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

You are crazy. Crazy is as crazy does. Cracked sidewalk percussive in street-night, your drum heartbeat. Get there, that’s all. To the corner lamppost, high o’erhead. . whew.

He rounded the unlighted haberdashery, up above it, as if in contrast to the quiet, the loud crack of pool balls cracking out of the break on some pool table in the pool room on the second story. Faster, but don’t get out of breath. One block. Take a deep breath. Slow down. One block. So. . “I forgot my term paper. I came back.” His lips moved in audible self-cross-examination and self-exculpation.

“Why did I take it out of my pocket? Why did I take it out? My pocketbook, that’s why. The dollar bill you gave me. I—” He had an alibi. Great. The bright light of the drugstore was like a tangible barrier he had to force his way through.

In the clinical brilliance of the interior, reflected on myriad hues of jars and vials and tubes of patent medicines, lotions and salves, herpicides, fungicides, soothing syrups, shampoos, toothpastes, laxatives, behind the glass tobacco showcase that served as his counter stood the pharmacist—

— No. Where’s that insert?

I lost the goddamn thing, Ecclesias. I thought I saved it, but I didn’t.

— Too bad. Both the fact and the moment require it. If you fail to insert it, your omission will gnaw at you till your dying day.

Oh, shit. I’m at the very peak of narrative form. Ecclesias, have mercy.

— I am merciful. I’m saving you an endless wrenching of future regrets. You know as well as I do, the contrast — which happens to be actual — is needed. Are you an artist?

Oh, shit!

The marble counter of the store had been divided into two parts: on one side was the pharmaceutical part, on the other the small soda fountain. Goddamn it, Ira swore to himself on crossing the threshold. They had to be here: two young people sat in front of the counter, straws in the froth of chocolate soda. A young man and young woman. On the other side of the counter the soda jerk.

Round-faced and wearing glasses, pleasant and alert, the young woman was saying: “I wish we had somebody like Hutchins for president. Old Nicholas Murray Butler is such a fuddy-duddy. Not a progressive idea in his head.”

And Ira approached the pharmaceutical side of the counter. “Right,” replied her escort. He was all but albino in the absence of pigmentation of his hair, his wisp of mustache invisible, until Ira reached the counter. “That’s what we ought to have at Columbia: a Great Books program, the kind of thing Hutchins has introduced at Chicago.”

Oh, hell, rub it in, Ira thought. That’s what I ought to be, but I ain’t. That’s what I ought to think about but don’t. Great Books program, my ass. Now, listen to this, boys and girls, good boys and girls. He waited for the pharmacist to put down his newspaper and rise to his feet—

As the young soda jerk said: “Hutchins has got the right idea. Who needs football? A college is a place of learning. Intramural sports involve everybody—”

Ah, nuts to you.

Iatrically clad and composed in his white medical jacket, the pharmacist rested on his fingertips, awaiting Ira’s request. Humane, brown-mustached, wearing a bow tie, and recognizably Jewish. Near him, yet oceans away, two different-size slick, white rolls of paper promised a prophylactic wrapper. “Yes, what can I do for you?”

“Trojans.” Ira tried to keep his voice low. He canted sideways to dig out two bills. One was Mamie’s, the other Edith’s five-dollar bill.

“Yes. How many? A dozen?”

“No, no. The smallest package.”

“Two. Two for a quarter.”

“Yeah.” Ira laid the dollar greenback down on the glass. “For now.”

The conversation on his left hand lapsed noticeably. Go ahead, listen. I give, I give a fuck. Rancorously, as if he had uttered brutal derision aloud, Ira glared at the soda jerk eyeing him diagonally across the counter. You too. Jesus Christ. The guy had a wad of hair that looked like a hirsute raft supporting his ludicrous white soda jerk’s fatigues. Goody middle-class. I’m going to screw my cousin, yeah. What’s it to you?

“Two? Yes, my friend.” The item was stored out of sight, but conveniently, on a low shelf next to the tobacco counter.

“My girlfriend,” the young soda jerk revived the conversation, “is on Hutchins’s staff of undergraduate assistants. She gets straight A’s. The whole staff is crazy about him.”

The druggist brought to light the familiar small, round container, placed it on the counter, and picked up the dollar with practiced hand. “You want a bag?”

“No wonder, I would be too.”

“Oh, you would?” her escort bantered.

“He’s so young and handsome. He looks like an undergraduate.”

“Huh? A bag? No.” Anything could trip the mind, tense with haste, strung to the highest pitch of hazard. He was sure he had betrayed himself — by their pause, by the druggist’s brief, incurious survey — and tried to compensate by overdeliberate possession of his purchase, neat little round of aluminum, with its Grecian helmeted head stamped on the lid. Stop twitching. Be a Trojan like the crested hero — will you hurry up, already, mister? Let me get outta here. Christ. What I am and what they are, and I go to college too.

He had to abide the transaction though, crowd out, nay, bury their seemliness and decency, their undergraduate, worthy conformity, with makeshift, with frantic mental rubble: my mother gave me a nickel to buy a pickle. I didn’t buy a pickle. I bought some chooing gum. Listen, listen, the cat is pissen. Where, where? Under the chair. He had to abide it: ah, hell, abort it instead. Don’t go back. Leave his damned “An Assessment of U.S. Immigration Quotas” on the Yiddish newspaper. It wasn’t any good anyway. The more he listened to what regular collegians talked about, the more certain he was. Go home. You sap, you’re always getting yourself into these fixes. Oh, Jesus, jams. That’s you, patent it: Stigman’s jams—

“Something else?”

“No.”

“He looks just like Nicholas Murray Butler,” the soda jerk quipped. To laughter.

“You’d have to have a bad case of astigmatism.”

“Twenty-five cents.” With scant smile, mossy dollar bill on the alabaster ledge of the elaborately filigreed brass cash register, the key went down and the flag popped up: 25¢. Keeping the dollar in view, the druggist made change. “That’s fifty,” he laid a quarter on the glass. “And fifty is a dollar.”

Scoop up the change. What shackles could stop him now? Hell, they didn’t know who he was, nor did the druggist. Ira pocketed the silver. So the customer was in a hurry, so — but walk, he’d have to walk out of the store, a dignified six strides — no, less. If he ran out, some dumb cop’d think he was a holdup guy, a holdupnik, as Mamie would say. Jesus, was she still asleep? Anh, you’re wasting your goddamn time, he censured himself. And now he began to run. Faster. Stop thinking. Run. Holdup man. Get shot in the ass with two new condoms in your pocket. New. What else could the druggist sell him? They couldn’t be secondhand. Secondhand condoms — condrums, they called them on 119th Street, the Irish: scum bags. No, no, don’t stop. So gasp. Shot in the ass with two new condoms, just bought, five dollars and seventy-five cents in his pocket, on 112th Street, Mamie’s block. So what would she think happened to the dollar she gave him? It grew. And Mom? And Pop? And the mishpokha, too. Jesus, dead giveaway. Yeah, dead — and giveaway. One kid, one only kid that my father bought for two zuzim, khad gadyo, khad gadyo .

Panting, he dashed into the flyer. Stop. Stop. Stop. Hold it. That’s what you get from smoking. No wind. No, that’s all right. At least grab your term paper: you forgot it, see? Say, if Jonas is there — no, he couldn’t be home yet. But say he is. Hello, Jonas, you know what? There it is, there it is. Right on Der Tag where I left it: right on the washtub. Boy, was I dumb. .