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

But Ira still wondered, why did she reveal these intimate details? Her purpose seemed to be to edify her young lover, and his young friend with him, to inculcate in them the ways of the world, its griefs and malice and aberrations. And yet, her telling, which was always understated, had another effect — on Ira, at least. She was like someone acting a part, modestly implying a part: a tragic part, a tragic heroine enmeshed in misfortune, innocent victim of the cruelty and callousness of others — or victim of her own benevolence, a trait that would indeed manifest itself throughout her whole life. Her first marriage, begun as a magnanimous gesture, ended in ugliness and annulment. Her sexual awakening was by force, by someone she trusted.

Afterward, at Berkeley, she formed a liaison with a much-harassed Jew, one Shmuel Hamberg, a Zionist agronomist studying arid-land farming at the university. A man oppressed and tormented, an outcast, a frenetic ideologue — a Socialist, so stridently outspoken in his views that he was tarred and feathered by a gang of patriotic fellow students. She had befriended him, and he had turned to her for comfort and refuge. Attending Berkeley so that he could learn scientific principles of large-scale irrigation, which he was then expected to bring back to the Zionist cooperative farmers who had sent him to America to study, and thus help restore the ancient homeland from its present barrenness to its Biblical plenty, he never did return. Irrigating the deserts of California provided opportunities for private enrichment so great that his idealism folded before them. Large-scale irrigation of the arid regions around Los Banos was a novel idea at the time, and obtaining loans from the neighboring banks to finance his schemes was no easy task; but Shmuel’s visionary zeal and powers of persuasion were equal to it. Even hardheaded and certainly non-Judeophile bankers succumbed to his rhapsodic proposals — and advanced loans. He was shortly in charge of farming great tracts of land, heretofore desert and worthless, but as soon as they were provided with water (brought up from artesian wells by means of huge pumps), they became immensely fertile, capable of producing huge crops of cotton, melons, vegetables, grain.

Edith liked to describe him: he was devoid of elementary courtesy. A Russian Jew, probably a Litvak, Ira surmised, he was tender, compassionate, and endlessly stimulating intellectually. At the same time, he seemed totally devoid of tact, without self-control in argument. Excited, he sputtered and spluttered, sprayed his auditors with saliva when he disputed with them. And such was his impoliteness that when company bored him, or he deemed it was time for them to go, he unceremoniously picked up the alarm clock and began winding it, shaking it, adjusting and setting off the alarm.

Still, Edith had become very attached to him; she would have married him, she said, for all his boorishness and craziness, but for one thing. He wouldn’t consider marrying any woman not Jewish. He couldn’t stand the thought of marrying a woman who was not Jewish! With that stunning rejection, Edith determined it was high time to leave Berkeley. Only by leaving Berkeley could she break his hold upon her, separate herself from his intellectual and emotional domination. She applied for a position at NYU, and fortunately for her, Professor Watt, head of the English department, although stuffy in many ways, rigidly decorous, believed firmly in as heterogeneous an English department as possible. Rumor had it he was even considering hiring a native Korean, author of a book about life in Korea. Nor was anyone sure that Professor Watt didn’t know that Boris G, a fellow instructor in the English department, was Jewish. Professor Watt seemed bent on ignoring, though still under cover of propriety, the accepted standards of the parent institution on the banks of the Hudson River. And with enrollment in the English department downtown increasing dramatically, while that of the properly academic university uptown dwindled, his superiors could not help but acquiesce in his conduct of the department.

Edith was offered an instructorship to begin in the fall of 1924. It was the same year Larry enrolled in her freshman English class.

Hmm. .

He’d have to think about that, Ira told himself: about her having an affair, as she called it, with Shmuel Hamberg, of his sleeping with her, as the euphemism went. Why did she accept that? Why was that okay? She must have realized that she was no whit less a shiksa in his eyes for all that. Then what did she expect? He’d have to muse on that, construe all the queer quirks impinging and overlapping within her nature. The things she welcomed, the things she couldn’t abide. She refused to convert to Judaism to please her lover, if conversion would have been sufficient. That was her independent-mindedness coming to the fore. Hmm. . Never mind the chemistry text, or the chemistry quiz coming up. Old Avogadro and gram-mass; you can get through. You’re not heading that way anyway. Think of it: the guy was Jewish. But she had no objection to marrying him. He did, though, he did: to marrying her. A Zionist. A Socialist, too. Christ, for all his freethinking, he was as bad as Zaida in that respect. Or was that an excuse? Maybe it was; it just possibly might be. But notice, marriage was important to her. Aha. Then what was going to happen to this love affair with Larry? He was ten, eleven years younger than she was. How could anything come of it? He said he wanted to marry her. But three years from now when he got his degree, he’d be twenty-two; she’d be thirty-three. So. . so you were a liberated, vanguard bohemian; you sneered at the Babbitts and the big butter-and-egg men, you despised the middle class. But what the hell, you had to get down to earth, and Larry especially, used to the best of everything — come on, for Chrissake, do a few of the chem exercises, balance a few of the tougher equations.

Not now. . But she could ride a saddle horse, she said. She was quite an expert horsewoman. She rode all over those Western trails, by the Indian reservations, the hogans, she called them, into the mountains that she said changed color all the time, the shadows slipping on and off them. And she showed her two friends a poem of hers in Poetry magazine that Larry understood and Ira didn’t. Dunce. Why didn’t they write like, oh, lots, lots he understood: Aiken and A. E. Robinson and Robinson Jeffers, and Teasdale and Millay, though he wasn’t crazy about them; he liked A. E. Housman better. Why did they have to hide the meaning out of sight, as if behind a screen or a hill? Once in a while he got the idea; whose poem was it like that he got the idea from long after he read it, and enjoyed his discovery? It was Robert Frost again: “I have had too much of apple-picking: I am overtired of the great harvest I myself desired.” And even that time Edith helped a little. She didn’t know it, but she helped when she said, “You’ll notice there’s always a compression in rhythm at the high point of his meaning.” Boy, she could tell right away.

Well. . It’s in 2.24 liters of solution. . What’s the normality of a phosphoric acid solution containing 270 g of H 3PO 4?. . And Edith could — oh, no, you’re given moles, moles, you donkey. So just multiply 1.3 moles by the gram weight of Na 2SO 4. .

IX

Edith would not be denied Ira’s company, not even so she could be alone with Larry, so for yet another time, while Iola was out, the three, Edith, her young lover, and a bewildered Ira, sat in the shared living room, white-painted, airy, and spacious, its windows on the street in one direction, and in the other on the churchyard of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. So light and unencumbered the apartment was! As unobtrusively as he could, Ira tried to sort out of his surroundings those specific elements from the composite that gave an airy charm to the whole. He had never seen sheer white walls like that before. So simple, plain, with just three pictures on them, reproductions, one of crude golden flowers almost leaping out of the frame. And another of a blue farm wagon. Whose were they? And the other adornments Navajo rugs, gray, white, and black, with thick, primitive designs on them, arrowheads some seemed to be.