“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.
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!