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

Though he had again become her “stupid brud,” Minnie tried, with utmost solicitude, to cheer him up, when she saw his evident despond. Mom and Pop were around, but her tenderness no longer made him scowl apprehensively. It was as if that same tenderness was always there, just took different forms. It was strange. The sisterly seemed to be winning out, sisterly concern, sympathy. Was that how she attained to maturity, something he had gloomy presentiment he wasn’t capable of, wasn’t anyway, and he was two years older? No matter his exaggerated pose of indifference, his slighting words, and what offended her most — his bored yawn — she persisted in her encouragement: “Don’t worry. Don’t get so downhearted. You’ll write a book yet, and I’ll type it, the way I did for The Lavender . You remember?”

He did. “Yeah,” he said skeptically.

She stroked his arm. He kept his face dour. No point in arousing suspicions at home, when nothing was happening anymore.

Doldrums, that sophomore year, interspersed with, punctuated by, excitements that left him more hollow, more gnawed by tedium than before. His college work, with the exception of his Composition 2 class, was substandard. He was failing in Calculus; he was doing so poorly in Physics he had to drop the course. He was doing no better than C work in Qualitative Analysis. His instructor in Descriptive Geometry could scarcely conceal his vexation when he looked at Ira’s mechanical drawing. His college career was a hopeless mess.

Ira felt he ought to drop out, quit college, apply to Loft’s for an all-day job behind the candy counter. If it weren’t for Mom’s fixation on his having a career, he would. Christ, what a career! Except for Composition 2, Professor Kieley’s course in descriptive writing, his college career was a disaster. It was like walking on a treadmill up in limbo. No future. No prospects. No preference in profession. High school teaching positions were reportedly harder and harder to obtain, especially for Jews, CCNY Jews — it was an open secret that they were being weeded out. And what would he teach, if he no longer felt interested in biology? English? Even worse. He already had a D in the subject, and even though he was doing A work how, standards were stricter — and worst of it was, he hadn’t the least inclination to teach English. He already felt intuitively he had no aptitude either. So he would be left with elementary-school teaching by default. Pop was right. A malamut , that’s all he would be: teaching grade-school kids, like Mr. Lennard, the goddamn fag, like Mr. Kilcoyne, the dairy farmer, Mr. Sullivan, the crippled public accountant, the only one who sensed that he had more than standard ability. Nothing with nothing, as they said in Yiddish, nothing but a wisp of hope that he might be a writer — someday maybe. Nah, he was ruined.

Ruined, ruined. Dumb. Sluggish. Shrinking. Sneaky. Abhorrent. Perverted, what else but perverted? He had fucked his sister, and when he no longer could, his kid cousin. Got a kick out of it, a double kick out of it — maybe not as vile, as violent, as with Minnie those special times, but good enough — like Joe, that sonofabitch who lured him way back when to Fort Tryon Park. He didn’t have to lure Stella, but, ah, Jesus, that was good. Once a week, once a week, on a Monday, make a sordid tour to Mamie’s. Right? Feel the exaltation, exultation of having violated, perpetrated — ah, the only relief he got: maneuver the fat little heifer into a half-minute of perilous privacy in the front room, precarious privacy, while everybody in the kitchen might be talking — what a tight squeeze, wow! — stick it in for a half-minute of furious, silent spraddle. He didn’t give a goddamn what anyone would have thought, if they knew — and who knew? He ravened, he lusted for the prohibited, the proscribed — Jesus, what would the heinous be like? The really heinous, like what? What was heinous? He couldn’t imagine.

But meanwhile he’d have to be satisfied by trampling on the deep shadows under the Park Avenue trestle on Monday night. The anticipation buoyed his climb up to 116th Street. He quickened his pace as he reached 112th Street, Mamie’s street, and felt at least for a while alacrity, the elation of shaking off the staleness of existence, the insidious stupor of his aimlessness, his torpid despair that he was scarcely conscious of — but Minnie guessed. And instead of appreciating her sympathy, he could only recall the instances when he wanted to hook it into her. Jesus, no question he was ruined. .

But it was on those same Monday nights that Larry, now a classmate at CCNY, had begun to ask Ira to accompany him on his visits to Edith’s, and more than ask — to urge. It was hard to decline, although at first Ira did. “Why don’t you go see her weekends? I mean, you got all weekend,” he had suggested.

“I know that,” was Larry’s smiling reply. “But I’d like you to be there. Edith would too.”

“Edith would? You sure?” Jesus, his one chance at a piece o’ tail. “When? In the evening?”

“Yes. Have supper at my house. And then we go downtown together. What say?”

Ira hesitated.

“Try it this Monday. You know, she hasn’t seen you since Woodstock. Come on, show her you haven’t disappeared. We talk a lot about you, and I keep telling her you’re working after school, but she’d like to see you.”

“Yeah?” He seemed to hear a rumor in the words “she’d like to see you,” a tiny intimation of a future dimension, a promise. It was only at Edith’s that some meaning toward a future might take shape. Only at Edith’s, nowhere else. “All right. Monday.”

“Fine!” Larry was genuinely glad. “Tell you the truth, I’m happy you’re coming too. What’s a few minutes gabbing in the alcove? Even my mother has asked about you. My family, in-laws and the rest.”

“Yeah, well. You know how a job is.”

So Ira went. . sardonic, strangely morose — at the utter jumble of his own mind, its peculiar villainy, of which Larry could guess nothing, not the sacrifice of gratification at Mamie’s. Oh, it was all so confused, so goddamn confused. He wasn’t accompanying Larry for nothing; Ira sensed his ulterior motives: he came to Edith’s with postponed lubricity, longing. There would have to be requital of some kind. Somehow. Someday. Or was it all just dumb fantasy? The dainty payoff for the foul. Nah.

From a pinnacle of purest enchantment, as Larry’s affair with Edith had seemed to Ira in the beginning, to the high, dreamy, ambivalent valley of Woodstock, it now leveled into a more comprehensible, more predictable plateau. With the arrival of the long-awaited, polished and dazzling Rhodes Scholar, Richard Smithfield, from fabled Oxford, Edith and Iola began to go their separate ways. Soon after Edith’s return from Woodstock, when the two women still shared their apartment on St. Mark’s Place, Richard, with John Vernon trailing him animatedly, called — at exactly the time when Larry and Ira were there. Richard was faintly amused at Edith’s sophomore lover, who was, despite all his urbanity, clearly at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the elegant Oxford graduate. As for Ira, he was totally tongue-tied. Completely abashed, Ira listened in awed silence to the other’s felicitous speech, and watched entranced the graceful movements of the superb, clean-flavored gentleman, whose very perfection summoned up visions of Continental drawing rooms, elite and exquisite. Would Ira ever forget Richard speaking of the flavor of borscht, borscht which he had eaten at the Russian Bear restaurant? — that it was delightfully dill. Dill! Borscht! And when he took his leave, after his brief, demigodlike visit, he said, with such impeccable protocol: “It desolates me to leave you.”