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

Conventional. There was another inert term suddenly come to life, emerging from the abstract, and becoming troublesome. He wasn’t used to that kind of thinking: categories, that was it. The classes that people belonged to. And people who were conventional. In Billy’s America nobody worried about that. He never once heard Billy mention anything like that around a campfire, or while they toted guns to a rifle match. Too intangible. Billy never said anything about society. “Hell, I know!” Ira burst out. “I know what you mean. ‘Class,’ you were saying. I don’t mean middle-class. Not classy. Class. I get the idea.”

“Now you know what I mean by social climbers now.”

“Yeah. When you talked about society, I just thought of a party I barged into the first day I worked for Park & Tilford. I had a steamer basket to deliver — a real expensive one — and I went to the wrong door. Upstairs instead of downstairs. I’m always pulling boners like that. Talk about high class.” Ira grinned, scratched. “It wasn’t the champagne I could see the butler serving, and the maids — you know, the dough. I came away thinking what they were was more than money. Class.”

Larry regarded him with his soft gaze, his brown eyes appreciative; then he shook his head. “You’ve got some wonderful stories.”

“Yeah?”

“You make everything so graphic, it’s really fascinating.”

That was enough. Ira scrolled the pages down. No, the El ride, the journey, couldn’t contain any more, anyway ought not to. Maybe interesting stuff, but a plethora. Then what? Delete? All that followed? What a shame. He sat, quietly, soberly, with hands cradled in lap, pondering. How rescue it, where interlard or append it? The monitor indicated that the RAM was already sixty percent of capacity, and he was jittery about going any higher. Exceeding sixty percent by too much, he had had difficulties once or twice in retrieving the document, at least from a floppy disk, though it was true he had a hard disk to fall back on. But actually his worries were groundless. Fiona, his secretary, expert in these matters, could be depended on to rescue him. Ah, yes.

Had he taken his second diuretic tablet, his furosimide, as its generic name went? Had he? When he took his luncheon cup of tea? No, he hadn’t. he had forgotten to. Still, he had been sitting here a long time, and he had to urinate. Well, there was the urinal hanging in his three-wheel walker. He could use that. Not take any chances of mishap during the trek to the bathroom in his bedroom. Better save right now, and get up and answer the call of nature forthwith. No chance of embarrassment either, right now, using the urinal. Diane, his housekeeper, was away; she had gone to pick up her daughter at school. So, except for himself, the place was vacant.

Old bore, they would think — he had broken his resolution not to intrude on his reedited manuscript, not to intervene with extraneous or current reflections into his already revised text. But he was eighty-six years of age now, and could brush off previous resolutions, if he chose. Even so, his doing so now gave him a sense of guilt, of sinfulness in breaking his own pledge made to himself. Maybe he ought to delete this intervention too, this bit of Nestorian garrulity. But the fact was it was more than that, more than an instance of the garrulity of senescence. The seemingly rambling passage played a key role. Unless he deleted the material that followed, and he was obviously loath to, his sense of rightness required this interlude. In short, his present intrusion, in this, the month of May, in the year 1992, into a text considered final two years ago was necessary, if he would include what followed, and he would. The balance , figuratively and literally, of the long dialogue already recorded aboard the ride on the El needed respite, needed relief. He hoped his aside had provided it. Anyway — he adjured himself — only in extreme cases, such as this, a dilemma between inclusion or deletion of work already accepted, would he permit himself another such infringement, another such flouting of a solemn contract he had made with himself. Well, have fun, Stigman, he heard mind speak to itself. Have fun.

XIX

Upon arriving at the El station where they got off, it seemed as if they were in the country, at the foot of a hillside, so low-lying the station was, by a brown cliffside via a short platform hewn out of the hill. All sedate it seemed, the cliffside above the station, above the tracks. He would never see it so again: that such an undreamed-of rural enclave would be a station on the route of the old, beat-up Ninth Avenue El. He would never see it that way again — an El station at the foot of a brown cliff.

They got to Larry’s home, one flight up in a neat and tidy hallway, stairs all quietly carpeted. The apartment was sedate and commodious. There were introductions to parents, and to sister Irma; brother Irving was not present. Ira awkwardly expressed formal admiration of their home, followed by his warm and sincere joy at beholding Larry’s own room, Larry’s own study, large enough for a full-sized bed, and a couch, an ample desk — and with a typewriter on it! Scatter rugs, a handsome five-drawer chest, a walk-in closet. All Larry’s own. And the design on the papered wall that he himself had chosen when he was “a lot younger”: of an old-fashioned choo-choo train chuffing by a river, through an old-fashioned village, with nostalgic farmhouses, barn, and steeple.

The living room was furnished with an inviting oak recliner; and — novel to Ira — the slant of the recliner’s back depended on the position of an iron rod in a kind of wooden ratchet in the rear. Sharing the floor space, or rather carpet space, were a large sofa of dark green cloth and two fat, opulent easy chairs of dark leather. Under them a lively, florid Turkish rug, rich with intertwining vines, spread from mopboard to mopboard. Electric sconces on the walls lit up reproductions of paintings that reminded Ira of the Corots, the gentle landscapes he had seen as a boy in the Metropolitan with Jake Shapiro. There was an arresting reproduction of a Maxfield Parrish landscape. Dickie Bird was its title; in it were depicted a cluster of round castles rising up to different heights, stiff and attentive, forming a bastion to a naked maid on a swing reaching its apogee. High in a sapphire sky, smooth and mellow as the dusk in paradise, the naked damsel swings, tits like macaroons. Boy. .

And supper: lamb chops, with divine never-tasted-before creamed spinach, served by Mary, the homely Hungarian maid. But who would believe that spinach could be so transmogrified? Ira lauded the dish with the most extravagant superlatives he could summon. Later he so inspired Mom, in the course of her interrogation concerning the kind of home the Gordons lived in, the food, the furnishings, the personae, that she undertook to prepare the same thing according to her son’s rapturous description of it. Nah! It didn’t taste like that at all! Ira growled, rude as ever. Poor Mom. She tried.

Ira could not get out of his mind Maxfield Parrish’s Dickie Bird in the living room, where the two youths sat afterward listening to records played on the phonograph duly cranked up by Larry. The dainty, the fair, the nude maiden with the pretty tits, shaped like a teacher’s bell on a desktop, disported on a swing, and all about her, turrets arose, high and low, yearning upward into ethereal, blue heaven. Beautiful. But see how dirty your mind is, Ira chastised: Dick for Dickie, and the turrets were hard-ons all around. Nobody else saw them, only he, crude and coarse: tukhis afn tish —the vulgar saying in Yiddish, ass on the table. Jewish immigrants who left their wives behind, like Pop, and screwed a twenty-five-cent nafke standing up, must have demanded tukhis afn tish before they paid. Only this time it was damsel’s ass on a swing. Not a sling, but a swing. Why did you have to think of it? Why? Why? Because he had bartered a stolen fountain pen once for Minnie’s “charms,” as she lay athwart his bed in the dingy little bedroom. That was why? One of those afternoons when the green walls tingled, and he nipped the little brass nipple of the lock upward — oh, hell. What a serene and homogenized sky the maiden swung into. Boy, supposing he was on the swing with her, and she was sitting straddle as they swung. “Boy, it’s cerulean,” Ira praised reticently, as he gazed.