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

But then, as 1925 pressed toward its wintry close, Ira would discreetly turn his chair sideways, so that his back was mainly but not entirely toward the lovers. Not to seem rude, as if he disapproved, the way he sat didn’t preclude occasional glimpses of close embrace by the two figures stretched out full-length on the studio couch, nor erotic speculations — while he ruminated intermittently over passages in The Waste Land .

Why? Why? Why did Larry want him there — and Edith too? Was he, did he appear so safe, in their eyes, so sexless, so indifferent, that their amorous play wouldn’t bother him? True, he feigned well, feigned unconcern, ingenuousness. Oh, but he had lots of experience dissembling: look at the way he had gotten away with it at home, under the noses of Mom and Pop; at Mamie’s, under her nose — and Zaida’s too, now that he lived with Mamie, under his very whiskers. Maybe because he appeared to be so phlegmatic, inattentive, abstracted, he gave the impression that he was unaffected by display of normal libido. That was why he had been invited to stay in Woodstock with them, that was why he was here. They were wrong, but they were right too. Something in him, that kind of normalcy, perhaps, had been stamped out, had been destroyed. Had something in her gone awry in Edith too? Would he still feel that way if — if, yeah, Larry rammed it into her, by some pretext, undercover flagrante? Yeah, that was it; why the hell didn’t he? Why this dry simulation, this dry cuddling? Maybe they did the regular thing some other time, and Larry made no mention of it. But Jesus, that was funny. He had the same feeling in the 8th Street basement apartment that he had about Larry in the lovely stone house in Woodstock, the same feeling about why Edith was so tense: Larry wasn’t satisfying her. All right? So if that was true, what difference did it make whether Ira was there or not? Okay, for Christ’s sake, why didn’t Larry satisfy? Why? You tell me. . While I was fishing in the dull canal on a winter evening round behind the gas-house . .

Wasn’t that good? It gave you the feeling of loneliness and emptiness, right in the midst of a great city, a sense of the forlorn, the drab and deserted. Who was that king whose death the poet mused on? The guy fishing in the dull canal musing on the king his father’s death. Who the hell was that? Ira’s gaze rested on the line of the open page: And on the king my father’s death before him—

Edith, who lay on the outside edge of the studio daybed, sat up first. “Sometimes Ira looks like an ancient Hebrew prophet.”

“Me?” Ira scraped his chair around. Now that the amorous séance was over, he could face them. “Me? I’m the raven never flitting.”

“I was just thinking you missed your vocation,” she said, still seated.

“Just barely missed,” Ira rejoined with appropriate absentness.

And Larry behind Edith, still lying on his side, his white shirttails out, mussed, “What vocation? He’s a bugologist.”

“Oh, no, a rabbi,” Edith countered. “He would have made a wonderful rabbi.”

“What’s the portion for the day, Rabbi Stigman?” Larry chaffed.

“I’d hate to tell you.”

“Go on. Let’s hear it.”

“Something I read in Walden Pond: What demon possessed me to behave so well .”

“Did Thoreau write that?” Larry rolled luxuriantly supine. “I don’t remember it.”

“Yeah. What demon possessed me to behave so well .”

“Is that how you feel?” Edith inspected him with large brown eyes. “You do behave well, so loyally in every way. And so stable. Do you regret it?”

“Yeah.” His lie loomed up before him huge as a genie from its vase.

“Poor lad.”

“What would you rather have been?” Larry asked. “If you didn’t behave so well? A what? A Don Juan? A trickster? Held up a stagecoach?” Larry grinned. “A highwayman, like Alfred Noyes’s. ‘The highwayman came riding, riding. .’ What’s the next word, please? That was a scream, to listen to Salmanowitz in Mr. Donovan’s Public Speaking 3. Everybody had to memorize a piece.”

“Yeah?” Ira enjoyed the imagined scene.

“About every third line—‘Salmanowitz: what’s the next word, please?’”

“Do you have Public Speaking? Oh, yes, you told me you do. It seems so strange.”

“I know. Ninety percent of CCNY is Jewish. It’s compulsory. Four years.”

“It’s the only college I know of where that’s true.”

“You can guess why.”

“I suppose so. It never bothers me, but then. Hamberg’s accent was atrocious. But nobody seemed to care. What annoyed people was his bad manners, and of course his political views. I told you he was tarred and feathered.”

“Unbelievable.”

“How do you get rid of tar and feathers?” Ira asked earnestly.

“Cleaning fluid of some kind, I imagine. Naphtha. I really don’t know. I never asked Shmuel what he did do.”

“You expect to be tarred and feathered?” Larry sat up.

“Me? No. Worse.”

“After telling us about the demon — that you behaved so well.”

“What would you rather have become?” Edith asked.

“‘A pair of ragged claws,’ Eliot says. I’m dumb. I don’t know. My mother told me I once wanted to be a janitor when I grew up, because that way we could get our rent free. Another time, the rabbi gave me a penny because I was so apt reading Hebrew. It was gibberish as far as I was concerned. Once he even came to the house to tell my mother I would make a great rabbi someday. So Mom gave him a glass of cold seltzer water out of one of those glass siphons we kept in the icebox.”

“Where was that?” Edith asked.

“On the East Side. Boy, didn’t I pity that poor deliveryman with the whiskers, panting and groaning up four flights of stairs with a wooden case half full of siphons.”

“You two are so different. Your backgrounds are so completely different. People tend to think of Jews as being alike, but that’s ridiculous. When I think of you two, and Shmuel Hamberg spluttering and ranting about Zionism and socialism those first years. And then of course there’s Boris, my colleague, who’s almost too smooth. Actually, I find him a little repulsive, you know, he’s so very oily.”

She had stood up. And now Larry followed suit: “Attraction of opposites in our case.” He opened his belt and the top button of his trousers, then began stuffing his shirt under his waistband. Flat as a lath and boyish his waist. “It gives us lots to shmooze about.” He had used the borrowed expression so often that Edith understood.

“I tell him about the wonderful beaches in Bermuda, the glass-bottom boats and the darkies singing, ‘Aeroplanes up in the air droppin’ bombs on Leicester Square,’ and he tells me about living on Avenue D and the tugboats in the East River. Just now about the man with the seltzer bottles. I tell him about my father’s dry-goods store in Yorkville, and the kinds of people who would come in there; and he tells me about his father’s milk wagon. That’s how we keep each other interested. I know all about manufacturing ladies’ housedresses from my brother, Irving. Ira knows all about hustling soda at the ballpark. I know how to sell housedresses; Ira knows how to sell Loft’s candy. You’re a better cadger than I am, though.” Larry rubbed an eyelid.

“What do you mean?” Edith asked.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Ira cautioned.

“There goes the prophet,” said Larry. “Say, how should I spell that? With a ph or an f ?”

“Aw, c’mon.”

“I don’t know what you two are talking about.”

“It’s a secret.”

“Let me just tell Edith about the roll of quarters. Okay?”