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

“Her older sister is only a little pregnant.” Stella bulked behind her sylphlike sister. “You hear, Ira, whenever they get married, the bride is only a little pregnant.”

“Oh, shut up. So she’s a little pregnant. I’m only going to be a bridesmaid. You—” Hannah turned angrily on her sister. “Give me back my Silver Screen !” She tore the magazine from Stella’s hand.

“ Oy, gevald! ” Mamie lamented. “Go to bed! Both of you! Go bathe, go wash. Leave me alone!”

“Say I can go. Please, Mama. It’s in a week next Sunday. I have to tell Isabella. She’s maid of honor. You liked fun yourself when you were a girl.” Hannah was close to tears.

“Go! Stop tormenting me. You wish to mingle with goyim , with Portorickies — go! May it not be as Zaida says: little by little—”

“It won’t be, Mama. Just this once, I’m going to be a bridesmaid. I’m going to carry a bunch of pretty flowers through the aisle—”

“ Noo, noo, carry pretty flowers, but let me be. Only beware,” Mamie’s thick arm swayed menacingly. “Breathe the least word to your father—”

“I? Never! Oh, Mama, I can go? Oh, Mama, thanks. You’ll see nothing will happen. I’ll still be Jewish.” Hannah kissed her mother’s cheek, pirouetted. “I’ll tell Isabella tomorrow. I’m so happy! I’ll take my pink dress to the dry cleaner’s. Oh, I’m going to be a bridesmaid!” She stood erect, ruddily radiant.

“Be a bridesmaid.” Mamie’s reluctance clear.

“Today a bridesmaid, tomorrow a bride,” Stella said unpleasantly. “Maybe you’ll be a little pregnant too.”

“Maybe you’ll be a little pregnant.” Hannah fired back. “Just because they don’t ask you, you’re jealous.”

“I don’t have to wear three pairs of stockings on my skinny legs.”

“Shut up!”

“Hush! Both of you! You’ll wake him up!” Mamie raised her voice. “And then you know what will happen, don’t you? A doom. Go wash, go bathe, go to bed!”

“Go wash,” Stella ordered Hannah. “I have to bathe after everybody else,” she informed Ira testily.

“Is that so?”

“Of course. After Zaida, I take his ring off the tub. And after she washes, because she’s younger—”

“ Oy,” Mamie prolonged her yawn. “Were you as tired as I am you would have gone to bed long ago, washed, unwashed, bathed, un-bathed. Ai, gevald.”

The skinny and the rotund. The skinny red-poll, the chubby blonde. The one slipping by the other out into the hall. Well, a lost cause, to be sure, but now that her sister no longer blocked his view, there she was, in a vision once he saw, fair, short-throated damsel without a dulcimer, bare-legged in baby-blue house slippers with pom-poms, Goldilocks with glisten of goldy hair on her calves. So beheld her he, delectable nigh-tubby she, nubile firkin of seventeen. He’d better get the hell out of here. But lingered instead, welded to the spot. That was how lost causes were won, but what they did to you, winning, you were better off with them lost.

“Tell me, Stella, what have I denied you?” Mamie chided wearily. “What have I denied you that you pout at everything?”

“Because that’s the only way I can get anything,” Stella rejoined. “I have to yell to get anything. If I don’t yell I don’t get anything.”

“ Azoy ? Pretty spectacle you made of yourself. You hear, Ira?”

“What?” Pretext to stall, this one of being caught in the middle, not that his guile would do any good, but—

“Big as she is,” said Mamie, “she threw herself on the kitchen floor, and lay there kicking up her heels, until I consented to buy her a new gray coat that she saw in the window on 14th Street. A grown-up maid having a tantrum like that. Wasn’t that shameful?”

“Did you?” Ira asked judiciously.

“Of course I did. Why shouldn’t I? I went into the store after I got out of business school. It’s on Union Square. So I went into Klein’s, and I fitted on the coat. It was perfect, Ira, it was just perfect. So why shouldn’t I get it?”

“Not whether I can afford it or not,” Mamie demanded.

“You can afford it. You can afford it. You don’t pay rent. You take care of two houses — and you let Papa and Hannah go to the mountains every summer—”

“You know why I send Hannah along: Jonas should behave himself. He likes to chuck the girls under their chins, and give them a little pinch and a caress—”

“Anyway, you send her to the mountains.”

“And she doesn’t like to go. I’m telling you. The chairs in the train scratch her legs. She has tender skin. And she doesn’t like walking on the roads there in the mountains, with cow dreck to step in. Ask her.”

“I don’t want to ask her.”

Stella advanced into the kitchen. “You know what it is, Ira? Mama says I pout. You know what the real reason is: she won’t let me be what I want, she won’t let me go to school to learn what I want—”

“No!” Mamie exclaimed. And then added immediately: “Shah! The old man, he’s gone to bed.”

“You see?”

“What is it you want?” Ira shifted patiently from one leg to the other.

“I want to be a manicurist.”

“Never!” said Mamie. “You know what a manicurist becomes?”

“Ira,” Stella turned to him as toward final appeal. “Does a manicurist have to become a you-know-what?”

“I don’t think so.” Ira had never been there at an hour as late as this. Ten o’clock already — past ten — Jesus, this was funny — if it wasn’t so combustible — what the hell did they do in Spain during the Inquisition? He was burning at the stake, his stake. Jonas would be coming home in a couple of hours, and that hemmed him between limits.

“Stella, let him go,” Mamie commiserated. “The poor youth is worn out. Noo , go, go,” she urged compassionately. “I don’t want your mother angry with me.”

“You’re right,” Ira squeezed eyelids together. “Just one thing I’d like to know before I go, Mamie. Are you really afraid she’ll become a you-know-what if she learns to be a manicurist?”

“No, I only say that. I brought up my daughters to be good Jewish girls. But I admit, I’m a bit afraid.”

“Why?”

“Hannah, you know, wants to be a dancer. Do I allow her to take dancing lessons? No. Why? Because I’m afraid she’ll become a you-know-what? A dancer has more temptations than a manicurist to become a you-know-what. Still, that’s not the reason I won’t let her become a dancer. Or Stella to become a manicurist. You are a student. Were they boys, I too would send them to college. But they’re girls. And in today’s world, which is better for a girl? To be a manicurist, or to be a bookkeeper? To be a dancer or to be a secretary in a tall office? For that reason I send Hannah to Julia Richmond to learn commercial subjects. And Stella I send to the Union Square secretary school also to learn commercial subjects, because everything today is commercialize, commercialize, as Saul, your uncle, says.”

With gross hands clasped in front of her bulging abdomen, Mamie folded infelicitous English into Yiddish.

“Yeah, because he reads that writer in the Daily Journal , so he knows more than everybody else,” Stella heckled.

“Tell me,” Mamie quelled her mutinous daughter, “which will they need more, when you go to earn a living, a dancer or a bookkeeper, a manicurist or a secretary?”

“And you think you can’t be a you-know-what in an office, too?”

“Go, you speak nonsense. I didn’t ask you that. You hear, Ira? Did I ask you that?”

“No, of course not.” Damned idiot, he cursed himself. Go yowl on a goddamn fence like a tomcat. Get the hell out of here!