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

A few weeks more Ira attended, sullenly — until the exasperated malamut himself dismissed his pupil: “Go, tell your mother to seek another malamut . You need, you know what you need? To be whipped to shreds. You’re nothing but a goy .”

“Then woe is me!” Mom mourned when Ira came home and told her. “You have a goya for a mother who doesn’t believe; she has a goy for a son. But I tell you now: Once we become reconciled with your grandfather, you’ll have to go.”

VIII

So the weeks went by without his attending. . Summer passed. . came the fall — November neared. Election Day floats rumbled through the street. Drawn by plodding horses, heavy drays bore prominent signs on them, signs leaning against each other like the walls of a tent, each wall proclaimed: DELANEY FOR ALDERMAN! HONEST AND EXPERIENCED! OR VOTE FOR O’HARE THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE. OR VOTE A STRAIGHT DEMOCRATIC TICKET! VOTE FOR THE PARTY OF THE PEOPLE! Election Day approached. Throughout the block, all available juveniles were marshaled — or volunteered jubilantly — to form teams foraging for wood, combustibles of every kind and condition, discarded furniture, mattresses, packing crates, planks, egg crates, milk boxes snitched from the front of grocery stores, barriers from street excavations. All of it was stored down the cellarways before tenements, piled almost to sidewalk level, the tolerant Irish janitors looking the other way — A fever of collection seized the juvenile and the half-grown. Ira too was infected: he who protested so vociferously when Mom pleaded with him to provide her with a little kindling from broken fruit boxes or other scraps of wood, the way other kids did on the street, so she could build a bed of fire to ignite the coal poured on top of the kindling in the cast-iron kitchen stove. No. He refused.

“ Shemevdik! Folentser! ” Mom fumed: “Cowering shirker!”

Without effect. But now he was tireless in his enthusiasm to gather fuel, excelling his Irish peers. “They got a float! They got a float!” came the excited cry throughout the block — on the very afternoon of Election Day. “McIntyre an’ Kelly an’ dem — dey got an election float. Dey’re pulling it under de Cut!”

Danny Heffernan and Vito and Eddie and Ira and Davey and Maxie, and a half-dozen more sped to Park Avenue under the Cut, the railroad overpass. And just around the corner, they saw it: approaching from 120th Street, an electioneering dray, with its VOTE FOR JAMES LEAHY still on its oilcloth tent, being tugged by a swarm of kids, and half-grown louts too, toward 119th Street. The newcomers threw themselves into the task of moving the vehicle along Park Avenue. “Steer it, O’Neill! Steer it, Madigan!” The wagon would make the biggest election night bonfire 119th Street had ever witnessed, the biggest in Harlem.

And then: “Cheese it! The cops!”

Bluecoats uptown, three of them, came charging down upon the culprits. Dropping the shafts, letting go of the spokes of the wheels, everyone took flight. In an instant the slowly moving vehicle came to rest, abandoned and forlorn in the gray afternoon light in front of a pillar of the overpass. The cops pursued. Yelling, the juvenile pranksters scattered in all directions. The police hurled their truncheons after them; police clubs bounced on the pavement, rang on the asphalt, bounding after the scampering urchins in malevolent pursuit. Delirious with escapade, Ira raced into his hallway, and up the stairs. Panting, he sat down in the kitchen: “Ooh, the policemen threw their clubs!” he announced.

“At whom?” Mom was blanching cabbage leaves on the oilcloth-covered washtub work surface. “You’re gasping for breath. What is it?”

“We were pulling one of those big wagons to burn in the street tonight. Election night.”

“ Oy, gevald! To burn it? A whole wagon? This too I need for you to learn. Oy, veh iz mir! No wonder the police threw their clubs at you!”

“Yeh! Bong! Bong! Bong! The clubs jumped in the air after us.” Ira giggled suddenly. “We ran. Everybody ran.”

“They could have split your head. Your father is right: You’ll be ruined by these wild Irish. They’ll bring you upstairs with a broken head. You can’t find good Jewish boys to play with?”

“Where’m I going to find them? There’s Davey and there’s Maxie, and all they like is gambling.”

“If you’d go to cheder , you’d find them.”

“And if they live on 114th Street, or on 115th Street? Or by Fifth Avenue?”

“Go there. Play there.”

“So why don’t you live there!”

“I’ll show you why.” She waved her hand, but her eyes were worried. “You do wrong; you sin: What can I do if he wants to live here? You mock at my sorrows.”

“Yeah? You didn’t want to live here? You didn’t want to move to Harlem? To Baba, to Zaida? We don’t even see them. Who wanted to live in the front? You.”

“You’re becoming like a stone,” she said.

Even without the election float, the bonfire on election night was spectacular. The blaze raged in the middle of the block, and sparks flew as high as the six-story roofs, while at street level the flames luridly mirrored themselves in grocery-store and tailor-shop glass fronts. The heat was felt yards away, and most of the tenement occupants, Mom and Pop included, leaned out of their windows watching the display — until the firemen arrived. They scattered the blazing debris with a powerful stream from the hose which they had connected beforehand to the hydrant. And suddenly the street darkened. A Sanitation Department truck rolled into the street the next afternoon. Men shoveled up the charred and still-dripping litter into the vehicle. The odor of molten tar filled the street. Ira and the other kids watched the ruined area of asphalt being patched: the laborers tamping the macadam with their heavy implements, the jumbo steamroller traveling and returning. .

That was seventy years ago, Ira reflected: That was more than seventy years ago. My God! Who’s alive? Yonnie True, Eddie, Mario, Vito, the barber’s two sons, Petey Hunt? As if he had suddenly dislodged them, the images came tumbling into mind: The pipes, the copper-lined box over the flush toilet in the hall froze during a cold snap, and thawing again, torrents of water cascaded down. “A tub! A flood! The janitor!” Mom rushed from the kitchen to the hallway toilet and back. “ Gevald! Run, Ira! The goya ! The janitor!”. .

Because of the falling-out between his parents and Mom’s kin, he could no longer avail himself of the hot water and bathtub in Baba’s house (for a short time Mamie too was included in Pop’s blanket ill-will). How black grew the grime encrusting his feet, unwashed the whole winter long, so black, the crust that coated his ankles was something to admire, like a dark peel — to pare off, to part with almost regretfully, as he did in Baba’s bathtub in the spring when reconciliation between families finally took place. “What were your happiest years in America?” he once asked Mom, fully expecting her answer would be the East Side, corresponding to his own sense of well-being, his sense of belonging.

But no: “Those first years in Harlem were my happiest years,” Mom replied: “When Baba was still alive, and all my kinfolk lived close by.”

“Those were?”

“Yes.”

Sitting in the rocking chair in Baba’s front room, he would croon mindless tunes to himself, as the Sabbath drew to an end, as the Sabbath twilight grew, before the turning on of lights, while the women chatted endlessly, Mom and her three sisters and Baba.

And again, because it was Saturday night, and Mom was loathe to tear herself away, and Pop was working an “extra,” as he called his supernumerary waiting at tables at a banquet, Mom would send Ira out to the Hebrew National Delicatessen on 116th Street and Madison where he bought two kosher frankforts (though not kosher enough for Zaida, who still swallowed saliva, while eschewing), a quarter of slant-sliced, crisp white bread, a paper-twist of mustard. Swiftly returned upstairs, the Sabbath over, he waited impatiently for Mom to boil the frankforts. And so ravenously did Ira bolt down his food, a bit of frankfort with a mouthful of scarcely masticated bread, that more than once he heaved up the whole mess into Baba’s flush toilet — and came out wailing at the loss of his most prized victuals. “What can I do,” Mom laughed at him, “if you eat like a wild animal?”