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

“What?”

“I was just trying to remember something by Sir Walter Raleigh. Nothing.”

“It certainly does something for you.” Irma rested two fingers on her cheek, as if she were seeing Ira for the first time. “It makes you look much more assured.”

“Yeah?”

“And very successful. All you need is a million dollars to go with it.”

Ira met her brown-eyed gaze unsteadily. She was so like Larry, and yet not like him in so many ways. Looked almost straitlaced, straitlaced and smoldering: the word bukher came to mind again. “Well.” Ira pulled at his ear. “I am now your brother’s keeper.”

“He may need one. Is that what you mean?”

“Well, no. I just said it. Instead of thanks. I mean, I owe him loyalty. Protection, I guess.”

“I think I know one very good way of showing it.” Irma directed a look at Larry. “Protection is something he may need. I’m glad to hear you’re conscious of it.”

“No, I just meant I owe him so much, that’s all.” Ira felt some sort of adverse pressure mounting.

“Irma, I don’t see why you have to bring that up.” Larry addressed his sister with uncommon curtness. “I didn’t call you in here for that. All I wanted you to do was look at the jacket.”

“Well, I’ve looked at it. He’s very handsome in it.”

“My sister sometimes behaves as if I’m not quite able to take care of myself.” Larry’s tone of voice was so elaborately equable that Ira couldn’t miss the satiric overtone. “You don’t have a big sister — or big sisters. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

Irma ignored her brother’s remark. She was not one to be deflected. Humorless, tough. “Are you an only child?” she asked.

“Me? No, I have a younger sister.”

“You do? I never heard you mention her. Is she very much younger?”

“No, about two years or so. But you know how it is.” Fecklessness served for pretext to obviate further explanation.

“Younger sisters don’t count, is that it?”

“Oh, no. They count. But a couple of years’ difference right now. . she goes to high school, I go to college. There’s a big separation between us. You know what I mean?” Boy, she made him work, forced him to tread warily.

“Where is she in high school? What high school?”

“Julia Richmond High. She’s aiming to attend Hunter College, the normal school.” He offered more than asked to forestall further inquiry.

“Irma, do me a favor. I just called you to look at the jacket,” Larry reminded.

“I told you. It’s very nice, very becoming, Ira.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m glad to hear him say he feels he owes you protection for the gift. That’s reassuring. That means he’s a very good friend. And good friends keep each other out of trouble.”

“That’s not what he meant,” Larry contradicted sharply.

“No, it isn’t, and I know it.”

Larry bridled at his sister’s provocative smile. “I wish I had the luxury of having just one younger sister, instead of all of them being older, all three of them, and all talking down to me in their superior wisdom. Talk about sisters not counting.” He turned to Ira. “My sisters have counted every day in my life, every day since I was born.”

“Fortunately for you,” Irma managed to comment.

The uncommon heat engendered by the two siblings finally began to stir perception in Ira’s mind: Larry was reconsidering dentistry and had alarmed his entire family. At last, the dispute had come to a head at home. So. . pleasing Miss Welles, Larry had said that before. Calling her Edith. That peculiar, sanguine look on Larry’s face when Ira said, with mock consternation, as if a joke: you just joined the Arts Club. Something like that. What d’ye know? What did Larry’s family suspect? They were becoming worried, that’s what it all meant. He never would have guessed. That veering away from preset goals, a specific veering away. And not only in Larry; Ira felt it taking place within himself, a wavering anyway.

Undoing the leather buttons of the English jacket, Ira saw his reflection again in the mirror, smiled back at himself in satisfaction at the annealing of conjecture. So that was it—

“You needn’t look so smug!” Irma snapped at him.

“Me?” Startled, he gaped in the mirror at her dark, taut face. She had never spoken to him that cuttingly before. No one in Larry’s family had ever done so.

“You needn’t pretend. You’re enjoying it all!”

“Enjoying it?” Ira turned around. “I was enjoying the jacket.” What a way of breaking the truce, the truce he tried to keep in his mind about her. It was as though she had caught him thinking of what he tried not to think about — she was so stormy and accusing. Chrissake. He felt like insulting her. Hurling some epithet out of his neighborhood at her. What the hell did she bring him into it for? What had he done? Maybe they thought he had; maybe they thought his friendship with Larry had influenced Larry, altered him in some devious, obscure fashion, tainted, marred Larry’s nature. Who the hell knew? Maybe it had. Larry had in fact changed him . Ira could feel his own wrath rising to contend with her stormy looks. So goddamn protective. Smut, obscenities arose in his mind: 119th Street invectives. Suddenly, involuntarily, she became naked, she walked like a mare on all fours, a mare with a human visage, curling her lips in. There she was, sucking them in. Made her look so goddamn prim. Back-scuttle her, since he didn’t want to face her, he was too angry; she had humiliated him for nothing. Do to her what the guys said on 119th Street: she had just the right chin to rest his balls on. And the way she sucked her lips in. Just right. Blow me, you bitch. Jesus Christ, he had never thought of her that way before. Jesus Christ, he was crazy. That was the middle-class manner that Larry spoke about, the middle-class manner that he himself didn’t know a thing about. It had all kinds of foreboding gloom about it, flowed over him, like an impalpable sable surf. What the hell was going to happen here? Hic jacket, he had said. A joke. It was no joke: here lies. But then he was always getting scared for no reason. “What d’you mean? I was just looking at, ad — admiring the jacket,” Ira insisted stubbornly.

“You were not. You know very well what I’m talking about, too.”

“Would you mind cutting out the accusations?” an irate Larry lashed out at his sister. “You’re officious!” he flung at her. “Officious, insulting. Please get out.”

“And you’re — I hate to tell you!”

“Don’t bother.”

“A silly romantic adolescent!” Irma was in a manifest huff. “If you don’t think I haven’t heard some of your remarks.”

“When?”

“Oh, your tone of voice.” Irma tried to portray a state of beatitude. Her eyes rolled up. She rested her cheeks on the fingertips of the two hands she held beneath it. “It touched my heart.”

“Will you please get out! Before I start using stronger language. Get out! I’m sorry I ever asked you in here.”

“I’m not only going to get out of here, I’m going to get out of the apartment.”

“That’s fine with me.”

Tense, irritated, Larry waited for his sister to leave the living room, then held up his hand in signal of silence until they heard the house door open and close, denoting her departure. “You get an idea of what’s going on — the acrimony,” Larry said heatedly. “That’s Irma, my own sister. Ever hear anything so mean? God, it’s a crisis. I should have known better than ask her in. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to be dragged into this, sorry she dragged you into it.”

“That’s all right.” Ira doffed the jacket, stood holding it silently a moment. “You know something? I got an uneasy feeling. Something like dread.”