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

“I gets fi’ dollars a day an’ tips. An’ ain’t very many tips. Man tol’ me in the office I’d make twice as much in tips. And I ain’t made over a dollar. First time I tried it, but I ain’t doin’ it again. They tell you anything.” She laughed.

“Maybe down in the lower stands they do better.” Ira looked straight ahead.

“I don’t know. I jest know I need the money. Look what my little dog did to me this mo’nin’. Scratch my bes’ stockin’ befo’ I go to work.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Look at the run in it.” She showed the calf of her leg, round, muscular, honey-colored skin visible under the shirred run.

Blood pounded, rammed against skull. The packed grandstands below fluttered and swam on the thump of his own pulse. They all could hear it, couldn’t they? The rush of blood hammering, hear it all the way to the pinch hitter out there, him with two bats swinging as he walked to the batter’s box, the home-plate umpire who came into view to brush the dust off home plate, yes, the batboy trotting by, couldn’t they hear? He bent down, dropped his hand below the handle of the tray of soda — touched the bare caramel-hued skin. “Run,” he said, his tongue just moving of its own accord — but never had he felt so starkly certain before, so animal-certain. Why? What was he suddenly? Because she was colored? He didn’t know. “Ballpark’s the right place for a run.” His jumbled thoughts found words.

“They goes together, you mean. Tha’s right.” She suddenly laughed her high, fluted laugh. Would anyone look their way? But no one did. Pinch hitter in the batter’s box, and the crowd roaring in wild hope. “You cute,” she said.

“You too.” And now there was nothing more to say, nothing that didn’t go beyond saying, beyond barrier of spoken small talk into commitment. “You live around here?”

Her shapely hand, fingernails above the same rosy flesh as his, floated to her temple, smoothed the long waves of barely tinted coppery hair. “I live in Harlem.”

“Where? I do too.”

“You do? Where you live?”

“On East 119th Street.”

“East 119th Street? I live on West 137th. West of Lenox.”

“Listen,” Ira heard himself saying, heard a frightened automaton within him speaking with temerity, “you want me to come to where you live?”

“Oh, yo’ just foolin’. Yo’ jest like the rest of ’em.”

“No, I’m not.” She had put him to the test, put him on his mettle before he knew it.

“How I know you ain’t?”

Bewildered boldness answered, “I got a lucky break today. I’ll show you. Look.” He drew the green roll of quarters out of his pocket, let her peek. “Look at that.”

“What dem?”

“Quarters. Ten dollars’ worth.” He opened his curled hand wider.

“Mm-mm! They nice.” She looked from the roll of coins to him. “Yo’ comin’ with them?”

“I hope so. Comin’ with them.” The roll of coins was already like a hard-on as he stared at her. Just like a dusky shade on pink skin, hers. And she must have known it suited her too: round pink disks covering her earlobes, a hint of pink under her attendant’s uniform, cloudy pink against taffy. “You ain’t talkin’ about all o’ ten dollars, are you?” he said, adopting dialect. To a mingled, myriad-throated cry below, the pinch hitter swung and missed, hopped to regain his balance. “I gotta go. How much you charge?”

She laughed, with faintest hint of embarrassment; and after a moment of hesitation, “Three dollah.”

“I got that right here. That’s only twelve of ’em. So where do I go?”

“Oh, you jest foolin’.”

“I tell ye I got the dough.” He pocketed the roll of quarters, searched under him, gripped the handle of his tray. “It’s just that I’ve never been to a — you know.”

“Well, I ain’t regular. I don’ walk the streets.”

“All right. So where?”

“You goin’ remember?”

“I’ll remember. I’ll write it down as soon as I get upstairs.”

“Pearl Canby,” she said. “Two thirty-seven West a Hundred Thirty-seven. West o’ Lenox. Room eighteen. You remember all that?”

He repeated the number. “At night?”

“Uh-huh. Like after nine or ten. That make sure I’m home.”

“Am I right?” Ira repeated the directions.

“Room eighteen,” she corrected. “Ground flo’. My little dog bark when he hea’ you, but don’ pay him no mind. He jest bark.”

A long fly ball— “All right.” Ira stood up, stepped into the aisle, repressed his cry of wares as he climbed to the walk at the top behind the last tier. The ball went sailing to Bob Meusel of the phenomenal throwing arm — not a hit, but a good sacrifice fly. Would the runner at third make a try for the plate, or hold? Ira didn’t dare look. Her name and address preempted all else. Pearl Canby. Two three seven one three seven, he kept repeating to himself; until he got his stub of pencil out: to jot in haste on the back of the menu on his soda placard, standing on a cement runway behind the last tier, with the dense roar of the crowd in front of him. Would he go? Nah. Yeah. She was right. And three whole dollars yet! Wait a minute. He reached into his pants pocket, felt his warm pipe. No, it wasn’t burning. But ah! That slippery roll, slippery, stiff roll. Gee, so that was what the lucky break was for: Mrs. Stevens should know. Three dollars: twelve quarters made three dollars. Ten dollars was forty quarters. He was flush, Jesus, he was flush. Was he game enough? Jeez, she was cute: peach color nearly.

There was McGraw, right at home plate, arms akimbo, the tunbellied bastard Shakespeare called Falstaff arguing with the ump. Guess what? Meusel’s throw from outfield must have beaten the runner to the plate. And look at that crowd of black faces in the top-floor window of the mortar-lumpy wall above the parking lot outside the ballpark: gleamy teeth and brown skin and gleamy eyeballs. All excited, gleefully meshed together. Jesus, to be one of them. Just for that compactness, that oneness. .

I can’t do anything with it, Ecclesias.

— No? Why not?

You know very well why not: the stile I have set in my way.

— Something not there is scarcely a stile. Or do you mean style?

Oh, no. The blockade, stockade. The taboo. The unspoken. The unspeakable. Do you have any advice?. . Do you?

— Only that the unspoken and unspeakable must become spoken and speakable, and the taboo broken and ignored. This has been taking place over the months and years.

I realized that.

IX

It wasn’t the silly two dollars and twenty-five cents he had paid her, before dropping his pants, paying for a condom retail, re-tail. The whole thing had turned out to be like a slash through his existence, not delirious, not something stunning — oh, no, not even entitled to the word “sordid”; just untidy, sleazy, at best a cross between feverishness and something damn near somnambulism.

After the Friday-night supper, the traditional Friday-night supper, the same, ever the same. Pop was as usual in a relaxed mood, hastily sniffing challah in order to relieve the sting of a dab of the freshly ground horseradish he had just eaten with the gefilte fish. And the flavorless boiled chicken. Oh, hell, the same: Fraytik af der nakht is dokh yeder yid a maylekh , went the ditty: every Jew was a king on Friday night. He was some Jew, he was, he, not Pop: a circumcised Prince of Wales.

He had delayed, wavered, couldn’t make up his mind. . observed the way the melted wax slipped down the two candles, until the wax itself provided a warm spillway over the lips of the golden brass candlesticks: formed pearly stalactites. And Pearl was her name too.