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

Ira had nothing to offer. He sensed the gist of Larry’s statement, but no more than that. His words made intermittent contact with Ira’s fantasizing, but like his own fantasizing still lacked the substance of everyday reality.

In spite of Edith’s departure for France, the summer had begun auspiciously for Larry. He had gotten the job he applied for early in the spring, a singing waiter who also collaborated with the recreational director of the Camp Copake summer hotel in the Catskills.

Larry’s good fortune, however, had left Ira with no one to turn to in any meaningful way, which brought on an increasing sense of isolation, anomie, and futility. There were always the few Jewish working youth on the block, or in the group whose nucleus was on 119th Street. But he cared little for their company, Jake, the airbrush commercial artist, included: they shared neither his interests nor aspirations, fuzzy as Ira’s were. More and more self-engrossed, self-enclosed, swamped by quandary, all but immured often by appetite, appetite always morticed to fear and self-reproach, he ignored their strivings, excluded their commonplace temperament and mundane activities from his range of curiosity — something he was to regret deeply later on, when, as a writer, he sought to give distinctive nature and substance to characters such as these, characters drawn from the past, Jewish youth deprived of formal education.

No matter how enervating the summer became, Ira could not go to Rockaway Beach more than once a week: he might arouse his Aunt Mamie’s suspicion. Besides, she gave him a dollar each time he appeared, and there was a limit to his ostensible shnorring . Only one thing provided relief from himself, from the slur of his existence that summer, from his bored, disdainful participations with the other youth of the neighborhood, his idleness, lethargies, feral, panicky escapades at Rockaway, despondency and guilty worry. It was Edith’s letters to him, not only to her young lover, Larry, from abroad.

She had booked passage to Europe in May, and was away in Europe that summer. . and Ira, more than half aware of his propensity for the wish-fulfilling and the farfetched, continually fantasized, continually dabbled with the fancy — or the hope — that somewhere in the matrix of Edith’s decision to go to Europe was also the hope that during her separation from Larry, he would find a young woman to his liking, and thus bring their affair to an innocuous and conventional close. He was wrong, as usual, as far as Larry’s finding someone in the summer resort that would divert his affection from Edith. For when Larry returned abortedly to New York, he expressed his disgust in no uncertain terms about his encounters with the young female guests at the resort, because some went so far in their aggressive amorousness to make a grab for his fly.

“I don’t like that, do you?” he asked Ira, who felt, as he shook his head vehemently like some kind of mechanical toy, wound-up double springs of intense envy and disappointment. “No, I don’t either.” Goddamn crumb he was, reduced to smutty, futile, and vindictive importunings, who couldn’t get — Christ, he could hardly say it even to himself out of shame and self-loathing — out to the beach to screw his cousin often enough. “No, I don’t either,” he who had to risk everything to get at a pudgy, simpering fifteen-year-old. Or sixteen, as if another year would palliate—

Edith was traveling through Europe, through Italy and France mainly, and almost every week Ira received a letter from her. She had taken her small portable typewriter with her, the portable in its rigid black carrying case, and her letters were typewritten in a style Ira quickly came to recognize, even the darkness and spacing of the type. What surprised him at first, all but astonished him, was her style. It was peculiar to all of her correspondence: hasty, disjointed, discursive, unrevised, and with words occasionally misspelled. She poured out her impressions of places visited, food consumed, the state of her “innards,” sundry reflections, with no attempt to sort things out, no attempt at order whatever. But how he treasured those letters! How he gloried in them! How often he reread them! They were the first he had ever received from a college instructor, a college English instructor, soon undoubtedly to be elevated to an assistant professor! A professor! And she deigned to write to him, nay, wrote to him as informally and vernacularly as if he were on an equal footing with her, one near to her, one whom she could trust to be discreet about her chatty confidences about her roommate Iola, about the university, the head of the department, even about Larry, her lover. Ira was relieved Larry was away when he received the letters, however much he missed him otherwise; he didn’t have to share Edith’s letters with him — for Larry would certainly have asked Ira whether he had received news from Edith, and it was easier to write a few words in general in answer to Larry’s letters from the summer resort than to speak to him in person about them. They were her messages to him, Ira felt, her bond to him alone, an augury, so he yearned, of the realization of the only future open to him. In it he could make some sort of restitution — what else call it? — redress — find some, no the only, outlet for the discontented, the sorry mess he felt he had become. Ah, to find redress in print, in words, as his piece in The Lavender foreshadowed. They called it métier , they called it forte , oh, Jesus: call it the shape of release on the pages of something he had written. Oh, in time perhaps, in time, a whole book!

For him, the dented, tarnished brass letter box in the much-trodden vestibule of the tenement took on a sudden glory, became transmogrified, when he descried through the curlicues the black type on an envelope that could only be Edith’s. Or already brought upstairs by Mom, a letter from Edith lying in wait for him on the kitchen table. To cherish, to read with pulsating spirit: words that sprang up before his eager eyes like a plume. Her letters praised his exceptional sense of humor, his descriptive powers, his latent abilities as a writer, his unusual maturity for his years, his astonishing gravity, for all his humor. Her words filled him with a glow of worth, discernible even to Mom.

“She writes you nice things, the Professora?”

“Yeah.”

Filling him with buoyancy, with aspiration, her letters inspired him with an eagerness to reply, and in replying, confirm the model of himself that she held up before him. And in that very reply also — adumbrated first on a scratch pad, and then carefully afterward elaborated on lined paper — certainties infused him that he was, that he could be, what she said he was, that he could rise to what she said, certainties sinking to uncertainties, and then suddenly waxing to elation, reflecting from the enthusiastic words he had committed to the page — and a moment later dampened by doubt again.

He sent his letters to her forwarding addresses — and received in return others that boosted his spirit skyward. His letters were so full of colorful detail and interesting observation, she wrote. He made her feel she was at the very place he was describing, experiencing his sensations. His letters were so direct and unaffected. She looked forward to them. She wished Larry could learn a little of that knack. He tended to poeticize his prose too much, and that was too bad, because it made his letters too studied. Followed immediately by remarks that although traveling was interesting, and she had met interesting people, traveling in general didn’t agree with her. French cooking especially. It was too rich, was always served under cover of rich sauces. It was constipating. She had to take frequent enemas. Ira could feel himself duck in embarrassment at her frankness, and yet at the same time feel a stirring of pride that she trusted him to the extent of imparting such confidences. She missed the absence of plain American cooked vegetables. She might have to curtail her trip by a week or two because of her constant “indigishchin,” she deliberately misspelled.