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

“Stop, girls,” Mamie reprimanded. “He’s waiting for Zaida. I don’t know what’s keeping him. Go, go back to the radio. And turn it down. I don’t want any quarrel. Zaida is going to bed soon.”

“Oh, him,” the two sisters chimed together in resentful unison. “Everything is for him.”

Then Stella solo: “If you think he’s in the toilet long, you should be here on Friday, erev Shabbes . Till he bathes, till he cuts his nails, till he wraps up every toenail, God forbid the rats shouldn’t eat it, you could plotz —”

“Do me a favor, daughter — both of you. Leave.”

They departed sulkily for the front room.

“And turn the radio down,” Mamie called after them. “Even if it doesn’t run on batteries now, it’s electricity, it costs. You hear?”

“Ye-e-s,” came the grudging drawl.

Mamie sighed — and yawned. “The old man to cater to, my daughters to look after, to rear them in true Jewishness, a glatt kosher home to keep. And two apartment houses.” Mamie held up a vee of two thick fingers. “My brother Saul with his evil temper. Thank God he’s no longer my partner. He thought I had nothing to do but collect rent. If he ever calls me a sonofabitchekheh again, I’ll spit in his face. So now I’m manager of the two houses for the bank. What more can I do than I am doing? Nothing. And rent I get free.” She rested her heavy arms on the table. “The neighborhood is becoming Portorickie: one has to know how to deal with them, and I do. I treat them like human beings. What else are they? I’m not afraid to live here with Portorickies. Other Jews are afraid. They move out. Everyone warns me, my husband, Jonas, warns me: don’t go in the backyard from one house to the other to collect the rent. He read in Der Tag how they felled a landlady, and tore her rent receipts from her. Noo , the white goyim , those Irish, don’t do that too? I’m not afraid.”

“No?”

“I fear only one thing, I fear the Almighty.”

“Yeah?”

“Only Him.”

Her blunt expression of faith was moving, a faith long lost to Ira, but still capable of resonance: the new radio softly churned out some popular instrumental number, Charleston, Black Bottom, jazz, who knew? Stella was in there too, object of his remote, his academic dawdling, nothing more. He smirked at himself — and at Mamie, his obese aunt, too obese to cross her legs, a balloon of faith. It made a curious design, a pattern, woven together with sardonic woof, and ambivalent warp. And Zaida, the figure Ira had all but forgotten, in the bathroom off the hallway, in the bathroom, opening the door, at last—

“Here he comes,” Mamie announced.

“Will he come in here?”

“No, he’ll go into his bedroom. He must be in his underwear already.”

“Then it’s late,” Ira demurred. “Isn’t it?”

“Go bide with him a few minutes,” Mamie pleaded. “His life is so bitter. He’s purblind. And the little sight still remaining to him he’ll soon hazard under the knife.”

“All right.” Ira arose to his feet, frowned in resolve.

“It’s a mitzvah , indeed, that you perform,” Mamie urged. “His eldest grandson, and an educated one, to comfort him in his loneliness, in his last years.”

“I don’t know whether I can.”

“You can, you can. Come back afterward, and say goodbye.”

“I’ll be back in a minute.” Farewells to Mamie usually paid off, even though he was in the funds for the nonce, thanks to Edith, and the end of his summer job for the IRT. Ira made for the threshold. On the one hand, in the direction of the house door, he saw the harsh light from Zaida’s bedroom streaming across the narrow hallway; on the other side he saw Stella in the front-room doorway, Stella reading a magazine at the large dining-room table, blond, cuddly, insipid quarry to his sudden onset of rut. He had never experienced that before, a kind of erotic second wind; he never had to wait that long, hadn’t thought of the time spent here as waiting, until this moment. . Nothing doing anyway. They exchanged glances through the harangue of a saxophone and timpani. Remarkable, almost incredible, that at so young an age, she could act so completely apathetic, and was not; she could seem so completely unconcerned, and was not. Hell, he’d been all right till now, quiescent. He’d better try and stay that way. His weekend was used up, even if his weak end wasn’t. He trudged toward his grandfather’s bedroom.

In house slippers, baggy, mussed trousers, and long-sleeved underwear, black yarmulke on his gray head, his back to the doorway, Zaida was plumping up the heirloom pillows on the bed.

“I came to say good night, Zaida.” Ira counterfeited mien of contrite deference. “I’ve hardly talked to you.”

“Who is it?” Squat man in his waning sixties with a bulging paunch, and the gait and flaccid flanks of a man much older, Zaida swiveled his gray-bearded visage — and peered. True, Zaida had cataracts in both eyes, but confirmed hypochondriac that he was, he missed no chance of exaggerating his ailments. “Oh, Leah’s son. Are you still here?”

“Yes. I was talking to Mamie.”

“Your mother was here this afternoon.”

“I know. She said goodbye to me when she left.”

“ Noo , come in and sit down.”

“I’ll only stay a minute. It’s getting late. I’ll be keeping you up.”

“Then I’ll sleep better for it. How are your studies in the college going?”

“About the same, Zaida. Not too wonderful.” Ira wagged his head in humorous belittlement.

“Then you should try harder, even to your utmost,” the old man counseled. “You owe your mother that bit of joy at least for the sacrifices she’s made for you — and still must make, no?”

“I guess so,” Ira replied.

“What?”

“You’re right, Zaida. It was just that first year that was hard, getting used to college. Now that I’m nearly a senior, as they call it in English—”

“What bliss will alight on my poor Leah when she sees you finished with your studies. How much longer do you have to go?”

“Another year. I hope no longer that than. I’m finishing summer school to make up credits. I won’t have enough of what they call credits to graduate this next summer.”

“I hope so too.” Zaida apparently caught the lack of enthusiasm in his grandson’s tone of voice. “It’s time you thought of her, no? How many years still have to pass before you begin earning money and begin to lighten her poverty? How many have already passed? My afflicted Leah, with her chronic catarrh and her sorrows, and her lunatic husband.” Zaida rocked back and forth a little, as if davening . “Woe is her. May the Almighty take pity on her — and on me, no? That I have to behold my daughter enduring such suffering? On me as well, on me, believe me, with my cares and my plagues, my shoulder joints and my hips, all racked — and my eyes, it goes without saying. And soon to be imprisoned in bed: they say with a bag of sand on each side of my beard. Oy, vey, oy, vey . Each day brings a new ague, a new grief, and no one to abide it but myself.” He indicated the direction of the front room. “Dancing and springing, that they know — to that ugly music. It’s called music. When they play it loud, a terror smites me, as if savages were at large. And these I have for granddaughters.”

“I’m sorry, Zaida. I don’t like that kind of music either. It’s called jazz. What can you do? That’s today.”

“What? I don’t know?” Zaida reproved. “May it be destroyed, as it destroys me. What it makes of Jewish children, and of Jewish girls.” He nodded significantly. “If this is today, tell me, what need of a tomorrow?”