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

One of his most salient recollections of their dining in the summit restaurant was his recurring qualm of embarrassment, to which he could scarcely refrain from giving utterance: he had no money, not even for the tip to the frilly-aproned young woman who waited on them and brought him repeated servings of rolls. And at Edith’s and Larry’s assurances that it was all right, they’d take care of it, “I’m especially conscious about tips,” he confessed.

“You are? Why?” Edith asked. “I honestly just make a practice of giving them ten percent of the bill.”

To which Larry added, “That’s what everyone does. What makes you so sensitive about tipping?”

“You forget? My father’s a waiter.”

“Oh, is that it?” Edith smiled at him sympathetically. “I suppose it’s bound to change your thinking about them.”

Larry burst into a laugh. “I was a singing waiter. I told you about Copake. It was only a few weeks, but I have to feel self-conscious about it. I’ve been initiated.”

“That’s right. I forgot.”

“Don’t worry about it, Ira. You’re our guest,” Edith reassured him.

“Thanks.”

And they went riding on saddle horses. It was the first time in Ira’s life that he had been astride a horse. How politely bemused was the look on the face of the attendant at the riding stable at the sight of this curious trio: a petite, mature woman in riding breeches and boots, completely at home in the saddle, easily managing her mount, accompanied by two fuzzy-bearded youths, the one, self-confident and handsome, who had evidently acquired a little experience as a horseman, the other, who obviously had none.

Ira trailed Edith and Larry, who were walking their mounts, undoubtedly out of consideration for his inexperience. Conscious of the ludicrous figure he cut on a horse, Ira was glad to get out of sight of the stableman. Only the equally ludicrous overlap of memory: of the kid who was himself behind Pop’s favorite horse, Billy, riding in Pop’s milk wagon; or sitting in the driver’s seat alone while Pop entered a small workshop with a few pint bottles of milk in his steel tray. America, America: a step at a time, a phase at a time. Here he was, from riding in his father’s milk wagon through a cobblestoned city street, to mounted on a saddle horse riding over a country lane. And how pristine, how rare with hue, with shape and silhouette, with spareness, with contentment of being, the rural landscape poised toward assuming the crispness of autumn, audible in the crackle of a few fallen leaves under the stamping hooves of the living beast he rode. Assuming autumn both audibly and visible. For overhead, the branches of trees wore a garb that had become mottled now, a fabric of variegated green and brown. Grown dry and sparse, boughs yielded supremacy to sky, retreating in solitary leaves drifting down. And the rail fences, rustic and weather-beaten, crooked, gray staves, split and knotty, rail fences parted the dirt road from the stubbled field on the other side. How daintily Edith cantered ahead, wheeled her mount, and cantered back, so modest and unassuming, almost apologetic of her equestrian mastery, petite, sober-eyed woman, against autumnal azure in a primordial landscape.

The cat—

A few times, a very few times, Edith and Ira walked to the outskirts of the town, where she purchased an item or two from the general store there. Or again, they walked on a wooden path, Ira duly and respectfully keeping his distance, except when he felt he ought to take her arm a moment in token support over some obstacle. Once or twice she patted his hand in thanks. And the difference in the coolness of her hand and the heat of his own startled him: as if he were betraying what he thought, and what he thought was so tightly sealed within him, fantasies immured so tightly, no faintest trace could be detected. Still, incorrigible intimations kept cropping up in his mind, intimations that had no business being there. He was faithful, he was faithful to his friend. He strove to adhere, as impeccably as he could, a veritable stickler, to his notions of the role he was expected to play according to the tacit provisions of the covenant of his friend’s romance with his English instructor. He strove to behave in such a way as to be a credit to the code of boon companionship, a credit to his own integrity, to his sense of appropriate behavior in such a situation. The least he could do to repay Edith and Larry for the trust they vested in him — and for all the privileges that went with it — was to comport himself with rigorous loyalty, conform to every tenet of uprightness — to behave with honor.

Yes, honor, that was the word that clung to purity of thought, in spite of self and the flicker of perverse promptings. He was determined to shield Edith from the brunt of his nasty world, and yet at the same time, he wished to draw Edith inside his world, a peculiarly complex world dominated by complex numbers, imaginary numbers, where ordinary rules often applied with extraordinary results, where he could think of Edith with chivalry and knightly probity, where both could abide by the rules of fairytales. While he wished to shield her from his own unimaginable bondage, he believed he hankered for her to recognize what he was, was endowed with; was destined one day to win her consent, her passionate consent, because he sensed it was that more than anything else which appealed to her, that kind of depth, of range, of imagination, abominable, desperate, reckless, but boundless. Hadn’t he done those things? Wasn’t he that way? He had breached the margins of fantasy; he could reach out and collate all manner of loony tag ends of the world. He could do all that, and at the same time do his utmost to act, to try to think and feel as he was expected to — as he thought he was expected to: be preoccupied with grasshoppers and with Joyce’s Ulysses ; seem phlegmatic toward sex, seem inoculated against romance, seem oblivious. And he thought he succeeded. He prided himself that he had — oh, that was no trick for him, that kind of dissembling— except how to dissemble completely, how to dissipate the remnant of that familiar and impermissible incitement that caused a recalcitrant shifting from his vile and predatory practices into the chaste world of Edith and Larry’s love affair.

He was sure that was it, that it was his vileness that spawned those despicable, immoral notions when he was alone with her, that he needed only to take her hand in his, that she wanted him to take her hand in his, transfer the heat of it to her coolness, impress his desire upon her, not by a token, not by a tentative touch, but by forceful possession. And she was prepared to answer in kind. If he took the initiative to carry matters further, she was poised to reward betrayal of friend with betrayal of lover. What nuttiness! Jesus! He was projecting his own shameful proclivities. That was all it was, nothing more. Make a pass, like a mug from his East Harlem street. Make a pass, as if she were — not Stella — he didn’t make passes at her; he got right down to business first chance, wasted not a second. Nor as if she were some floozy on 119th Street, Helen, receptive in the hallway, as Petey Lamb had prompted. Jesus, he didn’t know how to make a pass at someone refined. What would he do? What a fool he’d make of himself, worse than a fool, reveal who was really behind that artless, that pretend-abstracted, callow dreamer he strove so earnestly to appear. Disastrous. Wow! What would happen to her opinion of him, to his reputation? And if she told Larry — boyoboy! His contempt. No, no. Never mind the impulse in him that she aroused by her intangible tension, the meaningful momentary gravity of her features, that emanation of aloneness, like something sealing the two together. Nothing doing. It was a figment of his own construing. Lucky he had sense enough, a last iota of self-control — shyness enough, thank God — to interpret things right, keep himself in check, avert exposure, fiasco. Boy! Lucky he didn’t get a hard-on just then—