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

“ Loift shoyn ,” Mom chided. “I tell you, Lerry, you name? How he die is a bless to him. Auf mir g’sukt . How old he was?”

“Seventy-one.”

“All right!” Ira raised his voice.

“ Lusst nisht ausredden a vort .”

“You’ve already said more than a vort . Mom can jabber all day, and call it a word.”

“I don’t mind, Ira. I think she’s wonderful. I think I understand practically all she’s saying. She’s so kind. It comes right through.”

He gazed at Mom in steady admiration. “I was telling Ira what a wonderful mother he has.”

“He biliffs you? Hairst vus er sugt? Gleibst? ” she asked of Ira.

“Yeah, I gleibst ,” Ira said mockingly, stood up. “What d’ye say, Larry? Let’s go.”

“If you say so — but you know, I’m getting a lot of pleasure talking to your mom.”

“I know.”

“What about my coming here again.”

“ Sehr gut .”

“No, I mean it, Ira.”

“Okay. We’ll swap places.”

Larry got to his feet. “I’m glad I met you, Mrs. Stigman, even under these circumstances. It’s been a real pleasure to be talking with you.”

“If he would leave talk longer. But you must know already mein sohn . I’m only sorry you didn’t eat a little from something. A coffee—”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Stigman.” Larry suddenly sighed, smiled at Mom in frank, gentle affection, and said, tilting his head, “I don’t need the coffee. I feel so much better than when I came in, just talking to you. You have no idea.”

“Yeh? I’m gled. Noo, gey gezunt, mein ormeh . How you say?” Mom hesitated. “I don’t know.” She turned to Ira. “ Oona tateh ?”

“Orphan. For Christ’s sake, don’t get sentimental.”

“ Noo, bin ikh sentlemental,” Mom retorted defiantly, “ Gey gezunt, meine ormeh , my orphan.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Stigman.”

“You should come back soon. Mein Minneleh, his sister, oy , ven she hears you was in the house.” Mom rocked head and shoulders in disappointment. “ Und she didn’t see you. Ai, yi, yi! ”

“You tell her all about it,” Ira suggested with provocative drawl.

“ Ai bist die a hint, mein ziendle. ”

“Okay.” Ira turned the doorknob.

“Thanks again, Mrs. Stigman.”

“You fulkomen velcome. Gey gezunt .”

Larry sat down on the canvas cot. “Ah!” He stretched out. “This feels great. Ah.” His face shone with pleasure in the lantern light shed above him. “Come on. Forget it. Stretch out on the cot.”

“Ira could scarcely believe that Larry’s mourning had been so brief, that it was only three weeks ago that he had stuck his head in the Stigmans’ window. But following Larry’s lead, he lay down on the bedding. “Boy, it does feel good.” And after a few seconds’ pause, “Honest, I wouldn’t mind the tent or the cots or anything. It’s the change that’s taken place in my uncle. Boy.” He paused again. “If you knew what he was once like. He carried the Call rolled up like a baton. Well, you saw our kitchen table, he’d unroll it, and give us a lecture on that beautiful world to come. Even though I was a kid, and understood less than half of what he was saying, preaching, still, boy, it made a Socialist out of me. That’s what I wanted to be.”

Larry chuckled upward at the sloping khaki ceiling. “Relax. That’s what I’m doing. I am. I’m just dying to see Edith after everything that has happened. I imagine we’ll both have a lot to tell each other. I’ll bet she’ll have plenty to say about French cooking when she returns from Paris. Maybe more than about the museums she visited.” He chuckled again. “Say, this isn’t bad, the tent, the cot. We have privacy at least.”

Ira listened in relief. Larry made it all seem part of the adventure: sleeping under an army tent, with the packed dirt for a floor, on a canvas cot, under a scratchy army blanket for cover. Larry was right. What a rare, what a jolly occasion, what a lark, almost like an escapade. And with so little attention paid them, with so little sense of obligation to the onetime affection between himself and Uncle Louis that Ira had expected, and had led Larry to expect, that suddenly he felt guiltily blithe and carefree. Attachment had vanished, adoration had vanished. Like a couple of droll intruders, tired and elaborately at ease, they lay on their army cots, joking, chaffering, slapping at the all-too-frequent mosquitoes that got through the torn netting.

And to beguile his friend away from the last undercurrent of chagrin Ira felt, as the long summer twilight leaked away, he began reminiscing in the darkness: his very earliest memories in the new land to which he had been brought, an immigrant. Of contemplating the majestic russet rooster with the arching tail feathers in the backyard, when Ira’s parents lived in the same house with Uncle Louis and his family, the one on the “first” floor, the other on the “second” floor of a frame house in a place full of open fields and telegraph poles and billy goats in East New York. Maybe he was doing more than merely contemplating the rooster, Ira admitted, maybe he was chasing it, because Aunt Sarah leaned out of the second floor, her home, and scolded him. “I guess she’s still the same,” Ira added wryly, and laughed. “So am I.” He and Rosie, Uncle Louis’s only daughter, just a little older than Ira, and away in St. Louis at the moment, visiting Pop’s side of the family, had vowed to marry each other when they grew up. She and Ira, at Ira’s suggestion, had sat side by side on the floor examining each other’s sexual parts. “That ruby-red slash she had instead of the peg I had is still vivid in my mind when I think of it,” Ira confided. “However, when my Uncle Louis made the mistake of inviting me out to their Stelton farmhouse, was I ever a scamp. Did I ever pester the hell out of my prospective fiancée.”

Larry’s teeth gleamed in smile in the shadow. “The engagement was broken off at that point, I assume?”

“I guess I broke its back,” Ira rejoined. “It’s too bad she’s not around for me to see what she looks like, and how she feels about me. And about you especially. We might have gotten a better reception in that case.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Larry answered across the dark space between cots. He had taken his shoes off (both had done so), and he wriggled and spread the toes in his socks. His indulgence in the matter made his words seem peculiarly malleable. “It doesn’t make the least bit of difference. I told you, not in the least. I’d rather stay right here.”

“You sure make me feel better.”

“And I’m grateful to have my mind taken off my father. That’s one thing. The other thing is. . it takes my mind off waiting for Edith to come back from Europe. A little anyway.” In the interval of a pause, his sigh was less audible than inferred.

“Now it’s all going to be new. Strange. My father dies. It seems to put a period on things. You know, even if you’re sure it would have gone that way, no matter what you did, you can’t help feeling a little guilty. My switching to CCNY. Did it have any effect on him? My giving up dentistry. My falling in love with Edith. I don’t know.” His brow was troubled, and he held his big hands in front of him. “One thing, though, I don’t have that feeling of solidity I once had — you know what I mean?” He let his hands fall quite heavily on his thighs. “It’s something I can’t explain. Until I went to NYU, I lived in one world, the same kind of world my folks live in. That’s what I mean by saying that my life seemed solid. Now it’s a — it all revolves around Edith. I should say centers around her, maybe. Yes. Centers. That’s what I really mean.” He paused. “Not that I want things to be different. I love Edith. You know that. But what I’m worried about is the writing, my writing. Will it come out of me still. It will have to. I feel as if it’s tied up with my love of her. M-m-maybe more true the other way: her love for me. It depends on it. My being creative. She puts so much store in it. It’s very strange.”