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

His gaze held by the gold sunburst on her kimono, Ira followed Edith into the apartment. A profound breathlessness heaved within him as he entered, a breathlessness that seemed much greater than that due to physical exertion — of climbing up two flights of stairs — but like a panting of the spirit trying to recover from all that had assailed it. Dully, and always conscious of his lack of grace, as if his shambling were a safeguard against too much being expected of him, he shed his coat and hat, dropped them on a chair, his briefcase between, and stood swaying to his own pulse, looking about the apartment as if he weren’t familiar with the decor, the location of chairs, the gray Navajo rugs scattered about, the black maw of the fireplace under the sheen of marble mantelpiece, desk and manila files, bulldog bulk of typewriter, bookcases, telephone. He found his favorite wicker armchair, sank noisily into it. He felt utterly jaded; his tongue seemed twice as thick as normal, and he kept wanting to double it under his palate. He wished he could have refused her unyielding request that he come to her apartment. Still, it was almost a compensation for compliance, to sit there so blissfully relaxed, only a shade away from slumping, waiting for her to arrange herself on the black velvet couch, yellow pencil, blue NYU exam booklets beside her: Professor Edith Welles of the NYU English Department, dusky in the light of the end-table lamp, large-eyed, petite, shadow-brown hair in a bun at the back of her head, and pretty calves and ankles protuding.

“Did you take a taxi?” she demanded severely.

“Yeh.”

“You look completely done in.” She regarded him so intently and for so many seconds he felt like lolling his head. “You scared me out of a week’s growth,” she said. “I didn’t know what to imagine. Not hearing from you all afternoon.”

“I should have called up. I know.”

“Where on earth were you, child? You knew we had a doctor’s appointment.”

“Yeh. I was hoping you’d cancel it.”

“There wasn’t much else I could do — when nobody appeared after four.”

“I’m sorry. It’s been awful. Some afternoon. I mean it.” He slapped the wicker seat. “It’s been all my own doing, too.”

“It’s about what I expected when a girl is as young as she is.” Edith apparently misunderstood his reference. “I should think you’d be much relieved at the way things turned out.”

“I am. I am. I was.” He debated revelations. “What gets me is that she claims she tried to get in touch with me. She went to my house and all that. I was here Sunday, wasn’t I? I tried to think back when she told me.”

“Yes. I’m sure you were here Sunday. Does it matter?”

“No, but it would have saved everybody a lot of trouble: me a lot of dumb worrying. And you making doctor’s appointments and having to cancel ’em.” Ira looked off obliquely, paused for breath. “I guess the worst of it is my having to confess the louse I am.”

She shook her head, so characteristically: not disapproving, but with sober, sympathetic disagreement. “You were only confessing to the need that’s part and parcel of being human, of any species of life, I imagine. Marcia knows that better than all of us. We all satisfy it — in different ways, but we do satisfy it.”

“Yeh? I satisfied it.”

“Is there any reason why you shouldn’t? There isn’t. There are puritanical ones. You’re shy. You’re inhibited. But you needn’t feel that what happened is so very sordid, what you’ve done is so very sordid. If you but knew how really sordid—” Edith groped for words a moment, laughed. “You have no idea. Most children experiment at an early age.”

“Yeh.”

It was no use. He was what he was, and he couldn’t tell her what he was — or only as much as he had, and that was too much, and maybe now that he had, it would be best if he stayed away, let the friendship taper off. Let her words slide over him until he could leave politely. He was expert in attitudes of listening. And he was just tired enough so that he was afraid he might let go altogether, if he allowed himself to become too engaged, if he fueled her interest with rejoinders. She spoke of the practices of respectable businessmen, churchgoers, affluent and married and influential, ways that were truly sordid, with young children and prostitutes — married uncles and young nieces, and all the time maintaining a sanctimonious exterior. Those people were really despicable, because they were hypocrites, and she loathed hypocrites.

But as far as Ira was concerned, his sex relations with his cousin Stella were almost inevitable, because he was extremely sensitive and, unlike Larry, shy and unworldly, and unlike Larry, poverty-stricken and deprived. It was just too bad that he felt so guilty in the matter of sexual intercourse with his cousin. Sexual behavior sprang out of the mores of a culture; so did the attitudes people developed about sex. Because there was no genuine sex education, no sex education in the schools—“Heavens, no! The churches would be horrified, the Watch and Ward societies would be up in arms!”—attitudes about sex with few exceptions were determined by ingrained and often fallacious notions about sex, by sheer ignorance, by social custom and taboo, by religious and puritanical nonsense about sin and punishment—

“Yeah, that’s the way I am,” Ira agreed. “It’s inbred. When I read about Satan and Sin—” he hesitated for fear Edith might draw a parallel—“in Milton, the whole thing hit home despite myself. I don’t believe it, but what if you’re brought up that way? It’s bad.”

“Poor lad, I wish I’d known. But of course you — I’m bound by Victorian decorums too. No use crying over spilt milk. Ira, it’s bred in all of us, that sex is wicked — for some even in marriage,” she consoled. “I know I once thought so. I was deeply affected — influenced by my mother’s Christian Science priggishness. I’ve told you about it. My sister still feels that same way. I’m sure that may have been one of the reasons — I don’t know — of her divorce. It would be the last thing she’d talk about. But sooner or later we learn to escape from that kind of domination — it’s really nothing but superstition. You yourself have already thrown off much of it, haven’t you?”

“Yeah. It’s different throwing it off when you know what you’re doing.”

She smiled comfortingly. “I’m sure it is.” Her eyes strayed to the mirror above the fireplace at Ira’s back. “That very thing you were so concerned about: Stella’s menstruating. When I lived with Sam H in Berkeley, who I suppose had been brought up in much more Orthodox fashion than you were, he told me that Jews considered menstruating women unclean, practically untouchable for a whole week — they had to undergo a ritual bath afterward — he used some word—”

“ Mikveh .”

“Ah, that was it. Mikveh , you say?”

“Yes.”

“ Mikveh ,” she repeated. “What does it mean? Bath?”

“Swimming pool,” Ira said gruffly.

She laughed — always relishing his dumb sallies. “I think if I had agreed to submit to all that folderol I might be Sam H’s wife today.”

“Yes?”

“Sam told me bluntly he couldn’t conceive of marrying anyone who wasn’t Jewish. That’s when I left. But you see, it’s the same thing. It was perfectly all right to live with one.”

Ira sighed quietly. The way she had of deflating dogma and bugaboos, the way she quelled fears and guilts, as if bleaching them out of sight with her objectivity, he recognized had a kind of dual effect on him: she reduced the onus of his wickedness, eliminated much of the sense of heinousness, quenched the shimmer of guilt, stealth, risk that informed, that magnified his furor.