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

Read, will you. . Print swam back into focus, into ken. Okay. Satan is elected: And through the palpable obscure find out/His uncouth way . . Jesus, a guy ought not read this for tests. He ought to just read it and read it and read it. Oh, hell. . is right. At least to Book III tonight. How many more pages would that be? He moistened his finger, counted: twelve. Well, get going.

Meanwhile the Adversary of God and Man,

Satan, with thoughts inflamed of highest design,

Puts on swift wings, and toward the gates of Hell

Explores his solitary flight: sometimes

He scours the right hand coast. .

He felt completely alone. With an open book before him. In a green-painted kitchen. Bile green, Mom called it. Green icebox alarm clock on it at twenty to two: 1:40 ante meridian. Box of household matches beside the clock: Big Ben. Everything had connotations: the wrong ones at the wrong time.

Candlesticks yellow on white tablecloth, burned out to little drapes of wax. And outdoors the limitless cave of night like a cold eternity. Big Ben. Oh, Jesus, he’d forgotten. Stella was the one that should have happened to: oh, boy, he’d forgotten altogether. O-o-oh, o-o-oh. His mind was pulled apart. That dumbbell: “Is it all right if you don’t get your period in four days?” No, she didn’t say that. She said if it’s four days late. Boy, what a dumbbell. Tough luck — he didn’t know anything about it: tell her to tell Joe, tell Mamie, she was out with a — no, some goy caught her in the hallway, or better, a Portorickan. Said he’d choke her unless — They’ve got enough dough to find a midwife, or someone skilled in the business. Right?

He was thinking old thoughts, rehashing the rehash. And if she accused him, the dummy, never, he when? Oh, that was enough. But you know, to go over old fantasies again, what do they call it, make a virtue of necessity — some virtue: if he had to marry her, she’d be his slave: get him that, and cook him this. And he’d back-scuttle her every night, maybe day and night and Shabbes too. Would it be as wonderful as that night he’d hoisted her aloft on his stiff petard right under Mamie’s snore? No, that was like the penultimate rocket display with the American flag breaking out in red, white, and blue balls of flame — better than that: golden lions of Judah rampant on a field of sapphire. Hey, you know, that was one time cubic phylacteries turned into spheres, orisons into orgasm.

Shut up. You’re in trouble. Read, will you, for Christ Jesus. If you weren’t such a goddamn dope, you’d have been through Book II long ago. What d’ya got to say for yourself, Lucifer, shorn of glory?

Here we are, here we are: he ought to get a concordance — how he loved Milton. What gigantic talk. There was nobody like him; not even Shakespeare could command such ordinance of vowels as Milton, could consign such encyclopedic cohort of learning to his fable. Boy: Far less abhorred than these/Vexed Scylla, bathing in the sea that parts/Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore . . Ah. Ira stopped to meditate. The guy was a Puritan — unlike Shakespeare — and Ira himself was a Puritan, fouled up and gone astray. He admired Shakespeare, marveled at his inordinate, inexhaustible dramatic, linguistic prowess, but the artist was ever detached, ever uncommitted, unreeling out of his limitless being myriad characters in myriad situations, himself seemingly bound to no mystique. That was it. And Milton was bound. As Ira himself once was, still wanted to be, no longer could be. Mystique, devotion, sanctity — he was always running up against them, couldn’t rid himself of them. What a cinch — if he could.

He knew what was going to happen. Then skim. But tough thing to do: to skim that stupendous confrontation. And worse than that. . because so close to home. Stupendous and inciting. Would always be now. . all incest would: because he knew the inseparable mingling of the terror and iniquity. That was it: pariah’s orgasm at its highest, the shattering of all taboo, ecstatic reprisal against everything, everybody, yeah, against Pop, even Mom for moving to Harlem, Zaida for coming here, Jew with the whiskers and his kosher bosher and tvillim and thallis among the goyim . The whole works. Jesus, if that time, that Sunday morning way back on 9th Street, when Morris, her own brother, showed Mom his looming blooming bascule, if she hadn’t run from the room broom in hand, when he said, “Look what I’ve got, Leah,” but, oh, boy, just sent Ira out, so maybe he could have sneaked back, peeked in. Pop was a mensheleh , she taunted her husband when they quarreled, but with Morris—

Come on, quit it—

Incensed with indignation, Satan stood

Unterrified, and like a comet burned,

That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge

In the arctic sky. .

If that wasn’t the mightiest metaphor any poet ever wrote. Ophiuchus huge . Jesus, if only he had to make only one telephone call tomorrow, not two. Just one, please: Hello, Stella, you all right? Wouldn’t he be happy? What did the other guys in Professor Mott’s class think when they read about Satan screwing his own daughter, and fighting his own son, after he knocked her up? What Jewish innocents abroad: only you, you stupid sonofabitch. . Each at the head/Leveled his deadly aim; their fatal hands/No second stroke intend . . Keep reading.

Keep breeding. “Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, echo, dying, dying, dying.” Nothing much for him to do, except to try and keep on. Spiritless, in the midst of a heavy bronchial infection, he might just as well slavishly follow his typescript. He wasn’t capable of much else. Several days in fact had passed since he had last applied himself to his narrative: the bronchitis was one of the reasons for the interruption. Keep breeding. Answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

XI

In his dim little bedroom, Sunday morning dawned on sandy eyelids opening on the smudged, slotted wall across the gray airshaft. He listened a second — he scarcely ever could tell time in the dingy little coop. Kitchen door closed, and no sound beyond; so Mom and Pop were gone. And Minnie — still probably dozing — or if awake — who cared? He got out of bed, entered the kitchen. Almost nine-thirty. His volume of Milton and notebook on the table still. Nanh, it was all stupid, all his messages. Mom would have gone to Mamie’s anyway to find out the news, and learned of Mamie’s intended trip to Flushing. Nine-thirty. Just about the right time to call up Mamie’s, get Stella before she gadded off, find out the verdict. He headed for the toilet, came out, began dressing. Let’s see. He had a couple of nickels. Otherwise he’d have had to borrow from Minnie— and she would have misinterpreted his approach: Waddaye want? Sharp as a buzz saw: Get outa here. Or else waited until Mom came. Ah, the goddamn things he had gotten himself into — you really had to laugh. If you could: old man Chaos last night, giving the Devil his bearings: southeast by east. Ira rubbed his eyes. How the hell? Milton, you ought to have more goddamn sense. That ugly old glob of Sin with the mutts yelping inside her, opening up the gates of Hell that could never be closed again. Got it fixed all tricky. Well, that’s theology. Ira dug into his back pocket, found his folded handkerchief. All this guy asks is a break. Accursed, and in a cursèd hour, he hies . Oh, bullshit.

Into overcoat, and downstairs, he skipped down stoop, and crossed scuffy old 119th Street to Biolov’s drugstore, where he nodded at Joey tending the pharmacy before entering the phone booth, pulled the folding doors to — and then with doubled handkerchief at the ready gave the operator Mamie’s number, and as soon as he heard the call go through, carefully ascertaining himself free of witnesses, draped his handkerchief over the mouthpiece. He had seen Bert Lytell do the same in the movies. No reason to think the stratagem wouldn’t work. And with that bitter good fortune that so often mocked predicament, his meticulous precautions were unnecessary. It was Stella herself who answered the phone.