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

After Ira and M got back from the light supper tendered them by Señora Orozco and her veterinarian husband, Dr. Orozco, who had been instrumental in finding them the apartment, Ira began a preliminary, and shortly a hectic, search of the premises. Investigation revealed that one of the primary, if not the primary, nesting areas, retreats, snug havens, was an armchair, buff in color, a lighter shade than that of the insects themselves. Lifting the overstuffed cushion that constituted the seat of the chair he exposed, to his horror (M was so much more temperate about it), enough roaches to lug the seat of the chair away — in his overwrought imagination. They had a can of anti-roach spray, and he began wildly spraying them, but hell, why spray the beasts in the living room and fill the place with scented fumes of DDT? He hauled the chair out on the balcony, and he sprayed, and he sprayed, first the chair right side up, then upside down, and the sides. It was a frenzied matanza , and never did he enjoy a revolting task more. In the end, they left the chair out on the balcony overnight.

They felt better after they went back into the apartment. He did certainly, and M did too, because he did.

“He prayeth best, who loveth best, and all that sort of blarney,” Ira growled as he dropped down on the seat of a plain wooden dining chair. “Thank God, I prayeth worst.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. When did you ever hear me pray? You don’t mean my cussin’, my profanity? That’s the Harlem street where I was dug up.”

She settled into a wooden chair opposite him at the table. “No, you’re always appealing to the best in you, your conscience, your oracle. I never saw a man struggle with himself so. Isn’t that what you do?”

“What’s praying about that?. . Say, you know, hon, that’s more or less what Skelsy told me in L.A. where I fled from my dependency on Edith in ’38. Jerk that I was. I could have moved a half-dozen blocks away in Manhattan and gotten just as lost. But then, as soon as I was broke, I would have — anyway, Skelsy kept telling me, ‘You’re a new kind of guy to me. You keep asking yourself if a thing is right. I never do. I try to figure out if it’ll work.’”

“Who is Skelsy?”

“A very dangerous man, I assure you. He was biding his time under the guise of a bookkeeper working for the state. But every once in a while he had to go on a bash. Why? He had to talk. And I was the recipient of some of his confidences. He had been a rumrunner during Prohibition. An expert marksman with a pistol. I gather he dispatched three competitors on an island who had tried to muscle in on his high-class trade, expensive liquor they bootlegged from Canada in small speedboats. He and his partner, a Swede, but the Swede was found shot, killed, and his speedboat floating around, empty. Oh, I must have told you about him. We lived in the same rooming house in L.A., just after I left Edith’s the last time.”

“You told me about your landlord who got a bad heart searching for gold.”

“Yes, during the Depression. Quinn. Climbing mountains, living on flapjacks after his wife gave him the heave-ho. She told him to come back when he had made some money. Mean to tell me I’ve never mentioned Skelsy in all these years? As a matter of fact, it was Skelsy who told Quinn, when we were having a drink, he should have ripped his wife up to the belly, made her suffer.”

“How awful. No, this is the first time I ever heard you mention him. Skelsy?”

“Well, for Pete’s sake. He didn’t believe you could ever make money staying within the law. And — would you believe it? He wanted me for a partner.”

“You! A partner in crime? My lambikin.”

“Yeah, me. I ain’t such a lambikin. He said of course he didn’t expect me to hold up under a third degree. You know, that’s when the cops grill you, beat hell out of you to make you confess. I couldn’t hold up under that. But he was sure I’d never double-cross him. The guy was really very astute. He promised to get me a cute Swedish chick too,” Ira teased.

“Flaxen-haired, I’m sure. How could you resist?”

“Scared as hell. What do you mean, resist? I’ll never forget the teardrops so cool on my cheek after I rode the freights home to New York — half the way home anyway. To you in your rented bedroom-studio on the ground floor—” Ira chortled. “How could I resist?”

Faint scent of residual DDT. The quiet. Feeling of sojourning in a foreign land, of the Mexican night outdoors.

“But hell, we weren’t talking about that. How did I get started on that?”

“Coleridge, don’t you remember?”

“Oh, yeah, Coleridge and cucarachas . You accused me of always praying. What’s praying about appealing to your conscience? That’s not praying. Where’s the deity?”

“I don’t think Coleridge necessarily meant a deity as you and I think about God,” M replied. “I just feel he was limited by his time. What he meant was something universal. He couldn’t help but make the universal into a deity. God.”

“Maybe so, but you’re a clergyman’s daughter.”

“Now don’t be snide, love.”

“Siccusa me, boss. My amject apologies. Carlyle wrote that when he interviewed or visited Coleridge, the old boy kept intoning an interminable monologue about sumject and omject.”

“Seriously, darling — what am I trying to say? What I’m trying to say is that had he had the chance to — to live in our times, be exposed to a modern existentialist view of things, our view, his ‘He prayeth best, who loveth best,’ and the rest—” She smiled at her involuntary rhyme. “Oh, you know what I mean. That end, the meaning, Coleridge’s definition of the object prayed to — all that — would have been quite different.”

“You could be right. Yeah. . I’ve got no philosophy whatsoever. I don’t have to tell you. But I remember reading in one of his commentaries on The Ancient Mariner , he does say something to the effect that ‘He prayeth best, who loveth best’ is an unfortunate obtrusion of morality into the poem. And the reason I remember it is that he uses the word ‘obtrusion.’ Now I know what ‘intrusion’ means, ‘extrusion.’ ‘Protrusion,’” Ira raised his voice for emphasis. “But what the Jesus is to obtrude? Do you know?”

She rubbed her eyelid thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”

“Does the fumigant make your eyes smart?” Ira asked.

“No, you got the worst of it. The eye just itched.”

He watched her a moment longer. And all at once, before she dropped her hand, he realized she had brought into a single focus many of the features of her appearance that made her outwardly what she was, that he conjured up when he thought of her: the aging, distinguished, gentle brown eyes, the hair that in younger days he had seen the Cape Cod sun burnish into a radiant gold — and now streaked lackluster with gray. Her once pretty teeth looked irregular and fragile when she laughed, and her bony pianist’s hands hung down lankly from her wrists. She had become angular and gangly herself.

“We brought the Webster’s Collegiate along,” she reminded Ira. “Isn’t it in your study? Why don’t you look it up?”

“It’s more fun to guess. Ab, ante, con, in, inter, ob, post, prae, pro, sub, super . There’s the ob . Takes the ablative.”

“Very helpful. And now that it does, what does it mean?”

“It means I go to the head of the class.”

“Smarty pants. You’re always the vocal one.”

“What do I do, kvetch ? Gripe? Why do you say I vocalize?”

“It means that I hear you, my belovedest, I know what you’re thinking.”

“You hear me?” Ira pondered.