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

“With her, the Professora?” Mom asked incredulously.

“Of course! You should see her ride a horse. A little woman like that. Better than we could.”

“ Azoy . A professora on a horse.”

“A professora on a horse!” Pop mimicked. “What else? She’s from the West, no? You see them in the moving pictures in the West. Men and women ride horses.”

“To many moving pictures you took me, my generous spouse, that I should behold.” And to Ira, “You ate well?”

“Oh, yeah. Plenty. Larry’s a good cook. He did a lot of it.”

“What did you eat?”

“Oh, bacon and eggs for breakfast, soup, sandwiches for lunch—”

“ Treife . Naturally. Your grandfather should know.”

“Yeah,” Ira grinned. “I worried about him a lot. We sometimes had pork chops for supper. Broiled outdoors. Boy, they’re good.”

“Indeed. And lived?”

“In a wonderful house. Made of old stone. You should see it. Clinging vines around it, you know.” Ira gesticulated in spirals. “And outside a beautiful yard. A gardener came twice while we were there. He mowed the lawn, trimmed the bushes — with long scissors.”

“ Azoy? Noo . People have money. Why shouldn’t it be beautiful?”

“You wouldn’t live in the country anyway,” said Pop.

“Such country as you would have chosen, indeed not,” Mom retorted. “Live in another Galitzianer Veljish. In a hovel. Without water. Dung in the dark. The mongrel on the road is news—”

“Here she goes again, the mongrel on the road is news.”

“Go. With you there’s no talking.”

“All right. All right,” Ira arbitrated. “We’re not in Galitzia.”

“You may say that again. And praise the Lord we’re not.”

“The second night Minnie celebrated the yuntiff with her high school friend, Bessie. She ate there. We ate here. She stayed there overnight.”

“Oh, yeah?” Second night of Rosh Hashanah. Saturday night, last night. Pop would have been home most of today. Might have gone to shul for a couple of hours. Mom wouldn’t have shopped today. No pushcarts anyway until tonight, the way Jewish holidays ended. Oh, well. . “I’m not going to shave it off till tomorrow. She can see it in the morning.” Again he rubbed his beard. “I got a bush, haven’t I?”

“A what?”

“A bush, a bush,” he said in Yiddish, gesticulating. “Don’t you know? It grows on the ground.”

“You know what? Come with me tomorrow,” Mom urged eagerly. “Tomorrow morning I’ll have to go shopping. Let Zaida, Mamie, see I have a son with a beard.”

“What? Tomorrow? In daylight?”

“But you rode home already in a trolley car.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know about it.”

“Timid. Shrinking,” Mom chided. “What difference?”

“Why do you have to wait until tomorrow? Let him go now,” Pop urged. “Go now!” he enjoined Ira. “It’s dark, it’s night. Who’ll see you?”

“The very truth!” Mom agreed enthusiastically. “I beg you, Ira. Go show yourself to Zaida. How the old man will rejoice! It’s Sunday night. The whole family will be there. My brothers—”

“Indeed, the whole tribe,” Pop added.

“Nah. You want me to go all the way to 112th Street?” Ira demurred. “Just to show my whiskers.”

“I beg you,” Mom implored. “Be a good child. This once, for my sake. Is it a hardship for young legs like yours to stride a mere six blocks—”

“It’s eight blocks. Not six blocks. And crosstown all the way to Fifth Avenue. I’m hungry as hell.”

“Let it be eight blocks. How long will it take you to stride there and back? Say a gutn yuntiff and be gone? I’ll have supper on the table waiting for you the minute you step through the door.”

“Let the old man see you,” Pop seconded in rare concurrence. “It won’t harm you. Compel him to admit, ‘Well, Chaim sent me a grain of comfort for a change.’ The old shit. Noo? The others will be there too: my purblind sister-in-law, my well-disposed brothers-in-law—”

“I beseech you!” said Mom.

“Okay, okay,” Ira acquiesced. “Lucky it’s dark. A yeet mit a boort on 119th Street.”

“My beloved son! I’ll take out — I’ll wash everything in the satchel. Right away.”

“Never mind.” Ira raised his voice. “I’m gone, I’m gone. Jeez, to tear myself away from that mushroom and barley. I want you to know I’m doing you a favor.”

“My precious child. Go, go.”

And go he did. He left the kitchen, skipped down the flight of tenement stairs to the hallway, and from hallway to stoop to street. The three or four familiar faces he had passed when he turned the corner of Park Avenue into 119th Street on the way home from the trolley hadn’t recognized him. Even Irish Mrs. Grady, the Little Tusk, as Mom called her in Yiddish, because she had only the one front tooth, didn’t recognize him, though she had seen him close by many times. The poor, thin, angular woman, who always flushed animatedly when she talked to Mom, didn’t recognize him, though they passed each other in the light of Biolov’s drugstore window.

At a quick pace, he wheeled downtown around the corner of 119th and Park Avenue, hurried in the dark of the railroad trestle, through the familiar, frowsy neighborhood that became more Jewish with every block south. Up the hill to the crosstown trolley line at the crest on 116th Street, and down the hill to the Sunday-night recrudescence of the pushcart market that began at 115th Street, hawkers and shoppers leaving the carbide glare under the massive street canopy of the railroad, he drove his legs to 112th Street. Crazy to go, to defer his supper for the sake of displaying his whiskers to Zaida. But for once Pop and Mom were in harmony. So to make them happy. . let’s go.

And around the corner west a block to Madison, and weakening with haste, railing even more sulkily at himself for having acceded to his parents’ plea, he drove his legs another block to Fifth Avenue, and then another dozen houses to midblock, reached Mamie’s house. Up the flight of stone stairs, and panting, he swiveled the ratchety doorbell key, and to his surprise the door opened before he removed his hand from the knob, opened to a medley of Yiddish and Yinglish voices of his relatives calling out, “Who?” “Hoozit?”

They were nearly all there, Zaida’s progeny as well as the spouses of those who were married — and a few of their children, those who lived in Harlem, his first cousins, Yettie, four-year-old blond daughter of his aunt Ella, frisky red-haired Hannah, Mamie’s brat, and Stella, blue-eyed, blond, and pudgy, glared at covertly, peremptorily, to compensate for her total inaccessibility, by Ira, who realized he had vitiated another ambush by this premature visit, burning ambush; no, the altered pun lacked pungency even when contrasted with the romance in whose midst he had been just a few hours ago. Hell, an option shot. “Hello. Hello,” he called out without enthusiasm, and thrust open the door.

In various homely attitudes, they were gathered at the end of the long hallway in the front room about the large, square dining table under its multi-stained, taupe-colored tablecloth: a dozen or more people, all ages, relations, enclosed by wallpapered walls lit by the bright unpleasant light of the cluster of ceiling incandescents. Only Baba was gone. Ten years and a year more had passed since some of them had come here from Europe; uncouth, noisy greenhorns, they had charged into the kitchen in the house on 115th Street to gargle salt water, or something of the sort, and sent him wandering off in vast disappointment to Central Park to drink from a mountain rill. Bullshit. If he could wave a wand, make them vanish, as he used to wish at home with Mom and Pop so he could get at Minnie, he could give Stella, who was there with the rest, a real backscuttle, just what he needed. Jesus, all that pure romance charged up in him would have to find an outlet.