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

— Yes, good Jewish boys don’t run away from home at twelve. And Mama’s good Jewish boy at that. You would never have known M, and never have striven for and achieved, if only partially, redemption—

Oh, that sounds so jeezly Miltonic—

— Rebirth then, renewal, rehabilitation.

I might not have needed it.

Steamy and rank, the stagnant air of the dreary basement playground was fraught with the exhalation of the slate urinals in the toilets at one end. In the low ceiling, wire cages protected nests of electric lights. Underfoot, muddy slush splotched the dark concrete floors. The small, barred windows looked out on a narrow play-yard on one side, and the street on the other. Against the darkly wainscoted walls stretched rows of heavy, scarred wooden benches. On one of these benches, adjacent to the line in which Ira stood waiting his turn, sat a trio of Irish kids, bigger than kids, adolescents; their size, their air of assurance marked them as eighth graders. “Let’s see your record card,” said one — in a tone that brooked no refusal.

Docile, though hesitant, Ira handed over his blue record card. They examined it a moment, looked around, then all three spat on it. One threw it on the floor, and the others ground the card underfoot. In another second, with an eye on the teacher at the desk, they darted out of the side door into the street.

. . Once again it came to Ira, as he sat recording the incident: how sad. How sad he hadn’t fought every step of the way — like Greeny, even if he lost a tooth, an eye, was stabbed, even if he lost his life — like that kid in the slums whom the toughs in the block called a sissy for wearing a wristwatch: Soldiers had begun to wear them in the trenches. If he had to be wrested from the East Side, if it was his fate to have been pried out of protective homogeneity, then to have fought, and the very attitude, the toughening and belligerence, would have been manifest, would have deterred further abuse, victimization — Oh, hell, he hold himself, paused to reflect: Probably that was the reason why he had chosen Bill Loem for the central character of his second and aborted novel: Bill fought. And he, the novelist, had gone overboard because of that, romanticized his fictional character, glorified his belligerence, interpreting it as socialist militance. Everything interwove, as better minds than his had discovered long, long ago. But to try to follow them was vain: One could not follow into the past; one could only be edified, and seek to apply the principle. And had he been able to, he wouldn’t be sitting here writing about his failure to do so. Alas. Docile dolt, already wearing steel-framed eyeglasses.

“What’s this?” The teacher at the table frowned when Ira presented his blue record card. The teacher was Mr. Lennard, Ira was to learn later, a history teacher, a man with lips full to puffiness, whose blue eyes stared up at Ira through a pince-nez.

“Some big boys grabbed it and spit on it and stood on it,” Ira quailed.

“Which ones?”

“They ran away.”

His frown mingled resignation with annoyance. “You’ll have to help me out then. Is that Tysmen where it’s smeared — what? Austria-Hungary.”

“Tysmenitz,” Ira said. “That’s how my father says it. With a ‘z’ near the end.”

“With a ‘z’ near the end.” Mr. Lennard’s gold-nibbed fountain pen formed new letters on top of the smudged-over ones. “And you were born — what day?”

“I was born February eighth, 1906.”

“It distinctly says January here.” Mr. Danroe said sharply. “January tenth. Is that a six at the end or a five? Nineteen-oh-five.”

“Oh, I forgot!” Ira pleaded. “I forgot!”

“You forgot what? What did you forget?”

“My mother made a mistake. She thought they meant when she was married.” Ira knew better: Mom had deliberately lied in order to enroll him in school a term earlier. “She didn’t talk English good.”

“You’re in 7A-2. Here’s your homeroom number, 219.” Mr. Lennard handed Ira a slip of paper with the numerals he had just written on it. “Report there tomorrow morning before eight-thirty. Next boy,” he terminated Ira’s admission process. And as an afterthought: “You’ll have to straighten out that other thing at the office.”

Such was Ira’s induction into P.S. 24, the school in which he was destined to spend, not the next two years, as he had expected, before going on to high school, but three: two years to earn his public school diploma, and a third, when with typical flabbiness of purpose, he allowed himself to be cajoled into swelling the attendance of the newly instituted educational excrescence known as a junior high school. It was a commercial junior high school at that: offering courses he detested, bookkeeping, typing, stenography. Was there ever such a shlemiel ? Was there ever such a shlemazl ? But of that later. To speak of it now made Ira feel as if he were shifting so abruptly he was grinding the gears of time. Of that later. More pertinent was the D D D he received on his first report card; D D D his first month’s grades: D in deportment, D in effort, D in proficiency. He had fetched bottom, a dismal, total failure.

Both Mom and Pop had had enough acquaintance with report cards to know what the marks meant. “It’s worth sod over it,” Pop signed the report card with hasty flourish. “Send him to school. A golem made of lime; he’ll go to high school and college, yeh, yeh, as I will go.” Disapproval cleared the way for vindication. “You enjoy deceiving yourself? Then deceive yourself,” Pop mocked his wife. “He’s fated for the life of toiler, and be fortunate if he succeeds in that.”

“All at once he’s become a toiler, a turf layer,” Mom retorted sarcastically, but with tears forming in her eyes. “I’ll not allow it. I’ll wash floors, but to high school he’ll go.”

“I know, I know,” said Pop. “She already has him in high school. Listen to me: Better you took two stones and pounded loose the foolish notion in your head.”

“Never!” Mom declared. “When the midwife laid him on my breast, I blessed him: ‘May you achieve noble renown,’ I said. And he will yet. My blessing will not be denied. Let his report card read D D D, let it — What!” she suddenly recollected: “His malamut didn’t come to the house to praise him? Your son is a rabbi in the making. He can daven like a grown-up already. He retains like marble — What has happened to you?”

“I don’t know,” Ira answered sullenly.

“Try to expound with him,” Pop flipped the report card along the green linoleum-covered table back to Ira. “And heed what a malamut says— You know what: a heave with a spade and a toss on the dunghill.”

“My clever spouse,” Mom retorted.

XI

The more he recounted, the more dreamlike it all became. He heard his wife return from her weekly shopping expedition, tall, slender in her gray coat. “Do you want some help?” he asked, knowing only too well how slight his help could be in the present state of his capability.

“Yes, in a minute,” she smiled her ladylike smile of forty-five years of intimacy, and made for the bathroom. .

The grocery bags had been weighty, taxing him to the utmost, his carrying them through the long corridor of the mobile home, through the living room with its Baldwin piano and into the large kitchen-dinette, where Bizet’s symphony greeted him from the small radio on top of the refrigerator. No negligible burden. Breathing heavily, he had set the bags down on the chairs, rather than lifting them to the table, he who had once lugged hundred-pound sacks of grain and scratch and pellets for the waterfowl he raised, not as if the sacks were light, but nothing formidable either: Without strain he regularly emptied five or six sacks into the three sugar barrels in the barn where he stored the poultry feed. And he had even carried M on his shoulder and set her down in the car those months that she suffered from an “undiagnosable” form of Guillaume-Barre syndrome, paralyzed, in a Maine farmhouse, when the boys were young.