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

“How are you to blame?” Mom demanded.

“Maybe everybody is, and nobody is.” Ira wished to Christ he hadn’t lingered. He could have been gone and out of it. “Mom said you wanted to take her to a movie: Pola Negri. Why don’tcha both go. Make up for this damn foolishness. Come back in time for Shabbes —a little later. What d’ye say, Mom? Please!” She remained obdurately silent, contemptuous. “Please, you’re always complaining he doesn’t take you with him to see a movie,” Ira beseeched. “It’s soon Friday eve.”

“And if you don’t agree to go soon, the matinee prices will be over.” Pop pleaded.

“Please, Mom. Go this once, will you.”

“My spendthrift,” Mom said scornfully. “My prodigal.”

“Cut it out, I said!” Ira raised his voice. “Will you go? I’m going. I’m going to leave you.”

“I have a choice,” said Mom. “My liberal sport. I’ll go put on another garment.” She made for the bedroom.

“ Makh shnel ,” Pop ordered. “This will be a Friday.”

“Only because it’s Pola Negri. Your kind of sad actress.”

“Write Minnie a message. She can eat, or wait.”

“I’ll write, I’ll write. Go. Hurry with your shmattas .” Mom disappeared into the bedroom. “Till she moves,” said Pop. He pulled a stub of pencil out of his pocket. “You have a scrap of paper?”

“Yeah.” Ira tore a sheet of loose-leaf out of his small notebook.

“Okay.” Still in hat and coat, Pop sat down at the table and began scribbling a note.

“So long, Pop.” Ira hooked his fingers in the strings of the carton.

“So long, so long,” Pop replied curtly.

“I already said goodbye to Mom.” Ira opened the door.

“Well, let her get dressed.”

“Say goodbye for me to Minnie.”

“Goodbye, goodbye.” Pop scarcely looked up.

Corridor debouched into hall, hall led downstairs. Stairs thirteen years long, to ground floor, and ground floor to stone stoop, and stoop to sidewalk in front of 108 East 119th Street. All familiar, the expected number of kids and people for a cold day between the forsaken tenement facades. Dark veil of the Third Avenue El beyond Lexington to the east, and the gray Grand Central overpass — the Cut — at the west corner. A few cars parked against the curb, and fewer passing; a cat darting across the street; an elderly matron lifting heavy blue shawl to mouth, as she led a wizened poodle out of the cluttered midblock grocery. He walked west, crossed shadowy Park Avenue under the trestle. The strings cut off circulation, made his fingers cold. He wedged the carton under his arm, continued on toward Madison Avenue, westward along the abject block between graystone P.S. 103, stout oak doors locked, and cutout paper pumpkins and turkeys in the windows, cutout Pilgrims in high hats, and carrying blunderbusses. They came to America to be free. He was free. He was going to live with Edith, with a shiksa , and nobody to stop him. He was Edith’s lover now. That was what she called him: “Wait for me, lover.” That wasn’t what he would have called it with his cock inside her.

He’d have to try and relearn everything — like a veneer on everything he was. With an old shiksa , as Pop jeered, the old bastard. Ira couldn’t have done that in Galitzia. But neither could Pop have taken Mom to a movie to see Pola Negri at this time on Friday in Galitzia either, under the stern gaze of the old boy wearing his peyoth , his sidelocks in the portrait in the front room. It was Chaos. Old man Chaos who showed Satan the way out.

He was tormented for good. Ira shook his head. The fact that he could think of Minnie and Stella en route to Edith, and think of her the way he did, showed he wasn’t free, Pilgrims or no Pilgrims. He was still a prisoner: quiescent flame was banked in the mind: ever ready to awake at a puff of air, ever hopeful it would kindle a ruby jewel under thatch. See how his mind ran. He was lucky, that was all.

He was protean, he was capable of anything, he wasn’t sure of anything. Only that he was lucky that he had a goal that kept him walking west to Lenox Avenue, to the West Side subway station at 116th Street. Oh, it was just luck, just luck — stop.

And he did halt in midstride. Supposing he was sure beyond a doubt, the way he was always a hundred percent sure about Stella, that if there was the slimmest chance, she’d let him prat her some way some where. Would he go back? Turn, turn, Sir Richard Washington. Would he? Oh, Jesus, he couldn’t get over the cravings. He couldn’t get over it. He could only get away from it; that was all.

And what the hell was the matter with him, anyway? He had Edith, now — that was the difference. She had opened up for him — oh, cut out the smut at long last — a vibrant, new vision, vision of liberation, of independence, vision consummating the aureate promise he had experienced one summer afternoon on a busy West Harlem avenue. She kindled pride, self-esteem. She had faith, she said, in his literary potential. He had to develop more, but she was sure he would get there in his time.

And Fifth Avenue opened before him. Another long block to Lenox? Or should he turn now and take the three short blocks to 116th? Either course would get him to the subway.

He cut south, avoiding the monotonous façade of the 119th Street tenements, preferring the holiday smells of the clangorous avenue before him. Turn back? God no. He could only get away, that was all. He switched the parcel from right to left, the only evidence of Harlem past lying in that motley carton. Ira peeled down steps of subway station. As luck would have it, the express shrieked to a halt. Ira boarded the train, his cold fingers still aching, and strait was the route, and strait the rails — the IRT swerved, squealing on the tracks of the long curve westward as it repaired downtown and the hell out of Harlem.

I spoke with Henry Roth for the last time on Monday, the ninth of October, 1995. Having been unable to reach him at his home, a ramshackle former funeral parlor that he had purchased after the death of his wife, Muriel, I surmised that he might be in the hospital. I checked an ever-expanding list of Albuquerque hospital numbers that I kept in my address book, and was able to track him down that evening, shortly after I had come home from work. Despite the frailty of his condition and the excruciating severity of his pain, he sounded even jolly, his voice lilting and upbeat. Handed the receiver by a nurse, he was pleased to hear from me, his editor, his occasional analyst, but mostly, his friend of nearly four years.

Since I had first become acquainted with him back in December of 1992, just after Roslyn Targ, his devoted agent of over thirty years, had sold me the first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream , I had become inured to his expressions of gloom — his lugubrious moods that would descend on him for a day or two, sometimes even a month. Some of these depressive seizures were so intense that he would exclaim dramatically that he wished to die (“ apothonein theilo ,” he’d write in Greek), and that he would kill himself as soon as he turned ninety and had a big party.

But this night of October 9 was not like so many of those other nights. Gone was the gauze of melancholia, the “dark sullen telepathy” that had so often encumbered him, preventing him from continuing with the monumental task of writing, editing, and constantly revising the four books that form this quartet, which he had called Mercy of a Rude Stream , borrowing a phrase from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII . That Monday night, he was genuinely pleased that I, together with his assistant and final literary muse, Felicia Steele (the last of three women who had enabled him to create literature throughout his life), had made so much progress completing the editing of From Bondage and Requiem for Harlem , the third and the final volume of the Mercy series, respectively. Even as his limbs and his bowels had failed him with increasing regularity throughout 1994 and 1995, he had worked compulsively to complete the arduous task of shaping and rewriting over 5,000 pages of text, which comprised the four volumes, a large portion of which had already been hailed by numerous American reviewers as a “landmark of the American literary century,” in the words of the critic David Mehegan. Even when Steele was no longer able to work with Henry, since she herself had gone off to graduate school in English at the University of Texas,* he had engaged another young University of New Mexico undergraduate, Eleana Zamora, and the two of them had worked on the various revisions that were required in the final editing and restructuring of the last two volumes.