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

Their cold-water flat was entered via the kitchen door from the darkness of the narrow corridor separating the two opposite flats. The corridor ran almost the entire length of the two opposite flats, ending at doors inset with frosted glass, token doors that provided seldom-used entry to the front rooms at the other end of the flat. . It was a “dumbbell”-type tenement: One passed from kitchen to Ira’s dingy narrow bedroom, the crypt, Mom called it “ kaiver ,” or tomb, passed to his parents’ wider bedroom that followed, both rooms sharing the same grimy, narrow airshaft; and then, without benefit of door, through wide archway to the front room, ending in windows on fire escape and street.

A large, round, green oilcloth-covered table stood in the center of the kitchen, a built-in, glassed-in china closet covered one wall, an illustrated calendar hung on the wall between the gas stove and the icebox. At the foot of Ira’s “single” bed, a small chest of drawers accommodated both his scanty linen and the bed’s. Tenpenny nails driven into a wooden cleat nailed to the wall sufficed for clothes hangers. In his parents’ bedroom, a large built-in wardrobe with drawers at the bottom provided them with storage space. Initially the front room, the parlor of the home (weather permitting), had displayed a black pier-glass between the two front-room windows, as well as a long black horsehide couch. But these had been replaced by a secondhand glass-topped “set” bought from Broncheh H, a prosperous relative renovating her own living room. The set was quite attractive, the separate pieces of finely turned walnut, but it crowded the room. Bric-a-brac, miniature Dresden sheep, wolves and deer, ranged on the pseudo-mantelpiece above the sheet-metal shield to the flue opening. On the opposite wall hung portraits of Pop’s dour and departed father and mother in sepia orthodoxy of peyoth and shehtl , or wig. And most important feature of all, most decisive in fact, were the two front windows. The one on the right was masked by fire escape (on which, as slum-dwelling kids still did, Ira slept many a sweltering night). The window on the left was Mom’s chief consolation, and often Ira’s as well (Pop was too retiring to avail himself of its prospects). Unobstructed by fire escape, the window on the left was the one out of which to lean, observe the street’s changing aspects, or — Ira’s special joy — watch the trains go by, so smoothly, quietly, on the gray Grand Central overpass. . and read the names on the Pullman cars: GRAND RAPIDS, TUCKAHOE, BRISTOL, and that most beautiful of all names, so full of reverie, of intimations of solitude and distant horizon: WYOMING.

There was another window where he spent much time, the vile airshaft window outside his bedroom. Geologic strata of filth had settled at the bottom, headless dolls, assorted trash and an amalgam of garbage — over which the bloated brown rats foraged: He had bought a Daisy air rifle out of savings from his allowance when he worked in Biolov’s drugstore, with which he aspired to exterminate the rodents down below. But he never even hit one — or scared one as far as he could tell: The BB’s rolled out of the barrel when he pointed the gun down. So he had to content himself with firing matchsticks at the bleary opposing wall of the airshaft, into crannies where bricks had fallen out and spiders had built thick, dirty, velvety webs. Once or twice the head of the matchstick struck the wall before falling into the web, ignited and incinerated part of it. Two matchsticks would be more effective than one, he reasoned, and would annihilate the web in one fell swoop. To his dismay he plugged the bore of the air rifle. What to do?

Who to the rescue came but Uncle Max — Uncle Max, that great fixer. He came to the house and did what? He charred the matchsticks inside the air-rifle tube by heating the tube over the flame of the gas stove. How grateful Ira was, how speechless with admiration at his uncle’s ingenuity — until he discovered that the air rifle when fired wouldn’t propel a BB beyond the barrel. The solder that sealed the tube airtight had melted. Whimsically, whimsically.

Ha, yes (Ira returned from serving himself a cup of tea; M was away on manifold errands). Was it to ease the strain that made him break in upon himself this way, upon his narrative, such as it was? Undoubtedly. But life was in the making, while he remade his: Tomorrow, Jane would arrive from distant Toronto, at his and M’s invitation, his son Jess’s girlfriend, now curiously estranged, to talk about the affair with Jess’s parents, with his father especially, also curiously estranged from the son he once doted on. He knew the moment of dramatic rupture, Ira thought; and he had written an account of it as well; but that would have to wait. Order — Ira supposed the formulation of the idea went back to Aristotle — the perception of order was inherent in beauty. Order. And the only ordering that he had ever achieved reposed in a single novel and was ever after lost; perhaps undone might be a better word. Still, disorder had its attraction too, or was it only when perceived as subordinate to a higher order. . or was it a substitute for the unobtainable, a sop to his addiction to words, to prose, good, bad or indifferent, to narrative. Lord.

So the moony urchin without his air rifle sat quietly beside the airshaft window studying the ways of the rats, unmolested, traversing their province below. (He awoke one night as a rat scampered across his face.) Well, in a wry vein and easy.

But when he thought of his Bar Mitzvah, did he mean the festivities, the celebration? Everything turned bitter, turned dreary, scarifying. It was not only not funny; it was beyond him to be funny about it. Oh, well, perhaps, not altogether: The comic was ingrained in him, part of him, gift or antidote to plight, or the soul’s immunity: from his halting, stumbling recital of a brief portion of the Sabbath reading from the Torah scroll in the synagogue, with an embarrassed Zaida at his side prompting, embarrassed and deprecating over his woefully ignorant grandson, he who had once been so glib and praiseworthy at producing the sound of the language— lushin koydish , it was called.

From synagogue to Pop’s home-staged feast set before most of Ira’s homely relatives — Zaida too, food and utensils kosher, of Mamie’s providing — seated on rented chairs, at rented tables, stretching from parents’ bedroom to front room, never-heated rooms in winter, where the frost seemed well-nigh impacted, in spite of reeking kerosene stove borrowed from Mrs. Shapiro for the occasion, and the fishtail gas burners flaring yellow overhead. The parental bedstead had been knocked down to make room for conviviality, and together with the mattress had been stowed in the rear of the long passageway. Nothing to be distressed by, nor even by Pop’s nervous and high-strung hosting, nor by Yiddish din within goyish hearing, nor even by the oration Pop chose for his son, and under threat of the usual dire consequences, compelled him to memorize and deliver, which Ira did, in English, standing surly and glum between rooms, back to one doorpost, staring at the other, thanked God and his parents for having brought him up a Jew. He could have smirked at all that in his amorphous, chaotic mind, and even grinned tolerantly at the memory in later years.

But the Bar Mitzvah brought the realization he was only a Jew because he had to be a Jew; he hated being a Jew; he didn’t want to be one, saw no virtue in being one, and realized he was caught, imprisoned in an identity from which there was no chance of his ever freeing himself. The kid who had once been like a drop of water in the pool of water that was the East Side, indistinguishable from the homogeneity about him, who had wept and wailed to be allowed to return and felt the tears of separation rise in his throat, during his brief return, wanted none of it now, chafed at his lot, fantasized obliteration of the imposition, feigned with burgeoning cynicism that he was not a good Jewish boy: “Thanks, Tanta Mamie” (who brought him his gray flannel shirt); “Thanks, Zaida and Baba” (who gave him a two-dollar bill); “Thanks, Tanta Ella” (who gave him a fountain pen); “Thanks, Uncle Max” (who gave him a retractable fountain pen); “Thanks, Uncle Nathan” (Zaida’s brother, the jeweler, who gave Ira a slender gold watch-chain — but nobody gave him a watch! If only his uncle Moe were there, and not in Germany far away.). Dissembling stood him in good stead, for behind his happy, staple smile he knew he was already concealing vice that would have horrified them. He loathed the ceremony; he loathed himself in it. Becoming a Jew, becoming a man, a member of the community was a sick mockery, became a sick memory.