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

“Yeah. I’m all right.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’ll be over soon. It’s even over now.” Her bland cheeks wreathed, though she blinked, and her voice was still wrung. “It’s over now. How fast everything becomes then. When I look at Mama, or Tanta Leah, your mother, or the other tantas, I keep thinking they must have all grown up just waiting for a khusin, you know what I mean? Even Hannah. Is Minnie like that, too?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re her brother.”

“Yeah, but you know how it is. She has her secrets.”

“Like I have mine. Do I look all right?” She tilted her face. “Tell me honest. It was so dirty, everything up there. I can use where I cried in my handkerchief to wipe my face.” She was amused.

“No, no, you look fine. Say, you look all right,” he complimented. “You look all right.” She was really rather pretty, with her blond hair peeping out of the black cloche, short throat, fresh, fair skin of round cheeks heightened in color now, blue eyes, shallow, yes, behind glasses, and short girlish lips parted, plump, no, “adolescent” was the right word, adolescent phase, and kind of cute. He had never thought of her that way — just something to bend to his will, really bend, simpering pudding-compliant, implicitly at his disposal — his tubby, juvenile Trilby — and why? He surmised why: a collegian he, and schoolgirl she: not mettlesome like Hannah, but ungifted, held in low esteem at home, a cinch, a drippy cinch for the picking — or the pricking. Cynical? Sure.

He had previously honed his perfidy on Minnie. Consider the mitigating circumstance: he tolerated Stella’s drivel — long enough to achieve his ends. But never had he been tender, except for that momentary impulse — and maybe even then he was bestowing a token remuneration for supreme consummation. Till now. And now? So that’s what he wanted — his mouth watered at the new perception of himself, the perverse evolution of desire. Skew of screw — that’s what tenderness meant to him before something impressionable, half-formed, pathetic, susceptible, ductile, fawning: extension of the evening they sat opposite each other on the love seat at the bris in Flushing, extension of the initiation, when he first stuck his tongue into her mouth, seduced her, reduced her to trail him in a trance down the steps of the glary cellar.

Now Edith knew all about him too. Christ, he wasn’t worth living. “Let’s get you down the subway. You won’t be too late.”

“I’ll tell Mama what you told me. We had a party before the holiday. You going to go uptown too?”

“Not right away. I’m going to walk — no,” he contradicted himself, annoyed. “I’ve got to call up that lady. Jesus, what she must be thinking.” He felt stunned, disoriented.

“You’re not going there?”

“I better just call.”

“Why?”

“Guess.”

“You should be happy. She should be happy. She made a doctor’s appointment. If she made a doctor’s appointment—”

“She must have canceled that long ago,” Ira interrupted irritably. “Say, what would you have done if I had to take you there? What would you have told Mamie? It might have taken a long time — longer than this.”

“I couldn’t — I wouldn’t go. Only on Saturday. I could say I was going for a walk on 116th Street.”

“Oh, hell.”

“Why?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

“Maybe if you told me you were gonna be here for that, I could have told Mama about a party — I don’t know,” she said with unusual animation. “Look, Ira, I’m a girl, and I’m already over it. All right, razor blades, knives, those guys, they scared me. But you — I don’t mean you didn’t get scared too. But now, you should be happy. We got away. And look at the trouble you saved. You thought I was pregnant. And I’m not. You thought you would have to take me to that lady. And she would take me to the doctor—”

“I know! I know! All right.”

He looked straight ahead, determined to encourage her forward movement through the crowd, then, dissatisfied with progress, steered her along Broadway.

“How did you remember that toilet up there from all those years?” she asked curiously.

“Will I ever forget it?”

“They must not have cleaned it for a — was it clean when you worked there?”

“No, it never was clean. It was already closed, that whole gallery, I mean. I just took a chance. Oh, what the hell,” he added snappishly.

She suddenly laughed. For a moment Ira thought she was laughing at his discomfiture. But no. talking as always before she finished laughing, her words tumbled off pointless mirth.

“That projectionist looking down, will I ever forget him?”

“Did you see him?”

“Did I see him? In his sagging undershirt. If he didn’t look funny. But you know, Ira, it really is funny. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“What?”

“I had a boyfriend who was studying to be a projectionist. I thought of him. If he was looking down.”

“Oh.” How cheerless was spoiled lust. Her lips moved like larva — oh, Jesus, just get to the subway through the crowd.

“When I was fourteen, he worked in a projection booth. And Ira, you were fourteen, and you worked in a projection booth, too.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“When I was fourteen, he wanted to marry me.” Her dumb correspondences.

“Yeah?” He could feel his face crimp with fretfulness. If he had even gotten a piece of tail out of all this. Christ, nothing. “Fourteen? Who was fourteen? I mean, was he fourteen?” He felt as idiotic as she was — just as irascible as he had felt when he waited for her to come out of the business school. Mopey lout, he deserved what he got. “What’re you talking about?”

“I said I was fourteen. He wasn’t fourteen. He was already twenty-one. But he wanted to marry me. He hounded me. Gerald: Let’s go out and have an ice cream sundae. Let’s go to a dance. Nearly every evening he came to the house. But he wasn’t my type.”

“No?”

“He was short and fat, and already a little bald. Mama liked him, and Pap said it would be all right. Next year I’ll be going on eighteen.”

“Yeah?”

“But I kept telling Gerald, That’s all. I don’t wanna see you no more. I don’t care if Mama likes you—”

“Was that it?”

“Of course. I’m the one who has to marry him. And did Mama cry at the next wedding: two pillowcases. She was going to have an old-maid daughter on her hands. Can you imagine, at fourteen, no less.”

“No.”

“Who is your type, Ira? Is that lady your type?”

“I don’t know who my type is.”

“Mine is the married-man type. The tall, blond type. They’re not Jewish, but they’re married anyway, so it doesn’t matter. You I can tell, but if Mama ever knew.” Stella giggled.

Engulfed — enthronged (the word coined itself) — amid the home-going crowd, the air of holiday about them, swarming out of Klein’s on 14th and meshing with those from the smaller stores, he and Stella turned west toward the subway kiosk across Broadway. The first chill encroached on the last wedges of sunlight in the park, first chill seeping through the growing shadows. It had begun to empty the benches in the park, gave briskness to the stride of those crossing, and even seemed to increase the agitation of arguing groups, those pitted against each other, with shaking fist and stabbing finger. As undaunted as ever, Washington on his bronze steed on concrete pedestal contemplated turmoil and incessant noise. It made Ira wonder how much difference he himself made, how much, how little, even if he bellowed at the top of his lungs. It would be like going aboard an ocean liner, infinitesimally, imperceptibly lowering her hull in the water — like the time he delivered steamer baskets as a boy, like the time he accompanied Edith — Edith, yes, she must be waiting, wondering. Well, what excuse? In the eddy flowing around Orange Drink Nedick’s at the corner of University, in the aura of grilled hot dogs, he eased pants at the crotch. And the horror of it all. He was worse than even Joe, the bum, in Fort Tryon Park, who had pulled on his petzel while Ira, all of eight, recoiled in fear. He was worse than Pop, too, smashing Mom a glancing whack and little Ira, too. How the sins, the shande , had come full circle, and all of this in the eddy by the Nedick’s stand at University and 8th, a hundred blocks from Harlem, but one thing was sure, though: maybe one guy couldn’t add a perceptible increment to tumult, but a lot together could. That bunch — those two bunches — shouting at each other certainly added distinct stridor. What the hell were they all about?