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

“Me? You know what I’d say. What I heard.” Ira shrugged. “Where I was brought up. You know the old gag. She had a puss that could stop an eight-day clock. On 119th Street that would be considered polite,” he amended.

“Then that’s what you say.”

“Oh, no. Jesus, no.” Ira paused to marshal distinctions. “It’s different, Larry, it’s different. Bejeezis, it ain’t only — it’s not only that one expression, it’s the whole goddamn world that goes with it. What the hell am I doing here, will you tell me?” He confronted Larry more abruptly than he meant to. “Here I am, I’m helping you write out these postcards — to a poetry recital. Writing invitations in your house, your kitchen—” He checked himself; it would be folly to go on further.

“What about it?” Larry asked. “What’s so strange about that? You’re in college, it’s a natural thing for a college man to do.”

“Well, that’s what I mean. It doesn’t feel natural.”

He could never tell him. There were times he felt as if he were levitated, as if completely in someone else’s power. Tell that to Larry. “Nothing. Just — I don’t know.”

“I do know I’m going to take you to meet Edith.”

“Yeah?”

“Of course.” Larry was about to bend over the next card. “What are you shaking your head for?”

“You know what a palimpsest is?”

“Of course — it’s a parchment with the writing scraped off,” Larry replied.

“That’s what I see, when I look at one of these blank cards. I don’t see the writing. I see what’s been scraped off.”

“Oh, come on. Wait till Edith meets you.”

“All right, all right. Lo juro, lo juro .”

A few seconds of silence ensued, while Larry amusedly addressed the next card. “How’re you makin’ oot?” he said, mimicking Scots dialect.

“Are these all right?” Ira held up a few postcards. “My hen tracks? Not much better than that.”

“Oh, no, that’s fine,” Larry commended. “Perfectly legible.”

Another span of silence. Ira felt he’d talked too much already.

“You wouldn’t believe she had so much spunk,” Larry said.

“Who?” Ira could guess, but asked anyway.

“Edith.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Larry smiled reminiscently. “She’s really competitive, you know. You wouldn’t expect it: somebody as small and gentle as she is. But look out if you make a joke about it, belittle the fact that women don’t get the same treatment as men. About the kind of deal women get living in a man’s world. I did.”

“You did?” Ira rejoined incredulously.

“Yes, I was foolish enough to.”

“So what’d you say?”

“I said, ‘Oh, well, what’s the hurry? You’ll get there.’”

“Get where?”

“An assistant professorship.”

“Yeah? So what happened?”

“Sparks. All over the place. ‘If you were a woman you wouldn’t say that. I’m sick and tired of men dominating the world, and stupid men at that.’ She was right too, and I said so, I apologized. It’s true, can’t deny it. How’re you coming?”

“All right — I think.”

“Keep it up. You don’t know how grateful I am for your giving up your time to pitch in. So will she be when she hears about it.” Larry eyed the stack of finished cards. “Say, we’re really gaining on it. I’ve got a few more to address, and then I’ll join you writing notices. A Camel? Mustafa Kemal for this job.”

“Sure. But the way it’s going, it’s not bad.”

The two lit their cigarettes. . The invitations he scrivened on the yellow surface of the postcards, practically memorized by now, swam under Ira’s gaze. Palimpsest, as he told Larry, parchment whose writing was scraped off and written over. What strange mirages shimmered beneath the words he wrote, beckonings: his course lay athwart those postcards into the world that they presaged. As though he were putting his seal on the new direction each time he wrote on one, as though he were opening a casement on scenes of a future that could be his if he wished, really wished from the depths of his being, shadowy imaginings waiting for him to realize, guerdon of his folly and guerdon of his dolor.

It was not a gift; it was more like a fate. A fate whose first intimation he recalled yet again when riding with Larry that day on the Eighth Avenue El in the open air between the sad, nondescript tenements, and his peculiar awareness, his awareness of his unique perception of them. That was it. But unique perception of what? Their intrinsic nature: the blacks on the stoop laughing as Larry went by singing. Things. No, it wasn’t a gift. It was a specter over your plane geometry problem that you had invoked. Think of the way the catapult’s cords were twisted, intolerably, to the limit of integrity, at the risk of snapping — and then twist further — his price in exchange for murder: that twist. .

He felt like just puffing on his cigarette, with pen in hand inertly on his thigh. Tell the guy that. What world were you in? Whose world were you in, were you caught in? “ O-o-h, I needed it more last night” was her way of thanking him this morning. “Did I have hot pants? Did I need a big one after the dance?” Poetry recital: did I have hot pants? Did I need a big one after the dance? “Jaizis,” Ira said aloud.

“What’s up?” Larry inquired.

“Poetry recital.” Ira snickered. “If I could only write a little faster, the way you do, with a real free movement — you move your arm, I wriggle my fingers.”

“You never got used to doing it the other way?”

“No.” Ira allowed himself to smirk. “Didn’t I ever tell you?”

“You’ll get a vote of thanks from Edith anyway. Wait. Just one more address, and I’m coming to the rescue.”

“I guess I can use some help.”

“You’re doing just great,” Larry assured him, teased sportively. “Quit complaining.”

“I get so distracted. Honest.”

“Here I come.”

VII

. . Mythical, like the myths read in boyhood, like the engravings of classic figures in Bulfinch’s Age of Fable , loveliness in repose, rapture in repose, passion verging on the immaculate — that was how Larry’s love affair with Edith Welles seemed to Ira. What a contrast to his own sordid and stealthy snatchings, his cynical maneuverings at Mamie’s, his Sunday-morning ritual with Minnie.

“When are you gonna shenk me a dollar, my koptsn briderl?”

As long as you watched yourself, that’s what happened to abominations when they became customary. Only on a rare afternoon, rare as could be, when they were taking one hell of a chance, not knowing when Mom or Pop might come home — boy, that was when furor made the green walls flap. Boy, the danger! Contagious. It infected Minnie too, as if snapping up the little brass nipple of the lock inflamed her. She was already standing in the doorway to his bedroom watching him pull the rubber on his hard-on. Jesus, if Pop ever came home and found his son boring it into his daughter crosswise on the bed. Wow. . But the hell with him. Funny the kind of gags that came to mind: it was all in the family . And when Mamie told him they were going to form a Veljisher Family Circle, he laughed outright. Mamie thought it was out of pleasure at the idea; he saw himself hitting the bull’s-eye, the ten-ring. What the hell. He hated pulling off — kept postponing. One more day maybe: tomorrow wouldn’t be too soon to drop in at Mamie’s. Oh, the hell with it. Hang on. Don’t be like that rusty pervert bastard in Fort Tryon Park. .

As long as he got away with it, that was what counted — except for that wisp of fear that something might have gone wrong — and that corrosive revulsion he couldn’t dispel, couldn’t shake: nagging conscience, damn it.