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

Why hadn’t he taken some junk course — Economics — instead of Geology as a crash course that summer! Geology, the one course he truly enjoyed, the one class he looked forward to attending. Why hadn’t he saved it for a full semester? Those field trips, Saturday afternoon. He sometimes had to join the group already on site, he had so little time between quitting on Saturday afternoon and getting there. But even so: to view the potholes in Bronx Park, potholes bored in the rock by thousands of years of glacial eddies. Eons of the past intoxicated him. The mind reeled ecstatically contemplating metamorphic rock, just plain metamorphic rock. Ah, what entrancing ages had gone by, gone by and left their parallel glacial scoria on the mica schist outcrops in Central Park. Who would ever have guessed those scars were gashed by glaciers? He never knew just where the fault was that separated Manhattan from the Palisades, but what matter. He climbed the sedimentary rocks of the Palisades, the shales and the slates, so different from the mica schist and the gneiss of Manhattan. Just knowing the fact alone was heady, climbing the Palisades. “And did you know?” he asked Minnie. “Mt. Morris Park is a monadnock? A pile of rocks and boulders left by a melting glacier.” That fact alone all but reprieved “Porkpie hat,” the man who had molested him thirteen years ago on top of another hill, on a monadnock’s sister, of a summer day. All but. . The rise of the hill under the trestle on 116th Street and Park Avenue a monadnock, the hill he had panted up so many times on his way to Baba’s as a kid to scrounge a few coins — on his way to Mamie’s to scrounge a piece. So that was a monadnock with a new comfort station on top, and rows of pushcarts below.

“My clever son,” said Mom. “Alles veist er . Ah, would I be happy if my head didn’t roar so.”

And he found himself reflecting a great deal more that summer than he ever had before, seeking deeper explanations than the ones he thought already explained. The realization came to him sneaking a smoke with the others under the lowered trains at day’s end. It wouldn’t have made any difference if he had gone to work with the rest of the graduating class of P.S. 24, at age fourteen. He no longer belonged, he no longer belonged even then, at fourteen. Why? Minnie, and the guilt of his incest? Nah, he hadn’t thought a great deal about it, didn’t know much about it: it was gratification. Even before he lost the glimmering thread under the train before the quitting whistle blew, he had parted from the rest somewhere, somehow — when? What was all that “speeching” he did, way back on the East Side? Poems he recited in the public school assembly that Mom came to listen to: about the east wind, and the color it had, and the west wind, and the flowers it brought. Even then, even that far back, the separation had begun — quick, another drag or two, and he’d have to crawl out — separation from Yiddish to goyish , no, to beautiful, beautiful English. “Kelly around?”

“No, he’s in the office.”

Oh, long ago, he had parted company with the rest, long ago before he was fourteen. Before Harlem. In the very heart of the East Side. Before he was eight years old. When he learned to read. Yeah, yeah, yeah: 1912 on the calendar. Hard to remember—

Whe-e-e!

“There she goes. Quitting time. Another day, another dollar.”

They clinched their butts, broke the glowing embers of tobacco off, stamped on them, and climbed up to the aisle.

Some sort of large rhythm ran through his head as he joined the rest trooping to the washroom, a declamation without words. Another day, another dolor. Stuff that in your literary calumet — no. “I have lost the great — what?” he could hear himself say. Was he trying to remember a quote — from whom? Shakespeare? Othello? “I have lost the great — Damn.”

“Kolly,” said Quinto at his elbow. “Kolly biga cockasuck.”

“Yeah?”

August sunlight splayed on the great sullied skylights overhead, filtered through the smudged glass and spread over the shop, train and crane and aisle and workbench. Here and there, where a corner of windowpane had broken, or a piece of mullion weathered out, crystal spikes of sunlight flashed through, stabbed with radiance of splintered diamond. Bright, bright, ah, forever. You’d think the glitter was tangible.

The shop was hot. De Quincey, the shop was hot. Always August seemed summer’s last assault, and with a vengeance. Sweaty, and snorting everyone against the weight of thermal torpor. Wilted: “Hot enough for youze,” exchanged for mirthless: “It ain’t the heat, it’s the hoomiliation.” And: “I ain’t sweatin’ bullets, I’m sweatin’ minié balls.”

Ira had been tempted to give his notice that week, and with the heat, he regretted he hadn’t. But another week — or two, if he could hold out, another two weeks at $28.50, with gray fedora and secondhand oxford gray suit and “it’s like new, I should live so,” a Chesterfield overcoat with black satin collar, and yes, brand-new, tooled brogans, all bought for his senior year. He was all set: he’d have a few bucks in his pocket a few weeks longer at CCNY. He’d give Mr. Kelly notice in September, a week before college opened that fall of 1927, and give himself a week’s vacation. Doing what? Turkey trot, as they used to sing. You know? He squared off against himself within his mind: now that Stella had enrolled in that business school on Union Square, he could hang around there a free afternoon from CCNY until her school was out. And then? Yeah, and then? That was the whole trouble. Nowhere to take her. To the park, Centrum Pock, as Mamie called it. But they’d have to hike all the way past the lake, up the hill, genuine mica schist, and find some dell or dingle, what the hell ever that was. But that would take too long, and somebody might see them, meet them. That was the worst of it: somebody might see them. They’d know he wasn’t taking that little bimbo for a Platonic nature study in the bosky groves. . You know? What a villainous idea he just had! But that would take nerve. And a little dough, too. Well, he’d still have some. Take her to Fox’s Theater on 14th Street, where he worked when he was fourteen. Fourteen, fourteen, remember? First balcony — you could smoke up there. Third balcony, the projectionist’s booth. Second balcony, dead and dusty vacant, empty, empty as a — what did Andy Marvell say? None, I think, do there embrace . But it had two toilets in back, like the other balconies. And in the back, and in the back — which one would he use? The ladies’ or the gents’? With a low sweep of his new fedora like Sir Walter Raleigh: ladies foist. Oh, what a villain!. . Nah, he couldn’t, wild Indian, he couldn’t. But nobody could say that he didn’t have injunity — enginuity. But that two-handed engine by the door stands ready to smite once, and smite no more . I betcha it was the executioner’s ax. .

Edith invited him to attend a cocktail party at her apartment on the following Sunday. A singular honor: alone this time, without Larry. “I know I can trust your discretion,” her note in the old brass mailbox said. It was the second such “solo” invitation of the summer. That first time he felt himself balloon with pride like the frog in the story when she sat next to him on the couch across from Lewlyn. You could smell how delicate she was: “You mustn’t be so shy, lad.” And he had agreed, but was tongue-tied just the same. All those writers and poets and colleagues circulating around, who wouldn’t be awed? Larry wouldn’t, Larry wasn’t, and that’s what was so damned funny about it: he wasn’t invited, and the party was kept a secret from him. “He simply doesn’t fit into a gathering like this,” Edith confided, forgetting she had already confided the same thing the time before, but it was nice to hear just the same. Traitor. Yeah, he found himself pondering a thin segment of his mind, as if it were a slide on a microscope. Traditore , they sang in Aïda —that’s what the word sounded like on the phonograph record at Larry’s: traditore . Talk about irony. Wind up the crank, and the two were going to be walled up together, Larry said.