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

So that’s how overwrought she was, hysterically, morbidly overwrought, Ira thought. Why? Was it because of the strain she was under, the strain resulting from her defiance of conventions: risking her position at the university for the sake of some feminist principle about her rights to an affair with a younger man, a freshman student? No. The intensity, the abandonment of that scream, went way beyond that. It was shattering, it was corporeal. And once again crowded into Ira’s consciousness misshapen conjectures, spontaneous and insurgent and yet so overweening they made him wonder at their very peremptoriness. They usurped every other surmise, so insistent were they, though embodied out of nothing, out of lascivious intimations, as sure of themselves as if he were dealing with something definite, a textbook problem, and no other answer was acceptable, only one: she wasn’t deriving the kind of reward she had risked coming here for. She wasn’t getting the comfort, the release, the easement, her lover should have been able to give her: the assuagement of anxiety, relaxation, remission of tension — maybe just the assurance that this being together meant they would stay together. That scream! So rending, what else could it mean? All right, he was a dope, Ira conceded, he always got snagged on the one thing, always on the same thing. But what else could it mean? If something wasn’t wrong with him, with his intuition of what was wrong with her, then what the hell was wrong with Larry? Jesus, that was a funny one—

It was a funny one, all right. Ira removed his hands from the keyboard, thrust them halfway into his trouser pockets: that was the worst of being a novelist, especially an autobiographical novelist. You knew what the actual answer was. You knew what she had expected from her lover. And then you found yourself in a dilemma. Protect the memory of the guy you once loved? Your friend, your benefactor in so many ways, that gentle, sweet, generous guy who was Larry. Or reveal the truth? Dilemma horn number one. Dilemma horn number two: should you resolve the mystery right here and now, and deprive the narrative of its suspense? Strange. He had ventured into territory that as far as he knew, few if anyone had ventured into before. You met your past, vis-à-vis an amber monitor.

Strange, Ecclesias, you know I was right? Guided by sensibility alone.

— You mean right in part.

Very well, right in part. It was Jake B, an engineer-turned-editor, a hard-boiled sort, who told me, Jake B, another of Edith’s transient lovers, whom I met years and years later, at the old Chelsea Hotel, that landmark of a posh past on West 23rd Street. Jake stretched out his hand, his countenance glowing with pleasure in every aged seam: “Ah, Ira, the same youth, but now a man!” It was in him Edith confided the fact, the story of the young lover’s premature release, and it was he who told it to me.

— It happens that I know all about it.

Oh, you do? In that case I’m very grateful to you. How do you manage to arrive at such intimate knowledge?

Something was wrong with Larry. That’s all that sifted through. Ira could bet on it. In the very midst of reading Ulysses , the film of unappeasement on Edith’s face, when he took that last walk with her, would make the closely printed lines on the page ripple afterward, ripple through Bloom’s words in a flattened sine curve: “A nation is the same people living in the same place.” That sad-eyed appeal could give him a hard-on, like the predator hard-on Stella gave him, or maybe the opportunistic, windfall hard-on at the prospect of seclusion here in the isolating expectancy of clumps of roadside trees, instead of blistered kitchen walls. No, no. What was Bloom saying, “A nation is the—” Don’t walk with her, Ira ordered himself. You hear what I said, Stigman? You got bats in your belfry. Finish this goddamn book you’re reading — while you’ve got a chance. .

Came the end of their stay in the cottage, time to pack, to separate and depart. They left as discreetly as they had come. Edith, via a taxi from the cottage, took an earlier train back to the city. Larry and Ira took a later one, after a hike to the station. Hilarious, as though they were intoxicated with release from the strain they had been under the past two weeks, Larry from the constraint of an enforced maturity, Ira from the constraint of his model behavior — their mirth mounted with every passing mile aboard the train. At the train terminal on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, they were howling like seventeen-year-olds in Dr. Rickets’s elocution class, with laughter — over everything and nothing.

They crossed on the ferry to Manhattan at dusk — convulsed by each and every silly remark. Youthful again, all but juvenile, young companions free of all responsibility, they sat briefly in the weakly lit, stale-tobacco-laden, bulging midships of the ferry, object of curiosity of fellow passengers. Then, overcome by new fits of hilarity, they left, left for the inner, vehicular area. There they skulked in the deepest shadow, where they could double up with laughter, merely catching glimpses of each other’s fortnight’s growth of beard — or when some startled motorist still behind the steering wheel of his car chanced to spy them through the windshield.

It was not until they walked from the ferry slip to the escalator of the high dark Ninth Avenue El, scaling overhead like a sable sash about the evening, that their laughing jag, as Larry called it, subsided. With merry so-longs and the jolly “Abyssinias” of high school days, they parted, Larry for the train that would take him to the near Bronx — and to a house of mourning, he suddenly recalled — and Ira for the crosstown trolley that would take him to East Harlem.

On the corner where Ira waited, alone again, for the trolley, an unreal soberness began to enfold everything about him, and through which everything, passing cars and pedestrians, moved. He had laughed too much, and now he was paying for it, paying for it with almost painful assessment of the past two weeks. Yes, with constraints removed, they had both snapped back, reverted to the ones they really were. But it didn’t matter as far as Ira was concerned — or did it? He was just a witness, a spectator — as yet. Something in him had changed; he was sure of it. But where Larry was concerned it did matter, or it ought to matter, a lot. Wasn’t that the whole purpose of the tryst that Edith had arranged for them to have at Woodstock? That Larry would grow closer to her level, bind their intimacy more tightly together? Something like that. Was he all wrong? Larry hadn’t grown, Larry hadn’t developed. All that guffawing and all that squealing with laughter at every word when homeward bound, it was as if Larry had shared an escapade with his boon companion, shared a unique adventure, and not grown at all in the serious outlook, serious intimacy Edith hoped they would share. So she had failed, she had failed, Edith had failed.

If anything, it was Ira who felt himself genuinely and permanently changed, drawn closer to Edith’s level, to understanding even better the gravity that imbued her. Was it the walking with Edith alone through woodland paths that somehow diffused her personality through him? And despite all his shameful flaws and his slum Jewish rearing, his intellectual backwardness, his arrested masculinity, despite all that, compatibility of minds kept growing between them. While Larry, left behind in the stone cottage, was trying to write a poem — and tearing it up in frustration — Ira’s sense of consonance with Edith kept increasing, empathy kept growing. He could feel himself gain in insight when with her, grow toward equality, psychologically. What was it that kept nourishing his sense of confidence? Was it the detecting of that film of discontent on her face? Was it watching the two lovers together? Or was it his moiling through a book, the Ulysses , that made him feel grown in comprehension? Or the cat, the cat! Edith’s shattering scream. Jesus, if that wasn’t a trick of destiny, La Forza del Destino , as Caruso and Gigli sang on the record, that things should turn out that way. Pivot in Woodstock, yes. Christ, try and figure things out.