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

“Yeah? I wasn’t rubbin’ it in,” Tommy reiterated. “We was just talkin’.”

“So what d’ you do tomorrow?” I asked him.

“Me? Sleep.”

“Sleep!” I echoed. “Christmas?”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t git outa bed for the Pope.”

And suddenly the tension within me seemed to discharge. The awesome figure of the supreme Pontiff, seen in the rotogravure sections of the newspapers, loomed up solemnly in the darkness near the closed panel doors of the truck. In all his regalia, with crosier in hand and tiara on head, he sternly adjured Tommy to get out of bed — and was defied. It seemed so ludicrous, so gigantically ludicrous, that all at once I was convulsed with laughter; I squealed, I howled, I rolled on the pad. Tommy joined me without knowing why; and Quinn up front chortled wearily: “What the hell’s got into yuh, kid?”

“I don’t know. It’s so funny!” I gasped. “He said he wouldn’t get outa bed for the Pope.”

“What d’you mean? I don’t have to git outa bed fer nobody if I don’t wanna on Christmas,” said Tommy. “Right, Quinn?”

“Hell, you’ll be up before anybody else gets up, time you get home,” said Quinn. “The Pope won’t have to get yuh up.”

“Hey, that’s right. I bet it’s already Christmas,” said Tommy. “God rest you merry gentlemen,” he lifted his voice in song, “let nutt’n you dismay. For Jesus Christ, our Saviour, was born on Christmas day — you know that one, Quinn?”

“I’ve heard it.” Quinn prolonged another yawn.

“We don’t have to do everything the Pope tells us anyway, Irey,” Tommy explained. “That’s why we goes to Confession. Ketch on? If we done everything the Pope told us, we’d be a priest. We couldn’t take a liddle floozie out or nothin’.”

“Yeah?”

“Here’s Park Avenue. I hate this goddamn avenue.” Quinn braked the truck. The green glow through the glass of the New York Central ticket office door lapped against the pillars of the railway overpass. He rounded the corner steering south. “I wish the Pope’d git rid o’ these—” Quinn nipped off his words. “Even when ye c’n see straight, when y’ ain’t been drivin’ all day — and it ain’t night, like now — them goddamn pillars look like they’re everywhere. All I gotta do is pile up against one. Wouldn’t they be askin’, What the hell’re you doin’ way over there? A new White panel truck. The P an’ T’d gimme a raise, wouldn’t they? They’d gimme a roost in the tail.”

“See that? Yer gittin’ special service fer Christmas,” said Tommy.

“What’d you say? 119th Street?” Quinn asked.

“Yeah.”

In minutes we were at the little A & P grocery at the corner, the feeble blue light within the store barely visible. Quinn stopped the truck, came around the back and opened the panel doors. “Br-r!” he heaved his shoulders against the cold, stood waiting for me to get out, the fingers of his hands strangely locked together, knuckles upward, prayerfully.

“Thanks, Quinn.” I scrambled out.

“Merry Christmas.”

“Huh? Yeah. Merry Christmas, Quinn.”

“Merry Christmas, Irey!” Tommy called from inside the vehicle, his hand waving a pale greeting in the gloom.

“Yeah, Merry Christmas.”

Quinn slammed the panel doors shut, and returned to the driver’s seat. The truck got underway. I watched it a moment: gather speed, become a red bead of taillight passing foreshortened pillars. By the time I trudged through the opaque shadow under the trestle, the red bead of taillight had risen up the hill on 116th Street. It disappeared west, as I reached Jake’s somber mass of masonry on the corner.

119th Street. Past midnight, deserted in all directions, familiar yet unfamiliar. Heels clicking loudly, I plodded toward my stoop. Never saw so many, so many crowded stars, all shining together, studded thick as Mom’s horseradish grater. Dark drugstore, dark candy store, dark stoop before me, dark windows overhead. Only in midblock, the streetlight sprouted above the short green lamppost. After the wild hilarity in the back of the truck, after so many hours together, I was now solitary. After so many dumbwaiters and basements and back stairs, and servants met and greetings heard, now silence, now weariness.

Maybe even sadness, despite the jingle of small change in my pocket: “There’s something for you in the grocery box. Merry Christmas!” Was it that I felt left out, excluded again, with a kind of inbred exclusion. God save you, merry gentlemen. Was that how it went? Gentlemen. The hero of the book I had read by H. S. M. Hutcheson — what a lot of initials! — was a gentleman, the book said. A small legacy of fifty pounds from an investment in spinning mills in India made him a gentleman: those shiny black people in the crazy white diapers in the geography book made him a gentleman. Why did I have to think of everything? I mounted the stone stoop, passed the battered brass letter boxes, entered the long hallway, sealed in quiet, with the small, haggard electric light at the end, at the foot of the stairway.

A figment of fatigue, above me on the turn of the landing, brandishing his crosier at me, the Pope stood in brocaded shadow. I shivered, mounted the stairs toward him. He vanished. I reached the sable window beside which the figure had stood, through which nothing could be seen. Jesus, the trouble was always the same: alone, alone. I found scant solace in jingling the small change in my pocket, as my fingers singled out the housekey. Christmas for the world, Christmas for Irish cops and Irish janitors, for Italian barbers and Italian ice men and white-wing street sweepers.

I could hear Merry Christmas unspoken booming in my head.Jesus, was I ever tired. And alone.

XIV

Scarcely had the first term of the pristine junior high school begun when Ira felt himself drawn to a newcomer in the class, a blond, trimly built youth, somewhat more mature than the rest, handsome, blue-eyed, with a rounded jaw, a light voice and a buoyant gait. He was taller than average, though not a great deal, and Ira noticed at once how fine the other’s hands were — neither large nor small, but so neat and compact they seemed small for his size. How untroubled he seemed, frank and free. His name was Farley Hewins. He had come from St. Thomas Parochial School, adjoining the St. Thomas church on 130th Street, the red-brick church only two blocks away from P.S. 24 on Madison Avenue. .

No, I don’t think so — Ira became aware of the hum of the computer, like the hum of consciousness: No, your timing is wrong again, your timing and your sequence, your causality. Once again you can say, what difference will it make to another, your attributions and accuracy? This is a work of fiction. But the fact is it makes a difference to me, aye: Once again, perhaps at the beginning of the senior term, certainly before that senior grammar school term was over, Farley Hewins appeared — in Mr. Sullivan’s class. And once again, or rather for the first time, I was to do what I repeated later: allow irrelevant or superficial considerations to influence a decision that was to have the most far-reaching effect on my life, that was to make all the difference. No, it was not inertia on my part, though that was certainly a factor, as were my passivity and gelatinous mentality (And to what extent did that dark and troubling, furtive enormity play a role? To a great extent, undoubtedly), my gelatinous mentality that made me vulnerable to Mr. O’Reilly’s cajolings that we stay on in the newly formed junior high for our first year in high school.

No, it was the appearance of Farley Hewins before the last term in grammar school was over, when our friendship was formed. And before the term was over, our friendship had cemented. It was he, happy, easy, without definite goal, who elected to stay on in the newborn junior high, and I with him. Again — Ira looked moodily away from the monitor to the brown curtain behind it that blocked out the window’s glare.