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

“Lose my job! Shit, that was nothin’. That goddamn bunch o’ crooks went bankrupt. Every goddamn one of us conductors lost his hundred bucks.”

“Your security!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, our security! Not a fuckin’ one of us got his hundred bucks back again!”

Ira whistled.

“Only you, you lucky sonofabitch, you quit in time.”

“I didn’t know it. I had to go back to school.”

The other shook his head in sheer bitterness. “Yeah, you can laugh, you lucky bastard.”

“I’m not laughing. I’m sorry,” Ira protested. Lucky Jew bastard would be next. Ira could hear it coming. Boy, would he like to remind the louse how much he stole from the bus company himself; maybe if he and the rest hadn’t stolen so much he’d still have a job. But he wasn’t going to get into an argument with that farbisener hint , as Mom would have called him. Angry dog, he looked like a wolf.

“Yeah. You’re sorry. In a pig’s ass you’re sorry.”

“I am. I gotta go.” With an arbitrary wave of the hand, Ira parted abruptly, before Collingway could say anything in opposition. “I’ll see you.”

Frig you. Ira felt resentment mount after he had distanced himself from the other by a few steps. Good for you, you bastard: you made someone else steal, a kid, who was scared to, scared because he had learned his lesson, made him steal, so the company wouldn’t notice your own gypping. To hell with you. Bet he made over a hundred dollars long ago. Way before the company went broke. So he had to buy his way into the job? So he was too old, he said. That didn’t mean Ira owed him the hundred dollars. That’s how he made Ira feel.

By the time he reached the stoop, the ironic absurdity of it all brought a grin to Ira’s face. These guys gypping the bus company, and then the bus company gypped them. But this guy, he deserved it. Just because somebody else got away, he blamed them. . Gee, that was lucky, though. . for a change. Maybe he was being lucky. That ten-dollar roll of quarters. Hey, and Pearl — but that turned lucky too: homely Theodora showed him how to put it in where it belonged. And he got Minnie to let him in, put it in that way. Don’t get to be like Pop: superstitious. His luck had changed before he went to Theodora. He got the ten-dollar roll from Mrs. Stevens first. Had nothing to do with talking to Pearl, with screwing Theodora. He got his hundred dollars security back before everything else, before he was even a hustler. So maybe he was just plain getting a little lucky for a change. Twice in one week. He might even be lucky right now. He had a new tin in his pocket. He’d tell her, Look, this time I’m not so excited.

Complacency with self changed to eagerness as he climbed up the stone stairs of the stoop.

After an unrewarding glance through the scrolled apertures of the dented brass letter box, he entered the long dreary hall, mounted the battered steps to the landing, weakly lighted by the window there that opened on the clutter of washpoles and fences of the neighboring backyard. Then up to the “first floor,” as the first flight was called, through the ever-crepuscular hallway — with its green dumbwaiter door nailed shut — to the kitchen door under clear afternoon transom light, with a few flecks of paint still adhering to the glass.

He opened the door into the kitchen. All seemed tranquil and customary in form and movement — reassuring: bobbed, steel-gray-haired Mom at the sink in black-figured fire-engine-red housedress, her puffy feet in faded felt mules. She was paring onions over the black sink. In the large wooden bowl on the washtub cover, freshly peeled onions imbued the atmosphere of the kitchen with their pungency.

“Ah, my precious Iraleh.” Mom bunched together light brown onion skin. “I wanted to go to the window to watch you come home.”

And his inane “Yeh? Here I am, Mom.”

“So I’ll work a minute longer. What’s new?”

“I’ll tell you right away. I’ll get my football shoes outta the bedroom.”

He passed Mom disposing of the onion skin in the metal garbage pail behind the silly little pink curtain that hung from the sink, masking cleaning implements and roach powder behind it. It was not the pink of the curtains that brought Pearl’s earrings to mind, at first, but the light tan onion skin, not only tan, translucent, smooth and lambent. Would he ever forget her? So beautiful. What would it have been like? Well, the prosperous man in the panama hat had her. Make shift, they said. So. . there was still Minnie. He got his football shoes from their shadowy cardboard carton at the end of the bed, tied the laces together in order to sling the shoes over his shoulder. He heard the kitchen door open, Minnie’s voice, Mom’s exchanging greetings. So she had just come home from school, too. He returned to the lighted kitchen.

Her bulging leather book satchel already on the table, she was slipping out of her blue overcoat when he came in. In white middie blouse with blue ribbon about collar, she bent her bobbed, wavy red hair to open the satchel. Her brow was furrowed for some reason, fretting over annoyance of some kind, her greeting was sour. “Hello. Where you going?”

“Going for a little football.”

“Where? In Mt. Morris Park?”

“Yeah. Whatsa matter? You look—” He left the rest unsaid.

“Oh.” She allowed a long dissatisfied pause. “That Latin. You’re lucky you don’t have to take it.”

“I couldn’t anyway. I could only take Spanish.”

“Wish I never took it. But at Hunter College, if you’re gonna teach. .”

“I wonder why?”

“Why what? Why do you think? It’s so hard. And you can’t help.”

“No. I didn’t mean that. Why do you have to take it?”

“I told you. If you’re gonna teach.”

“Oh.”

“And you’re such a big helper.”

“Well, I didn’t take it.”

She folded her coat, brushed by him on the way to the bedroom closet. Boy. He watched her leave the kitchen. Boy. He’d better go, catch the last of the daylight, but couldn’t: something unusually stiff about her. He hesitated.

“My poor daughter,” said Mom. “S’iz azoy shver .”

“Yeah.”

“A little light coffee and a bulkie?”

“No. I better run. It gets dark so fast.” Still, he lingered. Something, something. . uneven. . worrisome. . what?

Returning, Minnie was careful to circle about him, sat down on a chair. “I gotta begin studying right away.” She pulled her Latin text out of the satchel on the table. “We’re gonna get a test tomorrow on all the conjugations of the four kinds of verbs. Four kinds yet.”

“Yeah? You look like you’re really gonna study,” he probed.

“What d’you think?” She opened her textbook. “My teacher is Miss Robin. An old maid, and is she a meshugener ? You never know what she’ll ask you. She says she’ll give you a test on all the verbs. So you study all the verbs. Instead she’ll give you a whole page to translate. Everybody thinks she’s crazy.”

“A little light coffee with a bulkie, my daughter?” Mom suggested. “You look as if your little heart needed cheering up.”

“Oh, I’m — no — oh, all right. A real light coffee.”

“And a little something to dunk in it?”

“You got any of that rugeleh left?”

“Indeed. Good. Good. It’s going to go stale.”

“I like it that way. Just right for dunkin’.” She began poring over the open page.

Ira studied her for a minute. Was she really peeved, and over what? Offish. The Latin test, and his inability to help. Fortunate. Yes, fortunately he didn’t take Latin, so he always had an excuse for not helping her — but it was a double-edged excuse — his mind complacently impinged pros on cons — because he couldn’t exact a promise of opportune recompense for helping her, as he had done at times in other subjects in the past. . But he was getting the real thing now, so was she; so it didn’t matter so much. Still, he wished he had studied Latin, as she was doing now, because he might have got a few more dividends that way. What the hell: he was forever correcting things in retrospect. And yet such little things made such a big difference. That lousy junior high he attended, and that fag Mr. Lennard’s half-assed teaching of Spanish. If he’d gone to DeWitt Clinton from the beginning, he probably would have taken Latin. For someone taking a “general course” to prepare for college, Latin would have been right. And there she was struggling with it. Boy. To have taken a look at her textbook, even now, and said — right in front of Mom — with that faint ulterior slur, You need some help? And when she said yes, how innocently he could have rejoined, with tutorial-level voice: Okay. But don’t forget. You owe me a favor. What delicious dirty double-meaning. Amo, amas, amat , he had heard her repeat in the beginning. He should have tried to catch up with her. And then — he could have softened her up, mollified her with a little help — what a cinch, right? Yeah, right now, siphoned off her annoyance with him — why? What for? Oh, of course: because of that last time, what else? Just on account of his coming too fast?