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

“Me? How? I can spull good, that’s all.” He chortled.

“Indexing, acknowledgments, and other chores. How’s your cold, by the way? You seem to have recovered.”

“I did. I got over it a long time ago.” He moved, self-conscious and awkward again, reached for the doorknob, fell silent a second peering at the dark tapa. “I wish your troubles didn’t amount to more than my cold.”

“I’d be glad if they didn’t. Unfortunately it’s not one of those things that goes away by itself.” She extended her hand.

And for the first time in his life, he felt like kissing somebody’s hand. She was so kind, so fond, so brave in the midst of trial, you had to bow before her. It didn’t seem artificial, lifting her tiny hand to his lips. It seemed as if the act were already presaged, performed in space. She raised her other hand toward her bosom. .

He glanced at the top of his yellow typescript, his notes, prepared years before. Nearly two decades ago he had attempted a first draft, on his Olivetti manual, with much prompting from dear friends, when his hands could still stand the impact of the keys. Now he knew he would never finish. Fortunately, the holy sages of his people relieved him of the obligation: “You are not required to finish,” ran the Talmudic dictum (as if it could be otherwise). A posthumous novel that might never see publication, floppy disks that might never be printed into paper copies.

His thoughts returned to Edith. And when I crumble who will remember the lady of the west country. Who could remember now, so many years after, decades after, why he had paid a visit to Mamie’s so late in the evening? Had he also been to Edith’s? Had he just left Edith’s, and on impulse on the way home gotten off at the 110th Street station on the Lenox Avenue line? Or had he just gone mad with craving for a piece of ass, vulgar as he thought of it, burning within? Need, desire, lust that had driven him out of the house and along the tract from 119th and Park Avenue to 112th west of Fifth. Skip to my loo, my darling. Memory held a kind of detritus, an intimation, that he was coming from somewhere, perhaps Edith’s, keeping him informed of the latest developments of her pregnancy, or the steps being taken to abort it, the appointment made for her by Lewlyn with the abortionist, the place, the fee. Was it twenty-five dollars? Or was that some figure that merely stuck in his mind for some reason? Still, twenty-five bucks was no mean sum in those days, a week’s pay (after all, Ira had earned about twenty-seven dollars for a fifty-six-hour work week in the subway repair barn). It would be ironic if his vestigial memory was correct: if he had actually come from a visit to Edith’s to Mamie’s — and hence called on Mamie so much later than usual. Ha, where the hell had he come from?

He had sought the answers to some of these questions with Marcia over twenty years ago at a luncheon in New York. “Once in the evening at Edith’s. .” Ira lunged heavily into the subject, hesitated for lack of preamble, and tacked into generalities. “I want to point this out first, the shock the uninitiated receives simply because he was unacquainted with the nuances, or hadn’t yet learned the—” he gesticulated erratically—” the amenities of the culture into which he was being inducted.”

“The manners?” Marcia sipped her martini.

“All right, the manners,” he acquiesced. “You and Edith were engaged in a tête-à-tête, when I came calling — unannounced and inopportunely, as I realized as soon as she opened the door. Do you remember that?”

Marcia gazed at him steadily from the other side of the table. Basilisk, the fearful alertness of the blue eyes behind her eyeglasses. “I’m not sure.”

“Then it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t be able to restore the situation for you. It was way back in the twenties. So there’s no point to the question I wanted to ask you.”

“I remember being at Edith’s one evening with you and Lewlyn and your friend Larry.”

“No, Marcia, that must have been some other evening. Before this. I recall one of Edith’s soirées when you had just heard Heisenberg’s lecture on his theory of indeterminacy. You gave us the benefit of what you had heard.”

“I believed it implied the existence of free will in the universe. And gave indirect proof of Christian theology. It implied the Christian concept of a deity—”

“But that’s not what I’m coming at,” Ira wrenched himself loose. “The occasion I’m referring to was when you and Edith were alone. Or you had been until I arrived. And you just said something to Edith — as you were pulling on your gloves — about her having enjoyed Lewlyn while she could.”

“I remember reminding her that he was irrevocably pledged to Cecilia.”

“Was that it?” Ira prompted.

“Just to make sure she had no illusions her possible childbearing would alter the situation. I don’t think she did. I believe she said, ‘I’m going to miss him. He’s such a wonderful lover.’ And I said, ‘France is full of wonderful lovers, Edith.’ And she answered with a kind of pretend wistfulness: ‘But I’m not in France.’ Is that what you mean?”

“Ah, that’s what I remember! Her saying to you with a smile: ‘But I’m not in France.’ It seemed so apt.”

“Were you in the apartment at the time?”

“Inconspicuously. Behind a book or a magazine.”

“Strange. I don’t remember. I don’t have any blocks in my memory either. Lewlyn does. But I don’t.”

“Lewlyn does?”

“Oh, yes. Many.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I hope to see him soon.”

“I warn you, be careful. His memory has become very patchy. Do you have his address?”

“Yes, thanks. Anyway, there you both were speaking so casually, so lightly, as if over a trifling matter. Do you remember what you said to her on leaving?”

“Not exactly.” Marcia paused long enough for the waitress to set down the bowl of steak tartar she had been ordered to bring for her, and the omelette for Ira. “I may have said I’m afraid this will have the opposite effect: of terminating the interim affair.”

“Ah, then you did! That’s my point about different cultural nuances, the shock they transmit to the uninitiated on recognition.” Ira wagged his finger at her, conscious of the irony of seeming to enlighten the most celebrated social critic of their time. “Do you know what Edith did as soon as you said goodbye, and closed the door behind you? She burst into tears. I was never so surprised in my life. I felt as if I were profaning a rite — or being initiated into one. In my tradition, when feelings got wrought up to that pitch, imprecations were exchanged, insults hurled, sometimes blows. Here, antagonisms were so rarefied I never sensed them. Cultivated spoofing, I thought.”

Marcia’s countenance betrayed rue — not penitence — rue, that she might have caused undue distress to one who nevertheless merited reproof then, but was now dead. Marcia said nothing for a moment, but sank her fork into the rubicund mound of steak tartare before her. “I may have been a little forthright,” she said. “That’s quite possible. I’m not ashamed to admit I never did approve of Edith’s dealing with men. They were anything but restrained. In fact, very nearly, well, very, promiscuous. I suppose my resentment showed. We used to say that sex with Edith was an extension of hospitality.”

“You did?” Ira grinned at the neatness of Marcia’s epigram. Trust Marcia; she could epitomize things more pithily than anyone else. “I was once crude enough to recite to her a list of her lovers. She burst into tears. Boorish of me.”

“Why, she even seduced my younger brother,” Marcia said in a tone bordering on vehemence.