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

“Do I look all right, Ira?” she asked. Her voice was humble.

“Huh?” He raised his eyes from the genetics chart he was trying to decipher, the small squares and symbols that hung like a screen before vision for a moment as he surveyed her: his sister, nothing special: serious, determined countenance. Red, curly bobbed hair, thick nostrils, hazel eyes. “You look all right. Some difference from before.”

“You know what?” Minnie smoothed the bosom of her dress. “Don’t say anything.”

“No? About what? What do you mean?”

“That I failed in the oral. My crazy s .”

“All right, if that’s what you want. Why?”

“I’ll tell ’em tomorrow. They’re coming home happy for a change. They saw a vaudeville show. What’s the hurry? I’ll tell Mom tomorrow. I won’t lie. I won’t say I didn’t fail. I’ll just say, so if I’m teaching public school and I get married, what’s the difference if I’m in an office and I get married? I’ll feel more like that tomorrow. You know what I mean? It’ll be better.” She paused to let the thought sink in. “I’m getting a little hungry. You? I wonder what Mom’s got ready. I don’t see anything to warm up. Must be a big can of salmon to chop up with an onion. But maybe she’ll buy something on the way.”

The image, the episode, the whole passage of it, grew to a peak days after it should have receded, became more immanent in his mind the next day and the next, immanent, became a revolting progression. It wasn’t as if he were haunted by some wrongdoing, specific offense, as in the past, cringing before imagined execration and worse in store for his miscreant self, discovered. More grievously, he was aware that he had tainted her forever, and that her recent failure was inextricably related to him. He would sometimes sit smirking when he felt out of danger, sounding the Yiddish epithets his parents would have hurled at him: Paskudnyack! Meeseh chaiye! A meeseh mishineh auf dir. Zus verfollt veren! Oh there were dozens, fantastic extravagant dozens. And Pop, what could he do? Now that Ira stood a head taller than his father? And as for little Jonas, Stella’s father, even shorter than Pop, the little erstwhile ladies’ tailor, cafeteria partner — Jesus, it sometimes made Ira chortle — when he was out of all danger. And Zaida, well, spewing Yiddish curses. No, he wasn’t the least filled with remorse for that act, guilt, burden of the sordid, consequences of taboo violation, disgrace. He almost wished it was as simple as that, as though they were the good old days, when he at least knew how he would feel, what to expect. The feeling he had now was general, altogether different. It was not the horrible twist of terror that wrenched his whole being, that terrible, that permanent crimp of plane-geometry days when she didn’t have her period, or any other time when she was late. Don’t think of the past, that’s all. Get over to Mamie’s. That didn’t do the same thing, even if she was still a kid, kid or no kid, and not such a kid, either: sixteen. And you had to walk eight, nine blocks, take a chance, act a part, wait, hang around, look dumb — and maybe lose. But it was outside, and if you won, as long as you were sure you didn’t knock her up, boy! But so what if you won, that was the trouble: winning, winning, no more winning.

He recalled a short address that he had given nearly a decade before, in which he had expressed his genuine perplexity that he should be so honored. His fame, the tributes he received for his first novel, never ceased to seem unreal to him — that he was the one who should be the object of these accolades. He felt that there was something freakish about it all, and he honestly felt so: a fluke. And he would quote from a biography of John Synge that he had read some years ago, that talent was not enough, that the writer, the artist, in order to achieve greatness, had in some way to tap something universal and permanent in his time. And he followed this quotation with another by the late Georgia O’Keeffe — one he had within easy access, contained within one of the poems of his rheumatologist, David B. “I might have been a better painter, and no one would have noticed, but because I was in touch with my time people saw something in my work that they knew. . ” She was saying the same thing as John Synge, whom Ira idolized.

So it was a fluke, he would reiterate, he would stress: he was acquainted with much-better-endowed writers than he, far more intelligent, brilliant guys, witty, acute, original. But it was as if they had tried and failed to align themselves with the lines of force of their time, and so if he were to name them, he was sure few in the audience would know them. And the strange thing was, in his opinion, that it was not given to the individual to align himself by an act of will to the lines of force of his time: one couldn’t choose to or refuse to. Genes and circumstances either made him do so, made him an eligible candidate for the canon, so to speak, one of the elect, or did not. It wasn’t in his hands. So if he was the one so chosen, he actually deserved very little credit. Only that of striving to develop the most preeminent, if not the only, gift he had. . which was what the others did, also. . those more gifted than he, who yet failed to win universal appeal. It was all a Calvinist fluke.

V

“Back safely,” his dear M announced when she returned home from a performance in Roswell. She had played selections from her latest composition there, a work for the piano. “I feel guilty leaving you alone all day, but I had such an exciting time.” She went on to tell him about the program given by the New Mexico Women Composers Guild, about the beautiful concert grand Baldwin on which she had played excerpts from the piece she was working on, and how well both her composition and her performance were received by the audience. “Though I did play a few wrong notes,” she smiled. “My eyes simply aren’t up to playing in public anymore — and isn’t that the longest stretch of nothing between Vaughn and Roswell? I’m glad I didn’t have to do the driving. My attention would surely have begun to wander. The ranches must be way back in.” And then she noticed that he hadn’t eaten the frozen dinner she had so solicitously provided for him.

“Too much trouble,” he said curtly. “I had a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.”

And then without asking, and without further comment, she knew he was depressed. .

Things had come together that morning, before she left for Roswell, adverse things, of little or no importance, except for the state he had been in — and still was. He had wondered aloud, as they shared a last sip of coffee, how soon they might invite John Keleher and his wife, Marie, over for supper. John was a young artist, devoted to Ira, a virtual surrogate son. M had heartily endorsed the idea.

“We might get four of the Le Menu frozen dinners, save you work,” Ira had suggested, and went on: “I’d like him to do an illuminated inscription for me, a couple of Greek words.”

“Enteuthen exelaunei ,” she quoted cheerily from the Anabasis , and then inquired: “May I ask what words they are?”

He put her off with: “Just a couple of words. Happen to be meaningful for me. I’d like to frame them.” It wouldn’t have made much difference probably if he had told her. They were included in the epigraph to The Waste Land , which Eliot himself had borrowed from the Satyricon of Petronius, and Ira with minuscule remnant of Greek, and the aid of a dictionary, had succeeded in translating them from the original: they were the Sibyl of Cumae’s reply to the youngsters who asked her what she wanted: “Sibylla ti theleis? “Sybil, what do you wish? “Apothanein thelo” was her reply.