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

“Hey, Irey, c’mon. You’re on our side. Hey, Ginsburg, here’s somebody else. You can play now.”

Ira had become too closely identified with his narrative, and not merely with that, but with the impasse he had reached by this re-creation of his sister into the narrative. He worried that he could only examine his own mind, however deranged, and not hers. How did she feel? How had this depravity affected her? He felt he was incapable of such comprehension. He had no answers, none at all. He thought perhaps he saw a glimmer of a solution by reverting to the role which he had adopted for himself at the beginning of the novel: that of amanuensis — no, rather that of editor of his own first draft.

Yet, the present suddenly erupted into frightful events, frightful atrocities wrought by lunatic fanatics. The so-called black box lay at the bottom of the sea that might explain the circumstances of the explosion that sent three hundred and more human beings, passengers in the Air India jumbo jet, together with the aircraft, to their destruction. The Sikhs were thought to be the perpetrators. . Dragging on into a second week, the Shiite Moslems in Beirut held some forty Americans hostage, and demanded that Israel redeem them by the release of seven hundred Shiite prisoners (and some of the hostages had Jewish-sounding names, according to the dispatches). . A horrendous plot by Irish terrorists to blow up summer and seaside resorts had been foiled. . In Japan, a bomb had exploded in the luggage destined to be loaded aboard another Air India plane, and several baggage handlers were killed. What else? Where else? Everywhere else. Planes in flight returned to the airports of departure because of false rumors that explosives were aboard. In all the media, talk of safeguards to be taken, actions to be avoided, reaction, and overreaction.

And to add mordancy to it all, one of his and M’s friends showed up unannounced, for the nth time, despite the fact that Ira and M had asked the ineffable jackanapes to phone before he called in person. Would he? By no means. He was not to be dictated to. Ira had retired to his study, after slamming the door. Worst of it was, that locked in as he was, M had thought his ire extended to her, because he had refused to answer her knock, thinking it to be the insufferable boor he was excluding, and what with the noisy evaporative cooler churning away in his study, Ira hadn’t heard her voice.

His poor lamb, become upset, by him! But honestly, could anyone imagine such boundless boorishness that would deliberately refuse to telephone before calling, even though repeatedly asked! And to barge in just as Ira wrote the last lines trying to portray, trying to recapture, the fearful panic he had gotten into at Minnie’s disclosure, the onset of those disastrous depredations the predator was to wreak on himself!

Result of this all was, he had been unable to fall asleep that night — not until he took a Valium. He had sat up two or three hours, then he became worried that if he sat up any longer, he might have another attack of “adrenaline failure,” the shock of adrenaline insufficiency that he had suffered a few months ago. It had necessitated his being taken by ambulance to the hospital, and spending a couple of days there. To obviate that, he took the tranquilizer.

And he awoke the next morning — a wreck. Well. But it had been while he was lying sleepless beside M, fast asleep, that something like an illumination blossomed within him, something like a whisper of grace, a dispensation that would enable him to go on through this slough of his past. It was to turn for respite to M’s love for him — that’s what he lived for; that was the meaning and mainstay of his life. At last, yes, that such as he, intolerable egoist, had learned that more important than his writing (whether it would eventually be deemed significant or not) was the showing, the activity, of his love for her. All else was subordinate. The miracle was that he should conceivably have reached that stage. He couldn’t sleep, no, but the epiphany consoled insomnia. Jane Eyre, Lizzy Bennet of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice , which he had almost finished reading, hovered over the sleeping figure beside him, his wife. She was as good, as gentle, as well-bred, faithful, loving, wise as they, and courageous and competent and gifted beyond them.

And he a Jew, apology of a Jew, apology of a man, redeemed by her. What was that other notion floating about, muddled as usual? That as Hitler had destroyed the core of Orthodox Jewry, its vital, fertile nucleus proliferating in Eastern Europe, then what was left of Orthodoxy outside Israel, except for the fossilized kinkies, flaunting their earlocks and fur shtramls ? Only the diluted remnant of rabbinical Jewry here in America. By assimilation, by intermarriage, by deliberately reduced fecundity, the remnant would painlessly disappear, except for the professional practitioners, the rabbis, watching their flocks dwindle. As in a vision, he saw the far-flung Diasporas wither, the boundaries of each, even that of the Soviet Union, surviving despite policies of attrition, nevertheless in the end contracting like a stagnant pool. Only in Israel could Judaism thrive, only in its own land survive and evolve.

XIII

The hours and days, whole days! went by, an ache, a woe, the hours stretching Ira on the rack of days, howling in silence in ever-growing anguish. Back home from school in the afternoon, in the earlier and still earlier darkening afternoon of the kitchen, the ebbing of daylight, the obscurity of the room became a sinister setting for the single window on the backyard, became the repository of his anguish: the washline pole opposite the window, the spiked footholds in the rising gray mist, the washlines on their pulleys drawn in different directions — the little house next to them, only two stories high, where Leo Dugonicz had once lived, and before him the Italian barber and his family. And across the fenced yard, Yussel’s gloomy, massy, six-story, cold-water fortress on the corner. Every scrap of deprivation and poverty became a bit of congealed, of concealed anguish. To all his agonized inquiries, no, no, and again, no, was all the answer he received. She hadn’t got her period. No. Nights he could put himself asleep only by summoning up behind his eyelids the façade of the Metropolitan Museum, to which even from his ninth year, he had hiked. . hiked, hiked alone, and with Jake Shapiro, all the way from grubby 119th Street and Park Avenue to the corner of Central Park, the pond and rowboats on it and across the pond the granite outcrop rising to a summit of shrubs and trees. All familiar. And then the walk, the long, lovely excursion along Fifth Avenue until the corner of the Museum building. Could he remember the steps, the broad steps leading up to the great wings of the stone facade on either side? How many steps? And the doors? And the famous names above the doors, and the tubular brass turnstiles inside the wide marble anteroom, and the guards in blue uniforms on duty? That was easy to summon up. And the lofty, lavish, palatial interior, all around majestic and light. But what was the first thing you saw after you were inside? The first thing that met your wandering gaze was the tapestries, the Gobelin tapestries on the high matched marble walls, with all kinds of Biblical scenes, was that it? Turbaned rulers and martyrs, armored soldiers with spears and ladies in costumes of long ago. Remember? That statue of Good and Evil, big as could be, that stood beside the marble stairs: he was standing on her, you thought, at first; but it was he standing on him. Both the same; so it looked like a fight, a wrestling match, evil overthrown and on the ground, always evil overthrown and on the ground, except Ira. So now he’d have to pay for it, as he did for the lost briefcase, as he did for the swiped silver fountain pen — but Ira didn’t for that roll of quarters he copped, and he didn’t with scrawny Theodora in that stuffy room showing him how he could go in for two dollars and a quarter. How did he know he wasn’t paying for going to Theodora now? She showing him how, and he’s paying for it now. Didn’t she giggle when he started to do it the wrong way? He said, nearly ashamed, “That’s the way I started with my”—and stopped himself in time—“my first one.”