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

Copulated, hell! Had I been a man I would have fucked her. Fucked her, else what’s a word processor for? Fucked her, though the quasars at the utter bourne of the universe blushed twice their red shift; fornicated avidly, extemporaneously and ignobly. Do you know what “ignoble” sounds like in Yiddish? Its kindred sound is knubl , Yiddish for garlic, that I pitched into the river of my life, together with all the earthiness that was my birthright—

— Let’s not go off the deep end, let’s not storm, advert to coarseness, teeter over the brink of coherence. The fact is: had you been a man you would not have been there.

More than a little astonished with himself, Ira sat with fingers clasped, gazing at the vase-shaped base of the lamp on top of his computer. The “vase” was metal, brass-coated, imitation brass in other words, but it served its purpose, illuminated his keyboard. In the excitement of the fable, of attempting to produce a literary clone of reality, he noticed that he had neglected to set his small electronic timer (which he always set at 33:33) that warned him it was time to SAVE. He pressed none too soon the rubbery buttons that summoned the usual digits into place. “But now that I have become a man,” the words of Saint Paul intruded without preface, “I have put away childish things.” Aye, and wasn’t it time?

Ah, such a perfect day! For Larry, it must have been felicity itself. And whatever regrets Ira may have felt, for him too it would remain a day full of light and tranquillity. At the warning hoot of the excursion steamer’s boat whistle, they gathered their belongings. They sighed in agreement at Edith’s remark, that the enjoyment of time was at the cost of time, and Iola adding that fortunately that was also true of misery, they walked down the hill to where the paddle wheeler was moored, where they embarked. They watched the river become wider as they returned to New York, passed the little dock of the boathouse, Ira reminiscing about days paddling the canoe with Billy Green.

When at length the excursion was over, and the steamer moored once more at its pier in Manhattan, Larry and Ira escorted the two women by crosstown trolley and subway to their apartment on St. Mark’s Place. Daylight still held sway. The two youths were invited in. Once settled, everyone was ready for a snack again. The two women served them coffee and raisin toast. Coffee and raisin toast. Raisin toast. Bread with raisins in it, not cake, just bread. And because the weather was too warm for cream to keep on the window ledge — and there was no canned milk in the cupboard — for the first time in his life Ira drank black coffee. How strange it tasted without simmered milk, as at home, often with the skim on it, esoteric and yet not unpleasant. And for the first time in his life he ate raisin toast, sprinkled with brown sugar and cinnamon. It was good. Last of afternoon daylight still shone on the white walls of Iola’s half of the apartment, daylight that illuminated Edith’s olive skin and dark hair with its elusive glint of copper.

Discussion arose whether, as some scholar asserted, Navajo poetry rhymed — an assertion Edith indignantly refuted. After getting her doctor’s thesis out of her room, she read several lines of a Navajo chant. “Why, there isn’t any more rhyme to this than—” She paused, searching for suitable analogy.

“Than reason,” Ira blurted.

To everyone’s amusement, but chiefly Iola’s.

The late-afternoon snack over, Iola took down a volume of Rudyard Kipling’s poems from the shelf. And with an indulgent, deprecating air, the waning light on her tightly bound blond tresses and pale bony face, she read aloud several of her favorite poems. . interspersed with amused comment.

Daylight ebbed from the white-walled living room, warm, golden, hallowed by its perfection; ineffable, the rare benison of untroubled hours, guerdon of respite from self, from self, but not from time drawing the day to a close.

With the coming of evening, swain and companion took their leave. Larry embraced Edith; they kissed. The two friends bade the two women farewell, closed the door between them, and walked down the muted stairs into the quiet street. Still inviolate, the twilight lingered at street’s end, as if the rosy stain would never fade from the stone crater in the distance.

XIII

As the last week approached, the final week of freshman year, Ira ruminated more and more on Larry’s romantic ties with Edith. The once miraculous affair appeared to breed new recognitions: a kind of strictness slowly encompassed it. Or was he himself, Ira wondered, beginning for the first time in his life to exercise something new to him — or exercise it consciously: his critical faculties? Not that he avoided doing so before, but rather, previously his attempts to exercise them became lost, became a fitful wandering in the mind’s labyrinth. He now recognized the critical function as a distinct mental process. He had read and heard the terms associated with critical analysis before: in English class, in Philosophy 1. An addled smattering. But it was in Edith’s company that concepts, like so many other abstractions he learned to identify there, became defined, braced with connotation and example. Ideas had begun to quicken in him, as something demarcated, independent. In “Little Black Sambo,” which had beguiled him long ago, the tigers in their hot pursuit in a circle lost identity, were rendered into a mass of butter. Critical inquiry restored the rendered butter into distinct tigers again, arrested their motion, permitted contemplation of amorphous impressions, so that one could draw conclusions, reach judgments. Critical inquiry was something like that.

With a new sense of objectivity, an enhanced grasp of implication, Ira found himself isolating the significance of Larry’s behavior, trying to infer the consequences of Larry’s character, his nature — in relation to Edith. Was Larry’s incipient tendency to prolong and elaborate an anecdote to the point where Ira began to feel he was foisting it on Edith, rather than entertaining her, was Larry doing that in order to dramatize himself? And something Ira could as yet scarcely name, for all his growing attentiveness to the effect of Larry’s behavior on Edith, Larry didn’t seek; Larry didn’t probe for dilemma, didn’t brood about sadness and loss. Curious, but that would never do for someone like Edith, would never satisfy the deep disenchantment Ira had already discerned in her, something akin to a kind of reconciliation with defeat, a tolerance of despair. She was given to insoluble quandary, temperamentally sad. Larry was disposed to optimism and well-being. Something was inherently dissonant here. And strangely, the suffering he had imposed on himself, and continued to do, sufferings, disenchanting and depraved lusts that robbed him of youthful joy, at the same time brought him closer to Edith’s nature than was Larry. What an odd conclusion. Was it valid, or just an extract of a wish?

Also — and this too Ira began to examine, as something discreet, an element with its own consequences, that would determine the future of the relationship between the two lovers — she had prevailed on Larry to yield to discretion, to remain at home, though she offered to help in his support if he didn’t. And it was his staying at home that already, even in that short time, seemed to hint at the possibility of the divergence of their temperaments. Because for all of their agonized disapproval of the course of Larry’s affair, his family members still doted on him. He was the youngest and most gifted, the most charming and diverting. The set joke and the humorous trivia, it was clear to Ira as the bystander, Edith had no taste for. Larry’s family flattered him with their adulation, rewarded him with their mirth, made him the cynosure of their admiration, and he enjoyed their unstinted appreciation in turn. His surpassing physical beauty wouldn’t be enough to hold her indefinitely. (Ira wasn’t sure whether he guessed that or he wished it.) And considering future developments from Larry’s side, even though it was hard to believe, still it was almost impossible to discount entirely the effect that Larry’s family brought to bear so heavily in opposition to his commitment to marry Edith, to believe that this same effect wouldn’t, in fact, actually prevail in time, even against Larry’s own buoyant, ardent self.