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

“Oh, Jesus,” Ira muttered, and tried to concentrate.

“Lucre!” Mom mocked. “ Oy, gevald! You hear?” she implored all and sundry. “Twelve stinking dollars a week to run the house he calls lucre—”

“Out of which you manage to skim off enough toward a Persian lamb coat. My fine lady with a Persian lamb coat.”

“So that the neighbors won’t know how afflicted I am—”

“Please!” Minnie exclaimed. “I want to study too. I’m gonna get finals. And I’m gonna have to take the Regents exams!”

“She’s afflicted, you hear?” Pop nodded in disbelief.

“Why else do I dress up in my finery, squeeze into a corset before I appear in the street? That happy Mrs. Stigman, the neighbors should say. See how stout and prosperous she looks. How fortunate she must be in her husband. How well he must provide, and with a lavish hand—”

“ Gey mir in der erd.”

“Gey mir in kehver.”

Ah, to be a timber wolf! To lift up his muzzle, like a timber wolf, and howl.

VIII

108 East 119th Street

New York City, N.Y.

July 17, 1927

Dear Ivan:

Yesterday it rained and rained, and everybody said it would then be very cool, and since everybody said so, even tho I am sweating as I write this, I suppose it is. And talking about sweating, I have already gained a reputation at the place I work for being the champion sweater there. But you don’t know where I work, so come closer, and listen, as Mel Klee, the black-face comedian in vaudeville, used to say when I was a kid and worked in Fox’s Theater on 14th Street.

The Irishman who lives with his termagant wife downstairs in the ground-floor flat, one Reb Mahoney by name, assistant timekeeper at the IRT subway system (once he was chief timekeeper, and I don’t know whether it was drink and the devil did for him, or his health gave out: he’s absolutely cadaverous) — Reb Mahoney, having been apprised by his wife, who was apprised by Mom that her son Ira neither toiled nor spun, suggested that I apply for a job at the Interboro Rapid Transit Co. I acted with alacrity. Of course they were going to make me assistant to the assistant timekeeper. On the strength of Mr. Mahoney’s recommendation to the fat — and Jewish! — personnel manager, I was hired — despite the disgust of the doctor who examined me: “You don’t have a single scar on you,” he said. “Where did

you

ever work before?”

Hence, for the past couple of weeks I have been working at the IRT repair barn nine hours every day, except Saturdays, until noon — for $28.50 per week. Instead of assistant to the assistant timekeeper, as I fondly dreamed would be my job, I was hired as pipefitter’s helper. That means like everybody else there, I’m always fiddling around in the vicinity of “old red mule,” as the third rail is called. I have learned, not by experience to be sure, not by hearse, but by hearsay, that a very brief contact with the 550 volts of the third rail doesn’t kill you as a rule, provided you’ve been endowed with a fairly sturdy constitution. What it does is play a percussion solo on your teeth, or cause them to play it; and since I’m not partial to that kind of music, I am very careful to keep my distance.

Another thing, I work just over the repair pit beneath the subway trains. And the first day there, I kept wiping my brow with my sleeves, which were filthy with grease.

Freg nisht

When I came out from under, half the place, from the superintendent to the lowly sweeper, went into a fit of laughter. I felt peeved at first to be taken for such a joke, but when I looked in the washroom mirror, I understood and forgave. I had two black horns of grease sticking up from my brow, and the rest of my features had those strange, eerie shadows on Dr. Caligari’s visage beat all hollow. The work is damn hard, but when I get that pay envelope, I’m satisfied.

At CCNY, which I attend after work, I am taking Government, Geology, and Public Speaking, the last-named course attended by Larry too, who’s also taking Sociology with Lewlyn, whom we told you we met at Edith Welles’s. I’m taking Government with a Mr. Benno. The guy is a scream. He has a lisp beyond anything you ever heard. And when he lectured us about the invalidity of

ex post facto

laws, “You can’t fool me, your honor. I thtudied ex potht facto lawth in Thity College too!” I had to duck down behind the seats ahead to hide my convulsions.

I see Larry twice a week in class, sometimes meet him before. Iz I haven’t seen until now, but I hear that while the Provincetown Theater is closed for the summer he sells programs at the Lewisohn Stadium concerts. He’s probably written you. So has Larry, I imagine.

You certainly got your driver’s license just in time for that boys’ camp job. You sound busy, picking up supplies from the railroad station, and taking kids on excursions. Hey, what’s this about your learning to ride horseback? Let me advise you: don’t ever say “Need any ice today, lady?” or the nag will stop so abruptly you’ll go over his head.

Please write soon, and tell me all about the women counselors, especially the attractive ones. Take care of yourself.

Ira.

It was the first time in his life that Ira had ever worked in so huge a plant, the first place that he learned about the transcendent power of the third rail. The plant structure itself was immense, an entire square block in size. And within it, hundreds of men, divided into crews, and every type of machinery and equipment, all there for the same purpose: the maintenance and repair of the IRT subway trains. Every morning, eight lines of trains, ten to a line, waited to be serviced, outside, inside, and underneath!

The first day that Ira was conducted into the huge “barn,” he quailed before the fury of motion and din that assailed him. Crews of burly men boosted thunderous timbers onto high, massive wooden trestles at each end of the train — while gargantuan steel hooks, dangling from a great horizontal hoist on tracks overhead , held that end of the train aloft. The work was perilous, to say the least, and the brawny Italian roustabout with bandages on his face as puffy as a pillow, who had been struck by one of the swinging hooks, was evidence to that fact. Appalling, the turmoil and the noise: airbrakes soughing, rheostats clacking, hammers banging, drills whirring. Acetylene torches blinded and smoked, kerosene reeked everywhere, cut through by the acrid odor of ozone. And as if lurking silently and unseen behind the overt turmoil brooded the greatest menace of all: the menace of high voltage.

The foreman, Mr. Kelly, beefy and tobacco-chewing, impressive in his striped, clean shirt, assigned Ira to help Vito, expert in the installation of brake rods, who would “break” Ira in on the job. Ira was more than a little apprehensive at the proximity of 550 volts. “The juice is off right now,” Vito advised. “But never touch here, here, here. Never take chance.” The propinquity, the seeming ubiquity, of 550 volts, and the uncertain footing, the narrow ledge just below the aisle between trains, and above the repair pit — his sheer lack of muscle in coping with brake rods that were anything but rods, egg-shaped slabs of steel that had to be held overhead while they were lined up by drift pin to mating parts, and a connecting bolt driven home — rendered him unequal to the task. Before the morning was over, he was shifted to a genuine “grease monkey” job: that of assistant to a diminutive Italian named Quinto in charge of servicing and maintaining brake cylinders.

The new job was actually more hazardous than the other, because the pistons were heavier than the brake rods and required two men to remove them, which in turn necessitated a degree of cooperation between them. Quinto was cooperative enough: he kept to the level aisle between trains, and stationed Ira on the ledge above the pit, when the pistons were to be removed. And once Ira even slipped from a greasy ledge down into the pit unscathed, much to Quinto’s amusement. Still, Ira felt more at home on the job. Quinto showed him how to unbolt the brake cylinder facing, and Ira had toughened enough to apply effectively the hefty open-end wrench to the hexagonal nuts — the wrench slid off once, and kissed Ira rudely on the lips. With Ira balanced on the pit side, the two removed the heavy piston and examined the large leather gasket; and if it was still in good condition, Ira, not Quinto, slathered great gobs of fresh brown grease inside the well-buffed cylinder wall, and then replaced the piston, with Ira, not Quinto, retightening the bolts. Ira noticed, as his muscles developed, that his shoulders and arms could thrust far more than his relatively small hands could endure. It was a mindless job, or nearly so.