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.