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

Oh, you’re crazy, he told himself, crazy as usual. But no. he might be right, for a change: why shouldn’t she be resentful, and with resentment intensified by failing eyesight that robbed her of her former superlative facility at sight-reading? Threat of blindness, when at last she had the opportunity to write music again. She no longer trusted herself to perform in public, and especially to read and perform her own music, with its greater strain on vision because of its novelty, its modernity of approach. A cataract in one eye dimming and discoloring the notes on the page; in the other, in the eye with the lens implant, far more ominous symptoms: hemorrhages around the macula propagating molds in vision. Laser treatments hadn’t helped, or only partially: blobs of darkness still interfered with sight. He looked at her in astonishment in the evening, when after the supper they read a paragraph or two of the Hebrew textbook, an account of Shalom’s ordeal in emigrating to Palestine in the early part of the twentieth century. She misread continually, not that Hebrew was easy to read at any time, the damned print with its gimels looking like nuns , and its beths like kaphs , and its daleths like reshes and its khets like hehs and its vahv like zion , but she even confused the more distinct letters, the tets and the mems , the mems and the sameks . He regarded her with astonishment — and with grief and apprehension — when she misread the obvious, as she held a hand over the eye with the implant to block out the blots that seemed to be hovering there, while she peered at the print with the other eye, its lens clouded by cataract. How old she looked, wrinkled and old, under the unsparing white light of the new circular fluorescents they had recently installed in place of the previous bulbs in their hobnail globes softening the light.

Dear M, dear, patient, steadfast, objective M, weighing her options, deciding on her priorities, bravely abiding by them — abiding him these many, many years; was there any reason why she shouldn’t be resentful?

But then, who could tell, perhaps that remark of hers simply indicated that she had reached a stage where she no longer needed him to the degree she had before. Far-fetched? Possibly. But the fact was she had matured, both as person and as artist; she was by then deeply engrossed in her music, in composition. And she had scored undeniable successes, both in the Babi Yar threnody and the unaccompanied cello rhapsody. She was as modest a person as he had ever known, devoid of affectation, devoid of self-aggrandizement, so when she said that her compositions were the event of the evening, stood head and shoulders above the others, he knew he could take her statement at face value, for she was a composer to be reckoned with. His decrepitude, his self-involvements, made inroads no longer merely on her time and energy, but on her creative time and energy. He was, or thought of himself as, a creative writer. He knew how he would have felt having to forgo his work to take care of another. He would have resented it; why shouldn’t she ? Especially in view of the limited number of years she then had at her disposal. It was only natural. To the past impediment of her art that he had posed in comparative youth and health, he continued to add present ones in old age and infirmity. In the past too, he had never given her the least occasion to doubt his total devotion, to fret over the least deviation from his total fidelity. And suddenly in senescence, in unworried impotence, he seemed to transmit all kinds of faintest, involuntary signals that, given her sensitivity, she was responding to, construing them as signals of changed attitude, diminished affection. Thus, she now had to bear the burden of his chronic ailments aggravated by a chafing of mistrust.

What did he mean, for example, or rather what did it mean, his inquiring whether he could get John to do an illuminated rendering of Apothanein thelo , the Cumaean Sibyl’s reply? It meant that his attachment to M then was not, as he once believed, as strong as his desire to die. Living with rheumatoid arthritis was an ordeal, to be sure, but it was one he was determined to endure because M needed him, because he was the one who watched over her, exactly to prevent her from harming herself with oversights she never could seem to guard against, yes, to keep her from roasting a pot or a kettle. But his previously constant affection must have waned, to some degree: his wish to die indicated that. And without his ever having to say a word, she knew it, even then — and with the sagacity that had been her distinguishing trait all their married life together, she had ironically prepared herself for his qualified departure, for quasi-widowhood, for certain eventualities.

“Please, don’t sing,” M requested later that evening, while he was at the sink washing the supper dishes. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t sing while I’m at my desk writing music.”

“Oh, sure, sure,” he replied. “I understand.”

It was interesting though how many times as he continued washing dishes he had the impulse to hum a few notes from this or that snatch of music. Habits were deep, head vacant seeking to alleviate tedium with a few notes of a remembered bit of song. But what did it mean that she had asked him not to sing while she was writing music, what did it mean beyond the request itself? That he was in the way, ought to be dispensed with, since she had begun to win musical and artistic acclaim? That or a hundred other things he misconstrued because — undoubtedly because the miasma of his damned past warped clear conception of everything.

But he had M, his M, from whom nothing could part him, he thought, only his death in due course. She was his M who had set Babi Yar to music, his tender, pitying M, who knew the Jewish plight, had set it to music. Levelheaded, judicious, merciful, lenient, she knew his plight, too, better than he did, his kinks and crazes. He had to hang on to her, the one sanity always available, the one sanity he could always count on.

“Any more dishes?” He looked about. “Coffeepot done?”

“Yes, I did it this morning.” She too had a swivel chair at her desk, and swiveled about, sitting thin and gray, her dark-rimmed glasses that masked the wrinkles under her eyes contrasting prominently with hoar hair and distinguished, fretted brow. “I’ll put the dishes away later, they can drain for now.”

He bowed his head to lessen the distance — and the pain — arthritic shoulders had to overcome lifting the loop of his apron free of his neck. “Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.”

“What are you getting me?” M teased.

“Well, I tried to buy you a plastic ketchup bottle. One that would squirt.”

“Only the cover didn’t screw on very well.”

“Yeah. So I left it on the bread counter.”

“It doesn’t matter. As long as you love me.”

“That I do.”

But he didn’t know just how much he loved her, he said aloud to himself, listening a moment to the piano notes from the living room. And continuing to himself in silence. He hadn’t known it at the outset, hadn’t known it would turn out so, that his conclusions would be the very opposite of his imputations at the start.

“Oh, yeah.” What with his emendations and interpolations, RAM was 91 % full (and thereby hung a tale too: why, when he had gone to the expense of having the IBM technician install another captain’s card, didn’t the system acquire more RAM? He would have to do something about it.). At what angle, when fingertips of one hand touched those of the other, like a gable, did the thumbs lose contact with each other, the pinkies, the forefingers, when the pitch of the gabled roofs approached the horizontal? What a problem. He shouldn’t have any bigger ones.