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

He sought the next line on the typescript: no, the hell with it, true or not, he would delete it: Mrs. Goldberg, Lucy’s divorced mother, across the street in her grayish, unbleached cotton shift again leaning disconsolately on her broom — what a graphic symbol!

Oh, he could work up another hard-on, given the incentive. After all, it was this morning early, his Sunday abomo — say, would that be an abomo or an abumo? If he walked across the street, nobody home here, nobody home there, nobody homeo, Romeo. Ask: was his sister there? He thought maybe she was. He wanted to ask her if she’d type something for him. Ask Mrs. Goldberg sadly leaning on a broom. See what she would do, or say. Leo Dugonicz, Hungarian pal, came to mind, and his account of the two cups of strong black coffee served him by his mother’s acquaintance who then stroked his shoulder. So. . one cup of black coffee, no cups of black coffee — no abumo.

Delete. Delete. There. “’Tis here, ’tis here. ’Tis gone!” said the guard in Hamlet, whacking away with his halberd. Not bad, though. That epitomized life: ’Tis here. ’Tis here. ’Tis gone. .

Say, don’t tell me you don’t know that jerk you see reflected in the thick plate glass on the glass-top table. Look at him, the dope, scowling back at you through steel spectacles, under a low half-moon brow topped by a mop of kinky black hair. That goddamn photographer posing the kid, the familiar child, in black armor, with a baton pendant between his legs. Look at you, fretting three different ways. No, that rifle-cage business was lifeless, lifeless as your high school hopes, separate from you — separate as you from Billy Green today.

The other choice of topic appealed to him more, was incomparably more stimulating. Alive. Just last summer. All summer. His eighteenth year. In the strong, burning sunshine, on practically rural land, just being parceled out by real estate developers. He’d have to be game to do it, though. Why not? He wasn’t asking himself to sneak across the street, knock on Mrs. Goldberg’s door, say hello. And just she, her, him. What the hell was the proper grammatical case? Object of a prepo — his heart was beginning to pound already. . No, it was just between him and the paper. You could flunk though, stupid. But why? Why should he flunk? It was how to build something, wasn’t it? Not how to abumo at sister’s friend’s home. Or how to finesse and finagle kid cousin Stella through Auntie Mamie’s intangible household maze. No, it was how to build something. That was legitimate: how to put up new plumbing in a new frame house. What was wrong with that? Bold, huh? Original. Daring. . as much as you like, yeah. Between you and the paper. He pushed the scratch pad over the features leering back at him from the plate glass — the devil grinning at him from the table could still have his due. Minnie would type it for him — if there was time. But there was no time. He hadn’t even written it, begun to write it. What if he typed it himself afterward? He had a smidgeon of touch typing left from Mr. Hoffman’s class in junior high. It didn’t have to be in ink; he could write the first draft in pencil. Let’s go. On top of the page, capitalizing each first letter of the title, he wrote: “Impressions Of A Plumber.”

And then he took stock, he reconsidered. Impressions? Something was wrong here. That wasn’t what Mr. Dickson had directed the class to do. No impressions, but a process, a method, something systematic and factual. Otherwise, if he were to do an impression, why then, the alarm clock would go off; he’d be getting up in the morning; he’d be riding on the subway with the other strap-hangers. That wasn’t a “how to.” Oh, nuts. Still, he ought to be able to put enough “how to” into it, enough specifics, to satisfy Mr. Dickson, right? How to raise the cast-iron soil stacks up to the roof for toilet vents, how to cut and thread nipples, how to tighten chrome-plated faucets without marring them, attach valves, wipe sink drain joints with molten lead, oh, lots and lots of “how to” stuff. And there were all the fittings to call attention to as well — what they were for: an elbow, a union, a coupling, a tee. And the tools of the trade: a monkey wrench, a strap wrench, and a Stillson wrench, the dye stocks for cutting thread on pipe. Oh, lots and lots of implements. But he had to do it his own way: as a whole . Mr. Dickson would understand. Sure he would. Wouldn’t he?

Doubt still gnawed at Ira. But if he made the process interesting, colorful, if he awoke in Mr. Dickson the same kind of — of verve that he himself felt when he recalled being a plumber’s helper, Mr. Dickson would overlook small deviations from instructions, small liberties taken with permission. Sure he would. Hope so.

“The alarm rings with frightened intensity,” Ira began writing. “It is half past six. I wake reluctantly, shut off the alarm, and yawn. It is chilly even on a summer morning, and my bed is very warm. . ”

Words flowed easily when he was writing about his own sensations and experiences that way. The evidence of his subject matter was at hand: no research was necessary, scarcely even exactitude of memory was needed. He had only to recall the approximate environment, the activities, recall the mood of the event, and then apply things to himself, not only to exemplify them, but to unify them in the course of an ordinary day’s work. He had to choose from the variety that came to mind. He had to judge which element was most effective in capturing the flow of a day’s work. He chose those elements that pleased him.

It was easy. He was the hub from which all else radiated, the center of perception to which everything and everyone was attached, everything and everybody, the tradesmen, the carpenters, the electricians, the roofers, the glaziers. So that was how it was done? He paused to reflect. No, that was how he could do it. If he tried to do it from another’s point of view, from the inside of the mason who was laying the brick for the outdoor chimney, or the plasterer, he might as well give up, go back to describing rifle practice inside the rifle cage in the DeWitt Clinton gym. The others talked about wages, the comparatively low wages for the skilled work they were doing, no paid holidays, no time and a half for overtime and Saturdays. They talked about the high price of everything they had to buy, from pork chops to workshoes. And they talked about unions, unions, even the Italian bricklayer: oonion. No oonion, no good. Hymie, who had palmed himself off as a full-fledged journeyman plumber, was glad to get a job, and he never would have gotten one if the contractor had been hiring only union labor. Neither would Ira have gotten a job as a plumber’s helper.

But Ira wasn’t interested in subjects of that sort; he hardly even cared listening to opinions about them: where these guys went home, what kind of homes they lived in, what subjects were closest to them, how they amused themselves — bluefish or flounder fishing in the bay, the Saturday-night show — or how much the dues were in the metal lathers’ union. No, there was no color to it, no place for him.His way was the spectator’s; his preferences were for the individual, not the collective: his getting up in the morning, his riding on the El as the sun came up, riding among the crowd of loudly yawning, grousing workers to the job. And once arrived at the work site, listening to the wisecracks on the job that only he could appreciate how funny they were: the parquet-floor layer cursing, “My goddamn rule lied to me!” And he himself, with eighteen-year-old exuberance, cutting three-quarter-inch galvanized pipe, threading it, lugging lengths of crusty, rough cast-iron pipe from the pile where the truck had dumped it to the frame house under construction: how hot the goddamn pipe was from lying for hours under the blazing sun. Wow! Right on his shoulder, unless he had a rag to buffer it. The images, as he scribbled, teemed within his mind so thickly he had to jot down a word or a phrase on the side to keep them in memory’s reserve, until he was ready to use them. Watch out for comma-sentences. Didn’t Dickson hate them. Look at that: five handwritten pages already. .