Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

“Oh, I wanna go back,” he suddenly cried out in English — he was sure Mom would understand. “I wanna go back to 9th Street. I wanna come back here. I don’t wanna live in Harlem.”

“ Bist mishugeh? ” Mom said startled. “Are you mad?”

“It’s full of Irishers. They always wanna fight.”

“And you can’t? Since when?”

“Yeah, but everybody! Everybody is Irish. They’re all on their side.”

“ Noo , you’ll have to learn to avoid a quarrel — with a good word, a jest. How can I help you? This is an ancient story of Jews among the goyim . You got a Jewish head. You’ll have to learn to fend for yourself.”

“Yeah, but even 114th Street was better!”

“I’ll sit there looking out at brick walls? And what? If your father is a lunatic and seeks only dreck ? Twelve shmoolyaris a month. Pay another dollar or two, and rent something with electricity, with hot water — No! A twisted head. And every penny he had to save to buy milk from the farmers, to buy oats, to buy hay. And he works day and night. Another would be satisfied to work for a boss. What can I do?”

“Ahh!”

“Go, don’t be a fool. I have there my sisters, my mother, a little happiness. He has his stable nearby. You’ll have to make the best of it.”

Ira was silent. It was useless. They passed the cheder -entrance across the street, passed the weathered wooden platform in front of Levi’s Dairy for whom Pop had once worked, the platform where Ira had sat with other kids a summer afternoon, and still remembered Mutke saying, “So if there was a Silver War, when was the Golden War?” They reached the candy store where his uncle Morris had been so generous, even saved up enough purchase-tickets to take Ira and Mom to the premium store and buy his nephew a tricycle, which was stolen from him the first day. How he wept! It was his street, his world, his life. Here. Where were the kids?

“I’m going upstairs to see Mrs. Dvorshkin. Do you want to come?”

“No, I’ll go around the block. Maybe they’re around that furniture factory. They make bows and arrows from the thin pieces the factory throws away.”

She didn’t understand. “ Noo . Be careful.” She climbed the low stoop. “Don’t wander too far.” She went inside the hall.

A minute longer he tarried in front of the house. In that hallway he had tried to kiss pretty, dark Annie. She had scratched his face. And across the street lived Izzy with whom Ira had gone into partnership, devising a try-your-luck you-never-lose machine, an arrow over a board with sectors divided on it, and a stick of chewing gum in each sector, and an entire package in one. By the carbide lights of the pushcarts on Avenue C, they had set up shop, tempted passersby to wager a penny. The two had made a profit, divided it up and come home — late: It was after nine o’clock, Pop’s milkman’s bedtime hour. And what a thrashing Pop gave him! But he could have been a businessman, a Jewish businessman. It was fun, it was exciting to be with the Saturday night crowds, after the Sabbath was over, to yell: “Try your luck, you never lose!” But now on 119th Street, among all the goyim jeering at Jews: “Mockies: Make money, oy .” Some even had learned how to say it in Yiddish: Makh gelt , waggling hands under chin — He hated it.

Ah, the East River — he walked toward the corner — the only time, or nearly the only time Pop seemed friendly, at ease with Ira, as he with him, was when the two went out on the big wooden dock at the end of the cobblestone street, and sat there on a bulky beam above the water, in torrid summer, when the river breeze was like the river’s gift, a benison cool and encompassing.

No. Nobody around the block. He turned back. Maybe he’d better go upstairs to Mrs. Dvorshkin’s, where Mom was; maybe Heshy was there: the top floor, five flights up, one floor above the floor the Stigmans had lived on; go all the way up there, one flight below the roof. Oh, the time Pop laughed, when he and Ira both went up to the roof on a cold day: Pop hung two calves’ feet in a smoking chimney, just as they did in his own country far away across the ocean in Galitzia.

Was that Izzy’s shout? Ira stopped at the threshold. Lucky! He was about to go in, but they had spied him, before he had seen them. And look: They had a wagon, Heshy and Izzy, coming toward him from Avenue C, the one pushing, the other steering with ropes tied on the front axle, and Heshy picking up speed, now that they had seen him. Ira ran out into the gutter to meet them. “Izzy! Heshy!”

Oh, it was as if he still lived there, the way Izzy pulled the wagon over to the curb in front of a pile that a horse had left, and all three pranced for joy at meeting again: swarthy, quick Izzy, with his thick eyebrows and flat, spreading nose. Heshy with his likable smile and sandy hair that had a slightly rancid odor as if it had been buttered with old butter. They jabbered about the past and the times spent together, and who lived in his “house” now, and how they had gotten the baby-carriage wheels — in exchange for roller skates “wit liddle windows in de steel w’eels a’ready.” They were now partners in the “Try-your-luck machine.”

“You gettin’ fat,” Heshy said. “You like it where you live?”

“No, it’s lousy. It’s no good!” Ira could almost have wept. “It’s full of lousy Irish goyim . They call me Jew bestit all the time, an’ they wanna fight.”

“You’re a good fighdah,” Izzy reminded him. “So give ’em.”

“Not there,” Ira hung his head sullenly. “Everybody cheers on their side.”

“Nobody’s Jewish?” Heshy asked incredulously.

“Nearly nobody.”

“So why did you move dere?” Izzy asked.

Ira tried to explain.

“Where do you go to cheder ?” they asked.

“I didn’t go once yet.”

“O-o-h! You don’t go to cheder ? Dere’s no cheder ?”

“Yeah, but my fodder wanted the money for a milk wagon.”

It took them a few seconds to absorb the sobering import of Ira’s answer. “Wanna ride?” Heshy invited.

“Nah, it’s your wagon. Lemme push.”

“Nah, you get on.”

“No. I’m suppose to push first.”

“Get on,” they insisted.

In vain he protested. That was not the custom, not proper: It was their wagon. He was supposed to push first; that was the code. It was only after he had pushed them around the block to their entire satisfaction, then and then only did he earn a claim to the driver’s seat, to hold the steering ropes. Everybody knew that was the accepted order of things. But the other two wouldn’t hear of it. He was their guest. And look how clean he was! A clean shirt, clean knee-pants. He could right away get dirty pushing.

In the end, it was they who prevailed; it was they who pushed him! Unhappy in the driver’s seat, and protesting his unmerited privilege, he let them take turns pushing him from Avenue D half the way to Avenue C, and back. “Now let me push,” he importuned. No one could any longer deny it was his turn to push. Instead, they excused him. No, he didn’t have to. It was all right. His mother might come down; she wouldn’t know where he was. He better stay here. They could coast down together on the slope in front of the “ice house” across the trolley tracks on 10th Street. They only had to push the empty wagon up. And with Izzy steering, and Heshy bent over providing traction, they left him on the corner of Avenue D.

His throat thickened with unaccountable sorrow; latent tears pressed against his brow. He was a guest now among his own kind. He, who had been so undifferentiated from the rest until only two months ago, was now excluded from belonging. Intuition divined it all: His special treatment was a sign that he was banned from return.