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

“That’s why I have to protect you.”

“And you wanted to?”

“Yes. I wouldn’t have anything else in the world. Do you realize that my life was already quite settled before I met you? I had made my future secure. I was teaching music at Western College. Elizabeth was teaching in the English department. She and I would find an apartment the year my sabbatical ended. We would live in it together. I would compose music. Quite settled, quite planned. And then you came along and ripped it all to pieces at Yaddo.”

“‘This is all I have to say to thee.’” Irresistibly Jocasta’s last speech in Sophocles’ Oedipus came to his mind, to the mind of one addicted to utterance. “’This is all I have to say to thee,’” he repeated gloomily, “‘and no word more forever.’”

“My honey lamb. You’re my honey lamb.”

“Yeah. I know. What an impostor.”

Fragrance of the tobacco burning in her pipe. . again the quiet. Feeling of sojourning in a foreign land, of the Mexican night outdoors.

“No, you’re not an impostor.”

“I’m not?”

“No. You’re so involved with yourself that you’re surprised when people assert themselves, when they get into your world, as I just did, and I’m a little sorry I did.”

“No, I had it coming to me. I ought to be reminded more often. Daily. Hourly. Sea nymphs wring his neck.”

“Darling, please don’t mutter. We were both babes in the wood when we married. We both had a lot of growing up to do. I know I did.”

“That’s an understatement when applied to me. When we met, you already held down a respectable job. You had been self-supporting for I don’t know how many years. Whereas I–Christ, what a blob! Larva! Coddled Junior of a ménage à trois . Yech!”

“Darling, you mustn’t. You break my heart.”

“Boyoboy, if you’re not the kindest creature. If it weren’t for you, I’d be dead by now. Dead as a haddock.”

“My honey lamb, my lambikin. Please!”

“I see what you’re doing. Me and my goddamn moods. Taking care of me and my swings, my fits.”

“Honey lamb, let’s change the subject. Please. Pretty please. For my sake.”

“Yeah, for your sake. Oh, boy, what a burden you carry.”

“I don’t care. As long as you love me.”

“Love you? God, women are easy to satisfy. Love you? ‘And when I love thee not, chaos is come again.’”

“Now you sound like my honey lamb. That’s so beautiful.”

“Yeah? It ain’t mine. That’s why.”

She laughed.

“So what were we on before all this?”

“Coleridge.”

“Yeah. Okay, tell me, what do you understand by the ‘He prayeth best’ stuff?”

“The way I interpret it, Coleridge simply meant that all life was mysterious and extraordinary. We may have to destroy some of it to preserve our own life. I forgot to tell you I bought two dozen shrimp on the way home. I’ll shell them in the morning before I go to the Diazes’. She’s got a gorgeous Steinway.”

“Yes?”

“They’re in the refrigerator. They were alive once, needless to say.”

“ Ach, zo . I see your point. Alive not too long ago, I trust.”

“Oh, yes. I’m always careful about what I feed you.” She leaned forward earnestly. “I wish you had my cast-iron stomach.”

“I’m glad one of us has it. Then what did you do in the fish market while I sat in the car? Ask the seafood which of them is freshest? Tell them you got a husband with a sensitive gut?”

“No. I ask them what’s the latest news in the deep sea.”

“Oh, is that it? Using a little feminine guile, were you? You’re wonderful. You know? How come about a million other guys didn’t snap you up?”

“Oh, I wasn’t the conventional pretty girl — like my sister Betty. And I was always falling for the wrong man.”

“And you did it again.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s none of my business why you don’t. But thanks anyway.”

She laughed lightly. “My funny man.”

She continued, a bit wearily, “Life’s all unique and the same at the same time. I think that’s what Coleridge meant. It’s special. Every speck of consciousness is precious. That’s what I mean. I think that’s what he meant.”

“Woof..”

“It’s the same kind of force. We all share it. Do you think there’s any difference between the lives — no, the life of a cockroach and ours? The life force?”

“Well, a much greater degree of awareness.”

“No. I’m speaking about the life force.”

“That animates us?” He shrugged. “Okay, probably not. So what am I supposed to be? Sorry I killed a bunch of roaches? The hell I am. I wish I’d killed a jillion.”

“I didn’t say that. I’m speaking about that miraculous speck of consciousness that — that matter turned into.”

“Say, how come you’re so smart? Musicians are supposed to be dumb. Louise Bogan was always going around denigrating musicians. They were short on brains.”

“Verbal skills maybe, but that doesn’t mean being dumb. The University of Chicago gave me a Phi Beta Kappa in my junior year. And my history professor asked if he could quote from my paper. So there.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think musicians and dancers and painters are any dumber than poets. We think in a different way. So do you, even though you are a writer.”

“I wish I’d known you when Bogan told me that, but I was scared of the dame anyway.”

“You were?”

“What a bimbo in a clinging peach velvet dress. I think she measured men by their powers of frigulation. She said Dalton — you know, the third in Edith’s ménage — she said he came to town like a bunny rabbit. You can imagine what she’d have thought of me.”

“You don’t come to town like a bunny rabbit.”

“Thank you, love. Not since I met you. Say, while we’re talking of specks of consciousness, maybe love is the highest thing in the speck. Or the best. How’s that?”

“I like the idea.”

“You mean the sentiment.”

“No, the idea. The thing you were talking about, the idea, the idea filled with sentiment.”

“Glory be. You mean it? I did it? Hosanna!”

A moment of silence, silicone silence, Ira and M under the yellow incandescents on the kitchen ceiling, the specks of memory which, until moments ago, lay irretrievably buried, now excavated and so pleasingly retrieved and reconfigured through the passage of time.

A new moment of silence, a solitary moment, as the gloaming light cast shadows over the books he loved so well. The last streaks of twilight had disappeared over the Palisades so long ago, and now, as Helius’ horse-drawn chariot raced by on its evening run, the desert sunset illumined the basalt horizon.

A moment of silence. The monitor hummed. Had he only dared look at her then with the passionate homage he now so keenly felt.

I

Ira Stigman’s legs were weary, legs and feet and instep, but the long march was well worth its fatigue. He had hiked and hiked, past Grand Central Station and 42nd Street, past all the crosstown trolley lines, at 34th, at 23rd, at 14th, at 10th, and then he turned west to 8th Street. Gut and innards were at peace, head was clear. He had traveled over a hundred city blocks from the red brick tenement, counting the jog west from Lexington to Fifth Avenue. Nearly six miles, according to accepted reckoning. Ahead of him, a block away, loomed two figures of George Washington, either side of the arch named in his honor, heroic in size and monumentally calm. And behind the arch, Washington Square Park spread out in a rectangle of grass and trees still verdant despite the October chill, paved walks and a fountain flourishing at the center. From the slant of sun and hint of chill in the shadows, Ira judged the time must be approaching five o’clock, though Sunday strollers were still numerous in the park, and benches well occupied. Luxuriously, negligent with liberation from acute discomfort, he considered his next step — literally. He could go into the park, find a space on a bench and sit down, rest his weary shanks awhile, and then walk east again, a few blocks past NYU to Astor Place, and take the Lexington Avenue subway home. Sunday, he’d be sure to have a seat. But he had another option: he had the keys to Edith’s apartment in his pocket.