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.