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

“Indeed, after he broke the mirror in Krug and Zinn’s vegetarian restaurant with a water pitcher, he would no longer hear of being a busboy,” Mamie nodded.

“Yes, I heard about that. He got his diploma.”

“He’s a madman,” Mamie dismissed Pop. “But speaking about my brothers again, to me they wouldn’t listen. It was not till Zaida ordered them — ordered them to take Jonas in for a partner into the business, that they did. You hear?”

“I hear.” Ira speared the penultimate pirogen on the right. “Boy!” he complimented his aunt again. “ Verenekehs like these are fit for the thirty-six Righteous — what’d Zaida call ’em? — Tzaddikim? For whose sake God spares the world.”

“Better than your goyish macaronkahs, no?”

“Oh, much.”

“A few more,” Mamie wheedled. “Nokh a bisseleh, nokh a shisseleh ,” she rhymed.

“A tureen, you mean, I’ll fall away to a ton,” Ira said in English.

“Such a small appetite you have.”

“Ho. Ho. No, I learned my lesson. Mamie, I really have to be going. It’s getting very late.”

“You eat and run?” Mamie reproached.

“Eat and run. It’s ten o’clock.”

“Hear only this last thing. You’re a learned youth. Perhaps you can give me a khokhma .”

“Me?” Ira dropped back into his seat. “I couldn’t give you chicken schmaltz .”

“Go, I know better. Hear me a minute. I’ll tell you.” She wagged her tuberous finger at him. “With Zaida, a pious Jew, and my two American daughters, how shall I reconcile them? It’s a difficult thing to do, no? You understand?”

“I should think so.”

“I’m glad you understand.” Mamie took the plate away, immediately began washing it. Rinsed, she set it on the drainboard, went to the stove, lowered the gas flame still lower, to a bare fringe under the simmer baffle. Then she came to the table and plopped down into a chair.

“To please both them and him is impossible. What they crave, he opposes. ‘Father,’ I plead, ‘it’s America, it’s not Galitzia.’ How did I meet my husband, Jonas? Through a marriage broker and photographs as in the old days? I met him in the same loft building on Delancey Street where we worked together. I worked at a sewing machine. In the shop next door he sewed the visors on caps. Both of us greenhorns. We ate lunch together. We joked together. We told stories of our Galitzianer hamlets. Then he asked me to go with him to a Yiddish theater on Second Avenue on Saturday night. I don’t know: maybe Tomashevsky was the leading actor. Who can remember? And so, little by little, we became acquainted; then we became engaged. ‘A girl has to win her own suitor in America, Father,’ I said to him. ‘But she can remain a good Jewish maiden, for all that,’ he said. ‘No, but your daughters are hulladrigas , both of them,’ he said: ‘Plain wantons. You at least had to go to work,’ he said to me. I said, ‘To toil as I did in a sweatshop all day over a sewing machine I won’t send them.’”

“Mamie, I really have to go.”

“Another minute and I’ll explain. Why did I buy a new radio? Cost me a full whole hundred dollars, that they’re listening to this minute — and that the old man loathes the sound of. To hear Rabbi Wise on The Jewish Hour ? No, I bought it so that the two girls could entice youth into the house, young men, swains, you know, to learn how to deport themselves with boys, with young men. The time isn’t far off when they’ll have to think of suitors, no? One is seventeen, the other has turned fourteen. So what do you think he did?”

“I can just guess,” Ira said laconically, and got his feet under him.

“Hear!” Mamie preempted. “He comes rushing into the front room, yarmulke in his hand — in his gotchkis , mind you, without trousers — flailing and shouting: ‘Out, trombenyiks , out, scamps, out, wastrels!’ Good Jewish boys. It vexed me so. Here I am, right here in the house when they’re here. What harm can they do?”

“That’s right,” Ira said reassuringly, as he stood up.

“Well, ready to go to bed?” Mamie asked.

“Me?” Confused a moment by his aunt’s deflected gaze, Ira looked over his shoulder. “Oh.”

It was Hannah. Posing in twiggy sulkiness, rusty-haired, skinny-shanked, she slouched in the doorway. “I’m so bo-o-red,” she said.

Shreds, transient husks winnowed from desire: not for Hannah, though. How the chaff swirled up between the time Mamie said, “Ready to go to bed?” and he turned his head expecting to see Stella in the doorway. What would it be like, with a whole night to spend pumping her. . in a bed — whole nights? Whole days, to have her at his beck and call, every time he had a hard-on. Why not resign himself to being a shlump, a ne’er-do-well, with his witless piece of ass, and let Mamie and Jonas support him, while he did what? Read, mope, moon, speculate — and screw his onetime kid cousin as the swift seasons rolled. Never mind the stately mansions. Just be what he always was, except for a ready, steady, statutory lay. At least it was more tenable than belated fantasies with Minnie, impossible, murderous fantasies, though this was too: what would his family say? To hell with them. Or his college friends? Edith? Nah, unthinkable — then why did he think about it? Just scrub it from your mind, if you’ve got a mind. And what the hell good would it do you to satisfy what you wanted now? None. All you wanted was about thirty seconds alone. thirty seconds. A thirty-second lost cause. Stella in the front room knew it was a lost cause too, undoubtedly she knew it. It would have to be a mackerel, said the Jewish yenta , when she meant to say “miracle,” for him to get a chance to exercise his cod unimpeded and legally. He interrupted the exchange already taking place between Mamie and Hannah with an absent: “I guess it’s time I went to bed too.” Which passed unnoticed.

“Go to bed, go to bed!” Hannah squirmed at her mother in quirky indignation. “That’s an answer to a maiden’s prayer? What am I gonna do in bed? Sleep?”

“What else? You should listen to the old man.” Mamie indicated the hallway. “You would know what a broken sleep means. He groans and he moans and he bewails his unhappy lot. Even in sleep he haggles with the Almighty. Like a Lubavitcher.”

“I’m not an old man!” Hannah retorted. “I’m a young girl. And a girl should have dates. She should have something to look forward to. Dances. A nice party.”

“Live. Only live,” Mamie rejoined. “You’ll have dates. You’ll have parties without measure. You hear, Ira? A Jewish girl, little more than fourteen, she has to have dates, she has to go to parties.”

“Why not?” Hannah countered. “Christian girls have dates, even when they’re twelve. Isabella Martinez upstairs has dates. She goes to parties, lots of parties, in fancy white dresses her mother buys on 125th Street. She doesn’t have to live, live, she’s living already. Only Jewish girls have to live, live — till a khusin comes along. I wish I was a Puerto Rican!”

“God forbid! Go to bed!”

“Go to bed! I want to be a bridesmaid!”

“Again? I said no!”

“You don’t have to buy me anything. No white dress. I have a pink dress already.”

“I don’t care whether it’s a white dress or a pink dress. It’s a goyish wedding.”

“Oh, such goyim as they are,” Hannah disparaged.

“I don’t care. Catholics they are. If the old man heard a whisper of it, he’d take his stick to you. And your father — he’d box both your ears.”

“They don’t have to know. It’s nothing, Mama. It’s fun. Puerto Ricans are so happy. They sing and they dance and they play the piano and they play the guitar. They have such nice parties. Isabella wants me to be a bridesmaid with her for her older sister — oh, Mama, please.”