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

“I know. I know. It’s brand-new. Jesus, don’t rush me. Gimme a chance.”

At other times she behaved quite the opposite, penitent perhaps, reverting to “O-oh, are you a louse! Why don’t you leave me alone? I’m your sister.”

And he, offended to the point of losing his chance, “So I’m a louse. If you’re my sister, I’m your brother. So what’re you?”

“Shut up. Sometimes I wish Mama would come home and catch us.”

“Yeah? What d’ye think I locked the door for?”

“You don’t think she’d know? You saw her look at us a couple of times funny. You didn’t see because you got your head in a book.”

“All right, so who would she blame?”

“You, you louse. Who would she blame? He asks yet.”

“You don’t get a thrill, too?”

“You’re older, that’s why it’s your fault. Who started it?”

“All right, let me in, will ye?”

“The rubber’s all right?”

“Of course.”

“O-o-h, o-oh, my poor brother, my poor dear brother. Oh, that’s good.”

“Yeah? Ah.”

“Don’t kiss me.”

III

The fall term at CCNY went by — routine and dull. Only through Larry could he share in the excitement of his freshman year at NYU, hear his account of the activities of the Arts Club, of the bohemian setting of their evening meetings in one or another of the restaurants in the college environs, the Pirates’ Den, the Romany Inn, and listen to his entertaining descriptions of the eccentrics one might meet crossing Washington Square Park. With Larry, Ira went on an excursion to Greenwich Village, trying not to gawk at long-haired, freakish individuals, posturing in poetic disregard of conventional clothes and behavior. Ira’s own vista was flat and uninspired in retrospect — punctuated by a few hectic minutes on a Sunday morning, or frenzied windfall on a rare weekday afternoon, when the two were alone, those unforeseen, wild pouncings of furor, snatching gratification out of baleful contingency — and the fears it spawned. .

He dropped trigonometry, hopelessly incapable of making headway against his utter confusions. The dropping of the course would mean a dangerous insufficiency of credit. It would bring a warning from the dean that Ira risked flunking out of college. As against the debacle in trig was the anomaly of an A in chemistry. A grade of D in phys ed — he who had been a sturdy plumber’s helper only a few months before, and could swim the length of the college pool underwater. Mili Sci, with its marching around Jasper Oval in fair weather and in foul weather, rehearsing the manual of arms down in the “tunnel” between buildings, singing, “The Infantry, the Infantry, with the dirt behind their ears,” in time to the beat set by the portly paterfamilias of a colonel (while the blond-haired sergeant could scarcely refrain from squirming in embarrassment).

“The infantry, the infantry,

With the dirt behind their ears,

The infantry, the infantry,

That never, never fears. .”

For some unaccountable reason he received an A in the course.

Baba died in the fall of that first semester, only about half a year after Lenin had died early in the winter. She died a lingering death of “pernicious anemia.” She lay at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, dying, but aware. Out of affection for his old grandmother, Ira accompanied Mom there: he entered a warm, sunny, bright room, joined his other relatives standing or sitting about the bed. Baba’s face above the smooth, white bedspread looking as shriveled as a weathered husk, weazened, her skin corrugated and as if pigmented by the tiny shadows cast by a myriad of minute wrinkles. It was dinnertime; the nurse served Baba her meal. It looked so fetching on the platter: a thick juicy tidbit of rib steak under a sprig of parsley next to a mound of mashed potatoes banked by bright green peas. Ira drooled at the sight; in imagination, he sank his teeth into the succulent, rosy beef. Even Zaida’s mouth must have watered, for his Adam’s apple bobbed visibly as he importuned Baba to eat. “ Ess, ess , Minkeh,” he urged, swallowing. Then he chided her for declining, exhorted with ever growing impatience, “ Ess, ess , Minkeh. How can you live unless you eat?”

She refused, feebly; she wasn’t hungry: “ Ikh vil nisht, ikh ken nisht. ”

“Goodbye, Baba.” Ira went over to Baba’s bedside, after he heard Max offer to take Mom home in his new car. “I hope you get better.” He bent down and kissed the dark, shrunken brow of the head that rested in the center of uncropped, mousy hair diverging on the white pillow.

“May God watch over you, my child. Be a good son to your mother.” Barely audible, her murmured blessing.

“Yes, Baba.” He straightened up.

“ Gey gezunt .”

“Thanks, Baba. Goodbye.”

Amid prayers for speedy recovery, Ira bade farewell to his dying grandmother, forever after enshrined in his memory, lying in a white bed and refusing all importuning to eat a morsel of a juicy piece of beefsteak he could have devoured in two bites, and without an urging.

For another year or a little longer, Zaida lived with his last two unmarried sons, Max and Harry, in the apartment on 115th Street. And when Max married, two years after his mother’s death, Harry went to live with Max and his new wife, Rosy, in the new house Max bought in Flushing, Long Island, while Zaida went to live with his daughter Mamie. She, in partnership with Saul, Ira’s shifty and conniving uncle, had acquired from the local bank, marginally, two large adjoining apartment houses on 112th Street between Fifth and Lenox avenues, two squat blocks of dwellings of gray stone and gray brick, two matched six-story buildings with four apartments on each floor above the ground floor. Mamie managed the two places, for which she was recompensed with an apartment of her choice rent-free. She chose a spacious apartment only a flight up from the street. The apartment consisted of six rooms, more than enough to accommodate herself, her spouse, Jonas, her two young daughters, Hannah and Stella, and, eventually, Zaida, whenever he was ready to move in, which he did as soon as the lease of the apartment on 115th Street expired. A sine qua non for Zaida to board anywhere required the household to be strictly kosher, and, of course, Mamie kept a strictly kosher home.

Thus a new configuration now obtained among the family Farb. Ella and her husband, Meyer, still a kosher butcher, and their two infant children lived in an apartment house on Fifth Avenue and 116th Street. All the other siblings, except Harry, were married; all were in the restaurant business, as partners, except Sadie’s husband, Max S, who preferred to remain a waiter and avoid the “headaches” of ownership. Mamie’s husband, Jonas, at Mamie’s insistence, had given up his trade of years’ standing as a ladies’ tailor in order to join his brothers-in-law in partnership. Moe and Saul, Max, and soon Harry purchased or shared in the purchase of newly built two-story frame houses in Flushing, adjacent to each other and not far from their place of business, a large cafeteria on Sutphin Boulevard in Jamaica.

The year 1924 waned into the Christmas holidays. In the Farb family a bris was to be celebrated on a Sunday during the Christmas holidays. A son had been born to Saul and his wife, Ida, the second Ida in the family. Of course, all the relatives had been invited to the circumcision, and the festivities to follow.

“At least show yourself,” Mom pleaded. “You’re so estranged from the family, they hardly know you. Show them I have a college son. Your father won’t attend any occasion: always at odds with everyone. Escort me. I have no one.”