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

“Oh, yeah.”

“I’ve agreed to do the anthology. I have that to do. And I have a couple of narrative poems in mind — narrative poems have a much better chance of being published than lyrics.”

“They do?”

“And I’d love to do them — especially I seem to want to do one about Lewlyn. I have just the right title for it too, I think: ‘The Reassembled Man.’”

“Reassembled?” Ira repeated. “You mean he came apart?”

“He had come apart,” she stressed. “He showed it during my pregnancy. You never saw a man so unhappy. It was as if my pregnancy were the last straw to the breakdown Marcia’s rejection of him had begun.”

“So why is he — I mean, who’s going to reassemble him?”

“It’s the English spinster who’s going to do that: fit him out with new ideals, with a sense of self-worth. Make a new person of him. He hurried frantically to make all the arrangements — with Marcia’s help, you can be sure, to get my pregnancy out of the way. He acted as if his salvation depended on it. And Marcia was only too happy to direct things for him.”

“Yeah?”

“She wanted him punished just enough for his mistake in taking me for a mistress, and then to rescue him. And he was only too happy to have her rescue him, as if he were a baby— I think it’s steeped long enough for me. He is a baby.”

“Yeah? Okay, I’ll pour it.”

“I had no idea how puerile he was. I know now.”

“Yeh? Like that?” Ira brought her tea over. “It looks shvakh , so weak.”

“Oh, no, that’s fine, thanks. You’re an angel. I wish I owned a pair of house slippers big enough for you. Would save your traipsing around in your bare feet.”

“That’s all right. Athlete’s foot fungus isn’t fussy. You don’t want sugar?”

“No, thanks. Just leave the spoon on the saucer.” She reached out tiny hands.

“So how can you drink tea without sugar?”

“The taste really comes through better.”

“And that’s what you want? That’s the opposite of the guy who wanted the slice of lemon.”

“He wasn’t very sophisticated.”

“Oh.”

“If I can manage to get invitations to Yaddo or Peterboro these next two years, I think I could get both jobs done.”

“Which jobs done?”

“The anthology and the narrative poems.”

“Oh.” He poured his own tea, added sugar. “That’s pretty hot, you know. You want me to come over and hold your cup so you can sit up more?”

“Oh, no. I can manage, thanks. I just hate to move at the moment. Do you think you’ll be able to spare Saturdays or weekends to help me with the anthology — once this nonsensical crisis is past? There’s been some money allocated for clerical assistance.”

“Me? I’d be glad to help. But I told you all I was any good at was proofreading. That’s in part because I’m fairly good at spelling.”

“That’s very important, too. Proofreading this kind of work is very important. But there are a hundred other things you can do, tiresome chores, if you wish, that I resent very much, but devilishly necessary in preparing an anthology — as I said before: writing poets or publishers for permissions, making sure of acknowledgments, checking bibliographies — oh, hundreds of things. Even helping me edit my own writing. I tend to be too hasty these days.” She smiled at last. “And discussing ideas with me.”

“Yeah? Ideas? You worry me.”

“Oh, no. Please, Ira. You have as good a mind as anyone.” She sipped cautiously from her teaspoon. “The tea is just right, thanks. I conceive of the book, for whatever worth it will have, as reflecting the realities of city life, and the moods they generate in the poet. And what I badly need, or mainly need, is someone like yourself born and brought up in the city—”

“I was born in Galitzia,” Ira groused in demurral. “And I’m not a poet. I’m scared, Edith. Honest.”

“Oh, fiddlesticks. You spent your entire life in the city,” Edith persisted. “You’ve already shown your grasp of the city mind in that piece of yours that appeared in your college magazine. You’re the ideal person to provide an antidote to the saccharine romanticism of people like myself brought up in the West. I suppose I’m a little better now than I was,” she qualified.

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, now, Ira. The city means so much more to you than it does to me. More in nuance, more in evocation, in metaphor. Do you understand? Especially because you’re still a student, don’t you see? An intelligent and sensitive student.”

The first tinge of liveliness heightened her olive skin, gray and lusterless until this moment. “You’re not a student in some out-of-the-way, self-contained campus, with its dormitories and fraternities and sororities and small-town stores and meeting places. You’re a student in the city, and that’s exactly the kind of student I have in my classes at NYU. Jewish mostly. So you can see how useful you could be — because those are the ones the anthology would be addressing: those living within city blocks, not in the country, not under open sky—”

“Yeah, but you got to have taste, you got to have—” He began rotating his shoulder against a sudden itch. “I mean — what do I mean? — discrimination in poetry, modern poetry. The kind of thing you have when you review somebody’s book of poems for the Times or The Nation . You’ve got that kind of certainty.”

“Oh, I’ll choose the poems, if that’s what’s worrying you. Between the textbook publishers and Dr. Watt, they’re going to want to get out the anthology on a shoestring. It’s only a scheme to put money into their pockets anyway. The anthology, so called, will be required reading in my modern poetry courses.”

“I’ll be glad to help with the — with the, with the mechanics—”

“No, I’d like your opinion about the poems too—”

“Listen, Edith, I don’t have opinions. I like or I don’t like. I’m still just the same as a kid. Sure, I can tell you I like Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ way ahead of his ‘Ulysses,’ but that’s a hundred years ago, and who cares? I like some of Vachel Lindsey, I like Conrad Aiken’s Senlin , I like some of Robert Frost. But what’s the difference? Everybody knows they’re good poems. I learned those from Larry’s Untermeyer anthology. But what I’m trying to say is I would never have known Eliot was a great poet except for you, reading him right here: ‘Prufrock,’ The Waste Land —”

“That’s more than Larry ever learned.”

“Yeah, but Larry’s got ideas. He can tell you why he’s got his opinion of a poem. I couldn’t. You got to have ideas why it’s good, why it’s bad.” Ira raised his voice. “I don’t. Gee whiz.”

“Well, you do have ideas, of course you do! Far better than his ever were!”

“I don’t!”

“Oh, rubbish, Ira. Will you stop that!”

“ Parakutskie , that’s the way I should be drinking,” he grumbled.

“What, dear? I’m sorry.”

“Well, if I had a lump of sugar, the way they used to break them off a loaf that came wrapped in blue paper on Passover, on the East Side, I could pour the tea in a saucer and suck it through the sugar. That’s parakutskie . Maybe I wouldn’t get a chance to holler so much — at a sick woman.”

“I’m not really sick.”

“No?”

“No, I intend to go on living.”

“That’s good. I’m really happy. Honest, Edith, I am.”

“I’m much happier too. Will you take my umbrella with you when you go home?”

“Oh, no, my socks must be bone-dry by now. I’ll duck in between the raindrops. I don’t want an umbrella, Edith, I’ll lose it.”