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

“Oh, no. They’re all worked up — over an imaginary something. And even if it was, I’m legally responsible for my acts. They’ve no right to harass me.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong, did I?”

“Of course not. My God.” Larry lifted his shoulders. “You can see — they can see the black coming out all over my wool. I feel like a black sheep. Any tiny deviation, they magnify it — into something horrendous. Ruin! On all sides. What I wished to be in high school, I don’t necessarily have to wish to be in college. “You’re lucky. Your relatives don’t—” He gestured vehemently. “Your parents, your sister, certainly don’t crush you with all kinds of preconceived ideas about your welfare, do they? God, crush you with their concern. Talk about the weight on that diving bell meant to go down into the — Oh, I don’t know what the name of that ocean trench is. Mariana?”

“I don’t know. All I can say is my mother — I mean, I’m the whole world to Mom.”

“Yes, but supposing she knew you were becoming deeply, deeply interested in an older woman? Irma has already told you. I’m just telling you what you heard.”

“If she was a shiksa , maybe. A little.” Ira felt a little breathless because of the sudden rush of feeling, Larry’s and his own by proximity. “But only a little. Mom wouldn’t worry. I mean, I know she’d care . But as long as I got my degree, my B.S. Bullshit,” he said, trying to ease intensities. “That’s the main thing with her. You know what she’d worry about? She’d worry about my grandfather — if I were to marry a shiksa . The old guy would go into a tailspin.

“That worries them less. Hardly. Victor, my dentist brother-in-law, is only half Jewish. I’ve already mentioned that. No, it’s profession. That’s their chief concern. You know? Profession. Convention. Assured respectability. Assured income. More important, Victor already told me he’d want me as a partner. And he has a fine practice.” Larry seemed harassed indeed. “Trouble is, you see, we’re such a tight family — I don’t know what it is — everyone intertwines — do something out of the way, and everyone is affected. Do the unconventional, and everyone is”—he shook his head—“hurt, moaning, oh my God!”

The wooden bell tower on top of Mt. Morris Park hill, an indelible landmark from Ira’s early teens, reared up with new, with momentous prominence. For a moment for Ira, the very timbers, the massive wooden beams, color and construction, loomed distinctly, near at hand, and within them the iron bell gleaming as it tolled. “So how’d they know about this? You tell ’em?”

“Oh, no. They didn’t have to be told. They’ve begun to watch every move I make, and draw conclusions from every move. I’m sure I’m the subject of endless discussions. And you know, they’re pretty sophisticated. My mother, my three sisters. My older brother. And there’s my brother-in-law, Victor, you know, the dentist. And Sam, a lawyer. The whole family keeps tabs. I’m really the baby.”

“Yeah? Wonder why I feel so funny afraid.” Ira began folding the jacket absently. “Guilty collywobbles.”

“Oh, that’s my sister Irma. She’d worry anybody. But don’t let her get under your skin. Here. Let me show you how to fold a jacket. This way: grab the seam. Turn the shoulders inside out. See? That’s what packing for steamship traveling does for you.”

Ira studied him as he folded the garment: big-handed, white-handed, he always did everything with that flair of assurance. Self-confident, he gave one an impression of competence, and he was competent. He took charge. He betrayed none of Ira’s uncertainty and awkwardness. On the contrary, he displayed a convincing capability, a ready facility. What a neat job he made of the jacket, pressing the folded garment into a compact parcel. “I know just where the right-sized shopping bag is. I’ll get it.” He left the living room.

And generous, Ira reflected. Never any condescension, but as if generosity were natural, the way his being functioned, the way he conducted himself. Boy, giving away that fine English jacket. . Jesus, life was strange. Just sitting down beside Larry in Elocution 7, and look what had flowed from it: their friendship, and all that was happening now, happening and going to happen. Like destiny. Had his friendship with Larry affected him , molded Larry? Into what? Maybe a little like Ira himself, his nonbelonging, noncaring, ambitionless, haphazard self. Half outcast self, pariah-Jew in Harlem getting into cruel, crazy fixes, with Minnie, with Stella, cunning, remorseless bastard pratting a fourteen-year-old. Maybe Irma was right when she turned on him. Maybe he did bear a share of responsibility in Larry’s reconsidering a career in dentistry, drifting toward writing, becoming attached to his English instructor. Jesus, what a change. Larry was an altogether different guy back then. Poetry was something you enjoyed, like a song, something like that. Dentistry was your serious aim in life. Yes. Schoolteachers didn’t earn very much. Right? Now he was in hot water with his family. Altered. A different guy. No wonder Irma was peeved: her brother was rejecting respectable goals, like Ira himself, as if he’d given Larry the fillip to go that way: prefer to fetch words out of a deep trance, like a coral diver, risk his future to delight Miss Welles. Yeah, dread, no wonder. What was it he had seen? Not a flywheel, a weight at the end of a rod, swung around, swung the other end around. Well, he should have gone to Cornell. They both would have been better off maybe, both attuned to a conventional America as they thought of it, rewarded by America. Now what? Jesus, you follow those threads, they get finer and finer, get tangled among one another, come back to where you were. You could go crazy.

Larry returned with a white Macy’s shopping bag. “Let’s forget about all that unpleasantness. I’ll put on a record.” He laid the shopping bag down in an armchair. “Don’t leave this when you go.”

“Oh, no,” Ira assured, then laughed — at a loss. “I don’t know. Is it the jacket that scares me? I said, Hic jacket.”

“I thought you never studied Latin.”

“I didn’t. Those two words just happened to stick.”

“What would you like to hear?”

“You know my favorite. The Unfinished. ”

“The Unfinished it shall be.” Larry sought the record in the oak cabinet beneath the turntable, found it, and as he brought it out with customary flourish—

“You know, we had a phonograph when I was just a kid in Brownsville, in Brooklyn, even before we went to the Lower East Side,” Ira remarked. “It was a little phonograph; that’s all I remember about it. And I took it apart. Did I ever get a shellacking.”

“Do you remember anything it played? I better change this needle.”

“I think it was ‘Hatikvah.’”

“‘Hatikvah’?”

“I can’t tell whether Mom sang ‘Hatikvah’ or the phonograph played it. You know how it goes?”

“No, I don’t.”

“No?” Ira essayed the melody, filling in the words with a tra-rea-la. “I don’t have your ear. I wish I did.”

“That sounds like the ‘Moldau,” Smetana’s ‘Moldau.’” Larry repeated the tune.

“Yeah? That’s funny. Mom couldn’t have known the ‘Moldau.’”

“He was a Bohemian. You’re a Galitz. It’s not very far away, is it?” Larry lowered the needle into the outer groove. “Hungary, Czechoslovakia, weren’t they all part of the Austro-Hungarian empire?”

“You know more about it than I do; I don’t know about Hungary. . Boyoboy, that’s music.”

Larry sat down on the leather armchair diagonally opposite. After the first few chords, he closed his eyes: eyelids blank, his lips parted, he sighed. Eyelids blank outwardly, a screen inwardly, Ira could well believe. Head tilted back, fine black hair above pale brow, his body motionless, he was transported by his envisaging. So that was love, or loving, in love, or what was it? What else could it be? Ira wondered. How ennobling it was: transfiguring. Could one ever, one like himself, with desire dismembered, severed from the kind of pure dream Larry was dreaming of now — severed from love, something like that — ever, ever? No. As if hacked away. Or Humpty-Dumpty. Well, witness it in Larry. Observe it. Best you could do. But Jesus, that’s where the guilt came in; that’s where the guilt came in that maybe Irma sensed. You could imagine guiding him by mental telepathy, by intangible, remote control, to do your bidding. That’s where your vileness had got you—