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

Pearly, pearly, seminal goo,

I got a hard-on for you.

How painful were the associations that you couldn’t avoid, that intruded unbidden into your consciousness, like waiting for the other shoe to drop. The channel in the mind had been dug, and there was no refilling it. How could you undig the dug, the ditch? And there went the associations unreeling again.

He sat there long after the last petal of candlelight guttered out, couldn’t get himself to break the spell of even a vitiated Shabbes . To go — oh, if he went now, right now, he could make it: make it easily to the 135th Street station. Stride over to Lenox Avenue, and take the Lenox Avenue subway. Two stations. Nine o’clock and west of Lenox. But the worst of it was, as so often happened to him, to the seemingly easy arrangements he made, she no longer appeared in the upper stand as attendant in the ladies’ room. He never saw her in the ballpark again, as he hoped to, in his uncertain, ever temporizing frame of mind. He hoped to be reencouraged, coaxed, urged on. But she wasn’t there. She wasn’t even there the rest of that same afternoon, in a sense: so that he could speak to her again, sit down negligently in the same spot he had sat before. No. A portly black man, light in color as she was, and attired obviously well, in a tan suit and a panama hat, despite the advent of fall, easy, well-fitting, tailored suit yes, sat there all the rest of the afternoon, in intimate, relaxed conversation. Ira felt a twinge of jealousy. And after that, the next afternoon, only one of those fat black women occupied her place, and again, two or three times before the World Series ended.

One Hundred Thirty-fifth Street. Crosstown trolley there also, Ira knew, like 125th Street, like Jewish 116th Street: promenade street, window-shopping street; maybe now becoming the dividing line between white and black. He recalled Farley’s more than mere annoyance whenever he mentioned “they” were moving downtown. “They” threatened his family’s home. The safe old brownstone, on 129th and Madison Avenue, and the undertaking parlor there were sure to be engulfed by the spreading sea of color. Nearest he’d ever seen Farley look so hostile, so baffled, as if his father’s business worries had filtered down into the son’s consciousness, undermined the son’s security. . And Park & Tilford too, on 126th and Lenox Avenue, gone, the decorous, fancy grocery store, gone, never to return. He hadn’t been in that section of town in months, years, not since the time he used to hunt up different libraries in hope of discovering new brands, new series, of fairy books: in the years of myth and innocence — before the Great War. No, not innocence, ignorance. How could you be innocent on 119th Street?

Pearl. Mulatto. Octoroon. Pretty, milk-chocolate mellow, smooth high yellow, that skin under the stocking run: three dollars the price, the cost, and he had the money, even had a few of the same quarters left. “You’re just foolin’,” she had laughed, laughed seriously; she wouldn’t believe him. Well? She was right. He really didn’t have to go. Ah, the hell with it. Three bucks, and way up there in black Harlem. Beside, he’d never laid a woman, a real full-grown woman with big tits. Maybe if he did, he’d, maybe if he did, he’d — so what was the difference? That nobody else did it? Did what he did; that it was bad, double bad, double, triple, quadruple bad? Horrible bad. Unspeaka-babble bad. Abomination bad. He was fated to do it. That was what the river said, when he stood on the flat diving rock. Now the comely, café-au-lay-he-oh, la-ay he-e oh waited on 137th Street. A light, hardly almond. Compare that to. . his pig-men-tation. Yeah.

The dishes done, Mom and Pop divided the Yiddish newspaper between them. They read. They read what? All of that immense world of 1922, all that was happening in Yiddishkeit , in goyishkeit , in the United States here with President Harding, with his Cal Koylitch for vice-president, and there in Russia with Lenin and Trotsky, and the hundred thousand other events he paid no attention to: the killing of scabs in the coal mine strike in Illinois. And about Sacco and Vanzetti, the poor Italians, accused of murdering that paymaster in South Braintree, Mass., just because they were wops, anarchists, in jail. And how more and more all over Europe the Jews were being persecuted. Open up his Spanish book, or better, his chemistry book in which he was floundering so, with its moles and molals and molar solutions and normal solutions, and gram molecular weights. Even his English book: try to work out a secret code — that was the assignment over the weekend — a cryptogram, like the one in Poe’s “Gold Bug”—but he stunk at that. Or in lieu of that, he was given the choice of writing a book review, and he stunk at that too: underlying ideas, character, local color, suspense, anh! He could get it out of the way, though, if he did it now — not plane geometry, no. He saved that for the last: that was tsimmes , his dessert, but get the others out of the way. .

Pearl. Her face seemed to grow lighter all the time: Pearly gates, not bad. He could still make it, even now, without hurrying. . You got nerve? Phantasmagoria, said Poe. What a word. Phantasmagoria in excelsis deo on the church’s high obtuse-angled lintel. Trouble was Pop had switched the last few Sundays with those Catholic police and firemen and who knew what other communion breakfasts and fraternities and Rotary Club and from Tammany Hall in Coney Island to “extra jops” at evening banquets for Elks and Shriners and Odd Fellows. So Pop was home when Mom went out shopping for the week. What lousy luck. Ira had hoped maybe after school, but Jesus, no luck. Hoped for a chance to flip up the little goddamn brass nipple that loosed the tongue in the lock. He thought of the goddamnedest things: but boy, that was exultation, wow! When he snapped the lock in the door. But Jesus, no chance; it hadn’t happened. Saturdays were no good; there was always the Harlem Five-and-Dime, where she worked all day. And tomorrow a college football game for him to hustle at. Even so, there would be time. . So on Sunday, no belly lox from Park Avenue, no fresh bagels, no news from Baba, Zaida, Mamie, the aunts, the uncles, and who was pregnant, to listen to afterward, could make up for the lost chance, even though he felt worry-free afterward, and thankful not to be gripped in the cruel clutch of doubt, instead of feeling wicked. Still, what the hell was wicked?. .

So it would be a long walk — no, no, a short ride, a ride; so beat it over to Lenox Avenue.

Mom looked up when Ira got to his feet, but Pop only glanced sideways past the curved sheet of newspaper.

“I’m just going to go out,” Ira said. “Maybe I’ll go across the street to the candy store.”

“You need to stay with those gamblers?” Pop queried, frowning. “You’ll grow into a gambler.”

“I won’t grow into a gambler.”

“No? Keep on going there, and you’ll see.”

Mom intervened, “Believe me, if you would go visit Zaida and Baba, you’d perform a mitzvah . They haven’t seen you in I don’t know when.”

“What do they want me for?”

“Go. Only yesterday Baba said to me, ‘When your sonny-lad has no money, he comes to visit us. Now that he works and earns a few dollars, he has no need of us.’ You know, my son,” Mom summed up, “you’re a little like your father.”

“Aha!” Pop’s head snapped back. “Immediately she hales in his father.”

“It’s not true? When you need somebody, you pet and stroke him, no?”

“Leah, it’s a Friday night. Spare me your recitals, your complaints.”

Ira raised his voice impatiently. “I’ve been here in the same house already since I came home from school. I want to go out.”