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

One sits here musing, ruminating, Ecclesias, this 25th of March, ’85, a warm Monday: the first day the thermometer has risen into the ’70s. Rejected by father, long ago, and rejected by son, the one on whom (to repeat) I doted, to make it the more poignant. If not rejected then excluded, so self-enveloped he is, so occult his personal life, as I cheerlessly quipped, a mind-field. And the result? Antagonism. M cogently stated it: antagonism.

Without question, antagonism is what I feel, and in all likelihood, I manifest it too. .

Jane said less was a writer manqué; his prose gives that impression. But certainly — I think — there’s no competition on that score. No, it is the sense of his condescension, his air of infallibility, and there’s no denying, he is exceptionally gifted intellectually, though not apt manually. Still, he manages to surmount that particular shortcoming by dint of his quickness at perceiving the principle governing a device or the nature of its functioning. And undoubtedly, as I have more than intimated before, my sudden impulse to succor Jane in her abandonment by Jess, my strong affection for her, stems from that same antagonism, my sense of being wronged, and seeking an ally against the common miscreant.

So much for our shared emotional bonds. I do think, to reiterate, that if she could harness her feelings, her hurt, give them form, which implies both objectification and craftsmanship, she could produce a commendable piece of writing. .

XVI

1920. The summer drew near. It was the end of his first term of junior high school, and the summer drew near, summer of his fourteenth year. Green, green is the age of fourteen — or it should have been.

With what gloating Mr. Lennard, now become a Spanish teacher, in one of whose classes Ira was, and Farley in another — with what ceremony he would smooth the back of the pants, the cloth over the buttocks of a misbehaving pupil, after bending the offender over a front desk, and with greenish eyes behind his pince-nez ravished by the sight of the protruding posterior, administer a number of whacks with the “slappamaritis,” a paddle with holes in it (“to let the air out,” he jested). He had ordered it made for him in the woodworking shop. Everyone knew Mr. Lennard was a fairy, but no one ever reported him to the principal, Mr. O’Reilly. Or so it seemed. No one ever complained about him at home, as far as Ira knew; and why no one ever did, he could only guess: The others were like himself. Adolescents, perhaps they feared they wouldn’t be believed; they feared to be branded squealers; or as in Ira’s case, they feared they might have to confront an adult, a teacher, a person in authority, feared to get into trouble, if, for nothing else, than for knowing what they were not supposed to know.

No one ever reported Mr. Lennard, and yet everyone knew he was a fag, and an arrant fag. He would often sit in the lap of one or another of the bigger boys in the back row of the classroom, while class was in session. With his free hand slipped under his thigh, the hand not holding the textbook, Mr. Lennard would toy with the scholar’s genitals. Incredible. And yet, how smoothly, composedly, Mr. Lennard would arise, if by chance the classroom door was opened, arise, adjust his pince-nez while looking up pleasantly over the open textbook at the visitor.

1920. Summer was near. (Ira had brought his aged, numb fingertips together for awhile.) Things were happening, simultaneously, integrally. One couldn’t dwell too long on this or that aspect of the fourteen-year-old’s existence, or else one ran the risk of excluding or forgetting the rest. The young adolescent still lived in the same home, but his role in it had changed. Once when Ira’s fountain pen clogged while he was doing his homework, in a fit of temper he jammed the point against the paper, jammed the penpoint completely out of shape. Pop raised his hand to strike him, then seemed to remember that his son was now post — Bar Mitzvah; he counted as a man in the congregation; Pop desisted. Yes, Ira had the same home, and yes, he was fourteen. He was fourteen. Usually, Pop left quite early Sunday morning to wait at table as an extra — an “extra jop,” as he called it, a breakfast sponsored by some fraternal order in “Coonyailant.” Less frequently, his extra job might be a formal luncheon, and then he might linger in the house until nine or ten in the morning. Those were the exceptions. The rule was the fraternal breakfast, which meant a very early departure. .

Soon after he left the house, Mom too would leave. Mom did much of her shopping Sunday morning, when the produce displayed by the pushcart peddlers under the Park Avenue trestle was freshest. She also brought dainties home for the late Sunday breakfast: bagels, lox at ten cents per quarter pound, cream cheese in bulk, purchased in her favorite “dairy” store in the same area of Park Avenue as the pushcart district. The same pot of coffee that she had brewed for Pop in the morning would still be on the gas stove for Ira to warm up, if he chanced to wake before she returned.

I told you all this before, Ecclesias.

— So you have.

No need to be impatient. Does anyone else, will anyone else see through my motives?

— I suspect many will. Most people, or let me say, most intelligent people, are far more acute than you give them credit for being, in fact, far more acute than you are.

Yes, worse luck, but are they as canny intuitively as I am? As innately endowed with a sense of form?

— Well. . there’s little doubt you’re only too well acquainted with many of the signatures of the sordid. But that’s little reason to preen.

Agreed. Nevertheless, to keep the narrative from falling into separate niches and vignettes, it is necessary to summon up, to present the various aspects of his life at this time in their entirety, and as near to one another as possible.

— So you were fourteen, and your father ordinarily left early for an extra job, and your mother brought home for your delectation bagels and lox on a Sunday—

Or bulkies and golden smoked whitefish. Or a chunk of smoked sturgeon, believe it or not. Devoted Mama. If there were a crowbar that one could drive under a boulder of the psyche, and tumble the boulder out of the way, I would. But there is none—“Oh, there’s none, there’s none, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “No, no, there’s none,” and Time, T sub one equals a constant in Time, T sub one equals a date that is not to be eradicated. Ah, if the psyche were like this computer monitor, Ecclesias, where a change of word, a change of phrase, sends a ripple of change through the whole screen! A sort of spreadsheet of the soul. There can be no such ripples on the cuneiforms of the mind, once impressed. Or can there?

XVII

It was a time when Mom’s chronic catarrh, without seeming to grow worse, began to impair her hearing — while continuing to produce noises of varying degrees of loudness in her head; tinnitus, it was called. Poor Mom. She learned to predict, and with considerable accuracy, the changes in the weather according to the loudness or softness of the noises in her ears. Meteorological turbulence conferred on her an auditory one. Mater, martyr, that was only another stage in her martyrdom. It was a time also when aunts and uncles were marrying or being given in marriage, or in Saul’s case, driven into marriage: bestowing or receiving diamond engagement rings and then wedding rings and going under the khuppa . And taxis would arrive each time at the curb before the Stigman tenement (sent there by ever-generous Moe); and Mom all corseted and dressed up in an ample new gown with loop-handle at the bottom, prepared to leave; and Pop, beside himself with nervous haste and frenzied apprehension, would rush wife and child out of the kitchen and down the flight of shabby steps into the dark street, pell-mell into the cab: “ Oy, vus yuksteh?” Mom would complain. “D’yukst aros de kishkas! ” And what was his irascible reply but: “ Klutz! D’yukst vie a klutz .” And away, away to the wedding hall on 110th Street and Fifth Avenue they would speed, festivity bound, nuptial merriment and glatt kosher fressen . .