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

The year was 1919, and in the larger and imposing apartment houses, goods were still delivered via dumbwaiter. Hence dumbwaiters became almost a way of life for me. This was true on Saturdays and frequently on weekdays too, a way of life and an ordeal: dumbwaiters in the dim basements of apartments on West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, dumbwaiters in Broadway apartment houses, dumbwaiters in the new concrete complexes in the Bronx. Unfamiliar with their location, especially at first, with a poor sense of direction and often too muddled by overanxiety to follow directions when given, I wandered at times in a veritable panic among square columns and labyrinthian cement partitions, seeking the dumbwaiter whose roster contained the name corresponding to the name on the list of groceries in my wooden box.

Ah, to locate at last the right name next to the right button, press it, and hear the door open overhead, see light slash across the dark shaftway, and announce, “Park and Tilford,” place my box of groceries in the double-tiered conveyor, yank on the scratchy rope, until I had reached approximately the right altitude, and then try to satisfy instructions from above, “A little higher,” or, “A little lower,” and finally, “Wait. Hold it!” And at length, after being thanked, haul my box down at an accelerating clip that brought the dumbwaiter conveyor thudding to the bottom. Delivery accomplished, a fully successful mission meant being able to retrace my steps to the street on which the truck was parked, and doing so within a reasonable time. All three drivers, Shea, Quinn and Murphy — and Quinn’s regular helper, Tommy Feeney, only a little older than myself — were vastly amused with me, when at last I came out of the maze, blinking at the daylight.

Once, after the Thanksgiving holidays, I found an extra dollar in my pay envelope, $6 instead of $5; and I went about bragging that I had been given a raise for exemplary services. Said the stately, wing-collared, old roué, once purveyor of fine wines and liquors, but now, with Prohibition, reduced to waiting behind the cigar and tobacco counter: “The P and T never gives raises.”

I thought he was just being mean because I was Jewish, but it turned out he was right: I had earned the extra dollar because Quinn had claimed two hours’ overtime for himself and crew — probably, at least in part, on account of my bemused, belated meanderings in quest of dumbwaiters in the cavernous, concrete basements in the Bronx, and then in quest of the correct egress. .

In the old-fashioned, smaller apartment houses and the sedate brownstones, especially those on the north and west side of Mt. Morris Park and others in the neighborhood of the store, deliveries were usually made without benefit of dumbwaiter. When Mr. Klein sent me out with Shea, who drove the Model-T truck that made only local stops, I would revert to an older and simpler form of delivering my groceries. I would climb up the stairs with the apple-box under my arm. I liked that way of delivering groceries much better than I did via dumbwaiter, because that way, there were no agonizing uncertainties and bewilderments, and besides, I might get a tip.

I also got a chance to see how a different class of people lived, refined Gentiles, not like those in the slum I lived in, the “dumps,” as everyone called them: the cold-water flats on East 119th Street, but Gentile people in comfortable circumstances, whose homes didn’t always have a picture of Jesus on the wall pointing to his exposed, crimson heart. Sometimes I would be rewarded by the sight of a dignified gentleman in leather house-slippers and velvet smoking jacket with satiny collar, puffing at a meerschaum pipe. Sometimes, I would be invited into the kitchen by the lady of the house, still wearing her lovely, figured, silk dressing gown. And more than once, while engrossed in my task of unloading the groceries on the kitchen table, I might feel the fingers of a hand run delicately through my hair, and look up at the roguish, dimpled face of a woman who seemed to wonder at herself for doing what she did: “You don’t mind?”

“No, ma’am,” I would assure her in worldly fashion. “Some other ladies did that already.”

“Did they? I’m not surprised. What a woman wouldn’t give for a curly head of hair like yours.”

X

. . He heard a thud in the living room, heard a thud, and couldn’t identify it: “Are you all right?” he called.

“I was just being careless,” M called back. “I’m all right.”

“You fell. Poor kid. What’d you trip over?”

“I won’t tell you.” Her voice was girlish. She had already gotten to her feet and was walking toward the kitchen.

Girlish. The mind singled out the thought amid the welter of recollections of her previous falls, her all-too-frequent tumbles: that time in Florence when they were walking one evening with Mario M, the Italian translator of his novel, when she tripped over some unevenness in the sidewalk and fell before anyone could catch her. Her glasses were broken, her brow and nose lacerated. Foot-drop was the cause, the aftermath of her months’ long immobilization, a quasi-paralysis brought on by an undiagnosable form of myelitis, akin to Guillaume-Barre syndrome. So much had to go before, so many episodes, so much “history” was needed to render with any justice the sketchiest of preambles to the subject of her girlishness, girlishness behind the wrinkled, dear exterior of the grandmother. It was within that girlishness he had achieved his regeneration, such as it was, attained an improved adulthood — what to say? — an image of a self more acceptable, a less repugnant identity.

. . And reached that stage — ironically, always ironically — when he was already within the defunctive zone, the end zone, when again and again thoughts reverted to dead friends, vanished times, lost opportunities. Worst of all, they, those dead friends and vanished times, too, had left so little trace within him, so little enduring deposition of themselves, so that he could accurately recall, substantially recall, the topical contentions, the subject matter, the eddies of difference or agreement or opposition that formed and changed in those days, the chafings and chafferings, the diversions and discontents, the actual content of them, in their detail, with their particular formulations. Ah, he had not listened enough! Most often only simulated listening. He had not been involved, had not come to grips, profoundly, thoughtfully agreed, or passionately disagreed. He had been essentially unaffected.

He thought of Joyce: How many times it had been noted that, by abandoning Ireland in order to embrace the “great universal culture” of Europe, Ireland was nonetheless all he wrote about — confined, parochial Ireland. In short, he couldn’t assimilate the great cosmopolitan “universal” Western culture that surrounded him on the European continent, to which he now had unlimited access. Why? Or why not? Another Irishman, Bernard Shaw, also of Dublin, though not a Catholic, had quit Ireland some twenty years before Joyce, without fanfare, posture or manifesto, but as a practical step, gone to live in England and had exploited easily, without let, Europe’s foibles, mores, divertingly, successfully. In a word he had been able to “use” European culture as a writer, a playwright. Why? Quite simply, perhaps too simply, because he contended actively with current ideas and biases and issues.

Joyce had not, deliberately had not. He skipped Ireland precisely to dodge having to deal with ideology. “Silence, exile, cunning,” borrowed from some religious order, had been his practice (he said). And why had he adopted that rule? He had made a virtue of necessity, in all likelihood. He had become locked into himself, for some reason, even as Ira had become locked into himself, locked into his “mind forged manacles,” to quote Blake. To have striven with him, to have riven them, fought to emancipate himself from his vast ego, might indeed have brought him closer to his touted slogan than the course he took, might not indeed have taken its toll of desuetude. Whereas to accept his hermetic ego, exploit it, projecting his Freudian bonds on Bloom, the nominal Jew, promised him the foremost place in twentieth-century English letters, a promise that was fulfilled. He stored up creative static for one supreme discharge.