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

Pop told me once that he tried to organize his fellow milk wagon drivers when he worked for a company named Levi Dairy — and was fired for his union activities. And he described a restaurateur “shooing” him out of his restaurant with a table napkin for attempting to organize the waiters there. Poor feckless man. Undoubtedly he was telling the truth when he told me of his “union man” activities. But as my son Jess cannily observed: “Pop meant well, but his judgment was atrocious.” Ditto his son. .

Of late, my work has been delayed by severe hindrances and obstacles, trolls on the bridge. In addition to some mental confusion, I have been quite unsteady. Especially, so it seemed to me, after first taking massive doses of cortisone just prescribed for me. Before I knew it, I had three times come close to falling. Once I saved myself by grabbing the handle on the freezer compartment in the kitchen, another time landing on the bathroom stool, a third time against the wall, scraping the skin off my elbow. Allowing myself even two or three degrees variance from the vertical when I stand or walk, I now realize, is a precarious deviation. I perambulate with a cane, and I would use two canes if it weren’t such an infernal nuisance, didn’t hamper me in my other movements — not to mention rendering me more tottering and conspicuous than I already am.

Such is the condition of the aged writer, or this one: no different from other individuals of his species, except that in this case he has still to tackle seventy-five or a hundred pages of narrative before he can lay claim to having completed a second draft. Not a completed piece of work (is there such?), but a second draft. How long will it take? How long will he live? Two unknowns, and in all likelihood, two inequalities, of benefit only one way and not the other, and guaranteeing nothing in any event: simply sine qua non. You are not required to finish, ran the Talmud dictum; neither may you desist from your task while you can do it. I would very much like to finish; I would very much like to complete a third draft. Perhaps it is because I seek to consummate my wish that I live. How strange that I should still strive to accomplish the task, even though the proceeds of all this travail are posthumous. How strange, in a word, is man, to whom almost everything finally becomes marginal — while still hale and in possession of all his faculties — except (probably a delusion) the Promethean catalytic exercising of his consciousness. In a universe of a billion trillion stars is there another like him? I’m inclined to doubt it. Man is matchless, man is peerless. (Far be it from me to lay claim to that revelation.) And yet, most peoples are unable so far to live in more than nominal peace with their neighbors. And some with virtually none: I think of Israel.

In the meantime my beloved M has received a phone call from Rosemary in Los Alamos, erstwhile secret city of the atom bomb. A vivacious woman in her mid-thirties, Rosemary teaches piano there, and lives with her husband, a nuclear physicist employed in the Los Alamos complex — a most melancholy-looking man who repudiates any imputation of melancholy, disavows it completely. Would M accept a commission to compose a suitable piece of music to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Fuller Lodge in Los Alamos, Rosemary asked. The answer was: Yes. Before she went off to fetch Marie, our dear and trusted cleaning woman, M had already left word with me to answer in the affirmative, in case Rosemary called. I relayed the message to her, to Rosemary’s great satisfaction. M has chosen a selection from Peggy Bond Church’s story about life in Los Alamos, before, during, and after the installation of the plant for creating the atomic bomb, and its successful detonation in the desert afterward. The name of the book is The House at Otowi Bridge , and it recounts many of the experiences of Edith Warner, who lived in the neighborhood more than twenty years, opened a tearoom next to the Rio Grande, a tearoom which was accessible to the research scientists at Los Alamos. In the course of time, though at first she had no inkling of what the project was about, she became acquainted with many of the foremost nuclear scientists of the period: Oppenheimer, Bohr, Fermi, Teller — who rode down the hill in their jeep to partake of her ragout and her famous chocolate cake. M now had to wait to receive permission from the author’s heirs and the publishers of the book to use the selection, incorporate it into her composition. No hitch was expected from that quarter; permission was assured; it was a mere formality.

So — considering the magnitude of the occasion, its importance as a musical event, M’s success in measuring up to the challenge would establish her fame as a composer nationwide. An artist she had already demonstrated she was — with her setting to the poem “Babi Yar,” and even more impressively, her Unaccompanied Cello Sonata. And now this is the offing, due by September, by my wife — I knew she would do an outstanding, perhaps a superlative piece of work, my wife, at age seventy-nine, an artist, once a student of Boulanger, to be reckoned with in her own right, an admirable, a noted musician — how strange to wrest away my own ego, try to anyway, render homage to that modest, unassuming, devoted woman, grown in stature in old age. The prospect fills me with a sweet serene joy. How much did I have a hand in that growth? How much did my own groping tenacity affect her development, spur it by example? I didn’t know, I felt it did, and then discounted my intuition as another example of my supreme egotism.

III

Sense of foreboding? And why not? Through all those scruffy streets of this his childhood and youth in slummy East Harlem. What gave them that character? You — suppose you were a writer, as Edith said you were meant to be, and would become — how would you describe that quality that made them scruffy, slummy? What? The neglect? They weren’t too dirty. The “white wing” street cleaners with brush and barrel — wheelbarrel — did their job every morning. Mostly wops, they didn’t do a bad job either, rounding up trash and scraps of garbage of all sorts with their characteristic shove-and-pause of the coarse-bristled push broom. Horseshit, in less than two decades, had practically disappeared from the asphalt, replaced by the automobile, both boon and bane; so cleaning up that was no longer a chore. No, it wasn’t an impression of uncleanliness, of the presence of noisome litter, that gave the slum its hopeless, joyless look. But rather that everything seemed worn, spiritless, the houses, the housefronts, the stoops, all weather-worn and stained, as if the very masonry became impregnated to some degree by the treadmill of existence within. Ah, that gave them that quality, the streets he wouldn’t be going through much longer — not with that regularity, that monotony, of day in, day out, to and from the Lenox and 116th subway station, or to and from 112th near Fifth for a piece of ass: Fifth for a filched piece of ass. Fifth Avenue, Filched Avenue — oh, Ira, don’t drift now: What gave them that forlorn, frowsy look? Monotony. Stagnation. Meanness. What do you mean by meanness? he asked himself. Just utilitarian, run-down, and nothing else to redeem it: like a subway station, like the 96th Street and Broadway transfer station, a place where you had to wait, longer or shorter, depending on your luck, before you could get the hell out of there, out of Harlem, to get somewhere else, somewhere you wanted to go. So you didn’t give a goddamn about the place itself — that wasn’t part of your life, except of necessity, a bustling, perfunctory channel, a subway turnstile, a stepping-stone to somewhere else. So the slum streets exuded grubbiness; that was it. Everybody wanted to get out. He did also. Oh, Jesus, yes. And he was — already he was halfway out. . and Mom too was talking about moving to the Bronx after he graduated from CCNY, so why the foreboding?