue it, where interlard or append it? The monitor indicated that the RAM was already sixty percent of capacity, and he was jittery about going any higher. Exceeding sixty percent by too much, he had had difficulties once or twice in retrieving the document, at least from a floppy disk, though it was true he had a hard disk to fall back on. But actually his worries were groundless. Fiona, his secretary, expert in these matters, could be depended on to rescue him. Ah, yes.

Had he taken his second diuretic tablet, his furosimide, as its generic name went? Had he? When he took his luncheon cup of tea? No, he hadn’t. he had forgotten to. Still, he had been sitting here a long time, and he had to urinate. Well, there was the urinal hanging in his three-wheel walker. He could use that. Not take any chances of mishap during the trek to the bathroom in his bedroom. Better save right now, and get up and answer the call of nature forthwith. No chance of embarrassment either, right now, using the urinal. Diane, his housekeeper, was away; she had gone to pick up her daughter at school. So, except for himself, the place was vacant.

Old bore, they would think — he had broken his resolution not to intrude on his reedited manuscript, not to intervene with extraneous or current reflections into his already revised text. But he was eighty-six years of age now, and could brush off previous resolutions, if he chose. Even so, his doing so now gave him a sense of guilt, of sinfulness in breaking his own pledge made to himself. Maybe he ought to delete this intervention too, this bit of Nestorian garrulity. But the fact was it was more than that, more than an instance of the garrulity of senescence. The seemingly rambling passage played a key role. Unless he deleted the material that followed, and he was obviously loath to, his sense of rightness required this interlude. In short, his present intrusion, in this, the month of May, in the year 1992, into a text considered final two years ago was necessary, if he would include what followed, and he would. The balance, figuratively and literally, of the long dialogue already recorded aboard the ride on the El needed respite, needed relief. He hoped his aside had provided it. Anyway — he adjured himself — only in extreme cases, such as this, a dilemma between inclusion or deletion of work already accepted, would he permit himself another such infringement, another such flouting of a solemn contract he had made with himself. Well, have fun, Stigman, he heard mind speak to itself. Have fun.

XIX

Upon arriving at the El station where they got off, it seemed as if they were in the country, at the foot of a hillside, so low-lying the station was, by a brown cliffside via a short platform hewn out of the hill. All sedate it seemed, the cliffside above the station, above the tracks. He would never see it so again: that such an undreamed-of rural enclave would be a station on the route of the old, beat-up Ninth Avenue El. He would never see it that way again — an El station at the foot of a brown cliff.

They got to Larry’s home, one flight up in a neat and tidy hallway, stairs all quietly carpeted. The apartment was sedate and commodious. There were introductions to parents, and to sister Irma; brother Irving was not present. Ira awkwardly expressed formal admiration of their home, followed by his warm and sincere joy at beholding Larry’s own room, Larry’s own study, large enough for a full-sized bed, and a couch, an ample desk — and with a typewriter on it! Scatter rugs, a handsome five-drawer chest, a walk-in closet. All Larry’s own. And the design on the papered wall that he himself had chosen when he was “a lot younger”: of an old-fashioned choo-choo train chuffing by a river, through an old-fashioned village, with nostalgic farmhouses, barn, and steeple.

The living room was furnished with an inviting oak recliner; and — novel to Ira — the slant of the recliner’s back depended on the position of an iron rod in a kind of wooden ratchet in the rear. Sharing the floor space, or rather carpet space, were a large sofa of dark green cloth and two fat, opulent easy chairs of dark leather. Under them a lively, florid Turkish rug, rich with intertwining vines, spread from mopboard to mopboard. Electric sconces on the walls lit up reproductions of paintings that reminded Ira of the Corots, the gentle landscapes he had seen as a boy in the Metropolitan with Jake Shapiro. There was an arresting reproduction of a Maxfield Parrish landscape. Dickie Bird was its title; in it were depicted a cluster of round castles rising up to different heights, stiff and attentive, forming a bastion to a naked maid on a swing reaching its apogee. High in a sapphire sky, smooth and mellow as the dusk in paradise, the naked damsel swings, tits like macaroons. Boy. .

And supper: lamb chops, with divine never-tasted-before creamed spinach, served by Mary, the homely Hungarian maid. But who would believe that spinach could be so transmogrified? Ira lauded the dish with the most extravagant superlatives he could summon. Later he so inspired Mom, in the course of her interrogation concerning the kind of home the Gordons lived in, the food, the furnishings, the personae, that she undertook to prepare the same thing according to her son’s rapturous description of it. Nah! It didn’t taste like that at all! Ira growled, rude as ever. Poor Mom. She tried.

Ira could not get out of his mind Maxfield Parrish’s Dickie Bird in the living room, where the two youths sat afterward listening to records played on the phonograph duly cranked up by Larry. The dainty, the fair, the nude maiden with the pretty tits, shaped like a teacher’s bell on a desktop, disported on a swing, and all about her, turrets arose, high and low, yearning upward into ethereal, blue heaven. Beautiful. But see how dirty your mind is, Ira chastised: Dick for Dickie, and the turrets were hard-ons all around. Nobody else saw them, only he, crude and coarse: tukhis afn tish—the vulgar saying in Yiddish, ass on the table. Jewish immigrants who left their wives behind, like Pop, and screwed a twenty-five-cent nafke standing up, must have demanded tukhis afn tish before they paid. Only this time it was damsel’s ass on a swing. Not a sling, but a swing. Why did you have to think of it? Why? Why? Because he had bartered a stolen fountain pen once for Minnie’s “charms,” as she lay athwart his bed in the dingy little bedroom. That was why? One of those afternoons when the green walls tingled, and he nipped the little brass nipple of the lock upward — oh, hell. What a serene and homogenized sky the maiden swung into. Boy, supposing he was on the swing with her, and she was sitting straddle as they swung. “Boy, it’s cerulean,” Ira praised reticently, as he gazed.

“It’s what?” Larry asked.

“It’s cerulean. Don’t I say it right?”

“Oh, yes. Cerulean. That’s just the right word.” Approval distended Larry’s handsome countenance into smiling beguilement. “Better than my lapis lazuli. I got that word from Browning. Where did you get yours?”

“You mean you expect me to know?”

Later that evening, after Larry had loaned him the Untermeyer anthology, the two youths left Larry’s home to walk to the subway line, a much longer walk than to the El, but in the end, after change and reversal at 96th Street, a ride that would bring Ira nearer home. A new book under his arm, a new kind of book to read, a new friend. Impressions of Larry’s parents: his father spoke without an accent; only flaw in his English, perhaps deliberate, he said um-possible for im-possible. Not taciturn, but spoke little, grave in appearance, though now and then his face would light up with pleasure at something Larry said. He was clearly his father’s favorite, the son of his advancing years. In his sixties, Ira guessed, a man above average height, not lean, not overweight either, flat-fronted, Mr. Gordon was dark in complexion, had a full, gray mustache, and wore his thick, speckled gray hair in close-cropped, military style. Probably when younger, he looked more like his daughter, Irma, Larry’s next-older sister, than like Larry.

Jews were like chameleons, Ira had begun to notice. Live in Hungary a couple of generations, and they commenced assuming Hungarian features — the way Baba looked Slavic, with blue eyes and snub nose, descendant of Jews who lived among the goyim in Galitzia. So did Mamie: Slavic. But not Mom, with her dark hair and broad nose. And not Moe either with his broad nose. Still, Moe was fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and blond. Well, exceptions and mixes, and some, like himself, ran true to the ancestral, patriarchal stock, the map of Jerusalem on his pan.

Larry’s mother was pretty, actually pretty. Mother of five children, she seemed much younger than her husband. She was a brunette, with a puffy cloud of hair untouched by any glint of gray. Her features were fresh, scarcely marked by a wrinkle — and regular (almost gentile) — another surprising characteristic Ira thought he discerned among many Hungarians, classically proportioned features, a finely delineated nose, like Larry’s, far too regular to be Jewish, with a smooth skin and brown eyes radiating cheerfulness. And yet she wasn’t a true Hungarian; she was Jewish. And besides, Hungarians were supposed to have descended from Attila’s feral oriental Huns. All very puzzling. Anyway, Mrs. Gordon was most cordial, solicitous, loquacious, and hospitable.

And there was Irma, resembling her father, and even Larry to some extent, but lacking the well-nigh classic symmetry of his countenance. Like her father, darker in hue than Larry, her lips prominent in their swelling roundness, so much so that she had developed the noticeable trait of rolling her lips inward to thin them. It seemed nothing short of a preoccupation.

So much for Ira’s first impressions of some of Larry’s folks. But what had happened to him in the past twenty-four hours since he had written this passage to cause a new listlessness? It was a change in plans. He had intended to advert again in passing, as he had to Larry’s folks, advert to the Untermeyer anthology — and then append the journal entry that he had been unable to append the day before. This time he, or rather old Ecclesias, would certainly have RAM enough to contain the journal entry still waiting without. There ought to be RAM enough, even if he included here something he had omitted, namely, reflections on the young Ira’s deplorable table manners, his eating habits, his jerky, ravenous, noisy, chomp-chomp, despite efforts to deport himself with restraint, with a little decorum. It seemed to Ira, even after these sixty years, he could still see Larry’s gentle gaze resting on him, tentatively, sympathetically. He had planned to include all that and still have room or rather RAM for the journal entry. But in the twenty-four hours that had passed, the projected collage had waned in interest. The urge to interrupt his yarn had passed.

XX

Once again events sped up, piled up in the course of the last few months of Ira’s senior year at DeWitt Clinton, in the spring of 1924. There was home life, with its permutations and combinations, grim, pent-up pending and rending, and vicious release. There was the gun club, mix of routine, boredom, and playful pastime. And there were classes, and the subjects elected: solid geometry, under the tutelage of Dr. McLarin, for Ira a delight. Then there was the second half of his biology course, his proficiency and avidity making him ever more certain that biology or some aspect of it would be the field of his vocation. Even the second half of his chemistry course at last emerged from preliminary confusion. His work in English was mediocre as ever. And, alas, the last half of third-year Spanish dragged along well into his senior year.

He and Larry enrolled in the same Elocution 8 class (though they now knew better than to sit in proximity), a class under the auspices of Mr. Staip. As far as stature was concerned, Mr. Staip was a gnome of a man, probably less than five feet tall; and yet he was capable of reducing his students, most of them standing head and shoulders above him, to mere gnomes themselves, subservient and docile. If ever there was a martinet of speech, it was Mr. Staip. He shrank his students to stammering puppets by the sheer fastidiousness of his pronunciation. No consonant or vowel but received its due when he uttered it, crisply, distinctly, and he expected, nay, he exacted the same from his quailing students. And very few could measure up to his demands.

That spring, as baseball got underway, Ira still hustled soda: at the Polo Grounds, at the new Yankee Stadium, occasionally at a prizefight in Madison Square Garden. Larry’s curiosity had been aroused by Ira’s accounts of his work there. And assured by Ira that he could obtain permission for him to put in a stint as a soda hustler, if only for the novelty of the experience, he met Ira one morning at the main gate of Yankee Stadium — not far from Larry’s home. Ira vouched for his friend before the ever-irascible Benny Lass, as two years before Izzy Winchel had vouched for him. After a cursory glance, Larry was admitted.

To Ira’s chagrin, it shortly became evident that for Larry the reality of work at the ballpark corresponded little to Ira’s entertaining descriptions of it. By the time the first inning was over, Larry had expressed his indignation to Ira at what a disgusting ratio obtained between commission and sales price, between remuneration and the amount of hard work entailed in earning it. Their paths crossed several times during the course of the afternoon, and each time, Larry’s offended demeanor, his asides, bordering on humorous reproach, left little doubt he felt imposed on, deceived. By the time the day’s work was over, he was thoroughly outraged by the meanness and surliness of personnel and fellow hustlers, the rudeness of fans. Once again, as at that moment on the El a year ago, Ira felt a peculiar superiority within the terms of Larry’s own, proper realm, realm of sensibility, because he sensed that somehow, compensating for the drudgery, the labor, the brusqueness, the affront, the rough and tumble of the workaday world yielded valuable aspects of the commonplace, though why he valued them he didn’t know. They became his, perhaps uniquely his, recognizable signatures of his surroundings, almost a kind of currency, limited in exchange, but highly prized by people like Larry. Well. . he didn’t know. He knew that certain kinds of perceptions affected him, and not Larry — something he could scarcely put into words: that Larry was irked by the piddling pay for so much hard work, and also because his charm and poise and good breeding were ignored in the hurly-burly of excitement and competition. He should have borne all that as Ira did, with a certain wry tolerance, in exchange for access to the raw and the turbulent, to all that was going on, a chance to see and feel the crude power of the mass, and not allow sensitivity and wounded vanity, even considerations of fairness, to get in the way. What if Billy had been in Larry’s place? How differently Billy would have reacted: wrinkled up his short nose, like the good sport he was. And grinned.

Billy was a good sport, and Larry wasn’t. Billy gave little heed to monetary factors; Larry did. Larry wanted to write poetry, short stories, but not at the price of his comfort, not at the price of not being a dentist — so Ira felt — not at the risk of too great exposure to the unceremonious, certainly not at the expense of participation in it. And yet, such was Larry’s attraction, the charm of his comfortable, Jewish, cultivated life, that Ira found it impossible to resist its appeal. And Larry was so generous: he loved to share, to guide; he took pleasure in initiating Ira into whole domains of which he knew almost nothing, the names only: ballet, the stage, modern sculpture, opera, architecture, orchestral music. Larry loved to lead, and Ira was only too ready to follow.

Billy noticed the new attachment (he and Larry had long since met, each a sort of curiosity to the other); and even though Ira felt changed in Billy’s eyes since his uncontrolled outburst on the New Jersey shore, they still shared common interests: the rifle team, canoeing, camping, and golf. Even so, Billy continued to take Ira to the golf course in Van Cortlandt Park, paid the admission fees, and supplied the clubs (as the winter before, ice skates for ice hockey). “Still trying for Cornell?” Billy asked with stoic tactfulness.

“Oh, sure.” But actually Ira had begun to doubt. He had applied for the requisite permission to take the examination, and he intended to take it, but would he go if he placed? Larry had applied to NYU, to the college’s new branch or extension opposite Washington Square Park. In two years he could complete his “predental,” as it was called, his academic prerequisites in the humanities, before going on to dental school. Tuition was charged at NYU, but not at CCNY, a city college, and except for texts and incidentals, free. Ira had applied there as a matter of course, because of his circumstances, his indigence, and as his only hedge against his likely failing to place in the Cornell scholarship examinations. But truth was he already felt himself drifting away from his original goal, drifting or drawn away, just as he had done from his strong affinity for Farley. And though he might adjure himself that he mustn’t allow the same thing to happen again, that he ought to keep his sights fixed on Cornell, keep steadily in mind his goal of a career in biology, and prepare himself as best he could for the coming examination, he kept repeating Mom’s bracing maxim Der viller iz mer vi der kenner, “He who aspires excels him who knows.” Still, despite everything, not so much an involuntary veering away from target was taking place as a wavering of resolve to fix his aim on it. A quibbling within himself whether doing so was worthwhile began to take place without the respite of common sense.

XXI

June 1924. His last June at DeWitt Clinton, the last month of the last term he would be a student there. Soon the finals, soon the “Regents,” the New York State uniform examinations, soon the Cornell scholarship exams. In Elocution 8, which Ira shared with Larry, all members of the class were expected to deliver an address satisfactory to Mr. Staip in order to pass the course. The address was to be about some outstanding personage, was to employ the aid of only minimal notes, and was to be not less than five minutes in length. Ira chose to speak on the English poet William Ernest Henley. Ira would never forget that he began by contrasting Poe and Henley, the one dying in a cellar after a drunken debauch, the other undauntedly fighting off tuberculosis all his life. He concluded his speech with a recitation of the ringing “Invictus.” And when he finished declaiming the last lines,

“I am the master of my fate;

I am the captain of my soul,”

to his utter astonishment, he saw the audience in front of him break into spontaneous applause — joined in by, of all people, Mr. Staip himself. The next minute he accorded a startled and all but incredulous Ira the unheard-of privilege of being excused from class for the balance of the period! Suffused with delight, his head whirling at his unprecedented triumph, Ira made his way down into the study hall. . there to mull over the ways of fate that had plunged him down here in disgrace and consternation from Elocution 7 in September, and now in breathless honor from Elocution 8 in June.

When next he met Larry, he seemed reserved, so scanty his praise as to seem no more than circumspect acknowledgment. Ira wasn’t sure what he expected after his oratorical achievement: something warm, bantering, humorously derogatory — something akin to the way Billy would have behaved: “Hey, what a fluke. Hey, who coached you in that?” Billy would have said. But this perfunctory mention, as if it were niggling recognition, was it envy? Had he taken Larry by surprise? Moved into the vanguard of subject matter where he didn’t belong, subject matter akin to the literary? Had he troubled Larry by show of unsuspected gifts — those in which Larry regarded himself as superior?

For whatever reason — it was probably that Larry felt reservations about Ira’s choice of personage, his choice of poet or poem — Ira felt hurt, hurt and resentful. Nah, what was he thinking about: attaching himself to Larry? Thinking of alternate ways of majoring in biology: at CCNY. Ridiculous; he was making the same mistake as he had made before, of letting blind feeling rule him. If he won a scholarship, Cornell was the place to go, to Cornell, the college Billy was applying to. Larry’s grudging acknowledgment was timely warning that he, Ira, ought to consider his best interests as objectively as he could.

“Hey, what did you do last weekend?” Ira asked Billy when he saw him next in school.

“Went canoodling. It was great.”

“Alone? Stay overnight?”

“Yeah, I went alone, but days are so long now, you can paddle for hours. You can go across the Hudson and back before dark — if you want to. I didn’t. I just sat under the Palisades afterward — talked to other fellows with canoes. Say, a couple of them brought a whole grocery store over: hot dogs and rolls. Apple pie. Blueberry pie. Cheese.”

“Wow! You build a fire?”

“A small one, and we swapped stories about camping. One of ’em got lost in the woods for three days. But he had about every Boy Scout badge there is, so it didn’t bother him. Say, you know it was still light until nine o’clock?”

“Is that when you came back?”

Billy grinned. “No, quite a few stars were out.” His face took on as beatific a look as would ever appear there. “I stayed out till nearly eleven.”

“Yeah? You got anybody goin’ with you Friday?”

“No.”

“All right we go canoodling together? Just Friday. I wanna hustle at the ball game Saturday. You know — I gotta make a few bucks Saturday — and Sunday, too. I don’t have to get up early, but I’ve gotta be there.”

“What about your friend? On Friday. Larry. Aren’t you seeing him?”

“No, not this time.”

Bright breezy afternoon awaited them as they stepped out of the kiosk of the Broadway subway station at 160th. Sun and wind, agreeable atmosphere pervading a normal scene, the stationary pedestrian and vehicle, and the pace of those in motion. If only he hadn’t said what he had said to Billy that terrible minute, minute of flaring insanity, as if Pop’s nature had taken hold of him. No, he couldn’t unsay it, couldn’t undo it, even though he thought he knew why: Van de Graaff crackling bolt, generated by his guilt, but nothing so spectacular: just uncontrollable short circuit across his hairline cleavage. He knew why. Then leave, leave, of course, leave it, separate himself from the source, from home, from Minnie, an inescapable vortex in which he was caught. Yeah. Two bucks for Sunday. Two bucks she demanded! She really had him over a barrel.

But there was Billy’s America signaling him: in a multitude of white-capped semaphores breaking out in mid-channel of the Hudson. Forget everything, try to push it all behind, get away, get clear. Ira goaded himself into quickened pace as the two descended from Broadway’s terrace to the boathouse on the riverbank. Common sense, at last; it was only common sense to accept America’s offer. He could never be Billy, but he could model himself after him, remodel himself into something like him. And he had the chance to. If he rejected Larry’s “values,” as he repeatedly called them, he had access to Billy’s model of life. In fact, he had no other so definite.

Whitecaps on the river, lapping the bright air, like so many tongues, clean and white. Start anew, start afresh. A wordless but visible choir, all saying the same thing. Start anew, start afresh. Break away from what held him. A Jewish Dick Whittington hearkening to watery Bow Bells on the river. Almost the same. Remember when you stood on the diving rock? Ira reminded himself of those desperate moments. The river promised you then. Boy. A circumcised Dick Whittington — Dick. Will you cut it out? Yeah, cut it out. I mean it. Get up before breakfast Sunday morning, before Mom leaves. Beat it out of the house.

Once in the boathouse, they went to the rack where the canoe was stored, took hold of each end of the small craft, carried it out, and gently set it down on its keel on the wind-rocked little wharf. Then Billy led the way back into the boathouse to the locker where paddles and cushions were stowed. Here the two could leave their neckties, felt hats, briefcases, while they paddled to the other shore. Maybe he’d spend half the night, munch on Billy’s box of crackers and jar of peanut butter, maybe mooch off other guys with a campfire. Who knew? With Billy, they’d meet some really nice guys—

“Even if you didn’t place,” Billy said, fishing in his pocket for the locker key, “heck, I bet you could work your way through Cornell. My dad worked his way through.” He continued to dig into his pockets. “He did all kinds of things around the college, maintenance work on the grounds, mowing lawns, repairing campus walks. Oh, gosh. He even spent a term being a busboy in the college cafeteria. Your dad’s a waiter.” Billy grinned. “That ought to come easy. Where the heck is that key? I had it this morning.”

“Did you have it at school?”

“Yes. I had it in the gun room. I know I had it.”

With mounting determination, mounting gravity, and then with vexation such as Ira had never seen Billy display before, he went through everything he owned; he ransacked pockets, wallet, his briefcase; probed pants cuffs; riffled through the pages of his textbooks. The key was nowhere to be found. “Heck, I had it this morning,” he kept repeating.

“Maybe you locked it in the gun room?” Ira suggested. “I mean, you left it there?”

“No, I had it afterward. I had it upstairs in the cafeteria, when I paid for lunch.”

Billy was certain he had the key after they left school. Perhaps he had lost it getting carfare out of his pocket on the subway station. Worst of all, he didn’t have a spare at home; it was the only key he had. In the end, they had to give up their planned outing. They picked up the canoe from the small dock. Ira felt something funereal, like a pallbearer, as with hoisted canoe they marched in step up the cleated gangway to the boathouse. Once inside, they returned it to the brackets the little craft had rested on, left it there as on a perch.

Disconsolately they retrieved street clothes and other belongings, strewn on the upturned keels of neighboring canoes. “Well, lucky we didn’t lose the key afterward,” Ira offered in consolation as he slipped on his tie. “We still got our stuff.”

“Yeah.” Billy shouldered into his jacket, restrained his frustration with crimped cheeks. “My dad’s got a hacksaw in his tool chest. It’s too good a padlock, though. That’s the trouble.”

“What d’you mean?”

They picked up their briefcases, stopped before the locker, where Billy hefted the brass base of the padlock. “This U-part that goes through the hasp is hardened steel. I don’t know whether even a bolt-cutter would go through it.”

“A bold-cutter?” Ira queried.

“No. A bolt-cutter,” Billy said impatiently. “Has a compound leverage, long handles.”

“Oh.”

“It’s all right for a regular steel bolt, but not that. You can read it on this U-part. It says ‘hardened.’”

“Say, I got an idea, Billy. Maybe I can borrow a little hydrochloric acid from the lab. You know, bring a small bottle from the house, and snitch a little in chem lab. Maybe we could dissolve it.”

“You think so?”

“It interacts with iron, any metal, I think. You want to try it?”

“That darn key! I wouldn’t care if I lost anything else.”

“I’ve got lab on Tuesday. I’ll sneak out a bottleful.” Ira depicted volume with encircled fingers. “We’ll go to your house first, and you get a glass. Not too big. Just big enough for the lock to fit in. We’ll let the lock soak in it.”

Tuesday afternoon, they repeated their trip to the boathouse. Ira emptied the hydrochloric acid into the tumbler Billy had provided, and raised it until the padlock was submerged. Instead of the furious interaction that Ira looked for, that he had seen take place between hydrochloric acid and metal chips or filings, a few bubbles formed reluctantly on brass and iron. Interaction was taking place, but at a rate beyond feasibility, certainly beyond the ability of either one to stand holding up the glass tumbler for the lock to drown in and dissolve. After a few minutes, Ira admitted defeat. “I guess my idea won’t work.”

“I’ll get someone to open it.” Billy’s optimism had returned. “It’s all right. I talked to my dad, and he told me the easiest way to get the darn lock open was to get a locksmith.”

“Yeah?”

“That key isn’t anything special.” Billy mitigated Ira’s chagrin. “Dad thinks his garageman would help him out with his acetylene torch, if he asked him. That might be easier than anything else.”

Billy succeeded somehow in getting the locker open, whether by means of locksmith or acetylene torch. In the gun room, perhaps for the last time together, Ira congratulated him, congratulated Billy, as Ira would recall later, with a peculiarly impersonal, an accommodating approval, like that of a friendly spectator. And after they ran the last cleaning patches through the bores of the rifles, and were oiling the rope to pull through the firearms for storage over the summer, for the new team, as if observing the end of something they had both held dear, and emboldened by imminent freedom from high school, they dared light up a single cigarette in their gun-club den under the stairs in the assembly hall. Giggling at each other in the camaraderie of mischief, they passed the butt from one to the other, inhaled a few puffs, exhaled down into a corner of the windowless niche, and trusted the stagnant air to retain the odor.

XXII

Graduation exercises approached in late spring just as the pavement began to buckle with the onslaught of New York summer heat.

“Noo, you’ll take me?” Mom asked eagerly. “Maybe your father will come along too, my paragon.”

“I’m not going,” Ira responded.

Her short throat flushed, skin crimson and scaled. “Again? A plague on you! Why not?”

“I’m working at Madison Square Garden that night. There’s a big prizefight on. I can make some money.”

“I’ll give you the few shmoolyaris you’ll earn that night.” Mom denigrated both the sound and value of the dollar. “Let it be my gift for your graduation. Why are you so intent on earning a few dollars that very night? Since when have you become my breadwinner?”

“I’m not your breadwinner. I just want to make a few bucks.”

“How much? Tell me. I’ll present them to you now. What will your earnings amount to?”

“I don’t know.”

“Noo? How much do you want?”

He tossed his head violently. “I don’t wanna go, that’s all.”

“Only to thwart me. Is that the reason?” She nodded bitterly. “To make a small sacrifice on this one occasion, he refuses. A small sacrifice, a crumb of consolation for these years he’s made his mother suffer, the tears she’s cried for him. No. I’m condemned to disappointment. Ai, vey, vey!” Mom heaved a deep sigh. “Be sacrificed yourself for the woe you cause me.”

“It’s just a bunch of speeches!” Ira burst out. “It’s nothing. Everybody marches in, then marches out.”

“Then why don’t you let Mom enjoy the speeches and the marching in and out?” Minnie interjected.

“Who asked you to butt in? Take her to your high school graduation.”

“Positively, I’ll take her. What d’you think, I’m like you? That I’m ashamed of my parents from spending all my time around goyim?”

“Aw, shut up.”

“I’ve never attended a graduation,” Mom declared, pleading. “Even once to see it. Ira, precious, once more, think about it. Relent. For your mother’s sake.”

“Oh, you are a louse.” Minnie glared at her brother.

Enjoying his manifest complacency, Pop adopted the deliberate tone of the seasoned arbiter. “An upstanding youth, Joey Schwartz next door, who has been working for Biolov’s ever since Ira threw up the job — years now, no? — had he been offered such an opportunity as this lout had, the opportunity to attend high school — and to be fostered, to be nurtured until graduation — four whole years — would he not have kneeled before his parents, kissed their hands in gratitude? Would his mother have needed to grovel before him, imploring him to take her to his high school to attend his graduation? What? He would have danced before her on the way. I am willing to wager had it concerned an upstanding youth in this case, a subway train would not have been good enough to convey his parents there, to this Davit Clinton High School. A taxicab, no less. As if it were his nuptials he were attending. A taxicab there”—Pop circled bunched fingers—“a taxicab home. Who knows. He would have skimped and hoarded his earnings to provide his parents with a supper at Ratner’s to spare her the preparing of a meal that day — to dine in style — ah, what is there to say? Even a Moe, a Moisheh, a gruber ying, sent by your good father, Ben Zion, the pious Jew, to work like a goy in the forests above the Dniester River, no? It’s a wonder he didn’t get a hernia.”

“Moe is a mensh. He’s so stout,” Mom retorted pointedly. “A gruber ying he’s not.”

“Then he’s not. But every summer, and how many times in the winter, has he taken the oldsters to spend two weeks or a month in a glatt kosher summer hotel? Since he came back from the war, how many?”

“Gey mir in der end. A great deal you care, except to relish my torment.” She turned from Pop to assail Ira. “You’re not ashamed? Base youth. Four years ago, four whole years ago, you told me the same thing. Deprived me of a bit of joy with the same pretext: speeches and marching, speeches and marching, nothing more. How do you know? Were you ever there?”

“I know. I don’t have to be there.”

“As long as you could go the next day, and get your diploma.”

“Louse! Mom oughta throw you outta here.” Minnie flared up at her brother. “She ought to throw you out on your ear. Out of the house.”

“Hah!” Pop gloated in agreement. “What have I said all along?”

“Aw, take her to your own graduation.”

“I need you to tell me? To my graduation she’ll go.” Minnie was close to tears. “But you, you, you’re the one that means everything to her. You’re a disgrace, that’s what you are. Take Mom to your graduation.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Her eyes dark with sorrow, Mom rocked from side to side. “He shrinks from his Yiddish mother, that’s the whole trouble, that’s my curse. You’re a Jew yourself, no? And there won’t be other Jewish parents present? I’ll find some niche, some crevice. I’ll hide. No one will notice me, and you need not either. You don’t know me. You don’t have to present me to your friends. Just let me witness. Minnie will lead me there, and home again. As long as I’ve seen my son graduate from high school.”

Alas, my mother. She breaks my heart sixty years too late, Ecclesias.

— Indeed? Pity all mothers of such sons. The whelp treats its dam better than you did yours, my friend. But you’re too late. The grave is a barrier to all amends, all redress.

By that same token, their neglect on my part makes no difference now, does it, Ecclesias?

— Desist. You mar your fable.

“I don’t wanna go.”

“Ai, vey, vey! What do I ask for? A crown? An ovation? No, only this paltry few hours out of all of twelve years to rejoice in. I nurtured him, I suffered for him — him! And yet I may not watch him given distinction, watch him given a high school diploma as other women watch their sons? Gevald! Heart of stone.” Desolate, she regarded him in tearless sorrow.

“I don’t wanna go!” Ira shouted. “I already told you once!”

“Go to hell!” Minnie wept with wrath and frustration. “Please, Mama, don’t aggravate yourself with that stupid bum. He — all he thinks about is himself, himself. Selfish, rotten stinker! Hint, that’s all I can call you. Dirty mutt. You should drop dead.”

“Megst takeh geyn in der erd,” Pop added his cutting amen.

Mom kept nodding bitterly, kept nodding, like a Norn or a Parca foreseeing endless woe: “Descend into the pit. The Almighty will repay you for this. And the Almighty pity me for damning my own son.” She slapped her mouth several times. “Oy, gevald. I intercede, Gotinyoo! Pay no heed to my implorings.”

“He’s listening,” said Pop. “Believe me.”

“Gey mir oukh in der erd,” Mom retorted.

“Uh. She’s made her prayer.” Pop folded his Yiddish newspaper. “Why is he that way? Why don’t you ask? Why is your son not like other Jewish children, upright, sensible—”

“I am well acquainted by now with your reasons,” Mom interrupted. “Further store of your wisdom spare me.”

“She doesn’t inquire why her kaddish’l Ira is the way he is.” Pop gnawed away on the bone of contention. “There are countless sons and countless mothers. And millions upon millions of sons strive to please their parents. They carry their parents on their fingertips. Their mothers and fathers on their fingertips. Azoy?” He illustrated, with upturned hands like sconces.

Mom’s face hardened with readiness of scornful reply. “You told me that already. Chaim, go torture the cat instead of me.”

“Such a mother, such a son.”

“And fathers like you should rot.”

“Aha! Utter a true word, and she flares.”

“You see what you do? It’s all your fault,” Minnie upbraided Ira. “A brother like you should go to hell. Shemevdik,” she mocked in Yinglish contracting in mimic cowering. “A neighbor comes to the door, right away he’s got his head down. Or he runs to the other room. That’s what the trouble is, Mom. He’s a stupid shemevdik. A high school graduate already, and he still runs away from somebody who knocks at the door.”

“Ai, a veytik iz mir,” Mom lamented. “Noo, leave him alone finally: an oaf.”

“You got such a fancy friend,” Minnie taunted. “He’s going to the graduation. He’s a mensh. Why doesn’t he teach you to be a mensh?”

“Who asked you to bring Larry into it? Nobody. So shut up.”

If he ever got around to it, Ira thought, he’d like to ascertain who were the pugilists who fought in the featured final bout on the night of his graduation exercises. He would append the information in a footnote. Whether it was Harry Greb or Gene Tunney. . perhaps both. . or neither. Well, let some scholar, if interested, dig up the data. About one thing he could rest assured — nay, two things: that the earnings, his pretext for depriving Mom of the pleasure of beholding him on the platform with fellow graduates in rented gown and mortarboard, could not have exceeded five dollars, and probably not more than three dollars. And that the inimitable Joe Humphrey was there, was there standing in the middle of the ring, and by dint of straw kelly and stentorian voice, quelling the boisterous fight crowd, while he announced the names and weights of the contenders, delighting the lowbrowed fans with his high-toned Bostonian “hawf-pound.”

XXIII

Ira lost track of Billy completely that summer of 1924. He never called Billy again on the phone, nor made any effort to get in touch with him; nor did he ever hear from Billy again, by letter or picture postcard. (Ira remembered vaguely something Billy had said about expecting that his father would get him a job on the survey crew of a new dam in Pennsylvania.) Perhaps he was already in Pennsylvania or somewhere, but their friendship was over with the end of high school, of their participation in the gun club, of their carefree hours of outdoor sports and “roughing it,” and with the irreparable breach Ira had caused by his egregious outburst — but more than anything else by his burgeoning attachment to Larry. When Ira looked back, the element of chance seemed to play a great role in his life. Still, it was inevitable that sooner or later he would have found someone with whom he could communicate, communicate those many new stirrings within him, fuzzy aspirations and wobbly ponderings. But then again, who could tell?

Larry stayed home that summer, giving his older brother Irving a hand in the ladies’-housedress-manufacturing plant that he operated. On one or two occasions, Ira walked with Larry to the factory, only blocks from Ira’s apartment. It occupied the entire floor of a typical loft building, and everywhere women worked at sewing machines, perhaps a hundred in all, sat and sewed ladies’ housedresses. It reminded Ira of the time, years ago, when he was still a young boy on the East Side, and would sometimes ride with Pop on the milk wagon: times when he would climb up the stairs to a factory loft with an extra tray of pints of milk to be distributed among the scores of women working at their sewing machines, under sweatshop conditions for all he knew. But they were jolly, and of course, they were immigrant, mostly Jewish, and they chaffered with Pop, and made much of Ira, and there was a sound of laughter. But now, these women were clearly not Jewish, Italian most of them, assuredly still immigrant, with a scattering of other nationalities, fair-haired Poles and dark-skinned Puerto Ricans. No one laughed, or smiled. A confused conjecture whirred in Ira’s mind that the faces lifted from the sewing machines toward the two youthful newcomers, himself and Larry, were fraught with animus, because they were presumably better off — both of them, which wasn’t indeed true. He couldn’t avoid feeling intensely self-conscious because of mistaken identity — and because he and Larry were Jewish: rich Jews, a category in which he was included, exploiting the poor wage slaves. More than anything else, though, he was aware that on the countenances of some of the younger women when they looked at Larry, a cruel hunger seemed suddenly to possess their features, an almost vengeful desire which he never dreamed that women felt or would reveal; only men would harbor such resentment, he thought.

The summer had begun for Ira with the accustomed routine of the ballpark. But that lasted no more than a week or ten days. Izzy Winchel, the very one who had persuaded Ira to hustle soda pop at the ball games, was now instrumental in dissuading him from doing more of the same. Izzy’s older brother, Hymie, after a short apprenticeship, served with his father, an independent plumber with headquarters in a little, sleazy store on grubby Park Avenue. Now married and with a son, he had to sally forth as a journeyman plumber, come what may: he had to break in as a nonunion plumber, as Izzy said, get a job with a building contractor putting up those new two-story frame houses, hundreds of which were going up in the further reaches of the Bronx. All brand-new housing, Izzy assured Ira. No dirty jobs, no cleaning clogged flush toilets or slimy sink drains, no running “snakes” through gunked-up soil pipe or wrestling with rust-frozen fittings. None of that shitty work. No, sir. Everything was brand-new and real clean.

“Yeah?” Ira asked, vaguely forewarned.

“Hymie wants you for a helper. It’s twenty-five a week.”

“Why me? You’re his brother.”

“I don’t like that kind o’ work. The same kind o’ work all day. You know what I mean? I like hustlin’ at the ballpark. I like all that excitement. Seein’ what I can make. You ain’t like that. You’re different. You just ain’t a hustler.” Izzy’s shallow blue eyes rested on Ira fondly. “Hymie wants you.”

Ira wavered. Izzy was too right about him: he could never lose himself in hectic pace and single-minded fervor of competition. He never ceased to feel ashamed foisting a lukewarm soda pop on a fan as if it were a cold one. He was always at the bottom of the list of hustlers checking in earnings at the end of the day. But for more than any of these reasons — and without the initiative as usual — he was beginning to wish for other kinds of work, because he was becoming increasingly loath to be seen in the garb of a soda hustler, a peddler of soda pop, recognized by former teachers and classmates, he who soon expected to enter college. The change in work proposed to him by cunning Izzy found little resistance in Ira.

“You don’t have to know nothin’ to be a helper.” Hooked proboscis, sandy hair in his service, Izzy stoked Ira with inducement. “Hymie’ll show you everything. What d’ye have to know? Cut pipe or a nipple, thread it, use a scale. How did I learn? I learned from my father. C’mon over to the shop. I’ll teach you in half an hour, how you set up the dies in a stock to thread the end of a pipe. I’ll show you the fittings, what they’re called, what they’re for. Let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“The shop. Hymie talked himself into a job for Monday,” Izzy said. “Tomorrow. He’s gotta have a helper.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Ira followed Izzy along to the shop.

And thus it was he became a plumber’s helper. The job wasn’t easy — as Izzy would have him believe — but at eighteen, the intrinsic joy of one’s own muscular resilience relieved novel toil of much of its laboriousness. In time he became a novice plumber’s helper, a barely acceptable one.

He saw a great deal of Larry, sometimes after work, though most often on weekends. Larry was admiring of Ira’s new vocation; his parents were amused — but approving too: of the indigent Jewish boy taking any kind of arduous toil in order to win a college education. So they were more than tolerant of the growing friendship between Larry and himself: by his seeming perseverance, his willingness to submit to any kind of toil to better himself, Ira set their son a good example. Respectful, bearing the proper attitude toward them, and always appearing clean-shaven and as decently dressed as he could, Ira was welcome in their home. He began to feel more at ease, his friendship with Larry and Larry’s with him becoming something indispensable for both, growing into a deep need for each other’s companionship.

After Ira had a Sunday dinner at Larry’s, the two lolled on the green sofa in the living room. Later, taking turns winding up the Victrola, they played selections from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. Was anything more musically fearful than those rending counter-clashes of the shipwreck of Sinbad’s vessel? Twice they played each side of excerpts from Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, which Ira loved inordinately. And then the two walked out together into the quiet evening air to a small park nearby, and sat down on one of the benches.

Larry adverted to Bermuda, to the several trips he had made there, even as a small child, to stay with his photographer uncle.

“Did you always travel with your mother when you visited your uncle in Bermuda?” Ira asked.

“Not the last time. I traveled alone. That was last summer.”

“I remember now, you told me.” Again Ira noted the air of reverie that settled on Larry’s handsome features in the dim light, the outline of some profound recollection.

“You’d be surprised how many schoolteachers spend their summer vacation in Bermuda. American schoolteachers go there by the thousands.”

“You don’t mean like Miss Pickens, who took a slow boat.” Ira grinned.

“Oh, no. She went to Europe. I mean young schoolteachers.” Larry’s voice continued fraught with the imminence of disclosure.

“Oh, yeah? I didn’t know that.” Already romance infused the night air, a mysterious kind of momentous confession. Hermetic, arcane, Ira could feel it enclosing them irresistibly within the scant lamplight, within the vacant park. “Young is how old?”

“Just out of normal school. That’s only two years of college in most parts of the country.”

“Yeah? That’s all?”

“You’ll keep what I tell you between you and me?”

“Listen, Larry, for you to tell me, it’s like a — I don’t know what to say. It’s like I took a pledge to keep my mouth shut. You know what I mean?”

“That’s why I trust you.”

Summer night in the small, intimate, empty park. Sunday evening, setting its seal on things ended, a seal of pristine, lovely reminiscence. His face set with seriousness, Larry began his account of his shipboard encounter with a young, beautiful schoolteacher. She hailed from Maryland. She had turned twenty-one, he eighteen. It was his initiation into sex, an initiation so beautiful, commencing on the deck of the ship, sailing under starlight, on a night in which wave crests glistened under a waning moon, and soft sea breezes caressed cheeks and stroking hands, so beautiful, it seemed to Ira, that it was as if Larry had been with a fairy princess. His friend, here talking quietly beside him on the park bench, had spent the whole night in the cabin of a beautiful, mature woman, making love to her in a ship far out at sea, making love to her in a vessel gliding through dark, boundless ocean. Glamorous even the listening was, laden with all the magic of romance, romance beyond anything Ira deemed happened in the real world.

He was transported by the sheer loveliness of what he heard, and yet, enchanted though he was, he listened without envy. Such things were not for him; he was barred, however much he might long for them, barred by himself from such raptures: sea and ship and tender caress. The closest he had ever come was to trail a thin, spinsterish schoolteacher from P.S. 103 to CCNY when he was still a boy in grade school. The best he could do now was. . sordid. . in a dingy bedroom, opposite the mortar-spattered brick wall of the airshaft. . like the wall surrounding those blacks as they watched the ball game at the Polo Grounds from the top-floor windows of their tenements, or those five minutes laying homely, scrawny Theodora in her stuffy, ill-lit room draped with shmattas, robbed of even the moment of possessing a comely woman like Pearl. Well. .

When he and Larry finally parted, after having walked the distance to the subway station, Ira went down the steps to the platform enfolded in a glorious cloud of loveliness. At least he had been allowed to participate in it, allowed to know what it was in the reality of a friend’s experience, to know what one should seek, even if the seeker felt himself flawed irreparably. Could one dare to strive afterward for that rare, transcendent bliss, even if already marred by the squalid? And yet he knew that was what he wanted to win, hopeless as his yearning was, Larry’s world, full of love and refinement and gentle surrender.

XXIV

In mid-July a letter waited for Ira when he came back from work as Hymie’s plumber’s helper, and two evenings later, another. Mr. Sullivan’s rebuke had come true after all. Both contained notices of greatest import. The first letter was from Cornell University congratulating him on having placed twenty-third among the first twenty-five in the city-wide competitive examination for a scholarship to Cornell. He was therefore entitled to free tuition for a period of four years at the university. Added was the school’s request for an early reply. The letter also contained assurances that part-time work was available at the university, and that preference would be given to needy scholarship students. He could doubtless earn enough to pay for dormitory room and meals. .

Ecclesias, Ecclesias, the missed, the spurned opportunities, and the missed, the spurned decent life I might have had.

— Yes, the heart wants everything, both ends and the middle. How would you have met M, I ask you for the millionth time? How would you have written a notable novel?

The novel I can dispense with, Ecclesias. With M I can’t. It’s not only what would I have done without M that concerns me, but as much — and more — what would she have done without me. And this is no self-flattery. For her tender, her concealed, her reticent girlishness, her artist’s sensibility, her nobility, her truly unique and yet wholly unsnobbish requirements for companionship, all that contrasted with an innate sadness born of the recognition of the hypocrisy and pretense of her middle-class rearing. And at the same time, her matchless self-restraint, her diligence, sense of propriety, all taken together, would have closed her in upon herself. This recognition would have congealed the passionate, sensitive girl within her, and kept her from flowering. So I feel, knowing her a little, Ecclesias, that someone truly worthy, not myself but M, was freed to grow and win a belated maturity, and through her, I too. For she would have survived without me, unhappily perhaps, but survived; I without her not at all. Through her I was vouchsafed not only a measure of growth, but of life itself.

— So now you’re reconciled to the course of events?

No. Not reconciled. Resigned perhaps, not reconciled. I want all my blunders undone, my lamentable choices annulled, a different itinerary through life, that would have bestowed Cornell, and M—

— Go, and catch a falling star, get with child a mandrake root. I trust you know the next line or two.

Alas, I do know Mr. Donne. But why couldn’t I have been a zoologist and have had M for a wife?

— You had M for a wife. The case is closed.

Indeed. Closed and enclosed — what mutinous turbulence suddenly springs up against the enclosure, within the bosom, Ecclesias, a futile rebellion.

The second letter was from CCNY. The letter endorsed Ira’s application to enroll as a candidate for a bachelor’s degree in science. He was given instructions where and when to appear at the college in order to register for courses.

So now the choice was his; options had been presented to him, destiny set in motion toward the future. For once in his life, everything had worked out to his advantage. Because his last math course had been in solid geometry, a course in which he excelled, he was sure he had done outstandingly in math. He had breezed through geometry. Biology, his other science choice, he had just finished at DeWitt Clinton with an A. He was a shark in biology. Chemistry had begun to fall dramatically in place in the second semester; comprehension of fundamental principles had come on with a rush; so he felt quite sanguine about his doing well in that. And even all the trouble he had had getting through Spanish in high school, so that it had taken him four years in high school to complete three years of the course, now turned out to be boon. Spanish was still fresh in his mind, even if he wasn’t proficient. Competitors who had completed their three-year courses on time, had completed them a year ago, would have had to cram for the test. He hadn’t had to. Taking everything into consideration, he was plain lucky.

Ira realized that his choice of CCNY or Cornell had been in actuality a conflict going on within the young man over which kind of America he would elect, which kind would prevail. He had endeavored to embody the conflict, imbue it with fictional plausibility, by recounting an imaginary correspondence with Billy, conveying the good news; and Billy’s delighted proposal that they get together and make plans for attendance at Cornell, that they room together.

Of course, none of this ever occurred — but he had gone further, much further, in his envisaging. He had gone so far, internalized his thoughts so deeply, that it had taken on the reality of fact, of an actual occurrence in the past. So much did it vie with fact in the arena of memory that more than once he had to remind himself that it was all figment.

It was real, though not actual. It never happened, only in fancy. But the choice, though it was indubitably a choice between which of two Americas he would throw in his lot with, was made within himself, with no need for externalized tension, for suspense, for specific denouement. Probably the way he posed the question, or the alternatives, was all wrong. There were no two kinds of America open to him. There were potentially two careers available to him at the given time. And had he not chosen, not entirely at random, to share the seat in Elocution 7 with the handsome, apparently gentile youth already occupying it, his career would surely have been different. The terrible fear, the brunt of ruthless savagery, that seemed to wring the very axons of the brain forever out of place, twist them to a murderous madness that only the clarity and calm rationality of plane geometry held in check long enough for reprieve, might very well have been immured within the disciplines of the zoologist. A life could have been led, could have been reared on a localized fault in the mind (something of the sort, however figuratively expressed). But there was a prior determinant to this, the crucial determinant, or really the crucial accident. But hell, once you began that kind of unraveling, it would never end. If there was any single “first cause” he could point to as the one most responsible for the permanent impairment of his personality, for its ever-present floating anxiety, his anxiety neurosis (in today’s terms), it was his family’s leaving the Orthodox ministate of the East Side.

In the midst of that summer, full of Ira’s debatings and speculations about his future, Farley suddenly appeared out of the past, not in person, but spectacularly in the sports pages of the press. He had become part of the Olympic track team that the United States was to field in France. He had graduated from high school the same year as Ira, and the sports pages of the New York newspapers were full of the schoolboy wonder who had been chosen to represent the United States in the 100-meter dash. He was slated to run against the redoubtable Harold Abrahams of Great Britain, who had trained for months, trained assiduously for the event, and was favored to win. Life could sometimes be inextricably tangled together. Ira had first watched Farley run against Le Vine, who, Ira felt sure, was Jewish, and whom, after the first, his novice, trials, Farley consistently defeated. Now in the greatest test of Farley’s career as a sprinter, he would be running against another Jewish athlete.

The whole thing bristled with peculiar ironies only to be disclosed later. Abrahams (who was later made a central figure in a documentary film) had dedicated himself to track events in order to attain status with the British upper class, and he presumably did attain it to some extent as a result of his track exploits, and especially his victory in the 100-meter dash. He had won the Olympic gold. Abrahams might have come off second-best had not the head coach in charge of the United States Olympic team decided that Farley was too young to be pitted against so seasoned and world-famous a runner as Abrahams, and instead of Farley competing in the 100-meter for which he had trained and in which he planned to compete, he was replaced by another runner, one of college age, who ran against Abrahams, and lost. .

Fifteen years were to pass. Ira was already married to M, and M pregnant for the first time, when Ira and Farley met again shortly before Ira left New York for good in 1939. They met one evening, after Ira had been called to do substitute teaching in an English class in a night high school, Haaren High School, which now occupied the same building as DeWitt Clinton. Farley held a permanent clerical position there. Both were overjoyed at this chance encounter, and agreed to meet after the night school session was over. They did. Farley, who had a companion with him, led the way to a nearby bar. They drank beer, and endeavored to recapture a little of the past. Farley had grown corpulent, his jowls heavy, so often the fate of the athlete who abandons training. Still his light hands were bony and delicate as ever, his blue eyes shone as boyishly as they once did, and his high-pitched voice had that same cheery, juvenile ring as it had when he and Ira attended junior high and listened to recordings of the great tenor John McCormack, at Farley’s home.

Something Ira said, probably imprudently, because it revealed the depth of his Marxist orientation, prompted badgering rejoinders on the part of Farley and his friend, no less antagonistic for all their flippancy. By quizzical jibe and insinuation they intimated — Ira sensed — a partiality for Father Coughlin’s pro-Nazi, stereotyped, infamous anti-Semitism. How far apart Farley and he had traveled, Ira realized with a start, not only politically, but in sympathy, hopelessly sundered in as many ways as once held them bound, and by a myriad of new biases.

He maneuvered the conversation to neutral ground again: the 1924 Olympics. Why hadn’t Farley run the 100-meter dash, the one track event of his unquestioned preeminence throughout high school? It was then Ira learned the circumstances that determined Farley’s elimination from competition against the renowned Abrahams — and why Farley was assigned instead to run in the 400-meter relay. Too much was at stake to entrust the U.S. colors in the 100-meter dash to so youthful a runner as Farley. The 400-meter relay, on the other hand, important though it was in medals won, meant less in terms of prestige to the United States than the 100-meter dash. Despite the prolonged, impassioned pleadings of Farley’s personal coach that he be given a chance — and that he could win — the head coach of track events, abetted by the U.S. Olympic committee of overseers, vetoed the proposition. They were ready to gamble on Farley as anchorman in the 400-meter relay, but to match a high school kid against the fleetest sprinter in all of Europe was altogether too risky.

“They knew better, though, the next day,” said Farley, his blue eyes growing luminous with pain and indignation. “Especially the head coach.” Because, irony of ironies, the anchorman of the British team received the baton ahead of Farley, and the anchorman of the British team was none other than Abrahams. The day before, he had won the 100-meter dash. The next day the high school kid overtook and outstripped him. “I knew I could beat him,” said Farley. And remembering the unassuming, straightforward adolescent who had been his chum in the past, Ira believed him. He too was persuaded Farley could have beaten Abrahams, just as years ago he was persuaded that Farley could beat Le Vine, based on Farley’s declaration “I know I can beat him.” The great opportunity was lost, and cruelly forever. When Ira consulted the World Almanac for reference concerning the 1924 Olympics in Paris, there was no record in it of the anchormen in the 400-meter relay, nor of the runners who composed the team. They were individually anonymous. It was a team effort. The entry stated simply that the U.S. team took the gold.

The 1924 Olympics were to be the culmination of Farley’s career as a sprinter. Against all expectation that in college and with greater physical maturity, his running ability would reach new heights, the contrary took place: he sank into mediocrity — and obscurity — never placing better than third, and in the end, not even that. He had peaked at the age of nineteen, and by his twenties had “burned out,” as the expression went.

Burned out. Ira shifted eyes away from the monitor. Whatever the expression actually signified, psychologically, physiologically, he knew what it meant, just as everyone else did. He knew what it meant as far as his own forte was concerned. As novelist he too had plummeted into oblivion.

— Was that the intent of this lengthy digression? An excursion into homily?

To be sure. That I and an appreciable number of my talented literary contemporaries would experience the anguish of “burning out” seems to me singular enough. But that the same thing would happen to a youthful runner before he reached his majority is astonishing, is it not? Burned out. He had one chance, Ecclesias, and only one chance; it was all he would ever have.

— Unlike you, his growing old in wisdom would do his legs no good.

Any more than it did mine. I’m curious to know whether he’s still alive. I’m more than curious. I think when I next get to New York, if I do, I shall look up the telephone number of the Hewin Funeral Parlor, assuming it’s still extant.

— Do that. As a matter of fact, all you need do is pick up the phone, and ask Directory Assistance for the telephone number of the Hewin Funeral Parlor in New York.

Yes. Though I doubt I shall.

Ira gave a copy of his only novel to Farley’s mother, soon after it was printed, sometime in 1935. Farley was in Boston then (he had attended Boston University, a Catholic school, Ira believed). His brisk, brown-mustached father had died, and the funeral parlor, still in the same location, which was rapidly becoming black demographically, had passed into the hands of Farley’s older brother, Billy. His mother sat in the empty funeral parlor upstairs, sat in a rocking chair, on the sandy rug, still the same quiet-spoken nunlike woman, wearing the same gold-framed eyeglasses, the heavy down quite gray on her upper lip. Resigned. She accepted the book in the absent Farley’s name. And Ira dreaded to think of the shock that her perusal of the book would give her.

— Why don’t you call him?

Well. . By brooks too broad for leaping the rose-lipped girls are laid. . Shall I delete?

— You ought to.

Ira sat many weeks later in the front room of the flat in Harlem, on a summer’s day, a Sunday in early August, and spread in front of him a sheet of lined paper on the glass-topped table. It was one of the elegant and newly acquired pieces of living-room furniture, bought at an unheard-of price from Mom’s affluent cousin Brancheh, because that kind of furniture had already gone out of style. He could only make token resistance against a foregone conclusion: the letter he was about to write to Cornell declining the scholarship. He read once again the request for an early reply, once again the reminder that part-time work was available at the university toward earning dormitory fees and meals. Pop — Ira tried to shift responsibility — had reneged, with typical hemming and hawing, on his first, impulsive, generous offer, an offer made in the flush of pride at his son’s outstanding achievement, one that took Pop completely by surprise, even as his ensuing magnanimity took Ira completely by surprise. Pop had initially volunteered to provide his son with a new wardrobe, offered to pay the railroad fare to Ithaca, to defray expenses for Ira’s first six months at Cornell. . But now he wasn’t sure he could afford the added expense that would accrue from Ira’s living away from home. There was an expression in Yiddish that summed up that kind of hemming and hawing, that combined the two verbs into a single one: into a kind of evasive snuffle connoting far more than did the English words, singly or both together: Er funfet shoyn. Pop funfeted.

Ira read the rough draft of his letter over again, meditated, picked up his fountain pen. His heart heavy with renunciation, he gripped the pen with fingers deeply ingrained with plumbing grime, and made corrections in the rough draft. He refined his craven reply. For craven it was, formulated by a mind that knew itself craven, craven and puerile, devoid of self-reliance and initiative. He regretted very much, he wrote, but he had to decline Cornell’s generous offer of a four-year scholarship. Parasitic, fresh from this very Sunday morning’s skulking, nasty lechery gratified on Minnie, he would rather stay home, stay tied to Mom’s apron strings, apron strings that afforded far more latitude than she ever dreamed of, far more leeway for sordid gratifications. He would rather stay home. Why part with all that? And give up his snug and complacent dependence on Larry, on affluent Larry, on charming Larry? Give up his friendship? Nah. Nevertheless, for all the cowardice and pusillanimity inherent in his abnegation of the scholarship, still, stirring within him he seemed to sense (was it an illusion?) an intimation of some kind of undefined foreknowledge, an inkling of a direction in which he had to go, and the direction in which he had to go was the direction of his present choice. Within the murky slough of his self-indulgence, he seemed to discern that if he had any hope of escaping from his abject slavery to his contemptible personality into some kind of freedom or self-respect, then he had to cling to Larry, which meant that he stay home and attend CCNY.

He declined the scholarship, couched his fateful renunciation in words written on another sheet of blue-lined paper, words shaped by a thick-nibbed fountain pen. He left the house with the two-cent stamp affixed to the sealed letter, and mailed it in the wide-mouthed slot of the cast-iron letter box on the corner lamppost opposite Biolov’s drugstore. The counterweighted lip uttered a cast-iron snicker as the letter box engulfed the white envelope.

PART THREE. CCNY

I

How beautiful, how glorious, the first hour or two spent in the environs of CCNY was! An academic cornucopia it seemed, so bountiful and promising from the outside he was convinced that he had made the right choice after all. The early-autumn afternoon on campus that day in 1924 was nothing short of entrancing. While he waited his turn to register for courses, he tramped over the dry, fallen leaves on Convent Avenue in upper Manhattan, trampling on the multitudes of crackling leaves to the east of the college in the shadow of the white and gray Gothic buildings, benign Gothic buildings sedately housing promise of wisdom and higher learning that would yet raise him above himself into a confraternity of serene and meditative peers. Trampling on the leaves on Convent Avenue, he felt an onset of euphoria, a veritable beatitude at the thought of the great transformations that would be wrought within him inside those white and gray Gothic walls. Change, change, the shedding of his abominable self, that was what he wanted most. Surely that would begin as soon as he registered: perhaps a new, an elevating, a desirable future would commence right here. At last.

He looked about to preserve within him, he hoped, this treasured moment: behind him spread the bare ground of the college playing field, behind him the pale tan parapets of the great Lewisohn Stadium. Before him were the black steel pikes of the barrier separating the heights on which the college and he stood from the declivity of the small park just below, with its green benches and gray outcrops of rock, its boulders and trees and brown leaves drifting down on the slope and the walks beneath. And the city opened up before him, as if at his feet, all below and beyond him, three boroughs in view at once, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, in their different directions, their rooftops at all levels, chimneys, smokestacks, and spires. Overhead, tenuous smoke streaked the dome of heaven. Everything seemed propitious, seemed an omen of great future consummations. He was still going to major in biology. He might still become a scientist of renown, yes, in time separate himself from the object of his shamefulness, find a normal course for his libido, redeem himself. In an hour or two he would take the first steps toward realizing the felicitous opportunities circulating within those cloistered sanctuaries of study housed in gray and white stone rearing up into the pure azure above them.

After a while, he was joined by another candidate for enrollment, a graduate of a Bronx high school. The other was Ira’s age, Jewish, almost as a matter of course, and obviously of more affluent background than Ira’s. An amiable youth, already cultivating a wisp of a mustache, he whiled away the time as he paced beside Ira over the crackling leaves, whistling and singing the latest hit tunes, none of which Ira had the least knowledge of, nor cared to have, but it occupied the time of waiting. Welcome as the youth and his friendly disposition were, his tastes and ambitions, as he expressed them, gave Ira the first hint that the halls of learning within those Gothic walls were not entirely as he had imagined. His new acquaintance spoke about joining a “frat” as soon as he could, and said he was only going to CCNY to get the bachelor’s degree, which was a pre-requisite for entry into law school. Idealism and fancy were absent; practicalities alone predominated. His goal was the familiar one of financial success. Makh gelt, the attainment of a lucrative career via the stepping-stone of CCNY. The fellow must be an exception, Ira thought.

And tolerantly, he listened to the other cheerily singing as they strolled together over the russet leaves:

“Looky, looky, looky, here comes cookie. .”

and:

“When my sweetie walks down the street,

all the birdies, they go tweet, tweet, tweet. .”

and:

“Do-o wacka, do-o wacka, do-o wacka do. .”

Ira felt his own euphoria wilt: wilt with his new acquaintance’s optimism, wilt with the chill of late afternoon pervading the air. Time came for Ira’s group to take its place in the registration hall.

And now the realities of college, of the stultifying mechanics of registration for classes at CCNY, revealed themselves in all their unlovely aspects. In one fell swoop they dashed to pieces Ira’s lofty imaginings, dispelled them in a single minute, the very first minute after his turn came to enroll. He was expected to devise a program of courses, a program of courses that would remain valid for the duration of his wait on line before the particular desk at which the registrar — or one of his student assistants — sat. Time and again, and time and again, a quirk of fate would eliminate from his program a course he had chosen — he would see it erased from the blackboard, often with only one or two students ahead of him before the registrar’s desk. Thus his entire program, compiled so laboriously, would be reduced to penciled inanity, and he would have to go back to his seat in the big auditorium, and start afresh. .

Dilatory, inefficient, slow, and agonizingly uncertain, he would devise another program, only to watch it succumb to the same attrition as its predecessor. Hours passed. Hours! Program after provisional program went by the board, indeed, went by the blackboard. Weary and dejected, Ira cursed his luck, his fate, his ineptitude, his dawdling. And as for Biology 1, the key course in his future career? It had been snapped up long ago by more proficient high school graduates — those with better average grades who were given first choice — snapped up by gifted freshmen, and by diligent sophomores who registered before the freshmen. It seemed as if the majority of lowerclassmen were intent on fulfilling requirements for entrance into medical or dental schools. Biology 1 had disappeared from the blackboard long before Ira was even admitted to the many-tiered lecture hall where students moiled over their programs. Biology 1 was a nekhtiger tog, as Mom would have said: it was as irretrievable as a bygone day. Oh, why hadn’t he elected to go to Cornell? The iron maw of the letter box fleered at him again, snapping up with straight lips the white envelope containing his letter of refusal, an impassive predator devouring his fate. .

Devil take the hindmost was the rule here, and the hindmost were dubs like Ira, laggard and inefficient, pathetic dawdlers. It was past nine o’clock at night, long after the majority of candidates had happily departed, their programs accepted, when Ira succeeded in patching together a program of courses that remained viable all the way to the desk. Viable if undesirable: French 1. Trigonometry, called a conditional course, a course he should have taken in high school, but didn’t because of a year wasted attending the newly instituted commercial high school at P.S. 24. Philosophy 1, though he was scarcely more ready than a child to grapple with its concepts and abstractions. Descriptive geometry, which sounded easy, and proved not to be, projections and mechanical drawing, beyond his aptitude, his manual skill. Military Science 1, a compulsory course that he learned would be a sort of calisthenics called the manual of arms performed with a Springfield rifle, in conjunction with a smattering of military tactics. Mili Sci was always open. Phys Ed 1. Even English Composition 1, humblest, and long the most accessible, of courses, had been closed out.

Such was his program the first half of his freshman term. It was a curtailed, a partial, a woefully insufficient program. It lacked the necessary number of credits of work, satisfactorily performed, meaning with a grade C or better, required to pass the first semester at CCNY. He would perforce become a “conditional” student next term, one who trailed behind the class in credits, and had to make them up somehow to be in good standing, to keep abreast of his class, one who ran the risk of being dropped from the college rolls. At the moment, Ira scarcely cared any longer. Flagging, famished, and thoroughly disgruntled by his ordeal, trudging on foot up the hill to the Amsterdam Avenue trolley car, and on foot again from 125th to 119th Street along Park Avenue on the sidewalk parallel to the Cut overhead, he made his way home.

Up the stone stoop, up a flight of dingy tenement stairs, and into the green-walled kitchen at last. The hands on the Big Ben alarm clock on top of the green-painted icebox pointed at ten minutes to ten.

“Oh, here he is, Ma.” Minnie looked up from her Latin text.

“Yeah. Here I am.” Ira shut the door behind him.

“Noo, where have you been?” Mom scolded. “Your father and I have begun to worry.”

“Yeah?”

Pop raised his dog-brown eyes from the Yiddish newspaper. “And with good reason.”

“Jesus Christ.” Ira doffed his jacket, hung it on the back of a chair, went to the sink. “What a goddamn college.” He turned on the faucet, soaping hands under cold water. “No wonder they call it Shitty College.”

“It’s not a shitty college. It’s wonderful college. The smartest Jewish boys go there,” Minnie countered spiritedly. “Just because it’s free? Mom, tell him how they wouldn’t let the Jews go to college in Europe—”

“Ah, nuts. I know all about it. We’re not in Europe. You know the Latin words for keeping Jews out of college? You’re studying Latin.”

“I don’t know what they called it. Did you get into college or not?”

“Numerus clausus.”

“Did you get in or not?”

“Yeah, I got in.” He ogled her with veiled animus.

“Papa, ask him.” Minnie rejected his innuendo, jerked her head sharply toward Pop. “Papa, you ask him. Did he get into City College or not?”

“Aw, what d’ye think?”

“Aha! Rueful.” Under strain of apprehension, Pop’s tone of voice rasped abrasively. “What’s amiss?” His weak chin tilted up in short premonitory hitches. “Noo, noo. Report. What fresh botch did you commit?”

“Nothing. For Chrissake, I was there till now, making out a program. Every goddamn thing I wanted was closed. No biology, no English, no chemistry, nothing I wanted.”

“But they let you into the college?” Mom asked in quick dismay.

“Oh, yeah. I just told you so. I said I’m in. I’m a CCNY freshman, they call it.”

“Then what?”

“It’s that goddamn programming. The classes. The schedule. How the hell do you say it in Yiddish?”

“He means vi m’geyt un ven m’geyt tsu hern di professors.” Her mutable countenance darkening with earnestness, Minnie translated for Mom’s benefit, gesticulating all the while. “Like where to go at what time, tsu velkhe klyasses.”

“I understand,” said Mom.

“Everyone is smarter and faster than I am.” Ira wiped his hands on the sink towel, flopped into his chair, and let his arms hang down. “Boyoboy, am I tired. I’m disgusted. Jesus.”

“My poor brother.” Minnie immediately tempered her acerbity, her pale features quick to wreathe in compassion. “And nobody there to help you? Nobody there to ask? They don’t come over when they see you’re taking so long, you’re having so much trouble? They don’t ask what’s the matter?”

“Yeah. In a pig’s eye.”

“Everyone has to do for himself?” Mom inquired. “Noo, az m’vayst nisht?”

“Oh, they tell you what to do.” Ira shrugged vehemently. “But there’s so many fast guys there. Jesus. Real whizzes.”

Minnie clucked in sympathy. “Farshtest, Mama?”

“Ikh farshtey, ikh farshtey.”

Boy, if only Pop and Mom would vanish right now, Jesus, he’d like to stick it into her, sitting slack with concern, lips loose and commiserative, and in the blue satiny dress with the round neck and short sleeves that showed — how white her skin. Boy, he could use a quick lay. Wooh. He could feel an incipient hard-on recruiting under his fly. Oh, hell, not a Chinaman’s chance. Ask Mom for something to eat—

“Noo, if you’re a sluggard,” said Pop, “naturally you’ll be there half the night. Give yourself a shove. A youth who won a Cornell scholarship can’t do as well as the others?”

“Yeah.” Ira seized the opportunity to parry and thrust. “I won a Cornell scholarship, all right. But what good did it do me? I wish I’d never thought about the damned place, never even applied. Then I wouldn’t have known what I was missing. Anh!”

“O-o-h, you could’ve gone to Cornell.” Grimacing, Minnie pined for his sake. “A nice university way up in the country. They would have helped you. Not like here. You know how New York is.”

Boy, was she ripe for a lay. Boy, could he use it.

“Noo, it was his choice,” said Pop. “The way you make your bed—”

“Yeah, now I gotta eat it.” Ira shunted Pop astray.

“Spare me your wit.” Pop raised a hand. “You’ve got to sleep in it, you mean. You could have gone to Cornell, as Minnie just said. They bade you come. What more do you want? You won the scholarship. Then go.”

“And what would I have to live on? Room and board. Where?”

“I offered to help you the first few months.”

“Yeah, and backed out.”

“I’ll spit in your face. You blame your sloth on me? Shit-ass. What do you want? To be taken by the hand and guided there by your mother? I told you, if you go, I’ll help. If you wanted to go, you would have gone. Don’t tell me it’s my fault. Your bones are strong and full-grown. Stronger than mine. They offered you work, a chance to make a few dollars, no? Who was to stop you from going? Nobody. Your own laziness.”

“Papa, please,” Minnie intervened. “He’s tired. All day waiting. You see what time he came home. It’s nearly time to go to bed.”

Desire hissed within him. Oh, Jesus, just the right thing. Time to go to bed. He could project his lust with such vividness, he barely restrained himself from shaking his head.

“I’m tired too,” said Pop. “All day waiting at table. And not only one day. All day long and every day, on the restaurant floor. From what does he eat, from what does he go to college? Even to this one, to CCNY?”

“What quarrel do you have with the youth? I pay for it. It’s my quarter a day pays his carfare and lunch,” Mom interjected.

“And where do you get that?”

“From your skimpy, stinking allowance. From depriving myself. Who keeps house? Who shops? Who haggles to save a penny with the hucksters? You try it. See if you can do as well.”

“Uh! Here we go again.”

“Please, Papa. I know how hard you have to work,” Minnie interceded. “You’re an experienced waiter. You’re used to it.”

“Used to it, the devil. I’m used to it because I must. Must has no remedy, farshtest? Comes in a customer five minutes before closing time, and sits down. You have to serve him. You must. Your feet ache, but you must. You need his ten-cent tip as I need a carbuncle on the nape of my neck. But—”

“Noo, isn’t that enough?” Mom persisted staunchly in her son’s behalf. “He’s spent with all that striving to get into the college. Let him be now. He’s really in college.”

“That’s right. Please, Papa,” Minnie concurred. Ardent in her appeal, she hooked a finger into the neckline of her dress, brought it away from her bosom to mitigate its warmth.

Watching her, Ira’s knees closed like calipers. He luxuriated, gazing off into the distance, gave himself over to futile reverie. “Oh, Jesus.”

“Here he is forthwith with his Jesus,” Pop chided. “Hover over him. Coddle him. Look at that sullen countenance.”

“But to college he’s going.”

“Yes. And you see how it suits him, how contented he is with it.”

“Well, if he didn’t choose to leave home and go away to college, if he wanted to stay at home, could I drive him out? And if he’s as abashed as you are — yes, uneasy as you are among the goyim,” Mom overrode her husband’s objection before he could utter it, “what cure for it is there? He hasn’t the chutzpa, that’s all. He should have been a Litvak accustomed to stand up to Russky insults, not a Galitzianer in one of Franz Joseph’s drowsy hamlets, as your brother-in-law Louie says, then he would have had the temerity to venture, to leave home and go to this Cornell.” And to Ira, his eyeglasses removed, rubbing his eyes wearily: “Listen to me, child. All beginnings are that way. Difficult, discouraging at the outset.”

“Not for everybody.”

“For you then. It takes you longer to become used to things. But as long as you’re in college, you’ll see: the way that began so rough will become smooth. Heed me. As long as you’re in college, and becoming an educated man, slowly you’ll learn to deal with your troubles, slowly they’ll begin to wane.”

“Yeah,” skeptically.

“That’s right. Mom’s right,” Minnie soothed.

“I wish you could show me your guarantee.”

“This hardship is nothing.” Mom filled in Minnie’s silence with comforting words. “Believe me, you’ll look back to this time with laughter.”

“Yeah, I got a great future behind me, like the comedian says.” He rocked around in his chair toward Minnie, and then back to Mom. “Meantime I’m damn hungry.”

“I have potted veal,” Mom said eagerly. “A flavor like paradise. And boiled kasha with the gravy.”

“I don’t like kasha.”

“Even starving with hunger?”

“No,” he reinforced his churlishness.

“Then without kasha.” Mom bustled about with bread knife and platter.

“You don’t know what’s good,” Minnie reproached.

“No, I don’t. Tell me sometime.”

“Only this he doesn’t know?” Pop observed. “Only that kasha is good? Does he know good from bad?”

“Believe me, you sin to refuse such delectable kasha.” Mom set a plate before him. “Someday you’ll mourn, you’ll yearn for such delectable kasha.”

“Swell. Till that time I’ll do without.”

“Fortunately, I was prepared,” said Mom. “As if I didn’t know your ways, my son. I baked a potato kugel too.”

“Ah, that’s better.” Ira grabbed a slice of her rough rye bread and chomped while he waited for the rest of his supper.

So he had muffed it again. He bolted down a half-masticated lump of bread. Been deflected irrevocably, just as he had been before: by silly intimations, by irrelevances, by insubstantial, damnfool, dopy irrelevances, by sloth, by following the line of least resistance. And by — you goddamn fool: by cozy, fierce expectancy, by cozy, coozy, quick coozy on a Sunday morning. Ever anybody have such a goddamn Sunday-morning crib? A crib was a place you humped a harlot in, wasn’t it? Or the same word, “crib,” helped you pass an exam. Assisted you — hey, ass sistered you. Right? Hey, pretty clever. Crib was a dreary little bedroom, his little bedroom, or Mom and Pop’s, next to the airshaft on the first floor, a dreary little crypt, as Mom called it, that became a hedge against pulling off. What do you think of that? Just snap the brass nipple of the lock, after Mom went, and the little crib hurtled into lurid prospects; its gloom dazzled you with arcs of guilt. The cramped crib suddenly shimmered with delirium of connivance, with nimbus of abomination. Oh, boy, what exquisite alarm lurked in the commonplace, alchemic ecstasy that he had discovered by accident: like another Archimedes in a big tin bathtub. Eureka in a bathtub. Yeah, but you know, it was like that alloyed crown and its different buoyancy from the genuine. This time it was buoyancy and girlancy. And what a paralyzing Eureka when he came. Yow! Never to be the same afterward. .

Eureka, yeah, the whole damn thing opened up a world nobody ever dared enter; nobody ever dared admit he entered. He had come across references to it in the faintest, weakest, most indirect way, hushed, prim and prudish — Jesus Christ, anyone less attuned than he was would never have pricked up his ears at the signal, pricked up was right. And he had read it, gone to the library and taken home Byron’s collected poems, Byron, who had imprisoned a willing Ira years ago in the same cell as The Prisoner of Chillon. Hell, Byron’s was nothing like it: remote, grandiose, and ambiguous, all those supernatural choruses, all those wild chasms; who could keep track of them, or remember them later? Nah. Byron never got any further than just beginning to tell what Manfred did; Manny just brooded in proud solitude in a mysterious, lonely tower, over the enormity of his transgression. Hey, Manny, here’s what it’s like in a cold-water flat in East Harlem.

Still, you had to give the guy credit for even — yes, even whispering. . “Gee, that looks good, Mom.” Ira salivated at the sight of the veal in its schmaltzy brown gravy that Mom ladled out of the pot onto the chipped white plate before him: “Potateh kugel too yet. Yay, team!”

“Eat slowly,” Mom cautioned.

“It tastes good?” Minnie beamed.

“I’ll say. That’s what I want when I graduate.”

“You hear, Mom?” Minnie commended.

“Takeh. We should all survive until that blessed day.”

Pop’s newspaper rustled. From behind it came the single curt reproach: “Chompkeh.”

“This time forgive him,” Mom arbitrated. “The youth hasn’t eaten since morning.”

“Okay, Pop, I’ll try to quit chompkin’. But boy, does it taste good. Hard to keep your mouth shut with a load of that kugel in gravy.” Hunger’s first pangs satisfied, Ira suppressed defiance. He darted a brief, veiled glance at Minnie again; she lowered her hazel eyes as if in prayer to her Latin text. So he had muffed, muffed in his choice of colleges. But how did he know? What did Solon say to Croesus? Look to the end, my fine-feathered friend. Same here. I’m the guy who put the muff in muffed. Come Sunday. He’d tell that to Minnie. No, he’d better tell her about looking to the end. Ha. Come Sunday morning. Come is right. And then he’d scoot off to Larry’s for the afternoon. So? A few compensations. What else? Jesus, his mind was mushy rotten. If he let his fancy range — boyoboy, going to college, with a head full of — merde, ah. All he could think of was the white-wing dago street cleaner pushing his fiber brush ahead of him next to the granite curb. . Tired.

Tired, that was the trouble. Chalked characters on a blackboard at registration still glimmered in kitchen light. Fuck ’em all, we eat, he gobbled, remembered his pledge to Pop, gobbled behind closed lips. Fuck ’em all, we eat — that’s what he had heard them say in the street. And his inner ear, perceiving the rhyme, incorporated it:

Fuck ’em all, we eat. I wanna repeat.

An’ if you screw your sister for a treat, what more d’ye neet?

What more d’ye neet?

A B.S. degree from CCNY, of course, indeet.

Oink, oink. Neat.

God, he was becoming brutish, iron-clad brutish, wanton, and yet ever more sensitized, caught in and aware of the net of his own endless associations. Would he, could he, ever escape? What did a herring think of when he saw the reticules of the seine closing in around him? What? And his seine was like steel mail—

My poor M. Ira paused, turned expiating eyes away from the monitor. My poor, darling lambikin wife. What you took to yourself, what you gave yourself to. Only the incorruptible — was he borrowing from St. Augustine? — only the incorruptible could have possessed such invincible grace as she did, to have remained as knowing and as unsullied as she had remained all these years of living with him, of abiding him. He stifled a sigh. Boyoboy.

II

Classes began a day or two later. Ira was soon floundering in trigonometry, over his head in a subject that was a precondition for matriculation for a science degree. The pace was simply too fast for him. Ability to keep abreast of the class in a subject that he should have studied and passed in high school was taken for granted for one who was majoring in science. And he was already failing, dismally. In French he fared better — at the beginning — in part perhaps because of his gift for mimicry of the pronunciation. But he made smeary messes in his draftsmanship in descriptive geometry. Again he failed to understand the fundamental and the not too difficult principles of projection of simple figures onto different planes, he who had been a whiz in plane and solid geometry. Geometry, his guardian angel subject, the course that had preserved his sanity. What the hell was wrong with him? Only in Philosophy I did he experience anything like the intellectual pleasure he had anticipated so fondly those hours before registration when he had trampled outdoors on the fallen leaves on Convent Avenue. It was in the engrossing, informal, sprightly lectures of Professor Overstreet that he did sense those pleasures of the intellect — in the lectures, spiced with wit, animated descriptions and personal experience: Professor Overstreet illustrating the general nature of assumptions by acting out how the French picked their teeth openly after dinner while Americans hid the toothpick behind their hand or a napkin. His lectures were a joy, and so too was reading the multigraphed brochure of selections from various philosophers the professor distributed to the class. Far and away the most stirring excerpts were from Bertrand Russell’s audaciously contemporary statement of the faith of an atheist, the eloquent statement of the awareness of man’s insignificance in a blind, indifferent cosmos. Nothing in that first semester captivated Ira more.

But the seminars, oh, the seminars conducted by a young graduate student, seminars dealing with the central ideas of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, and the other great names in philosophy. The words embodying the abstractions the philosophers sought to convey flowed by him like the tide by a channel post. Utterly nebulous his notions of what their ideas consisted of, their concepts a floating ephemera, maintaining their outlines and distinctions from one another no better than a cloud, patches of haze. He did try to understand; the more earnestly he tried, the more soporific his endeavors became, the more opiate the elucidations in the text.

The weeks passed. Indian summer gave way to full autumn. Classes became routine; college became routine, an unhappy routine divided into equal segments of time. His performance in his subjects varied erratically, without ostensible reason, without rational control. In chemistry he did A work — and scarcely understood why; in trigonometry his failure was already irreversible. In philosophy it was just necessary to coast along to pass. In French, after a laudable start, he was soon warned by the precise, pedantic head of department that his work was deteriorating. Sluggish, incompetent, discouraged was the way he felt most of the time, was the way life made him feel, as if a pall separated his mind from his studies. And it did: a pall that confined him within it, that he passively submitted to.

With a quarter in his pocket, he would leave the house on 119th Street and hike along Park Avenue in the shadow of the trestle of the New York Central to 125th Street. There, wait on the corner for the Third and Amsterdam Avenue trolley, board it, ride to 137th Street and Amsterdam, alight, walk east with fellow students past Lewisohn Stadium, cross the small campus-quadrangle surrounded by Gothic conformity of white and gray edifices, enter the main building — and if time permitted, lounge in the Class of ’28 alcove until time for class. Once or twice, in the morning, experimentally, he wore his Mili Sci uniform from home to college. He thought he would save time that way, by eliminating the change from civilian to military attire. But he found it embarrassing, coming out of the tenement onto the stoop into the slummy street on a bright fall morning, and then marching along grubby Park Avenue to 125th Street — all in World War scratchy, horse-blanket khaki breeches, puttees (which he could never roll on with any degree of neatness), rough woolen shirt and jacket that chafed the back of his neck. He would have to wear it all the rest of the day, until classes were over, and still in military uniform he rode home again. It didn’t pay.

Altogether that first semester constituted a formless, foggy time; how formless and foggy it was he scarcely realized, because he was too confused intellectually to realize. What little satisfactions he derived, whether of attainment, as in Chem 1, or of enjoyment in listening to Professor Overstreet, were riddled, infiltrated, by the ever-present, the obsessive yearning for the exultation, the exaltation of perpetrating an act of glorious abomination. What the hell were studies compared to that? All they did was contrast his mediocrity, his aimlessness and boredom, his inattention with his ferocious audacity, his resourceful assaults on Minnie. Contrast his passivity, his temporizing in his studies, in his flaccid pursuit of knowledge, with his ingeniousness in winning Minnie’s surrender. Ah, that was what mattered, that minute or two when he pumped the cry out of her of incestuous consummation.

Such was the nature of his attendance at college. Instead of imbuing him with aspiration and hope as it did his classmates, more often than not, it simply contrasted the ugly tenement facade and smelly hallway and four-room dump on 119th Street in which he and his family lived, his dingy little bedroom, transmogrified by evil refulgence that minute or two when Minnie lay athwart the bed, drawers hanging from one foot, like a white flag hoisted in capitulation contrasted with the staid, aloof, academic atmosphere of the halls of instruction within the Gothic exteriors of CCNY. Oh, bullshit. He was ruined, he was ruined, okay. So he was ruined. Fuck it. Yes, others endured even greater extremes between home and college than he did, but they hadn’t gotten snagged, snarled inextricably, the way he had.

Oh, sure, he was crazy; he knew it. He was crazy and he welcomed, he cultivated, the exacerbation of his craziness all the while. He should have frequented the piers on the North River, pestered the steamship chief steward or boatswain or mate for a job, any menial job that would take him away from home, deckhand, pot walloper, oil wiper, anything. But if he had been capable of that, had that necessary smidgeon of initiative, then he wouldn’t have been the one he was, wanted and didn’t want to be. At least, he could have gone with Billy to Cornell. .

Larry, meanwhile, in pursuance of the two-year academic prerequisite for entering dental school, his “predent,” as he humorously referred to it, had enrolled in the Washington Square extension of NYU. He had encountered no difficulty in registering for any course he chose, and was enjoying all of them, interested in all, doing well in all, and especially in his two courses in English, one in English composition, the other titled Outlines of English Literature. The former, the class in composition, was conducted by a young New Englander, a Mr. Vernon, who incidentally was a poet, a writer of free verse, and had already published a book of poems at his own expense.

The latter, the course in English literature, was conducted by a young woman, a native of New Mexico, a poet as well as a critic, with a background, or second discipline, in anthropology. A very stimulating instructor, she had already published two volumes of verse translations of Navajo Indian religious chants. The respect for and harmony with nature, which the white man continually disregarded, when not destroying it, she had rendered with great sensitivity and sympathy. The reviewers had all praised her for her skill and delicacy as a poet, and especially for awakening in the white reader a new understanding of the Indians’ unique reverence for all things in nature, and their awareness of its beauty, and above all, their unsuspected eloquence in rendering their feelings about these things. Her name was Edith Welles.

Both were recent appointees at the university, and both ranked as instructors. It was his instructor in Outlines of English Literature who captivated Larry’s fancy completely.

Edith Welles, as Larry described her, was extremely girlish in appearance, dainty and petite, with the tiniest hands and feet he had ever seen on a grown woman. No one looking at her would have guessed that she already had her doctorate — interdepartmentally, in two disciplines, as they were called, English and anthropology. She was so sensitive, so fine and discerning, it was really a shame, Larry said, that such an exceptional person should waste her energies lecturing on English literature to a bunch of premeds and predents, who didn’t give a damn about literature and about poetry. All they cared about — the majority in both Vernon’s class and Welles’s class — was getting a passing grade so they could go on to what they were really interested in: mastering a profession that would assure them a comfortable living.

“You never saw such a bunch of thick-skinned, fat-headed guys. Jewish, I’m ashamed to say.” Larry grimaced.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, there are some in the class, a few, really serious students of literature, who intend to go on to graduate school and get their doctorates, or are preparing themselves for a career in writing: you know, journalism, writing fiction, criticism, poetry too. Some already excel. Really. I’ve got to admit it. They’re not all interested in middle-class values, you know, becoming a doctor or a dentist with a good practice. They’re really aiming at becoming creative writers.”

“Yeah? You mean write their own stuff? Already? And only freshmen? Jesus, we don’t hear anything like that at CCNY.”

“Oh, I don’t mean there’s a lot of it here. But they tell me there’s a lot more than in that hoity-toity NYU up on the Hudson, where they hardly admit any Jews.”

“Yeah? I’m sure they would have admitted you if you wanted to go there.”

“I’m glad I’m not there. They say it’s dull as dishwater up there.”

“No kidding.”

“Yes. Isn’t that funny? We don’t even have a campus down here. Unless you want to say Washington Square Park is our campus. That’s where all the Greenwich Village bohemians hang out.”

“Is that the place they hang out? Where the college is?”

“Well, really the college is where they hang out.” Larry smiled. “They were there before NYU.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“They live in those run-down old town houses you see all around there. Mostly small houses. Those old brownstones with a flight of stone steps in front. Cheap and run-down, you know what I mean? And that allows them to be free, free to do what they want. Live unconventionally with a woman. Not marry if they don’t want to. Paint, write, loaf.” Larry shrugged for humorous emphasis. “Anything not to hold down — be held down, I should say, by a regular job. That’s the main thing. Some of ’em are just fakes.”

“Gee!”

“The whole place is that way. Unconventional. But I like it.”

“What d’you mean? NYU?”

“Oh, no. I mean Washington Square. It’s not the stereotypical college atmoshmear.”

“Atmoshmear,” Ira repeated appreciatively.

“Yes, no atmoshmear.” Larry relished Ira’s appreciation. “There’s none of that rah-rah college spirit. No raccoon coats. At least I don’t see any. None of that Ivy League crap. Fraternities. Maybe there are I don’t know. It’s right smack in the middle of all kinds of cheap manufacturing buildings. It was once the center of the garment industry, the ex-sweatshop area. It’s down-to-earth.”

“Gee, what a college. Sounds less than CCNY.”

“Yes. The main building, the administration office, most of the classrooms, everything is in a remodeled loft building.”

“You mean it?”

“It’s a fact. Someone pointed out the building where that Triangle Shirtwaist fire took place. You must have remembered hearing about that when you were a kid?”

“No, I didn’t. My father was a milkman when we lived on the Lower East Side. So I got kind of left out of all of that trade union stuff. I’ve read about it, though. It was awful. Women jumping from the tenth floor. Boy”

“Well, it’s practically next door.”

“No kidding.” Ira shook his head. “So what d’you like about the place?”

“There’s so much ferment going on. In the English department especially. It’s so informal. You feel as if it’s the real thing.” Larry held up a large white finger. “That’s it. You don’t feel any distance between yourself and your instructor. You talk literature, you talk writing. Stuff you may be doing yourself. You talk modern poetry. You exchange opinions about anything, almost as equals.”

“Yeah? I get it now. That’s the last thing you feel in CCNY — although I like Professor Overstreet. I told you about him. But you don’t get close to him or anything like that. It’s just the way he lectures, that’s all. But otherwise—” Ira left the rest unsaid. “You think it’s because you pay tuition?”

“I don’t think so. I think Columbia would be like CCNY. Stiff and formal. And you pay tuition there. The only complaint I have is that Miss Welles assumes in Outlines of English Lit that none of us has heard of Chaucer or Milton or the Romantic Movement. So the course tends to be a little too elementary. I mean, she has to explain a great many obvious points. Gets a little boring for a few people, you know.”

“Boy, I never heard anybody complain about that in the ’28 alcove. We’re glad to get into an English course. I couldn’t.”

“Probably Miss Welles has to keep things simple because she has to cater to a bunch of predents and premeds.”

“Yeah?” Ira felt perplexed, at a loss. What kind of expectations did Larry have? Or were they called standards? He was a predent himself, and yet he criticized the presentation of literature, and criticized with such assurance, such interest, yes, as if literature took precedence over dentistry, as if he were disassociating himself from the others with the same aims. It was confusing.

Larry went on., For the benefit of those undergraduates who were disposed to go more deeply into the subject of writing, writing their own poems and short stories, Edith Welles and her colleague, John Vernon, had just instituted a new kind of student society: an Arts Club. All those students who were seriously interested in the writing of fiction, criticism, poetry, in creative writing in short, could foregather, and read their own work, and listen to that of others. Members of the faculty could do the same. Also, professional writers, or those of established reputations, would be invited to give readings of their poems, stories, or essays. Larry himself had submitted some of his lyrics for Miss Welles to appraise. She thought them very promising. Very promising indeed. And for someone taking a predent course, quite remarkable. “I certainly felt good.” Larry’s features seemed enlarged by separate glow of modest pride. “You know, hearing praise from her.”

“Boy. I would, too.”

“She suggested I join the Arts Club, that I become a member.”

“Yeah? You going to?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t miss this chance for anything. It’s a real honor. And an opportunity. It’s an incentive, you know what I mean? There are a lot of juniors and seniors in the club. I guess I’d be about the only freshman.”

Rapt, avid auditor of marvelous tidings, Ira could feel longing whet his appetite. How free, how intimate, how awake and fulfilling NYU seemed compared to antiquated, drab, regulated CCNY. Contemporaneous and vital the one, lusterless the other, except for that glint of life once a week — Professor Overstreet’s lectures. NYU was what he thought college would be when he trod on the fallen leaves on Convent Avenue. College would be responsive to his needs, would mean an expansion of his mind, would challenge with all kinds of exploration and discovery. Oh, to be on a par with English instructors, the way Larry described he felt, to listen to and meet writers and poets who actually had published books. What a privilege, as if a new empyrean had opened up. And he himself still without even a composition course or an English literature course to provide the kind of leavening that raised his spirits most: the wonders of language, the felicity — he could already recognize it as if recognition were second nature — the appositeness of word and phrase to connotation. A kind of bleary fragmentation seemed to imbue studies and courses at CCNY, a sense of futility. On the basis of his A’s in chemistry, in a kind of despairing search for a new purpose, or career, Ira asked genial Professor Esterbrook, head of the chemistry department, whether he approved of “Ira’s majoring in chemistry. “I’m sorry to tell you,” was the professor’s reply, “there’s not much future for your people in chemistry.”

For your people. In a way, Ira was relieved, secretly, relieved of striving, relieved of purpose. Go the rounds, phlegmatically, get by somehow, shrug at your mediocrity, and — sink into her on Sunday mornings as fast as she’d let you, ram it into her ravishing crimson passage in fiendish need and savage turpitude, in her, who seconds after it was over would be just Minnie his sister. So what. A nickel a day kept the baby away. A nickel a day from his twenty-five-cent allowance, when he had stopped hustling at sports events, meant a quarter a week, meant a tin of two Trojan rubbers. So he swiped a ten-cent ham sandwich on white bread in the CCNY lunchroom. Fuck ’em. The sandwich wasn’t worth a dime anyway.

And she was strange, Jesus, Minnie, she was strange, changeable. Sometimes she was wide awake by the time Mom left, not only awake, but waiting, peremptory, damn near, calling on him to hurry into the kitchen and snap the lock right after Mom left. He would have liked a few minutes of gloating, a few minutes of pawing, petting — he knew they could afford a few minutes of anticipation. But nothing doing. And he didn’t have a dime to his name to offer her, but it didn’t make any difference — as though he had partly perverted her. She had her thighs raised to him in her own folding cot, even while venting her displeasure at him for being dilatory. Lucky for him those times. “All right, all right, you can do it to me here. Hurry up. Put the rubber on. Just make sure it’s a good one. I don’t want that white stuff in me.”

“I know. I know. It’s brand-new. Jesus, don’t rush me. Gimme a chance.”

At other times she behaved quite the opposite, penitent perhaps, reverting to “O-oh, are you a louse! Why don’t you leave me alone? I’m your sister.”

And he, offended to the point of losing his chance, “So I’m a louse. If you’re my sister, I’m your brother. So what’re you?”

“Shut up. Sometimes I wish Mama would come home and catch us.”

“Yeah? What d’ye think I locked the door for?”

“You don’t think she’d know? You saw her look at us a couple of times funny. You didn’t see because you got your head in a book.”

“All right, so who would she blame?”

“You, you louse. Who would she blame? He asks yet.”

“You don’t get a thrill, too?”

“You’re older, that’s why it’s your fault. Who started it?”

“All right, let me in, will ye?”

“The rubber’s all right?”

“Of course.”

“O-o-h, o-oh, my poor brother, my poor dear brother. Oh, that’s good.”

“Yeah? Ah.”

“Don’t kiss me.”

III

The fall term at CCNY went by — routine and dull. Only through Larry could he share in the excitement of his freshman year at NYU, hear his account of the activities of the Arts Club, of the bohemian setting of their evening meetings in one or another of the restaurants in the college environs, the Pirates’ Den, the Romany Inn, and listen to his entertaining descriptions of the eccentrics one might meet crossing Washington Square Park. With Larry, Ira went on an excursion to Greenwich Village, trying not to gawk at long-haired, freakish individuals, posturing in poetic disregard of conventional clothes and behavior. Ira’s own vista was flat and uninspired in retrospect — punctuated by a few hectic minutes on a Sunday morning, or frenzied windfall on a rare weekday afternoon, when the two were alone, those unforeseen, wild pouncings of furor, snatching gratification out of baleful contingency — and the fears it spawned. .

He dropped trigonometry, hopelessly incapable of making headway against his utter confusions. The dropping of the course would mean a dangerous insufficiency of credit. It would bring a warning from the dean that Ira risked flunking out of college. As against the debacle in trig was the anomaly of an A in chemistry. A grade of D in phys ed — he who had been a sturdy plumber’s helper only a few months before, and could swim the length of the college pool underwater. Mili Sci, with its marching around Jasper Oval in fair weather and in foul weather, rehearsing the manual of arms down in the “tunnel” between buildings, singing, “The Infantry, the Infantry, with the dirt behind their ears,” in time to the beat set by the portly paterfamilias of a colonel (while the blond-haired sergeant could scarcely refrain from squirming in embarrassment).

“The infantry, the infantry,

With the dirt behind their ears,

The infantry, the infantry,

That never, never fears. .”

For some unaccountable reason he received an A in the course.

Baba died in the fall of that first semester, only about half a year after Lenin had died early in the winter. She died a lingering death of “pernicious anemia.” She lay at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, dying, but aware. Out of affection for his old grandmother, Ira accompanied Mom there: he entered a warm, sunny, bright room, joined his other relatives standing or sitting about the bed. Baba’s face above the smooth, white bedspread looking as shriveled as a weathered husk, weazened, her skin corrugated and as if pigmented by the tiny shadows cast by a myriad of minute wrinkles. It was dinnertime; the nurse served Baba her meal. It looked so fetching on the platter: a thick juicy tidbit of rib steak under a sprig of parsley next to a mound of mashed potatoes banked by bright green peas. Ira drooled at the sight; in imagination, he sank his teeth into the succulent, rosy beef. Even Zaida’s mouth must have watered, for his Adam’s apple bobbed visibly as he importuned Baba to eat. “Ess, ess, Minkeh,” he urged, swallowing. Then he chided her for declining, exhorted with ever growing impatience, “Ess, ess, Minkeh. How can you live unless you eat?”

She refused, feebly; she wasn’t hungry: “Ikh vil nisht, ikh ken nisht.”

“Goodbye, Baba.” Ira went over to Baba’s bedside, after he heard Max offer to take Mom home in his new car. “I hope you get better.” He bent down and kissed the dark, shrunken brow of the head that rested in the center of uncropped, mousy hair diverging on the white pillow.

“May God watch over you, my child. Be a good son to your mother.” Barely audible, her murmured blessing.

“Yes, Baba.” He straightened up.

“Gey gezunt.”

“Thanks, Baba. Goodbye.”

Amid prayers for speedy recovery, Ira bade farewell to his dying grandmother, forever after enshrined in his memory, lying in a white bed and refusing all importuning to eat a morsel of a juicy piece of beefsteak he could have devoured in two bites, and without an urging.

For another year or a little longer, Zaida lived with his last two unmarried sons, Max and Harry, in the apartment on 115th Street. And when Max married, two years after his mother’s death, Harry went to live with Max and his new wife, Rosy, in the new house Max bought in Flushing, Long Island, while Zaida went to live with his daughter Mamie. She, in partnership with Saul, Ira’s shifty and conniving uncle, had acquired from the local bank, marginally, two large adjoining apartment houses on 112th Street between Fifth and Lenox avenues, two squat blocks of dwellings of gray stone and gray brick, two matched six-story buildings with four apartments on each floor above the ground floor. Mamie managed the two places, for which she was recompensed with an apartment of her choice rent-free. She chose a spacious apartment only a flight up from the street. The apartment consisted of six rooms, more than enough to accommodate herself, her spouse, Jonas, her two young daughters, Hannah and Stella, and, eventually, Zaida, whenever he was ready to move in, which he did as soon as the lease of the apartment on 115th Street expired. A sine qua non for Zaida to board anywhere required the household to be strictly kosher, and, of course, Mamie kept a strictly kosher home.

Thus a new configuration now obtained among the family Farb. Ella and her husband, Meyer, still a kosher butcher, and their two infant children lived in an apartment house on Fifth Avenue and 116th Street. All the other siblings, except Harry, were married; all were in the restaurant business, as partners, except Sadie’s husband, Max S, who preferred to remain a waiter and avoid the “headaches” of ownership. Mamie’s husband, Jonas, at Mamie’s insistence, had given up his trade of years’ standing as a ladies’ tailor in order to join his brothers-in-law in partnership. Moe and Saul, Max, and soon Harry purchased or shared in the purchase of newly built two-story frame houses in Flushing, adjacent to each other and not far from their place of business, a large cafeteria on Sutphin Boulevard in Jamaica.

The year 1924 waned into the Christmas holidays. In the Farb family a bris was to be celebrated on a Sunday during the Christmas holidays. A son had been born to Saul and his wife, Ida, the second Ida in the family. Of course, all the relatives had been invited to the circumcision, and the festivities to follow.

“At least show yourself,” Mom pleaded. “You’re so estranged from the family, they hardly know you. Show them I have a college son. Your father won’t attend any occasion: always at odds with everyone. Escort me. I have no one.”

“There’s Minnie. What d’you mean, nobody to escort you?” Ira countered.

“That afternoon she has a date.”

“A what?”

“A dance. A Christmas revelry, don’t you know how the goyim celebrate? At Julia Richmond High School, with the young men from the commoysheh high school. Commoysheh high school has many Jewish students, as you know. Perhaps she’ll find a good Jewish youth for a suitor.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Believe me, they’ll admire you at the bris. My handsome son, and a college student, who won’t admire you?” Mom wheedled. “And food and drink they’ll proffer without end. They’re all in the restaurant business, no?”

“And Minnie is going to be gone all afternoon?” Ira brushed aside the lure, at the same time as he probed for possibilities of another sort. “When is she coming home?” he probed.

“Not until late evening. I’m telling you. Not till your father is home from the benket in Coonyiland. Maybe not till we return,” Mom affirmed. “Come. Be a kind and considerate son. Escort me this once.”

“I don’t see why. You can go with Mamie.”

“I know. I know that. But this one time, favor me. What else does a mother wish but to display her admirable son?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s just what I want.”

“My sisters are bringing their children. Only I am without. Forlorn. Neither husband nor son. Public school graduation, not. High school graduation, not. I don’t deserve anything? Is it so much?” She sat there so patiently, heavy hands in her lap, bobbed hair speckled gray, deep, sorrowful brown eyes pleading.

“Oh, well,” Ira grudgingly consented.

“Indeed a precious son!”

“Okay, okay, I said I’d go,” he quenched sentiment abruptly. “Holy mackerel. Sit there, and do what?” He wagged his head in distaste. “Chibeggeh, chibeggeh, chibeggeh, as Pop says. Boy, how to ruin a Sunday.” He felt especially out of sorts, frustrated. Minnie had refused him this morning. She was having her period. “Anh, nuts.”

“My darling child.”

After a long ride to Flushing, and a walk of several blocks from the Sutphin Boulevard station, they came to Saul’s brand-new frame house, full of relatives. As Zaida’s oldest grandson, first of a new generation of cousins, and a “collitch” boy besides, Ira was greeted effusively and with admiration by all the guests. Complimented for her distinguished offspring by everyone there, Mom flushed with pride, glowed with pleasure. Laconic in defense, Ira, as he had anticipated, had embarrassingly little to discuss with his restaurateur uncles, a perfunctory minimum which he made no effort to expand. Nor could he interest himself, on the other hand, in the seemingly limitless differences of points of view they exchanged among themselves. As bored as he had ever been in his life, he sat inertly and with unfeigned listlessness amid the flow of opinions about aspects and prospects of the cafeteria business between naively boastful Max and slinking Saul, between tactless Harry and robust and candid Moe. Only Moe took time to make a few inquiries about Ira’s collegiate activities, inquiries crossing the Yiddish and Yinglish hubbub of domestic and business activities. How did college appeal to Ira? And how many years more would he have to attend? And what had he chosen as a career? “Poor Leah, your mother, will finally have something to be happy about.”

Replied to by Ira with remarks that were shallow and truncated, even in response to Moe’s inquiries, perfunctory acknowledgments of kinship that had long since lost whatever living interactions it once had. Two worlds drifting further and further apart from their original cluster. “How is the restaurant gesheft?” Ira asked in humorous deference.

And received the expected stereotypical reply, “M’makht a lebn.”

Neither had anywhere to go in the other’s domain. Ira could scarcely mask his utter indifference to, if not disdain for, their various observations on making a living in the cafeteria business. It was difficult for him to feign interest — out of politeness, out of minimal consideration for the occasion, or what? A celebration, birth of his uncle’s firstborn son. Boyoboy, talk about tedium, about being bored stiff. What would life have been, relations have been in the close-packed Orthodoxy of the stagnant Galitzianer hamlet they came from? Something more meaningful, surely, more interwoven, shared and dynamic, even if seemingly insignificant when viewed by the outside world.

How far apart they had traveled since they had crossed the ocean — the thought repeatedly rolled through Ira’s mind. Was it — he found himself mulling amid the cry and flurry of festivity — that he had preceded them to America by a few years, or was just an infant when he arrived? Trailed no residue of Europe? Or what? It seemed to him he was forever capturing the answer, and losing it again. Minnie was a damn sight closer to them than he was, and Minnie had been born here. You had to search somewhere else, search somewhere else for an answer. That move to Harlem from 9th Street on the Lower East Side — again the cause: “It is the cause, my soul,” said Othello. That crazy impulse to drink of that rill of rainwater trickling down the hillside in Central Park. Or the reading, all the reading he did about the gentile world. But Minnie seemed to read as much as he did. She had spent whole afternoons in the library, when the Great War forced a curtailment in classes to half a day, to mornings only for her — and was he ever furious with her for not staying home, for not coming home early from the library. What chances she deprived him of, again and again. Jesus Christ, right away, the skull throbbed. He had no barriers, not even tissue-paper barriers to hold impulse within bounds—

Zaida didn’t come to the bris. Ira thought he heard someone say he was still in mourning. And not all the uncles were there at one and the same time either. They had to take turns tending to the cafeteria, especially the cash register. Nor was Ida there, the “first” Ida, the flamboyant Ida Link, Morris’s wife, who lived upstairs in the same house. She had had a falling-out with Sam, Mom whispered to Ira, adding, “And a geferlikhe gemblerke ist she too,” referring to Ida’s passion for cards.

With the assembled guests, Ira watched the shrill infant’s foreskin slit by the mohel, thrown on the floor, and stamped on — to Hebrew invective. Then followed the feast: the gefilte fish, and the fricassee and the kreplach, the kishka, siphons of seltzer, the wine and whiskey, and desserts fruity and desserts baked — all consumed amid ritual Jewish din. Mamie, already in girth like a barrel, ate until her eyes bulged. As for Ira, he not only gorged but tippled, first whiskey, with bravado, then copious drafts of sweet wine along with the ample viands, and by the end of the repast, he reached the end of his capacity. Loaded, bloated, in lethargic haze, reacting to his orgy of gluttony, he sprawled on one side of the twin love seat in the sunroom off the living room, wishing to hell he had never acceded to Mom’s appeal. What the hell had he come here for? To cram his gut? Goddamn tun-belly.

It was evening. The sunroom lay in deep shadow. The living room was deserted. Most of the guests had eaten and gone their various ways, perfunctorily bidden farewell by Ira. And now, yawning dormantly, he waited for Mom to announce that she was ready to leave — before he would have to remind her that he was ready to leave. More than ready. After the departure of so many people, the place seemed to have subsided, become semideserted. From the brightly lit doorway of the kitchen on the other side of the unlit living room came the splash and clink of dishwashing and chatter of the women, interspersed by the voices of Mamie’s younger and loquacious daughter, Hannah, and the treble voices of Sadie’s kids, while their mothers — and Mom — helped the second Ida clean up in the aftermath of the banquet. Stuffed, reclining on his half of the love seat in lassitude of gourmandizing, Ira bided his time, lulled by the hum issuing from the kitchen, hebetating to the verge of somnolence. . about to doze off—

The kitchen doorway opened brightly. .

Casting her shadow into the living room, the kitchen doorway darkened with her short, unhurried presence, and a moment later, framed her deliberate, casual exit from the others in the kitchen. . darkening behind her as she shut it, stepping into the penumbra of the living room: Stella. For Chrissake. How old was she? Fourteen? Was he crazy or was he right? She was coming nearer. He could feel himself inflame: willing prey? Knowing prey? What? He marked something in her dim, wavering step. Innocent approach? No, innocuous approach, that was it, a possibility, a potential, feasible and farfetched at the same time: Mamie’s older daughter, fourteen years old now, for Chrissake, short, plump, blond, blue-eyed, simple, but for all that, pudgy, tubby, unformed as she was, already wafting carnal tiding, diffusing nubile compliance. If he could only get her alone. Boy, she was like a lascivious cordial to his gluttony, cordial to satiation. Wow. Why the hell was she dawdling? Why didn’t she come over to where he was? Oh, no, she was clever, dissembling; she knew what she was doing. Aimlessly arriving, on oblique tack, yes, yes. And here she was. Oh, he was right, he was right. All ploy, all surreptitious, like a noncommittal complement to her dissembling. He smiled cautiously without incentive.

She was very blond as she passed from penumbra into the deeper shadow of the withdrawn sunroom, drawled something banal, banal utterance of the obvious. “It’s dark, and you’re sitting alone.”

And standing tubby, standing in front of him, in front of Ira, burning now in predatory rut, in lecherous fury that he felt would kill him, if he didn’t gratify it on her. “Why don’tcha sit down.” He beckoned innocently at the twin seat at his back. “It’s nice here. Quiet.”

And in vapid collusion she complied.

Sitting opposite, his eyes fixed watchfully on the kitchen door, he tilted his head sideways, sought her mouth. She converged. She parted her lips for his tongue to delve — to plumb. Oh, yes, Jesus Christ, no doubt, discreet, ready, expectant. Where could he try? Boyoboy, his blazing passion could kill this little, oh, fat little heifer, supine, submissive, inviting murderous sacrifice. Jesus. But where? Where freedom for rut to erupt, where a minute of privacy, innocent-seeming privacy? Think. Upstairs. Possibly. Try.

The signaling tip of his head when he stood up was superfluous. She followed, tractable as if on a leash. “Let’s look at the rooms upstairs.”

“Upstairs is Uncle Morris’s and Ida’s,” she meshed with him in dissembling. “Uncle Morris is by the cash register tonight.”

“Yeah?” Preceding her, he had climbed to the landing on top of the stairs. “And Ida? Do you know?”

“I don’t know. Mama said she went to play cards.”

He tried the doorknob. Fixed. Locked. “They’re not home.” But no good. Christ, get caught here on the landing as obvious as a placard, their ploy. What the hell would he be doing up here but to screw her? They came down again.

Throbbing, he felt as if he were treading on a surface without a floor beneath him in fierce, foiled quest. Chrissake, where? They went outdoors: stood a few seconds inspecting the narrow lane between duplicate houses. Cold the dark, and betraying. No good. Locked anyway. By Max who lived there. They’d be in the doorway, should anybody come along. And where were they, should Mom or Mamie ask? No good, no good, no good. Jesus, he’d go crazy. He led the way back into the house: kitchen light under the closed doorway, sound of utensils, voices. They’d be finished in another few minutes, probably, putting away the last of the dishes, silverware. Finished they. And so would he be. Somebody would pop out the door, and then. Goddamn. Ever hear of such a goddamn. . such a goddamn. . Here she was at his elbow, waiting — simpering, her blond head at his shoulder—

Hey, wait a minute. The cellar!

The cellar! The new concrete-floored, concrete-walled cellar that Saul had showed off so proudly to his guests — when Max had bragged about his. . Should he lead her there, to Max’s darkened house, search for an entrance across the narrow lane? Go out again? Nah. Jesus, no time. Right here. Take a goddamn chance.

Ira beckoned with his head. She followed, as if bereft of independence, a puppet utterly guided by the sovereign depravity of will. Dummy. Hell, no. She wore a dummy disguise. Boy, that made it a lot safer. No blabbing. .

This way, yes, to the cellar. Fitting they should make exploratory excursion toward the cellar door, plausible to swing it ajar, tip switch up, and peer down into blank whiteness, emphasize surprise. Close door behind, descend. . half-dozen wooden steps to the glaring new cement floor under the stark, unshaded light bulb. Sharp and solid shadow of furnace, hot water heater, laundry tub, displacing the glare of wall.

“Quick.” Ira lifted her dress.

She pulled aside the skimpy sling of her teddy to reveal elemental, adolescent fuzz. Already out with it, his charger, ready, brute in the van, hauling creature after it, mind and body. “Ever do it before?” he asked.

She hesitated a moment, reluctant to confess, and yet not to forgo, to miss by being remiss: “The painter.”

“The painter?” he approached.

“After we moved in. The new rooms.” Her shallow blue eyes glazed—“Oh!”—glazed, unblinking. . at his penetration, unblinking, shallow blue eyes accomplice of his perpetration. Minnie closed her hazel eyes, but not Stella, shallow, blue stare, gone vacuous, gone void. It was working, working, it was working, working. Look at her eyes, shallow, blue, stupefied: stultified inanity fixed on him, his prey, accessory to his violation, Jesus Christ, intrinsic to his spraddling her. Destroy her, ah-h, straddling him — slump, mum larva, squash her dumbstruck trance with guy-geyser brutish he — fucking her. Ai-i. Get out! Get away! Aoh, just when—

It was over.

“Upstairs,” he commanded. And as she climbed back up the wooden steps, “You think you look all right?”

Her juvenile blond head nodded.

“Sure? Good. All right. Out.”

He watched her juvenile round butt pause a second longer above him at the door, pause, her hands smoothing skirt. She went out, left the door a crack ajar. He loitered. . to break nexus, quietly smearing ejaculate underfoot, as Jews smeared phlegm underfoot in synagogue, as the mohel had mashed the infant’s foreskin underfoot after stamping on it. Dry up soon. Then tiptoed up the stairs, switched off the light as he eased out of the cellar door, sneaked back to the love seat, dropped quietly down, and sitting back, surrendered to last, vestigial panting.

— So you did it.

Yes, I did. And relived it too. Many a time.

— Why?

To alert the world to the menace of housepainters.

— Dispense with the levity. Why?

Good question, Ecclesias. I don’t know why. Not at the moment. The answer may suggest itself later on, take shape into coherence, but for the moment I’m at a loss. Certes, I’m not engaged in a sociological tract, but a rendering, excuse me, or attempt at holistic rendering of my lamentable past. But even so, I suppose I’m open to the charge of appealing to the prurient interest. On the other hand, Ecclesias, I feel bound not to mitigate the behavior of this literary scamp, bound to present him as despicable as he was. Of course, as I say, I could have done so — in general terms, clinically.

— And chose not to. Why is the reliving so important to you, an old man edging closer to eighty this mid-August than seventy-nine?

Tough again. I mean to find an answer. Have I overstepped the boundary from the erotic into the pornographic? Is this the fumarole manifestation of the well-nigh extinct libido? Likely as not. Let the psychiatric specialist decide. There will be more of the same, by the way, and I must admit that I come to life, so to speak, leap into an orbit of higher energy, when in the grip of the sexual escapade or episode. Again why? Animal impetus, elemental instinct of an individual, alas, in whom the seismic wrench of sexuality brought libido into abnormal salience above reason.

— You think so?

Yes, and I can think only, if you call it that, I can think only figuratively, or subjectively: how the event, the episode, feels. Probably all of this is interconnected: my subjectivity, my weakness in objective analysis, my paucity of ideology—

— And of ideas.

And of ideas. Granted. It’s all one zone, one ever-changing, ever-recurring zodiac: personality, proclivity, vicissitude, act, character, rearing, perpetual zodiac.

— Do you know what you’re talking about?

Quite frankly, no.

— I think I have an inkling, though, one that breaks through the wall of your verbiage.

What?

— Unpremeditated too in this case. I do think that you wrote as explicitly as you did because you still are what you were. That the hold on you of what you were is, so to speak, still in force. Though your hard-won wisdom, or perhaps foresight, restraint, together with your depleted appetite, might make you, if not immune to those same temptations, at least resistant, more resistant than you were. Perhaps even to the point of distancing yourself from them, taking to your heels, the way that Saint Anthony did, who left his cloak in the harlot’s clutch. Who knows, you cannot, never will, recover, have not shaken, cannot shake, the brand you seared into yourself.

That’s why the explicitness?

— I think so. I’m almost sure of it.

Well. And what do you advise, Ecclesias?

— You might as well accommodate it.

It?

— What you were. Be it again you never can be.

You mean the danger of my being it again?

— Yes. And you already see that resisting it was to no avail. You set out in a first draft without a sibling. Ineluctably your sister forced her way into your narrative, strange, even bizarre though it may be for one to commit sibling incest without mentioning a sister, at least in the beginning. You see what a fix you’re in now that the truth has made its way to the fore. You’ve lopped off the beginning of your yarn; you’ll have to make amends some way. So powerful a shaping force in your life simply would not drown.

I had hoped when I was through, when all this sordidness was over, to introduce her, portray her as another character. .

— As it was, you were left with a lopsided tale. Anyway, to conclude, it would be folly to repeat the error again. So make a clean breast of what you are. It’s perfectly evident you can’t do otherwise, because you’re no other than you were, though you’re other than you were—

All right. All right. All right.

— Or dangle in some surrealist limbo.

All right. All right. So now I maneuver in double jeopardy, double-furtive, double-scurvy, through incest-and-a-half. Soror. Sobrina.

— Yes. Doubly fecund and doubly fertile. Also doubly liable to indictment for statutory rape.

I do thank you, Ecclesias.

— Never mind. Incest cum suror—can you supply the ablative?

And so it came to pass that he had really screwed her. And no one had noticed, no one had guessed. She had gone back inside the kitchen to rejoin the others. Oh, she knew, she had wanted it, she feigned dummy-blandness. She’d never tell. Nearly hadn’t told him about the painter, except — as if he’d back off, constrained in deflowering her. But that sonofabitch of a house painter. . Nobody home, and the plump pullet waggling her tail around. Down with his overalls, let the walls wait. Balls for the walls, and pop goes the cherry-o over his overalls. . All right. Ira tried to put his thoughts in order. Jesus, only fourteen years old, but down went your kasha-colored secondhand knickers. So what? Minnie was younger, just tickled sandwich-style — till that time once suddenly, oooh! So when could he go there again to visit Mamie? After Zaida went there to live; that would be praiseworthy. Laudable pretext, boy, keep the old codger company, hearken to his Talmudic disquisitions, commiserate with him in his widowerhood, in his hypochondriac ills.

But until then: let’s see.

IV

With the resumption of classes in the new year, the year 1925, Larry read a short story he had just written, with considerable help in plot from Ira, at the next scheduled session of the Arts Club, but he came away bitterly resentful at the contemptuous treatment his work had received at the hands of his fellow undergraduate members of the club. “The dumb bastards!” he stormed. “They never even saw the underlying significance of the story. The dumb futzes! Always preening themselves on being in the vanguard. It’s sheer empty bragging. They’re blind. Everything has to be so esoteric nobody knows what it’s about, and I’ll bet they don’t either. Just plain show-offs. Make a big impression by running down an honest piece of work.”

“Boy, I can’t believe it.” Ira listened sympathetically. “The parts you read to me sounded great.” He had never seen Larry so wrought up.

“Oh, no, they’re much too highfalutin for a straightforward piece of writing, a genuine short story.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“And do you want to know something? There’s an undergraduate in the club, Schneider — swell-headed. Upperclassman. Senior, you know the kind. A self-styled penetrating literary critic.” Larry’s wrath took the form of an unblinking stare. “You know what he did? He actually plagiarized an essay on Ezra Pound, and read it at the Arts Club as if it were his own.”

“Who?”

“Schneider! Snider! However he spells it,” Larry snapped.

“Oh. Snider. He must be a good poet.”

“No, Schneider’s the plagiarist. Ezra Pound, he’s the poet.”

“I think I remember the name now.”

“Schneider copied the whole thing word for word out of a small out-of-the-way magazine that he thought nobody else would read. Well, somebody did. Boris G. I told you about him. He’s in love with Edith. And the bloke was caught. Edith said he cried all over the place about it.”

“Wow. Sorry he was caught.”

“Yes. And he had the nerve to get up and say that my story was just an old wives’ tale. He plagiarizes an article, and he sneers at an honest short story.”

Ira felt he had to wait a few seconds to let Larry subside. “What’d the others say?”

“Snide. Like Schneider. Snotty. Anything to show off. Oh, they said the story shed no light on the modern condition, modern quandaries. Quandaries!” Larry repeated, deliberately theatrical. “It didn’t reflect contemporary attitudes. It could have been written in the nineteenth century. As if it wasn’t expressing anything universal. Hadn’t any value. What bull!” He slapped a phonograph cover. “And it had a plot! Sin of sins. Can you imagine? Even though I explained at the beginning I was trying to do a tightly knit short story.”

“Yeah?”

“I read the whole thing to the family. They thought it was great. All right, say they’re not the foremost literary critics in the world. Edith read it. She thought it was good. She saw I was working with a symbol about past and present. But to these superintellectuals — as they think they are — the story was trivial. They couldn’t write one as good. That’s the truth of the matter.”

Again, as that day when he hustled soda at the Polo Grounds, Larry seemed prone to, seemed prepared to, dismiss adverse criticism. Was it because the critics belittled his ego, or wounded his vanity? Didn’t recognize his distinction, maybe. Ira couldn’t say. Unlike Larry, Ira realized, he had come to absorb humiliation almost as if it were his due.

“It was just a raw, a rotten exhibition of plain jealousy, that’s all it was. It was mean,” Larry inveighed.

“Yeah?”

“Especially that Percy-on-the-half-Shelley Markowitz, with his experimental poems about the sea-green sea and the hoar-gray hoar-frost. All kinds of Gertrude Steinish stuff. He—”

With his large, white hands flowing in front of him, Larry mimicked prissiness. “‘The writer of the short story has not read T. S. Eliot. He has evidently been unaffected by the depletion of meaning, the erosion of consensus.’ What a pose! Even John Vernon said they were being gratuitously unkind, ignoring the well-sustained mood, the local color, the genuinely fresh imagery. They weren’t giving any credit to style and allusion. And touches of humor too.”

Ira felt guilty, guilty in a curiously ambivalent way: for having not only suggested but also acquainted Larry with Mom’s twice-told tale. He had dangled the lure before Larry — and thereby instigated his discomfiture — over which Ira now felt a secret satisfaction. Why? Schadenfreude? How could he be that way? He was an ingrate, perfidious ingrate. All unconsciously, so it seemed, he had sacrificed Larry, as one read about miners in coal mines sacrificing a canary to warn them of the seepage of insidious gas, that the air was no longer safe to breathe. So the sophisticated intellectuals didn’t like formal, old-fashioned plots. What did they like? What was modern? What shed light on the modern psyche? Inevitably the thought led him to an awareness of the heaving magma of his own being. Was he feeling again that same hermetic superiority he had felt before, on the El ride that first time he went to Larry’s home? That sense of possessing something deeper, deeper awareness, a greater span of sensibility, more startling fusions of fancy, even if maybe wild, uncontrolled. The notion troubled him at the same time as it elated, disturbed him with welcome contrarieties.

He wasn’t supposed to be competing with Larry. He was supposed to go into biology, not English, study organisms, not write stories. But there was Larry himself: supposed to go into dentistry, and yet he was so painfully wounded about his failure to win sought-for praise for literary work. Jesus, what kind of aberrations were taking place? He could feel them in Larry, could feel them within himself. They had been imperceptible until now, but with Larry’s vexed recital of the scornful reception of his story at the Arts Club, they were no longer imperceptible; they were appreciable; they were like a deliberate veering away from announced goal, not accidental but deliberate.

Ira had fostered the deviation. Jesus. From dentistry to writing, a careening of career, of aims and values. And if it came to the possibility of the same thing happening to him, of a drastic switch in aspiration, analogous to Larry’s, from biology to writing, God, what would he have done? There was no comparison between himself and Larry. What he had done and was capable of imagining: Minnie, Stella, violation and torment, frenzy and predicament — all in a sardonic ambience, wasn’t it? Like a herring in tomato sauce. Knocked up his sister, or thought he had, in a murderous afternoon of plane geometry. Wow. Who the hell knew, as he knew, his private amalgam of vileness and caprice? And the jobs he had held, and the diurnal squalor of surroundings, yes, squalor and sordidness all stored in that glob that he was, amorphous glob, slowly revolving in his mind as Larry spoke. “Jesus, I’m sorry, Larry.” Ira lowered his eyes.

“Nothing to be sorry about, Ira. If they’re such egotistic showoffs, it didn’t affect Edith. She just laughed. She thought the imagery was beautiful: that rind of moon above the graveyard — I told you about it. I knew she’d like it. It was genuine.”

“Oh, she’d read it before?”

“New Year’s Eve. Saturday. Before Boris came to take her to a party.”

“That’s why I couldn’t get you on the phone?”

“I just had to show it to her.”

Ira tried to trace one of the fiddlehead spirals in the carpet’s design while he retraced the events of that same Saturday evening. Ironic. Or what? Because he hadn’t been able to get Larry on the phone, Ira had strolled over to Mamie’s house. So at maybe the same minute when Larry was reading to Miss Welles, reading his retelling of Mom’s yarn, reading Ira’s relayed tale — that was funny, how that word kept cropping up — Ira was wangling his chubby little coz into the precarious privacy of the cellar. Jesus, taken separately, one episode was almost holy, like an adoration, a votive offering that Larry was making to Edith with his version of Ira’s version of Mom’s yarn. The other episode was just as unholy as the first was sacrosanct; the second was wholly unholy, impaling plump little Stella on his stalk sitting down. First time he had ever tried it, and it had worked: it was good: bounce her up and down like a piledriver — boy! But the two things, his doings and Larry’s, didn’t occur separately in his mind. They occurred together, as if fused. They were more — what? More wicked together? No. More vicious together? No. They were more sardonic, that was it. When the hell did he get that way? When did he begin to recognize and enjoy that — that blend of pure and. . and nasty? Yeah, yeah, instead of the one or maybe the other by itself. Like a dissonance in music maybe that repelled him at first, a perverse dissonance, like Wagner, like The Meistersinger when he first heard Mischa Elman play it in Izzy’s house, and was so fond of it afterward. So when? When did he begin to relish the sardonic mixture? Ira hung on to rumination another moment: after the East Side, that was when. Jewish living, feeling went poof. Well. . But wasn’t it something, Jesus, wild, when you joined the two together: sardonics? Sardonics meant discovery: like that Saturday night way back—

“My grandfather gave me black Greek olives in the synagogue on Saturday night,” Ira said, grinning. “Havdalah, they call it. Half-a-dollah. First time I ever tasted ’em, wow! I didn’t know which way they oughta go: spit out or swallowed.”

“What?” Larry was disconcerted.

“Nah. I was just trying to take your mind off your disappointment.”

“Oh, I’m all right. You don’t think I’d let their snooty pretense get me down, do you?”

Larry shook his head, ever so slightly, sighed and locked his hands. “I’m really not interested in coming up to their expectations.” He swiveled about in his seat. “I wanted to do at least one rounded short story, conventional, yes, free of smut too, but with an underlying meaning. It’s family-type reading.” Larry tossed his head. “Somebody there — I think it was Reuben Mistetsky — very subtly wisecracked: ‘It’s decent, family-type fiction.’ Well, I don’t regret it. I just don’t have to please them. And what the hell.” He stood up, went to the phonograph, pushed the crank down. “If I’d done another kind of short story, I know just what they’d say — that I was imitating Sherwood Anderson or whomever. And yet I don’t want to imitate anyone. That wasn’t my intention. So to hell with ’em. It pleased Edith.”

“You keep calling her Edith.”

“Not before the other students, of course.”

“No.”

“It’s just easier. Less formal. It gets a little artificial to keep calling her Miss Welles, and Iola Reid, the woman she shares the apartment with on St. Mark’s Place — also an English instructor — Miss Reid. We were making out postcards for the last meeting of the Arts Club. We had coffee and cookies. She asked me herself to call her by her first name. All working together around the table. It was just natural.”

“I get it.”

“It’s a chore, you know.”

“What?”

“The postcards. We have to send out about a hundred of them. To faculty. Students. Guests. It’s too much. Vernon never helps. The club needs an executive secretary. There are all kinds of arrangements to make. The tearoom to hire for the evening. Refreshments to order. Cookies. That sort of thing.”

“Oh, yeah.” Ira listened, contented and passive again.

“I’ve volunteered for the position,” Larry said.

“You have?”

“Yes. I’ll have to be nominated and elected at the next meeting, of course, and all that. But you can be sure nobody else wants the job.”

“Holy smoke. You just got yourself in for a lot.”

“That’s true.”

“Boyoboy.”

“It’s only once a month.” Larry’s countenance, so pensive, so level in response to Ira’s exuberance, crinkled into a playful and enticing smile. “I know somebody I can count on to help when the time comes to send out postcards.”

“What d’ye mean?”

“Don’t tell me you’ll let me down?”

“Oh. When?”

“Next term.”

“Gee. Me? Where?”

“Right here.”

“Oh. Okay. I was afraid for a minute.” Ira plainly showed his relief.

“Why?”

“I thought it was—” He gesticulated.

“I thought that’s what you meant. Edith wants to meet you anyway. She knows about you now.”

“What for?” Ira felt abashed at the very thought. “I’m CCNY.”

“Wouldn’t you like to meet her?”

“I don’t know. Jesus, I’m in biology.”

“Doesn’t make any difference. Come on, I’m a predent. It’s for anyone interested in creative writing. You can come as my guest to the next Arts Club meeting.”

“Nah. I don’t belong there. I’ll help you get the postcards off, but—” He grimaced extravagantly. “Leave me in pieces, will ye?”

“We’re having an important poet there next time. She’s giving a reading. Hortense L. You’ll enjoy it. She’s a very good lyric poet. What are you afraid of?” Larry changed tone of voice and mien. “Oh, come on, Ira! Honest, it’s an experience. And I want you to meet Edith.”

“Oh, God!” Ira cringed.

“She knows you’re shy. She’s a very fine, very sensitive and considerate person. All you have to do is say hello.”

“Yeah?”

“All right?”

“Why the hell do you want me there?” Ira was close to flaring up. “Seriously. I mean it. For Chrissake, I’m nobody. Jesus, you know how painful that goddamn thing is. You know how awkward I am. Why don’tcha leave me out of it? I’m happy.”

“Yes, but she’ll think it’s so strange — a close friend of mine, one I talk about all the time. I repeat your remarks. She says you sound very entertaining. So does Iola.” Larry’s voice rose to hold its own against Ira’s strenuous note. “Ira, you’re being childish.”

“All right, I’m childish.”

“Yes, but you’re not childish!”

“Then I’m Jewish.”

“Oh, cut it out! Listen, Ira. You’ve got to get over this business of—” The fingers of Larry’s large white hand splayed out. “This business of being Jewish. I just think you’re shy about meeting people.”

“All right, the one after this one. The next Arts Club meeting. Okay? I’ll earn my admission by helping you write postcards.”

Larry was about to turn away impatiently, but then in midmovement, to and fro abruptly, he said, “I’ll make a deal with you.”

“Yeah?” More worried than wary, Ira watched him.

“You know that English jacket I have, the one you call kasha-colored?”

“Yeah. Like those knickers I have.”

“Wait a minute.” In three strides Larry crossed the living room and entered the hallway. “I’ll be right back.”

Ira sat waiting. He became aware of an indistinct contralto voice humming in one of the rooms down the hall: the Hungarian maid’s voice? When had she come in, or had she been in her room all this time? There she went again, humming. Chrissake, that sounded like an American song: Titina, my Titina. Was it Larry’s sister? It must be. He had said the whole family had gone to Bermuda. Boy! Ira expelled despairing breath: sure, she was about three or four years older. What of it? Just imagine Mom and Pop going off for a week, and leaving him with Minnie. The prospect made his temples bulge.

“This isn’t fair.” Larry’s voice preceded him as he came back.

“What isn’t? Say, I heard somebody in the other end.”

“It was Irma.” Larry came in, bearing his oat-colored English jacket — so distinguished, with leather elbow patches. “She works for a designer. You know. They were just too busy. She was sleeping. Reading in her room. Sewing maybe.”

“Oh.” It was terrible, it was just terrible, that was all. “So what isn’t fair?”

“This isn’t fair,” Larry repeated. “But what the hell, all’s fair in love and war. You go to the next meeting of the Arts Club, it’s yours. It’s yours anyway.” A flush invaded his dappled cheek. “Try it on.”

Ira stood up. “Jesus, Larry.”

“All right, take yours off. Let’s see how it fits. It ought to. The sleeves have always been too short for me.” He slipped the garment up and over Ira’s arms to his shoulders. “Say, that’s — look at yourself. That’s better than I expected. Isn’t that good?”

The two surveyed Ira in the wall mirror.

“Boy, an English jacket,” Ira breathed, swelled with elation. “Boy, it really fits.” He bent his elbows toward the glass, hissed in pleasure at their reflection. “Real leather.”

It’s yours. I was just kidding about the deal.” Larry’s brown eyes were soft; affection played over his entire countenance. “I’m glad it fits as well as it does. Just a little bit shorter sleeves — be perfect.”

“It doesn’t matter. Boy, you sure you want to — to part with it?”

“I thought of keeping it till spring before I gave it to you,” said Larry. “You don’t have to wear it until you like. I mean, let’s forget the whole deal. It’s yours.”

“Oh, no. I’ll go.” Ira’s gaze traveled from the dark, buckwheat-colored tweed on his arm to the dark, buckwheat-colored tweed in the mirror. “Wait till Mom sees this.”

“Do you want to wear it home instead of yours?”

“Oh, no. Not till the Arts Club meeting. No, sir.” He was about to slip out of the jacket.

“Wait a minute,” Larry advised. “Hold it a second. . Irma?” he called down the hallway. “I know she’s up. Irma?” He waited for a reply. “Will you come here a minute? Please. . You don’t mind if she sees you in it?” He turned to Ira.

“No, I don’t care. I’ll bet she yells, ‘Robber, give it back!’”

A young woman with a full feminine figure, brunette, Irma shared a similarity of features with Larry, enough to make them easily recognizable as brother and sister. But Irma’s features lacked the almost perfect regularity of her brother’s, and her complexion was quite dark, while his was dappled and fair. Temperamentally, she was also far more matter-of-fact than Larry, prosaic and bored, in a sultry kind of way. She always made Ira think of the Yiddish word bukher, a guy, a suitor. There was never one in evidence, and maybe that was the trouble. But he was always on some tack or other like that, so he couldn’t trust his impressions. But what if he had a sister three or four years older than he was? Would she consider making shift with him for a while? You never knew; the funny thing was, sultry as she seemed — maybe she was too sultry, maybe too demanding; now that she stood right in front of him, he wasn’t sure how he would feel. He’d much rather have a go at Stella — of that he was sure. Minnie next.

“My, don’t we look grand.” Irma’s praise was tempered; still in her surprise at the sight of Ira in Larry’s jacket, she forgot to curl inward her very full, round lips. “Don’t we look distingué?”

“Doesn’t he?”

“Hic jacket,” Ira quoted uncomfortably.

“What?”

“I was just trying to remember something by Sir Walter Raleigh. Nothing.”

“It certainly does something for you.” Irma rested two fingers on her cheek, as if she were seeing Ira for the first time. “It makes you look much more assured.”

“Yeah?”

“And very successful. All you need is a million dollars to go with it.”

Ira met her brown-eyed gaze unsteadily. She was so like Larry, and yet not like him in so many ways. Looked almost straitlaced, straitlaced and smoldering: the word bukher came to mind again. “Well.” Ira pulled at his ear. “I am now your brother’s keeper.”

“He may need one. Is that what you mean?”

“Well, no. I just said it. Instead of thanks. I mean, I owe him loyalty. Protection, I guess.”

“I think I know one very good way of showing it.” Irma directed a look at Larry. “Protection is something he may need. I’m glad to hear you’re conscious of it.”

“No, I just meant I owe him so much, that’s all.” Ira felt some sort of adverse pressure mounting.

“Irma, I don’t see why you have to bring that up.” Larry addressed his sister with uncommon curtness. “I didn’t call you in here for that. All I wanted you to do was look at the jacket.”

“Well, I’ve looked at it. He’s very handsome in it.”

“My sister sometimes behaves as if I’m not quite able to take care of myself.” Larry’s tone of voice was so elaborately equable that Ira couldn’t miss the satiric overtone. “You don’t have a big sister — or big sisters. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

Irma ignored her brother’s remark. She was not one to be deflected. Humorless, tough. “Are you an only child?” she asked.

“Me? No, I have a younger sister.”

“You do? I never heard you mention her. Is she very much younger?”

“No, about two years or so. But you know how it is.” Fecklessness served for pretext to obviate further explanation.

“Younger sisters don’t count, is that it?”

“Oh, no. They count. But a couple of years’ difference right now. . she goes to high school, I go to college. There’s a big separation between us. You know what I mean?” Boy, she made him work, forced him to tread warily.

“Where is she in high school? What high school?”

“Julia Richmond High. She’s aiming to attend Hunter College, the normal school.” He offered more than asked to forestall further inquiry.

“Irma, do me a favor. I just called you to look at the jacket,” Larry reminded.

“I told you. It’s very nice, very becoming, Ira.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m glad to hear him say he feels he owes you protection for the gift. That’s reassuring. That means he’s a very good friend. And good friends keep each other out of trouble.”

“That’s not what he meant,” Larry contradicted sharply.

“No, it isn’t, and I know it.”

Larry bridled at his sister’s provocative smile. “I wish I had the luxury of having just one younger sister, instead of all of them being older, all three of them, and all talking down to me in their superior wisdom. Talk about sisters not counting.” He turned to Ira. “My sisters have counted every day in my life, every day since I was born.”

“Fortunately for you,” Irma managed to comment.

The uncommon heat engendered by the two siblings finally began to stir perception in Ira’s mind: Larry was reconsidering dentistry and had alarmed his entire family. At last, the dispute had come to a head at home. So. . pleasing Miss Welles, Larry had said that before. Calling her Edith. That peculiar, sanguine look on Larry’s face when Ira said, with mock consternation, as if a joke: you just joined the Arts Club. Something like that. What d’ye know? What did Larry’s family suspect? They were becoming worried, that’s what it all meant. He never would have guessed. That veering away from preset goals, a specific veering away. And not only in Larry; Ira felt it taking place within himself, a wavering anyway.

Undoing the leather buttons of the English jacket, Ira saw his reflection again in the mirror, smiled back at himself in satisfaction at the annealing of conjecture. So that was it—

“You needn’t look so smug!” Irma snapped at him.

“Me?” Startled, he gaped in the mirror at her dark, taut face. She had never spoken to him that cuttingly before. No one in Larry’s family had ever done so.

“You needn’t pretend. You’re enjoying it all!”

“Enjoying it?” Ira turned around. “I was enjoying the jacket.” What a way of breaking the truce, the truce he tried to keep in his mind about her. It was as though she had caught him thinking of what he tried not to think about — she was so stormy and accusing. Chrissake. He felt like insulting her. Hurling some epithet out of his neighborhood at her. What the hell did she bring him into it for? What had he done? Maybe they thought he had; maybe they thought his friendship with Larry had influenced Larry, altered him in some devious, obscure fashion, tainted, marred Larry’s nature. Who the hell knew? Maybe it had. Larry had in fact changed him. Ira could feel his own wrath rising to contend with her stormy looks. So goddamn protective. Smut, obscenities arose in his mind: 119th Street invectives. Suddenly, involuntarily, she became naked, she walked like a mare on all fours, a mare with a human visage, curling her lips in. There she was, sucking them in. Made her look so goddamn prim. Back-scuttle her, since he didn’t want to face her, he was too angry; she had humiliated him for nothing. Do to her what the guys said on 119th Street: she had just the right chin to rest his balls on. And the way she sucked her lips in. Just right. Blow me, you bitch. Jesus Christ, he had never thought of her that way before. Jesus Christ, he was crazy. That was the middle-class manner that Larry spoke about, the middle-class manner that he himself didn’t know a thing about. It had all kinds of foreboding gloom about it, flowed over him, like an impalpable sable surf. What the hell was going to happen here? Hic jacket, he had said. A joke. It was no joke: here lies. But then he was always getting scared for no reason. “What d’you mean? I was just looking at, ad — admiring the jacket,” Ira insisted stubbornly.

“You were not. You know very well what I’m talking about, too.”

“Would you mind cutting out the accusations?” an irate Larry lashed out at his sister. “You’re officious!” he flung at her. “Officious, insulting. Please get out.”

“And you’re — I hate to tell you!”

“Don’t bother.”

“A silly romantic adolescent!” Irma was in a manifest huff. “If you don’t think I haven’t heard some of your remarks.”

“When?”

“Oh, your tone of voice.” Irma tried to portray a state of beatitude. Her eyes rolled up. She rested her cheeks on the fingertips of the two hands she held beneath it. “It touched my heart.”

“Will you please get out! Before I start using stronger language. Get out! I’m sorry I ever asked you in here.”

“I’m not only going to get out of here, I’m going to get out of the apartment.”

“That’s fine with me.”

Tense, irritated, Larry waited for his sister to leave the living room, then held up his hand in signal of silence until they heard the house door open and close, denoting her departure. “You get an idea of what’s going on — the acrimony,” Larry said heatedly. “That’s Irma, my own sister. Ever hear anything so mean? God, it’s a crisis. I should have known better than ask her in. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to be dragged into this, sorry she dragged you into it.”

“That’s all right.” Ira doffed the jacket, stood holding it silently a moment. “You know something? I got an uneasy feeling. Something like dread.”

“Oh, no. They’re all worked up — over an imaginary something. And even if it was, I’m legally responsible for my acts. They’ve no right to harass me.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong, did I?”

“Of course not. My God.” Larry lifted his shoulders. “You can see — they can see the black coming out all over my wool. I feel like a black sheep. Any tiny deviation, they magnify it — into something horrendous. Ruin! On all sides. What I wished to be in high school, I don’t necessarily have to wish to be in college. “You’re lucky. Your relatives don’t—” He gestured vehemently. “Your parents, your sister, certainly don’t crush you with all kinds of preconceived ideas about your welfare, do they? God, crush you with their concern. Talk about the weight on that diving bell meant to go down into the — Oh, I don’t know what the name of that ocean trench is. Mariana?”

“I don’t know. All I can say is my mother — I mean, I’m the whole world to Mom.”

“Yes, but supposing she knew you were becoming deeply, deeply interested in an older woman? Irma has already told you. I’m just telling you what you heard.”

“If she was a shiksa, maybe. A little.” Ira felt a little breathless because of the sudden rush of feeling, Larry’s and his own by proximity. “But only a little. Mom wouldn’t worry. I mean, I know she’d care. But as long as I got my degree, my B.S. Bullshit,” he said, trying to ease intensities. “That’s the main thing with her. You know what she’d worry about? She’d worry about my grandfather — if I were to marry a shiksa. The old guy would go into a tailspin.

“That worries them less. Hardly. Victor, my dentist brother-in-law, is only half Jewish. I’ve already mentioned that. No, it’s profession. That’s their chief concern. You know? Profession. Convention. Assured respectability. Assured income. More important, Victor already told me he’d want me as a partner. And he has a fine practice.” Larry seemed harassed indeed. “Trouble is, you see, we’re such a tight family — I don’t know what it is — everyone intertwines — do something out of the way, and everyone is affected. Do the unconventional, and everyone is”—he shook his head—“hurt, moaning, oh my God!”

The wooden bell tower on top of Mt. Morris Park hill, an indelible landmark from Ira’s early teens, reared up with new, with momentous prominence. For a moment for Ira, the very timbers, the massive wooden beams, color and construction, loomed distinctly, near at hand, and within them the iron bell gleaming as it tolled. “So how’d they know about this? You tell ’em?”

“Oh, no. They didn’t have to be told. They’ve begun to watch every move I make, and draw conclusions from every move. I’m sure I’m the subject of endless discussions. And you know, they’re pretty sophisticated. My mother, my three sisters. My older brother. And there’s my brother-in-law, Victor, you know, the dentist. And Sam, a lawyer. The whole family keeps tabs. I’m really the baby.”

“Yeah? Wonder why I feel so funny afraid.” Ira began folding the jacket absently. “Guilty collywobbles.”

“Oh, that’s my sister Irma. She’d worry anybody. But don’t let her get under your skin. Here. Let me show you how to fold a jacket. This way: grab the seam. Turn the shoulders inside out. See? That’s what packing for steamship traveling does for you.”

Ira studied him as he folded the garment: big-handed, white-handed, he always did everything with that flair of assurance. Self-confident, he gave one an impression of competence, and he was competent. He took charge. He betrayed none of Ira’s uncertainty and awkwardness. On the contrary, he displayed a convincing capability, a ready facility. What a neat job he made of the jacket, pressing the folded garment into a compact parcel. “I know just where the right-sized shopping bag is. I’ll get it.” He left the living room.

And generous, Ira reflected. Never any condescension, but as if generosity were natural, the way his being functioned, the way he conducted himself. Boy, giving away that fine English jacket. . Jesus, life was strange. Just sitting down beside Larry in Elocution 7, and look what had flowed from it: their friendship, and all that was happening now, happening and going to happen. Like destiny. Had his friendship with Larry affected him, molded Larry? Into what? Maybe a little like Ira himself, his nonbelonging, noncaring, ambitionless, haphazard self. Half outcast self, pariah-Jew in Harlem getting into cruel, crazy fixes, with Minnie, with Stella, cunning, remorseless bastard pratting a fourteen-year-old. Maybe Irma was right when she turned on him. Maybe he did bear a share of responsibility in Larry’s reconsidering a career in dentistry, drifting toward writing, becoming attached to his English instructor. Jesus, what a change. Larry was an altogether different guy back then. Poetry was something you enjoyed, like a song, something like that. Dentistry was your serious aim in life. Yes. Schoolteachers didn’t earn very much. Right? Now he was in hot water with his family. Altered. A different guy. No wonder Irma was peeved: her brother was rejecting respectable goals, like Ira himself, as if he’d given Larry the fillip to go that way: prefer to fetch words out of a deep trance, like a coral diver, risk his future to delight Miss Welles. Yeah, dread, no wonder. What was it he had seen? Not a flywheel, a weight at the end of a rod, swung around, swung the other end around. Well, he should have gone to Cornell. They both would have been better off maybe, both attuned to a conventional America as they thought of it, rewarded by America. Now what? Jesus, you follow those threads, they get finer and finer, get tangled among one another, come back to where you were. You could go crazy.

Larry returned with a white Macy’s shopping bag. “Let’s forget about all that unpleasantness. I’ll put on a record.” He laid the shopping bag down in an armchair. “Don’t leave this when you go.”

“Oh, no,” Ira assured, then laughed — at a loss. “I don’t know. Is it the jacket that scares me? I said, Hic jacket.”

“I thought you never studied Latin.”

“I didn’t. Those two words just happened to stick.”

“What would you like to hear?”

“You know my favorite. The Unfinished.”

“The Unfinished it shall be.” Larry sought the record in the oak cabinet beneath the turntable, found it, and as he brought it out with customary flourish—

“You know, we had a phonograph when I was just a kid in Brownsville, in Brooklyn, even before we went to the Lower East Side,” Ira remarked. “It was a little phonograph; that’s all I remember about it. And I took it apart. Did I ever get a shellacking.”

“Do you remember anything it played? I better change this needle.”

“I think it was ‘Hatikvah.’”

“‘Hatikvah’?”

“I can’t tell whether Mom sang ‘Hatikvah’ or the phonograph played it. You know how it goes?”

“No, I don’t.”

“No?” Ira essayed the melody, filling in the words with a tra-rea-la. “I don’t have your ear. I wish I did.”

“That sounds like the ‘Moldau,” Smetana’s ‘Moldau.’” Larry repeated the tune.

“Yeah? That’s funny. Mom couldn’t have known the ‘Moldau.’”

“He was a Bohemian. You’re a Galitz. It’s not very far away, is it?” Larry lowered the needle into the outer groove. “Hungary, Czechoslovakia, weren’t they all part of the Austro-Hungarian empire?”

“You know more about it than I do; I don’t know about Hungary. . Boyoboy, that’s music.”

Larry sat down on the leather armchair diagonally opposite. After the first few chords, he closed his eyes: eyelids blank, his lips parted, he sighed. Eyelids blank outwardly, a screen inwardly, Ira could well believe. Head tilted back, fine black hair above pale brow, his body motionless, he was transported by his envisaging. So that was love, or loving, in love, or what was it? What else could it be? Ira wondered. How ennobling it was: transfiguring. Could one ever, one like himself, with desire dismembered, severed from the kind of pure dream Larry was dreaming of now — severed from love, something like that — ever, ever? No. As if hacked away. Or Humpty-Dumpty. Well, witness it in Larry. Observe it. Best you could do. But Jesus, that’s where the guilt came in; that’s where the guilt came in that maybe Irma sensed. You could imagine guiding him by mental telepathy, by intangible, remote control, to do your bidding. That’s where your vileness had got you—

Just where the familiar “You are the dream of love” had been stolen from it, plagiarized, the music changed pitch, faltered. “I’ll do it.” Ira stood up, went to the phonograph, cranked.

“I guess I didn’t wind it enough,” Larry said.

Oh, the man with his ten thousand, ten million synapses flickering, his billion combinations of bits of thought, shred and filament of idea. Oh, a million billion threads, motes, spirochetes—

All of which he had to sweep aside to resume, in acceptable prose, prose in some sense, the continuity of what he already knew, and knew only too well and grievously, to strive to nurture the masterpiece model he hoped to re-create.

V

The fall term ended, ignominiously for Ira, with a C-minus average. The average would have been even worse, positively gruesome, without the A in chemistry to buoy the other grades up. As it was, what with two D grades, which automatically deducted an eighth of a credit from the total, he was woefully short of the complement for a first-semester freshman. What was he gonna do, Ira asked himself in self-aware, ninny-rationalizing fashion, when he had to compete with so many quick, sharp, bright Jewish classmates who knew all the answers?

To Cornell he should have gone, congregating with the relaxed gentiles; he might have shone there by comparison. . One never knew, consorting with the easygoing goyim. Competition destroyed him. And besides, away from Minnie and Sunday-morning persuasions — and grim aftermaths — away from Stella, dawdling, chubby, and blankly ready, and a new set of grim aftermaths, away from promptings that found a frame on any textbook page, prompting him with: good chance tonight at Mamie’s. Lucky night, maybe, so hike over. All that, all that, all that, and now Larry and his Edith — the time wasted withal spent in study might have earned a B average at Cornell. He might have found a bimbo out there, or been tipped off about one by fellow classmates, a bimbo whose favors he might have bought for a couple of bucks, which he earned busboying in the college calf-eat-here-ia or something like that. Been a mensh, instead of — himself.

It was one of those dull, dreary late afternoons, a Sunday in February, the weak daylight clinging to the windowpanes of the Gordon living room, an afternoon encompassed by the cold murk outdoors like a diving bell in the sea around it. He and Larry were alone, Irma and their parents visiting with kin and in-laws, Mary the maid away on her day off. Late, dim winter afternoon enclosing the comfortable apartment, the coziness of the overstuffed armchair accentuated by the radiators in the room hissing at the rawness at bay the other side of the windowpanes. Still, for all the lowering of the day, the scantiness of conversation, the grayness of the living room, with unlit electric sconces, Ira felt the imminence of something momentous, something in reserve. He had only to be patient. There was some reason that Larry was so pale and listless. Other times it was Larry who managed the needle arm over the records on the phonograph; this afternoon it was Ira, choosing his favorite disks, while Larry sat in the flat cushion of the tilting leather armchair, sat withdrawn, in a kind of ascetic reverie.

“They always sound like each one is showing the other guy he can sing as high or low as he can.” Ira tried to divert Larry from the wan trance that sheathed him. “Caruso and Gigli: Solenne in quest’ora — Lo juro, lo juro. You know what I mean?”

A silence. . unnatural. . extensive.

“I have something to tell you,” Larry finally said. “Something I–I very much want to tell you.”

“You mean now?”

“Yes.”

Ira lifted the arm from the disk, pushed the little lever that stopped the turntable. “Yeah?”

“Something I’d like kept in confidence.”

“It’s all right. I mean, if you don’t want to tell me.”

“I do.”

Ira went to the green divan and sat down. “Who am I gonna tell it to, anyway?”

“You’re the only one I can talk to about this.” So solemn he seemed, his cheekbones without their wonted dapple, cheekbones so pale and prominent they deepened the sockets of his eyes. He looked peaked, too slender and too flat. He took a deep breath, held it, as though to reinforce it for the thing he had to say. “I stayed with Edith last night.”

Ira could only remain motionless, say nothing. Show comprehension, betray nothing, or as little of the incredulity he felt as possible. What could you say to someone who told you he stayed all night with a college instructor, his English instructor, a Ph.D.? Say something like “You did?” When the incredible became true it became magic; it worked a spell on everything within reach of the senses: on the unlit sconces on the wall, the nude on her swing melting into the darkening blue among the towers, the Corot reproductions waning, the parquet floor and the pattern on the Turkish rug merging at the boundaries. But that still left nothing to say. It could happen only once. Once in all of a whole lifetime. Say nothing. Let the blood whirl around inside your cranium. What could be more incredible?

“I’m in love with her.” Larry crossed one big white hand over the other. “I’ve been in love with her for some time. Now I know we love each other.”

Ira listened, heard, comprehended: all of a great gray cloud: as if the winter twilight were speaking inside a familiar, gemütlich living room, forming words drifting toward him. Who was there? Jesus, he had just turned off the aria from La Forza del Destino.

“I love her. I want to marry her. I want to take care of her. I want her for my own. Mine!” he added suddenly. “When I see her teaching her heart out for that dumb bunch of premeds and predents in her class, I want to take her in my arms, hold her there, protect her. She’s so tiny. She’s so girlish, small, you have no idea. And the tiny thing has to work so hard—” His voice choked, he snuffed, his eyes became moist, glistening in the gloom. He stood up, tried to speak, fidgeted for self-control.

Ira had to look away.

Silence within the room, silence so utter it whined, like a sling. And then abruptly Larry resumed talking again, unburdening himself of a turmoil of words, plans and yearnings. In a medium of the marvelous it all came, thick and fast it all came, and tumbling about Ira’s ears, now comprehensible, now incomprehensible, the multitude of things Larry and Edith had discussed, his impulses, her advice, his declarations about his future, her comments on the announcement of his drastic change of career: to hell with dentistry. Literature was his proper calling. Damn middle-class conventions. He ought to get out, leave the family, defy their crass, materialistic carpings — and so unsure was Ira of what he heard, and what he felt, that he dared not comment, too conscious of his own ignorance of that kind of interrelation, of that kind of committal. It was so beyond the scope of anything Ira had ever dreamed of, his chief concern as he listened was to guard against saying anything dumb, exposing the depth of his mawkishness, the flimsiness of his comprehension. In a situation like this, when you knew you lacked anything cogent to say — in a situation like this — and how could anyone aspire to a situation like this? A lofty liaison, a mythical affair! Nod cognizance was the best you could do, even when you had only the faintest notion of the reality of it. She was older; that went through Ira’s mind; that was different; but it made no difference to Larry. Neither did the gap in rank or station. He was a freshman, she a Ph.D., a college instructor; she was a gentile, he was Jewish. Only the bulky contrasts stood out. All right, give up dentistry, major in English, then what? The substance, the actuality, the practical functioning of romance, the fact of romance, simply swept away things that would have flitted through his mind; the romantic gave the prosaic no access, no purchase: swept away all the carnal curiosity, all the irrelevant needs, self-indulgent fantasizing, and the where and the when and the. .

“She said it would be folly if I didn’t go on and get my degree,” said Larry. “Get my B.A.”

“But if you left home — didn’t you say you’d leave home?”

“She’d help me.”

“So where do you go live?”

“That would have to be worked out. I’d go live in the Village. Somewhere near her. And if we married, I’d live with her, of course—”

“Married!” It just didn’t sound in the realm of the possible. “Do you have to marry? I mean—” Scratching frantically up and down his skewed neck was the only way he could end his question. “That isn’t what I mean. I mean, how can you marry?”

“It might not be convenient right away. She ought to wait till she had tenure. I ought to get my bachelor’s first.”

“Yeah? But Jesus, that’s three years off for you! Or what?”

“That’s nothing. I can easily earn enough to support myself, certainly to get by on while I’m taking courses. I can always sell. That I know. What I’m saying is, I wouldn’t be dependent on her to make a living. She wouldn’t have to support me, if that’s what you’re thinking. I wouldn’t allow it anyway. I could pay my own way — and more. That wouldn’t stand in the way of marriage. I wouldn’t have to — to wait until I got my degree to get married. But tenure in her position, that’s something else. So until then, marriage might have to be sub rosa. At the very beginning, in other words. I told her we could get married at the end of the term, if she wanted to — secretly.” He pointed a large white finger at Ira. “I don’t have to go to NYU.”

“You don’t? What d’you mean?”

“I don’t have to go there any more than you do. I wouldn’t go there anyway if we were married.”

“Then to Columbia, you mean?”

“No! CCNY. Like you!” Larry exclaimed. “Of course. I’d switch to a free college. Get my bachelor’s there. Major in English.”

“Oh.”

“Write in my free time. That’s what I want to do most — write. That diploma, that damned silly piece of paper! God, didn’t we talk about that for hours! Suddenly you want to break all connections, everything that ties you to family, my family. Might as well say to the middle class. To conventions, respectability, all that you and I have talked about. Even to getting a degree. That’s where I differ from Edith. I don’t need a degree to write. I could get a job aboard an ocean liner: a steward’s job, an engine wiper, a deckhand, anything. Knock around. Jump ship. You know how many Americans — they call them expatriates now — are in France? I could be another one for a while. Why not? Once we were married, and we belonged to each other, I could feel free to separate for a while. Others have done it. Marriage doesn’t mean you’re both tied together in the same place. That’s the conventional view. That’s what I’m talking about. You ducked the Arts Club meeting last time. But if you go to the Arts Club meeting this Friday, you’re going to see Marcia Meede. She’s married to Luther. She went to Samoa to do her doctoral; he went to England on some kind of grant. For a year. You get it? Edith and I could marry, and I could do all that. Instead of being tied down, I’m — I’m practically released, freed from my middle-class conditioning, which is what I need. I have to slough it all off, all that I’ve been. You know what I was.” He hitched his shoulders almost violently. “A member of the comfortable, the smug, middle class. Supported by my family. Given an allowance. Coddled. A predent. What else was I?”

At odds with himself, agitation besetting him, transmitted even through the deep dusk of the living room, he stirred in his chair restlessly, aimlessly, uttered uneasy, subdued exclamations of protest. “To tell you the truth — you wouldn’t believe this — I think I could fall asleep right here right now. We slept almost not at all last night. But that isn’t it. I’m just worn out mulling over the thing, stewing about it. What’s the best thing to do, for me, for us? What’s the best thing to do right now? Announce I’m leaving NYU? I’m leaving the family? Go get a job? Here in New York? Or the kind I was talking about: ship out on a tramp steamer. Or an ocean liner. I know I can talk my way into a steward’s job. Do you follow me?” His harrowed eyes further darkened by quandary, in manifest crisis, he hunted for his pipe, found it, held it between both large hands in his lap. “I’ve really come to a significant crossroads in my life. It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“It is, yeah. Jesus, I wish I could help you, Larry. But you know. .” Ira projected his helplessness by gesture and grimace. “It just doesn’t belong in my world. Or I don’t belong in it. And you’re so far ahead of me in what’s happening to you. I mean, who’d ever have thought that kind of a thing would happen, could happen, to a friend of mine just out of DeWitt Clinton? I can’t even find the words. Okay? So I’m no help.”

“And of course, the ones I might turn to — those close to me. Can you imagine?” He allowed himself a curt, derisive laugh. “Ask Irma, right? Ask any of my sisters. Ask any of my family.” He brooded, twiddled the pipe.

“I’ll tell you, I don’t know a thing about these things. I don’t know her. But she’s the one to ask.”

“Edith?”

“Yeah. In my opinion. Who else? Who else is there?”

“She doesn’t think I ought to do anything rash. I mean, you know, follow my impulses: cut all ties, cut loose.”

“No?”

“No. She wants me to get my degree. I told you, she said it would be folly not to.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“So what’re you gonna do?”

“Hm! We’re back where we began. What am I going to do?”

“All I can say is it’s up to you.” Ira gazed at the intricate vacancy the dark had begun to spin. “And that’s not saying much.”

Larry too seemed in the thrall of the same kind of vacancy. “I’d pretty nearly destroy them.”

“You mean your family?”

“Oh, yes, you can imagine if I tore up all ties. If I went on the bum. Disappeared. Something like that. Pampered baby of the family. Brought up in Bermuda. I allowed myself to be, I grant you. But they’d be distraught. And then too I want to be with her, with Edith. I’m really torn. Instinct tells me that right now a wild move, a wild plan, is the right one. What do you think?”

Ira held up his palms to fend off the question. He shook his head. “Don’t ask me. Boy!”

Larry rested his lips on his fingers, sucked silently on an unlit pipe. “Yes.” He seemed to be affirming that the moment was critical. He sighed. And after a few seconds shook his head in resignation. “I guess Edith is right.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m being rash. Romantic.”

“Yeah?”

“Okay.”

“Okay, what?”

“I’ll just stay put. I’m worn out thinking about it. Maybe I’ll get a better idea later.” He slumped slightly. “Status quo for the time being. That’s all. Status quo ante. You know what that means?”

“Do the sensible thing. The practical thing.”

“Sounds that way, but not quite. Continue what you’ve been doing.”

“Oh.”

“Carry on, the English say. What I want to do is much too soon. We ought to be with each other for a while. And of course I want to. I want nothing more than that. . And there are my folks. My parents. Sisters. They’re fine people, you know. Kind, generous. Just that — well, right now, I feel a world apart, and I think, well, you’ve got to do the surgical thing. Act! Once and for all.” He turned his head away, moaned, inarticulately frustrated, fidgeted again. “Well, we better switch the lights on, hadn’t we? I’m probably, you know, as they say, ready to go off the deep end.”

“Want me to do it? I mean turn on the lights.” Ira felt silly.

“I’d appreciate it. Before it gets pitch-dark in here.”

Ira stood up, found the wall switch. The sudden onset of light discovered a somber Larry on the green divan. Exhausted, limp with indecision, he was gnawing at his upper lip, and still toying with his pipe. The fine black shell briar contrasted with the pallor of his large hands. “Well, that’s that.” Again random movements of body and feature expressed altering patterns of lassitude. Resignation seemed to replace agitation — a dissatisfied resignation. “I’m lucky I had you here, Ira, to talk to.” He overrode Ira’s self-belittling protest. “No, that’s all right. I know what you’re going to say. But I’ve never been in such a stew in my life. I’m lucky you were here, that’s all. It’s—” Resignation tinged his voice with bleakness. He sighed. “Edith’s right. See what develops? It’s just too short notice. I adore her, but — I’m going to get out of NYU next year. That much I’ve made up my mind to do. Without question.”

“CCNY?”

“Gradually lessen my dependence on my folks — without killing them, you might say. Transfer credits. Maybe get part-time work of some kind.”

“Hey, you know something? I think I oughta give you a chance to get to bed. Early. You’re worn out.”

“I suppose Edith is too. Well, in a little while. . Let’s rustle up a bite of supper. See what’s in the larder. Soup. Leftovers. I know we always have some.”

“Oh, sure. Anything.”

“Soupe du jour,” Larry said mirthlessly. “Soup du Jew.”

“Want any help?”

“No, no. I’ll do it. Do me good. Help bring me back to the — everyday. Let’s go into the kitchen.”

Ira followed him, watched him empty a bowl into a pan. “It’s Hungarian goulash. It would be.” He set the pan on the stove, returned to the icebox, brought out a half head of lettuce. “We make our own French dressing. Vinegar and olive oil, okay?”

“Sure, I like it.”

“Toast?”

“Great.”

As he did everything else, Larry set the table with a flair, and despite weariness prepared the supper with a flourish. Ira watched him in silence. It was a welcome silence, a minute in which to try to think, to ponder in secret, laboriously probe, grope into the future that allowed only the shallowest of shallow speculation, grope through a haphazard labyrinth. Jesus, for Larry to ask him what to do? When he hardly knew what there was to do, just barely could name the options. Let’s see: to further his, Larry’s, love affair, his aim of marrying Edith, Larry said he was ready, he felt impelled, to leave home, to go on the bum, he said: to change himself, leave Edith for a while, leave his family, and all that comfort, spending money — he called it allowance — fine clothes, his own room. And leave his friend, bosom companion, Ira.

The thought traveled inward to himself, to the fateful choices he, Ira, had made. He had relinquished the appropriate high school because of Farley, and then had renounced a future, maybe, for the sake of Larry’s friendship, but Ira didn’t enter into Larry’s considerations. Not that he felt hurt. It was a lesson, a sobering one. But it was crazy. Crazy. Larry wasn’t going to set out, give way to that kind of impulse, especially when Edith counseled him not to; he would do what she counseled. Oh, it was confused, it was confused, but as before, the shape in the hovering obscurity of his mind took on the same, strangely auspicious lineaments: Larry would have to do the thing that Ira prefigured, that Ira predestined was for his own ultimate benefit. Wasn’t that crazy too? Oh, it was, it was. The same thing, the same thing. Had he ever been in love, Larry had asked him, somewhere in the course of talking, ever known puppy love. Jesus, what a joke. He had burst through barriers beyond love, known the urge to murder, known the quaking of green walls when Minnie said, “All right.” And pratting his fat, foolish little cousin in the cellar. When did he have time for love? He didn’t need time for love; just enough time to tear off a piece of hide in a despicable, precarious snatch. Wow! What the hell, nutt’n like it. The risk, peril, win the jackpot of the transcendental abominable.

No, he was clinging to Larry, because therein lay his future; that’s all he could tell himself — a hundred times. It was a future whose nature he couldn’t discern, but latent with. . with fulfillment. He was in its grip; he imagined at the same time as he disbelieved; he disbelieved at the same time as he adumbrated. Somehow the dim, formless aspiration within himself had to be coagulated, eventually, this nameless essence of a fatal sense of human plight, his own, of aberrations, hideous, zany, and sad, far more than Larry had ever imagined. No, Larry could never apprehend the infernal torments of the kind of suffering he, Ira, had inflicted on himself, not even by moving out of the house.

But there it was again: that awful twist in his sophomore year in DeWitt Clinton that became a murderous warp that conferred uniqueness, conferred election, even though others were brighter than he was, like Larry, had quicker minds, dexterity, had all the attributes of greater intelligence, taste, judgment, still — was it delusion? — his, yes, he knew it was shameful — would he admit incest to anybody? Or did his impressing his fourteen-year-old cousin to his lechery confer a destiny that would not be denied? What madness! He had willed Larry’s choice, willed Larry to remain with his family. As though in Larry’s wake, like those cyclists behind the pace-setting motorcycles in the Velodrome, Ira would be drawn along to a destiny that was still only cloudy aspiration, fantasy. Still, fantasy had prefigured reality, as Michelangelo said the statue was in the marble.

Ira had ridden the jolting, windy platform of the Ninth Avenue El, and had heard his new acquaintance preen, soon after he had quoted from Louis Untermeyer’s anthology those clarion lines of modern poetry like a fanfare for a new world, preen that he was going to be a dentist. . and that schoolteachers didn’t earn very much money. And then he knew something was wrong, something didn’t fit. And now Larry, privileged, romantic Larry had attempted, in the high frenzy of his new love affair with Edith, to make it fit, to sacrifice the one he was to become, but he thought better of it, yes, acceded to practicalities. There he was — handsome Larry adding salt and pepper to the French dressing, judiciously tasting the mixture — wanting to become what Ira already was, had been for so long, the feckless, impractical, suffering sap — incurable sap, and incurably self-aware. The model Larry wanted to fit into fit Ira better than it did him, and perhaps this was the basis of the great friendship. Ira felt that this had occurred, if that slosh and slap of insight that went on continually inside his head had any truth in it. He had the terrible stamina, he had the range. He had no bounds, no hobbles on his imagination. He had striven with madness, suffered the utmost wrenching of the mind. Kill her! Kill her. . Still, in the midst of madness, he solved problems in plane geometry, problems demanding reason — how was that? — he found solace in applying theorems about tangents and secants, apothems and chords.

It fit Ira better, yes; he saw as naturally as breathing the stodgy facades the El passed, with faces in the windows awaiting lackluster advents. Still, Larry’s perceptions didn’t have to be on that level; they could have been deprived out of his own milieu. Listen to him saying, listen to him repeating, “I know she’s looking out for my welfare. But I ought to experience life. At the very least, I ought to get a place in the Village, a cheap room. Anything. I have a small bank account — my Aunt Lillian left me a small legacy. Break away. Be on my own. I ought to. I ought to. I have to feel the necessity of what I’m doing.” And again the question: “What would you do?”

Around and around, over the same ground (it sounded like The Ancient Mariner). “For me it would be leaving a dump; what do you mean? You’d be leaving — well, look at the place.”

“I’d be leaving a suffocating middle-class atmosphere!”

“A suffocating atmosphere?”

“Yes.” Larry turned around in eagerness from slicing bread on the breadboard. “Is French bread okay? I can’t stay here. My folks aren’t bad. You know that. But I’ve got to break away. Break my dependency, my connections. All that family feeling. God, it’s awful! I love my folks. Even Irma, though I may not sound that way. My brother Irving. My sisters. My niece. My brothers-in-law. The tears and the grief I’d cause. Do you realize the amount of pain this is going to cause everybody? And my father’s heart isn’t the best. Still, I think it’s the thing I ought to do. God, it would be cruel!”

How much older sheer strain made him appear, thin and drawn. Who would have guessed he was just a college freshman? One saw snapshots sometimes of a high school athlete in the very crux of competition — high school kids looking old as an adult.

“Yeah?”

“Edith thinks I ought to wait till the end of the term. I don’t. She thinks I ought to try to take everything possible into consideration. I can’t. I have the feeling I’m the kind of person, if I want to be a writer, then I have to create the situation for myself. Do you understand? Now, right now. Not next semester, three years from now, get my degree. No, no, no! Now. Committed.” He ladled out the rich brown goulash.

“Committed?” Ira’s mouth watered. “Wow, that smells good, looks, oh, boy. What makes Hungarian goulash Hungarian?”

“Paprika. That’s the national condiment.”

“Oh, yeah? Mind if I begin fressing?”

“Go ahead. There’s more.”

“Committed. So what d’you mean, committed?” He heard the word echo within himself, reecho, as if it tried to extract meaning from his noisy mouthfuls.

“Yes. Not follow Edith’s advice. Follow my own instincts now! But then again, am I kidding myself? A few lyrics, a borrowed plot of a short story. What have I got to go on? I’m teetering on a knife edge. What if I’m wrong—” He reversed himself. “The Village wouldn’t be far enough away from my folks. Irma would be down there, my sisters, my mother certainly, urging me back, coaxing, imploring, my brothers-in-law arguing — can’t you just hear the pleas? I’d begin wavering. I couldn’t stand it. That’s the point I make. If I was going to break away, I’d have to go on the bum completely. Disappear like a hobo. Like a common seaman on a tramp steamer. And I can’t. I can’t break their hearts to that extent.”

“No? Do you mind slipping over more of that French bread?”

“Here, help yourself. Should I slice some more?”

“I think there’s enough. Boy, I like bread. We eat everything at home with bread. Sometimes even with Mom’s compote.”

“My family would go out of their minds if I disappeared,” Larry added in gloomy aside. “Talk about causing pain.” He lifted his fork with large trembling hand. “I can’t do anything. I’m stymied. I’m just beginning to realize that. I’m just beginning to see those things. No wonder Edith kept insisting, ‘Get your degree first.’”

“You better keep eating.”

“Yes.” He laid his fork down, pressed his eyelids shut, and when he opened them, reached for salad tongs. “I’ll have some salad. You?”

“No. We always eat it afterward.”

“Three years.” He meditated, chewed a leaf of lettuce, disconsolately. “With a maximum schedule of summer courses — at NYU. She’d be in Silver City in the summer. Or Berkeley. One or the other. Her mother and sister are there. I think both divorced. The sister has ambitions to be a violinist — but she has no talent. And do you know something? Edith helps support — pays the life insurance I think, for her mother. Even helps out her father — he’s a ruined politician — his health too. He drinks. I think I told you, the whole state of New Mexico went Republican in 1920. But it just breaks my heart. That tiny little thing, so generous, so devoted. I can’t help but want to support her. I know I could, too. I could protect her—”

“Protect her? Jeez, she’s got a job,” Ira interrupted. “She’s your instructor. I’m not trying to butt in,” he apologized. “Can I have another spoonful of stew?”

“Oh, sure. Mind helping yourself out of the pan?”

“Oh, no.” Ira arose to his feet. “I’m listening.”

“She has so many obligations, so many demands on her. That’s the point of my saying I want to help her. Make a financial contribution. To relieve the burden on her, the nervous strain. She’s hardly able to bear up under it. The nervous strain alone is causing all kinds of digestive upsets.”

“Yeah?”

“I could help guide her. I could contribute income. Commissions. Salary.”

“Yeah? I don’t see how, and get a degree in three years. I don’t think it’s possible.” He sat down again. His mind had already begun its unhearing contemplation. His eyes drifted away and back, to provide a semblance of listening while he ate. Protect her. Was that part of love? He had never wanted to protect anybody — only himself. Protect Minnie? Jesus, the only protection he offered was on his own behalf: spare himself the anxiety, no longer the same anguish now, but the anxiety, of thinking maybe he’d knocked her up. And the same thing with Stella. Hell, tell her to say somebody else laid her. He was wise to that subterfuge now. Some big guy — some big goy stuck it into her. Maybe forced her. Give her advice. But protect, protect? He just wanted to get in and get out.

So that was one thing that was wrong with him. And what did that mean — even if Larry was being foolish on the subject? You weren’t old enough, was that it? Yeah, that was it. Jesus, you could see the whole thing in a panorama: screwing your kid sister, Minnie, out of habit now — she wasn’t such a kid anymore — screwing your cousin Stella. It made a self-enclosed entity: you were checked, your development was arrested; you weren’t interested in adult problems, adult considerations. Boy, what a picture: of something clawing at an impalpable net — clawing and squalling, and never really trying to get out of it. And how the hell were you going to get out of it? O-o-oh, Sunday morning, o-o-h, get Stella straddling him on weekdays. Jesus, if he could ever get her alone. He was dying to back-scuttle the little bitch. Get it way up in her. So there you were. Almost at a rage with yourself, listening. “You know, you’re saying the same thing over.” Ira tried to keep the irritation out of his voice.

“I am?” Larry was taken aback.

“Not exactly.” Ira hastened to mitigate. “More or less round and round.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Larry became dejected.

“No, no. Go ahead, go ahead. I just happened to think about something else. I get into these — I don’t know whatcha call ’em: reveries.”

“I’ve noticed. Do you want me to stop?”

“No, no. Go ahead. I’m — I’m beset, I guess.”

“By what?”

He had to get out of that corner — fast: “All kinds of doubts — I mean about you, your fix,” Ira said. “Gee, you do a nice job with salad.” He helped himself.

“I don’t go in for that bought dressing. What you were saying is putting things mildly.”

“What d’you mean? Hey, have a little more to eat. You’ll fall away to a ton.”

“I mean the simplest solution is for Edith and me to get married. That would—” he brought his cutlery to a halt—“that would justify everything. My moving out. Transferring to CCNY. Be completely independent. I have to cause them pain. But that would be the least. Don’t you think so?”

“Maybe.”

“And married, well — there’s the fact, that’s all: my parents, family, they’d have to face it, they’d have to take it, that’s all. That was my point with her.” Larry turned aside in negation. “She said I was very dear, very tender, and sweet. All right, maybe I am. But that doesn’t help, doesn’t solve anything. I could marry her now. Nobody has to know. My folks, yes, well, they’d be aghast. That’s the sickening part of it. I’m eighteen, say, almost nineteen, and she’s thirty. It’s okay the other way around. I’m thirty. She’s nineteen. Ask Father Time to draw us closer together. There’s a poem about that in our Outlines of English Lit. I can’t remember — Cartwright, I think, Cartwright. More or less on the same theme: difference in age.” He began hunting for his pipe.

“Hey, eat something, will you? Christ, you’ll have me turning into a Jewish mama: Ess, ess, mein kindt. SOS.”

“No. I’ve had all I want right now. You can finish everything.”

“Yeah? Thanks. There’s still some goulash left.”

“My mother’ll be glad to see it gone.”

“Yeah, you know why? She’ll think you ate it. Anyway, I’m glad to help out. I’m glad I’m not in love either.” Ira made another trip to the stove. “Sure?”

“Absolutely. She doesn’t earn enough on an instructor’s salary. She doesn’t earn enough to do all the things she feels she has to do — mostly for others. She canvasses the Times, the New York Trib, The Nation, The New Republic, for book reviews. It breaks my heart to see her driving herself so — for others. And I’m beginning to understand what a disadvantage the women in the department are under, in the English department — and in the other departments too. She’s already entitled to an assistant professorship. A doctorate and two books out on Navajo Indian religious chants. And praised by poets and anthropologists. Some man, just because he wears pants, will get there ahead of her. It makes her so mad. It makes me sore too.”

“Yeah?” Ira had to suppress his disgruntlement with having to attend to the same thing, the same subject. Boy, to be able to say, the way Jews said: all right already. Well, fress instead. His gluttony would go unnoticed.

Annoyed, Ira locked fingers below the keyboard. That was not in the text; he was diverging from the text, diverging from the yellow typescript, from the first draft. He was bored with it. He was bored with it, rather than his character; he was bored with it in advance of his character — in fact, he was projecting his boredom onto his character. Why? Because there was so goddamn much information still to be presented, still to be introduced. Oh, Jesus, what tricks of the trade, new devices, to employ? He had used about every stratagem he could think of. He was fresh out, as the storekeepers said in Maine: we’re fresh out of bacon.

It was John Vernon, Ira remembered, the homosexually inclined instructor, who had set the ball rolling — with his advances toward Larry. His advances toward Larry had aroused, so it would have seemed, Edith’s competitiveness. Speaking of wearing pants as a reason for getting ahead of women! She had not wanted Larry to fall into the toils of a homosexual — at least before he had experienced normal love. Okay. You’ve said it, Ira told himself irritably. Delete all the rest, goddamn it.

Yes, as novelist practitioner, he had recourse to any number of different stratagems. True. Somebody entered the apartment, say, Irma again, and put an end to the intimacy of disclosure. Or Ira had deliberately thrown the narration off track, asked one of his typical obtuse questions. Or better yet — look, man — what was the legal lingo? — appeal to the prurient urge, postpone matters by writing that he had got an idea that maybe he might be lucky tonight. Tear off two pieces of ass in one day. And said: “You know, I owe my Aunt Mamie a visit. I haven’t been there in an age.” Or should he have said that his grandfather intended to move there soon? Or that Zaida was living there already? Christ, no. He had to keep something straight, and something in reserve too. He intended to use that ploy later. It was a thought, though. He always got horny a few hours after his connubial-type intercourse with Minnie in the morning. Usually, he pulled off that same night, and that held him for the rest of the week — or if he was lucky, the rest of the midweek, when a nocturnal call at Mamie’s paid off. But actually, there was only one thing that was of value, quite apart from the information, one narrative detail that was interesting in itself, that had a touch of encounter about it, that mix of the absurd, the youthful, the silly yet erotic. Ira scrolled up the amber text on the monitor.

“There’s somebody else lives there, isn’t that right?” Ira felt impelled to assure Larry that he had an audience. “Somebody else shares her apartment with her, I thought you told me.”

“Iola Reid. You know, they’re both instructors in the English department. They have separate bedrooms and a common living room.”

“Oh, that’s how it is.”

That wasn’t bad, Ira encouraged himself. He felt better, now that he had released his pent-up impatience.

Larry began clearing the dishes from the kitchen table.

“Want some help with the dishes?”

“They’re only a few. I’ll stack them. I’ll leave the pan for Mary. I don’t mean, well, you know, that he’s the cause of it all, but that’s how it all began. I was telling her about John Vernon. He’s a nice guy, but he’s a homo.”

“Huh?”

“He’s been trying to make me.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yes. I never bothered telling you all the details. But Edith knew.”

“Jesus. In the college too. I know you told me about homos. But I have to get used to the idea.”

“Oh, yes. It’s nothing unusual anymore. He writes free verse. He read some of his work at the first meeting of the Arts Club I attended.” Larry grimaced, tilted his head. “He had it privately printed.”

“A book?”

“Yes. You pay for the printing and binding yourself. I don’t see that it’s worthwhile. Especially his stuff. Either I’m crazy, or it’s — it’s just prose broken up into different lengths. Edith thinks so, too. He has an idea it’ll come into its own someday.”

“You mean be—” Ira gesticulated. “Be recognized? Win applause?”

“He’s convinced it will.”

“Yeah?”

“He invited me up to his apartment. Turns the lights down. We smoke. His hand’s on my thigh.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, about a week ago. I thought to myself: you make for my fly, I’m going to tip that burning cigarette end down on the back of your hand.”

“Did he?”

“No. He must have guessed.”

“Jesus.” Ira tried to grin. “What the—” He paused in semiperplexity. “The — er — the thing gives me half a dozen different notions: what a girl must feel like if a guy she doesn’t like makes passes at her. What the hell makes guys that way? I can’t imagine it, ye know. Getting worked up about another man?”

“Well, that was what worried Edith.” He scraped the uneaten goulash on his plate into the metal garbage can, replaced the lid. “I told her about it.”

“About him? Vernon?”

“She said that she was very much afraid. That he would succeed in seducing me before I had a chance to experience a normal love relationship with a woman.”

Ira chortled in derision. “You already did. Aboard ship. Right?”

“Well, nevertheless, we all have that tendency,” Larry assured him.

“What d’ye mean? In us?”

“In us, yes; we’re partly feminine, partly masculine. One dominates over the other, usually. But it’s true in all of us, no matter how masculine the fellow is. Sometimes he’ll fool you. He acts like a bruiser, looks like one, and likes guys. Cowboys often were homos, Edith said.”

“A cowboy!” He snickered. “Goodbye, old Paint. I’m a-leavin’ Cheyenne. Yeah? I’m a-leavin’ all men. Amen. Sorry.”

“There’s Vernon himself,” said Larry. “He was brought up on a New England farm. He was married to a Russian noblewoman; she ran from the Revolution — you know, the Bolsheviks. He was married. He has a son. He’s divorced now. He’s bisexual.”

“Bisexual,” Ira stressed. “Bi. Both ways? Did he tell you that?”

“No. Edith did. She said she was dreadfully afraid of my getting caught in the toils of homosexuality, as I told you. She had seen too many promising young men ruined that way. She didn’t want to see me ruined. Homosexuality was not a normal way of life. It was a distorted one.”

“But this is bisexual. He gets the best of both.” Ira grinned. “But I still don’t know what’s good about the other half. Anh!”

“I told her there was very little chance of Vernon seducing me.” Larry stood up a rinsed plate between the rubber-lined arches of the drainer.

“Gee, my mother oughta get one o’ those,” Ira observed.

“I told her I was too much in love with her to be interested in anyone else, man or woman. Certainly not a man. I want her love. I adore her. I want to marry her.” He turned from the sink.

Why did he feel a pulse of embarrassment, hearing the reiterated declaration of that kind of ardor? “You told me.”

“I was very mature for my age, she said. I was poised and serious; I had far more assurance in dealing with people and social situations than she had at that age. And she loved me very much. But I was still a lad — that’s the word she used: lad. I ought not to be burdened with marriage, even secretly, before I got my degree. I ought to get my degree, and then decide. We’d both be in a better position to decide.”

Jesus, wouldn’t this be just about the right time, or say in another minute, to dig up a pretext for leaving? Be just about right to grab the subway downtown to the 110th Street and Lenox Avenue station. He’d get to Mamie’s just about the right time, after supper. Mamie at the dishes. Oh, frig this love business. But he had to stall awhile, not make it look as if he were fed up and ducking out. The right time, the right time. Boy. Love. Dove. Shove.

“Shall we go back to the living room? Like to hear a record? ‘Chanson Arab’?” Larry dried his hands on the dish towel.

“Not this time, thanks. I think you oughta get some rest. After all you’ve been through.”

“I’m all right. Recovered.” Larry seemed to hold his breath a moment, expelled it.

“I really think you should get some rest. A guy who told me he was ready to fall asleep talking. You’ve got big circles under your eyes.”

“That was because of the crisis I’ve been through. It’s over now. Not resolved. Just over the worst of it.”

“Yeah? I’m glad to hear it. Anyway, I ought to shove off.”

“Got anything on this evening?”

“No. But you oughta hit the sack.”

“I will. I’m all right, though. Easier in the mind.”

“Yeah. That’s good. Thanks for the grub.”

“It was nothing. Nothing compared to your being here.”

“Glad I was. Some goulash, amico fidato,” Ira said, trying to render the oft-heard aria from La Forza del Destino. “Where’s that secondhand rug of mine?”

“You left it in my room. Have you worn your — the one you call kasha-colored?” Larry followed him down the hall. “The English jacket?”

“Oh, no. I told you, that’s for the big splurge,” Ira answered over his shoulder, as he made for Larry’s room.

He could hear Larry’s chuckle. “It’s just a poetry reading. You don’t have to make a splurge. And Edith knows all about you.”

“Yeah.”

Well, he was only Ira Stigman, he thought; the more he did the more he was aware, alas, of his formidable deficiencies, his multifarious shortcomings. Then why do what he was doing, why make the attempt? He had asked himself that many times before, and would again, no doubt. It was something, this craving, innate — perhaps chronic would be the right word — craving of the octogenarian, or nearly. He could hear the intonation of old days, speech of recently arrived Jewish immigrants—“What do you want from me?” Yesterday, in making the longest walk he had made in many and many a month, some six or eight city blocks from the optometrist’s to the Presbyterian Medical building, he was, moved to compose something akin to a poem in prose, revealing the individual he was, the same one now seated before his word processor, tapping keys that invoked yellow letters on the screen.

But there is nothing. .

Just the old man lurching across Central Avenue, thrusting his cane behind him, like a boatman his pole, to propel his hulk a foot or two nearer the curb before the traffic light changes from WALK to red.

And his lips writhe with effort, and he remembers the kid he was, so spry and jaunty, how he could have bounded across the street with exuberant, elastic stride. .

And the tear welling up is not his own, but one the kid sheds for him. .

VI

Where the hell was he? Where had he left off? After all these days and weeks spent in the Presbyterian Hospital where he had undergone removal of his gallbladder, days and weeks running up a hospital bill of over six thousand dollars, not to mention the surgeon’s and other doctors’ bills, the anesthetist’s, his assistant’s, the internist’s. Jumpin’ Jesus — he hoped his auxiliary insurance would pay the difference between fee and Medicare. He had been away so long from his yarn. Once, during the whole medical ordeal, he thought of Zaida, who, through one connection or another, probably via a fellow congregant in the synagogue, had been referred to a fine denture maker: a Dr. Veinig. He had made Zaida a wunderbar double set of dentures, and at an exceptionally reasonable fee. Naturally, he would repair Ira’s teeth at the same reasonable rate, and thus end, once and for all, the misery of the toothaches Ira suffered from, sometimes sobbing and moaning all night long — in a home destitute of even an aspirin — gnawing at the corner of his pillow in vain attempt to ease his pain. Zaida introduced Ira to the dentist, who agreed to fill his patient’s three dental cavities for a total of ten dollars.

Work began, work accomplished chiefly by means of an engine that Mr.-Dr. Veinig had in his office, a contraption with a foot treadle, like a Singer sewing machine, and while Mr.-Dr. Veinig puffed on his curved pipe, he pumped away at the treadle that spun the drill that ground away the decay in Ira’s dental cavity. The rhythm of words, Ira thought as he wrote, reminded him of the Passover liturgy: Khad gadyo, one kid, one kid that my father bought for two zuzim. The door to the dentist’s apartment was always locked, locked and further secured by a heavy chain that enabled Mr.-Dr. Veinig to scrutinize every caller before admitting him — or her — to the premises. From some source, perhaps from Mom, Ira learned that though Mr.-Dr. Veinig was without a license to practice dentistry, his illicit practice earned the funds necessary to pay his wife’s tuition in dental school — she, in turn, taught him the latest in dental techniques.

Weeks and weeks went by before the cavities were filled, weeks of drilling and drilling, until at last the nerve was probed for and withdrawn from the squirming moaning patient, until at last the cavity was filled. Each session lasted at most ten minutes: in and out of the Mr.-Dr.’s “office,” with the taste of tobacco-laden hands still lingering during the nighttime walk from 113th Street near Lexington all the way home. What did the mopey kid dream of then? The mopey kid who recalled in old age the Mr.-Dr., the humorless Litvak visage with a tobacco pipe in it, scrutinizing his patient above the heavy chain across the kitchen door before admitting him. Wraith of sixty-five years ago, the setting: the kitchen reception room, the ancient dental apparatus in the bedroom. .

Not many years later, when Ira was attending DeWitt Clinton, one, then another, and finally the third of the filled teeth began to ache unbearably. Each in turn had to be extracted, and each one, beyond the taste of blood of the torn gum, emitted a foul, putrescent stench in his mouth.

It was in early winter, in the old brick building that housed the DeWitt Clinton swimming pool across the street from the high school, when he came away from his frolicking in the winter, that the last of the three teeth began to ache. Peculiar associations, but inseparably bound together. With what indignation another white-jacketed dentist extracted the molar: would Ira tell him the name and address of the practitioner? Who had done his dental work? Ira no longer remembered. And after that, in the years to come, whether because of the gap left between teeth so early in life or not, all the other teeth loosened, abscessed and then loosened, and had to be extracted. So that at an age even earlier than Zaida’s, Ira first acquired his dentures. Ira acquired his, though not at quite such a bargain price as his grandfather.

But he had to get back to Ira Stigman, before he disintegrated under the impact of so many collateral concerns.

It was a weekend evening in the kitchen of Larry’s home, his parents and Irma away, perhaps the Hungarian domestic home, and only Larry and Ira there. Between them on the table was a stack of fifty penny postcards and several sheets of paper on which were typed and handwritten the names and addresses of the invitees to the next poetry recital. Site of the occasion would be as usual, the Village Inn Teahouse on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, and the time 8:00 P.M. this coming Saturday. As secretary of the Arts Club, Larry had undertaken the task of sending out the notices, thus relieving Edith of doing so. And Ira was only too glad to be co-opted as assistant.

“It’s a helluva bore.” Larry slipped the elastic off the pack of postcards. “I’ll write the addresses; you write the notices on the other side. Here’s the model form: Time. Date of meeting. Place. Name of poet reading: Margaret Larkin. Get it? Soon as I’m finished addressing, I’ll help with the notices. Maybe that’ll speed things up, instead of each of us turning out one apiece.”

“Takeh. Takeh. What d’ye call it, conveyor-belt production?”

“What’s takeh?” As usual, Larry was amused at hearing a Yiddish expression new to him, and eager to learn it too.

“Tick-tockin’,” Ira quipped, applying fountain-pen scrawl to the first postcard. “Actually, it means ‘indeed.’”

“Takeh,” Larry repeated.

“Takeh emes, they say, Indeed the truth, though they might be lying like hell.” Ira enjoyed Larry’s grin. “Who’s this Margaret Larkin?”

“She writes an easy-to-read, almost light verse. Charming most of the time. Feminine. I’ve met her at Edith’s. Handsome, still fairly young. I think she’s also a Westerner.” He handed Ira a newly addressed postcard. “Kind of verse I like. She writes her name backward in her poems sometimes: Nikral.”

“Yeah?”

“She has one about standing cigarettes up like candles in front of her lover’s portrait. Clever.”

“Hmm,” Ira sighed for no reason: bohemian fancy. It was so whimsical. Ah, to have experienced that kind of life, at least once.

“When they get too cerebral, like T. S. Eliot, or obscure — well, just like The Waste Land—count me out. There’s no pleasure in reading it.” Larry slid a postcard over toward Ira. “Don’t turn it over right away. The ink’s still wet.”

“No. T. S. Eliot is obscure?”

“Deliberately so. I resent it, too. I think I’m fairly sensitive to imagery, someone else’s imagery in a poem. But when they get so highfalutin symbolic, I don’t feel I need to dig and scratch around for all the allusions. To hell with ’em!” Larry’s demeanor left no doubt about his distaste.

“Yeah?”

“You’d agree if you read him. There’s no—” Larry raised his fountain pen in disapproval, circled his hands. “There’s no connection that I can see between one part and another. And sometimes between one line and another. The whole thing’s a disjointed collection of lines, some fine, some — well. .”

“Where do you read T. S. Eliot?”

“At Edith’s. She has about the best collection of modern verse in town.”

“Yeah?”

“Wallace Stevens, Millay, Genevieve Taggard, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, A. E. Robinson, Léonie Adams, William Carlos Williams, Cummings, Frost, Elinor Wylie—”

“Wow!”

“She never hesitates to buy a new book of poems she thinks is good. Wilfred Owen, Yeats, Sassoon, Sitwell — some of them she doesn’t think are so hot, either. But she needs them for her course.”

“Oh.”

“Everyone who’s taken the course says it’s great.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“One of the things I’ll regret about leaving the place. . Let’s see.” Larry reached over the table to look at the last card he had given Ira: “I don’t want to send two of these to the same person: Berry Burgoign.” he consulted the chart. “Next is Madge Thomson — she’s in the English department too. Specializes in early English: Beowulf, and that kind of thing. Very homely, but nice. Fluttery. Giggles. She’s like an adolescent.”

“Yeah? You met all of ’em?”

“I think so. Not Professor Watt.”

“Who’s he?”

“Head of the English department.”

“Oh.” Ira waved a postcard to dry the ink. “Jesus, I haven’t met a soul at CCNY. All I know is Mr. Dickson, the guy I’m taking English Composition with — English 1.” He turned over another postcard. “I just know him in class,” Ira added dejectedly. “What about the folks? Any more trouble?”

“No. I think they’ve decided to let things ride. We’re sort of playing a cat-and-mouse game. Each one waiting for the other to make the next move.”

“Yeah? And you?”

“Oh, I’ll stay out the term, of course. That satisfies them. And what I do next — well, it all depends. I think I know what I’m going to do — CCNY. But there’s no use my talking about it any further until — well, things jell a little more.”

“Yeah.” Ira watched Larry tighten the cap on the barrel of his fountain pen. It was a new substantial Waterman, not like his own bleary, old one. He could say: you know, a fountain pen got me into trouble once. Yeah, he could say. He could say. . He suddenly saw Minnie’s face brighten with pleasure when he dangled a stolen fountain pen in front of her — for bait. He could say, yeah, he had a cousin Stella — he looked for the next name on the list. It was the very one Larry had been talking about, the one who laughed like an adolescent. To Larry, she laughed like an adolescent. Not worth bothering about. To Ira, that spurred the predator. “Homely?” Ira turned the yellow card over, read the name. “This Dr. Madge Thomson?”

“Homely as a hedge fence.” Larry smiled indulgently. “That’s what Edith says. Cute expression, isn’t it?”

“Hedge fence? Yeah. Gee,” Ira said regretfully. “You know, you live somewhere in a different part of the world. You’re really brought up differently. You say, ‘Homely as a hedge fence.’ Why the hell a hedge fence?” They both stopped writing, as Larry waited for Ira to finish. “To me it could be beautiful. A hedge fence. A hedge. The country, the—” He gesticulated, held his hands apart. “Wide, trimmed, you know, with little green leaves. Homely as a hedge fence. It’s attractive.”

Larry chuckled, his handsome face indulgent as he gazed at Ira. It was almost as if he wasn’t sure whether Ira was serious or spoofing. “She’s not pretty. Believe me.” He shook his head for emphasis. “How would you say it? I mean ‘homely.’”

“Me? You know what I’d say. What I heard.” Ira shrugged. “Where I was brought up. You know the old gag. She had a puss that could stop an eight-day clock. On 119th Street that would be considered polite,” he amended.

“Then that’s what you say.”

“Oh, no. Jesus, no.” Ira paused to marshal distinctions. “It’s different, Larry, it’s different. Bejeezis, it ain’t only — it’s not only that one expression, it’s the whole goddamn world that goes with it. What the hell am I doing here, will you tell me?” He confronted Larry more abruptly than he meant to. “Here I am, I’m helping you write out these postcards — to a poetry recital. Writing invitations in your house, your kitchen—” He checked himself; it would be folly to go on further.

“What about it?” Larry asked. “What’s so strange about that? You’re in college, it’s a natural thing for a college man to do.”

“Well, that’s what I mean. It doesn’t feel natural.”

He could never tell him. There were times he felt as if he were levitated, as if completely in someone else’s power. Tell that to Larry. “Nothing. Just — I don’t know.”

“I do know I’m going to take you to meet Edith.”

“Yeah?”

“Of course.” Larry was about to bend over the next card. “What are you shaking your head for?”

“You know what a palimpsest is?”

“Of course — it’s a parchment with the writing scraped off,” Larry replied.

“That’s what I see, when I look at one of these blank cards. I don’t see the writing. I see what’s been scraped off.”

“Oh, come on. Wait till Edith meets you.”

“All right, all right. Lo juro, lo juro.”

A few seconds of silence ensued, while Larry amusedly addressed the next card. “How’re you makin’ oot?” he said, mimicking Scots dialect.

“Are these all right?” Ira held up a few postcards. “My hen tracks? Not much better than that.”

“Oh, no, that’s fine,” Larry commended. “Perfectly legible.”

Another span of silence. Ira felt he’d talked too much already.

“You wouldn’t believe she had so much spunk,” Larry said.

“Who?” Ira could guess, but asked anyway.

“Edith.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Larry smiled reminiscently. “She’s really competitive, you know. You wouldn’t expect it: somebody as small and gentle as she is. But look out if you make a joke about it, belittle the fact that women don’t get the same treatment as men. About the kind of deal women get living in a man’s world. I did.”

“You did?” Ira rejoined incredulously.

“Yes, I was foolish enough to.”

“So what’d you say?”

“I said, ‘Oh, well, what’s the hurry? You’ll get there.’”

“Get where?”

“An assistant professorship.”

“Yeah? So what happened?”

“Sparks. All over the place. ‘If you were a woman you wouldn’t say that. I’m sick and tired of men dominating the world, and stupid men at that.’ She was right too, and I said so, I apologized. It’s true, can’t deny it. How’re you coming?”

“All right — I think.”

“Keep it up. You don’t know how grateful I am for your giving up your time to pitch in. So will she be when she hears about it.” Larry eyed the stack of finished cards. “Say, we’re really gaining on it. I’ve got a few more to address, and then I’ll join you writing notices. A Camel? Mustafa Kemal for this job.”

“Sure. But the way it’s going, it’s not bad.”

The two lit their cigarettes. . The invitations he scrivened on the yellow surface of the postcards, practically memorized by now, swam under Ira’s gaze. Palimpsest, as he told Larry, parchment whose writing was scraped off and written over. What strange mirages shimmered beneath the words he wrote, beckonings: his course lay athwart those postcards into the world that they presaged. As though he were putting his seal on the new direction each time he wrote on one, as though he were opening a casement on scenes of a future that could be his if he wished, really wished from the depths of his being, shadowy imaginings waiting for him to realize, guerdon of his folly and guerdon of his dolor.

It was not a gift; it was more like a fate. A fate whose first intimation he recalled yet again when riding with Larry that day on the Eighth Avenue El in the open air between the sad, nondescript tenements, and his peculiar awareness, his awareness of his unique perception of them. That was it. But unique perception of what? Their intrinsic nature: the blacks on the stoop laughing as Larry went by singing. Things. No, it wasn’t a gift. It was a specter over your plane geometry problem that you had invoked. Think of the way the catapult’s cords were twisted, intolerably, to the limit of integrity, at the risk of snapping — and then twist further — his price in exchange for murder: that twist. .

He felt like just puffing on his cigarette, with pen in hand inertly on his thigh. Tell the guy that. What world were you in? Whose world were you in, were you caught in? “O-o-h, I needed it more last night” was her way of thanking him this morning. “Did I have hot pants? Did I need a big one after the dance?” Poetry recital: did I have hot pants? Did I need a big one after the dance? “Jaizis,” Ira said aloud.

“What’s up?” Larry inquired.

“Poetry recital.” Ira snickered. “If I could only write a little faster, the way you do, with a real free movement — you move your arm, I wriggle my fingers.”

“You never got used to doing it the other way?”

“No.” Ira allowed himself to smirk. “Didn’t I ever tell you?”

“You’ll get a vote of thanks from Edith anyway. Wait. Just one more address, and I’m coming to the rescue.”

“I guess I can use some help.”

“You’re doing just great,” Larry assured him, teased sportively. “Quit complaining.”

“I get so distracted. Honest.”

“Here I come.”

VII

. . Mythical, like the myths read in boyhood, like the engravings of classic figures in Bulfinch’s Age of Fable, loveliness in repose, rapture in repose, passion verging on the immaculate — that was how Larry’s love affair with Edith Welles seemed to Ira. What a contrast to his own sordid and stealthy snatchings, his cynical maneuverings at Mamie’s, his Sunday-morning ritual with Minnie.

“When are you gonna shenk me a dollar, my koptsn briderl?”

As long as you watched yourself, that’s what happened to abominations when they became customary. Only on a rare afternoon, rare as could be, when they were taking one hell of a chance, not knowing when Mom or Pop might come home — boy, that was when furor made the green walls flap. Boy, the danger! Contagious. It infected Minnie too, as if snapping up the little brass nipple of the lock inflamed her. She was already standing in the doorway to his bedroom watching him pull the rubber on his hard-on. Jesus, if Pop ever came home and found his son boring it into his daughter crosswise on the bed. Wow. . But the hell with him. Funny the kind of gags that came to mind: it was all in the family. And when Mamie told him they were going to form a Veljisher Family Circle, he laughed outright. Mamie thought it was out of pleasure at the idea; he saw himself hitting the bull’s-eye, the ten-ring. What the hell. He hated pulling off — kept postponing. One more day maybe: tomorrow wouldn’t be too soon to drop in at Mamie’s. Oh, the hell with it. Hang on. Don’t be like that rusty pervert bastard in Fort Tryon Park. .

As long as he got away with it, that was what counted — except for that wisp of fear that something might have gone wrong — and that corrosive revulsion he couldn’t dispel, couldn’t shake: nagging conscience, damn it.

So why shouldn’t Larry’s love affair be as beautiful as a romance conjured out of legend? It was pure — was that the right word? Sounded priggish; that wasn’t what he meant. Seemly, oh, hell, just decent, without peril, without guile or guilt, unharried, unhurried. Not like his — copulations, that’s all they were, depraved and abominable.

And the guy was so handsome, gifted, poised, charming, no sense of smirch about him, as Ira felt about himself, no sense of anything devious, ulterior. No wonder Larry’s parents beamed and laughed at the sight of their son. Ira himself stared, so captivated was he by Larry’s seraphic luster.

Oh, well, there could be no competition between them, no thought of competition in Ira’s mind (except in the chaotic writhings of wishful imagination). They inhabited different spheres of breeding, of outlook. Ira couldn’t name them yet, but he knew they were so different that Larry’s love affair with Edith was beyond coveting — or nearly beyond coveting — because beyond comparing, on the only level Ira knew: behaving with Edith as with Minnie, or Stella. It was unthinkable!

Nevertheless, still too awestruck to overcome his reluctance to attend the Arts Club poetry recital for which he had helped Larry write the notices, Ira reneged again on his promise to attend — and stayed away. He received a pained, vehement exhortation from Larry when they next met. He wanted Ira there, damn it! He was his guest, a guest of the secretary of the Arts Club. Ira even had a certain claim to being there: for services he had rendered writing the invitations.

“You promise to come, cross your heart?” Larry demanded a month later, at the next session of writing notices.

“Cross my fingers, I will.”

“No, none of that! I’m serious.”

“Okay, okay, okay.”

So wearing the English tweed jacket of Larry’s beneficence, a garment “that never grew on your soil,” as Mom reminded her son, wearing it a little self-consciously, with his secondhand chesterfield overcoat above, Ira set out to find the meeting place of the Arts Club. It was already dark. He followed the trolley tracks, as Larry had instructed him, from the Christopher Street subway kiosk through Eighth Street, splotchy with snow. Once past the lowering Sixth Avenue El, Eighth Street became active: animate with people, show window lights, delicatessens, bookstores, small art galleries. He turned right, to Waverly Place, and then along the west boundary of glimmering, snowy Washington Square Park, with its view of the Washington Square arch on Fifth Avenue, and the equestrian general himself, halfway toward the scattered lights of NYU’s converted loft building, and walked to MacDougal Street. The neighborhood was largely Italian, to all appearances — and sounds — typically ill-lit and grubby. But near the corner, the illuminated sign proclaimed in large letters: VILLAGE INN TEAHOUSE.

Helpless, dubious, Ira waited for someone else to enter, someone whom he could follow. And soon a small group of youthful coeds, bright plaid scarves showing, and jolly as they approached the tearoom, made their way in. Ira trailed them through the door, tarried near it inside while the newcomers paid their contribution for the evening’s entertainment, dropping their coins into the lidless cigar box on the counter. Behind the counter, in charge of proceedings, stood Larry — handsome, glowing, filling the part perfectly — exchanging mirthful greetings with the newly arrived guests. Ira had just time enough to glance about the large dining room, well filled with a murmuring audience sitting at round tables, each one softly lit by a candle in the center, the candle set in a dark bottle laced with wax drippings, the candle flames fluttering at each opening of the door, the unsteady light shedding bewitching gleam on the faces of the seated audience. Magic atmosphere, cigarette-smoke-filled, droning, shadowy ambience. So that was a poetry recital, that was how poets foregathered—

Larry’s cry of pleasure broke through Ira’s hesitant appraisals. In another moment, Larry strode from behind the counter, came face to face with the newcomer. “Ira! Am I glad to see you! You didn’t let me down after all. I was beginning to wonder.” He took hold of Ira’s arm.

“I’m kinda leery.” Ira grinned, tried to shrink comically within himself.

“What for?”

“What for? Hey.”

“I told you there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“They’re just undergraduates, most of them. Some seniors, some juniors. You helped me write the notices. What’s there to it? You sit and listen like the rest. Say, you’re wearing the tweed jacket.”

“Yeah. Hey, what’s that you’re wearing?” Ira pointed at the wide colored sash around Larry’s boyish waist.

“That’s called a cummerbund.”

“A what?”

“A cummerbund. I bought it in Bermuda. The English wear it in the evening. Like it? Elegant, isn’t it?”

“I guess so. Okay I sneak over there to that empty chair by the corner?”

“Oh, no. You’ve got to meet Edith first.”

“Oh, Jesus, Larry!” Grimacing fiercely to shake his friend’s resolve, Ira rubbed damp palms on the front of his chesterfield. “Why not afterward?”

“You’ll meet her afterward too. She’s been wanting to meet you for a long time. No excuses. Come on.” He feigned an adamant frown. “Follow me.”

“Ow, I knew it.” Hangdog, struggling stonily within himself, Ira trailed Larry amid tobacco smoke and hum of voices in candle-lit murk toward the further end of the tearoom. A low dais had been set at that end, in front of the audience, next to the rear wall. A lectern reared up on the dais. An unoccupied table stood close by, a tablet on it marked RESERVED. Close to the table, a woman seemed to be introducing another woman: to older people, faculty members maybe. And as she turned away, leaving the other woman engaged in conversation with the new acquaintances, Ira, in the self-conscious numbness of approach, even before Larry addressed her, recognized her.

By some kind of inevitability, he knew, knew that the petite olive-skinned woman, turning away with winning and receptive mien, smiling countenance, like a dark-hued source for rays of generosity, sympathy, smiling countenance with prominent, sad eyes, the woman with small earrings, bunching a minute handkerchief, toying with a thin gold necklace, was Edith Welles. Larry spoke her name, spoke Ira’s. She greeted him, fixed on him through the blur of his acute embarrassment her steady, large-brown-eyed and solicitous gaze. She gave him her dainty hand to hold — and of course he would drop his hat in his acute embarrassment. Was there a hint in her eyes of something appeasing — appeasing just in general, or because he knew about her affair with Larry? He couldn’t say. Something stirred the notion in his mind that because she imposed her trust in him, it was like an immediate, implicit bond between them, a bond which, at the same time as she appealed to it, was intended to reassure him. It did nothing, though, to dispel his abashed inarticulateness. Larry left them to go back to the counter when a party of young guests came in.

“Larry says you’re remarkably sensitive to literature, but you’ve made up your mind to be a biologist.” Her face brightened with encouragement. “Of course, there’s nothing mutually exclusive between the two.”

“No, ma’am. Yeah, I’ll be a biologist if I ever get a biology course. It’s so crowded.”

“So Larry told me. I think that’s a great pity.”

“Yeah. .”

“Larry has gotten a great deal from you.”

“I don’t know. I got a lot from Larry.”

“When did you develop your interest in literature?”

“I didn’t know it was literature. I mean, it was just plain books.”

She smiled, and yet her eyes remained solemn, never leaving his, studying him — unwavering. He wished he too could maintain so comprehensive and at the same time unoffending a gaze as hers. He had to steal glances at people — something like Pop.

“Have you tried writing anything?”

“Me? No, ma’am. I mean, only assignments.” Small, pert nose she had, dark hair, not black, in a bun back of her head. She was built like a girl still, yet she was an instructor in English. . in a university. . with a Ph.D. And as his eyes lowered before her frank survey: what tiny feet she had. In shiny black pumps. Trim ankles. Trim calves. . gave an inkling he wasn’t supposed to think about. How could Larry think about it? A girl, but a college teacher girl. Another world: such sheer daintiness, delicate refinement. Gee. .

Deep brown orbs peered into his, sympathetically. “I hope you’ll be able to accompany Larry when he calls on us — at our place, Iola Reid’s and mine. On St. Mark’s Place.”

“In the Bowery? I know. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Why?”

“In New York? In the Bowery? I mean, it’s a tough place.”

She dimpled. “We seem to be in some kind of haven there. I suppose you’d call it a respectable haven.”

“Yeah? Everyone behaves?”

She laughed, candidly, freely amused by his unintended witticism. “You’ve been very kind to undertake so much of the drudgery of getting off the notices. I hope Larry has made known my appreciation. It’s one of those unavoidable boring bits of drudgery.”

“Well, we — we gab a lot, ye know, when we do ’em. Makes the time go. Doesn’t feel so bad.”

“I’m happy you don’t mind—”

“Nah. I mean, no, ma’am.”

“Before I forget I’d like to invite you to a party of my modern poetry class. Larry will be there. Other undergraduates, too. I’m sure he’ll ask you to accompany him. I’d like to do it in person. You’d be very welcome.”

Ira swallowed. “Me? Thanks. That’s at night.” He wished his voice didn’t sound so rough.

“Yes. The first Friday in April. I hope you’re free that evening. Are you?”

He scratched his head. “Yes, ma’am. I think so. That far ahead I must be. Friday. Oh, sure.”

“I’m having my poetry class over for tea and cookies.” She smiled fetchingly. “I’d be delighted to have you attend.”

“Tea and cookies?” He giggled foolishly. “Yes, ma’am.” Did he dare try to be funny? “Cookies even without tea. Thanks. But I don’t know anything about poetry.”

She found fresh cause for merriment in what he said. “You’re not alone, by any means. A surprising number of people don’t.”

“They don’t? So who does?”

Again she was stirred to merriment. “They’re poets, or would-be poets. In large part.”

“Oh, now I know.”

“I find that hard to believe in your case.”

“Yeah? Mostly I know what Larry told me. I mean about the modern poets.”

Her solemn eyes that had been regarding him so fixedly swerved away. She let the fine gold necklace slip through her tiny fingers. “I’m so glad I finally met you, Ira. Will you excuse me? I’ve got to meet these people.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah.” He backed away.

She patted his arm.

He watched her move with gracious cordiality toward two people who had just come in, two women, whom Larry, lambent with the privilege, was escorting toward Edith. They both carried themselves with the polite air of inner distinction. The one was gray-haired, stately, slender, with a curiously veiled look, at the same time knowing and modest. The other was stockily built, decisive and public in manner, homely-bright, with restless, glittering eyeglasses on her snub nose, and mouth vigorously engaged in speech.

Ira sidled away, heard salutations exchanged, names and welcomes: “Marcia, Anne, so glad you could come.”

And the gray, taller woman: “We wouldn’t miss Léonie reading her poems for the world. Her voice is exactly suited to them.”

“Contrasting, don’t you think?”

“True,” Edith seconded. “A huskiness against such mellow syllables.”

“And yet so unaffected,” said the stocky woman. “There she is.”

And Larry, elated with office, a blooming, blushing Ganymede, “I’ve reserved the table in front. And guests.”

Pleased by the very perfection of his presence, the very essence of his youth — one could see — the woman named Marcia bustled, “Oh, that’s just fine! Thank you. . Léonie! How are you, dear? Anne, do sit down. So you plan to stay on in the Village? We get all the intellectual stimulation we need in the Columbia area. Don’t you think, Anne? Perhaps not the same kind of artistic ferment. .”

Boy, they were smart, smart, confident, quick, deft, so sure — Ira felt as if he were slinking away, seeking the chair in the far corner: smart, gee, and they were women too. Boyoboy. Made him feel like a — what? He didn’t know what. Like a grobyan, as they said in Yiddish: a boor, a dolt. And he was, wasn’t he? He knew he shouldn’t be here, didn’t belong here. They just seemed to drive him down with their, their manners, education, yeah, drive him down to street level, to the hoi polloi, to what he was. What the hell. Home was a slum, a bleary tenement, a railroad flat a flight up, with Mom and Pop in it, sometimes leaning out the window in balmy weather, as he did too watching the Pullman trains go by in summer. And. . what strange brutality coursed through him at the thought of it, yeah, and Minnie, too.

So what the hell was he doing here? He searched for a likely seat in the most obscure corner. It made less sense than his friendship with Farley. At least the guy was his speed — as far as his mind moved, he was — however fast his legs flew otherwise. And yet, there it was again: who here had his reckless imagination? Nothing but dreck to work with, nothing but smithereens to feed the fire, splinters he made out of an apple box he jumped on that he had swiped from in front of the grocery — and he kept the spud baking in the can, like Weasel that night. He didn’t know how to be polite, but he knew words; he was rich in words, a millionaire that way, a gentleman of great estate: words unbounded. That was indeed what crippled Mr. Sullivan discerned in class that day when he accused Ira of making a boob of himself for others’ entertainment. That’s what Ira felt Edith Welles was probing for when she looked into his eyes with her round, unwavering, solemn ones: words. Words, tameless and teeming, headlong. Apollo’s steeds that ran away — not Icarus, fathead.

He couldn’t deceive her, even in those few minutes they spoke together — the realization grew to conviction — he couldn’t hide his chaotic hoard from her — his fumbling, his disquiet, his crudities, traits that he himself recognized — and could do nothing about — his Jewishness that he was so conscious of, his ingratiating, silly grin, she saw it all, but not a reverberation of any of that returned, not a one; all that was mute as a bell ringing in a vacuum as it did way back in General Science — of only one thing did she make him aware, only one thing pulsed back to him: her appraisal of what she had found hidden in his mind, as if that above all was important to her. .

“There’s a coat rack behind you,” the young mustached undergraduate at the table suggested.

“Oh, yeah!” Ira stripped off his chesterfield hurriedly. “I’ll just hold it.” He draped the coat across his knees, and on top of it he rested his gray fedora. Now, exposed for all to see, conspicuous for this time of year, as Larry had said, because of its light color, Larry’s kasha tweed conferred unwanted prominence on its wearer. Ira tried to look nonchalant.

“I haven’t seen you before,” the young undergraduate made overture.

“No.”

“I’m Nathan. That’s Tamara. That’s Leonard. That’s Wilma.”

“I’m Ira.” He nodded his head gauchely. “Ira Stigman.”

“English major?”

“No. Bio.”

“Do you write?”

“No, I happen to be a friend of somebody here. I go to CCNY.”

“Oh. City College?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you like CCNY? Any good courses?”

“You mean in English?”

“Yes. Or philosophy. The humanities.”

He wasn’t sure what they meant by the humanities, but he felt his benightedness too keenly to want to talk, to disclose his want of articulateness, his want of comprehension of more than elementary opinions. “I take English Composition 1. I’m just sittin’ here,” he said gruffly.

His reply had the effect he hoped for. After sharp surprise, they looked lingeringly askance, then divested themselves of interest in him. It was just as well. With nothing to communicate, he felt his isolation, and perversely preferred it intact: he was the obtuse and listless listener. Words crossed the table, and were crossed by others from nearby tables. Only a single time was his attention brought to a focus by what they were saying: when a spirited disagreement arose about a poet named Jeffers.

“He’s crazy!” someone asserted.

“No, he’s not.”

“That Tamar. And now, Roan Stallion. You’ve read it?”

“Of course.”

“What’s next? Pasiphae giving birth to the Minotaur?”

“Pacify? Why pacify?”

“Oh, come on. You know what I mean. Animal sex and incest mean something else to him. Man is sick.”

“The man is sick. Jeffers is sick.”

“Oh, no, he’s not. He’s talking about man, introverted man.”

“Well, aren’t we all?”

“No. In general. And in general, I agree with him. Man is alienated from nature. Man is doomed.”

“I don’t think so. The further he gets away from nature, the better off he is. He became man only by getting away from nature. That’s why I say Jeffers is crazy.”

“That may sound clever—”

“It’s been so all along. What else does it mean to be civilized?”

“At least he doesn’t keep harping on the Jews, like Eliot,” said one of the young women, Tamara. “Jeffers does use my name, which happens to be Hebrew.”

“Oh, yes? Why? Any reason?”

“It means ‘date,’ the fruit, but it means something else — to Jeffers. It’s clear.”

“What?”

“Tamar in the Bible is raped by her brother.”

“I didn’t get that connection at all. You Zionists have all the Biblical answers.”

“You don’t have to be a Zionist to know that. She was King David’s daughter, and the whole thing fits into Jeffers’s incest symbol.”

Incest symbol. The way they used it, it didn’t mean anything. . a symbol? Putting a newspaper, Der Tag, under Minnie when she was bluggy, and then pitching it out the window down the airshaft, and scaring the rats scurrying. Now that was the real thing. Didn’t Mom look all over hell for it afterward, though, for the roman she hadn’t read yet to Mrs. Shapiro? Symbol, so all right, symbol. Symbol referred to something else. Referred to alienation — that fellow there said it — alienation? — getting away from everybody else. . sick introspection. . Maybe. So what’re you gonna do? You’re alienated. Yeah. “Where’s Der Tag?” Mom kept hollering, accusing: “Did you see Friday’s Tag?”

“Me? No. Not me. What do I want with Der Tag?”

Ira tried not to steal glances at Edith, but couldn’t help it, and from time to time she caught his gaze before he could shift away, and she smiled at him, sympathetically, reassuringly.

Smiling winningly to gain attention, Edith, who, together with her guest, had seated herself on the dais a few minutes before, stood up. The poet they were privileged to hear this evening, she informed her audience, was undoubtedly familiar to the majority of them. She ranked as one of the most distinguished writers of lyric poetry in the country, rich and distinguished in her imagery, in her superb use of the poetic medium, her poetic meanings wonderfully compressed, and yet losing none of their singing quality thereby. Léonie Adams. And without more ado, she would turn the platform over to her. Edith expressed certainty all would find the evening a memorable one.

Followed scattered applause. The recital began. Léonie Adams arose from her chair, and with two slender volumes in hand, stepped up to the lectern; she opened the first of the volumes, a thin blue one, turned pages, pressed down the page selected, and yet without consulting it at all, she began reciting. Larry had praised her lyrics highly when he and Ira were engaged in writing the announcements of the recital—“Her poems really sing. You rarely come across such beautiful, really original imagery! She’s tops. I wish I had one of her books of poems here to show you. She’s way ahead of Edna Millay.”

And now she stood there, in front of everyone, a real poet, a poet in the flesh, reading her poems. Ira listened intently, lost and recovered meanings, lost them again, never truly grasping the intent of the whole. Nevertheless, however sporadic, he was moved. Even the fragments had a richness that made him wonder whether, given the book in front of him, poring over it and returning, he would grasp the meaning of a separate poem in something like its entirety, something like the way he grasped James Stephens’s “What Tomas Said in a Pub” in the Untermeyer anthology. Or trying to discover the essence of Walter de la Mare’s “Here lies a most beautiful lady,” or John Masefield’s “Cargoes,” nearly any poem there, like Sandburg’s “Fog”—oh, wasn’t that beautiful fancy Adams read just now: “The dream of flying would lift a marble bird.”

In the intervals while auditory attention lapsed, the visual replaced it. He studied the reader. She was pretty, short in stature, mature yet young, a short figure with a small head, small features contained in dark, bobbed hair. She was curiously built, though, almost as if her figure were at odds with itself. From the waist down, as her lower body appeared when she first stood up and from time to time when she stepped away from the lectern, her hips were chunky. Her face and torso were delicate, seraphic and delicate, but rested on a stocky base, strong, chunky hips, piano legs, as they were called. With her blue eyes set wide apart, and seemingly focused on an ethereal yonder, and with her soft, clinging, husky voice, she looked and sounded like a true poet, otherworldly and inspired — above the waist — and down below like any housekeeper. Could it be, Ira ruminated, the poet sort of borrowed from the centaur?

Murmurs of approval greeted the end of each poem. Though Ira failed to understand anything but lovely fragments, out of courtesy to his host, Larry, and in case Edith looked his way, he manifested appreciation, conveyed an immobilized rapture. He was slow, he was inveterately slow of mind — Ira palliated disappointment with himself at his failure to comprehend. He had to mull things over and over, he told himself — consoled himself once again — and then perhaps he might be able to fathom the meaning, or fuse the separate wonderful metaphors into a unity. Listen to her: “Since the salt terror swept us from our course”—that applied to him. Striking and unique juxtapositions of words, musical, labyrinthian in their evocation, if only he could encompass the significance of the whole. No, not the message. Whatever it was. The allusion. Yeah, yeah. When he read the Robert Frost poem about stopping by the woods in winter, he caught the central allusion of death and duty, he felt it within the context of the words themselves. Not this. Well, dummy that he was, what the hell could he do?

Afterward — when the reading was over — to sustained applause — cookies and coffee were served by young students, volunteer waitresses. Colloquy hummed anew. Cross-table talk set the dwindling candle flames fluttering, corresponding to utterance like tiny yellow tongues. And while the refreshments were being consumed, Larry sauntered over, bent down, and with lips close to Ira’s ear, whispered, his words brimming with import. “I’m seeing Edith home tonight. Okay?”

“Sure. Sure. I get it.” Ira nodded.

And audibly, “How’d you like it?” Larry asked.

“The cookies?”

“C’mon, Ira, I’m talking about art.”

Larry patted his friend’s shoulder, and again speaking sotto voce: “Someone likes you. Thinks you’re very genuine.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll tell you more later.”

“Thanks.” So easy to come out with a self-conscious, and discontented, “Tanks, tanks to dee, my wordy friend” (to parody Longfellow); but he didn’t, and was glad he didn’t.

Larry bent down again, murmured, “Come over and say good night.”

Ira winced, shut both eyes. “Can’t you do it for me?”

Larry glared a long, mock-menacing glare — and not until Ira nodded in grudging acquiescence did Larry leave.

“Know him a long time?” The question was put to Ira by Nathan, the undergraduate who had previously introduced himself and the others, the one who sported the brown mustache.

“Yars’n yars.” Ira enjoyed his riposte. There was such a little difference between a fool and a foil, it just occurred to him.

“You don’t sound like City College, much more like Columbia.” Nathan was apparently glossing over with amenity his misjudgment of Ira’s newly revealed status.

“I don’t know what City College sounds like.”

But the other was quick in riposte, quicker than Ira, as usual. “I know you’ve got to have at least a B average to matriculate.”

“Yeah? I musta got in on a rain check.” Again, without his intending, gruffness rasped in his voice. Matriculate. Jesus. Highfalutin. He cleared his throat. “What does NYU sound like?”

“You heard us tonight.”

“I sure did. You mean you, right?” He felt surly. But hell, this wasn’t the place to display ill will; he was Larry’s friend. Ira simply lowered his head.

“Do you know Miss Welles, too?”

Pumping him. “Not very.” He noticed that the others at the table were paying close attention, especially the rather svelte, sleek Jewish beauty toying with the earring. The earring slipped from her fingers, rolled toward Ira on the floor. He stooped, recovered it, and handed it to her. She said not a word, just looked at him, loftily. Goddamn her, where did she get off with that haughty crap? Next time he’d let the goddamn thing stay where it fell. But a next time there would never be. “Thanks,” he said pointedly, animosity swelling within him, his ears kindling. “You’re Tamara?”

“Yes,” she conceded.

“What happened to the guy?”

“I don’t understand. What guy?”

“You might be Tamar yourself,” Ira said. “I mean the real one. In the Bible.” He was being uncouth. Cut it out, he counseled himself.

“I don’t see the point of that. What makes you say that?”

“She musta been real good-lookin’, no?”

And this Tamara was too: svelte, sleek, basking in the glow of her warm, harmonious Jewish features. And smart. Too smart for him, Ira already knew, with her scale of appraisal, secure and deeply delineated. No docile kid cousin this one, or sister yielding to need.

“Thank you,” she said, with a formal blink of eyelids; she wasn’t going to let him take acquaintance too far.

“You mind if I ask you what happened to the guy?”

“What guy?”

The others around the candle-lit table stopped chatting and listened. He struggled with the boor inside him, unmanageable suddenly. “The guy who raped her. He was her brother, wasn’t he?”

“He was her half brother, Amnon.”

“Oh. He was only her half brother.”

“Only?”

“Yeah. So that was only half so bad.”

“For heaven’s sake!” she said, after the slightest, but curiously electric, throb of silence. “I didn’t think when I came here this evening I was going to discuss degrees of incest.”

“This kind must be the third degree.” He was strangely glib, even with a young woman as attractive as she was, just so long as no amorous notions interfered in his head. Then his heart stopped beating. “No, I know. But what happened to him?”

“Absalom killed him.”

“Who? Absalom?”

“Please!” Condescending and affronted, she clearly found the conversation distasteful. She looked away, toyed with the earring he had retrieved.

“You’re asking the right person,” the young man named Nathan complimented, slyly. “She’s Sholem Aleichem’s granddaughter.”

“Yeah?”

“Please, Nathan, don’t drop names. You know how much I hate that.”

“That’s all right. I don’t know who he is.”

A few seconds of silence. He had really messed up, messed up the vis-à-vis, but gotten a few licks in, though, in return for her haughtiness, halfway gotten even with all of them. Anh, wasn’t he a bastard? Yeah. Might as well move his freight the hell outta here. He gathered up coat and hat in brusque hold, and stood up, turned his back on them. Let ’em think he was crazy.

Jesus Christ, he didn’t seem to be at home anywhere, not here among these — these well-behaved, well-to-do students, like the kid, the grown-up guy by now, whose silver-filigreed fountain pen Ira had swiped. And he wasn’t at home at CCNY either, all of them Jewish, trying desperately to assimilate. He should have “fit in” there, but he didn’t. If his family had stayed on the East Side — at least till he was Bar Mitzvah, maybe. Not at home on 119th Street in goyish Harlem, that went without saying. He wasn’t at home anywhere. He was Larry’s friend, that was all.

Now for this last minor ordeal. Only for him it wasn’t minor. Ill at ease, worried, he approached the small group standing about the table nearest the podium. If his first meeting with Edith was trying, this leave-taking promised to be even more so. Damn Larry. She was speaking with someone else, undoubtedly a faculty member, a fairly tall man, smooth and regular-featured, with darkening blond hair (was that Mr. Vernon, the cosponsor of the Arts Club, whom Larry had mentioned, the homosexual?). And another, an eager-appearing short man with a quick, frequent laugh and a pockmarked face (was he the one Larry had said disparagingly was frantically in love with Edith?). And the poet, Léonie Adams. And the two distinguished women who had come in at the last. Nah, he’d better beat it. He rippled fingers at Larry, screwed up the side of his face in sign of farewell. But Miss Welles turned toward him, again with winning, solicitous mien. He had to say something:

“I came to say goodbye, Miss Welles.”

“I hope not as finally as that.”

“No, good night, I mean. But I told Larry I already said it.”

“I don’t mind hearing it again. Did you enjoy the evening?”

“Yeah. Parts of it.” Agitated, he jerked his head nervously. “Maybe I don’t hear right, ye know? I mean fast enough.”

She met his troubled frown with consoling smile. “That’s true for most of us. Only we’re too polite to say so. I hope you haven’t been discouraged from coming again—”

“Well, I’m outta place, ma’am — Miss Welles. I’m glad to help with the postcards. But more than that. .” He looked away hopelessly, tried to prevent the hitch of his shrug from exceeding polite limits, or what he thought were.

“Oh, no, please don’t feel that way. You may enjoy the next one more. I’m sure you will. The students will read some of their own work then. Graduates and a few of the faculty,” she corrected herself. “We’ll mix prose and poetry next time.”

“Yeah? Maybe it’s a better idea. It’s just that in poetry I don’t get it right away. Larry does. Boy. He’s talented.”

“Probably because he writes poetry. As I said before. You didn’t miss all of it?”

“No. The words, I mean, ma’am, the words. When she says something about questioning my idol, wasn’t it? ‘What strange and barbarous fancy it may keep.’ Boy, do I love that.”

“You do?” She studied him anew, steadily appraising, appraising. “Are you taking English courses at your college?”

“Me? I finally got into English Composition 1.” He spoke with a kind of glum irony, meant to amuse her.

But she wasn’t amused; she shook her head, kinked the slim gold necklace over her tiny forefinger. “I expect you to come over with Larry.”

“You mean that party next month?”

“No. Before that. Some evening.”

“Thanks.”

“You mustn’t be so shy, child.”

“Me? Well. . you know.”

She extended her hand. “Good night, Ira.”

How small and dainty were the fingers he held for a moment. “Good night, Miss Welles.”

“Thanks for coming this evening.”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks too,” he nodded, as he left the room and headed into the chill air on MacDougal Street.

VIII

College, the world within CCNY’s Gothic gray-white façade, was already shrunken from a place of blooming, nebulous expectations to one in which Ira merely hoped to get a passing grade — a C for a recitation, for a quiz — any passing grade. College was a loom on which it would take four years to weave a diploma. The 125th Street trolley was its shuttle, thrown between the mean cold-water flat on 119th Street and the trodden and scuffed alcoves and lecture halls within the Gothic walls on Convent Avenue; between — should he call it the adulterated Yiddishkeit at home? — and between that and the Americanism presided over by the sometimes kind, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes aloof, but so far always gentile professors.

For Ira, college was dwarfed in significance by the world outside: not only by the cruel encroachments of his relentless and degrading appetites, but by their very opposite: the beautiful, the wondrous intrusion of Larry’s world into his own. . College became a satellite, no, a yo-yo, controlled by both the base and the lovely at the same time: to sordid eroticism and seemingly celestial romance. In Ira’s myth-laden mind, Edith Welles could easily be the Elfin Queen who had claimed Tom Rimer for her own: she imparted that sense of delicacy and remove: an Elfin Queen with a Ph.D., or despite her Ph.D., who had claimed her freshman student for her own. Wasn’t that like a fairy tale?

College became a place to go through paces while destiny unfolded. If it wasn’t a loom, then it was a four-year holding pen. Good grades elated him — a little; elated him wryly; about as much as poor grades dejected him: with a shrug, because of the inconvenience they would cause him. He would have to take summer courses. Grades didn’t make much difference one way or another, so long as he passed. And why were they of so little import? Because he felt in his innermost self, and couldn’t reveal, that there was some kind of a design at work; that the passing of listless college days, academic weeks and months, was meant to ripen some kind of cloudy promise. If Larry sometimes had qualms about aborting his dental career in favor of an uncertain literary one, Ira, though he might chafe at the tedium, rarely felt misgivings in his fuzzy ruminations about the decay of his future as a zoologist or biology teacher. Everything seemed to play a role in his murky aspirations: even the things that beset him, that he did and couldn’t stop doing, that he felt corroded him, besmirched him, all fitted into the design: the way he had felt on the flat diving rock on the Hudson River, after stealing the silver-filigreed fountain pen, it was part of a design. Fatalistic, was that the right word for it?

Incorrigibly, in intervals of quiescent appetite, his mind infringed on college time, on time due his studies. . He reviewed — and meditated on — every bit of information Larry conveyed to him about Edith. He added to Larry’s observations, added to them, and dwelled on those he had made about her himself, some of them gleaned much later on when he would know Edith much better. He cogitated about them, like a sleuth almost, seeking clues to Edith’s character, seeking to reconstruct her, in order to familiarize himself with her, in order to know how she would be apt to respond, her likes and dislikes, to know what to expect, to adapt himself to her tastes. And why was he so intent on learning all that? In part, he was driven by a kind of unconscious urge toward self-improvement, according to the standards of one he regarded with such deference, such esteem. But to an even greater degree, he felt impelled to attune himself to her in order to prepare himself for her, a strange, subliminal will to conform to her expectations, to establish his dependability, his loyalty, his indispensability in an imaginary hour of need. He had moments of insight, as in a fairy tale, that brought home to him that his motives clashed with probability, tilted against common sense. Intermittent aspects of actuality, of the actual state of things, the unlikely fruition of his fantasies, often sobered him, checked him, toppled his insubstantial aspirations. And yet he continued to entertain them. They prevailed against all odds. They would prevail because they were an extension, an elaboration of something in which he was already well schooled — ever since age eight and a half, when his parents settled in 119th Street in Irish Harlem. They would prevail by dint of his well-nigh precociously developed ability to adapt, by his powers of ingratiation. The path he had set out on years ago, and had followed for years, had become a confirmed one, and confirmed in him. It seemed to bid him to follow it whither it was bound, and by the same means that had become inveterate: by earnest application to adapt to her nature, as he learned her traits, by studied ingratiation. Paradoxically, that mode which he once had to adopt for survival, because the original East Side Jewish self was imprisoned and choked off, became for him, however obscurely felt, a hope for more than self-preservation: a hope for self-realization, a hope for freedom.

She had come to New York from California, from Berkeley, Larry told him, where she had gotten her doctorate, and afterward she taught English literature there, that much Ira soon learned. She was not a native of California, though, but of New Mexico. She was born in Silver City, a very small city, scarcely worthy the name (to a New Yorker), in that sparsely inhabited territory, where gun duels still took place in the street in broad daylight. How laconic and amusing were her descriptions of her father, who never carried a gun, prudently dropping to the sidewalk while the bullets flew. He had won his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania, had migrated west, and was one of the few lawyers in Silver City. He was also a member of the Democratic Party, and shortly became active in politics. At the outset, he was very successful; he gave promise of becoming one of the leading political figures in the Southwest. When the territory was admitted into the Union as the state of New Mexico in 1912, it was Edith’s father, William Welles, who was the first representative elected to the Congress of the United States. He was again reelected during Woodrow Wilson’s term in 1916, and held the same office until 1920. But, alas, with the end of the Great War came a revulsion against the War, against Wilson’s violation of his pledge not to involve the United States in the War, against the enormous, senseless slaughter of the common people — with the result that in the elections of 1920, the Democrats went down to defeat; the Republicans swept the elections in New Mexico. Edith’s father, nominated by his party as candidate for the U.S. Senate, which in predominantly Democratic New Mexico was tantamount to election, lost his bid for the seat, and with it most of his personal fortune, which he had invested in the race. He never recovered from his defeat. He sank in political stature; he slipped into political obscurity; he took to drink.

His political career a failure, his marriage also became one, Ira would subsequently learn. His wife, whom Edith described as a prudish Christian Scientist, wept when he approached her sexually. Her parents already had three children — the third was Edith’s brother — and they were frequently forced to listen to loud beratings by a demanding, inebriate father of his beseeching, sobbing wife. And then occurred the most incredible thing he had ever heard in his life: Edith’s father took a prostitute out of one of the local brothels, and with scarcely any attempt at concealment, provided a residence for her and installed her in it as his mistress. With that, his wife left him, sued for divorce, and being granted it, together with custody of the children and some alimony, moved to Berkeley, where she established herself as a piano teacher. Meanwhile Edith’s father’s health began to fail. His law practice fell off; he sank toward indigence. Faithful to him, though, through all this, was Mildred, the woman he had reclaimed from the brothel.

Edith had a brother and sister, both younger than herself. The brother, William Welles, Jr., went to work for a firm dealing in prefabricated aluminum siding as soon as he graduated from high school. The sister, Lenora, of whom Edith had no high opinion, because so totally impractical in financial matters, so very conventional and a Christian Scientist as well, was described by Edith as “very large. Lenora is huge.” She had been directed, by maternal decree, to apply herself to the violin — the instrument Edith wanted to play. But no, Mother thought Edith was better fitted for the piano (one had to keep these things, these antagonisms, well in mind). Edith thought her sister was insensitive musically, for all her practice; and that her sister’s ambitions, fostered by her mother, to become a concert artist, one who would make her debut in New York, were absurd. Edith herself relinquished the piano, not because she wasn’t musical, wasn’t sensitive in the extreme to musical nuance. Rather, she gave up the long, arduous practice that would have prepared her for concertizing because she decided her hands were simply too small to cope with the demands of professional concert performance.

She gave up all hope of being a concert performer — but then used her training at the instrument to play after school in movie houses, in the days of silent movies. And later, in company with other musicians of varying skills, at something she named — with a smile — shivarees. What things they did out West! Ira fixed on the word: shivaree. . It sounded wild and cowboy, wild and woolly: a corruption of the French word charivari, his Webster’s Collegiate informed him: a mock serenade of discordant noises. . From her earliest teens she had been self-supporting. Edith had disclosed, her determination unmistakable in the way she tilted her chin. Much to Ira’s secret embarrassment, that a slight young girl in her teens was already self-supporting, and he, big oaf, farleygt, as they said in Yiddish, burdening his parents. Lenora already had a child, and had custody of it, after her divorce. Mother and child also lived in Berkeley — precariously, according to Edith’s incisively stated opinion — on alimony that would have been sufficient, “if Lenora had any sense.” But she didn’t. She couldn’t manage anything; she was always in debt; and Mother, or more often Edith herself, was called on to help get her sister out of her monetary difficulties, which Edith did, at some sacrifice to her own welfare, indignant at her “ninny of a sister,” but coming to her aid for the sake of the child. .

Her musical career foreclosed, Edith had gotten her B.A. summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Berkeley, which Ira took to be the name of the university, learning only later that it meant the University of California at Berkeley. Afterward, while supporting herself as before, she had gotten her doctorate there. It was the first interdisciplinary doctorate ever awarded by the university. Her doctorate linked the English department with that of anthropology. The subject matter of her thesis was an analysis of the rhythms and structure of Navajo songs and religious chants, their transliterations into Roman characters, with scrupulous indication of accent and syllabic pattern, and finally their rendering into English verse, not verbatim but by re-creation into English, faithfully equivalent to the spirit of the original Navajo. Out of this material, imbued with Southwestern light and sky, and evocative of the primeval bond between man and nature, Edith published two books of poems. They were well received; they were praised by critics for their successful capturing of the elevated moods and mystical communings of a tribal people whose culture had long been ignored, long despised, by those who had all but despoiled them of land and heritage.

The poems also came to the attention of another young anthropologist, one with a keen interest in poetry, the brilliant Marcia Meede — the same young woman with the energetic lip and restless glitter of eyeglasses whom Ira had seen together with her older, enigmatically smiling friend, ushered to their seats by a radiant Larry at the poetry recital. A correspondence between the two women, Edith and Marcia, had begun while Edith was still in Berkeley and became a bridge to acquaintance and friendship when Edith took up residence in New York to teach at NYU.

Edith divulged so much, and so freely, first to Larry and then to both of them, that for all his eagerness to imprint a composite of her on his mind — and to steep himself within the ambience of her temperament — Ira was sometimes embarrassed, even as Larry obviously was, by the frankness, the explicit particulars of her disclosures: that her mother believed sex ought to be terminated after five years of marriage; that Edith, out of sheer impulse of altruism, and in defiance of convention, had married one Kurt Finklepaugh (did anyone ever hear such a ludicrous Heinie name?), in order to provide him with time enough to stay in the country and obtain his doctorate. But after wedlock, he wanted more than had been agreed upon: he wanted her body, and this she had no inclination to yield.

“No inclination, no desire, no anything.” She laughed, and added by way of explanation that she had devoted herself so completely to her studies, she had not yet been “wakened.” So their matrimony came to a violent and disgraceful end: with mutual recrimination, and books — oh so academic — thrown at each other. Since consummation had never taken place, the marriage was legally annulled. Still, her account of their brief conjugal relation revised the picture of her in Ira’s mind, tinged it with plucky defiance and acrimony: like warning shadows cast over her apparent sweetness and gentleness. Dainty and petite person though she was, she didn’t flee, with eyes streaming tears, flee and seek refuge from her pursuer among friends and relatives. Oh, no, she stood her ground and fought back. Those large, sad eyes took aim, that tiny hand swung and hurled — a tome maybe, a dictionary, at her adversary. One ought to impress that on oneself: underneath the goodness and kindness was something akin to a coiled spring; it could be released, given sufficient provocation, and a spirited retaliation loosed. Yes, that tone of competitiveness, when she spoke of others being given books of poetry to review, not because of superior literary judgment, but because they were men — or because they were favorites of the editor of the book review section of the Tribune or the Times—that too was a trait that one had to take note of and be aware of. Under Edith’s winning generosity, under pleasing sufferance, lurked militance, feminine militance. Larry’s account of Edith’s censure of his levity with regard to her professional advancement within the English department took on new meaning. Be aware of that trait in her nature, and beware of ruffling her on that account. Be sympathetic. .

But Ira still wondered, why did she reveal these intimate details? Her purpose seemed to be to edify her young lover, and his young friend with him, to inculcate in them the ways of the world, its griefs and malice and aberrations. And yet, her telling, which was always understated, had another effect — on Ira, at least. She was like someone acting a part, modestly implying a part: a tragic part, a tragic heroine enmeshed in misfortune, innocent victim of the cruelty and callousness of others — or victim of her own benevolence, a trait that would indeed manifest itself throughout her whole life. Her first marriage, begun as a magnanimous gesture, ended in ugliness and annulment. Her sexual awakening was by force, by someone she trusted.

Afterward, at Berkeley, she formed a liaison with a much-harassed Jew, one Shmuel Hamberg, a Zionist agronomist studying arid-land farming at the university. A man oppressed and tormented, an outcast, a frenetic ideologue — a Socialist, so stridently outspoken in his views that he was tarred and feathered by a gang of patriotic fellow students. She had befriended him, and he had turned to her for comfort and refuge. Attending Berkeley so that he could learn scientific principles of large-scale irrigation, which he was then expected to bring back to the Zionist cooperative farmers who had sent him to America to study, and thus help restore the ancient homeland from its present barrenness to its Biblical plenty, he never did return. Irrigating the deserts of California provided opportunities for private enrichment so great that his idealism folded before them. Large-scale irrigation of the arid regions around Los Banos was a novel idea at the time, and obtaining loans from the neighboring banks to finance his schemes was no easy task; but Shmuel’s visionary zeal and powers of persuasion were equal to it. Even hardheaded and certainly non-Judeophile bankers succumbed to his rhapsodic proposals — and advanced loans. He was shortly in charge of farming great tracts of land, heretofore desert and worthless, but as soon as they were provided with water (brought up from artesian wells by means of huge pumps), they became immensely fertile, capable of producing huge crops of cotton, melons, vegetables, grain.

Edith liked to describe him: he was devoid of elementary courtesy. A Russian Jew, probably a Litvak, Ira surmised, he was tender, compassionate, and endlessly stimulating intellectually. At the same time, he seemed totally devoid of tact, without self-control in argument. Excited, he sputtered and spluttered, sprayed his auditors with saliva when he disputed with them. And such was his impoliteness that when company bored him, or he deemed it was time for them to go, he unceremoniously picked up the alarm clock and began winding it, shaking it, adjusting and setting off the alarm.

Still, Edith had become very attached to him; she would have married him, she said, for all his boorishness and craziness, but for one thing. He wouldn’t consider marrying any woman not Jewish. He couldn’t stand the thought of marrying a woman who was not Jewish! With that stunning rejection, Edith determined it was high time to leave Berkeley. Only by leaving Berkeley could she break his hold upon her, separate herself from his intellectual and emotional domination. She applied for a position at NYU, and fortunately for her, Professor Watt, head of the English department, although stuffy in many ways, rigidly decorous, believed firmly in as heterogeneous an English department as possible. Rumor had it he was even considering hiring a native Korean, author of a book about life in Korea. Nor was anyone sure that Professor Watt didn’t know that Boris G, a fellow instructor in the English department, was Jewish. Professor Watt seemed bent on ignoring, though still under cover of propriety, the accepted standards of the parent institution on the banks of the Hudson River. And with enrollment in the English department downtown increasing dramatically, while that of the properly academic university uptown dwindled, his superiors could not help but acquiesce in his conduct of the department.

Edith was offered an instructorship to begin in the fall of 1924. It was the same year Larry enrolled in her freshman English class.

Hmm. .

He’d have to think about that, Ira told himself: about her having an affair, as she called it, with Shmuel Hamberg, of his sleeping with her, as the euphemism went. Why did she accept that? Why was that okay? She must have realized that she was no whit less a shiksa in his eyes for all that. Then what did she expect? He’d have to muse on that, construe all the queer quirks impinging and overlapping within her nature. The things she welcomed, the things she couldn’t abide. She refused to convert to Judaism to please her lover, if conversion would have been sufficient. That was her independent-mindedness coming to the fore. Hmm. . Never mind the chemistry text, or the chemistry quiz coming up. Old Avogadro and gram-mass; you can get through. You’re not heading that way anyway. Think of it: the guy was Jewish. But she had no objection to marrying him. He did, though, he did: to marrying her. A Zionist. A Socialist, too. Christ, for all his freethinking, he was as bad as Zaida in that respect. Or was that an excuse? Maybe it was; it just possibly might be. But notice, marriage was important to her. Aha. Then what was going to happen to this love affair with Larry? He was ten, eleven years younger than she was. How could anything come of it? He said he wanted to marry her. But three years from now when he got his degree, he’d be twenty-two; she’d be thirty-three. So. . so you were a liberated, vanguard bohemian; you sneered at the Babbitts and the big butter-and-egg men, you despised the middle class. But what the hell, you had to get down to earth, and Larry especially, used to the best of everything — come on, for Chrissake, do a few of the chem exercises, balance a few of the tougher equations.

Not now. . But she could ride a saddle horse, she said. She was quite an expert horsewoman. She rode all over those Western trails, by the Indian reservations, the hogans, she called them, into the mountains that she said changed color all the time, the shadows slipping on and off them. And she showed her two friends a poem of hers in Poetry magazine that Larry understood and Ira didn’t. Dunce. Why didn’t they write like, oh, lots, lots he understood: Aiken and A. E. Robinson and Robinson Jeffers, and Teasdale and Millay, though he wasn’t crazy about them; he liked A. E. Housman better. Why did they have to hide the meaning out of sight, as if behind a screen or a hill? Once in a while he got the idea; whose poem was it like that he got the idea from long after he read it, and enjoyed his discovery? It was Robert Frost again: “I have had too much of apple-picking: I am overtired of the great harvest I myself desired.” And even that time Edith helped a little. She didn’t know it, but she helped when she said, “You’ll notice there’s always a compression in rhythm at the high point of his meaning.” Boy, she could tell right away.

Well. . It’s in 2.24 liters of solution. . What’s the normality of a phosphoric acid solution containing 270 g of H_3PO_4?. . And Edith could — oh, no, you’re given moles, moles, you donkey. So just multiply 1.3 moles by the gram weight of Na_2SO_4. .

IX

Edith would not be denied Ira’s company, not even so she could be alone with Larry, so for yet another time, while Iola was out, the three, Edith, her young lover, and a bewildered Ira, sat in the shared living room, white-painted, airy, and spacious, its windows on the street in one direction, and in the other on the churchyard of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. So light and unencumbered the apartment was! As unobtrusively as he could, Ira tried to sort out of his surroundings those specific elements from the composite that gave an airy charm to the whole. He had never seen sheer white walls like that before. So simple, plain, with just three pictures on them, reproductions, one of crude golden flowers almost leaping out of the frame. And another of a blue farm wagon. Whose were they? And the other adornments Navajo rugs, gray, white, and black, with thick, primitive designs on them, arrowheads some seemed to be.

Over her cup of tea, held with daintiest of fingers, Edith related that there was a certain Indian tribe that had apparently vanished entirely from its abode among the forests of California. No one knew its language, no one had bothered to learn it, or study the anthropological relics of the tribe’s former existence, no one except a Dr. Wasserman, professor of anthropology, under whom Edith studied at Berkeley. But lo and behold, Edith told an enthralled Larry and Ira: one member of the tribe had survived into their century. His name was Zaru. In wretched state, emaciated and dying of starvation, he had given himself up, the last wild Indian in California. He was sure the white men were going to kill him, as they had killed the other members of his tribe. He begged his astonished “captors” to slay him at once, not to torture him. But no one understood his entreaties, no one understood anything of what he was saying, laymen and trained anthropologists alike, until Dr. Wasserman was called upon. He had acquired some rudiments of the language, acquired from fragmented though still extant remnants of California Indians. From these he had compiled an elementary dictionary. Aided by it, he succeeded in communicating with the terrified, miserable aborigine (who had refused all nourishment while in the county jail, in the belief he was held there to be fattened for sacrifice). Dr. Wasserman assured Zaru that no one was going to kill him — and by persistence and by slow degrees, he won the Indian’s trust, prevailed on him to take food and drink, take medications, learn something of white man’s customs with regard to sanitation, wear white man’s garments, and won him back a semblance of well-being, a modicum of confidence.

How had he managed to survive in such close proximity to civilized settlements? How had he succeeded in eluding detection in an area that was scarcely more than an enclave in the midst of the dreaded white man’s habitations? Edith enthralled her small audience, intentionally retarding the action of her story. Hunters in search of game traversed the terrain that was Zaru’s refuge, sportsmen, fishermen, campers, and forest rangers. Zaru and his sister, while she was alive, using all the ancient lore of their forefathers, had subsisted on fish and wild animals, by spearing fish, by trapping small animals, hunting wildfowl with snare and bow. Ever vigilant, ever on the alert to the presence of the white man, depending on every device of stealth and concealment that tribal childhood had inculcated in them, the two siblings had managed to evade detection and survive. Zaru had lost track of the moons and the years that had passed during his and his sister’s long, furtive, unobserved existence. .

Time, Ira thought, to break this exposition. Yes. He pressed the F7 key. Better try it out first, the change or insertion, try out whether it was appropriate, whether it blended with material before and afterward, and then if the interpolation appealed to him, he could move it into its proper place. If not, just delete. However, the insertion about Zaru, the new departure, did appeal to him. Such were the wonders of the age of computers. Ira pressed the F7 key again. In trying to describe the many advantages the device presented its user, he had said to others, without knowing exactly what he meant — just a general notion, or perhaps because it was a handy cliché—that the word processor added a new dimension to his writing. It summoned to the writer’s side a faithful and supportive friend, Ecclesias, for example. Ira smiled. Fact was, and again he invoked a semi-cliché, the device vouchsafed the writer a quantum leap in means of communication, in versatility. It enabled him to do things he could not have done otherwise, operations too formidable otherwise, beyond his skills, his patience, though he regarded himself as patient where writing was concerned, to accomplish things beyond his stamina.

Even when he was young — writing his first and only novel — he could not have done now, so reduced in vitality, what he could do then, without the assistance of this marvel of electronic technology. Panegyric was furthest from his mind when he set out to make his remarks, but if anything ever came of this long, long opus, anything worthwhile, it would be owing in large part to the work of multitudes of men and women who, without fanfare, matter-of-factly, had perfected and assembled this instrument (and continued to improve it). They were liberators of the mind. .

“It’s really true?” Larry asked. “It seems utterly fantastic.”

“Oh, no.” Edith smiled fondly at her young lover. “It really did happen. In 1912. Wasserman wrote a book about it later — called Zaru. I think the NYU library may have a copy. It ought to, anyway.”

“How long did they live that way?”

“The brother and sister? Years, I imagine. As I told you, Zaru told Wasserman he lost track of the moons. The only way he could have counted them would have been to make a mark on a stick, or something of the sort, and I don’t think he was interested. Survival was the main thing.”

“I was thinking,” Larry said diffidently. “They call them Indians, and they’re not Indians.”

“No, of course not.” Edith regarded him indulgently. “Anthropologists have tried many other names. ‘Aborigine’ is one. But there’s been an objection to that. On the part of the Indians themselves in some cases, yes. It makes them feel as if they were considered some kind of wild creature. And of course they’re anything but that. They have — or had — a highly developed culture. ‘Native’ is a good term, probably the best, certainly the most legitimate. But our one hundred percent Americans, fourth- or fifth-generation super-patriots, object. They consider themselves the only native Americans. Which is absurd. ‘Amerind’ is one term that’s been tried.”

“Tamarind,” Larry chuckled. “Tamarind is a tree, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I think so. I don’t know what kind.”

“A wooden Indian,” Larry quipped.

“And about as awkward as ‘Amerind,’” said Edith. “I don’t believe the name will last. Do you have a name to suggest, Ira?”

“No,” he said, with lingering bashfulness. “But I was thinking of ‘Indigen.’”

“‘Indigenous’ or ‘indigent’?” Larry bantered.

“It could be both.”

“As in fact most Indians are,” Edith commented. “It’s not a bad term. Is there such a word, Ira?”

“‘Indigen’? Oh I doubt it ‘Injun.’ ‘Aborigine.’ Something like that.” With the same finger that he pointed, Ira scratched his temple.

Larry smiled at him. “Ira is like a pack rat with words. I read once how they stow away every shiny trinket in their nests.”

“I’m sorry.” Ira grinned in abnegation. “It happens to be true about me and words. It’s a habit.”

“It’s not a bad one. Your feeling for words is remarkable. I’ve noticed that,” Edith said.

“If I could only remember important things the same way that I remember words. You know, practical things, useful matters, the way Larry does. But I don’t.”

“His sister died,” Larry prompted. “I suppose it was sheer loneliness that drove him out of hiding.”

“And hunger. Imagine the terrible ordeal of trying to survive, survive and hide, in a constantly shrinking living space. Oh, I’m sure he wanted to die.”

“I wonder how long he had been alone.”

“Many moons. Again many moons. Just as he said he and his sister had been together.”

“Is that so.”

Many moons, Ira meditated. Zaru and his sister had apparently lived a number of years together evading the white man. .

And at night, with Minnie beside him, the listening Ira became grim with fantasy, fantasy so close to his reality — and who knew, similar to that of the primitive siblings — they wouldn’t dare build a campfire in their woodland covert, but he would have reached out and felt for her cunt. And she would have understood. It was the only pleasure they had. What else were they going to do? He’d slap her if she didn’t submit. To whom was she going to complain? The white man? Besides, that was her only pleasure, too. Maybe she’d ask for it, the way Minnie did sometimes when she was younger: stick out her round white ass from under the covers — only Zaru’s sister’s would be brown. But what if he knocked her up? Jesus, you couldn’t just leave the kid bawling in the woods. Poor naked little bastard. Who the hell would have had the heart to abandon the newborn infant? And somebody might find it, too. Then you’d have to kill it, bury it? Jesus, no. Maybe they knew native contraceptives, native scumbags. Or just get out a second before you came, left some of that “white stuff,” Minnie called it, semen, and gave her a kid. Still, the goddamn Canaanites killed their kids, their firstborn. Lucky Edith and Larry didn’t know what he was thinking about; how could they? Every night a chance to fuck your sister. Would you ever get tired of it? Among the trees in the forest, all quiet and bosky, only “O-o-h, o-o-h,” beneath the green boughs, “I’m getting that good feeling! W-o-o-h!” crescendoing the first time she got it. And ear cocked, always cocked for that sonofabitch white man tramping through the woods, maybe just when you were coming — or she was. Jesus Christ, it wouldn’t be so different, would it? As when he humped Minnie, always in dread of Mom or Pop; or if the airshaft window was open, afraid the two might be heard upstairs or downstairs? Yes. Or panic of Mamie in the kitchen, Mamie just around the hall when he was dandling Stella on his dick — oh, poor Mom; telling Uncle Louis she yearned and burned at three o’clock in the morning for Moe, Moe and his pillar of meat—“Look what I’ve got here, Leah”—alone with him, while Pop was making his rounds delivering milk. Husky Moe snoring, Mom yearning, “Es hot mir gefelte libe,” while little Pop, all by himself, crossed the low walls between tenement roofs at night, low walls topped by brown, glazed ceramic hoods. Oh, Ira knew rooftops well. . Sacrifice a newborn infant, but you can’t screw your sister. Sinful, sinful. But he had broken through that barrier, broken through religion or taboo, or whatever it was. Before he knew it, he had broken through it. And paid, and paid, and — cut it out. Listen to what she was telling them, listen attentively, the way Larry did. Get everything else out of your mind. Ask her if Zaru and his sister ever cooked anything. .

When a lowered window shade happened spontaneously to snap free and roll itself up, the way window shades sometimes did, as if on a hair trigger, Zaru had averred, “Great magic.”

Nothing else in the white man’s world impressed Zaru. But he was awed by the skittish window shade. “Great magic!” Dr. Wasserman had gained international fame by publishing an account of Zaru’s adjustment to twentieth-century civilization. Edith herself was so intrigued that she decided to take a course in anthropology with him. Then followed the most personal revelation of any she had made so far or as yet. One evening, during a field trip under the guidance of the same Professor Wasserman, she had been invited by him to stroll away from the campfire where the rest of his students were taking their ease, and as soon as they had walked beyond earshot of the others, he had virtually raped her. “I fought him off,” Edith said. “But he knew just what to do to make me surrender. . ” And poor Larry flinched at her explicitness.

Edith spoke with the two young men so intimately, with so little hesitation, it made Ira shrink. If he were to confess so about his family, what would be their reaction? But he listened, continuing to compose his portrait of her, of the life and its struggles this girlish Ph.D. had endured.

X

What a glorious silver ring Larry sported!

Edith had written her aunt in Silver City describing the kind of ring she wanted, and the finger size — large — and asked her aunt to buy the ring and send it to New York. Made by a Navajo craftsman from a silver dollar, an erstwhile “cartwheel” as silver dollars were called, it formed the setting for a chunk of glossy, mottled turquoise. Bold and solid, the ring just fit on the pinkie of Larry’s big hand, and because it was on his pinkie, the ring seemed even bolder and more solid. And boy, was it beautiful!

Ira had never before seen anything so distinguished, so rare. What was gold, what were diamonds in comparison? Even platinum seemed a platitude. Anybody who hoarded up enough money could buy items of that kind; every jewelry store sold them. But this — Ira was bewitched. Not envious, though full of longing. Ah, to be the object of such affection, to be worthy of such a gift! It spoke of New Mexico, that far-off place from which Edith came. It spoke of open spaces, amplitude, of leisurely stances, of solitudes, of generous feelings — it called for rare perceptions that appreciated silver fashioned by an Indian artisan, perceptions that prized the unique artisanship more than standardized gems of gold, that esteemed the modest, elusive color of turquoise more than glittering diamonds. You had to change, you had to change and try to come close to her — her values: to learn to recognize artistry cultivated in the most unlikely places, adapting to the humblest materials. You had to learn to feel the aura of the created artifact. What a beautiful ring!

But what a tummel, a tumult, it stirred up in Larry’s family when they saw the ring on his finger. They tried to dissemble their worry and disapproval when Ira was present, though he knew they were convinced he was in league. He could feel their dissatisfaction with him, their unhappy reproach. He secretly supported Larry, yes, but he was just a follower, an acolyte of sorts. He hadn’t connived with Larry; he hadn’t inveigled him to give up dentistry and enter upon a literary career. What did he have to do with Larry’s falling in love with Edith? He was just a bystander, at most a confidant, willing, yes, but hardly more than that.

Sure, he was secretly happy Larry had made up his mind to switch from NYU to CCNY in the fall of 1925—who wouldn’t want his pal to be in the same college? But Larry wasn’t going to CCNY so the two would be together; he was going to CCNY in order to become more independent of his parents. He no longer would need to turn to them to pay his tuition to college. CCNY required no tuition. All he asked of them, at present, so it seemed, was just to furnish him with room and board. He could get enough money for the year, spending money, and cash for incidental expenses, and supply himself with a few clothes too, by drawing on his small legacy, and by working during the summer vacation. Avoid working for his brother Irving as housedress salesman, avoid practically all dependency on his family. His best bet this coming summer, better than being a counselor at a boys’ camp, was to do something that paid a great deal more, and suited his temperament and talents to a tee: become an entertainer on the staff of a large borscht-circuit summer resort.

That would really be the most congenial job he could think of. He had a natural flair for acting, for thinking up skits, for the role of a stand-up raconteur — cracking jokes, hamming it up. Failing that, he might even earn as much in pay and tips as a singing waiter. The tips were good, and he had a good voice. He could hold a tune. He could read music. Not only would he come home with a tidy sum, but a singing waiter’s job would provide an excellent avenue to the summer resort entertainment world. Perhaps more than that. With a little experience, versatility garnered on the borscht circuit, he could make the next step — to the world of the stage, to the world of entertainment in general, the theater. No question: that was his best bet for loosening his ties with his family, for gaining the kind of freedom he needed for a new career. He had friends and connections in the resort business, in the entertainment business. All he needed to do was to cultivate a few whom he had more or less avoided in the past. He had already told Ira about them. They would welcome overtures, welcome his initiatives of cordial relations. They were bores, but what the hell. Exploit them. Spend a little time with them. He could stand it for the sake of achieving a larger goal, promoting his future. Make a few phone calls, accept a few dinner invitations, take the daughter of somebody he knew who owned a famous Jewish resort to a dance. And if all his finagling failed, then, as he said before, he could certainly get a singing waiter’s job. Not first choice, but a sure way of getting the next-best returns out of the summer. Anyway, he’d better begin action at once, make inquiries, follow up leads, land some kind of a well-paying job.

Ira approved. Although an entertainer’s job or a singing waiter’s job would not have been the kind he would have sought, that was only because he didn’t have Larry’s gifts. A more menial job, a shlepper’s job, was more in keeping with his aptitudes — and his inclinations too, for that matter. He had no talent. But the type of job or position that Larry secured wasn’t the important thing right now; the important thing was that Larry was going to use it to break his dependence on his family, break the mutually sentimental hold of family, widen the cleavage between them.

That was exactly how his family perceived his actions. When he announced his intention to get a job that would keep him away from home for most of the summer, the Gordons were deeply disturbed. Under other circumstances, without their son’s obvious infatuation with a woman ten or eleven years his senior, and a gentile at that, without his apparent determination to carry the love affair, the liaison, all the way to marriage, they would have reacted altogether differently. They were accustomed to Larry’s absence for long periods of time with his Bermuda uncle. But now they interpreted Larry’s effort as exactly what it was: a definite signal of his decision to sever connections with his family. Perhaps leave them, quit the household, when he returned. And horrors, perhaps marry Edith when he returned. Assure them to the contrary though he might, that he wasn’t planning anything so drastic at present, they were convinced that was his purpose, to enter on a preliminary stage of a road that would ultimately lead to his perdition. Such a handsome, gifted nineteen-year-old youth married to someone bound to become an old crone in a few years, bound to look like one in a few years: in her forties when he was still in his twenties. (An alte klyafte, an old virago, Mom would have said, but the Gordons didn’t know any Yiddish.) He could have had young heiresses at his beck and call, a worldly, polished youth like Larry, exceedingly handsome, and with a bit of English accent to enhance his charm — so Larry reported them as saying — young heiresses, daughters of elite German Jewish families, millionaires, leading merchants and financiers. Even if they weren’t heiresses, no, even if they weren’t Jewish, at least someone near his own age; they didn’t have to be beauties. At least young. Madness, his father burst out, sheer madness, what Larry planned to do. And she, meaning Edith, was to blame too, his mother accused, and the sisters concurred.

“At which I got hot under the collar,” Larry added. “Especially when my officious sister Irma suggested that maybe Sam, being a lawyer, ought to go see Edith and talk things over with her. I told them flatly it was none of their business.”

Edith, Larry had already let it be known emphatically, Edith would be gone for most of the summer. She had already made arrangements to travel to Europe, so his getting a job as entertainer or singing waiter was no subterfuge for going to live with her, or eloping, or whatever lurid imaginings they might have (and they did indeed seem to have them, if Larry’s report of their behavior was any indication: they sometimes seemed beside themselves, especially his father). It was just a summer job, he kept insisting, a job, not an overture to disaster.

Much to his surprise, Sam agreed with him. Intensifying their opposition to the youth’s love affair might only drive the two lovers together, so Larry gathered from hints dropped by Irma, and from pumping their Hungarian serving woman, with whom he was a favorite. Getting a B.A. from CCNY was not the worst thing that could happen to Larry, was the gist of Sam’s argument. Sam had gotten his B.A. there too, and gone on to be a lawyer. And who knew what would happen in three years, the changes that might take place in the youth — and in her, Edith? After all, she was an intelligent woman; she could foresee the consequences of the disparity in their ages a few years hence. Larry might even recognize the wisdom of eventually getting his degree in dentistry. Their best policy, Sam urged, would be a sort of truce. Let Larry have his way. He was head over heels in love at the present. In time he might come to his senses. Or she might. There were always those possibilities. Laissez-faire. .

They adopted Sam’s counsel, but with little grace. They continued to simmer beneath the surface, barely suppressing their opposition to the course Larry was committed to taking. And worst of all, as far as Ira was concerned, a by-product of their resentment of Larry’s flouting of their convictions of what was in his best interest, they believed Ira had a hand in his friend’s disastrous design. They believed he had helped Larry concoct the scheme. Or if not that, then by his own pauperish example, his indifference to commercial and financial matters, his lack of ambition, he had undermined Larry’s healthy practicality concerning things material, led Larry astray. Ira no longer felt welcome at the home of the Gordons. In his reluctance to meet Larry there, unless Larry’s relatives were absent, he declined supper invitations, frankly proposed meetings elsewhere, sometimes in a cafeteria, sometimes in Washington Square Park.

And when Larry, after his very first interview — with the manager of Copake Lodge in the Catskill Mountains — was informed that the management had already filled its quota of entertainers, but was offered a singing waiter job, even though, as the manager remarked, Larry was bumping someone else more or less assured of the same job, he accepted the offer immediately. At Larry’s earnest importuning, Ira attended a sort of farewell reunion for his friend before he departed for the resort. Cordiality toward him had vanished almost entirely from the Gordons’ reception. Mere recognition, something akin to sufferance, was all they vouchsafed.

And yet, oddly enough, though Ira could protest with good semblance of faith that he had nothing to do with Larry’s change of career, Ira still felt a recurring sense of guilt, a fuzzy culpability that told him he deserved the ill-disguised censure emanating toward him from Larry’s close relatives. He felt that in some obscure way he was influencing Larry, subverting his will. It went even further than that in Ira’s untrammeled imagination: he deserved the censure of Larry’s folks for helping mislead one they doted on, because he not only approved all Larry did but, like an understudy, conned all Larry did. It was all very strange. And confused. Yes, he felt guilty. No, he had nothing to do with it. Yes, he was taking advantage of his friend — he had always taken advantage of his friend, using him. But how the hell could it be otherwise? His friend had wanted him involved.

Long were the dialogues he audited in Edith’s apartment. (And again, why should he have been there? Why did they both want him there?) They were dialogues he rarely entered into, not at the beginning certainly. They were dialogues he barely understood at first, he only slowly, slowly grasped their import, their abstract assumptions, which he could only do by filling them with specific references and examples: the Middle Class. Their values. The Middle Class, their materialism, their emphasis on acquisition, their striving for material things: for mink coats, for the latest in Grand Rapids furniture, for prestigious addresses. (Jesus, didn’t they know what 119th Street was all about? Didn’t everybody want to climb out of those cold-water slums?) The Middle Class, their abject subservience to convention, to keeping up with the Joneses. The Middle Class and their stifling of the Artist, or even the Artiste. Ah, that was their worst offense: in their demand for conformity they allowed the Artist no latitude; they condemned him to mediocrity. The Artist had to be free to express himself, and especially to give vent to his disillusionment with hollow Middle-Class standards, Middle-Class pretensions to morality, Middle-Class hypocrisy, shams, crassness. And ever and again, these faults and woeful shortcomings, these constraints and impediments were exemplified by the Gordons — Edith continually warned about the dangers inherent in Larry’s family for him, the snares and temptations they would place in his way, their appeals to family loyalty, to his natural tenderness. On and on.

But what should he do? Larry asked. He had already taken the first step to oppose them. Next fall: CCNY. What else, what next? It was up to him, Edith said: it would depend on how provoked his family might become by the new direction he had taken, and how unpleasant their opposition to the change might be: the pressure of disapprobation on him personally, as well as the enticements they would put in his way. They had already shown their hand by their offer to send him to Bermuda to stay with his uncle till the next academic year, and afterward attend Columbia University. But she was always ready to help, should he decide to sever all ties: to pay rent for a room, to see that he had enough to eat, subsidize his attendance at CCNY—

Oh, no, he could take care of that, Larry immediately assured her. He had the salesman’s knack, he could sell, after school. He could get a part-time job anytime. Action on so drastic a break with his folks could be deferred. Transition could and should be more gradual. He had to consider his father’s condition, especially. After all, his folks did have his welfare at heart, however mistakenly they perceived that welfare. He owed them a gradual transition. Let them see that he could get a bachelor’s degree at CCNY (as she too had recommended), even though in preparation not for the profession of dentistry, but for a writing career. And first and foremost he meant to accustom them to his attending CCNY while he lived at home; that would appease their anxiety. Another year, he might take the next step, move into a small apartment, and they might be reconciled to it. Edith agreed. It would be unnecessarily cruel to his parents to quit NYU, renounce a professional career, and leave home all at one and the same time; it would cause unnecessary distress, to his parents and to his close kin.

It was all very stirring, full of dark assessments and pending adventure, prediction and suspense. Intriguing, engrossing promises of exhilarating future that had the power in a moment to preempt for Ira any assignment in any subject — and even classroom instruction. “You began the term by doing A work.” Pedantic, precise Dr. Laine, professor of French, raised his fine, delicately pastel features from his recitation grade book and cautioned Ira with chiseled words. “You’ve slipped very badly of late.”

XI

Edith had been instrumental in securing an instructor’s position at NYU for Iola Reid. She was taller than Edith, and because she was so slender and willowy, she looked quite statuesque. Just turned thirty, like Edith, Scandinavian in origin and appearance, Iola had straw-colored blond hair, which she wore in a tightly bound braid around her head. Her face was thin, her nose too, and barely saved from prominence by the general air of cultivation her countenance conveyed. And she wore, almost invariably, a green costume or green accessory (as against Edith’s wide spectrum of colors); green dress, green earrings, green pendants.

All kinds of fascinating flecks of information pertained to her past, in one case sensational. All of them were divulged by Edith in matter-of-fact tones to her young lover and his friend (to their great wonder every now and then). Iola had been brought up with her brothers and sisters on a potato farm in Idaho. She was the oldest of the siblings, and after her mother died, the widowed father, either in fury or sexual furor, chased his daughter with an ax over the fields. Iola still dreamt of the terrible episode, and awoke at night screaming.

She was to all intents and purposes engaged to a Rhodes scholar, Richard Scofield, presently studying for his master’s degree in English literature at Oxford. Oxford, hoary with tradition, epitome of cloistered scholarship, fraught with awesome prestige! Oxford! Could anything sound more utterly entrancing? Olympian, Jesus. Maybe that’s what he had once dreamed CCNY would be like. Edith described Richard as extraordinarily polished, charming, and handsome. While on a visit to Paris, he had been raped by a homosexual friend in a taxicab. Raped by a homosexual in a taxicab? A grown man? Not the nine- or ten-year-old urchin he was when that rusty sonofabitch had lured him to Fort Tryon Park. And as if in answer to Ira’s thoughts, Edith implied that perhaps the episode had not been altogether a rape — that Richard, she had reason to believe, leaned, ever so slightly, in that direction. “Bisexual” was the term she used. “Bisexual,” that new term for Ira. John Vernon, her faculty cosponsor of the Arts Club, and an avowed homosexual (though he had been married), was “licking his chops,” said Edith, waiting for Richard to return. And the whole affair, John Vernon’s interest in Richard, and the episode in Paris, had naturally given Iola grave misgivings, distressed her with incertitude as to whether she could truly count on Richard to go through with his pledge of marriage.

What tiny, tiny inflections of tone entered Edith’s recital of all this, so barely perceptible that Ira could imagine afterward that he had only heard his own suspicions, hearkened to his own suspect promptings. No, Edith couldn’t possibly allow even a word of her account to dip into envy; she was too good, too kind; she was above finding relish in the possibility of Iola’s hopes going astray. Maybe they were going astray; who knew? Why did he get the idea that Iola was deliberately fostering some kind of symmetry with regard to himself, symmetry, vis-à-vis Edith, to counterbalance Edith’s affair with Larry? Ira felt a tug of enticement, albeit discreet, a tug of rivalry, a cool inducement to be her squire. And those private, faint signals, hints of incipient archness, that enlisted him into alliance, not of derision for the other couple, but of calm detachment, maybe imperceptible gravitation in the direction of her orbit. . Perhaps if he weren’t so obtuse, and mistrustful of himself, he might have seen through Edith’s sangfroid, accorded due significance to those millimicron signals, as Ivan, the physics whiz, would have called them, that she transmitted. But boy, would he make a dumbo of himself if he was wrong. And wrong he surely was. What else? And do what, anyway? Edith had already told him and Larry that after Iola’s father had chased her, she became frigid, lost all interest in sex. So what did he think? That she was like Stella, ready to yield at a touch? Or like Minnie, with a little wheedling, lewd arousing — flap his hard-on with a rubber on it, ready to go? Or was Edith just getting back at Iola, because Iola envied Edith’s growing reputation at the university, as Edith claimed, because Dr. Watt was very favorably impressed with the syllabus of her modern poetry course, and with the large body of students who attended her lectures? Or worse: Iola, Edith said, was jealous of her love affair, her infatuation, as Iola egregiously referred to it, with her freshman lover.

Look at that: Ph.D.s both, and they behaved almost like anybody else when they envied or were jealous of each other. Almost like everybody else, except their grudges were honed so fine, they hurt without lacerating, unlike the way Jews volleyed their grudges about, as did other tenement denizens on 119th Street. No, the edges of polite grudges were so fine, you had to be warned they could wound, you had to be told afterward they had wounded. Ira could hardly recognize the edges himself. Would he ever? Or was he wrong? All he felt sometimes in the exchanges between the two women was just a kind of — a faint rumor. . Was that the way you knew? It might have come out of your own head—

No, he had gone astray. .

Ira had poked about for causes all that afternoon and evening, dully, spiritlessly, like a blind man rummaging, only worse, hopelessly, as though the bottom had dropped out of his purpose, left him without any élan, any direction.

“I’ve suddenly lost all my zing,” he confessed to M, his steadfast M, always so quick to console.

Oh, he recognized the symptoms of his malaise, although that did little good, symptoms of the sudden onset of acute depression. Old story. And yet, he wasn’t quite sure, wasn’t quite sure he hadn’t brought the condition on himself. He had locked himself out, or rather in, painted himself into a corner, as they said: the corner of solipsism. He had oversimplified himself, for one thing; he wasn’t that much of a simpleton — and moreover, he would be repeating that obtuseness leitmotif later on. But mostly the fault was, the blockade was, solipsism: it wasn’t what he felt at this junction that was of primary consideration; it was what Larry felt or did, and was going through. Ira had lost sight of that. He knew he had to continue the tale, but in his need to portray his own sensations and emotions, he had almost forgotten those sharp, those acrid moments of quarrel that broke out between Larry and his family: over his staying out late or his staying out overnight, over his losing weight, his emaciation. All this, even before he announced that he intended to abort his career as dentist, devote himself to poetry and to writing. Those were the important things, those sudden and embarrassing eruptions of scolding and upbraiding by his parents or sisters — all three sisters — at family gatherings — and Larry’s own irate and desperate rejoinders.

For it was true that to such a pitch had differences reached between Larry and his immediate kin that for a while Ira feared that their passionate concern for Larry’s welfare, their furious resentment of Edith, might lead to her undoing. They might complain about her behavior to the head of the English department, Dr. Watt. They might excoriate her disgraceful carrying-on with a freshman. Exposing her love affair with Larry might lead to her termination from NYU, might ruin her chances for college teaching positions elsewhere. That Larry’s family never did any of these things was to their credit. They also probably reasoned that there were other approaches to the problem, that time might be on their side, just as Sam advised.

He had quit. He was stuporous, and he slept; the miserable day had passed. Something else he had wanted to interpolate, but it had been forgotten, and the omission irked him now. Where was that goddamn ballpoint, or his alertness now to satisfy the need for making a memo of these volatile ideas, if such they could be called? He slept, awoke, went for a two-block walk along Manhattan Street, north of the mobile home court. Two blocks in one direction marked the limit of his present pedestrian boundary; retracing his steps made four blocks in all.

He mused about Israel, his people of Israel. Their almost forty years of statehood had forged them into a nation; they would never give up being one, even if it took atomic weapons to defend — and if possibly they would be destroyed in retaliation. And yet that was the world problem that had to be resolved, the problem on which the future of humanity pivoted. They had built a society with their own hands. The Israelis were different from the Crusaders, he mused. And his gloomy certainties were reinforced later, when he and M read their nightly paragraph or two from their Hebrew reader recounting the adventures and mishaps of one Shulim making aliyah, his privations and travails even getting to Eretz Israel, and once there the blood and sweat expended, the monsoons endured, the skin cracked by the heat, and the lives taken by malaria. Surrender it? Nothing doing. And then to read in the evening a Xerox out of the New York Times sent them by Barney B, about the movie Claude Lanzmann had made, monumental in scope — nine and a half hours in duration! — of the Holocaust, ha-Sho’ah. Never, never, never! And before bedtime, adjusting electronic watches, his and M’s, from daylight saving to standard time, listening to the last of his tapes. Life without purpose, without writing, without re-creating toward some end or design, was simply unbearable. (Oh, and perhaps that was what he had had in mind and forgotten: today’s frustration made for tomorrow’s resolution. But at the moment the adage was devoid of comfort.)

So. . proceed. He had said enough of his failure. He must reenter the stream, and with something merry, at last. .

That evening Larry and he had gotten rid of the crowd of Edith’s modern poetry students, whom she had invited to attend the cookie and coffee soirée, by pulling a ruse, one right out of Robert Louis Stevenson, whimsical and daring. After winking at Ira to follow his lead, and with a great flourish that called the attention of all the young guests, Larry announced with just the right tone of authority that the hour had come when propriety called for departure. With apologies for having overstayed their welcome, he and Ira wriggled into their topcoats, waved their hats — and shamed the others into following their example and taking their leave. The trick was as old as the dawn of urban life, no doubt, but it worked. It terminated Percey’s spouting about E. E. Cummings and lured everyone out of the apartment into the dark, cool street. Larry declined the sensible route of the others, in the direction of the subway, but chose an incomprehensible one, on pretext of a belated engagement, and bade the others a resolute farewell. Thereupon the two conspirators circled the block — and back to the apartment, which they reentered with great laughter and gaiety. Ah, what a master stratagem!

And afterward, when he finally parted company with Larry, who took the 42nd Street shuttle to the West Side, parted with such camaraderie and joy, the ride home was nothing short of rapturous: to Lexington and 116th Street, and then treading on air to the stoop steps of dismal tenement, up the ill-lit, bleary stairs, into the bleak kitchen. And Mom and Pop in bed and. . in her folding cot beside them, Minnie asleep too, asleep, unapproachable, out of reach. . just as well, despite regret and flicker of craving. Gave him a chance to meditate on True Love. He, alone, sitting at the round table with the green oilcloth on it, in the silent, empty kitchen, to feel the transfiguring power of True Love! True Love that swamped Ira with glamour, hovered above the eyes in a rare twilight of tender ardor, through which the roach crept over the scuffed linoleum for refuge under the rosy apron that hung about the sink, crept on an oblique mission on a strange geodesic.

But it’s all screwed up for you, pal: the right words, screwed up — and how to keep solipsism at bay, Ecclesias, when the snail of tomorrow, of Sunday morning, left his tacky track on tonight’s glorious reverie? Heh?

Yeah. . It sat there like a rock. . with its mind vitiated, like the mind of a rock, if it had one, in the silent, bleak kitchen with the tired-white window blind drawn. .

How could he re-create it all? Ira mused. How could he re-create it, limited by his own modest gifts and talents? — there would have had to have been talents as inexhaustible as Shakespeare’s to do justice to the recreation. Endowed with something more finite, such a one as he must speak or write.

Finals in a month and May drawing to a close; Larry’s departure for Copake Lodge as soon as finals were over; Edith’s Pullman tickets already bought for her imminent trip to California and New Mexico. The imminence of summer of 1925.

XII

Dulcet the air, and youth expansive. Expectations chromatic. Even in slum squalor, even in academic disaster, even in woeful gratifications, haunting depravity — despite all that, the waning weeks of spring could still infuse the nineteen-year-old with the preciousness of being alive, summon up, single out, enshrine the euphoria of the moment.

It was on a Sunday morning in late May. Yes, a Sunday morning just after dawn, before Mom went shopping on Park Avenue, and the provisions for the occasion already bought the night before, Edith and Iola and their two escorts, Larry and Ira, took the Hudson River excursion steamer to Bear Mountain. Amid the eager crowd of other excursionists, the four boarded the broad-beamed white paddle wheeler, the Henry Hudson, and found four deck chairs on the open, agreeably breezy upper deck. Fair and lightsome the springtime zephyr met them as the boat churned away from its pier, a nimble breeze that brought the hands of the two women to the throats of their open collars, to the brims of their rakish straw hats. Edith was edged with a black stuff of some kind, Iola’s with jade velveteen. It was something to take note of, Ira impressed on himself again, that blond ladies favored green. Stella, too? He hadn’t noticed. Forget it.

They sat facing the Palisades, the New Jersey side of the river broadening away in ripples beyond the railings. Quickened by the fresh, free-roving air, by the innocent, the safe novelty of the journey, one and all reveled at the sight of ever-changing, gliding, tree-lined shores. Meanwhile the vessel made headway against current upstream, leaving a creamy wake in the green water, the bow sending a never-ending small surf before it. It was all so lovely in weather that was flawless, under a sky without a cloud. Ira had never been so conscious of the sheer bliss of a perfect day. Smoothly the steamer traveled on, from tidal to fresh water, from banks that had been a mile apart to banks separated by only a few hundred rods. Euphoria savored both time and distance, would have extended both indefinitely, interchanged them both within the steady churning of paddle wheels impelling the excursion boat up the river.

After a sail of over two hours, they reached Bear Mountain, the other terminus. They disembarked, climbed up the slope until they found a shady place by themselves under a cluster of trees. They spread the blanket Larry had brought along, brought the sandwiches and the thermos bottle of iced tea out of the basket, and picnicked. The day was full of gladness and regret, gladness that sharpened regret, regret that thrust gladness into greater relief. For Ira, gladness at being there, being privileged to participate in traditional, innocent, untroubled diversion, to practice refinement, to spend a day in the company of two cultivated women, to share rare contentment with them, and note how they enjoyed nature, the outdoors, the warm, balmy air, sunlight and leafy shade, lolling, serving sandwiches, pouring tea from the quart thermos bottle. And regret at his naïveté, his nineteen-year-old bashfulness, his nineteen-year-old assessment of propriety, his callow assessment of what others would like or dislike — of what risks he ran in their opinion of him in his expressions of opinion, his reactions. .

I become mute here, Ecclesias, I become inert, suspended and still. For I am transported backward in time a total of sixty years. And though I now think I know what to do, what to expect, to recognize signal and interpret message, in a word, how to behave, time has long since embalmed the one who would have profited by all this.

— You bear within you a sort of edified mummy, is that what you’re saying? Aren’t all your memories that? Even those of a quarter of an hour ago?

I suppose so. Some I bear within me, blithely, some few. This is one of them.

— Most, it would seem, rather than bear within you, you have to bear. True. In this instance it would seem we chose the right place to picnic.

— My felicitations.

Mom had prepared sandwiches early that morning for Ira to take along as his contribution to the spread — sandwiches, by the way, that in a flush of boldness — or rashness — of audacious gustatory sortie, he had himself asked Mom to buy the ingredients for the previous night, and to make early the next morning: fine Jewish salami, thickly sliced, to be sandwiched between fresh bulkies. She had obliged; she understood, and was impressed, as was Minnie, by how splendid and special the occasion was. Mom had everything in readiness even before Ira was awake. She packed the sandwiches in a brown paper bag while he had breakfast; they were waiting for him on the oilcloth-covered washtub lids when he kissed Mom goodbye and took his leave. With four bulkies, sandwiches in a brown paper bag, he skipped down the shabby stairs, spryly traversed the drab hallway, past the dented letter boxes, to the stoop. Into the quiet, grubby street. And with resilient, youthful stride, he hurried to the subway.

Redolence of salami, garlic redolence, in the subway train, garlic redolence trailing downtown from station to station, until he got off, got off, climbed up, with nascent dubiety, to the street. Redolence of salami, garlic redolence, environed him as he walked west to the Hudson River. And stronger and stronger, as the morning grew warmer — or he imagined — the nearer he approached the rendezvous, garlic redolence. The more he sniffed the paper bag, the more worried he became, the more the contents assaulted and alarmed his nostrils. Jewish immigrant boor, he was certain to be judged, slum, Jewish boor. He had blatantly violated the most elementary rules of etiquette: no one but a gross numskull, an ignorant chump, would outrage the delicate palates of two such well-bred ladies by offering them food that reeked of garlic to high heaven. Fortunately, he arrived at the dockside before the others. That gave him his chance, his one and only chance. As swiftly as he could, he hurried toward one side of the pier, found open water between pier and bow of the excursion steamer, and tossed bag and contents into the river. Gone was the garlic, gone the redolence. What a relief!

Tell me, is this the place for regrets, Ecclesias?

— You might say it’s the place for everything: regrets, confessions, confusions, despondence, and elation.

Because it occurred to me, Ecclesias, and not for the first time, occurred to me in my pusillanimity, that as Larry lay outstretched beside his love, why should not the incipient symmetry prevail, and I lie at ease likewise beside Iola?

— In the first place, it doesn’t work that way. And in the second place, even if the example of your chum and Edith transmitted the same kind of prompting for Iola as it did for you, say, to the level of acquiescence, what then? You were already disabled.

It’s very kind of you to be so explicit.

— No trouble at all, old chap. You were already incapacitated as far as passing encounters with mature women were concerned. Is that the truth or not? With women like Iola, for example. You lived, or comported yourself, in a fantasy world with respect to them, and were incapable of realizing your fantasies. And why? Because you were incapacitated, as I say: frightened, timid, puerile. I venture to surmise that your imaginary scenario, as they term it today, might indeed have had some basis in fact: that, acting on the incentive Iola seemed to proffer, the hints of inducement she seemed to waft your way, in all likelihood because of your puerility, had you not been so disabled, had you been another type of individual — masculine, virile, self-confident — your guess would have proved right, fancy might have materialized into event. Offer to stroll with her along the path through the woods round about (a velleity that guttered in your mind, and guttered out, all but stillborn). I imagine that because as she perceived you, you offered no threat, she would have accepted your invitation. It’s a matter of intuition, of course, of surmise. Nevertheless it coincides with yours. And not so farfetched, considering she was a woman, a human being, who had taken no vows of celibacy, a young woman of thirty, who had foregone sex for over a year, if not much longer, and was living with a woman who was enjoying its pleasures, or seeming to. Pretend you had the courage you lacked; summon up lost directness, conceive of yourself as the young Steve V, of later acquaintance: “Iola, let’s leave these two lovers to themselves, and stroll among the leafy groves.”

— So what if the other two had guessed your motives? There was nothing unnatural about them; nor would the guess necessarily have predicted the outcome: an innocent stroll was all that might have eventuated. . But, say that while strolling you took her hand. That was enough to tell you. And what would you have done had she returned the pressure of your hand in kind? What should you have done? Oh, you know now, you know now, decades and generations later. What would she have done with that narrow straw hat with the jade lining, uncovering the flaxen braids? Your jacket, the oaten one that had been Larry’s, worn so much now, the creases on the inner side of the arm, creases opposite the elbow, had become permanent — Larry’s jacket your improvised couch. But you didn’t do anything of the sort, did you?

No, I didn’t. I didn’t come back from the walk, with the reverse of the well-known limerick, of the lady inside the tiger, that is, I having been inside the lady, come back with the leaves and weeds brushed from my kasha jacket, and looking bland and introspective, as if I had encountered only the vines and brambles of a hillside. No, I did not.

— Impeccable, slum Prufrock, conforming outwardly, and so faultlessly, to the correct, the virtuous paragon.

The conformation was pathetic; it was all that was left me, and you know it.

— Well, granted. So you’re marooned on barren strands of fancy: desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope. Too bad: Your de rigueur was mortis.

Indeed. How often I’ve thought, had it been Stella, had it been Minnie, the merest suggestion, an unspoken sign, had been sufficient. I did the same thing with another woman later. .

— We waste our time. You cast the salami and bulkies into the river, and they come back to you, not after many days, but in a few hours. During picnic time, still remorseful at the enormity of your throwing away good food, compounded by a new sense of how wrong, how distorted, was your view of refinement, as if politeness were shorn of naturalness, shorn of appetite, eschewed variety, piquancy, you confessed to the deed. And how roundly you were reproved by the others, were you not? By Iola in particular. She was terribly fond of Jewish salami, she said. She loved the savor and the consistency; it was so pungent and substantial. Oh, why had you done it!

Yes, why?

— Unkind of me to say so, I suppose, but sometimes your yearning to undo the done becomes very wearing. What it all amounts to is that had you been a man, you might have copulated with her—

Copulated, hell! Had I been a man I would have fucked her. Fucked her, else what’s a word processor for? Fucked her, though the quasars at the utter bourne of the universe blushed twice their red shift; fornicated avidly, extemporaneously and ignobly. Do you know what “ignoble” sounds like in Yiddish? Its kindred sound is knubl, Yiddish for garlic, that I pitched into the river of my life, together with all the earthiness that was my birthright—

— Let’s not go off the deep end, let’s not storm, advert to coarseness, teeter over the brink of coherence. The fact is: had you been a man you would not have been there.

More than a little astonished with himself, Ira sat with fingers clasped, gazing at the vase-shaped base of the lamp on top of his computer. The “vase” was metal, brass-coated, imitation brass in other words, but it served its purpose, illuminated his keyboard. In the excitement of the fable, of attempting to produce a literary clone of reality, he noticed that he had neglected to set his small electronic timer (which he always set at 33:33) that warned him it was time to SAVE. He pressed none too soon the rubbery buttons that summoned the usual digits into place. “But now that I have become a man,” the words of Saint Paul intruded without preface, “I have put away childish things.” Aye, and wasn’t it time?

Ah, such a perfect day! For Larry, it must have been felicity itself. And whatever regrets Ira may have felt, for him too it would remain a day full of light and tranquillity. At the warning hoot of the excursion steamer’s boat whistle, they gathered their belongings. They sighed in agreement at Edith’s remark, that the enjoyment of time was at the cost of time, and Iola adding that fortunately that was also true of misery, they walked down the hill to where the paddle wheeler was moored, where they embarked. They watched the river become wider as they returned to New York, passed the little dock of the boathouse, Ira reminiscing about days paddling the canoe with Billy Green.

When at length the excursion was over, and the steamer moored once more at its pier in Manhattan, Larry and Ira escorted the two women by crosstown trolley and subway to their apartment on St. Mark’s Place. Daylight still held sway. The two youths were invited in. Once settled, everyone was ready for a snack again. The two women served them coffee and raisin toast. Coffee and raisin toast. Raisin toast. Bread with raisins in it, not cake, just bread. And because the weather was too warm for cream to keep on the window ledge — and there was no canned milk in the cupboard — for the first time in his life Ira drank black coffee. How strange it tasted without simmered milk, as at home, often with the skim on it, esoteric and yet not unpleasant. And for the first time in his life he ate raisin toast, sprinkled with brown sugar and cinnamon. It was good. Last of afternoon daylight still shone on the white walls of Iola’s half of the apartment, daylight that illuminated Edith’s olive skin and dark hair with its elusive glint of copper.

Discussion arose whether, as some scholar asserted, Navajo poetry rhymed — an assertion Edith indignantly refuted. After getting her doctor’s thesis out of her room, she read several lines of a Navajo chant. “Why, there isn’t any more rhyme to this than—” She paused, searching for suitable analogy.

“Than reason,” Ira blurted.

To everyone’s amusement, but chiefly Iola’s.

The late-afternoon snack over, Iola took down a volume of Rudyard Kipling’s poems from the shelf. And with an indulgent, deprecating air, the waning light on her tightly bound blond tresses and pale bony face, she read aloud several of her favorite poems. . interspersed with amused comment.

Daylight ebbed from the white-walled living room, warm, golden, hallowed by its perfection; ineffable, the rare benison of untroubled hours, guerdon of respite from self, from self, but not from time drawing the day to a close.

With the coming of evening, swain and companion took their leave. Larry embraced Edith; they kissed. The two friends bade the two women farewell, closed the door between them, and walked down the muted stairs into the quiet street. Still inviolate, the twilight lingered at street’s end, as if the rosy stain would never fade from the stone crater in the distance.

XIII

As the last week approached, the final week of freshman year, Ira ruminated more and more on Larry’s romantic ties with Edith. The once miraculous affair appeared to breed new recognitions: a kind of strictness slowly encompassed it. Or was he himself, Ira wondered, beginning for the first time in his life to exercise something new to him — or exercise it consciously: his critical faculties? Not that he avoided doing so before, but rather, previously his attempts to exercise them became lost, became a fitful wandering in the mind’s labyrinth. He now recognized the critical function as a distinct mental process. He had read and heard the terms associated with critical analysis before: in English class, in Philosophy 1. An addled smattering. But it was in Edith’s company that concepts, like so many other abstractions he learned to identify there, became defined, braced with connotation and example. Ideas had begun to quicken in him, as something demarcated, independent. In “Little Black Sambo,” which had beguiled him long ago, the tigers in their hot pursuit in a circle lost identity, were rendered into a mass of butter. Critical inquiry restored the rendered butter into distinct tigers again, arrested their motion, permitted contemplation of amorphous impressions, so that one could draw conclusions, reach judgments. Critical inquiry was something like that.

With a new sense of objectivity, an enhanced grasp of implication, Ira found himself isolating the significance of Larry’s behavior, trying to infer the consequences of Larry’s character, his nature — in relation to Edith. Was Larry’s incipient tendency to prolong and elaborate an anecdote to the point where Ira began to feel he was foisting it on Edith, rather than entertaining her, was Larry doing that in order to dramatize himself? And something Ira could as yet scarcely name, for all his growing attentiveness to the effect of Larry’s behavior on Edith, Larry didn’t seek; Larry didn’t probe for dilemma, didn’t brood about sadness and loss. Curious, but that would never do for someone like Edith, would never satisfy the deep disenchantment Ira had already discerned in her, something akin to a kind of reconciliation with defeat, a tolerance of despair. She was given to insoluble quandary, temperamentally sad. Larry was disposed to optimism and well-being. Something was inherently dissonant here. And strangely, the suffering he had imposed on himself, and continued to do, sufferings, disenchanting and depraved lusts that robbed him of youthful joy, at the same time brought him closer to Edith’s nature than was Larry. What an odd conclusion. Was it valid, or just an extract of a wish?

Also — and this too Ira began to examine, as something discreet, an element with its own consequences, that would determine the future of the relationship between the two lovers — she had prevailed on Larry to yield to discretion, to remain at home, though she offered to help in his support if he didn’t. And it was his staying at home that already, even in that short time, seemed to hint at the possibility of the divergence of their temperaments. Because for all of their agonized disapproval of the course of Larry’s affair, his family members still doted on him. He was the youngest and most gifted, the most charming and diverting. The set joke and the humorous trivia, it was clear to Ira as the bystander, Edith had no taste for. Larry’s family flattered him with their adulation, rewarded him with their mirth, made him the cynosure of their admiration, and he enjoyed their unstinted appreciation in turn. His surpassing physical beauty wouldn’t be enough to hold her indefinitely. (Ira wasn’t sure whether he guessed that or he wished it.) And considering future developments from Larry’s side, even though it was hard to believe, still it was almost impossible to discount entirely the effect that Larry’s family brought to bear so heavily in opposition to his commitment to marry Edith, to believe that this same effect wouldn’t, in fact, actually prevail in time, even against Larry’s own buoyant, ardent self.

On the one hand, Ira envisaged Edith turning into Baba, his deceased grandmother, stooped, tottering, and tremulous, and Larry eleven years younger, resilient, handsome, energetic, attractive. Wouldn’t that be true? And for Edith, granted she had grown old and wrinkled, wouldn’t the classic young Endymion with whom she was so smitten have vanished? He would. “Beauty passes,” Walter de la Mare wrote in the Untermeyer anthology, “Beauty vanishes, however rare, rare it be”; that applied to Larry as well. Then what? Abiding interest for Edith had to withstand her disillusionment, her confirmed gravity, her preoccupation with loss and loneliness, with aging and mortality. Any enduring relationship with her demanded a temperament, however acquired, full of misgivings, hurt, and affliction. Larry’s temperament was anything but that: a happy one, a stable one. He gave the impression that the future would continue to be the same, a joyous extension of today. He sure wasn’t used to grief, misgiving, lasting hurt, adversity, deprivation. Boy.

His loose-leaf notebook paper, fountain pen, pencil, scratch pad on the glass-topped table of the elegant walnut “set” in the front room, Ira sat looking at Pop’s collection of bric-a-brac on the mantelpiece above the embossed metal shield of the chimney flue. The collection consisted of a little Dresden sheep dog, two sheep, a picturesque shepherdess. They reminded the old boy of the old country, Ira supposed. Nostalgic. Touching. Ira wasn’t sure whether the little group would be considered in good taste by someone like Edith or not. But what the hell, though he never was sure of things of that kind, they were cute little things, fetching, innocent, so winsome in color. Up above, on the wall, were the two portraits of Pop’s departed parents: severe, if ever two faces were, severe in sepia: Grandma in her sheytl, her wig, Grandpa with beard and peyoth, his earlocks. Mom had told Ira they were in fact as severe as their portraits, unsmiling and distant, the year or so she lived with them, after he was born. That was before Pop had accumulated enough dough to buy steerage passage for wife and kid to join him in America. So Ira had known them, seen and heard them with his own eyes and ears, as they had known him, but he didn’t remember a thing about them — any more than they did about him in their graves in Galitzia where they lay buried. A year and a half old he was when Mom left for America with her baby son in her arms. Two strict sepia faces in ebony frames on the wall were all his paternal grandparents were now. Mom loved to repeat how the old man, Saul the Schaffer, whom everyone addressed out of respect as Saul the Overseer, had leaned on his walking stick the night before his daughter-in-law and grandson left for America. “And you danced so prettily that night, the tears came to the old man’s eyes.” And Ira had lately quipped in reply, “Oh, I did? Is that why I’m bowlegged?”

Oh, he had a term paper to do, term paper in his first term in English Composition, term paper for Mr. Dickson, the instructor of the course. And as usual he was addressing himself to the task at the very last minute. It had taken until the second term before Ira could get into a class in English Composition 1, a prerequisite for a B.S. or a B.A. degree. There was a class in English Composition 1 open, and it stayed open until he had it safely registered in his name. On that disastrous first night of registering for courses the previous fall, practically every freshman course had been closed, but between terms most of them were open, except Biology 1 still, because his class had access to them ahead of the influx of new freshmen.

Composition 1. The course was under the aegis of Mr. Dickson, a tall, angular Ichabod Crane sort of character, academically sedulous, academically sere. Mr. Dickson, evidently in pursuit of his doctorate, was in his late twenties, a man with curly, rusty hair, and with the funniest damn habit of screwing up his face into a quizzical gnarl, at the same time reaching over the top of his head with his long arm in order to scratch the opposite ear. As usual, Ira was acquitting himself with no better than a C for the course. Tomorrow, Monday, was the last day the term paper would be accepted. Its evaluation would determine fifty percent of the final grade. So. . he’d better get to work.

Outside, through the open windows, spring on 119th Street was in full cry, full yippee. Balmy air wafting in through the open windows swelled the bellows of the long, lacy white curtains, curtains that would soon be taken down and stored for the summer. Urchins’ yells down below scored the city’s placid drone.

Sunday afternoon. Everyone was away: Mom was visiting her sister, Ella Darmer. She had married Meyer, and with their two kids they now live on 116th Street and Fifth Avenue. Pop was working an “extra jopp,” another “benket” in “Kunyilant.” And. . oh, Minnie had gone out with Lucy Goldberg across the street on a date. She was growing up now: having real dates. She could have all she wanted as long as he got his. But what if the right guy came along? Meant serious business, proposed, produced an engagement ring. Well, Stella was growing up, too.

Wasn’t that the goddamnedest thing any photographer ever did? Musing, Ira eyed the portrait of his own sad three- or four-year-old self on the wall. Why the hell did the guy do that? Pose him that way? Ira shook his head. For all he knew, now that he had acquired a smidgeon of Freud, that might have planted the seed of his fixation, nutty fixation with and about sex — that might have got him into this, yes, abomination in the first place. These abominations, you should say. Man, wouldn’t you have gotten stoned for that in days of yore? And not so long ago at that. Hanged, drawn and quartered, torn apart by horses or boiled in oil—vey iz mir. And as if that wasn’t enough, how old was Stella now? About fifteen. Yeah, abominations you can call them now, now that you’re cooled off with Sunday morning’s abomination. . not much of a one either. . wonder how many scumbags the rats were treading on down at the bottom of the airshaft? But if you weren’t, if you didn’t get it, you’d be trotting over to Mamie’s. Right? Right. Hic jacet. .

Yeah, hic jack it. . phooey.

But the goddamn fool behind the black camera box had set him on a chair — look at it — round-backed chair with upright spindles, but in the center, the main, ornamental spindle was truncated. It didn’t reach from curved back all the way to the seat of the chair. Instead it hung exactly between the kid’s legs, hung down like a gelding’s slack hard-on after pissing. How terrified Ira had been as a child whenever he looked at the portrait. The photographer’s camera had revealed the horrendous guilt that only Ira discerned, only he and no one else.

Silly phobia; no time to waste. Tomorrow, Monday, was the deadline for handing in the term papers. They were to be essays based on the general theme or topic of how to construct something of a fairly complex nature. How to carry out an elaborate scientific experiment. How to assemble a scientific exhibit. Or an account of the operation of some fairly complicated mechanism. Nothing simple, like fixing a bicycle, changing a tire. No, sir. To meet requirements, the piece of writing had to be at least a half-dozen pages long, which implied that the device or process be fairly complicated, and consequently test the student’s ability to present the subject in clear, orderly, comprehensible exposition. Ira doodled contemplatively. Tic-tac-toe. A profile. A seagull.

His choice of topic had narrowed down to two subjects. He was familiar with both. First was the rifle cage of his high school days as a member of the rifle team, still remembered so clearly: the tiny target corresponding to the regulation-size target across the gym floor, the needle-pointer corresponding with the actual sighting of the mock firearm, the trigger mechanism, and all the do’s and don’t’s of proper aiming, breathing, trigger-squeezing, types of gunsights, of leather slings. . all so warmly entwined with memories of Billy, and days when another course, another career, another America seemed to beckon. .

He sought the next line on the typescript: no, the hell with it, true or not, he would delete it: Mrs. Goldberg, Lucy’s divorced mother, across the street in her grayish, unbleached cotton shift again leaning disconsolately on her broom — what a graphic symbol!

Oh, he could work up another hard-on, given the incentive. After all, it was this morning early, his Sunday abomo — say, would that be an abomo or an abumo? If he walked across the street, nobody home here, nobody home there, nobody homeo, Romeo. Ask: was his sister there? He thought maybe she was. He wanted to ask her if she’d type something for him. Ask Mrs. Goldberg sadly leaning on a broom. See what she would do, or say. Leo Dugonicz, Hungarian pal, came to mind, and his account of the two cups of strong black coffee served him by his mother’s acquaintance who then stroked his shoulder. So. . one cup of black coffee, no cups of black coffee — no abumo.

Delete. Delete. There. “’Tis here, ’tis here. ’Tis gone!” said the guard in Hamlet, whacking away with his halberd. Not bad, though. That epitomized life: ’Tis here. ’Tis here. ’Tis gone. .

Say, don’t tell me you don’t know that jerk you see reflected in the thick plate glass on the glass-top table. Look at him, the dope, scowling back at you through steel spectacles, under a low half-moon brow topped by a mop of kinky black hair. That goddamn photographer posing the kid, the familiar child, in black armor, with a baton pendant between his legs. Look at you, fretting three different ways. No, that rifle-cage business was lifeless, lifeless as your high school hopes, separate from you — separate as you from Billy Green today.

The other choice of topic appealed to him more, was incomparably more stimulating. Alive. Just last summer. All summer. His eighteenth year. In the strong, burning sunshine, on practically rural land, just being parceled out by real estate developers. He’d have to be game to do it, though. Why not? He wasn’t asking himself to sneak across the street, knock on Mrs. Goldberg’s door, say hello. And just she, her, him. What the hell was the proper grammatical case? Object of a prepo — his heart was beginning to pound already. . No, it was just between him and the paper. You could flunk though, stupid. But why? Why should he flunk? It was how to build something, wasn’t it? Not how to abumo at sister’s friend’s home. Or how to finesse and finagle kid cousin Stella through Auntie Mamie’s intangible household maze. No, it was how to build something. That was legitimate: how to put up new plumbing in a new frame house. What was wrong with that? Bold, huh? Original. Daring. . as much as you like, yeah. Between you and the paper. He pushed the scratch pad over the features leering back at him from the plate glass — the devil grinning at him from the table could still have his due. Minnie would type it for him — if there was time. But there was no time. He hadn’t even written it, begun to write it. What if he typed it himself afterward? He had a smidgeon of touch typing left from Mr. Hoffman’s class in junior high. It didn’t have to be in ink; he could write the first draft in pencil. Let’s go. On top of the page, capitalizing each first letter of the title, he wrote: “Impressions Of A Plumber.”

And then he took stock, he reconsidered. Impressions? Something was wrong here. That wasn’t what Mr. Dickson had directed the class to do. No impressions, but a process, a method, something systematic and factual. Otherwise, if he were to do an impression, why then, the alarm clock would go off; he’d be getting up in the morning; he’d be riding on the subway with the other strap-hangers. That wasn’t a “how to.” Oh, nuts. Still, he ought to be able to put enough “how to” into it, enough specifics, to satisfy Mr. Dickson, right? How to raise the cast-iron soil stacks up to the roof for toilet vents, how to cut and thread nipples, how to tighten chrome-plated faucets without marring them, attach valves, wipe sink drain joints with molten lead, oh, lots and lots of “how to” stuff. And there were all the fittings to call attention to as well — what they were for: an elbow, a union, a coupling, a tee. And the tools of the trade: a monkey wrench, a strap wrench, and a Stillson wrench, the dye stocks for cutting thread on pipe. Oh, lots and lots of implements. But he had to do it his own way: as a whole. Mr. Dickson would understand. Sure he would. Wouldn’t he?

Doubt still gnawed at Ira. But if he made the process interesting, colorful, if he awoke in Mr. Dickson the same kind of — of verve that he himself felt when he recalled being a plumber’s helper, Mr. Dickson would overlook small deviations from instructions, small liberties taken with permission. Sure he would. Hope so.

“The alarm rings with frightened intensity,” Ira began writing. “It is half past six. I wake reluctantly, shut off the alarm, and yawn. It is chilly even on a summer morning, and my bed is very warm. . ”

Words flowed easily when he was writing about his own sensations and experiences that way. The evidence of his subject matter was at hand: no research was necessary, scarcely even exactitude of memory was needed. He had only to recall the approximate environment, the activities, recall the mood of the event, and then apply things to himself, not only to exemplify them, but to unify them in the course of an ordinary day’s work. He had to choose from the variety that came to mind. He had to judge which element was most effective in capturing the flow of a day’s work. He chose those elements that pleased him.

It was easy. He was the hub from which all else radiated, the center of perception to which everything and everyone was attached, everything and everybody, the tradesmen, the carpenters, the electricians, the roofers, the glaziers. So that was how it was done? He paused to reflect. No, that was how he could do it. If he tried to do it from another’s point of view, from the inside of the mason who was laying the brick for the outdoor chimney, or the plasterer, he might as well give up, go back to describing rifle practice inside the rifle cage in the DeWitt Clinton gym. The others talked about wages, the comparatively low wages for the skilled work they were doing, no paid holidays, no time and a half for overtime and Saturdays. They talked about the high price of everything they had to buy, from pork chops to workshoes. And they talked about unions, unions, even the Italian bricklayer: oonion. No oonion, no good. Hymie, who had palmed himself off as a full-fledged journeyman plumber, was glad to get a job, and he never would have gotten one if the contractor had been hiring only union labor. Neither would Ira have gotten a job as a plumber’s helper.

But Ira wasn’t interested in subjects of that sort; he hardly even cared listening to opinions about them: where these guys went home, what kind of homes they lived in, what subjects were closest to them, how they amused themselves — bluefish or flounder fishing in the bay, the Saturday-night show — or how much the dues were in the metal lathers’ union. No, there was no color to it, no place for him.His way was the spectator’s; his preferences were for the individual, not the collective: his getting up in the morning, his riding on the El as the sun came up, riding among the crowd of loudly yawning, grousing workers to the job. And once arrived at the work site, listening to the wisecracks on the job that only he could appreciate how funny they were: the parquet-floor layer cursing, “My goddamn rule lied to me!” And he himself, with eighteen-year-old exuberance, cutting three-quarter-inch galvanized pipe, threading it, lugging lengths of crusty, rough cast-iron pipe from the pile where the truck had dumped it to the frame house under construction: how hot the goddamn pipe was from lying for hours under the blazing sun. Wow! Right on his shoulder, unless he had a rag to buffer it. The images, as he scribbled, teemed within his mind so thickly he had to jot down a word or a phrase on the side to keep them in memory’s reserve, until he was ready to use them. Watch out for comma-sentences. Didn’t Dickson hate them. Look at that: five handwritten pages already. .

Mom came home: in dark street dress, her bearing portly and dignified, as always when she faced the public, her form squeezed rigidly into corseted shape, a silver fox fur over her shoulder. Was he hungry? she asked.

“No.”

“If you’ll eat something now, I’ll fix it for you. I’m going out again.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“We’re going out to Baba’s grave in New Jersey. It will soon be a year since she died.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I’ll fry you some lox and eggs.”

“I don’t want any lox and eggs. I want to finish my term paper.”

“Then what else?”

“Nothing.”

“I’ll leave you some bulkies in the same bag with the rye bread. The lox is between two saucers in the icebox.” She opened her handbag, made sure she had her key. “If you should get hungry.”

“Who’s going?”

“All four sisters. Ai, where our mother lies, there in the earth of New Jersey. It’s a good thing we contributed for a burial plot for all of us when we did. Jewish burial sites grow costlier all the time.” She paused at the door. “I’ll be home for supper. But you don’t have to wait until then. Eat when it suits you.”

“Okay. Mamie going too?”

“Of course. All four of us, I said. A drife,” Mom said, trying the word in English. “A loffly drife through the country efter we cross the river. We’ll enjoyet ourselves,” she said, in English again. “While our mother molders in the earth, we go riding over it in Moe’s katerenke. But so it is with the dead and the living.”

“A katerenke was a hand organ. Mom called Moe’s automobile that because of the starting crank in front of the vehicle. Her unspoiled perceptions were something to admire, the way she shunted the macabre into the comic: a katerenke. Probably a Polish or Russian word the ever-accretive Yiddish had absorbed.

“Very well, I’m going,” she said.

“Zaida, too?”

“Oh, no!” Her voice contained reproach — at his ignorance. “He’s a koyen. A koyen in a cemetery? A priest? He would be defiled walking among the dead. Ask him next time when you go visit Mamie’s.”

“What do you mean, ask him? I can figure that out. A koyen must be a Cohen. Isn’t that right?” He checked himself abruptly. “What do you mean, ask him when I go to Mamie’s?”

“He’s already moved away from the old place on 115th Street. He spent the Sabbath at Mamie’s already. I told you. You and Minnie, your father. Ach.” She moved her heavy hand in impatient gesture. “Your head’s in the ground today. I told you he moved because he didn’t trust the woman who cooked for him. She wasn’t kosher enough for him, he thought. It heppens she’s a loyal Jewess. But he has cataracts on both eyes. He sees scarcely anything clearly. So he suspects everything. Mamie he knows keeps a kosher home.”

“But what about that lease on 115th Street?”

“Harry will finish it out. I’m going.”

“So he’s there now.”

“Where else? Visit him. You’ll learn something of Yiddishkeit.”

“That’s all I need.”

“Indeed. You know less of Yiddishkeit than those already lying in hellowed ground.”

“Yeah? Okay.”

“Goodbye, my hentsome son. Eat a morsel.”

He watched the heavy, dark figure leave, heard the kitchen door swing shut. Solitude. So Mamie would be gone. But Zaida would be there now. Would Stella be home, too? Sunday? Nah. Maybe yes, with Hannah and a bunch of Charleston-jigging swains. Would Zaida allow it? Boy, what a gauntlet to run that would be now. All for a fat, oozy, surplus straddle, while the dance-band music barely seeped out of the Stromberg Carlson radio: couldn’t turn it on too high: you had to hear every creak on the floor from the kitchen. Lucky for him again he’d lowered his peccary-pressure this morning. What the hell was a peccary? A sort of wild pig, wasn’t it? Wild pig was right. Nonkosher. Oh, pecker, peccary, peccavi.

Ah, he bent over his scrawl. You scrawled a world out of words, and in turn the world you scrawled brought you to life. You glowed, rereading it, something the same way you glowed after you solved a geometry problem. You had to rise to a glow in order to solve it. Afterward, after the glow faded, you wondered, what the hell was all this about? How did you solve it?

He stood up, went into the kitchen, more in order to prolong his musing than in search of food; though when he found the bag with the bulkies and the “corn” bread in it, as Mom called it, the heavy rye bread, he cut off the heel of the loaf to gnaw on it. Funny, the bread didn’t contain corn at all — that was maize — but this was made of rye flour: corn in the old, old sense, as grain was called. “The corn was orient”—Larry had called his attention to the beautiful lines by Thomas Traherne in his copy of Highlights of English Literature: “I thought it had stood from everlasting unto everlasting.” Boyoboy, like himself that time he stood on a West Harlem street corner on a summer day: when he felt as if an aureate promise had been made him. “I thought it had stood from everlasting unto everlasting.” An artist — was that the promise that strange aureate moment made? What an idea. Edith worshiped the artist, she said. Now don’t get sidetracked. Don’t let your flow of. . of. . whatever the hell it was that carried you along, like a scrap of paper — and that was a right figure — on a rain-rivulet by the curb. No, but it was true: you had to be able to hold the mood intact from beginning to end: hold it up in front of you, more than even you would in front of a mirror — because it had so many sides — and look at each side, and not be afraid the others would lose their shape while you did.

Still gnawing on the tough brown crust, bark-brown boat, skiff of crust, brown bark of old with a gray, pitted deck, corn bread, he went back to the front room, and resumed writing. .

So Baba was living once, and Baba is dead now, Ecclesias. And I’m writing about being a plumber’s helper in the first quarter of the twentieth century, I who am virtually living in the twenty-first, though I don’t belong there, and not merely because I have so few years left of living.

— You spoke of sustaining a mood.

And so I did. But you know as well as I do that my mood is a cracked mirror, no longer entire, no longer continuous. Not altogether trustworthy, in short, and incapable of withstanding extreme strain; it’s a good, a reasonable facsimile of the pristine one, but certainly no longer that.

— Why do you break the thought so, the flow, when it was sustained, so obviously under firm guidance? I suppose I can guess the answer.

Yes, I do so not merely out of perversity. Safety valve, Ecclesias, safety valve. My wife invited me for tea — tea and yogurt — an invitation which she extended while wearing a pink skirt and blue shirt, a color combination at which we both laughed this morning, and then I returned here to you, passing through the hallway between the kitchen and my study. And here I am again, Ecclesias, on the second day of November of the year 1985, writing again of the plumber’s helper I was in the summer of 1924.

— Nevertheless, I fail to understand completely the reason for all your intrusive and irrelevant associations, when it seems to me you could conveniently dispense with them. You ask, knowing very well why. Very likely, with his grandmother interred in the grave, then a year later, her lusty freshman grandson leers to himself while he writes of his (selected) experiences as a plumber’s helper in the context, should one say — hardly the right word, in the iniquitous context of possibly, possibly of screwing his deceased Baba’s second-oldest granddaughter, Stella—

— Do you realize what you’ve done? What you did, I should say.

Not till this very moment, Ecclesias. It has certain order to it, hasn’t it? Well, the plumber’s helper, and his perhaps unattended first cousin, next in line, having more or less slaked desire on his sibling earlier in the day. No, the whole thing, not to pun, springs from memory: of the nasty ditty about not being a plumber, nor a plumber’s son. And the all-too-obvious, smutty conclusion. Bear with me.

It was midafternoon when he finished, an execrable draft, barely legible, even to himself, particularly the last two pages, scribbled in the furious haste of completion. He sat quietly relaxing, exultant with consummation, whose fervor he could now afford to let drain away. It had to be typed — not only for the sake of legibility; it deserved typing. He felt so oddly proud of it, elated by it, complete justice could only be done to it by having it typed — typed rather than merely rewritten in ink. Minnie was the only one he could have turned to for the favor, and of course she would agree: but where was she? Beyond appeal. He could have dictated it to her. Too late even for that by the time she came home. He might as well do it in ink, in his best penmanship, which was lousy anyway, but would have to do. Or beg Dickson for another day. Lose a few credits maybe, as penalty. He was willing to accept that, God, yes, but the manuscript had to be legible. Typewritten it might mollify Dickson to some extent, which was another reason for typing it. It would make the reading easy; and that way he might get by his not adhering strictly to all the letters of the law, his small deviations from the strict confines of the cut-and-dried “how-to.” His work had taken a few skips out of bounds. Small ones. And if he missed the deadline besides — ouch! Type it, type it. Make a few amends. Time? Ten minutes to three. He stood up. Type it yourself, goddamn it. Walk over to Mamie’s and type it on that ancient gummy Underwood, weighing half a ton, that Stella employed making out dispossess notices for her mother, or new bills of fare which the partners of the restaurant in Jamaica then mimeographed. Move your ass. Hoof it over there. You can do it before it gets too late.

Should he include it, delete it? Ira studied his typescript. Written when? When committed to the familiar yellow second sheets? He raised his eyes to the umber, grainy piece of cloth M had attached to the curtain rod from which the regular white curtain hung, in order to minimize the brightness of the sunlight coming from behind the monitor and directly into his eyes. Yes, when had he written the typescript? Ira retraced the years: evidently when he could still type on a manual typewriter, however ineptly, when his now weak and arthritic hands and fingers could then still abide the impact of the keys of the large manual Olivetti portable he had used in those days.

And when did that become too much for him? At. . about. . 1980 or ’81. So he was still able to pound away at the keys — until M insisted he buy an Olivetti electronic. (And that was only a halfway measure.) Anyway, he was still typing manually in 1980; that was five years ago. And he was then seventy-four years of age. What the hell was the odds, as his fifty-year-old Irish crony, back in the thirties, Frank Green, would have said. What’s the odds? Why do it? Well, just to see what difference there was between the Ira Stigman of five years ago and the Ira Stigman of today, the tone of his literary difference. Why not? And one would have to consider the role of Ecclesias too, credit him for any maturing of ideas, improvement in prose — and Ira believed there was — again in good part thanks to Ecclesias. He was so benign usually, caustic rarely, ever disposed to condone. “Tolle lege,” Saint Augustine in spiritual crisis heard the voices of children crying: “Tolle lege,” take up and read. That was in the days long before floppy disks.

It was important, this five-year-old prose that Ira was about to transcribe, it was important for another reason, now that he had made mention of Saint Augustine. It was important because he had divested himself of a formidable inhibition: he had admitted a sister into his narrative, something he hadn’t done in the draft on the desk beside him. He had been compelled, reluctantly, painfully, to make the inclusion; he had done so belatedly, in spite of himself, but eventually he had done so. And surely, prior to that, how different must have been the rationale of the narrative—“rationale” was a polite understatement, as Ira knew only too well. Once Minnie was admitted into the story, everything was different, drastically different, nay, it would be nearer the truth to say flagrantly different, self-revealing in approach, in treatment, in the contour of the narrative. How long it had taken him to square with the truth; how long he had clung to subterfuge!

“Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton [the original typescript began], and at least several score of other lesser bards invoked the Muse at the outset of their grand epics, that she might vouchsafe the poet the power of imagination, the poetic stamina to sustain his lofty envisaging all the way to its successful conclusion. Invoking the muse has gone out of fashion these days: Dante’s ’O Musa, O alto ingegno,’ or m’aiutate.’ Milton’s ’Sing, Heavenly Muse,’ Homer’s ’aeide, thea,’ are no longer heard. We don’t believe in the Muse any longer. Still I feel the need to advert to some source of spiritual replenishment that will enable me to carry forward the account of this nasty, muddled, contradictory, and confused life of mine. In one of the cantos of the Inferno, Dante describes with the horrible vividness of his genius the gruesome transformation that takes place between man and serpent, both of them two aspects of damned souls (for committing what sin I’ve forgotten). As the one stings the other, the two exchange roles, the two exchange form and function, the erstwhile viper now assumes human guise, pursued by the erstwhile human, now viper: a paradigm of the interaction between depravity of environment and the susceptible individual: De me fabula narratur.

“Instead of the Muse, I turn for inspiration and a sense of renewal to the Lower East Side — though God knows, I was already wayward enough there. Still, I felt at home there, shored and stayed by tenets I imagined inhered in the nature of things. I belonged. And therefore, everything I did, however wicked, was somehow endemic, indigenous, part of the general scheme, as was even Pop’s insensate corrections. (It was as a prank, and by my own volition, I dropped the milk dipper down into the third rail of the trolley — though it is true I had been previously initiated into the performance of the act by a couple of goyish gamins.) To repeat, I belonged. Therefore, nothing I did destroyed common norms, though I may have been guilty of their infraction. Escapade and punishment pertained to each other, and both comported with the Lower East Side consensus. In a way, I couldn’t do anything that vitiated my normalcy, and inclusion within normalcy equated to a kind of absolution. As robust an absolution as the ever renewing innocence that coursed like an ichor through my veins, and made me ready to accept any challenge.

“What scraps are these I evoke, gather, to give me fresh impetus for the long rueful journey ahead? Well. Trimmings, findings, in a word, remnants: vignettes and tableaux that for one reason or another I either overlooked or found no place for in my first novel about an immigrant childhood on the Lower East Side. Or perhaps, as so often happens, they ran contrary to my conception of the spirit of the whole: they didn’t fit, proved fractious (and perhaps, also, had they been accorded their due weight, a more viable model of a Lower East Side childhood might have emerged: viable, in the sense that it might have assured the author a longer writing career, a professional future). But — the ancient adage about the ill will has its application here — the previous exclusions of scrap and remnant now rescue me from redundancy.

“As I recall, I sit with my little schoolmates in the darkened primary-school assembly room, the one I attended when we lived on 9th Street and Avenue D. I was about seven years old, the year 1913 (year between the disaster that befell the Titanic and the outbreak of the World War). In the lighted frame of a miniature stage on the assembly-hall platform, a Punch and Judy show is in progress. And while the darkened hall reverberates with the shrill laughter of the assembled kids at the spectacle of Punch belaboring clamorous Judy — who should give vent to heart-rending sobbing but me. I bawled so loudly, I had to be removed from the assembly room. I still recall one of the schoolteachers bending toward me at the end of the row of seats, and with kindly forebearance signaling to me to get up, and come to her. ‘He’s hitting her!’ I blubbered as the teacher escorted me out of the assembly hall. ‘He’s hitting her!’

“I alone saw it in that light. I wonder why? I don’t think it was pure compassion on my part that led to the anomalous outcry — I was an aggressive enough little tyke. Rather, it was that the belaboring of one puppet by another provided altogether too faithful a reproduction of Pop’s often insane beatings of me. Provocations I must have afforded in plenty, without any doubt. But the little man, pathetic, deeply troubled little man, frustrated by his inadequacy, haunted by fear of ridicule, undoubtedly a rejected child himself, lost all self-control in administering chastisement. He went almost berserk, seized the first scourge within reach, stove poker, butt of horsewhip, wooden clothes hanger. Mom, in fact, always maintained that the peculiar inward crook of the pinky of my left hand resulted from my trying to ward off some flailing blow. If nothing was at hand to flog me with, he yanked me up from the floor where I lay groveling under his blows, yanked me up by both ears, threw me down again, and trampled me. He himself — scared, resentful, unstable, little man! I have made mention before, in my novel, how I would stand in front of the long, black-framed pier glass, the same one we brought from the Lower East Side to Harlem, admiring the indigo-blue welts on my back. I am certain Mom must have saved me from being permanently maimed, or saved my life perhaps, on more than one occasion, by sheer physical intervention, grappling with Pop, for which she would have received blows herself. So I howled with terror when Punch battered Judy.”

Thus he had written, the Ira of only five years ago. And he could have added that the assault by one puppet on another on the little stage might also have called to mind the sometimes violent quarrels between Mom and Pop, when they came to blows, when they threw the contents of coffee cups at each other — and when Ira and his little sister Minnie cowered under the table, and wept in fear. Punch walloping the vituperative Judy; Pop walloping Mom; Pop thrashing Ira. And so Ira sobbed at the fearsome verisimilitude. That was what he wrote, that was what he thought represented a valid reflection of childhood reality before, long before he ever dreamed he would or could bring himself to an honest admission of the true nature of his own adolescence, one which was undoubtedly shaped by much of the violence of his childhood.

It was that interpretation which underwent a change. It changed because of a reorganization of ethos that changed the former personality and viewpoint. The reason he blubbered at the sight of Punch beating Judy — Ira was now convinced — was not primarily that the act recalled his own savage chastisement at the hands of Pop, or those ugly, violent quarrels Pop sometimes had with Mom, especially in the cheerless penury of those earliest days on Essex Street and Henry Street. But rather that he was already deficient in the average child’s ability to discriminate, to distinguish the virtual from the real. Surely other children were present in the assembly hall that day who must have been chastised as severely as he, or witnessed as harrowing scenes at home as those Ira had beheld; and yet they laughed noisily and unrestrainedly at the antics of the puppets. Was it because of lack of sensitivity that they didn’t identify with the ludicrous little figures on the stage? Or because they were better able to distinguish the actual from the imaginary? Ira was certain of the truth now: it was because in the minds of the rest of the kids present, a fair balance between emotion and intellect had already been struck. Ira lacked just that: an equilibrium between his feeling about a perception and a rational appraisal of it, in a word, objectivity.

It was difficult for him, on account of that very lack, to undo, as it were, adequately gainsay, what he had written five years ago. But to have done otherwise, to have accepted what he had written, without making the effort to convey his altered view of self, would have meant that he still envisaged that self as unchanged from the child he had depicted in his novel, passive victim of malign forces about him, susceptible, innocent sufferer of the wounds and spiritual havoc inflicted on him by a neurotic father and by a callous and hostile environment. He was not innocent, and the environment was not callous and hostile; these were facts he no longer could conceal from himself. The difference between the Ira of five years ago and the Ira of today, who revised the view of his predecessor into a view he deemed more just, stemmed from that negation; and that negation in turn was accomplished by the slow, agonizing denial of a previously consummated holistic metaphor. The very travail that went into forging the plausibility and holism of the metaphor also forged the shackles on the spirit of the artisan himself. They had to be broken. By that and that alone: the breaking or repudiation of the approved and the applauded. The Marxist-Hegelian negation of negation. At all costs, because only thus could he win renewal of self. In his case — Ira thought grimly — revision and renewal were accomplished not by an accession of greater powers of analysis, an enhanced gift of abstraction, though with the passage of years something like that must have occurred to a moderate degree. Rather, he had learned to sublimate feeling into fine sensibility, until it became a more reliable, a keener, judge of reality than his dubious sagacity.

“And Pop [Ira reverted to the 1979 typescript] — memory harbors a few, tender recollections of Pop too, rare but precious. We climbed up to the roof of our house on 9th Street, he and I. We stepped through the roof door into the limpid vault of October sky. We located the chimney of our kitchen stove, spewing smoke from the woodfire Pop had kindled there. He had already bought a pair of calves’ feet in the kosher butcher store, the small hooves still on them, and with a scrap of wire tied about them, he suspended the calves’ feet within the chimney. They were to be smoked. For how long a time they were thus processed I no longer recall (until the small hooves came off, I think); nor how Mom prepared them afterward for the table. The entrée was called pechah in Yiddish: calves’ feet in aspic, I daresay would be the equivalent in English, a quivering, amber mass savory with smoke and spice, and served on slices of toasted, stale challah impregnated with whole cloves of garlic rubbed into it. Much relished by all of us: pechah, savory Galitzianer token of rare paternal companionship.

“Again, though the recollection is almost too faint to descry, Pop and I are sitting on the barrier timber at the end of the dock jutting into the East River. In one sense, where we are sitting is a continuation of 9th Street into the East River. In another sense, it is where East 9th Street ends, and a cobblestone-paved, lopped-off block east of Avenue D begins. The day, a summer’s day, has been scorching hot, and now at last, supper over, the first shadows of twilight fallen, a cooling breeze blows toward us from the river. Other residents, immigrants or less recent arrivals to the New World, residents of the immediate neighborhood, are sprawled there too, certainly. But I am aware only of being with Pop, of the unusual pleasure of sharing a pleasant interlude with Pop, a brief interlude of relaxed amiability: to sit side by side with him on the massive, splintery, weathered timbers and look out across the river at low-lying, smoky Brooklyn, to watch a hempen-mustached tugboat chug by, butting into green water, and driving undulating rollers toward us; with what sinister sound they lap among the piles beneath the dock. Sitting there, one could get a view of the gas company plant a few blocks uptown, its buff-colored storage tanks like huge bass drums at the foot of a smokestack against the darkening sky. Infrequently, but worth waiting for, as if it were a pyrotechnic display for our diversion, a lurid shaft of flame springs from the top of the smokestack into the twilight’s dusty lapis lazuli, and flares, flares upward—‘Look, Pop. Look!’. .”

“One thinks that all this must vanish, the good and the bad, the treasured and detested, my heritage, my identity, must vanish with me, save for slight evocations, occasional distillation of eloquence preserved in print; all else must vanish. And eventually, even that too. From time immemorial, nay, ever since the universe became conscious of itself, in the form of Homo sapiens, the toll for that supreme ‘privilege’ has been consciousness of mortality — the toll, with all its overtones. The cry of every human has been: ‘And when I crumble, who will remember?’ Often have I imagined the rain leaching out memory, the wind making sport of it, the assiduous maggot consuming a recondite trope — or, for that matter, an elegant formula: E = MC^2; or e to the i pi = −1, ingested by happy helminthes. .

“All of these memories were a mere seventy years ago. That same summer, we flocked in droves out of our brick warrens into the street, shouting and pointing and craning up at the first squadron of aircraft we had ever seen, biplanes high above the rooftops. .

“Am I done? Am I sufficiently restored by my Antaean return to East Side origins to tackle what lies ahead?

“But there was still the matter of the tricycle. Mom and Moe — and I skipping in the van — stroll together to the store where ‘tickets’ are redeemed. By a combination of ‘tickets,’ a kind of trading coupon amassed by Moe as a result of his multitudinous candy-store purchases, ‘tickets’ plus a little cash, Moe was going to procure a tricycle — for me! Clearly remembered, as if fused together with the child’s extreme eagerness to get to the premium depot, was the subliminal realization that the two adults leading the way through the crowded streets, chatting amiably as they walked, should be Mom and Pop. But they were not Mom and Pop, and because they were not, they called forth an awareness, like a well-defined afterimage, the complementary realization, that that was the way Mom and Pop ought to behave together, easy and leisurely and pleasant — and did not. It wasn’t the stolen tricycle, stolen the same day it was purchased, that mattered so much now, as once it had; it was the poignant awareness of how much he yearned for the untroubled companionship of his elders, how much he missed it, even as he was aware of the same thing later on, when Mom and Uncle Louis strolled together in the evening beside Mt. Morris Park.

“And there was Johnny-in-a-high-chair, as we called him, the driver of an old-fashioned hansom cab, leaping down from his elevated perch, and whip in hand, pursuing a pack of little gamins who had volleyed him with stones: furious, top-hatted cabby, whip in hand, chasing a covey of Jewish kids scampering away through 9th Street, leaving the patient, spotted white horse motionless in mid-street. . And my first near encounter with an automobile. Yes, I stepped off the curb into the path of the oncoming vehicle, and such was my frantic doubling back out of the way, my ribs ached for days afterward. And I would remember — even to this present — the amused profiles of driver and passenger as the motorcar rolled by. .

“Two eggs cost a nickel. Mom sent me down four flights of stairs to buy them; and an egg in each hand, I climbed back up four flights of stairs. Mom sent me down four flights of stairs to buy a pound of honey, bronze, crystallized honey, scooped up by the grocer out of a stubby wooden firkin in the little, untidy grocery store across the street. Hunik-lekekh was the Yiddish name of the cake that Mom concocted and baked from the crystallized honey, hunik-lekekh, a dark solid slab of cake, substantial enough to bolster up any Sabbath. .

“Oh, how lighthearted, light-footed, he who once was I, hopped down four flights of sandstone stairs, and up four flights of sandstone stairs.

“Yes, and do you remember how her father spanked Yettie, a girl of about twelve, for swinging a little kid between her legs, and thus exposing the crack between her legs through her torn drawers?

“I remember.”

Alas, my friends — Ira scanned the lines of the typescript — the 1979 draft, the old one, just won’t do. Oh, damn it, damn it: subterfuges he had had to resort to, and the rectifications that supplanted, they made him feel like a juggler keeping aloft a number of incongruous objects, an orange, a skillet, a paintbrush. And there was another element too that would have to be reckoned with, and that he already foresaw would plague him with its consequences: to depart from the typescript meant departing from his general guide, demanding not only a different set of circumstances for the episode, but alterations in the treatment of it as well, a general reordering, in short. But if he was compelled to range too far abroad in the re-creation of the episode, when would he ever return to the comfortable mainstream of work largely accomplished? To his story? Ever? Discouraging, to say the least.

At one side of the typescript, the object that had lain there for days and days, with no particular significance, now asserted its significance: the paperweight (at least, he used it for that purpose), the bronze relief of Townsend Harris, the medal CCNY had given him for “Notable Achievement.” (Notable achievement equal to a C-minus average in his scholastic work — but that wasn’t the point.) The medal recalled the luncheon given in his honor by the then president of the college and members of the English faculty, and the account he gave them in the course of his address in acknowledgment of the honor the college bestowed on him: of the moment when he was lackadaisically listening to Mr. Dickson’s comments on the quality of the term papers — and the sudden, the startling turn of events that ensued — none of which was on the original typescript, and which he now felt should be included. Why? Because those things he had subordinated before took on new prominence as a consequence of his new, his liberated, approach to his writing.

It was the last day of class. Mr. Dickson had read and graded all the term papers, and was about to return them to the various members of the class. They were surprisingly good, Mr. Dickson commented — and commended: some were exceptionally good. And one was of such unusual quality that in his capacity as faculty adviser to the staff of the magazine, he had recommended the inclusion of the piece, at the last minute, in the City College quarterly, The Lavender. Who was that whiz? Ira wondered idly at first, and then for some reason, listlessness gave way to an abrupt sharpening of attention. Was there, could there have been any substance to that zest he had felt, that lift, when he was writing the piece apart from Minnie’s extravagant, though by her brother patronizingly discounted, praise of how “wonderful” it was when he accorded her the privilege of reading the typescript at breakfast in the morning? The term paper Mr. Dickson had recommended for inclusion in The Lavender was entitled “Impressions of a Plumber,” and the author was Ira Stigman.

“Wow!” Ira had exclaimed.

Classmates turned to locate the recipient of the distinction.

“Is that you?” someone nearby asked, with gratifying incredulity. “He means you?” And another fellow student, “You mean to say you wrote it?”

Ira grinned, elated: he had fooled these wiseguys just as he had fooled the kids in Mr. Sullivan’s class.

Mr. Dickson manifested his displeasure at this ruffling of classroom decorum. He grimaced in disapproval, and lest the grimace go unnoticed, he framed it by arching an arm over his leaf-brown poll and scratching the opposing ear. “You realize, don’t you, Mr. Stigman, that for some reason you chose not to follow my very explicit instructions with regard to the treatment of subject matter?”

“Yes, sir.”

“An impression of the subject, an impressionistic article, was precisely not what I asked you to write, but a straightforward work of exposition. You’re a science major, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you’ll have to be satisfied with the low mark you’ll receive for your term paper. And, I’m afraid, in the course as well.”

But no reproach, no matter what the magnitude, or potential penalty, could diminish the swell of exultation Ira felt. He was going to be in The Lavender! He! A nobody! Wow! What an exoneration of his nonentity! The years, the hours, the days enduring the sullen shlemiel who was himself. And worse than than: a shlemiel perpetrator. Reprieve. A rift of reprieve. Ah, wait till he told Mom, told the family — Mom’s bosom would heave with joy. And what would Pop say? He’d have to admit that there was something more to his son than the kalyikeh he appeared to be. And Larry? And Edith and Iola? The magazine was due to appear during exam week, but he couldn’t wait to tell them! Wow! Minnie would beam: my marvelous brother! Exploit that adulation for what it was worth, of course. Oh, boy! And Stella — she was too dumb, malleable, to require extra incitement. Admire, go ahead and admire. And with vast, cynical gratitude, accept Mamie’s proffered reward of a dollar afterward: “Here. Indigent collitch bhoy. Take.” Jesus, wasn’t the world wonderful!

He looked hopefully at the typescript at his elbow. Where was there an opening, an ingress in the block of prose? Or an unobtrusive place to justify end to beginning? There wasn’t any really. So. . grab the first convenient starting point:

Originally when Ira would tell the story “The Impressions of a Plumber,” he always treated the sequel as the climax. And what was the sequel? He received a D in the course. What a delicious contrast, he felt, between having won inclusion of his term paper in the college Lavender, received inclusion in the college literary quarterly because of its literary merits, or, at least, because of its narrative merit, and the ignominious D grade he received for the course in English Composition 1. That sequel no longer seemed now the climax, risible and paradoxical though the whole incident might be.

No. That, and all he envisaged — and which was realized too, for the most part — seemed, at this remove, anticlimax. The true climax was of a twofold nature. One, and perhaps the less important one, was Larry’s barely concealed hurt, not resentment, hurt, expressed in the perceived attitude toward him. He was almost aloof, he was perfunctory in his compliments, in his congratulations. Larry was too kind and generous a person to be envious or discomfited; instead, he was hurt, he was reserved. His manner reminded Ira of that time in their senior year when they shared Elocution 8 together at DeWitt Clinton, and Ira had been excused from class for the balance of the period by Mr. Staip, as a reward for the excellence of his address on William E. Henley’s “Invictus.” Larry had seemed disconcerted, as much by Ira’s unexpected infringement on purlieus he assumed were his, but more since he was doing so without credentials.

Oh, it was easy, Ecclesias — easy and unjust — for someone like me, fraught with guilt and self-hatred, to impute to Larry thoughts he may never have entertained: that I was some sort of apparition from the slums functioning ably in a cultural realm.

He should merely have said, the true result was of a twofold nature, one being Larry’s reaction. The other — ah! Not Edith’s flattering eagerness in reaching for the copy of The Lavender, when the sketch appeared in the last days of the college year. Nor the realization about Iola, awaiting her turn to read it, with a show of even greater eagerness — radiating pleasure and almost emphatic pride in this vindication of her judgment, as though the sketch were a disclosure of greater latency, developing under her implied aegis, in competition with Edith’s sponsorship of Larry. No, nor Mom’s flushed happiness, nor Pop’s noncommittal raising of eyebrows — ah, no. The other result, to which everything else became peripheral external, became subsidiary, was the impetus to an internal change, an internal change wrought in him as a consequence of the publication of something he had written.

Difficult to formulate, other than badly, and perhaps there was no need to formulate it at all, but he now realized that if there was anything he could do in his life, there was only one thing he had a chance of doing well. If Ira was to have a career, a future, if he had a definite bent, he now had only one: it was in the art of letters, in the craft of writing. The publication of his sketch disclosed, at least to him, that in spite of the booby negligence of its author to follow clear instructions, which had yielded instead to an inner urge, he had nonetheless written something that compelled recognition. The piece had evidenced a nascent literary ability. The accolade, the seal of approval, was bestowed on a piece of prose written not in accordance with Mr. Dickson’s directives, but on his own impulses. What was it those Spanish mariners shouted from the crow’s nest high on the mast — or soldiers too, from some height, the conquistadores — when they spied the first trace of land? “Albricias! Albricias!” Bounty! So with Ira. Albricias for the inner discovery.

Moribund from then on became the subject of biology, the career of zoologist. So this was what he had been groping toward all these years? Ever since leaving the Lower East Side, surly and bewildered by what the years were making of him — or unmaking. Unmaking and making of him this, and he never knew it. This was all they could have formed or fashioned out of what was undone. So it seemed. When the core of decency, his self-esteem, was wrecked, what else could have arisen to win positive, approved fulfillment? Writing was all that could in some way gain rehabilitation — without his seeking pardon or absolution, but by employing what he was. Jesus. Because he had destroyed, or undermined irreversibly, the central strength of who he was, writing was all there was left to him as justification for being what he now was. God, it was a strange thing to have to discover for oneself. Because — shift the blame to chance, or to obscure, early influence — other strengths, other virtues, or fortes, he did not feel that he possessed. Ira had forfeited them, if he ever had them. It was a choice that was not a choice; it was a choice without alternative, without option. It was his sole recourse. And fortunately, there was even that, for without it, only crime and perversion would have been the consequence. He would have been another inmate in an institution.

So writing became a hope toward a career, not a true commitment, but an inchoate, befuddled aspiration. Nevertheless, however flimsy the aspiration, it afforded a kind of temporary haven for the maimed psyche, a holding pen (what a bilious pun!), until such time as opportunity for marshaling his inner turbulence into some order presented itself.

The literary path became thus his “choice,” and as murky and confused a one as it was possible to be, not for any goal of material success, which certainly was a legitimate incentive, and a mark of professionalism, but out of that same blind intuition upon which he had come to depend as a better guide to survival than his intellect. And fortunate he was too that there already existed a road, a well-traveled highway in his psyche, one that he should have abandoned at a far earlier age than he did, but not having done so proved a boon: it was a road paved with ten thousand myths and legends, and the fairy tales he loved so well.

And the old man suddenly recalled Henley’s lines from high school, so clearly across a fault line that seemed wider than the sixty years that sundered him from his boyhood—

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

VOLUME III: FROM BONDAGE

TO THE MEMORY OF LEAH, MY MOTHER

I pass, like night, from land to land;

I have strange power of speech;

The minute that his face I see

I know the man that must hear me,

To him my tale I teach.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

I acknowledge the sustaining help of my agent,

Roslyn Targ, my editor, Robert Weil,

my assistant, Felicia Jean Steele,

and my attorney, Larry Fox.

PROLOGUE

He was a widower, one in whom his bereavement for his lost wife never vanished. Even five years after Ira Stigman had lost her, grief over his loss sometimes assailed him unbearably, shook him with strange, dry sobs. . He was eighty-nine years old now — on the verge of becoming a nonagenarian. Much that had once greatly exercised his attention, his partisanship, national and international strife, Israel, even things literary, the field of his own calling, these things interested him only marginally now, remotely — something to be expected of a man nearing ninety. What did he have left? At best? A year or two more of life. A year or two of feebleness, of dependence on others for almost everything, even locomotion, a year or two in which he might suffer the humiliation of incontinence — in short, a year or two left of life he didn’t want, would be quite ready to dispense with. And he would, if he could find some easy means of doing so.

The only thing that still interested him, that meant anything, helped pass the burdensome time, was his word processor. It not only helped tide him over to the awaited end, but made possible his earning the income necessary to supply him with the sustenance, the human assistance, and the creature comfort that served to mitigate this last onerous lap of the journey. Modern technology, that ambiguous genie, might prove in the end an enormous bane or an enormous boon for mankind, but at the moment, it enabled him to transmute this otherwise worthless, pain-ridden time known as old age into something of value. The computer provided him with a modern analogy of the legendary philosopher’s stone, dream of the alchemists for transmuting the base into the noble. In this case it transmuted the pain-racked into the pleasurable, or at least into a kind of anodyne, a respite from his woes. He owed modern technology a debt of gratitude.

With those thoughts in mind, he sat nervelessly eyeing the small puddle of urine on the floor where he had missed the urinal. Like that puddle, he was probably all wet, as usual, befuddled and illogical. But if he had come anywhere near the truth, then he had accomplished something of immense benefit to himself, almost a beatitude. He had already reconciled himself with himself. And now, he had freed himself from the necessity of that reconciliation. To have suffered so much over so long a span of time over nothing. Liberated. Liberated at last in the year 1995 from bondage imposed on himself more than seventy years ago, from bondage whose depiction he had begun, and would now endeavor to continue.

PART ONE

I

Sunburned by hours of trudging on the highway, and with the unruly air of the vagabond about them, Ira Stigman and Larry Gordon were scarcely an ornament to the Spring Valley Retreat. But even the dusty mess they were, Ira never expected the cold, scant reception that Aunt Sarah gave them. A dark-haired, dark-complexioned woman, conscious of her American-born superiority, her manner toward Ira’s family had always been condescending. She was visibly taken aback by the two young wayfarers; she could barely muster a minimum of tolerance, let alone cordiality, in greeting Ira and his best friend. Even more disappointing, though, was Uncle Louis’s distant, preoccupied, and impersonal manner. Ira’s long-idolized uncle was like a different person. Gone was the wide, golden smile Ira had so glowingly described to Larry on the way over, the smile that appeared on Uncle Louis’s face when he heard the whoop of joy his nephew uttered the moment he caught sight of his uncle’s postman’s uniform. Where was his lean, magnanimous uncle, who never left without thrusting a handful of small change into his adoring nephew’s palm?

Ira had told Larry all about Uncle Louis as the two hiked along thumbing rides: about Uncle Louis the soldier, the teller of wonderful tales about the Far West, about Indians and forbidding landscapes and buffalo, while the entranced young Ira sat on the fire-escape windowsill listening to stories about the Rocky Mountains and the torrents of Yellowstone. Uncle Louis, the real American, ever ready to unroll the Socialist Call on the kitchen table, described the future world of Socialist equality, the fraternity of Jew and gentile. In his fervor, he swept away Pop’s vacillations, and spun hopes out of doubts: the mujik would never again be the same mujik under socialism; pogroms were forever ended with the execution of Czar Nicholas, the Kolki, the bullet; the epithet jhit, Yid, was finally outlawed in the new Russia, as were all manifestations of race hatred. A new world had miraculously come into being in the year of 1917, and it would breed a new order of mankind. Uncle Louis had even made Ira want to be a Socialist himself.

Four years later, the glow had receded. Poor health — poor lungs, Mom grimaced significantly — had compelled Uncle Louis to apply for a medical retirement at half pay from the post office. As soon as it was granted, he and his wife, Sarah — and their three children — moved from the Socialist colony in Stelton, New Jersey, to a large farmhouse in Spring Valley, New York. At first, to eke out Uncle Louis’s decreased salary, and at the initiative of Sarah, they took in a small number of boarders for the summer. Apparently, the venture exceeded expectations. The next year they were at capacity all season. Thanks to their successful catering to their Jewish clientele, and because of their proximity to the metropolis, and because their rates were reasonable, the place by this year of 1925 had become quite, quite well known. With the help of a partner, who provided the finances, they had built an entirely new summer hotel. It was a high-class one, according to Pop, who had been out there and furnished the details, a large summer hotel with private rooms, private bathrooms, equipped with a swimming pool, a tennis court, and a resplendent dining hall.

With all that he had heard about the spaciousness of the new hotel, Ira was sure Uncle Louis would have room enough to put up his devoted nephew, who was, in fact, Louis’s first cousin, but enough younger to be considered a nephew, and his nephew’s friend for the night. Although both had left their probable itinerary with their parents, Larry telephoned his mother long distance to let her know in what fine fettle they were, and to keep her posted on their whereabouts and destination. They might be home a day later than planned, if they liked the place they were heading for, and please not to worry. Their eagerness had been sharpened by inviting billboards on both sides of the highway setting forth the desirable features of the retreat.

It would happen so often in later life, that dim bewilderment at the change that had taken place in another, as if he — or she — had sloughed off an accretion of attitudes, like a skin, like a sheath. Conversation with Uncle Louis was perfunctory. The two youths were obviously in the way. They were fed an early supper on the oilcloth-covered table by a serving woman in the former farmhouse kitchen — scrambled eggs, bread and butter, and coffee and jam. And then with Uncle Louis’s older son, Gene, in the van, they were shown a well-worn army field tent some distance from the hotel, and furnished with a couple of canvas cots and blankets. That was to be their lodging for the night. Gene hung the kerosene lantern on a tent pole, and bidding them an embarrassed good night, left them to their own devices.

It was a humiliating reception, after so much anticipation, not in the slightest approaching the welcome Ira felt he had led his chum to expect. Crestfallen, he tried to explain how much his uncle had changed; he stressed his own mystification, his inability to account for the change. Was it because of Mom’s rejection of Uncle Louis’s passionate appeal? But how could that be? That was years ago. Ira apologized for misleading his friend, expressed his confusion at the change that had taken place in his uncle.

“Jesus, he’s miles away from the man I knew as a kid, the mail carrier in his blue uniform, so fond of me, so liberal with his small change. I don’t know what happened. I’m sorry.”

“Quit apologizing. His wife fed us some supper. We’ve got a place to sleep.” Larry made light of it all. “They may not have room in the hotel. Beside, look at us. What we’d look like to his guests: a couple of tramps. What we’d do to the towels, the sheets.”

“Yeah, but his attitude. Jesus, I wish I — we hadn’t come. I’d remember him the way he was. The American. My idol.”

“Well, he’s busy. You could tell the man’s tired.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Mind? This is a relief to me. You have no idea how bad things are at home since Dad died. This is a real adventure.”

Ira could not believe it had already been three weeks since Larry had stood in the light of the kitchen window, the kitchen window next to the iron sink, Larry in the Stigman kitchen, his handsome face framed together with the backyard fixtures of washpole and washlines, against the background of the rear of Jake’s dreary pile of a tenement. There he had stood, prosperous Larry, his cherished friend!

It was the first time he had ever visited that lowly flat on 119th Street. The homely kitchen became luminous with his presence. Ira could have embraced him out of pure joy at seeing him, but whooped delightedly instead, and the two shook hands. What was he doing here? Why had he come back to New York? He had written Ira in his most recent letter that he intended to work until Labor Day.

Larry snuffed sharply at Ira’s joyous inquiry. He snuffed sharply, as he always did when he was deeply moved, and he blinked, and with an effort held his eyelids wide open. His father had suffered a heart attack, and died before help reached the house. He had breathed his last by the time the ambulance arrived. The young intern who had accompanied the vehicle pronounced him dead.

There was nothing Ira could say at this abrupt shearing of his glee by mourning, nothing other than an earnestly attempted expression of condolence. “Gee, I’m sorry, Larry.”

And Mom, attuned to sorrow as she was, despite the narrow range of her smattering of English, readily grasped the gist of Larry’s message. If not his words, his sad mien and the tone of voice were sufficient signs of his bereavement. She stroked his arm. “Mein orrim kindt. Sit down. Sit down, pleease.” And when he seated himself, his eyes stricken, lips pinched with grief, “Alles mus’ go sleep, mein kindt, tsi rich, tsi poor,” she said. “So is it shoyn millt alle fon us, vee menshen. You should excuse me mine English.”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Stigman. I understand. Thanks.”

“Come, sit closer by the table,” Mom invited, indicating with a movement of heavy arm toward the green oilcloth-covered round table. “A cup of coffee? A keekhle. I have fresh keekhle.”

“It’s a kind of cake, Larry,” Ira translated. “It’s dry. It’s good for dunkin’,” he diffused his embarrassment.

“No, thanks, Mrs. Stigman.” Larry smiled up at Mom. “I had all kinds of things to eat before I came here.”

“A little bit, no? And coffee? Something like this should make the heart a little heppier. No?” She shook her head in sympathy with Larry’s polite, mute refusal. “Azoy shein und azoy troyrick,” she said.

“Talk English, Mom,” Ira rebuked, and for Larry’s benefit: “She says you look sad.” And to Mom again, “Noo, vus den?”

“I don’t mind your mother speaking Yiddish,” Larry assured Ira earnestly. “You seem to think I do. I really don’t. I can’t tell you why.”

“It’s atavistic,” Ira quipped uneasily.

“No, there’s something warm about it. Honestly. Please don’t stop her. Don’t be embarrassed, Ira. Some of it I think I can understand. Your mother is very eloquent, do you know? She’s really comforting. I mean it.”

“Yeah? I’m glad.” Ira still begrudged. “I don’t like it, that’s the trouble. I become kind of — I don’t know. I’m afraid she’ll get sentimental.”

“Sentlemental.” Mom had heard Ira accuse her of being that so many times, she recognized the word. “Then I’m sentlemental. What better way to ease an orphan’s grief?” She ignored his ban on her speaking Yiddish. “A great deal you would have sorrowed for your father. How loudly you would have lamented.”

“As loudly as you would,” Ira retorted in kind.

Larry looked from one to the other in candid wonderment.

“Just mother and son,” Ira explained, and added resentfully, “I’m glad you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind, not at all. What I do regret is that I don’t understand.”

“Oh. It’s about as far from the way you and your — your family get along as I don’t know what. You can see.”

“Is that it? You know there isn’t much harmony between myself and my folks right now, and you know why. Besides, it isn’t as if we always got along. We don’t, of course.”

“I feel almost outta kilter. You come here to tell me about losing your father, and we’re all sidetracked onto something else. What about going for a walk?”

“Oh, no. This is doing me a lot of good. Don’t rush, Ira. Please.”

“Anything you say.”

“He died, your father, in the house?” Mom persisted in asking.

“Yes. He was still eating lunch. He said he didn’t feel well. He wanted to lie down.”

“Aha. On the bed he died?”

“Yes. My mother had no idea he was having a heart attack.”

“Sie hut nisht gevissen?” Mom addressed Ira.

“Yes, sie hut nisht gevissen,” he corroborated sullenly.

“So venn she know?”

“My mother went into the bedroom when Papa didn’t come back. He was just resting, she thought. But when she spoke to him, and he didn’t answer—” Larry relied on gesture. “You know what I mean?”

“Ikh farshtey, ikh farshtey. Mein son he don’t believe I farshtey. Auf eibig he laying there.”

“Ewig?” Larry caught the word. “That’s right. Auf ewig. You say eibig?”

“Tockin. Aza gitteh kupf. Aza gitteh kharacter,” she commended Larry to her son. “You a goot kharacter,” she repeated for Larry’s benefit.

“Thanks, Mrs. Stigman.”

“Noo, he had a good life, no?” She clasped thick fingers.

“I think so. He was always — busy. Busy in his dry-goods store — it was in Yorkville, Ira may have told you. Downtown, in the eighties. We lived there, too. He liked trading, buying and selling, bargaining.”

“Aha. Business.”

“Yes.”

“Noo, a yeet oon business,” she addressed a scowling Ira. “Only mein sohn,” she informed Larry. “And a quviet man he vas too? In the house vit his vife and children?”

“Oh, yes. He was mostly quiet. He was happiest with the family. He liked being with the family. He was happy with all the kids around him, his grandchildren especially. He liked buying them presents.”

“Okay,” Ira interjected. “What d’ye say we go, Larry?”

“Loift shoyn,” Mom chided. “I tell you, Lerry, you name? How he die is a bless to him. Auf mir g’sukt. How old he was?”

“Seventy-one.”

“All right!” Ira raised his voice.

“Lusst nisht ausredden a vort.”

“You’ve already said more than a vort. Mom can jabber all day, and call it a word.”

“I don’t mind, Ira. I think she’s wonderful. I think I understand practically all she’s saying. She’s so kind. It comes right through.”

He gazed at Mom in steady admiration. “I was telling Ira what a wonderful mother he has.”

“He biliffs you? Hairst vus er sugt? Gleibst?” she asked of Ira.

“Yeah, I gleibst,” Ira said mockingly, stood up. “What d’ye say, Larry? Let’s go.”

“If you say so — but you know, I’m getting a lot of pleasure talking to your mom.”

“I know.”

“What about my coming here again.”

“Sehr gut.”

“No, I mean it, Ira.”

“Okay. We’ll swap places.”

Larry got to his feet. “I’m glad I met you, Mrs. Stigman, even under these circumstances. It’s been a real pleasure to be talking with you.”

“If he would leave talk longer. But you must know already mein sohn. I’m only sorry you didn’t eat a little from something. A coffee—”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Stigman.” Larry suddenly sighed, smiled at Mom in frank, gentle affection, and said, tilting his head, “I don’t need the coffee. I feel so much better than when I came in, just talking to you. You have no idea.”

“Yeh? I’m gled. Noo, gey gezunt, mein ormeh. How you say?” Mom hesitated. “I don’t know.” She turned to Ira. “Oona tateh?”

“Orphan. For Christ’s sake, don’t get sentimental.”

“Noo, bin ikh sentlemental,” Mom retorted defiantly, “Gey gezunt, meine ormeh, my orphan.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Stigman.”

“You should come back soon. Mein Minneleh, his sister, oy, ven she hears you was in the house.” Mom rocked head and shoulders in disappointment. “Und she didn’t see you. Ai, yi, yi!”

“You tell her all about it,” Ira suggested with provocative drawl.

“Ai bist die a hint, mein ziendle.”

“Okay.” Ira turned the doorknob.

“Thanks again, Mrs. Stigman.”

“You fulkomen velcome. Gey gezunt.”

Larry sat down on the canvas cot. “Ah!” He stretched out. “This feels great. Ah.” His face shone with pleasure in the lantern light shed above him. “Come on. Forget it. Stretch out on the cot.”

“Ira could scarcely believe that Larry’s mourning had been so brief, that it was only three weeks ago that he had stuck his head in the Stigmans’ window. But following Larry’s lead, he lay down on the bedding. “Boy, it does feel good.” And after a few seconds’ pause, “Honest, I wouldn’t mind the tent or the cots or anything. It’s the change that’s taken place in my uncle. Boy.” He paused again. “If you knew what he was once like. He carried the Call rolled up like a baton. Well, you saw our kitchen table, he’d unroll it, and give us a lecture on that beautiful world to come. Even though I was a kid, and understood less than half of what he was saying, preaching, still, boy, it made a Socialist out of me. That’s what I wanted to be.”

Larry chuckled upward at the sloping khaki ceiling. “Relax. That’s what I’m doing. I am. I’m just dying to see Edith after everything that has happened. I imagine we’ll both have a lot to tell each other. I’ll bet she’ll have plenty to say about French cooking when she returns from Paris. Maybe more than about the museums she visited.” He chuckled again. “Say, this isn’t bad, the tent, the cot. We have privacy at least.”

Ira listened in relief. Larry made it all seem part of the adventure: sleeping under an army tent, with the packed dirt for a floor, on a canvas cot, under a scratchy army blanket for cover. Larry was right. What a rare, what a jolly occasion, what a lark, almost like an escapade. And with so little attention paid them, with so little sense of obligation to the onetime affection between himself and Uncle Louis that Ira had expected, and had led Larry to expect, that suddenly he felt guiltily blithe and carefree. Attachment had vanished, adoration had vanished. Like a couple of droll intruders, tired and elaborately at ease, they lay on their army cots, joking, chaffering, slapping at the all-too-frequent mosquitoes that got through the torn netting.

And to beguile his friend away from the last undercurrent of chagrin Ira felt, as the long summer twilight leaked away, he began reminiscing in the darkness: his very earliest memories in the new land to which he had been brought, an immigrant. Of contemplating the majestic russet rooster with the arching tail feathers in the backyard, when Ira’s parents lived in the same house with Uncle Louis and his family, the one on the “first” floor, the other on the “second” floor of a frame house in a place full of open fields and telegraph poles and billy goats in East New York. Maybe he was doing more than merely contemplating the rooster, Ira admitted, maybe he was chasing it, because Aunt Sarah leaned out of the second floor, her home, and scolded him. “I guess she’s still the same,” Ira added wryly, and laughed. “So am I.” He and Rosie, Uncle Louis’s only daughter, just a little older than Ira, and away in St. Louis at the moment, visiting Pop’s side of the family, had vowed to marry each other when they grew up. She and Ira, at Ira’s suggestion, had sat side by side on the floor examining each other’s sexual parts. “That ruby-red slash she had instead of the peg I had is still vivid in my mind when I think of it,” Ira confided. “However, when my Uncle Louis made the mistake of inviting me out to their Stelton farmhouse, was I ever a scamp. Did I ever pester the hell out of my prospective fiancée.”

Larry’s teeth gleamed in smile in the shadow. “The engagement was broken off at that point, I assume?”

“I guess I broke its back,” Ira rejoined. “It’s too bad she’s not around for me to see what she looks like, and how she feels about me. And about you especially. We might have gotten a better reception in that case.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Larry answered across the dark space between cots. He had taken his shoes off (both had done so), and he wriggled and spread the toes in his socks. His indulgence in the matter made his words seem peculiarly malleable. “It doesn’t make the least bit of difference. I told you, not in the least. I’d rather stay right here.”

“You sure make me feel better.”

“And I’m grateful to have my mind taken off my father. That’s one thing. The other thing is. . it takes my mind off waiting for Edith to come back from Europe. A little anyway.” In the interval of a pause, his sigh was less audible than inferred.

“Now it’s all going to be new. Strange. My father dies. It seems to put a period on things. You know, even if you’re sure it would have gone that way, no matter what you did, you can’t help feeling a little guilty. My switching to CCNY. Did it have any effect on him? My giving up dentistry. My falling in love with Edith. I don’t know.” His brow was troubled, and he held his big hands in front of him. “One thing, though, I don’t have that feeling of solidity I once had — you know what I mean?” He let his hands fall quite heavily on his thighs. “It’s something I can’t explain. Until I went to NYU, I lived in one world, the same kind of world my folks live in. That’s what I mean by saying that my life seemed solid. Now it’s a — it all revolves around Edith. I should say centers around her, maybe. Yes. Centers. That’s what I really mean.” He paused. “Not that I want things to be different. I love Edith. You know that. But what I’m worried about is the writing, my writing. Will it come out of me still. It will have to. I feel as if it’s tied up with my love of her. M-m-maybe more true the other way: her love for me. It depends on it. My being creative. She puts so much store in it. It’s very strange.”

Ira had nothing to offer. He sensed the gist of Larry’s statement, but no more than that. His words made intermittent contact with Ira’s fantasizing, but like his own fantasizing still lacked the substance of everyday reality.

In spite of Edith’s departure for France, the summer had begun auspiciously for Larry. He had gotten the job he applied for early in the spring, a singing waiter who also collaborated with the recreational director of the Camp Copake summer hotel in the Catskills.

Larry’s good fortune, however, had left Ira with no one to turn to in any meaningful way, which brought on an increasing sense of isolation, anomie, and futility. There were always the few Jewish working youth on the block, or in the group whose nucleus was on 119th Street. But he cared little for their company, Jake, the airbrush commercial artist, included: they shared neither his interests nor aspirations, fuzzy as Ira’s were. More and more self-engrossed, self-enclosed, swamped by quandary, all but immured often by appetite, appetite always morticed to fear and self-reproach, he ignored their strivings, excluded their commonplace temperament and mundane activities from his range of curiosity — something he was to regret deeply later on, when, as a writer, he sought to give distinctive nature and substance to characters such as these, characters drawn from the past, Jewish youth deprived of formal education.

No matter how enervating the summer became, Ira could not go to Rockaway Beach more than once a week: he might arouse his Aunt Mamie’s suspicion. Besides, she gave him a dollar each time he appeared, and there was a limit to his ostensible shnorring. Only one thing provided relief from himself, from the slur of his existence that summer, from his bored, disdainful participations with the other youth of the neighborhood, his idleness, lethargies, feral, panicky escapades at Rockaway, despondency and guilty worry. It was Edith’s letters to him, not only to her young lover, Larry, from abroad.

She had booked passage to Europe in May, and was away in Europe that summer. . and Ira, more than half aware of his propensity for the wish-fulfilling and the farfetched, continually fantasized, continually dabbled with the fancy — or the hope — that somewhere in the matrix of Edith’s decision to go to Europe was also the hope that during her separation from Larry, he would find a young woman to his liking, and thus bring their affair to an innocuous and conventional close. He was wrong, as usual, as far as Larry’s finding someone in the summer resort that would divert his affection from Edith. For when Larry returned abortedly to New York, he expressed his disgust in no uncertain terms about his encounters with the young female guests at the resort, because some went so far in their aggressive amorousness to make a grab for his fly.

“I don’t like that, do you?” he asked Ira, who felt, as he shook his head vehemently like some kind of mechanical toy, wound-up double springs of intense envy and disappointment. “No, I don’t either.” Goddamn crumb he was, reduced to smutty, futile, and vindictive importunings, who couldn’t get — Christ, he could hardly say it even to himself out of shame and self-loathing — out to the beach to screw his cousin often enough. “No, I don’t either,” he who had to risk everything to get at a pudgy, simpering fifteen-year-old. Or sixteen, as if another year would palliate—

Edith was traveling through Europe, through Italy and France mainly, and almost every week Ira received a letter from her. She had taken her small portable typewriter with her, the portable in its rigid black carrying case, and her letters were typewritten in a style Ira quickly came to recognize, even the darkness and spacing of the type. What surprised him at first, all but astonished him, was her style. It was peculiar to all of her correspondence: hasty, disjointed, discursive, unrevised, and with words occasionally misspelled. She poured out her impressions of places visited, food consumed, the state of her “innards,” sundry reflections, with no attempt to sort things out, no attempt at order whatever. But how he treasured those letters! How he gloried in them! How often he reread them! They were the first he had ever received from a college instructor, a college English instructor, soon undoubtedly to be elevated to an assistant professor! A professor! And she deigned to write to him, nay, wrote to him as informally and vernacularly as if he were on an equal footing with her, one near to her, one whom she could trust to be discreet about her chatty confidences about her roommate Iola, about the university, the head of the department, even about Larry, her lover. Ira was relieved Larry was away when he received the letters, however much he missed him otherwise; he didn’t have to share Edith’s letters with him — for Larry would certainly have asked Ira whether he had received news from Edith, and it was easier to write a few words in general in answer to Larry’s letters from the summer resort than to speak to him in person about them. They were her messages to him, Ira felt, her bond to him alone, an augury, so he yearned, of the realization of the only future open to him. In it he could make some sort of restitution — what else call it? — redress — find some, no the only, outlet for the discontented, the sorry mess he felt he had become. Ah, to find redress in print, in words, as his piece in The Lavender foreshadowed. They called it métier, they called it forte, oh, Jesus: call it the shape of release on the pages of something he had written. Oh, in time perhaps, in time, a whole book!

For him, the dented, tarnished brass letter box in the much-trodden vestibule of the tenement took on a sudden glory, became transmogrified, when he descried through the curlicues the black type on an envelope that could only be Edith’s. Or already brought upstairs by Mom, a letter from Edith lying in wait for him on the kitchen table. To cherish, to read with pulsating spirit: words that sprang up before his eager eyes like a plume. Her letters praised his exceptional sense of humor, his descriptive powers, his latent abilities as a writer, his unusual maturity for his years, his astonishing gravity, for all his humor. Her words filled him with a glow of worth, discernible even to Mom.

“She writes you nice things, the Professora?”

“Yeah.”

Filling him with buoyancy, with aspiration, her letters inspired him with an eagerness to reply, and in replying, confirm the model of himself that she held up before him. And in that very reply also — adumbrated first on a scratch pad, and then carefully afterward elaborated on lined paper — certainties infused him that he was, that he could be, what she said he was, that he could rise to what she said, certainties sinking to uncertainties, and then suddenly waxing to elation, reflecting from the enthusiastic words he had committed to the page — and a moment later dampened by doubt again.

He sent his letters to her forwarding addresses — and received in return others that boosted his spirit skyward. His letters were so full of colorful detail and interesting observation, she wrote. He made her feel she was at the very place he was describing, experiencing his sensations. His letters were so direct and unaffected. She looked forward to them. She wished Larry could learn a little of that knack. He tended to poeticize his prose too much, and that was too bad, because it made his letters too studied. Followed immediately by remarks that although traveling was interesting, and she had met interesting people, traveling in general didn’t agree with her. French cooking especially. It was too rich, was always served under cover of rich sauces. It was constipating. She had to take frequent enemas. Ira could feel himself duck in embarrassment at her frankness, and yet at the same time feel a stirring of pride that she trusted him to the extent of imparting such confidences. She missed the absence of plain American cooked vegetables. She might have to curtail her trip by a week or two because of her constant “indigishchin,” she deliberately misspelled.

Silence separated the dark space between them, a solemn silence. As they lay there on their cots, Larry began again. “Only one thing matters,” Larry said, trying to convince himself more than Ira. “Edith. She’s the only person in the world that really matters to me. . Ah, to be able to solve that problem.” His words, so full of gravity, distributed themselves throughout the semigloom of the tent. “We’re back again to the crux of the problem — whether I should leave my family and marry Edith. I know that’s what you’re saying to yourself, Ira, that I should not care what anyone else thinks.”

“Oh, no, go ahead, go ahead.”

“Leave home now, with my father gone? It seems less possible — I seem less able to do it now than ever. It becomes more cruel. Really cruel. I’m at a crossroad. Up till, up till Papa died, I thought, if necessary, I had the — the necessary heartlessness. I thought I’d mustered up the courage while I was at Copake to carry out my resolution. The more some of these, you know, sex-hungry ones threw themselves at me, the more resolved I became. But Papa’s death was a cruel blow. More than the loss of a father. I mean, it shakes up everything I’ve made up my mind about.”

The time for bantering, for flightiness, was indeed over, at least for a while. Ira couldn’t fathom Larry’s world, that was all, he couldn’t fathom it. What the hell was he doing here with Larry in the first place? With Larry and his proper, decent problems. Problems of love, of solicitude about his mother, and still influenced by family judgment. Scruples, yeah. And he, Ira — talk of love, talk of family! No, all he could hope for, speculate about, was his slim chances of a quick screw with Stella in Mamie’s front room. Jesus. Yes, Larry’s solemnity affected him, but by the very incongruity of it all. As if the two were like clouds in the obscurity of the tent. What a place. What an interlocutor—

“All right, I know you don’t get along well with your father. The situation is — or I should say was—” Larry’s big hand moved in a pale arc through the shadow. “Was. Say you’re in my shoes. You’ve got no father. You’ve lost him, right?”

“Yeah?”

“Your mother is a widow. Oh, you’ve got family — but if she ever needs you, it’s now. Your sister is soon going to be married. You’re the last child. I’ve asked you something like this before. But now the question has really become sharp, intense.”

Two pale hands plowed the gloom. “Would you, if you could, go off and leave your mother? Get a room somewhere, a part-time job somewhere? Whatever. I know you’re attached to your mother — as I am to mine, maybe more. Would you leave her — to herself? Remember, your sister is gone. We’re going to sell the house, move to an apartment in Manhattan.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Would you?”

“Leave Mom?” Ira asked.

“Yes.”

“Where am I going?”

“I told you. Some one-room place in the Village maybe. Leave your mother and go to a rooming house. I don’t know. You get some kind of a job, part-time. Nights. You can’t afford an apartment.”

“What’s the aim?” Ira temporized.

“You know the aim. The same as it’s been. Break all the ties that I, you, have.”

“I don’t have any, any like yours.”

“But that’s not relevant. Break all the deep, close family ties. Change your whole outlook. What’s dear to you. What you value, enjoy. You’ve got to undo what you were. All right? I’ve said all this before. I’m repeating myself, I know. Become a bohemian, toss out ambition, career, profession, live any old way,” Larry suddenly stressed. “Live just to write poetry, live to be a writer. Live I don’t know how.” He paused. “Well?”

Was the guy looking for a way out? The thought drilled through Ira’s mind. Nah. “Listen, pal, you’re practically asking me to decide your life.”

“In a way, yes.” Larry spoke as grimly as Ira had ever heard him. “Decide my life now.”

“Wow!”

Silence again in the space between the two cots. Decide my life now, Ira heard repeated in his own mind. Literally. It could be that. Then what did he want? Decide my life now. If he told Larry what he would do, if he told Larry the truth, about his own willfulness, callousness, self-centeredness, stemming from what he had become, yes, stemming from his own contemptible gratifications, his corroded character — in which the once resonant Lower East Side world, holistic, Jewish, with its cheder, reverence, fear of God, and all the rest, were all lost in the fog of himself, all turned to pulverized, floating sensations, impressions in a self devoid of integrity — hell, he had gone astray — in more ways than one.

Silence, presumably deliberative, meditative. Larry was waiting. Start again. If he told Larry the truth, the course of action he would have blindly pursued, blindly, instinctively, his course of action — he would have said: sure. He would leave Mom. With somebody like Edith the goal, the prize, that kind of future, or whatever to call it, option — and for himself, he knew damned well there was no other, no other avenue open to him. But hell, for Larry, a hundred avenues were open. A hundred twats too. Nah. Then he would have to lie. And if Larry took him seriously, if his answer counted seriously in forming Larry’s course of action, he was bending Larry’s destiny, he was consigning Larry to his fate. Unless he, Ira, was willing to play a subordinate role to Larry indefinitely, as he had told himself before, feed Larry with all his own wild imaginings, his agonies and capers, he was advancing his own future at Larry’s expense. It was like an envisaged sacrifice of Larry to his own aims. Ira imagined he could see his own face in the lamplit canvas overhead, see eyeglasses and all, leering at himself in knowing mockery at his imminent betrayal. Jesus, it wasn’t right. He tried to stall. One last opportunity to ward off perfidy: “‘Decide my life now,’” Ira finally said. “You mean if I were in your place?”

“No! You make the decision in your place. Not for me. For yourself.” Larry’s voice filled the tent with vehemence. “Your mother.”

“My mother?” He was nailed to an answer — no, he was nailing Larry with his answer: “I guess I wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Leave Mom — all alone.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Well, with me it’s different. I don’t have that kind of family you have. We don’t have any of that kind of — well, affluence—”

“We’re not really all that affluent.”

“Compared to me, for Christ’s sake. And different life, background. Years in Bermuda. Culture. All right? So you don’t have to do as I say, as I advise. If I didn’t have a sister, I wouldn’t leave Mom alone, that’s all.”

“It makes my leaving home all the more difficult, judging from what you say.” A note of irritation at Ira’s manifest lack of logical coherence crept into Larry’s voice. “According to you, I have so many advantages; in other words, I have a dozen times more reason to stay at home with my mother than you have, and yet what I’m trying to tell you is those are the reasons I ought to leave.”

“Well, you asked me what I would do in my case,” Ira said forcibly. “It’s hard.” The argument made him feel less like a traitor. “I can’t do both, you know. Be poor as we are, and be well off as you are.”

“Would you stay home if you were well off? I mean, you lacked for nothing. All right? You’re making it seem that you would stay home because you don’t have anything. That’s not an issue.”

“But now you’re asking me to be as you are.”

“We’re not considering money.” Larry transmitted his insistence across the dim interval. “Would you leave your mother at this point? Yes or no?”

“No.” He had committed it, the ultimate in transgression, betrayal.

“That’s what I want to know. . Why?”

“In your case, or my case?”

“In my case.”

“You told me yourself why.”

“Does it seem like a good reason to you?”

“No.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!”

“I can’t help it. It’s just too tough for me.” Ira raised his voice. “Christ’s sake!” He swatted at the thin fine sting of proboscis penetration. “Bastard. I think I got him. But I’d have to get out into the light to see if there’s any smear of blood. But — aw, nuts, if I got out into the light, they’d eat me alive. I’m sorry I dragged you into this place, adventure or no adventure. We could have hitchhiked right home.”

“It’s all right. I told you I have no complaint,” Larry insisted strongly. “As a matter of fact, it’s paid off better than hitchhiking home. I mean, talking to you clarifies a few things in myself. I can’t leave my mother. I’ll have to work this thing out some other way. If I could just talk to Edith, and get her opinion. But then again, I know what she’d say. Stay home. Get my degree. Do the sensible thing. All that. But we’re both in the same situation. She’s uncertain too. I would have to do the thing that would make her certain. Do you follow me? It would depend on my action. Am I certain? Am I ruthless for her sake? And so I go right around in a circle again.”

Silence once more. Something else to talk about, to distract. It was too taxing, all they had been discussing; it was too fateful. Jesus, he was caging himself into a future as well as Larry, a possible future. If he was instrumental in excluding Larry from occupying the space, there it was. That didn’t mean it was automatically his, of course, but maybe a step closer. Oh, hell, what was he thinking of? He couldn’t’ stand anything so strict as behaving the way Edith expected. He wasn’t built that way, no matter what kind of insidious perceptions pricked his mind. Aw, bull.

“I was telling you we lived in the same house as Uncle Louis in Brownsville,” Ira said to change the subject. “We shared a flock of chickens. Mom told me that all the chickens were stolen one night. Including the marvelous rooster. Disappeared.”

Larry seemed not to have heard, not to be listening.

His attempt at diversion scarcely glanced off the brooding Larry. Ira pondered. How the hell was he going to get the guy off the subject of their destinies? He had to get off it. Jesus. Get off it, and away from his sense of guilt. “Mom told me that the reason we moved away — to the East Side — and how different everything would have been if we hadn’t — was that Pop, as usual, got into one helluva row with Uncle Louis, his nephew. They called each other all kinds of terrible names, cursed each other. Ze vun sikch balt geshlugen tsim toit.” And expecting as always Larry’s “What does that mean?” he prefaced translation with remarks about the Yiddish tendency toward horrendous invective. “‘Drop dead’ is the mildest of them,” Ira tried to humor his friend. “‘Be burned to death, be slaughtered.’ ‘Be drawn and quartered.’ Hey, I’m rhyming,” he added comically.

No acknowledgment came from the outstretched, discernible figure on the cot on the other side of the tent.

“I think maybe it’s what Jews may have seen or suffered over the centuries.” Ira spoke more slowly. He was becoming discouraged, as though he had no audience. Surely, Larry’s silence wasn’t owing to Ira’s counsel, which Larry perhaps perceived as false, as treacherous. Nah. “I have a hunch that’s it,” he continued, paused, received no confirmation of being heard. “Funny thing is they never swear by genitals. Know what I mean? Wops’ll say ‘yer mudder’s ass,’ or ‘yer fodder’s hairy balls. .’” His voice trailed off. No use. The best thing to do was to turn over on the cot, forget the whole damn thing, wait, sleep if he could, till morning. Jesus, Larry was in a bad way. Larry was in a bad way, or he himself was in bad. Boy. Ira bent forward to reach for the rough blanket at the end of the cot. “My father had better hoss blankets than this,” he grumbled, barely audibly.

“You know, I’ve never asked you,” Larry said, almost abruptly. “Have you ever been in love?”

The ground had shifted. In the ambiguous gloom under the sloping walls of an army tent, a bell tower reared up from the summit of Mt. Morris Park hill. “Well, I told you about Rosie, my uncle’s daughter,” Ira stalled.

“Oh, no, that’s just kids investigating. Have you ever — well — it’s personal. Do you mind?”

“Oh, no. God, after you telling me all your — all the private things about yourself.”

“All right, I’ve told you. Have you ever been with a woman? Or a girl? I realize I’ve volunteered information. But asking is different. So—”

“Oh, no.”

Larry let a few seconds of silence go by. “I have a reason for asking. I’m not just prying.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“Have you ever gotten so excited you came too fast? You got a premature orgasm?”

“Oh, is that it?” Ira debated, foresaw consequences — in every answer, save one: profession of complete ignorance. What was the next best choice to outright lying? “Oh, maybe once or twice.” Ira still felt secure behind seeming casual curiosity. The locus of concern was within Larry’s province.

“Once or twice. But not usually?” He rolled about to face Ira. “I seem to have run into some sort of trouble that way. It really bothers me. I don’t know how to get over it.”

“Yeah? Maybe you ought to see a doctor.”

“I may have to. I’m sure there are any number of men who’ve run into the same thing. You didn’t do anything special about it?”

“Me! Oh, no.” It was gratifying how little truth it took to deflect, to stopper up the genie within the vase.

“Then I can be frank about the whole business. I didn’t think you’d had any experience. You never mentioned it.”

“Mentioned what?”

“Sexual intercourse.”

“Oh.” The scrawny colored woman who had replaced the comely Pearl of the ladies’ rest room atop Yankee Stadium? Scrawny Theodora, apparition in the doorway opening on a stuffy ground floor, shmatta-draped room. Jesus, you couldn’t mention that. “Well,” Ira began, had to clear his throat to dispel reluctance. “Nothing to be proud of.”

“Oh, sure. I wasn’t interested in romantic adventure. I was just interested in whether it was usual, that’s all. You said once or twice. I guess that answers it.”

A boxer hung on the ropes in Madison Square Garden. Strands in his own brain shuttled back and forth, twisting to a cable of last refuge: I used to lay my sister. Try and say that. All right, make Stella older: I lay my cousin a lot. I still lay my cousin every chance I get. Jesus, he’d been afraid of that, afraid at the very moment when Larry proposed the trip. Lucky it wasn’t a whole week, as Larry had suggested, a suggestion he had shrunk from in advance, within his own mind. Lucky. The urge to unburden, to claw at the toils of the net holding the pent-up self. Boy, if he ever got started, there was no telling where he’d end. Older cousin, older than what, than he was, than she was? “I. .” he began. “It isn’t very nice. But you know, sometimes the damn thing runs away with you.”

“Sometimes?” Larry echoed mirthlessly. “That’s the understatement for today. Runs away with you is right. If I wasn’t keeping faith with Edith, listen, I’m no prude, you know? I made up my mind.”

“You sometimes get started early. By surprise. Well, nearly by surprise,” Ira corrected himself. There it was: he stood on the threshold of the moment of transfer. Transfer of what? Energy. The potential trapped within himself. Motive force. Power. Explosive memory. The anguish and folly that supplied the soul, the unique surge that drove him toward his chaotic visions.

II

How did his day begin? He sat there not so much trying to recollect as marveling at the amazing diversity of reflections and revelations that could occur, that the mind could generate in the course of a couple of hours — between arising from bed and sitting down before the word processor. So much more, yes, so much more interesting, valuable, than the snarled skein of yarn he spun. In the first place, in the time when M was still alive, the day began drearily, cold, with a fine snow falling. He hadn’t arisen from bed yet. M had come to his rescue, as she did more than once in their last few years together, slipped her hand under his neck, and helped him sit up. Then she stood beside the bed, making sure he was steady enough to be safely left alone. He had a whistle, a small plastic whistle, that M had equipped him with, attached by a string to his pajama buttonhole, a child’s police-type whistle, which trilled when he blew it, and which he blew when he was ready to get up, or needed help.

On such mornings, M had gotten out of bed a half hour or so before him, had turned the furnace up, set in motion coffee-making procedures, and begun the arduous diurnal chore of pulling on her heavy elastic stockings — not mere support hose, but the heavy anti-varicose-vein stockings she wore, and had worn for many years. So strongly elastic was the fabric she had to exert herself to the utmost to draw the stockings up, a task made all the more difficult because of the reinforcing pads she also had to keep in place at the same time, powder-puff pads against her ankles, where she had to contend with dormant ulcers. He groaned when she hoisted him to a sitting position, and then sat on the edge of the bed after she left. He sat with eyes squeezed shut against the atrocious pain.

Every joint in his body ached, from finger to elbow, to shoulder, to neck — worst offenders of all were the neck joints, where they connected with the left side of the head — the pain they caused often kept him from sleeping, and from getting up. That was the way consciousness returned in the morning, giving vent to its advent in a scarcely suppressed howl: “Ow-o-oh!”

So to his study, shuffling along in the moccasins he wore in bed (to keep the winter bedding from chafing the skin off his big and middle toes).

— What a recital, my friend, organ recital, as they say.

I know, Ecclesias.

To his study, because he had provided it with its own wall heater, and it was next to the bathroom, and because he kept his shorts and trousers there, and could get them on by himself after his shower. (M had to help him with his upper garments.) Next, he sat in the swivel chair beside his computer, which had a white hood over it, which came to a peak, like that worn by the KKK, an amended trash-can liner, improvised into a dust cover. There he sat, groaning while he toilsomely removed pajamas and white socks. Then to the bathroom, into the tub, turning on the water of the shower, and adjusting its temperature as hot as he could stand it.

Where, empty-headed, he often sang “La donna è mobile,” and all the songs he still remembered, and he still remembered them all, songs that Miss Berger, that hatchet-faced crone, had taught him. He knew and loved almost all.

A tinker I am.

My name’s natty Dan.

From morn till night I trudge it. .

Or:

Out on the sea when the sun is low,

and the fisherman homeward turns. .

Or:

Men of Harlech, in the hollow,

Do ye hear like rushing billow. .

The other juveniles, his fellow classmates, snickered and sang:

A stinker I am.

My name’s snotty Dan.

They sang, “Men of Harlem, in the hollow. .” But she singled him out to bring Mom to school. He should have gone straight to Mr. O’Reilly, poor, damn fool, timid Jewish oaf he was, straight to the principal with the twitch on his cheek, who understood him, and said, “I didn’t do anything, Mr. O’Reilly. I didn’t do anything bad. I just grinned. I forgot what you told me.” Oh, appeal to the dust. Where was Mr. O’Reilly? Where were seventy years? More than seventy. My God, it was now nearer eighty than seventy.

Meanderings, reflections in the hot shower that limbered grateful joints and sinews, limbered, eased their rheumatic ache. And as the pain abated, allowed him to think, after a fashion, and with nothing else importuning for attention, he would invariably address a group of his peers with his favorite, nay, his perennial thesis: the reason for our failure, yours and mine, to go beyond that first book or two, or trilogy, whether we were black or white, we practitioners in black in white, in print, Jew or gentile. The reason for our failure was the discontinuity we suffered during our development, or having reached the peak of our development. There was the central reason. The first few years of our lives, the psyche laid down the basis, the foundation on which we expected, consciously or otherwise, to build upon all the rest of our lives. What did he mean by that? Perhaps he had made these foundations seem too static; they were not; they were dynamic; they were processes. Those first few years built an interpretational system within each human being — Christ, why didn’t he write it all out, and deliver it as the content of a lecture? Which he had been invited to give so many times, and declined: because he knew himself to be the world’s worst lecturer, a sheer flop on a podium, a stranded jellyfish.

— As you are now.

Sí, sí, amigo Ecclesias. Verily. As I am now.

Write the goddamn thing out, and read it. Memorize it after a while. Jesus, the dough they offered him: all expenses paid, and a fat honorarium to boot. He could have been affluent, he and his beloved spouse.

Lecture like crazy (well said): a grave discontinuity was what he suffered from, a grave and disabling discontinuity. The child expected that those things implanted into his psyche would flourish as he developed: the landscape, the field or farm or village or barrio, would also comprise his larger world as he grew up. And the language: how important a factor that was: Yiddish, in his case. He witnessed its drying up, his mother tongue shriveling in a single lifetime. For the Italian, the few who wrote, DiDonato, the same, or the Chicano, Anaya, or even the Southern black. And the people, the kind of people that composed his ambience, the same thing could be said of them, the way they spoke, what they did, the way they did it, their mannerisms, parochialisms, whether of region, of enclave, all were built into the nascent personality, all were expected to continue: the folkways, the people, their pursuits. And they didn’t. That’s the whole point. They didn’t. They were truncated—

Ira’s lecture increased in fervor as physical distress was relieved: sometimes more drastically, sometimes less, he declaimed in silence, the cosmopolitan world displaced the parochial one. And simultaneously much of the parochial world also disappeared, also was absorbed in the cosmopolitan one, at times dramatically as with the Jewish East Side, at times more slowly, as with rustic existence in America. The hick town ceased being so, the barrio as well. Fortunate the author who could return to what was left, or was still undergoing change, and draw on the remainder, the vernacular and the folkway. Because otherwise, he found that he would have to start again with a new landscape, a new ambience, a new set of conditions and characters, customs and behavior, functions that didn’t match the foundations already laid down, the interpretations settled upon for maturity, didn’t jibe with the pristine norms. The two were incommensurable. Yes.

And much of it, nay, most of the motive force driving the transformation was economic. Economics, the drive to get out of the precincts of impoverishment, the drive to escape the restrictions imposed by the parochial milieu, restrictions closely associated with poverty, restrictions that were part and parcel of penury.

The mind, informed now with awareness of the greater opportunities of the cosmopolitan world, chafed in revolt against prohibitions, prohibitions that only yesterday were nurturing traditions, but now newly perceived as constraints. Thus, when the revolt against the parochial world succeeded, and the individual, say a writer, cast off the restrictions that were part and parcel of his formative milieu, he simultaneously abandoned his richest, most plangent creative source: his folk, their folkways, his earliest, most vivid impressions, the very elements of his formation. Hence the price of success in his best work was to condemn him to discontinuity, if he was to continue. What a paradox! Condemned him to draw on shallower, lately acquired sources different in kind, in nature, from those that imbued his best work. Hence he was condemned to repetition, to academia, to Hollywood, to booze, to immobilization, singly or in combination. Q.E.D.

Ira shut off the shower, and bent over the faucets to turn the small handle between them that deflected water from shower to tub, and also allowed the residual water in the shower pipe to trickle into the tub. Then, holding on to a variety of handgrips he had attached long ago, to prevent M from slipping on the tub bottom — and now, what irony: it was he who needed them, not M — he trod carefully on the antiskid toadstool shapes M had stuck to the bathtub bottom. At the other end of the tub, he reached around past the shower curtain to the yellow bath towel hanging on the clothes hook affixed to the narrow door of the small utility closet close by.

Yes. Therein lay the contradiction. He might have returned to his source, he might have continued to write about a dwindling, a crumbling away of life, once lusty and flourishing, and — how unbelievably soon! — disintegrating. But who could do so with any validity and conviction — after he had rejected that life, after he had been infected by association with the cosmopolitan, the larger world in which he now functioned and moved freely? Others had managed to do it, return to a stagnant or depleted source. He too might have done so, and continually extruded a different model of it, the same sausage in a different casing, a different version of a world no longer extant, or no longer viable. . He could have echoed and reechoed himself, rung variations indefinitely. . sold hundreds of thousands of copies of each new edition. . lived in luxury off the royalties. .

Head and neck, neck eased by hot water, he could towel off without too much trouble; it was armpits he couldn’t reach, couldn’t stretch stiff, unyielding sinews that far. With his back he had difficulty too, in drying it; still, if results weren’t wholly satisfactory, the effort was tonic. No use striving to dry his legs below the knees. No use and dangerous too. He might topple over — so. Sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

But that was a minor, minor point, though how nice to have all kinds of dough, but that was a minor point. He began folding the bath towel. Dropped to the floor just below: to raise the makeshift elevator he had devised for getting out of the tub: oddity of oddities, oh, everything about him was oddity. It was a pretty piece of wood, supported underneath by the wooden drawer knobs, which added height, knobs of drawers; but a pretty platform the pretty piece of wood made. It had been the cover of the outhouse toilet of Ira’s home in Augusta, Maine, when he and M had first bought the place. He stepped out of the tub safely onto the platform — no, the important question was: why were those first novels so often the best ones? No, that was obvious. He had already answered that. The earliest were the freshest. But still, other first writing, fresh though it might be, might also suffer from ineptitude, the crudity of the novice. No, no. The question was: why did those first (and sometimes only) novels frequently have such wide appeal? They were often best-sellers, if not at the outset, then, like his own, and others as well, eventually. Why? The answer was that it was not only the writer, the literary artist, who suffered from disabling discontinuity; it was the multitude, the populace, the reading public who were troubled by the selfsame thing as well. He was certain of it—

His moccasins on, he padded back to his study, where his shorts lay on the open pages of the unabridged Webster on its improvised stand, a flimsy TV serving table on wheels — certain of it as hell. That was what his fable had been all about without his knowing it; unwittingly he had struck the universal chord of what had affected millions of people. In the U.S., in foreign countries via more than a half-dozen translations. Why the hell should a dope like him, who could write nothing of any consequence thereafter, have established an international reputation of sorts? Imagine: on that teeming East Side, who would have dreamed, who would have wagered a dollar to a kopeck, among all those millions of immigrants, that the Stigman brat, who lived in the corner house on 9th Street and Avenue D, would distinguish himself in any way except maybe becoming a rabbi. . well, maybe one guy might have surmised: the boarder in their fifth-story aerie, before Uncle Morris came to America, Feldman by name, who prophesied to Mom, with extraordinary clairvoyance, even if a bit wide of the mark, “There grows another Maxim Gorky.” Who else would have dreamed that the little gamin whom the poor harassed rabbi, or malamut, was preparing to translate lushin koydish into mama lushin would one day see his English step-mama lushin translated into modern lushin koydish.

But really — Ira chided himself — the thought was a bagatelle, a bauble, a one-liner. The genuinely significant idea, which one Israeli reviewer writing in Haaretz delivered, was: “Childhood is not a step of the way, but the whole way.” The man was uncanny! Without knowing more about the author than the book itself, he had unerringly probed to the truth. The source of the novel’s strength lay in the novelist’s weakness; the adult may have accreted literary techniques and virtuosity; the creator was still the child, precocious perhaps with respect to letters, but still a child.

Well — after trunks, pants, after shorts, trousers, take your choice. Standing up, following even a brief period of sitting down, was a consideration these days, with knees what they were, capable of a single poor and painful thrust. He tried to “rationalize” the business, spare himself superfluous movements: put shorts on partway, then draw his pants up to his knees, before getting up, so that he had to stand up only once, not twice: pull his shorts up to the waist, then his trousers while still standing; keep his trousers from falling down by tightening the belt so that the garment stayed above his knees. Oh, there were tricks in every trade, more than one way to skin a cat, or outwit rheumatoid arthritis — chief point was that in his novel, he had stumbled on a fable that addressed a universal experience, a universal disquiet, more prevalent in this age, undoubtedly, than ever before in human history: the sense of discontinuity.

He didn’t have to be a supreme literary genius — Ira walked barefoot through the hall toward the kitchen. M had already transferred there, as she always did, his socks, his wristwatch, his sneakers and upper garments — it was John Synge, Ira reflected, who had already discovered the foregoing. John Synge, whom Ira admired as man and writer, who had taught Ira so much, from whom he had never grown estranged, whom he had never grown to detest, as he did Joyce, but admired to this day. It was Synge who had observed, to paraphrase him, that talent wasn’t enough. The writer had to strike a chord reverberating in harmony with something deep within his time. That was why a dub like himself could write a classic of its genre, as it was called. A real fluke.

He entered the kitchen, where M had everything ready to finish dressing him. She waited for him, ever kind, ever forbearing, in pink skirt, brown sweater, her long, elliptical, Anglo-Saxon countenance wrinkled and beautiful, her hair gray and ivory, and she uttered consoling, cheerful words as he came in. He sat down in the big armchair bought especially for him, because its high back provided support for his neck. On the table, already collected in a Chinese enameled spoon, were his vitamins and minerals, capsules and pills, about six of them, and there was fruit juice to get them down with, and near at hand the little kit with swab and tub of anti-athlete’s foot cream which M dabbed between his toes after drying them. Within reach was the small square wooden platter that bore utensils, salt and pepper-grinder — and the vial containing the Imuran tablets, of which he took one, and the other vial containing the prednisone five-milligram tablets, his cortisone, of which he took two. Meanwhile M at the stove spooned out the whole-grain porridge she had cooked this morning. .

III

A faint light came through the mosquito netting at the entrance of the tent, and lifting his head, Ira saw someone light a lantern on the back porch of the farmhouse. They had been given their supper there. Probably the help ate there; it seemed to have become a satellite to the hotel. And now light gleamed on the eyeglasses of the figure bearing the lantern down the porch steps — and toward them. . It was Uncle Louis. Ira felt a resumption of affection, a renewal of boyhood gratitude. Uncle Louis had considerately taken a little spare time to come over and talk to them. Away from the hotel and his cares, perhaps he would indulge in a round of friendly conversation, display a token of his former heartening sympathy that had so endeared him to his nephew in years gone by. Now perhaps Larry could see for himself that Ira’s praise of his uncle was at least partly justified.

“My uncle is coming over.” Ira sat up, swiveled about on the cot, then stood up. . waited until the approaching figure was within earshot.

“Uncle Louis. Gee, I’m glad to see you, Uncle. Come in away from the bugs.” Ira held open the mosquito netting. “Come in and sit down.”

“No. I didn’t come to talk.”

“No?” Ira was at a loss. “I’m sorry, Uncle. I thought maybe you would.” His regret was intermingled with appeal. “I was telling my friend here, on the way”—he indicated Larry, who had lifted his head and soberly regarded Uncle Louis—“how much you knew about socialism, how much you influenced me in wanting to be a Socialist.”

Uncle Louis was never other than lean, but now he looked gaunt. As he hung his lantern on a second hook on the tent pole, the cords of his skinny neck crossed above the open collar of his striped shirt. The second lantern’s light seemed to dredge creases in his careworn, leathery features. Uncle Louis shook his head.

“I can see you’re tired, Uncle,” Ira said forgivingly.

Curtly, his eyes behind rimless eyeglasses glinting disapproval, Uncle Louis turned away from the lantern. Gone was all indulgence, the gentleness that had disabused Ira when at fourteen he announced he wanted to go to West Point, and Uncle Louis said, “They don’t like Jews in West Point,” a different voice, but the same person, now said: “It’s a waste of time.”

“What is? You mean socialism, Uncle?”

“Yes, socialism. Don’t waste your time on it.”

Ira was too confounded to say anything more, to do anything more than gaze. Uncle Louis’s disillusion, like the light of the lantern he had hung upon the center pole, drove away everything of an entirely different personal nature that had instilled the semidark with a different strain and crisis only a minute ago.

“It’s nothing. It’s worse than nothing.” Uncle Louis scarcely raised his voice, as if the subject had long ago become a matter of indifference to him, had died. “It didn’t turn out to be anything like we thought. No idealism, no principles, no brotherhood. What is there in Russia? Socialism? They murder Socialists. The Communists are greater tyrants than the czar ever was. They oppress the common people more than ever, the honest, hardworking farmers. What kind of socialism is that? Freedom, we thought, freedom. They tell you what to do, where to go, what you should think. Nobody is safe. You can’t open your mouth, you can’t disagree. The bureaucrats’ll take your head off. It’s total subjection. You know what subjection is?”

“Of course, Uncle.” Ira could hear the plaintiveness in his own reply.

“That’s what they have in Russia. It’s subjection, it’s not socialism. And Jews? Ah! Jhit is on every Russian’s lips. The same as it was before. Worse than it was before. Stalin is a murderer, he’ll be worse than anyone thinks. You talk about anti-Semites. He’s an anti-Semite of anti-Semites. Every Jew is trying to slip out of Russia, even Socialist Jews. Lenin’s friends Stalin sends to the firing squads. A murderer. And this is what we waited and prayed for, the Socialist revolution. What a Socialist revolution.” Uncle Louis stood in gaunt immobility a few seconds, hopeless. “Noo.” He dismissed the subject with a wave of the yellow slip of paper in his long bony hand. “Take my advice, don’t waste your time on it. You’ll only be disappointed in the end.”

“You really think so, Uncle?”

“I guarantee it. It’s only a question of time.”

So once again, Uncle Louis quenched the illusion he had kindled within his nephew’s mind. Only now that Ira was older, and able, at least fleetingly, to perceive motives that he had scarcely been responsive to before, hardly ever taken the pains to probe, he wondered whether the things Uncle Louis was saying in disparagement of socialism and the Soviet Union were true. Or whether it was because he now owned a summer hotel, or had just naturally become disenchanted because he was growing old, or both. How strange that so much could happen within the space of time in which less than a decade of disillusion was compressed. Compressed into a small bail, yeah, bale: Ira felt that Uncle Louis’s withdrawal from the ranks of idealism meant his withdrawal from life. He had given up, and it was now Ira’s task to carry forward the bold ideas his uncle had abandoned. It seemed almost inevitable that he would have to be that youth who bore a new banner when shades of night were falling fast. That was how it always went: that stupid “Excelsior” of Longfellow that anybody with the least modern attitudes, with the least taste, just plain gagged at for its sappy sentiment. “Excelsior.” No wonder the kids snickered: wood shavings. You packed shipments with it. But it was more than the ideals of onward and upward, justice to the downtrodden — and tolerance of Jews — that had moved Ira toward socialism, that made him so ready to absorb Uncle Louis’s fervor, and transform it into something personal, into an answer to a deep need — with scarcely the ability to put the need into words. It was what he felt he had become, was ever more becoming, a thing he despised. Socialism addressed his self-contempt; socialism fluoresced against the pall over him. He could never be Larry sitting there, almost immobilized with indecision, in love, in love with a mature, cultivated woman, Larry harrowed by conflicts between decent, coherent choices. But maybe he, Ira, could stop being himself, through socialism. Within the space of a minute, the unexpected became the preordained. He would have to pick up where his uncle left off. Without benefit of words, inner colloquy signaled assent and difference like patches of color.

“Thanks for the lantern, Uncle,” Ira said. It wasn’t surprising that his uncle’s visit would mean so much to him, and so little to Larry, still sitting motionless on the cot, his incurious gaze directed upward at Uncle Louis. “Don’t you want to sit down even for a minute, Uncle?” Ira motioned to his cot. “Funny, I was sure you brought the lantern to talk.”

“No, no. I just came for a minute.” Uncle Louis warded off the invitation with curt flap of the yellow slip in his hand. He bent toward Larry on his cot. “Are you Larry Gordon?”

Through all sorts of turbid perspectives, as through a spectral shimmer and shadow, the yellow slip in Uncle Louis’s bony, veined hand materialized into the slick surface of a Western Union telegram envelope.

“Yes, I am.” Larry’s apathy gave way to attentiveness, his bent posture straightened in concern. “Is that for me, Mr. Sanger?”

“Here you are.” Uncle Louis tendered the yellow envelope. “I knew we didn’t have any guests by that name.”

“Thanks. This can’t be—” Larry stood up. “I lost my father the same way. A telegram.” His voice and hands trembled. Every bit of light in the tent seemed to focus on him as he tore open the thin yellow envelope, scanned—

“Ohh!” He threw his head back in prolonged cry. He slapped hands and yellow paper together. His features were transfigured, his countenance beatified, his impassioned gladness cast new light in the tent itself. “She’s back!” he cried. “Edith is back! Edith is back! She’s back in New York! Oh, thanks, thanks, Mr. Sanger! Sorry I’m so excited. I couldn’t get better news than this! It’s wonderful!” His words tumbled out in rapturous disorder. “Oh, great! Oh, marvelous!”

Ira grinned in embarrassment at his friend’s ecstasy, in embarrassment looked from Larry to Uncle Louis in the hope he would understand, make allowances. He and Larry were about the same height, standing close together in lantern light under the ridge of the sloping canvas walls, their faces level, the one young, handsome, exalted with joy, the other drained, wasted, creased.

“I see you’ve got some good news,” Uncle Louis, unbeguiled, wearily sanctioned.

“Oh, have I, Mr. Sanger. I don’t think I’ll get news as good as this if I live to be a hundred years old! I can’t tell you how happy I am. I mean—” Larry’s head tossed shadows on the tent walls. “It’s just impossible. It’s fantastic, it’s so good.”

“I’m glad for you. Glad you got it. The Western Union boy left it at the desk. I just barely happened to think it might be you.” Uncle Louis stretched a lank arm for the lantern. “You won’t need this. It only draws more mosquitoes.”

“Mr. Sanger, I wonder if — if I dare — please — beg a favor of you — on top of all your kindness,” Larry entreated. “May I make a long-distance call? Collect, of course. May I use the phone? Would you mind? Right now? To New York.” Winning, breathless, Larry importuned.

“No reason you can’t. Go ahead. You can use the phone in the kitchen.” Uncle Louis brought the lantern down, beckoned with it. “Just follow me. It’s the same way you came.” Dour and exhausted, his suppressed groan trailed after him. “Be sure to tell the operator to reverse charges.”

“Oh, certainly. I know. I know. Certainly, Mr. Sanger! Thanks.” Larry quickly made shift to hold the mosquito netting open to follow his guide. He turned to Ira as Uncle Louis moved away from the tent. “Coming?”

“No. I’ll stay here.” Ira remained standing — and called, “Good night, Uncle. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, goodbye,” came from the laconic voice in the dark above the departing lantern. “Give my regards to your father and mother.”

Larry paused, beckoned for Ira to follow, his pale hand fervent in obscurity.

Ira signaled him to go on.

IV

And leaves the world to darkness and to me, Ira thought as he sat waiting, glum, confused, perturbed—“Anh,” he heard himself flout himself. Too much, too conflicting, too contradictory. And boy! Agitated, yeah. Amid Larry’s hopes, problems, hopes, elations, and joy! Contrasting with Uncle Louis’s weary disenchantment, as if his main concern was to survive amid the ruin of his hopes and ideals. Jesus, pathetic, what a sight! And he, Ira? Seeing both, seeing both together, in his own goofy way, through his own twisted cravings, and nearly giving way, betraying himself to Larry. “Anh.” Go there, go back to the kitchen with him, listen to his rapturous outpouring? Sure as hell he was calling Edith. Love, dove, love, shove. My darling, darling, and all the hotel help there too maybe, listening, while Ira tried not to shrink. And Uncle Louis there also. Jesus, wasted away, wasn’t he? Like his ideals of socialism. And strict, exacting, patronizing Aunt Sarah, making sure the call was collect. . So Edith was back. Yeah, tender words, sighs, endearments, verbal caresses — by Larry, gushing with rapture. And himself bystander, lamely attending, for everybody to see, hanger-on. But what the hell was that about premature orgasm? Ira had to tear it off in a hurry because, because, Christ, anybody knew why. Larry had all the time in the world. Jesus, life was full of jokes. Contrarieties. How much he had once wanted Uncle Louis for a father. Once wanted him to lay Mom. Lyupka. Sarah should know. Uncle Louis should know he made his nephew dream a stiff peg against Mom’s rump, and she laughed. Pop should know. All that socialism was a waste of time, said Uncle Louis. Oh, nuts.

Edith had called up Larry’s home first, Larry informed him when he returned to the tent. She had been told where he was, where he probably was — by Larry’s sister, after some hesitation. And so the telegram. . delivered to the tent in the dark, and by lantern light. . by lank and changed and spent Uncle Louis. . delivered to Larry brooding on his cot, brooding about his predicament.

Ira had never asked him, in the years afterward, during the decades that went by, Do you remember that time? Has anything happened to you more exciting than that? He had never asked. Strange that he hadn’t — well, not so strange. That was his own, imperfect, egotistical nature — or, to give him the benefit of a little charity, his tactfulness, sensitivity: why drag that up, the illusions, the infatuations, the hopeless emotional entanglements of youth? What could you say to Larry about an eventual loss, an eventual defeat — at your hands? Wasn’t that a thrill, Larry? Something banal as that. Boy, wasn’t that something? The tent, the dark, the dirt floor, the mosquitoes — real New Jersey mosquitoes in New York you could throw a saddle over. And Uncle Louis coming in with the lantern and the telegram. Maybe you could, after many, many years, hark back, when it hardly mattered any longer, muse on it, share it, add a jot to the patter. . No. For obvious reasons.

Sit with hand in pocket awhile, head hanging. It was the summer of 1925, again. And the mind stands still or seems to, but of course it doesn’t. Silly business, the whole thing, like existence itself. That he, Ira, to reiterate, should be with a well-bred, tenderly reared youth like Larry, should have had designs on the guy already, wavered, shaken off loyalty in the nick of time, compulsively determined to make of him, his friend, a vehicle for a future with only the vaguest definition, haziest outline. How do you do it? It wasn’t done consciously, that was the odd part of it; it was done by an act of involuntary imagination. Nobody else could have been that crazy. . How the hell did you ever dream you could do it? Well, he had told himself before how he had done it, a dozen times, or tried to. Think of that dreary cold-water flat on 119th Street, think of Larry’s comfortable, well-furnished, roomy apartment in the Bronx, an apartment occupying the entire floor, and Larry with a room of his own. Oh, fare thee well, friend, friend and stepping-stone. Larry accused Ira of using him just for that — much later, when recriminations were in order — Larry told Ira what he was. And he was right. But what the hell can you do? Nada. The guy had to make life fit fiction.

So, as a consequence of all these circumstances, coincidences, connivings, conscious and unconscious, he, Ira, managed to write a novel that eventually won wide acclaim. Whether the acclaim was merited or not, it would take a few more generations to decide, just as it would take a few more generations for a firm appraisal of Joyce to be made: whether Joyce deserved to be ranked with a Milton or a Shakespeare, deserved to be enshrined among the supreme in literature. Even if the acclaim for his own novel remained firm, say as firm as the deserved esteem accorded to an Oliver Goldsmith, or somebody a lot less worthy, a Jack London, a Nathanael West, a Mike Gold, maybe Lowry, Wright, Ellison, Abe Cahn, the question Ira directed at himself was: was the achievement worth it in terms of the personal suffering, and the suffering of others, Larry’s Edith’s? Was the achievement worth it at the expense of the man too? His integrity, his character? Foolish question, futile question, it would seem at first cry. And yet the whole thing involved a moral element that could not be denied or rejected. Who could say that the impaired moral element, the moral canker inherent in the achievement, did not exercise a subtle retaliation when again he came to assay the next stage of the creative process, this second novel — whether it was not that same moral canker, metastasizing within him, that disabled him? The thought had come to him in the midst of what seemed an easy disposal of the question. That was the way it happened, the way it went was already on the monitor, when the new insight intervened — succeeded by the words Foolish question, futile question. And yet, was it? Deterioration of character was the price of a serious moral flaw, deterioration of character or of identity, and when the next stage came, when both character and unified identity were required, mature and sound, he was found woefully wanting. Over just such moral questions, Ira surmised, did old man Ezra Pound rue the day he ever set pen to paper. And what did he think of Joyce afterward, of Finnegans Wake? Something about writing a gospel? Or Scripture? Was that it? Something disapproving.

Well, of what use were these lucubrations, even if true? And what of value could he, Ira, any more than Pound, transmit to his fellow humans, to posterity, what glimmer of enlightenment could he impart, that would help others avoid the pitfalls he had been prone to, help others, in a substantial way, to live lives more befitting human beings, with dignity, with decency, with a sense of probity — and some sense of fulfillment? Probably not much more than any preacher. Salvation, such as it was, moral improvement, character change for the better, very rarely derived from homily or from sermon. And for each one improved, changed for the better, social conditions, the environment, probably bred a hundred in need of redemption — or rehabilitation. The great changes, the mass changes for the better, required mass action, the concerted activity of the mass in converting the society to one more favorable to the promotion of decency, their decency; and that meant, in the first place, improvement in the material conditions of life, the quality of life, and in the second place, tangible incentives to improve their lot, convictions that would translate into action. And much more. One thing was a fairly safe bet: anybody, damn near, could behave virtuously in his dotage without too much difficulty.

It was predawn dark when Ira was awakened — by Larry insistently calling him from across the tent. Larry was already sitting on his cot, lacing up his shoes. Predawn darkness for the predent. Jesus, what a time to get up. Ira groaned in protest, yawned long and uncouthly, clawed at mosquito bites, hissed and swore, sat up, and dug his feet into his shoes.

“How the hell’d you wake up?”

“I’ve been lying here awake for I don’t know how long. I wanted to make sure it was near morning.”

Predawn. There it was, faintly marbling the sky on the other side of the netting. Neither knew the time. Cool, bleary, Ira got up from the cot, slipped around the tent, urinated against the nocturnal damp, huffed, puffed, broke wind, rejoined Larry in the tent. Larry had his jacket on, ready to go. Lights were on in the kitchen windows of the farmhouse. Uncle Louis was probably up. Maybe if they went in to bid goodbye, they could get a cup of coffee. But Larry urged they skip it, skip the coffee, and get out on the highway to New York. The earliest hours offered the best chances of getting a lift, he reminded Ira, who agreed, but reminded him in turn they only had a short way to go: they were close to the city, about forty or fifty miles. What was the sense — he tried making his grumpiness sound amusing — of hitchhiking by starlight. “We’ll need the Big Dipper to know which way.”

Larry’s urging prevailed. Striding along the narrow ribbon of pavement to the main highway was invigorating — and reviving. Dawn pried the night open, like an entering wedge, making room for sunrise. They reached the three-lane concrete Route 1, and both tramping New Yorkward, Larry wheeled and thumbed, aggressively wheeled and thumbed.

Soon, the countryside took on form and green, and houses along the road variety and shape; the concrete road began to glare. Larry thumbed for rides, back-walking tirelessly toward destination, exuberantly imploring the motorists. Within a half hour after sunrise, a truck slowed down, stopped on the shoulder of the road. The two sped after it for dear life. The driver was a Jewish poultry-and-egg farmer, Manhattan-bound with crates of eggs for the wholesale market. In a glorious moment, full of breathless laughter and exclamations of gratitude, they boarded the vehicle, slid into place beside the ruddy, middle-aged, thickset man at the wheel.

Identities were confirmed. Larry entertained their benefactor at once with his enthusiasm, his large gestures, and his non-Jewish appearance and Jewish charisma — and with snatches of song and story, recent acquisitions from his weeks as singing waiter at Copake. The harassing dilemmas of last night quickly disappeared. Buoyancy and self-confidence were restored. He was Larry again, receptive and congenial, as if both indecision and mourning were a thing of the past. Those few hours in the tent between the arrival of the telegram and the first light of dawn must have been spent coming to some kind of resolution. Although he said nothing about it to Ira, it was evident he still found the resolution valid, even exhilarating, in the full light of day. His alacrity this morning, the springiness of his step as they hurried to reach the main highway, his cheeriness, assurance, all seemed to indicate that a crisis within himself had passed, and a happy faith in himself had taken the place of misgiving.

Ira wondered, as the truck bowled along, with new tires alternately whining and thumping, in transit from concrete slab to slab, like a train over the gaps in rails, whether the intense discussion he and Larry had had last night had determined anything in his decisions, whether Ira’s own compulsive self-serving — was it the creating of reality, or was it self-creating? — had misled his friend. At the moment he hoped not; it weighed on his conscience. Let Larry determine his own future. It already sounded to Ira as if, from his point of view, Larry had decided to do exactly the thing Ira could secretly exult about: Larry had decided to do the wrong thing — for Larry, for his hopes as a writer, for that future that imperceptibly (to Larry) the two had begun to vie with each other.

Oh, it was crazy, it was crazy. But there it was. What was his gaiety and gladness all about? Just because he would soon see Edith, be with her? Certainly. But Larry himself had said that Edith wanted him to stay home, live at home, get his degree, and he was acting in accordance with her advice. And yet at the same time, last night he had said that it was up to him to lead the way, lead the way by doing the opposite of what she advised, convince her by an act of the depth of his sincerity, take the crucial step, the drastic step, even if it wasn’t the wisest one, that marriage to him would be feasible, that he was ready to break all other ties to marry Edith. His behavior didn’t seem to indicate that kind of indomitable resolution — if intuition had anything to say about it. Larry had somehow reconciled his love for Edith with affection for family, with his ties to his family. At least in his own mind, and he was happy with his compromise. Again, dumb hunch prevailed: Larry could avoid disruption and pain and strife that way — postpone it. Well. .

Thoughts unreeled against the passing countryside, trailed past buses and meadows, slipped over houses, floated against the clouds beyond the trees at the margins of hayfields.

As if he were eavesdropping, Ira remained silent, trying to assess the implications of his friend’s merriment — and the implications they would have for himself — for potentialities, the advantages. Meanwhile, Larry entertained the Jewish poultryman. And he — Asher was his name — never lost his smile of contentment. He beamed as he drove. Even as they approached the city, and traffic began to hem them in, he steered through it with a smile, with the look of a man getting the better of a bargain, the bargain of Larry’s anecdotes, Larry’s mirthful borscht-circuit tidbits, acted out with infectious enthusiasm, with all the vigor of a seasoned showman. If the resolution of last night’s conflict with himself had liberated Larry from dilemma, his release showed itself in something Ira had only seen traces of before, never seen exhibited with such verve and aplomb as Larry demonstrated, seated beside the beguiled poultry-man in the cab of the rolling truck: it was Larry as the performer, Larry enjoying his role as performer.

They entered the city, reached the last station on the elevated subway line. When the two offered to alight, Asher told them to sit still, and then he generously drove them all the way through the Bronx. At length he drew up to the curb under the platform of the station after which he would have to branch off from the subway line, stopped, extended his hand, invited them to drop in at his farm not far from Spring Valley. “Asher’s Shady Brook, everybody knows it. You wanna see good farmerettes, like they called them when the war was on? My four girls. And they’re all pictures too.”

Assuring him they would try to avail themselves of his hospitality, the two set off, with much laughter. Ira, too, felt himself suddenly possessed by a vivacity he could scarcely recognize, that didn’t belong to him. And indeed, there was something inebriate about it all, blithe, the spell of Larry’s release. No, he was all wrong — Ira felt a fleeting giddiness, as though he were displaced from himself. This was the way to be. Stop scheming, stop calculating, furtively nourishing fancies he ought never spawn. Larry’s choice was the right one. Who the hell was he to think he had any part in the matter, could conceivably benefit one way or the other, no matter what Larry decided? Who the hell was he? Nobody. He was a shlemiel. So get back to being one.

They dashed up the stairs at the rumble of an approaching train, jabbed coins in the slot of the turnstile, and charged into the train, cheating the closing doors. . panted, grinned in private frolic, hung on to straps and stood, although there were empty seats interspersed among sitting passengers.

After a two-station ride, they separated; Larry got off the train. “Call me in a couple of days. Call up. Day after tomorrow! I’ll be home.” Moving along the platform, Larry shouted through the partly open window, loud enough for the whole car to hear, and Ira, secure in his induced excitement, felt no embarrassment, but shouted in return:

“Right!”

The train went on, it left Larry behind, but for a second, the window through which Ira last saw him seemed to trail after it the lover’s face, blissful, radiant with happiness and anticipation.

What a splendid, exciting span of time, of existence, so heady, so vicarious, spent in another’s enamored, ardent state, vicarious and ephemeral. It had been great. Like the difference between a completed drawbridge and a single cantilever, open, himself, yeah, what he was. . Let’s see. He could sketch a little strategy while he rode, serve up a pretty little core within the racket the train made traveling, traveling over the rails downtown. Do a little planning on the banging din, Gunga Din, let’s see, as he swayed, train-davening toward the 96th Street and Broadway exchange that would take him back uptown to Lenox Avenue and Harlem. Then let’s see how lucky he was: if he was lucky, no explanations were needed. Catch Stella in a favorable moment, home now from a month at the beach. Easy as pie. Oh, maybe bestow on her, and Mamie, and Hannah, if they were home, a few bits about his trip with Larry, like sprinkles on a cake, to improve the tedium of temporizing while he waited his chance. Oh, he was cunning, he congratulated himself, versatile and devious. In that department, nobody could beat him; he knew the most ingenious moves. But if he wasn’t lucky, if he wasn’t lucky. It happened often — he suppressed a shrug — if he wasn’t lucky, then tough luck, tough luck. He couldn’t fall back on Minnie on Sunday mornings any longer. Jesus, that goy with the car, he got his licks in these days on Saturday night, after work. He laid her first, humped her in the back of the car, sure as hell. Dished him out of his whack on Sunday morning, the way the Irish kids said, dished him out of his turn at bat. It was over. She spurned him, that was all. He’d be wheedling; they’d be arguing, till Mom got back from shopping. Stella was his only bet.

He cast his gaze down from knees across the aisle to shoes on the cement subway floor. He reduced exposure of prurient maunderings that way, with his head down, as if examining trampled tabloid headlines beneath his own feet: SCOPES TRIAL BATTLE LOST BUT NOT WAR: DARROW; FRANCE DEMANDS DEMILITARIZED RHINELAND. Only trouble was, it made him drowsy when he tried to read the smaller type. And drowsy he might well be, after last night’s wakeful excitement, Larry sputtering away, like a fuse, wasn’t he? And e-e-e, the whine of mosquitoes, and then suddenly, boom, the telegram: looky, looky, looky, here comes nooky. And Uncle Louis, what a pathetic wreck, what a difference between him and the lean sinewy guy in prestigious postman’s blue who tried to lay Mom — only about seven or eight years ago. She should have let him.

What the hell are you gonna do? Suddenly surly with himself, he rebuffed his internal thoughts, his self-esteem, with its hated sneer. Who the hell was he to tell him? Did he get a fancy, dainty Ph.D. to lay, like Larry? No. So quit yapping, goddamn you. Get a job after school, spend two bucks for a lay, like other guys. Yeah — his demurral dripped with skepticism: lazy bastard. Broke. Get a dose maybe. Excuses: he was shy, he was timid. Hell, why could Larry go to a nice, clean, white apartment in a house on St. Mark’s Place, with that pretty view outside the window in the late, late afternoon, when all four came back from that excursion up the Hudson River to Bear Mountain? And back of the house, what a pretty yard down below, the sculpture on the lawn, the trees, the shrubs. Like a landscape framed in the window. All the time in the world to enjoy each other, stroke each other smooth, and shmooze and smooch and smooch and shmooze. Minnie wouldn’t even let him kiss her anymore, and Stella half the time exhaled onions, canned salmon and onions. And never a word to say, just cover-up gab. But with Larry and Edith, they mingled kisses with talk about Beauty, Beauty, Beauty, like Edna Millay, talking about Euclid alone. While he? Yeah. At Mamie’s, he knew all too well, he would — with the dance band blaring — drive it into her with a front-room straddle of an evening by the Stromberg Carlson Superheterodyne radio.

They were passing the 110th Street station. . just passed. . 103rd next. Next 96th. And he, he got a couple o’ crumbs out of it, out of Larry’s romance. Like the khumitz Pop used to brush up with a feather the morning before the first Passover night, crumbs of unleavened bread. Went into a wooden spoon. Tied up with a rag. And burned in the street — Ira snorted silently, sourly, joke. Who bothered today? You could really make it funny on 119th Street: hey Mickey, hey Feeney, hey Maloney, you know what this is? It’s khumitz, a few dry bread crumbs. So they’ll say, Yeah? Waddaye do wit’ it? And you’ll say, Burn it in the street. And they’ll say, Go ahead, we’ll piss on it. You Jews are nuts. .

103rd Street. Passover. Pesach. Matzohs. When Moses led the Hebrews out of bondage. When the landlord, the Irisher, did Mom a favor and painted the kitchen. And painted the toilet, and painted the big tin bathtub in its wooden casket of matchboards, cheap green house paint that stuck to your ass in hot water. But, boy, was the bathtub big. .

96th Street was next, he’d better stand up. .

So big you could float in it. Passover, 1918, when he was twelve. When the World War was still on. Talk about bondage. Boy, he could yell, Nates, nates, nates! He knew the fancy name, as he did so many others. Natey, nickname for a Jewboy. But to be understood, he’d have to yell like a wop. Boy, was it smooth and slick: levitation, levitation, right out of the tepid water. And that was before Passover. Moses — or was it God? — parted the Red Sea with a titanic — nah, cosmic command. How the hell could one little Israelite guy with one little staff split a whole sea asunder, cause such a cataclysm?

Ah, the hell with it. Here came 96th. Try your luck, you never lose. The train slowed, stopped. He eyed the gray rubber pads between doors, waiting for them to part. . smirked. Anh. Maybe Larry was at this minute just getting ready to go to Edith’s.

Nonetheless, Ira wasn’t lucky at all. Having gone home first, he didn’t try Mamie’s right away, and when he did, Stella was out. So Minnie was at home. She had, she said, stopped “dating” her gentile boyfriend, the gentile “buyer” of the firm in which both worked, Rodney, “the goy with the car,” as Ira jibed. He wanted to come to the house, her last week at the job, and why not? He liked her a lot. He wanted to meet her parents. His folks lived in Schenectady, otherwise he’d already have taken her to meet them. He was serious about her. He wanted to go steady with her; she was nice, he said, she was sharp and shrewd, and feisty too. But mostly, she was faithful. He was sure of it. She was the kind of woman he wanted for a wife; she would never two-time him. And how was he going to meet her other than in her home, if he was serious about her? On a street corner? That wasn’t right. He had a good job, and Minnie had one year more to go in high school. She could say yes or no to an engagement, right then and there. He was sure she would say yes; they hit it off so well together. After they were married, and had a place of their own, she could go right on to Hunter as she planned. That was okay with him if she wanted to teach for a few years.

“Oh, no, listen,” Minnie confided to Ira, informing him of developments, “I could never marry him, he’s a goy. I’m breaking it off. I shouldn’t have started in the first place.”

And to leave no doubt about her intentions, she announced that she would be home for supper this Saturday. “And don’t ask why. Never mind. I’m going back to Julia Richmond. I don’t need him. I want to be a schoolteacher.”

“Ah!” Mom said resignedly. “Noo, I won’t ask.”

“We never even saw him once.” Pop’s mien bespoke his sympathy.

Minnie prefaced rejoinder with a flap of her hand. “Who wants him to see this place?”

“Well, let’s move, let’s go in search of new rooms.” Pop was generous where Minnie was concerned.

“Let’s move to the Bronx,” Mom suggested. “There are fine rooms in the Bronx, and it’s becoming very Yiddish — more and more.” She began to enumerate neighbors and acquaintances who had recently moved there. “And kosher butchers, and live fish stores, for Friday. And delicatessens and bakeries too. You’ll show me two or three times how I should travel to Mamie to see Zaida. Then I’ll be able to go there alone.”

“Never mind moving to the Bronx! I told you. After I’m finished with Richmond, then I’ll talk about steady boyfriends. At least I’ll have a high school diploma. Right now I don’t want to talk about it anymore. So do me a favor.”

Ira knew why, and gloated. She had to ditch her goyish goldfish. If she brought him to the house — not that Mom would mind. Maybe not even Pop. But oy, oy, oy, Zaida, the relatives—oy, yoy, a goy! She was a good kid, though, Minnie, to give him up, chase him off. Jesus, he wouldn’t have, if he liked him — or her, Ira bridled at the idea — to hell with Zaida and everybody else. But she liked the guy — a lot. Rod looked as if he were going to cry when she told him she wouldn’t go out with him on Saturday-night dates anymore. Minnie sniffed in the telling, and before she was done, she also shed an honest tear or two. And how Ira sympathized with her, in true crocodile fashion, with “Ah, tsk, tsk, tsk,” and “Gee, I’m so sorry, he sounds like such a nice guy,” and he stroked her bare arm in her nightgown. “You’ll find somebody else, Minnie, somebody Jewish. Don’t worry. You’re a real grown-up, and good-looking. Sure, if he thought you were smart, and if he thought you were good-looking, what’re you worrying about?”

“Mostly I thought, if you wanna know the truth — maybe he would shmott—you know he’s circumcised? They did it in the hospital.”

“Yeah.”

“But I gotta get that Hunter diploma. I can’t take any chances. If we got married. Something came up. I got pregnant. Or—” Minnie nervously pushed back a lock of auburn hair from before mobile features creased in frown. “Something else comes up. I already heard about trouble with mothers-in-law. She’s gentile, I’m not. If I had a baby, the baby would have to be Jewish. Suppose he didn’t want to, or she didn’t. I better end it while there’s a chance. I’m going back to get my high school diploma.”

“That’s smart,” Ira commended, with the approving pat of an older brother on her bare shoulder. “Lucky too, because it’s a natural break.”

“You know, I was really beginning to love him.”

“Tsk, tsk.” Ira sedulously wrung each precious minute of Mom’s absence. “You poor kid.”

Tears welled up in her eyes. “My dear brother. I got nobody else.”

“Oh, you will have. You’ll see. Right now you got Julia Richmond High School to keep your mind off him.” God, why was he built that way; why did he have to know he was built that way? Conscious of a dual conscience: like Mercury’s caduceus in the doctor’s office, medical caduceus, with the two snakes twining up the single staff, twin sine curves intersecting at nodes: sin curves abbreviated in trig, sin curve was right, in frig. .

He felt sorry for her, at these moments, he really did. He could let her grieve, be a brother, a real mensh of a brother, for once.

V

He could summon up the tableau at will, many years later: Edith standing in the open door of the weather-stained day coach of the railroad train. In a light sage summer dress, figured with pale vines, petite, olive-skinned, she stood framed within the gunmetal sides of the railroad car that appeared to have slid apart to make room for the slight figure between. It was Edith Welles herself, her large, heavy-lidded brown eyes searching, seeking for a familiar face among the few people awaiting the train. The station had no platform, only stout planks between tracks. And while the gold-spectacled conductor in his blue uniform, with his immemorial brass plate on his visored cap, and his heavy gold chain across his vest, stooped paternally to set the snub pair of wooden steps to supplement the iron ones on the train, she continued to survey the scene before her. Her chin was tilted, which gave her whole mien an aspect of defiance, proud defiance and determination. And yet, about the large brown eyes, and the brow under its black cloche, something contrary hovered, something akin to doubt, to concern. Within a bland, September-sunlit doorway of a day coach, a small figure, her countenance self-denigrative, but still brave, she peered into the light drenching the primitive station that was Woodstock.

At the hail of her joyful young lover, she smiled, tenderly, ruefully, resignedly, as if accepting her foolhardiness and folly, as if claiming her prerogative of enjoyment at her own deliberate act of imprudence. Pleased and unbeguiled, she descended the iron steps of the day coach to the wooden ones below, steadied in descent by the conductor, who solicitously relieved her of the suitcase she was carrying — in the one hand — and set it down on the planks below, while she held on to her black portable typewriter case in the other. And in the dusty train windows, faces of passengers, contemplative and discreet witnesses of a glowing reunion of a handsome youth bounding with a cry of unrestrained rapture to greet the new arrival, a woman of indeterminate age, not girlish, though girlish in figure, girlishly diverted by the brimming ardor of the youth who took her portable typewriter, her suitcase, and guided her to the single taxi already engaged and waiting. .

Eyed by the departing passengers in the train windows, the two would be left behind forever, it seemed to Ira, who trailed, conscious of his inveterate, twofold role of being part spectacle, part spectator — the two would be left behind in unresolved attitude, while the passengers themselves would be borne away to their obscure destinations.

A wave of the conductor’s arm. He stepped aboard the train, in his hand the stumpy auxiliary stairs. To the accompaniment of gleaming wheel and chuffing locomotive, the mystery of arrival and departure was accomplished.

The three got into the taxi. Not venturing to embrace, Larry and Edith sat hand in hand, gazing at each other. What transport of love Larry exuded, while Edith, indulgent recipient, patted his large hand with her tiny free one. And Ira, conscious of self as always, slum youth from a shabby tenement in East Harlem, privileged to assist at this wondrous, romantic encounter: so beautiful, beautiful, yes — and beyond him, as someone in limbo, or on the other side of a diaphanous, intangible partition of blissful, acceptable amorousness, of love, love, the state he was barred from. He had forfeited empathy, or ruined it. Yes, once again, who would understand? He had ruined it by knowing the end before knowing the beginning: knowing the shattering consummations, but torn out of the context of tenderness, the sanctity of tenderness and affection he witnessed here — that was it. By craving, or cravenness, stealth, or collusion, coupling having once united him with Minnie, now Stella, only to bar him from all else that love meant. “Don’t kiss me,” his sister had said. And Stella, except that once, who wanted to kiss her? Watching you come in her astride, her shallow, wide-open blue eyes glazing in orgasm. So where was love? Love, shmuv, shove.

They had come there to spend the two weeks just before college opened, to tryst in the mellow old stone cottage on the outskirts of the town of Woodstock. Enchanting to Ira, unbelievable the freedom within unity, of its random, stony façade that seemed to draw its enduring strength from the rambling white veins of lacy mortar that bound rock to haphazard rock. The house gave him a sense of nestling in continual shade, whether of vines clinging to the walls, or the large trees overshadowing the front lawn, or the sunken front entrance in a corner, a sense of shade — and seclusion. Even the mowed backyard, a retreat rather than a yard, though open to the sky, was walled about with a high and stately, yet rustic wall. Green lawn, late flowers, flagstones embedded in turf, shaded by hemlocks above. Natural beauty everywhere floated on the surface of sensation — anchored unseen below by sights and scenes of East Harlem.

The house had been made available to them by John Vernon, Edith’s colleague in the English department. “My fairy godfather,” Larry quipped. Not that John owned the place. It belonged to his sister, who planned to join her husband, a corporation executive, at present in Scotland. With great aplomb, with worldly urbanity, Larry met the very finical, well-nigh askance scrutiny of the proper mistress of the estate, and won her over with a convincing display of responsibility, maturity, and appreciation of the antique charm of the appointments and decor. They conferred about kitchenware and facilities, the care of the grounds, the gardener, who would come in at least once during their stay, and his wife, who was the cleaning woman. Debonair, yet deferential, Larry listened with close attention to all the lady’s instructions. In the end, obviously satisfied the place would be well cared for, she named, as she said, a nominal sum, little more than would cover the utilities. Larry made out a check, a blank check, which Edith had already signed, and handed it over to the lady — who, after a glance at it through her lorgnette, stood for the briefest interval, contemplating Larry. Never had he looked so expressive, handsome, and worldly-wise. . All this while, to one side, scarcely taken note of, stood Ira, like a mute in a play, hat in hand, hearkening intently, feeling his face flicker with the wonderment within, but too bewildered with novelty to grasp more than merest snatches of what went on.

They were alone that night, Ira and Larry, after Larry telephoned Edith to confirm that he had successfully obtained occupancy, and the place was beautiful. She called him the next morning to tell him what train she was taking, and when it would arrive. It would reach Woodstock by late afternoon, and though Larry chafed with impatience, Ira secretly welcomed the interlude. It gave him time, time to orient himself, accustom himself to utterly new surroundings, isolate their elements, hedge them within memory. He was grateful for a chance to admire, humbly and slowly to appraise simple elegance, and to try and judge what made it elegant. Again and again he felt like shaking his head: he shouldn’t be there; he was learning too much, and hardly understanding what he learned, just feeling it. Yes, he wanted to learn. But he was too susceptible, impressionable, or something; he was being — he was being spoiled. That was funny. He didn’t really mean spoiled; he was being moved away, further away than ever before, from his customary round of existence, his established base, like being moved away from his center of gravity — and once moved, he couldn’t return. Elegance didn’t just grow, didn’t sprout out of having a lot of possessions, a lot of money, being wealthy, a pooritz, as Mom would say in Yiddish, a magnate. None of that by itself made for simple elegance. It went beyond that. How should he say it to himself? That’s what was spoiling him: taste. He could feel it right away — like that feeling he got inside the brownstone house into which he mistakenly delivered his first Park & Tilford steamer basket when he was twelve. He was vulnerable to it. It made his mouth water like something delectable: good taste. The rough gray flagstones before the sunken entrance to the cottage, the thick rich ivy draping the fieldstone walls. And the flowers and shrubs, he didn’t know what, between cottage and road. The spruce tree sentinels before the house. And inside, in the big living room, the fireplace wrought out of boulders, under the mottled marble mantelpiece, and the brass andirons, so appealing, Hessians in Revolutionary-time uniforms, in tall, imposing hats. And on the wall, paintings of early Americans, in the colorful vests and knee breeches, against a background of light blue, and women in high white bonnets. You could really study them, portraits of once living people, maybe the owner’s own ancestors, in their wrought-gilt frames posing so tranquilly in the azure atmosphere of another age. And those opulent and plain wooden chests, and the sideboards with deep mirrors, and those spindly high-backed rocking chairs, and settees and divans with striped cloth. And that lustrous piano — and even the round, rotating piano stool with wood that was warm and dense and rich.

He went outdoors again, to the lawn in the backyard: leafy-covered walls surrounded it, walls conferring delicious privacy, communion with sky and cloud. On the grass stood filigreed iron garden furniture, so white, so heavy — how lovely to eat out there. So informal, so lovely and pleasant everything. Elegance. What else should you call it? And now all of a sudden, go back in your mind to East 119th Street, near Park Avenue and the Grand Central overpass, the stoop with the kids sitting on it above the cellarway, the dark hallway after the battered letter boxes, the dingy stairs, climb them, enter the scrubbed kitchen, clean and bleak, Jesus, and after it, through the railroad flat with the vile air shaft on the way. It wasn’t fair: Mom and Pop arguing about how much allowance was still coming to Mom for the week. Arguing about the relatives, about money, about who ought to pay for the new washline. Upbraidings and beratings, and Jesus Christ, his own machinations and designs, having devised secret snares for Minnie right in the house, while Pop and Mom argued, right there, around the kitchen table, figuring out enticing webs, disarming wiles. Like a crook casing a joint for the best entrance. Best entrance was right. Wasn’t that funny? Now that she had dismissed her Rod, her “goyish feller,” Minnie tried to steer clear of her brother, steer clear of Ira, suspicious of him still.

But, boy, was he a coaxer, when he wanted to be, what was the word? What a wheedler, wheedler, yeedler. Cajoler, cadger. Well, what could you do? He wanted it, and having seen when he was eight that rusty pervert pull off, his scum dripping from the tree, he just fought it; he wasn’t going to do it. Nearly every time he did, he felt like cutting his prick off afterward, as if he’d sunk to something worse than he already was: like “Joe,” that pederast in a porkpie hat. Anh, kill yourself, you bastard. No. Better to assume his well-practiced fake negligence, say he would walk to Mamie’s, show his duty to Zaida, pay his respects to the old hypochondriac. Sure his grandson was a louse. But to whom wasn’t it fair? Were they doing him a favor? Right away his head turned into a mulligatawny, the word he read in a book, a farrago. Why couldn’t things be straightforward within his mind, the way they were within Larry’s mind, clean, unlittered, instead of always crisscrossed with shunts and with crazy Moebius detours, like those Dr. Sorel showed the math class? Why?

And he had to be careful, on guard. It was just at these times of baffling rumination that Edith would regard Ira with her large, solemn eyes, trying to fathom him, and he would hang his head slightly, and grin. Step up and call me crazy Moebius the Dopius, he should have said to her, and maybe made her laugh. But then she would have asked him to explain. And hoo-hoo, that crawling, infested mire he had inside him; his hideosities, he called it, admiring his triple portmanteau. Even to hint of it, even as close as he had come with Larry, was unthinkable. But what the hell, enough of that.

He tried to think, those two days while he and Larry were awaiting Edith — and after she arrived. He tried to think of matters outside himself — in this sumptuous house he was living in, in this all but bizarre situation. He tried to think, to conjecture, to grope toward motives: perhaps Edith was deliberately coming to test the feasibility of marrying her young swain, as he had continually implored her to do. Perhaps not. The idyll at Woodstock might be a defiant assertion of her right to a private life as a woman in a male-dominated world, as she so often emphasized. Defiant. But necessarily cautious, because it was a male-dominated world, and her livelihood, her position at the university, could be jeopardized. Her own and the welfare of those dependent on her, her mother, father, sister, all of whom she was supporting in part, the younger brother she was helping through college; their welfare was in jeopardy, if her highly unconventional behavior was discovered — highly unconventional at best, turpitude at worst.

Foggy as Ira felt himself to be about all kinds of sophisticated matters like these, he couldn’t escape awareness of how dangerous this adventure was for Edith, altogether different from his sordid ones, but just as clandestine. So alike in that respect, it made him all the more keenly mindful of the trust placed in him, all the more determined to deserve it, to protect Edith. She was violating accepted mores; she had to be circumspect, very much on the lookout for friends and acquaintances who might recognize them, and especially recognize Edith. What a scandal, what a commotion, that would whip up at the university! Certainly there would be much ado in the English department, that was certain. Confronted by it, Professor Watt, respectable and decorous head of the English department, for all his flirting with the unconventional in the hiring of his teaching staff, would undoubtedly protect himself by dismissing Edith. She could expect to be fired. A love affair with a freshman, an eighteen-year-old freshman. Bad enough with a graduate student.

So Edith was tense, on edge. The more so because Iola, who had agreed to join them in their rendezvous, and had all but decided to go when Edith did, reneged at the last minute, leaving Edith to bear the whole burden of exposure herself. An illicit ménage, Iola had blandly avoided it, disloyally too, shirking the debt she owed Edith, who had helped get her the position in the NYU English department. Edith was piqued, Ira disappointed. Edith attributed Iola’s refusal to join them to the imminent return of Richard Smithfield, to whom she was as good as betrothed — if he opted in favor of heterosexuality, and not, as John Vernon hoped, homosexuality. Some such picture as that, Ira fuzzily gathered: Iola didn’t want to offend her quasi-fiancé who would soon be returning to America on completion of his Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. But Richard had been “raped” by a sodomist, or someone like that, in a taxicab in Paris, and the shock had unnerved him to the extent that he had become ambivalent about his own sexuality, uncertain in his relation to Iola. She was no longer sure of him.

But Ira had his own surmise to account for Iola’s last-minute defection from the symmetry her presence would have conferred on the group: how the hell could a grown man get raped in a taxicab, Parisian or otherwise? A man, not a woman, get raped, without consenting? Christ, stop the cab, even if he didn’t know French, and Richard, scholar that he was, must surely have known the language. And how would a man get raped? Open his fly, get at his cock, suck him off, pull him off, or what? Without compliance? Jesus Christ. Nah, the guy must have had half a mind to submit to the experience. No wonder Iola was beset by doubts, and Vernon was licking his chops in anticipation.

Iola would have taken a chance and joined Edith, made it a foursome. There was plenty of room, and bedrooms and bathrooms, in the fine two-storied abode. No, he himself was the reason Iola declined to accompany Edith: it was his irresolute, his tenuous appeal, his wavering sex appeal. The supposition refused to be lulled or staved off: it was his timidity, his shyness, his accursed flimsiness of libido because of what he had become, or had made of himself, with his never-ending steeping of himself in incurable guile and guilt, stealth, fear, degradation, and worst of all, in an ambience of violated taboo. No, he had wrenched normalcy apart forever, for aye and for good, that terrible afternoon, when only a few problems in plane geometry leashed frenzy from committing murder. Leashed madness, yes, but gnarled something in the mind too far, irrevocably. That was how it felt.

That was how it was. That was why Iola didn’t join them. What would Richard have known about it if she had? John Vernon wouldn’t have told him. He might be a homosexual, but he was honorable: look what he was doing for Edith, like a good sport who had lost: securing this wonderful place in Woodstock for her and her young lover. No. It was he himself who was to blame. Iola could sense his vitiated manhood, suppressing virility, his shrinking from adult encounter. No. Ruined for the rest of his life his — his — ability to rise to the occasion. Yeah, some joke. That time she took the rolled-up papers out of his hand — rolled-up prospectus of CCNY courses of study, or something like that, after his “Impressions of a Plumber” appeared in The Lavender: “You’ve written another piece? For me?” She reached out her hand and took hold of it, her blue Scandinavian eyes sinking into his as she reached for the scroll. God, you get the cuckooest ideas, you know: phallic, her holding it, veiled incitement in her gaze. But no, he didn’t have a manuscript for her. No. Goddamn it. How arch she was, that afternoon, that matinee, when they had all met on the upper balcony of the Theater Guild to see Shaw’s Arms and the Man.

A dark fearful anguish once more assailed him in a way it hadn’t for a long time, and he smiled drearily at Iola’s teasing. Christ, yes, no doubt about it: he had telegraphed once again his botched virility. So why the hell should she come here and join them, if he had nothing to offer? Not Richard she was concerned about, but Ira, his perceived lack of phallic response. He saw in her droll, Scandinavianthin features that she could be wanton. She could flirt, and did. But what did he have to offer her? Nothing but his rolled-up CCNY course summary. Epitomized it: braided-haired blond woman provocative in green dress, coquettish before curtain call to Arms and the Man. Arms and the Man! Jesus, everything scrambled around in horny symbols, and you, paralyzed long ago by the illicit — you, riven by shameful false alarms — flinched away from the overture. But hell, months ago you could have asked her to stroll through the woods of Bear Mountain, if you could have screwed your courage, as Bill Shakespeare said, to the sticking point. But you couldn’t. So goodbye. You stripped your threads, or most of ’em. .

They settled down in their elegant quarters, each in a different study by day. At night, Larry and Edith shared the same bedroom, the master suite at the other end of the house. Ira had a smaller one off the hall near a separate bathroom. Mornings were fresh and crisp — the three breakfasted in the kitchen. By noon, the day had warmed enough to have lunch outdoors on the white-painted iron furniture on the lawn enclosed by the high stone walls. Larry usually prepared breakfast, though sometimes Edith did, with Larry — or Ira — squeezing the oranges on the latest leverage orange-squeezer. Luncheon consisted of soft-boiled eggs and asparagus, or chicken à la king out of a can, and boiled fresh peas and carrots. She needed bulk, but had to avoid too much roughage, she said, because she had colitis. Ira ate ravenously as usual, barely able to keep from wolfing his food, at each meal consuming twice as many slices of bread or toast as both Larry and Edith. Talk about roughage: nothing was better than bread, good loaves of Russian rye or heavy pumpernickel, not fluffy slices in packages. Boy, if it were up to him, he’d have eggs, he’d have lox, he’d have chopped tomato-herring and onions for breakfast. But he had to try and behave, to avoid chompken, as Pop chided him for doing: masticating out loud. “When the fress falls on him, he’s like one possessed,” said Pop. And even Larry called him aside and said gently, “I don’t mind, but you ought not smack your lips after every mouthful.”

Ira was surprised — and embarrassed. “Gee, I do?”

“Yes. It’s very noticeable.”

Ira was penitent, silent.

“You don’t mind my telling you?”

“Oh, no. I’ll try to stop. Anything else I do wrong?”

“It isn’t wrong exactly. It’s just a habit.”

“I know. But you might as well tell me,” Ira urged. “You know how it is: you know what it is.”

“Do you realize you keep saying ‘gee’ all the time?”

“I do?” Ira suddenly realized he did. “Boy!”

“And ‘boy,’ too,” said Larry.

“Oh, boy.”

Larry chuckled.

“Gee, I’ll try. Boy, I’ll try. I mean it.”

Edith’s portable chattered away a good part of the day. She had two reviews of books of poetry to do, one for the Sunday New York Times, and one for The Nation. She didn’t think much of the verse in either book, she said, and neither did she get paid very much for the reviews, but she was especially pleased to have made a contribution in the New York Times: small as the notice was, it was her first. Larry read the book, read her review afterward. They discussed it. Ira was given the book of poems to read, and scratched his earlobe apologetically: “I don’t know. I read it, and I don’t understand it.”

“Oh, you do too!” Edith refused to believe. “Anyone as sensitive as you are.”

“I mean, I know the words. And I get the similes too. But I don’t get the—” He gesticulated. “I don’t get the jumps from one thing to another.”

She and Larry laughed.

She wrote letters, many of them, dashed them off, like those he had received from her when she was traveling in Europe. The typewriter clacked without pause. She was rewriting some of her lectures too, those on modern English and American poets. Glancing at the thin books strewn on her table, Ira secretly marveled. She had brought them along in her suitcase: books of poetry, by Wallace Stevens, by Elinor Wylie, by Archibald MacLeish, by Edith Sitwell. How could she extract meaning from all that disparate, oblique wording? It was beyond him. How could she perceive so much, type so much about what she read? It mystified him, when he leafed through the pages; the poems were either too opaque to penetrate, or they were like a wide-open grid through which he fell, missing gist to grab on to, missing enlightenment. He was ashamed to admit it. He looked at a poem that was given him to read, nodded appreciatively, or tried to show his appreciation by illuminating his features with pleasure, like a glowworm. Why didn’t they say what they meant? They didn’t have to say something simpleminded, like Longfellow’s “Village Blacksmith.” But why couldn’t they say what the particular figure of speech meant? Say it was this or say it was that. Or come close enough to the meaning so that he could comprehend it, and maybe even be moved by it, the way he was by Robert Frost in the Untermeyer anthology: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep.” Anybody could guess what that meant. Or the poem by Baudelaire, “L’Albatros,” that Iz Rabinowitz, who was going to major in French, showed him: “Le poète est semblable au prince des nuées. . ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.” Gee, that was good. He felt like that himself sometimes: a prince in fantasy, and a dub in practice.

Maybe he was both.

The first two days after they moved in, while Edith in the master bedroom industriously plied her portable typewriter, Larry sat in the library, reading the book Edith had brought from France. When not reading, he devoted himself to writing poetry, “lyrics” as he called them, which he returned to in the evening, when he felt the poetic mood more strongly. Ira took naps, and brought back staples and groceries. Or, still hopeful that his interest in biology would revive, he sat in the sunny, enclosed yard, studying the biology text that he had brought with him. It was an outmoded Biology 1 text, which he had gotten from a sophomore for nothing, because it was being supplanted next term by a later edition, and the college bookstore refused to buy the outmoded one back. “The bastards don’t want it,” said the sophomore. “Here. You can have it.” So Ira conned pages of mostly familiar material, alternated reading by catching grasshoppers, and with his jackknife crudely dissecting them. Oh, he knew every part of a grasshopper — its name and function, the spiracles and the mandibles, the ovipositor and the tarsi. He could draw a diagrammatic sketch of a grasshopper’s anatomy from memory. Maybe next term, not that he didn’t have to compete with sophomores or with droves of bright, incoming freshmen eager to get started on their medical careers, Biology 1 would be open, and he could get started on his own career. He could test his own interest again, awaken his forte maybe. For Edith’s and Larry’s edification, Ira discoursed learnedly about the grasshopper, its anatomical features and exoskeleton, the insect’s species, genus, phylum. “You know, the funny thing is,” he observed, “I think they’re kosher. I think Jews can eat them. I’m not sure why, but I think that was because they spent forty years in the desert, and maybe that’s all they could find to eat sometimes. Gee, I’d like to find out what the rabbis think the ravens fed Elijah, whether it was grasshoppers or what? I must remember to ask my grandfather when we get back. He lives in Harlem now with my aunt Mamie.”

Edith would just sit with her tiny hands in her lap and gaze at him with her large, brown eyes fixed on him unwaveringly, the expression on her face sober, yet, to Ira, inscrutable. What was she trying to plumb? Larry seemed to welcome the disquisitions; he encouraged them. Still, he really didn’t seem to listen — that was the peculiar part of it. He sat receptively with big hands locked, but it was clear his mind was elsewhere — about what? a poem? And yet Ira got the feeling it wasn’t that, something else was disquieting Larry, and Ira’s lectures about biology filled a kind of troubled interlude in his friend’s mind. Where the hell Larry got his ideas for poems anyway, Ira didn’t have the slightest notion, but he seemed more and more receptive of late to Ira’s impromptu lectures. A little puzzling, wasn’t it? But if that was what Larry wanted—

“They’re called Orthoptera, because they have straight wings,” Ira discoursed. “You know, insects are cousins to crustaceans, like the lobster. But just the same, Jews can’t eat lobster. Isn’t that funny? My father once when he waited at a fancy banquet ate so much lobster that was left over on the plates he got sick and threw up.”

Edith laughed. Larry smiled — absently.

“My Uncle Moe loves lobster too. But not clams. He can’t eat a clam.”

“Why not? They’re seafood,” Edith said. “Is that the kosher thing again?”

“Oh, no, they’re neither of them kosher.” Ira hesitated, grinned apologetically. “Boy, have I got myself into it. It isn’t very nice. It’s because of what people commonly call them. Common people call them.”

“What do they call them?”

“It isn’t nice. I said I’d get myself in trouble.”

“Heavens, Ira. I’m not that squeamish. Do I seem to be?”

“No.”

“Then why not tell me?”

“Another time. I know, I’ll tell Larry. I’ll leave it up to him.”

Edith smiled, unenlightened, but indulgent.

There came a day, the third or fourth day after Edith had joined them, on which one of those not entirely casual episodes occurred, not entirely casual because it seemed fraught with remote rumor, or stirred by a hint of challenge. It would only be later, when all that remained of the environs of the incident was the spacious, quiet living room in which the incident had taken place, later condensed into a workaday patch of daylight, with a woman standing in it. The woman was Edith, and with simple generosity, she proffered a book, a fairly thick volume, proffered it to Larry. It would only be some time later that Ira came to realize the import of what took place in that elegant living room in that small fraction of time. And yet, the very fact that the event left behind, however small, an irreducible knot within memory would forever mark in Ira’s mind the momentous instant of transition when the past departed from its old aim, its previously envisaged future, to a new one, the instant when sensibility redirected its commitment from an old to a new function.

The book that Edith held out to Larry was one she had brought with her from France. She had smuggled it through customs, a blue paper-bound book, an untitled copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. And that was something else to mark, to note about her — the errant insight fluttered through Ira’s mind — that behind her steady, gentle gaze, deception could lurk, duplicity within the friendly dimple of her smile. Yes, she had broken the law deliberately, she explained, and she took pride in doing so, and was jubilant that she had succeeded. “It tickles me no end that I slipped the book through the barrier they’ve built around it,” she said. “Of all the silly prudishness. As if a book that demanded so much from the reader could possibly impair anyone’s morals. Only Mr. Sumner or other prigs like him in the Watch and Ward Society who hunted for the four-letter words might think a reader would take all that trouble for so little titillation. But anyone with ordinary common sense would know better.”

She not only saw no reason to abide by the puritanical standards of the Watch and Ward Society, which she characterized as nothing more than a lot of inhibited prudes, but she was also genuinely curious about the book, which had won so much critical acclaim, on which so many encomiums were bestowed — by Eliot, by Pound, by other leading critics of English literature, critics who appeared in The Hound and Horn and The Dial. She wanted at least to become acquainted with it. Above all, she was eager to have Larry read it. She hoped that its daring literary innovations might provide impetus to his own writing, might steer his imagination into uncharted regions. “It may give you some new ideas, darling,” she said, when she tendered him the blue-covered volume. “I’d love to hear your reactions. It’s made such a clean break with convention. And of course it’s so daring in its treatment of sex.”

“You’re so sweet to do it.” Larry kissed her. He took the book from her, leafed through it, glowed with pleasure. “I don’t know how else I’d have gotten to see it. And speaking of taking a chance.” He shook his head in admiration. “I’ve gone through customs coming through Bermuda. Even with nothing really valuable to declare, I shook in my shoes. I don’t know if I’d have had the nerve to look those customs officials in the eye with this in my suitcase.”

“Oh, poof. The worst that could have happened was confiscation of the book. They would have relieved me of it — if they had recognized that it was banned from the country, and that’s dubious. And of course, I would have played innocent. I didn’t know it was banned. I just hope it does something for you, dear, encourages you to experiment.”

“And so do I.” Larry opened to the first page, read: “‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan. . Introibo ad altare Dei. .’ My Latin can certainly handle that. Well, there’s no time like the present. Thank you, darling. This is just the right required reading for Woodstock.” He kissed her again.

Edith fondly watched him depart for the library, and when he settled into an upholstered leather library chair, she went to her portable typewriter among the scattered papers, folders, and carbon sheets in her master bedroom study, leaving Ira to wander out to a seat in a white filigreed chair in the enclosed lawn and absently mull over the incident, while he studied the grass to catch sight of some unusual insect.

He had heard about the book. He had heard it spoken of with bated breath by the literary elite among his classmates, the vanguard aesthetes in the ’28 alcove in the basement of the college. One of them, goateed Seymour K, though older than the average freshman, was already on the editorial staff of the CCNY Lavender. And it was Seymour who sought out Ira, in order to make his acquaintance: “Oh, you’re the one who wrote that piece about the plumber?” he asked Ira. Seymour had a twitchy tic that affected one of his cheeks above his goatee, and when he heard Ira’s diffident admission of authorship, his tic registered with great positiveness. Neither he, he told Ira bluntly, nor any of the upperclassmen editors had thought the thing ought to be published in a college magazine. It wasn’t only an amateurish piece of writing, “it could really have been written by a plumber’s helper.” He laughed at his jest. It was only at the insistence of Mr. Dickson, the faculty adviser for the magazine, that the piece was considered at all, and eventually published.

Anyway, the CCNY literati were all conversant with Ulysses, the imposing literati like Leon S and Yarmolinsky and Lester H, upperclassmen and for the most part only names to Ira, but all reputedly bursting with modern trends in writing, who knew all about something called the New Humanism, who read The Hound and Horn and The Dial, could descant on Gerard Manley Hopkins and sprung verse, and poets named Pound and Eliot and Wallace Stevens, and — they made Ira feel like a maundering dub without an opinion to his name. James Joyce’s Ulysses—it was like a fetish to them, to the highbrows in the alcoves. The rare one who had read the book seemed invested with a veritable luster; he was like one inducted into an esoteric sodality, an ultramodern one. Even to demonstrate familiarity with the book warranted pretensions to the intellectual vanguard.

So here was Larry, not only a poet and writer, but one privileged to read the fabulous book of the decade, perhaps it would prove to be of the whole century. And after college opened, to meet, to mingle with the initiates on equal footing, mingle with the cognoscenti, the avant-garde of the class of ’29, condescending even about the faculty of the English department, none of whose professors, they were sure, was privy to this supernova that illumined the literary firmament, in all likelihood had never heard of the Ulysses. But—

Two days after he received the volume from Edith’s hands, Larry returned it. He had spent most of the last forty-eight hours perusing the book; then, frustrated, skimming here and there seeking a window of interest; in the end, irked, yawning with boredom, he gave up further investigation, and called it quits. “Thanks, my love,” he said to Edith.

“Have you read it?” Edith asked.

“No, and I doubt if I ever will. I’m afraid I can’t.”

“I’m sorry. Is it too packed?” Edith sympathized. “As I said before, it’s not light reading by any means.”

“No. I didn’t expect it would be. But oh—” Larry rolled his eyes up in comic bewilderment. “Oh, no. It just takes altogether too much work to find out how little happens in pages and pages of print. I’d much rather spend our next week together here doing something else — if you don’t mind. I feel time’s too precious to waste on something I’m not getting anything out of. Time with you, especially, darling.”

“You do what you like,” Edith urged tenderly. “That’s more important than the book. Please, lad, don’t feel you have to read it.”

“I don’t.”

“You shouldn’t, if it doesn’t contribute anything to your literary development. I’m sure the book isn’t for everyone, and might even be harmful to the lyric, romantic state you’re going through. I should have thought of that, before I burdened you with it. I’m so sorry.” Fondness and contrition mingled on her face as she held the volume in her hands. “I didn’t mean to impose it on you.”

“Oh, well, it hasn’t done me any harm.” Larry put his arm around Edith’s waist. “It’s satisfied my curiosity. I just wish you’d gone to all that trouble, taken those risks for — a little better — return.” He smiled down at her.

“My beautiful lad.” She looked up at him, her slightly protuberant eyes shining with adoration. “You do what you please. Just be the sweet, sensitive lad you are. You’ll get there your own way, I’m sure.”

Boyoboy — Ira tried to feign inattention, play the stock figure, the stock presence, which he thought was his role. But just look at the way they loved — the way fine, tender, sound people loved. Look at them: so unsullied their affection, their love, they didn’t have to hide it, except for gossip that might endanger her college position, things like that, concessions to prudence — but otherwise, so pure, elevated, yeah. Boyoboy. As if your — Jesus, he hated to say it even to himself — your cock were a mile away, had nothing to do with your balls in this kind of seraphic love. Boyoboy. So what the hell did they do at night?

VI

The opportunity to read the novel devolved upon Ira. He was aware of a ripple of craftiness coming over him when Edith turned to him, saying, “Would you like to look at it, Ira?” and offered him the blue paper-bound book. He felt as if he were about to steal a march on Larry, good, kind, generous Larry. And yet there was no help for it. If Larry couldn’t or wouldn’t subject himself to this shibboleth of modern novels, he had to accept the consequences of his refusal. Yet Ira felt ruthless, nonetheless. He couldn’t help it: he needed to enter any gateway of esteem far more than Larry did, any gateway of esteem, of prestige. Ha! Why had he clung so to Farley? And been deflected into the shameful disaster of Stuyvesant High? What an insight that was, yeah. Gone to Stuyvesant instead of Clinton for the same reason: because with Farley he entered a gateway of esteem. Why did he need to? On account of what he himself had become, had done to himself, damage inflicted on himself, that had never scathed Larry. Maybe Larry was right, for all Ira knew. The book wasn’t worth all that tedious, unrewarding conning of all kinds of literary stunts, as Larry called them, just for the sake of the fancy panaches the vanguard of supercilious CCNY aesthetes who had read the Ulysses prided themselves as deserving to wear. The outcome was something Ira couldn’t tell; he could glimpse things, all kinds of things, notions that had come to him unbidden when he saw his Composition 1 sketch printed in The Lavender—and also when Edith complimented him on his letters to her in Europe. Notions, farfetched fancies for one who wanted to be a zoologist — or a biology teacher. But you never could tell. One thing was sure: he would butt his way through the book, cost what it might, the Ulysses that Larry had just rejected. Still, maybe it was more than that, maybe it was the way one had to go. Fainthearted and shirker though he knew himself to be, he had a dullard’s plodding tenacity within himself, an unsparing resignation to drudgery. The grind, they sometimes called it: the scholastic grind. And yet, he wasn’t a grind. Discipline wasn’t the right word either. He wasn’t disciplined: he was a slouch, a folentser, as Mom so often railed at him, a sloven. Anybody could tell that. But he had — it wasn’t a sense of destiny — goddamn it, that was too fancy a way of stating it anyway. A hunch? No, not even that. It came back to the same thing, some kind of spasmodic, dumb determination he was going to find a way out of himself, out of what he had gotten himself into, cost what it might. Larry didn’t have to pay that kind of price. He didn’t need to. Neither did most everybody else, classmates Ira had begun to hobnob with: Aaron, Ivan, Iz, Sol. They didn’t need to either. Ira did. He needed to, and he was willing to pay the price. That was the only way he could put it into words for himself. What other way was there? What other gateway?

How does one treat all this — Ira thought — while the computer growled, and requisite amber primed the monitor into legibility — how does one treat of a literary antimony, attraction, repulsion, still eddying ecumenically in the same breast? Say you’re treating the tender inception of a love affair, and at the same time completely cognizant of its rancorous termination? Oh, well, a minute’s reflection would reveal that most of life was that way: the furious flouting of the once warmly espoused, the eviction of enchantment from the bosom, and its preemption by disenchantment — or worse: hatred. Any grown-up was familiar with the dyad, and any writer worthy of the name had dealt with it at some time in his life. He needn’t have raised the question at all, Ira told himself, except that he was intellectually slower than most.

His disaffection with Joyce had been slow indeed, for at first he had regarded this book brought by Edith rapturously, his irritation growing at first imperceptibly, yet over sixty years later to reach this crescendo of loathing. Such was his disavowal of the greatest seminal work of English literature of the twentieth century. Ulysses had become to him an evasion of history; its author resolved to perceive nothing of the continuing evolution of Ireland, refusing to discover anything latent within the seeming inane of a day in 1904. History may have been a nightmare, but the ones who could have awakened him were the very ones he eschewed: his folk.

The man loathed, the man quailed before change — that was the crux of Ira’s present aversion to his quondam idol. The book was the work of a man who sought to fossilize his country, its land, its people, to rob them of their future, arrest their ebullient, coursing life, their traditions and aspirations. Within the compass of a single day, he would embalm their élan in intricate irrelevancies, and mummify them in the cerecloth of correspondences. (What horrible analogies came to Ira: of the corpse and the ghoul, the corpse and the necrophile!) In short, even as evolution developed the predator from among its own kind, here was one in whom the wretchedness and degradation of his people had instilled such appetite, it amounted to a vested interest, to societal cannibalism. He opposed alteration of the wretchedness and famine of their lives. The sordidness these inevitably spawned became his stock in trade, his literary storehouse. For him to have transformed his contempt for “the sow that ate her young” into sympathy for the desperate strivings of his people to free themselves from abysmal want, from their proverbial tha shane ukrosh under British economic and social domination, would have required a complete overhaul of the haughty psyche that derided the very source of its identity, the Irish folk; would have demanded a complete humbling of that psyche, indeed its abnegation, its reversal, which alone could have effected the regeneration of that psyche. There was no other way.

— You know what that entails, do you?

Oh, I have some notion, Ecclesias. I too used my folk as mere counters in nugatory design. Far worse than the humiliation of nonentity, or the morose disorientation of lost identity, is the despairing contest between aging and a new beginning—

Oh, there was much more he could say — Ira felt himself flag — much more that had occurred to him in the heat of his antagonism to Joyce. What had changed Ira’s view of Joyce so radically these last few years — Ira drew pent breath at the intensity of his introspection — what was it that had changed his view so radically? Ira’s views of Joyce had changed, not suddenly, but irresistibly, the result of small dissents, cumulative contentions, that at length reached a critical point: the point of outright repudiation. Again the process was dialectical in character; his increasing discontent with his great master culminated by changing quantity into quality. The illustrious author, greatest prose writer of the twentieth century, from whom, wittingly or unwittingly, Ira had drawn method and guidance, to whom he turned as to a touchstone of tacit approval, to whom he paid boundless homage, the supreme author had renounced his people, renounced their trials, their yearning and their suffering. Even as Ira had renounced his, without slogan or fanfare, but to the same degree, as if Joyce were the very paradigm of the kind of severance it was incumbent on every genuine artist to do whose goal was greatness. But severance from folk had provided no exchange, certainly not the exchange Ira had expected, from a specific people to a universal one, from the parochial to the cosmopolitan. There was no universal transfer inherent in the severance, no pending renovation. Severance from a people meant just that: to be cut off from them. To be liberated from them, yes, but at the same time to renounce belonging to them, to remove himself from the opportunity to tap their inexhaustible diversity, their vitality and invention. The reaction, to borrow from the language of chemistry, went to an end: to an irreversible precipitation: a novel, yes, out of one’s folk, out of solution, out of ionic interchange, precipitated into estranged immobilized sediment. And as had happened to Joyce, so, on a humble scale, to Ira. Oh, the analogy proceeded ineluctably (a word Joyce favored), proceeded clumsily, but ineluctably. Sequestered by his own monstrous ego, isolated from access to the dynamic vitality of his folk, Joyce crystallized the sterile precipitant of his art into pyrites of portmanteaux, the ultimate in antic medium, the ultimate in imposing stasis in human interaction. Unlike his great mentor, Ira couldn’t go that far, neither did he care to try. He came to terms with his dearth, became resigned to sterility.

But now — and for some time — Ira’s direction had changed, and changed to diametrically opposite to his original one, the one that had supplied the initial guide to his only novel. His new direction was diametrically opposite to that of Joyce. It was a direction toward a reunion with his people, growing with the passage of years ever stronger, more purposeful, more partisan, more informed, more steadfast. Even though at times it seemed to him that his reunion might be a reunion with a lost cause, that history and social change might overwhelm the small nation to which his spirit had fused in hope and pride, nevertheless, he clung all the more loyally to the midwife of his rebirth: Israel.

His people were Israel. Not the Diaspora, the mercantile, the professional, the urban, the business Diaspora, a people of the past, as far as he was concerned, who might well disappear in another century, and might do well to disappear — and from whom his estrangement had been very little reduced — but Israel! A people of the future, a people redeemed, redeeming their land, his people were Israel. Not some idealized country, but all of it, ranging from the slattern in the chain store to the snide male bus driver waggling insulting hand under his chin passing his female counterpart, who was driving her bus in the opposite direction; from the proverbially rude clerks and civil servants, from the exacting little despots presiding over desks in the post office, to the myriad of harassed, intelligent, and cordial folk, bearded or clean-shaven, observant or indifferent, the researchers at the universities, the keepers of fish ponds, drivers of tractors, cultivators of cotton fields under Mount Gilboa, harvesters of the avocado groves near the Jordan River. Kibbutz and moshav and posh hotel and run-down Tel Aviv seafront: Israel. It was Israel that had rescued him from Joyce, had rescued him from alienation, modified him even to tolerating the Diaspora. It was late in happening, true, but it had happened, and it succeeded in altering the orientation of the once withdrawn individual. Ah, for the gift to express the changes that had taken place within him, since the end of that withdrawal — the accession of judiciousness along with partisanship, of steadfastness along with deep concern. To Israel he owed a new staunchness of affirmation, a sympathy with people, a unity within and without, a regeneration, that by contrast made Joyce recede into the distance like a black hole, pathologic and pathetic, a black hole of English letters, beyond whose event horizon change became stultified, illumination became trapped, trapped and retarded as in Finnegans Wake. .

That was how he felt about Joyce now. Not when Edith tendered him the Ulysses to read. Not how he felt then. It was those two things, two strophes, toward and away from the altar, he had to bear in the same breast. Nothing uncommon, he told himself. It happened all the time. And yet, he knew very well, it didn’t happen all the time. Would that the time spent in reverie on why it happened, why and when and where it did and didn’t happen, would repay for itself with an answer, one that his limited analytical powers could set forth.

Still, two things had come out of his rendering of his cogitations, the one trivial, the other too late, though of immense importance in contributing to his understanding of himself. The trivial one he named an aphorism for an aphid, a wisecrack of dubious quality: Sure, Bloom is some sort of hybrid; he’s a Hybrew. And the other was that in “analyzing” Joyce, in attempting to probe Joyce’s character, Ira had stumbled on his own fatal, or near-fatal, weakness. It was one that he shared with Joyce, and probably was the reason for the intense initial affinity with the other: both sought escape from milieu, from environ of folk, and eventually succeeded — but in doing so, both arrested maturity. Oh, it would take time, it would take time to ponder that one anywhere close to its depth.

It was like a letter that one left unfinished, and returned to the next day. Ira had “saved” his day’s writing, and switched off the device. And then he had ruminated further on his last statement, whether it truly reflected the actual state of things, that both Joyce and he had sought escape from milieu, from environ, and in so doing had arrested personal maturity. The realization came to him that the statement was not a true reflection of actuality. Rather, it was a surface observation. The truth was that during those first few years, when both identified with their folk, when both belonged to their people, perception was a window on the world around them, perception and its accepted setting of opinion and inference and practice. But more and more, as time passed, each driven by his own compulsions, each employed the activity of mind, of mentation, as a baffle against perception, against its accepted setting of opinion and inference and practice. Ira had sat well-nigh stunned by the realization, stunned and appalled: so this was what he had spent a lifetime doing? Not transforming his perception of reality into art, but transforming mind into art as a way of buffering, of screening out, reality. And now near ninety, he finally understood: he had continually, increasingly — until the act had become inveterate and automatic — responded to the buffer, to the screen, not to life-derived actuality, but from the resonance of the very thing that occluded actuality. . Too awful to think about, too awful to think that the revelation had come at the end of life. Crushing was the only way to put it. All those years of not perceiving, but responding only to the resonance transmitted by the protective sheath against perception. It was not something Kantian that he was discovering about himself (and Joyce), a ding an sich. It was the common response to ordinary perception shared by all mankind, but which he had learned to alter, to create by muffling the data of existence.

The first chapter of the Ulysses seemed delightfully narrative, pungent, wry, precisely focused. Above all, the writing flowed freely, as a sparkling stream of disenchanted realism. The light and air in the round tower was clear and crystalline; the seascape was glorious; stately Buck Mulligan bearing in his shaving articles was delectably sacrilegious. Ira wondered how Larry could have found impediment obstructing his enjoyment of the book: certainly not by Buck Milligan and his spoofing, his blasphemous intonings over his shaving mug, certainly not the arrival of the old milk-woman, and the badinage of the three youths in the tower. To him, the atmosphere of the narrative at first felt transparent, the movement and posture sharp, the tone engaging and natural. The chapters were brilliant — and completely accessible. Ira was delighted, delighted and triumphant: Ira understood it: the great, the redoubtable Ulysses of James Joyce, all its nuances seemed open to him.

As the clandestine love affair circulated about him in the ivy-covered stone cottage at Woodstock, the pages, even for Ira, began to grow opaque, the story to grow labyrinthian, loopholes within a massive masonry. He could see what Larry had objected to, why he had put the book down: it became a labor to read, an arduous, unrewarding groping, a groping often beset with perplexity, often in the dark. All too often, he felt as if he were besieging a citadel of narrative bristling with devices to protect, to fend off comprehension. He stumbled through long, esoteric passages that humiliated him by his inability to understand. Never once did it occur to him to make any association between the episodes in the narrative and the title; never once did he descry parallels between characters and situations in the novel and their Homeric prototypes, satiric parallels, ironic parallels, parallels of any kind. Sheer drudgery to endure, most trying of all to contend with, was that the story went nowhere, with interludes, Bloom and the Citizen, Bloom’s grief for his dead son, Bloom’s stagy shmertz at the hour of his cuckolding, Bloom consuming his “feety” cheese sandwich (Go know his fellow diners, gobbling, gnawing, chomping, were Lestrygonians. Poor guys. How else do working commoners eat?). As long as the pub was full of Lestrygonians, that’s what counted: Lestrygonians (as later parsed by the Gilbertian synoptic chart), the Lunch, 1PM, Esophagus, Architecture, Constables, Peristaltic. . Now, there was something to engross the consummate artist, the construction of a learned three-dimensional crossword puzzle.

Oh, despite that, there were many peepholes, there were a multitude of apertures through which one beheld facets of Irish urban life, matchlessly depicted, his throbbing catalogs of locale and landmark. And yes, yes, not to forget, of especial poignance to Ira, that rift in the dense texture of prose when the disapproving priest spied the two young lovers emerging guiltily from the bosky seclusion of their fornication. How like the two young Irish lovers who had saved Ira from that rusty pederast in Fort Tryon Park, the one lover trailing the other down the path, the flushed, glowing domestic, the deprecating, muscular swain, husky caretaker or freight-handler. How Irish that seemed to Ira, having spent so many years among the Irish, on an Irish-dominated street.

Yes, it was more than these now mundane observations that had enthralled him as a young man. Despite the carping of the dour, refractory old codger who, because he had himself reunited with Judaism in the form of Israel (and thereby had sharpened his once dull consciousness of being a Jew), had become the adversary of his renowned preceptor, and kept injecting his present bias, his revisions and reservations, into the impressions of the youthful reader that was once himself, the Ulysses was more than that. It was an immensely liberating experience for the as yet pre-embryonic literary man, the amorphous, larval novelist. Oh, it was not merely because of the trail it blazed, the conventions broken, the daring situational and verbal precedents it set, Bloom sitting on the crapper, Molly’s monologue while menstruating.

They were of immeasurable importance in breaking down conventional barriers in literary representation. But more important than anything else, of supreme importance to Ira: the Ulysses demonstrated to him not only that it was possible to commute the dross of the mundane and the sordid into literary treasure, but how it was done. It showed him how to address whole slag heaps of squalor, and make them available for exploitation in art. Equally important was Joyce’s tutelage in the sorcery of language, how it could be made to fluoresce, to electrify the mood and rarify the printed word. No more awesome master of every phase of syntax, no more authoritative mentor — nay, taskmaster! — of subtlest effects, subtlest distinctions of word or phrase, had Ira in his desultory way ever encountered than Joyce. Wryly, Ira remembered the old saying about the Chicago packing houses: that they used every part of the pig except the squeal. Joyce elucidated ways to use even the squeal: lingo as well as language, the double entendre, the pun, the homely squib, the spoonerism, the palindrome, pig Latin and pig Sanscrit.

So Ira read on, toiling doggedly through hundreds of close-knit pages, wrenching his brow in perplexed concentration, seeking denouement — going unrewarded, save for Bloom’s escape from near-altercation with an Irish jingo, save for Stephen’s smashing the gaslight in a whorehouse, and being punched in the jaw by a vociferous British soldier. Ira sought a meaning that was absent, without ever realizing that was the meaning. But as the days passed, and he read and wrestled, read and floundered, the strange conviction took firmer and firmer hold of him, that within himself was graven a crude analogue of the Joycean model, just as he felt within himself a humble affinity for the Joycean temperament, a diffident aptitude for the Joycean method. Opaque though many and many a passage might be, Ira sensed that he was a mehvin of that same kind of world of which Joyce was an incomparable connoisseur: of that same kind of pocked and pitted reality. There were keys that evoked that world, signatures by which they were recognized, and he was ever receptive to them — why, he couldn’t say. He could summon up words that connoted those signatures, signatures that were keys to their quotidian.

What was there in that stodgy variety of Dublin city through which Bloom and Dedalus went to and fro that was so very different from the stodgy variety of Harlem’s environs, the environs Ira knew so well — and the East Side environments that memory retained like a reserve of impressions? If a one-eyed Irish jingo heaved a box after the ignominiously fleeing Bloom, Ira had just as cravenly allowed a couple of micks to spit on his blue record card while he waited in line to enroll in P.S. 24. If Bloom knew the hour when his wife cuckolded him, what did that compare to Ira’s knowing the equatorial hour on Sunday morning when Mom and Pop were gone? And worse, worse than anything Bloom ever suffered: that agonizing afternoon when murder flapped bat wings over his plane geometry text, because Minnie hadn’t menstruated. And talk about the nastiness of the diurnal — talk about the absolute vertigo of furore of a chance weekday break, what was looking up a statue’s buttocks compared to that. . or the colossal jape of compassionate Mamie’s sentimentally “forcing” a greenback on him, a buck, right after he had hoisted her drippy kid daughter, Stella, on his petard. Hell, of nastiness, of sordidness, perversity, and squalor — compared to anyone in the Ulysses, he had loads, he had droves, he had troves. But it was language, language, that could magically transmogrify the baseness of his days and ways into precious literature — into the highly touted Ulysses itself. It could free him from this depraved exile, from this immutable bondage. Sensibility and need, given language, could beat silence, exile, cunning anytime, especially if sensibility and need, given language, was a past master at silence, exile, cunning.

The forlorn backyards of tenements, the dreary, Felsnaphtha-mopped hallways, enlivened sometimes by homely emanations of cabbage (it could have been the spicy aroma of stuffed cabbage, the hullupchehs that Mom was cooking). Oh, the round iron coal-scuttle cover in the sidewalk, and the roar of coal down the chute, and the coal-streaked visage of the Irish toiler — the ex-hod carrier he might have been — down in the cellar, at the other end of the chute, lugging his basket of anthracite to the tenant’s storage bin. It was in the cellar too where the one-eyed Jewish painter, the Cyclops of 119th Street, stored his paints and brushes and turpentine. Speak of the worn lip of the stoop stairs, the battered brass letter boxes in the foyer, the dilapidated flight of linoleum-covered steps past the window at the turn of the landing, and up to the “first floor.” And oh, into the gloomy, narrow corridor, between the toilets of opposing flats, to the door under the paint-spotted transom light, the door that meant home.

Weren’t fourteen years of school, from kindergarten to college, the raw material of literature? Didn’t it qualify for alchemical transformation, like those chunks and hunks of iron the avaricious Puritans brought to the faker in the Ben Jonson play? If that was latent wealth in the domain of letters, why, he was rich beyond compare: his whole world was a junkyard. All those myriad, myriad squalid impressions he took for granted, all were convertible from base to precious, from pig iron to gold ingot. The kids rolling dice under the shadow of the railroad trestle on Park Avenue — ah, the very job of painting the trestle itself every four or five years! First, after the chipping, the undercoat of red, then the finishing coat of gray. Tell them, Ira thought, tell them what a simpleton you were: how you fancied they painted the trestle red first, not to provide it with a tough undercoat, but so they could see how far they reached with the second coat of gray. Such was the level of your boyhood inferences. You fancied that the huge stone ramp which brought the trains up from underground to the trestle at 103rd Street housed within it pirates and buccaneers. You could hear them wrangling over their booty, could hear the clash of steel from their cutlasses. .

Petey Lamb, the janitor’s son, humping Helen under the stairs. The housewives setting out to shop in the Park Avenue pushcart market in the morning, summer morning, the immense, moted sunlight glistening on their black oilcloth shopping bags. And you watched Mom from the front-room window on a Sunday morning to make sure, shamefully, miscreant, craftily sure, traced Mom’s steps around Jake’s squat brown pile of a tenement, and disappearance around the corner. Ponderous Mr. Clancy, the street-repair foreman, mounting the creaking stairs at the close of the day: they actually creaked under his weight. Flora Baer, Davey’s sister, whom you tried to get to play bad down in the cellar, but couldn’t. The foam on top of the simmering pot of thin soup you sopped up with a crust of bread, and ate with relish: Greasy Joan doth keel the pot, a delicacy of destitution. Meanwhile Flora’s scabby infant brother in his bleary high chair clutched a cockroach he had just grabbed in his little fist and offered to throw it into doting, ne’er-do-well cardsharp Papa’s cup of tea; and dark with penury, the meager mother looked on.

No, you didn’t have to go cruising o’er the billows to the South Sea Isles on a sailing vessel crowded with canvas, or fist a t’gallant, like a character in The Sea Wolf, or prospect for gold in the faraway Klondike, or float down the Mississippi in a raft with Huck Finn, or fight Indians in the young Wild West nickel magazines. You didn’t have to be an escaped criminal like Jean Valjean or the Count of Monte Cristo in glamorous France, or a corsair with a cutlass clenched between his teeth climbing a hemp boarding ladder or a treasure hunter with a pegleg, or a swashbuckling swordsman like D’Artagnan. You didn’t need Scottish moors or desert islands, and you didn’t need tiger-infested African velds or the jungles of remote India. You didn’t need to go anywhere, anywhere at all. It was all here, right here, in Harlem, on Manhattan Island, anywhere from Harlem to the Jersey City Pier: from the feisty Irish urchins who patronized the old Jewish couple’s candy store, saying sidemouthed, “Gimme two o’ deze, an’ t’ree o’ dem, and one o’ doze,” to the bigger guys who bought two Sweet Caporal cigarettes for a cent. “Oim as dhroy as a loyme-kiln.” The sewer cleaner handed his helper the tin beer bucket. “Will yez rush the growler, me b’y.” Garish though the contents of the great glass amphorae in Biolov’s drugstore show window seemed during the day, how vividly ruby and emerald they glowed at night, suffused with incandescence. Language was the conjurer, indeed the philosopher’s stone, language was a form of alchemy. It was language that elevated meanness to the heights of art. Like the irritating particle that bred the nacre of the pearl, language ameliorated the gnawing irritant of existence; it interceded between the wound and the dream.

What a discovery that was! He, Ira Stigman, was a mehvin of misery, of the dismal, of the pathetic, the deprived. Everywhere he looked, whole treasuries were exposed, repositories of priceless potential ignored, and hence they were his. It brought back to mind what he had just vaguely ruminated about when he had the impulse — an impulse he had suppressed — of sharing this unique world, this bonanza of penury, with Larry. It was his world — again he could feel the base, proprietary thrust of his niggardliness vindicate him: he had suffered for all this, earned it by years of indenture to the foul and the pitiful: to wraithlike old Mr. Malloy, seated in the sunshine before the wrought-iron cellar barrier of the tenement, sucking on his stubby, blackened clay pipe, with a rubber baby-bottle nipple at the end of the stem to protect his toothless gums. That vignette, that gem, was his, Ira’s. Yonnie True on bare-ass beach between the freight tracks and the Hudson, standing on the diving rock, to which Ira in his anguish had once returned, sporting a Bull Durham sack on his dink, because, said Weasel reverently, Yonnie had a dose of clap — and Yonnie had just wriggled into Fat’s tights, and who was Fat but Ira! It was indecent, but it was literary, and Ira had paid his fee in full for the right to use it. The repulsive and the graceful stood opposed; only language could bridge the gap. Ah, how to say it?

At Larry’s suggestion, from the first day of their stay in Woodstock, he and Ira let their beards grow. Whether Larry’s aim in their doing so was to foil casual recognition with a hirsute mask or to mediate the contrast between their callow youthfulness and Edith’s maturity, Ira wasn’t sure. Nor whether their droll disguise accomplished anything. His own beard flourished with surprising vigor, curly and black. For diversion, and again to lessen the risk of recognition, the three avoided town; instead they took long walks in the country, explored lonely dirt roads and lanes. With Larry and Ira on either side of her, Edith did most of the talking as they strolled along, edifying her young escorts about life in general, and her own in particular. When she dwelt on her own past, and she often did, she invariably adopted a matter-of-fact tone of voice, underplaying her role in the enduring of the many outrageous and tragic circumstances in her life.

Dispassionately minimizing, she conveyed the impression — which Ira could only feel, feel, but not define — of long-suffering innocence, of quiet, self-sacrificing fortitude. Listening to her talk about incidents in her past, Ira felt at times as if he were recalling passages of the few long-forgotten ephemeral romances he had read: of wistful heroines caught in the fell toils of villainy or baleful misfortune. Though most of the specifics had eroded, the contours remained and were still recognizable: Edith was the heroine of her own drama. She wasn’t the kind of central character who struggled against the various impulses in himself, good or evil, and triumphed or surrendered: a Jane Eyre, a Dr. Jekyll, a Dorian Gray. No, no. She was a heroine in the tried-and-true tradition: kind, benign, brave, and unselfish. Ira recalled a line in one of her later poems: My generous gesture gone astray. She could have been right. Why not? Her gestures might always have been generous, and as often gone astray. But her life, when he came to know her, didn’t present itself to him that way. Well, perhaps he was biased in his attitude toward her.

Ira mused on the sad, olive-skinned face that once was Edith’s, the solicitous reproach in her protrusive brown eyes. He could have been wrong, he could be wrong now. Who was to say? My generous gesture gone astray. . On the other hand, M, his wife of more than fifty years, had never said anything of the sort, or implied anything of the sort, though she was to him the finest among women, the finest person he had ever known. But she was human, fallible, sensible and amused, acknowledging her needs, wants, appetites, foibles. Nevertheless, she was peerless among women. And an artist too, a musician, composer of growing note in her old age: Mother M, as Ira teased her. Well. .

Edith spoke often of her unhappy childhood in Silver City, New Mexico, spoke as they strolled along the country road. Her tales of her inebriated father, her mother’s refusal to have sexual intercourse with Edith’s dad, a former — and fallen — legislator, her mother’s favoring of her younger, inept sister, Lenora, were all familiar to him from earlier in the year. Larry had confided these secrets to his best friend during their evenings alone the previous winter and spring, and Ira had absorbed every word with the greatest of interest. Yet when Edith repeated these tales of personal travail, albeit with a new slant, Ira feigned astonishment and wonderment and thoroughly enjoyed hearing them from Edith in person, as if for the first time.

But many of the stories that Edith told them about literature, especially poetry, were new. And to these passions, she joined the study of anthropology. She long ago in New Mexico had become acquainted with the Navajo Indians. In the company of schoolmates, under the guidance of teachers, she had often ridden out to the Navajo reservation on horseback, and camped out in the desert. She admired the innate dignity of native Indians; she respected their oneness with nature, their reverence for nature. And as she did with all the oppressed, she felt a great sympathy with them, because of their mistreatment at the hands of the white usurpers of their lands, the ignorant and heartless desecrators of Navajo religious traditions and culture, in whose place they left a ruinous legacy of epidemic, depravity, and alcohol. Feeling as she did, it was natural that she would turn to their literature, learn their lore and language and their tribal and ceremonial chants. Later, when she embarked on her doctorate, she combined the two disciplines in a single study of Navajo poetry, its religious content, its rhythms, its structure and forms.

VII

Two or three times during their sojourn in the stone cottage, as the cooler evening skies presaged the imminence of fall, they ventured to walk the long, dusty, though pleasant distance upward to a fine restaurant, almost circular in shape, at the very summit of a hill. The dining room, large and shaded, was sparsely patronized, perhaps because of the lateness of the season, and this lulled their fears of recognition. Edith felt secure when they dined there, so secure that instead of choosing a table in an alcove or next to a wall, she chose one next to a window, because of the lovely view. Every window had its own panorama of mountains. The nearer ranges were solid with conifers, thick as the nap of a carpet, the farther ones less and less shaggy in appearance, until the last ridges seemed to lose opacity and become almost translucent. It was all so new to Ira, gazing out, half enchanted, at mountains, mountains in ridges like motionless waves, waves at the very last ready to blend into sky.

Larry took pleasure in his friend’s rapture. “Enjoy it,” he prompted. “That’s why we’re up here.”

“Gee, do I!”

“You’ve never seen a mountain before?” Edith asked with that sympathy so inseparably a part of her. “Really?”

“In the Carpathians maybe, where I was born. But I don’t remember them. In America,” Ira tried being facetious, “I only know Mt. Morris Park.”

“Where is that?”

“I’m just joking.”

“It’s near where he lives in Harlem,” Larry explained. “It has a wooden bell tower on it. Quite a picturesque place. Without intending to be, you know.”

“Really? I didn’t think there were any mountains in New York. Even hills of any size.”

“That’s the biggest one I knew when I was little,” Ira said, soberly remembering. “You know how it is to be a kid. The top once looked a mile high. But I’ve also seen Bear Mountain.”

“I once intended to write a short story about the bell tower on top. It was a kind of alarm bell, mostly in case of fire,” Larry said.

“Did you?”

“No. It wasn’t so much because I lost interest. I realized I had a wrong view of Ira — and his neighborhood too. Quite different from what I thought.”

“Why didn’t you become acquainted with it? You had Ira here to ask.”

“I know. But — something strange.” Larry looked off through the window at the distant mountains. “That’s something I can’t answer.” He drew in his round lips reflectively, then laughed shortly. “I realized that I really didn’t know a thing about Ira. Or almost. All the things he told me about — say, the ball games where he used to hustle soda — he’s told you about it too.”

“Yes.”

“They’re different.”

“Well, it’s the same way when I went to your brother’s dress-manufacturing loft there on 119th Street. You just take it naturally when you go in there. I get stiff self-conscious.”

“You do? You never said anything.”

“Well.” Ira shrugged deprecatingly. “I’m not used to it.” And a moment later added with uncommon quickness, “Like you, but opposite.”

Edith looked from one to the other, appraisingly. “Larry is so much more worldly. I suppose that’s the chief difference.” And after a few seconds of silence, “Would you like another one of these French rolls?”

“I’ll say. So crisp.” Ira grinned apologetically. “I can’t let this gravy go to waste. My mother says it’s a sin.”

“Does she?” Edith smiled.

“I’ll order it.” Larry raised his arm. “Oh, miss.” And addressing Ira, “We can’t let you do that.”

“What?”

“Sin.”

“Oh.”

Larry and Edith laughed.

“I wonder what either of you would say to a real mountain out West?” Edith said. “To the Rockies, for example.”

Ira noted with satisfaction that more than one roll arrived in the napkin-lined basket. “You mean because they’re so high?”

“Oh, yes, the plain is a mile or more high. The mountains are two or more in some cases.”

“Two miles up!”

“And not in the least friendly, the way these mountains out here are. We’d call them hills out West. People have become lost for days in the mountains near Silver City. In the Gila Wilderness, in the Mogollon, as it’s called. People have actually died before they were found.”

“Well, I—” Ira caught himself. “I almost died in Mt. Morris Park.”

They laughed.

“Are you serious?” Edith asked. It was typical of her to inquire into morbid details. “Did you fall?”

“Oh, no. I just slipped.”

I just slipped, Ira thought. His eyes strayed from the amber monitor of his word processor to the east window of his study — at no great distance loomed the Sandias, two miles high at their crest, exactly the kind of mountains Edith spoke of in a dining room on the summit of a hill in Woodstock seventy years ago. Seventy years ago. Now he resided in the state of New Mexico, the very same part of the country in which she was born and once lived, in which almost certainly his life would come to an end where hers began. Elegiac, wasn’t it? But elegies had nowhere to go. Best gobble a half-tablet of Percocet, like drinking at an oasis, and get back to the desert. .

One of his most salient recollections of their dining in the summit restaurant was his recurring qualm of embarrassment, to which he could scarcely refrain from giving utterance: he had no money, not even for the tip to the frilly-aproned young woman who waited on them and brought him repeated servings of rolls. And at Edith’s and Larry’s assurances that it was all right, they’d take care of it, “I’m especially conscious about tips,” he confessed.

“You are? Why?” Edith asked. “I honestly just make a practice of giving them ten percent of the bill.”

To which Larry added, “That’s what everyone does. What makes you so sensitive about tipping?”

“You forget? My father’s a waiter.”

“Oh, is that it?” Edith smiled at him sympathetically. “I suppose it’s bound to change your thinking about them.”

Larry burst into a laugh. “I was a singing waiter. I told you about Copake. It was only a few weeks, but I have to feel self-conscious about it. I’ve been initiated.”

“That’s right. I forgot.”

“Don’t worry about it, Ira. You’re our guest,” Edith reassured him.

“Thanks.”

And they went riding on saddle horses. It was the first time in Ira’s life that he had been astride a horse. How politely bemused was the look on the face of the attendant at the riding stable at the sight of this curious trio: a petite, mature woman in riding breeches and boots, completely at home in the saddle, easily managing her mount, accompanied by two fuzzy-bearded youths, the one, self-confident and handsome, who had evidently acquired a little experience as a horseman, the other, who obviously had none.

Ira trailed Edith and Larry, who were walking their mounts, undoubtedly out of consideration for his inexperience. Conscious of the ludicrous figure he cut on a horse, Ira was glad to get out of sight of the stableman. Only the equally ludicrous overlap of memory: of the kid who was himself behind Pop’s favorite horse, Billy, riding in Pop’s milk wagon; or sitting in the driver’s seat alone while Pop entered a small workshop with a few pint bottles of milk in his steel tray. America, America: a step at a time, a phase at a time. Here he was, from riding in his father’s milk wagon through a cobblestoned city street, to mounted on a saddle horse riding over a country lane. And how pristine, how rare with hue, with shape and silhouette, with spareness, with contentment of being, the rural landscape poised toward assuming the crispness of autumn, audible in the crackle of a few fallen leaves under the stamping hooves of the living beast he rode. Assuming autumn both audibly and visible. For overhead, the branches of trees wore a garb that had become mottled now, a fabric of variegated green and brown. Grown dry and sparse, boughs yielded supremacy to sky, retreating in solitary leaves drifting down. And the rail fences, rustic and weather-beaten, crooked, gray staves, split and knotty, rail fences parted the dirt road from the stubbled field on the other side. How daintily Edith cantered ahead, wheeled her mount, and cantered back, so modest and unassuming, almost apologetic of her equestrian mastery, petite, sober-eyed woman, against autumnal azure in a primordial landscape.

The cat—

A few times, a very few times, Edith and Ira walked to the outskirts of the town, where she purchased an item or two from the general store there. Or again, they walked on a wooden path, Ira duly and respectfully keeping his distance, except when he felt he ought to take her arm a moment in token support over some obstacle. Once or twice she patted his hand in thanks. And the difference in the coolness of her hand and the heat of his own startled him: as if he were betraying what he thought, and what he thought was so tightly sealed within him, fantasies immured so tightly, no faintest trace could be detected. Still, incorrigible intimations kept cropping up in his mind, intimations that had no business being there. He was faithful, he was faithful to his friend. He strove to adhere, as impeccably as he could, a veritable stickler, to his notions of the role he was expected to play according to the tacit provisions of the covenant of his friend’s romance with his English instructor. He strove to behave in such a way as to be a credit to the code of boon companionship, a credit to his own integrity, to his sense of appropriate behavior in such a situation. The least he could do to repay Edith and Larry for the trust they vested in him — and for all the privileges that went with it — was to comport himself with rigorous loyalty, conform to every tenet of uprightness — to behave with honor.

Yes, honor, that was the word that clung to purity of thought, in spite of self and the flicker of perverse promptings. He was determined to shield Edith from the brunt of his nasty world, and yet at the same time, he wished to draw Edith inside his world, a peculiarly complex world dominated by complex numbers, imaginary numbers, where ordinary rules often applied with extraordinary results, where he could think of Edith with chivalry and knightly probity, where both could abide by the rules of fairytales. While he wished to shield her from his own unimaginable bondage, he believed he hankered for her to recognize what he was, was endowed with; was destined one day to win her consent, her passionate consent, because he sensed it was that more than anything else which appealed to her, that kind of depth, of range, of imagination, abominable, desperate, reckless, but boundless. Hadn’t he done those things? Wasn’t he that way? He had breached the margins of fantasy; he could reach out and collate all manner of loony tag ends of the world. He could do all that, and at the same time do his utmost to act, to try to think and feel as he was expected to — as he thought he was expected to: be preoccupied with grasshoppers and with Joyce’s Ulysses; seem phlegmatic toward sex, seem inoculated against romance, seem oblivious. And he thought he succeeded. He prided himself that he had — oh, that was no trick for him, that kind of dissembling—except how to dissemble completely, how to dissipate the remnant of that familiar and impermissible incitement that caused a recalcitrant shifting from his vile and predatory practices into the chaste world of Edith and Larry’s love affair.

He was sure that was it, that it was his vileness that spawned those despicable, immoral notions when he was alone with her, that he needed only to take her hand in his, that she wanted him to take her hand in his, transfer the heat of it to her coolness, impress his desire upon her, not by a token, not by a tentative touch, but by forceful possession. And she was prepared to answer in kind. If he took the initiative to carry matters further, she was poised to reward betrayal of friend with betrayal of lover. What nuttiness! Jesus! He was projecting his own shameful proclivities. That was all it was, nothing more. Make a pass, like a mug from his East Harlem street. Make a pass, as if she were — not Stella — he didn’t make passes at her; he got right down to business first chance, wasted not a second. Nor as if she were some floozy on 119th Street, Helen, receptive in the hallway, as Petey Lamb had prompted. Jesus, he didn’t know how to make a pass at someone refined. What would he do? What a fool he’d make of himself, worse than a fool, reveal who was really behind that artless, that pretend-abstracted, callow dreamer he strove so earnestly to appear. Disastrous. Wow! What would happen to her opinion of him, to his reputation? And if she told Larry — boyoboy! His contempt. No, no. Never mind the impulse in him that she aroused by her intangible tension, the meaningful momentary gravity of her features, that emanation of aloneness, like something sealing the two together. Nothing doing. It was a figment of his own construing. Lucky he had sense enough, a last iota of self-control — shyness enough, thank God — to interpret things right, keep himself in check, avert exposure, fiasco. Boy! Lucky he didn’t get a hard-on just then—

It would have been a snap had he been someone else. And he knew he was right. He knew. Of course. Poor woman. Oh, to have been a mannerly roughneck! Some stud off 119th Street: he don’t know no better, see? But then, he wouldn’t have been there, in Woodstock, playing the role of the wool-gathering patsy.

Ivan, you remember my friend Ivan?

— Are you speaking to me?

Yes, Ecclesias. Edith invited him to dinner in her apartment, dinner she had cooked herself, when we were both still CCNY undergraduates. Strong-thewed Ivan, crack hurdler once, and promising physicist, with a score of 168 on the Binet IQ test. And he said, oh, many years later, as we sipped the twelve-year-old bourbon he had presented me with, said, as we sat outdoors in the shade of the mobile home before supper, that on the evening on which Edith had invited him, he had shaved as closely and dressed as neatly as he knew how. He was in a swivet to appear at his most presentable. And they had dinner, he and Edith, and they talked. And after a decent interval, after a proper visit, he thanked her for the delicious meal she had prepared, and took his leave. Here Ivan began to perspire. Even in the reminiscing, he mopped his brow, mopped it repeatedly. And regret, never more palpably — never more palpably did regret wring a man’s features.

“I thought that was all I was invited for,” Ivan said. “To have dinner in her apartment. The things you don’t know when you’re young.” Never more wan did a man look, contemplating his past, nor more slowly, lugubriously, shake his head.

I chortled, Ecclesias, I chortled cruelly at the spectacle of my friend’s rue. “I thought I was the only one imprisoned in my regret,” I said. “Incarcerated in crestfallen repinings, you might say.”

But he wasn’t diverted by my glee, Ecclesias, nor shared it in the least. His was the intelligent face of a man studying the irrecoverable — for the nth time — not to recover a lost sensation, but to alter the course of his life: “Too bad,” he said. “I might have got over those damned inhibitions a lot sooner, inhibitions that were killing me. I could have gone on and got my doctoral at Columbia, instead of an ulcer that cut it short.”

“And swelled Edith’s undergraduate trio to a quartet,” I twitted. “Too bad is right. We could have had something else in common, you and I.” I could just see Edith, after her young guest left, daintily shrugging off mild disappointment before the mirror, while her little hands bunched about an earlobe, removing an earring. .

And Ira cackled again. . as wickedly as he had then. . and thought awhile. No, there was more to it than that. Reverie held inestimable reserves. What if he had said to her — what if he had confessed the truth, as he eventually did, though many months later. While on one of those walks, what if he had done the talking — implored, thrown himself on her mercy, then blurted out, “Edith, there’s my sister, she continually preys on my mind, continually overpowers me. These are the circumstances, this is how it happened. There’s my kid cousin, Stella. My aunt Mamie thinks I come there for the dollar she gives me, her nephew, the indigent collegian. Listen, I know all about sex, sex that’s wrong, horribly wrong. I’m driven wild by it. . ”

Then what? No. Impossible. Impossible for him to confess. Confess against or through the rigidity of the disguise he wore, the mask he lived behind? But how remorseless was the frenzy to wreck time, to demolish the past, the way — so it was said — professional house-wreckers were sometimes so carried away in their excitement to raze an old structure that they actually endangered their own lives. As there was rapture of the depths of the sea that overcame scuba divers, so there was rapture of demolition, demolition of buildings, demolition of the past. And she couldn’t have resisted, could she? This exposure of who he was. She’d have made shift to rescue him. No? Of course she would. The strongest instinct in her was to rescue, to pacify, to allay another’s need. The very thing he was was all the lure he needed. He needed nothing else. Jesus, wouldn’t that have been a tricky situation, had it happened? A love-trust double-cross in that timeless stone cottage in Woodstock? Because in another time, in other surroundings, happen it did—

Assume he laid her in some bosky dell, Ecclesias, as once in fact he did, in some bosky dell by the side of the road, betrayed poor, gentle Larry. Hey, does this latter generation, from which I’m as distant as they will be from me by 2070 A.D., does the word “betrayed,” in the sense I mean it, Ecclesias, have any significance or utility in their vocabulary any longer?

— I doubt it.

Ditto.

Well, anyway, there was a cat.

The cat pawed partway down the rough mortar joints in the stone wall, the way felines do, seeking the lowest elevation before having to drop, and then leaped clear — to the lawn below. It happened that the three inhabitants of the stone cottage were having luncheon in the delightful privacy of the enclosed backyard at the time. They were seated on the white iron lawn chairs around the white filigreed table, and enjoying the fine air and sky as they ate: savory grilled cheddar cheese sandwiches and bacon, tossed salad, fresh-brewed coffee, a repast prepared by Larry, who enjoyed exercising his culinary flair.

Ira followed the animal’s movements: the cat was a calico tabby. They had seen her before. A friendly pussycat. They had spoken about her, and Ira had even learned something new about cats. Calicoes were always females, Edith had informed him, and Larry had added something about the possibility of becoming rich developing a new breed: “You’re going into biology. There’s your chance, Ira,” he spoofed. “Breed a calico male, and your fortune is made. Because then you can produce a stable line of calico cats, a distinct breed. They will be known as the Stigman Calicoes.”

And Ira, facetiously in character, recalling a speech from Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, replied, “Fancy that, Hedda.”

Motley orange, the feline landed on the grass; then leisurely, tranquilly, traversed the turf between wall and table, and in mélange of pigments approached. The question stirred within Ira’s mind whether he should apprise Edith of the animal’s presence; had she noticed it? Would mention of it be superfluous? Or did he refrain from doing so — as it would seem to him later — deliberately, out of a subliminal curiosity to ascertain how Edith would react, when the cat was close by? Would the cat surprise her, and if so, what would she do? And yet, why should he want to learn how Edith would react? In what obscure way was that connected to the aberrant, refractory, sullied promptings that had reached such a pitch those few times he walked with her alone?

He saw the animal disappear under the table. A second or two passed, a calm interval, almost long enough to dispel, to dissipate Ira’s negligible suspense. And then—

She screamed! She screamed hysterically, piercingly, at the very extremity of terror, her entire visage concentric to the wide-open screaming mouth. Ira knew why. But not Larry. Poor fellow, he jumped to his feet, he rushed to her side. The color had drained from his fine young face, and frightened, bewildered, with outstretched hands, he sought to protect Edith — from what? From no visible danger, but as if she had a seizure.

The startled cat sprang out from under the table, scooted across the grass for the wall—

“It’s just a cat,” said Ira, knowing full well that his warning, his advisory, came too late.

She had thought it was a skunk, she explained, seconds later, after she regained her composure. A hydrophobic skunk, she added, implausibly. “We were all deathly afraid of hydrophobic skunks out West.”

So that’s how overwrought she was, hysterically, morbidly overwrought, Ira thought. Why? Was it because of the strain she was under, the strain resulting from her defiance of conventions: risking her position at the university for the sake of some feminist principle about her rights to an affair with a younger man, a freshman student? No. The intensity, the abandonment of that scream, went way beyond that. It was shattering, it was corporeal. And once again crowded into Ira’s consciousness misshapen conjectures, spontaneous and insurgent and yet so overweening they made him wonder at their very peremptoriness. They usurped every other surmise, so insistent were they, though embodied out of nothing, out of lascivious intimations, as sure of themselves as if he were dealing with something definite, a textbook problem, and no other answer was acceptable, only one: she wasn’t deriving the kind of reward she had risked coming here for. She wasn’t getting the comfort, the release, the easement, her lover should have been able to give her: the assuagement of anxiety, relaxation, remission of tension — maybe just the assurance that this being together meant they would stay together. That scream! So rending, what else could it mean? All right, he was a dope, Ira conceded, he always got snagged on the one thing, always on the same thing. But what else could it mean? If something wasn’t wrong with him, with his intuition of what was wrong with her, then what the hell was wrong with Larry? Jesus, that was a funny one—

It was a funny one, all right. Ira removed his hands from the keyboard, thrust them halfway into his trouser pockets: that was the worst of being a novelist, especially an autobiographical novelist. You knew what the actual answer was. You knew what she had expected from her lover. And then you found yourself in a dilemma. Protect the memory of the guy you once loved? Your friend, your benefactor in so many ways, that gentle, sweet, generous guy who was Larry. Or reveal the truth? Dilemma horn number one. Dilemma horn number two: should you resolve the mystery right here and now, and deprive the narrative of its suspense? Strange. He had ventured into territory that as far as he knew, few if anyone had ventured into before. You met your past, vis-à-vis an amber monitor.

Strange, Ecclesias, you know I was right? Guided by sensibility alone.

— You mean right in part.

Very well, right in part. It was Jake B, an engineer-turned-editor, a hard-boiled sort, who told me, Jake B, another of Edith’s transient lovers, whom I met years and years later, at the old Chelsea Hotel, that landmark of a posh past on West 23rd Street. Jake stretched out his hand, his countenance glowing with pleasure in every aged seam: “Ah, Ira, the same youth, but now a man!” It was in him Edith confided the fact, the story of the young lover’s premature release, and it was he who told it to me.

— It happens that I know all about it.

Oh, you do? In that case I’m very grateful to you. How do you manage to arrive at such intimate knowledge?

Something was wrong with Larry. That’s all that sifted through. Ira could bet on it. In the very midst of reading Ulysses, the film of unappeasement on Edith’s face, when he took that last walk with her, would make the closely printed lines on the page ripple afterward, ripple through Bloom’s words in a flattened sine curve: “A nation is the same people living in the same place.” That sad-eyed appeal could give him a hard-on, like the predator hard-on Stella gave him, or maybe the opportunistic, windfall hard-on at the prospect of seclusion here in the isolating expectancy of clumps of roadside trees, instead of blistered kitchen walls. No, no. What was Bloom saying, “A nation is the—” Don’t walk with her, Ira ordered himself. You hear what I said, Stigman? You got bats in your belfry. Finish this goddamn book you’re reading — while you’ve got a chance. .

Came the end of their stay in the cottage, time to pack, to separate and depart. They left as discreetly as they had come. Edith, via a taxi from the cottage, took an earlier train back to the city. Larry and Ira took a later one, after a hike to the station. Hilarious, as though they were intoxicated with release from the strain they had been under the past two weeks, Larry from the constraint of an enforced maturity, Ira from the constraint of his model behavior — their mirth mounted with every passing mile aboard the train. At the train terminal on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, they were howling like seventeen-year-olds in Dr. Rickets’s elocution class, with laughter — over everything and nothing.

They crossed on the ferry to Manhattan at dusk — convulsed by each and every silly remark. Youthful again, all but juvenile, young companions free of all responsibility, they sat briefly in the weakly lit, stale-tobacco-laden, bulging midships of the ferry, object of curiosity of fellow passengers. Then, overcome by new fits of hilarity, they left, left for the inner, vehicular area. There they skulked in the deepest shadow, where they could double up with laughter, merely catching glimpses of each other’s fortnight’s growth of beard — or when some startled motorist still behind the steering wheel of his car chanced to spy them through the windshield.

It was not until they walked from the ferry slip to the escalator of the high dark Ninth Avenue El, scaling overhead like a sable sash about the evening, that their laughing jag, as Larry called it, subsided. With merry so-longs and the jolly “Abyssinias” of high school days, they parted, Larry for the train that would take him to the near Bronx — and to a house of mourning, he suddenly recalled — and Ira for the crosstown trolley that would take him to East Harlem.

On the corner where Ira waited, alone again, for the trolley, an unreal soberness began to enfold everything about him, and through which everything, passing cars and pedestrians, moved. He had laughed too much, and now he was paying for it, paying for it with almost painful assessment of the past two weeks. Yes, with constraints removed, they had both snapped back, reverted to the ones they really were. But it didn’t matter as far as Ira was concerned — or did it? He was just a witness, a spectator — as yet. Something in him had changed; he was sure of it. But where Larry was concerned it did matter, or it ought to matter, a lot. Wasn’t that the whole purpose of the tryst that Edith had arranged for them to have at Woodstock? That Larry would grow closer to her level, bind their intimacy more tightly together? Something like that. Was he all wrong? Larry hadn’t grown, Larry hadn’t developed. All that guffawing and all that squealing with laughter at every word when homeward bound, it was as if Larry had shared an escapade with his boon companion, shared a unique adventure, and not grown at all in the serious outlook, serious intimacy Edith hoped they would share. So she had failed, she had failed, Edith had failed.

If anything, it was Ira who felt himself genuinely and permanently changed, drawn closer to Edith’s level, to understanding even better the gravity that imbued her. Was it the walking with Edith alone through woodland paths that somehow diffused her personality through him? And despite all his shameful flaws and his slum Jewish rearing, his intellectual backwardness, his arrested masculinity, despite all that, compatibility of minds kept growing between them. While Larry, left behind in the stone cottage, was trying to write a poem — and tearing it up in frustration — Ira’s sense of consonance with Edith kept increasing, empathy kept growing. He could feel himself gain in insight when with her, grow toward equality, psychologically. What was it that kept nourishing his sense of confidence? Was it the detecting of that film of discontent on her face? Was it watching the two lovers together? Or was it his moiling through a book, the Ulysses, that made him feel grown in comprehension? Or the cat, the cat! Edith’s shattering scream. Jesus, if that wasn’t a trick of destiny, La Forza del Destino, as Caruso and Gigli sang on the record, that things should turn out that way. Pivot in Woodstock, yes. Christ, try and figure things out.

Before the crosstown trolley came — fix that clearly in mind, see if you couldn’t keep it defined: the way luck worked, bringing you a step nearer to the blurry, intangible goal you aspired to, but never really expected to reach. Quick, just as you got your jitney out to have the fare ready, you never thought so much about what things like that could bode for you, never pondered the augury of Larry’s sitting before two candles at night, striving to write a poem, so visibly, so raptly hushed, and finally so dissatisfied: “I can’t seem to sustain the mood.” Why was that desolate voice, those handsome features, invaded by something akin to despair? Why did the large white hand in the instant of crumpling the paper impinge on the conglomerate night of the bustling 125th Street corner? What was the significance for you of the words of defeat sounding above the din of traffic and overhead subway train? “I can’t seem to sustain the mood.”

Ira climbed aboard the trolley, dropped his nickel in the coin hopper, barely aware of the prolonged look on the face of the conductor cranking the coins down into the little till. He went inside, chose a straw-covered seat to his liking. Oblivious of the lighted, monotonous, miscellaneous ranks of store windows that passed with the trolley’s eastward course toward Park Avenue, passed like a tawdry curtain on which beautiful scenes of the last two weeks were projected, he sighed. And with his old square valise resting on the floor between his ankles, he girded himself for a resumption of all that life in East Harlem had come to mean, life in East Harlem approaching resumption crosstown block by crosstown block.

He had turned aside to scan his journal, feeling guilty about interrupting his narrative (he would have to sooner or later, so much had happened). He could hardly believe that it had been over five years since M had died. He recalled the February day, a week after his birthday, just a few years before she died, when it had snowed continually, phenomenally, for about three days consecutively, piling masses of snow on roof and canopy of the mobile home, the trailer as it was commonly called. Across the court, poor epileptic Diana’s canopy had collapsed under the weight of frozen snow — what a sad sight: a sheet of painted aluminum leaning against her doorway. Snowed, melted, snow froze. The day before yesterday, ice had evidently formed under or between the seams of the sheet-metal covering on the roof of his mobile home, with the result that for the first time since he owned the place, drops of water pattered down from the ceiling onto the shelf where the black box of the transformer between the power source and the IBM PCjr rested. That necessitated setting a pail underneath the trickle to contain it, which Ira had just finished doing when the rapturous warbling of geese or cranes overhead reached his ears. So early in the year, so soon in the winter, the warbling of the wildfowl heading south! Geese or cranes: E come i gru van (his italian was negligible) cantando lor lai, facendo in aer di se lunga riga. . Ah, how beautiful! Cantando lor lai. . He simply had to go outdoors to look at them. He went out on the back porch. Nor was it an easy matter to locate them, so near the sun they flew, and so high, barely visible, a troupe — how could he resist the alliteration? — a troupe of transported troubadours. They seemed to the earthbound wight either disoriented, for they flew round and round warbling, or so delighted within the scope of sunlight that they warbled almost giddily in an azure zone with the bare branches of the young locust tree in the backyard. E come i gru van cantando lor lai. . as the cranes fly singing their lay. Six, seven hundred years ago Dante wrote it, died, and left his legacy to lesser mortals to use, to fuse his words with the sight and sound of wildfowl returning. E come i gru van cantando lor lai. . as the cranes fly singing their lay.

Oh, there was so much he had to write, so much had accumulated during this snail’s pace of his setting down of the narrative, so much that had occurred during the real time of the narrator. His supply of new, highest-quality floppy disks were formatting erratically. What did that mean? Were the disks imperfect, or would he have to disconnect the system, and impose on his ever-obliging wife to drive him and the system to the supplier’s?

Glowering, he looked up at the ceiling: small blessings! Respite. The dripping had stopped.

VIII

Ira gave Mom and Pop quite a start when he walked into the kitchen. A Sunday evening, Minnie was away on a date, and there was always the chance Pop too might be away on an “extra” at an evening banquet, rather than the usual communion or fraternity breakfast.

Instead, both his parents were home, sitting at the round table, not covered with the usual green oilcloth, but with a white linen tablecloth. He could see part of a pan of strudel on the table beside the half-empty teacups. Mom baked strudel only on festive occasions, high holidays.

“Here I am,” he announced in Yiddish. “What’s up? What’s today?”

They stared at him in astonishment. The door he had just entered opened inward, between him and them, and he hadn’t knocked. They stared at him questioningly, a full second or two, until he put his satchel down, before they recognized him. And the Pop exclaimed in rare commendation, as though surprise had stripped away for a moment his usual cursory or tacit salutation, “Now you look like a man! Strong. As a man should look. Azoy. Look, Leah, no? With a man’s front, a man’s will.”

“Yeah? Thanks, Pop. Gee, I forgot about it. Even on the trolley car. No wonder they”—Ira pressed down the shallow, curly mat on his cheeks—“they kept staring at me.”

“Such a comely beard.” Mom reveled at the sight. “Who would believe it could have grown in so short a time — ach! Black, thick. A gantseh yeet.” She got up from her chair. “He speaks nonsense.” She turned to Ira. “Are you hungry? I have a fine barley and mushroom soup, a piece of fricasseed chicken left over.”

“Fine. Left over from what? What day is this?”

“It’s the end of the New Year’s. The end of Rosh Hashanah. You didn’t know?”

“No. How should I — where I was? Rosh Hashanah? Say.”

“You’re growing to be a total goy,” Pop said indulgently.

“Noo, a gutn yuntiff. A happy New Year,” Mom invoked. “May it be with good fortune.”

“You too,” Ira rejoined shortly. “Boy, my mazel sounds pretty good right now. I’m ready for that barley and mushroom soup. Ah, no wonder I thought I smelled Polish mushrooms when I came in.”

“That you didn’t have there.”

“I’ll say.”

“Well, you haven’t given me a kiss yet, my handsome bearded son. A kiss before I serve you.”

“How can you tell I’m handsome? You can’t see me behind all this pelt.” Ira kissed her soft cheek, and grinned. “I’ll have to get rid of it soon.”

“So glossy. Like a young khassid, a yeshiva student. At least let Minnie see you,” Mom adjured.

“Oh, sure. Where is she?”

“Indeed, as your father says, you have a man’s lineaments, a man’s bearing.”

“Oh, we just — just had some fun. We grew whiskers.”

“And handsome ones. His, too, your friend’s?”

“I think so. Mine were thicker maybe.”

“Like a full-grown man. Noo, you enjoyed yourself?”

“Oh, sure. I even rode a horse. We all did.”

They both laughed. “A ferd noch!”

“A horse!” Pop echoed. “What kind of horse?”

“A regular horse, what do you think? With a saddle on him and with stirrups, they call it in English — you put your feet into them.”

“With her, the Professora?” Mom asked incredulously.

“Of course! You should see her ride a horse. A little woman like that. Better than we could.”

“Azoy. A professora on a horse.”

“A professora on a horse!” Pop mimicked. “What else? She’s from the West, no? You see them in the moving pictures in the West. Men and women ride horses.”

“To many moving pictures you took me, my generous spouse, that I should behold.” And to Ira, “You ate well?”

“Oh, yeah. Plenty. Larry’s a good cook. He did a lot of it.”

“What did you eat?”

“Oh, bacon and eggs for breakfast, soup, sandwiches for lunch—”

“Treife. Naturally. Your grandfather should know.”

“Yeah,” Ira grinned. “I worried about him a lot. We sometimes had pork chops for supper. Broiled outdoors. Boy, they’re good.”

“Indeed. And lived?”

“In a wonderful house. Made of old stone. You should see it. Clinging vines around it, you know.” Ira gesticulated in spirals. “And outside a beautiful yard. A gardener came twice while we were there. He mowed the lawn, trimmed the bushes — with long scissors.”

“Azoy? Noo. People have money. Why shouldn’t it be beautiful?”

“You wouldn’t live in the country anyway,” said Pop.

“Such country as you would have chosen, indeed not,” Mom retorted. “Live in another Galitzianer Veljish. In a hovel. Without water. Dung in the dark. The mongrel on the road is news—”

“Here she goes again, the mongrel on the road is news.”

“Go. With you there’s no talking.”

“All right. All right,” Ira arbitrated. “We’re not in Galitzia.”

“You may say that again. And praise the Lord we’re not.”

“The second night Minnie celebrated the yuntiff with her high school friend, Bessie. She ate there. We ate here. She stayed there overnight.”

“Oh, yeah?” Second night of Rosh Hashanah. Saturday night, last night. Pop would have been home most of today. Might have gone to shul for a couple of hours. Mom wouldn’t have shopped today. No pushcarts anyway until tonight, the way Jewish holidays ended. Oh, well. . “I’m not going to shave it off till tomorrow. She can see it in the morning.” Again he rubbed his beard. “I got a bush, haven’t I?”

“A what?”

“A bush, a bush,” he said in Yiddish, gesticulating. “Don’t you know? It grows on the ground.”

“You know what? Come with me tomorrow,” Mom urged eagerly. “Tomorrow morning I’ll have to go shopping. Let Zaida, Mamie, see I have a son with a beard.”

“What? Tomorrow? In daylight?”

“But you rode home already in a trolley car.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know about it.”

“Timid. Shrinking,” Mom chided. “What difference?”

“Why do you have to wait until tomorrow? Let him go now,” Pop urged. “Go now!” he enjoined Ira. “It’s dark, it’s night. Who’ll see you?”

“The very truth!” Mom agreed enthusiastically. “I beg you, Ira. Go show yourself to Zaida. How the old man will rejoice! It’s Sunday night. The whole family will be there. My brothers—”

“Indeed, the whole tribe,” Pop added.

“Nah. You want me to go all the way to 112th Street?” Ira demurred. “Just to show my whiskers.”

“I beg you,” Mom implored. “Be a good child. This once, for my sake. Is it a hardship for young legs like yours to stride a mere six blocks—”

“It’s eight blocks. Not six blocks. And crosstown all the way to Fifth Avenue. I’m hungry as hell.”

“Let it be eight blocks. How long will it take you to stride there and back? Say a gutn yuntiff and be gone? I’ll have supper on the table waiting for you the minute you step through the door.”

“Let the old man see you,” Pop seconded in rare concurrence. “It won’t harm you. Compel him to admit, ‘Well, Chaim sent me a grain of comfort for a change.’ The old shit. Noo? The others will be there too: my purblind sister-in-law, my well-disposed brothers-in-law—”

“I beseech you!” said Mom.

“Okay, okay,” Ira acquiesced. “Lucky it’s dark. A yeet mit a boort on 119th Street.”

“My beloved son! I’ll take out — I’ll wash everything in the satchel. Right away.”

“Never mind.” Ira raised his voice. “I’m gone, I’m gone. Jeez, to tear myself away from that mushroom and barley. I want you to know I’m doing you a favor.”

“My precious child. Go, go.”

And go he did. He left the kitchen, skipped down the flight of tenement stairs to the hallway, and from hallway to stoop to street. The three or four familiar faces he had passed when he turned the corner of Park Avenue into 119th Street on the way home from the trolley hadn’t recognized him. Even Irish Mrs. Grady, the Little Tusk, as Mom called her in Yiddish, because she had only the one front tooth, didn’t recognize him, though she had seen him close by many times. The poor, thin, angular woman, who always flushed animatedly when she talked to Mom, didn’t recognize him, though they passed each other in the light of Biolov’s drugstore window.

At a quick pace, he wheeled downtown around the corner of 119th and Park Avenue, hurried in the dark of the railroad trestle, through the familiar, frowsy neighborhood that became more Jewish with every block south. Up the hill to the crosstown trolley line at the crest on 116th Street, and down the hill to the Sunday-night recrudescence of the pushcart market that began at 115th Street, hawkers and shoppers leaving the carbide glare under the massive street canopy of the railroad, he drove his legs to 112th Street. Crazy to go, to defer his supper for the sake of displaying his whiskers to Zaida. But for once Pop and Mom were in harmony. So to make them happy. . let’s go.

And around the corner west a block to Madison, and weakening with haste, railing even more sulkily at himself for having acceded to his parents’ plea, he drove his legs another block to Fifth Avenue, and then another dozen houses to midblock, reached Mamie’s house. Up the flight of stone stairs, and panting, he swiveled the ratchety doorbell key, and to his surprise the door opened before he removed his hand from the knob, opened to a medley of Yiddish and Yinglish voices of his relatives calling out, “Who?” “Hoozit?”

They were nearly all there, Zaida’s progeny as well as the spouses of those who were married — and a few of their children, those who lived in Harlem, his first cousins, Yettie, four-year-old blond daughter of his aunt Ella, frisky red-haired Hannah, Mamie’s brat, and Stella, blue-eyed, blond, and pudgy, glared at covertly, peremptorily, to compensate for her total inaccessibility, by Ira, who realized he had vitiated another ambush by this premature visit, burning ambush; no, the altered pun lacked pungency even when contrasted with the romance in whose midst he had been just a few hours ago. Hell, an option shot. “Hello. Hello,” he called out without enthusiasm, and thrust open the door.

In various homely attitudes, they were gathered at the end of the long hallway in the front room about the large, square dining table under its multi-stained, taupe-colored tablecloth: a dozen or more people, all ages, relations, enclosed by wallpapered walls lit by the bright unpleasant light of the cluster of ceiling incandescents. Only Baba was gone. Ten years and a year more had passed since some of them had come here from Europe; uncouth, noisy greenhorns, they had charged into the kitchen in the house on 115th Street to gargle salt water, or something of the sort, and sent him wandering off in vast disappointment to Central Park to drink from a mountain rill. Bullshit. If he could wave a wand, make them vanish, as he used to wish at home with Mom and Pop so he could get at Minnie, he could give Stella, who was there with the rest, a real backscuttle, just what he needed. Jesus, all that pure romance charged up in him would have to find an outlet.

They gaped at him, more taken aback, startled, than even Mom and Pop had been. “Hollo, mishpokha,” he greeted the assembly. He felt like Douglas Fairbanks adroitly, improbably, foiling the thrust of so much openmouthed cynosure with a single blade of jocularity. “Vus macht sikh?”

His uncle Saul, ever taut, suspicious conniver, scowled. “Who’re you?”

“’Tis I. Don’t you know me? Mom, your sister, asked me to come over.”

And of all the people to recognize him first, it was his aunt Sadie. Mom’s youngest sister, so myopic that Pop, in benign mood, called her The Purblind; but more often, his spite prevailing, he called her Der Blindeh. “Oy, it’s Ira! Gevald!” she cried out. “It’s Leah’s son!”

Commotion and outcry throughout the room. “What do you say to that?” and “What’s got into you?” from Moe’s wife, sharp, disapproving, bleached-blond Ida. Ever-tactless Harry, Ira’s youngest uncle, demanded, “Whatsa matter, you’re such a koptsn, you can’t afford a safety razor?” And “See, Father!” Mamie cried out. “Your oldest grandson, a Jew with a beard.” And meek Ella, her meat-cutter spouse Meyer absent, gaming in a café on 116th Street, “Oy, is he handsome! Avert the Evil Eye!”

“Leah’s son?” Gray-bearded Zaida, though his cataracts had been removed, still squinted. He had eyeglasses, but wore them only when reading. Invincible hypochondriac, he peered at Ira with histrionic squint. “I don’t see well. Who? Is that Leah’s son?”

Burly, affectionate Moe, now permanently Morris, stood up, came over, shook hands and laughed, “Tockin, a yeet mit a boort,” he addressed the assemblage. “I used to carry him with one hand in Galitzia.”

“Who doesn’t remember? He was a tot,” said Ella. “Smaller than you,” she addressed little Yettie. “Just look.”

“A rebbeh,” Morris chuckled. He stroked Ira’s beard with blunt fingers. “His malamut came to the house on 9th Street when I boarded there, and told Leah that God had bidden her son to be a rabbi.”

“I don’t like whiskers on a young man,” Ida reproved, secure in her platinum-blond acculturation. “When I was still single, I never made a date with a man with whiskers.”

“You didn’t. Maybe he didn’t want to make a date with you too,” acute Max twitted. “Did a man with whiskers ever ask you?”

Ida ignored the innuendo. “He knew I would’ve turned him down.”

“You?” Max replied.

“Don’t be snotty. I wouldn’t care who he was. I’m Jewish, but to go with somebody with whiskers? On an old man, a religious Jew, all right. But on a young man like you,” she addressed Ira, lapsing simultaneously into Yiddish: “S’pahst nisht.” Vehemence kindled the large wen on her chin into a fiery plug.

“No?” Ira said apologetically. “I wouldn’t inflict it on you. It was Mom’s idea. She wanted me to come here.”

“Take it off.”

“Oh, sure, sure, Ida. First thing in the morning. After Minnie sees it.” Goddamn Delancey Street tramp. Ira looked away.

“Why should he take it off? Maybe he wants to become a rabbi, like Morris says,” talkative and mettlesome Hannah drawled in Ira’s defense. “We’ll have a rov in the family. A real rov. He’ll come to the family circle. He’ll say all the baruches for us—”

“Maybe he’ll be the rabbi that marries us. He would learn all the Hebrew he would have to say.” Stella’s wit was whetted. “You hear, Mama? If Ira was a rabbi, he’d get the twenty dollars you pay for marrying,”

“Kissingly I would present it to him,” Mamie said with fervor. “Oy, I should see the day.”

“I’d love to do that, Mamie.”

“For my sake I know you would. Ah, the very thought serves me with a large helping of health.”

“Mama’s always worrying about marrying.”

“What’re you gonna be? A Reform rabbi? I like Reform rabbis. They talk in English,” Hannah chattered on. “You could talk over the radio, too, like Rabbi Wise. He’s such a smart rabbi. Everybody loves to listen to him—”

“Listen, local talent, children should be seen, not heard,” Ida attempted to squelch her niece.

“Who’s speaking to you? I’m speaking to him, not you. I got a right to talk to him. He’s my cousin. You know why I’m only local talent? That’s because Mama won’t let me go to dancing school. She’s afraid I’ll grow up to be a you-know-what.”

Almost everyone laughed at Hannah’s retort. It might have been innocent in intent, but Ida took umbrage. Her wen glowed. She glared at Hannah. Ira had to admire the kid’s crust, speaking in such tones to Ida.

“Where did you grow such a big black boort?” Harry demanded bluntly. “Aza boort.”

“On his chin. Where else?” Hannah offered at once.

“Smart. You’re so clever. You’re local talent, just like I told you,” Ida huffed. “Where else?”

“You don’t think there’s a where else?” Saul asked unpleasantly. “Max. Tell her.”

“You tell her. Morris, you didn’t show her already?”

“Not even once.”

Laughter mingled with Hannah’s sharp “Oh, shoddop, you and your where elses. I don’t have to know. How long did it take you, Ira?” She defended her modesty staunchly.

“Only about two weeks.”

“You hear? Azoy!”

It was time to go. He had been on exhibit long enough. Besides, he had come for Zaida’s diversion, but the old man sitting cheerlessly at the end of the table across the room obviously understood nothing of the English repartee. Nor, in all likelihood, would he have approved: he existed in a lopped-off, truncated ethos.

“I haven’t had supper yet,” Ira said by way of prelude to leave-taking. “I hope everybody’s had a good look.” He mingled Yiddish with English. “Noo, Zaida, I’m going.” He brushed by Stella to where Zaida was sitting — could feel raptor desire spread wing within him: Sinbad’s roc. Who was Sinbad — apt word — who the roc? Lucky he had whiskers to muffle facial twitch. “’Bye, Stella,” he bade gruff-voiced, and neutrally, “’Bye, Hannah, Mamie, Ella, Sadie, uncles and everybody, Morris, Max, Harry, Sadie. ’Bye, Zaida. Don’t get up.” He knew the kind of handshake to expect: the weak token pressure of the Orthodox Jewish handshake.

Instead Zaida stood up. Even without glasses, the old boy’s eyesight wasn’t really gone. The steadiness, nay, fixity of his scrutiny made Ira feel suddenly flimsy, a tatter of self, sailing erratically like a scrap of wind-driven newspaper in the street. Jesus, he hadn’t come here for that; he had come here at Mom’s behest to display two weeks’ growth of beard, grown in another place, another world, for reasons they would never dream. “Yeah, it’s really me, Zaida, Leah’s son,” Ira reassured him in Yiddish. “Your oldest grandson, Ira Stigman.”

“I know, I know,” Zaida said once. “I want to behold you close, as well as these feeble eyes are able.”

The two gazed at each other. How antic his own whiskers compared to the millennial-seeming gray beard of his grandfather; it was the difference between a transitory caper and a covenant. Boy, everything was turning out altogether unexpectedly — thumping out unhappy meanings, when all he had anticipated was a jovial greeting, a display amid hilarity — and after a brief visit, departure.

“Noo, let me remember you so.” The old man stretched out his short thick arms, encircled Ira within them. “A Jew as God willed. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Weak as my vision is, these eyes have seen my oldest grandson a Jew.” He grasped Ira to himself, holding his grandson to his thick torso in strong embrace. They kissed each other, beard through beard. “Baruch atah adonoi, elohainu, melekh ha oylum. .” Zaida began the traditional prayer celebrating the rare occasion when a Jew feels he has been privileged to survive to a supreme moment. “L’hazman hazeh,” he concluded.

And each one, affected in his or her own way by awe of the patriarchal invocation, all the assembled relatives, devoutly sealed his prayer with their “O-omehn.”

“Gey gesinteheit.” Zaida opened his arms.

“Thanks, Zaida.”

“S’kimteh dir tockin a shekheyooni, Tateh.” Whose voice was it that Ira heard behind his back as he turned to leave? Mamie’s, ever solicitous, protective where Zaida was concerned, no matter how lacking in sign of gratitude his response. Obese Mamie, alacritous to attend to his wants — his loyal daughter. She followed behind Ira down the hall to the door. “It’s a pity my Jonas isn’t here to view your Yiddishkeit with the others. How he would enjoy it. He was here celebrating the first day of Rosh Hashanah.” And as they reached the door, “The partners thought of closing the cafeteria for the holiday, but the neighborhood is so goyish, Saul said no. So the others went in the first day. Saul took cash, Harry behind the counter, Max cooked, and later Moe — so Joe had to take cash the second day. All day, my poor husband.”

“Always seemed to me one day was enough.”

“Azoy id es shoyn.”

“Yeah, G’bye, Mamie.”

“Greet Leah for me.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Once again into the street, and striding toward the carbide pushcart lights under the trestle on Park Avenue—Oh, fare thee well, for ill fare I. Housman’s lines, spontaneous and succinct, welled up. Why did everything turn out so differently from what you expected? Jesus, it was supposed to be a joke, supposed to entertain the old boy. But it didn’t. The Yiddles at the pushcarts when he got there wouldn’t know the difference between him right now and another ehrlikher yeet, one who bound his phylacteries on his arm and brow in the morning, one who davened: swayed and prayed under his striped prayer shawl. He never expected to be reminded of it. Kid among the pushcarts on the East Side. Cheder yingle, commended for his glibness in making the right sounds to match the Hebrew characters on the page. Jesus, you met yourself all the time, really all the time. What did Hannah say about his becoming a rov, a rabbinical sage? Instead he was coming fresh from a goyish two-week holiday at Woodstock, with Larry and Edith, his English instructor-lover, older gentile woman from New Mexico. Boyoboy. Could you blame anyone for shaking his head in disbelief?

“Bulbas, bulbas, sheineh bulbas!” The bearded peddler stretched a hand out toward Ira, familiarly, enticingly, exhibited a large potato.

The guy’s trying to sell you potatoes. The next guy, tomatoes. Moe’s joke on himself when he first came to America: he took them for ripe plums: pomatoes. Ira began the ascent to 116th Street — you go to see Zaida to duck out of, you call it circumvent, Mom’s nagging that you go with her tomorrow morning to show off her sonny boy’s beard — and you lose the chance of a casual weekday gamble, yeah, gambol with Stella Monday night. But look at what it contrasts with: all that courtesy and politeness and tenderness he was witness to just this very morning, when Edith and Larry parted. Figure it out, and the nerve of you, transfixed by lust for Stella, in the same second you took Zaida’s kiss, his benison. Excruciating. No? The flesh wouldn’t stop.

Away from the hustle and chalky light below, he climbed upward, heard overhead a train, its wheels muted by the solid steel trestle. He headed down the incline past the squat brick comfort station at the summit of 116th Street, where the trestle seemed to dip nearest to the ground, how wonderful to see from there the trolley tracks, east-west trolley tracks gleaming at night as they passed by a hundred stoops and stores and a thousand people out Saturday-night shopping. Listen to the drone, way deep, steady. Tenor you call it, right? Tenor of the city.

What star was that, he paused to wonder, visible after he crossed the sidewalk, in the dark again between the tenements and the trestle: the uptown star he called it, came up first in September in constellation Bronx — Jesus Christ, it was different being a Jew, alienated — as Edith had used the word on one of those strolls — from other Jews — which Edith said he was, and Larry wasn’t. Alienated, not assimilated, alienated.

Nearing the show-window lights of Biolov’s drugstore, the ruby and cobalt amphorae casting their glow on the corner, he was almost home at last for supper, barley-mushroom soup, chicken fricassee, for a festive night it was.

IX

Ever since Ira had come back from Woodstock and had told Minnie — lied to her — that he had had intimacies with Edith, laid her in Woodstock, Minnie’s attitude toward her brother had undergone a change. And even though he later confessed that he had lied, and she laughed indulgently, and called him ligner, prevaricator, her attitude toward him had clearly shifted. Was it those few dates with Rodney, and the fact that he had wanted to propose to her? Or was it the beard that had wrought the change?

Suddenly, Minnie saw him as the man he had become, no longer her rapscallion brother, and affectionately she greeted her brother, not having seen him for such a long time.

“She hasn’t seen her brother in two weeks,” Mom explained Minnie’s warm demeanor.

“Not so. What are you saying?” Pop gainsaid. “Can’t you see? It’s her Yiddishkeit surging up in her. Noo, Minneleh?” he addressed her humorously. “Whether you like him or not, it’s his Yiddishkeit that appeals to you?” Pop chuckled again.

The transformation in her was startling. She disclosed a new, an actual fondness for him, in touch of hand, tone of voice, slapping his hand in homey caress. Her actions with him when everyone was home were impish, sportive — always traced with a slight, easing detraction of voice, or modified by her peculiar short chuckle, that ended in the faintest derisive snort, but still fond.

“Ira, I know it’s only been a summer, but I’ve become a grown woman, an adult. I’m no longer a girl you can have your way with. I’m in high school, Ira. Sometimes I think you still think of me as an object, as your kid sister.”

Reproach and sultriness mingled in her voice. “You only think about what you want. What about what I want? Did you ever think of that? Just when I’m starting to fall in love with Rod, my goyish friend, somebody I can’t marry, and it’s no use going on, and you come home looking like a man, like a real mensh. What d’ye think I’m gonna feel?”

He was silent.

“You know, my darling brother, I could tell you something, but I don’t wanna hurt your feelings, but you’re just like all the rest of the Farbs. You men only understand how to satisfy yourselves, nothing about love. Moe is different.”

“I’m not a Farb. I’m a Stigman,” Ira replied proudly. He paused as he drank another cup of coffee in the kitchen. “What about the Farbs?”

“Sadie Farb told Mama all about Harry: ‘It’s in and out with him, with my husband.’ Mama had to laugh.”

“Yeah?”

“And it’s the same with Saul. As soon as she puts on her corset Saul likes, it’s in and out with him. She thinks maybe he’s different with shiksas.”

“Mom told me about Saul too. So I’m not an athlete.”

“Athlete yet!” Minnie scoffed, waved him away.

Disbelief and fond forgiveness connected raised eyebrow to moue. “All right.” Minnie turned toward the bedroom door, un-provocatively. “Tell Mama to let me sleep a little. I’m really tired this morning.”

He sat down in the kitchen chair over which he had draped most of his clothes the night before, meditating, dressing slowly. Mom seemed to be taking longer this Sunday shopping — or paying her visit to Zaida at Mamie’s. His frustration was increasing. What if? Jesus, he’d break Mom’s heart. He would if he got caught — or they got caught. Pop couldn’t thrash him anymore. He was bigger than Pop. Order him out of the house maybe. Well, it almost didn’t matter. He’d break Mom’s heart. What the hell are you gonna do?

He should have gone out of the house with Mom on Sunday morning. Anh, he knew he couldn’t do it. Besides, why? Mom would ask why. What a habit — some habit — to have gotten into — from the age of twelve. And now, Minnie with a crush on him. He had to be careful, careful. Try to figure. You’re cool now, cool. In another three or four hours you wouldn’t be. Figure, for Christ’s sake, figure. It’s a goddamn calamity. She went from taboo, the goy, to taboo you, Jew-brother. All right, you said that. Figure. .

Figure. .

A job maybe. Some kind of job. What kind? He had heard talk in the ’28 alcove about jobs at Loft’s candy store. Part-time work there after three o’clock. . weekdays, Saturdays, he had heard: “a real sweet job,” some sophomore wag had cracked. All day Sunday. They wanted clerks to substitute for the regular help on their days off. All day Sunday. He’d have to give it a try. Loft’s or any job like that. Christ, with Minnie like that, if he ever tried anything like that again, he’d get caught, he couldn’t resist it.

As he gulped down a third cup of Mom’s coffee, his hands began to tremble, just a bit. As Minnie lay down for her Sunday-morning nap in the bedroom, he imagined what would happen if Pop ever caught them. Came in unexpectedly in his waiter’s outfit and saw him in his underwear, barefoot. If he wanted to lay a hand on him, he’d go crazy. All those goddamn beatings the sonofabitch gave him, the dreams he used to have when he was a kid, after a beating, trying to pick a knife off the table to stab Pop with, but it was stuck there. Jesus Christ, he really would go crazy, hit back, grab anything, any goddamn knife. See Pop lying there, bleeding on the scuffed linoleum. Killed maybe, who knows? Dead. Cops. Courts. Jail and judges. Mom without support. Crushing disgrace. Bowed down by it, lifelong, like Atlas. And Larry thought he felt bad about his widowed mother. He wasn’t like Ira. He hadn’t made his mother a widow as Ira could his. Jesus, maybe the best thing, go in there where Minnie was sleeping, and bust her one — right now — bam! — right on the jaw. What an aubade. Cure her from being stuck on him. Cure her for good.

Slowly the terror crept over him, the deep, hair-raising horror he hadn’t felt since plane geometry days — there it was, that fracture inside him, separating him within: murder. Murdher. While she slept in the bedroom on a Sunday morning, murder her. Oh, Jesus. He had to find a way out.

The nearest thing to death that the living can know of death is in the memory of old times once lived. He would soon be ninety, Ira thought. He would be ninety in eight months. Incredible, wasn’t it? And how many times will you say it? he asked himself. How many times will you exclaim the petrified, old fact in wonder? 1995 this year, 1925 that. What do you want of me? He could hear the echo of Yiddish inflection in his ear, though they would have said, What do you want from me. Seventy years ago, and you ask me to recall all this? Or embellish it, trick it out with frill and fancy. Ach, for a guy who has mangled his life — or cooperated in the mangling — there seems so damned little use in setting it down, how much less in the re-creation, in the artifice of fable. But it must do for now, tide me over this low ebb. Who said he was supposed to or expected to present a unified piece of fiction, being crazed and cross-hatched as an old saucer?

When aging Dr. Newman, psychiatrist at the Augusta State Hospital in Maine, where Ira worked for four years as an attendant, finished reading TSE’s Waste Land, he was convinced Eliot had gone through a “psychotic episode,” as the good doctor phrased it, had suffered a brief psychotic interlude at the time he wrote the poem. Said Ira at the time: “I guess we were all more or less suffering from the same aberration, or the poem wouldn’t have spoken so unerringly to us and for us.”

The good doctor was unconvinced. He was still of a piece, the elderly man replied, and that was why he could recognize symptoms of the poet’s psychosis during the writing of his famous poem. (Of course, no one at the time knew of the important role Ezra Pound had played in the poem’s creation, or at least in determining its final form.) Born many years ago in Latvia, Dr. Newman was still of a piece; his psyche had stabilized firmly and satisfactorily within his time, and perhaps that was why he failed to understand what happened to succeeding generations of highly sensitive men and women of letters, increasingly fragmented in their diverse ways, and increasingly hostile to the society in whose midst they lived.

Four hours later. Autumn afternoon in 1925, in the kitchen, alone, desire as shriveled as his dick. Oh, Jesus, what a life. White oilcloth-covered washtubs, and brass-faucet sink, window on the gray washpole in the backyard, and door between window and washtubs to the toilet. College texts on the table. That was the worst of it, what a mix. He had told himself a hundred times before, if only they had stayed on the Lower East Side, if only he had gone to work, maybe everything would have been different. Well, make a compromise. Try to obliterate Sunday. Monday morning go to the Loft’s employment office, the way he had gone to the P&T office, and fill out an application. Show initiative.

But think — Ira paused at the keyboard — you had never exorcised the violence, you had survived it, driven it underground, but not far. When Jess had just entered his adolescence, think of that afternoon he talked back to you: verged on insolence: sassy. You struck him. You didn’t slap. In fact, you scarcely knew how to slap, had unlearned it after all those years, literally, of training to box, in the aftermath of that beating you took on the waterfront handing out CP leaflets. You hardly knew how to slap; you knew only how to hook, like a boxer, with thumb down and knuckles forward, even though your hand was partly open (ah, would that it had fallen off! Fallen off before you batted one of your sons! Oh, those vain, Yiddish implorings). The kid was ungainly, seemed without instinct of self-preservation. Hershel, the younger, on the other hand, immediately dropped to the floor out of reach, out of harm’s way, the moment his father lashed out at him. But Jess uttered a cry of pain, swung around — and struck his head on the corner of the newel post he was standing next to, struck his temple on the very corner, and grabbed his head. That was sufficient not only to cool Ira’s wrath, but send him into a transport of dismay at what he had done: “Goddamn it, what the hell did you do that for?” he swore at his son. “For Christ’s sake, you always do the goddamnedest things to yourself!” He sheltered his son’s head, massaged his son’s temple.

Now, whether that had anything to do with what followed, there was no telling; whether the subsequent symptoms were the outcome of impact of the boy’s temple with newel-post corner, or simply the result of a change taking place in adolescence (Ira devoutly hoped it was the latter). His son developed what the doctor termed an equivalent epilepsy. With a strange, fixed expression on his face, Jess would take off his shirt and undershirt, because — he said — he couldn’t bear to wear them — his skin was burning. What were the other symptoms? Ira searched the ceiling for some clue to memory, saw only the yellowish patch of the leak where ice had apparently forced the seams of the sheet-metal roof. He’d have to ask M what the other symptoms were. Not the typical petit mal seizures which he had come to recognize during his four years as a state hospital attendant, the momentary loss of consciousness, the brief period of disorientation, but something else. M took Jess to the Portland General Hospital for tests, encephalograms. They showed nothing conclusive.

“Why don’t we just wait, and see if he grows out of it,” M suggested to Dr. Thomas U, whose daughter Penny was taking piano lessons with her. “It’s just my maternal intuition that he’ll grow out of it,” she added apologetically.

And Dr. U had replied, “A maternal intuition is sometimes more dependable than a medical one. Let’s do nothing more for the time being, and see what happens.”

Nothing did happen. Jess seemed to return to normalcy. But one day, he was washing his hands at the kitchen sink — the black cast-iron kitchen sink of their Maine farmhouse — kitchen sink with large, ever-reliable pitcher pump at the end. Done with washing his hands, he sipped a few mouthfuls of water from the pump lip. And in aimless, awkward fashion, his usual fashion, holding on to the pump handle, he reached over and touched the massive, old-fashioned “Dual Atlantic” stove, as it was called. It was a truly massive construction of cast iron (they didn’t care how much metal they used in those days; oh, they were prodigal once!), with nickel-plated grille about the upper edge and just before the compartment for heating water, grates and firebox in which to burn wood or coal — which Ira adapted to burn kerosene. Gas burners on top (hence the adjective “Dual”), supplied by a tank of propane outside, just beside the back stairs — Yankee ingenuity the stove represented, Yankee ingenuity of the twenties and thirties, as weighty with nostalgia as with cast iron (and for all its bulk, with too small an oven to suit M). In every way, though, it was adequate: it warmed the kitchen winter nights with steady kerosene flame, during the long years the kids grew up, almost twenty in all; the long years of his mental depression, M’s limitless constancy, teaching school and giving piano lessons for the only reliable cash income of the household. Meanwhile he lost so much money waterfowl farming that all her withholding taxes were rebated. Clear profit!

“Do you ever expect to show a profit in your waterfowl business?” The IRS person had called Ira and his daffy accountant, Quinner, into the IRS office.

“I hope so, sir.”

“When do you think that will be?”

“I can’t tell yet.”

Holding the iron pump handle, the boy reached out aimlessly, and touched the stove — he uttered a wild shriek, and burst into tears: for no reason, no reason!

Oh, I’ve lost! The words sprang from within Ira’s heart: I’ve lost! I’ve lost! The son he doted on. Maybe because of that blow he had struck him. Lost his temper completely — like Pop. Oh, anguish! The anguish beyond remorse, anguish of irrevocable, unbearable loss. “What’s the matter?” Ira asked, numbed to the core, already bereaved, an automaton speaking — while M looked in utter consternation, and Hershel swung a disbelieving gaze from brother to parents. “What happened?” Ira pursued — without hope. He knew full well what had happened: the kid was off his rocker, out of his mind.

“I got a shock!” Jess wailed. “I got a shock when I touched the stove.”

“Oh, yeah?” Ira humored him — with all the bitterness of futility. He was already reconstituting the self to adjust to this hideous catastrophe: his kid had gone insane. He had fallen prey to dementia praecox. “You say you got a shock when you touched the stove?”

“I did! I did, Dad. I just put my hand on it!”

Well, what harm in his trying to do the same, see if he got the same effect? The kid was so earnest, vehement; he sounded rational. But so did some of the schizophrenics at the Augusta State Hospital where Ira had worked for four years, and many of them had complained, raged about diabolic magnetism, baleful electric currents. What the hell. . what was there to lose? Humor him, that’s all. Ira arose from the kitchen table, went to the stove, rested his hand on the nickel-plated grille. Nothing. Just as he expected. “Is that what you did?”

“No. I was holding on the pump handle. Like this.” Jess leaned over, reached for the stove, but made no contact.

“All right. I’ll do it too.” Last chance. Last chance. Better be knocked down by a shock, knocked to the floor, anything to prove the kid right. What joy that would be, no matter the jolt, even if knocked cold — and sure enough, it came! Not a great jolt, but sufficient to make him recoil. “Well, for Christ’s sake!” he cried out, this time shaken by pure bliss. “You’re right! Listen, M, there is a — there’s current in there. An electric current. I just felt it.”

“There is?” She too showed her great relief.” I wonder how?”

“I don’t know. There’s a short somewhere. No doubt about it. Okay, Jess, don’t touch the damn thing. I mean the two of them together, pump handle and stove — everybody. Let’s see if I can’t figure this out.”

Eventually he did. They had had the supplier of their bottled butane gas install a new gas dryer in the hall, and the mechanic had attached the ground wire to the water-pump pipe under the kitchen. Ira called up the owner of the company from which he bought his bottled gas, and in no uncertain terms made clear his indignation at this instance of flagrant carelessness or sheer ineptitude. “One hell of a job!” he stormed. “Was the guy who installed it a qualified electrician?”

“Why, yes,” was the answer at the other end of the phone.

Ira thought he detected a qualm. “Well, he ought to lose his license, that’s all I can tell you. My kid got quite a shock. He’s been going through a difficult phase in his adolescence and when he let out that yell, I thought he had gone completely off his pulley. I wanna tell you, that took ten years off my life. And my wife’s too.”

“I can sympathize with you,” the businessman at the other end commiserated. “I know just what you feel. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. It’s our mistake. We’ll fix it right off, and we’ll make it right with you.”

“Yes? How?”

“The next five tanks of gas are on us.”

“Well.” Mollified. “It wasn’t my intention to put the screws on you because of that.”

“I understand. It’s a mistake. And we made it. If five tanks of gas squares us with you, that’s all we ask.”

“Okay.” Ira was a heavy user of bottled gas in his “dressing plant,” euphemism for his waterfowl slaughterhouse. Five large tanks of butane at about ten dollars apiece, that represented most of a year’s supply — free! “I appreciate the—” For him to use the word gesture would be too highfalutin. “I appreciate the goodwill.”

“That keeps us in business.”

X

Ira did as he had resolved, and always it seemed that if he really meant it, if his fate hung on the event, it came to pass. He was hired. He was assigned to the Loft’s candy store on 149th Street and Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. The corner was an extremely busy one, a shopping mart of the populace, bustling, noisy, heavily traveled, the junction of trolley lines, the location of a large subway station, a train interchange with a large platform above the street. And everything below the platform, shop windows and window shoppers, throngs and vehicles, was shaded by it, submerged in the perpetual shadow of a subway station which in the Bronx became a stop on an elevated line. Located in the midst of a medley of storefronts was Loft’s, and here Ira was assigned.

He worked six days a week: weekdays from three to ten in the evening, Saturdays, a full eight-hour shift from three to eleven at night. And Sunday, from nine-thirty to six. On Sundays the store closed early. Mom had to change her schedule on Sunday, give him some breakfast first, anything, fry a couple of eggs, serve up a roll and Swiss cheese with his coffee. He remembered what had hounded him, what had driven him off to work. It wasn’t for the sake of the sixteen bucks a week, it was only that goyish boyfriend Minnie had had. It was that goddamn terror. When that crowded into him, preempted his psyche, it didn’t matter if he told himself a thousand times he had been safe as hell — he couldn’t dispel it, budge it. Guilt, guilt, guilt — as if he had murdered somebody: Minnie herself. Guilt, guilt, and more guilt. But enough of that! he told himself en route to the 116th Street subway station. It would soon be time to put on a big smile for the customers. That was why he had a job: to keep busy wrapping up the “99¢ Special,” to keep the diffuse terror at bay.

Of the sixteen dollars he earned per week — and a dollar or two at the end of the month for commission on sales — he kept five, gave Mom nine — and with a great flourish, gave Minnie a dollar every payday, to Mom’s beaming and Pop’s grudging approval. A few times she secretly asked him for more, another dollar, which he gave her, without knowing why he was so generous, since he didn’t get anything for it. How could he? Or hardly. To salve his conscience maybe, pay back, or because he was relieved she was going though a transition again, a kind of waning of feeling that allowed the return of ostensible attitudes, the safe and snippy Minnie. Giving her that extra buck was like a propitiatory offering to anxiety.

Why — Ira turned aside to ponder the question — why did he continue to demean himself so? Why was he debasing himself, the Jew, the serious writer, the serious literary man, the artist? Why didn’t he just bowdlerize the story, please his critics, delete his amorous dalliances with Minnie and Stella, as easily as pressing control-Y on his computer? It would take a volume to answer that alone. And was this the place to try to find an answer to his question? For he was posing the question to himself, not in the time of his typescript, or the later time of his first transcription to the word processor, his IBM PCjr, sometime during the mid-eighties, but during the living present, this very moment as it passed. It was something he had earlier promised himself not to do, inject the living present, but remain within the confines of time in which he had set down his narrative. To do otherwise would load the narrative exponentially — and finally it would be out of control. Entanglements would become endless, become the briar wall around Sleeping Beauty. He would never be able to get through it to his narrative — his double narrative. But now he couldn’t resist the diversion into the present moment, the living present.

He would only pause, he promised himself, just long enough to dwell on a few points, although even in doing so, he was breaking the rule, violating the canon. He was allowing room for precedent, for new departures — before the time he had planned to allow them. Well, the question had dogged him long enough: why was he doing this, demeaning himself — and perhaps Jews, the multitude of Jews who had transformed one previous novel into a shrine, a child’s shrine at that — to the extent he was?

The answer seemed to be connected with the same frame of mind that had produced his first novel: anxiety, dread. But now much enlarged, involving his whole people, involving Israel, especially Israel. How and in what way? He feared for Israel’s survival. The question hadn’t come to him in that context, and perhaps the answer he found to it was simply rationalization. Before, in the thirties when he wrote that first novel, the Nazis were coming to power, did come to power. He had reason to fear. Now it was Israel’s survival he feared for, Israel’s viability he had begun to doubt. What his aspersions, his stigmatizings, meant was that to himself he was already setting the stage for, already justifying, Israel’s and the Jews’ disappearance. In other words, in the confusion and alarm in his soul, he feared he was laying a basis for a new Final Solution. Look at the scum these Jews are. Why should they not be annihilated? How else could he say it? It was in the old sense, in the Biblical sense, that they suffered — because they had sinned, because he had sinned. He had been guilty of abomination.

He would have to dwell on it at greater length later. But right now all he could do was to reflect the desolation he felt that Israel would not survive. Desolation like Jeremiah’s. It wasn’t only that the media took every opportunity, like a school of piranhas, to tear at Israel’s flesh — Jew and gentile alike (Who owned the New York Times? Who owned the Washington Post?). Damned piranhas! But the facts — no, the acts! — the acts grew more and more brutal, the acts grew more and more insensate and remorseless, vicious tributaries that would join into a flood sweeping the Jews out of existence. He couldn’t avoid, he couldn’t evade, the conclusion: Israel was doomed.

Ira bought a tin of condoms to use on Stella, who was proving to be a damned good substitute. Stella could be counted on to be the same every Monday, his evening off, when he called at Mamie’s house after supper. Always the same, blond and plump and simpering-ready for his lead, if he could connive a scoundrelly way with her assistance, improvise a subterfuge. She was always ready, ancillary to his opportunism. All he needed was a little luck. No beating around the bush with Stella, no sitting on the edge of a bed, or things like that, wooing against the clock, as he used to do, wooing like an alley cat on a fence. Nothing like that. He got into her first crack out of the box of contingency. Rare was the Monday he missed.

Oh, it was damn funny, and oh, the treachery of it, Iago. About once every other month he would arrive with Zaida’s favorite — a two-pound box of glacéed fruit from Loft’s (at a small discount for employees). Glacéed fruit were the only sweets the old man regarded as sufficiently kosher for him to consume. Perfect show of deference on Ira’s part, perfect tribute, perfect pretext! And yes, the gift rewarded him with a durable vignette. The swift movement of the old boy’s hands as he helped himself to a piece of glacéed pineapple, and immediately, with what astonishing speed, popping the box into his trunk. Yet Zaida’s presence at Mamie’s constituted a new hazard for Ira. One more person to keep an ear and an eye open for. But then, the race of heartbeat, the spindling of wit and senses to the pricking point, the rearing of a pinnacle, the rearing of a steeple of awareness, higher, higher, as if his flat, phlegmatic nature tapered to a singularity by the forces of duplicity, stealth, concentration, craftiness. If only — devoid of conviction, the wish merely flitted in and out of Ira’s consciousness — if only he could invoke all that cunning and wariness, that acumen, foresight, playing cards, playing pinochle, poker, he’d be a shark, a world-beater. He’d clean up. The same in business, if he ever tried it. He’d be rich. If he were as intent on getting the advantage, as sharp, premonitory, in the marketplace, putting it over on someone — oh, hell — he’d be a millionaire! Or now that he was a collegian, if he paid that much attention in class, listened acutely to a lecture, acutely and with the same assiduity, as he took stock of the situation at Mamie’s, he’d be a straight-A student, like Aaron H, or Ivan H. Straight-A, yeah, straight eight. Maxima come lewder. What the hell.

Despite all that, the job at Loft’s, Minnie’s inaccessibility, the furtive gambles at Mamie’s, his sophomore year was a dreary one. Why this was so, Ira in retrospect was never sure. Perhaps because that fall of 1925 was a time of spiritual lethargy, the withering of an intended career, the realization, growing into conviction, that the withering was irreversible, irreversible because he had been deprived of nutrient interest. How could he be expected to pursue a career in biology when his schedule at CCNY was nothing more than an exercise in waiting, waiting while his interests drained and drifted into other fields, disciplines, and finally, the shadowy, nebulous art of literature? He would never, never be a zoologist, biology teacher, or anything of the sort. He seemed headed into a degraded future, a baneful void, with only an iota of luster to light it, a hint of aspiration whose sole credential was the CCNY Lavender in which the “term paper” that earned him a D had appeared — and which Mom kept as a souvenir.

Though he had again become her “stupid brud,” Minnie tried, with utmost solicitude, to cheer him up, when she saw his evident despond. Mom and Pop were around, but her tenderness no longer made him scowl apprehensively. It was as if that same tenderness was always there, just took different forms. It was strange. The sisterly seemed to be winning out, sisterly concern, sympathy. Was that how she attained to maturity, something he had gloomy presentiment he wasn’t capable of, wasn’t anyway, and he was two years older? No matter his exaggerated pose of indifference, his slighting words, and what offended her most — his bored yawn — she persisted in her encouragement: “Don’t worry. Don’t get so downhearted. You’ll write a book yet, and I’ll type it, the way I did for The Lavender. You remember?”

He did. “Yeah,” he said skeptically.

She stroked his arm. He kept his face dour. No point in arousing suspicions at home, when nothing was happening anymore.

Doldrums, that sophomore year, interspersed with, punctuated by, excitements that left him more hollow, more gnawed by tedium than before. His college work, with the exception of his Composition 2 class, was substandard. He was failing in Calculus; he was doing so poorly in Physics he had to drop the course. He was doing no better than C work in Qualitative Analysis. His instructor in Descriptive Geometry could scarcely conceal his vexation when he looked at Ira’s mechanical drawing. His college career was a hopeless mess.

Ira felt he ought to drop out, quit college, apply to Loft’s for an all-day job behind the candy counter. If it weren’t for Mom’s fixation on his having a career, he would. Christ, what a career! Except for Composition 2, Professor Kieley’s course in descriptive writing, his college career was a disaster. It was like walking on a treadmill up in limbo. No future. No prospects. No preference in profession. High school teaching positions were reportedly harder and harder to obtain, especially for Jews, CCNY Jews — it was an open secret that they were being weeded out. And what would he teach, if he no longer felt interested in biology? English? Even worse. He already had a D in the subject, and even though he was doing A work how, standards were stricter — and worst of it was, he hadn’t the least inclination to teach English. He already felt intuitively he had no aptitude either. So he would be left with elementary-school teaching by default. Pop was right. A malamut, that’s all he would be: teaching grade-school kids, like Mr. Lennard, the goddamn fag, like Mr. Kilcoyne, the dairy farmer, Mr. Sullivan, the crippled public accountant, the only one who sensed that he had more than standard ability. Nothing with nothing, as they said in Yiddish, nothing but a wisp of hope that he might be a writer — someday maybe. Nah, he was ruined.

Ruined, ruined. Dumb. Sluggish. Shrinking. Sneaky. Abhorrent. Perverted, what else but perverted? He had fucked his sister, and when he no longer could, his kid cousin. Got a kick out of it, a double kick out of it — maybe not as vile, as violent, as with Minnie those special times, but good enough — like Joe, that sonofabitch who lured him way back when to Fort Tryon Park. He didn’t have to lure Stella, but, ah, Jesus, that was good. Once a week, once a week, on a Monday, make a sordid tour to Mamie’s. Right? Feel the exaltation, exultation of having violated, perpetrated — ah, the only relief he got: maneuver the fat little heifer into a half-minute of perilous privacy in the front room, precarious privacy, while everybody in the kitchen might be talking — what a tight squeeze, wow! — stick it in for a half-minute of furious, silent spraddle. He didn’t give a goddamn what anyone would have thought, if they knew — and who knew? He ravened, he lusted for the prohibited, the proscribed — Jesus, what would the heinous be like? The really heinous, like what? What was heinous? He couldn’t imagine.

But meanwhile he’d have to be satisfied by trampling on the deep shadows under the Park Avenue trestle on Monday night. The anticipation buoyed his climb up to 116th Street. He quickened his pace as he reached 112th Street, Mamie’s street, and felt at least for a while alacrity, the elation of shaking off the staleness of existence, the insidious stupor of his aimlessness, his torpid despair that he was scarcely conscious of — but Minnie guessed. And instead of appreciating her sympathy, he could only recall the instances when he wanted to hook it into her. Jesus, no question he was ruined. .

But it was on those same Monday nights that Larry, now a classmate at CCNY, had begun to ask Ira to accompany him on his visits to Edith’s, and more than ask — to urge. It was hard to decline, although at first Ira did. “Why don’t you go see her weekends? I mean, you got all weekend,” he had suggested.

“I know that,” was Larry’s smiling reply. “But I’d like you to be there. Edith would too.”

“Edith would? You sure?” Jesus, his one chance at a piece o’ tail. “When? In the evening?”

“Yes. Have supper at my house. And then we go downtown together. What say?”

Ira hesitated.

“Try it this Monday. You know, she hasn’t seen you since Woodstock. Come on, show her you haven’t disappeared. We talk a lot about you, and I keep telling her you’re working after school, but she’d like to see you.”

“Yeah?” He seemed to hear a rumor in the words “she’d like to see you,” a tiny intimation of a future dimension, a promise. It was only at Edith’s that some meaning toward a future might take shape. Only at Edith’s, nowhere else. “All right. Monday.”

“Fine!” Larry was genuinely glad. “Tell you the truth, I’m happy you’re coming too. What’s a few minutes gabbing in the alcove? Even my mother has asked about you. My family, in-laws and the rest.”

“Yeah, well. You know how a job is.”

So Ira went. . sardonic, strangely morose — at the utter jumble of his own mind, its peculiar villainy, of which Larry could guess nothing, not the sacrifice of gratification at Mamie’s. Oh, it was all so confused, so goddamn confused. He wasn’t accompanying Larry for nothing; Ira sensed his ulterior motives: he came to Edith’s with postponed lubricity, longing. There would have to be requital of some kind. Somehow. Someday. Or was it all just dumb fantasy? The dainty payoff for the foul. Nah.

From a pinnacle of purest enchantment, as Larry’s affair with Edith had seemed to Ira in the beginning, to the high, dreamy, ambivalent valley of Woodstock, it now leveled into a more comprehensible, more predictable plateau. With the arrival of the long-awaited, polished and dazzling Rhodes Scholar, Richard Smithfield, from fabled Oxford, Edith and Iola began to go their separate ways. Soon after Edith’s return from Woodstock, when the two women still shared their apartment on St. Mark’s Place, Richard, with John Vernon trailing him animatedly, called — at exactly the time when Larry and Ira were there. Richard was faintly amused at Edith’s sophomore lover, who was, despite all his urbanity, clearly at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the elegant Oxford graduate. As for Ira, he was totally tongue-tied. Completely abashed, Ira listened in awed silence to the other’s felicitous speech, and watched entranced the graceful movements of the superb, clean-flavored gentleman, whose very perfection summoned up visions of Continental drawing rooms, elite and exquisite. Would Ira ever forget Richard speaking of the flavor of borscht, borscht which he had eaten at the Russian Bear restaurant? — that it was delightfully dill. Dill! Borscht! And when he took his leave, after his brief, demigodlike visit, he said, with such impeccable protocol: “It desolates me to leave you.”

Yes — for once, Ira had successfully located a document in his files: it was from Richard, who had married lola within a year of returning from Oxford, cordially acquiescing in Ira’s request to visit him and lola in Annapolis, where they lived in retirement after Richard’s distinguished teaching career at St. John’s College. “What a horse’s ass I was!” Ira said aloud — and shook his head. He had a chance to visit them, and hadn’t. “Goddamn lazy bastard.”

“Dear Ira,” he read Richard’s fountain-pen black but clear handwriting: “I hope it isn’t too late for this to reach you. Iola and I would very much like to see you. We can’t put you up. For different though similar reasons, we are invisible until about three o’clock in the afternoon, but we’d love to take you to dinner and travel backward with you to New York and forty-odd years ago.”

That was in May of 1970, and Ira, lazy, cheap bastard, after first writing them he would go, canceled at the last minute. Ira still heard Richard’s voice on the phone expressing his regret at hearing Ira’s change of mind, the pause in conversation, and the regretful silence prelude to acceptance. Rue would consume him every time he thought of the lost opportunity. Shlemiel, shlimazl. They both had cancers. Both were dead in a couple of years. .

With unfailing altruism, Edith dictated that she would leave the St. Mark’s Place apartment to Iola and Richard, while she herself sought, and found, another place. The new apartment was far less attractive — probably less expensive too — totally without any charm, even to Ira’s slowly developing taste in such matters, a single low-ceilinged room, dingy, two steps down from the sidewalk and in the basement of a typically remodeled former townhouse — in the very midst of the turmoil of 8th Street’s motley thoroughfare, its stores, traffic, eating places, window shoppers, trolley-car din and clang. It was there, in that dingy, low-ceilinged basement apartment, that Larry’s inability to find lyric outlet, or to tap new sources of literary inspiration, became associated in Ira’s mind as the place where his friend’s frustration became chronic. Avowedly so. It was there he grieved over the loss, lamented his condition more than once; the last time, when Ira was there, Larry’s voice faltered, became throaty, almost broke. Edith tried to soothe, to cheer. All writers ran into these “fallow periods,” she said, endeavoring to keep incentive alive. Fallow periods were succeeded by recrudescence, she assured him: inspiration revived all the more vigorously after such periods of quiescence.

The weeks went by, but Larry’s poetic impulse showed no sign of revival. It was as though a phase had passed. Something — a lyric, a literary surge, had risen on the tide of his early youth — and ebbed away with it. Why? What was this thing called imagination? This urge called creativity? What drove it; what was its motive force? What was this strange need that demanded outlet in a certain form, that could only be satisfied a certain way? Strange. And was it the need that left one, or only the ability to satisfy it? Or both? Ira pondered, and could find no answer. It happened, and as Mom would have added: und shoyn.

The Arts Club, in which Larry had been so active, too was disbanded. Larry was no longer an undergraduate at NYU, and whether he could have continued as secretary of the club or not had become moot. He no longer cared to be secretary, nor even cared to belong. And with Larry gone, and no one to replace him as student secretary, no one to accept the executive burden of arranging meetings, Edith and John Vernon found themselves too busy with other matters to afford the time necessary to keep the club functioning. They felt the club had served its purpose. The initial enthusiasm, the ferment of innovation, had also waned, or been permitted to subside. Ira also gathered the impression that the two faculty sponsors both felt more secure in their positions, and hence could safely slacken in their activities to win favor with Professor Watt by further devotion of time and energy to the enterprise they had initiated. Edith, especially, was sure she would be advanced to an assistant professorship the following year. The Arts Club was allowed a quiet demise.

The weeks went by, bringing the fall term of 1925 to an end. Having given up further attempts at writing, Larry turned to another art form entirely: sculpture. What a strange metamorphosis Ira felt he was witness to, on those Monday evenings when he accompanied his friend to Edith’s basement apartment. Larry had enrolled in a private school of design, and was taking evening lessons in drawing and the plastic arts. Not only had his art form changed, but the whole setting of his love affair underwent a change as well, became different, in so many ways, and in so short a time. Truly, the pristine bloom that once had seemed to encompass the lovers had passed. That bright, airy, quiet apartment, to which Larry had taken Ira the first time, with white walls more radiant than reality, with trees outside the windows in a yard of verdant and flourishing vegetation, had now given way to a dingy, cramped, low-ceilinged room, one into which street noises intruded, past whose single, smudged window the legs and feet of pedestrians continually traveled. Changed, vanished, hard to define: the novelty was gone, the afflatus and promise of that first sense of new freedom, its bewitching latency and illusory horizons, all had dissolved like a mirage. “Romantic” was the word that described what it once was — ah, yes, now he understood, understood the meaning of the word — in his terms: the sense of a marvelous unfolding of the new, mysterious and boundless. He understood because he realized he had been under a spell, and the spell was broken. Drab clay now displaced all those airy sentiments, glamorous overtones, those allusions to books and belles lettres. Masses of drab clay dispossessed discussion of ideas, the New Criticism, the advent of Humanism, often, more often than not, insubstantial and fragmentary to Ira’s intellectual grasp, yet all the more precious whatever he succeeded in grasping — grasping and retaining. Ah, precious to dwell on, to try to extend, extend the implications, mentally test their application. The only thing that had the power of transfixing him, like the power of plane geometry, seemingly long ago, the only thing that sometimes could actually evict thoughts of sex from his mind.

But changed now, changed. Terminated. Yielding to talk of sculpture, sculptors, and techniques. Oh, hell, who cared? The change in Larry’s artistic medium seemed to have a kind of subliminal symbolism about it, graphic, maybe too, well, say visible. Drab clay in a small, gray apartment had taken over the aspiring word, the novel notion, the expansive oral prompting. Did the kind of transformation he saw occurring in Edith’s dingy apartment take place in his mind only? Did it mean a change in Larry’s personality? Anh, what kind of a dumb question was that? And yet he now actually beheld how the quotidian, the mundane, precipitated out of the romantic the way silver chloride precipitated out of solution. Facts swept away illusions — one had read about that and reread about that, but one had to experience the process, mull it over, and even then still be puzzled about how the change took place, and what effect it had, or what it indicated. Something mysterious about it, sad too, the final settling into a mold, the hardening forever of the once protean and iridescent, eternally cast in dingy pall. Jesus, he’d never get free of his confusions; he couldn’t think. Feel, yeah. How the hell do you get ready for the change that will lock you into the settled and prosaic? Jesus, and you thought that out of the change something else was going to emerge, something else come to fruition?

Brought in by Larry, a mass of clay on a modeling stand made its appearance, modeling tools, large wooden calipers, other instruments of the sculptor’s craft, an ample cloth throw as well. Edith was to be Larry’s model; a study of her face, a portrait or bust of her in clay, his first serious project. And while Larry sculpted the image of his lady love, Ira was left to his own devices, more or less. It seemed he was left to spend the evening in any way he pleased. But little by little, out of the vagueness of Ira’s mind, the realization began to coalesce that Larry needed, Larry craved, someone to admire him, to extol him, that he brought Ira along as audience. For a time, Ira played the role expected of him: he watched and praised, and for a while it was diverting to watch Larry at work. As he did everything else, he sculpted with a flair. Nor did he omit any item pertaining to his role as sculptor. He wore a smock, he wore a beret. He exclaimed in delight as he traced the contours of Edith’s features with his long white fingers. Praiseworthy and truly impressive was the facility with which he reproduced the contours of Edith’s features in clay, reproduced them with ever-growing verisimilitude. It was clear he had talent, just as it had been clear he had talent as a lyric poet.

Edith meanwhile sat silently with a manila file folder in her lap, reviewing her lectures for the next day, or sometimes conversing with Larry and Ira as she posed. Two or three hours of the evening would pass while Larry worked on the bust. When he was done, and the session over, all signs of his artistry were concealed: the cloth was carefully draped over his work, and the unfinished sculpture again stowed in a corner of the apartment, to be unveiled and brought out the next time, a Monday hence.

What a bore that must have been for her. .

With fingertips together, Ira sat reconstructing scanty vestiges of recollection.

You hear, Ecclesias, what a bore. That mature, increasingly sophisticated (and undoubtedly discontented) woman sitting there patiently, while her youthful lover exclaimed in delight when his scanning fingers discovered a new curve. . in the light of the floor lamps and table lamps of her small room. She should have posed bare-ass: the not-too-proper, risqué thought crossed an old mind. That would have been more fun, given the occasion more éclat and daring and reward, more exposure—

— Come along with you.

Mo’ diversion, at any rate — who knows — though not for Larry, of course. He was an honest, faithful, and conventional lover; and she, as Ira was to learn in time, most enterprisingly unconventional and demurely clandestine: the way she smuggled in the Ulysses, the way her sober gaze perched on his fly. More diversion, for everyone but Larry.

As things were, Ira sat there, many an evening, Larry’s inert retainer, wishing he were at Mamie’s and then remembering why he wasn’t: biding his time, biding his time in Edith’s apartment, especially at first, when lamplight would contract to merest points, as if he were in a trance, biding his time, in suspended animation, biding his time. So that even Larry’s sculpture phase seemed to add a listless increment to the doldrums of that sophomore year.

Still, there’s one thing to observe, Ecclesias, a trait of Edith’s, not too conspicuous, but noticeable: a subdued — should one say? — a well-bred narcissism. Or what else to call it? A covert seeking out of self in the mirror, a culling, as it were, of every new fold and wrinkle. (Others too had noticed the trait.) Perhaps that accounted not only for her numerous, passing, amorous episodes, but for the seeming passion she had for initiating youth, friends of mine and strangers. Would I had known it—

— You did, eventually.

No, no. I meant known it sooner. Even, as I have already indicated, as early as Woodstock.

— You still regret?

Yes, the undone. Not to do again, but the undone. It is the undone that exerts a stronger grasp on the soul than the done. She would have been avid to lay for us both, to be vulgar, lay with us both, to be Biblical. I know. All the more so, since she was indeed dissatisfied, unfulfilled, by Larry as a lover, as I surmised at the time, and ascertained later. But more than that, she was given to treating the body, her body, as a kind of counter, not contour but counter, an existential pawn subservient to curiosity or to policy. For example, out of sheer altruism, she and another woman both undertook to induct a famous homosexual poet — well, what the hell — Hart Crane — into the praxis of ordinary fornication. The guy puked—

— Gossipmonger.

No. It’s an illustration. We’ll all be dust in a couple of years, Ecclesias. I daresay I’m almost the sole survivor.

XI

At Loft’s, where in a surprisingly short time Ira became cloyed with even the choices of pecan “logs,” as they were called, not to mention chocolates, however exotic the filling, the company promoted the regular evening clerk-cashier to assistant manager, and transferred him to a different branch. As a result, the duties of the clerk-cashier, by order of Mr. Ryce, the manager of the store, devolved upon Ira. Another clerk was hired in Ira’s place, a young Southerner, lately come to New York. He was winning in person and manner, charming all and sundry with relaxed friendliness and native drawl. He and Ira worked well together; he was easy to get along with. He was a member of the Naval Reserve, to which he had to report for duty one weekend per month, and he filled Ira’s ears with all kinds of agreeable tales of the uses to which he and his mates put the launch that took them — and often female friends and visitors — to the training ship and back. How varied and interesting must have been his experiences aboard the man-of-war, his impressions and manifold memories of life in Alabama, which he told Ira during those many afternoons and evenings they worked together. Most notably, however, to the vulgarly, no, perversely inclined Ira, was that he frequently and humorously referred to the naval launch as a fuck-boat. How Ira envied him.

And well you might, Ira thought, well you might indeed: how pitifully contracted already was the scope of your libido, how atrophied the spirit of play, of sport.

Working the same shift, afternoon and evening, was the soda dispenser, soda jerk, a Briton by the name of Jeffrey, with a peculiarly orange complexion and a penchant for telling the most pointless and smutty jokes Ira had ever heard. One clung to Ira’s mind particularly — the attempted buggery by an English seaman of an Oriental shipmate. “Hey, me Chinaman,” the latter protested. To which the nautical sodomist made retort: “I don’t care if you’re a charabanc, I’m going to ride you anyway.” And then Jeffrey had to explain for the benefit of Bob, their Southern sidekick behind the candy counter, what a charabanc was. No gag deserved the name more than his.

Known to Jeffrey was a speakeasy two or three doors away from the store, and there at his invitation, Bob and Ira would repair Saturday nights, after the store closed, and quaff “needle beer,” and listen to more of orange-faced Jeffrey’s jokes. Oddest damn thing though: not so many years later, now a writer, and in the company of Edith, Ira met the same joker tending bar in a restaurant. Franklin Roosevelt was in office by then; Prohibition had been annulled; and there was Jeffrey behind the bar shaking up a cocktail. “Hi,” Ira said. “How are you? You and I worked together at Loft’s. Remember? You were a soda jerk there.”

Ira must have said all the wrong things in the world, all the things that belied everything he told his employers. He gave Ira the blankest stare an orange could give, and shook his head. And somewhat miffed, embarrassed too, and seeking to avoid further embarrassment, Ira returned to the table, sat down again next to Edith. “The so-and-so was a soda jerk at the same store I was at Loft’s,” Ira explained. “And now he doesn’t know me at all.”

She laughed: “You may have changed since then a great deal.”

But the guy kept his eyes on Ira, a little worriedly, all the time the two were there. Why the hell didn’t Ira ask him, “Hey, do you remember that story about the Chinaman and the charabanc?” Too sensitive. But then again, what the hell would have been the difference? Ira shouldn’t argue with a tangerine in a barkeep’s outfit.

One night, when time came to cast up accounts, to turn in Ira’s receipts for the evening, he was ten dollars short. Ira compared actual receipts with the figures for receipts on the cash register, tallied and totaled and retallied, with growing alarm — he was still short by a ten-dollar bill. Ten dollars exactly! Not nine dollars and fifty cents, or ten dollars and a quarter, or some other number, but exactly ten dollars, give or take a measly penny or two, a discrepancy of no small consequence. To account for so large a discrepancy as the one in his receipts for the evening was beyond him — and beyond everybody else, Bob or Mr. Buckley, the assistant manager, who took over in the evening. Neither Mr. Ryce, the manager of the store, nor the day cashier, Mrs. Deane, whom Ira relieved in the evening, could account for the shortage. No one could. Had Ira — so Ira and others reasoned — inadvertently given a customer a ten-dollar bill instead of a one when he made change, then he would be nine dollars short. Or if Ira had been guilty of some other carelessness in making change, then he would be short some other explicable amount. But in no case an even ten dollars. The mystery resisted solution. Ira was docked ten dollars from his weekly total of sixteen dollars per week.

Slim pay envelope that week: reminded him of the time Biolov docked him two weeks’ pay to make up for the five-dollar bill he lost on his way to the wholesale drugstore on Third Avenue. Hard to cavil at the justice of the penalty, but hard not to, hard not to rankle at the sting, especially when one is certain of one’s scrupulous honesty and unfailing attention to business.

A week later, the mystery was solved: concentrating on making change for the customer who stood in front of the cashier’s cage, quick, vigilant Mrs. Deane spied — out of the corner of her eye — a youngster’s very small hand slide beneath the acorn-shaped ferrules of the upright brass rods that enclosed the cage, dip into the open till of the cash register, and pinch a ten-dollar bill out of its compartment. They habitually kept bills of larger denominations in the compartment on the left (which was also on the door side of the store). In a flick, the little hand snapped the bill out of the cage, and before Mrs. Deane could move, the little scamp beat it through the door. Out and away he fled, and into the crowd on 149th Street.

“Thief! Thief!” Mrs. Deane screamed: “Thief! There he goes, Mr. Ryce!”

At once Mr. Ryce set off in pursuit, glimpsed his quarry an instant, but lost him the next, as the kid dodged among the moving throng and vanished in shadow. Now they knew why Ira’s shortage had been exactly ten dollars. Together, Mrs. Deane and Ira signed a petition, which he drew up and Minnie obligingly typed, to the president of the Loft’s corporation, requesting forgiveness of the ten-dollar loss: the money had disappeared not because of the crew’s negligence, but because it had been stolen. The manager of the store himself attested to the fact. Noo, noo, as they said in Yiddish, it helped like cupping a cadaver. In her next pay envelope Mrs. Deane too found she had been docked ten dollars.

She fumed about the injustice a great deal. She was a slightly built woman, with shrewd, darting black eyes behind her eyeglasses. Angry, she seemed to condense into the very essence of outraged probity. But nothing could move the president of the Loft’s corporation. He sympathized, but in management’s view, Mrs. Deane and Ira had been wanting in alertness. Their carelessness was to blame for the loss of the money, and therefore they had to make amends. As a precaution against further thefts, a metal barrier was fastened to the bottom of either side of the cage, closing off the space between the acorn-shaped ferrules and the wooden ledge beneath.

For Mrs. Deane, after a few days or a week of indignation at the injustice the two had suffered at the hands of a great company, the matter ended there — Mrs. Deane sought to recoup the lost portion of her salary by flitting in and out of her cage to wait on customers. Staff were given a tenth of a percent on all sales they rang up. Whether in the course of time she succeeded in recovering her ten dollars, Ira didn’t know. Ira did know that a little brooding over the wrong done him hatched another and speedier system of redress. The system, or scheme, went as follows:

The Loft’s weekend special, three boxes of different kinds of candy for ninety-nine cents, was a very popular item and in great demand. With it, as with the purchase of any item in the store, came a little sales slip. The clerk behind the counter printed the amount of the purchase on the cash register, and issued the sales slip to the customer together with his purchase. The customer then presented the slip to the cashier, in this case Ira, and paid the amount of the sale printed on the slip. All Ira had to do was to retain the little sales slip, retain it absently, and instead of giving it back to the customer as proof of payment, simply hand the sales slip back to Bob. He would then issue it to the next purchaser of the ninety-nine-cent special, without ringing up a sale, who would then present Ira with the same sales slip, along with a greenback, usually a dollar, receive his penny in change, and go on his way — without Ira’s having rung up a sale. The sales slip would then be returned to Bob for another round in the nefarious cycle. Would Bob agree to be a party to the scheme? Ira made discreet inquiry: would he? Of course he would, and with alacrity. His sense of justice too had been violated by the company’s summary disposition of Ira’s appeal, especially since the two would go half on the proceeds: “That bunch o’ tightwads doin’ yo’ all outta ten skins. We only gettin’ even.”

They got even. If not in a jiffy, in short order: on two successive Saturdays, on the way to the speakeasy after work, they surreptitiously divvied up a little more than five dollars apiece. Ira was satisfied; he had gotten his money back. Justice was served.

Bob was not. His sense of justice outstripped Ira’s. The ease with which they had redressed the balance, or, witticisms aside, mulcted the company of over twenty dollars whetted his appetite for more. His day off was Tuesday, the day after Ira’s, and he was making it big with a honey of a beauty parlor operator, a blonde who looked like a million bucks in her black skirt and white blouse, and brother, could he use a little extra dough.

Ira too was impressed by how smoothly the stratagem had worked — not a hitch! How easily they had skimmed off more than twice the sum Ira felt the company owed him! Ira agreed to continue the ploy next Saturday. But nothing on the same scale. There were spotters, he warned. They both knew that: Mr. Ryce, the manager, had given Ira and Bob a report of the findings on their approach to customers: whether the two had addressed the investigator in guise of a bona fide patron with a properly obsequious “May I help you, sir” (or “ma’am”), and thanked him — or her — with due appreciation after the purchase. And of course — what went without saying — whether they were guilty of any irregularities in the way in which either, or both, Ira and Bob conducted the transaction, namely in the handling of sales receipts and cash. That was the main thing. And besides, Ira stressed to his cohort, Loft’s had an accounting department, and if the manager himself couldn’t explain the reason for a continued drop in the store’s income on Saturday — yes, even ten bucks, Ira overrode Bob’s skepticism vehemently — they would surely send somebody out to keep the two under surveillance.

Ira’s prudence — or cowardice — prevailed: they limited their swindling to a couple of dollars apiece per weekend. Even then, Ira felt uneasy. “Let’s cut it out altogether,” he urged. “What the hell. For a couple of bucks. What the hell will it look like on your record if some big guy steps behind the counter and tells us we’re under arrest? You say you hope to be a petty officer in the Navy someday.”

“No, you don’t mean to tell me one o’ those fat I-talian ladies waddles in heah with three, fo’ kids is goin’ to step back heah and put the ahm on us. Yo got mo’ sense than that, Iry,” Bob blandished. “That’s a safe sale, an’ you know it.”

“Yeah, but somebody else could be watching. The fat lady may be just a decoy.”

“Aw, come on. Listen, tell you what ah’ll do: instead of us going to that gin mill Saturday night, we-all go to my girl’s place. I’ll tell her to get one of her friends for you.”

“Yeah?. . Thanks.”

“What d’y’all say?”

“No, I can get all I want.”

“This one’s a real cutie. I laid her myself.”

“No, I’m cutting out the—” In the face of Bob’s eager candor, Ira felt his shrug was churlish. He riffled the stack of white waxed bags on the marble counter. “I got my dough back, and more. I’m not takin’ any more chances, that’s all. I’m ringing up every sale. No more sales slips back.”

“Suit yo’self.” Bob was clearly miffed.

“You do a thing regularly like that, you’re asking for it,” Ira commented darkly.

“How come you so sure?”

“I’m sure, all right.”

And it wasn’t more than two weeks later that the clerks were agog with tales of a night-shift team like theirs that had been caught doing the same thing they were guilty of. Only they had gone Ira and Bob one or several better: they had a number of sales slips in reserve, sales slips with different prices on them, and the one they had been caught passing was for a two-pound heart-shaped box of fancy chocolates, with nuts and rich fudge centers, costing two-fifty. They were both fired, but not before they signed a confession of guilt, in lieu of being hauled into court to face petty-larceny charges.

“We were lucky,” Ira said to Bob. “See?”

“A two-pound box o’ nonpareils. They must’ve thought they were in business fo’ themselves. Two-fifty a clip.” His lips pursed in generous confession. “I’m just kiddin’, Iry. Y’all were right that time. You’re purty smaht.” He moved away to attend to a blowsy woman just entering the store; she looked a little unsettled, to say the least: her hat was jammed all the way down to her eyebrows like a fuchsia bucket with a green flower on it.

“Yes, ma’am. What can I do fo’ you, ma’am?” Bob’s address was punctilio itself. “Can I he’p you, ma’am?”

She looked like a freak, but she could be just the type of customer who could put the arm on them, as Bob phrased it.

Ira went back to the cage and sat down behind the cash register. Idly, Ira watched Bob dig the candy scoop into the dark slope of malted milk balls under the glass counter, then into the mound of peanut clusters. No, probably not. The dame was probably straight, was just what she seemed to be: a mama, maybe some widow returning from the shop or factory, bringing home a treat for herself and the kiddies, bringing home “bong-bongs,” as Ira had jested with Larry. No, Ira wasn’t “smaht,” though it flattered him that Bob thought so. Bob slid the scoop under the pile of paper-wrapped nougats, pale surfaces flecked with citrus. No, Ira wasn’t smart. He just learned on his own hide, the only way he seemed able to learn. For a moment, a small cloud settled on the white-topped soda tables in front of the cage. Wherever his eyes roved, from the large double doors opening on 149th Street to the soda fountain tended by henna-skinned Jeffrey, the cloud roved; and embedded in it was a silver-filigreed fountain pen. The nightmare of Stuyvesant High School had taught him a little, anyway. Ira had quit just in time. But what a damned fool he was to run that risk for ten bucks. Oh, it was a lot of money, but compared to what might have happened to him — what a damned fool he was, and yet Ira had done the same thing in his bus-conductor days, swiped nickels; nearly croaked when the spotter in the car yelled at him. And this time to have the dick come around the counter and say “You’re under arrest” would have killed him. Smart. Ira was smart in the other sense, when “smart” meant hurt.

Yet this newly acquired wisdom did not constrain him on his visits to 112th Street. He continued to use any imaginable ploy to visit Stella, growing bigger, plumper, at sixteen. She was his regular one, and he hated passing up a Monday visit that fall and winter. Larry could not understand why he refused to accompany him after classes on Monday evenings. Again and again, Larry invited him for supper in the new apartment on West 110th Street to which Larry’s mother and he had moved. With Irma married, and the uncle traveling, they lived alone now.

Nonetheless, Ira adamantly declined Larry’s invitation. “No, I gotta catch up on work,” was Ira’s unfailing excuse. “Can’t do it. Thanks. Can’t do it. Jesus, am I ever failing.” Boy, give up his only chance for a nice piece of ass that week in exchange for a couple of lamb chops or broiled salmon and fresh peas — and have to listen to Larry’s enthusiastic disquisitions about his latest artistic outlet: the stage, and the flair he had for acting.

The trouble was that visiting Mamie’s was regular, every Monday evening, regular. Oh, he was great at maneuvering, keeping a straight face. He was a wonder when it came to that: maneuvering, waiting, stalling, stalking — hey, that was another pretty good one: stalking, he’d have to underline the stalk — what the hell was he talking about? It was the regular, regular, that’s what he was talking about; that was what was gonna trip him up. With Stella, the same as with the fountain pens, regular, the same thing he had warned Bob about. Monday, one after another. Cut it out then. He couldn’t. Couldn’t. As long as he knew it was there. Christ, he finger-fucked her when she had the monthlies and she pulled him off. That was all right, as long as he had someone else doing it, someone else coming with him.

Better he took up Bob’s offer of getting him a lay. Better, but he couldn’t. That was the worst of it. He knew he wouldn’t get a hard-on now. Scared with grown-up girls who knew all about it. That’s what fucking kids had done to him, fucking Stella when she was fourteen, taking Minnie when she was eleven. .

Ruined. . long ago. . and that was why performance with words was the only option open to him, the only tramway out of himself. Conveyor belt: and on it, like chunks of ore cut out of a gloomy mine (mind): words, words, extricating himself from Joyce by Joycean means. Well, perhaps not words alone: anything innovative might do as substitute, anything exploratory, visionary, even quixotic: the thing Pop did when he was eighty-seven. He bought the old Turner farm on Church Hill Road in Maine above where the Stigmans had lived, an old run-down farm on the crest of the hill, and a horse and old buggy for transportation to town (the Kennebec Journal ran a feature on the old coot and his hay-burner) — and he died a year and a half later in Bellevue Hospital, the pathetic, damned old fool. .

The overwhelming notion of his own death now lay imminent in him. And he recalled the morning when M had smiled at him wisely. “If you’re not all right, I can’t be all wrong.” And she had added something he couldn’t remember now about either one not living if the other didn’t and he had seconded the notion of not living, seconded it all too heartily. L’chaim, the Jews said when downing a libation: to life. Apart from the correctness of the Hebrew, the toast might just as well have been L’met. To death. It would serve him just as well: L’met. Well met.

XII

While Larry sculpted, continually imbuing the clay with greater detail, and Edith posed meditatively in the light of the floor lamp, Ira began to depart from his practice of just sitting there quietly, more or less patiently, under the light of the other floor lamp, augmenting the weak, wintry light of the basement room. Chatting with Edith too much tended to disturb her repose as model, so Ira began to delve into Edith’s ever-growing collection of modern poetry, the proverbial slim volumes of modern poets: Aiken, Pound, Frost, Adams, Sandburg, Millay, Stevens, Wylie, Winters, Teasdale, MacLeish, Cummings, Taggard, Sitwell, Williams, Tate, Ransom, Robinson.

Edith never hesitated an instant to buy a book of poetry she deemed to have literary merit — and most of them Ira failed to understand. Oh, there were exceptions: Jeffers he could follow quite well, his long narrative poems. Ira could follow a story, and the “plots” of some of Jeffers’s stories dealt with subject matter he had become too thoroughly and too shamefully acquainted with, and Jeffers’s incestuous narratives aroused his interest all the more. And Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay and a few others, like Housman, were easy. Edith remarked when she saw him assaying their collected poems that they no longer addressed the modern mood. “Passé,” Larry chimed in, and added, “That’s me. Passé.”

Edith tried to soothe him: “Oh, no. You haven’t really come into your own yet, how can you be passé?”

“It’s a feeling I have.”

“Oh, lad, these things have their own pace. Poets find their own voices. And sometimes quite suddenly.”

And then in Ira’s haphazard way, he came upon T. S. Eliot. He had by now achieved major status as a poet, in vanguard critical opinion — and among the CCNY literary elite, of course. Once again, Ira felt as he had about Joyce, even though Larry, just as with Joyce, found no affinity with Eliot. Ira felt this was another case in which it was his duty, if he really wanted to get some notion of the age in which he lived, its attitudes and presentiments, it was his duty to read Eliot. No, not merely to read — Ira didn’t grasp what he read, so reading wasn’t enough. Ira had to strive to understand, to study, study as if he were applying greater and greater mental pressure to a problem before him, to try to make up by sheer, undeviating pressure of concentrated pondering, make up for his lack of the kind of sensitivity to the significance pulsing within a poem that Edith had, and Larry too, when he cared, though he no longer seemed to. Ira thought he ought to try at least in this one case, to comprehend the widely acclaimed poet, T. S. Eliot, this one case, to make up for his failure to resonate, for his limitation of response to delicacy, to subtlety of allusion. Perhaps his defense against an inner foe, his continual sense of shame, had become a barrier to the messages of other minds, modern minds, the messages of most of the poets on Edith’s bookshelves. That was how it seemed. But Ira was determined to wring intelligibility out of this one enigma, T. S. Eliot.

And alas, Ira began to think he had performed the task too well. In the nihilism of spirit that his self-opprobrium had brought him to, in which Ira found himself now, odious and unspeakable to himself, Ira was all too susceptible to the meaning, T. S. Eliot’s meaning steeped in crushing fatuity, in alienation, tortured anomie, despair, that he absorbed so single-mindedly, as Ira had never absorbed the content of the Ulysses—it was too large, recondite, and finned with irony. Ira absorbed the emotion of Eliot’s poems, especially his two major poems, before he understood the meaning. Ira absorbed the emotion, until much of it became part of him.

Ira was all too conscious of the recurring Jew-mockery in a number of the poems: of Rachel née Rabinovitch tearing at the grapes, of the Jews in “Gerontion” sitting in the window, “spawned in some estaminent,” of Bleistein, of Sir Ferdinand Klein, Sir Alfred Mond, and the Jew underneath the lot, and the echt deutsch Litvak in The Waste Land. He was all too conscious of the poet’s anti-Jew bias, but he accepted it, shared it, even approved of these thoughts — since leaving the East Side and becoming conscious of himself, not as a member of a homogeneous folk, but as an individual Jew, distinct from his milieu, nullified, demeaned, experiencing the entire spectrum from sufferance through malevolence to violence. And with relatives all sordidly straining for success, and home life what it was — and the even uglier thing he had made of it — and of the wider family relations — eventually, Ira became averse to Jews and repelled by Jews. Eliot’s clever aspersions and disdainful caricatures seemed no more than just. Deft and diverting and oh so apt, their contemptuous attributions didn’t apply to him, for the simple reason that Ira appreciated them. Ira shared his repugnance, appreciated his wit, applauded his finesse. That excluded him from Eliot’s gibes, as it did all other Jews who possessed taste fine enough to relish the supreme adroitness of his calumnies. Or to whom his ridicule no longer pertained, people like Larry, sophisticated Jews, the assimilated, the deracinated: Jews like himself. Those Jews were exempt, because they were the elite, more or less.

Sixty years later he no longer felt so elite, or so impervious to more common acts of anti-Semitism. In fact, he could easily become depressed. He recalled a sense of dread when M told him, as she lifted him to a sitting position in bed one morning, that according to the radio newscast earlier, an avowed Jew-hater by the name of LaRouche had won election to office — over the major-party candidates. The news haunted him all through breakfast: a Hitlerite sonofabitch had won office in the United States, a self-proclaimed Nazi — under his leadership, his political party had established itself in four or five states. Haunted him: with a flurry of memories and fears: storm troopers, the camps, the ovens. . the cinema scenes of women lined up naked before the “bathhouses,” and the kids lugging suitcases to the freight cars, and — mostly what came back was the days before World War II, when Jew-baiting was becoming the vogue, in higher circles, not just the slum street, no, no, had become a tactic — what had Dalton Miltz told him, co-lover of Edith, Dalton, when he treated Ira to lunch in a Chinese restaurant: that the class of ’38 at Cornell — the very university Ira had won a scholarship to — had marched in jubilant file across campus, singing, parodying the song of the seven dwarfs in Walt Disney’s Snow White:

Yo ho, yo ho, we’ve joined the CIO

We’ve paid our dues to the goddamn Jews

Yo ho, yo ho, yo ho, yo ho, yo ho. .

In the city parks too, provocateurs had taken up positions, lying so plausibly, debating so coolly, and with henchmen about them, Nazi shills to attract a crowd. And the fear and the helplessness and the hopelessness that possessed him. And Father Coughlin whipping up a pogrom over the radio, with his boyhood pal Farley as an acolyte. Perhaps it was that, perhaps it was that, that triggered his depression. He couldn’t tell. And where would the Jews run now? Apparitions of Jews thronging in flight, cramming into planes, cars. Where now? And he himself, and M, and Hershel, his Orthodox son, and Hershel’s rabbi’s-daughter wife, and their three offspring. Run. And what about Jess, half-Jewish son, and his son, Oliver, quarter-Jewish grandson — where would they run? Would they have to run? “We decide who is a Jew,” said Hitler. By the time Ira had finished breakfast, gone into his study and switched on the computer, the very thought of resuming his narrative had become intolerable.

So he had gone shopping with M, stopped her just as she was about to back the car out of the driveway, and gone along. . to a new Wal-Mart west across the Rio Grande, and while he shopped for a scratcher such as he had seen his neighbor use a few days ago, to combat weeds, and a beaded chain-pull to extend the ones from the ceiling fan and lamp, which he could no longer reach, and two tubes of Magic Glue for the price of one, yes, a bargain in Magic Glue. What else? An old-fashioned apple corer that M had been hunting for for some time. The apple, he said to himself sardonically, now costs more than its corer. Chatted in front of a gas grill on sale for $125 with a burly old Western type, gray-haired under his cowboy hat, who said he was a retired auto-body repairman. And when the good Lord gave him the call to stop smoking as He had already to stop drinking, he would. He was smoking over two packs a day, and it was killing him with coughing, but he couldn’t stop. He had been smoking so long, he couldn’t remember when he began, and he could remember all the way back to the age of three. His stepfather had given him cigarettes. “What do you do for a living?” he asked.

“Retired. I worked as a gauge-maker.” Ira fell back on the old subterfuge. “I worked in a toolroom years ago.”

“I thought you were some kind of an old perfessor,” said the new acquaintance.

“Well, I happened to be a math teacher once. A tutor.” One couldn’t deny the man the satisfaction of his perceptiveness.

“Ah, I thought so.” Vindicated in his appraisal, the other nodded contentedly.

They parted, smiling.

Meanwhile, M, who had stepped into Walgreen’s for his Valium which he had ordered by phone, stressing: generic Valium (the difference was about twelve dollars), then shopped for groceries to swell the larder sufficient to meet the added demands of son and grandson, guests beginning tomorrow; met him at Wal-Mart. “Ah, I found you right away.”

“Yeah?”

“I hate this store,” she said. “Not that there aren’t good things in it. It’s so cluttered.”

“What you hate is of no consequence. Look at the mobs in it. The clutter attracts the hoi polloi. They’d feel uncomfortable in a roomy, orderly store.”

“I feel uncomfortable in Kistler-Kollister.” She led the way to the checkout counter. “Even the clerks are better dressed than I am. I suppose that’s more or less the same thing in reverse.”

“That’s right. . The guy runs Wal-Mart knows what he’s doing.” And after a moment: “Personally, I don’t give a damn what it looks like.” And reaching the checkout counter, preceded only by a woman with a single cart, “They bait you into the place with a few bargains. That’s the thing to beware of. Those Circline fluorescents cost twice as much here as at Allwoods. But once in here, you get into a buying furor.”

They were out of the store, in the car again, M driving home.

“I’ve been thinking, what does my grandson mean to me, the little I see of him.” Ira gazed moodily at the chocolate-brown waters of the Rio Grande. “And what do I mean to him? Either one of us could disappear, and not make much difference to the other.”

“Oh, it would. It does.” M shifted her eyes from the plastic orange tubs that marked the street construction on their corner. “I’ll bet the El Vado Motel owner will be glad when those barrels are gone from in front of his place.”

Father and son were to stay at the El Vado, where M had made reservations. The El Vado, cheaper by far than the AAA Monterey, less expensive, but very decent, as the new East Indian owner assured M over the phone. And she was pleasantly surprised by the neatness and attractiveness of the decor when she went there to make an advance payment for the room.

“Why is Oliver coming to visit us?” she asked after she negotiated the left turn safely into the multipronged entrance to New York Avenue.

“Custom. The thing to do. To see his grandma, obviously.”

“Not his grandpa?”

“No. You love him. The best we can ever do is understand each other, and I don’t believe there’s that much time.”

And when they got home, and began unloading purchases from plastic and paper bags, and spreading items on the kitchen table, he saw what M had bought by way of drugs, his poor wife: she had bought Valium, proprietary Valium. “Well, for Christ’s sake!” Ira exploded. “I told them I wanted generic. Jesus Christ, on top of everything else! Don’t you look at the price?”

“I’m sorry,” said M. “I just gave them my Visa card. It never occurred to me to look at the price.”

“It’s just too much!” he stormed. “You can’t take a goddamn thing for granted.”

He went to the phone and called. “This is Ira Stigman. I ordered generic Valium yesterday, didn’t I?”

“Just a minute, sir. I’ll check,” said the female voice at the other end. And after a short conference with someone else, the pharmacist, most likely, “Yes, you did.”

“What happened? I’ve got the name brand.”

“It was a mistake,” said the voice.

“Yeah?”

“You asked for generic. But when we called Dr. Bennoah to okay the prescription, he said Valium. So then we called back to find out if you could have the generic. So he said, okay, generic. They were both down on the order, and we didn’t notice you were supposed to have generic—”

The only appropriate reply that came to mind was Brooklynese: all right already. It took an act of will for him to limit himself to merely, “Yes.”

“Please bring it in, and we’ll change it,” said the voice.

“Thanks.” He set down the cordless phone on the typing table opposite the monitor, got up, went back into the kitchen, and recounted his dialogue for M’s benefit.

“I feel I have to go change it,” M said. “Get it off my mind. It’ll just worry me otherwise.”

“I’m afraid to have you go. I’m afraid of compounding mistakes into worse. You be careful.”

He waited uneasily until she returned, about a half hour later. “Safely back,” she called cheerfully from the rear door.

“Thank goodness.” He waited until she came into the kitchen. “Big difference in price, wasn’t there?”

“Over twelve dollars. No wonder they had that notice on the back of the prescription telling you how much you saved. They meant you saved by buying the generic.”

“They make out a Visa credit slip for the difference?”

“No, they gave me cash.”

“They did? That’s a new one.”

“That’s what they did. Oh, I’m so dry. It’s the excitement. I’ve got to have a drink of something: herb tea.”

“And I’d better take half a Percocet, and get over this goddamn depression.”

“Perk up with a Percocet.” She reached a long arm to the shelf in the cabinet over the sink: a long arm in a blue knit sleeve with white and red stripes, of a knit shirt striped the same way. Ivory-gray hair with a gray fillet around it, a small yellow comb in back. In front, under her distinguished brow, dark, thick-framed glasses to conceal the folds under her eyes. With her, age took its toll in folds, rather than wrinkles.

While she set the splotched copper kettle over the gas flame, always too high — that’s why the copper kettle was splotched: she roasted it — he took out a Percocet tablet from the small vial he kept on the wooden tray of his medications, snapped the tablet in half down the cleavage line. “Only two things in this world are worth a damn: love and a sense of creating something worthwhile.” There was still a little cold coffee left in the cup on the table to down the half tablet with. “I’m going back to the computer.”

Where the time went? he thought as he crossed diagonally, the darkened path on the buff carpet, entered the hallway to his study: you will ask. . a year hence. . ten years hence. . just as others continually ask: where did the time go? Where did the time go? Not if you had a hundred secretaries, a thousand amanuenses, could you keep track of where the time went, act by act, each within its moment, glissando. If anyone asks — he sat down before the blue-dark monitor — tell ’em time went thataway. .

XIII

How protean “Prufrock” seemed at first reading — and at second reading, and at third. How utterly ungraspable. It was like learning to swim; nothing to hold on to, no firm medium to depend on. What the hell was the man talking about? It was not each separate part that baffled Ira. It was all of it. It was the meaning of the whole that tantalized, that he couldn’t comprehend. He felt as if he would have to memorize it, commit it to his mind, or his mind to it, have it with him at all times, without need of the book, contemplate the poem until the meaning became part of him, and then he could understand it — the way he understood himself.

Finally that was what happened, or something akin to it: the sum of the meaning came into view: almost like moonrise, like a harvest moon, to wonder at, yet know it to be true. So that was what Eliot was talking about? It was how living in the modern world affected his spirit; how living in the modern world formed his mood, a mood made up of futility and timidity, frustration and emptiness, loneliness, misunderstanding, self-distrust. That was what all the parts added up to. Now Ira could sustain himself within the poem. Ira had made it part of himself. It was himself. The only thing missing that Ira thought he could add was his self-revilings, his cankerous, special depravity. Yeah. Kept him from feeling all that intolerable ennui Eliot felt, but otherwise Ira knew he was close. He was telling you life was a worthless, pointless, tiresome void, papered over by what d’ye call it? Formalities. Why had it taken him so long to figure that out? The poet didn’t say it right out loud, the way an old gink like Longfellow might have said it: life is real, life is earnest. He didn’t say life is vain, it’s a lot of worn-out etiquette. He didn’t have to say it. You were the one who said it. So. . he was only saying what Ira felt. And now what Ira felt was a poem. He could quote it. Though he was speaking for the leisure class, for the gentry and for gentiles, and he was from the koptsn and the shleppers, and a Jew, still, Ira felt the same; funny, Larry didn’t. All in all, if he had come out of the long moiling and groping through Joyce’s Ulysses with the realization that the materials for literature lay in the plethora of the squalid and the banal all about him, Ira emerged from the “Prufrock”—much more than from The Waste Land—inoculated with disenchantment, immune to ideology, to allegiance, more prone than he had ever been before to alienation, courting it. Everything became mere counters for manipulation — inventory for a writer, if that’s what he was ever going to be: pegs to hang irony on: religion, Yiddishkeit, immigrant ordeals and adversities, sweatshops and trade unions and “sotzialism,” sordidness and Jew-baiting, penury and persecution, one’s own enormities, one’s own callousness and cowardice, everything was convertible to universal literary currency.

How strange, how strange in so many ways! So many fateful forces at work: the petering out of Larry’s literary impulse, his interest too, and with it, as though his charm were draining away, his personal charm, his social charm, as if he had lost an inner grace, and in its place, in place of that freshness, originality of observation, that lyric bloom, as in genetics, a separation had occurred. The pristine feature became recessive, and the commonplace one dominant. The poetic imagist became the spinner of set jokes, the histrionic raconteur, luxuriating in tedious embellishment. At first, and more and more, as time went on, Ira would catch Edith’s eye seeking his own, as if he were trying to transmit her patient indulgence, or her evaluation on the beam of her sympathy — at the same time as she smiled tightly at one of Larry’s long-winded anecdotes. Just a week before Ira got the job at Loft’s, she had intimated — and how he treasured that minute of privacy! — that she would always welcome a visit by Ira alone. How he gloated over that! Some time was to elapse before he could — and before he dared — take advantage of her invitation. But when he finally did, the bashfulness he felt at first wore off by the time the visit was over. Ira went away, urged warmly, earnestly, to return; he went away, gleeful in his treachery, feeling as if he were someone between a neophyte and a confidant. Ira was pledged to discretion.

Edith and Ira discussed Larry a great deal — that first time, and afterward. From the very beginning, she dwelled on her disappointment in the way he was developing. He was merely facile, she now realized: his talents were superficial — not as Ira’s were, deep and serious; they would develop, she was sure, into those of a genuine literary artist. Larry would never grow as an artist, she was sure of that too, because he shied away from discipline, or lacked the stamina to cope with it, with the taxing and the unpleasant — as Ira was capable of doing, as she had seen him do, first in Woodstock with the Ulysses, and then by his poring over T. S. Eliot and his shy comments about “Prufrock” and The Waste Land; she found them very stimulating. Larry’s taking on sculpture was really just another proof of failure. It was an escape. Instead of tackling the arduous, the demanding, and patiently, quietly, requiring all he could of himself, he had shifted to the immediately rewarding. That was his trouble: he craved immediate rewards, accolades. It was his family that was at the root of all this: they had made so much of his cleverness that he expected the same kind of instant applause and admiration for everything he did, and when he didn’t get it, he turned to something else. She had hoped he could overcome their middle-class influence, their ideas of success, and for a while she had thought he could, but she was mistaken. Though he had shifted from NYU to CCNY, and had given up his dental career, he hadn’t been able to break away from his middle-class ties and his middle-class standards. He was just too dependent on family, too attached, too given to basking in their admiration. He would become just like the rest of his family in time: conventional. He would surrender to their middle-class values: “I’m sure you’ve noticed how shallow he’s becoming.” Edith shook her head solemnly.

Shallow. What did it mean, he now pondered, having become — long ago — a lapsed writer himself. His springs of creativity had run dry, seemingly petered out, just as Larry’s had done, the chief difference being that his depletion took place a few years later than Larry’s. Did the same stricture that Edith had once applied to Larry apply to Ira as well? Was he too shallow? Once again, what did it mean? In that case there were dozens of shallow writers of that period, that time, each showing great promise at the outset, each producing creditable work, a novel, a trilogy, and then, silence or redundancy, Hollywood or academia — or premature demise, as though they willed it. Salmon who fought their way upstream to breed — Ira turned eyes inward, as if to examine the metaphor. Perhaps it went deeper than he knew. Salmon fought their way up to their own origins, their own native freshwater streams, to breed and perish. But that was only an analogy; it told you nothing of the concrete forces at work, psychological, social. One could say they were like certain minerals, Ira told himself: lead sulfide that fluoresced in ultraviolet light. They were on the beam then, irradiated and radiant, and when it passed, they went dark. But again, that was only analogy. What beam? How many writers and poets who belied their early promise did Edith dismiss in the same way that she dismissed Larry: they were shallow? What was it that gave out? It seemed as if an entire literary generation, Ira’s own contemporaries, had petered out. Why had replenishment been curtailed for them, and what kind of replenishment was required, but absent? One after another of the writers whose acquaintance Ira had made through Edith came to mind. Each offered a different explanation, or for each one a different explanation was offered, to account for each individual’s default in the face of early promise. Here, one imbibed too freely, here, another suffered a psychological block, here marital and here financial difficulties. . until Ira began to suspect that all these explanations, or excuses, were so many symptoms of a general malady that affected them all. It was a most peculiar malady, more nearly like a plague, and today, Ira regarded Larry’s case as one of the earliest examples of how that plague affected them, the more susceptible talents like his first, the less susceptible ones later, but all eventually. Initial success virtually guaranteed that one would succumb to the plague sooner or later. And why? Because the dynamic of the scourge lay coiled within itself: success tended to drive the artist from his source. To the degree that he exploited that source, to the same degree was he divorced from it. Nor was there any other source remotely as viable that could be annexed in place of the abandoned one. Why? Did the transfer from a parochial world to a cosmopolitan one negate the parochial one? Negate, yes, in an organic sense. But here was annulment, and therein might be the answer. The two worlds were not organically connected, for otherwise the one might have subsumed the other. Greenwich Village literati, growing excited about literature over a cocktail, were sterile as literary material — at least to Ira. He didn’t know these people, their origins, memories, motivations, patterns of thought. They were alien to the world Ira had fled from, but was informed by, as he was alien to the world they had fled from, and were informed by — and neither they nor Ira could any longer return.

There you have it. And Eliot before you. Ira slid dry fingertips over dry fingertips. Editing his prose of five years ago gave him an oddly unreal feeling, imposed a kind of surrealist duality upon himself, almost dangerous, in that he was at a loss as to who the writer was, who judged, who determined, whose emotion and sense of fitness was the more authentic, corresponded best with reality. Dangerous, in that he verged on loss of control. Or was it that writing under stress made the transcribing and rewriting seem surrealist? He had been depressed again this morning (new pains, new symptoms: osteoporosis, perhaps, from taking cortisone over so long a period). He had been hostile to existence, surly to M, and she had begun to weep: “Do you want me to give up writing music?” she had asked.

Perhaps it had been the visit of M’s brother, Clive, and his wife, Mary, these last two days, that had had something to do with his grimness — unconscious maybe, who knew. Clive was well-to-do, with a winter home in Florida and a summer home in Michigan. A retired insurance consultant, he was tall, naturally imposing, and thoroughly American. Soon to be eighty, a bit florid of countenance, he had to watch his blood pressure, hoped to die on a tennis court, and addressed his placid wife — mother of their eight children, social register, though exceedingly versatile domestically — as Mrs. P. Clive was very cordial with Ira, communicative, as toward a member of the family. He was warmly affectionate with his sister, recalling old times when they tried to motorize a bicycle, and failed, and when they went out to the sand dunes with the outmoded box camera that took pictures on glass plates. “And who carried the covering cloth?” M reminded pointedly, just as a sister would. And therein lay the rancor, of that were the filaments spun.

From the time of her marriage to Ira, until. . when? 1975, over thirty-five years, Clive had never communicated with M. And in what dire straits she had been once, back in 1950, when she had lain paralyzed with undiagnosable Guillain-Barré, she who had driven her brother, Clive himself, for radiation treatment when he developed a cancer of the colon — miraculously remitted. Well, what the hell. . Ira had behaved boorishly, in the family’s Cape Cod home, Jew Ira, after Father, executive secretary of Kiwanis International — and an ordained Baptist minister besides — in his monumental insensitivity had remarked that Kiwanis International, that famous, public-spirited, public service organization, didn’t want kikes joining in. Ira had been asked to leave. And when Father himself was about to die of a stroke a year later, he enjoined his wife to have nothing more to do with M, cut her off from all inheritance (to their credit, M’s siblings had ignored the paternal injunction). Well, the hell with it. What did Pop do, the old sonofabitch? Left Ira and his two sons a dollar apiece, out of about forty grand. To hell with it. What did Blake say? Something about running your team and plow over the bones of the dead. There were other things more important to consider.

Yes. Whose voice did the talking, whose was in the right? The one in a previous draft arguing so persuasively, so convincingly, that he felt unmoored from his own ego? Or his own later voice, almost diametrically opposed in view: that it was not separation from source, or truncation of “roots,” that was the cause of the deterioration of the talents, the cause of the fading of the brilliant gifts of those whose advent as writers had been so auspicious? He had argued that the cause of their failure lay in their inability — and his own too — to align themselves with the future. Marcia Meede had said something akin to the same notion in one of her poems, a kind of old-fashioned exhortation in verse, which Edith (in days of friendship still) had included in her first anthology: “We have no past for fuel,” the young men said, as the first stanza began. And the second: “Cut then your future down!” the old men said. It was an ingenious conceit, more than a little forced, and like some of Longfellow’s tropes, silly if pressed too far. Who knew what to cut, or where? Who knew where that future lay? It was a matter of luck, of conditioning, of alignment with the grain of that future forming in the present. Moreover, he didn’t like her metaphor of “cutting your future down.” It struck him as distasteful, lacking in nuance. And further, it begged the question. Then so did he with his own idea that he and others as talented as he was, or more, had failed because they had been unable to align themselves with the future. Oh, hell, all he proved to himself was that he was no intellectual, even remotely, was incapable of dealing with abstractions. No philosopher. How many times had he looked up the meaning of “ontology,” only to forget it the next day. He learned by rote; he learned through his muscles, he was wont to say. Plebeian: Christ, anybody could see that Larry had clung to his folk, had not severed from them, his sources, so called. But were they, were they? And if they were, was that where the “shallowness” was to be found? Who were they, first-and possibly second-generation Americans? Then Edith was only partly right, partly right and partly wrong. Larry had the capacity — for feeling; he had the receptivity, the discrimination, the imaginative bent — but no profound source to draw from. Then he, Ira, was back to his original thesis: the same thing applied to him: his sources were the measure of his depth. Though deeper than Larry’s they too had given out.

That was not all he could say about the subject. That was all he should say. Literary figures appeared at the threshold of mind, Joyce and Shaw, Synge and Sean O’Casey and Yeats — curiously, all Irishmen. Well, Faulkner then. But he barred them all. This was not the place to dwell on the topic any longer, even in his ramshackle fashion. It was strange, though, how contradictions within the self made you feel, as if you had lost all your substance, were hollow. It had taken him a long time to oppose himself to himself, nor was he sure any longer he was right now and wrong then, but at least he had acknowledged the two opposing theses. He had tried not to ignore anything, blot out anything, fake anything. He had tried to be honest. And the answer he sought still eluded him. Still, acknowledging his own contrarieties reunited him within himself.

He sighed. Time to save: his electronic timer beeped a warning that the hour was up. And then the dreadful thought occurred to him. If his second thesis was true, could it be there was no future, and that was why so many bright spirits so suddenly dimmed? Nonsense.

I am Merlin and I am dying, involuntarily, the Tennysonian quote came to mind: I am Merlin and I am dying. .

XIV

They would be lying on the studio couch, Edith and Larry, after Larry had put away his sculpture, or possibly finished it, done all he was capable of in reproducing a likeness of Edith in clay. They would be lying on the studio couch necking, as it was commonly called: clinging, caressing, billing and cooing, giggling. That was how they made love, with a third party, himself, present, though why he should be present puzzled him — at first. Was it because Larry wanted to show off his skill in modeling clay? (Afterward, his being there seemed natural, and later still, in later years, the tripolar, if not more, seemed to characterize all of Edith’s relations.) He knew only that he was welcomed by both, welcomed by Edith, invited by Larry. They didn’t mind his being present, he explained to himself, because their lovemaking was so harmless, so innocent, so unsullied. Little wonder — he would reflect afterward — that he got all kinds of bizarre notions of how decent people made love, people not wrenched beyond recovery, not saturnine and self-despising, as he was by the despicable things he did — with a kid cousin. Unfortunately, there was an element of truth in his bizarre notions too: decent people weren’t maimed by their early sex experiences as he was; quite the contrary, their early sex experiences may have been, as they were with Larry, one of memory’s loveliest blooms. All this Ira discovered later.

But then, as 1925 pressed toward its wintry close, Ira would discreetly turn his chair sideways, so that his back was mainly but not entirely toward the lovers. Not to seem rude, as if he disapproved, the way he sat didn’t preclude occasional glimpses of close embrace by the two figures stretched out full-length on the studio couch, nor erotic speculations — while he ruminated intermittently over passages in The Waste Land.

Why? Why? Why did Larry want him there — and Edith too? Was he, did he appear so safe, in their eyes, so sexless, so indifferent, that their amorous play wouldn’t bother him? True, he feigned well, feigned unconcern, ingenuousness. Oh, but he had lots of experience dissembling: look at the way he had gotten away with it at home, under the noses of Mom and Pop; at Mamie’s, under her nose — and Zaida’s too, now that he lived with Mamie, under his very whiskers. Maybe because he appeared to be so phlegmatic, inattentive, abstracted, he gave the impression that he was unaffected by display of normal libido. That was why he had been invited to stay in Woodstock with them, that was why he was here. They were wrong, but they were right too. Something in him, that kind of normalcy, perhaps, had been stamped out, had been destroyed. Had something in her gone awry in Edith too? Would he still feel that way if — if, yeah, Larry rammed it into her, by some pretext, undercover flagrante? Yeah, that was it; why the hell didn’t he? Why this dry simulation, this dry cuddling? Maybe they did the regular thing some other time, and Larry made no mention of it. But Jesus, that was funny. He had the same feeling in the 8th Street basement apartment that he had about Larry in the lovely stone house in Woodstock, the same feeling about why Edith was so tense: Larry wasn’t satisfying her. All right? So if that was true, what difference did it make whether Ira was there or not? Okay, for Christ’s sake, why didn’t Larry satisfy? Why? You tell me. . While I was fishing in the dull canal on a winter evening round behind the gas-house. .

Wasn’t that good? It gave you the feeling of loneliness and emptiness, right in the midst of a great city, a sense of the forlorn, the drab and deserted. Who was that king whose death the poet mused on? The guy fishing in the dull canal musing on the king his father’s death. Who the hell was that? Ira’s gaze rested on the line of the open page: And on the king my father’s death before him—

Edith, who lay on the outside edge of the studio daybed, sat up first. “Sometimes Ira looks like an ancient Hebrew prophet.”

“Me?” Ira scraped his chair around. Now that the amorous séance was over, he could face them. “Me? I’m the raven never flitting.”

“I was just thinking you missed your vocation,” she said, still seated.

“Just barely missed,” Ira rejoined with appropriate absentness.

And Larry behind Edith, still lying on his side, his white shirttails out, mussed, “What vocation? He’s a bugologist.”

“Oh, no, a rabbi,” Edith countered. “He would have made a wonderful rabbi.”

“What’s the portion for the day, Rabbi Stigman?” Larry chaffed.

“I’d hate to tell you.”

“Go on. Let’s hear it.”

“Something I read in Walden Pond: What demon possessed me to behave so well.”

“Did Thoreau write that?” Larry rolled luxuriantly supine. “I don’t remember it.”

“Yeah. What demon possessed me to behave so well.”

“Is that how you feel?” Edith inspected him with large brown eyes. “You do behave well, so loyally in every way. And so stable. Do you regret it?”

“Yeah.” His lie loomed up before him huge as a genie from its vase.

“Poor lad.”

“What would you rather have been?” Larry asked. “If you didn’t behave so well? A what? A Don Juan? A trickster? Held up a stagecoach?” Larry grinned. “A highwayman, like Alfred Noyes’s. ‘The highwayman came riding, riding. .’ What’s the next word, please? That was a scream, to listen to Salmanowitz in Mr. Donovan’s Public Speaking 3. Everybody had to memorize a piece.”

“Yeah?” Ira enjoyed the imagined scene.

“About every third line—‘Salmanowitz: what’s the next word, please?’”

“Do you have Public Speaking? Oh, yes, you told me you do. It seems so strange.”

“I know. Ninety percent of CCNY is Jewish. It’s compulsory. Four years.”

“It’s the only college I know of where that’s true.”

“You can guess why.”

“I suppose so. It never bothers me, but then. Hamberg’s accent was atrocious. But nobody seemed to care. What annoyed people was his bad manners, and of course his political views. I told you he was tarred and feathered.”

“Unbelievable.”

“How do you get rid of tar and feathers?” Ira asked earnestly.

“Cleaning fluid of some kind, I imagine. Naphtha. I really don’t know. I never asked Shmuel what he did do.”

“You expect to be tarred and feathered?” Larry sat up.

“Me? No. Worse.”

“After telling us about the demon — that you behaved so well.”

“What would you rather have become?” Edith asked.

“‘A pair of ragged claws,’ Eliot says. I’m dumb. I don’t know. My mother told me I once wanted to be a janitor when I grew up, because that way we could get our rent free. Another time, the rabbi gave me a penny because I was so apt reading Hebrew. It was gibberish as far as I was concerned. Once he even came to the house to tell my mother I would make a great rabbi someday. So Mom gave him a glass of cold seltzer water out of one of those glass siphons we kept in the icebox.”

“Where was that?” Edith asked.

“On the East Side. Boy, didn’t I pity that poor deliveryman with the whiskers, panting and groaning up four flights of stairs with a wooden case half full of siphons.”

“You two are so different. Your backgrounds are so completely different. People tend to think of Jews as being alike, but that’s ridiculous. When I think of you two, and Shmuel Hamberg spluttering and ranting about Zionism and socialism those first years. And then of course there’s Boris, my colleague, who’s almost too smooth. Actually, I find him a little repulsive, you know, he’s so very oily.”

She had stood up. And now Larry followed suit: “Attraction of opposites in our case.” He opened his belt and the top button of his trousers, then began stuffing his shirt under his waistband. Flat as a lath and boyish his waist. “It gives us lots to shmooze about.” He had used the borrowed expression so often that Edith understood.

“I tell him about the wonderful beaches in Bermuda, the glass-bottom boats and the darkies singing, ‘Aeroplanes up in the air droppin’ bombs on Leicester Square,’ and he tells me about living on Avenue D and the tugboats in the East River. Just now about the man with the seltzer bottles. I tell him about my father’s dry-goods store in Yorkville, and the kinds of people who would come in there; and he tells me about his father’s milk wagon. That’s how we keep each other interested. I know all about manufacturing ladies’ housedresses from my brother, Irving. Ira knows all about hustling soda at the ballpark. I know how to sell housedresses; Ira knows how to sell Loft’s candy. You’re a better cadger than I am, though.” Larry rubbed an eyelid.

“What do you mean?” Edith asked.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Ira cautioned.

“There goes the prophet,” said Larry. “Say, how should I spell that? With a ph or an f?”

“Aw, c’mon.”

“I don’t know what you two are talking about.”

“It’s a secret.”

“Let me just tell Edith about the roll of quarters. Okay?”

“No. Some bosom companion you turned out to be.”

“What are you two talking about?”

Larry smiled at Ira’s discomfiture. “It has to do with the baseball park, the Polo Grounds it’s called. I told you I worked there too for a day. It was awful.”

“Oh, yes.”

“The concession owner’s wife, or daughter—”

“Daughter-in-law.”

“All right?” Larry pressed for permission.

Ira remained silent: his tacit consent and curiosity about Edith’s reaction. . complex curiosity, like that about the cat.

“What was her name?”

“What’s the difference? Mrs. Stevens,” Ira conceded.

“Oh, yes. She gave Ira a ten-dollar roll of quarters by mistake when he asked for a two-dollar roll of nickels for change.”

“Yes?”

Larry broke into a delighted chuckle: “Oh, you don’t get the point at all, darling. You don’t get the point at all!”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t return it, Ira?”

“He’s a traitor, a low-down traitor. Wait till I get even.”

“You really didn’t keep it, Ira?” Edith was manifestly shocked. “I don’t believe it.”

“It felt so nice and round,” Ira began — stopped, and sensed a blush rising to his cheeks at Larry’s guffaw, and Edith’s sudden high-pitched laugh. “Well, it’s a difference in upbringing.” He scowled, gesticulated. “Poverty has a — a different set of rules from affluence — maybe. I don’t know.”

“I never would have dreamed of taking anything that didn’t belong to me.”

“Well, you get funny ideas of impersonality,” Ira tried to justify. “If it’s from a company, or a corporation, it isn’t so bad as from a person.”

“I don’t think it makes any difference.”

“No? Well.”

“Would you do it again?”

“You want me to be honest?” And meeting her large-eyed gaze: “Hey, that’s a funny question a guy like me should be asking himself.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up,” Larry apologized. “I didn’t know we would get into a debate on morality.”

“I warned you,” Ira accused. “What was the point, anyway?”

“I just thought I’d give Edith an idea of what we talked about. The demon didn’t possess you altogether.”

“I’m sure she knows by now.” Ira could feel Edith’s large brown eyes still searching, searching candidly, as if to penetrate the surface of the identity he presented. Seconds passed before he could meet her gaze, and then he did, and for the first time since they had known each other, though he could feel his lips trembling, he was aware of the steady harshness with which his eyes met hers. “Well, I’ll tell you, the lady with the orange hair is smoking a cigarette in a long silver cigarette holder. And she comes up to the till with a big bosom, and condescends to swap your money for a roll of coins. You don’t think of 119th Street, the cold-water flat you live in, and maybe,” he hesitated a moment, “what it did to you, what it’s doing to you. It takes over, a dynamic mass, you might say. Now that doesn’t make the act any more honest, you know, doesn’t justify dishonesty. Condones maybe.” He fought against the grimness permeating him. “I’ve paid for it, over and over, for that lousy roll of quarters.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Ira dear.”

“What a tempest I’ve managed to stir up,” Larry interjected. “Never again, I promise on a stack of Bibles. Let’s forget it.”

“Do you still want to know whether I’d do it again?”

“Oh, no, please, Ira.”

“You know, it’s funny. Now that you’ve asked, maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I never would again. Two worlds get into collision.” He could sense the trace of a faint smile easing the grimness of his visage. “I’m sorry, Edith. I’m just getting to know yours.”

“Oh, no. I’m the one who should apologize,” Edith said, compassionate in her contrition. “I keep being surprised all the time by the values other people have. I think everyone’s values are like mine. I should know by now they’re not. Especially in New York. In fact, I know they’re not, but I still keep being surprised. The impersonality of the big city, of cosmopolitan New York, the very height of the skyscrapers, instead of the piñons and ponderosas of New Mexico. Instead of the desert and the cactus of all kinds, there’s the noise and the crowds of the streets. I suppose they breed an altogether different outlook from my Western one. I’m just getting over my belated Western romanticism. We’re about twenty years behind someone like you in the East.”

Values. Values. Ira took a deep breath, studied the black-and-gray design of the Navajo rug on the floor. He seemed on the margin of some kind of idea that he couldn’t quite compel into definition — as usual. He saw values as an agglomerate of tiny bits of experience, or tiny conditions of life, hers in Silver City, in the Southwest, sun-drenched, open, mountainous, and clean, a land he never knew — and his ghetto and slum values, like minute bits of shells and silt, held together into a mass. Where had he seen it? A mass, abrasive and crude, agglomerated by his inescapable East Side Jewishness.

“Where are you two going from here this evening?” Edith asked.

“To the apartment, I hope.” Larry turned his head toward Ira. “Real Hungarian goulash. I heard Mama say this morning she hadn’t made it in a long time.” He adjusted his tie. “What d’you say?”

“What?”

“Have dinner at the apartment.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve got a bunch o’ work to do.”

“So have I. You’ve got your briefcase. We can practically have the whole house to ourselves after supper.”

“I know.”

“Okay?”

“No.”

“Why not? You’re not peeved about my bringing up that roll of quarters, I hope. I apologized.”

“Oh, no.”

“Then what?”

Ira burst into sudden strained laughter. “I don’t like Hungarian goulash.”

“Oh, come on. I know you do. And nobody makes it better than my mother.”

“Well, the fact is I ought to visit my grandfather. My mother’s been after me for weeks.”

“Do you still have a grandfather?” Edith asked.

“Yes. On my mother’s side. On my father’s side they’re both gone, both grandparents. It’s one of those freaks. Mom was the oldest child of her parents, and Pop was the youngest of his. And I’m the firstborn grandson. It’s the only night off I have,” he addressed Larry. “Thanks just the same.”

“Well. . big galoot.” Larry approached with grudging manner. “Dr. Pickens fired him out of the class for whispering. Both of us were at fault, but Ira was the big galoot. I can just see Dr. Pickens in his stage-acting days touring the country with a traveling company, and playing out West before an audience of big galoots. Back in 1890, I bet. You know, Edith, we used to have to learn gestures.” Larry extended a long arm gracefully: “Left hand, middle front supine. Like this.”

“Really?” Edith smiled appreciatively. “And he called you a big galoot?”

“Oh, I deserved it, I guess.”

“Elocution 7,” Larry added. “That’s how we met.”

“You know. .” Ira looked up, embarrassed by the memory. “The funny thing is that galoot in Hebrew means ‘in exile.’”

“Galoot in exile!” Larry bent over Ira’s armchair. “Oh, my God, not again!” He looked down at the book in Ira’s hands, inclined his head further to make sure. “Hebrew in exile. Edith, do you know what this raven never flitting has been reading again?” Larry wailed in mock despair. “He’s been reading The Waste Land.”

“Why not?”

“That’s an obsession. An idée fixe.”

“So it’s an idée fixe. Next time I’ll hide it behind a jogafree book.”

“Hide it behind Sandburg, hide it behind Amy Lowell. Cummings, Aiken — now there’s a lovely poet!”

“I think I ought to buy you a copy.” Edith tugged prettily at the tassels of her brown dress, straightened up to regard herself in the large wall mirror. “Would you like a copy?”

“Oh, no, I’ve practically memorized it. Be a waste of money. Waste o’ land. Ho, ho.”

“Then why do you keep reading it?” Larry demanded.

“I don’t always read it. Sometimes I read ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’”

“But why?”

“Something I need to know.”

“Something you need to know?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, great.”

“I think I understand,” said Edith.

“You do?”

“I think Ira keeps reading Eliot to find out what he feels about life—”

“Who’s he?” Larry interrupted. “Eliot?”

“Oh, no. Ira. Isn’t that so?”

“It comes close,” Ira agreed.

“Do you mean to say,” Larry addressed Edith, while he pointed at Ira, “he doesn’t know what he feels about life?”

“It’s quite possible.”

“That’s news to me. You don’t know what you feel about life?” Larry demanded.

“I don’t. That’s right.”

“I didn’t either at his age.” Edith interceded. “But I didn’t have time to think about it. I was too busy being an A student, getting on the dean’s list, honors, a Phi Beta Kappa key, and other things I don’t think are anywhere near as important as I did once. And of course, earning my own way, playing the piano in moving-picture houses, at shivarees. I think what Ira’s doing is far more important.”

“Why? What’s he doing? He reads The Waste Land. He reads ‘Prufrock.’ All right, then what do you get out of them? I’ll ask you.” Larry turned to Ira.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Ira began slowly, paused.

And when he failed to go on: “It’s not to be in the swim with the literati in the ’28 alcove?” Larry suggested.

“Well, maybe. I don’t know.” Ira found a cove in his ear to scratch. “You’re asking a multiple-choice question. I could either make a gag out of it, or tell you a tale that would make the hair on your head — what is it Shakespeare says, snaky locks in horror standing on end?”

“Well, we’re all grown up. Go ahead.”

“Make your hair stand on its head.” Ira grinned in evasion.

“You’ve indicated something like that before,” Larry persisted. “In fact, a number of times.”

“It’s like something I’m trying to find out. I won’t know till the end.”

Larry shook his head.

“Eliot is a bitterly disappointed romantic,” Edith came to the rescue. “Completely disenchanted about everything in the modern world. He scoffs at progress. He doesn’t believe in it, doesn’t believe in our modern conveniences. Or says he doesn’t. For him all our old values are meaningless or exhausted. Not necessarily middle class. Western values. They’re arid. He compares them to the richness of the Renaissance, the grace of the Elizabethans. He juxtaposes them to show how mean and tawdry ours are.”

“All right. But how many times do you have to read him to get a particular meaning? Once or twice would be enough. Ira reads him like a — what’s the name of that book clergymen read?”

“Breviary.” Ira shifted position, self-deprecating.

“Yes, breviary. Thanks. Why? Because he’s become the fashion, he’s become the vogue.”

“No. Because there’s more to it than that.”

“To tell you the truth, Edith,” Larry digressed, “I pity anybody with talent today. I mean any poet, especially if he falls under Eliot’s influence. It’s the undoing of their own, you might say, pristine sort of perceptions. That’s what I think, anyway. I feel that even though I don’t go along with Eliot, he has subtly undermined me.”

“You do?” Edith regarded her lover with large, solemn eyes. “Darling, I don’t think any writer can afford to neglect that part of his existence that a poet like Eliot is addressing, ignore it and hope to develop as a writer. I often tell my class: beauty is truth today in a way Keats never would have imagined. In fact, he might have been revolted by the way poets interpret beauty today.”

“I wouldn’t blame him,” Larry said.

Edith tilted her head and smiled, as much to console Larry as to indicate that she was prepared for what he said: she was resigned. There was a lull.

“I do. Yes. I feel quite resentful about him. It’s enough to feel his effect, the undermining of one’s own romanticism. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with romanticism, with being a romantic. I mean, Eliot’s destructive enough of youthful outgoing feeling, say like Millay’s, without having to pay tribute, get aboard his bandwagon. And I—” He looked at Ira with a certain restrained desperation. Then his gaze fixed on a passerby seen through the window, at the same time as the window light illuminated Larry’s regular features. “We seem to be very much opposed in this matter.” The palms of his big hands opposed each other. “That’s the chief reason I can’t stand rereading him. I’m just repeating what I said. He does something peculiar to my psyche, my id, identity, whatever you want to call it.” Larry grimaced at a vague unpleasantness, looked chidingly at Ira. “That’s why I wonder why Ira keeps rereading him. It’s not a question of bad faith, it’s a — well, antagonism.” He laughed at himself.

“I really think it’s too bad.” Edith shook her head commiserating. “Something like Eliot coming between you. It’s just too bad. It’s odd too. And almost funny.”

“That’s what I say.”

“I’m not arguing that. I’m not a poet,” Ira tried to rebut.

“Then what in all that futile, yes, cheap, moribund world of today he makes such a point of appeals to you so much?”

“That’s it. I see myself mirrored.”

Edith sat at the edge of the couch, her tiny hands clasped in her lap. Meditatively her large brown eyes traveled from Larry to Ira.

“Well, beauty has gone out of style is what it amounts to. I still think it exists despite Mr. Eliot. I can put it in a word: he’s undercut beauty.” Larry pressed his lips inward against his vehemence.

“And I have no feeling for it. Somehow, it’s not my world, that’s all. You’ve been raised on Beauty as something to worship; I haven’t. And when you turn Eliot down,” Ira leaned forward in his chair, “it means you haven’t been weaned.”

Edith suddenly laughed.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Larry demanded.

“Oh, I don’t know. Just a wisecrack maybe. Weaned into the lousy modern world.”

“I don’t think Ira is denying Beauty,” Edith intervened. “I think what he’s trying to say, and I think what he’s looking for in Eliot, and Joyce too, is to find some way to make use of his city upbringing, with its many ugly aspects, to make it into something beautiful.”

“Are you?” Larry addressed Ira.

“Vehr veist?”

“Galitz!” Larry’s epithet was not altogether humorous. “Vehr veist? He means ‘who knows.’”

“Although it may not necessarily be in Joyce’s or Eliot’s manner,” Edith continued soberly. “I suspect he’s trying to find some way of keeping the ugliness of modern urban life from overwhelming him. And us too for that matter.”

“By doing what?”

“Almost by making a shield of it.”

“And I can’t because I spent so much time in Bermuda, where life was so peaceful and beautiful. Is that it?”

“It’s not just that, lad. You were too gently reared.”

“And yet you thought it wasn’t advisable for me to break away from it. Or try to. Expose myself to some rough spots.”

“And I still think my advice was right, darling. It would be the height of folly if you didn’t go on and get your degree.”

“Damned if I do, and damned if I don’t. You got a good quotation for me, Ira? You generally manage to come up with a good one.”

“Not this time.”

“All right, then tell me: you pore over Eliot whenever you’re here. You waded through Joyce, right? When we were in Woodstock? You admitted you didn’t understand half of what you were reading about. The same thing is certainly true of The Waste Land. You need a lot of scholarship, literary background, not just English literature, foreign literature, Latin, Greek, all kinds of esoteric allusions. Frazer, for example. You haven’t got all that any more than I have. So in what way are they going to help you? That’s what I want to know. If you don’t understand it?”

“What you say is true. I don’t.” Ira thumped his back against his chair. “It’s a state of mind I get out of them. I don’t know what that state of mind is. I couldn’t give you a definition. But as I’ve said before, I can discern a compatibility. And I need it if I’m to do any writing. Maybe I can’t. But you know, Larry, there’s a lot of difference between us. I don’t have to tell you. I’m a shlemiel, yeah, I am,” he overrode Larry’s gesture of objection. “Gee, the things you can do. You can turn your hand to almost anything: writing popular lyrics, skits, acting, selling, that modeling in clay over there you’re doing. I haven’t got a damn thing, excuse me, Edith, I mean anything except where my ‘Impressions of a Plumber’ in The Lavender points to. If I’m wrong about that, I’m, gee, I don’t know. I could end up—” He wagged his hand in comic transition. “Dun’t esk.”

“And you think Joyce and Eliot will guide you toward realizing future literary ambitions?”

Ira shrugged. “I imagine I need more than just those two. But so far, I notice one thing: they both contrast a heroic or — or noble, maybe, past, chivalric pieces, passages, with an ugly present. Is that right, Edith?”

“I think you’re making a better point of it than I did.”

“Yeah? I don’t think the past was what they make of it either. Not for the common guy. The nobility maybe.”

“Is that what you expect to do also? Contrast the two?”

“I don’t think so. Not explicitly, you know. It happens that I come from a past a helluva, I mean a heck of a lot longer than any of their goyish ones. I mean gentile, Edith. But in both of those guys, life today is a negation. And I demand an affirmation. Another point is that Larry makes unfair comparisons. You know what he does. We’ve spoken of it. He contrasts the inconsequence and sordidness of modern life with the great literary art of the past. He links passages of his own observations of the tawdry modern actualities with quotations from the classics. Well, if you’re going to compare all the common ratty things of today with Elizabethan art and courtliness, it’s a cinch to tell who comes out ahead. What about comparing like with like? Joe Blow who comes in off the street to buy the Loft’s ninety-nine-cent special with Tom the shepherd who blows his nail, or the actual illiterate guy, probably, who lugs the logs into the hall.”

“All the more reason for me to ask, why are you so smitten with them?” Larry queried.

“I told you. If I don’t know who I am, how I can handle who I am, they come closest to telling me.”

Despondently, he skimmed through the small stack of her Xeroxed letters in his possession. Years and years ago, in the depths of the Depression, he had bought for Edith a secondhand five-drawered metal filing cabinet — twenty-five dollars — had paid two bucks extra for delivery from the Jewish office furniture dealer’s on Third Avenue to their place at 64 Morton Street.

And in this ample filing cabinet he had sorted out all his letters to her, and separately, all her letters to him. Of the ten-year exchange of letters, he had recovered none of his, only this little batch of Edith’s letters to him.

Just the sight of these letters made him recall Edith, poor Edith, near the end, an alcoholic, a confirmed sot, and she had undoubtedly blabbed everything. Pitying insight posed the question: what had happened to her self-esteem? Edith’s? So fine, so good, so generous, so tender. Oh, Christ, he had been just the right protégé for her. And had Edith also had incestuous relations with her father? A friend of Edith’s, Daniel, had asked him. Shux. If that wasn’t the morbidity of inversion.

Daniel had intended to write a biography of Edith sometime in the near future. But apparently the project fell apart when he learned about Larry. Edith hadn’t told Daniel a word about her freshman lover, or about other young men she had initiated, and was inclined to be skeptical about Ira’s assertion that Daniel’s primary source of information was untrustworthy, until Ira’s disclosure about Larry: “Well, how the hell did I meet Edith? I went to CCNY. Larry, my high school chum, went to NYU.” Perhaps, after that, Daniel saw that Edith was making sure she would be seen the way Ira felt she always wanted to be seen: as the heroine of her own tragic drama.

Anyway, there they were, the Xeroxes of her letters, relics of Edith, of the living woman that was, the mundane, the matter-of-fact, the worried, the hurt, unhappy, intelligent, forthright, moderately promiscuous woman he had scarcely understood, and couldn’t portray. Her voice in the typewritten letter was unmistakable.

I’ve been to Silver City twice in two weeks. The days are as I described before: just a setting and setting and a lifting Papa up and down, and getting his cigarettes or his glasses, and making and making conversation; and when he’s to bed, then there is Inez, his housekeeper, who can’t read, and making conversation with her till bedtime. I’m calming down now, was frightfully nervous at first, and have had little appetite, but sleep has helped, and I’m taking advantage of that at any rate.

So, to repeat, apparently things are awful out here. They are damned bad in Gallup too, I gather. I’ve decided I’m weird in one respect. All these people here around my age do is reminisce about the past. And how well they remember it! I’ve always pushed the past out of my mind; I don’t linger on it, rather resent it, I suppose, and consequently completely forget it. I always think either I’m crazy, or these people are, when I’m out here with them at all, as I’ve been once or twice, and only out here. Moreover I’ve an inclination to want to shock them, which is purely childish on my part, and this shows I still resent them more than I should. I’ve outgrown everything I met, one thing at a time, but you’re the one thing I’ll never outgrow, that outgrows me all the time, and that therefore I adore, and sometimes could kick violently in the seat of the pants, because you’re able to hurt me, and no one else is, and because most of the time you’re right, though your youth makes you immature in knowing how people live and are, often. You’d better have more personal life soon, or you’re going to need it badly, and whatever amuses you and feeds your imagination is all right with me always. Those letters of mine you’re filing away will give you a good deal of dope, I think, with which your imagination can work. I’ve forgotten how many people have deared and darlinged me, and it doesn’t matter, but what does matter is that most of them still like me, and take me for what I am without glamour. There is a terrific streak of emotional sentimentality in my family which I’ve always fought free of, but undoubtedly am possessed by at moments.

Much love, darling, and kisses for the beautiful black eyes, and go on a tear with a lady or a lamb or a man or a wolf now and then. Just don’t get bit or hurt.

So. . there she was, a trace of her. Echo, an echo. He stared at the pale keys until they swam, and he became melancholy with brooding about a past he strove so valiantly to re-create, about a past that he could feel, but that he could not resurrect from the dead.

Ira turned the doorknob, eased the doorknob, eased the door ajar, as he prepared to leave. “Gee, these glacial departures,” he muttered.

Edith laughed lightly. “What did you say?”

“I said these glacial departures. In the hallway already.”

“That’s what I thought,” she smiled. “Good night, lad.” She lifted her face to Larry’s, as he put on his coat as well.

“Good night, Edith.” Larry kissed her lips. “I’ll call you in a couple of days.”

“Good night, Ira.” Smiling fondly, she extended her hand.

“Good night, Edith. Thanks for all that toasted raisin bread and cinnamon.”

She followed them as far as the street door, contracted when they opened it, caught her breath and shrank back. “Isn’t it cold! Good night.”

“Good night, Edith. You’d better get back inside,” Larry called out.

They closed the door behind them, entered upon wintry, incandescent, hurrying, shifting forms on 8th Street: turned toward the Sixth Avenue El, amid the frigid stridor, frigid commotion of the crosstown trolley car, passing voices — and the ding-dong of the Christmas bell, shaken by the well-padded Salvation Army Santa Claus on the corner, tending the black iron pot hanging between the legs of the tripod.

“Oh, boy, it’s sure snappy out.” Ira quickened his gait, to keep abreast of the longer-striding Larry.

They forged ahead toward the musky dusk until the illuminated frosted-glass sides of the Christopher Street subway kiosk came into view.

“I wish you’d reconsider coming over to the house and having some of that lovely goulash with us,” Larry urged.

For a moment Ira hesitated. “Gee, wouldn’t I like to. But my poor old grandfather. It’s long past time I paid the old boy a visit. Mom’s been after me. You know how it is. I bet I’m missing something good.”

“You are, believe me. I’ve told you, my mother makes the finest goulash this side of Hungary.”

“What tough luck.” Ira shook his head regretfully. It would still be early evening when he got off at the 110th Street station, early enough to make a homey call at Mamie’s. Stella would surely be home by now. “I really mean it. Boy.”

Larry pulled off a fur-lined glove to get at a coin in his pocket. “Next Monday, okay?”

“That’s a far-sure as Pop would say.”

J’ai fait la magique etude que nul n’élude. Was that approximately the way Rimbaud’s line ran? He understood now. What was it he understood? The encompassing realization that he had slipped into his mind of its own accord some pages back, and been deferred. Edith would say, when he revealed his sorry history, first with Stella, then, as if torn from him, with Minnie, “I thought you were unawakened. I thought you were maternally directed, and still uninterested in sexual relations.” She thought right, in the right direction, but not far enough. How could she? It had taken him a lifetime for the truth about himself to coalesce into the simple fact that stared him in the face, single fact with multifacets: that answered such questions as: why was he invited to accompany Larry and Edith on their tryst in Woodstock? His first conjecture had been that he was invited in order to play a diversionary role (actually, had they been discovered by people who knew Edith, they might easily have come to absurdly erroneous conclusions regarding her appetites). But the true answer, he now felt, went deeper than that.

He had been invited to Woodstock first, and later, with Edith’s consent and apparent approval, he was invited to assist at those sculpture-cum-lovemaking sessions, because of what he was. Had he, Ira, been other than what he was, someone with developed masculinity, or with developed libido corresponding to his age, Larry would certainly have discerned it, certainly have avoided competition. Was Larry too wanting in that respect? Of course he was. As if it were a formula by which a number of seemingly diverse problems were solved. Turn where he would, the same fact stared him in the face from a score of directions. Even that — what did Edith say in her letter to him of which he had excerpted a part: “. . though your youth makes you immature in knowing how people live and are, often. You’d better have more personal life soon, or you’re going to need it badly. . ”

Ira put the letter back in the file.

Ironic as hell! Two waves intersecting so casually: “your youth makes you immature. .” and “You’d better have more personal life.” Two waves that originated from the same source, two waves propagated at different times. For when he did seek that more personal life she spoke about, strove to break free of that which she called immaturity (merely immaturity!), there was hell to pay: Edith turned into a Fury. But what was this all leading up to? What was the underlying cause of this unifying fact that stared him in the face, that synthesized his diverse manifestations of behavior into a comprehensive realization, into a Joycean epiphany? Nothing other than his continued, his prolonged infantilism. It was that that made him a safe confederate at his friend’s wooings, such as they were; it was that that had accounted for his own acts with Minnie and kid cousin Stella. Why the hell hadn’t he seen that before — and chided Ecclesias for not revealing it? Why the hell? His infantilism. Safe as a child — ostensibly — safe as an “unawakened” juvenile. His puerility lulled everybody into trust, his own family, his shrewd aunt Mamie, predisposing Larry, perceptive Edith. Only the almost clairvoyant, mercilessly unequivocal Vivian, with whom he was to fall in love, saw through him at once: “You kiss like a baby.”

You might swing around in your swivel chair, my friend, and ask, Why? Ask why of your mentor, Ecclesias. Oh, it wasn’t necessary, Ira thought: he knew why, knew why without asking. He had been fixed in infantilism as deep as a bronze boundary marker was fixed in the ground, deep as a utility pole. A few genes might have been predisposing factors, a few of Pop’s genes. But no use going into that now, Ira checked himself. Enough that he had abstracted at last the key to his behavior, a conception of the driving force of behavior he loathed — and in the end, had to counteract.

PART TWO

I

The joy Ira had felt when Larry transferred from NYU to CCNY, the joy of having his closest friend in the same college, the same class, sharing the same alcove with him, had worn off by the time the spring term of 1926 began. Relationships had altered, and no longer was Larry the unquestioned, the well-nigh anointed guide he once seemed in realms of art, letters, and poetry, Ira his shy, abashed follower. It was not only that Ira had published a piece in The Lavender and Larry had stopped writing that changed attitudes and roles, but Ira had learned much from Edith, in the very presence of Larry, by whose wish he was present. He had learned much from Edith by merest hints and intimations, inklings, almost, of judgment, reflecting without doubt her changed feelings about Larry. Barely perceptible changes of mien transmitted all manner of subtle information concerning true feeling under a beguiling exterior. Whether Edith knew it or not, or Larry either, Ira’s presence at these sessions enhanced awareness, capacity for perception; it increased his explicit evaluation too. All at once, as if stemming from early subordination to Larry, incipient rivalry grew, and then domination. Edith knew it. Larry knew it. His creativity seemed in retrograde remorselessly. He gave up sculpting, dropped out of the School of Design. The clay bust of Edith, the stand, and the modeling instruments disappeared. His enthusiastic descanting on Brancusi and Maillol shifted to talk about the theater, about the stage. Acting was nothing to look down upon, he declared. Many a well-known playwright had begun as an actor, and he intended to begin that way himself. He was sure he was endowed with a natural talent for the stage. Dramaturgy might well follow. A single term in a school for acting would be all he needed. He intended to apply for a bit part at the Provincetown Playhouse that spring, and if none was forthcoming, then a bit part the next fall when the theater opened with a new play.

Fortunately, Izzy, classmate and member of their small clique at the college, worked as a doorman at the Provincetown Playhouse, the famed little theater in Greenwich Village. Eugene O’Neill had made his debut as playwright there, and since it was the policy of the theater’s ruling committee to try out plays by new and often unknown dramatists, avant-garde plays were to be expected, and did occur. Because Izzy’s sister, who had gotten Izzy the job as doorman, was a combination cashier-bookkeeper and business manager for the theater, it would be a simple matter for Iz to keep Larry posted about new developments. Besides introducing Larry to Tom Wright, the stage director, Izzy could let Larry know when casting would begin. Flushed with hope of a new beginning, and the auspicious way expectations dovetailed with prospects, Larry already moved about like a seasoned actor treading a proscenium.

Edith and Ira applauded his new choice of artistic calling. Ira knew they both made the same appraisal of it, though Ira felt sure his was far less kind, far less generous, than hers. Ira’s contained an element of gloating — because, knowing Edith so much better now, if only intuitively, and striving to conform to her standards, her values, Ira could guess how she must be comparing Larry in his new avocation with the promising young lyric poet who had so romantically entered her life only a short year and a half ago. So he’d found his true level — that of a performer and nothing more; Ira knew she wondered how she could have been so mistaken. Conjecture, and unkind conjecture, was all Ira had to go on — at first. Fancy, given play, became a kind of thermocouple formed by her merest hints of tone of voice and features and his wish fulfillment. And yet, the more Ira tried to reflect objectively on what was taking place, the more inevitable became what he had foreseen, even when presented with the Ulysses by default the summer before. The present reverted to the past, but in a spiral. He and Larry walked again through 59th Street from DeWitt Clinton toward the chary shadow under the West Side El, in which the United Cigar store show window glared with incandescent beacons. How different the meaning in retrospect of Larry’s singing those snatches from The Pirates of Penzance in which he had a small part: “A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox—” The enchantment Ira felt then had its current analogue in Larry’s own bathetic parody: a pair o’ socks, a pair o’ socks, a most ingenious pair o’ socks.

In keeping with his new choice of artistic avocation, Larry applied for the position of assistant entertainment director at the prestigious Jewish summer resort Lemansky’s, in the Catskills, for the summer of 1926. He was granted an interview with the board of directors of the resort. Larry came away believing that he had made a very favorable impression, ad-libbing as stand-up comic, suggesting skits and partly performing them. A short time later he jubilantly announced that the board of directors had confirmed his appointment to the position of first assistant to chief of entertainment for the entire summer season. His summer, as he said, was taken care of. And not only this summer, but the next, and his prospects of a career on the stage greatly enhanced. For besides his functioning regularly as an emcee in the evening, he would have a hand in conceiving, writing, and staging all kinds of theatricals. True, it would be on a borscht-circuit level; still, it was a great chance to acquire professional knowledge of theater, from creating effects to scene-designing, costuming, and, of course, acting. Once again, Larry stressed, as if he were addressing himself to Ira’s unspoken reservations, that even the position of borscht-circuit entertainer offered valuable grounding for a career on the stage. He again cited instances.

And then something happened, momentary and sinister, an omen so ephemeral that only after many years was it recognized as a kind of preamble of a fateful warrant. During exam week, after which, and without waiting to ascertain grades, Larry had planned to pack at once and leave for the mountain resort, he suffered an unaccountable brief loss of consciousness. He had just stepped out of the doorway of the high-rise apartment house on West 110th Street “when all of a sudden I went blotto,” said Larry. The spell of unconsciousness must have lasted only a few seconds, for he recalled trying to pick himself up from the sidewalk just as passersby were extending a helping hand. He hadn’t suffered any ill effects to speak of, just a bruised shoulder and a swollen and lacerated ear. He was assured later by the family doctor the cause had probably been a small blood clot, nothing serious. Probably it would never happen again.

“He told me a little borscht would do me good,” Larry laughed when he met Ira in the ’28 alcove at noon between exams. “I just took the Mili Sci exam before, wouldn’t you know it. If I’d taken it with this bandaged ear I might have gotten an A-plus for the course. I got a battle wound.”

“Boy, all those bandages; that’s some knob. What’ll you tell ’em up there in the mountains?”

“Oh, I still got a day or two left. I’ll take it off. It’s just there against infection.” He tapped the top of the bandage with long, white forefinger. “They’d think it’s a gag anyway: a comedian with a cauliflower.”

He left the city without further incident.

Came the Tuesday following exam week. With Larry out of town, and at Lemansky’s, Ira took the opportunity to telephone Edith. She would be delighted to have him over, if Ira didn’t mind the mess. She was packing her suitcases, she was getting ready to leave New York and take the train for the three-day trip to New Mexico.

She was in the act of wrapping a pair of her tiny shoes in tissue paper when Ira entered the apartment. A couple of her dresses were still laid out on the bed. “It doesn’t look too much of a mess,” he commented, after greetings.

“The cleaning woman was here yesterday, so it looks halfway tidy,” she said. “Would you believe I’ve sublet it for the summer? I posted a notice on the college bulletin board, not expecting anyone would want it. It’s so dingy and noisy. And I told them about the dust they could expect in the summer. But that didn’t stop them in the least. They were simply starry-eyed at the prospect of living in the heart of Greenwich Village. It is near the university. I wish you might have seen the two very proper schoolteachers who rented it. They’re here from Waukegan, Illinois, to get credits in education.”

She invited Ira to sit down. No, she didn’t need any help. She could do this in her sleep, she had done it so often — and please forgive her for not stopping; she hoped he didn’t mind. “I loathe these ritual trips to the West,” she said. “The long boring train ride. I’m sure to get constipated. But I haven’t been there in two years. Last summer, of course, I went to Europe. It would break Papa’s heart if I didn’t appear. Mother could live. So could my sister, as long as I sent them a check regularly. But Papa is beginning to sound so old and defeated in his letters, it breaks my heart. I’m more attached to him than I realized. This daughter of his,” she tucked the shoes into a corner of the suitcase, “not one of whose ideas he approves of. Still, there’s a kind of unspoken affection that comes through despite our differences.”

“That’s how I feel about my mother. Not that she doesn’t approve. She doesn’t understand.”

“I know. Your face lights up when you speak of her.”

“Yeah? I guess you always love something you once loved,” Ira ventured.

She smiled. “Scarcely.”

“No?”

“I daresay you haven’t been through as many of these things as I have. They’ve left scars, deep ones, and perhaps it’s those very scars that have helped me get over loving. Anyway, I seem to have done that very well.” She folded inward the shoulders of a dress, held it to her as she faced Ira. “Perhaps you’re right.” She studied her reflection in the wall mirror. “I may not be speaking of true love. And yet I don’t think what I’ve been through, certainly not all of it, would be classed as merely encounter.”

“Encounter?” The word made Ira think, or try to, and thinking interfered with talking. Encounter? He worried the word. It was that kind of subtle distinction Larry could handle, could comprehend at once, justly, properly, Larry and his kind, yes, his middle-class kind. Ira couldn’t. Or was it that he had destroyed the true shape of that sort of word? Ira knew what she meant, he thought, but he had to translate it to himself — no, that wasn’t right. He had to let the word resound, not to translate it: resound within himself until it became imbued with a kind of pragmatism. Wasn’t that crazy? He knew that word, and now it was a stranger, or as if displaced. Which was the word, and which the parallax? Encounter. The same word used in a different world, one of the many Ira would have to relearn. And who would understand what he meant? How could he explain it?

“Oh, dear, I’ve forgotten to lay down a sheet of tissue paper. These linen dresses muss so.” She laid the dress down on the bed, where in the basement dusk the pale linen turned putty. She spread tissue paper on the top layer in the suitcase, then picked up the dress again. “I shouldn’t have bragged about being able to do this in my sleep.”

“You were talking,” Ira provided the excuse. . waited until she patted the dress smooth on top of the suitcase. “You heard about Larry?”

“Oh, yes. He was here Friday evening.”

“Oh, he was?” His aim was to say it as if it had no implication. Maybe it didn’t, for all he knew. No more than that scream she had uttered in Woodstock. Nothing ever stayed simple with Ira. “Did he take the bandage off yet?”

“No, poor lad. His ear was still pretty sore. I believe that’s a very, very serious thing — I know people will think I’m overly worried. They always do. But I’ve turned out to be right many times: his losing consciousness for no reason.”

“The doctor didn’t think it meant anything serious.”

“I’m very suspicious of most doctors.” With the last dress disposed of, she sat down on the studio couch. “Very suspicious. Larry’s father died of a heart attack. I presume the doctor knew that too. There’s always the danger. Unusual strain may bring it on, and it happened during examination week. I find that very disturbing. I think it’s a clear sign he may be headed for trouble, poor lad.”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t worried about the exams, though. His courses were easy, you know, arts courses. I don’t say they’re all snap courses, but—” Ira shrugged a shoulder. “Larry does B work — almost without trying. He tosses it off.”

“Well, how about that resort position? You don’t think he was overanxious about succeeding in it? He had already given up trying to write poetry, the thing he seemed at first best fitted to do. Then the stab at sculpture. It didn’t last very long. Again, he didn’t want to work at it. I can’t blame him if he tries different things. But he’s got to learn, none of them can be mastered without hard work, without self-discipline. You can’t substitute personal charm for achievement.”

“No, I know. But I thought he was happy about this: acting and that sort of thing. The stage. Entertainment.”

“That’s how he seemed to me.” Her bosom rose in an involuntary catch of breath. “I’m almost afraid to think about the possible causes. For one thing, they bring the matter so much closer to home.”

As usual, intuition provided an inkling of her meaning, an inkling cruel in its inference as Ira construed it, yet avidly countenanced.

“The last things the doctors take into account are the psychological factors; they’re always looking for physiological ones. I suppose they have to. That’s all most doctors can treat. But I don’t think I need to go the same route they do.” Her dress had large, bronze oblongs strewn against a lighter brown background. Her hands pressed palm to palm in her lap were so tiny, they seemed like a wedge in one of the oblongs. “There’s only one thing to do. Not show my concern. Or overconcern. And to be very careful.”

“You mean you have to be very careful?” It seemed the safest thing to say.

“Yes. I’m afraid so. He may be suffering from an inherent weakness: his heart. But it doesn’t change things very much. I mean, as far as my own responsibility is concerned. Even though nobody can accuse me of it. Possibly Larry’s folks might. Still, I may bear a greater share of the responsibility than I care to admit.”

“You mean responsibility for Larry falling down?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t see how.”

“I’m glad you don’t think so.”

“If you’ll excuse me, Edith, I think you’re exaggerating. It was a blood clot. So?”

“I keep reassuring myself that’s all it is — or was. And telling myself I’m being morbid. On the other hand, he was very young when all this began. I gave him all sorts of false hopes. As I said, the effect is beyond any doctor to detect. I can’t wish that the same beautiful lad was in somebody else’s English class, and see what would happen then. Would he have switched from dentistry into English literature — into thinking he had any kind of substantial talent as a writer, as a poet? All of which, unfortunately, I encouraged. In that sense I do bear responsibility. I’m sorry beyond words.” Her tiny fingers laced and unlaced as she spoke.

“Yeah, but there are other people who go through the same thing. Make big decisions that turn out wrong. You might say I did. They don’t get heart failure right away. They don’t even get blood clots.”

She laughed. “Thank goodness you came over.” Her nervous fingers came to rest. “Do you think — in fact — anything will come of his new enthusiasm for the theater?”

“I don’t know,” he hedged. “Larry’s always liked to — well, play a part.”

“And I’ve been foolish enough not to realize that trait from the very start. I’ve encouraged the poor lad to try to reach goals he never, never can reach. And there was Vernon with his homosexual designs to cloud my judgment even further.”

“Yeah.”

“Larry is a dilettante by nature. Perhaps he has to be, that may be how he saves himself. I know you think I’m hipped on the subject. But art does take a sturdy constitution. You notice how stockily Léonie Adams is built. Art does make demands on the body. His efforts to be a poet, or do anything worthwhile in writing, have come to nothing. I think because he loved me he was determined to show that he could live up to my expectations, and he couldn’t. He can’t. So his very love has frustrated the poor lad. The one thing he wanted most was to find meaningful artistic expression, and he’s been unable to. I think the pain has gone much deeper than he’s let anyone know. And now there’s the proof of it.” She paused, regarded Ira with her large, solemn brown eyes so steady within her olive countenance. “There’s proof of what’s happened.”

“Gee, just that one fall? We keep saying the same thing.” Ira tried to avoid looking askance.

“Yes. But I’m sure that’s just the beginning.”

“So how do you know? The doctor didn’t say so.”

“And you know what I think of doctors.”

“Then why’re you to blame?”

“I’ve said. For encouraging him to do what he’s not capable of. I think I encouraged him to overtax himself.” She paused, moistened her lips. “Of course, I didn’t know how serious it might be — how serious the consequences might be. But as I look back on it, I just know when the real heartbreak happened. Do you remember those last few days — or nights — in Woodstock when he would sit by candlelight trying to create the mood for a lyric, and couldn’t?”

“I remember he said once that the lyric he was writing wouldn’t go anywhere.” Even as Ira spoke, inarticulate perception hummed in the background: how calamitous she was.

The dimness of the room accentuated the gravity of her features. “It’s too late to do anything about that now. I’ve got to bring this thing to an end without his hurting himself any further. I’d never forgive myself if he did. I know I’m straining your loyalty to Larry, but you can see why, I’m sure. I’m deathly afraid of anything happening to him.”

“I don’t think anything will.”

“You won’t say anything, please?”

“Oh, no. I understand what you’re saying. But I don’t think you are — you’re anywhere near as guilty — I mean as responsible as you, uh—” Ira tried a pejorative frown. “As you say. And holy smoke, you’re accusing yourself of being responsible for just guesswork.”

“I hope you’re right.” She paused. “Oh, dear.” She seemed to encounter her anxiety in the window on the sidewalk. “You’re sweet to bear with me.”

“I don’t mind. I mean, I’m glad. I don’t know what good I am.” He shrugged. “Anyway, nobody can tell. How can you tell? His father had a heart attack last year. And this is a year later that Larry fell on the sidewalk. So even if what you say is true, I don’t see how you — you can blame yourself.”

“I probably wouldn’t, if John Vernon hadn’t been in the picture. I might have acted a little more maturely. I was much too concerned, and needlessly.” She raised a tiny hand to the back of her head as she spoke, absently fingered the bun of braided, glinting, dark hair, and brought a hairpin into view. “No use shifting the blame to John. I was just plain silly.” She applied the round of the hairpin to the inside of her ear. “It’s all water over the dam anyway.”

Ira watched, fascinated. When she had apparently relieved the itch, she pressed the round of the hairpin between her lips—

“Gee!” Ira exclaimed, jerked his knees together.

She regarded him in surprise.

“How can you do that?”

“Do you mean what I just did?” She held the hairpin suspended.

“Yeah. I never saw anybody do that before.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be doing it either.” She bent her head placatingly.

“Doesn’t it have a taste?”

“Oh, no. It’s just a bad habit.” She restored the hairpin to its place in the bun behind her head. “I’ll try not to do it again.”

“It’s all right.”

“It isn’t, really.” She patted the back of her head. “Does it bother you?”

“Oh, no, no. I was just—” He shrugged.

She smiled. “I wish Larry had more of your directness.”

Embarrassed, Ira was silent. To him, the incident had a peculiar metaphysical quality, a permanence transcending the transience and confusion of her preparations for departure, the shadowy walls, darkened by street dust, the open suitcase beside which she was sitting, on top of the mussed black couch cover. Reality seemed of another order, seemed condensed, the novelty of his being alone with Edith, here in her 8th Street apartment below the sidewalk. Her thoughts had apparently reverted to the difficulties of her situation.

“I’d thought even before Larry got this position of entertainer at the summer resort where he is now, that was where he was headed, and when he did get it, I was sure our relationship would come to a natural end. He was maturing so differently from what I expected. We were moving in such different directions. You must have noticed it.”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“Now I’m not at all sure how things will end, especially with his fainting so unaccountably, and this hint of heart trouble he’s shown. I can no longer be direct with him, you see, at least not as direct as I might have been otherwise. And of course there’s no turning back for either one of us, undoing what’s been done. All I can do is hope and pray that some adoring young female at that summer resort will worship him to the point of diverting his attention away from me. From me, and all I represent. It’s a rather slim hope, but it’s all I have to go on. His weakness for adoration for its own sake.”

“I know. He told me once.”

“Oh, he did?” Edith looked at him questioningly.

“Something about wanting a woman to get down on her knees and worship him. I thought that was funny.”

“I’m not at all surprised. Then you understand what I mean. I’m past that stage. I can’t imagine how I could have been such a ninny in the first place. But I was. . I don’t suppose you know what it means to be a woman turning thirty, and someone as beautiful as Larry coming into her ken. Such an extraordinary Adonis comes into her life — so worldly, so cosmopolitan — in love with you.”

“I was crazy about him too — that way, at first. He was wonderful.”

“Yes. . and I don’t want to spoil your feeling for each other either. It’s a very beautiful relationship.”

A kind of rhythm went through Ira’s head, as of a poem whose words he had forgotten. The two sat quietly looking at each other for a few seconds without saying anything. How could Ira tell her, he felt sorry for the guy, but it has to be? Tell her: It isn’t her fault at all. It’s his. He’s up against a will that’s so inexorable, he doesn’t even have to exert it, a will that compels him. How did he know he hadn’t overborne him step by step, overcome him? As if he had become some kind of elemental, insensate force, and Larry was somebody humane and mild and good. Tell her that he was like that hungry fighter you read about; you can’t beat him. Not Jack London’s hungry fighter either. But he said: “You want some help with those satchels tomorrow? I don’t go to Loft’s till three-thirty tomorrow.”

“No. You’re very sweet to offer. I’m going to telephone for a cab. Then I’ll get a porter at Grand Central. There’s no trouble in getting one, and they’re always very accommodating. Do you work the same hours at Loft’s in the summer?” She crossed her legs, so trim under the discreetly low hemline of the bronze overlay-patterned skirt. “You’ve given me a great deal of comfort just being here.”

Ira tried to look away, find distraction in passersby outside the window. “Well. About Loft’s, yeah. But I’m going to take a French course this summer. Every day, two hours a day. I didn’t take enough credits, and I lost nearly a credit with the D’s I got; I gotta start making up credits.”

She shook her head wonderingly. “You’re such a strange mixture. It would seem you would have no trouble at all getting good grades. You got an A in Composition this semester. That wasn’t even your original interest.”

“That was just my luck. Mr. Kieley’s course was devoted to descriptive writing. You’ve told me yourself I’m good at that. Overall, I’m slow.” Lowering eyes brought into view sleek ankles, calves. “Slow as molasses. And college. . I daydream instead of paying attention. I can’t keep up.”

They meditated differently from men, women did, or at least Edith did. She seemed lenient, but was she really? “I’m going to have an early dinner with a colleague, Boris, you’ve met him. And I’m going to bed early afterward. Probably my last good night’s sleep for the next two or three nights.”

“Two or three nights,” Ira repeated, shook his head in sympathy. “That’s some trip. Then all the way back too?”

“Yes.” There was a wry curve on her lips. “People still ask me whether New Mexico is in the United States.”

He hemmed in appreciation, stood up.

“Please, don’t feel you have to leave.”

“No, I just—” He debated in himself an instant: he had employed the alibi only a short while ago. “I have to go and make my visit.” At least, by semi-quoting, he obviated repeating prevarication.

“Oh, yes.” She stood up also. Womanly figure, yet girlish. Bronze skirt bridged by neutral heathery sweater to olive skin. And after a glance at the mirror, “How is your grandfather?”

“My grandfather? He’s the same. He complains and complains. His eyes, his legs, his sides.”

Her charity was proof against Ira’s flippancy. She shook her head pityingly. “He lives with your aunt, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah, my aunt Mamie. She’s getting so fat she can’t cross her legs.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” How different his world must seem in her view. “And right now he’s complaining about how loud the girls play the new radio.”

“Oh. I don’t think you ever mentioned them before.”

“My two kid cousins? Yeah.” Boy, that was a boner. He felt as if he carried a tremendous pack on the back of his brain: a pack-Jew carrying a skull crammed with ugly articles he couldn’t display. That would be a funny notion, if he could do something with it. But it had to be beautiful — to suit the goyim—yeah. They carried around beauty in the back of their heads—“What? I’m sorry.” He had heard the question she asked but needed more preparation to answer.

“How old are they?” So steady her large brown eyes in her curiosity.

“Oh, sixteen, twelve. Something like that. One’s blond, wants to be a manicurist, the other’s a redhead, wants to be a dancer.” Ira chuckled. “They’re both taking commercial courses.”

“Then they’re younger even than your sister.”

“Oh, yeah. Minnie’s about — two years older. Eighteen. She graduates from high school next term. In the winter.”

“I’m really sorry I have to make this trip, Ira. I think it’s time we knew each other better.”

“Yeah?”

“One more thing. Thank goodness I remembered.”

He waited, puzzled, watched her rummage in her sewing box. “This ought to do the trick. I just plain guessed Larry’s size, but your hand is so much smaller.” She came dangling a yellow seamstress’s tape. “Really, one ought to have those jeweler’s sizing circlets, but — which finger do you prefer to wear a ring on?”

“Oh.” Ira complied almost automatically. “This one.” Ira presented the third finger.

“I’ll try to measure as carefully as I can.” She looped the tape around his finger, tightened the band, read the divisions on the tape, loosened it, then read the divisions again. “You can always get it adjusted afterward.”

He tried to concentrate on what she was doing — to foil an incipient hard-on, first time ever in her presence. “You gonna get me one o’ those?” He frowned worriedly. “I mean, Indian rings?” Jesus, he was on the verge of disgracing himself. Hell of a way to show appreciation. “Gee. That’s gonna be nice. I mean thanks.”

And he wasn’t concealing the tumescence very well, wriggling in order to increase room of trouser. It was that encirclement of tape that did it. But what a bland way she had of observing one’s condition: unperturbed brown eyes impersonal, and toying with the yellow tape around her dainty finger. “Larry’s ring was very bold — to go with his big hand. I’ll have to find something right for you.”

“Thanks. We’ll be the only two people in City College with Navajo rings.” Ira sidled toward the door. That was the way to beat it: keep moving. “I just write the box number you gave me, and Silver City, New Mexico? Is that all I have to do? No street?”

“No. That’s all. And do please write often. You have no idea how much I enjoy your letters.” She followed Ira to the door.

“Yeah? I’m glad.” He felt the offending member sink into reverse. “I hope you have a good trip.”

“Oh, it won’t be. They never are.” So American, the way she opposed a cheerful demeanor against a disagreeable prospect. “I’ll be bored to death. There’s nothing more certain than that. And constipated, of course.” Her expression changed to one of serious affection. Her hands stretched up, and held Ira’s cheeks between them, drew his head down, and pressed her delicate lips against his, delicate yet firm. Ira could feel the cool shape of them. “You’re very dear to me, Ira.”

“Thanks.” It was strange to be oneself, no more, no less, just honestly be oneself. “I’ve learned so much from you, I can’t tell you.”

“I hope it’s a little more than the silly things I’ve done.”

“Oh, no. I don’t think you’ve been silly. Yeah, I know: you’re too generous. And you worry too much. You blame yourself too much. I do something like that too. But I’m not generous.”

“You’ve been that with me. All this time.”

“Yeah, just listening.”

She laughed. “Please take care of yourself, lad.”

“I’ll try.”

“Goodbye. And write often.”

“All right. And your letters mean a lot to me.” He took her extended small hand in his. “Goodbye, Edith.”

“Goodbye.”

II

Ira attended a daily two-hour French class in the early après-midi. Oui. The course, the second half of the second year of French, all Ira would ever take, was given by a Professor Girain, a native of Gascony (D’Artagnan’s country), a most astringent and delightful person. He bristled with gruff Gallic wit. Gallic wit it would be called — there was such a thing as Gallic wit, Ira reflected: no other people made those sudden reversals and ripostes (possibly the Irish). “I ask a man on ze corner where is Leo Nard Street, please. ‘Leo Nard Street.’ It is ze English langwahje wheech is crazy: you write Leo Nard, and pronounce it Lennard.”

Ira relished his professor’s jests and thrusts, relished them so, and was so receptive, he invariably caught their drift before anyone else in the class did, laughed before anyone else. And after a while Professor Girain’s glance would veer toward this most appreciative of his students, as if Ira were a sort of connoisseur of the quality of the humor being purveyed. There was also one other bond between them: Ira’s pronunciation of French. Out of the entire class, only two students consistently received a ten out of ten for pronunciation; one was Ira, and the other an upperclassman, Calvin Schick, who had spent the last six months in France on a scholarship.

Ira stopped typing. The damned memories of that college, the damned memories that college had branded on his mind, memories twined with his own folly, rashness, febrile sex as the New Masses reviewer, unwittingly euphemistic, called it — even now the damned past arrested its own recounting. It was that same Calvin Schick that Ira had tussled with when he obstinately insisted on staying in the registrar’s office until he was given his transcript, and the other, who now did part-time work there, tried to throw him out, physically. Ira resisted: the window in the office door was broken, and Ira’s wrist superficially cut. The women clerks, alarmed at the sight of Ira’s gore-smeared hand, quickly conceded. Ira received the object of his long trip uptown — his transcript — and exited the building shielding it from his bleeding wrist. Oh, hell, the memories that trooped back. It was Schick’s brother, classmate of Ira’s and with whom he had been on good terms, a goy, who upbraided Ira bitterly when he appeared in the very decimated ’28 alcove on Yom Kippur: “That’s your holiest day. Why don’t you respect it like the rest?”

“Because I don’t feel like it.” A little more, and the two might have come to blows. Ira was to repeat the performance at a much later date, under different circumstances, but with much the same reaction by a non-Jew. It meant, Ira dimly “divined,” that refusing to observe his own religion in some way undermined the other’s faith, undermined it, trivialized it, in short, was an affront to the other’s beliefs. One would have thought, in advance, the goy would have said: Ah, here’s a Jew who doesn’t give a damn about Judaism. But no, it meant: Here’s a Jew who doesn’t give a damn about religion.

To return to his French course again, it was one of the few courses that Ira enjoyed, that bestowed not an element of pleasure in recollection, but an element in the formation of taste, an enhancement of discrimination, something, in general, that he had thought he was attending college to acquire, and in general didn’t. Was it because an adaptation of Anatole France’s Le Livre de Mon Ami was used as a text? Ira thought so. He still remembered the selection to be recited from memory as part of the final exam: Soyez beni pour m’avoir révélé, quand je ne sais pas à peine de la pensée, les tourments délicieux que la beauté donne aux âmes avides de la comprendre. “May you be blessed for having revealed to me, when I scarcely knew of the idea, the delicious torments that beauty gives to those souls who are avid to understand her.” How he loved to imitate the pronunciation of that gruff old Gascon, the way he gargled his r’s in the back of his throat. And Professor Girain in turn seemed to be more than a little well disposed toward his slouchy, capricious student. Once, when Ira chanced to wander alone with his elderly instructor, without exhorting, Professor Girain almost seemed to plead: “Why are you not more serious? You are capable of excellent work. You have a remarkable delicacy for French, for its literature. Hein?” And was met by Ira’s enigmatic — and probably insufferable — grin.

Get it over with, get it over with — Ira hunted an old acne itch under his shirt collar. Get it over with, goddamn ’em, those stupid years, all those intervening, feckless years — feckless? Understatement of the week — rotten years, until he met M.

Oh, one had to reconsider and qualify, Ecclesias, include those transitory, those illusory intermissions: when he became Edith’s lover, when he began writing his novel. The years are like hounds after the roebuck, Ecclesias, tireless, hemming in the quarry.

— E l’animo mio ch’ancor fuggiva—until that sublime, ultimate, transfiguring instant of clarity, when nothing’s left to be said, nothing’s left to be done, save perceive, save contemplate. It’s a kind of ineffable grandeur. .

Not that those years after he met M were so much better, or that he was any more judicious or wiser — he wasn’t. But he had M to turn to, M to guide him, a Beatrice to guide him through a journey toward redemption, to steady him — what should he say? — moderate his manias with her clemency and her wisdom. Jesus, he had said to himself this morning, when his brain seemed like a lump of dough, and facing the monitor, utterly beyond him—

He had gone back to bed, defeated, stuporous, wishing he were dead: apothanein thelo; enjoining himself before he fell asleep. Remember, the thing to do is to shop around for the right-sized trunk, and begin packing away all your — lousy, he said and retracted — all your inane papers, stow them away, get ready for demise, for peigern. Did anyone leave more written trash behind, more documentary drivel, than the baffled scrivener? Nobody. Get things ready, in some arrangement, in order to depart leaving a minimal mess.

Ira contemplated the tangled, intangible skein of thought that seemed to lurk in the dark corner between monitor and system: the carnal component of his marriage to M, once so overriding in importance, had now sublimated completely into the intimacies of custom, of caring and sharing, the intimacies of intellectual companionship. But even as M had expected and received his total fidelity in the previous stage, so now she expected a monogamous mental fidelity. She wanted all of his mind; she opposed anyone else’s partaking of it.

— And thus, what do you commit with me, dear friend?

Ecclesias? No, confiding in a reflection of what was, a window onto my only remaining future, is not infidelity — that is my survival, and a penance.

But he was flattering himself. His hypothesis would never hold up under any rigorous examination. Well, get on with it. How many times — he feared — would he tell himself that before the end of his testament, if he ever reached it. No matter, if spurring himself on served to help him reach the end, then as many times as was necessary. Get on with it. . as expeditiously as possible:

But before that he had quit his job at Loft’s, quit or was fired. In July. If there was such a thing as a gray area between, it was within that area that his job was terminated.

Mr. Buckley, the night manager, was on duty. A summer night. Warm, brightly lit, sweet-flavored interior of the store, with the wide-bladed fans circling languidly overhead. And customers coming in for sundaes and sodas, and seating themselves at the round marble tables.

A crowd of people came into the place intent on ice cream refreshments, and occupied the round tables. Bob shuffled over to Ira, turning his back to the front of the store. “Boy, look at them nigger customers comin’ in, fo’, five. Uh-oh, they’re all settin’ down at a table,” said Bob.

“Buckley is lookin’ this way. You know what that means.”

“Oh, nuts! You mean I’m gone t’ have t’ play waiter to them niggers?”

“Nobody else but.”

Bob turned back toward the front of the store, where children and their parents sipped on malteds and milk shakes, and young couples fresh from the moving pictures shared sundaes. As he turned his body, he rotated so that he hugged the cash register, effectively pushing Ira into Mr. Buckley’s view. Ira was now the unoccupied employee who needed a task.

Mr. Buckley called on Ira to wait on the newly arrived patrons. Ira refused. Truculently, without doubt, he asserted it wasn’t his job to wait on tables; he was a cashier as well as candy clerk, and that was enough. He intended to stay behind the counter; he refused to be a waiter. And Mr. Buckley, offended, probably more by Ira’s manner than his insubordination, snapped that if Ira refused to do as he was told, he could go home. Ira took off his white Loft’s jacket and cap and left the store. Bullheaded, caught in a loony consistency of his own making, as so many times before. He went home — and he stayed home.

He had been wishing for some time to quit, wishing subliminally to quit, and had never found occasion. When he went in a week later to get his pay for the previous week, Mr. Ryce, the manager, berated him in no uncertain terms for not reporting to work the next day — or days — for staying away so long a new clerk had to be hired in his place. What was the matter with him? That disagreement with Mr. Buckley was of no consequence.

“A college man like you, with all the experience you got in the store, why, they would have grabbed you when you graduated — even before, maybe, for a relief manager,” Mr. Ryce fumed. “A young fellow like you could have gone way further than me — you could have got up there with them general managers.”

Ira hung his head, trying to look more foolish than he was. “I–I thought I was fired.”

Mr. Ryce handed him his pay envelope with the finality of one dealing with a hopeless case.

Just before Edith left for New Mexico, Minnie left her job at the five-and-ten store. She had succeeded in getting a job with B. Altman’s, the department store, and worked down in the bargain basement, where she sold marked-down articles of all kinds — furniture, clothing, housewares. A few weeks passed. Near the end of July, she confided to Ira that she had met “a nice Panamanian fellow, and he wants to date me.”

“Yeah?” Cool now, limp and detached, he listened with a certain degree of judiciousness. Curious, though his reaction was understandably ambiguous. He was aware that he felt benign, even helpful: “Well, you don’t mind he’s Spanish. Is he a nice guy?”

“Oh, he’s lovely. He’s so good-looking, I’m telling you; he’s the floorwalker, in charge of all the different kinds of plants and flowerpots, all those things that have to do with houseplants growing in windows, and hanging from the ceiling. Vines. He knows all their names. He learned all that in Panama.” She paused in amused reminiscence. “And he wears a white carnation in his lapel, just like you see in the movies.”

“Yeah? How’d you meet him?”

“Oh, you know Altman’s. In the elevator before the store opens. You see people. You hear them talk. I heard about the gorgeous flowers and plants on the third floor. So I went up there during my lunch hour. He thought I was a customer, and we started in talking. He asked me to meet him after the store closed. He took me to Schrafft’s.”

“To Schrafft’s. Hey, that’s high-class. How old is he?”

“Twenty-six, maybe twenty-eight.”

“And you don’t mind that he’s not Jewish? You said last year you’d never again go steady with a goy. Or something like that.”

“I don’t care. I was a fool then. I’m not going to be a dope this time. So Zaida can say Kaddish for me. But,” she stressed, “until then, I’m just talking. He gives me that feeling, you know?”

“Yeah?” Ira studied her: pretty, despite the thickened eyeglasses she now had to wear, lips parted, her eyelids arched, her fresh, dappled cheeks rosy with surge of tender sentiment, she signaled the kind of state he recognized, but would never know.

“Well, good,” he said. “Good luck.” He started suddenly to his feet.

A few days later, on a Sunday morning, he heard Mom leave. He lay in his narrow bed, unmoving, staring at the opposite gray-daubed bricks seen through the window of their air shaft. It was only a few weeks after the summer solstice, he reflected, and yet the sunlight would no longer descend even this far down at high noon — not that it was noon. Who was it? Eratosthenes, who had conducted his experiment to determine the earth’s diameter by climbing down into a deep well. It couldn’t have been any deeper than the bottom of an air shaft was from the roof. Even to the first flight.

Minnie had been out late last night, a sure sign she was out on another date. She had turned on the ceiling lights after entering the kitchen, shut the door to the bedrooms immediately after, but he had awakened. He said nothing to her when she went by on her way to her folding cot in Mom and Pop’s bedroom. There could be no doubt in his mind with whom she had been out: Arturo — but she called him Artie, the good-looking Latin floorwalker in charge of the potted plants and the hanging vines. He felt strange; he felt almost sexless as he lay there in abject silence, trying to determine how he felt, since it was really over for good. Oh, hell, let it be over, and stay over. He’d sneak a quick one into Stella as he had at most other times. Needed only to raise half a hard-on, and he was done, hardly had a hard-on and it was over, and she was retreating from his knees — before anyone even guessed. Hell of a way to fuck, half a minute, half-backed, high speed.

Toss-up. She was sleeping, sleeping it off. Well, then, get up, get up and dress, if he really wanted to make this the breaking point. Show her. Oh, hell, he didn’t know. Would the Latin romance go on? Would there be an engagement, the way other romances progressed? Would she accept? Maybe. Would he attend to old Zaida, tearing his hair, davening over her Kaddish candle? But she would never begin with him again anyway.

So pay no attention to her. Get out of bed. Right. Jesus, start now. Right. Get your clothes on. Okay.

He got up, walked quietly barefooted into the kitchen. He was behaving so differently now, aware of it, for once not opportunistic, not halfhearted, or what to call it? Shilly-shallying. He felt almost like a somnambulist, sleepwalking in broad daylight, standing in the kitchen, Sunday morning, looking at the washpole out of the corner window on the backyard, and alone with Minnie — would that be the way Siamese twins felt if they tried to tear themselves apart?

He was about to shut the kitchen door to the bedroom, but he heard a bed creak, the creak of one bed, a few barefooted footsteps, and the creak of another bed. She was changing from her cot to Pop and Mom’s bed. He eased the tongue of the lock into its aperture as quietly as he could.

“Mama?”

“No,” he said gruffly. “It’s me.”

“So she went away a long time?”

“No. A few minutes ago.”

“So what are you doing?”

Invisible point of the spinning dreidel on Hanukkah: shim when it came to rest, take all or lose all. Which? He had forgotten. Gimel, take all or what? Not since the East Side. “I was gonna get dressed.”

“Let me talk to you a second.”

“What for?”

“Sit down. I want to tell you about my date. It was wonderful. Oh, it was wonderful.”

“Yeah?” Ira sat on the edge of the bed. Oh, Jesus, would it never end. “Tell me quick. All right?”

“You got time. We’re not doing anything. He took us to a hotel room, you know. Just for a couple of hours. Oh, we had such a wonderful time. So easy—” Her hands came together rapturously above the white-fringed bosom of her nightgown. “I’ve been out on dates. But like this, never. You got a big bed, you got a wonderful room all to yourselves. Oh, you got ti-i-me.”

“Wonderful. So why tell me?”

“He’s got such a soft, golden skin. And what a wonderful lover. You feel like you could—” The hands at her bosom arose upward, spread apart. “You don’t know how much you can stand. I’ll tell you something else you should know. He’s married!” Her head lifted from the pillow. “He’s married, he’s even got two kids.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned.”

“He told me.”

“You know that, and you still let him fuck you?”

“Shut up, you dirty louse. Dirty. Dirty. That’s all that you are.”

“All right. Good.”

“You stink.”

“Yeah?”

“You oughta see somebody who can make love. Oh.”

He turned on her, spewed vindictiveness. “You mean you with your spic feller. Why not?” He was about to dredge up more, but the viciousness of his own gloating stunned him, nay, intoxicated him — there was no telling the two apart, only that he was ravished by his own memories — and transfigured by the rapture of his horror at the abyss he had come to, untrammeled, the barriers he had broken down to the verge of depravity — that he had fondly imagined only minutes ago that he could somehow begin to restore. He barely heard her as through a corridor of selves in a mirror, the dark reiterated reflection of becoming nil.

“Shut up, louse. He makes you look like a mensheleh, you know that? What he’s got you’ll never have in all your life. He’s got charm. And a build. He’s beautiful.”

She stung, the way Mom did Pop, when she taunted him. “So what’re you blaming me for, you goddamn twat!” he reviled. “And with a Spanish goy yet! And married.” He could hear himself, abandoned in his malevolence, saw apparition of summery gutter dust at the curb, the grated sewer at the corner. What of it? He could murder her.

“Better than a brother, better than a brother,” she kept jeering in rejoinder. “Better than you. And don’t scare me you’re gonna tell Mom this time. I’m nearly of age. I’m a senior at Richmond. I told her myself I was going out with a Panamanian.”

“Yeah? What’d she say to her little rusjinkeh? Did you tell her he was a married man with kids?”

“No, I didn’t. I just said he was from Panama. She said — you know what Mom said?” Minnie scaled over his heavy irony. “She said, ‘Noo, do what you want. Bist shoyn a groyseh moyt. You’re not a child. Nur bring mir nisht kein benkart.’ You know Mom: don’t bring me a baby.”

“I hope you do.”

“Go to hell. I could tell Mom I had learned from you.”

“Go to hell yourself. I’ll tell her it was her fault.”

“Her fault?” Minnie was startled from rancor to perplexity. “Why was it her fault?”

“Never mind.” He adopted an easy, lofty sneer. “I’ll stay on the sidelines, okay? Till the end of summer.”

“Yeah, I believe you,” she parried sneer with contempt. “You’ll stay on the sidelines, period. No more. Always with your nose in a book, a book. Go make some girl the way other fellers do. No, you’re too lazy — a folentser. Her voice tightened, became almost a squeal, the way it always did when she was wrought up.

“Who else do you know who did it with his sister? You’re my brother, and I was like your wife, like a hoor with you. Yeah, because I loved you. That’s the whole trouble. I loved you and I hated you. Why? Because you were making me like you. I don’t have to go with other boys. They rub up against me when we’re dancing. I know what they want. I have to act like I don’t. They wanna neck. Who needs to neck? I’ve missed all a girl should have, what other girls still have, all the excitement. Finding out and everything. All because of you, I missed the whole thing. That’s all!”

Welladay. Little more was to be gained by laboring the point any further. It was the sense of exploration that drove him on, in the present as it had in the past. It was the word “exploration” that aroused him now, that still swung in his mind with something of the original lurch of feeling when he jotted the word down. He would be an exploration in debasement, his own, the soul of a twentieth-century first-generation American-Jewish writer, alienated from his kind by twist of circumstance, and perhaps, in part, justifiably alienated. But it would be exploration in vileness organically connected with the sensibility of one professing to be an artist. At least Unity would be attained, however reluctantly he had been driven to it. What if Saint Augustine had obliterated from his Confessions the pain — one could guess — the throes of his renouncing the two women, his paramours, banning his sensual appetites, even the most innocuous. Could one ever forget the old saint’s self-reproach for yielding to the entrancing sight of a swift hound coursing a hare? He would have given us a docked Saint Augustine, and who would have cared for it? He gave us the whole man, something Joyce didn’t. Joyce espoused the Unities, but eschewed Unity. Something that he, Ira, now strove to do while battling old age, and approaching the eternal.

III

The first of September 1926, Edith returned from the Southwest. She began a “furious” hunt for another apartment, an apartment “a little more gracious” than the one she had been living in. She found one on Morton Street, on the south side of Morton Street, a renovated town house, like others between Seventh Avenue and Hudson Street. It seemed odd at first that renovated town houses shared the street with two or three typical five-flight walk-ups. They were all undoubtedly relics of the past, before the Village spread into a formerly immigrant Italian neighborhood, even before that neighborhood became Italian. A day after the Labor Day weekend, Larry returned home from the summer resort. He looked fit, tanned. He had gained weight. Sanguine, successful, with every movement he belied Edith’s calamity-ridden prognosis of the ills the future held in store for him.

As she had promised before she left, she brought back with her a Navajo ring from New Mexico for Ira, and while Larry stood by, his healthy countenance aglow with approval at this show of Edith’s esteem for his friend, she presented Ira with the gift. The ring was altogether different from Larry’s, which, as she had said, was bold, a large piece of turquoise held in a solid setting of silver. Ira’s was far more delicate, and more elaborate, with nine turquoise beads held in a matching silver grid, and fretted at the sides with small embossings. She thought its approximate age was at least fifty years, from a time when Southwestern Indians still melted down silver dollars and made jewelry out of them.

And that was nearly seventy years ago when she presented it to him, Ira allowed himself the luxury, the luxurious dolor, of brooding: of time and vicissitude. . fixed an instant on the enticing pun on the amber monitor: silver dolor. . He snorted, and went on.

The ring was a little too loose for his third finger, but any jeweler could adjust it to his size, Edith thought. Transported by joy at the novelty and the honor, Ira held out his hand.

“Beautiful! Beautiful!” Larry exclaimed. “Everybody at the resort wanted to know where I got mine. I bet that’s what happens to you. Everybody in the ’28 alcove will ask you where you got yours. We’ll be the only ones at CCNY wearing Navajo rings.”

“That’s just what I told—” Ira swallowed Edith’s name down just in time. “Just what I told myself. I wish I knew what to say, Edith. It’s a beautiful surprise!”

She just loved giving; she showed her enjoyment in fond brown eyes, olive-skinned smile. “It’s not very expensive. I bought it because it was so unusual. It seemed to be right for you.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” He looked down at the ring that rotated so easily partway around and back on his finger. What a strange gulf seemed to open within himself, so wide, so nameless. He fancied, always on the brink of a pun, that the beneficent gravity of her world was separating the wretched fragments of his. “Maybe I can help you when you move. We both can.”

“That’s right,” Larry concurred. “We’ll get Ivan. He’s back from camp. He’s got a driver’s license. And Matt’s got a car. He and Miriam are crazy about Ivan.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, no. You’re both very sweet. I’m going to let someone else handle the mess. They know just what to do—”

“I was once a plumber’s helper,” said Ira. “If I could save you something.”

She laughed, so merrily for once.

“And don’t forget I was an able-bodied seaman on His Majesty’s ship the Pinafore,” Larry joined in. “Trust me. I can batten down the butter plates abaft the binnacle better than the boatswain himself.”

Happiness was a short respite when well-being held sway. A bulkhead of euphoria — Ira recalled the Conrad tale — that held miraculously, in secrecy, against the unrelenting pressure of the future.

Ostensibly, Ira and Larry were juniors in college. Ostensibly. In fact, they were both wanting sufficient college credits to rate as valid juniors, juniors in good standing academically: Ira for the usual reasons, failures, insufficient number of courses, incompletions, poor grades, and Larry because he “lost credits” when he switched from NYU to CCNY, where credits were differently evaluated. Both faced the prospect of having to take summer courses next year. The three credits Ira had gained in a summer of French still left him woefully in arrears — and with little hope of reversing the shabby trend of attainment. College routines were now well ingrained, a familiar treadmill for both of them. Mechanical drudgery, most of it, drudgery resigned to, drudgery despised and shoddily performed. Floundering in mediocrity, Ira’s career came close to foundering when he took on that most boring of banes, his first “Ed” courses, electives. He drove himself to read the pages of his texts on the subject resentfully, sullenly, cursing the career he had chosen for himself, more like a miserable fate than a career.

There were small variations in the collegiate rounds sometimes: hiking home with Aaron Hessman, classmate who lived a few blocks farther south — in Jewish Harlem. Not altogether dull, Aaron H, not altogether humorless, but already dried by academic overachievement, and wound up with a shoulder-hitch tic. He was well on his way to a Phi Beta Kappa key, well on his way to a tutorship in Latin: Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni. Crack breaststroke swimmer too, he had impersonated brawny Ivan, physics whiz, who swam like a plumb bob, swam as if he meant to thrash the pool dry, and walk its length instead.

Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni. Alas, how swiftly the fleeting years have gone by. How could so powerful a swimmer as you, Aaron, drown off Rockaway Beach a year after you won your coveted key and your summa cum laude, and your Latin tutorship? It seemed impossible — unless you intended to. . to be the first of the class of ’28 to go.

— And indeed you will be the last.

To have traded places with Aaron.

— To your narrative, my friend.

Delighted classmates, sitting about the large scarred oak table in the middle of the ’28 alcove, stopped whatever they were doing to listen to Larry sing one of the skits he had helped concoct last summer at Kopake in the Catskills. As always, with his charm, his personableness, his air of worldliness, his facility as entertainer, Larry had already become a popular figure in the class. Many were drawn to him, as long ago many were drawn to Ira’s childhood chum Farley. There were adulators who sought to curry favor with him, but as with Farley, only certain ones were allowed into the inner circle, of which Ira was the closest to the center. On the scarred alcove table, Larry, the sad little Jew, wearing his World War khaki uniform, swayed with stereotypical Jewish woe to the tempo of his song:

“Vot is life, dot’s the question vot I ponder.

Vot is life, over here or over yonder?

It’s a game of chence, of circumstence—

Oy, gewalt! I burned a hole in my only pair of. .”

Larry paused, and against expectation, instead of pants, sang: “trousers.”

The alcove applauded, and Ira grinned, amused and sardonic as ever. Larry was certainly funny: with that fresh batch of gags, anecdotes, comic lyrics he’d brought back from Kopake, and now Lemansky’s, there was no doubt about his ability to amuse. And there was no doubt the stuff was amusing, too. But it was — what was it? — the way Larry appraised it, the value he set on it, personal value, the way he identified with it, that was new, new and different. He no longer related to the stuff with a show of derision, a mocking counterbalance of appraisal, but as if it were stock in trade, a commodity of value to be purveyed in the marketplace of entertainment. A paradoxical change had taken place in him, as if this recent accession of comic triviality were an embellishment of his personality, an enhancement of it, not something he might advert to in passing, with absence of self-emphasis, an absurdity naturally apropos, but rather as if the anecdotal and the droll were prized substance of his character, his gift to any group. Ira had the most difficult time with himself trying to “figure out,” as he would put it, just what the difference was between the Larry that was and the Larry now — and between himself and Larry — when it came to things of this sort, to humor in particular. Was it the performer taking over in Larry, was that the difference? The performer filling a vacuum left by the exhaustion of the poetic impulse that had burgeoned within the college freshman of only a couple of years ago? It was a strange thing, something to contemplate, a decline, a deterioration of sensibility, that at the same time as it seemed a matter of choice, seemed the effect of spiritual compulsion. It was like an optical illusion, the nugatory imbuing one aspect, pathos the other.

Ira felt a throb of poignancy at the unmistakable proliferation of the commonplace in Larry. How the constellation of personality could change, how it could alter — as Ira had read celestial constellations would change after many millennia — and the whole configuration of temperament scarcely be recognizable as what it once was. By intuitive modulations of affinity, he had taken advantage of Larry’s temperament in an earlier phase. By a different method he was now ready to take advantage of it in the next. Inbred, alert predator, who could not be anything else, as if it were a matter of inevitability, he could only function by exploiting his friend, his benefactor, who had been so generous to his grubby, slum-misshapen chum, misshapen in more ways than Larry ever dreamed, who had instilled something of deportment in Ira, something of couthness: from that first dinner at Larry’s home, of lamb chops and creamed spinach. It was a recurrent, ambivalent theme with Ira, his attitude toward his friend’s bloom and blight. And even though Edith had attributed Larry’s change, his petering out of poetic impulse, to his “shallowness,” still, her dictum continued to leave Ira unsatisfied. While he profited by her disparagement, and stood to gain by it, it left him uneasy: something unaccountable about it, or if applicable, how wide was the scope of its application? If that was shallowness, what was depth? How deep did “depth” have to go to prove itself? Or did a guy burn out, the way Farley had “burned out,” a schoolboy outrunning the foremost sprinter of his day, outrunning the gold medalist Abrams in the Olympic relays.

— You’ve already expatiated on that at length, my friend.

And so I have, so I have. But I suppose it’s become an obsession with me, Ecclesias, because I traveled the same road as Larry did, and if I traveled it “farther” than he did, I’m no longer sure which one of us suffered more when the road ended in trackless morass. . I lived. His heart slowly atrophied. And something else has come to me in belated fashion, something I should perhaps merely make a note of at this stage, and reserve dealing with at a later time: consider that central trope of my first novel: why did I “choose” the central character’s near-fatal contact with the third rail as a climax? The third rail that all but immolated the child, virtually gutted his future? And I was so oblivious I didn’t know my seemingly detached fable de me narratur.

IV

It was in Ira’s junior year that he was at last able to program into his schedule the Biology 1 course that he had been so eager to register for the afternoon of his first day inside the college — and that had become after two years mere memory of an aspiration and no more: desiccated and crushed autumn leaves trodden underfoot in the euphoria of sauntering along Convent Avenue high in blue sky above the city — before encountering the workaday, lackluster interior of the auditorium where he was to register, the chalked courses on blackboards, the crowd of competing students busy at their seats, or impatiently waiting in long files. No, there was nothing like that now — in registering for courses in his junior year. He had all the time in the world to make out his schedule, and do it in leisurely fashion without fear of seeing the course erased on the blackboard before he reached the desk.

But what the hell was the use? In two years’ time, he had become nobody. And less and less every day. Together with scarce-known classmates, he walked out of the auditorium, through the dull halls, past the gray-white Gothic exterior walls, down the steps into the quadrangle among the trimmed ginkgo trees. .

And Bio — by the time classes began, the subject left him as cold, if not as clammy, as the pickled frog he shared with a fellow student, and dissected parts of as ineptly and lackadaisically as he drew the batrachian’s innards, barely wresting a C from a quiz, and skittering toward a C for the course. Oh, he understood what Mendel was all about, the methodical monk in the apron and little eyeglasses, understood the dominant and the recessive in sweet peas, and what happened when they were crossed. So what? But this genetics business — why the hell did they have to wrack his brains with all these crossword-puzzle-looking charts?

Minnie was faring no easier than Ira. One afternoon she flung herself through the doorway, flung herself at him with a cry of woe, inarticulate with weeping, woe, a lamentation, loud and louder, disfiguring, eyes crimped together, tears in droplets and glistering in liquid braid down her cheeks as far as chin, her mouth open to its widest, red-curled tongue and tissue flaming, bawling.

“Shut up! What the hell’s the matter with you!” Ira closed the door as quickly as he could — to confine her frenzy, her hysteria, to the kitchen interior. “What happened to you? For Christ’s sake, talk!”

“Oh, my dear brother! Ira, dear! Ira-a-a!” Her sob soared from coherence to a prolonged wail, then trailed away into a moan: “A-a-a-ah!”

“For Christ’s sake, I heard that!” Brutal with dismay, he yelled at her. “A-a-h, what? What the hell happened?”

“Oh, oh, oh, what happened,” she wailed, and with the same hand that let her briefcase drop onto a chair, she stroked his. “Oh, Ira, my darling brother!”

“Well, what, for Christ’s sake?” He yanked his hand clear.

“They didn’t want me, they didn’t wanna take me into teachers college,” she sobbed.

“Into what? What d’you mean?”

“Into Hunter. Into the teachers college. That I was taking an academic course for. Taking Latin for.”

“Why the hell not? What the hell’s wrong? If you’ll stop your goddamn bawling, I’ll know what you’re talking about. Why wouldn’t they take you?”

“My s,” she wept. “Wait, I’ll get my handkerchief — I failed.”

“Failed what?” He was beginning to surmise.

“The test, the test for normal school. The speaking test. I failed.” It seemed as if her spirit were scourged, not her body. “Ah-ah-ah!”

“Will you cut it out and talk!” he shouted at her.

“Oh, Ira.”

“Yes! Yes! Yes! Bullshit! You failed what? What s?”

“I have a lateral s,” she moaned.

“You have a lateral s. What in hell!”

“That’s what she said. The lady that came to test us. From the Board of Education. I don’t talk right. She gave everyone something to read. A hundred we were nearly. . so. Oh, Ira.” Forlorn, she seemed without a will of her own. She pushed the briefcase from chair to floor, but didn’t sit down, kept standing. “You know how I wanted to teach in the public school,” she continued brokenly, fingers crooked above the collar of her gray dress, and chin drooping to rest on them. “If I could get my teacher’s degree, we could move out of this dump. We could move to the Bronx. We could have a decent apartment. We could have a phone. Decent dates. Jewish fellers who could come to the house.”

“All right. All right.”

“You don’t care. You’re a man. You don’t care.”

“I do care. What the hell good is all that crying gonna do?”

“Oh, Ira, I can’t help it. Oh, I tried so hard. I read every word. I knew what everything meant when she asked me. And I didn’t pass. I didn’t pass. They don’t want me.” She slumped into a morbid silence. When she spoke again, her sobs had dried. She panted rather than spoke, words arid with bitterness: “A lateral s. A lateral s. A kid’s gonna know I got a lateral s. Who ever told me I had a lateral s? Nobody. No English teacher. That’s how they took us out. That’s how they got rid of us. I think it’s only the Jews that they got like that.”

“Yeah?”

“I could swear. It was only the Jewish girls that failed in the speech test.” She brooded. “I’m glad you were here, not Mama, when I came home.”

“I am too. Your shriek. You would have scared the life out of her.”

“Oh. My darling brother. Oh.”

“Aw, c’mon. For Christ’s sake! Teaching isn’t the only thing in the world.”

“So why do you wanna teach?”

“Because I’m a malamut, as Pop says. What the hell’s that got to do with it? I hate business. I don’t want to have anything to do with it, and you don’t. You’ve had—” He gesticulated. “Experience. You’ve worked in stores, in a shop. You’ve been in an office — you like people. You get along with people. You like to talk with people.”

“But I wanted to be a public school teacher.”

“Listen, don’t tell me what you wanted to be. You got that half year left next term: then take business courses. Didn’t I get all screwed up with those commercial courses in the beginning of high school, junior high school, that I didn’t want?” He tried to talk as fast as he could, as forcefully as he could, anything to get her out of the sagging collapsed creature that sat as if dumped into a chair. “I’m telling you. I’m really sorry. No bull. But Jesus, Mom comes home and looks at you. You — you act like the end of the world. Immediately her ears are gonna start roaring. You’re gonna get her all worked up. Oy, gevald! Oy, a brukh iz mir! Mein orrim kindt!” He rocked in disgusted mimicry.

“That lousy supervisor. She should croak! I know it was only the Jewish girls.”

“So we’re up against the same goddamn thing. What’re you gonna do? At least the other way you can tell her — calm. “They didn’t take me. I didn’t pass the test. I’m going into all commercial courses next term.’ Make it natural. You didn’t pass the test, so—”

“My dear brother. Oh, you’re so smart. Oh, I’m glad you were here. You make me feel better. I could hardly come home. I could hardly walk. I was so fertsfeilet, I didn’t know where I was going. I swear I could have walked downtown from Richmond. I could have died. I wanted to die. You know what I thought of: the subway tracks.”

“Listen, you didn’t steal anything. You weren’t going to get expelled from school.” Harsh memory steeled his harsh voice, against itself, against sympathy.

“My poor brother.”

“Yeah.”

“I feel just like it.”

“Like what?”

“Like you. When you were expelled from Stuyvesant.” She lifted her face, nodded drearily several times. “When you came home, and gave Papa the stick to hit you with. I’m no good. No good, that’s all.”

“Aw, come one. The two things don’t compare. I didn’t fail. I stole fountain pens. I got caught. I was expelled. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I did. I did. I let you lay me. How many times? How many times did we go in the bedroom? How many Sunday mornings?”

“What the hell’s that got to do with it?”

“A lot. Everything. Everything it’s got to do with. That’s why I’m no good.”

“Listen, for Christ’s sake, Minnie. Now, listen.” With hands extended, he summoned full exigency of plea. “Try coming back to yourself, will you? You’re way, way too excited. I mean, it’s a shock you’ve been through. Come on. Be sensible, Minnie. You’ll get over it.” He gesticulated. “Listen, there are other girls failed that test.”

Her hysteria blocked out the outside world, the world of Larry and Edith. In the preternatural light of the musty kitchen, Ira looked from the door back to his sister. Her hair disheveled, bronze locks hanging tear-drenched in her tortured face, she looked more like a Bacchant than a sister. The evident madness of his own horror contrasted so vividly with Larry’s descriptions of his shipboard romance, of the sweetness of salty-aired love: firm, cool, and far removed from this frenzy.

At last, she did go to the sink and wash, freshened her appearance, brought the dapple back to her cheeks, combed her reddish bobbed locks, primped. Fortunately another half hour passed, and Mom and Pop still hadn’t come home. By that time she seemed completely recovered, presentable, engrossed in a textbook, as he was.

“Do I look all right, Ira?” she asked. Her voice was humble.

“Huh?” He raised his eyes from the genetics chart he was trying to decipher, the small squares and symbols that hung like a screen before vision for a moment as he surveyed her: his sister, nothing special: serious, determined countenance. Red, curly bobbed hair, thick nostrils, hazel eyes. “You look all right. Some difference from before.”

“You know what?” Minnie smoothed the bosom of her dress. “Don’t say anything.”

“No? About what? What do you mean?”

“That I failed in the oral. My crazy s.”

“All right, if that’s what you want. Why?”

“I’ll tell ’em tomorrow. They’re coming home happy for a change. They saw a vaudeville show. What’s the hurry? I’ll tell Mom tomorrow. I won’t lie. I won’t say I didn’t fail. I’ll just say, so if I’m teaching public school and I get married, what’s the difference if I’m in an office and I get married? I’ll feel more like that tomorrow. You know what I mean? It’ll be better.” She paused to let the thought sink in. “I’m getting a little hungry. You? I wonder what Mom’s got ready. I don’t see anything to warm up. Must be a big can of salmon to chop up with an onion. But maybe she’ll buy something on the way.”

The image, the episode, the whole passage of it, grew to a peak days after it should have receded, became more immanent in his mind the next day and the next, immanent, became a revolting progression. It wasn’t as if he were haunted by some wrongdoing, specific offense, as in the past, cringing before imagined execration and worse in store for his miscreant self, discovered. More grievously, he was aware that he had tainted her forever, and that her recent failure was inextricably related to him. He would sometimes sit smirking when he felt out of danger, sounding the Yiddish epithets his parents would have hurled at him: Paskudnyack! Meeseh chaiye! A meeseh mishineh auf dir. Zus verfollt veren! Oh there were dozens, fantastic extravagant dozens. And Pop, what could he do? Now that Ira stood a head taller than his father? And as for little Jonas, Stella’s father, even shorter than Pop, the little erstwhile ladies’ tailor, cafeteria partner — Jesus, it sometimes made Ira chortle — when he was out of all danger. And Zaida, well, spewing Yiddish curses. No, he wasn’t the least filled with remorse for that act, guilt, burden of the sordid, consequences of taboo violation, disgrace. He almost wished it was as simple as that, as though they were the good old days, when he at least knew how he would feel, what to expect. The feeling he had now was general, altogether different. It was not the horrible twist of terror that wrenched his whole being, that terrible, that permanent crimp of plane-geometry days when she didn’t have her period, or any other time when she was late. Don’t think of the past, that’s all. Get over to Mamie’s. That didn’t do the same thing, even if she was still a kid, kid or no kid, and not such a kid, either: sixteen. And you had to walk eight, nine blocks, take a chance, act a part, wait, hang around, look dumb — and maybe lose. But it was outside, and if you won, as long as you were sure you didn’t knock her up, boy! But so what if you won, that was the trouble: winning, winning, no more winning.

He recalled a short address that he had given nearly a decade before, in which he had expressed his genuine perplexity that he should be so honored. His fame, the tributes he received for his first novel, never ceased to seem unreal to him — that he was the one who should be the object of these accolades. He felt that there was something freakish about it all, and he honestly felt so: a fluke. And he would quote from a biography of John Synge that he had read some years ago, that talent was not enough, that the writer, the artist, in order to achieve greatness, had in some way to tap something universal and permanent in his time. And he followed this quotation with another by the late Georgia O’Keeffe — one he had within easy access, contained within one of the poems of his rheumatologist, David B. “I might have been a better painter, and no one would have noticed, but because I was in touch with my time people saw something in my work that they knew. . ” She was saying the same thing as John Synge, whom Ira idolized.

So it was a fluke, he would reiterate, he would stress: he was acquainted with much-better-endowed writers than he, far more intelligent, brilliant guys, witty, acute, original. But it was as if they had tried and failed to align themselves with the lines of force of their time, and so if he were to name them, he was sure few in the audience would know them. And the strange thing was, in his opinion, that it was not given to the individual to align himself by an act of will to the lines of force of his time: one couldn’t choose to or refuse to. Genes and circumstances either made him do so, made him an eligible candidate for the canon, so to speak, one of the elect, or did not. It wasn’t in his hands. So if he was the one so chosen, he actually deserved very little credit. Only that of striving to develop the most preeminent, if not the only, gift he had. . which was what the others did, also. . those more gifted than he, who yet failed to win universal appeal. It was all a Calvinist fluke.

V

“Back safely,” his dear M announced when she returned home from a performance in Roswell. She had played selections from her latest composition there, a work for the piano. “I feel guilty leaving you alone all day, but I had such an exciting time.” She went on to tell him about the program given by the New Mexico Women Composers Guild, about the beautiful concert grand Baldwin on which she had played excerpts from the piece she was working on, and how well both her composition and her performance were received by the audience. “Though I did play a few wrong notes,” she smiled. “My eyes simply aren’t up to playing in public anymore — and isn’t that the longest stretch of nothing between Vaughn and Roswell? I’m glad I didn’t have to do the driving. My attention would surely have begun to wander. The ranches must be way back in.” And then she noticed that he hadn’t eaten the frozen dinner she had so solicitously provided for him.

“Too much trouble,” he said curtly. “I had a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.”

And then without asking, and without further comment, she knew he was depressed. .

Things had come together that morning, before she left for Roswell, adverse things, of little or no importance, except for the state he had been in — and still was. He had wondered aloud, as they shared a last sip of coffee, how soon they might invite John Keleher and his wife, Marie, over for supper. John was a young artist, devoted to Ira, a virtual surrogate son. M had heartily endorsed the idea.

“We might get four of the Le Menu frozen dinners, save you work,” Ira had suggested, and went on: “I’d like him to do an illuminated inscription for me, a couple of Greek words.”

“Enteuthen exelaunei,” she quoted cheerily from the Anabasis, and then inquired: “May I ask what words they are?”

He put her off with: “Just a couple of words. Happen to be meaningful for me. I’d like to frame them.” It wouldn’t have made much difference probably if he had told her. They were included in the epigraph to The Waste Land, which Eliot himself had borrowed from the Satyricon of Petronius, and Ira with minuscule remnant of Greek, and the aid of a dictionary, had succeeded in translating them from the original: they were the Sibyl of Cumae’s reply to the youngsters who asked her what she wanted: “Sibylla ti theleis? “Sybil, what do you wish? “Apothanein thelo” was her reply.

I wish to die. He would like the Greek words framed and hung on the wall of his study.

Things had come together that Sunday morning, things of little or no importance, as he had said, except when he was in that state of mind. Goddamn it, stuporous. Would anybody believe that the onset of daylight saving on the same Sunday morning that M left for Roswell would have so adverse an effect on him as it had? He loathed the damned change of time: it threw everything off for him: sleeping and eating and the other established nodes of existence.

“Why don’t you just accept it?” M had counseled. “Why do you have to keep referring to the old time, telling yourself it’s really an hour earlier? It would be so much easier if you didn’t. You make things so much harder for yourself that way.”

“I always do,” he had answered. “Apothanein thelo.”

“You really did look awful when I got home from Roswell,” M told him a day or so later. “You look better now, but you looked awful when I came in. What were you so depressed about?”

“Just depressed,” he had answered evasively. “Frustrated maybe. You know how my goddamn neurosis takes its toll every so often.”

But afterward they had gone through a brief estrangement. She chided him for twitting her before company, dinner company, something he almost never did, deplored when others did, something she never did, and reminded him she never did, which was true. What was it this time he was guilty of? Because he was, and was ashamed of himself (and pondered deeply why, found insidious, subterranean reasons to account for his anomalous behavior). But what was it made her say, “You know how I feel about husbands picking on their wives before others. You hurt my feelings. I never do that to you. I’m going to fight for my rights.” He would have to ask her what it was he said or did specifically. .

Specifically. . he sat down before the keyboard. Scenario: Action! Camera slowly pans big blond John Opa, tubist with the Albuquerque Symphony, and his Jewish wife, Leslie Heil, bassoonist, and presently publicity director for the orchestra (and most important, proficient at the computer; she has just offered to turn over to Ira a program that would allow his PCjr more memory). They are seated with Ira around the Stigman dinning table in the evening, partaking of a quart of Baskin-Robbins vanilla ice cream in celebration of the tender of a better-paying position to John by Florida University. While M is at the gas stove brewing decaffeinated coffee, Ira jibes: “My wife frequently turns the gas flame to high, and as a result she often roasts a pot — not to be mistaken for pot roast.” Smiling at the amusement of his guests, he adds jocularly: “That’s been the grounds for many a divorce.”

Trifles. Minute modulations of the quotidian, Ira reflected moodily: how anyone would allow them to take precedence over the catastrophic explosion of the nuclear reactor near Kiev, which at that very moment was impregnating the atmosphere with lethal radioactivity, perhaps threatening the existence of whole populations, he didn’t know. But most people did, they did, and everyone knew they did and why they did: the petty immediate concern took precedence over generalized impersonal peril. Platitudes. He felt the same way about politics, political crises, social controversies, reformist clashes: for him they were most often mere eddies of concern, superficial and ephemeral.

And yet, he had been a zealot once, he reminded himself, the supercharged missionary of revolutionary change, proclaiming the messianic new, peaceful, just world order, the Socialist utopia around the corner, all in accordance with the tenets of Marx, whose true disciples were members of the CPUSA. He had a mystique once, to fill the void left by that all-encompassing ancestral mystique he had left behind on the East Side. But what a mystique the new one had turned out to be! What a mystique! A hideous personal debacle — though he was still half convinced that the principles on which the mystique was based were sound and were bound to triumph in time — which made the debacle even worse. It was all a great mystique.

Only one force of a social and political nature had stirred him in the last decade, had ruptured the tight shell surrounding his self-absorption, disrupt his “explorations.” That force was Israel! Only Israel had sundered his well-nigh impervious preoccupations with his psyche, burst open the pod of his self-engrossment, and had sent predilections flying — as if his partisanship were an accelerator. And even then, when anxiety about Israel’s welfare or some latest report of menace or outrage against Israel had breached his habitual introspection, it had done so only temporarily — though violently — the way the Red Sea parted, only to close again after the Israelites passed.

But it was like the parting of the Red Sea. The waters returned (alas, without engulfing the foe), returned, and once again rolled in their wonted way, and once again from the great deep to the great deep he went. Oh, the mind of man, how could one express even a whit — of its, yes, wit, express admiration comparable to its capacity, versatility, susceptibility, its epiphanies, Joyce called them: that resentment of M’s against her husband’s facetiousness at her expense went deeper than a principled criticism of his behavior — justified though her protest was. No one could deny that. But there was an even deeper justification for it. The music she was writing now, the music she had begun writing in the last few years, was music she should have been writing, she said, years ago. Spoken in calm and even tone of voice: “Music I should have been writing years ago.” He didn’t believe it, but he didn’t say so, he believed she had to live, to experience, to be seasoned by the innumerable hardships she went through — teaching in a primitive one-room school, building the fire in the schoolroom stove on bitter-cold Maine mornings, caring for their two offspring, living near the rural school in a dilapidated farmhouse where she had no sink, had to haul up water by pail from the well in winter, water that froze in the very pail itself even when in the kitchen, all this while he was away working as an attendant in the Augusta State Hospital. She had to be changed by their living together, tempered to a greater maturity, as he was changed and tempered by their living together to a greater maturity. By living and striving and suffering, by forgetting and learning, by the forging of vicissitude, only then, and only at the last moment and with many waverings, had he built up the confidence to endure the shifting demands of serious writing, of coping with new and untried and questionable forms.

She had been a musician of acknowledged attainment when he first met her in Yaddo. His spiritual and artistic breakdown, his mental turbulence and fits of near madness, had no counterpart in her life, her career. So if she believed that the music she was composing now she should have been composing years ago, what had stopped her? It was obvious what had stopped her. He had. His neuroses and his foibles, his defects of character and judgment. And his impecuniousness too. But obstacle above all others, obstacle that stood in the way of her realizing her gifts, was his inability to earn the kind of living a man of his status, his education, his potential, was expected to earn, as a rule did earn, and at some respectable social calling. Of course, he was a Jew, a factor not to be forgotten. Still, it was his impracticality, his aberrant impulse, his vacillations and flaccid assertiveness, that had precluded his realization of his potential, rather than his Jewishness; and so their standard of living and her musicianship were both forfeit to the flaws of his mind and temperament. Therefore, instead of a composer, she had been the breadwinner, the one-room-school teacher, school principal, the piano teacher, the steady cash-income earner, and he auxiliary, working as a hospital attendant four years, raising and “dressing” waterfowl four and more years, tutoring math — ever frustrated, at a loss, ever in need of her steadiness. It was he, he, who had barred her from her rightful profession, her art. And now her resentment was coming to the surface. . like that bit of pavement he passed on his way to the dumpster with the day’s accumulation of trash, the asphalt crumbling above the welling up of ground.

Oh, you’re crazy, he told himself, crazy as usual. But no. he might be right, for a change: why shouldn’t she be resentful, and with resentment intensified by failing eyesight that robbed her of her former superlative facility at sight-reading? Threat of blindness, when at last she had the opportunity to write music again. She no longer trusted herself to perform in public, and especially to read and perform her own music, with its greater strain on vision because of its novelty, its modernity of approach. A cataract in one eye dimming and discoloring the notes on the page; in the other, in the eye with the lens implant, far more ominous symptoms: hemorrhages around the macula propagating molds in vision. Laser treatments hadn’t helped, or only partially: blobs of darkness still interfered with sight. He looked at her in astonishment in the evening, when after the supper they read a paragraph or two of the Hebrew textbook, an account of Shalom’s ordeal in emigrating to Palestine in the early part of the twentieth century. She misread continually, not that Hebrew was easy to read at any time, the damned print with its gimels looking like nuns, and its beths like kaphs, and its daleths like reshes and its khets like hehs and its vahv like zion, but she even confused the more distinct letters, the tets and the mems, the mems and the sameks. He regarded her with astonishment — and with grief and apprehension — when she misread the obvious, as she held a hand over the eye with the implant to block out the blots that seemed to be hovering there, while she peered at the print with the other eye, its lens clouded by cataract. How old she looked, wrinkled and old, under the unsparing white light of the new circular fluorescents they had recently installed in place of the previous bulbs in their hobnail globes softening the light.

Dear M, dear, patient, steadfast, objective M, weighing her options, deciding on her priorities, bravely abiding by them — abiding him these many, many years; was there any reason why she shouldn’t be resentful?

But then, who could tell, perhaps that remark of hers simply indicated that she had reached a stage where she no longer needed him to the degree she had before. Far-fetched? Possibly. But the fact was she had matured, both as person and as artist; she was by then deeply engrossed in her music, in composition. And she had scored undeniable successes, both in the Babi Yar threnody and the unaccompanied cello rhapsody. She was as modest a person as he had ever known, devoid of affectation, devoid of self-aggrandizement, so when she said that her compositions were the event of the evening, stood head and shoulders above the others, he knew he could take her statement at face value, for she was a composer to be reckoned with. His decrepitude, his self-involvements, made inroads no longer merely on her time and energy, but on her creative time and energy. He was, or thought of himself as, a creative writer. He knew how he would have felt having to forgo his work to take care of another. He would have resented it; why shouldn’t she? Especially in view of the limited number of years she then had at her disposal. It was only natural. To the past impediment of her art that he had posed in comparative youth and health, he continued to add present ones in old age and infirmity. In the past too, he had never given her the least occasion to doubt his total devotion, to fret over the least deviation from his total fidelity. And suddenly in senescence, in unworried impotence, he seemed to transmit all kinds of faintest, involuntary signals that, given her sensitivity, she was responding to, construing them as signals of changed attitude, diminished affection. Thus, she now had to bear the burden of his chronic ailments aggravated by a chafing of mistrust.

What did he mean, for example, or rather what did it mean, his inquiring whether he could get John to do an illuminated rendering of Apothanein thelo, the Cumaean Sibyl’s reply? It meant that his attachment to M then was not, as he once believed, as strong as his desire to die. Living with rheumatoid arthritis was an ordeal, to be sure, but it was one he was determined to endure because M needed him, because he was the one who watched over her, exactly to prevent her from harming herself with oversights she never could seem to guard against, yes, to keep her from roasting a pot or a kettle. But his previously constant affection must have waned, to some degree: his wish to die indicated that. And without his ever having to say a word, she knew it, even then — and with the sagacity that had been her distinguishing trait all their married life together, she had ironically prepared herself for his qualified departure, for quasi-widowhood, for certain eventualities.

“Please, don’t sing,” M requested later that evening, while he was at the sink washing the supper dishes. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t sing while I’m at my desk writing music.”

“Oh, sure, sure,” he replied. “I understand.”

It was interesting though how many times as he continued washing dishes he had the impulse to hum a few notes from this or that snatch of music. Habits were deep, head vacant seeking to alleviate tedium with a few notes of a remembered bit of song. But what did it mean that she had asked him not to sing while she was writing music, what did it mean beyond the request itself? That he was in the way, ought to be dispensed with, since she had begun to win musical and artistic acclaim? That or a hundred other things he misconstrued because — undoubtedly because the miasma of his damned past warped clear conception of everything.

But he had M, his M, from whom nothing could part him, he thought, only his death in due course. She was his M who had set Babi Yar to music, his tender, pitying M, who knew the Jewish plight, had set it to music. Levelheaded, judicious, merciful, lenient, she knew his plight, too, better than he did, his kinks and crazes. He had to hang on to her, the one sanity always available, the one sanity he could always count on.

“Any more dishes?” He looked about. “Coffeepot done?”

“Yes, I did it this morning.” She too had a swivel chair at her desk, and swiveled about, sitting thin and gray, her dark-rimmed glasses that masked the wrinkles under her eyes contrasting prominently with hoar hair and distinguished, fretted brow. “I’ll put the dishes away later, they can drain for now.”

He bowed his head to lessen the distance — and the pain — arthritic shoulders had to overcome lifting the loop of his apron free of his neck. “Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.”

“What are you getting me?” M teased.

“Well, I tried to buy you a plastic ketchup bottle. One that would squirt.”

“Only the cover didn’t screw on very well.”

“Yeah. So I left it on the bread counter.”

“It doesn’t matter. As long as you love me.”

“That I do.”

But he didn’t know just how much he loved her, he said aloud to himself, listening a moment to the piano notes from the living room. And continuing to himself in silence. He hadn’t known it at the outset, hadn’t known it would turn out so, that his conclusions would be the very opposite of his imputations at the start.

“Oh, yeah.” What with his emendations and interpolations, RAM was 91 % full (and thereby hung a tale too: why, when he had gone to the expense of having the IBM technician install another captain’s card, didn’t the system acquire more RAM? He would have to do something about it.). At what angle, when fingertips of one hand touched those of the other, like a gable, did the thumbs lose contact with each other, the pinkies, the forefingers, when the pitch of the gabled roofs approached the horizontal? What a problem. He shouldn’t have any bigger ones.

98 % full.

How now, Ecclesias?

VI

And as they had often done before during an idle hour and a fair one, Ira and one or another of his college cronies strolled along the sidewalk next to the main building of the college. Across the street was Jasper Oval, the playing field. There, in fair weather, freshmen and sophomores, “frosh” and “sophs,” attired in their World War uniforms, marched and countermarched over the bare ground to the command of junior officers; by column right or left, or by the right flank or left or to the rear. With their Springfield rifles, the cadets went through a manual of arms: port arms, present arms, order arms — just as Ira had done exactly a year before, in the spring of his sophomore year, and as Larry did still. The Gothic gray-and-white college main building on one side, the bare ground with the Mili Sci cadets marching on the other, both shared the unstinting sunlight of rejuvenating spring. Drawn up in close order, in platoon, led by the colonel as choral master, they could often be heard singing the infantry song:

“Oh, the Infantry, Infantry, with the dirt behind their ears,

The Infantry, the Infantry, that never, never fears.

The Cavalry, Artillery, the Corps of Engineers,

Will never catch up with the Infantry in a hundred thousand years.”

That was fun. But what a pain it seemed to give the blond staff sergeant; he stood so stiffly at attention, he gave the impression his skin would have rippled otherwise with embarrassment. The junior officers also stood by much too politely, as if they too were enduring a minor ordeal.

“The old shithead hopes he’ll build up esprit de corpses that way,” Larry imparted sarcastically. “Honest, isn’t he the biggest joke on campus?”

Everyone agreed.

The first campus rebellions, pacifist rebellions, against compulsory ROTC had already begun the year before in the spring of 1926, and would reach a crescendo in the three years that followed with the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and all the naval disarmament treaties. There was even talk that the League of Nations would outlaw war. Suddenly, the junior officers lecturing on the elements of military science deported themselves in a very defensive manner: “We’re not here to promote war,” Lieutenant Jacobs repeatedly argued. “We’re here to train you how to prevent the enemy from massacring you in the event of war. If you didn’t know how to deploy your troops against enemy machine-gun fire from lower ground, or how to deploy them against a cone of fire from above, then you’d be massacred. And that’s what we’re here to prevent.”

The tall, sandy-haired major, soldierly even in civilian clothes, defending Mili Sci in CCNY’s largest lecture hall, packed with quiet though hostile students, interrupted his address when the redoubtable Professor Morris Raphael Cohen entered, entered like a Jewish thunderhead. “Of course I’m no match for Professor Cohen in a debate,” the major smiled deferentially.

“Then you shouldn’t talk!” snapped Professor Cohen — to tumultuous cheers from the assembled undergraduates — and Professor Cohen took over the forum. Ira felt a twinge of embarrassment — and then and afterward, a sneaking wave of sympathy for the major. He found himself disavowing the renowned professor’s tart riposte (as well as any ethnic allegiance with him). What arrogance, what intellectual intolerance. Strange and paradoxical too that involuntary demurral, mere sympathy and emotion, should better limn the shape of things to come than a highly touted intellect.

That spring too, a memorable occasion for Ira, Edith gave a cocktail party in the evening, to which Larry and he were invited. Chief guest was Marcia Meede, the same scintillating personage whom a little more than a year ago Larry had so proudly escorted to her seat, together with her enigmatic friend, at a poetry reading of the Arts Club. Spiky in brilliance the lady was, unanswerable her retort and epigram. Fortunately, or unfortunately, she was snub-nosed and homely, affording fantasy no leeway to stray, though attention often did. What long dark stretches of homage he had to maintain for the honor of being there. A short time ago, she had returned to America after completing a study of the mores and customs of the natives of a South Sea island. It was a spectacular, a daring and pioneer venture for a young woman, a venture — so Edith informed Ira later — that Dr. Boas, the eminent head of the anthropology department at Columbia, where Marcia was studying toward her doctoral, was very reluctant to have her undertake, gave his consent to only after much trepidation. Needless alarm, Ira snickered to himself, after Edith told him. She had been under the protection of a U.S. naval base there, to which she retired at night. Besides, who would have dared assail such spiky brilliance as Marcia’s? It was like a spiked collar on a mastiff. She could quell anybody, anybody’s incipient hard-on, with the swift deployment of her sharp rejoinders backed by her invincible homeliness. Jesus, he had such vulgar thoughts, but he couldn’t help it. How could her husband stand her? He was with her at the party: Lewlyn Craddock, tall and engaging, wearing greenish tweeds, a genial, pleasant man with a ready chuckle that often punctuated his dry, nasal tone of voice. He had just been appointed to an instructorship in the sociology department at CCNY — Edith laughed at the slight awkwardness of introducing a pair of CCNY undergraduates to a CCNY instructor — and he laughed too, agreeably and warmly, when he shook hands with them, showing not the least condescension, but asking them about their intended careers and favorite courses and whether they felt the college answered their needs. And he listened with a kind of self-effacing gravity to the replies. Though abashed at first to be on such equal terms with a CCNY instructor, one who didn’t keep his distance the way the others did, Ira soon felt at ease with the man, talked freely to him, and listened to him in turn. He had been to England on a grant from his theological seminary, during his wife’s stay in Samoa. He spoke glowingly of long jaunts through the English countryside as a relief from his research into European methods of birth control, the purpose of the grant.

“Are you a — are you still a—” Ira gesticulated. “You’re a clergyman?” Thank God he remembered the proper word.

“I’m an Anglican priest.”

“A priest?” It was hard to suppress that start of surprise. “So excuse me, how is that?”

“Are you referring to the cloth or the collar?” Lewlyn chuckled.

“Color? Oh, collar! No. I mean—” Ira thumbed in the direction of Marcia. “You’re her husband. You got a wife.”

“Marriage of priests is permitted in the Anglican Church,” said Lewlyn. No chuckle accompanied his reply, and he seemed thoughtful. “We resemble the Catholic Church in most ways, except for obedience to the Pope. And we don’t take vows of celibacy. Does that answer your question?”

“Yeah, thanks. I don’t know much about the Christian religion. Just what I’ve read, and that’s not much. So if somebody says priest, I think of the Catholic Church. Around where I live, almost everyone’s Irish.”

“Where is that?”

“In East Harlem. On 119th Street.”

“119th Street!” Lewlyn exclaimed. “We do too.”

“You do? Where?”

“In an apartment house near Columbia University.”

“Oh, that’s different. Gee. Some difference.”

Lewlyn chuckled. “I suppose it is.”

Drinks in hand, a mix of grapefruit juice and bootleg gin, delivered by the Italian janitor of the house, the two had moved into a corner of the room. Sitting on the burlap-covered couch, Marcia was speaking to an admiring group of Edith’s colleagues at the university, Boris and John Vernon among them, and two or three others of the English faculty, whom Ira knew only slightly, and poets, friends, Léonie, who had given the reading at the Arts Club the same evening Marcia had attended. Ira could hear her say that Scribner had paid her a handsome advance on her doctoral dissertation to be published as a book. And there was Edith across the room, smiling her indulgent, amiable smile, speaking to Larry, while her eyes searched for Lewlyn; then catching Ira’s gaze, answering with amused, deprecating expression, as if sharing something.

“Otherwise the forms are much the same,” Lewlyn continued. “And of course so is the ritual appeal. I’m on the inactive list at the moment.”

“Oh.” Ira felt completely out of his element. “Because you’re gonna teach?”

“No, for other reasons, I’m afraid.” Again, Lewlyn failed to chuckle. “I’m no longer sure of my mission, to tell the truth.”

“Oh.” The distance between their worlds made Ira feel a little dizzy, and yet Lewlyn seemed unaware of it, as if Ira shared his background, or was conversant with it.

“I think the twenties have much to do with it,” Lewlyn went on in his dry, unaware fashion, this time interspersing remarks with a chuckle. “No other decade has seen such an upheaval of accepted ideas. In all fields. Anthropology, social science, psychology, the physical sciences. In the arts. Innovations are taking place on every side. No other decade in recent history has seen so many. We’re really fortunate to be alive at this time, aren’t we?”

“Huh? Yeah.” Ira was glad to see Larry threading his way toward them. It was too much to cope with, generalizations of that kind, too much was expected of him, by way of knowledge and thought, to hold his own with a practiced mind, accustomed to forming generalizations.

“Edith just told me you’re going to begin teaching this summer, Professor Craddock,” Larry said.

“Lewlyn,” the other corrected. “Yes, I am. Not a moment too soon, either, before I’ll be reduced to borrowing.”

Larry joined him in chuckle. “Are you going to be teaching an elementary course? I mean Sociology 1?”

“Yes, indeed. A new instructor could scarcely escape Sociology 1.”

“That’s fine. You wouldn’t mind if I took your course this summer?”

“By all means. Glad to have you. I just hope you think it’s worth your while.”

“I’ve got to make up credits.” Larry caught himself and smiled apologetically. “I didn’t mean that. I meant I’m sure it will. Is there a standard text for the course? I might as well get it now.”

“No, I intend to mimeograph leading ideas. The course is compressed. I feel I ought to keep it as open as possible, and a standard text won’t do. Besides, concepts are changing so rapidly, standard texts are becoming outmoded. You might find it useful to go through Abernathy’s Social Institutions, if you have time. It’s easy on statistics, doesn’t stress measurements as much as some of the other texts, and makes good reading. Again, a little outmoded. I think — they say there’s a revision due out soon. You might want to wait—”

“I’ve gotta make up a pile o’ credits myself,” Ira chipped in — and then noticed Edith was staring at him fixedly. Did she want to speak to him? She made a motion with her arm, and he realized that all this time she had been holding something in her free hand that looked like a strip of cloth. He made his way toward her.

“I don’t think you’ve seen this before, Ira, have you?” She displayed the coffee-colored, foot-wide strip, on which there seemed imprinted a dark green, flowerlike design.

“It looks like tree bark,” he said. “What is it?”

She was looking at him intently. “It is. It’s made from the bark of a tree, a mulberry tree I think Marcia said. It’s called tapa.”

“Tapa?” Ira scratched his ear.

“Marcia brought it from Samoa.”

“Oh. What do you do with it?”

“Tack it on the wall.” And with fixed smile, “Or the door.” Then with altered voice, “Do you think you could come over alone sometime during the week?”

“Alone?” He knew she didn’t mean for him to tack the thing up.

She actually turned slightly toward the apartment door. “Can I trust you to say nothing to Larry?”

“Sure.”

“Some evening.”

“I’ll come right over after supper, if you want. When?”

“Monday, if you’re free. Tuesday.”

“I can come Monday.”

“I’ll expect you then.” She displayed the tapa again for Ira’s appraisal.

It had all the makings of the plot of a mystery story, except that it wasn’t. Ira felt elated that Edith wanted to talk to him alone, but she already had before once or twice. It was something personal; it was probably about Larry again. He knew how she felt about Larry, and he had delved in his mind for mature suggestions he might offer to her problem: how to end the affair without hurting Larry. Ever since Larry had lost consciousness and fallen, she had dreaded the consequence of wounding him. Ira had no ideas. Not even zany notions. How do you end a love affair, painlessly or otherwise, when you’ve never had one? Hey, wait a minute: suggest to Edith that she tell Larry she had had. . intimacies with Ira. What an idea! Oh, stop it, you cuckoo.

But things turned out to be utterly different from what he was prepared to hear when he came into Edith’s apartment. It was altogether different, a new development, a disappointing one too, imparting a mild chagrin, ruling him out for good, sap that he was, proving what he was for the nth time:

She was having an affair with Lewlyn.

“Oh.” And after recovering, Ira asked: “I thought — he’s married to Marcia, isn’t he?”

“Yes. I know you’ll be discreet.” Edith’s large, solemn brown eyes rested on him.

He felt almost disgruntled, thwarted, waited silently for her to explain. They were no longer happy together, Lewlyn and Marcia, and Lewlyn had taken his own apartment in the Village.

“No?”

“Marcia had become restless and dissatisfied with their marriage.”

“I didn’t know.”

“She believes their marriage was a student type of marriage, at a student level, and she could do much better, accomplish much more work, with a husband in the same field she’s in: someone in anthropology.”

“So how can that be?” Ira felt a certain grimness come over him, perhaps because he had lost all hope. “How d’you — I’ve never been in love. How do you pick somebody else out just like that?”

Edith laughed. “You’re priceless.”

“Yeah?” And now he felt shy.

Edith told him what had taken place. Instead of taking a ship directly to Marseilles where Lewlyn had agreed to come from England to meet her, because of a seamen’s strike, she had taken a ship to Australia, and aboard she had met a young and brilliant anthropologist, who had also been studying native customs in another part of Polynesia, and the two had fallen in love.

“Oh. That’s different then.”

He was of noble descent, could lay claim to a title if he chose, she went on.

Suddenly he was reminded of the fact that Edith had the nicest calves, and the smallest feet, such a trim figure, and she was even fond of him. Shucks. Trim figure, the way it was molded out from the waist to her bottom on the gunnysack material covering the bed on which she so habitually sat, like a vase with legs projecting. He was the natural pretender, wasn’t he, now that Larry was about finished? Natural heir apparent. Instead, Edith had gone and fallen for another man: a usurper. Nice guy, sure, Lewlyn. If only Edith didn’t have such an appetite, such a gusto for someone else’s hard luck, calamity. So it was the guy’s hard luck. But then she wouldn’t be Edith. And then he wouldn’t be here. Hell, no use looking sullen. Shine up sympathetically. Even if you didn’t like it, what the hell.

“How come Lewlyn’s a priest?” Ira snagged the question out of the air.

“I doubt he’ll remain one much longer.” Edith smiled.

“I think he said something like that, about becoming inactive. Why?”

Explanations followed, to which Ira listened restively, distracted by Lewlyn’s recurrent hum of disappointment. For one thing, Lewlyn had lost his faith in the efficacy of his priestly office — he saw no efficacy in prayer, in the mass, in any of the sacraments. Beauty, yes, often, but no efficacy, and hence no real meaning. Salvation was an illusion. And so was religion in general: a crutch. And on and on, about what a bunch of rigmaroles anybody should have known religion was, as Ira had learned when he was fourteen years old.

“He’s been going through a great deal of soul-searching,” Edith said cheerfully. “It’s been something of a crisis for him.”

“Yeah, I see. Is he over it?”

Edith gazed at him. “Not quite. For a while he considered remaining in the church as an as-if priest, if you know what I mean. As if he did believe, because that way he would comfort others, his congregation, his flock.” She tilted her head, charitably smiling. “But in the end, he’s decided against that too. He wouldn’t be true to himself. And if Marcia sues for divorce, as she undoubtedly will, he’ll have no alternative except to resign from the priesthood.”

“Why?”

“He won’t contest it.” She went on to say something about the church’s not tolerating such permissiveness on the part of one of its priests.

“Where does he live now?” Ira asked.

“In the Village.”

“Down here?”

“Yes. On Barrow Street.”

So that was that, that was about as much as he needed to know. Well, what else could you expect. Lewlyn was a grown man, an adult, steady, presentable, self-sufficient, a man with a Ph.D., a man with a teaching job at CCNY. Boy, the way his own fantasies ran away with him. Wasn’t he a loksh though, a lymineh golem.

“She can’t make up her mind,” Edith was saying. “He’s been trying to counsel her—”

“He’s been trying to counsel her?”

“Yes. Console her. Quiet her down. She gets quite frantic when she doesn’t receive a letter from Robert.”

“Oh, boy, is that the guy she’s leaving him for, the guy she met on the boat? Robert?” It would take a year and a day before he understood, before he could really comprehend that world. Maybe he never would: priests that married, consoled their wives when they cast them off—

“He’s still quite in love with her.”

“This Robert?”

“Oh, no, Lewlyn. He actually speaks of Marcia’s beautiful body, her white breasts.”

“To you? He tells you?”

“And to others of their former friends, other women. Léonie has told me. And about his devotion to Marcia. It’s touching, in a way, his trying to help her do the thing best for her, make the right decision.”

“It’s touching. That’s what you call it?” Ira stuck both hands in his pockets, heard the wicker chair creak loudly as he pushed against the back.

“You’re such a strange lad,” she said. “So blunt and so sensitive. So mature in so many ways, and so withdrawn. You’re the only one I’ve spoken to about it. Of course, Léonie knows, and one or two others of Marcia’s friends know.” She referred pensively to her reflection in the mirror across the room.

“I don’t know how mature I am. Maybe I’ve been through a few things. But to tell you the truth, I don’t understand most of this. It’s not the way the people I know would have done.”

“What would they have done? He’s moved out of the apartment.”

“Well, that isn’t all. Gee. Moved out of the apartment.” Ira shook his head. “Boy.” He placed his hand on his cheek. “I guess that’s the way you should do it.”

“If you’re at all civilized.”

“Yeah?”

“They’ve remained on perfectly friendly terms — needless to say. Marcia promised Lewlyn when the two went on their separate projects last year that she would never leave him, except for someone she loved more.”

“And what about him?”

“It wouldn’t have mattered. He would have remained faithful to his vows, no matter what.”

“Because he was a priest, you mean?”

“Quite probably. But I think that was his nature.”

“You mean he’s like that. Is she in the same church too?”

“Oh, yes, Marcia’s family has always been Anglican. It was she who convinced him to switch from Lutheran to Anglican.”

“She convinced him? Why?”

“The Anglican ritual is much more beautiful, has so much more sensuous appeal, than the plainer Lutheran one, in fact, the Protestant ritual in general.”

“And that counts. I get you.” He jerked his head suddenly. “Humph!”

“Why?”

“I was just thinking of a synagogue. Not that I’ve gone there very often. Especially of late. But talk about lack of appeal.”

“I went to a newly consecrated one in Silver City. It was quite attractive. In fact, it had a new organ.”

“Yeah. The one Larry’s folks go to on the high holidays is very fancy — I understand. But the only ones I ever knew were little stuffy dumps — you know, three-room flats on the ground floor. Anyway, she feels free to get a divorce. He doesn’t.”

“He won’t contest it.”

“Because he’s a priest. Or something like that. Boy, I get about thirty-five different ideas running through my head all at the same time. She convinced him to leave the Lutheran Church and join the Anglican one. Convince a Jew to quit the synagogue for a Christian church, no matter how beautiful. Wow. How’d I get out on that topic?”

“I’m afraid I led you astray.”

“No. Well. I better keep quiet awhile.”

They gazed at each other in silence while she toyed with a yellow pencil. Silent, while all about were the tools of her trade, or profession, whatever one called the clutter of learning: the massive Underwood typewriter with its black cover on the floor next to the desk, brown briefcase too, and manila files open and closed in haphazard fashion, carbon paper, letters, magazines, The Nation and The New Republic, easily recognizable, the New York Times Book Review. A desk drawer protruding. . A quite place too. Outside noise was almost inaudible.

“You’re very dear to me, Ira.” Her tiny hand suspended the pencil at either end. “I know I can trust you completely.”

“Thanks. You’ve got no idea what I’ve learned through Larry and through you. This is where I’ve really learned. CCNY is a washout. I’ve told you that before.” He waited, while he scratched his brow. “Mind if I ask you something?”

“What is it, child?”

“Does Lewlyn know about Larry?”

“Yes, of course.”

Again a silence, solemn.

“We both understand this is a friendship. We’re not bound by any vows, if you wish. It’s the kind of relationship in which we’re both free. It’s friendship.” She paused, leaning forward winningly. “We’re both mature enough to know we can’t rule out sex, the last step in intimacy between a man and a woman.”

“Yeah.” Ira hunted for his pipe in his jacket pocket.

“It’s the thing missing from my relation with Larry, and why I have to protect him. His attachment was romantic from the beginning, and remains so.”

“I think I understand. I think I do.” He probed the bowl of his pipe, rubbed forefinger clean of char. He wished he could say something wise, appropriate, could make a plausible forecast into the future; but the future offered no more outline than the inside of his pipe bowl. Dense, he was dense, that’s all.

“Of course, if two people intended to have children, that would change things,” Edith said. “It’s difficult to imagine having children without a marriage license.” She smiled. “Of course you can.”

“Oh.” Why hadn’t he said that? “That’s how it goes?”

“Yes.” And then blithely, “I might as well tell you Lewlyn is taking me to visit his parents’ home next weekend.”

“Where do they live?” Ira asked.

“In Pennsylvania. In a small town. His father is a country doctor there.”

“Oh. Like that.” He finally realized that she was talking about more than a mere visit: the contentment on her face, the look of anticipation, that was it. Jesus, they didn’t tell you what they meant. You were supposed to understand. And now he understood. He felt almost proud of himself, despite the absurd end of an illusion.

“Lewlyn becomes quite poetic where his father is concerned. About their rides together in winter to pay a call on a patient. His father is evidently a very unusual person, knows the name of every tree in that part of the country, can recognize animal tracks in the snow. Lewlyn says he himself had a beautiful childhood, and I can well believe him.” She sighed suddenly, arresting Ira’s attention. “He feels, unlike myself, that life has borne out the promise of his upbringing. I could very much wish I had that kind of stability too, that kind of satisfactory sense that what I had been inculcated with was realized when I grew up.”

“Life has borne out his upbringing,” Ira repeated, to hear the words again. Well, you can’t be a sore loser. She had been so nice to him, kind to him. “Gee, I hope it goes well,” he said.

“You’re very sweet to say that.”

“No,” he deprecated. “What will you tell Larry — I mean, what will you say to him if you and Lewlyn want to — well, make a permanent relation together? You get married?”

“That’s another reason I wanted to speak to you. What do you think I should say — if it came to that? Or how should I say it that would hurt him the least? You know Larry, perhaps better than I do. What would hurt him the least?”

“Tell him.” Ira shrugged. And at her laugh, he spread both hands before him. “Explain. The way you just did to me. You know, if it was like what it was when you came back from Europe, maybe it would be different. I don’t know. But it’s hard to say now the way things have changed. I don’t know myself. It’s just a feeling.”

“Then you think I could tell him, safely tell him about the new relationship with Lewlyn? You think he’d see the necessity of it?”

“Listen, I don’t know what you’d do before you’re sure, you know what I mean? But if you are sure, why not? It’s your life. What else can you do? Now that I know, if you tell him, he’ll tell me. I can — well.” He shrugged again. “I can tell him, ‘Listen, if you love her, you want her to be happy, Lewlyn is her best chance.’ You know what I mean?”

In an instant she was up from the couch, with mirthful countenance, advanced on him in three quick steps, bent over and kissed him. “I’ll treasure that always.” She lingered a moment, body in brown dress near, returned to the couch and sat down — and shook her head: “You’re like no one I’ve ever known. Ever will know probably.”

Ira sat mutely. The high pitch of his visit had been reached. His thoughts were too flurried between gratitude for the sign of her favor and certainly at the end of his usefulness. He debated, eyes on his gray fedora occupying the other wicker armchair, just under the tail of Paisley shawl that followed the curve of the small grand piano she had recently bought.

“I know you have a great deal of studying to do,” she said.

“Yeah. My ed courses.” He smirked in disparagement. So he had guessed right. It was time to leave.

“Oh, no, no, please, Ira. Can you stay another minute?”

“Oh.” Now it was time to hunt a place on his person to scratch. “You really want me to stay?”

“Yes. I won’t keep you long. Do you mind?” She smiled her wonderfully winning smile.

“No, it’s interesting. Honest.”

“I wanted to tell you about one other thing — Cecilia.” She tilted her head as if in expectation of his puzzled gaze. “That’s the name of the woman Lewlyn met in England. She’s a secretary of some social service society there. He saw a great deal of her.”

Her voice had become so matter-of-fact he couldn’t help sense the overtone of significance in her restraint. What? As always, implication lagged behind: but it was somebody, no? Another woman. A worry. “Yeah?”

“They correspond a great deal. He’s obviously formed quite an attachment to her.”

“She’s in England?” Redundance helped him orient himself.

“Yes. And she’s a spinster. I imagine she’s one of those many British spinsters left behind by the war. Probably a Victorian in her outlook. I don’t know. I’m judging by what Lewlyn has told me, when they were together, on walking trips through the English countryside. I’m sure that was just as delightful as he says. And by a letter or two.”

“He showed you?”

“Yes. He gets one every ten days. Perhaps oftener. She writes well. He finds her wistfulness very attractive.”

“Oh.” Wistfulness. Something made his mouth water — the word, or the edge of bleakness it had when Edith pronounced it? Wistfulness. A whisper of trouble. Maybe more. Look at the way things were, in two directions — like Janus: one for you, one for me. Dope, he’s taking her to Pennsylvania. Ira licked his lips.

“Her father is dying, which of course makes her more appealing. She is devoted,” Edith was saying. “There’s no question about that. But I should think he’d take very much into consideration the large difference in their ages. There’s no getting away from that: a woman ten years older than he is. I’m sure it must be all of that. I wonder if she’s passed child-bearing age.”

“How much older you say?”

“At least ten years.”

“Ten years. Oh.” As if there were no question Edith had nothing to fear.

“You never know about men, and their need for mothering,” Edith countered his unspoken reassurance. And with tiny hand in tiny hand, her head upraised, she added, “And that, sad to say, is very important to some men.”

“Yeah?” He could sense his own uneasy identity.

“Lewlyn is especially vulnerable at the moment: he’s lost his faith, he’s lost his wife — or been rejected by her. He’ll probably soon lose his priestly office. I don’t see how he can do anything else.”

“Than what?”

“Resign from the priesthood.”

“Yeah, but — what’s — what do you mean, vulnerable?”

“Cecilia. Cecilia means protection to him. Comfort. Men are such babies sometimes.”

All he could catch was a little, little hint of meaning. If he could only think it out. All of a sudden she was talking about him, his motives, his traits, instead of just herself, Lewlyn, Marcia, and holding up a picture in front of him of what he surely was — and wanted. She thought being that way was unworthy, and yet he couldn’t break free of what he wanted. What the hell. “He’s taking you to — where? Pennsylvania?” Ira asked.

“And I hope his parents think well of me. He’s so undecided himself.”

“Yeah. And Marcia knows all about this too?”

“About Lewlyn’s affair with me? Oh, yes, of course. He’s under her influence more than he realizes, and I don’t trust her.” Edith became quite animated, seemed to dismiss the image she spied in the mirror. “I simply don’t trust her. I know she favors Cecilia more than she does me. I can tell by the things Lewlyn repeats from their conversation — oh, I know. She took a dislike to me the minute she heard Lewlyn was seeing me. It’s quite obvious why, but it doesn’t put me in a very happy frame of mind to know she’s doing all she can to change his opinion of me. And she may very well make all the difference. To have someone like Marcia opposed to you — well, you’ve met her. You know how overpowering she is. It would take an unusual person to stand up against her.” Edith stopped speaking, looked at Ira, and laughed, commiserating in the midst of her own worry. “Am I wearing you out? You look so much older.”

“No, I was just thinking.” He found a subterfuge. “It’s all so symmetric.”

“What is?”

“He was in England, she was in Polynesia, and each found a different one.”

“And now they advise each other. Is that what you mean?”

“Something like that.” Actually it wasn’t what he meant, though he wasn’t sure that what he meant was true or not, or stemmed from his wish. “I mean — I hope I’m wrong — it’s easy for Lewlyn to keep up Marcia’s courage about this Robert if he cares for somebody else.”

Edith sat up, sat perfectly still, intensely serious. “I’m afraid so. I’m afraid it’s something I keep hiding from myself.”

“No, I was just saying,” Ira mitigated. “Maybe he is like that. If he’s a priest and wants to help her.”

“Oh, no. It very much needed saying.”

“But he’s taking you to Pennsylvania.”

“Yes.” She was no longer exhilarated at the prospect, she seemed remote, profoundly reflective, then shook her head. “A woman ten years older than he is.” She watched him stand up, and pick up his hat from the wicker chair.

“I didn’t mean to—” he faltered.

“Oh, no, no.” She got to her feet. “I don’t know where you get your maturity.” She seemed quite severe, so unlike her usual indulgent self. “I keep thinking of the story Lewlyn told me about the poppies growing under the washline, where his mother hung up his brother’s World War uniform after he had returned from fighting in France. Poppies grew under it — just a minute, Ira.”

He already divined what she was doing, long before she reached her purse on top of the chest of drawers — just as he divined what Mamie was going to do when she asked him to wait.

“You must not refuse me, do you understand? It’s not charity. It’s not a gift — it’s a very little return for my indebtedness. A little token of what I owe you for bearing with me. I wish it were more.” She tendered him a greenback: the numeral 5 in the corner puffed out visibly, almost haughtily.

“Edith, it’s a five-dollar bill.” Ira drew back.

“I want you to have it. It’s little enough.”

“Gee, it’s too much.” There was no use gainsaying, only observing formalities of reluctance. “You shouldn’t.”

“Of course I should. You’re very dear to me, Ira. I hate the thought of your going about without any money.”

“I know, but—” Superfluous the saying. She held him to her purpose inflexibly. He took the greenback from her hand, and there was her tiny hand floating between them. He held it, and kissed it. As if space converged into the act, it seemed more than his own doing. And then he ran his knuckles over the suddenly moist recess under his lip. “Thanks, Edith.”

“You’re very welcome, lad.”

“Gee, Edith. I hope you have a good time in Pennsylvania.”

“Thank you, Ira. I hope I do too. Good night.”

“Good night.”

— Well, Stigman, how step by step you’ve been drawn into the web that seems to be of your own spinning.

Aye, father Ecclesias. What is it I do? Make life follow art, as I’ve said before? The actuality follow the narrative? It’s the damnedest thing how the conceit, the fancy, lures on the deed.

VII

Lo, it is summer — almighty summer! How Ira loved that invocation of De Quincey’s — and De Quincey too. Lo, it is summer — almighty summer! But instead of the everlasting gates of life and summer thrown open wide that De Quincey glorified so eloquently, final exams were near at hand, finals in two ed courses (yech), Economics (ditto), a dull Psychology 1, where only once did the professor know Ira was alive, when the results of a vocabulary test were in. And a disappointing English course in the essays of Addison and Steele, which he was taking with Professor Kieley, who had been so admiring of Ira’s descriptive pieces in Freshman Composition II. He would have to take at least two courses in summer school — two evening courses, if he hoped to get to a job during vacation — in order to make up for credits lost over the past three years. He had a deficit of credits, he joked sourly with classmates. And for all of De Quincey, it still wasn’t summer; it just felt that way in mid-May. Real summer meant not oceans, tranquil and verdant as a savanna, as De Quincey phrased it, but humid night classes, his stifling, sweltering tenement bedroom, and who knew what kind of a vacation job to make enough dough to buy clothes and shoes to get him through his senior year.

Hadn’t that five dollars felt good while it lasted, that five dollars Edith had given him. “A fiver in my wallet, a fiver in my wallet,” he hummed inwardly to the tune of “A-hunting we will go.” “I got a fiver in my wallet. I got five bucks in my poke.” He no longer felt, what with Edith’s affections and Stella’s pliancy, the need to try to tempt Minnie with a buck, or even two. She was finished with him for good — adamantly. She’d be getting a job soon anyway. She was getting ready for graduation.

Friends of Iz — not friends of the coterie, for they were seniors — in exchange for his admitting them free into the Provincetown Theater allowed him and a selected friend or two to slip into Carnegie Hall, where they were ushers. For the first time, Ira heard the New York Philharmonic, saw Feuchtwangler press his hand to his heart, heard Beethoven’s Fifth — while he waited behind the last tier of the uppermost balcony until legs began to wobble, until it was clear no one was going to sit in the empty seat he kept in view. Sunday had settled into a usual routine, even without the compliancy of his sister. He would chafe through his texts till afternoon, and then hike to Mamie’s on 112th. With luck or without it, he could count on coming away with a dollar — hence an easy nickel for subway fare to the CCNY recital hall where he could listen to Professor Baldwin of the Music Department boom out the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Tannhäuser on the college organ, or other Wagnerian selections. He loved that high linky-linky-link from Tannhäuser, especially if he had been lucky; it fitted in with the way he felt, dispelled that last little cloudlet or worry about whether he’d pulled away in time.

He did good turns also, something like a mitzvah, except he was usually rewarded for it: tutoring Leo Dugonicz in plane geometry. Leo, the Hungarian, had lived a flight up in the small three-story house next to Ira’s, at the same elevation as Ira. They could — necks outstretched — talk to each other, leaning out of their respective windows on the backyard, and they became fast friends. Leo, of course, had gone to work with the bulk of the graduating class of P.S. 24, and had found a job as a lab assistant in a materials-testing lab, and had worked there ever since. At his invitation, Ira had visited him there, watched Leo subject a bar of iron to huge force, heard it snap with awesome bang. Meanwhile Leo’s mother, widowed when her husband was crushed between freight trains when working for the Pennsylvania Railroad, at first kept house for a Jewish dentist on 111th Street, a morose and taciturn bachelor. Leo mimicked him endlessly, especially his gait and floppy pants cuffs, and called him the admiral of the Swiss Navy. Afterward Leo’s mother married an Italian second cook in a large hotel, and she and Leo moved to their new dwelling on 111th Street and Lexington Avenue. It was because Leo sought out Ira, and because Ira enjoyed Leo’s untroubled puckish nature, that the two kept in touch with each other. Leo demonstrated for Ira’s benefit, and to Ira’s alarm, how nitroglycerin exploded when wrapped in tinfoil and struck with a hammer. And he took Ira for a wild drive in a used car he had bought and was learning to operate, and wrecked while he was at it.

Leo was short and stocky, thick-lipped, pug-nosed — good-humored and amiable. He was in his twenties now, and eligible to take the examination for municipal steam-boiler inspector, a sinecure of a civil service job, with no few prerequisites on the side. He was both eligible and eager to take it, his years as lab assistant acceptable in lieu of formal studies. He felt he could easily pass the written part, except for one thing: he needed a smattering of plane geometry. He had tried boning up on the subject by himself, but his head began to swim as soon as the book dealt with proving the simplest propositions. Could Ira help him out? Of course he could. Plane geometry was his beloved forte, his savior.

So Ira would walk over to Leo’s home an evening or two a week and endeavor to tutor him in the rudiments. It was a relief to be with him, on that plebeian level Ira felt he should never have left, the unadorned, uncultivated, unlettered, to which he could never return. It was a relief to be superior to someone in something, to be looked up to for something other than words, something demonstrable, tangible, that liberated one from that everlasting fretting and disapprobation that mind had become.

Leo was the worst dub at plane geometry Ira had ever known, would even have dreamed possible. He would look earnestly at Ira as he proved a theorem, or applied it to the solving of a problem, look at Ira soulfully with his blue-green eyes, his thick lips parted in grateful, humble admiration. But the simplest question would reveal that he had grasped not an iota of what Ira was so fervently striving to impart. His ignorance discovered, Leo would laugh — contritely. How could you get sore at the guy? Ira would begin the same problem again from the beginning, allow no latitude, take nothing for granted, but raise his voice and demand answers at each step. And at the end, maybe a little of the subject stuck, a little of Euclidean light entered. Q.E.D.

Because Ira would accept no cash payment, Leo would take his tutor afterward to the local seafood bar, with sawdust-covered floor — on Third Avenue under the El near 95th Street — and treat him to oysters when the months had r’s in them, and littleneck clams afterward with lots of ketchup and horseradish and a bowlful of small round oyster crackers. It gave Ira that mixed nostalgic feeling of the lost paradise of the uneducated, sitting there at the marble table on top of the sawdust, watching the pimply Greek youth, son of the owner, whack off the end of an oyster shell and pry it open.

Long ago, so it seemed now, when he first came to live on 119th Street, Ira remembered surveying these delicacies, on 125th Street, surveying them with revulsion, grotesque, rocky-looking fare fit only for goyim. Introduced to them now, as with other deviations from kosher food, he enjoyed them. How he had changed, from 1914 to 1927: thirteen years. And how Harlem had changed too in those thirteen years, imperceptibly, until you suddenly noticed. 125th Street, which had once appeared high-toned gentile, had become shabby, much of it. Where were those stores and shops that once seemed so fancy, and those ladies in white dresses carrying parasols who once patronized them? Ladies coming from the suburbs or from estates in Connecticut, and getting out at the 125th Street station of the New York Central on Park Avenue? And where the self-assured, freshly shaven gentlemen, often with a black porter behind them, carrying their suitcases, sometimes sample cases — they looked so large — and hailing a taxicab? Gone the way of Park & Tilford, the way of the sedate brownstones that once bordered Mt. Morris Park near the library. How secretly, relentlessly, change took place: like the replacement of gas-lit lampposts by tall electric-lit ones, like styles that people wore, like long pants for knee-pants, and socks for long black stockings — now only men wore knee-pants: knickers. Like the Irish moving away, so many, and the Jews moving in, with even a kosher butcher store across the street with a wide green blind in the window, above the Italian iceman’s cellar — he was still there.

Except for a few who still lived in the big cold-water flats through most of 119th Street, the Irish had retreated as to a last enclave to the few three-story redbrick houses near Lexington Avenue. And across the street on Lexington, a wholesale cheese store had opened, Kraft’s. Across Lexington, the stable on the other corner in which Pop had boarded his old nag during his brief period as entrepreneur milkman had gone up in flames (arson, it was rumored, since you rarely saw a horse anymore). In its place now stood a funeral home.

And the colored people were moving in, moving south from uptown Harlem. The colored people, Negroes, they were called when they were referred to politely, slowly moved south from uptown Harlem, at the same time as Puerto Ricans settled at the other end of Harlem. Several Puerto Rican families now occupied Mamie’s houses in 112th Street west of Fifth Avenue. The twin six-story walk-up apartments weren’t really Mamie’s — or Mamie’s and Saul’s. The banks had repossessed them. (One of shifty Saul’s unsuccessful finaglings.) Instead of being part landlord, Mamie was now only superintendent and rent collector. That way she got her apartment rent-free.

Not only in Mamie’s houses but all through West 112th Street, all through mid-Harlem, Jewish tenants were moving away — to the Bronx, usually — and Puerto Ricans were taking their places: Spanyookels, Mamie punned, tartly bilingual. Ira had just finished screwing Stella in the front room, standing up, hurrying up, when to his consternation, lo and behold, two young Puerto Rican youths leaning out of the third-story window across the street were having a gala time pretending to be viewing them with opera glasses: peering at them through rounded fingers — and pointing and laughing. Jesus! How humiliating. On the other hand, what luck! Supposing they had been Jewish. Yi-yi-yi and oy, gevald. Undoubtedly, they would have told somebody else who was Jewish, and that somebody else might have known Mamie — and told her! The long-dreaded exposure would have erupted. Revilings and recriminations would have been the least of his penalties. His disgrace would have spread like a wildfire throughout the family: the abominable doings of Leah’s college-boy son. And then what? Who knew? Certainly Mamie’s door would have been barred to him forever. Mamie’s door and her dollar bill. Aza paskudnyack! Aza parsheveh shmutz! And he was. He was. Anyway, what luck, it didn’t have to come to that. East was east and west was west, and the “Portorickies” across the street were scarcely on speaking terms with the Jewish superintendent on the “first floor” of the house where her daughter was getting reamed. Woof. Didn’t he beat it away from that window fast.

Indeed, the whole cosmos was changing: island universes and spiral galaxies could arrest one’s breathing thinking about them. He never tired of repeating to himself that bit of floss he knew was anything but great poetry — about the great star Canopus — he had read in the Untermeyer anthology Larry had loaned him—“I meditate on interstellar spaces, and smoke a mild cigar. .” He didn’t even remember the poet who wrote it. And events crowded out events: Coolidge was President, and prosperity was going to last forever. The League of Nations was at the height of its ephemeral power, Stalin had taken over the USSR, and Mussolini ruled Italy. Mussoli-i-ini, the Italians pronounced it. There was socialism, and there was inchoate Fascism, and anybody knew that socialism was better, because Fascists gave dissidents castor oil. But in Russia, wrongdoers and wreckers were shot, which was only right. And everywhere, the Sacco-Vanzetti case aroused passions pro and con — everywhere — and the names of the two anarchists appeared in headlines in all the city’s newspapers: from the tabloid Daily News to the New York Times, in the Hearst press, in the Sun and the Globe and the World, the Herald, the Tribune. And in the liberal magazines which Ira saw so often on Edith’s desk, The New Republic and The Nation. Everyone who wasn’t biased against Italians, anybody who knew enough to call an Italian an Italian and not an Eyetalian, knew they were innocent, and were condemned to die in the electric chair just because they were wops or dagos and anarchists. “Orrimen Talyaner,” said Mom pityingly. And Mom, who always followed the call of her feelings, was rarely wrong. Poor Italians, especially Vanzetti with his long, drooping mustache. Of course they were innocent, but why, why would a president of the most distinguished university in the whole country, President Lowell of Harvard, still agree with the prejudiced judge, still find the two innocent men guilty? Emotions rose to a fever pitch, as the newspapers said, as the day of their execution in the electric chair drew near. Fever pitch. Ira himself was so moved, had become so involved, so outraged at the patent, gruesome injustice of putting the two men to death, just because they were foreigners and opposed to big fat corporations (what if they were foreign-born; he was too) — so they were anarchists; that didn’t mean they had scraggly whiskers and threw bombs with lit fuses in them the way the Hearst newspaper caricatured them — that he made the case the subject of his final address in Public Speaking 6, which would account for half his grade in the course. He went to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and Fifth, and read as much about the famous cause célèbre as he could — and came away more convinced than ever that the two men were innocent of killing the paymaster of the shoe company in South Braintree, Massachusetts, as charged.

Mr. O’Tealy, the young, handsome — and Irish — instructor, didn’t seem pleased with Ira’s choice of subject matter; in fact, the more Ira put his heart and soul into his address, the more Mr. O’Tealy’s jaws tightened, the more Ira could sense the other’s antagonism. How could he be that way? It was the first time Ira had been gripped by anything political, the first time he spoke with conviction, spoke the truth about discrimination and oppression, and Mr. O’Tealy was practically frowning at the end. Irisher hint, as Mom would say. And all Ira got for all his trouble and effort was a C.

The old man at the keyboard sighed. Sometimes he pitied the youth: not because the youth had once been himself. No, he might have been anyone else’s youth. But so naive, so vulnerable, so lacking in ordinary judgment, foresight, unable to envisage consequences until they were upon him. A child, that was it: he was a child, long after he should have attained to at least a sophomore’s canniness. And a child he would remain, long, long after childhood was over.

Mr. O’Tealy previously had directed every student to choose a piece to recite from memory, a moving poem, a prose selection, an excerpt from a drama, but something by means of which he could convey a play of powerful emotion. And Mr. O’Tealy himself had demonstrated the sort of thing he expected from his class by delivering Shylock’s speech in answer to the question about what he would do with a pound of human flesh: “To bait fish withal.” Mr. O’Tealy’s entire demeanor changed, and by the time he was done, his chest was heaving and his nostrils flaring for breath.

So tempestuous had Mr. O’Tealy become that Ira felt embarrassed. But instead of emulating, instead of choosing something approximately as impassioned, Ira chose three short poems that he liked: T. S. Eliot’s section of The Waste Land entitled “Death by Water,” John Masefield’s “Ships,” and Walter de la Mare’s “Lady of the West Country.” Mr. O’Tealy expressed his dissatisfaction in a voice and gesture keyed low with hopelessness.

A nar, the old man at the keyboard thought, a nar und shoyn. No savvy. It would take fifty years before he acquired a little acumen, a little khokhma. Still, child though he still remained in spirit, the kids in the street had begun calling him Mister. When a rubber handball had gotten away from them, and was rolling toward him: “Hey, Mister, will you stop that ball. Hey, Mister, please! Don’t let it roll down the sewer.” From Fat, Fat, the Water-rat, he had too outwardly changed, had evolved, into Mister. And boyhood, and the East Side of early boyhood, were as remote as where the remote Bermudas ride, as Marvell wrote.

Mom now suffered severely from what the family thought then was merely chronic catarrh. She heard noises in her head, sometimes loud, sometimes soft, sometimes so loud that she would ask Minnie or Ira to put an ear against hers to hear the sound, as Uncle Louis had done. They heard nothing. Now a loud roar, now a soft piping, the volume of the sounds she heard she was convinced depended on the weather. “The weather is about to change,” she would say. “The engineer has begun to drive the train like one demented.”

“What did they tell you at the new clinic, Ma?” Minnie asked, after Mom had been guided downtown by Mamie to the New York Polyclinic.

“Chronic catarrh and chronic catarrh, and again chronic catarrh. In that hospital especially they tell you nothing. Every word costs them too dearly. To a doctor — I won’t say all — a pauper is a pariah.” She hung the dish towel above the sink, blew her nose between her fingers, and flushed them clean under the running water of the faucet. “A Jewish woman waiting her turn there told me if I could go to Kholyerada, to a sanatorium on a lofty mountain, I would hear only a thin whistle. Who knows whether it’s true, and who can go to Kholyerada?”

“Colorado, Mom,” Minnie corrected gently.

“Kholyerada,” Pop lowered his Yiddish newspaper long enough to mimic.

“I thought it was Kholyerada. Kholyeria means plague, that’s why it was named Kholyerada, so many consumptives went there.”

“No, it’s like color, Ma. Color, like this.” Minnie pinched the cloth of her blue dress. “It doesn’t have anything to do with kholyeria.”

“And I always thought it did.”

“Because you got that kind of head. You’re here twenty years, and you still speak like a greenhorn,” Pop jibed through his paper.

“My clever spouse. How did you learn? By going to work. How would I have learned? By going to work. Just as my sisters did, Mamie and Sadie and Ella. In the shops.”

“Who kept you from working?” Pop queried. “Not I. You were entirely at liberty to bring home wages had you chosen to.”

Mom sat down. “Go dig your grave,” she said calmly. “Married and with two children, to go to work.”

“Mrs. Shapiro goes to work,” Pop reminded her. “And she has a husband and three children.”

“The kind of work she does, I could only have done too: wash floors, clean windows, dust, stand and iron shirts. Much English I would have learned that way. The mistress of the house where she works doesn’t know any herself.”

Pavlov: dogs and salivary glands, bells, and synapses: Ira looked up from the psychology text he was trying to bone up on. “Did you ever think of trying it, Mom, I mean plain housework?” What a complex, yeah, more than Freudian complex, his own question brought into being. A complex of contradictory filaments simultaneously weaving in and out of awareness: earnest wish and guilt and desire, fantasy and remorse. Why hadn’t he gone to work with most of the others in his class in 8B? How much easier it would have made life for Mom, and been better for him too. But if he hadn’t, if she had gone to work, the house would have been empty all day long, as empty as the day was long.

“Besides, I become so bewildered when I step out of the subway into the street. I don’t know where I am, where is uptown, downtown.” (“Optom, domtom,” she pronounced it.) “The whole neighborhood reels about. And if the person you ask — with my Engalish—is a goy, he, she, it doesn’t matter even a child, laughs in my face.”

“Well, sure, if you have no head—”

“I could have taken you in the subway the first time. Or the second,” Minnie interrupted. “You could have gone by signs. You know how you do? Here is a wallpaper store, here is a tailor shop.”

“I become so panic-stricken. Noo, ferfallen. Chaim,” she addressed the barrier of newspaper, “you’ll do me a great favor if you give me the last two dollars of my allowance now. You still owe me—”

“So I owe you.” Pop folded the newspaper. “I’m not fleeing town.” He flattened the Yiddish newsprint on the table.

“Flee into your grave.”

“Money! Money! Money! Forever harps on money.”

“Aw, please, Pop!” Minnie intervened.

“Yeah, for Christ’s sake, let’s not get started on that!” Ira added reinforcement.

“Spare me your for Christ’s sakes,” Pop rebuked. “Right away it’s for Christ’s sake. Here live Jews.”

“No foolin’.”

“Don’t mix in,” Mom urged. “Study. Apply yourself.”

“Yeah, try.”

“Another wife,” Pop continued, flattening the newspaper, “another wife, if she isn’t earning herself, would think: how can I help my husband? How can I help him succeed: to be a businessman, an owner, a boss? Mamie fussed and frothed so for her little Jonas that Zaida finally commanded the brothers: you must take him in as a partner. Now he’s a partner in the Jamaica cafeteria. From a little ladies’ tailor, now he’s a makher, a boss—soll mit im gibn a tremoss,” Pop rhymed his spite into Yiddish. “But she, my good wife, she thinks only how much lucre she can wrest from me—”

“Oh, Jesus,” Ira muttered, and tried to concentrate.

“Lucre!” Mom mocked. “Oy, gevald! You hear?” she implored all and sundry. “Twelve stinking dollars a week to run the house he calls lucre—”

“Out of which you manage to skim off enough toward a Persian lamb coat. My fine lady with a Persian lamb coat.”

“So that the neighbors won’t know how afflicted I am—”

“Please!” Minnie exclaimed. “I want to study too. I’m gonna get finals. And I’m gonna have to take the Regents exams!”

“She’s afflicted, you hear?” Pop nodded in disbelief.

“Why else do I dress up in my finery, squeeze into a corset before I appear in the street? That happy Mrs. Stigman, the neighbors should say. See how stout and prosperous she looks. How fortunate she must be in her husband. How well he must provide, and with a lavish hand—”

“Gey mir in der erd.”

“Gey mir in kehver.”

Ah, to be a timber wolf! To lift up his muzzle, like a timber wolf, and howl.

VIII

108 East 119th Street

New York City, N.Y.

July 17, 1927

Dear Ivan:

Yesterday it rained and rained, and everybody said it would then be very cool, and since everybody said so, even tho I am sweating as I write this, I suppose it is. And talking about sweating, I have already gained a reputation at the place I work for being the champion sweater there. But you don’t know where I work, so come closer, and listen, as Mel Klee, the black-face comedian in vaudeville, used to say when I was a kid and worked in Fox’s Theater on 14th Street.

The Irishman who lives with his termagant wife downstairs in the ground-floor flat, one Reb Mahoney by name, assistant timekeeper at the IRT subway system (once he was chief timekeeper, and I don’t know whether it was drink and the devil did for him, or his health gave out: he’s absolutely cadaverous) — Reb Mahoney, having been apprised by his wife, who was apprised by Mom that her son Ira neither toiled nor spun, suggested that I apply for a job at the Interboro Rapid Transit Co. I acted with alacrity. Of course they were going to make me assistant to the assistant timekeeper. On the strength of Mr. Mahoney’s recommendation to the fat — and Jewish! — personnel manager, I was hired — despite the disgust of the doctor who examined me: “You don’t have a single scar on you,” he said. “Where did

you

ever work before?”

Hence, for the past couple of weeks I have been working at the IRT repair barn nine hours every day, except Saturdays, until noon — for $28.50 per week. Instead of assistant to the assistant timekeeper, as I fondly dreamed would be my job, I was hired as pipefitter’s helper. That means like everybody else there, I’m always fiddling around in the vicinity of “old red mule,” as the third rail is called. I have learned, not by experience to be sure, not by hearse, but by hearsay, that a very brief contact with the 550 volts of the third rail doesn’t kill you as a rule, provided you’ve been endowed with a fairly sturdy constitution. What it does is play a percussion solo on your teeth, or cause them to play it; and since I’m not partial to that kind of music, I am very careful to keep my distance.

Another thing, I work just over the repair pit beneath the subway trains. And the first day there, I kept wiping my brow with my sleeves, which were filthy with grease.

Freg nisht

When I came out from under, half the place, from the superintendent to the lowly sweeper, went into a fit of laughter. I felt peeved at first to be taken for such a joke, but when I looked in the washroom mirror, I understood and forgave. I had two black horns of grease sticking up from my brow, and the rest of my features had those strange, eerie shadows on Dr. Caligari’s visage beat all hollow. The work is damn hard, but when I get that pay envelope, I’m satisfied.

At CCNY, which I attend after work, I am taking Government, Geology, and Public Speaking, the last-named course attended by Larry too, who’s also taking Sociology with Lewlyn, whom we told you we met at Edith Welles’s. I’m taking Government with a Mr. Benno. The guy is a scream. He has a lisp beyond anything you ever heard. And when he lectured us about the invalidity of

ex post facto

laws, “You can’t fool me, your honor. I thtudied ex potht facto lawth in Thity College too!” I had to duck down behind the seats ahead to hide my convulsions.

I see Larry twice a week in class, sometimes meet him before. Iz I haven’t seen until now, but I hear that while the Provincetown Theater is closed for the summer he sells programs at the Lewisohn Stadium concerts. He’s probably written you. So has Larry, I imagine.

You certainly got your driver’s license just in time for that boys’ camp job. You sound busy, picking up supplies from the railroad station, and taking kids on excursions. Hey, what’s this about your learning to ride horseback? Let me advise you: don’t ever say “Need any ice today, lady?” or the nag will stop so abruptly you’ll go over his head.

Please write soon, and tell me all about the women counselors, especially the attractive ones. Take care of yourself.

Ira.

It was the first time in his life that Ira had ever worked in so huge a plant, the first place that he learned about the transcendent power of the third rail. The plant structure itself was immense, an entire square block in size. And within it, hundreds of men, divided into crews, and every type of machinery and equipment, all there for the same purpose: the maintenance and repair of the IRT subway trains. Every morning, eight lines of trains, ten to a line, waited to be serviced, outside, inside, and underneath!

The first day that Ira was conducted into the huge “barn,” he quailed before the fury of motion and din that assailed him. Crews of burly men boosted thunderous timbers onto high, massive wooden trestles at each end of the train — while gargantuan steel hooks, dangling from a great horizontal hoist on tracks overhead, held that end of the train aloft. The work was perilous, to say the least, and the brawny Italian roustabout with bandages on his face as puffy as a pillow, who had been struck by one of the swinging hooks, was evidence to that fact. Appalling, the turmoil and the noise: airbrakes soughing, rheostats clacking, hammers banging, drills whirring. Acetylene torches blinded and smoked, kerosene reeked everywhere, cut through by the acrid odor of ozone. And as if lurking silently and unseen behind the overt turmoil brooded the greatest menace of all: the menace of high voltage.

The foreman, Mr. Kelly, beefy and tobacco-chewing, impressive in his striped, clean shirt, assigned Ira to help Vito, expert in the installation of brake rods, who would “break” Ira in on the job. Ira was more than a little apprehensive at the proximity of 550 volts. “The juice is off right now,” Vito advised. “But never touch here, here, here. Never take chance.” The propinquity, the seeming ubiquity, of 550 volts, and the uncertain footing, the narrow ledge just below the aisle between trains, and above the repair pit — his sheer lack of muscle in coping with brake rods that were anything but rods, egg-shaped slabs of steel that had to be held overhead while they were lined up by drift pin to mating parts, and a connecting bolt driven home — rendered him unequal to the task. Before the morning was over, he was shifted to a genuine “grease monkey” job: that of assistant to a diminutive Italian named Quinto in charge of servicing and maintaining brake cylinders.

The new job was actually more hazardous than the other, because the pistons were heavier than the brake rods and required two men to remove them, which in turn necessitated a degree of cooperation between them. Quinto was cooperative enough: he kept to the level aisle between trains, and stationed Ira on the ledge above the pit, when the pistons were to be removed. And once Ira even slipped from a greasy ledge down into the pit unscathed, much to Quinto’s amusement. Still, Ira felt more at home on the job. Quinto showed him how to unbolt the brake cylinder facing, and Ira had toughened enough to apply effectively the hefty open-end wrench to the hexagonal nuts — the wrench slid off once, and kissed Ira rudely on the lips. With Ira balanced on the pit side, the two removed the heavy piston and examined the large leather gasket; and if it was still in good condition, Ira, not Quinto, slathered great gobs of fresh brown grease inside the well-buffed cylinder wall, and then replaced the piston, with Ira, not Quinto, retightening the bolts. Ira noticed, as his muscles developed, that his shoulders and arms could thrust far more than his relatively small hands could endure. It was a mindless job, or nearly so.

“What the hell is a white man doin’ on a ginzo job like that?” asked Burgess, stoutly built, bronzed young family man. “Why don’t you ask Kelly for a decent job?”

“I’m happy,” Ira assured him. “I don’t mind.”

Summer of his twenty-first year, summer of 1927, still vivid after almost seventy summers, still printed on memory: the straw-boss worker, near day’s end, proceeding from aisle to aisle, like a town crier, warning all and sundry: “On the juice! On the juice!” Now that all the trains had been lowered down to the tracks, ready to roll out of the barn, unaccustomed quiet prevailed, and the sunlight, sloping on the high smudged glass roof, hinted of evening. Because smoking was forbidden, those who craved a cigarette crouched in the gloom of the pit beneath the lowered trains, as in a tunnel. Cigarette tips glowing, the smokers took hasty, furtive, heady drags. Tobacco smoke mingled with smell of unwashed bodies, unmistakable stench of unwashed feet. And once again, member of a group, sharing the risk, squatting with the others, Ira felt the claim of nostalgia: of a fraternity missed, a communion lost.

From a distance in the tunnel, his kerosene flare rising, falling, as he ducked under train axles, disappearing when he poked the torch into crannies to examine newly done work and metal tags, the long, lean inspector approached — to be stopped sometimes by someone lagging in the shadow who wanted to light a butt off the yellow flame: tobacco aroma, kerosene stink, musty body odor.

Ira could scarcely continue. Ah — the regretful wish kept coming back and back — if only you had written of this while you were engaged in it, or soon after, never mind the unpolished prose. The freshness of it, or perception, sensation, experience, would have more than made up for lack of finish. Why didn’t someone say, Hey, sit down and describe it. Why wasn’t there someone to assign it as a theme for a course? Why wasn’t there a course? Why? Don’t blame anyone else for your own lack of gumption, your idler’s ways. Instead of supinely taking those deadly ed courses at CCNY, if you had enrolled in one of Edith’s courses at NYU, perhaps with Edith’s assistance. .

There were eighty trains at a time in the shop every day, eight rows of ten each. Quinto, the lead man, though illiterate, would be given the work sheet. Their stint for the day consisted of eight cars whose brake cylinders were to be maintained. Before work began, with list in hand, Ira would lead the way, traveling from aisle to aisle, and pointing out to Quinto the cars on the list. Eight cars in eighty; they were like separate points in the huge rectangular quadrant determined by a pair of coordinates. Eight points in eighty, and yet Quinto’s ability to remember them afterward was all but uncanny. It was Ira who was more apt to make a mistake in location than he. They got along quite well, after Ira learned to do most of the work. They horseplayed now and then, after work, especially at Saturday noon, during wash-up, in the euphoria of the remainder of the weekend off: Quinto initiated the practice of dousing his workmate with kerosene-soaked wads of lint: “Managia chi ti battiavo” was the sound of the words Quinto baptized him with. Ira followed suit, without benefit of clergy — and dashed kerosene into Quinto’s eyes. They almost came to blows.

They loafed a great deal together, as did most of the crews. The practice was one of the things that puzzled Ira at first, and he was never really sure later why it was so. The company would rather have them — and the other workers in the place — loaf, than reduce the hours of work down to the time it would actually take to finish the assigned task.

Oh, hell — he lifted his eyes from the monitor — it was obvious now (showed he was growing more practical, finally, nearly ninety).

Keeping the work force on the job longer than was necessary reduced the hourly rate of the work — that was at least one good reason.

So they loafed a good deal, especially after the half-hour lunch break, when full of food, and lethargic with summer heat, they seemed unable to contend with drowsiness, and yielding, fell into stuporous sleep — on the straw-covered subway seats of a train lifted up on its wooden trestles, and safely out of the way of foreman and superintendent. At other times, their stint finished, or all but finished, they lounged in the lifted trains along with others whose work was almost done and were killing time. One could smoke up there too, take a few drags discreetly, or gab about anything under the sun. Usually talk was about sports: racehorses, and the odds on them, the jockeys, and the favorites, about baseball, the standing of the home teams and the ballplayers, for Babe Ruth was nearing a record in home runs. Or about women: what tight lays the new wave of German nursemaids were. And about wages and working conditions. This was where Ira came to life.

A union, that’s what was needed. Instead of the company union whose meetings nobody attended except the bosses and their stooges. Instead of a company union that was as phony as a three-dollar bill, the subway workers needed a bona fide union of their own, one that would win them an eight-hour day and higher rates of pay, pensions, sick leave, paid vacations — it was obvious as hell. Ira preached with fervor: all they had to do was organize.

“Muz be a union.” Padget, whose task was to change the advertising cards under the train ceiling, looked up from his green racing form. “Muz be right away a union,” he jibed.

Young family-man Burgess, dark-haired, serious, assistant electrician, had been telling the others about fishing for flounder: “Sure, we ought to have a union,” he said to Ira. And not challenging, not hostile, but stalwart and practical: “Who’s gonna do it? You?” And relenting when he saw the effect of his words on Ira: “It’s a good idea. Nobody’s against that. But how’re you gonna do it? That’s what we wanna know: How?”

Their job was their livelihood — Ira had the queer feeling that the murkiness of his callow thought was being parted by realization, the way the dark waters of the East River foamed before the prow of a tugboat. The job was their rent, the meals on the table for themselves and their family, clothes and shoes and a pack of butts and an outing once in a while. They couldn’t depend on words, on good intentions; they had responsibilities, pressing ones: wife and kids depended on them. How mawkish he was, urging them forward, onward, out of the security of a summer job. Why should they risk what they had for just words? No wonder. They had to know how the thing worked that would improve their lot, just like their tools, concrete, visible. He could feel his insights float away afterward, but something remained: a notion of practicality, bare though it was: of necessity, necessity.

As if to punish him for his impulsive harangues about the benefits of organizing into a union, when a brief strike did break out, a strike called by the motormen, the operators of the subway trains, against the company in the shape of the city-appointed IRT board members, Ira and a half-dozen other expendable workers in different departments of the system were culled out to attend to the wants of the strikebreakers. “Scabs,” hired to replace the striking motormen in the event the strike was a prolonged one, they were herded onto the platform of a marshaling yard spur deep in the Bronx. So Ira, great proponent of trade unions though he was, confronted with the choice of being fired or submitting to the new assignment, Ira went meekly along. It wasn’t hard to compromise with principles, such as they were, Ira discovered, and he enjoyed the irony of the adventure.

Everything was adventure. He no longer reported for duty at the car barn. Instead, he rode all the way out to the last stop of the Bronx line, got off, and walked over tracks and covered third rails to the spur. Under the supervision of a surly Italian cook, Ira and his fellow “caterers” prepared the ingredients for beef stews, chowders, and the other entrées that met the cook’s criteria for a strikebreakers’ menu.Sitting perched on the steel stairs leading to the platform, the kitchen hands pared and peeled vegetables. An Englishman from the El station maintenance crew, probably singled out because he was an Englishman, had been a steward aboard transatlantic liners before he settled in America. Never did Ira see potatoes peeled as the Englishman peeled them: they had as many facets as a fine gem. Ira tried to do the same; he wasted potatoes like mad, but not once was he able to produce anything resembling the exquisite polyhedra of the other.

After the kitchen crew had prepared the food, and it was cooked, they served it. Once, as Ira reached over to set a plate of stew before one of the scabs, the plate in his other hand tipped slightly, spilling gravy on the shirt of another scab. He sprang to his feet, snarling fiercely. And scared and quaking, Ira cried out, “I’m sorry, mister. You can see I’m not a waiter!” Thus mollified, the man sat down again.

The culinary and dining area occupied the space where the ticket booth and turnstiles usually stood. The dormitory was the station platform. On it were double rows of canvas cots, and the scabs slept there in the open air. They were a seedy bunch, especially in the morning, when Ira came to work to serve them their breakfast of bacon and eggs, a seedy bunch who sat blearily or groggily on the edge of their cots, sat yawning in their blue work shirts and dungarees. Where did they come from, where would they go afterward? To another strike-torn place? Ira could almost pity them — perversely — though he knew he wasn’t supposed to, and that he was no more scrupulous than they were, but they looked so surly and withdrawn — just like condemned men might look, he thought. Sometimes he thought he caught the glint of a hypodermic needle. They shot craps in the afternoon.

“The strikers won’t maul you?” Mom asked anxiously, when Ira told her what his new duties were. “I fear greatly.”

“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “They won’t maul me.”

“You’re mixing into a strike,” said Pop. “You don’t know what they’ll do. They’ll open your head.”

“Maybe you better not go to work,” Minnie worried.

“And get fired?” Ira retorted. “Nobody’s gonna open my head. Nothing’s gonna happen. What am I? A scab? I’m not gonna run the trains. They’re the scabs.”

“Oy, vey,” Mom moaned. “It goes ill with me. The first one they’ll pick on will be the Jew.”

“They won’t pick on me. I’m not running the trains,” Ira maintained doggedly. “If one of these scabs went into a restaurant where you’re a waiter, will the strikers beat up the waiter?”

“That’s right,” Minnie agreed. “Ira’s right. He’s only a waiter.”

“Indeed.” Mom remained stubbornly unconvinced. “Would that I never knew that shrew downstairs, Mrs. Mahoney. Evil befell me that I had to gossip with her.”

“Don’t worry,” Ira rebuked Mom wrathfully. “All I do is hang around, for Christ’s sake, and peel potatoes. It’s a cinch. And I’m making twenty-eight fifty a week.”

“We’ll see,” Pop said ominously. “We’ll see.”

And Minnie pleaded, “Yeah, please be careful, Ira.” She approached him, patted his shoulder tenderly. “Please watch out.” She clucked worriedly. “Maybe you shouldn’t go to work. Say you’re sick. You got flu. You can go to Dr. Weiner. He’ll give you a letter.”

As suddenly as the strike had been called, it was called off. Mr. Quackenbush (what a moniker!), the comptroller, came to terms, the newspapers all proclaimed, with the motormen. They again manned the trains. All subway services return to normal, the newspaper said. All trains running on schedule. Before quitting time on Wednesday, Ira and the others were told to report to their regular places of work. He gave scant thought to the fate of the strikebreakers: they were still standing around, sitting on their cots, or striding on the platform, waiting for their pay, some rumbling about the bastards wouldn’t even give us our supper, and some went to find the Italian cook for a handout or a sandwich, but he had disappeared. They’d like to wreck the goddamn station, they said, heave the cots onto the track — but they hadn’t been paid. And there were a couple of cops around — somewhere.

It was back to the subway barn for Ira. Nobody seemed to have missed him. Mr. Kelly smacked his lips when he glanced at Ira. Quinto said: “Hey, what’sa matter for you? You seek?” Maybe he pretended he didn’t know.

Ira answered, unsuccessfully nonchalant: “No, they wanted me to work uptown.”

Only Burgess seemed to take the measure of him with calm survey — without a word, quizzically, his brown eyes level, as if he were committing a thought to memory, or an object lesson: affirming the compulsions of reality. Who knew? No one said anything.

And at home, everything returned to normal also, to Mom’s great relief, to Pop’s noncommittal “Noo, it became nothing out of nothing.” Fervently concurred in by Mom’s “Gott sei dank,” and Minnie’s terse “You gave me a real scare.”

Because Quinto was illiterate, and his command of English very poor, Ira would go on errands to the toolshed, in the charge of a cross-eyed, redheaded Irishman (the Irish were in the ascendant, needless to say), and fetch a leather gasket, new bolts, or other components needed to replace worn ones on the brake cylinders. Sometimes his errands took him to far corners of the barn, remote, almost mysterious places, visited once and not again, and as a result, imbuing the senses with imagery as vivid as they were pristine. He beheld with the eyes of childhood, with wondering gaze, the great emery grindstones truing the flange of a rusty car wheel, sending a comet’s train of sparks into the gloom of the workshop, starchy and ozone-laden. He loitered whenever he had a chance: how like a dawn lighting up the smithy were the heavy, white-hot forgings brought from their crimson beds of fiery coke. And the two brawny, bare-armed Irishmen hammering the white forging on the black anvil, rhythmically, like the automata of a clock beating out the hours, spoke to each other as if out of a trance. Said one: “Do you mind the time we were in Cork?” And the other: “’Twas a day like this.”

With eighty trains in the barn daily, eight rows of them, gobs of grease from the work of maintenance and repair fell in splotches everywhere, and mainly in the aisles: a hazard to the men traversing them. For safety’s sake, the sweepers broadcast clouds of slaked lime, “to cut the grease,” they said: to dry the smear left by the lubricant after it was cleaned up: to cut the grease. To cut the choking dryness of the clouds of slaked lime, men chewed tobacco. Ira soon got the hang of the vile habit. Ever impressionable, eager for every new sensation, he bought his package of cut plug chewing tobacco, and was soon squirting tobacco juice everywhere with the best of them, and proud of his ability to do so. Work made him oblivious of the cud in his cheek, except when time came to discharge a mouthful: Chew Star Navy. Spit ham gravy. It was easy. Wait till he got back to college. He’d show them. It happened he had a wide gap between his upper incisors, and could force a stream of brown fluid between them to arc over a considerable span. Also, chewing abated the craving to sneak a smoke. Quinto, who neither chewed nor smoked, was impressed. Chew Star Navy. Spit ham gravy.

IX

Ira dreamed at night, strange verbal, literary dreams. He often walked with literary and historical personages through the car barn, explaining the work that was being done: once with Mark Twain in his white suit, once with tense General Sherman. Again, in the company of George Gordon, Lord Byron, Ira took the poet on a tour of the place. Work was at an end, trains had been lowered down on the rails — and the barn was quiet and somber. Byron looked just as he did in Moody and Lovett’s Outlines of English Literature, handsome and sleek, with tousled hair above a fine brow, and shirt collar open at the throat. The two talked as they walked by the ends of the long lines of brooding trains. Suddenly the atmosphere darkened, became sinister — trains stretched away in ominous perspective. And turning to Byron, Ira said, “You see, Lord Byron: the Aisles of Grease, the Aisles of Grease, where burning Sappho loved and sung.” Byron laughed. A jubilant light spread over the entire car barn. Ira woke. “You’re priceless,” said Edith when he told her about the dream one evening early that fall.

From Edith he learned that Marcia had definitely made up her mind to sue Lewlyn for divorce. Proceedings began apace, and Lewlyn refused to contest the suit. And though it was all much too complex, too involved and unfamiliar, for Ira to grasp in all but haziest fashion, he gathered that Lewlyn was suffering acutely: from the ultimate rejection by his wife, from the disapproval of his bishop in the church for declining to contest the divorce, from his own renunciation of holy orders, the collapse of his religious beliefs and aspirations, and especially from the negative mood about life that had overwhelmed him of late. Life had become empty of almost everything worthwhile, empty of everything except sensation — how did Edith phrase it? Love had become glandular relief. He was profoundly disenchanted and pessimistic. How could she not help but comfort a man so dejected? She had, and, of course, intimacies had followed. She refused to assign undue importance to the body, Edith asserted, and both understood that physical intimacy was a consummation of friendship between man and woman — without binding commitment. And now even more than before, Lewlyn’s affections were torn between Edith as a potential permanent mate and the woman he had met in England, Cecilia. The question of who was going to win out was the predominant issue in Ira’s mind — it was simplistic, but he knew no other way of formulating it; and he was sure that, brought down to simplest terms, that would have been the way Edith would finally have expressed it. What other way was there? That was the paramount question: Ira could sense it: through all of Edith’s altruistic, objective presentation of the triangle, within all the restrictions of cultivated behavior, all the restraints of propriety and fairness, she wanted to win, she wanted Lewlyn to marry her. Well, he had been through all that before, Ira mused, heard all those circular, subdued hopes before. . and had so little to offer by way of practical response, by way of anything except sympathy, sympathy and attentiveness, until the subject became so attenuated it floated off beyond him. Yet even so, inadequate though he felt his response to be, Edith seemed to hunger for it, cleaved to it, sought for more. In fondest, most earnest terms she besought him to telephone at the earliest, to call. Twice she pressed a five-dollar greenback on him. She now had the utmost faith in his discretion.

It was encouraging to Ira that the body didn’t mean too much to Edith, that she felt — aside from necessary physiological precautions, for the sake of health — like eating cooked fresh vegetables and other smooth bulk — the body deserved no special consideration. All the fuss made about it, preserving its “purity,” chastity, was nonsense, nothing but a ridiculous carryover from stuffy Victorianism. No modern person would abide by such, or could abide such silly prudery. No emancipated woman would, certainly not after Freud had shown the grave emotional disorders puritanical repressions brought on. It was too tenuous for Ira — not entirely, but most of it, grazing him like a mist, and drifting off. Two clouds of thought interpenetrated within his mind though — the solution to the oft-posed problem (his wits roamed out of contact, mooning on the irrelevant): answer to the oft-posed problem: what happens when an irresistible force meets the immovable body: they interpenetrate — two clouds of thought all but fused inseparably, solipsistically, and in customary fogginess. Was he an example of a repressed person? If he screwed Stella whenever he got a chance, even though she was a kid cousin, true, not such a kid now: he was twenty-one; from that minus four left seventeen. Did that indicate repression? Of course, he couldn’t ask Edith, that was the worst of it. He might fantasize as usual by telling her, describing the “first-floor” apartment, with its gewgaw onyx electric lamp in the parlor front room, the lamp Jonas got by opening a savings account with the Harlem Savings Bank, so heavy that as tart Hannah said, you could get a hernia lifting it. And the new Stromberg Carlson Heterodyne radio pouring out Black Bottom or Charleston music, anything to drown out the act, but boy, did your ears have to be honed for the least sound — no, no, it was a fantasy-urge to tell her. But was that repression? He felt like a felon, no, like a falcon, successful, fierce, the osprey rising with the live fish in his talons. Now there again, that sense if only he had the nerve during those few walks with Edith, if he told her his intimations, but he didn’t, and maybe because he didn’t the mind kept coming back to it. Did all that indicate repression? Of course he was repressed. Look at Leo, he even offered Ira a chance at the coffee-dispensing divorced friend of his mother, a regular hunky yenta, with eyeglasses and big tits and a box like the tunnel of love in Coney Island. Of course he was repressed. Leo with his fat nose and thick lips wasn’t. He was always making jokes about it, pretending he was laying one of those hallway whores: Ow! Ow! Take your quarter back! Of course he was repressed. Why did he prey first on Minnie, and now on Stella in his aunt’s house? Why didn’t he go hunt up a piece of ass like a man?

No. . all right. If she didn’t propose to accord the body undue consideration, as she said, why was she so careful about her skirts, about the way she sat, so primly, hem down well below knees, always decent, never gave him a chance to look up, why? He didn’t know, but that was how she was reared, inbred modesty, as they said, but it didn’t give him much encouragement. Anyway, most of the time he’d be afraid to try to raise a hard-on with her. What would she think of him, although once or twice — was he crazy? — he could have sworn her large, steady, noncommittal eyes rested on his fly, as if appraising, as if appraising the bulge next to his crotch were the most natural thing in the world. He could have bet a dollar, but maybe it was just absentmindedness. Jesus, the things he was keeping from Larry these days, things like that, things he had learned: surmises and confidences. And only yesterday, it seemed, Larry was standing on the fine green carpet in the living room of the empty apartment by the crank of the Victrola, saying with a shining tear in his eye: I’m in love with her, with Edith, my English instructor. And the world toppled. But now he, Ira, was miles ahead of Larry in confidences, in revelations, maybe in chances too, if he ever got the breaks. Jesus. . goddamn it, he had the rawest, unfettered sense of humor — that was the worst of it; how the hell did it get away from him, range at will with no trammel? He could — in imagination — ask Larry the filthiest questions: Hey, Larry, did you ever try back-scuttling Edith? I have to back-scuttle my kid cousin Stella most of the time — she’s so short, you know? I never did with Minnie, didn’t have to, across the bed on weekdays and along the bed Sunday, you know what I mean: regular. Who’s Minnie? he might ask. You don’t know? My sister. What about you and Edith? Ask him for advice. Ad-Vice. Ha, ha, ha! Absent thee from felicity awhile, said Hamlet. So what do you do? And why did she nearly jump out of her skin in Woodstock when the cat brushed her leg? Come on. Come clean. I’ll swap you smut: no holds barred. Not what did you do; what didn’t you do? Ha, ha, ha.

You bastard. Le poète est semblable au prince des nuées, Iz could quote from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. Prince de nuts, Ira could quote from Stigman. .

If only Marcia would keep her hands off the affair, it might develop into something permanent, a life together, Edith told Ira for the ninth time: a life together. She and Lewlyn had so much in common, love of nature, love of beauty, love of poetry. He was so sensitive to loveliness of flower and leaf and country road. And now that he had taken up living in the Village, they saw so much more of each other, had dinner together, breakfast on the weekdays. And he was so gentle, so very gentle and considerate of her; even though he knew all the tricks of sex, and they tried every kind of play, his hands were so gentle. They were strong, but gentle. And he was so steady, for all the terrible suffering Marcia was putting him through, and the crisis he was going through in reordering his life. If only Marcia would stay out of it, if she didn’t interfere, their friendship could ripen into a permanent relationship.

“How does she interfere?” Ira asked, though he had a vague notion he had asked the question before, in another form, and could derive the answer from Edith’s manner and tone of voice.

“She keeps trying to influence him. She’s so smart. And of course, he’s still enough in love with her, under her spell, he listens.”

“Against you?” Ira asked the safely obvious.

“Against me, without a doubt.”

“Why?”

“She still has his interest at heart.”

“That’s what she says?”

“Oh, yes. That’s her way of saying she’s not going to lose control over him. She’ll keep her grip on him. She’ll manage his life as long as it suits her, as long as she pleases.”

Man-ages, Ira watched the word break apart. “But why, if she’s got another man, this Robert, I mean, to keep her busy? She’s in love, isn’t she?” He stoked edification with candid simplicity. “She’s getting rid of him. I mean Lewlyn.”

“Oh, yes, she will in time — get rid of him, as you say: when it pleases her, or she finds other things more important — other ambitions to satisfy. But she’s always intent on power—that’s what she’s most interested in: power over people. It doesn’t matter who. I think the same thing will happen with Robert. I don’t envy him.” Edith was clearly unhappy — with back against the wall, primly sitting on the gunnysack-covered couch. “She’s going to get Lewlyn away from me if it’s the last thing she does.”

He broke the narrative in midstream, unable to repress the memory of his own behavior eleven years later, when he returned from Yaddo, and told Edith of his intention to leave her for M. He had used Edith basely at that, to gratify his sexual urge — and in front of a mirror to intensify his gratification — and she, poor woman, had more than acquiesced — had urged him on. Poor woman was right. Poor women! So many of them, they would do anything — first Mom, then Minnie, then Edith, even M — they would do anything to try and hold on to the guy, at all costs, the guy who wasn’t worth holding. Nothing so bizarre about it. Nothing to prate about, no need to prate about it. Edith had mothered him, was mistress and mother both; but she had abased herself, for the sake of holding on to him, as Mom, the voices ringing in her ears as echoes of unforgettable assaults, had done with Pop and also him.

Indeed, Ecclesias, the grave is a barrier to all redress, but I must continue with this fable.

“Why does Marcia have a problem with you?” Ira asked. “I mean, what’s so wrong with you?”

“Oh.” Edith’s knees drew elevated an instant — only. “What’s wrong with me is that Lewlyn and I are lovers, something she wasn’t prepared for — had none of her blessings. And was none of her business either, but she soon made it so. She never expected he would find someone else so soon, and I think she’s more than a little jealous. She thought he’d curl up and die when she left him, and he hasn’t. Her ego is — well, ruffled. It’s a huge one anyway, if I know anything about such things. Lewlyn didn’t pine to the extent she expected, that’s certain — I wish he would pine even less — I’d feel much more encouraged. Truth is he found somebody else compatible, and I suppose that’s hard for her to swallow. And she’s so religious about these things, to put it mildly. Straitlaced—”

“Huh? Marcia?”

“Marcia is a practicing Episcopalian. She believes in God, in the sacraments, and all the rest.”

“Yeah?” Ira became genuinely alert. “After her husband gave it up? You mean she’s religious? I guess that’s where he made a mistake.” He grinned deprecatingly: “The idea just came to me that as long as Lewlyn was a priest, he”—Ira gesticulated, sought facial areas to rub—“he was superhuman. Godlike, you know? He had a speaking tube like the captain to the engine room—” Ira giggled. “So she felt something like awe. No?”

Edith laughed with him. “You may be right. It’s simply that she abides strictly to religious doctrine in matters of sex. She’s guided by the dogma of the church. She absolutely won’t countenance sex without marriage — she won’t allow sex before marriage.”

“Yeah? Not even the trial marriages they talk about today?”

“Oh, no. Heavens, no.”

“And she’s an anthropologist?”

Edith radiated amusement.

“So you’re sinning.”

“It amounts to that. Only I’m the temptress, I suppose, and therefore the guiltier party.”

He knew it was anything but funny; but, cracking a smile, he skimmed excess of levity with a sober “Gee.”

And expectedly, she remarked, “It would be funny, if it weren’t so serious—”

“I know.”

“They never had sex before they were married — in fact, she was frigid, Lewlyn told me that. It was several days — or nights — before she relaxed. ‘Your body is more honest than you are, Marcia,’ Lewlyn told her.”

“More honest than she was,” Ira tried to fathom. What the hell did that mean? Get a breast drill and an auger bit. Boy, you had to give Lewlyn credit, though—

“Of course you won’t mention this. It’s very confidential. I trust you. I’d tell no one else but you.”

“Oh, no! I’ll tell you, Edith, I’m dumb in a lot of ways—”

“You’re not.”

“I am. But the little common sense I have tells me that once she found a man who loved her, and they became — what d’ye call it — compatible, Jesus, she should have stuck to him—”

“Unfortunately—”

“No, no,” Ira interrupted. “It wouldn’t have been good for you—”

“That’s hard to say. What I was going to say is that’s not Marcia’s way. She’s determined to become the foremost woman in America — in the field of anthropology. That comes first. That’s what she’s made up her mind to build toward. Not a husband, not a family, but a career. She’s ready to sacrifice anything to that. And that’s why Robert—” Edith raised her chin to stress: “He’ll be the perfect foil for her in building her career. If he isn’t, she’ll do the same with him as with Lewlyn.”

“So how the hell—” Ira caught himself. “How did he get along with her all this time? I mean Lewlyn?”

“By laughing at her.”

“By what?”

“Laughing at her when she said something extreme. Of course, she eventually came around to recognizing it herself: that she was wrong. But you can be sure it wasn’t often.”

“No. I guess not,” Ira admitted. “Not somebody as brilliant as she is.”

They were both pensive. Did he dare — no, he didn’t dare — tell Edith, though maybe she might like to hear it, if he could say it right, phrase it politely, summon up drawing-room politesse, which he couldn’t do anyway, like Richard Smithfield, or only rarely, by imitation, which was a wonder anyway, considering 119th Street when he was eight, and the barber’s son mocking the mick kid with “You gargle a weenie,” and though incredulous about the reality of what he said, knew what he meant: I wouldn’t fuck her with a wooden prick. All he could think about Marcia was dark asshole and bristling eyeglasses. Well, he was ruined; so what’re you gonna do? And a nice guy like Lewlyn working her around. Jesus Christ, he’d sooner have Larry’s homely Hungarian maid, and they didn’t come any homelier than that; what a pork-nose: oink! Throw a blanket over ’em, said impish Leo. Then they all look alike. . Yeah, maybe.

Over forty years later, Ira’s image of Marcia had not changed, but had crystallized as he observed her while waiting for her in her spacious Central Park West apartment, where he spent an hour or so, and where, after his fat omelet and two drinks previously imbibed, he dozed off in the vacant living room, while Marcia was occupied elsewhere. With age, the lady had become grander, being ministered to by her companion-lady-in-waiting-amanuenis-body-servant, who bound up Marcia’s injured ankle, a little self-consciously. Then, with Ira her escort-in-tow, the two attended the memorial services for Louise Bogan, the poet, svelte of yore and presently deceased, svelte of yore in a peach dress when Ira last shyly eyed her queenly sensuousness at Edith’s place. Svelte once, but dead now: she had said of Dalton, Edith’s later lover in a second, or even third, love triangle, that he screwed like a rabbit — what these women talked about. Quit caviling: what did you talk about? Oh, hell, there was scads of copy — for a prudent guy in his right mind to write about, at least as valuable socially, and as enlightening as that which Ira dwelled on — or rather was restricted to.

He recalled two taxi rides, and in one, the Jewish hackie recognized the great seeress, and treated her with all the deference that Jews reserved for the learned and the intellectually endowed (and financially also didn’t hurt). Surely, a weighty matter or two had been discussed on the way, broached and enlarged on; the gathering itself required extra chairs, he recalled, since she had been a famous poet, and many significant associates, including William Who, the editor of The New Yorker, clean-cut gentleman, running the show, looked fittingly grieved and gravely concerned.

Most telling was the inescapable fact that, while Léonie Adams read Louise Bogan’s poems, Marcia slept off her steak tartare and two martinis, specks of lip skin — or was it crumbs of steak tartare? — stirring like tiny hackles to the current of her breath. There was Marcia snoozing away, while Léonie read Bogan’s poems. “You wretch!” Léonie denounced Ira the following day when, seeing her off on the train to Connecticut, he told her that Marcia had slept through her reading of Bogan. (Hell, Bogan never stirred either.) And then Léonie went on to lament the fact that a once fetching huskiness had disappeared from her voice, ever since she had given up smoking. Fancy that! The service provided other memorable insights, not the least of which was when the celebrated poet W. H. Auden, sitting in the window seat of the chapel in the back, tapped Marcia’s shoulder and said, “Hello.” At which she was looking very pleased. And you sat there like a goddamn block looking up at Auden, glaring up at Auden, neither standing up nor seeking introduction. Why? Because the bastard had published, had allowed to be published in some late and unlamented ephemeral magazine, a piece of disgusting erotica, or homosexuality, of fellatio in clever rhyme. Talk about pubic smells and phallic sights unholy. So you glared up at him, never made a move to rise, introduce yourself, shake hands.

— Do you conveniently forget your own incestuous excesses, those acts of carnal behavior you have rendered so? Have you not eschewed the interactions of the polite world, as well?

Treat, Ecclesias, but not drooling about it in an amatory paean.

“We were quite good friends until this.” Edith pulled a hairpin out of the tight bun in the back of her head and probed her ear delicately with the round end, licking the wax off in her unbelievable habit. She probed the bun with hairpin again. “But now I know she disapproves. Very. Her antagonism is evident in every word of hers Lewlyn repeats to me.”

“Yeah?”

“Especially, do I resent”—the channel of brown dress between thighs narrowed, and Edith tossed her head with unusual abruptness—“her constant reference to my negativism. My negativism. I’m no more negative than she is, if I were happy. She makes it seem as if I’m incapable of anything but a destructive tendency toward life. That shows how stunted, really stunted, her sympathy is — no matter what she says. Or prates. Or pretends. She simply doesn’t know what I’m about. I wonder if she knows what anybody is about? She paints me as being in love with defeat. It happens that I think Man is ultimately defeated. And I’m not alone either. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like people, I don’t sympathize, I don’t enjoy the simple things of life, that I shun happiness. It infuriates me.”

“Yeah.” Something was coming through to him beyond the tepid roil of slackness and his lasciviousness, something about Edith’s plight, Edith’s longings, her endearing traits too: a glimpse. Something more than Stella, a woman, a person, a complexity with a mind, and above all with feelings, capacity for suffering. Vast matrix of synapses: mind, reflection, trying, worriedly trying, to peer into the future. The realization was sobering: not whether she’d slip him five bucks, as she did before he got a job, not whether that carnal opportunity would ever come. But Edith, the troubled woman, existing with her dilemmas apart from himself, in her own right. How rarely he felt that; how often others, sensible people, seemed to — and he ought to.

“I was just thinking I couldn’t do anything for you,” he informed her, penitently.

“I don’t expect you to do more than you’re doing. You’re very dear to me, Ira, just by bearing with me.”

“I know. You told me that. But it’s funny.” He shook his head, and suddenly caught his breath. “I just got an idea: what can you do? Intervene!” The word made him jerk, thrust his legs out spasmodically. “That’s what I mean. You’ve been good to me—” Like bilge he felt, putrescence; it suddenly silenced him, and he lost hold of the thread of the idea, sought to stimulate it with fingers stroking temple: “Good to me. I mean what can I do? Is there anything I can do? Gee, I feel as if—” He hefted fate in half-closed hand. “If I could do something it would make all the difference. But what? I’ll get a regular aura in a minute, like Prince Mishkin, or somebody.”

With tiny hands in her lap, she listened — so receptive, solemn, as if deliberating. “I don’t think anyone can do anything, change anything — I’m not fatalistic, or am I? I can’t change myself. Neither can I change Marcia, certainly not Marcia, any more than a juggernaut. Cecilia is far away in England — not that I would hope to change her. The key is Lewlyn, his will, his character, his decision — his character, to say it all over again. He’s the one going through a very critical phase, and it will all depend in the end what he decides is best for him.”

“But still you talk about Marcia’s influence on him.”

“That may just tip the balance. She’s a very strong person.”

“Still, he’s here with you. Somebody else would have told her beans. I mean, wouldn’t have told her.”

“We, Marcia, Lewlyn, and I, have friends in common. He’s spoken to all of them about his treatment by Marcia. They all know about it, and of course they’re friends of hers — primarily. It’s a big joke among them. They give him tea and sympathy. Léonie said.”

“Only you.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Boy. I don’t know.” Ira drew arm against the hand gripping his wrist in awkward stretch of skepticism. “Everybody’s got someone to fall back on but you.”

“Wouldn’t common sense indicate that a woman closer to his own age would be a better mate than one ten years older?”

“Yeah. Sure.” He shrugged.

And the tiny hands remained quietly locked in her lap, and there seemed to be a kind of drooping in her demeanor, something akin to resignation — no, more than that: it registered with no more than blurred observation: she had a kind of lien on defeat — what a crazy idea! Something within her ran contrary to winning, even if she wanted to. She fed on it. No wonder Marcia charged her with negativism. Oh, no, oh, no, he could hear within himself: oh, no, she’s gonna lose. She’s got to lose. Well, for Christ’s sake. His hand fell from his lip to his thigh. Be goddamned. Which came first? That he’d have that trim body there for his? Or was sorry for her defeat? It was written as clearly as she sat there. Yeah. All he needed was Prince Mishkin’s aura. The way the whole thing was building up. Ira squirmed around in the wicker armchair. Look, the way he was being drawn in here, as if preordained. Look. Look. And could you change it? Never come here again. Disappear. Larry might invite you, but too busy, pal. Or any goddamn thing. Would that make a difference? Who knew? He was forcing destiny. Drop out of sight, drop out of college, go over to the steamship companies on the Hudson River, the way Mannie Levine did on 118th Street, when Ira went with him: bedbugs on the mattress under the blanket on his bunk, but he got a job, pot walloper. Get a job as oiler, anything. Disappear. Do something decent in your life, quit pratting Stella, forget about Minnie — would that make a difference in Edith’s life? Would she win, despite herself? He was making her lose, helping to prepare her to lose, so he could gain. Jesus Christ, did you ever see such a cuckoo?

Or just the reverse — when was he going to say something instead of sitting there mulling glumly like a stick? Go over to her and say: Hey, Edith, how about a lay? Hey, Edith how about a frig? Hey, Edith, how about a piece of ass? Would that make a difference? It would break the spell. What spell? Vortex spell. Free things — free her from the web he was weaving. So I’m a prick, all I want is a piece of ass. That’s all I’ve been wanting all along. Nah! Goddamn it, she wouldn’t be horrified; she’d probably laugh at him. what if she said: here. You cuckoo. Can you foresee consequences? Yeah, yeah, yeah, instead of this closeness continually binding them together, that mental web he was helping her spin. Nuts. Drool and swallow, drool and swallow. Only difference between chewing tobacco in the car barn: what’s the use? You chew tobacco and spit the juice.

“I forgot what I was going to say,” he finally said, shrugged hard: “I can’t figure it out.”

“It’s not surprising,” she said. “Only Marcia thinks she can, and probably will. Are you still doing the same work at the repair place?”

“Yeah. Grease monkey. Look at this.” Ira rolled back his sleeve. “I wash and I wash and I wash. And there’s one place I keep missing: right under the elbow. See that black smear? It keeps escaping me. It hides.”

X

Flashing his IRT pass at the change-booth man in the subway station, Ira grabbed a train home after quitting time. Oh, he had to rush, there was so little time between jumping into the tin tub of tepid tap water in the bathroom, scrubbing with pumice soap (and leaving the grime he couldn’t get off ingrained in fingers and deposited under nails), so little time between bolting supper, to Mom’s cries of dismay, and Minnie’s pleadings to slow down — though Pop chortled in rare show of pleasure: his son was earning wages for a change. So little time to trot to 125th Street, in the shadow of the New York Central trestle, iron parasol against the slant sun, and, sweating anew, climb aboard the Third and Amsterdam trolley, and clang, clang, he was on his way to CCNY evening classes. He was twenty-one, and inexhaustible, tough and inexhaustible. If anything was immortal, it was twenty-one, more immortal than De Quincey’s summer: twenty-one. By the shores of the Gitchee Goomee, twenty-one I heard a wise man say. And that last time Zaida and Mamie gone, he had to hold Stella up almost, she went so slack afterward; he grew bigger and bigger coming, scared he’d get stuck like a dog inside her, cock swelling up like a bottle.

So off at 137th Street, and hurrying. There were times he overtook Larry on the way to campus — and once or twice in the company of his sociology instructor, Lewlyn. Oh, that was ironic. One had to have a flair for irony, to enjoy it to the fullest, the overtones within overtones, endlessly propagating: rarer and rarer, evanescent. They made you grin: From bush and bar, from brack and scar, the horns of elfland faintly blowing. The horns of elfland! What did Quinto say, index finger and pinkie spread under his nose in imminent goring of mimic horns? Cornuta. Ha, ha, ha! Eager Larry doing his utmost to entertain his sociology instructor with the latest salesman’s jokes, win a dry chuckle of appreciation, unaware the guy was cuckolding him; nah, he couldn’t be cuckolding Larry; he wasn’t married to Edith: just laying Larry’s lady fair, laying his lady love. Now that was ironic, or wasn’t it? Sitting in the classroom sopping up sociology from the guy sinking a shaft into the same woman you were. Only, Lewlyn really sank a shaft, and Larry just bunny-hugged on the couch. Why the hell was that all he seemed satisfied to do, so innocent he didn’t mind having Ira there? Mystery. . mystery.

Ah, loyalties had long ago shifted, hadn’t they? Now it was all waiting, waiting, long waiting and wondering. No other way to describe it. Waiting for what? Wondering about what? Whether the way for him would someday be cleared: by Larry, by Lewlyn. Ira didn’t have to gloat over it, he ought not; Larry was his friend, but it was a fact. Larry was just hanging on by sufferance, as they called it: she didn’t want to hurt him, Edith said, dreaded his harming himself. If she was unnecessarily drastic, it might affect his heart. The other, ah, there was the rub, the toss-up. Negative, Marcia decreed: Edith’s outlook on life was negative. She and Lewlyn would destroy each other, if he joined his life with hers in marriage at this time. Why would they destroy each other? Can you think that one through? Ira asked himself. On a magnet, poles that are like repel, but hell, they weren’t magnets. He wasn’t afraid of Edith destroying him, and he was more negative than Edith was, a damn sight more, Ira told himself. What was Edith’s negativism compared to his negativism, Ira heard himself echo a quotation he couldn’t place. Biblical maybe. His world had been twisted right around, dislocated by woe, and not by self-pity either, twisted around all the way to murder, murder Minnie, his own sister. What contemplation of an act could make one more negative than that? Lot’s wife had turned to look back at burning Sodom and Gomorrah, and been turned into a pillar of salt (if you believed it). But what it meant was that horror petrified her.

And so resolve to murder had petrified him, unhappy forever, though an assignment in plane geometry saved him a split hair away from killing. “Woe, woe, unhappy,” Jocasta’s words crossed his mind, “this is all I have to say to thee, and no word more forever.” That’s what negativism meant: unhappy. Lewlyn couldn’t stand the depth of Edith’s unhappiness. The guy was normal, the guy was sound, optimistic in disposition; that was it: he was affirmative in outlook. He believed in Man’s future. That was why a permanent union with Edith, marriage with Edith, would destroy him. She was too sad for him, she was too tragic in outlook, that was all there was to it, Marcia or no Marcia. Bet a buck Lewlyn only listened to counsel he wanted to hear, and Marcia’s was the counsel he wanted to hear. Even though Ira nodded his head in agreement when Edith accused Marcia of prejudicing Lewlyn against her, that was just good tactics to agree. Instinct told him Lewlyn was more and more inclined to do what Marcia advised him to do. So. . go along with her interpretation. What use saying no? Besides, he couldn’t be sure. She was older, smarter, a hundred times more sophisticated in the ways of the polite world than he was or would ever be. Who the hell was he to gainsay? Gainsay and lose-say. No, let it unfold.

Privy to it all, wasn’t it strange? Grease monkey working over a pit under a subway train, so engrossed with what was going on in Greenwich Village, so bemused about Edith and Lewlyn and that brilliant, brilliant anthropologist pitted against poor Edith, so in the grip of speculations about the future, he felt himself at times like a link, an odd human turnbuckle, fastening the most delicate of people to the grossest, the poet and professor to subway repair barn crews, where nobody would have dreamed as he started to loosen the bolts on a brake housing, when working alone by old red mule, while Quinto faded off to take a leak, nobody would have dreamed, when, wham! Jesus! Someone was in the motorman’s cab checking the brakes. The sleeve snapped back within an inch of his cheek. But he was battle-hardened, he was twenty-one. What the hell was a brake sleeve, as long as it didn’t hit you? Nothing. Except on his part: “Hey, for Jesus’ sake, you up there?” To the answering cry of: “Hey, for Jesus’ sake, you down there? Why didn’t you tell me?”

So downhill toward campus of a late, sunlit afternoon, with Lewlyn between them, Ira and Larry, talking of this and that, Ira’s subway job, Larry’s salesman’s job, Lewlyn saying that his father expected each of his sons to grow enough wheat during the summer to pay for his tuition at Penn State. Ah, how different, how healthy, wholesome in the best sense. . Downhill past Lewisohn Stadium to the campus quadrangle in tranquil shadow. There they separated, Larry to Lewlyn’s sociology course, Ira to Government or Geology, or once a week another way, Larry and Ira to Public Speaking 7. Larry had applauded vigorously, his big hands smacking together noisily, when Ira finished delivering his defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. It was a rehash of the same defense he had delivered in Public Speaking 6, but tolerant, old (and more politically sympathetic). Dr. Dranon didn’t know that. Anything to get by in the summer.

Why hadn’t he taken some junk course — Economics — instead of Geology as a crash course that summer! Geology, the one course he truly enjoyed, the one class he looked forward to attending. Why hadn’t he saved it for a full semester? Those field trips, Saturday afternoon. He sometimes had to join the group already on site, he had so little time between quitting on Saturday afternoon and getting there. But even so: to view the potholes in Bronx Park, potholes bored in the rock by thousands of years of glacial eddies. Eons of the past intoxicated him. The mind reeled ecstatically contemplating metamorphic rock, just plain metamorphic rock. Ah, what entrancing ages had gone by, gone by and left their parallel glacial scoria on the mica schist outcrops in Central Park. Who would ever have guessed those scars were gashed by glaciers? He never knew just where the fault was that separated Manhattan from the Palisades, but what matter. He climbed the sedimentary rocks of the Palisades, the shales and the slates, so different from the mica schist and the gneiss of Manhattan. Just knowing the fact alone was heady, climbing the Palisades. “And did you know?” he asked Minnie. “Mt. Morris Park is a monadnock? A pile of rocks and boulders left by a melting glacier.” That fact alone all but reprieved “Porkpie hat,” the man who had molested him thirteen years ago on top of another hill, on a monadnock’s sister, of a summer day. All but. . The rise of the hill under the trestle on 116th Street and Park Avenue a monadnock, the hill he had panted up so many times on his way to Baba’s as a kid to scrounge a few coins — on his way to Mamie’s to scrounge a piece. So that was a monadnock with a new comfort station on top, and rows of pushcarts below.

“My clever son,” said Mom. “Alles veist er. Ah, would I be happy if my head didn’t roar so.”

And he found himself reflecting a great deal more that summer than he ever had before, seeking deeper explanations than the ones he thought already explained. The realization came to him sneaking a smoke with the others under the lowered trains at day’s end. It wouldn’t have made any difference if he had gone to work with the rest of the graduating class of P.S. 24, at age fourteen. He no longer belonged, he no longer belonged even then, at fourteen. Why? Minnie, and the guilt of his incest? Nah, he hadn’t thought a great deal about it, didn’t know much about it: it was gratification. Even before he lost the glimmering thread under the train before the quitting whistle blew, he had parted from the rest somewhere, somehow — when? What was all that “speeching” he did, way back on the East Side? Poems he recited in the public school assembly that Mom came to listen to: about the east wind, and the color it had, and the west wind, and the flowers it brought. Even then, even that far back, the separation had begun — quick, another drag or two, and he’d have to crawl out — separation from Yiddish to goyish, no, to beautiful, beautiful English. “Kelly around?”

“No, he’s in the office.”

Oh, long ago, he had parted company with the rest, long ago before he was fourteen. Before Harlem. In the very heart of the East Side. Before he was eight years old. When he learned to read. Yeah, yeah, yeah: 1912 on the calendar. Hard to remember—

Whe-e-e!

“There she goes. Quitting time. Another day, another dollar.”

They clinched their butts, broke the glowing embers of tobacco off, stamped on them, and climbed up to the aisle.

Some sort of large rhythm ran through his head as he joined the rest trooping to the washroom, a declamation without words. Another day, another dolor. Stuff that in your literary calumet — no. “I have lost the great — what?” he could hear himself say. Was he trying to remember a quote — from whom? Shakespeare? Othello? “I have lost the great — Damn.”

“Kolly,” said Quinto at his elbow. “Kolly biga cockasuck.”

“Yeah?”

August sunlight splayed on the great sullied skylights overhead, filtered through the smudged glass and spread over the shop, train and crane and aisle and workbench. Here and there, where a corner of windowpane had broken, or a piece of mullion weathered out, crystal spikes of sunlight flashed through, stabbed with radiance of splintered diamond. Bright, bright, ah, forever. You’d think the glitter was tangible.

The shop was hot. De Quincey, the shop was hot. Always August seemed summer’s last assault, and with a vengeance. Sweaty, and snorting everyone against the weight of thermal torpor. Wilted: “Hot enough for youze,” exchanged for mirthless: “It ain’t the heat, it’s the hoomiliation.” And: “I ain’t sweatin’ bullets, I’m sweatin’ minié balls.”

Ira had been tempted to give his notice that week, and with the heat, he regretted he hadn’t. But another week — or two, if he could hold out, another two weeks at $28.50, with gray fedora and secondhand oxford gray suit and “it’s like new, I should live so,” a Chesterfield overcoat with black satin collar, and yes, brand-new, tooled brogans, all bought for his senior year. He was all set: he’d have a few bucks in his pocket a few weeks longer at CCNY. He’d give Mr. Kelly notice in September, a week before college opened that fall of 1927, and give himself a week’s vacation. Doing what? Turkey trot, as they used to sing. You know? He squared off against himself within his mind: now that Stella had enrolled in that business school on Union Square, he could hang around there a free afternoon from CCNY until her school was out. And then? Yeah, and then? That was the whole trouble. Nowhere to take her. To the park, Centrum Pock, as Mamie called it. But they’d have to hike all the way past the lake, up the hill, genuine mica schist, and find some dell or dingle, what the hell ever that was. But that would take too long, and somebody might see them, meet them. That was the worst of it: somebody might see them. They’d know he wasn’t taking that little bimbo for a Platonic nature study in the bosky groves. . You know? What a villainous idea he just had! But that would take nerve. And a little dough, too. Well, he’d still have some. Take her to Fox’s Theater on 14th Street, where he worked when he was fourteen. Fourteen, fourteen, remember? First balcony — you could smoke up there. Third balcony, the projectionist’s booth. Second balcony, dead and dusty vacant, empty, empty as a — what did Andy Marvell say? None, I think, do there embrace. But it had two toilets in back, like the other balconies. And in the back, and in the back — which one would he use? The ladies’ or the gents’? With a low sweep of his new fedora like Sir Walter Raleigh: ladies foist. Oh, what a villain!. . Nah, he couldn’t, wild Indian, he couldn’t. But nobody could say that he didn’t have injunity — enginuity. But that two-handed engine by the door stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. I betcha it was the executioner’s ax. .

Edith invited him to attend a cocktail party at her apartment on the following Sunday. A singular honor: alone this time, without Larry. “I know I can trust your discretion,” her note in the old brass mailbox said. It was the second such “solo” invitation of the summer. That first time he felt himself balloon with pride like the frog in the story when she sat next to him on the couch across from Lewlyn. You could smell how delicate she was: “You mustn’t be so shy, lad.” And he had agreed, but was tongue-tied just the same. All those writers and poets and colleagues circulating around, who wouldn’t be awed? Larry wouldn’t, Larry wasn’t, and that’s what was so damned funny about it: he wasn’t invited, and the party was kept a secret from him. “He simply doesn’t fit into a gathering like this,” Edith confided, forgetting she had already confided the same thing the time before, but it was nice to hear just the same. Traitor. Yeah, he found himself pondering a thin segment of his mind, as if it were a slide on a microscope. Traditore, they sang in Aïda—that’s what the word sounded like on the phonograph record at Larry’s: traditore. Talk about irony. Wind up the crank, and the two were going to be walled up together, Larry said.

“People aren’t interested in his long-winded anecdotes. People are interested in ideas.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s amusing sometimes. If only he didn’t demand to be the center of attraction always.”

“No. That’s true.”

“Lewlyn has observed the same thing. He told me he liked your brief descriptions of people in your workshop much better than Larry’s stories. He took so long coming to the point.”

“Yeh?”

It was funny that first time, funny and strange — and embarrassing. After two big drinks of bathtub gin and grapefruit juice, he didn’t know what he was talking about, especially when everybody got on the subject of Sacco and Vanzetti; still, Edith accompanied him into the hall when he left, squeezed his hand, and said he was wonderful. What did he say that was so wonderful?

Said the statuesque dame, statuesque, Edith called her, not dame, just statuesque, in a peach frock — poet too — Louise? Louise Who? Boy, you’d have to be six feet tall or nearly, have a cock three inches longer, like Guido up in the stifling lifted train, putting eight quarters on his lazy hard-on. “Animahl!” said Russo. In Italian. Not animal. “Animahl!” So what did she say in the peach frock after Edith introduced them? “What do you do, if I may ask?”

“Me? I work in a car barn.” He just barely got the words out, nearly inaudible with self-consciousness.

“A cow barn!”

“No, a car barn!”

“Oh, how delightful!” And then she suddenly laughed — not at him, but at the thought. Laughing made her beautiful too. Boy, what a goddess. “You herd trains into a barn. What rare human touch in our mechanized existence. It becomes almost livable.”

And then five or six clustered around him, unwilling center of attention. What do you do? You do, really! Oh, tell us! Tell us what you do. They sat down on the couch, women, men, and Edith, her olive skin even more luminous with pleasure, made room, and left him. And that was when it all started about Sacco and Vanzetti. “We’re sure the men are bitter about it,” one woman said.

“They hardly even talk about it. Maybe the Italians.”

“They don’t? What do the others talk about?”

He had finished his first drink, and giggled, “Who’s gonna win in the Aqueduct races. The odds. Babe Ruth. God, what else do they talk about.”

“The very worst thing in the world to romanticize,” said the poet in the peach frock. “A cause. The very last thing a poet ought to write about. It’s sheer sentimentality. There you have it. What did the Irish nationalists do about Yeats and about Synge’s plays? They excoriated them, they blistered them. Please!”

“You’re absolutely wrong!” declared the short, stocky man. “In fact, I’m glad you mentioned the Irish nationalists. Who wrote, ‘A terrible beauty is born’? And on what occasion was the poem written? On the occasion of the Easter Rising. Was that a cause?”

By now Ira had glugged down his second drink. He began to feel a little at ease with the short, ladylike poet, Léonie, whom he had met several times, although he still venerated her. She had read before the Arts Club when Marcia and her enigmatic friend had attended, and what lovely poems she wrote, lyrics, said Edith; Ira had read them when she and Larry snuggled together on the couch. And Larry was the first to agree they were lovely. What figures of speech they were — although she didn’t have much of a figure herself: torso and face above like a Dresden doll, and a poly-solid build below. She was the one who just kept opening her lips to say something, and never said it, her mouth forming words without voice. What a wonderful way to talk; you never got into an argument. “What do you think of all this, Ira?” she said softly, so that almost nobody heard. And that was when he got started.

“You can’t break the writer apart,” he said almost sullenly — didn’t care who listened. He didn’t care if he made sense, as if he had a ventriloquist talking inside him. Hell with them, they didn’t know what he knew; their beings hadn’t been wrung the way his had. “You can’t break him into this and that. He can’t write like a doctor writes a prescription. It comes out of one piece — all his sickness too. That’s the way I keep thinking about it when I’m under a train slopping grease in a brake cylinder. If I was to write, how’m I gonna separate it? I can’t.” Neither could he check his gesticulations. “He’s supposed to use everything if he’s a writer, a poet, I don’t care what he is. We had some of Milton’s sonnets in Survey of English Literature: he could write so beautifully reaching in a dream for his dead wife”—the words began to choke him—“and he could write, ‘Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints.’ He didn’t divide himself up. That’s what I mean.”

“I agree with you entirely,” said smooth-featured, attentive John Vernon. “But how many writers can be so completely holistic?”

“Huh?” He was being taken seriously. What the hell was holistic?

“Not even Milton was entirely whole,” said John. “The only two that come to mind are Shakespeare and Rabelais.”

“Plautus might be included,” said Berry Berg.

Ira knew he was over his head. And worse, other guests had stopped to listen. He was flighty with liquor, he ought to shut up. “You can be just as involved as you wanna be!” he burst out.

“You can?” asked blurry Juno in peach. “Can you illuminate further?”

“You can!” He couldn’t stop himself. The words seemed visionary within him. “If you had something inside you that kept you together, anything you write you can keep together.” The guy he was, all twisted to hell, and only something to hold on to: holistic? He’d have to look it up. Mystical, mystical, and he didn’t believe a goddamn thing. Jesus Christ, he must be disgracing himself. “You have to believe and not believe. You have to use everything like counters, you know what I mean? Did Melville believe that sky pilot’s sermon? I don’t think so. You use everything, I think, the way a kid uses blocks. Any kind of blocks. Any which way suits you.”

“Go on,” urged the poet in peach.

Instead, suddenly bashful at his temerity, he grinned in silent appeasement.

Edith offered him coffee, but he declined. He said he had to leave. And then she followed him into the hall, and squeezed his hand, almost looked as if she wanted to give him a kiss.

But you’d think that was enough. He got into the subway train uptown, and what did he start doing? He began to doze — and the next thing he knew was the trainman shaking him: he had already removed his necktie and jacket and was unbuttoning the top button of his shirt.

“Hey, bud, wake up.” The blue-uniformed trainman shook him again, while everyone else in the train focused eyes on him.

“Oh, Jesus, I thought I was home.”

“Well, you ain’t. You’re in a subway train.” Still watchful, the trainman removed his hand from Ira’s shoulder. “You all woke up?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Mortified, Ira stood up, hung on the straps till he got to the cubicle next to the train door. Braced in a corner, he pocketed his necktie, put on his jacket. He skulked there, out of sight, until the train reached the 96th Street interchange for the Harlem local, and then he got off. He’d better stand up in the station, he told himself, stand up in the train for Harlem too, all the way to 116th Street. And then sober up walking from Lenox to Park Avenue. He paced groggily back and forth on the platform, waiting for the local. He was like somebody coming from one world into another. Was that the world promised him in that aureate moment of beatitude when he stood on the street corner in West Harlem? Oh, Jesus, maybe he ought to try puking after he climbed up to the street.

The spikes in the chinks of skylight had become lances, smoky lances, like a moving-picture beam, only narrower and all impregnated with floating, powdery lime. Time for a siesta. They had only two more brake drums to do, and most of the afternoon to do it. Quinto looked guardedly about, beckoned to Ira, and mounted the ladder to one of the hoisted trains. Ira followed.

“Hey, wait a minute, you guys. Hey, you, Ira.” It was the short, barrel-built chief electrician, Eakind, never without his blue racing form in his shirt pocket. He didn’t seem to care about Quinto, but Quinto came down anyway. “Hey, Vito.” He leaned under the train. “C’mon up, will ye? You there, Padget?” he called up to an adjoining train. “Okay. Will you give us a hand, Padget?”

“That ought to do it,” said Burgess.

Vito climbed up to the aisle, pocketed his drift pin. Padget, with a sheaf of cardboard ads under his arm, looked out between trains, climbed down a few seconds later. One glance and he recognized the hitch. “That fuckin’ thing holdin’ up the parade again?”

The trouble was familiar to Vito, and here came Quinto, bobbing his head in recognition. Ira too could surmise. It was a heavy-duty cable, probably carried all the amperage to the motors right from the third rail. Heavily insulated, heavily lubricated, it had to be drawn through a length of steel tubing that protected it from damage under the train. A long wire, taped to afford a better grip, projected from the end of the tube. A “tail” it was called, and it was interconnected with the cable. Most of the time, Eakind and Burgess could pull the cable through by themselves, but sometimes, perhaps because of a slight kink in the tubing, the cable proved balky, and to slide it through took more muscle than the two men could exert. Besides, it was hot.

“All right, grab hold,” said Eakind, “and get yer ass behind it.”

All did as they were told, tugged manfully at the taped tail. With Eakind at the other end, guiding it, the thick, dark cable slid a few inches into its metal sheath. “Give us a little more, fellers,” Eakind directed. “That’s it. She’s comin’.”

“So is Christmas.” Padget popped a shred of tobacco from the tip of his tongue, puffed at the heat. “Jesus, you’d think they’d have some kind o’ goddamn winch for this by now, some kinda gimmick — a half-horse motor.”

“I told ’em that fifteen years ago,” said Eakind. “I told old man Haverly when he was superintendent. He said you’d pull the cable windin’s apart.”

“Bullshit. They’re not goin’ to spend the dough as long as they got a buncha stumblebums like us with strong backs and weak minds. Right, Ira? Muz be a union.”

“It’s only once in a while they’re tight as this,” said Burgess.

“Fica stretta, eh, Vito?” Quinto prompted.

“What the hell does that mean?” asked Padget. “You ginzos are always talkin’ to yourselves.”

“Let’s go,” said Eakind.

“Fica stretta, gatzo duro,” Vito explained.

“Yeah? What’s dat?”

All took hold of the tail.

“Acqua fresca, vino puro—” Quinto rhymed.

“Pull! For Christ’s sake!”

“Oh, my achin’ back! Hey, Red. What the hell’re you guys doin’ here?”

Newcomers: a moment ago they were out of sight — nowhere to be seen. Now they stood at the end of the greasy workbench, guys in overalls, vaguely known, the way fellow workers in a big shop are known, by gait, by purpose more than visage, as they strung along the street dangling paper bag or lunch box, to enter the shop, in the endless commutation of punching the time clock in — or out, flocking toward it at the end of the day, as if to render rough noisy obeisance before it, to escape home from the shop. Mostly anonymous, except Red, the cross-eyed keeper of the tool crib and spare parts. Everybody knew him: Red. Gingery Red, with a cushy job and Irish as Mrs. Maloney’s pig. He had a tabloid in his hands, the Daily News, August 23, and he was evidently the leader, the spokesman of the several men with him. “Hey, how d’ye say dis name?” He held out the open front page to Ira’s view.

“Vanzetti,” Ira obliged. “They’ll tell you. Right, Vito? Vanzetti?”

Vito said nothing, only looked — obliquely. Quinto couldn’t read, but somehow gave the impression he sensed something unfriendly. What the hell? Padget grinned, and stocky Eakind waited indulgently, while he ran a thick, nicked thumbnail between chin and lip. Only Burgess stared at Ira, a level, dark-eyed, almost forbidding stare. What the hell?

“Not that one,” said Red. “How do ye say de udder one?”

“The other one?” Ira could scarcely believe his ears. “Anybody can say the other one. You don’t mean the word ‘executed’ at the end, do you?”

“No, we know dat. Dese guys are callin’ dat foist name ‘Sayco.’”

“Hell, yeah, dat’s right.” Red was seconded by one or two of his group.

“We want to know how you say it in American. You’re a college guy, ain’tcha?”

And now Ira knew there was something wrong. A ruse, but what? He had a sense of the others hemming him in. What the hell could be loaded in the word “Sacco”? He stared at the big block headlines: SACCO & VANZETTI EXECUTED. The black scare headline seemed about to bolt from the page, held there as if leashed. Vito had begun to glower, Padget snickered, Eakind seemed on the point of pulling out the blue racing form from his shirt, scratched his chest instead, and Burgess looked hopeless.

“Can’t you say that?” Ira hedged.

“I told ye, everyone was all sayin’ it different. Wuzn’t we, Feeney?”

“Yeah.”

Ira knew he was trapped. But how to get out of it, whatever the trick was? Shinny up the sunbeam slanting right down to the lime-powdered cement slab: Jacob’s ladder. “It’s simple,” he said, backing away toward Burgess.

“Yeah, what?”

“‘Sacco.’”

And the avalanche fell. Six tightly rolled-up paper truncheons appeared from behind backs of Red’s henchmen, and a guffaw went up as the truncheons crashed down. “Socko!” They flailed away at Ira’s head. “Socko-o-o!”

Arm overhead, holding his glasses in place, and forcibly grinning, Ira retreated past Burgess out of range, but not before he had taken a dozen or more hard wallops. “Oh, so that was it?” he said.

“Yeah.” They were bright with glee: “Socko! Right?”

“Managia,” Vito muttered out of the side of his mouth.

“Let’s go,” said Eakind; and to the roisterers, “You guys wanna give us a hand with this cable?”

“Not us. Dat’s too much like woik.”

“Okay, you’ll have Kelly around here in a minute askin’ what it’s all about. So let’s go.”

“Fuck Kelly,” Red blustered. “We ain’t afraid of him.” Nonetheless, they moved off in the direction they had come from. “Socko!” They slapped their paper truncheons against their palms as they went through the aisle. “Socko!” They disappeared around the end of the line of trains.

“The fact is,” Ira muttered the first words audibly, as he so often did when vexed or in quandary, that the transition he had envisaged, the second party alone at Edith’s, felt anticlimactic. He had already told all that mattered: it was an open-faced sandwich — it didn’t need that upper slice of bread. He had gotten his lumps in the shop, lumps on the coconut, and that settled the matter — and contrasted with the cultivated cocktail party at Edith’s that had gone before. The two episodes balanced each other — he hoped: were poised in dynamic equilibrium, or should be. Besides, many of the same people were there — the short stocky lawyer too. And this time there was Lewlyn, and the young, tender-looking, freckled doctoral student in philosophy from across the hall, Amelia, sitting quietly by herself, and stealing a glance at Ira as he at her. Was she what you called demure? Or vulnerable? Or wan with study? Or. . what? Philosophy: Plato, Aristotle. How could she be so much smarter than he was? That Philosophy 1 course he had taken as a freshman, one of the few courses still open when the classes on the blackboard were closed, what a fiasco that Philosophy 1 course had been. He didn’t know a categorical imperative from a jelly bean. Hey, go over and tell her that. I Kant — ooh, mamma mia! Yeah, but she’s a cinch. You can see, your brain tells you, but you Kant. Anh, what a shame. Everything had to be on the sly — first with Minnie, then with Stella — talk about a hit-and-run driver. Spoiled, that open, candid, natural self — ah, what the hell was the difference? Behold, Juno-Louise in a pink dress instead of a peach frock, clinging all the way up from calf to tous-tous. A vous tous-tous avez a vous? Pig French that meant “Where do you hurt?” in Yiddish.

Anticlimax, Ira told himself. The two anarchists were dead as doornails, and history seemed to mark time with disjointed postmortems.

Ira took notice of Dalton, the short thickset man, a lawyer, Ira learned, who was drinking a glass of bootleg gin. “I find the purport, the message, if you wish, objectionable,” Dalton loudly interjected about Edna Millay’s poems. “It’s wholly negative and despondent. The death of the two martyrs hasn’t ended the fight for civil liberties. It isn’t over.”

And Louise, tall, goddesslike, and certain, responded, “That’s entirely irrelevant. It’s a bad poem.”

Which elicited from the thickset man a heated: “You’ve just made me realize it’s bad because it’s limited to her own emotions.”

“And just whose emotions should it have come out of?”

“It concerns us all. It’s not a private matter,” Dalton continued. “It’s of epic proportions. All who worked so hard on the case, and made so many sacrifices for the two men, and often at great personal risk. Men and women at every level from a needle trades worker to a history professor.” He became vehement. “We may become discouraged at times, but we’re not demoralized. She’s, Millay’s, demoralized. I can assure you the seed hasn’t been planted under a cloud, as she expresses it. And it hasn’t been planted in sour soil, as she says. And we haven’t forfeited our patrimony.”

Disjointed postmortems. Ira felt gloomy. He didn’t know why, either. It wasn’t just the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti that made him feel that way: more grumpy than gloomy. His own thoughts maybe, his everlasting hemming himself in with what he was. Last time, liquor had freed him temporarily — and even then, look what happened: he had begun to take his clothes off in the subway. Suppose he had started unbuttoning his pants, before the trainman shook him awake — in front of everyone!

Anyway, he wasn’t going to let the bathtub gin get the better of him on this occasion. He nursed his drink, sipped a little — now and then — and tried to forget his glass altogether, put it down on the floor next to his chair, when his fingertips chilled. Yeah, history felt as if it had gone to pieces, had exploded, slow-motion shrapnel floating around in ugly unidentifiable scraps. And yet nothing really stopped — Tunney was still going to fight Dempsey again, Chaplin was still getting divorced. The newspapers were just as full today as they were when he was conked on the bean with newspaper bludgeons: my head is bloody but unbowed. Baloney. Maybe he felt let down because he had given Mr. Kelly notice he was quitting next week. That was part of it. He had told Burgess too.

“I’m sorry you’re goin’,” said Burgess. “I wish they was all like you.”

Who was the “they”? Ira teased the tiny hint absently: Jews, who else? That seemed to put an end to things. Nice guy, Burgess. You wished what he wished for — and then you didn’t. You knew it couldn’t be, and you knew what you were. And Ira had looked forward so to the evening at Edith’s. He had a haircut at that strict German-Jewish barber’s on Park Avenue, scrubbed and washed leisurely, with no geology field trip to take up the afternoon — all his summer courses over — walked as slowly as he could to Lexington Avenue and 116th Street, and then to the West Side shuttle, leisurely, not to sweat up again.

Ha. Arrived. Introduced. In the room the women come and go, talkin’ of Bartolomeo. . The guests seemed steeped now in twilight. How pleasant the living room was without busy electric lights. The guests waded about in the sepia twilight with glasses in their hands, shadowy, two-dimensional silhouettes, moving or standing or sitting languidly around an urn, you could say, an urn containing the bones of the two martyrs, if your imagination was as crazy as his was. Bet he’d remember that beautiful half-light, long after he forgot about Sacco and Vanzetti, that beautiful half-light: late afternoon’s chiaroscuro, and all figures in it two-dimensional. Serene notions about things that weren’t serene drifted around in the twilight, if you could forget sex for a minute — it — what’d he call it? Id? Spikes of sunshine through chinks in the shop skylight, and old red mule dozing on its paws beside you, like a sleeping dog. They didn’t crucify you, they electrocuted you was what it meant; if only he were a poet. . Came Juno in darkening pink — there was a poet, flesh and blood and svelte, and with long gams. Followed by tall, proper Professor Berg, breaking away from John Vernon. Boy, try to connect John Vernon, not-a-bad-guy homo, with Larry, whom Edith had not so long ago tried to rescue, Larry who wasn’t here, and with himself who was here, and boy, figure that out. And now Lewlyn teetering between Edith and the other woman in England — how could he dream such a thing? Ira couldn’t, and yet he did; he watched his own future teeter with Lewlyn’s. Boyoboy—

“Oh, it’s quite possible, even for one with Puritan inhibitions like mine, given the incentive.” Professor Berg elevated his glass.

“To be silly.”

“To be imaginative.”

Louise laughed incredulously. “You!”

“Yes. I can just see you with your nipples stained a deep purple.”

Ira could feel his toes curl.

“Berry, you must have spent half the night thinking that one up.” Louise looked around, in the tranquil sepia, at the other silhouettes. “Did anyone else hear that? Berry is becoming gamy. Berry, how bawdy.”

“I thought it was rather felicitous, you know: tit for tat. Ha-ha-ha!”

“Oh, no! To what depths have we sunk.”

“I definitely do not think Longfellow is a modern poet.”

“I didn’t say that.” Louise moved off purposefully in search of an ashtray, though there was one at Ira’s side. “I only repeated Tom Wolfe’s taunt. And I spared you his four-letter words. Why carp at me?”

“He’s so much bigger than you are. And a male besides. It so happens I’m heterosexual.”

“You may be, but your chemistry is all wrong.”

They moved out of range, as Lewlyn crossed the room and sat down beside Ira. “You’ve been very quiet.”

“I was just listening.” Ira grinned weakly. “I’ll tell you the truth. I’m afraid — after the last time.”

“The last time? Edith told me how eloquent you were.”

“Yeah, but was I ever stewed. I started to take my clothes off in the subway.”

Lewlyn threw his head back and laughed into the soft gloaming of the room. “Did you?”

“I only stopped because the trainman shook me.”

“Not because you discovered your pajamas were missing.”

Should he say “I don’t wear pajamas”? Ira debated. No. And aloud, “No.”

Lewlyn’s chuckle tapered to seriousness: “I came over to find out what the men at your shop said about the executions.”

“They didn’t say. Gee. This one bunch didn’t say. They just—” He interrupted himself when he saw Edith approach.

Lewlyn stood up — and belatedly, almost forgetting, Ira got to his feet.

“Oh, please don’t,” Edith said.

“I’ll take the piano stool,” said Lewlyn.

“I probably can’t stay more than a minute,” Edith said. She didn’t look as radiant as the last time, even though Lewlyn was present, but solemn, despite glint of gold-and-ruby earrings. “Isn’t Berry a scream? Poor Berry. Trying so hard to break through his straitlaced New England background.”

“What was that Tom Wolfe said?” Lewlyn asked.

“Oh, he shouted across the faculty desks at Berry — and I wouldn’t be surprised if Dr. Watt heard all the four-letter words in his office: ‘You still think Longfellow is a modern poet.’ Louise would get wind of it. Am I interrupting you two?”

“Oh, no. We were talking about the men in Ira’s shop. I was interested to know how they reacted to the executions.”

“I started to say I got banged on the head,” said Ira.

“You did! Why?” Edith asked.

Intricate twilight seemed to swathe the three from the others in the room. What a fathomless moment, as if something fateful were — but Edith was waiting for an explanation: “They yelled ‘Socko!’ and whacked me with rolled-up newspapers when I read the name ‘Sacco.’”

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” said Edith.

It was Lewlyn’s silence that revealed to Ira what it must be like to be — to have been — a priest. He remained unshaken, calm and grave and forbearing. “It’s not surprising. Cruelty is a form of ignorance, and always seeks a victim. How can they know any better, when they’re so misled by people in power, people who speak with authority. It’s a wonder any do know better.”

Ira felt as if he had been gently chided, felt that way, not overtly, but as if his raw resentments were being addressed. He could never feel the way Lewlyn did, gently damping indignity — or indignation — with charity. So, that was a priest?

“Ira, are you ready for some coffee?” Edith asked.

“Yeah, but I hardly drank anything tonight. Thanks.”

“I hate to turn on the lights, but I’ll have to in a minute. Lewlyn and I would like to ask you something.”

“Me?”

“Lewlyn is taking the steamer to England next Sunday. Do you think you could accompany us to the pier?”

“I’m taking a Cunarder,” said Lewlyn. “It’s berthed in Hoboken. Do you think you could come?”

“Sunday? Sure. What time is it leaving?”

“It’s late,” said Lewlyn. “After midnight.”

“That’s nothing. I gave my notice on the job. I can sleep all day Monday if I want.”

“I can’t, unfortunately.” The smile on Edith’s olive skin merged with the dusk. “I have classes the next morning.”

“That’s right. You got the second half of the summer session.” Ira was beginning to feel sidetracked, puzzled. “So what are you going for?”

“To see Lewlyn off. The point is, Lewlyn would like me to have an escort when I go home.”

“Oh, oh. You wanna go to the ship anyway.”

“Yes. Very much.”

“Would you?” Lewlyn asked Ira. “It’s going to be quite late by the time Edith gets back to New York. You’re sure you want to do it, Edith? With classes the next morning?”

“They’re not till ten. Oh, yes, that’s all been decided, Lewlyn. I do want to go.”

Ira thought he detected a slight shift in Edith’s tone of voice, slight, stirring, something that made him feel nonplussed. He’d have to defer thinking about it. “I’ll go,” he said. “If you want me to go, sure.”

“I’d appreciate it very much,” said Lewlyn.

“Ira, you’re an angel to let me impose on you so.” Edith stood up. “I’ll write you a note reminding you. Or do you want to tell me? Or both — I’d better go turn on the lights.”

“You understand: that’s Sunday a week,” Lewlyn said as Edith left. “Not Sunday tomorrow.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Gee, that’s already in September — and you can go to England and come back before?” Ira gesticulated. “Before college begins?”

“I’ve arranged with one of my colleagues in the department to hold down my classes for a couple of days — that makes quite a difference,” he chuckled dryly, as the lights came on. “Interesting. We really have no idea how dark it’s getting until the lights are turned on.”

“No.” Ira felt as if everyone had tumbled out of condoning twilight into an unsparing, a utilitarian reality held between walls: a fluid twilight that clotted into concrete things and people: Amelia freckled and so flaccid, and tall John Vernon, and short Boris, and tall Berry and tall pink Louise, and Edith with a large aluminum percolator — and a set smile.

Lewlyn seemed to linger — deliberately. “How were your grades this summer?”

“I got all C’s in the first session. I still have to write a paper for Government tomorrow. But C’s, for me that’s good.”

“And you had to hold down a heavy job besides,” Lewlyn extenuated.

“Not so heavy.” Ira lolled his head. “Greasy. Yeah.”

Lewlyn arose from the piano stool. “I’d better go to the assistance of the lady.” And bending down toward Ira, discreetly: “I’m sure she’ll tell you when and where we meet. We have to take the Hudson Tubes to get there.”

“Oh, yeah? That’s right. The Hudson Tubes. Hoboken.”

“It’s an easy walk from the station. It’s practically across the way from the steamship pier, fortunately.”

“Yeah? I’ve never been there.” Ira took advantage of Lewlyn’s momentary pause. “Mind if I ask you, Lewlyn? Do you remember how Larry made out? I didn’t see him all week.”

Personable, strong and tall in his heathery tweeds, Lewlyn chuckled in his boyish way, short, high-pitched, ushering in humor: “I’m sure he must be amused. I gave him an A-minus.” He chuckled once again. “Excuse me, Ira, won’t you?”

It was a convection. Ira felt that he was a feather, blown around in a tremendous chamber he didn’t know the bounds of, without any control of what he would hit, or what he would graze. Yet he knew that the currents were of his own making: Lewlyn taking a steamer to England, Ira escorting Edith back from the pier. He couldn’t defer the thought any longer. Lewlyn’s choice had been made, Ira knew, without need to refer to Marcia’s judgments or advice. Did Edith? Did she acknowledge it? Or could she even see it as a choice for Lewlyn to make? All that existed for Edith within this tremendous wind tunnel was the currents, the zephyrs, and the hurricane winds of the tragedy she felt inevitable.

So that was that. Now it was up to Ira. No more telekinesis, no more telepathy, no more malicious subconscious connivings. He had to turn his id toward action, had to bring to bear the things that he had made possible by dastardly wishings. If only he could know the bounds, the powers, of his own breath, blowing Larry away from Edith, Lewlyn too, and leaving open a great passage, a wide corridor toward something like salvation, toward something that could lead him from bondage.

So don’t blame me. If I gave my body to be burned for the poor, as Paul says, and the flakes went up the chimney in Auschwitz, they’d still bear the curlicues of abomination, am I right, ole mole? You’ll never budge the flukes of that anchor, Ecclesias, buried in the protozoic, briny slime of the seafloor, no matter how powerful the capstan. Am I right, old mariner?

— You’re right. But mad. Mad with the realization engendered of reality. .

PART THREE

I

Two days after the party at Edith’s, just as the final summer session was drawing to a close, Ira stared at the cream-colored wall at Aunt Mamie’s house, where preparations for the Days of Awe had already begun. It was that time of year when a crepuscular haze had already signaled summer’s end; the orange, grayish tones of twilight appeared earlier over the western skies, and cooler air, while only at night, necessitated the removal of sweaters from the higher reaches of Mom’s closet. With the knowledge that the school year, this being his last, was about to begin, there was a twinge of sadness that tempered the party atmosphere, perhaps a recognition that his student days were clearly waning. Ira knew he was no closer now to a career, or soundness and evenness of mind, than he was the day that he first walked into the CCNY auditorium staring up at the board trying to establish an academic program.

Ira took the last of the typed sheets out of the machine, and after switching off the ceiling lights, stood in this stuffy little bedroom that Mamie had converted into her apartment house manager’s office. Should he roll up the typewritten sheets, having finished the job, or should he fold them, Ira debated. He ended by folding them, and shipping them into his jacket breast pocket. The scribbled sheets of loose-leaf notebook paper that had been his guide all afternoon he crumpled and tossed into the wire wastebasket. It was done. His term paper for the second summer session was about new immigration quotas and their effect on employment in the United States.

The bright Indian-summer sunlight of midafternoon, which had still shone when he first addressed himself to Mamie’s ancient, grimy Underwood, had palled hours ago to an ashy dusk on the single window of the bedroom office. For an eternity, it seemed, he had pecked away, erasing and cursing his mistakes, and erasing again. Toward the end, something of that touch system he had been so cavalier about learning the year he took typing in Mr. Hoffman’s class in junior high began to reassert itself. His typing had improved immeasurably. He recalled how Mr. Hoffman had clouted him alongside the head for being remiss in slipping a sheet of paper for a dust pan under his erasures to catch the errant crumbs of rubber and prevent them from going into the machine. What the hell, he had finished the course, and now this. A trained typist would have taken maybe an hour to do the job, but who could afford, who could even deem the work worthy of the offices of a professional typist. Ira had even considered asking Minnie, but after how changeable she had been, how quick to fly off the handle at him, he thought why bother. He even considered asking Larry if it would be possible to enlist the services of his sister, a private secretary, to do the typing. She was more reliable than Minnie. She had typed Larry’s short story, “The Graveyard.” But then, the thought of exposing his crudities — and possibly, his embryonic political leanings — checked him from carrying out his first impulse: he hadn’t realized to what a degree the simple act of putting words on paper in one’s own way placed one’s personality on trial. No, he would perform the task himself, in the privacy of self.

So all that long Sunday afternoon and into the early evening, hours after he had halted restlessly before the dark, metal-sheathed front door of the “first-floor” apartment on 112th Street and turned the brass key of the cranky doorbell, he had labored in the office. Mom was there as well, visiting with Zaida, when Ira arrived, and was surprised to see her son, who, after greetings, explained the purpose of his visit.

“About everything else he’s shiftless,” Mom remarked to the others in her fond, disparaging way. “Only this he cleaves to without stint. It’s a — something of a novelty.”

“I’m trying to get a good grade, that’s why,” Ira emphasized. “And all I got is today. It has to be in tomorrow. All right then if I use your typewriter, Mamie?”

“Mit gesundheit,” she accorded her terse blessing on the enterprise. “I have paper there near the rent receipts and the plumber’s bills, and the heap of bill-of-fare paper which Stella types for the cafeteria. You’re welcome to use it, if it’s useful.”

“It’s useful. Thanks, Tanta. Noo. Zaida, vus macht sikh?”

“One makes do,” the old man replied with predictable unhappiness, “one gets along without teeth, with worthless bones, and worst of all without eyesight. Such clouds I have in front of my eyeballs. As if I walk in a perpetual fog. And the doctor tells me that to remedy my condition, I shall have to enter a goyish hospital—”

“Tateh,” Mamie assured him quickly. “There’s a rabbi that will see that your meals are kosher. I swear to you.”

“Among nuns a rabbi,” the old man said despondently. “Noo, as the Almighty wills, blessed He, so be it.” And to Ira: “Old age is a boon, my son. You know to whom? To the ground.”

“I’m sorry, Zaida.”

“Noo, go write, go write,” Mom urged.

Ira needed no further prompting. He left the front room, went through the long hall to the first room after the entry, Mamie’s office, settled into a chair, laid his penciled draft down on the frazzled green baize of the old rolltop desk, and began transcribing handwriting to typescript. Time passed, an hour or two. Mom took her leave — entering the little office first to bid Ira goodbye, but not before reminding him that Mamie had cooked a potful of pirogen, potato verenekehs, this morning, of which there would be enough and more than enough to go around. “And don’t be bashful,” she enjoined. “She’ll serve you lovingly with sour cream.”

“Yeah.” His mouth watered. “Thanks for telling me, Mom.”

“My handsome son,” she said by way of departure.

“’Bye, Mom.” He kept pecking away at the keys.

Mamie’s two girls came home, lithe, carrot-topped Hannah, the younger, prancing and gabbling in pert, tireless dither; Stella tubby in comparison, though merely adolescent plump, and seemingly stolid, though actually she was not — she was judged a good dancer. It was simply an air, an effect she had, an unfortunate one, that Mamie took at face value, which in turn produced unfortunate results in her daughter. It drastically diminished her self-esteem, and at present he gloated at the ineffable proceeds of that diminished self-esteem, the easy gratification afforded him by her lowered sense of self. Ironic, wasn’t it? Oh, boy!

Evading the quick, rash quips of her younger sister — Hannah’s glib, derogatory thrusts — Stella spent much of her time reading. She read voluminously, read indiscriminately and without taste, every new popular novel to appear in the public library, every new romance she could lay hands on (in fact, he once, in heat, went looking for her in the library, to bring her home). So curious that she never developed taste. And musically — she had only to listen for a few seconds to any popular dance band on the radio, and she could identify it. Something wrong, something denigrated, something stunted. And his prey! Blond, round zaftig Stella, his prey, his peremptory, his summary lay. No hesitation here, no Edith, no subtle banter, no forlorn eyes perched on his fly, no friendship. For a minute, while she stood next to her chaffering, flighty sister, he burned, burned. But hell, there was no chance. And he had to finish his term paper. Maybe he ought to pull off, go into the bathroom and get it over with. No. Burn, you bastard. Keep on typing till you’re done. Fortunately, Stella kept her distance in the doorway, and only Hannah skipped into the office to pry into what her cousin was engaged in doing. “What are quotas?” she exclaimed. “Why aren’t you writing another story?”

“Bye-bye, chatterbox. Yes, that’s what I’m writing about for college. Quotas, immigrants, workers, greenhorns. I’m working on my college term paper.” He dismissed her with a supercilious wave of the hand.

“Collegiate, collegiate.” Hannah exited, snapping her fingers, while her sister laughed her vapid laugh. “Yes, we are collegiate. Nothing intermedgiate. No, sir!” Trailing song, they went down the hall, leaving him to himself, to forget himself in his typing.

Three times he had to retype pages, or parts of pages, twice because his interlardings and his crossings out — X’ings out — of words were so numerous as to seem like a rank growth on the page, and once because his digression from his penciled guide left him at the end without feasible return; it had to be abandoned, and a fresh start faithful to the original made. At length he was done. He would look at it again before class, give the typescript a last inspection before handling it in. He got up, aware of a slight cramp in the region of the abdomen, broke wind, tapped the ashes of his pipe into the cracked soup plate Mamie had brought him for an ashtray, turned off the ceiling light, and walked through the long hall to the kitchen. The kitchen was this side of the sconce-lit front room. All the other rooms, the bedrooms of the apartment, opened on the hall, except two, one of which, Mamie and Jonah’s bedroom, opened off the kitchen, and the other, Stella’s bedroom, opened off the front room the same way. He felt played out, depleted. He didn’t think, even if the chance were presented to him on a silver platter, he could work up enough interest in a sexual go-round with Stella. Uppermost in his awareness was the feeling of being spent; his very breathing, chest heaving, seemed jaded. All he wanted to do was thank Mamie, say goodbye to Zaida, and beat it for home. He wasn’t even hungry, though he was sure once he traipsed the eight or ten blocks from Mamie’s to his house he’d do justice to anything Mom set in front of him. Odd: he had been struck by the accidental mistyping of the word “stud” when he meant to type the word “study,” and its meaning as applied to the vertical two-by-fours between which water pipes were installed in a wood-frame dwelling. Stud, with its further, its associate meaning pertaining to virility, to breeding, to sex, all suddenly dispersed by the simple correction, the addition of the letter y. That was what it seemed to have done to him. Where was Zaida?

His little, bare, and cheerless bedroom, the next room after the office, was vacant. Where was Zaida?

A few steps farther along the hall, and Ira could guess: Zaida was behind the frosted, wire-reinforced window of the bathroom, illuminated when occupied. Ahead of Ira in the front room, he caught sight of Hannah and Stella executing the latest dance step — to the muted band music of the family’s newly acquired Superheterodyne console radio. In the darkened bedroom at the rear of the lighted kitchen, he could hear a window close. Mamie came in, short, obese, broad almost as the bedroom doorway.

“Hollo, bhoy,” she said affectionately. “Noo, have you prevailed?”

“Yeah, thanks, Tanta. I think so.”

“And the machinkeh served you well?”

“Better than I served it. The mistakes I made, gevald!”

“It’s the first time since I bought it secondhand from a shikker who came to the door — only the Founder of the universe knows where he plucked it — the first time that a collitch bhoy has used it for his collitch work. Who would have thought it would be so honored? Bills of fare were all that were written on it before. Goyish fare: puck chops, hem, such things. And now and then, something Jewish, but treife, you know, even if Jewish: shav, potato lotkehs, borscht.”

“Yeah?”

“And when needed, an eviction notice, you understand. Stella writes out on the machine an eviction notice that I have to hand a Portorickie sometimes. Ai,” she groaned. “Rarely, rarely. I don’t like adding to a poor man’s woes. But often to repay your pity, they’ll play you a trick: they’ll steal off in the dead of night with their belongings. Noo, saves taking them to court.” She soaked a rag under the brass hot water faucet, wrung it out, and wiped the enamel front of the sink.

“Have you become acquainted with these Portorickies? Who ever heard of them before? A peculiar people.” She turned to face Ira. “Sit down.”

“Mamie, I just came to say goodbye, that’s all. It’s after eight. And thanks for the typewriter.”

“And Zaida? Won’t you bid him goodbye?”

“I meant to.”

“Sit, sit. Every minute you spend talking to him is another mitzvah.”

Ira sat down — reluctantly. “But he’s in the bathroom.”

“A minute, just a minute more.” She transferred the damp rag to the oilcloth-covered washtub lids, and bending her heavy, Slavic, sober face under mousy topknot, mopped the green-and-white-figured expanse. “What can you do for a man who no longer cares to live? His shoulders hurt. He can’t see. His haunches ache. His feet pain. Noo—mine do too. Still, I run for him twice a day every day save Shabbes, to fetch him fresh, crisp egg biscuits, and every morning fresh rolls, a half a quarter pound sweet butter. Nothing pleases. Nothing wins thanks. Neither my soup, my veal cutlets, my fricassee, my strudel. Neither dairy or parveh, nor flesh. What can you do?” She bunched the gray rag and left it at a corner of the washtub lid. Then she sat down, ponderously. “Ah!” she relished her relief with a loud sigh. “Oy! I’ll tell you: his life soured too early. He was scarcely thirty when your mother, Leah, was already a child, Genya a girl too, I was an infant, and Ella was born — four daughters! Gevald, he foresaw a desperate future. Somehow he would have to make a fortune. The dowry alone, to defray that for so many daughters, oy, where does one find a panacea? It happened that he knew that they were going to hew down the count Tatevsky’s forests on the mountainside nearby, among the Carpathians, for lumber. Morris, your uncle, worked there awhile.”

“I know.” Beguiled, Ira encouraged: “He told me once he lost his crayon that he marked the ends of logs with. So he slit his finger, and marked the ends with that.”

“Tockin, that’s Moishe.” Mamie folded thick hands on her wadded belly. “‘Noo,’ Zaida thought, ‘hah, the count will need huts for the woodcutters. And with what do you chink the cracks of a hut? With mortar made of lime.’ His little gesheft would be the purveyor. With all his money, and some borrowed, he ordered three great dray-loads of lime — three, and goyim to cart them. Didn’t the Almighty send down a deluge from the skies, that mired the wheels, a deluge that fell hour after hour after hour. And the lime, freg nisht, worth nought but a curse. He took to the Talmud after that. He would scarce tend the little store. ‘Minkey, this,’ he would call Baba, may she rest in peace to eternity, ‘Minkey, that. The goy wants kerosene. The shiksa wants half a loaf of sugar.’ And so it went. Do you know Baba once loved him dearly? But little by little his selfishness killed all her devotion.”

“Yeah?”

Mamie pushed her snub nose upward with the heel of her hand. “It is indeed so. He’ll be out in another minute.”

“Who’s there? Who’s talking? That’s not Zaida.” Hannah’s voice rose above the radio announcer’s. “We keep hearing somebody.” A moment later, she presented her carrot-topped lissome self in the kitchen doorway. “Oh, it’s you. Our college cousin. You finished?”

Stella wasn’t far behind. “Of course he’s finished. Can’t you see? Now he has to dance with Mama.”

“Always serious. Always his mind is somewhere else. On something important, something high and intellectual,” Hannah said with customary effrontery. “You typed and you typed and you typed. Now you can dance. Why don’t you dance?”

“I don’t dance.”

“You don’t wanna, or you can’t?”

“Both.”

“Come on, we’ll teach you.”

“I said both.”

“Oh.”

“You know what it is.” Stella slid by her sister through the doorway. “He doesn’t wanna, because he doesn’t know how.” She approached Ira, lifted a flirtatious shoulder. “And he doesn’t know how because he doesn’t wanna. He’s too intellectual, he’s a real college man.”

“At least waltz,” Hannah enticed. “It’s such an easy step. Come on. We need a partner.”

“That’s right, a male partner.” Stella leaned against him. “We always need a male partner because Zaida won’t let us have one in the house. To him men can only dance with men. And women can only do the chardash at weddings, when there’s a big crowd.” She tittered, leaned against him more flagrantly, bearing down on his shoulder with musky heft. “If he sees you dancing with us, he can’t say anything. We’re first cousins.” She straightened up brightly. “It’s in the family.”

“No!” Ira shied away.

“How can you be so selfish?” Hannah scolded. “Your own cousins. We’d be so thrilled. All you got to do is hold us in your arms.” She gauchely mimicked: “Ah, you hear it? Listen, it’s dreamy. Come on. Before Zaida comes out, one little glide around the front-room table.”

“It’s not fair.” Stella nudged again, bold in the patent innocuousness of her seductive teasing. “Men can do all the picking when they want. And we girls have to wait. If we were both boys, and you were our girl cousin, you’d have to wait and then you’d find out.” She bumped Ira again for good measure.

Greatly diverted, Mamie’s girth shook at her daughters’ antics. “Let him be, you’re nothing but hoydens. He has more on his mind than dancing. He didn’t come here to dance.”

“No, he came here to typewrite a term paper — a college term paper,” Hannah said with mocking asperity. “About quotas. A college man, no less.”

“I better leave.” Ira tilted away.

“Stop, girls,” Mamie reprimanded. “He’s waiting for Zaida. I don’t know what’s keeping him. Go, go back to the radio. And turn it down. I don’t want any quarrel. Zaida is going to bed soon.”

“Oh, him,” the two sisters chimed together in resentful unison. “Everything is for him.”

Then Stella solo: “If you think he’s in the toilet long, you should be here on Friday, erev Shabbes. Till he bathes, till he cuts his nails, till he wraps up every toenail, God forbid the rats shouldn’t eat it, you could plotz—”

“Do me a favor, daughter — both of you. Leave.”

They departed sulkily for the front room.

“And turn the radio down,” Mamie called after them. “Even if it doesn’t run on batteries now, it’s electricity, it costs. You hear?”

“Ye-e-s,” came the grudging drawl.

Mamie sighed — and yawned. “The old man to cater to, my daughters to look after, to rear them in true Jewishness, a glatt kosher home to keep. And two apartment houses.” Mamie held up a vee of two thick fingers. “My brother Saul with his evil temper. Thank God he’s no longer my partner. He thought I had nothing to do but collect rent. If he ever calls me a sonofabitchekheh again, I’ll spit in his face. So now I’m manager of the two houses for the bank. What more can I do than I am doing? Nothing. And rent I get free.” She rested her heavy arms on the table. “The neighborhood is becoming Portorickie: one has to know how to deal with them, and I do. I treat them like human beings. What else are they? I’m not afraid to live here with Portorickies. Other Jews are afraid. They move out. Everyone warns me, my husband, Jonas, warns me: don’t go in the backyard from one house to the other to collect the rent. He read in Der Tag how they felled a landlady, and tore her rent receipts from her. Noo, the white goyim, those Irish, don’t do that too? I’m not afraid.”

“No?”

“I fear only one thing, I fear the Almighty.”

“Yeah?”

“Only Him.”

Her blunt expression of faith was moving, a faith long lost to Ira, but still capable of resonance: the new radio softly churned out some popular instrumental number, Charleston, Black Bottom, jazz, who knew? Stella was in there too, object of his remote, his academic dawdling, nothing more. He smirked at himself — and at Mamie, his obese aunt, too obese to cross her legs, a balloon of faith. It made a curious design, a pattern, woven together with sardonic woof, and ambivalent warp. And Zaida, the figure Ira had all but forgotten, in the bathroom off the hallway, in the bathroom, opening the door, at last—

“Here he comes,” Mamie announced.

“Will he come in here?”

“No, he’ll go into his bedroom. He must be in his underwear already.”

“Then it’s late,” Ira demurred. “Isn’t it?”

“Go bide with him a few minutes,” Mamie pleaded. “His life is so bitter. He’s purblind. And the little sight still remaining to him he’ll soon hazard under the knife.”

“All right.” Ira arose to his feet, frowned in resolve.

“It’s a mitzvah, indeed, that you perform,” Mamie urged. “His eldest grandson, and an educated one, to comfort him in his loneliness, in his last years.”

“I don’t know whether I can.”

“You can, you can. Come back afterward, and say goodbye.”

“I’ll be back in a minute.” Farewells to Mamie usually paid off, even though he was in the funds for the nonce, thanks to Edith, and the end of his summer job for the IRT. Ira made for the threshold. On the one hand, in the direction of the house door, he saw the harsh light from Zaida’s bedroom streaming across the narrow hallway; on the other side he saw Stella in the front-room doorway, Stella reading a magazine at the large dining-room table, blond, cuddly, insipid quarry to his sudden onset of rut. He had never experienced that before, a kind of erotic second wind; he never had to wait that long, hadn’t thought of the time spent here as waiting, until this moment. . Nothing doing anyway. They exchanged glances through the harangue of a saxophone and timpani. Remarkable, almost incredible, that at so young an age, she could act so completely apathetic, and was not; she could seem so completely unconcerned, and was not. Hell, he’d been all right till now, quiescent. He’d better try and stay that way. His weekend was used up, even if his weak end wasn’t. He trudged toward his grandfather’s bedroom.

In house slippers, baggy, mussed trousers, and long-sleeved underwear, black yarmulke on his gray head, his back to the doorway, Zaida was plumping up the heirloom pillows on the bed.

“I came to say good night, Zaida.” Ira counterfeited mien of contrite deference. “I’ve hardly talked to you.”

“Who is it?” Squat man in his waning sixties with a bulging paunch, and the gait and flaccid flanks of a man much older, Zaida swiveled his gray-bearded visage — and peered. True, Zaida had cataracts in both eyes, but confirmed hypochondriac that he was, he missed no chance of exaggerating his ailments. “Oh, Leah’s son. Are you still here?”

“Yes. I was talking to Mamie.”

“Your mother was here this afternoon.”

“I know. She said goodbye to me when she left.”

“Noo, come in and sit down.”

“I’ll only stay a minute. It’s getting late. I’ll be keeping you up.”

“Then I’ll sleep better for it. How are your studies in the college going?”

“About the same, Zaida. Not too wonderful.” Ira wagged his head in humorous belittlement.

“Then you should try harder, even to your utmost,” the old man counseled. “You owe your mother that bit of joy at least for the sacrifices she’s made for you — and still must make, no?”

“I guess so,” Ira replied.

“What?”

“You’re right, Zaida. It was just that first year that was hard, getting used to college. Now that I’m nearly a senior, as they call it in English—”

“What bliss will alight on my poor Leah when she sees you finished with your studies. How much longer do you have to go?”

“Another year. I hope no longer that than. I’m finishing summer school to make up credits. I won’t have enough of what they call credits to graduate this next summer.”

“I hope so too.” Zaida apparently caught the lack of enthusiasm in his grandson’s tone of voice. “It’s time you thought of her, no? How many years still have to pass before you begin earning money and begin to lighten her poverty? How many have already passed? My afflicted Leah, with her chronic catarrh and her sorrows, and her lunatic husband.” Zaida rocked back and forth a little, as if davening. “Woe is her. May the Almighty take pity on her — and on me, no? That I have to behold my daughter enduring such suffering? On me as well, on me, believe me, with my cares and my plagues, my shoulder joints and my hips, all racked — and my eyes, it goes without saying. And soon to be imprisoned in bed: they say with a bag of sand on each side of my beard. Oy, vey, oy, vey. Each day brings a new ague, a new grief, and no one to abide it but myself.” He indicated the direction of the front room. “Dancing and springing, that they know — to that ugly music. It’s called music. When they play it loud, a terror smites me, as if savages were at large. And these I have for granddaughters.”

“I’m sorry, Zaida. I don’t like that kind of music either. It’s called jazz. What can you do? That’s today.”

“What? I don’t know?” Zaida reproved. “May it be destroyed, as it destroys me. What it makes of Jewish children, and of Jewish girls.” He nodded significantly. “If this is today, tell me, what need of a tomorrow?”

They were both silent, Ira in his straight-backed chair, the only spare one in the small bedroom, Zaida in his high armchair next to the rectangular black table. Brass studs about the tall horsehide headrest framed his discontented, humorless features, those visible between yarmulke and beard: brown eyes oppressed, lips between tobacco-yellowed mustache and beard downturned and cheerless. He sighed often, his broad paunch straining the pearly buttons of his dingy underwear. He pitied himself so ostentatiously, Ira continually felt torn between compassion and exasperation. Protocol required about five minutes of restive, stereotyped commiseration, and then he’d be off. No use spending any more time than that in giving plausibility to deference.

“You care to smoke a cigarette?” Zaida picked up the square blue box of Melachrinos. He held up the box rather than out, unopened and close to himself.

“No, thanks, Zaida.” Ira brought out his pipe. It would be a crime to deprive his grandfather of his budgeted and hoarded butts.

Zaida found a cigarette stub on the ashtray, struck a match and lit the charred end, then felt about for the quill-and-paper cigarette holder. He fitted the stained tip of the butt into the scorched holder. “It’s not good, it’s not good, that’s all.”

“No?”

“I tell you we live in botched times. Botched, ruined. Fit for burial, no more.”

“But if you’re Jewish, you’re not supposed to look at life that way.” Ira tried tilting with the weak lance of his own skimpy lore. “Aren’t you? A Jew is supposed to have faith in life.”

“Faith in the Almighty who gave him life. That I have, blessed be His holy name. But if the mill won’t turn, the millers quarrel. I’m not speaking of my life alone.”

“No?”

“No. Though I pray it would please the Founder of the universe to gather me unto Himself. I mean the lives of Jews everywhere in the world. Immeasurable the menace that hangs over them, the woe in store for them. Except here in America, where we are tolerated — barely, but tolerated. In a small compass. Didn’t my son Moishe tell me that when he first came to America, he applied for work in a company that makes these betterien for automobiles? ‘You’re strong and I like you. I can tell you’d be a good worker,’ the owner said to him. ‘You don’t look Jewish either. But I can’t hire you. There would be turmoil in the shop.’ So Moishe told me. And noo: his officer after the Great War urged him to stay. ‘You’ve learned how to command, and your men trust you.’ Noo.” Zaida puffed frugally on his cigarette. “Why are we tolerated today? Why was Moishe raised in the ranks, and given those stripes to wear on his shirtsleeves when he was in the military? Because true piety is ignored, because Orthodox observance is ignored — one in a thousand is observant. My own sons — the very ones who support me — pay for my room and board in a kosher home — which of them dons phylacteries in the morning, which eschews work on Shabbes? None. Noo. I have to live, and live off their earnings. Do as you see fit, I say. What else can I say? A pious existence is for you to choose. Or not to choose. So at the expense of observance, they go unmolested, here in the Golden Land. They barter holy living for livelihood. Noo. I can see the day when the Jews will be hounded, sooner than later. Mark me. Soon they will not be permitted to earn a livelihood at all. I’ve seen it before: open Jew-baiting increases from day to day. And in Russia, no? They don’t hate Jews? It doesn’t matter whether observant or not, Jews they loathe.”

“I don’t think so, Zaida, from what I’ve read. Jews are treated as equals in Russia.”

“Go, don’t delude yourself. Why is Trotsky running to escape from Russia? From whom is he running? He’s running from the Russian goy, the khlop? What is Stalin but a khlop? You can see it in his face. And a khlop is a pogromist. He was for centuries a pogromist, a khlop under the Romanovs, under the czars. So he’ll be for God knows how long a khlop under the Bolsheviks. Why have they expelled a Jew from his high post in Russia, one that he shared once with Lenin? Heed me, were he a goy, it would be a different story.”

“You think so?”

“I know. And I know you won’t believe. The Jew is hated with a bestial hatred the wide world over.”

“Well, what do you do about it?”

“Do? You pray to God. May He send us aid. As the Jews in Russia when the czar oppressed them prayed that the next czar would be more merciful. Was he? He wasn’t. We pray that a new day will bring relief.” His cigarette holder had begun to reek with the proximity of the burning tobacco ember.

“Zaida, the end of your cigarette holder.”

He dislodged the butt, poked at the live end with a house key. “I won’t cite Talmud since you believe in nothing of Yiddishkeit.”

“I do, Zaida. Some of it.”

“It seemed to me, when we first came to America, that you were truly growing up in Jewishness. A child, I thought, blessed by the Almighty, my firstborn grandchild goes with me to the synagogue on Shabbes, on Shabbes at night as well, for the Havdalah.”

“Shabbes at night, oh, sure,” Ira humorously parried his grandfather’s censure. “They used to have a little spread in the synagogue at the end of Shabbes: black olives and wine, brandy, fresh rye bread.”

“Noo?” Undiverted, the old man pushed his yarmulke back over grizzled gray hair. “They still do.”

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Zaida, but if I’m not the Jew I might have been, it’s because we left the East Side when you came to America. You know why: my mother wanted to be near you and Baba.”

“Azoy?” Zaida’s tone sharpened. “Because we came to America you’re not a Jew — and your father didn’t have crazy ideas of becoming an independent milkman?”

“I didn’t mean that was the only reason,” Ira hastened to palliate.

“Live among the goyim because he thought he would be closer to the railroad where the milk came into the city. Because you were living among goyim, you should have been more a Jew than before. Here was I, in this Harlem too. We could have expounded all of Talmud together.”

“It didn’t work that way. Here was Harlem. Yes. But here were the Irish — here were the other goyim: the Italians. They were in the street, and where else did I have to go?”

Zaida was becoming aroused. “Is it my fault? That my poor daughter has such a lunatic for a husband — I shouldn’t tell you that. He’s your father—”

“Oh, I know.”

“He could have lived in Jewish Harlem, like the rest of us. But instead he wedges himself on 119th Street, to save a dollar or two in rent. Live among the goyim at twelve dollars a month. Here on 112th Street still are Jews: 114th Street, 115th Street, 116th Street. He failed as a milkman. He becomes a busboy, thanks to Moishe. He learns to be a waiter. So don’t be a lunatic; show the proprietor of the restaurant the respect due the owner. No, he has to be Chaim — look at Chaim askance, and he’s enraged. Mamie lived across the street from us on 115th Street, and we came here from Galitzia, and from a cap maker Jonas became a ladies’ tailor, steady, quiet, decent. They lived among Jews. Do I dare go into your street, a Jew with a beard? That’s where he crawled to—119th Street, to live with Esau, and he dragged my poor daughter with him. Woe is me.”

“Well, we lived here too, on 114th Street east of Park Avenue when you came to America, Zaida. 114th Street. A Jewish neighborhood. But Mom didn’t like living in the back. No window on the street. It was too much like Veljish, she said. So it wasn’t his fault alone — even though I know he’s a mishugeneh,” Ira conceded.

“It fares well with me,” said Zaida. Contemplation accented the distress in his eyes and lips. “Sis mir git. Let God be my judge, how ill I fare.”

Unhappy and irreconcilable, they were silent again, in a silence coated like a pill by soft, cloying dance-band music that drifted through the long hallway. Should he leave; had he paid his respects sufficiently? Queer, how one had to estimate the just duration of a forced protocol. Or was all protocol forced? Another minute should do it. Then stand up and say goodbye. His eyes ranged about the room: bare and cheerless bedroom. Not dingy, the light beige walls looked recently painted — Mamie had probably had them painted over the summer for the New Year. Not dingy, no, but cheerless, with only a complimentary calendar from the Harlem Savings & Loan Bank hanging from a brad on the door of the closet. Calendar on the wall and mezuzah on the doorframe. What else did the reverent Orthodox Jew require? It was as if decor were consigned — or confined — to the mind alone — decor of justice, of righteousness, decor of divine sublimity, without a single tangible attribute. It seemed impossible of realization now, but he had known it long ago, when he was eight years old, and attended cheder on the lost and irrevocable — and unwanted — East Side. Decor of the invisible — well, no, not entirely: hanging from a hook on the other side of the closet door was the lambent sapphire-blue velvet bag containing Zaida’s prayer shawl and phylacteries. Ella’s work, no doubt, Mom’s fourth-oldest sister, placid, painstaking Ella of “the blessed hands.” It was she who had embroidered in gold thread the two lions rampant either side of the Tablets of the Law. Lions of Judah, they shone within the shadow of the closet, as if the gold thread of the design were informed with its own light.

“What is there to say? I am like one besieged. I am like one beset on every side,” Zaida finally said. “I have only the Almighty to turn to, blessed be He.”

“I’m sorry, Zaida.” Again he had expressed his commiseration in English, and again corrected himself. There — now all he had to do was to wish his grandfather’s pending cataract operation a success: “Zol gehen mit mazel, Zaida,” Ira said on the point of arising — he had fulfilled his obligation.

“Do you know who I am like?” Zaida asked. “I often think I am like that bishop among the Christians, that Augustinus.”

“Who?”

“That saint among them: Augustinus.”

“Oh, Saint Augustine.”

“Is that how you name him?”

“Yeah. Saint Augustine in English.” The fact that his grandfather had said Christlikher, instead of goy, indicated respect. “You know about Saint Augustine?” Ira lingered.

“Noo, vus den? I don’t read? While I could. I don’t know?”

“You do?” It was already late on Sunday evening, almost nine thirty, on Zaida’s open gold watch on the table. Terminate as fast as he could, Ira told himself. “Yes?” He began adjusting his jacket.

“His city was besieged by the barbarians, the Goths, the Vandals, the Teutonim,” Zaida Hebraized.

“The Teutonim.” Ira itched, scratched. What was it Eliot said in his notes on The Waste Land? “To Carthage then I came. . unholy loves sang all about mine ears—” “I think he was supposed to be black, an African.”

“Black, white. Whatever he was. After weeks passed, and the barbarians were still outside the walls, he prayed the Almighty to end the siege. Or to end him.”

“Him?”

“Augustinus.”

Ira got to his feet. “I ought to say goodbye to Mamie, Zaida. It’s getting late.”

“Well, go in good health.”

“Thanks.”

“And greet your mother for me.”

“I will. I hope you see better after the operation, Zaida.”

Zaida nodded — with invincible skepticism.

Ira took a last look at the tranquil blue phylactery bag. Boy, those gold lions rampant, they reared up around the Tablets of the Law, shining. He paused in the doorway. “And I hope the siege lifts a little for you too, Zaida,” trying to instill a little humor into the parting.

The old man smiled at last: “What are you saying?”

“I meant I hope that things get a little easier, Zaida.”

“Oy, vey, vey. You’re still a child. Can the siege of existence ever be lifted? How? Never. Wish me what happened to Augustinus: that the Almighty would do as well by me as He did by him.”

“Why?”

Zaida laughed — shortly, but for the first time. “You don’t know?”

“No.” Ira felt slightly annoyed to have Zaida laughing at him, and about a gentile subject too. “What happened?”

“What happened was that Augustinus never lived to see the Teutonim, the Vandals, sack the city. That’s what happened. He never saw the havoc they wrought. You can imagine what wild barbarians are capable of: the cruelty, the slaughter, the violations, the atrocities. None of that he lived to see. What a blessing. Would the Lord favor me likewise.”

Frowning, Ira tried to separate chagrin from confusion. “Is that what you meant?”

“What else?”

“Good night, Zaida.”

II

Cryptic. . His grandfather’s laugh echoed in Ira’s mind, as he walked past the now darkened bathroom door toward the lighted kitchen and front room. Did they or didn’t they lift the siege? Enigmatic. Wonder where the old boy gleaned that bit of ancient history? Probably from Der Tag. Didn’t the old guy want to die, though. Maybe that was the answer.

Apothanein thelo. Ah, how I understand today, Ecclesias.

His mind reverted to The Waste Land again. Funny — he smirked — a barrel of unholy loves buzzing about my ears: too late, though, for him to have a chance at Stella. And for Christ’s sake, he adjured himself: make it snappy. Bid Mamie “adJew” and be off, whether she rewarded him this evening with a buck or not. Stella was no longer in sight, and the radio was turned down to a barely audible floss of dance band as Ira entered the kitchen.

“Good night, Mamie. I gotta go.”

“Come in. Another minute won’t hurt.”

“Oh, no. I’ve been here long enough.”

“Come in. Sit.”

“I’ve been sitting.”

“Come in. Sit.”

Ira came into the kitchen, dropped into a chair.

“Noo, was he complaining?” Mamie asked.

“Zaida? Well, he’s an old man.”

“He isn’t so old. Baba of beloved memory used to say that every part of her husband Ben Zion’s body failed him early, save one.”

“Did she?” Ira couldn’t resist a grin.

“After the disaster with the lime, he suddenly grew listless. ‘I’m wearying of watching the stones grow in Veljish,’ he would say. But appetite he had — the best was saved for him — and when it came to meting out punishment, blows he could deal out not a few. I sometimes think Leah married a man just like her father.”

Ira shook his head.

“‘The stones, only the stones thrive in Veljish,’ he would say. ‘Only stones prosper here.’”

“Yeah?” A hamlet he may himself have seen in earliest infancy, before he was three, Ira reflected: all the sights and sounds the toddler’s wondering eyes absorbed, absorbed from the vantage of his stout young mother’s arms. The Galitzianer hamlet of Mom’s girlhood, with its village anomie and stagnation, of which she had given him so many intimations, must have weighed down the young spirit to intolerable melancholy. Little wonder she inveighed against living in “the back” of a tenement.

“Did Zaida ever go to a doctor for his disorder?” Ira said soberly. “You know, they have a name for it in English. Did he ever go to a doctor?”

“A doctor?” Mamie scouted. “In Veljish they called a doctor when you were dying. That’s when you saw a doctor, and that’s when you saw an orange.”

“Neurasthenia,” Ira suddenly recalled. “That’s the name in English.”

“Don’t give it fancy names.” Stella’s voice preceded her. She had apparently overheard, and was coming from front room to kitchen. “New rasthenia, old rasthenia. Believe me, you don’t have to go to college and use fancy words for him. I can tell you in plain English.” In buff dress, always with that bland misleading unconcern, she leaned against the doorpost.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, you wanna know?”

Jesus Christ. He felt like shutting his eyes. Get your ass out of here, and go home. You don’t stand a chance. What was he waiting for? His shoes scraped the linoleum as he abruptly shifted his legs. Don’t give yourself away. The little knish, the little twat, knew he was beginning to smolder, and she basked in his heat at a discreet distance from the — yes, the skewer. Helter-skelter libido swirled the associations about: associations with just the right prefix. His behavior had to be more than noncommittal; he had to overcompensate. A grim appearance was the only one he could rely on. “Neurasthenia’ isn’t a fancy word,” he said severely. “That’s the word for Zaida’s condition.”

“That old guy?” Stella scoffed. “He likes the misery, that’s all.”

“Daughter dear, you know what? You’re turning into an anti-Semite,” Mamie reproved — but without conviction.

“Of course he likes his misery,” Stella reiterated. “Ira, listen, if you’re sick, and you tell everybody about it, doesn’t it mean you like your misery?”

“Well. I don’t know. .”

“My daughter,” said Mamie. “May no harm ever come to you, and enjoy a thousand blessings, but sympathy for another person you never had.”

Stella was not to be put off so easily. “Look, Ira, your uncle Gabe, your father’s brother, came here from St. Louis. When did he see Zaida before? Never. Maybe in Galitzia. Maybe. So what’s the first thing Zaida begins to tell him? How mean his granddaughters are, with their radio and their dancing and springing, how lousy they make him feel, Jewish girls, and how rotten life is. Now if you talk like that right away to strangers, it must mean you like it.”

“Go, you have no heart,” Mamie rebuked. “Go back to your moving-picture megglezine that you’re reading.” She sighed — like a great bale of something, kind, obese woman. “Comes an old Jew to the door, an old Jew with a beard and a pishkeh, collecting money for the yeshivas or the poor in Eretz Yisroel. She gives him a penny, one penny.”

“I gave him a penny, and that’s enough, but she gave him a dime. Why? Because he’s got whiskers.”

“A fortunate thing your grandfather is in bed in his bedroom,” said Mamie. “Go back to the front room, Stella, and let us be. It will soon be your bedtime.”

“That’s right,” Ira said, and stood up — as Stella left the kitchen.

“Sit! Sit!” Mamie’s vehemence halted him. “I hardly have a chance to talk to you. We’ve been interrupted at every turn. One minute more. Be a good child.”

“One minute.” Ira dropped back in his chair.

“I have such good verenekehs; they smack of paradise,” she cajoled. “Before you go, eat some. Tell me if they’re not the best verenekehs—the best pirogen you ever tasted.”

“Oh, is that why you want me to stay?”

“Well, isn’t that a good reason?”

“That’s what I thought. It so happens that I’m hungry.”

“And that’s what I thought,” Mamie said, triumphantly tapping her large bosom.

“God, why do you have to tempt me, Mamie. I’m going home. Mom’ll give me some supper.”

“Nein. Nein. I have a whole potful of verenekehs, more than twice what Jonas and I will eat when he comes home. They didn’t please the old man. The children avoid them, makes them fat. Why should they go into the garbage?” Mamie moved quickly for so heavy a woman; she was at the stove in an instant, wooden ladle in hand, stirring the white enamel pot on the stove lid that she used for a simmerer over the low gas flame. “A few. They won’t harm you, believe me.” She began the transfer of pirogen from pot to platter. “You’ll still have a bit of appetite when you get home.”

“I won’t need it.”

“You’ll see. Appetite comes with eating.”

“That’s enough, Mamie! Gee, that’s my weakness. You’re a pasta masta too,” he said ruefully.

“A what?” She brought the plate of gently steaming pirogen to the table and provided him with a fork. “What means a ‘pasta masta’? Wait, I’ll bring you bread.”

“Oh, no! Not bread too.”

“And a little sour cream. I have good heavy sour cream I bought this morning on Park Avenue.”

“No — oh, all right,” he capitulated. “Thanks, Tanta. Boy! That’s enough sour cream.” What a transmogrification took place when humble mashed potatoes were laced with sautéed onions, then clad in a jacket of boiled dough and drowned under sour cream.

“You are hungry. You swallow them whole.”

“I’ll say. Jewish oysters. What time does Jonas come home?”

“Another two hours. Twelve o’clock, sometime a little earlier. It depends on the train from Jamaica after he leaves the cafeteria. And sometimes on my brother Harry too, how promptly he gets to the store to relieve Joe. Are they good?”

“Are they good!”

“More?”

“No, no, no! Well, maybe a couple more.”

“Aha.” Mamie spooned out half a dozen. “I told you: appetite comes with eating.”

“And I thought it went!” he guffawed with zany mirth. “Ooh, if I’m not a goner!” Ira assailed the fresh batch with a gusto that made the pirogen seem to blench.

“You should know that with my poor husband I had to move heaven and earth,” Mamie said as she rested the pot on the simmerer, “until I got my fine brothers to take him in for a partner. ‘A cap maker, a tailor,’ was their cry — Jonas was a good ladies’ tailor too—‘what has that got to do with the restaurant business? How can the one go together with the other?’ So they said.”

“How will they suit?” Delectable, the warm, slippery Jewish pirogen, lubricated by sour cream, and skidding down his gullet on an English pun. “Aah!”

“What?”

“A match,” he chortled.

“A match,” Mamie repeated, puzzled. “You know, they’re dairy. You can stay and sit a little longer. Have some coffee with milk afterward, keep me company awhile.”

“No, thanks, Tanta. Please!”

“I know why they didn’t want him in the cafeteria. Jonas is not very imposing. Jonas is little. He is short. So? He can’t hold his own at the cash register? If it weren’t that Zaida intervened—‘you must take your brother-in-law in as a partner’—I would be bickering with them still.”

“Go ahead. Why does Jonas have to eat at home? He’s got a whole cafeteria to get his meals in — to get his supper.”

“Is it kosher?” Mamie tacked question to question.

“Oh.”

“They said how will a cap maker, a tailor, be of use in a restaurant, how will he—”

“Fare?” Ira giggled.

“What?”

“Never mind. Just joking. Bill of fare.”

“So I said, how did Harry become a makher in a restaurant? He was a furrier’s apprentice. How did Max do it? He was a sign painter. He was a glove maker—”

“And my father.” Ira tried to slow down his rate of consumption out of courtesy to the dwindling remnant. “My father came right from driving a wet-wash wagon, after he stopped being a milkman, and in no time at all, he was a waiter.”

“Indeed, after he broke the mirror in Krug and Zinn’s vegetarian restaurant with a water pitcher, he would no longer hear of being a busboy,” Mamie nodded.

“Yes, I heard about that. He got his diploma.”

“He’s a madman,” Mamie dismissed Pop. “But speaking about my brothers again, to me they wouldn’t listen. It was not till Zaida ordered them — ordered them to take Jonas in for a partner into the business, that they did. You hear?”

“I hear.” Ira speared the penultimate pirogen on the right. “Boy!” he complimented his aunt again. “Verenekehs like these are fit for the thirty-six Righteous — what’d Zaida call ’em? — Tzaddikim? For whose sake God spares the world.”

“Better than your goyish macaronkahs, no?”

“Oh, much.”

“A few more,” Mamie wheedled. “Nokh a bisseleh, nokh a shisseleh,” she rhymed.

“A tureen, you mean, I’ll fall away to a ton,” Ira said in English.

“Such a small appetite you have.”

“Ho. Ho. No, I learned my lesson. Mamie, I really have to be going. It’s getting very late.”

“You eat and run?” Mamie reproached.

“Eat and run. It’s ten o’clock.”

“Hear only this last thing. You’re a learned youth. Perhaps you can give me a khokhma.”

“Me?” Ira dropped back into his seat. “I couldn’t give you chicken schmaltz.”

“Go, I know better. Hear me a minute. I’ll tell you.” She wagged her tuberous finger at him. “With Zaida, a pious Jew, and my two American daughters, how shall I reconcile them? It’s a difficult thing to do, no? You understand?”

“I should think so.”

“I’m glad you understand.” Mamie took the plate away, immediately began washing it. Rinsed, she set it on the drainboard, went to the stove, lowered the gas flame still lower, to a bare fringe under the simmer baffle. Then she came to the table and plopped down into a chair.

“To please both them and him is impossible. What they crave, he opposes. ‘Father,’ I plead, ‘it’s America, it’s not Galitzia.’ How did I meet my husband, Jonas? Through a marriage broker and photographs as in the old days? I met him in the same loft building on Delancey Street where we worked together. I worked at a sewing machine. In the shop next door he sewed the visors on caps. Both of us greenhorns. We ate lunch together. We joked together. We told stories of our Galitzianer hamlets. Then he asked me to go with him to a Yiddish theater on Second Avenue on Saturday night. I don’t know: maybe Tomashevsky was the leading actor. Who can remember? And so, little by little, we became acquainted; then we became engaged. ‘A girl has to win her own suitor in America, Father,’ I said to him. ‘But she can remain a good Jewish maiden, for all that,’ he said. ‘No, but your daughters are hulladrigas, both of them,’ he said: ‘Plain wantons. You at least had to go to work,’ he said to me. I said, ‘To toil as I did in a sweatshop all day over a sewing machine I won’t send them.’”

“Mamie, I really have to go.”

“Another minute and I’ll explain. Why did I buy a new radio? Cost me a full whole hundred dollars, that they’re listening to this minute — and that the old man loathes the sound of. To hear Rabbi Wise on The Jewish Hour? No, I bought it so that the two girls could entice youth into the house, young men, swains, you know, to learn how to deport themselves with boys, with young men. The time isn’t far off when they’ll have to think of suitors, no? One is seventeen, the other has turned fourteen. So what do you think he did?”

“I can just guess,” Ira said laconically, and got his feet under him.

“Hear!” Mamie preempted. “He comes rushing into the front room, yarmulke in his hand — in his gotchkis, mind you, without trousers — flailing and shouting: ‘Out, trombenyiks, out, scamps, out, wastrels!’ Good Jewish boys. It vexed me so. Here I am, right here in the house when they’re here. What harm can they do?”

“That’s right,” Ira said reassuringly, as he stood up.

“Well, ready to go to bed?” Mamie asked.

“Me?” Confused a moment by his aunt’s deflected gaze, Ira looked over his shoulder. “Oh.”

It was Hannah. Posing in twiggy sulkiness, rusty-haired, skinny-shanked, she slouched in the doorway. “I’m so bo-o-red,” she said.

Shreds, transient husks winnowed from desire: not for Hannah, though. How the chaff swirled up between the time Mamie said, “Ready to go to bed?” and he turned his head expecting to see Stella in the doorway. What would it be like, with a whole night to spend pumping her. . in a bed — whole nights? Whole days, to have her at his beck and call, every time he had a hard-on. Why not resign himself to being a shlump, a ne’er-do-well, with his witless piece of ass, and let Mamie and Jonas support him, while he did what? Read, mope, moon, speculate — and screw his onetime kid cousin as the swift seasons rolled. Never mind the stately mansions. Just be what he always was, except for a ready, steady, statutory lay. At least it was more tenable than belated fantasies with Minnie, impossible, murderous fantasies, though this was too: what would his family say? To hell with them. Or his college friends? Edith? Nah, unthinkable — then why did he think about it? Just scrub it from your mind, if you’ve got a mind. And what the hell good would it do you to satisfy what you wanted now? None. All you wanted was about thirty seconds alone. thirty seconds. A thirty-second lost cause. Stella in the front room knew it was a lost cause too, undoubtedly she knew it. It would have to be a mackerel, said the Jewish yenta, when she meant to say “miracle,” for him to get a chance to exercise his cod unimpeded and legally. He interrupted the exchange already taking place between Mamie and Hannah with an absent: “I guess it’s time I went to bed too.” Which passed unnoticed.

“Go to bed, go to bed!” Hannah squirmed at her mother in quirky indignation. “That’s an answer to a maiden’s prayer? What am I gonna do in bed? Sleep?”

“What else? You should listen to the old man.” Mamie indicated the hallway. “You would know what a broken sleep means. He groans and he moans and he bewails his unhappy lot. Even in sleep he haggles with the Almighty. Like a Lubavitcher.”

“I’m not an old man!” Hannah retorted. “I’m a young girl. And a girl should have dates. She should have something to look forward to. Dances. A nice party.”

“Live. Only live,” Mamie rejoined. “You’ll have dates. You’ll have parties without measure. You hear, Ira? A Jewish girl, little more than fourteen, she has to have dates, she has to go to parties.”

“Why not?” Hannah countered. “Christian girls have dates, even when they’re twelve. Isabella Martinez upstairs has dates. She goes to parties, lots of parties, in fancy white dresses her mother buys on 125th Street. She doesn’t have to live, live, she’s living already. Only Jewish girls have to live, live — till a khusin comes along. I wish I was a Puerto Rican!”

“God forbid! Go to bed!”

“Go to bed! I want to be a bridesmaid!”

“Again? I said no!”

“You don’t have to buy me anything. No white dress. I have a pink dress already.”

“I don’t care whether it’s a white dress or a pink dress. It’s a goyish wedding.”

“Oh, such goyim as they are,” Hannah disparaged.

“I don’t care. Catholics they are. If the old man heard a whisper of it, he’d take his stick to you. And your father — he’d box both your ears.”

“They don’t have to know. It’s nothing, Mama. It’s fun. Puerto Ricans are so happy. They sing and they dance and they play the piano and they play the guitar. They have such nice parties. Isabella wants me to be a bridesmaid with her for her older sister — oh, Mama, please.”

“Her older sister is only a little pregnant.” Stella bulked behind her sylphlike sister. “You hear, Ira, whenever they get married, the bride is only a little pregnant.”

“Oh, shut up. So she’s a little pregnant. I’m only going to be a bridesmaid. You—” Hannah turned angrily on her sister. “Give me back my Silver Screen!” She tore the magazine from Stella’s hand.

“Oy, gevald!” Mamie lamented. “Go to bed! Both of you! Go bathe, go wash. Leave me alone!”

“Say I can go. Please, Mama. It’s in a week next Sunday. I have to tell Isabella. She’s maid of honor. You liked fun yourself when you were a girl.” Hannah was close to tears.

“Go! Stop tormenting me. You wish to mingle with goyim, with Portorickies — go! May it not be as Zaida says: little by little—”

“It won’t be, Mama. Just this once, I’m going to be a bridesmaid. I’m going to carry a bunch of pretty flowers through the aisle—”

“Noo, noo, carry pretty flowers, but let me be. Only beware,” Mamie’s thick arm swayed menacingly. “Breathe the least word to your father—”

“I? Never! Oh, Mama, I can go? Oh, Mama, thanks. You’ll see nothing will happen. I’ll still be Jewish.” Hannah kissed her mother’s cheek, pirouetted. “I’ll tell Isabella tomorrow. I’m so happy! I’ll take my pink dress to the dry cleaner’s. Oh, I’m going to be a bridesmaid!” She stood erect, ruddily radiant.

“Be a bridesmaid.” Mamie’s reluctance clear.

“Today a bridesmaid, tomorrow a bride,” Stella said unpleasantly. “Maybe you’ll be a little pregnant too.”

“Maybe you’ll be a little pregnant.” Hannah fired back. “Just because they don’t ask you, you’re jealous.”

“I don’t have to wear three pairs of stockings on my skinny legs.”

“Shut up!”

“Hush! Both of you! You’ll wake him up!” Mamie raised her voice. “And then you know what will happen, don’t you? A doom. Go wash, go bathe, go to bed!”

“Go wash,” Stella ordered Hannah. “I have to bathe after everybody else,” she informed Ira testily.

“Is that so?”

“Of course. After Zaida, I take his ring off the tub. And after she washes, because she’s younger—”

“Oy,” Mamie prolonged her yawn. “Were you as tired as I am you would have gone to bed long ago, washed, unwashed, bathed, un-bathed. Ai, gevald.”

The skinny and the rotund. The skinny red-poll, the chubby blonde. The one slipping by the other out into the hall. Well, a lost cause, to be sure, but now that her sister no longer blocked his view, there she was, in a vision once he saw, fair, short-throated damsel without a dulcimer, bare-legged in baby-blue house slippers with pom-poms, Goldilocks with glisten of goldy hair on her calves. So beheld her he, delectable nigh-tubby she, nubile firkin of seventeen. He’d better get the hell out of here. But lingered instead, welded to the spot. That was how lost causes were won, but what they did to you, winning, you were better off with them lost.

“Tell me, Stella, what have I denied you?” Mamie chided wearily. “What have I denied you that you pout at everything?”

“Because that’s the only way I can get anything,” Stella rejoined. “I have to yell to get anything. If I don’t yell I don’t get anything.”

“Azoy? Pretty spectacle you made of yourself. You hear, Ira?”

“What?” Pretext to stall, this one of being caught in the middle, not that his guile would do any good, but—

“Big as she is,” said Mamie, “she threw herself on the kitchen floor, and lay there kicking up her heels, until I consented to buy her a new gray coat that she saw in the window on 14th Street. A grown-up maid having a tantrum like that. Wasn’t that shameful?”

“Did you?” Ira asked judiciously.

“Of course I did. Why shouldn’t I? I went into the store after I got out of business school. It’s on Union Square. So I went into Klein’s, and I fitted on the coat. It was perfect, Ira, it was just perfect. So why shouldn’t I get it?”

“Not whether I can afford it or not,” Mamie demanded.

“You can afford it. You can afford it. You don’t pay rent. You take care of two houses — and you let Papa and Hannah go to the mountains every summer—”

“You know why I send Hannah along: Jonas should behave himself. He likes to chuck the girls under their chins, and give them a little pinch and a caress—”

“Anyway, you send her to the mountains.”

“And she doesn’t like to go. I’m telling you. The chairs in the train scratch her legs. She has tender skin. And she doesn’t like walking on the roads there in the mountains, with cow dreck to step in. Ask her.”

“I don’t want to ask her.”

Stella advanced into the kitchen. “You know what it is, Ira? Mama says I pout. You know what the real reason is: she won’t let me be what I want, she won’t let me go to school to learn what I want—”

“No!” Mamie exclaimed. And then added immediately: “Shah! The old man, he’s gone to bed.”

“You see?”

“What is it you want?” Ira shifted patiently from one leg to the other.

“I want to be a manicurist.”

“Never!” said Mamie. “You know what a manicurist becomes?”

“Ira,” Stella turned to him as toward final appeal. “Does a manicurist have to become a you-know-what?”

“I don’t think so.” Ira had never been there at an hour as late as this. Ten o’clock already — past ten — Jesus, this was funny — if it wasn’t so combustible — what the hell did they do in Spain during the Inquisition? He was burning at the stake, his stake. Jonas would be coming home in a couple of hours, and that hemmed him between limits.

“Stella, let him go,” Mamie commiserated. “The poor youth is worn out. Noo, go, go,” she urged compassionately. “I don’t want your mother angry with me.”

“You’re right,” Ira squeezed eyelids together. “Just one thing I’d like to know before I go, Mamie. Are you really afraid she’ll become a you-know-what if she learns to be a manicurist?”

“No, I only say that. I brought up my daughters to be good Jewish girls. But I admit, I’m a bit afraid.”

“Why?”

“Hannah, you know, wants to be a dancer. Do I allow her to take dancing lessons? No. Why? Because I’m afraid she’ll become a you-know-what? A dancer has more temptations than a manicurist to become a you-know-what. Still, that’s not the reason I won’t let her become a dancer. Or Stella to become a manicurist. You are a student. Were they boys, I too would send them to college. But they’re girls. And in today’s world, which is better for a girl? To be a manicurist, or to be a bookkeeper? To be a dancer or to be a secretary in a tall office? For that reason I send Hannah to Julia Richmond to learn commercial subjects. And Stella I send to the Union Square secretary school also to learn commercial subjects, because everything today is commercialize, commercialize, as Saul, your uncle, says.”

With gross hands clasped in front of her bulging abdomen, Mamie folded infelicitous English into Yiddish.

“Yeah, because he reads that writer in the Daily Journal, so he knows more than everybody else,” Stella heckled.

“Tell me,” Mamie quelled her mutinous daughter, “which will they need more, when you go to earn a living, a dancer or a bookkeeper, a manicurist or a secretary?”

“And you think you can’t be a you-know-what in an office, too?”

“Go, you speak nonsense. I didn’t ask you that. You hear, Ira? Did I ask you that?”

“No, of course not.” Damned idiot, he cursed himself. Go yowl on a goddamn fence like a tomcat. Get the hell out of here!

“You look dejected,” said Mamie.

“Yeah, I am. I don’t have much hope for the future myself.”

“Why?”

“My college career is kaput. Farshtest?”

“Go, you’re just tired. They say in Yiddish, everything depends on will. He who wills achieves more than he who knows.”

“Yeah? I don’t know much, Mamie, but I sure will a lot,” Ira said in Yinglish — and chortled wickedly.

“Azoy doff sein.” Mamie got to her feet. “Money lost is nothing lost. But will lost, then is everything lost. Keep on willing.” She went to the gas stove and tried to turn the fringe of flame under the stove lid still lower. The fringe winked out. “Noo, ferfallen,” she said, “I’ll light it again when Jonas comes home. Another hour and a half. Maybe two. It’ll stay warm.” She returned to the table, turned her back to the kitchen chair to sit down — her knees lost control of her bulk, and she tumbled heavily onto the chair seat. “Oy!”

“She ruins all the sofas that way, my dear mother,” Stella observed coolly. “Plop, the springs go.”

“What can I do? I dearly love to eat. I’m only waiting for Jonas to come home to have a few verenekehs.”

“So why don’t you give Ira some? He’s looking so sad.”

“I already had some,” Ira rejoined.

“Oh, then it’s a wonder you’re sad. My mother cures every kind of trouble with eating. If my father says business in the cafeteria isn’t so good, she eats. If that drunken shikker upstairs doesn’t pay his rent, she eats. The trouble with you is you cure everything with eating.”

“Very clever of you, Stella. Go bathe.”

“You know, Ira, my mother can finish a whole pound box of chocolate cherries in one hour.”

“I told you to go bathe!”

“Hannah’s in the bathroom.”

“And that’s where you should be, too.”

“I have to get my clothes off first, don’t I?” Stella retorted.

“Then go into your bedroom. And turn off the front-room lights. Is the radio off?”

“Ye-e-s. O-o-f. Can you hear it?” Stella drawled petulantly, gave her mother an angry look as she left the kitchen for the hallway. “You’d think we still had batteries in the radio. She tsitses, my mother. It’s a penny — electricity.” She disappeared. A moment later the front room’s electric wall buttons could be heard clicking.

“Something today,” Mamie said to Ira. “I don’t know what. Aggravations. Between two daughters and their grandfather, between the tenants and the bank, oy, what one has to bear.”

“I bet.” Time to go. Time to have gone — long ago. Hellish tedium. How could he be such a goddamn horse’s ass? Jesus, all for the sake of a half minute. Was it even a half minute? All these sanctimonious preachers prating the same thing: was the soul’s salvation or damnation worth a half minute? No, that wasn’t what they said. Risking hell’s fire worth the pleasure of a half minute? Evidently.

“That one, especially,” Mamie spoke through a wide, prolonged yawn. “Till I see her under the canopy, the hair will creep out of my head.” She passed her grubby hand before her eyes. Flesh rimmed the gold band on her finger. “Oh, I would so dearly love to lie down a few minutes.”

“Well, why don’t you? I’m leaving.” Ira really meant it.

“Jonas may come home a little early today. Harry was off yesterday. So he may relieve him earlier. That’s the way we have a few minutes together.”

“Oh, yes.” In the midst of his thwarting, a ray of pity made its way: for his gross, ponderous aunt, her immigrant striving, limitless, limitless sacrifice to climb out of her steerage arrival in the goldeneh medina, servant girl and indentured drudge paying off her passage to Granduncle Nathan, the diamond merchant. That’s the way we have a few minutes together. Pity. The rays opened wider, like Blake’s calipers. “Well, good night, Mamie.” Ira stepped to the threshold.

He remained there, for down the hall, the doorbell whirred. Ira gaped in astonishment at his aunt.

“Oy, gevald!” Mamie sat transfixed, upright.

“Is it Jonas?” Ira asked.

“No, no! He has a key! It’s too early.” She thrust herself to her feet. “They’ll wake the old man!” She squeezed past Ira into the hall.

Again the doorbell whirred.

Mamie’s speed was again surprising; solicitude drove her shuffling down the hall. “Who?” she challenged at the door. “Whozit?” And then apparently reassured by the answer she heard, she withdrew the bolt of the lock, swung open the door. “Mrs. Gomez, it’s you?”

With Mamie’s girth filling the doorway, the newcomer couldn’t be seen, only heard: a woman’s voice excitedly sputtering a medley of Spanish and English. Then a small girl’s treble, supplementing the first voice: something about little Teodoro. “Little Teodoro no can get out.”

“How? Vie zoy? In the closet?” Mamie demanded. “Is not no locks on closet doors, Mrs. Gomez.”

High-pitched protestations in Spanish. The apartment doorknob was rattled, as if in demonstration — which was followed by an admonitory “Sh!” sounded by Mamie.

“He break,” said the woman’s voice. “He cry inside. Cry! Cry! ‘Out! Mama!’”

Mamie apparently understood. “Ver is Isabella? The other big sister? Ver is Mr. Gomez?”

“He night man Horna Harda work.”

Horna Hardon, Ira coughed with weary, hectic mirth: Horn & Hardart, the Automat.

And the child’s voice: “Isabella go with my big sister. Gonna marry.”

“And a neighbor? The next doorkeh? Somebody. It’s a nothing with nothing. A scrooldriver can open it.”

“Scrooldrive?”

“A pointig knife you put in de hull und give a drei—Sh! Oy, gevald, der alter. Pliss comm. In de hall.”

Perhaps he could help, whatever it was, Ira wavered. He ought to try. It couldn’t be very much of a job: a screwdriver can open it, Mamie said. Maybe it was just a— Oh. . he hadn’t heard her, Stella, and no shadow thrown before her as she came out of the gloom of the front room into the muted light in the hallway from the kitchen, juvenile, voluptuous apparition: “You!”

She simpered.

“O-o-oh,” he purred. His hand under the green-striped bathrobe sought her rump in rapturous turpitude, digits seemed to sprout eyes, spread their width to clutch: “Ooh, if only I had a hand twice as big.” And marched around to her mound with forty thousand men. “Get back.” He nudged her toward the dark of the front room. “Jesus, maybe Mamie’ll have to go upstairs.”

“Hannah’s in the bathroom. She’ll come out.”

“Oh, nuts! I forgot.” Checked, goddamn it, checked, mated, checked, not mated — he didn’t know enough chess. “Let’s go in the kitchen.”

She lagged behind him as he withdrew toward the kitchen, speaking as she followed: “These Puerto Ricans must never have lived in houses. They don’t know what to do in a house. Give them the sidewalk. They love the sidewalk. There’s nothing to fix there.”

How could she prattle so inanely when seconds mattered, prattle away a prat. “You think she’ll come out right away?”

“She’s out already. She must have heard Mama.”

Down the hall a door creaked. Seconds later, bosomless Hannah, boyish in petticoat, pattered in, barefoot. “I heard the bell,” she said anxiously. “Is Mama outside?”

“What else? She’s outside with your Puerto Rican friends,” Stella informed her sister. “She’s telling Mrs. Gomez how she should open the closet door without knobs. They fell off.”

“Poor Mama. Why?”

“Mrs. Gomez doesn’t know how. Her little Teodoro is inside.”

“Oh, my poor mother,” Hannah fretted. “Everything she has to do. Give instructions on how to be a handyman.”

“They’re your Spanish friends,” said Stella. “So why don’t you go help her? That’s why Mrs. Gomez came here. She could’ve gone next door.”

“You’re so shallow! I’m not even dressed!”

“You’ll wake up Zaida,” Ira arbitrated.

“He’s used to it already,” said Stella. “As long as we’re in the kitchen, and the radio isn’t playing.”

The apartment door was heard opening, was closed quietly, and quickly locked. Mamie’s heavy, careful tread brought her into the kitchen again. “Oy, aza shver leben!” Her voluminous bosom heaved as she made for a chair — and thudded into it.

“Did you tell her what to do, Mama?”

“Oy! She was frightened.” Mamie panted. “Nothing more. A mother, don’t you know. But three flights of stairs I would have had to climb.”

“You didn’t!”

“Am I crazy? In a minute she understood. An old scrooldriver she had. And pointig knives she had — from Horn and Hardot, borrowed, no doubt. Up she ran, with the little one after her.”

“You took so long, Mama,” Hannah chided solicitously.

“Your friend, the other bridesmaid, and her older sister, the bride, they came just’n a just,” Mamie drew on her stock of English. “Just’n a just, I tell you. So I had to explain to them also. But she know herself now what to do, Mrs. Gomez.”

“Poor Mama.” Hannah kissed her mother’s cheek.

“Indeed. Noo, to bed. Tomorrow is school. Oy, cry havoc, it’s late. Noo, Stella, the bathtub?”

“Good night.” Studied annoyance marked Stella’s departure.

“Good night, Mama. I’m sorry,” said Hannah.

“Good night, my child. Sleep well.”

“Draw a long line down the middle of the bed, I’ll sleep better,” Hannah said after her sister.

“Uh. Do you want a cot?”

“No, I don’t like cot. I’ve told you that, Mama. Good night, Ira.”

“Good night, Hannah.” Ira waited until his red-polled cousin disappeared past the doorway toward the front room. “I thought I might help if I stayed another minute, Mamie,” he explained his presence.

“Noo, a handsome thanks. It wasn’t necessary, I already know this business,” Mamie remarked. “O-oy, gevald, would I had the strength for it as I know it. I’m exhausted. Today was wearisome without measure.” Her head bobbed from side to side. “No help for it. I have to lie down.”

“It would do you good, Tanta. It’s too much,” Ira encouraged. “I don’t see how you stand it.” And moving toward the doorway, “Good night, Tanta,” he said partly over his shoulder. “Get some rest.”

“Wait.” Laboriously, Mamie groaned to her feet. “Wait.” She seemed almost as if talking in her sleep, somnolently plodded toward the bedroom in the back of the kitchen, and got her handbag from the other side of the doorknob. Soughing aloud with fatigue, she turned, opening the handbag.

“Mamie,” Ira reproved. “I didn’t come here for that.”

“I know, I know. Poor boy.” She brought out her small leather purse, snapped open the brass prongs, and from a roll of greenbacks peeled off a dollar bill. “Indigent student, don’t say a dollar doesn’t come in handy?”

“Mamie, no!” Ira retreated.

“Take. Take. Don’t protest. You waited so long.”

“I didn’t wait for that.”

“Take,” she insisted. “As one gives, take. After you amass a fortune, you’ll repay me.”

“Thanks, Tanta.”

“Noo, give me a kiss.”

Ira kissed her soft, flabby cheek. “Thanks.”

“I’ll have to leave the door open.” She plodded back to the small bedroom. “I won’t hear him come home otherwise. Ai, these Portorickies.” She hung up her handbag. “They wear me out so. Only one thing they care about.”

Ira paused obediently.

“Nur dem fuck,” said Mamie.

“Tanta Mamie!” Ira was genuinely shocked.

“Truth is truth. Nothing means more with them.”

“Well,” Ira deprecated. He had used up his last shred of temporizing. He fixed on the Yiddish print of Der Tag on the washtub as he moved toward the hall door, lingered.

“You can still read Yiddish?” With one hand on the bedroom doorknob, Mamie watched him drowsily from the darkness of the bedroom.

“I just wanted to see if I can.” Another step, and Ira advanced to the hallway threshold.

He heard the bedstead creak, then Mamie’s moan of relief. He couldn’t stall any longer. Ferfallen, goddamn it. There she was, behind the oyster-gray glazed light of the window in the bathroom door, as he stepped into the hall. If only he had half a chance—

“Child,” Mamie’s voice followed him.

“Me, Tanta?” Ira retraced a step or two.

“You’re still here?”

“I was going.” Oh, Jesus, had his loitering alerted her?

“Do me a favor.”

“Sure. What?” He reentered the kitchen.

“Can you pull the door.”

“So it’s closed, you mean? Oh, sure.”

“No, keep it open a bit so the light is in my eyes.”

“How much?” A polymorphous surf began pounding within him.

“A little open, so I can hear Jonas come home.”

“This much?” He pulled the bedroom door slowly toward him, inches ajar.

“Azoy, azoy.” Sleep furred her voice. “Indeed so. A slit. Blessed. .”

He stood irresolute, listening: heard his aunt’s breath thicken, snag into a snore. Do what? Improvise. Safeguard. Rearguard. No, he didn’t have any stratagems. Flurry of pink flesh, que ce cor a de longue haleine, que ce cor, que ce cor, pale safeties. He drew his term paper out of his breast pocket, tiptoed over to the washtub, laid the term paper conspicuously on the Yiddish print of Der Tag, scowled at the typed sheets as if to fix them there, and stepped into the hallway. In three strides he was at the bathroom door, opened it onto full banana-light on her smooth, wide, droplet-glistening back above the waterline. She pivoted small-titted, soapy torso. She smiled guiltily.

“Listen, Stella. I’ll be right back. Get out, will you? Soon as you can.”

“Now?”

“No, I’ll be right back!” It was all he could do to keep impatience from raising his voice instead of intensifying its harshness. “Five minutes. You hear me?”

“So where’s Mama?”

“She’s asleep. Yeah. I left my term paper here by mistake-on-purpose, in case she wakes up. Get it? That’s why I came back.” He overrode her look of bewilderment. “Just make it snappy, will ya? Get out as soon as you can.” He was already shutting the door.

At utmost speed that stealth allowed, tiptoeing, he passed Zaida’s closed bedroom door, quickened gait past the little office doorway framing the dark, to the apartment door — retracted the tongue of the lock, slipped the little brass nipple up to hold it. And out. Shut door. Raced down the flight of marble stairs, to the lit foyer. Out the open double doors to the night street, deserted, row of roofs cleated on night sky, planet-star a smear east. Cool and late and eleven the hour. Maybe later. Get going. By ebon-windowed storefronts, from stride to brisk pace, he broke into trot. Faster. Soles of shoes smacking the pavement. Oh, so many memories: Farley’s trained legs driving over the armory boards. Ira quit running at Fifth Avenue, slowed to a walk, at his best clip. Walk a block, in breezy September air, to 113th Street, he counseled himself. You can’t go into that goddamn drugstore all out of breath. He’d think you’re crazy, the druggist would.

You are crazy. Crazy is as crazy does. Cracked sidewalk percussive in street-night, your drum heartbeat. Get there, that’s all. To the corner lamppost, high o’erhead. . whew.

He rounded the unlighted haberdashery, up above it, as if in contrast to the quiet, the loud crack of pool balls cracking out of the break on some pool table in the pool room on the second story. Faster, but don’t get out of breath. One block. Take a deep breath. Slow down. One block. So. . “I forgot my term paper. I came back.” His lips moved in audible self-cross-examination and self-exculpation.

“Why did I take it out of my pocket? Why did I take it out? My pocketbook, that’s why. The dollar bill you gave me. I—” He had an alibi. Great. The bright light of the drugstore was like a tangible barrier he had to force his way through.

In the clinical brilliance of the interior, reflected on myriad hues of jars and vials and tubes of patent medicines, lotions and salves, herpicides, fungicides, soothing syrups, shampoos, toothpastes, laxatives, behind the glass tobacco showcase that served as his counter stood the pharmacist—

— No. Where’s that insert?

I lost the goddamn thing, Ecclesias. I thought I saved it, but I didn’t.

— Too bad. Both the fact and the moment require it. If you fail to insert it, your omission will gnaw at you till your dying day.

Oh, shit. I’m at the very peak of narrative form. Ecclesias, have mercy.

— I am merciful. I’m saving you an endless wrenching of future regrets. You know as well as I do, the contrast — which happens to be actual — is needed. Are you an artist?

Oh, shit!

The marble counter of the store had been divided into two parts: on one side was the pharmaceutical part, on the other the small soda fountain. Goddamn it, Ira swore to himself on crossing the threshold. They had to be here: two young people sat in front of the counter, straws in the froth of chocolate soda. A young man and young woman. On the other side of the counter the soda jerk.

Round-faced and wearing glasses, pleasant and alert, the young woman was saying: “I wish we had somebody like Hutchins for president. Old Nicholas Murray Butler is such a fuddy-duddy. Not a progressive idea in his head.”

And Ira approached the pharmaceutical side of the counter. “Right,” replied her escort. He was all but albino in the absence of pigmentation of his hair, his wisp of mustache invisible, until Ira reached the counter. “That’s what we ought to have at Columbia: a Great Books program, the kind of thing Hutchins has introduced at Chicago.”

Oh, hell, rub it in, Ira thought. That’s what I ought to be, but I ain’t. That’s what I ought to think about but don’t. Great Books program, my ass. Now, listen to this, boys and girls, good boys and girls. He waited for the pharmacist to put down his newspaper and rise to his feet—

As the young soda jerk said: “Hutchins has got the right idea. Who needs football? A college is a place of learning. Intramural sports involve everybody—”

Ah, nuts to you.

Iatrically clad and composed in his white medical jacket, the pharmacist rested on his fingertips, awaiting Ira’s request. Humane, brown-mustached, wearing a bow tie, and recognizably Jewish. Near him, yet oceans away, two different-size slick, white rolls of paper promised a prophylactic wrapper. “Yes, what can I do for you?”

“Trojans.” Ira tried to keep his voice low. He canted sideways to dig out two bills. One was Mamie’s, the other Edith’s five-dollar bill.

“Yes. How many? A dozen?”

“No, no. The smallest package.”

“Two. Two for a quarter.”

“Yeah.” Ira laid the dollar greenback down on the glass. “For now.”

The conversation on his left hand lapsed noticeably. Go ahead, listen. I give, I give a fuck. Rancorously, as if he had uttered brutal derision aloud, Ira glared at the soda jerk eyeing him diagonally across the counter. You too. Jesus Christ. The guy had a wad of hair that looked like a hirsute raft supporting his ludicrous white soda jerk’s fatigues. Goody middle-class. I’m going to screw my cousin, yeah. What’s it to you?

“Two? Yes, my friend.” The item was stored out of sight, but conveniently, on a low shelf next to the tobacco counter.

“My girlfriend,” the young soda jerk revived the conversation, “is on Hutchins’s staff of undergraduate assistants. She gets straight A’s. The whole staff is crazy about him.”

The druggist brought to light the familiar small, round container, placed it on the counter, and picked up the dollar with practiced hand. “You want a bag?”

“No wonder, I would be too.”

“Oh, you would?” her escort bantered.

“He’s so young and handsome. He looks like an undergraduate.”

“Huh? A bag? No.” Anything could trip the mind, tense with haste, strung to the highest pitch of hazard. He was sure he had betrayed himself — by their pause, by the druggist’s brief, incurious survey — and tried to compensate by overdeliberate possession of his purchase, neat little round of aluminum, with its Grecian helmeted head stamped on the lid. Stop twitching. Be a Trojan like the crested hero — will you hurry up, already, mister? Let me get outta here. Christ. What I am and what they are, and I go to college too.

He had to abide the transaction though, crowd out, nay, bury their seemliness and decency, their undergraduate, worthy conformity, with makeshift, with frantic mental rubble: my mother gave me a nickel to buy a pickle. I didn’t buy a pickle. I bought some chooing gum. Listen, listen, the cat is pissen. Where, where? Under the chair. He had to abide it: ah, hell, abort it instead. Don’t go back. Leave his damned “An Assessment of U.S. Immigration Quotas” on the Yiddish newspaper. It wasn’t any good anyway. The more he listened to what regular collegians talked about, the more certain he was. Go home. You sap, you’re always getting yourself into these fixes. Oh, Jesus, jams. That’s you, patent it: Stigman’s jams—

“Something else?”

“No.”

“He looks just like Nicholas Murray Butler,” the soda jerk quipped. To laughter.

“You’d have to have a bad case of astigmatism.”

“Twenty-five cents.” With scant smile, mossy dollar bill on the alabaster ledge of the elaborately filigreed brass cash register, the key went down and the flag popped up: 25¢. Keeping the dollar in view, the druggist made change. “That’s fifty,” he laid a quarter on the glass. “And fifty is a dollar.”

Scoop up the change. What shackles could stop him now? Hell, they didn’t know who he was, nor did the druggist. Ira pocketed the silver. So the customer was in a hurry, so — but walk, he’d have to walk out of the store, a dignified six strides — no, less. If he ran out, some dumb cop’d think he was a holdup guy, a holdupnik, as Mamie would say. Jesus, was she still asleep? Anh, you’re wasting your goddamn time, he censured himself. And now he began to run. Faster. Stop thinking. Run. Holdup man. Get shot in the ass with two new condoms in your pocket. New. What else could the druggist sell him? They couldn’t be secondhand. Secondhand condoms — condrums, they called them on 119th Street, the Irish: scum bags. No, no, don’t stop. So gasp. Shot in the ass with two new condoms, just bought, five dollars and seventy-five cents in his pocket, on 112th Street, Mamie’s block. So what would she think happened to the dollar she gave him? It grew. And Mom? And Pop? And the mishpokha, too. Jesus, dead giveaway. Yeah, dead — and giveaway. One kid, one only kid that my father bought for two zuzim, khad gadyo, khad gadyo.

Panting, he dashed into the flyer. Stop. Stop. Stop. Hold it. That’s what you get from smoking. No wind. No, that’s all right. At least grab your term paper: you forgot it, see? Say, if Jonas is there — no, he couldn’t be home yet. But say he is. Hello, Jonas, you know what? There it is, there it is. Right on Der Tag where I left it: right on the washtub. Boy, was I dumb. .

His breathlessness of a moment before strangely converted into long, momentous heaving of chest as he climbed the flight of stairs to Mamie’s floor, halted before the apartment’s dull red lead-painted, metal-sheathed door. Here goes. He reviewed his alibis — like loading a weapon. Wait! If Jonas had come, the door would be locked. For once he was smart. Why wasn’t he smart this way always? The door would be locked, and Jonas would be asking Stella why wasn’t it locked when he came home? But maybe she had already ducked into bed beside Hannah. She didn’t know from nothin’. Blame Ira when he left. But if the door wasn’t locked — let’s go.

The door wasn’t locked, the tongue still back, held by its catch. The hallway was dark — until where lit at the other end by the kitchen light. Who the hell knew: anybody there and who? He was in deep, deep danger now. Boy. Holding the bolt, he quietly raised the tongue. . into its catch. You’re in deep danger now, boy. No, he could still bluff it out with the forgotten term paper. Come in as if looking for it, grab it — he tiptoed past Zaida’s bedroom. And ah — still the momentum of the ruse, he snatched up the term paper, stowed it. . safely. . in breast pocket, all the while his eyes fixed on Stella seated at the table in green bathrobe, before her an open movie magazine. Her lips were parted, expectant, waiting. He pointed at the bedroom door, behind which Mamie lay; it was exactly, barely ajar as he remembered leaving it. Stella nodded, docile, expectant. Sound of Mamie’s breathing filled the kitchen — Ira leaned toward it a moment, listening with sharpened ears, heard the reassuring snore, stertorous, he thought, regular, impervious, rough with weariness. He beckoned, eyes and head. Boy. Stella arose softly, approached, shallow blue-green eyes in trance, and blond and still humid, entered his embrace, to his swift, imperious pawings, and ruthless signals of his will. He retracted the little tin, displayed it a fraction of a second: it would have to explain all, his going, his absence, his errand — and it did, for when he opened it, she tittered.

“Turn around.” He armed his piece. “Bend over,” he pressed compliant shoulders. “Wow.” He couldn’t restrain exultation altogether, at least vent that whisper of gratified vision: of orbital womanly spinnaker unfurled. Unfurled from the release of the green toweling of bathrobe wings, cupped, sleek, ballooning vans of fulfillment. The brain scintillated. Hoist. She weighed a wisp, she lost gravity to furor.

“O-o-oh, Ira!”

“Sh!”

“O-o-oh, Ira, o-o-oh, Ira!”

“Shut up!” Ram-pant. Ra-a-m. Ram, ram, rampant Lions of Judah, gold Lions of Judah on sapphire ground guarding the Torah. Ram-ram-ram, tikyoo, tikyoo. Sound the shofar. Tikeeyoo, matryoo.

“Ooooh, Ira, ooooh, Ira, ooooh!”

To that last lustful gasp. Breathless both, they separated. Green curtain fell on plump, adolescent rump, too soon, even as he took up cudgel for composure, buttoning up with all celerity. “All right?” he asked her as she turned around.

And received her assent in lambent, pale blue-green eyes.

“Boy, that was good,” he breathed in the wake of rapture. “You better get in bed. I’m going to sneak out.” For the first time he felt a truly tender impulse toward her, toward Stella. He kissed her — on not so sweetly exhaling lips. “G’bye.”

She smiled, girlishly, uncertainly appreciative. “Bye-bye.”

A last swift glance at the bedroom door reassured him: all unchanged. Mamie’s regular burr of breath rasping out of the dark. Safe. Safe all around. Get rid of his “safety” sticking to him, peel it off as soon as outdoors. Stella had already started toward the front room, and he in the opposite direction to the apartment door at the end of the hall. On the very point of raising the balls of his feet to tiptoe, when he heard it — he heard it: bedspring noise, bed creak, groan, and electric-switch button click all at once. And crack of light under Zaida’s door. Jesus Christ! Ira wavered. He’d never beat it out before the old man opened the door. Tell Zaida he’d dozed off? No! No! Ira retreated. Tiptoes, tip toe, Jesus, like a ballet dancer, back to kitchen-light. Pretend to read Yiddish still? Zaida’s door opened, and a terrifying slab of incandescence toppled sinisterly from the room across the narrow passage of hall. God Almighty! He bumped into Stella.

“It’s Zaida,” she whispered at his back.

“I know.”

“He’s going to the can.”

“Sh!” He agonized caution. Should he send her on her way — to the bedroom adjoining the front room she shared with Hannah, asleep too? Was that the safest thing to do? With time passing so? Maybe she’d wake Hannah — oh, Christ! — and Jonas home soon — oh, Jesus! Was he ever in a jam! The front-room window. Open it. The fire escape. Open it. But the noise — get back into the kitchen. Read Yiddish, no matter what — too late. He retreated into the deeper dark, into the recess of the front room, tugging Stella with him.

Grumbling, the old man emerged — in his long underwear — shuffling on his felt carpet slippers. With one hand he kept patting down the crumpled black yarmulke on his head; the other hand slid along the molding of the wall to guide and steady him: “Oy, vey, oy, vey, Raboinish ha loilim. What joy have I known? At fifteen a bridegroom, at sixteen a father. Barely twenty-two, and a bankrupt with four daughters. What joy have I known? Care, always care, since youth. And pain, pain and sorrow without measure. Old and afflicted before my time, widowed and grown blind before old age. Raboinish ha loilim, how long until you are pleased to take me?”

He seemed to become aware of the stream of kitchen light ahead of him, peered anxiously at it a moment — paused, but then entered the bathroom. A third luminous bridge spanned the hallway when the bathroom light went on, and filtered by the frosted glass in the bathroom door, changed to softer texture when he shut the door.

“Jesus, here’s my chance. While he’s in there.” Ira moved forward.

“He’s got good ears,” Stella whispered. “He can’t see, but he can hear—”

“When he flushes the toilet. Maybe this—” Ira stooped to tear at his shoelaces. “I can make it.” Shoes in hand, he straightened up. “You go to bed as soon as I beat it.”

He advanced as far as the kitchen light, and bent as a sprinter poised for the starting signal, raised himself on tiptoe, waited with straining ears. . heard lifted toilet seat bat against pipe. . stream. . splash. . now. . now. . he crept forward a step. Now!. . Now!. . No! Nothing doing. . the old guy hadn’t flushed the toilet. Oh, Jesus H. Christ. Already the bathroom doorknob was turning. . bathroom door opening. Ira retreated back into the front room. Off clicked bathroom light. It couldn’t be! In this place, caught in this trap, in this fix? It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be. Not Ira Stigman. He wasn’t — back. Back into deeper dark—

“Wait, he’ll get in bed,” Stella breathed in his ear.

“Yeah.” Soundlessly to make it happen.

But instead, the gray beard, yarmulke, and underwear paunch that was Zaida shuffled toward the kitchen, stood expectantly in the light: “Mamie?”

Sunk! If thought could bellow through cranium, the whole house would hear him. He was sunk.

“Sleeping, Mamie?” Zaida asked with drowsy grumpiness. Dread hiatus, while he looked up disapprovingly at the kitchen ceiling light.

Window. Fire escape. Roof. At least they wouldn’t know who it was. It would be a robber making his escape! Still he didn’t dare move: with the old man so near, he’d hear the window open, cry out. But if he awoke Mamie, then no help for it: dash for the window. And with — Jesus, oh, shoes in hand — it can’t be you!

Zaida peered again, frowned: a whole lifetime of trial by ordeal. Give up, get caught, admit, deny, brazen it, or jump down to the street, to a flight, how high? Height lessened by hanging from bottom fire escape, maybe only break a leg, not killed. Or up fire escape, to the roof, better. Or under bed.

“Noo, sleep if you’re sleeping. Sleep until Jonas comes. Oy, vey iz mir.” The old man turned away heavily. “A plague on this night. Something went wrong with my sleep.”

He shuffled back toward the bedroom light.

“I heard multitudes clamoring and braying in strange tongues to the sky, and yet I understood: see, it is not perfect, they howled: see, it is not perfect. Noo? Ha? Raboinish ha loilim, if Thy thought fills the universe, why do we suffer? Then how can Thy thought be perfect? An imp crawled out of the shofar and screamed: There must be a flaw? Foolishness. Foolishness. Oh, why does the Messiah delay?”

Yawning noisily, Zaida scratched under his yarmulke, entered his bedroom. The door closed. The light under it quenched.

Two clocks in the front room ticked, minced each other’s intervals. . synchronized. . diverged. .

“I’m going,” Ira rasped.

“Wait, a little more,” Stella implored. “He’ll fall asleep. Another minute, and you’ll be sure.” She tugged at his arm.

“I can’t wait. Your father’ll be here next. Jesus Christ.” He elbowed her hand away. Stupid bitch, he’d had to fuck her tonight. “Come with me. When I go, you go.”

The bland face lifted upward in the gloom, susceptible, suppliant: “You want me to come with you?”

“Yes.” Hectic with impatience, he could have raved. “He won’t hear me.” Ira brandished the shoes in his hand. “He’ll hear you. Go right up to the door. If he says anything, say it’s you.”

“What’ll I say?”

“Oh, shit. The lock. Any goddamn thing. Somebody you heard. You’re making sure!” Nudging her ahead, his chubby patsy, he tiptoed after: on stockinged feet seeking cover under the soft tread of her house slippers—

“Mamie?” came from the other side of Zaida’s bedroom door. “Is that you, Mamie?”

Ira gesticulated, jabbed at the lock, mimed, rolled his wrist about frantically.

“I thought I heard somebody turn the lock, Zaida,” Stella said, and at Ira’s furious nod, “I’m going to make sure.”

“Who is it? Is it you, Stella?”

“Yes, Zaida.”

“Don’t open the door.”

“No. I just wanted to see if it’s locked.”

Ira pushed her ahead. On toenails to the door, his face all crookedly twisting, he eased back the bolt of the lock, eased open the door, nodded fiercely at Stella, crept out. The door swung to, bolt slid back, all in one interval, with his feet trampling into his shoes on the landing. Let her explain it as best she could. He was out. He was free.

Free! Out! Out in the clear! Never mind laces. Down the stairs. Never mind tripping. Hold banister. Down to the ground floor. Foyer, foyer, foyer. Out. Street. Raven sky-wings brooding streetlamps. Roc’s eggs. Nutty. Dodge in between parked cars. Dodge. Ha. Get across, before anybody — Jonas comes. Now: on the double, triple, move your hams, move your good old kosher hams. Hear that, Zaida, pow, pow, pow, wow, screwed her, your grandchild in flagrante copulante, in flagrante copulante—and oh, boy, was it good. . He passed two doorways. . three doorways. . four. . miracle, to get out of there. . past Puerto Rican grocery: Hernandez.

Mr. Hernandez, mind of yours truly, Johnny Dooley, steps on your nice, dark iron step to tie — oh boy, oh joy — his laces on? Oh boy, oh joy, got away with it! Now to get rid of that — sticker-tape, ticker tape, dicker-tape, pricker tape, frick-her tape, like Joyce: Sinbad the Sailor, and Tinbad all bad — hope it’s still — belly pulled in, and with furtive glance over his shoulder, Ira thrust his hand down under pants belt to pinch the condom loose — and froze. Rigid. Smitten motionless with panic. He had the condom all right; he pulled it up, imminent in pallid phallic plane view and faint semen smell. But the notebook, the notebook! Had he left it on the Yiddish newsprint of Der Tag? You goddamn boob! Had he? Reckless with alarm, he pitched the condom up in the air toward the curb — no, no, no, he dug his hand into his breast pocket: he had it, he had it! And he had his notebook, too. Boy, what luck! What luck! He had it still! Had it. Had left no incriminating evidence — huh? Could that little guy coming across the street from Lenox Avenue — shrimp of a guy: looked like Jonas. Christ, that condom so rashly flung just now. He’d tossed it in the air: high as a flaunt, taunt, kid’s sparkler. Pale as a slug. Wan in the gutter and full of his sparks. Beat it.

Beat it. He headed east, through Monday’s early-morning darkness, legs driving, clicking heels in the deserted street in a rush to leave. Got away! Scot-free. Scut free, too, he got. Scut free, scot-free. He-e-e-ya! If that was Jonas? Nah, some other little shrimp.

III

Hurrying, he crowed his wordless exultation aloud, his cock-crow aloud, and headed east, straight toward Park Avenue. He was the luckiest guy alive, luckiest punk alive, luckiest prick alive, luckiest bastard alive, alive-o. Before him, he could see a fire burning under the great gray viaduct of the New York Central Railway on Park Avenue, a fire in a big steel drum. Just as a Pullman with dim windows rumbled by overhead on wheels muffled by the solid trestle, the flames on the ground below spewed upward. Dreaming in the Pullman, they never dreamed a fire was burning in a drum in the pushcart district beneath them, never knew they were rolling over a Jewish pushcart district, never knew he, Ira Stigman, had paused beside the open phone booth at Gabe’s Wholesale Produce on the corner to watch them roll by in the night, never knew him, never knew his wild escapade, his frenzied escape, those up there, sleeping peacefully in trains named Lake George, Fort Collins, and Atlanta. He felt like tarrying a minute with the thought, tarrying to recover norm. The flames lit up the underside of the trestle to lurid parasol of yellow and scarlet, and lit up the cross-braced pillars too, fitfully, so that they almost seemed in motion, legs of a huge, ambling myriapod. It felt so good leaning against the phone booth, just leaning, subsiding, surceasing. After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well. Was that from Lear? No, Macbeth. Only he wasn’t sleeping, just enjoying escape, blissful fugitive. Boy, that was good. Better than with Minnie that time. Nice and plump and fresh and humid. Beautiful, beautiful back-scuttle. Celestial back-scuttle. Boy, you could get another hard-on thinking about it. If he ever let himself pull off, that was what he would think about. How could anything be so wonderful and so vile, so rotten, so dirty, and so heavenly? Jumpin’ Jesus. Figure it out. Oh, easy: it was you.

Near the drum a large truck was parked, and the blaze from the drum played on a sturdy young fellow on the tailgate who shoveled refuse swept into a heap on the floor of the truck to fuel the blaze: broken slats of vegetable crates, fruit wrappers, packaging material, trash. Each shovelful damped the flames momentarily, flames that leaped up again, hurling light as far as the granite wall at 111th Street, where the massive ramp began. Firelight lapped the stoops of tenements and skimmed along the store windows of the closed, scruffy little shops at the base of the tenements that flanked the pushcart district that found shelter beneath the trestle. . where Mom shopped Sunday mornings — Ira’s lip curled — in the good old days.

Brief spell of respite, damaged respite, like everything else in his life. Then passage again: Ira on the sidewalk exchanged cursory inspection with the young fellow on the truck, felt the moment set in his mind as if it were some kind of a cerebral casting. Passing on, he glanced inside the wide-open sliding doors of Gabe’s: two men were in there, a hulking one with a metal-clad clipboard, and a stumpy one with a push broom. On one side of them in the weak light, stacks of crated produce lined the wall; on the other, from sliding door to back wall a crowd of tarpaulin-covered pushcarts were jammed in for the night.

Scrape of shovel, crackle of fire, smell of smoke wafted on the crisp night air, greeted the senses, and the tableau inside Gabe’s place added a hint of citron: grapefruit, lemons, oranges, ah. As though exorcising the last of inner turmoil. Ah, dispelling vestige of heinous furor — and terror, guilt — the young guy on the tailgate of the truck dumped all the rubbish into the steel drum — and the rubbish turned into flame writhing upward, flame glorifying the squalor that surrounded the place.

“Take it easy, Giorgio.” Snapping down the cover of his metal-clad invoice clip, the hulking and deceptively soft-looking man with slightly rolling gait came out of the wide-open sliding doors, followed by the other, the squat, grizzled, Italian-appearing keeper of the place — or night watchman: he glanced at Ira.

“Me? Take it easy? When you git as old as me, it’s too late to take it easy.”

“Too late? That’s when I thought it was just right.” The other clamped the clipboard under his arm, brought out a package of cigarettes.

“T’anks. Maybe fer some, but not fer me.”

A match flared. The old watchman’s grizzled face leaned into the matchlight, craggy and worn. “T’anks,” puffing his cigarette, his visage lost its features. “Dat’s a Camel, ain’t it?”

“Yeah.” The other lit up his cigarette. “You can get in a snooze on the job every once in a while, can’tcha?”

“Me? No. Days only is when I can sleep. But not nights, not even when I’m off. Nights, I don’t know what the hell it is: bundles keep bustin’ open in my head.”

“Yeah?” The man with the metal clipboard laughed. “Damaged goods, hah? No Joisey tomaters, here.” He uttered a fat, genial laugh.

“Nah,” the old watchman growled rejection. “Not fer me. When I lost my Gina, I lost it all.”

“I was just kiddin’, Giorgio. You know how it is.”

Was he dreaming, somnambulating? No, he wasn’t dreaming, somnambulating. Here came a guy, wiry, thin as a rail, in crumpled hat, maybe porkpie shape once, in the sere, weathered garb of the tramp, but disheveled, hurrying toward them. Shaken out of his momentary trance, streetwise, Ira sidestepped to the curb, noted the newcomer’s bony face to the firelight: his jaws were spattered with blood, his nostrils raw, his nose askew. Jesus, what a pasting someone had given him: a drunk. Rubbing his lips, oblivious of everyone, the other plunged into the open phone booth outside Gabe’s. The light clicked on. No, it was real enough: that savage pummeling racket coming from the half-closed booth was real enough. So was the violent shadow thrown on the sidewalk by the feeble dome light of the booth: the figure of a man banging, hammering the coin box.

“Dat’s right, beat the shit out of it,” the night watchman encouraged. “Wake up de neighborhood. Waddaye, crazy?”

Fresh onset of banging the coin box was the answer.

“Hey, you hear dat rummy, Guido?” the truck driver called to the young fellow on the tailgate of the truck. “He’s like a pimp beatin’ on his whore, ain’t he? Listen to him.”

The young fellow leaned sideways on his shovel to get a better view. “Tickle it, dat’s right. He’s got his finger up her. Hey, bowl it, why don’tcha?” His youthful laugh rang out under the brooding trestle.

A few more bangs, demented, obdurate pounding against the silence, terminated by the old watchman’s threat: “You don’t git the fuck outta here, I’ll take a hunk o’ pipe t’ye, ye fuckin’ bum!”

With a yank of folding doors, the gleam in the booth blinked out; the other stepped out like a lank, starved animal from his lair into the lapping torchlight of the steel drum. Ira began discreetly moving away, stole another glance over his shoulder as he increased the intervening distance. Obvious, the meaning of the other’s importunate crouch, the other’s panhandler’s glimmering palm extended to the two men. All too obvious his rebuff: the blunt jab of thumb, the jeering injunction: “Scram, rummy.” To Ira’s consternation, the man suddenly broke away from the others and dashed after him. Ira’s impulse was to run. Nuts! Just walk away as fast as he could. It didn’t do any good. He was caught up within a dozen strides.

“Listen, bud, I’m flat broke. What d’ye say? A thin dime. I ain’t kiddin’. I’m broker’n the Ten Commandments. I been ridin’ freights since yesterday morning. All the way from Aroostook, from Maine, ya know. I ain’t a rummy. Honest, I was pickin’ pertaters, I ain’t no rummy. I’m just goddamn hungry. I’m starvin’. I got rolled an’ I lost my dough.” The battered, bony face pleaded, blood-stippled, unnerving. Beef-red nostrils twitched. Was that a new gap in his front teeth as he spoke? Jesus, to be confronted with this apparition in dire need in the night, face-to-face with dire need, unyielding need on dark, vacant Park Avenue, wide, ugly Park Avenue, between the unlit storefronts, penurious hall lights, stodgy brick walls — and the railroad viaduct planted on its immobile legs. Not even an auto passed, nor were headlights to be seen. Were the others at the corner watching, where flames fluttered from the drum like an Indian warbonnet? What the hell had he stopped for?

“I haven’t got any money.” Ira tried to repel his accoster with surliness.

“A nickel. Anything. I can walk into a beanery with a nickel. Some of ’em’ll give you som’n stale with a cuppa java. Waddaye say, pal?” He lifted forefinger to nostrils, brought the hand away trembling: “The fuckin’ railroad bull caught me ridin’ in the blinds. Between the Pullman trains. Sonofabitch saw me at 125th Street station. He sapped me silly, knocked the shit outta me. I swear I’m tellin’ you the truth.”

“I haven’t got a nickel.”

“Pennies. Please! Maybe I can get a roll. A slice o’ bread. I’m like to pass out.”

Sucker, Ira assailed himself. But who could deny that pleading, bashed, blood-speckled visage? He felt among the coins in his pocket. Two: a big half dollar and a quarter, big enough too, too big — and a condom tin. Oh, Jesus, why hadn’t he asked that druggist to break that quarter? A quarter! That was his total allowance from Mom for a day at CCNY. But he had five bucks, Edith’s bounty, poor woman. Boy, the way the mind wavered, flickered: screwed his kid cousin. Escaped by the skin of his teeth — and with his notebook. Give alms for Zaida not to guess, give alms the little shrimp wasn’t Jonas. Nuts. Superstition. But that was the way the mind spun its web: here was a tramp begging: mendicant redressing some kind of arrant imbalance. “Yeah,” Ira’s voice was much louder than he intended, strident and bold in hollow gloom: “You better wipe your face.” Strange, how hostility seemed harbinger of relenting.

“That’s right. I must look like a fuckin’ mess.” At a loss, as if he had given up hope of further comfort, the other turned his face dully. “An’ my ear. See that? The fuckin’ bull done that too.” He began licking his fingertips, scouring cheeks at random. “That’s why I didn’t wanna hit up 125th Street. Some cop ketch me panhandlin’, he’d get my ass throwed in the slammer just to make a pinch.”

“I got a quarter. That’s all I got.” Ira drew out the coin.

“What de ye mean? Ye givin’ it t’ me?”

“Not unless you can change it.” His own sarcasm riled him, it was so devoid of efficacy. “Here, take it.”

“Jesus, yer a prince! A whole two bits! God bless ye! God bless ye!”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“I’ll be prayin’ fer ye, honest to God, I’ll pray for ye. You’re white. I mean it. Maybe you’re a Jew. But you’re a Christian. You’re a gent.” He tipped the crumpled hat.

Ira cooked his hand in sign of curt disparagement, curt disengagement. “Go find yourself someplace to eat, will you?” He stepped to the curb. A Christian, my ass, his thoughts echoed.

“Thanks. God bless ye. I’m gittin’ some coffee-an’, right away. Two bits.”

“Yeah.” Broad shadow of the trestle stirred by curling flame of a fire a block away: God bless you. Ira crossed to the north corner of 114th Street. Jesus, Mamie should know what he’d gotten out of her dollar: a well-fucked daughter, right under her mother’s snoring nose, a hell of a scare — what a scare! — a rubber condom pale in the gutter for some dumb kid to find tomorrow, and blow up into a balloon, another one in his pocket. And all of two bits’ worth of blessings from a tramp with a crumpled hat who’d got his lumps. Boy, that was a bargain, wasn’t it? If he could only tell it to somebody: the delirious contrasts in just one night, one day, wild whoosh, pathos, bathos. But that was the difference between himself and Larry. Larry could relate his adventures; they slipped easily through regular channels. His didn’t, his were deformed, fitted no channel, could never be told.

You got to think, Ira continued morosely on his way uptown: you got to think before you did, think, think, think. That was the trouble: you didn’t think. Try to think. Oh, think, your ass, he suddenly raged at himself: he wasn’t meant to think. He had stood on a flat, a diving rock by the Hudson and told himself that. He was meant to feel and to believe. He was made to suffer and to imagine. He wasn’t smart. Everybody knew that. But when would he begin? To think, to try to think: the practical things, the prosaic, the consequences, the way other people did, grown-up people, appraising and calculating. Even young people. Like those Columbia goodies in the drugstore. Oh, you had to, you had to. That was the way the world was: what did Gabe earn in that storehouse he owned, how much rent did he pay, how much rent did he charge each pushcart, how much did he pay the watchman, how much profit did he make on a crate of oranges or tomatoes? That was what should concern him. Not feel and suffer and imagine: what that old wop would say to himself, after the truck left him alone in Gabe’s warehouse, looking out of the little window in the door at the fire in the steel drum. How he remembered, maybe, his dead wife — who knows, he said he was alone: how maybe she picked up horseshit in the gutter like the other Italian women wearing black on 119th Street, horseshit to put on the geraniums in the wooden window boxes. Maybe he had a coal and ice cellar once, like the wop across the street. Maybe he once whistled “Chimes of Italy” when he jabbed his icepick into an ice cake on the sidewalk on a summer morning. That wasn’t what he was supposed to think about. He was a freak.

Up the hill rising to the closed brick comfort station under the trestle at 116th Street. The trolley tracks. The streetlights east and west. Rolls of linoleum standing like mummies wrapped in brown paper in the corner store show window. And downhill again to the muted rumble of a train passing overhead. And where was that bum going, that hobo-panhandler? South? After he got his coffee-an’ in some beanery someplace. Put his quarter on the counter — to show he had it — ordered a mug of coffee, got his change, and headed for the washroom to wash off his bloodstains. Headed for the West Side, to the Hudson River where the freight trains ran. He was a kid once too. Did he grab his father’s hand when the old man came home from work in the evening? Hey, Dad, what about a nickel? Come on, Dad, give us a jitney. Did that rusty bastard in the porkpie hat do that too. . once? How could you escape feeling, suffering, imagining; how could you extricate yourself at least to some degree? And yet, he would have to. . someday. When?

It was late. It was dark. He had risked. Who else had risked like that? Not Larry, in his nice comfortable room in the West 110th Street apartment. But it wouldn’t be Larry walking Edith back from the ship next Sunday. It was Ira she trusted, Ira she invited. It was Ira who knew. It wasn’t big blond Ivan, the physics whiz, saying to the classmate he was helping in the ’28 alcove: Now all we got to do is find the right integral. Not Sol, whose father sold trusses on Delancey Street, not redheaded Sol spouting all that Professor Cohen said in class. Not the Columbia students who knew all about Hutchins. No. Nobody. Only he had risked, crazy-risked. And he was going home now.

And here were the four-corners where he lived, where he lived and grew up, with the New York Central viaduct steel millipede nearby always.

He had risked, and he was going home. With half a buck of Mamie’s left in his pocket and a half-full condom tin, and five bucks of Edith’s. Was there a barucha for that? A prayer? Zaida, old hypochondriac, old boy? Jews had a prayer for everything? Was there a shekheyooni? A prayer for deliverance for having screwed the ass of Zaida’s granddaughter, and not being caught? He had risked. And he had gotten away with it. Who had helped him do that and get away? He had pacified her, and Pasiphaë’d her. Who had helped him do that, Zaida, old boy? Was it the imp that jumped out of the shofar? That was a good one.

He heard his own snicker, short and mirthless. Here was where he lived, for now, 108 East 119th Street.

IV

With maybe an hour to spare, Ira made his way along Sunday-darkened 116th Street toward the Lenox Avenue subway kiosk. No more IRT pass now; he had surrendered it when he had quit the summer job, just after Labor Day. He dropped his jitney in the slot and swung the jarring turnstile ahead of him. He had already determined he would be a chevalier tonight, a chivalrous chevalier, so unlike his behavior with Stella the Monday before, two days after Edith’s request. And once again, he had reminded Mom he would be home “way, way late,” so that she wouldn’t worry.

He stayed on the local to kill time, but still he got to Christopher Street too early. So he sauntered. . along dull Seventh Avenue with its miscellaneous high and low buildings. The September night air had a touch of chill mixed with the darkness. He looked at the moon-faced clock in the gas station window at the foot of Morton Street: twenty minutes to ten. Slow. Slow. O lente, lente, currite noctis equi. Slow down. How could you make a house that was only a little more than a half block away seem as far as a house five blocks away? So if he got there a few minutes early, they wouldn’t mind; they’d be secure in knowing he had arrived. He crossed Morton to the south side, walked past Edith’s house, and as far as Hudson Street to the west, Sunday-silent, Sunday-dark, darker than Seventh Avenue. Tag-end. It was called a street, but it ran north and south, like the avenue it really was — Hudson Street by name. If that pitchy-black Ninth Avenue El a short distance away didn’t cut across the view, you could see the Hudson River. They’d be crossing to the other side soon. Underneath. Adventure, wasn’t it? Dark, Sunday-dark, the darkness that inevitably came when everyone was at home at the end of a weekend in the fall. Escort the lady home. But the minute you began to anticipate, you contemplated, and the minute you contemplated, memory floated up out of the ooze in repulsive patches. Better be on your best behavior, he cautioned himself: behave, for once, like a gentleman, and don’t forget it. Be like Lewlyn, like Larry. Jesus, wouldn’t that be a joke: like Larry. Ira turned back, passed the stoops of the two adjacent unrenovated tenements where the Italians still lived. . and on to Edith’s house, on Morton Street, number 64. He rang the bell. At the speedy buzz in reply, he lunged quickly against the door, barged in—

There she was, outside her apartment, two flights up. She called his name as he climbed the carpeted steps, waiting for him at the banister, under the hem of her dark dress a glimpse of sheer silk calves he couldn’t help looking up at.

“Ira, so glad you’re early.”

Still on the floor below, he replied with a matter-of-fact “Figured maybe I better.”

How fondly, fingering jet bead necklace, she greeted him when he climbed up to the apartment floor. She must like him, he thought: smiling so affectionately. But why? He hung his head shyly, even virginally, bashfully at least, and entered. Navajo rugs, burlap-covered couch. Mantelpiece. Blue wagon painting. Piano. And next to one of its mahogany legs, prominent, significant, bulgy, hefty leather valise, tautly strapped and buckled — standing ineluctably ready. Lewlyn advanced, tall and manly in his greenish tweeds, to shake hands: his dry, cordial chuckle: “I see you believe in getting to appointments early.”

“Yeah, well,” Ira answered with uncertain matching good humor. “Later than this, it’d be a hard job to get here. You know what I mean? I don’t know when I had an appointment at ten at night.”

“No, I agree, it’s not a usual hour to call. But this is a question of time and tide, as you know. The Cunard Line determined that.”

“We’re both very appreciative that you didn’t wait any longer. Trains, steamships, always put my mind on edge, even when I know I have plenty of time. Does anyone ever get over it? I wonder.” Edith sighed. She shut the door — and brought into view the tapa tacked to it, Marcia’s present, Marcia’s presence, with the dim flowers on the brown tree bark. An instant was all you had to think about certain things: the tapa on the door, and next to the piano leg, the bulgy leather valise, tautly strapped and buckled. Edith was already picking up her heather coat from the couch, and Lewlyn his ministerial black topcoat from the wicker armchair. And a new perception crowded out the old: they were leaving right away.

“It’s getting to the point where it’s fashionable to be late,” Edith said as she got into the garment Lewlyn held for her in his own courtly way. “You probably haven’t learned that bad habit yet,” she smiled at Ira. “I’m glad you haven’t, especially now. But Ira, you didn’t bring anything extra to wear?”

“No. I didn’t think I needed to.”

“The open river allows for quite a sweep of wind,” Lewlyn interjected as he got his own topcoat.

“It is late September,” Edith added. “I’d love to lend you something of mine.” She smiled.

“No, thanks, I got a vest. I’ll be all right.” Ira couldn’t quite adjust to the tension they seemed to be under. There was plenty of time. They weren’t hurrying. It wasn’t that, but he felt a strain, an unsettling pall, that seemed to suspend time in Edith’s living room. He felt they welcomed him more than was his due, the way people might welcome a gamboling child, the way some might stroke a cat, arching cat, as a diversion from their own stress or disquiet, welcoming a shift of the center of preoccupation. Or was the tension just natural: because of the long voyage ahead for Lewlyn — and getting to that ship on time. But they had hours yet to go. He could feel himself take a deep breath against ambient nervousness. Or maybe because they were separating, yes, just as Mom had predicted when he had told her and Minnie, over a breakfast of fresh bulkies and lox, about Edith and Lewlyn’s awkward arrangement.

“Azoy? Oy, vey, oy, vey,” Mom had sighed gustily when she learned that Lewlyn would be leaving Edith to return to England. “It’s a terrible thing to toy with a woman’s heart. Poor Edith, my heart tears for her,” Mom had commented. “Had I had a revolver once, my betrayer would have paid for it.”

“If we go now,” Lewlyn, hardly the destroyer of Mom’s vision, said, “we won’t have to bother calling a cab. We can take the subway at Christopher Street. And probably get to Thirty-fourth before a cab.”

“It’s nice out,” Ira encouraged. “I just walked from the subway.”

“And we’ll have to go all the way to Seventh Avenue before we can hope to get a cab,” Lewlyn said to Edith. “Unless I call one from your apartment. Do you mind the walk, dear?”

“Oh, no, Lewlyn. Let’s just walk. It’s really just a short walk.”

“What about the valise? You want a hand?” Ira offered.

“Not now, thanks. I may take you up on that later. You’ve probably noticed valises have a way of getting heavier as time goes on.” He turned his kind gaze on Edith. “Are we ready?”

“I am. I’ll just lock the door and turn out the lights.” She got her keys out of her purse.

Scarcely anything more was said. They were on their way: out of the apartment, down the carpeted stairs, out of the house, into the night of the street, into the coolness of the night of the street, into the silence of Morton Street. On whose sidewalk Ira diffidently accompanied two people, because they had asked him to, and because he felt that something unknown waited upon his doing so, something distant and obscure he had to reach. And he had to behave, to walk, to appear, as if he were part of the scheme of things, though he didn’t know what it was, but only that their lives, their customs, their deportment, all of which they took for granted, and much he couldn’t even name, were ingredients of an evolving possibility.

Around the corner of Seventh Avenue he traveled with them, around the gas station, with the hands of the moon-faced clock in the window pointing almost to half past ten. By now Mom and Pop were getting ready to go to bed. Minnie was at a dance. Her folding cot beside Mom and Pop’s bed would be empty. His bed would be empty, too. He was here, on a school night, in the Village, putting up a cheerful front, keeping up with two professors — no, two Ph.D. lovers, college teachers, all the way American, walking to the Christopher Street subway kiosk, on the way to a ship, on the way to an ocean liner: a Cunarder, Lewlyn said. He was, he reminded them, from Pennsylvania: he had once been a Christian seminary student, once a priest, and was talking about courses in Greek, and how much they still meant to him. And she was his what? Mistress, a word he had heard Edith sometimes use: a hetaera from Silver City, New Mexico, where she said her father never carried a pistol, but dropped to the ground whenever the shooting started. At Berkeley, in California, she had pursued her graduate work. No, there were no more hetaeras in Berkeley — only in the dictionary. And he himself, on the valise side of Lewlyn, who so strongly carried it, he himself trailed all of Galitzia behind him, Jews and Jews and Jews, an ocean away that he had actually crossed in Mom’s arms: Galitzia and the Lower East Side and Irish Harlem: Jew-boy, Jew-boy, with these fine people. Forget it, forget! And remember it, remember. Why were you here? You swiped a silver-filigreed fountain pen, and gave it to your best friend, which was why you were here. You won a scholarship to Cornell, but your best friend was in New York, which was why you were here. Boy, you wouldn’t dare tell them: you wouldn’t dream of telling them about your fat heifer of a cousin you had fucked only last Monday, while your pious grandfather silently chanted in his bedroom, earnestly praying for his death. You wouldn’t dare use that f word with them. But still you were here with them. All you dared say was what everybody could see: that the night over Seventh Avenue was beginning to get chilly, that the subway entrance was only another block away.

Down the subway steps. And weren’t trains always perverse that way, when you weren’t in a hurry? The local pounded into the station just as Lewlyn dropped the nickel into the turnstile to let broadly smiling Ira onto the platform, and before the train stopped, he himself and valise were at the open door to join them. What a neat connection. The moment of haste gave them all a cause for small, diverting congratulations:

“Lewlyn’s luck,” he chuckled.

And in a few minutes, they were at 34th Street, standing up to await the door’s opening. They got off, and with playful, appreciative smile, Lewlyn turned over the valise to Ira’s keeping — and carrying.

It was heavy. And again Ira was impressed with how sinewy Lewlyn must be, enduring and strong his body under those tweeds, what stamina he must have. How many acres did he say you had to grow and harvest wheat for a college education? Did he say ten? The valise was heavy — in either hand. Ira began lagging behind. . wouldn’t betray how much of a strain the valise was. Ahead of him the two lovers walked — really as lovers now, perhaps because so few people were in evidence. Lewlyn’s arm was curved around the back of Edith’s waist. As if it were a movement in a dance, she leaned slightly against the arm encircling her back — and yet at the same time, stepped forward with a determined jauntiness, as if — Ira tried to disassociate the observing mind from the tugging arm — as if her sprightliness were genuine, arose without inner coercion or pretense. She was enjoying the occasion. Brave, wasn’t she, or behaving according to form. Proud. She was, wasn’t she? Ira tried to force his gait a little faster, and then, becoming just a bit out of breath, again allowed himself to lag.

They entered the long, white-tiled tunnel connecting the IRT subway station to the Hudson Tubes terminal. Long, long, white-walled cavern. Laboriously he passed through it, fixed grin on his face. Pale, fateful tiles slowly retreating on either side, on either side unreeling the glossy squares of their faces, yielding to other square faces that prolonged a passage nearly deserted, except for two lovers walking gracefully ahead of him. What did it mean? Did it mean anything? Two lovers about to part, trailed by himself with arms beginning to complain, hauling a burden that was beginning to weigh like a ton.

At last, at last, they reached the change booth and entrance of the stale-drafty platform of the Hudson Tubes.

Again Lewlyn paid their fares, and they entered a waiting and nearly vacant train, and sat down, with Edith between them.

“You’ve done yeoman service, Ira. Thanks.” Lewlyn took charge of the valise. He slid it between his legs. “We’ve made wonderful time, haven’t we?” He leaned forward slightly. “In another five minutes this train will be on its way.”

“Is it a long ride?” Ira asked.

“No, it’s very short — short and rather unpleasant. You ought to have a veil, Edith, against the dust.”

“Have one or take one,” she answered, as if to someone straight ahead.

He chuckled. “It hasn’t come to that, I hope. I’m honestly at a crossroads, Edith. I don’t need to repeat it. You’ll excuse us, Ira?”

“Oh, sure, sure.” Ira withdrew from audience, sat back.

“And I needn’t repeat,” Edith said, “that the basic flaw in the whole idea of uncommitted friendship is the assumption that men and women are the same. Are built the same, feel the same — react similarly. They don’t.”

“We agreed it was a risk we took.”

“But not each risking the same thing. Not each taking the same risk.”

Ira could hear, but didn’t venture to look, didn’t care to. Voice alone, Edith’s stony posture seen out of the corner of his eye, Lewlyn’s reasonable, dry, constrained voice conveyed a gravity understood without a glance, made a glance both impertinent and superfluous. Two, three passengers straggled in. The motorman came through the car bearing the control handle in his gloved hand, glanced at the three as he went by. And no sooner had he gone by than Lewlyn said earnestly: “But nothing has been settled, Edith, nothing has been decided. Whole lifetimes are at stake, your lifetime, mine, yes. Cecilia’s too. You realize that, I’m sure. I must be given a chance to consider choices. It would be absolute folly on my part not to.”

“Which only goes to prove even further how utterly unfair the whole thing is. I haven’t any.”

“You’re sure?”

And now Ira could feel Edith stiffen beside him. “You don’t really mean that, do you?”

“How can I ignore other factors when they exist?”

“Rubbish.”

“Believe me, Edith, this can only lead to recrimination.”

She was silent, with the resolute silence of a refused reply.

“No, really,” Lewlyn urged. “With everything up in the air the way it is.”

Ira could see her head turn toward Lewlyn, but whether in conciliation, in reproof, in appraisal, he couldn’t tell. “It’s a great pity both of us aren’t in the same city,” he heard her say. “I think your protestations would soon be tested. And—” She scratched a small ear.

“And?”

“Forgive me.” Her voice became stony. Unmistakable, the rigidity of her posture, even if unseen. “Forgive me for not going on, dear. Of what use inflicting wounds? All we’re saying would lead to them, as you pointed out. It’s certainly not my intention to, and I won’t. We’re on the eve of parting, aren’t we?”

“Temporary. I assure you, dear. I’m on the eve of departure, that’s all.”

The train doors slid shut. Seconds later, the train jarred into motion and accelerated.

The roar within the closely encompassing tube became deafening. Fetid subterranean gusts swirled through and inside the car; they spun scraps of newspaper, spiraled dust. At the far end, the lady in the blue coat, last person to come in, frowned, tucked her coat more securely beneath her squalid thighs. Ira swallowed hard. Wow! Plunging through the mud of a whole river above you. He saw Lewlyn’s hand move forward, pat Edith’s, saw his lips shape words, only one of which was audible: “ordeal.” She nodded. Did she say, “Quite”? Everything had other meanings, meanings. Quite. Ordeal. Why would she want to do it, anyway? She could have said goodbye right there on Morton Street. Goodbye and good luck. But no. And he was going to see another woman, and make up his mind about her, between her and Edith. So why do you have to go all the way to the ship with him? Why don’t you cross the ocean with him too? Anh, don’t get funny. Or snide. You’ll begin to sound like Mom. Yeah. . Growing late, that was the trouble: eleven o’clock, half past eleven maybe. Past his bedtime, and the dust made you blink. But you never were in love, said Minnie. So what do you know, stupid? Let’s see: twelve o’clock maybe, they would leave the ship. Then all the way back to the apartment: that would be one o’clock. Then to Harlem: two o’clock. Whew, he’d be walking in his sleep.

If only, Ira’s despairing cry ran loud within himself, he didn’t dawdle so, didn’t moan, didn’t temporize. He had been just a bit too timid, and more than a bit. He was, to say the least, amply and fully disgusted with himself. There was so little time. He had overextended himself, overplayed his hand, or whatever cliché fitted the situation. The situation, the story, needed to be resolved, and quickly. He had been too cavalier about his abilities, his ability to cover ground within the limited time he had allotted himself — though it might have been adequate for someone else, younger, brighter, with greater stamina. The novelistic process — and it was a process, not just a form — could only sustain so much. Beyond that, whatever the tolerances of the exact points were, the process would soon become impacted, like an oversized, overloaded engine. It would stop and stall — the way the old engines of a plane became impacted when encountering a flock of starlings beyond the engine’s capacity to digest, and the plane, so low in reverse, would crash, the journey unfulfilled.

The roar did indeed subside. The train slowed down. Surrounding tunnel walls fell back into the wide expanse of station sliding by and coming to rest with the train: Lewlyn stood up, Edith and Ira did likewise, and the other few passengers as well.

“Don’t you want me to carry that?” Ira asked.

“No, thanks. My turn.” Lewlyn picked up the valise, guided Edith to the train doors, and when they glided open, sustained her across the gap to the platform. The three stepped out into the great deserted chamber of concrete: HOBOKEN.

“It’s this way.” Lewlyn led them to the stairs.

Fresh air, poured down from above, and growing fresher as they climbed, sharpened when they reached the carbide daylight of the news vendor’s stand at street level. “Aren’t you chilly?” Edith asked.

“Not much. Oh, I can feel it’s a little nippy. Maybe that’s why I should be carrying the valise.” Ira hitched his shoulders.

“Oh, no, thanks, Ira. It’s only a short way. You can see where it is from here.”

“That building with the lights?”

“Yes. That’s a Cunarder pier. Number ninety-two.”

“I can still give you a hand.”

“No, thanks. You’ve done more than your share.”

“It would warm me up.”

“Oh, dear! I knew I shouldn’t let you go without more over you.”

“I’m all right. I have my vest.”

“We’ll be there in a minute.”

Over cobblestones into the obscurity of a starry night. . in the direction of a dim, low, hulking row of buildings: the piers. Before the gaping entrance of one of them, weak, yellow incandescence spilled out on the cobblestones. Beside the pier a moored ship blazed with floodlights crisscrossing in basketweave from boom to mast.

“There it is,” said Lewlyn.

“Isn’t that funny? I always get twisted around. I would have sworn the Hudson was that way.” Ira thumbed over his shoulder.

“That’s more nearly the direction of the Ohio. Are you all right on these cobblestones, Edith?”

“Oh, yes.”

“They’re meant for wagons, not for heels, picturesque in daylight. But out of date.”

“I better go over to that side.” Ira suited action to word.

“Thank you, Ira.”

“Oops! Cobblestones is right.”

They trod their way carefully.

“I hope you don’t regret coming,” Lewlyn said gently.

Ira could sense at once the intolerable latency in her reply, a silent latency that brooked no ameliorating in speech. His presence was both essential and superfluous, diversionary, even more than when Lewlyn made those fragmented exonerations, those token apologies, on the train. They were like two people caught in a personal vortex that affected them and no one else, no matter how close.

“Oh, it’s picturesque, it’s dramatic. Ocean voyages, departures are—” Edith seemed deliberately to pause, clip her words in odd places. “Notably poetic. I’m glad I came. Am I overjoyed? No. . I’m glad I came — this once. It was necessary for me to come. I’ll never have to do it again. I suppose that might be viewed as a consolation of sorts.”

“It wasn’t very wise of me to ask, was it? I was hoping it would mean the same thing to both of us, something beautiful and shared.”

“How can it be?” Edith replied.

“I realize that now. I thought of it as something shared — or I thought you regarded it that way. Even if not a happy occasion. There are those times. Parting with someone close, say, off to war, as we did with my older brother, Andrew. Fortunately he came back from France. I told you about the poppy seeds that fell out of his uniform. Are you still able to cope with these cobblestones?”

“Oh, I took precautions and wore my lowest-heeled shoes.”

“That was wise.”

A few steps farther without speaking. Headlights of a car approaching the entrance of the pier, headlights that came to a stop, preempted the yellow light on cobblestones with twin beams. Car doors opened on voices quick to laughter. Edith continued, “I don’t like to say this, but the thing that I didn’t realize was the extent to which Marcia has molded your character. Changed it — I think for the—” She hesitated. “Weakened it.”

“I don’t believe so.”

“I think that’s where you’re mistaken. The person you were, the person I had the feeling you were when you took me to see your parents, was originally quite different. I’m sure he would have made an entirely different decision from the one you’re making.”

“That’s where you’re mistaken, Edith. I haven’t made it.”

Edith seemed not to hear. “It’s as though you’re trying to find someone who will help reassemble you, now that you’ve lost Marcia.”

“Oh, Edith.” Lewlyn tried to soften his reply with a touch of humor. “If there’s anything in my decision, I mean any single factor that will determine my decision, it’s whether — really, listen, Edith — whether I’ll be able to sustain your very negative view of life.”

“I hear Marcia again.”

“Simply because Marcia and I happen to agree doesn’t mean it’s her view, or her view imposed on me. I came to that consideration on my own — be careful, dear!”

“I’m holding her on the other side,” Ira assured.

“That’s good. Thanks. . Edith, I admit, Marcia said when I mentioned my concern, she said: ‘I was wondering when you’d perceive that.’” He seemed to wait for Edith’s reply, and when she made none, he went on, “I’m speaking for myself, as an individual, trying to assess as objectively as I can a very difficult situation. You must believe me. And please, Edith, don’t decide things in advance. It will just interfere with objectivity, with judgment. There are three lives at stake here, three futures: yours, Cecilia’s, and mine.”

“And all three futures are being decided by Marcia.”

“I don’t think that’s fair, Edith.”

“Really? It may be unpleasant, but it happens to be true.”

“I don’t think so. I’m sorry.”

“Well. . what matter?” Edith moved her head in the increasing light, from side to side, in a swaying motion weary in its resignation. The headlights in front were turned off: car doors slammed, figures entered the pier bearing luggage. “The regrettable thing is that the very negativism you talk about, my so-called negativism, is only strengthened by your own behavior — at Marcia’s behest. I can feel changes taking place in myself as a result of all this.”

“Like what, my dear?”

“Unfortunate changes. For one thing, I wonder whether any man is worth trusting.”

“But I’ve been honest. I’ve been honest all the way, Edith.”

“You’ve been honest in your way.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You can’t be honest. Not until you’ve been reassembled.”

“Oh, heavens! Please, Edith, you keep harping on that. Reassembled out of what?”

“Out of the priest who’s come apart, the very one Marcia created in the first place.”

“You don’t think I would have arrived at the conclusions I did in any event? Even if she had come back, and continued to be my wife? Even if she had not fallen in love with Robert? Not decided on divorce? I would still have begun to be skeptical of the efficacy of prayer, of religion in general.”

“Perhaps. That remains moot, as they say.”

“Edith, won’t you at least wait till I return?”

“I fear I’ll have to.”

“And suspend judgment meanwhile?” he coaxed. “You owe me that much.”

She laughed for the first time — briefly. “Do I?”

Cobblestones gave way to level plank. The three had come to the entrance of the pier, like that of a huge shed. Lewlyn seemed completely oblivious of his valise. He still had not changed hands. God, the man was strong — or completely occupied. The strings of electric lights overhead strove wanly with the expanse gloom of the interior — till the cluster of lights at the gangway: there, all was brightness, brightness shining on passengers and well-wishers entering the circle of radiance. Voices. Merriment of new arrivals.

Lewlyn displayed his boarding pass to the uniformed guard. The trio were smilingly waved on. Hanging on to the rail, they climbed the cleated gangway from dock to ship — passing above a lane of murky water to the brightly lit deck. The vessel seemed small for an ocean liner; or was it foreshortened by its illuminated areas? Few passengers were visible, but already the pitch of gaiety peculiar to departure was beginning to come from different directions, as more newcomers boarded the ship. In the group nearest them, a woman in a fur stole smoked a cigarette in a silver cigarette holder, like those of an actress on a stage her eyes glittered in the floodlights. A white-jacketed steward appeared, fizzling club soda on his tray, the White Rock nymph on the bottle clearly visible, recognized from Park & Tilford days. Lewlyn had put his valise down, and he and Edith spoke in low tones to each other, which Ira felt he ought to make all the more private by withdrawing a discreet distance away. He stood near the rail, appreciative of the tangy wind that blew so fresh over the river. But it had an edge too, and made him wish he had just one more garment to cover him, a sweater, a shirt, anything. Maybe Edith had one of Lewlyn’s pajama tops.

As he gazed at the lights of Manhattan twisting toward him across the rippling water like a gimlet, he was relieved to hear Edith say, “I don’t think we ought to wait.”

“I think you’re right,” Lewlyn concurred.

They embraced — eloquently. Lewlyn’s hat was off, his coat open, and nestling close to him, clinging to him with body and with lips, was Edith, her body within the coat, within the encompassing arm that held the hat. It was too embarrassingly beautiful a scene for real life — it was a scene to glimpse — and look away from: a man and woman clasped within a shaft of light.

They parted. And just then a band struck up, and music — a new Cole Porter tune — came wafting from an open door of the nearby saloon.

“Take care of her, won’t you? See that she gets home safely.” Speaking with voice raised above the music, Lewlyn pressed Ira’s hand.

“Oh, sure. Hope you have a good trip.”

Feeling himself wavering inwardly, and yet having to maintain an overt show of firmness, Ira took Edith’s arm and guided her toward the brightly lit gap in the ship’s rails where the uniformed guard, the ship’s sentry, was still standing.

She walked rigidly. They passed others coming up the lighted gangway, and she stumbled against them. Ira increased the firmness of his grip. They stepped onto the solid pier again. Ira looked back. Lewlyn was watching them from the rail, from the height of the deck above them. And it seemed to Ira that Lewlyn shook his head, sympathetically, and with a certain humorous camaraderie. Could it be that he was relieved to see someone else assume the burden? The two waved a last goodbye.

V

Ira supported the blindly unheeding Edith out of the pier, past arriving automobiles and taxis, over the indistinct cobblestones, back to the carbide brightness of the newsstand. She seemed utterly disoriented, abandoned, aimless. He dared not relinquish his hold on her arm. What was happening to her? So forsaken of self he had never seen anyone. With one hand on the banister and the other grasping her arm, he helped her descend the stairs to the change booth. She was mute the entire way; it was only when they stopped before the change booth that she spoke.

“Ira, do you have the fare?”

“Oh, sure.” He still had a good part of the five she had given him. He changed a quarter. Ira piloted the dazed Edith to the turnstile. Two dimes in the slot. And through. And once again, they had very little time to wait before the train pulled into the station. They had evidently left the ship long before its departure, because this time the arriving train discharged far more passengers than the one that had brought the three there. Almost no one was returning yet, and once the various groups of talkative and vivacious newcomers climbed up the stairs, the platform was left deserted.

Ira led Edith through the train doors. They sat down, alone in the big empty car. What should he say to her? Everything he could think of seemed vain, seemed futile and insipid against the impenetrable silence that immured her. “C’mon, train, let’s go,” he finally said aloud, and then because her self-absorption increased his uneasiness, he demanded irritably, “I wonder how long these trains take to turn around?”

Immobile and expressionless, she made no answer. Distraught, if ever anybody was, looking with blank, protrusive eyes from floor to window of the train, from window to the row of straw seats opposite, and hopelessly at the advertising placards overhead.

Minutes passed. A man and woman came aboard, sat down across the way. At last, doors slid to — the longed-for thrust set the train into motion. In seconds, the dingy tube enclosed them, the stupefying roar rose to crescendo, partly welcome this time as vindicating abandonment of all efforts to speak. But not for the couple on the other side of the aisle — the young man, Arrow-collar clean-featured, with ruby stickpin in his tie and a thin, segmented Charlie Chaplin walking stick between his knees; the young woman, pretty in her pearl earrings and light taupe coat, beneath which the tassels of her slate-colored skirt showed — they were leaning toward each other. And as if enjoying the exertion of making themselves understood, they were apparently shouting at each other at the top of their voices, though not a word was audible across the aisle. Ira watched them, fascinated — until his eyes began to smart. Hilarity engulfed the pair as the train slowed down, and they shrieked with laughter when the train stopped. Ira looked at Edith — she seemed completely oblivious. The situation was getting to be serious. What should he do?

He steered her through the open train doors, then from the platform out to the general underground area, his eyes raised, searching for the tiled tunnel that connected the Hudson Tubes to the IRT subway.

“I think—” Frowning uncertainly, Ira hunted for a directional sign overhead. “We go — it’s this way to the IRT, isn’t it? Just a minute, Edith, I’ll ask someone.”

“No. Please. Ira.” She checked him, and bending her head, snapped open her purse. “Please, let’s take a taxi.” She held out another five-dollar bill. “Take it, won’t you?”

“Is that what you want?”

“Yes.” Like an automaton, she proferred the bill.

He took it from her. Grim, how grim she made him feel, with all the determination and responsibility of being in charge: he had never hailed a cab in his life. “We gotta go upstairs to the street first. All right?” Again he took her arm, and with his other hand on the banister, helped her mount the stairs.

Out of the subway, they emerged into well-lighted, cool, and sparsely peopled 34th Street. There were cabs in evidence cruising by. So he was Larry now, worldly Larry; he was Lewlyn, adult Lewlyn. Resolute and stern, Ira held up his arm, signaled. And at once a checkered yellow cab swerved, tires squealing, to the curb.

“We want to go to 64 Morton Street,” Ira instructed the driver. “Hudson Street’s your best bet. As soon as you can, go downtown on Hudson.”

“I know where it is.”

Ira held the door open for Edith to get in, followed her. The meter flag snapped down, and they were on their way.

And then — with stunning suddenness — she wept! Wept, sobbed: a torrent of tears he would never have believed possible: heartbroken, uncontrollable. They threatened to wrack her asunder. These were not Mom’s tears, filled with old-world imprecations, or even Minnie’s taunting tears of rage. These were tears of such inexhaustible sorrow. God, what to do, how to calm her, quiet her? What would the driver think? For there was no doubt he could hear, though he gave no sign. Anxiety over her state, solicitude over her woe, his helplessness, all assailed Ira at once — immobilized him, at a loss, the victim of a flood. With an effort, he wrenched himself into action: “Edith, please!” he implored. “For God’s sake, try to get hold of yourself. You gotta stop that! Edith!

Sobs. Broken, stifled cries. A spate of tears swamping the glimmering little square of handkerchief she tried to staunch it with.

“Here. Take this one.” Ira yanked his own handkerchief, which Mom had just laundered, out of his pocket. “It’s clean. C’mon, calm down, Edith. You hear what I’m saying? That’s enough!”

“I’ll try. I’ll try.” For the first time coherent words mingled with her sobs. “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”

“You’ll be a wreck, that’s what’ll happen.”

“I know it. I know it. It doesn’t matter.”

“Sure it does. What d’ye mean, it doesn’t matter? You’ve got classes tomorrow.”

“I can call them off.”

“All right, so you’ll call ’em off. But there’s yourself, you can’t go on this way.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Ira. Putting you through this. Oh, mercy!”

“That’s nothing. I don’t want you to get sick.”

“I’ve been such a damned ninny. I’ve been such an unspeakable fool.”

“Why? What did you do? I don’t know — oh, you dropped it.” He stooped to pick up her handkerchief from the floor of the cab. “I don’t know everything about this. I mean”—he said vehemently—“you know what I mean. I don’t see that you did anything wrong. What did you do that was wrong?”

“I deluded myself. Just deluded myself. Clung to wish fulfillment. I’ve been such a damned fool. How could I have been such a damned fool? Oh, God! A woman my age just plain sacrificing herself to schoolgirl daydreams!”

“About what? About Lewlyn?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“He’s coming back, isn’t he? You said yourself he was just going to England to make up his mind.”

“He’s not. His mind is made up. No matter what he says. And even if he comes back empty-handed, who knows what he’ll do?”

Perplexity gathered like a turbulence in the mind. “What d’you mean? How d’you know?”

“It’s only too clear, Ira. Lord!” A sob shook her. “I know when I’ve lost. I knew when I had lost, but did I do anything about it? No! Can you imagine such a perfect fool?”

“Did he say? Did he tell you it was over? I only heard his telling you not to — gee!” All he could do was lean forward in the bounding vehicle and gesticulate against swiftly changing slash of light and shadow. “What? Like don’t give up. He hasn’t decided, made up his mind. No?”

“Ira, dear, he’d been planning this trip to England for months. They’ve been writing back and forth. He’s been telling me what she said. And I’ve been conspiring with him to delude myself all this time.” She wept softly into the handkerchief against her face. “Oh, dear. Oh, dear. It’s like knowing someone will die, and now you have to face the fact.”

He tried to catch a glimpse of the street sign. They must be close to destination. He felt an irresistible urge to scratch under his hat band. “Gee, I didn’t know.”

“You must think I’m a hopeless idiot to go along with this charade.”

“No. I don’t.”

“You’d have a perfect right to. I have no one to blame but myself.”

Wordless. They sat back on the cushioned seats, as the streetlamps passed. Silent, solitary, eerie, all of it: the driver steering his cab, his face in profile as impassive in the intermittent light as if cut out of sheet metal, the dark kind, hot rolled steel it was called, the frying-pan kind — oh, boy, was he nutty. Swirling thought seeking respite. . The driver steered his curved way along Hudson Street; the cab throbbed south — only a couple of blocks from that same river where he had once thought of killing himself, where the Cunarder now was moored. Or was it? Had it already cast off? The ship moving south toward the harbor’s mouth, Sandy Hook, while they moved south between desolate, unlit tenements. . they were being driven on an excavated street of a buried city. . by an expressionless driver who never turned his head, an Egyptian charioteer, through a necropolis with streetlights on the corners. . Edith continued to weep softly.

“Listen, Edith,” Ira tried to assuage. “You’re an English professor. I mean, you know literature. You’ve come to this situation a hundred times reading about it.” He fumbled, opened his hands to the dark. “You know what I mean?”

“You mean I ought to have been better prepared, and I’m not.”

“Something like that.”

“You’re perfectly right. I ought to have been better prepared. Better prepared by every minute I was with him. But you see I’m not. I wasn’t. Will I be any better prepared when he returns in a few weeks? He’s coming back, as you said. Oh, yes, he has to. With the same needs as before.” She shook her head hopelessly while she let it sink in. “Another’s need becomes my need. Isn’t it ridiculous?”

“Two more blocks,” Ira leaned forward to speak to the driver. “The one after this one, Morton Street.”

“I know it.”

Jesus, did he have that five bucks? Ira felt in his right-hand pocket. Yeah. Hell, he didn’t need it anyway. He had a few bucks of his own, really of hers anyway. Did the driver think he was the culprit? Who the hell knew? “Here it is. Sixty-four is the middle of the block.”

The driver nodded, rounded the corner.

“Right there.”

The cab drew up to the curb. And no sooner did it come to a stop than, unassisted, Edith sprang from car to the sidewalk, and eyes streaming anew, crossed the sidewalk to the house door and disappeared inside.

“What is it, eighty-five cents?” Ira peered at the meter.

“Right.”

“Here’s a dollar. Sorry. . you know.”

“Okay, pal. T’anks.” Curtly spoken as the greenback was pocketed. Up went the meter flag. Ira made for the door. The cab, its engine churning loudly in the empty street, the reeking exhaust visible under the nearby streetlight, squeaked a tire against the curb, rolling away toward the dark bend before Seventh Avenue.

VI

She was stretched out on the gunnysack-covered couch weeping when he entered the floor-lamp-illuminated apartment. She sat up when he came in. And uncertain how to comfort her further, to bring her to quiescence, except by his presence, he dropped into the wicker armchair opposite. His damp handkerchief lay crumpled on top of the chest of drawers — the upper drawer was open, and two or three of her dainty handkerchiefs lay on the couch beside her. “I’ve made a proper fool of myself,” she said. “In all ways. Will you ever forgive me?”

His mind thick with the late hour, he could find little soothing to say: “Oh, sure. Gee. But don’t you give him any credit?”

For once she laughed — shortly: “For helping make me one?”

“No, no, I didn’t mean that!” Jesus, he’d better wake up. “I mean, you’re so sure he’ll never change his mind?”

“Oh, no. That would be more of the same wishful thinking I’ve been guilty of all along, that I’ve been silly enough to indulge in all along. You can be certain that if there is any hope in that direction — and I know there isn’t — Marcia will be here to see that he doesn’t change his mind. As I say, even if he wanted to. And I’m sure he doesn’t. You’re an angel to stand by anyone so stupidly redundant.”

Checked, he’d better shut up. What did he have to offer to people older, smarter, more sophisticated? What did he know about their lives? Only something about Edith’s life: a little something: her affair with Larry, her affair with Lewlyn. He had seen this evening the beautiful, the dramatic parting on board ship. Lucky he hadn’t put his foot in it so far, had gotten by with least betrayal of gaucheness. If she were Stella he’d know what to do. So, say, Stella — what a cinch. Alone, boy. All he had to offer now was a sigh. A forked-tongue sigh: sympathy for her plight — sympathy that melted into contemptible self-satisfaction, because she had lost. A triple-tongued sigh, maybe: that he felt he could take advantage of her plight, as he could have of Minnie, as he easily could of Stella, but now didn’t dare. . Different world, class, everything else different. A grown-up woman. Same old story. How the hell did Larry have the nerve? Now wait a minute. Don’t give up altogether: forlorn, drooping havoc-aftermath, you call it? Small, defeated by perjury: Minnie with a Ph.D., if you made changes — in her, in himself.

She was talking, alternately berating Marcia for the ruin she had wrought in Edith’s chances of marrying Lewlyn, and Lewlyn for his weakness in listening to the wife who had cast him off, railing even at Cecilia, her artfully winsome letters — of a spinster ten years Lewlyn’s senior, desperate to snare him. And to none of it could Ira make any reply. What could he say? Any more than the mirror her eyes sought from time to time could answer. He could sit soberly and listen with pained attention — or half listen — and often understand only half of what we heard.

“I’ve had such rotten luck with men,” she kept repeating. “Yes, I’ve had any number who deared me and darlinged me, but they were either impossible, like Shmuel, or Larry, young and impossible, or Silver City grown-ups, deadly bores, reminiscing till you could scream. Or Boris — I can’t stand him physically, even though I have had to. I think I ought to go jump in a lake.”

“Oh, now, Edith. Gee.”

“That insufferable Tinklepaugh I married so he could finish his doctoral at Berkeley. Oh, dear. My fat cousin Ralph in New Jersey, auto parts salesman, courting me. Wasserman, committing just plain rape. Only that Mexican boy years ago — of course, there was no possibility there, but he was so gentle and tender. And now the only man with whom a marriage would have worked.”

What a strange way of putting it: a marriage would have worked. What had he said to Larry once about his sisters’ marriages? He had translated into English the Yiddish expression gitten shiddekh. And been reproved for it. What subtle distinctions: a marriage would have worked. “But there are others,” he ventured.

“I just don’t have that kind of feminine attraction. The sexual appeal of someone like Louise Bogan that men find so arresting.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.” That was the best he could say to her — at this hour of the night. Jesus, at this hour of the night he’d be apt to say anything: if she were someone else, someone Jewish, he’d flare up, rudely, agree with her sarcastically, put an end to her lachrymose self-decrying. But it wouldn’t be true. Even grief-darkened as her features were, and limp with fatigue her body, she was still so girlishly attractive. But hell, it would be even more ludicrous if he waxed enthusiastic about her sex appeal: praised her Elizabethan features, her protrusive brown eyes, the bun of hair at the back of her head, her ankles, her tiny feet, her hourglass waist. Christ, look at the clock, clock over the arched mantelpiece. She’s suffering, sure, suffering, but it’s getting past one-thirty. The very number made his eyelids tacky.

“You know what time it is, Edith? It’s nearly two o’clock.”

“It is? Is it as late as that?”

“Yeah. I think you should go to bed.”

“I won’t be able to sleep.”

“Oh, sure you will. Two o’clock? Boy, I can hardly keep my own eyes open.”

She remained inert, brooding — and distant. “I’ve imposed on you dreadfully. I’m so dreadfully sorry, Ira.”

“I know. But you’re tired. All right?” He got to his feet, aware of his own unsteadiness. “Lemme give you a hand.”

She pushed herself forward on the couch as he approached, tottered slightly when she arose, held his arm a moment, and let go. “I’ll be all right, Ira. Heavens. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”

“You know I—” He brushed away bleariness. “If I wasn’t so tired, I’d tell you what I mean: I got a chance to see something that I never could have seen otherwise.”

“I think I know what you mean. Scarcely repayment, though. My carrying on — as if I didn’t deserve what was coming to me — for deluding myself so.”

“No, that wasn’t — that was only part of it. There was everything else.”

She shook her head. “You’re incredible. Someone as young as you to feel that way. Who else would bear with such a fool?” Slow large eyelids covered her eyes. “It’s time I put an end to this nonsense. Time I went to bed. You’re right.”

“Maybe I better stay tonight.”

Her eyes opened wide, scanning his face. “Oh, I’ll be all right. I promise. I’ll go to bed.”

“No, I mean I’d like to stay.” He diluted his boldness, scrambled motives. “It’s so late. Just to lie down on the edge of the bed.”

“By all means. Of course you can stay, Ira. I just wish I had another bed.”

“It’s all right. Just so I can lie down.”

“I had no idea. I’ll be out of the bathroom in a few minutes. I’ll put out a towel for you. I’m sure you’ll want a facecloth too?”

“Huh? Yeah, thanks.” A facecloth? He had only learned lately what it was.

She got her bathrobe, nightgown, and bedroom slippers out of the closet and disappeared behind the bathroom door. He heard the toilet flush, faucet splash. He sat down to wait.

Boom. Was he ever overwrought, exhausted with excitement? The late hour had begun to toll its knell. Not a word spoken, but silence itself resounding. There it went again. Boom. No, it was thought itself reverberating, a word formed at the throat that was never uttered. Tired. Such rending emotion, shattering of sedate surfaces. But you saw it before, he told himself wearily: in Woodstock. The cat. Her hysteria. Would you marry her? You’re Lewlyn. All those dimples, smiles, charms, shapeliness, neat ankles, accomplishments, scholarship, degrees? Would you? Only because the steel frames of his eyeglasses intercepted vision did he realize he was shaking his head. . So what was wrong? Wrong-ong-ong-o-ong. What had he tried to figure out once? She was acting in her own tragedy. She was sorrowing for herself, the heroine. Could it be he was right? He was right, yeah, he was right. That’s how she was. Sorrowing for herself, the heroine. She had lost the only man, she said, with whom a marriage would have worked. So. . he had willed it. He had willed that everyone else would be eliminated. And they were. And there was nobody else. . You’re crazy. . But if there was nobody else. . You’re crazy. . But if there was nobody else, and that’s what you willed, from the deepest inside, see? That’s what would happen, and so now that’s what he would have to do. If he weren’t so goddamn shy, if he weren’t so goddamn guilty-shy, he could tell already what would happen, right now, tonight, or this morning, or what the hell time it was: five after two. He was twenty-one years old. How old was she? He had come all the way from Galitzia, and she all the way from New Mexico. Shixal, Mom called it, shixal, fate, shixal with a shiksa.

The ivory-colored neckline of her nightgown showing under the scattered brown checks of her bathrobe, she came out of the bathroom, tried to smile: “It’s your turn. You’ll find a fresh towel on the door hook. I’m sorry about the facecloth. I couldn’t find a better one.”

Ira gaped at her, and still openmouthed, pushed himself to his feet against the creaking wicker. “What’s that on your face?” Between loose braids, a pale, waxy layer covered all her features. “That.” He pointed.

“Oh. Cold cream. My skin is so very dry.”

“Oh. Cold cream. So when do you wash?”

“Before I put it on.”

“Oh. So do you wipe it off afterward?”

“In a few minutes. Doesn’t your sister use it?”

“I never saw it on her before. Excuse me. I didn’t know.” He removed his jacket. “I’ll go now.” He made for the bathroom.

Jesus, you’re dumb, he removed his tie, Jesus Christ, you’re dumb, he opened his collar, tucked it under. Larry must have seen it, must have known; his older sister used it. But Minnie never did. Why the hell was it, in Woodstock he never saw it? Hey, maybe he better take the shirt off. Yeah. He stank like a — like a polecat under the armpits. What the hell was a polecat? He removed his glasses. Soap up, yeah. Get that Hudson Tube dirt off your puss, boyoboy. And no shave, either. That’s the facecloth? Hey, it ain’t a bad idea: a shmatta made out of a piece of towel. Soap up heavy for now. Tomorrow, get in that bathtub or shower. And don’t forget, button up fly. Dry-dry-dry. Keep on pants and socks, right? Jacket too? Jesus, it’s really getting chilly. Stretch out on the edge of the bed. Boy, can’t wait. He put on his glasses, retracted his shirt collar. He hoped he looked all right.

Tie in hand, he came out. She was already lying in bed, burlap coverlet exposing dark blankets up to her chin. He would be against the wall. Okay. Chance to get as far from her as possible. “It’s half past — is there an alarm on the clock? You want me to set it?”

“I’ve already set it, thanks. I’ll wake before it goes off anyway.”

“And the window?”

“Just a crack will do.”

“Okay.” He lifted the sash up. Then kicked his shoes off. He gauged distance and direction to the wall his side of the bed — don’t make any mistakes — and rub against her — he switched off the floor lamp. Darkness. . in semidarkness he made his way, wriggled up his side of the bed. And for Christ’s sake, don’t wake up the way you did with Mom. Maybe should have kept jacket on too. He lay quietly supine, shank and right shoulder against the wall.

“Aren’t you going to get under the blanket?” Her voice came from the other side.

“No. I’m all right.”

“Don’t be such a goose, Ira. Get under the blankets. You’ll catch cold.”

“All right, I’ll get under that bedcover.” He eased himself under the coverlet, stretched out, again wished he’d kept his jacket on. Wo-o-o. Called a goose, boy. Ships and shoes and sealing-wax. Ardent, sculptured embracing in the ship’s floodlights. His hat was off, his coat was open, and she within his arms, nestling. . Merrily did we drop below the kirk, below the hill, below the lighthouse top — oh, that’s who it was the demon hackie was afterward on the ride home: not Pharaoh’s hackie. No. It was the Ancient Mariner piloting his cab through the basalt chasm of Hudson Street: the ice did split with a thunder-fit. . Oh, boy, the helmsman steered us thro-o-o. .

So what is truth? said jesting Pilate. And would not stop for answer, said Francis Bacon. Yeah. Ira paused to scratch an eyebrow. Sometimes as he typed, countenances merged, or persons merged. There were times when he thought it was M he was lying so scrupulously separated from by the width of the bed. Not Edith. Because after a while the separation, that separation, ceased to exist — with Edith. And became the same kind of intimacy he had known with M, and still did, even five years after her death. With Edith, there was understandably not the same kind of treasured intimacy as with M, but real intimacy — over a long period of time, an entire decade. Yeah. Where was all this leading to? Why had he begun by saying, What is truth? said jesting Pilate. Not because he had been talking about a pilot, and the echo lingered. No. And why the merging of persons, the intrusion of one period on another, of youth retracting on age? Was his own mind beginning to become cloudy, become blurred with senescence? No, he didn’t think so. He had been listening to a microtape the other day, the kind of tape, or tape recorder, he used to eavesdrop, and this particular tape had been enclosed in a plastic case on which he had written the word: listen.

Listen. He wrote that, or some other warning sometimes, to keep himself from absentmindedly erasing the tape on behalf of some immediate matter that had come up. And he was fortunate he did listen. The tape was worth preserving, preserving in the original. He had had, as Edith remarked about men, rotten luck when it came to duplicating these small tapes (which were relatively expensive) onto the cheaper larger cassettes. What was the cause of the ill luck he didn’t know, wasn’t expert enough to tell. When he listened to the same tape with earphones — he had a very fine though painfully binding headset, almost vise-tight earphones — he heard all that was audible with great clarity. When he tried transferring the tape via patchcord to another, the results were extremely disappointing: all gravelly, speech drowned in gravelly growling, almost as bad as those ancient days on 119th Street, when the coal that each denizen of the tenement bought to be stored in his own cellar bin roared down in a steel chute from truck to sidewalk manhole through a conduit to the cellar below; and waiting for it to pour out of the conduit stood the Irish navvy with streaked visage and bushel basket. (Homeric, the way men toiled in those days, days not so very long ago.) So Ira had heeded the injunction and listened to the microtape. Ah, what is truth? said jesting Pilate. Or do you simply let the statement, Bacon’s epigram, overlap with “All’s fair in love and war”? The common, coarse expression was — stable talk, the well-bred would call it — blowing one’s nuts. Lewlyn had to blow his nuts (glands, he would term them); Ira had to blow his nuts. What male adult didn’t have to? And all’s fair in love and war.

Ira then did as he had instructed himself, he listened, eavesdropped on the old tape. The year, the year was about 1979, or perhaps the year before. And the place was where he and M and Lewlyn, having aged over fifty years, were having their lunch; it was — judging from the voices of youngsters that seemed to come from the immediate surroundings — and judging from the context — a small picnic area off the road to Jemez Springs. The road was opposite an abandoned copper mine, which geophysicist son Jess had previously prospected, bringing back a few specimens.

Why did one feel that peculiar bitterness? Was it truly bitterness? Difficult to decide what the feeling was, this feeling of listening, not to a voice of the distant past, but to one evoking the distant past. And not only that, but rectifying impressions one had of that past, correcting, giving form to one’s fuzziness, giving it substance, as he said, definition.

Perhaps the demonstration of his woeful mental inadequacy (at least, his lack of social sophistication, “gentle breeding”) contributed as much to his sense of bitterness as anything else: that he should have been thrown into a milieu that he only scarcely understood, had so little foundation for understanding, so little familiarity with, and so slow an intelligence to comprehend. The reality, this small sample of it, made even more glaring the contrast between what occurred and what he grasped, between the complexity of the actuality and the mote he grasped. Of necessity his interpretation was — and still remained — simplistic. And realization pari passu with that. . trailing the awareness of the extent to which his abnormal adolescence, his more than usually stricken adolescence, his distorted, cramped, deformed assessments, his judgment of events and circumstances that even with his limited faculties and slum rearing he might otherwise have perceived — and recalled — to a greater degree than he did. One had to make the best of it, peg the trophies of fancy to a few authentic memories.

Begin anywhere, skip anything. There would still be enough left over, enough obtained to provide some indication of the nature of the protagonists, the workings of their minds, the interaction of their personalities. In fact, it occurred to Ira, given his traditions, his warped growth, upbringing, outlook — and theirs — no other way was open to him than to resort to the impersonal, the fictional as transmuted by time, the “electronic” evidence, not only to adjust his portrayal, his interpretation of other characters, but his own as well, inescapably, out of reach of the scribe’s gentle mitigations.

Yow! Didn’t those earphones hurt! They must have been manufactured at the very acme of the tight, heavily padded set — before the lighter, more comfortable ones were introduced. They muffled outside noises better than those made to be worn on a rifle range. “We were abstinent until the time of our marriage,” Lewlyn’s words continued sounding outside the earphones. “We were very, very careful.” That was a tough one, Ira reflected: put yourself in the man’s place. What would you have done? Aye. Not with Stella — that was somehow too easy. No moral problem. Just an old habit. It had been the same with Minnie, if such a situation were possible. Neither of them meant, would have meant for either one, more than the most transient emotional surrender; no, not even that, so well understood it was, even when Minnie had been tenderest toward him — it wasn’t possible. Understood, understood. And the same thing was true with Stella. Ah, but what if it had been Dorothy? Dorothy in L.A. years later, the year he had pledged his troth, declared his love for M, his intention to marry her? Supposing Dorothy had come out to L.A. to stay with her father, Bill Loem, when Ira had fled out there with him in order to break his dependence on Edith? A dozen years later in the narrative he had to tell. Fortunately Dorothy was in New York, freckled, unlettered, working-class Dorothy. So not even that would have been fair test; he didn’t know what would have been. But he was lucky anyway; he was lucky anyway: six months without a woman. So don’t judge, Ira thought. And yet, how unconsciously the man would apply one set of rules to Cecilia, the woman he came to love, and at the earliest, to marry, and another to Edith, whom he was to leave. “We were very, very careful,” he said: careful. And the word he had used to describe the degree of their self-imposed reserve, “abstinent,” wasn’t quite apropos in this context. Oh, this was picayune on your part, niggling, Ira censured himself. But then, he was inescapably the literary guy: “abstinent” was not the most appropriate word he could have used — oh, it would do, it would do — better than “celibate.” But the word Lewlyn should have chosen was “continent.” They were continent.

Ira awoke once during the little that was left of the night, awoke to see Edith’s drawn face in the crumbling dark turned toward him — and she must have seen that he was awake and conscious of her gaze — for the face stamped on the brayed gloom seemed indurate with censure — or scorn — or contempt. He felt himself shrink away placatingly: apologizing for sharing the same bed with her, without proffering the ultimate comfort she craved and needed. How puerile could he be not to be aroused by her proximity, not to turn toward her with a hard-on? That was how he construed her gaze. . even though he attempted in the short interval between her daunting look and the time he rolled over sheepishly and fell asleep to interpret her severity with a palliating excuse: it was the manifestation of the fierce grudge she held against all men because of her resentment of Lewlyn. Still, instinct prompted, albeit fuzzily, that he was kidding himself. She wanted to be laid, needed to be laid as a kind of solace against the overwhelming rejection she had suffered. It had been that which had impelled him to his tentative-bold act of staying with her the night. Instinct in him told him that, but how to muster a hard-on for an adult woman, for a real lady, when libido, except for a single encounter with a black streetwalker, had functioned only with minors, only in a milieu of stealth and guilt? It was easy to persuade himself his instincts were wrong.

As she had predicted, Edith awoke before the alarm went off, and as soon as she stirred, Ira awoke too — slid out of bed, sat at the end, scratched, sneezed, chortled sleepily, and slipped on his jacket against the morning coolness. He waited his turn for the bathroom, tried to wash, put on his tie, and came out as Edith, olive-skinned to the vee in her bathrobe, was turning slices of toast on the slat sides of the toaster over the gas flame, while coffee burbled in the newfangled electric percolator.

“Did you manage to get any sleep?” she asked solicitously, none of the rebuke of that relentless glare of a few hours before still lingering. And when he assured her he had, “I don’t see how you could. Weren’t you cold?”

“Not me, no,” he lied. “How about you?”

“I suppose I slept a few hours.” She protracted the blink of puffy eyes. “I feel like the wrath of God.”

“You look all right,” he encouraged.

“Do I? Thanks.” She yawned. “You’re very nice to say so. I feel like something the cat dragged in.”

“Oh, no,” he protested. “I don’t know how you did it after all you’ve been through, but your look fine.”

Her eyes sought out the wall mirror. “You’ve been an angel to see me through this, Ira. I never dreamed I could be such a fool.”

“Oh, no — can I make some more toast?”

“Make all you want.”

He stood up and canted four slices of packaged bread against the sides of the frustum toaster. “You gonna want some more?”

“No, thanks, this is about all I can stomach. I’ll just have a little more coffee.” She filled her cup, all black, eschewing that healthy dollop of cream that Mom always poured. “I’m sorry I don’t have anything else to offer you for breakfast except more marmalade. If I’d known you were going to stay the night I would have had some eggs and bacon on hand.”

“That’s all right.” Ira peeped out of the corner of one eye as he gingerly turned the toast. “Bacon ain’t kosher.”

“My God!” she exclaimed suddenly. “Your parents! I’ve forgotten all about them. You have no phone? You couldn’t call?”

“No.”

“You can still send a telegram.”

“I’d scare hell out of ’em. Excuse me. I told Mom I’d be late.”

“Late? Heavens! Ira, what will they think?”

He licked his lips as he transferred slices of toast from toaster to plate. “I’m telling you: I told Mom I didn’t know when I’d be home. Not to worry, that’s all. I’ve stayed over at Larry’s a few nights.”

“You’re sure they’re all right? Do they know where you are?”

“I told them what I was going to do. They must have figured out where I was — besides, I left your phone number. My sister would have called if they were worried.”

“Thank heaven you thought of doing that.”

“Yeah, if she called, you could have told her I stowed away on board the ship.”

“I can’t get over how cavalier you are with your family. And yet your face lights up when you speak of your mother. Your love for her is so touching.”

“Yeah?” He lowered his head, reached for the coffeepot. “Well, my parents are immigrants, I don’t have to tell you. And I’m the only collegian in the whole tribe. So I lead the way in things American. You get it? I’m the authority.”

“That’s quite different from Larry’s family.”

“Zackly. There’s three more of these slices of toast here. You don’t want one?”

“You eat them. I’d love to meet your mother.”

“Mom doesn’t speak English very well.”

“Oh, we’d understand each other, I’m sure.”

“Yum.” He crunched into a second slice. “What a nice jar they sell this marmalade in. Crosse and Blackwell. You know, as soon as I tell my mother I like something, out she goes and buys it. She spoils the hell — heck out of me.”

“And your sister?”

“Oh, no. Nothing like that. Minnie practically has to fend for herself. She’s my father’s favorite.”

Edith looked steadily at Ira, appraising as was her wont, a full second — and then her gaze shifted to the clock on the mantelpiece. “I ought to begin dressing. I have a class at ten. But you don’t need to feel you have to hurry.”

“No? All right.”

Her look, animated now, scarcely belonged to the same face that had stared at him so unforgivingly — when? — just a few hours ago? Rancorous, granulated ivory in the gloom, glaring: you lummox, I need. Can’t you see I need? Like Minnie, when she came home from Richmond rejected. So what if he said to her, You know, you stared at me during the night. What did you mean? Yeah, he was a lummox, all right, that he should have to ask her such a dumb question. But what would it have led to? What would a woman say when you asked her that? Evade? Or answer candidly? I suppose I wanted you to hold me. Nah. How could she? But she had lost so much, she had lost so much. “How many classes have you got this morning?”

“Two. One after the other, and an hour and a half each.”

“Oh, boy.”

“Fortunately it’s the same lecture in both. And it’s old ground too: women poets in America. Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, Teasdale, Flanner, Taggard, Léonie, and of course dear Edna. Not all today. I may introduce them to Marianne Moore.” She began undoing her loose braids. “Please finish your breakfast, Ira.”

“Thanks. That’ll be easy.”

“And have some more coffee.” She stood up. “I’d love to chat, but I don’t dare.”

“Oh, wait a minute. You know something? I owe you four dollars. Change from that five. It only came to a—”

“Don’t you mention it.”

“What?”

“Mention it.”

“Aw, gee, why not?”

“I don’t want to hear about it. You make me feel ashamed of myself, owing you so much. Please!”

“Boy, I ought to go into business.”

“I just don’t know what I’d have done without you. You know that very well.”

“Yeah?” He could sense the circuitous route of his own discontent at his failure in the face of her need. “You know something? You’d have been better off. Maybe both of us.”

Edith stopped on the way to the bathroom. “Why?”

“You wouldn’t have gone. See what I mean? I mean if you hadn’t had me to go along with you, then you wouldn’t have gone.”

“I admit my going was sheer folly, and I know I behaved like a romantic idiot afterward. But why both? Unless you would have spent a better night at home in your own bed. And I imagine you would have.”

“No, I could have gone home.”

“Then what do you mean? Not that I don’t appreciate your staying.”

“I saw something beautiful, and you had to pay a lot for it. So you hated me.”

“Oh, fiddlesticks!”

“Didn’t you stare at me during the night?”

“I may have. I may have wondered what the strange man was doing in my bed.”

“Oh, was that it? You didn’t hate me because I caused it? I didn’t help you afterward.” He gesticulated.

“Caused what?”

“All you suffered last night.”

“Heavens, child! Caused it? You stood by me magnificently. No, because of what I cause. You are the strangest lad!” The face above the checked bathrobe became businesslike. “I’ve got to run.” And as an afterthought, plucking a dress of bronze lozenges from the closet, before she entered the bathroom: “The cause is my playing a role, that’s the cause. Trying to extract a very little beauty on false pretenses — from a hopeless situation. That can be very costly emotionally. But I really believe I learned this time.” The bathroom door closed.

Beauty. Beauty. Beauty. They were always talking about it. Ira munched toast and marmalade. He knew what a beautiful statue was, or thought he did, music, a poem, a picture, yeah, even like a few times in the country, in Woodstock, when the dirt road curved out of sight a certain way, or streams of light came through the mountains like the swirls of amber seashells. Yeah, and the ship too on the dark water amid all the lights. And that scene of the two lovers parting, gee whiz: as if parting forever. That could be beautiful. He understood that. But as soon as he tried to concentrate on why it was beautiful, the thought sailed away, flew off in all directions, like a dandelion when you puffed on it. He became drowsy. Jesus, he was drowsy. Beauty. Beauty. Beauty. Hell, what was tragedy all about? Romeo and Juliet, which he didn’t like: it gushed with amorous sentiment. And all he had ever known was hardly beauty, but that sordid exaltation of years past of slipping the little brass nipple of the lock — up! And fast as you could into Minnie’s dingy bedroom. Was that beautiful? Or Stella sliding down with parted thighs on his hard-on. Or back-scuttling her, hoisting her up while the radio band blared dance music live from the ballroom of the Commodore Hotel.

As the keyboard played its melody, every sense became an antenna. See? You’re cracked. The only guy who came that close was Joyce. But even he didn’t come anywhere near that close: to beauty of fear, beauty of furtiveness, of sordidness. The guy was afraid to venture, afraid of the shock, of real terror. There was something phony about the way that Bloom agonized at two o’clock in the afternoon, or whenever it was that Blazes Boylan gave Molly the business. His agonizing was bullshit. If it was that tough, he would have interfered — long before. But hell, if he was a Jew, and he was, he would have talked about it to her, gone to a medico. Found some other way if they still loved each other. Naah. The guy who was so interested in finding out how far into the marble the statue’s nates went was Jimmy Joyce, the timid harp. Not the semi-demi-hemi half-assed Yiddle of his invention — cut it out. He was getting somewhere.

Edith came out of the bathroom, fully attired, groomed, her bronze dress blanching her olive skin by contrast, her delicate lips rouged, and forced into a smile, her face still piqued and strained. She seemed unwilling to speak, beyond essentials. “Would you help me pull the bed up?. . Don’t bother with the dishes.” She took a last sip of cold coffee, looked up at the mirror, and ran a tiny fingertip over her large eyelids, made a hopeless moue. No, she didn’t want Ira to escort her to the university. Unseemly — the thought crossed his mind — to be seen at such an early hour leaving the house together. No need to. It was a fair morning, although cool; she let him help her into her dark, satiny jacket. And yes, here was Lewlyn’s set of keys. Ira could have them: the door had to be locked from the outside.

“You’re welcome to stay as long as you please,” she said. “And if the phone rings, just ignore it.” Her utterly sober face in black cloche hat, she tugged the lapel of his jacket and kissed him. “Please call me in the next few days.”

“All right.”

She opened the apartment door to leave. How gamely she braced her shoulders back, tightened her lips, lifted her chin, took a fresh grip of her briefcase handle. Boy, that took courage. Without effort he noted her behavior those last seconds: the petite woman resolutely determined to meet the world. She shut the door behind her, and he was suddenly aware of a shamefaced admiration for her. Could he have behaved with such resolve after what she had been through? He was relieved he wasn’t called on to prove himself, wasn’t put to the test. He would certainly have failed. Even now, all his inclinations called for a nap, right there on the gunnycloth-covered bed. But better get home, he told himself, before Mom started to worry. Get home and have another breakfast — and a real nap. His eyes were like some kind of synchronized device, one eyelid closing as he forced the other open. Wash the few plates and coffee cups on the card table. That would be a decent gesture. He picked up the few breakfast things, took them to the small sink in the kitchenette, rinsed them, soaped and again rinsed them, placed them on the drainer.

Well, there could be no mistaking now: enough time had elapsed to break any connection between her leaving the house and his, if that was what she wanted. She must have crossed Washington Square Park by now. He could just see her advancing with quick step and with fixed, unhappy expression on her face, hurrying toward the off-white administration building, and now and then having to smile mechanically at a student or colleague. God, what they didn’t know.

VII

And suddenly another memory came floating back, memory to the man at the keyboard before the amber monitor: not of the woman in the black cloche hat, whom he had genuinely loved for a time, whose image, wraithlike, was receding, like Eurydice’s, back to an underworld he had once inhabited, but of his wife in Maine, in Montville, M in the Army-Navy surplus-store coveralls Ira had bought her while he worked as a toolmaker for Keystone Camera Co., near Boston. This more enduring image came flooding back, his tall, cheerful, brave wife in her khaki coveralls, leaving the warmth of the house for the frigid outdoors, carrying milk pail in gloved hand (who had to teach herself to milk, for the sake of their two boys, because no stores were nigh in that rural countryside her husband had brought her to). And returning to the warmth of the kitchen again, chilled, nose white and cheeks rose — chilled in her khaki coveralls, with not too much milk in pail, for the cow was nearing the end of her cycle, and needed breeding again, needed a calf, which as it turned out she never could have — for some reason — as the Yankee neighbor knew, who moved away after he sold the animal: a true Yankee trader. He had been married to her for fifty years, fifty years plus four months. He had to say it again, fifty years. Was it not a wondrous thing, the pioneer courage of M’s New England tradition, her fortitude, her fidelity?

The five years that had intervened since her death seemed so agonizingly slow, as if time were suspended, not allowed to proceed in a normal sort of way. He could, with the flick of a key, recall her voice, her intonation, the subtlety of her logic. He recalled the time he had become, despite her calming protestations, so very upset, the very evening after they moved into the apartment that housed them during their stint in Mexico, when the superabundance of cucarachas, roaches, big enough to throw a saddle over, as the old quip goes, roaches big, brown, and ubiquitous, filled the new household. They epitomized all that was vile, hideous, in childhood spent on the East Side, but even more so, early boyhood and youth spent in Harlem, spent living on 119th Street. So much that had become nasty and hateful to him about those early years of his life seemed closely associated with scurrying roaches, roaches, by the way, not half the size of these, ever lurking in some crevice despite Mom’s constant forays against them. He hated them worse than he did bedbugs — or even lice. After nearly ninety years, there still remained in memory the image of a doomed roach spreading his glistening outer shell to bring into play his billion-year-atrophied, gauzy wings in vain attempt to escape the sole of his pursuer’s shoe. Ha, the bastard, how could he keep from exulting when he heard the small squish that marked the end of his loathsome career: you bastard, you can’t have it both ways: wings and a sheltered life. . But those roaches lived in Harlem; and they were mere shavers compared to these whoppers in the land of alegría.

After Ira and M got back from the light supper tendered them by Señora Orozco and her veterinarian husband, Dr. Orozco, who had been instrumental in finding them the apartment, Ira began a preliminary, and shortly a hectic, search of the premises. Investigation revealed that one of the primary, if not the primary, nesting areas, retreats, snug havens, was an armchair, buff in color, a lighter shade than that of the insects themselves. Lifting the overstuffed cushion that constituted the seat of the chair he exposed, to his horror (M was so much more temperate about it), enough roaches to lug the seat of the chair away — in his overwrought imagination. They had a can of anti-roach spray, and he began wildly spraying them, but hell, why spray the beasts in the living room and fill the place with scented fumes of DDT? He hauled the chair out on the balcony, and he sprayed, and he sprayed, first the chair right side up, then upside down, and the sides. It was a frenzied matanza, and never did he enjoy a revolting task more. In the end, they left the chair out on the balcony overnight.

They felt better after they went back into the apartment. He did certainly, and M did too, because he did.

“He prayeth best, who loveth best, and all that sort of blarney,” Ira growled as he dropped down on the seat of a plain wooden dining chair. “Thank God, I prayeth worst.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. When did you ever hear me pray? You don’t mean my cussin’, my profanity? That’s the Harlem street where I was dug up.”

She settled into a wooden chair opposite him at the table. “No, you’re always appealing to the best in you, your conscience, your oracle. I never saw a man struggle with himself so. Isn’t that what you do?”

“What’s praying about that?. . Say, you know, hon, that’s more or less what Skelsy told me in L.A. where I fled from my dependency on Edith in ’38. Jerk that I was. I could have moved a half-dozen blocks away in Manhattan and gotten just as lost. But then, as soon as I was broke, I would have — anyway, Skelsy kept telling me, ‘You’re a new kind of guy to me. You keep asking yourself if a thing is right. I never do. I try to figure out if it’ll work.’”

“Who is Skelsy?”

“A very dangerous man, I assure you. He was biding his time under the guise of a bookkeeper working for the state. But every once in a while he had to go on a bash. Why? He had to talk. And I was the recipient of some of his confidences. He had been a rumrunner during Prohibition. An expert marksman with a pistol. I gather he dispatched three competitors on an island who had tried to muscle in on his high-class trade, expensive liquor they bootlegged from Canada in small speedboats. He and his partner, a Swede, but the Swede was found shot, killed, and his speedboat floating around, empty. Oh, I must have told you about him. We lived in the same rooming house in L.A., just after I left Edith’s the last time.”

“You told me about your landlord who got a bad heart searching for gold.”

“Yes, during the Depression. Quinn. Climbing mountains, living on flapjacks after his wife gave him the heave-ho. She told him to come back when he had made some money. Mean to tell me I’ve never mentioned Skelsy in all these years? As a matter of fact, it was Skelsy who told Quinn, when we were having a drink, he should have ripped his wife up to the belly, made her suffer.”

“How awful. No, this is the first time I ever heard you mention him. Skelsy?”

“Well, for Pete’s sake. He didn’t believe you could ever make money staying within the law. And — would you believe it? He wanted me for a partner.”

“You! A partner in crime? My lambikin.”

“Yeah, me. I ain’t such a lambikin. He said of course he didn’t expect me to hold up under a third degree. You know, that’s when the cops grill you, beat hell out of you to make you confess. I couldn’t hold up under that. But he was sure I’d never double-cross him. The guy was really very astute. He promised to get me a cute Swedish chick too,” Ira teased.

“Flaxen-haired, I’m sure. How could you resist?”

“Scared as hell. What do you mean, resist? I’ll never forget the teardrops so cool on my cheek after I rode the freights home to New York — half the way home anyway. To you in your rented bedroom-studio on the ground floor—” Ira chortled. “How could I resist?”

Faint scent of residual DDT. The quiet. Feeling of sojourning in a foreign land, of the Mexican night outdoors.

“But hell, we weren’t talking about that. How did I get started on that?”

“Coleridge, don’t you remember?”

“Oh, yeah, Coleridge and cucarachas. You accused me of always praying. What’s praying about appealing to your conscience? That’s not praying. Where’s the deity?”

“I don’t think Coleridge necessarily meant a deity as you and I think about God,” M replied. “I just feel he was limited by his time. What he meant was something universal. He couldn’t help but make the universal into a deity. God.”

“Maybe so, but you’re a clergyman’s daughter.”

“Now don’t be snide, love.”

“Siccusa me, boss. My amject apologies. Carlyle wrote that when he interviewed or visited Coleridge, the old boy kept intoning an interminable monologue about sumject and omject.”

“Seriously, darling — what am I trying to say? What I’m trying to say is that had he had the chance to — to live in our times, be exposed to a modern existentialist view of things, our view, his ‘He prayeth best, who loveth best,’ and the rest—” She smiled at her involuntary rhyme. “Oh, you know what I mean. That end, the meaning, Coleridge’s definition of the object prayed to — all that — would have been quite different.”

“You could be right. Yeah. . I’ve got no philosophy whatsoever. I don’t have to tell you. But I remember reading in one of his commentaries on The Ancient Mariner, he does say something to the effect that ‘He prayeth best, who loveth best’ is an unfortunate obtrusion of morality into the poem. And the reason I remember it is that he uses the word ‘obtrusion.’ Now I know what ‘intrusion’ means, ‘extrusion.’ ‘Protrusion,’” Ira raised his voice for emphasis. “But what the Jesus is to obtrude? Do you know?”

She rubbed her eyelid thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”

“Does the fumigant make your eyes smart?” Ira asked.

“No, you got the worst of it. The eye just itched.”

He watched her a moment longer. And all at once, before she dropped her hand, he realized she had brought into a single focus many of the features of her appearance that made her outwardly what she was, that he conjured up when he thought of her: the aging, distinguished, gentle brown eyes, the hair that in younger days he had seen the Cape Cod sun burnish into a radiant gold — and now streaked lackluster with gray. Her once pretty teeth looked irregular and fragile when she laughed, and her bony pianist’s hands hung down lankly from her wrists. She had become angular and gangly herself.

“We brought the Webster’s Collegiate along,” she reminded Ira. “Isn’t it in your study? Why don’t you look it up?”

“It’s more fun to guess. Ab, ante, con, in, inter, ob, post, prae, pro, sub, super. There’s the ob. Takes the ablative.”

“Very helpful. And now that it does, what does it mean?”

“It means I go to the head of the class.”

“Smarty pants. You’re always the vocal one.”

“What do I do, kvetch? Gripe? Why do you say I vocalize?”

“It means that I hear you, my belovedest, I know what you’re thinking.”

“You hear me?” Ira pondered.

“Yes. Did you ever try to conceal a state of mind, an emotion, say a disappointment? Mourning a loss? You moan, you groan, you sigh, you go around swearing.”

“Ah, now I get it. No. All right. You go to the opposite extreme. It’s true. I haven’t got your blue-nosed Pilgrim ancestry, but that little girl riding in the train beside her ma, when you were coming back from Oregon to Chicago, the little girl who dropped her dolly out of the open train window, and then sat there quietly, giving no sign of loss. Not a tear. You told me.”

“We weren’t allowed to cry.”

“Allowed to cry, my ass! Who the hell decides that you’re allowed to? I would have howled, why not?”

“Well, we did carry repressing feelings too far.” Her gentle eyes rested on him tenderly. “Oh, I’m sure we did.”

“Yeah, that’s probably why I love you,” he admitted grudgingly. “But you say I’m always praying. That makes us even.”

“No, that’s what makes me love you.”

“Oh, yeah? Unfortunate moral sentiment.”

She laughed.

“Ain’t it?”

“In me or Coleridge?”

“In both of you, I guess. It’s odd, you know. I recognized it as a kid,” Ira recalled, “I mean The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Everything about the poem enchanted me, especially that first time I read it in the ninth grade. But then I could feel a kind of twinge of resentment about that ‘He prayeth best, who loveth best.’ I used to think, if you’ll pardon zee expression: oh, balls.”

She laughed, as she always did at his vulgarity.

“So that’s what I’m doing. Pop, pop, pop, apah!” he burlesqued. “Pop, pop, pop, apah! The man is always praying, praying, praying, praying, praying, braying, baying, baying, baying. Boom! Pop, pop, apah. How’s that for a chunk of the Fifth?”

“That sounds to me like a chunk of Stigman’s Fifth,” M replied. “It’s approximately in the right key, C minor, and three-quarter time, don’t you think?”

“You know, I just got an illumination about Beethoven. His greatest dramas were in his symphonies.”

“That’s a good observation. There’s your friend ob again.”

“Yeah, right. I’ll tell you why he couldn’t write an exciting opera: he had such Jovian storms going on inside him, he couldn’t adjust, he couldn’t empathize with the earthly conflicts of ordinary humans.” He paused—

She had stood up. “Just a moment, dear.”

“Yeah.”

She left the kitchen, returned shortly with her tobacco pouch. “You’re a little like that yourself.” She sat down.

“Oh, zank you, zank you. To be mentioned in the same breath with sublimity. Boy.”

“No, I simply mean,” she unzipped the tobacco pouch, “you don’t empathize with others very well either.”

“I don’t?”

“Do you?” She brought out her little pipe.

“No, it’s true. I get such Olympian ideas — hey, where you goin’ again?”

“To get the alcohol bottle.” She picked up the bottle of denatured alcohol from the kitchen shelf, stood searching for something else. “I don’t see the pipe cleaners.”

“Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. They’re on my desk — let me go get ’em.”

“Oh, no, by the time you get out of your chair—” She stepped out of the kitchen door. Gone for thirty seconds, she reentered.

He sat quietly for a minute watching her. “Hey, you know, you do the purtiest job of cleaning a pipe ever the eye did see? Look at that.” And as she withdrew the browned end of the pipe cleaner and inserted the other end, freshly soaked in alcohol, “Wish I could do that.”

“You can too do that. Of course you can.” She swabbed the stubby pipestem. “Anybody can. No, don’t pretend.”

“Yeah, but method, method, my beloved frau. When you do a job, it’s done. It doesn’t need redoing.”

“Actually, this pipe will need it very soon. I should ream out the bowl first. But the stem was beginning to taste bad.”

“Reminds me of Larry, the way you smoke a pipe. The char in his pipe closed to a cone downward. The way it should. He smoked the tobacco down to the last shred.”

“Don’t you?” She bent the pipe cleaner double, dropped it into the large, square glass ashtray on the table. “See how foul the ends have gotten?” She drew out a fresh pipe cleaner.

“Yeah.”

“Do you want me to clean yours?”

“Hell, no. Womern, leave that pipe in the ashtray.”

“Don’t you want to smoke?”

“Not right now. Orozco gave me a postprandial stogie. Anh.” Ira lapped his lips in distaste. “I’ll tell you: it’s not only empathizing. Some guys can imbue an idea with drama. Damned if I can. Damned if Beethoven could. But he could imbue drama with ideas. How the hell is that? Hey, where’d you get the Blue Boar tobacco?”

“Just before we left El Paso. I bought three packages.”

“Creeps’ sake. Ever providential.” He sighed admiringly: She was so impeccably methodical, filling her pipe a few flakes of tobacco at a time. “You’re so tidy.” He shook his head. “Jaiz. But Mozart could.”

“Could what?”

“Do what Beethoven couldn’t. Imbue ideas with drama.”

“I’m sure I’d rather see Don Giovanni than Fidelio, given the choice,” M commented.

“Well, there you are. I don’t even remember what Fidelio is about. About a faithful husband, wasn’t it — you got the funniest way of striking a book match. Why don’t you hold it nearer the head?”

“I’m afraid I’ll get burned.”

“Nonsense. More apt to the way you do it.”

“You do it for me next time.”

“Glad to.”

She blew out a fragrant stream of tobacco smoke. “Yes, a faithful hubby like mine.”

“Who cares about faithful hubbies?”

“I do.”

“Oh, you, tenderhearted. You’re even a madre de cucarachas.”

Frowning, M blew out another stream of smoke. “I am not a madre de cucarachas.”

“You’re not?”

“No, it’s very unkind of you to say that.”

“Well, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“That’s the trouble with you. Your mean side comes out when you don’t mean it.”

“Pretty good.”

“No, I’m serious.”

“Well, maybe I’m smarting a little bit at being so bested in me own bailiwick. My metus. All right, I take it back. What are you a madre of?”

“I’m a madre of two sons. And mostly I’ve been a madre of you.” Her vehemence indicated something deeper than umbrage at his fatuous remark.

“Me?” He took cover. “What did I do?”

“It’s not what you did. It’s what I did.” She emphasized both pronouns. “It’s what I had to do. I spent all my time taking care of you in your moods, protecting you from your moods, your depressions, despairs. Heavens! Taking care of you, instead of spending the time doing my own work, instead of spending the time composing music.”

That he understood. “I guess I have to agree,” he said soberly.

“Do you? Are you sure?”

“Yeah, yeah. When it comes to art I understand. So what am I going to do about it?”

“Nothing. Be my beloved hubby. Just like Fidelio.”

“That’s not enough. Why in hell didn’t you, don’t you, heave me out of your life?”

“Now, don’t be silly. I chose to do it. It’s what I wanted to do.”

“Yeah? But how can anyone choose something like that?” Ira demanded. “How can anybody want something like that?” It seemed to him he caught a glimpse, an awe-inspiring glimpse, of a truly disciplined, truly resolute mind. Even that glimpse, that inkling, confused him. “I never wanted in that sense, never chose. I’m blind as a thread of water. Moving through dust.”

“That’s why I have to protect you.”

“And you wanted to?”

“Yes. I wouldn’t have anything else in the world. Do you realize that my life was already quite settled before I met you? I had made my future secure. I was teaching music at Western College. Elizabeth was teaching in the English department. She and I would find an apartment the year my sabbatical ended. We would live in it together. I would compose music. Quite settled, quite planned. And then you came along and ripped it all to pieces at Yaddo.”

“‘This is all I have to say to thee.’” Irresistibly Jocasta’s last speech in Sophocles’ Oedipus came to his mind, to the mind of one addicted to utterance. “’This is all I have to say to thee,’” he repeated gloomily, “‘and no word more forever.’”

“My honey lamb. You’re my honey lamb.”

“Yeah. I know. What an impostor.”

Fragrance of the tobacco burning in her pipe. . again the quiet. Feeling of sojourning in a foreign land, of the Mexican night outdoors.

“No, you’re not an impostor.”

“I’m not?”

“No. You’re so involved with yourself that you’re surprised when people assert themselves, when they get into your world, as I just did, and I’m a little sorry I did.”

“No, I had it coming to me. I ought to be reminded more often. Daily. Hourly. Sea nymphs wring his neck.”

“Darling, please don’t mutter. We were both babes in the wood when we married. We both had a lot of growing up to do. I know I did.”

“That’s an understatement when applied to me. When we met, you already held down a respectable job. You had been self-supporting for I don’t know how many years. Whereas I–Christ, what a blob! Larva! Coddled Junior of a ménage à trois. Yech!”

“Darling, you mustn’t. You break my heart.”

“Boyoboy, if you’re not the kindest creature. If it weren’t for you, I’d be dead by now. Dead as a haddock.”

“My honey lamb, my lambikin. Please!”

“I see what you’re doing. Me and my goddamn moods. Taking care of me and my swings, my fits.”

“Honey lamb, let’s change the subject. Please. Pretty please. For my sake.”

“Yeah, for your sake. Oh, boy, what a burden you carry.”

“I don’t care. As long as you love me.”

“Love you? God, women are easy to satisfy. Love you? ‘And when I love thee not, chaos is come again.’”

“Now you sound like my honey lamb. That’s so beautiful.”

“Yeah? It ain’t mine. That’s why.”

She laughed.

“So what were we on before all this?”

“Coleridge.”

“Yeah. Okay, tell me, what do you understand by the ‘He prayeth best’ stuff?”

“The way I interpret it, Coleridge simply meant that all life was mysterious and extraordinary. We may have to destroy some of it to preserve our own life. I forgot to tell you I bought two dozen shrimp on the way home. I’ll shell them in the morning before I go to the Diazes’. She’s got a gorgeous Steinway.”

“Yes?”

“They’re in the refrigerator. They were alive once, needless to say.”

“Ach, zo. I see your point. Alive not too long ago, I trust.”

“Oh, yes. I’m always careful about what I feed you.” She leaned forward earnestly. “I wish you had my cast-iron stomach.”

“I’m glad one of us has it. Then what did you do in the fish market while I sat in the car? Ask the seafood which of them is freshest? Tell them you got a husband with a sensitive gut?”

“No. I ask them what’s the latest news in the deep sea.”

“Oh, is that it? Using a little feminine guile, were you? You’re wonderful. You know? How come about a million other guys didn’t snap you up?”

“Oh, I wasn’t the conventional pretty girl — like my sister Betty. And I was always falling for the wrong man.”

“And you did it again.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s none of my business why you don’t. But thanks anyway.”

She laughed lightly. “My funny man.”

She continued, a bit wearily, “Life’s all unique and the same at the same time. I think that’s what Coleridge meant. It’s special. Every speck of consciousness is precious. That’s what I mean. I think that’s what he meant.”

“Woof..”

“It’s the same kind of force. We all share it. Do you think there’s any difference between the lives — no, the life of a cockroach and ours? The life force?”

“Well, a much greater degree of awareness.”

“No. I’m speaking about the life force.”

“That animates us?” He shrugged. “Okay, probably not. So what am I supposed to be? Sorry I killed a bunch of roaches? The hell I am. I wish I’d killed a jillion.”

“I didn’t say that. I’m speaking about that miraculous speck of consciousness that — that matter turned into.”

“Say, how come you’re so smart? Musicians are supposed to be dumb. Louise Bogan was always going around denigrating musicians. They were short on brains.”

“Verbal skills maybe, but that doesn’t mean being dumb. The University of Chicago gave me a Phi Beta Kappa in my junior year. And my history professor asked if he could quote from my paper. So there.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think musicians and dancers and painters are any dumber than poets. We think in a different way. So do you, even though you are a writer.”

“I wish I’d known you when Bogan told me that, but I was scared of the dame anyway.”

“You were?”

“What a bimbo in a clinging peach velvet dress. I think she measured men by their powers of frigulation. She said Dalton — you know, the third in Edith’s ménage — she said he came to town like a bunny rabbit. You can imagine what she’d have thought of me.”

“You don’t come to town like a bunny rabbit.”

“Thank you, love. Not since I met you. Say, while we’re talking of specks of consciousness, maybe love is the highest thing in the speck. Or the best. How’s that?”

“I like the idea.”

“You mean the sentiment.”

“No, the idea. The thing you were talking about, the idea, the idea filled with sentiment.”

“Glory be. You mean it? I did it? Hosanna!”

A moment of silence, silicone silence, Ira and M under the yellow incandescents on the kitchen ceiling, the specks of memory which, until moments ago, lay irretrievably buried, now excavated and so pleasingly retrieved and reconfigured through the passage of time.

A new moment of silence, a solitary moment, as the gloaming light cast shadows over the books he loved so well. The last streaks of twilight had disappeared over the Palisades so long ago, and now, as Helius’ horse-drawn chariot raced by on its evening run, the desert sunset illumined the basalt horizon.

A moment of silence. The monitor hummed. Had he only dared look at her then with the passionate homage he now so keenly felt.

VOLUME IV: REQUIEM FOR HARLEM

FOR ROZ AND BILL TARG,

PARAGONS OF LOYALTY

Without Haste, Without Rest.

Not thine the labour to complete,

And yet thou art not free to cease!

— The Mishnah, Abot, 2:16 I, Translated by Rabbi Isidore Myers

PART ONE

I

Ira Stigman’s legs were weary, legs and feet and instep, but the long march was well worth its fatigue. He had hiked and hiked, past Grand Central Station and 42nd Street, past all the crosstown trolley lines, at 34th, at 23rd, at 14th, at 10th, and then he turned west to 8th Street. Gut and innards were at peace, head was clear. He had traveled over a hundred city blocks from the red brick tenement, counting the jog west from Lexington to Fifth Avenue. Nearly six miles, according to accepted reckoning. Ahead of him, a block away, loomed two figures of George Washington, either side of the arch named in his honor, heroic in size and monumentally calm. And behind the arch, Washington Square Park spread out in a rectangle of grass and trees still verdant despite the October chill, paved walks and a fountain flourishing at the center. From the slant of sun and hint of chill in the shadows, Ira judged the time must be approaching five o’clock, though Sunday strollers were still numerous in the park, and benches well occupied. Luxuriously, negligent with liberation from acute discomfort, he considered his next step — literally. He could go into the park, find a space on a bench and sit down, rest his weary shanks awhile, and then walk east again, a few blocks past NYU to Astor Place, and take the Lexington Avenue subway home. Sunday, he’d be sure to have a seat. But he had another option: he had the keys to Edith’s apartment in his pocket.

If Edith was home, he could rest while he visited; if she wasn’t home, he could stretch out on the couch; could relieve his bladder in privacy, though it wasn’t too distended: perspiration had taken care of that. No, it would be better to piss right here in the men’s toilet in the park and be done with it, in case Edith was home. Right. He made his way across the park to the men’s toilet, relieved himself against the slate, holding his hand cupped over his cock, a trick he had learned from an obvious gentleman next to him once, learned it eagerly because he was always a little apprehensive that he didn’t stack up so well against other guys.

He exited — and now what? The walk to the pissoir had brought him a few blocks nearer Edith’s. He felt renewed. What were a few blocks more? She would be transported with mirth when he regaled her with an account of his gastronomic adventures with Leo, whom he had just finished tutoring. He could already hear the peal of her laughter as he described the waning of the bowling ball within him — to the tune of “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching.”

Three helpings of pasta with lovely little meatballs he had consumed earlier that afternoon, with collateral slices of bread, washed down with dago red wine. “Wow!” he had told Leo as he put down his fork. “Boy, am I ever full. I’m stuffed.”

He was indeed — and more: sated to stupefaction — arms hanging down, stultified. “Hey, Leo, I got to lie down,” Ira had told his friend after they had finished.

“No kiddin’? There’s a sofa in the front room. Or you want to go in my bedroom?”

“No. Just to lie down for a few minutes. I guess I ate too much.”

Leo had led the way. The front-room windows above the sofa looked out on Lexington Avenue. Early-afternoon sunlight, which had warmed the black horsehair of the sofa, had fallen on Ira as he stretched out on top. Lethean Lexington Avenue traffic three stories below, volleys of Italian from the dining room, clink-clank of dishes and utensils being washed in the kitchen — Ira fell into a slumber like a coma. When he awoke, he felt a huge, gross lump of undigested feast inside his stomach that pressed against his abdomen like a bowling ball. He wasn’t sure he’d survive. Panicky, he got to his feet, tottered, plopped back on the sofa again, and sat there, unable even to slump, rubbing the bowling ball in his belly. “Wow!”

Leo had heard him, and had come in, faithful Leo, snub nose and thick lips awry with concern. “Whatsa matter?”

“Ow, I ate too much.” Ira massaged his bloated paunch and lamented. “Jesus, I ate too much.”

“You’re not gonna be sick or nothin’?”

“No. It’s all in there. What a bellyache.”

“You didn’t eat so much. You’re pregnant,” Leo grinned.

“Aw, cut out the shit. Jesus, I hurt.”

“Waddaye wanna do? You wanna lay down some more?”

“No, no. Jesus Christ.”

“You don’t wanna puke, do you? I can get you some o’ my mother’s bakin’ soda.”

“No, no. Don’t say anything.”

“What d’you wanna do?”

“Lay an egg. Wow!”

Leo cackled.

“I’m not kidding.”

“You ain’t?”

“No. Wooh! Did you ever see an aepyornis egg?”

“A who?”

“That’s what I got in my gut. Go to the Museum of Natural History. I gotta walk.”

“Is that where you goin’?”

“No, I’m just going to walk, walk, walk. Get me my hat and jacket, will you? I don’t want them to see me, you know what I mean?”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, I’ll just go in and say goodbye. Get the hat and jacket.” Only the most heroic kind of locomotion could help him in the fix he was in, Ira was sure. “Wow!”

He was grateful to Leo for helping him into the jacket. He grimaced over suppressed groans, and with a smile like a plaster cast on his face, went into the kitchen and thanked Leo’s mother, then into the dining room, where the three cooks were playing cards. He said something about a great fiesta, and now he had to walk it off, and made for the door and the stairs. Leo, who insisted on following Ira down into the street, to make sure he was all right, again offered to accompany him, but Ira shook hands with him at the stoop and waved his pupil away. “Good luck. I’ll see you after the exam. I got to get goin’. Boy,” he grunted. “Thanks. So long.” And he headed downtown.

Ow, bowling ball, bowling ball. Why did he have to do it? He’d have to churn it up, and churn it up, and churn it down to size. Knead it and knead it back again into the dough it was supposed to be. Oh, bastinado it, drub it, rubadubdub it. No hungry generations tread thee down. O-o-o-h. Jumpin’ Jesus, how do you tenderize a bowling ball? Walk. Hoof it, man, hoof it.

He had first wheeled toward Park Avenue, tramped a block west, and there wheeled south. Forget it, if you can at least get by the side of the Grand Central ramp on 102nd Street; look at the blocks of glittery mica schist and gneiss. Watch the afternoon sun glint off the rock as you knead down the rock in your belly. He groaned.

He strode south; and thought of the kid exploring here a seeming thousand years ago, catapulted to Harlem from the Lower East Side just thirteen years ago, a thousand years ago, a geologic age. There were then pirates skulking in that railroad ramp, do you remember? Buccaneers with booty, wassailing with tankards and cutlass. Oh, jolly good ale and old they swigged. Stride, stride. There. It was a little easier, wasn’t it? By the shores o’ Gitchee Goomie, there I sat down and wept, remembering thee, O Zion. Keep goin’.

Heading south, ramp and ground intersect, the best-laid plans, and the best lays too gang aft agley, by-by, ol’ granity pal. O-o-o-h. Median strip, see? Full of grass and flowers and shrubs. Charming, ain’t it, when one was affluent? And resided in sedate townhouses on either side of wide, wide Park Avenue, with a butler or a footman visible through the glass door. Ah, hear ye, magnates, hear ye: how the trains down below rumbled softly through the vents among the marigolds, rumble obsequiously, w-o-o-o. Keep up the footwork, bud. Once more into the breech, O Peristalsis, and yet once more. Marvelous! It’s only a croquet ball now. .

He hadn’t seen Edith since that famous night when he escorted her with Lewlyn to the Hoboken pier, last spring, months ago now. He could have seen her last night, with her old loverboy Larry — but no, this was going to be so much better, total independence. And she liked his independence much better. Now heading west, further refreshed by his lightened load, he left the park and headed for Sixth Avenue under the El.

He could not wait to tell her about the orgy at Leo’s: three cooks, three plates of pasta, two loaves of Italian bread, bumpers of wine — if that wasn’t hilarious, despite the pain.

Quickening his steps, he reached Sixth Avenue in the fine shadow of a late Indian summer, passed under the El, followed familiar diagonal shortcuts to Seventh and Morton. Around the gas station, and under the leaves of sidewalk trees, he reached house number 64, got out the key to the house door — no, no, he’d better ring. He did. No buzzer sounded in return. Then she wasn’t home. Exactly the alternate contingency he had thought of. He could stretch out on that couch — just what his knees prayed for, answer to his knees’ needs — ah, a quarter hour, half hour, and if she came home meanwhile — so what if he fell asleep?

Up the two flights of carpeted stairs, silently ascended. And just to make doubly sure, and be doubly polite, he knocked on the door. . waited. No answer. Okay. He separated her apartment door key from the house door key, groped for the slot, inserted.

And as he did, he heard, he thought he heard, no, he heard the slightest commotion on the other side of the door, and he hesitated—

Just in time to hear Edith’s voice, unmistakably Edith’s, hurried: “Just a minute, Ira!”

Had she been asleep, had he wakened her? Oh, God! Ira withdrew the key.

A second later, two seconds later, the door swung open, and into the electric-lighted hall stepped Edith, pulling the door after her. “Ira,” she said. “I thought it was you.”

“Yeah, it’s me.” He retreated in utter confusion. “Excuse me! Gee, Edith. I rang the buzzer — I–I’m sorry!”

“I wasn’t in a position to receive callers.” The Professora’s eyes were bright, bright and roguish; and her voice high-pitched, on the verge of shrillness. “It’s quite all right, Ira.” She was wearing a new dark green bathrobe with black trefoils on it. Not merely wearing it, but by the way she held the garment at her throat, bunching the cloth together with tiny fist, by the intimate way her form swelled the cloth with contour, there could be no escaping the perception: the body her bathrobe enveloped was nude. “Ira, can you wait a few minutes? You can wait in my neighbor Amelia’s room. She’s gone for the weekend, and I have her keys. Please wait,” she appealed.

“Oh, no. What a dope I am. Gee.”

“I’m glad you came over. I’ll get her keys. Just one minute.”

“No, I was only walking. I’ll come again. It’s all right.”

“You’re sure? Will you call me?”

“Yeah, I just happened to eat too much macaroni — I mean pasta — and I—” Keys still in hand, Ira began making his way toward the stairs. “I was walking it off.”

“I’m so sorry,” Edith said. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, sure. It’s all eased up, shrunk.”

As he spoke, he took the first step down. Solicitously watching him descend, Edith opened the door behind her, and from deep inside the room, a dry, sandy chuckle emanated.

“You’ll call?” Edith’s voice followed Ira down the steps.

“Yeah. In a couple o’ days. All right?”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s nothing. G’bye.”

“Goodbye, Ira.”

He heard the apartment door close above him. . walked carefully, deliberately down the stair treads, as if his doing so helped to obliterate his blunder, as if quiet would eliminate his mistake — as if it never happened. . What a sap. Hand slid on banister to newel post. He jingled the two keys on the ring; he could almost have flung them out into the gutter when he opened the house door, so great was his chagrin. He pocketed them instead, and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

What a dope! What an imbecile! He turned back toward Seventh Avenue. Yeah, but all those tears, all that sound and fury, storm and stress, that wracking taxi ride last spring with Edith so distraught, those floods of woe — they didn’t mean a thing; there she was in bed with Lewlyn again. The same guy she had renounced, denounced, heaped with scorn! Hey, wait a minute — and now his knees began to ache with renewed pang — couldn’t he get it through his thick head that ladies wanted to be laid? Yeah, ladies wanted to be laid, just like gentlemen wanted to lay them?

It was the same feeling of disappointment he had had six weeks before, just as his senior year of CCNY had begun, when, keeping pace with the scattering of fellow students traveling downhill, he had caught sight of Larry about a half block ahead: Larry accompanied by someone else: yes, sociology professor Lewlyn, still fleeing his unfaithful wife, Marcia Meede. . how operatic it all did sound. . had returned from England. Ira made no effort to catch up with the two, but kept his distance, until he saw them enter Wentworth Hall. Something to meditate on, watching the pair, the younger and the elder, instructor and student, Larry gesturing with large, white hands, Lewlyn listening benignly. Something to ponder on, with Edith the unseen despairing apex of the triangle. So much meaning inhered in it, so much meaning in this transient configuration, but what was it? Irony, irony was easy to discern — he was a mehvin of irony. But the immense, positive shape of meaning escaped him, the meaning that all this irony declared about human life. It was way beyond the mere sexual involvement of student and instructor with the same woman. What was human life striving after? If he could only discover that larger significance, that larger affirmation. Maybe there wasn’t any, though it seemed there was. He had thought he was then nothing but a big fool and a wretched sinner too.

The feeling persisted still, not a week after Yom Kippur, his unobservant atonements all for naught, as he rounded the small gas station at Seventh Avenue again. Maybe he was wrong. What the hell did he know about love? Maybe Lewlyn was now all finished with that British spinster he hoped would free him from Marcia’s net. Or maybe Lewlyn had come back to Edith again. No wonder she looked that way: droll, wanton, impish. “’Tis done, ’tis done, I’ve won, I’ve won, quoth she and whistles thrice. Yeah, but why had she wanted Ira to come over again, almost imploring him? No, he was wrong again. Nothing had changed. He could bet on that.

He had to get to a subway seat and sit down before his legs caved in. Get on at Christopher, transfer at 42nd. In the scarce remaining light from the west, Ira broke into a trot, and as he passed the news kiosk on Seventh he picked up speed, from trot to run. He tore down the stairs, in twilight’s gloom, plunked a token in the slot, for once, and breathless, he boarded the uptown train; he’d dropped his jitney into the hopper.

Ira sat with thumbs hooked in belt. Had he painted himself into a corner? Probably. But he had to keep going to keep from falling down. He tried to think back, scanned an older yellow typescript to his right: I felt baffled; I felt bitter; with this first line, the next chapter had begun. No use denying it to myself any longer, slurring the matter over as I did about so much else in life, habitually permitting connotations to blur, and thus obviate a decisive response. It was true, Ira meditated, he had a knack for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. He had already begun to hope, more and more articulately, that Edith would lose Lewlyn, irrevocably. And with Larry clearly diminishing to a mere indulgence, one depending on a propitious moment to terminate, he, Ira himself, heir apparent, somehow, sometime soon would become Edith’s lover.

Ira bolted up and suddenly addressed himself consciously to the little chips of the time when he was alive, alive, twenty-one, and entering that senior year at CCNY. Chips, he called them, noting he had used a singular instead of a plural verb. Well, chips of the time — considered as a unit. In a more illustrative way of speaking, they weren’t really chips, these notations he had beside him on the collapsible steel typing table; they were a few of the anchor points in the world he lived in, and to which the web of his existence was connected, loosely connected mostly, remotely connected. They and millions of other events like them made up the ever-changing content of his days. In this particular case, these events — the start of class, the Yankees World Series win, those agonizing fifteen seconds of the Tunney-Dempsey fight, the “slow count,” were all part, all chips, of the year 1927, nearing the end of October.

For a while, after what he had seen — and heard — that Sunday afternoon in October, his hopes seemed to him fatuous, fatuous and untenable. How could she so reverse herself, when she had hardened her mind against Lewlyn as a duplicitous and perfidious person — and weak — as one who had made it appear that he was undecided in his choice of wife, whose indecision she was gullible enough to take at face value? Was he still undecided, or was he still playing her for a fool? Which? These were difficult, nay, impossible judgments for the young and anything but acute Ira to make. According to Edith’s version in later years, Lewlyn had come back from England in the same uncertain frame of mind as he had gone, and she had resumed the relationship with him upon his return, because Lewlyn still ostensibly hadn’t made up his mind. He was still in a state of uncertainty, but Edith tended to fabricate. Ira came to learn that, to learn it by his own relationship with her, and its aftermath. It was the same thing he had discerned, intuitively, about Edith from the beginning: her trait of making herself the heroine of a tragedy in which she was enmeshed and made to suffer because others took advantage of her innate goodness. And just as she had admitted in the midst of her sobs and tears, the night Ira escorted her home from the ship, that she had been deceiving herself with regard to Lewlyn’s choice of permanent mate, so she did when he came back from England — came back, according to him, to Lewlyn, with vows of marriage already exchanged between himself and Cecilia. That he entered into a sexual transaction with Edith, that was another matter. An entire year of continence, or celibacy, was too much to expect of any man, as Ira found out when he nearly went mad in Los Angeles during his six months of separation from M in ’38—too much to ask of any man, and yet not too much to ask of a woman, as M bore witness, as Cecilia bore witness, and how many myriads of women over the centuries bore witness? Anyway, this last sequel of the sterile affair Edith evidently entered into in a spirit of play — consciously — or in that Greek spirit that Lewlyn esteemed so greatly: wherein friendship between the sexes reached its greatest intimacy via intercourse.

October was in its third week when in the afternoon’s mail delivery Ira recognized the single letter showing through the scroll in the dented brass letterbox as Edith’s: inside her unmistakable envelope was her typed note, single-spaced as was her wont, helter-skelter, and dashed-off. PLEASE! PLEASE! Her letter appeared almost hysterical. Would he telephone her as soon as he could? She was very much concerned at not hearing from him. She had telephoned the drugstore, Biolov’s, but they told her nobody answered the door. Please, would he call her as soon as he received this. Ira had refused to come along to visit Edith, Larry had told her. She thought she knew why, but not hearing from him so long, she was deeply upset. She had something terribly important she wanted to tell him — and only him.

Ira had sulked awhile. Was that “something important” just an inducement? Was he wrong about Lewlyn? And what if he was wrong? And Lewlyn and Edith had just made shift to while away the time until Lewlyn could marry elsewhere. They played the two-backed beast in the meantime, as Shakespeare called it, expediently and amicably franfreluquied — how did Quarles spell it? So there was still Lewlyn. And there was Larry still. So he would kind of squeeze in between them, if he ever did. Make up a troika. Nah. And he wouldn’t know how to break down the barrier anyway. If he couldn’t when he lay next to her in the same bed, when would he have the gumption? All he had about a career as a writer was just a bunch of hallucinations, his usual muzzy fantasies. Leaving his briefcase on the kitchen table of Mom’s empty kitchen, he tripped lightly down the dingy stairs. Fishing the nickel out of his pocket, he crossed the street, entered Biolov’s, twirled his hand in greeting at Joey Shapiro behind the counter. Joe was the younger son of Mrs. Shapiro on the same floor, and now a longtime Biolov’s unlicensed pharmacy assistant. Ira opened the telephone booth’s folding wooden doors and called Edith’s number.

“Ira, is that you? Heavens, I’m dreadfully sorry about what happened. I didn’t offend you, I hope. I wouldn’t offend you for the world.”

“Oh, no. It’s just a—” He shrugged at the transmitter. “It wasn’t your fault. If I barge in like that.”

“You’re always welcome. You know that. I was hoping you’d be with Larry when he came over. I don’t know how I could have made amends. Or somehow — indicated — I was with Lewlyn.”

“I know. I heard him.”

“You did? One of those utterly meaningless things still continuing. You must have gone away thinking I’m a perfect fool.”

“No. I just figured.”

“I’d made up my mind I wasn’t going to break my heart a second time. And just when I do, wouldn’t you know this silly thing renews — only it’s far from silly.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh. Can you come over? I miss not being able to talk to you terribly, Ira.”

“What d’you mean? When?”

“This afternoon, for a few minutes.”

“Today?”

“Yes. Can you? I’ve gotten so dependent on you.”

“Well, if you want me to.”

“Very much.”

“All right. I’m in the street already. I’ll take the subway.”

“You’re a treasure.”

Utterly meaningless. Ira mulled over her words as he directed his purposeful stride toward Lexington Avenue. At the corner of Lexington, he turned right to 116th Street. Less of a walk. What did utterly meaningless signify? It meant that she didn’t expect anything to come of this, what d’you call it? Liaison. That was what it meant. What the hell, he laid Stella every chance he got; he wasn’t going to marry her. It was what he was telling himself a couple of weeks ago — that Surfeit Sunday, he could call it, the way goyim, gentiles, called a certain Tuesday — before Lent? After Lent? No, before Lent, Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Schmaltzy Tuesday. And what else? Maundy Thursday. What the hell was Maundy?

How the stores had all proliferated along the avenue, now that there was a subway station on 116th Street. It was just Pop’s bad luck that he had invested in a delicatessen on 116th near Lexington too soon, before the subway was built. He might have prospered afterward.

Ira descended the subway stairs, wedged his jitney into the slot, and bulled through the turnstile to the platform. What he should be thinking about was Edith’s saying meaningless — meaningless what? Meaningless pastime — oh, no, she didn’t say that; she said utterly meaningless. That was it. It could only mean one thing: it was just pastime, just as she had said. Lewlyn was betrothed, fancy word, to the other woman in England. That was what it meant. So the way was open. Wow. He entered the uncrowded downtown train. So he wasn’t wrong. Destiny was destiny. Jesus, how would he do it then? She said he was a treasure. So what should he do? Lie to her? Say he had never done it, but wanted to do it with her. He liked her, dearest person he knew. She was so fond of him too, valued his friendship, she said. So he — he needed, like Lewlyn, like Lewlyn’s Greek idea of intimacy consummating. Ah, hell, he couldn’t. He was sure she would, but he couldn’t. Jesus Christ. Edith pulling up her knees, drawers off, pussy out, bare-ass. He couldn’t. He couldn’t think of her that way. Delicate, refined, Ph.D., professor of English literature, a professor. That was the trouble. .

II

Open-mouthed, aware momentarily that he had lapsed into total unawareness, he listened to Edith.

She had suspected she might be in for trouble, Edith said, when she was four days overdue. She had always been so regular. But now she was certain, after the examination by Dr. Teragan. There could be no doubt about it: she was definitely pregnant. “It’s so strange,” she said. “I feel so blithe, and yet I’m terribly concerned. Abortions are no joke, Ira, and it looks as if I may have to go through one.”

“Why?” he asked numbly.

She had tried everything else, she explained. Everything that might bring on menstruation, chamomile, angelica, even castor oil. Of course, what she was really trying to do was to bring on miscarriage, but nothing had worked. She was lavish with particulars; feminine and arcane, they agitated rather than edified: there might be all sorts of complications from an abortion. Even with the best of them, when one had money enough to have them done by a doctor, they were illegal, and abortionists risked their licenses to perform them. Also because of the pressure on the physician, and the conditions of secrecy under which he performed the operation, sterility might be neglected; hemorrhaging and infections might result, and often did. With lagging and uneasy attention, Ira interrupted only once: that was when she said, “I can imagine how risky these back-alley ones must be.”

“What are back-alley ones?” he asked.

“When they’re done by midwives or other nonprofessionals.” She laughed ruefully. “What women have to go through.” And because the doctor did risk his license, the fee he charged for an abortion was high. And that brought on another round of problems, problems centering on money, or the lack of it, and why: “I can ill afford the expense of an abortion right now,” she said. “It comes at such a dreadful time. I ought to send my sister something for the child’s birthday. Something, now that she’s divorced. Her husband is deliberately delaying alimony. He has plenty of money. He was law partner of Woodrow Wilson’s secretary. But that’s his way of getting back at Leona. And of course, she’s a fool when it comes to managing her affairs. Father is in a terrible fix. He can’t help her. He needs help himself. He’s hardly able to carry on his own law practice. And Mother’s life insurance payments are due.” Still, oddly enough, despite all the difficulties and obligations she enumerated, she was animated in feature and in movement, and she laughed — quite gaily for Edith. “If I could, if it weren’t that kind of a male-dominated world, I’d be tempted to go through with it. I really think I would, for the sake of the sensation of well-being. I don’t imagine it lasts.”

“Go through with what?” God, his mouth was wet enough, he had to run the back of his hand over his lips.

“Have the child.”

“You would?”

“Oh, yes. Can you imagine the shock I’d give the head of the English department? Can’t you just see Professor Watt’s face when I became unmistakably pregnant — walked into our faculty office, big with child!” She was jesting, something she almost never did, deliberately breaking out of her patina of solemnity with witticism of her own making. “In some societies one could. I’m sure I could have my own child if I so wished in modern-day Russia, without benefit of a marriage license. But alas, it’s our own sanctimonious America, and I’ll have to have an abortion, and an illegal one too, as if even a legal one were fun. And I’ll have to find the money to pay for it. And that’s going to be a great, great nuisance, to say the least. And I’ll have to find an abortionist. I don’t know any. And I’ll have to turn to Lewlyn. It is his child.”

Ira felt as if all his past worries, worries and anxieties — and memories of anguish — effectively dammed the flow of even simpleminded inference. “So if it is?”

“I think I know exactly the day. I thought it was one of my safe ones.” Her little hands, locked negligently in her lap, tightened. “Oh, I understand. I don’t have the money. Can you imagine what would happen if I didn’t have an abortion — in the impossible event I didn’t? Lewlyn would regard that as willful, deliberate entrapment, do you understand, Ira? As if I were compelling him to marry me. I wouldn’t stoop to that, it goes without saying.” Her brown eyes held steady in determination, and she added: “I no longer want him to marry me.”

“No? I didn’t think of it that way.” How could he tell her in what way he thought of these things? What these things were to him that she dwelled on so freely, things that to him were snarled into such knots and tangles of wrongdoing he could never hope to loosen them. So she was pregnant. Pregnancy pointed toward abortion, abortion to abortionist, abortionist to his fee, to money. That was how it went. He frowned with downcast eyes at the stylized corn symbol on the gray Navajo blanket at his feet. That was how it went, how it ought to go, diagrammatic, honest. His mind felt so caught in its own coils — no, struggling with its own coils, trying to free itself, to see, see what? Objectively, no, more than that: see himself oppositely, from the woman’s point of view — Edith’s view — his mirror image in his own head. “Does Lewlyn know?” he groped.

“Not yet.”

“No?”

“I wasn’t certain myself until I wrote you.”

“No.” Again, Ira felt compelled to resort to the back of his hand against his moist lips. “I don’t know how it goes. I just feel scared.”

“You’re very sweet,” she said. Voice and feature combined in endearment. “I knew I could turn to you. No, it’s not all that dangerous,” she reassured. “There’s always a chance of infection, of course. And bleeding. The nastiest thing is the illegality of the whole business. And that’s not very comforting. But most people walk out of the doctor’s office after a few hours’ rest not too much the worse for the experience. I suppose because I’ve never had an abortion I’m less fearful about it than perhaps I should be. What worries me most at the moment is the financial aspect of it. As I say, Lewlyn will have to take financial responsibility for that, or part of it. I don’t expect there will be any trouble on that score. Marcia and her friends can undoubtedly put him in touch with a competent abortionist.” Seated on the gunnysack-cloth-covered couch, with her back to the wall as always, she tugged absently at the ash-gray hem of her skirt, toward trim, silk-smooth calves. And as absent as her act, her mien: “Irony is, I no longer care.”

“No? When we came back from the ship, last spring, I asked you, why did you have to do it? You explained. Love was that way. You wouldn’t be denied the beauty of its ending. Something like that. You said you were — you weren’t wise.” Ira gesticulated. “So why did you begin again?”

“I can’t resist another’s need.” She smiled placatingly.

“But everybody needs.”

“I do too. I need to be reassured in my insecurity with men. I mentioned Louise Bogan to you, I remember. I have a feeling of inadequacy with the typical masculine male, the kind of thing she doesn’t have. I have to shore up the feeling that haunts me of not being entirely — not being properly a woman.”

The perplexity on Ira’s countenance must have been graphic; her delicate lips formed into tender sympathy. “I don’t suppose I make too much sense.”

“Not yet, but that’s probably me.”

She laughed outright.

“No, I don’t mean that,” Ira hastened to amend. “I mean, I’ll think about it. That’s how I figure things out. I go over what somebody said. Over and over. And then there’s a kind of message comes out of it.”

“I know. You’re remarkable. I’m going to tell you something,” she said after a brief pause. “Something I’ve never told anyone else. It’s something in the nature of a confession. It’s the other side of what I just said about not being able to resist another’s need. It needs to be said, so you won’t think I’m all magnanimity, I’m all altruism. In other words, I have my wicked side.”

“You? You have a wicked side, Edith?”

“Why did I begin again? It’s my secret way of evening scores. With Marcia, with Cecilia. I guess Marcia would see it in her typically anthropological way. We’re all apes, you know. It’s a female’s way of evening scores, and not a very nice one. I’m going to have to pay for it too.”

“I just hope it comes out all right.”

“Yes. But I’m much tougher than I seem.”

“I hope so, Edith. I hope I can help, but I don’t know how.”

“You have already. A great deal. As long as you don’t become impatient with me.”

“No. Gee.”

“You’ll call me? Often. Do you have enough money?”

“Enough? A whole nickel?”

“I don’t want you to go without. Ira, you’re very dear to me.” She slid forward, and pretty above the knees too, stood up.

Ira did too.

“I guess I’ll go.”

“I won’t let you go unless you let me help you — for all the help you’ve given me.”

He was all too familiar with the maneuver. “I haven’t! I haven’t given you any help,” he protested — pro forma. “You’re gonna need the money yourself.”

“Not to that extent. I need you more. Please. I know how little allowance you get.” She extracted a five-dollar greenback from her purse, tendered it.

“You keep tempting me, Edith, and I can’t resist.”

“Don’t. You’ll hurt my feelings.”

She could look so winning at some moments, moments like these, the gleam on her olive skin, her brown eyes appealing, she’d get him started, when it was the furthest thing from his mind: maternal, that was it: she wanted to take care of him. Maybe because she was pregnant. He took the five dollars from her, guiltily, yet with a sense of sheepish inevitability. Rumors of the future could petrify you where you stood between the dark piano and the dark tapa on the door. “Thanks, Edith.”

“How are courses going, Ira?”

“Huh? ‘Orful,’ as Mom would say. The only thing I get anything out of is Milton.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah. What vowels: Ophiucus huge. Makes you drool.”

“I may get to work on an anthology of modern poetry — after this is all over.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“It’s Professor Watt’s idea, his and the publishers. They believe I ought to have a textbook for my course. You can see why.” She inclined her head pertly. “I’ll get very little out of it, either in money or glory. Do you think you’d care to help? I have a feeling I could use your help once it really begins to take shape.”

“Me? How? I can spull good, that’s all.” He chortled.

“Indexing, acknowledgments, and other chores. How’s your cold, by the way? You seem to have recovered.”

“I did. I got over it a long time ago.” He moved, self-conscious and awkward again, reached for the doorknob, fell silent a second peering at the dark tapa. “I wish your troubles didn’t amount to more than my cold.”

“I’d be glad if they didn’t. Unfortunately it’s not one of those things that goes away by itself.” She extended her hand.

And for the first time in his life, he felt like kissing somebody’s hand. She was so kind, so fond, so brave in the midst of trial, you had to bow before her. It didn’t seem artificial, lifting her tiny hand to his lips. It seemed as if the act were already presaged, performed in space. She raised her other hand toward her bosom. .

He glanced at the top of his yellow typescript, his notes, prepared years before. Nearly two decades ago he had attempted a first draft, on his Olivetti manual, with much prompting from dear friends, when his hands could still stand the impact of the keys. Now he knew he would never finish. Fortunately, the holy sages of his people relieved him of the obligation: “You are not required to finish,” ran the Talmudic dictum (as if it could be otherwise). A posthumous novel that might never see publication, floppy disks that might never be printed into paper copies.

His thoughts returned to Edith. And when I crumble who will remember the lady of the west country. Who could remember now, so many years after, decades after, why he had paid a visit to Mamie’s so late in the evening? Had he also been to Edith’s? Had he just left Edith’s, and on impulse on the way home gotten off at the 110th Street station on the Lenox Avenue line? Or had he just gone mad with craving for a piece of ass, vulgar as he thought of it, burning within? Need, desire, lust that had driven him out of the house and along the tract from 119th and Park Avenue to 112th west of Fifth. Skip to my loo, my darling. Memory held a kind of detritus, an intimation, that he was coming from somewhere, perhaps Edith’s, keeping him informed of the latest developments of her pregnancy, or the steps being taken to abort it, the appointment made for her by Lewlyn with the abortionist, the place, the fee. Was it twenty-five dollars? Or was that some figure that merely stuck in his mind for some reason? Still, twenty-five bucks was no mean sum in those days, a week’s pay (after all, Ira had earned about twenty-seven dollars for a fifty-six-hour work week in the subway repair barn). It would be ironic if his vestigial memory was correct: if he had actually come from a visit to Edith’s to Mamie’s — and hence called on Mamie so much later than usual. Ha, where the hell had he come from?

He had sought the answers to some of these questions with Marcia over twenty years ago at a luncheon in New York. “Once in the evening at Edith’s. .” Ira lunged heavily into the subject, hesitated for lack of preamble, and tacked into generalities. “I want to point this out first, the shock the uninitiated receives simply because he was unacquainted with the nuances, or hadn’t yet learned the—” he gesticulated erratically—” the amenities of the culture into which he was being inducted.”

“The manners?” Marcia sipped her martini.

“All right, the manners,” he acquiesced. “You and Edith were engaged in a tête-à-tête, when I came calling — unannounced and inopportunely, as I realized as soon as she opened the door. Do you remember that?”

Marcia gazed at him steadily from the other side of the table. Basilisk, the fearful alertness of the blue eyes behind her eyeglasses. “I’m not sure.”

“Then it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t be able to restore the situation for you. It was way back in the twenties. So there’s no point to the question I wanted to ask you.”

“I remember being at Edith’s one evening with you and Lewlyn and your friend Larry.”

“No, Marcia, that must have been some other evening. Before this. I recall one of Edith’s soirées when you had just heard Heisenberg’s lecture on his theory of indeterminacy. You gave us the benefit of what you had heard.”

“I believed it implied the existence of free will in the universe. And gave indirect proof of Christian theology. It implied the Christian concept of a deity—”

“But that’s not what I’m coming at,” Ira wrenched himself loose. “The occasion I’m referring to was when you and Edith were alone. Or you had been until I arrived. And you just said something to Edith — as you were pulling on your gloves — about her having enjoyed Lewlyn while she could.”

“I remember reminding her that he was irrevocably pledged to Cecilia.”

“Was that it?” Ira prompted.

“Just to make sure she had no illusions her possible childbearing would alter the situation. I don’t think she did. I believe she said, ‘I’m going to miss him. He’s such a wonderful lover.’ And I said, ‘France is full of wonderful lovers, Edith.’ And she answered with a kind of pretend wistfulness: ‘But I’m not in France.’ Is that what you mean?”

“Ah, that’s what I remember! Her saying to you with a smile: ‘But I’m not in France.’ It seemed so apt.”

“Were you in the apartment at the time?”

“Inconspicuously. Behind a book or a magazine.”

“Strange. I don’t remember. I don’t have any blocks in my memory either. Lewlyn does. But I don’t.”

“Lewlyn does?”

“Oh, yes. Many.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I hope to see him soon.”

“I warn you, be careful. His memory has become very patchy. Do you have his address?”

“Yes, thanks. Anyway, there you both were speaking so casually, so lightly, as if over a trifling matter. Do you remember what you said to her on leaving?”

“Not exactly.” Marcia paused long enough for the waitress to set down the bowl of steak tartar she had been ordered to bring for her, and the omelette for Ira. “I may have said I’m afraid this will have the opposite effect: of terminating the interim affair.”

“Ah, then you did! That’s my point about different cultural nuances, the shock they transmit to the uninitiated on recognition.” Ira wagged his finger at her, conscious of the irony of seeming to enlighten the most celebrated social critic of their time. “Do you know what Edith did as soon as you said goodbye, and closed the door behind you? She burst into tears. I was never so surprised in my life. I felt as if I were profaning a rite — or being initiated into one. In my tradition, when feelings got wrought up to that pitch, imprecations were exchanged, insults hurled, sometimes blows. Here, antagonisms were so rarefied I never sensed them. Cultivated spoofing, I thought.”

Marcia’s countenance betrayed rue — not penitence — rue, that she might have caused undue distress to one who nevertheless merited reproof then, but was now dead. Marcia said nothing for a moment, but sank her fork into the rubicund mound of steak tartare before her. “I may have been a little forthright,” she said. “That’s quite possible. I’m not ashamed to admit I never did approve of Edith’s dealing with men. They were anything but restrained. In fact, very nearly, well, very, promiscuous. I suppose my resentment showed. We used to say that sex with Edith was an extension of hospitality.”

“You did?” Ira grinned at the neatness of Marcia’s epigram. Trust Marcia; she could epitomize things more pithily than anyone else. “I was once crude enough to recite to her a list of her lovers. She burst into tears. Boorish of me.”

“Why, she even seduced my younger brother,” Marcia said in a tone bordering on vehemence.

“Oh, she did?” Ira congratulated himself that his guile had paid off.

“It didn’t hurt him any. But I was furious at the time.”

Ira addressed himself to his omelette. “I must say that he wasn’t on my list.”

III

It was a raw, sodden afternoon in November when Ira left the shelter of the Christopher Street subway kiosk — and left behind the more prudent passengers, lingering on the top steps, anxiously studying the lowering outlook for some sign of abatement of the rain. He set out as fast as he could toward Morton Street and Edith’s apartment, driving himself through cold, slant flurries, and over street rill and puddle, yet he still arrived with shoes soggy and dripping, and topcoat drenched through to the jacket shoulder. Just as well he had decided to stow his briefcase in his locker for the day; would have been one more thing to lug through the rain. Tomorrow was Friday anyway, and he had only one class that day, Culture and Education. He would read the damned assignment sometime in the morning. Or try to. Enough to get by.

It was actually interesting stuff, if he gave it a chance, but he didn’t. He let his brain turn to concrete when he opened a text in education. He didn’t give a damn. How the hell was it that Larry could stand up in class and palaver with Professor Elkins minutes on end, as if the rest of the class didn’t exist, or was an audience, about the effect on the Renaissance of Vittorino da Feltre’s theories of education — with a bewitched Professor Elkins? Just the reverse of the way things had been in that elocution class long ago — everything seemed long ago.

In black-and-white herringbone skirt, and finely knit black sweater, a wanly smiling Edith admitted Ira into the apartment. But no sooner had she done so than she sat down with an air of constraint, hastily, in her usual place on the gunny-cloth-covered couch, her back to the wall. Perhaps it was the black sweater that made her look paler than usual, or it may have been after she told him about her condition that he thought so in a kind of instant retrospect. She was her considerate, solicitous self: “Heavens, Ira, you didn’t tell me when you called you had no umbrella and no rubbers. You’re soaking. You’d better take off as many layers of those wet clothes as you can. And your shoes and stockings.”

“I wear socks.” Dripping fedora in hand, he stood raptly before the fire in the steel basket of the fireplace. “Boy, you got a fire going, Edith. That’s really nice.” He removed his topcoat, approached the hearth. “Gee.”

“You’re sopping wet. Ira, please take off your shoes, dear. You’ll catch your death.”

“Yeah? I don’t mind.” He sat down on the wicker armchair — which snapped disconcertingly under his weight. “I mean, I don’t mind taking off my shoes. . my socks too. . What d’you call that kind of coal, those big chunks, do they have a name?”

“Cannel coal.”

“Cannel coal?” He looked from fluttering flame to Edith, and back at flame appreciatively. “I wonder why?”

“I had the janitor bring them from the man across the street. It’s such a dreary day. I’ve been so cold.”

“Yeah? It’s so cozy. Only thing is, it’s expensive, I bet.”

“Moderately. But on occasion—” Smiling, in obvious discomfort, she thrust her legs out stiffly over the edge of the couch. “I thought I’d splurge.”

“Yes?” Shoes in one hand, socks in the other, Ira stood up. “Mind if I spread these on the radiator for a while? I bet they’ll start steaming too.”

“Please don’t stand on ceremony — after all these years. You can take your trousers off and dry them if you want to.”

“Oh, no! I just want to dry the socks. The shoes—” He flapped his hands in token of hopelessness. “They’ll take all night.”

“Yes? As long as that?” Again, there was no mistaking the stiffness with which her back slid up erect against the wall behind her — and the way her neck became rigid. “I had no business letting you come in all this weather. But I did desperately want to talk to you—” She laughed weakly. “As always.”

“That’s all right.” Ira sat down, tried rubbing toes together. “In front of this fire, after wading through all that rain, it’s like a reward—” He turned to look at Edith again, and stopped: something about her appearance he wasn’t taking into account, something amiss. He could feel his brow furrow as his gaze became intent. “You all right, Edith?”

“Not at the moment, I’m afraid.” She grimaced uncharacteristically, more in annoyance with herself than in pain. Still, the way she shifted her body on the couch bespoke extreme discomfort.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve had the abortion.”

“When?”

“This morning. At about half past ten.”

“Pete’s sake, you let me talk about socks and shoes, and you’ve had an abortion? Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve canceled classes. Tomorrow too probably. I called up the secretary of the English department—”

“What does the doctor give you? Does he know?”

“She.”

“All right, she. Does she know?”

“I’m to see her tomorrow morning again. It’s bearable. I’m sorry I’m so — conspicuously uncomfortable.” She grimaced again. “The doctor scrapes the inside of the uterus, scrapes the embryo off. It’s like an induced miscarriage—”

“I know. You told me.”

“Of course, there’s some internal hemorrhaging—”

“And as much pain as that?”

“That’s what worries me.”

“No wonder you keep moving around.”

“I just hope there are no complications. Infections and that sort of thing.”

“No.” Ira was silent, his own helplessness manifest. “Can I do something? Can I get you something to eat?”

“Oh, no. Thanks. I’ll have a cup of canned soup later. I’m not altogether helpless; I just feel awful.” She smiled bravely. “I’m sorry. I must look like something the cat dragged in.”

“Oh, no. What’s the difference?” Ira felt oppressed by the sheer gravity of the event, oppressed, compelled to undivided focus. “Infections. That’s something to worry about.”

“Oh, I’ll be all right, I’m sure. There may be a few more complications than usual.”

“I hope you’re wrong. Anybody with you? Anybody coming? I mean Lewlyn.”

“No.”

“No?”

His fists struck both thighs. Thoughts slipped one past the other in his mind, rendering all opaque. Jesus, he could pass judgment — or he could feel disapproval — freely about Lewlyn. Real indignant. The night the Yankees won the series, he and Stella, Murderers’ Row, all right.

“You’re an angel to bear with me this way,” said Edith.

“Oh, no! Gee whiz.”

“You are. You’re the only one I care to see.” Her small hands in her lap, slack torso against the wall, brown eyes very large in the sallowness of pallid olive skin. “I’ve finished with all my lovers, I’m glad to say.”

All? Ira made no attempt to reply. The word all bulked in his mind, too unwieldy to budge.

“To make matters worse, Larry was here yesterday. That was quite a session.”

“Yesterday? He didn’t say anything to me.”

“Hardly surprising.” Nuances never found him prepared: Hardly surprising. “He came to resolve certain doubts he had about his mistress. About me— Are you in a draft?”

He had sneezed. The current of air flowing close to the floor had cooled his bare feet. He eased his sopping pants cuffs away from his shins.

“I’m all right.”

“Here, put this cushion over them.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“Please, lad, I don’t want you catching another cold. I have a blanket somewhere—”

“That’ll be fine. That’s enough.” He got up with forestalling haste and took the cushion she proffered, went back to the wicker armchair, and snuggled his toes under the velvety cover.

“That’s plenty.”

“You sure? I can’t tell you how guilty I felt about your last cold.”

“Nah.”

“Larry felt that our relationship was no longer the same as it had been, that I no longer loved him, that he was no longer as dear to me as he had been. I no longer gave him the kind of encouragement I once had. He sensed my indifference. He sensed all kinds of changes had taken place between us — all of which was true. And then he asked me point-blank: was I having an affair with Lewlyn?” Edith straightened her back again. “I said I was—”

“Yeah, but—” Ira interrupted impulsively, mechanically. “You said it was over.”

“I said I was — deliberately. I might have added ‘had been,’ but I didn’t.”

“No?” How complex the form of those delicate lips in the face across the room now seemed.

“On the eve of an abortion, I no longer felt like coddling him. Perhaps I was a little hardhearted. But he seemed to have recovered very well from that one incident involving his heart, and it was time he knew the truth. He didn’t own me; he couldn’t possibly own me. I didn’t tell him he’d become too commonplace for words. I did tell him I was pregnant — there was no possibility in the world the child was his. Not the least. And for very obvious reasons. For very obvious reasons.”

Ira’s attention sheered away. There it was again: the cramped synopsis of cat on the wall, and the shriek, and the bunny-hugging—

“Cruel of me to tell him, because he would certainly know as much. I told him I was sure the child was Lewlyn’s. Oh, we had quite a session. I didn’t tell him how much I would rather have the child than go through an abortion. I didn’t want to hurt him any more than I could help. Good heavens, if only there were a man who saw fit to marry me and give the child color of legitimacy—” Her pallor increased, her large brown eyes became protuberant and her countenance resentful.

“I wonder what I would have done if I were a man who loved, or thought I loved, a woman who was pregnant by another man — would I feel enough protectiveness to overcome my jealousy or vanity? I wonder. I think I would. I did as much for a friend once with much less at stake. But I really shouldn’t complain. I was fortunate.”

“Fortunate!” Ira could hear his own Yiddish intonation.

“Larry ranted at me: I was promiscuous, I was loose. I was unfaithful. All sorts of rubbish. Fie on thee, I thought: I told him I was due to have an abortion tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Ira felt the momentary throb of headache, as if he had gulped down too much ice cream. “You mean today?”

“Yes, of course. Just what I expected happened. He was through with me. I didn’t deserve his love.” She found solace in a deep breath. “Thank heavens he won’t be too hurt. He won’t hurt himself. At least, I’m sure of that: the one thing I was so afraid of. What a relief that is!”

Her pallor had increased, ashy; her solemn brown eyes bulged; her shoulders drooped. He wasn’t following her.

“Maybe you shouldn’t talk anymore,” Ira pleaded. “Listen, I’ll stay around till you go to bed. Whatever you want.”

“No, I’d rather forget the pain. Please. If you don’t mind.”

“Yeah, but maybe it’s no good for you.”

“Oh, no. It is. Wait till you hear why: he slammed the door when he left. Larry actually slammed the door. I knew then he had protected his ego. He was safe.”

“Oh.”

Ira turned his chilly feet toward the fire for a second or two. Tongues of flame rising from the blocks of coal inaudibly mulled the thought in warmth and color: so that was how she knew: the guy slammed the door. The guy was sore, so he slammed the door. He slammed the door, so he was safe. The gray rain pattered hard against the window when Ira faced Edith again.

“So he’s through with you?”

“Oh, yes, he’s through.” She spoke with such animated disdain it approached derision. “His undefiled love for me is at an end — poof! But what I’ve been through — what I’m going through this minute — is nothing.”

“You hurt?”

“I hurt like fury.”

“I’m so sorry, Edith.”

She laughed — and wept. Ira sat quietly, wondering what to do next. Pity, he heard a block of coal shift in the basket grate behind him: pity. The fire somehow felt good at his back. Pity was consumed into comfort, oxidized into warmth. Why, let the stricken deer go weep; the hart ungalled play. Yeah, he had willed it all. But what could he do?. . Just sit there, socks drying, woman weeping, Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth, murie sing cuccu. In a little while, the rain would let up a little maybe, but it wouldn’t matter if it didn’t. He couldn’t console her, he couldn’t help her. What it must feel like with your insides scraped — about where would the uterus be in him? Belly-button height, or lower? Imagine it rubbed against a grater, Mom’s riebahsel. Well, he’d get his socks, and see what she said: whether she wanted him there any longer, or wanted to be alone with her suffering.

He got up from the creaking chair and went to the radiator. Her gaze followed him; drearily, she wiped the copious tears on her cheeks with dainty handkerchief. “I bet you hate the sight of everybody who wears pants,” Ira ventured.

“Not quite everybody.” She held the damp ball of handkerchief in her lap. “Are you going out in this?”

“I think I better.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“No, it isn’t that,” he protested the implication of his deserting her. “If you want me to stay — or do something.”

“You’ve borne with me quite long enough.”

“Nah.”

“I’m a little ashamed of myself, as usual. I ought to be able to stand this, without having to weep on your shoulder.”

“It’s all right. Boy, these socks are nice and toasty already.”

“At least one good thing has come out of the whole sorry mess: a harmless end to a long-drawn-out, silly affair. I don’t think you’re likely to see Larry here again very soon.”

“No,” Ira agreed. “I guess not.” Curious, how the past coalesced into a kind of opaque introspection that marked the end. “Could I get you a drink, Edith? Would you like something? I think my socks are pretty dry by now. I could go out to a restaurant.”

“No. Thanks. I’d like some tea. Would you?”

“Yes, sure. How do you make it? I saw you use a teapot. You just put the tea in it? I mean, at home, Mom makes a kind of essence. It’s separate, and you add hot water.” Was his garrulity welcome to her, he wondered: she sat so passively enduring pain. “We have tea when we have meat for supper. If you have coffee, you can’t have milk in it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I only learned here you can drink coffee black. So what do I do?”

“There’s a teaball in the drawer of the kitchenette. I think I ought to stay quiet.”

“Oh, yeah, I’ll find it. I’m the champeen finder of teaballs. Which drawer?”

“Usually, it’s in the one on the left — unless Dorotheena changed it when she cleaned.”

“Then it would have to be on the right. Hmm!” Why did he feel compelled to clown? “My inferences—” he wagged his hand—“nobody can match them. Except when I have to find something. I’ll need hot water, right?”

“Yes.” Was that a wan smile she tried to retain through a troubled shifting of her body? “About half-fill the copper kettle. And no more tea than half in the teaball. I use much less. I like it weak. I’m afraid you’ll have to rummage in the shelf above the sink for the package of tea. Can you find it? I keep it up there with the coffee and the Grape-Nuts.”

“Oh, yeh, yeh.” He held the copper kettle under the gushing brass faucet in the closet kitchenette. And after he had lit the flame on the two-burner gas stove and set the kettle on it, he hunted for the other articles. He found them also. Finding them was no great trick, since utensils were few, and the place was so small. “You going to want some toast? I see there’s slices of package bread here.”

“No, thanks, dear, I’d better not. I’ll consider myself lucky if the tea stays down.”

“Is that so? It hurts that much?” He couldn’t help noticing the gray cast over her olive skin. “I’ll sit down where I can keep my eye on the kettle.”

“Make some toast for yourself, if you like. There’s marmalade.”

“No, I’ll spoil my supper. I’ve got to have an appetite like a wolf, or I don’t eat. And then Mom moans and groans— Wait a minute: you want me to stay? I mean it: I can stay as long as you like.”

“No, thanks. It’s sweet of you, Ira, but I’ll be all right. I’ve just got to get through the next twenty-four hours. I have some kind of painkiller the doctor gave me if I needed it.”

“Well, don’t you need it?”

“I hate to take it. It has morphine in it, I’m sure.”

“Oh, yeh?” Ira glanced at the kettle.

“It’s terribly constipating.”

“Well, maybe you’ll get dreams, like De Quincey. I read that Coleridge was interrupted in the middle of ‘Kublai Khan’—” He chortled at his absurd non sequitur. “I mean somebody interrupted him.” She regarded him with patient indulgence. “Another minute. Maybe I put too much water in the kettle. But I got the teaball in the teapot already. Then I pour about half full of boiling water in the teapot. Is that the idea?”

“Yes.”

“Another minute. My mother never lets me do anything around the kitchen.”

“I’m sure this puts an end to any notion I may have had of having children,” Edith said apathetically, as if at a distance, or talking to herself. “It may not be the worst thing: they take up one’s whole life, unless one is rich and can afford a maid to take care of them. And how often they turn out like some relative one has no use for. Or worse, perhaps, in this case: like the father. But they are adorable as babies.”

Slowly, the extent, the numbness of her dolor communicated itself to him, vacated his masquerade of concentrating on the kettle. He glimpsed for an instant something outside his ken, the frustration of a womanly urge, a woman’s reality, a woman’s woe. And there was nothing to offer in the face of that, only the silence of pity, and nothing commensurable with it either, only the troubled forcing of fingernails against the flesh of fingers — even as he listened. So that was an abortion, a bereavement of her body.

“I no longer expect magnanimity from any man,” she went on in the same hopeless, contemplative tone. “The child might have been Larry’s. There was that chance. But you see what his reaction was. And Lewlyn’s — his was the most truly craven behavior in the whole ugly mess.”

“Yes?” She activated all kinds of memories of his own vile behavior, behavior of a trapped rat. Murder-prone. Yes, but Jesus Christ — swiftly justification welled up — how did Lewlyn’s fix compare to having once possibly knocked up his own sister? Ira listened with averted eyes, glowering with inner contention: and where would he have gotten the dough for an abortion? Whom could he have asked to help him out? Leo maybe? To whom could he have dared confess he’d knocked up his sister?

“Lewlyn reminded me it could have been Larry’s — about which I told him there was almost no chance. Or as he said, that other Palestinian — he meant Zvi Benari, the Zionist agronomist friend of Shmuel Hamberg’s, the man I knew at Berkeley. I told him I hadn’t seen Zvi in months.” She shook her head. “Lewlyn was sure it wasn’t his. In spite of my own instincts, my own certainly, he refused to believe it was his. Isn’t that revealing? You have no idea of the panic he went into about accepting mere responsibility, as if I would take advantage of him — which I would never dream of doing.”

“No.”

It was all so grim. While she softly carried on, he thought that he was himself blood brother to Larry in his evasion of responsibility, and to Lewlyn also — though in different, wildly different circumstances. He might have done the same thing — although once again he justified his panicky evasion by rejecting the analogy: how did this compare to the anguish, the murderous anguish, the high school kid had felt that fall afternoon, an afternoon that twisted him past his tolerance to endure any more.

Ira studied the raindrops under the top of the window, each waiting for reserves to swell it out before sliding down the pane. Her acrimony was different from Minnie’s, wasn’t it, but it was still acrimony. There was no forgiveness if they thought you knocked them up — you were the father, they said — whether you thought you were or not, or whether you knocked them up or no. You were to take care of them, defenseless with child.

Everything he learned, he learned here. A block of coal in the fireplace split, and he turned just in time to see the two interfaces separate, and each half foliate, like thick decks of some kind of black cards. Black cards, blackguards. Life was always in flux, but it always seemed to go to a predetermined end. Why did he think that?

As though she were answering his unspoken question, “You’d believe I was having the abortion solely for his sake,” Edith said. “I was to have the abortion to keep his skirts clean. I shan’t have anything more to do with Lewlyn. You can be sure of that.”

To keep his skirts clean. She had used that expression before, and he never could visualize it. Men didn’t wear skirts, unless she was thinking of Lewlyn, the former priest with black surplice buttoned down to his shoes — and you’d have to be sure the first button matched the first buttonhole — but hell, don’t get yourself sidetracked, don’t bounce back into woozy orbit again.

There it was: I shan’t have anything more to do with Lewlyn. And just before that she had said: You won’t see much of Larry around here. Not Larry and not Lewlyn. And he himself, he, the least and the last, here he was, trying to comfort her after an abortion for which the other two might have been responsible. Just as if he had made it up out of whole cloth, as they said, as if he had made the future jump through the hoop of his fantasy. He almost had, hadn’t he?

When the hell was that kettle going to boil? Should he raise the flame? There — there went the kettle: Boiling. Steaming. About time.

“I wonder if discolored teakettles take longer to boil.” Ira stood up. “Now the hot water goes into the teapot, right?”

“Yes. But be careful of the handle.”

“It’s not too hot.”

“And let the ball steep — oh, a minute will be enough. You can leave it in longer after you’ve poured mine.”

Leave it in a minute longer after he had poured hers. “And in a minute there is time,” he said, effacing involuntary smut with a quote as he pressed the teapot cover in place. Too bad to be bent out of whack forever. “You take sugar?”

“No, thanks.”

“No? I was in a cafeteria once, and the counterman asked the customer sitting beside me if he wanted tea. The guy said tea with a slice of lemon. And the counterman said no, we don’t have any lemon. So the man just shrugged, as if what’s the use? It’s strange how some things remain in your mind forever.”

“You’re priceless.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Oh, you’ve found the paper napkins too?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“I’ve agreed to do the anthology. I have that to do. And I have a couple of narrative poems in mind — narrative poems have a much better chance of being published than lyrics.”

“They do?”

“And I’d love to do them — especially I seem to want to do one about Lewlyn. I have just the right title for it too, I think: ‘The Reassembled Man.’”

“Reassembled?” Ira repeated. “You mean he came apart?”

“He had come apart,” she stressed. “He showed it during my pregnancy. You never saw a man so unhappy. It was as if my pregnancy were the last straw to the breakdown Marcia’s rejection of him had begun.”

“So why is he — I mean, who’s going to reassemble him?”

“It’s the English spinster who’s going to do that: fit him out with new ideals, with a sense of self-worth. Make a new person of him. He hurried frantically to make all the arrangements — with Marcia’s help, you can be sure, to get my pregnancy out of the way. He acted as if his salvation depended on it. And Marcia was only too happy to direct things for him.”

“Yeah?”

“She wanted him punished just enough for his mistake in taking me for a mistress, and then to rescue him. And he was only too happy to have her rescue him, as if he were a baby— I think it’s steeped long enough for me. He is a baby.”

“Yeah? Okay, I’ll pour it.”

“I had no idea how puerile he was. I know now.”

“Yeh? Like that?” Ira brought her tea over. “It looks shvakh, so weak.”

“Oh, no, that’s fine, thanks. You’re an angel. I wish I owned a pair of house slippers big enough for you. Would save your traipsing around in your bare feet.”

“That’s all right. Athlete’s foot fungus isn’t fussy. You don’t want sugar?”

“No, thanks. Just leave the spoon on the saucer.” She reached out tiny hands.

“So how can you drink tea without sugar?”

“The taste really comes through better.”

“And that’s what you want? That’s the opposite of the guy who wanted the slice of lemon.”

“He wasn’t very sophisticated.”

“Oh.”

“If I can manage to get invitations to Yaddo or Peterboro these next two years, I think I could get both jobs done.”

“Which jobs done?”

“The anthology and the narrative poems.”

“Oh.” He poured his own tea, added sugar. “That’s pretty hot, you know. You want me to come over and hold your cup so you can sit up more?”

“Oh, no. I can manage, thanks. I just hate to move at the moment. Do you think you’ll be able to spare Saturdays or weekends to help me with the anthology — once this nonsensical crisis is past? There’s been some money allocated for clerical assistance.”

“Me? I’d be glad to help. But I told you all I was any good at was proofreading. That’s in part because I’m fairly good at spelling.”

“That’s very important, too. Proofreading this kind of work is very important. But there are a hundred other things you can do, tiresome chores, if you wish, that I resent very much, but devilishly necessary in preparing an anthology — as I said before: writing poets or publishers for permissions, making sure of acknowledgments, checking bibliographies — oh, hundreds of things. Even helping me edit my own writing. I tend to be too hasty these days.” She smiled at last. “And discussing ideas with me.”

“Yeah? Ideas? You worry me.”

“Oh, no. Please, Ira. You have as good a mind as anyone.” She sipped cautiously from her teaspoon. “The tea is just right, thanks. I conceive of the book, for whatever worth it will have, as reflecting the realities of city life, and the moods they generate in the poet. And what I badly need, or mainly need, is someone like yourself born and brought up in the city—”

“I was born in Galitzia,” Ira groused in demurral. “And I’m not a poet. I’m scared, Edith. Honest.”

“Oh, fiddlesticks. You spent your entire life in the city,” Edith persisted. “You’ve already shown your grasp of the city mind in that piece of yours that appeared in your college magazine. You’re the ideal person to provide an antidote to the saccharine romanticism of people like myself brought up in the West. I suppose I’m a little better now than I was,” she qualified.

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, now, Ira. The city means so much more to you than it does to me. More in nuance, more in evocation, in metaphor. Do you understand? Especially because you’re still a student, don’t you see? An intelligent and sensitive student.”

The first tinge of liveliness heightened her olive skin, gray and lusterless until this moment. “You’re not a student in some out-of-the-way, self-contained campus, with its dormitories and fraternities and sororities and small-town stores and meeting places. You’re a student in the city, and that’s exactly the kind of student I have in my classes at NYU. Jewish mostly. So you can see how useful you could be — because those are the ones the anthology would be addressing: those living within city blocks, not in the country, not under open sky—”

“Yeah, but you got to have taste, you got to have—” He began rotating his shoulder against a sudden itch. “I mean — what do I mean? — discrimination in poetry, modern poetry. The kind of thing you have when you review somebody’s book of poems for the Times or The Nation. You’ve got that kind of certainty.”

“Oh, I’ll choose the poems, if that’s what’s worrying you. Between the textbook publishers and Dr. Watt, they’re going to want to get out the anthology on a shoestring. It’s only a scheme to put money into their pockets anyway. The anthology, so called, will be required reading in my modern poetry courses.”

“I’ll be glad to help with the — with the, with the mechanics—”

“No, I’d like your opinion about the poems too—”

“Listen, Edith, I don’t have opinions. I like or I don’t like. I’m still just the same as a kid. Sure, I can tell you I like Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ way ahead of his ‘Ulysses,’ but that’s a hundred years ago, and who cares? I like some of Vachel Lindsey, I like Conrad Aiken’s Senlin, I like some of Robert Frost. But what’s the difference? Everybody knows they’re good poems. I learned those from Larry’s Untermeyer anthology. But what I’m trying to say is I would never have known Eliot was a great poet except for you, reading him right here: ‘Prufrock,’ The Waste Land—”

“That’s more than Larry ever learned.”

“Yeah, but Larry’s got ideas. He can tell you why he’s got his opinion of a poem. I couldn’t. You got to have ideas why it’s good, why it’s bad.” Ira raised his voice. “I don’t. Gee whiz.”

“Well, you do have ideas, of course you do! Far better than his ever were!”

“I don’t!”

“Oh, rubbish, Ira. Will you stop that!”

“Parakutskie, that’s the way I should be drinking,” he grumbled.

“What, dear? I’m sorry.”

“Well, if I had a lump of sugar, the way they used to break them off a loaf that came wrapped in blue paper on Passover, on the East Side, I could pour the tea in a saucer and suck it through the sugar. That’s parakutskie. Maybe I wouldn’t get a chance to holler so much — at a sick woman.”

“I’m not really sick.”

“No?”

“No, I intend to go on living.”

“That’s good. I’m really happy. Honest, Edith, I am.”

“I’m much happier too. Will you take my umbrella with you when you go home?”

“Oh, no, my socks must be bone-dry by now. I’ll duck in between the raindrops. I don’t want an umbrella, Edith, I’ll lose it.”

“Then you’ll have to take five dollars. I want you to call me Saturday. And have dinner with me.”

“It costs only a nickel to call, and you’ve had a great expense already.”

“But your call is easily worth five dollars.”

“Oh, yeh? Your five dollars, and my Aunt Mamie’s dollar, I’m gonna get rich.”

“Silly.”

“More tea? There’s more.”

“No, thanks. I’d appreciate it if you took my cup.”

“Oh, yeh, sure.”

“Thanks. It distresses me, Ira, to hear you run yourself down so.”

“Well, I’m just comparing myself with others.”

“And I am too, child.”

IV

Hollow. .

Why he wanted to start the section with that particular word he wasn’t quite sure, nor whether it was appropriate. Probably only roughly appropriate. Jess had flown in Thursday evening from a geophysics conference he had attended in Dallas — and stayed until Sunday morning at the Monterey.

Jess had been with his parents from Thursday night until Sunday morning (actually, Saturday night, for he had arranged to take the shuttle bus from the motel to the airport so early Sunday morning they didn’t see him off). They had had the pleasure of his company Thursday night, and two whole days. And a pleasure it had been indeed. Their son with them, rangy, charming, distinguished in mind and in person, and graying, graying, alas — their little boy was now forty-five — no matter what had happened before, no matter Jess’s now ingrained silences. Perhaps Ira’s son no longer knew how to communicate over the entire spectrum of his rich personality — a cause for sorrow rather than animus: who knew how badly hurt he had been by that first ill-fated marriage of his? Anyway, Ira felt himself doting on his son again, as he had when the grown man had been a child.

Ira had never been allowed to be a child, nor had Ira the father allowed his son. Too late in life Ira had tried to redress the situation, do incompetent penance for blame. He and M had gone shopping one day, and he had bought his eldest son, Jess, a gift, remarking when he presented it how damned few times he had bought his children presents (with which M concurred later, when Ira repeated the remark): a combination digital clock and auto compass, marked down from three dollars to two. (And Ira had received a gift in return, bought at the Albuquerque Museum, which Jess and M visited: a book entitled Pioneer Jews, by Harriet and Fred Rochlin, about the role and career of Jews in the West and Southwest, full of archival photos and interesting accounts of all sorts of prosaic, mercenary, and picturesque Jewish characters, including even a major general, but mainly of resourceful merchant Jews from Germany who emigrated to America in the latter half of the nineteenth century, amassed fortunes there, and often attained high political office, including, in several cases, governorships of the states or territories they had settled in.)

“Maybe you shouldn’t have turned off your word processor,” said M on the same occasion, when the two came back into the kitchen after closing the water valve under the mobile home. “But then you may not be able to work anyway.”

She was right, to a certain extent: right, write, rite. Damn. Griefs of the mobile home owner. It hadn’t occurred to him when Jess was still here, fixing a leak in the little valve in the copper tubing leading to the evaporative cooler — it hadn’t occurred to him that the small pilot light in the heat tape, which was wrapped around the water pipe that supplied kitchen and bathroom, might be on, while the tape itself was burned out. Such had apparently been the case. For when he went outdoors first thing in the morning after breakfast to check on whether the job was effective — after a cold night, with the temperature dropping to the low twenties — although he had let a small trickle of water run from the kitchen faucet as additional safeguard and kept a 100-watt lamp burning under the “trailer,” he noticed damp semicircles on the cement at places where the skirting at the bottom of the mobile home touched the patio. Evil omen. He hadn’t noticed those damp half-moons yesterday, and the night before last had been just as cold. Well, maybe it was just precipitation, cold air coming in contact with the relatively warmer skirting. Ah, man and his fond hopes. So he and M had gone out and raised one of the “hatches” in the skirting in order to ascertain the cause, the origin of the damp places on the cement, in order to verify their hopes that condensation indeed was responsible, and not a break or crack in the water lines.

“No, it doesn’t look very hopeful,” M had said, when Ira pointed to the cement at the edge of their neighbor’s skirting — which seemed bone-dry. If the cause of the wetness had been condensation of cold air on the skirting, why wasn’t her patio strung with half-round splotches? Everything pointed in the right direction: the heat tape was shot, burned out, done for. And so it was. And last night, having assured himself everything was in order, 100-watt lamp on, the holes of the nearby ventilation strip in the skirting duly masked with a sheet of plastic, and a slender stream of water flowing in kitchen sink and bathroom lavatory, he had slept as he hadn’t slept in many a night, the sleep of the just, and he awoke almost pain-free. Fool’s paradise. Well. He had poked his arm into the open hatch, and crooked the elbow so that he could run his fingers along the near edge of the floor, and encountered a kind of shallow channel there, for what reason it was there he didn’t know, but moist it was, more than damp: wet. Hélas!

V

Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ ethereial sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire,

Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to Arms.

“Well, where is he?” Mom’s voice came to Ira as if across the centuries, from the present to the time Milton wrote Paradise Lost. He had finished reading the lesser poems, finished Comus and Lycidas, and begun reviewing the first six books of Paradise Lost for the midterms.

“Who? Pop?” Ira looked up from the page.

“Pop, shkrop, the sire, the shmire,” Mom found satisfaction in the pejorative echo. “You can’t trust him at all.” She opened the kitchen window — on the immediacy of bare wash lines in the cold, darkening backyard. Pushing aside the butter dish and half-full quart bottle of milk in the window box, she brought in the freshly prepared jar of horseradish. Its tarnished metal cap was tightly screwed down over a scrap of brown paper that covered the mouth of the jar. Next she took out of the window box an enameled pot — gefilte fish balls, Ira conjectured — that she had set out in the cold to congeal the sauce into aspic. And finally, she brought into view a glass bowl of fruit compote, prunes and raisins and dried apples. Ingredients of the Shabbes supper, of Friday-night fare, they were as familiar as the pair of solid brass candlesticks on the cloth-covered table.

“It grows wintry,” Mom remarked as the cold draft from outdoors invaded the close air of the kitchen.

“Yeah, well, it’s November, Mom,” Ira agreed. He could almost see the cold air coil itself within the humid, prevailing odor of chicken soup issuing from the large kettle on the gas stove.

“It’s shivery out. Perhaps I shouldn’t have brought the food in yet. Who knows when he’ll come?” She set the compote and horseradish on the sink sideboard, shut the window.

“It’s still early, isn’t it? Not even five.” Ira held aloft his notebook and Collected Poems of John Milton while Mom spread the white tablecloth beneath his elbows. He let his eyes wander over the lines he had just read: Him the Almighty Power/Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ ethereial sky. . What lingo! It made you hold your breath. “Minnie isn’t even here yet,” he said absently.

“Minnie east at Mamie’s on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Three times a week. Have you forgotten?” Mom set the brass candlesticks on the tablecloth. “She goes to your college at night.”

“Oh, yeah.” Minnie had enrolled in a business course and a speech course given in the evening at CCNY. And to save shuttling from west to east from her job, and rushing through supper at home, and then back again from east to west to CCNY, she had arranged with Mamie to have supper there the nights she attended classes. Thus she could stay within easy reach of the West Side subway.

“It’s growing dark,” Mom said. “It’s time for me to bensht lekht.” She planted the pale candles in the candlesticks.

“Go ahead.”

Mom was a wavering demi-agnostic: whenever she referred to God, she invariably added (unless in the presence of Zaida) “. . if there is a God.” Still she blessed the Sabbath candles, bensht lekht, just as she had been taught to do from girlhood. The practice was too deeply ingrained to abandon, but there again, she would often finish the Hebrew prayer by saying: “Why I do this, I don’t know.” Without religious faith himself, a self-proclaimed atheist, an Epikouros, as Pop with his manifold superstitions dubbed his son, Ira nevertheless enjoyed the ritual. He found it touching; the balm of candlelight, the rich, mellow candlesticks, the hush of ceremony awoke in him a remnant of reverence still lingering from childhood. He welcomed the occasion. Maybe it was because it was Mom who officiated at it, and not Pop, that Ira remained solemn and pensive throughout the short invocation, neither condescending nor snide in witticism, as he invariably was when Pop presided over Jewish festivals, especially those that were celebrated a second night: the Rosh Hashanah and the Passover. Above all, he found the second recital of the Passover insufferably tedious. To have to sit through a second time the circumstances of the Exodus from Egypt, a second time consecutively, Pop droning unintelligibly and interminably as he conducted a fuming Ira twice in succession out of Egypt. “This is the bored of affliction” was Ira’s favorite quip, when the matzah was displayed, which fortunately only Minnie understood at first, although after a while Pop took umbrage at his son’s irreverence. Pop became particularly irritated when Ira insisted on repeating the same remark whenever his father’s recitation of the Haggadah reached the page which contained the engraving of Moses smiting the recumbent Egyptian: “Boy, think of all the suffering we Jews would have been saved if it was the other way. If the slave driver smote Moses, and we had settled in Egypt like all the rest of Pharaoh’s subjects. But no, we have to be different.”

Short-throated, her heavy body plodding on swollen, edemic ankles, her bobbed hair thick and graying about her wide, fleshy face, Mom was wearing a freshly laundered, fire-engine-red housedress with white shrimplike curlicues on it and a red bow at the back; she was wearing the freshly laundered housedress l’kuvet Shabbes. She took the box of household matches from the top of the green icebox, brought it over to the table, and extracting a match, struck a light against the sandpaper strip on the side. Broad brow knit, her sorrowful eyes intent, she lit the candles one after the other. Then she blew out the flame on the end of the match and placed it in the ashtray near Ira’s pipe. Covering her face with her puffy, workaday hands, she recited the traditional prayer under her breath and in scarcely articulate Hebrew, so that all Ira could make out were the long-imbued sounds of the incantation that began all Hebrew benedictions: “Baruch atah adonoi elohenu melekh ha oylum. .” And the terminal words, when she removed her hands from before her face: “Uhmein seluh.”

Nine times the space that measures day and night

To mortal men, he with his horrid crew,

Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf,

Confounded, though immortal—

“He could be here an hour ago if he wanted to.” Mom’s words knit into Milton’s printed ones. “How long does it take to clean up after a breakfast-lunch job? To fill the salt and pepper cellars, the ketchup and the mustard bottles, the sugar bowls. He tells me he spends the time in between that and coming home inspecting business prospects. But I know better.”

“Yes?” impatiently Ira skimmed the text for his cue word, found it: immortal. But his doom/Reserv’d him to more wrath; for now the thought/Both of lost happiness and lasting pain/Torments him—

“He slips into a movin pickchehr.”

“Yeh?” Ira looked up again.

“Me he never takes along. I’m a stock, a block—”

“Mom!”

“Ah, that’s right, you’re studying.”

“Well, what else? I’ve got a test, a midterm test it’s called, and it’s being given on Monday.”

“Ah, ah. Forgive me. I chatter.”

“I don’t mind. I’m used to it. But not when you’re talking about Pop. You understand?”

“I understend. But my heart overflows.”

“Yeah, I know. But you upset me.”

“Well, let’s talk about something else. Or do you wish to study?”

“I don’t know. It all depends,” Ira relented. “Just don’t talk about Pop.”

“When Minnie is home, we have a hundred things to talk about, don’t you know, about women’s wear, about rags and relatives, what he said and what she said, about cooking and window curtains. But with you, Ira, I have to unburden myself.”

“Well, please don’t. Or I’ll begin studying again. Maybe I better anyway. I’ve got about a hundred and fifty pages to review—‘review’ means reading over again what I’ve already read before.” He translated the English word into Yiddish, and was caught off-guard by a yawn. “Go ahead.”

“Noo, let’s talk of other things,” Mom said resignedly. She turned off the burner under the frying pan in which she had been frittering croutons in chicken fat. Next to the soup pot was a discolored old bean crock, and after removing the last of the croutons, she drained the chicken schmaltz into the crock. He ought not to be watching her, Ira told himself; he had more important things to do. Nor should he be talking to her either. He had learned long ago that the euphoria of Friday afternoon wasn’t as far from the grind of Monday morning as the extravagant mirage of the weekend made it seem. And the midterm on Milton was only the first of the exams coming up. One in Modern European History. At least two more in the ed courses. Blah. Interim quizzes already indicated that at the rate he was going, by the end of the spring term, he’d still be lagging behind a credit or more toward his B.S. degree at graduation.

No, he ought not to be watching her or talking to her, but he felt like taking a break. Strange, though they were whole worlds apart in schooling, in attainment, and — what was the right word? — in milieu, mental milieu as well as environmental, and there was much, much he could no longer share with her, and much he would never dream of sharing with her, abominations that would have grieved and horrified her, still she was Mom. Her brooding temperament meshed with his as it always had, and did even now, despite his advantages, his college education, his cultivated friends.

She still understood him, intuitively, imaginatively, understood him in the realm of feeling. Unknowingly, she had indoctrinated him into tragedy, given him a penchant for it, the tragic outlook. He recognized that fact, now that he had grasped the rudiments of how to form abstractions, to generalize. She was the source of his tragic bent, and that was their bond.

“Let’s talk of how people work their way up in the world.” Mom took the frying pan to the sink and began wiping the inside with a sheet of Yiddish newspaper. “Agreed?”

“All right,” Ira conceded warily.

“There’s my sister Mamie. She has a new radio. They already had a phonograph. She has a telephone, hot running water, a large apartment with steam heat—”

“Stimma hitta, hotta watta, alavata, talafana,” Ira jeered indulgently out of Joyce.

“What?”

“Oh, I was just joking. So what about Mamie?”

“From a little cap maker, her husband, Jonas, is now a partner in a restaurant. No? And Mamie is a — how do you call it? Superintendent of the house, and gets her rent free.”

Mom attacked the frying pan with a liberal salvo of Rokeach’s scouring powder. “Sometimes I think they guard themselves from me, for fear I might blight their prosperity with the evil eye. But what, think I. Envy you? Never. You’re my sister. Thrive. Prosper.”

She flushed the frying pan under the faucet. “It will have to wait until I do the supper dishes. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Tockin, tockin,” Ira patronized in Yiddish.

“As cold water flows like icicles from our faucet in winter, so my fate is my fate. Not only to be bitterly poor, but yoked to that lunatic.”

“Mom!” Ira warned.

“It’s not true?”

“You said you wouldn’t talk about Pop. You’re going crazy on the subject.”

“Crazy? I?”

“Yeah, lately.”

“God be my judge if I am crazy.”

“All right, then you’re not. I just can’t stand it!”

“He’s crazy!” She had been stung too badly to contain herself. “Who doesn’t know his capers? Through the length and breadth of the waiters’ union they know it. Boss and busboy, who doesn’t know my little Chaim? And patrons too — beyond doubt. This one he will tell, ‘If you’re in such a hurry, why didn’t you come in earlier,’ and the other one who points to the tip left on the table, he will say, ‘If you didn’t take it, nobody else will’—”

“That’s his idea of a joke!” Ira countered.

“A joke? May a stroke fell him. Fortunately, his present boss is a goy, a Bohemian, a decent man, and the patrons are largely goyim. If he had a Jewish boss, and they should come to quarrel, your father would throw crockery at him. Hasn’t he already flung a water pitcher through a mirror? But before goyim he quakes, so he behaves a little.”

“All right! All right, Mom! Save it for some other time.”

“The wonder is I’m not crazy,” she persisted obdurately. “Who wouldn’t go crazy serving such a sentence as I’m condemned to serve living with him? And to the stranger”— she suddenly shifted mien—“he’s a model of meekness. Inoffensive. Tender as a mulberry.”

“I know!” Ira flared up, shouted: “For Christ’s sake, I know!”

He slumped down in his chair, scowled. “If only I’d got away from here and gone to Cornell when I had a chance!”

“Noo, it’s an old story.” It was Mom’s turn to pacify. “Pray, pay no attention. It’s an old story. Nothing to become distraught over.” She came over to the table and sat down.

“No, but you do.”

“Pay no attention. Beside, today is the Shabbes bay nakht, and on the eve of the Sabbath, serenity and peace should hold sway — don’t you know?” Her irony wasn’t lost on him.

“Yeah. Shabbes bay nakht or not, I could kill the sonofabitch.”

“Go, don’t be foolish.” Mom tried to keep her tone light.

“I could. Not only for what he’s done to you, for what he’s done to me. Was there ever such a mean, stingy, screwy little louse. I can’t figure him out, that’s all. You know what? He’s a child. He’s a lunatic.”

“Noo, tockin, tockin.” A tremendous sigh shook her. “What can you do? A loafer he is not. A gambler he is not. He works, he provides. On whose earnings would you have gotten this far into college?”

“On your skrimping you mean, on your quarter a day, the stipend of your miserable allowance. I know the guy. He gives and begrudges, he promises and withholds. It’s the goddamnedest thing, the way he keeps changing his mind. It’s the way he offered to pay my first-year expenses in Cornell, and then reneged. I didn’t want to go anyway. So what the hell was the difference? He would have paid Minnie’s way through college, though.”

“Well, she’s his favorite. A father, a daughter, don’t you know. But your father he still is.”

“Yeah, that’s about all. Tell me one thing, will you — before he comes home: why the hell didn’t you leave him? Now that I’m old enough to understand these things, it would have been better for all of us, for you, for Minnie, for me. I remember his throwing coffee in your face — I still remember it was coffee with milk in it—café au lait it’s called in French. Why the hell did you stand for it? And Minnie and I sat under the table crying when you came to blows — on Essex Street or Henry Street, there on the East Side when he was out of work. Why didn’t you leave him? What the hell made you hang on to the louse? This is America.”

Her face sagged as her heavy fingers stroked the weave of the tablecloth. “Indeed it is America. And I with two children in it, not much more than toddlers. To whom should I turn? Were my father and mother here? No. Nor my kin? Not even one. Not Moe, not Mamie. No one. Believe me, were even Moe here, things would have been different.”

Her features changed, almost as if a ripple passed across them, reflecting some kind of inner debate, an envisaging. “A man like Moe — Morris, my stout, hearty brother. But he had still to arrive in the new land. Then to whom would I turn? If I had clasped my children to me and fled, then to whom and where? A word of English I didn’t know.”

“Well, but it was all Yiddish, all around you. What do you mean?” Ira challenged. “You didn’t need English.”

“You don’t understend. And the shame and the fright? Alone and timid. Well, I had one landsfrau, Frieda — I had more, but I knew only the way to Frieda’s. Did I know the way through streets? I knew only the way to Frieda’s, and she already had consumption. So what other remedy, except to cling to Chaim, to bow the head and cling to my husband?”

“Oh, hell.”

“Verfallen,” she said. “It’s all in the past. Meanwhile I have an ausgestudierteh son.”

“Yeah, ausgestudiert. What I’ve learned you wouldn’t believe. I’d have been a hell of a lot better off, a lot more independent, a lot tougher, if I’d had to go to work like the other kids on the block, after they graduated from public school—”

“But I didn’t want that, a crude toiler for a son. Never!” She raised her head in unflinching, indomitable opposition. “When the midwife placed you on my breast, I blessed you, and I vowed I would have a son schooled in the nobility of the mind.”

“Yeah?”

“And that was the least he owed me, no? A pittance more to further your education. Minnie’s he needed no urging — and as if in spite, fate prevented her. Alas, he’s a peculiar man. There’s no knowing him: one minute he’s proud that you attend college — he brags to the other waiters that he has a son in college — the next minute he chafes at the expense. You’re a never-ending burden; you earn nothing; your idleness is fostered at his cost.”

“Mmm.”

Maybe Freud was all wrong. The confused smattering Ira had picked up about Freudianism jiggled in conjecture. Freud was wrong with his theory of the father’s urge to castrate the son because of sexual rivalry for the mother. The old boy had got it wrong, Ira speculated sardonically. He himself had whet his piece on his sister, had grown up ravening to get in her every chance he had, and even though her dating had made her off limits for several years now, he desired her nonetheless.

It always would hold him, lure his fantasy. Maybe that was the form the Freudian hypothesis about the supposed rivalry of father and son for the mother took. Who the hell knew. Damn. The whole thing was irrelevant anyway, wasn’t it? The relevant insight might be the inherent resentment of the son by the father because of economic reasons. The parent had to support his offspring, as in Ira’s case, had to provide for him a long time before he could expect a return — maybe never get one. Hence the resentment, which Freud translated into sexual rivalry for the mother.

Oh, it was goofy, both views. What about the female child, the daughter? She had to be supported too, until she could contribute her share to the domestic economy of the family, but she contributed early, and wasn’t resented as much — and maybe brought in a fat purchase price at marriage. . They could always drown them, as they did in China. Cut the balls off boy infants, drown the girl infants, sell the boy infants as eunuchs.

The West did neither, of course; neither did Jews. So where did that leave him? With aimless moorings, aimless moonings. One could as easily exploit that selfsame economic resentment of father toward son, and the subsequent sense of guilt on the part of the son toward the father, as the seminal, seminal, yeah, as the seed-need for substantiating that guilt by guilty act, really endowing guilt with justification, as you could by Freudian means. Hail Karl Marx. Maybe the guys in the ’28 alcove had a point with their economic determinism.

The notion elated him: as if he had made a discovery, like — well, say like Copernicus accounting for the motion of the planets, of the solar system, a damned sight better than old man Ptolemy, more simple, more sensible, too, dispensing with all the swarming, silly epicycles.

Extraordinary! In a kind of golden haze compounded of candlelight and rumination, he watched Mom plodding heavily but quietly about the kitchen. From a large paper bag on the washtub utility table she removed the braided kholleh, the appealing Sabbath bread, its ornamental braids on top glistening like sardonyx as she transferred the loaf to a platter. She brought the platter to the dining table near the candlesticks, covered the loaf with a white cloth.

“Everything is becoming so frightfully dear,” she said. “A small bunch of soup greens, five cents, an onion three cents, a piece of chuck meat forty cents a pound.” She went to the stove, lifted the lid on the pot of simmering chicken soup, looked down disapprovingly at the contents. “I cut off all the fat from the hen, but still the broth has a thick layer of it.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I know. He does.”

“Well, I don’t. It’s too damned schmaltzy.”

“I know. I know your American tastes, Ira. Yours and Minnie’s. Do you remember when you once fought over who was to get the heel of Herbst corn bread with chicken schmaltz on it? Chicken schmaltz spread on after it was rubbed with garlic.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind it today, but not in soup. And anyway, try to show up among American people with garlic on your breath.” He chuckled. “Good old knubl,” reverting to the word in Yiddish. “Knubl, knubl, toil and trouble.”

“For your sake I’ll skim off as much as I can.” She brought out a large serving spoon and a carving knife from the drawer in the built-in china closet, placed the carving knife on the table, and proceeded to skim the chicken soup. “So why has everything become so frightfully dear?”

“Supply and demand,” Ira said tersely.

“And what does that mean?”

“More buyers, fewer sellers.”

“And yet I see the same pushcart peddlers when I go shopping on Sunday morning on Park Avenue. The pushcarts are heaped with fruit and vegetables. So much. Still, every housewife with her few dollars stands aghast at the high prices. A cabbage, to make stuffed cabbage, a lowly cabbage, four cents a pound. It’s unheard of, Iraleh. I have to ponder every Sunday where best to spend the little money I have. It’s the truth. It takes me longer and longer to shop.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

“Why?”

“Why what? That I’ve noticed?”

“No. That everything is so dear.”

“Oh.” Ira scowled. “There must be a shortage somewhere, Mom,” he said testily. “Somebody’s cornered the cabbage market. Or all the Yidlekh are suddenly dying for hullupchehs. Has sour salt gone up too?”

“Alles!” Mom said emphatically. “Turn where you will.”

“Damned if I know, Mom. Tell you the truth, I never gave a damn about economics. That’s what they call this subject in college. It has to do with commerce and trade and profits. And of course, money—gelt.”

“I know it. A Jew like you is something not to be believed. A Jew without regard for making money — who hates huckstering, haggling, bargaining — he wriggles like a worm when I go shopping with him for secondhand clothes. Did you ever hear of such a thing? Not to strive for wealth. It’s something rare, rare. How did you lose out? You’re my son. You’re Chaim Stigman’s son. For success in business, my husband would barter his breath. Had he the judgment to match his craving, believe me he’d be a magnate, but he hasn’t. And you care nothing for success. Even Minnie does.”

Mom rested the serving spoon in a dish and came over to the table and sat down again. “Well, where is he? Plague take him. He’s lost himself in some theater.”

She suddenly became spirited and spiteful. “Would he were lost for good. I’d be rid of him. Gotinyoo!” she invoked. And was interrupted by Ira’s exclamation of warning:

“Mom!”

“Forgive me, zindle. I forgot myself. I forgot our agreement.” And after a short space of silence, “Do you know the rent goes up two dollars a month beginning December?”

“You told me.”

“An Irisher, and for no reason he raises the rent. Talk about Jewish landlords flaying the hide off the tenant. An Irisher. You see? The bleak year take him. He doesn’t do the same? Two dollars, on top of the three he already mulcted from us when he tore out a washtub and knocked a doorway through to the toilet and put in electricity. But to paint these decrepit burrows, to daub the kitchen walls with a fresh coat of that green bile, green slop, he calls paint, condemn him to death before he’ll do it.”

“Yeah?” He forgot himself listening to Mom: who could help but surrender to that contralto richness of feeling in which everything she uttered was steeped?

“And you,” her sorrowful brown eyes searched his face, “do you have a few groats on yourself?”

Ira debated with himself for a few seconds while he returned her steady gaze. The last thing he wanted was a donation from Mom. He knew only too well how much and how often she suffered wringing her paltry allowance from Pop.

“I have a few groats, yes.”

“You have, yes,” she mimicked skeptically.

“I tell you I have!”

“From whence have you? Mamie’s alms were a week ago. You don’t think I know?”

“Aw, Mom. For Christ’s sake!”

“Sinful mother that I am, I mean only if you truly need it. I see you have become a personage. You mingle with higher folk than ever I dreamed you would — than ever you dreamed you would. Isn’t that true? Noo, with empty pockets how can you consort with them — those you’ve told me about? Somehow your destiny is there. I see.” She clasped her hands. “Only speak — I hoard for a Persian lamb coat, you know as well as I do.”

“I don’t need it. Thanks.” Ira nodded in strenuous assurance; less than strenuous Mom wouldn’t believe. “I’ve got almost three dollars in my pocket.”

“Verily?”

“Do I have to show you?”

“No, no. Gott sei dank. From where did you filch three dollars?”

“I didn’t filch it. Edith gave it to me.”

“The Professora? Azoy?”

Ira shrugged — noncommittally.

“Aha. I have a gigolo for a son. Cadger!”

“I’m not a cadger!” He had raised his voice. “I’ve spent a lot of time with her when she’s been in trouble—tsuris, you understand? I’ve listened to her complaining. I’ve sympathized with her. She feels I’ve been of service, I’ve done a great favor, done her a lot of favors. She feels indebted. So what am I going to do? She won’t let me go around penniless.”

“You don’t feel ashamed?”

“I don’t know what to feel.”

“But you take it. Noo, bless her for her generosity. What a fine, noble person she must be.”

“She is.”

“Woe is me.” Mom’s sigh would have been stagy in anyone else, but with her, emotion resonated from the depths of her being.

“Why do you say that?” Ira demanded gruffly.

“I already see,” she said.

“Oh, you do? You see what?”

“Indeed, my son.” A sibylline presence, a sibylline quiescence enveloped her as she spoke. “A woman forsaken is like a vine. She clings to whatever will support her.”

“Who says she’s forsaken?”

“She’s not?”

“You make it sound so Jewish.”

“Jewish, goyish, regardless.” When she meditated, Mom’s lips always swelled out in a pout. “How destiny fulfills itself: that you should be on hand, impecunious Jewish youth, out of this poverty, out of this destitute 119th Street, in her need for someone to turn to. Truly, it’s something to marvel at.”

“Mom, will you cut it out? You’re going way, way off. She’s an independent woman: she doesn’t have to turn to anybody; she doesn’t have to lean on anybody. She’s just the opposite of you. She’s self-reliant, they call it in English. Brave. Self-supporting. You should have seen how brave she was after she had an abortion.”

“A what? Oy, gevald! She was pregnant?”

“Well, what else?” Ira could scarcely refrain from yelling. “If she had an abortion!”

“Poor woman! He deserves the gibbet, that rascal.”

“Oh, boy! The gibbet, no less.”

“No? He who toys with a woman’s heart deserves the gibbet. And to get her with child beside.”

“Listen, he didn’t toy with her heart, and he got her an abortionist, it’s called, as soon as she found out. He paid for the whole thing. He paid the doctor.”

“A great boon.” Mom was unimpressed.

“No? You’ve got a short memory, Mom. Don’t be such a saint. You had to lift up your brother Morris. You picked up two-hundred-and-twenty-pound Morris, when you didn’t want another baby. You think I don’t remember.”

“What else could I do with a miser like my husband, tell me?”

“Oh, all right. I wasn’t talking about that.” They were both silent, vexed with each other.

“Don’t forget there were other men around. Larry was there too.” Ira buttressed contention with reminder.

“Larry?” Mom dismissed her son’s plea. “What was Larry to a grown woman? A boy, a comely boy, nothing more. Could she consider him seriously? Go. This Lewleh you call him, this was an adult. Cholera carry him off, but an adult he was. And he gave her to understend he might marry her. You told me yourself.” Mom interspersed words with ominous strokes of double fingers.

“Yeah, but Christ’s sake, we weren’t talking about that!”

“What were we talking about?”

“We were talking about how she could have been pregnant—who made her pregnant.”

“You don’t have to shout. I understand.”

“Yeah, but you’re always winding things around.” Ira gesticulated vehemently. “I just wanted to tell you that he paid for it all.”

“He paid. What are you saying?”

“Cash I mean.”

“All right. A fine man.” Mom halted further discourse in that direction with heavy sarcasm. “Deep into the sod let him go, for my sake.”

“Yeah?”

“The man buys a passage to England — last summer you told me. He knows months in advance where his choice lies. His choice lies with another woman. And he returns and toys with her heart. He deludes her into thinking he is still undecided.”

“How do you know?”

“You told me, no?”

“Well, she knew too. She knew that he had chosen the other woman, the woman in England!” Ira shouted. “She saw a book the other woman gave him: Shakespeare’s Sonnets they were called. Inscribed — you know what I mean: inscribed ‘To our future together’—Ah, what’s the use,” he growled. “You just live in a different world, that’s all.”

“Noo, I’m a Dummkopf, a greenhorn. Not a sophisticate like your Professora. What can I do? I wept these eyes out to enhance your education, to keep you from becoming the common Dummkopf that I am.”

“Aw, Mom, you’re not a Dummkopf. I didn’t say that. I said you lived in a different world.”

“Well, let’s talk further.” Mom directed her sad, searching gaze at him — in challenge. “Would you like? You can tell me. I’m your mother.”

“Like what?” Ira countered guardedly.

“You’ve seen her fondled by other lovers; you’ve seen her kissed and cherished and handled by others. She’s lost her appeal to you, hasn’t she?”

“Oh, is that it? You’re back to the clinging vine again.”

“Don’t sneer.” Once more oracular her gravity: “How old is she?”

“Edith? She’s thirty-two.”

“Undoubtedly thirty-five.”

“I said she was thirty-two!” Ira bristled. “Tsvei’n dreizig! If I say she’s thirty-two, why do you tell me she’s thirty-five?”

“Very well, thirty-two. Eleven years older than you are.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Everything and nothing. I mean only—” Mom groped for words. “Granted she isn’t a clinging vine. Today you are her confidant. But tomorrow? The distance between confidant and lover grows ever shorter.”

“I never measured it,” he sulked.

“No? But I have.”

“Yeah? How?”

“You shared the same bed with her.”

“But I told you! Nothing happened!” Ira again raised his voice.

“Not this time. But she shed tears before you, did she not?”

“Shed tears before me. Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

Mom sighed again. “I wouldn’t blame you if you became her lover — in real earnest: you may go and live with her.”

“Is that so? Thanks.”

“No? What? Live in these gloomy, little crypts, this forlorn coldwater flat of four cells, when you can have better? And in this poverty to have to depend on him, tight-fisted and stingy — do I need edify you — when she already has shown over and over how bountiful she is, how fond of you, no? What do you prefer? My travails, my tears, his hostility, our dearth, the four of us pent up between narrow walls. Or do you crave trudging for alms to Mamie’s on 112th Street once a week? Go to the Professora if you wish. She is kind to you. She is generous. She is refined. That she’s a shiksa and older? That’s nothing, counts for nothing. She would take care of you. I bless her for that. Perhaps she would help you find a path to become someone: a mensh. Who knows? Something other than you are now, a shlemiel. Still, you’re my son.”

“Yeah?”

Mom made no answer. In the silence, Ira heard Pop’s quick, light step entering the hallway outside — and nodded in signal.

“Me and my deafness.” Mom tilted her head in surmise. “Is it he, my paragon?”

“It’s your paragon, all right,” Ira assured laconically.

“L’kuvet Shabbes, my paragon returns. Noo.” She stood up. “Shall I take your books off the table?”

“No. I’ll put them away myself.” Ira arose as the door opened.

VI

Furious with himself. The goddamn drive had locked — wouldn’t budge — and locked him out of over an hour’s work. And as luck would have it — always ill luck became compounded — he had forgotten to release his timer, which he habitually set to tinkle when an hour had elapsed. So he was stuck. He had touched some hexed combination of keys, and the accursed cursor had disappeared from the screen. Well, goddamn it again. What had he been up to? It wasn’t what he was up to that was primary; it was the mood he was in, the emotional setting of his prose that determined the form of the prose. Well, what the hell good was blowing his top, raving and ranting? The frigging thing was lost, down the tube, down the drain, into the empty set. A shvartz yur auf is! Try to repeat what he had said:

Oh, yeah, how well it began — could he recapture it? His introducing first the fact that the sort of backbiting his parents were engaged in was entirely proscribed on Shabbes bay nakht, Sabbath eve, time of serenity, when every Jew was a king, a potentate. And God forgive him now because he couldn’t forget the deplorable wisecrack he was guilty of making: that Pop was a mashed potentato; mawkish verbal incontinence, responsibility for which he wriggled out of by laying the blame at the foot of Joyce. Sing heavenly muse how Mom had reminded Pop that he had blackened the eyes of the son of the master artisan, before quitting the artisan’s employ. And she had gone on to pun that the deed was in keeping with his blacksmith’s calling. Her twitting earned her his harassed glare.

Yet again, but in a variegated fashion, Mom told Ira the familiar story of Pop’s first trip to America. A few days after Pop fled from his apprenticeship and came home, she recalled, he had purloined a sufficient sum from his father’s wallet to pay for steerage passage to America, purloined the cash and absconded with it to Hamburg, port of departure for America. Once in New York, he telegraphed his brother Gabe for additional funds for his fare to St. Louis. Both of these things Pop himself related to Ira years later, laughing at the memory of his youthful misdemeanor. Pop did have a glint of humor — but usually long after the fact. In short, Pop had avoided New York with its sweatshops, its opportunities severely limited to the needle trades, its virulent discrimination against Jews, its crammed tenements, infested with vermin and breeding grounds for tuberculosis and cholera, its teeming Jewish multitudes scrounging and toiling for a living. Instead, he had traveled by railroad coach to the West. The West — where so many Jews in the nineteenth century had already gone, not the hordes of Jews who composed the early-twentieth-century influx from the persecuted, orthodox shtetls of East Europe, with their narrow, rabbinically defined horizons, but adventurous, cosmopolitan Jews of German origin, who settled in the West and in many instances made their fortunes there.

The year in which Pop set out, 1899, was almost like a watershed in time, separating the arrival of the German Jews from that of the East European ones. To St. Louis Pop had first gone, and — again with a laugh — he told how he had backed a cart loaded with scrap metal collected from his brother Gabe’s junkyard over the dock and into the Mississippi. The two had quarreled.

“Oh, with whom didn’t my spouse quarrel?” Mom observed with due redundancy.

Pop had quarreled with his brother, felt sorry for himself, felt neglected, deserted, and lonely. Poor man — he must have been deprived of mother love, youngest in the family, and not regarded as either prudent or shrewd, and he wasn’t. Still, the baby of the family — of about eight or nine children — should have been cherished, but he wasn’t cherished either. How many times had Ira studied his paternal grandmother Rivkeh’s photographic portrait hanging on a wall in the front room: the rigidity, the forbidding rigidity, of her lineaments was such that Ira would think of her later as the Jewish twin of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Deprived of mother love, maybe — to do a little homespun psychologizing — not deemed perspicacious, shrewd, a khukhim, either with respect to money matters or to study. Again, Ira recalled Mom’s saying how delicate in constitution Pop’s next-older brother was, Jacob, and devoted entirely to the study of the Talmud — and how Pop had tormented his weaker sibling, even provoked him into a scuffle. He had mauled Jacob so badly that Pop had to go into hiding for a week in order to avoid a paternal caning. Keeping out of sight during the day, he had skulked in the dark at night outside the house, waiting for his mother to circumvent her husband’s wrath by surreptitiously providing her wayward son with the leftovers from supper.

Anyway, in America, in the expansive American West, Pop naturally became homesick, and he returned to Galitzia.

How like his son, Ira reflected, not without bitterness: how like him his son was in hundreds of ways.

If there existed any differences in character between them, Ira and his own execrable father, they probably derived from Mom, and salient among them was that Ira couldn’t permit himself the subterfuge to which Pop invariably had recourse, when he sought relief from the consequences of his impetuousness, his folly, his execrable judgment: it was all the fault of the Devil. The Devil always came to Pop’s rescue. “The Devil prompted me,” Pop invariably said. And so now: “The Devil prompted me. I became homesick. I yearned to see my mother.”

And see her he did. He traveled back to Austro-Hungary. He not only saw his mother, but there, alas, he also found Leah, the woman who was to become Ira’s mother.

Old story. Still fuming over the fancied lost verve of the prose the computer had robbed him of, old story, Ira told himself. Well, you’ve patched up the lacuna, after a fashion, bridged the gap, more or less. Get on with the tale, get on with your Shabbes bay nakht, goddamn the luck.

VII

“

Indeed.” The single word seeped irony as Mom leaned over the table to clear the dishes.

“It wasn’t so?” Pop looked up at her.

“I said indeed.”

“Nag.” He goosed her, chirruping genially at the same time, chirruping the way he had urged on his horse when he was a milkman. “Tlkh, tlkh.”

“When you’re frozen by the past, embarrassed, yes, molest your wife.” She bumped his hand away.

“Uh-uh. She’s excited.” Her reaction never failed to amuse him.

“Spare me your endearments.” Mom paused on the way to the sink. “You still owe me two dollars balance from my allowance for the week. I would appreciate receiving that more than your endearments.”

“On Shabbes bay nakht?” Pop indulged in mock dismay. “The candles are still burning, shedding their holy light. How can you ask me for two dollars? It’s a sin. I’m a Jew, no?”

“My pious Jew. Tomorrow is also Shabbes. Until evening. And what new excuse will you find then? Yesterday was Thursday. You could have settled the score then. Sunday begins a new week.”

“I’ll pay you, I’ll pay you. I’m not fleeing the country.”

“You could flee into your grave.”

Pop chuckled. Mom glowered. It was the stock confrontation between them. Too bad Minnie was absent, the only one capable of entreating and cajoling Pop into ending the petty crisis. She had a way with him, softly beseeching and pleading as Ira never could. She probably would persuade him to give Mom the balance of her allowance when she got home — but until she got home, the air of conflict that he hated more than anything else hung about the kitchen: conflict over money, and in particular the tag end of Mom’s allowance.

Oh, hell, guilt again: Jesus, had Ira been out working, bringing home a pay envelope, the way the other kids on the street did, how different, how much easier for Mom — having to wrangle with the old bastard for all of two bucks.

He gazed at the candles, trying to make up his mind whether to get his copy of Milton’s poems from the shelf under the china closet, or to try to protect Mom, interject some witticism, maybe, divert her fixation on the subject of her allowance. How she tormented herself over it, and how Pop enjoyed prolonging her torment. No, he couldn’t lose himself in Milton. Not on Shabbes bay nakht. Not with Pop digging his mother’s grave before him.

Again, his gaze rested on the wavering light of the candles. Tapers they were called once. Probably because they did taper once. Burned halfway down. Weren’t they a measure of time in ancient days? Once they were lit, if you were an Orthodox Jew you weren’t allowed to touch them again, or touch the flame. Or relight them if they were blown out. To do so was to perform work. And on Shabbes no work was permitted. Wasn’t that the silliest goddamn idea? And yet for him this particular observance, this particular manifestation of Judaism, had become an intertwining of rebellion with memory, of erstwhile piety with present disbelief.

Ira was about to get up and go for his book, but paused to listen to Pop reminisce. “To every married couple my father allotted a milk cow,” Pop resumed.

“Yeah?”

The expansive little man adjusted his eyeglasses and pushed his stained felt hat back on his head, revealing the deepening coves of his balding brow. “To my brother Sam, who already had two children, he allotted two cows. And to all married pairs, of course, a flock of chickens, a garden plot — and a goy to tend it, naturally. Firewood we had, eggs we had, sour cream we had, cottage cheese also.”

Ira smirked surreptitiously, diverted in spite of himself by Pop’s pronunciation of the English word: Kaddish cheese.

“It’s true,” Pop insisted.

“I believe you, Pop.”

“We didn’t starve — as they did, the children in her family. That old glutton Zaida took good care of himself, you can be sure of that. He kept food under lock and key. But not so my father. We had an abundance of everything. Even brandy we didn’t lack. Schnapps. What, Saul, the superintendent of Count Ustorsky’s distillery, should begrudge us a measure of brandy?”

“Then why did you leave Austria, Pop?”

“Why? To go around idle, that’s not my nature.”

“But your father was the superintendent of a big distillery.”

“Hah! Struck the mark.” Mom brought up the glass bowl of compote. “My clever son.”

“Struck the mark? What do you know about it?” Pop turned on her. “I’m not one to rely on my father.”

“Oh.”

Ira smacked his lips as Mom set down the compote and went to the sideboard for saucers and a serving spoon. He loved Mom’s compote, the variegated prunes, raisins, and dried pears in dark sauce.

“Go tell your grandmother. We’ve heard your stories.” Mom returned and sat down. Her laughter too often held the hint of a jeer, and it did now. “Why do you believe him?”

“It’s all right,” Ira appeased. Jesus, that goddamn two bucks. She was as implacable as a piranha when he baited her.

“You were too light-witted for that kind of work. To run a large distillery takes judgment. Your father didn’t trust you. True?” She picked up a saucer.

“In your addled brain it’s true,” Pop retorted. “My father didn’t want all his sons working at the same trade. My brother Simon was already working there — and Raphael and Meyer and my brother-in-law, Schnapper. The rest of us he wanted to learn a trade.”

“Aha.”

“No,” he mocked in turn. “Look! Look how she serves! A thousand times I told you, don’t dump it out of the bowl. Use the serving spoon.”

“Chaim,” Mom rejoined, “you serve your customers in the restaurant however you wish. I’ll serve however I wish at home.”

“Even a horse would have learned by now.”

“Dine with a horse then, my finical spouse.” An angry and constrained silence followed, all too latent with furious quarrel.

“Wow, this is good compote, Mom,” Ira said with enthusiasm — that he hoped would allay tension. “It tastes good, so good.”

“Ess, ess, zindle.”

“With pleasure, Mom. You know that.”

“I’ll brew some tea.”

“Such a compote I could wish on my foes.” Pop put down his spoon.

“Sin, what you’re saying is sin,” Mom warned.

“Aw, c’mon, Pop.” Lacking Minnie’s tender supplication, Ira tried jollying his father. “It’s tasty, Pop.”

“Let her next husband eat it.” He pushed away his saucer.

“Would the Almighty bless me with one.”

“Okay.” Ira was determined to avert head-on collision. “What trade did you learn, Pop?”

“None. I never learned a trade.” Pop evidently sought to collaborate in keeping the Sabbath peaceful — despite Mom’s knowing moue. “That was my misfortune. That’s why I had to come to America. My brother Gabe was here dealing in junk—”

“But you say your father wanted you to learn a trade,” Ira interrupted.

“And I didn’t want to learn the trade he chose for me — Uh, she’s grimacing again!”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake! Mom, just let me talk to Pop, will you?”

“Talk. To your heart’s content.” She couldn’t have signaled more clearly that she meant not a word of it.

“My father apprenticed me to an artisan in wrought iron. I wanted to be a fiddler.”

“A what? A fiddler?”

“A fiddler.”

“You wanted to be a fiddler?” Ira had never heard Pop say that before. He had wanted to be a fiddler. All at once, so much about him appeared to fall into place, could be made explicable: his fits of merriment at times, on weekends or during the summer vacation, when they rode together in the milk wagon, when the strain Pop was under seemed to relax, or his distance from Ira seemed to diminish, when brief, antic interludes of camaraderie slipped out from behind the strict guise of father; those times when he watered the horse at the polished granite watering troughs with other teamsters, and they chaffered, laughed at Pop’s comic remarks, joked and bantered. And he joined them, prankish and merry, boyish, waggish, off-guard, hardly Pop, his forbidding aspect in abeyance.

So he had wanted to be a fiddler. If one could but hold that phase of him in mind, consider who he might have been, the impulses that once ruled him — implied in his wanting to be a fiddler. No, it was too late. Too late because of what Pop thought he had to be, strict and aloof toward his son, too late because of Mom, because Ira saw Pop as she saw him, as she had trained Ira to see him.

But here was that glimpse: of an atrophied core, a core that bespoke a latent kinship, also atrophied, scarified, and hardened beyond Ira’s reaching.

“I wanted to be where people were enjoying themselves and were happy,” Pop said. “Where people danced and had a gay time. At a wedding. At a festival. A party. . No, it didn’t suit my father: Saul Schaffer, the Count’s distillery master, in charge of hundreds of cattle — they were fed mash from the distillery. As good as a veterinarian in the eyes of the peasants — they knew him for miles around. Saul Schaffer’s son apprenticed to a common fiddler? The son of distillery master Saul Schaffer to play in a kletchmer? Never! That was no trade. He apprenticed me to an artisan in wrought iron. Imagine a stalwart like me working at a forge, with hammer and tool and tong amid flame and soot. And his wife, she provided fare — after what I was accustomed to at home — so may she fare. I ran away. I ran home again.”

Ira awakened from his reverie, and felt as if the bottom had dropped out of everything, his work, inspiration, especially his drive, everything else. Strange it happened. It happened to all writers, all artists he was sure: some kind of lapse, the momentary power failure, when fluorescents went out, and had to be relit. Jesus, he knew the plot, the track he had in mind, the bearing — but he could only think of Maine, the time when goose down, plucked early in the fall while flies still abounded, had become a repository for fly eggs — which hatched in the down, after M had made a pillow of it, his pillow, in which the maggots soon began a ceaseless crepitation as they devoured the barbules of the feathers, setting up a gruesome ticking within the ticking: a macabre time bomb. No, this story would scarcely do. Nor would the other: about the bags of feathers he had hung up to dry in the attic, right above the kitchen table, on which unaccountably — for a while — maggots dropped out of the electric fixture in the kitchen ceiling. Oh, a jocund time he and M and the kids had of it. But one germane story he might draw on: about the time the warden of the state prison brought two trusties to help dress the several crates of ducks and geese raised in the prison. That might be touching. .

But the one thing he wanted to emphasize above all else was that no matter how profitable the business might have been, the business of raising, processing, custom-dressing, and marketing waterfowl, there was nothing unscrupulous about his custom dressing; it was just in the nature of things. How many hand-fed, plump, choice, and most attractive and easily marketable ducks and geese were brought to him by their owners, who had bought them from him as ducklings or goslings, and now pleaded with him that he swap their birds for any birds of his own, usually nothing near so well-fed and select as theirs, the reason being that neither the owner nor his family could bring themselves to eat their pets. Oh, dear, departed days not so dear, just departed. And besides that, there was no one else in the entire state of Maine who did custom dressing of ducks and geese, because no one else had on hand the hundred or so pounds of wax in which to dip the birds after most of the feathers had been removed, thus producing a clean, shiny skin. Waterfowl hunters by the dozen brought him their game birds — in fact, people came from as far away as the neighboring state of New Hampshire to have him dress their ducks and geese. It was amazing the lengths to which people would go to avoid plucking a duck or goose.

So it was very profitable — or should have been, if he had charged enough, and he didn’t. Mom had been right after all. But no matter how potentially profitable it all was or would have been, the point to make was that he couldn’t take it seriously. There was the rub, the disability: once he had known that unique, unutterable afflatus of creativity, he could never take any other occupation seriously again. He could never quite sever from that pristine rapture again, divorce himself from it though he tried — and thought he had succeeded in doing. That was the whole thing in a nutshell — or an eggshell. The writing of the one novel had gone so deep, he would be forever after haunted by the experience. Some metaphoric vein of precious ore he had struck within the psyche — and he could never ignore, never forget it, do what he might. He had been a precision metal grinder and a gauge maker in toolrooms and machine shops for five years before he raised ducks and geese, and he had been a busy shop steward and active union man all that time, and still the pressure of narrative dialogue and situation and denouement, half-formed shapes of stories and novels, kept intruding into his mind. Some vein of a rare lode of perception he had been fortunate enough to strike within the spirit, a lode he had exposed, kept radiating beyond his control. Thanks to his wife, thanks to longevity, in large part due to her intelligent care, despite infirmities, he could once again prospect within his soul for what seemed to him its luminous treasure. Considering his age, the opportunity extended him couldn’t possibly last much longer, but long or short, he had known a moment of grace. He was happy to share it with others, even as he was honored in the privilege his readers accorded him of making it possible for him to share his happiness with them.

VIII

It would seem that Ira’s paternal grandfather, devout Jew with earlocks, and in the portrait hanging in the Stigman front room only a little less Gothic than his wife, had relented in his attitude toward Pop, after Ira was born. Mom affirmed that the old man had become very fond of Ira, dandled him on his knee. “And the night before we left for America, he leaned on his stick and watched you dance: you danced so prettily, the tears came to his eyes, the eyes of Saul, distillery foreman of Tysmenicz.” He had relented so far as to put a stake in, to “bankroll” Pop so he could set himself up as a horse trader. Pop, in addition to loving the fiddle, loved horses; he loved horses the way young people of a later generation loved automobiles. However, love was not enough when it came to trading horses: he was outwitted time and again, and in short order he went bankrupt.

“So what was there to do?” Pop asked rhetorically. “To wander about in idleness, and depend on my father again? Nisht b’mutchkeh. I borrowed the money from my father, and I came to America once more.”

“You did? You were already a citizen.”

“Of course. They put me in jail when I came back to Austria, because I didn’t answer the call to serve in the army.” Pop chuckled. “For a few days only, before they let me go. There were other prisoners in the same cell. And one fellow could fart whenever he wanted to. Hup hup! Another one.” Pop laughed heartily. “‘Stefyan, fart for us’: Hup. Hup. A report. He married a girl in Czechoslovakia, and when he picked up his bride to carry her through the door, the way the goyim do, he ripped out a fart you could hear all over Prague.”

“That is funny.” Ira grinned appreciatively.

“When it comes to that he’s adept,” Mom agreed, derogatively. “He can always spin you a funny tale.”

“Here she comes,” Pop derided.

Mom seemed ever impelled to blight budding amiability between father and son. “You know that means I was a citizen born abroad. Like an ambassador’s son. Isn’t that true?”

“In those days, what else?”

“And you weren’t really a citizen yourself. Boyoboy, nothing has ever gone regularly with me,” Ira reflected.

“Now you’re worrying? You voted already.”

“I know. It’s just that, technically, I’m not supposed to be here.”

“And if it weren’t for Saul, the superintendent, you wouldn’t be here,” said Mom.

“You mean that he loaned Pop the money to come over again?”

“Loaned? He gave. You didn’t borrow the money,” Mom addressed Pop.

“She knows I borrowed the money.”

“Mom, will you let him tell his story!” Ira chided.

“His father gave him the money.”

“In her addled brain, my father gave me the money.”

“Then when did you repay him? Did you have money to repay him?”

“Afterward. He wrote me that he forgave me the debt.”

“When?”

“When I was already in America. Before I brought you and Ira over. To use the money I owed him to bring you here.”

Mom grimaced — in hopeless disbelief so intense it was indistinguishable from an affront.

“As if I weren’t there.” She turned to Ira. “I see the old man standing before me as if it were yesterday. ‘Chaim,’ he said, ‘the first time you stole a way to America. This time, go like a man. I don’t want you to disgrace yourself. You have a wife and child. Here’s the passage money to America. Go with my blessings.’”

“Away, madwoman!”

“What the hell’s the difference, Mom?” Ira burst out.

“The truth is nothing to you? That’s how I brought you up?” By his silence, she knew she had her son at a disadvantage. “Do you want me to teach you how to catch a liar?”

“I don’t want to know.”

“Ask him to repeat his story a week from now. Two weeks from now.”

“Leah, if you’re seeking for something untoward to darken your fate, you haven’t far to search.”

“I’m seeking the two dollars coming to me, if you want to know what I seek.”

“In spite, no?”

“Be consumed in my spite.”

“A man comes home from work on Friday night,” Pop said bitterly. “He comes home from pikers and from stiffs who don’t leave him even a dime for a tip. From nudnicks and from pests. Waiter, the coffee is cold. Waiter, the rolls are stale. Waiter, you call this borsht? Waiter, I came in ahead of her. It’s erev Shabbes. He looks for peace and quiet. What awaits him? A shrew. A nag. A plague. Right away, money. In front of the lighted candles, she holds up her bag, and wants her husband, tired from a day’s work, to fill it up.”

“Fill up my bag,” Mom scoffed with equal bitterness. “Fill up a grave! Fill up my bag on eleven miserable dollars a week. Who buys the scouring powder for the pots and pans? And the Bon Ami for the windows? I’m out of cockroach powder, and the goya below us on the ground floor never powders. Who buys the kerosene to burn the bedbugs out of the bedsprings? Who pays the line-up man when the washline breaks? — a whole quarter. And a quarter five days a week for Ira—”

“Go tell it to your granny. You think I don’t know Minnie contributes to your purse five dollars every week?”

“Fortunately. Or there would be chaos here. You would go shop for your own horseradish, you would go shop for your own carp and pike for gefilte fish on Friday.”

“And you wouldn’t sport a new rag every other week.”

“And what if I do? And if I do, why do I? In a rag is my consolation for the wretched husband I have. In a rag I conceal my sorrows from my neighbors.”

“Mom, will you cut it out, for Christ’s sake! Let’s have some more tea. Why don’t you do the dishes? Anything! Please!”

“A hivnuh!” Mom snapped at Ira. “A fine son I have.”

“Now you can see what she’s like. What a fine mother you have. What a fine wife I have—”

“Yeah? Why the hell don’t you give her the lousy two dollars?”

“Oh, you’re becoming a cracker, too?” Pop retorted. “So easily said. Let’s see you give her two dollars.”

“All right. I will, goddamn it.” Ira jumped up, dug his hand into his pocket.

“Sit down!” Mom flared at him. “I don’t need your charity.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Ira flopped down into his chair.

“You see she doesn’t need it,” Pop baited. “She doesn’t need the two dollars. What will she do with them tonight? Where will she spend them? She does it to provoke me. To mar a Sabbath.”

“I’ll lend them to you. Give them to her. We’ll have some peace.”

“Wipe your ass with them.”

No one spoke. It was as though vituperation had brought them so close to explosion that no one wanted to risk the angry word of detonation.

“I have some honey cake left.” Mom brought Ira a second cup of tea. “Would you like? It’s good.”

“A very small piece, Mom,” Ira obliged.

“It’s very filling.” She brought the leftover slab of dark-brown, solid loaf, hunik-lekekh, as it was called, made with crystallized honey, and served Ira with a slice to accompany his second glass of tea. “You’re still not taking any sugar?”

“No, Mom. The cake’s enough.”

“Chaim?” she offered equably. He waved her away. She went to the sink, stacked the dishes in the enameled basin, and then went to the stove for the steaming, speckled blue pot on the gas flame, returned to the sink, and moderated the cold water gushing from the brass faucet with the hot water decanted from the pot. She began washing dishes. Midway, she wiped her eyes, blew her nose into her hand, and rinsed it under the other faucet.

“Immediately, she starts piddling with her eyes,” Pop remarked.

“If your head roared like mine,” Mom said expressionlessly, “you’d know what it is to weep.”

“Is it bad?” Ira asked.

“Tonight, the engineer is in a frenzy. The train roars like mad.”

“Yeah? Did they have anything new to say at the clinic?”

“Chronic catarrh and again chronic catarrh. At the Harlem Hospital especially they tell you nothing. Each word costs them too much. I would need slaves, like Titus, to pound on anvils to drown out the roaring in my head.”

“Is that what he did? You mean the Roman emperor Titus.”

“So your Zaida told me. The Almighty punished him for destroying the holy temple in Eretz Yisrael.”

“Yeah? What did you do?” Ira said. She laughed.

“My clever son.” Pop had gotten Der Tag from the top of the icebox meanwhile, spread it on the table, and begun perusing it.

“Noo, Chaim,” Mom persisted in patient, appeasing tone of voice. “What do you think? Will the French judges let him go free?”

“I’m not a prophet,” was Pop’s curt reply.

“Who’s that?” Ira asked.

“Schwartzbart.”

“Oh, the guy who shot Simon Petlyura?”

“The bastard who killed as many Jews as he could in Galitzia. A thousand deaths that beast deserved, not one,” Mom intoned. “The Almighty has a special fire for him.”

“Yeah? Trouble is all it takes is one bullet.”

“Sometimes it’s a great pity. A bloodthirsty, cold-blooded brigand like that. Ai, yi, all the Jews he killed and maimed: in the tens of thousands. And, I’m sure, many of our own mishpokha.” Mom turned around partly from the sink. “A Ukrainian murderer and his cossacks destroy a world of Jews, our world of Jews, and he can live unscathed in Paris. Let one Jew, a Russian Jew at that, a student, avenge their deaths, and it’s an outrage. And your gentile papers call him a patriot. How is that?”

“I don’t know, Mom. You just wonder whether it’s worth it, that’s all. The guy is dead. Killing him doesn’t bring the Jews to life that he killed. So what the hell’s the use?”

“Then what would you do? Schwartzbart, is he that much different from you, a student like you, an immigrant?”

“I don’t know.” Ira frowned, nibbling meditatively on the edge of the dense hunik-lekekh, so unlike American cakes, unglamorous, barely sweetened — so Jewish. .

It occurred to him suddenly there had been a time when he hadn’t realized the cake was Jewish. It was simply hunik-lekekh. He was an urchin on 9th Street skipping down the tenement stairs to the untidy grocery across the street to buy five cents’ worth of crystallized honey for Mom, viscous, sluggish stuff scooped from an open keg into a speckled wax-paper cone. “I don’t know, Mom. That’s the trouble.”

“Noo, could you take him to court? If the Jews he slew were in Russia, and he and his marauders are in Paris? In what court could you accuse him? In a French court? He’s in Paris, and he committed his crimes in Russia. And who cares about Yidlekh anyway? Hanging would have been a better end for the dog. It would have taken a few minutes longer—”

“Chibeggeh, chibeggeh, chibeggeh.” Pop shuffled his newspaper while he mocked. “She talks.”

Mom was stung: “My sage. Then you speak.”

“I have better things to do. I’m reading.”

She took a deep breath, was mute.

How often conversation was aborted that way, ended that way, in the Stigman household — with a thud of silence. Only when Minnie was home was there a little more give and take, chatter, debate. Pop welcomed his daughter’s opposition, often laughed at it, at her sharp disagreements and impertinences. She overrode his opinions, and he enjoyed her doing so — all the things he wouldn’t have brooked Ira’s doing. No wonder Ira had vented his anger with Pop on his sister, especially when she was younger. When Pop was waitering at his Sunday banquets, he had shown Minnie good, real good.

But when Minnie was absent now from the house, a dull cheerlessness took over — except during those times Ira had a job, in the summer, and more rarely, after school; and then a modicum of amiability, even joviality, tempered Pop’s manner, relaxed domestic interchange. Otherwise, an air of brooding prevailed. Ira thought he could guess why. But always his surmise was tainted, the clarity of the surmise was sullied.

Sure — Ira studied the candle flames wavering gently a couple of inches above their brass sockets — if the cause of their antagonism were only a matter of Pop’s supporting his son these many years through high school and college, when Ira could have been bringing in his earnings instead, helping sustain the household, as the other Jewish youth on 119th Street did, as Minnie was doing. If only it were. Had Minnie succeeded in getting into normal school, miserly though Pop was, Ira was sure Pop would have been willing to contribute to Minnie’s support, contribute because Minnie always exerted herself to find part-time work, while Ira was too lacking in initiative, and just plain spunk, to get a job after classes. Mom would have hired out to scrub floors before she would see him give up “his career,” as she called it.

Still — still what? The way his mind bobbled a nub of thought. Yes: even if Pop resented supporting his son through college, that would have been comparatively easier to deal with. It would have been a simple case of economics — almost. Or even if Mom’s favoring him, coddling him, as Pop said, caused dissension, he, Ira, could have made a show of disapproval, as if he agreed with Pop. All kinds of ways of smoothing things out. But ah, there was one thing you couldn’t smooth out. It was the groundswell that he himself roiled up, a secret tension he charged the household with, as if home were some kind of Leyden jar. .

Incest, incestuous longings. Jesus Christ, name it for what it was. It didn’t matter that Minnie wouldn’t give in anymore. She had, once upon a time. He knew it, she did too. She had, right in that cold little bedroom next to the kitchen, with the same blistered kitchen walls, all but capered, and regularly Sunday. You couldn’t forget it, that was all. And had come so close to getting it again once or twice. It was the same old goddamn reason: the shock he’d gotten watching that rusty bastard jack off against a tree in Fort Tryon Park. His dark, sullen telepathy ionized the joint. He hated it, he fought it. Lucky there was Stella, fat little piece of ass. Could that be the reason there were no decent conversations in the Stigman household? The kind of homespun discussions everyone else reported as a staple of home life — that he witnessed at Larry’s in the years of close friendship — the taking up of a topic of mutual interest and debating about it, differing about it, warmly defending pros and cons, but in a civil way. They discussed ideas — ah, there it was: ideas. Even Minnie developed her own ideas, reached conclusions, on her level. Her ideas didn’t interest him, neither did her conclusions, usually, but what did? Nevertheless, he recognized, he had to admit to himself that she could think independently, generate ideas: she could reason. He couldn’t reciprocate.

With Minnie no longer available, Stella continued to be the kid he pratted down in the glaring cellar in Flushing, from when she was fourteen. But it had been that — sex — that had ruined, rendered turbid, ideological exchange in the household, a monstrous intrusion that had mangled his own intellectual development. What else could it be? Stunted his analytical abilities, judiciousness, appraisals. Shabbes bay nakht.

Jesus Christ, what a sinister cyst of guilt that was within the self, denigrating the yuntiff, denigrating everything within reach, exuding ambiguity, anomaly, beyond redemption now. Yeah, but maybe the fault wasn’t all his own, maybe a lot of the trouble was with Pop. Not because he was of immigrant birth. Pop didn’t seem able to consider an idea, to weigh, to test it against some sort of evidence, to hold it steadily in view. Pop uttered pronouncements instead, diktats, commands, expressed likes and dislikes, dismissed, reminisced, yes, told stories, told stories of old times. God, you could wander all over the place looking for the cause, for the blame, like Goosy Gander, all over hell and gone. The blame was with himself, the blame was with Pop, the blame was with Mom too. But how could he ever get free of it? Could he get free of it? Ever? Ever?

That was the crux of the matter. To hell with the blame. Too late to find fault. Get out of it, whatever the goddamn cause. Or causes. But how? That was the worst of it. He was an addict. The minute he saw Stella — just the right moves: an iota of precarious privacy — prickarious privacy. .

Mom had finished doing the dishes. She put them away in the china closet. Because it was built against the wall opposite the sink, she passed by the table several times.

“Tea I don’t care for, but tonight it looks appetizing. I’ll have a glass.” And addressing Pop: “Chaim? Anything?” Unperturbed by his brusque shrug, as if discounted in advance, she addressed Ira: “A morsel more of hunik-lekekh?”

“No thanks, Mom,” he said cheerlessly. “Don’t you think Minnie ought to be home by now?”

“On Friday night? Another hour.” Mom sat down with her glass of tea. “My poor daughter, how she strives, strives—”

Ira could sense rather than see Pop lift his eyes from the newspaper. Mom sucked her tea, steaming hot, her lips squealing in osculation against the rim of the glass. It was like a scene in a Russian play, Ira thought. He averted his face.

“How can you stand it so hot?”

“The tea? I like it when it scalds my gullet.” Her lips squealed against the glass again. She laughed guiltily, cut a piece of the dark cake. “How is it you remember nothing of what Minnie does, and she remembers everything you do?”

“Does she? I’m an important brother.”

“How?” Pop interjected. “His head’s on the roof. How?”

“I don’t pay any attention to Minnie,” Ira defended himself with asperity. “A lot of times I’m not home on Fridays.”

“You weren’t home on Friday,” Mom corrected. “Once indeed that was true. But not now. You don’t see your friend Larry very often.”

“Well, I do in college,” Ira said shortly. Mom deliberated, raised her eyebrows eloquent of resignation.

“To tell you the truth, Friday nights, now that it’s almost winter, I’m sure my poor daughter has an ample meal at Mamie’s It’s the only time. I’ll be happy when the end of her attendance comes this year. I’ll forgive her the rest.”

“Yeah? What do you mean, Mom?”

“You know how it is,” said Mom. “You think Mamie feeds her the same meal the rest of the family eats? Even though Minnie pays her two dollars every week? A bygone day. Mamie gives her eggs, herring in tomato sauce, a bowl of falsheh-zup, such things.”

Falsheh-zup. Ira’s mind wandered to the words themselves: false soup, by which Mom meant meatless soup. How would John Synge have translated the words out of the speech of Aran Islanders? Pseudosoup.

“Mamie does?”

“Believe me. It’s only now, when night falls early, erev Shabbes comes early, and Zaida davens to an end before dark, they all eat Friday-night supper together. Then she runs off to the college. And Jonas is there too — of course.”

“Another pious Jew,” Pop commented.

“Well, that’s his nature.” Mom welcomed Pop’s participation in spite of acrimony. “As you’re not, he is. Why else would Zaida stay at Mamie’s if Jonas weren’t observant?”

“Shoyn tsat tse zahn a mensh.” Screwing up his face to the utmost, and snuffling as he spoke, Pop caricatured his long-nosed brother-in-law. “Telling me it was time I behaved like a man. I behaved like a man. That runt. I spat in his face.”

Mom sat perfectly still a moment, and then, animating herself, squealed into her glass.

“She has to kiss the glass every time,” Pop disparaged. “Can’t you drink a glass of chai without a fife?”

“Well, then I won’t,” Mom conciliated. “I ought to learn to drink tea from a saucer.”

“I didn’t know Mamie was like that,” Ira said, to lead away from the volatile.

“Uh!” Pop voiced his contempt. “A lot you know.”

“What’s there to say?” Mom shielded her son. “Minnie isn’t Mamie’s child. It’s a boon to Minnie as it is. She doesn’t have to fly like mad from one subway to another. Well, what were we saying?” She took a cautious sip of tea. “I have such an ugly quirk: I suck the glass,” she apologized. “We were saying — yes — Minnie? No. Ah, yes. To my mind every Jew owes Schwartzbart a debt of gratitude for ridding the world of that monster.”

“Well, you already said that.” Ira stared at Mom askance. “You said enough about it.”

She laughed — culpably, nodded her broad countenance in almost abject willingness to preserve harmony. “What else were we talking about?”

“Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh—yenta,” Pop accused, then turned to Ira for confirmation. “She’s tangled in this Schwartzbart as if he were an angel, a messiah.”

“Still, he risked his life for Jews. Another Petlyura will know what awaits him, no? Dead he is, as Ira says, and may he rot too where he lies. But if there came another brute like him, he might think twice before he commits such atrocities against Jews. Is it true or not?”

“A khlyup is a khlyup.” Pop’s rimless eyeglasses reflected the candlelight. “If you think that a Roosky goy will ever be dissuaded by this example, then you’re deceiving yourself. Read and read — to what avail?”

“But they were khlyups who gave Czar Kolki, that foe of Israel, his just deserts. Every Jew rejoiced.”

“Why? Because there were Jews among them,” Pop countered. “A Trotsky, a Zinoviev, a Kamenev. I don’t even know the names. Jews ran out of the yeshivas to join the Bolsheviks. But now, see for yourself: Trotsky flees. They need him no longer. It won’t be the same with the others? Wait, just wait, Leah.”

“Now the prophet speaks!” Mom shrugged her shoulders. “But meanwhile they let a Jew live in Russia,” said Mom.

“Meanwhile,” Pop echoed in rebuttal. “Every letter from a Russian Jew to America begs for help: send a few rubles in God’s name. We perish from hunger here. Russian Jews write the roman for you and Mrs. Shapiro for a few pennies, just to buy bread.”

“Then what do you say is best — for the poor man?”

“Americhka,” said Pop. “For the poor or the rich. The goy still despises us, but he lets us make a living. He doesn’t know about pogroms. A Jonas, like my brother-in-law, a mouse, can be a partner in a restaurant, can work his way up in the world. As my brother Gabe in St. Louis says, one need only work hard and vote Republican, and everyone can prosper here.”

“I didn’t know elephants were kosher,” Ira bantered.

Mom laughed.

“Epikouros,” said Pop. “Scoffer.”

“Why? I just wanted to know.”

“Yeh, why? On the Epikouros and on the Zionisten may the same blighted year befall both.”

Ira was well aware of Pop’s dislike of atheism, especially Ira’s but he couldn’t recall Pop’s expressing an opinion on Zionism, and such a vehement opinion at that. Ira really felt no interest in Zionism whatever; he felt condescending, actually. Just the least curiosity as to why Pop was so exercised on the subject. He debated with himself whether to challenge Pop in order to find out why he had suddenly taken such a strong stand, then decided not to: for the sake of keeping the Sabbath tranquil.

“This.” Pop tapped the lower corner of the newspaper. And to Mom again: “Would you read this, you would read something of importance.”

“I read it,” said Mom. “That they’re trying to redeem Israel.”

“That’s what you think, these idiots, with Rothschild urging them on. These are our idiots. Not Russian Jews who think they’ll transform the mujik into a noble creature: he’ll abide Jews. But Jews of all lands befuddled into returning to Israel, into redeeming Israel, the Land of Israel. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

“So what is so wrong with Jews building a homeland there?”

“Because without a Messiah, there can be no return of Jews from the dispersion into the Land of Israel. Every rabbi has taught us that. Every Jew knows it. They know it as well as anyone. Still they persist. What they’re doing is a disgrace before God and man. A dire fate awaits them, that’s a for-sure.” Pop said the last words in English.

Ira stood up. So that was it? Lacking one Messiah. Cause for animus and all this diatribe. Ira smirked to himself. Not that he was any more concerned than before. Ludicrous though Pop’s insistence on the need for the Messiah’s advent to redeem Israel was. That notion of the Messiah — Ira walked over to the china closet under which he had placed his notebook with his blue-bound Collected Poems of John Milton on top — that notion of the Messiah was like the notion of infinity, the equivalent of never. “When the messiah comes,” Ira smirked to himself again. Mom or Pop or any of the mishpokha would say, when the Messiah comes, then this or that or the other obligation or event would be fulfilled or take place — meaning one whose chances were nil. Would it be called a euphemism for never? Or a circumlocution for never.

Anyway, it looked as if the Friday night would come to a peaceful end. The candles were about to go out, guttering in molten wax. Mom seemed to have forgotten her two dollars, or at least gotten over her animosity at having been stalled off. Pop was safely engrossed in his Der Tag. All was well with the world — at one flight up in the front of 108 East 119th Street. And Minnie would be home soon. All safe and serene. Watchman, what of the night? Fine, except himself.

What did Milton say? Ira sat down. License they mean when they cry Liberty. He turned pages. He’d have to skim, try to read a little faster, maybe skip a little. He preferred not to; he worshiped Milton. That in itself was guarantee of his doing better than his usual dismal level of work in the course. Maybe a B, glory be. He reached the page he had been reading, as Pop slid the back pages of the newspaper to Mom. Homeland in Zion, cloudland in Zion — he deliberately kept his eyes from focusing on the page, so he could pursue the fitful notion in his mind. Jesus, these Jews. .

But it was strange. The minute he thought about Jews, and realized he was one of them, more or less caught up in the same fate with them, more or less, even though he wanted no part of them, the entire conception dissipated, became a nebula. Who were they, what were they? He couldn’t seem to think any further: the thought dissolved, connectives and all. God, here he was again, in the same old predicament. He had no being; the person in his head had no foundation, no perch, no purchase. Same old thing: the rubbled guy — there was no such word: the crumbled guy. Burned, seared, that was it, branded, cauterized — oh, hell. He could say it a hundred, well, a dozen different ways. It always came down to the same thing — and down was right. Here was Minnie coming home any minute now. He didn’t have a single solitary chance, either with her or, under the circumstances, with anything. Where Izzy Winchel of Polo Ground days didn’t hesitate to contrive any scheme, utter the most barefaced lie, in order to cheat a sports fan out of a little money, as though all compunction were vitiated in the pursuit of the dollar — at the same time as Izzy showed not the least interest in sex, so Ira, overly conscious Ira, seemed to himself almost the reverse. Marked, branded. That was how he thought of himself.

Ruined. . what a shame. .

Plain flat intrinsic state, you could look at it clear-eyed sometimes. . no self-pity, no pyrotechnics. He would rather have that wicked rapture back than any delight forward. He would rather be mired down in the sordid ecstasy of the past than proceed to the decent sanity of the future. Something like that. Those combinations and modulations of fear and furtiveness, cunning, guilt — an incest cocktail: break the word in half, and you had it. He composed his features, returned his concentrated gaze to Milton — if only he had concentrated so intently in the filthy cheder of his youth:

But his doom

Reserved him for more wrath; for now the thought

Both of lost happiness and lasting pain

Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes,

That witnessed huge affliction and dismay

Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate:

Lost in Satan’s throes, Ira continued to read, until he paused a moment, reflecting somberly. He heard Mom ask:

“Are you going to work tomorrow, Chaim?”

And heard Pop reply: “I’ll go to the union hall. I’ll see what they have to offer. If it’s something promising,” Pop drawled rabbinically, “I’ll work. If not, I’ll take Shabbes off. I’ll be a devout Yiddle like Jonas. I’ll rest. Sunday I have a benket anyway.”

“In Cunyilant?”

“In Rockaway. No tips. Every table has a service charge. You rush your kishkehs out, but you make a few dollars.”

“A toiler’s life, what else,” said Mom.

“What else? Mazel. One needs mazel. Where to find mazel? A lucky man can balk the Devil himself.”

Mom listened with noncommittal patience. She raised an eyebrow in forbearance, sighed.

“No?” Pop demanded.

“You believe in mazel?” Mom asked.

“I just told you I did.”

“And what would mazel have brought you?” Mom smiled, teasing, knowing. “Something you don’t have.”

“Mazel would have brought me a clever wife, speaking of something I don’t have.”

“You chose her. She pleased you, no?”

“Well, lost and gone.” Pop prolonged uneasy raillery. “A colt, don’t you know. Later, he gets horse sense.”

“Would a clever woman have married you? She would have sought cleverness to match, no? She would have sought shrewdness, judgment, prudence—”

“Aha, here she comes once more.”

“Let’s not begin that again!” Ira interjected testily. “I’ve got to do a little studying for an exam. Please. I hardly got started.”

“Your father has just eaten a fine Shabbes meal on the pittance he doles out to me for my weekly allowance — on which he’s still owing, mind you — and he tells me I’m not a clever wife.”

“I heard him. He didn’t say you weren’t clever.”

“What else does not being a clever wife mean?”

“You know what he means. He means not clever in business,” Ira rejoined impatiently. “You don’t have to pick him up on everything he says.”

“Who incites these spats?”

“You do.” Ira meant to be facetious. His levity was taken amiss. Mom twisted her countenance in wry grimace, and said something in Polish that sounded like ya bem tvoiyoo motch.

“Okay. ‘Full fathom five my father lies,’” Ira orated. “Now can I read my book?”

“Go, read your book. A good son you are too.”

“You see?” Pop tested a precarious truce. “Immediately she becomes excited. I was at Ella’s this afternoon—”

“Oh, that’s the business prospects you were appraising.”

“Noo? I can’t go to see your sister?”

“You were so late, I thought you were skulking in some movim pickcheh.”

“I was late because I went to Ella’s. I may not go there?”

“Go. Go. A good place for business prospects. She condones a pinch or a pat, my sister, with her husband in the insane asylum?”

“Well, what else? She’s a mule like you?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

“Do me a favor.” Pop wagged his head at Ira. “Spare us your fahr Crite secks. It’s a Jewish home here. It’s Friday night. The candles are still burning.”

“Yeah.” Ira’s chest filled. “I see. I thought they were out.”

Strange, how the mind rummaged about for a literary quotation to solace itself with, something noble and universal. And Troy went up in one high funeral gleam. Larry had quoted that. Supposing he himself had gone on studying khumish in the cheder on 9th Street, could he have said to himself in Hebrew: “Though they forget Thee, yet will not I forget Thee. Behold, I have graven Thee upon the palms of my hands”? Ah, how beautiful that was. He looked down on the open pages of blank verse. Hopeless to read against their everlasting bickering.

“With a wife like Ella,” Pop meditated aloud, “I could have thrived. With a wife like Ella, one can get something done. She’s lively, quick to see where a dollar can be made. And how deft she is and apt, ah!” Mom’s face was turned away, lips curling. “She can jest. She’s full of savor. And she can weigh and deliberate—yi, yi, yi. How many blocks — to the step! — you need to go from the corner of Fifth Avenue and 116th Street, from her house, to the nearest store with thread and ribbons and thimbles and things a woman needs to sew. A store like that on the corner of 116th Street can make a dollar. I venture to say she would soon learn how to treat a customer in a luncheonette. And ah, such a welcome as her children give me! ‘It’s Uncle Hymie! It’s Uncle Hymie!’ they shout — as soon as I appear. Even the youngest of the three prances about me. ‘Uncle Hymie, tell us how you drive a horse. Uncle Hymie, make the noise a horse makes. Uncle Hymie, make a noise to giddap.’ I come into her house, and I skim bliss.”

“Well, go live there,” Mom invited, her short throat flushing. “Skim bliss. Who bars your way?”

“Uh! Look at her. The truth chokes her.”

“The truth is, Chaim, my sister is careless. She has a husband in the asylum, she’s careless. I don’t know it?”

“Uh!” Pop derided. “Find what you seek, but pray let me be. Bist mishugeh?”

“Ov toit,” Mom said pointedly. “Mad to death.”

“Seek out a suitable tomb then.”

Ira sat with locked fingers. Pent, he knew only too well what Mom was talking about: Ella was careless. She wore no drawers. She crossed her legs often. You could see all the way up to her bush, a great big female bush. He was at her house with Mom, about a few months after Max was committed, and staring at her cunt gave Ira such a hard-on, he couldn’t help it. He was so close to coming he went into Ella’s bathroom, and in three strokes jacked off: in a trice. He hated the recall — was that Ella’s substitute, sublimate? And Pop scrounging like a jackal. Jesus!

“I’ll go crazy myself, if you don’t cut that out,” Ira complained sullenly. “You said it was Friday. It’s Friday night.”

“Noo, go for a walk.” There was a note of pleading in Mom’s voice.

“I told you I had a test.”

“It’s my fault you have a nag like your mother?”

Maybe he ought to leave. Interrupt the course of backbiting. He had a hunch he was the irritant. He ought to get his coat. Get the hell out. It was cold outdoors, but what of it? Ten minutes. Less. Minnie would be home. Ira closed the book on his thumb, opened it again, irresolute. He had to read: page 125—

“Even a wife like Mamie, carbuncles cover her thick hide, still, she loaned Joe all her savings, her whole bankbook, he would have enough to become a partner with your brothers. From a little cap maker, a snuffling namby-pamby, he’s become a restaurant owner. I’m condemned to a mate who hoards only for shmattas—and a Persian lamb coat.”

“Joe is a businessman.” Mom refused to budge.

“And I’m not?”

“Joe is circumspect and collected. Are you? No. Joe can reckon. Can you? I don’t say it’s your fault. Have I ever said it was your fault? It’s your trait. You become flustered. When you were a milkman you were always shutt.” Mom used the English word “short.” “Shutt and again shutt in your receipts. When you were a trolley car conductor you were always shutt. I worked with you in the little delicatessen on 116th Street, you became bewildered—”

The little delicatessen on 116th Street, ha, boy — attention found release in lubricity: static flashed off in jagged streaks of recall. Those evenings, alone, with Minnie, wow, at leisure, post — Bar Mitzvah, what a charge, what a bolt! If only that damned delicatessen had succeeded. Yeah. He wrung his hands in concealment.

“I became bewildered? If I became bewildered, it was because of you!” Pop accused Mom irately. “The woman slices salami like lemon wedges. Just like for tea. Go make a sandwich from that for a customer.”

“The customers liked my service better than yours. I didn’t become z’misht the way you did. I’m not telling you that to bait you.” Mom raised a deprecating hand against her breast. “I’m saying that only to show you that you’re better off being a simple waiter, working a steady job, living quietly on your earnings, your tips. What does Max, Sadie’s husband, do? The brothers wanted to take him in for a partner. He didn’t want the headaches. He wanted to work his lunch and supper, and go home. What do the rest of the tenants who live here do, Jew and gentile alike? See, Mr. Beigman on the third floor works in a cleaning and dyeing shop; Lefkowitz on the third floor in the back is a baker. What is Shapiro in the back? An upholsterer. And McIntyre on the top floor, whose wife has only that one fang in her head? In a foundry making stoves. And besides he gives his wife the whole pay envelope — only keeps enough for a bottle of moshkeh on a Saturday night. D’Angelo on the second floor works in a barber shop—”

“Away with your stupid prating! I’ll be a common shlepper like the rest: a noodle porter all my life. I can’t sit behind a cash register as well as your brothers, as well as that mealy-mouthed gnome?”

“I’m trying to tell you—”

“You’re telling me nothing. Prattle. Ah, if I haven’t a clever wife, had I but a little fortune in other things.”

“Then go into business with Ella!”

“In a minute. If she had what to contribute, if she didn’t have three young children. Ai. There’s a coffeepot on 26th Street, if I had another thousand dollars I could buy it — like nothing. Give those Greeks two thousand dollars, and I could tell them to take their hats and coats and get out. They’re losing their shirts.”

“Oy, gevald.” Mom snatched at her cheek. “If they’re losing their shirts, how can you hope to succeed?”

“It’s a coffeepot, don’t you understand? It’s in a furriers’ district. Furriers don’t like coffeepots. They like — as if—” he twirled his hand—“half kosher. They’re still Jews.”

“Noo?”

“Ha!” Pop gloried in his vision. “I would take out the round white tables, and put in square wooden tables. I would take out the white tiles from the wall, it shouldn’t look like a toilet, and put in nice brown panels. And immediately, I would hire away Schildkraut’s salad woman for a couple of dollars more a week.”

“Why Schildkraut’s?” Mom asked apathetically.

“You don’t understand anything,” Pop rebuked. “It would be a vegetarian restaurant.”

“Aha.”

“Wouldn’t Schildkraut’s nose fall when he came to the door, and saw me standing in my vegetarian restaurant across the street.”

“Across the street!” Mom cried in dismay. “You mean it’s in the same street?”

“The same street. The same street,” Pop reiterated triumphantly. “He’ll know better next time to fire a man like me. After all I did for him. I opened up the restaurant in the morning. I took in the bags of fresh rolls and bread, and the boxes of milk. I dragged in the crates of vegetables—”

“So what has that to do with it?”

“To get fired?”

“No. To open a restaurant across the street.”

“Let him see what he did!”

“But you pulled the chair out from under the headwaiter!”

“He was a right-winger!”

“Oy,” Mom mourned. She turned to her son. “Am I not condemned, am I not cursed?”

“Mom, he’s just talking,” Ira burst in heatedly. “He’s just imagining. There’s no restaurant.”

“No. Because she hoards for a Persian lamb coat!”

“And hoard I will,” Mom said defiantly. “I’ll pour my skrimping and skimping into his wild schemes? Ai, judgment, judgment. He sees one vegetarian restaurant in the street already. And he has to squeeze in with another — why? Out of spite for a boss who sacked him. Isn’t that an infant’s mind?”

“Say that again and I’ll fling something at your head!”

“Fling,” Mom challenged. “A novelty.”

“There can’t be two vegetarian restaurants in one block?” Pop chose to ignore her provocation. “How many times have you seen two jewelers in the same block, two clothing stores, two hardware stores, furniture, florists — even more than two? It’s a furrier’s district, I told you: furriers and furriers and furriers: of rabbit and of mink, of seal and sable. She babbles on.”

“And people will shop from one vegetarian restaurant to the other — the way a buyer shops for clothing, for a diamond ring, for a dining-room set,” Mom thrust.

“They won’t shop,” Pop parried. “If Schildkraut’s has sand in the spinach, the next time they’ll go elsewhere; they’ll come to mine.”

“And if you have sand in the spinach?”

“That’s why I would hire away his salad woman. She would break in Ella with her wonderful hands. Don’t you see?”

“Oy, mad to the death,” said Mom. “Isn’t this a child’s mind?”

“Leah, I warn you!”

“Mom, please,” Ira pleaded vehemently. “Can’t you just let him talk? You’re only making things worse all the time. Anh, what’s the use.” He snapped the book shut.

But Mom seemed obdurate beyond retrieval now, stony, irrevocably desolate. “I’m making things worse. I. Two dollars a whole week he owes me, and if I didn’t flay him for it, he’d cheat me. He’d forget. But me, who penny by penny, with tears, scraped together a few hundred dollars toward some comfort in my life, he would wrest away to squander in his lunatic schemes. Oh, my mother, where you lie there in the grave: ‘Break it off,’ you said. ‘Give him back his gift. He’s a lunatic.’ Everyone in Tysmenicz comes to me with the same story, everyone who knows him: ‘Er’s a mishugeneh. Break it off.’ Ha, Mamaleh, Mamaleh, that I didn’t heed you. But with four younger sisters at my back, how could I? ‘No, Mamaleh,’ I said. ‘My shoulders are broad. Sorrows I can bear, griefs won’t break me.’”

“And good wares they foisted on me too!”

“I’m getting the hell out of here!” Ira slammed his book down on the table and sprang to his feet.

“Go, go,” Mom invited. “Who’s keeping you? Do you still have to hear this story?”

“He won’t take your lousy few hundred dollars!” Ira raged. “You’re out of your mind!”

“No? I don’t know his burnings and his blisterings. He’ll burn at me until I offer it, just for relief.”

“He won’t, I tell you! He can’t!”

“Ah, would she come to her senses!” Pop addressed unseen auditors in a transport of fulfillment. “Would she sponsor me with that few hundred. The balance, if the bank didn’t loan me, suppliers would advance. And then”—Pop glowed with inner light—“who would sidle up to the restaurant window to peer in and count my customers? Her brothers: Moe and Saul, that swindler, and Max and Harry with his long nose. ‘Come in,’ I would wave from the cash register. ‘Come in.’ And I would say: ‘Why loiter outside? Have a prune tart. Have a coffee.’ I can be munificent too. And who would be the first one to brag that her husband had a kopf for business like no other? She.”

“Mad to the death.” Mom sat perfectly still, her palms flat on the figured red cloth of the housedress on her broad thighs; only her head shook, barely, as if trembling — trembling with incredulity. “Isn’t this a dreamer? Isn’t this a child? What I married.” Then suddenly aroused: “Talk till you drop! This time I won’t budge. You can’t tempt me. Ah.” She rubbed her breast in a fierce joy of triumph. “The few hundred are mine.”

“Cow!”

“Baby!”

“You goad me?” Pop jumped to his feet. “I warned you!”

“Fling, if you dare. Mad dog!” Mom pushed the table suddenly and stood up. A candle guttered out, smoked.

“Pop!” Ira stood between them. “For Christ’s sake, will you quit it! What the hell, are you going crazy?”

“Out of the way! Shtarkeh! Na!” He gave Ira a sudden shove.

“I fear you,” Mom taunted. “I’m not that same timid, docile slave you brought over from Galitzia.”

“No? Let’s see.” He had turned quite pale. All in one motion he seized Mom’s half-empty glass from the table and dashed the tea in her face.

“You filth! You mange!” Mom’s voice seemed to drop whole octaves, appallingly, viscerally frenzied. “Vile mannikin!” She wiped drops from her chin that were falling on her florid bosom. “Be torn to shreds.”

“You still seek? I’ll slap your gross mouth too!” Pop advanced on her.

“And I’ll submit?”

Ira threw himself at his father. “That’s enough, Pop. Cut it out!”

“Let go!”

“No!”

“I said let go!” Pop stamped his foot.

“No!”

“No?” Pop made a sudden vicious thrust downward toward Ira’s crotch — and not a moment too soon Ira pinned Pop’s arms to his sides.

“Cut it out, Pop! You do that again—”

They tussled, swayed. Compact, surging with rage, Pop’s head in his felt hat butted his son’s face, while he tried to bowl him over, yelled curses in Yiddish, and Mom screamed — and then, from below: a series of terrifying thumps, like demented gaveling at a mad auction: thump, thump, thump, and unintelligible epithets like shouted bids, undistinguishable babel of opprobrium converging on one distinct word: “Jews!” Thump. Thump. Thump. Pop went slack. And the next instant, as if he were falling away, he tore himself from Ira’s hold. Thump. Thump. Thump.

“Ah!” Mom patted her stomach in an exaltation of gloating. “A splendid goy! Oh, is that a fine goy! Stamp your foot again, Chaim!”

“Leah.” Pop retreated. “Leah, enough.”

“Why enough? Knock their ceiling down. He’ll come up and smash your paltry face. I would rejoice.”

“Leah, my jewel.”

“Huh. Huh. I’ll tell him: there he stands.” Her head snapped back, and she pointed at Pop. “Oy, Raboinish ha loilim, let him come up!”

“Leah, please,” Pop entreated. “Say you tumbled, you tripped, you fell. You knocked a chair over.”

“No. Let him know what a cur I have here. Look, I’ll show him.” She wiped the moisture from her cheek, mocking her husband in what English she had. “Mister Irisher, azoy you do vit your vife’s gless tea? Look on mein housedress, vie sit’s vet. Ai, may he buffet you soundly!”

“Mom!” Ira implored hopelessly. “Calm down.” And in a sudden fit of wrath: “You were to blame yourself. You didn’t have to bring up that goddamn two dollars. Friday, let the goddamn thing go!” He pawed at the air. “Two lousy bucks!”

“Gey mir in der erd. It was my money. A whole week he tormented my blood — and now this?” Her chin lowered to the dark stain below the neckline of the housedress. “Lord bless me, that Esau is on the way!”

“Leah, I beg before you. Two dollars is due you. True. True. You’re right. Here. Let’s not dispute.” Pop tugged at his pocketbook, fingered among the banknotes. In the frantic haste he tore the bills out, a third greenback clung to the second.

“Na, a drittle!” Irate with himself, he threw all three to the floor. “Here. Peace. Turn him aside. You’re my wife, no?”

“Burn to a cinder — for my sake!” The tears starting from her eyes, Mom stooped and gathered up the scattered dollar bills. “How hideous, my life. Martira. Martira. L’chaim, na,” she punned bitterly on Pop’s name, and straightening up, the three greenbacks in one hand, she made a fig with the other: “To life indeed.”

“Do you hear anyone?” Poised for retreat, Pop shrank against the bedroom door. “Ira, child, tell me.”

“Yeah.” Ira thought he heard something in the hall. “Yes.” Now what? “I hear somebody.”

“Maybe it’s the virago. She won’t devour you,” Mom advised her husband — as she herself staunchly confronted the door to the hall. Pop slipped into the dark of the bedroom. Without a knock, the knob turned, the hall door opened — Minnie entered. “Come out, my stalwart,” Mom called. “It’s your daughter.”

Everything took on a different tenor the moment Minnie entered. She dissipated tension. Rosy-cheeked from the cold, breathing quickly with hurrying and climbing of stairs, she looked pretty and animated as she got out of her coat, took off her cloche, shook her reddish bobbed hair.

“You didn’t see the downstairsniks?” Pop reappeared from the bedroom. “You didn’t see the Irisher on the ground floor, Tokhterel?” The very sight of his daughter cheered him.

“No, Papa, I didn’t see anybody,” was her puzzled answer. “In the hall?” And as Mom took Minnie’s coat and hat, saying, “Give me, I’ll hang it up,” Minnie noticed the stain on Mom’s housedress. “Whatsa matter?” she asked in that pacifying tone she so often used with Pop and Mom.

“Goor nisht,” said Mom.

“It’s the first time nobody asked me what I had to eat at Mamie’s.”

There were times when Minnie could have been a stranger, as far as Ira was concerned. No connection between the two: the impersonal young woman, with brows knit, reaching for the coat that Mom held, and continued to cling to. “What’d you spill?” Minnie asked.

“Nothing,” said Mom. “I had to take the balance of my allowance from him. We became a little vexed, don’t you know?”

“Oh, again? So why’re you asking me if I saw somebody from downstairs?” She addressed Pop. “You mean the McRoneys?”

“Yeh, we bickered a little here.” Pop made light of the matter.

Minnie understood his understatement. “So?”

“They knocked, a once-twice on the ceiling. You don’t know Irishers? Right away they get mad.”

As he spoke, Mom nodded, in complex, nullifying agreement.

Minnie looked at Ira for elaboration. “Listen,” he began brusquely, and then snickered: “They had their regular workout — over two bucks.”

“So what’s so funny about it?”

“It’s not. I didn’t say it was, did I?”

“You laughed,” she accused. “You didn’t have to say.”

“Well, what’re you gonna do? They squawk over two bucks. You’d think it was two thousand.” He leaned back.

“It’s not funny, you know. You should feel real sorry,” Minnie scolded. “Over a nothing from money. Why didn’t you try to keep it from happening — say something to them?” She was scolding him, speaking entirely in English.

“Me? Ho-ho.”

“It makes me feel so bad. And over money. Mom, why do you have to do that? It’s Friday. There’s still a little light from a candle.”

“Tell him,” Mom said bluntly, pointing at Pop.

“Tell me? A nag of nags—”

“All right, that’s enough!” Minnie said sharply.

“Indeed, enough,” Mom agreed. “What’s doing at Mamie’s? Let’s better talk of that.”

“Oh, do I have news for you!”

“Azoy? Wait, wait,” Mom said eagerly. “I’ll hang your coat and hat. Noo, zug,” Mom urged. “What?” She couldn’t refrain from a terminal “Oy, veh!”

Released from self-consciousness, Pop’s eyes became browner and glossier, especially when he listened to Minnie.

“Zaida wasn’t there tonight,” she said.

“What? My father wasn’t there?” Mom exclaimed — between shock and disbelief. “What happened?”

“Nothing. He wasn’t there. He’s not living there anymore. He’s not living at Mamie’s.” Minnie raised her voice.

“Oh, I swoon!”

“I nearly did too when they told me. When I came in and Zaida wasn’t there, I was s-o-o surprised.”

“Oy, gevald! What for? Why? Oy!”

“He’s living with Sadie.”

“Sadie, you mean Moe’s Sadie?” Mom’s confusion was utter. “What happened there at Mamie’s? What? They told you?”

“Of course they told me — and is Mamie angry! I never saw her so upset — and angry. You know what he did?”

“Noo?” Mom demanded peremptorily.

“He sneaked away. He didn’t say anything. He just plain sneaked out of the house. He took his clothes, his siddurs, his tvillim—you know, all those Jewish things — his thallis. Even his yashikish, his big pillows. And away he went.”

“I don’t believe it! My father?”

“Well, don’t believe it,” Minnie retorted. “Your father! Mamie didn’t believe it either.”

“Who would take him? Vie zoy? How could he—”

“Morris took him. He asked Mrs. Schwartz next door to call Moe on Mamie’s telephone to come for him — because Mamie was in court with a dispossess. Moe should come right away with the car from his house in Flushing, so Zaida could get to Sadie’s before Shabbes. Oh, I tell you. Was there a something. Morris scribbled he was taking Zaida to Sadie’s. Then he called Mamie on the telephone: the old man is at Sadie’s. I’m glad I got there after all the excitement. Oh, was Mamie mad. ‘He’ll never come back to live here again,’ Mamie said.”

“Azoy?” Mom slumped in her chair.

“The old kocker,” Pop jeered. “And Jonas, stunted Jonas, what did he say?”

“You know Joe. Mir nisht, dir nisht. If he doesn’t want to live here, he doesn’t want to live here.”

“Ah, khah khah!” Pop reveled. “Sadie will give him a lively time. She’s blind as a cadaver. When she begins mixing up the meat utensils, the cutlery and the dishes, with the dairy dishes, oy, will he feel a nausea.”

“But why did he leave?” Grave and intense in perplexity, Mom sought an answer. “Didn’t I go there Sundays, after Baba died, often early in the morning before shopping? I helped Mamie tidy his room, fluff his pillows, change sheets. And kosher. Mamie is faultless. In every shred of food. In every dish, in every spoon. No one could ever be more so. In everything!”

“And the Passover dishes too,” Minnie concurred. “Everything wrapped up, separate. And packed up, no khumitz shouldn’t touch it. Touch it? Shouldn’t even come near it. I don’t know why,” she said abruptly. “Moe said over the telephone that Zaida said his grandchildren were too much for him.”

“Oh, the two young hussies,” Mom interpreted with rising emphasis. “That’s it. The springing and the dancing and the racket of the radio. But then”—she mustered argument to the contrary—“that’s nothing new. No, something, something has happened. For my father to bolt away without a word of farewell, without a word of notice. No. Something has deeply disturbed him. Deep. Deep.”

“Go,” Pop opined, “he’s grown fearful of the Portorickies. A Jew with a beard in a neighborhood full of Spanyookies. And the blacks too are already there. Ella whispered to me that Hannah was to be a bridesman at a Portorickie wedding. Goyish, Catolickehs. He may have gotten wind of it. He’s fleeing. With Sadie he’ll be spared that grief. Sadie has only boys, three boys.”

“Still, he could have said something,” Mom countered. “Ben Zion Farb, my father, was never one afraid to speak his mind.”

“No, you’re right, Mom. It’s something else,” Minnie agreed. “But still, he wouldn’t say what.” She grimaced expressively. “Only he fumfit about things going on late at night with his grandchildren. He must have been dreaming. He says Stella is carrying on with somebody — something shameful. She lets somebody in and out after he goes to bed. Can you imagine, sixteen years old, and she’s letting a geliebter in and out of the house at night?

“What?” Ira cast off listlessness. “What does he mean by that?”

“You ask me?” Minnie shot back. “If Mamie herself doesn’t know. Who believes him? She asked Stella, Hannah — they looked at her like she was crazy.”

“No. I mean in and out of where?”

“I told you: in and out of the house, that’s where.” Minnie was close to ridicule. “One night he could swear there was somebody with her. Then he started to think about it, and it kept him awake. He started to think who and how and where and when.” She shrugged. “Maybe he told Moe more. Maybe Moe told Mamie more. They didn’t tell me.” Her manner was fraught with finality; she yawned. “Oh, I had such a hard day today. That new office manager. He’s like a nervous string bean. And then the two classes at CCNY. I tell you, Mom.”

“Boy, that’s a new one, a new complaint about his grandchildren,” Ira persisted obliquely.

“Of course it’s a new one. He yelled about the radio, he yelled about the jazz bands, the Charleston they did. And of course, the trombenyiks that came into the house. But never this.”

“I wonder why?”

“I told you all he said.” Minnie spoke through a yawn. “‘My grandchildren, my grandchildren. I don’t wannna live here.’ You wanna know more, go over there yourself. Go to Mamie’s. Go to Zaida in Flushing.”

“Yeah.”

“Tockin yeah,” Mom echoed her son; and then tutted in dissatisfaction. “Who’ll guide me now, if I want to visit him? It’s an interminable journey to Flushing, to Sadie and Moe. I’ll have to ask Mamie when she goes. Maybe Moe would drive us out there in his car. Ai, what to make of it? One grows old.” She worried a crumb of kholleh on the tablecloth.

“I’ll take you next Sunday, Ma, in the subway,” Minnie offered.

“Good. Take her,” Pop approved — scornfully — in Yinglish. “But fahr a fahr sure I’ll tell you. Me he won’t see. The old leech won’t see me, and the blind ignoramus in Flushing won’t see me either.”

“No need to enlighten us,” said Mom. “We’re well informed.”

“It won’t harm you to visit him less frequently too,” Pop retaliated.He’ll have less chance to smear me with his dung.”

“Chaim,” Mom began angrily, caught herself. “You don’t have to worry. I’ll no longer fluff his pillows on a Sunday morning.”

“Good. Let the blind one do it.”

Ira contracted within himself. What did it mean? Zaida’s sudden departure. His muttering about his grandchildren — Jesus, had the old boy figured out something? What had Minnie said? He couldn’t abide. . what was going on. . heard Stella. . carrying on with somebody? Oh, hell, how could he guess? He was a smart old guy, though. All because of that superglorious night, hoisted her pink damp melonions on his tergo hook, whammoh, Israel. Ramp, oh, gramp, oh, gold lions of Judah. Jesus, what a night, what a scare — Now, wait a minute, think, think. Crazy coming back with condoms on Mamie’s dollar. . Jew-dough. No, no, no. Wait a minute. Did Zaida suspect? What if he did? Wait a minute! Oh, God!

IX

The fact was the actual event had taken place in the late fall of 1927, had taken place when Ira was in the first semester of his senior year at CCNY. Fact. And he surmised, he had good reason to believe, that if he had aroused Zaida’s suspicions by creeping out of the house in his stockinged feet, under cover of Stella’s tread, he had confirmed those suspicions in a much more prosaic, a much less melodramatic way: Ira had paid Mamie a visit on the Sunday before, and only Zaida and Stella were home. With only Zaida for chaperon, Ira had been a little too eager to get at Stella. He had paid his ritual, preliminary call on Zaida, and then not to lose the opportunity of having Stella almost without company — without Mamie’s presence, or Hannah’s — he had been a bit too abrupt in his leave-taking of his grandfather. Oh, Ira remembered well. Because of what happened after Ira had got his piece (as it would happen, only a run-of-the-mill piece). The old man did something he had never done before: he called Ira into his room again — just as Ira was leaving, walking down the hall toward the apartment door. And what had the old man done? Under pretext, Ira was sure, of reminiscing about his early boyhood, he had given Ira a lecture on how one obtained a wife, according to Judaism. Sitting at the keyboard of his word processor over sixty years later, Ira tried to remember his grandfather’s version. It wasn’t easy: how much sixty years had eroded! But it all seemed to add up to a hint on Zaida’s part that he was on to something. It seemed a hint — until Minnie brought the tidings of Zaida’s departure from Mamie’s. Then it no longer seemed a hint; it was a hint, and a broad one, in fact, a disclosure of the old man’s suspicions about the behavior of his two grandchildren. The more Ira dwelled on the news Minnie had brought, the more worried he became, the more certain he was that Zaida knew what his two grandchildren were up to.

Ira could no longer sit still at home, wondering whether Zaida had told Moe, Moe had told Mamie, whether his sins had caught up with him — or whether (there was a chance after all that Pop was right) the old man had left Mamie’s for altogether different reasons, reasons that had nothing to do with Ira’s shameful pratting of his sixteen-year-old kid cousin. But guilt wouldn’t down, guilt prevailed over hope. The old twist in the psyche, the plane-geometry neurosis Ira dubbed it, chafed within him as the genie of the fable chafed within the vase. No, he had to find out. Walk over to Mamie’s, and find out. Yes — even if Mamie said nothing, Joe said nothing, the one who would certainly know and tell him would be Stella; she’d know. He could feel his mind trapped in disquieting refrain: walk over, find out. Walk over, find out. Tolle lege, the same as Saint Augustine kept hearing — Saint Augustine: same one Zaida talked about. Same night. Tolle lege. Walk over and find out. He probably wouldn’t sleep tonight if he didn’t. Stay awake imagining things. And if he did find out, if it was true that Zaida knew and had told Moe and Mamie, and Joe knew, well, what? Ira could imagine that too. No, wait till tomorrow, late Saturday afternoon, Joe’s day off would be over, Joe would be gone. Find out then. Not have to confront the little guy, Stella’s father, as well as Mamie. But then all day Saturday, study for a test, try to skim Milton, knowing his own goose was cooked, his universal disgrace: Leah Stigman’s ausgestudierteh college boy, Leah’s preen and pride pratting his dumb little cousin. Stella, Stella. Why did his star, his stella, no longer shine over Mt. Morris Park? It was getting dark after all. And of course, Mom would learn of it, Mom, Pop, and now that searching brightness that beamed from her eyes when she returned from shopping Sunday morning, searching his and Minnie’s faces — wow.

Ira got up from the table, went into his cold, dark little bedroom, and got his overcoat. He would just stroll about, all right? he told himself. He didn’t have to go to Mamie’s. He’d just try to think. Maybe he could convince himself there was nothing to the whole thing. Zaida had left Mamie’s. He had a right to leave. His four sons contributed toward his keep; he could spend his room-and-board money anywhere. Pop was right. The old man objected to the girls, the radio, maybe half-grown swains pestered him. Who knew? Sadie had three boys, no girls. Bet that was it. Bet. But if not, if Zaida didn’t say anything, well — he could go on all night debating with himself.

For a moment the waning ivory moon above the gloomy gantries of the New York Central trestle seemed poised like a tusk at Ira as he pattered down the sandstone steps of the stoop to the sidewalk; boar’s tusk aimed at Endymion, he thought, turning left on grubby, cold, dark, deserted 119th Street toward the corner at Park Avenue. Why did he have to think of that, being gored by a waning moon; he didn’t like the image at all, the associations — just showed how uneasy he was. The November night air, the Shabbes air, nipped at the warmth he had just brought from the kitchen, the little warmth stored under his overcoat. He buttoned the garment all the way up. Single-breasted overcoats didn’t retain the heat the way double-breasted coats did, even if they were both made of shoddy wool. He’d know better than to buy a secondhand Chesterfield next time. He had chosen it because Iz was wearing one. It made Iz look slim and ascetic and studious. Well. . Ira plugged hands into pockets. Across the street, the old Jewish couple’s shabby little candy store was closed. It was getting late anyway, and it was Shabbes. The only store open was Biolov’s on the corner of Park Avenue, the resplendent show window featuring an almost life-sized figure of a fisherman in sou’wester oilskins, facing a green amphora and lugging on his back a huge codfish above the legend SCOTT’S EMULSION. Good symbol, the codfish, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s gags about the codpiece. His cod, and the moon goring him because of it.

He had told Mom — and the others — he was going for a walk, although it was almost nine-thirty. They were surprised. But perhaps that was all he was going to do: walk. Everything was still in suspension — he kept going west toward Madison — and would be until. . until who the hell knew. . until he came home again. God, he forgot, until he was keyed up, the slummy — that was all it was: he kept coming back to the same word — the slummy, the dismal streets of East Harlem, as you slanted alone toward the lampposts on Madison. Joe would be there tonight, Jonas. How many times did he have to tell himself that? And — there was something else to take into consideration too, goddamn it — if he called on Mamie tonight, he’d lose his chance to drop in Saturday or Sunday — he couldn’t drop in two days in a row. Looked suspicious. Two days. So no piece of ass, no screw — out of the question tonight — not with Joe there. And he’d lose his chance to get a buck from Mamie too, again because Joe was there — and Mamie wouldn’t handle money on Friday night. No, no, he was nutty to drop in tonight. He was just plain stupid. But grandchildren, the old man had said: grandchildren. The old boy was in his bedroom studying Talmud — or something. No reason to think he’d got an inkling of what was going on in the front room, even though the radio was turned way down. This goddamn business of getting a piece of tail, getting a lay, a piece of hide, pussy, and all the other goddamn names they had for it, Jesus Christ, drove him nuts, yeah, drove him nuts, especially if he knew it could be had, and he didn’t have to resort to ye cousin-handmaiden.

Leo had offered to set him up with his girl’s girlfriend. Ira could have embraced and ravished Iola, Edith’s former roommate, he had so impressed her with his story in the Lavender, and so disappointed her with his manhood. He could even have hoarded Mamie’s dollars for a whore now and again. What was a dose compared to this — this? Incest, of Biblical proportions, committed while Zaida, earnest, kosherer than kosher Zaida, pored over Talmud in the back room.

But now — what if Zaida couldn’t tolerate the noise, the protogoyishness, he observed in the girls? Now his excuse, his raison d’être, was in Flushing. Now Mom wouldn’t even have to stop at Mamie’s anymore to help make Zaida’s bed and straighten out his room.

But what the hell was the difference now? Longer or shorter absence. He couldn’t get it anyway. No, no, better wait until tomorrow, tomorrow late afternoon. Forget about his fears of Zaida’s getting wise — he was a sap to think so. Go there late Saturday, sit next to the fancy new radio, turn it up a little; and Stella would drift over at the right moment, shift the sling of her teddy aside, squat down on his hard-on. But all this was a day away. Christ, he ought to be home, reviewing Milton.

On to Fifth Avenue. He turned. Well, not the first time he’d mashed a grade hunting and hunting a lay. And here he was again, walking briskly downtown. . just to find out there was nothing to worry about. . heading downtown. .

Boyoboy, hadn’t Mom and Pop battled over the two bucks though. He had to laugh, except it was so goddamn awful. Pop scared shitless about the goy coming up, and instead who should step in but Minnie. But you know, while they wrestled there, Pop could have gone crazy enough to grab a candlestick from the table and bat his son with it, a sin to touch the candlestick or not. The old days when Pop had a horsewhip and flogged his son with it were gone. For one thing, times had changed and no one carried a horsewhip anymore, and for another, Ira was bigger than his father was. But if Pop had grabbed that candlestick, yeah, what would he have done? Grabbed the other candlestick. Yee-hee-hee! Wouldn’t Mom have screeched? His thoughts became impervious to the passing nightscene, or it dissolved. Wouldn’t that have made some movie? Ira felt his cheekbones lift in a grin. They fought with everything in the movies: swords, of course: Doug Fairbanks hopping up and over tables, wielding his rapier; daggers too, pistols, rifles, it went without saying, and even whips, and phony medieval knights-at-arms, with maces, Robin Hood with quarterstaves, and fake Roman gladiators with net and trident. But nobody had ever fought with a couple of solid brass candlesticks. Had both candles gone out? 116th Street already. On Shabbes you fight with candlestick? Ha-ha-ha! Reformed out of the nightscene he passed and passed, doorways, lighted store windows of mostly closed stores, autos traveling toward and away with headlights low, pedestrians wearing gloves, bundled-up couples.

Ira felt a sudden twinge of pity as he crossed the trolley car tracks. Poor Mom. Tea dripping down her chin, darkening the neckline of her red housedress. Poor Mom, the way her voice dove down to a distraught bass. He ought to kill that sonofabitch. If he ever busted Pop with a candlestick — they were goddamn heavy, those European ones. Grump: his skull would cave in. Pop goes Pop’s pate. Yeah, but no joke. Cops in the house. Oy, gevald! It was all a mistake, officer. It was all an accident. What kind of an accident, Jew-boy? We were playing Loki and the Utgard Giants. I thought he had a mountain between his head and the candlesticks. Yeah? Tell that to the judge. Right now you’re under arrest. Homicide. No, patricide. Handcuffs snapped on his wrists. Mom wringing her cheeks, Minnie hanging on to him. Say, maybe, after they let him out, on bail maybe, and Minnie hung around him to comfort him, who knew? Work on her sympathy; he had done it before, and it worked: H-v-v — o-o-h. Woddayasay, Minnie? Tell her how much he needed it. Kill your father to lay his daughter. Wasn’t this the meaning of it all? If you knocked her up, you’d be the kid’s father and the kid’s uncle at the same time, a duncle, with a dad, or a puncle with a pop, or a funcle with a father. And Mom, hey, listen, she’d be a double grandmother, sure, the kid’s maternal and paternal Baba. 114th Street.

That sonofabitch went for his balls, didn’t he?

Turn backward, turn backward, O time in thy flight — Ira crossed the street, halted in the light of the show window full of electrical fixtures, lamps and lampshades. Turn, turn, Sir Richard Whittington, Lord Mayor of London. Started out with a cat. . But what the hell did the old man say when Ira was on the way out? Still with a Trojan on — did he or didn’t he have it on? Disgraceful, downright sacrilegious, to sit down with a devout old man, with holy writ, a siddur, in front of him, and still be wearing a bag of sticky stuff: semen, Abraham’s seed. Onanism, wasn’t it? For which you got stoned in the old days. The more he ruminated on it, the daffier life was. Zaida communing with his third-generation offspring, with his fourth-generation seed caught in a condom (he hoped). But who the hell knew the old man was going to stop him? Ira slowly began walking again; he could see the bright drugstore a block and a half ahead. But what the hell had the old guy said? Now think, think. “When I was a child, I thought as a child—” No, no, no. That was Saint Paul: now we see as through a glass eye darkly. No, Zaida had offered Ira snuff. . not a cigarette this time (because it was Saturday; no smoking?), snuff out of a lacquered black snuffbox, and when Ira declined, Zaida had plied his nostrils with a pinch between thumb and forefinger vibrato. Very good. Go on. “How the Talmud teaches one, how the Talmud prepares the child for adulthood. You would have found out, had you continued faithful to Judaism. How different a college youth you would have been.”

That was the code to the cypher, wasn’t it? The cryptogram? Or was it? Ira walked ahead, mechanically. He had sat with hat and coat on listening, feigned he was listening, and yet puzzled. Stella had remained discreetly in the front room — or retired to her bedroom. Anyway. . “What does one understand with the mind of a child?” Zaida said. “I’ll tell you from my own experience.” Was that a thrust under cloak of reminiscence? Now think: did it or didn’t it mean anything? “From my own life experience.” His hand in didactic cusp: “When I was eleven, and I first read in Kedushim”—was that right? Kedushim, whatever that was—“a portion of Talmud: How do you get a wife? How does one acquire a wife?” And Ira with a condom glued fast — it was, wasn’t it? “There are three ways of getting a wife.” Zaida depressed his little finger as if it were a cash-register key: “One is with kessef.”

“Huh?” A few more steps and he’d reach the drugstore.

“Kessef, coin, silver. Seh heist kessef.”

“Oh, yeh. Kessef.” Ira had heard that word before — in Yiddish. “Okay.”

“Another is by shtar.” By written agreement, by bond. (Twinkle, twinkle, little shtar—that was easy to remember.) And the third is by biyah,” said Zaida.

“By beer,” Ira had chortled nervously.

“By biyah. To have intercourse with her. You come upon her, and you have intercourse with her.”

“That’s simple, Zaida.” Ira had maintained his sangfroid with a show of facetiousness: “Kessef, shtar, and biyah. Anybody can remember those.” Holy jumpin’ Jesus! How much more did he need to be told? The old boy was driving the spike right through him. That was it, that was it.

And the way he stared at Ira, out of hard, brown, uncompromising eyes. But then maybe it was just because of the cataracts he had in his eyes: “You say to her, ‘By this act I have made you my wife.’” (Listening, Ira had forgotten his restiveness.) “What did I understand as a child of eleven: ‘By this act’?” Old man with stained vest over paunch speaking, old man in a black yarmulke and with scraggly beard delivering his homily. “But you see how wise the Talmud was to prepare the immature mind for the time when the mature mind would understand?”

“Yeah.” How convulsively he had swallowed the saliva in his mouth. “In about a year or so,” Ira had jested.

“It could take longer,” the old man said seriously. “Who knows how much longer? Each youngster is different. But longer or shorter, before he knew desire, each child knew how God decreed desire should be satisfied: by taking a wife. And how wives were taken.”

It’s nothing, Ira assured himself, halted again in the light of the French pastry shop, open still, just short of the overhead poolroom on 112th Street, sniffed fragrance. It’s nothing with nothing. Look at those brave napoleons and chocolate éclairs. Handsome. If only this wasn’t Friday night, he’d blow fifteen cents on a slice of mocha tart for Mom. How she adored it, how little he ever bought her. What a son, what a sonofabitch he was, except calling himself that insulted Mom, poor Mom, with the scalding tea dripping down her chin. What did Eliot say, Mr. Tse-tse fly: I should have been a pair of ragged claws. You shouldn’t have been at all, period — Ira addressed himself as he rounded the closed millinery store on the corner — tell you something — the mind directed itself to the click of pool balls overhead: do you know that “Prufrock” has more in it than The Waste Land? Of course. But if you told Edith’s highbrow friends that you liked “Prufrock” better than The Waste Land, they’d laugh you out of court. What did that mean? Laugh you out of court. Hee-haw. Oh, just judge. A Daniel come to judgment, Jew. 112th Street, trudging west.

Only the little Puerto Rican grocery store was open and illuminated on the other side of the street; every other gesheft was dark, l’kuvet Shabbes. But the little tienda, as he remembered from high school Spanish, was still open, the same one on whose iron step he had fastened together the laces of his shoes. Long ago. Oh boy, what a fuck that had been! What the hell are you gonna do? How are you gonna make love to a nice woman, an intelligent woman, a refined woman? How’re you gonna say: Ah, you’re beautiful, you’re lovely, exquisite — the way, yes, Larry had sighed about Edith? She was so sweet, so tiny, so fragile. He just wanted to hold her in his arms, protect her. Protect her from what? Protect her from his hard-on. Never mind being lewd about it. Tears of pure worship had come into Larry’s eyes. Yeah, as if she were a statue of a goddess: effigy.

Who the hell was it brought the Pallas Athena from Troy, or the Lares and Penates? Well, how the hell were you gonna do that when you didn’t feel it? You came at twelve riding Minnie. Wham! So much for Dido and Aeneas. There went your romantic love, keyed into a carnal crevice, plugged into a submerged, unromantic socket, sock it, sock it. . shorted, that was it. You were no longer capable of romantic love; you were too late. Then how were you gonna use fancy, high-flown poetic diction, when the street words, the slum words of Harlem, already resounded in your ears, and you already had knowledge of what they were? And not only knowledge: the flesh knew, the body and brain knew: tit, knockers, twat, cunt, pussy, and piece of ass, that was what you’d had. Not delicate terms. You couldn’t use fancy words. They stood right in your way — balked your hard-on.

Yep—

Once to every man and nation comes

the moment to decide:

Something about choosing the good or evil side. But it hadn’t worked out that way for him. The evil side, the line of demarcation, had been Minnie’s pink little ass above the bathtub water line. It had been some sensation. Sensation wasn’t the word for it. A thousand years couldn’t undo its wicked transport.

Apt word, Ira smirked at himself: how buoyantly conveyed. Archimedes never dreamed of that one. Here he was: he had sauntered all that way, yeah, as aimless, as errant as a Western Union messenger boy with a telegram — right to the right address, right to the first of the twin solid blocks of masonry where Mamie lived. Mamie’s house was the first, when approached from the east. Ira stood contemplating the empty, lighted tile foyer; he stepped back on the sidewalk and looked up. Oh, the front-room windows a flight up were lit, all right. The family was home. Once to every man and nation. . for the good or evil side. He could walk past, now that he had been here, past the other, the second stone warren, stroll on to the lights of Lenox Avenue. And around to the north again. Plot your course: to 116th East, around the big ice-cream parlor, back to Fifth and the corner theater, and then east to Madison, and uptown this time following the long shiny reins of the trolley tracks — giddap. He entered the foyer: now’s the time and now’s the hour. See the front o’ battle lour — oh, Rabby Burns, amico fidato—if only I’d been a Scotsman — and began climbing the stone stairs. . came to the landing. . came to the first flight, stood on the wan tiles amid the dark-green-painted apartment house doors, each sticking out the brass tongue of its doorbell in ridicule.

Here goes. Brace for Mamie’s — or Joe’s — furious Yiddish tirade: Paskudnyack! Scoundrel! You dare show your vile face here? Ferbrent zollste veren! Heraus. Fershtinkeneh dreck! I’ll slap you forthwith. I’ll spit in your face! Grunk, grunk, grunk. He spun the brass key of the ratchety doorbell.

His grimness waxed with the passage of time, and time seemed unconscionable in duration. Finally, Hannah’s voice challenged: “Who?”

“It’s Ira.” His throat burred.

“Who?”

“Ira!” he called. Damn. Let the blow fall.

“Oh, it’s my collegiate cousin.” The tongue of the lock slid back; the door swung open. And there, jiggling in her antics, his stripling, saucy, redheaded cousin.

He stared searchingly at her countenance, waited for some sign. There was none. Only an effusive welcome.

“C’mon in. It’s cold in the hall. Oh, is my father gonna be surprised.”

“Is he home?” He had tumbled into fatuity, the absolute, boundless fatuity of his unfounded fears. He had ruined his chances for the weekend — but hell. . worth it. . for the next minute anyway. . until relief wore off. And then he’d kick himself in the pants.

“Is he home? My father?” Hannah led the way to the farther end of the hallway, brightened by the overlapping of light of front room ahead with that of the kitchen doorway to the side. Traditional Friday-night supper emanations became stronger as he advanced. “My father shouldn’t be home on Friday night? On Shabbes bay nakht? My father?”

“Of course.” Ira passed the open door of Zaida’s empty, darkened bedroom.

“You’ll be surprised too, you haven’t seen him in so long. He shaved off his mustache, did Minnie tell you? He says it makes him look taller. And will he ever be surprised to see you. When was it last? Did you go to Max’s wedding? Look who’s here,” she announced.

“Who is it?” Mamie bulked in the kitchen doorway.

“You’ll never guess,” Hannah promised.

“It’s Ira. A gitten Shabbes,” Mamie greeted. She turned her head to inform those in the kitchen. “Indeed a guest for you, Jonas. You haven’t seen each other since you’ve been working so late all the time.” And to Ira: “Come in, come in, let Jonas see you. Why so late?”

“I’m sorry.” Ira advanced into the kitchen with simpleton apology. “I started to take a walk, and just thought, I’m here, I’ll see Joe.” He extended his hand in greeting. “Noo, vus macht a yeet?” There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to have been alarmed about. What a dope. “How’s the gesheft?”

“Nisht kosher.” Joe stood up from the table. “You’re indeed a grown man, avert the evil eye. How long since I’ve seen you? It must be — God knows.”

“I really don’t remember.” Ira looked down at the face under the brim of Joe’s gray felt hat. It was a wholly unprepossessing countenance, blue-eyed and long-nosed. Joe was a very little man, scarcely five feet in height, shorter by inches even than Pop. Nor was he the kind of little man that Pop was, strong for his size, close-knit and quick, but trudging in his gait, weak-kneed and deliberate in movement. Temperament seemed to conform to outward appearance. He dragged out his words; he was patient in manner; he submitted docilely to interruption. And yet, there was about his lips, his small pointed jaw, something obstinate, canny, of which his very deliberation was part: one might expect him to ask endless questions, unabashed, about anything he was interested in — unlike Pop — and even then not feel bound to come to a decision, again unlike Pop, so impetuous, trusting in luck. One felt about Joe that it was futile to expect him to show pride or obligation where his interests were concerned.

Ira recalled seeing the apartment years later when Hannah gave him a tour. She supplied Ira with her own shrewd descriptions of her parent’s predilections. “Just as my father was short, shorter than your father, he liked everything big. And everywhere they gave you a prize, when you opened up a new bank account, there he would go and open up a new bank account: we had great big clocks, half-naked Venuses with a big round clock in their pipick; we had two of them with a clock in their bellies. We had table lamps that he got when he opened a new account; you could get a hernia when you tried to lift them. And the table itself — it was banquet-size. Of course, even when Zaida didn’t live with us anymore, he still came to the house for the Passover Seder. So with our family, and sometimes with the uncles and aunts — Ella’s husband was in the asylum, so she came with the three children; Morris and his wife didn’t have any children because she already had a hysterectomy before she was married, so they came — who else? You needed a table as big as a dance floor. When you pulled it out, and put in the spacers, it could seat twenty-four people. That was my father.”

“I think Harry’s wedding was the last time I saw you,” said Joe as he and Ira shook hands.

“I guess so. It’s funny, no matter how much time has passed, I still remember you shaving with a straight razor. It was on a Sunday.”

“Azoy. Gotinyoo! So long ago you remember me? I must have been working on ladies’ dresses yet.”

“It’s funny how some things stick. You were stropping your razor.”

“Azoy” Noo, come in, come in. Sit down. Sit down. Have a glazel tea,” Joe invited. “Let’s shmooze a little. I never see you.”

“He never comes Fridays. We see Minnie, but you only pop in when it pleases you,” Hannah accused.

“Well, Fraytik bay nakht,” Ira excused himself. “You know how it is. I came because I heard about Zaida.”

“Aha. Noo, what do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“We know like you know,” said Mamie.

“Is that so? No reason?”

“No reason, no reason. He’s gone.”

“I’ll be darned. Where’s Stella?”

“She’s in the front room reading.”

“Oh. It’s really a mystery,” Ira said in English.

“If he wants to go because we turn the radio up, and we dance the Charleston, so—” Hannah shrugged saucily. “We’re girls, what does he expect? So Sadie’s got boys. They won’t dance the Charleston too? They won’t turn on the radio?”

“It’s not that alone,” Mamie interjected.

“No?” Ira listened intently.

“He dreams they have lovers, gevald. They let them into the house at night, let them out. Girls sixteen, fourteen, antics to play.”

“What goes on in his head,” said Hannah.

“He’ll soon talk fetus in their belly,” said Joe.

“Noo, we all get old. What can you do? Ah, what is there to say? Is your father working?”

“As far as I know.”

“What’s Minnie doing?” Hannah asked.

“Well, you know what she’s doing. Office and night school. She’s the one who told us tonight.”

“You didn’t listen to what I had to say,” Mamie intervened. “You didn’t listen till I finished.”

“Okay. What?” Hannah accorded audience.

“I already know what you’re going to say,” said Joe.

“You know. But Hannah thinks,” Mamie stressed with upraised grubby finger, which flowed in gesture toward the front room. “And Stella, indeed: the reason the grandsire left was because of the radio and the Charlesburg, azoy—”

“He had dreams,” Hannah interrupted.

“So he says,” Mamie added. “But the true reason is that we were beginning to bicker about you, about you and Stella. He would not allow good Jewish youth into the house, only you, Ira. And he knew that I was vexed. I told him time and again this was America, and not Galitzia. It didn’t help. If his sons work on Shabbes, that’s their affair. But to encourage — he thinks — that some youth and his granddaughter should embrace each other, seize each other, he would be guilty of sinning before God: fornication, you understand?”

“Oh, tseegekhappen!” Hannah scoffed, echoed her mother’s Yiddish word.

“Yeh, yeh, tockin. He, the patriarch, all the household sins would be upon his head. The coming and going by night, who knows: whether he imagines, whether he feigns?”

“So he isn’t here. Don’t think we won’t invite boys, now.”

“Invite, invite, to your heart’s content. Why do I have a new radio? As long as they’re good Jewish boys. A little fluden?” Mamie offered Ira. “I baked such good fluden today.”

“No, thanks, Mamie. It’s late. I just dropped in to get the news to tell Mom. She said something about your traveling out to Flushing together.”

“Indeed. We’ll have to pursue him now.”

“Who is it you don’t see here tonight?” Stella proposed a riddle, as she appeared in the doorway, textbook in hand.

“We just told him,” Hannah informed her sister scathingly. “What do you think we’ve been talking about?”

“I know,” Ira said to mitigate Hannah’s sharpness. “Minnie told me.”

“So who do you think is gonna have his room? Guess.”

“You?”

“Naturally. She gets everything,” said Hannah.

“Aza mensh.” Mamie locked gross fingers and deplored. “Whatever I cooked for him, no matter how good it was, he never praised it. He would just nod his head. It passed. Shoyn—”

“It was coming to him,” Hannah seconded.

“Shah! Don’t interrupt your mother,” Jonas chided.

Hannah refused to be squelched: “What is it about these European fathers — just because they begot you, like the Bible says, you owe them everything.”

“You think he’s strict,” said Joe. “You should have known my father. We quivered. I had a brother, Leibele. He was eighteen already. It was Yom Kippur, and he was hungry. So he ate something. Freg nisht. When he came back to the shul, my father said, ‘Where have you been? Let me see your tongue.’ Noo, noo. He gave him with the stick right in front of the synagogue. I can still see Leibele with the blood running from his face. With my father, his word was law. Life and death. Zaida is nothing compared to my father.”

“That’s because he’s here in America,” Hannah remarked.

“Well, just the same, I’m not sorry he’s gone,” Stella said boldly. “Why should I be sorry? If you want to know, I’m glad. Would you want somebody in the house who’s always chasing out every fellow that comes in? And good Jewish fellows too. You’re the only one he’d let into the house. Everybody else was a trombenyik.”

“Yeah?” Ira scratched an eyebrow.

“Go, who’s talking of such things,” Mamie rebuked her daughter. “What he wanted I ran to get: the freshest bulkies. I went to the bakery three times a day to bring back fresh bulkies—”

“You ran five times a day,” Hannah contradicted.

“Noo, five times a day. And those hard egg biscuits I got him for a nosh between meals. They had to be just so. If they were too brown, too crisp, he wouldn’t eat them. If they were too soft, he wouldn’t eat them. All I did for him, and he leaves. What? He flees. All right, he was an embittered man: nothing suited him; he was that kind of a man. But flee without saying a word, I don’t understand.”

“Iz nisht gefilte fish,” Joe remarked humorously. “Another kosher home like this he won’t find again.”

“Yeah, that’s what Pop said.” Ira watched his uncle cut a slice of kholleh into small cubes and pop them into his mouth as if they were bonbons.

“Well.” He stood, went for his coat and hat on the washtub surface. Though he had ruled out another visit for the weekend, he had much to be thankful for. He was cleared of all suspicion. That was certain. And besides, when he called at Mamie’s again, Zaida would no longer be there: one hazard less when he got Stella alone. Still, why had the old man recited that business about getting a wife, especially that business about coming upon her and having sexual relations with her? Only a week ago, and so pointed in Ira’s direction. There was only one person who might know, who could clinch matters. Stella. He had screwed her in the front room only minutes before. Was it possible the old man said something to her after Ira had departed? She was about to leave the kitchen for the front room.

“What are you reading, Stella?” Ira called after her.

“I’m not reading. It’s Pitkin shorthand.” Her voice trailed from the hall.

“Yeah? I studied Gregg years ago. Is Pitman better?”

“Oh, a lot.”

“Well,” Ira hesitated. No, he was sure he was out in the clear. Why bother to follow Stella into the front room?

“Well, good night, everybody.” He slid into his coat. “Excuse me for coming so late, but you know when Minnie told us—”

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” Mamie reassured.

“O-o-h, Papa.” Hannah turned to Joe suddenly. “You’re gonna let Ira go away without your goodbye thing?”

“Let him be,” Mamie interceded. “He has other things on his mind besides that. And on Friday night.”

“Noo, it won’t harm anything,” Joe countered, smiling. “The old man isn’t here, so I may. Wait, I’ll go get it.”

“A goodbye thing?” Ira repeated, nonplussed.

“Yeh. Wait, wait. It’s in my jacket pocket.” Joe left the kitchen for the back bedroom.

“What’s he up to?” Ira inquired of Mamie.

“A foolish thing,” was her answer.

But Joe seemed to have difficulty finding the object he sought. “Maybe it’s in my overcoat,” he said. “Where did I — when did I show you?”

“Do you wanna see how Pitman looks, Ira?” Stella called from the front room.

“Sure.” Ira was certain she was sending him some kind of signal. Why of course: she wanted to remind him that with Zaida gone, Joe working, and Mamie escorting Mom to Flushing, the house would be virtually empty Sunday. He made for the front room.

“Don’t go away,” Joe urged.

Mamie kept on the subject of Zaida’s departure as Ira tried to insinuate his way into the front room after his prey. “For the children, for me, it’s easier. You can see. Would they dare play the new radio tonight? But that has nothing to do with it.”

“New radio?” Ira asked in surprise.

“Wait till you see it,” said Stella. “He got it at a place on Main Street.”

“You fret yourself and fret yourself.” Joe savored a kholleh cube while comforting his wife. “It’s nothing with nothing. “He’s a pious Jew. Perhaps he was afraid you’d try to dissuade him—”

“But why did he mumble about his grandchildren?”

“Who knows? Go. I’m not stopping you from going. Go in good health. And I wager he won’t tell you. He’ll give you some other excuse. Faults he has in plenty, but an observant Jew he is. He wouldn’t let his own son, Saul, jilt Ida, to whom he had pledged marriage. Why? Because she was an orphan. And Saul had to be led fainting to the canopy. That’s how Ben Zion is. Hear me out. If you want to know what my complaint is, it’s not his love of fresh bulkies and fresh egg biscuits. At age fifty — you hear, Ira? — when he came to America, what man in his fifties can’t work? Hired work didn’t suit him. Commerce and trade he couldn’t pursue — how? Without a word of English? His brother Nathan was a diamond dealer. That would have suited Ben Zion. But dealing in diamonds you don’t learn so easily, and Nathan, brother or not, wasn’t willing to teach him—”

“Especially to sell diamonds with little black spots in them to all your relatives,” Hannah remarked, and for Ira’s benefit, “To all Uncle Nathan’s relatives, he sold a diamond with a little, a black spot.”

“Shah! He’s dead. Wild prattler,” Mamie reprimanded. “You know, Uncle Nathan threw himself from the window. He had a cancer.”

“I know. Mom told me.” Ira’s gaze furtively followed Stella as she left the kitchen again.

“It’s a great scandal.” Mamie lowered her voice. “Zaida was never told.”

“So if he leans on all his sons for support,” Hannah observed tartly, “how can he be such an ehrlikher yeet, when all his sons work on Shabbes? Doesn’t that sin fall on him too?”

“And he knows it,” Stella called from the hall on the way to the front room.

“America is America,” Joe yawned, a cruet between thumb and forefinger. “Everything is a little treife. What? I don’t take a coffee with milk at night when I’m in the cafeteria? And the cup — it’s not washed by the dishwasher with everything else milkhdik, fleishik? A piece of steak, like Max, I don’t eat. But a piece of fish, yes. Piety is stretched here. It’s not Europe, and that’s how it is.”

“And with Zaida, what you do, you do. What I do, I do,” said Mamie.

“And women count for nothing,” Hannah added. “It’s no use talking. That’s how he was brought up. You told me yourself a hundred times,” she said to her mother with asperity: “A girl is only good to get married.”

“She’s a thorn,” Mamie smiled.

“I’ll save you a trip,” said Joe. “Saturday night I go to work, I’ll ask Morris: Why? What happened? Morris will tell me sooner than your father will tell you.”

“No. I want to see him,” Mamie insisted.

“You know what?” Stella’s voice preceded her from the front room. She was holding a textbook. “He knows we’re not going to get married the way he wants us to get married. Kosher it should be. With a shotkhin and pictures. So he doesn’t want to stand in the way.”

“Go, you’re foolish,” said Mamie.

“All right, so I’m foolish.” Stella held up her book: Pitman Method Shorthand. “So why do you take a whole towel along when we go to somebody’s wedding, and they say, ‘The same should happen to you next year’? Why?” She addressed Ira. “You know I’m sixteen, and I’m supposed to be a kolleh moit already, a bride.”

“I don’t get you.”

“Mama is afraid I’m not pure enough for Zaida. He found out maybe some boy was escorting me, and he touched my breast by accident on purpose.”

“That’s enough,” said Mamie. “May it be no worse.”

“How did you first find out where he went, if nobody was home?” Ira asked.

“I found out,” Stella answered.

“You did?”

“Morris talked to me over the phone. I was the only one home afterward.”

“Oh.” Ira searched her face. She betrayed nothing: blank. He was stewing over nothing. But then again, she was expert at exhibiting only vacuities. Fortunate too, or he would have been compromised more than once. Still, that last Talmudic comment of Zaida’s to his grandson: “By this act.” He watched her leave for the front room. Hell, bored to death over nothing. He stood up.

“Ira, are you leaving so soon?” Joe asked.

“Soon? It’s almost ten o’clock.”

“He’s got such big things on his mind. You don’t know him, Papa. He’s always in a hurry.”

And then turning to Ira, she said, “Girl, when it comes to talk, you’re a regular geyser.”

“You’re a geyser. I’m a girl.”

“O-o-y! Good night.”

“You didn’t see yet the bargain I made with the radio store for my old one,” Joe said, intercepting Ira’s retreat. “A piece of furniture you’ll never see,” said Joe.

“Well, I’ll take a quick look.”

“When you look once, you’ll look longer.” Joe led the way to the front room. “Na. You ever saw such piece of furniture?” And a piece of furniture it certainly was, a softly crooning cabinet, massive in size, maple in veneer.

“Hey, that’s the biggest I’ve seen yet,” Ira commended.

“Look yet how they painted it,” Joe extolled. “He said they got special Chinamen who were the only ones could do it. Look on how that goes, both whole sides. One sticking out the tongue to the other. No? Dus heist kunst.”

“Art. I should say,” Ira agreed.

“They’re genuine.”

“Not even Zaida could complain,” Stella remarked from the other side of the table.

“What d’ye mean?”

“Does it remind you of any animal or anything?”

“Oh, graven images. Oh, no. What dragons! It’s real lacquer.”

“I told you,” Joe said, gratified. “Turn it up a little. You’ll hear.” Joe matched act with word. “Stay a minute.”

“Oh, yeah.” Ira stood rapt in admiration. “What a radio!” With an opportunity like that, he simply had to wait — transfixed with awe — at least another minute. Joe returned to the kitchen.

Ira stepped swiftly to Stella’s side, bent over, whispered: “Did Zaida — I mean, did he tell Morris anything about us? Did Morris say anything?”

“Us?” Her smooth face, her shallow blue eyes opened in surprise. “Us, what?” She shook her blond head vigorously — for her.

“Oh. Okay.” Disgruntled with himself at final confirmation of the groundlessness of his fears, he was on the point of leaving — then remembered to salvage a little anticipation: “Listen, stay home after they leave Sunday. You hear me?”

“I wanted to ask you something, Ira,” she whispered. “Not now. Sunday.”

He hesitated. “What? Fast.”

“Ira, is it all right if I didn’t get my period for four days?”

He had expected the opposite: that she was having her period; he had prepared an answer. Speechless, his lips and scowl formed the question: “What?”

“Is it all right?” Her features were childishly suppliant, lips slackly open in plea.

“No.” Her very entreaty sent a surge of savagery through him. “It’s not. What the hell’s the matter with you? Four days?”

Sound of conversation in the kitchen had subsided. She nodded.

“You’re sure?” he whispered into her ear.

“Tomorrow’ll be five.”

“Holy bejesus,” he bit off. “I’ll be here Sunday. I’ll find out.”

She smiled, supplicating.

“Some radio,” he said, raising his voice. “You got the best radio in Harlem.” He prepared to go. “I’ll get my coat.” And by dint of teeth and brows alone: “Sunday.” He stabbed his forefinger at her. And prepared a face to meet the faces in the kitchen. “Well, mazel tov, ” he said cheerfully. “I’m glad I came. That’s some radio. Those red dragons around it. Wow!” He picked up his coat and hat from the covered washtub. “Wait till I tell Mom.”

“And don’t forget Sunday she should be here. Twelve o’clock.”

“Oh, no.”

“It cost a good little piece of money, that radio,” said Joe. “I’m a mehvin, no? Value I recognize right away.”

“Wunderbar! It’s some beauty. Wear it in good health,” Ira joked.

“Wear it without Zaida coming out in his underwear, you should say,” Hannah appended.

“You’re a bright one, all right,” Ira approved.

“I should be on the stage, no?”

“Home talent,” Stella called the front room.

“Oh, shut up.”

“Well.” Ira buttoned up toward leave-taking. “Good night, everybody. Good night, Mamie. I’ll tell Mom.”

“Wait, I have something else to show you.” Diminutive Joe stood up and stretched out his hand. Visible on it, though flesh-colored, a flat round disk was strapped against the palm. “A salissman made a deal with me for a piece of pineapple-cheese pie and a cup of coffee.”

“What is it?”

“Shake hands with me, you’ll find out.”

“It’s not gonna squirt water, is it?”

“Nah, nah. Don’t be afraid. Give a shake.” Ira clasped his uncle’s outstretched hand, squeezed mutually. The device in Joe’s palm emitted a loud, blatant fart. Involuntarily, Ira drew his hand away — to Joe’s beaming chuckle.

“It’s a real fortz, nisht?”

“Couldn’t be better.”

“If it stank a little, it would be just like my second cousin Meyer, the shnorrer. You remember him, Ira?”

“He always looked like he needed a shave.”

“Tockin, tockin,” Mamie corroborated. “With him such a fart would be a trifle. Nothing to disapprove of.”

Hannah giggled. “For once Ira doesn’t look like he’s got something important on his mind.”

X

You dumb sonofabitch, you dumb sonofabitch. Like an animal dragging his trap after him, Ira made through dark 112th Street for the brightly lit store under the streetlamp on the corner of Fifth Avenue. Reaching it, he stopped there, trying to think, could think only of the click of pool balls overhead, sometimes cracking loudly, subdued at others — at the far end of the overhead pool hall, clicking like knitting needles. He moved on, stopped again to watch the big-bosomed woman in white removing the French pastries from show window to refrigerator in the back. It was cold, but he scarcely felt it; nor was he aware of the few passersby, nor throb of low-beam autos rolling along the avenue. Funny only it wasn’t funny: the first thing you thought of was to murder them. Clyde, Clyde, lost his hide. Lucky he had already read An American Tragedy, so he knew better than to act like Clyde. But he didn’t feel that same twist, that same frenzied torsion beyond tolerance, beyond sound return, that had wrenched him so horribly with Minnie, so that even when she told him she was all right he felt he would never wholly recover: the Euclid twist, the fatal snap, the wave of insanity, who would know what he meant? But he had grown wise now, wise guy: blame someone else. What if she didn’t? And what if Mamie finds out something from Zaida?

Oh, shit, he groaned, moved on: think, will you, think. . Four days overdue. Blastula, gastrula, exponential growth. How big was a fetus four days, tomorrow five days old? Big as a bead? Big as a marble?

Let’s see. He didn’t know anything about pregnancy. He knew names. That’s all he knew about everything: parturition, gestation. Names stuck to him like — yeah, like that goddamn thing is stuck to her. Now, wait a minute. What did Edith say? She tried hot baths. That didn’t work. What else? Castor oil. Didn’t work. What the hell was the name of that drug? Ergot. Erg is from physics, quantity of work. Ergo, it didn’t work. What did Mom do? Picked up Morris with her arms and belly. .

He had slowed down to a plod, trying to think, and beginning to feel cold. C’mon, get up a little steam. He quickened gait. Look, Edith turned to you when she needed — when she needed bolstering. . consoling, yes? This is so shameful, screwing your sixteen-year-old kid cousin. You’d have to tell her everything, if she said: how long? From the time she was only thirteen. And if she asked about anybody else. Who-o-ow. Tell her about Minnie, pratting her when you were only twelve yourself; she was only ten. Smash the mask you wear, the pretty gentile mask she’d painted over your twisted Harlem face: pristine innocence; impersonal, nice guy, chaste, noble. Reveal. Reveal. Confess.

Call her up tomorrow — no, wait. Call up Stella first, you dope. What if she says, I’m all right? I’m all right. Oh, boy! But what if not? Then call up Edith, that’s all. Call up Edith, and tell her you’re in trouble. You’re in trouble. You need a favor. Advice. She ain’t perfect, right? She double-crossed Larry with Lewlyn. And when you took those walks with her in Woodstock — if you hadn’t been so scared because all you’d ever screwed was kids—

At 116th Street, he wheeled east, traveled between the few remaining lighted stores and the accompanying glint of trolley tracks. How will you say it? You impregnated your cousin. You inseminated her. Nah, you donkey, who do you think you are? Milton? Oh, Jesus, Milton he had just barely looked at. If he’d stayed home and read, he wouldn’t have known a damn thing about any of this. And maybe Stella would have got over it after a while by herself. All right, you call up Edith, and you ask to come over. All right, so you can’t say you think you knocked up your cousin. You had intercourse, all right? Maybe she’s pregnant; she hasn’t had her period — menstruated, menstruated — four days — it would be five tomorrow. Maybe you don’t have to mention Minnie. Why should you? Stella was bad enough. Don’t even have to tell Edith when you started. Stella’s sixteen now, going on seventeen. That’s old enough. So. . you’re waiting for Mamie to come home, and maybe give you a dollar. Edith knows that. So Stella comes over and puts her arms around you. .

Just within hearing distance on Park Avenue, and seemingly at eye level ahead, the trestle level above the rise of ground, a New York Central coach glided by, the lighted windows of the train like the luminescence of a deep-sea creature. Dubito, cogito, ergo sum. Yeah. Ergo. No fancy Latin is going to talk the kid out of her belly, as Mom would say. Just tell Edith you’re stuck, and why.

He turned north again. What the hell happened to that moon?

They must have just gone to bed when he unlocked the kitchen door, switched on the light, and entered — because Mom, Mom spoke to him softly, when he opened the door to the freezing bedroom, and hung up coat and hat on the wall hooks at the foot of his bed. She always fell asleep last, slowly, like himself, while Pop fell asleep at once, slept hard for a few hours, then lightly the rest of the night; and Minnie in her folding cot beside the bed did very much the same.

“Ira?” Mom said.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“You won’t stay up too late.”

“No.”

“And turn off the gas stove before you go to bed.”

“Okay.” He shut the door to the cold, dark bedrooms. No point in holding a long conversation. He’d tell Mom about Mamie’s proposed trip to Flushing tomorrow. Time enough. What the hell was the Hebrew word? Biyah? Beer, he had wisecracked. By this act. . of my copulating with you. .

He pulled out the black looseleaf notebook with the blue-bound copy of Milton’s poems on it from the pantry shelf under the china closet, took them to the green-oilcloth-topped kitchen table, and sat down. How the hell could a guy stay as pure as Milton did? Jesus, angelic, and looked it. Traveled all over Italy. Must’ve been plenty of cash around.

Ira opened the book to where he had left off. Never mind the dreaming. He’d have to skim like hell. And tomorrow, Jesus, yes, he’d have to call Edith — no, Stella first, you boob. Get lost in your book, for Christ’s sake. Maybe coffee later. He read, skimmed, held steady on a line, forgot the burden of his troubles in its beauty. Boy, look at that about Satan’s shield: Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb/Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views. . Galileo, Tuscan artist. . If you could only have gone up to Galileo, and said: Hey, listen, Gallo, old boy. Instead of wasting your time trying to find out the speed of light from one mountaintop to another, keep your eye on one of those moons of Jupiter. Notice how long it takes before you see it again as the earth moves round the sun.

What a discovery. Trickle. Trickle. Gurgle. Gurgle. Leaky toilet flush valve in the box over the stool. Not a roach in sight. Scan me out that in iambic pentameter. Trickle, trickle, leaky flush — that’s a dactyl, hoople-head.

The way Mom picked up Morris, leaning way back like those ivory figurines of Mary holding baby Jesus to conform to the shape of the tusk — ah, the tusk again.

Read, will you?. . Ira leafed through pages, flattened the text. Man, what that guy knows. What did Mott say? In between studying Hebrew and Chaldean, you were supposed to pick up Italian on the side. Pages passed. The tenement creaked. The blue fringe of gas flame along the bar in the open gas stove hissed quietly.

Remember Belial’s argument. How did Milton say it? Counseled ignoble ease and peaceful sloth. Who opposes him? Beelzebub. With what rebuttal? Get at God via Man. Right? Seduce them to our party, that their God/May prove their foe. Okay. Belial versus Beelzebub. What time is it? Getting on twelve. A light wind had come up, driveled in colloquy with washlines in the backyard, seeped through the kitchen window, ever so slightly swayed the window shade. How long would he study? How long would his eyes last reading a blind poet? Ira allowed himself the luxury of letting the printed lines swim out of focus.

No, he couldn’t ask Mom to lend him money out of what she was saving for a Persian lamb coat. He’d have to tell her what it was for, even if he could find out who did abortions (without asking Edith who did hers).

“Oy, gevald,” he could just hear Mom cry out. “How could you bring yourself to do such a thing!” And he: “I could, that’s all.” She’d forgive him, she’d forgive him even if she knew he used to screw Minnie.

There were some things you couldn’t understand: motherhood: she had conceived him, gestated him, just as maybe Stella had conceived by him and was gestating part of him, changing him from son to father. Couldn’t you just hear Mom and Mamie haggling over what share of the midwife’s bill or doctor’s bill each ought to pay? Nah. Better ask Leo. He wouldn’t have to say whom he knocked up. Just knocked up a jane.

The irony of it all. A short while ago, Edith had had her uterus scraped, or what the hell ever they do. They go into the cunt somehow: vagina — those fancy goddamn words — with that kind of light on a mirror, parabolic, spherical, with a peephole in it. Open wider. Say a-a-h. Which one of those nimble, little, flagellant, little, spermy, little, protozoan bastards got to her. Christ, he thought he had a bag on; he could have sworn he had a bag on. Next time wear two — if there is a next time. Call him Houdini, if he gets out. You and your stale jokes.

Read, will you. . Print swam back into focus, into ken. Okay. Satan is elected: And through the palpable obscure find out/His uncouth way. . Jesus, a guy ought not read this for tests. He ought to just read it and read it and read it. Oh, hell. . is right. At least to Book III tonight. How many more pages would that be? He moistened his finger, counted: twelve. Well, get going.

Meanwhile the Adversary of God and Man,

Satan, with thoughts inflamed of highest design,

Puts on swift wings, and toward the gates of Hell

Explores his solitary flight: sometimes

He scours the right hand coast. .

He felt completely alone. With an open book before him. In a green-painted kitchen. Bile green, Mom called it. Green icebox alarm clock on it at twenty to two: 1:40 ante meridian. Box of household matches beside the clock: Big Ben. Everything had connotations: the wrong ones at the wrong time.

Candlesticks yellow on white tablecloth, burned out to little drapes of wax. And outdoors the limitless cave of night like a cold eternity. Big Ben. Oh, Jesus, he’d forgotten. Stella was the one that should have happened to: oh, boy, he’d forgotten altogether. O-o-oh, o-o-oh. His mind was pulled apart. That dumbbell: “Is it all right if you don’t get your period in four days?” No, she didn’t say that. She said if it’s four days late. Boy, what a dumbbell. Tough luck — he didn’t know anything about it: tell her to tell Joe, tell Mamie, she was out with a — no, some goy caught her in the hallway, or better, a Portorickan. Said he’d choke her unless — They’ve got enough dough to find a midwife, or someone skilled in the business. Right?

He was thinking old thoughts, rehashing the rehash. And if she accused him, the dummy, never, he when? Oh, that was enough. But you know, to go over old fantasies again, what do they call it, make a virtue of necessity — some virtue: if he had to marry her, she’d be his slave: get him that, and cook him this. And he’d back-scuttle her every night, maybe day and night and Shabbes too. Would it be as wonderful as that night he’d hoisted her aloft on his stiff petard right under Mamie’s snore? No, that was like the penultimate rocket display with the American flag breaking out in red, white, and blue balls of flame — better than that: golden lions of Judah rampant on a field of sapphire. Hey, you know, that was one time cubic phylacteries turned into spheres, orisons into orgasm.

Shut up. You’re in trouble. Read, will you, for Christ Jesus. If you weren’t such a goddamn dope, you’d have been through Book II long ago. What d’ya got to say for yourself, Lucifer, shorn of glory?

Here we are, here we are: he ought to get a concordance — how he loved Milton. What gigantic talk. There was nobody like him; not even Shakespeare could command such ordinance of vowels as Milton, could consign such encyclopedic cohort of learning to his fable. Boy: Far less abhorred than these/Vexed Scylla, bathing in the sea that parts/Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore. . Ah. Ira stopped to meditate. The guy was a Puritan — unlike Shakespeare — and Ira himself was a Puritan, fouled up and gone astray. He admired Shakespeare, marveled at his inordinate, inexhaustible dramatic, linguistic prowess, but the artist was ever detached, ever uncommitted, unreeling out of his limitless being myriad characters in myriad situations, himself seemingly bound to no mystique. That was it. And Milton was bound. As Ira himself once was, still wanted to be, no longer could be. Mystique, devotion, sanctity — he was always running up against them, couldn’t rid himself of them. What a cinch — if he could.

He knew what was going to happen. Then skim. But tough thing to do: to skim that stupendous confrontation. And worse than that. . because so close to home. Stupendous and inciting. Would always be now. . all incest would: because he knew the inseparable mingling of the terror and iniquity. That was it: pariah’s orgasm at its highest, the shattering of all taboo, ecstatic reprisal against everything, everybody, yeah, against Pop, even Mom for moving to Harlem, Zaida for coming here, Jew with the whiskers and his kosher bosher and tvillim and thallis among the goyim. The whole works. Jesus, if that time, that Sunday morning way back on 9th Street, when Morris, her own brother, showed Mom his looming blooming bascule, if she hadn’t run from the room broom in hand, when he said, “Look what I’ve got, Leah,” but, oh, boy, just sent Ira out, so maybe he could have sneaked back, peeked in. Pop was a mensheleh, she taunted her husband when they quarreled, but with Morris—

Come on, quit it—

Incensed with indignation, Satan stood

Unterrified, and like a comet burned,

That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge

In the arctic sky. .

If that wasn’t the mightiest metaphor any poet ever wrote. Ophiuchus huge. Jesus, if only he had to make only one telephone call tomorrow, not two. Just one, please: Hello, Stella, you all right? Wouldn’t he be happy? What did the other guys in Professor Mott’s class think when they read about Satan screwing his own daughter, and fighting his own son, after he knocked her up? What Jewish innocents abroad: only you, you stupid sonofabitch. . Each at the head/Leveled his deadly aim; their fatal hands/No second stroke intend. . Keep reading.

Keep breeding. “Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, echo, dying, dying, dying.” Nothing much for him to do, except to try and keep on. Spiritless, in the midst of a heavy bronchial infection, he might just as well slavishly follow his typescript. He wasn’t capable of much else. Several days in fact had passed since he had last applied himself to his narrative: the bronchitis was one of the reasons for the interruption. Keep breeding. Answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

XI

In his dim little bedroom, Sunday morning dawned on sandy eyelids opening on the smudged, slotted wall across the gray airshaft. He listened a second — he scarcely ever could tell time in the dingy little coop. Kitchen door closed, and no sound beyond; so Mom and Pop were gone. And Minnie — still probably dozing — or if awake — who cared? He got out of bed, entered the kitchen. Almost nine-thirty. His volume of Milton and notebook on the table still. Nanh, it was all stupid, all his messages. Mom would have gone to Mamie’s anyway to find out the news, and learned of Mamie’s intended trip to Flushing. Nine-thirty. Just about the right time to call up Mamie’s, get Stella before she gadded off, find out the verdict. He headed for the toilet, came out, began dressing. Let’s see. He had a couple of nickels. Otherwise he’d have had to borrow from Minnie—and she would have misinterpreted his approach: Waddaye want? Sharp as a buzz saw: Get outa here. Or else waited until Mom came. Ah, the goddamn things he had gotten himself into — you really had to laugh. If you could: old man Chaos last night, giving the Devil his bearings: southeast by east. Ira rubbed his eyes. How the hell? Milton, you ought to have more goddamn sense. That ugly old glob of Sin with the mutts yelping inside her, opening up the gates of Hell that could never be closed again. Got it fixed all tricky. Well, that’s theology. Ira dug into his back pocket, found his folded handkerchief. All this guy asks is a break. Accursed, and in a cursèd hour, he hies. Oh, bullshit.

Into overcoat, and downstairs, he skipped down stoop, and crossed scuffy old 119th Street to Biolov’s drugstore, where he nodded at Joey tending the pharmacy before entering the phone booth, pulled the folding doors to — and then with doubled handkerchief at the ready gave the operator Mamie’s number, and as soon as he heard the call go through, carefully ascertaining himself free of witnesses, draped his handkerchief over the mouthpiece. He had seen Bert Lytell do the same in the movies. No reason to think the stratagem wouldn’t work. And with that bitter good fortune that so often mocked predicament, his meticulous precautions were unnecessary. It was Stella herself who answered the phone.

“Don’t say who it is.” Ira removed the handkerchief. “It’s me, Ira. Any luck?”

“No.”

“No.” Chance to tighten lips. “Your mother’s still going to Zaida’s, right?”

“Leah is here.”

“Okay. Never mind. Let me ask the questions.”

“Nobody is listening. They’re in the front room.”

“Doesn’t matter. They’re going to leave about one o’clock?”

“I think so. Is Minnie going?”

“Shut up, for Christ’s sake! I’ll be there about two o’clock. At your house. We gotta see what we can do. You understand?” He gesticulated, his voice tightened. “Just say yes.”

“All right.”

“You’ll wait there for me.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll see you later. Two o’clock. I’m — let’s see — I’m Esther, you get it?”

“I know what you mean.”

“So goodbye, Esther. You say it. Is Hannah there?”

“No. Just Mama and Leah.”

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

Never in his life had he felt so like a moron as he did when he hung up the receiver. But what was he going to do? He was trapped — and he had to get down to her level. He left the drugstore and recrossed the street, to the stoop of his tenement, and through long murky hall and up flight of stairs.

So Mom was still at Mamie’s. She certainly must be expecting he’d be asleep, as in the old days, when she came home with breakfast for him and Minnie. As in the old days. Jesus, what irony: to know Mom was still blocks and blocks away, that he had all the time he needed to tear off a piece, and even if he could, no longer give a damn. The dumb cluck didn’t know she might be pregnant, and he did all the worrying. Now try to think, he adjured himself, entering the kitchen.

Minnie waited warily for him to return to the kitchen before entering. Holding her purple bathrobe defensively about her, she skirted him cautiously when he went to the stove to look into the coffeepot, and then she crossed the kitchen to the bathroom.

Mom had made coffee, the blue-enameled coffeepot was on the stove, only the coffee had become lukewarm. He lit the gas flame under it, tried to become interested in the opening of Book III while the coffee heated, couldn’t, got up and stood beside the stove, waited until the first bubbles broke the surface, and poured himself a cup, just as Minnie came out of the bathroom.

“Mom isn’t back yet?” she asked.

“You see she isn’t.” He carried his cup to the table. His indifference, or curtness, apparently reassured her.

“No milk? It’s outside the window, in the box.”

“No.”

“Whatsa matter? You’re so worried about the exam?”

“No. I’m not worried about the exam.” He tested a sip of near-boiling coffee, dipped a spoon into the sugar bowl.

“Mom’ll be home right away with some bulkies. Cream cheese. What’re you in such a hurry for? You’re all dressed up. You can’t wait?”

“Never mind — I mean, no.” A sudden idea had struck him, and he moderated his tone. “You wanna do me a favor?”

“Like what?”

“Lend me a quarter.”

“A quarter? What for? A quarter?”

“Lend me a quarter. Even fifteen cents. All right?”

“Whatsa matter with you? You’re so jumpy. You’re all upset. Like auf shpilkis, Mama says. Like on tacks.”

“Well, I am.”

Minnie studied him with unyielding gaze a full five seconds, as if trying to pry loose a hint of what was wrong, then gave up with one of her overly furrowed grimaces. “My poor brother. What gets into him. Right away he’s in a big panic.”

She was getting perilously close to those times when she was the cause, cause of fears that proved groundless.

“Look at you. Fifteen cents is gonna get you out of all the veitig you’re showing? You can’t even say what’s the trouble.”

He swallowed a mouthful of coffee. He had to keep a tight check on himself. And the effort seemed to carry him further than he had expected: into a subdued kind of reasonableness. “No, I can’t. I’m in trouble, that’s all.”

He put his cup down, clasped his fingers together. “I’m in trouble,” he repeated with new grim emphasis. “You know what I mean by trouble.”

And now she seemed to grasp his meaning, didn’t shrink away, but hollowed her length. She made a tutting sound, turned her face away, not in reproach, but pity.

“My poor brother.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“So what’re you gonna do?”

“Lend me fifteen cents, will ya?”

“So with fifteen cents—?”

“That’s all I’m asking.”

“I knew it. I knew it would happen. That’s why I told you I didn’t want any more.”

“Supposing you got knocked up?” he demanded angrily. “Supposing somebody else knocked you up? One of your goyish friends, or that good-looking Cuban guy. I’m not trying to be funny. What would you do?”

He waited a moment for an answer. “All right, tell me. I know fifteen cents isn’t going to do it. But I—” He hacked at the air. “Right now I need fifteen cents. So you haven’t told me. What would you do? Give me an eytser, good counsel.”

She hesitated, profoundly serious. “I’d go to a friend, what could I do? Maybe I’d have to keep asking. Maybe one of the married women in the office—”

“And you’d let ’em know?”

“What could I do? I could say it’s for a friend. So even if they knew, it’s still better than having a baby. Do you want me to ask?”

He waved her away brusquely. “Let me have fifteen cents. I’ll take care of it.”

“You’ll have me more worried than myself.” Her eyes glistened as she tilted her head. “I’m glad it isn’t me. But oh, God, oh, God! You always get so mixed up in your troubles, Ira. I can’t stay out of it. I try to stay out of them. I try to stop it, so you won’t get in trouble. I stayed out of it. Now look.”

“Jesus Christ, will you stop throwing everything in my face? You know what arguing with you does to me? You’re as bad as Mom.” His hips lunged from side to side. “Goddamn it!” Ferocity turned desperate. “I wish I was never born!”

“Don’t say that!” Minnie pleaded.

“Never born! Dead! Dead as a goddamn mutt by the curb. I had to live in this goddamn 119th Street. Take baths in that goddamn vonneh!” He thumbed bitterly in the direction of the bathroom. “The sonofabitch place. Who knows what I’m in for!”

“Please, Ira, you make me so — I could — I don’t know what.” Her tone nasal with unshed tears, her mien wilting, hand outstretched. “Mom’ll be here soon.”

“Yeah, I know. So what? What?” He sneered, shook his hand wildly. “Give me the fifteen cents. So I can beat it before—” And reverting to sarcasm again: “C’mon, I don’t need—” He couldn’t finish. The madness latent in it all.

“I’ll give you a quarter.”

“Okay. Make it snappy, will ya?” She preceded him to Mom and Pop’s bedroom, while he got his coat and hat, and she was in the kitchen again with a quarter in her hand before he had wrestled into his overcoat.

“Here.”

“I’ll get some dough somewhere. Pay you back.”

“You don’t — doesn’t have to be tomorrow. I wish I was out of this dump.” She was again on the verge of tears. “Everything happens here. All kinds of rotten things already. We gotta move, that’s all.”

“We do?” He turned cruel. “I got all kinds of nice memories from it.”

“Oh, stop! Everything is from this lousy Harlem. Even my chance to be a teacher. Who knew when I played hopscotch and I went around the Maypole in Mt. Morris Park it was gonna be like this?”

“Bye-bye.” He was out the door. “Boy, I’d like to duck Mom.”

“What’ll I tell her?” she called after him in the cold hall. “You didn’t have breakfast.”

“Any damn thing.”

Once out in the street again, he turned swiftly east. To go the other way, west, to Park Avenue, was too risky. He’d be almost bound to run into Mom — not that it would make too much difference: he’d have to dream up an explanation, and fend off her distress at his not having breakfast. What the hell would he be running out of the house for on a Sunday morning? Damned if he could think of an excuse. Besides, there was a drugstore on the corner of Lexington and 118th Street. He had bought condoms there several times. Biolov’s was just a little too close for comfort. This little pharmacist with the short black mustache didn’t know him, except as a customer in the vicinity somewhere. In fact, the slight man’s face wreathed in a certain expression when Ira laid down his quarter on the counter, as if expecting the usual request.

“Would you mind changing it?” Ira asked. “I’d like to use the phone.”

Change was made wordlessly, and separating out the nickel, pocketing the rest, Ira went into the empty booth. Ten o’clock. Mom way later than usual. But not too early for — temptation an instant surged strongly to make another try at Mamie’s — maybe something had happened in the last half hour. He debated a few seconds, while he watched the drugstore owner slip a pale ceramic brick into the humidor of the box of fat Admiration stogies. Oh, hell, don’t be a sap. He pressed the nickel home. Five days. He’d be just wasting money. The coin clinked down into the holding receptacle, the operator made her stereotyped inquiry, and he gave her Edith’s Greenwich Village exchange. He heard the repeated short hum of the busy signal, and in a few seconds, he heard, “Sorry, the line’s busy,” and the jitney jingled down. Well, at least that meant she was home. Meant he had another minute or two to think about his decision. He opened the folding door. Yeah. Well, who else? Two o’clock he’d said he’d be there. Five hours nearly. An hour to travel downtown, well, maybe less, another uptown. An hour with Edith — oh, plenty of time. Three hours from five hours. You know if they were pregnant, you could screw ’em to your heart’s content. And without a Trojan on. Save money. Yeah — if they were pregnant. Five days. He pressed the nickel into its aperture, heard the ringing signal this time, pulled the folding door to.

She must have just finished her last conversation, and be still sitting within reaching distance of the phone, for she had lifted the receiver from the hook and was answering even before the first ring ended. “Hello, Edith. It’s Ira,” he said.

“Heaven’s sakes, lad, where have you been?”

“Oh, exams and things.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, well, that’s why I’m calling.”

“Anything serious? I hope your family isn’t in trouble.”

“No. They’re all right.”

“You’re not leaving home?”

“Oh, no, no. Wonder if I could come over for a few minutes?”

“Why, of course. You know you’re always welcome.”

“Thanks. How have you been?”

“Oh, much better than for a long time. You sound serious. It isn’t your father again? It isn’t Larry, I hope.”

“Oh, no. Look, I’m only a couple of blocks from the subway. I — it’s better if I come over and tell you.”

“Do, please. You really have me concerned.”

“I won’t be in anybody’s way? It’s not too early?”

“Heavens, no. At ten-thirty? You won’t be in my way at all. You should see the dull batch of student themes I’ve been grading. Ira, I very much want to see you.”

“I should be there in a half hour or so — no, three-quarters of an hour.”

“Please come right along. Ira, you know if there’s anything I can do, please let me help.”

“Yeah. Thanks. Somebody’s here for the phone.” Raptor. Hawk’s eyes, brilliantined approach. Middle-aged dame dolled up. Rouged, perfumed muskily, she brushed by to stuff herself into the booth he’d vacated. Off to a party, somebody’s engagement, peroxided tresses like Morris’s Ida, that phony tramp Pop had procured. Reminded him of the one Leo stuffed it into, wanted to fix him up with. So what? Been a goddamn sight better than the ones — the one he stuffed it into. No, not because no periods, no condoms. No, but to be a man: so you put a pillow on her puss, if she’s as fat a yenta as Leo jokes, so long as you get a piece o’ hump. Be a man, that’s the main thing. Not knock up a sixteen-year-old, and have to tell Edith. Jesus Christ, this lousy Harlem.

He sallied out of the store and headed for the 116th Street station, and as he neared the kiosk thought he heard a train pulling in. Never make it. He’d have to change the dime. An express roared by as he came away from the change booth. Well, he hadn’t missed anything. He pressed his jitney into the turnstile slot, paced on the platform a few minutes, looking down the dark tunnel for telltale headlights. White orbs of a local appeared at length, lurching toward the station. Locals always gave the impression of being so damned self-important, cocky, brash, what the hell. .

XII

His eyes briefly assuaged by the sight of the dull wintry-brown leaves still clinging to shrubbery in the little triangular park across Seventh Avenue, he cleared the last subway step of the kiosk at Christopher Street. After the jaundiced ambience of subway train and platform, the sky seemed a cleaner blue. The southern sun, though low on the jagged horizon, still radiated meridian warmth as he proceeded south. As if reluctant to leave their cozy folds, a few fleecy clouds drifted up out of the deep, irregular gaps in rooftops of miscellaneous buildings downtown. Reluctant too, his heavy legs alternated between trudging and need. He’d have to make it to Mamie’s by two o’clock, to a waiting Stella there, waiting for advice, guidance, help, who knew what, waiting for something he could tell her to do. Jesus. At least there would be time, as Mr. Eliot said. There would be time to find out what to do — or where to have it done — and get back to Stella. Thank God he wouldn’t have to shuttle at Times Square. West Side to East Side, the way Minnie went to CCNY from her office. Jesus Christ, the disgrace. But could he wait any longer? Five days. That was his portion in life: disgrace. . disgrace. Swiped a filigreed fountain pen, overreached, was caught, and how stupidly caught, confessed. Nah, he had found it, he could have said, as he had told himself a thousand times. Was he going to go through that all over again? It had meant expulsion, and expulsion had meant he eventually met Larry. . and eventually left him behind, and on to Edith grown so fond, so warm, admiring — of him, Jesus, trustful, eager, her utter confidant, kind, generous, dainty woman. Okay, you were meant to kick over the apple cart. . and you’re about to. Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of merde. Seventh Avenue traffic on Sunday, mostly checkered taxicabs with blue smoking tailpipes. And birds, turds, surds, and words. What the hell is a surd: a square-root sign. . any irrational root. That’s you, an irrational root, absurd. You’ve been maimed, all right? You stood on the flat diving rock on the shore of the Hudson River, and you said there was a meaning, and you would find an answer. But why does it always have to be on your own hide? Answer. What do you mean by answer? Almost a glimpse at times: like Thoreau’s hound and horse, and hawk was it? Buildings were squat and jammed together, and now and then buildings reared high into the blue; some were loft buildings, some were warehouses, and some of yellow brick, and some of red. It was not really just an answer he was looking for. Something more. Hmph. What the hell was it Iz went around quoting from Rimbaud? J’ai fait la magique étude que nul n’élude. But Rimbaud didn’t say what he found. Meanwhile, as Larry sang, he burned a hole in his only pair of trousers—

Look how serene Barrow Street is, how retiring Commerce Street next. Coign within the great city, recess within the everlasting clamor, within the havoc of the heart. Young trees rise from the sidewalk, bare of leaves now, and prettier for being so, in a way, appropriate to the day and the season: slender branches caressing bare sky. . opposite them the remodeled townhouses, haphazard and habitable, ah, so many shades of weathered masonry you never could imagine, soft and umber with age, set with dormer windows and topped with attic slopes — oh, Attic shape. This was that world he dreamt was elsewhere, like Coriolanus, when he stood as a kid on a certain Harlem street corner on the West Side, beatified, euphoric. But you’ve screwed it up now. And in deed. What do the barkers in Coney Island yell to get you to fork up a quarter to pitch a couple of baseballs at a hole in the wall? Sock it in, and get a baby doll. How true. Gone is the enclave in turmoil for you, forever.

The owner of the little service station at the foot of Morton Street, muscular, limber Italian, sloshed water from a garden watering can with sprinkler removed on a small puddle of gasoline on the asphalt next to the pump stands, looked up at Ira as he passed. Curious, how recognitions became implicit, without need to reside in specific acquaintance. Morton Street — Ira rounded it — felt as if it were here the Village tapered off. The dwellings were mostly remodeled, reclaimed from townhouse and tenement, DE LUX, as the TO LET signs read; still two decidedly slummy tenements remained side by side across the street from where Edith had moved this fall, slummy tenements still occupied by Italians, whilom immigrants, of Pop’s and Mom’s steerage-vintage, matrons in window’s weeds, and others on the twin stoops, still accompanying their native speech with twirly gesture of hub and spoke of digits. Joe lived there too. Ferret-eyed, anarchist janitor of Edith’s house, he believed in finishing off the richa bosses with a banga-banga, and brought Edith the bootleg gin for her cocktail parties. Ah, respite: meandering reverie as crisis drew near, like the last meal of the condemned.

The street curved slightly in the middle, but passing the bight, 61 Morton came into view, and spying the stoop, Ira quickened gait — grimly and scared. Eager to cross the Styx, like one of the damned souls in the Inferno. Fear turned into desire — wasn’t that what Dante said? Odd, he should suddenly recall that short Italian footnote at the bottom of the page: Come augel a la sua richiamo. He didn’t need old Charon, the ferryman, to smack him with an oar. He pressed the doorbell, bucked the door open at the peevish buzzer’s insistence, entered the foyer, and mounted the carpeted stairs. As usual, Edith had come out of the apartment and was awaiting him above at the banister.

“You’re like a ministering angel up there.” He kept his eyes down on the carpet under his feet as he climbed.

“That’s very sweet of you,” she said — and paused, then met him with outstretched hand and a smile, when he reached the floor level where she stood. “Also a little alarming. Come in, Ira.”

“Thanks.” He preceded her with embarrassed shamble into the apartment.

“Whatever is the matter? I’ve been cudgeling my wits trying to guess what’s wrong. I know something very much is.”

“Yes.” He removed his coat with the slowness of despond.

“What is it, lad?” More comfort and solicitude could not have been compressed into such faint compass of smile.

“That’s new.” He gazed admiringly at the short jet-black silk kimono she was wearing. “Is it Japanese?”

“Oh, yes, it’s a great extravagance. And black shows the dust so. I’m afraid I’ve splurged.”

“Yeah?”

“You can see why.” She half-turned.

“Wow.” His eyes dazzled at the gold-embroidered sunburst that covered the entire back of the garment.

“It gives me the illusion of warmth. Actually, silk is warm.”

He headed uncertainly for a wicker armchair, and sat down at her invitation, traced the course of the interwoven wicker, while she seated herself opposite him on the new black-velvet-covered couch. Black kimono, black couch cover, taupe silk stockings over trim calves projecting at the right angles, ending in tiny black pumps. How often had he and Edith sat that way, her large brown eyes solemn and solicitous. His right sideburn itched; he scratched it. Poetry books in a bookcase against one wall, her desk between backyard windows on the other. And on the desk, her massive Underwood typewriter rising from a welter of blue examination booklets. She turned a pensive face from him to the oval mirror above the bookcase, and back.

“I’ll tell you what’s on my mind in a minute,” he said.

She smiled, winning and meek in her tenderness: “Whenever you’re ready. That mess you see on the other side of my Underwood is only a few of the many candidates for the Urban Almanac.”

“Your anthology?”

“Yes. The trouble is that good poems by good poets are expensive. And the less royalties the publishers have to pay, the more profit they make. And friends and colleagues who fancy themselves poets, and will let you publish their poems for the privilege, aren’t worth publishing — John Vernon, for example, imagines himself a second Walt Whitman, and of course he isn’t. But I’ll have to include at least one of his poems, as a matter of policy, and they’re all so long-winded. And of course there’s Harriet Monroe, and oh Lord have mercy, what makes her think her long catalogs of things are poems. They’re excruciating. But she’s Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine. And I’ve got to include poets who are really passé, Sandburg and Bynner. Oh, I’ve just been scrambling around, doing the best I can on a very limited budget. Very limited. I had to be quite strenuous with Dr. Watt to convince him that an anthology of modern poetry has to have a fair sampling of Eliot and Stevens and Pound and Williams. Cummings too. They know the name Edna St. Vincent Millay, and that’s about all. Again, I don’t think she’s indicative of the modern trend any longer — I’ve decided to leave out Amy Lowell altogether, and spend a little more on Elinor Wylie.”

“Yeah?”

“Fortunately I’ve been able to include fairly good poems by relative unknowns who are good poets at very little cost. Roberta Holloway and Taggard. Greenhood. I’m afraid it’s a hodgepodge, and a profit-making scheme on the part of Dr. Watt and the publishers at the expense of the students in the modern poetry courses, but I’ve agreed to do it.” She paused, waited a few seconds, and when he said nothing, smiled archly, to help allay his tension. “Oh, yes, I’m including a poem by Marcia. It’s what you’d expect of her, a clever little sermon.”

“I didn’t know she wrote poetry.”

“She doesn’t.” She raised her eyes to the oval mirror.

“You mean you’re being altruistic?”

“Oh, no.”

“You’re not being altruistic?”

“Definitely not.”

“I see. I wish I could hide in your class, so I could learn something.”

“You already know more than I could teach you.”

“I mean about poetry. Modern poetry. . Well.” He frowned. What was the use of stalling any longer? He was only wasting time, his, hers being considerate of him. “I. .” His lips clamped closed.

“Ira, dear, you’re so obviously troubled,” she pleaded.

“Yeah. I’m troubled, all right. I don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t like to hear trouble.” He tried to mitigate bluntness by a humorous glance, failed. “You’re so interested in other people’s troubles.”

“I suppose I am. It’s my way of keeping in contact with other human beings and avoiding getting wrapped up in myself. It’s not everyone’s troubles I’m interested in. Only certain people, interesting people. People like Ira Stigman.”

“You know I’ve always put you on a pedestal.”

“Oh, pooh. You’ve seen me in every state of disarray, and some not very pretty ones. I’ve never hesitated to tell you about my distress, and I don’t think you ought to hesitate to tell me about yours. Believe me, I’m more interested in helping you at the moment than being on a pedestal. But I can’t — unless you tell me what’s wrong.” Her brown eyes never wavered from his, and as direct as her look was her tone of voice. “What is making you so unhappy? What is it?”

“Well. .” Pleats went the long way on a dress, up and down; so those must be ruffles on her tan skirt, folds that went the other way.

“I’ve turned to you on dozens of occasions,” she said.

“Yes.” Leaning sideways was like token toppling. “You’ve heard me talk about my Aunt Mamie.”

“Is she the obese one?”

“Obese is right. She can’t cross her legs. Looks like a balloon. I’ve told you about her.”

“She gives you a dollar from time to time, you’ve said.”

“Good-hearted, yeah.” Before him black kimono swam into black velvet couch cover, above them a ringed face circled. “She has a daughter named Stella. I’ve been having sexual relations with her.”

Interval of quiet, the quiet of comprehension; her eyes averted in momentary comprehension. What she knew, she would never unknow. “You never mentioned her, to my knowledge, Ira. Stella?”

“Yeah. My aunt’s oldest daughter — older daughter.” He felt the need for grammatical rigor, as if it were a support. “She has two daughters.” He knew that behind the solemn face listening so intently all the correct anticipations had been formed. “I’ve been having sex with her off and on I don’t know how long.”

“How old is she?”

“All of sixteen.”

Edith concealed surprise, only sighed very slightly.

“Anyway, I guess she’s pregnant.”

“Why? Why do you say that?”

“She hasn’t had her period — she hasn’t menstruated in five days — I mean she’s five days overdue.” The wicker creaked as he tossed himself wrathfully.

“For pity’s sake, child, five days overdue in a sixteen-year-old is nothing unusual. You can’t expect the established rhythm of a mature woman in a sixteen-year-old.”

“No? Not even five days?”

“Oh, they may skip even longer than that, an entire period. Has she been subject to any kind of stress, or emotional upset?”

“Not that I know of. She’s kind of — kind of — well, I don’t know. On the outside, what would you say? Slow.”

“She’s probably not pregnant at all. She’s not overworking?”

“She goes to business school.”

“Of course, there are blockages; something may go wrong with the organism. Only a doctor could tell.”

“So she may not be pregnant at all.”

“I wouldn’t be the least surprised if she isn’t.”

“Well, I feel better — and I feel worse.” He pushed his glasses back up. “What if it goes on seven days, eight days, nine days?”

“She’d better see a doctor. Any practitioner can tell by what’s called a dilation whether she’s pregnant or not. That’s how I found out I was.” Her very normalcy of tone, her matter-of-factness, sent her statement skimming out of plausibility: See a doctor! “Why don’t you bring her here?” Edith suggested. “I’ll take her to see Dr. Trower. He’s not an abortionist. He’s just a general practitioner, but—”

“Oh, no!” Ira groaned. “Oh, no!”

“Why, Ira? I don’t understand.”

“Bring her here!”

“Why not?”

“Oh, God! She’s a tub.”

“Don’t be a goose, Ira,” Edith rebuked sharply. “She’s an adolescent. What did you think I would expect an adolescent girl to look like? Heavens. She’s going through an entire physiological change.”

“Oh, Jesus, wait till you see her.”

“Ira!”

“Yeah. What a dumb tub.”

“Will you please be practical?”

“Yeah.”

“And exercise a little common sense?”

“I thought there was something she could take. I thought maybe you had something left over you could give me. Some drug. I thought you said something about ergo—”

“Ergot.”

“How?”

Edith spelled the word out. And then added: “It can only be had by a doctor’s prescription, and it may be too dangerous for an adolescent in any case. I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.”

“So what can she do? What’s safe? All right, tell me. What did you try? Did you go to a doctor right away? My mother—” he began, interrupted himself: “What?”

“There are two things she can safely do, pregnant or not. They didn’t work for me — neither did the ergot. But they may for her.”

“Yeah, what? I gotta get back there by two o’clock.”

“Oh, is she waiting to hear?”

“Yeah. It’s my best chance to tell her.”

“She can try very hot baths. As hot as she can stand them. And a strong cathartic: castor oil. As I say, nothing helped me. The embryo must have been attached to me like iron.”

“Hot baths. Castor oil,” he repeated with doleful earnestness.

“And if nothing works — and as I say, you’re unduly worried, I don’t believe she’s pregnant — bring her here after a few more days. A few more days won’t matter one way or the other — if she is pregnant.”

“Like when? When should I bring her?”

“I’m free all afternoon Friday. I can make an appointment with the girl in my doctor’s office the day before. Of course, I can cancel it if she’s menstruating by then.”

“Friday.” The only thing that kept him from wringing his hands was counting his fingers. “Today is Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Ten days.”

“But even then only a doctor’s examination can tell whether she’s pregnant or not. Are you the only one having sex relations with her?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. . I never asked. . I just hung around till I got a chance.”

A silence as she contemplated him. He could feel an unspent sigh lodge deep in his gut.

“Ira, may I ask how long it’s been going on?”

“Since she was fourteen. Since I was a sophomore at CCNY.”

“Almost as long as I’ve known you.”

“That’s right.”

She shook her head the slightest bit. “I thought you were completely attached to your mother. I thought you were completely withdrawn into yourself, shy and unawakened. I suppose I can’t be blamed for misjudging you. I’m not blaming you. I’m just surprised that I did. You never spoke about girls. You spoke mostly about your mother. Your sister occasionally. And of course, there you were, such as close friend of Larry’s.”

“Yeah. You can see why.” Her dainty fingertips played among themselves; her level brown eyes invited an explanation. “Why I never mentioned girls.”

She shook her head — in sympathy. “Child, don’t punish yourself so. You are what you are, and it’s your extreme sensitivity that’s to blame, if anything. Besides, I’m sure that kind of thing is very, very common. Sexual experiences begin much earlier than people realize, or pretend they do. The few times one hears or reads about it — between cousins and even closer relations — incest—”

“Yeah?”

“They’re probably no more than tips of the iceberg. Your aunt never suspected?”

“I told you. She thought I came there for the dollar she gave me. Makes it treacherous, doesn’t it?” His voice thickened, and he hemmed to clear it, smirked: “I wanted to play a decent part — where you were concerned — you know?”

“You poor lamb. What time do you think you could get her here Friday? Where is she? She’s not employed yet?”

“No. That business school that faces Union Square Park, that’s where she goes. I don’t know the name. Near 14th Street.”

“And what time can you get her here?”

“Any time you say. If it’s an emergency.”

“About two — that is, assuming she hasn’t menstruated by then.”

“Will I ever call you to tell you!”

“I’d better make the appointment for two-thirty. I take it she won’t have any trouble getting out of the business school?”

“Oh, no — I’m sure of it. It’s a private school. Secretarial, that kind of thing.”

“Near 14th? You can get her here by taxi in a few minutes then. What is her name again?”

“Stella. . kubella.”

“What?”

“It’s Yiddish. Cybel.”

“Is that her name?”

“No. Cow.”

“Oh, Ira, please!”

“That’s how I feel. Dumb, dumb satyr, Minotaur.”

Edith slid off the couch and came toward him, even before he’d gotten to his feet. “Ira, I want you to know I don’t think any less of you for what you’ve told me than I did before. You may think I do, but I don’t. You’re caught in the grip of nature’s most powerful drive — we all are, and we’re going to satisfy it somehow, men and women — in spite of religion and society, and everything else. It’s unfortunate she’s so young, but she may simply be more mature sexually than most girls her age. There’s no clear line. It just happens she’s your cousin. What if she were someone unrelated to you? You would still need help if she’s pregnant, and I can only repeat, as young a girl as that probably isn’t. I just hope you don’t become so panic-stricken and frightened by guilt and God knows what that you let this thing ruin your life. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you? Don’t go to pieces. Don’t let this thing do that to you.”

“No.”

“Ira—” She waited for him to stand up. “You’re very dear to me. You know that. If necessary I’ll do everything possible to prevent any disaster. Will you trust me?”

“That’s why I came here.”

“And I’m glad you did. You’ll keep in touch with me?”

“All right.”

“Over the next few days. I’m home evenings. Phone or come over.”

He began getting into his coat. “It’s just that I — you know. I’m a—” He swayed for lack of adequate words. “No good, that’s all.”

“Oh, fiddlesticks! Would you have been a better person not to have tried to take care of it, to have run away from it all? You’ve had the courage to take the responsibility for the whole thing — which in some ways is more than Lewlyn did.”

“I don’t know.” He hung his head. “I–I better go tell her.”

She pushed his chin up with dainty finger. “You’re not to go to pieces and you’re to keep in touch with me.”

“I won’t go to pieces, you know why? It isn’t as bad as it might be.”

She regarded him curiously. He felt as if he were switching all he had in mind to another track. “It isn’t as bad as it might be because of you.”

“I’m happy you feel that way, my dear. And I will take care of everything possible at this end.”

“Thanks, Edith.”

“And please stop being so downcast.”

“It’s hard not to. My type of guy.”

“And wait a minute — before you go.”

“Oh, no. Edith!”

“Oh, yes. God knows all this might have been avoided if you had some money.”

“I did have some money. I thought I was playing it safe — that’s what gets my goat. I can’t remember.”

“Even with Lucerol or a pessary one can’t always be sure either. Not that—” she extracted the expected greenback from her purse while she spoke—“in the circumstances you could possibly use them. Please take this with you. It’s for carfare, phone calls. Anything. Taxi, if you need it.”

“Thanks. If one could only say — you know.” He rubbed the folded five-dollar bill against itself. “There’s nothing. It would take words made out of bronze.”

“Don’t try. But do keep in touch with me.” She patted the back of his hand. “And do keep up your courage.”

XIII

Drab and disconsolate, the stairs he climbed, informed with his own state of mind — and dim too, dingy, dim, with the landing between ground and first flight starved for light by the even taller tenement to the east. It had always been such a pleasant revelation when he was a youngster to climb up a flight or two, and especially to the top floor, where the window at the landing rang with daylight. But that was long ago, fifth grade long ago. First-landing window, ten-thousand-fold familiar, gave on a narrow slot of adjacent tenement, backyard and fence, drab scene to be climbed. . upward to the obscure first flight, of a house that seemed quieter than usual, because of the cold, traced with fewer sounds and odors. First flight, “first floor,” where the dumb waiter, now retired, was nailed shut. .

There were three flats per floor. The one on the left, Mrs. Shapiro’s, was tsevorfen, scattered, the two on the right, separated by a gloomy hallway, were railroad flats. Mrs. Shapiro’s flat was “in the back,” all her rooms looked out on the backyard; the railroad flats were in the front: each had a front room with two windows overlooking the street, and the long, obscure hallway between railroad flats borrowed a little illumination from the frosted glass of the front-room doors at the very end of the hallway. They were permanently locked. No one ever used them — except that one time at Ira’s wintry Bar Mitzvah, when his parents’ bed was dismantled and taken through the front-room door to be stored out of the way. Still, if the family had a boarder, and the Stigmans had had one once, a young woman, during the Great War, so long ago and so briefly, Ira remembered only that she, like Minnie, had red hair, if the boarder was given the front room, she (or he) could go to the hall toilet without having to disturb the family.

During evening hours, unless it was very late and everyone had gone to bed, Ira could always tell whether anyone was home or not, by merely glancing up at the paint-spattered transom over the door: whether friendly light shone through. But not during daylight hours: speckled glass was all that met the eye, and only voices in the kitchen told him it was occupied. Automatically, Ira reached into his pocket for the key, realized that he hadn’t transferred Edith’s five-dollar bill to his wallet; the banknote lay together with what was left of the quarter Minnie had loaned him. Better get the bill safely stored away now, or reaching in and out like that, he would lose it. Goddamn him and his lousy predicaments, his sordid little crises that swelled up like monstrous balloons and preempted the sane, the lissome world. Minnie’s delay of a couple of days had produced terror, twisted him out of shape forever; and now that dumb bunny Stella. . immune to his pleas, his begging: all she would agree to was a hot bath — she liked hot baths anyway. But castor oil? Ira, castor oil! What are you talking about! Hannah and two or three of her girlfriends had been there too, so his importuning and haranguing had to be done in whispers, to no avail against her vapid optimism. If she didn’t have her period by Friday, she’d go with him to his professor-lady. That was as much as she would concede, the klutz, too silly-sanguine to know the danger she was in — screw her — Ira tried the doorknob before inserting the key — somebody else gave her the big belly: Zeus, the Juice, the golden rain, Zeus, the Bull, the Gander, no, the Holy Goose. The door opened.

Alone, the Yiddish newspaper spread open wide in front of him on the green oilcloth of the kitchen table, Pop sat reading, Der Vorwärts. He was still wearing his vest, though he had removed the starched collar from his shirt, leaving only the brass stud protruding through the open neckband. Cigarette smoke was in the air, and Pop was smoking, evidently one of the Lucky Strikes from the several midget packs of cigarettes strewn on the table, revealed when Pop shifted the newspaper, complimentary little open packages of Lucky Strikes he must have salvaged from the banquet where he had been an “extra” this afternoon. He had a round-lipped way of smoking, unaggressively sipping smoke, with mouth softly shaped into an oval around the tip of the cigarette.

“Hi, Pop.”

“Hi, hi. Noo?” Pop lifted brown eyes behind their gold-rimmed glasses, in habitual acknowledgment of Ira’s presence: due and without affection. How differently they lighted up when Minnie appeared; they beamed. But with Ira they appraised.

And this time, apparently, they were none too pleased by what they saw, for Pop looked away more quickly than usual. Was it his imagination baiting him? Ira wondered as he removed hat and coat; he had a sense of being furtively scrutinized. Still, what could Pop guess about the fix his son was in?

He returned from the bedroom to the kitchen again — and to the tension he always felt when alone with Pop. The days had long passed when he needed Mom’s protection against his father, her amelioration of their antagonism. Still. . if there wasn’t the old fear, there was the same lack of affinity, and still the same need for token concealment of their estrangement. So what? He was twenty-one years old, and bigger than the little guy. And there was Edith. . There, that made him feel a little more secure, almost patronizing — like a shield against Madame Curie’s radioactive speck of guilt: “Well, how did the banquet go, Pop?”

Pop went through his elaborate evolution of deprecation. “May it please them that kind of death,” he said. “A fruit cup, a half chicken with vegetables, a devil’s food cake and coffee. Nothing fancy. One plate, und shoyn. No stairs.”

“Yeah?”

“May it never be worse.”

“Well.”

“I shared three tables with an Irishman. They say Yidlekh. Were the Jewish waiters half the man he was. Strong. And with his laugh. They make the jop a nothing. Shoulders. He could have served me on his tray. ‘Hey, Charley,’ he called me. ‘Hey, Charley.’”

“Oh, yeah?” Ira grinned appreciatively.

“Mazel, mazel.” Pop’s amiability increased, catalyzed by his son’s. “Sometimes one has a little luck. Even I.”

“Yeah?” Ira encouraged.

“With a yeet I would have rushed my kishkehs out. With him it was easy. Seven and a half dollars apiece. And then the Irish police lieutenant slipped us another five dollars between us — a countryman, you know? Would a Yiddle have told me? A goy is a goy. If he hadn’t such a hatred against Jews, we could live.”

“Yeah.”

“After, I stayed.”

“What do you mean?”

“They give you another dollar and a half if you stay after the banquet and fill up the ketchup and the vinegar bottles. And the salt and pepper and the sugar bowls.”

“I see.”

“Would God, next week it should be the same,” Pop prayed. “Do you want a cigarette?”

“I’m not crazy about Luckies. You?”

“He who wanted picked them up. To every diner they gave a package. So. . they were on the tables.” Pop paused. It was as though he were waiting before testing Ira with the gesture. “You want, take. You don’t, iz nisht.”

“Oh, no, thanks, Pop!” Ira was hearty in acceptance. “I gotta try one.” He shook out the single cigarette left in the mini-package, struck a match, and lit up. “Not bad.” He puffed. Could he safely cut off the old boy without offense? He still had three books of Paradise Lost to skim through. “I wonder where’s Mom, where’s Minnie?”

“Indeed, where’s Minnie?” Pop rejoined. “Mom will be there at the alter kocker’s until Mamie, the clever, decides it’s time to leave. And God alone knows when that will be. Let’s both — you know what?”

“No.”

“We’ll both have the kugel and sour cream she left. And a cup coffee, and a piece of that poppy-seed bread, yes?”

“Oh, sure. Good idea, Pop. That sounds swell.” And after that, what a fine transition to an end of currying cordiality, spinning a web of friendship across the void. Grab his Milton and shut up.

“Yeh? All right.” Pop locked palm in palm. “I had such a good-luck day, come with me to the movies.”

“What?”

“And when she comes home, there won’t be anybody here. Well, Min,” Pop conceded. “Let her wonder.”

“Mom, you mean?”

“Who else?”

“Yeah, but I’ve gotta do some studying.”

“Uh!” As abrupt as his exclamation was the change in Pop’s mien.

“But I do.”

“I already know.”

“I have a test tomorrow. I’d like to get a decent grade. It really counts.”

“Yeh, yeh, yeh. Do you know who’s playing in the Jewel Theater on Fifth Avenue? Duffy?”

“Duffy?” Ira repeated, puzzled.

“Tomorrow he won’t be there.”

“Who’s Duffy?”

“You don’t know? You saw him yourself, you said, in the last picture: Duff and dynamite.”

“Duff and dynamite?” Ira strained at memory. “I didn’t — you don’t mean — you mean Chaplin?”

“Duffy, yeh. You want to go?” Pop reverted to customary brusqueness. “Don’t do me no favors. You want to go, or you don’t want to go? Iz nisht. I’ll save a dollar.”

“But that isn’t the idea—” Ridiculous: his own confusions, Pop’s confoundings. Everything a welter of predicament, compassion, and irresolution. “No, I know you’re doing me a favor, Pop — I mean — I love Chaplin.”

“Noo?”

“I told you I have to study. There’s a test coming up.”

“Yeh, yeh, yeh. And all day? I come home. You’re not here. Now you have to study.”

“But Pop,” Ira pleaded. “You never asked me before.” It was beyond belief, Pop’s being so — importunate, demanding, in his generosity. Beyond belief. Unique. “I’d go. You know that.”

“I know. I know already from long ago. Everything you see through her eyes. She made you herself. And then she says, see what you are. I know. I know.” He mashed his cigarette in the dish. “Let it be that way. I’ll go alone. I need no companion. Only Minnie understands a little bit, a little bit.” He stood up, locked both ends of the neckband in the collar button, then went into the bedroom.

What the hell was he talking about? As if he didn’t have troubles enough, his head churned listening to Pop. Ira went irresolutely to the shelf under the china closet, where he had left his copy of Milton’s poems this morning. Maybe he was all wrong about the reason he thought Pop was scrutinizing him when he came in. See things through Mom’s eyes. Was the old guy going off his pulley? He didn’t seem that way. And Charlie Chaplin: Dough and Dynamite. Christ Almighty. Dark and hostile, his old self, Pop reentered the kitchen. He had his hat and overcoat on, was dressed to leave.

“You’re not going to eat?” Ira asked noncommittally, only too aware how quickly roles had been restored.

“I’m obliged to her.” Pop flapped his hand in customary dismissal. “As she is, so are you. If there’s no pity, nothing helps. As she made my life — and you made my life — then I’m the sinful one.”

Ira listened in silence. No use answering something he couldn’t make sense of.

“Tell her I’ll be back I don’t know when.”

“Enjoy yourself, Pop.”

His father barely nodded. The cold gloom of the hallway pried into the kitchen through the open door, which Pop closed again behind him.

They must have had a hell of a battle this morning, after he left to go to Edith’s. That was all the feasible conjecture Ira could reach. Minnie wouldn’t know what it was about either, since she had left when he had. He let the pages riffle through his fingers. The tight book had a way of returning to its own equilibrium, unless borne down upon and held open, and he had neglected to do so, talking to Pop. Did you ever hear of Pop offering to take you to a movie? What was wrong? Ira asked himself sarcastically. That cheapskate, what the hell had gotten into him? And that stuff about sinning. Pity. And Duffy. Remembering, Ira snorted: Duff and dynamite. Jesus, if that wasn’t — boy, pitiful. .

The flipping pages stopped — or he stopped them, deliberately, though he had already perused the one that attracted his attention — the all too relevant lines of verse mocking his state. No wonder people sorted — was that the right word? Told their fortunes by opening to someplace in the Bible:

Pensive here I sat

Alone, but long I sat not, till my womb,

Pregnant by thee, and now excessive grown

Prodigious motion felt and rueful throes.

Damn right. He slapped the pages over. Book X, Book X. That was where he had left off: Full of sticky theology that old man Mott would be sure to ask about, pose questions requiring essay-type answers — at which he stunk. Well, he’d have to resign himself to losing credits — hell, skip it. Adam couldn’t figure it out either:

O Conscience, into what abyss of fears

And horrors hast thou driven me; out of which

I find no way, from deep to deeper plunged!

The tread in the hall was light — Ira listened, his ears straining to the light tread: he heard the door opposite open, and a youngster’s voice: One of Mrs. Gruberg’s kids. .

Ever since he was twelve, he thought to himself. No wonder he was a virtuoso at dissembling. Even fooled Edith. What would have happened if Minnie hadn’t refused, if she had yielded every time, like Stella? Oh, they’d have found out, Pop, Mom, by now. Boy, what a racket. Worse than the silver-filigreed fountain pen. Then what? A whipping like nothing ever before. But would it cure him? What happened in families where it happened? If the guy was grown up, as he was now, and was caught — out, bum! Out, crumb, out of the house; yuh miserable punk! “Aw, I was just givin’ her a fuck,” he’d say, if they were goyim, the way the Irish say in the street, I was just fuckin’ around. And make a gag out of it: “What about you, Pop? She’s better’n Mom, ain’t she?” And Ira had always thought as a kid “yuh motherfucker” was just a fanciful insult, like “Aw, yer father’s hairy balls!” Boy, though, a father fucking his daughter, like Satan fucking Sin, that must be wonderful — see what Milton had done to him, see what he was? Ira bowed his head — impenitently. But if they were Jews: Oy, gevald, Peigern zollst deh! Paskudnyack! Be torn into shreds — he could just see Zaida’s whiskers opening like a maw to hurl curses at the abomination. He’d rend his garments. And worse: raise his walking stick. But if it happened now, now that he was twenty-one, it would be just as he would have been with Pop the other night, Friday. Frig you, Pop. Maybe bust him one and run. Oh, nuts. Read, will you? Book X. You’re not in enough of a mess with Stella already. Ho, Jesus, what if he had gone back to Edith, and told her he had knocked up his sister too. You knocked up your cousin. You knocked up your sister. You busted your old man. Could you sleep on the floor till you found a job? Boyoboy, and she thought you were an innocent: unawakened, was that what she said? If she knew when you were awakened. And how. Boyoboy, what paralysis that was, that awakening, after Moe went off to war: in the springtime, the only pretty ringtime: erev Pesach of 1918—

Her color heightened by cold and exertion, Mom swept the kitchen with her brown eyes as she entered, bringing a merciful end to wakeful nightmares. “He’s not here?” She removed her black turban hat, shook her speckled gray hair. “Was he home?” She freed herself of her dark coat.

“Yeah. He was here. He went to a movie.”

“Wandered off.” She nodded — with undue, unpleasant emphasis, features creased in unspoken grudge. “Wandered off.” She opened the bedroom door, muttered something in Polish: “Let him go hang. May I never see him again.” Coat over arm, she was about to enter the bedroom.

“Whatsa matter?”

“May he be slain.”

“Why? He even wanted to take me along,” Ira probed.

“Azoy? My fine husband, he’ll be tender as a mulberry, may he moulder.” Her voice was vengeful, even for Mom.

“What did he do this time?”

“May they do him under.” She refused to answer his direct question. Instead, she stepped into the bedroom.

What was up now? Ira wondered. What the hell was up? Oh, nuts. He had too much on his mind to be concerned. Finish up Book X, Book XI, Book XII, call Stella on the phone tomorrow. If he could only get a break — this once. He ought to look at his ed texts. Oh, balls.

Mom returned, shut the kitchen door to the cold bedroom. “Have you had anything to eat?”

“No.”

“I left kugel and sour cream. He didn’t eat either?”

“No.”

“He’s the affronted one, my mannikin. I’ll warm up the kugel.”

“What the hell’s the matter now?” Ira demanded irritably. “He gave you your allowance Friday.”

“Go! Why deliberate on the carrion? Let him rot.” She opened the kitchen window, brought out a pan, a bowl. “I’ll warm it right away.” She busied herself with frying pan and gas stove. “I’ll cut some bread. I have some farmer cheese.”

“All right. All right. What I want to know is, what did you find out at Zaida’s? I mean at Sadie’s. What was the whole to-do about? It wasn’t about Pop, that I’m sure of.”

“Only that I lack.”

“Well, the way you’re talking, anybody would think—”

“It was nothing with nothing.”

“No? Please, no chicory in the coffee, Mom.”

“I know, I know.”

“What do you mean, nothing with nothing?”

“To me, to Mamie, it would have been nothing with nothing. To him, he’s a koyen, a priest — ekh, who can follow it all. An old man, he imagines — don’t you know? He swears he once heard Stella and a lover — anh, weeks ago. At the door, you hear?”

“Yes?”

“The radio music fills him with terror. That we know already. And the neighborhood grows more and more Portorickie. The girls grow friendlier and friendlier with them. And then blacks too moving in. Ask not. He imagines, God knows.” Mom laughed in short pained resignation. “A disgrace, a bastard, and a dark one.”

“Is that all?”

“Preys on his mind, ever since that night he swears he heard — and wouldn’t the dire year befall: on his way home from the synagogue Friday morning — and you know how much it pleases him to be a Jew with a beard among Portorickies and blacks? — his fortune it is on his way home from the synagogue he comes to the corner of 112th Street near Fifth Avenue — and there, in an empty lot, where a house has been torn down, in the rubble stands a policeman — and while bystanders gather and watch and as Zaida goes by, he sees the policeman take out a newborn infant from a paper grocery bag — dead. Now,” Mom nodded in imitation of Zaida’s admission, “he confesses it was illusion. But then, when he saw the dead infant: Stella’s features, Stella’s light hair—noo, noo. You needn’t ask.”

“What bullshit.”

“Go debate with a panic-stricken old man, and one eye half blind. He fled. In an instant he makes up his mind — he’s defiled if he stays at Mamie’s. Heraus from Mamie’s. Heraus erev Shabbes. The neighbor calls up Morris: Bring the meshinkeh at once. He fares forth.”

“Well, I’ll be—”

“And now, do you think he’s content?” Mom set plate and cutlery in front of Ira. “A bygone day.”

“He’s never content.”

“This time he may have reason. Sadie, with all her thick eyeglasses, is also half blind. And blind as he is, he says he thought he saw her once about to confuse a meat with a dairy dish — so he whispered to us.”

“Yeah? Tough. Somebody told me that would happen. Joe, I think.”

“It’s as I told you. The kugel is good?”

“Oh, your kugel is always good.”

She laughed at his mock-serious tone: his mother, all love and devotion — love and devotion out of her ever-receding world. She set a white saucer and coffee cup on the table. “Take more sour cream. I have yeast cake. And jelly too that I made out of plums.”

“Yeah? I don’t see you eating anything.”

“I ate enough for the whole day at Sadie’s. Mamie brought pickled herring, creamed herring. Two jars. Borsht, a jar. And verenekehs—like all the Farbs. Afterward she was sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

“She wanted to punish him for leaving the way he did — to remind him.” Mom placed white saucer and cup in front of Ira. “But then, when she saw how unhappy he was, she got no satisfaction. You understand?”

“What else is bothering Zaida besides food?”

“The children.”

“Why the children? They’re boys, three of them.” Ira snickered. “The oldster won’t have to fret about bastards in a paper bag.”

“No, no, it’s my brother Saul’s imp comes over and eggs the others on. They tied a cord across the door, and screamed and goaded him, until he ran after them. And half blind as he is, don’t you think he stretched out his full length?”

“Jesus, an old guy like that?” Ira watched Mom pour coffee out of the small enamel pan.

“I said to him, ‘Father, if you can’t live here, then together with you as a boarder, we could find a better place than 119th Street — near a synagogue. And I swear to you I would keep a kosher home.’ He knows I would keep my word.”

“That’s all we need, a kosher home.”

“Go, he wouldn’t live here. He loves Chaim’l like the Angel of Death. And with reason.” She cut a slice of yeast cake. “My paragon would soon be grinding his teeth and stamping his feet. Who doesn’t know my Chaim’l? But even I didn’t know him until this morning.” She placed the freshly cut slice in front of Ira.

“What?” He looked up at her face — a kind of implacable disdain graven on it. What was she dramatizing now? Or concealing? They had seemed as amiable as they ever were, when he and Minnie had said goodbye to them this morning. “What the hell’s the matter now?”

“You have your own woes.” She refused to clarify. “I can see it in your face: your examinations, your penniless existence. A youth without a groat.”

“That’s nothing.” He was about to cheer her with mention of Edith’s gift of five dollars, but stopped himself in time. He’d only have to think up some phony explanation — or defend himself of the charge of cadger.

“The old man took off his yarmulke, and bowed to me.”

“What?”

“Zaida.” Mom sat down with her cup of coffee.

“Zaida?”

“When I gave him my word I would keep a kosher home for him. ‘I abused you when you were young,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know how noble you were, Leah. Forgive me.’”

“Zaida did? That haughty Yid? Jesus.”

Her full lips smacked the coffee mug. “What was there to say after so many years? That his righteousness helped him as much as my nobility helped me? A little more jelly? The cake is so dry.”

“No, it’s not bad, Mom. Thanks.” Were those his two profiles he saw staring at each other in his mind? Or just any two profiles that wore eyeglasses? They could never become a single face that way, he allowed himself to ruminate: if you slid one past the other, they still stared in opposite directions, like Janus. No good. You had to have a third dimension for their views to coincide—

“Shtudier, shtudier,” Mom interposed.

“Oh, yeah.” Only to him was Milton so easy, a diversion from the drama of his own home. He applied himself to the italicized rubric of Book XI: “The Son of God presents to his Father the Prayers of our first Parents now repenting, and intercedes for them. God accepts. . ” What the hell, Satan had had a point when he disputed back then with Abdiel. Jesus was asking God to forgive Adam, and the whole damn thing had started because God had anointed Jesus to reign as coequal. Satan wasn’t to blame if he objected to the dichotomy. So did Jews. Shmai Yisroel, adonoi elohenu adonoi ekhud! Every Jew knew that: it was the Credo: God is one. Lefty Louie, the gangster, when he sat in the electric chair, yelled it out loud. Otherwise, what? A split divinity. A split infinity. Object, and you’re on the side of Satan; even if the whole thing is sheer figment, you’re on the side of Satan. So he, Ira Stigman, was on the side of Satan. That was why he had to call up Stella tomorrow afternoon, after the exam, and find out if she had had her period — boy, what an emancipation proclamation that would be. Maybe he ought to pray to Jesus Christ. Cross himself thrice and pray to Christ—

“Shtudierst?” Mom asked.

“No, I was just thinking about the exam tomorrow.”

“Zoll dir Gott helfen.”

“Yeah.” If he had knocked her up, so what the hell was the difference if Divinity were unity or twinity or trinity? He would have had to marry her, if it happened in Arkansas: they would have had shotguns for a khuppa. Read, will you: God accepts them, but declares that they must no longer abide in Paradise; sends Michael with a Band of Cherubim to dispossess them. . With a dispossess notice, like Mamie with a Portorickie. . in court. . the day Zaida beat it to Flushing. . boy, like that old, old, old, old gag in the vaudeville show: Who was dat lady I seen you wit’ in dat sidewalk café? Dat was no sidewalk café. Dat was my foinicher.

Why the two pages of notes had been lying on his right-hand typing table all this time — literally all these weeks — and to just what use he had intended to put them, Ira could no longer recall — nor even when he had typed them. Sometime in the late sixties, he guessed, judging by the discolored border of the yellow second sheets. But here they were, Hannah’s recollections: he ought to use them or dispose of them. If he was ever to use them, this would be an appropriate time: when he was writing about the jam he had been in with Stella. The notes seemed to alter his interpretation of his sexual conduct, not entirely, but enough to be significant — by injecting a curious element of external and deliberate influence in his behavior. At the same time as the notes mitigated his acute self-reproach, by appearing to shift the blame slightly, they also tended to diminish the importance he assigned to his guile; they made him feel chagrined — almost: less culpable, but more foolish — as if he had gone to great lengths to reach a goal that was practically at hand — kinked himself into farcical postures to achieve a simple gesture. Typical of him, absence of acumen about the other person’s motives. Not that it was entirely true — Ira meditated — but as a quip, one might say that the notes on the yellow sheets adulterated the construction he placed on his adultery, except that technically speaking, it wasn’t adultery, but fornication with a minor.

Ira recalled taking deep breath before posing the question to his cousin Hannah: “What did you girls do for pastime in the twenties, when you lived in Harlem?”

“Oh, we went looking for boys, like other girls did. Or we went to the Y to dance. It was fifty cents admission.” Inflection of Bronx or Brooklyn virtually marinated matronly — and widowed — Hannah’s drawl. “Or we took long walks through Central Park. And always we talked about the boys. What would it be like? What was sex like? Why did we get so excited when a boy took our arm to cross the street, and by accident on purpose touched our breast? And sometimes, kissing, we could feel he was getting an erection. We were excited. Still, we pushed him away. My mother had a different view of sex than most mothers.”

“Yes?”

“She was terribly afraid of the mental results of a girl not having sex.” Hannah tapped her temple. “She believed that if a girl didn’t have sex by twenty at the latest, she would be a mental case.”

“By twenty. At the latest?” Ira queried.

“In Galitzia, with the shotkhins, they married so early they didn’t have to worry. But here — a girl had to have sex before she was twenty.”

“That’s interesting,” Ira said meditatively — and then with a start: “Mamie believed that?”

“Oh, Mama as much as told me if I wasn’t married by nineteen I should go to the Catskills to a summer resort and get laid. Naturally a nice boy, and be careful.”

“I’ll be damned.” Ira gazed at his cousin intently. “That’s illuminating.”

“Isn’t it? She really had a phobia. And with Stella—”

“Mamie didn’t have to worry about that,” Ira scoffed.

“No. But about marriage. Stella was having such a good time, she didn’t care about marriage—” Grief suddenly intruded: “My poor sister. So soon.”

“Yes.” Ira sympathized. “One question more: How would you characterize Stella during those years?”

“Those years and now. She was shallow. Stella is a shallow person. Intellectually she’s sluggish. Not so much now as she was then. My poor sister,” Hannah mourned. “I should see her walking again.”

XIV

Sense of impending tragedy — Ira was carried along with the swarm of fellow students into the lecture hall — impending tragedy, with only Edith to intercede, with only Edith to relieve the strain. For him, only him, the midterm exam served as respite from agony. He climbed up the steep stairs of the lecture hall. Relieve it and compound it. He found his assigned seat among the curved tiers of chairs. Relieve it and compound it: the immigrant boy’s ultimate terror. He envisaged himself leading the tubby sixteen-year-old through Morton Street, and up the two flights of carpeted steps to Edith’s urbane, genteel (or was it gentile?) apartment: “Edith, this is Stella.” Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus. His eyes roved unseeingly about the auditorium, unseeing, uncaring, registering faces he knew, just as his ears registered familiar noise of hinged chairs lowered, hinged side desks opened. Monitors checked off the attendance against the cardboard seating plan. Goateed Seymour was one of them, the only undergraduate in all of CCNY to sport a beard — probably because Professor Mott wore one, and Seymour was often seen carrying Professor Mott’s briefcase to Amsterdam Avenue, where he hailed a cruising taxi for the elderly scholar.

The bell rang the beginning of the period hour, just as Professor Mott entered, followed by a student carrying a stack of blue examination booklets. The usual white examination question papers were not in evidence; were they in the booklets? They were being distributed by the monitors. Suddenly there was a loud guffaw. And shaken out of his unhappy reverie, Ira saw that the old professor had fallen on the steps leading up from the floor to the lecture platform where his desk was. Seymour leaped forward to help him, and one or two others jumped from their seats to lend assistance. With an irritated shake of the head, Professor Mott waved them away, climbed up the last two steps, and placed his briefcase on the desk. He sat down behind it; then, bending over, he inconspicuously rubbed his shin.

“Professor Mott.” Seymour drew himself up resolutely. “I wish to apologize for the rude behavior of my classmates.” Professor Mott nodded his silky white head in terse acknowledgment and opened his briefcase. Through the tic about his left eye, Seymour scowled up at his unchastened classmates. He strode to the lecture-hall door and shut it, and still glaring up in reprimand, came back and sat down in his seat in the first row.

“In the interest of all concerned,” Professor Mott kept surreptitiously rubbing his shin, “I’ve decided to vary the form of the midterm examination. There will be no written questions.” He drew out a leather-bound volume of Milton’s works. “I shall review briefly some of the chief arguments thus far, and then ask you to answer to the best of your ability a single question. First I shall present a brief summary of the course of events, and at the end, pose the question. Is that clear? You’ll have a half hour to answer. I have deliberately limited the time.” Professor Mott waited until the murmuring in the lecture hall died down, indicating the class had recovered from its surprise. “You recall that Satan, having rallied his ruined cohorts, volunteers to explore a certain happy seat — in the words of Beelzebub — of some new race called Man. By discovering it, he hopes thereby to frustrate the designs of the Almighty. Frustration of God’s designs has now become the consuming purpose of the denizens of Hell, the former imperial powers of Heaven. It is interesting to note, by the way, that while their chief has gone on his mission, his confederates pass the time variously, according to mood and temperament, some violently, some in melancholy, singing to the accompaniment of harps — fallen angels, it appears, also have access to harps. Much of this part is drawn from paganism, much is reminiscent of Homer, of the activities of ancient Greece, including, if you remember, the holding of Olympic Games — again attesting to Milton’s vast erudition. At any rate, after a long, arduous flight, Satan finally reaches the gates of Hell. Nothing better exemplifies Milton’s absolutely sublime powers of poetic rhetoric than the dramatic confrontation that takes place between these personifications of the triad of foremost evils in the world: Satan, Death, and Sin — Yes?” Professor Mott raised his silky white poll questioningly. “Please be brief.”

“Professor Mott.” Sol P, stubby and carrot-topped, lowered his hand and arose to his feet — knocking his large loose-leaf notebook from the armrest and sending it flopping loudly to the floor. “If God in His heaven was all-seeing, all-knowing, om — er — omni—”

“Omnivorous,” Yarman, who sat just below, heckled in a whisper.

“Omnipotent,” Sol shook off Yarman’s insidious prompting, “why did he allow all this to happen?”

“Of course, you could ask that question from the very outset. Why did He allow Satan — Lucifer — to incite mutiny in Heaven? This is the very problem that has bedeviled Christianity from the beginning. I use the word ‘bedeviled’ advisedly.” Professor Mott’s mild blue eyes brightened in appreciation of his jest.

“But Professor, doesn’t that imply God’s complicity in Satan’s actions?”

Low groans could be heard. Someone hissed, “Shmuck, sit down.” Yarman turned completely around and muttered sotto-ventriloquistically between rigid lips: “It wasn’t enough he fell flat on his whiskers today. You gotta add to his shmertz?” Sol tossed his red head defiantly.

“I’m sorry. I can’t go into that, for the very simple reason that the pros and cons of the answer to that question make up the answers to the question I intend to assign.” Professor Mott looked down at his leather-bound volume, then raised his head in snowy afterthought. “Of course, you understand that the theological debate on the subject still goes on, and is far beyond the scope of this course. Your question concerns the compatibility or incompatibility of predestination and free will, and the role played by grace. Churches have been split by disputes over these doctrines. Innumerable theses have been written on them. Paradise Lost may be classed as the most sublime of these, and now at the end of the poem, I hope you’ll have derived some notion of the doctrines themselves, quite apart from Milton’s interpretation of them.”

Sol sat down, then crouched to retrieve his loose-leaf notebook; but it had been kicked from neighbor to neighbor, and into the aisle. “Bastards,” he hissed, and when no one heeded his urgent gestures to return his possession, he stood up again and stepped on foot after foot in his journey to recover it.

“Dumb cluck. Bullshit artist,” they baited him under their breath. “Ouch! Rivington Street shyster.” Through it all, and for the next ten minutes afterward, Professor Mott in level tones summarized the twelve books, dwelling now and then on some special point. “There is probably nothing so poignant in all of Milton,” Professor Mott turned pages, “as his invocation to Light at the beginning of Book III. And here his invocation has added relevancy because the poet has escaped, as he says, the Stygian Pool. Nevertheless, being blind, he has only the light of his imagination to irradiate his mind. He beholds Jehovah sitting on his throne, who Himself spies Satan flying toward the newly created Eden. Here we have the assertion of Divine Justice, and the role of the Son of God offering Himself as a ransom. . ”

No, he wouldn’t call Stella today. It would be smarter if he called her tomorrow, Tuesday: the seventh day, lucky seventh. If not, he was a goner. Be no use hoping anymore. Call Edith to make an appointment for Wednesday. And meet Stella in front of the business school on 14th Street. Take a cab. Right? Oh, Jesus. Come seven, come eleven. Seven, Tuesday, eight, Wednesday, or was it nine? He was beginning to forget. Hang on one more day: Tuesday.

“No doubt it hasn’t escaped your notice,” Professor Mott commented as he looked up at the tiers of students, “that in Book VI, during the gigantic battle between the forces of good and evil, the account of which the Angel Raphael reports to Adam, it is the forces of evil who introduce artillery. It is the invention of Satan himself.” Professor Mott locked a delicate hand on his white beard as he sought the appropriate quotation. “Yes. An infernal device, naturally.” He read from the open page: “‘Shall yield us, pregnant with infernal flame, which into Hollow Engines, long and round thick rammed—’” Ira smirked drearily. “Parenthetically, the innovation was already censured even before Milton by Shakespeare, who speaks of firearms as a coward’s way of felling many a tall lad. Still, not even these engines of destruction are of any avail before the infinite power with which God has clothed His Son. Satan and his cohorts are cast down into Hell. And Raphael, having told Adam all this, warns him to beware of Satan’s designs.” Professor Mott pointed a pink finger at the ceiling: “‘Listen not to his temptations,’” he recited from memory. “‘Warn thy weaker. Thy weaker—’”

Professor Mott drew out his watch. “I’m going to have to stop here. You have a little more than a half hour left. Please try to write as legibly and as concisely as you can, and with pen and ink. Name or describe at least six events in Paradise Lost which will prove to be the most crucial to Man’s future existence. And why. Please don’t forget to write your name and seat number on the front of the blue book.” Professor Mott bent sideways, and with decorous mien reached down behind his desk — manifestly toward his shin. “Yes, I’ll repeat the question,” he answered the tacit inquiry of a few raised hands. Six events.

Ira unscrewed his fountain-pen cap. All about him fountain pens already scratching. Hell, there was only one event, the one that had occurred to him last night: the creation of a coequal only son, later to be incarnated as Jesus H. Christ. What in hell did He need Him for? Ira recalled somewhere, sometime reading that the Son had been coeternal with the Father. That made more sense than appointing a straw boss late in the game before whom to genuflect twice, or something to that effect.

He’d better get it down on paper, and fast. Quit dawdling. He applied gold penpoint to paper. And giving the key to Hellgate to Sin. Let’s go. What the hell did God expect the old broad to do? Keep her word? Christ, and then the door wouldn’t close afterward. Was that an event? No. The holy disposes, oh, yeah. But giving the key way before was already two: she opened the gate. Then there was Pride. Why the hell did Lucifer get a dose of Pride, anyway? Didn’t the Almighty know what that would cause? Was that an event? Pride, pride, pride — and then that burning in the mind that made old Nick giddy, old Nick sick. Was he himself familiar with that one: Jesus Christ, his thoughts reverted, madness, geometry planes, will you cut it out? Whew. Damn near added that one. Wouldn’t old man Mott’s snowy locks stand right up on end when he read adolescent rosebuds opening before the suppliant? Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. Oh, no, sap: the apple, the apple. A key event. Let’s see, what was he supposed to do? He was supposed to call Stella — tomorrow, tomorrow, not today. Tomorrow and tomorrow steps in this petty pace — so the guy started screwing his own daughter. Hey, there was an event: an archangel screwing — Jesus, what bullshit. So get it down on paper. How? Copulating. No. Coitus, no. Too impolite. Venery. Intercourse. How the hell did Milton say it? Took a fancy to her. No. Such favor found. Event, come on. He impregnated her with Satanic semen vile. Write something — Ira’s suppressed snicker brought a sidelong look from his neighbor. So she bore him an heir: Death — who immediately raped his own mother. Some heir. Hey, wait a minute: that’s an event. Is that four? So if Sin is Satan’s daughter, and Death is Satan’s son, they’re brother and sister. There you go: father and daughter, son and mother, brother and sister.

What a bunch. But that’s not an event, you halfwit. Get away from it and forage, will you: the defeat of Satan by the Son of God. Artillery. That was an event. Mott gave the class that one on a platter just now. That was five, or was it? What the hell did the rest of these Jews think? They didn’t think about screwing their sisters, or knocking up their cousins, did they? He was living the real thing and they only thought it was a course, that was all. If there was a hell, where you’d be. Where would they all be? They’re Jews.

Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, before the bell rang: Jesus offered Himself as a sacrifice to redeem man for having sinned against God Almighty. And what a selfish prig He was, offering himself as a sacrifice for no one. But that was an event. Damn right. He said six, a half-dozen.

What else? Ira squinted at his scrawl on the lined pages, looked away. Below him, hoary and tranquil, Professor Mott sat with fingers clasped on his already fastened briefcase, old scholar musing on. . what? Musing on getting ready to leave. Did he believe that stuff? He couldn’t; how could any intelligent, learned man believe it? And yet, you never knew with these goyim. Poppycock, Edith would have said. Still, what pleasure Ira’s love of Milton’s wonderful, orotund lines gave her— The gong sounded. Period’s end.

“Please stop writing,” Professor Mott directed. “Deposit your blue books on the desk as you go out. Mr. K, would you mind collecting them, please.”

“Certainly not, Professor.”

Seymour eagerly jumped up amid the bustle and scrape and clatter of the class in motion— One more event for good measure: Ira scribbled frantically: Chaos gives Satan directions to Eden.

XV

Ira joined the throng of classmates flocking noisily toward the stairs. There was a good chance Larry would be in the ’28 alcove. Both had free periods next. Time and change, time and change, never ending, never resting. However much they seemed to shift and dance, the two variables were like the solid earth, whose motion the pendulum, with the feather at its end, marked in the sand the spin of the sphere. The two variables, the only constants, carved into the instable sand, and left nothing untouched. Once, in another time, he would have looked forward eagerly to meeting Larry, meeting him, exchanging the latest, the latest Jewish joke or the latest about Edith or — or just the opportunity to shoot the breeze. But that seemed ages ago. . like so much else, like so much else. Besides, Larry had made so many new friends since transferring to CCNY, especially Iven H, blond, husky, and outstanding physics major, who seemed as unworldly as Larry was worldly. They had taken to hobnobbing together — for which Ira was thankful, since their friendship relieved him of the responsibility to provide vitality to an intimacy no longer viable. He descended to the dingy ground floor of the alcoves. Perhaps he ought to duck out of the building, just as he was, trot the short distance to the library, skulk — never mind the overcoat in the locker — he had too damned much on his mind for trivialities, for glossing over crisis. But then what would happen? Anxiety would grab hold, and he’d be in the phone booth trying to reach Stella — but that wasn’t the plan. He could only allow himself one or two more tries at the most, with that Bert Lytell trick of masking speech with handkerchief over the phone. No, he’d better head for the alcove. Iven might be there, or Iz S, with news about a new play at the Provincetown Theater — and a possible bit part for Larry, now interested in the stage, having abandoned poetry, sculpture, and all other creative outlets Edith might indulge. His latest stage, Ira smirked. Trouble with Iz was he was so damn studious; he might be in the library himself — and Iven in a physics lab.

And so it appeared. Unaccompanied, Larry was sitting at the end of the mahogany bench of the ’28 alcove, poring over a text. The guy might be boning up for midterms too, it occurred to Ira. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Let him be, and slip into the unappetizing lunchroom until time for his ed class. Instead he allowed himself to stand at the entrance to the alcove, until Larry spied him.

“Ira. Hey.”

“Larry. Wotcha got? Midterm next?”

“No. Lewlyn — Dr. Craddock,” Larry corrected himself, “said the finals would be enough.”

“Yeah?”

“Sit down.”

Ira slipped into the well-polished space between Larry and Yerman, who had already gotten there.

“I just came from Mott’s little midterm,” Ira informed his colleagues.

“Do you know why he bothers?” Yerman, slight of build, but with a plump, impassive face, had the reputation of having read everything, and retaining it — phenomenally.

Ira shrugged. “What’re you gonna do with goyish religion and Jewish students?”

“Why? What was the test?” Larry asked.

Ira mugged. “Why we got driven outta the Garden of Yeeden.”

Larry smiled. His mustache was now fully rounded out, black and thick, contrasting with his dappled skin. “You didn’t have to read Milton to find that out. I could have told you.”

“No.” Yerman remained staunchly serious. “You don’t have to trivialize the course, just because it involves Christian theology. Mott ought to emphasize the difference in the Puritan construction of religious doctrine — and practice too — as against the upper class, the Cavalier Anglican. You don’t get any idea of what a radical Milton was.”

“You mean Satan wouldn’t give Sin the business?” Ira jibed at Yerman’s lecture.

“Oh, come on. That’s not what I’m talking about. It was the sixteenth century, not ours. And there was a helluva split going on at the time. How many in the class realize that Milton was speaking for the same Puritans who came over here on the Mayflower? They were radicals. They were the Reds of their day.”

“We didn’t know because we took a later boat,” said Larry.

“Ah, go on. Even if the course dealt with the contrast between the prevailing knowledge of the cosmos in Milton’s time and what it was in feudal times, we’d get more out of it.”

“Oh, boy,” Larry interjected.

“There’d be a little life to the course, instead of Professor Mott just sitting up there reading and commenting. As if we couldn’t read for ourselves.”

“All right, tell Seymour to suggest it.” Ira leaned heavily on the facetious. “Sure, I know Milton mentioned artillery. And Milton must have looked through Galileo’s telescope too. So?”

“So the globe wouldn’t be hanging from Heaven by a gold cord—”

“Okay. Okay. So where’s Paradise?” Ira questioned.

“It’s done lost, I heard,” said Larry.

“There’s more truth in that than you suspect. Even John Donne had to acknowledge that the round earth had imaginary corners. Milton’s cosmos lacks all unity — just compare it to Dante’s.”

“Okay. I believe you. Here comes Sol.” Evidently fresh from the lunchroom, Sol pried morsel from teeth by dint of tongue and toothpick. “Hey, Sol, when did Paradise get lost?” Ira asked.

“Who wants to know?”

“Yerman.”

“Yerman shouldn’t know? He’s covering up.”

“You’re a Philistine. What’s the use of talking to you?” Yarman commented on Sol and Ira’s exchange.

“It comes in handy to be a Philistine,” said Sol. “What’s wrong with being a Philistine? So I don’t read the Dial, and I don’t read Mencken. But the whole country is Philistines. Do they read the Dial, do they read The American Mercury? No. They read the tabloids. They make a living. They dance the Charleston, listen to soaps on the radio. And they’ll support cool Cal Coolidge, because he stands for prosperity. And prosperity is what I want. Look at the stock market. It’s way up in the sky, and going higher. The best people are playing the market. You think I’m gonna fight prosperity? Only a mishugeneh aesthete, like Yerman here, would do that. That’s not what I’m going to college for. I wanna be up there with the other Philistines. You know, we’re gonna read Samson Agonistes next week. Did you take Hebrew? Did you go to cheder? You were Bar Mitzvah, no?” Sol addressed Yerman.

Yerman merely shifted disdainfully in his seat.

“You remember Samson saying, ‘Tammus nafshi im plishtim?’ You know what it means?”

“No, I don’t, wise guy.” Yerman was satiric.

“So you do know what it means. That’s you aesthetes. You’re gonna wreck prosperity — if you could. Why did your father come here from the shtetl? For the same reason my father came. To come to the goldeneh medina. So it’s a goldeneh medina. Fine! Why should I complain?”

“It’s mercenary, crass, banal, and materialistic.” Yerman listed.

“So take advantage of it.”

“Sell more trusses on Delancey Street.”

“Listen, that’s ad hominem!” Sol accused. “Because my father happens to be in the orthopedic supply business— You owe me an apology. You know that?”

“Here, makher, take my seat.” Yerman stood up.

“I don’t want your seat.” Redheaded Sol followed Yerman out of the alcove. “What’s wrong with selling trusses on Delancey Street?”

“Don’t get excited,” Yerman replied.

“Who’s excited?” They moved out of earshot.

“Is that what your Milton midterm did to you?” Larry asked.

“No. The questions were really a snap, too. But when Sol and Yerman get together, you better duck: the bullshit flies at high velocity.”

“Does Sol’s father really own a truss shop on Delancey Street?” Larry asked.

“Yeah, trusses, artificial limbs. Braces,” Ira replied.

“Nothing wrong with it.”

“No, but you know how they bait Sol. He gets so excited. The old man has already put his two older brothers through law school.”

A moment of silence ensued as Larry relit his calabash. “I’ve just been made a job offer,” he said.

“Just? A job offer?” Ira asked. “No kidding.”

“By Chapman.”

“The head of the ed department?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean it? Are you that good in your ed courses?”

“I just sling the bull.”

“There must be more than that. You’ve got some kind of knack.”

“I don’t know.” Larry let a billow of fragrant smoke mushroom before his open lips, and reclaimed it before it escaped. “He seemed to think I was unusually qualified to go into ed. He practically offered me a tutorship if I’d go on and get a master’s.”

“He did?” How much of that same attractiveness Larry still had, surface attractiveness in countenance and bearing, in subdued richness of clothes, in uninflected, articulate speech. He was heavier now than the lyric youth who had bewitched Ira in high school, entranced Edith in her freshman class, beguiled John Vernon in the Arts Club — to the point where the two virtually competed. Larry was heavier, and with his thick mustache looked much more masculine, but still as winning as ever — on the surface. No wonder Professor Chapman was taken with him. “What’d you say?”

“I said I’d think about it. I’d rather get out into the world, to tell the truth. Sixteen years in school is enough.”

“Is that what you told him?”

“Not quite. I hinted at it. But he was keen.” Larry leaned back and let out another cone of pipe smoke. “He came right back and asked why was I getting a minor in ed if I didn’t intend to teach. I might as well be doing it in a college.”

“Teaching, you mean?”

“Yes. I admitted I did want to make sure I’d have something to fall back on, like teaching — I didn’t say just in case the stage didn’t work out — or”—Larry twitched his head slightly—“selling housedresses for Irv, and eventual partnership doesn’t work out either. Anyway, I’d like to go out into the world for a while. He said he understood. Anytime I changed my mind to let him know.”

“It’s a wonderful break,” Ira said with enthusiasm.

“Have you seen Iz in the last couple of days?” Larry wondered.

“Just to wave. Why? The E. E. Cummings play is still running.”

“He told me last time the Provincetown may be putting on a Pinsky play next. Jimmy White has been talking about it. He’s strong on experimentation.”

“Pinsky? What did I ever read by Pinsky?” Ira questioned.

“There are quite a few bit parts in it, Iz’s sister says. So I may get a chance to play one.”

“That would be great.”

“Wouldn’t it?”

“Do you get anything for it?” For once, Ira thought monetarily.

“I doubt if it’s very much. A few bucks. But—” Larry left the rest pending a moment — classmates at the alcove study table were closing their notebooks and getting ready to go. “What I get isn’t important right now. It’s the experience I’m after. I’ve had some on the borscht circuit, but it isn’t the same thing. This would be legitimate theater, serious theater.”

“I get the idea. I can’t remember—” Ira wrinkled brow to convey perplexity. “Seems to me I read a Pinsky play — in translation, of course — when I was going through a play-reading phase. What’s the title?”

“I don’t know the title. Iz will probably tell me in a day or two — if they decide to put it on.”

“Then what d’you do?”

“Hoof over pronto and ask White for a tryout.”

“I ketch.” Ira nodded.

“Listen, why don’t you come over to the house? Say, in a few days. It’ll be Thanxy. We’ll both have some time off. We can shmooze. What say?”

“I really don’t know, Larry.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know what I’ll be doing.”

“Look.” Larry’s big hands adjusted his jacket. “I’m sure you know all about what’s happened between Edith and me.”

“Yeah.” Ira looked straight ahead — to the wall above the wainscoting on the other side of the alcove. Wasn’t it strange to be talking about Edith here in CCNY, in the ’28 alcove? Talking about an NYU English professor and a dead romance here in the ’28 alcove? A dead romance, while your mind was on a live embryo in your cousin’s gut, or wherever it was: womb, tomb, uterus. Would such a combination of circumstances ever happen again, anything like that to two guys seated on the rich, smooth, pants-smoothed, mahogany-dark benches of CCNY? Or of Oxford? Or of Cambridge? Or of Heidelberg with its students’ ritual scars — the Sorbonne? Oh, Jesus, what was history? Shadows impinging on shadows impinging, darker and darker and darker. God, what had already happened in one short span. And was happening. Or was it just to him? “Yeah,” Ira answered, reluctant to engage in the subject any further than he had to. “She told me.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. After all, we knew each other before Edith came into the picture, right? In DeWitt Clinton. When we were both freshmen, and I was a predental student. We knew each other. We palled around together. There’s no reason why all that should end just because I don’t see Edith.” Larry’s toes lifted at the same time as his hands on his thighs turned palm upward. “So that’s over, but not our friendship, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” Ira could feel a certain hardening within himself — or about himself — a kind of crust forming, a sullen obduracy that beat back appeals to former friendship. Boy, that was queer, and cruel, and ungrateful. But what was he going to do? At a time like this? He couldn’t take Larry into his confidence. First of all, he didn’t need Larry, in fact, didn’t want his intimacy. Larry would be a clog now. Ira stared at shifting patterns of guilt and obligation merging into each other before his eyes. He was in trouble, and the only thing he wanted to talk about was that, and he couldn’t talk about it to Larry. Edith was the only one he could talk with about the nasty fix he had gotten himself into, because only Edith could get him out of it. What was he going to do? Say that he had knocked up his sixteen-year-old cousin? He might as well say that before that, he once fucked his sister. He could have divulged his secrets to Larry long ago. But he hadn’t. Now Ira could give a lecture, no, a term paper, on the adventures of incest — something dirty like that — like his freshman plumber’s helper theme: got him a D, and publication in The Lavender. But bullshit, bullshit. That wasn’t what Larry wanted to talk about. “What’s there to talk about?”

“A lot. For one thing, what you’ll be doing. I’m out of the picture, okay, but I’m still your friend. I’d like to talk about things. I don’t see any reason for a barrier between us, just because of Edith. We’ve got lots in common — the same things as before.”

“Well, we don’t.”

“Why not?” Larry remained calm.

Ira felt himself retreat before the pleading in Larry’s gentle brown eyes. “Trouble is, I’m all frigged up.”

“What about?”

“That’s just it. The things that happened between you and Edith you could talk about — most of the time. I mean, when the affair was going on with Edith, when you were in love and so on. But I can’t.”

“I don’t understand. Who’s stopping you?”

“Nobody. But I’m the center now. That’s what you’re interested in — I’m not flattering myself,” Ira added glumly. “The whole thing has shifted. And on top of that, I’m all screwed up by all kinds of things I can’t talk about. I won’t. I wish I could, but I won’t. It’s a—” He shrugged, shook his head.

“All right. I don’t intend to pry into your personal life,” Larry persisted reasonably. “I just don’t see the objection to talking about what your plans are. What Edith thinks of them.”

“I don’t know what they are myself.” Ira’s rejoinder was curt.

Again Larry tried to contain disagreement within amity. “Listen, I know Edith is crazy about you. She’s crazy about you in a way she never was about me. And I think I know why too. It’s the kind of a person you are. It’s the same thing I found in you when we met by accident, absolutely by accident, in high school, in old man Pickens’s class. What is it? I don’t know how you get it, how you got it — when I visited your home there in Harlem — I mean — I’ll be honest with you — I couldn’t understand how anybody brought up in that place, in that slum,” Larry nodded for emphasis, “could be so sensitive—listen, all I’m saying is I want for us to keep in touch.”

“Okay. We’ll talk about it later. I think the period is about up.”

“But Ira, come for dinner this Thanxy? We’ll have all the fixings. And special cranberry relish only my sister Sophie has the recipe. You’ll love it.”

“I’m not sure.”

Larry was quick to allow latitude. “All right, you got another Thanxy dinner?”

“No.”

“We’ll see each other tomorrow. We’ve got till Wednesday. You can tell me the day before. If not Thursday, then Friday, Saturday, Sunday.”

It was like a reenactment of an event in the past: that first time Ira had been invited by Larry to have supper at his home, and Ira had declined, deliberately, intuitively, not to appear overeager. Almost four full years ago, at the foot of the stairs of the Eighth Avenue El at 59th Street, amid the battering din and under the autumn shadow. But how different now — no, how different-seeming now. He was still a shlepper, still a pauper, but some kind of self-awareness had come into play, awareness of distinction, arrogance stemming from what he was, the awful, unique things he had done, suffered — who the hell knew. It wasn’t because he was smart or had become smarter than Larry — Gee. “I don’t wanna make you feel bad. I don’t think I can make it,” Ira said.

“What?”

“I mean don’t count on it.” And in answer to Larry’s questioning look, “I’m sure I’m gonna be tied up this weekend.” He frowned, as much to convey his preoccupation as to discourage further exploration of the topic. “Maybe I’ll try.”

“What about we bum around a day together? Wilma is married. We’ve got room. Any night you want to stay over, my mother is adjustable. She loved having Iven stay with us.”

“Yeah? Hey, there goes the bell. I’ll see.”

They both stood up.

“Which way you going?” Ira asked.

“Sociology.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Ira kept his tone neutral.

“I registered for it before my relations with Edith broke up.”

“I know. You told me.”

“Or else I wouldn’t. But it’s all right. I don’t care anymore.” And Larry added: “He’s a good lecturer.” And appended: “He’s a nice guy. I don’t hold it against him.”

“No. What life is like.”

They joined the students beginning to swarm through the dim midway dividing the two sections of class alcoves.

“You know, Edith had an abortion.” It was the first time Larry had mentioned the fact.

“Yeah, I do.”

“Joke was on the subject of birth control last time. In his last lecture.”

“Yeah? Boyoboy.”

“You could see he had to be discreet,” Larry said as they climbed the stairs to the administration floor. “The examples he gave were from English and Continental practice. We knew where he stood just the same.”

“Yeh? I think I remember Edith saying that the church gave him a grant to study that and juvenile delinquency in England. Jesus, that’s a combination.”

“What do you mean?” Larry paused momentarily on the next flight.

“Nothing special. Juvenile delinquency, birth control. He goes to England to study that while his wife, Marcia, is out in Samoa some place studying adolescents and their sexuality. 1925 they set out. In the fall. And they both fall out of love. Coincidence, huh?”

“I see what you mean. We waited in a tent in your uncle’s place. And I got a telegram. Which way?”

“I got an ed class.”

“Tell me one thing.” Larry held Ira’s arm lightly. “Does she still see him — Lewlyn?”

“No, that’s over and done with.”

“I thought so, the way he acts in class.”

“See you later.”

“Try to make it over Thanxy.”

“Okay.”

XVI

Manhattan Street was the name of the street along which he had hobbled for his abbreviated afternoon constitutional walks when M was still alive. Manhattan Avenue, of all the ironies, was also the name of the street on which a tall woven-wire fence enclosed one side of a slovenly mobile home court. The very trees of the court, he allowed himself to imagine, recoiled in affront at the clamorous squalor below them — or shrank away, as if maternally protecting their newly budding branches from the noisy mess perpetrated by the humans on the ground beneath. While high in azure overhead, above the court, above the troubled trees, the cranes flew warbling by, like petals of aureate rose against the blue, the cranes flew warbling balm. Old hat (Ira gazed unseeing at the black connectors of his word processor plugged into the long aluminum box of the electric strip), old hat, this contrasting of natural loveliness with man-made unsightliness and tumult. E come i gru van cantando lor lai—Dante had written that line some six, almost seven centuries ago. Like cranes singing in formation, so flew the damned to their eternal torment: e come i gru van. . To the east, the snow on the Sandias was radiant as a cloud resting there, the Sandias where the labs for atomic research were situated. What can you do? Resignation was a comfort at his age.

He wondered where his musings would have led him if he hadn’t stopped for a cup of Zinger tea, where, and how far. And wondering, he had gotten up to take an Awake, a caffeine tablet against his drowsiness. And on his way to the bathroom door he had stubbed his toe against the caster of the table, which was usually at his back. And were it not for the little shelf on top of the table, with its IBM manual on it, he very likely would have fallen. “You’ll break your goddamn leg,” he swore at himself. He was sure that would be his end — like old Bernard Shaw breaking his hip, at age ninety or so, and saying it would be a miracle if he recovered from this one. He ought to have a cane nearby, Ira told himself, to steady himself that first second or two after getting up. He ought not get around without a cane, but canes were a damned nuisance. And when he returned, after taking the tablet, he thought he ought to begin the paragraph with: Ira tapped the tab key cautiously. But didn’t. It would clog the paragraph’s opening, make it too busy, as they said. Seated again, he tried to recall the thought a moment after he had sworn at himself.

Not that he had more than the foggiest notion of where to resume his narrative (nothing new there), but as usual, the compulsion to clear away the debris of existence before resuming his narrative took precedence. Life was full of chaotic fragments, discreet, in the mathematical sense, disparate, often dull and banal, but often fiercely engrossing, disparate but often desperate. And as often unexpected and unforeseen.

Unable to face his narrative again, pick up where he had left off, lacking the resolve, he had gone back to bed after breakfast, slept another hour; and even then, he stalled fifteen minutes, during which he located with indelible pencil the spot on his lower denture that was irritating his gum — then with the aid of a small metal burr in his electric drill he gouged out a hollow in the hard plastic of the denture that he hoped would relieve the pressure, the point of chafing on the gum. You goofiest of all scriveners, he told himself: always you opt for last things first. .

XVII

He had called Mamie’s home Tuesday, according to the schedule he had set himself, called from the college phone booth, but got no answer, although he continued stubbornly ringing until the operator told him that the party didn’t answer — and sent his jitney clinking down the coin-return chute. Classes over, he left campus, took the trolley home, and at 125th Street entered the waiting room of the New York Central station, and carefully arranging two layers of his handkerchief over the mouthpiece, he called again. This time Hannah answered. And between evasions of self-identification and message, he was told Stella was at the library, and wouldn’t be home until later. She was at the library — Ira frowned speculatively. He knew the public library at 115th Street, just as he knew every library in Harlem, had frequented every one of them during boyhood in search of new fairy tales and legends and myths. He was on 125th and Park Avenue, ten blocks to go to 115th, and a half-dozen long blocks west. Well, nothing unusual about that.

He was already on his way, envisaging finding her in an ideal place to talk, to learn how lucky he was. The smirk of wicked conniving he felt on his face reminded him of Death’s ghoulish grin in Paradise Lost when he heard of the multitude of souls that would be his to devour once Satan exited Hell. “I had not thought Death had undone so many,” said Eliot in The Waste Land, quoting Dante. Only trouble was there was no place in the library — hell, her monthlies wouldn’t bother him. He strode on, trying to imagine some coign, retreat, where he could lead her, as once he had led her down to the glary basement of Max’s new home on the occasion of the infant’s bris. Jesus, there wasn’t a single place in Harlem — except the Park, Central Park. Why of course. If she was okay, why of course. There would be light enough — and dark enough: around the lake, up the paved path above the granite outcrop, among the grove of trees where he had wandered (with Psyche my soul), and sipped of that rill — ugh — when Baba and Zaida came to America. How could he be such a dope to drink that water of Central Park’s rocks and rills? That was the place to lay her. Against a tree, in the shade, in the glade, it wasn’t too cold — if only she had had her monthlies — he strode doggedly to the inner beat: had her monthlies, had her monthlies.

The American flag hung above the entrance. How standard the exterior of public libraries, always a gray wall in which large windows were set, and how standard the interior, the checkout counter, the shelves, oak tables under incandescents. Where? He sidled past the counter, looked avidly about. That table. No. Not there. Aisles of bookcases? No. He made careful search. Nothing doing. No sign of her. So maybe that was her way of tricking Mamie, her ruse to get out of the house and meet a guy. He hadn’t encountered her on his way there, that was sure. Nuts. He was wrong. If she was having her period. . No, there were too many factors to contend with, yes, no, maybe. She had probably left while he was on the way, and she would be home now.

Should he call again? The first drugstore. And once more he gave the operator Mamie’s number, and once more Hannah answered. No, Stella wasn’t home. “Who is this?” Hannah’s voice had more than curiosity in it, as though she were striving to identify something familiar. Another minute of talking, and she’d probably recognize his voice — even through the muffle over the mouthpiece. It was only in the theater they could carry on that charade indefinitely. That meant he hardly dared telephone again.

“Tell her it’s a friend. When’s her school over t’morrer?” he tried to growl with gritty, hardly intelligible voice.

“Stella’s business school? Like always. Three o’clock. Who’s this?”

Ira immediately hung up the receiver.

What a fiasco! Glowering, he left the drugstore, his hopes shriveling. Hell, this was probably her seventh, eighth, no, seventh day without menstruating. What was he dreaming of? He was out of luck. Might as well face the truth, meet her in front of the business school Wednesday, brace himself for the ignominy of taking her to Edith’s — of exhibiting her before Edith! Oh, Jesus, that simpering wad o’ lascivious lard. Oy. One glance at her and Edith would be appalled at the fake he was.

That evening Minnie was absent at supper, a calm supper, at long last. She was attending evening class at CCNY, but she came home so promptly afterward, Ira couldn’t help but think she did so out of solicitude for him. Confirmed — he was sure he was right by the anxious way she eyed him, so obviously expressed was her concern that he could have snarled at her, except he knew doing so would be completely baffling to Pop and Mom — or worse, excite their curiosity, their surmise, maybe questions. He managed to keep his scowl averted and his mouth shut. All he could see was a hopelessly intricate skein, an untidy web within a small household, like those sooty webs the spiders tended in the crannies across the air shaft, to which every soiled strand and particle adhered, a web composed of every grubby thread of his soiled worries. Not until Mom and Pop went to bed did Minnie, lingering, get a chance to ask, to whisper the question he had been trying to evade:

“It’s still the same?”

“Yeah.” He felt himself squirm.

“My poor brother.”

Her sympathy he dismissed with a brusque flap of his hand. But she was not stopped by the gesture. “You need any money?” she persisted.

“I told you. I got somebody to help me.”

“So then you don’t have to worry so much if you got somebody to help you.” She had a way of frowning her compassion so that lines formed on her brow, and dark wreaths on her cheek, that threw her countenance into shadow. “If you got that professor to help you, what more can you want? Don’t worry so much,” Minnie entreated. “If you — I mean she — she wants to spend the money, and she knows where to go, you can’t do any more. Another few days, Ira,” she stressed, and came over to whisper her encouragement in lower breath. “You’ll be all right.”

Wednesday morning, lived through somehow, lived through on a plateau of numb anxiety that couldn’t go any higher. Morning passed in a monotonous pall of crisis. A stuporous early class in economics. He saw Larry for a second day in a row, Larry genial, only the least aware of how irritating to Ira his coaxing had been the previous day. Larry’s every new entreaty to Ira, “Spend Thanxy,” “Spend the night,” seemed to grate, to plane the edge, to near Ira closer to fissure. Every little extra thing seemed too much. Who the hell cared about Thanxy? He finally snapped at Larry: “Why don’tcha invite Iven, for Christ’s sake?”

Larry hadn’t taken offense; merely laughed. “Okay, let’s have Iven over too.”

Ira had made no reply, sullenly engrossed in his fingernails.

“I can see you’ve got things on your mind,” Larry said earnestly. “Maybe I can help.”

“Yeah.” Was it to ease the strain that he allowed all sorts of obscene images to dwell in his mind? — Larry backscuttling Stella, laying Minnie for good measure, for auld lang syne. He was heavier-hung than Ira. What a picture. Especially with Stella, younger, more salacious. And Ira the bystander, extracting the erotic. Would he have to pull off when they came, or would he come just watching? His mind was steeped in foulness, pickled in it. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws,” he quoted.

Larry thought the quote amusing. “All right, I’ll meet you for the subway ride. Okay?”

“I got an appointment.”

“When?”

“About three.” He never could think fast enough to lie, lie in a way that left no openings.

“Oh, that’ll leave you plenty o’ time.”

“I was going to cut ed, anyway.”

“What is it, next period? What for?”

“Yeah,” Ira said hopelessly. “It’ll only mean a trip to the dean.”

“So why cut it?”

“Oh, nuts. No reason. Just want to stew by myself for a while.”

“Listen, if you go to class, we get out the same time. We can shmooze on the way,” Larry urged. His handsome face became sober. “Maybe a few minutes’ really serious talk would help.”

“It’d help you.”

“Why not you?”

“I’m frigged. That’s what my appointment’s about.” Larry arrested his sigh of frustration, regarded Ira with his gentle brown eyes, almost pleading for enlightenment, that failed of forthcoming — an answer literally stillborn, the trope darted through Ira’s mind.

“Well, you have your reasons,” Larry conceded the minor defeat after a pause. “Okay, we take the train together?”

“Okay.”

“May take your mind off things. That sometimes helps.”

“Yeah. Vie a toiten bankehs.”

Intrigued as always when a new Yiddish expression came within his ken: “A toiten bankehs?” Larry queried.

“Yeah. It means cupping a corpse, cupping a cadaver. You know how much good that would do.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Abyssinia.” Ira invoked their old parting logo.

“Abyssinia.”

Ever the peregrine lout, lackluster, purposeless, wayward, roaming from car to car, left the doors open between them — to skate and slam with every lurch of the train. Cold, drear tunnel draft swooped in, swirled the dust and pounced on newspaper scraps, Hershey penny chocolates and Tootsie Roll candy wrappers on the floor, flapped the pages of tabloids in the hands of seated, swaying readers. The short, husky Italian in flannel shirt and raveling gray sweater under a nondescript mackinaw fixed his brown hat tighter on his head against the gale; and with tabloid gripped in one fist, stood up, grabbed the brass door latch, exposing the longshoreman’s cargo hook in his belt, and banged the door shut, permanently. “Punk!” He scowled through the glass of the door after the departed vagrant, and then sat down again.

Across the aisle two teenage girls studied Larry, trailed rapt gaze away to chatter to each other behind the covers of raised loose-leaf black notebooks, stole glances at Larry again, who remained oblivious. It was early afternoon, Wednesday afternoon.

The train slanted up the grade from 137th Street, where Larry and Ira had gotten on, as usual, as was their custom — an almost four-year custom by now — slanted up the grade from the tunnel to the cold elevation of the 125th Street station. With its outdoor view, anomalous for a subway. But somewhere, in his geology class last summer — Iven would know — the land had dipped here because of a terrestrial fault, or been gouged out by a glacier — there was even an obsolescent, beat-up escalator under the station to lift passengers aloft. Years ago, how bemused he had stood, East Side kid from 9th Street reconnoitering along 125th.

Out of the windows of the train, the solid, fused apartment houses each lowered their roofs a jog as the train climbed, and at street intersections, offered brief panels of the slaty Hudson and the wintry bluffs of the Palisades across the river. The subway car doors opened. A few passengers boarded, among them a Salvation Army couple in uniform. In rushed cold air with them. The doors slid closed. And now the train slanted downward again past concrete parapet to reenter the stuffy, snug tunnel.

“All right, we get off at 96th?” Larry asked. “I have to change there anyway.”

Ira was loath to mesh with the imminent encounter he had sensed was coming from the minute Larry proposed riding downtown with him. But there was no evading it: it had to be faced sooner or later. “You’re gonna pass your own station? 110th?” As if reminding Larry would bring a change of mind.

“I know. We’ll both have to change. When you change for the Lenox Avenue to Harlem, I’ll grab the Broadway local.”

I’m in a double bind now, Ecclesias. I’ve got to use essentially the same episode, now on the same file, in two places, to serve two purposes.

— I know it.

What do you advise? Do you have any advice to offer?

— No. Nothing plausible. Indeed, it’s impossible to do what you intend to do. At least I don’t ever recall the narrative use of substantially the same episode in two different time frames.

I can’t either. So do what?

— Do what you may do.

What? Do what you may, and wisdom is early to despair — if I quote Gerard Manley Hopkins with any fidelity.

You may, as far as I can tell, but you can’t quote your way out of difficulties. You could, of course, rewrite to suit, or shall I say, rewrite clear of your temporal contradictions. Two meetings, two encounters, more or less devoted to the same subject on the same subway train, on the same station? Creo cano. I don’t think so.

Then what alternative do I have? I’ve already interrupted, greatly interfered with, the course of the narrative. So be it. I’m too advanced in years—

— Oh, I’ve heard all that before. That plea grows tiresome.

I’m sorry. Nonetheless, ’tis so.

— Fact is that Larry is eager to take this occasion to make his pitch to retain some remnant of his former intimacy with Ira. And Ira is far too worried about his responsibility in Stella’s pregnancy to care about discussing such matters with Larry, at this point, too preoccupied with this, as well as the obligation preying on his mind, excessively, as usual, of escorting Stella into Edith’s presence. The coming confrontation, or whatever to call it in this case, the full revelation of his disgrace, almost sickens him. . Well, why make any more bones about it. We know what faces him. Do the best you can.

The best I can will be a fiasco. . Nonetheless. I thank you. .

Ira refrained from answering, and Larry appeared nonchalant all at once. Larry appeared to have discovered another fleck of color in the large turquoise gem of the Navajo ring bestowed on him so seemingly long ago. He turned it pensively, appreciatively, on his long pale finger, unconstrained, oblivious of the girls across the way, candid in the boldness of their admiration as Ira was surreptitious in his admiration of their boldness: shiksas. Cute. Pert. Staring blue-eyed, the intensity of their interest forcing their knuckles to press whitely on girlish, weak clenched hands. Little wonder they stared. Despite his thick black mustache, his added weight, Larry still looked like Ganymede, a little older, Ganymede a few years after being snatched up to Olympus to wait on the gods, chief butler now, chief steward: Greek nose, winged eyebrows, milky skin — and dressed like a prince: his ample gray camel’s-hair topcoat, tweed trousers showing below, his woven, woolen burnt-umber necktie, his finely tooled brogans. Nothing needed adornment with Larry. Nothing needed superfluous gloss; everything was rich, everything spoke of good taste and fine rearing. Clothes, features, deportment, person. Only his full lips, his big hands, deviated from some ideal, his big hands, his longer-than-average arms, fused Michelangelo’s David to classic Greek.

Raising his voice against the din in the tunnel, Larry leaned toward Ira: “All your midterm tests finished?”

“Narbhill had the flu. So we had public speaking the last minute. Pain in the ass. You have him too, don’t you?”

“That’s why I’m here today. Had to come in for only a couple of classes.”

“How did you make out?”

“In public speaking? I didn’t tell you. Oh, Narbhill beamed approval when I finished. I gave him Alfred Noyes’s old chestnut ‘Highwayman.’”

“Wow. All o’ that?” Ira feigned amazement.

“I still had it more than half memorized from last year. Did I put on the dog? ‘Impeccable diction,’ he said.”

“Yeah? Well.”

Larry chuckled, and then again, amused by his own amusement. “You should have heard Sol. The guy was a scream. He set out to deliver Kipling’s ‘Recessional’: ‘God of our fathers, known of old,’ and all that lofty, imperialist invocation, but he didn’t know it, let alone have it memorized pat—‘What’s the next word, please, Professor Narbhill?’ ‘Beneath. .’ ‘Oh, yes. Thank you. “Beneath whose awful hand we hold—” What’s the next word, please?’ He had old Narbhill practically reciting it for him.” Larry lifted his head in renewal of mirth. Ira joined him — noting how Larry had won soulful smiles from the two girls over as well. Who could resist his charm and mimicry?

“What was your selection?” Larry asked.

“I still got a wrong t—a Jewish t, I guess. But it was content of my selections that got the old boy’s thumbs down. No room for expressiveness, quotha. Expressiveness with a capital X.”

“Why?”

“I chose Eliot’s ‘Phlebas the Phoenician,’ and Masefield’s ‘Cargoes,’ and Walter de la Mare’s ‘Lady of the West Country.’ And what else? Anyway, the old coot disapproved so of my absence of expressiveness, you know what he did? As a demonstration of the kind of thing he expected from me, from all and sundry in fact, he brought out the text for the course, and did he ever rant away on Shylock’s speech before the Duke. You know it: ‘To bait fish withal. If ’twill feed nothing else ’twill feed my revenge—’ I thought he’d blow a gasket.”

“That classifies more as acting rather than public speaking,” Larry objected.

“Yeah. Histrionics. Well, he was going to show me how cramped my expressiveness was, my eloquence. So that, together with my flat-footed recitation, makes a D for the midterm.”

“Really? Does that mean you’re on the way to losing another eighth of a credit?”

“Don’t I pile them up? I have to take a summer course anyway.”

The last enameled 110 of Larry’s station whisked by. The two gave up trying to outyell the roar of the train, rode awhile in silence. At 103rd, the two girls got off, peeled off, with a last longing glance at Larry — who still never noticed. Instead, before the train began moving again, he turned impulsively toward Ira: “You know, that’s where we came in.”

“Huh?”

“Elocution. Elocution 7, sitting next to each other. We had to double up in the same seat.”

“Oh, that? I was a big galoot. That big galoot in the second row, fourth seat, or what the hell ever it was, stand up! You know, I’ll never forget that: you stood up.”

“I really thought he meant me. He was looking right at me. He did have rather close-set eyes.”

“Old man Pickens. We used to call his sister Slim Pickens.”

“Just one period in class together,” said Larry. “Can you imagine? Just because her ship was delayed a couple of days getting into New York.”

“I’ve thought about it a hundred times.”

“So have I. Do you think we would ever have met otherwise?”

“Hard to say — in a high school as big as DeWitt Clinton. I have me doots.” When pressed for reminiscence, mugging was easiest for Ira.

“I would have finished my predent by now. What am I saying: a year ago. Finished a year of anatomy, cutting up stiffs. Begun to do some real dentistry.”

“Yeah?”

“Can you hear me?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Did I ever get thrown off course.”

“You?”

“You feel that way too?”

“Way, way off.”

“For you it’s different.”

“What? Oh. Why?”

“Well, you know why.” They were both silent. The next stop was 96th Street, so no use wasting breath when the big moment was only a minute or two away. What would it be about, if it were a big moment? What form would it take? His own feelings about what lay ahead were uneasy, fateful and yet formless. Not a horrible crisis, a ghastly turning point, like being kicked out of Stuyvesant — or waiting for Stella to hear the news — or telling Edith about it. Or Jesus, how many were there? That sick, harrowing feeling of maybe confessing to Edith about Minnie. No. But some kind of big moment just the same. Momentous in its way — even if not a cataclysmic upheaval. Decisive, that was the word. Not everything had to be a tornado, a blast of recriminations. Momentous confrontation. Certainly. But why not dealt with calmly, or as calmly as possible. The imperceptible, the rift within the lute, had begun long ago. Larry beside him was probably thinking the same thing. What did he want, what did he hope for? He was bound to ask about Edith. Bound to have something to do with Edith — Edith and Ira.

Try to figure out, try to get ready for the coming colloquy. What did Larry mean? For you it’s different. Of course it was different. The 96th Street station was next. He would soon find out — definitely.

He saw Larry prepare for alighting from the train, grip the handles of his handsome stippled briefcase, the very opposite of the workaday walrus-hide briefcase Mamie had presented her nephew — that had been stolen from him. Everything reminded him of something else. Was it because of his uneasiness? He followed Larry’s lead, gripped the peeling handles of his cowhide briefcase. They both stood up, with others getting off, clung to the enameled hangers to steady themselves from the thrust of the train’s deceleration as it pulled alongside the local platform.

“Well, we’ll get a chance to talk now,” Larry said.

“Right.”

Misgivings seemed to pile on misgivings. And after he and Larry had come to grips, and that was settled, if it was settled, Ossa on Pelion would follow, waiting outside the business school to take Stella to meet Edith. Owoo.

The train lurched to a stop. A local train, an early hour, exit was uncontested. With a scattering of fellow passengers, the two stepped across the gap between train and platform, to encounter a scattering waiting to step the other way — into the train — across the gap that always seemed to ask a question.

“I’ve got an appointment at about four o’clock with Jim Light,” said Larry.

“Who?”

“Jim Light. He’s the director of the new Pinsky play they’re putting on at the Provincetown.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks. It shouldn’t be hard getting a bit part.”

They traversed the short tunnel under the tracks of the express train island overhead, climbed up the stairs to the uptown local side. Once there, Larry looked about smartly for the station bench, located it, the massive oak bench, next to an O’Sullivan Heel poster, in front of the penny Hershey bar vending machine that was wedged between the riveted flanges of a smudged subway pillar. At the other end of the bench sat an old guy in a greasy-looking coat, peeling an orange in a paper bag. His fingers were stiff, fingers evidently tacky with orange juice; he kept wriggling them to separate them.

“Helluva place to shmooze.” Larry led the way to the other end. “We could go back to the apartment—”

“No, no.” Ira realized he was too peremptory. On guard, he warned himself as he sat down: Watch it.

“You know why I wanted to talk to you?”

“I can sorta guess.”

“It’s the same thing we started to talk about in the alcove the other day.”

“I might as well tell you quite a lot else has happened since then.”

“Yes?”

“Larry, I’ve got to tell you that Edith asked me to help her on her new anthology of modern poetry.” As always Ira could only tell Larry half of any given truth. Edith’s trust in him offered a future, out of Harlem. Ira had just begun to see his machinations, his spells, begin to come to fruition. And, as always, he couldn’t share his plots with his friend.

“I’m not surprised. I heard about that too.”

“Okay. And now you have something—” Ira began, gave up before the clash of an incoming uptown express train, immediately augmented to overpowering din by a downtown express pounding in on the parallel track — deafening. “Helluva place is right.” Even shouting, he barely made himself heard.

“Let’s wait a minute,” Larry said, raising his voice. A cheerful couple with a youngster in tow sat down between them and the orange-eater; a lively kid, but fixed into quiescence by the sight of the old man peeling the orange. The trains came to a halt; the thunder of metal subsided. “I’ve always thought it would happen, you and Edith.” Larry resumed. “I knew she was humoring me, long before she told me that Lewlyn was engaged to the woman in England. I knew she would turn to you.”

“All right. So it’s all sorta predictable on both sides.”

“Now it is. I didn’t foresee that I would be a rung in your ladder. Did you?”

“Sure. I had designs on Edith from the beginning.” Ira’s candor shocked him.

“Oh, come on.”

“Fact.”

Larry sat with one large hand in the other, watching the two express trains rumble apart. They seemed to stretch an elastic transparency between them. Then he turned to Ira: “I don’t believe it.”

“You said ‘rung,’ didn’t you. We could go on indefinitely. I’m not going to. Because it’ll get to be damn painful. I know you’ve got some kind of trouble with your heart—”

“Oh, to hell with that! Just a transient thing: a small clot. I lost consciousness for all of five seconds.”

“Edith was damned concerned.”

“She’s always ready to magnify any disorder: a cough becomes TB.”

“Okay. Okay. Is that what you wanted to complain to me about, your being a rung in my ladder? Let’s have it.”

“No, I wasn’t going to complain at all.”

“Then what?”

“We were friends, weren’t we? You were my friend, weren’t you? Clichés about bosom companions aside, that’s what we were. And that’s what remains precious to me, more than I can tell you.”

“Yes?” Ira could feel himself congealing defensively.

“Look, what I’m trying to tell you is this—”

The family trio sitting beside them got to their feet, the young mother holding firmly to the child’s lifted hand, as the Broadway local pulled in. The old man carefully separated orange segments. Larry kept on speaking: “When I went to bed at night, I would think of things I would tell you tomorrow — storing them up, from my reading, Irving’s latest salesman’s gags. Do you remember the winter you stayed overnight in my room, so we could see the eclipse the next morning on the roof — when we were still in DeWitt Clinton — everything had twice the meaning when we did things together.”

“Yes? I felt that way too. All right.” Just what would he have to brace himself against? The outlines were becoming more defined.

“That night in that dusty old tent in your uncle’s summer hotel when your uncle brought that telegram from Edith, you were with me — we were together. When we shook the crowd after the soirée in her St. Mark’s Place apartment. And there was the cottage in Woodstock.”

“Yeah. And we visited her apartment in the Village together.” Ira wondered whether the crease of irony in his cheek would betray him. It didn’t.

“That’s what I mean.”

“So? Okay.”

“I’m making a kind of appeal. You were on my side from the beginning. Because you’ve become Edith’s confidant — I guess that is what you’d call it, right — doesn’t destroy for me what you were. I just don’t want you to cut me out of your life. I want to feel that I continue to share in it.”

“Oh.”

Larry made a peculiar motion, with rigid white fingers directed toward his heart. “You can’t let it all die.”

“And how do you intend to keep it alive?”

“By keeping our friendship alive: sharing your impressions about what you’re doing — if you’re writing — mostly what you’re thinking, feeling. And — anything else.”

“I don’t know, Larry. I’m not that generous, I guess.”

“No?”

“It’s the way I’m built. I don’t feel that kind of allegiance.” The more liquid the brown eyes looking into his, the more appealing the features, the more ruthless Ira had to be in Stygian caves forlorn, in subway caves forlorn. “I’m sorry, Larry, the best thing we can do is cut loose from each other. I’m going my own way.” Boy, that was brusque. Boy, that was cruel.

Larry’s breath snagged in his throat. He snuffed up tears. He would have run for cover, sought hiding place — Ira felt — if he could. The last ties were breaking. And there were others due to break, Ira reflected gloomily: he had to announce changes at home, renounce home — and Mom, say to her: or ever the silver cord be loosed, Mom, or the beaker be shattered in the chemistry lab, the threads be stripped off the screw, the battery shot, the what else is ruined? The straw Kelly bashed in at the end of summer.

“I’m thinking of leaving my long home on 119th Street, leaving Mom. Part of the time anyway,” Ira said aloud. Give the guy a decent interval, a chance to recover. Ira let a minute go by. The old gaffer at the other end still had a couple of orange segments left. Jumpin’ Jesus, the guy must be toothless to take so long. He probably was, masticating nose to chin. He probably had nothing else to do: orange peel in a bag, and licking the cleft between stuck, stiff fingers, while subway trains came and went, came and went, local and express: Bronx Park and Van Cortlandt, and Lenox Avenue, plunging into the tunnel at the end of the platform, an incandescent-stippled murk in which track and train disappeared at random. And the guy was young once; once the guy was young.

A pale, middle-aged man sat down, his hair the smoky hue of once-blond hair faded. And pouting with thought, he opened his newspaper: Polish. Hobo Canobo was the name the top of the paper seemed to spell out, almost like Hobo Canoe, Hoboken. But of course it wasn’t: in Cyrillic, half the time the alphabet was written backward. Polish was in Cyrillic, wasn’t it? Larry reached down, retrieved his briefcase. His full lips were scrolled in, features set into a determined equanimity.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Sure.” They stood up, paid their ritual respects at the edge of platform, leaning over to see what was coming. The guy was all right, wasn’t he? Leaning over that way? After the way he’d pointed to his heart.

“I think the next one’s mine,” said Larry.

“Oh, did I miss the local?”

“If I’m not mistaken,” Larry answered.

Suppress everything, Ira counseled himself: suppress everything. Anything you say is out of place. But Jesus, what a — academic, yeah, academic temptation to pitch it all away: destiny, destiny. Bullshit. Recover the old hobnob: come back to Aaron, Mavourneen, Mavourneen. Say to him: Listen, pal, doesn’t she give it up to anybody? Boy, that was vulgar: gutter smut. What the hell. Come back to each other the way they did after they parted with Edith at Woodstock. Not to jeopardize her job at the university. Not to be seen in the same train with a couple of freshman. Took different routes home, and skulked in the shadowy midship of the ferry boat when it grew dark. . to hide the ten-day growth of beard on their chin-chops. Was that ever hilarious: Larry rid of the strain of courting an older woman, Ira rid of the strain of good conduct, the two youths howled with mirth. Do it in reverse: your turn now. Never. Never. Never.

“That’s a Lenox Avenue train coming in.” Larry took another quick look down the track. “I must not have seen your local.”

“White and green headlight. I guess you did,” Ira confirmed. “It’s mine. I’ll see you in the alcove.” And as the train ranged into the station: “Where you going?”

“I’m going to tear over to the express side. I think I hear one. Abyssinia.”

Larry broke into a quick trot toward the downstairs exit. He was right about the train. And apparently in time. The Broadway express charged into the station a few seconds after the Harlem local had arrived, and the local kept waiting, until the magisterial express pulled out. And then the local, which Ira had boarded, left, gathered speed rapidly — and insolently overtook its ponderous rival. . sped by the last cars. . until almost abreast of the first — and there was Larry on his express, on the opposite seat of an opposite train, his eyes raised perusing subway ads, oblivious of Ira traveling parallel at the same speed. And so for a few seconds, and only a few, they traveled within view of each other, as if they were still pals, still cronies, once again.

PART TWO

I

Seemly oddly mundane, squeezed between the two narrow stylish office buildings, with ornamentation and lofty balcony and fluted column embedded in their facades — and dwarfed by their height as well — the three-story building that housed the Union Square Business School had the appearance of a chalk box — a chalk box with windows, with the wall painted blue. A flight up, Ira could see intermittent rows of typewriters in sunken typewriter tables at which girls sat, busily transcribing from steno manuals beside them. A flight above, a woman with a yellow pencil in her hair and a book in her hand walked to the window, glanced out, and moved away, her lips moving as if she were dictating to a class. Earmarks, repugnant earmarks of the business school. Ira rested his briefcase on the low stone wall surrounding Union Square Park across the street: the only thing not in view was the bookkeeping class, that damned farrago of debits and credits, and accounts receivable and payable. Hadn’t old man Sullivan back in junior high gone wild with him over his inability to determine when one debited and when one credited? Makeshift junior high school, and the blue veins crinkled on Mr. Sullivan’s temples: shtand up, shit down. She was in there somewhere. She had to be. He had such lousy luck. All that had to happen now was for Stella to skip school today. That would cap everything. Ah, no. There went the chime.

He turned his head to look up at the pyramidal belfry atop the Consolidated Edison Building off 14th Street, just as a matching chime, playing Haydn, like an echo, sounded from a similar pinnacle uptown, the Metropolitan Life Tower, or whose? Quarter past one, the ponderous iron hands read. Forty-five minutes to go. He didn’t need to have cut his ed class, but hell, he was too nervous. As it was, the damned combination lock on his locker when he went to get his coat and hat had proved refractory, always did when he became keyed up, keyed up, pun. He’d have gone wild if he had only a few minutes to spare. Better this way with lots of time to collect his wits. Such as they were, damn horse’s ass, what was he doing here? Waiting on a little tub he’d screwed and knocked up. Jesus, can you imagine that? In a frumpy, blue-balls little building across the street where the wheeled traffic and pedestrians flowed and flowed. Din, din. Honk, honk. Dong, dong, from here to the 14th Street trolleys. People and wheels. Shuffle and squeal. Glitter and gleam of windshield and hubcap. And sickly sweet blue gasoline fume, and next to him, the hot dog cart, under whose umbrella the proprietor sat reading, redolence wafted — of the kishkelikh, Mom called them. He saw himself for a moment as if formed and forged by a million, billion impacts of his surroundings. Jesus Christ, and go break the worthy eidolon of self you presented to someone who admired you, was fond of you, oh, oh, a wax face such as he had seen in a movie once, wax features that someone bashed with his fist, fractured and fell off, revealing the gruesome horror of hideous nothingness. . So, you, trailing into Edith’s apartment the little kewpie doll you pratted, the wax mask dropping off you: Edith, this is Stella. And like one who came breathless out of the sea, said Dante, you look back at the storm-tossed waves of what’s to happen. You gotta harden yourself, that’s all. God! Orestes, meet Oedipus. This is all I have to say to thee, and no word more forever. Ay, ay, Jocasta. Boy.

Turmoil, turmoil. Uptown, downtown, on the avenue, on the street, fretting, fretting, everything. . shoppers and window shoppers and vehicles, movement everywhere, to the right, to the left, in Union Square Park behind him, where voices squabbled, and he could distinctly hear words spoken in foreign accent, Russian Jewish, “de right-vingers. . Piss-voik. . Ladies gomments. . Mittings fom de union.” And now someone taunting — Ira turned to look. “Hey, Mistah Faschistah,” someone from a group seated on a bench mocked a man hurrying by. “Vere you ronning?” Unrest, Jesus. There must have been a more quiet time, once. That narrow, white building, which overlooked the business school, must have been built in a quieter time, difficult as it was to imagine, a more leisurely time that could afford dispensations like that single coy marble balcony high up on about the twelfth or fifteenth story, the arched windows, and the overhanging eaves like mortarboards with dovetails in them. A quieter time — what was it like? — and what would he have been like? He wouldn’t be waiting here to make amends, mortified at having to take the little klutz he was screwing to Edith to get him out of a scrape. The spectacle he was going to make of himself! Oh, nuts, better than having no one to take her to. He felt his restlessness within himself mount. Get moving. Goddamn it, this was the last time he’d go to Mamie’s.

Should he walk all the way around Union Square? No, no, it made him uneasy to lose sight of that damned doorway. Even though he had plenty of time — how much? — almost twenty minutes. But that was all he had to do was miss her. As far as the bandstand at the north end of the park, say hello to Mr. Abe Lincoln, honest Abe, standing under the bare trees in his crumpled bronze clothes on his pedestal, and looking downtown. A few steps more — all he would allow himself — around the corner where the cars were parked on 16th, “Socialism is inevitable” was scrawled in large letters in back of the bandstand shell at the end of the park — and somebody had crossed out “Socialism” and written “Communism” above it. Far enough; Ira turned back.

Damn. He seemed to need more air. Like those pitchers — Pennock, Sad Sam Jones — he had seen coming on the mound when he hustled soda pop in the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium. They hadn’t pitched a ball and were already short of breath. Excitement, yeah. C’mon, ye goddamn little twat. He rammed his hand in his overcoat pocket, groping for pipe, changed briefcase to his other hand and rummaged, found the briar. But he didn’t feel like smoking, just clenching the stem between his teeth was enough. Keep an eye out. Don’t forget, for Christ’s sake. He passed abreast of the school doorway, on his way downtown. Some guys would be cool about it. How many times did he have to tell himself that? What d’ye mean, cruel about it? “Oh, shit, I didn’t say cruel,” he protested aloud. Oh, nuts, calm down, ye cold-wet-under-armpits coward. Nuts to you. What comfort there was in the thought that some guys could be cool about it. Go on, act the part: be cool about it. What relief. Jesus, he’d gone over that role too, but still, what respite.

If only he were different. So he knocked her up. So what? Oh, to have the gall to say to Mamie: “Look, your daughter and I, vir hutzikh tsegekhapt, ye know?” Funny goddamn Yiddish expression: it’s natcherel. We grappled. No, not quite. Hooked into each other. That’s closer. Clasped. Got fouled in each other. You weren’t on the lookout, Mamie, you were loafing on the job, Mamie. It’s partly your fault. Heh. Heh. Joke’s on you we fouled into each other. You gotta foot the bill, Mamie. Fooled ya. Or she has a kid. Allee samee me. It’s your baby. Heh. Heh. You want me to marry her? Sure, plunk down ten G. I’ll yentz her day and night, and get a Ph.D. Pah. But just to finish the thought, what a father he’d make. What the hell would it be like to be a father? Goo-goo, ga-a-ga-a, da-da. Hail Columbia, happy land, baby shit in Pap’s hand — Hey, what time was it? Ten minutes to three.

He had reached George Washington in bronze at the other end of the square — and facing south too, dauntlessly fronting the clangor of 14th Street. Why did both presidents face south? Ira prompted himself to worry, worry rather than wonder. Why south, and not each other? Because Washington, D.C., lay in that direction? Was that the reason? Like Moslems facing Mecca? No, that couldn’t be it. At Washington Square, the marble statues of Washington looked north. Oh, balls. When the hell would they start coming out of that school? LINDY WINS MEDAL, one of the headlines on the corner newsstand read. All engrossed with himself, Ira drew closer: AL SMITH FOR CHANGE IN VOLSTEAD. . NO. AGAIN NO SAYS COOLIDGE.

“Paper, Mister?” the wind-blown, blocky newsstand owner suggested pointedly. “Woddaya read?”

But stung, Ira blurted out an offended “No!”

“A’right.”

There was no mistaking the meaning of the way he jingled the coins in the little apron around the blue pea jacket in which he was stuffed. Nor the jerk of his stubbly jowls. The man did not tolerate loiterers.

Bastard. Ira backed away. Giving him the bum’s rush. Fuck you, he wanted to say: fuck you and your papers. God, everything got under his nerves; anything could throw him into a fury. Jesus, that was all he had to do: get into a battle with a barrel for ears. Hell. He looked anxiously at the business-school door. Empty. Damn. Christ. When?

“Atta boy, Garrity, lessee ye nail him dis time.” The newsstand owner might have been talking to himself, so barely tinged was his gruff voice with sour approval. He couched wrist in weathered hand expectantly.

Across busy 14th Street, on the thronged, bustling sidewalk on the other side, a black street vendor, with display case closed and light folding stand clutched, was running pursued by a cop, was at the curb when Ira looked, and only out of reach of the young, speedy bluecoat because of intervening pedestrians, who delayed him a split second, while the other, lithe and nimble — and reckless — sped into the street, dodged among cars, and, dropping trinkets from his display case, distanced himself. For a moment, the cop aimed his club to throw, thought better of it, and instead shook his head with a loser’s good grace, flushed, watching his quarry escape.

“He’ll git him,” said the newstand owner with hoarse confidence. “Black bastard, he’s been comin’ down here peddlin’ dat shit every day.”

“Yeah?” At least amity was restored.

“Look at it. Dere’s a car goin’ over it. See? Fuckin’ brass lockets, an’ phony lavalieres wit’ glass in em.”

“Yeah?” LINDY WINS MEDAL. AL SMITH FOR CHANGE IN VOLSTEAD. NO. AGAIN NO. COOLIDGE. “De bastard’s got more noive den brains. He ain’ de on’y one. Ye see more ‘n’ more o’ dem boogies on Fawteent Street every day.”

“No!”

“Betcher ass ye do!”

“Oh, Jesus!” Ira exclaimed, turned to look at the business-school door. Students were coming out. “Oh, hell.” He broke into a run.

II

He could have batted her with his briefcase, he was so furious with her dawdling down the steps, seemingly the last one out of the school. And he had been almost on the point of running up into the accounting classroom, Mr. McLaughlin’s class, where the first students out said she was. Goddamn her, he raged when she recognized him — with her simpering, sappy surprise at the top of the stair. Jesus, somewhere else, he’d have let loose all the obscenities he knew, as she descended the wide steps, fat knock knees in fawny silk stockings under spongy green coat, chewing gum, her pleased and complacent shallow blue eyes shining behind silver-framed eyeglasses on pork nose, her gold curly hair compressed by black cloche. Book in hand, banister in hand. God, the temptation to upbraid her, insult her — if possible! Could she be insulted, the dumb bunny?

“What’re you doin’ up there, layin’ for the guy?” Ira could barely contain the nervous impatience of his tone, just short of savage. “For Christ’s sake, ye know I called Hannah. I couldn’t get you.” Still inside the building, he brought his voice within testy limits.

“I was with my accounting teacher, Mr. McLaughlin, going over the test I flunked.”

“Yeah. All right. But I’m waiting. I hinted—” Ira jerked his arm emphatically.

“So what’s the hurry?” Insipidly nonchalant, she was actually cheerful.

“What’s the hurry?” He glared at her. “What’s the hurry! I come all the way downtown. I wait.” Again, he fought himself to lower his voice. Irate, watched her plant her foot on the ground floor. “Don’t you know we’re supposed to go to a doctor? I’m gonna take you to that — that lady I told you about.”

“With the castor oil?”

“No, for Christ’s sake!” He snapped. He gripped her arm. Dawdling little bitch, was she ever going to move? He led her through the building door and into the street. “I don’t— That’s the reason we’re going. Let’s get a move on. We don’t know. We gotta find out.”

“I know.”

“All right, then let’s get going.” Ira all but tugged the green-cloth-covered arm toward 14th Street. “I’ll get a cab.”

“But I told you I know.”

“Waddaye mean, you know?” He felt absolutely vicious. Lucky they were in a crowd.

“I don’t need it.”

“What de ye mean, you don’t need it? Don’t need what?” Other pedestrians alongside, no matter: he was shouting.

“I don’t need a doctor.”

“Why? Don’t tell me you’re not going to go?”

“I don’t have to go.”

A tiny inkling was beginning to make headway. “You don’t have to go?” His voice that began as bluster subsided ludicrously: dopy Doppler effect. “What d’ye mean?”

“I told you, you worry too much, Ira.”

“All right.” He frowned warily. “So I worry too much. Who do you think I worry for?”

“For yourself. If I was somebody you didn’t know, if I was pregnant, you wouldn’t worry.” Her voice held an uncommon note of firmness. “I worried about you, and you weren’t pregnant.”

“What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean, ‘if I was pregnant’? What am I here for?”

“What I said: because you only worry about yourself.”

“Wait a minute. Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right.”

“You had your period?” He arrested both their progress, an abrupt embolus in the flow of the throng; a woman’s face turned in passing, her rouged cupid-bow lips affixing a fiery stigma on air. “You did? You’re not kidding? You did?” He drew her after himself out of the current of passersby against the plate-glass embankment of a store window. “I wanna know. Tell me.”

“Tell you? I told you. You think so much about yourself you don’t even hear.”

“Never mind that. Tell me!”

“I did.”

“You’re not pregnant?”

“You want me to be?”

“O-oh! O-oh! O-oh!” He could have whooped, he could have capered for joy, cubits high. Fourteenth Street ahead, gray mass of building, slash of blue sky, solid street and park trees and highway, and everything in it became supple as a tapestry, undulated. “Oh, that’s wonderful! You’re really not?”

She simpered, again her old self, compliant, eager to please. “All right, enjoy yourself.”

“Am I? This is like a dream. A-ah! You’re wonderful.” His hand on her arm checked her from moving away. “Look inside the window a minute.”

“It’s Barron’s.” She peered through the glass. “I told Minnie about it Friday. They’re having a sale of fall dresses. She wants me to come with her tomorrow, Thanksgiving. They’re giving twenty percent off. You know, Ira, your sister is small around the bust? She’s nearly like me.”

“Yeah?” Beatitude of reprieve was what he felt, so exultant, ferocious in its exultance — how could the plate glass in which he saw himself reflected show only a stupid smirk on a face wearing round shell-framed eyeglasses under a gray felt hat? Jesus Christ, Jesus H. Christ, his visage should be transfigured, radiant. Just a dumb dope listening to a kid cousin blabbling. Jesus, he ought to sprout wings with joy. Instead he was already looking sideways down at the short round figure in green beside him: little pork-nose Stella in a black cloche. He had never been out in public with her before. Why the hell didn’t he meet her all the time in front of her school — or whenever he had a chance? Yeah? Where would they go? Smooth, juvenile, fair face, vapid, blond. Ever ready, like a flashlight, but where would they go? Jesus, wasn’t he a goddamn goat? A minute ago, damn near shitting in his pants with dread, now ready to go. And here they were. Alone, alone in a mob.

“What d’ye see?” he asked.

“That navy dress there with the tassels, that would be just right for Minnie — I mean the color. Be just right for winter in the office. And like Mama would say, it’s a gurnisht money: eighteen dollars.”

“Yeah? I don’t know anything about ladies’ clothes. I don’t even look— Boy, do I feel good. Ah-h.” His bespectacled open-mouthed face in the plate glass looked moronic. “Fur-trimmed coats for thirty-nine fifty,” he read the price tag on the mannikin.

“That’s what I mean. You know how much Saks Fifth Avenue gets for them? Twice as much.”

“Really?” He nudged her into the stream of pedestrians. “Boy, I could give you a big fat feel I’m so happy.” He patted the waist of her green coat. “Don’t you feel wonderful too?”

“Not why you feel wonderful. I got a collegiate boyfriend. Somebody in my class should see me. Wouldn’t they look. But they left already. Mr. McLaughlin should see I had a date.” She glanced over her shoulder.

“Mr. McLaughlin wouldn’t bother me,” Ira bantered. “Max, Moe, Harry. Or somebody like that; one of our uncles. What they’d think.”

“You’re like Zaida when he lived with us: worry, worry, worry. Now I know where you get it from.”

“I’m not worrying now.” Ira caressed the green coat sleeve.

“Hey, that’s nice,” she tittered. He kneed her thigh in stride. “Oh, boy.”

At the corner of 14th the two stopped, close to the curb, but to one side of the crossing; the young, placid face beside him — protoplasm came in all shapes and sizes, but none better than the little piece beside him — for what he wanted — as if he mirrored within the distorted, sordid mirror of himself the turmoil all about him, the noise, the traffic become predatory, the crouching storefronts. He was ravening again — like a guy who quit a habit and then caved in, became twice as addicted. He had to fuck her. Where? Jesus, the nuttiest goddamn notions: Ask Edith; she was broad-minded; he was broad-minded — could he have her apartment. Everything had turned out all right: Please: five minutes, he who a half hour ago was ready to crawl with mortification. Oh, God—

“You going to see that professor-lady?” Stella asked.

“Yeah. But I was thinking. Wait a minute. Give me a minute.”

Stella surmised his drift of motive. “I can’t go anyplace, Ira. I have to be home. You know Mama. Ten minutes late, and there’s a big geshrei.”

“We don’t need a half hour.”

“Where? I can’t.”

“I’m trying to think. Someplace. Damn!” An interval passed, desperate interval, while he wracked his brains, while crowds passed, wheels turned and a million million things changed position, and the clock on the Edison tower struck the quarter hour. “What time you supposed to be home?”

“You know. About four o’clock. Same time as Hannah comes home from Julia Richmond.”

“Oh, Jesus!” Ira stared about — at illimitable motion and commotion — and then at the placid pleading, appealing, girlish smiling a trace, blue-eyed, fair countenance — himself and that rusty pederast, but different. “What a goddamn world!”

“We could go into a telephone booth,” Stella ventured.

“A what?” Ira was startled.

“Down in the subway.”

“And then what?”

“Hold a newspaper in front of the glass like.”

“Hold a newspaper?”

“I could go around the world. Underneath.”

“Christ’s sake, when’d you learn that?” She reddened, but kept mum. “I just got an idea. C’mon!”

“Where? Where, I said?”

“No, I’ve got a better idea. Let’s go.” And when she balked, his voice sharpened. “I said, let’s go.”

“But I can’t. I gotta be home. I told you.”

“Tell Mamie it’s a goddman Thanksgiving party. A party, a little party after school everybody stayed for. Why not?”

Overborne, she was fearful, whined, yet submitted to his lead. “Where you gonna take me?”

“You’ll be a few minutes late, that’s all. We can be real quick. I’m not going to take you a mile away. I know you have to be home.”

They stopped only briefly at the impacted, milling intersection of 14th and Broadway. The same young cop Ira had seen before now stood in midstreet, unkinking anarchy with beckoning hand and whistle. He pointed to his feet in strict signal to the left-turn driver. “Ira, where are you going?” Stella pleaded. “Oh, will I get it from Mama.”

“No. It’s right here.”

“Where?”

“The same street. The other side.” Her gaze ranged along the low drab row of buildings. “Read the name,” Ira encouraged.

“You mean that theater?”

“Fox’s. Right.”

“So what d’you wanna go in there for?”

“I worked there.”

“Yeah, but you gotta pay to get in now, don’t you?”

“Damn sight better than a telephone booth. C’mon, you’ll see,” he encouraged. “It’ll be in and out, in and out. Maybe you won’t even be ten minutes late.”

She let the elbow he was holding relax permissively. “Oh, in there?”

“Smart, huh? Let’s cross here.”

“I never was in Fox’s.”

“It’s a good place. Used to be. It’s got a great balcony.”

“Oh.”

“All right? Boy, am I dying. Hey, maybe I’ll let you. I never tried it. You still got your period?” He squeezed her arm, masterfully amorous, steering her toward the run-down theater marquee. “A-ah. You still—?”

“What?”

“Got your period?”

“No. I finished.”

“What?!”

“I finished this morning already.”

“You did!” He all but came to a halt. “How could you?”

“I began Sunday, that’s why, right after you called. Isn’t that funny? Nearly right after I just hung up.”

“Holy crow! I suffered all those days, thinking you— And I made arrangements. Jesus, I haven’t even told her. And boy.” He screwed up his face, clawed at his brow. “I spilled the beans. All about — me. Jesus, I didn’t have to. If I’d only known— Why couldn’t you have stayed home that goddamn afternoon? Roxy, shmoxy.” The words poured out of him rife with contempt.

“You’re not the only one.” She turned on him resentfully. “It’s what I keep telling you, Ira. Only you count. Just like Zaida.”

“Just like — now, listen—” He nipped off his truculence. Jesus Christ, he’d lose her if he didn’t. “All right,” he appeased. “All I’m saying is you could have given me a break. You could have let me know. Somehow. Oof, Jesus. Have I got luck.”

“What d’you think I did? I tried to tell you.” Stella lifted her face in bland challenge.

“What d’you mean? What did you do?”

“And I got myself in trouble, too.”

“When?”

“You know how much I love your neighborhood, with all the Irish and the Italians. They’re worse than the Portorickies. Even your hallway. That long, dark — o-o-h. Don’t tell me I wasn’t afraid.”

“Is that what you mean? What were you doing in my neighborhood? My house? You mean 108 East 119th Street?”

“Yes, I mean 108 East 119th,” she repeated. “Your house. Where else?” And she suddenly added: “Let’s go back.”

“Oh, no, no!” Ira truckled. “There’s the theater. Where was I? Me?”

“You weren’t home.”

“I wasn’t?”

“No.”

“I wasn’t!”

“You talk about me? Why shouldn’t I go to the Roxy afterward? I’m gonna wait? You’ll find out later.”

“Oh, that was Sunday morning! Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty! I would go get advice I didn’t need. Oh, Jesus!” he wailed. “Talk about Romeo and Juliet.”

“Who?”

“Oh, you know, Romeo and Juliet. Christ.” His voice slowed under freight of utter disgust. “Oh—” And then suddenly spurred on: “So how’d you get in trouble? Some mick follow you in the hall, or what?”

“No. And don’t think there wasn’t somebody on the stoop.”

“Then what? So what happened?” Again, her mum, obdurate mien met his question. How could she be so blue-eyed, blank, and recalcitrant: sappy enigmatic. “Okay. Forget it, none of my business,” he slurred. “Let’s go.”

“But not to watch anything? No flick?”

“No, no. I told you. Listen, the subway gets jammed.” He gesticulated. “It’s a holiday tomorrow. Things like that can happen.”

“So you tell Mama.” There was a new note of defiance in her tone.

“C’mon, kid, you forgot something in school.” He patted her butt. “Hey, Mr. McLaughlin — he wanted to show you something,” Ira teased provocatively. “Is he good-looking? Married? I bet you’re teacher’s pet.” She refused the lure.

“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.”

“Right. Lucky guy. Okay. Here we go. In another ten minutes we’ll be walkin’ the other way.”

“You make me feel I’m doing you a favor, Ira, because I worried you so much.”

“Oh, no,” he patronized. “It’s Thanxy, it’s Thanxy. Let’s celebrate. Turkey-lurkey. Goosey-loosey.” He winked. “And here’s Foxy-loxy. Foxy-loxy with cream cheese on a bagel.”

Rewarded with a token simper, he got out his wallet, approached the ticket booth. There. He had gotten around her again. But she baffled him just the same, baffled him, once she made up her mind she wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t let on; fooled him because so unexpected: suddenly her flaccid mask became impenetrable. What kind of trouble did she mean? Well, just as he had his tricks of artful dodging, she had too: like that round-the-world stuff. What d’you know about that? Mr. McLaughlin’s big mick uncircumcised cock with her heavily rouged lips around it. She was getting way ahead of him, the little cunt. A head was right. Jesus, the way street words had ruined him. What if she takes it into her head to make money, now? Lucky she had no inkling of what he could do in Fox’s, no, what he could think of doing in Fox’s. Boy, wild — He laid a dollar in front of the half-moon opening at the bottom of the glass cage shielding the woman cashier: “Two in the mezzanine.”

“Admission’s the same as the orchestra till six o’clock.” Spoken crisply from behind the glass cubicle. Glimpse of regular, chiseled features no longer young, heavily made up, in eyeglasses, too.

“Oh, I didn’t notice. Okay. Two.” Flat brass mechanism crackled under the woman’s fingers. The tickets sprouted magically from the metal, were tendered through the opening, along with the change. His briefcase under the crook of his arm, Ira scooped up tickets and coins. He still had comfortable surplus from Edith’s fiver. Could anything plait together the mat of irony that got him here because of Mamie’s dollar that he was going to replicate with a Trojan bought out of Edith’s fiver: out of Mamie’s kitchen to Fox’s smoking balcony. He had an odd image of primitive, of African statuary — the plum-and-striped-uniformed swarthy ticket taker returned the stubs — the grotesque faces they maybe thought were beautiful. Try to map, to match, the different cultures, Edith called them, and smart-ass Marcia — with Stella hesitantly in his lee, Ira made for the balcony. Their thoughts must have converged within the dingy plaster of the spiral walled staircase.

“Isn’t she waiting for you, Ira, that lady we were going to?”

“Yeah. I shoulda called her. She made an appointment — for you.”

“So?”

Ira climbed a couple of steps, turned. “She’ll know.” Stella’s shallow blue eyes glistened up at him. These females really had their own rivalries. Or whatever you call it: their own fortes, circean premiums, something like that, niches for bitches — Jesus, the dirty valences of terms.

“What do you get out of all of this?” he asked, two steps before the balcony top.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Yeah.”

“You’d be surprised.” In the last dull streetlight of the small window of the staircase, her lips barely swelled out, her short throat barely inflated. Boy, that was a new one, all right. From the gray light of the staircase they stepped into the stale perfume of piano musical gloom of the first balcony. Disoriented a few seconds, they groped through tenebrae, through movie-house night pegged to the red exit lights, under the cigarette smoke meandering in the beam high above them that fell on the screen. The usher’s flashlight moved toward them.

“Right here, Stella.” Ira anticipated the usher’s approach, led her to the very last row, behind barrier and curtain, at the top of the balcony.

“Here?”

“Yeah. Last row.” She understood: he meant the first two seats on the aisle — the last aisle, with the heavy protective curtain behind them. Just in front of the curtain, she stood poised a moment uncertainly. And Ira after her: “You want help with your coat?”

“No. Should I take it off?”

“A minute. It’d be easier.” Ira set down his briefcase, doffed his Chesterfield. They both sat down, coats over their knees. Her pudgy face emerging out of the beam-lightened gloom looked contented, reassured, spreading her short legs to invite the course of his ardor. With his hand on her thigh, working up, they watched the screen: a few minutes of hot petting, fingering her parted muff under her green coat, till her legs stretched rigid. With graven, expectant face, her eyes followed the hand he guided to the hard-on sprung like a pale spar from his open fly. President Coolidge — grave-faced, austere countenance, the embodiment of Puritan rectitude — shook hands with Gene Tunney on the newsreel. Below the scanty audience, men scattered here and there on the balcony, here and there puffing on a cigar or cigarette.

“You want me to?”

“Go ahead.” He spoke before he even looked, and only when she lowered her curved blond lock under cloche-covered head did he turn his head away from the screen to peer athwart. Was everything all right? She was just bending down under cover of his coat. Oh, was that it? That was what it was like? She pressed hard against the hand on her pussy. That was his part, to cooperate, as she bent almost double, latent, unguessed, limber little fatso.

“Oh,” he breathed silently — could see her eyes were closed tightly shut, always open unseeing when she straddled him before, but shut now: swoggled, the word arose spontaneously—“O-o-h,” his turn this time: “O-o-h, Stella.” Hornswoggled — inner ecstacy hers, hermetic, supreme, too deep for utterance—

Light from the opened balcony door darted into the gloom of the balcony. She neither saw it nor heard the quiet sound of hinge. Her eyes popped open as he lifted her face away, covered receding stalk under coat — but before? Or not before? The three spindly, springy black youths reached the top of the balcony stairs. Oh, Jesus, they were inspecting Ira and Stella with glistening white eyeballs. And then furtively, knowingly, one another. Oh, God. Ira sat upright.

Stella too now realized what had happened. She recovered resignation first: “Should we go?”

Between fear and fury, Ira sat immobilized. “Sonofabitch luck.” Yeah. They had bounced down to the lowest tier of seats, just before the brass railing, and the tallest looked up. Then dark faces leaned together. They talked as Ira squirmed about. Where the hell was that usher? If he could hear them jabber, everybody else could. He heard a soft tread behind him, saw a flashlight beam on and off. About time.

“Get your coat. Wait a minute, my briefcase.” He saw Stella get ready, just as the uniformed usher, flashlight like a baton, began descending the aisle.

“Listen,” Ira whispered, “do what I say.”

“What? What’re you gonna do?”

“Never mind. You ready? When I tell you, follow me.” Ira could see she was dismayed. He shook his hands at her more in menace than reassurance. Fuck her. Fuck them. “Get ready to get up.” His mind seemed in uproar. He didn’t give a damn. Guardedly, he turned his head to peer over his shoulder: was everything still the same? The white, rubber-covered chain still stretched across the steps to the second balcony? Jesus, it was. And so was the white NO ENTRANCE sign still hanging from the chain — he had ducked under it a hundred times on his way to and from the projectionist’s booth on top of the stark third balcony, where the chairs had no cushions. Jesus, everything looked the same. But it would take nerve, boy, it. . would. . take. . nerve. But he wasn’t going to lose it — goddamn her, them. Red Grange carried the ball, shaking tacklers, running like a phantom through the broken field. Maybe give it up. Open his fly again, hold her twat, and jack off — and go. Play it safe. Mamie was waiting. He was about to reopen the top button of his fly. Nah. Jimmy Walker was doing the honor with visiting dignitary; not Mussolini, was it?

Unaware of the usher’s flashlight descending, the three black youths below seemed to have shaken off theater protocol, buoyant in their mirth, unfazed by fellow patrons — and again they looked up, but this time saw the beam approaching. “It’s nearly now,” Ira warned.

“Where do you wanna go?” She turned plaintive, puerile face.

“Follow me. Another sec.”

“What?”

“Shut up.” Between this and his next word, he caught a flash of rosy Irish face, so reminiscent of that Irish serving girl who with her husky amorous escort descending the sloping path through woods had saved him from his rusty predator long ago. They had saved him, saved him in Fort Tryon Park. Jesus, he spurned the prompting. Save her? Little cocksucker. What the hell, did she think he wasn’t going to get his piece of ass?

“Now! C’mon, c’mon!” And even as he had once docilely complied, she did too, in his power: out into the aisle, and then quickly, while he lifted the heavy muffled links of chain, she ducked, to be prodded under, faltering or not, and up the first dusty carpeted steps. Crouching, he followed.

As down below, the usher’s subdued and subduing voice rose after them: “Hey, you, where d’yuh think you are?”

“Yeah, man,” was uttered with risible abandon. “We just come in, yeah. Sittin’ down.”

“Well, take it easy. There’s others in here. .” But he got away from them that time. Just beat the gleam of the eyeball?

“Go ahead.” He shepherded her up the dust-laden carpeted stairs. And climbed quickly after her — to his backward glance, the movie on the screen of the first balcony disappearing below the tallest black youth, before the second balcony hove into view, utterly deserted, dark and private. They had made it. He pressed her plump, round rump under palm exultantly. “Oh, boy!”

“Ira, here?”

“No, wait a minute.” First harbingers of rekindled furor fired every sense, every second, transformed into accessories rank on rank of dim, empty, raised seats sloping to the antic screen below where spare, sparsely smiling Lindbergh received a medal to silent applause, translated into increased volume of piano accompaniment — private roost above the world, cozy terrain of gloom under shaft of projected cinema, staked out by a couple of red exit lights. Just one little step more, and it couldn’t be beat for utterly seamless, pulsating solitude — almost like the kitchen green walls—

“In here.” He opened the door to the merest glimmer of a flush toilet stool.

“O-oh, it’s so dark, Ira.”

“Waddaye want? Light? Git in.” He shut the door after her. Tomb darkness encased them: mummy-yummies. He felt for the light switch. “Okay, honey bun.” Through dusty bulb, the snapped-on weak, spongy light bound them together in exquisite depravity. “Boy, everything!”

“It’s for ladies.” Her chalky blue eyes behind eyeglasses, so tractable, regarded self in the smudged square mirror above the lavatory, and him beside her, she regarded him. Her amorphous, juvenile countenance below his stubble-shadowed features met his relentless brown eyes behind glasses, she timidly basking in his leer. She didn’t need to be told; she responded to the mere movement of his head, as if his ferocity, compressed by close quarters, was permeating her with his desire, his will, chalky-eyed. And as her bosom began to heave, she set down her Elements of Bookkeeping in the dusty enamel bowl, her green coat over it, and bowed, tugging up skirt, down panties—

“Ah — h!” Maniac bliss at the sight, dropped briefcase on covered toilet bowl, coat in rumpled heap on top. And oh, boy, what bulbs of ass. He unbuttoned fly, “Oh, boy, this is better. Way better.” Sight of her fed the greed of eyes, sight of her whetted, as did feel of her, the greed of hands insatiable of contour. And oh, boy, that face of his, though bespectacled silly, transcendentally gloated in the dusty mirror: carnal guerdon, wow. Little pig, little sow, let me in. The dumb little punk in pleated blue up, dappled ass-rise above cloud of lacy drawers, as she clutched the caked lavatory rim with pudgy hands, thrall to abuse, ecstatic for defilement, obeisant before ravaging, his chattel, chattel to destroy. No wonder guys beat up on ’em, gave ’em the works, left ’em for dead — Jesus, the terrible ultimate mutilate spawned by a whole week’s fear and humiliation bloating consummation, damn her, oh, to plug and throttle in blot of bestial woe-betide — boy, it was a shame to ram it into her, and get it over in a few seconds— And then was heard. . what the hell? — footsteps in no uncertain sound and number. And oh, Jesus, a scared and shrinking pause, two faces staring open-mouthed with alarm at a cobweb trapdoor, while automatic nerveless hands restored garments, picked up briefcase, bookkeeping manual.

“Sh-h!” But his panicky warning failed to avert the footsteps: too late to turn the light off, door-crack light, boxed into light, immovable as a picture in a frame, gripped in concrete, yet breathing — oh, Jesus Christ, the usher! No, the tread was multiple: usher and manager. Bluff it out, plead it out, whine it out. Already on his trembling lips abject imploring, Please, mister, please. Extenuate. He had worked here was why. Never again — grovel, as he did in Stuyvesant. Maybe the guy would be Jewish.

The door opened — to Stella’s short startled “O-o-h!” The three young Negroes seemed to pull the light toward them as they swung the door wide open. Like a net, like a seine, they pulled the light toward them. And happy with their catch, pale eyeballs, polished brown skin, grew lustrous with pleasure. They seemed quite young. And even spindlier in the light, like reeds, but already at least Ira’s height, or taller. Elastic, brown striplings, fourteen years old, fifteen, who knew? None had a coat, but under an array of motley, raveled sweaters wore sweatshirts, gaudy summer sport shirts. One sported a striped knit cap, a second something resembling a beret, the third a sawtooth-brimmed and incised-diamond-crowned gray felt.

“Hey, man,” the tallest greeted with flip of wrist and lilt of shoulder, his voice just above a whisper. “We come up t’see how you doin’.”

“You doin’ all right.” The shortest might be the oldest. He had a small scar across his upper lip. His brown face gleamed amiably; his white-nailed hand lingered on his crotch. “We see you an’ her duck the man. We knew y’all gonna finish it.”

“Ri-ight,” commended the third, his gaze lingering appreciatively on Stella. “How ’bout dat? She friend o’ yo?”

Were they serious? Was he in danger? What course to follow? Demeanor what? Tough-bluff. Sheepish, sharing-prank. Options ripped through the mind; his eyes riveted on three brown, flippant faces; he strove to plumb intentions, adjust actions — all in gnarled seconds. Mostly, it was their conspiratorial, their knowing leering he feared, their feral implications that bound together. Penned in here, cornered, he could let out a yell, an outcry: Stella would follow suit. Then what?

He let instinct take control. “All right, fellers.” He moderated a resolute front with concession of foible. “We just tried to duck away — you’re right.” He tried not to move precipitously toward termination. “You know how it is.” He made to edge Stella toward the open door. “Let’s go, Stella.”

But none of the youth showed the least sign of accommodation, no one made room for him. “You ain’t gone break up de party like dat, man?” the tallest objected. “What about us?”

Time to fence — for all he was worth: “You already have.”

“Aw, no, man, we jes’ join it.”

“You just spoiled it.” His chuckle was staple, nonrecriminatory. “Let’s quit kiddin’, fellers.” He appealed to reason. “Waddaye say?” He again leaned in the direction of passage, which they again blocked.

“Say? Nothin’ t’say, man,” the short youth said. “She blow you, she blow us.”

“You get outta the way.” A frightened Stella pushed at Ira’s shoulder, her voice rising. “Get outta the way. We wanna go.”

“Better get outta the way before the usher hears you,” Ira advised.

“We don’ want no trouble, Stella. Dat yo name?” The third youth — nearest the door — pulled it to behind him. All five locked in: ladies’ slate-partitioned toilet, dusty lavatory with rust ring.

“What’re you lockin’ us up for?” Stella’s voice rose in panic. “Open that door!”

“We jes’ want some fun, Stelly.”

“Right. Jes’ a little fun,” two voices blended. “Ev’body like a little fun. Don’t you like a little fun, Stella. A little fun neveh hurt nobody.”

“Sho thing, Stella, bebeh. You do us like yo do him.”

“C’mon, fellers,” Ira pleaded, his ineffectiveness a lead weight within him. “I tell you, you’re gonna get in trouble.”

“I’ll scream.” Stella drove to the fore of opposition. “You let us go!”

“Aw, Stella, bebeh, don’ go gittin’ yose’f all excited.” The tallest youth’s brown finger was curved around its own pale inner pad, hooked like a setting about something metallic, a Gem safety razor blade. “You tell her, man, we ain’ gone hurt her.” Stella shrank back. “Look, man, we don’ like messin’ aroun’.” A bright blade appeared, clicked open out of the pearl-handled knife, pale in the brown hand of the shorter youth.

Ira contracted to nothingness. “Waddaye want? I got three bucks.”

“We don’ wantcher money, man. We wan’ a little fun.”

“Nobody lookin’ t’cutcha up. We all have a little fun.”

“We all stay here, an’ everyone gone take a turn in de ladies’ booth.”

“Yah.” So apropos, persuasive, the shortest youth.

All three brown faces beamed. “Rotten niggers!” Stella screamed — and threw herself forward with flailing fist and manual. “Help! Lemme go!”

“Help!” Ira shouted, surged in tandem. “Goddamn you bastards! Git away from us!”

They gave ground. The door cracked open, flew around, and out they burst into gloom.

“Poleese!” Stella screamed, fleeing toward the stairs. “Help! Poleese!”

“Here! No! This way! Stella!” Ira plunged through the obscurity of the balcony, the movie foaming on the screen below. He hurled himself at the brass bar of the fire-escape door under the red exit light. He flung it open on daylight, with Stella behind him. Were they following? They were — and they weren’t. They lagged. Bluff hadn’t worked, or something like that. Past the edge of daylight, with Stella pressing bodily beside him, out on the fire escape the two charged. Ira led the way down: iron steps under skipping feet, and Stella keeping pace with hand sliding along black iron guardrail, as though gripping a pike, and bookkeeping manual raised like a shield, rushing frantically down by his side. As he ran free, he was surprised at her speed, the reckless patter of her feet in women’s shoes flickering from step to step to the first-balcony level.

“It’s closed. It’s locked. The doors.”

She stopped, perceived the dead end of fire escape, was about to hammer on the metal door.

“Ira, where you going?” she screamed after him.

“Don’t be afraid. Watch.” He felt — what? — a stirring of respect, camaraderie, never felt before. “I’ll show you.” He took hold of her arm, pressed it in encouragement. “Come on. Just walk out after me.” He led the way forward to the end of the cantilever staircase that jutted like a peninsula into empty space over the street, a gangway to nowhere—

“It’s moving!”

“I know. I did this already.” He felt solicitous: libido metamorphosed by stress: poor kid.

“Oh, it goes right to the sidewalk.”

“That’s the whole idea. We’ll be down in a second.” Across the street, windows in the warehouse wall rose above them as they descended — descended in the open air to the level of wooden packing crates beside doorways gathering afternoon shadow. Hardly anyone below paid any attention to them; the few pedestrians on 13th Street had their backs to them. Only the driver of a sedan spared a hasty stare, and was gone. Doors creaked open above them as he steadied her the last few feet of the sinking trammel. The blue-uniformed fireman about to enter the squat brick firehouse a few buildings east regarded them askance, as if tricksters inciting his reproach.

“Just easy. That’s it. Walk off.” Ira tightened his grip of her arm. “Now!” And they stepped onto the sidewalk.

A quick glance upward in the direction of the freed cantilever floating up again: “Hey, fellers. Downstairs, fellers. You ain’t suppose to be up there. That’s against the law.” The usher in plum uniform hanging partway out of the fire-exit door, with neck twisted and face skyward calling to three black visages above like a cluster of coconuts suddenly cracking open from grave witness, while higher still on the third balcony the projectionist in undershirt gaped down, at a loss. “Hey, what’re you doin’, wise guys?” he directed censure downward. “Yous can get locked up fer dat.”

The avenue, the avenue at last, the higher airs — he helped her with her coat, as she juggled her purse, plunged arms into his, as he juggled his briefcase, while all the time the two hurried toward the thronged avenue at the corner that meant safety, meant deliverance. Once there, they lost themselves among window shoppers and strollers and the hurrying, dodging ambitious individuals, holiday-homeward-bound, weaving with purpose. In seconds he and Stella were anonymous, in seconds blending with the crowd, liberated, noncommittal among the crowd walking briskly toward 14th Street.

Ira puffed with relief. “Wow!” She was breathless too, giggled, busy trying to rub grime from her hand — and still constrained to whisper. “Mama’s right, ye know, Ira. It’s just like what she keeps saying. That’s all the shvartze and the Portorickies think about. But I’ve never had a razor and a knife at me before. Was I scared.”

“Same here.”

“All I could think of was if Mama knew where I was — o-oh, what could have happened.”

“I know. And I took you up there.” He tried to make amends. “How the hell was I going to know one of those sonsofbitches saw me?”

“So where was the usher?”

“Yeah, where? Maybe they didged up the way we did. I don’t know.”

“A babbeh waked up for us, like Mama says in Jewish.”

“Yeah. That scream you let out helped too.”

“Was I scared. You think they all had a razor blade, a knife?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if they really meant it. When you called ’em niggers, I thought, oh, we’re lost.”

“I just couldn’t help it. And you know what, Ira? Now I wanna cry.”

“I don’t blame you. Go ahead. Want my handkerchief? You got one?”

“In my coat pocket.” She sniffled, plied the handkerchief while she leaned against him, walking. “First I laugh and then I cry.”

“It’s okay, Stella, it’s okay. We’re outta the woods.” He stroked her back soothingly.

“I told you,” she said without rancor, “let’s go into a telephone booth.” She suddenly laughed, wiped tears from her cheeks.

“I should have listened. I’ll never try that again.” What kind of new tenderness seemed to flow from the cloth of her coat, from the soft girlish shoulders beneath the coat through his hand, to his arm, his mind. Jesus, he had felt that only once before about her: when he had come so prodigiously the night he humped her, with Mamie snoring spasmodically nearby. He had kissed her that time — tenderly. No wonder the kid wanted to cry, after what he had put her through just now. No wonder. “You all right now?”

“Yeah. I’m all right.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’ll be over soon. It’s even over now.” Her bland cheeks wreathed, though she blinked, and her voice was still wrung. “It’s over now. How fast everything becomes then. When I look at Mama, or Tanta Leah, your mother, or the other tantas, I keep thinking they must have all grown up just waiting for a khusin, you know what I mean? Even Hannah. Is Minnie like that, too?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re her brother.”

“Yeah, but you know how it is. She has her secrets.”

“Like I have mine. Do I look all right?” She tilted her face. “Tell me honest. It was so dirty, everything up there. I can use where I cried in my handkerchief to wipe my face.” She was amused.

“No, no, you look fine. Say, you look all right,” he complimented. “You look all right.” She was really rather pretty, with her blond hair peeping out of the black cloche, short throat, fresh, fair skin of round cheeks heightened in color now, blue eyes, shallow, yes, behind glasses, and short girlish lips parted, plump, no, “adolescent” was the right word, adolescent phase, and kind of cute. He had never thought of her that way — just something to bend to his will, really bend, simpering pudding-compliant, implicitly at his disposal — his tubby, juvenile Trilby — and why? He surmised why: a collegian he, and schoolgirl she: not mettlesome like Hannah, but ungifted, held in low esteem at home, a cinch, a drippy cinch for the picking — or the pricking. Cynical? Sure.

He had previously honed his perfidy on Minnie. Consider the mitigating circumstance: he tolerated Stella’s drivel — long enough to achieve his ends. But never had he been tender, except for that momentary impulse — and maybe even then he was bestowing a token remuneration for supreme consummation. Till now. And now? So that’s what he wanted — his mouth watered at the new perception of himself, the perverse evolution of desire. Skew of screw — that’s what tenderness meant to him before something impressionable, half-formed, pathetic, susceptible, ductile, fawning: extension of the evening they sat opposite each other on the love seat at the bris in Flushing, extension of the initiation, when he first stuck his tongue into her mouth, seduced her, reduced her to trail him in a trance down the steps of the glary cellar.

Now Edith knew all about him too. Christ, he wasn’t worth living. “Let’s get you down the subway. You won’t be too late.”

“I’ll tell Mama what you told me. We had a party before the holiday. You going to go uptown too?”

“Not right away. I’m going to walk — no,” he contradicted himself, annoyed. “I’ve got to call up that lady. Jesus, what she must be thinking.” He felt stunned, disoriented.

“You’re not going there?”

“I better just call.”

“Why?”

“Guess.”

“You should be happy. She should be happy. She made a doctor’s appointment. If she made a doctor’s appointment—”

“She must have canceled that long ago,” Ira interrupted irritably. “Say, what would you have done if I had to take you there? What would you have told Mamie? It might have taken a long time — longer than this.”

“I couldn’t — I wouldn’t go. Only on Saturday. I could say I was going for a walk on 116th Street.”

“Oh, hell.”

“Why?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

“Maybe if you told me you were gonna be here for that, I could have told Mama about a party — I don’t know,” she said with unusual animation. “Look, Ira, I’m a girl, and I’m already over it. All right, razor blades, knives, those guys, they scared me. But you — I don’t mean you didn’t get scared too. But now, you should be happy. We got away. And look at the trouble you saved. You thought I was pregnant. And I’m not. You thought you would have to take me to that lady. And she would take me to the doctor—”

“I know! I know! All right.”

He looked straight ahead, determined to encourage her forward movement through the crowd, then, dissatisfied with progress, steered her along Broadway.

“How did you remember that toilet up there from all those years?” she asked curiously.

“Will I ever forget it?”

“They must not have cleaned it for a — was it clean when you worked there?”

“No, it never was clean. It was already closed, that whole gallery, I mean. I just took a chance. Oh, what the hell,” he added snappishly.

She suddenly laughed. For a moment Ira thought she was laughing at his discomfiture. But no. talking as always before she finished laughing, her words tumbled off pointless mirth.

“That projectionist looking down, will I ever forget him?”

“Did you see him?”

“Did I see him? In his sagging undershirt. If he didn’t look funny. But you know, Ira, it really is funny. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“What?”

“I had a boyfriend who was studying to be a projectionist. I thought of him. If he was looking down.”

“Oh.” How cheerless was spoiled lust. Her lips moved like larva — oh, Jesus, just get to the subway through the crowd.

“When I was fourteen, he worked in a projection booth. And Ira, you were fourteen, and you worked in a projection booth, too.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“When I was fourteen, he wanted to marry me.” Her dumb correspondences.

“Yeah?” He could feel his face crimp with fretfulness. If he had even gotten a piece of tail out of all this. Christ, nothing. “Fourteen? Who was fourteen? I mean, was he fourteen?” He felt as idiotic as she was — just as irascible as he had felt when he waited for her to come out of the business school. Mopey lout, he deserved what he got. “What’re you talking about?”

“I said I was fourteen. He wasn’t fourteen. He was already twenty-one. But he wanted to marry me. He hounded me. Gerald: Let’s go out and have an ice cream sundae. Let’s go to a dance. Nearly every evening he came to the house. But he wasn’t my type.”

“No?”

“He was short and fat, and already a little bald. Mama liked him, and Pap said it would be all right. Next year I’ll be going on eighteen.”

“Yeah?”

“But I kept telling Gerald, That’s all. I don’t wanna see you no more. I don’t care if Mama likes you—”

“Was that it?”

“Of course. I’m the one who has to marry him. And did Mama cry at the next wedding: two pillowcases. She was going to have an old-maid daughter on her hands. Can you imagine, at fourteen, no less.”

“No.”

“Who is your type, Ira? Is that lady your type?”

“I don’t know who my type is.”

“Mine is the married-man type. The tall, blond type. They’re not Jewish, but they’re married anyway, so it doesn’t matter. You I can tell, but if Mama ever knew.” Stella giggled.

Engulfed — enthronged (the word coined itself) — amid the home-going crowd, the air of holiday about them, swarming out of Klein’s on 14th and meshing with those from the smaller stores, he and Stella turned west toward the subway kiosk across Broadway. The first chill encroached on the last wedges of sunlight in the park, first chill seeping through the growing shadows. It had begun to empty the benches in the park, gave briskness to the stride of those crossing, and even seemed to increase the agitation of arguing groups, those pitted against each other, with shaking fist and stabbing finger. As undaunted as ever, Washington on his bronze steed on concrete pedestal contemplated turmoil and incessant noise. It made Ira wonder how much difference he himself made, how much, how little, even if he bellowed at the top of his lungs. It would be like going aboard an ocean liner, infinitesimally, imperceptibly lowering her hull in the water — like the time he delivered steamer baskets as a boy, like the time he accompanied Edith — Edith, yes, she must be waiting, wondering. Well, what excuse? In the eddy flowing around Orange Drink Nedick’s at the corner of University, in the aura of grilled hot dogs, he eased pants at the crotch. And the horror of it all. He was worse than even Joe, the bum, in Fort Tryon Park, who had pulled on his petzel while Ira, all of eight, recoiled in fear. He was worse than Pop, too, smashing Mom a glancing whack and little Ira, too. How the sins, the shande, had come full circle, and all of this in the eddy by the Nedick’s stand at University and 8th, a hundred blocks from Harlem, but one thing was sure, though: maybe one guy couldn’t add a perceptible increment to tumult, but a lot together could. That bunch — those two bunches — shouting at each other certainly added distinct stridor. What the hell were they all about?

“You know something funny?” Stella asked.

“No, what?”

“We made a big circle — from my school over there, through the theater, and back again.”

“Oh, yeah.” His wry voice ended by inhaling a squelched sigh. “What d’ye do? Take the shuttle?”

“I have to.” She led the way across the sidewalk to the kiosk. “I have to, but you don’t. You can go on the Lexington.”

“I know, but I’d better make my call first.”

“You can make it downstairs.”

“You mean the phone booths in the subway?”

“There’s three, four. Those big wooden ones — when you go from the IRT to the BMT.”

“I’m not sure,” he hedged. “Okay. Let’s go,” he said hastily. “Jesus, I’m late. Later than you’re going to be.” They both flowed down the steps with the cataract of commuters heading home. “Show me the booths, will you?”

“Around the platform. This way. I’ll wait for you.”

“You don’t have to.” His voice sharpened.

“We both gotta ride to 42nd. A minute more.”

“Holy Jesus!”

“Why? You’re not gonna tell her what happened?”

“Oh, no! Get in here. It’s too goddamn noisy. Or do you wanna stay out?” She was already in the way of the folding door, giggled as he dropped the nickel into the aperture.

“You know,” she whispered as he waited for the operator, “I wanted to meet her, but I didn’t wanna meet her. You know what I mean?”

“Sh!”

“Number please.” Oh, Christ, in the interval, preparing for apology. In the phone booth — that she had recommended. Oh, man, oh, man, the jibes of those boys still echoing. He felt as though he were losing his mind — heard the stimulated ring of the phone, hoped Edith wasn’t home. Whee-ooh, he whistled, windily audible, while Stella watched him. In a minute there is time, said Eliot. And Larry this afternoon. No, Jesus, she wasn’t home. Oh, Jesus, the teetering. He wedged his briefcase on the shelf in the angle of phone box and wall—

“You know, I forgot my steno book up there,” Stella whispered, waited a second. “She’s not home?”

“I don’t know. A coupla more rings.”

“The operator’ll tell you.”

Jesus, he was crazy enough he was ready to tell Edith it was all right. He was going to marry the little cunt. He couldn’t say “cunt.” No, she wasn’t pregnant; he was just crazy: Mishugeh auf toit, Mom would say. There she was pressed against him. Go ahead, give her a feel. Go home with her. He could just see himself escorting Stella through 112th Street, her native heath, and Mamie coming out of the neighboring apartment house, and simply transported with delight at the vision of Stella on Ira’s arm, and Ira suddenly a prospective khusin for her daughter. And then he could have all the latest she had learned right here in a phone booth. A slave. If that wasn’t crazy, if he wasn’t crazy. Two poles, he ought to have two poles. Yeah. His insufferable, imperious need, and hazy, imperious bidding of the future. If only it were one or the other, not jeering at himself as he jauntily advanced to greet his putative, rapturous mother-in-law. Oh, you’re off your pulley. So what? All right, Mamie, start furnishing that empty apartment. He reached down for the neighborhood of Stella’s muff, to her simper—

“Hello. Sorry, I was—”

“Edith.”

“For pity’s sake, lad, where on earth have you been?”

Muff, pneumatic muff, Eliot echo. “I don’t know where I’ve been. I don’t think I could tell you.” He leered cruelly at Stella. “Everything’s all right. I shoulda called you. What about that doctor?”

“Oh, I’ve taken care of that. I waited till the last minute. What on earth—”

“I got sidetracked. I’m sorry.”

“Is the girl all right? You sure?”

“Yeah, that’s what threw me. You were right.”

“You sound very strange just the same. Are you all right?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry I bothered you— Hell!”

“Where are you?”

“Fourteenth Street subway station.”

“Please, will you listen to me?”

“What?”

“I want to see you. As soon as possible. Ira, please.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m serious. Will you take the first taxi you can, and come here? I’m very worried. Ira, do you have enough money? I’ll wait in front of the house.”

“No.”

“You will.”

“Yes.”

“As soon as you can. Promise.”

“Eftsoons his hand dropped he.”

“What? You’re mumbling so.”

“I’ll tell you.”

“I’ll be waiting for you.”

“All right. I’m going upstairs. Give me a minute.”

“You be sure?”

“Yes. Sure. Goodbye.” He hung up.

“You going there? To that lady?” Stella asked.

“You heard me.” He shoved the folding doors open. “Fresh air. Go home, will you, Stella?”

She opened her purse. “Wait a minute. Which way?” He got a nickel out, strode. “That’s the BMT — Ira!”

“Oh, the other one.”

“Don’t you know yet?” Her acne stood out in surprise. “I can pay the carfare.”

“I know it. Come on.” He led the way to the IRT turnstiles, dropped a nickel in the slot. Her green coat pressed the revolving petal, banging admission.

“Bye-bye,” she smiled, juvenile, vapid. “Bye.” Utterly lost within himself, he climbed the stair, sole, single-file counter to the throngs descending. And up into the street, auto-exhaust-laden autumn air, slant sun artificially bright on the facades of tall east buildings, on the clock in the Edison tower — half past four — feigning light on the limp lusterless top leaves of trees in the park. A cab? He wheeled about, searching, gaze sweeping the corner, where the vendor had been. A Checker cab, but occupied. Maybe more as far as the Union Square Secretarial — raggle-taggle, coming out of the park, the women in both groups were wearing babushkas, the men caps; the larger group seemed to be hounding the smaller one; and the smaller though pursued was uncowed: they hurled back defiances at their adversaries, taunts in heavily accented English: “Splitters! Wreckers! Stalinist gengsters! Vot did Abramovitz tell us, hah?” A truly stentorian voice bawled out, “Lenin hugged him ven he vas dere. He came beck, and he said, ‘Clara, it’s not for us.’ No?” Cab? Oh, hell, at this hour. there went another — with a fare—“Not for you, reformist, scissor-bills vot de Vobblies call you. Sqvealers!”

“Wreckers!”

“Recketeers!”

“Go to hell!”

Hell was right. Where the hell was a taxi? He had worried her enough—“Singk, singk, everybody!” A very short woman in the pursuing group, as stocky as she was tall, broke into song, and her cohorts soon followed, inundating those ahead with scorn; above the counter chant of “Bendits! Moscow Bendits! Stalinite tools!” rose the derisive song: “Oh, de cluck-meckers union is no-good union, it’s a right-ving union by de boss. De stinkin’ ga’ment meckers un de doity labor woeckers give de voikers a doity double cross. Oh, de Kahns, de Hillquvits, un de Thomases, dey give de voikers all false promises. Dey pritch sotsialism, but dey prektice fatzism in de toid kepitalist pahty by de boss!”

“Hey, taxi, taxi!” Ira waved frantically. “Hey! Right here!”

PART THREE

I

As if he had been traveling for hours on end, Ira got out of the cab in a stupor, told the hackie to keep the change from the dollar he handed over, dazedly aware that the tip came to more than the fare, and walked unsteadily through the cold blanching of day’s end to Edith’s house door. He pressed the nacreous bell button below her name, leaned inward at the buzzer, laboriously entered the carpeted hallway. Reverberations of streets through which he had just been, of acts, Stella at a drinking fountain, knife blades, faces in subways, moving hordes on station platforms, places and grimaces, all seemed to have gotten into his nerves), seethed in his blood — stairs settled like a fire escape as he climbed — along with voices and cries, a reeling farrago of his libido, his lunacy, almost palpably filling the softly lit hallway, like a half-delirious transition to the new surroundings, new atmosphere of Edith’s apartment. Adjust — with heaving chest, recognize the scent of lemon oil at the nostrils at the same time as the rich gleam of piano and piano stool told him the cleaning woman must have been here today. Adjust, try to sequester the topsy-turvy memories that he had no time to dwell on, no time to abate.

His gaze held by the gold sunburst on her kimono, Ira followed Edith into the apartment. A profound breathlessness heaved within him as he entered, a breathlessness that seemed much greater than that due to physical exertion — of climbing up two flights of stairs — but like a panting of the spirit trying to recover from all that had assailed it. Dully, and always conscious of his lack of grace, as if his shambling were a safeguard against too much being expected of him, he shed his coat and hat, dropped them on a chair, his briefcase between, and stood swaying to his own pulse, looking about the apartment as if he weren’t familiar with the decor, the location of chairs, the gray Navajo rugs scattered about, the black maw of the fireplace under the sheen of marble mantelpiece, desk and manila files, bulldog bulk of typewriter, bookcases, telephone. He found his favorite wicker armchair, sank noisily into it. He felt utterly jaded; his tongue seemed twice as thick as normal, and he kept wanting to double it under his palate. He wished he could have refused her unyielding request that he come to her apartment. Still, it was almost a compensation for compliance, to sit there so blissfully relaxed, only a shade away from slumping, waiting for her to arrange herself on the black velvet couch, yellow pencil, blue NYU exam booklets beside her: Professor Edith Welles of the NYU English Department, dusky in the light of the end-table lamp, large-eyed, petite, shadow-brown hair in a bun at the back of her head, and pretty calves and ankles protuding.

“Did you take a taxi?” she demanded severely.

“Yeh.”

“You look completely done in.” She regarded him so intently and for so many seconds he felt like lolling his head. “You scared me out of a week’s growth,” she said. “I didn’t know what to imagine. Not hearing from you all afternoon.”

“I should have called up. I know.”

“Where on earth were you, child? You knew we had a doctor’s appointment.”

“Yeh. I was hoping you’d cancel it.”

“There wasn’t much else I could do — when nobody appeared after four.”

“I’m sorry. It’s been awful. Some afternoon. I mean it.” He slapped the wicker seat. “It’s been all my own doing, too.”

“It’s about what I expected when a girl is as young as she is.” Edith apparently misunderstood his reference. “I should think you’d be much relieved at the way things turned out.”

“I am. I am. I was.” He debated revelations. “What gets me is that she claims she tried to get in touch with me. She went to my house and all that. I was here Sunday, wasn’t I? I tried to think back when she told me.”

“Yes. I’m sure you were here Sunday. Does it matter?”

“No, but it would have saved everybody a lot of trouble: me a lot of dumb worrying. And you making doctor’s appointments and having to cancel ’em.” Ira looked off obliquely, paused for breath. “I guess the worst of it is my having to confess the louse I am.”

She shook her head, so characteristically: not disapproving, but with sober, sympathetic disagreement. “You were only confessing to the need that’s part and parcel of being human, of any species of life, I imagine. Marcia knows that better than all of us. We all satisfy it — in different ways, but we do satisfy it.”

“Yeh? I satisfied it.”

“Is there any reason why you shouldn’t? There isn’t. There are puritanical ones. You’re shy. You’re inhibited. But you needn’t feel that what happened is so very sordid, what you’ve done is so very sordid. If you but knew how really sordid—” Edith groped for words a moment, laughed. “You have no idea. Most children experiment at an early age.”

“Yeh.”

It was no use. He was what he was, and he couldn’t tell her what he was — or only as much as he had, and that was too much, and maybe now that he had, it would be best if he stayed away, let the friendship taper off. Let her words slide over him until he could leave politely. He was expert in attitudes of listening. And he was just tired enough so that he was afraid he might let go altogether, if he allowed himself to become too engaged, if he fueled her interest with rejoinders. She spoke of the practices of respectable businessmen, churchgoers, affluent and married and influential, ways that were truly sordid, with young children and prostitutes — married uncles and young nieces, and all the time maintaining a sanctimonious exterior. Those people were really despicable, because they were hypocrites, and she loathed hypocrites.

But as far as Ira was concerned, his sex relations with his cousin Stella were almost inevitable, because he was extremely sensitive and, unlike Larry, shy and unworldly, and unlike Larry, poverty-stricken and deprived. It was just too bad that he felt so guilty in the matter of sexual intercourse with his cousin. Sexual behavior sprang out of the mores of a culture; so did the attitudes people developed about sex. Because there was no genuine sex education, no sex education in the schools—“Heavens, no! The churches would be horrified, the Watch and Ward societies would be up in arms!”—attitudes about sex with few exceptions were determined by ingrained and often fallacious notions about sex, by sheer ignorance, by social custom and taboo, by religious and puritanical nonsense about sin and punishment—

“Yeah, that’s the way I am,” Ira agreed. “It’s inbred. When I read about Satan and Sin—” he hesitated for fear Edith might draw a parallel—“in Milton, the whole thing hit home despite myself. I don’t believe it, but what if you’re brought up that way? It’s bad.”

“Poor lad, I wish I’d known. But of course you — I’m bound by Victorian decorums too. No use crying over spilt milk. Ira, it’s bred in all of us, that sex is wicked — for some even in marriage,” she consoled. “I know I once thought so. I was deeply affected — influenced by my mother’s Christian Science priggishness. I’ve told you about it. My sister still feels that same way. I’m sure that may have been one of the reasons — I don’t know — of her divorce. It would be the last thing she’d talk about. But sooner or later we learn to escape from that kind of domination — it’s really nothing but superstition. You yourself have already thrown off much of it, haven’t you?”

“Yeah. It’s different throwing it off when you know what you’re doing.”

She smiled comfortingly. “I’m sure it is.” Her eyes strayed to the mirror above the fireplace at Ira’s back. “That very thing you were so concerned about: Stella’s menstruating. When I lived with Sam H in Berkeley, who I suppose had been brought up in much more Orthodox fashion than you were, he told me that Jews considered menstruating women unclean, practically untouchable for a whole week — they had to undergo a ritual bath afterward — he used some word—”

“Mikveh.”

“Ah, that was it. Mikveh, you say?”

“Yes.”

“Mikveh,” she repeated. “What does it mean? Bath?”

“Swimming pool,” Ira said gruffly.

She laughed — always relishing his dumb sallies. “I think if I had agreed to submit to all that folderol I might be Sam H’s wife today.”

“Yes?”

“Sam told me bluntly he couldn’t conceive of marrying anyone who wasn’t Jewish. That’s when I left. But you see, it’s the same thing. It was perfectly all right to live with one.”

Ira sighed quietly. The way she had of deflating dogma and bugaboos, the way she quelled fears and guilts, as if bleaching them out of sight with her objectivity, he recognized had a kind of dual effect on him: she reduced the onus of his wickedness, eliminated much of the sense of heinousness, quenched the shimmer of guilt, stealth, risk that informed, that magnified his furor.

“And you must remember,” Edith was saying, “your cousin Stella is no child.”

“Yeah, not now. But then, then — when she was only fourteen.”

“Even at fourteen. Young people, girls especially, mature at quite different ages — no matter what the law has to say in the matter. It’s only a rule of thumb. I still hadn’t been sexually awakened in my twenties. It took Wasserman to do that.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sure I told you.”

“Yes. In Woodstock. With Larry.”

“Speaking of an utter waste of time!” Her tone of voice and the movement of her head were full of severity. “How could I have been such a ninny?”

The cat perched on top of the stone wall; the cat leaping down to the ground, brushing against her leg under the filigreed white table — the hysterical scream. Prophetic intuition, smarter than the intellect.

“Well.”

There wasn’t much to say: regret: vain synapse between fingernails.

She resumed the didactic. “The thing I wanted you to realize, what you have already surmised from Marcia, was that in other times and places, other cultures, Stella would be considered nubile, marriageable. You needn’t feel as if you had committed a grave offense. You needn’t feel you were vicious. You’re not.”

“No.”

“It’s a lesson. Fortunately not as costly as it might have been. The whole point is, don’t go into these things without a contraceptive of some kind.”

“I did. I thought I did,” Ira defended himself, too spent for vehemence. “I thought the — the thing didn’t work — when she was late, that’s all.” He felt as though they had entered a stage of repetition, of pointlessness. Why had she insisted on his coming to her apartment anyway? He was most ungracious when it came to expressing gratitude. He didn’t know how. It irked, it pained him.

“Would you like some coffee? Or tea?”

He pondered, was about to decline. “All right, coffee,” he conceded. “If it’s not too much trouble. Mind if I go to the bathroom?”

“Oh, no. Go ahead. I’ll make some coffee meanwhile.” He got up from the chair, as she slid off the couch — garter-belt ends winked—

He stopped in the doorway that led to both bathroom and kitchenette. “You were talking about Larry—”

“Yes?” She walked toward him, petite, tender smile glistening from points of olive skin. Her presence, her nearness, gave him pause. He would have wished to ponder with all his strength the contrast: Stella, the Jewish kid with blond hair under cloche, girlish, at best bland, subservient. And Edith, brunette and dainty and knowing and womanly — and a world apart. He could crook his finger at the one, and would shrivel at the other’s tenderness—

“Yes?” Edith repeated.

“Oh, I got thrown off.”

“So I’ve noticed. That’s what makes you so interesting, your withdrawals. And a little maddening. What’s it all about this time?”

“What a day. It starts off with a midterm quiz on Milton. Anyway, I had a long, long confer — I don’t know what you call it — with Larry in the subway. Was that today? Boy, it seems like yesterday.”

“Yes?”

“He wanted to hang on to our friendship. It didn’t matter that his love affair with you was over. He said we were friends before that.”

“There doesn’t seem to be much reason it shouldn’t continue, if you were interested.”

“That was it. I told him I wasn’t. Poor guy. I guess I hurt his feelings.”

She had busied herself in the cubicle of the kitchenette, filled the electric coffee urn. “It’s sometimes impossible not to. Lewlyn trampled on mine — and in not a very honorable way.”

“Yeah. Anyway, I said no. I said something about going my own way. I really don’t know what I meant. Just another way of saying no.”

“I can understand, Ira. Your ways have separated. Just as mine and Larry’s have — if ever they were very close and not an illusion. It can very well be that once, given time, this pseudo-romance begins to fade, we may become good friends again in a different way. If Larry matures.”

The perking of the electric coffee urn became audible, like a prompter to an actor.

“I gotta go,” Ira said.

“Do.” Edith smiled. He went into the bathroom, familiar bathroom, but more in order than usual, towels, tissues, washcloth, because of the late ministrations of the cleaning woman. Boy, you take your cock out to urinate, you think a thousand thoughts. Did anybody ever ask a woman whether urinating had the same effect? It couldn’t, could it? And he wanted to explain so much, but he buttoned his fly.

“Gee.” Aroma of coffee met his nostrils as he came out. “What I wanted to say, and I suppose he felt, I owed him such a debt of gratitude. I mean Larry.”

“Did you think of what he owed you? You provided him with a view of another world he never would have had otherwise. He was always repeating the things you said. These things are never completely one-sided, you know that, Ira. In this case not even remotely. Toast?” Edith asked.

“No,” he began. “Yes. I love toast, but I can eat just bread. You still have raisin bread?”

“It happens that I do. And butter? You sure you don’t want me to toast it? It’ll only take a minute.”

“Yeah.” He adopted a dour front. “But that’s enough. My grandfather always said that anybody who had bread and butter to eat shouldn’t look for more.”

“Did he?”

“Especially raisin bread. Of course, he ate everything else, the old tyrant.”

“I know you don’t take sugar or cream.”

“Well, this time I want everything. Zuleika Dobson got hungry with deep emotion. So this guy Larry has been smashed, like a kid’s paper boat in a curbside brook, you know what I mean? You know, when he asked me to share in my life, and he envisaged, he made all kinds of offers — I don’t remember, because my mind was on Stella, pregnant, all that — he spoke of our different backgrounds, lives together; we could write about it — collaborate, yeah, the thing that kept coming back to my mind — I don’t know whether I ought to tell you. Oh, thanks. That’s toast.”

“Be careful of the raisins.”

“Hot, you mean? Yeah, they are. I wonder why?” He gobbled.

“You think you’re good for another slice or two?”

“Yeah. Thanks, I mean. If it isn’t too much trouble.”

“Oh, no. You were saying?”

“I kept thinking of sitting here — I mean in that basement room — reading T.S. Eliot, while you two — well, you spooned.” She turned from the frustum of the toaster over the gas to look at him, stood quietly gazing.

“Yes?”

“I thought, boy, I’d never share that with you.”

“Is that what you thought of?’

“I mean even through all my troubles, it kept coming back.” He smiled apologetically. “I got my nerve, haven’t I?”

She shook her head. “You are beyond all doubt the strangest, most unusual person I’ve ever met. And I’ve met many, young and old.”

“It wasn’t because I wanted to be.”

“I don’t think you could.” She removed the slice, quickly, with dainty finger. Bearing the plate of toast, she crossed the room so gravely Ira was sure he had said something wrong. He shouldn’t have told her what he thought. The giddiness of the day had slackened everything.

“Thanks. It’s good.” He took the plate from her. “I still haven’t thanked you enough for all the trouble you took, and all the rest I put you through.”

“It really wasn’t very much trouble. Mostly I was concerned about you. Especially not hearing from you all afternoon, as I said.”

“Yeah. I was inconsiderate.”

“She might have come here in any case.”

“Oh, no, what was the point?”

Balancing her coffee cup, trim, petite, in her brown dress under the open black Japanese kimono, she went back to the couch, sat athwart. “I might have cared to meet her.”

“That’s exactly what I didn’t want to happen.”

“But why?”

“I told you.”

“And I explained to you before that I didn’t expect to see anyone but an adolescent girl — not a mature beauty, nothing of the sort — with very little charm of person, and no sophistication. You already described her to some extent.”

‘I know. And that’s what you would have seen, only more so.”

“Oh, fiddlesticks, Ira! Honestly. Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot all about napkins. I’ll get you one.” She slid off the couch again, more carefully this time. What a pretty figure she had, so feminine, neat, and yet so modest, as if she were bred to deprecate it — something like that: the way she cantered her horse that golden September afternoon in Woodstock, so adeptly, so modestly. And now, a glance at the mirror was all that betrayed awareness, and yet, judging by the angle of her gaze, it was directed at her face. It was her face she cared about. Well, why not? Odd irrelevant wisp of speculation: exchange Stella’s. She was outside the realm of permissible comparison, in a forbidden world—

“Thanks.” Ira took the napkin, and as he watched Edith sit down: “In my house, we don’t have napkins. Only, my father brings home a napkin sometimes from a restaurant, you know? We got two butter knives from the Waldorf Astoria. We’re not kosher, you see? So — well,” he snickered wearily, took a large bite: “Yum!” He chomped: “Gr-r-r.” He sipped, grunted: “Ah.”

He felt an insane impulse to abandon all pretense to seemly behavior, to alienate her entirely, to do any number of idiotic, uncouth things, pick his nose, dig at his ears, scratch his rump, hoist his scrotum. He wasn’t sure why. To fend off what he sensed coming. Or like an insolent tyke, to punish her for having learned what he was, and to build new barriers against her finding out more. Samsonish, Parsifallic, ho-ho, he was weary. He would have paraded any kind of immature caprice, except that he knew she wouldn’t be in the least deceived, in the least fazed. He’d only prove himself all the more a futile ass. Besides. . he had a little pride left, a little stoicism, the recalcitrance of disgrace, maybe, the obduracy of frailty. Or a smidgeon of maturity that dictated that he endure his own failings — and she knew only half the story. So: preserve a scrap of rectitude.

“Did you part friends?” Coffee cup in hand, Edith sat on the edge of the bed, crossed her knees modestly — she was always modest. “My, you eat so fast.”

“I am what’s called in the old country a fresser.”

“A what?”

“A glutton. You must have noticed.”

“I think you’re plain famished — heavens, how can you drink your coffee so hot?”

“I learned that with my mother’s milk. She loves to scald her gullet. I guess it’s kind of fitting.”

“Would you like some more?”

“Yes, I would, thanks.”

She brought the coffee urn over: it had a slender waist and a high arching spout. And as she poured: “I presume you were so late talking the whole thing over.”

“Oh, no.”

“You’re not on good terms.”

“I guess so. That’s not what I meant.” Ira squirmed, scratched, gobbled. “I saw her off on the subway. Is that what you mean?”

“More or less. I’m sure you remember how my pregnancy ended anything I had to do with Lewlyn. That was the last straw: when he showed what a baby he was. Trying to shift the responsibility to Larry or Zvi, as if I didn’t keep track of that sort of thing, or were trying to trap him into marrying me. And bringing Marcia into the picture, turning to that bully for support.”

“I’ll tell you one thing, Edith, I understand the guy, now I’ve been through the same — the same crisis. I’ve been a baby too. And I turned to you for support. And thank God for your generosity too.” He wasn’t sure why he brought the matter up in that form: to steer her away from further questions, and spare him further revelations. He tried to keep his voice level, free of provocation, but with a hint of challenge he hoped might deflect her curiosity. He failed.

“Rubbish,” she said. “You’ve not been a baby at all.”

“No?”

“You’re as different from Lewlyn as day is from night.”

“I am? I must be the night.”

“You’re only beginning to learn who you are. And sooner or later you will. I’ve overtaken everyone I know: Hamb, I know I’ve told you about Shmuel Hamberg, Lewlyn, Zvi, and with Larry there never was any question. In fact, all those who’ve wanted to dear me and darling me. But I already know I’ll never overtake you. You’ll always be ahead of me, young as you are.”

“Yeah? It’s flattering.” He scarcely paused to masticate a mouthful. “But you know something, I think that’s because you’re kind to people, you sympathize with people — me. I might as well tell you: I don’t. I can’t seem to separate anything from the ulterior. What can I do with them? What they say? What can I use it for?”

“That’s the artist,” she said solemnly. “Without that kind of self-centeredness you couldn’t be one. I lack it. I can’t keep from helping people, from responding to their needs: to my parents’ needs. My father, whose health is ruined. My divorced ninny of a sister, because of her child. Lewlyn was a good example. Perhaps if I didn’t, and could devote myself to writing poetry, I might be a better poet. But I’ve always placed other people’s needs ahead of mine.”

“And that’s so important?”

“I worship the artist, as you know. It’s the only religion I have, Ira.”

“All right.” Ira gulped the last of his coffee. He sensed that she wasn’t being strictly logical, was too lenient in his behalf, couldn’t be swayed by anything he said. Answering to the point, but the edge had been taken off his appetite. He smeared the paper napkin across his mouth. “Boy, that was good. All I can say is I’m glad I’m out of it. I never would have lived through it without you.”

She didn’t seem to realize — or chose to ignore — the finality of his tone of voice and his forward-leaning movement. She seemed intent on keeping him there. “You spoke just now of the similarity between yourself and Lewlyn. But consider the differences in your ages, child. Here was a grown man, and a married one too, a former priest seemingly able to dispense comfort to others and all that folderol, acting like a child, turning for comfort to the wife who discarded him, turning to a woman ten years older than he is to reassemble him.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not going to leave?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“You haven’t told me anything.”

“What’ll I tell you? I’m afraid to tell you — no.” He suddenly felt himself swept by a contrary urge: a last resort, a last defense. “All right. When she told me she was okay — after she came out of the business school, and told me she was all through — with her menstrual period.” The words tumbled out. “She said she tried to get the news to me — I already told you.” He gesticulated. “What the hell. Anyway, old Priapus busted forth. I tried to take her to a place for intercourse.”

“I might have known it.”

“Yeah. Well? So now what’s there to say?”

“You’re very dear to me, Ira. There’s everything to say.”

“That’s the trouble. I’ll be a lot less dearer in a minute — I mean if I talk.” He met her profoundly compassionate, large-eyed gaze, her hands lying quietly in her lap. “I took her to Fox’s movie house on 14th — where I worked lugging film. The place has three balconies. It musta been a garlic opera house once. I took her to the middle balcony — that’s an empty one — into the ladies’ toilet. And Jesus, three Negroes came up there after us. They wanted a piece of her, and one of them had a safety razor, another one a knife.”

“Heavens, Ira!”

“Yeah. So I didn’t get my lay — of the last minstrel.” He sat bowed over, unable to face her.

“Gracious, child, your life was in danger. You were in serious danger.” No word of Stella, her danger too.

He couldn’t speak for a few seconds. “I guess she gets the credit — Stella — she gave me a shove. I gave them a shove. The door—” He gesticulated, scowled. “The catch went, and so did we — out to the fire escape.”

“Gracious!”

“I shouldn’t tell you.” He squeezed the wicker arms of the chair; they creaked. “Boy, I feel like I’m ripping it all outta myself. Jesus, was I scared. I’m scared now.” He could feel tears smarting at his eyes. “Jesus, down that fire escape. We could have broken our necks — mine and hers. No, but the worst thing is I felt like, I felt like murder.”

“Of whom? You mean the Negroes? That’s understandable.”

“No, her. In that toilet. For a second, you know. It wasn’t the first time either. I’m crazy. She’s like mush.” He blinked. “It wakens everything evil in me. You know, those black guys may have saved her life.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“No? Everything starts to scintillate. I want. I’m greedy. I want to destroy the bold — much, much more than my sister, Minnie. I might as well tell you that too. I had my first orgasm with her when I was twelve. All right?”

“How old was Minnie?”

“About a year and a half younger. I told you you’d like me a lot less before I was done. I was kicked out of high school for stealing — fountain pens.” He began sighing uncontrollably.

“No, don’t!” She had been shaking her head, and now stood up from the edge of the couch and was crossing the room. He tried to fend her off. But silently, in utter gravity, she would not be denied. She slid past the card table, pushed his shoulders back to make room for herself on his knees, and sat down. Firm, trim buttocks palpable through bone, from thigh to thigh. He felt no desire, only need. He put his arm around her trim waist, and wept. She bent over and kissed him with small, delicate lips.

“I’m filthy after where I’ve been,” he said. “I’m filthy anyway. You shouldn’t do that.”

“I’m simply not going to let you mislead me another time.” As she spoke, she undid a button of his shirt, undid it with determination. “Poor lamb. You should have told me all this a long time ago. Did you think I’d be shocked?” She slipped a cool tiny hand into the opening she had made; her palm glided along the bare skin of his chest. “You seemed quite without interest in sex, as I said before. I took that to mean you hadn’t been awakened — since I hadn’t either until late. I told you how my German-born husband and I threw books at each other because he demanded his rights as husband. It’s only later that men seem to develop an overriding interest in sex. Do you still have sex relations with your sister?”

“No, she won’t let me anymore.” He tried to conceal errant stir of desire from Edith on his knees by leaning sideways to drag out his handkerchief.

“And doesn’t your Aunt Molly—”

“Mamie.”

“—guess why you come to her home?”

“She thinks I come for the dollar she gives me: indigent scholar. I imagine so. Ironic, isn’t it? I get a buck for a — I’m sorry. I—”

“Were you going to use the word ‘fuck’?” He felt the blood rush to his head — with a suddenness that made him feel faint. Those dainty lips to form that word! The very sound of it in her voice rendered him speechless. And yet she looked so calm, unruffled, ladylike. His arm slackened about her waist. She must have guessed why, but how impassive she was, drawing his arms about her again.

“I’ve told you. I’ve outgrown everyone I met. One at a time. I left them completely in the past, and done with. But you’re something I’ll never part with. You’re something that’s — that’s mine. It doesn’t matter what you think of yourself. You’re outside of me and beyond, and at the same time you’re mine. I’m not going to let you go to waste, do you understand?”

“I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”

“It was you I thought of when I had the abortion, not Lewlyn, but you. It was you I wanted near me. And thank heaven something drew you here at just the right moment.” She regarded him with unswerving brown eyes in dusky countenance.

“Yeah, but what am I supposed to feel?”

She laughed — merrily for her. “Whatever you do feel.”

“But it’s not the way Larry felt. I remember.”

“Larry felt something altogether romantic and ephemeral. He’d tell me he loved me, maybe two dozen times each time he saw me. Gratifying for a while, of course, to a woman just turned thirty. But only for a very short while. And then a bore and constricting besides. You let me be myself. That’s what I treasure about you. There’s no false idealism to hem me in.”

“Maybe I don’t know any better.” She laughed again, and they were silent: the woman on his knees, as if it were the most natural thing in the world — and inconceivable at the same time. She was an assistant professor of English literature, and he was — what? — a lout, a shlemiel, laying his sister, until he spoiled it — he hadn’t told Edith half the Jesus Christ Almighty awful details. But could there be anything further than Larry, than Lewlyn, than anybody? And yet here she was. Two things twisted about in his mind simultaneously, without his knowing which to give preference to: the sense of a stage, a new stage entered upon: a leap, a transformation, her lover — impossible — and yet here she sat contentedly on his knees, like the consummation of some kind of mopey plan he had willed — and so he had, he had. It was like that aureate promise to the kid on a street corner in Harlem long ago. And yet, here he was alone with a woman, all alone, private, in her big studio apartment, without dread, without furtiveness, like a friend, despite her sitting on his knees, her petite body close to his, and yielding — what was the word, what was the word? Normal. “Hmph!”

“What is it, precious?”

“You want me to be honest with you?”

“Of course, darling.”

“I feel like a friend.”

She smiled down at him indulgently: “We’ve been friends much too long, more’s the pity. I wish we had been more than friends long ago. And we will be.”

“Yeh?”

“Won’t we?”

“You won’t get mad?” He waited for tacit permission. “With Stella I told you most of the time I felt like a criminal. In that insecticide-perfume balcony, I told you, I could go out of my mind. That was bad enough. But when I was with Minnie — everything started to dazzle, the walls, the green-painted walls, when she said yes. The calendar on the wall, the furniture—” He gesticulated. “They lilted. So what am I going to do?”

“You’re going to stay here tonight.”

“I am? I told you. I’m filthy.”

“Oh, no you’re not. It’s nothing water won’t take off. Would you like a shower?”

“Yeah. But inside?”

The smile on her lips was small and tender, her brown eyes large and grave — and steady, her whole expression sober and reflective. “I’m not going to say, darling, that the kind of thing you’ve suffered won’t have its lasting effect. I’m not an analyst either. And perhaps you ought to see one to help you get over the worst of the effects—”

“Oh, no!”

“I thought not. I’m not inclined that way either, apart from the expense. They may help some. I’m not at all sure they help the artist. For all I know they may neutralize rather than help. And you’re so obviously the artist. But to return to the wounds, the neuroses, you’ll have to live with them, if you can. Do you think you can?”

“I have so far.”

“You know that I’ve suffered some rather bad wounds myself in childhood. I’m sure I’ve told you about the violent quarrels between my father, with his heavy drinking, and my weeping Christian Science mother, protesting, weeping — it could all be heard through the house. You can imagine the effect on a child. I seem to have suffered more than either my brother or sister. At least as far as I could tell. I was so sensitive too, Ira. I saw my mother growing more and more unhappy. I actually could tell when a new wrinkle appeared on her face.” Edith pointed to her own. “I suppose my antipathy to sex, my frigidity until well into my twenties, may have been the result of that. It took Wasserman to break through that — practically rape — to awaken me. I told Lewlyn about it. So of course Marcia knows it. She was amused by it all, Lewlyn reported back, skeptical: I could so easily have screamed. Well.” Edith clasped her small hands even closer; she looked off into reminiscence with a kind of fixed disconsolateness. “You had your sister, you had your cousin. I discovered orgasm with one of those hand electric massaging things.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve never told anyone else.”

“I don’t know. Here I am: East Side. Harlem. New York. And you come from way out in Silver City. What do I mean to say? I don’t know. How can you get so — well, you know: dark. I thought only slums, you know, breed that. Way out west it would be all different.”

“It isn’t. It may be much worse.” Her tiny hand traveled over his chest. “Strange, unhappy lad. Let’s put as much of that behind us as we can.”

“All right. How should I begin? As Eliot says.”

“You already have, dark eyes. Now, you go shower. You prefer that to a bath, don’t you?”

“Oh, yeah. I need to shave too.”

“I have a lady’s safety razor. Will that do?”

“Oh, sure — I’m pretty sure: it’s a Gem, I bet.”

“I think so. It’s on the top shelf in the medicine cabinet.” She stood up from his lap, began smoothing her brown skirt under the sunburst on the black kimono, viewed herself in profile in the mirror over the mantelpiece. “Do you want me to show you?”

“No, no. I know what it looks like. Three guys in Fox’s theater in a vision I once saw.”

“The razor? Heavens, child, are you still thinking of that?”

“Yeah. Trauma, I guess you call it. It’s unbelievable, you know.” He waved his hand in front of him. “That. This. You.” He rubbed the day’s stubble on his chin.

“Please promise you’ll never do that again.”

“Never, never. Something dumber next time. On the other hand, look at the boon they brought me.”

Something about what he said or the way he said it seemed to affect her. She sat down on the edge of the couch and watched him with intent gazelle eyes, so intent, so candid in her tenderness, she immobilized him; he stood uncertain and embarrassed. Nobody should show feelings as deeply as that. . What a hold it had on him. Like Mom. The embryo Edith lost, the abortion she had: good and bad: he had a berth, he heard himself pun. What was bad about it? The intensity. And you couldn’t shake her the way you could Mom, cavalier. She was your equal, and better than your equal: native stock, the Ascendancy, John Synge called it.

“What’re you thinking about?” he asked, as gently as he could. “Maybe I should just wash my hands and go home?”

“Oh, no. I want you to have dinner with me, as soon as you’ve showered — if you don’t mind tearoom food.”

“Tearoom food? I should cavil at tearoom food?”

“And your mother? What will you do about her? Your parents. You have no phone.”

“Min would answer — she’d go down to the drugstore. But they’ll die of fright. I’ve been away before.” He was sure she had something more important in mind.

“Do you think you could love me?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re the most unromantic person I have ever had anything to do with. I often worry that you remind me of my father, but then you don’t drink.” Her smile seemed unable to contend with her seriousness. “But at least you’re honest. Do you think you could learn to love me?”

“I don’t know what it is! Edith — I–I’m ashamed of myself. You know what I am. I began at twelve. That’s all I could think of, that one thing: there was no love.”

“You never had a crush of any kind, on any girl?”

“Once, I think, for a little while. She wore her long underwear under her black stockings. She became an usherette in a movie house later on — looked like she was drumming up trade. Her older brother was shot and killed by a cop when he was running away from a crap game he’d just held up. The younger brother fell through an awning of a German meat and sausage store on Third Avenue I used to stand in front of and drool. I guess he was trying to swipe something. I don’t know why I tell you all this. That’s the nearest I came to love. I guess I was already doing things to my sister. So I can’t tell you. Why should I love you?”

“Because I’ve begun to love you.” Edith stopped shaking her head. “More than a little. More than I can tell you. I know it sounds trite. I want to be loved — and by you.”

“Yeah, but everything with me is ulterior. I told you.”

“That’s only because you’ve seen me so often in other men’s arms.”

“You think so? Maybe. I like you, you know — that’s kind of stupid. I worship you. I think you’re wonderful. What should I say?”

“Nothing. I think you should go take your shower.”

“You sure?” Could anything be more prosaic — could anything seem more portentous.

“I’m quite sure. I’m beginning to feel a few hunger pangs. But are you sure?”

“Of what?” He looked at her in surprise. “I told you what I am. You’re taking all the risks.”

“But I haven’t told you what I am: I can’t stand being tied down. It was what Lewlyn knew, though I suppose I could if I were married. I’ve had affairs.”

“I know.”

“I think very little of the body, Ira, do you understand what I mean?” She smoothed a fold in the black velvet couch cover. “Other than something to be taken care of, be kept in as good physical condition as possible — and mine isn’t very good — very robust — I have no great regard for it.” She paused to note whether he was following her. “I have no great sense of sanctity about, exaggerated holiness about. . ” Again she paused — for emphasis: “But I do have a great curiosity about men. Do I need to be reassured continually that I have some physical attraction for them? I’m sure I do, even though I know I haven’t that kind of sexuality that some women have — Louise Bogan, for example. But it’s mainly my curiosity, Ira. It’s almost compulsive. And I know no way of knowing them better, my dear — not in bed.”

“No?” It seemed the opposite of what he expected her to conclude with; he frowned, probing for a channel in perplexity.

“No. Bed is something to get out of the way. Sex is something to get over with. It’s their minds I want to get at. It’s their minds I find stimulating. It’s their minds that will sometimes set a poem going through my head. When that happens I feel as if I’ve put my body to some use, something really worthwhile.”

“Oh.”

“Can you stand that? I’ve known men who can. No. Only Zvi can. But he’s in California. Can you? Because crazy as I am about you — and it must be evident I am — I’ll only hurt you badly, worse than you are already. Please be honest.”

“Sure. I don’t own you.” Ira chuckled wearily. “I haven’t even begun.” More was on his mind: contraries: a certain kind of relief from obligation: she had been others’, hadn’t been his, wasn’t yet, but precarious possession too: others more. . More mind: snug haven gone glimmering.

“Then let’s go have dinner. You won’t mind doing the honors?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll give you enough to pay the check before we go in.”

“Oh, yeh, yeh.” He began taking his jacket off. “You mind if I leave everything here in a heap? Shirt, shoes, socks.”

“You can leave your trousers here too. I really think we ought to have a cocktail to celebrate.”

“The pants I’ll take with me,” he said. “Boy it feels good standing on a Navajo rug.”

“You have such beautiful feet.”

“Yeh?”

“You’ll find an extra facecloth and towel inside,” Edith said.

“You know, in my house they never use them.”

“I think you told me. What afternoons do you have off from college?”

“From classes? I have Wednesdays, I have Fridays.”

“Fridays would suit me.”

“Why?” He paused in the bathroom doorway.

“We ought to go to Wanamaker’s.”

“Huh?”

“I have a charge account there. You ought to have a bathrobe. Do you have one?”

“No.”

“A jacket. Something attractive that fits you. A shirt or two. At least one pair of decent trousers. The men are all wearing tweeds.”

“Yeah?”

“You might bring a change of underwear. There’s room in the bottom drawer of the chest.”

“There’s words running through my head, a kind of rhythm.”

“That’s the way my poems always begin, with a rhythm first. That’s always a sign I’m incubating a poem.”

“Yeh?”

“Now run along, Ira.”

“I’ll try to make it snappy. Tara. Tarara. The urchins are writing their names on the torrid sidewalks of the East Side of New York — with watermelon rinds, with watermelon rinds.”

The last thing he saw as he entered into the bathroom was not so much a smile on her face as a brief variant of her habitual gravity. Large-eyed — she leaned over on the couch to reach a yellow pencil.

II

It was as if everything had risen up to impede him in the last week or fortnight, ever since Easter Sunday. Ira turned the wire-bound pages of his small green plastic-covered log, pages on which his scrawl had become well-nigh illegible, almost out of control. He was no longer able to enter more than the merest tags of things, and then with the aid of his word processor to elaborate his reflections further.

He studied his notes, scribbling jotted down on May 4, 1987, Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, when M, shielded M, was still alive. He had decided on Easter Sunday, 4-19-’87, as a suitable time to begin an account of his tribulations — or to convert his scrawled mnemonics into a semblance of prose: overcast A.M. Cooler. On my walk along Manhattan Avenue yesterday afternoon (and he still wrote in first person then), all the foliage on all the trees in the messy mobile home court across the street — and they are blessed with many trees — say enviously — every trailer with a full-grown tree over it, cottonwoods, aspen, elm (which have doggedly survived the inroads of the pestilential beetle), are all quite laden with fresh verdure. Each is a green burgeoning parasol — often shading some of the most slovenly yards in creation — an arboreal parasol over abandoned bedsprings, doghouses, warped plywood kitchen chairs, and auto parts — as if by the design of a slob virtuoso. The woodbine with its five-six fingers is already spreading its green quilt over the six-foot-high woven-wire fence of the square, well-built white-painted adobe house on the corner of Marble Avenue. The place is well-kept and spacious, has a guest house, a two-car garage, and occupies a large corner lot, and yet during the five years we have lived here, it has changed hands at least four times — and is presently advertised for sale. Why? Is it because of the proximity of the “mobiloon” courts, as I call them, ours and our seedy neighbors’? I don’t know.

In our own court next door, in front of toothless, garrulous, ultra-God-fearing, widowed Mrs. Hurst’s trailer, and also diagonally across the pavement, at stocky, muscular, health-spa-frequenting Mr. Nolsten’s place, rows of tulips stand guard like gaudy pickets. Incredibly, this is my eighty-first spring, I reflect — with rampant solipsism: 81. Nine 9’s. In answer to a request from the Jewish Publication Society for a better Xerox copy of a memoir I published some years ago in Midstream, I hunted through the cartons where my writings are packed helter-skelter — as usual. I found the Zionist magazine with the article in it, but I also found something else which intrigued me greatly. I had forgotten I owned it: it was the restaurant workers’ union house organ, the Hotel and Club Voice, and in it a published account of an interview in April 1966. Pop was born twenty-eight years before me, in 1878; he was eighty-three when interviewed: eighty-three, and still occasionally waiting at table. He is categorized as a Roll Call waiter: “I make three lunches a week,” he is quoted as saying. “I can’t stop working.”

It was because of the “runaway” best-seller status that my novel had achieved a little more than a year before the interview that Pop had been sought out for this signal honor. “Are you the father of Ira Stigman?” Pop reported his patrons everywhere asking. “Are you the father of the man who wrote the best-seller?” (How had Pop replied to those who asked whether his insensate rage as portrayed by his author son had been exaggerated?) The magazine was already packed away in its carton, and in too awkward a place for an old arthritic to get at conveniently. Pop had said something to the effect that he was a little stern, but not like the book. He had been “a little sore” at first, at his son’s portrayal of his father, but he figured that was fiction. (Still, I recall Mom telling me that Pop remarked after he first perused the book: “I’m sorry I beat him so much.”) Of Mom he said “She would give her neck for him.” Meaning me. And how much she loved to have me kiss her brow. Curious: M prompts me to an identical show of endearment.

Most of the interview could be characterized as typically Pop: a matrix of confusions, confabulations, inventions, contradictions. He had me Bar Mitzvah’d on the Lower East Side instead of in East Harlem. Some of it, his errors of omission and commission, might have been due to advanced age and failing memory, but the bulk of it was due to his incurable evasions, his inability to face himself, or simply to admit the truth. It was the trait that drove Mom crazy, literally — she had to be committed — his ineffable glosses on his own erratic, impetuous, infantile behavior, glosses that presented him as a feiner mensh, generous, cogent, steady — all the things he wasn’t, poor guy. Infant — Mom baited him with the word, and it was the word that infuriated him most, because it struck nearest home: infant. And when he was forced to face his own senselessness, face his own puerile self-deceptions, beyond all equivocating, beyond all denial, he either struck out at the one who had the temerity to show him his error — or he wept. Pop wept. Poor unfortunate. What a martyr he made of his wife. The juvenile who pleaded with his father to apprentice him to a fiddler, so that he could play in a kletchmer at weddings and merry-makings, that he might contribute to jollity, to joy. What a difference that might have made in the man, all the difference in the world.

But. . but the thing that attracted me most, the feature I pored over the longest time, although I must have seen it many, many times years and years ago, was Pop in a photo, a vintage 1913 photo, leaning against one of the fills or shafts of his milk wagon, a milk wagon painted dark. (It was a dark shade of brown — as well as a seven-year-old remembers it seventy-four years later.) Beside Pop stood one who Pop had told me was the inspector, a man even shorter than Pop, although stocky — Pop was slight, but wiry. The former wore the street clothes of the time, high, starched collar, tie, overcoat, and fedora hat, as befitted a company inspector. Pop wore his milkman’s pea jacket and visored cap. On the side of the wagon were printed the words that I still remember. I had already learned them at age seven, not only learned to read them, but to chant them: Sheffield Farms, Slawson Decker Company. And the horse, Billy — the centerpiece, the most charismatic creature in the picture — a big brown horse whom I saw urinate blood the first day Pop drove him, when I accompanied Pop in the milk wagon: Billy was just at that moment looking around and facing the camera, his ears pricked up, his long, equine visage contemplative and uncomprehending. Gentle beast. The caption under the photo, in Pop’s handwriting, read: “My horse Billy.”

Pop told me once that he tried to organize his fellow milk wagon drivers when he worked for a company named Levi Dairy — and was fired for his union activities. And he described a restaurateur “shooing” him out of his restaurant with a table napkin for attempting to organize the waiters there. Poor feckless man. Undoubtedly he was telling the truth when he told me of his “union man” activities. But as my son Jess cannily observed: “Pop meant well, but his judgment was atrocious.” Ditto his son. .

Of late, my work has been delayed by severe hindrances and obstacles, trolls on the bridge. In addition to some mental confusion, I have been quite unsteady. Especially, so it seemed to me, after first taking massive doses of cortisone just prescribed for me. Before I knew it, I had three times come close to falling. Once I saved myself by grabbing the handle on the freezer compartment in the kitchen, another time landing on the bathroom stool, a third time against the wall, scraping the skin off my elbow. Allowing myself even two or three degrees variance from the vertical when I stand or walk, I now realize, is a precarious deviation. I perambulate with a cane, and I would use two canes if it weren’t such an infernal nuisance, didn’t hamper me in my other movements — not to mention rendering me more tottering and conspicuous than I already am.

Such is the condition of the aged writer, or this one: no different from other individuals of his species, except that in this case he has still to tackle seventy-five or a hundred pages of narrative before he can lay claim to having completed a second draft. Not a completed piece of work (is there such?), but a second draft. How long will it take? How long will he live? Two unknowns, and in all likelihood, two inequalities, of benefit only one way and not the other, and guaranteeing nothing in any event: simply sine qua non. You are not required to finish, ran the Talmud dictum; neither may you desist from your task while you can do it. I would very much like to finish; I would very much like to complete a third draft. Perhaps it is because I seek to consummate my wish that I live. How strange that I should still strive to accomplish the task, even though the proceeds of all this travail are posthumous. How strange, in a word, is man, to whom almost everything finally becomes marginal — while still hale and in possession of all his faculties — except (probably a delusion) the Promethean catalytic exercising of his consciousness. In a universe of a billion trillion stars is there another like him? I’m inclined to doubt it. Man is matchless, man is peerless. (Far be it from me to lay claim to that revelation.) And yet, most peoples are unable so far to live in more than nominal peace with their neighbors. And some with virtually none: I think of Israel.

In the meantime my beloved M has received a phone call from Rosemary in Los Alamos, erstwhile secret city of the atom bomb. A vivacious woman in her mid-thirties, Rosemary teaches piano there, and lives with her husband, a nuclear physicist employed in the Los Alamos complex — a most melancholy-looking man who repudiates any imputation of melancholy, disavows it completely. Would M accept a commission to compose a suitable piece of music to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Fuller Lodge in Los Alamos, Rosemary asked. The answer was: Yes. Before she went off to fetch Marie, our dear and trusted cleaning woman, M had already left word with me to answer in the affirmative, in case Rosemary called. I relayed the message to her, to Rosemary’s great satisfaction. M has chosen a selection from Peggy Bond Church’s story about life in Los Alamos, before, during, and after the installation of the plant for creating the atomic bomb, and its successful detonation in the desert afterward. The name of the book is The House at Otowi Bridge, and it recounts many of the experiences of Edith Warner, who lived in the neighborhood more than twenty years, opened a tearoom next to the Rio Grande, a tearoom which was accessible to the research scientists at Los Alamos. In the course of time, though at first she had no inkling of what the project was about, she became acquainted with many of the foremost nuclear scientists of the period: Oppenheimer, Bohr, Fermi, Teller — who rode down the hill in their jeep to partake of her ragout and her famous chocolate cake. M now had to wait to receive permission from the author’s heirs and the publishers of the book to use the selection, incorporate it into her composition. No hitch was expected from that quarter; permission was assured; it was a mere formality.

So — considering the magnitude of the occasion, its importance as a musical event, M’s success in measuring up to the challenge would establish her fame as a composer nationwide. An artist she had already demonstrated she was — with her setting to the poem “Babi Yar,” and even more impressively, her Unaccompanied Cello Sonata. And now this is the offing, due by September, by my wife — I knew she would do an outstanding, perhaps a superlative piece of work, my wife, at age seventy-nine, an artist, once a student of Boulanger, to be reckoned with in her own right, an admirable, a noted musician — how strange to wrest away my own ego, try to anyway, render homage to that modest, unassuming, devoted woman, grown in stature in old age. The prospect fills me with a sweet serene joy. How much did I have a hand in that growth? How much did my own groping tenacity affect her development, spur it by example? I didn’t know, I felt it did, and then discounted my intuition as another example of my supreme egotism.

III

Sense of foreboding? And why not? Through all those scruffy streets of this his childhood and youth in slummy East Harlem. What gave them that character? You — suppose you were a writer, as Edith said you were meant to be, and would become — how would you describe that quality that made them scruffy, slummy? What? The neglect? They weren’t too dirty. The “white wing” street cleaners with brush and barrel — wheelbarrel — did their job every morning. Mostly wops, they didn’t do a bad job either, rounding up trash and scraps of garbage of all sorts with their characteristic shove-and-pause of the coarse-bristled push broom. Horseshit, in less than two decades, had practically disappeared from the asphalt, replaced by the automobile, both boon and bane; so cleaning up that was no longer a chore. No, it wasn’t an impression of uncleanliness, of the presence of noisome litter, that gave the slum its hopeless, joyless look. But rather that everything seemed worn, spiritless, the houses, the housefronts, the stoops, all weather-worn and stained, as if the very masonry became impregnated to some degree by the treadmill of existence within. Ah, that gave them that quality, the streets he wouldn’t be going through much longer — not with that regularity, that monotony, of day in, day out, to and from the Lenox and 116th subway station, or to and from 112th near Fifth for a piece of ass: Fifth for a filched piece of ass. Fifth Avenue, Filched Avenue — oh, Ira, don’t drift now: What gave them that forlorn, frowsy look? Monotony. Stagnation. Meanness. What do you mean by meanness? he asked himself. Just utilitarian, run-down, and nothing else to redeem it: like a subway station, like the 96th Street and Broadway transfer station, a place where you had to wait, longer or shorter, depending on your luck, before you could get the hell out of there, out of Harlem, to get somewhere else, somewhere you wanted to go. So you didn’t give a goddamn about the place itself — that wasn’t part of your life, except of necessity, a bustling, perfunctory channel, a subway turnstile, a stepping-stone to somewhere else. So the slum streets exuded grubbiness; that was it. Everybody wanted to get out. He did also. Oh, Jesus, yes. And he was — already he was halfway out. . and Mom too was talking about moving to the Bronx after he graduated from CCNY, so why the foreboding?

He ought to be blithe. He ought to cheer. Halfway out of these goddamn streets, and the nine different, sad ways home from the Lenox Avenue subway, sad and autumnal, sad Friday after Thanksgiving, Thanxy, Larry said, with the sun south like a kid’s hoop tipped over behind downtown buildings. Approaching the equinox. No, no, the solstice, the winter solstice, when Minnie’s boss let her go home way early for the erev Shabbes. Was her boss ever religious? Almost as bad as Zaida. Get home before sundown, start cleaning up, bathing, primping, fluffing out the waves in tresses, all in order to prepare to pay homage to the Sabbath Queen. Minnie got both ends and the middle out that way: Thanxy on Thursday, and erev Shabbes on Friday, and Saturday and Sunday off too — wow.

But — what? Yes. He was about to sever from existence here, breaking away from nearly fourteen years of it. He had formed part of his milieu while he lived here, grew up here; he had formed part of it, and he was formed by it. Look at yourself: all you’ve become, and all you wish you ne’er had become, can’t obliterate and can’t give up. . Cut it out. You’ve got Edith. Yeah, all right, all right. But he was made; that was the point. He was formed, set in the mold, made. And now he had to break up what he was. Or try to. In Edith’s apartment, on Morton Street in the Village, the answer was yes. He could. Coming home, into 108 East 119th Street, on the first-floor front, he’d bet the answer was no. On 118th Street, right here, this minute, between Madison Avenue and Park, still walking home in the cold-empty dreary street, the answer was maybe.

He ought to have been happy — Edith had tucked him inside her, and had laughed when he got a hard-on, and said, “Wait for me, lover.” Lover, he! Larry was the one the word fitted. He had been damn harsh with Larry, cruel, the way he cut his friend off. Cut him off from sharing in his life. But what the hell was he going to do? He didn’t know how to be politic, or civil, never did. He hadn’t been raised that way. He and his superstitions: that was another gift from Pop. Put your underwear on backward or inside out, uhuh! That was bad luck. If you’ve forgotten something, and come back into the house to get it — uhuh! You might as well not go, give up your mission, you’re going in vain. Praise something, admire something too warmly, uhuh! A gitoik, you’ve blighted it with the Evil Eye. How do you pry that out of yourself? O saisons, O châteaux—was that Iz’s quote from Rimbaud? — Quelle âme est sans défauts?

Oh, Park Avenue under the steel viaduct of the Grand Central, oh, shabby tenements, what’ve you got to say? Or what was he trying to tell himself? Himself — he had to laugh — he wasn’t a self; he was a manifold, he was a clump of chumps, he was like a swarm of interacting creatures about to leave the old. . the old warren. That was it. He was about to leave home, break with his surroundings, break away from Mom. How many times did he have to say that: apprehensive because of it. No matter if the new was better than the old, no matter if he was to live with Edith, part of the time, for a while, and permanently afterward. He had figured it out: change, change, that made one forbode. Okay. Okay. “Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.” Okay, okay — he heard a Grand Central train approaching overhead, a muted rumble, saluting his a-home-again stumble. “Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more ye myrtles brown.” Okay. Okay. “O fare thee well”—that was a good one from Hausman—“for ill fare I.” No, that would fit Larry, not him. But after all, what had he said to the guy? Nothing so bad, only the way he said it.

You turned the corner around Jake’s six-story pile, ugly six-story pile of Jake’s house, bricks brown as coffee grounds. Fitting landlord Jake was too, like a steer, poor fat Mamie’s counterpart, though she was no longer landlady. After Jake’s house came the three-story dwelling next, where the Italian barber once had his shop and his spiral red-white pole in front, and Leo D and his widowed mother had once lived on the first floor — oh, boy, that pasta, after they moved — his reward — and the awful bellyache, wow! And the terrible hike to Edith’s in bed with Lewlyn, her olive-skinned body naked under dark bathrobe coming to the door laughing guiltily felicitous. . from opening the calipers of her thighs around Lewlyn, now closing them around his. Wasn’t that strange? And what made the difference? Time. Time and change. You couldn’t compress it all: Larry get off, Lewlyn get on, Lewlyn get off, Ira mount her, Ira get in. Gang fuck stretched over months and years. . Jesus, the things that came to mind: gang fuck, whorehouse, geologic eons: what would the past year be, compared to the billions of Precambrian years he was walking on? The metamorphic mica schist, the gneiss. Not even yesterday. Not even five minutes ago. Human time and change. Who would know as he knew that beside Jake’s brown fortress had once been the escape doors of a movie house on Park Avenue, a movie house that failed: metal-sheathed escape exits where in the summer you put your head against the other kid’s ass to make a train of horses, while the opposing side jumped up on your back, yelling as they landed, “Johnny on the pony, one, two, three!” and tried to break down the train. What crude games these micks brought over from Ireland. Or their grandfathers did. . 108 East 119th Street.

IV

Mrs. Shapiro was in the kitchen with Mom when Ira entered, dumpy, shapeless Mrs. Shapiro. She lived “in the back” on the same floor, in the five tsevorfeneh rooms, because she didn’t object to looking out at backyards and wash poles the way Mom did, and she had been living in the house almost as long as the Stigman family. Despite her illiteracy, Mrs. Shapiro managed to keep abreast of the latest news, usually of Jewish interest, thanks to Mom, who read the paper to her neighbor almost every day, when both had a little free time. And of course she read her as well the latest installment of the roman, the serial that appeared daily in Der Tag. Mrs. Shapiro was in better circumstances now than when Ira was a kid. She had taken in boarders then, and one of them Ira still remembered: a tall, lanky guy, a men’s garment presser by trade, a Mr. Zolichef, who openly offered Mom, in Mrs. Shapiro’s kitchen — and in Ira’s presence — five dollars for letting him gratify his sexual cravings on her person. How the hell it was said in Yiddish, Ira no longer remembered, but intercourse with her was the gist of it — and so crude, the two women burst into laughter. And of course, Ira would remember exactly that. Mrs. Shapiro no longer took in boarders, no longer had to, because her three children, Meyer and Joe and Sophie, were all working and contributing to the household. Meyer was a bookkeeper, and Joe worked in Biolov’s drugstore — still worked in Biolov’s drugstore, where he had taken the job after Ira quit in resentment at being docked for the five dollars he lost, or that was stolen from him. Sophie was a file clerk. Long ago, Ira, as he did with every little girl he had a chance to, tried to induce her to “play bad” with him, without success.

So life was easier for Mrs. Shapiro now, for which Mom was very happy, goodhearted Mom, because before the children began to earn and contribute to the household — and had become old enough to insist that their mother get some of their earnings — her husband, Abe, squat, bald, pompous ladies’ garment worker, had allowed her a pittance, even less than Mom’s, on which to run the household. And Mrs. Shapiro, in order to make both ends meet, as soon as the children were off to school, left the house to work as a domestic — of the most menial kind, scouring floors, cleaning windows and woodwork, boiling and scrubbing clothes on corrugated washboards. Mom had previously thought — and so she had informed the rest of the family — that Mrs. Shapiro was a shnorrerkeh, a moocher, a spurious mendicant, who frequented Jewish philanthropic and charitable institutions for which she could beg or solicit, because Mrs. Shapiro frequently returned home with all manner of bundles and packages in her black oilcloth shopping bag, sometimes clothing, obviously castoffs according to Mom, or household articles, or half loaves of bread, staples, matzahs when in season, leftover kugel, leftovers in jars. Quiet and meek, the poor woman seemed to accept the unspeakable stinginess of her husband, his contemptuous — and contemptible — treatment of her as her fate: she had brought no whit of dowry to her marriage, came of a large family of a bali gooleh, a stage driver, was homely and illiterate. No wonder the bastard, her husband, lorded it over her, lorded it over her unconscionably. It was only by accident — from the caterer of a wedding Mom attended — that she learned that Mrs. Shapiro did domestic work for the caterer’s wife, and the things she brought home were discards and leftovers, meted out to her by her employer. She worked. She was not the illegitimate recipient of Jewish charity. She toiled to eke out the miserable pittance her husband thought fit to dole out for her household needs. Compared to Abe, Pop was a model of munificence. So there were worse than Pop, Ira reflected: worse in that respect, like Mr. Shapiro, the skinflint, miserly Yid. But how was he toward his kids — and they toward him? They were fond of him, and he of them. Ah, there was the difference. Figure that out.

Much as he despised Mr. Shapiro, Ira felt a genuine affection for Mrs. Shapiro. Her humility, her resignation, moved him; she aroused his sympathy, all the stronger because she didn’t seem to feel sorrow for herself about her condition, even to the extent that Ira felt for her. Her deprivation, her squat dumpiness, her flabby homeliness, even her illiteracy she accepted so meekly it made pity cry out within him. But then, he was a nut. He felt things beyond all bounds; he felt his own notions of them, not what they really were.

Still, he owed Mrs. Shapiro a debt. Perhaps he owed her his life. That was no mere notion. She had intervened years and years ago to halt one of Pop’s atrocious, demented thrashings, administered at the time Ira was wrongfully accused of knocking down Mrs. True’s little boy. Accompanied by a bunch of kids from the street, Mrs. True, pretty young Irish matron who lived on the top floor, had come into the house and immediately slapped Ira’s face for knocking her kid down to the sidewalk — which he hadn’t. Patty True was the smallest of the crowd of kids trailing Ira and chanting “Fat, fat, the water rat.” And when Ira turned in feigned threat of pursuit, they fled, and knocked Patty on his face, bruising his cheek and bloodying his nose. Pop had gone mad. He had trampled on Ira, picked him up by the ears, and thrown him down, picked him up again, groveling and shrieking, from the floor. Even Mrs. True had been taken aback. There was no telling what would have happened to him if Mrs. Shapiro hadn’t interposed herself between them. Undaunted by Pop’s insensate rage, his snarling menace, she demanded in Yiddish: “Are you going to slay your own son on the word of a goya?” How staunchly she stood there, unflinching, obdurate — stood there a whole minute while Ira howled — blocking Pop from administering any more of his maniac punishment — until Mom, hearing her son’s bewildered, hectic and belligerent cries, flung a furious “Vot you vant?” at Mrs. True that sent her and her retinue of Irish gamins packing. And then she turned the full brunt of her wrath on Pop, cursed him so fiercely for an insane murderer, so fiercely, fervently, her hyperboles of execration seemed on the verge of materializing until Pop retreated to the front room.

“Hello, Mrs. Shapiro, vus macht ihr?” Ira said in passing as he set briefcase down on green oilcloth of the round table.

“Mein kaddish’l iz duh,” Mom beamed. What joy she got out of the mere sight of him, what maternal bliss—

Even Mrs. Shapiro smiled slowly, admiringly. He was a collitch boy, soon to graduate, an ausgestudierteh mensh. He had reason for pride; still, his heart felt sunken within him, and he didn’t know why. Oh, maybe he did: the brusque spurning of Larry, of a friend who had meant so much, his pending separation from Mom, and from all this snug, sheltered life. Oh, fare thee well, for ill fare I.

He doffed hat and coat, went into the frigid, dismal little bedroom behind the kitchen door — the crypt, Mom called it, one of the kvoorim. Or did the word mean tombs? Apt translation, for here he was about to die. He laid his coat down across the bed — he could have hung it up on the antlers of the old clothes tree, but he would be leaving soon. So there it was across the bed — where Minnie had been across the bed, athwart but nevermore. Oh, no. if only he noted as attentively other people’s lives — couldn’t, though, obsessed with his own. Only on the East Side, 9th Street and Avenue D, he had been part of everything. Same old story. Why the hell didn’t Mr. Dickson in English Composition 1, Mr. Kieley in English 2, ask him: submit something else, a story, a sketch, an impression, that could go in the Lavender, like that Sacco-Vanzetti episode in the car barn that summer — socko! — given him a purpose — Ah, don’t blame them. It was himself: his mind always on Minnie, or on simpering, adolescent Stella to straddle him by the radio. He ought to be glad Edith had broken him at last into making love, as she called it, to an intelligent, full-grown woman. But he wasn’t happy, not right now. Moishe Kapoyer. Mr. Topsy-turvy, he dreaded happiness. He was breaking with what he was with little hope of any remaking into anything else; little hope of remaking, and with too much expected of him — by himself above all that was it, that was the worst of it. He was inadequate to the task. He reentered the warmth of the kitchen.

Mrs. Shapiro was standing up, one hand on the doorknob, ready to leave.

“You don’t have to run away because I’m here, Mrs. Shapiro.” Atrophied neighborliness was like a dead weight, self-conscious and Sisyphean.

“I have to do a little more shopping. It will soon be time to begin preparing for the Shabbes,” Mrs. Shapiro replied.

“So? It’s only about what?” Ira directed a pro forma look at the Big Ben on the icebox lid. “Not even three o’clock.”

“It’s almost winter, it’s November, Ira,” said Mrs. Shapiro. “It grows dark early. Don’t you know? Everything must be done earlier. The Sabbath meal prepared earlier; the candles must be blessed earlier.”

“Yeah, but everybody comes home the same time anyway.”

“Today’s world. What can you do? I keep to the way I was brought up. I prepare and I wait. I have followed the Commandments of our great Rabbi of Rabbis, Moses. I pay tribute to him in my thoughts on Friday night, and he repays me with peace.” She smiled her slow, remote smile. “Show me money, show me gems more valuable. True?”

“I guess so.”

“Let others do as they see fit. For me, erev Shabbes cannot be tampered with.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Indeed, so says my father also,” Mom concurred. “A devout Jew, he lives off the earning of four sons who work Friday night, Saturday all day. Only not on the high holy days. Still he makes no complaint that they break the Sabbath. Let them do as they see fit, he says also. But how else can he live unless they work on the Sabbath? How many bosses are there like Minnie’s observant to the letter?”

Mrs. Shapiro nodded. “Well, I must go.” Her face, so flabby, double-chinned, and pale, paid open tribute to Ira, the educated man. “May God further your work in the collitch.”

“Thanks. I need it.”

“Do you still believe in God? Tell me.”

“I? I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings, Mrs. Shapiro.”

“Then I have my answer. And why don’t you believe?”

Ira chuckled mirthlessly.

“Go. At fourteen,” Mom intervened, “his father accused him of being an Epikouros. He declared there was no God.”

“Azoy? At fourteen? I was fourteen once. I have children who were fourteen once. I and they, and of course Abe, all believe. How did you learn God didn’t exist?”

He recalled the disks of pigmentation on her pale cheeks as she stood, squat and obdurate, between himself and Pop’s fury: the homely, homely Jewess, despised even by that unspeakable pisspot of a husband, she saved his life, for all he knew — Jesus, the labyrinthian implications he no longer wanted to think about. “I don’t know, Mrs. Shapiro,” Ira said abruptly. “It didn’t make sense to believe in God.”

“And I don’t know what to believe. I half believe, half not. But go through the motions I must. I can’t help myself. Would to God I got the comfort out of it you get. You see: I don’t believe and I call on Him in whom I don’t believe. It’s a form of madness.”

Mom laughed her apologetic, contralto laugh. “Then you’re half an Epikouros.”

“Indeed. Perhaps more than half.” Mrs. Shapiro rested her puffy hand on the white ceramic doorknob. “To me, He doesn’t make sense either.”

“What? What do you mean, Mrs. Shapiro? How can He not make sense for you?” Minor surprise, minor perplexity, oscillated fleetingly within Ira’s mind. Was she serious, twitting him, or what?

“You’ll forgive me: I don’t know. That is for the educated.”

“Oh.” Ira relaxed. He was about to chuckle.

“When one speaks of sense, of wisdom, then for the educated, the Epikouros, it must spring from here, no?” She touched the thin, graying hair of her temple.

“I suppose so.” This time Ira did chuckle. “And for you?”

“Only when I go to buy something, if it’s worth the money, if I can get it for less, from the seller or somewhere else.”

“Yes?”

“But of God I can’t think. He doesn’t spring from the same place, because as you know, I’m an illiterate woman. He has no place, so He makes no sense.”

“Oh, boy.”

“But on Friday nights, erev Shabbes, He seems to alight here.” She spread a hand over her heavy breast. “Here where the tears flow from.”

“I see.”

Here where the tears flow from. How bitter the taste of his own lips, and how fitfully they matched together again. He exhaled breath in a gust.

“Noo, Mrs. Stigman.” Mrs. Shapiro turned the doorknob. “You’ll read me the rest of the roman tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

“Ihr zolt hub’n a gitten Shabbes.”

“A sheinem dank. Ihr aukh.” House keys clinking, Mrs. Shapiro padded out from kitchen into hall.

“She’s smart,” Ira acknowledged.

“Indeed, she retains more from my reading to her about political matters than I do myself. She retains more and construes better.”

“Yeah?” He sat down in his favorite chair.

“Are you going to become a guest?” Mom said, after a pause.

“You didn’t worry about me?”

“One night. I’m used to that.”

“I’m afraid I’m really going to become a guest, Mom.”

“Yes? When?”

“Beginning now.”

“Azoy?” She moved her forearms across the strawberry-and-white sheaves printed on her housedress, until her elbows locked against her abdomen. “Are you staying here tonight?”

“No, I’m staying at Edith’s apartment.”

“Azoy. And for how long?”

“That’s what I came to tell you. I don’t know.”

Edith had asked him to bring some of his belongings to the apartment. Now that he was her lover, she saw no reason why he shouldn’t stay overnight more often. She would rather he did, she said: she missed his company. And that way too, staying with her often, he would avoid, avoid as much as possible, a recurrence of the ugly situation at home. Ugly situation, she called it. There was his father to consider, Edith emphasized: the always latent violence between them.

“Have you got a carton in the house?” Ira asked.

“For what?” And then she nodded. “I can empty one. It has summer curtains in it. A large one I don’t have.”

“I don’t need a large one. I’m only taking a few things: some socks, my BVDs, a couple of ties, a couple of shirts — what else? My new pair of pants. A few books. I gotta carry my briefcase in the other hand.”

“And the heavy underwear, Ira? It’ll soon be December, you know. How about a sweater?”

“Maybe the one without sleeves.”

Mom sighed. “I’ll go empty the carton.” She went into the other part of the house. Even though the kitchen door was shut, he could hear the familiar thump and slither of cardboard. She was probably emptying the contents of the carton on her bed. .

Foreboding. . What the hell was the matter with him? Foreboding and cuckoo combinations of disparate quotes: Woe is me, my mother, that I was ever born to set it right. Foreboding of long journeys: “Oh, who is this one has done this deed?”

Mom brought the carton into the kitchen: medium-sized, sturdy, all four flaps intact. “It’s a handsome one,” she said. “Joey Shapiro brought it to me from the drugstore.”

“Let’s see if I can get my arm around it.” Ira stood up. He rested the carton on his hip. “Just about.”

“And while you’re collecting your belongings, I’ll make a little snack.”

“Don’t bother. I’m going to have supper with her tonight — dinner, they call it.”

“A little snack won’t mar your appetite. I have smoked whitefish.”

“Please, Mom.”

“A little Muenster cheese and a bagel. My son, my only son, how can it harm you?”

“Okay, okay.”

“And a little jabah.” She always punned bilingually on the English word “java,” making it sound like the word for frog in Yiddish.

The cardboard of the carton was cold to the touch when he picked it up — as cold as his dreary little bedroom when he entered it — his single bed with the coat across it. Maybe Minnie would sleep in it now — nevermore to return.

Couldn’t help his thoughts, though, his goddamn swoon of fantasy. He began packing the carton from the drawers in the mirror-surmounted bureau in the front room. Socks, oh, two pair — you could always wash them. BVDs, a couple. All right? One pair of gray flannel pants? Joke: how many pair of gray flannel pants you got? And two laundered shirts pinned to cardboard. Oh, where has the chinky Chinaman gone who gave you litchi nuts on the East Side? Hey, you know? It’s you you’re forsaking, you who took the litchi nuts. Well, bless my soul. . No neckties with gravy spots. Jesus, no room for old cardigan either. Hey. Look up there, will you? — on the wallpapered wall: Zaida, Baba, Mom’s parents, wearing earlocks he, and wig she, with what horror watching their young crazy grandson about to go live with a shiksa. Oy, vey iz mir! Well, not so bad, Zaida, Baba: Which is better? A little dump of a Harlem habitat with everyone crammed into the kitchen, or a cozy little corner of a Greenwich Village apartment under lemony lampshade on a card table? Or lusting after your sister or tearing off a paltry piece of your kid cousin — that, or being a shiksa’s lover. A petite Ph.D.’s pet, a petite shiksa’s lover-lad — such a sweet sound. Now, there’s one for you. Propound me that: untutored sister or ungifted kid cousin — or refined shiksa? There’s one for Solomon, for Shloimeh ha Mailackh. Gotcha there. . Look out the north window, through the lace curtains, at the red-brick six-story, sick (sic) story dump, where Mrs. Green in her dingy white shift used to lean on her mop handle — mop handle in hand, mind you — framed in the first-floor window. Goodbye. Not bad, huh? And farewell, a long farewell to the little Dresden wolf and sheep and the shepherdess on the mantelpiece. Oh, fare thee well. And you too, dirty old lime-daubed bricks across the airshaft. Jesus, how you used to peal out, when that wasn’t a coat got laid across the bed. Like morning stars when they sang together. Comin’ through.

Carton under arm, he returned to the kitchen, relegating the cold behind the closed door. Strong aroma of Mom’s primitively brewed jabah, jabah coffee wafted through the room. On the table, two, no less, bagels, gold slab of whitefish, thick, inelegantly sliced Muenster cheese, big wedge of butter right out of the tub, were set out in hopes of filial seduction.

“What do you think I’m going to be able to eat tonight, Mom? If I eat this?” Ira tried to keep his voice gentle.

“Seh gurnisht, gurnisht.”

“Some gurnisht.” Well, no point in making an issue of it with Mom, poor Mom. Don’t argue about it; just try to exercise a little restraint. He went to the drawers under the china closet, got out a couple of ed texts, and his copy of Milton, and put them in the carton on top of his clothes. Then he sat down at the table.

Holding the chipped blue enamel coffeepot in the scorched pot holder, Mom poured coffee into the white mug. “Have you everything you need?”

“I think so, Mom.”

“Handkerchiefs too?”

“Oh, yeh. I nearly forgot ’em.” He reached for a bagel.

“Take. Eat. Don’t skimp.”

“When did I ever?”

“I have to entreat you to eat now. You’re my guest.”

“I’ll be home again. I told you.”

Mom sat down opposite him. If he hadn’t long ago become accustomed — become inured — to the mournful, deep-eyed fixity with which she regarded him, he would hardly have been able to eat.

“I might have sliced an onion for you, except that I know where you are going.”

“Thanks.”

“And what does she say about your frayed underwear?”

“Aw, Mom! What does she say about my frayed underwear?”

She laughed her light, humble, extenuating laugh. “Undoubtedly, she can buy you better.”

“I won’t sleep in my underwear anymore. She bought me pajamas.”

“Azoy?”

“At Wanamaker’s, this morning.” Ira chomped away. “She bought me a bathrobe too. A woolen one. A red one. She said it made me look like a Turkish sultan when I tried it on — he’s a king.”

“Will I ever have the bliss of seeing you in it?”

“I don’t know, Mom. She would like to meet you.”

“And I her. Noo? When?”

He delayed before answering, sought noncommittal evasion. “Well, it’s up to her.”

“Are you ashamed?”

“Of you?”

“Of your crude mother?”

“No.” Ira shook his head, not convincingly, but in predicament. “What will Pop say?”

“He’ll grieve.”

“What? What for?”

“Friends you’re not.”

“That’s right. I thought he’d be glad to get rid of me.”

“On good terms you will never be,” Mom continued. “And a burden you’ve been; don’t think you haven’t. But he’s an odd, peculiar creature. Follow him I can’t. Would I could understend him. You’re his son. His son, and for all the ill will between you, when he knows you’re going away from us, leaving us for a strange world, with its strange ways he can’t follow — well, God forbid, as if you were to die. Or as we left Austria for America. He’ll grieve.”

“Yeah? That’s news. You sure it’s not you?”

“No. It’s your father. A stupid man he isn’t. Shrewd, no. Not at all. But for some things, yes. Some things he discerns, he has pity for, he has feeling — who knows him? Only the bleak year.”

“So what would he want?” Ira stopped eating, could feel himself become grim and contrary.

“He hoped when you graduated, we would all move to the Bronx — in a handsome apartment near the Concourse — Minnie is working — someplace where she could entertain a caller. A caller; he doesn’t have to be a suitor. Lately, something has come to pass: he has the manner of a swain. So she whispered. He’s been accepted for training in the fire department. Now he’s a temporary policeman in a new reservoir they’re building. Of course, nothing is decided. I’m not even supposed to speak of it.”

“No. So what did he have in mind for me?”

“With you a schoolteacher, in a larger place to live, in a better one, of course, for you an extra bedroom. That was what he counted on. You would live with us.”

“In the Bronx?”

“Indeed.”

“Minnie would have a bedroom, I would have a bedroom. We’d be like Larry and his family.”

“Noo, about time. Would it harm us to live together until one of you married?” Mom asked rhetorically. “Bedrooms with doors. Genteel. Upstanding. A fine bathroom with a tile floor.”

“Yes?” Ira looked about the green walls, his gaze coming to rest on the clock: the hour was approaching four. “When was all this going to happen?”

“When you become half a schoolteacher.”

“Half a schoolteacher?”

“It’s a saying we Jews have. After you graduated from college. More coffee?”

“No, no. Thanks.” Ira tempered impatience. “I’ve got to be going.”

“She doesn’t make an early Shabbes, your dama?” Mom jested.

“Neither early nor late. No.”

“Noo, if it’s time to go,” Mom concluded obligingly. “Your friend Larry didn’t leave a good home to go live with an old shiksa—”

“The hell she is! She’s not old!” Ira snapped.

“I only told you what he said. Old or not old, you’re leaving us, no?” She indicated the carton. “And just when home might be shayn, nice, good.” She mixed English with Yiddish.

“I’ll be back. I told you I’ll be back. Where do you think I’m going? I’m only going downtown!”

“But strange it is. Can you say it isn’t? Where will you stay, when she has her own visitors, collegios, professorim, who knows?”

“I may have to disappear for a few hours. What else? She’s talking about moving across the street to a bigger apartment, maybe with an extra little room. I’ll come back here. Don’t worry.”

“Not here. To the Bronx — with God’s help — if only for Minnie’s sake.”

“Okay. Then to the Bronx.”

“And what if she taunts you with that good word: Jew?”

“Aw, come on, Mom! For Chrissake!”

She loves you so much?” And at Ira’s silence. “Noo, why not, why not indeed? Handsome and young and full of beguiling fancies. There grows another Maxim Gorky, said our first boarder on 9th Street: Feldman. You enchanted him with your tales, even as a child. ‘Mrs. Stigman, there grows another Maxim Gorky.’ Well, what can you do? Do you remember Feldman?”

“Yeah, and I’m gonna leave in about ten minutes.”

“Then you do remember him?”

“A short fellow, wasn’t he? With curly hair. He used to stand on the stoop in 9th Street in the summer and watch us kids whirl punks against the mosquitoes. Punks are those long thin sticks that give off a smell. That’s how I remember him.”

“He was a very gentle, refined man.”

“That’s good. Mom, I love talking to you, but—” Ira stood up and began interlocking the flaps of the carton. “Let’s get some string.”

Mom stood up also — slowly. “Don’t you want to say goodbye to him?”

“Huh?” Ira rested hands on carton. “Pop?”

“He’ll be home soon. And he’ll be home promptly.”

“Oh, you mean Friday, and all that? No, what for? Let’s have the string. Tell me where you keep it. I’ll get it.”

“I’ll get it.” She went to the sink, pulled the little polka-dot curtain back under the dark recess of the sink, to disclose the wooden box where she kept household items. “It’s not because of Friday.” She stooped down, rummaged in the box, before she brought out a ball of sorted, knotted twine. “It’s not because of Friday he’ll be home so promptly. When was he ever so pious as that?”

“We’re getting all mixed up,” Ira said irritably. “I didn’t mean what for, when I said it. I meant stay around to say goodbye. I’m not going a thousand miles. I told you that.” He beckoned for the string impatiently. “I don’t want to get into a big quarrel with him.”

“I understend.” She handed him the knot-fringed ball. “It’s stout enough?”

“I’ll go around each way a few times.” He was beginning to feel uneasy: there it was again: something impending. He rolled the carton from side to side, binding it. Get out as soon as he could.

“Do you love her?” Mom asked.

“Boy, what a question. I guess so.”

“Sinful mother that I am, I seek to live in my son’s life. How did you make known your passion?”

“I didn’t. I wept. I think I said once when we were in bed that I wanted to be reborn.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t like what I’d become. Is that enough?”

“My own son.”

“Well.” He strained at the knot. “I’m going to need a knife.”

“I’ll fetch it.” She plodded to the cutlery drawer, next to the one in which he kept his texts and notebooks, brought out the heavy carving knife that Pop had sharpened and resharpened so often against the rim of the cast-iron sink, until the stained blade had become concave in the center. “Do you want it now?” She offered him the worn handle.

“No, I better go around once or twice more. Some of this string — just put it down.”

She laid the knife on the table. “Ai, my ears have begun to roar.”

“Your catarrh bothering you again? It’s clear outside, Mom. It’s cold, but it’s clear.”

“I can tell a day before when the weather changes. But it’s not always the weather. Woe can also wreak havoc. Ira, the roaring gets stronger.”

“I’m sorry.” Ira let the string go slack. “What do you want me to do, Mom? I can’t stay here. I absolutely can’t stay. And I’m not going to,” he added vehemently.

“But an educated man you are. You’ve studied such things. I can speak to you now.”

“Speak to me about what?” From slack to motionless, the string, and motionless the silly ball festooned with knots. He set the carton down on the table. “What are you talking about, Mom?”

“Stella was here last Sunday.”

As though he were deprived of independent speech, Ira kept looking at the carton. “Stella was here,” he repeated.

“You left early.”

“I left early.”

“You remember?”

“Oh, sure. I went sleepwalking that morning.”

“Ira, I’m serious.”

“So am I. Go ahead.”

“I left soon after you did — minutes. He was packing up his little satchel to go to that Catolisher benket in Cunyilant.”

“Yeah? I had not thought death had undone so many.”

“What? I don’t understand such deep English.”

“Don’t mind me.”

“I buy roach powder always from the same old Jew who has a small niche of a store on Park Avenue, smaller than even Zaida had in Veljish. And he reads the Talmud too, just like Zaida. And he sells other such items. Cleaning fluid. Camphor balls. Candles. Bon Ami for the windows. He gives me a few pennies off — he does it of his own accord. ‘You never haggle with me,’ he says. ‘You’re a fine woman.’”

“Yes, my mother.”

“I had already gone — what? — three blocks: to the top of the 116th Street hill — when—Gotinyoo! — I remembered: the keys! I didn’t have the keys to the house. How would I get in?”

“Where was Minnie?”

“She went to her friend to have her hair primped. Oh, where one’s mind strays sometimes! It’s unbelievable!” Mom became visibly incensed at herself. “To set out on an errand with one’s brain underground!”

“Oh, yeah.”

“I hurried. I ran. I flew. Gott sei dank, from 116th Street the way is downhill. I hastened and I sped. I rushed — to 119th Street at last, with might and main. And to the house. And up the stairs. Breathless. I burst into the kitchen—” Her lips closed, her broad countenance slackened with despondency, became forbidding in its quietus: “Isn’t he standing there with his member in his hand, fondling her?”

“Her?”

“Stella. Who else?” Mom said.

“Yeah?” Heartbeat flagged. “Pop?”

“‘Why did you come back?’ He ground his teeth at me — with such wrath, with such fury. As if I were the culprit. ‘Why did you come back?’”

Ira nodded, in the very depth of loss, loss of self, a very rubble of being. “He didn’t have much else to say.”

“But such fury! At me!”

“And now you have to tell me.”

“So you’ll know what kind of a father you have.”

“Goddamn it, I know what kind of a father I have!”

“Then you’ll know what you’re leaving me with.”

“You’ve got Minnie, goddamn it.” Ira struck the carton. It leaped away from him, pulling the ball of string out of his hand. The nubby sphere rolled no farther than his feet. He kicked it in a sudden onset of rage. “What do you want me to do? Stay? Christ’s sake, you’ll be worse off if I stay. I’ll kill someone!”

“I’m afraid he’ll kill me.” She moved the knife toward him along the green oilcloth of the table.

“Kill you!” Ira jeered. “Kill you! You’re dead already, for Christ’s sake. You’ve been martyred. I’ll kill that sonofabitch.” He grabbed the knife. “You gave me just the right thing. He’ll be home right away. I’ve had dreams of picking this thing up, again and again, and it always stuck to the table. Here it is. Free! Loose.”

“Oy veh, oy veh.” Mom kept nodding as if in prayer, davening. “Alas and woe is me. Ira, child.” She clasped her hands. “I spoke. Forget I spoke. Spare me! Spare me! Child, I beg you! Only this I lack! I beg you. A foolish thing I spoke. Ira, Ira. On my knees!” She made to seize the hand that held the knife.

“Go away! What the hell did you tell me for? I should’ve freed you from this bastard ten years ago — when all the other kids went to work. It’s been in my mind all these years. I had to go to high school, I had to go to college. Because of you. What do you want me to do? Pay off the debt?”

“No, no, no! It’s my fault—”

“You said it’s your fault — more than you know!”

“Forgive, forgive. Out of my anguish I had to tell you. Come, child. Remember this, this Professora, this Yeeda named. You’re going to another woman, another life.” She stooped, snatched up the ball of twine from the floor. “Child, let’s tie up your carton and be gone. Let’s not delay.”

“Anh, what the hell’s the use?” Ira threw the knife down on the table, took the ball of twine from her hands. “I’m through, Mom. I’m finished here. Do you understand? Don’t get me—” He gesticulated with gyrating hands. “Don’t get me tied up again. I can’t bear any more.”

“I understend. I understend. I can live with him. I’ve lived with him all these years. I’ll last till the end. I have Minnie. Go your way. It’s tight enough now, no? The string.”

“Yeah.” He found a clear length of string, free of knots, viciously yanked motley strands tight, pulled the knot he made as hard as he could. “You hold that here. Right here. Give me the knife. I’ll cut it. There. I’ll make a couple more knots.”

“Now you can go. I’ll get your hat and coat.”

“Oh, don’t worry. Nothing’s going to happen.”

“You swear? You won’t say anything?”

“Oh, no.”

“This week he’s been tender as a mulberry. This week I got my allowance on time. He said he wouldn’t fill the salt cellars and the pepper cellars and the ketchup bottles today. He’ll dispense with the extra dollar. He talked about coming home early to take me to a cinema show.”

“Today? On Friday?”

Mom nodded her head in a peculiarly negative way: “What? He used to slip in by himself on Friday night. Honorable Jew. I am not acquainted with his wiles? It’s some actress he wants to see: Pola Negri, who reminds him, he says, of Hannah.”

“Oh, yeah.” Ira paused at the bedroom door. “Pola Negri. I passed her pictures there in front of the theater on 116th Street.”

“Pola Negri. Such a name: Pola Negri.”

He went into the cold bedroom, put on his hat, picked up his overcoat athwart the bed, slid an arm into a sleeve as he came out into the kitchen. “How’s your catarrh?”

“It’s to be tolerated. And tolerate it I must. It’s quieted.”

“That’s good. Well, I better beat it, Mom.” He wriggled into his coat. “Say goodbye to Pop and to Minnie.”

“I’ll have to leave her word.”

“What do you mean?”

“We may be gone before she comes home.”

“Oh, yeah.” Ira hefted the carton reflectively. “That’s right.”

“The great sire will have to write her a message: to wait a little while for supper. The gefilte fish is in the window box. She can light the stove under the soup again if she wants to. I told her about his—” Mom’s fingers waved in ironic festoon—“his magnanimity. She was glad. Naturally.”

“You didn’t tell her about anything else?”

“Only you I would tell.” Rotating turbines. The empty house. Bleak kitchen. Wintry ambience of humid glistening blistery green walls. The brain needed a circuit breaker. Edith was like a shunt to a new life, but the old was still there, intact, accessible, with all the ferocious allure of the forbidden — Satan’s dilemma in Milton — the forbidden that augured ruinous foreboding, but still— Ira affected dawdling, set down the carton on the table. “What did Stella say when you came in?”

“You’re not going?”

“I can spare another minute. I’m not wrought up. Honest. Calm down.”

“Truth?”

“Truth.”

“And if he were to come in the door this minute?”

“I told you.” Ira shrugged emphatically. “It’s passed. I’m outta this dump, this life, if you call it that, this craziness. I’m outta your tsuris,” he capped sentiment with false toughness in Yiddish. “I don’t care if he comes home. ‘So long, Pop,’” Ira projected facetious farewell.

“I’m glad. I was afraid for a while. He’s not worth your ire. The whole thing. It’s Chaim’l, noo?”

“Yeah. Chaim’l is right. So what did she say?”

“What could she say? She turned red as the clout she was wearing.”

“The what? She was wearing a clout, you say?”

“That too.” Mom pressed her lips sideways in revulsion. “Shameless she, and shameless he.”

“Yeah. I don’t blame you, Mom.”

“Well. Nothing. But what fiend possessed her to come here?” Mom contracted in a fresh spasm of indignation. “She knows I have nothing in common with her. She’s flavorless. She’s insipid. The silly nonsense she talks about — she prattles. I can scarce abide her. And to come here to our neighborhood, to 119th Street. She fears it. But here she is. Why?”

Ira shook his head. “Got me, Mom,” he said in English. He lifted his briefcase. “Sorry, Mom. They say in English: Parting is such sweet sorrow.”

“Indeed, so it is. At least you’ll be in better hands. When will you come home?”

“Soon as I can.”

“And your career you won’t abandon? College you won’t abandon?”

“No, no. Listen, Mom, you asked me before, and I told you. I can’t stay there all the time. Part of the summer she goes west and rents the apartment. So I’ll have to come back here. And she’s getting that book together that I told you about. An anthology it’s called. She’ll be busy. Maybe I can help, but I’m not sure. Anyway, I don’t know where I’ll stay a lot of the time. You haven’t lost me yet.”

“No? Zolst gehen gesint. Give me a kiss.”

“G’bye, Mom.” Ira laid briefcase on carton to embrace her. He clasped her bulky, thick body in his arms, kissed her surprisingly soft cheeks, kissed her brow, as she had always wanted him to do since childhood. His throat tightened.

“God protect you,” she said.

“I hope so.” He transferred the heavy carton from table to washtub, so that he could the more conveniently take hold of it when he opened the door. He opened the door, hooked fingers into the carton strings, and was about to lift his burden from the white-oilcloth-covered washtub when he heard out of the hallway chill, out of the dim corridor, the light step, saw the slight figure, saw the glint of eyeglasses. His hand on the crossed cords of the carton opened. He stood with briefcase dangling from his arm.

“Hi ye, Pop.” Uttering his usual preliminary puff, the unsmiling little man came into the kitchen.

Unfriendly — offended — he looked first at Mom, then at Ira, and then at the carton on the washtub. “Noo, you’ve driven him off,” he said. “You weren’t content until you drove him off.”

“I? I drove him off?” Mom countered. “Are you mad? He’s going of his own accord. Tell him, Ira.”

But Pop interjected before Ira could speak: “You take me for a fool? I don’t understand that you already told him last night? And now he flees for good.” He pointed at the carton.

“Go. You’re demented.”

“I can’t recognize it?” He pointed up at Ira’s face.

“Listen, Pop—”

“Listen, Pop,” Pop mocked. “Noo?” he challenged. “It was such an abominable thing? And even so, a wife will tell a son about it. This isn’t an abominable thing?”

“Nobody said it was,” Ira palliated.

“Aha!”

“So I told him!” Mom flung defiantly at her husband. “Do I need to be ashamed, or you?”

“You see how her head works? Does she need to be ashamed, or I? Not that she shouldn’t be ashamed to tell her son, to besmirch his father. That’s nothing. Only to show how blameless she is. Why did you have to tell?” Pop confronted his wife. And then to Ira: “She enlightened you greatly with this? What have you to say?”

“Leave the boy alone,” Mom warned.

“Listen, Pop, will you listen? As far as what happened, it’s none of my damn business, all right? I’m not leaving home because of anything you did — about that — all right? I’m leaving because I’m going to live with somebody else. I’m going to live with a woman. Okay? In Greenwich Village. You’ve heard me talk about her: Edith, yes? I’m going to live with her. Part of the time. It has nothing to do with you at all. It’s practically my only hope. That’s why I’m going.”

“There you have the truth,” said Mom.

Pop, his suspicious, dog-brown eyes staring behind spectacles, searched Ira’s countenance with rare fixity. “Your only hope?”

“Yes.”

“To go live with an old shiksa?”

“I won’t go into that — that’s my affair.”

“And my affair?”

“That’s yours.”

“It’s so heinous?”

“I won’t go into that. It’s yours.”

“But she had to splash you with it. What have you to say? Tell.”

“Leave him alone!” Mom intervened.

“I demand to know.”

“As far as I’m concerned, Pop, all you did was, well—” Ira shrugged, denigrated. “It was just human, all right? Can I go now?”

“Tell her.” Pop pointed to his wife. “A man is left alone with a toy. What she’s doing here I don’t know. But a comely little toy she is. So what terrible thing has he done? Noo? He played with her. A pretty young plaything yields to a man’s caresses. He toys with her, and such a little toy. Does he merit the gibbet for that? I have such a dear and loving wife that I’m not tempted, tell me? Such a doting wife—”

“Gey mir in der erd,” Mom cut in stonily.

“Uh! That answer she has ready.”

“All right, let’s cut it out. Please.” Ira looked toward the door.

“And how many times need I hear about her brother’s prowess? She knows about her brother’s prowess. How?”

“Indeed. Moe would have suited me.”

“You see?”

“Mom, cut it out!” Ira snapped. “Let’s forget it! Jeez, I’ve got no argument, Pop. It’s one of those things. Please! As far as I’m concerned, I may be as much to blame as anybody.”

“How are you to blame?” Mom demanded.

“Maybe everybody is, and nobody is.” Ira wished to Christ he hadn’t lingered. He could have been gone and out of it. “Mom said you wanted to take her to a movie: Pola Negri. Why don’tcha both go. Make up for this damn foolishness. Come back in time for Shabbes—a little later. What d’ye say, Mom? Please!” She remained obdurately silent, contemptuous. “Please, you’re always complaining he doesn’t take you with him to see a movie,” Ira beseeched. “It’s soon Friday eve.”

“And if you don’t agree to go soon, the matinee prices will be over.” Pop pleaded.

“Please, Mom. Go this once, will you.”

“My spendthrift,” Mom said scornfully. “My prodigal.”

“Cut it out, I said!” Ira raised his voice. “Will you go? I’m going. I’m going to leave you.”

“I have a choice,” said Mom. “My liberal sport. I’ll go put on another garment.” She made for the bedroom.

“Makh shnel,” Pop ordered. “This will be a Friday.”

“Only because it’s Pola Negri. Your kind of sad actress.”

“Write Minnie a message. She can eat, or wait.”

“I’ll write, I’ll write. Go. Hurry with your shmattas.” Mom disappeared into the bedroom. “Till she moves,” said Pop. He pulled a stub of pencil out of his pocket. “You have a scrap of paper?”

“Yeah.” Ira tore a sheet of loose-leaf out of his small notebook.

“Okay.” Still in hat and coat, Pop sat down at the table and began scribbling a note.

“So long, Pop.” Ira hooked his fingers in the strings of the carton.

“So long, so long,” Pop replied curtly.

“I already said goodbye to Mom.” Ira opened the door.

“Well, let her get dressed.”

“Say goodbye for me to Minnie.”

“Goodbye, goodbye.” Pop scarcely looked up.

Corridor debouched into hall, hall led downstairs. Stairs thirteen years long, to ground floor, and ground floor to stone stoop, and stoop to sidewalk in front of 108 East 119th Street. All familiar, the expected number of kids and people for a cold day between the forsaken tenement facades. Dark veil of the Third Avenue El beyond Lexington to the east, and the gray Grand Central overpass — the Cut — at the west corner. A few cars parked against the curb, and fewer passing; a cat darting across the street; an elderly matron lifting heavy blue shawl to mouth, as she led a wizened poodle out of the cluttered midblock grocery. He walked west, crossed shadowy Park Avenue under the trestle. The strings cut off circulation, made his fingers cold. He wedged the carton under his arm, continued on toward Madison Avenue, westward along the abject block between graystone P.S. 103, stout oak doors locked, and cutout paper pumpkins and turkeys in the windows, cutout Pilgrims in high hats, and carrying blunderbusses. They came to America to be free. He was free. He was going to live with Edith, with a shiksa, and nobody to stop him. He was Edith’s lover now. That was what she called him: “Wait for me, lover.” That wasn’t what he would have called it with his cock inside her.

He’d have to try and relearn everything — like a veneer on everything he was. With an old shiksa, as Pop jeered, the old bastard. Ira couldn’t have done that in Galitzia. But neither could Pop have taken Mom to a movie to see Pola Negri at this time on Friday in Galitzia either, under the stern gaze of the old boy wearing his peyoth, his sidelocks in the portrait in the front room. It was Chaos. Old man Chaos who showed Satan the way out.

He was tormented for good. Ira shook his head. The fact that he could think of Minnie and Stella en route to Edith, and think of her the way he did, showed he wasn’t free, Pilgrims or no Pilgrims. He was still a prisoner: quiescent flame was banked in the mind: ever ready to awake at a puff of air, ever hopeful it would kindle a ruby jewel under thatch. See how his mind ran. He was lucky, that was all.

He was protean, he was capable of anything, he wasn’t sure of anything. Only that he was lucky that he had a goal that kept him walking west to Lenox Avenue, to the West Side subway station at 116th Street. Oh, it was just luck, just luck — stop.

And he did halt in midstride. Supposing he was sure beyond a doubt, the way he was always a hundred percent sure about Stella, that if there was the slimmest chance, she’d let him prat her some way some where. Would he go back? Turn, turn, Sir Richard Washington. Would he? Oh, Jesus, he couldn’t get over the cravings. He couldn’t get over it. He could only get away from it; that was all.

And what the hell was the matter with him, anyway? He had Edith, now — that was the difference. She had opened up for him — oh, cut out the smut at long last — a vibrant, new vision, vision of liberation, of independence, vision consummating the aureate promise he had experienced one summer afternoon on a busy West Harlem avenue. She kindled pride, self-esteem. She had faith, she said, in his literary potential. He had to develop more, but she was sure he would get there in his time.

And Fifth Avenue opened before him. Another long block to Lenox? Or should he turn now and take the three short blocks to 116th? Either course would get him to the subway.

He cut south, avoiding the monotonous façade of the 119th Street tenements, preferring the holiday smells of the clangorous avenue before him. Turn back? God no. He could only get away, that was all. He switched the parcel from right to left, the only evidence of Harlem past lying in that motley carton. Ira peeled down steps of subway station. As luck would have it, the express shrieked to a halt. Ira boarded the train, his cold fingers still aching, and strait was the route, and strait the rails — the IRT swerved, squealing on the tracks of the long curve westward as it repaired downtown and the hell out of Harlem.

EDITOR’S AFTERWORD

I spoke with Henry Roth for the last time on Monday, the ninth of October, 1995. Having been unable to reach him at his home, a ramshackle former funeral parlor that he had purchased after the death of his wife, Muriel, I surmised that he might be in the hospital. I checked an ever-expanding list of Albuquerque hospital numbers that I kept in my address book, and was able to track him down that evening, shortly after I had come home from work. Despite the frailty of his condition and the excruciating severity of his pain, he sounded even jolly, his voice lilting and upbeat. Handed the receiver by a nurse, he was pleased to hear from me, his editor, his occasional analyst, but mostly, his friend of nearly four years.

Since I had first become acquainted with him back in December of 1992, just after Roslyn Targ, his devoted agent of over thirty years, had sold me the first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream, I had become inured to his expressions of gloom — his lugubrious moods that would descend on him for a day or two, sometimes even a month. Some of these depressive seizures were so intense that he would exclaim dramatically that he wished to die (“apothonein theilo,” he’d write in Greek), and that he would kill himself as soon as he turned ninety and had a big party.

But this night of October 9 was not like so many of those other nights. Gone was the gauze of melancholia, the “dark sullen telepathy” that had so often encumbered him, preventing him from continuing with the monumental task of writing, editing, and constantly revising the four books that form this quartet, which he had called Mercy of a Rude Stream, borrowing a phrase from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. That Monday night, he was genuinely pleased that I, together with his assistant and final literary muse, Felicia Steele (the last of three women who had enabled him to create literature throughout his life), had made so much progress completing the editing of From Bondage and Requiem for Harlem, the third and the final volume of the Mercy series, respectively. Even as his limbs and his bowels had failed him with increasing regularity throughout 1994 and 1995, he had worked compulsively to complete the arduous task of shaping and rewriting over 5,000 pages of text, which comprised the four volumes, a large portion of which had already been hailed by numerous American reviewers as a “landmark of the American literary century,” in the words of the critic David Mehegan. Even when Steele was no longer able to work with Henry, since she herself had gone off to graduate school in English at the University of Texas,* he had engaged another young University of New Mexico undergraduate, Eleana Zamora, and the two of them had worked on the various revisions that were required in the final editing and restructuring of the last two volumes.

That October evening, Henry politely asked me how my own father, his senior by a mere seven months, and physically in no better shape, was doing, as if the two old men were competitively engaged in a race to see which one would meet his maker first. Not wanting to alarm Henry with dire medical reports from California, I lied, of course, and said that my dad was holding his own, and Roth replied, “Carry on the good work, my friend,” as if he were a literature professor from one of his 1920s screwball plots. Four days later, on Friday, October 13, Henry was gone. He had died just after sundown, having made the Sabbath in the very nick of time, and to mix Hebrew and Greek images, as he was wont to do, just after Helias in his horse-drawn chariot had raced by Albuquerque on his nightly run.

Felicia, in touch with Henry’s two sons, Hugh and Jeremy, left the news of Henry’s passing both on my telephone machine at home and in the office, messages that I picked up in California soon after my plane had landed. My father was in worse condition than I had imagined — his head drooped so low, his consciousness so dim that the doctor advised the next afternoon that we not feed him intravenously. I sat that afternoon in the kitchen of my parents’ apartment, at work at the table, numbed, grief-stricken, with the manuscript pages of Mercy spread out willy-nilly before me, struggling with the editing of a particularly salacious description of sex between the fictional cousins Ira and Stella. Yet as stunned as I was about Henry’s death, I took great comfort in knowing that Roth, at least for me, had not died; in fact, the very pages before me represented his very tree of life, and what better way to show my love than to do just as Henry had commanded, “Carry on, . my friend.”

I am sure that I was concentrating so mightily on Henry’s prose because I wished to distract myself from my own father’s predicament — Dr. Reed’s pronouncement of gloom, and the knowledge that Henry’s departure was a harbinger of my own father’s imminent death. And as the doctor was packing his bag, my father suddenly struggled to lift his head — he even bolted — and like the stirring of a shroud, acknowledged my presence, speaking his first words in over two days. Casting his gaze on the messy sheaf of papers, my father suddenly uttered, with his thick, barely comprehensible German accent, the questioning words, “Henry Rot, Henry Rot?” “rot” being the German pronunciation of Roth, as in the color red, although Henry of all people was not unaware of the pun.

“Doctor Reed, did you hear that, he knows what I am working on, he said ‘Henry Roth,’” I exclaimed. The doctor was as stunned as I was; so was my mother, and although this was the only phrase my dad uttered that weekend, the doctor immediately called for an IV bag and an infusion of fluids, and arguably, because of Henry Roth, my father lived another sixteen days.

I felt that autumn that I had lost two giants, both men atavistic in wholly different ways. Having had the privilege of working with Henry, I can unequivocally state that my perception of the world has been remarkably altered. In fact, I can no longer walk the streets of Manhattan without feeling a far greater empathy for the poor. It is as if I had discovered a new Dostoevsky, and at the end of our stultifyingly narcissistic twentieth century at that. Despite our gap in age, I felt that Roth was writing about my city of New York in the 1990s, even though Henry’s stories detailed a far more technologically primitive world of a greenhorn generation long since vanished. Roth was perhaps the last voice of an era, yet his description in Requiem for Harlem of crosstown traffic on 14th Street—“shuffle and squeal. Glitter and gleam of windshield and hubcap”—save for the eloquence of his language, could easily pass for a street scene in 1997, so constant is the farrago of whirling images that New York manages faithfully to project. The immigrant Jews and Italians who were, of course, so hated in Roth’s youth have long since entered the mainstream, made complacent by the prosperity that education and middle classdom bring, yet the privations described endow us with a vision of poverty so compassionate and transcendent that we can never forget that there are millions of people in New York City alone who remain destitute. I as a reader have learned that behind the grimace of every street sweeper, behind the fretful countenance of every hot dog vendor, there exists a fellow journeyman, whose plaintive gaze or feral eyes bespeak a magnificent drama that remains untold. In listening to the story of a Pakistani taxi driver talking about his children at school in Queens, I am confronted by an immense pride and beauty, mine for the listening. Manhattan, despite the passage of seventy years, despite the incursion of television, graffiti, new racial tensions, and e-mail, has not changed at all — and the Rothian immigrant world of the 1920s remains as immanent today as it was when David Schearl, the young protagonist of Call It Sleep, was but a small boy on the Lower East Side.

There are, of course, numerous critics and countless readers who still continue to hold on to the notion that Call It Sleep is indeed the only masterpiece that Henry Roth ever wrote. As the first two volumes of the Mercy series came off press, most reviewers felt compelled to compare these new works to a book published in 1934 when its author was a mere twenty-eight years old, as if a man in his late eighties was simply expected to pick up writing in the exact manner as he had done as an unexamined young man. The notion was absurd, and this wretched form of comparison would be enough to dissuade any blocked writer, like J. D. Salinger, Harper Lee, or the late Ralph Ellison, from even contemplating a new work late in life. Yet Roth possessed in many ways an elephantine hide, and when he happened to glance at a review or two (most he never even looked at), he merely shrugged, and said, “Baah, she just didn’t get the book,” and that was that. His mission was manifest — it was ordained that he carry on his novels, as if writing were the only force that was keeping him alive, and a hostile review did not deter Roth in the slightest. It would often amaze interviewers who came to his home in the early 1990s to listen to the old man describe his one novel “from childhood.” He would tell not a few visitors that he had disavowed the first book — that it was a boy’s work no longer worth reading, a book that had been inspired under the spell of his erstwhile mentor and now necromancer James Joyce — and that he cared no longer to discuss it or its themes.

Call It Sleep was simply a book that had died when another man by the name of Henry had perished decades ago. Didn’t they have something else to ask, he questioned the parade of interrogators? When asked why he was writing the Mercy series, he prided himself in telling people that it was simply “for the dough,” and that this newly found income was required to pay for his nurses, doctors, and the cornucopia of medications that rested on the kitchen table.

It was only after Roth’s death, and with the publication of the third volume, From Bondage, that over a dozen critics and reviewers hailed the third book as a masterpiece in its own right, not a novel that had to be reviewed in the context of a distant literary antecedent. As Call It Sleep is arguably one of the finest American novels that has ever depicted childhood, so too can the four volumes of Mercy of a Rude Stream now be viewed not only as a necessary complement to the prior work, but as a unified body of literature that stands on its own. No less a scholar and critic than Mario Materassi, who for many years was Roth’s closest friend and soulmate, and who deserves singular credit for transforming Roth into a writer of such huge international stature, has written that “Call It Sleep can be read as a vehicle through which, soon after breaking away from his family and his tradition, young Roth used some of the fragments of his childhood to shore up the ruins of what he already felt was a disconnected self. Forty-five years later, Roth embarked on another attempt to bring some retrospective order to his life’s confusion: Mercy of a Rude Stream, which he has long called a ‘continuum,’ can be read as a final, monumental effort on the part of the elderly author to come to terms with the pattern of rupture and discontinuity that has marked his life.” My own personal feeling is that there are few works in this decade, much less in this century, that have come like Mercy to reflect as acutely the internal dislocation of the intellectual and the society at large.

Just when we think we know what Roth as a writer is up to, what course he has charted for his journey home, he twists and turns, and changes his mind, and with each new volume, we must constantly reassess our agile narrator as his epic proceeds. As Materassi has commented in his insightful essasy, “Shifting Urbanscape: Roth’s ‘Private’ New York,” Roth “has never been interested in any story other than the anguished one of a man who, throughout his life, has contradicted each of his previously held positions and beliefs.” A superb holder of secrets, Roth as a novelist does not even alert his readers (there is a one-line hint in the first volume, however) that Ira Stigman has a fictional sister until one-third of the way through the second volume, A Diving Rock on the Hudson. The revelation must be a surprise.

I once asked Henry if his wife Muriel, with whom he shared a compact one-bedroom trailer home, had ever read any of the early drafts of Mercy. “She never asked, and I never offered to show her,” he told me, as if it were completely natural for a writer’s wife not even to get one glimpse of the thousands of pages that lay on each side of the computer whom he chose to call Ecclesias. Although I cannot think of a human being who was more honest with me than Henry, Roth’s varying accounts of his life’s story, as Materassi has suggested, did shift frequently over time. For example, after having told reporters for decades that it was his Communist experience, and the resulting disillusionment, that prevented him from writing again, Roth suggested in the last few years of his life that his sexual preoccupations and obsession lay more at the root of his unwillingness to continue writing for more than forty years. Yet on other occasions, he maintained that the block was caused by his early break with Judaism and his family’s departure in 1914 from the hermetic, shtetl-like world of New York’s Lower East Side.

Like their creator, these modern books effortlessly mutate in tone and sensibility, and while the arc is unerringly tragic, the seismic waves registered throughout are unpredictable, and deliberately so. While A Diving Rock on the Hudson is purposefully scandalous and confessional in its often Augustinian tone, From Bondage, despite the brilliant sexual tension of the last third of the book (Roth called the Ira-Stella-Zaida section a “novella” in its own right), is largely redemptive, as if Roth were indeed seeking deliverance in this penultimate work. Yet the final volume, Requiem for Harlem, contains a sexual wantonness and “depravity,” a word favored by Roth, that seems surprising for a man of eighty-nine laboring to finish the epic of his life. As his close friend and literary executor, Larry Fox, once explained to me, “Henry could not die false. He was a truth seeker, and only when he could review the truth about himself could he become free. In fact, he remained alive to unburden himself so that he could die free and perhaps free all of us. Once Muriel died, Henry could finally tell the truth, and then it was only between him and his Maker.”

Roth would have been the first person to note that nothing in any of his books was gratuitous, so why would he so deliberately debase his alter ego Ira? Few people like seeing their idol so compromised or disgraced; no one indeed wants to see his revered novelist revealed to be a predator, an agent of incest, and victimizer himself. So why then did Roth in his eighties become so emotionally patulous, or why did he begin to flirt with Nabokovian flights of fancy, choosing to make Ira as sexually compulsive and loathsome as possible? Having known Henry quite well, I would refute anyone’s contention that this octogenarian’s “need” to eroticize his life was merely a way to jolly himself as his body disintegrated. This quite conscious decision to debase himself — to make his “rude stream” as repellent as possible — as he depicted “the last onerous lap” of his life, was meant, I suspect, to bring about a spiritual salvation in the only way that he knew how. In any given interview or even in the text of this work, Roth, however, would have been the first to negate any such redemptive refuge. Listen to his own words: “What a sinister cyst of guilt that was within the self, denigrating the yuntiff, denigrating everything within reach, exuding ambiguity, anomaly, beyond redemption now.” And so, Requiem for Harlem is a work fraught with often unimaginable family cruelty, the young man emerging from his adolescent chrysalis the very tyrant his father Chaim was. Indeed, we revisit more so than in any previous volume the unprecedented violence of Call It Sleep. At last, the abuse that the young boy witnessed so viscerally when his father beat his mother gets replayed here with equal ferocity — the cup of scalding tea hurled in Leah’s face, for example, or the horrific way in which Chaim torments his wife after she has caught him flagrantly fondling their lustful niece. It must be her fault after all, so Leah is led to believe.

No wonder that Roth’s mother unknowingly “had indoctrinated him into tragedy, given him a penchant for it, the tragic outlook,” for her path toward depression and episodic madness seemed destined, given her docile and even masochistic nature. And while the mother so lovingly depicted in the final volume becomes a “wavering demi-agnostic” and questions the existence of Adonoi, so too did Roth throughout his life simultaneously embrace and reject the notion of a forgiving God. Yet while Roth no doubt inherited his depressive gloom and his religious ambivalence from his mother, he learned far too ably at his father’s knee as well. The brilliant boy, once David Schearl, now Ira Stigman, absorbed from his father a relentless pattern of violence and verbal imprecation that mixed often explosively with his mother’s maternal kindness. The boy, as precocious as he was, learned at a very tender age, whether from his father or through a pederast named “Moe,” that the star was no longer shining over Mt. Morris Park (stella, stella, it was getting so dark after all). And familial incest, many psychiatrists have maintained, comes twinned with family violence, and the fictional relationship between Ira and his sister Minnie and cousin Stella must have had some basis in the models provided in various ways by both of Ira/Henry’s parents.

Yet despite Roth’s constant claims that redemption, particularly at the end of our materialistically excessive century, was no longer viable, I contend that he was transfixed in his declining years by the possibility of mercy, perhaps not for himself, but rather for his wife Muriel, for both of his sons, for Eda Lou Walton whom he had abandoned in the late 1930s, and, in fact, for us all. If we could as readers still like, empathize, or even pray for Ira, even after all that he had perpetrated, then there might be mercy even for us. And so the old man pecked away furiously, keenly aware that his days were diminishing, the stream of urine dripping from his leg not even deterring him as the story reached its terrifying dénouement. And “for a moment the waning ivory moon above the gloomy gantries of the New York Central trestle seemed poised like a tusk at Ira as he pattered down the sandstone steps of the stoop to the sidewalk; boar’s tusk aimed at Endymion, he thought, turning left on grubby, cold, dark, deserted 119th Street toward the corner at Park Avenue.” Entranced by the drama of the narrative, age seemed almost miraculously to disappear, and once again life had suddenly achieved a unity; this unity, despite a persistent theme of alienation, being perhaps the crowning literary achievement. And as many readers have no doubt noticed, the dialogue with Ecclesias, the philosophical chatter between the old man and his computer, actually recedes in Requiem for Harlem, for the old man is once again in his prime, not distracted by physical decrepitude, this work being the last gasp of existence before the proverbial jig was up.

While Roth commented numerous times before his death that Mercy of a Rude Stream comprised six volumes, his publisher, along with Felicia Steele, Larry Fox, and Roslyn Targ, all agreed at the time that the work would best be served by appearing as four. In fact, Roth did write six separate books, the first four which he called “Batch One,” and the last two, which he simply labeled “Batch Two” of Mercy for lack of a better title. The truth is that these first four volumes possess a stylistic and thematic unity which are quite distinct from the other two books. The first volume opens with Ira’s move to Harlem, while Volume IV concludes with Ira’s decision to flee Harlem into Edith’s overprotective arms. Likewise, all four volumes take place over a sustained period of thirteen years, from 1914 through the end of 1927. Written in two voices and two type styles (Roth was adamant from the beginning that the Ecclesias passages were essential to the thematic wholeness of the works), the books are linked by a chronologically coherent and unified style.

On the other hand, the two books that Roth called “Batch Two” do not contain an Ecclesias narrator, and jump the reader to the 1930s. They tell the story of Ira’s breakup with Edith Welles and the love affair with a young composer named M, who would soon become his wife. The final revisions that Roth was able to undertake both in 1994 and in 1995 were of From Bondage and Requiem for Harlem, so that the story that unfolds in “Batch Two” was written in the late 1980s and was revised with Felicia Steele in 1990 and 1991.†

“‘You are not required to finish,’ ran the Talmud dictum” notes Roth in the final volume of Mercy, and perhaps the same thing can be said of this opus, as if “the past coalesced into a kind of opaque introspection that marked the end.” As Edith Welles in the story quelled Ira Stigman’s “fears and guilts, as if bleaching them out of sight with her objectivity,” so the same can be said of Roth pecking away at his beloved keyboard at the end of his life. “She [Edith] reduced the onus of his wickedness, eliminated much of the sense of heinousness, quenched the shimmer of guilt, stealth, risk that informed, that magnified his form,” and so do these books, their completion being a deliverance from the vile self-loathing that had consumed Roth for almost all of his life.

“Strange, unhappy lad. Let’s put as much of that behind us as we can,” his mentor and lover — the woman of “brown eyes very large in the sallowness of pallid olive skin”—tells Ira, and Mercy of a Rude Stream, as fine a portrait of the artist in old age as we may ever see, achieves in virtuosic fashion just that what first Edith and later the senescent genius Henry Roth set out to do.

— Robert Weil

September 1997

* Felicia Steele has since become a professor of English at the College of New Jersey. [2014]

† “Batch Two” was subsequently edited posthumously by Willing Davidson, a fiction editor at The New Yorker, serialized by that magazine, and published as one novel by W. W. Norton in 2010. [2014]

GLOSSARY OF YIDDISH AND HEBREW WORDS AND PHRASES

Note: Some spellings reflect Galitzianer pronunciations and may seem unfamiliar to speakers of “standard” Yiddish; others, such as cheder rather than kheder, are the most common English spellings. Some words, such as klyasses, are adaptations of English words, and even Yiddish words, such as fress, often have English inflections: fressing.

ABI GESINT as long as you’re healthy

A BISL NAKHES a little satisfaction

A BRUKH AF DIR a curse on you

A BRUKH IZ MIR I’m broken up

A BRUKH UF ZEH a curse on them

A FERD NOCH another horse; one more horse

AF MAYNE PLAYTSES on my shoulders

A GANTSER HUNDERTER a whole hundred

A GANTSEH YEET a whole Jew

A GITTEN SHABBES a good Sabbath

A GRUBER YING a coarse lout

A GUTN YUNTIFF a good holiday

AI; AI, YI, YI cry of surprise, alarm, etc

AI BIST DIE A HINT, MEIN ZIENDLE oh, you’re a dog, my son

A KLEEGE SHVARTZE a clever black man

ALLES everything

ALLES VEIST ER he knows everything

ALLEVAI would that

ALIYAH going up (as to the pulpit); back to Palestine, now Israel

ALTER KOCKER old man; (der.) old shit

A MEESEH MISHINEH AUF DIR a wretched fate to you

AN ALTE KLYAFTE an old virago

A NAR UND SHOYN a fool already

ANSHULDIG MIR pardon me

APIKOROS heretic; lit. “Epicurean”

A SCHEINEM DANK a handsome thanks

A SHLOCK AUF ISS damn them

A SHVARTZ GELEKHTER black humor

A SHVARTZ YUR a black year

A SHVARTZ YUR AUF IS it is a black year

AUF EIBIG forever; German EWIG

AUF MIR G’SUKT said about me

AUF SHPILKIS on pins and needles

AUSGEBRENDT, ICH BIN GANTS AUSGEBRENDT burned out, I am burned out

AUSGESTUDIERTEH studious

A VEYTIK IZ MIR woe is me

A YEET MIT A BOORT a Jew with a beard

AZA GITTEH KUPF such a good head

AZA KUPF what a head

AZA LEBN AF DIR you should live so

AZA MENSH such a man

AZA PARSHEVEH SHMUTZ such a contemptible louse

AZA PASKUDNYACK such a contemptible, odious person

AZA SHVER LEBEN living is so hard

AZ M’VAYST NISHT if you don’t know

AZ NISHT IZ NISHT if not, then not

AZOY? right; is that so?

AZOY DOFF SEIN that’s the way it has to be

AZOY ID ES SHOYN so it is already

AZOY SHEIN UND AZOY TROYRICK so beautiful and so sad

BABBEH grandmother

BALI GOOLEH stage driver

BAR MITZVAH the initiation ceremony for young men into Judaism

BARUCHA prayer, blessing

BARUCHES blessings

BARUCH ATAH ADONOI ELOHENU MELEKH HA OYLUM. . Praised are you, Eternal our God, Sovereign of the Universe

BARUCH ATOO ADONOI blessed are thou, Lord

BARUCH HA SHEM blessed be the lord

BEKHELES cups

BENKET banquet

BENSHT LEKHT to recite benedictions over lit candles on Sabbath eve and holidays

BETTERIEN batteries

BIST DOCH GEBOYREN IN GALITZIA nevertheless you were born in Galitzia

BIST MISHUGEH? are you crazy?

BIST SHOYN A GROYSEH MOYT you’ve already a big girl

BIST TAKEH MESHIGEH you’re really crazy

BIST TOCKIN A YOLD you are indeed a fool

BIYAH sexual intercourse

BLINTZES rolled up pancake with filling

BOORT beard

BORSHT beet soup

BRIDERL little brother (affectionate, diminutive)

BRIS Jewish ceremony of circumcision taking place eight days after birth

BUKHER fellow

BULBAS potatoes

CHAI tea

CHALLAH egg bread made for the Sabbath

CHARDASH Hungarian dance performed at weddings

CHEDER traditional Hebrew school for young boys of pre — Bar Mitzvah age

CHEDER YINGLE schoolkid

CHIBEGGEH nonsense word meaning chattering

CHOMPKEH chomp

CHRISTLIKHER Christian

CHUTZPA brass, nerve, gall

COMMOYSHEH commercial

DAMA woman

DAVEN pray; DAVENS prayers; DAVENING praying

DER ALTER the old man

DERMA cow’s intestine prepared into a special dish

DER VILLER IZ MER VI DER KENNER he who aspires excels him who knows

DIKTATS dictates, commands

DOS TSEYNDL the little tooth

DRECK dung; trash

DREI turn

DREIDEL a top marked with four Hebrew letters, used for games played during Hanukkah

DUMMKOPF blockhead, fool, idiot (German)

DUS HEIST KUNST that’s called skill

DYBBUK evil spirit or demon

D’YUKST AROS DE KISHKAS you’re rushing my guts out

D’YUKST VIE A KLUTZ you move like a log

EHRLIKHER YEET honest Jew

EPIKOUROS Epicurean; loosely, hedonist, atheist

ERETZ YISROEL the land of Israel

EREV PESACH evening of the Passover

EREV SHABBES evening of the Sabbath

ER FUNFET SHOYN now he’s speaking unclearly

ERLIKH pious

ER’S A MISHUGENEH he’s a crazy person

ES HOT MIR GEFELTE LIBE I lacked love

ESS eat

EYTSER piece of advice

FALASHA Ethiopian Jew, isolated from mainstream Judaism

FALSHEH-ZUP false (i.e meatless) soup

FARBISENER HINT angry dog

FARLEYGT displaced, out of place

FARSHTEST? do you understand?; IKH FARSHTEY I understand

FEINER better

FERFALLEN lost

FERTSFEILET (German) depressed

FLEISHIK foods prepared with meat

FLUDEN pastry

FOLENTSER lazy person

FORTZ fart

FRAYTIK AF DER NAKHT IS DOKH YEDER YID A MAYLEKH on Friday night every Jew is a king

FRAYTIK BAY NAKHT Friday night

FREG NISHT don’t worry, don’t ask

FRESS eat ravenously or loudly

FRESSER glutton

FULKOMEN entirely

FUMFIT speaks

GANTS wholly

GANTS GELER quite yellow, ripe; acculturated

GEFERLIKHE GEMBLERKE awful gambler (female)

GEFILTE FISH dish of chopped, poached fish

GEHARGET ZOLST DI VEREN may you be slain

GELIEBTER beloved

GELT money, gold

GEMÜTLICH cozy, comfortable, friendly; GEMÜTLICHKEIT friendliness (German)

GENUK enough

GERARA Yinglish for “get out of here”

GESHEFT store, business; pl. GESHEFTN

GESHREY screaming, to-do, outcry

GESHRIGEN cried

GEVALD havoc

GEY GESINTEHEIT go in health

GEY GEZUNT farewell, go in health

GEY MIR IN DER ERD go to hell, drop dead

GEY MIR IN KEHVER go to your tomb

GIB DIKH A RICK move

GITOIK evil eye

GITTEN SHIDDEKH good match

GLATT strict

GLATT KOSHER strictly kosher

GLATT KOSHER FRESSEN eating kosher

GLAZEL glass; GLAZEL tea

GLEIBST do you believe

GLIKLIKH lucky

GOLDENEH MEDINA golden country; America

GOLEM humanoid from Jewish mythology made of clay; dolt, monster

GONIFF thief

GOTINYOO dear God

GOTT SEI DANK God be thanked

GOTT’S NAR God’s fool

GOY gentile (noun); GOYA gentile woman; GOYIM gentiles; GOYISH of the gentiles (adj); GOYISHKEIT the world of gentiles, gentile matters

GROBYAN gross, coarse fellow, boor

GURNISHT nothing

G’VIR man of great strength

HAARETZ a Hebrew newspaper (“The Land”)

HAGGADAH collection of stories and scripture for reading aloud on Passover

HAIRST VUS SER SUGT did you hear what he said

HAMANTASHEN stuffed pastries served at Purim, the festival commemorating the deliverance of Persian Jews from Haman’s plan to kill them

HA-SHO’AH the Holocaust

HATIKVAH “The Hope,” Zionist hymn, now the Israeli national anthem

HAVDALAH prayers recited at the conclusion of the Sabbath

HERAUS out; HERAUS, FERSHTINKINEH DRECK! Out, stinking, dirt!

HINT dog

HIVNUH contract

HULLADRIGAS unseemly women

HULLUPCHEHS stuffed cabbage

HUNIK-LEKEKH honey cake

ICH BIN DIR MOICHEL spare me

ICH KHOM MIKH BEPISHT I wet my pants

IHR ZOLT HUB’N A GITTEN SHABBES you have a good Sabbath

IKH FARSHTEY I understand

IKH VIL NISHT, IKH KEN NISHT I don’t want to, I can’t

IZ A FEINER MENSH he’s a fine person

IZ NISHT it is nothing

JABAH frog

JHIT Jew (Russian, derogatory)

KADDISH Hebrew prayer for the dead;

KADDISH’L son who will eventually say KADDISH for the parent

KADDISH V’YISKADDAISH, SHMAI RABOH The first line of the prayer for the dead

KAIVER tomb

KALYIKEH cripple

KAMERAD surrender (German for “friend”)

KAPUT finished

KATERENKE hand organ

KEDUSHIM wedding

KEEKHLE roll, small dry cake

KESSEF money

KEYN AYIN-HOREH [may there be] no evil eye

KHAD GADYO one kid; the name of a song sung at Passover

KHAROSES bitter herbs used at Passover

KHARUSEH repented

KHASSID devoutly Orthodox Jew, Hasid

KHLOP to strike a blow, to yammer

KHOKHMA wisdom, intelligence

KHOLLEH Sabbath bread

KHOLYERIA cholera, plague

KHUKHIM wise person

KHUMISH the study of Hebrew

KHUMITZ crumbs; matzah crumbs scattered before the Passover

KHUNTER (vulgarism) “cunt,” whore

KHUPPA wedding canopy

KHUSIN groom

KIDDUSH HA SHEM in honor of the lord

KINDERLEKH children

KINDT “MEIN KINDT” son, “my child”

KISHKA stomach, or dish made of stuffed stomach

KISHKEHS, KISHKELAH, KISHKELIKH stuffed pastries; (coll.) genitalia, innards

KLEEGE clever

KLETCHMER string band that traditionally plays at weddings

KNISH (vulgarism) cunt

KNUBL garlic

KOCKER shit (person)

KOLKI bullet

KOLLEH MOIT girl old enough to be a bride

KOMETS-ALEPH, “O”; KOMETS-BETH, “BO”; KOMETS-GIMEL, “GO” Hebrew syllables combining the vowel komets (“o”) with the consonants aleph, beth, and gimel, as recited by child learning to read

KOPF head

KOPTSN beggar

KOPTSN BRIDERL poor little brother

KOYEN Hebrew priest, descendant of priest of ancient Israel

KREPLACH a stuffed pasta dish, similar to meat-filled ravioli

KUBELLA cow

KUGEL casserole of noodles or potatoes

KUPF head, mind

KUSHENIRKE female shopper, haggler

KVETCH complain

KVOORIM tombs

LANDSFRAU landlady

LANDSLAYT fellow immigrants from the same hometown or region (German LANDSLEUTE)

L’CHAIM to life

LEMEKH lame, clumsy, awkward fool

LEYDN suffering

LIGNER liar

L’KUVET SHABBES in honor of the Sabbath

LOIFT SHOYN he is running already

LOKSHN noodles

LOKSHN-TREGER noodle porter

LOTKEHS pancakes

LUSHIN KOYDISH holy tongue

LUSST NISHT AUSREDDEN A VORT you don’t let me get in a single word

LYMINEH GOLEM clay monster

LYUPKA (Polish) love

MAKHER businessman, big shot, big wheel

MAKH GELT make money

MAKH SHNEL make haste

MALAMUT Hebrew teacher

MALKHUMAH war

MAMALEH dear mother

MARTIRA martyr

MATZAH unleavened bread

MAZEL luck

MAZEL TOV(S) best wishes, congratulations

MEESEH CHAIYE ugly animal

MEGILLAH long story

MEGST TAKEH GEYN IN DER ERD you can drop dead

MEHVIN maven

MEIN KADDISH’L IZ DUH my child is here; lit. “the one who will say Kaddish is here”

MEIN KINDT my child

MEIN ORMEH MANN my poor husband

MEIN ORRIM KINDT my poor child

MELAMED Hebrew teacher

MENSH man; honorable or admirable man; a good-hearted person; MENSHEN men; MENSHELEH little man

MESHINKEH machine

MET death

MIKVEH ritual bath

MILKHDIK foods prepared with dairy products

MINCHAH daily afternoon prayers

MINYAN assembly of ten men necessary for religious services; quorum

MIR NISHT, DIR NISHT nothing to me, nothing to you

MISHIGOSS madness

MISHNAH interpretations of Biblical texts forming the older part of the Talmud

MISHPOKHA relatives, family

MISHUGENEH crazy; MISHUGEH AUF TOIT crazy as a loon

MESHUGENER crazy person

MIT GESUNDHEIT with health; do it in good health

MITZVAH good deed or Biblical commandment

M’MAKHT A LEBN I’m making a living

MOHEL person who circumscises a child at a bris

MOISHE KAPOYER a person who does everything wrong or in reverse

MOMINYOO dear mother

MOSHAV farm, commune

MUJIK Russian peasant

NA, A DRITTLE okay, a third

NAFKE whore

NAR fool

NEKHTIGER TOG lost hope; something impossible; lit. “yesterday’s day”

NISHT B’MUTCHKEH it’s not much

NISHT KOSHER not kosher; not right

NOKH A BISSELEH, NOKH A SHISSELEH just a little bit

NOO well, well now, so

NOO, VUS DEN well, what then

NOSH snack

NUDNICK nagger, nuisance

NUR BRING MIR NISHT KEIN BENKART just don’t bring me a bastard

NUR DEM only the

OONA TATEH poor father

ORMEH orphan

ORRIMEN TALYANER poor Italians

OUKH also

OUSGESHTUDIERT learned

OV TOIT completely

OY oh

OY, GEVALD cry of alarm, concern, or amazement

OY, VEH oh, woe; OY, VEH IZ MIR oh, woe is me

PARAKUTSKIE low-life

PARVEH Kosher term indicating that the food is compatible with meat and dairy

PASKUDNYACK scoundrel; an odious person

PAVOLLYEH slow

PECHAH calves’ feet in aspic

PEIGERN ZOLLST DEH he should drop dead

PESACH Passover

PETZEL penis

PEYOTH earlocks worn by devout Orthodox male Jews (Hebrew; PEYES in Yiddish)

PIPICK navel

PIROGEN potato and dough dumplings

PISHER one who urinates; insignificant person

PISHKEH a little pisser, alms-box

PLOTZ burst

POGROM an organized assault on Jews

POORITZ smart guy

POTATEH KUGEL potato pudding

PRUST simple, crude

PRUSTER ARBEITER plain worker, worker on lowest level

RABOINISH HA LOILIM (Hebrew) God in Heaven, Master of the Universe

REBBEH Hasidic rabbi

RIEBAHSEL grater

ROMAN serial romance, novel

ROV rabbi

RUGELEH pastry

RUSJINKEH little Russian

SCHADENFREUDE pleasure in other’s misfortunes (German)

SCHMALTZ fat

SCHMALTZY fatty

SEDER Passover service

SEH GURNISHT it’s nothing

SEH HEIST KESSEF it’s called money

SEHR GUT very good

SELAH be it so

SELTZER CUST GELDT seltzer costs money

SEYKHL intelligence, common sense

SHABBES the Sabbath

SHABBES BAY NAKHT Sabbath evening (Saturday night)

SHANDE shame

SHAYN nice, good

SHEHTL wig

SHEINEH beautiful

SHEKHEYOONI blessing said at beginning of holiday or other happy occasions, lit. “that He let us live”

SHEMEVDIK bashful, timid, shy, shamefaced

SHENK give, donate

SHEYTL wig

SHIKKER drunkard

SHIKKER AUF TOIT he’s dead drunk

SHIKSA gentile girl

SHIM a Hebrew letter

SHIVA the seven-day period of mourning the dead

SHIXAL fate

SHLAKHT HAUS slaughter-house

SHLEMIEL bungler, fool, an ill-fated person

SHLEP, SHLEPPEN carry, pull

SHLEPPER someone who fetches and carries at work; someone who drag’s one’s feet; someone untidy; laborer

SHLIMAZL unlucky person

SHLOIMEH, HA MAILACKH Solomon the king

SHMAI YISROEL, ADONOI ELOHENU ADONOI EKHUD Hear, O Israel: Adonai is our God, Adonai is One (Deuteronomy 6:4), the Jewish creed

SHMATTAS rags that old women buy and wear; clothes

SHMERTZ pain

SHMOOLYAREH, SHMOOLYARIS dollar, dollars

SHMOOZE converse in friendly fashion, chat

SHMOTT convert

SHMUCK jerk; (lit) penis

SHNORRER, SHNORRERKEH, SHNORRING beggar, moocher, begging

SHOTKHIN matchmaker

SHOYN already; SHOYN FARFALLEN already lost; SHOYN GENUG already enough

SHOYN MILLT ALLE FON already will all go

SHOYN TSAT TSE ZAHN A MENSH already that is a man

SHROTCHKEE diarrhea

SHTAR written agreement

SHTARKEH strong

SHTETL traditional Eastern European Jewish community

SHTICKEL a bit

SHTRAML wide-brimmed black hat worn by orthodox Jewish men, especially in Galitzia and Poland

SHTUDIER study; SHTUDIERST are you studying

SHUL synagogue

SHVAKH ill

SHVARTZE black; African-American

SIDDUR prayer book

SIE HUT NISHT GEVISSEN she didn’t know

SIS MIR GIT it’s okay with me

SIT A SAKH HELFIN that will help a lot

SIT BALT SEIN DU A MALKHUMAH there’ll be a war here soon

SIZ A MANSEH MIT A BEAR it’s a story with a bear (fairy tale)

S’IZ AZOY SHVER it is very heavy or hard

S’IZ GIT KALT it’s quite cold

S’IZ TAKEH GOLD? it’s really gold?

S’KIMTEH DIR TOCKIN A SHEKHEYOONI, TATEH indeed, may a blessing be given to you, father

SOLLST KHOPPEN A KRENCK catch the plague

S’PAHST NISHT it doesn’t fit

S’TOIGT SHOYN UF A KAPURA it is worth a sacrifice; not worth much

TAKEH indeed; TAKEH EMES indeed true

TALMUD rabbinical commentaries on the Torah

TANTA aunt

TATEH father

THALLIS prayer shawl

TOCKIN indeed

TOKHTEREL daughter

TOV good

TREIFE nonkosher

TROMBENYIK ne’er-do-well

TSEEGEKHAPPEN fornication

TSEVORFEN, TSEVORFENEH scattered

TSIMMES sweet dish of stewed fruit or side dish of vegetables and fruit; dessert

TSITSES habitually goes “Tsk-tsk”

TSURIS troubles, worries

TSU VELKHE KLYASSES to which classes

TSVEI’N DREIZIG thirty-two

TUKHIS AFIN TISH ass on the table

TUMMEL commotion

TVILLIM phylacteries

TZADDIKIM righteous men, holy men

UHMEIN SELUH Amen, so be it

UND and

VEHR VEIST who knows

VEITIG sorrow

VERBRENT burned out

VERENEKEHS fried pastry made of rounds of dough filled with jelly, fruit or meat

VERFALLEN lost

VERFLUKHTEH damned

VERFOLLEN ZOLL ER VIE E LIKT may he rot where he lies

VERSHTINKENEH foul

VEY sorrow; VEY IZ MIR woe is me

VIDDER again

VIE A TOITEN BANKEHS cupping a cadaver

VIE ZOY how come?

VI M’GEYT UN VEN M’GEYT TSU HERN DI PROFESSORS how and when you go to listen to the professors

V’IM LO AKHSAV, MATAI? if not now, when?

VIR HUTZIKH TSEGEKHAPT we grappled

VONNEH bath

VUS HEIST what does it mean

VUS I’DIS what’s that

VUS MACHT IHR? how are you?

VUS MACHT SIKH what’s up?

VUS YUKSTEH why are you rushing

WUNDERBAR wonderful (German)

YAPONCHIKIS Japanese

YEET Jew

YELED boy

YENEMS belonging to that other person; bummed cigarettes

YENTA shrewish or gossipy woman

YESHIVA rabbinical college; also an Orthodox Jewish high school for both secular and religious study

YIDDISHER KUPF Jewish head; intelligent or wily person

YIDDISHKEIT Jewishness, Yiddish life or culture

YIDLEKH little Jew

YINGLE little youth

YINGOTCH overgrown youth

YISGADAL, V’YISKADASH, SH’MEY RABO first lines of the Kaddish: “Magnified and sanctified be the name of the Lord”

YOLD fool

YOM KIPPUR Day of Atonement, most solemn Jewish fast day

YUKSTEH to rush

YUNTIFF holiday

ZAFTIG full-figured

ZE VUN SIKCH BALT GESHLUGEN TSIM TOIT they almost killed each other

ZEY HOBN GEMAKHT A GITTEN SHIDDEKH they’ve made a good match

ZINDLE child

Z’MISHT confused

ZOLL DIR GOTT HELFEN may God help you

ZOL ER GEHARGERT VERN may he be murdered

ZOL GEHEN MIT MAZEL may you go with luck

ZOLST GEBENTSHT VERN may you be blessed

ZOLST GEHEN GESINT may you go in health

ZOLST SHOYN ELTER VERN may you not grow any older

ZUG speak

ZUS VERFOLLT VEREN you should rot

ZUZIM coins (archaic; occurs in song KHAD GADYO)

ZVICKER pince-nez glasses

ABOUT THE ARTIST

MARTIN LEWIS, born in Australia in 1881, was considered one of the greatest chroniclers of American urban life. His ability to capture adverse weather conditions and obscure light sources, coupled with a keen sense of composition and technical skill, made him one of America’s greatest printmakers of the twentieth century. Arriving in the United States in 1900, he was by 1909 living and working in New York City, and his earliest etchings date from 1915. He produced more than 147 drypoints, etchings, mezzotints, aquatints, and lithographs between 1915 and 1953. His first success was as a watercolorist, but he also worked in oil. He died in 1962.

Jacket: Bay Windows. Drypoint and sand ground, 1929.

Volume I: Arch Midnight. Drypoint, 1930.

Volume II: Relics [Speakeasy Corner]. Drypoint, 1928

Volume III: Glow of the City. Drypoint, 1929.

Volume IV: Late Traveler. Drypoint, 1949.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

HENRY ROTH, who died in 1995, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the age of eighty-nine, had one of the most extraordinary careers of any American novelist who lived in the twentieth century.

He was born in the village of Tysmenitz, in the then Austro-Hungarian province of Galitzia, in 1906. Although his parents never agreed on the exact date of his arrival in the United States, it is most likely that he landed at Ellis Island and began his life in New York in 1909. He briefly lived in Brooklyn, and then on the Lower East Side, in the slums where his classic novel Call It Sleep is set. In 1914, the family moved to Harlem, first to the Jewish section on 114th Street east of Park Avenue; but because the three rooms there were “in the back” and the isolation reminded his mother of the sleepy hamlet of Veljish where she grew up, she became depressed, and the family moved to non-Jewish 119th Street. Roth lived there until 1927, when, as a senior at City College of New York, he moved in with Eda Lou Walton, a poet and New York University instructor who lived on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. With Walton’s support, he began Call It Sleep in about 1930. He completed the novel in the spring of 1934, and it was published in December 1934 to mixed reviews. He contracted for a second novel with the editor Maxwell Perkins, of Scribner’s, and the first section of it appeared as a work in progress in Signatures, a small literary magazine. But Roth’s growing ideological frustration and personal confusion created a profound writer’s block, which lasted until 1979, when he began the earliest drafts of Mercy of a Rude Stream.

In 1938, during an unproductive sojourn at the artist’s colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, Roth met Muriel Parker, a pianist and composer. They fell in love; Roth severed his relationship with Walton, moved out of her apartment, and married Parker in 1939, to the disapproval of her family. With the onset of World War Two, Roth became a tool and gauge maker. The couple moved first to Boston with their two young sons, Jeremy and Hugh, and then in 1946 to Maine. There Roth worked as a woodsman, a schoolteacher, a psychiatric attendant in the state mental hospital, a waterfowl farmer, and a Latin and math tutor, while Muriel also taught and eventually became principal of a grammar school.

It was the paperback reprint in 1964 of Call It Sleep, republished by Peter Mayer, then a young editor at Avon Books, and reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review by Irving Howe, which catapulted Roth from literary oblivion and brought him widespread international recognition. In 1968, after Muriel’s retirement from the Maine state school system, the couple moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. They had become acquainted with the environs during Roth’s stay at the D. H. Lawrence ranch outside of Taos, where Roth was writer-in-residence. Muriel began composing music again, mostly for individual instruments, for which she received ample recognition, while Henry Roth, mentored by the publisher, William Targ, and Roth’s literary agent, Rosyln Targ, collaborated with his friend and Italian translator, Mario Materassi, to put out a collection of essays called Shifting Landscape, published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1987. After Muriel’s death in 1990, Roth occupied himself with revising the final volumes of the monumental Mercy of a Rude Stream, which he had begun eleven years earlier. The first volume was published in 1994 by St. Martin’s Press under the title A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, and the second volume, called A Diving Rock on the Hudson, appeared from St. Martin’s in 1995.

The third volume, From Bondage, published in hardcover in 1996, was the first volume of the four Mercy books to appear posthumously. Requiem for Harlem, the fourth and final volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream, which came out in 1998, concluded the cycle, which began in 1914 with the Stigman family’s arrival in Jewish-Irish Harlem and ended with Ira’s decision to leave the ancestral family tenement and move in with Edith Welles on the night before Thanksgiving in 1927. Roth was able to revise both the third and fourth volumes in 1994 and 1995 shortly before his death.

An American Type, a posthumous novel published by W. W. Norton in 2010, was originally labeled by Roth as “Batch Two” of Mercy of a Rude Stream. It emerged from 1,900 pages that Roth was also revising in the years before his death with his assistant at the time, Felicia Jean Steele. Delivered to The New Yorker as a raw manuscript in 2005, it was crafted by Willing Davidson, then an assistant in the fiction department, into one final work of fiction after two excerpts were excerpted in 2006 by the magazine under the titles “God the Novelist” and “Freight.”

While still alive, Roth received two honorary doctorates, one from the University of New Mexico and one from the Hebrew Union College — Jewish Institute of Religion. Posthumously, he was honored in 1995 with the Hadassah Harold U. Ribalow Lifetime Achievement Award and by the Museum of the City of New York with Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger having named February 29, 1996, as “Henry Roth Day” in New York City. From Bondage was cited by the National Book Critics Circle as being a finalist for its Fiction Prize in 1997, and it was in that same year that Henry Roth won the first Isaac Bashevis Singer Prize in Literature for From Bondage, an award bestowed by The Forward Foundation. In 2005, ten years after Roth’s death, the first full biography of his life, the prize-winning Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, by the literary scholar Steven G. Kellman, was published, followed in 2006 by Henry Roth’s centenary, which was marked by a literary tribute at the New York Public Library, sponsored by CCNY and organized by Lawrence I. Fox, Roth’s literary executor.

OTHER WORKS BY HENRY ROTH

FICTION

An American Type

Call It Sleep

NONFICTION

Shifting Landscapes

INTRODUCTION COPYRIGHT © 2014 JOSHUA FERRIS

Mercy of a Rude Stream, Volume I: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park

Copyright © 1994 by Henry Roth

Mercy of a Rude Stream, Volume II: A Diving Rock on the Hudson

Copyright © 1995 by Henry Roth

Mercy of a Rude Stream, Volume III: From Bondage

Copyright © 1996 by The Estate of Henry Roth

Mercy of a Rude Stream, Volume IV: Requiem for Harlem

Copyright © 1998 by The Literary Estate of Henry Roth

Editor’s Afterword copyright © 1998 by Robert Weil

All rights reserved

First Edition

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Frontispiece and volume openers art: Estate of Martin Lewis, courtesy of The Old Print Shop, Inc.

Book design by Ellen Cipriano Design

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Roth, Henry.

Mercy of a rude stream: the complete novels / Henry Roth. — First edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-87140-762-7 (hardcover)

1. Jews — New York (State) — New York — Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y.) — Fiction. 3. Jewish families — Fiction. 4. Immigrants — Fiction. 5. Boys — Fiction. I. Title.

PS3535.O787M47 2014

813'.52—dc23

2014014825

ISBN 978-0-87140-763-4 (e-book)

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Content

Henry Roth
Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels

~ ~ ~

INTRODUCTION by Joshua Ferris

MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM

VOLUME I: A STAR SHINES OVER MT. MORRIS PARK

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

VOLUME II: A DIVING ROCK ON THE HUDSON

PART ONE. STUYVESANT

PART TWO. DEWITT CLINTON

PART THREE. CCNY

VOLUME III: FROM BONDAGE

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

VOLUME IV: REQUIEM FOR HARLEM

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

EDITOR’S AFTERWORD

GLOSSARY OF YIDDISH AND HEBREW WORDS AND PHRASES

ABOUT THE ARTIST

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OTHER WORKS BY HENRY ROTH

INTRODUCTION COPYRIGHT © 2014 JOSHUA FERRIS