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

He went outdoors again, to the lawn in the backyard: leafy-covered walls surrounded it, walls conferring delicious privacy, communion with sky and cloud. On the grass stood filigreed iron garden furniture, so white, so heavy — how lovely to eat out there. So informal, so lovely and pleasant everything. Elegance. What else should you call it? And now all of a sudden, go back in your mind to East 119th Street, near Park Avenue and the Grand Central overpass, the stoop with the kids sitting on it above the cellarway, the dark hallway after the battered letter boxes, the dingy stairs, climb them, enter the scrubbed kitchen, clean and bleak, Jesus, and after it, through the railroad flat with the vile air shaft on the way. It wasn’t fair: Mom and Pop arguing about how much allowance was still coming to Mom for the week. Arguing about the relatives, about money, about who ought to pay for the new washline. Upbraidings and beratings, and Jesus Christ, his own machinations and designs, having devised secret snares for Minnie right in the house, while Pop and Mom argued, right there, around the kitchen table, figuring out enticing webs, disarming wiles. Like a crook casing a joint for the best entrance. Best entrance was right. Wasn’t that funny? Now that she had dismissed her Rod, her “ goyish feller,” Minnie tried to steer clear of her brother, steer clear of Ira, suspicious of him still.

But, boy, was he a coaxer, when he wanted to be, what was the word? What a wheedler, wheedler, yeedler. Cajoler, cadger. Well, what could you do? He wanted it, and having seen when he was eight that rusty pervert pull off, his scum dripping from the tree, he just fought it; he wasn’t going to do it. Nearly every time he did, he felt like cutting his prick off afterward, as if he’d sunk to something worse than he already was: like “Joe,” that pederast in a porkpie hat. Anh, kill yourself, you bastard. No. Better to assume his well-practiced fake negligence, say he would walk to Mamie’s, show his duty to Zaida, pay his respects to the old hypochondriac. Sure his grandson was a louse. But to whom wasn’t it fair? Were they doing him a favor? Right away his head turned into a mulligatawny, the word he read in a book, a farrago. Why couldn’t things be straightforward within his mind, the way they were within Larry’s mind, clean, unlittered, instead of always crisscrossed with shunts and with crazy Moebius detours, like those Dr. Sorel showed the math class? Why?

And he had to be careful, on guard. It was just at these times of baffling rumination that Edith would regard Ira with her large, solemn eyes, trying to fathom him, and he would hang his head slightly, and grin. Step up and call me crazy Moebius the Dopius, he should have said to her, and maybe made her laugh. But then she would have asked him to explain. And hoo-hoo, that crawling, infested mire he had inside him; his hideosities, he called it, admiring his triple portmanteau. Even to hint of it, even as close as he had come with Larry, was unthinkable. But what the hell, enough of that.

He tried to think, those two days while he and Larry were awaiting Edith — and after she arrived. He tried to think of matters outside himself — in this sumptuous house he was living in, in this all but bizarre situation. He tried to think, to conjecture, to grope toward motives: perhaps Edith was deliberately coming to test the feasibility of marrying her young swain, as he had continually implored her to do. Perhaps not. The idyll at Woodstock might be a defiant assertion of her right to a private life as a woman in a male-dominated world, as she so often emphasized. Defiant. But necessarily cautious, because it was a male-dominated world, and her livelihood, her position at the university, could be jeopardized. Her own and the welfare of those dependent on her, her mother, father, sister, all of whom she was supporting in part, the younger brother she was helping through college; their welfare was in jeopardy, if her highly unconventional behavior was discovered — highly unconventional at best, turpitude at worst.

Foggy as Ira felt himself to be about all kinds of sophisticated matters like these, he couldn’t escape awareness of how dangerous this adventure was for Edith, altogether different from his sordid ones, but just as clandestine. So alike in that respect, it made him all the more keenly mindful of the trust placed in him, all the more determined to deserve it, to protect Edith. She was violating accepted mores; she had to be circumspect, very much on the lookout for friends and acquaintances who might recognize them, and especially recognize Edith. What a scandal, what a commotion, that would whip up at the university! Certainly there would be much ado in the English department, that was certain. Confronted by it, Professor Watt, respectable and decorous head of the English department, for all his flirting with the unconventional in the hiring of his teaching staff, would undoubtedly protect himself by dismissing Edith. She could expect to be fired. A love affair with a freshman, an eighteen-year-old freshman. Bad enough with a graduate student.

So Edith was tense, on edge. The more so because Iola, who had agreed to join them in their rendezvous, and had all but decided to go when Edith did, reneged at the last minute, leaving Edith to bear the whole burden of exposure herself. An illicit ménage, Iola had blandly avoided it, disloyally too, shirking the debt she owed Edith, who had helped get her the position in the NYU English department. Edith was piqued, Ira disappointed. Edith attributed Iola’s refusal to join them to the imminent return of Richard Smithfield, to whom she was as good as betrothed — if he opted in favor of heterosexuality, and not, as John Vernon hoped, homosexuality. Some such picture as that, Ira fuzzily gathered: Iola didn’t want to offend her quasi-fiancé who would soon be returning to America on completion of his Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. But Richard had been “raped” by a sodomist, or someone like that, in a taxicab in Paris, and the shock had unnerved him to the extent that he had become ambivalent about his own sexuality, uncertain in his relation to Iola. She was no longer sure of him.

But Ira had his own surmise to account for Iola’s last-minute defection from the symmetry her presence would have conferred on the group: how the hell could a grown man get raped in a taxicab, Parisian or otherwise? A man, not a woman, get raped, without consenting? Christ, stop the cab, even if he didn’t know French, and Richard, scholar that he was, must surely have known the language. And how would a man get raped? Open his fly, get at his cock, suck him off, pull him off, or what? Without compliance? Jesus Christ. Nah, the guy must have had half a mind to submit to the experience. No wonder Iola was beset by doubts, and Vernon was licking his chops in anticipation.

Iola would have taken a chance and joined Edith, made it a foursome. There was plenty of room, and bedrooms and bathrooms, in the fine two-storied abode. No, he himself was the reason Iola declined to accompany Edith: it was his irresolute, his tenuous appeal, his wavering sex appeal. The supposition refused to be lulled or staved off: it was his timidity, his shyness, his accursed flimsiness of libido because of what he had become, or had made of himself, with his never-ending steeping of himself in incurable guile and guilt, stealth, fear, degradation, and worst of all, in an ambience of violated taboo. No, he had wrenched normalcy apart forever, for aye and for good, that terrible afternoon, when only a few problems in plane geometry leashed frenzy from committing murder. Leashed madness, yes, but gnarled something in the mind too far, irrevocably. That was how it felt.

That was how it was. That was why Iola didn’t join them. What would Richard have known about it if she had? John Vernon wouldn’t have told him. He might be a homosexual, but he was honorable: look what he was doing for Edith, like a good sport who had lost: securing this wonderful place in Woodstock for her and her young lover. No. It was he himself who was to blame. Iola could sense his vitiated manhood, suppressing virility, his shrinking from adult encounter. No. Ruined for the rest of his life his — his — ability to rise to the occasion. Yeah, some joke. That time she took the rolled-up papers out of his hand — rolled-up prospectus of CCNY courses of study, or something like that, after his “Impressions of a Plumber” appeared in The Lavender : “You’ve written another piece? For me?” She reached out her hand and took hold of it, her blue Scandinavian eyes sinking into his as she reached for the scroll. God, you get the cuckooest ideas, you know: phallic, her holding it, veiled incitement in her gaze. But no, he didn’t have a manuscript for her. No. Goddamn it. How arch she was, that afternoon, that matinee, when they had all met on the upper balcony of the Theater Guild to see Shaw’s Arms and the Man.