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

“Then go out. But why do you have to go into that candy store with its gambling den in the rear to play cards?” Pop demanded sharply. “And lose money to those sharpers? You think I can’t tell from your long nose when you lose money?”

“All right, then I’ll go somewhere else. I’ll walk.” Ira shifted tactics.

“Don’t you want a coat? Nights are growing keen,” Mom suggested.

“Well.” He stood motionless a second or two, thoughts almost crackling audibly in his ears with the swiftness of projected eventualities. “No — okay. I’ll put on that little sweater under my jacket. So I’ll walk,” he directed a faint jibe at Pop.

“Don’t roam about too long. You’re a toiler these days. You have to go to work tomorrow.”

“Yeh.”

“He toils through thick and thin,” Pop scouted. “Once a week, through fast and loose. Wait, just wait,” he prolonged dire prophesy, “he’ll have a wife and child on his hands someday. He’ll learn what it is to toil; he’ll learn the affliction of running from place to place in search of livelihood. Shall I wait in Local Number One to be called? Shall I run to Waiters Local Two?”

“And why do you think I strive?” Mom asked — and answered herself. “Only to keep him from becoming that kind of menial toiler.”

“ Af mayne playtses .”

There he went again: on his shoulders.

“Why does one have children? To whom will you turn in old age?” Mom contended.

“Hah! As long as I can serve a customer, as long as I can go on the dining-room floor, I need no one to help me. In old age. He’ll help me? The Messiah will come,” Pop chortled unpleasantly. “When that day comes that I have to turn to him for aid, may God help me indeed. You think I’m like your father?”

“Now he brings in my father,” Mom retorted. “What have you got against my father?”

“Nothing. To find a more pious Jew you would have to search every cranny in America. But has he done a day’s work since he came to this golden land? Has he ever done a day’s work, even in Galitzia?”

“Well, with him,” Mom condoned, “his study of holiness provides us, his wife and many daughters, with the right to enter paradise.”

“And you believe it?”

“No. But then, God forgive me, I’m half a goya .”

Pop smiled sardonically, jerked his chin up. “Half a goya . But the other half is a Jew, no? Then which half recognizes the pious old fraud for the shirker he is?”

Disgruntled, silent, Ira lined his jacket with his lightweight gray sweater. The way they argued made him almost lose interest in his venture. Almost. But boy, now if ever. Those pink earrings. Pearl in pink earrings. Three bucks from a ten-dollar roll of free quarters. How it went together, one innuendo — was that the word? — nuance, nuance, no. Suggestion. Risky risqué. . Don’t stand there blowing, flattening afflatus between the edge of teeth and lip. Go find her.

But when he got there, entered the muted, still, stuffy hallway, knocked at the door in the rear of the “basement” floor, Pearl’s number, the black girl who answered his knock, the black girl who opened the door was — was scrawny and homely and black-coffee brown.

“Pearl?” he asked, gaping in uncertainty. “I’m sorry. Isn’t there a Pearl here?”

“You mean the girl who live hea’ befo’?”

“I don’t know. Yeah, I guess so. She told me she did.”

“She found her a man. They said she gone live with him, ef that’s the one yo’ mean.”

“Pearl?”

“I didn’t pay no mind to her name.” Asperity gleamed from her dark brown features. “Come on in. You don’ want to stan’ outchea. You lookin’ fo’ a girl?”

“Yeah, but I—”

“Yo’ get what you come fo’. Come on in.” She opened the door wider. “I’m Theodora.”

“Theodora?” he repeated stupidly, stock-still.

“That’s what I said. This is my place.”

Her scrawny body, as she turned to indicate her lodgings, appeared to be negligently, yet acceptably clothed: a white, open-throated blouse over a flat torso, a maroon skirt above bare, dark feet in sky-blue, fur-trimmed house slippers. Sinewy, undernourished, or just skinny? In her twenties still. He wouldn’t know her tomorrow; he wouldn’t know her in an hour, that swart visage, skin barely sheathing tendons. .

“Ain’t you comin’ in?”

“I musta made a mistake. I was lookin’ for Pearl.”

“You lookin’ fo’ somebody that ain’t heah. But I’m heah. Come on in, honey, I take care o’ you. Come in.” She stepped over the threshold, encircled his waist with thin arm. “Yo’ jes’ a mite shy, ain’t you?” She ushered him in. “No need to be. I know yo’ kind. I like yo’ kind, honey. Yo’ ain’t the kind that like to slam a woman in bed. See ef I don’t treat you right.” She shut the door. “Yo’ didn’t make no mistake, honey. That girl an’ her dog went off with the service agency man.”

“The who?”

“The man who hire her. He cullud too. But that don’ matter. You can get a little lovin’ rightcha, honey.” Deftly, she undid the single catch in front of her maroon skirt, held it to one side before dropping it on a sofa. As if she had stepped out from between portieres in a single step, she stood with lean legs forked from a jet-black muff — under a white blouse: “You got it, honey. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat.”

“Yeah, but I—” Shaken, Ira stared, wavered, stared, assailed by a last sortie of caution. “So all right. So how much you charge?”

“All depend on what kind o’ fun you wants to pay fo’.” She could make her black muff squirm.

“Just plain.”

“I gets two dollars an’ twenty-fi’ cents.” Her attitude indicated payment in advance. “An’ twenty-fi’ cent mo’ fo’ a bag.”

He hesitated just briefly, but he paid her, a single greenback and the balance in quarters — and an extra quarter for a condom.

So that was it, that was it. He knew all along that was the way it was done, but he’d never done it. She showed him. In the depth of her dark, skinny, upraised thighs, legs doubled to receive him, forked like a mahogany-human oarlock. And could she wriggle it! She rowed him home. He rode her, but she rowed him. Scull, skull, her workaday, dark face opposite his, until. . his oncoming orgasm transformed the face he stared at into something desirable, something beautiful, her body his to lift in his embrace, and despite fleeting awareness of the false endearments on her full lips, his to will they were genuine. He pumped furiously, reached culmination. . and it was all over.

In the minute or two afterward, buttoning up his fly, even through eagerness to get out, came inklings of his surroundings: how stuffy her room was, not a window open, and the weather wasn’t so cool yet. And all kinds of hangings around the walls too, shmattas , Mom would have said; was that to muffle the sound? Who put the shma in shmattas , oh, boy. Like a séance place. When had he ever been to a fortune-teller place? He never had. Seen it in a movie, maybe, a vaudeville skit, a mystery. Everything in deep shadow as if starved for light. Was every one of the rooms like that, the whole house a cathouse? She was friendly afterward, kind, cheerful, yes sympathetic, giggled watching him wriggle into his jacket. Sensation, that was it, that’s what he bought. Blew his nuts into her. Oh, nothing as excited as he had been in the Polo Grounds that moment when he felt the skin on Pearl’s leg through the run in her stocking. Oh, no. And Jesus, nothing like Pearl’s long-waved copper-tinted wealth of tresses. Instead, on Theodora’s twat and head, when he clumsily caressed them: fine-drawn wires, a wiry poll, a wiry bush. His palms would remember their surprise of contact long afterward. What would Pearl’s wavy coppery locks have been like? Well, it couldn’t be helped. But still, he couldn’t resist the impulse afterward — what a strange thing: he had kissed her on the brow, her round, shiny, mahogany brow. How she had giggled. He was silly. Sure. But he felt that way: kindly disposed. Why? Because she was considerate, she understood he was a novice, or what? Because he felt guilty? But he didn’t. He felt foolish. No transgression (he was well versed in that). No, just fornication in the dim light of that tiny little rose table lamp, her thin shadow thighs up, and yes, penumbra about umbra pussy, not the weak contrast as when there was only fuzz, but total eclipse. Well, so that was it: going to a whore. A businesslike screw, orgasm, cost you, with the condom, two and a half bucks.