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

“Then you’ll have to take five dollars. I want you to call me Saturday. And have dinner with me.”

“It costs only a nickel to call, and you’ve had a great expense already.”

“But your call is easily worth five dollars.”

“Oh, yeh? Your five dollars, and my Aunt Mamie’s dollar, I’m gonna get rich.”

“Silly.”

“More tea? There’s more.”

“No, thanks. I’d appreciate it if you took my cup.”

“Oh, yeh, sure.”

“Thanks. It distresses me, Ira, to hear you run yourself down so.”

“Well, I’m just comparing myself with others.”

“And I am too, child.”

IV

Hollow. .

Why he wanted to start the section with that particular word he wasn’t quite sure, nor whether it was appropriate. Probably only roughly appropriate. Jess had flown in Thursday evening from a geophysics conference he had attended in Dallas — and stayed until Sunday morning at the Monterey.

Jess had been with his parents from Thursday night until Sunday morning (actually, Saturday night, for he had arranged to take the shuttle bus from the motel to the airport so early Sunday morning they didn’t see him off). They had had the pleasure of his company Thursday night, and two whole days. And a pleasure it had been indeed. Their son with them, rangy, charming, distinguished in mind and in person, and graying, graying, alas — their little boy was now forty-five — no matter what had happened before, no matter Jess’s now ingrained silences. Perhaps Ira’s son no longer knew how to communicate over the entire spectrum of his rich personality — a cause for sorrow rather than animus: who knew how badly hurt he had been by that first ill-fated marriage of his? Anyway, Ira felt himself doting on his son again, as he had when the grown man had been a child.

Ira had never been allowed to be a child, nor had Ira the father allowed his son. Too late in life Ira had tried to redress the situation, do incompetent penance for blame. He and M had gone shopping one day, and he had bought his eldest son, Jess, a gift, remarking when he presented it how damned few times he had bought his children presents (with which M concurred later, when Ira repeated the remark): a combination digital clock and auto compass, marked down from three dollars to two. (And Ira had received a gift in return, bought at the Albuquerque Museum, which Jess and M visited: a book entitled Pioneer Jews , by Harriet and Fred Rochlin, about the role and career of Jews in the West and Southwest, full of archival photos and interesting accounts of all sorts of prosaic, mercenary, and picturesque Jewish characters, including even a major general, but mainly of resourceful merchant Jews from Germany who emigrated to America in the latter half of the nineteenth century, amassed fortunes there, and often attained high political office, including, in several cases, governorships of the states or territories they had settled in.)

“Maybe you shouldn’t have turned off your word processor,” said M on the same occasion, when the two came back into the kitchen after closing the water valve under the mobile home. “But then you may not be able to work anyway.”

She was right, to a certain extent: right, write, rite. Damn. Griefs of the mobile home owner. It hadn’t occurred to him when Jess was still here, fixing a leak in the little valve in the copper tubing leading to the evaporative cooler — it hadn’t occurred to him that the small pilot light in the heat tape, which was wrapped around the water pipe that supplied kitchen and bathroom, might be on, while the tape itself was burned out. Such had apparently been the case. For when he went outdoors first thing in the morning after breakfast to check on whether the job was effective — after a cold night, with the temperature dropping to the low twenties — although he had let a small trickle of water run from the kitchen faucet as additional safeguard and kept a 100-watt lamp burning under the “trailer,” he noticed damp semicircles on the cement at places where the skirting at the bottom of the mobile home touched the patio. Evil omen. He hadn’t noticed those damp half-moons yesterday, and the night before last had been just as cold. Well, maybe it was just precipitation, cold air coming in contact with the relatively warmer skirting. Ah, man and his fond hopes. So he and M had gone out and raised one of the “hatches” in the skirting in order to ascertain the cause, the origin of the damp places on the cement, in order to verify their hopes that condensation indeed was responsible, and not a break or crack in the water lines.

“No, it doesn’t look very hopeful,” M had said, when Ira pointed to the cement at the edge of their neighbor’s skirting — which seemed bone-dry. If the cause of the wetness had been condensation of cold air on the skirting, why wasn’t her patio strung with half-round splotches? Everything pointed in the right direction: the heat tape was shot, burned out, done for. And so it was. And last night, having assured himself everything was in order, 100-watt lamp on, the holes of the nearby ventilation strip in the skirting duly masked with a sheet of plastic, and a slender stream of water flowing in kitchen sink and bathroom lavatory, he had slept as he hadn’t slept in many a night, the sleep of the just, and he awoke almost pain-free. Fool’s paradise. Well. He had poked his arm into the open hatch, and crooked the elbow so that he could run his fingers along the near edge of the floor, and encountered a kind of shallow channel there, for what reason it was there he didn’t know, but moist it was, more than damp: wet. Hélas !

V

Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ ethereial sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire,

Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to Arms.

“Well, where is he?” Mom’s voice came to Ira as if across the centuries, from the present to the time Milton wrote Paradise Lost . He had finished reading the lesser poems, finished Comus and Lycidas , and begun reviewing the first six books of Paradise Lost for the midterms.

“Who? Pop?” Ira looked up from the page.

“Pop, shkrop, the sire, the shmire,” Mom found satisfaction in the pejorative echo. “You can’t trust him at all.” She opened the kitchen window — on the immediacy of bare wash lines in the cold, darkening backyard. Pushing aside the butter dish and half-full quart bottle of milk in the window box, she brought in the freshly prepared jar of horseradish. Its tarnished metal cap was tightly screwed down over a scrap of brown paper that covered the mouth of the jar. Next she took out of the window box an enameled pot — gefilte fish balls, Ira conjectured — that she had set out in the cold to congeal the sauce into aspic. And finally, she brought into view a glass bowl of fruit compote, prunes and raisins and dried apples. Ingredients of the Shabbes supper, of Friday-night fare, they were as familiar as the pair of solid brass candlesticks on the cloth-covered table.

“It grows wintry,” Mom remarked as the cold draft from outdoors invaded the close air of the kitchen.

“Yeah, well, it’s November, Mom,” Ira agreed. He could almost see the cold air coil itself within the humid, prevailing odor of chicken soup issuing from the large kettle on the gas stove.

“It’s shivery out. Perhaps I shouldn’t have brought the food in yet. Who knows when he’ll come?” She set the compote and horseradish on the sink sideboard, shut the window.

“It’s still early, isn’t it? Not even five.” Ira held aloft his notebook and Collected Poems of John Milton while Mom spread the white tablecloth beneath his elbows. He let his eyes wander over the lines he had just read: Him the Almighty Power/Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ ethereial sky . . What lingo! It made you hold your breath. “Minnie isn’t even here yet,” he said absently.