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

“Wouldn’t you recognize my Chaim’s contrivances,” said Mom to Ira, and lowering her voice because the topic was shameful. “All Delancey Street knows her. Every saylissmon [as she pronounced the word for salesman] on Delancey Street knows her. Every saylissmon of every sort. A common strumpet. Does she have innards? They’re gone with yesterday. My poor brother, he loves children so. And he loved you. He’ll have children in the other world.”

Nobody told Morris, of course, or Zaida or Baba, hoping he or they would hear about Ida’s flagrant promiscuity from other sources. They never did. And perhaps it might not have done much good if they had. For if Pop was dazzled, Moe was bewitched. Poor Moe, for all the rudiments of worldliness he had learned in the army, Ida’s ways, her figure, her poise, her up-to-date breeziness, her lemon-ice hair were irresistible. The engagement went on apace, went on remorselessly to its consummation: the taxicab duly arrived at 108 East 119th Street; Morris stomped on the nuptial glass under the canopy; Pop probably got at least a token expediter’s fee for his marriage broker’s services.

And in the meantime, intertwined with all this, came the first hint of Park & Tilford’s closing, of the closing of the Lenox Avenue store. Ira didn’t believe it at first. Someone was just teasing, spoofing, the way they asked you to fetch a skyhook or some other implement that didn’t exist. It was a joke. But the hint swelled to rumor, rumor to certainty. Ira was heartbroken. He had found such an enjoyable niche here. Everything he did was familiar, yet laced with enough variance to be interesting. The performance of his duties was almost effortless most of the time, or didn’t require too much effort. And he was appreciated, and that was the thing he liked most: everyone’s amused tolerance — well, maybe not the old cigar and tobacco clerk’s, but everyone else’s, including Mr. Stiles’s, the manager. He felt at home here, that was it, accepted by outside the Jewish world, the way he felt with Farley: that precious element of confidence, of approval by those not his own, where it mattered, especially now, especially now.

“Wouldn’t do you any good anyway, if you’re going to Stuyvesant,” said Mr. Klein. “You’d never get here in half an hour. They’d have to hire another boy anyway.”

“Yeah,” Ira agreed glumly.

“You could ask. There’s a store downtown. Mr. Stiles’d recommend you.”

“It wouldn’t be the same.”

“The same,” Mr. Klein echoed. “What’s the same, tell me? Nothing’s the same. You work. You get used to the layout in a new store, the different clerks — or shipping clerks. You learn something new.”

“Are you going?”

“With Park and Tilford? No. I’m getting a different job. A different company— What do you want to go to Stuyvesant for anyway? Stuyvesant is for engineers. You know what chance you have to be an engineer? Like you can fly. It’s not for Jews.”

“I don’t wanna be an engineer.”

“So what’re you going there for?”

“My friend’s going there.”

“Oh! Now I understend,” Mr. Klein nodded as if in fresh confirmation of Ira’s fecklessness. “You know, you’re a smart kid, a lot smarter than I thought when you came here. But it don’t come out. Why do you hev to play dumb. Why? Tell me. Why do you hev to go to a school where your friend goes? You told me you wanted to be a teacher. There you stend a better chence. So what d’you wanna teach?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“So you go to a general high school. Then you go to City College, and you come out with a diploma, and you teach. Well?” Mr. Klein paused, regarded Ira with his unsmiling, unyielding demeanor. “You can make your whole life what it’s gonna be by what you do now. If you do the right thing, and there’s not gonna be another war, you could have a happy life. You grow up, you marry, you have kids, you’re a teacher. This way, where are you?”

“I can still go to City College.”

“And if your friend goes someplace else? He’s Jewish?”

“No.”

“I can see you’re in for trouble.”

“All right,” Ira sulked.

“ Tsuris , kid, you’re askin’ for tsuris . If you were my kid brother, I’d give you right away a few good smacks you should wake up. You remember what they used to sing in the army? What’s become with hinky dinky, parlez vous? You’re a little hinky dinky in the head, even smart like you are.”

“OK.”

“OK is right. Let’s start peckin’ the beskets.”

“So what do they got to close the store for?” Ira burst out angrily.

“ Farshtest nisht? ” Mr. Klein picked up the sheaf of invoices and stepped back the better to survey Ira — who once again couldn’t help note the man’s peculiar, cocky stance: not bowlegged, but with rigidly locked knees: concave in front. “Can’t you see the neighborhood is changing? It’s getting shvartze uptown, more and more. It’s getting Jewish downtown, high-tone Jewish Broadway, Riverside Drive. They don’t buy Park and Tilford. But mostly, even if they did, there’s no more whiskey, no more wine, no more brandy, no more cordials, no more beer. Farshtest? That’s where the big profit used to come from. Ask the old pooritz behind the tobacco counter, the duke from kacki-ack with his wing-collar. He had two helpers once, and that little percentage on sales the clerks get, he got the highest in the place. Ask the alter kocker . That was a nice bonus.”

“I don’t wanna ask him. I believe you.” Ira’s tone was hostile.

“Listen, don’t get smart.” Mr. Kline handed him the first batch of items to stow in the basket. “Put the gless between the cocoa and the split peas.”

“They’ll deliver from one place, from only one place. The big downtown store. And only in Manhattan. That’s all. The other store, the one on Broadway on 103rd Street? Only with a kid with a box. Local. With kids like you. The cellarman sends you out.”

Ira worked on, stowing goods away mechanically, resentfully. He felt bereaved, and as always when changes theatened, apprehensive. .

The school vacation began. To his great disappointment, Farley went to New Rochelle to stay with an aunt and be near the water. He came back once and sought out Ira: the immense, the ineffable delight of coming lonesomely home from the library — and finding Farley in the kitchen, in the homely, Jewish Stigman kitchen: Farley, tanned, hair sun-bleached, blue-eyed, in the kitchen where he had been talking to Pop.

“Farley!” Ira shouted at the sight of him. And Pop couldn’t refrain from imitating his son’s joyous cry: “Farley!” They spent a few hours together, hunted for snipes — they had both taken up cigarette smoking — puffed away at discarded butts, while seated on a bench below the bell tower on Mr. Morris Park hill. And then they separated a few minutes before three-thirty in the afternoon, when Ira went to work.

That was all he saw of Farley until the summer was over and school began again after Labor Day. But in the interim, when not working, Ira spent most of the day reading, at home in the morning, in the library after lunch, and going to the store directly from the library, as he did customarily from school to store. Books, books, books, the only solace now, without Farley, and the added unhappiness of knowing the store was soon to close. Books. Narrative after narrative, novels, short stories, tales of adventure. He knew, he was only too aware there were other things to read: The shelves were full of books marked History, Biography, Science, Philosophy, Poetry — no, that wasn’t quite true: He took home a book of love poems once.