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

“Away, madwoman!”

“What the hell’s the difference, Mom?” Ira burst out.

“The truth is nothing to you? That’s how I brought you up?” By his silence, she knew she had her son at a disadvantage. “Do you want me to teach you how to catch a liar?”

“I don’t want to know.”

“Ask him to repeat his story a week from now. Two weeks from now.”

“Leah, if you’re seeking for something untoward to darken your fate, you haven’t far to search.”

“I’m seeking the two dollars coming to me, if you want to know what I seek.”

“In spite, no?”

“Be consumed in my spite.”

“A man comes home from work on Friday night,” Pop said bitterly. “He comes home from pikers and from stiffs who don’t leave him even a dime for a tip. From nudnicks and from pests. Waiter, the coffee is cold. Waiter, the rolls are stale. Waiter, you call this borsht? Waiter, I came in ahead of her. It’s erev Shabbes . He looks for peace and quiet. What awaits him? A shrew. A nag. A plague. Right away, money. In front of the lighted candles, she holds up her bag, and wants her husband, tired from a day’s work, to fill it up.”

“Fill up my bag,” Mom scoffed with equal bitterness. “Fill up a grave! Fill up my bag on eleven miserable dollars a week. Who buys the scouring powder for the pots and pans? And the Bon Ami for the windows? I’m out of cockroach powder, and the goya below us on the ground floor never powders. Who buys the kerosene to burn the bedbugs out of the bedsprings? Who pays the line-up man when the washline breaks? — a whole quarter. And a quarter five days a week for Ira—”

“Go tell it to your granny. You think I don’t know Minnie contributes to your purse five dollars every week?”

“Fortunately. Or there would be chaos here. You would go shop for your own horseradish, you would go shop for your own carp and pike for gefilte fish on Friday.”

“And you wouldn’t sport a new rag every other week.”

“And what if I do? And if I do, why do I? In a rag is my consolation for the wretched husband I have. In a rag I conceal my sorrows from my neighbors.”

“Mom, will you cut it out, for Christ’s sake! Let’s have some more tea. Why don’t you do the dishes? Anything! Please!”

“A hivnuh! ” Mom snapped at Ira. “A fine son I have.”

“Now you can see what she’s like. What a fine mother you have. What a fine wife I have—”

“Yeah? Why the hell don’t you give her the lousy two dollars?”

“Oh, you’re becoming a cracker, too?” Pop retorted. “So easily said. Let’s see you give her two dollars.”

“All right. I will, goddamn it.” Ira jumped up, dug his hand into his pocket.

“Sit down!” Mom flared at him. “I don’t need your charity.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Ira flopped down into his chair.

“You see she doesn’t need it,” Pop baited. “She doesn’t need the two dollars. What will she do with them tonight? Where will she spend them? She does it to provoke me. To mar a Sabbath.”

“I’ll lend them to you . Give them to her. We’ll have some peace.”

“Wipe your ass with them.”

No one spoke. It was as though vituperation had brought them so close to explosion that no one wanted to risk the angry word of detonation.

“I have some honey cake left.” Mom brought Ira a second cup of tea. “Would you like? It’s good.”

“A very small piece, Mom,” Ira obliged.

“It’s very filling.” She brought the leftover slab of dark-brown, solid loaf, hunik-lekekh , as it was called, made with crystallized honey, and served Ira with a slice to accompany his second glass of tea. “You’re still not taking any sugar?”

“No, Mom. The cake’s enough.”

“Chaim?” she offered equably. He waved her away. She went to the sink, stacked the dishes in the enameled basin, and then went to the stove for the steaming, speckled blue pot on the gas flame, returned to the sink, and moderated the cold water gushing from the brass faucet with the hot water decanted from the pot. She began washing dishes. Midway, she wiped her eyes, blew her nose into her hand, and rinsed it under the other faucet.

“Immediately, she starts piddling with her eyes,” Pop remarked.

“If your head roared like mine,” Mom said expressionlessly, “you’d know what it is to weep.”

“Is it bad?” Ira asked.

“Tonight, the engineer is in a frenzy. The train roars like mad.”

“Yeah? Did they have anything new to say at the clinic?”

“Chronic catarrh and again chronic catarrh. At the Harlem Hospital especially they tell you nothing. Each word costs them too much. I would need slaves, like Titus, to pound on anvils to drown out the roaring in my head.”

“Is that what he did? You mean the Roman emperor Titus.”

“So your Zaida told me. The Almighty punished him for destroying the holy temple in Eretz Yisrael.”

“Yeah? What did you do?” Ira said. She laughed.

“My clever son.” Pop had gotten Der Tag from the top of the icebox meanwhile, spread it on the table, and begun perusing it.

“ Noo , Chaim,” Mom persisted in patient, appeasing tone of voice. “What do you think? Will the French judges let him go free?”

“I’m not a prophet,” was Pop’s curt reply.

“Who’s that?” Ira asked.

“Schwartzbart.”

“Oh, the guy who shot Simon Petlyura?”

“The bastard who killed as many Jews as he could in Galitzia. A thousand deaths that beast deserved, not one,” Mom intoned. “The Almighty has a special fire for him.”

“Yeah? Trouble is all it takes is one bullet.”

“Sometimes it’s a great pity. A bloodthirsty, cold-blooded brigand like that. Ai, yi, all the Jews he killed and maimed: in the tens of thousands. And, I’m sure, many of our own mishpokha .” Mom turned around partly from the sink. “A Ukrainian murderer and his cossacks destroy a world of Jews, our world of Jews, and he can live unscathed in Paris. Let one Jew, a Russian Jew at that, a student, avenge their deaths, and it’s an outrage. And your gentile papers call him a patriot. How is that?”

“I don’t know, Mom. You just wonder whether it’s worth it, that’s all. The guy is dead. Killing him doesn’t bring the Jews to life that he killed. So what the hell’s the use?”

“Then what would you do? Schwartzbart, is he that much different from you, a student like you, an immigrant?”

“I don’t know.” Ira frowned, nibbling meditatively on the edge of the dense hunik-lekekh , so unlike American cakes, unglamorous, barely sweetened — so Jewish. .

It occurred to him suddenly there had been a time when he hadn’t realized the cake was Jewish. It was simply hunik-lekekh . He was an urchin on 9th Street skipping down the tenement stairs to the untidy grocery across the street to buy five cents’ worth of crystallized honey for Mom, viscous, sluggish stuff scooped from an open keg into a speckled wax-paper cone. “I don’t know, Mom. That’s the trouble.”

“ Noo , could you take him to court? If the Jews he slew were in Russia, and he and his marauders are in Paris? In what court could you accuse him? In a French court? He’s in Paris, and he committed his crimes in Russia. And who cares about Yidlekh anyway? Hanging would have been a better end for the dog. It would have taken a few minutes longer—”

“ Chibeggeh, chibeggeh, chibeggeh.” Pop shuffled his newspaper while he mocked. “She talks.”

Mom was stung: “My sage. Then you speak.”

“I have better things to do. I’m reading.”

She took a deep breath, was mute.