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?