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

He entered the kitchen, where M had everything ready to finish dressing him. She waited for him, ever kind, ever forbearing, in pink skirt, brown sweater, her long, elliptical, Anglo-Saxon countenance wrinkled and beautiful, her hair gray and ivory, and she uttered consoling, cheerful words as he came in. He sat down in the big armchair bought especially for him, because its high back provided support for his neck. On the table, already collected in a Chinese enameled spoon, were his vitamins and minerals, capsules and pills, about six of them, and there was fruit juice to get them down with, and near at hand the little kit with swab and tub of anti-athlete’s foot cream which M dabbed between his toes after drying them. Within reach was the small square wooden platter that bore utensils, salt and pepper-grinder — and the vial containing the Imuran tablets, of which he took one, and the other vial containing the prednisone five-milligram tablets, his cortisone, of which he took two. Meanwhile M at the stove spooned out the whole-grain porridge she had cooked this morning. .

III

A faint light came through the mosquito netting at the entrance of the tent, and lifting his head, Ira saw someone light a lantern on the back porch of the farmhouse. They had been given their supper there. Probably the help ate there; it seemed to have become a satellite to the hotel. And now light gleamed on the eyeglasses of the figure bearing the lantern down the porch steps — and toward them. . It was Uncle Louis. Ira felt a resumption of affection, a renewal of boyhood gratitude. Uncle Louis had considerately taken a little spare time to come over and talk to them. Away from the hotel and his cares, perhaps he would indulge in a round of friendly conversation, display a token of his former heartening sympathy that had so endeared him to his nephew in years gone by. Now perhaps Larry could see for himself that Ira’s praise of his uncle was at least partly justified.

“My uncle is coming over.” Ira sat up, swiveled about on the cot, then stood up. . waited until the approaching figure was within earshot.

“Uncle Louis. Gee, I’m glad to see you, Uncle. Come in away from the bugs.” Ira held open the mosquito netting. “Come in and sit down.”

“No. I didn’t come to talk.”

“No?” Ira was at a loss. “I’m sorry, Uncle. I thought maybe you would.” His regret was intermingled with appeal. “I was telling my friend here, on the way”—he indicated Larry, who had lifted his head and soberly regarded Uncle Louis—“how much you knew about socialism, how much you influenced me in wanting to be a Socialist.”

Uncle Louis was never other than lean, but now he looked gaunt. As he hung his lantern on a second hook on the tent pole, the cords of his skinny neck crossed above the open collar of his striped shirt. The second lantern’s light seemed to dredge creases in his careworn, leathery features. Uncle Louis shook his head.

“I can see you’re tired, Uncle,” Ira said forgivingly.

Curtly, his eyes behind rimless eyeglasses glinting disapproval, Uncle Louis turned away from the lantern. Gone was all indulgence, the gentleness that had disabused Ira when at fourteen he announced he wanted to go to West Point, and Uncle Louis said, “They don’t like Jews in West Point,” a different voice, but the same person, now said: “It’s a waste of time.”

“What is? You mean socialism, Uncle?”

“Yes, socialism. Don’t waste your time on it.”

Ira was too confounded to say anything more, to do anything more than gaze. Uncle Louis’s disillusion, like the light of the lantern he had hung upon the center pole, drove away everything of an entirely different personal nature that had instilled the semidark with a different strain and crisis only a minute ago.

“It’s nothing. It’s worse than nothing.” Uncle Louis scarcely raised his voice, as if the subject had long ago become a matter of indifference to him, had died. “It didn’t turn out to be anything like we thought. No idealism, no principles, no brotherhood. What is there in Russia? Socialism? They murder Socialists. The Communists are greater tyrants than the czar ever was. They oppress the common people more than ever, the honest, hardworking farmers. What kind of socialism is that? Freedom, we thought, freedom. They tell you what to do, where to go, what you should think. Nobody is safe. You can’t open your mouth, you can’t disagree. The bureaucrats’ll take your head off. It’s total subjection. You know what subjection is?”

“Of course, Uncle.” Ira could hear the plaintiveness in his own reply.

“That’s what they have in Russia. It’s subjection, it’s not socialism. And Jews? Ah! Jhit is on every Russian’s lips. The same as it was before. Worse than it was before. Stalin is a murderer, he’ll be worse than anyone thinks. You talk about anti-Semites. He’s an anti-Semite of anti-Semites. Every Jew is trying to slip out of Russia, even Socialist Jews. Lenin’s friends Stalin sends to the firing squads. A murderer. And this is what we waited and prayed for, the Socialist revolution. What a Socialist revolution.” Uncle Louis stood in gaunt immobility a few seconds, hopeless. “ Noo. ” He dismissed the subject with a wave of the yellow slip of paper in his long bony hand. “Take my advice, don’t waste your time on it. You’ll only be disappointed in the end.”

“You really think so, Uncle?”

“I guarantee it. It’s only a question of time.”

So once again, Uncle Louis quenched the illusion he had kindled within his nephew’s mind. Only now that Ira was older, and able, at least fleetingly, to perceive motives that he had scarcely been responsive to before, hardly ever taken the pains to probe, he wondered whether the things Uncle Louis was saying in disparagement of socialism and the Soviet Union were true. Or whether it was because he now owned a summer hotel, or had just naturally become disenchanted because he was growing old, or both. How strange that so much could happen within the space of time in which less than a decade of disillusion was compressed. Compressed into a small bail, yeah, bale: Ira felt that Uncle Louis’s withdrawal from the ranks of idealism meant his withdrawal from life. He had given up, and it was now Ira’s task to carry forward the bold ideas his uncle had abandoned. It seemed almost inevitable that he would have to be that youth who bore a new banner when shades of night were falling fast. That was how it always went: that stupid “Excelsior” of Longfellow that anybody with the least modern attitudes, with the least taste, just plain gagged at for its sappy sentiment. “Excelsior.” No wonder the kids snickered: wood shavings. You packed shipments with it. But it was more than the ideals of onward and upward, justice to the downtrodden — and tolerance of Jews — that had moved Ira toward socialism, that made him so ready to absorb Uncle Louis’s fervor, and transform it into something personal, into an answer to a deep need — with scarcely the ability to put the need into words. It was what he felt he had become, was ever more becoming, a thing he despised. Socialism addressed his self-contempt; socialism fluoresced against the pall over him. He could never be Larry sitting there, almost immobilized with indecision, in love, in love with a mature, cultivated woman, Larry harrowed by conflicts between decent, coherent choices. But maybe he , Ira, could stop being himself, through socialism. Within the space of a minute, the unexpected became the preordained. He would have to pick up where his uncle left off. Without benefit of words, inner colloquy signaled assent and difference like patches of color.

“Thanks for the lantern, Uncle,” Ira said. It wasn’t surprising that his uncle’s visit would mean so much to him, and so little to Larry, still sitting motionless on the cot, his incurious gaze directed upward at Uncle Louis. “Don’t you want to sit down even for a minute, Uncle?” Ira motioned to his cot. “Funny, I was sure you brought the lantern to talk.”