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

“Oh, yeh, yeh.” He held the copper kettle under the gushing brass faucet in the closet kitchenette. And after he had lit the flame on the two-burner gas stove and set the kettle on it, he hunted for the other articles. He found them also. Finding them was no great trick, since utensils were few, and the place was so small. “You going to want some toast? I see there’s slices of package bread here.”

“No, thanks, dear, I’d better not. I’ll consider myself lucky if the tea stays down.”

“Is that so? It hurts that much?” He couldn’t help noticing the gray cast over her olive skin. “I’ll sit down where I can keep my eye on the kettle.”

“Make some toast for yourself, if you like. There’s marmalade.”

“No, I’ll spoil my supper. I’ve got to have an appetite like a wolf, or I don’t eat. And then Mom moans and groans— Wait a minute: you want me to stay? I mean it: I can stay as long as you like.”

“No, thanks. It’s sweet of you, Ira, but I’ll be all right. I’ve just got to get through the next twenty-four hours. I have some kind of painkiller the doctor gave me if I needed it.”

“Well, don’t you need it?”

“I hate to take it. It has morphine in it, I’m sure.”

“Oh, yeh?” Ira glanced at the kettle.

“It’s terribly constipating.”

“Well, maybe you’ll get dreams, like De Quincey. I read that Coleridge was interrupted in the middle of ‘Kublai Khan’—” He chortled at his absurd non sequitur. “I mean somebody interrupted him.” She regarded him with patient indulgence. “Another minute. Maybe I put too much water in the kettle. But I got the teaball in the teapot already. Then I pour about half full of boiling water in the teapot. Is that the idea?”

“Yes.”

“Another minute. My mother never lets me do anything around the kitchen.”

“I’m sure this puts an end to any notion I may have had of having children,” Edith said apathetically, as if at a distance, or talking to herself. “It may not be the worst thing: they take up one’s whole life, unless one is rich and can afford a maid to take care of them. And how often they turn out like some relative one has no use for. Or worse, perhaps, in this case: like the father. But they are adorable as babies.”

Slowly, the extent, the numbness of her dolor communicated itself to him, vacated his masquerade of concentrating on the kettle. He glimpsed for an instant something outside his ken, the frustration of a womanly urge, a woman’s reality, a woman’s woe. And there was nothing to offer in the face of that, only the silence of pity, and nothing commensurable with it either, only the troubled forcing of fingernails against the flesh of fingers — even as he listened. So that was an abortion, a bereavement of her body.

“I no longer expect magnanimity from any man,” she went on in the same hopeless, contemplative tone. “The child might have been Larry’s. There was that chance. But you see what his reaction was. And Lewlyn’s — his was the most truly craven behavior in the whole ugly mess.”

“Yes?” She activated all kinds of memories of his own vile behavior, behavior of a trapped rat. Murder-prone. Yes, but Jesus Christ — swiftly justification welled up — how did Lewlyn’s fix compare to having once possibly knocked up his own sister? Ira listened with averted eyes, glowering with inner contention: and where would he have gotten the dough for an abortion? Whom could he have asked to help him out? Leo maybe? To whom could he have dared confess he’d knocked up his sister?

“Lewlyn reminded me it could have been Larry’s — about which I told him there was almost no chance. Or as he said, that other Palestinian — he meant Zvi Benari, the Zionist agronomist friend of Shmuel Hamberg’s, the man I knew at Berkeley. I told him I hadn’t seen Zvi in months.” She shook her head. “Lewlyn was sure it wasn’t his. In spite of my own instincts, my own certainly, he refused to believe it was his. Isn’t that revealing? You have no idea of the panic he went into about accepting mere responsibility, as if I would take advantage of him — which I would never dream of doing.”

“No.”

It was all so grim. While she softly carried on, he thought that he was himself blood brother to Larry in his evasion of responsibility, and to Lewlyn also — though in different, wildly different circumstances. He might have done the same thing — although once again he justified his panicky evasion by rejecting the analogy: how did this compare to the anguish, the murderous anguish, the high school kid had felt that fall afternoon, an afternoon that twisted him past his tolerance to endure any more.

Ira studied the raindrops under the top of the window, each waiting for reserves to swell it out before sliding down the pane. Her acrimony was different from Minnie’s, wasn’t it, but it was still acrimony. There was no forgiveness if they thought you knocked them up — you were the father, they said — whether you thought you were or not, or whether you knocked them up or no. You were to take care of them, defenseless with child.

Everything he learned, he learned here. A block of coal in the fireplace split, and he turned just in time to see the two interfaces separate, and each half foliate, like thick decks of some kind of black cards. Black cards, blackguards. Life was always in flux, but it always seemed to go to a predetermined end. Why did he think that?

As though she were answering his unspoken question, “You’d believe I was having the abortion solely for his sake,” Edith said. “I was to have the abortion to keep his skirts clean. I shan’t have anything more to do with Lewlyn. You can be sure of that.”

To keep his skirts clean. She had used that expression before, and he never could visualize it. Men didn’t wear skirts, unless she was thinking of Lewlyn, the former priest with black surplice buttoned down to his shoes — and you’d have to be sure the first button matched the first buttonhole — but hell, don’t get yourself sidetracked, don’t bounce back into woozy orbit again.

There it was: I shan’t have anything more to do with Lewlyn. And just before that she had said: You won’t see much of Larry around here. Not Larry and not Lewlyn. And he himself, he, the least and the last, here he was, trying to comfort her after an abortion for which the other two might have been responsible. Just as if he had made it up out of whole cloth, as they said, as if he had made the future jump through the hoop of his fantasy. He almost had, hadn’t he?

When the hell was that kettle going to boil? Should he raise the flame? There — there went the kettle: Boiling. Steaming. About time.

“I wonder if discolored teakettles take longer to boil.” Ira stood up. “Now the hot water goes into the teapot, right?”

“Yes. But be careful of the handle.”

“It’s not too hot.”

“And let the ball steep — oh, a minute will be enough. You can leave it in longer after you’ve poured mine.”

Leave it in a minute longer after he had poured hers. “ And in a minute there is time ,” he said, effacing involuntary smut with a quote as he pressed the teapot cover in place. Too bad to be bent out of whack forever. “You take sugar?”

“No, thanks.”

“No? I was in a cafeteria once, and the counterman asked the customer sitting beside me if he wanted tea. The guy said tea with a slice of lemon. And the counterman said no, we don’t have any lemon. So the man just shrugged, as if what’s the use? It’s strange how some things remain in your mind forever.”

“You’re priceless.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Oh, you’ve found the paper napkins too?”