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

That was Ira, the kid in midwinter, with the drear night coming on, swinging his tin can by a loop of wire, while the flames from slivers of wood, roasting the small spud inside that Mom had given him, spurted through the vents punched in the bottom. As through a dark medium, between stone stoop and curb, bundled-up figures hurried home from work, hurried past him through the winter night, and he, for once carefree, whirled his roasting spud in front of the house — until Mom called him in her contralto voice from the window that it was time he came upstairs for supper. . They were like strata, these new impressions, goyish impressions, strata built up by goyish ways and diversions drifting down over memories of 9th Street and the East Side: Halloween, when the Irish kids filled the feet of long black stockings with coal ashes (a few, a very few, with flour), stocking-slings that thudded cruelly against one’s back, printing a dusty, pale stamp of impact on jacket or mackinaw (if one didn’t wear them inside out, as some did to escape parental reproof). “Sliding ponds,” long, icy ribbons slicked out of snow to glide on, but a hazard to steel-shod horses, suddenly skating in mid-stride. Snow-forts on opposite sides of the street, and the wild melee and abandon of snowball fights, snowballs often with chunks of ice embedded in them.

IX

Lightning, sulphurous as pebbles rubbed together, burned far off in sweltering summer. The nice Gentile neighbor — who wasn’t Irish, and said wawtch for watch, and Wawrshington for Washington, lifted him up from the stoop stair to sit on the stone ledge that capped the sides of the stoop after the dented brass banister ended — was so surprised how wet and smelly his armpits were that she sniffed her hands twice with wrinkled nose, and exclaimed in dismay. And yes, that same stone ledge, where everyone did stunts by holding on while hanging upside down over the cellar a flight below — what a scare it gave him! The skinny ones could do it — safely — like Eddie, or like Weasel, after Eddie and his mother moved away.

But Ira weighed twenty pounds more than they did; and when he tried the stunt, the ledge tipped, the ledge tipped! Terrified, he flung his body back to the stoop. What would Mom have said had he and the ledge plunged down into the cellar? That might have been the end of him. Think of it: the end of him at nine years of age, plunging down into the cellar, holding onto the heavy stone ledge and screaming as he hurtled down. Benny Levinsky, whose big brother with the hook nose was a crook and was shot by a cop when he ran away after holding up a crap game, Benny fell off the roof of the treife butcher shop on Third Avenue, German butcher shop, where the beautiful fat sausages hung — the beautiful plump knockwursts and balonies. Oh, they made meat look so nice in a goyish butcher store — even Mom said so — with the bones of a roast raised like a crown and pot roast all neatly tied around with twine, and a turkey with breast pouting and enticing — not like a kosher butcher store where meat looked dead and a chicken hung from its hook in the show window as if it was sorry it looked so unappealing. Benny was trying to steal a salami, even though it was treife , but fell off the roof instead right on top of the butcher store awning. Wasn’t he lucky? All he got was a kick in the ass. So at nine, if Ira had fallen down the cellar, he would have been extinct.

Ira’s mind went blank. Ecclesias; never to have known seventy more years. Never to have known M. Whom would she have known, or loved? All would have been changed. . as howling in terror he hurtled down into the cellar.

What a dub he was playing ball (and was struck in the eye once passing 117th Street, walking home from Baba’s); sat on the curb sobbing, while the owner of the baseball crept up, grabbed it where it had rolled near Ira, and ran. The kindly Jewish housewife asking: “What is it?” And uttering curses at the players — who had by now disappeared. And Ira sobbing as he sat on the curbstone at the corner of 117th and Park Avenue.

Baseball. The very thing he was worst at: A dub , a ham, he couldn’t catch, he couldn’t hit, he couldn’t run: He was the last man chosen in the toss-up — in baseball, in handball, in boxball — chosen after everyone else, if another player was still needed. He was scarcely chosen; he was included with a reluctant groan. Apt at no sport, except touch football (the ball was so large, had to be caught so differently — with arms and body, not hands — and he learned to punt exceptionally well), and swimming — he was at home in the water. But at nothing else was he apt; neither at tops nor at marbles nor at flipping checkers. In the spring when he was in 4A in school, the teacher took him to the playground in Mt. Morris Park, and each one took hold of a long ribbon, and circled the Maypole, singing. The strangeness, the innocence would never wear off. And he rubbed plum pits on the rough granite curbstones in midsummer to make a whistle, after he dug out the seed, the bitter seed. But there was something not usual about the way Ira stayed close to Mom on the stoop in midsummer, even learned to tat on a handkerchief between wooden hoops, the way Mom did. She laughed at him before the neighbors, apologetically. What a marvelous green pool of light filled the western sky one evening after a shower. He would never see the like again, emerald, emerald rare to gaze at in wonder. Kids sneaked into the movies (he could still see the Levine kid caught and roundly cuffed by the movie-manager in front of the theater). Mom took him to a vaudeville show once, of which she understood only a little: the jugglers and the tap dancers. And the Jewish Hawaiians, their grass kilts swaying to the plink of ukuleles as they sang:

“Tocka hula, wickie doolah, Moishe, lai mir finif toolah . I’ll give it beck to you in a day or two. I’ll go to the benk; Sollst khoppen a krenck. Uhmein! ”

Unfortunately, Ira was so regaled by the absurdity of the song — Moishe, lai mir finif toolah , meant, “Moses, lend me five dollars”—that he moved his head abruptly — and struck Mom in the nose. She slapped him involuntarily. .

If you went to the movies, alone and on Saturday, it was better to go there with three cents, and wait outside for a partner with two cents (that kind of ratio was more conducive to successful admission than the other way round); and ask an adult who was about to go in, “Mister, will you take us in?” Two for a nickel on Saturday morning was kids’ price. . And once inside, you could see the roly-poly man — was his name Bunny? — Ira never thought him very funny (who some years later was convicted of involuntary homicide in the death of a female guest at some scandalous Hollywood orgy, rupturing her vagina into which he had crammed cracked ice). Nor that lugubrious, downtrodden character, Musty Suffer. But oh, when Chaplin came on the screen, what rib-cracking laughter in those early two-reel films! And how desolate one felt too, after coming out of a movie with Davey and Maxie, who had somehow scraped a nickel together (perhaps their father had won at cards, perhaps there was a little more to spare after the baby died), who insisted on watching the features and the shorts over and over again, to come out into the real world, the real afternoon sunlight filtering through the El on Third Avenue where the movie was, how forlorn one felt, jaded, wasted in spirit. He would never do that again.

They sneaked into the subway, again he and Davey and Maxie, and a couple of Irish kids, and because the others made such a nuisance of themselves, scurrying about and jumping up to hang on the straps, the trainman put them off at the last stop, Bronx Park at 180th Street. Far, far from home. The others giggled nervously, or sat sheepishly on the benches of the platform. Far away from home, from Mama, Mama. He began to blubber: “I wanna go home! I wanna go home! My mama’s waiting!”