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

103rd Street. Passover. Pesach. Matzohs. When Moses led the Hebrews out of bondage. When the landlord, the Irisher, did Mom a favor and painted the kitchen. And painted the toilet, and painted the big tin bathtub in its wooden casket of matchboards, cheap green house paint that stuck to your ass in hot water. But, boy, was the bathtub big. .

96th Street was next, he’d better stand up. .

So big you could float in it. Passover, 1918, when he was twelve. When the World War was still on. Talk about bondage. Boy, he could yell, Nates, nates, nates! He knew the fancy name, as he did so many others. Natey, nickname for a Jewboy. But to be understood, he’d have to yell like a wop. Boy, was it smooth and slick: levitation, levitation, right out of the tepid water. And that was before Passover. Moses — or was it God? — parted the Red Sea with a titanic — nah, cosmic command. How the hell could one little Israelite guy with one little staff split a whole sea asunder, cause such a cataclysm?

Ah, the hell with it. Here came 96th. Try your luck, you never lose. The train slowed, stopped. He eyed the gray rubber pads between doors, waiting for them to part. . smirked. Anh. Maybe Larry was at this minute just getting ready to go to Edith’s.

Nonetheless, Ira wasn’t lucky at all. Having gone home first, he didn’t try Mamie’s right away, and when he did, Stella was out. So Minnie was at home. She had, she said, stopped “dating” her gentile boyfriend, the gentile “buyer” of the firm in which both worked, Rodney, “the goy with the car,” as Ira jibed. He wanted to come to the house, her last week at the job, and why not? He liked her a lot. He wanted to meet her parents. His folks lived in Schenectady, otherwise he’d already have taken her to meet them. He was serious about her. He wanted to go steady with her; she was nice, he said, she was sharp and shrewd, and feisty too. But mostly, she was faithful. He was sure of it. She was the kind of woman he wanted for a wife; she would never two-time him. And how was he going to meet her other than in her home, if he was serious about her? On a street corner? That wasn’t right. He had a good job, and Minnie had one year more to go in high school. She could say yes or no to an engagement, right then and there. He was sure she would say yes; they hit it off so well together. After they were married, and had a place of their own, she could go right on to Hunter as she planned. That was okay with him if she wanted to teach for a few years.

“Oh, no, listen,” Minnie confided to Ira, informing him of developments, “I could never marry him, he’s a goy . I’m breaking it off. I shouldn’t have started in the first place.”

And to leave no doubt about her intentions, she announced that she would be home for supper this Saturday. “And don’t ask why. Never mind. I’m going back to Julia Richmond. I don’t need him. I want to be a schoolteacher.”

“Ah!” Mom said resignedly. “ Noo , I won’t ask.”

“We never even saw him once.” Pop’s mien bespoke his sympathy.

Minnie prefaced rejoinder with a flap of her hand. “Who wants him to see this place?”

“Well, let’s move, let’s go in search of new rooms.” Pop was generous where Minnie was concerned.

“Let’s move to the Bronx,” Mom suggested. “There are fine rooms in the Bronx, and it’s becoming very Yiddish — more and more.” She began to enumerate neighbors and acquaintances who had recently moved there. “And kosher butchers, and live fish stores, for Friday. And delicatessens and bakeries too. You’ll show me two or three times how I should travel to Mamie to see Zaida. Then I’ll be able to go there alone.”

“Never mind moving to the Bronx! I told you. After I’m finished with Richmond, then I’ll talk about steady boyfriends. At least I’ll have a high school diploma. Right now I don’t want to talk about it anymore. So do me a favor.”

Ira knew why, and gloated. She had to ditch her goyish goldfish. If she brought him to the house — not that Mom would mind. Maybe not even Pop. But oy, oy, oy , Zaida, the relatives— oy, yoy , a goy ! She was a good kid, though, Minnie, to give him up, chase him off. Jesus, he wouldn’t have, if he liked him — or her, Ira bridled at the idea — to hell with Zaida and everybody else. But she liked the guy — a lot. Rod looked as if he were going to cry when she told him she wouldn’t go out with him on Saturday-night dates anymore. Minnie sniffed in the telling, and before she was done, she also shed an honest tear or two. And how Ira sympathized with her, in true crocodile fashion, with “Ah, tsk, tsk, tsk,” and “Gee, I’m so sorry, he sounds like such a nice guy,” and he stroked her bare arm in her nightgown. “You’ll find somebody else, Minnie, somebody Jewish. Don’t worry. You’re a real grown-up, and good-looking. Sure, if he thought you were smart, and if he thought you were good-looking, what’re you worrying about?”

“Mostly I thought, if you wanna know the truth — maybe he would shmott —you know he’s circumcised? They did it in the hospital.”

“Yeah.”

“But I gotta get that Hunter diploma. I can’t take any chances. If we got married. Something came up. I got pregnant. Or—” Minnie nervously pushed back a lock of auburn hair from before mobile features creased in frown. “Something else comes up. I already heard about trouble with mothers-in-law. She’s gentile, I’m not. If I had a baby, the baby would have to be Jewish. Suppose he didn’t want to, or she didn’t. I better end it while there’s a chance. I’m going back to get my high school diploma.”

“That’s smart,” Ira commended, with the approving pat of an older brother on her bare shoulder. “Lucky too, because it’s a natural break.”

“You know, I was really beginning to love him.”

“Tsk, tsk.” Ira sedulously wrung each precious minute of Mom’s absence. “You poor kid.”

Tears welled up in her eyes. “My dear brother. I got nobody else.”

“Oh, you will have. You’ll see. Right now you got Julia Richmond High School to keep your mind off him.” God, why was he built that way; why did he have to know he was built that way? Conscious of a dual conscience: like Mercury’s caduceus in the doctor’s office, medical caduceus, with the two snakes twining up the single staff, twin sine curves intersecting at nodes: sin curves abbreviated in trig, sin curve was right, in frig. .

He felt sorry for her, at these moments, he really did. He could let her grieve, be a brother, a real mensh of a brother, for once.

V

He could summon up the tableau at will, many years later: Edith standing in the open door of the weather-stained day coach of the railroad train. In a light sage summer dress, figured with pale vines, petite, olive-skinned, she stood framed within the gunmetal sides of the railroad car that appeared to have slid apart to make room for the slight figure between. It was Edith Welles herself, her large, heavy-lidded brown eyes searching, seeking for a familiar face among the few people awaiting the train. The station had no platform, only stout planks between tracks. And while the gold-spectacled conductor in his blue uniform, with his immemorial brass plate on his visored cap, and his heavy gold chain across his vest, stooped paternally to set the snub pair of wooden steps to supplement the iron ones on the train, she continued to survey the scene before her. Her chin was tilted, which gave her whole mien an aspect of defiance, proud defiance and determination. And yet, about the large brown eyes, and the brow under its black cloche, something contrary hovered, something akin to doubt, to concern. Within a bland, September-sunlit doorway of a day coach, a small figure, her countenance self-denigrative, but still brave, she peered into the light drenching the primitive station that was Woodstock.