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

There she was, outside her apartment, two flights up. She called his name as he climbed the carpeted steps, waiting for him at the banister, under the hem of her dark dress a glimpse of sheer silk calves he couldn’t help looking up at.

“Ira, so glad you’re early.”

Still on the floor below, he replied with a matter-of-fact “Figured maybe I better.”

How fondly, fingering jet bead necklace, she greeted him when he climbed up to the apartment floor. She must like him, he thought: smiling so affectionately. But why? He hung his head shyly, even virginally, bashfully at least, and entered. Navajo rugs, burlap-covered couch. Mantelpiece. Blue wagon painting. Piano. And next to one of its mahogany legs, prominent, significant, bulgy, hefty leather valise, tautly strapped and buckled — standing ineluctably ready. Lewlyn advanced, tall and manly in his greenish tweeds, to shake hands: his dry, cordial chuckle: “I see you believe in getting to appointments early.”

“Yeah, well,” Ira answered with uncertain matching good humor. “Later than this, it’d be a hard job to get here. You know what I mean? I don’t know when I had an appointment at ten at night.”

“No, I agree, it’s not a usual hour to call. But this is a question of time and tide, as you know. The Cunard Line determined that.”

“We’re both very appreciative that you didn’t wait any longer. Trains, steamships, always put my mind on edge, even when I know I have plenty of time. Does anyone ever get over it? I wonder.” Edith sighed. She shut the door — and brought into view the tapa tacked to it, Marcia’s present, Marcia’s presence, with the dim flowers on the brown tree bark. An instant was all you had to think about certain things: the tapa on the door, and next to the piano leg, the bulgy leather valise, tautly strapped and buckled. Edith was already picking up her heather coat from the couch, and Lewlyn his ministerial black topcoat from the wicker armchair. And a new perception crowded out the old: they were leaving right away.

“It’s getting to the point where it’s fashionable to be late,” Edith said as she got into the garment Lewlyn held for her in his own courtly way. “You probably haven’t learned that bad habit yet,” she smiled at Ira. “I’m glad you haven’t, especially now. But Ira, you didn’t bring anything extra to wear?”

“No. I didn’t think I needed to.”

“The open river allows for quite a sweep of wind,” Lewlyn interjected as he got his own topcoat.

“It is late September,” Edith added. “I’d love to lend you something of mine.” She smiled.

“No, thanks, I got a vest. I’ll be all right.” Ira couldn’t quite adjust to the tension they seemed to be under. There was plenty of time. They weren’t hurrying. It wasn’t that, but he felt a strain, an unsettling pall, that seemed to suspend time in Edith’s living room. He felt they welcomed him more than was his due, the way people might welcome a gamboling child, the way some might stroke a cat, arching cat, as a diversion from their own stress or disquiet, welcoming a shift of the center of preoccupation. Or was the tension just natural: because of the long voyage ahead for Lewlyn — and getting to that ship on time. But they had hours yet to go. He could feel himself take a deep breath against ambient nervousness. Or maybe because they were separating, yes, just as Mom had predicted when he had told her and Minnie, over a breakfast of fresh bulkies and lox, about Edith and Lewlyn’s awkward arrangement.

“ Azoy? Oy, vey, oy, vey, ” Mom had sighed gustily when she learned that Lewlyn would be leaving Edith to return to England. “It’s a terrible thing to toy with a woman’s heart. Poor Edith, my heart tears for her,” Mom had commented. “Had I had a revolver once, my betrayer would have paid for it.”

“If we go now,” Lewlyn, hardly the destroyer of Mom’s vision, said, “we won’t have to bother calling a cab. We can take the subway at Christopher Street. And probably get to Thirty-fourth before a cab.”

“It’s nice out,” Ira encouraged. “I just walked from the subway.”

“And we’ll have to go all the way to Seventh Avenue before we can hope to get a cab,” Lewlyn said to Edith. “Unless I call one from your apartment. Do you mind the walk, dear?”

“Oh, no, Lewlyn. Let’s just walk. It’s really just a short walk.”

“What about the valise? You want a hand?” Ira offered.

“Not now, thanks. I may take you up on that later. You’ve probably noticed valises have a way of getting heavier as time goes on.” He turned his kind gaze on Edith. “Are we ready?”

“I am. I’ll just lock the door and turn out the lights.” She got her keys out of her purse.

Scarcely anything more was said. They were on their way: out of the apartment, down the carpeted stairs, out of the house, into the night of the street, into the coolness of the night of the street, into the silence of Morton Street. On whose sidewalk Ira diffidently accompanied two people, because they had asked him to, and because he felt that something unknown waited upon his doing so, something distant and obscure he had to reach. And he had to behave, to walk, to appear, as if he were part of the scheme of things, though he didn’t know what it was, but only that their lives, their customs, their deportment, all of which they took for granted, and much he couldn’t even name, were ingredients of an evolving possibility.

Around the corner of Seventh Avenue he traveled with them, around the gas station, with the hands of the moon-faced clock in the window pointing almost to half past ten. By now Mom and Pop were getting ready to go to bed. Minnie was at a dance. Her folding cot beside Mom and Pop’s bed would be empty. His bed would be empty, too. He was here, on a school night, in the Village, putting up a cheerful front, keeping up with two professors — no, two Ph.D. lovers, college teachers, all the way American, walking to the Christopher Street subway kiosk, on the way to a ship, on the way to an ocean liner: a Cunarder, Lewlyn said. He was, he reminded them, from Pennsylvania: he had once been a Christian seminary student, once a priest, and was talking about courses in Greek, and how much they still meant to him. And she was his what? Mistress, a word he had heard Edith sometimes use: a hetaera from Silver City, New Mexico, where she said her father never carried a pistol, but dropped to the ground whenever the shooting started. At Berkeley, in California, she had pursued her graduate work. No, there were no more hetaeras in Berkeley — only in the dictionary. And he himself, on the valise side of Lewlyn, who so strongly carried it, he himself trailed all of Galitzia behind him, Jews and Jews and Jews, an ocean away that he had actually crossed in Mom’s arms: Galitzia and the Lower East Side and Irish Harlem: Jew-boy, Jew-boy, with these fine people. Forget it, forget! And remember it, remember. Why were you here? You swiped a silver-filigreed fountain pen, and gave it to your best friend, which was why you were here. You won a scholarship to Cornell, but your best friend was in New York, which was why you were here. Boy, you wouldn’t dare tell them: you wouldn’t dream of telling them about your fat heifer of a cousin you had fucked only last Monday, while your pious grandfather silently chanted in his bedroom, earnestly praying for his death. You wouldn’t dare use that f word with them. But still you were here with them. All you dared say was what everybody could see: that the night over Seventh Avenue was beginning to get chilly, that the subway entrance was only another block away.

Down the subway steps. And weren’t trains always perverse that way, when you weren’t in a hurry? The local pounded into the station just as Lewlyn dropped the nickel into the turnstile to let broadly smiling Ira onto the platform, and before the train stopped, he himself and valise were at the open door to join them. What a neat connection. The moment of haste gave them all a cause for small, diverting congratulations: