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

Well, he had said his say, thrown off the spell of the arch-necromancer. He had to have his say, however chaotic, or he would never have been able to proceed, sucked in by that dread black star. No. He would not continue perusing Gilbert’s book on Ulysses , Ira decided. By no means. You could not fool with old habits, old addictions, old vices; precisely because they were old, were deeply ingrained, they were never, never dead, never entirely banished. Part of one always, they waited, in suspended animation, like a dormant virus. No. Dear acolyte Mr. Gilbert was going back on the shelf, banished there for good, as far as Ira was concerned. Bloom had become a Zionist, Stephen ambushed Albion’s Black and Tan. Nor could Ira help, grinning to himself, taking note, one last time, of the large number of Jews who figuratively, and literally, clasped Joyce to their bosoms, because he was among the very, very few of that generation of literary men not openly anti-jew. Joyce didn’t portray Bloom as a grasping, avaricious, unscrupulous Fagin or a contemporary Shylock, or as Hemingway’s Cohen presuming to Western culture, Western grace in default of Western virility, or as Eliot’s Sir Alfred Monde, Sir Ferdinand Klein, Bleistein, or the Jew in the window in “Gerontion.” One of Ira’s Jewish friends, a Jewishist and Hebrewist of note, even pointed to the delicacy the great writer showed to Jewish sensibilities by having Bloom attribute his wife’s infidelities, not to her Jewish blood, but to her “hot Spanish blood.” But to hell with Joyce and his holy writ. And with genuflecting Stu Gilbert to boot. It was with M that he, Ira, had found the way to adulthood. With M, the adult, sensitive and sensible, admirably intelligent, courageous, artistically creative, wife of his bosom, mother of his kids, he was safe, his soul growing in his pride in and admiration of his beloved spouse, which awoke finally to identity with his people, Israel.

He was free again, free to return to his narrative, employing Joyce’s method, many of Joyce’s devices, though freed of his impediments. True. But why, Ira couldn’t help wondering the other night, when he could feel the Joycean incubus settle on him. As if encumbered by the fabled Old Man of the Sea, held in his relentless clutches, all this when half asleep, he had worried the night through, talked in his stuporous state, imagined he was taping his somnolent discourse — why, why had he dreamt of Ida, Ida Link, his last living aunt, aunt by marriage, the deceased Uncle Moe’s widow, dreamt that she was feeding him a sandwich made of a full pound of butter between two slices of bread? He had nibbled at it, trying to accommodate filler to its jacket, its filly, he had thought.

At the same time his aunt was telling him about Moe, and not a word could Ira understand. Which meant what? And so vivid. Then she showed him Moe’s workbench, a strange contraption with a work surface of thick gray glass, translucent windows, as once of old, bathroom doors were fitted with. Did that recall his cousin Stella and her bath in Tanta Mamie’s house, and of the high jinks of the Rabelaisian fanfrelucky yet to be told? It was a weird contraption that Ida kept turning round and round until it was flush with the wallpapered wall. Why? Years ago, when she owned a store in Flushing purveying ladies’ “foundations” (Ida was large of girth herself — just right for Moe), after her husband’s death, she had asked Ira if he would lend her, waive, whatever the legal term was, the one thousand dollars Moe had bequeathed his nephew Ira. He did — when, as M sagely and discreetly remarked, “Your own family was in need. I wore torn petticoats and slips for months.” M darling. But what? What did his consuming of that inordinately pinguid sandwich mean? That the long-delayed legacy would soon be restored? That would be oneiromancy, not Freudianism. But then how convenient if the “debt” were restored, not that he didn’t wish Ida all the ripeness of old age mortality was vouchsafed, ripeness and over-ripeness as well.

And perhaps —last aside— all this convergence of the peripheral was intended to forestall that dread, that rending of the soul, soon now and soon . .

VIII

Ira became in time a regular hustler, after a fashion, a lackadaisical one, but conversant with most of the tricks of the trade, if lacking the cheek to foist them on his customers. He was accepted, for some reason or other, by Benny Lass in the morning at the shape-up outside the ballpark. Rarely did Ira earn more than five dollars for his day’s work, at a time when Izzy earned nine or ten, and the indefatigable Greeny twelve or more. Oh, once in a while, he was favored with a windfall. When? Probably it was during the World Series, or during those “crucial” games at season’s end that would determine who won the pennant. Probably it was then, when Harry M. Stevens needed all the hands he could muster — not in the hustling department, there he had a plethora of hands, but in the fiscal, the managerial cadres, the overseers, the checkers. In these departments he was understaffed, he was woefully shorthanded.

And there, behind the counter, henna-haired and balcony-bosomed, smoking a cigarette in a silver cigarette holder, presided Mrs. Harry M. Stevens, Jr., lacking only a lorgnette to complete her stylish demeanor, as she moved toward the till with leisurely noblesse. She had a large tally sheet in front of her, and in it she kept a record of all the “checks,” the notched metal counters that each hustler bought from her. Business was extremely brisk, feverish in fact. Her strongly built husband, red-haired too, tended to other duties: overseeing the emptying of cases of soda in the cooling tank, in which by now much of the ice had melted into ice water. He also stood guard at the door, and collected the metal checks from the vendors on their way out of the depot, after loading up their trays inside. Even their redheaded, rotund, well-nurtured son seemed to be making himself useful in an agreeable way: topping ice cream cones with balls of vanilla ice cream. And Harry M. Stevens, the renowned proprietor himself, white-haired, doughty, and baronial, stood in the dugout that connected depot to grandstands, smoking a cigar and waving on his assiduous vassals to ever greater achievement: “Go on, get it! It’s out there!” he urged. And to Ira: “Come on, boy! Get a move on!”—imperiously uttered, as might a monarch, easily irked and short of temper, spurring his subjects forward into the fray (and yet, as Ira sensed, the mogul had a saving touch of compassion in him, a touch of Irish sentiment). .

So, there stood his daughter-in-law, waiting behind the zinc-covered counter, svelte and stately Mrs. Harry M. Stevens, Jr. Her movements were a bit fastidious, or a bit disparaging, as befitted the heiress of a catering empire, to which she was just now lending a helping hand, graciously easing the heavy burden on her father-in-law in his need. Usually Phil, experienced and loyal Jewish henchman, tended to that job, the job of presiding over the main depot, but Phil was sick, suffering from severe bronchitis. Ira stepped up to the counter.

He had already noticed, he had long ago become uncomfortably aware, that he either shed some kind of perverse emanation or was invested with a peculiar propensity that had the effect of mussing up the smooth flow of clerical work, of generating all kinds of hitches in mechanical routines, tics in established procedures, aberrations in formalities. Perhaps it was because he himself was so often just not present in mind, sufficiently absentminded that like an induction coil he induced a corresponding or reciprocal absence of attention within the mind of his counterpart in the transaction, frequently his counterpart on the other side of the counter.