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

Ira took the last of the typed sheets out of the machine, and after switching off the ceiling lights, stood in this stuffy little bedroom that Mamie had converted into her apartment house manager’s office. Should he roll up the typewritten sheets, having finished the job, or should he fold them, Ira debated. He ended by folding them, and shipping them into his jacket breast pocket. The scribbled sheets of loose-leaf notebook paper that had been his guide all afternoon he crumpled and tossed into the wire wastebasket. It was done. His term paper for the second summer session was about new immigration quotas and their effect on employment in the United States.

The bright Indian-summer sunlight of midafternoon, which had still shone when he first addressed himself to Mamie’s ancient, grimy Underwood, had palled hours ago to an ashy dusk on the single window of the bedroom office. For an eternity, it seemed, he had pecked away, erasing and cursing his mistakes, and erasing again. Toward the end, something of that touch system he had been so cavalier about learning the year he took typing in Mr. Hoffman’s class in junior high began to reassert itself. His typing had improved immeasurably. He recalled how Mr. Hoffman had clouted him alongside the head for being remiss in slipping a sheet of paper for a dust pan under his erasures to catch the errant crumbs of rubber and prevent them from going into the machine. What the hell, he had finished the course, and now this. A trained typist would have taken maybe an hour to do the job, but who could afford, who could even deem the work worthy of the offices of a professional typist. Ira had even considered asking Minnie, but after how changeable she had been, how quick to fly off the handle at him, he thought why bother. He even considered asking Larry if it would be possible to enlist the services of his sister, a private secretary, to do the typing. She was more reliable than Minnie. She had typed Larry’s short story, “The Graveyard.” But then, the thought of exposing his crudities — and possibly, his embryonic political leanings — checked him from carrying out his first impulse: he hadn’t realized to what a degree the simple act of putting words on paper in one’s own way placed one’s personality on trial. No, he would perform the task himself, in the privacy of self.

So all that long Sunday afternoon and into the early evening, hours after he had halted restlessly before the dark, metal-sheathed front door of the “first-floor” apartment on 112th Street and turned the brass key of the cranky doorbell, he had labored in the office. Mom was there as well, visiting with Zaida, when Ira arrived, and was surprised to see her son, who, after greetings, explained the purpose of his visit.

“About everything else he’s shiftless,” Mom remarked to the others in her fond, disparaging way. “Only this he cleaves to without stint. It’s a — something of a novelty.”

“I’m trying to get a good grade, that’s why,” Ira emphasized. “And all I got is today. It has to be in tomorrow. All right then if I use your typewriter, Mamie?”

“ Mit gesundheit ,” she accorded her terse blessing on the enterprise. “I have paper there near the rent receipts and the plumber’s bills, and the heap of bill-of-fare paper which Stella types for the cafeteria. You’re welcome to use it, if it’s useful.”

“It’s useful. Thanks, Tanta. Noo . Zaida, vus macht sikh? ”

“One makes do,” the old man replied with predictable unhappiness, “one gets along without teeth, with worthless bones, and worst of all without eyesight. Such clouds I have in front of my eyeballs. As if I walk in a perpetual fog. And the doctor tells me that to remedy my condition, I shall have to enter a goyish hospital—”

“ Tateh ,” Mamie assured him quickly. “There’s a rabbi that will see that your meals are kosher. I swear to you.”

“Among nuns a rabbi,” the old man said despondently. “ Noo , as the Almighty wills, blessed He, so be it.” And to Ira: “Old age is a boon, my son. You know to whom? To the ground.”

“I’m sorry, Zaida.”

“ Noo , go write, go write,” Mom urged.

Ira needed no further prompting. He left the front room, went through the long hall to the first room after the entry, Mamie’s office, settled into a chair, laid his penciled draft down on the frazzled green baize of the old rolltop desk, and began transcribing handwriting to typescript. Time passed, an hour or two. Mom took her leave — entering the little office first to bid Ira goodbye, but not before reminding him that Mamie had cooked a potful of pirogen , potato verenekehs , this morning, of which there would be enough and more than enough to go around. “And don’t be bashful,” she enjoined. “She’ll serve you lovingly with sour cream.”

“Yeah.” His mouth watered. “Thanks for telling me, Mom.”

“My handsome son,” she said by way of departure.

“’Bye, Mom.” He kept pecking away at the keys.

Mamie’s two girls came home, lithe, carrot-topped Hannah, the younger, prancing and gabbling in pert, tireless dither; Stella tubby in comparison, though merely adolescent plump, and seemingly stolid, though actually she was not — she was judged a good dancer. It was simply an air, an effect she had, an unfortunate one, that Mamie took at face value, which in turn produced unfortunate results in her daughter. It drastically diminished her self-esteem, and at present he gloated at the ineffable proceeds of that diminished self-esteem, the easy gratification afforded him by her lowered sense of self. Ironic, wasn’t it? Oh, boy!

Evading the quick, rash quips of her younger sister — Hannah’s glib, derogatory thrusts — Stella spent much of her time reading. She read voluminously, read indiscriminately and without taste, every new popular novel to appear in the public library, every new romance she could lay hands on (in fact, he once, in heat, went looking for her in the library, to bring her home). So curious that she never developed taste. And musically — she had only to listen for a few seconds to any popular dance band on the radio, and she could identify it. Something wrong, something denigrated, something stunted. And his prey! Blond, round zaftig Stella, his prey, his peremptory, his summary lay. No hesitation here, no Edith, no subtle banter, no forlorn eyes perched on his fly, no friendship. For a minute, while she stood next to her chaffering, flighty sister, he burned, burned. But hell, there was no chance. And he had to finish his term paper. Maybe he ought to pull off, go into the bathroom and get it over with. No. Burn, you bastard. Keep on typing till you’re done. Fortunately, Stella kept her distance in the doorway, and only Hannah skipped into the office to pry into what her cousin was engaged in doing. “What are quotas?” she exclaimed. “Why aren’t you writing another story?”

“Bye-bye, chatterbox. Yes, that’s what I’m writing about for college. Quotas, immigrants, workers, greenhorns. I’m working on my college term paper.” He dismissed her with a supercilious wave of the hand.

“Collegiate, collegiate.” Hannah exited, snapping her fingers, while her sister laughed her vapid laugh. “Yes, we are collegiate. Nothing intermedgiate. No, sir!” Trailing song, they went down the hall, leaving him to himself, to forget himself in his typing.

Three times he had to retype pages, or parts of pages, twice because his interlardings and his crossings out — X’ings out — of words were so numerous as to seem like a rank growth on the page, and once because his digression from his penciled guide left him at the end without feasible return; it had to be abandoned, and a fresh start faithful to the original made. At length he was done. He would look at it again before class, give the typescript a last inspection before handling it in. He got up, aware of a slight cramp in the region of the abdomen, broke wind, tapped the ashes of his pipe into the cracked soup plate Mamie had brought him for an ashtray, turned off the ceiling light, and walked through the long hall to the kitchen. The kitchen was this side of the sconce-lit front room. All the other rooms, the bedrooms of the apartment, opened on the hall, except two, one of which, Mamie and Jonah’s bedroom, opened off the kitchen, and the other, Stella’s bedroom, opened off the front room the same way. He felt played out, depleted. He didn’t think, even if the chance were presented to him on a silver platter, he could work up enough interest in a sexual go-round with Stella. Uppermost in his awareness was the feeling of being spent; his very breathing, chest heaving, seemed jaded. All he wanted to do was thank Mamie, say goodbye to Zaida, and beat it for home. He wasn’t even hungry, though he was sure once he traipsed the eight or ten blocks from Mamie’s to his house he’d do justice to anything Mom set in front of him. Odd: he had been struck by the accidental mistyping of the word “stud” when he meant to type the word “study,” and its meaning as applied to the vertical two-by-fours between which water pipes were installed in a wood-frame dwelling. Stud, with its further, its associate meaning pertaining to virility, to breeding, to sex, all suddenly dispersed by the simple correction, the addition of the letter y . That was what it seemed to have done to him. Where was Zaida?