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

And the old man suddenly recalled Henley’s lines from high school, so clearly across a fault line that seemed wider than the sixty years that sundered him from his boyhood—

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

He was a widower, one in whom his bereavement for his lost wife never vanished. Even five years after Ira Stigman had lost her, grief over his loss sometimes assailed him unbearably, shook him with strange, dry sobs. . He was eighty-nine years old now — on the verge of becoming a nonagenarian. Much that had once greatly exercised his attention, his partisanship, national and international strife, Israel, even things literary, the field of his own calling, these things interested him only marginally now, remotely — something to be expected of a man nearing ninety. What did he have left? At best? A year or two more of life. A year or two of feebleness, of dependence on others for almost everything, even locomotion, a year or two in which he might suffer the humiliation of incontinence — in short, a year or two left of life he didn’t want, would be quite ready to dispense with. And he would, if he could find some easy means of doing so.

The only thing that still interested him, that meant anything, helped pass the burdensome time, was his word processor. It not only helped tide him over to the awaited end, but made possible his earning the income necessary to supply him with the sustenance, the human assistance, and the creature comfort that served to mitigate this last onerous lap of the journey. Modern technology, that ambiguous genie, might prove in the end an enormous bane or an enormous boon for mankind, but at the moment, it enabled him to transmute this otherwise worthless, pain-ridden time known as old age into something of value. The computer provided him with a modern analogy of the legendary philosopher’s stone, dream of the alchemists for transmuting the base into the noble. In this case it transmuted the pain-racked into the pleasurable, or at least into a kind of anodyne, a respite from his woes. He owed modern technology a debt of gratitude.

With those thoughts in mind, he sat nervelessly eyeing the small puddle of urine on the floor where he had missed the urinal. Like that puddle, he was probably all wet, as usual, befuddled and illogical. But if he had come anywhere near the truth, then he had accomplished something of immense benefit to himself, almost a beatitude. He had already reconciled himself with himself. And now, he had freed himself from the necessity of that reconciliation. To have suffered so much over so long a span of time over nothing. Liberated. Liberated at last in the year 1995 from bondage imposed on himself more than seventy years ago, from bondage whose depiction he had begun, and would now endeavor to continue.

I

Sunburned by hours of trudging on the highway, and with the unruly air of the vagabond about them, Ira Stigman and Larry Gordon were scarcely an ornament to the Spring Valley Retreat. But even the dusty mess they were, Ira never expected the cold, scant reception that Aunt Sarah gave them. A dark-haired, dark-complexioned woman, conscious of her American-born superiority, her manner toward Ira’s family had always been condescending. She was visibly taken aback by the two young wayfarers; she could barely muster a minimum of tolerance, let alone cordiality, in greeting Ira and his best friend. Even more disappointing, though, was Uncle Louis’s distant, preoccupied, and impersonal manner. Ira’s long-idolized uncle was like a different person. Gone was the wide, golden smile Ira had so glowingly described to Larry on the way over, the smile that appeared on Uncle Louis’s face when he heard the whoop of joy his nephew uttered the moment he caught sight of his uncle’s postman’s uniform. Where was his lean, magnanimous uncle, who never left without thrusting a handful of small change into his adoring nephew’s palm?

Ira had told Larry all about Uncle Louis as the two hiked along thumbing rides: about Uncle Louis the soldier, the teller of wonderful tales about the Far West, about Indians and forbidding landscapes and buffalo, while the entranced young Ira sat on the fire-escape windowsill listening to stories about the Rocky Mountains and the torrents of Yellowstone. Uncle Louis, the real American, ever ready to unroll the Socialist Call on the kitchen table, described the future world of Socialist equality, the fraternity of Jew and gentile. In his fervor, he swept away Pop’s vacillations, and spun hopes out of doubts: the mujik would never again be the same mujik under socialism; pogroms were forever ended with the execution of Czar Nicholas, the Kolki , the bullet; the epithet jhit , Yid, was finally outlawed in the new Russia, as were all manifestations of race hatred. A new world had miraculously come into being in the year of 1917, and it would breed a new order of mankind. Uncle Louis had even made Ira want to be a Socialist himself.

Four years later, the glow had receded. Poor health — poor lungs, Mom grimaced significantly — had compelled Uncle Louis to apply for a medical retirement at half pay from the post office. As soon as it was granted, he and his wife, Sarah — and their three children — moved from the Socialist colony in Stelton, New Jersey, to a large farmhouse in Spring Valley, New York. At first, to eke out Uncle Louis’s decreased salary, and at the initiative of Sarah, they took in a small number of boarders for the summer. Apparently, the venture exceeded expectations. The next year they were at capacity all season. Thanks to their successful catering to their Jewish clientele, and because of their proximity to the metropolis, and because their rates were reasonable, the place by this year of 1925 had become quite, quite well known. With the help of a partner, who provided the finances, they had built an entirely new summer hotel. It was a high-class one, according to Pop, who had been out there and furnished the details, a large summer hotel with private rooms, private bathrooms, equipped with a swimming pool, a tennis court, and a resplendent dining hall.

With all that he had heard about the spaciousness of the new hotel, Ira was sure Uncle Louis would have room enough to put up his devoted nephew, who was, in fact, Louis’s first cousin, but enough younger to be considered a nephew, and his nephew’s friend for the night. Although both had left their probable itinerary with their parents, Larry telephoned his mother long distance to let her know in what fine fettle they were, and to keep her posted on their whereabouts and destination. They might be home a day later than planned, if they liked the place they were heading for, and please not to worry. Their eagerness had been sharpened by inviting billboards on both sides of the highway setting forth the desirable features of the retreat.

It would happen so often in later life, that dim bewilderment at the change that had taken place in another, as if he — or she — had sloughed off an accretion of attitudes, like a skin, like a sheath. Conversation with Uncle Louis was perfunctory. The two youths were obviously in the way. They were fed an early supper on the oilcloth-covered table by a serving woman in the former farmhouse kitchen — scrambled eggs, bread and butter, and coffee and jam. And then with Uncle Louis’s older son, Gene, in the van, they were shown a well-worn army field tent some distance from the hotel, and furnished with a couple of canvas cots and blankets. That was to be their lodging for the night. Gene hung the kerosene lantern on a tent pole, and bidding them an embarrassed good night, left them to their own devices.