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

On the one hand, Ira envisaged Edith turning into Baba, his deceased grandmother, stooped, tottering, and tremulous, and Larry eleven years younger, resilient, handsome, energetic, attractive. Wouldn’t that be true? And for Edith, granted she had grown old and wrinkled, wouldn’t the classic young Endymion with whom she was so smitten have vanished? He would. “Beauty passes,” Walter de la Mare wrote in the Untermeyer anthology, “Beauty vanishes, however rare, rare it be”; that applied to Larry as well. Then what? Abiding interest for Edith had to withstand her disillusionment, her confirmed gravity, her preoccupation with loss and loneliness, with aging and mortality. Any enduring relationship with her demanded a temperament, however acquired, full of misgivings, hurt, and affliction. Larry’s temperament was anything but that: a happy one, a stable one. He gave the impression that the future would continue to be the same, a joyous extension of today. He sure wasn’t used to grief, misgiving, lasting hurt, adversity, deprivation. Boy.

His loose-leaf notebook paper, fountain pen, pencil, scratch pad on the glass-topped table of the elegant walnut “set” in the front room, Ira sat looking at Pop’s collection of bric-a-brac on the mantelpiece above the embossed metal shield of the chimney flue. The collection consisted of a little Dresden sheep dog, two sheep, a picturesque shepherdess. They reminded the old boy of the old country, Ira supposed. Nostalgic. Touching. Ira wasn’t sure whether the little group would be considered in good taste by someone like Edith or not. But what the hell, though he never was sure of things of that kind, they were cute little things, fetching, innocent, so winsome in color. Up above, on the wall, were the two portraits of Pop’s departed parents: severe, if ever two faces were, severe in sepia: Grandma in her sheytl , her wig, Grandpa with beard and peyoth , his earlocks. Mom had told Ira they were in fact as severe as their portraits, unsmiling and distant, the year or so she lived with them, after he was born. That was before Pop had accumulated enough dough to buy steerage passage for wife and kid to join him in America. So Ira had known them, seen and heard them with his own eyes and ears, as they had known him, but he didn’t remember a thing about them — any more than they did about him in their graves in Galitzia where they lay buried. A year and a half old he was when Mom left for America with her baby son in her arms. Two strict sepia faces in ebony frames on the wall were all his paternal grandparents were now. Mom loved to repeat how the old man, Saul the Schaffer, whom everyone addressed out of respect as Saul the Overseer, had leaned on his walking stick the night before his daughter-in-law and grandson left for America. “And you danced so prettily that night, the tears came to the old man’s eyes.” And Ira had lately quipped in reply, “Oh, I did? Is that why I’m bowlegged?”

Oh, he had a term paper to do, term paper in his first term in English Composition, term paper for Mr. Dickson, the instructor of the course. And as usual he was addressing himself to the task at the very last minute. It had taken until the second term before Ira could get into a class in English Composition 1, a prerequisite for a B.S. or a B.A. degree. There was a class in English Composition 1 open, and it stayed open until he had it safely registered in his name. On that disastrous first night of registering for courses the previous fall, practically every freshman course had been closed, but between terms most of them were open, except Biology 1 still, because his class had access to them ahead of the influx of new freshmen.

Composition 1. The course was under the aegis of Mr. Dickson, a tall, angular Ichabod Crane sort of character, academically sedulous, academically sere. Mr. Dickson, evidently in pursuit of his doctorate, was in his late twenties, a man with curly, rusty hair, and with the funniest damn habit of screwing up his face into a quizzical gnarl, at the same time reaching over the top of his head with his long arm in order to scratch the opposite ear. As usual, Ira was acquitting himself with no better than a C for the course. Tomorrow, Monday, was the last day the term paper would be accepted. Its evaluation would determine fifty percent of the final grade. So. . he’d better get to work.

Outside, through the open windows, spring on 119th Street was in full cry, full yippee. Balmy air wafting in through the open windows swelled the bellows of the long, lacy white curtains, curtains that would soon be taken down and stored for the summer. Urchins’ yells down below scored the city’s placid drone.

Sunday afternoon. Everyone was away: Mom was visiting her sister, Ella Darmer. She had married Meyer, and with their two kids they now live on 116th Street and Fifth Avenue. Pop was working an “extra jopp,” another “benket” in “Kunyilant.” And. . oh, Minnie had gone out with Lucy Goldberg across the street on a date. She was growing up now: having real dates. She could have all she wanted as long as he got his. But what if the right guy came along? Meant serious business, proposed, produced an engagement ring. Well, Stella was growing up, too.

Wasn’t that the goddamnedest thing any photographer ever did? Musing, Ira eyed the portrait of his own sad three- or four-year-old self on the wall. Why the hell did the guy do that? Pose him that way? Ira shook his head. For all he knew, now that he had acquired a smidgeon of Freud, that might have planted the seed of his fixation, nutty fixation with and about sex — that might have got him into this, yes, abomination in the first place. These abominations, you should say. Man, wouldn’t you have gotten stoned for that in days of yore? And not so long ago at that. Hanged, drawn and quartered, torn apart by horses or boiled in oil— vey iz mir . And as if that wasn’t enough, how old was Stella now? About fifteen. Yeah, abominations you can call them now, now that you’re cooled off with Sunday morning’s abomination. . not much of a one either. . wonder how many scumbags the rats were treading on down at the bottom of the airshaft? But if you weren’t, if you didn’t get it, you’d be trotting over to Mamie’s. Right? Right. Hic jacet . .

Yeah, hic jack it. . phooey.

But the goddamn fool behind the black camera box had set him on a chair — look at it — round-backed chair with upright spindles, but in the center, the main, ornamental spindle was truncated. It didn’t reach from curved back all the way to the seat of the chair. Instead it hung exactly between the kid’s legs, hung down like a gelding’s slack hard-on after pissing. How terrified Ira had been as a child whenever he looked at the portrait. The photographer’s camera had revealed the horrendous guilt that only Ira discerned, only he and no one else.

Silly phobia; no time to waste. Tomorrow, Monday, was the deadline for handing in the term papers. They were to be essays based on the general theme or topic of how to construct something of a fairly complex nature. How to carry out an elaborate scientific experiment. How to assemble a scientific exhibit. Or an account of the operation of some fairly complicated mechanism. Nothing simple, like fixing a bicycle, changing a tire. No, sir. To meet requirements, the piece of writing had to be at least a half-dozen pages long, which implied that the device or process be fairly complicated, and consequently test the student’s ability to present the subject in clear, orderly, comprehensible exposition. Ira doodled contemplatively. Tic-tac-toe. A profile. A seagull.

His choice of topic had narrowed down to two subjects. He was familiar with both. First was the rifle cage of his high school days as a member of the rifle team, still remembered so clearly: the tiny target corresponding to the regulation-size target across the gym floor, the needle-pointer corresponding with the actual sighting of the mock firearm, the trigger mechanism, and all the do’s and don’t’s of proper aiming, breathing, trigger-squeezing, types of gunsights, of leather slings. . all so warmly entwined with memories of Billy, and days when another course, another career, another America seemed to beckon. .