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

“There’s Minnie. What d’you mean, nobody to escort you?” Ira countered.

“That afternoon she has a date.”

“A what?”

“A dance. A Christmas revelry, don’t you know how the goyim celebrate? At Julia Richmond High School, with the young men from the commoysheh high school. Commoysheh high school has many Jewish students, as you know. Perhaps she’ll find a good Jewish youth for a suitor.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Believe me, they’ll admire you at the bris . My handsome son, and a college student, who won’t admire you?” Mom wheedled. “And food and drink they’ll proffer without end. They’re all in the restaurant business, no?”

“And Minnie is going to be gone all afternoon?” Ira brushed aside the lure, at the same time as he probed for possibilities of another sort. “When is she coming home?” he probed.

“Not until late evening. I’m telling you. Not till your father is home from the benket in Coonyiland. Maybe not till we return,” Mom affirmed. “Come. Be a kind and considerate son. Escort me this once.”

“I don’t see why. You can go with Mamie.”

“I know. I know that. But this one time, favor me. What else does a mother wish but to display her admirable son?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s just what I want.”

“My sisters are bringing their children. Only I am without. Forlorn. Neither husband nor son. Public school graduation, not. High school graduation, not. I don’t deserve anything? Is it so much?” She sat there so patiently, heavy hands in her lap, bobbed hair speckled gray, deep, sorrowful brown eyes pleading.

“Oh, well,” Ira grudgingly consented.

“Indeed a precious son!”

“Okay, okay, I said I’d go,” he quenched sentiment abruptly. “Holy mackerel. Sit there, and do what?” He wagged his head in distaste. “ Chibeggeh, chibeggeh, chibeggeh , as Pop says. Boy, how to ruin a Sunday.” He felt especially out of sorts, frustrated. Minnie had refused him this morning. She was having her period. “Anh, nuts.”

“My darling child.”

After a long ride to Flushing, and a walk of several blocks from the Sutphin Boulevard station, they came to Saul’s brand-new frame house, full of relatives. As Zaida’s oldest grandson, first of a new generation of cousins, and a “collitch” boy besides, Ira was greeted effusively and with admiration by all the guests. Complimented for her distinguished offspring by everyone there, Mom flushed with pride, glowed with pleasure. Laconic in defense, Ira, as he had anticipated, had embarrassingly little to discuss with his restaurateur uncles, a perfunctory minimum which he made no effort to expand. Nor could he interest himself, on the other hand, in the seemingly limitless differences of points of view they exchanged among themselves. As bored as he had ever been in his life, he sat inertly and with unfeigned listlessness amid the flow of opinions about aspects and prospects of the cafeteria business between naively boastful Max and slinking Saul, between tactless Harry and robust and candid Moe. Only Moe took time to make a few inquiries about Ira’s collegiate activities, inquiries crossing the Yiddish and Yinglish hubbub of domestic and business activities. How did college appeal to Ira? And how many years more would he have to attend? And what had he chosen as a career? “Poor Leah, your mother, will finally have something to be happy about.”

Replied to by Ira with remarks that were shallow and truncated, even in response to Moe’s inquiries, perfunctory acknowledgments of kinship that had long since lost whatever living interactions it once had. Two worlds drifting further and further apart from their original cluster. “How is the restaurant gesheft ?” Ira asked in humorous deference.

And received the expected stereotypical reply, “ M’makht a lebn .”

Neither had anywhere to go in the other’s domain. Ira could scarcely mask his utter indifference to, if not disdain for, their various observations on making a living in the cafeteria business. It was difficult for him to feign interest — out of politeness, out of minimal consideration for the occasion, or what? A celebration, birth of his uncle’s firstborn son. Boyoboy, talk about tedium, about being bored stiff. What would life have been, relations have been in the close-packed Orthodoxy of the stagnant Galitzianer hamlet they came from? Something more meaningful, surely, more interwoven, shared and dynamic, even if seemingly insignificant when viewed by the outside world.

How far apart they had traveled since they had crossed the ocean — the thought repeatedly rolled through Ira’s mind. Was it — he found himself mulling amid the cry and flurry of festivity — that he had preceded them to America by a few years, or was just an infant when he arrived? Trailed no residue of Europe? Or what? It seemed to him he was forever capturing the answer, and losing it again. Minnie was a damn sight closer to them than he was, and Minnie had been born here. You had to search somewhere else, search somewhere else for an answer. That move to Harlem from 9th Street on the Lower East Side — again the cause: “It is the cause, my soul,” said Othello. That crazy impulse to drink of that rill of rainwater trickling down the hillside in Central Park. Or the reading, all the reading he did about the gentile world. But Minnie seemed to read as much as he did. She had spent whole afternoons in the library, when the Great War forced a curtailment in classes to half a day, to mornings only for her — and was he ever furious with her for not staying home, for not coming home early from the library. What chances she deprived him of, again and again. Jesus Christ, right away, the skull throbbed. He had no barriers, not even tissue-paper barriers to hold impulse within bounds—

Zaida didn’t come to the bris . Ira thought he heard someone say he was still in mourning. And not all the uncles were there at one and the same time either. They had to take turns tending to the cafeteria, especially the cash register. Nor was Ida there, the “first” Ida, the flamboyant Ida Link, Morris’s wife, who lived upstairs in the same house. She had had a falling-out with Sam, Mom whispered to Ira, adding, “And a geferlikhe gemblerke ist she too,” referring to Ida’s passion for cards.

With the assembled guests, Ira watched the shrill infant’s foreskin slit by the mohel , thrown on the floor, and stamped on — to Hebrew invective. Then followed the feast: the gefilte fish, and the fricassee and the kreplach , the kishka , siphons of seltzer, the wine and whiskey, and desserts fruity and desserts baked — all consumed amid ritual Jewish din. Mamie, already in girth like a barrel, ate until her eyes bulged. As for Ira, he not only gorged but tippled, first whiskey, with bravado, then copious drafts of sweet wine along with the ample viands, and by the end of the repast, he reached the end of his capacity. Loaded, bloated, in lethargic haze, reacting to his orgy of gluttony, he sprawled on one side of the twin love seat in the sunroom off the living room, wishing to hell he had never acceded to Mom’s appeal. What the hell had he come here for? To cram his gut? Goddamn tun-belly.

It was evening. The sunroom lay in deep shadow. The living room was deserted. Most of the guests had eaten and gone their various ways, perfunctorily bidden farewell by Ira. And now, yawning dormantly, he waited for Mom to announce that she was ready to leave — before he would have to remind her that he was ready to leave. More than ready. After the departure of so many people, the place seemed to have subsided, become semideserted. From the brightly lit doorway of the kitchen on the other side of the unlit living room came the splash and clink of dishwashing and chatter of the women, interspersed by the voices of Mamie’s younger and loquacious daughter, Hannah, and the treble voices of Sadie’s kids, while their mothers — and Mom — helped the second Ida clean up in the aftermath of the banquet. Stuffed, reclining on his half of the love seat in lassitude of gourmandizing, Ira bided his time, lulled by the hum issuing from the kitchen, hebetating to the verge of somnolence. . about to doze off—