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

Saturnine and thin, Mr. Stiles looked up from his desk. He had straight, mousy hair, combed back and parted on the side. His tongue nudged the quid of tobacco behind his cheek as Ira proffered the letter.

“So you’re Ira Stigman?” he returned the letter.

“Yes, sir.”

“Ever work for Park and Tilford before?”

“No, sir.”

Mr. Stiles leaned over the side of his armchair, drooled a trickle of tobacco juice into the brass cuspidor just below, and stood up. “All right, Ira, come with me.”

“Yes, sir.” Ira felt as if his eagerness to please would burst through his skin.

He followed Mr. Stiles down a flight of stairs into the brightly lit cellar. Rows and rows of shelves filled with all manner of tins and glass jars stretched away toward the rear. In front, at the bottom of the stairs, two men in tan jackets were removing grocery items — canned goods, small fancy packages and string-tied paper bags — from the expanse of a wide zinc-sheathed table dominated by two tremendous spools of string. The two clerks fit the items neatly into a huge wicker hamper. Mr. Stiles introduced Ira to a short, sturdy, brisk man with curly brown hair, standing assertively on legs, not bowed but oddly concave, and speaking — with an unmistakable Jewish accent. He was Mr. Klein. He was the shipping clerk. He held a sheaf of small invoices in his hand. In the buttonhole on his jacket lapel, he wore the small bronze star that Ira had come to recognize as the badge of the World War veteran.

“Where’s Harvey?” Mr. Stiles asked.

“Down here somewhere. Harvey!” Mr. Klein called.

“Rightchere.”

“He’s over at the sink.”

Mr. Stiles crooked his finger at Ira to follow. Midway of the cellar, at one side, the sleek, muscular porter was churning soapy water in the deep, enameled utility sink, churning the water with a mop. “Right here, Mr. Stiles.” He held the mop handle between powerful hands. His palm was pale against the mop-handle, his face gravely alert; on his tan jacket he too wore the same emblem as Mr. Klein.

“Harvey, that elevator sump is getting pretty bad, don’t you think?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Stiles.”

“Will you show this young fellow — Ira?”

Ira bobbed with alacrity.

“Show him how to clean it out, would you?”

“Yes, sir!”

“When he finishes that, send him over to Mr. Klein. He’ll tell you what to do next,” Mr. Stiles instructed.

“Yes, sir.”

At Harvey’s suggestion, Ira hung up his jacket in the toilet next to the sink. Harvey wrung out the mop between the rollers of the big pail, emptied it into the sink, got a wide, flat shovel out of the sink closet, gave it to Ira, and carrying the pail himself, led Ira over to the elevator used to lift or lower freight to and from the sidewalk. The elevator platform had been raised out of the way to street level. Down below, a couple of feet lower than the cellar floor, the massive spindle around which the elevator cable was wound stretched like a bridge above the surface of a square pond of inky, malodorous water. “You just stand on that axle,” said Harvey. “I’ll hand you the bucket an’ shovel.”

That was his stint: to clean out the sump by scooping up the muck with the shovel and emptying it into the bucket. When he had filled the bucket as nearly full as he dared, because he had to hoist it to floor level while balancing himself on the motor housing, he clambered up, lugged the bucket to the utility sink and dumped it. So this was the nice job he had dressed up so neatly for, Ira thought sullenly. Lousy bastard manager, why didn’t he let the porter do it? That’s what the porter was for. Still — the presentiment kept recurring as he crouched to scoop up the foul sludge — maybe he was being tested. They were testing him, he bet. If only he weren’t wearing his good Bar Mitzvah suit, his only good suit for weddings and special occasions, why did they have to do it just then? But that wasn’t their fault; that was his fault for harboring such nutty illusions, for being so anxious to please. For all the care he took to keep clear of spatters, he already had a dozen spots on his knee-pants. And look at his knees — smudges from the sump walls climbing out. Well, he couldn’t help it. Whatever Mom said, he was earning money, five dollars per week.

He must have emptied the bucket a dozen times. Slowly the tarry water-level lowered. And each time he made the round trip to the sink and back, he used the occasion to make covert reconnaissance of the cellar. There, beyond the sink, was a very large icebox with glass doors. One side was locked, the other unlocked. Behind the glass doors of the locked side, he could see fruit he had never dreamed of: orange-colored smooth shapes, small and large, others chocolate-colored, others purple, all luscious-seeming and all choice. There were other fruits still that he recognized but had never tasted: grapes green and long, grapes round and ruddy, apples of unmistakable ripeness and succulence: pears, plums, peaches, apricots, cherries, tangerines. What a store! If he ever got his hands on them.

Behind the glass of the unlocked icebox were homelier, but still-tempting foods: cheeses, whole wheels of them, whole pineapple-shapes of them, and small crocks of cheese too — at least, the labels said so: cheddar cheese in wine. Whoever heard of cheddar cheese? Who ever heard of cheese in wine? Probably it wasn’t kosher; that was why he had never heard of it. Packages of butter and cartons of eggs. Just wait, just wait till he knew his way around. And look at that aisle across the way: fancy cans of salmon. Cans of lobster and crab that weren’t kosher, and what was that small jar? Beluga what? Caviar. Sardines he knew. But what were anchovies? Tiny little tins, he’d have to ask somebody. And that next aisle that he skirted about shiftily with empty bucket when no one was paying attention: Woo! Kumquats in syrup, what the hell were kumquats, chestnut glacé, figs he knew, but gooseberries, loganberries — maybe Mr. Kilcoyne could tell him. He knew all about fruit and vegetables. And that! Strangest of all: at the end of the cellar, double-padlocked, sealed, dusty, dirty, thick steel-bar lattice— Oh, he knew what that was, could see through to spider-webbed, dusty bottles: Inside was all that was against the law. Prohibition, that was why.

At length, after many pailfuls had been scooped up, miry patches of concrete began to show through the muck; then the damp floor of the sump itself, which he tried to scrape clean. He called Harvey for his verdict.

“You do it any better, you spoil it, kid.”

“What?”

“Just go on and wash that bucket and shovel.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s right. And the sink, who’ll clean that?”

“You want me to clean it?”

“Ain’t nobody else gonna do it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then see what Mr. Klein wants.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Klein wanted him to wash his face and hands first. And when Ira returned from the sink, “How’d he do?” Mr. Klein asked Harvey, on his way to the stairs with pointed ladder, pail and squeegee.

“Oh, comme çi, comme ça ,” Harvey twirled the squeegee easily.

Mr. Klein winked at his assistant, who stole up behind Harvey as he mounted the first step, and with tweety, clucking chirp, goosed him.

Harvey’s whole frame convulsed: “Jesus, man, don’t do that!” Water splashed out of his pail. “Man!” His eyes opened into a glare. “Jesus, man, I’ve told you. I almost jumped off a box car when someone did that to me while I was coming north!” He sidled warily up the stairs.

“Ever see anybody so goosy, Walt?” Mr. Klein grinned at his returning assistant.

“Me? Never.” Walt, short and round, who also wore a veteran’s emblem in the lapel of his tan jacket, reached for an item on the zinc-sheathed table. “I’ve seen goosy colored guys, but he’s the goosiest. You know, Black Jack Pershing commanded a black regiment when he went after the greasers in Mexico. Can you imagine what those guys were like? All Pancho Villa woulda had to do was order his troops to goose ’em.”