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

“Swell. Till that time I’ll do without.”

“Fortunately, I was prepared,” said Mom. “As if I didn’t know your ways, my son. I baked a potato kugel too.”

“Ah, that’s better.” Ira grabbed a slice of her rough rye bread and chomped while he waited for the rest of his supper.

So he had muffed it again. He bolted down a half-masticated lump of bread. Been deflected irrevocably, just as he had been before: by silly intimations, by irrelevances, by insubstantial, damnfool, dopy irrelevances, by sloth, by following the line of least resistance. And by — you goddamn fool: by cozy, fierce expectancy, by cozy, coozy, quick coozy on a Sunday morning. Ever anybody have such a goddamn Sunday-morning crib? A crib was a place you humped a harlot in, wasn’t it? Or the same word, “crib,” helped you pass an exam. Assisted you — hey, ass sistered you. Right? Hey, pretty clever. Crib was a dreary little bedroom, his little bedroom, or Mom and Pop’s, next to the airshaft on the first floor, a dreary little crypt, as Mom called it, that became a hedge against pulling off. What do you think of that? Just snap the brass nipple of the lock, after Mom went, and the little crib hurtled into lurid prospects; its gloom dazzled you with arcs of guilt. The cramped crib suddenly shimmered with delirium of connivance, with nimbus of abomination. Oh, boy, what exquisite alarm lurked in the commonplace, alchemic ecstasy that he had discovered by accident: like another Archimedes in a big tin bathtub. Eureka in a bathtub. Yeah, but you know, it was like that alloyed crown and its different buoyancy from the genuine. This time it was buoyancy and girlancy. And what a paralyzing Eureka when he came. Yow! Never to be the same afterward. .

Eureka, yeah, the whole damn thing opened up a world nobody ever dared enter; nobody ever dared admit he entered. He had come across references to it in the faintest, weakest, most indirect way, hushed, prim and prudish — Jesus Christ, anyone less attuned than he was would never have pricked up his ears at the signal, pricked up was right. And he had read it, gone to the library and taken home Byron’s collected poems, Byron, who had imprisoned a willing Ira years ago in the same cell as The Prisoner of Chillon . Hell, Byron’s was nothing like it: remote, grandiose, and ambiguous, all those supernatural choruses, all those wild chasms; who could keep track of them, or remember them later? Nah. Byron never got any further than just beginning to tell what Manfred did; Manny just brooded in proud solitude in a mysterious, lonely tower, over the enormity of his transgression. Hey, Manny, here’s what it’s like in a cold-water flat in East Harlem.

Still, you had to give the guy credit for even — yes, even whispering. . “Gee, that looks good, Mom.” Ira salivated at the sight of the veal in its schmaltzy brown gravy that Mom ladled out of the pot onto the chipped white plate before him: “ Potateh kugel too yet. Yay, team!”

“Eat slowly,” Mom cautioned.

“It tastes good?” Minnie beamed.

“I’ll say. That’s what I want when I graduate.”

“You hear, Mom?” Minnie commended.

“ Takeh . We should all survive until that blessed day.”

Pop’s newspaper rustled. From behind it came the single curt reproach: “ Chompkeh .”

“This time forgive him,” Mom arbitrated. “The youth hasn’t eaten since morning.”

“Okay, Pop, I’ll try to quit chompkin ’. But boy, does it taste good. Hard to keep your mouth shut with a load of that kugel in gravy.” Hunger’s first pangs satisfied, Ira suppressed defiance. He darted a brief, veiled glance at Minnie again; she lowered her hazel eyes as if in prayer to her Latin text. So he had muffed, muffed in his choice of colleges. But how did he know? What did Solon say to Croesus? Look to the end, my fine-feathered friend. Same here. I’m the guy who put the muff in muffed. Come Sunday. He’d tell that to Minnie. No, he’d better tell her about looking to the end. Ha. Come Sunday morning. Come is right. And then he’d scoot off to Larry’s for the afternoon. So? A few compensations. What else? Jesus, his mind was mushy rotten. If he let his fancy range — boyoboy, going to college, with a head full of — merde, ah. All he could think of was the white-wing dago street cleaner pushing his fiber brush ahead of him next to the granite curb. . Tired.

Tired, that was the trouble. Chalked characters on a blackboard at registration still glimmered in kitchen light. Fuck ’em all, we eat, he gobbled, remembered his pledge to Pop, gobbled behind closed lips. Fuck ’em all, we eat — that’s what he had heard them say in the street. And his inner ear, perceiving the rhyme, incorporated it:

Fuck ’em all, we eat. I wanna repeat.

An’ if you screw your sister for a treat, what more d’ye neet?

What more d’ye neet?

A B.S. degree from CCNY, of course, indeet.

Oink, oink. Neat.

God, he was becoming brutish, iron-clad brutish, wanton, and yet ever more sensitized, caught in and aware of the net of his own endless associations. Would he, could he, ever escape? What did a herring think of when he saw the reticules of the seine closing in around him? What? And his seine was like steel mail—

My poor M. Ira paused, turned expiating eyes away from the monitor. My poor, darling lambikin wife. What you took to yourself, what you gave yourself to. Only the incorruptible — was he borrowing from St. Augustine? — only the incorruptible could have possessed such invincible grace as she did, to have remained as knowing and as unsullied as she had remained all these years of living with him, of abiding him. He stifled a sigh. Boyoboy.

II

Classes began a day or two later. Ira was soon floundering in trigonometry, over his head in a subject that was a precondition for matriculation for a science degree. The pace was simply too fast for him. Ability to keep abreast of the class in a subject that he should have studied and passed in high school was taken for granted for one who was majoring in science. And he was already failing, dismally. In French he fared better — at the beginning — in part perhaps because of his gift for mimicry of the pronunciation. But he made smeary messes in his draftsmanship in descriptive geometry. Again he failed to understand the fundamental and the not too difficult principles of projection of simple figures onto different planes, he who had been a whiz in plane and solid geometry. Geometry, his guardian angel subject, the course that had preserved his sanity. What the hell was wrong with him? Only in Philosophy I did he experience anything like the intellectual pleasure he had anticipated so fondly those hours before registration when he had trampled outdoors on the fallen leaves on Convent Avenue. It was in the engrossing, informal, sprightly lectures of Professor Overstreet that he did sense those pleasures of the intellect — in the lectures, spiced with wit, animated descriptions and personal experience: Professor Overstreet illustrating the general nature of assumptions by acting out how the French picked their teeth openly after dinner while Americans hid the toothpick behind their hand or a napkin. His lectures were a joy, and so too was reading the multigraphed brochure of selections from various philosophers the professor distributed to the class. Far and away the most stirring excerpts were from Bertrand Russell’s audaciously contemporary statement of the faith of an atheist, the eloquent statement of the awareness of man’s insignificance in a blind, indifferent cosmos. Nothing in that first semester captivated Ira more.

But the seminars, oh, the seminars conducted by a young graduate student, seminars dealing with the central ideas of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, and the other great names in philosophy. The words embodying the abstractions the philosophers sought to convey flowed by him like the tide by a channel post. Utterly nebulous his notions of what their ideas consisted of, their concepts a floating ephemera, maintaining their outlines and distinctions from one another no better than a cloud, patches of haze. He did try to understand; the more earnestly he tried, the more soporific his endeavors became, the more opiate the elucidations in the text.