Why did he remember chiefly the unpleasant, the disastrous incidents connected with the job, Ira queried himself, the all-too-frequent mishaps of which he was the cause? Why was he so intent on proving he was a shlemiel? For no other reason than that he was. It was not a case of his protesting too much; he simply was. Ah, yes, wonderfuclass="underline" Ses ailes de géant l’empêche de marcher.
Who was to know that? Strangely enough, his blunders and casualties infuriated the younger Mr. Stein far more than the father. The senior Mr. Stein seemed not so much amused with Ira as always on the verge of being amused: what antic would he furnish next? It was Mortimer who made life miserable for Ira, made him so continually ill at ease that he virtually guaranteed Ira’s commission of some egregious slip, which in turn vindicated Mortimer’s rancor as it stoked further cause. Ira broke unbreakable dolls. He stepped into whole cartons of fragile Christmas-tree baubles. Immediately after, he spied the older man at his desk wheezing alarmingly with averted face: “Die insurinks vill pay for it,” he said indulgently to his son, who, Ira supposed, wanted him fired at once. “My madicine dey don’t pay for. So — de yold is better vie madicine.”
But Mortimer was not to be appeased. One afternoon, returned from lunch, when he was at his most sluggish, Ira was called on to help Mortimer unload a big case of teddy bears. And while Mortimer stood high above his helper, one foot on a stepladder, the other on an upper bin, Ira tossed him teddy bears to stow away at the very top tier of the shelves. And Ira’s aim astray more than once, Mortimer had to catch himself and the teddy bear at the same time. Suddenly, as Ira bent over to get at the bottom layer of teddy bears, whack! a teddy bear bounced off his skull. No teddy bear could ever make an impact that hard by merely being dropped — of that Ira was sure. It had to be aimed and hurled — deliberately and with maximum force. And even though Mortimer, high on his perch near the ceiling, served up a conciliating smile and an unconvincing “I’m sorry,” Ira resolved to quit. That Saturday he did, without notice.
Ah, what it would have been like, Stigman — Ira let his head loll back — without the canker, susceptible to all phases of existence, unaware, or scarcely, of the poverty, of the penury and the squalor all about you? What else did the kid know, besides what he perceived, what he discerned within the confines of the slum his milieu? Mostly those things that books told him, the too often insubstantial library-world, at a far remove from his own. Still, the mind did open sometimes upon literary avenues, and some were feasible, might reward the traveler for his journey.
We go this way only once, said Thoreau; and he, Ira, had all but gone to the end of that way already. Nonetheless, it was a privilege to reconstruct the route, and on a computer. Could Ira repress that, that which now strove for utterance? No, he couldn’t. It was the consequence of his having taken a half-tablet of Percodan, Percodan, which always tended to make him loquacious. Millie M, Marcello’s wife, had given him Jane Eyre to read, the first and only Brontë novel he had ever read — and he could hear the quality of her prose pulse in his. A hundred and forty years ago she lived. She died in childbirth, but she spoke to him now, her spirit still alive and vital, toiling at the same craft, speaking through the medium of the same craft, speaking with a fine, vibrant woman’s voice over a span of a century and a half, relating what it was to be alive then, imparting a sense of life through all the fuddy-duddy tags of religiosity, gothic implausibilities, supernatural folderol, bursting through Freud and the grave, through custom, culture, ethos, to impart a sense of the young woman of her time to an old man of his. And now look ahead — he thought — look ahead 140 years. Say Kaddish not only for your grandchildren, but for your great-grandchildren; rend your garments now, sit humbled by bereavement, sit shiva—which you never have done for the living — in a word, mourn for the unborn, for the departed of the future.
In that utterly changed world of 2125, with its changed mores, changed ambience, changed awareness, will any look back at you? Look back from a humanity whose nature you can scarcely guess at now: more extraordinarily different probably than Jane Eyre’s world was from yours. Still, the only holistic world they will have to look back at will be such as this, through all the lame and ludicrous anachronisms — this mélange of fact and fiction. A hell of a lot of difference a misplaced year is going to make 140 years from now. Indeed, Ecclesias, if you wish to know, you have much to be grateful for in this digression. Not only because it relieves the heart, but it illuminates mortality in continuity, or continuity in mortality, reconciles the soul, yes, a very little bit, the human soul to its fate. So, let this be an indefinite interlude. .
VII
He had earned enough money for Mom to buy him his clothes for the coming school year: a few pieces of underwear — BVDs — socks, a pair of cheap shoes, and enough secondhand outergarments to last until he again brought home wages next summer. And how unabashedly she haggled with the secondhand clothes dealer on 114th Street, flushed with indignation, holding up to the light the seat of the touted pants to exhibit the worn fabric — heedless of the shopkeeper’s disclaimers and Ira’s cringing complaints. With his raiment provided, Ira felt excused from further responsibility for his own welfare until next year. Food and shelter, a bed to sleep in, he took that for granted; it was his by virtue of his parents’ obligation — or really, Mom’s obligation, since she was so dedicated to his getting an education. The carfare too, the dime she tendered him every day for transportation to and from high school, he felt equally complacent about. Hadn’t he contributed sufficiently to his present source of supply when he worked in the summer? Apparel was the one thing that — to his way of thinking — didn’t accrue naturally in the household, demanded supplemental cash, cash from the outside, cash that it was his duty to earn. And he had earned enough to defray the cost of secondhand raiment. He had discharged his duty. And as soon as he believed he had done so, he felt he was entitled to quit the job, to loaf with clear conscience.
So with bathing suit wrapped in a towel to form a small bundle, and the bundle tucked under his arm, Ira strolled west through 125th Street’s shopping mart, its string of one-story shops, west, under the Sixth Avenue El, west, to the soaring, dark 125th Street subway overpass, and under it all the way to the St. George’s ferry slip at the Hudson River shore. That was as far as shank’s mare could take him. From there he had to board the ferry, which cost a nickel, and ride to the other side of the river, the New Jersey side at the foot of the Palisades. A highway ascended to the Palisades, but partway up, an avenue branched off through a residential section, and here he would hike north, above the river and parallel to it, hike along a narrow sidewalk by comfortable homes set back on sloping lawns, under the shade of trees in the full leaf of late summer. And now and then note a house rising in quiet affluence from curved, paved driveways where motorcars were parked.
America, flourishing, prosperous, where modish women in picture hats pulled on long white gloves as they walked to their automobiles. Almost without benefit of words, but as if thoughts were clouds imbued with meaning, he would mull on the imponderable gulf that separated him from everything he beheld — and was enchanted by — that separated him, the immigrant, from the American-born, the Jew from the gentile. Oh, it was more than just that, Ira would ruminate. To be the kind they were you had to come from the kind they were a long, long time. Always. No old Jews with whiskers, no Shloime Farb with his forked gray beard, clearing his throat luxuriantly as he bent over the Torah scrolls, Shloime Farb in top hat on Shabbes, no cheder, scant as the memory was, East Side pushcarts, babble of Yiddish, matzahs and Moses in the Haggadah engraving clubbing the felled Egyptian taskmaster. This world had no warm Yom Kippur afternoons strolling past the ground-floor synagogue, no feeble old Jews in their shrouds prostrating themselves in atonement — scary — nothing to flaw the wholeness of the kind they were who lived in those well-kept homes beneath the trees where he walked. And worst of all, he was sure, he was sure, no secret canker had already begun to mar the contented wholesomeness they seemed to possess when he saw them clipping the hedges about their neat, elevated lawns, or seated in vivacious conversation opposite each other in their swinging gaily striped chairs. No. Their heartiness, their soundness, removed them.