A mile or so he would ramble thus along the tree-lined avenue — until he came to a painted arrow that marked the entrance to a path downhill whose other end opened on an artificially sandy beach. It was a privately owned swimming area on the Hudson, complete with dressing room, lockers, and a diving platform extending into the river. A fee of ten cents was charged for the use of a locker; otherwise, admission to the dressing room was free. There, Ira would change to his two-piece bathing suit, deposit his clothes in an out-of-the-way spot outdoors, walk to the sandy beach, and swim out into the “clean,” pleasantly brackish depths of the wide Hudson estuary. He was a good swimmer. His roly-poly build, so often disadvantageous in land sports, served to advantage in water. He would swim out to the rusting hulks of the Liberty ships, quondam military transports during the Great War, now idly tugging at the moorings in midstream. Airplanes, pontoon planes, were often anchored partway between the rusting ships and the shore, and Ira would hang on to a strut or guy wire for a breather. And once, while he was perched on a pontoon, a navy patrol boat churned up, and an officer ordered him to clear off. He did, but in his haste to comply, he dove off — and struck his head against something solid, was stunned, but managed to stay afloat until he recovered enough to swim back to shore.
Alone, so rash and alone, and often far from shore, from rescue, had he been the victim of serious accident, or been seized by cramp, he would certainly have drowned. And always in those spasms of momentary panic, when he imagined some Leviathan under him, or bucking the combined flow of river current and outgoing tide, when dry land seemed unattainable, he always thought of Mom: he shared in her inconsolable grieving for him.
“Why do I let you go?” she said to Ira more than once, so often that her words would remain fixed in his heedless mind. “I don’t know myself why I do. I let you go because you have to learn about America. You must learn alone, because help you I can’t. Neither I nor your father.” And she would laugh ruefully. “Mrs. Shapiro chides me that I’m like a goya. ‘You have a heart of stone,’ she says. ‘A stony heart like a goyish mother.’ She doesn’t know. If I lost you I would fall lifeless. I go about numb until you come home.”
Too late to enroll in the current term, Ira had enrolled in the summer session of the night high school — at the very same large gray school building he had passed so often — and would again — on his way to and from the Lenox Avenue subway station on 116th Street. Second-year English, his junior high school record entitled him to take, second-year Spanish, and elementary algebra. After oppressive, sultry, electric-lit classrooms, sauntering through 116th Street, the crosstown trolley thoroughfare and the Jewish shopping equivalent to goyish 125th Street. He would saunter along with other working youth, as if he too were on his own as they were, and not just temporarily thrown in with them, bantering, chatting — about what? Classes, courses, jobs.
Ira could recall one exchange distinctly. He was sharply reproved by a gentile student — already a young man, several years older than he was — for some facetious remark he made impugning Calvin Coolidge. Ingratiating himself, as usual, when with gentiles, by recourse to mild Jewish denigration, he said humorously that Jews called Coolidge “Koilitch,” which was the Yiddish word for stale challah, day-old Sabbath loaf, because it was so dry and colorless. His night-school classmate’s rejoinder was prompt and pointed: Jews of all people had no business making light of the man who had led the country into its greatest period of prosperity. “Look at the way business is booming,” he averred. “And who’s getting the most benefit out of it? The Jews. That’s the trouble with them. They don’t know when they’re well off.” He was so emphatic in his condemnation that Ira made no reply.
Booming business. Commercial, industrial, financial prosperity. Exactly the things that had the least meaning for him, that he didn’t give a damn about. But Ira couldn’t tell him that. Such values were part of his fiber, as an American and as a white-collar worker, a clerk striving to get ahead. He would have been outraged if Ira had told him he didn’t give a damn about Prosperity and Booming Business and the buoyant stock market. He would have called Ira a Red, a Bolshevik, one of the mangy, rabid, bewhiskered guys in cartoons in the Hearst newspapers who rushed wildly about wielding round bombs with fuses ignited. He would probably have told Ira to go back where he came from, or go back to Russia.
VIII
From the day of his expulsion from Stuyvesant, Ira continually thought of Farley. What did Farley think of him now? Could he, Ira, make amends? How could Ira get in touch with him? Did he dare get in touch with him? Had Farley told his parents? Ira yearned to see him. It was after his job in the warehouse, loading compartments with toys, had come to its inglorious end, though still a month before the close of the school year, on a clear, fine Saturday afternoon in late May, that Ira made his way to the Armory on upper Broadway where the high school interscholastic track meet was to be held. It was the last interscholastic track meet of the school year. Advance notices of the meet had been featured in the sports pages of all the metropolitan newspapers, especially by the World, which carried the most Boy Wanted ads. Farley’s name figured often, as the one runner who could seriously vie for first place with the reigning star of the 100-yard dash, the junior from Utrecht High in Brooklyn, Le Vine. Anonymous among the first bands of students surging from subway to Broadway, Ira made his way to the Armory. He knew just where to sit — to obtain the best view of the finish of the one event he cared about. He sat at the very end of the Armory, where the finish line of the 100-yard dash was clearly visible from the first few rows of seats in the balcony above the track.
He arrived early, on purpose, paid his twenty-five cents admission, hurried upstairs to choose a seat in the first tier, the tier next to the tubular brass balcony barrier. In a little while, the bulk of the crowd began to pour in, ebullient, colorful high school youth, hailing classmates, waving school pennants, striding over the stiles of seat backs to join friends — carefree, as he was not — gregarious, boisterous, outgoing, all the things that he really was not. More than a little furtive, troubled lest one of his former classmates might recognize him, perhaps, even, if he was there, the very youth whose silver-filigreed fountain pen Ira had stolen, stolen and bestowed on Farley, the silver-filigreed fountain pen now resting securely in its owner’s pocket. No. No one seemed even remotely conscious of his presence. He was safe, secure in his commonplace aspect, secure in his lackluster nonentity.