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

“Minnie east at Mamie’s on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Three times a week. Have you forgotten?” Mom set the brass candlesticks on the tablecloth. “She goes to your college at night.”

“Oh, yeah.” Minnie had enrolled in a business course and a speech course given in the evening at CCNY. And to save shuttling from west to east from her job, and rushing through supper at home, and then back again from east to west to CCNY, she had arranged with Mamie to have supper there the nights she attended classes. Thus she could stay within easy reach of the West Side subway.

“It’s growing dark,” Mom said. “It’s time for me to bensht lekht .” She planted the pale candles in the candlesticks.

“Go ahead.”

Mom was a wavering demi-agnostic: whenever she referred to God, she invariably added (unless in the presence of Zaida) “. . if there is a God.” Still she blessed the Sabbath candles, bensht lekht , just as she had been taught to do from girlhood. The practice was too deeply ingrained to abandon, but there again, she would often finish the Hebrew prayer by saying: “Why I do this, I don’t know.” Without religious faith himself, a self-proclaimed atheist, an Epikouros , as Pop with his manifold superstitions dubbed his son, Ira nevertheless enjoyed the ritual. He found it touching; the balm of candlelight, the rich, mellow candlesticks, the hush of ceremony awoke in him a remnant of reverence still lingering from childhood. He welcomed the occasion. Maybe it was because it was Mom who officiated at it, and not Pop, that Ira remained solemn and pensive throughout the short invocation, neither condescending nor snide in witticism, as he invariably was when Pop presided over Jewish festivals, especially those that were celebrated a second night: the Rosh Hashanah and the Passover. Above all, he found the second recital of the Passover insufferably tedious. To have to sit through a second time the circumstances of the Exodus from Egypt, a second time consecutively, Pop droning unintelligibly and interminably as he conducted a fuming Ira twice in succession out of Egypt. “This is the bored of affliction” was Ira’s favorite quip, when the matzah was displayed, which fortunately only Minnie understood at first, although after a while Pop took umbrage at his son’s irreverence. Pop became particularly irritated when Ira insisted on repeating the same remark whenever his father’s recitation of the Haggadah reached the page which contained the engraving of Moses smiting the recumbent Egyptian: “Boy, think of all the suffering we Jews would have been saved if it was the other way. If the slave driver smote Moses, and we had settled in Egypt like all the rest of Pharaoh’s subjects. But no, we have to be different.”

Short-throated, her heavy body plodding on swollen, edemic ankles, her bobbed hair thick and graying about her wide, fleshy face, Mom was wearing a freshly laundered, fire-engine-red housedress with white shrimplike curlicues on it and a red bow at the back; she was wearing the freshly laundered housedress l’kuvet Shabbes . She took the box of household matches from the top of the green icebox, brought it over to the table, and extracting a match, struck a light against the sandpaper strip on the side. Broad brow knit, her sorrowful eyes intent, she lit the candles one after the other. Then she blew out the flame on the end of the match and placed it in the ashtray near Ira’s pipe. Covering her face with her puffy, workaday hands, she recited the traditional prayer under her breath and in scarcely articulate Hebrew, so that all Ira could make out were the long-imbued sounds of the incantation that began all Hebrew benedictions: “ Baruch atah adonoi elohenu melekh ha oylum . .” And the terminal words, when she removed her hands from before her face: “ Uhmein seluh .”

Nine times the space that measures day and night

To mortal men, he with his horrid crew,

Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf,

Confounded, though immortal—

“He could be here an hour ago if he wanted to.” Mom’s words knit into Milton’s printed ones. “How long does it take to clean up after a breakfast-lunch job? To fill the salt and pepper cellars, the ketchup and the mustard bottles, the sugar bowls. He tells me he spends the time in between that and coming home inspecting business prospects. But I know better.”

“Yes?” impatiently Ira skimmed the text for his cue word, found it: immortal. But his doom/Reserv’d him to more wrath; for now the thought/Both of lost happiness and lasting pain/Torments him—

“He slips into a movin pickchehr.”

“Yeh?” Ira looked up again.

“Me he never takes along. I’m a stock, a block—”

“Mom!”

“Ah, that’s right, you’re studying.”

“Well, what else? I’ve got a test, a midterm test it’s called, and it’s being given on Monday.”

“Ah, ah. Forgive me. I chatter.”

“I don’t mind. I’m used to it. But not when you’re talking about Pop. You understand?”

“I understend. But my heart overflows.”

“Yeah, I know. But you upset me.”

“Well, let’s talk about something else. Or do you wish to study?”

“I don’t know. It all depends,” Ira relented. “Just don’t talk about Pop.”

“When Minnie is home, we have a hundred things to talk about, don’t you know, about women’s wear, about rags and relatives, what he said and what she said, about cooking and window curtains. But with you, Ira, I have to unburden myself.”

“Well, please don’t. Or I’ll begin studying again. Maybe I better anyway. I’ve got about a hundred and fifty pages to review—‘review’ means reading over again what I’ve already read before.” He translated the English word into Yiddish, and was caught off-guard by a yawn. “Go ahead.”

“ Noo , let’s talk of other things,” Mom said resignedly. She turned off the burner under the frying pan in which she had been frittering croutons in chicken fat. Next to the soup pot was a discolored old bean crock, and after removing the last of the croutons, she drained the chicken schmaltz into the crock. He ought not to be watching her, Ira told himself; he had more important things to do. Nor should he be talking to her either. He had learned long ago that the euphoria of Friday afternoon wasn’t as far from the grind of Monday morning as the extravagant mirage of the weekend made it seem. And the midterm on Milton was only the first of the exams coming up. One in Modern European History. At least two more in the ed courses. Blah. Interim quizzes already indicated that at the rate he was going, by the end of the spring term, he’d still be lagging behind a credit or more toward his B.S. degree at graduation.

No, he ought not to be watching her or talking to her, but he felt like taking a break. Strange, though they were whole worlds apart in schooling, in attainment, and — what was the right word? — in milieu, mental milieu as well as environmental, and there was much, much he could no longer share with her, and much he would never dream of sharing with her, abominations that would have grieved and horrified her, still she was Mom. Her brooding temperament meshed with his as it always had, and did even now, despite his advantages, his college education, his cultivated friends.

She still understood him, intuitively, imaginatively, understood him in the realm of feeling. Unknowingly, she had indoctrinated him into tragedy, given him a penchant for it, the tragic outlook. He recognized that fact, now that he had grasped the rudiments of how to form abstractions, to generalize. She was the source of his tragic bent, and that was their bond.