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

Ira mused on the sad, olive-skinned face that once was Edith’s, the solicitous reproach in her protrusive brown eyes. He could have been wrong, he could be wrong now. Who was to say? My generous gesture gone astray . . On the other hand, M, his wife of more than fifty years, had never said anything of the sort, or implied anything of the sort, though she was to him the finest among women, the finest person he had ever known. But she was human, fallible, sensible and amused, acknowledging her needs, wants, appetites, foibles. Nevertheless, she was peerless among women. And an artist too, a musician, composer of growing note in her old age: Mother M, as Ira teased her. Well. .

Edith spoke often of her unhappy childhood in Silver City, New Mexico, spoke as they strolled along the country road. Her tales of her inebriated father, her mother’s refusal to have sexual intercourse with Edith’s dad, a former — and fallen — legislator, her mother’s favoring of her younger, inept sister, Lenora, were all familiar to him from earlier in the year. Larry had confided these secrets to his best friend during their evenings alone the previous winter and spring, and Ira had absorbed every word with the greatest of interest. Yet when Edith repeated these tales of personal travail, albeit with a new slant, Ira feigned astonishment and wonderment and thoroughly enjoyed hearing them from Edith in person, as if for the first time.

But many of the stories that Edith told them about literature, especially poetry, were new. And to these passions, she joined the study of anthropology. She long ago in New Mexico had become acquainted with the Navajo Indians. In the company of schoolmates, under the guidance of teachers, she had often ridden out to the Navajo reservation on horseback, and camped out in the desert. She admired the innate dignity of native Indians; she respected their oneness with nature, their reverence for nature. And as she did with all the oppressed, she felt a great sympathy with them, because of their mistreatment at the hands of the white usurpers of their lands, the ignorant and heartless desecrators of Navajo religious traditions and culture, in whose place they left a ruinous legacy of epidemic, depravity, and alcohol. Feeling as she did, it was natural that she would turn to their literature, learn their lore and language and their tribal and ceremonial chants. Later, when she embarked on her doctorate, she combined the two disciplines in a single study of Navajo poetry, its religious content, its rhythms, its structure and forms.

VII

Two or three times during their sojourn in the stone cottage, as the cooler evening skies presaged the imminence of fall, they ventured to walk the long, dusty, though pleasant distance upward to a fine restaurant, almost circular in shape, at the very summit of a hill. The dining room, large and shaded, was sparsely patronized, perhaps because of the lateness of the season, and this lulled their fears of recognition. Edith felt secure when they dined there, so secure that instead of choosing a table in an alcove or next to a wall, she chose one next to a window, because of the lovely view. Every window had its own panorama of mountains. The nearer ranges were solid with conifers, thick as the nap of a carpet, the farther ones less and less shaggy in appearance, until the last ridges seemed to lose opacity and become almost translucent. It was all so new to Ira, gazing out, half enchanted, at mountains, mountains in ridges like motionless waves, waves at the very last ready to blend into sky.

Larry took pleasure in his friend’s rapture. “Enjoy it,” he prompted. “That’s why we’re up here.”

“Gee, do I!”

“You’ve never seen a mountain before?” Edith asked with that sympathy so inseparably a part of her. “Really?”

“In the Carpathians maybe, where I was born. But I don’t remember them. In America,” Ira tried being facetious, “I only know Mt. Morris Park.”

“Where is that?”

“I’m just joking.”

“It’s near where he lives in Harlem,” Larry explained. “It has a wooden bell tower on it. Quite a picturesque place. Without intending to be, you know.”

“Really? I didn’t think there were any mountains in New York. Even hills of any size.”

“That’s the biggest one I knew when I was little,” Ira said, soberly remembering. “You know how it is to be a kid. The top once looked a mile high. But I’ve also seen Bear Mountain.”

“I once intended to write a short story about the bell tower on top. It was a kind of alarm bell, mostly in case of fire,” Larry said.

“Did you?”

“No. It wasn’t so much because I lost interest. I realized I had a wrong view of Ira — and his neighborhood too. Quite different from what I thought.”

“Why didn’t you become acquainted with it? You had Ira here to ask.”

“I know. But — something strange.” Larry looked off through the window at the distant mountains. “That’s something I can’t answer.” He drew in his round lips reflectively, then laughed shortly. “I realized that I really didn’t know a thing about Ira. Or almost. All the things he told me about — say, the ball games where he used to hustle soda — he’s told you about it too.”

“Yes.”

“They’re different.”

“Well, it’s the same way when I went to your brother’s dress-manufacturing loft there on 119th Street. You just take it naturally when you go in there. I get stiff self-conscious.”

“You do? You never said anything.”

“Well.” Ira shrugged deprecatingly. “I’m not used to it.” And a moment later added with uncommon quickness, “Like you, but opposite.”

Edith looked from one to the other, appraisingly. “Larry is so much more worldly. I suppose that’s the chief difference.” And after a few seconds of silence, “Would you like another one of these French rolls?”

“I’ll say. So crisp.” Ira grinned apologetically. “I can’t let this gravy go to waste. My mother says it’s a sin.”

“Does she?” Edith smiled.

“I’ll order it.” Larry raised his arm. “Oh, miss.” And addressing Ira, “We can’t let you do that.”

“What?”

“Sin.”

“Oh.”

Larry and Edith laughed.

“I wonder what either of you would say to a real mountain out West?” Edith said. “To the Rockies, for example.”

Ira noted with satisfaction that more than one roll arrived in the napkin-lined basket. “You mean because they’re so high?”

“Oh, yes, the plain is a mile or more high. The mountains are two or more in some cases.”

“Two miles up!”

“And not in the least friendly, the way these mountains out here are. We’d call them hills out West. People have become lost for days in the mountains near Silver City. In the Gila Wilderness, in the Mogollon, as it’s called. People have actually died before they were found.”

“Well, I—” Ira caught himself. “I almost died in Mt. Morris Park.”

They laughed.

“Are you serious?” Edith asked. It was typical of her to inquire into morbid details. “Did you fall?”

“Oh, no. I just slipped.”

I just slipped, Ira thought. His eyes strayed from the amber monitor of his word processor to the east window of his study — at no great distance loomed the Sandias, two miles high at their crest, exactly the kind of mountains Edith spoke of in a dining room on the summit of a hill in Woodstock seventy years ago. Seventy years ago. Now he resided in the state of New Mexico, the very same part of the country in which she was born and once lived, in which almost certainly his life would come to an end where hers began. Elegiac, wasn’t it? But elegies had nowhere to go. Best gobble a half-tablet of Percocet, like drinking at an oasis, and get back to the desert. .