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

“Yes,” Pop resumed, addressing Uncle Louie. “They threw me into jail, into the sraimoolyeh (wasn’t that a comical word for jail?). Pop laughed. “Because I came back to Austria, and I hadn’t reported for conscription. So they threw me into jail. They didn’t know I was an American citizen already — or they didn’t want to know. Gabe made me a citizen before I was of age, so I could vote a straight Republican ticket. In 1900 I became a citizen. I was born in 1882. I was only eighteen, and a birth certificate I didn’t have. So Gabe said, say you’re twenty-one; Gabe was my witness I was twenty-one.”

“And why did the Austrians let you out of jail?” asked Uncle Louis.

“Whether because they found out I was an American citizen, or because I didn’t pass the examination — big and strong I’m not — the warden came in, and ‘Out! Out!’ he said.” Pop laughed, and laughed again: “There was somebody else there — we were three, four in the cell — you should anshuldig mir , he could make a fartz whenever he wanted. Say to him, ‘Fortz , Stanislas.’ Hup! A Fortz . Kheh, kheh, kheh!”

XV

The war came closer. Confused by strange stirrings within him, strange rumors without, the Great War would always remain cloudy, a nebulous complex of memory without regard for time or relevance. Mamie, mother of two daughters now, always bought Ira a flannel shirt for his birthday, a new gray flannel shirt. Of what relevance to the Great War was that? The question made him feel as if he were answering some kind of catechism: In the impoverished life in that taken-for-granted, dreary cold-water flat, gas-mantle-lit still, the kitchen alone was heated in winter — by the twinkling row of blue beads of the single long burner of the gas oven. The kitchen alone was warm, fetid sometimes, while the other three rooms on the other side of the closed door to the rest of the flat were ice cold. And so he went to bed under the frigid goose-feather-stuffed ticking. Unquilted, the feathers in it shifted and bunched from one end to the other, and one had to pedal an imaginary bicycle the first few minutes after getting into bed in order to generate a pod of warmth. Yes, they came from Europe: The featherbeds were heirlooms made of goosedown.

“In the winter when we had nothing to do,” said Pop, reminiscing nostalgically, “everybody sat around the big table in my father’s house, and we took the big feathers from the goose, the big wing feathers, and the tail feathers, and we stripped off the feather from the quill. Even those we saved, the little feathers from the quill.” And the ticking also had two or three coins enclosed in it — Ira could feel the coins sometimes when they collected in a corner, but the ticking was sewn so tightly, you couldn’t get them out. (They were charms, he learned later, included with the feathers to bring fecundity and good fortune.) And kind-hearted Mamie gave her nephew a pair of high-laced boots, not new, but oh, how treasured! High boots to wear in snow of any depth.

“On your soil they didn’t grow,” Mom said ironically. “Well, may you mirror yourself in them.”

Unaccountable stirrings and compulsions: He was in 6A or 6B, the last year of his attendance in P.S. 103, the “elementary school,” as it was called. What prompted him to skulk across the street that afternoon, after dismissal, opposite the big oak doors of the main entrance? And to wait until Miss Driscoll came out, his teacher. Tall, slender, unsmiling, aloof Miss Driscoll, of the refined, delicate features. With guilty, nameless excitement, he stalked her, block after block, to 125th Street, keeping her just barely in sight ahead of him. To what mysterious abode was she bound? What mysterious rites would be performed there, or what languors would she surrender to, or to what secret lover?

Miss Driscoll sauntered west along busy 125th Street, alone and dignified, while Ira, in her wake, wove in and out among pedestrians. Now north along mundane trolley-traveled Amsterdam Avenue, flanked by nondescript five-flight brick walk-ups whose roofs and stoops each rose a jog higher up the hill than the last. But Ira was sure that at the end was an inkling of breathless revelation, a rare insight, a discovery. North to the 130s, and still north. Miss Driscoll turned east again, downhill, between the walls of a huge stadium and gray and white buildings, like churches he had seen in pictures in fairy tales, or formidable castles, gray and white. And then — she turned a corner around one of the castles at the bottom of the hill, and as if by magic, disappeared. . But there was a door open at the corner where she had turned, at sidewalk level, where the buildings enclosed a big square, with flagpole and trees and a lofty clock in a turret of gray and white stone. So that was where she went? There were other people about, some women, like Miss Driscoll, but most of them young men, and many of them carrying books or briefcases. So it was just another school. Was that all? Disappointed and chagrined, he turned to retrace his steps in the hour before dusk, leaving behind the gray and white buildings that looked like churches or castles. .

How many times would he pass that same door on his way to class, pass it so many times he all but forgot it was the same door. One could brood, one could brood, that the fecklessness, nay, the folly of the youth was even greater than the simple fecklessness of the kid he had been. But what the hell good was it to be aware of the fact?

Came those first intimations as well — signals whose significance he would recognize later, he would be able to name later when he strove to realize them — intimations of a calling. Something innate burgeoned inside you, identifiable, and yet mostly wordless, an urge that was yours alone. The kid in his mackinaw on the way home from the library on 124th Street, at 6:00 P.M. at closing time in the upstairs reading room. Tucked under his arm are the volumes of myths and legends he loved so well. And he passes below the hill on Mt. Morris Park in autumn twilight, with the evening star in the west in limpid sky above the wooden bell tower. And so beautiful it was: a rapture to behold. It set him a problem he never dreamed anyone set himself. How do you say it? Before the pale blue twilight left your eyes you had to say it, use words that said it: blue, indigo, blue, indigo. Words that matched, matched that swimming star above the hill and the tower; what words matched it? Lonely and swimming star above the hill. Not twinkling, nah, twinkle, twinkle, little star — those words belonged to someone else. You had to match it yourself: swimming in the blue tide, you could say. . maybe. Like that bluing Mom rinses white shirts in. Nah, you couldn’t say that. . How clear it is. One star shines over Mt. Morris Park hill. And it’s getting dark, and it’s getting cold— Gee, if instead of cold, I said chill. A star shines over Mt. Morris Park hill. And it’s getting dark, and it’s getting chill. .

I

The time draws near. . Logy, and still under the spell of the mad dreams of last night, feverish and despairing, and affected by the influence of the drug he had taken in the early morning to ease the extreme pain of RA, he was loathe to proceed. But more than all that, because the time drew near.

Oh, it was not only the War — what was the War to a kid turned twelve? A surface comprehension, a sporadic awareness: the collection of peach pits for gas masks — in school — a patriotic speech, a comic strip, a poster, a song, a few words now and then, addressing the subject at home and in the street. He joined the Boy Scouts briefly, on a summer evening sitting on the curb with Davey Baer in front of the 124th Street Library opposite the north end of Mt. Morris Park — and he was soon diffidently selling Liberty Bonds in the evening to crowds gathered about a patriotic rally staged by his troop on Seventh Avenue and 116th Street. Heterogeneous fragmentary aspects that made few lasting and deep impressions — until that April day when America was already at war.