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

“Yes?”

“She was terribly afraid of the mental results of a girl not having sex.” Hannah tapped her temple. “She believed that if a girl didn’t have sex by twenty at the latest, she would be a mental case.”

“By twenty. At the latest?” Ira queried.

“In Galitzia, with the shotkhins , they married so early they didn’t have to worry. But here — a girl had to have sex before she was twenty.”

“That’s interesting,” Ira said meditatively — and then with a start: “Mamie believed that?”

“Oh, Mama as much as told me if I wasn’t married by nineteen I should go to the Catskills to a summer resort and get laid. Naturally a nice boy, and be careful.”

“I’ll be damned.” Ira gazed at his cousin intently. “That’s illuminating.”

“Isn’t it? She really had a phobia. And with Stella—”

“Mamie didn’t have to worry about that,” Ira scoffed.

“No. But about marriage. Stella was having such a good time, she didn’t care about marriage—” Grief suddenly intruded: “My poor sister. So soon.”

“Yes.” Ira sympathized. “One question more: How would you characterize Stella during those years?”

“Those years and now. She was shallow. Stella is a shallow person. Intellectually she’s sluggish. Not so much now as she was then. My poor sister,” Hannah mourned. “I should see her walking again.”

XIV

Sense of impending tragedy — Ira was carried along with the swarm of fellow students into the lecture hall — impending tragedy, with only Edith to intercede, with only Edith to relieve the strain. For him, only him, the midterm exam served as respite from agony. He climbed up the steep stairs of the lecture hall. Relieve it and compound it. He found his assigned seat among the curved tiers of chairs. Relieve it and compound it: the immigrant boy’s ultimate terror. He envisaged himself leading the tubby sixteen-year-old through Morton Street, and up the two flights of carpeted steps to Edith’s urbane, genteel (or was it gentile?) apartment: “Edith, this is Stella.” Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus. His eyes roved unseeingly about the auditorium, unseeing, uncaring, registering faces he knew, just as his ears registered familiar noise of hinged chairs lowered, hinged side desks opened. Monitors checked off the attendance against the cardboard seating plan. Goateed Seymour was one of them, the only undergraduate in all of CCNY to sport a beard — probably because Professor Mott wore one, and Seymour was often seen carrying Professor Mott’s briefcase to Amsterdam Avenue, where he hailed a cruising taxi for the elderly scholar.

The bell rang the beginning of the period hour, just as Professor Mott entered, followed by a student carrying a stack of blue examination booklets. The usual white examination question papers were not in evidence; were they in the booklets? They were being distributed by the monitors. Suddenly there was a loud guffaw. And shaken out of his unhappy reverie, Ira saw that the old professor had fallen on the steps leading up from the floor to the lecture platform where his desk was. Seymour leaped forward to help him, and one or two others jumped from their seats to lend assistance. With an irritated shake of the head, Professor Mott waved them away, climbed up the last two steps, and placed his briefcase on the desk. He sat down behind it; then, bending over, he inconspicuously rubbed his shin.

“Professor Mott.” Seymour drew himself up resolutely. “I wish to apologize for the rude behavior of my classmates.” Professor Mott nodded his silky white head in terse acknowledgment and opened his briefcase. Through the tic about his left eye, Seymour scowled up at his unchastened classmates. He strode to the lecture-hall door and shut it, and still glaring up in reprimand, came back and sat down in his seat in the first row.

“In the interest of all concerned,” Professor Mott kept surreptitiously rubbing his shin, “I’ve decided to vary the form of the midterm examination. There will be no written questions.” He drew out a leather-bound volume of Milton’s works. “I shall review briefly some of the chief arguments thus far, and then ask you to answer to the best of your ability a single question. First I shall present a brief summary of the course of events, and at the end, pose the question. Is that clear? You’ll have a half hour to answer. I have deliberately limited the time.” Professor Mott waited until the murmuring in the lecture hall died down, indicating the class had recovered from its surprise. “You recall that Satan, having rallied his ruined cohorts, volunteers to explore a certain happy seat — in the words of Beelzebub — of some new race called Man. By discovering it, he hopes thereby to frustrate the designs of the Almighty. Frustration of God’s designs has now become the consuming purpose of the denizens of Hell, the former imperial powers of Heaven. It is interesting to note, by the way, that while their chief has gone on his mission, his confederates pass the time variously, according to mood and temperament, some violently, some in melancholy, singing to the accompaniment of harps — fallen angels, it appears, also have access to harps. Much of this part is drawn from paganism, much is reminiscent of Homer, of the activities of ancient Greece, including, if you remember, the holding of Olympic Games — again attesting to Milton’s vast erudition. At any rate, after a long, arduous flight, Satan finally reaches the gates of Hell. Nothing better exemplifies Milton’s absolutely sublime powers of poetic rhetoric than the dramatic confrontation that takes place between these personifications of the triad of foremost evils in the world: Satan, Death, and Sin — Yes?” Professor Mott raised his silky white poll questioningly. “Please be brief.”

“Professor Mott.” Sol P, stubby and carrot-topped, lowered his hand and arose to his feet — knocking his large loose-leaf notebook from the armrest and sending it flopping loudly to the floor. “If God in His heaven was all-seeing, all-knowing, om — er — omni—”

“Omnivorous,” Yarman, who sat just below, heckled in a whisper.

“Omnipotent,” Sol shook off Yarman’s insidious prompting, “why did he allow all this to happen?”

“Of course, you could ask that question from the very outset. Why did He allow Satan — Lucifer — to incite mutiny in Heaven? This is the very problem that has bedeviled Christianity from the beginning. I use the word ‘bedeviled’ advisedly.” Professor Mott’s mild blue eyes brightened in appreciation of his jest.

“But Professor, doesn’t that imply God’s complicity in Satan’s actions?”

Low groans could be heard. Someone hissed, “ Shmuck , sit down.” Yarman turned completely around and muttered sotto -ventriloquistically between rigid lips: “It wasn’t enough he fell flat on his whiskers today. You gotta add to his shmertz? ” Sol tossed his red head defiantly.

“I’m sorry. I can’t go into that, for the very simple reason that the pros and cons of the answer to that question make up the answers to the question I intend to assign.” Professor Mott looked down at his leather-bound volume, then raised his head in snowy afterthought. “Of course, you understand that the theological debate on the subject still goes on, and is far beyond the scope of this course. Your question concerns the compatibility or incompatibility of predestination and free will, and the role played by grace. Churches have been split by disputes over these doctrines. Innumerable theses have been written on them. Paradise Lost may be classed as the most sublime of these, and now at the end of the poem, I hope you’ll have derived some notion of the doctrines themselves, quite apart from Milton’s interpretation of them.”