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

So there he was, Ira at the beginning of November 1922, the latter part of his sixteenth year, and technically a junior at DeWitt Clinton, though not quite, Ira sauntering through 119th Street homeward toward the gray trestle on Park Avenue. And with not a worry in the world, not an overt worry in the world. With a canker in the soul, yes, but then he kept that under control by buying a little tin of two condoms now and then, because most of the time Sundays had become his again. Pop had shifted from evening banquets to regular breakfast communion “extras” in Rockaway Beach. He earned a little less than he did at the evening banquets in Coney Island. But he hated the stairs in the Coney Island banquet hall. The Rockaway dining room had no stairs between it and the kitchen. That was worth a dollar, a dollar and a half less. So Sunday mornings, in the fall and winter, Ira could lie abed, usually awake, lurking, wait till Mom took her black oilcloth shopping bag, and went shopping for the week among the pushcarts under the Cut.

“Minnie. Okay?”

She said all kinds of dirty words at first; where did she learn them? After he showed her how different it was, “Fuck me, fuck me good!” He wished she wouldn’t, though he liked it. He wished she wouldn’t, because it incited him, spurred him on too much. He wished she wouldn’t, though he grinned about it afterward: so prust , as they would say in Yiddish, so coarse: “Fuck me, fuck me good.” It made him come before he wanted to, though he knew he ought to come fast to be safe, but not so fast as her dirty words made him, that and her crying out, “Ah, ah, oooh wah, ooowah!” Still, it made him feel proud too, and even prouder when she almost whooped with rapture, “Oooh, you’re a good fucker. Oooh, don’t get off yet!” But he had to, right away quick, as soon as it was over, quick and into his own bed, or start dressing. And he hardly had to coax anymore. She was ready as soon as he snapped the lock; a minute after Mom left, he pressed the little brass of the lock down: tink-tunk. Everything with celerity, everything coordinated. Nearly. She slid out of her folding cot, and into Mom and Pop’s double bed beside it; while he dug for the little tin of Trojans in his pants pocket, little aluminum pod at two for a quarter. And then she watched him, strict and serious, her face on the fat pillow, her hazel eyes, myopic and close together — like Pop’s — watched him roll a condom on his hard-on, readying her pussy while he hurried toward her, opening her flower to him when he reached the bed. What dirty words she greeted him with: “Fuck me like a hoor. No, no kisses. I don’t want no kisses. Just fuck me good.”

“All right. All right.”

“That rubber all right? I don’t want that white stuff in me—”

“No, no. I just bought ’em. Okay. A-a-h.”

“O-oh. They’re like the ones before?”

“Yeah. Real Trojans. Yeah. Come on.”

“O-oh. So you can give me a dollar, too.”

“All right. Later. Later.”

Afterward she might even haggle with him for more than a dollar. “You worked in Madison Square Garden last night. I want a new sash on me; I want to get a wide sash with a bow.”

“How much d’you think I made yesterday? Two dollars and a half! You made some money yourself working in the five and ten Saturday.”

“Mama doesn’t give me anything. Everything is for you. For you and for her Persian lamb coat — I don’t count.”

“Aw, come on.” He had to get things settled fast, because you never knew when Mom would be back. If you argued too long, and delayed until after Mom returned, he’d have to sneak the money to Minnie anyway, but she would look sulky, cheated. And that was bad. Hearing them disputing once, Mom had looked puzzled. “All right, all right. I’ll give you the dollar and a half. Only don’t make a fuss. Jesus!”

— Oh, horror, horror.

That’s right, Ecclesias. That’s why I turned to you. As a buffer against my demon, my dybbuk , my nemesis — haven’t I changed? O me, Angnel, come ti muti!

— Your pseudo-recondite self.

But I have change, haven’t I? Still, for all that, I could sit back this very moment, and raise my eyes to the window, the curtained window above the word processor, above imaginary you, Ecclesias, and wish myself fervently never to have been.

— And well you might. But what good does your fervent wishing do? Evidently something blocks the act itself. What is it?

I have an illusion I owe something to the species, as a specimen.

— Your offering may be of value. There’s no telling. In any case, since you’ve chosen this mode of oblation, chosen to live, to scrive, then there’s no undoing the done. There’s only the outwearing it, the outwearying it, the attenuating of remorse, and guilt. That’s all you can do, as far as you personally are concerned. And of course, there’s always room for enhanced comprehension. How deep can one delve into platitude? As to your wish never to have been, that will soon be granted, if that’s any comfort.

It isn’t; it isn’t the same thing at all.

— There’s no expunging of the been, of the past, if that’s what you mean. How can you expunge that which has ceased to be? Carry on, as the British say. What else is left? At worst — what is it at worst? Senescent erotic fantasy. At best, you’ve breached a mighty barrier within yourself, and done so, witting or unwitting, for the benefit of others. If in your own lifetime you’ve achieved an accession of reality — to give it a name, and a clumsy one — a long-belated transformation of view that conforms more closely with the actual, that’s all the consolation available to you at this stage of the game.

Was grinsest du mir, heilige Schädel? said Goethe, said Faust (said Ira?) to the skull on the table.

— Did Faust say that? But I still don’t know why you’re quoting Goethe.

Yes, contented was he, and why not, when everything was under control. It was like a sneaky mini-family, a tabooed one, and discovered by him, by cunning exploitation of accident, to seal off a little enclave within, utterly unspeakable, vicious, yes, near brutally wicked, oh, wicked was too insipid, all the evil consummate, rolled up, concentrate, essence, wild, and made him feel so depraved that anything went, anything he could think of, rending all the enclosures: Mephisto wrapped in a bedsheet in front of a mirror, the pier glass mirror, in a moment of playfulness: “Look at that, Minnie. I’m a Roman in a Roman toga, sticking out with a rubber Trojan.”

And she giggled, but only enough not to delay proceedings. “Don’t fool around. Hurry up.”

Wasn’t he lucky though?

Even at this late hour, and yours truly a man near eighty; for these things are like to one who has sniffed the coocoo, and never lost the beatitude; that was the worst of it, the ambivalence of sin, if you call it that, of depravity, the amphi-balance of it, the Escher fugue, the optical illusion, the Jekyll-Hyde slide, the fleur du mal .

Lucky, supremely lucky, the luck of having Pop a waiter, on a Sunday morning again, and long gone to Rockaway Beach to wait on table on a breakfast “benket.” Well, it got so actually it wasn’t limited to Sunday mornings. Hell, no. At sixteen going on seventeen, and lusty, and Minnie at fourteen plus, and now in Julia Richmond High School. And she was dating boys, and going out a bit, and to dances, and someone must have broken her cherry already, and he was the one reaping the full benefit, because there was never any blood, though she would never let him inside before. Maybe the guy had hurt her. “No, just between. I don’t want that white stuff in me.”

And then she finally surrendered, after he told her about Theodora, and how it was done, how it had to be done, for her to get the real thrill he got out of it, not her way, and how it was safe, it was safe, too.