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

“A cowboy!” He snickered. “Goodbye, old Paint. I’m a-leavin’ Cheyenne. Yeah? I’m a-leavin’ all men. Amen. Sorry.”

“There’s Vernon himself,” said Larry. “He was brought up on a New England farm. He was married to a Russian noblewoman; she ran from the Revolution — you know, the Bolsheviks. He was married. He has a son. He’s divorced now. He’s bisexual.”

“ Bi sexual,” Ira stressed. “Bi. Both ways? Did he tell you that?”

“No. Edith did. She said she was dreadfully afraid of my getting caught in the toils of homosexuality, as I told you. She had seen too many promising young men ruined that way. She didn’t want to see me ruined. Homosexuality was not a normal way of life. It was a distorted one.”

“But this is bisexual. He gets the best of both.” Ira grinned. “But I still don’t know what’s good about the other half. Anh!”

“I told her there was very little chance of Vernon seducing me.” Larry stood up a rinsed plate between the rubber-lined arches of the drainer.

“Gee, my mother oughta get one o’ those,” Ira observed.

“I told her I was too much in love with her to be interested in anyone else, man or woman. Certainly not a man. I want her love. I adore her . I want to marry her.” He turned from the sink.

Why did he feel a pulse of embarrassment, hearing the reiterated declaration of that kind of ardor? “You told me.”

“I was very mature for my age, she said. I was poised and serious; I had far more assurance in dealing with people and social situations than she had at that age. And she loved me very much. But I was still a lad — that’s the word she used: lad. I ought not to be burdened with marriage, even secretly, before I got my degree. I ought to get my degree, and then decide. We’d both be in a better position to decide.”

Jesus, wouldn’t this be just about the right time, or say in another minute, to dig up a pretext for leaving? Be just about right to grab the subway downtown to the 110th Street and Lenox Avenue station. He’d get to Mamie’s just about the right time, after supper. Mamie at the dishes. Oh, frig this love business. But he had to stall awhile, not make it look as if he were fed up and ducking out. The right time, the right time. Boy. Love. Dove. Shove.

“Shall we go back to the living room? Like to hear a record? ‘Chanson Arab’?” Larry dried his hands on the dish towel.

“Not this time, thanks. I think you oughta get some rest. After all you’ve been through.”

“I’m all right. Recovered.” Larry seemed to hold his breath a moment, expelled it.

“I really think you should get some rest. A guy who told me he was ready to fall asleep talking. You’ve got big circles under your eyes.”

“That was because of the crisis I’ve been through. It’s over now. Not resolved. Just over the worst of it.”

“Yeah? I’m glad to hear it. Anyway, I ought to shove off.”

“Got anything on this evening?”

“No. But you oughta hit the sack.”

“I will. I’m all right, though. Easier in the mind.”

“Yeah. That’s good. Thanks for the grub.”

“It was nothing. Nothing compared to your being here.”

“Glad I was. Some goulash, amico fidato ,” Ira said, trying to render the oft-heard aria from La Forza del Destino . “Where’s that secondhand rug of mine?”

“You left it in my room. Have you worn your — the one you call kasha-colored?” Larry followed him down the hall. “The English jacket?”

“Oh, no. I told you, that’s for the big splurge,” Ira answered over his shoulder, as he made for Larry’s room.

He could hear Larry’s chuckle. “It’s just a poetry reading. You don’t have to make a splurge. And Edith knows all about you.”

“Yeah.”

Well, he was only Ira Stigman, he thought; the more he did the more he was aware, alas, of his formidable deficiencies, his multifarious shortcomings. Then why do what he was doing, why make the attempt? He had asked himself that many times before, and would again, no doubt. It was something, this craving, innate — perhaps chronic would be the right word — craving of the octogenarian, or nearly. He could hear the intonation of old days, speech of recently arrived Jewish immigrants—“What do you want from me?” Yesterday, in making the longest walk he had made in many and many a month, some six or eight city blocks from the optometrist’s to the Presbyterian Medical building, he was, moved to compose something akin to a poem in prose, revealing the individual he was, the same one now seated before his word processor, tapping keys that invoked yellow letters on the screen.

But there is nothing. .

Just the old man lurching across Central Avenue, thrusting his cane behind him, like a boatman his pole, to propel his hulk a foot or two nearer the curb before the traffic light changes from WALK to red.

And his lips writhe with effort, and he remembers the kid he was, so spry and jaunty, how he could have bounded across the street with exuberant, elastic stride. .

And the tear welling up is not his own, but one the kid sheds for him. .

VI

Where the hell was he? Where had he left off? After all these days and weeks spent in the Presbyterian Hospital where he had undergone removal of his gallbladder, days and weeks running up a hospital bill of over six thousand dollars, not to mention the surgeon’s and other doctors’ bills, the anesthetist’s, his assistant’s, the internist’s. Jumpin’ Jesus — he hoped his auxiliary insurance would pay the difference between fee and Medicare. He had been away so long from his yarn. Once, during the whole medical ordeal, he thought of Zaida, who, through one connection or another, probably via a fellow congregant in the synagogue, had been referred to a fine denture maker: a Dr. Veinig. He had made Zaida a wunderbar double set of dentures, and at an exceptionally reasonable fee. Naturally, he would repair Ira’s teeth at the same reasonable rate, and thus end, once and for all, the misery of the toothaches Ira suffered from, sometimes sobbing and moaning all night long — in a home destitute of even an aspirin — gnawing at the corner of his pillow in vain attempt to ease his pain. Zaida introduced Ira to the dentist, who agreed to fill his patient’s three dental cavities for a total of ten dollars.

Work began, work accomplished chiefly by means of an engine that Mr.-Dr. Veinig had in his office, a contraption with a foot treadle, like a Singer sewing machine, and while Mr.-Dr. Veinig puffed on his curved pipe, he pumped away at the treadle that spun the drill that ground away the decay in Ira’s dental cavity. The rhythm of words, Ira thought as he wrote, reminded him of the Passover liturgy: Khad gadyo , one kid, one kid that my father bought for two zuzim . The door to the dentist’s apartment was always locked, locked and further secured by a heavy chain that enabled Mr.-Dr. Veinig to scrutinize every caller before admitting him — or her — to the premises. From some source, perhaps from Mom, Ira learned that though Mr.-Dr. Veinig was without a license to practice dentistry, his illicit practice earned the funds necessary to pay his wife’s tuition in dental school — she, in turn, taught him the latest in dental techniques.

Weeks and weeks went by before the cavities were filled, weeks of drilling and drilling, until at last the nerve was probed for and withdrawn from the squirming moaning patient, until at last the cavity was filled. Each session lasted at most ten minutes: in and out of the Mr.-Dr.’s “office,” with the taste of tobacco-laden hands still lingering during the nighttime walk from 113th Street near Lexington all the way home. What did the mopey kid dream of then? The mopey kid who recalled in old age the Mr.-Dr., the humorless Litvak visage with a tobacco pipe in it, scrutinizing his patient above the heavy chain across the kitchen door before admitting him. Wraith of sixty-five years ago, the setting: the kitchen reception room, the ancient dental apparatus in the bedroom. .