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

I wish to die . He would like the Greek words framed and hung on the wall of his study.

Things had come together that Sunday morning, things of little or no importance, as he had said, except when he was in that state of mind. Goddamn it, stuporous. Would anybody believe that the onset of daylight saving on the same Sunday morning that M left for Roswell would have so adverse an effect on him as it had? He loathed the damned change of time: it threw everything off for him: sleeping and eating and the other established nodes of existence.

“Why don’t you just accept it?” M had counseled. “Why do you have to keep referring to the old time, telling yourself it’s really an hour earlier? It would be so much easier if you didn’t. You make things so much harder for yourself that way.”

“I always do,” he had answered. “ Apothanein thelo .”

“You really did look awful when I got home from Roswell,” M told him a day or so later. “You look better now, but you looked awful when I came in. What were you so depressed about?”

“Just depressed,” he had answered evasively. “Frustrated maybe. You know how my goddamn neurosis takes its toll every so often.”

But afterward they had gone through a brief estrangement. She chided him for twitting her before company, dinner company, something he almost never did, deplored when others did, something she never did, and reminded him she never did, which was true. What was it this time he was guilty of? Because he was, and was ashamed of himself (and pondered deeply why, found insidious, subterranean reasons to account for his anomalous behavior). But what was it made her say, “You know how I feel about husbands picking on their wives before others. You hurt my feelings. I never do that to you. I’m going to fight for my rights.” He would have to ask her what it was he said or did specifically. .

Specifically. . he sat down before the keyboard. Scenario: Action! Camera slowly pans big blond John Opa, tubist with the Albuquerque Symphony, and his Jewish wife, Leslie Heil, bassoonist, and presently publicity director for the orchestra (and most important, proficient at the computer; she has just offered to turn over to Ira a program that would allow his PC jr more memory). They are seated with Ira around the Stigman dinning table in the evening, partaking of a quart of Baskin-Robbins vanilla ice cream in celebration of the tender of a better-paying position to John by Florida University. While M is at the gas stove brewing decaffeinated coffee, Ira jibes: “My wife frequently turns the gas flame to high, and as a result she often roasts a pot — not to be mistaken for pot roast.” Smiling at the amusement of his guests, he adds jocularly: “That’s been the grounds for many a divorce.”

Trifles. Minute modulations of the quotidian, Ira reflected moodily: how anyone would allow them to take precedence over the catastrophic explosion of the nuclear reactor near Kiev, which at that very moment was impregnating the atmosphere with lethal radioactivity, perhaps threatening the existence of whole populations, he didn’t know. But most people did, they did, and everyone knew they did and why they did: the petty immediate concern took precedence over generalized impersonal peril. Platitudes. He felt the same way about politics, political crises, social controversies, reformist clashes: for him they were most often mere eddies of concern, superficial and ephemeral.

And yet, he had been a zealot once, he reminded himself, the supercharged missionary of revolutionary change, proclaiming the messianic new, peaceful, just world order, the Socialist utopia around the corner, all in accordance with the tenets of Marx, whose true disciples were members of the CPUSA. He had a mystique once, to fill the void left by that all-encompassing ancestral mystique he had left behind on the East Side. But what a mystique the new one had turned out to be! What a mystique! A hideous personal debacle — though he was still half convinced that the principles on which the mystique was based were sound and were bound to triumph in time — which made the debacle even worse. It was all a great mystique.

Only one force of a social and political nature had stirred him in the last decade, had ruptured the tight shell surrounding his self-absorption, disrupt his “explorations.” That force was Israel ! Only Israel had sundered his well-nigh impervious preoccupations with his psyche, burst open the pod of his self-engrossment, and had sent predilections flying — as if his partisanship were an accelerator. And even then, when anxiety about Israel’s welfare or some latest report of menace or outrage against Israel had breached his habitual introspection, it had done so only temporarily — though violently — the way the Red Sea parted, only to close again after the Israelites passed.

But it was like the parting of the Red Sea. The waters returned (alas, without engulfing the foe), returned, and once again rolled in their wonted way, and once again from the great deep to the great deep he went. Oh, the mind of man, how could one express even a whit — of its, yes, wit, express admiration comparable to its capacity, versatility, susceptibility, its epiphanies, Joyce called them: that resentment of M’s against her husband’s facetiousness at her expense went deeper than a principled criticism of his behavior — justified though her protest was. No one could deny that. But there was an even deeper justification for it. The music she was writing now, the music she had begun writing in the last few years, was music she should have been writing, she said, years ago. Spoken in calm and even tone of voice: “Music I should have been writing years ago.” He didn’t believe it, but he didn’t say so, he believed she had to live, to experience, to be seasoned by the innumerable hardships she went through — teaching in a primitive one-room school, building the fire in the schoolroom stove on bitter-cold Maine mornings, caring for their two offspring, living near the rural school in a dilapidated farmhouse where she had no sink, had to haul up water by pail from the well in winter, water that froze in the very pail itself even when in the kitchen, all this while he was away working as an attendant in the Augusta State Hospital. She had to be changed by their living together, tempered to a greater maturity, as he was changed and tempered by their living together to a greater maturity. By living and striving and suffering, by forgetting and learning, by the forging of vicissitude, only then, and only at the last moment and with many waverings, had he built up the confidence to endure the shifting demands of serious writing, of coping with new and untried and questionable forms.

She had been a musician of acknowledged attainment when he first met her in Yaddo. His spiritual and artistic breakdown, his mental turbulence and fits of near madness, had no counterpart in her life, her career. So if she believed that the music she was composing now she should have been composing years ago, what had stopped her? It was obvious what had stopped her. He had. His neuroses and his foibles, his defects of character and judgment. And his impecuniousness too. But obstacle above all others, obstacle that stood in the way of her realizing her gifts, was his inability to earn the kind of living a man of his status, his education, his potential, was expected to earn, as a rule did earn, and at some respectable social calling. Of course, he was a Jew, a factor not to be forgotten. Still, it was his impracticality, his aberrant impulse, his vacillations and flaccid assertiveness, that had precluded his realization of his potential, rather than his Jewishness; and so their standard of living and her musicianship were both forfeit to the flaws of his mind and temperament. Therefore, instead of a composer, she had been the breadwinner, the one-room-school teacher, school principal, the piano teacher, the steady cash-income earner, and he auxiliary, working as a hospital attendant four years, raising and “dressing” waterfowl four and more years, tutoring math — ever frustrated, at a loss, ever in need of her steadiness. It was he, he, who had barred her from her rightful profession, her art. And now her resentment was coming to the surface. . like that bit of pavement he passed on his way to the dumpster with the day’s accumulation of trash, the asphalt crumbling above the welling up of ground.