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

Swift to the tent of his bride he went,

The beautiful Indianola:

“Oh, me wanna go where the cannon roar.

Oh, me help the white Yank win this war.

Oh, me tararara gore,”

Blankety blankety blank blank blank.

“Over There,” and “Johnny Get Your Gun,” and “Keep the Homefires Burning” had quite crowded out “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” At home Mom still opposed the War, to Ira’s irate, patriotic protests. The names of Lenin and Trotsky were in the air, grotesque demons in the Hearst newspapers, demons to everybody, it seemed to Ira, except to Jews. Bolsheviks were Reds. All Reds were wild-eyed; all Reds had bristly, unkempt whiskers in the cartoons, and carried round bombs with fuses graphically sputtering. So did anarchists. What a horrible word, anarchist! But Mom, and Pop too, paid no attention to what the American newspapers said; Baba and Zaida especially: All they wanted was for Moishe to be safe, for Moishe to come home again safe and sound. They had no patriotism, no “Breathes there the man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said”. . Souls of rattlesnakes and mosquitoes were shown in the cartoons in the newspapers Pop brought home from the Stock Exchange restaurant. The greatly magnified souls of cooties and ticks and other detestable insects were shown, and lastly the souls of Slackers and Profiteers: They were invisible under a thousandfold magnification. Kaiser Bill — everybody knew Kaiser Bill — with his spiky mustache and spike helmet. And Charlie Chaplin too capturing the Kaiser. Oh, how funny that was! Who else was a hero? And there were aces who shot down five enemy planes. And everywhere Montgomery Flagg’s red-white-and-blue Uncle Sam in top hat trailed the pedestrian with stern gaze: I Want You! “ Ashcan” depth charges were dropped on submarines. Baron von Richthofen flew a red Fokker; the “Big Bertha” shelled Paris. Marshal Joffre, Marshal Foch and General Pershing, and all the people in President Wilson’s cabinet — one of Ira’s classmates, some kids were just naturally bright that way, made up a whole sentence with everyone in President Wilson’s cabinet punned into place.

In 1918 you read “The Lady of the Lake” in grammar school, in 1918 you read the “Lay of the Last Minstrel” (Who was she? Yee-hee-hee!). But how pretty some of the words were: “’Tis merry, ’tis merry in the good greenwood where the mavis and merle are singing.” And you had to bring Mom to school because of your grin — at which your singing teacher took offense — for nothing, as Mr. O’Reilly had warned you, and you were humiliated, standing in front of the class saying you were sorry, and blubbering: Hatchet-faced, bespectacled Miss Bergman. Ira hated her forever, hated her to this very day.

How he hated Miss Bergman! He would hate her all his life, hatchet face in eyeglasses, hate her for the gratuitous humiliation she had inflicted on him, punishing him so inordinately for a grin that somehow twisted his face into a mask that people didn’t like. And even now, as he typed, old man as he was, his resentment at the injustice done him returned. Sixty-five years later! Who else of her music class would remember all through life, as he remembered — and appreciated — and could still sing — the songs she had taught them:

A tinker I am. My name’s natty Dan.

From morn till night I trudge it. .

Of course, everyone whispered, a “stinker I am” (and perhaps his grin over that had gotten him into trouble). Still, how he enjoyed the song, relished that double entendre about being a lad of mettle.

He had departed from his text, the yellow second sheet beside him, wandered from himself abroad, as Tom O’Bedlam said, included all sorts of unforeseen, extraneous material. It was the prevalence of the war undoubtedly, the ubiquitousness of the war in everyone’s life that swerved him off course. Lame excuse, but (he heard himself sigh): Again and again, what bitterness welled up in him over the accident, at the terrible deformation that was its consequence. Bootless his grudge against fate, and yet he couldn’t help it: indicative of the depth to which the inner life had been scarred, a whole life long, mutilated, a whole life long. Fortunately, fortunately, and more than fortunately, there was M.

Well. .

The first image that always occurred to Ira, the teacher whose face Ira always saw first when he thought of P.S. 24 (perhaps after that of Mr. O’Reilly), was his General Science teacher, Jewish and tired-looking — he, too, like Mr. Sullivan and some of the others, may have had second jobs after school — Mr. Steifen: looking over his shoulder at the class with worn, weary face, as he demonstrated how to find the center of gravity of the cardboard triangle hanging in front of the blackboard. . or as he showed the awesome weight of the earth’s atmosphere, when he turned off the heat of the Bunsen burner under the sheet-steel gallon can, screwed the top on tightly, and while he spoke, so patiently, sadly, a mysterious force suddenly crumpled the can; it fell in upon itself before the awed, incredulous eyes of his pupils, as if by wizardry.

Next, in no definite order, Mr. Kilcoyne. He taught Civics or Government, or something of the sort. A big man, in his early forties, not too tidy, an oyster of mucus might adhere to his fibrous mustache — which some of the kids said was foam off the beer he drank in the café on 125th Street where he had his lunch. He commuted to work from the small dairy farm he owned in Yonkers. His familiarity with every aspect of dairy farming, and his willingness to impart his knowledge, made him easy prey for the tough, case-hardened gamins in his class: who, choosing the right moment, perhaps after a talk on the order of succession to the presidency, might pop up with: “How d’you milk a cow, Mr. Kilcoyne” (usually not so blatantly irrelevant as that, but something close).

Mr. Kilcoyne hesitated.

“We never seen a farm,” Victor Pellini pleaded.

“No. Well, the first thing you’ve got to do is wipe the udder clean, with a cloth and good sudsy warm water—”

“De udder?” Hands were raised, those of harriers in wait, accomplished accomplices — like Vito or Guido Spompali. “De udder what?”

“No, no. I didn’t say other. Udder. That’s the bag under the cow. That’s where the teats hang from.”

“Is dat what you grab?”

“One in each hand, yes.” Mr. Kilcoyne milked the air. “And after you strip ’em. .”

But the kids had heard enough. Heads ducked under desks whose owners sought figment property on the floor, while faces contorted in glee. Tits. A teacher talking about tits. What could be funnier? Gone for that period at least was the succession to the presidency of the United States.

Dickensian, Ira thought. Not altogether: It happened often enough so that it survived a half-century in memory; more than that, it survived three score and seven, as Lincoln might have said. The predominant farm-type individual with his normal-school teaching degree, the once-average American faced by sly little first-generation urban rapscallions: “So you grab ’em by de tits, Mr. Kilcoyne?”

“Teats. An udder has teats.”

Mr. Kilcoyne might have been duped. But Mr. Sullivan was not to be fooled with. The first day of class he brought out his shillelagh, a massive cudgel, which he slammed twice or thrice on the desk, and invited anybody to get funny. Nobody did. He was a badly crippled man, stunted, grotesquely stooped, and compelled to get about with two canes. A gentle, long-suffering man underneath his pose of cantankerousness, with a disproportionately large head on whose temples blue veins crinkled like miniature lightning, Mr. Sullivan never touched a pupil, relying instead on his bitter, sarcastic comments that stung the most mischievous into behaving, and very few ever misbehaved in Mr. Sullivan’s class. He had a vestige of a brogue, and something that was worse, a speech defect that in any other teacher would have destroyed all possibility of his controlling a class of Harlem slum toughies, shillelagh or not. Perhaps it was merely an attribute of his brogue: he “shushed” every “s.” “Shtand up,” Mr. Sullivan would say. “Shit down.”