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

It would have been a snap had he been someone else. And he knew he was right. He knew. Of course. Poor woman. Oh, to have been a mannerly roughneck! Some stud off 119th Street: he don’t know no better, see? But then, he wouldn’t have been there, in Woodstock, playing the role of the wool-gathering patsy.

Ivan, you remember my friend Ivan?

— Are you speaking to me?

Yes, Ecclesias. Edith invited him to dinner in her apartment, dinner she had cooked herself, when we were both still CCNY undergraduates. Strong-thewed Ivan, crack hurdler once, and promising physicist, with a score of 168 on the Binet IQ test. And he said, oh, many years later, as we sipped the twelve-year-old bourbon he had presented me with, said, as we sat outdoors in the shade of the mobile home before supper, that on the evening on which Edith had invited him, he had shaved as closely and dressed as neatly as he knew how. He was in a swivet to appear at his most presentable. And they had dinner, he and Edith, and they talked. And after a decent interval, after a proper visit, he thanked her for the delicious meal she had prepared, and took his leave. Here Ivan began to perspire. Even in the reminiscing, he mopped his brow, mopped it repeatedly. And regret, never more palpably — never more palpably did regret wring a man’s features.

“I thought that was all I was invited for,” Ivan said. “To have dinner in her apartment. The things you don’t know when you’re young.” Never more wan did a man look, contemplating his past, nor more slowly, lugubriously, shake his head.

I chortled, Ecclesias, I chortled cruelly at the spectacle of my friend’s rue. “I thought I was the only one imprisoned in my regret,” I said. “Incarcerated in crestfallen repinings, you might say.”

But he wasn’t diverted by my glee, Ecclesias, nor shared it in the least. His was the intelligent face of a man studying the irrecoverable — for the n th time — not to recover a lost sensation, but to alter the course of his life: “Too bad,” he said. “I might have got over those damned inhibitions a lot sooner, inhibitions that were killing me. I could have gone on and got my doctoral at Columbia, instead of an ulcer that cut it short.”

“And swelled Edith’s undergraduate trio to a quartet,” I twitted. “Too bad is right. We could have had something else in common, you and I.” I could just see Edith, after her young guest left, daintily shrugging off mild disappointment before the mirror, while her little hands bunched about an earlobe, removing an earring. .

And Ira cackled again. . as wickedly as he had then. . and thought awhile. No, there was more to it than that. Reverie held inestimable reserves. What if he had said to her — what if he had confessed the truth, as he eventually did, though many months later . While on one of those walks, what if he had done the talking — implored, thrown himself on her mercy, then blurted out, “Edith, there’s my sister, she continually preys on my mind, continually overpowers me. These are the circumstances, this is how it happened. There’s my kid cousin, Stella. My aunt Mamie thinks I come there for the dollar she gives me, her nephew, the indigent collegian. Listen, I know all about sex, sex that’s wrong, horribly wrong. I’m driven wild by it. . ”

Then what? No. Impossible. Impossible for him to confess. Confess against or through the rigidity of the disguise he wore, the mask he lived behind? But how remorseless was the frenzy to wreck time, to demolish the past, the way — so it was said — professional house-wreckers were sometimes so carried away in their excitement to raze an old structure that they actually endangered their own lives. As there was rapture of the depths of the sea that overcame scuba divers, so there was rapture of demolition, demolition of buildings, demolition of the past. And she couldn’t have resisted, could she? This exposure of who he was. She’d have made shift to rescue him. No? Of course she would. The strongest instinct in her was to rescue, to pacify, to allay another’s need. The very thing he was was all the lure he needed. He needed nothing else. Jesus, wouldn’t that have been a tricky situation, had it happened? A love-trust double-cross in that timeless stone cottage in Woodstock? Because in another time, in other surroundings, happen it did—

Assume he laid her in some bosky dell, Ecclesias, as once in fact he did, in some bosky dell by the side of the road, betrayed poor, gentle Larry. Hey, does this latter generation, from which I’m as distant as they will be from me by 2070 A.D., does the word “betrayed,” in the sense I mean it, Ecclesias, have any significance or utility in their vocabulary any longer?

— I doubt it.

Ditto.

Well, anyway, there was a cat.

The cat pawed partway down the rough mortar joints in the stone wall, the way felines do, seeking the lowest elevation before having to drop, and then leaped clear — to the lawn below. It happened that the three inhabitants of the stone cottage were having luncheon in the delightful privacy of the enclosed backyard at the time. They were seated on the white iron lawn chairs around the white filigreed table, and enjoying the fine air and sky as they ate: savory grilled cheddar cheese sandwiches and bacon, tossed salad, fresh-brewed coffee, a repast prepared by Larry, who enjoyed exercising his culinary flair.

Ira followed the animal’s movements: the cat was a calico tabby. They had seen her before. A friendly pussycat. They had spoken about her, and Ira had even learned something new about cats. Calicoes were always females, Edith had informed him, and Larry had added something about the possibility of becoming rich developing a new breed: “You’re going into biology. There’s your chance, Ira,” he spoofed. “Breed a calico male, and your fortune is made. Because then you can produce a stable line of calico cats, a distinct breed. They will be known as the Stigman Calicoes.”

And Ira, facetiously in character, recalling a speech from Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler , replied, “Fancy that, Hedda.”

Motley orange, the feline landed on the grass; then leisurely, tranquilly, traversed the turf between wall and table, and in mélange of pigments approached. The question stirred within Ira’s mind whether he should apprise Edith of the animal’s presence; had she noticed it? Would mention of it be superfluous? Or did he refrain from doing so — as it would seem to him later — deliberately, out of a subliminal curiosity to ascertain how Edith would react, when the cat was close by? Would the cat surprise her, and if so, what would she do? And yet, why should he want to learn how Edith would react? In what obscure way was that connected to the aberrant, refractory, sullied promptings that had reached such a pitch those few times he walked with her alone?

He saw the animal disappear under the table. A second or two passed, a calm interval, almost long enough to dispel, to dissipate Ira’s negligible suspense. And then—

She screamed! She screamed hysterically, piercingly, at the very extremity of terror, her entire visage concentric to the wide-open screaming mouth. Ira knew why. But not Larry. Poor fellow, he jumped to his feet, he rushed to her side. The color had drained from his fine young face, and frightened, bewildered, with outstretched hands, he sought to protect Edith — from what? From no visible danger, but as if she had a seizure.

The startled cat sprang out from under the table, scooted across the grass for the wall—

“It’s just a cat,” said Ira, knowing full well that his warning, his advisory, came too late.

She had thought it was a skunk, she explained, seconds later, after she regained her composure. A hydrophobic skunk, she added, implausibly. “We were all deathly afraid of hydrophobic skunks out West.”