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

“Yeah? Tough. Somebody told me that would happen. Joe, I think.”

“It’s as I told you. The kugel is good?”

“Oh, your kugel is always good.”

She laughed at his mock-serious tone: his mother, all love and devotion — love and devotion out of her ever-receding world. She set a white saucer and coffee cup on the table. “Take more sour cream. I have yeast cake. And jelly too that I made out of plums.”

“Yeah? I don’t see you eating anything.”

“I ate enough for the whole day at Sadie’s. Mamie brought pickled herring, creamed herring. Two jars. Borsht, a jar. And verenekehs —like all the Farbs. Afterward she was sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

“She wanted to punish him for leaving the way he did — to remind him.” Mom placed white saucer and cup in front of Ira. “But then, when she saw how unhappy he was, she got no satisfaction. You understand?”

“What else is bothering Zaida besides food?”

“The children.”

“Why the children? They’re boys, three of them.” Ira snickered. “The oldster won’t have to fret about bastards in a paper bag.”

“No, no, it’s my brother Saul’s imp comes over and eggs the others on. They tied a cord across the door, and screamed and goaded him, until he ran after them. And half blind as he is, don’t you think he stretched out his full length?”

“Jesus, an old guy like that?” Ira watched Mom pour coffee out of the small enamel pan.

“I said to him, ‘Father, if you can’t live here, then together with you as a boarder, we could find a better place than 119th Street — near a synagogue. And I swear to you I would keep a kosher home.’ He knows I would keep my word.”

“That’s all we need, a kosher home.”

“Go, he wouldn’t live here. He loves Chaim’l like the Angel of Death. And with reason.” She cut a slice of yeast cake. “My paragon would soon be grinding his teeth and stamping his feet. Who doesn’t know my Chaim’l? But even I didn’t know him until this morning.” She placed the freshly cut slice in front of Ira.

“What?” He looked up at her face — a kind of implacable disdain graven on it. What was she dramatizing now? Or concealing? They had seemed as amiable as they ever were, when he and Minnie had said goodbye to them this morning. “What the hell’s the matter now?”

“You have your own woes.” She refused to clarify. “I can see it in your face: your examinations, your penniless existence. A youth without a groat.”

“That’s nothing.” He was about to cheer her with mention of Edith’s gift of five dollars, but stopped himself in time. He’d only have to think up some phony explanation — or defend himself of the charge of cadger.

“The old man took off his yarmulke, and bowed to me.”

“What?”

“Zaida.” Mom sat down with her cup of coffee.

“Zaida?”

“When I gave him my word I would keep a kosher home for him. ‘I abused you when you were young,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know how noble you were, Leah. Forgive me.’”

“Zaida did? That haughty Yid? Jesus.”

Her full lips smacked the coffee mug. “What was there to say after so many years? That his righteousness helped him as much as my nobility helped me? A little more jelly? The cake is so dry.”

“No, it’s not bad, Mom. Thanks.” Were those his two profiles he saw staring at each other in his mind? Or just any two profiles that wore eyeglasses? They could never become a single face that way, he allowed himself to ruminate: if you slid one past the other, they still stared in opposite directions, like Janus. No good. You had to have a third dimension for their views to coincide—

“ Shtudier, shtudier ,” Mom interposed.

“Oh, yeah.” Only to him was Milton so easy, a diversion from the drama of his own home. He applied himself to the italicized rubric of Book XI: “The Son of God presents to his Father the Prayers of our first Parents now repenting, and intercedes for them. God accepts. . ” What the hell, Satan had had a point when he disputed back then with Abdiel. Jesus was asking God to forgive Adam, and the whole damn thing had started because God had anointed Jesus to reign as coequal. Satan wasn’t to blame if he objected to the dichotomy. So did Jews. Shmai Yisroel, adonoi elohenu adonoi ekhud! Every Jew knew that: it was the Credo: God is one. Lefty Louie, the gangster, when he sat in the electric chair, yelled it out loud. Otherwise, what? A split divinity. A split infinity. Object, and you’re on the side of Satan; even if the whole thing is sheer figment, you’re on the side of Satan. So he, Ira Stigman, was on the side of Satan. That was why he had to call up Stella tomorrow afternoon, after the exam, and find out if she had had her period — boy, what an emancipation proclamation that would be. Maybe he ought to pray to Jesus Christ. Cross himself thrice and pray to Christ—

“ Shtudierst?” Mom asked.

“No, I was just thinking about the exam tomorrow.”

“ Zoll dir Gott helfen. ”

“Yeah.” If he had knocked her up, so what the hell was the difference if Divinity were unity or twinity or trinity? He would have had to marry her, if it happened in Arkansas: they would have had shotguns for a khuppa . Read, will you: God accepts them, but declares that they must no longer abide in Paradise; sends Michael with a Band of Cherubim to dispossess them. . With a dispossess notice, like Mamie with a Portorickie. . in court. . the day Zaida beat it to Flushing. . boy, like that old, old, old, old gag in the vaudeville show: Who was dat lady I seen you wit’ in dat sidewalk café? Dat was no sidewalk café. Dat was my foinicher.

Why the two pages of notes had been lying on his right-hand typing table all this time — literally all these weeks — and to just what use he had intended to put them, Ira could no longer recall — nor even when he had typed them. Sometime in the late sixties, he guessed, judging by the discolored border of the yellow second sheets. But here they were, Hannah’s recollections: he ought to use them or dispose of them. If he was ever to use them, this would be an appropriate time: when he was writing about the jam he had been in with Stella. The notes seemed to alter his interpretation of his sexual conduct, not entirely, but enough to be significant — by injecting a curious element of external and deliberate influence in his behavior. At the same time as the notes mitigated his acute self-reproach, by appearing to shift the blame slightly, they also tended to diminish the importance he assigned to his guile; they made him feel chagrined — almost: less culpable, but more foolish — as if he had gone to great lengths to reach a goal that was practically at hand — kinked himself into farcical postures to achieve a simple gesture. Typical of him, absence of acumen about the other person’s motives. Not that it was entirely true — Ira meditated — but as a quip, one might say that the notes on the yellow sheets adulterated the construction he placed on his adultery, except that technically speaking, it wasn’t adultery, but fornication with a minor.

Ira recalled taking deep breath before posing the question to his cousin Hannah: “What did you girls do for pastime in the twenties, when you lived in Harlem?”

“Oh, we went looking for boys, like other girls did. Or we went to the Y to dance. It was fifty cents admission.” Inflection of Bronx or Brooklyn virtually marinated matronly — and widowed — Hannah’s drawl. “Or we took long walks through Central Park. And always we talked about the boys. What would it be like? What was sex like? Why did we get so excited when a boy took our arm to cross the street, and by accident on purpose touched our breast? And sometimes, kissing, we could feel he was getting an erection. We were excited. Still, we pushed him away. My mother had a different view of sex than most mothers.”