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

“Yeah? What’d she say to her little rusjinkeh ? Did you tell her he was a married man with kids?”

“No, I didn’t. I just said he was from Panama. She said — you know what Mom said?” Minnie scaled over his heavy irony. “She said, ‘ Noo , do what you want. Bist shoyn a groyseh moyt . You’re not a child. Nur bring mir nisht kein benkart .’ You know Mom: don’t bring me a baby.”

“I hope you do.”

“Go to hell. I could tell Mom I had learned from you.”

“Go to hell yourself. I’ll tell her it was her fault.”

“Her fault?” Minnie was startled from rancor to perplexity. “Why was it her fault?”

“Never mind.” He adopted an easy, lofty sneer. “I’ll stay on the sidelines, okay? Till the end of summer.”

“Yeah, I believe you,” she parried sneer with contempt. “You’ll stay on the sidelines, period. No more. Always with your nose in a book, a book. Go make some girl the way other fellers do. No, you’re too lazy — a folentser . Her voice tightened, became almost a squeal, the way it always did when she was wrought up.

“Who else do you know who did it with his sister? You’re my brother, and I was like your wife, like a hoor with you. Yeah, because I loved you. That’s the whole trouble. I loved you and I hated you. Why? Because you were making me like you. I don’t have to go with other boys. They rub up against me when we’re dancing. I know what they want. I have to act like I don’t. They wanna neck. Who needs to neck? I’ve missed all a girl should have, what other girls still have, all the excitement. Finding out and everything. All because of you, I missed the whole thing. That’s all!”

Welladay. Little more was to be gained by laboring the point any further. It was the sense of exploration that drove him on, in the present as it had in the past. It was the word “exploration” that aroused him now, that still swung in his mind with something of the original lurch of feeling when he jotted the word down. He would be an exploration in debasement, his own, the soul of a twentieth-century first-generation American-Jewish writer, alienated from his kind by twist of circumstance, and perhaps, in part, justifiably alienated. But it would be exploration in vileness organically connected with the sensibility of one professing to be an artist. At least Unity would be attained, however reluctantly he had been driven to it. What if Saint Augustine had obliterated from his Confessions the pain — one could guess — the throes of his renouncing the two women, his paramours, banning his sensual appetites, even the most innocuous. Could one ever forget the old saint’s self-reproach for yielding to the entrancing sight of a swift hound coursing a hare? He would have given us a docked Saint Augustine, and who would have cared for it? He gave us the whole man, something Joyce didn’t. Joyce espoused the Unities, but eschewed Unity. Something that he, Ira, now strove to do while battling old age, and approaching the eternal.

III

The first of September 1926, Edith returned from the Southwest. She began a “furious” hunt for another apartment, an apartment “a little more gracious” than the one she had been living in. She found one on Morton Street, on the south side of Morton Street, a renovated town house, like others between Seventh Avenue and Hudson Street. It seemed odd at first that renovated town houses shared the street with two or three typical five-flight walk-ups. They were all undoubtedly relics of the past, before the Village spread into a formerly immigrant Italian neighborhood, even before that neighborhood became Italian. A day after the Labor Day weekend, Larry returned home from the summer resort. He looked fit, tanned. He had gained weight. Sanguine, successful, with every movement he belied Edith’s calamity-ridden prognosis of the ills the future held in store for him.

As she had promised before she left, she brought back with her a Navajo ring from New Mexico for Ira, and while Larry stood by, his healthy countenance aglow with approval at this show of Edith’s esteem for his friend, she presented Ira with the gift. The ring was altogether different from Larry’s, which, as she had said, was bold, a large piece of turquoise held in a solid setting of silver. Ira’s was far more delicate, and more elaborate, with nine turquoise beads held in a matching silver grid, and fretted at the sides with small embossings. She thought its approximate age was at least fifty years, from a time when Southwestern Indians still melted down silver dollars and made jewelry out of them.

And that was nearly seventy years ago when she presented it to him, Ira allowed himself the luxury, the luxurious dolor, of brooding: of time and vicissitude. . fixed an instant on the enticing pun on the amber monitor: silver dolor. . He snorted, and went on.

The ring was a little too loose for his third finger, but any jeweler could adjust it to his size, Edith thought. Transported by joy at the novelty and the honor, Ira held out his hand.

“Beautiful! Beautiful!” Larry exclaimed. “Everybody at the resort wanted to know where I got mine. I bet that’s what happens to you. Everybody in the ’28 alcove will ask you where you got yours. We’ll be the only ones at CCNY wearing Navajo rings.”

“That’s just what I told—” Ira swallowed Edith’s name down just in time. “Just what I told myself. I wish I knew what to say, Edith. It’s a beautiful surprise!”

She just loved giving; she showed her enjoyment in fond brown eyes, olive-skinned smile. “It’s not very expensive. I bought it because it was so unusual. It seemed to be right for you.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” He looked down at the ring that rotated so easily partway around and back on his finger. What a strange gulf seemed to open within himself, so wide, so nameless. He fancied, always on the brink of a pun, that the beneficent gravity of her world was separating the wretched fragments of his. “Maybe I can help you when you move. We both can.”

“That’s right,” Larry concurred. “We’ll get Ivan. He’s back from camp. He’s got a driver’s license. And Matt’s got a car. He and Miriam are crazy about Ivan.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, no. You’re both very sweet. I’m going to let someone else handle the mess. They know just what to do—”

“I was once a plumber’s helper,” said Ira. “If I could save you something.”

She laughed, so merrily for once.

“And don’t forget I was an able-bodied seaman on His Majesty’s ship the Pinafore ,” Larry joined in. “Trust me. I can batten down the butter plates abaft the binnacle better than the boatswain himself.”

Happiness was a short respite when well-being held sway. A bulkhead of euphoria — Ira recalled the Conrad tale — that held miraculously, in secrecy, against the unrelenting pressure of the future.

Ostensibly, Ira and Larry were juniors in college. Ostensibly. In fact, they were both wanting sufficient college credits to rate as valid juniors, juniors in good standing academically: Ira for the usual reasons, failures, insufficient number of courses, incompletions, poor grades, and Larry because he “lost credits” when he switched from NYU to CCNY, where credits were differently evaluated. Both faced the prospect of having to take summer courses next year. The three credits Ira had gained in a summer of French still left him woefully in arrears — and with little hope of reversing the shabby trend of attainment. College routines were now well ingrained, a familiar treadmill for both of them. Mechanical drudgery, most of it, drudgery resigned to, drudgery despised and shoddily performed. Floundering in mediocrity, Ira’s career came close to foundering when he took on that most boring of banes, his first “Ed” courses, electives. He drove himself to read the pages of his texts on the subject resentfully, sullenly, cursing the career he had chosen for himself, more like a miserable fate than a career.