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

“Something like that.” Actually it wasn’t what he meant, though he wasn’t sure that what he meant was true or not, or stemmed from his wish. “I mean — I hope I’m wrong — it’s easy for Lewlyn to keep up Marcia’s courage about this Robert if he cares for somebody else.”

Edith sat up, sat perfectly still, intensely serious. “I’m afraid so. I’m afraid it’s something I keep hiding from myself.”

“No, I was just saying,” Ira mitigated. “Maybe he is like that. If he’s a priest and wants to help her.”

“Oh, no. It very much needed saying.”

“But he’s taking you to Pennsylvania.”

“Yes.” She was no longer exhilarated at the prospect, she seemed remote, profoundly reflective, then shook her head. “A woman ten years older than he is.” She watched him stand up, and pick up his hat from the wicker chair.

“I didn’t mean to—” he faltered.

“Oh, no, no.” She got to her feet. “I don’t know where you get your maturity.” She seemed quite severe, so unlike her usual indulgent self. “I keep thinking of the story Lewlyn told me about the poppies growing under the washline, where his mother hung up his brother’s World War uniform after he had returned from fighting in France. Poppies grew under it — just a minute, Ira.”

He already divined what she was doing, long before she reached her purse on top of the chest of drawers — just as he divined what Mamie was going to do when she asked him to wait.

“You must not refuse me, do you understand? It’s not charity. It’s not a gift — it’s a very little return for my indebtedness. A little token of what I owe you for bearing with me. I wish it were more.” She tendered him a greenback: the numeral 5 in the corner puffed out visibly, almost haughtily.

“Edith, it’s a five-dollar bill.” Ira drew back.

“I want you to have it. It’s little enough.”

“Gee, it’s too much.” There was no use gainsaying, only observing formalities of reluctance. “You shouldn’t.”

“Of course I should. You’re very dear to me, Ira. I hate the thought of your going about without any money.”

“I know, but—” Superfluous the saying. She held him to her purpose inflexibly. He took the greenback from her hand, and there was her tiny hand floating between them. He held it, and kissed it. As if space converged into the act, it seemed more than his own doing. And then he ran his knuckles over the suddenly moist recess under his lip. “Thanks, Edith.”

“You’re very welcome, lad.”

“Gee, Edith. I hope you have a good time in Pennsylvania.”

“Thank you, Ira. I hope I do too. Good night.”

“Good night.”

— Well, Stigman, how step by step you’ve been drawn into the web that seems to be of your own spinning.

Aye, father Ecclesias. What is it I do? Make life follow art, as I’ve said before? The actuality follow the narrative? It’s the damnedest thing how the conceit, the fancy, lures on the deed.

VII

L o, it is summer — almighty summer! How Ira loved that invocation of De Quincey’s — and De Quincey too. Lo, it is summer — almighty summer! But instead of the everlasting gates of life and summer thrown open wide that De Quincey glorified so eloquently, final exams were near at hand, finals in two ed courses (yech), Economics (ditto), a dull Psychology 1, where only once did the professor know Ira was alive, when the results of a vocabulary test were in. And a disappointing English course in the essays of Addison and Steele, which he was taking with Professor Kieley, who had been so admiring of Ira’s descriptive pieces in Freshman Composition II. He would have to take at least two courses in summer school — two evening courses, if he hoped to get to a job during vacation — in order to make up for credits lost over the past three years. He had a deficit of credits, he joked sourly with classmates. And for all of De Quincey, it still wasn’t summer; it just felt that way in mid-May. Real summer meant not oceans, tranquil and verdant as a savanna, as De Quincey phrased it, but humid night classes, his stifling, sweltering tenement bedroom, and who knew what kind of a vacation job to make enough dough to buy clothes and shoes to get him through his senior year.

Hadn’t that five dollars felt good while it lasted, that five dollars Edith had given him. “A fiver in my wallet, a fiver in my wallet,” he hummed inwardly to the tune of “A-hunting we will go.” “I got a fiver in my wallet. I got five bucks in my poke.” He no longer felt, what with Edith’s affections and Stella’s pliancy, the need to try to tempt Minnie with a buck, or even two. She was finished with him for good — adamantly. She’d be getting a job soon anyway. She was getting ready for graduation.

Friends of Iz — not friends of the coterie, for they were seniors — in exchange for his admitting them free into the Provincetown Theater allowed him and a selected friend or two to slip into Carnegie Hall, where they were ushers. For the first time, Ira heard the New York Philharmonic, saw Feuchtwangler press his hand to his heart, heard Beethoven’s Fifth — while he waited behind the last tier of the uppermost balcony until legs began to wobble, until it was clear no one was going to sit in the empty seat he kept in view. Sunday had settled into a usual routine, even without the compliancy of his sister. He would chafe through his texts till afternoon, and then hike to Mamie’s on 112th. With luck or without it, he could count on coming away with a dollar — hence an easy nickel for subway fare to the CCNY recital hall where he could listen to Professor Baldwin of the Music Department boom out the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Tannhäuser on the college organ, or other Wagnerian selections. He loved that high linky-linky-link from Tannhäuser , especially if he had been lucky; it fitted in with the way he felt, dispelled that last little cloudlet or worry about whether he’d pulled away in time.

He did good turns also, something like a mitzvah, except he was usually rewarded for it: tutoring Leo Dugonicz in plane geometry. Leo, the Hungarian, had lived a flight up in the small three-story house next to Ira’s, at the same elevation as Ira. They could — necks outstretched — talk to each other, leaning out of their respective windows on the backyard, and they became fast friends. Leo, of course, had gone to work with the bulk of the graduating class of P.S. 24, and had found a job as a lab assistant in a materials-testing lab, and had worked there ever since. At his invitation, Ira had visited him there, watched Leo subject a bar of iron to huge force, heard it snap with awesome bang. Meanwhile Leo’s mother, widowed when her husband was crushed between freight trains when working for the Pennsylvania Railroad, at first kept house for a Jewish dentist on 111th Street, a morose and taciturn bachelor. Leo mimicked him endlessly, especially his gait and floppy pants cuffs, and called him the admiral of the Swiss Navy. Afterward Leo’s mother married an Italian second cook in a large hotel, and she and Leo moved to their new dwelling on 111th Street and Lexington Avenue. It was because Leo sought out Ira, and because Ira enjoyed Leo’s untroubled puckish nature, that the two kept in touch with each other. Leo demonstrated for Ira’s benefit, and to Ira’s alarm, how nitroglycerin exploded when wrapped in tinfoil and struck with a hammer. And he took Ira for a wild drive in a used car he had bought and was learning to operate, and wrecked while he was at it.

Leo was short and stocky, thick-lipped, pug-nosed — good-humored and amiable. He was in his twenties now, and eligible to take the examination for municipal steam-boiler inspector, a sinecure of a civil service job, with no few prerequisites on the side. He was both eligible and eager to take it, his years as lab assistant acceptable in lieu of formal studies. He felt he could easily pass the written part, except for one thing: he needed a smattering of plane geometry. He had tried boning up on the subject by himself, but his head began to swim as soon as the book dealt with proving the simplest propositions. Could Ira help him out? Of course he could. Plane geometry was his beloved forte, his savior.