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

Before the crosstown trolley came — fix that clearly in mind, see if you couldn’t keep it defined: the way luck worked, bringing you a step nearer to the blurry, intangible goal you aspired to, but never really expected to reach. Quick, just as you got your jitney out to have the fare ready, you never thought so much about what things like that could bode for you, never pondered the augury of Larry’s sitting before two candles at night, striving to write a poem, so visibly, so raptly hushed, and finally so dissatisfied: “I can’t seem to sustain the mood.” Why was that desolate voice, those handsome features, invaded by something akin to despair? Why did the large white hand in the instant of crumpling the paper impinge on the conglomerate night of the bustling 125th Street corner? What was the significance for you of the words of defeat sounding above the din of traffic and overhead subway train? “I can’t seem to sustain the mood.”

Ira climbed aboard the trolley, dropped his nickel in the coin hopper, barely aware of the prolonged look on the face of the conductor cranking the coins down into the little till. He went inside, chose a straw-covered seat to his liking. Oblivious of the lighted, monotonous, miscellaneous ranks of store windows that passed with the trolley’s eastward course toward Park Avenue, passed like a tawdry curtain on which beautiful scenes of the last two weeks were projected, he sighed. And with his old square valise resting on the floor between his ankles, he girded himself for a resumption of all that life in East Harlem had come to mean, life in East Harlem approaching resumption crosstown block by crosstown block.

He had turned aside to scan his journal, feeling guilty about interrupting his narrative (he would have to sooner or later, so much had happened). He could hardly believe that it had been over five years since M had died. He recalled the February day, a week after his birthday, just a few years before she died, when it had snowed continually, phenomenally, for about three days consecutively, piling masses of snow on roof and canopy of the mobile home, the trailer as it was commonly called. Across the court, poor epileptic Diana’s canopy had collapsed under the weight of frozen snow — what a sad sight: a sheet of painted aluminum leaning against her doorway. Snowed, melted, snow froze. The day before yesterday, ice had evidently formed under or between the seams of the sheet-metal covering on the roof of his mobile home, with the result that for the first time since he owned the place, drops of water pattered down from the ceiling onto the shelf where the black box of the transformer between the power source and the IBM PC jr rested. That necessitated setting a pail underneath the trickle to contain it, which Ira had just finished doing when the rapturous warbling of geese or cranes overhead reached his ears. So early in the year, so soon in the winter, the warbling of the wildfowl heading south! Geese or cranes: E come i gru van (his italian was negligible) cantando lor lai, facendo in aer di se lunga riga . . Ah, how beautiful! Cantando lor lai . . He simply had to go outdoors to look at them. He went out on the back porch. Nor was it an easy matter to locate them, so near the sun they flew, and so high, barely visible, a troupe — how could he resist the alliteration? — a troupe of transported troubadours. They seemed to the earthbound wight either disoriented, for they flew round and round warbling, or so delighted within the scope of sunlight that they warbled almost giddily in an azure zone with the bare branches of the young locust tree in the backyard. E come i gru van cantando lor lai . . as the cranes fly singing their lay. Six, seven hundred years ago Dante wrote it, died, and left his legacy to lesser mortals to use, to fuse his words with the sight and sound of wildfowl returning. E come i gru van cantando lor lai . . as the cranes fly singing their lay.

Oh, there was so much he had to write, so much had accumulated during this snail’s pace of his setting down of the narrative, so much that had occurred during the real time of the narrator. His supply of new, highest-quality floppy disks were formatting erratically. What did that mean? Were the disks imperfect, or would he have to disconnect the system, and impose on his ever-obliging wife to drive him and the system to the supplier’s?

Glowering, he looked up at the ceiling: small blessings! Respite. The dripping had stopped.

VIII

Ira gave Mom and Pop quite a start when he walked into the kitchen. A Sunday evening, Minnie was away on a date, and there was always the chance Pop too might be away on an “extra” at an evening banquet, rather than the usual communion or fraternity breakfast.

Instead, both his parents were home, sitting at the round table, not covered with the usual green oilcloth, but with a white linen tablecloth. He could see part of a pan of strudel on the table beside the half-empty teacups. Mom baked strudel only on festive occasions, high holidays.

“Here I am,” he announced in Yiddish. “What’s up? What’s today?”

They stared at him in astonishment. The door he had just entered opened inward, between him and them, and he hadn’t knocked. They stared at him questioningly, a full second or two, until he put his satchel down, before they recognized him. And the Pop exclaimed in rare commendation, as though surprise had stripped away for a moment his usual cursory or tacit salutation, “Now you look like a man! Strong. As a man should look. Azoy . Look, Leah, no? With a man’s front, a man’s will.”

“Yeah? Thanks, Pop. Gee, I forgot about it. Even on the trolley car. No wonder they”—Ira pressed down the shallow, curly mat on his cheeks—“they kept staring at me.”

“Such a comely beard.” Mom reveled at the sight. “Who would believe it could have grown in so short a time — ach! Black, thick. A gantseh yeet .” She got up from her chair. “He speaks nonsense.” She turned to Ira. “Are you hungry? I have a fine barley and mushroom soup, a piece of fricasseed chicken left over.”

“Fine. Left over from what? What day is this?”

“It’s the end of the New Year’s. The end of Rosh Hashanah. You didn’t know?”

“No. How should I — where I was? Rosh Hashanah? Say.”

“You’re growing to be a total goy ,” Pop said indulgently.

“Noo, a gutn yuntiff. A happy New Year,” Mom invoked. “May it be with good fortune.”

“You too,” Ira rejoined shortly. “Boy, my mazel sounds pretty good right now. I’m ready for that barley and mushroom soup. Ah, no wonder I thought I smelled Polish mushrooms when I came in.”

“That you didn’t have there.”

“I’ll say.”

“Well, you haven’t given me a kiss yet, my handsome bearded son. A kiss before I serve you.”

“How can you tell I’m handsome? You can’t see me behind all this pelt.” Ira kissed her soft cheek, and grinned. “I’ll have to get rid of it soon.”

“So glossy. Like a young khassid , a yeshiva student. At least let Minnie see you,” Mom adjured.

“Oh, sure. Where is she?”

“Indeed, as your father says, you have a man’s lineaments, a man’s bearing.”

“Oh, we just — just had some fun. We grew whiskers.”

“And handsome ones. His, too, your friend’s?”

“I think so. Mine were thicker maybe.”

“Like a full-grown man. Noo , you enjoyed yourself?”

“Oh, sure. I even rode a horse. We all did.”

They both laughed. “ A ferd noch! ”

“A horse!” Pop echoed. “What kind of horse?”

“A regular horse, what do you think? With a saddle on him and with stirrups, they call it in English — you put your feet into them.”