“Not — yeah. I mean only a little bit.” Ira’s mouth watered.
“I told you I could beat Le Vine, Ma,” Farley reiterated placidly. “He came in second this time.”
“It was wonderful, Mrs. Hewin.” Ira tried to hold fervor in check, in keeping with everyone else. “I sat at the finish line. I — gee! The way Farley ran.”
Mrs. Hewin turned from making sandwiches to look at her son. “I suppose you’ll be all over the newspapers.”
“I talked to reporters.”
“You did?”
“All kinds o’ reporters were there. You didn’t see those bulbs pop, Irey — me and O’Neil together?”
“No. I was outside already.”
“Wow! Thanks, Ma.”
“Gee, thanks, Mrs. Hewin!”
“Do you think you can wash your track suit now?” Mrs. Hewin filled two glasses with milk. “That and your sweat suit. We can already smell when you’re coming.”
“You can’t wash them, Ma,” Farley objected plaintively.
“I can’t? You’d be surprised.”
“Aw, no. You wash all the luck out of it, Mom.”
“That wouldn’t be all you washed out of it. And don’t you air all the luck out of it too, when it’s out in the yard hanging on the line?”
“Luck doesn’t air out, Ma.”
“Oh, no? Faith, and what if it rained?”
“Ma, you can’t wash it; that’s all I know.”
“Can you wash your hands?”
“I guess so.”
Mrs. Hewin put the bottle of milk back in the icebox, followed by the platter of meat, while both youths washed their hands at the kitchen sink. She wet her lips, seemed to form words silently a moment as she closed the icebox door. “I wouldn’t want you to lose.”
“I’m not going to lose, Ma.”
“No?”
Farley swigged a draft of milk. “I know I’m not. All I got to do is keep on training. I can get that gold medal every time.”
How little sentiment she allowed herself to dole out: just a kind of pensiveness, a slight swelling out of bosom as she regarded her son. “Well, if you’re going to stay with your Aunt Maureen in New Rochelle, could you wade out in the water with them on?”
“Aw, Ma!”
Later that same evening, when the two went out, and walked over to the lamplit street next to the church, Farley’s friends were there waiting to meet him. A few of them had been to the track meet too, and had seen Farley triumph in the 100-yard dash. St. Pius Academy hadn’t even placed. Still, when he displayed his newly won gold medal, even the owl-eyed Malloy, who had been so antagonistic before, forgot resentment in his unfeigned enthusiasm. “Hurray for the Irish!” he cheered at sight of the trophy.
Absolved, Ira basked in the glow of Farley’s victory. Absolution and victory. And yet, it was to be the last such totally intimate restoration of their friendship. They would join together again, after track meets, in which Farley now regularly placed first — except for the initial meet following that summer’s vacation, which he had spent in New Rochelle, swimming: “Softened my muscles,” Farley explained. But he beat Le Vine in the next meet, and never placed second again while in high school. “Schoolboy wonder,” the sportswriters called him. He was surrounded by new friends, droves of them, out of whose circle he never failed to single Ira out with his cheery greeting, “Hey, Irey.”
Still, friendship thinned, not because of Farley’s growing fame and number of admirers, but as the bond of interest between the two attenuated. They diverged — inevitably. Reunions became less and less frequent, and more and more transient: an exchange of greetings followed by congratulations offered for his almost routine victories. Ira attended track meets less and less often. Soon to be a student of DeWitt Clinton High School, he would have no reason for going but to watch the performance of a rival of his own school, a Stuyvesant runner, and one who came in first with unfailing regularity. Ira could read about it in the sports section of the following Sunday’s newspaper. He ceased going. .
PART TWO. DEWITT CLINTON
I
He had lost a whole semester when he entered DeWitt Clinton in September of 1921. He could no longer expect to graduate from high school with the February class of 1924, but with that of June. At least, though, he was back in high school again. It was a bleak time for him, without close schoolfriends, without close friendships of any kind, chastened by the ordeal of expulsion. He was humbled by a growing awareness of his inadequacies, amounting almost to stupidity, his slowness to grasp instruction, compared to most of his classmates, above all his inability to cope with abstractions, whether delivered orally in class or appearing on the printed page. And always contending with, always succumbing to, his vile cravings, cravings that preempted studies, ousted and routed concentration, cravings bringing terror and anxiety in their train, perpetual shadows inexorably etiolating his youthful spirits, his normal appetites, his readiness for diversion, his cheerfulness.
A smear of dreariness, Ira harked back in cheerless recollection. And worse to come, psychologically, and soon. Well, no need to anticipate it. It would arrive, flaw him irreversibly, rend integrity, with that little rift within the lute, he echoed the Tennysonian snatch. Had a lot of truth in it, sardonic snatch aside: a fifty-year widening, for example, made the music moot. No hurry, no hurry. That little rift within the lute that would make junk of any second novel. Immobilité de junk, as Rimbaud never said. But what would he do with it? Ira already found himself wondering. With one of his characters disallowed, disavowed, invisible. The thought came to him that he could excise material from his future writing, writing many, many pages hence, and inject it like a geologic dike extraneously into a different strata. No, it would never do. Let it be, let it rest. When that time comes, do what you can. You’ve enough to do rendering a straightforward account, without trying to skate on your ear. You’re not clever enough.
Though he made no close friends in school, he drew nearer to Jewish acquaintances, new and old, on 119th Street. The street had changed in character over the years, since that day in 1914 when he and his parents had moved in — as he had changed from that pugnacious little East Side Jewish kid then to his present indeterminate Harlem self today. The street had in the intervening years become largely Jewish — with a Jewish grocery store in the middle, a kosher butcher shop across the street, a tailor shop too that was Jewish. A new candy store had opened in the middle of the block. In the back of it, strident pinochle games took place. And on the corner and around it on both sides along Park Avenue a Jewish greengrocer, Jewish butter-and-egg store, a Jewish hardware store, notions, and other minuscule Jewish gesheftn of that sort. Those Irish families who hadn’t quit the neighborhood before the influx of Jews, who had chosen to stay on and live in tenements predominantly Jewish, had retreated to the block of red-brick, three-flight cold-water flats near Lexington Avenue. Next to the five-flight tenements of gray brick and brown, under their imposing eaves, the short block of red dwellings looked dwarfish indeed; and they were old as well, perhaps the oldest houses on the street, judging by the intriguing iron stars each had on its front, ornamental bolts at the end of massive iron rods that were concealed between floors and yoked opposite walls together.
— Ah, Stigman, Stigman. Fourteen years you resided there. Couldn’t you have simply chronicled the changes that took place in the street? Vicissitudes of vicinity. There’s a high-flown title for you. Fourteen years spent in polyglot Harlem, as against a few years on the homogeneous Lower East Side — which you warped out of shape anyway by the neutron mass of your later experience. Ah! Documented that motley squalor, that poverty: stoop and hallway and roof, street and cellar and backyard; and the sort that lived there, and when. Ah, what more did you need? There was a mine there for the literary man: see the Irish kids in their confirmation suits, white ribbon on their arm — wasn’t that what the little gamins wore? See Veronica Delaney in the pride of princess-loveliness with her mincing gait and black beauty spot on her chin. And the box-ball games, and the rubber baseball games, and kids climbing down the sewer for the lost ball, or up, all the way up one of the cross-braced pillars, and over into the New York Central trestle, the overpass, daring the exposed third rail for the sake of a ten-cent rubber ball.