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

“So he lives with you too?”

“Oh, yes. My brother Irving. He was in the army. Wilma and Sophie both taught school. They’re both married now and have children. I have the sweetest, loveliest niece.” Larry’s face brightened with genuine pleasure. “I get so much sheer delight out of the way she talks and moves. Do you know she’s already writing an opera?”

“Oh. A what?” And then Ira, startled, added, “An opera? How old is she?”

“She’s four. Listen.” He began singing, “‘Some people like banana splits and other things. But I like my chocolate soda!’ Isn’t that a wonderful aria?”

“Yeah.” Ira felt a presentiment of embarrassment — and with nothing to say, except an amenable, “Four years. That’s all? I got a cousin who’s nearly fourteen years old. Stella. My Aunt Mamie’s kid. She wouldn’t know an aria from a—” A new prompting coalesced into consciousness. “—a hole in the wall. Yeah.” He puffed on his cigarette.

“Is your family very close?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Close-knit. I mean, do they have strong family ties? Are they affectionate with one another, with you? Do you have any affection for them?”

“Oh, no. Jesus!”

Larry studied Ira in his vehemence. “Is that so?” He shook his head. “You’re so different. In a lot of ways, it seems. We’re a very close-knit family. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the Hungarian influence. Anyway, we are. Both my brothers-in-law are like members of the family. My sister Wilma is married to a lawyer, I told you: Sam, Sam Elinger. Incidentally, he went to CCNY for his B.A. You were talking about going there.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“And my oldest sister, Sophie, is married to a dentist, Victor.”

“Yeah? Gee.” Something warned Ira not to say what he was about to; it had such a Jewish mercenary overtone. But the momentum of the remark prevailed despite misgiving. “Your sisters are well-married?”

Larry looked a little pained, for the first time almost disapproving. “I wouldn’t say they were well-married. They’re happily married.”

“Oh. I guess that’s what I meant.” Ira felt chastised, confirmed in his misgiving. You don’t say “well-married,” he instructed himself, like zey hobn gemakht a gitten shiddekh . It wasn’t proper. Happily married. Yeah? Who was happily married in Baba’s family?

“What about your folks?” Larry asked.

Ira’s lips moved without sound: well. He suddenly felt glum. He had told Billy that Pop was a waiter; that was nothing to Billy. It would probably be nothing to Larry either: just another curiosity about Ira that Larry found so quaint, why so fetching, like Ira’s stock of gags, picked up in a hundred places. Or what? And all this taking place within the mind while thousands of people, vehicles, were making new configurations in tumultuous passing, and overhead too, rattle of the rolling coffins, the El trains.

Within the mind and within an instant, so it seemed: when an instant kindled, it never went out, was never extinguished, it lasted fiery forever, receding. How was that? Even that stylish young dame, yes, hoity-toity, slinky dame, in her purple cloche, staring at Larry as she passed, had lasted forever, had lasted ever since then.

Ira looked up from the cigarette, glowing within gray ash at one end, yellowing in a ring where he put it to his mouth at the other. “I’ll tell you,” he said, then grinned — that grin that Mr. O’Reilly had warned him against, when? Then, when it first began with Minnie — ah, that must be the crazy, hidden bridge between him and Larry, the bond of strangeness or something, that had even got him into trouble with Dr. Pickens. His goofy, no, his clandestine, worry-haunted ways made him different, more different all the time, possessed him with an utter uniqueness, spasmodic in new situations, uncouth often as well, an ultra, ultra something which only a Mr. Sullivan, crippled, deformed Mr. Sullivan, could see through: “thatsh right, made a boob o’yourshelf—”

“My father is a lokshn-treger ,” Ira said — deliberately in Yiddish, the very thing he sensed would intrigue Larry; but why? Why did he surmise so often the rightness of the results he could produce in another, when he sought to, without knowing why they were effective — with Farley, with Billy Green, even Eddy Ferry, the janitor’s kid, long ago in early boyhood? And now Larry. Something goyish he had adapted himself to (he had thought Larry was a goy ), or something goyish he preferred, he was becoming.

“A what?” Larry’s laugh was bright and forthcoming. “He’s a what? A what treger?”

“He’s a lokshn-treger , a noodle porter.”

“Noodles. Oh, yes.”

“My father’s a waiter.”

“Oh,” And again Larry laughed, his features all eagerness. “Is that what you call him — I mean, a waiter?”

As Ira had guessed, in nothing so wily as this. He had completely deflected Larry from fact to word, from word to mirth. “ Lokshn-treger ,” Ira repeated. “It’s Yiddish.”

“Is that Yiddish? I know that word, tragen ! It’s German for ‘carry.’” He was delighted at the discovery. “Is that how you say Nudeln? Lokshn?”

“Yeah. A loksh is any kind of gawky sap. I made that up outta Yiddish. Where are you in German?”

“This is my third year. My parents speak some too. You know — because my grandparents did. When Hungary was part of Austro-Hungary. Lokshn-treger . Noodle porter.” He savored the sound, highly entertained. “Why don’t we take the El train together,” he urged. “We can talk while we ride uptown.”

“It’s about a league outta me way,” Ira declined with antic solecism. “Listen, I got only a few puffs left on my butt, so that means the curfew tolls the knell of parting day, and I gotta go.”

Not even his heavy-handed humor could dispel the disappointment settling about Larry’s soft brown eyes. He let a billow of smoke all but escape from his open lips, then withdrew it again on the inhale. “I’ll tell you what: this Friday let’s take the El together. All right? We won’t have to worry about preparing for class the next day.”

“Okay.”

“Front of the school. Friday. Right?”

“Right.”

“I’ll see you before then.”

“Right. Abyssinia.”

“What? Oh, I get it. Abyssinia.”

They parted, Larry dropping the cigarette as he mounted the El steps, Ira his in the gutter on the way east to the subway. If that wasn’t strange, strange, and flattering too, even if Larry wasn’t a gentile. Wonderful, wasn’t it? He was a gentile, and suddenly Jewish. Like magic. Something Ira had seen change that way just by being stared at for a time: an optical illusion. But Larry couldn’t change back again, could he? Was that why Jews were circumcised? What an idea. Lucky he hadn’t known Larry was Jewish when he pleaded with Dr. Pickens that first day. He might not have got off. And suppose Dr. Pickens knew? Boy, talk about things doubling back on themselves. Like Jessica, Shylock’s daughter: pretended to be a boy, masqueraded as a boy. But she was a boy! In Shakespeare’s time, said the English teacher, boys played women’s parts; Portia’s too, so there you were, being yourself, but not supposed to be yourself. .

Ira made his way east on noisy, restless 59th Street. . And what would he tell Billy about Friday? Just say nothing. Not show up. Billy would wait awhile in the gun room. . Still, wasn’t that funny, though, the way Larry laughed at lokshn-treger , noodle porter. . as if he enjoyed hearing things out of that lousy world that Ira lived in. Only some of it, yes. But Billy wasn’t interested in any of it. He really was a gentile; that was the difference; Larry wasn’t. Could you be a gentile in part? Half-assed Jewish, bringing some of his own selected rotten world to Larry. .