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

Ira cooked his hand in sign of curt disparagement, curt disengagement. “Go find yourself someplace to eat, will you?” He stepped to the curb. A Christian, my ass, his thoughts echoed.

“Thanks. God bless ye. I’m gittin’ some coffee-an’, right away. Two bits.”

“Yeah.” Broad shadow of the trestle stirred by curling flame of a fire a block away: God bless you. Ira crossed to the north corner of 114th Street. Jesus, Mamie should know what he’d gotten out of her dollar: a well-fucked daughter, right under her mother’s snoring nose, a hell of a scare — what a scare! — a rubber condom pale in the gutter for some dumb kid to find tomorrow, and blow up into a balloon, another one in his pocket. And all of two bits’ worth of blessings from a tramp with a crumpled hat who’d got his lumps. Boy, that was a bargain, wasn’t it? If he could only tell it to somebody: the delirious contrasts in just one night, one day, wild whoosh, pathos, bathos. But that was the difference between himself and Larry. Larry could relate his adventures; they slipped easily through regular channels. His didn’t, his were deformed, fitted no channel, could never be told.

You got to think, Ira continued morosely on his way uptown: you got to think before you did, think, think, think. That was the trouble: you didn’t think. Try to think. Oh, think, your ass, he suddenly raged at himself: he wasn’t meant to think. He had stood on a flat, a diving rock by the Hudson and told himself that. He was meant to feel and to believe. He was made to suffer and to imagine. He wasn’t smart. Everybody knew that. But when would he begin? To think, to try to think: the practical things, the prosaic, the consequences, the way other people did, grown-up people, appraising and calculating. Even young people. Like those Columbia goodies in the drugstore. Oh, you had to, you had to. That was the way the world was: what did Gabe earn in that storehouse he owned, how much rent did he pay, how much rent did he charge each pushcart, how much did he pay the watchman, how much profit did he make on a crate of oranges or tomatoes? That was what should concern him. Not feel and suffer and imagine: what that old wop would say to himself, after the truck left him alone in Gabe’s warehouse, looking out of the little window in the door at the fire in the steel drum. How he remembered, maybe, his dead wife — who knows, he said he was alone: how maybe she picked up horseshit in the gutter like the other Italian women wearing black on 119th Street, horseshit to put on the geraniums in the wooden window boxes. Maybe he had a coal and ice cellar once, like the wop across the street. Maybe he once whistled “Chimes of Italy” when he jabbed his icepick into an ice cake on the sidewalk on a summer morning. That wasn’t what he was supposed to think about. He was a freak.

Up the hill rising to the closed brick comfort station under the trestle at 116th Street. The trolley tracks. The streetlights east and west. Rolls of linoleum standing like mummies wrapped in brown paper in the corner store show window. And downhill again to the muted rumble of a train passing overhead. And where was that bum going, that hobo-panhandler? South? After he got his coffee-an’ in some beanery someplace. Put his quarter on the counter — to show he had it — ordered a mug of coffee, got his change, and headed for the washroom to wash off his bloodstains. Headed for the West Side, to the Hudson River where the freight trains ran. He was a kid once too. Did he grab his father’s hand when the old man came home from work in the evening? Hey, Dad, what about a nickel? Come on, Dad, give us a jitney. Did that rusty bastard in the porkpie hat do that too. . once? How could you escape feeling, suffering, imagining; how could you extricate yourself at least to some degree? And yet, he would have to. . someday. When?

It was late. It was dark. He had risked. Who else had risked like that? Not Larry, in his nice comfortable room in the West 110th Street apartment. But it wouldn’t be Larry walking Edith back from the ship next Sunday. It was Ira she trusted, Ira she invited. It was Ira who knew. It wasn’t big blond Ivan, the physics whiz, saying to the classmate he was helping in the ’28 alcove: Now all we got to do is find the right integral. Not Sol, whose father sold trusses on Delancey Street, not redheaded Sol spouting all that Professor Cohen said in class. Not the Columbia students who knew all about Hutchins. No. Nobody. Only he had risked, crazy-risked. And he was going home now.

And here were the four-corners where he lived, where he lived and grew up, with the New York Central viaduct steel millipede nearby always.

He had risked, and he was going home. With half a buck of Mamie’s left in his pocket and a half-full condom tin, and five bucks of Edith’s. Was there a barucha for that? A prayer? Zaida, old hypochondriac, old boy? Jews had a prayer for everything? Was there a shekheyooni ? A prayer for deliverance for having screwed the ass of Zaida’s granddaughter, and not being caught? He had risked. And he had gotten away with it. Who had helped him do that and get away? He had pacified her, and Pasiphaë’d her. Who had helped him do that, Zaida, old boy? Was it the imp that jumped out of the shofar? That was a good one.

He heard his own snicker, short and mirthless. Here was where he lived, for now, 108 East 119th Street.

IV

With maybe an hour to spare, Ira made his way along Sunday-darkened 116th Street toward the Lenox Avenue subway kiosk. No more IRT pass now; he had surrendered it when he had quit the summer job, just after Labor Day. He dropped his jitney in the slot and swung the jarring turnstile ahead of him. He had already determined he would be a chevalier tonight, a chivalrous chevalier, so unlike his behavior with Stella the Monday before, two days after Edith’s request. And once again, he had reminded Mom he would be home “way, way late,” so that she wouldn’t worry.

He stayed on the local to kill time, but still he got to Christopher Street too early. So he sauntered. . along dull Seventh Avenue with its miscellaneous high and low buildings. The September night air had a touch of chill mixed with the darkness. He looked at the moon-faced clock in the gas station window at the foot of Morton Street: twenty minutes to ten. Slow. Slow. O lente, lente, currite noctis equi . Slow down. How could you make a house that was only a little more than a half block away seem as far as a house five blocks away? So if he got there a few minutes early, they wouldn’t mind; they’d be secure in knowing he had arrived. He crossed Morton to the south side, walked past Edith’s house, and as far as Hudson Street to the west, Sunday-silent, Sunday-dark, darker than Seventh Avenue. Tag-end. It was called a street, but it ran north and south, like the avenue it really was — Hudson Street by name. If that pitchy-black Ninth Avenue El a short distance away didn’t cut across the view, you could see the Hudson River. They’d be crossing to the other side soon. Underneath. Adventure, wasn’t it? Dark, Sunday-dark, the darkness that inevitably came when everyone was at home at the end of a weekend in the fall. Escort the lady home. But the minute you began to anticipate, you contemplated, and the minute you contemplated, memory floated up out of the ooze in repulsive patches. Better be on your best behavior, he cautioned himself: behave, for once, like a gentleman, and don’t forget it. Be like Lewlyn, like Larry. Jesus, wouldn’t that be a joke: like Larry. Ira turned back, passed the stoops of the two adjacent unrenovated tenements where the Italians still lived. . and on to Edith’s house, on Morton Street, number 64. He rang the bell. At the speedy buzz in reply, he lunged quickly against the door, barged in—