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

The American flag hung above the entrance. How standard the exterior of public libraries, always a gray wall in which large windows were set, and how standard the interior, the checkout counter, the shelves, oak tables under incandescents. Where? He sidled past the counter, looked avidly about. That table. No. Not there. Aisles of bookcases? No. He made careful search. Nothing doing. No sign of her. So maybe that was her way of tricking Mamie, her ruse to get out of the house and meet a guy. He hadn’t encountered her on his way there, that was sure. Nuts. He was wrong. If she was having her period. . No, there were too many factors to contend with, yes, no, maybe. She had probably left while he was on the way, and she would be home now.

Should he call again? The first drugstore. And once more he gave the operator Mamie’s number, and once more Hannah answered. No, Stella wasn’t home. “Who is this?” Hannah’s voice had more than curiosity in it, as though she were striving to identify something familiar. Another minute of talking, and she’d probably recognize his voice — even through the muffle over the mouthpiece. It was only in the theater they could carry on that charade indefinitely. That meant he hardly dared telephone again.

“Tell her it’s a friend. When’s her school over t’morrer?” he tried to growl with gritty, hardly intelligible voice.

“Stella’s business school? Like always. Three o’clock. Who’s this?”

Ira immediately hung up the receiver.

What a fiasco! Glowering, he left the drugstore, his hopes shriveling. Hell, this was probably her seventh, eighth, no, seventh day without menstruating. What was he dreaming of? He was out of luck. Might as well face the truth, meet her in front of the business school Wednesday, brace himself for the ignominy of taking her to Edith’s — of exhibiting her before Edith! Oh, Jesus, that simpering wad o’ lascivious lard. Oy . One glance at her and Edith would be appalled at the fake he was.

That evening Minnie was absent at supper, a calm supper, at long last. She was attending evening class at CCNY, but she came home so promptly afterward, Ira couldn’t help but think she did so out of solicitude for him. Confirmed — he was sure he was right by the anxious way she eyed him, so obviously expressed was her concern that he could have snarled at her, except he knew doing so would be completely baffling to Pop and Mom — or worse, excite their curiosity, their surmise, maybe questions. He managed to keep his scowl averted and his mouth shut. All he could see was a hopelessly intricate skein, an untidy web within a small household, like those sooty webs the spiders tended in the crannies across the air shaft, to which every soiled strand and particle adhered, a web composed of every grubby thread of his soiled worries. Not until Mom and Pop went to bed did Minnie, lingering, get a chance to ask, to whisper the question he had been trying to evade:

“It’s still the same?”

“Yeah.” He felt himself squirm.

“My poor brother.”

Her sympathy he dismissed with a brusque flap of his hand. But she was not stopped by the gesture. “You need any money?” she persisted.

“I told you. I got somebody to help me.”

“So then you don’t have to worry so much if you got somebody to help you.” She had a way of frowning her compassion so that lines formed on her brow, and dark wreaths on her cheek, that threw her countenance into shadow. “If you got that professor to help you, what more can you want? Don’t worry so much,” Minnie entreated. “If you — I mean she — she wants to spend the money, and she knows where to go, you can’t do any more. Another few days, Ira,” she stressed, and came over to whisper her encouragement in lower breath. “You’ll be all right.”

Wednesday morning, lived through somehow, lived through on a plateau of numb anxiety that couldn’t go any higher. Morning passed in a monotonous pall of crisis. A stuporous early class in economics. He saw Larry for a second day in a row, Larry genial, only the least aware of how irritating to Ira his coaxing had been the previous day. Larry’s every new entreaty to Ira, “Spend Thanxy,” “Spend the night,” seemed to grate, to plane the edge, to near Ira closer to fissure. Every little extra thing seemed too much. Who the hell cared about Thanxy? He finally snapped at Larry: “Why don’tcha invite Iven, for Christ’s sake?”

Larry hadn’t taken offense; merely laughed. “Okay, let’s have Iven over too.”

Ira had made no reply, sullenly engrossed in his fingernails.

“I can see you’ve got things on your mind,” Larry said earnestly. “Maybe I can help.”

“Yeah.” Was it to ease the strain that he allowed all sorts of obscene images to dwell in his mind? — Larry backscuttling Stella, laying Minnie for good measure, for auld lang syne. He was heavier-hung than Ira. What a picture. Especially with Stella, younger, more salacious. And Ira the bystander, extracting the erotic. Would he have to pull off when they came, or would he come just watching? His mind was steeped in foulness, pickled in it. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws,” he quoted.

Larry thought the quote amusing. “All right, I’ll meet you for the subway ride. Okay?”

“I got an appointment.”

“When?”

“About three.” He never could think fast enough to lie, lie in a way that left no openings.

“Oh, that’ll leave you plenty o’ time.”

“I was going to cut ed, anyway.”

“What is it, next period? What for?”

“Yeah,” Ira said hopelessly. “It’ll only mean a trip to the dean.”

“So why cut it?”

“Oh, nuts. No reason. Just want to stew by myself for a while.”

“Listen, if you go to class, we get out the same time. We can shmooze on the way,” Larry urged. His handsome face became sober. “Maybe a few minutes’ really serious talk would help.”

“It’d help you.”

“Why not you?”

“I’m frigged. That’s what my appointment’s about.” Larry arrested his sigh of frustration, regarded Ira with his gentle brown eyes, almost pleading for enlightenment, that failed of forthcoming — an answer literally stillborn, the trope darted through Ira’s mind.

“Well, you have your reasons,” Larry conceded the minor defeat after a pause. “Okay, we take the train together?”

“Okay.”

“May take your mind off things. That sometimes helps.”

“Yeah. Vie a toiten bankehs .”

Intrigued as always when a new Yiddish expression came within his ken: “ A toiten bankehs? ” Larry queried.

“Yeah. It means cupping a corpse, cupping a cadaver. You know how much good that would do.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Abyssinia.” Ira invoked their old parting logo.

“Abyssinia.”

Ever the peregrine lout, lackluster, purposeless, wayward, roaming from car to car, left the doors open between them — to skate and slam with every lurch of the train. Cold, drear tunnel draft swooped in, swirled the dust and pounced on newspaper scraps, Hershey penny chocolates and Tootsie Roll candy wrappers on the floor, flapped the pages of tabloids in the hands of seated, swaying readers. The short, husky Italian in flannel shirt and raveling gray sweater under a nondescript mackinaw fixed his brown hat tighter on his head against the gale; and with tabloid gripped in one fist, stood up, grabbed the brass door latch, exposing the longshoreman’s cargo hook in his belt, and banged the door shut, permanently. “Punk!” He scowled through the glass of the door after the departed vagrant, and then sat down again.

Across the aisle two teenage girls studied Larry, trailed rapt gaze away to chatter to each other behind the covers of raised loose-leaf black notebooks, stole glances at Larry again, who remained oblivious. It was early afternoon, Wednesday afternoon.