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

To everyone’s surprise, Baba took the news with strange fortitude. “With God’s help and those stripes on his arms, my Moishe will live,” she said. Nevertheless she brooded a great deal, grew gaunt and worn. She shopped, she went about her household tasks, and though it no longer took a tirade on Zaida’s part to make her eat, she seemed to fade; she seemed to fade waiting. . waiting from letter to letter from her son, but always as if vitality were slowly draining away. Thus the weeks and months of a distant war went by. Aunt Mamie, so buxom, so brash, offered the doughboys who did guard duty under the Grand Central overpass fresh Jewish pastry and hot, sugary café au lait in her enameled milk-bucket with the narrow neck. And Mom, unreticent and frank in her immense pity, would say in barely intelligible English to some young soldier patrolling the viaduct: “You heff such beautiful, strung lecks now. Gott shuld helf you’ll heff them when you come beck.”

And the young American lad would laugh: “Aw, don’t worry, Mom. We’ll be O.K.”

Oh, the terrible years, who can bear them, Ecclesias?

That August afternoon in 1914, when he had been sent into the heat-shimmering street to buy the “Wuxtra” the two vendors cried, Ira was now old enough to connect in his own mind as links, the one with the other, two isolated events, no longer isolated, but as if one was precursor to the other, even if the other came so late you almost forgot the first: a warm Yiddish newspaper bought in the street, and Moe in khaki off to war, off to France — and Saul howling and Zaida pulling out handfuls of beard. . And the cop on the corner sneering to a bystander, “Will yez look at them Jews? Ye’d think the guy was dead already.” Ira had the meaning within him, brooding on it, though he couldn’t tell what it was. He could only think of it just so far: that he contained both episodes in feeling, and they were fused together in his mind but that was all. Other things were fringes to that same indelible fusion: Moe sent letters from France, letters and souvenirs to the nephew he was so fond of, so much more fond of than was Pop — fond of him like Mom almost: brass artillery shell casings, engraved and stippled, a pair of French opera glasses, three German iron crosses. .

Winter came on, and after the return to school from the Christmas holidays, winter brought a new date to write on top of composition papers: 1918. 1918. History swirled about him in little spindrifts. Debs was in jail. IWW meant “I Won’t Work.” Draft dodgers were cowards. Cartoons in the newspapers showed that mosquitoes had bigger souls than profiteers. Bolsheviks wore bristling whiskers and carried round bombs with ignited fuses.

Ira brought the three iron crosses to school to his 6B teacher, Miss Ackley. Miss Ackley was known as the most formidable teacher in the whole school. She was large of body and raucous of voice: “Oh, the audacity! The audacity of this boy!” she would exclaim, while she administered punishment by gripping the culprit’s cheeks between thumb and strong fingers until he yelped with pain. ( Audacity, Ira took note, in the midst of chastisement: What a beautiful new word!) Miss Ackley screamed in horror when Ira inventively misinformed her that his uncle had taken the iron crosses from the cadavers of German soldiers on the battlefields of France.

“Take them away!” She seemed close to fainting. “Take them away!”

He was getting even with her, the sudden, expanding buoyancy of his mind told him. Intuitively, he had lied just right, just where it would have the most effect. She had gripped his jaws at least a half-dozen times. Mostly because he had been guilty of disorderly conduct, giggling during penmanship exercises. He couldn’t make Palmer ovals. He tried, but they always changed shape and course and jumped wildly outside their boundaries of blue lines until they looked like smoke blowing in the wind; and he dipped his penpoint too deeply into the inkwell on the desk, so the up-and-down line exercises merged into blotted walls. Shlemiel, as Pop said: A shlemiel in everything. And shlemiels were punished. So Ira grinned to himself, when Miss Ackley nearly fainted at the sight of the iron crosses, because of a lie he made up about dead German soldiers stretched out on the battlefield, and Moe plucking iron crosses off their chests. Maybe he did. .

Entrusted into each pupil’s safekeeping when he (or she) “graduated” from P.S. 103, the elementary school on 119th Street and Madison Avenue, was his “blue record card.” On it was recorded his scholastic performance up to and including the completion of his sixth year of school. After that, he no longer attended elementary school; he attended grammar school. Ira was directed to take his blue record card to P.S. 84, the grammar school that extended from 127th to 128th Street near Madison Avenue, and there present himself, together with his blue record card, to one of the teachers in charge of admitting the new pupils. It was an all-boys school, and each boy, his blue record card in hand, stood in one of several lines before the stout oak lunch tables at which sat a teacher registering the newcomers.

It was a February day, the first week in February, 1918. In another few days he would be twelve years of age. And farewell to childhood. .

X

You keep a battery of such pretty signs on the top of your keyboard, Ecclesias. Or should I say, array?! @ # $ % ^ & () — +. . I am seventy-nine years old. In one way, I look forward to dying; in another I am filled with too great a sense of gratitude to M to yield, even in the mind, to the wish of having my life come to an end. Other than that, what’s the use of living? Or what’s the difference? I ring changes on the same theme, the same old theme. I wonder if “the branch that might have grown full straight,” of which Kit Marlowe speaks, retains forever within it a sense of that lost straightness, lost rectitude. Let’s imagine my father, a Zionist. In a few months, the Balfour Declaration will be published. Let’s away to Israel, let’s away to a kibbutz. I would know chiefly hard work, rigor, danger, but also kinship, precious kinship, dignity. But alas, I wouldn’t have known M—

— You’re back on the same treadmill, my friend, or the same roller-bearing race — call it what you will: ball-race. Fate or history devised it. But more to the point, it was only because you could compel yourself beyond it, and thanks to M, you attained a measure of growth, something approaching maturity, an approximate maturity, a passable facsimile. Or to put it another way, for almost five decades you were well-nigh immobilized by your inability to go beyond childhood. Isn’t that true?

Well, my liege. .

The multipurpose lunchroom, drab, indoor-playground-basement where everyone waited his turn to be registered was steamy and rank that winter’s day, a brumous day—

— Proceed. That isn’t the crisis.

And what shall I do when I come to it?

— Do you remember the shaft that Siegfried threw, the unseen Brunhilde aiding? And that leap?

That quantum leap? Yes.

— Have faith in an existential universe, in the dialectic of five decades.

I’d rather, Ecclesias, my friend, have taken that blue record card and hidden or destroyed it. Never attended P.S. 84 at all. Who would have known? Mom and Pop. But otherwise? What primitive trust institutions had those days. Give the juvenile his blue record card to convey from school to school. What control was there? Or what verifying that the pupil had really presented himself and been enrolled in the school to which he had been transferred? Oh, probably there was a list of pupils, their names separately transmitted. But if not, then to hell with the damned card. Chuck it in a trash can in front of a tenement and disappear. Do you remember Kelsey who ran away from home at the age of twelve?