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

It was too much for one of the station guards. “Now, get on there, and see you behave yerselves.”

“Thanks, Mister! Thanks! Thanks!” Ira was rapturous with gratitude.

And he did behave himself (as he had before, self-conscious and constrained), but not the others: they tore about the train as they had previously. And they teased him: “Crybaby. Crybaby. I want my mama.”

“Yeah, but I–I was the one who made the man let you back on the train!” Ira defended himself. And for the remainder of the return trip, he separated himself from the rest, sat by himself, refused to recognize the others.

Mom gave him a nickel when he was promoted to 5A, and the Irish kid he had once fought and lost to that first time, McGowan, grown taller, but still with the same dripping front teeth, sat beside Ira in the backyard at 114 East, waiting for Ira to decide how the nickel was to be spent. Whether they should spend it in the untidy little candy store next to Biolov’s, owned by the slow-moving, old, old Jewish couple, patiently attending to the Irish kids: “Gimme t’ree o’ dese, two o’ dem, four o’ dem — no, gimme four more o’de udders.” Ah, the euphoria of sitting in the shade of a wooden fence in the backyard at the end of school! He was promoted, with B B B on his report card, and Mom’s blessing in heart. He was promoted, with a nickel in his pocket, and an Irish friend beside him, who said yes to whatever he said, but didn’t understand, his mind elsewhere, maybe couldn’t understand that delicacy of mood, the brief precious bliss of lounging in the backyard amid the golden fences at the beginning of summer.

It should have gone into a novel, several novels perhaps, written in early manhood, after his first — and only — work of fiction. There should have followed novels written in the maturity gained by that first novel.

— Well, salvage whatever you can, threadbare mementos glimmering in recollection.

In part for reasons of health (his lungs were affected, Mom hinted), in part because of his socialist convictions, Uncle Louie lived on a farm in Stelton, New Jersey. And he once took his adoring pretend-nephew there. After they got off the train, Ira rode on the handlebars of Uncle Louie’s bicycle the rest of the way to the small farm. And how wretchedly he had behaved there: He had fought with Uncle Louie’s two sons, teased Rosie, Uncle Louie’s daughter, mimicked her when she was practicing on her cardboard dummy piano keyboard. And when Auntie Sarah scolded him for almost drowning a duckling in a pan of water — and ducking its head under, too — he had blubbered loudly: “I wanna go home!” (What a nasty brat he was; no wonder only Mom could abide him.)

He stole a nickel from Baba — he had noted that she kept her pocketbook in the second drawer of the bureau — which she kept locked. But above the second drawer, the top drawer was left unlocked. How clever of him to pull the top drawer all the way out and get at her pocketbook. Even Zaida acknowledged, after he had chastised his grandson, that he was an ingenious little rascal.

He threw dice in the shade under the Cut once, rolling the tiny dice to the concrete base of one of the urine-malodorous, cross-braced pillars that held up the railroad overpass. It was the only time he ever had any luck gambling, throwing six or seven — or eight! — consecutive passes. Had he been a seasoned gambler like Davey or Maxie, he would have cleaned up; instead, he kept drawing off his winnings after each pass — to the angry disgust of the Irish kids who faded him: What the hell was he afraid of, with a run of luck like that? But he was. So he won only a dozen pennies. (With five of which he bought a hot dog and sauerkraut on a roll from the itinerant Italian hot dog vendor. And conscious of Davey and Maxie, who had been too broke to play and were now watching him with their bright brown eyes, as alertly and mutely as two hungry dogs ready to snap up any morsel, Ira impulsively tendered Davey the last of the tidbit. It was marvelous to watch Davey take a nip of the tiny morsel, and without pause, but with the same sweep that he received the morsel, hand the even tinier remainder to his kid brother.)

Those were a few, a very few, of the strands out of which a child’s life was woven in East Harlem in the teens of the twentieth century, Ecclesias. Futile to ask what his life would have been like among his own kind in the Jewish ghetto he had left.

— You say a child’s life?

Well. His.

— When will you redress the omission, introduce the crucial factor? In good time, Ecclesias, in good time. .

X

It was late on a sunny morning when he climbed the rough granite steps leading to the summit of Mt. Morris Park hill. A trio of kids were playing tag about the bell tower. A solitary individual sat on one of the green park benches. Vacant otherwise, the benches bordered the inner circle of the iron-pipe barrier separating the summit from the hillside. Down below, Harlem streets and avenues stretched away in different directions. On Madison Avenue, at the base of the hill to the east, stretched the Fourth and Madison trolley tracks. At eye level, an irregular view revolved: the tops of brownstone roofs, the spire of a red-brick church on 121st Street, stodgy tenement facades, and bordering the west of the park, decorous and well-kept apartment houses. Smoke and shreds of cloud hovered in the sky to the pale horizon. And directly overhead — the thing he had come to see — hung the great bronze bell, motionless in the open belfry atop the massive wooden beams of the tower.

Breathing a little faster because of the climb, Ira walked about the tower, looking aloft, enjoying the sight of the huge bell among its equally huge timbers open to the sky — and wondering how the bell could have been used long ago as a fire alarm, which was what he once heard somebody say. How could anyone have climbed the hill and rung the bell in time to summon the firemen before the house burned down?

Unhurried and with little commotion, the trio of boys played their sporadic game of hide-and-go-seek, dodging behind the tower or trotting to the pipe railing about the summit. The lone adult sitting on the park bench watched them negligently — until Ira came close enough to speak to, and then to his surprise, the man greeted him. He engaged Ira in conversation. He said he could see that Ira liked hills and woods and country. Did he?

Ira did. He loved the country. So did the stranger. He knew some wonderful places too, not far away either, after a real nice trolley car ride. Did Ira like to ride in an open-air trolley car? Ira loved open-air trolleys. Then they could go out together — ride out and see a real wild place and ride back.

The man must be fooling. He wouldn’t take Ira on a long trolley-car ride. A trolley-car ride cost five cents. Everybody knew that. No, the man was going to go out there himself anyway. Be nice to have company. He’d pay the carfare, if Ira wanted to go.

Ira hesitated. The stranger was smiling, but he was in earnest too. Ira stared at him, trying to make sure the other meant what he said: He was blue-eyed, loose-limbed and slender. He wore his brown felt hat crimped all around, “pork-pie” style, Ira had heard the other kids on the block call it. And there was a sort of rustiness about his clothes, as if weathered, but not mussed or wrinkled. No, he was serious. And he was so friendly, good-humored and relaxed.

“I have to go home first, and eat. My mama’ll worry.”

“That’s all right. After you eat your dinner. We got plenty o’time.”

“Yeh?”

“I’ll be on 125th Street. When you finish your dinner, you just wait for me on the corner of Fifth Avenue. We’ll take the trolley and have some fun.”