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

Mom came home: in dark street dress, her bearing portly and dignified, as always when she faced the public, her form squeezed rigidly into corseted shape, a silver fox fur over her shoulder. Was he hungry? she asked.

“No.”

“If you’ll eat something now, I’ll fix it for you. I’m going out again.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“We’re going out to Baba’s grave in New Jersey. It will soon be a year since she died.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I’ll fry you some lox and eggs.”

“I don’t want any lox and eggs. I want to finish my term paper.”

“Then what else?”

“Nothing.”

“I’ll leave you some bulkies in the same bag with the rye bread. The lox is between two saucers in the icebox.” She opened her handbag, made sure she had her key. “If you should get hungry.”

“Who’s going?”

“All four sisters. Ai , where our mother lies, there in the earth of New Jersey. It’s a good thing we contributed for a burial plot for all of us when we did. Jewish burial sites grow costlier all the time.” She paused at the door. “I’ll be home for supper. But you don’t have to wait until then. Eat when it suits you.”

“Okay. Mamie going too?”

“Of course. All four of us, I said. A drife,” Mom said, trying the word in English. “A loffly drife through the country efter we cross the river. We’ll enjoyet ourselves,” she said, in English again. “While our mother molders in the earth, we go riding over it in Moe’s katerenke . But so it is with the dead and the living.”

“A katerenke was a hand organ. Mom called Moe’s automobile that because of the starting crank in front of the vehicle. Her unspoiled perceptions were something to admire, the way she shunted the macabre into the comic: a katerenke . Probably a Polish or Russian word the ever-accretive Yiddish had absorbed.

“Very well, I’m going,” she said.

“Zaida, too?”

“Oh, no!” Her voice contained reproach — at his ignorance. “He’s a koyen . A koyen in a cemetery? A priest? He would be defiled walking among the dead. Ask him next time when you go visit Mamie’s.”

“What do you mean, ask him? I can figure that out. A koyen must be a Cohen. Isn’t that right?” He checked himself abruptly. “What do you mean, ask him when I go to Mamie’s?”

“He’s already moved away from the old place on 115th Street. He spent the Sabbath at Mamie’s already. I told you. You and Minnie, your father. Ach.” She moved her heavy hand in impatient gesture. “Your head’s in the ground today. I told you he moved because he didn’t trust the woman who cooked for him. She wasn’t kosher enough for him, he thought. It heppens she’s a loyal Jewess. But he has cataracts on both eyes. He sees scarcely anything clearly. So he suspects everything. Mamie he knows keeps a kosher home.”

“But what about that lease on 115th Street?”

“Harry will finish it out. I’m going.”

“So he’s there now.”

“Where else? Visit him. You’ll learn something of Yiddishkeit .”

“That’s all I need.”

“Indeed. You know less of Yiddishkeit than those already lying in hellowed ground.”

“Yeah? Okay.”

“Goodbye, my hentsome son. Eat a morsel.”

He watched the heavy, dark figure leave, heard the kitchen door swing shut. Solitude. So Mamie would be gone. But Zaida would be there now. Would Stella be home, too? Sunday? Nah. Maybe yes, with Hannah and a bunch of Charleston-jigging swains. Would Zaida allow it? Boy, what a gauntlet to run that would be now. All for a fat, oozy, surplus straddle, while the dance-band music barely seeped out of the Stromberg Carlson radio: couldn’t turn it on too high: you had to hear every creak on the floor from the kitchen. Lucky for him again he’d lowered his peccary-pressure this morning. What the hell was a peccary? A sort of wild pig, wasn’t it? Wild pig was right. Nonkosher. Oh, pecker, peccary, peccavi .

Ah, he bent over his scrawl. You scrawled a world out of words, and in turn the world you scrawled brought you to life. You glowed, rereading it, something the same way you glowed after you solved a geometry problem. You had to rise to a glow in order to solve it. Afterward, after the glow faded, you wondered, what the hell was all this about? How did you solve it?

He stood up, went into the kitchen, more in order to prolong his musing than in search of food; though when he found the bag with the bulkies and the “corn” bread in it, as Mom called it, the heavy rye bread, he cut off the heel of the loaf to gnaw on it. Funny, the bread didn’t contain corn at all — that was maize — but this was made of rye flour: corn in the old, old sense, as grain was called. “The corn was orient”—Larry had called his attention to the beautiful lines by Thomas Traherne in his copy of Highlights of English Literature: “I thought it had stood from everlasting unto everlasting.” Boyoboy, like himself that time he stood on a West Harlem street corner on a summer day: when he felt as if an aureate promise had been made him. “I thought it had stood from everlasting unto everlasting.” An artist — was that the promise that strange aureate moment made? What an idea. Edith worshiped the artist, she said. Now don’t get sidetracked. Don’t let your flow of. . of. . whatever the hell it was that carried you along, like a scrap of paper — and that was a right figure — on a rain-rivulet by the curb. No, but it was true: you had to be able to hold the mood intact from beginning to end: hold it up in front of you, more than even you would in front of a mirror — because it had so many sides — and look at each side, and not be afraid the others would lose their shape while you did.

Still gnawing on the tough brown crust, bark-brown boat, skiff of crust, brown bark of old with a gray, pitted deck, corn bread, he went back to the front room, and resumed writing. .

So Baba was living once, and Baba is dead now, Ecclesias. And I’m writing about being a plumber’s helper in the first quarter of the twentieth century, I who am virtually living in the twenty-first, though I don’t belong there, and not merely because I have so few years left of living.

— You spoke of sustaining a mood.

And so I did. But you know as well as I do that my mood is a cracked mirror, no longer entire, no longer continuous. Not altogether trustworthy, in short, and incapable of withstanding extreme strain; it’s a good, a reasonable facsimile of the pristine one, but certainly no longer that.

— Why do you break the thought so, the flow, when it was sustained, so obviously under firm guidance? I suppose I can guess the answer.

Yes, I do so not merely out of perversity. Safety valve, Ecclesias, safety valve. My wife invited me for tea — tea and yogurt — an invitation which she extended while wearing a pink skirt and blue shirt, a color combination at which we both laughed this morning, and then I returned here to you, passing through the hallway between the kitchen and my study. And here I am again, Ecclesias, on the second day of November of the year 1985, writing again of the plumber’s helper I was in the summer of 1924.

— Nevertheless, I fail to understand completely the reason for all your intrusive and irrelevant associations, when it seems to me you could conveniently dispense with them. You ask, knowing very well why. Very likely, with his grandmother interred in the grave, then a year later, her lusty freshman grandson leers to himself while he writes of his (selected) experiences as a plumber’s helper in the context, should one say — hardly the right word, in the iniquitous context of possibly, possibly of screwing his deceased Baba’s second-oldest granddaughter, Stella—