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

A dark fearful anguish once more assailed him in a way it hadn’t for a long time, and he smiled drearily at Iola’s teasing. Christ, yes, no doubt about it: he had telegraphed once again his botched virility. So why the hell should she come here and join them, if he had nothing to offer? Not Richard she was concerned about, but Ira, his perceived lack of phallic response. He saw in her droll, Scandinavianthin features that she could be wanton. She could flirt, and did. But what did he have to offer her? Nothing but his rolled-up CCNY course summary. Epitomized it: braided-haired blond woman provocative in green dress, coquettish before curtain call to Arms and the Man. Arms and the Man! Jesus, everything scrambled around in horny symbols, and you, paralyzed long ago by the illicit — you, riven by shameful false alarms — flinched away from the overture. But hell, months ago you could have asked her to stroll through the woods of Bear Mountain, if you could have screwed your courage, as Bill Shakespeare said, to the sticking point. But you couldn’t. So goodbye. You stripped your threads, or most of ’em. .

They settled down in their elegant quarters, each in a different study by day. At night, Larry and Edith shared the same bedroom, the master suite at the other end of the house. Ira had a smaller one off the hall near a separate bathroom. Mornings were fresh and crisp — the three breakfasted in the kitchen. By noon, the day had warmed enough to have lunch outdoors on the white-painted iron furniture on the lawn enclosed by the high stone walls. Larry usually prepared breakfast, though sometimes Edith did, with Larry — or Ira — squeezing the oranges on the latest leverage orange-squeezer. Luncheon consisted of soft-boiled eggs and asparagus, or chicken à la king out of a can, and boiled fresh peas and carrots. She needed bulk, but had to avoid too much roughage, she said, because she had colitis. Ira ate ravenously as usual, barely able to keep from wolfing his food, at each meal consuming twice as many slices of bread or toast as both Larry and Edith. Talk about roughage: nothing was better than bread, good loaves of Russian rye or heavy pumpernickel, not fluffy slices in packages. Boy, if it were up to him, he’d have eggs, he’d have lox, he’d have chopped tomato-herring and onions for breakfast. But he had to try and behave, to avoid chompken , as Pop chided him for doing: masticating out loud. “When the fress falls on him, he’s like one possessed,” said Pop. And even Larry called him aside and said gently, “I don’t mind, but you ought not smack your lips after every mouthful.”

Ira was surprised — and embarrassed. “Gee, I do?”

“Yes. It’s very noticeable.”

Ira was penitent, silent.

“You don’t mind my telling you?”

“Oh, no. I’ll try to stop. Anything else I do wrong?”

“It isn’t wrong exactly. It’s just a habit.”

“I know. But you might as well tell me,” Ira urged. “You know how it is: you know what it is.”

“Do you realize you keep saying ‘gee’ all the time?”

“I do?” Ira suddenly realized he did. “Boy!”

“And ‘boy,’ too,” said Larry.

“Oh, boy.”

Larry chuckled.

“Gee, I’ll try. Boy, I’ll try. I mean it.”

Edith’s portable chattered away a good part of the day. She had two reviews of books of poetry to do, one for the Sunday New York Times, and one for The Nation . She didn’t think much of the verse in either book, she said, and neither did she get paid very much for the reviews, but she was especially pleased to have made a contribution in the New York Times : small as the notice was, it was her first. Larry read the book, read her review afterward. They discussed it. Ira was given the book of poems to read, and scratched his earlobe apologetically: “I don’t know. I read it, and I don’t understand it.”

“Oh, you do too!” Edith refused to believe. “Anyone as sensitive as you are.”

“I mean, I know the words. And I get the similes too. But I don’t get the—” He gesticulated. “I don’t get the jumps from one thing to another.”

She and Larry laughed.

She wrote letters, many of them, dashed them off, like those he had received from her when she was traveling in Europe. The typewriter clacked without pause. She was rewriting some of her lectures too, those on modern English and American poets. Glancing at the thin books strewn on her table, Ira secretly marveled. She had brought them along in her suitcase: books of poetry, by Wallace Stevens, by Elinor Wylie, by Archibald MacLeish, by Edith Sitwell. How could she extract meaning from all that disparate, oblique wording? It was beyond him. How could she perceive so much, type so much about what she read? It mystified him, when he leafed through the pages; the poems were either too opaque to penetrate, or they were like a wide-open grid through which he fell, missing gist to grab on to, missing enlightenment. He was ashamed to admit it. He looked at a poem that was given him to read, nodded appreciatively, or tried to show his appreciation by illuminating his features with pleasure, like a glowworm. Why didn’t they say what they meant? They didn’t have to say something simpleminded, like Longfellow’s “Village Blacksmith.” But why couldn’t they say what the particular figure of speech meant? Say it was this or say it was that. Or come close enough to the meaning so that he could comprehend it, and maybe even be moved by it, the way he was by Robert Frost in the Untermeyer anthology: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep.” Anybody could guess what that meant. Or the poem by Baudelaire, “L’Albatros,” that Iz Rabinowitz, who was going to major in French, showed him: “Le poète est semblable au prince des nuées. . ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher .” Gee, that was good. He felt like that himself sometimes: a prince in fantasy, and a dub in practice.

Maybe he was both.

The first two days after they moved in, while Edith in the master bedroom industriously plied her portable typewriter, Larry sat in the library, reading the book Edith had brought from France. When not reading, he devoted himself to writing poetry, “lyrics” as he called them, which he returned to in the evening, when he felt the poetic mood more strongly. Ira took naps, and brought back staples and groceries. Or, still hopeful that his interest in biology would revive, he sat in the sunny, enclosed yard, studying the biology text that he had brought with him. It was an outmoded Biology 1 text, which he had gotten from a sophomore for nothing, because it was being supplanted next term by a later edition, and the college bookstore refused to buy the outmoded one back. “The bastards don’t want it,” said the sophomore. “Here. You can have it.” So Ira conned pages of mostly familiar material, alternated reading by catching grasshoppers, and with his jackknife crudely dissecting them. Oh, he knew every part of a grasshopper — its name and function, the spiracles and the mandibles, the ovipositor and the tarsi. He could draw a diagrammatic sketch of a grasshopper’s anatomy from memory. Maybe next term, not that he didn’t have to compete with sophomores or with droves of bright, incoming freshmen eager to get started on their medical careers, Biology 1 would be open, and he could get started on his own career. He could test his own interest again, awaken his forte maybe. For Edith’s and Larry’s edification, Ira discoursed learnedly about the grasshopper, its anatomical features and exoskeleton, the insect’s species, genus, phylum. “You know, the funny thing is,” he observed, “I think they’re kosher. I think Jews can eat them. I’m not sure why, but I think that was because they spent forty years in the desert, and maybe that’s all they could find to eat sometimes. Gee, I’d like to find out what the rabbis think the ravens fed Elijah, whether it was grasshoppers or what? I must remember to ask my grandfather when we get back. He lives in Harlem now with my aunt Mamie.”