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

Much as he despised Mr. Shapiro, Ira felt a genuine affection for Mrs. Shapiro. Her humility, her resignation, moved him; she aroused his sympathy, all the stronger because she didn’t seem to feel sorrow for herself about her condition, even to the extent that Ira felt for her. Her deprivation, her squat dumpiness, her flabby homeliness, even her illiteracy she accepted so meekly it made pity cry out within him. But then, he was a nut. He felt things beyond all bounds; he felt his own notions of them, not what they really were.

Still, he owed Mrs. Shapiro a debt. Perhaps he owed her his life. That was no mere notion. She had intervened years and years ago to halt one of Pop’s atrocious, demented thrashings, administered at the time Ira was wrongfully accused of knocking down Mrs. True’s little boy. Accompanied by a bunch of kids from the street, Mrs. True, pretty young Irish matron who lived on the top floor, had come into the house and immediately slapped Ira’s face for knocking her kid down to the sidewalk — which he hadn’t. Patty True was the smallest of the crowd of kids trailing Ira and chanting “Fat, fat, the water rat.” And when Ira turned in feigned threat of pursuit, they fled, and knocked Patty on his face, bruising his cheek and bloodying his nose. Pop had gone mad. He had trampled on Ira, picked him up by the ears, and thrown him down, picked him up again, groveling and shrieking, from the floor. Even Mrs. True had been taken aback. There was no telling what would have happened to him if Mrs. Shapiro hadn’t interposed herself between them. Undaunted by Pop’s insensate rage, his snarling menace, she demanded in Yiddish: “Are you going to slay your own son on the word of a goya? ” How staunchly she stood there, unflinching, obdurate — stood there a whole minute while Ira howled — blocking Pop from administering any more of his maniac punishment — until Mom, hearing her son’s bewildered, hectic and belligerent cries, flung a furious “Vot you vant?” at Mrs. True that sent her and her retinue of Irish gamins packing. And then she turned the full brunt of her wrath on Pop, cursed him so fiercely for an insane murderer, so fiercely, fervently, her hyperboles of execration seemed on the verge of materializing until Pop retreated to the front room.

“Hello, Mrs. Shapiro, vus macht ihr? ” Ira said in passing as he set briefcase down on green oilcloth of the round table.

“ Mein kaddish’l iz duh ,” Mom beamed. What joy she got out of the mere sight of him, what maternal bliss—

Even Mrs. Shapiro smiled slowly, admiringly. He was a collitch boy, soon to graduate, an ausgestudierteh mensh . He had reason for pride; still, his heart felt sunken within him, and he didn’t know why. Oh, maybe he did: the brusque spurning of Larry, of a friend who had meant so much, his pending separation from Mom, and from all this snug, sheltered life. Oh, fare thee well, for ill fare I .

He doffed hat and coat, went into the frigid, dismal little bedroom behind the kitchen door — the crypt, Mom called it, one of the kvoorim . Or did the word mean tombs? Apt translation, for here he was about to die. He laid his coat down across the bed — he could have hung it up on the antlers of the old clothes tree, but he would be leaving soon. So there it was across the bed — where Minnie had been across the bed, athwart but nevermore. Oh, no. if only he noted as attentively other people’s lives — couldn’t, though, obsessed with his own. Only on the East Side, 9th Street and Avenue D, he had been part of everything. Same old story. Why the hell didn’t Mr. Dickson in English Composition 1, Mr. Kieley in English 2, ask him: submit something else, a story, a sketch, an impression, that could go in the Lavender , like that Sacco-Vanzetti episode in the car barn that summer — socko! — given him a purpose — Ah, don’t blame them. It was himself: his mind always on Minnie, or on simpering, adolescent Stella to straddle him by the radio. He ought to be glad Edith had broken him at last into making love, as she called it, to an intelligent, full-grown woman. But he wasn’t happy, not right now. Moishe Kapoyer . Mr. Topsy-turvy, he dreaded happiness. He was breaking with what he was with little hope of any remaking into anything else; little hope of remaking, and with too much expected of him — by himself above all that was it, that was the worst of it. He was inadequate to the task. He reentered the warmth of the kitchen.

Mrs. Shapiro was standing up, one hand on the doorknob, ready to leave.

“You don’t have to run away because I’m here, Mrs. Shapiro.” Atrophied neighborliness was like a dead weight, self-conscious and Sisyphean.

“I have to do a little more shopping. It will soon be time to begin preparing for the Shabbes ,” Mrs. Shapiro replied.

“So? It’s only about what?” Ira directed a pro forma look at the Big Ben on the icebox lid. “Not even three o’clock.”

“It’s almost winter, it’s November, Ira,” said Mrs. Shapiro. “It grows dark early. Don’t you know? Everything must be done earlier. The Sabbath meal prepared earlier; the candles must be blessed earlier.”

“Yeah, but everybody comes home the same time anyway.”

“Today’s world. What can you do? I keep to the way I was brought up. I prepare and I wait. I have followed the Commandments of our great Rabbi of Rabbis, Moses. I pay tribute to him in my thoughts on Friday night, and he repays me with peace.” She smiled her slow, remote smile. “Show me money, show me gems more valuable. True?”

“I guess so.”

“Let others do as they see fit. For me, erev Shabbes cannot be tampered with.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Indeed, so says my father also,” Mom concurred. “A devout Jew, he lives off the earning of four sons who work Friday night, Saturday all day. Only not on the high holy days. Still he makes no complaint that they break the Sabbath. Let them do as they see fit, he says also. But how else can he live unless they work on the Sabbath? How many bosses are there like Minnie’s observant to the letter?”

Mrs. Shapiro nodded. “Well, I must go.” Her face, so flabby, double-chinned, and pale, paid open tribute to Ira, the educated man. “May God further your work in the collitch.”

“Thanks. I need it.”

“Do you still believe in God? Tell me.”

“I? I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings, Mrs. Shapiro.”

“Then I have my answer. And why don’t you believe?”

Ira chuckled mirthlessly.

“Go. At fourteen,” Mom intervened, “his father accused him of being an Epikouros . He declared there was no God.”

“ Azoy? At fourteen? I was fourteen once. I have children who were fourteen once. I and they, and of course Abe, all believe. How did you learn God didn’t exist?”

He recalled the disks of pigmentation on her pale cheeks as she stood, squat and obdurate, between himself and Pop’s fury: the homely, homely Jewess, despised even by that unspeakable pisspot of a husband, she saved his life, for all he knew — Jesus, the labyrinthian implications he no longer wanted to think about. “I don’t know, Mrs. Shapiro,” Ira said abruptly. “It didn’t make sense to believe in God.”

“And I don’t know what to believe. I half believe, half not. But go through the motions I must. I can’t help myself. Would to God I got the comfort out of it you get. You see: I don’t believe and I call on Him in whom I don’t believe. It’s a form of madness.”

Mom laughed her apologetic, contralto laugh. “Then you’re half an Epikouros .”

“Indeed. Perhaps more than half.” Mrs. Shapiro rested her puffy hand on the white ceramic doorknob. “To me, He doesn’t make sense either.”