“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.