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

So Ira would walk over to Leo’s home an evening or two a week and endeavor to tutor him in the rudiments. It was a relief to be with him, on that plebeian level Ira felt he should never have left, the unadorned, uncultivated, unlettered, to which he could never return. It was a relief to be superior to someone in something , to be looked up to for something other than words, something demonstrable, tangible, that liberated one from that everlasting fretting and disapprobation that mind had become.

Leo was the worst dub at plane geometry Ira had ever known, would even have dreamed possible. He would look earnestly at Ira as he proved a theorem, or applied it to the solving of a problem, look at Ira soulfully with his blue-green eyes, his thick lips parted in grateful, humble admiration. But the simplest question would reveal that he had grasped not an iota of what Ira was so fervently striving to impart. His ignorance discovered, Leo would laugh — contritely. How could you get sore at the guy? Ira would begin the same problem again from the beginning, allow no latitude, take nothing for granted, but raise his voice and demand answers at each step. And at the end, maybe a little of the subject stuck, a little of Euclidean light entered. Q.E.D.

Because Ira would accept no cash payment, Leo would take his tutor afterward to the local seafood bar, with sawdust-covered floor — on Third Avenue under the El near 95th Street — and treat him to oysters when the months had r ’s in them, and littleneck clams afterward with lots of ketchup and horseradish and a bowlful of small round oyster crackers. It gave Ira that mixed nostalgic feeling of the lost paradise of the uneducated, sitting there at the marble table on top of the sawdust, watching the pimply Greek youth, son of the owner, whack off the end of an oyster shell and pry it open.

Long ago, so it seemed now, when he first came to live on 119th Street, Ira remembered surveying these delicacies, on 125th Street, surveying them with revulsion, grotesque, rocky-looking fare fit only for goyim . Introduced to them now, as with other deviations from kosher food, he enjoyed them. How he had changed, from 1914 to 1927: thirteen years. And how Harlem had changed too in those thirteen years, imperceptibly, until you suddenly noticed. 125th Street, which had once appeared high-toned gentile, had become shabby, much of it. Where were those stores and shops that once seemed so fancy, and those ladies in white dresses carrying parasols who once patronized them? Ladies coming from the suburbs or from estates in Connecticut, and getting out at the 125th Street station of the New York Central on Park Avenue? And where the self-assured, freshly shaven gentlemen, often with a black porter behind them, carrying their suitcases, sometimes sample cases — they looked so large — and hailing a taxicab? Gone the way of Park & Tilford, the way of the sedate brownstones that once bordered Mt. Morris Park near the library. How secretly, relentlessly, change took place: like the replacement of gas-lit lampposts by tall electric-lit ones, like styles that people wore, like long pants for knee-pants, and socks for long black stockings — now only men wore knee-pants: knickers. Like the Irish moving away, so many, and the Jews moving in, with even a kosher butcher store across the street with a wide green blind in the window, above the Italian iceman’s cellar — he was still there.

Except for a few who still lived in the big cold-water flats through most of 119th Street, the Irish had retreated as to a last enclave to the few three-story redbrick houses near Lexington Avenue. And across the street on Lexington, a wholesale cheese store had opened, Kraft’s. Across Lexington, the stable on the other corner in which Pop had boarded his old nag during his brief period as entrepreneur milkman had gone up in flames (arson, it was rumored, since you rarely saw a horse anymore). In its place now stood a funeral home.

And the colored people were moving in, moving south from uptown Harlem. The colored people, Negroes, they were called when they were referred to politely, slowly moved south from uptown Harlem, at the same time as Puerto Ricans settled at the other end of Harlem. Several Puerto Rican families now occupied Mamie’s houses in 112th Street west of Fifth Avenue. The twin six-story walk-up apartments weren’t really Mamie’s — or Mamie’s and Saul’s. The banks had repossessed them. (One of shifty Saul’s unsuccessful finaglings.) Instead of being part landlord, Mamie was now only superintendent and rent collector. That way she got her apartment rent-free.

Not only in Mamie’s houses but all through West 112th Street, all through mid-Harlem, Jewish tenants were moving away — to the Bronx, usually — and Puerto Ricans were taking their places: Spanyookels, Mamie punned, tartly bilingual. Ira had just finished screwing Stella in the front room, standing up, hurrying up, when to his consternation, lo and behold, two young Puerto Rican youths leaning out of the third-story window across the street were having a gala time pretending to be viewing them with opera glasses: peering at them through rounded fingers — and pointing and laughing. Jesus! How humiliating. On the other hand, what luck! Supposing they had been Jewish. Yi-yi-yi and oy, gevald . Undoubtedly, they would have told somebody else who was Jewish, and that somebody else might have known Mamie — and told her! The long-dreaded exposure would have erupted. Revilings and recriminations would have been the least of his penalties. His disgrace would have spread like a wildfire throughout the family: the abominable doings of Leah’s college-boy son. And then what? Who knew? Certainly Mamie’s door would have been barred to him forever. Mamie’s door and her dollar bill. Aza paskudnyack! Aza parsheveh shmutz! And he was. He was. Anyway, what luck, it didn’t have to come to that. East was east and west was west, and the “Portorickies” across the street were scarcely on speaking terms with the Jewish superintendent on the “first floor” of the house where her daughter was getting reamed. Woof. Didn’t he beat it away from that window fast.

Indeed, the whole cosmos was changing: island universes and spiral galaxies could arrest one’s breathing thinking about them. He never tired of repeating to himself that bit of floss he knew was anything but great poetry — about the great star Canopus — he had read in the Untermeyer anthology Larry had loaned him—“I meditate on interstellar spaces, and smoke a mild cigar. .” He didn’t even remember the poet who wrote it. And events crowded out events: Coolidge was President, and prosperity was going to last forever. The League of Nations was at the height of its ephemeral power, Stalin had taken over the USSR, and Mussolini ruled Italy. Mussoli-i-ini, the Italians pronounced it. There was socialism, and there was inchoate Fascism, and anybody knew that socialism was better, because Fascists gave dissidents castor oil. But in Russia, wrongdoers and wreckers were shot, which was only right. And everywhere, the Sacco-Vanzetti case aroused passions pro and con — everywhere — and the names of the two anarchists appeared in headlines in all the city’s newspapers: from the tabloid Daily News to the New York Times , in the Hearst press, in the Sun and the Globe and the World , the Herald , the Tribune . And in the liberal magazines which Ira saw so often on Edith’s desk, The New Republic and The Nation . Everyone who wasn’t biased against Italians, anybody who knew enough to call an Italian an Italian and not an Eyetalian, knew they were innocent, and were condemned to die in the electric chair just because they were wops or dagos and anarchists. “ Orrimen Talyaner ,” said Mom pityingly. And Mom, who always followed the call of her feelings, was rarely wrong. Poor Italians, especially Vanzetti with his long, drooping mustache. Of course they were innocent, but why, why would a president of the most distinguished university in the whole country, President Lowell of Harvard, still agree with the prejudiced judge, still find the two innocent men guilty? Emotions rose to a fever pitch, as the newspapers said, as the day of their execution in the electric chair drew near. Fever pitch. Ira himself was so moved, had become so involved, so outraged at the patent, gruesome injustice of putting the two men to death, just because they were foreigners and opposed to big fat corporations (what if they were foreign-born; he was too) — so they were anarchists; that didn’t mean they had scraggly whiskers and threw bombs with lit fuses in them the way the Hearst newspaper caricatured them — that he made the case the subject of his final address in Public Speaking 6, which would account for half his grade in the course. He went to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and Fifth, and read as much about the famous cause célèbre as he could — and came away more convinced than ever that the two men were innocent of killing the paymaster of the shoe company in South Braintree, Massachusetts, as charged.