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

— Obviously, the memory appeals to you.

Yes. Without nostalgia. Every precious memory now is tarnished. A mild way of saying it, Ecclesias. Tarnished, frayed, gnawed, blighted. Alas. No, not nostalgia, probably because usurped by overweening fear and anxiety. . Fortunately, I have you to speak to, Ecclesias, or I doubt if I could manage to keep going, so hampered, burdened.

“Thank you for the tea,” he had said to M, as he left the kitchen for his study. She had invited him to partake of a snack of lunch early, earlier than usual, because her cellist was due to arrive soon, within the half-hour. M was to perform with him this Sunday at Keller Hall at UNM, a piano-cello piece of her own composing. His beloved wife: saying this morning at breakfast, while a Hebrew melody was being broadcast: “It doesn’t have the usual augmented seconds. It’s technical. Someday I’ll play it for you so you’ll understand the difference.”

From the ends of the world they came and met, Ira thought (again for the thousandth time); and she, despite his psychic deformity caused by woe and guilt, loved him enough to cleave to him, made their day-to-day life, their domestic quotidian, a means to his salvation. One could vary the statement a multitude of ways; it came down to the same thing: If life, his life, were worth living, it was she who made it so. And though she was quite aware (he was certain) of the vexations and trials that were the penalty of her love, well. . obduracy was a trait to be thankful for sometimes— No, not obduracy, New England tenacity, Pilgrim steadfastness. There was something to be said for breeding, for lineage, for stock.

XIV

At last, at last, Kaiser Bill abdicated. At last, it was Armistice Day! At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Fire engine sirens went berserk, church bells pealed and jangled from every belfry, factory whistles hooted and auto horns tooted. Anything capable of adding to the din did, whether it was only a penny whistle, a tin horn, a toy drum, a human throat. School was let out. Impromptu parades of antic mobs funneled through 125th Street. Doughboys were smothered with kisses; people danced and frolicked in the street. Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!

Moe had survived, miraculously survived, unscathed. “OK everything love and kisses Moe,” his cablegram was read and reread. Zaida davened prayers of deliverance. “ Baruch ha Shem, baruch ha Shem, Moishe lebt! ” he repeated for the benefit of skeptical Baba. “ Er lebt! Would I tell you he lived if he didn’t? He comes home, no? You’ll see him. Ira, child, read her the paper, the telegram. Say it in Yiddish.”

“A hundred times,” said Baba. “A hundred times until I believe.”

“A hundred times!” Ira objected. “It says, OK everything—”

“Say it in Yiddish.” Baba just sat and listened, sat and seemed barely to breathe, as if the bliss of her son’s resurrection within her were sufficient to sustain her. Then she sighed, slumped and uttered a barely audible: “Woe is me that I rejoice. For everyone spared, a hundred others are mourned. Woe is me,” she slapped her lips. “God forgive me my joy.”

But Moe was not to come home at once. He wrote that he had been assigned to the Army of Occupation, and he wasn’t sure when he would return to America again. Weeks, months were to pass before he did. In the meanwhile, to keep Baba from pining again, Mom and Mamie, but Mom especially, since Baba communed with Mom more than with any of her other children, spent much time there — usually during the early part of the afternoon, when Ira was still in school; although he frequently came home when Mom was away, lingering at Baba’s house. . and might not come home until four or later in the afternoon. Strange, perhaps not so strange, how well he remembered the lock on the kitchen door of the flat. Black, with a small brass nipple protruding that when pushed down released the tongue that locked the door, pushed up, would hold the tongue in check. Oh, yes, that and many other things about their domicile he remembered, some things because he couldn’t forget. Then or now. .

How ancient a device are these dots, this string of dots, Ecclesias?

— Not so very ancient, probably. Not before printing, certainly. It’s a good question. I had thought at first that you would find yourself in straits for having omitted or excluded so key a witness, one that imposed thereby severe constraints upon yourself, but now I rather think it’s—

Clever?

— No, not exactly, since you didn’t plan it to begin with, but rather, shall I say, enabling:

It comes of being two beings, one a mere hull and moderately sage; while the other a chimney of the extinct volcano — we have such in the state — a flue, a memento of fiery throes, though today sans lava.

— No need to go to such graphic lengths of metaphor.

Not with you, of course. Is it too early to introduce here Fred Skelsy, whom I met years later in Los Angeles?

— Point is he ran away from home at the age of twelve, is that it? Yes.

— In due course. You’ve a long way to go before then. There’s something to be said for observing the actual order of events.

The timeline?

— Yes.

XV

It was 1919—February 8th. His Bar Mitzvah.

PLUMBER’S PROGRESS (an excerpt) — so ran the next line of his “script,” his typescript guide on the yellow second sheet beside him. He had evidently written the piece on another occasion and meant to consider it for inclusion here. But where was it? Always when he filed something, some of his writing, always it seemed to him, the niche he chose for filing it was the most obvious one in the world, and always he couldn’t remember where it was. So now. He had searched in all the “obvious” places. With him, filing was truly forgetting. Well, he had had his reservations about the piece anyway.

He wool-gathered, mulled. Last night, in a debate on professional boxing presented by the noncommercial Channel 5, he had seen the spindly young Welshman — bantamweight? featherweight? — knocked out by his Mexican opponent; knocked out, the young Welshman suffered a brain concussion from the blow and died: Such a polite, sterling young Briton, saying, yes, sir, no, sir, to the attending physician and the referee. (And, Jesus Christ, why did all those goddamn promoters have the unmistakable Semitic hook, despite their anglo names! They made him cringe, especially that wise guy in floppy felt hat, contemptuously refuting those who thought professional boxing ought to be outlawed: “The only place where that’s true is in the Communist countries.” What an unwitting boost for Communist sanity! Oh, God! O Popule me!) The shock he felt witnessing the fatal punch still lingered; and led his thoughts to the summer of the year 1919, when Jack Dempsey knocked out Jesse Willard — and where he, Ira, was at the time, and what his mind was fixed on and obsessed with. But that was later, only a short time later.

He thought he would introduce here, as preamble to that Bar Mitzvah of sixty-six years ago — preamble, ambience (preambience, Meister Joyce) — a description of their Harlem living quarters where his parents and he had lived these fourteen years, from 3A in P.S. 103 to a mangled B.S. degree at CCNY. All dark and comfortless, said the brutally blinded Gloucester in King Lear . Four “straight” rooms, as railroad flats were called then, comprised their living quarters; the rent at the outset was $12 per month. All dark and comfortless . The toilet, the “bad room,” was the sound of the word in childhood, was entered via the narrow hallway separating opposite flats. Soon after the end of the World War, a doorway was cut through the partition separating kitchen from bathroom, a doorway between the kitchen window and the sink, thus giving direct access to the bathroom. At the same time, the gas lighting fixtures, the gas pipes, were removed, and electric ones installed in their place — and the rent raised $3 per month. He had thought he would take the reader on a tour of their quarters, a slumming tour: So he had written, realizing as he wrote what treacherous ground he had ventured on here, the ground between his original approach to his material and his changed attitude toward it. Did he mean a changed view of what might be called the Joycean allure of sordidness, surface allure Ira had repudiated?