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

Of the sixteen dollars he earned per week — and a dollar or two at the end of the month for commission on sales — he kept five, gave Mom nine — and with a great flourish, gave Minnie a dollar every payday, to Mom’s beaming and Pop’s grudging approval. A few times she secretly asked him for more, another dollar, which he gave her, without knowing why he was so generous, since he didn’t get anything for it. How could he? Or hardly. To salve his conscience maybe, pay back, or because he was relieved she was going though a transition again, a kind of waning of feeling that allowed the return of ostensible attitudes, the safe and snippy Minnie. Giving her that extra buck was like a propitiatory offering to anxiety.

Why — Ira turned aside to ponder the question — why did he continue to demean himself so? Why was he debasing himself, the Jew, the serious writer, the serious literary man, the artist? Why didn’t he just bowdlerize the story, please his critics, delete his amorous dalliances with Minnie and Stella, as easily as pressing control-Y on his computer? It would take a volume to answer that alone. And was this the place to try to find an answer to his question? For he was posing the question to himself, not in the time of his typescript, or the later time of his first transcription to the word processor, his IBM PC jr , sometime during the mid-eighties, but during the living present, this very moment as it passed. It was something he had earlier promised himself not to do, inject the living present, but remain within the confines of time in which he had set down his narrative. To do otherwise would load the narrative exponentially — and finally it would be out of control. Entanglements would become endless, become the briar wall around Sleeping Beauty. He would never be able to get through it to his narrative — his double narrative. But now he couldn’t resist the diversion into the present moment, the living present.

He would only pause, he promised himself, just long enough to dwell on a few points, although even in doing so, he was breaking the rule, violating the canon. He was allowing room for precedent, for new departures — before the time he had planned to allow them. Well, the question had dogged him long enough: why was he doing this, demeaning himself — and perhaps Jews, the multitude of Jews who had transformed one previous novel into a shrine, a child’s shrine at that — to the extent he was?

The answer seemed to be connected with the same frame of mind that had produced his first novel: anxiety, dread. But now much enlarged, involving his whole people, involving Israel, especially Israel. How and in what way? He feared for Israel’s survival. The question hadn’t come to him in that context, and perhaps the answer he found to it was simply rationalization. Before, in the thirties when he wrote that first novel, the Nazis were coming to power, did come to power. He had reason to fear. Now it was Israel’s survival he feared for, Israel’s viability he had begun to doubt. What his aspersions, his stigmatizings, meant was that to himself he was already setting the stage for, already justifying, Israel’s and the Jews’ disappearance. In other words, in the confusion and alarm in his soul, he feared he was laying a basis for a new Final Solution. Look at the scum these Jews are. Why should they not be annihilated? How else could he say it? It was in the old sense, in the Biblical sense, that they suffered — because they had sinned, because he had sinned. He had been guilty of abomination.

He would have to dwell on it at greater length later. But right now all he could do was to reflect the desolation he felt that Israel would not survive. Desolation like Jeremiah’s. It wasn’t only that the media took every opportunity, like a school of piranhas, to tear at Israel’s flesh — Jew and gentile alike (Who owned the New York Times ? Who owned the Washington Post ?). Damned piranhas! But the facts — no, the acts ! — the acts grew more and more brutal, the acts grew more and more insensate and remorseless, vicious tributaries that would join into a flood sweeping the Jews out of existence. He couldn’t avoid, he couldn’t evade, the conclusion: Israel was doomed.

Ira bought a tin of condoms to use on Stella, who was proving to be a damned good substitute. Stella could be counted on to be the same every Monday, his evening off, when he called at Mamie’s house after supper. Always the same, blond and plump and simpering-ready for his lead, if he could connive a scoundrelly way with her assistance, improvise a subterfuge. She was always ready, ancillary to his opportunism. All he needed was a little luck. No beating around the bush with Stella, no sitting on the edge of a bed, or things like that, wooing against the clock, as he used to do, wooing like an alley cat on a fence. Nothing like that. He got into her first crack out of the box of contingency. Rare was the Monday he missed.

Oh, it was damn funny, and oh, the treachery of it, Iago. About once every other month he would arrive with Zaida’s favorite — a two-pound box of glacéed fruit from Loft’s (at a small discount for employees). Glacéed fruit were the only sweets the old man regarded as sufficiently kosher for him to consume. Perfect show of deference on Ira’s part, perfect tribute, perfect pretext! And yes, the gift rewarded him with a durable vignette. The swift movement of the old boy’s hands as he helped himself to a piece of glacéed pineapple, and immediately, with what astonishing speed, popping the box into his trunk. Yet Zaida’s presence at Mamie’s constituted a new hazard for Ira. One more person to keep an ear and an eye open for. But then, the race of heartbeat, the spindling of wit and senses to the pricking point, the rearing of a pinnacle, the rearing of a steeple of awareness, higher, higher, as if his flat, phlegmatic nature tapered to a singularity by the forces of duplicity, stealth, concentration, craftiness. If only — devoid of conviction, the wish merely flitted in and out of Ira’s consciousness — if only he could invoke all that cunning and wariness, that acumen, foresight, playing cards, playing pinochle, poker, he’d be a shark, a world-beater. He’d clean up. The same in business, if he ever tried it. He’d be rich. If he were as intent on getting the advantage, as sharp, premonitory, in the marketplace, putting it over on someone — oh, hell — he’d be a millionaire! Or now that he was a collegian, if he paid that much attention in class, listened acutely to a lecture, acutely and with the same assiduity, as he took stock of the situation at Mamie’s, he’d be a straight-A student, like Aaron H, or Ivan H. Straight-A, yeah, straight eight. Maxima come lewder. What the hell.

Despite all that, the job at Loft’s, Minnie’s inaccessibility, the furtive gambles at Mamie’s, his sophomore year was a dreary one. Why this was so, Ira in retrospect was never sure. Perhaps because that fall of 1925 was a time of spiritual lethargy, the withering of an intended career, the realization, growing into conviction, that the withering was irreversible, irreversible because he had been deprived of nutrient interest. How could he be expected to pursue a career in biology when his schedule at CCNY was nothing more than an exercise in waiting, waiting while his interests drained and drifted into other fields, disciplines, and finally, the shadowy, nebulous art of literature? He would never, never be a zoologist, biology teacher, or anything of the sort. He seemed headed into a degraded future, a baneful void, with only an iota of luster to light it, a hint of aspiration whose sole credential was the CCNY Lavender in which the “term paper” that earned him a D had appeared — and which Mom kept as a souvenir.