Of Time and the River (77 page)

“Ah!” he said in his tough, high city-urchin’s voice, “a coupla guys tried to get wise wit’ me an’ I socked one of ‘em. Dat’s all!”

“Oh-ho-ho-ho!”—Abe turned his grey grinning face prayerfully to heaven and laughed softly, painfully.

“Fightin”, huh?” said Sylvia. “Do you remember what I told you last time?” she said in a warning tone. “If I catch yuh fightin’ again there’s goin’ to be no more ball games. YOU’LL stay HOME next time.”

“Ah!” he cried again in a high protesting tone. “What’s a guy gonna do? Do you t’ink I’m gonna let a coupla mugs like dat get away wit’ moidah?”

“Oh-ho-ho-ho!” cried Abe, lifting his great nose prayerfully again; then with a sudden shift to reproof and admonition, he said sternly: “What kind of talk do you call that? Huh? Didn’t I tell you not to say ‘mugs’?”

“Ah, what’s a guy gonna say?” cried Jimmy. “I neveh could loin all dem big woids, noway.”

“My God! I wish you’d listen to ‘m,” his mother said in a tone of hard and weary resignation. “I suppose that’s what I’m sendin’ him to school for! ‘LOIN, WOIDS, NOWAY, T’INK! Is THAT the way to talk?” she demanded harshly. “Is THAT what they teach yuh?”

“Say THINK!” commanded Abe.

“I DID say it,” the child answered evasively.

“Go on! You DIDN’T! You didn’t say it right. I’ll bet you can’t say it right. Come on! Let’s hear you: THINK!”

“T’ink,” Jimmy answered immediately.

“Oh-ho-ho-ho!”—and Abe lifted his grinning face heavenward, saying, “Say! This is rich!”

“Can yuh beat it?” the woman asked.

And, for a moment she continued to look at her son with a glance that was quizzical, tinged with a mocking resignation, and yet with a cold, detached affection. Then her long blue-veined hands twitched nervously and impatiently until all the crusted jewels on her wrists and fingers blazed with light: she sighed sharply and, looking away, dismissed the child from her consideration.

Although the boy saw very little of his mother, Abe watched and guarded over him as tenderly as if he had been his father. If the child were late in coming home from school, if he had not had his lunch before going out to play, if he remained away too long Abe showed his concern and distress very plainly, and he spoke very sharply and sternly at times to the other members of the family if he thought they had been lax in some matter pertaining to the boy.

“Did Jimmy get home from school yet?” he would ask sharply. “Did he eat before he went out again? . . . Well, why did you let him get away, then, before he had his lunch? . . . For heaven’s sake! You’re here all day long: you could at least do that much—I can’t be here to watch him all the time, you know—don’t you know the kid ought never to go out to play until he’s had something to eat?”

Eugene saw the child for the first time one day when Abe had taken him home for dinner: Abe, in his crisp neat shirt-sleeves, was seated at the table devouring his food with a wolfish and prowling absorption, and yet in a cleanly and fastidious way, when the child entered. The boy paused in surprise when he saw Eugene: his wheaten sheaf of hair fell down across one eye, one trouser leg had come unbanded at the knee and flapped down to his ankle, and for a moment he looked at Eugene with a rude frank stare of his puggish freckled face.

Abe, prowling upward from his food, glanced at the boy and grinned; then, jerking his head sharply toward Eugene, he said roughly:

“Whatcha think of this guv? Huh?”

“Who is he?” the boy asked in his high tough little voice, never moving his curious gaze from Eugene.

“He’s my teacher,” Abe said. “He’s the guy that teaches me.”

“Ah, g’wan!” the child answered in a protesting tone, still fixing Eugene with his steady and puzzled stare.

“Whatcha handin’ me? He’s NOT!”

“Sure he is! No kiddin’!” Abe replied. “He’s the guy that teaches me English.”

“Ah, he’s NOT!” the boy answered decisively. “Yuh’re bein’ wise.”

“What makes you think he’s not?” Abe asked.

“If he’s an English teacher,” Jimmy said triumphantly, “w’y don’t he say somet’ing? W’y don’t he use some of dose woids?”

“Oh-ho-ho-ho!” cried Abe, lifting his great bleak nose aloft. “Say! . . . This is good! . . . This is swell! . . . Say, that’s some kid!” he said when the boy had departed. “There’s not much gets by HIM!” And lifting his grey face heavenward again, he laughed softly, painfully, in gleeful and tender reminiscence.

Thus, the whole care and government of the boy had been entrusted to Abe and his mother: Sylvia herself, although she paid liberally all her child’s expenses, took no other interest in him. She was a hard, feverish, bitter, and over-stimulated woman, and yet she had a kind of harsh loyalty to her family: she was, in a fierce and smouldering way, very ambitious for Abe, who seemed to be the most promising of her brothers: she was determined that he should go to college and become a lawyer, and his fees at the university, in part at any rate, were paid by his sister—in part only, not because Sylvia would not have paid all without complaint, but because Abe insisted on paying as much as he could through his own labour, for Abe, too, had embedded in him a strong granite of independence, the almost surly dislike, of a strong and honest character, of being beholden to anyone for favours. On this score, indeed, he had the most sensitive and tender pride of anyone Eugene had ever known.

At home Abe had become, by unspoken consent, the head of a family which now consisted only of his mother, two brothers, and his sister’s illegitimate child Jimmy. Two of his older brothers, who were in business together, had married and lived away from home, as did Sylvia, and another sister, Rose, who had married a musician in a theatre orchestra a year or two before; she was a dark, tortured and sensitive Jewess with a big nose and one blind eye. Her physical resemblance to Abe was marked. She was a very talented pianist, and once or twice he took Eugene to visit her on Sunday afternoons: she played for them in a studio room in which candles were burning and she carried on very technical and knowing conversations about the work of various composers with her brother. Abe listened to the music when she played with an obscure and murky smile: he seemed to know a great deal about music: it awakened a thousand subtle echoes in his Jewish soul, but for Eugene, somehow, the music, and something arrogant, scornful, and secretive in their knowingness, together with the dreary consciousness of a winter’s Sunday afternoon outside, the barren streets, the harsh red waning light of day, and a terrible sensation of thousands of other knowing Jews—the men with little silken moustaches—who were coming from concerts at that moment, awakened in him vague but powerful emotions of nakedness, rootlessness, futility and misery, which even the glorious memory of the power, exultancy and joy of poetry could not conquer or subdue. The scene evoked for him suddenly a thousand images of a sterile and damnable incertitude, in which man groped indefinitely along the smooth metallic sides of a world in which there was neither warmth, nor depth, nor door to enter, nor walls to shelter him: he got suddenly a vision of a barren Sunday and a grey despair, of ugly streets and of lights beginning to wink and flicker above cheap moving-picture houses and chop-suey restaurants, and of a raucous world of cheap and flashy people, as trashy as their foods, as trivial and infertile as their accursed amusements, and finally of the Jews returning through a thousand streets, in that waning and desolate light, from symphony concerts, an image which, so far from giving a note of hope, life, and passionate certitude and joy to the wordless horror of this damned and blasted waste of Dead-Man’s Land, seemed to enhance it rather and to give it a conclusive note of futility and desolation.

Abe and his sister did not seem to feel this: instead the scene, the time, the day, the waning light, the barren streets, the music, awakened in them something familiar and obscure, a dark and painful joy, a certitude Eugene did not feel. They argued, jibed, and sneered harshly and arrogantly at each other: their words were sharp and cutting, impregnated with an aggressive and unpleasant intellectualism; they called each other fools and sentimental ignoramuses, and yet they did not seem to be wounded or offended by this harsh intercourse: they seemed rather to derive a kind of bitter satisfaction from it.

Already, the first year Eugene had known him he had discovered this strange quality in these people: they seemed to delight in jeering and jibing at one another; and at the same time their harsh mockery had in it an element of obscure and disquieting affection. At this time Abe was carrying on, week by week, a savage correspondence with another young Jew who had been graduated with him from the same class in high school. He always had in his pocket at least one of the letters this boy had written him, and he was for ever giving it to Eugene to read, and then insisting that he read his answer. In these letters they flew at each other with undisciplined ferocity, they hurled denunciation, mockery, and contempt at each other, and they seemed to exult in it. The tone of their letters was marked by an affectation of cold impersonality and austerity, and yet this obviously was only a threadbare cloak to the furious storm of personal insult and invective, the desire to crow over the other man and humiliate him, which seemed to delight them. “In your last letter,” one would write, “I see that the long-expected débâcle has now occurred. In our last year at high school I saw occasional gleams of adult intelligence in your otherwise infantile and adolescent intellect, and I had some hope of saving you, but I now see my hopes were wasted—your puerile remarks on Karl Marx, Anatole France, et al., show you up as the fat-headed bourgeois you always were, and I accordingly wash my hands of you. You reveal plainly that your intellect is incapable of grasping the issues involved in modern socialism: you are a romantic individualist and you will find everything you say elegantly embalmed in the works of the late Lord Byron, which is where you belong also: your mother should dress you up in a cowboy suit and give you a toy pistol to play with before you hurt yourself playing around with great big rough grown-up men.”

Abe would read Eugene one of these letters, grinning widely with Kike delight, lifting his grinning face and laughing softly, “Oh- ho-ho-ho-ho!” as he came to some particularly venomous insult.

“But who wrote you such a letter?” Eugene demanded.

“Oh, a guy I went to school with,” he answered, “a friend of mine!”

“A friend of yours! Is that the kind of letter that your friends write you?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why not? He’s a good guy. He doesn’t mean anything by it. He’s got bats in the belfry, that’s all. But wait till you see what I wrote HIM!” he cried, grinning exultantly as he took his own letter from his pocket. “Wait till you see what I call HIM! Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho!”—softly, painfully, he laughed. “Say, this is rich!” and gleefully he would read his answer: five closely typed pages of bitter insult and vituperation.

Another astonishing and disquieting circumstance of this brutal correspondence was now revealed: this extraordinary “friend” of Abe’s, who wrote him these insulting letters, had not gone abroad, nor did he live in some remote and distant city. When Eugene asked Abe where this savage critic lived, he answered: “Oh, a couple of blocks from where I live.”

“But do you ever see him?”

“Sure. Why not?” he said, looking at Eugene in a puzzled way. “We grew up together. I see him all the time.”

“And yet you write this fellow letters and he writes you, when you live only a block apart and see each other all the time?”

“Sure. Why not?” said Abe.

He saw nothing curious or unusual in the circumstance, and yet there was something disturbing and unpleasant about it: in all these letters Eugene had observed, below the tirades of abuse, an obscure, indefinable, and murky emotionalism that was somehow ugly.

Within a few months, however, this strange communication with his Jewish comrade ceased abruptly: Eugene began to see Abe, in the halls and corridors of the university, squiring various Jewish girls around with a sheepish and melancholy look. His lust for letter-writing still raged with unabated violence, although now the subjects of his correspondence were women. His attitude towards girls had always been cold and scornful: he regarded their cajoleries and enticements with a fishy eye and with a vast Jewish caution and suspiciousness, and he laughed scornfully at anyone who allowed himself to be ensnared. Like many people who feel deeply, and who are powerfully affected by the slightest and remotest changes in their emotions, he had convinced himself that he was a creature whose every action was governed by the operations of cool reason, and accordingly now that his feelings were powerfully and romantically involved in thoughts about several of these warm and luscious-looking Jewish wenches, he convinced himself that he “cared only for their minds” and that what he really sought from them was the stimulation of intellectual companionship. Accordingly, the love-letters which this great-nosed innocent now wrote to them, and read to Eugene, were extraordinary and unwitting productions of defence and justification.

“. . . I think I observe in your last letter,” Abe would write, “traces of that romantic sentimentality which we have both seen so often in these childish lives around us but from which you and I long ago freed ourselves. As you know, Florence, we both agreed at the beginning that we would not spoil our friendship by the intrusion of a puerile and outmoded romanticism. Sex can play no part in our relations, Florence: it is at best a simple biological necessity, the urge of the hungry animal which should be recognized as such and satisfied without intruding on the higher faculties. Have you read Havelock Ellis yet? If not, you must read him without further delay. . . . So Myrtle Goldberg really thought I was in earnest that night of the dance. . . . Ye Gods! It is to laugh! Ha-ha! What fools these mortals be . . . I laugh, and yet I do not laugh . . . I laugh and observe my laughter, and then there is yet another level of reality which observes my laughter at my laughter. . . . I play the clown with an ironic heart and put on the grinning mask these fools wish to see. . . . O tempora! O mores!”—etcetera.