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

The forlorn backyards of tenements, the dreary, Felsnaphtha-mopped hallways, enlivened sometimes by homely emanations of cabbage (it could have been the spicy aroma of stuffed cabbage, the hullupchehs that Mom was cooking). Oh, the round iron coal-scuttle cover in the sidewalk, and the roar of coal down the chute, and the coal-streaked visage of the Irish toiler — the ex-hod carrier he might have been — down in the cellar, at the other end of the chute, lugging his basket of anthracite to the tenant’s storage bin. It was in the cellar too where the one-eyed Jewish painter, the Cyclops of 119th Street, stored his paints and brushes and turpentine. Speak of the worn lip of the stoop stairs, the battered brass letter boxes in the foyer, the dilapidated flight of linoleum-covered steps past the window at the turn of the landing, and up to the “first floor.” And oh, into the gloomy, narrow corridor, between the toilets of opposing flats, to the door under the paint-spotted transom light, the door that meant home.

Weren’t fourteen years of school, from kindergarten to college, the raw material of literature? Didn’t it qualify for alchemical transformation, like those chunks and hunks of iron the avaricious Puritans brought to the faker in the Ben Jonson play? If that was latent wealth in the domain of letters, why, he was rich beyond compare: his whole world was a junkyard. All those myriad, myriad squalid impressions he took for granted, all were convertible from base to precious, from pig iron to gold ingot. The kids rolling dice under the shadow of the railroad trestle on Park Avenue — ah, the very job of painting the trestle itself every four or five years! First, after the chipping, the undercoat of red, then the finishing coat of gray. Tell them, Ira thought, tell them what a simpleton you were: how you fancied they painted the trestle red first, not to provide it with a tough undercoat, but so they could see how far they reached with the second coat of gray. Such was the level of your boyhood inferences. You fancied that the huge stone ramp which brought the trains up from underground to the trestle at 103rd Street housed within it pirates and buccaneers. You could hear them wrangling over their booty, could hear the clash of steel from their cutlasses. .

Petey Lamb, the janitor’s son, humping Helen under the stairs. The housewives setting out to shop in the Park Avenue pushcart market in the morning, summer morning, the immense, moted sunlight glistening on their black oilcloth shopping bags. And you watched Mom from the front-room window on a Sunday morning to make sure, shamefully, miscreant, craftily sure, traced Mom’s steps around Jake’s squat brown pile of a tenement, and disappearance around the corner. Ponderous Mr. Clancy, the street-repair foreman, mounting the creaking stairs at the close of the day: they actually creaked under his weight. Flora Baer, Davey’s sister, whom you tried to get to play bad down in the cellar, but couldn’t. The foam on top of the simmering pot of thin soup you sopped up with a crust of bread, and ate with relish: Greasy Joan doth keel the pot , a delicacy of destitution. Meanwhile Flora’s scabby infant brother in his bleary high chair clutched a cockroach he had just grabbed in his little fist and offered to throw it into doting, ne’er-do-well cardsharp Papa’s cup of tea; and dark with penury, the meager mother looked on.

No, you didn’t have to go cruising o’er the billows to the South Sea Isles on a sailing vessel crowded with canvas, or fist a t’gallant, like a character in The Sea Wolf , or prospect for gold in the faraway Klondike, or float down the Mississippi in a raft with Huck Finn, or fight Indians in the young Wild West nickel magazines. You didn’t have to be an escaped criminal like Jean Valjean or the Count of Monte Cristo in glamorous France, or a corsair with a cutlass clenched between his teeth climbing a hemp boarding ladder or a treasure hunter with a pegleg, or a swashbuckling swordsman like D’Artagnan. You didn’t need Scottish moors or desert islands, and you didn’t need tiger-infested African velds or the jungles of remote India. You didn’t need to go anywhere, anywhere at all. It was all here, right here, in Harlem, on Manhattan Island, anywhere from Harlem to the Jersey City Pier : from the feisty Irish urchins who patronized the old Jewish couple’s candy store, saying sidemouthed, “Gimme two o’ deze, an’ t’ree o’ dem, and one o’ doze,” to the bigger guys who bought two Sweet Caporal cigarettes for a cent. “Oim as dhroy as a loyme-kiln.” The sewer cleaner handed his helper the tin beer bucket. “Will yez rush the growler, me b’y.” Garish though the contents of the great glass amphorae in Biolov’s drugstore show window seemed during the day, how vividly ruby and emerald they glowed at night, suffused with incandescence. Language was the conjurer, indeed the philosopher’s stone, language was a form of alchemy. It was language that elevated meanness to the heights of art. Like the irritating particle that bred the nacre of the pearl, language ameliorated the gnawing irritant of existence; it interceded between the wound and the dream.

What a discovery that was! He, Ira Stigman, was a mehvin of misery, of the dismal, of the pathetic, the deprived. Everywhere he looked, whole treasuries were exposed, repositories of priceless potential ignored, and hence they were his. It brought back to mind what he had just vaguely ruminated about when he had the impulse — an impulse he had suppressed — of sharing this unique world, this bonanza of penury, with Larry. It was his world — again he could feel the base, proprietary thrust of his niggardliness vindicate him: he had suffered for all this, earned it by years of indenture to the foul and the pitiful: to wraithlike old Mr. Malloy, seated in the sunshine before the wrought-iron cellar barrier of the tenement, sucking on his stubby, blackened clay pipe, with a rubber baby-bottle nipple at the end of the stem to protect his toothless gums. That vignette, that gem, was his, Ira’s. Yonnie True on bare-ass beach between the freight tracks and the Hudson, standing on the diving rock, to which Ira in his anguish had once returned, sporting a Bull Durham sack on his dink, because, said Weasel reverently, Yonnie had a dose of clap — and Yonnie had just wriggled into Fat’s tights, and who was Fat but Ira! It was indecent, but it was literary, and Ira had paid his fee in full for the right to use it. The repulsive and the graceful stood opposed; only language could bridge the gap. Ah, how to say it?

At Larry’s suggestion, from the first day of their stay in Woodstock, he and Ira let their beards grow. Whether Larry’s aim in their doing so was to foil casual recognition with a hirsute mask or to mediate the contrast between their callow youthfulness and Edith’s maturity, Ira wasn’t sure. Nor whether their droll disguise accomplished anything. His own beard flourished with surprising vigor, curly and black. For diversion, and again to lessen the risk of recognition, the three avoided town; instead they took long walks in the country, explored lonely dirt roads and lanes. With Larry and Ira on either side of her, Edith did most of the talking as they strolled along, edifying her young escorts about life in general, and her own in particular. When she dwelt on her own past, and she often did, she invariably adopted a matter-of-fact tone of voice, underplaying her role in the enduring of the many outrageous and tragic circumstances in her life.

Dispassionately minimizing, she conveyed the impression — which Ira could only feel, feel, but not define — of long-suffering innocence, of quiet, self-sacrificing fortitude. Listening to her talk about incidents in her past, Ira felt at times as if he were recalling passages of the few long-forgotten ephemeral romances he had read: of wistful heroines caught in the fell toils of villainy or baleful misfortune. Though most of the specifics had eroded, the contours remained and were still recognizable: Edith was the heroine of her own drama . She wasn’t the kind of central character who struggled against the various impulses in himself, good or evil, and triumphed or surrendered: a Jane Eyre, a Dr. Jekyll, a Dorian Gray. No, no. She was a heroine in the tried-and-true tradition: kind, benign, brave, and unselfish. Ira recalled a line in one of her later poems: My generous gesture gone astray . She could have been right. Why not? Her gestures might always have been generous, and as often gone astray. But her life, when he came to know her, didn’t present itself to him that way. Well, perhaps he was biased in his attitude toward her.