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

He should have gone out of the house with Mom on Sunday morning. Anh, he knew he couldn’t do it. Besides, why? Mom would ask why. What a habit — some habit — to have gotten into — from the age of twelve. And now, Minnie with a crush on him. He had to be careful, careful. Try to figure. You’re cool now, cool. In another three or four hours you wouldn’t be. Figure, for Christ’s sake, figure. It’s a goddamn calamity. She went from taboo, the goy , to taboo you, Jew-brother. All right, you said that. Figure. .

Figure. .

A job maybe. Some kind of job. What kind? He had heard talk in the ’28 alcove about jobs at Loft’s candy store. Part-time work there after three o’clock. . weekdays, Saturdays, he had heard: “a real sweet job,” some sophomore wag had cracked. All day Sunday. They wanted clerks to substitute for the regular help on their days off. All day Sunday . He’d have to give it a try. Loft’s or any job like that. Christ, with Minnie like that, if he ever tried anything like that again, he’d get caught, he couldn’t resist it.

As he gulped down a third cup of Mom’s coffee, his hands began to tremble, just a bit. As Minnie lay down for her Sunday-morning nap in the bedroom, he imagined what would happen if Pop ever caught them. Came in unexpectedly in his waiter’s outfit and saw him in his underwear, barefoot. If he wanted to lay a hand on him, he’d go crazy. All those goddamn beatings the sonofabitch gave him, the dreams he used to have when he was a kid, after a beating, trying to pick a knife off the table to stab Pop with, but it was stuck there. Jesus Christ, he really would go crazy, hit back, grab anything, any goddamn knife. See Pop lying there, bleeding on the scuffed linoleum. Killed maybe, who knows? Dead. Cops. Courts. Jail and judges. Mom without support. Crushing disgrace. Bowed down by it, lifelong, like Atlas. And Larry thought he felt bad about his widowed mother. He wasn’t like Ira. He hadn’t made his mother a widow as Ira could his. Jesus, maybe the best thing, go in there where Minnie was sleeping, and bust her one — right now — bam! — right on the jaw. What an aubade. Cure her from being stuck on him. Cure her for good.

Slowly the terror crept over him, the deep, hair-raising horror he hadn’t felt since plane geometry days — there it was, that fracture inside him, separating him within: murder. Murdher. While she slept in the bedroom on a Sunday morning, murder her. Oh, Jesus. He had to find a way out.

The nearest thing to death that the living can know of death is in the memory of old times once lived. He would soon be ninety, Ira thought. He would be ninety in eight months. Incredible, wasn’t it? And how many times will you say it? he asked himself. How many times will you exclaim the petrified, old fact in wonder? 1995 this year, 1925 that. What do you want of me? He could hear the echo of Yiddish inflection in his ear, though they would have said, What do you want from me. Seventy years ago, and you ask me to recall all this? Or embellish it, trick it out with frill and fancy. Ach, for a guy who has mangled his life — or cooperated in the mangling — there seems so damned little use in setting it down, how much less in the re-creation, in the artifice of fable. But it must do for now, tide me over this low ebb. Who said he was supposed to or expected to present a unified piece of fiction, being crazed and cross-hatched as an old saucer?

When aging Dr. Newman, psychiatrist at the Augusta State Hospital in Maine, where Ira worked for four years as an attendant, finished reading TSE’s Waste Land , he was convinced Eliot had gone through a “psychotic episode,” as the good doctor phrased it, had suffered a brief psychotic interlude at the time he wrote the poem. Said Ira at the time: “I guess we were all more or less suffering from the same aberration, or the poem wouldn’t have spoken so unerringly to us and for us.”

The good doctor was unconvinced. He was still of a piece, the elderly man replied, and that was why he could recognize symptoms of the poet’s psychosis during the writing of his famous poem. (Of course, no one at the time knew of the important role Ezra Pound had played in the poem’s creation, or at least in determining its final form.) Born many years ago in Latvia, Dr. Newman was still of a piece; his psyche had stabilized firmly and satisfactorily within his time , and perhaps that was why he failed to understand what happened to succeeding generations of highly sensitive men and women of letters, increasingly fragmented in their diverse ways, and increasingly hostile to the society in whose midst they lived.

Four hours later. Autumn afternoon in 1925, in the kitchen, alone, desire as shriveled as his dick. Oh, Jesus, what a life. White oilcloth-covered washtubs, and brass-faucet sink, window on the gray washpole in the backyard, and door between window and washtubs to the toilet. College texts on the table. That was the worst of it, what a mix. He had told himself a hundred times before, if only they had stayed on the Lower East Side, if only he had gone to work, maybe everything would have been different. Well, make a compromise. Try to obliterate Sunday. Monday morning go to the Loft’s employment office, the way he had gone to the P&T office, and fill out an application. Show initiative.

But think — Ira paused at the keyboard — you had never exorcised the violence, you had survived it, driven it underground, but not far. When Jess had just entered his adolescence, think of that afternoon he talked back to you: verged on insolence: sassy. You struck him. You didn’t slap. In fact, you scarcely knew how to slap, had unlearned it after all those years, literally, of training to box, in the aftermath of that beating you took on the waterfront handing out CP leaflets. You hardly knew how to slap; you knew only how to hook, like a boxer, with thumb down and knuckles forward, even though your hand was partly open (ah, would that it had fallen off! Fallen off before you batted one of your sons! Oh, those vain, Yiddish implorings). The kid was ungainly, seemed without instinct of self-preservation. Hershel, the younger, on the other hand, immediately dropped to the floor out of reach, out of harm’s way, the moment his father lashed out at him. But Jess uttered a cry of pain, swung around — and struck his head on the corner of the newel post he was standing next to, struck his temple on the very corner, and grabbed his head. That was sufficient not only to cool Ira’s wrath, but send him into a transport of dismay at what he had done: “Goddamn it, what the hell did you do that for?” he swore at his son. “For Christ’s sake, you always do the goddamnedest things to yourself!” He sheltered his son’s head, massaged his son’s temple.

Now, whether that had anything to do with what followed, there was no telling; whether the subsequent symptoms were the outcome of impact of the boy’s temple with newel-post corner, or simply the result of a change taking place in adolescence (Ira devoutly hoped it was the latter). His son developed what the doctor termed an equivalent epilepsy . With a strange, fixed expression on his face, Jess would take off his shirt and undershirt, because — he said — he couldn’t bear to wear them — his skin was burning. What were the other symptoms? Ira searched the ceiling for some clue to memory, saw only the yellowish patch of the leak where ice had apparently forced the seams of the sheet-metal roof. He’d have to ask M what the other symptoms were. Not the typical petit mal seizures which he had come to recognize during his four years as a state hospital attendant, the momentary loss of consciousness, the brief period of disorientation, but something else. M took Jess to the Portland General Hospital for tests, encephalograms. They showed nothing conclusive.