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

“Go whistle, and not talk,” said Pop. “I have brothers there in St. Louis, no? Even if I failed in business, Gabe is a political fixer. He would have interceded for me. He wangled a garbage collection inspector’s job for my brother Sam; he could have found some safe crevice for me to escape the military.”

“Who could know things would come to this bitter pass,” Mom continued her self-restrained exoneration. “You needed only to send me my allowance, you could have stayed in St. Louis until the Messiah came.”

“ Azoy? Without a wife? Two separate abodes. I might as well have landed in the military, stout soldier that I would have made. And a fatherless household. It’s clear what you wished.”

“To you it’s clear,” Mom said stonily.

“No? And if I didn’t send you your allowance?”

“Then I would accompany Mrs. Shapiro to the synagogue that sends them to homes to wash floors.”

“And you think I would live alone? All by myself.”

“My paragon. Blessed be the day you found another.” Mom leveled her sarcasm evenly. “Chaim, it was you yourself who chose to be a trolley-car conductor.”

“Much I could do about it.”

“You could have chosen to be a milkman again. Milk all people with children must have.”

“Go, you don’t know what you’re talking about! Milkman. Do you see milk-wagons today? Milk-wagons drawn by a horse?”

Mom was silent, then tilted her head in acknowledgment — and sighed. “Indeed. Were my griefs as rare.”

“Aha. Today the milk companies want only drivers who can operate those little hand-organs, with a crank in front that you spin, and the whole cart shudders. That’s the sort of drivers they want today.”

“Perhaps they would have taught you if you hadn’t fallen out with Sheffield and with Borden’s.”

“You speak like a fool.”

“Then I don’t know. Oy , it’s a dire affliction.” Mom swayed from side to side — stopped: “Do you want to hear a panacea? Don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m in a good mood to laugh,” Pop retorted with a grim jerk of his head.

“You go past 119th Street every day. One way, the other way. Again and again. Let the kaddish wait for you there. I’ll give him a bag with food you can eat. You’ll tell us a time — when you pass. He leaves school. He runs home. I have the food ready. He runs back to the corner with it.”

Pop meditated in harassed uncertainty.

“Cornmeal mush is also good for this kind of spasm. With a pat of butter on it. Your favorite dish,” Mom urged. “I’ll have it hot. And on Fridays a little broth in a jar, a bit of boiled fowl in a clean napkin. Ira will wait with it on the corner. He knows where.”

“ A shlock auf iss! ” Pop snapped furiously. “They and their accursed war. May they be destroyed with it one by one and soon!”

“Amen, selah ,” said Mom.

So day after day, a few minutes after he came home from school, Ira was dispatched with a brown paper bag containing Pop’s midafternoon meal. Always Ira waited on the corner on the uptown side because the terminal was only a dozen or so blocks away in uptown Harlem, and in the few minutes while allowing the preceding trolley a little more lead time, Pop managed to consume most of his meal. Ira stationed himself at the newly opened variety store opposite the gray school building and waited for Pop’s trolley to arrive. . and waited. . and invariably daydreamed, wool-gathered—

Until suddenly out of the haze of reverie, there was Pop in his blue conductor’s uniform leaning out of the rear platform of the trolley, calling irately in Yiddish: “ Dummkopf! Bring it here! The smallest task you bungle!” And almost at the point of leaping off the trolley step to fetch the paper bag himself — and probably fetch Ira a blow for his laggardliness as well.

Poor Pop! The home-cooked meals helped at first, but only for a while, and then he relapsed again into chronic diarrhea. It was no use. The cause of his disorder, he maintained, his shrotchkee , as he called it (the very sound of the Yiddish word suggested gastric turmoil), was the lurching and jouncing of the trolley car, nothing else. And coffee with scalded milk, and strong tea with lemon, or hard-boiled eggs wouldn’t help and didn’t help. The constant motion caused a commotion of his bowels. He cursed the “jop,” he cursed his luck — and time and again, he reminded Mom how much she was to blame for his plight because she refused to move to St. Louis. “Had you granted me a few weeks, abided here a few weeks,” he fumed, “till I accumulated enough money to send you passage by train and have the furniture moved, we would have been reunited as in a new land. What am I saying? For you it would have been better than in a new land. It would have been easier. It’s the same land. And a little you’ve learned — true, it’s a smattering — but a greenhorn you’re not anymore: You’ve learned to ask where and how much, and to say yes and no.”

“Indeed.”

“We would have quit this accursed New York.” Pop rubbed his abdomen. “Who would have needed your hard-boiled eggs and your scalded milk with skim? Perhaps in time we might have bought our own home on the outskirts of the city, as my brothers have, lived decently, with a tree in front and grass in the yard.”

“Another Veljish,” said Mom. “Here in New York, here in Harlem are my relatives. I made my choice. Here I remain.”

“You’ll pay for remaining here, just as you’ll pay for my suffering,” Pop warned ominously. “A ruinous choice you’ve made. You’ll see.”

“And you didn’t want to come here with your pitiful milk-wagon?”

“I but followed after you. Who knows what I would have done otherwise? I could have driven a horse for other kinds of deliveries. Like your cousin Yussel with the red beard. I could have delivered bread from the bakers to the grocers.”

Mom maintained her grave composure: “Chaim, tell me: How do these goyim stand it, the rocking of the trolley car?”

“Because they’re goyim ,” said Pop.

“It’s not because they’re always on edge like you? It’s not because they have a skittish stomach?”

“Why should they have a skittish stomach?” Pop echoed in nugatory denial. “Did they have to skimp as I did until I saved enough money for your passage to America?”

“Who told you you had to starve? To live on a sweet potato the peddler baked in his street oven, or a boiled ear of corn, or a duck dinner for fifteen cents, and who knows how the duck met his end. So it would have taken another month or two to buy my passage.”

“Another two months, then I surely would have had to pay full fare for him. Who would have believed he was only a year and a half.” Pop’s retort was quick in coming. “In Galitzia you were reasonable when it came to waiting; you were patient. Why not when I would have been in St. Louis?”

“A good reason.”

“What?”

“Chaim, to talk about it further is in vain.”

VII

Where could he try it out, when a petzel stiffened into a peg? Dora Bahr, Davey’s scrawny sister. Their tenement cellar-door opened on the yard. You could hide behind it. Or Meyer Shapiro’s younger sister, if you could get her alone and if she wanted — or one of the little Irish shiksas —“Mary, Mary, what a pain I got,” the Mick kids singsang. “Let’s go over to the empty lot. You lay bottom. I lay top. Mary, Mary, what a pain I got.” Pop should never have left for St. Louis. You wanted that feeling again that came with rubbing against Mom — that’s what Uncle Louie must have wanted. Uncle Moe too, exhibiting his great tower of red flesh — and that rusty bum who wanted Ira to take his pants down. And then pumped his big thing against a tree. And most startling of all, Mom too, even if no longer — she said— ausgebrendt in Yiddish. “Burned out.” So girls too. And for her own brother Moe, more, more than for Pop, but not allowed. All for that feeling. Where could you get it? With whom? The Hoffman kid on the roof; that was lousy, sitting down pulling your own peg, like that rusty bum. It had to be somebody to pry into: living, warm, like Mom’s thighs, a girl it had to be, like Rosy S, Louie’s daughter, who showed him she was a girl, with a fire-red slit instead of a petzel . Who liked it, who wanted it the same way he did, who got the same wonderful feeling between her thighs he almost got with Mom, when she woke up and laughed. What girl? Where?